 5. Chicago. I know thy cunning and thy greed, thy hard, high, lust, and willful deed, and all thy glory loves to tell of specious gifts material. I have struck a city, a real city, and they call it Chicago. The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon. This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million people with bodies, and it stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hoogley, and its air is dirt. Also, it says it is the boss-town of America. I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country. They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is over much gilded and mirrored. There I found a huge hall of tessellated marble, crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty's earth. By the way, when an American wishes to indicate the next county or state, he says, God Almighty's earth! This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity. When I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and without end, and verily it is not a good thing to live in the east for any length of time, your ideas grow to clash with those held by every right-thinking man. I looked down in terminable vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen storied houses, and crowded with men and women, and the show impressed me with a great horror. Except in London, and I've forgotten what London was like, I've never seen so many white people together, and never such a collection of miserables. There was no colour in the street and no beauty, only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging underfoot. A cab driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so much an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired, that it was good huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices. He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say, they were trying to make some money that they might not die through lack of food to put in their bellies. He took me to canals as black as ink, and filled with untold abominations, and bibi watched the stream of traffic across the bridges. He then took me into a saloon, and, while I drank, made me note that the floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A hot-and-top would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism. The coins made an effect pretty enough, but the man who put them there had no thought of beauty, and therefore he was a savage. Then my cab driver showed me business-blocks, gay with signs, and studied with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods. And looking down the long street so adorned, it was as though each vendor stood at his door howling, For the sake of my money, employ or buy of me and me only. Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You know, then, how men leap into the air, stretching out their arms above the crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women dollarously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper. I had sooner watch famine-relief, than the white man engaged in what he calls legitimate competition, the one I understand, the other makes me ill. And the cab man said that these things were the proof of progress, and by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper as every intelligent American should. The papers till their clientele in language fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together of telegraph wires, the heaving up of houses and the making of money, is progress. I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness wandering through scores of miles of these terrible streets, and jostling some few hundred thousand of these terrible people, who talked piezer-bat through their noses. The cab man left me. But after a while I picked up another man, who was full of figures, and into my ears he poured them as occasion required, or the big blank factories suggested. Here they turned out so many hundred thousand dollars' worth of such-and-such an article. There are so many million other things. This house was worth so many million dollars. That one, so many million, more or less. It was like listening to a child, babbling of its horde of shells. It was like watching a fool playing with buttons. But I was expected to do more than listen or watch. He demanded that I should admire. And the utmost I could say was, ha! he thinks so. Then I am very sorry for you. That made him angry. And he said that insular envy made me unresponsive. So, you see, I could not make him understand. About four-and-a-half hours after Adam was turned out of the Garden of Eden, he felt hungry. And so, bidding Eve take care that her head was not broken by the descending fruit, he shinned up a coconut palm. That hurt his legs, cut his breast, and made him breathe heavily. And Eve was tormented with fear lest her lord should miss his footing. And so bring the tragedy of this world to an end ere the curtain had fairly risen. Had I met Adam, then, I should have been sorry for him. Today I find eleven hundred thousand of his sons, just as far advanced as their father in the art of getting food and immeasurably inferior to him, in that they think that their palm trees lead straight to the skies. Consequently, I am sorry in rather more than a million different ways. In the East, bread comes naturally, even to the poorest, by a little scratching or the gift of a friend not quite so poor. In less favoured countries one is apt to forget. Then I went to bed. And that was on a Saturday night. Sunday brought me the queerest experience of all, a revelation of barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially described as a church. It was a circus, really. But that the worshippers did not know. There were flowers all about the building, which was fitted up with plush and stained oak, and much luxury, including twisted brass candlesticks and the severest gothic design. To these things, and a congregation of savages, entered suddenly a wonderful man, completely in the confidence of their God, whom he treated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper reporter would exploit a foreign potentate. But, unlike the newspaper reporter, he never allowed his