“At Columbus I went to the State House,[47] while the General Assembly and Senate were sitting. If one were a politician, I can imagine nothing more interesting than to study the details of the American system of government, the question of State rights, and other features of the general administration. Each State seems very distinct and independent of the other. For instance, some States and cities have special laws of their own, and many complications which seem inexplicable would be more easily explained if this were more understood. It is not the government of the United States which can control all matters; it is the State which sometimes plays the principal part. I did not quite understand that until recently. For instance, in New York city or State there is a law giving certain privileges to ticket-speculators; while at Philadelphia, and at Boston, I believe, there is a law against speculators selling tickets on the sidewalks. Talking upon this subject to a lawyer in Baltimore, he told me that baggage-smashing on the railroads had reached such a pitch that a State law had been passed in Maryland making it a misdemeanor. English, and indeed European, travellers generally, who have had no experience of America, can have no conception of the way in which baggage is treated; it seems to me as if the intention often is really to stave in trunks and boxes. The credulous Britisher, who should put on his trunk, ‘This side up, with care,’ would have a fit if he saw the porter throw it down with a crash on the other side, and then pile a ton or two of the heaviest kind of merchandise upon it. When you think of the respect with which a traveller’s trunks are treated on European railways, it is startling to encounter a general sort of conspiracy here to break them up, and in a country which has invented the best system of ‘expressing’ and delivering baggage known to modern travel,—to me this is incomprehensible.
“From Columbus we went back to Chicago, the first of our return visits. I felt quite at home again at the Grand Pacific Hotel,—one of the finest and most comfortable houses of the entire tour. The colored attendant, Walter, who is told off for my service, is the most intelligent and courteous fellow I have ever met in the position he holds. Singularly handsome, too, is he not? Indeed one is struck with the physical beauty of some of these half-breeds, mulattoes, Creoles—wonderful fellows! I remember that Sala describes the Grand Pacific as ‘Wonder Number One’ among the marvels of Chicago, and the newspaper press as ‘Wonder Number Two.’ I should put the press first,—did you ever see such papers as the Sunday journals? Sixteen to twenty and twenty-four pages,—why, it’s marvellous how they get the matter for them together! One of the St. Louis papers I noticed was also a very large one. What a deftness of allusion and adaptation of events to personal criticism there is in these western journals! The Standard oil affair,—I don’t know the merits of it; but charges of unfairness in connection with the enterprise are before the public. Somebody has sent me this paragraph about it, from the ‘Columbus Times’:—