How I found Peace at Musquash on the Monongahela
Prince, blown by many a western breeze
Our vessels greet you treasure-laden;
We send them all — but best of these
??A free and frank young Yankee maiden.
IT is a mean thing and an unhandsome to ‘do’ a continent in five-hundred-mile jumps. But after those swine and bullocks at Chicago I felt that complete change of air would be good. The United States at present hinge in or about Chicago, as a double-leaved screen hinges. To be sure, the tiny New England States call a trip to Pennsylvania ‘going west,’ but the larger-minded citizen seems to reckon his longitude from Chicago. Twenty years hence the centre of population — that shaded square on the census map — will have shifted, men say, far west of Chicago. Twenty years later it will be on the Pacific slope. Twenty years after that America will begin to crowd up, and there will be some trouble. People will demand manufactured goods for their reduced-establishment households at the cheapest possible rates; and the cry that the land is rich enough to afford protection will cease with a great abruptness. At present it is the farmer who pays most dearly for the luxury of high prices. In the old days, when the land was fresh and there was plenty of it and it cropped like the Garden of Eden, he did not mind paying. Now there is not so much free land, and the old acres are needing stimulants, which cost money, and the farmer, who pays for everything, is beginning to ask questions. Also the great American Nation, which individually never shuts a door behind its noble self, very seldom attempts to put back anything that it has taken from Nature’s shelves. It grabs all it can and moves on. But the moving-on is nearly finished and the grabbing must stop, and then the Federal Government will have to establish a Woods and Forests Department the like of which was never seen in the world before. And all the people who have been accustomed to hack, mangle, and burn timber as they please will object, with shots and protestations, to this infringement of their rights. The nigger will breed bounteously, and he will have to be reckoned with; and the manufacturer will have to be contented with smaller profits, and he will have to be reckoned with; and the railways will no longer rule the countries through which they run, and they will have to be reckoned with. And nobody will approve of it in the least.
Yes; it will be a spectacle for all the world to watch, this big, slashing colt of a nation, that has got off with a flying start on a freshly littered course, being pulled back to the ruck by that very mutton-fisted jockey Necessity. There will be excitement in America when a few score millions of ‘sovereigns’ discover that what they consider the outcome of their own Government is but the rapidly diminishing bounty of Nature; and that if they want to get on comfortably they must tackle every single problem from labour to finance humbly, without gasconade, and afresh. But at present they look ‘that all the to-morrows shall be as to-day,’ and if you argue with them they say that the Democratic Idea will keep things going. They believe in that Idea, and the less well-informed fortify themselves in their belief by curious assertions as to the despotism that exists in England. This is pure provincialism, of course; but it is very funny to listen to, especially when you compare the theory with the practice (pistol, chiefly) as proven in the newspapers. I have striven to find out where the central authority of the land lies. It isn’t at Washington, because the Federal Government can’t do anything to the States save run the mails and collect a Federal tax or two. It isn’t in the States, because the townships can do as they like; and it isn’t in the townships, because these are bossed by alien voters or rings of patriotic home-bred citizens. And it certainly is not in the citizens, because they are governed and coerced by a despotic power of public opinion as represented in their papers, preachers, or local society. I found one man who told me that if anything went wrong in this huge congress of kings,— if there was a split or an upheaval or a smash,— the people in detail would be subject to the Idea of the sovereign people in mass. This is a survival from the Civil War, when, you remember, the people in a majority did with guns and swords slay and wound the people in detail. All the same, the notion seems very much like the worship by the savage of the unloaded rifle as it leans against the wall.
But the men and women set Us an example in patriotism. They believe in their land and its future, and its honour, and its glory, and they are not ashamed to say so. From the largest to the least runs this same proud, passionate conviction to which I take off my hat and for which I love them. An average English householder seems to regard his country as an abstraction to supply him with policemen and fire-brigades. The Cockney cad cannot understand what the word means. The bloomin’ toffs he knows, and the law, and the soldiers that supply him with a spectacle in the Parks; but he would laugh in your face at the notion of any duty being owed by himself to his land.1 Pick an American of the second generation anywhere you please — from the cab-rank, the porters’ room, or the plough-tail,—’specially the plough-tail,— and that man will make you understand in five minutes that he understands what manner of thing his Republic is. He might laugh at a law that didn’t suit his convenience, draw your eye-teeth in a bargain, and applaud ’cuteness on the outer verge of swindling: but you should hear him stand up and sing:—
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing!
