THE AMERICANS IN CHICAGO.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 52, 20 January 1872, Page 5

THE AMERICANS IN CHICAGO.

[From the Spectatob.]

The good side, both of American institutions and of American character, came out in strong relief during the Chicago fire, and it is very curious to note how different that good side is from the good side of the British ways and mind. Except in susceptibility, which is greater in the Americans, the two nations resemble each other in all evil; but when a call is made on their virtues, display them in widely different directions. Compare, for instance, the conduct of the Mayor of Chicago with the conduct which, under similar circumstances, would have been pursued by almost any average Englishman. The latter would, we take it, have fought the fire quite as bravely; but we question if he would have recognised as promptly the necessity for illegal action, or, recognising it, would have acted with such utter contempt of consequences. As the fire died down, greed and selfishness revived in Chicago in their most naked forms. The criminal classes began to plunder the ruins and the ruined ; the traders who held stocks of bread and timber demanded unheard-of prices; the hotels raised their tariffs to a threefold figure. The people in selfdefence began to shoot and bludgeon the thieves, the remaining shops were threatened with rioters, and it seemed for a few hours as if society was going to pieces. An English Mayor, we suspect, would have appealed to Mr Bruce, and then sworn in special constables ; but the American, accustomed to think of the people as the ultimate sovereign, and sure of support if he would but act, rose to the level of circumstances at once, proclaimed a state of seige—which he had legally about as much right to do as a parish clerk has — .invested General Sheridan with absolute power, requested soldiers to shoot criminals at night, and in six hours had victims and criminals equally in hand. He probably never thought twice about possible consequences, knowing perfectly well if resisted by force lie would be backed in a moment by the armed population, and that if threatened by law no jury would dream of giving a verdict, or magistrate of listening to the complaint. The safety of the city was at stake, and the laws must just get out of the way. His next step was even, more audacious. The friends of a burglar shot for pillaging a burning house would not, even in England, obtain very much sympathy or redress; but we cannot imagine the circumstances under which in England a provincial mayor could have issued an ordei directing bakers to sell bread at eight cents the pound, under penalty of immediate confiscation of their stocks, and commanded hotel-keepers to revert to their usual tariffs, as otherwise “ the mayor would occupy their houses and run the machines himself.” The Englishman must have given a promise of compensation, or a hint of a bill of indemnity; but the American had no notion of the necessity of either. There was the people suffering, and he was their representative, and for the removal of that suffering his authority had no more limit than their physical power. Nobody disobeyed or resisted, and as to any subsequent action against the mayor, public opinion would make it impossible for anybody who brought it to live in Chicago. This capacity of developing a dictator for the hour, and supporting and obeying him in the most revolutionary expedients, without formally suspending the laws or demanding legislative aid, is a real feature in American politics, and one of the many resources by which they overcome unexpected calamity, and it seems to us due to the fluidity of their political organisation. The people make the laws, and therefore when the safety of the people is concerned and lawa hamper needful action, they think they may suspend them, and the populace secures its dictator ad hoc without any resulting break in the continuity of municipal life. There is danger, no doubt, to freedom in this idea that public welfare is above law; hut the sentiment does occasionally act as a corrective of the great defect of the American system, the absence anywhere of any final and absolute authority. A good Home Secretary in England would have done almost as much as the mayor, though he would not have been so prompt, and

then have asked for an Act of Indemnity ; but neither State Legislature, nor Congress, could in Chicago have given one, for the mayor did the one thing both are forbidden to do ; he dissolved the obligation of a contract The flexibility or easiness found in American institutions manifests itself also in the individual character. Not a little of the surpassing energy and spirit displayed by individuals after the fire, may be traced to the absence, of that appreciation of the weight of circustances which, like his liabilty to the laws, presses so heavily upon the Englishman. Mr Joseph Medill, for example, is one of the proprietors of the Chicago Tribune.” It was thought that the “ Tribune” office, a huge block of marble, might resist the fire : the neighboring journalists sent in their presses, and the staff seem to have waited for the flames as they would for an enemy’s attack. Despite the strength of the building, however, the flames “ licked in,” and Mr Joseph Medill walked out, to purchase there and then a store at some distance and a couple of machines, with which, before his old office had grown cold, he was circulating “ Tribunes” to the public. It is impossible not to admire such energy, and impossible not to suspect that one source of it was indifference; that Mr Medill did not really care as an Englishman would have done; that his heart was not choking or his brain bursting with a sense of defeat and pain, as an Englishman’s would have been. There is something of “ What does it signify ?” in it all, as there is in the Mayor’s vigorous and benevolent leap through the laws. A merchant hurrying back to Chicago to see what had become of house and home, is said to have met a friend, and asked him of their fate- “ House burned, wif9 safe at our fathers’, papers all right,” was the reply ; whereupon the merchant remarked, “ Well, when a man has his wife and his papers, what more does he want.” “ Heroic stoicism,” says the listener, and there is heroism and stoicism too in the speech ; and so also there is indifference,, easiness, fluidity of feeling on points which would have touched an Englishman very deeply. The American cared about his wife and about his papers, but about his house and its associations and their sudden disappearance out of this life he did not care at all. Even the burnt-out multitude seem after the first shock to have turned to work again with an ease which is in itself admirable, but which would, we suspect, be impossible if the chances of life weighed there as they do here. Life, as well as the law, presses more lightly across the Atlantic, and men struck by misfortune turn to work again, not with the dogged resolution of the Englishman, not by a supreme effort of the will, but with a light elasticity and heartiness which resemble frivolity; even while they have with frivolity nothing in common.

It would be a benefit to mankind to ascertain, if only such ascertaining- were possible, how far this elasticity is due to American institutions. If it is due to them, that would be the best argument ever advanced in their favor, one argument at least of human institutions being human happiness, and there is something to be said for American theories on the subject. The American social system is a result, in part at all events of the American political system ; and its tendency is to lighten life by increasing sympathy and diminishing that sense of isolation which so greatly intensifies the impression of any calamity, and which is, we suspect, one of the greatest causes of the depressed tone visible in English life. But we believe that a much stronger cause is one with which institutions have very little to do, the visible presence of innumerable chances in life, the sight, as it were, of endless potential wealth besides that which has been destroyed. A great English peer is not very heavy-hearted if one of his houses is burnt down and no life is lost, and that is very much the American feeling about a similar calamity. The house he lives in is only one of his houses. He has no other just at present, but he will have, and in that certainty he loses the sense of the irreparable character of any loss not involving a human life. Prosperity is sure to come back to Chicago, or if not, then to Milwaukee, and Milwaukee will do just

as well as Chicago ; and the American, as certain of that as he is of to morrow’s sun, feels misfortune not as a wound, but as a grain of sand in his eyes, annoying, no doubt, but sure to be out in a minute. It is not the present men really fear, but the future; and to the American, taught from childhood to appreciate the vast and certain reversions which belong to him, the future is always pleasant, and life therefore never without light. The burning of his house or of his city matters no more to him, than the wearing out of his furniture to the English rich man ; he has only to get more. If his cheque-book is right, all is right; and to Joseph Medhill his paper is his cheque-book, and the grand office old furniture soon to be replaced. Americans have not developed a new strength, they only exert the strength they have through a lighter medium.