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+Project Gutenberg's The Twentieth Century American, by H. Perry Robinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Twentieth Century American
+       Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great
+       Anglo-Saxon Nations
+
+Author: H. Perry Robinson
+
+Release Date: November 26, 2009 [EBook #30549]
+
+Language: EN
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Michael Zeug, Lisa Reigel,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been
+left as in the original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have
+been corrected. A complete list follows the text.
+
+Words surrounded by _underscores_ are in italics in the original.
+Ellipses match the original. A row of asterisks represents a thought
+break.
+
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                           The Twentieth                            |
+  |                          Century American                          |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                               Being                                |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |               A Comparative Study of the Peoples of                |
+  |                 the Two Great Anglo-Saxon Nations                  |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                 BY                                 |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                         H. PERRY ROBINSON                          |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |           AUTHOR OF "MEN BORN EQUAL," "THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY           |
+  |                       OF A BLACK BEAR," ETC.                       |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                           [Illustration]                           |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                        The Chautauqua Press                        |
+  |                        CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK                        |
+  |                               MCMXI                                |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+                           COPYRIGHT, 1908
+
+                                  BY
+
+                         G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+
+
+                  The Knickerbocker Press, New York
+
+
+
+
+                                  TO
+
+                            THOSE READERS,
+
+                     WHETHER ENGLISH OR AMERICAN,
+
+                                 WHO
+
+                  AGREE WITH WHATEVER IS SAID IN THE
+
+                   FOLLOWING PAGES IN LAUDATION OF
+
+                          THEIR OWN COUNTRY
+
+                              THIS BOOK
+
+                       IS INSCRIBED IN THE HOPE
+
+              THAT THEY WILL BE EQUALLY READY TO ACCEPT
+
+                     WHATEVER THEY FIND IN PRAISE
+
+                                  OF
+
+                              THE OTHER.
+
+
+[Illustration: The British Isles and the United States.
+
+A Comparison (see Chapter IV.)]
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+There are already many books about America; but the majority of these
+have been written by Englishmen after so brief an acquaintance with the
+country that it is doubtful whether they contribute much to English
+knowledge of the subject.
+
+My reason for adding another volume to the list is the hope of being
+able to do something to promote a better understanding between the
+peoples, having as an excuse the fact that I have lived in the United
+States for nearly twenty years, under conditions which have given rather
+exceptional opportunities of intimacy with the people of various parts
+of the country socially, in business, and in politics. Wherever my
+judgment is wrong it is not from lack of abundant chance to learn the
+truth.
+
+Except in one instance--very early in the book--I have avoided the use
+of statistics, in spite of frequent temptation to refer to them to
+fortify arguments which must without them appear to be merely the
+expression of an individual opinion.
+
+                                                         H. P. R.
+
+February, 1908.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+     AN ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE                                        5
+
+     The Avoidance of Entangling Alliances--What the Injunction
+     Meant--What it Cannot Mean To-day--The Interests of the United
+     States, no less than those of England, Demand an Alliance--But
+     Larger Interests than those of the Two Peoples are
+     Involved--American Responsiveness to Ideals--The Greatest
+     Ideal of All, Universal Peace: the Practicability of its
+     Attainment--America's Responsibility--Misconceptions of the
+     British Empire--Germany's Position--American Susceptibilities.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+     THE DIFFERENCE IN POINT OF VIEW                                  35
+
+     The Anglo-Saxon Family Likeness--How Frenchmen and Germans
+     View it--Englishmen, Americans, and "Foreigners"--An Echo of
+     the War of 1812--An Anglo-American Conflict Unthinkable--
+     American Feeling for England--The Venezuelan Incident--The
+     Pilgrims and Some Secret History--Why Americans still Hate
+     England--Great Britain's Nearness to the United States
+     Geographically--Commercially--Historically--England's Foreign
+     Ill-wishers in America.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+     TWO SIDES OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER                              60
+
+     Europe's Undervaluation of America's Fighting Power--The
+     Americans as Sailors--The Nation's Greatest Asset--Self-reliance
+     of the People--The Making of a Doctor--And of a Surveyor--
+     Society in the Rough--New York and the Country--An Anglo-Saxon
+     Trait--America's Unpreparedness--American Consuls and Diplomats--
+     A Homogeneous People--The Value of a Common Speech--America
+     more Anglo-Saxon than Britain--Mr. Wells and the Future in
+     America.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+     MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS                                         94
+
+     America's Bigness--A New Atlantis--The Effect of Expansion on
+     a People--A Family Estranged--Parsnips--An American Woman in
+     England--An Englishman in America--International Caricatures--
+     Shibboleths: dropped H's and a "twang"--Matthew Arnold's
+     Clothes--The Honourable S---- B----.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+     THE AMERICAN ATTITUDE TOWARDS WOMEN                             111
+
+     The Isolation of the United States--American Ignorance of the
+     World--Sensitiveness to Criticism--Exaggeration of their Own
+     Virtues--The Myth of American Chivalrousness--Whence it
+     Originated--The Climatic Myth--International Marriages--English
+     Manners and American--The View of Womanhood in Youth--
+     Co-education of the Sexes--Conjugal Morality--The Artistic
+     Sense in American Women--Two Stenographers--An Incident of
+     Camp-Life--"Molly-be-damned"--A Nice Way of Travelling--How do
+     they do it?--Women in Public Life--The Conditions which
+     Co-operate--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit again.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+     ENGLISH HUMOUR AND AMERICAN ART                                 145
+
+     American Insularity--A Conkling Story--English Humour and
+     American Critics--American Literature and English Critics--The
+     American Novel in England--And American Art--Wanted, an
+     American Exhibition--The Revolution in the American Point of
+     View--"Raining in London"--Domestic and Imported Goods.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+     ENGLISH AND AMERICAN EDUCATION                                  166
+
+     The Rhodes Scholarships--"Pullulating Colleges"--Are American
+     Colleges Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?--Other Educational
+     Forces--The Postal Laws--Ten-cent Magazines and Cheap Books--
+     Pigs in Chicago--The Press of England and America Compared--
+     Mixed Society--Educated Women--Generals as Booksellers--And as
+     Farmhands--The Value of War to a People.
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+     A COMPARISON IN CULTURE                                         191
+
+     The Advantage of Youth--Japanese Eclecticism and American--The
+     Craving for the Best--_Cyrano de Bergerac_--Verestschagin--
+     Culture by Paroxysms--Mr. Gladstone and the Japanese--Anglo-Saxon
+     Crichtons--Americans as Linguists--England's Past and America's
+     Future--Americanisms in Speech--Why They are Disappearing in
+     America--And Appearing in England--The Press and the Copyright
+     Laws--A Look into the Future.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+     POLITICS AND POLITICIANS                                        226
+
+     The "English-American" Vote--The Best People in Politics--What
+     Politics Means in America--Where Corruption Creeps in--The
+     Danger in England--A Presidential Nomination for Sale--Buying
+     Legislation--Could it Occur in England?--A Delectable Alderman--
+     Taxation while you Wait--Perils that England Escapes--The
+     Morality of Congress--Political Corruption of the Irish--
+     Democrat and Republican.
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+     AMERICAN POLITICS IN ENGLAND                                    260
+
+     The System of Parties--Interdependence of National and Local
+     Organisations--The Federal Government and Sovereign States--
+     The Boss of Warwickshire--The Unit System--Prime Minister
+     Crooks--Lanark and the Nation--New York and Tammany Hall--
+     America's Superior Opportunities for Wickedness--How England
+     Is Catching up--Campaign Reminiscences--The "Hell-box"--Politics
+     in a Gravel-pit--Mr. Hearst and Mr. Bryan.
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+     SOME QUESTIONS OF THE MOMENT                                    285
+
+     Sovereign States and the Federal Government--California and
+     the Senate--The Constitutional Powers of Congress and the
+     President--Government by Interpretation--President Roosevelt
+     as an Inspiration to the People--A New Conception of the
+     Presidential Office--"Teddy" and the "fraid strap"--Mr.
+     Roosevelt and the Corporations--As a Politician--His
+     Imperiousness--The Negro Problem--The Americanism of the South.
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+     COMMERCIAL MORALITY                                             308
+
+     Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?--An American
+     Peerage--Senators and other Aristocrats--Trade and the British
+     Upper Classes--Two Views of a Business Career--America's Wild
+     Oats--The Packing House Scandals--"American Methods" in
+     Business--A Countryman and Some Eggs--A New Dog--The Morals of
+     British Peers--A Contract of Mutual Confidence--Embalmed Beef,
+     Re-mounts, and War Stores--The Yellow Press and Mr. Hearst--
+     American View of the House of Lords.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+     THE GROWTH OF HONESTY                                           347
+
+     The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon--America's Resemblance to
+     Japan--A German View--Can Americans Lie?--Honesty as the Best
+     Policy--Religious Sentiment--Moral and Immoral Railway
+     Managers--A Struggle for Self-preservation--Gentlemen in
+     Business--Peculation among Railway Servants--How the Old
+     Order Changes, Yielding Place to New--The Strain on British
+     Machinery--Americans as Story-Tellers--The Incredibility of
+     the Actual.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+     A CONTRAST IN PRINCIPLES                                        371
+
+     The Commercial Power of the United States--British Workmanship--
+     Tin-tacks and Conservatism--A Prophetic Frenchman--Imperialism
+     in Trade--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit--About Chaperons--"Insist upon
+     Thyself"--English and American Banks--Dealing in Futures--Dog
+     Eat Dog--Two Letters--Commercial Octopods--Trusts in America
+     and England--The Standard Oil Company--And Solicitors--Legal
+     Chaperons--The Sanctity of Stamped Paper--Conclusions--Do
+     "Honest" Traders Exist?
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+     THE PEOPLES AT PLAY                                             408
+
+     American Sport Twenty-five Years Ago--The Power of Golf--A
+     Look Ahead--Britain, Mother of Sports--Buffalo in New York--
+     And Pheasants on Clapham Common--Shooting Foxes and the
+     "Sport" of Wild-fowling--The Amateur in American Sport--At
+     Henley--And at Large--Teutonic Poppycock.
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+     SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION                                          429
+
+     A New Way of Making Friends--The Desirability of an Alliance--
+     For the Sake of Both Peoples--And of all the World--The Family
+     Resemblance--Mutual Misunderstandings--American Conception of
+     the British Character--English Misapprehension of Americans--
+     Foreign Influences in the United States--Why Politicians
+     Hesitate--An Appeal to the People--And to Cæsar.
+
+
+     APPENDIX                                                        451
+
+     INDEX                                                           453
+
+
+
+
+The Twentieth Century
+American
+
+
+     "_If I can say anything to show that my name is really
+     Makepeace, and to increase the source of love between the two
+     countries, then please, God, I will._"--W. M. Thackeray, in
+     _Letters to an American Family_.
+
+     "_Certainly there is nothing like England, and there never has
+     been anything like England in the world. Her wonderful
+     history, her wonderful literature, her beautiful architecture,
+     the historic and poetic associations which cluster about every
+     street and river and mountain and valley, her vigorous life,
+     the sweetness and beauty of her women, the superb manhood of
+     her men, her Navy, her gracious hospitality, and her lofty
+     pride--although some single race of men may have excelled her
+     in some single particular--make up a combination never
+     equalled in the world._"--The late United States Senator Hoar,
+     in _An Autobiography of Seventy Years_.
+
+     "_The result of the organisation of the American colonies into
+     a state, and of the bringing together of the diverse
+     communities contained in these colonies, was the creation not
+     merely of a new nation, but of a new temperament. How far this
+     temperament was to arise from a change of climate, and how far
+     from a new political organisation, no one could then foresee,
+     nor is its origin yet fully analysed; but the fact itself is
+     now coming to be more and more recognised. It may be that
+     Nature said at about that time: 'Thus far the English is my
+     best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; now for another
+     turning of the globe, and for a further novelty. We need
+     something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman; let
+     us lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process.
+     Put in one drop more of nervous fluid and make the American.'
+     With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human
+     race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organised type of
+     mankind was born._"--Thomas Wentworth Higginson, _Atlantic
+     Monthly_, 1886.
+
+     "_The foreign observer in America is at once struck by the
+     fact that the average of intelligence, as that intelligence
+     manifests itself in the spirit of inquiry, in the interest
+     taken in a great variety of things, and in alertness of
+     judgment, is much higher among the masses in the United States
+     than anywhere else. This is certainly not owing to any
+     superiority of the public school system in this country--or,
+     if such superiority exists, not to that alone--but rather to
+     the fact that in the United States the individual is
+     constantly brought into interested contact with a greater
+     variety of things and is admitted to active participation in
+     the exercise of functions which in other countries are left to
+     the care of a superior authority. I have frequently been
+     struck by the remarkable expansion of the horizon effected by
+     a few years of American life, in the minds of immigrants who
+     had come from somewhat benighted regions, and by the mental
+     enterprise and keen discernment with which they took hold of
+     problems to which, in their comparatively torpid condition in
+     their native countries, they had never given thought. It is
+     true that in the large cities with congested population,
+     self-government as an educator does not always bring the most
+     desirable results, partly owing to the circumstance that
+     government, in its various branches, is there further removed
+     from the individual, so that he comes into contact with it and
+     exercises his influence upon it only through various, and
+     sometimes questionable, intermediary agencies which frequently
+     exert a very demoralising influence._"--Carl Schurz's
+     _Memoirs_, II, 79.
+
+     "_Anglo-Saxon Superiority! Although we do not all acknowledge
+     it, we all have to bear it, and we all dread it; the
+     apprehension, the suspicion, and sometimes the hatred provoked
+     by l'Anglais proclaim the fact loudly enough. We cannot go one
+     step in the world without coming across the Anglo-Saxon. . . .
+     He rules America by Canada and the United States; Africa by
+     Egypt and the Cape; Asia by India and Burmah; Australasia by
+     Australia and New Zealand; Europe and the whole world, by his
+     trade and industries and by his policy._"--M. Edmond Demolins
+     in _Anglo-Saxon Superiority_ "_À quoi tient la Supériorité des
+     Anglo-Saxons?_"
+
+     "_It may be asking too much, but if statesmanship could kindly
+     arrange it, I confess I should like to see, before I die, a
+     war in which Britain and the United States in a just quarrel
+     might tackle the world. After that we should have no more
+     difficulty about America. For if the Americans never forget an
+     injury, they ever remember a service._"--The late G. W.
+     Steevens in _The Land of the Dollar_.
+
+
+
+
+The Twentieth Century
+American
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+AN ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE
+
+     The Avoidance of Entangling Alliances--What the Injunction
+     Meant--What it Cannot Mean To-day--The Interests of the United
+     States, no less than those of England, Demand an Alliance--But
+     Larger Interests than those of the Two Peoples are Involved--
+     American Responsiveness to Ideals--The Greatest Ideal of All,
+     Universal Peace: the Practicability of its Attainment--
+     America's Responsibility--Misconceptions of the British
+     Empire--Germany's Position--American Susceptibilities.
+
+
+The American nation, for all that it is young and lacks reverence, still
+worships the maxims and rules of conduct laid down by the Fathers of the
+Republic; and among those rules of conduct, there is none the wisdom of
+which is more generally accepted by the people than that which enjoins
+the avoidance of "entangling alliances" with foreign Powers. But not
+only has the United States changed much in late years, but the world in
+its political relations and sentiments has changed also and the place of
+the United States has changed in it. That sacred instrument, the
+Constitution itself, holds chiefly by virtue of what is new in it.
+Whatever is unaltered, or is not interpreted in a sense quite other than
+the framers intended, is to-day comparatively unimportant. It must be
+so. It would be impossible that any code or constitution drawn up to
+meet the needs of the original States, in the phase of civilisation and
+amid the social conditions which then prevailed, could be suited to the
+national life of a Great Power in the twentieth century. In internal
+affairs, there is hardly a function of Government, scarcely a relation
+between the different branches of the Government itself, or between the
+Government and any of the several States, or between the Government and
+the people, which is not unlike what the framers of the Constitution
+intended or what they imagined that it would be.
+
+But it is in external affairs that the nation must find, indeed has
+found, the old rules most inadequate. The policy of non-association
+which was desirable, even essential, to the young, weak state, whose
+only prospect of safety lay in a preservation of that isolation which
+her geographical position made possible to her, is and must be
+impracticable in a World-Power. Within the last decade, the United
+States has stepped out from her solitude to take the place which
+rightfully belongs to her among the great peoples. By the acquirement of
+her colonial dependencies, still more by the inevitable exigencies of
+her commerce, she has chosen (as she had no other choice) to make
+herself an interested party in the affairs of all parts of the world.
+All the conditions that made the old policy best for her have vanished.
+
+A child is rightly forbidden by his nurse to make acquaintance with
+other children in the street; but this child has grown to manhood and
+gone out into the world to seek--and has found--his fortune. The old
+policy of isolation has been cast aside, till nothing remains of it but
+a few old formulæ which have no virtue--not even significance--now that
+all the conditions to which they applied are gone. The United States has
+been compelled to make alliances (some, as when she co-operated with the
+other Powers in China, of the most "entangling" kind), and still the old
+phrase holds its spell on the popular mind.
+
+The injunction was originally intended to prevent the young Republic
+from being drawn into the wars with which Europe at the time was rent,
+by taking sides with any one party against any other. It was levelled
+not against alliances, but against entanglements. It was framed, and
+wisely framed, to secure to the United States the peace and isolation
+necessary to her development. The isolation is no longer either possible
+or desirable, but peace remains both. The nation would in fact be living
+more closely up to the spirit of the injunction by entering into an
+alliance which would secure peace and make entanglements impossible,
+than she is when she leaves herself and the world exposed to the
+constant menace of war, merely for the sake of seeming to comply with
+the letter of a maxim which is now meaningless. If Washington were alive
+to-day, it does not seem to me possible to doubt that he would favour a
+new English treaty, even though he might have more difficulty in
+compelling Congress to accept his views than he had once before.
+
+As the case stands, the United States may easily become involved in war
+with any one of the Great Powers, no matter how pacific or benevolent
+her intentions may be. There are at least three Powers with which a
+trivial incident might precipitate a conflict at almost any time; while
+the possibilities of friction which might develop into open hostilities
+with some one of the lesser states are almost innumerable. It is beside
+the question to say that the United States need have no fear of the
+result: indeed that very fact contributes largely to the danger. It is
+ever the man who can fight, and knows it, who gets into trouble. Every
+American who has lived much in the farther West knows that he who would
+keep clear of difficulties had best not carry a revolver. In its very
+self-confidence--a self-confidence amply justified by its strength--the
+American people is, measured by the standards of other nations, an
+eminently bellicose people--much more bellicose than it supposes.
+
+Great Britain's alliance with Japan has with reasonable certainty, so
+far as danger of conflict between any two of the Great Powers is
+concerned, secured the peace of Asia for some time to come. The
+understanding between Great Britain and France goes some way towards
+assuring the peace of Europe, of which the imminent _rapprochement_ with
+Russia (which all thinking Englishmen desire[8:1]) will constitute a
+further guarantee. But an alliance between Great Britain and the United
+States would secure the peace of the world. There is but one European
+Power now which could embark on a war with either Great Britain or the
+United States with any shadow of justification for hopefulness as to the
+result; and no combination of Powers could deceive itself into
+believing that it could make head against the two combined or would dare
+to disturb the peace between themselves when the two allies bade them be
+still.
+
+In the days of her youth,--which lasted up to the closing decade of the
+nineteenth century,--provided that she did not thrust herself needlessly
+into the quarrels of Europe, her mere geographical position sufficed to
+secure to America the peace which she required. The Atlantic Ocean, her
+own mountain chains and wildernesses, these were bulwarks enough. She
+has, by pressure of her own destiny, been compelled to come out from
+behind these safeguards to rub shoulders every day with all the world.
+If she still desires peace, she will be more likely to realise that
+desire by seeking other shields. Nor must any American reader
+misunderstand me, for I believe that I estimate the fighting power of
+the United States more highly than most native-born Americans. She needs
+no help in playing her part in the world; but no amount of
+self-confidence, no ability to fight, if once the fight be on, will
+serve to protect her from having quarrels thrust upon her--not
+necessarily in wilfulness by any individual antagonist but by mere force
+of circumstance. Considered from the standpoint of her own expediency,
+an alliance with Great Britain would give to the United States an
+absolute guarantee that for as many years as she pleased she would be
+free to devote all her energies to the development of her own resources
+and the increase of her commerce.
+
+But there are other considerations far larger than that of her own
+expediency. This is no question of the selfish interests either of the
+United States or of Great Britain. There is no people more responsive
+than the American to high ideals. Englishmen often find it hard to
+believe that an American is not talking mere fustian when he gives
+honest expression to his sentiments; but from the foundation of the
+Republic certain large ideas--Liberty, Freedom of Conscience,
+Equality--have somehow been made to seem very real things to the
+American mind. Whether the Englishman does not in his heart prize just
+as dearly as the American the things which these words signify, is
+another matter; it is not the Englishman's habit to formulate them even
+to himself, much less to talk about them to others. Most Englishmen have
+large sympathy with Captain Gamble who, bewailing the unrest in Canada
+at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, complained that the Colonials
+talked too much about "that damned absurd word Liberty."[10:1]
+
+It is rarely that an English political campaign is fought for a
+principle or for an abstract idea, and equally rarely that in America
+the watchword on one side or the other is not some such high-sounding
+phrase as Englishmen rather shrink from using. It is true that behind
+that phrase may be clustered a cowering crowd of petty individual
+interests; the fact remains that it is the phrase itself--the large
+Idea--on which orators and party managers rely to secure their hold on
+the imaginations of the mass of the people. It does not necessarily
+imply any superior morality on the part of the Americans; but is an
+accident of the different conditions prevailing in the two countries.
+
+British politics are infinitely more complex than American, and foreign
+affairs play a much larger part in public controversies. The people of
+the United States have been throughout their history able to confine
+their attention almost wholly to their home affairs, and in those home
+affairs, the mere vastness of the country, with the diverse and
+conflicting interests of the various parts, has made it as a rule
+impossible to frame any appeal to the minds of the voters as a whole
+except in terms of some abstract idea. An appeal to the self-interests
+of the people in the aggregate in any matter of domestic policy is
+almost unformulable, because the interest of each section conflicts with
+the interest of others; whence it has necessarily followed that the
+American people has grown accustomed to be led by large
+phrases--disciplined to follow the flag of an ideal.
+
+Not all the early colonists who emigrated, even to New England, went
+solely for conscience' sake. Under the cloak of the lofty principle for
+which the Revolutionary War was fought there were, again, concealed all
+manner of personal ambitions, sectional jealousies, and partisan
+intrigues. It was in truth (as more than one American historian has
+pointed out) a party strife and not a war of peoples. The precipitating
+cause of the Civil War was not the desire to abolish slavery, but the
+bitterness aroused by the political considerations of the advantage
+given to one party or the other by the establishment or
+non-establishment of slavery in a new territory. The motive which
+impelled the United States to make war on Spain was not, as most
+Europeans believe, any desire for an extension of territory, any more
+than it was, as some Americans would say, a yearning to avenge the
+blowing up of the _Maine_; it was the necessity of putting an end to the
+disturbed state of affairs in Cuba, which was a constant source of
+annoyance, as well as of trouble and expense, to the United States
+Government. If a neighbour makes a disturbance before your house and
+brings his family quarrels to your doorstep, you must after a time ask
+him to stop; and when, after a sufficient number of askings, he fails to
+comply with your request, it is justifiable to use force to make him.
+That was America's justification--the real ground on which she went to
+war with Spain. But the thing which actually inflamed the mind of the
+American people was the belief that the Spanish treatment of Cuba was
+brutal and barbarous. It was an indignation no less fine than that which
+set England in a blaze in the days of the Bulgarian atrocities. The war
+may been a war of expediency on the part of the Government; it was a
+Crusade in the eyes of the people. Thus it may be easy to show that at
+each crisis in its history there was something besides the nobility of a
+Cause or the grandeur of a Principle which impelled the American nation
+on the course which it took, but it has always been love of the Cause or
+devotion to the Principle which has swayed the masses of the people.
+
+And this people now has it in its power to do an infinitely finer thing
+than ever it did when it established Liberty of Conscience, or founded a
+republic on broader foundations than had been laid before, or abolished
+slavery within its borders, or when it won Cuba's independence of what
+it believed to be an inhuman tyranny. I believe that it has it in its
+power to do no less a thing than to abolish war for ever--to give to
+the peoples of the earth the blessing of Perpetual Peace. The question
+for it to ask itself is whether it can, with any shadow of
+justification, refuse to take this step and withhold this boon from
+humanity.
+
+If it does refuse and wars continue--if, within the coming decade, war
+should break out, whether actually involving the United States itself or
+not, more bloody and destructive than any that the world has seen--and
+if then the facts should be presented to posterity for judgment,--will
+the American people be held guiltless? It is improbable that the case
+ever could be so presented, for there is none to put the United States
+on trial, none to draw an indictment, none to prosecute. The world has
+not turned to the United States to ask that it be saved; no one has
+arisen to point at the United States and say, "Thou art the one to do
+this thing." The historians of another generation will have no
+depositions before them on which to base a verdict. But if the facts are
+as stated and the United States knows them to be so, does the lack of
+common knowledge of them make her responsibility any the less? It
+remains that the nation has the power to do this, and it alone among
+nations.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first idea of most Americans, when a hard and fast alliance with
+Great Britain is suggested to them, usually formulates itself in the
+statement that they have no wish to be made into a cat's-paw for pulling
+England's chestnuts out of the fire. America has no desire to be drawn
+into England's quarrels. Until less than ten years ago, there was
+justification for the point of view; for while England seemed to be
+ever on the brink of war, the United States lived peacefully in her
+far-off Valley of Avilion. But the map of the world has changed, and
+while the United States has left her seclusion and come out to play her
+part in the world-politics, England has been buttressing herself with
+friendships, until it is at least arguable whether the United States is
+not the more exposed to danger of the two. But it is no question now of
+being dragged into other people's quarrels; but of making all
+quarrelling impossible.
+
+Again, the American will say that the United States needs no allies. She
+can hold her own; let Great Britain do the same. And again I say that it
+is no question now of whether either Power can hold its own against the
+world or not. Great Britain, Americans should understand, has no more
+fear for herself than has the United States. England "does not seek
+alliances: she grants them." There is not only no single European Power,
+but there is no probable combination of European Powers, which England
+does not in her heart serenely believe herself quite competent to deal
+with. British pride has grown no less in the last three hundred years:
+
+     "Come the four corners of the World in arms
+      And we shall shock them."
+
+Americans should disabuse themselves finally of the idea that if England
+desires an alliance with the United States it is because she has any
+fear that she may need help against any other enemy. Englishmen are too
+well satisfied with themselves for that (with precisely the same kind of
+self-satisfaction as the United States suffers from), and much too
+confident that, in whatever may arise, it will be the other fellow who
+will need help. But if England has no misgiving as to her ability to
+take care of herself when trouble comes, she is far from being ashamed
+to say that she would infinitely prefer that trouble should not come,
+either to her or to another, and she would join--oh, so gladly!--with
+the United States (as for a partial attainment of the same end she has
+already joined with France on the one hand and with Japan on the other)
+to make sure that it should never come. Has the United States any right
+to refuse to enter into such an alliance--an alliance which would not be
+entangling, but which would make entanglements impossible?
+
+At Christmas time in 1906, the following suggestion was made in the
+London correspondence of an American paper[15:1]:
+
+"The new ideals which mankind has set before itself, the infinitely
+larger enlightenment and education of the masses, the desperate struggle
+which every civilised people is waging against all forms of social
+suffering and vice within itself, the mere complexity of modern commerce
+with its all-absorbing interest--these things all cry aloud for peace.
+War does not belong to this phase of civilisation. Least of all can it
+have any appeal to the two peoples in whom the spirit of the Twentieth
+Century is most manifest. Of all peoples, Great Britain and the United
+States have most cause to desire peace.
+
+"There should be a Christmas message sent from the White House which
+should run something like this:
+
+     "TO HIS MAJESTY KING EDWARD THE SEVENTH:
+
+     "To your majesty, to her majesty the Queen, and to the people
+     of the British empire, I desire to express the best wishes of
+     myself and of the people of the United States. At the same
+     time, I wish to assure your majesty that you will have both
+     the sympathy and the practical support of the American people
+     in such action as it may seem right to you and to the British
+     people to take in the direction of securing to the nations of
+     the world that peace of which your majesty has always shown
+     yourself so earnest an advocate.
+
+                                   "(Signed), THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
+
+"Some such an answer as this would be returned:
+
+     "TO HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:
+
+     "In acknowledging with gratitude the expression of good wishes
+     to ourselves, to her majesty the Queen, and to the people of
+     the British empire of yourself and the population of the
+     United States, I desire most cordially to reciprocate the
+     sentiments of good will. Even more cordially and gratefully, I
+     acknowledge the assurance of sympathy and support of the great
+     American people in action directed to securing peace to the
+     nations of the world. It will be my immediate care to propose
+     such a course of joint action between us as may secure that
+     blessing to all peoples in the course of the coming year.
+
+                                               "(Signed), EDWARD.
+
+"Does anybody doubt that, if the two nations bent themselves to the task
+in earnest, universal peace could be so secured to all the peoples of
+the earth in the course of the coming year? And if it is in truth in
+their power to do this thing, how can either conceivably convince itself
+that it is not its duty?
+
+"And what a Christmas the world would have in 1907!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Does any one doubt it? Does any one doubt that, if the two peoples were
+in earnest, though the thing might not be brought about in one year, it
+is far from improbable that it could be achieved in two years or three?
+Since the paragraphs which I have quoted were published, a year has
+passed and for a large part of that year the Conference has been in
+session at The Hague; and of the results of that Conference it is not
+easy for either an Englishman or an American to speak with patience.
+Does any one doubt that if the two Governments had set themselves
+determinedly, from the beginning of the _pourparlers_, to reach the one
+definite goal those results might have been very different?
