menu_book Chapter 5

CHAPTER V. Chicago. I know thy cunning and thy greed, Thy hard, high lust and willful deed, And all thy glory loves to tell Of specious gifts material. I have struck a city, a real city, And they call it Chicago. The other places do not count.

San Francisco was a pleasure resort as well as a city, And Salt Lake was a phenomenon. This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million people with bodies, And it stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta.

Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, And its air is dirt. Also it says it is the boss town of America. I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country.

They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is over much gilded and mirrored. There I found a huge hall of tessellated marble, Crammed with people talking about money, And spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their

hands, And yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him, Told me that this was the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty's earth. By the way, when an American wishes to indicate the next county or state, he says, God Almighty's earth.

This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity. When I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and without end, And verily it is not a good thing to live in the east for any length of time, Your ideas grow to clash with those held by every right-thinking man. I looked down in terminable vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen storied houses,

And crowded with men and women, And the show impressed me with a great horror. Except in London, and I have forgotten what London was like. I have never seen so many white people together, And never such a collection of miserables. There was no colour in the street, and no beauty, Only a maze of wire ropes overhead And dirty stone flagging underfoot.

A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so much an hour, And with him I wandered far. He conceived that all this turmoil and squash Was a thing to be reverently admired, And that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop the other, And to dig holes in the ground for offices.

He said that Chicago was a live town, And that all the creatures hurrying by me Were engaged in business. That is to say, they were trying to make some money that they might not die Through lack of food to put in their bellies. He took me to canals as black as ink, And filled with untold abominations,

And bid me watch the stream of traffic across the bridges. He then took me into a saloon, and, while I drank, Maybe note that the floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A hot-and-top would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism. The coins made an effect pretty enough, But the man who put them there had no thought

of beauty, And therefore he was a savage. Then my cab-driver showed me business-blocks, Gay with signs, and studied with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods. Looking down the long street so adorned, It was as though each vendor stood at his door howling, For the sake of my money, employ or buy of

me, and me only. Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You know, then, how men leap into the air, Stretching out their arms above the crowd, in the hope of being seen, While the women dolerously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper.

I had sooner watched famine-relief than the white man engaged in what he calls legitimate competition. The one I understand. The other makes me ill. And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress,

And by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper as every intelligent American should. The papers tell their clientele in language fitted to their comprehension, That the snarling together of telegraph-wires, The heaving up of houses and the making of money is progress. I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, Wandering through scores of miles of these

terrible streets, And jostling some few hundred thousand of these terrible people, Who talked pizabat through their noses. The cabman left me. But after a while I picked up another man, Who was full of figures, and into my ears he poured them as occasion required, Or the big blank factories suggested.

Here they turned out so many hundred thousand dollars worth of such and such an article. There so many million other things. This house was worth so many million dollars. That one so many million. More or less.

It was like listening to a child babbling of its hoard of shells. It was like watching a fool playing with buttons. But I was expected to do more than listen or watch. He demanded that I should admire. The utmost I could say was,

"'Ha, these things so! Then I'm very sorry for you.' That made him angry. And he said that insular envy made me unresponsive. So, you see, I could not make him understand.

About four and a half hours after Adam was turned out of the Garden of Eden he felt hungry. And so, bidding Eve take care that her head was not broken by the descending fruit, he shinned up a coconut palm. That hurt his legs, cut his breast, and made him breathe heavily. And Eve was tormented with fear lest her Lord should miss his footing.

And so bring the tragedy of this world to an end ere the curtain had fairly risen. Had I met Adam then, I should have been sorry for him. Today I find eleven hundred thousand of his sons just as far advanced as their father in the art of getting food, and immeasurably inferior to him, in that they think that their palm-trees lead straight to the skies.

Consequently, I am sorry in rather more than a million different ways. In the East bread comes naturally, even to the poorest, by a little scratching or the gift of a friend not quite so poor. In less favored countries one is apt to forget. Then I went to bed.

And that was on a Saturday night. Sunday brought me the queerest experience of all, a revelation of barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially described as a church. It was a circus, really, but that the worshippers did not know. There were flowers all about the building which was fitted up with plush and stained oak,

and much luxury, including twisted brass candlesticks and the severest Gothic design. To these things, and a congregation of savages, entered suddenly a wonderful man, completely in the confidence of their God, whom he treated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper reporter would exploit a foreign potentate. But unlike the newspaper reporter, he never allowed his listeners to forget that he, and

not he, was the center of attraction. With a voice of silver, and with imagery borrowed from the auction-room, he built up for his hearers a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House, but with all the gilding real gold and all the plate-glass diamond, and said in the center of it a loud-voiced, argumentative, very shrewd creation that he called God.

One sentence at this point caught my delighted ear. It was apropos of some question of the judgment, and ran, No, I tell you, God doesn't do business that way. He was giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, and a gold-and-jeweled heaven in which they could take a natural interest.

