I Once Made My Plaint On This
Subject At The Bar Or Office Of A Hotel, And Was Told That No
Remonstrance Was Of Avail.
"It is a monopoly," the man told me,
"and if we say anything, we are told that if we
Do not like it we
need not use it." In railway matters and postal matters time and
punctuality are not valued in the States as they are with us, and
the public seem to acknowledge that they must put up with defects -
that they must grin and bear them in America, as the public no
doubt do in Austria, where such affairs are managed by a government
bureau.
In the beginning of this chapter I spoke of the population of New
York, and I cannot end it without remarking that out of that
population more than one-eighth is composed of Germans. It is, I
believe, computed that there are about 120,000 Germans in the city,
and that only two other German cities in the world, Vienna and
Berlin have a larger German population than New York. The Germans
are good citizens and thriving men, and are to be found prospering
all over the Northern and Western parts of the Union. It seems
that they are excellently well adapted to colonization, though they
have in no instance become the dominant people in a colony, or
carried with them their own language or their own laws. The French
have done so in Algeria, in some of the West India islands, and
quite as essentially into Lower Canada, where their language and
laws still prevail.
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