+
+During the last few years, the two Powers, each acting in her own way,
+have done more to establish peace on earth than has been done by all the
+other Powers in all time; and I most earnestly believe that it only
+needs that they should say with one voice that there shall be no more
+wars and there will be none. Nor am I ignoring the complexities of the
+situation; but I believe that all the details, the first step once
+taken, would settle themselves with unexpected facility through the
+medium of international tribunals. Of course this will be called
+visionary: but whosoever is tempted so to call it, let him read history
+in the records of contemporary writers and see how visionary all great
+forward movements in the progress of the world have seemed until the
+time came when the thing was to be accomplished. What we are now
+discussing seems visionary because of its unfamiliarity. It has the
+formidableness of the unknown. The impossible, once accomplished, looks
+simple enough in retrospect. The fact is that never before has there
+been a time when boundaries all over the world have been so nearly
+established--when there were so few points outstanding likely to embroil
+any two of the Great Powers in conflict--so few national ambitions
+struggling for appeasement. It is easy not to realise this unless one
+studies the field in detail: easy to fail to see how near is the
+attainment of universal peace.
+
+The Councils of the Powers have in the past been so hampered by the
+traditions of a tortuous diplomacy, so tossed and perturbed within by
+the cross-currents of intrigue, that they have shown themselves almost
+childishly incapable of arriving at clear-cut decisions. Old policies,
+old formulæ, old jealousies, old dynastic influences still hold control
+of the majority of the chancelleries of Continental Europe, and these
+things it is that have made questions simple in themselves seem complex
+and incapable of solution. But there is nothing to be settled involving
+larger territorial interests or more beset with delicacies than many
+questions with which the Supreme Court of the United States has had to
+deal--none so large as to seem formidable to his Majesty's Privy Council
+or to the House of Lords. And under the guidance of Great Britain and
+the United States acting in unison, assured in advance of the sympathy
+of France and Japan and of whatever other Powers would welcome the new
+order of things, a Hague committee or other international tribunal could
+be made a businesslike organisation working directly for results,--as
+directly as the board of directors of any commercial corporation. And it
+is with those who consider this impracticable that the onus lies of
+pointing out the direction from which insuperable resistance is to be
+expected,--from which particular Powers in Europe, in Asia, or in
+Central or South America.
+
+The ultimate domination of the world by the Anglo-Saxon (let us call him
+so) seems to be reasonably assured; and no less assured is it that at
+some time wars will cease. The question for both Englishmen and
+Americans to ask themselves is whether, recognising the responsibility
+that already rests upon it, the Anglo-Saxon race dare or can for
+conscience' sake--or still more, whether one branch of it when the other
+be willing to push on, dare or can for conscience' sake--hang back and
+postpone the advent of the Universal Peace, which it is in its power to
+bring about to-day, no matter what the motives of jealousy, of
+self-interest, or of self-distrust may be that restrain it.
+
+It has been assumed in all that has been said that the onus of refusal
+rests solely on the United States; as indeed it does. Great Britain, it
+will be objected, has asked for no alliance. Nor has she. Great Britain
+does not put herself in the position of suing for a friendship which may
+be denied; and is there any doubt that if Great Britain had at any time
+asked openly for such an alliance she would have been refused? Would she
+not be bluntly refused to-day? Great men on either side--but never, be
+it noted, an Englishman except for the purpose of agreeing with an
+American who has already spoken--have said many times that a formal
+alliance is not desirable: that things are going well enough as they are
+and that it is best to wait. Things are never going well enough, so
+long as they might go better. And these men who say it speak only with
+an eye to the interests of the two countries, not considering the
+greater stake of the happiness of the world at large; and even so (I say
+it with deference) they know in their own minds that if indeed the thing
+should become suddenly feasible, neither they nor any thinking man, with
+the good of humanity at heart, would dare to raise a voice against it or
+would dream of doing other than rejoice. It is only because it has
+seemed impossible that it has been best to do without it; and it is
+impossible only because the people of the United States have not yet
+realised the responsibilities of the new position which they hold in the
+councils of the world, but are still bound by the prejudices of the days
+of little things, still slaves--they of all people!--to an old and
+outworn formula. They have not yet comprehended that within their arm's
+reach there lies an achievement greater than has ever been given to a
+nation to accomplish, and that they have but to take one step forward to
+enter on a destiny greater than anything foreshadowed even in the
+promise of their own wonderful history.
+
+And when those who would be their coadjutors are willing and waiting and
+beckoning them on, have they any right to hold back? Is it anything
+other than moral cowardice if they do?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wish that each individual American would give one hour's unprejudiced
+study to the British Empire,--would sit down with a map of the world
+before him and, summoning to his assistance such knowledge of history as
+he has and bearing in mind the conditions of his own country, endeavour
+to arrive at some idea of what it is that Englishmen have done in the
+world, what are the present circumstances of the Empire, what its aims
+and ambitions. I do not think that the ordinarily educated and
+intelligent American knows how ignorant he is of the nation which has
+played so large a part in the history of his own country and of which he
+talks so often and with so little restraint. The ignorance of Englishmen
+of America is another matter which will be referred to in its place. For
+the present, what is to be desired is that the American should get some
+elementary grasp of the character of Great Britain and her dependencies
+as a whole.
+
+In the first place it is worth pointing out that the Empire is as much
+bigger than the United States as the United States is bigger than the
+British Isles. I am not now talking of mere geographical dimensions, but
+of the political schemes of the two nations. Americans commonly speak of
+theirs as a young country--as the youngest of the Great Powers,--but in
+every true sense the British Empire is vastly younger. The United States
+has an established form of government which has been the same for a
+hundred years and, all good Americans hope, will remain unchanged for
+centuries to come. The British Empire is still groping inchoate: it is
+all makeshift and endeavour. It is in about that stage of growth in
+which the United States found herself when her transcontinental railways
+were still unbuilt, when she had not yet digested Texas or California,
+and the greater part of the West remained unsettled and unsurveyed.
+
+If the American will look to the north, he will see Canada in
+approximately the phase in her material progress which the United
+States had reached in, let us say, 1880 to 1885. Australia and New
+Zealand are somewhat further behind; South Africa further still. Behind
+that again are the various scattered portions of the Over-Sea Dominions
+in divers states of political pupilhood. In some there are not even yet
+the foundations on which a Constitutional or commercial structure can be
+built. And while each unit has to be led or encouraged along the path of
+individual development, beyond all is the great vision which every
+imperially-thinking Englishman sets before himself--the vision of a
+Federation of all the parts--a Federation not unlike that which the
+United States has enjoyed for over a hundred years (save that Englishmen
+hope that there will always be a monarchy at the centre) but which, as
+has been said, is almost incomparably larger in conception than was the
+Union of the States and requires correspondingly greater labour in its
+accomplishment.
+
+If the American will now consider the conditions of the growth of his
+own country, he will recognise that the only thing which made that
+growth possible was the fact that the people was undistracted by foreign
+complications. The one great need of the nation was Peace. It was to
+attain this that the policy of non-entanglement was formulated. Without
+it, the people could not have devoted its energies with a single mind to
+the gigantic task of its own development.
+
+But the task before the British Empire is more gigantic; the need of
+peace more urgent. It is more urgent, not merely in proportion to the
+additional magnitude and complexity of the task to be done, but is
+thrice multiplied by the conditions of the modern world. The British
+Empire must needs achieve its industrial consolidation in the teeth of
+a commercial competition a thousand times fiercer than anything which
+America knew in her young days. The United States grew to greatness in a
+secluded nursery. Great Britain must bring up her children in the
+streets and on the high seas, under the eyes and exposed to the
+seductions of the peoples of all the world.
+
+The American is a reasoning being. A much larger portion of the American
+people is habituated to reason for itself--to think independently--to
+form and to abide by its individual judgment--than of any other people
+in the world. No political fact is more familiar to the American people
+than the immense advantage which it derived, during the period of its
+internal development, from its enjoyment of external peace. Will not the
+American people, then, reasoning from analogy, believe that, under more
+compelling conditions, England also earnestly desires external peace?
+
+I can almost hear the retort leaping to the lips of the American reader
+who holds the traditional view of the British Empire. "It is all very
+well for you to talk of peace now!" I hear him say. "Now that the world
+is pretty well divided up and you have grabbed the greater part of it.
+You haven't talked much of peace in the past." And here we are
+confronted at once with the fundamental misconception of the British
+Empire and the British character which has worked deplorable harm in the
+American national sentiment towards England.
+
+First, it is worth remarking that with the exception of the Crimean War
+(which even the most prejudiced American will not regard as a war of
+aggression or as a thing for which England should be blamed) Great
+Britain has not been engaged in hostilities with any European Power
+since the days of Napoleon. Nor can it be contended that England's share
+in the Napoleonic wars was of England's seeking. Since then, if she has
+avoided hostilities it has not been for lack of opportunity. The people
+which, with Britain's intricate complexity of interests, amid all the
+turmoils and jealousies of Europe, has kept the peace for a century can
+scarcely have been seeking war.
+
+And again the American will say: "That's all right; I am not talking of
+Europe. You've been fighting all over the world all the time. There has
+never been a year when you have not been licking some little tin-pot
+king and freezing on to his possessions."
+
+Americans are rather proud--justly proud--of the way in which their
+power has spread from within the narrow limits of the original thirteen
+States till it has dominated half a continent. It has, indeed, been a
+splendid piece of work. But what the American is loth to acknowledge is
+that that growth was as truly a colonising movement--a process of
+imperial expansion--as has been the growth of the British Empire. Of
+late years, American historical writers have been preaching this fact;
+but the American people has not grasped it. Moreover there were tin-pot
+kings already ruling America. Sioux, Nez Percé, or Cree--Zulu, Ashanti,
+or Burmese: the names do not matter. And when the expansive energy of
+the American people reached the oceans, it could no more stop than it
+could stop at the Mississippi. Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico
+were as inevitable as Louisiana and Texas. And the acquisition of the
+two last-named was precisely as imperial a process as the acquisition
+of the others. It is only the leap over-seas that, quite illogically,
+gives the latter, to American eyes, a different seeming. It matters not
+whether you vault a boundary pillar on the plain, a river, a mountain
+barrier, or seven thousand miles of sea-water. The process is the same.
+Nor in any of the cases was the forward movement other than commendable
+and inevitable. It was the necessary manifestation of the unrestrainable
+centrifugal impulse of the Anglo-Saxon.
+
+The impulse which sent the first English colonists to North America sent
+them also to Australia, to India and the uttermost parts of the earth.
+The same impulse drove the American colonists westward, northward,
+southward, in whatever direction they met no restraining force equal to
+their own expansive energy. It drove them to the Pacific, to the Rio
+Grande, to the Sault Ste. Marie; and it has driven them over oceans into
+the Arctic Circle, to the shores of Asia, down the Caribbean. And as it
+drove them it drove also those Englishmen who were left at home and they
+too spread on all lines of least resistance. But no American (I have
+never met one, though I must have talked on the subject to hundreds)
+will agree that the dispersal of the Englishmen left at home was as
+legitimate, as necessary, and every whit as peaceful as the dispersal of
+those Englishmen who went first and made their new home in America.
+
+With the acquisition of over-sea dominions of their own, many Americans
+are coming to comprehend something of the powerlessness of a great
+people in the grip of its destiny. They are also beginning to understand
+that the ruling and civilising of savage and alien peoples is not
+either all comfort or all profit. If Americans were given the option
+to-day to take more Philippines, would they take them? Great Britain has
+been familiar with _her_ Philippines for half a century and more. Does
+America suppose that she also did not learn her lesson? Will not
+Americans understand with what utter reluctance she has been compelled
+again and again to take more? Some day Americans will come to believe
+that England no more desired to annex Burmah than the United States
+deliberately planned to take the Philippines; that Englishmen were as
+content to leave the Transvaal and the Orange Free State alone as ever
+Americans were to be without Hawaii or Puerto Rico. Egypt was forced
+upon Great Britain precisely as Cuba is being foisted on America
+to-day--and every Englishman hopes that the United States will be able
+to do as much for the Cubans as Great Britain has done for the
+Egyptians.
+
+Great Britain would always vastly prefer--has always vastly
+preferred--to keep a friendly independent state upon her borders rather
+than be compelled to take over the burden of administration. The former
+involves less labour and more profit; it retains moreover a barrier
+between the British boundaries and those of any potentially hostile
+Power upon the other side. England has shown this in India itself and in
+Afghanistan. She tried to show it in South Africa. She has shown it in
+Thibet. More conclusively than anywhere perhaps she has shown it in the
+Federated Malay States--of which probably but few Americans know even
+the name, but where more, it may be, than anywhere are Englishmen
+working out their ambition--
+
+     "To make the world a better place
+      Where'er the English go."
+
+It might happen that, under a weak and incompetent successor to
+President Diaz, Mexico would relapse into the conditions of half a
+century ago and the situation along the border be rendered intolerable
+to Americans. Sooner or later the United States would be compelled to
+protest and, protests being unheeded, to interfere. The incompetence of
+the Mexican Government continuing, America would be obliged to establish
+a protectorate, if not over the whole country, at least over that
+portion the orderly behaviour of which was necessary to her own peace.
+Thereafter annexation might follow. Now, at no stage of this process
+would Englishmen, looking on, accuse the United States of greediness, of
+bullying, or of deliberately planning to gratify an earth-hunger. They,
+from experience, understand. But when the same thing occurs on the
+British frontiers in Asia or South Africa, Americans make no effort to
+understand. "England is up to the same old game," they say. "One more
+morsel down the lion's throat."
+
+I am well aware of the depth of the prejudice against which I am
+arguing. The majority of Americans are so accustomed to consider their
+own expansion across the continent, and beyond, as one of the finest
+episodes in the march of human progress (as it is) and the growth of the
+British Empire as a mere succession of wanton and brutal outrages on
+helpless and benighted peoples, that the immediate impulse of the vast
+majority of American readers will be to treat a comparison between the
+two with ridicule. Minnesota Massacres and the Indian Mutiny--Cetewayo
+and Sitting Bull--Aguinaldo and the Mahdi--Egypt and Cuba; the time
+will come when Americans will understand. It is a pity that prejudice
+should blind them now.
+
+And if the American reader will refer to the map, which presumably lies
+open before him, he might consider in what part of the world it is that
+England is now bent on a policy of aggression--where it is that
+collision with any Power threatens. In Asia? England's course in regard
+to Afghanistan and Thibet surely shows that she is content with her
+present boundaries, while her alliance with Japan and the
+_rapprochement_ with Russia at which she aims should be evidences enough
+of her desire for peace! In Africa? Where is it that spheres of
+influence are not delimited? That there will be disturbances, ferments,
+which will have to be suppressed at one time and another at various
+points within the British sphere is likely--as likely as it was that
+similar disturbances would occur in the United States so long as any
+considerable number of Indians went loose unblanketed,--but what room is
+left for anything approaching serious war? With the problem of the
+mixture of races and the necessity of building up the structure of a
+state, does not England before all things need peace both in the south
+and north? In America? In Australia? With whom? That perils may arise at
+almost any point--in mid-ocean even, far away from any land--of course
+we recognise; but Americans can hardly fail to see, with the map before
+them, that England cannot seek them, but must earnestly desire to avoid
+them as she has avoided them with any European Power for this last
+century. To borrow a happy phrase, Great Britain is in truth a
+"Saturated Power." She has been compelled to shoulder burdens which she
+would feign have avoided, to assume obligations which were not of her
+creating and which she fulfils with reluctance. And she can assume no
+more, or, if she must, will do it only with the utmost unwillingness.
+What she needs is peace.
+
+And now one must go as delicately as is compatible with making one's
+meaning clear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is one Power in Europe whose ambitions are a menace to the peace
+of the world--one only. I do not think that Americans as a rule
+understand this, but it is true and there can be no harm in saying so,
+for neither in her press nor in the mouths of her statesmen are those
+ambitions denied by that Power herself. Indeed they are insisted on to
+the taxpayer as the reason why she needs so powerful an army and a
+fleet. It is not suggested that Germany's ambitions are other than
+legitimate and inevitable: it would be difficult for either Englishman
+or American to say that with grace. I am not arguing against Germany; I
+am arguing for Peace.
+
+Germany says frankly enough that she is cooped up within boundaries
+which are intolerable--that she is an "imprisoned Power." She argues,
+still with perfect frankness, that it was a mere accident that, to her
+misfortune, she came into being as a great Power too late to be able to
+get her proper share of the earth's surface, wherein her people might
+expand and put forth their surplus energy. The time when there was
+earth's surface to choose was already gone. But that fact has in no way
+lessened the need of expansion or destroyed the energy. She must burst
+her prison walls, she says. It would have been better could she have
+flowed out quietly into unoccupied land--as the United States has done
+and as Great Britain has done--but that being impossible, she must flow
+where she can. And ringed around her are other Powers, great or small,
+which bar her way. Therefore she needs the army and the fleet. It is
+logical and it is candid.
+
+It is evident that the Franco-Russian Alliance makes the bursting of her
+banks difficult in what might seem to be the most natural direction. The
+Anglo-French _entente_ and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance--perhaps even
+more Germany's own partnership in the Triple Alliance with Italy and
+Austria--also constitute obstacles which at least necessitate something
+more of an army and more of a fleet than might otherwise have been
+sufficient for her purpose. But those barriers are not in the long run
+going to avert the fulfilment of--or at least the endeavour to
+fulfil--that purpose.
+
+There is only one instrumentality, humanly speaking,--one Power,--which
+can ultimately prevent Germany from using that army and that fleet for
+the ends for which they are being created; and that instrumentality
+happens to be the United States. It is difficult to see how Germany can
+make any break for freedom without coming in conflict not only with one
+of the Great Powers but with a combination of two or more. It is
+improbable that she will attempt the enterprise without at least the
+benevolent neutrality of the United States. Assurances of positive
+sympathy would probably go a long way towards encouraging her to the
+hazard. But if the United States should range herself definitely on the
+side of peace the venture would become preposterous.
+
+I am not arguing against Germany; I am arguing for Peace. Least of all
+am I arguing for an American alliance for England in the event of
+Germany's dash for liberty taking an untoward direction. England needs
+no help. What does need help is Peace--the Peace of Europe--the Peace of
+the World.
+
+There is no talk now of stifling Germany's ambitions: of standing in the
+way of her legitimate aspirations. It may be that under other
+conditions, under a different form of government, or even under another
+individual ruler, those aspirations and ambitions would not appear to
+the German people so vital as they do now. They certainly do not appear
+so to an outsider; and the German people is far from being of one mind
+on the subject. But assuming the majority of Germans to know their own
+business best, and granting it to be essential that the people should
+have some larger sphere, under their own flag, in which to attain to
+their proper growth, if they were compelled to drop war as the means for
+obtaining that larger sphere out of their calculations, it would not
+mean that those ambitions and aspirations would have to go unsatisfied.
+Violence is not the only means of obtaining what one wants.
+
+There was a time when, as between individuals, if one man desired a
+thing which his neighbour possessed he went with a club and took it; but
+civilised society has abandoned physical force as a medium for the
+exchange of commodities and has substituted barter. If physical force
+were once discountenanced among nations, any nation which needed a thing
+badly enough could always get it. Everybody who had facilities for sale
+would be glad to sell, if the price was sufficiently high. It is not
+unlikely that, in an age of compulsory peace, Germany would be able to
+acquire all that she desires at a less price than the expenditure of
+blood and treasure which would be necessary in a war. It would almost
+certainly cost her less than the price of war added to the capitalised
+annual burden of the up-keep of her army and navy.[32:1]
+
+But the real cost of war does not fall upon the individual nation. And
+for the last time let me say that I am not arguing against Germany: I am
+arguing for Peace. It has been necessary to discuss Germany's position
+because she is at the moment the only factor in the situation which
+makes for war. All other Powers are satisfied, or could be satisfied,
+with their present boundaries. Outside of the German Empire, the whole
+civilised world earnestly desires peace. It may be that Great Britain,
+acting in concert with France, Russia, and Japan, will in the near
+future be able to take a longer step towards securing that peace for the
+world than seems at present credible. But England's natural coadjutor is
+the United States. The United States has but to take one step and the
+thing is done. It is a _rôle_ which ought to appeal to the American
+people. It is certainly one for the assumption of which all posterity
+would bless the name of America.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Critics will, of course, ridicule this offhand dismissing in a few
+sentences of the largest of world problems. Each one of several
+propositions which I have advanced breaks rudely ground where angels
+might fear to tread; each one ought to be put forth cautiously with much
+preamble and historical introduction, to be circuitously argued through
+several hundred pages; but that cannot be done here because those
+propositions are not the main topic of this book. At the same time they
+must be stated, however baldly, because they represent the basis on
+which my plea for any immediate Anglo-American co-operation in the cause
+of peace must rest.
+
+I am also fully conscious of the hostility which almost everything that
+I say will provoke from one or another section of the American people,
+but I am not addressing the irreconcilables of any foreign element of
+the population of the United States. I am talking to the reasoning,
+intelligent mass of the two peoples as a whole. The subject of an
+Anglo-American alliance is one of which it is the fashion to hush up any
+attempt at the discussion in public. It must be spoken of in whispers.
+It is better--so the argument runs--to let American good-will to England
+grow of itself; an effort to hasten it will but hurt American
+susceptibilities.
+
+In the first place this idea rests largely on an exaggerated estimate of
+the power of the Irish politician, a power which happily is coming every
+day to be more nearly a thing of the past,--"tending," as Carlyle says,
+"visibly not to be." In the second place, I believe that I understand
+American susceptibilities; and they will not be hurt by any one who
+shows that he does understand. What the American resents bitterly is the
+arrogant and superficial criticism of the foreigner who sums up the
+characteristics and destiny of the nation after a few weeks of
+observation. Moreover, Americans do not as a rule like whispering or the
+attempt to come at things by by-paths--in which they much resemble the
+English. When they want a thing they commonly ask for it--distinctly.
+When they think a thing ought to be done they prefer to say
+so--unequivocally. They have not much love for the circuitousnesses of
+diplomacy; and if England desires American co-operation in what is a
+great and noble cause she had much better ask for it--bluntly.
+
+Personally I wish that forty million Englishmen would stand up and shout
+the request all at once.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8:1] Since this was written, the Anglo-Russian agreement has been
+arrived at.
+
+[10:1] Justin H. Smith, _Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony_,
+Putnams, 1907.
+
+[15:1] _The Bellman_, Minneapolis, Dec. 22, 1906.
+
+[32:1] A point which there is no space to dwell upon here but which I
+would commend to the more leisurely consideration of readers--especially
+American readers--is that under a _régime_ of physical force there can
+in fact be hardly any transfer of commodities at all. What a man has, he
+holds, whether his need of it be greater than another's, or whether he
+needs it not at all. There is no inducement to part with it and pride
+compels him to hold; so that only the strongest can come by the
+possession of anything that he desires. If the dollar were substituted
+for the club in the dealings of nations, the transfer of commodities
+would forthwith become simplified, and such incidents as the purchase of
+Alaska and the cession of Heligoland, instead of standing as isolated
+examples of international accommodation, would become customary. To take
+an example which will bring the matter home at once, many imperialist
+Englishmen on visiting the West Indies have become convinced that
+certain of England's possessions in those regions could with advantage
+to all parties be transferred to the United States. But so long as the
+military idea reigns--so long as an island must be regarded primarily as
+an outpost, a possible naval base, a strategic point--so long will the
+obstacles to such a transfer remain. As soon as war was put outside the
+range of possibilities, commercial principles would begin to operate and
+those territories, however much or little they might be worth, would be
+acquired by the United States. The same thing would happen in all parts
+of the world. Possessions, instead of being held by those who could hold
+them, would tend to pass to those who needed them or to whom they
+logically belonged by geographical relation, and neither Germany's
+legitimate aspirations nor those of any other country would need to go
+unsatisfied.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE DIFFERENCE IN POINT OF VIEW
+
+     The Anglo-Saxon Family Likeness--How Frenchmen and Germans
+     View it--Englishmen, Americans, and "Foreigners"--An Echo of
+     the War of 1812--An Anglo-American Conflict Unthinkable--
+     American Feeling for England--The Venezuelan Incident--The
+     Pilgrims and Some Secret History--Why Americans still Hate
+     England--Great Britain's Nearness to the United States
+     Geographically--Commercially--Historically--England's Foreign
+     Ill-wishers in America.
+
+
+The one thing chiefly needed to make both Englishmen and Americans
+desire an alliance is that they should come to know each other better.
+They would then be astonished to find not only how much they liked each
+other, but how closely each was already in sympathy with the other's
+ways of life and thought and how inconsiderable were the differences
+between them. Some one (I thought it was Mr. Freeman, but I cannot find
+the passage in his writings) has said that it would be a good way of
+judging an Englishman's knowledge of the world to notice whether, on
+first visiting America, he was most struck by the differences between
+the two peoples or by their resemblances. When an intelligent American
+has travelled for any time on the Continent of Europe, in contact with
+peoples who are truly "foreign" to him, he feels on arriving in London
+almost as if he were at home again. The more an Englishman moves among
+other peoples, the more he is impressed, on reaching the United States,
+with his kinship to those among whom he finds himself. Nor is it in
+either case wholly, or even chiefly, a matter of a common speech.
+
+"Jonathan," says Max O'Rell, "is but John Bull expanded--John Bull with
+plenty of elbow room." And the same thing is said again and again in
+different phraseology by various Continental writers. It is said most
+impressively by those who do not put it into words at all, as by
+Professor Münsterberg[36:1] who is apparently not familiar with England,
+but shows no lack of willingness to dislike her. There is therefore no
+intentional comparison between the two peoples, but the writer's point
+of view has absorbing interest to an Englishman who knows both
+countries. More than once he remarks with admiration or astonishment on
+traits of the American character or institutions in the United States
+which the Englishman would necessarily take for granted, because they
+are precisely the same as those to which he has been accustomed at home.
+Writing for a German public, the Professor draws morals from American
+life which delight an English reader by their naïve and elementary
+superfluousness. In all unconsciousness, Professor Münsterberg has
+written a most valuable essay on the essential kinship of the British
+and American peoples as contrasted with his own.
+
+Two brothers will commonly be aware only of the differences between
+them--the unlikeness of their features, the dissimilarities in their
+tastes or capabilities,--yet the world at large may have difficulty in
+distinguishing them apart. While they are conscious only of their
+individual differences, to the neighbours all else disappears in the
+family resemblance. So it is that Max O'Rell sees how like the American
+is to the Englishman more clearly than Mark Twain: Professor Münsterberg
+has involuntarily traced the features of the one in the lineaments of
+the other with a surer hand than Matthew Arnold or Mr. Bryce.
+
+When, in his remarkable book, M. Demolins uses the term Anglo-Saxon, he
+speaks indifferently at one time of Englishmen and at another of
+Americans. The peoples are to him one and indistinguishable. Their
+greatness is a common greatness based on qualities which are the
+inheritance of their Anglo-Saxon origin. Chief among these qualities,
+the foundation-stone of their greatness, is the devotion to what we will
+follow him in calling the "Particularistic" form of society,--a society,
+that is, in which the individual predominates over the community, and
+not the community over the individual; a society which aims at
+"establishing each child in its full independence." This is, a Frenchman
+sees, eminently characteristic of the English and the Americans, in
+contrast with other peoples, with those which hold a republican form of
+government no less than those which live under an autocracy. And it is
+peculiarly Saxon in its origin,--not derived from the Celt or Norman or
+Dane. These latter belonged (as do the peoples sprung from, or allied
+to, them to-day) to that class of people which places the community
+above the individual, which looks instinctively to the State or the
+government for initiative. The Saxons alone (a people of earnest
+individual workers, agriculturalists and craftsmen) relied always on the
+initiative and impulse of the individual--what M. Demolins calls "the
+law of intense personal labour"--and it was by virtue of this quality
+that they eventually won social supremacy over the other races in
+Britain. It is by virtue of the same quality that the Americans have
+been enabled to subdue their continent and build up the fabric of the
+United States. It is this quality, says the French writer almost
+brutally, which makes the German and Latin races to-day stand to
+_L'Anglais_ in about the same relation as the Oriental and the Redskin
+stand to the European. And when M. Demolins speaks of _L'Anglais_, he
+means the American as much as the "Englishman of Britain." It is a
+convenient term and, so essentially one are they in his eyes, there is
+no need to distinguish between the peoples. Mr. William Archer's remark
+is worth quoting, that "It is amazing how unessential has been the
+change produced in the Anglo-Saxon type and temperament [in America] by
+the influences of climate or the admixtures of foreign blood."[38:1]
+
+When individual Englishmen and Americans are thrown together in strange
+parts of the world, they seldom fail to foregather as members of one
+race. There may be four traders living isolated in some remote port; but
+though the Russian may speak English with less "accent" than the
+American and though the German may have lived for some years in New
+York, it is not to the society of the German or the Russian that the
+American or the Englishman instinctively turns for companionship. The
+two former have but the common terms of speech; the Englishman and the
+American use also common terms of thought and feeling.
+
+The people who know this best are the officers and men of the British
+and American navies, who are accustomed to find themselves thrown with
+the sailors of all nations in all sorts of waters; and wherever they are
+thus thrown together, the men who sail under the Stars and Stripes and
+those who fly the Union Jack are friends. I have talked with a good many
+British sailors (not officers) and it is good to hear the tone of
+respect in which they speak of the American navy, as compared with
+certain others.
+
+The opportunities for similar companionship among the men of the armies
+of the two nations are fewer, but when the allied forces entered China
+the comradeship which arose between the American and British troops, to
+the exclusion of all others, is notorious. Every night after mess,
+British officers sought the American lines and _vice versa_. The
+Americans have the credit of having invented that rigorous development
+of martial law, by which, as soon as British officers came within their
+lines, sentries were posted with orders not to let them pass out again
+unless accompanied by an American officer. Thus the guests could not
+escape from hospitality till such hour as their hosts pleased.
+
+Some ten years ago military representatives of various nations were
+present by invitation at certain manoeuvres of the Indian army, and
+one night, when an official entertainment was impending, the United
+States officers were guests at the mess of a British regiment. Dinner
+being over, the colonel pushed his chair back and, turning to the
+American on his right, said in all innocence:
+
+"Well, come along! It's time to go and help to receive these d----d
+foreigners."
+
+An incident less obviously _à propos_, but which seems to me to strike
+very truly the common chord of kinship of character between the races,
+was told me by a well-known American painter of naval and military
+subjects. He was the guest of the Forty-fourth (Essex) at, I think,
+Gibraltar, when in the course of dinner the British officer on his right
+broke a silence with the casual remark:
+
+"I wonder whether we shall ever have another smack at you fellows."
+
+The American was not unnaturally surprised.
+
+"Why? Do you want it?" he asked.
+
+"No; we should hate to fight you of course, but then, you know, the
+Forty-fourth was at New Orleans."
