CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUSION.

For many years after the earlier records of travel in America, the local and social traits therein described lingered; so that those who look back half a century, find many familiar and endeared associations revived by these casual memorials of an antecedent period. Two principal agencies have caused the rapid transition in outward aspect and social conditions which make the present and the past offer so great a contrast even within the space of an average American life-immigration, and locomotive facilities. The first has, in a brief space, quadrupled the population of cities, and modified its character by a foreign element; and the second, by bringing the suburban and interior residents constantly to the seaboard, has gradually won them to traffic and city life. What was individual and characteristic, exclusive and local therein, becomes thus either changed or superseded. There is no longer the reign of coteries; individualities are lost in the crowd; natives of old descent are jostled aside in the thoroughfare; the few no longer form public opinion; distinctions are generalized; the days of the one great statesman, preacher, actor, doctor, merchant, social oracle, and paramount belle, when opinion, intercourse, and character were concentrated, localized, and absolute, have passed away; and the repose, the moderation, the economy, the geniality and dignity of the past are often lost in gregarious progress

and prosperity. A venerable reminiscent may lead the curious stranger to some obscure gable-roofed house, a solitary and decayed tree, or border relic strangely conserved in the heart of a thriving metropolis, and descant on the time when these represented isolated centres of civilization. Standing in a busy mart, he may recall there the wilderness of his youth, and, before an old, dignified portrait by Copley, lament the fusion of social life and the bustle of modern pretension; or, dwelling on the details of an ancestral letter, argue that, if our fathers moved slower, they felt and thought more and realized life better than their descendants, however superior in general knowledge. Except for the purpose of literary art and historical study, however, the past is rarely appreciated and little known; hence the curious interest and value, as local illustrations, of some of these forgotten memorials of how places looked and people lived before the days of steam, telegraphs, and penny papers.

Sir Henry Holland, writes Lockhart to Prescott, "on his return from his rapid expedition, declares, except friends, he found everything so changed, that your country seemed to call for a visit once in five years." The truth is, that, owing to the transition process which has been going on here from the day that the first conflict occurred between European colonists and the savage inhabitants, to the departure of the last emigrant train from the civilized border to the passes of the Rocky Mountains; and owing, also, to the incessant influx of a foreign element in the older communities, to the results of popular education and of political excitements and vicissitudes, there is no country in the world in regard to which it is so difficult to generalize. Exceptions to every rule, modifications of every special feature and fact, oblige the candid philosopher to reconsider and qualify at every step.

One vast change alone in the conditions and prospectspolitical, social, and economical-of this continent, since the records of the early travellers, would require a volume to describe and discuss-the increase of territory and of immi

gration, with the liberal character of our naturalization laws. Whole communities now are nationally representative; each people finds its church, its fêtes, its newspaper, costume, and habits organized in America. Every convulsion or disaster abroad brings its community of exiles to our shores. After the French Revolution, nobles and people flocked hither; after the massacre at St. Domingo, the creoles who escaped found refuge here; famine sends thousands of Irish annually, and in the West is a vast and thrifty German population; Hungarians make wine in Ohio; Jenny Lind found her countrymen on the banks of the Delaware; an Italian regiment was organized in a few days, when New York summoned her citizens to the defence of the Union; and in that city, the tokens of every nationality are apparent-the French table d'hôte, the Italian caffe, the German beer garden, image venders from Genoa and organ grinders from Lucca, theatres, journals, churches, music, and manners peculiar to every people, from the Jewish synagogue to the Roman convent, from the prohibited cavatina to the local dish, from the foreign post-office clerk to the peculiar festival of saint or municipality, betoken the versatile and protected emigration.

