MR. HUSS'EY VIVIAN ON AMERICA.*

• Notes of a Tour in America. By H. Haney Vivian, M.P. London: Stanford.

Ira: long and prosperous autumn excursion of last year which forms the subject of this book was made under circumstances of exceptional ease, comfort, and enjoyment. Mr. Childers, going out to Canada on a tour of inspection, in his capacity of Chairman of the Great Western Railway Company, and on a further tour through the United States with his daughter, proposed that Mr. and Mrs. Hussey Vivian should join their party. It was so arranged, and the result was a journey which, next to the voyage of the Sunbeam,' seems to have been the most ideally delightful on record. The finest weather, the warmest welcome, the most per- fect arrangements, attended them everywhere. Decidedly, since one cannot, by clapping one's hands or rubbing a ring, have Prince Hassan's carpet, or even a friendly and broad-shouldered djinn, to whisk one about, it must be next best to have Mr.

Pullman's own " car-yacht" to take one " just anywhere." This good-fortune befell the travellers after they had arrived at Chicago, and up to that point all had been prosperous in the ex- treme with them. Mr. Childers had serious and responsible business to attend to for a great deal of the time, but Mr. Hussey Vivian had only to look about him. No one ever did so more thoroughly, we imagine, and the results are before us. Before he starts in Mr. Hussey Vivian's company from Newfoundland for Halifax, the reader will have recognised that a more practical, business-like, observant traveller, with a more excellent gift of brevity, he has not been made acquainted with through the medium of print. He puts into a page and a half a sketch of Newfound- land which omits nothing, not even statistics of religion and a list of big game ; describes the Nova Scotian coal-field, with a hint of its vast future importance ; affords us a charming peep at the Nipisiquit River, with the gliding canoes of the Micmac Indians, and its little colony of fisher-people ; at the beautiful Gulf of St. Lawrence, with the British Fleet at anchor ; at quaint, dull, historic Quebec, where he finds the moral of the French law of division of property pointed very sharply indeed ; tells us a great deal about Montreal, with its glorious sunshine, and its skies as blue as those of Northern Italy ; takes us to Ottawa, and gives us a sample of his practical method, in the following description of the river, 500 miles in length, and the industry which it feeds :-

"A hundred ruthless tools, from the frame and circular saw to the minute ' plough and tongue,' or still more minute match-making machines, are set in motion by its abundant waters, and yet the gran- deur of the (Chaudibre) Falls is in no way diminished. Doors, windows, and every other lumber-fixing,' down to matches from the slabs and refuse, are, in fact, now made at head-quarters, not by man's hand, but by cunningly devised tools, set in motion by the costless drainage of a wilderness. Let our craftsmen in wood be warned, and beware how they pit their measured hours against these simple but mighty com- binations of nature and art. I believe that no joiner-work of or belonging to a house exists which could not be ordered and sent from Ottawa, and many other places in Canada, ready fitted and numbered for its place, almost untouched by man's hand. It is hardly an ex- aggeration to say that the log floats in at one end of the establishment, and leaves it in the form of doors, windows, boards, roof-parts, joists, and the like at the other end, without aid from man, all force having been supplied by the simple gravitation of falling water. The incidence of freight and charges is also on the net, and not on the gross weight ; nor does the stall need to pay toll to a dozen intermediaries."

This summary process has a horrid resemblance to that by which pigs are converted into pork at Chicago, an operation which Mr. Hussey Vivian witnessed and describes with his usual curtness and completeness, recording that the animals are "slaughtered methodically and mercifully, but with extraordinary rapidity." There is a great deal, however, between Ottawa and Chicago which catches the keen eye of Mr. Hussey Vivian, and nothing is beneath his notice, not the new-fangled desks supplied, like the portfolios in the French Assembly, to the members of the Canadian Legislature, nor the test of respectability at " the hub of the Universe " (Boston), which is not a gig, but "a brown stone swell front " to one's house, which, when a man has attained to, he is " at the top of the heap." From Saratoga, where Mr.

