In the great cities I go to see, what travellers think alone worthy of being seen; but I make a job of it, and generally gulp it all down in a day. On the other hand, I am never satisfied with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators, with a degree of curiosity which makes some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am.[111]
He seems to have been dominated by the same utilitarian preoccupations during his English journey. There he noted carefully all the peculiarities of English gardens, visiting all the show places with Whateley's book on gardening in his pocket: "My inquiries," he himself said, "were directed chiefly to such practical things as might enable me to estimate the expense of making and maintaining a garden in that style." This is why the only thing worth noticing at Kew was an Archimedes screw for raising water, of which he made a sketch. His conclusions were summed up in a letter to John Page after he came back to Paris. England had totally disappointed him. The "pleasure gardens", to be sure, went far beyond his ideas, but the city of London, though handsomer than Paris, was not so handsome as Philadelphia: "Their architecture is in the most wretched style I ever saw, not meaning to except America, where it is bad, not even Virginia, where it is worse than in any other part of America which I have seen." On the other hand, the mechanical arts were carried to a wonderful perfection, but he took no joy in visiting manufactures and shops, since the view reminded him that the frivolity of his fellow countrymen made them import many articles from London and thus pay tribute to a foreign nation.[112]
When he left Paris for the South of France he was in no more amiable mood. It was his first real contact with the French countryside and he was shocked beyond words at the sight of the first villages he passed through from Sens to Vermanton. He could not understand why the French peasants insisted on living close together in villages instead of building their houses on the grounds they cultivated. He racked his brains for an explanation and could find no better one than to suppose that they were "collected by that dogma of their religion which makes them believe, that to keep the Creator in good humor with His own works, they must mumble a mass every day." The people were illy clothed; the sight of women and children carrying heavy burdens and laboring with the hoe made the Virginian slave-owner conclude that "in a civilized country, men never expose their wives and children to labor above their force and sex, as long as their own labor can protect them from it." But he nowhere expressed any emotional distress nor heartfelt sympathy for these poor wretches and concluded that if there were no beggars it was probably an effect of the police.[113]