GRANT ALLEN ON THE NEW WORLD.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXVI, Issue 8034, 6 December 1886, Page 6

GRANT ALLEN ON THE NEW WORLD.

(Pall Mall Gazette.) Mr Grant Allen called at our office the other day on his return from America. We were delighted to see the improvement which four months’ holiday abroad had wrought in the appearance of the wellknown novelist and Darwinian. By virtue of his birth in the New World and hia naturalisation in the Old, Mr Grant Allen is able to speak of America as an American, and of England as an Englishman ; but as he had not revisited America for nearly eleven years, we felt some curiosity as to the changes which he had noted in the continent which claims him as its son. Mr Grant Allen in this journey has confined himself, to the North-eastern States of the Union and to Canada, spending most of his time among his friends in the Dominion and making short excursions westward along the Canadian Pacific. “How does the New World look to you after a lapse of eleven years P ” we enquired. “ Very much the same,” he replied. “The cities are bigger, and so are the hotels, but such parts of the country as I visited showed very little change. I did not go out far West, my visit being confined to the districts which have long been settled. What struck me as new in the sense of making a new impression on my mind was perhaps the oldest phenomenon on the Continent. Looking at America with a geological eye I was impressed as I had never been before with the enormous extent to which the country has suffered from the ice sheets of the glacial epoch. Here in England that period has left a scar or two, but it is a mere scratch to the terrible punishment inflicted by the glaciers of America. There are whole districts in which the great ice chisel of nature seems to have scraped off all the surface, leaving the bare rock exposed, incapable of any cultivation.” “ But is there no moraine or any deposit of alluvial soil ? ”

“ Certainly. In the valleys there is soil enough, but even there the ice has worked almost as much mischief as it has done on the hillsides, by heaping up and mixing in a most heart-breaking way enormous masses of boulders, which are almost the despair of the agriculturist. Hence, from these two causes there are huge tracts of country in America which can never be capable of profitable cultivation. In fact, I may say the most vivid impression I have brought back from America is that of the immensity of the area which is practically waste land, irreclaimable and useless. There is nothing like it to be seen in Europe, excepting in some parts of Wales and here and there in Switzerland.” “ But is not the land very fertile ?” “In parts. There are certainly great valleys—those of the Mississippi and the Missouri—where there is fertility enough; and pray remember that I have not been out West; but the soil which I have seen, even where it is capable of bearing crops, is poorer soil than that which we have here, and a coarser soil. Although you may say America bears an immense harvest, yet the immensity of the harvest only corresponds to the immensity of the area from which it is reaped. Acre for acre the Old World yields heavier crops than thejNew.” “ The immensity of the country,” continued Mr Grant Allen—"by_ country meaning agricultural land as distinguished from mere geographical area—is a fact which has been much more deeply impressed upon my mind during this visit than before. As a rule, Englishmen who go to America see nothing of the country, strictly so called. They are whirled in Pullman cars at night time from one great city to another. In their life in these crowded centres of luxury and civilisation they hardly spare a thought for the vast intervening spaces, which are little better than barbarous. The contrast is most marked between the civilisation of the cities and the barbarism of Lho country---European barbarism, t admit, but it is barbarism still; and it is a somewhat melanchoiv reflection + ' think that the United States of America is nearly all country, with'only cities dotted here and there like pin points upon a great wilclerj ness.” i la what sense arc inhabitants of j the United State? haroaron? ? | “ Barbarous only in the sense of leading R life (.hat is do-ait-ute of almost all the conveniences and appliances of .’’’’ilisation. They lead a life of unceasing toil in spacious solitudes, lab -urimr ail the year round