Hussey Vivian and his party heard good stories of the late Commodore Vanderbilt, and were present at a " telephone con- cert," where songs sung 250 miles away, at New York, were dis- tinetly reproduced ; he passes on to Niagara, which the author contrives to treat with mingled respect and unaffectedness quite refreshing, and through Toronto to Hamilton, which he describes as " the Swindon of the Great Western Railway of Canada," and the birth-place of the Wanzer sewing-machine, giving the statistics of that manufacture, and also of the stove-making business, in full detail. He is enthusiastic about the virtues of the Hamilton stove, and as this is a subject in more than one sense seasonable, we will quote him upon it :—

" The essential feature of the Hamilton stove is that it is a self- feeder. It is lighted in the autumn, and put out in the spring, burns

but little coal, gives but little trouble, and throws out a great and uniform heat. I believe that much economy would result from the use of these stoves, especially if placed in the passages and entrances of our houses, the pipes being carried through the living-rooms into the chimneys A Canadian stove means perfect comfort in winter, and no heavy coal-bills We possess the finest anthracite in the world, and it lies almost unworked. It would be well if our anthracite- coal proprietors would push the Canadian stove ; and if any desire to do so, I shall be only too glad to show them those I have ordered, which I hope to have in full blast before Christmas."

Perfect comfort in winter, and no heavy coal-bills ! Can it be that the future has these blessings in store for us, in addition to the electric light and cheap meat? It looks like it, according to this practical-minded traveller, who began to examine the meat question at Hamilton,—although not with a view to home demands, as the beef of the future will not come to England from Canada,— and gives the following tantalising list of retail prices :—" Beef, 4d. to 6d. per lb. for the best pieces, inferior pieces much less, stock-meat almost given away ; mutton, 3d. per lb. ; lamb, 3d. per lb. ; a couple of fine chickens, 2d. and fid. ; and other poultry in like proportion. The meat was excellent ; I never saw finer mutton and lamb. There was the carcase of a sheep hanging up which would have done credit to the Vale of Glamorgan." One feels that such praise from Mr. Hussey Vivian, whose heart, un- travelled, ever fondly turns to Wales, can no farther go. Reserving the practical investigation of the meat export question for Chicago, after merely arousing in his readers a Micawber-like design of "going-in" for Hamilton and half their customary bills, he proceeds to describe some wonderful farming operations in the far west of Canada, on the part of a man who grows fifteen thou- sand acres of wheat annually. His farm is in Manitoba, and he goes there with his men and his teams, ploughs the land in furrows six miles long—one furrow out and home is a day's work—sows and reaps his corn, clears off and goes home in three months. The author mentions casually that he met the Colorado beetle, taking his walks abroad, in happy unconsciousness of his ill-fame. Starting for New York, he is at first not deeply impressed by the beauties of the Hudson, and even compares Rip Van Winkle's Catskills unfavourably with the Malvern Hills ; but from West Point on he grows enthusiastic, and says of the approach to New York, and the western boundary of precipices called " The Palisades," that the Hudson there is finer than the finest parts of the Rhine ; nay, he declares that he will even go farther, and say that it has "many of the attributes of his own Bay."

Of course Mr. Hussey Vivian says he will not attempt to describe New York, but for all that he does describe the Empire City in the most lucid and most vivid manner within our knowledge, and as usual picks out the points on which even the Vale of Glamorgan might be improved by taking a hint from the New World. Here is one of them

:- "For lightness, their carriages are masterpieces. We are in the days of our grandfathers. Peters, Barker, Ward and Co. have yet to learn what a carriage is, and how to build it. We make our horses drag weights which are wholly unnecessary, because we do not know how to use materials properly. I was driven over some roads in New Jersey which would have shaken any of my carriages to pieces, but the New Jersey waggon, holding six, went over them like a spider, and as easily as a C and underspring barouche."