+
+It appealed to the American--not merely the pride in the regiment that
+still smarted under the blow of ninety years ago, but still more the
+feeling towards himself, as an American, that prompted the Englishman to
+speak in terms which he knew that he would never have dreamed of using
+under similar circumstances to the representative of any "foreign"
+nation. The Englishman had no fear that the American would
+misunderstand. It appealed to the latter so much that after his return
+to the United States, being called upon to speak at some entertainment
+or function at West Point, when, besides the cadets, there were many
+officers of the United States Army in the room, he told the story.
+Instantly, as he finished, a simultaneous cry from several places in the
+hall called for "Three cheers for the Forty-fourth!" There was no
+Englishman in the company, but, as he told me the story, never had he
+heard so instantaneous, so crashing a response to any call, as then when
+the whole room leaped to its feet and cheered the old enemies who had
+not forgotten.[41:1]
+
+It is not my wish here to discuss even the possibility of war between
+Great Britain and the United States. The thing is too horrible to be
+considered as even the remotest of contingencies--the "Unpardonable
+War," indeed, as Mr. James Barnes has called it. None the less, there is
+always greater danger of such a war than any Englishman imagines or than
+many Americans would like to confess. However true it may be that it
+takes two to make a quarrel, it is none the less true that if one party
+be bent upon quarrelling it is always possible for him to go to lengths
+of irritation and insult which must ultimately provoke the most
+peaceful and reluctant of antagonists. However pacific and reluctant to
+fight Great Britain might be at the outset, she is not conspicuously
+lacking in national pride or in sensitiveness to encroachments on the
+national honour.
+
+Mr. Freeman makes the shrewd remark that "the American feels a greater
+distinction between himself and the Englishman of Britain than the
+Englishman of Britain feels between himself and the American," which
+remains entirely true to-day, in spite of the seemingly paradoxical fact
+that the American knows more of English history and English politics
+than the Englishman knows of the politics and history of the United
+States. This by no means implies that the American knows more of the
+English character than the Englishman knows of his. On the contrary, the
+Americans have seen infinitely less of the world than Englishmen, and
+however many of the bare facts of English history and English politics
+they may know, they are strangely ignorant of the atmosphere to which
+those facts belong, and have never learned how much more foreign to them
+other foreign nations are. The individual American will take the
+individual Englishman into his friendship--will even accept him as a
+sort of a relative--but as a political entity Great Britain is almost as
+much a foreign nation as any.
+
+The casual Englishman visiting the United States for but a short time
+will probably not discover this fact. He only knows that he is cordially
+received himself--even more cordially, he feels, than he deserves--and
+most probably those persons, especially the ladies, whom he meets will
+assure him that they are "devoted" to England. He may not have time to
+discover that that devotion is not universal. Only after a while, in all
+probability, will the fact as stated by Mr. Freeman dawn upon him, and
+he will somehow be aware that with all the charming hospitality that he
+receives he is in some way treated as more of a foreigner than he is
+conscious of being. It is necessary that he should have some extended
+residence in the country--unless his visit happens to coincide with such
+an incident as the Venezuelan controversy or the outbreak of the Boer
+War--before things group themselves in at all their right perspective
+before his eyes. The intensity of the feeling displayed at the time of
+the Venezuelan incident came as a shock to Englishmen at home; but those
+who had lived for any length of time in America (west of New York) were
+not surprised. It is probable that the greater number of the American
+people at that time wished for war, and believed that it was nothing but
+cowardice on the part of Great Britain--her constitutional dislike of
+fighting anybody of her own size, as a number of the papers pleasantly
+phrased it--that prevented their wish from being gratified.
+
+The concluding paragraphs of ex-President Cleveland's treatise on this
+subject are illuminating. In 1895, as I have said, a majority of the
+American people unquestionably wished to fight; but that numerical
+majority included perhaps a minority of the native-born Americans, a
+small minority certainly of the richer or more well-to-do among them,
+and an almost infinitesimal proportion of the best educated of the
+native-born. This is what Mr. Cleveland says:
+
+"Those among us who most loudly reprehended and bewailed our vigorous
+assertion of the Monroe Doctrine were the timid ones who feared personal
+financial loss, or those engaged in speculation and stock-gambling, in
+buying much beyond their ability to pay, and generally in living by
+their wits [_sic_]. The patriotism of such people traverses exclusively
+the pocket nerve. . . . But these things are as nothing when weighed
+against the sublime patriotism and devotion to their nation's honour
+exhibited by the great mass of our countrymen--the plain people of the
+land. . . . Not for a moment did their Government know the lack of their
+strong and stalwart support. . . . It [the incident] has given us a
+better place in the respect and consideration of the people of all
+nations, and especially of Great Britain; it has again confirmed our
+confidence in the overwhelming prevalence among our citizens of
+disinterested devotion to our nation's honour; and last, but by no means
+least, it has taught us where to look in the ranks of our countrymen for
+the best patriotism."[44:1]
+
+Mr. Cleveland, now that he is no longer in active politics, holds, as he
+deserves, a secure place in the affections of the American people. But
+at the time when this treatise was published, he was a not impossible
+nominee of the Democratic party for another term as President; and the
+"plain people of the land" have a surprising number of votes. Mr.
+Cleveland knows his own people and knows that with a large portion of
+them war with England would in 1895 have been popular. It is significant
+also that he still thought it worth while to insist upon this fact at
+the time when this treatise was given to the world in a volume; and
+that was as late as 1904, very shortly before the Democratic party
+selected its nominee for the Presidential contest of that year. It is
+possible that if Mr. Cleveland had been that nominee instead of Justice
+Parker, one of the leading features of his campaign would have been a
+vigorous insistence on the Monroe Doctrine, as interpreted by himself,
+with especial reference to Great Britain.
+
+Englishmen are inclined (so far as they think about the matter at all)
+to flatter themselves that the ill-feeling which blazed so suddenly into
+flame twelve years ago was more or less effectually quenched by Great
+Britain's assistance to the United States at the time of the Spanish
+War. Those Englishmen who watched the course of opinion in America at
+the time of the Boer War must have had some misgivings. It is evident
+that so good a judge as Mr. Cleveland believed, as late as 1904, that
+hostility to Great Britain was still a policy which would commend itself
+to the "plain people of the land."
+
+It is true that the war fever in 1895 was stronger in the West than in
+the Eastern States. A traveller crossing the United States at that time
+would have found the idea of hostilities with England being treated as
+something of a joke in cultivated circles in New York, but among the
+people in general to the West of Buffalo and Pittsburg it was terrible
+earnest. A curious point, moreover, which I think I have never seen
+stated in England, is that many good men in the Democratic Party at that
+time stood by President Cleveland, though sincerely friendly to Great
+Britain; the truth being that they did not believe that war with
+England was seriously to be apprehended, while another Power was at the
+moment seeking to obtain a foothold in South America, for whose benefit
+a "vigorous assertion of the Monroe Doctrine" was much to be desired.
+The thunders of the famous message indeed were, in the minds of many
+excellent Americans in the East, directed not against Great Britain but
+against Germany.
+
+None the less it should be noted that it was in the hope of influencing
+the voters in a local election in New York that Mr. Hearst, as recently
+as in November, 1907, thought it worth while to appeal to the
+"traditional hatred" of Great Britain. However little else Mr. Hearst
+may have to commend him, he cannot be said to be out of touch with the
+sentiments of the more ignorant masses of the people of New York. That
+he failed did not signify that he was mistaken as to the extent or
+intensity of the prejudice to which he appealed, but only that the cry
+was raised too late and too obviously as an electioneering trick in a
+campaign which was already lost.
+
+In spite of what happened during the Spanish War, in spite of every
+effort that England has made to convince America of her friendliness, in
+spite of the improvement which has taken place in the feelings of (what,
+without offence, I venture to call) the upper classes in America towards
+Great Britain, the fact still remains that, with a large portion of the
+people, war with England would be popular.
+
+That is, perhaps, to state the case somewhat brutally. Let me rather say
+that, if any pretext should arise, the minds of the masses of the
+American people could more easily be inflamed to the point of desiring
+war with England than they could to the point of desiring war with any
+other nation. It is bitter to have to say it--horrible to think it. I
+know also that many Americans will not agree with me; but I do not think
+that among them will be many of those whose business it is, either as
+politicians or as journalists, to be in touch with the sentiments of the
+people.
+
+Let me not be suspected of failing to attach sufficient importance to
+those public expressions of international amity which we hear so
+frequently, couched in such charming phraseology, at the dinners given
+by the Pilgrims, either in London or New York, and on similar occasions.
+The Pilgrims are doing excellent work, as also are other similar
+societies in less conspicuous ways. The fact has, I believe, never been
+published, but can be told now without indiscretion, that a movement was
+on foot some twelve years ago for the organisation of an Anglo-American
+League, on a scale much more ambitious than that of the Pilgrims or any
+other of the existing societies. Certain members of the British Ministry
+of the time had been approached and had welcomed the movement with
+cordiality, and the active support of a number of men of corresponding
+public repute in various parts of the United States had been similarly
+enlisted. It was expected (though I think the official request had not
+been made) that the Prince of Wales (now his Majesty King Edward VII.)
+would be the President of the English branch of the League, while
+ex-President Harrison was to have acted in a similar capacity in
+America. By a grim pleasantry of Fate, the letter from England conveying
+final and official information of the approval of the aforesaid
+Ministers, and arranging for the publication of the first formal
+overture from the United States (for the movement was to be made to
+appear to emanate therefrom) arrived in America on the very day of the
+appearance--and readers will remember how totally unexpected the
+appearance was--of Mr. Cleveland's Venezuelan message. What would have
+been the effect upon the crisis which then ensued if the organisation of
+the League had been but a few weeks further advanced, is an interesting
+subject for speculation. That, after a year or two of preparation, the
+movement should have been beaten by so totally unforeseen a complication
+at, as it were, the very winning post, was a little absurd. Thereafter,
+the right moment for proceeding with the organisation on the same lines
+never again presented itself.
+
+Englishmen must not make the mistake of attaching the same value to the
+nice things which are said by prominent Americans on public or
+semi-public occasions as they attach to similar utterances by
+Englishmen. It is not, of course, intended to imply that the American
+speakers are not individually sincere; but no American can act as the
+spokesman for his people in such a matter with the same authority as can
+be assumed by a properly qualified Englishman. One of the chief
+manifestations of the characteristic national lack of the sentiment of
+reverence is the disregard which the American masses entertain for the
+opinions of their "leading" men, whether in public life or not. The
+English people is accustomed, within certain limits, to repose
+confidence in its leaders and to suffer them in truth to lead; so that a
+small handful of men can within limits speak for the English people.
+They can voice the public sentiments, or, when they speak, the people
+will modify its sentiments to accord with their utterances. There is no
+man or set of men who can similarly speak for the American people; and
+no one is better aware of that fact than the American, however honoured
+by his countrymen, when he gives expression in London to the cordiality
+of his own feelings for Great Britain and expresses guardedly his
+conviction that a recurrence of trouble between the peoples will never
+again be possible. For one thing, public opinion is not centralised in
+America as it is in England. If not _tot homines_, at least _tot
+civitates_; and each State, each class and community, instinctively
+objects to any one presuming to speak for it (a prejudice based
+presumably on political tradition) except its own locally elected
+representative, and even he must be specifically instructed _ad hoc_.
+
+Only the good-humoured common-sense of British diplomacy prevented war
+at the time of the Venezuelan incident; and it may be that the same
+influence would be strong enough to prevent it again. But it is
+desirable that Englishmen should understand that just as they were
+astounded at the bitterness against them which manifested itself then,
+so they might be no less astounded again. It is, of course, difficult
+for Englishmen to believe. It must necessarily be hard to believe that
+one is hated by a person whom one likes. It happens to be just as
+difficult for the mass of Americans (again I should like to say the
+lower mass) to believe that Englishmen as a whole really like them. In
+1895, the American masses believed that England's attitude was the
+result of cowardice, pure and simple. Knowing their own feeling towards
+Great Britain, they neither could nor would believe that she was then
+influenced by a sincere and almost brotherly good-will--that, without
+one shadow of fear, Englishmen refused to consider war with the United
+States as possible because it had never occurred to them that the United
+States was other than a friendly nation--barely by one degree of kinship
+farther removed than one of Great Britain's larger colonies.
+
+And this is the first great obstacle that stands in the way of a proper
+understanding between the peoples--not merely the fact that the American
+nation is so far from having any affection for Great Britain, but the
+fact that the two peoples regard each other so differently that neither
+understands, or is other than reluctant to believe in, the attitude of
+the other. For the benefit of the English reader, rather than the
+American, it may be well to explain this at some length.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The essential fact is that America, New York or Washington, has been in
+the past, and still is in only a slightly less degree, much farther from
+London than London is from New York or Washington. This is true
+historically and commercially--and geographically, in everything except
+the mere matter of miles. The American for generations looked at the
+world through London, whereas when the Englishman turned his vision to
+New York almost the whole world intervened.
+
+Geographically, the nearest soil to the United States is British soil.
+Along the whole northern border of the country lies the Dominion of
+Canada, without, for a distance of some two thousand miles, any visible
+line of demarcation, so that the American may walk upon the prairie and
+not know at what moment his foot passes from his own soil to the soil of
+Great Britain. One of the chief lines of railway from New York to
+Chicago passes for half its length over Canadian ground; the effect
+being precisely as if the Englishman to go from London to Birmingham
+were to run for half the distance over a corner of France. A large
+proportion of the produce of the wheat-fields of the North-western
+States, of Minnesota and the two Dakotas, finds its way to New York over
+the Canadian Pacific Railway and from New York is shipped, probably in
+British bottoms, to Liverpool. When the American sails outward from New
+York or other eastern port, if he goes north he arrives only at
+Newfoundland or Nova Scotia; if he puts out to southward, the first land
+that he finds is the Bermudas. If he makes for Europe, it is generally
+at Liverpool or Southampton that he disembarks. On his very threshold in
+all directions, lies land over which floats the Union Jack and the same
+flag flies over half the vessels in the harbours of his own coasts.
+
+It is difficult for the Englishman to understand how near Great Britain
+has always been to the citizen of the United States, for to the
+Englishman himself the United States is a distant region, which he does
+not visit unless of set purpose he makes up his mind to go there. He
+must undertake a special journey, and a long one, lying apart from his
+ordinary routes of travel. The American cannot, save with difficulty and
+by circuitous routes, escape from striking British soil whenever he
+leaves his home. It confronts him on all sides and bars his way to all
+the world. Is it to be wondered at that he thinks of Englishmen
+otherwise than as Englishmen think of him?
+
+Yet this mere matter of geographical proximity is trivial compared to
+the nearness of Great Britain in other ways.
+
+Commercially--and it must be remembered how large a part matters of
+commerce play in the life and thoughts of the people of the United
+States--until recently America traded with the world almost entirely
+through Great Britain. It is not the produce of the Western wheat-fields
+only that is carried abroad in British bottoms, but the great bulk of
+the commerce of the United States must even now find its way to the
+outer world in ships which carry the Union Jack, and in doing so must
+pay the toll of its freight charges to Great Britain. If a New York
+manufacturer sells goods to South America itself, the chances are that
+those goods will be shipped to Liverpool and reshipped to their
+destination--each time in British vessels--and the payment therefor will
+be made by exchange on London, whereby the British banker profits only
+in less degree than the British ship-owner. In financial matters, New
+York has had contact with the outer world practically only through
+London. Until recently, no great corporate enterprise could be floated
+in America without the assistance of English capital, so that for years
+the "British Bondholder," who, by the interest which he drew (or often
+did not draw) upon his bonds, was supposed to be sucking the life-blood
+out of the American people, has been, until the trusts arose, the
+favourite bogey with which the American demagogue has played upon the
+feelings of his audiences. Now, happily, with more wealth at home,
+animosity has been diverted to the native trusts.
+
+It is true that of late years the United States has been striking out to
+win a world-commerce of her own; that by way of the Pacific she is
+building up a trade free, in part at least, from British domination;
+that she is making earnest efforts to develop her mercantile marine, so
+that her own commerce may in some fair measure be carried under her own
+flag; that New York is fast becoming a financial centre powerful enough
+to be able to disregard the dictation--and promising ere long to be a
+rival--of London; that during the last decade, America has been
+relieving England of vast quantities of her bonds and shares, heretofore
+held in London, and that the wealth of her people has increased so
+rapidly that she can find within herself the capital for her industries
+and (except in times like the recent panic) need no longer go abroad to
+beg. It is also true that of recent years England has become not a
+little uneasy at the growing volume of American trade, even within the
+borders of the British Isles themselves; but this newly developed
+uneasiness in British minds, however well grounded, can bear no
+comparison to the feeling of antagonism towards England--an antagonism
+compounded of mingled respect and resentment--which Americans of the
+older generation have had borne in upon them from youth up. To
+Englishmen, the growing commercial power of the United States is a new
+phenomenon, not yet altogether recognised and only half-understood; for
+they have been for so long accustomed to consider themselves the rulers
+of the sea-borne trade of the world that it is with difficulty that they
+comprehend that their supremacy can be seriously threatened. To the
+American, on the other hand, British commercial supremacy has, at least
+since 1862, been an incontrovertible and disheartening fact. The huge
+bulk of British commerce and British wealth has loomed so large as to
+shut out his view of all the world; it has hemmed him in on all sides,
+obstructed him, towered over him. And all the while, as he grew richer,
+he has seen that Great Britain only profited the more, by interest on
+his bonds, by her freight charges, by her profit on exchange. How is it
+possible that under such conditions the American can think about or feel
+towards England as the Englishman has thought about and felt towards
+him?
+
+Yet even now not one half has been told. We have seen that the
+geographical proximity of Great Britain and the overshadowing bulk of
+British commerce could not fail--neither separately could fail--to
+create in American minds an attitude towards England different from the
+natural attitude of Englishmen towards the United States; but both these
+influences together, powerful though each may be, are almost unimportant
+compared to the factor which most of all colours, and must colour, the
+American's view of Great Britain,--and that is the influence of the
+history of his own country.
+
+The history of the United States as an independent nation goes back no
+more than one hundred and thirty years, a space to be spanned by two
+human lives; so that events of even her very earliest years are still
+recent history and the sentiments evoked by those events have not yet
+had time to die. In the days of the childhood of fathers of men still
+living (the thing is possible, so recent is it) the nation was born out
+of the throes of a desperate struggle with Great Britain--a struggle
+which left the name "British" a word of loathing and contempt to
+American ears. American history proper begins with hatred of England:
+nor has there been anything in the course of that history, until the
+present decade, calculated to tend to modify that hatred in any material
+degree.
+
+During the nineteenth century, the United States, except for the war
+with Spain at its close, had little contact with foreign Powers. She
+lived isolated, concentrating all her energies on the developing of her
+own resources and the work of civilising a continent. Foreign
+complications scarcely came within the range of her vision. The Mexican
+War was hardly a foreign war. The only war with another nation in the
+whole course of the century was that with Great Britain in 1812.
+Reference has already been made to the English ignorance of the War of
+1812; but to the American it was the chief event in the foreign politics
+of his country during the first century and a quarter of its existence,
+and the Englishman's ignorance thereof moves him either to irritation or
+to amusement according to his temperament. In the American Civil War,
+British sympathy with the South was unhappily exaggerated in American
+eyes by the _Alabama_ incident. The North speedily forgave the South;
+but it has not yet entirely forgiven Great Britain.
+
+The other chief events of American history have nearly all, directly or
+indirectly, tended to keep Great Britain before the minds of the people
+as the one foreign Power with whom armed conflict was an ever-present
+possibility. The cession of her North American territory on the part of
+France only served to accentuate England's position as the sole rival of
+the United States upon the continent. Alaska was purchased from Russia;
+but Russia has long ago been almost forgotten in the transaction while
+it was with Great Britain that the troublesome question of the Alaskan
+boundary arose. And through all the years there have been recurring at
+intervals, not too far apart, various minor causes of friction between
+the two peoples,--in the Newfoundland fisheries question on the east and
+the seal fisheries on the west, with innumerable difficulties arising
+out of the common frontier line on the north or out of British relations
+(as in the case of Venezuela) with South American peoples.
+
+If an Englishman were asked what had been the chief events in the
+external affairs of England during the nineteenth century he would say:
+the Napoleonic wars, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the China,
+Ashanti, Afghan, Zulu, Soudan, Burmese, and Boer wars, the occupation of
+Egypt, the general expansion of the Empire in Africa--and what not else
+besides. He would not mention the United States. To the American the
+history of his country has chiefly to do with Great Britain.
+
+Just as geographically British territory surrounds and abuts on the
+United States on almost every side; just as commercially Great Britain
+has always hemmed in, dominated, and overshadowed the United States, so,
+historically, Great Britain has been the one and constant enemy, actual
+or potential, and her power a continual menace. How is it possible that
+the American should think of England as the Englishman thinks of the
+United States?
+
+There have, moreover, been constantly at work in America forces the
+chief object of which has been to keep alive hostility to Great Britain.
+Of native Americans who trace their family back to colonial days, there
+are still some among the older generation in whom the old hatred of the
+Revolutionary War yet burns so strongly that they would not, when at
+work on the old family farm in, let us say, Vermont, be very seriously
+surprised on some fine morning to see a party of red-coated Hessians
+come round the angle of the hill. There are those living whose chief
+pastime as boys was to fight imaginary battles with the loathed British
+in and out among the old farm-buildings--buildings which yet bear upon
+them, perhaps, the marks of real British bullets fired in the real
+war.[57:1] And those boys, moving West as they came to manhood, carried
+the same spirit, the same inherited dislike of the name "British," into
+the cities of the Mississippi Valley, across the prairies and over the
+mountains to the Pacific slope. But it is not the real American--except
+one here and there on the old New England homestead--who talks much of
+his anti-British feeling. It is the imported American who has refused to
+allow the old hostility to die but has kept pouring contumely on the
+British name and insisted on the incorporation of an "anti-British"
+plank in his party platform to catch the votes of the citizens of his
+own nationality at each succeeding election.
+
+Englishmen are generally aware of the importance in American politics of
+the Irish vote. It is probable, indeed, that, particularly as far as the
+conditions of the last few years are concerned, the importance of that
+vote has been magnified to the English mind. In certain localities, and
+more particularly in a few of the larger cities, it is still, of course,
+an important factor by its mere numbers; but even in the cities in which
+the Irish vote is still most in evidence at elections, the influx during
+the past decade from all parts of Europe of immigrants who in the course
+of the five-years term become voters has, of necessity, lessened its
+relative importance.
+
+In New York City, for instance, through which pass annually some
+nineteen twentieths of all the immigrants coming into the country, the
+foreign elements other than Irish--German, Italian (mainly from the less
+educated portions of the Peninsula), Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Hebrew,
+Roumanian, etc.,--now far outnumber the Irish. In New York, indeed, the
+Germans are alone more numerous; but the Irish have always shown a
+larger interest in, and a greater capacity for, political action, so
+that they still retain an influence out of all proportion to their
+voting number. On the other hand the Irish, or their leaders, have
+maintained so corrupt a standard of political action (so that a large
+proportion of the evils from which the affairs of certain of the larger
+American cities suffer to-day may be justly charged to their methods and
+influence) that it is uncertain whether their abuse of Great Britain
+does not, in the minds of certain, and those not the worst, classes of
+the people react rather to create good-will towards England than to
+increase hostility.
+
+The power of the Irish vote as an anti-British force, then, is
+undoubtedly overrated in England; but it must be borne in mind that some
+of the other foreign elements in the population which on many questions
+may act as a counterpoise to the Irish are not themselves conspicuously
+friendly to England. If we hear too much of the Irish in America, we
+hear perhaps too little of some of the other peoples. And the point
+which I would impress on the English reader is that he cannot expect the
+American to feel towards England as he himself feels towards the United
+States. The American people came in the first instance justly by its
+hatred of the name "British," and there have not since been at work any
+forces sufficiently powerful to obliterate that hatred, while there have
+been some operating to keep it alive.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[36:1] _The Americans_, by Hugo Münsterberg, 1905.
+
+[38:1] _America To-day_, by William Archer (1900). Mr. Archer's study of
+the American people is in my opinion the most sympathetic and
+comprehending which has been written by an Englishman.
+
+[41:1] The battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812, is not one of
+those incidents in English history which Englishmen generally insist on
+remembering, and it may be as well to explain to English readers that it
+was on that occasion that an inferior force of American riflemen (a
+"backwoods rabble" a British officer called them before the engagement)
+repulsed a British attack, from behind improvised earthworks, with a
+loss to the attacking force of 3300 killed and wounded, and at a cost to
+themselves of 13 wounded and 8 killed--or 21 casualties in all. Of the
+Forty-fourth (Essex) Regiment 816 men went into action, and after less
+than thirty minutes 134 were able to line up. The Ninety-third
+(Sutherland) Highlanders suffered even more severely. Of 1008 officers
+and men only 132 came out unhurt. The battle was fought after peace had
+been concluded, so that the lives were thrown away to no purpose. The
+British had to deliver a direct frontal attack over level ground, penned
+in by a lake on one side and a swamp on the other. It was the same
+lesson, in even bloodier characters, as was taught on several occasions
+in South Africa.
+
+[44:1] _Presidential Problems_, by Grover Cleveland, p. 281 (New York,
+1904).
+
+[57:1] I had written this before reading Senator Hoar's Reminiscences in
+which, in speaking of his own youth, he tells how "Every boy imagined
+himself a soldier and his highest conception of glory was to 'lick the
+British'" (_An Autobiography of Seventy Years_).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TWO SIDES OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER
+
+     Europe's Undervaluation of America's Fighting Power--The
+     Americans as Sailors--The Nation's Greatest Asset--Self-reliance
+     of the People--The Making of a Doctor--And of a Surveyor--
+     Society in the Rough--New York and the Country--An Anglo-Saxon
+     Trait--America's Unpreparedness--American Consuls and
+     Diplomats--A Homogeneous People--The Value of a Common
+     Speech--America more Anglo-Saxon than Britain--Mr. Wells and
+     the Future in America.
+
+
+One circumstance ought in itself to convince Americans that cowardice or
+fear has no share in the greater outspokenness of England's good-will
+during these later years, namely that when Great Britain showed her
+sympathy with the United States at the time of the Spanish War,
+Englishmen largely believed that they were giving that sympathy to the
+weaker Power,[60:1]--weaker, that is as far as organised fighting
+strength, immediately available, was concerned. It is a century or two
+since Englishmen did Spain the compliment of being afraid of her. How
+then, in 1895, could they have had any fear of the United States?
+
+Few Europeans, indeed, have any conception of the fighting power of the
+United States, for it is not large on paper. Nor is an Englishman likely
+to make special allowance for the fighting efficiency of either the
+ships or the men, for the reason that, in spite of experiences which
+might have bred misgivings (English memory for such matters is short),
+it remains to him unthinkable that, in the last resort, any men or still
+less any ships will prove--man for man and gun for gun--better than his
+own. He might be glad to concede that 25,000 American troops are the
+equivalent of 50,000 Germans or 100,000 Cossacks, or that two American
+men of war should be counted as the equivalent of three Italian. He
+makes no such concession when it comes to a comparison with British
+troops or British ships. What then can there be in the fighting strength
+of the United States, for all the figures that she has to show, to breed
+in him a suggestion of fear?
+
+This is a statement which will irritate many a patriotic American, who
+will say that it is the same old British superciliousness. But it should
+not irritate; and if the American understood the Englishman better and
+the spirit which inspires him, he would like it. The Englishman prefers
+not to regard the American troops or ships as potentially hostile, and
+Great Britain has sufficient to do in measuring the strength of her
+possible enemies. As for the people of the United States, he opines that
+they know their own business. They are best able to judge how many ships
+and how many men under arms will serve their purpose. England would,
+indeed, be glad to see the United States with a few more ships than she
+has, but--it is none of England's business. Englishmen can only wish her
+luck and hope that she is making no mistake in her calculations and go
+on about their own affairs, which are pressing enough. At the same time
+if the United States should prove to have miscalculated and should ever
+need . . .--well, England has a ship or two herself.
+
+It would be a gain for the world if Americans would only understand!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Englishman of the present generation knows practically nothing of
+the Americans as a maritime nation; and again let me say that this
+arises not from superciliousness or any intentional neglect, but merely
+from the fact that the matter is one beyond his horizon. He is so
+familiar with the fact that Britain rules the waves that he has no
+notion that whenever opportunity of comparison has offered the Americans
+have generally shown themselves (if there has been anything to choose)
+the better sailors of the two. Every English reader will probably read
+that sentence again to see if he has not misunderstood it. The truth is
+that Englishmen have forgotten the incidents of the Revolutionary War
+almost as completely as they have forgotten those of the War of 1812;
+Paul Jones is as meaningless a name to them as Andrew Jackson. While it
+is true that American historians have given the American people, up to
+the present generation, an unfortunately exaggerated idea of the heroism
+of the patriot forces and have held the British troops up to all manner
+of unmerited odium, it is also true that English historians, while the
+less partial of the two, have perhaps been over-careful not to err in
+the same direction. Not until the last twenty years--hardly until the
+last four or five--have there been accessible to the public of the two
+countries the materials for forming a just judgment on the incidents of
+the war. It must be confessed that there is at least nothing in the
+evidence to permit the Englishman to think that a hundred years ago the
+home-bred Briton could either sail or fight his ships better than the
+Colonial. Nor has the Englishman as a rule any idea that in the middle
+of the nineteenth century the American commercial flag was rapidly
+ousting the British flag from the seas. Even with a knowledge of the
+facts, it is still hard for us to-day to comprehend.
+
+So amazing was the growth of the mercantile marine of the young
+republic--such qualities did the Americans show as shipbuilders, as
+sailors, and as merchants--that in 1860, the American mercantile marine
+was greater in tonnage and number of vessels than that of all other
+nations of the world combined, except Great Britain, and almost equal to
+that of Great Britain herself. These were of course the days of glory of
+the American clipper. It appeared then inevitable that in a few years
+the Stars and Stripes--a flag but little more than half a century
+old--would be the first commercial flag of the world; and but for the
+outbreak of the Civil War, it is at least probable that by now
+Englishmen would have grown accustomed to recognising that not they but
+another people were the real lords of the ocean's commerce. When the
+Civil War broke out, the tonnage of American registered vessels was
+something over five and one-half millions; and when the war closed it
+was practically non-existent. The North was able to draw from its
+merchant service for the purposes of war no fewer than six hundred
+vessels of an aggregate tonnage of over a million and carrying seventy
+thousand men. Those ships and men went a long way towards turning the
+tide of victory to the North; but when peace was made the American
+commercial flag had disappeared from the seas.
