Greater Britain

After all, it is hard even to pass jokes at the expense of the Northwestern people. A population who would maintain schools and universities under difficulties apparently overwhelming was the source from which to draw Union volunteers such as those who, after the war, returned to their Northern homes, I have been told, shocked and astonished at the ignorance and debasement of the Southern whites.

The system of elective studies pursued at Michigan is one to which we are year by year tending in the English universities. As sciences multiply and deepen, it becomes more and more impossible that a “general course” scheme can produce men fit to take their places in the world. Cambridge has attempted to set up both systems, and, giving her students the choice, bids them pursue one branch of study with a view to honors, or take a less valued degree requiring some slight proficiency in many things. Michigan denies that the stimulus of honor examinations should be connected with the elective system. With her, men first graduate in science, or in an arts degree, which bears a close resemblance to the English “poll,” and then pursue their elected study in a course which leads to no university distinction, which is free from the struggle for place and honors. These objections to “honors” rest upon a more solid foundation than a mere democratic hatred of inequality of man and man. Repute as a writer, as a practitioner, is valued by the Ann Arbor man, and the Wolverines do not follow the Ephesians, and tell men who excel among them to go and excel elsewhere. The Michigan professors say, and Dr. Hedges bears them out, that a far higher average of real knowledge is obtained under this system of independent work than is dreamt of in colleges where competition rules. “A higher average” is all they say, and they acknowledge frankly that there is here and there a student to be found to whom competition would do good. As a rule, they tell us this is not the case. Unlimited battle between man and man for place is sufficiently the bane of the world not to be made the curse of schools: competition breeds every evil which it is the aim of education, the duty of a university to suppress: pale faces caused by excessive toil, feverish excitement that prevents true work, a hatred of the subject on which the toil is spent, jealousy of best friends, systematic depreciation of men‘s talents, rejection of all reading that will not “pay,” extreme and unhealthy cultivation of the memory, general degradation of labor – all these evils, and many more, are charged upon the competition system. Everything that our professors have to say of “cram” these American thinkers apply to competition. Strange doctrines these for young America!

Of the practical turn which we should naturally expect to discover in the university of a bran-new State I found evidence in the regulation which prescribes that the degree of Master of Arts shall not be conferred as a matter of course upon graduates of three years’ standing, but only upon such as have pursued professional or general scientific studies during that period. Even in these cases an examination before some one of the faculties is required for the Master‘s degree. I was told that for the medical degree “four years of reputable practice” is received, instead of certain courses.

In her special and selected studies, Michigan is as merely practical as Swift‘s University of Brobdingnag; but, standing far above the ordinary arts or science courses, there is a “University course” designed for those who have already taken the Bachelor‘s degree. It is harder to say what this course includes than what it does not. The twenty heads range over philology, philosophy, art, and science; there is a branch of “criticism,” one of “arts of design,” one of “fine arts.” Astronomy, ethics, and Oriental languages are all embraced in a scheme brought into working order within ten years of the time when Michigan was a wilderness, and the college-yard an Indian hunting-ground.

Michigan entered upon education work very early in her history as a State. In 1850, her legislature commissioned the Hon. Ira Mayhew to prepare a work on education for circulation throughout America. Her progress has been as rapid as her start was good; her natural history collection is already one of the most remarkable in America; her medical school is almost unequaled, and students flow to her even from New England and from California, while from New York she draws a hundred men a year. In only one point is Ann Arbor anywhere but in the van: she has hitherto followed the New England colleges in excluding women. The State University of Kansas has not shown the same exclusiveness that has characterized the conduct of the rulers of Michigan: women are admitted not only to the classes, but to the professorships at Lawrence.

This Northwestern institution at Ann Arbor was not behind even Harvard in the war: it supplied the Union army with 1000 men. The 17th Regiment of Michigan Volunteers, mainly composed of teachers and Ann Arbor students, has no cause to fear the rivalry of any other “record;” and such was the effect of the war, that in 1860 there were in Michigan 2600 male to 5350 female teachers, whereas now there are but 1300 men to 7500 women.

