Part 7

Once more to the road. The American high-road differs considerably from any way in Europe. Every farm-house has a white letter-box on a post outside its main entrance, and the farmer posts his letter and hoists a metal flag as a signal to the peripatetic postman that there are letters to collect. There are no thatched cottages; the homesteads stand back from the road, they are always of wood, and have shady verandahs and cosily furnished front rooms. The fields on each side of the road are protected by six-inch mesh steel netting, turned out by some great factory in Pittsburg I suppose. There are very few country guide-posts, and in New York State those there are come rather as a reward to you after you have guessed right. They are put up at a distance from the cross-roads. The pointers of the guide-posts are of tin. The telephone cones are of green glass, the poles are mostly chestnut, are not straight, and rot quickly. There are many advertisements by the way, and as you approach a town of importance they are as thick as fungi. They are not written for tramps to jeer at, but as hints to rich motorists. Still one necessarily smiles at:

CLOTHE YOUR WHOLE FAMILY ON CREDIT $1 A WEEK.

or

DUTCHESS TROUSERS. TEN CENTS A BUTTON. A DOLLAR A RIP.

A great portion of the State of Indiana seems to be devoted to Dutchess trousers, and I often wonder whether the company had to pay many indemnities to customers.

One sorry feature of country advertising was the number of notices scrawled in black with charcoal or painted in tar. In Europe picnickers write their names or the names of their sweethearts on the rocks and the walls and palings, but in America they write their trade, the thing they sell, and the price a pound, what O. Henry would call their especial sort of "graft."

Then "rrrrrrr! rhrhrh--whaup--ssh!" the automobile appears on the horizon, passes you, and is gone. I have no prejudice against automobilists; they were very hospitable to me, and carried me many miles. If I had accepted all the lifts offered me I should have been in Chicago in a week, instead of taking two months on the journey. But the farmers curse them. On one Sunday late in June I counted everything that passed me. The farmer commonly tells you that hundreds of automobiles whirl past his door every day. This day there were just one hundred and ten, of which thirty-two were auto-cycles and the rest cars. As a set-off against this there were only five buggies and three ordinary cyclists. That was one of the last days of June, when I was seventy miles from Chicago. I had two offers to take me into the city that day!

Besides counting the vehicles that passed me I took stock of the automobilists themselves. No one passed till 7 A.M., and then came a loving couple, looking like a runaway match. He was clasping her waist, and their trunks were roped on to the car behind. Then six young men, all in their wind-blown shirts, came tearing along on auto-cycles. Scarcely had the noise of these subsided when a smart picnic party rolled past in a smooth-running car, flying purple flags on which was printed the name of their home city--Michigan. This is a common custom in America, to carry a flag with the name of your city. It boosts your own town, and is thought to bring trade there.

Six townsmen came past me in a grand car. Their hats were all off; they were all clean shaven and bald. Coats had been left at home, and the six were in radiantly clean coloured shirts. They smiled at me; I was one of the sights of the road.

Many picnic parties passed me, and men and women called out to me facetiously. Six shop-girls on a joy ride came past, and one of them kissed her hand to me--that is one of the things the girl in the car can safely do when she is passing a pedestrian.

Family parties went by, and also placid husbands and wives having a spin before lunch, and bashful happy pairs sitting behind the back of the discreet chauffeurs. There came an auto-cycle with a frantic man in front and a girl astride on his carrier behind. She was wiping the sand out of her eyes as she passed, her skirt was blown by the wind, and she showed a pair of dainty legs; the funny way in which she was obliged to sit made her look like a stalk bending over among reeds.

One of the few cyclists I met came up after this, and he dismounted to talk to me. He was a tender of gasoline engines "on vacation." I learned from him about the single auto-cycle for two. It appears that in America they manufacture special seats to screw on the back of a motor-cycle; some use that. Many, however, just strap a cushion on. Young men who have auto-cycles have a "pull" with the girls; they pick them up and take them to business, or take them home from business, and on holidays they take them for rides of joy. Several similar couples passed me during the day.

All sorts of gear went by; rich gentlemen in stately pride, workmen with their week-day grime scarcely cleared from their faces, gay girls with parasols, honeymoon pairs, cars with men driving, cars with women at the wheel. The automobile is far more of a general utility in the United States than in England. Workmen, and, indeed, farmers themselves--not those who curse--have their own cars. They mortgage their property to get them, but they get them all the same. Even women buy cars for themselves, and are to be seen driving them themselves. In Great Britain it is very rare that you see a woman travelling alone in a car, but in America it is a frequent sight. Of course in Russia, in the country, an automobile is still a rarity. I passed last summer in a populous part of the Urals and did not see a single car. I did not even see an ordinary bicycle. The farther west you go the more you find the inventions of the day taken advantage of. It is an important phenomenon in America; it shows that there is a readiness to adopt and utilise any new thing right off, directly it is discovered.