+
+It would be out of place here to go into a statement of the causes which
+co-operated with the substitution of iron for wood in shipbuilding to
+make it hard at first for America to regain her lost position, or into a
+discussion of the incomprehensible apathy (incomprehensible if one did
+not know the ways of American legislation) which successive Congresses
+have shown in the matter.
+
+A year or so back, the nation seemed to have made up its mind in earnest
+to take hold of the problem of the restoration of its commercial marine;
+but the defeat in the early part of 1907 of the Ship Subsidies Bill left
+the situation much where it was when President Grant, President
+Harrison, and President McKinley, in turn, attempted to arouse Congress
+to the necessity of action; except that with the passage of time
+conditions only become worse and reform necessarily more difficult. The
+Ship Subsidies Bill was defeated largely by the votes of the
+representatives of the Mississippi Valley and the Middle Western States,
+and to an outsider the opposition of those regions looked very much
+like a manifestation of selfishness and lack of patriotism, on the part
+of the inland population jealous of the seaboard States. In the East,
+various reasons were given at the time for the failure of the measure. I
+happened myself to be travelling then through the States of the
+Mississippi Valley, and I discussed the situation with people whom I
+met, and particularly with politicians. The explanations which I
+received fell into one of two categories. Some said: "It is true that
+the Mississippi Valley and the West have little direct interest in our
+shipbuilding industry, but none the less we should like to see our
+merchant marine encouraged and built up. The trouble is that we have
+from experience acquired a profound distrust of a certain 'gang' in the
+Senate [and here would often follow the names of certain four or five
+well-known Senators, chiefly from the East], and the mere fact that
+these Senators were backing this particular bill was enough to convince
+us Westerners that it included a 'steal.'"
+
+Others took this ground: "The Mississippi Valley and the West believe in
+the general principle of Protection, but we think that our legislation
+has carried this principle far enough. We should now prefer to see a
+little easing off. We do not believe that the right way to develop our
+commercial marine is, first by our tariff laws to make it impossible for
+us to build or operate ships in competition with other countries and
+then to be obliged, in order to equalise things, to have recourse to
+bounties. What we want is a modification of our law which will help us,
+in the first instance, to build and to run the ships at a reasonable
+price. When a bill to that effect comes along, the Mississippi Valley
+will be found all right."
+
+Not a few of the voters in the East, also cordially interested in any
+plan that seemed to them promising and equitable for building up the
+American commercial marine, took the ground that it was an absurdity to
+build up barriers against foreign trade by enacting a tariff bill, such
+as the Dingley measure, with higher duties than the country had ever
+known, and then to attempt to overcome that barrier by means of bounty
+measures, which must themselves constitute a fresh form of taxation on
+the general public.
+
+The mass of the people, in fact, are in sympathy with the movement to
+encourage American shipping, but, for sectional or other reasons, a
+large proportion of them objected to the particular form in which the
+end was sought to be reached in the last Congress. So long as the voice
+and opinion of Mr. Roosevelt have any weight, it is not to be expected
+that the subject is going to be allowed to drop; and with his strength
+of will and determination of character it is at least not improbable
+that, where successive Presidents before him have failed, he will,
+whether still in the Presidential chair or not, ultimately succeed, and
+that not the smallest of the reasons for gratitude to him which future
+generations of Americans will recognise will be that he helped to
+recreate the nation's merchant marine. At present, less than nine
+percent of the American foreign commerce is carried in American bottoms,
+a situation which is not only sufficiently humiliating to a people who
+but a short while ago hoped to dominate the carrying trade of all
+countries but also, what perhaps hurts the Americans almost as much as
+the injury to their pride, absurdly wasteful and unbusinesslike.
+English shipping circles may take the prospect of efforts being made by
+the United States to recover some measure of its lost prestige seriously
+or not: but it would be inadvisable to admit as a factor in their
+calculations any theory as to the inability of the Americans either to
+build ships or sail them as well as the best. With the growth of an
+American merchant marine--if a growth comes--will come also the obvious
+need of a larger navy; and other nations might do well to remember that
+Americans have never yet shown any inability to fight their ships, any
+more than they have to build or sail them.
+
+In basing any estimate of the fighting strength of the United States on
+the figures of her army or navy as they look on paper, the people of
+other nations--Englishmen no less than any--leave out of sight, because
+they have no standard for measuring, that remarkable attribute of the
+American character, which is the greatest of the national assets, the
+combination of self-reliance and resourceful ingenuity which seems to
+make the individual American equal to almost any fortune. It is
+remarkable, but not beyond explanation. It is an essentially Anglo-Saxon
+trait. The British have always possessed it in a degree, if inferior to
+the present day American, at least in excess of other peoples. The
+history of the Empire bears witness to it on every page and it is in
+truth one of the most fundamentally English things in the American
+character. But the conditions of their life have developed it in
+Americans beyond any need which the Englishman has felt. The latter,
+living at home amid the established institutions of a society which
+moves on its way evenly and without friction regardless of any effort
+or action on his part, has had no occasion for those qualities on which
+the American's success, his life, have commonly depended from day to day
+amid the changing emergencies of a frontier life. The American of any
+generation previous to that which is now growing up has seldom known
+what it meant to choose a profession or a vocation in life; but must
+needs do the work that came to him, and, without apprenticeship or
+training, turn to whatever craft has offered.
+
+The notion that every American is, without any special training, by mere
+gift of birthright, competent to any task that may be set him, is
+commonly said to have come in with Andrew Jackson; and President Eliot,
+of Harvard, has dubbed it a "vulgar conceit."[68:1] It is undoubtedly a
+dangerous doctrine to become established as a tenet of national belief
+and least of all men can the head of a great institution for the
+training of the nation's youth afford to encourage it. None the less,
+when the American character is compared with that of any European
+people, it has, if not justification, at least considerable excuse.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once into a new mining camp in the West there drove in the same
+"stage-coach" two young men who became friends on the journey. Each was
+out to seek his fortune and each hoped to find it in the new community.
+Each had his belongings in a "valise" and in each "valise" among those
+belongings was a "shingle," or name-plate, bearing each the name of its
+respective owner followed by the words "Attorney at Law." The young men
+compared their shingles and considered. The small camp would not need
+two lawyers, even if it would provide a living for one. So they
+"matched" coins (the American equivalent of tossing up) to see which of
+the two should erase "Attorney at Law" from his sign and substitute
+"Doctor of Medicine." Which is history; as also is the following:
+
+In another mining camp, some twenty-three years ago, there was at first
+no surveyor. Men paced off the boundaries of their claims and went to
+work as fancy inclined them, and in the town which began to grow up
+houses were built at random regardless of any street-line and with no
+finnicking considerations of a building frontage. So a young fellow
+whose claim was unpromising sent out to civilisation for a set of
+instruments (he had never seen a transit or a level before) and began
+business as a surveyor. He used to come to me secretly that I might
+figure out for him the cubic contents of a ditch or the superficial area
+of a wall. He could barely write and knew no arithmetic at all; but he
+worked most of the night as well as all the day, and when the town took
+to itself a form of organised government he was appointed official
+surveyor and within a few weeks thereafter was made surveyor to the
+county. I doubt not that G---- T---- is rich and prosperous to-day.
+
+On a certain wharf, no matter where, lounged half a dozen seamen when to
+them came the owner of a vessel. It was in the days of '49 when anything
+that could be made to float was being put into commission in the
+California trade, and men who could navigate were scarce.
+
+"Can any of you men" said the newcomer "take a boat out for me to San
+Francisco?"
+
+"I'll do it, sir" said one stepping forward.
+
+"Thunder, Bill!" exclaimed a comrade in an undertone, "you don't know
+nothing about navigating."
+
+"Shut your mouth," said Bill. "Maybe I don't know nothing now, but you
+bet I will by the time I get to 'Frisco."
+
+The same spirit guides almost every young American who drifts West to
+tackle hopefully whatever job the gods may send. The cases wherein he
+has any destiny marked out for him or any especial preference as to the
+lines on which his future career shall run (except that he may hope
+ultimately to be President of the United States) are comparatively few.
+In ten years, he may be a grocer or a banker or a dry-goods merchant or
+a real-estate man or a lawyer. Whatever he is, more likely than not ten
+years later he will be something else.
+
+"What is your trade?" is the first question which an Englishman asks of
+an applicant for employment; and the answer will probably be truthful
+and certainly unimaginative.
+
+"What can you do?" the American enquires under the same circumstances.
+"'Most anything. What have you got to do?" is commonly the reply.
+
+It is an extraordinarily impressive experience for an Englishman to go
+out from the old-established well-formulated ways of the club-life and
+street-life of London, to assist in--not merely to watch but to
+co-operate in--the organisation of society in the wilderness: to see a
+town grow up--indeed, so far as his clumsy ability in the handling of an
+ax will permit, to help to build it; to join the handful of men,
+bearded, roughly clad, and unlettered most of them, proceeding
+deliberately to the fashioning of the framework of government, the
+election of town officers, the appointment of a sheriff, and the
+necessary provisions, rough but not inadequate, for dealing with the
+grosser forms of crime. Quickly thereafter, in the case which I have
+especially in mind, came the formation of the county government and,
+simultaneously therewith, the opportunity (automatically and by mere
+right of the number of the population) to elect a representative to the
+Territorial Legislature. In the first year, however, this last privilege
+had to be pretermitted. The Territorial laws required that any member
+must have been resident in the district from which he came for not less
+than six months prior to his election and must be able to read and
+write; and, as cruel chance would have it, among the first prospectors
+to find their way into the new diggings in the preceding winter, who
+alone could comply with the required term of residence, not one could
+write his name. Had but one been able to do it ever so crudely--could
+one but have made a reasonable pretence of an ability to stumble through
+the opening paragraphs of the Constitution of the United States,--that
+man would inevitably and unanimously have been elected a full-blown
+Legislator. As it was, the new district was perforce compelled to go
+without representation in the Territorial Capital.
+
+"But," it will be objected, and by no one more quickly than by the
+American of the Eastern States, "All Americans do not go through these
+experiences. How many New Yorkers have helped to organise a new mining
+town?" Not many, certainly; and that is one of the reasons why New York
+is, perhaps, the least representative section of all the United States.
+But though the American of to-day may not have had to do these things,
+his father and his grandfather had to. The necessity has long ago left
+New York, but Illinois was not far removed from the circumstances of
+frontier life when Abraham Lincoln was a youth; and the men who laid the
+foundations of Minneapolis, and Kansas City, and Omaha, and Duluth, are
+still alive. The frontiersman is latent in every American.
+
+For the benefit of many Englishmen who think that they have been to the
+United States, when as a matter of fact they have only been to New York,
+it may be as well to explain why New York City is the least typically
+American of all parts of the country. There are some who go back as far
+as Revolutionary days for the explanation, and point out that even then
+New York was more loyalist than patriot; one might go even farther back
+and show that New York always had a conspicuously large non-Anglo-Saxon
+element. But there is no need to go back even to the Revolution. In the
+century that has passed since then, the essential characteristics of the
+American character have been the products of the work which the people
+had to do in the subduing of the wilderness and of the isolation of the
+country--of its segregation from contact with the outside world. New
+York has been the one point in America farthest removed from the
+wilderness and most in touch with Europe, and it has been there that the
+chief forces which have moulded the American character have been least
+operative. The things in a New Yorker which are most characteristic of
+his New-Yorkship are least characteristically American, and among these
+is a much greater friendliness towards Great Britain than is to be found
+elsewhere except in one or two towns of specialised traits. This is not
+in any way to depreciate the position of New York as the greatest and
+most influential city in the United States, as well as (whatever may
+have been the relative standing of it and Boston up to twenty years ago)
+the literary and artistic centre of the country; and I do not know that
+any city of the world has a sight more impressive in its way than
+upper-middle New York--that is to say, than Fifth Avenue from Madison
+Square to the Park. But the English visitor who acquires his ideas of
+American sentiments from what he hears in New York dining-rooms or in
+Wall Street offices, is likely to go far astray. There is an
+instructive, if hackneyed, story of the little girl whose father boasted
+that she had travelled all over the United States. "Dear me!" said the
+recipient of the information, "she has travelled a great deal for one of
+her age!" "Yes, sir! all over the United States--all, except east of
+Chicago."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the course of a long term of residence in the United States, this
+adaptability, this readiness to turn to whatever seems at the time to
+offer the best "opening" (which is so conspicuously a national trait but
+is not especially noticeable in the typical New Yorker) becomes so
+familiar that it ceases to be worth comment. I have seen among my own
+friends journalists become hotel managers, advertising solicitors turn
+to "real estate agents," merchants translated straight into responsible
+positions in the executive departments of railway companies, and railway
+men become merchants and bankers, editors change into engineers and
+engineers into editors, and lawyers into anything from ambassadors to
+hotel clerks. I am not now speaking in praise of these conditions or of
+the results in individual cases. The point to be noticed is that the
+people among whom these conditions prevail must in the long run develop
+into a people of extraordinary resourcefulness and versatility. And in
+the individual cases, the results are not nearly as deplorable as an
+Englishman might suppose or as they would be if the raw material
+consisted of home-staying Englishmen.
+
+The trait however is, as has been said, essentially an Anglo-Saxon
+trait--an English trait--and the colonial Englishman develops the same
+qualities in a not incomparable degree. The Canadian and the New
+Zealander acquire a like unconquerable soul, but the Englishman at home
+is not much impressed thereby, chiefly for the reason that he is almost
+as ignorant of the Canadian and the New Zealander as he is of the
+American, and with the same benevolent ignorance.
+
+In the individual citizen of the United States, he recognises the
+quality in a vague way. "Yankee ingenuity" is familiar to him and he is
+interested in, and amused at, the imperturbability with which the
+individual American--and especially the individual American
+woman--confronts and rises at least equal to whatever new and unheard of
+conditions he (or she) may find himself (or herself) placed among in
+England. But just as the American will not from the likability and
+kindliness of individual Englishmen draw any general inference as to the
+likability and kindliness of the nation, so the Englishman or other
+European rarely gives to these occasional attributes, which he sees
+reproduced again and again in particular Americans, their proper value
+as the manifestations of a national trait of the first importance, a
+trait which makes the people unquestionably formidable as competitors in
+peace and would make them correspondingly formidable as antagonists in
+war. The trait is, as I have said, perhaps the most precious of all the
+American national assets.
+
+Great Britain has recently had abundant evidence of the difficulty of
+turning out all the paraphernalia of victory ready made and is now
+making earnest effort to guard against the necessity of attempting it
+again. But the rules which apply to European peoples do not apply, with
+anything like equal force, to America. England in the South African war
+found by no means despicable fighting material almost ready made in her
+colonial troops; and that same material, certainly not inferior, America
+can supply in almost unlimited quantities. From the West and portions of
+the South, the United States can at any time draw immense numbers of men
+who, in the training of their frontier life, their ability to ride and
+shoot, their habituation to privations of every kind, possess all those
+qualities which made the Boers formidable, with the better moral fibre
+of the Anglo-Saxon to back them.
+
+But this quality of resourcefulness and self-reliance is not a mere
+matter of the moral or physical qualities of the individual. Its spirit
+permeates the nation as a unit. The machinery of the government will
+always move in emergencies more quickly than that of any European
+country; and unpreparedness becomes a vastly less serious matter. The
+standing army of the United States, in spite of the events of the last
+few years, remains little more than a Federal police force; and with no
+mercantile marine to protect and no colonies, there has been till lately
+no need of an American navy. But the European who measures the
+unpreparedness of the nation in the terms of the unpreparedness of his
+own, or any other European, country, not taking into account the
+colonial character of the population, the alertness and audacity of the
+national mind, the resourcefulness and confident self-reliance of the
+people, is likely to fall into error.
+
+The reverse of the medal is, perhaps, more familiar to Europeans, under
+the form of what has generally been called the characteristic American
+lack of the sentiment of reverence. The lack is indubitably there--is
+necessarily there; for what the Englishman does not commonly understand
+is that that lack is not a positive quality in itself. It is but the
+reflection, as it were, or complement, of the national self-reliance.
+How should the American in his new country, with his "Particularist"
+spirit, his insistence on the independence and sovereignty of the
+individual, seem to Europeans other than lacking in reverence?
+
+It is true that now, by mere passage of years, there are monuments in
+the United States which are beginning to gather the dignity and respect
+which naturally attach to age. The American of the present day has great
+veneration for the wisdom of the Fathers of the Republic, much love for
+the old buildings which are associated with the birth of the nation.
+Even the events of the Civil War are beginning to put on something of
+the majesty of antiquity, but there are still alive too many of the
+combatants in that war--who are obviously but commonplace men--for the
+figures of any but some three or four of the greatest of the actors to
+have yet assumed anything like heroic proportions. For the rest, what is
+there in the country which the living American has not made himself, or
+which his fathers did not make? The fabric of society is of too new a
+weaving, he knows too well the trick of it, for it to be wonderful in
+his eyes.
+
+Lack of reverence is only a symptom of the American's strength--not
+admirable in itself, yet, as the index to something admirable, not,
+perhaps, altogether to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack
+of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of
+imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful.
+The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman.
+
+The American national character is, indeed, a finer thing than the
+European generally supposes. The latter sees only occasional facets and
+angles, offshoots and outgrowths, some of them not desirable but even
+grotesque in themselves, while those elements which unify and harmonise
+the whole are likely to escape him. The blunders of American
+diplomats--the _gaucheries_ and ignorances of American consular
+representatives--these are familiar subjects to Europeans; on them many
+a travelling Englishman has based his rather contemptuous opinion of the
+culture of the American people as a whole. But it is unsafe to argue
+from the inferiority of the representative to the inferiority of the
+thing represented.
+
+If two fruit-growers have adjoining orchards and, for the purpose of
+making a display at an agricultural show, one spends months of careful
+nourishing, training, and pruning of certain trees wherefrom he selects
+with care the finest of his fruit, while the other without preparation
+goes out haphazard to his orchard and reaches for the first fruit that
+he sees, it is probable that, judging by their exhibits, the public will
+get an erroneous idea of the characters of the orchards as a whole. And
+this is precisely the difference between the representatives whom the
+United States sends abroad and those sent to be displayed beside them by
+other nations.
+
+There is no recognised diplomatic service in the United States, no
+school for the training of consular representatives, no training or
+nurturing or pruning of any sort. The fundamental objection of the
+American people to the creation of any permanent privileged class, has
+made the thing impossible in the past, while, under the system of party
+patronage, practically the entire representation of the country
+abroad--commercial as well as diplomatic--is changed with each change of
+government. The American cannot count on holding an appointment abroad
+for more than four years; and while four years is altogether too short a
+term to be considered a career, it is over-long for a holiday. So in
+addition to the lack of any trained class from which to draw, even among
+the untrained the choice is much restricted by the undesirability of the
+conditions of the service itself.
+
+Though the conditions have improved immensely of late years, the fact
+remains that the consular service as a whole is not fairly to be
+compared on equal terms with that of other countries; and the majority
+of appointments are still made as the reward for minor services to the
+party in power. Nor are the conditions which govern the appointments to
+the less important diplomatic posts much different; but Great Britain
+has abundant cause to be aware that when the place is one which appeals
+to the ambition of first-class men, first-class men enough are
+forthcoming; though even Ambassadors to London are generally lacking in
+any special training or experience up to the time of their appointment.
+
+Sydney Smith's phrase has been often enough quoted--that when a woman
+makes a public speech, we admire her as we admire a dog that stands upon
+its hind legs, not because she does it well, but because she does it at
+all. Congress includes among its members many curious individuals and,
+as a unit, it does queer things at times. State legislatures are
+sometimes strange looking bodies of men and on occasions they achieve
+legislation which moves the country to mirth. The representatives of the
+nation abroad make blunders which contribute not a little to the gaiety
+of the world. But the thing to admire is that they do these things at
+all--that the legislators, whether Federal or State, and the members of
+the consular service, appointed or elected as they are, and from the
+classes which they represent, do somehow manage to form legislative
+bodies which, year in and year out, will bear comparison well enough
+with other Parliaments, and do in one way and another succeed in giving
+their country a service abroad which is far from despicable as compared
+with that of other peoples, nor all devoid of dignity. The fact that
+results are not immeasurably worse than they are is no small tribute to
+the adaptability of the American character. There is no other national
+character which could stand the same test.
+
+In the absence of any especially trained or officially dedicated class,
+the American people in the mass provides an amazing quantity of not
+impossible material out of which legislators and consuls may be
+made--just as it might equally well be made into whatever should happen
+to be required.
+
+And this fact strikes at the root of a common misapprehension in the
+minds of foreigners as to the constitution of the American people, a
+misapprehension which is fostered by what is written by other foreigners
+after inadequate observation.
+
+Much is thus written of the so-called heterogeneousness of the people of
+America. The Englishman who visits the United States for a few weeks
+only, commonly comes away with an idea that the New Yorker is the
+American people; whereas we have seen why it is that good American
+authorities maintain that in all the width and depth of the continent
+there is no aggregation of persons so little representative of the
+American people as a whole as the inhabitants of New York. After the
+Englishman has been in the United States for some months or a year or
+two, he grows bewildered and reaches the conclusion that there is no
+common American type--nothing but a patchwork of unassimilated units. In
+which conclusion he is just as mistaken as he was at first. There does
+exist a clearly defined and homogeneous American type.
+
+Let us suppose that all the negroes had been swept as with some vast net
+down and away into the Gulf of Mexico; that the Irishmen had been
+gathered out of the cities and deposited back into the Atlantic; that
+the Germans had been rounded up towards their fellows in Chicago and
+Milwaukee and then tipped gently into Lake Michigan, while the
+Scandinavians, having been assembled in Minnesota, had been edged
+courteously over the Canadian border;--when all this had been done,
+there would still remain the great American People. Of this great People
+there would remain certain local variations--in parts of the South, in
+New England, on the plains--but each clearly recognisable as a variety
+only, differing but superficially and in substance possessing
+well-defined all the generic and specific attributes of the race.
+
+If the entire membership of the Chicago Club were to be transferred
+bodily to the Manhattan Club-house in New York, and all the members of
+the Manhattan were simultaneously made to migrate from Fifth Avenue to
+Michigan Avenue, the club servants, beyond missing some familiar faces,
+would not find much difference. Could any man, waking from a trance,
+tell by the men surrounding him whether he was in the Duquesne Club at
+Pittsburgh or the Minnesota Club in St. Paul? And, if it be urged that
+the select club-membership represents a small circle of the population
+only, would the disturbance be much greater if the entire populations of
+Erie and Minneapolis and Kansas City were to execute a three-cornered
+"general post" or if Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine, swapped
+inhabitants? How long would it take the inhabitants of any one town to
+settle down in their new environment and go to work on precisely the
+same lines as their predecessors whom they dislodged? The novelty would,
+I think, be even less than if Manchester and Birmingham were
+miraculously made to execute a similar change in a night.
+
+I do not underrate the magnitude of the problem presented to the people
+of America by the immense volume of immigration from alien races, and
+chiefly from the most undesirable strata in those races, of the last
+few years. On the other hand, I have no shadow of doubt of the ability
+of the people to cope with the problem and to succeed in assimilating to
+itself all the elements in this great influx while itself remaining
+unchanged.
+
+It seems to me that the American himself constantly overestimates the
+influence on his national character of the immigration of the past. To
+persons living in New York, especially if, from philanthropic motives or
+otherwise, they are brought at all into immediate contact with the
+incoming hordes as they arrive, this stream of immigration may well be a
+terrifying thing. Those who are in daily touch with it can hardly fail
+to be oppressed by it, till it gets upon their nerves and breeds
+nightmares; and to such I have more than once recommended that they
+would do well to take a holiday of six months; journey through the West,
+and so come to a realisation of the magnitude of their country and
+correct their point of view. With every mile that one recedes from
+Castle Garden, the phenomenon grows less appalling: the cloud which was
+dense enough to blacken New York harbour makes not a veil to stop one
+ray of sunlight when shredded out over the Mississippi Valley and the
+Western plains.
+
+A bucket of sewage (or of Eau de Cologne), however formidable in itself,
+makes very little difference when tipped into the St. Lawrence River. It
+is, of course, a portentous fact that some twenty millions of foreigners
+should have come into the country to settle in the course of half a
+century; but, after all, the process of assimilation has been
+constantly and successfully at work throughout those fifty years, and I
+think the figures will show that in no one year (not even in 1906, when
+the volume of immigration was the largest and contained the greatest
+proportion of the distinctly "undesirable" elements), if we set against
+the totals the number of those aliens returning to their own countries
+and deduct those who have come from the English-speaking countries, has
+the influx amounted to three quarters of one per cent of the entire
+population of the country.
+
+So far, the dilution of the original character of the people by the
+injection of the foreign elements has been curiously slight, and while
+recognising that the inflow of the last few years has been more serious,
+both in quantity and character, than at any previous period, there does
+not seem to me any reason for questioning the ability of the country to
+absorb and assimilate it without any impairment of the fundamental
+qualities of the people. That at certain points near the seaboard, or in
+places where the newly introduced aliens become congested in masses of
+industrial workers, they present a local problem of extreme difficulty
+may be granted, but I think that those who are in contact with these
+local problems are inclined to exaggerate the general or national
+danger. The dominating American type will persist, as it persists
+to-day; the people will remain, in all that is essential, an Anglo-Saxon
+and a homogeneous people.
+
+In one sense--and that the essential one--the American people is more
+homogeneous than the English. What individuals among them may have been
+in the last generation does not matter. The point is here:--When one
+speaks of the "average Englishman" (as, without regard to grammar, we
+persist in doing) what he really means is the typical representative of
+a comparatively small section of the population, from the middle, or
+upper middle, classes upward. It is the same when one speaks of
+Frenchmen. When he says "the average Frenchman dresses," or "thinks," or
+"talks" in such and such a way, he merely means that so does the normal
+specimen of a class including only a few hundred thousand men, and those
+city dwellers, dress or think or speak. The figure is excusable because
+(apart from the fact that an "average" of the entire population would be
+quite unfindable) the comparatively small class does indeed guide, rule,
+and, practically, think for, the whole population. So far as foreign
+countries are concerned, they represent the policy and mode of thought
+of the nation. The great numerical majority is practically negligible.
+
+The same is true of the people of the United States, but with this
+difference, that the class represented by the "average"--the class of
+which, when grouped together, it is possible to find a reasonably
+typical representative--includes in the United States a vastly larger
+proportion of the whole people than is the case in other countries. It
+would not be possible to find a common mental or moral divisor for the
+members of Parliament in the aggregate, and an equal number of Norfolk
+fishermen or Cornish miners. They are not to be stated in common terms.
+But no such incongruity exists between the members of Congress, Michigan
+lumbermen, and the men of the Texas plains.
+
+It may be that within the smaller circle in England, the
+individuals--thanks to the public schools and the universities--are more
+nearly identical and the type specimen would more closely represent the
+whole. But as soon as we get outside the circle, much greater
+divergences appear. The English are _homogeneous_ over a small area: the
+Americans _homogeneous_ over a much larger.
+
+"You may go all over the States," said Robert Louis Stevenson (and
+Americans will, for love of the man, pardon his calling their country
+"the States") "and--setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of
+foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese--you shall scarce meet with so
+marked a difference of accent as in forty miles between Edinburgh and
+Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and
+Aberdeen." And Stevenson understates the case. There are differences of
+speech in America, but at the most they remain so slight that, after
+all, the resident in one section will rather pride himself on his
+acuteness in recognising the intonation of the stranger as being that of
+some other--of the South, it may be, or of New England. An educated
+Londoner has difficulty in understanding even the London cockney.
+Suffolk, Cornish, or Lancashire--these are almost foreign tongues to
+him. The American of the South has at least no difficulty in
+understanding the New Englander: the New Yorker does not have to make
+the Californian repeat each sentence that he utters.
+
+And this similarity of tongue--this universal mutual
+comprehensibility--is a fact of great importance to the nation. It must
+tend to rapidity of communication--to greater uniformity of thought--to
+much greater readiness in the people to concentrate as a nation on one
+idea or one object. How much does England not lose--there is no way of
+measuring, but the amount must be very great--by the fact that
+communication of thought is practically impossible between people who
+are neighbours? How much would it not contribute to the national
+alertness, to national efficiency, if the local dialects could be swept
+away and the peasantry and gentry of all England--nay of the British
+Isles--talk together easily in one tongue? It is impossible not to
+believe that this ease in the interchange of ideas must in itself
+contribute greatly to uniformity of thought and character in a people.
+Possessing it, it is not easy to see how the American people could have
+failed to become more homogeneous than the English.
+
+But there is a deeper reason for their homogeneousness. The American
+people is not only an English people; it is much more Anglo-Saxon than
+the English themselves. We have already seen how the essential quality
+of both peoples is an Anglo-Saxon quality--what has been called (and the
+phrase will do as well as any other) their "Particularist" instinct. The
+Angles and Saxons (with some modification in the former) were tribes of
+individual workers, sprung from the soil, rooted in it, accustomed
+always to rely on individual labour and individual impulse rather than
+on the initiative, the protection, or the assistance of the State or the
+community. The constitutional history of England is little more than the
+story of the steps by which the Anglo-Saxon, by the strength which this
+quality gave him, came to dominate the other races which invaded or
+settled in Britain and finally worked his way up to and through the
+Norman crust which, as it were, overlay the country.
+
+In England many institutions are of course Norman. An hereditary
+aristocracy, the laws of primogeniture and entail--these are Norman. By
+the help of them the Norman hoped to perpetuate his authority over the
+Saxon herd; and failed. Magna Charta, Cromwell, the Roundheads, the
+Puritans, the spirit of nonconformity, most of the limitations of the
+power of the Throne, the industrial and commercial greatness of
+Britain--these things are Anglo-Saxon. The American colonists (however
+many individuals of Norman blood were among them) were Anglo-Saxon; they
+came from the Anglo-Saxon body of the people and carried with them the
+Anglo-Saxon spirit. They did not reproduce in their new environment an
+hereditary aristocracy, a law of primogeniture or of entail. It is
+probable that no single English colony to-day, if suddenly cut loose
+from the Empire and left to fashion its form of society anew, would
+reproduce any one of these things. In the United States the Anglo-Saxon
+spirit went to work without Norman assistance or (as we choose to view
+it) Norman encumbrances. The Anglo-Saxon spirit is still working in
+England--never perhaps has its operation been more powerfully visible
+than in the trend of thought of the last few years. It is working also
+in the United States; but, because it there works independently of
+Norman traditions, it works faster.
