The fact was that the produce had re-created itself
quicker than mankind had multiplied.
The ingenuity of man had not
worked quick enough for its disposal. The earth had given forth
her increase so abundantly that the lap of created humanity could
not stretch itself to hold it. At Dixon, in 1861, corn cost four
pence a bushel. In Ireland, in 1848, it was sold for a penny a
pound, a pound being accounted sufficient to sustain life for a
day; and we all felt that at that price food was brought into the
country cheaper than it had ever been brought before.
Dixon is not a town of much apparent prosperity. It is one of
those places at which great beginnings have been made, but as to
which the deities presiding over new towns have not been
propitious. Much of it has been burned down, and more of it has
never been built up. It had a straggling, ill-conditioned,
uncommercial aspect, very different from the look of Detroit,
Milwaukee, or St. Paul. There was, however, a great hotel there,
as usual, and a grand bridge over the Rock River, a tributary of
the Mississippi, which runs by or through the town. I found that
life might be maintained on very cheap terms at Dixon. To me, as a
passing traveler, the charges at the hotel were, I take it, the
same as elsewhere. But I learned from an inmate there that he,
with his wife and horse, were fed and cared for and attended, for
two dollars (or eight shillings and four pence) a day. This
included a private sitting-room, coals, light, and all the wants of
life - as my informant told me - except tobacco and whisky. Feeding
at such a house means a succession of promiscuous hot meals, as
often as the digestion of the patient can face them. Now I do not
know any locality where a man can keep himself and his wife, with
all material comforts and the luxury of a horse and carriage, on
cheaper terms than that. Whether or no it might be worth a man's
while to live at all at such a place as Dixon, is altogether
another question.
We went there because it is surrounded by the prairie, and out into
the prairie we had ourselves driven. We found some difficulty in
getting away from the corn, though we had selected this spot as one
at which the open rolling prairie was specially attainable. As
long as I could see a corn-field or a tree I was not satisfied.
Nor, indeed, was I satisfied at last. To have been thoroughly on
the prairie, and in the prairie, I should have been a day's journey
from tilled land. But I doubt whether that could now be done in
the State of Illinois. I got out into various patches and brought
away specimens of corn - ears bearing sixteen rows of grain, with
forty grains in each row, each ear bearing a meal for a hungry man.
At last we did find ourselves on the prairie, amid the waving
grass, with the land rolling on before us in a succession of gentle
sweeps, never rising so as to impede the view, or apparently
changing in its general level, but yet without the monotony of
flatness. We were on the prairie, but still I felt no
satisfaction. It was private property, divided among holders and
pastured over by private cattle. Salisbury Plain is as wild, and
Dartmoor almost wilder. Deer, they told me, were to be had within
reach of Dixon, but for the buffalo one has to go much farther
afield than Illinois. The farmer may rejoice in Illinois, but the
hunter and the trapper must cross the big rivers and pass away into
the Western Territories before he can find lands wild enough for
his purposes. My visit to the corn-fields of Illinois was in its
way successful, but I felt, as I turned my face eastward toward
Chicago, that I had no right to boast that I had as yet made
acquaintance with a prairie.
All minds were turned to the war, at Dixon as elsewhere. In
Illinois the men boasted that, as regards the war, they were the
leading State of the union. But the same boast was made in
Indiana, and also in Massachusetts, and probably in half the States
of the North and West. They, the Illinoisians, call their country
the war-nest of the West. The population of the State is
1,700,000, and it had undertaken to furnish sixty volunteer
regiments of 1000 men each. And let it be borne in mind that these
regiments, when furnished, are really full - absolutely containing
the thousand men when they are sent away from the parent States.
The number of souls above named will give 420,000 working men, and
if, out of these, 60,000 are sent to the war, the State, which is
almost purely agricultural, will have given more than one man in
eight. When I was in Illinois, over forty regiments had already
been sent - forty-six, if I remember rightly - and there existed no
doubt whatever as to the remaining number. From the next State,
Indiana, with a population of 1,350,000, giving something less than
350,000 working men, thirty-six regiments had been sent. I fear
that I am mentioning these numbers usque ad nauseam; but I wish to
impress upon English readers the magnitude of the effort made by
the States in mustering and equipping an army within six or seven
months of the first acknowledgment that such an army would be
necessary. The Americans have complained bitterly of the want of
English sympathy, and I think they have been weak in making that
complaint. But I would not wish that they should hereafter have
the power of complaining of a want of English justice. There can
be no doubt that a genuine feeling of patriotism was aroused
throughout the North and West, and that men rushed into the ranks
actuated by that feeling, men for whom war and army life, a camp
and fifteen dollars a month; would not of themselves have had any
attraction.
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