listeners to forget that he, and not he, was the centre of attraction. With the voice of silver, and with imagery borrowed from the auction room, he built up for his hearers a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House, but with all the gilding real gold and all the plate-glass diamond, and said in the centre of it a loud-voiced argumentative, very shrewd creation that he called God. One centre at this point caught my delighted ear. It was a propose of some question of the judgment, and ran, no, I tell you, God doesn't do business that way. It was giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, and a gold-and-dulled heaven in which they could take a natural interest. He interlided his performance with the slang of the streets, the counter, and the exchange, and he said that religion ought to enter into daily life. Consequently, I presume, he introduced it as daily life, his own and the life of his friends. Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring no benediction at such hands. But the persons who listened seemed to enjoy themselves, and I understood that I had met with a popular preacher. Later on, when I had perused the sermons of a gentleman called Talmadge and some others, I perceived that I had been listening to a very mild specimen. Yet that man, with his brutal gold-and-silver idols, his hands-in-pocket cigar in mouth, and hat on the back of the head style of digling, with the sacred vessels, would count himself spiritually quite competent to send a mission to convert the Indians. All that Sunday I listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron to wood and getting a steam-and-iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and a net work of wires overhead was progress. They repeated their statements again and again. One of them took me to their city hall and bought of trade works and pointed it out with pride. It was very ugly, but very big, and the streets in front of it were narrow and unclean. When I saw the faces of the men who did business in that building, I felt that there had been a mistake in their billeting. By the way, it is a consolation to feel that I am not writing to an English audience. There I should have to fall into feigned ecstasies over the marvellous progress of Chicago since the days of the Great Fire, and to allude casually to the raising of the entire city so many feet above the level of the lake which it faces, and generally to grovel before the golden calf. But you, who are desperately poor, and therefore by these standards of no account, know things, will understand when I write that they have managed to get a million of men together on flat land, and that the bulk of these men together appear to be lower than maharjans, and not so companionable as a Punjabi jat after harvest. But I don't think it was the blind hurry of the people, their ago, and their grand ignorance of things beyond their immediate interest that displeased me so much as the study of the daily papers of Chicago. Impremise. There was some sort of dispute between New York and Chicago as to which town should give an exhibition of products to be here and after Holden. And through the medium of their more dignified journals, the two cities were yahooing and hee-yee-ing at each other like opposition newsboys. They called it humour, but it sounded like something quite different. That was only the first trouble. The second lay in the tone of the productions. Leading articles which include such gems as back of such and such a place, or we notice Tuesday such an event, or don't for does not, are things to be accepted with thankfulness. All that made me want to cry was that in these papers were faithfully reproduced all the war cries and backtalk of the Palmer House bar and the slang of the barber shops, the mental elevation and integrity of the Pullman car porter, the dignity of the Dime Museum, and the accuracy of the excited fish-wife. I am sternly forbidden to believe that the paper educates the public. Then I am compelled to believe that the public educates the paper. Yet suicides on the press are rare. Just when the sense of unreality and oppression was strongest upon me, and when I most wanted help, a man sat at my side and began to talk what he called politics. I had chance to pay about six chillings for a travelling cap worth eighteen pence, and he made of the fact a text for a sermon. He said that this was a rich country, and that the people liked to pay two hundred percent on the value of a thing. They could afford it. He said that the government imposed a protective duty of from ten to seventy percent on foreign-made articles, and that the American manufacturer consequently could sell his goods for a healthy sum. Thus an imported hat, wood with duty, cost two guineas. An American manufacturer would make a hat for seventeen chillings and sell it for one pound fifteen. In these things he said lay the greatness of America and the effete-ness of England. Competition between factory and factory kept the prices down to decent limits, but I was never to forget that this people were a rich people, not like the pauper-continentals, and that they enjoyed paying duties. To my weak intellect this seemed rather like juggling with counters. Everything that I have yet purchased costs about twice as much as it would in England, and when native-made is of inferior quality. Moreover, since these lines were first thought of, I have visited a gentleman who owned a factory which used to produce things. He owned the factory still. Not a man was in it, but he was drawing a handsome income from a syndicate of firms for keeping it closed, in order that it might not produce things. This man said that if protection were abandoned, a tide of pauper labour would flood the country. And as I looked at his factory, I thought how entirely better it was to have no labour of any kind whatever, rather than face so horrible a future. Meantime, do you remember that this particular country enjoys paying money for value not received? I am an alien, and for the life of me I cannot see why six chillings should be paid for eighteen penny caps, or eight chillings for half-crowned cigar