+
+In many things--in almost everything, as we shall see--the two peoples
+are progressing along precisely the same path, a path other than that
+which other nations are treading. In many things--in almost
+everything--the United States moves the more rapidly. It seems at first
+a contradiction in terms to say that the Americans are an English people
+and then to show that in many individual matters the English people is
+approximating to American models. It is in truth no contradiction; and
+the explanation is obvious. Both are impelled by the same spirit, the
+same motives, the same ambitions; but in England that spirit, those
+motives and ambitions work against greater resistance.
+
+What looks at first like a peculiar departure on the part of the
+American people will again and again, on investigation, be found to be
+only the English spirit shooting ahead faster than it can advance in
+England. When, in a particular matter, it appears as if England was
+coming to conform to American precedent, it is, in truth only that,
+having given the impulse to America, she herself is following with less
+speed than the younger runner, but with such speed as she can.
+
+If we bear this fact in mind we shall see how it is illustrated, borne
+out, supported by a score of things that it falls in our way to notice;
+as it is by many hundred things that lie outside our present province.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shall have occasion to notice hereafter how in the past the American
+disposition to dislike England has been fed by the headlong and
+superficial criticism of American affairs by English "literary"
+visitors; and it is unfortunate that the latest[88:1] English visitor to
+write on the United States has hurt American susceptibilities almost as
+keenly as any of his predecessors. With all its brilliant qualities, few
+more superficial "studies" of American affairs have been given to the
+world than that of Mr. H. G. Wells.
+
+Mr. Wells, by his own account, went about the country confronting all
+comers with the questions, "What are you going to make of your future?"
+. . . "What is the American Utopia, how much Will is there shaping to
+attain it?" This, he says, was the conundrum to find an answer to which
+he crossed the Atlantic, and he is much depressed because he failed in
+his search. "When one talks to an American of his national purpose he
+seems a little at a loss"; and when he comes to sum up his conclusions:
+"What seems to me the most significant and pregnant thing of all is
+. . . best indicated by saying that the typical American has no 'sense
+of the State.'"[89:1]
+
+Has Mr. Wells ever gone about England asking Englishmen the same
+question: "What are you going to make of your future?" How much less "at
+a loss" does he anticipate that he would find them? Mr. Wells apparently
+expected to find every American with a card in his vest pocket
+containing a complete scheme of an American Utopia. He was disappointed
+because the government at Washington was not inviting bids for roofing
+in the country and laying the portion north of Mason and Dixon's Line
+with hot-water pipes.
+
+The quality which Mr. Wells--seeing only its individual manifestations,
+quite baffled and unable to look beyond the individuals to any vision of
+the people as a whole (he travelled over a ludicrously small portion of
+the country)--sums up as a "lack of sense of the State" is in truth the
+cardinal quality which has made the greatness of the United States--and
+of England. It is precisely because the peoples rely on individual
+effort and not on the State that they have become greater than all
+other peoples. That is their peculiar political excellence--that they
+are not for ever framing schemes for a paternal all-embracing State, but
+are content to work each in his own sphere, asserting his own
+independence and individuality, from the things as they are, little by
+little towards the things as they ought to be.
+
+If Mr. Wells had prevailed on any typical American to sit down and write
+what, as he understood it, his people were working to accomplish, the
+latter would have written something like this:
+
+"We have got the basis of a form of government under which, when
+perfected, the individual will have larger liberty and better
+opportunity to assert himself than he has ever had in any country since
+organised states have existed. We have a people which enjoys to-day more
+of the material comforts of life than any other people on earth, and the
+chief political problem with which we are wrestling to-day is to see
+that that enjoyment is confirmed to them in perpetuity--not taken from
+them or hampered or limited by any power of an oppressive capitalism. We
+are spending more money, more energy, more earnest thought on the study
+of education as a science or art and on the endowment of educational
+establishments than any other people; as a result we hope that the next
+generation of Americans, besides being the most materially blessed, will
+be the most educated and intelligent of peoples. We are doing all we can
+to weed out dishonesty from our commercial dealings. In the period of
+our growth there was necessarily some laxity in our business ethics, but
+we are doing the best we know how to improve that, and we believe that
+on the whole our methods of doing business are calculated to produce
+more honest men than those in vogue in other countries. What we hope to
+make of our future therefore is to produce a nation of individuals
+freer, better off, and more honest than the world has yet seen. When
+that people comes it can manage its own government."
+
+Not only are these, I fear, larger national aims than the average
+Englishman dares to propose to himself, but they are, I venture to say,
+much more definitely formulated in the "typical American's" mind. If Mr.
+Wells desires to find a people which considers it the duty of good
+citizenship to go about to fashion first the roofs and walls, rafters,
+cornices, and chimney-pots of a governmental structure, relying on the
+State afterwards to legislate comfort and culture and virtue into the
+people, he visited the wrong quarter of the globe. In the Latin races he
+will find the "sense of the State" luxuriantly developed.
+
+Mr. Wells appears infinitely distressed by his failure to find any
+unified national feeling in the American people--by "the chaotic
+condition of the American Will"--by "the dispersal of power"--by the
+fact that "Americans knew of America mainly as the Flag." Which is a
+most curiously complete demonstration of the inadequacy of his judgment.
+
+If Mr. Wells had seen the United States twenty-five years ago, ten years
+ago, and five years ago, before his present visit, the one thing that
+would have most impressed him would have been the amazing growth of the
+sense of national unity. Mr. Wells looks superficially upon the country
+as it is to-day and finds society more chaotic, distances larger,
+sentiment less crystallised than--_mirabile!_--in the older countries of
+Europe, and is plunged in despair. Had he had any knowledge of
+America's past conditions by which to measure the momentary phase in
+which he found the people, he would have known that exactly that thing
+of which he most deplores the absence is the thing which, in the last
+thirty years, has grown with more wonderful rapidity than anything else
+in all this country of wonderful growths.
+
+The mere fact of this development of national feeling is a thing which
+will necessarily call for attention as we go on; for the present it is
+enough to say that Mr. Wells could hardly have exposed more calamitously
+the superficial and cursory quality of his "study" of the country.[92:1]
+
+As a man may not be able to see the forest because of the trees, so Mr.
+Wells is as one who has stood by a great river's bank for a few minutes
+and has not seen the river for the flash of the ripples in the sun, the
+swirl of an eddy here and there, the flotsam swinging by on the current;
+and he has gone away and prattled of the ripples and the eddy and the
+floating branch. The great flow of the river down below does not expose
+itself to the vision of three minutes. He only comes to understand it
+who lives by the river for awhile, sits down by it and studies it--sees
+it in flood and drought--swims in it, bathes in it. Then he will forget
+the ripples and the branches and will come to know something of the
+steadiness of purpose, the depth and strength of it, its unity and its
+power. Nothing but a little more experience would enable Mr. Wells to
+see the national feeling of the American people.
+
+Literature contains few pictures more delightful than that of Mr. Wells,
+drawn by himself, standing with Mr. Putnam--Herbert Putnam of all
+people!--in the Congressional Library at Washington and saying (let me
+quote): "'With all this,' I asked him 'why doesn't the place _think_?'
+He seemed, discreetly, to consider it did."
+
+Mr. Putnam is fortunately always discreet. Otherwise it would be
+pleasant to know what _he_ thought--of his questioner.
+
+     _Note._--On the subject of the homogeneousness of the American
+     people, see Appendix A.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[60:1] As a statement of this nature is always liable to be challenged
+let me say that it is based on the opinions expressed in conversation by
+the correspondents of English papers who came to America at that time in
+an endeavour to reach Cuba. They certainly did not anticipate that the
+American fleet would be able to stand against the Spanish. And, lest
+American readers should be in danger of taking offence at this, let it
+be remembered with how much apprehension the arrival of Admiral
+Cervera's ships was awaited along the eastern coast and how cheaply
+excellent seaside houses were to be acquired that year. Events have
+moved so rapidly since then (above all has the position of the United
+States in the world changed so much) that it is not easy now to conjure
+up the circumstances and sentiments of those days. If Americans
+generally erred as widely as they did in their estimate of the Spanish
+sea-power as compared with their own, it is not surprising that
+Englishmen erred perhaps a little more.
+
+[68:1] _History of the United States_, by James Ford Rhodes, vol. vi.
+
+[88:1] Mr. Crosland has written since; but he has fortunately not been
+taken sufficiently seriously by the American people even to cause them
+annoyance.
+
+[89:1] _The Future in America_, by H. G. Wells, 1906.
+
+[92:1] The futility of this kind of impressionist criticism is well
+illustrated by the fact that almost simultaneously with the appearance
+of Mr. Wells' book, a distinguished Canadian (Mr. Wilfred Campbell) was
+recording his impressions of a visit to England and said: "The people of
+Britain leave national and social affairs too much in the hands of such
+men [professional politicians]. There is a sad lack of the education of
+the people in the direction of a common patriotism. . . . She must get
+back to the sane idea that it is only as a nation and through the
+national ideal that she can help humanity. . . . She has great men in
+all walks of life; she has still the highest-toned Press in the world;
+she has . . . the most ideal legislature, she has great universities and
+churches with the finest and greatest Christian ideals. But none of
+these influences are used, as they should be, for the general national
+good. They work separately, or too much as individuals. It is only the
+leavening of these institutions with a large spirit of the national
+destiny that will lift Britain . . . out of its present material
+slough." (_The Outlook_, November 17, 1906.) These words are almost a
+paraphrase of Mr. Wells' indictment of the United States.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS
+
+     America's Bigness--A New Atlantis--The Effect of Expansion
+     on a People--A Family Estranged--Parsnips--An American
+     Woman in England--An Englishman in America--International
+     Caricatures--Shibboleths: dropped H's and a "twang"--Matthew
+     Arnold's Clothes--The Honourable S---- B----.
+
+
+"John Bull with plenty of elbow-room" was the phrase. It does not
+necessarily follow that the widest lands breed the finest people; and
+there is worthless territory enough in the United States to cut up into
+two or three Englands. Yet no patriotic American would wish one rod,
+pole, or perch of it away, whether of the Bad Lands, the Florida Swamps,
+the Alkali Plains of the Southwest, or the most sterile and inaccessible
+regions of the Rockies. If of no other use, each, merely as an
+instrument of discipline, has contributed something to the hardening of
+the fibre of the people; and good and bad together the domain of the
+United States is very large. Englishmen are aware of the fact, merely as
+a fact; but they seldom seem to appreciate its full significance.
+
+Let us consider for a minute what would be the effect on the British
+people if it suddenly came into possession of such an estate. We are not
+talking now of distant colonies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South
+Africa--these may be equal together to more than another United States,
+and they are working out their own destiny. The inhabitants of each are
+a band of British men and women just as were the early inhabitants of
+the United States and as, essentially, the people of the United States
+still remain to-day. Each of those bands will follow its own path and
+work its own miracles--whether greater than that which the people of the
+United States has wrought or not, only later generations will know. Each
+of these, though British still and always, is launched on its individual
+career; and it is not of them that we are speaking now, but of the
+Englishmen who remain at home, of the present-day population of the
+British Isles.
+
+What would be the result if suddenly the limits of the British Isles
+were to be miraculously expanded? What would happen if the floor of the
+ocean heaved itself up and Great Britain awoke to find the coast of
+Cornwall and Wales mysteriously reaching westward, the Irish Sea no more
+than a Hudson River which barely kept the shores of Lancashire and
+Cumberland from touching Ireland,--an Ireland of which the western
+coast--the coast of Munster and Connaught--was prolonged a thousand
+leagues towards the setting sun; while the west coast of the north of
+Scotland, Ross and Sutherland, had absorbed the Hebrides and stretched
+unbroken into two thousand miles of plain and mountain range--Britain no
+longer but Atlantis come again and all British soil? It was to nothing
+less miraculous that the thirteen original States fell heir. And what
+would be the effect on the British race?
+
+Coal and iron, silver and gold, rivers full of fish, forest and prairie
+teeming with game, pasture for millions of cattle, wheat land and corn
+land, cotton land and orchard for any man who chose to take them;--the
+wretches struggling and stifling in the London slums having nothing to
+do but grasp axe and rifle and go out to subdue the wilderness;--farms,
+not by the half-acre, but by the hundred acres for every one of the
+unemployed. Is it possible to doubt that the race would be strengthened,
+not materially only, but in its moral qualities,--that Englishmen in
+another generation would not only be a wealthier and a more powerful
+people but a healthier, lustier, nobler? How then are we to suppose that
+just such a change, such an uplifting, has not come about in that other
+British people to whom all this has happened, who came into their
+wonderful birthright four generations ago and for a century and a
+quarter have been fashioning it to their will and being fashioned by it
+after the will of Another? By what process of logic, English reader, are
+you going to convince yourself that this race--your own with larger
+opportunities--is not the finer race of the two?
+
+I have not, be it observed, expressed the opinion that the American
+national character is finer than the English; only that it is finer than
+the European commonly supposes. Nor am I expressing such an opinion now
+but only setting forth certain elementary considerations for the
+reader's judgment. When the European sees in the individual American, or
+in a dozen individual Americans, certain peculiarities, inelegancies,
+and sometimes even impertinences--call them what you will,--he is too
+prone to think that these are the essentials of the American character.
+The essentials of the American character are the essentials of the
+English character--with elbow-room. "While the outlook of the New
+Yorker is wider than ours," says Mr. Archer, "his standpoint is the
+same." In that elbow-room, with that wider outlook, it is likely that
+new offshoots from the character will have developed--excrescences, not
+perhaps in themselves always lovely--but if we remember what the trunk
+is from which they spring, or what it was, we shall probably think
+better, or less, of those excrescences, while remembering also the
+likelihood that in the larger room and richer soil the trunk itself may
+also have expanded and strengthened and solidified.
+
+The English reader might decide for himself what justification there is
+for supposing that the character of that offset from the British stock
+which, a century and a quarter ago, was put in possession of this
+magnificent estate should have deteriorated rather than improved as
+compared with the character of that portion of the stock which remained
+rooted in the old soil hemmed in between the ancient boundaries.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There have been, of course, many other influences at work in the
+moulding of the American character, besides the mere vastness of his
+continent; but the fact remains that this has been immensely the most
+powerful of all the factors. English originally, the American is still
+English in his essentials, modified chiefly by the circumstances of his
+material environment, the magnificence of his estate, the width of his
+horizons, the disciplining of his nature by the Titanic struggle with
+the physical conditions of the wilderness and the necessary development
+of those qualities of resourcefulness, buoyancy, and self-reliance which
+the exigencies of that struggle have demanded. Moreover, what is almost
+the most important item of all, his entire national life has been lived,
+and that struggle conducted, in practical isolation from all contact
+with other peoples. Immigrants, indeed, from all of them, the United
+States has constantly been receiving; but as a nation the American
+people has been singularly segregated from the rest of the earth,
+blessedly free from friction with, and dependence on, other countries.
+As we have seen, it has had no friction with any Power except Great
+Britain; and with Great Britain itself so little that Englishmen hardly
+recall that it has occurred.
+
+It may be worth while to stop one minute to rehearse and to re-enforce
+the points which so far it has been my aim to make.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For their own sakes, anything like conflict between the two nations is
+not to be dreamed of; but, for the world's sake, an intimate alliance
+between them in the cause of peace would be the most blessed conceivable
+thing. There is every justification for such an alliance, not merely in
+the incalculable benefits that would result, but in the original kinship
+of the peoples, the permanent and fundamental sympathy of their natures,
+and their community of ambitions and ways of thought. Unfortunately
+these reasons for union have been obscured by a century of aloofness, so
+that to-day neither people fully understands the other and they look,
+one at the other, from widely different standpoints. By reason chiefly
+of their isolation, in which they have had little contact with other
+peoples, the Americans have come to think of Great Britain as little
+less foreign (and by the accidents of their history as even more
+hostile) than any other Power. Still acknowledging as an historical
+fact the original kinship, they, like many a son who has gone out into
+the world and prospered exceedingly, take pleasure chiefly in
+contemplating how far they have travelled since they struck out for
+themselves and how many characteristics they have developed which were
+not part of the inheritance from the old stock. Dwelling on these they
+have become blind to the essential family likeness to that old stock
+which still remains their dominant trait. Moreover, seeing how during
+all these years the old folk have let them go their own way, seemingly
+indifferent to their future, at times, intentionally or not, making that
+future none the easier of accomplishment, they have come to nurse a
+resentment against those at home and will not believe that the family
+still bears them an affectionate good-will quite other than it feels for
+even the best-liked of the friends who are not of the same descent.
+
+On England's part, she saw the younger ones go out into the world with
+regret, strove to restrain them unwisely, obstinately, unfairly--and
+failed. Since then she has been very busy, supremely occupied with her
+own affairs. The young ones who had gone out into the world in, as
+seemed to her, such headstrong fashion, for all that she knows now that
+she was wrong, have been doing well, and she has always been glad to
+hear it, but--well, they were a long way off. At times she has thought
+that the young ones were somewhat too pushing--too anxious to get on
+regardless of her or others' welfare,--and half-heartedly (not all
+unintentionally, but certainly with no thought of alienating the
+affection of the others) she has interfered or passively stood in the
+young folk's way. At last the day came when she was horrified to find
+that the younger branch--very prosperous and independent now--had not
+only ceased to regard her as a mother but had come almost to the point
+of holding her as an enemy. It was at first incredible and she strove as
+best she could to put matters right and to explain how foreign to her
+wishes it was and how unnatural it seemed to her that there should be
+any approach to ill-feeling between them. But she does not convince the
+other, partly because she herself has in her turn grown out of touch
+with that other's ideas. At intervals she has met members of the younger
+branch who have come home to visit and she has discovered all sorts of
+new tricks of manner, new ways of speech, new points of view that they
+have picked up in their new surroundings, and, like the members of the
+younger branch themselves, she sees more of these little things than she
+does of the character that is behind them. Her vision of the family
+likeness is blurred by the intrusion of provoking little points of
+difference. She sees the mannerisms, but the strength of the qualities
+of which they are manifestations escapes her.
+
+So it comes about that the two are at cross purposes. "We may call this
+country Daughter," wrote G. W. Steevens, "she does not call us Mother."
+The elder sincerely desires the affection of the younger--sincerely
+feels affection herself; but is hampered in making the other realise her
+sincerity by a constant desire to criticise those little foreign ways
+that the other has acquired. Just so does a parent obscure her love for
+a son by deploring the strange manners which he picks up at school; just
+so is she blinded to his real qualities as a man, because he will insist
+on giving his time to messing about with machinery instead of settling
+down properly to study for the Church.
+
+Burke (was it not?) spoke of his love for Ireland as "dearer than could
+be justified to reason." Englishmen might well have difficulty in
+justifying to their reason their affection for America; for to hear an
+Englishman speak of American peculiarities and eccentricities, it would
+often seem that to love such men would be pure unreason. But these
+criticisms are no true index to the British national feeling for the
+Americans as a people. Does a brother not love his sister because he
+says rude things about her little failings? Americans hear the
+criticisms and, their own hearts being alienated from Great Britain,
+cannot believe that Britishers have any affection for them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am well aware that I make--and can make--no general statement from
+which many readers, both in England and America, will not dissent.
+Englishmen will arise to say that they do not love America; and
+Americans--many Americans--will vow with their hands on their hearts
+that they have the greatest affection for Great Britain. Vast numbers of
+Americans will protest against being called a homogeneous people, and a
+vast number more against the accusation of being still essentially
+English; the fact being that it is no easier now than it was in the days
+of Burke (I am sure of my author this time) to "draw up an indictment
+against a whole people." A composite photograph is commonly only an
+indifferent likeness of any of the individuals--least of all will the
+individual be likely to recognise it as a portrait of himself. But the
+type-character will stand out clearly--especially to the eyes of others
+not of the type. Most of the notions of Englishmen about Americans are
+drawn from the casual contact with individual Americans in England
+(where from contrast with their surroundings the little peculiarities
+stand out most conspicuously) or from the hasty "impressions" of
+visitors who have looked only on the surface--and but a small portion of
+that. Even, I am aware, after a lifetime spent in studying the two
+peoples, in pondering on their likenesses and unlikenesses and striving
+to measure the feeling of each for the other, there is always danger of
+talking what I will ask to be permitted to call "parsnips."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I first went to the United States I carried with me a commission
+from certain highly reputable English papers to incorporate my
+"impressions" in occasional letters. Among the earliest facts of any
+moment which I was enabled to communicate to English readers was that
+the middle classes in America (I was careful to explain what the "middle
+classes" were in a country where none existed)--that the middle classes,
+I say, lived almost entirely on parsnips. I had not arrived at this
+important ethnological fact with any undue haste. I had already lived in
+the United States for some three months, half of which time had been
+spent in New York hotels and boarding houses and half in Northern New
+York and rural New England, where, staying at farms or at the houses of
+families in the smaller towns to which I bore letters of introduction, I
+flattered myself that I had probed deep--Oh, ever so deep!--below the
+surface and had come to understand the people as they lived in their own
+homes. And my ripened judgment was that the bulk of the well-to-do
+people of the country supported life chiefly by consumption of parsnips.
+
+Some fifteen years later I was at supper at the Century Club in New
+York and the small party at our table as we discussed the scalloped
+oysters (which are one of the pillars of the Century) included a
+well-known American author and journalist and an even better known and
+much-loved artist. But why should I not mention their names? They were
+Montgomery Schuyler and John La Farge. Both had been to Europe that
+year--La Farge to pay his first visit to Italy, while Schuyler, whether
+with or without La Farge I forget, had made a somewhat extensive trip
+through rural England in, I think, a dog-cart. The conversation ran
+chiefly on their experiences and suddenly Schuyler turned to me with:
+"Here, you Englishman, why do the middle classes of England live chiefly
+on parsnips?"
+
+The thing is incredible--except that it happened. Schuyler, no less than
+I fifteen years before, spoke in the fulness of conviction arising from
+what he, no less than I, believed to have been wide and adequate
+experience. The memory of that experience has made me tolerant of the
+cocksure generalisations with which the Englishman who has visited
+America, or the American who has been in England, for a few months
+delights to regale his compatriots on his return. Quite recently a
+charming American woman who is good enough to count me among her
+friends, was in London for the first time in her life. She is perhaps as
+typical a representative of Western American womanhood--distinctively
+Western--as could be found; very good to look upon, warm-hearted,
+fearless and earnest in her truth-loving, straightforward life. But in
+voice, in manner, and in frankness of speech she is peculiarly and
+essentially Western. She loved England and English people, so she told
+me at the Carlton on the eve of her return to America,--just loved them,
+but English women (and I can see her wrinkling her eyebrows at me to
+give emphasis to what she said) were so _dreadfully_ outspoken: they did
+say such _awful_ things! I thought I knew the one Englishwoman from
+whose conversation she had derived this idea and remembering my own
+parsnips, I forgave her. She has, since her return, I doubt not, dwelt
+often to her friends on this amazing frankness of speech in
+Englishwomen. And if she only knew what twenty Englishwomen thought of
+her outspokenness!
+
+Not long ago I heard an eminent member of the medical profession in
+London, who had just returned from a trip to Canada and the United
+States with representatives of the British Medical Association, telling
+a ring of interested listeners all about the politics, geography,
+manners, and customs of the people of America. Among other things he
+explained that in America there was no such thing known as a _table d'
+hôte_; all your meals at hotels and restaurants had to be ordered _à la
+carte_. "I should have thought," he said, "that a good _table d' hôte_
+at an hotel in New York and other towns would pay. It would be a
+novelty." It may be well to explain to English readers who do not know
+America, that fifteen years ago a meal _à la carte_ was, and over a
+large part of the country still is, practically unknown in the United
+States. The system of buying one's board and lodging in installments is
+known in America as "the European plan."
+
+If it would not be too long a digression, I would explain how this is a
+cardinal principle of the American business mind. The disposition of
+every American is to take over a whole contract _en bloc_, which in
+England, where every man is a specialist, would be split into twenty
+different transactions. The American thinks in round numbers: "What will
+the whole thing come to?" he asks; while the Englishman wants to know
+the items. This habit permeates American life in every department. It is
+labour-saving. Few things amuse or irritate the American visitor to
+England more than the having to pay individually for a number of small
+conveniences which at home he is accustomed to have "thrown in"; and the
+first time when he is presented with an English hotel bill (I am not
+speaking of the modern semi-American hotels in London) with its infinite
+list of items, is an experience that he never forgets.
+
+All of which is only to explain that the distinguished physician, when
+he spoke of the absence of _tables d'hôte_ in America, was talking
+parsnips. His experience had been limited to a few hotels and
+restaurants in New York and one or two other large towns.
+
+If only it were possible to catch in some great "receiver" or "coherer,"
+or some similar instrument, all the things that were said in London in
+the course of twenty-four hours about the United States by people who
+had been there, and all the things that were said in New York in the
+same period about England by people of equal experience, and set them
+down side by side, it would make entertaining reading. The wonder is,
+not that we misunderstand each other as much as we do, but that somehow
+we escape a vast mutual, international contempt.
+
+Several times in the course of my residence in the United States I have
+had said to me: "What! Are you an Englishman? But you don't drop your
+H's!"
+
+Which is ridiculous, is it not, English reader? But before you smile at
+it, permit me to explain that it is no whit worse than when you
+say:--"What! Are you an American? But you don't speak with an accent!"
+Or possibly you call it a "twang" or you say "speak through your nose."
+
+You may be dining, English reader, at, let us say, the Carlton or Savoy
+when a party of Americans comes into the room--Americans of the kind
+that every one knows for Americans as soon as he sees or hears them. The
+women are admirably dressed--perhaps a shade too admirably--and the
+costumes of the men irreproachable. But there is that something of
+manner, of walk, of voice which draws all eyes to them as they advance
+to their table, and the room is hushed as they arrange their seats.
+"Those horrid Americans!" says one of your party and no one protests.
+But at the next table to you there is seated another party of delightful
+people--low-voiced, well-mannered, excellently bred in every tone and
+movement. You wonder dimly if you have not met them somewhere. At all
+events you would very much like to meet them. They are infinitely more
+distressed than you at the behaviour of the American party which has
+just come in--because they are Americans also. And I may add that they
+will not be in the least flattered, if you should be lucky enough to
+meet them, by your telling them that you "never would have thought it."
+
+Perhaps, English reader, you have lived long enough in some other
+country than England to have learned what a loathsome thing the
+travelling Englishman often appears. Possibly you have been privileged
+to hear the frank and unofficial opinion of some native of that
+country--an opinion not intended for your ears, but addressed to a
+compatriot of the speaker--of English people in general, based upon his
+experience of those whom he has seen. Such an experience is quite
+illuminating. I know few things more offensive than the behaviour of a
+certain class of German when he is in Paris. The noisy, nasal American
+at the Carlton or Savoy is no more representative of America than the
+loud-voiced, check-suited Englishman at Delmonico's or the
+Waldorf-Astoria is the man by whom you wish your nation to be judged. It
+may be a purposeful provision of a higher Power that the people of all
+countries should appear unprepossessing when they are abroad, for the
+fostering in each nation of the spirit of patriotism; for why should any
+of us be patriots if all the foreigners who came to our shores were as
+inoffensive as ourselves? The truth is that those who are inoffensive
+pass unnoticed. It is the occasional caricature--the parody--of the
+national type that catches our eye; and on him we too often base our
+judgment of a whole people.
+
+Those Englishmen who only England know are inclined to think that the
+check-suited fellow countryman is a creation of the French and German
+comic press. Those who have lived outside of England for some
+considerable number of years have learned better. The late Senator Hoar
+in his _Autobiography of Seventy Years_ has some very shrewd remarks
+about Matthew Arnold. The Senator had a cordial regard for Matthew
+Arnold--"a huge liking" he calls his feeling,--and he has this
+delightful sentence in regard to him: "I do not mean to say that his
+three lectures on translating Homer are the greatest literary work of
+our time. But I think, on the whole, that I should rather have the pair
+of intellectual eyes which can see Homer as he saw him, than any other
+mental quality I can think of." "But"--and mark this--"Mr. Arnold has
+never seemed to me fortunate in his judgment about Americans . . . The
+trouble with Mr. Arnold is that he never travelled in the United States
+when on this side of the Atlantic. . . . He visited a great City or two,
+but never made himself acquainted with the American people. He never
+knew the sources of our power or the spirit of our people."
+
+Senator Hoar, with a generous nature made thrice generous by the
+mellowness of years, speaking of the man he hugely liked, tempered the
+truth to a more than paternal mildness. But it is the truth. Matthew
+Arnold, to put it bluntly, was wrong-headed in his judgment of America
+and Americans to a degree which one living long in the United States
+only comes slowly and reluctantly to understand. And if he so erred, how
+shall all the lesser teachers from whom England gets its knowledge of
+America keep straight?
+
+But what the American people really objected to in Matthew Arnold was
+not any blundering things that he said of them, but the fact that he
+wore on inappropriate occasions in New York a brown checked suit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And across all the gulf of more than twenty years there looms up in my
+memory--"looms like some Homer-rock or Troy-tree"--the figure of the
+Hon. S----y B----l flaunting his mustard coloured suit, gridironed with
+a four-inch check, across three thousand miles of continent, to the
+delight of cities, filling prairies with wonder and moving the Rocky
+Mountains to undisguised mirth. And how could we others explain that he,
+with his undeniably John-Bull-like breadth of shoulder and ruddy face,
+was not a fair sample of the British aristocrat? Was he not an
+Honourable and the son of a Baron and the "real thing" in every way? I
+have no doubt that there still live in the prairie towns of North Dakota
+and in the recesses of the mountains of Montana hundreds of men and
+women, grown old now, who through all the mists of the years still
+remember that lamentable figure; and to them, though they may have seen
+and barely noticed ten thousand Englishmen since, the typical Britisher
+still remains the Hon. S----y B----l.
+
+It is not possible to say how far the influence of one man may extend. I
+verily believe that twenty years ago those clothes of Matthew Arnold
+stood for more in America's estimate of England than the _Alabama_
+incident. Ex-President Cleveland, as we have seen, speaks of the
+"sublime patriotism and devotion to their nation's honour" of the "plain
+people of the land" who backed him up when war with Great Britain seemed
+to be so near. But I wonder in how many breasts the desire for war was
+inspired not by patriotism but by memory of the Hon. S----y B----l. And
+when the Englishman thinks of the possibility of war with the United
+States, with whom is it that he pictures himself as fighting? Some one
+individual American, whom he has seen in London, drunk perhaps,
+certainly noisy and offensive. Such a one stands in the mind of many an
+Englishman who has not travelled as the type of the whole people of the
+United States.