He interlarded his performance with the slang of the streets, the counter, and the exchange, and he said that religion ought to enter into daily life. Consequently, I presume, he introduced it as daily life, his own and the life of his friends. Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring no benediction at such hands.

But the persons who listened seemed to enjoy themselves, and I understood that I had met with a popular preacher. Later on, when I had perused the sermons of a gentleman called Talmage, and some others, I perceived that I had been listening to a very mild specimen. Yet that man, with his brutal gold-and-silver idols, his hands-in-pocket cigar-in-mouth,

and hat-on-the-back-of-the-head style of dealing with the sacred vessels, would count himself spiritually quite competent to send a mission to convert the Indians. All that Sunday I listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron to wood and getting a steam-and-iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and a net work of wires overhead was progress.

They repeated their statements again and again. One of them took me to their city hall and board of trade works, and pointed it out with pride. It was very ugly, but very big, and the streets in front of it were narrow and unclean. When I saw the faces of the men who did business in that building, I felt that there had been

a mistake in their billeting. By the way, it is a consolation to feel that I am not writing to an English audience. Then I should have to fall into feigned ecstasies over the marvellous progress of Chicago since the days of the great fire, and to allude casually to the raising of the entire city so many feet above the level of the lake which it faces, and generally to grovel before the

golden calf. But you who are desperately poor, and therefore by these standards of no account, no things, will understand when I write that they have managed to get a million of men together on flat land, and that the bulk of these men together appear to be lower than Mahajans, and not so companionable as a Punjabi jat after harvest.

But I don't think it was the blind hurry of the people, their argo, and their grand ignorance of things beyond their immediate interest that displeased me so much as the study of the daily papers of Chicago. IMPROMISE There was some sort of dispute between New York and Chicago as to which town should give

an exhibition of products to be herein after Holden. And through the medium of their more dignified journals the two cities were yahoing and he-yeeing at each other like opposition newsboys. They called it humour, but it sounded like something quite different. That was only the first trouble.

The second lay in the tone of the productions. Leading articles which include such gems as Back of Such and Such a Place, or We Notice Tuesday Such an Event, or Don't, for Does Not, are things to be accepted with thankfulness. All that made me want to cry was that in these papers were faithfully reproduced all the war cries and back-talk of the Palmer House bar and the slang of the barber shops, the

mental elevation and integrity of the Pullman Car Porter, the dignity of the Dime Museum, and the accuracy of the excited fish-wife. I am sternly forbidden to believe that the paper educates the public. I am compelled to believe that the public educate the paper, yet suicides on the press are rare.

Just when the sense of unreality and oppression was strongest upon me, and when I most wanted help, a man sat at my side and began to talk what he called politics. I had chance to pay about six chillings for a travelling cap worth eighteen pence, and he made of the fact a text for a sermon. He said that this was a rich country, and that the people liked to pay two hundred

percent on the value of a thing. They could afford it. He said that the government imposed a protective duty of from ten to seventy percent on foreign-made articles, and that the American manufacturer consequently could sell his goods for a healthy sum.

Thus an imported hat, wooed with duty, cost two guineas. An American manufacturer would make a hat for seventeen chillings and sell it for one pound fifteen. In these things, he said, lay the greatness of America and the effeatness of England. Competition between factory and factory kept the prices down to decent limits, but I was

never to forget that these people were a rich people, not like the pauper-continentals, and that they enjoyed paying duties. To my weak intellect this seemed rather like juggling with counters. Everything that I have yet purchased costs about twice as much as it would in England, and when native-made is of inferior quality.

Moreover, since these lines were first thought of, I have visited a gentleman who owned a factory which used to produce things. He owned the factory still. Not a man was in it, but he was drawing a handsome income from a syndicate of firms for keeping it closed, in order that it might not produce things.

This man said that if protection were abandoned, a tide of pauper-labour would flood the country, and as I looked at his factory I thought how entirely better it was to have no labour of any kind whatever, rather than face so horrible a future. Meantime, do you remember that this particular country enjoys paying money for value not received?

I am an alien, and for the life of me I cannot see why six shillings should be paid for eighteen penny caps, or eight shillings for half-crown cigar cases. When the country fills up to a decently populated level, a few million people who are not aliens will be smitten with the same sort of blindness. But my friend's assertion somehow thoroughly suited the grotesque ferocity of Chicago.

See now and judge. In the village of Isser Jang on the road to Montgomery there were four Chang'ar women who winnow corn, some seventy bushels a year. To their heart lives Purundas, the money-lender, who on good security lends as much as five thousand rupees a year.

Joala Singh, the smith, mends the village ploughs, some thirty, broken at the share, in three hundred and sixty-five days. And Kum Chun, who is letter-writer and head of the little club under the travellers' tree, generally keeps the village posted in such gossip as the barber and the midwife have not yet made public property.

Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the million bushels. A hundred banks lend hundreds of millions of dollars in a year, and scores of factories turn out plough gear and machinery by steam. Scores of daily papers do work which Kum Chun and the barber and the midwife perform with due regard for public opinion in the village of Isser Jang.

So far as the manufactories go, the difference between Chicago on the lake and Isser Jang on the Montgomery Road is one of degree only and not of kind. As far as the understanding of the uses of life goes, Isser Jang, for all its seasonal colours, has the advantage over Chicago. Joala Singh knows and takes care to avoid the three or four ghoul-haunted fields on

the outskirts of the village, and he is not urged by millions of devils to run about all day in the sun and swear that his ploughshares are the best in the Punjab. Nor does Purundas fly north in an eka more than once or twice a year, and he knows, on a pinch, how to use the railway and the telegraph as well as any son of Israel in Chicago. But this is absurd.

The east is not the west, and these men must continue to deal with the machinery of life and to call it progress. Their very preachers dare not rebuke them. They gloss over the hunting for money and the thrice-sharpened bitterness of Adam's curse by saying that such things dower a man with a larger range of thoughts and higher

aspirations. They do not say, Free yourselves from your own slavery, but rather, if you can possibly manage it, do not set quite so much store on the things of this world. And they do not know what the things of this world are. I went off to see cattle killed by way of clearing my head, which, as you will perceive,

was getting muddled. They say every Englishman goes to the Chicago stockyards. You shall find them about six miles from the city, and once having seen them you will never forget the sight. As far as the eye can reach stretches a township of cattle pens, cunningly divided into blocks,

so that the animals of any pen can be speedily driven out close to an inclined timber path, which leads to an elevated covered way straddling high above the pens. These viaducts are two-storied. On upper storey tramp the doomed cattle, stolidly for the most part. On the lower, where the scuffling of sharp hooves and multitudinous yells run the pigs,

the same end being appointed for each. Thus you will see the gangs of cattle waiting their turn, as they wait sometimes for days. And they need not be distressed by the sight of their fellows running about in fear of death. All they know is that a man on horseback causes their next-door neighbours to move by the

means of a whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and, behold, that crowd have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel and returned no more. It is different with the pigs. They shriek back the news of the exodus to their friends, and a hundred pens skirled

responsive. It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct which was full of them, as I could hear, though I could not see, I marked a sombre building whereto it ran, and went there, not unalarmed by stray cattle who had managed to escape from their proper quarters.

A pleasant smell of brine warned me of what was coming. I entered the factory and found it full of pork in barrels, and, on another storey, more pork unbarrelled, and in a huge room the halves of swine, for whose behoof great lumps of ice were being pitched in at the window. That room was a mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little while in state.

Ere they began their progress through such passages as kings may sometimes travel, turning a corner, and not noting an overhead arrangement of greased rail, wheel and pulley, I ran into four eviscerated carcasses, all pure white and of a human aspect, pushed by a man clad in vehement red. When I leaped aside the floor was slippery under me.

Also there was a flavour of farmyard in my nostrils and the shouting of a multitude in my ears. But there was no joy in that shouting. Twelve men stood in two lines, six aside, between them and overhead, round the railway of death that had nearly shunted me through the window.

A large man carried a knife. The sleeves of his shirt were cut off at the elbows, and from bosom to heel he was blood-red. Beyond this perspective was a column of steam, and beyond that was where I worked my awestruck way, unwilling to touch beam or wall. The atmosphere was stifling as a night in the rains by reason of the steam and the crowd.

I climbed to the beginning of things, and, perched upon a narrow beam, overlooked very nearly all the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin. They had been shot out of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled together in a large pen. Thence they were flicked persuasively, a few at a time, into a smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle to their hinder leg so that they rose in the air, suspended from

the railway of death. Oh, it was then they shrieked and called on their mothers, and made promises of amendment, until the tackle-man punted them in their backs, and they slid head down into a brick-floored passage, very like a big kitchen sink, that was blood-red. There awaited them a red man with a knife, which he passed jauntily through their throats,

and the full-voiced shriek became a splutter, and then a fall as of heavy tropical rain, and the red man, who was backed against the passage wall, you will understand, stood clear of the wildly kicking hooves and passed his hand over his eyes, not from any feeling of compassion, but because the spurted blood was in his eyes, and he had barely time to stick the next arrival.

Then that first swine dropped, still kicking, into a great vat of boiling water, and spoke no more words, but wallowed in obedience to some unseen machinery, and presently came forth at the lower end of the vat, and was heaved on the blades of a blunt paddle-wheel, things which said, Huff, huff, huff, and scalped all the hair off him, except what little a couple of men

with knives could remove.