Chapter XX: Velocipedal

How mixed Blood effervesces.—Of the Causes and Developments of
American Fastness.—Unrest in Prisons and at Home.—Time lost in
Sleep, etc.—The distressing Hurry of Brains.—Compressing a Cow in
a Milk-Pot.—Of Doctors’ Gigs and Apoplectic Whirligigs.—American
Stomachs considered.—A general Stomach; how employed and hired
out.—Doctors’ Bills.—Clothes Wringers and State Wringers.—“Speedy
Trials” secured.—The Common and Un-common Law of the United States
considered at length.—Of Dower, and how taken.—Property
administered before Death.—Heirs cheated.—Injunctions
used.—Illinois Divorces.—Of Prohibited Degrees of Marriage.—Of Fat
People and Servants.—Boarding-Houses and Hotels.—American Trade
and its Feats at diminishing Quantities.—Fast Americans in
Europe.—How they overcome Distances, History, and Landlords.—The
Paris _Genus_.

If “in the midst of life we are in debt,” so in the midst of debt Americans are always lively. Mixed blood seems to discharge rapidly its effervescing ingredients.

Fastness, except in the colors of our cheeks and chintzes and in the movement of our mails, works its curious ways through all manifestations of American civilization. Over a small, old, long-cultivated territory, like most of the European, life moves respectably slow, careful of its savings, gathered up by centuries of work and put out at low rates of interest; across continental stretches like ours, sweeping in wide districts and materials of unbundled, aching plenty, it hastens with panting speed, and can afford to lose everything except time. Our great areas, therefore, make us lively, their vast opportunities, restless, wide-talking, and manifesting the generous coarseness of a large-grained breadth. Out of these alone would come marked characteristics; but when these are further quickened by accelerating activities of discovery in all departments, and by mechanical inventions of vast power in translating man and his products over the earth, the result is rapid brain-work, stimulating action, quick combinations, eruptive and vivacious speech.

M. Varet, a French savan, has ascertained that a fly caught by him in France made three hundred and thirty movements of his wings in a second. This is rapid work; but a Wall Street bull will toss his horns twice as fast.

The larger trains of thought thus started will run of themselves with time-table exactness. We shall only accompany a few special excursion ideas a short distance from the main depot.

An impatient unrest under discipline and restrictions, while kept below fever heat by the wet bandages of a self-imposed law, makes jails double punishments for American criminals, and homes often houses for the detention of juveniles under sixteen. Confinements, except to a small class of our married population, is an abridgment of enterprising work, which, if continued beyond a natural law that prescribes sleep to all and a longer period of inactivity to the special class just named, would be a grievance, calling at least for a convention, addresses, and agitation to get rid of.

The distress of hurry which vexes the _vis inertiæ_ out of our brains, stirs our intellectual pans continually, so that we do not always get the natural cream of ideas. An American is always working for condensed milk processes; to compress a cow into a milk-pot, or utilize all the herds in his neighborhood on his breakfast-table, in a way unheard of elsewhere. Of course this wide-reaching hurry, which grasps large results and scorns the domestic economies, that occupy the thoughts of people elsewhere, refuses to be concerned for any length of time with the importunities of suffering stomachs.

American stomachs have not time enough to wait on nature. Hence doctors’ gigs and apoplectic whirligigs. A patent stomach that should grind grist for a neighborhood or village, and leave the unstomached worker to avail himself of his accelerating opportunities, would command a high price. It would be hired out around the neighborhood, like a threshing-machine or corn-sheller. In fact, American households might in general be advantageously grouped around or framed into one of these mechanical digesters, with attachments for washing out, ironing, and starching their clothes, and for doing up the wasteful processes of visiting, to economic advantages that would tell on the census. One of the disadvantages would be the discouragement of that branch of American industry, now so largely prosperous, of doctors’ bills, chasing in vain after many of the living and at last only overtaking the administrator of the estate, clean out of breath.