+
+If it were possible for the two peoples to come to know each other as
+they really are--if one half of the population of each country could for
+a season change places with one half of the other, so that all the
+individuals of both nations would be acquainted with the ways and
+thoughts of the other, not as the comic artists draw them, nor as they
+are when they are abroad, but as they live their daily lives at
+home--then indeed would all thought of difference between the two
+disappear, and war between them be as impossible as war between Surrey
+and Kent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE AMERICAN ATTITUDE TOWARDS WOMEN
+
+     The Isolation of the United States--American Ignorance of the
+     World--Sensitiveness to Criticism--Exaggeration of their Own
+     Virtues--The Myth of American Chivalrousness--Whence it
+     Originated--The Climatic Myth--International Marriages--
+     English Manners and American--The View of Womanhood in
+     Youth--Co-education of the Sexes--Conjugal Morality--The
+     Artistic Sense in American Women--Two Stenographers--An
+     Incident of Camp-Life--"Molly-be-damned"--A Nice Way of
+     Travelling--How do they do it?--Women in Public Life--The
+     Conditions which Co-operate--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit again.
+
+
+It will be roughly true to say that the Englishman's misunderstanding of
+America is generally the result of misinformation--of "parsnips"--of
+having had reported to him things which are superficial and untrue;
+whereas the American's misunderstanding of England is chiefly the result
+of his absorption in his own affairs and lack of a standard of
+comparison. The Americans as a people have been until recently, and
+still are in only a moderately less degree, peculiarly ignorant of other
+peoples and of the ways of the world.
+
+This has been unfortunate, so far as their judgment of England is
+concerned, in two ways,--first, as has already been said, because they
+have had no opportunity of measuring Great Britain against other
+nations, so that one and all are equally foreign, and second and more
+positively, in the general misconception in the American mind as to the
+character and aims of the British Empire and the temper of British rule.
+From the same authorities, the popular histories and school manuals, as
+supplied the American people for so long with their ideas of the conduct
+of the British troops in the Revolutionary War, they also learned of
+India and the British; and the one fact which every American, twenty
+years ago, knew about British India was that the English blew Sepoys
+from the mouths of cannon. Every American youth saw in his school
+history a picture of the thing being done. It helped to point the moral
+of British brutalities in the War of Independence and it was beaten into
+the plastic young minds until an impression was made which was never
+effaced. Of late years not a few Americans have arisen to tell the
+people something of the truth about British rule in India--of its
+uprightness, its beneficence, its tolerance,--but it will be a
+generation yet before the people as a whole has any approximate
+conception of the facts.
+
+It was in no way to the discredit of the American people--and enormously
+to their advantage--that they were for so long ignorant of the world.
+How should they have been otherwise when separated from that world by
+three thousand miles of ocean? They had, moreover, in the problems
+connected with the establishment of their own government, and the
+expansion of that government across the continent, enough to occupy
+their thoughts and energies. For a century the people lived
+self-concentrated, introspective, their minds filled only with thoughts
+of themselves. If foreign affairs were discussed at all it was in
+curiously childlike and impracticable terms. The nation grew up a
+nation of provincials (there is no other word for it), with a
+provincialism which was somewhat modified, but still provincial, in the
+cities of the Atlantic coast, and which, after all, had a dignity of its
+own from the mere fact that it was continent-wide.
+
+The Spanish-American War brought the people suddenly into contact with
+the things of Europe and widened their horizon. The war itself was only
+an accident; for the growth of American commerce, the increase of
+wealth, the uncontainable expansive force of their industrial energy,
+must have compelled a departure from the old isolation under any
+circumstances. The quarrel with Spain did but furnish, as it were, a
+definite taking-off place for the leap which had to be made.[113:1]
+Since then, foreign politics and foreign affairs have acquired a new
+interest for Americans. They are no longer topics entirely alien from
+their every-day life and thoughts. It would still be absurd to pretend
+that the affairs of Europe (or for that matter of Asia) have anything
+like the interest for Americans that they have for Europeans, or that
+the educated American is not as a rule still seriously uninformed on
+many matters (all except the bare bones of facts and dates) of
+geography, of ethnology, of world-politics which are elementary matters
+to the Englishman of corresponding education;[113:2] but with their
+_début_ as a World-Power--above all with the acquisition of their
+colonial dependencies--Americans have become (I use the phrase in all
+courtesy) immensely more intelligent in their outlook on the affairs of
+the world. With a longer experience of the difficulties of colonial
+government, they will also come to appreciate more nearly at its true
+value the work which Great Britain has done for humanity.
+
+Americans may retort that their knowledge of Europe was at least no
+scantier than the Englishman's knowledge of America, and the mistakes of
+travelling Englishmen in regard to the size, the character, and the
+constitution of the country have been a fruitful source of American
+witticism. But why should Englishmen know anything of the United
+States? The affairs of the United States were, after all, however big,
+the affairs of the United States and not of any other part of the rest
+of the world; while the affairs of Europe were the affairs of all the
+world outside of the United States. Undoubtedly the American could
+fairly offset the Englishman's ignorance of America against the
+American's ignorance of England; but what has never failed to strike an
+Englishman is the American's ignorance of other parts of the world,
+which might be regarded as common to both. They were not common to both;
+for, as has been said, since the beginning of her history, which has
+stretched over some centuries, England has been constantly mixed up with
+the affairs, not only of Europe, but of the remoter parts of the earth,
+while the United States for the single century of her history has lived
+insulated and almost solely intent on her own affairs. So though the
+American has no adequate retort against the Englishman for his
+ignorance, he need not defend it. It has been an accident of his
+geographical situation and needs no more apology than the Rocky
+Mountains. But, like the Rocky Mountains, it is a fact which has had a
+distinct influence on his character. It is probably unavoidable that a
+people--as an individual--which lives a segregated life, with its
+thoughts turned almost wholly on itself, should come to exaggerate,
+perhaps its own weaknesses, but certainly its virtues.
+
+The boy who lives secluded from companionship, when he goes out into the
+world, will find not merely that he is diffident and sensitive about his
+own defects, real or imaginary, but that he is different from other
+people. It may take him all his life to learn--perhaps he will never
+learn--that his emotional and intellectual experiences are no prodigies
+of sentiment and phoenixes of thought, but the common experiences of
+half his fellows. It has been such a life of seclusion that the American
+people lived--though they hardly know it (and perhaps some American
+readers will resent the statement), because the mere fact of their
+seclusion has prevented them from seeing how secluded, as compared with
+other peoples, they have been. It is true that individual Americans of
+the well-to-do classes travel more (and more intelligently) than any
+other people except the English; but this, as leavening the nation, is a
+small off-set against the daily lack of mental contact with foreign
+affairs at home.
+
+But if this sheltered boy be further occasionally subjected to the
+inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world--a candid
+and outspoken elderly relative--he is likely to become, on the one hand,
+morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame,
+and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride in whatever is awarded
+praise.
+
+Both these tendencies have been acutely developed in the American
+character--an extraordinary sensitiveness to criticism by outsiders of
+certain national foibles, and a no less conspicuous belief in the heroic
+proportions of their good qualities. For surely no people has ever been
+blessed in its seclusion with such an abundance of criticism of singular
+candour. The frank brutality with which the travelling Englishman has
+made his opinions known on any peculiar trait or unusual institution
+which he has been pleased to think that he has noticed in the United
+States has been vastly more ill-mannered than anything in the manners of
+the Americans themselves on which he has animadverted so freely. The
+thing most comparable to it--most nearly as ill-mannered--is, perhaps,
+the frank brutality with which the travelling American expresses
+himself--and herself--in regard to things in Europe. In it, in fact, we
+see again another aspect of the same fundamentally English trait,--the
+insistence on the sovereignty of the individual--and Americans come by
+it legitimately. Every time that they display it they do but make
+confession of their original Anglo-Saxon descent and essentially English
+nature. The Englishman in America has, however, had some excuse for his
+readiness to criticise, in the interest, the anxiety, with which, at
+least until recent years, the Americans have invited his opinions. But
+if that has gone some way to justify his expression of those opinions,
+it has furnished no sort of excuse for the lack of tact and breeding
+which he has shown in the process. The American does not commonly wait
+for the invitation.
+
+"My! But isn't that quaint! Now in America we . . ." etc. So speaks an
+uncultivated American on seeing something that strikes him--or her--as
+novel in London, not unkindly critical, but anxious to give information
+about his country--and uninvited. But whereas the Englishman is so
+accustomed to the abuse and criticism of other peoples that the harmless
+chatter of the American ripples more or less unheeded by him, the
+American, less case-hardened in his isolation, hears the Englishman's
+bluntly worded expression of contempt, and it hurts. It does not hurt
+nearly as much now as it did twenty years ago; but the harm has largely
+been done.
+
+The harm would not be so serious but for the American sensitiveness
+bred of his seclusion,--if that is (at the risk of seeming to repeat
+myself I must again say) he knew enough of the world to know that he
+himself has precisely the same critical inclination as the Englishman
+and that it is a trait inherited from common ancestors. The Anglo-Saxon
+race acquired early in its life the conviction that it was a trifle
+better than any other section of the human kind. And it is justified.
+We--Americans and Englishmen alike--hold that we are better than any
+other people. That the root-trait has developed somewhat differently in
+the two portions of the family is an accident.
+
+The Englishman--who, when at home, has himself lived, not entirely
+secluded, but in a measure shut off from contact with other peoples--by
+continual going abroad and never-ceasing friction with his neighbours,
+by perpetual disheartenment with the perplexities of his colonial
+empire, has become less of a critic than a grumbler; and to do him
+justice he is, in speech, infinitely more contemptuous of his own
+government than he is of the American or any other. The American on the
+contrary remains cheerfully, light-heartedly, garrulously critical. He
+comes out in the world and gazes on it young-eyed, and he prattles: "My
+father is bigger than your father, and my sister has longer hair than
+yours, and my money box is larger than yours." It is neither unkindly
+meant nor, by Englishmen, very unkindly taken. It is less offensive than
+the mature, corrosive sullenness of the Englishman; but it is the same
+thing. "The French foot-guards are dressed in blue and all the marching
+regiments in white; which has a very foolish appearance. And as for blue
+regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the Artillery," says
+the footman in Moore's _Zeluco_.
+
+Similarly, when he has been praised, the lad has plumed himself unduly
+on the thing that found approval. He would not do it now; for the
+American people of to-day is, as it were, grown up; but, again, the harm
+has been done. Americans rarely make the mistake of underestimating the
+excellence of their virtues. Nor is it their fault, but that of their
+critics.
+
+The American people labours under delusions about its own character and
+qualities in several notable particulars. It exaggerates its own energy
+and spirit of enterprise, its sense of humour and its chivalrousness
+towards women. That it should be aware that it possesses each of these
+qualities in a considerable degree would do no harm, for self-esteem is
+good for a nation; but it believes that it possesses them to the
+exclusion of the rest of mankind. And that is unfortunate; for it makes
+the individual American assume the lack of these qualities in the
+English and thereby decreases his estimate of the English character. I
+am not endeavouring to reduce the American's good opinion of
+himself--only to make him think better of the Englishman by assuring him
+that in each of these particulars there is remarkably little to choose
+between them. And what excellence he has in each he owes to the fact
+that he is in the main English in origin.
+
+That Americans should think that they have a higher respect for
+womanhood than any other people is not surprising; for every other
+people thinks precisely the same thing. They would be unique among
+peoples if they thought otherwise. Frenchman, German, Italian,
+Spaniard, Greek--each and every one who has not had his eyes opened by
+travel and knowledge of the world believes, with no less sincerity of
+conviction than the American, that to him alone of all peoples has it
+been vouchsafed to know how duly to reverence the divine feminine. To
+the Englishman it seems that the German not seldom treats his wife much
+as if she were a cow; and he is sometimes distressed at the way in
+which, for all the pretty things he says to her, the Frenchman, not of
+the labouring classes only, will allow his wife to work for and wait on
+him. While the language which an Italian can, on occasions, use towards
+the partner of his joys is, to English ears, appalling. But each goes on
+serenely satisfied of his own superiority. You others, you may pay
+lip-service, yes; but deep down, in the heart of hearts--_we_ know. The
+American has as good a right to this same foible as any other; but what
+is to be noted is that whereas Englishmen laugh at the pretensions of
+Continental peoples, they have been willing to accept the chivalry of
+the American at his own valuation: the fact being that the valuation is
+not originally American, but was made by the travelling Englishmen of
+the past who communicated their appraisement to the people at home as
+well as to the American whom they complimented. Englishmen of the
+present day have accepted the belief as an inheritance and without
+question; for it was at least a generation and a half ago that the myth
+first obtained vogue, and the two facts most commonly adduced in its
+support by the English visitors who spread it were, first, that women
+could walk about the streets of New York or any other American city,
+unattended and at such hours as pleased them, without being insulted;
+and, second (absurdly enough), the provision of special "ladies'
+entrances" to hotels, which seem to have enormously impressed several
+English visitors to the United States who afterwards wrote their
+"impressions."
+
+For the first of these, it is a mere matter of local custom and police
+regulation. When it is understood that in certain streets of certain
+cities, at certain hours of the day, no women walk unattended except
+such as desire to be insulted, it is probable that other women, who go
+there in ignorance, will suffer inconvenience. Nor has the difference in
+local custom any bearing whatever on the respective morality of
+different localities. These things are arranged differently in different
+countries; that is all. Moreover, in this particular a great change has
+come over American cities in late years, nor are all American cities or
+all English by any means alike.
+
+A similar change has come in the matter of "ladies' entrances" to
+hotels. If the provision of the separate doors was a sign of peculiar
+chivalry, are we then to conclude that their disappearance shows that
+chivalry is decaying? By no means. It only means that the hotels are
+improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was
+built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly
+from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all
+hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged
+and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side,
+came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women
+should frequent that common entrance. Had a hotel constructed and
+managed on the same principles been set down in any English town, women
+would have declined to use it at all, nor would Englishmen have
+expected their womenfolk to do so. Americans avoided the difficulty by
+creating the "ladies' entrance." But it was no evidence of superior
+chivalry on the part of the people that, having devised a place not fit
+for woman's occupancy and more unpleasant than was to be found in any
+other part of the world, they provided (albeit rather inadequate) means
+by which women could avoid visiting it.
+
+Once I saw two young English girls--sweet girls, tall and graceful, with
+English roses blooming in their cheeks--come down-stairs in the evening,
+after dinner, as they might have done in any hotel to which they had
+been accustomed in Europe, to the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New
+York. It was a time of some political excitement and there are enough
+men living now who remember what the Fifth Avenue Hotel used to be at
+such seasons twenty years ago. The girls--it was probably their first
+night on American soil and they could not stand being cooped up in their
+room upstairs all the evening--made their way to the nearest seat and
+sat down clinging each to the other's hand. Around them surged perhaps a
+hundred men, chewing, spitting, smoking, slapping each other on the
+backs, and laughing coarsely. The girls gazed in wonder and with visibly
+increasing embarrassment for perhaps five minutes, before they slipped
+away, the roses in their cheeks doubly carmine and still clinging each
+to the other's hand.
+
+For the benefit of my companion (whose appearance indicated an
+Englishman) an American on an adjoining seat held forth to his friends
+on what he called the "indecency" of the conduct of the girls in coming
+down to the public hall and the "effrontery" of Englishwomen in
+general.
+
+In hotels of the modern type there is no need for women to use a
+separate entrance or to draw their skirts aside and hurry through the
+public passages. But it is sad if we must conclude that the building of
+such hotels is an evidence of dying national chivalry.
+
+Every American firmly believes that he individually, as well as each of
+his countrymen, has by heritage a truer respect for womanhood than the
+peoples of less happy countries are able to appreciate. But many
+Americans also believe that every Englishman is rough and brutal to his
+wife, who does daily all manner of menial offices for him, a belief
+which is probably akin to the climatic fiction and of Continental
+origin. In the old days, when there was no United States of America, the
+peoples of the sunny countries of Southern Europe jibed at the English
+climate; and with ample justification. English writers have never denied
+that justification--in comparison with Southern Europe; and volumes
+could be compiled of extracts from English literature, from Shakespeare
+downwards, in abuse of British fog and mist and rain. But because Nice
+and Naples are entitled to give themselves airs, under what patent do
+Chicago and Pittsburgh claim the same right? Why should Englishmen
+submit uncomplainingly when Milwaukee and Duluth arrogate to themselves
+the privilege of sneering at them which was conceded originally and
+willingly enough to Cannes? Riverside in California, Columbia in South
+Carolina, Colorado Springs or Old Point Comfort--these, and such as
+they, may boast, and no one has ground for protest; but it is time to
+"call for credentials" when Buffalo, New Haven, and St. Paul and the
+rest propose to come in in the same company. If, in the beginning of
+things, English writers had had to compare the British climate not with
+that of Europe but with the northern part of the United States, the
+references to it in English literature would constitute a hymn of
+thanksgiving.
+
+As the case stands, however, the people of all parts of the United
+States alike, in many of which mere existence is a hardship for some
+months in the year, are firmly convinced that the inhabitants of the
+British Isles are in comparison with themselves profoundly to be pitied
+for their deplorable climate; and it is probable that the prevailing
+idea as to the Englishman's habitual treatment of his wife has much the
+same origin. It is an inheritance of the Continental belief that John
+Bull sold his womenfolk at Smithfield. The frequency of international
+marriages and the continued stream of travel across the Atlantic is, of
+course, beginning to correct the popular American point of view, but
+there are still millions of honest and intelligent people in the United
+States who, when they read that an American girl is going to be married
+to an Englishman, pity her from their hearts in the belief that, for the
+sake of a coronet or some such bauble, she is selling herself to become
+a sort of domestic drudge.
+
+Occasionally also even international marriages turn out unhappily; and
+whenever that is the case the American people hear of it in luxuriant
+detail. But of the thousands of happy unions nothing is said. Not many
+years ago there was a conspicuous case, wherein an American woman, whom
+the people of the United States loved much as Englishmen loved the
+Empress Frederick or the Princess Alice, failed to find happiness with
+an English husband. Of the rights and wrongs of that case, neither I nor
+the American people in the mass know anything, but it is the generally
+accepted belief in the United States that the lady's husband was some
+degrees worse than Bluebeard. I would not venture to hazard a guess at
+the number of times that I have heard a conversation on this subject
+clinched with the argument: "Well, now, look at N---- G----!" Against
+that one instance the stories of a thousand American women who are
+living happy lives in Europe would not weigh. If they do not confess
+their unhappiness, indeed, "it is probably only because they are proud,
+as a free-born American girl should be, and would die rather than to let
+others know the humiliations to which they are subjected."
+
+"Oh, yes, you Englishmen!" an American woman will say, "your manners are
+better than our American men's and you are politer to us in little
+things. But you despise us in your hearts!" It is an argument which, in
+anything less than a lifetime, there is no way of disproving. American
+men also, of course, habitually comfort themselves with the same
+assurance, viz.,--that with less outward show of courtesy, they cherish
+in their hearts a higher ideal of womanhood than an Englishman can
+attain to. Precisely at what point this possession of a higher ideal
+begins to manifest itself in externals does not appear. After twenty
+years of intimacy in American homes I have failed to find any trace of
+it.
+
+Let me not be misunderstood! I know scores of beautiful homes in the
+United States, in many widely sundered cities, where the men are as
+courteous, as chivalrous, as devoted to their wives--and where the women
+are as sweet and tender to, and as wholly wrapped up in, their
+husbands--as in any homes on earth. As I write, the faces of men and
+women rise before me, from many thousand miles away, whom I admire and
+love as much as one can admire and love one's fellow-beings. There are
+these homes I hope and believe--there are noble men and beautiful women
+finding and making for themselves and each other the highest happiness
+of which our nature is capable--in every country. But we are not now
+speaking of the few or of the best individuals, but of averages; and
+after twenty years of opportunity for observing I have entirely failed
+to find justification for believing that there is any peculiar inward
+grace in the American which belies the difference in his outward manner.
+
+This is, of course, only an individual opinion,[126:1] which is
+necessarily subject to correction by any one who may have had superior
+opportunities for forming a trustworthy judgment. I contend, however,
+not as a matter of opinion, but as what seems to me to be a certainty,
+that whatever may be the inward feeling in regard to the other sex on
+the part of the men of either nation after they have arrived at mature
+years, the young Englishman, as he comes to manhood, possesses a much
+higher ideal of womanhood than is possessed by the young American of
+corresponding age. And I hold to this positively in spite of the fact
+that many Americans possessing a large knowledge of transatlantic
+conditions may very possibly not admit it.
+
+I rejoice to believe that to the majority of English youths of decent
+bringing up at the age at which they commonly leave the public school to
+go to the university, womanhood still is a very white and sacred thing,
+in presence of which a mere man or boy can but be bashful and awkward
+from very reverence and consciousness of inferiority, even as it surely
+was a quarter of a century ago and as, at the same time, it as surely
+was not to the youth of the United States. Again, of course, in both
+countries there are differences between individuals, differences between
+sets and cliques; but I am not mistaken about the tone of the English
+youth of my own day nor am I mistaken about the tone of the American
+youths, of the corresponding class, with whom I have come in intimate
+contact in the United States. Their language about, their whole mental
+attitude towards, woman was during my first years in America an
+amazement and a shock to me. It has never ceased to be other than
+repellent.
+
+The greater freedom of contact allowed to the youth of both sexes in the
+United States, and above all the co-educational institutions (especially
+those of a higher grade), must of course have some effect, whether for
+good or ill. It may be that the early-acquired knowledge of the American
+youth is in the long run salutary; that his image of womanhood is, as is
+claimed, more "practical," and likely to form a better basis for
+happiness in life, than the dream and illusion of the English boy; but
+here we get into a quagmire of mere speculation in which no individual
+opinion has any virtue whatsoever.
+
+I am well aware also of the serious offence that will be given to
+innumerable good and earnest people in the United States by what I now
+say. This is no place to discuss the question of co-education. I am
+speaking only of one aspect of it, and even if it were to be granted
+that in that one aspect its results are evil, that evil may very
+possibly be outweighed many times over by the good which flows from it
+in other directions. Even in expressing the opinion that there is this
+one evil result, I am conscious that I shall call down upon myself much
+indignation and some contempt. It will be said that I have not studied
+the subject scientifically (which may be true) and that I am not
+acquainted with what the statistics show (which is less true), and that
+my observation has been prejudiced and superficial. Let me say however
+that I have been brought to the conclusions to which I have been forced
+not by prejudice but against prejudice and when I would have much
+preferred to feel otherwise. Let me also say that my condemnation is not
+directed against the elementary public schools so much as against that
+more select class of co-educational establishments for pupils of less
+juvenile years. It would, I think, be interesting to know what
+percentage of the girls at present at a given number of such
+establishments are the daughters of parents--fathers especially--who
+were at those same institutions in their youth. It is a subject
+which--so amazed was I, coming with an English-trained mind, at certain
+things which were said in incidental conversation--I sought a good many
+opportunities of enquiring into; with the result that I know that there
+are some parents who, though they had fifty daughters, would never allow
+one to go to the institutions at which they themselves spent some years.
+And this condemnation covers, to my present memory, five separate
+institutions scattered from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"If you marry an American girl," says _Life_--I quote from memory,--"you
+may be sure that you will not be the first man she has kissed. If you
+marry an English one, you may be certain you will not be the last."
+
+Whether this is true, viz., that, granting that the American girl is,
+before marriage, exposed to more temptation than her English sister, the
+latter more than makes up for it in the freedom of married life, is
+another quagmire. No statistics, whether of marriage, of divorce, or of
+the ratio of increase in population, are of any use as a guide. Each man
+or woman, who has had any opportunity of judging, will be guided solely
+by the narrow circle of his or her personal experience; and I know that
+the man whose opinion on the subject I would most regard holds exactly
+opposite views to myself--and what my own may be I trust I may be
+excused from stating. But while on the subject of the relative conjugal
+morality of the two peoples opinions will differ widely with individual
+experience, I have never met a shadow of disagreement in competent
+opinion in regard to the facts about the youth of the two countries. It
+may be, as I have heard a clever woman say, that the way for a member of
+her sex to get the greatest enjoyment out of life is to be brought up in
+America and married in England. If so let us rejoice that so many
+charming women choose the way which opens to them the possibility of the
+greatest felicity.
+
+There is, of course, a widespread impression in England that American
+women as a rule are not womanly. The average American girl acquires when
+young a self-possession and an ability to converse in company which
+Englishwomen only, and then not always, acquire much later in life.
+Therefore the American girl appears, to English eyes, to be "forward,"
+and she is assumed to possess all the vices which go with "forwardness"
+in an English maiden. Which is entirely unjust. Let us remember that
+there is hardly a girl growing up in England to-day who would not have
+been considered forward and ill-mannered to an almost intolerable degree
+by her great-grandmother. But that the girls of to-day are any the less
+womanly, in all that is sweet and essential in womanliness, than any
+generation of their ancestors, I for one do not believe. Nor do I
+believe that in another generation, when they will perhaps, as a matter
+of course, possess all the social precocity (as it seems to us) of the
+American girl of to-day, they will thereby be any the less true and
+tender women than their mothers.
+
+In particular, are American girls supposed to be so commercially
+case-hardened that their artistic sensibilities have been destroyed. A
+notorious American "revivalist" some years ago returned from a
+much-advertised trip to England and told his American congregations of
+the sinfulness which he had seen in the Old World. Among other things he
+had seen, so he said, more tipsy men and women in the streets of London
+in (I think) a month than he had seen in the streets of his native town
+of Topeka, Kansas, in some--no matter what--large number of years. Very
+possibly he was right. But he omitted to say that he had also seen
+several million more sober ones. A population of 6,000,000 frequently
+contains more drunkards than one of 30,000. It also contains more
+metaphysicians. On the same principle it is entirely likely that the
+American girl, who talks so much, says many more foolish things than the
+English one who, if she can help it, never talks at all. The American
+girl is only a girl after all, and because she has acquired a
+conversational fluency which the Englishwoman will only arrive at twenty
+years later, it is not just to suppose that she must also have acquired
+an additional twenty years' maturity of mind.
+
+Most English readers are familiar with the picture of the American girl
+who flits through Europe seeing nothing in the Parthenon or in Whitehall
+beyond an inferiority in size and splendour to the last new insurance
+company's building in New York. She has been a favourite character in
+fiction, and the name of the artist who first imagined her has long been
+lost. Perhaps she was Daisy Miller's grandmother. In reality, in spite
+of that lack of reverence which is undoubtedly a national American
+characteristic, the average American woman has an almost passionate love
+for those glories of antiquity which her own country necessarily lacks,
+such as few Englishwomen are capable of feeling.
+
+"How in our hearts we envy you the mere names of your streets!" said an
+American woman to me once. It is not easy for an English man or woman to
+conceive what romance and wonder cluster round the names of Fleet Street
+and the Mall to the minds of many educated Americans. We, if we are
+away from them for half a dozen years, long for them in our exile and
+rejoice in them on our return. The American of sensibility feels that
+he--and more especially she--has been cut off from them for as many
+generations and adores them with an ardour proportionately magnified.
+But he (or she) would not exchange Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Euclid
+Avenue or the Lake Shore Drive, as the case may be, for all London.
+
+It was once my fortune to show over Westminster Abbey an American woman
+whose name, by reason of her works--sound practical common-sense
+works,--has come to be known throughout the United States, and I heard
+"the wings of the dead centuries beat about her ears." I took her to
+Poet's Corner. She turned herself slowly about and looked at the names
+carved on either side of her, and then looked down and saw the names
+that lay graven beneath her feet; and she dropped sobbing on her knees
+upon the pavement. Johnson was not kind to the American colonies in his
+life. Those tears which fell upon his name, where it is cut into the
+slab of paving, were part of America's revenge.
+
+We all remember Kipling's "type-writer girl" in San Francisco,--"the
+young lady who in England would be a Person,"--who suddenly quoted at
+him Théophile Gautier. It is an incident which many Englishmen have read
+with incredulity, but which has nothing curious in it to the American
+mind. A stenographer in my own offices subsequently, I have heard,
+married a rich owner of race-horses and her dinners I understand are
+delightful. She was an excellent stenographer.
+
+In all frontier communities, where women are few and the primitive
+instincts have freer play than in more artificial societies, there
+blossoms a certain rough and ready chivalrousness which sets respect of
+womanhood above all laws and makes every man a self-constituted champion
+of the sex. This may be seen in a thousand communities scattered over
+the farther West; but it is no outgrowth of the American character, for
+it flourishes in all new societies in all parts of the world, no matter
+to what nationality the men of those societies belong.
+
+In a certain mining camp, late at night, a man--a man of some means, the
+son of a banker in a neighbouring town--was walking with a woman.
+Neither was sober and the woman fell to the ground. The man kicked her
+and told her to get up. As she did not comply he cursed her and kicked
+her again. Then chanced to come along one Ferguson, a gambler and a
+notoriously "bad man," who bade the other stop abusing the woman,
+whereupon he was promptly told to go to ---- and mind his own business.
+Ferguson replied that if the other touched the woman again he would
+shoot him. It was at this point that the altercation brought me out of
+my cabin, for the thing was happening almost where my doorstep (had I
+had a doorstep) ought to have been. The banker's son paid no heed to the
+warning, and once more proceeded to kick the woman. Thereupon Ferguson
+shot him. And, with the weapon which Ferguson carried and his ability as
+a marksman, when he shot, it might be safely regarded as final.
+
+No attempt was made to punish Ferguson. The deputy sheriff, arriving on
+the scene, heard his story and mine and those of one or two others who
+had heard or seen more or less of what passed; and Ferguson was a free
+man. Nor was there any shadow of a suggestion in camp that justice
+should take any other course. The fact was established that the dead man
+had been abusing a woman. Ferguson had only done what any other man in
+camp must have done under the same circumstances.
+
+And while the banker's son was a person of some standing, there was
+certainly nothing in her whom he had maltreated, beyond her mere
+womanhood, to constitute a claim on one grain of respect.