So proud are Michigan men of their roll of honor, that they publish it at full length in the calendar of the university. Every “class” from the foundation of the schools shows some graduates distinguished in their country‘s service during the suppression of the rebellion. The Hon. Oramel Hosford, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan, reports that, owing to the presence of crowds of returned soldiers, the schools of the State are filled almost to the limit of their capacity, while some are compelled to close their doors against the thronging crowds. Captains, colonels, generals, are among the students now humbly learning in the Ann Arbor University Schools.

The State of Michigan is peculiar in the form that she has given to her higher teaching; but in no way peculiar in the attention she bestows on education. Teaching, high and low, is a passion in the West, and each of these young States has established a university of the highest order, and placed in every township not only schools, but public libraries, supported from the rates, and managed by the people.

Not only have the appropriations for educational purposes by each State been large, but those of the Federal government have been upon the most splendid scale. What has been done in the Eastern and the Central States no man can tell, but even west of the Mississippi twenty-two million acres have already been granted for such purposes, while fifty-six million more are set aside for similar gifts.

The Americans are not forgetful of their Puritan traditions.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PACIFIC RAILROAD

WHEN the companions of the explorer Cartier found that the rapids at Montreal were not the end of all navigation, as they had feared, but that above them there commenced a second and boundless reach of deep, still waters, they fancied they had found the long-looked-for route to China, and cried, “La Chine!” So the story goes, and the name has stuck to the place.

Up to 1861, the Canadians remained in the belief that they were at least the potential possessors of the only possible road for the China trade of the future, for in that year a Canadian government paper declared that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory, were impassable for railroads. Maps showed that from St. Louis to San Francisco the distance was twice that from the head of navigation on Lake Superior to the British Pacific ports.

America has gone through a five years’ agony since that time; but now, in the first days of peace, we find that the American Pacific Railroad, growing at the average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one mile a day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in 1869 or 1870, while the British line remains a dream.

Not only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to be passable, but the engineers have found themselves compelled to decide on the conflicting claims of passes without number. Wall-like and frowning as the Rocky Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling gaps are many, and they are easier crossed by railway lines than the less lofty chains of Europe. From the heat of the country, the snow-line lies high; the chosen pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto. The dryness of the air of the center of a vast continent prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter. At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the Pacific line will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter than their brothers on the Grand Trunk or the Camden and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand, fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless succession of smaller snowy chains which have to be crossed, upon the Grand Plateau or basin of the Great Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line will be an accomplished fact.

In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, passed in 1862, the company were bound to complete their line at the rate of a hundred miles a year. They are completing it at more than three times that rate.

When the act is examined, it ceases to be strange that the road should be pushed with extraordinary energy and speed, so numerous are the baits offered to the companies to hasten its completion. Money is to be advanced them; land is to be given them for every mile they finish – on a generous scale while the line is on the plains, on three times the scale when it reaches the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are estimated at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alternate sections, a width of four hundred feet, with additional room for works and stations, is granted for the line. The California Company is tempted by similar offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each company is struggling to lay the most miles and get the most land upon the great basin. It is the interest of the Eastern Company that the junction should be as far as possible to the west; of the Western, that it should be as far as possible to the east. The result is an average laying of three, and an occasional construction of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day as a bullock train could travel. So fast do the headquarters “cities” keep moving forward, that at the Californian end the superintendent wished me to believe that whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, they threw themselves upon their backs, and held up their legs, that they might be tied and thrown into the cart for a fresh move. “They are true birds of passage,” he said.

When the iron trains are at the front, the laying will for a short time proceed at the rate of nine yards in every fifteen seconds; but three or four hundred tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon the single track, and it is in this that the time is lost.

The advance carriages of the construction train are well supplied with rifles hung from the roofs; but even when the Indians forget their amaze, and attack the “city upon wheels,” or tear up the track, they are incapable of destroying the line so fast as the machinery can lay it down. “Soon,” as a Denver paper said, during my stay in the Mountain City, “the iron horse will sniff the Alpine breeze upon the summit of the Black Hills 9000 feet above the sea;” and upon the plateau, where deer are scarce and buffalo unknown, the Indians have all but disappeared. The worst Indian country is already crossed, and the red men have sullenly followed the buffalo to the south, and occupy the country between Kansas State and Denver, contenting themselves with preventing the construction of the Santa Fé and Denver routes to California. Both for the end in view, and the energy with which it is pursued, the Pacific Railroad will stand first among the achievements of our times.

