I have travelled in many countries, but in almost everything have found America twice as dear as any other country. The charges are simply monstrous. Having to go from an hotel to the steam wharf, we were not permitted to take our very modest amount of luggage in the omnibus with us, although we had the vehicle all to ourselves; but the hotel people insisted upon sending it in a special wagon, charging two dollars for what a cabman in Birmingham would willingly have done for a shilling. On board the steamer we were charged six shillings each for a plain dinner, without wine, which in England would not have cost more than 1s. 6d. Bound books are equally dear. Pocket volumes, containing not more than one-sixth of the matter in a shilling volume of Chambers’ “Miscellany of Entertaining Tracts,” were charged two shillings each. Most of the newspapers, also, are very inferior to, yet much dearer than, the English papers. Another form of extortion is to be found in the impossibility, in many hotels, of obtaining information as to the sailing of river-boats, departure of trains, etc., the only apparent explanation being a desire to give “touts” and “loungers,” of whom there are many, opportunities of extorting money. These fellows seem to know nothing unless they can hear the dollars chink, or see the dirty greenbacks (and some of them are very dirty). A fellow once gave me in change a dollar note which was so filthy that scarcely a word was legible upon it. It looked as though it might contain smallpox or typhoid, so I asked him to wash it. He said he guessed he would—for a dollar.
Against all this, I am bound to say that the charges made by the steamboat companies and most of the railways are exceedingly moderate, and their arrangements in connection with baggage most convenient. On arriving at any of the large cities by river-boat, the agent of the Luggage Express Company comes on board and takes possession of your baggage, giving vouchers for it. He also undertakes to collect any baggage you may have sent to the City Railway Station from distant parts of the country, and very soon after you arrive at your hotel it is brought to you. At the landing stages in such cities as New York there are numbers of cabs, mostly driven by Irishmen, and when they find you have disposed of your luggage and do not require their services, they give vent to their disgust in no measured terms, and if the traveller is a Britisher, he is soon reminded of the fact.
The mode of dealing with baggage on the railway is almost equally convenient. The following will give some idea of it. You are travelling, say, from Aberdeen to Penzance, intending ultimately to proceed by way of London to Dover, and do not require the bulk of your luggage till you arrive at the latter place. On leaving Aberdeen, the Baggage Master takes your superfluous luggage, putting brass labels upon it, thus—
ABERDEEN—DOVER.
846.
giving you corresponding labels, after which you have no further occasion to trouble yourself in the matter until you get to Dover.
We visited the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia for the purpose of inspecting the various productions corresponding to our own, hoping, indeed expecting, to find something which would repay us for coming. We were, indeed, repaid, but in a sense totally opposed to what we expected, for we found that so far from Americans being in advance of the English, they were, in many cases, taking credit for so-called “improvements” (claiming them as novelties), which we had been familiar with, and had used in our own works many years before. They appear to be strangely unaware of what has been done in European countries, and a single instance will illustrate this. The machinery in the Exhibition was driven by a single large steam-engine. The newspapers made a great deal of this engine, declaring that it was the largest in the world, and that it had been made in the smallest State—Rhode Island. An American engineer with evident pride took us to see the big engine, which, after all, had a cylinder of only 70in. diameter. We told him that five-and-twenty years before a small engineering firm in Cornwall, England, had made several engines with cylinders 144in. in diameter, and which are yet at work.
We were permitted to inspect some of the most important engineering establishments, and found the tools of such an inferior character that our only wonder was that they could produce either good or cheap work. In most cases the floors of the workshops were inches deep in ferruginous dust. Under such conditions every time a heavy casting is dropped on the floor a cloud of dust must rise, and entering the bearings of the tools, cut them up badly. We found many of the tools actually wedged up because of this.
An American manufacturer speaking to me of a visit he had paid to the Exhibition in company with his foreman, told me how astonished the latter was at the excellence of the European exhibits. He said he had no idea they could make the things half so well, “for,” he said, “they are almost as good as ours,” and, I added, “only one half the cost.”
The agricultural machinery was exhibited in a separate building erected specially for its reception, and here the Americans were unmistakably far ahead of all competitors.
At the time of our visit several consignments of calicoes had been made to England and to various British markets, and sold at prices considerably below what they could be produced at by English manufacturers. This incursion occasioned great disquietude in England until the cause was manifested—viz., overproduction. On this point I read an article in a New York Protectionist paper intended as an answer to the Free Trade argument, that Protection increased the price of goods. The article stated that this was not so: and to prove its position said that the tendency of Protection was to induce people to go into manufacturing who know little or nothing of the processes they were undertaking, but who fancy that with the tariff of from 40 per cent. to 80 per cent. upon foreign goods, there must necessarily be a sufficient margin to compensate for mistakes caused by their inexperience. “And so it happens,” continues the writer, “that there is great over-production, ruinous competition among American manufacturers, frequent failures, and consequently large stocks of goods are forced on the markets at a great loss, the public getting cheap supplies in consequence.” Adam Smith would scarcely have quoted this as one of the methods of adding to the wealth of nations. But if the people at large obtain their cotton goods cheaper through this system of over-production, it is clear that the millowners are not the only sufferers, for it appears from a speech delivered by Mr. Shearman of New York, at the Cobden Club dinner in the present year (1883), that the wages of the factory operatives are twenty per cent. less than in Lancashire, while their hours of labour are from eighteen to twenty per cent. longer.