ART. V.-SOCIAL EMULATION, AS A FEATURE OF AMERICAN LIFE.

New America. By WILLIAM HEPWORTH DIXON. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

MR. DIXON'S vivacious and entertaining story deals as we have remarked elsewhere- mainly with a few phenomena, mostly abnormal, in the social and religious life of this country, which are doing their part to shape out a "new America," differing, in many most important features, from what is familiar and old. We shall not attempt, at this time, to discuss the general character of that revolution whose germs and elements he seeks in the chaos of new opinions and strange experiments; but rather to trace the influence of a single motive, perhaps more potent than any other single one in effecting those more superficial changes which strike every traveller's eye, and perhaps equally important with any other in affecting the tone and quality of our people's moral life. We mean the motive of social emulation, to which the strength and the weakness, the safety and the danger, of our American life are largely due, -a motive never before so active and wide-spreading in its operation as now and here.

Nowhere but in a young, prosperous country, uncrowded, with undeveloped and unlimited resources, could this principle have the sway it possesses among ourselves. In older nations, emulations are confined within narrow bounds. A certain spirit of contentment, born of circumstances that promise but doubtful prizes to ambition or rewards to effort, captivates the heart weary with observing the restlessness and forward-pushing desires of our own people. But, where this moderation or contentment prevails, we find feeble and dispirited energies, unawakened or drowsy powers, and a fixed mediocrity of affairs. Old abuses go uncured. Permanent inequalities prevail. Along with unknown and unused resources, there is needless poverty, stereotyped dulness and thinness of life.

Doubtless, no state of society is so picturesque as one in which broad contrasts are produced by unequal laws: on one side, a lofty aristocracy; on the other, a meek and dependent vassalage. None is so saintly in seeming as that in which a showy asceticism, accompanied with a sentimental devoutness, produces faces and costumes which are the delight of artists and the awe of ritualists. And, besides the picturesque effect, there is often an advantage more substantial. A noble condescension in the high, or a tender reverence in the low; the loyalty of an implicit faith, or that order of graces which flows out of the relations of widely-contrasted classes of society, cannot be had where the exalted of yesterday are brought low to-day, and the low of to-day are lifted up to-morrow. Still, justice is the only permanent foundation of political or social life. All legal or artificial inequalities are curses and wrongs. The freest nation, the most equitable law, has the surest guaranty of its stability and happiness.

Social emulation is the whip that stirs the slothful faculties and drowsy desires of that constitutionally idle animal, man. It is to this, in great measure, we owe our swift growth in wealth and civilization. No man is willing to be poorer, less favored, less respectable, than his neighbors. He must be as well clothed and as well appointed as they; his family must be as well dressed and housed as theirs; he will not be content with less of educational advantage, or religious privilege, or opportunity of literary culture, or facility of communication with the world at large. The railroad system of this country, that miracle of energy, wealth, and engineering skill, is due but in small part to immediate needs of commerce, or hope of pecuniary profit. Farmers have mortgaged their lands to invest in roads that merely increased their sense of being in direct relations with the centres of life, and not behind the times; and this emulation has provoked and sustained enterprises of the most hopeless financial character. Take the Baltimore and Ohio Road, for example, — running directly across the bed of numerous torrents, or laid in rocky troughs, or raised on huge embankments, or lifted on stilted tressels, — here heaving an expensive bridge, there diving into a tunnel bored through

a granite mountain.* Contemplating the poverty of the region and the costliness of the road, one is dumb with wonder at that ambitious rivalry which would not allow Pennsylvania or New York to frame the only bonds between East and West, but compelled Maryland and Virginia to this herculean and magnificent task, at any cost to their resources. In the West, social emulation is the great civilizer. It bridges the Mississippi; it occupies the banks of the Colorado and Columbia; it carries schools, churches, colleges, all the comforts and refinements of the oldest parts of this country, into the newest Territories and States. Michigan claims the largest American university, most munificent in endowment, and most generous in plan. St. Louis is at this hour rebuilding the largest and most sumptuous hotel in the world, destroyed by the recent conflagration; is building an Episcopal church, perhaps the costliest on the continent; has the finest building for a Polytechnic Institute to be found in America; the noblest Post-office and City Hall; and has grown, in the last thirty years, from fourteen thousand inhabitants to upwards of two hundred thousand. Chicago, even more energetic and restless, rivals New York in bustle and stir, and in its vast territorial extent. With its elegant churches, its convenient and expensive school-houses, it looks in parts like a city hundreds of years old; while in other parts a mere collection of extemporized shanties. The best models of New-England schools, with the best teachers, are already scattered over Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California. No Eastern churches that we have seen are as thoroughly equipped for parish uses and religious charities, as are found in Illinois, Missouri, and California. The social element is so predominant in Western piety, that the churches almost uniformly provide for every gratification and development of that feeling, some even including arrangements for exhibiting tableaux and semi-dramatic

