I was told that the stockholders in these boats were in a bad way at the present time. There were no dividends going. The same story was repeated as to many and many an investment. Where the war created business, as it had done on some of the main lines of railroad and in some special towns, money was passing very freely;but away from this, ruin seemed to have fallen on the enterprise of the country. Men were not broken hearted, nor were they even melancholy; but they were simply ruined. That is nothing in the States, so long as the ruined man has the means left to him of supplying his daily wants till he can start himself again in life.
It is almost the normal condition of the American man in business;and therefore I am inclined to think that when this war is over, and things begin to settle themselves into new grooves, commerce will recover herself more quickly there than she would do among any other people. It is so common a thing to hear of an enterprise that has never paid a dollar of interest on the original outlay--of hotels, canals, railroads, banks, blocks of houses, etc. that never paid even in the happy days of peace--that one is tempted to disregard the absence of dividends, and to believe that such a trifling accident will not act as any check on future speculation. In no country has pecuniary ruin been so common as in the States; but then in no country is pecuniary ruin so little ruinous. "We are a recuperative people," a west-country gentleman once said to me. Idoubted the propriety of his word, but I acknowledged the truth of his assertion.
Pittsburg and Alleghany--which latter is a town similar in its nature to Pittsburg, on the other side of the river of the same name--regard themselves as places apart; but they are in effect one and the same city. They live under the same blanket of soot, which is woven by the joint efforts of the two places. Their united population is 135,000, of which Alleghany owns about 50,000. The industry of the towns is of that sort which arises from a union of coal and iron in the vicinity. The Pennsylvanian coal fields are the most prolific in the Union; and Pittsburg is therefore great, exactly as Merthyr-Tydvil and Birmingham are great. But the foundery work at Pittsburg is more nearly allied to the heavy, rough works of the Welsh coal metropolis than to the finish and polish of Birmingham.
"Why cannot you consume your own smoke?" I asked a gentleman there.
"Fuel is so cheap that it would not pay," he answered. His idea of the advantage of consuming smoke was confined to the question of its paying as a simple operation in itself. The consequent cleanliness and improvement in the atmosphere had not entered into his calculations. Any such result might be a fortuitous benefit, but was not of sufficient importance to make any effort in that direction expedient on its own account. "Coal was burned," he said, "in the founderies at something less than two dollars a ton; while that was the case, it could not answer the purpose of any iron-founder to put up an apparatus for the consumption of smoke?" I did not pursue the argument any further, as I perceived that we were looking at the matter from two different points of view.
Everything in the hotel was black; not black to the eye, for the eye teaches itself to discriminate colors even when loaded with dirt, but black to the touch. On coming out of a tub of water my foot took an impress from the carpet exactly as it would have done had Itrod barefooted on a path laid with soot. I thought that I was turning negro upward, till I put my wet hand upon the carpet, and found that the result was the same. And yet the carpet was green to the eye--a dull, dingy green, but still green. "You shouldn't damp your feet," a man said to me, to whom I mentioned the catastrophe.
Certainly, Pittsburg is the dirtiest place I ever saw; but it is, as I said before, very picturesque in its dirt when looked at from above the blanket.
From Pittsburg I went on by train to Cincinnati, and was soon in the State of Ohio. I confess that I have never felt any great regard for Pennsylvania. It has always had, in my estimation, a low character for commercial honesty, and a certain flavor of pretentious hypocrisy. This probably has been much owing to the acerbity and pungency of Sydney Smith's witty denunciations against the drab-colored State. It is noted for repudiation of its own debts, and for sharpness in exaction of its own bargains. It has been always smart in banking. It has given Buchanan as a President to the country, and Cameron as a Secretary of War to the government!
When the battle of Bull's Run was to be fought, Pennsylvanian soldiers were the men who, on that day, threw down their arms because the three months' term for which they had been enlisted was then expired! Pennsylvania does not, in my mind, stand on a par with Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, or Virginia.
We are apt to connect the name of Benjamin Franklin with Pennsylvania, but Franklin was a Boston man. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania is rich and prosperous. Indeed it bears all those marks which Quakers generally leave behind them.
I had some little personal feeling in visiting Cincinnati, because my mother had lived there for some time, and had there been concerned in a commercial enterprise, by which no one, I believe, made any great sum of money. Between thirty and forty years ago she built a bazaar in Cincinnati, which, I was assured by the present owner of the house, was at the time of its erection considered to be the great building of the town. It has been sadly eclipsed now, and by no means rears its head proudly among the great blocks around it.
It had become a "Physio-medical Institute" when I was there, and was under the dominion of a quack doctor on one side, and of a college of rights of women female medical professors on the other. "Ibelieve, sir, no man or woman ever yet made a dollar in that building; and as for rent, I don't even expect it." Such was the account given of the unfortunate bazaar by the present proprietor.