BOOKS.
NEW AMERICA.*
Tins is a most readable book, perhaps the most readable published this year. We do not agree with all Mr. Hepworth Dixon's opinions, and his style in its unbroken lightness rather wearies us, but he has written a book which it is a real pleasure to read, a pleasure considerably increased by the reader's perception, which comes to him about page 50, that he is acquiring solid information without too much trouble. Mr. Dixon has travelled for some months recently in America, and has compiled from his diary, from his recollections, we imagine, of a previous visit, and from the statements of others, two volumes which we must first describe by negatives. They do not contain sketches of New York society. They do not contain elaborate disquisitions upon the past, the future, and the present of the New World. They do not contain any reflections other than incidental upon the Constitution of the United States. They do not contain any articles visibly intended for leaders upon Democracy. And they do not contain any statements about Mr. Hepworth Dixon's jour- neys, proceedings, expenses, adventures, dinners, or fleas, which are interesting only to Mr. Dixon's personal friends. That is a great deal to say of any book of modern travel, more to say of a book of modern travel obviously compiled either from a diary or from letters, most of all to say of a book of modern travel com- piled from a diary by a professed litterateur. Instead of these things, Mr. Dixon's volumes contain, first, sketches of the little known trans-Missouri region, Kansas, Colorado, and the Salt Lake, which, if a little thin, are in essentials new, amusing, and pictorial ; and secondly, a very good account of some of the new peculiarities of the Union, the new creeds, new forms of semi-religious, semi-social development, and new social peculiarities. Mr. Dixon had some great advantages in his travels of a personal kind, and he made the most of them. He knew, for example, Robert Wilson, Sheriff of Denver, and, as we suspect and he hints, chief of the Vigilance Committee of Colorado, a man who has displayed all the qualities of a heroic brigand on the side of justice and order, and who, to judge from a photograph published with the book, must have one of the rare " Caesar " faces, the face of a man whom no physiognomist would dream of dis- obeying, and learnt from him, among others, what society really is in Colorado—anarchy, tempered by a few ideas and many revolvers. It is the typical society of the West before it has been spoiled by civilization, a society in which a man wears high boots, belts, and six-shooters, talks as if he were a good-humoured, slightly brutal enemy, is as hospitable as an Arab, faithful as a good dog, —where is the human simile?—and murderous as a quick-tempered Malay ; in which a man keeps his life and his property with his own right hand, and in which; nevertheless, social order is slowly growing up. The author was also honoured with the confidence of Brigham Young, who told him, among other things, his secret theory about incest, which he is slowly legalizing ; with the friendship of Mr. Frederic, Elder of the Shakers, the ano- malous society which makes the perfection of worship con- sist in terminating the race of worshippers ; and with the acquaintance of Mr. Noyes, Pope of the Oneida settlement, the colony of Perfectionists, which is based upon the principles of " free love," or, as the French say, of the nullity of marriage, or as theorists would say, of community of wives, or as decent Englishmen would say, of promiscuous intercourse. He has given an account, sometimes a little wanting in explanation, but always lively and pregnant, of each of these strange so- cieties, of the Spiritualists, of the advocates of woman's rights, of all the strange forms of thought and belief and organiza- tion which are springing up from the foam of ideas now seething in the New World. His sketches will probably not satisfy his readers, but they will stimulate a keen political and social curi- osity, and send them to fuller accounts, which, nevertheless, if taken by themselves, would leave a much less distinct impression. It is not the America about which we have all been reading and writing for six years, but a " New America " that is presented to our view, an America heretofore known only to a few English readers of out-of-the-way literature ; an America in which the ancient laws of mankind are being laid aside, and new experiments attempted ; an America in which, amid much that is grotesque and a little that is horrible, something which is true stands at least a chance of being developed. It is well for the world, though not perhaps for Mr. Noyes' disciples, that they, and not the world, should fairly try under favourable circumstances what result the
• New America. By Hepworth Dixon. London: Hurst and Blackett.
formal release of the passions from restraint would ultimately produce.
