New England you traverse walks into which it
appears to you that the whole of Old England
might be dropped with no more chance of being
found again than has a needle in a pottle of hay.
But it is when you come to dwell in towns that
Form-sickness gets its firmest grip of you. In
a city of three or four hundred thousand
inhabitants, you see nothing but mere flat surfaces,
straight lines, right angles, parallel rows of
boards and perpendicular palings. The very
trees lining the streets are as straight as walking-
sticks. Straight rows of rails cut up the
roadway of the straight streets. The hotels are
marble packing-cases, uniformly square, and
pierced with many windows; the railway cars
and street omnibuses arc exact parallelopipeds;
and, to crown all, the national flag is ruled in
parallel crimson stripes, with a blue quadrangle
in one corner, sown with stars in parallel rows.
Philadelphia, from its rectangularity, has been
called the " chess-board city;" Washington has
been laid out on a plan quite as distressingly
geometrical; and nine-tenths of the other towns
and villages are built on gridiron lines. There
are some crooked streets in Boston, and that is
why Europeans usually show a preference for
Boston over other American cities; while in
the lower part of New York, a few of the
thoroughfares are narrow, and deviate a little
from the inexorable straight line. In most
cases there is no relaxation of the cord of
tension. There are no corners, nooks, archways,
alleys; no refuges, in fact, for light and shade.
In the State of Virginia, there is one of the largest
natural arches in the world; but in American
architecture a curved vault is one of the rarest of
structures. The very bridges are on piers without
arches. Signboards and trade effigies, it is
true, project from the houses, but always at right
angles. This rigidity of outline makes its mark
on the nomenclature and on the manners of the
people. The names of the streets are taken from
the letters of the alphabet and the numerals in the
Ready Reckoner. I have lived in G-street. I
have lived in West Fourteenth, between Fifth and
Sixth Avenues. Mathematical calculation is the
basis of daily life. You are fed at the hotels at
stated hours; and the doors of the dining-room
are kept locked until within a moment of the
gong's sounding. At some tables d'hôte, fifty
negro waiters stand mute and immobile behind
the chairs of two hundred and fifty guests, and
at a given signal uncover with the precision of
clockwork, one hundred dishes. These are not
matters of opinion; they are matters of fact.
Routine pursues you everywhere: from the
theatre to the church: from the fancy fair to the
public meeting. In the meanest village inn, as
in the most palatial hotel, there is a travellers'
book, in which you are bound to enter your
name. You may assume an alias; but you must
be Mr. Somebody. You cannot be, as in
England, the " stout party in Number Six," or the
"tall gent in the Sun." You must shake hands
with every one ta whom you are introduced;
you must drink when you are asked, and then
ask the asker to drink—though I am bound to
say that this strictly mathematical custom has,
owing to the piteous protests of Europeans,
somewhat declined of late. If you enter a
barber's shop to be shaved, a negro hands you
a check bearing a number, and you must await
your turn. When your turn arrives, you must sit
in a certain position in a velvet-covered fauteuil
with high legs, and must put your feet up on a
stool on a level therewith, The barber shaves you,
not as you like but as he likes, powders you, strains
a napkin over your face, sponges you, shampoos
you, pours bay rum and eau-de-Cologne on your
head, greases, combs you out, and "fixes"' you
generally. The first time I was ever under the
hands of an American barber, I rose as soon as
he had laid down his razor, and made a move in
the direction of the washhand basin. He stared
at me as though I had gone mad. " Hold on!"
he cried, in an authoritative accent. " Hold
on! Guess I'll have to wash you up." That I
should be washed up or " fixed," was in
accordance with the mathematical code.

This all but utter absence of variety of form,
of divergence of detail, of play of light and shade,
are productive in the end of that petulant
discontented frame of mind—of that soreness of
spirit—with which almost every tourist who has
visited the Great Republic has come at last to
regard its civilisation. As a rule, the coarser
the traveller's organisation—the less he cares
about art or literature—the better he will get
on in America. I met a fellow-countryman
once, the son of an English earl, at one of the
biggest, most mathematical, and most comfortless,
of the New York hotels, who told me that
he should be very well content to live there for
ten years. "Why," he said, "you can have
five meals a day if you like." This is the kind
of traveller, the robust hardy strong-stomached
youth, fresh from a public school, who goes to
America and does not grumble. But do you
take, not a travelled Englishman, but a travelled
American, one who has been long in Europe,
and has appreciated the artistic glories of the
Continent, and you will discover that he finds it
almost impossible to live in his own country, or
"board" at an American hotel. Every
continental city has its colony of cultivated
Americans, good patriots and staunch republicans,
but who are absolutely afraid to go back to their
native land. They dread the mathematical
system. Those who, for their families' or their
interests' sake, are compelled to return, live at
hotels conducted, not on the American, but on
the European system—that is to say, where they
can dine, breakfast, or sup, not as the landlord
likes, but as they themselves like. Those
who are wealthy, shut themselves up in country-
houses, or splendid town mansions, surrounded
by books, and pictures, and statues, and tapestry,
and coins from Europe, until their existence is
almost ignored by their countrymen. In no
country in the world are so many men of shining
talents, of noble mind, of refined tastes, buried
alive as in the United States.

That which I call the mathematical system is
only another name for a very stringent and