I have heard a few thousand of them engaged in that employment. I respect him. There is too much Romeo and too little balcony about our National Anthem. With the American article it is all balcony. There must be born a poet who shall give the English the song of their own, own country — which is to say, of about half the world. Remains then only to compose the greatest song of all — The Saga of the Anglo-Saxon all round the earth — a p?an that shall combine the terrible slow swing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (which, if you know not, get chanted to you) with Britannia Needs no Bulwarks, the skirl of the British Grenadiers with that perfect quickstep, Marching through Georgia, and at the end the wail of the Dead March. For We, even We who share the earth between us as no gods have ever shared it, we also are mortal in the matter of our single selves. Will any one take the contract?
It was with these rambling notions that I arrived at the infinite peace of the tiny township of Musquash, on the Monongahela River. The clang and tumult of Chicago belonged to another world. Imagine a rolling, wooded, English landscape, under softest of blue skies, dotted at three-mile intervals with fat little, quiet little villages, or aggressive little manufacturing towns that the trees and the folds of the hills mercifully prevented from betraying their presence. The golden-rod blazed in the pastures against the green of the mulleins, and the cows picked their way home through the twisted paths between the blackberry bushes. All summer was on the orchards, and the apples — such apples as we dream of when we eat the woolly imitations of Kashmir — were ripe and toothsome. It was good to lie in a hammock with half-shut eyes, and, in the utter stillness, to hear the apples dropping from the trees, and the tinkle of the cowbells as the cows walked statelily down the main road of the village. Everybody in that restful place seemed to have just as much as he wanted; a house with all comfortable appliances, a big or little verandah wherein to spend the day, a neatly shaved garden with a wild wealth of flowers, some cows, and an orchard. Everybody knew everybody else intimately, and what they did not know, the local daily paper — a daily for a village of twelve hundred people!— supplied. There was a court-house where justice was done, and a gaol where some most enviable prisoners lived, and there were four or five churches of four or five denominations. Also it was impossible to buy openly any liquor in that little paradise. But — and this is a very serious but — you could by procuring a medical certificate get strong drinks from the chemist. That is the drawback of prohibition. It makes a man who wants a drink a shirker and a contriver, which things are not good for the soul of a man, and presently, ’specially if he be young, causes him to believe that he may just as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb; and the end of that young man is not pretty. Nothing except a rattling fall will persuade an average colt that a fence is not meant to be jumped over; whereas if he be turned out into the open he learns to carry himself with discretion. One heard a good deal of this same dread of drink in Musquash, and even the maidens seemed to know too much about its effects upon certain unregenerate youths, who, if they had been once made thoroughly, effectually, and persistently drunk — with a tepid brandy and soda thrust before their goose-fleshed noses on the terrible Next Morning — would perhaps have seen the futility of their ways. It was a sin by village canons to imbibe lager, though — experto crede — you can get dropsy on that stuff long before you can get drunk. ‘But what man knows his mind?’ Besides, it is all their own affair.
The little community seemed to be as self-contained as an Indian village. Had the rest of the land sunk under the sea, Musquash would have gone on sending its sons to school in order to make them ‘good citizens,’ which is the constant prayer of the true American father, settling its own roadmaking, local cesses, town-lot arbitrations, and internal government by ballot and vote, with due respect to the voices of the headmen (which is the salvation of the ballot), until such time as all should take their places in the cemetery appointed for their faith. Here were Americans and no aliens — men ruling themselves by themselves and for themselves and their wives and their children — in peace, order, and decency.
But what went straightest to this heart, though they did not know it, was that they were Methody folk for the most part — ay, Methody as ever trod a Yorkshire Moor, or drove on a Sunday to some chapel of the Faith in the Dales. The old Methody talk w............