Mr. Dixon draws an unfavourable and yet a hopeful picture of life in the far West, peopled, as he says, with "young Norse gods," men at once brave and brutal, insensible to some moral obligations now keenly felt, sensitive to others now almost neg- lected, reverential to women if they are " ladies," but given to bareins, careless of human life, but brave to desperation, encroach- ing and greedy, yet disposed to protect property, horses especially, by savagely stern laws. They are very like the Germans of the
thirteenth century, and, indeed, all Europeans during the birth of the Feudal tithe. The worst part of their conduct is towards the Indians, conduct which Mr. Dixon, who is just to impartiality about negroes, seems half inclined to extenuate, and which no doubt can be pardoned by men who really understand the sort of warfare Shoshones and Cheyennes wage, worse in one point, the treatment of women, than any warfare ever waged, except by the early Mussulman conquerors of Southern Asia. The Western men are, however, except upon this one point, little better than the natives, murdering Indians as they would kill animals, sometimes with circumstances of horrible cruelty, more frequently with that lust for blood which extermi- nates men, women, and children as it would wolves. Mr. Dixon tells a story of one white man who rode into Denver, the capital of Colorado, with an Indian's thigh hanging to his saddle, on which he had lived for two days, and another who tore out a squaw's heart, which we would fain believe untrue, but which, as unpunished crimes, would show a social tone like that of Borneo. The absolute want of excuse for such offences is shown in the fact that the Mormons have made friends of these very tribes, and rely on their aid, and by the circumstance that all savages not white contrive to live together in occasional peace. The truth is, the Anglo-Saxon, in such circumstances, is at once a ruler and a savage, will neither let the submissive alone, nor make peace on equal terms, and needs, if the inferior race is to be preserved at all, the stern, inflexible restriction which in Colorado cannot be exer- cised. Fortunately for him, he is a Christian in name, and has, therefore, the possibility of becoming a Christian in reality, and possesses an instinct of accumulation which compels him, sooner or later, to enforce and to respect order.
Mr. Dixon's account of the Mormon settlement will interest even those who have read many descriptions of that strange colony, but the most original facts he contributes are these. The Mormon rulers are gradually permitting incest, have already per- mitted it, as far as the marriage of mother and daughter to the same man is concerned, or of half-brother with half-sister, and would permit the marriage of brother and sister but for " prejudices," Brigham Young told Mr. Dixon this himself, using that word; and we cannot but think the secret doctrine which Mr. Dixon is not at liberty to mention, was an expression of his belief that there neither exists nor can exist such a thing as a sexual law. Poly- gamy, however, is confined in Utah to the rich,—as it is in Asia,— harlotry is strictly forbidden, as in all Mohammedan countries, and the settlement thrives amazingly. Mr. Dixon evidently thinks polygamy when confined to a limited section of a nation, favour- able to the multiplication of numbers ; but he speaks of a hardy race of adventurers, the pick of the enterprising dissolute of a great race. Let him wait a generation or two, when the never failing curse of polygamy, early sterility, begins fairly to work. That experiment, however, will not be tried in Utah. The North- erners are determined that polygamy shall cease, and though Brigham Young has 20,000 troops, and a desert for frontier, and 100,000 followers, he cannot face the United States, must either emigrate, or announce a revelation suspending polygamy, or try a device which, from an odd but intelligible peculiarity of human nature, will break down. The Union intends to pass a law making any marriage on Mormon principles punishable with heavy fines, and Mr. Young may meet this by a decree changing the wives, after the Old Testament phraseology, into " concubines," and protecting their children only by will. Law could not meet that, but then human nature can and will, for the Saints would cease to attract women who never consent willingly to a position legally dishonourable. It is more probable that he will abolish it, and then the Mormon creed, the great secret of which is that all Saints are an organized brotherhood, and not merely inmates of a competitive wild beasts' den, may possibly grow great. Visible theocracy has charms, or the Papacy would not last so long, and a theocracy which makes physical comfort an end, and pursues it intelligently, will always attract the miserable among mankind. As to successful resistance, are the Mormons stronger than the South ?