This readiness, however, results in a lack of seriousness. Inexpert driving is no crime; accidents are nothing to weep over; badly constructed cars are driven along loose springy roads with blood-curdling speed and recklessness. The pedestrian is vexed to see a car come towards him, leaping, bounding, dodging, dribbling, like some tricky centre-forward in a game of football. The nervous pedestrian has to climb trees or walls upon occasion to be sure he won't be killed. And then the cars themselves go frequently into ditches, or overturn and take fire. The car has become a toy, but it's dangerous for the children to play with.

Then the dust! Carlyle said there was nothing but Justice in this world, and he used the law of gravity as his metaphor, but he didn't consider the wind--alas, that the dust does not fly in front of the car and get into the motorist's eyes, but only drifts away over the poor tramp who never did him any harm.

The only horse vehicle I remarked on the road was the buggy, a gig with disproportionately large wheels, the direct descendant of the home-made cart. The buggy is still popular.

"Where've you been?" asks one American of another.

"Oh, just buggying around," he replies.

But the buggy is staid and conventional. It belongs to the old censorious religious America. It is supremely the vehicle of the consciously virtuous. It is also a specially rural vehicle. I think those who ride in buggies despise motorists from the bottom of their hearts; they think them vulgar townspeople, and consider motoring a form of trespass. But the automobilists are not prevented, and they bear no rancour. They haven't time to consider the countryman. The man in the buggy belongs to the past. In the future there will not be time to be condemnatory, and the man who stands still to feel self-virtuous will go to the wall.

The people who will continue to feel superior to the motorists will be tramps sitting on palings, grinning at them as they pass by. They also will remain the only people the motorists, rushing abreast of Time, will ever envy. However much progress progresses there will always remain those who sit on the palings and grin.

VI

THE REFLECTION OF THE MACHINE

As I tramped from village to village I was surprised to see so much stained glass in the churches of the Methodists, the Congregationalists, and other Puritans. Until quite modern times stained glass belonged exclusively to the ritualistic denominations. The Puritan, believing in simplicity of service, and in spirit rather than in form, put stained glass in the same category as the burning of incense, singing in a minor key, and praying in Latin. It partook of the glamour of idolatry; it had a sensuous appeal; it blurred the pure light of understanding. The true Puritan meeting-place is one of clear glass windows, hard seats, and a big Bible. It seems a pity that a very clear profession of faith should be blurred by picture windows--and, let me add by way of parenthesis, cushioned seats and revivalist preachers.

I examined in detail the coloured glass of a fine "Reform Church" that I passed on the road. The windows were rather impressive. They were not representations of scenes in Holy Writ, they contained no pictures of saints or angels, of the Saviour, or of the Virgin. So they escaped the imputation of idolatry. They were just pictures of symbolical objects or of significant letters. Thus, one window was the bird and symbolised Freedom, another was an anchor and symbolised Hope, another was a crown and symbolised Eternal Life. In one window the letters C.E. were illuminated--meaning Christian Endeavour, I presume; on another window was the open Bible, symbolising the foundation of belief. In every case the whole window was stained, and the little symbolical picture was set against a brilliant background.

It was all in good taste, and was a pleasant ornament, which made the church look very attractive exteriorly. But it was a compromise with a spirit not its own. My explanation is, some one must have wanted chapels to put in stained glass. Some one now has a great interest in making them put in stained glass. He is the manufacturer of that commodity. He has put stained glass on the market in such a way that every church is bound to have it. And he has devised a way of not offending the rigorous Puritans. "What is wrong in coloured light?" said he. "Nothing. It is only what you use it for. We can use it to show the things in which we believe." If incense could be manufactured in such a way as to make millions of dollars it would find its way somehow into the chapels. I was walking one day with an itinerant preacher, a man who called himself "a creed smasher." He wanted to weld all creeds into one and unify the Church of Christ. "Think of commerce," said he, "already it has stopped the wars of the nations; in time it will calm the wars of the sects. If only the churches were corporations, and Methodists could hold shares in Roman Catholicism, and Roman Catholics in Methodism!"