It is when, with the horrors of Spielberg vivid to his fancy, such an observer beholds the industrious and cheerful Italian exile in America; when he notes the Teutonic crowd grouped round the German post-office window at Chicago, and thinks of the privations of the German peasant at home; 'when he watches the long ranks of well-fed and hilarious Celts, in procession on St. Patrick's Day in New York, and compares them with the squalid tenants of mud cabins in Ireland; when he listens to the unchecked eloquence of the Hungarian refugee, and thinks of the Austrian censors and sbirri; when he beholds Sisters of Charity thridding the crowd on some errand of love; placidly clad Friends flocking to yearly meeting; Fourier communities on the Western plains; here a cathedral, there a synagogue; in one spot a camp meeting, in another a Unitarian chapel; to-night a political caucus, to-morrow a lyceum lecture; here rows of

carmen devouring the daily journal, there a German picnic; now a celebration of the birthday of Burns, wherein the songs and sympathies of Scotland are renewed, and now a Gallic ball, the anniversary fête of St. George, the complacent retrospections of Pilgrims' Day, or the rhetoric and roar of the Fourth of July ;-it is when the free scope and the mutual respect, the perfect self-reliance and the undisturbed individuality of all these opposite demonstrations, indicative of an eclectic, tolerant, self-subsistent social order, combination, and utterance, pass before the senses and impress the thought, that we realize what has been done and is doing on this continent for man as such; and the unhallowed devotion to the immediate, the constant superficial excitements, the inharmonious code of manners, the lawlessness of border and the extravagance of metropolitan life, the feverish ambition, the license of the press-all the blots on the escutcheon of the Republic, grow insignificant before the sublime possibilities whereof probity and beneficence, tact and talent, high impulse and adventurous zeal may here take advantage..

An English statesman, on a visit to New York, expressed his surprise at the spirit of accommodation and the absence of violent language during a deadlock of vehicles in Broadway, whence his conveyance was only extricated after long delay. The fact made a strong impression, from its contrast to the brutal language and manners he had often wit nessed, under like circumstances, in London. After reflecting on the subject, he attributed the self-control of the baffled carmen to self-respect. "They hope to rise in life," he said, "and, therefore, have a motive to restrain their temper and improve their character." There was much truth and sagacity in this reasoning. An artist fresh from Europe and the East observed that the expression of self-reliance was astonishing in the American physiognomy. These spontaneous remarks of two strangers, equally intelligent but of diverse experience the one a social and the other an artistic philosopherinclude the rationale of American civilization. The prospect of ameliorating his condition elevates man in his own esteem,

while self-dependence gives him confidence; but the latter feeling is apt to make him indifferent to public duty: hence the gross municipal corruption and legislative abuses which are directly owing to neglect of the duties of the citizen. Not until there is a "rising of the people" in the cause of national reform, as earnest and unanimous as that which rallied to the national defence, may we hope to see those ameliorations, the need of which all acknowledge, to purify the elective franchise and the judicial corps, make the centripetal force in political affairs dominate the centrifugal, and bring the best men in capacity and honor to the highest positions.

To the eye and mind of an American, when disciplined by study and foreign observation, while the incongruities of our social and physical condition, as a nation, are often startling, the elastic temper, the unsubdued confidence of the national character, reconcile discrepancies and console for deficiencies, by the firm conviction that these are destined to yield to a civilization whose tendency is so diffusive. There' are, indeed, enough signs of amelioration to encourage the least sanguine. Within a few years, the claims of genius. and character, of taste and culture, have been more and more practically recognized. The refinements in domestic economy, the popularity of art, the prevalent love and cultivation of music, the free institutions for self-culture, the new appreciation of rural life, the tempered tone of religious controversy, the higher standard of taste and literature, and the more frequent study of the natural sciences, are obvious indications of progress in the right direction, since the severe comments upon American life and manners were partially justified by facts. Even the specific defects noted by travellers half a century ago, are essentially lessened or have quite disappeared.

A living and candid French writer alludes to the United States as (6 une terre plus séparée de nous par les nuages de nos préjugés que par les brouillards de l'Atlantique." Not a few of these prejudices had their origin in facts that no