The account of the Shakers is curious, but we are more in- terested in the sketch of Oneida, the Free-Love settlement, which created such a noise about ten years ago, and has followers, open or secret, all through America. The American female mind seethes more in America than in Europe, a fact which Mr. Dixon traces to the disproportionate number of men in most of the States, and the consequent courtship paid to women ; but which is, we think, at least as likely to be produced by the well known fact that women need mental stays more than men, are more helped by the restraints of conventionalism and law. As these are compara- tively withdrawn in America, women try experiments with some rashness, and the tendency of those experiments is towards some new relation with men. The pious, a great majority, urge absolute equality, the unpious are not disinclined towards the abolition of all restraint. John Humphrey Noyes, lawyer's clerk. of Vermont,—man tall and pale, with sandy hair, dreamy eyes, good mouth, and noble forehead —was in 1831 struck by the Revivalist fever, and, on his recovery, discovered, as he thought, the secret of the world. It is simply Antinomianism in a new form, and carried out to its logical termination. Christ, as he thinki, abolished the Law, and with it the possibility of sin, making men who believed in him " holy," without reference to acts, ex- cept so far as they may be ,responsible under " the law of sym- pathy," i.e., love, provided it is not individualized. After various experiments, Noyes settled at Oneida; and there gathered to himself a family, as he calls it, of about 300 men and women, who have all goods, including each other, in common, and speedily grew rich. "They made no rules, they chose no chiefs.
very man was to be a rule to himself, every woman to herself ; and as to rulers, they declared that nature and education make men masters of their fellows, putting them in the places which they are born and trained to fill ; another way of saying that God was to rule in person, with Noyes for His visible pope and king. All property was made over to Christ ; and the use of it only was reserved for those who had united themselves to Him. The wives and children of the Family were to be as common as the loaves and fishes ; the very soul of the new society being a mystery very difficult to explain in English phrase." The wealth comes mainly from making traps, and from agriculture ; the women are brisk and healthy, and, as they say, like their lives ; the men are contented, and Mr. Noyes is founding new societies on his system, which finds adherents everywhere, and which we have seen denounced in American papers as exercising a strong though silent influence against the moral law in quarters where it is not openly professed. Ultimately, of course, it will break down, as every similar experi- ment has done, shattered against the natural preservative, the instinctive desire of every man, be his creed or his philosophy what it may, to keep the woman he loves exclusively to himself ; and meanwhile most of our readers will probably consider the judgment passed by Elder Frederick, chief of the Shakers, pretty accurate :—" You may expect to see the Bible Families increase very fast,' said Frederick, who looks upon their growth with any- thing but a friendly eye ; ' they meet the desires of a great many men and women in this country ; men who are weary, women who are fantastic ; giving, in the name of religious service, a free rein to the passions, with a deep sense of repose. Women find in them a great field for the affections. The Bible Communists give a pious charter to Free Love, and the sentiment of Free Love is rooted in the heart of New York." That some ideas of a revolu- tionary character are at work among New England women is clear, from their contemporary literature, but it is by no means as clear yet what their result will be. The only one visible is a bad one, to which no traveller before Mr. Hepworth Dixon has had the courage openly to allude, the determination of New England women of the upper class not to have many, or in some cases any, Children :—A lady told him clearly that children were ruinous to the happiness of mothers. " She spoke with fervour, and with a fixed idea that what she was saying to me might be said by any lady in open day before all the world ; unconscious, as it seemed to me, that while proudly insisting on woman's rights, she and those for whom she spoke were ready to abandon all woman's duties; unconscious also, as it'seemed to me, that in asserting the loss of beauty, as a consequence of domestic cares, she and those who think with her were assuming the very fact which almost every father, almost every husband, would deny. Yet in pious Boston and Philadel- phia, no less than in wicked New Orleans and New York, this objection to become a mother in Israel is one of those radical facts which (I am told) must be admitted, whether for good or evil ; the rapid diminution of native-born persons being matter of 'record in many public acts." This statement is, we think, admitted by Dr. Alston in an official report, and was, we may mention,
stated to ourselves ten years ago, by a missionary who knew New England well, as the greatest drawback upon her progress, and the greatest impediment to her otherwise certain sovereignty over the Union. Upon all these subjects and many more, including the position and qualities of the negro, Mr. Dixon touches with a light, but not uncertain pen, producing a book which, though not intended perhaps to live, will most indubitably be read by all who care to study the newest phenomena of American life.
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