cases. When the country fills up to a decently populated level, a few million people who are not aliens will be smitten with the same sort of blindness. But my friend's assertion somehow thoroughly suited the grotesque ferocity of Chicago. See now and judge. In the village of Issa Jang, on the road to Montgomery, there were before Changa women, who we know corn, some seventy bushels a year. Beyond their heart lives Purundas, the moneylender, who, on good security, lends as much as five thousand rupees a year. Joala Singh, the smith, mends the village plows, some thirty, broken at the share, in three hundred and sixty-five days. And Kum Chun, who is letter-writer and head of the little club under the traveller's tree, generally keeps the village posted in such gossip as the barber and the midwife have not yet made public property. Chicago husks and winows her wheat by the million bushels. A hundred banks lend hundreds of millions of dollars in a year, and scores of factories turn out plough gear and machinery by steam. Scores of daily papers do work which Kum Chun and the barber and the midwife perform with due regard for public opinion in the village of Issa Changa. So far, as manufacturers go, the difference between Chicago on the lake and Issa Changa on the Montgomery Road is one of degree only and not of kind. As far as the understanding of the uses of life goes, Issa Changa for all its seasonal collars has the advantage over Chicago. Joala Singh knows and takes care to avoid the three or four ghoul-haunted fields on the outskirts of the village. And he is not urged by millions of devils to run about all day in the sun and swear that his ploughshares are the best in the Punjab. Nor does Purundas fly north in an Eka more than once or twice a year, and he knows, on a pinch, how to use the railway, and the telegraph as well as any son of Israel in Chicago. But this is absurd. The East is not the West. And these men must continue to deal with the machinery of life and to call it progress. Their very preachers dare not rebuke them. They gloss over the hunting for money and the thrice-sharp and bitterness of Adam's curse by saying that such things dour a man with a larger range of thoughts and higher aspirations. They do not say, free yourselves from your own slavery, but rather, if you can possibly manage it, do not set quite so much store on the things of this world. And they do not know what the things of this world are. I went off to see cattle killed by way of clearing my head, which, as you will perceive, was getting muddled. They say every Englishman goes to the Chicago stockyards. You shall find them about six miles from the city, and once having seen them, you will never forget the sight. Far as the eye can reach, stretches a township of cattle pens, cunningly divided into blocks, so that the animals of any pen can be speedily driven out close to an inclined timber path, which leads to an elevated covered way, straddling high above the pens. These viaducts are too storied. On an upper story, tramp the doomed cattle, stolidly for the most part. On the lower, with a scuffling of sharp hooves and multitudinous yells, run the pigs, the same end being appointed for each. Thus you will see the gangs of cattle waiting their turn, as they wait sometimes for days. And they need not be distressed by the sight of their fellows running about in fear of death. All they know is that a man on horseback causes their next-door neighbors to move by the means of a whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and behold, that crowd have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel and returned no more. It is different with the pigs. They shriek back the news of the exodus to their friends and a hundred-pen skull responsive. It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct which was full of them, as I could hear, though I could not see, I marked a somber building where to it ran, and went there, not on an alarmed by stray cattle who had managed to escape from their proper quarters. A pleasant smell of brine warned me of what was coming. I entered the factory and found it full of pork in barrels, and on another story more pork unbarrelled, and in a huge room the halves of swine, for whose behoof great lumps of ice were being pitched in at the window. That room was a mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little while in state. There they began their progress through such passages as kings may sometimes travel. Turning a corner and not noting an overhead arrangement of greased rail, wheel and pulley, I ran into the arms of four eviscerated carcasses, all pure white and of a human aspect, pushed by a man clad in vehement red. When I leaped aside the floor was slippery under me. Also there was a flavour of farmyard in my nostrils and the shouting of a multitude in my ears. But there was no joy in that shouting. Twelve men stood in two lines six aside. Between them and overhead ran the railway of death that had nearly shunted me through the window. Each man carried a knife. The sleeves of his shirt were cut off at the elbows and from bosom to heel he was blood-red. Beyond this perspective was a column of steam, and beyond that was where I worked my awestruck way, unwilling to touch beam or wall. The atmosphere was stifling as a night in the rains by reason of the steam and the crowd. I climbed to the beginning of things and, perched upon a narrow beam, overlooked very nearly all the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin. They had been shot out of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled together in a large pen. Thence they were flicked persuasively, a few at a time, into a smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle to their hind legs so that they rose in the air, suspended from the railway of death. Oh! it was then they shrieked and called on their mothers and made promises of amendment till the tackle man punted them in their backs and they slid head down into a brick-floored passage, very like a big kitchen sink, that was blood-red. There awaited them a red man with a knife, which he passed jauntily through their throats and the full-voiced