Under Either Phase Of Life He Can Rarely Find
Himself Comfortable, And Therefore He Lives As Little At A Hotel As
The Circumstances Of His Business Or Of His Pleasure Will Allow.
I
do not think that any of the requisites of a good inn are habitually
to be found in perfection at our Kings' Heads and White Horses,
though the falling off is not so lamentably distressing as it
sometimes is in other countries.
The bed-rooms are dingy rather
than dirty. Extra payment to servants will generally produce a tub
of cold water. The food is never good, but it is usually eatable,
and you may have it when you please. The wines are almost always
bad, but the traveler can fall back upon beer. The attendance is
good, provided always that the payment for it is liberal. The cost
is generally too high, and unfortunately grows larger and larger
from year to year. Smiling faces are out of the question unless
specially paid for; and as to that matter of foul smells, there is
often room for improvement. An English inn to a solitary traveler
without employment is an embodiment of dreary desolation. The
excuse to be made for this is that English men and women do not live
much at inns in their own country.
The American inn differs from all those of which I have made
mention, and is altogether an institution apart, and a thing of
itself. Hotels in America are very much larger and more numerous
than in other countries. They are to be found in all towns, and I
may almost say in all villages. In England and on the Continent we
find them on the recognized routes of travel and in towns of
commercial or social importance. On unfrequented roads and in
villages there is usually some small house of public entertainment
in which the unexpected traveler may obtain food and shelter, and in
which the expected boon companions of the neighborhood smoke their
nightly pipes and drink their nightly tipple. But in the States of
America the first sign of an incipient settlement is a hotel five
stories high, with an office, a bar, a cloak room, three gentlemen's
parlors, two ladies' parlors, and a ladies' entrance, and two
hundred bedrooms.
These of course are all built with a view to profit, and it may be
presumed that in each case the originators of the speculation enter
into some calculation as to their expected guests. Whence are to
come the sleepers in those two hundred bed-rooms, and who is to pay
for the gaudy sofas and numerous lounging chairs of the ladies'
parlors? In all other countries the expectation would extend itself
simply to travelers - to travelers or to strangers sojourning in the
land. But this is by no means the case as to these speculations in
America. When the new hotel rises up in the wilderness, it is
presumed that people will come there with the express object of
inhabiting it. The hotel itself will create a population, as the
railways do. With us railways run to the towns; but in the States
the towns run to the railways. It is the same thing with the
hotels.
Housekeeping is not popular with young married people in America,
and there are various reasons why this should be so. Men there are
not fixed in their employment as they are with us. If a young
Benedict cannot get along as a lawyer at Salem, perhaps he may
thrive as a shoemaker at Thermopylae. Jefferson B. Johnson fails in
the lumber line at Eleutheria, but hearing of an opening for a
Baptist preacher at Big Mud Creek moves himself off with his wife
and three children at a week's notice. Aminadab Wiggs takes an
engagement as a clerk at a steamboat office on the Pongowonga River,
but he goes to his employment with an inward conviction that six
months will see him earning his bread elsewhere. Under such
circumstances even a large wardrobe is a nuisance, and a collection
of furniture would be as appropriate as a drove of elephants. Then
again young men and women marry without any means already collected
on which to commence their life. They are content to look forward
and to hope that such means will come. In so doing they are guilty
of no imprudence. It is the way of the country, and, if the man be
useful for anything, employment will certainly come to him. But he
must live on the fruits of that employment, and can only pay his way
from week to week and from day to day. And as a third reason, I
think I may allege that the mode of life found in these hotels is
liked by the people who frequent them. It is to their taste. They
are happy, or at any rate contented, at these hotels, and do not
wish for household cares. As to the two first reasons which I have
given, I can agree as to the necessity of the case, and quite concur
as to the expediency of marriage under such circumstances. But as
to that matter of taste, I cannot concur at all. Anything more
forlorn than a young married woman at an American hotel, it is
impossible to conceive.
Such are the guests expected for those two hundred bedrooms. The
chance travelers are but chance additions to these, and are not
generally the mainstay of the house. As a matter of course the
accommodation for travelers which these hotels afford increases and
creates traveling. Men come because they know they will be fed and
bedded at a moderate cost, and in an easy way, suited to their
tastes. With us, and throughout Europe, inquiry is made before an
unaccustomed journey is commenced, on that serious question of
wayside food and shelter. But in the States no such question is
needed. A big hotel is a matter of course, and therefore men
travel.
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