The vehicles increased on the highway, the lumber of much traffic commenced, the red and yellow tramcars multiplied, railway lines crossed the road, and by the rush of trains one felt that all the traffic of Eastern and Central America was converging to one point. The open country disappeared. The air of the roadway became full of dust. The heat increased ten degrees, and to move a limb was to perspire. Foreigners jostled one another on the sidewalks, negroes and negresses sat in doorways. The odour of carcases came to the nostrils from Packing-town, and at last the great central roar of traffic—Chicago.
I can give no account of the great city here—it would be only to recount and add together the uglinesses and the promises of other cities. It was at once worse and better than I had expected. The hopelessness of the picture given by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle I felt to be exaggerated. I was told at Hull House that the novelist had got all his stories at the stockyards, but that the massed calamities that are so appalling in the story never occurred to one family in real life. The effect of accumulated horrible detail in The Jungle deprives you at the time of any[Pg 276] love towards America; it made me, a Briton, feel hatred towards America, and when first I read the book I felt that no Russian who read it carefully would entertain willingly the idea of going to America. If he had entertained the idea, having read The Jungle he would abandon it. It is an astonishing tract on the fate of a Russian peasant family leaving the land of so-called tyranny for a land of so-called freedom; and its obvious moral is that Russia is a better country for the individual than America—that America takes the fine peasant stock of Europe and shatters it to bits.
It is true that Chicago makes a convenience of men, and that there man exists that commerce may thrive rather than that commerce exists that man may thrive. It is a place where the physical and psychical savings of Europeans are wasted like water, and where no one understands what the waste means. Spending is always joyful, and Chicago is a gay city. It is full of a light-hearted people, pushing, bantering, laughing, blindfolded over their spiritual eyes. In such places as Chicago the immigrant finds a market for things he could never sell at home—his body, his nerve, his vital energy; a ready market, and he sells them and has money in his pocket and beer in plenty. Listen to the loud-voiced, God-invoking crowd in the saloons! They have the proceeds that come of selling the savings of Europe. They have come out of the quiet villages and forests where, from generation to generation and[Pg 277] age to age, the peasantry live quiet lives, and grow richer and richer in spirit and nerve. But these in the Chicago streets and saloons have found their mysterious destiny, to lavish in a life, and for seemingly worthless ends, what hundreds of quiet-living ancestors have saved. The tree of a hundred years falls in a day and becomes timber, supporting a part of the fabric of civilisation for a while.
AT THE FOUNTAIN IN THE PARK: A HOT DAY IN CHICAGO
AT THE FOUNTAIN IN THE PARK: A HOT DAY IN CHICAGO.
The strangest thing is the clamour of the Chicago crowd—it is dead-sure about everything in the world, ignorant, cocksure, mocking. It does not know it is losing, does not know that it is blind-folded, because it is the victim of destiny.
Part of the spiritual blindness of the great city is the belief it holds that there is no other place of importance but itself. And many outsiders take the city at its own estimate. But Chicago is not America, neither is New York or any other great city. If going to America meant going only to the great cities, then few but the Jews would emigrate from Europe.
The ideals of America cannot be worked out merely in the great cities. The cities are places of death, of the destruction of national tissue, and of human combustion, necessary, no doubt, as such, certainly not places where one need worry about national health. The national health is on the farms of Pennsylvania and Indiana and Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, the Dakotas, the Far West. The men range big out there;[Pg 278] the stand-by of the people will always be found in these places and not in the cities.
And New York and Chicago, though necessary, are abnormal. They are not so much America as unassimilated Europe. The population of a city should be the natural sacrifice of the population of the country. It is often deplored that the country people are forsaking the land and flocking to the towns; but the proper people to replenish the failing stock of the cities is just those whom instinct and destiny prompt to leave the country. It is most bewildering to the student of America that her city-populations are replenished by the foreign immigrants, by people nursing, it is true, American sentiments, but not yet born into the American ideal, not made America's own. The natural place for the first generation of immigrants is on the land. If Chicago seems too large, too sudden a growth, disorderly, unanticipated, altogether out of hand, it is because of the hordes of foreigners who are there, who have not the impulse to co-operate, and who do not readily respond to the efforts of the idealist and politician. And they do not readily respond because they have not lived long enough in the true American atmosphere, have not served a quiet apprenticeship in the country, but have been dumped into an industrial wilderness served with the yellow press and "sped up."
