30 JANUARY 1869, Page 19

A "TOUR OF OBSERVATION" IN AMERICA.* Tins is the sort

of book which one would like best to review by making frequent quotations. It is composed mainly of detached remarks and descriptions of men and things, which can therefore bear transplantation well, and they are so fresh and striking as to tempt the critic to show the value of the book in the easiest way for himself. There would be more excuse for so doing in the circumstance that Mr. Zincke in this volume is more given to observation than to reflection. He has been content to let the United States,—its people, and scenery, and characteristics, —photograph itself on his mind, his conscious share in the performance being merely to see that no side lights or defects in the instrumeut of observation were permitted to mar the impression. We should, therefore, only imitate him by reproducing specimens of his pictures without note or comment, leaving the reader to judge for himself of the quality of the artist. However much we may regret that we cannot follow this course, for want of space alone would prevent our quoting in sufficient quantity, the statement of an inclination to pursue it may perhaps show better than anything else we can say, our opinion of the merits of the book. There have been few better " travels " in America. In many respects, Mr. Zincke suggests a comparison with Dr. W. 11. Russell and Mr. Hepworth Dixon, as he has collected, like them, striking incidents and conversations to illustrate America for English readers ; but he is never farcical or sensational, and exhibits indefinitely more painstaking to make his selections illustrative. Thus, he has not, to make his book sell, yielded to the temptation of caricaturing Americans ; and that his book remains, nevertheless, as readable or more readable than those of the writers who may be compared with him, is the strongest proof of the merit of his style. To present only a specimen or two where we might give a score or a hundred, we may take the following sketchof a "genuine Yankee of the received type," who was a fellow-passenger of the author's going out ; and that without any compunctions about caricaturing the American nation, as Mr. Zincke is careful to note elsewhere that his sketch is of a rare exception, the real American being something very different :—

" He had been a successful inventor of improvements in machinery, though medicine, not mechanics or engineering, was his business. Ile thought that anything by which he could make money was as much his business as his profession was. He was always tilk:ng, and ready to argue on any subject ; if unacquainted with it, that made no difference —he still had a right to express his opinion. His favourite idea was that discussion led to knowledge, and that books came after knowledge, and that therefore they were not of much value. This dictum he fearlessly applied to everything—to history, to science, and to religion. Theoretically he was a strong Negrophilist. He believed that the patriarchs and prophets, that the Saviour of the world and His Apostles were all Negroes. He thought that the amount of wealth a man had been able to accumulate was the true measure of a man, because all pursued wealth, and employed in the pursuit the whole of their power. If a man was idle or stupid, he employed what power was left him, after so much had been cancelled by his idleness or stupidity. And therefore —for this was his conclusion—if he could produce several blacks, which he was sure he could do, who had accumulated more wealth than any one present, then they were better mon than any of the present company. I say he was theoretically A Negrophilist, because, although he liked tho Negro, he liked him best at a distance. In politics, he held that clever men, and men with ideas, were the bane of the country. They had already got their constitution and their laws. The people did not want a letter of either altered, or anything added to either. All officers, therefore, elected by the people, whether for the general or the local government, were in the position of servants with written instructions. No one would tolerate a domestic servant who, in the face of his instructions, thought for himself ; nor ought the people ever to re-elect a public servant who acted in this way. Indeed he held that no man should ever be re-elected, but that all public offices should be made to go as far as possible' in bringing into notice deserving young men, and in helping them on a little, and in rewarding in a temporary way those who had exerted themselves on behalf of their party. He was always joking ; his jokes consisting of grotesque impossibilities and laughable exaggerations. But his unconscious and unfailing conceit, and his assumptions of omniscience, were as ridiculous as his jokes."