Of course, the benefits of associated wealth and skill have not been overlooked as levers to move enterprises, people’s purses, and sometimes those low-down, coarse adjectives, volcanic in their origin, which, in case of dissatisfaction, erupt over the surface. Universal clothes-wringers are the product of this observation. So other combinations have been and are rapidly forming to wring money out of city, State, and Federal exchequers. It is curious to see how the handles of these joint pumping and pocket-exhausting companies all lie towards the great cities.

Most of the business in the United States, north of Washington, is carried on after an express and accelerated fashion, which is impatient of holidays, and rides over the Fourth of July even, as ruthlessly as an express-train over the human obstruction which thus gets forwarded on his journey out of the United States with a despatch almost enviable to the survivors. Even the Federal Constitution prescribes “speedy trials” as a right, and treats a man as injured who does not go it in a capital way, when on that precipitous road, with a final rush.

The common law of the United States presumes that all are minute-men, and know the quick step; while the uncommon law in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado dispenses with the tedious confinement between the apprehension of the accused and his transporting sentence and uprising. “Delays are dangerous,” is their condensed code.

MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN A. D. 1900.
(p. 520)
]

The law of dower, as practically enforced, is shaped by the same rapidly revolving lathe, which makes so much of our domestic hollow-ware. The wife spends the principal before her husband’s death, and thus shuns the tedious complications of legal proceedings, which admeasures the dower often to the enterpising lawyer, the bailiffs, and the court clerks.

A marked improvement has also been made in the distribution of estates generally. Among the slow nations of Europe the children generally wait for the unfortunate old people to die before taking their property. This tardy habit is now found to be often productive of great injury to children, especially to those who, snatched away by rapid manners before their begettors, are thus defrauded of their shares. “A bird in the hand” is no longer a _rara avis_, but a domestic fowl cultivated by rapid feeding. Gifts to the living avoid the taxes and discomforts of probate courts, in which it is disagreeable for a family, covered with crape, to sit and see a politician assess the estate upon the heirs.

Fast progress has been made, also, in preventive justice. Injunctions, behind whose shields such old fogies as Lord Eldon, Lord Somers, Lord Thurlow, John Marshall, or William Story were accustomed to hide threatened rights until the danger was over-past, have recently been turned edgewise, and cut down corporations and others obnoxious Fisc-ally or otherwise, or else pressed against them so that they perspired away their adipose stock until they were comfortably ready for a receiver.

The doctrine of divorce, which has puzzled the learned John Miltons in all the sleepy ages that have dozed before us, has been, in many States, simplified, so that he who runs through them may read a decree. Some people have uncharitably supposed that the premiums offered to individual disunions by such States as Illinois and Indiana, were devices to draw speculators thither for a day or so; but these are vagrant suspicions that ought not to be allowed on our trains.

In feudal countries, where purity of blood is carefully guarded,—inasmuch as the descents to property are the rule and not descents from it as in America,—legists declare that a woman may not marry her cousin, her uncle, her grandfather, or even her father,—a wise enough restriction, perhaps, for such benighted folks, and where care in marrying often leaves the female part of the household to the dangerous company of these relations until far on in life. But with us women are not shut up to any such necessities, except in Utah, where they may, in the course of a respectably long life, marry through every genealogical degree without knowing it. In other parts they are as necessary as insurance companies, and so marry very soon; so that silver weddings are often seen at an early age, while golden matrimonies are more frequent than maternities or patrimonies. To every thoughtful man, who moves about our rapidly dissolving surfaces, where the railroad car is the kaleidoscope which turns up the bits of humanity in new combinations, a wife is necessary to put up a monument over him; for moving on is such a fixed law,—the only fixed thing in America, except debt and live corruption,—that while he was turning his majority, all his family relations would have gone to other States.