America will have to guide the flow of the [Pg 279]immigrants, and learn to irrigate with it and make fertile the Middle and the Far West. It is over-commercialisation and near-sightedness that clamours for more labour in the great cities. The size of a city is never too small. In the normal state of a nation the city functionises the country, and according to the strength of the people in the background the state of the great town will be busy or slack. It is good news that negotiations are being made with the trans-Atlantic shipping companies to ship immigrants to the Far Western coast via the Panama Canal, at rates not very much heavier than at present exist for shipment to Boston and Philadelphia and New York. A man and his wife planted on the land in the East are worth ten given to the greedy cities of the West.
In the matter of the colonisation of her own country America might learn a great deal from Russia, especially in the matter of railway transit. It is all to the advantage of a country that means of transit are cheap, and that there be a brisk circulation of the blood of the body-politic. As a newspaper realises that the cheaper its price the greater its success, the greater its circulation, so America might realise that the cheaper were its railway fares the more facility would there be for the mingling of the peoples, the assimilation of foreigners, and the development of the country.
In America it costs 39 dollars 60 cents to go as far[Pg 280] as Denver, Colorado, which is about 2000 miles, and $76.20 to go to San Francisco. A comparison with the Russian rates will give an idea how much more cheaply it is possible to carry people:
railway rates
Of course, the cost of working is more in America than in Russia, and the trains are twice as fast; but that is not enough to set off against the enormous differences in fares. A great profit is made out of the railway business, and the profit is at the expense of America as a whole. It is absurd to compare the prices of fares in America with the prices of fares in Great Britain. It is bad enough with us, but ours is a small territory; it does not cost much to go from end to end. But America is a vast country. It costs almost a year's wages to pay the fare of a family across it. You think twice before determining to travel even a thousand miles. The consequence is that the circulation of people is sluggish in the extreme. The East begins to get congested, and the cities are packed with people who would gladly have gone straight to the West if facilities had been granted them.
[Pg 281]
In the development of democracy it is circulation that is important, the circulation of opinion, of sentiment, of ideals. The large circulation of interest and affection caused by the reduction of postage rates down to a penny in Britain and two cents in America has given an immense impetus to democratic development; the larger circulation of ideas and opinions caused by the reduction of the price of newspapers to a cent has also been advantageous. But how much more important than the circulation of opinions, ideas, and sentiments is the circulation of the people themselves, controlled by the price of fares on railways! How much more swiftly would the American democracy become homogeneous if it were possible to travel a thousand miles for five dollars. That would entail either nationalisation of railways or subsidisation by the Government. But it would be worth it to the American people.
Because of the heavy expense of railway travelling America is only dimly conscious of itself, geographically and ethnologically. Americans even boast of the distances between their towns and between different points of the country. Chicago, only one-third of the way across the continent, is called "The West." Indiana and Illinois and Minnesota are "out West." It is as if we referred to Berkshire or Warwickshire as the West of England.
In due course, it may be imagined, the United[Pg 282] States Government will assume state-control of many of the railways, and ten dollars will pay your fare from New York right across. Immigrants will not be allowed to settle in great cities till they have spent ten years on the land. Such a provision would make it easier to admit all sorts and conditions of Europeans at Ellis Island; and at the corresponding Immigration stations at other ports a great deal of the White Slave trouble would be averted, and the shelter of immigrants would not absorb so much of the urban attention so urgently needed elsewhere.
* * * * * * *
Railways have as much power to make the new American as the newspaper has. Perhaps they have more power; for the railways can afford great opportunities for social mingling. The railway can take any immigrant to a place where he will be not merely a hireling, but a living organism grafted into the vast body of America. At present the high fares deter the immigrant, and he is cooped up in districts which he would like to leave, but cannot; in districts where he must remain foreign and not American.
For there is an impulse to move and to mingle. If railway facilities were granted there would be a great deal more social and commercial intercourse over the surface of America. Each new immigrant who comes into the United States is particularly[Pg 283] wanted somewhere; his landing is not an accident. Some village or countryside has called him, and will still call him, though he be frustrated at first, doing the wrong sort of work among the wrong group of people.
The great heterogeneous mass of peoples wants to become one nation. There is a power which works through the peoples for that end. The people are ready to mingle; they are already mingling; they are going to and fro and in twos and threes, and every step and every transaction is something essential in the making of the coming homogeneous nation.
It is a choir dance, a dance of molecules or atoms, if you will, but a dance of human atoms, and one that yields a mystic music that can be heard by the poet's ear. Leading the peoples in the involutions and evolutions of the choir dance is a masked figure, not itself one of the people. What is that figure? Not trade, I think, though it helps; not common interest, though it is perhaps a rule of the dance; not even the American idea. The masked figure that leads is a fate; it is an instinct of Destiny.
The dance is being played out on a vast stage with much scenery—the three-thousand-mile stretch of America, East to West: the Industrial East, with its hills; the corn plains and forests of the middle West; the wild West; the luxuriant and wonderful South.
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