Jonathan and His Continent Part 5

The streets are wide, the houses coquettish-looking, the gardens, especially the park of the Soldier's Home, extremely beautiful.

Washington is wholly given over to politics. When Congress is not sitting, it is dead; when Congress is sitting, it is delirious.

Little or no commerce is done.

No visitor leaves Washington without making a pilgrimage to Mount Vernon, where Washington is buried, and where everything speaks of him who was "first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen."

A journey of an hour and a half up the beautiful Potomac, every turn of which discloses a fresh panorama, brings you to the woods of Mount Vernon.

The house, a wooden structure with a piazza along the front, stands on a considerable elevation, and commands a fine view of winding river and wooded banks. One is seized with admiration at the sight of all this beauty, as one stands upon the threshold of the old home of America's liberator.

It was here, in this peaceful country-house, that lived, like the most modest of America's sons, the man who was the greatest hero of modern times. A feeling of reverent admiration fills you as you enter the quaint little hall.

Each room is kept up at the expense of one of the thirty-three States of the Union. Everything has been arranged, as nearly as possible, to represent the state of the house at the time Washington lived in it.

In the hall hangs the key of the Bastille presented in 1789 by Lafayette to the "Great friend of Liberty."

There is an interesting little souvenir attaching to the history of the banquet hall. This room was built in 1784, and finished at the time of Lafayette's third visit to America. He and several French n.o.blemen were visiting Mount Vernon, and a ball was to be given in their honour. A handsome wall-paper, imported from England, had arrived; but the paper-hangers had not arrived, greatly to Mrs. Washington's annoyance.

Seeing his hostess grow distressed over the delay of the workmen, Lafayette, with characteristic enthusiasm, said to her:

"Do not despair, Madame; we are three or four able-bodied men, who will soon make short work of it."

And, without more ado, the marquis and his friends set about papering the walls, and were soon joined by Washington himself, who proved a vigorous and efficient help.

The tomb of the General is of the simplest description; but it evokes far more touching memories than the magnificent sarcophagus of Napoleon in the Church of the _Invalides_. I never felt more sincerely impressed and touched than at Mount Vernon.

Philadelphia, formerly the capital of the United States, is a city of eight or nine hundred thousand inhabitants, and is built like New York, in parallelograms. Its Town Hall is, next to the Capitol at Washington, the finest edifice in America. I do not know anything to compare to its splendid park, unless it be the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. The alleys of this park, if put together, would cover about sixty miles in length--so said a Philadelphian who added: "therefore it is the biggest park in the world." Seen after New York or the busy western cities, Philadelphia strikes one as monotonous. It is full of all kinds of manufactories, however, this Quaker city of quiet streets and sober people.

On the sh.o.r.es of Lake Michigan there stood a rather insignificant town, built of wood, and peopled by a few thousand inhabitants. This town was called Chicago.

On the evening of the 8th of October, 1871, a cow, that an old woman was milking in a barn, kicked over a lamp and set fire to the structure. The flames spread, and on the morrow of that terrible night the whole city was level with the ground. The Chicago people of to-day show, as a curiosity to the visitor, the only house which escaped the flames.

At the present time, this city, like the phoenix of which she is the living and gigantic emblem, stands, rebuilt in hewn stone, and holding 800,000 inhabitants.

Such is America.

In less than twenty years, Omaha, Kansas, Denver, Minneapolis, will be so many Chicagos. Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Louisville will rival her in five.

Chicago is, in my eyes, the very type of the American city--the most striking example of what Jonathan calls _go-a-headism_.

The streets are twice as wide as the Parisian boulevards, the houses of business are eight, ten, twelve stories high. Michigan Avenue is seven miles long: the numbers of the houses run up to three thousand and something. The city has parks, lovely drives by the Lake Sh.o.r.e; statues, including a splendid one of Abraham Lincoln; public buildings imposing in their ma.s.siveness, fine theatres and churches; luxurious clubs, hotels inside which four good sized Parisian ones could dance a quadrille, etc., etc.

Michigan Avenue and Prairie Avenue are extremely handsome. Picture to yourself the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne prolonged for seven miles in a straight line, and imagine the effect, the beautiful vista, when this is lit up at night, or when the trees, with which both these grand roads are planted, are in all their fresh spring beauty.

In these avenues American eccentricity has been allowed free play. The houses are built in all imaginable styles of architecture: some of them are Florentine, some English, others Moorish, others a mixture of all three; others, again, look like Greek temples, whilst here and there you come across what looks like a little Gothic church, and close alongside mediaeval castles in miniature, or an imitation of mosques; some have the look of villas in the Paris suburbs; some have been modelled upon Swiss chalets, others upon the residence of some pacha on the borders of the Bosphorus. There are styles for all tastes.

The American may be eccentric, or what you will, but he is never monotonous.

Enter one of these houses, and you will see handsome furniture, not only rich, but in good taste.

Riches beget the taste for literature and the arts; perhaps one day it will beget the taste for simplicity. I was not astonished to find Chicago society genial, polished, and well read. You find here still more warmth and much less constraint than in the East, You feel that you have quitted the realms of New England puritanism. No frigidity here; people give free play to their sentiments. If I had to name the most sympathetic of my American audiences, the warmest[4] and promptest to seize the significance of a look or gesture, I should name the one which I had the honour of addressing in Chicago.

[4] I have had this opinion corroborated since by all the public speakers and artists with whom I have spoken on the subject.

At seven in the morning every man is astir and at work, whether he be millionaire or poor clerk. As I have mentioned elsewhere, only the idle are outside the pale of respectability in Chicago.

The business done in Chicago is fabulous. The money value of the total trade last year, I am told, reached the immense sum of 227 millions sterling. The aggregate bank clearings amounted to about 612 millions sterling. 2,383,000 cattle are slaughtered, and 6,250,000 barrels of flour received. Chicago is probably the most flourishing city in America--therefore in the world, as Jonathan would put it. I give these figures also to show that divine wrath does not seem to fall upon this city which opens its places of recreation on Sundays.

Twenty railway lines, besides local ones, have termini at Chicago. The total mileages of Chicago railroads is 28,817. Stop and catch your breath!

I do not think it is possible for a European to imagine the activity which reigns in Chicago without seeing it.

"You will soon be inventing," I said to a resident, "a machine that will take a live rabbit at one end, and turn out a chimney-pot hat at the other."

"We have done something very like it already," he replied.

And next morning he took me to see the famous pig-killing and pork-packing premises of Philip Armour and Co.

Picture to yourself a series of rooms connecting. In the first, 5,000 pigs a day are killed; in the second, they are sc.r.a.ped as they come out of a cauldron of scalding water; in the third, the heads are cut off; and so on, and so on. The process is somewhat sickening, and I will not enter into any more details. At the end of the establishment the poor pigs are presented to you under the forms of bacon, sausage, galantine, etc. The various processes take place with all the rapidity of conjuring.

What will they not invent in Chicago? That which looks like a joke to-day may be a reality next week; and I shall not be surprised, next time I go to Chicago, to find that the talking power of women has been utilized as a motor for sewing machines by connecting the chin with the wheel.

How leave Chicago without mentioning the adieux that reached me at my hotel during the hour before I left for Canada?

Ding-rrrring, goes the telephone bell.

"h.e.l.lo!"

"h.e.l.lo!"

"Good-bye; good luck!"

"h.e.l.lo!"

"Pleasant journey!"

"h.e.l.lo!"

"Good-bye; our compliments to John Bull!"