shriek became a splutter and then a fall as of heavy tropical rain and the red man, who was backed against the passage wall, stood clear of the wildly kicking hooves and passed his hand over his eyes, not from any feeling of compassion, but because the spurted blood was in his eyes he had barely time to stick the next arrival. Then that first swine dropped, still kicking, into a great vat of boiling water and spoke no more words, but wallowed in obedience to some unseen machinery and presently came forth at the lower end of the vat and was heaved on the blades of a blunt paddle-wheel, things which said, off, off, off, and scalped all the hair off him, until a couple of men with knives could remove. End of Chapter 5, Chicago Recording by Tim Bulkley of BigBible.org Chapter 6 of American Notes This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Tim Bulkley of BigBible.org American Notes by Rudyard Kipling Chapter 6, The American Army I should very much like to deliver a dissertation on the American army and the possibilities of its extension. You see, it is such a beautiful little army and the dear people don't quite understand what to do with it. The theory is that it's an instructional nucleus round which the militia of the country will rally and from which they will get a stiffening in time of danger. Yet other people consider that the army should be built like a pair of lazy tongs on the principle of elasticity and extension so that in time of need it may fill up its skeleton battalions and empty saddle troops. This is real wisdom because the American army as at present constituted is made up of 25 regiments infantry, 10 companies each, 10 regiments cavalry, 12 companies each, 5 regiments artillery, 12 companies each. Now, there is a notion in the air to reorganise the service on these lines. 18 regiments infantry at 4 battalions, 4 companies each, 3rd battalion skeleton, 4th on paper. 8 regiments cavalry at 4 battalions, 4 troops each, 3rd battalion skeleton, 4th on paper. 5 regiments artillery at 4 battalions, 4 companies each, 3rd battalion skeleton, 4th on paper. Observe the beauty of this business. The 3rd battalion will have its officers but no men. The 4th will probably have a rendezvous and some equipment. It is not contemplated to give it anything more definite at present. Assuming the regiments to be made up to full complement, we get an army of 50,000 men which after the need passes away must be cut down 50% to the huge delight of the officers. The military needs of the states be three. A. Frontier warfare an employment well within the grasp of the present army of 25,000 and in the nature of things growing less arduous year by year. B. Internal riots and commotions which rise up like a dust devil will furiously and die out long before the authorities of Washington could begin to fill up even the 3rd skeleton battalions quite less hunt about for material for the 4th. C. Civil War in which as the case in the affair of the north and south the regular army will be swamped in a mass of militia and armed volunteers would turn the land into a hell. Yet the authorities persist in regarding an external war as a thing to be seriously considered. The power that would disembark troops on American soil would be capable of giving a shovelful of mud into the Atlantic in the hope of filling it up. Consequently the authorities are fascinated with the idea of the sliding scale or concertina army. This is an hereditary instinct for you know that when we English have got together two companies one machine gun, a sick bullock, 40 generals and a mass of W.O. forms we say we possess an army corps capable of infinite extension. The American army is a beautiful little army. Some day when all the Indians are happily dead or drunk it ought to make the finest scientific and survey corps that the world has ever seen. It does excellent work now. But there is this defect in its nature. It is officered as you know from West Point. The mischief of it is that West Point seems to be created for the purpose of spreading general knowledge of military matters among the people. A boy goes up to that institution, gets his pass and returns to civil life so they tell me with a dangerous knowledge that he is a suckling von Molcher and may apply his learning when occasion offers. Given trouble that man will be a nuisance because he is a hideously versatile American to begin with as cocksure of himself as a man can be and with all the racial disregard for human life to back him through any demi-semi-professional generalship. In a country where as the record of the Daily Papers show men engaged in a conflict with police or jails are all too ready to adopt a military formation and get heavily shot in a sort of cheap, half-constructed warfare instead of being decently scared by the appearance of the military. This sort of arrangement does not seem wise. The bond between the states is of an amazing tenuity. So long as they do not absolutely march into the District of Columbia, sit on the Washington Statues and invent a flag of their own, they can legislate, lynch, hunt negroes through swamps, divorce, railroad and rampage as much as ever they choose. They do not need knowledge of their own military strength to back their genial lawlessness. That regular army, which is a dear little army, should be kept to itself, bloodied on detachment duty, turned into the paths of science and now and again assembled at feasts of freemasons and so forth. It is too tiny to be a political power. The immortal wreck of the Grand Army of the Republic is a political power of the largest and most unblushing description. It ought not to help to lay the foundations of an amateur military power that is blind and irresponsible. By great good luck the evil-minded train already delayed twelve hours by a burned bridge brought me to the city on a Saturday by way of that valley which the Mormons over their efforts had caused to blossom like the rose. Twelve hours previously I had entered into a new world where in conversation everyone was either a Mormon or a Gentile. It is not seemly for a free and independent citizen to dub himself a Gentile, but the mayor of