* Sixteen of these tunnels we counted, on a recent journey, in a few miles. The melting snow, followed by a bitter frost, had decked the sides of those rocky excavations with frozen stalactites of enormous proportions. A fringe of colossal circles hung from the opposite walls of the gleaming way, and, as the sun got power, melted into noisy cataracts, and echoed the thunder of the train.

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shows, while furnishing all possible accommodation for parish parties. The same spirit of emulation improves domestic architecture, introducing water and gas and side-walks into the remotest towns. A lecturer in a Western village finds himself indebted for his flattering audience to the attractions of the novel gas-illumination; and, being eagerly solicited to repeat his address in a certain place, presently discovers that the anxiety is not to hear him, but simply to prevent Oshkosh from receiving any privilege which Fond du Lac may not enjoy. Frivolous as the motive may seem, it is a powerful spring of improvement in our whole new country. It first did its work in the East, where town academies and turnpikes were built fifty years ago under its inspiration; and is now transferring its domain to the West, where it is working its miracles of civilization with a rapidity and success that no less universal or less immediate motive could rival.

But it works for evil too, as well as good. The extravagant fashions, the late hours, the expensive living, the high prices, travel as fast and as far as schools and churches. The fast driving, the gold-gambling, the gaudy drinking-houses, the gift-enterprises and showy weddings, the mania for piebald costumes, propagate themselves with telegraphic speed and American universality. If at Leavenworth and Omaha we find the newspapers, the gas-works, the paved side-walks, the stone fronts, the schools and churches of the Eastern cities, we still more surely find in their streets the Broadway saloons, and on their pavements the identical millinery of the metropolis. We find every vice of older civilizations blooming with hot-house luxuriance out of their fresh soil. The latest fashions flourish almost in sight of the desert and the buffalo; snatches of Italian opera or quotations from Emerson may be broken short by the whoop of the wild Indian, or the bark of the prairie wolf; and at the crossings of the ways we meet just as idle, over-dressed, and frivolous young men and women as we may see sauntering in the sun of any bright afternoon, up and down our city avenues.

In an era in which social emulation is the characteristic and unchecked passion, the landmarks of reason and piety are lost

in the deluge of imitation and rivalry. What is good and what is bad spread as by contagion. The common school and the church are borne on the same universal tide which floats into every region the follies and extravagances and fashionable vices of the day. Religion is built up in stone and mortar with prodigious outlay; while its moral and spiritual foundations are undermined by ribaldry and unseemly jesting about all sacred things in the very columns that advertise the Sunday topics of the pulpit. The mania for hospitals, asylums, and reading-rooms spreads like an epidemic, and with it the passion for horrible exhibitions, in which the contortionist risks his life to amuse the fears and thrill the nerves of the spectators; or women exhibit their coarse immodesty to the vulgar gaze, while people of standing will eagerly applaud some lottery scheme, thinly disguised by the sacred name of charity.* Microscopic science informs us that two opposite currents run in the same slender tubules of the lungs: one setting out and carrying off the carbonic acid; the other setting in, charged with pure oxygen, death and life thus flowing in the same channel. And so it is with the current of social emulation, with this difference, that the tides here mingle, and both run one way.

One great peril of American society is the lack of manly, independent thinking, and individual conscience. Personal aspiration gets lowered to a popular standard. An average and compromised pattern of character is thrust on us by a tyrannical, hasty, and unreasoning public opinion. Things go by tides and rushes and sweeping floods; to colonize Califor

* At the time of the drawing of the Crosby Opera-house lottery, it was said that hardly a town in the Western country was not largely interested in the exciting scheme. One poor-looking man in the cars was heard to speak of having a hundred and seventy chances in it. It was talked of more than the recent snow-storms, or Southern Reconstruction, or the prospects of spring wheat, or the renewal of the Canadian treaty, or even the price of lots in the new streets of a city that hopes and boasts of its ability to make New York a second-rate place in a generation more. The excitement of a passing fever would have been of no great moral account, if it had not illustrated the immense craving for speculation, the terrible gambling propensity, which, in the haste to be rich, has led to so much of moral debauchery and commercial ruin.