Such is Mr. Zincke's style throughout—a rapid and concise report on what he saw or heard—but the report of one who is so sure of his specimen facts that he saves himself the trouble of pointing the moral. When he does indulge in reflection, what he has to say is out of the common groove, the thought of a man who is richly stored with old experiences and knowledge, to be compared with the new. To give only one instance, we have all been amused lately with Mr. Reverdy Johnson's joke, or supposed joke, about Englishmen getting to speak English as well as Americans ; but the jest might have been uttered with good faith by some of his countrymen, and is not without foundation. Mr. Zincke caused astonishment in some Yankee circles by the excellence of his English for an Englishman, the prevalent belief being that the language of Englishmen is very unlike that of the Americans" full of ungrammatical and vulgar expressions, from which theirs is entirely free." Mr. Zincke explains : "It is a remarkable fact that the English spoken in America is not only very pure, but also is spoken with equal purity by all classes. This in some measure, of course, results from the success of their educational efforts, and from the fact which arises out of it that they are, almost to a man, a nation of readers. But not only is it the same language without vulgarisms, in the mouths of all classes, but it is the same language without any dialectical differences over the whole continent. The language in every man's mouth is that of literature and of society ; spoken at San Francisco just as it is spoken at New York, and on the Gulf of Mexico just as on the great lakes. It is even the language of the negroee in the towns. There is nothing resembling this in Europe, where every county, as in England, or every province and canton, has a different dialect. Of this the philological observer I was dining with was ignorant. He only knew that all Americans spoke uniformly one dialect. He naturally therefore supposed that all Englishmen must do the same; and as his acquaintance with Englishmen was confined to poor immigrants, he imagined that their dialect was the language of all Englishmen. Often, in parts of the country most remote from each other, in wooden shanties and the poorest huts, I had this interesting fact of the purity and identity of the language of the Americans forced on my attention. And at such times I thought, not without some feelings of shame and sorrow, of the wretched vocabulary, consisting of not more than three or four hundred words, and those often ungrammatically used, and always more or less mispronounced, of our honest and hardworking peasantry."

American topics, it will easily be seen that his contribution is of no little value.

Mr. Zincke's main defect, we are inclined to think, is an ex cessive sense of difference between Englishmen and Americans. The England with which he mentally compares everything American is rather a narrow one—the most literary and refined sec tion of English society, which is sometimes curiously different from the world around it, and apart from common sympathies and knowledge, which is therefore not at all typical of the mass of the nation. A man of this class travelling promiscuously in America is often surprised at things which would be quite as likely to. strike him at home as they do abroad. To this peculiarity about him we must set down Mr. Zincke's astonishment at getting on so well with Americans at all. He seems to have had enough of the repose and frigidity of the class he belongs to to be earmarked as an Englishman at once, Americans only finding these characteristics in Englishmen; but he was fortunately pliant and tolerant enough to accommodate himself quickly, and escaped with but one or two collisions. His want of knowledge of what goes on at home is occasionally odd. Thus, he remarks on the singular hos pitality of an American Colonel who was travelling in the same carriage with him on one occasion, and who was well provided with spirits, which he liberally shared with his travelling com panions, an incident which is probably paralleled in almost every long-journey train within the United Kingdom. Again, he describes, as follows, a scene which he witnessed on one occasion in a train that happened not to have a sleeping car attached :—

" It was in the South, and there happened to be about forty people in the car, of whom eight or ten were married ladies travelling with their husbands ; like everybody one sees in America, they were young, and of course, as all American Young ladies are, were better looking than the generality of the fair sex. English ladies would probably, under circumstances of so much publicity, have unnecessarily and unwisely endeavoured to keep awake. But their American sisters passed the. night as comfortably as might be, each laying her head on her husband's shoulder as a pillow, and with their arms round each other, and with their hands locked together."

Why would English ladies endeavour to keep awake under such circumstances? The author assigns no reason, and the fact is that under such circumstances they do go to sleep, like their American sisters and like any sensible women. An English railway compartment secures even more mutual publicity than an American car for the acts of its occupants, though the actual number of observers is reduced. But the ladies who travel by the night trains in this country sleep if they can, though seldom perhaps in precisely the mode of their American sisters. Mr. Zincke might produce rather an amusing book by travelling in this country and writing about what he sees strange to him, as he would of a. foreign country. Perhaps it will be said that the English women who go to sleep in such circumstances are not ladies, that delicately nurtured and highly educated women are seldom in such circumstances at all, always securing privacy when they travel. But this comes of ignoring the growth of a well educated class, who may fairly be compared with the average travellers in American cars, though they may not belong to that one section of extreme culture and refinement which is always in the author's mind. He remarks very properly in one part of his book on the absence in America of this special section of society, but he hardly takes into account that the average American is not to be compared with that class, but with the average Englishman.