without the ujuhiH of society or the privileges of conversation.” “ |!i:o do you moan to say that their life ts harder and more barbarous than that of our agricultural labourers P ” “ I "distinctly think so, especially for the women. The farmers in the States are not capitalist farmers, but labouring farmers. The wife has to do all the cooking, housekeeping, and washing for her husband and sons, by whom the farm is tilled, and also for the hired mm if the holding is sufficiently large to justify his employment. They have less leisure than the English labourer, and they dwell more apart. They have no books excepting religious publications of low intellectual type and the newspaper. The result is that every one who can live in towns flies from the country as from a pest-smitten city. The overcrowding of the great urban centres is one of the ""most difficult problems before American society. No one will remain ou land longer than is necessary to enable him to get into the town. The unending monotony and heavy strain of the field labour have produced two ugly phenomena of which I heard a great deal during my sojourn in America. One is the prevalence of brutal murders. On this side of the Atlantic brutal murders are usually committed in towns; in America it is the reverse. That is one phenomenon. The other is the fact that the women in a good number of cases become insane.” “ A terrible look-out this for a country nine-tenths of which is farm land, if farming is carried on under conditions which make men commit brutal murders aud make women go mad.” “ That is putting it strongly ; but it is only an exaggeration of a very genuine truth. It is very remarkable that in America there seems to be no love for the country or for country life. In England delight in rural life has descended from generation to generation, and is one of the few counterbalancing benefits with which the English land system has atoned for its many faults. But unfortunately the love of field sports and a rural landscape has not been inherited by our kinsmen beyond the sea. Here there is a constant tendency for town to spread itself into country, until you have outposts of London scattered over the whole country between the Thames and the English Channel. In America the tendency is all the other way. The well-to-do classes are deserting the suburbs and crowding into tbe town. Within sixteen miles of Boston the country is almost in a state of aboriginal wildness. You strike the forest primeval and the natural wilds within a few hours after leaving the largest cities. The enormous proportion of land that is still left wild conies upon the stranger with a great sense of surprise, even in the New England States. I remarked one day to Mr W. D. Howells that some day the love of rural life might begin to develop itself among the cultured classes of America, He replied, f It has begun, but it has stopped. The country houses in the neighbourhood of the city are now left without tenants. It is impossible to let them. Their are now living in town, and no new-comers can be prevailed upon to face the solitude and lack of conveniences of civilisation which rural residences imply/ I remember being very much amused at the frank astonishment expressed by a young cultured American when he learned that it was absolutely possible in England for a

couple of literary men to live and enjoy life as far from London as the village of Dorking. It must be said in excuse for the Americans, however, that their country is by no means so well worth looking at as ours. The purely agricultural landscape is desolation itself. All the indefinable beauties which add a charm to the English landscape do not exist in the great expanse of treeless, hedgeless plain, crossed here and there by roads, about as uninteresting as a cabbage garden, and by no means so well cultivated. Perhaps what most attracts the eye in an American landscape is the enormous quantity of weed which are to be found at every turn. The native weeds have not gone out, while a vast host of weeds from the Old World have come in. This is especially the case with all weeds which have winged seed-vessels. The dandelion, thistle, groundsel, and all similar plants have flourished amain. They cannot be kept in check there as in more densely populated countries, owing to the enormous expanse of waste land in which they flourish, and from which they despatch their seeds to adjacent land. In Manitoba the local authority has a right to extirpate weeds when growing on anybody’s land at the expense of the owner; but no legislation can cope with the curse of thistles until men are thicker upon the ground. The so-called Canadian thistle, which is simply the common English thistle, has spread itself over the whole of the United States.”

“ Well, what with glaciers of the remote past and the weeds of the present day, to say nothing of the slavery of the agricultural district, your account of the New World is anything but encouraging. To turn from these sombre subjects, what do you think of the Canadian Pacific. You went a short way along it ? ” “ Yes, but not very far. lam inclined to take a more hopeful view of its fortunes than the majority of educated people in Canada. It runs through the heart of our corn belt, but it is weighed down at the other end by an enormous tract of barren land—a wilderness which would never have been crossed by a railway but for the sake of reaching the terminus on the Pacific at Vancouver. Notwithstanding this drawback, I am inclined to believe that it is a hopeful venture.” “ Was there anything worth noting in politics ? ” “Not much, excepting this: do not be misled by Mr Gold win Smith when he represents the Canadians as all in thorough sympathy with the Ulster protests against Home Rule. There are Orangemen, no doubt, who are, in short, Orangemen in Canada as they are in Ireland; but the majority of the English-speaking inhabitants of Canada are Irish Catholics, and Scotch Presbyterians and their descendants. Irish Catholics are for Home Rule, of course, and so it may be said of the Scotch, who are as much for Home Rule as they are in Scotland. The Scotch race seems to have gone en hloc for Home Rule.”

“ Have you written anything while you have been away ?” “ Absolutely nothing,” said Mr Grant Allen. “For eight months I hare been solely occupied in regaining my health. But now I am once more buckling to work again.”