The two curiosities in the United States are fat people and servants. Both run away in a velocipedal hurry; the former into sharp bargains, and the latter into independent powers which dictate treaties and make alliances like other self-governing communities. An American family is like a South Carolina regiment, all officers and no privates; a boarding-house, a Swiss confederacy, in which the cantons, wedged into neutralizing elements, get forward like a stool braced every-way and equipoised into an aching discomfort; and a hotel, like twenty German _Bunds_ entangled by contrarious independent interests that knot themselves into teasing discontents, and fret into jars which hold a variety of unpreserved, acidulating fruits. The freest joke in all America is one of its large hotels, which fancies Axminster carpets and chandeliers in a large parlor, and numerous discomforts packed in ever-dwindling rooms, to be happiness. But then the “gentlemanly proprietor” makes up for all this in the bills, which convince all the guests, that they must have enjoyed themselves and at an American rate of speed.

Trade has also had its great advances, not only in the figures which stand in merchants’ magazines like pyramids, with bases always widening downwards, but in the dwindling measures, quarts, gallons, pecks, and bushels, and the waning qualities which sharpen upwards to steady apexes. How to make up in the bill what is taken from the body is a critical study, in which most tradesmen have, without any prizes offered by outsiders, become great proficients. If that man is a public benefactor who makes two blades grow in the place of one, surely he may be rewarded with a passing notice, who takes all the steel out of the one sent to him for repairs, and then divides up the instrument into several blades. Making water into wine, chalk into milk, chemicals into as many varieties of drinkables as there are days of the year, and diluting articles deemed too strong when left to their raw native vigor, so as to adapt them to our weakened constitutions, attest the beneficent designs of manufacturers and merchants upon Americans of plethoric habits. Peabodies shelling out to poorbodies furnish examples of abundant charity not so widely touching as these.

To make a small measure go twice as far as a large one is more than a feat; it approaches creation. What may in time be considered a double bed, it is impossible yet to foresee; but certain it is, that while single beds are increasing to an alarmingly wide extent, their narrowness is becoming such as to require a new definition of a line to avoid disagreeable collisions.

Mercantile failures, elsewhere hurtful, are with us hurried on into vivacious benefits, dividing up, before the expiration of the credits given, the accumulated profits which otherwise might accumulate in stagnating dulness in the firm. A steady increase of wages is solving, too, those perplexing theories how to balance capital and labor; a weekly distribution of earnings keeping down injudicious balances in the bank.

The frequent jumps of men from low places into high ones, with a celerity very pleasing to their families and often to their creditors, show that the world is governed too much; for acting on this Jeffersonian maxim, most of these ready leapers leave off the governing part and expend their activities in securing, along with their weak salaries, strong flying benefits, which only light on the vigilant.

While the velocipedal ways of Americans thus cut across their own country, it is in foreign fields that they are most striking and cutting. Crossing the well-worn paths of Europe, scattering high-premium gold on those jolly fellows, landlords and waiters, they ridge its old historic surfaces with little histories which the facetious persons, who catch sight of them as they whiz through histories, which they leave grandly behind them and all unknown, retail with as much glee, as the travellers themselves once did saleratus, fine-cut nails, or bobinet. Their scant intellectual stores and unfurnished stock of knowledge, so far from embarrassing, only enable them to spin on faster. Mythology, paintings, biographies, architecture, are soon wound up on their clean spindles.

Another class, like aeronautic vessels, have gaseous heads and heavy undergearing, which enable them to run over and run down everything abroad by swift-moving slangs. They always float by the bad air of their own heads, and are apt to anchor in vicious soils. These they can-can. The spent money surprises the hotel squeezers; the spent morals astonish themselves by the ease with which they lose their little all.

But of all the fast classes in America, that is the most velocipedal which, having expressed themselves through the modish follies of the largest American cities, are transported to the stronger vices of Paris. Tired of tapping the younger trees of American growth, they spend the rest of their precious lives in pecking assiduously the rotten parts of foreign woods, content with the phosphoric slime of decay and dissolving maturities.