Ogden, which is the Gentile city of the valley, told me that there must be some distinction between the two flocks. Long before the fruit orchards of Logan or the shining levels of the Salt Lake had been reached, that mayor himself a Gentile and one renowned for his dealings with the Mormons told me that the great question of the existence of the power within the power was being gradually solved by the ballot and by education. All the beauty of the valley could not make me forget it. And the valley is very fair. Bench after bench of land flacked as a table against the flanks of the ringing hills, marks where the Salt Lake rested for a while in its collapse from an inland sea to a lake fifty miles long and thirty broad. There are the makings of a very fine creed about Mormonism. To begin with, the church is rather more absolute than that of Rome. Drop the polygamy plank in the platform, but on the other hand deal lightly with certain forms of excess. Keep the quality of the recruit down to the low mental level and see that the best of all the agricultural science available is in the hands of the elders. And there you have a first-class engine for pioneer work. The tawdry mysticism and the borrowing from Freemasonry serve the low caste Sweden Dane, the Welshman and the Cornish Cotter, just as well as a highly organized heaven. Then I went about the streets and peeped into people's front windows, and the decorations upon the tables were after the manner of the year 1850. Main street was full of country folk from the desert. Come in to trade with the Zion Mercantile Cooperative Institute. The church I fancy looks after the finances of this thing, and it consequently pays good dividends. The faces of the women were not lovely. Indeed. But for the certainty that ugly persons are just as irrational in the matter of undivided love as the beautiful, it seems that polygamy was a blessed institution for the women, and that only the dread threat of the spiritual power could drive the hulking broad-faced men into it. The women wore hideous garments, and the men appeared to be tied up with strings. They would mark it all that afternoon, and on Sunday go to the praying-place. I tried to talk to a few of them, but they spoke strange tongues and stared and behaved like cows. Yet one woman, and not an altogether ugly one, confided to me that she hated the idea of Salt Lake City being turned into a show-place for the amusement of the Gentiles. If we have our own institutions, that ain't no reason why people should come here and stare at us, is it? The dropped H betrayed her. And when did you leave England, I said? Summer of 84. I'm Dorset, she said. Mom and agent was very good to us, and we was very poor. Now we're better off, my father and mother and me. But then you like the state? She misunderstood at first. Oh, I ain't living in the state of polygamy. Not me yet. I ain't married. I like where I am. I've got things of my own and some land. But I suppose you will. Not me. I ain't like them Swedes and Danes. I ain't got nothing to say for or against polygamy. It's the elder's business. And between you and me, I don't think it's going on much longer. You'll ear him in the house tomorrow, talking as if it was spreading all over America. The Swedes, they think it is. I know it isn't. But you've got your land all right. Oh yes, we've got our land. And we never say art against polygamy, of course. Father and mother and me on a table land overlooking all the city stands the United States garrison of infantry and artillery. The state of Utah can do nearly anything it pleases, until that much-to-be-desired hour when the Gentile vote shall quietly swamp out Mormonism. But the garrison is kept there in case of accidents. The pig, shark-mouthed, pig-eared, heavy-boned farmers sometimes take to their creed with wildest fanaticism and in past years have made life excessively unpleasant for the Gentile when he was few in the land. But today, so far from killing openly or secretly or burning Gentile farms, it is all the Mormon dare do to feebly try to boycott the interloper. His journals preach defiance to the United States government. And in the tabernacle on a Sunday the preachers follow suit. When I went there, the place was full of people who would have been much better for a washing. A man rose up and told them that they were the chosen of God, the elect of Israel. That they were to obey their priests and that there was a good time coming. I fancy that they had heard all this before so many times that it produced no impression whatever, even as the sublimist mysteries of another faith lose salt through constant iteration. They breathed heavily through their noses and stared straight in front of them, impassive as flat fish. End of Chapter 6 The American Army Recording by Tim Bulkley of BigBible.org Chapter 7 The American Notes This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Tim Bulkley of BigBible.org American Notes by Rudyard Kipling Chapter 7 America's Defenseless Coasts Just suppose that America were twenty days distant from England. Then a man could study its customs with undivided soul. But, being so very near to next door, he goes about the land with one eye on the smoke with the flesh-pots of the old country across the seas, while with the other he squints biliously and prejudicially at the alien. I can lay my hand upon my sacred heart and affirm that up to today I have never taken three consecutive trips by rail without being delayed by an accident. That it was an accident to another train makes no difference. My own turn may come next. A few miles from peaceful, pleasure-loving Lakewood they had managed to upset and express goods-train to the detriment of the flimsy permanent way, and thus the train which should have left at three departed at seven in the evening. I was not angry. I was scarcely even interested. When an American train starts on time I begin to anticipate disaster, a visitation for such good luck you understand. Buffalo is a large village of a quarter-million inhabitants situated on the seashore which is falsely called Lake Erie. It is a peaceful place and more like an English country town than most of