It was not the idle class that wasted their nights at these parties; it was the business men dragged into the fashions and foibles of the idle, which made that strange and unique thing we call society in America.
I should have replied to that man that his wife was a fool. If she were willing to sacrifice his health, and with it her support, for the greeting and applause of these midnight functions, I pitied him. Let him lose his health, his business, and his home, and no one would want to invite him anywhere. All the diamond-backed terrapins at fifty dollars a dozen which he might be invited to enjoy after that would do him no harm. Society would drop him so suddenly that it would knock the breath out of him. The recipe for a man in this predicament, a man tired of life, and who desired to get out of it without the reputation of a suicide, was very simple. He only had to take chicken salad regularly at midnight, in large quantities, and to wash it down with bumpers of wine, reaching his pillow about 2 a.m. If the third winter of this did not bring his obituary, it would be because that man was proof against that which had slain a host larger than any other that fell on any battle-field of the ages. The Scandinavian warriors believed that in the next world they would sit in the Hall of Odin, and drink wine from the skulls of their enemies. But society, by its requirements of late hours and conviviality, demanded that a man should drink out of his own skull, having rendered it brainless first. I had great admiration for the suavities and graces of life, but it is beyond any human capacity to endure what society imposes upon many in America. Drinking other people's health to the disadvantage of one's own health is a poor courtesy at best. Our entertainments grew more and more extravagant, more and more demoralising. I wondered if our society was not swinging around to become akin to the worst days of Roman society. The princely banquet-rooms of the Romans had revolving ceilings representing the firmament; fictitious clouds rained perfumed essences upon the guests, who were seated on gold benches, at tables made of ivory and tortoise-shell. Each course of food, as it was brought into the banquet room, was preceded by flutes and trumpets. There was no wise man or woman to stand up from the elaborate banquet tables of American society at this time and cry "Halt!" It might have been done in Washington, or in New York, or in Brooklyn, but it was not.
The way American society was moving in 1886 was the way to death. The great majority, the major key in the weird symphony of American life, was not of society.
We had no masses really, although we borrowed the term from Europe and used it busily to describe our working people, who were massive enough as a body of men, but they were not the masses. Neither were they the mob, which was a term some were fond of using in describing the destruction of property on railroads in the spring of 1886. The labouring men had nothing to do with these injuries. They were done by the desperadoes who lurked in all big cities. I made a Western trip during this strike, and I found the labouring men quiet, peaceful, but idle. The depôts were filled with them, the streets were filled with them, but they were in suspense, and it lasted twenty-five days. Then followed the darkness and squalor—less bread, less comfort, less civilisation of heart and mind. It was hard on the women and children. Senator Manderson, the son of my old friend in Philadelphia, introduced a bill into the United States Senate for the arbitration of strikes. It proposed a national board of mediation between capital and labour.
Jay Gould was the most abused of men just then. He was denounced by both contestants in this American conflict most uselessly. The knights of Labour came in for an equal amount of abuse. We were excited and could not reason. The men had just as much right to band together for mutual benefit as Jay Gould had a right to get rich. It was believed by many that Mr. Gould made his fortune out of the labouring classes. Mr. Gould made it out of the capitalists. His regular diet was a capitalist per diem, not a poor man—capitalist stewed, broiled, roasted, panned, fricaseed, devilled, on the half shell. He was personally, as I knew him, a man of such kindness that he would not hurt a fly, but he played ten pins on Wall Street. A great many adventurers went there to play with him, and if their ball rolled down the side of the financial alley while he made a ten strike or two or three spares, the fellows who were beaten howled. That was about all there really was in the denunciation of Jay Gould.
I couldn't help thinking sometimes, when the United States seemed to change its smile of prosperity to a sudden smile of anger or petulance, that we were a spoiled nation, too much pampered by divine blessings. If we had not been our own rulers, but had been ruled—what would America have been then? We were like Ireland crying for liberty and abusing liberty the more we got of it.
Mr. Gladstone's policy of Home Rule for Ireland, announced in April, 1886, proposed an Irish Parliament and the Viceroy. It should remain, however, a part of England. I fully believed then that Ireland would have Home Rule some day, and in another century I believed that Ireland would stand to England as the United States stands to England, a friendly and neighbouring power. I believed that Ireland would some day write her own Declaration of Independence. Liberty, the fundamental instinct of the most primitive living thing, would be the world's everlasting conflict.
Our exclusion of the Chinese, which came up in the spring of 1886, when an Ambassador from China was roughly handled in San Francisco, was a disgrace to our own instincts of liberty. A great many people did not want them because they did not like the way they dressed. They objected to the Chinaman's queue. George Washington wore one, so did Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock. The Chinese dress was not worse than some American clothes I have seen. Some may remember the crinoline monstrosities of '65, as I do—the coal-scuttle bonnets, the silver knee-buckles! The headgear of the fair sex has never ceased to be a mystery and a shock during all my lifetime. I remember being asked by a lady-reporter in Brooklyn if I thought ladies should remove their hats in the theatre, and I told her to tell them to keep them on, because in obstructing the stage they were accomplishing something worth while. Any fine afternoon the spring fashions of 1886, displayed in Madison Square between two and four o'clock, were absurdities of costume that eclipsed anything then worn by the Chinese.
The Joss House of the Chinese was entitled to as much respect in the United States, under the constitution, as the Roman Catholic church, or the Quaker Meeting house, or any other religious temple. A new path was made for the Chinese into America via Mexico, when 600,000 were to be imported for work on Mexican territory. In the discussion it aroused it was urged that Mexico ought to be blocked because the Chinese would not spend their money in America. In one year, in San Francisco, the Chinese paid $2,400,000 in rent for residences and warehouses. Our higher civilisation was already threatened with that style of man who spends three times more money than he makes, and yet we did not want the thrifty unassuming religious Chinaman to counteract our mania for extravagance. This entire agitation emanated from corrupt politics. The Republican and Democratic parties both wanted the electoral votes of California in the forthcoming Presidential election, and, in order to get that vote, it was necessary to oppose the Chinese. Whenever these Asiatic men obtain equal suffrage in America the Republican party will fondle them, and the Democrats will try to prove that they always had a deep affection for them, and some of the political bosses will go around with an opium pipe sticking out of their pockets and their hair coiled into a suggestion of a queue.
The ship of state was in an awful mess. No sooner was the good man in power than politics struggled to pull him down to make room for the knaves. When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, the Sentinel of Boston wrote the obituary of the American nation. I quote it as a literary scrap of the past: