Chapter XXII

TAKEN FOR GRANTED; OR, WHAT IS EXPECTED OF GRANT AND THE AMERICAN
FUTURE.

MARCH 4, 1869, TO ——.

The supposed Difficulties of writing History in advance considered, and
the Popular Delusions on the Subject disposed of.—Lively Expectations
of what our future Presidents, Cabinet Members, Foreign Ministers,
etc., etc., will be and do.—What Citizens will be exempt from
Executing and Garroting the Laws.—The Public Debt to disappear.—The
Ways considered.—Cut up into Dividends and no more heard of.—What is
expected of Common Schools and Sunday Schools in improving Public Men
and their Speeches.—Certain Occupations to be dispensed with.—The Uses
to which their Pursuers are to be put.—Improvements in Judges,
Injunctions, and Court-Houses.—Extension of Efforts of Society for
preventing Cruelty to Animals, to Employers, etc.—Woman’s Rights
discussed from various Aspects.—Men and Women equal,—especially
Women.—How any Differences between them are to be disposed of.—How
Children are to be utilized before they get to be Twenty-one and lose
their Activities.—The new Arts and Sciences to be taught.—Secretary of
the Treasury to regulate the Fashions, and how.—The President and
Sunday Schools.—All Mining to be transferred to Wall Street.—Advance
Sheets of Reports for 1969.—What our Railway System is to
be.—Grumbling and Patriotism.—Of the Future of Chicago, New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston.—_A Pax Vobiscum._

Most people suppose that it is difficult to write history in advance. There is no greater delusion. Facts—even when we can get at them and are sure of them, which seldom happens—are great obstructions to a narrative. They involve sudden leaps into unforeseen depths of human action, perplexing struggles through very dynastic uncertainties, or ascents to unexpected developments of character, trying to one’s judgment and patience, and often hurtful to one’s pride of opinion. Our preconceptions, unverified by a set of obstinate facts, are distressed by the unsatisfactory contradictions. We halt dissatisfied on a dusty road, which the tramp of events has worn smooth, and left nothing to novelty or an industrious fancy.

Besides, the great majority of readers are partisans, and have a right to be disappointed at and to blame those unreasoning conclusions, which slide inevitably out of realities. They confront sternly those facts, which affront them, by insisting on happening in a way or order different from their expectations or wishes. Hitherto, we have been obliged to conform to the hard conditions thus inherent in actual chronicles, and have been forced to submit our readers to these annoying certainties.

We can, however, now dismiss these tantalizing fixities of events, which have run before us, and left us the wearisome business of catching up to them; and leaving them to overtake us, if they can, to write up a future history of events, which ought to happen, and which will greatly disappoint the sanguine expectations of Americans if they do not. The excuse for failure will be lessened by the outlined path which we here stretch downward into the wooded future.

We take it for granted, then, that all our future Presidents will be the very best and most competent men in the nation, spontaneously acclamated to the office, and not wrung out by industrious party conventions for political ends. Uncommitted to committees or political sponsors, and unweighted by onerous gratitude to ex-working party canvassers, they will naturally hereafter pensively appoint to Cabinet places and diplomatic posts statesmen of pre-eminent ability, patriotism, and integrity, who will as modestly wait to be invited in, as the same class now, when in, stand as if hopelessly deaf, to be distinctly invited out. That they will reluctantly, if at all, subject weak citizens to the pains and penalties of executing and garroting the laws, or the slow and unpractised, to the heavy tasks of carrying the public burdens.

The public debt will naturally disappear. Perhaps some fortunate speculator in petroleum or Erie stock will pay it off, rather than have it in the way, or see it left to bear the market inopportunely. The secret of making money scarce will lead doubtless to the discovery of making it plenty; and then the public debt, being of no use to anybody, will naturally stand aside, as poor relations in times of plenty. Besides, gentlemen being selected, not for their own interests, but for the public good, will, it is to be expected, donate their salaries to a sinking fund, which will carry it off, as some companies do their stockholders’ dividends, to unfathomed bottoms. In fact, if the debt could be cut up into dividends, nothing more would be heard of it. If the whole truth may be safely told, the difficulty in the extinguishment of the debt will not be so much in its undoubted disappearance, as in settling upon that plan among the numbers presented, which will be permitted to hurry it out of sight.

Of course, when the Federal obligations quit, the State and city debts will not have the face to remain behind.

These subjects out of the way, members of Congress, being then gentlemen, as well as educated, capable, and honest men, dragged unwillingly from and not into business, will deal with the few remaining topics with a wise silence,—and this course we take for grant-ed now; or else will discuss them and not each other, or the encyclopædia of unrelated questions, the publication of which now so enhances the price of paper.

This improvement in our Congressional debates will have a corresponding advantage, also, to those foreigners who, desirous of learning our system, venture upon the speeches made at the Capitol, and, hopelessly misled by the terms employed, and the ferocious adjectives that commit horrible murders on almost every paragraph, confound our geography with that of the Cannibal Islands. We also take it for granted, that our public men will wait for events to justify the crude speculations, which they toss out in conversations with reporters, before cruelly amusing the good-natured public with their vaticinations. Possibly, too, the spread of common schools and Sunday schools, teaching grammar and morality, may lead to the disuse by our print-rushing politicians of styles of speech quite incomprehensible, and of words so raw in outline and so destitute of middle letters as to lead profane people to fancy that they are imitations of their own heedless expressions. Of course, in the better days now dawning, “rings” will only be used to tie quadrupeds to posts, or to restrain vicious bipeds in state prisons. Combinations to do good and increase the general happiness will naturally supplant those curious American circles, whose peripheries are not equidistant from the centre, but which consist in fact only of a centre, and that centre, self.

Happiness, and not wealth, being thus the main pursuit, of course many kinds of occupations, now called business, such as brokers, money-lenders, etc., will cease, and those now engaged in these so-called pursuits—of others, will look after the poor to minister unto them and not to take them in. The superior claims of charity upon the fortunate, who are now living, will naturally be enhanced by the fact that, being at present in the world, they cannot reasonably expect to live much longer than 1970, and may quit much earlier, leaving some selfish heirs not disposed to divide except for an equivalent.

Many judges being released from their present arduous duties of so administering law as to get re-elected—for then no one will value an office so much a sinecure—will have some time, especially in New York, to study law; and some courts of appeal can be repealed. The only injunctions issued will be oral, delivered, not to railroad speculators, but to indiscreet juveniles, unwarily betrayed into their first and last offence. The expense of court-houses being thus partially saved, it is expected, that the small unventilated places in which law is peddled out will be enlarged, and a humane effort be thus made to save the exposed lives of suitors, lawyers, jurors, and judges.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will naturally, with larger means, extend its operations, and embrace employers, suffering from servants of independent ways, from domestics who take six evenings in the week out, and allow their mistress one, and who, for certain discreet considerations, not worth mentioning here, permit those, who divide their estates with them, to occupy a portion of the same house, on condition of not interfering with their separate apartments.

We also take it for granted, that woman’s rights will not be wrongfully urged or withheld; but will be so adjusted, that the public will ascertain what some people would ask for, if they did not become incomprehensible through abundant talking, or what—considering the modesty of the applicants—they really ought to have, although they do not clamor for it in a way that makes some suspect, that men are either to be extinguished outright, or else kept for a few hundred years on probation, until they shall have learned to be respectful, just, and unmanlike.

In this coming good time, men and women are to be equal,—especially the women. If any differences are discovered in any way between them, these differences are to be submitted to conventions chosen by the wisest women, and the differences either to be entirely suppressed, or the dissenters all expelled from the United States. Uniformity is to be secured at all hazards. If necessary, ballot-boxes will be attached to cradles; and women, by any cause confined from active canvassing, will be allowed to vote twice at the next election, in order to bring up their rights to a point where nature left them.

We further take it for granted, that children will then be content to be vivacious; will be left to the witching ways, the pulpy and dewy freshness of the morning glory of life, until they shall have gradually come to the ripe maturities of action; that they will not fall from grace into the condemnation of mischievous notice; will not daily burst into astonishing feats of memory or attainment before reluctant, domestic audiences, nor carry on social insurrections against the United States of their begettors until they have achieved their independence, nor hold a Fourth of July every day in the year.

Should reform in this direction not take place as just anticipated, then we shall expect that infantile precocities will be utilized before they shall have evaporated into the insipidities of manhood and womanhood. At present, it is well understood, children are anachronisms, sadly out of place, squandering uselessly their best powers without any corresponding responsibilities; legally treated as minors, when they are in fact majors; denied the legal rights to marry until they reach a period when marriage is tame and idle, and the means to support a wife are exhausted; prohibited from going to Congress and being Presidents, while full of original ideas and administrative ability, and allowed to go when they have oozed away through the leakages of active growths all capacity, and become just—what we see them at Washington; and wasting in pantalets the money which, if suffered, they might earn better than the old heads which are now only figure-heads.

We shall not be surprised to see, if not during Grant’s time, at least before the century runs out, a constitutional amendment relieving aged Americans—those, for example, who have attained the ripe, very ripe age of twenty-one—from the duties and cares of office, and securing to the public the benefit of young vigorous intellects, varying from twelve to seventeen years of age.

The happy results of this change will be apparent—to any infant mind. Short-jacketed M. C.’s will impart new vivacity to Congressional debate; young ministers to foreign courts will be able to acquire, if they do not know, some language beside the American, and be able to converse with those with whom they have business,—an un-speakable luxury now. Active, bustling infants will give a new ardor to journalism, and produce a more enterprising corps of wide-awake, newspaper correspondents, to keep up the stock of telegraph companies by information which, being constantly in advance of the facts, would fairly represent and be fitting types of, the infantile correspondents themselves, and necessitate additional contradictions. As territorial governors, obliged to take hazardous journeys on our railways,—which often intervene and prevent older men from reaching their destination,—they would be nimble enough to get out of the wreck, or perhaps smart enough to keep their deaths secret, and have their ancestors draw their salary,—thus accomplishing, although not present, the principal business of that office. Then, too, how much livelier would things go on in our churches, if, instead of the dull, old elders, deacons, or vestrymen, now seldom elected before they reach the great age of thirty, and who, when they were boys, were smart enough, although not as alert as their own boys now, were allowed to rest their stiffer awkward limbs in their pews, and ecclesiastical affairs were managed by their youngers? The sick would be visited by cheerful, round-faced persons, bright with the health which would be brought as a living fact to the invalid; widows would be comforted by the presence of dark-haired and hopeful youths, and not depressed by the aspect of people encumbered with wives and the chilling experience of at least a score and a half of years; while the poor would receive liberally from those who well know, that the best use for money is to keep it in vigilant circulation.

SCHOOL TEACHING FROM 1869 ONWARDS.
(p. 542)
]

Business would also be conducted on youthful principles, in consonance with the other rapid ways of the times; capital would be nimble and alert, creating profits so lively that they would leap back into the common and rapidly running current. Old legislative peculators, bank and trust defaulters, would soon, in the natural course of things, and without the shocks of legal trials,—which generally produce no results,—be displaced; while young iniquity would scarcely acquire the rime and rust which now incrust so many of the old instruments of corruption, making them almost respectable. Biographies, now often running tediously through so many chapters, would be brief; as an American life might be assumed to close up substantially at twenty-five at least, and we should get the rich morning cream, without wearying ourselves with collecting the thin globules that float on the pan of age.

In the better times to which of course everybody looks, we take it for granted, also, that the every-day arts and the familiar sciences, now taught in schools and colleges, will be laid aside; and that Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Irish, and other tongues,—those sad reminders of Babels and other polyglot attempts and results,—will give place to more practical studies. How to cook, so as not to destroy the remnants of stomachs left by candy-eating, hot breads, and other delectable addictions of the old barbarous times which America has passed dyspeptically through; how to get a husband or wife, in every way suited to the expectations and ideas of different members of the family, and on a scale mathematically adjusted to the pecuniary latitude and longitude calculated from the paternal meridian; how to scale a tariff for conductors, which shall not raise the market price of gold rings, studs, and heavy watches, and yet leave something for the directors to operate the stock with; the best methods of acquiring a fortune without the stale process of failure and settling with creditors; the mode of conducting railway collisions and steamboat explosions, without ruining whole families and destroying rising communities at a blow, and without leaving so many facetious questions to funny coroners and irresistibly comic jurors; a method of advertising wares and leaving some praiseful adjectives not used up; a system which should graduate the decrease in weights and measures to the price; and how to make an hour’s work go as far as ten old-fashioned absurd hours,—these will help to furnish out a curriculum of study for institutions high and low.

The fashions will be regulated by the Secretary of the Treasury, who will issue a daily telegraphic bulletin, so that no one shall have any advantage over another.

The President of the United States, by way of keeping his hand in, may practise on a Sunday school every Sunday, addressing them in rotation, and going over those in New Jersey and Texas several times, if a safe pass can be secured. The antique modes of mining will be abolished altogether. A central bureau, located in Wall Street, will so work all kinds of veins and arteries, auriferous, argentiferous, and verdibackish, as to entice out all their values on call.

The traditions about gold are to be wrought up into poetry, and thus forever forgotten.

We have been put in possession of the advance sheets of several reports, to be made to the various State legislatures in 1969, on “The Absence of Legislative Corruption,” from which it is manifest, that nothing with money in it ever reaches the capitals of that day, and that the members are left to the tedious business of practical legislation, their spare time being amused with antiquarian researches into the capital chances for money-making between 1860 and 1870. It is also apparent from these coming reports that great amusement is to be afforded by a study of the severely virtuous styles of examinations, conducted by committees of our time, into alleged briberies of fellow-members; while the hotel bills of the cautious investigators are to be regarded as inimitable specimens of the gastronomic abundance of their predecessors in America.

We also take for granted, that the railway system of the United States will be wonderfully simplified. We now make it a matter of boasting that since the beginning of our railways, in 1829, we have extended them until, in forty years, they have reached a length of 38,500 miles, or a circuit around the earth one and a half times; costing in their construction and equipment $1,700,000,000, or a sum equal to two thirds of the debt of the United States; employing 8,000 engines and 135,000 cars, or enough, if placed side by side, to reach from New York to Chicago, and carrying annually 145,000,000 of passengers, or a number more than four times the whole population, men, women, children, and John Smiths put together. We are jubilant over the completion, in four years, of the Pacific Railroad, 1,900 miles in length, forming a line from New York to San Francisco of 3,353 miles, straining across prairies, chasing off herds of buffalo, spitting Utah with a skewer, climbing the Sierras 8,000 feet high, and levelling the Rocky Mountains with iron maces.

All these performances are, in the absence of anything better, and in our poor beginnings, not disdainful topics of conversation or newspaper comment. But in the near future we take it, that a single consolidation of all lines in the hands of one man,—whose name at present we mercifully withhold,—replacing our wooden depots with stone structures tastefully decorated with waving flags and live eagles, our tressel-work bridges with solid granite buttresses, spanned by iron girders,—the old ones being kept under glass cases for curious exhibition,—will so prolong, carry around, and multiply iron ways, that the entire population of the United States, excepting, perhaps, newspaper reporters and members of Congress, will be invited several times a year to take a pleasure trip, gratuituously, to every town having a thousand inhabitants, and be entertained six months on the suspended dividends, made palatable by watered stock.

THE AMERICAN LAOCOÖN.
(p. 547)
]

Grumbling will, also, in those gladsome days, be left to the unnaturalized Englishmen among us, and to those wry-faced observers of the weather and crops, who get up such very unlively stacks of figures, and elongate their rueful faces beneath their cold shadows.

Patriotism will, of course, be merged in a cosmopolitan feeling; for, as our boundaries will naturally take in nearly all the world, what is outside will be the subjects of our pity and commiseration, as those portions of the globe unfortunately left outside of England were, a few years ago, to Englishmen.

Chicago will then have so many elevators, that she will raise not only her surface above Lake Michigan, but her manners to a point where mending can begin. New York will doubtless be ruled by a descendant of the Fisk-al family, who will utilize New Jersey as a railroad depot or a coal-yard. Philadelphia, letting go of New York as a bad job, beneath her satire, will have such a Rush-ing library as to be the book lender of the Union. Boston will be, to her delight, roofed in, and become the Publication Office of Fields, Osgood, & Co., with Faneuil Hall and the Athenæum for press-work and lithographing; while the Southern cities along the coast will serve as light-houses for the dark landscapes which have hitherto glowered behind them.

Cotton will be more than king,—will be a good thrifty farmer, replacing broom-sedgy fields with smiling furrows, razor-backed hogs with blooded stock, and will stand out in round completeness, not isolated by a heritage which kept it aloof from the world, but linked in a rosy chain of productive good with the happy brotherhood of work, prosperity, and well-doing.

We need hardly add, that we shall leave off praising ourselves when we shall most deserve praise, and cease to be sensitive to foreign censure when we shall be hardy enough to laugh at it.

As everybody is naturally expecting to be happy, so we expect that everybody will be, without being seriously hurt or stunted by any of the little taps of this history. _Pax vobiscum._

Meanwhile, and until all these blessed times and expectations shall converge into the focalizing future, we trust that our readers, jolly, good, and happy, will get over, as best they can, the intermediate spaces, keeping their eye and faith steadily upon

THE END.

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Transcriber’s Note

Given the humorous intent of the author, and the age of this edition, one must circumspect regarding oddities of spelling and hyphenation. Hyphenation at line breaks is retained only when a word is very clearly unhyphenated everywhere else. Otherwise, hyphens appear as printed.

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.

22.27 What England lost and America gained[.] Restored.

57.8 and commis[s]erate the other Removed.

126.12 W[o/u]ter Van Twiller Inverted.

149.16 found its supply of [anthracile] coal _sic_:
anthracite?

196.18 is[s]ued once a week Added.

269.28 the king of Great Brit[ia/ai]n Transposed.

339.24 for the four follow[i]ng years Inserted.

355.21 when the speaker’s gav[i/e]l fell Replaced.

367.4 and the ac[c]umulated taxes upon Inserted.

392.12 and first smell of villa[i]nous saltpetre Inserted.

418.22 rose simultaneously[,/.] Replaced.

498.3 and with Fort Henry, Feb[ur/ru]ary 6th Transposed.

498.8 Feb[ur/ru]ary 16th Transposed.

537.8 we take for [grant-ed] now _sic_

505.12 and beleagu[e]red from May 4, 1863 Inserted.

531.23 The restless, [lever] pen of Mr. Seward _sic_:
clever?