Commerce is exerting an influence that cannot be withstood. To take another instance, it has provided America with rocking-chairs and porch-swings. Although the Americans are an extremely active people, much more so than the British, yet their houses are all full of rocking-chairs, and on their verandahs they have porch-swings and hammocks. The British have straight-backs.

The Americans did not all cry out with one voice for rocking-chairs and swings. The Pilgrim Fathers did not bring them over. The reason they have them lies in the fact that some manufacturer started making them for the few. Then ambition took possession of him and he said, "There's something in rocking-chairs. I'm going to turn them out on a large scale."

"But there aren't the customers to buy them," some one objected.

"Never mind, we'll make the customers. We'll put them to the people in such a way that they gotta buy. We'll make 'em feel there's going to be such an opportunity for buyin' 'em as never was and never will be again."

"You believe you'll succeed?"

"We'll make it so universal that if a man goes into a house and doesn't see a rocking-chair and a porch-swing he'll think, 'My Lord, they've had the brokers in!'"

So rocking-chairs and porch-swings came. So, many things have come to humanity--many worse things.

I had just written this note, for I have written most of my book by the road, when I heard the following interesting talk about the town of Benton, Pennsylvania. I was walking from Wilkes Barre to Williamsport, and Benton is on the way. It is a place that has had many fires lately.

"Ah reckon ah know wot cleared Benton out more'n fires."

"What's that?"

"Wy, otomobeeles; mortgaging their farms to get 'em. There's not much in Benton. You couldn't raise a hundred dollars. It's the agents and the boosters of the companies that are mos' to blame, no doubt, but they're fools all the same who buy otomobeeles when they cahn pay their bills at the stores."

"What agents?" I asked. "D'you mean commercial travellers?"

"No. The agents in the town. Every little town has a man, sometimes two or three men, who are agents for the companies who manufacture the cars; they are just like the insurance agents, and are always talking about their business, comparing makes of car, praising this one and that, and getting folks on to want them."

"I suppose the companies want to make the motor car a domestic necessity, a thing no one can do without," I remarked.

"You're right; they do and they will. They'll fix that in time, you betcher, we'll all be having them. Then when we cahn do without 'em they'll raise the prices on us. Already they've started it with the gasoline; there's plenty motor spirit in the world, but the company gets possession of it and regulates the prices. An' you cahn make an oto go without gasoline. They can put it on us every time."

I should say society at Benton was suffering very badly from the influence of depraved commercialism. Some years ago Miss Ida Tarbell exposed what has been called "The Arson Trust," a company formed for setting fire to insured establishments on a basis of 10 per cent profit on the spoil. Benton might have furnished her with some interesting examples. There have been so many fires in the little town of late that tramps are refused the shelter even of barns, as if their match-ends were responsible. On the Fourth of July three years ago half the town was burnt down. Last year in a gale the shirt factory was gutted; the workmen had banked the fire up for the night, and about twenty minutes after the last man had left the works there was an explosion, and the red coals were scattered over the wooden building. Two months ago a large house took fire, and just a week before I reached the settlement the large Presbyterian church was consumed. Indeed, as I came into the town I remarked with some surprise the charred walls and beams of the church, and read the pathetic printing on the stone of foundation, "This stone was laid in 1903."

I had an interesting account of the church from the wife of a farmer at whose house I stayed a night. The church had been insured for seventeen thousand dollars, and it was twelve thousand dollars in debt. The money borrowed was not secured on the church building, but on the personal estates of many people in the town. Consequently, several people were liable to be sold up if the money were not forthcoming. Two days before settling day the fire took place, and there was doubtless rejoicing in some hearts. The villagers had tried hard to make the place pay, they had even let a portion of the church building to be used as a bank! Bazaars had failed. The debt-raiser had tried "to put a revival over on to them," but had failed. The minister, not receiving his salary, had abandoned them, and at last the bare fact remained of the big white church and the big unpaid debt. Then occurred the providential fire.

But the insurance company would not pay the seventeen thousand dollars. The fire had taken place under suspicious circumstances, and it was said there would be a legal fight over it. The conflagration had occurred on the night of a school-opening meeting. Choice flowers had been sent from many houses in the town, and it was beautifully decorated. There was, however, nothing obviously inflammable in the church; it was built largely of brick and stone. But about an hour after the people had gone home the fire broke out. Next day it was found that the big Bible had been soaked in coal oil. Oiled newspaper was found, and it was alleged that the fire brigade would have saved the church, but that as fast as they put it out in front somebody else was lighting it up behind. Anyhow, the insurance company refused to pay the seventeen thousand dollars. But it cannot refuse absolutely; the advertisement of failure to pay would be too damaging--it will put up a new church instead! The Presbyterian church will be resurrected.

