style="font-size:15px;"> The danger to our race and to the world from Irish ascendency is perhaps less imminent than that to the republic. In January, 1862, the mayor, Fernando Wood, the elect of the “Mozart” Democracy, deliberately proposed the secession from the Union of New York City. Of all the Northern States, New York alone was a dead weight upon the loyal people during the war of the rebellion. The constituents of Wood were the very Fenians whom in our ignorance we call “American.” It is America that Fenianism invades from Ireland – not England from America.
It is no unfair attack upon the Irish to represent them as somewhat dangerous inhabitants for mighty cities. Of the sixty thousand persons arrested yearly in New York, three-fourths are alien born: two-thirds of these are Irish. Nowhere else in all America are the Celts at present masters of a city government – nowhere is there such corruption. The purity of the government of Melbourne – a city more democratic than New York – proves that the fault does not lie in democracy: it is the universal opinion of Americans that the Irish are alone responsible.
The State legislature is falling into the hands of the men who control the city council. They tell a story of a traveler on the Hudson River Railroad, who, as the train neared Albany – the capital of New York – said to a somewhat gloomy neighbor, “Going to the State legislatur’?” getting for answer, “No, sir! It‘s not come to that with me yet. Only to the State prison!”
Americans are never slow to ridicule the denationalization of New York. They tell you that during the war the colonel of one of the city regiments said: “I‘ve the best blood of eight nations in the ranks.” “How‘s that?” “I‘ve English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, French, Italians, Germans.” “Guess that‘s only seven.” “Swedes,” suggested some one. “No, no Swedes,” said the colonel. “Ah! I have it: I‘ve some Americans.” Stories such as this the rich New Yorkers are nothing loth to tell; but they take no steps to check the denationalization they lament. Instead of entering upon a reform of their municipal institutions, they affect to despise free government; instead of giving, as the oldest New England families have done, their tone to the State schools, they keep entirely aloof from school and State alike. Sending their boys to Cambridge, Berlin, Heidelberg, anywhere rather than to the colleges of their native land, they leave it to learned pious Boston to supply the West with teachers, and to keep up Yale and Harvard. Indignant if they are pointed at as “no Americans,” they seem to separate themselves from everything that is American: they spend summers in England, winters in Algeria, springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a sneer, “Good New Yorkers go to Paris when they die.”
Apart from nationality, there is danger to free government both in the growth of New York City, and in the gigantic fortunes of New Yorkers. The income, they tell me, of one of my merchant friends is larger than the combined salaries of the president, the governors, and the whole of the members of the legislatures of all the forty-five States and territories. As my informant said, “He could keep the governments of half a dozen States as easily as I can support my half dozen children.”
There is something, no doubt, of the exaggeration of political jealousy about the accounts of New York vice given in New England and down South, in the shape of terrible philippics. It is to be hoped that the overstatement is enormous, for sober men are to be found even in New York who will tell you that this city outdoes Paris in every form of profligacy as completely as the French capital outherods imperial Rome. There is here no concealment about the matter; each inhabitant at once admits the truth of accusations directed against his neighbor. If the new men, the “petroleum aristocracy,” are second to none in their denunciations of the Irish, these in their turn unite with the oldest families in thundering against “Shoddy.”
New York life shows but badly in the summer-time; it is seen at its worst when studied at Saratoga. With ourselves, men have hardly ceased to run from business and pleasures worse than toil to the comparative quiet of the country house. Among New Yorkers there is not even the affectation of a search for rest; the flight is from the drives and restaurants of New York to the gambling halls of Saratoga; from winning piles of greenbacks to losing heaps of gold; from cotton gambling to roulette or faro. Long Branch is still more vulgar in its vice; it is the Margate, Saratoga the Homburg of America.
“Shoddy” is blamed beyond what it deserves when the follies of New York society are laid in a body at its door. If it be true that the New York drawing-rooms are the best guarded in the world, it is also true that entrance is denied as rigidly to intellect and eminence as to wealth. If exclusiveness be needed, affectation can at least do nothing toward subduing “Shoddy.” Mere cliqueism, disgusting every where, is ridiculous in a democratic town; its rules of conduct are as out of place as kid gloves in the New Zealand bush, or gold scabbards on a battle-field.
Good meat, and drink, and air, give strength to the men and beauty to the women of a moneyed class; but in America these things are the inheritance of every boy and girl, and give their owners no advantage in the world. During the rebellion, the ablest generals and bravest soldiers of the North sprang, not from the merchant families, but from the farmer folk. Without special merit of some kind, there can be no such thing as aristocracy.
Many American men and women, who have too little nobility of soul to be patriots, and too little understanding to see that theirs is already, in many points, the master country of the globe, come to you, and bewail the fate which has caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and dwellers in a country where men call vices by their names. The least educated of their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar class that America brings forth, they fly to Europe “to escape democracy,” and pass their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living libels on the country they are believed to represent.
Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knickerbockers, Germans, Irish, “first families,” “Petroleum,” and “Shoddy,” we are forced to construct our composite idea – New York. The Irish numerically predominate, but we have no experience as to what should be the moral features of an Irish city, for Dublin has always been in English hands; possibly that which in New York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely Celtic. However it may be, this much is clear, that the humblest township of New England reflects more truly the America of the past, the most chaotic village of Nebraska portrays more fully the hopes and tendencies of the America of the future, than do this huge State and city.
If the political figure of New York is not encouraging, its natural beauty is singularly great. Those who say that America has no scenery, forget the Hudson, while they can never have explored Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the Mohawk. That Poole‘s exquisite scene from the “Decameron,” “Philomela‘s Song,” could have been realized on earth, I never dreamt until I saw the singers at a New Yorker‘s villa on the Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen, from which there was an outlook upon the basaltic palisades and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in some such spot that De Tocqueville wrote the brightest of his brilliant letters – that dated “Sing Sing” – for he speaks of himself as lying on a hill that overhung the Hudson, watching the white sails gleaming in the hot sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became of the river where it disappeared in the blue “Highlands.”
That New York City itself is full of beauty the view from Castle Garden would suffice to show; and by night it is not less lovely than by day. The harbor is illuminated by the colored lanterns of a thousand boats, and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never sleeps. The paddles of the steamers seem not only to beat the water, but to stir the languid air and so provoke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and Wall Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm glare the eye reaches through the still night to the feathery acacias in the streets of Brooklyn. The view is as southern as the people: we have not yet found America.
CHAPTER V.
CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT
“OLD CAMBRIDGE! Long may she flourish!” proposed by a professor in the University of Cambridge, in America, and drunk standing, with three cheers, by the graduates and
