On the other side of the Atlantic there is a populous city called
Grandville. It is, as its name indicates, a great city,--but it is said
that it thinks itself a good deal greater than it really is. I meant to
say that Grandville was its original name, and the name by which even at
the present day it is called by its own citizens. But there are certain
wits, or it may be, vulgar people, who by some process have converted
this name into Grindwell.
I may be able, in the course of this sketch, to give a reason why so
sounding and aristocratic a name as Grandville has been changed into the
plebeian one of Grindwell. I might account for it by adducing
similar instances of changes in the names of cities through the bad
pronunciation and spelling of foreigners. For instance, the English
nickname Livorno Leghorn, the Germans insist on calling Venice Venedig, and the French convert Washington into the Chinese word Voss-Hang-Tong. And so it may be that the name Grindwell has originated among us Americans simply from miscalling or misspelling the foreign name of Grandville.
I incline to think, however, that there is a better reason for the name.
For a good many years Grandville has been famous for a great machine, of
a very curious construction, which is said to regulate the movements of
the whole city, and almost to convert the men, women, and children into
cranks, wheels, and pinions. As a model of this machine does not exist
in our Patent Office at Washington, I shall beg the reader's indulgence
while I attempt to give some account of it. It may be thought a very
curious affair, though I believe there is little about it that is
original or new. The idea of it was handed down from remote generations.
In America I know that many persons may consider the Grindwell Governing
Machine a humbug,--an obsolete, absurd, and tyrannous institution, wholly unfitted to the nineteenth century. A machine that proposes to think and act for the whole people, and which is rigidly opposed to the people's thinking and acting for themselves, is likely to find little favor among us. With us the doctrine is, that each one should think for himself,--be an individual mind and will, and not the spoke of a wheel. Every American voter or votress is allowed to keep his or her little intellectual wind-mill, coffee-mill, pepper-mill, loom, steam-engine, hand-organ, or whatever moral manufacturing or grinding apparatus he or she likes. Each one may be his own Church or his own State, and yet be none the less a good and useful citizen, and the union of the States be in none the more danger. But it is not so in Grindwell. The rules of the Grindwell machine allow no one to do his own grinding, unless his mill-wheel is turned by the central governing power. He must allow the big State machine to do everything,--he paying for it, of course. A regular programme prescribes what he shall believe and say and do; and any departure from this order is considered a violation of the laws, or at least a reprehensible invasion of the time-honored customs of the city.
The Grindwell Governing Machine (though a patent has been taken out for
it in Europe, and it is thought everything of by royal heads and the
gilded flies that buzz about them) is really an old machine, nearly worn
out, and every now and then patched up and painted and varnished anew. If a committee of our knowing Yankees were sent over to gain information with regard to its actual condition, I am inclined to think they would bring back a curious and not very favorable report. It wouldn't astonish me, if they should pronounce the whole apparatus of the State rotten from top to bottom, and only kept from falling to pieces by all sorts of ingenious contrivances of an external and temporary nature,--here a wheel, or pivot, or spring to be replaced,--there a prop or buttress to be set up,--here a pipe choked up,--there a boiler burst,--and so on, from one end of the works to the other. However, the machine keeps a-going, and many persons think it works beautifully.