"I put Benton up against the world for fires," said my hostess. "For a small place, only a thousand people, I reckon there isn't its like."

For my part I felt sorry for the Bentonians, even for those who set the fire alight, supposing it was deliberately lighted. When commercial interest is the greatest thing in the world there are opportunities for a few men to feel themselves great and powerful, but that glory of mankind is far overbalanced by the occasions on which it causes man to be mean. Commercial tricks bring the holy spirit of man into disrepute. To find oneself mixed up in certain machinations is poignantly humiliating. We have all of us been wounded in that way ere now. The just pride of the soul has been offended, and we have thought how shameful a thing it was to have become mixed up in it at all, by _it_ meaning the world, the whole shady business, call it what you will.

As I went along from village to village in New York and Pennsylvania I was struck by the uniformity of the architecture. Every church and school and store and farmstead seemed standard size and "as supplied." There seemed to be a passion for having known units. Not only in architecture was this evident, but in every utensil, machine, carriage, dress of the people. It was evident in the people themselves. Americans have the name of being extremely conventional. I think that is because, under the present domination of the _commercial machine_, American boys and girls and men and women are all turned into standard sizes. If Americans have rigid principles of ethics it is because they believe all the parts of the great machine are standardised, and that when any one part wears out there must always be an accurately fitting other part ready to be fixed where the old one has fallen out. Personality itself is standardised; thus the tailor-priest advertises his wear, "Preserve your Personality in Clothes. Occasionally you have observed some article of wear that has led you to the mental conclusion--'That's my style--that's me.'"

It was strange to me to find that even tramps and outcasts, who fulfil little function in the machine, were expected to conform to type. I was stared at, questioned; my rough tweeds, so suitable to me, were an object of mirth; my action of washing my face and my teeth by the side of the road was a portentous aberration. I remember how astonished a motorist and his wife appeared when they came upon me in the act of drawing a pail of water for a thirsty calf one morning in Indiana. The temperature stood at ninety-five in the shade--all nature was parched, and as I came along the highway a calf, fastened by a chain to the steel netting of a field, came up and rubbed his nose on my knees. As calves don't usually take the initiative in this way, I concluded he expected me to do something for him. There was an empty pail beside him. I took it to the farmhouse pump and drew water. As I did so, the farmer and his wife drew up at the farm in their motor, and they looked at me curiously. The calf came bounding towards me and almost upset the pail in his eagerness to drink. Then he gulped down all the water, and whilst I went to draw another pailful he executed a sort of war-dance or joy-dance, throwing out his hind legs and bounding about in a way that testified his happiness. The farmer's wife broke silence:

"Wha' yer doing?"

"I'm giving the calf some water."

"Nao," said she, and looked at her husband, "giving the calf some water, can--you--beat--that?"

I gave the calf his second bucketful and then started off down the way again, and the farmer and his wife looked after me in blank surprise. In America no tramp has any compassion for thirsty calves, he is not expected to look after the thirst of any one but himself. The farmer and his wife looked at one another, and their eyes seemed to say, "But tramps don't do these things!"

Thence it may be surmised that America is no place for individuals as such. Originality is a sin. Americans hate to give an individual special attention, special notice. Even personal salvation is merged in mass salvation. The revivalist, his press agents, and stewards are a means of wholesale salvation. A revival meeting is a machine for saving souls on a large scale. It might be thought that the revivalist himself took his stand as an exceptional individual. Not at all: he is only a type. American public opinion does not allow a man to stand out as superior. It is surprising the dearth of noble men in the popular estimate of to-day. Mockery follows on the heels of noble action or individual action, and reduces it to type. That is a great function of the American Press of to-day, the defaming of men of originality and the explaining away of noble action. I remember a conversation I heard at Cleveland. Roosevelt had just cleared himself of the press libel of drunkenness.

"Wasn't it a good thing to clear the air, so," said one man, "and get clear of the charge once for all?"

"I don't think he got clear of it," said the other. "It's all very well to bring an action against the editor of a provincial paper, but why didn't he take up the cudgels against one of the powerful New York journals, who said the same thing? They had money and could have defended their case."

"I don't think money was needed--except to buy evidence."

"If you ask me," said the other, "it was all a very shrewd electioneering dodge. Roosevelt is an expert politician. He knows the value of being in the limelight, and he knows that nothing will fetch more votes in the United States just now than a reputation for sobriety. He was just boosting himself and the home products."

That is a fair example of the way people think of striking personalities and original views.