If the end to be kept in view in the construction of the first Pacific Railroad line were merely the traffic from China and Japan to Europe, or the shortest route from San Francisco to Hampton Roads, the Kansas route through St. Louis, Denver, and the Berthoud Pass would be, perhaps, the best and shortest of those within the United States; but the Saskatchewan line through British territory, with Halifax and Puget Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous. As it is, the true question seems to be, not the trade between the Pacific and Great Britain, but between Asia and America, for Pennsylvania and Ohio must be the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years.

Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough: in 1870 we shall reach San Francisco from London in less time than by the severest traveling I can reach it from Denver in 1866.

Wherever, in the States, Forth and South have met in conflict, North has won. New York has beaten Norfolk; Chicago, in spite of its inferior situation, has beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha, or cities still farther north, will carry off the trade from Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately Puget Sound may beat San Francisco in the race for the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities become still less able to keep their place than they have been hitherto. Time after time, Chicago has thrown out intercepting lines, and diverted from St. Louis trade which seemed of necessity to belong to her; and the success of the Union Pacific line, and failure of the Kansas road, is a fresh proof of the superior energy of the Northern to the Southern city. This time a fresh element enters into the calculation, and declares for Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line, is in these great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred miles than the straight lines of the maps and charts, and the Platte route becomes not only the natural, but the shortest route from sea to sea.

Chicago has a great advantage over St. Louis in her comparative freedom from the cholera, which yearly attacks the Missourian city. During my stay in St. Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to have reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A quarantine was established on the river; the sale of fruit and vegetables prohibited; prisoners released on condition that they should work at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were forbidden. Chicago herself, unreached by the plague, was scattering handbills on every Western railroad line, warning immigrants against St. Louis.

The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the Mississippi River, and have forgotten that railroads are superseding steamboats every day. Chicago, on the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth city in America, is probably by this time the third. As a center of thought, political and religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash and Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of streets.

One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is to be found in the fact that all her “inland” towns are ports. The State of Michigan lies between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the single State has upon the great lakes a coast of 1500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water is nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steamboat port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest sea upon the same side the dividing range, than is the White Sea from the Persian Gulf. Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold this river.

A great American city is almost invariably placed at a point where an important railroad finds an outport on a lake or river. This is no adaptation to railways of the Limerick saying about rivers – namely, that Providence has everywhere so placed them as to pass through the great towns; for in America railways precede population, and when mapped out and laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is no great wonder in this, when we remember that 158,000,000 acres of land have been up to this time granted to railroads in America.

One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines will be made, and trade being thus driven into certain unchanging routes, a small number of cities will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing stations or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and population. Where a system of cheap railways is adopted, there will be year by year a tendency to multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports and seats of trade – a tendency, however, which may be more than neutralized by any special circumstances which may cause the lines of transit to converge rather than run parallel to one another. Of the system of costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, where we see the creation of Umritsur and the prosperity of Calcutta alike due to our single great Bengal line; of the converging system we have excellent instances in Chicago and Bombay; while we see the plan of parallel lines in action here in Kansas, and causing the comparative equality of progress manifested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaha. The coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines ruined Goa and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hundred village ports to push our factory at Calcutta, founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown to be the third or fourth city of the empire.

Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for the honor of becoming the future capital of the West, Leavenworth, with 20,000 people, three daily papers, an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons, was, at the time of my visit in 1866, somewhat ahead of Omaha, with its 12,000, two papers, and a single “one-horse” theater, though the northern city tied Leavenworth in the point of “saloons.”

Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton, and Lawrence, each praises itself and runs down its neighbor. Leavenworth claims to be so healthy that when it lately became necessary to “inaugurate” the new grave-yard, “they had to shoot a man on purpose” – a change since the days when the Southern Border Ruffians were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of abolitionists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Nebraska man, when asked whether the Kansas people were fairly honest, said: “Don‘t know about honest; but they do say as how the folk around take in their stone fences every night.” Lawrence, the State capital, which is on the dried-up Kansas River, sneeringly says of all the new towns on the Missouri that the boats that ply between them are so dangerous that the fare is collected in installments every five minutes throughout the trip. Next after the jealousy between two Australian colonies, there is nothing equal to the hatreds between cities competing for the same trade. Omaha has now the best chance of becoming the capital of the far West, but Leavenworth will no doubt continue to be the chief town of Kansas.