its friends. Once clear of the main business streets you launch upon miles and miles of asphalted roads running between cottages and cut-stone residences of those who have money and peace. All the eastern cities own this fringe of elegance but except in Chicago nowhere is the fringe deeper or more heavily widened than in Buffalo. The American will go to a bad place because he cannot speak English and is proud of it. But he knows how to make a home for himself and his mate knows how to keep the grass green in front of his veranda and how to fullest use the mechanism of life and hopes, telephones, etc. His shops sell him delightful household fitments at very moderate rates and he is encompassed with all manner of labour-saving appliances. This does not prevent his wife and his daughter working themselves to death over household drudgery but the intention is good. When you have seen the outside of a few hundred thousand of these homes and the insides of a few score you begin to understand why the American the respectable one is interested in what they call politics and why he is so vaguely and generally proud of the country that enables him to be so comfortable. How can the owner of a dainty chalet with smoked oak furniture imitation Venetian tapestry curtains hot and cold water laid on a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks a baby crawling down the veranda and a self-acting twirly-wirly hose gently hissing over the grass in the barmy dusk of an august evening How can such a man despair of the Republic or descend into the streets on voting days and mix cheerfully with the boys? No, it is the stranger the homeless jackal of a stranger whose interest in the country is limited to his hotel-bill and a railway ticket that can run from Dan de Pierschiva crying All is barren! Every good American wants a home a pretty house and a little piece of land of his very own good American seems to get it. It was when my gigantic intellect was grappling with this question that I confirmed a discovery half-made in the West. The natives of most classes marry young, absurdly young. One of my informants not the 22-year-old husband I met on Lake Chatauqua said that from 20 to 24 was about the usual time for this folly. When I asked whether the practice was going into the constitutionally improvident classes he said no very quickly. He said it was a general custom and nobody saw anything wrong with it. I guess perhaps. Very early marriage may account for a good deal of divorce said he reflectively. Whereas I was silent. Their marriages and their divorces only concern these people and neither I traveling nor you who may come after them. Only only coming from a land where a man begins to likely turn to thoughts of love not before he is 30. I own that playing at housekeeping before that age rather surprised me. Out in the West though they marry boys and girls from sixteen upward. And I have met more than one bride of fifteen, husband aged twenty. When man and woman are agreed what can the cars do? From those peaceful homes and the envy they inspire to trunks and a walking stick and a bit of pine forest in British Columbia are not satisfactory any way you look at them. I turned me to the lakefront of Buffalo where the steamers bellow to the grain elevators and the locomotives yell to the coal shoots and the canal barges jostle the lumber raft half a mile long as it sneaks across the water in tow of a launch and earth and sky and sea alike are thick with smoke. In the old days before the railway ran into the city all the business quarters fringe the lake shore where the traffic was largest. Today the business quarters have gone uptown to meet the railroad. The lake traffic still exists but you shall find a narrow belt of red brick desolation broken windows gap-toothed doors and streets where the grass grows between the crowded wharves and the bustling city. To the lakefront comes wheat from Chicago, lumber, coal and ore and a large trade in cheap excursionists is my felicity to catch a grain steamer and an elevator emptying that same steamer. The steamer might have been 2,000 tonnes burden. She was laden with wheat in bulk from stem to stern 13 feet deep lay the clean red wheat. There was no 25% dirted mixture about it at all. It was wheat fit for the grindstones as it lay. They manoeuvred the forehatch of that steamer directly under an elevator a house of red tin 150 feet high. Then they let down into that forehatch a trunk as if it had been the trunk of an elephant but stiff because it was a pipe of iron champed wood. And the trunk had a steel shod nose to it and contained an endless chain of steel buckets. Then the captain swore raising his eyes to heaven and a graph voice answered him from the place he swore at and certain machinery also in the firmament began to clack and the glittering steel shod nose of that trunk burrowed into the wheat and the wheat quivered and sunk upon the instant as water sinks when the siphon sucks because the steel buckets within the trunk were flying upon their endless round carrying away each its appointed morsel of wheat. The elevator was a Persian well-wheel. A wheel squashed out thin and cased in a pipe a wheel driven not by bullocks but by much horsepower licking up the grain at a rate of thousands of bushels the hour and the wheat sunk into the forehatch while a man looked sunk till the brown timbers of the bulkhead showed bare and men leaped down through clouds of golden dust and shoveled the wheat furiously round the nose of the trunk and got a steam shovel of glittering steel and made that shovel also till they remained of the grain not more than a horse leaves in the fold of his nose bag. In this manner do they handle wheat at Buffalo on one side of the elevator is the steamer on the other the railway track and the wheat is loaded into the cars in bulk wa-wa God is great and I do not think he ever intended Garshahi or Luckman Narain to supply England with her wheat India can cut in not without profit to herself when her harvest is good and the American yield poor but this very big country can upon the average supply the earth with all the beef and bread that is required a man