The general tone of the book is much in harmony with the drift of English opinion about America since the close of the American war. Englishmen are now only beginning to recognize what America is both in magnitude and in likeness to the mother country. Unless to those who are every day familiar with them, or among whom, as with the Americans, education is generally diffused, the great new growths in the world need to be advertised, and the American Civil War was, in one sense, a huge advertisement. It brought home to the consciousness of English people at least the facts that a vast community of their fellow-countrymen was tilling the continent of America. like in the main though in some qualities unlike to themselves, and that unheard-of resources were at the command of this new people. Mr. Roebuck the other day justified his hostility to the North by alleging the danger of an overpoweringly strong single power growing up on the American Continent, before which no power in the world could stand ; but we suspect that this fear had very little to do with the misdirection of English sympathy during the American war. Among those who encouraged the South, there was too much real ignorance of American feeling, too genuine a faith in the necessity of a vast Republic going to pieces, to permit the sham statesmanlike motive for which Mr. Roebuck claims credit having any great influence. Before sharing it Englishmen must have known what America was; and they did not know. That Mr. Roebuck is wrong is even better shown by the disposition to fraternize with the Americans which has been displayed since Englishmen have had better knowledge of them, and by the positive absence of all wish or care to arrest the growth of the Union. The tendency rather is to take credit for American greatness as something really English, and to appreciate that greatness as the Americans do, though little thought was taken of it before the Civil War. Mr. Zincke represents this current of opinion all the better, perhaps, because the particular section of society he belongs to was one whose sympathies were most misdirected in that war, and which had least excuse for going wrong. They ought not to have waited for so big an event as the Civil War to discover who the Yankees were, but having at length found out their mistake, they are best able to show up the error and produce for the information of themselves and their countrymen a truer picture of America. Mr. Zincke's work is well calculated to deepen the growing impression about the United States, as a land full of rough abundance, exploited by the most energetic Englishmen, and breeding in particular provinces, as California, a newselect stock in which certain qualities of the race are more happily blended than ever. The penitence of the tone in which the growth of California is compared with the resurrection of Italy as an event of more significance to the world, but to which in this country so much less attention was paid, may fitly be referred to as an example of the new style of discussing America and the Americans.

It would be out of place to analyze the miscellaneous observations made, of which there are not a few, though the book, as we have said, is not a book of opinions. The writer does not speak dogmatically, and intelligent readers will not be offended when they find some things from which they dissent. The remarks, besides, are for the most part sober and shrewd, with which people in general will agree. We may notice, however, one or two points —perhaps slips rather than gross mistakes. One of the things which the author had to remark on of course was the American feeling of equality,—the effect it has in conjunction with general education in improving and not deteriorating the manners of the people, who are put upon their honour to act as gentlemen, and so forth. But he also notices an evil result of this sentiment of equality in the education of rich and poor at a common school, and the demoralizing influence of this education on those who are poor, and who afterwards see their companions enjoying superior advantages. The result, he says, is a far stronger encouragement to envious feeling than in a society where the schools of the poor are kept apart. This is a statement we are decidedly inclined to question. Even in an old country the mixture of classes in common schools, as in Scotland, does not engender envious feelings in the poor, and we cannot understand why it should do so in a still more democratic community where the tendency is stronger to make all moderately rich. The other point we wish to notice is the apparent belief of the author in the economic advantage to a country of having its industries segregated and localized, —woollen manufacture in one district, cotton in another, iron in a third, and so forth. This distribution, he says, causes the growth of commerce by which countries are enriched, and was the secret of England's growth, as it will yet be the fruitful cause of American prosperity. As stated, we fear this is nonsense. Commerce is obviously not dependent on the localization of industries, but only a certain kind of commerce. Strictly measured, the economic gain to the world would be immense if everything a community required could be had on the spot, if the necessity of transit could be confined to merely local exchanges. All our railways and ships are merely agencies for overcoming a disadvantage. Indirectly the world gains, no doubt, by. a larger commerce ; the consequent expansion of mind and stimulus to civilization have helped to produce a race of greater energy and capability of utilizing resources than would have been possible with every village or country complete in itself, and nothing beyond that it could desire. In this way we are richer, but directly we are poorer by the localization of resources. But these are small slips, as are also one or two digressions into the common-place which rather surprise us in a writer of Mr. Zineke's calibre. They are not such as to detract from the pleasure of reading the book, which deserves to be widely circulated.