OLD-WORLD QUESTIONS AND NEW-WORLD ANSWERS.*

MR. PIDGEON'S former work, An Engineer's Holiday, left nothing to be desired in the way of fresh and vigorous description of the United States of America, and his personal impressions of men and matters there. Keen perception, an impartial judgment, and an unaffected but not careless style, rendered that work attractive., and memorable to an unusual degree among books of travel in comparatively beaten tracks. The volume before us is a useful and interesting supplement of the previous narrative. In it the author treats the industries, resources, institutions, and customs of the New World, in their relation to and as bearing upon the present and future of those of the Old World, in a luminous and direct fashion, which will prevent the subject from being found dry by readers to whom it may not appeal with any special interest He is urgent that we should bear in mind that the people who possessed the land up to "fifty 3-ears ago, when the great wave of European emigration, which to-day throws annually more than a million of souls on the American shore, had scarcely begun to rise," are they who only can be justly called Americans. Not a hundred years ago there were authors who correctly designated the Red-skins "Americans ;" and Mr. Pidgeon is no less complacent than writers far inferior -to him in humanity in recording how these people were "pushed back before the advance of a new nation, English in its origin, language, and laws, but, above all, English in its devotion to the Bible." He will not have it that "the heterogeneous hordes" now in process of occupying the public domain of America are as yet Americans ; he insists upon confining that definition to the sons of New England, whose principles and characters have been formed by the social and political influences created by their forefathers, with the addition of the Quaker colonists of Pennsylvania, the form of whose institutions, whether religious or political, was largely determined by their Puritan ancestors. It is, therefore, with New England that Mr. Pidgeon's present work deals ; the claims of New England upon the kiusmanly interest and affection of all travellers from the mother-country are the claims he urges most strongly, as superior to those of the more romantic West. "No peak or canon of the Sierras," he says, "no stretch of sunlit, sea-like plain, no forest of giant piues, no mountain miningcamp, offers objects of such interest as may be found in New England's rocky valleys, Whose swift streams turn a thousand mills, and whose prosperous towns, happy homes, and bright

people suggest many a grave question to the least thoughtful Briton."

It is then on a trip to what Mr. Pidgeon calls "the roaring valleys of Massachusetts and Connecticut" that he invites his readers to accompany him, not without a promise of lingering for a while by the brown Hudson, the blue Lake George, and the sea-green St. Lawrence, when they have done the manufacturing districts of New England. There he proposes to give them by demonstration the true answers to many of those questions which are being so anxiously asked at home ; there he has strange sights to show them, and certain aspects of labour and "the working-man " which will move them to surprise and envy on behalf of the toilers of the old country at home. A delightful expedition this proves, with its "start" in a pleasant anecdote,—" The earliest settlers of New Hampshire were fishermen, who, being once rebuked by a travelling minister for their neglect of religion, said, 'Sir, you are mistaken ; you think you are speaking to the people of Massachusetts Bay.

Our main object in coming here was to catch fish.'" A chapter devoted to the Nangatuck and Housatonie factories takes us first to Ansonia, the creation and namesake of Mr. Anson Platt, who dammed the Nangatuck at this spot about thirty years ago, and built the first of the great "brass mills," for which the river is now famous. The history of pin-making in New England since the "revolution," when the State offered " for the best twenty-five dozen pins of domestic make, equal to those imported from England "—and costing seven and-sixpence a dozen—down to the present day, has quite a fairy-tale effect. It also introduces us to the Connecticut man," an eh ment of the utmost importance in the industrial development of America, and a force of which we unfortunately have no equivalent in England. In his own far different way the Connecticut man is a personage as characteristic, as racy of the soil, and as impressive as was the crowing Kentuckian, —" half-horse, half-alligator "—of Dr. Bird's admirable stories, which are not read or remembered as they ought to be. The Connecticut man abounds in the workshops of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and, naturally, Connecticut. He is tall, thin, reflective, and taciturn ; he is clever and free ; he is the equal, although a mechanic, of the capitalist upon whose ready alliance he can count ; and his leading characteristic is of a kind to fill

Mi. Ruskin with disgust. "Tools and processes which we are inclined to consider exceptionally clever," says Mr. Pidgeon, "are the commonplaces of American workshops ; and the determination to do nothing by hand which can be done by a machine is a marked characteristic of the workman there, while it scarcely exists among operatives here." The passage in which the author fully analyses the Connecticut man is one of the best in the book. We have space for only one picture of what he is doing at Wallace's Brass Mill in Ansonia. It comes after an

interesting account of an automaton pin-machine :—

"Here is a row of strange organisms, in shining nickel-plate costumes, nipping away, like the pin-machine, at a roll of brass wire, and carrying the pieces, one at a time, by means of fingers as shapely as those of a girl, to be headed, and then dropping them, finished corset-studs, as fast as one can count into a box. There is another group of wire-eaters, taking in brass and turning out chain at the rate of seventy links a minute, no one regarding, while the links grow from yards to miles. Here is a wonderful automaton which sticks 2,000 pins a minute into pin-papers, and there another which punches, folds, and glues together card-board pin-boxes at the rate of a thousand an hour. Such are the surroundings among which the Connecticut man lives. Here he observes, alters, schemes, and amends. These pulsating and quasi-living beings are his friends and companions, who give him occupation, pleasure and stimulation. The thousand wants of the world offer him a boundless field for his creative powers, and he invents now and again a new automaton, as a poet produces a verse, or a musician a melody."

The homes of the workmen in Ansonia, and in Waterbury, called by Mr. Pidgeon " Clockland," and their pleasant, intel ligent lives under a regime of strict equality, are interesting to read of ; the great factory of the Waterbury Watch Company, not yet five }ears old, but one of the most beautiful industrial establishments in the world, is a grand monument to "the Con necticut man." Sam Slick has followed Chingachgook and the Mingoes into the Land of Shadows ; but Mr. Pidgeon tells us of "tin pedlars" still roaming through all the settled States in the

Union, doing a wonderfully various business (largely in rags for the paper. makers), and that these pedlars are chiefly Connecticut men. 'We think of the tin-pedlar respectfully," says the author, "as one of the few old things in America, a survival in the country where scarce'y anything survives the passage of the car of progress." The storj of the Waterbury Watch is too

long to quote ; but the reader whom it will not interest must be a chill person and unsympathetic if he be not touched to admiration and envy by the description of the comfort of the workmen's lives and the admirable conditions regu lating the entire establishment. The Waterbury factory employs 300 hands and turns out 600 watches a day,—that is, a watch per working minute. The automata employed are curiously beautiful. All the parts of the watch are interchangeable. If you had a pair each of wheels, pinions, springs, and pivots, you could put any of them together, and the watch so produced would go and keep time, because each piece is made by automatic machinery, which cannot make errors as the hand can.

But if you took twenty Swiss watches to pieces, and shuffled up their parts, you would spoil twenty watches, and not be able to make one that would go without fitting. The manager explained and showed Mr. Pidgeon all this ; and then one thing more. The price of a Waterbury watch is two dollars and forty-three cents. " Why not an even two-fifty ?" asked the visitor. "Don't you

know ? Three cents is the cost of the watch ; the profit is an even two-forty."

Stories of " Winsted, a Temperance Town ;" of the New. Englandfarmer's life among the Berkshire hills ; of Pittsfield, with its thriving lindustries and high cultivation, its "library of 17,000 yolumes, magnificently housed in marble, and cared

for by a staff .fully worthy of its splendid charge ;" of the Dalton paper mills (with a very striking episode concerning an indus

trial pioneer); digressions to a Shaker village, ideal communisn:7 and the Chinese labour question (fairly treated, and to the credit of the Yellow Man) ; a remarkable description of Hartford, its Old-World and New-World physiognomy, its literary celebrities, and its flourishing manufactures—those are but a few of the subjects which Mr. Pidgeon touches in a bright an vigorous style. Of the problems which he states, and their solution, we have not space to speak ; the book is a two-sided one, and readers will, find much to interest them on its more serious and questioning side. The author is an ardent admirer of the true "Americans," but he is not a partial witness. There are deep shadows as well as bright lights in his vivid narrative. The following passage sums-up his views of the future of the great question of which he treats :—

"Outside the simply luxurious classes, more conspicuous in New York than elsewhere, a true idea of the function of wealth has arisen. in America, where it must be remembered that there were practically no rich men previously to the war. In New England particularly, the responsibilities of the rich are being cor.stantly insisted upon, and as constantly acknowledged in a variety ef ways, of which. the model-factory is one, and the gift of free libraries to cities and towns another. New England, the heart of America, conceives that man the richest who, having perfected his own life as for as in him lies, exercises the widest influence for good, whether by his character or his money, over the lives of others ; and that nation the richest which contains the greatest number of noble and happy human beings. To the action of this belief, which, in spite of dollar-worship, moulds, as I believe, the conduct of an increasing number of lives in New England, we may, I think hopefully, leave tho future of American labour."