in the train said to me we can feed all the earth just as easily as we can whip all the earth now the second statement is as false as the first is true one of these days the respectable Republic will find this out unfortunately we the English will never be the people to teach her because she is a charted Libertine allowed to say and do anything she likes from demanding the head of the Empress in an editorial wastebasket to chevying Canadian schooners up and down the Alaska seas it is perfectly impossible to go to war with these people whatever they may do they are much too nice in the first place and in the second it would throw out all the passenger traffic of the Atlantic and upset the financial arrangements of the English syndicates who have invested their money in breweries railways and the like and in the third it's not to be done everybody knows that and no one better than the American yet there are other powers who are not a high band of the brotherhood China for instance try to believe an irresponsible writer when he assures you that China's fleet today if properly manned could waft the entire American navy out of the water and into the blue the big fat Republic that is afraid of nothing because nothing up to the present date has happened to make her afraid is as unprotected as a jellyfish not internally of course it will be madness for any power to throw men into America they would die but as far as regards from five miles out at sea I've seen a test of her 45 ports a ship with the power of HMS Collingwood they haven't run her on a rock yet would wipe out any or every town from San Francisco to Long Branch and three first class ironclads would account for New York Bartholdi statue and all reflect on this it would be pay up or go up around the entire coast of the United States to this furiously answers the patriotic American we should not pay we should invent a Columbia ad in Pittsburgh or or anywhere else and blow any outsider into hell they might invent they might lay waste their cities and retire in land for they can subsist entirely on their own produce meantime in a war wage the only way it could be waged by an unscrupulous power their coast cities and their dockyards would be ashes they could construct their navy inland if they liked but you could never bring a ship down to the water ways as they stand now they could not with an ordinary water patrol dispatch one regiment of men six miles across the seas there would be about five million excessively angry armed men pent up within the American limits these men would require ships to get themselves afloat the country has no such ships and until the ships were built need not be allowed a single wheeled carriage within her limits behold now the glorious condition of this republic which has no fear there is ransom and loot past the counting of men on her seaboard alone plunder that would enrich a nation and she has neither a navy nor half a dozen first class ports to guard the whole no man catches a snake by the tail because the creature will sting but you can build a fire around the snake that will make it squirm the country is supposed to be building a navy now when the ships are completed her alliance will be worth having if the alliance of any republic can be relied upon for the next three years she can be hurt and badly hurt pity it is that she is of our own blood looking at the matter from a pindaris point of view dog cannot eat dog these sinful reflections were prompted by the sight of the beautifully unprotected condition of buffalo a city that could be made to pay up 5 million dollars without feeling it there are her companies of infantry in a sort of port there a gunboat brought over in pieces from Nicaragua could get the money and get away before she could be caught while an unarmored gunboat guarding Toronto could ravage the towns on the lakes when one hears so much of the nation that can whip the earth it is to say the least of it surprising to find her so temptingly spankable the average American citizen seems to have a notion that any power engaged in strife with a star-spangled banner will disembark men from flat bottom boats on a convenient beach for the purpose of being shot down by the local militia in his own simple phraseology not by a down-site no sir ransom at long range will be about the size of it cash or crash let us revisit the Kama scenes in the heart of Buffalo there stands a magnificent building which the population do innocently style a music hall everybody comes here of evenings to sit around little tables and listen to a first-class orchestra the place is something like the Gearty Theatre at Simla in large 20 times the light brigade of Buffalo occupy the boxes and the stage as it was at Simla in the days of old and the others sit in the parquet here I went with a friend poor or bore is the man who cannot pick up a friend for a season in America and here was shown the really smart folk of the city I grieve to say I laughed because when an American wishes to be correct he sets himself to imitate the Englishman this he does violently and earns not only the contempt of his brethren but the amused scorn of the Britain I saw one man who was pointed out to me as being the glass of fashion hereabouts he was aggressively English in his get-up from eyeglass to trouser hem the illusion was perfect but he wore with evening dress buttoned boots with brown cloth tops not till I wondered about this land did I understand why the comic papers belabor the Anglomaniac certain young men of the more idiotic sort launch into dog carts and raiment of English cart and here in Buffalo they play polo at four in the afternoon I saw three youths come down to the polo ground faultlessly attired for the game and mounted on their best ponies expecting a game I lingered but I was mistaken these three shining ones with the very new yellow hide boots and the red silk sashes had assembled themselves for the purpose of knocking the ball about they smote with great solemnity up and down the grounds while the little boys looked on when they trotted, which was not seldom they rose and sunk in their stirrups with a conscientiousness that cried out riding