we have a fancy that the development of the race has
only just begun, and that the future will show us
in perfection a kind of man new to the world.
Out somewhere on the Santa Fe route, where the desert
of one day was like the desert of the day before,
and the Pullman car rolls and swings over the wide
waste beneath the blue sky day after day, under its
black flag of smoke, in the early gray of morning,
when the men were waiting their turns at the ablution
bowls, a slip of a boy, perhaps aged seven, stood
balancing himself on his little legs, clad in knicker-bockers,
biding his time, with all the nonchalance of an old
campaigner. “How did you sleep, cap?”
asked a well-meaning elderly gentleman. “Well,
thank you,” was the dignified response; “as
I always do on a sleeping-car.” Always
does? Great horrors! Hardly out of his swaddling-clothes,
and yet he always sleeps well in a sleeper! Was
he born on the wheels? was he cradled in a Pullman?
He has always been in motion, probably; he was started
at thirty miles an hour, no doubt, this marvelous
boy of our new era. He was not born in a house
at rest, but the locomotive snatched him along with
a shriek and a roar before his eyes were fairly open,
and he was rocked in a “section,” and his
first sensation of life was that of moving rapidly
over vast arid spaces, through cattle ranges and along
canons. The effect of quick and easy locomotion
on character may have been noted before, but it seems
that here is the production of a new sort of man,
the direct product of our railway era. It is
not simply that this boy is mature, but he must be
a different and a nobler sort of boy than one born,
say, at home or on a canal-boat; for, whether he was
born on the rail or not, he belongs to the railway
system of civilization. Before he gets into trousers
he is old in experience, and he has discounted many
of the novelties that usually break gradually on the
pilgrim in this world. He belongs to the new
expansive race that must live in motion, whose proper
home is the Pullman (which will probably be improved
in time into a dustless, sweet-smelling, well-aired
bedroom), and whose domestic life will be on the wing,
so to speak. The Inter-State Commerce Bill will
pass him along without friction from end to end of
the Union, and perhaps a uniform divorce law will
enable him to change his marital relations at any place
where he happens to dine. This promising lad is
only a faint intimation of what we are all coming
to when we fully acquire the freedom of the continent,
and come into that expansiveness of feeling and of
language which characterizes the Great West.
It is a burst of joyous exuberance that comes from
the sense of an illimitable horizon. It shows
itself in the tender words of a local newspaper at
Bowie, Arizona, on the death of a beloved citizen:
“‘Death loves a shining mark,’ and
she hit a dandy when she turned loose on Jim.”
And also in the closing words of a New Mexico obituary,
which the Kansas Magazine quotes: “Her tired