Chapter 2

ACROSS A CONTINENT

It is not easy to escape from a big city. An entire continent was
waiting to be traversed, and, for that reason, we lingered in New York
till the city felt so homelike that it seemed wrong to leave it. And
further, the more one studied it, the more grotesquely bad it grew--bad
in its paving, bad in its streets, bad in its street-police, and but for
the kindness of the tides would be worse than bad in its sanitary
arrangements. No one as yet has approached the management of New York in
a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome
of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do
so, because reflections on the long, narrow pig-trough are construed as
malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the great American
people, and lead to angry comparisons. Yet, if all the streets of London
were permanently up and all the lamps permanently down, this would not
prevent the New York streets taken in a lump from being first cousins to
a Zanzibar foreshore, or kin to the approaches of a Zulu kraal. Gullies,
holes, ruts, cobbles-stones awry, kerbstones rising from two to six
inches above the level of the slatternly pavement; tram-lines from two
to three inches above street level; building materials scattered half
across the street; lime, boards, cut stone, and ash-barrels generally
and generously everywhere; wheeled traffic taking its chances, dray
_versus_ brougham, at cross roads; sway-backed poles whittled and
unpainted; drunken lamp-posts with twisted irons; and, lastly, a
generous scatter of filth and more mixed stinks than the winter wind can
carry away, are matters which can be considered quite apart from the
'Spirit of Democracy' or 'the future of this great and growing country.'
In any other land, they would be held to represent slovenliness,
sordidness, and want of capacity. Here it is explained, not once but
many times, that they show the speed at which the city has grown and the
enviable indifference of her citizens to matters of detail. One of these
days, you are told, everything will be taken in hand and put straight.
The unvirtuous rulers of the city will be swept away by a cyclone, or a
tornado, or something big and booming, of popular indignation; everybody
will unanimously elect the right men, who will justly earn the enormous
salaries that are at present being paid to inadequate aliens for road
sweepings, and all will be well. At the same time the lawlessness
ingrained by governors among the governed during the last thirty, forty,
or it may be fifty years; the brutal levity of the public conscience in
regard to public duty; the toughening and suppling of public morals, and
the reckless disregard for human life, bred by impotent laws