The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pistol-shots by day and night are frequent, but trade and development are little interfered with by such incidents as these; and as the village cities are peopled up, the pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing westward, seeking new “locations.” “You‘re the second man I‘ve seen this fall! Darn me, if ‘taint ’bout time to varmose out westerly – y,” is the standing joke of the “frontier-bars” against each other.

…

At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth Dixon, just out from England, and with him I visited the Kansas towns, and then pushed through Waumego to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space remained between forty leathern mail-bags and the canvas roof of the mule-drawn ambulance, which was to be at once our prison for six nights, and our fort upon wheels against the Indians.

CHAPTER IX.

OMPHALISM

DASHING through a grove of cottonwood-trees draped in bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a charming scene: a range of huts and forts crowning a long, low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine, while the clear stream of the Republican fork wreathed itself about the woods and bluffs. The block-house, over which floated the Stars and Stripes, was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which continents are to measure all their miles; the “capital of the universe,” or “center of the world.” Not that it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the center of its crust also moves: within the last ten years it has removed westward into Kansas from Missouri – from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest for centership is no new thing. Herodotus held that Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more unfortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their poor lives in order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon; London plumes herself on being the “center of the terrestrial globe;” Boston is the “hub of the hull universe,” though the latter claim is less physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley the Western men seem to have found the physical center of the United States, but they claim for the Great Plains as well the intellectual as the political leadership of the whole continent. These hitherto untrodden tracts, they tell you, form the heart of the empire, from which the life-blood must be driven to the extremities. Geographical and political centers must ultimately coincide.

Connected with this belief is another Western theory – that the powers of the future must be “continental.” Germany, or else Russia, is to absorb all Asia and Europe, except Britain. North America is already cared for, as the gradual extinction of the Mexican and absorption of the Canadians they consider certain. As for South America, the Californians are planning an occupation of Western Brazil, on the ground that the continental power of South America must start from the head-waters of the great rivers, and spread seaward down the streams. Even in the Brazilian climate they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is destined to become the dominant race.

The success of this omphalism, this government from the center, will be brought about, in the Western belief, by the necessity under which the nations on the head-waters of all streams will find themselves of having the outlets in their hands. Even if it be true that railways are beating rivers, still the railways must also lead seaward to the ports, and the need for their control is still felt by the producers in the center countries of the continent. The Upper States must everywhere command the Lower, and salt-water despotism find its end.

The Americans of the Valley States, who fought all the more heartily in the Federal cause from the fact that they were battling for the freedom of the Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look forward to the time when they will have to assert, peaceably but with firmness, their right to the freedom of their railways through the Northern Atlantic States. Whatever their respect for New England, it cannot be expected that they are forever to permit Illinois and Ohio to be neutralized in the Senate by Rhode Island and Vermont. If it goes hard with New England, it will go still harder with New York; and the Western men look forward to the day when Washington will be removed, Congress and all, to Columbus or Fort Riley.

The singular wideness of Western thought, always verging on extravagance, is traceable to the width of Western land. The immensity of the continent produces a kind of intoxication; there is moral dram-drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth of July oration can come up to the plain facts contained in the Land Commissioners’ report. The public domain of the United States still consists of one thousand five hundred millions of acres; there are two hundred thousand square miles of coal lands in the country, ten times as much as in all the remaining world. In the Western territories not yet States, there is land sufficient to bear, at the English population rate, five hundred and fifty millions of human beings.

It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs the Eastern States. Buffalo is called a “Western City;” yet from New York to Buffalo is only three hundred and fifty miles, and Buffalo is but seven hundred miles to the west of the most eastern point in all the United States. On the other hand, from Buffalo we can go two thousand five hundred miles westward without quitting the United States. “The West” is eight times as wide as the Atlantic States, and will soon be eight times as strong.