+
+I trust that I am not reflecting on the chivalry of the camp when I
+record the fact that the name by which the lady was universally known
+was "Molly-be-damned." The camp, to a man, idolised her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One of my earliest revelations of the capacity of the American woman was
+vouchsafed to me in this way:
+
+A party of us, perhaps fifteen in all, had travelled a distance of some
+two thousand miles to assist at the opening of a new line of railway in
+the remote Northwest. We duly arrived at the little mountain town at
+which the junction was to be made between the line running up from the
+south and that running down from the north, over which we had come. The
+ceremony of driving the last spike was conducted with due solemnity,
+after which a "banquet" was given to us by the Mayor and citizens of the
+small community. After the banquet--which was really a luncheon--we
+again boarded our train to complete the run to the southern end of the
+line, a number of the citizens of the town with their wives accompanying
+us on the jaunt. It chanced to be my privilege to escort to the car,
+and for the remainder of the journey to sit beside, the wife of the
+editor of the local paper. She was pretty, charming, and admirably
+dressed. We talked of many things,--of America and England, of the red
+Indians, and of books,--when in a pause in the conversation she
+remarked:
+
+"I think this is such a nice way of travelling, don't you?"
+
+It puzzled me. What did she mean? Was she referring to the fact that we
+were on a special train composed of private cars, or what? The truth did
+not at first occur to me--that she was referring to railway travelling
+as a whole, it being the first time that she had ever been on or seen a
+train. Explanations followed. She had been brought by her parents, soon
+after the close of the Civil War, when two or three years old, across
+the plains in a prairie schooner (the high-topped waggon in which the
+pioneers used to make their westward pilgrimage), taking some four
+months for the trip from the old home in, I think, Kentucky. At all
+events she was a Southerner. Since then during her whole life she had
+known no surroundings but those of the little mining settlement huddled
+in among the mountains, her longest trips from home having been for a
+distance of thirty or forty miles on horseback or on a buckboard. She
+had lived all her life in log cabins and never known what it meant to
+have a servant. She read French and Italian, but could not take any
+interest in German. She sketched and painted, and was incomparably
+better informed on matters of art than I, though she knew the Masters
+only, of course, through the medium of prints and engravings. What she
+most dearly longed to do in all the world was to see a theatre--Irving
+for choice--and to hear some one of the Italian operas, with the
+libretti of which, as well as the music, so far as her piano would
+interpret for her, she was already familiar.
+
+Now at last the railway had come and she was, from that day forward,
+within some six days' travelling of New York; and her husband had
+faithfully promised that they should go East together for at least three
+or four weeks that winter. And as she sat and talked in her soft
+Southern voice, there in the heart of the wilds which had been all the
+world to her, she might, so far as a mere man's eyes could judge, have
+been dropped down in any country house in England to be a conspicuously
+charming member of any charming house-party.
+
+Familiarity with similar instances, though I think with none more
+striking, has robbed the miracle, so far as its mere outward
+manifestation is concerned, of something of its wonder; but the inward
+marvel of it remains as inexplicable as ever. By what power or instinct
+do they do it? With nothing of inheritance, so far as can be judged, to
+justify any aspirations towards the good or beautiful, among the poorest
+and hardest of surroundings, with none but the most meagre of
+educational facilities, by what inherent quality is it that the American
+woman, not now and again only, but in her tens of thousands, rises to
+such an instinctive comprehension of what is good and worth while in
+life, that she becomes, not through any external influence, but by mere
+process of her own development, the equal of those who have spent their
+lives amid all that is most beautifying and elevating of what the world
+has to afford? When she takes her place, graciously and composedly, as
+the mistress of some historic home or amid the surroundings of a Court,
+we say that it is her "adaptability." But adaptability can do no more
+than raise one to the level of one's surroundings--not above them. Is it
+ambition? But whence derived? And by what so tutored and guided that it
+reaches only for what is good? How is it tempered that she remains all
+pure womanly at the last?
+
+It may be that the extent to which, especially in the Western States,
+American women of wealth and position are called upon to bear their
+share in public work--in the management of art societies, the building
+of art buildings and public libraries, the endowment and conduct of
+hospitals, and in educational work of all kinds--gives them such an
+opportunity of showing the qualities which are in them, as is denied to
+their English sisters of similar position but who live in older
+established communities. And there are, of course, women in England who
+lead lives as beautiful and as beneficent as are lived anywhere upon
+earth. The miracle is that the American woman--and, again I say, not now
+and again but in her tens of thousands--becomes what she is out of the
+environment in which her youth has so often been lived.
+
+It will be necessary later to refer to the larger part played by
+American women, as compared with English, in the intellectual life of
+the country,--a matter which itself has, as will be noticed, no little
+bearing on the question of the merits and demerits of the co-education
+of the sexes. The best intellectual work, the best literary work, the
+best artistic work, is still probably done by the men in the United
+States; but an immensely larger part of that work is done by women than
+in England, and in ordinary society (outside of the professional
+literary and artistic circles) it is the women who are generally best
+informed, as will be seen, on literature and art. To which is to be
+added the fact that they take a much livelier and more intelligent
+interest than do the majority of Englishwomen in public affairs, and
+assume a more considerable share of the work of a public or quasi-public
+character in educational and similar matters. It might be supposed that
+this greater prominence of women in the national life of the country was
+in itself a proof that men deferred more to them and placed them on a
+higher level; but when analysed it will be found far from being any such
+proof. Rather is woman's position an evidence of, and a result of, man's
+neglect. By which it is not intended to imply any discourteous or
+inconsiderate neglect; but merely that American men have been, and still
+are, of necessity more busy than Englishmen, more absorbed in their own
+work, whereby women have been left to live their own lives and thrown on
+their own resources much more than in England. The mere pre-occupation
+of the men, moreover, necessarily leaves much work undone which, for the
+good of society, must be done; and women have seized the opportunity of
+doing it. They have been especially ready to do so, inasmuch as the
+spirit of work and of pushfulness is in the atmosphere about them, and
+they have been educated at the same schools as the men. The contempt of
+men for idleness, in a stage of society when there was more than enough
+work for all men to do, necessarily extended to the women. It is not
+good, in the United States, for any one, woman hardly more than man, to
+be idle.
+
+Women being compelled to organise their own lives for themselves, they
+carried into that organisation the spirit of energy and enthusiasm which
+filled the air of the young and growing communities. Finding work to
+their hands to do, they have done it--taking, and in the process fitting
+themselves to take, a much more prominent part in the communal life than
+is borne by their sisters in England or than those sisters are to-day,
+in the mass, qualified to assume. Precisely so (as often in English
+history) do women, in some beleaguered city or desperately pressed
+outpost, turn soldiers. No share in, or credit for, the result is to be
+assigned to any peculiar forethought, deference, or chivalrousness on
+the part of the men, their fellows in the fight. It is to the women that
+credit belongs.
+
+And while we are thus comparing the position of women in America with
+their position in England, it is to be noted that so excellent an
+authority among Frenchmen as M. Paul Cambon, in speaking of the position
+of women in England, uses precisely the same terms as an Englishman must
+use when speaking of the conditions in America. Americans have gone a
+step farther--are a shade more "Feminist"--than the English, impelled,
+as has been seen, by the peculiar conditions of their growing
+communities in a new land. But it is only a step and accidental.
+
+Englishmen looking at America are prone to see only that step, whereas
+what Frenchmen or other Continental Europeans see is that both
+Englishmen and Americans together have travelled far, and are still
+travelling fast, on a path quite other than that which is followed by
+the rest of the peoples. In their view, the single step is
+insignificant. What is obvious is that in both is working the same
+Anglo-Saxon trait--the tendency to insist upon the independence of the
+individual. Feminism--the spirit of feminine progress--is repugnant to
+the Roman Catholic Church; and we would not look to see it developing
+strongly in Roman Catholic countries. But, what is more important, it is
+repugnant to all peoples which set the community or the state or the
+government before the individual, that is to say to all peoples except
+the Anglo-Saxon.
+
+We see here again, as we shall see in many things, how powerless have
+been all other racial elements in the United States to modify the
+English character of the people. The weight of all those elements must
+be, and, so far as they have any weight, is directly against the
+American tendency to feminine predominance. All the Germans, all the
+Irish, all the Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, or other foreigners who
+are in the United States to-day or have ever come to the United States
+have not, as Germans, or Irish, or Frenchmen, contributed among them one
+particle, one smallest impulse, to the position which women hold in the
+life of the country to-day; rather has it been achieved in defiance of
+the instincts and ideas of each of those by the English spirit which
+works irrepressibly in the people. There could hardly be stronger
+testimony to the dominating quality of that spirit. One may approve of
+the conditions as they have been evolved; or one may not. One may be
+Feminist or anti-Feminist. But whether it be for good or evil, the
+position which women hold in the United States to-day they hold by
+virtue of the fact that the American people is _Anglais_--an English or
+Anglo-Saxon people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And in spite of all the precautions that I have taken to make myself
+clear and to avoid offence, I feel that some word of explanation, lest I
+be misunderstood, is still needed. It is not here said that American men
+do not place woman on a higher plane than any Continental European
+people. I earnestly believe that both branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock
+do hold to a higher ideal of womanhood than some (and for all I know to
+the contrary, than all) of the peoples of Europe. What I am denying is
+that Americans have any greater reverence for women, any higher
+chivalrousness, than Englishmen. And this denial I make not with any
+desire to belittle the chivalry of American men but only in the
+endeavour to correct the popular American impression about Englishmen,
+which does not contribute to the promotion of that good-will which ought
+to exist between the peoples. I am not suggesting that Americans should
+think less of themselves, only that, with wider knowledge, they would
+think better of Englishmen.
+
+And, on the subject of co-education, it seems that yet another word is
+needed, for since this chapter was put into type, it has had the
+advantage of being read by an American friend whose opinion on any
+subject must be valuable, and who has given especial attention to
+educational matters. He thinks it would be judicious that I should make
+it clearer than I have done that, in what I have said, I am not
+criticising the American co-educational system in any aspect save one.
+He writes:
+
+"The essential purpose of the system of co-education which had been
+adopted, not only in the State universities supported by public funds,
+but in certain colleges of earlier date, such as Oberlin, in Ohio, and
+in comparatively recent institutions like Cornell University, of New
+York, is to secure for the women facilities for training and for
+intellectual development not less adequate than those provided for the
+men.
+
+"It was contended that if any provision for higher education for women
+was to be made, it was only equitable, and in fact essential, that such
+provision should be of the best. It was not practicable with the
+resources available in new communities, to double up the machinery for
+college education, and if the women were not to be put off with
+instructors of a cheaper and poorer grade and with inadequate
+collections and laboratories, they must be admitted to a share of the
+service of the instructors, and in the use of the collections, of the
+great institutions.
+
+"It is further contended by well-informed people that what they call a
+natural relation between the sexes, such as comes up in the competitive
+work of university life, so far from furthering, has the result of
+lessening the risk of immature sentiment and of undesirable flirtations.
+By the use of the college system, the advantages of these larger
+facilities can be secured to women, and have in fact been secured
+without any sacrifice of the separate life of the women students.
+
+"In Columbia University, for instance (in New York City), the women
+students belong to Barnard College. This college is one of the seven
+colleges that constitute Columbia University: but it possesses a
+separate foundation and a faculty of its own. The women students have
+the advantage of the university collections and of a large number of the
+university lectures. The relation between the college and the university
+is in certain respects similar to that of Newnham and Girton with the
+University of Cambridge, with the essential difference that Barnard
+College constitutes, as stated, an integral part of the university, and
+that the Barnard students are entitled to secure their university
+degrees from A.B. to Ph.D."
+
+From the above it is by no means certain that on the one point on which
+I have dwelt, his opinion coincides with mine; and the best explanation
+thereof that I can offer is that while he knows certain parts of the
+country and some institutions better than I, I know certain parts of the
+country and some institutions better than he. And we will "let it go at
+that."
+
+As for the rest, for the general economic advantages of the
+co-educational system to the community, I think I am prepared to go as
+far as almost anyone. I am even inclined to follow Miss M. Carey Thomas,
+the President of Bryn Mawr College, who attributes the industrial
+progress of the United States largely to the fact that the men of the
+country have such well-educated mothers. It seems to me a not
+unreasonable or extravagant suggestion. I am certainly of the opinion
+that the conversational fluency and mental alertness of the American
+woman, as well as in large measure her capacity for bearing her share in
+the civic labour, are largely the result of the fact that she has in
+most cases had precisely the same education as her brothers.
+
+At present I believe that something more than one-half (56 per cent.) of
+the pupils in all the elementary and secondary schools, whether public
+or private, in the United States are girls; and that the system is
+permanently established cannot be questioned. What are known as the
+State universities, that is to say universities which are supported
+entirely, or almost entirely, by State grants, or by annual taxes
+ordered through State legislation, have from their first foundation been
+available for women students as well as for men. The citizens, who, as
+taxpayers, were contributing the funds required for the foundation and
+the maintenance of these institutions, took the ground, very naturally,
+that all who contributed should have the same rights in the educational
+advantages to be secured. It was impossible from the American point of
+view to deny to a man whose family circle included only daughters the
+university education, given at public expense, which was available for
+the family of sons.
+
+Co-education had its beginning in most parts of the United States in the
+fact that in the frontier communities there were often not enough boy
+pupils to support a school nor was there enough money to maintain a
+separate school for girls; but what began experimentally and as a matter
+of necessity has long become an integral part of the American social
+system. So far from losing ground it is continually (and never more
+rapidly than in recent years) gaining in the Universities as well as in
+the schools, in private as well as public institutions.
+
+But, as I said in first approaching the subject, the merits or demerits
+of co-education are not a topic which comes within the scope of this
+book. It was necessary to refer to it only as it impinged on the general
+question of the relation of the sexes.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[113:1] The English reader will find this explained at length in Mr. A.
+R. Colquhoun's work, _Greater America_.
+
+[113:2] That Americans may understand more clearly what I mean and, so
+understanding, see that I speak without intention to offend, I quote
+from the list of "arrangements" in London for the forthcoming week, as
+given in to-day's London _Times_, those items which have a peculiarly
+cosmopolitan or extra-British character:
+
+Friday--Pilgrims' Club, dinner to Lord Curzon of Kedleston, ex-Viceroy
+of India.
+
+Saturday--Lyceum Club, dinner in honour of France to meet the French
+Ambassador and members of the Embassy, etc.
+
+Sunday--Te Deum for Greek Independence, Greek Church, Moscow Road.
+
+Monday--Royal Geographical Society, Sir Henry MacMahon on "Recent
+Exploration and Survey in Seistan."
+
+Tuesday--Royal Colonial Institute, dinner and meeting. Royal Asiatic
+Society, Major Vost on "Kapilavastu." China Association, dinner to
+Prince Tsai-tse and his colleagues, Mr. R. S. Grundy, C. B., presiding.
+
+Wednesday--Central Asian Society, Mr. A. Hamilton on "The Oxus River."
+Japan Society, Professor J. Takakusu on "Buddhism as we Find it in
+Japan."
+
+This, it should be explained, is not a good week, because it is "out of
+the season," but the list will, I fancy, as it stands suffice to give
+American readers an idea of the extent to which London is in touch with
+the interests of all the world--an idea of how, by comparison, it is
+impossible to speak of New York (and still more of America as a whole)
+as being other than non-cosmopolitan, or in a not offensive sense,
+provincial.
+
+[126:1] It is worth remarking that Dr. Emil Reich (whose opinion I quote
+not because I attach any value to it personally, but in deference to the
+judgment of those who do) prophesies that the "silent war" between men
+and women in the United States "will soon become so acute that it will
+cease to be silent." It is to be borne in mind, of course, that the
+Doctor's experience in the United States has as yet been but
+inconsiderable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ENGLISH HUMOUR AND AMERICAN ART
+
+     American Insularity--A Conkling Story--English Humour and
+     American Critics--American Literature and English Critics--The
+     American Novel in England--And American Art--Wanted, an
+     American Exhibition--The Revolution in the American Point of
+     View--"Raining in London"--Domestic and Imported Goods.
+
+
+It is no uncommon thing to hear an American speak of British
+insularity--the Englishman's "insular prejudices" or his "insular
+conceit." On one occasion I took the opportunity of interrupting a man
+who, I was sure, did not know what "insular" might mean, to ask for an
+explanation.
+
+"Insular?" he said. "It's the same as insolent--only more so."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Flings at Britain's "insularity" were (like the climatic myth)
+originally of Continental European origin; and from the Continental
+European point of view, the phrase, both in fact and metaphor, was
+justified. England _is_ an island. So far as the Continent of Europe is
+concerned, it is _the_ island. And undoubtedly the fact of their insular
+position, with the isolation which it entailed, has had a marked
+influence on the national temperament of Englishmen. Ringed about with
+the silver sea, they had an opportunity to meditate at leisure on their
+superiority to other peoples, an opportunity which, if not denied, was
+at least restricted in the case of peoples only separated from
+neighbours of a different race by an invisible frontier line, a well
+bridged stream, or a mountain range pierced by abundant passes. Their
+insularity bred in the English a disposition different from the
+dispositions of the Continental peoples just as undeniably as it kept
+them aloof from those peoples geographically.
+
+Vastly more than Great Britain, has the United States been isolated
+since her birth. England has been cut off from other civilisations by
+twenty miles of sea; America by three thousand. As a physical fact, the
+"insularity" of America is immensely more obvious and more nearly
+complete than that of Britain; and it is no less so as a moral fact. It
+is true that America's island is a continent; but this superiority in
+size has only resulted in producing more kinds of insularity than in
+England. The American character is, in all the moral connotation of the
+word, pronouncedly more insular than the British.
+
+Like the English, except that they were much more effectively staked off
+from the rest of the world, the Americans have found the marvel of their
+own superiority to all mankind a fit and pleasing subject for
+contemplation. Perhaps there was a time when Englishmen used to go about
+the world talking of it; but for some generations back, having settled
+the fact of their greatness entirely to their satisfaction, they have
+ceased to put it into words, merely accepting it as the mainspring of
+their conduct in all relations with other peoples, and without, it is to
+be feared, much regard for those other peoples' feelings. Americans are
+still in the boasting stage. Mr. Howells has said that every American
+when he goes abroad goes not as an individual citizen but as an envoy.
+He walks wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. It is only the insularity of
+the Britisher magnified many times.
+
+It is as if there were gathered in a room a dozen or so of well-bred
+persons, talking such small talk as will pass the time and hurt no
+susceptibilities. It may be that the Englishman in his small talk is
+unduly dogmatic, but in the main he complies with the usages of the
+circle and helps the game along. To them enters a newcomer who will hear
+nothing of what the others have to say--will take no share in the
+discussion of topics of common interest--but insists on telling the
+company of his personal achievements. It may be all true; though the
+others will not believe it. But the accomplishments of the members of
+the present company are not at the moment the subject of conversation;
+nor is it a theme under any circumstances which it is good manners to
+introduce. This is what not a few American people are doing daily up and
+down through the length and breadth of Europe; and they must pardon
+Europe if, occasionally, it yawns, or if at times it expresses its
+opinions of American manners in terms not soothing to American ears.
+
+"The American contribution to the qualities of nations is hurry," says
+the author of _The Champagne Standard_, and this has enough truth to let
+it pass as an epigram; but many Americans have a notion that their
+contribution is neither more nor less than All Progress. With their eyes
+turned chiefly upon themselves, they have seen beyond a doubt what a
+splendid, energetic, pushful people they are, and they have talked it
+all over one with another. Moreover, have not many visitors, though
+finding much to criticise, complimented them always on their rapidity of
+thought and action? So they have come to believe that they monopolise
+those happy attributes and, going abroad, whenever they see--it may be
+in England, or in Germany--an evidence of energy and force, they say:
+"Truly the world is becoming Americanised!" Bless their insular hearts!
+America did not invent the cosmic forces.
+
+When the first suspension bridge was thrown over Niagara, there was a
+great and tumultuous opening ceremony, such as the Americans love, and
+many of the great ones of the United States assembled to do honour to
+the occasion, and among them was Roscoe Conkling. Conkling was one of
+the most brilliant public men whom America has produced: a man of
+commanding, even beautiful, presence and of, perhaps, unparalleled
+vanity. He had been called (by an opponent) a human peacock. After the
+ceremonies attending the opening of the bridge had been concluded,
+Conkling, with many others, was at the railway station waiting to
+depart; but, though others were there, he did not mingle with them, but
+strutted and plumed himself for their benefit, posing that they might
+get the full effect of all his majesty.
+
+One of the station porters was so impressed that, stepping up to another
+who was hurrying by trundling a load of luggage, he jerked his thumb in
+Conkling's direction and:
+
+"Who's that feller?" he asked. "Is he the man as built the bridge?"
+
+The other studied the great man a moment.
+
+"Thunder! No," said he. "He's the man as made the Falls."
+
+It is curious that with their sense of humour Americans should so
+persistently force Europeans into the frame of mind of that railway
+porter. The Englishman, in his assurance of his own greatness, has come
+to depreciate the magnitude of whatever work he does; nor is it
+altogether a pose or an affectation. He sees the vastness of the British
+Empire and the amazing strides which have been made in the last two
+generations, and wonders how it all came about. He knows how
+proverbially blundering are British diplomacy and British
+administration, so he puts it all down to the luck of the nation and
+goes grumbling contentedly on his way. There is no country in which
+policies have been so haphazard and unstable, or ways of administration
+so crude and so empirical, as in the United States. "Go forth, my son,"
+said Oxenstiern, "go forth and see with how little wisdom the world is
+governed"; and on such a quest, it is doubtful if any civilised country
+has offered a more promising field for consideration than did the United
+States from, say, the close of the Civil War to less than a decade ago.
+All thinking Americans recognise this fact to the full; but whereas the
+Englishman sees only the blunders that he has made and marvels at the
+luck that pulled him through, the American generally ignores the luck
+and is more likely to believe that whatever has been achieved is the
+result of his peculiar virtues.
+
+I never heard an American ascribe the success of any national
+undertaking to the national luck. The Englishman on the other hand is
+for ever speaking of the "luck of the British Army," and the "luck that
+pulls England through."
+
+And there is one point which I have never seen stated but which is worth
+the consideration of Americans. It has already been said that it would
+be of great benefit if the American people knew more of the British
+Empire as a whole. They have had an advantage in appreciating the
+magnitude of their own accomplishments in the fact that their work has
+all to be done at home. They have had the outward signs of their
+progress constantly before their eyes. It is true that the United States
+is a large country; but it is continuous. No oceans intervene between
+New York and Illinois, or between Illinois and Colorado; and the people
+as a whole is kept well informed of what the people is doing.
+
+The American comes to London and he sees things which he regards with
+contemptuous amusement much as the Englishman might regard some peculiar
+old-world institution in a sleepy Dutch community. The great work which
+is always being done in London is not easy to see; there is so much of
+Old London (not only in a material sense) that the new does not always
+leap to the eye. The man who estimates the effective energy of the
+British people by what he sees in London, makes an analogous mistake to
+that of the Englishman who judges the sentiments of America by what is
+told him by his charming friends in New York. The American who would get
+any notion of British enterprise or British energy must go afield--to
+the Upper Nile and Equatorial Africa, to divers parts of Asia and
+Australia. He cannot see the Assouan dam, the Cape to Cairo Railway, the
+Indian irrigation works, from the Carlton Hotel, any more than a
+foreigner can measure the destiny of the American people by dining at
+the Waldorf-Astoria.
+
+This is a point which will bear insisting on. Not long ago an American
+stood with me and gazed on the work which was being done in the Strand
+Improvement undertaking, and he said that it was a big thing. "But," he
+added thoughtfully, "it does not come up to what we have on hand in the
+Panama Canal." I pointed out that the Panama Canal was not being cut
+through the heart of New York City and apparently the suggestion was new
+to him. The American rarely understands that the British Isles are no
+more--rather less--than the thirteen original states. Canada and India
+are the British Illinois and Florida, Australia and New Zealand
+represent the West from Texas to Montana, while South Africa is the
+British Pacific Slope; just as Egypt may stand for Cuba, and Burma and
+what-not-else set against Alaska and the Philippines. Many times I have
+known Americans in England to make jest of the British railways,
+comparing them in mileage with the transcontinental lines of their own
+country. But the British Transcontinental lines are thrown from Cairo to
+the Cape, from Quebec to Vancouver, from Brisbane to Adelaide and
+Peshawar to Madras. The people of the United States take legitimate
+pride in the growth of the great institutions of learning which have
+sprung up all over the West; but there are points of interest of which
+they take less account, in similar institutions in, say, Sydney and
+Allahabad.
+
+It is not necessary to say that I do not underestimate the energy of the
+American character. I have seen too much of the people, am familiar
+with too many sections of the country, and have watched it all growing
+before my eyes too fast to do that. But I think that the American
+exaggerates those qualities in himself at the expense of other peoples,
+and he would acquire a new kind of respect for Englishmen--the respect
+which one good workman necessarily feels for another--if he knew more of
+the British Empire.
+
+A precisely similar exaggeration of his own quality has been bred by
+similar causes in the American mind in his estimate of his national
+sense of humour. I am not denying the excellence of American humour, for
+I have in my library a certain shelf to which I go whenever I feel dull,
+and for the books on which I can never be sufficiently grateful. The
+American's exaggeration of his own funniness is not positive but
+comparative. Just as he is tempted to regard himself as the original
+patentee of human progress, and the first apostle of efficiency, so he
+is very ready to believe that he has been given something like a
+monopoly among peoples of the sense of humour. With a little more
+humour, he would undoubtedly have been saved from this particular error.
+Especially are the Americans convinced that there is no humour in
+Englishmen. Germans and Frenchmen may possess humour of an inferior
+sort, but not Englishmen. It is my belief that in the American clubs
+where I find copies of _Fliegende Blätter_ and the _Journal Amusant_,
+these papers are much more read than _Punch_, and in not a few cases, I
+fear, by men who have but slight understanding of the languages in which
+they are printed. Indeed, _Punch_ is a permanent, hebdomadally-recurrent
+proof to American readers that Englishmen do not know the meaning of a
+joke.[153:1] Americans, of course, do not understand more than a small
+proportion of the pages of _Punch_ any more than they would understand
+those pages if they were printed in Chinese; but because _Punch_ is
+printed in English they think that they do understand it, and because
+they cannot see the jokes, they conclude that the jokes are not there.
+
+A certain proportion of American witticisms are recondite to English
+readers for precisely similar reasons, but the American belief is that
+when an Englishman fails to understand an American joke, it is because
+he has no sense of humour; when an American cannot understand an English
+one, it is because the joke is not funny. It is a view of the situation
+eminently gratifying to Americans; but it is curious that their sense of
+humour does not save them from it.
+
+Whatever American humour may be, it is not subtle. It has a
+pushfulness--a certain flamboyant self-assertiveness--which it shares
+with some other things in the United States; and, however fine the
+quality of mind required to produce it, a rudimentary appreciative sense
+will commonly suffice for its apprehension. The chances are, when any
+foreigner fails to catch the point of an American joke or story, that
+it is due to something other than a lack of perceptive capability.
+
+What I take to be (with apologies to Mr. Dunne) the greatest individual
+achievement in humorous writing that has been produced in America in
+recent years, the Wolfville series of books of Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis,
+is practically incomprehensible to English readers, not from any lack of
+capacity on their part, but from the difficulties of the dialect and
+still more from the strangeness of the atmosphere. In the same way the
+Tablets of the scribe Azit Tigleth Miphansi must indeed be but ancient
+Egyptian to Americans. But it would not occur to an Englishman to say,
+because Americans have not within their reach the necessary data for a
+comprehension of Mr. Reed, that, therefore, they do not understand a
+joke. Still less because he himself falls away baffled from the Old
+Cattleman does the Englishman conclude that the Wolfville books are not
+funny. He merely deplores his inability to get on terms with his author.
+The English public indeed is curiously ready to accept whatever is said
+to be funny and comes from America as being in truth humorous even if
+largely unintelligible; but few Americans would give credit for the
+existence of humour in those parts of an English book outside their ken.
+Yet I think, if it were possible to get the opinion of an impartial jury
+on the subject, their verdict would be that the number of humorous
+writers of approximately the first or second class is materially greater
+in England than in the United States to-day. I am sure that the sense of
+humour in the average of educated Englishmen is keener, subtler, and
+eminently more catholic than it is in men of the corresponding class in
+the United States. The Atlantic Ocean, if the Americans would but
+believe it, washes pebbles up on the beaches of its eastern shores no
+less than upon the western.[155:1]
+
+American humour [distinctively American humour, for there are humorous
+writers in America whose genius shows nothing characteristically
+American; but among those who are distinctively American I should class
+nearly all the writers who are best known to-day, Mr. Clemens (Mark
+Twain), Mr. Dunne, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Lorimer, Mr. Ade]--this distinctively
+American humour, then, stands in something the same relation to other
+forms of _spirituellisme_ as the work of the poster artist occupies to
+other forms of pictorial art. Poster designing may demand a very high
+quality of art, and the American workmen are the Cherets, Grassets,
+Muchas, of their craft. Few of them do ordinary painting, whether in oil
+or water colour. Fewer still use the etcher's needle. None that I am
+aware of attempts miniatures--except Mr. Henry James, who, if Americans
+may be believed, is not an American, and he has invented a department of
+art for himself more microscopic in detail than that of any miniaturist.
+The real American humourist, however small his canvas, strives for the
+same broad effects.
+
+It is not the quality of posters to be elusive. Their appeal is to the
+multitude, and it must be instantaneous. It is easily conceivable that a
+person of an educated artistic sense might stand before a poster and
+find himself entirely unable to comprehend it, because the thing
+portrayed might be something altogether outside his experience. His
+failure would be no indictment either of his perceptivity or of the
+merit of the work of art.
+
+It is a pity that Americans as a rule do not consider this, for I know
+few things that would so much increase American respect for Englishmen
+in the mass as the discovery that the latter were not the ponderous
+persons they supposed, but even keener-witted than themselves. At the
+time of the Venezuelan incident, it is probable that more than all the
+laborious protests of good men on both sides of the ocean, more than all
+the petitions and the interchange of assurances of good-will between
+societies in either country, the thing that did most to allay American
+resentment and bring the American people to its senses was that
+delightful message sent (was it not?) by the London Stock Exchange to
+their _confrères_ in New York, begging the latter to see that when the
+British fleet arrived in New York harbour there should be no crowding by
+excursion steamers. Like Mr. Anstey's dear German professor, who had
+once laboriously constructed a joke and purposed, when he had ample
+leisure, to go about to ædificate a second, will Americans please
+believe that Englishmen too, if given time, can certainly make others?
