James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[372] confront a tribunal prepared for its condemnation. Before it stood John Bull, burly, dogged, and determined not to be humbugged—his judgment made up and his sentence ready to be recorded. Nothing disconcerted, the brown, rough, homespun Yankee in charge jumped on the box, starting the team at a smart walk, setting the blades of the machine in lively operation, and commenced raking off the grain in sheaf-piles ready for binding,—cutting a breadth of nine or ten feet cleanly and carefully as fast as a span of horses could comfortably step. There was a moment, and but a moment of suspense; human prejudice could hold out no longer; and burst after burst of involuntary cheers from the whole crowd proclaimed the triumph of the Yankee “ treadmill.”

A rapid tour through the north of England, Scotland, and Ireland absorbed the last week of Mr. Greeley's stay in Europe. The grand old town of Edinburgh surpassed his expectations, and he was amused at the passion of the Edinburghers for erecting public monuments to eminent men. Glasgow looked to him more like an American city than any other he had seen in Europe; it was half Pittsburgh, half Philadelphia. Ireland seemed more desolate, more wretched, even in its best parts, than he had expected to find it. As an additional proof of his instinctive sense of means and ends, take this suggestion for Ireland's deliverance from the pall of ignorance that overspreads it:—‘Let the Catholic Bishops unite in an earnest and potential call for teachers, and they can summon thousands and tens of thousands of capable and qualified persons from convents, from seminaries, from cloisters, from drawing-rooms, even from foreign lands if need be, to devote their time and efforts to the work without earthly recompense or any stipulation save for a bare subsistence, which the less needy Catholics, or even the more liberal Protestants, in every parish, would gladly proffer them.’

Perfectly practicable—perfectly impossible! The following is the only incident of his Irish tour that space can be found for here:— ‘Walking with a friend through one of the back streets of Galway beside the outlet of the Lakes, I came where a girl of ten years old was breaking up hard brook pebbles into suitable fragments to mend. roads with. We halted, and M. asked her how much she received for that labor. She answered, “Sixpence a car-load.” How long will it take you to break a car-load? “ About a, fortnight.” ’