Of Philadelphia, too, where white marble is a cheap building material, and churches are as leading a feature as in Rome, where the river (Schuylkill) runs through the finest city park in the world, the author has the best opinion, except as regards its drains. He owns to one disappointment, the great Lakes, whose shores are flat and uninteresting ; but he gives a striking account of Sarnia, at the southern outlet of Lake Huron, of the perpetual traffic and immense business of the place ; and also of Cleveland, on Lake Erie, the lake port nearest to the great Pennsylvanian coal-field, a place bristling with industries, among them vast oil refineries, steel, iron, and screw works, the machinery of the latter being entirely automatic. The grain elevators, the stock- yards, and the go-aheadativeness of Chicago are described with a briskness in harmony with the subject ; then comes the Pullman's "car-yacht," which seems too good to be true, especially the _glazed platform, whereon, as the car-yacht was always at the end of the train, the travellers used to sit for hours enjoying, in splendid weather, an unbroken view of the country. "The best messman was selected to cater for us," says the writer, " two black servants to wait on us (really, I love these blackies, they are such quick, good-natured, excellent servants), and the best cook to cook for us. To talk of the hardships of a journey under such circumstances would be an ungrateful romance." Clearly so, and Mr. Hussey Vivian's only rumpled rose-leaf seems to have been an overdose of singing, " in every letter of the alpha- bet, from a pretentious organ gallery " at a church in Albany. Of the Missouri, he says a hard thing,—that it is ugly and dirty, " worse than the Severn at Gloucester ;" of the Plains, that the eye wearies of maize-fields ; but Mr. Jay Gould and Mr. Dillon, the one a director, the other the President of the Great Pacific line, were in the train, and the journey, when the scenery was unlovely, was enlivened by the information, on a variety of interesting sub- jects, which those gentlemen gave the travellers. Arrived at the Salt Lake Valley, they made a visit to the Emma Mine, by a road " up which the little locomotive travelled like a mule," so steep was the gradient, through a fine gorge, on emerging from which they found themselves in presence of a few tumbledown sheds, a couple of boilers, some winding-gear, and little else. " I was told," says the writer, " the history of the Emma' in a few words :"—

" It was discovered by a poor miner, who bad resolved that if be was ever offered 100,000 dollars (.£20,000) for• any discovery, be would sell it. He was offered 110,000 dollars for the 'Emma,' by a Mr. Hussey, a banker in Salt Lake City, and he sold it ; it was put on the Now York market for 1,500,000 (£300,004 and transferred to the English market at £1,000,000 sterling. The details can be filled in from the records of the Court of Chancery and other Courts in England and An.orien ; the moral can be read by every one. The talk of the place is that there is plenty of ore still be got out of the mine, but when I asked those who said so if they had been underground and spoke of their own know-

ledge, they admitted that they had not, and spoke by hearsay The old miner I talked to, and who knew the mine well, denied that the timbering was bad and caused the mine to run together ; and I fancy

he was correct, for I should greatly doubt the truth of that story... Mine is perhaps the only practised and thoroughly disinterested eye that has ever looked into the Emma mine, short and cursory as my glance was."

The writer takes an odd view of the decline of the peculiar institution of Mormonism ; polygamy, he thinks, cannot stand against the expense of fine clothes, and the Salt Lake City ladies will not do without them. The dowdy days of those delectable households on which Mr. Hepworth Dixon gave us objectionable dissertations are seemingly over. The often-described, always delightful journey to San Francisco has never been made more vividly interesting than by Mr. Hussey Vivian, and his account of San Francisco is especially remarkable for his vindication of the Chinese. He denies the dirt and the diseases of the Chinese quarter ; he claims much of the prosperity of the city as their work ; he utterly repudiates the current stories of their vices and their evil smells ; he visited their houses, their theatre, and their places of worship ; he thoroughly informed himself concerning them ; he sums up their usefulness by stating that without them the Great Pacific Railroad never could have been made for many years to come, the corn could not be harvested, nor could the grapes be gathered in the vineyards where they work, "with the patience of women and the strength of men." They overcrowd, no doubt, 45,000 persons being located in a " quarter " 400 by 400 yards, but they are extremely cleanly. Of the Chinese as servants, Mr. Hussey Vivian gives an account which induces us to wish they

would take to emigrating our way. "A Chinaman," he says, "is ready to learn and to do everything ; he is as docile as a poodle,

and moves about his work as quietly as a tame cat, always good- natured and willing, never drunk, never away when he is wanted, no ' followers,' no ' this isn't my place,' about him ; ready to do anything he is told, whether it be in the house, the field, or the factory." No wonder the " Hoodleums," whose market he reasonably injures, do not like him, and want to hunt him out.

Next to mines, which are the objects of his special attention, the writer treats the wine-growing industry most fully ; his account of it is most interesting, and to us at least, quite new. So is his description of St. Louis, the chief centre of the American lead trade, and wonderfully active in grain and cotton ; a city of which we had never before formed such an idea as this book presents. The chapters in which the writer sums up his impres- sions are instructive and very pleasant reading, indeed the entire work combines the value of a handbook with the racy interest of a personal and characteristic narrative.