school from afar other young men in the park were riding after the English manor in neatly cut riding trousers and light saddles fate in derision had made each youth bedisen his animal with a checkered enameled leather browband visible half a mile away a black and white checkered browband they can't do it any more than an Englishman by taking cold can add that indescribable nasal twang to his orchestra the other side of the evening was a horror the little tragedy played itself out at a neighboring table where two very young men and two very young women were sitting waiting it did not strike me till far into the evening that the pimply young reprobates were making the girls drunk they gave them red wine and then white and the voices rose slightly with the maidens' cheek flushes I watched wishing to stay and the youths drank till their speech thickened and their eyeballs grew watery it was sickening to see because I knew what was going to happen my friend eyed the group and said maybe they're children of respectable people I hardly think though they'd be allowed out without any better escort than these boys and yet the place is a place where everyone comes as you see they may be little immoralities in which case they wouldn't be so hopelessly overcome with two glasses of wine they may be whatever they were they got indubitably drunk there in that lovely hall surrounded by the best of Buffalo society one could do nothing except invoke the judgment of heaven on the two boys themselves half-sick with liquor at the close of the performance the quieter maiden laughed vacantly and protested she couldn't keep her feet the four linked arms and staggering flickered out into the street drunk gentlemen and ladies as Davies swine drunk as lords they disappeared down a side avenue but I could hear their laughter long after they were out of sight and they were all four children of sixteen and seventeen then recanting previous opinions I became a prohibitionist better it is that a man should go without his beer in public places and content himself with swearing at the narrow-mindedness of the majority better it is to poison the inside with very vile temperance drinks and to buy lager furtively at backdoors giving temptation to the lips of young fools such as the four I had seen I understand now why the preachers rage against drink I have said there is no harm in it taken moderately yet my own demand for beer helped directly to send those two girls wheeling down the dark street too God alone knows what end if liquor is worth drinking it is worth taking a little trouble to come at such trouble as a man will undergo desires it is not good to wish it let it lie before the eyes of children and I have been a fool in writing to the country very sorry for myself I sought a hotel and found in the hall a reporter who wished to know what I thought of the country him I lured into conversation about his own profession and from him gained much that confirmed me in my views of the grinding tyranny of that thing which they call the press here thus I but you talk about interviewing people whether they like it or not have you no bounds beyond which even your indecent curiosity must not go he I haven't struck him yet what do you think of interviewing a widow two hours after her husband's death to get her version of his life I think that is the work of a gaol must the people have no privacy he there is no domestic privacy in America do what the papers do see here some time ago I had an assignment to write up the floral tributes when a prominent citizen had died I translate please I do not understand your pagan rites and ceremonies he I was ordered by the office to describe the flowers and wreaths and so on that had been sent to a dead man's funeral well I went to the house there was no one there to stop me so I yanked the tinkler, pulled the bell and drifted into the room where the corpse lay all among the roses and the smile acts I whipped out my notebook and poured around among the floral tributes turning up the tickets on the wreaths and seeing who had sent them in the middle of this I heard someone saying please oh please behind me and there stood the daughter of the house just bathed in tears I you unmitigated brute he I am very sorry miss I said to intrude on the privacy of your grief trust me I shall make it as little painful as possible I but by what conceivable right did you outrage he hold your horses I'm telling you well, she didn't want me in the house at all and between her sobs fairly weighed me away I had half the tribute to describe though and the balance I did partly on the steps when the stiffen came out and partly in the church the preacher gave the sermon that wasn't my assignment among the floral tributes while he was talking I could have made no excuse if I had gone back to the office and said that a pretty girl sobs had stopped me obeying orders I had to do it what do you think of it all I slowly do you want to know he with his notebook ready of course how do you regard it I it makes me regard your interesting nation with the same shuddering curiosity that I should bestow upon a pappin cannibal chewing the scalp of his mother's skull does that convey any idea to your mind it makes me regard the whole pack of you as heathens real heathens not the sort you send missions to creatures of another flesh and blood you ought to have been shot not dead but through the stomach for your share in the scandalous business and the thing you call your newspaper ought to have been sacked by the mob and the managing proprietor hanged he from which I suppose you have nothing of that kind in your country oh pioneer venerable pioneer and you not less honest press of India who are occasionally dull but never blaggedly what could I say a mere no would not have met the needs of the case I said no word the reporter went away and I took the train for Niagara Falls which are 22 miles distant from this bad town where girls get drunk of nights and reporters trample on corpses in the drawing-rooms of the brave and the free end of Chapter 7 America's Defenseless Coasts recording by Tim Bulkley of bigbible.org and end of American Notes by Rajad Kipling