530 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



fends many of the critics of the manners of 

 English manufacturing districts is, I believe, the 

 direct result of our aristocratic social order. 

 There is no reason for a man to be " uppish " in 

 America. He does not live in the presence of 

 social institutions which permanently assert the 

 social superiority of a class to which he does not 

 belong. 



To an English traveler the scare which the 

 Americans received last autumn from the railway 

 disturbances is very surprising. I talked with 

 many grave and wise men — men who had studied 

 the political and social history both of America 

 and of Europe — who imagined that the Pittsburg 

 riots were an outburst of the spirit of communism, 

 and that they indicated the existence of a serious 

 conspiracy against the institution of private prop- 

 erty, and against the whole social order of the 

 country. The strikes were no doubt very annoy- 

 ing. They showed that some of the economical 

 and social troubles from which the old countries 

 of Europe have suffered will have to be faced in 

 America. Perhaps, too, they showed that the pres- 

 ent means for repressing popular disturbances 

 are inadequate. But that the strikes were the 

 result of a deep and general hostility against the 

 present social organization of America, that they 

 were the premature explosion of forces which 

 threaten America with a social revolution, ap- 

 peared to me to be one of the wildest and most 

 grotesque fancies which ever found a lodgment in 

 the brains of reasonable men. 



It is very possible that in several of the great 

 manufacturing cities there maybe a few hundreds 

 of restless and discontented men who have car- 

 ried with them across the Atlantic the bitter hos- 

 tility to government and to society which exists 

 among the less fortunate classes in many Conti- 

 nental nations. Men with similar passions may be 

 scattered thinly through the agricultural States. 

 In the New World as in the Old, some of these 

 men see visions and dream dreams. They are 

 hoping for a social millennium in which all the 

 present contrasts between poverty and wealth, 

 luxurious ease and severe labor, will disappear. 

 They have clung to the hope so long and so pas- 

 sionately that they cannot easily surrender it. 

 They see that under a republic these contrasts, 

 if less violent than in the monarchical countries 

 from which they came, are still violent enough. 

 They believe that it is an economical, not a mere- 

 ly political, reorganization of society which is to 

 remedy all human evils and redress all human 

 wrongs. But, of all the great countries in the 

 world, America contains the smallest number of 



people that can have any motive for desiring a 

 social revolution. The fiercest hatred of the in- 

 stitution of private property gradually cools when 

 a man finds that he is getting his house filled with 

 good furniture ; it vanishes altogether when he is 

 able to buy a farm. There has been considerable 

 distress during the last few years in some of the 

 manufacturing districts of America ; but the dis- 

 tress has been very slight and transient compared 

 with what was suffered in this country during the 

 first quarter of the present century; and the enor- 

 mous numbers of the population holding prop- 

 erty in land constitute a conservative social force 

 of enormous and irresistible power. 



While I was staying at Bridgeport, in Con- 

 necticut, my host proposed that we should drive 

 twenty miles round the neigborhood, that I might 

 have some impression of the agricultural districts 

 in New England. It was a charming afternoon 

 in October, and the maple and the oak and the 

 hickory were beginning to clothe themselves in 

 their autumnal splendor of scarlet and gold. 

 But it was not the beauty and the glory of the 

 foliage which struck me most powerfully. We 

 drove on for mile after mile, but there was not 

 a laborer's cottage to be seen. We came to a 

 village — it was a group of beautiful houses with 

 lawns and trees about them. In the open coun- 

 try, at intervals of every few hundred yards along 

 the road, there was a cozy, clean-looking farm- 

 house. The houses were nearly all built of wood, 

 and were painted white ; the windows were pro- 

 tected against the sun by green Venetian shutters. 

 I hardly ever saw a house that was in bad condi. 

 tion. The paint was nearly always bright and 

 fresh. There were no mansions belonging to 

 great landlords. The farms belong to the men 

 who cultivate them. On my voyage out a New 

 York lawyer, with a large knowledge of American 

 affairs, said to me : "A girl will not look at a 

 man who wants to marry her, if he hasn't a farm 

 of his own. Marry a man that hires his land ! — 

 she will not dream of it. It sometimes happens 

 that a man takes a farm and can't pay the money 

 down ; in that case he engages with the owner to 

 rent it for four or five years ; but it is arranged 

 that at the end of that term — or earlier if he is 

 able to find the money — he shall have the farm 

 for a price that is fixed when his occupation be- 

 gins. Tenant-farmers are almost unknown in 

 America." 



The farmer owns the farm and works on the 

 land himself. His sons, if he has any, work with 

 him. If he wants additional labor, he may get 

 help from a neighbor whose farm is too small to 