+
+And need I say again that in each of the things that I have said,
+whether on the subject of American chivalry, American energy, or
+American humour, I am not decrying the American's qualities but only
+striving to increase his respect for Englishmen?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now let us look at the other side of the picture. Just as undue
+flattery awoke in the American people an exaggerated notion of their
+chivalry and their sense of humour, so the reiteration of savage and
+contemptuous criticism made them depreciate their general literary
+ability. It goes farther back than the "Who ever reads an American
+book?" Three quarters of a century earlier the _Edinburgh Review_ (I am
+indebted for the quotation to Mr. Sparks) asked: "Why should Americans
+write books when a six-weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue
+our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads? Prairies,
+steamboats, gristmills are their natural objects for centuries to come."
+
+Franklin's _Autobiography_ and Thoreau's _Walden_ are only just, within
+the last few years, beginning to find their way into English popular
+reprints of the "classics." Few Englishmen would listen with patience to
+an argument that the contribution to literature of the Concord school
+was of greater or more permanent value than, let us say, the work of the
+Lake Poets. So little thought have Englishmen given to the literature of
+the United States, that they commonly assume any author who wrote in
+English to be, as a matter of course, an Englishman. It is only the
+uneducated among the educated classes who do not know that Longfellow
+was an American--though I have met such,--but among the educated a small
+percentage only, I imagine, would remember, unless suggestion was made
+to them, that, for instance, Motley and Bancroft among historians, or
+Agassiz and Audubon among men of science (even though one was born in
+Switzerland) were Americans. To the vast majority, of course, such names
+are names and nothing more, which may not be particularly reprehensible.
+But while on the one hand a general indifference to American literature
+as a whole has carried with it a lack of acquaintance with individual
+writers, that lack of acquaintance with the individuals naturally
+reacted to confirm disbelief in the existence of any respectable body of
+American literature. And the chilling and century-long contempt of the
+English public and of English critics for all American writing produced
+its result in a national exaggeration in American minds of their own
+shortcomings. Only within the last ten years have Americans as a whole
+come to believe that the work of an American writer (excepting only a
+very small group) can be on a plane with that of Englishmen.
+
+In England the situation has also changed. American novelists now enjoy
+a vogue in England that would have seemed almost incredible two decades
+ago. At that time the English public did not look to America for its
+fiction, while Americans did look to England; and each new book by a
+well-known English novelist was as certain of its reception in the
+United States as--perhaps more certain than it was--in England. That has
+changed. There are not more than half a dozen writers of fiction in
+England to-day of such authority that whatever they write is of
+necessity accepted by the American public. Americans turn now first to
+their own writers--a dozen or a score of them--and only then do they
+seek the English book, always provided that, no matter whose the name
+may be that it bears, it has won the approval of their own critics on
+its merits. They no longer take it for granted that the best work of
+their own authors is as a matter of course inferior to the work of a
+well-known Englishman. It may not be many years before the American
+public will be so much preoccupied with its own literary output--before
+that output will be so amply sufficient for all its needs--that it will
+become as contemptuously indifferent to English literature of the day as
+Englishmen have, in the past, shown themselves to the product of
+American writers. There is, perhaps, no other field in which the
+increase of the confidence of the nation in itself is more marked than
+in the honour which Americans now pay to their own writers.
+
+It is worth noticing that the English appreciation of American
+literature as yet hardly extends beyond works of fiction. Specialists in
+various departments of historical research and the natural sciences know
+what admirable work is being done in the same fields by individual
+workers in the United States; but hardly yet has the specialist--still
+less has the general public--formed any adequate conception of the great
+mass of that work in those two fields, still less of its quality.
+Englishmen do not yet take seriously either American research or
+American scholarship. It would be absurd to count noses to prove that
+there were more competent historians writing--more scientific
+investigators searching into the mysteries--in America than in England
+or vice versa; but this I take to be an undoubted fact, namely, that men
+of science in more than one field in other countries are beginning to
+look rather to the United States than to Great Britain for sound and
+original work.
+
+The English ignorance of American literature extends even more markedly
+to other departments of productive art.[159:1] The ordinary educated and
+art-loving Englishman would be sore put to it to name any single
+American painter or draughtsman, living or dead, except Mr. C. D.
+Gibson. Whistler and Sargent, of course, are not counted as Americans.
+There is not a single American sculptor whose name is known to one in a
+hundred of, again I say, educated and art-loving Englishmen, though I
+take it to be indisputable that the United States has produced more
+sculptors of individual genius in the last half-century than Great
+Britain. American architecture conveys to the educated and art-loving
+Englishman no other idea than that of twenty-storey "sky-scrapers" built
+of steel and glass. Richardson is not even a name to him. He knows
+nothing of all the beauty and virility of the work that has been done
+in the last thirty years. In the minor arts, he may have heard of
+Rookwood pottery and have a vague notion that the Americans turn out
+some quite original things in silver work; but of American stained
+glass--of Tiffany and La Farge--he has never heard. It would do England
+a world of good--it would do international relations a world of good--if
+a thoroughly representative exhibition of American painting and
+sculpture could be made in London. I commend the idea to some one
+competent to handle it; for it would, I think, be profitable to its
+promoters. It would certainly be a revelation to Englishmen.
+
+The English indifference to--nay, disbelief in the existence
+of--American art is precisely on a par with the American incredulity in
+the matter of British humour; and the removal of each of the
+misconceptions would tend to the increase of international good-will.
+Americans believe the British Empire to be a sanguinary and ferocious
+thing. They believe themselves to be possessed of a sense of humour, a
+sense of chivalry, and an energy quite lacking in the Englishman; and
+each one of the illusions counts for a good deal in the American
+national lack of liking for Great Britain. Similarly, Englishmen believe
+Americans to be a money-loving people without respectable achievement in
+art or literature. I am not sure that it would make the Englishman like
+the American any the more if the point of view were corrected, but at
+least he would like him more intelligently, and it would prevent him
+from saying things--in themselves entirely good-humoured and quite
+unintentionally offensive--which hurt American feelings. We cannot
+correct an error without recognising frankly that it exists, and the
+first step towards making the American and the Englishman understand
+what the other really is must be to help each to see how mistaken he is
+in supposing the other to be what he is not.
+
+That the American should hold the opinions that he does of England is no
+matter of reproach. Not only is it natural, but inevitable. Absorbed as
+he has been with his own affairs and his own history, and viewing Great
+Britain only in her occasional relations thereto, seeing nothing of her
+in her private life or of her position and policies in the world at
+large, how could the American have other than a distorted view of
+her--how could she assume right proportions or be posed in right
+perspective? Nor is the Englishman any more to be blamed. America has
+been beyond and below his horizon, and among the travellers' tales that
+have come to him of her people and her institutions has been much
+misinformation; and if he has not yet--as in the realms of literature
+and art--come to any realisation of America's true achievements, how
+should he have done so, when Americans themselves have only just shaken
+off the morbid sensitiveness and diffidence of their youth, and have so
+recently arrived at some partial comprehension of those achievements
+themselves?
+
+Probably the most successful joke which _Life_ ever achieved (Americans
+will please believe that it is not with any disrespect that I explain to
+English readers that _Life_ is the _Punch_ of New York), successful,
+that is, measured by the continent-wide hilarity which it provoked, had
+relation to the New York dandy who turned up the bottoms of his trousers
+because it was "raining in London." That was published--at a
+guess--some twenty years ago.
+
+Some ten years later a Chicagoan (one James Norton--he died, alas! all
+too soon afterwards) leaped into something like national notoriety by a
+certain speech which he delivered at a semi-public dinner in New York.
+In introducing Mr. Norton as coming from Chicago the chairman had made
+playful reference to the supposed characteristic lack of modesty of
+Chicagoans and their pride in their city. Norton, in acknowledgment,
+confessed that there was justice in the accusation. Chicagoans, he said,
+were proud of their city. They had a right to be. They were as proud of
+Chicago as New Yorkers were of London! And the quip ran from mouth to
+mouth across the continent.
+
+It would be too much to say that those jokes are meaningless to-day, but
+to the younger generation of Americans they have lost most of their
+point, for Anglomania has ceased to be the term of reproach that once it
+was--it has, at least, dropped from daily use--partly because the
+official relations of the country with Great Britain have so much
+improved, but much more because the United States has come to consider
+herself as Great Britain's equal and, in the new consciousness of her
+greatness, the idea of toadying to England has lost its sting. It is
+already difficult to throw one's mind back to the conditions of twenty
+years ago--to remember the deference which (in New York and the larger
+cities at least) was paid to English ideas, English manners, English
+styles in dress--the enthusiasm with which any literary man was received
+who had some pretension to an English reputation--the disrepute in which
+all "domestic" manufactured articles were held throughout the country
+in comparison with the "imported," which generally meant English. In all
+manufactured products this was so nearly universal that "domestic" was
+almost synonymous with inferior and "imported" with superior grades of
+goods. That an immense proportion of American manufactured articles were
+sold in the United States masquerading as "imported"--and therefore
+commanding a better price--goes without saying, and in some lines, in
+which the British reputation was too well established and well deserved
+to be easily shaken, the practice still survives; but in the great
+majority of things, the American now prefers his home-made article, not
+merely from motives of patriotism but because he believes that it is the
+better article. It is not within our present province to discuss how far
+this opinion is correct, or how far the policy of protection, by
+assisting manufacturers to obtain control of their own markets and so
+distract attention from imported goods, has helped to bring about the
+change. The point is that the change has taken place. And, so far as the
+ordinary commodities of commerce are concerned, the Englishman is in a
+measure aware of what has occurred. He could not be otherwise with the
+figures of his trade with the United States before him. Nor can he
+conceal from himself the fact that the change of opinion in America may
+have some justification when he sees how many things of American
+manufacture he himself uses daily and prefers--patriotism
+notwithstanding--to the British-made article.
+
+But Englishmen have little conception as yet that the same revolution
+has taken place in regard to the less material--less easily
+exploited--commodities of art and literature. American novels and the
+drawings of Mr. Gibson have made their way in England in the wake of
+American boots and American sweetmeats; but Americans would be unwilling
+to believe that their creative ability ends with the production of
+Western romances and drawings of the American girl.
+
+Until recent years, the volume as well as the quality of the literary
+and artistic output of Great Britain was vastly superior to that of the
+United States. The two were not comparable; but they are comparable
+to-day, though England is as yet unaware of it. In time, Englishmen will
+awake to a realisation of the fact; but what the relative standing of
+the two countries will be by that time it is impossible to say.
+Englishmen would, perhaps, not find it to their disadvantage, and it
+would certainly (if not done in too condescending a spirit) not be
+displeasing to the people of the United States, if they began, even now,
+to take a livelier interest in the work that the other is doing.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[153:1] At this point my American friend, to the value of whose
+criticisms I have already paid tribute, interjects marginally: "none the
+less _Fliegende Blätter_ presents more real humour in a week than is to
+be found in _Punch_ in a month." To which I can but make the obvious
+reply that I have already said that Americans think so. He points out,
+however, further that, while the Munich paper is always to be found in
+the higher-class American clubs, it is comparatively infrequent in the
+clubs of Great Britain, which is undoubtedly true; and that is a subject
+(the relative breadth of outlook on the world-literature of the day in
+the two countries) which will necessarily receive attention later on.
+
+[155:1] Lest any American readers should assume that some personal
+feeling is responsible for my point of view (which would entirely
+destroy any value in my argument) it seems necessary to explain that I
+have become calloused to being told that I am the only Englishman the
+speaker ever met with an American sense of humour. Sometimes I have
+taken it as a compliment.
+
+[159:1] It is merely pathetic to find such a paper as the London
+_Academy_ at this late day summing up the American æsthetic impulse as
+follows: "Their culture is now a borrowed thing animated by no life of
+its own. Their art is become a reflection of French art, their
+literature a reflection of English literature, their learning a
+reflection of German learning. A velleity of taste in their women of the
+richer class seems to be all that maintains in their country the
+semblance of a high, serious, and disinterested passion for the things
+of the mind."
+
+It would be interesting to learn from the _Academy_ what school of
+English writers it is that the American humourists "reflect," who among
+English novelists are the models for the present school of Western
+fiction, where in English historiography is to be found the prototype of
+the great histories of their country, collaborated or otherwise, which
+the Americans are now producing, which journals published in England are
+responsible for American newspapers, what English magazine is so happy
+as to be the father of the _Century_, _Harper's_, or _Scribner's_. The
+truth is that the writer in the Academy, like most Englishmen, knows
+nothing of American literature as a whole, or he would know that,
+whether good or bad, the one quality which it surely possesses is that
+it is individual and peculiar to the people. The _Academy_, it is only
+fair to say, has recently changed hands and I am not sure that under its
+present direction it would make the same mistake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ENGLISH AND AMERICAN EDUCATION
+
+     The Rhodes Scholarships--"Pullulating Colleges"--Are American
+     Universities Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?--Other Educational
+     Forces--The Postal Laws--Ten-cent Magazines and Cheap Books--
+     Pigs in Chicago--The Press of England and America Compared--
+     Mixed Society--Educated Women--Generals as Booksellers--And as
+     Farmhands--The Value of War to a People.
+
+
+It may be presumed that when Cecil Rhodes conceived the idea of
+establishing the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford, it did not occur to him
+that Americans might not care to come to Oxford--might think their own
+universities superior to the English. Nor is it likely that there will
+in the immediate future be any dearth of students anxious to take those
+scholarships, for the mere selection has a certain amount of _kudos_
+attaching to it and, at worst, the residence abroad should be of
+advantage to any young American not destined to plunge at once into a
+business life. If it were a mere question of the education to be
+received, it is much to be feared that the great majority of Americans,
+unless quite unable to attend one of their own universities, would
+politely decline to come to England. At the time when the terms of the
+will were made public, a good many unpleasant things were said in the
+American press; and it was only the admiration of Americans for Mr.
+Rhodes (who appealed to their imagination as no other Englishman,
+except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, has appealed in the last fifty years),
+coupled with the fact that he was dead, that prevented the foundation of
+the scholarships from being greeted with resentment rather than
+gratitude.
+
+There was a time, of course, when the name of Oxford sounded very large
+in American ears; and it will probably be a surprise to Englishmen to be
+told that to-day the great majority of Americans would place not only
+Harvard and Yale, but probably also several other American universities,
+ahead of either Oxford or Cambridge. Nor is this the opinion only of the
+ignorant. Trained educational authorities who come from the United
+States to Europe to study the methods of higher education in the various
+countries, seldom hesitate to say that the education to be obtained at
+many of the minor Western colleges in America is fully as good as that
+offered by either of the great English universities, while that of
+Harvard and Yale is far superior to it.[167:1] And it must be remembered
+that education itself, as an art, is incomparably more studied, and more
+systematically studied in America than in England.
+
+Matthew Arnold spoke of the "pullulating colleges and universities" of
+America--"the multitude of institutions the promoters of which delude
+themselves by taking seriously, but which no serious man can so take";
+and he would be surprised to see to what purpose some of those
+institutions have "pullulated" in the eighteen years that have passed
+since he wrote--to note into what lusty and umbrageous plants have grown
+such institutions as the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, though
+one of those is further west by some distance than he ever penetrated.
+That these or any other colleges have more students than either Oxford
+or Cambridge need not mean much; and they cannot of course acquire in
+twenty years the old, history-saturated atmosphere. Against that are to
+be set the facts that the students undoubtedly work, on the average,
+much harder than do English undergraduates and that the teaching staffs
+are possessed of an enthusiasm, an earnestness, a determination not
+merely to fill chairs but to get results, which would be almost "bad
+form" in some Common (or Combination) Rooms in England. Wealth,
+moreover, and magnificence of endowment can go a considerable way
+towards even the creation of an atmosphere--not the same atmosphere as
+that of Oxford or Cambridge, it is true; for no money can make another
+Addison's Walk out of Prairie Avenue, or convert the Mississippi by St.
+Anthony's Falls into new "Backs."
+
+     "We may build ourselves more gorgeous habitations,
+        Fill our rooms with painting and with sculpture,
+      We cannot buy with gold the old associations----."
+
+But an atmosphere may be created wholly scholastic, and well calculated
+to excite emulation and inspire the ambition of youths.
+
+Nor is it by any means certain that the American people would desire to
+create the atmosphere of an old-world university if they could. The
+atmosphere of Oxford produces, as none other could, certain qualities;
+but are they the qualities which, if England were starting to make her
+universities anew, she would set in the forefront of her
+endeavour?[169:1] Are they really the qualities most desirable even in
+an Englishman to-day? Are they approximately the qualities most likely
+to equip a man to play the noblest part in the life of modern America?
+The majority of American educators would answer unhesitatingly in the
+negative. There are things attaching to Oxford and Cambridge which they
+would dearly love to be able to transplant to their own country, but
+which, they recognise, nothing but the passage of the centuries can
+give. Those things are unattainable; and, frankly, if they could only be
+attained by transplanting with them many other attributes of English
+university life, they would rather forego them altogether.
+
+What Englishmen most value in their universities is not any
+book-learning which is to be acquired thereat, so much as the manners
+and rules for the conduct of life which are supposed to be imparted in a
+university course,--manners and rules which are of an essentially
+aristocratic tendency. Without wishing to push a point too far, it is
+worth noting that that aristocratic tendency is purely Norman, quite out
+of harmony with the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon. It would never occur to
+an Anglo-Saxon, pure and simple, to make his university anything else
+than an institution for scholastic training, in which every individual
+should be taught as much, and as equally, as possible. The last thing
+that would occur to him would be to make it a weapon of aristocracy or
+an institution for perpetuating class distinctions. The aim and effect
+of the English universities in the past has been chiefly to keep the
+upper classes uppermost.
+
+That there are too many "universities" in America no one--least of all
+an educated American--denies; but with the vast distances and immense
+population of the country there is room for, perhaps, more than Matthew
+Arnold eighteen years ago could have foreseen, and not a few of those
+establishments which in his day he would doubtless have unhesitatingly
+classed among those which could not be taken seriously, have more than
+justified their existence.
+
+To the superiority of the American public school system over the
+English, considered merely as an instrumentality for the general
+education of the masses of a people, and not for the production of any
+especially privileged or cultivated class, is generally ascribed the
+confessedly higher average of intelligence and capacity among (to use a
+phrase which is ostensibly meaningless in America) the lower orders. But
+the educational system of the country has been by no means the only
+factor in producing this result; and it may be worth while merely as a
+matter of record, and not without interest to American readers, to note
+what some of those other factors have been during the last twenty
+years--factors so temporary and so elusive that even now they are in
+danger of being forgotten.
+
+First among these factors I would set the American postal laws, an
+essential feature of which is the extraordinarily low rates at which
+periodical literature may be transmitted. A magazine which may be sent
+to any place in the United States for from an eighth of a penny to a
+farthing, according to its weight, will cost for postage in England from
+two-pence-halfpenny to fourpence. It is not the mere difference in cost
+of the postage to the subscriber that counts, but the low American rate
+has permitted the adoption by the publishers of a system impossible to
+English magazine-makers, a system which has had the effect of making
+magazines, at least as good as the English sixpenny monthlies, the
+staple reading matter of whole classes of the population, the classes
+corresponding to which in England never read anything but a local
+weekly, or halfpenny daily, paper. It might be that the reading matter
+of a magazine would not be much superior to that of a small weekly
+paper. But at least it encourages somewhat more sustained reading and,
+what is the great fact, it accustoms the reader to handling something
+_in the form of a book_. That is the virtue. A people weaned from the
+broad-sheets by magazines readily takes next to book-reading.
+
+Moreover, under the American plan, books themselves, if issued
+periodically, used to have the same postal advantages as the
+magazines.[171:1] A so-called "library" of the classical English,
+writers could be published at the rate of a book a month, call itself a
+periodical, and be sent through the post in precisely the same way. The
+works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, or anybody else could be published
+in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly parts. If in monthly parts at
+sixpence, the cost to the subscriber would be practically the same as
+that of a monthly magazine, only that the reader would accumulate at the
+rate of twelve volumes a year--and read at the rate of one a month--the
+works of Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Of course much worthless
+literature, fiction of the trashiest, has been circulated in the same
+way--much more perhaps than of the better class. But even so, the
+reading matter was superior to that previously accessible, and the vital
+fact still remains that the people acquired the habit of book-reading.
+
+In America, the part thus played by some of the periodical libraries was
+of much importance, but it was probably not comparable to the influence
+of the ten-cent magazine. In the United States itself, the immense
+beneficence of that influence has hardly been appreciated. The magazines
+came into vogue, and the people accepted the fact as they accept the
+popularity of a new form of "breakfast food." The quickening of the
+national intelligence which resulted was no more immediate, no more
+readily traceable or conspicuous to the public eye, than would be the
+improvement in the national stamina which might result from the
+introduction of some new article of diet. A change which takes five or
+ten years to work itself out is lost sight of, becomes invisible, amid
+the jostling activities of a national life like the American. Moreover,
+several causes were contributing to the same end and, had any one
+stopped to endeavour to do it, it would not have been at any time easy
+to unravel the threads and show what proportion of the fabric was woven
+by each; but if it had been possible to affix an intellect-meter to the
+aggregate brain of the American people during the last twenty years, of
+such ingenious mechanism that it would have shown not only what the
+increase in total mental power had been but also what proportions of
+that increase were ascribable to the various contributing
+causes--education, colonial expansion, commercial growth, ten-cent
+magazines, and so forth--and if, further, the "readings" of that meter
+could be interpreted into terms of increase in national energy, national
+productiveness, national success, I do not think that Parliament would
+lose one unnecessary day in passing the legislation necessary to reform
+the English postal laws.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One other point is worth dwelling upon--equally trivial in seeming,
+equally important in its essence--which is the selling of books by the
+great department stores, the big general shops, in America. Taking all
+classes of the British population together and both sexes--artisans and
+their wives, peasants in country districts, slum residents in London and
+other large cities,--what proportion of the population of the British
+Isles do of set purpose go into a bookseller's shop once a year or once
+in their lives? Is it ten per cent.--or five per cent.--or two per
+cent.? The exact proportion is immaterial; but the number must be very
+small. In America some years ago, the owners of department stores and
+publishers found that there was considerable profit to be made in the
+handling of books--cheap reprints of good books in particular. The
+combined booksellers' and stationers' shops in the cities of the United
+States are in themselves more frequent and more attractive than in
+England: and I am going back to the days before the drug-store library
+which is as yet too recent an institution to have had an easily
+measurable influence. But incomparably more influential than these, in
+bringing the multitude in immediate contact with literature, have been
+the department stores, of almost every one of which the "book and
+stationery" department is a conspicuously attractive, and generally most
+profitable, feature. Here every man or woman who goes to do any shopping
+is brought immediately within range of the temptation to buy books--is
+involuntarily seduced into a bookshop where the wares are temptingly
+displayed and artfully pressed on the attention of customers. New books
+of all kinds are sold at the best possible discount; but what was of
+chief importance was the institution of the cheap libraries of the
+"Classics"--tables heaped with them in paper at fourpence, piles of them
+shoulder high in cloth at ninepence, shelves laden with them in
+glittering backs and by no means despicable in typography at one and
+sevenpence. Thus simultaneously with the inculcation of the book-reading
+habit by the magazines came the facility for book-buying, and, always
+remembering the difference in the scale of prices in the two countries,
+it was easy for the woman doing her household shopping to fall a victim
+to the importunities of the salesman and lavish an extra eighteen or
+thirty-eight cents on a copy of _The Scarlet Letter_ or _Ivanhoe_,
+Irving's _Alhambra_, or _Bleak House_, to take home as a surprise. In
+this way, whole classes in America, the English counterparts of which
+rarely read anything more formidable than a penny paper, acquired the
+habit of book-buying and the ambition to form a small library. The
+benefit to the people cannot be computed.
+
+Incidentally, as we know, not a little injustice was done to English
+authors by the pirating of their books, without recompense, while the
+copyright still lived. It was after I went to America, though I had
+heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford, that I first read _Fors Clavigera_ and
+_Sesame and Lilies_ in Lovell's Library, at five-pence a volume, and,
+about the same time, Tolstoi's _War and Peace_ in the _Franklin Square
+Library_, at the same price. Of older works, I can still remember Lamb
+and part of De Quincey, _Don Quixote_ and _Rasselas_ (those four for
+some reason stand out in my mind from their fellows in the row), all
+bought for the modest ten-cent piece per volume--the price of two daily
+newspapers (for all newspapers in America then cost five cents) or one
+blacking of one's shoes. Much has, of course, been done of late years in
+England in popularising the "Classics" in the form of cheap libraries;
+but the facilities for buying the books--or rather the temptations to do
+so--are incomparably less, while the relative prices remain higher.
+
+Even at fourpence halfpenny (supposing them to be purchasable at the
+price) Lamb's Essays still cost more in London than a drink of whiskey.
+In America, more than twenty years ago, the whiskey cost half as much
+again as the book.
+
+All of which is in the nature of a digression, but it has not led us far
+from the main road, for the object that I am aiming at is to convey to
+the English reader some idea of what the forces are which are at work on
+the education of the American people. The Englishman generally knows
+that in the United States there is nothing analogous to the great public
+schools of England--Winchester, Westminster, Eton, and the rest--and
+that they have a host of more or less absurd universities in no way to
+be compared to Oxford or Cambridge. The American, as has been said,
+challenges the latter statement bluntly; while, as for the public
+schools, he maintains that it is not the American ideal (if he wished to
+fortify his position, he might say it was not an Anglo-Saxon ideal) to
+produce a limited privileged and cultivated class, but that the aim is
+to educate the whole nation to the highest level; that, barring such
+qualities as their mere selectness may enable the great English schools
+to give to their pupils, the national high schools of America do, as a
+matter of fact, prepare pupils just as efficiently for the university as
+do the English institutions, while the great system of common schools
+secures for the mass of the people a much better education than is given
+in England to the same classes. Added to which, various other causes
+co-operate with the avowedly educational instrumentalities to produce a
+higher level of intellectual alertness and a more general love of
+reading in the people.
+
+And what is the result? Is the American people as well educated or as
+well informed or as well cultivated as the English? To endeavour to
+make a comparison between the two is to traverse a very morass, full of
+holes, swamps, sloughs, creeks, inlets, quicksands, and pitfalls of
+divers and terrifying natures. If it is to be threaded at all, it must
+be only with the greatest caution and, at times, indirectness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The charming English writer, the author of _Sinners and Saints_,
+affected, on alighting from the train in the railway station at Chicago,
+to be immensely surprised by the fact that there was not a pig in sight.
+"I had thought," he said, "Chicago was all pigs." There are a good many
+English still of the same opinion.
+
+The one institution in any country of which the foreigner sees most, and
+by which perhaps every people is, if unwittingly, most commonly judged
+by other peoples, is its press; and it is difficult for a superficial
+observer to believe that the nation which produces the newspapers of
+America is either an educated or a cultivated nation. Max O'Rell's
+comment on the American press is delightful: "Beyond the date, few
+statements are reliable." Matthew Arnold called the American newspapers
+"an awful symptom"--"the worst features in the life of the United
+States." Americans also--the best Americans--have a great dislike of the
+London papers.
+
+The fact is that merely as newspapers (as gatherers of news) the
+American papers are probably the best in the world. What repels the
+Englishman is primarily the form in which the news is dressed--the
+loudness, the sensationalism but if he can overcome his repugnance to
+these things sufficiently to be able to judge the paper as a whole, he
+will find, apart from the amazing quantity of "news" which it contains,
+a large amount of literary matter of a high order. I am not for one
+moment claiming that the American paper (not the worst and loudest,
+which are contemptible, nor the best, which are almost as
+non-sensational as the best London papers, but the average American
+daily paper) is, or ought to be, as acceptable reading to a cultivated
+man--still less to a refined woman--as almost any one of the penny, or
+some halfpenny, London papers. But the point that I would make and which
+I would insist on very earnestly is that the two do not stand for the
+same thing in relation to the peoples which they respectively represent.
+
+We have seen the same thing before in comparing the consular and
+diplomatic services of the two countries. Just as in the United States
+the consuls are plucked at random from the body of the people, whereas
+in England they are a carefully selected and thoroughly trained class by
+themselves, so the press of the United States represents the people in
+its entirety, whereas the English press represents only the educated
+class. The London papers (I am omitting consideration of certain
+halfpenny papers) are not talking for the people as a whole, nor to the
+people as a whole. Consciously or unconsciously they are addressing
+themselves always to the comparatively small circle of the educated
+class. When they speak of the peasant or the working man, even of the
+tradesman, they discuss him as a third person: it is not to him that
+they are talking. They use a language which is not his language; they
+assume in their reader information, sentiments, modes of thought, which
+belong not to him, but only to the educated class--that class which,
+whether each individual thereof has been to a public school and a
+university or not, is saturated with the public school and university
+traditions.
+
+It was said before that the English people has a disposition to be
+guided by the voice of authority--to follow its leaders--as the American
+people has not. The English newspaper speaks to the educated class,
+trusting, not always with justification, that opinion once formulated in
+that class will be communicated downwards and accepted by the people.
+The American newspaper endeavours to speak to the people direct.
+
+That English papers are immensely more democratic than once they were
+goes without saying. A man need not be much past middle age to be able
+to remember when the _Daily Telegraph_ created, by appealing to, a whole
+new stratum of newspaper readers. The same thing has been done again
+more recently by the halfpenny papers, some of which come approximately
+near to being adapted to the intelligences, and representing the tastes,
+of the whole population, or at least the urban population, down to the
+lowest grade. But it is not by those papers that England would like to
+be judged. Yet when Englishmen draw inferences about the American people
+from the papers which they see, they are doing what is intrinsically as
+unjust. It would be no less unjust to take the first hundred men that
+one met with, on Broadway or State Street, and compare them--their
+intellectuality and culture--with one hundred members of the London
+university clubs.
+
+Let us also remember here what was said of the Anglo-Saxon spirit--that
+spirit which is so essentially non-aristocratic, holding all men equal
+in their independence. We have seen how this spirit is more untrammelled
+and works faster in the United States than in England; but where, in
+any case, it has moved ahead among Americans the tendency in England
+generally is to follow in the same lines, not in imitation of America
+but by the impulse of the common genius of the peoples.
+
+The American dailies, even the leading dailies, are made practically for
+those hundred men on Broadway; the London penny papers are addressed in
+the main to the university class. Judging from the present trend of
+events in England it may not be altogether chimerical to imagine a time
+when in London only two or three papers will hold to the class tradition
+and will still speak exclusively in the language of the upper classes
+(as a small number of papers in New York do to-day), while the great
+body of the English press will have followed the course of the American
+publishers; and when the English papers are frankly adapted to the
+tastes and intelligence of as large a proportion of the English people
+as are now catered for by the majority of the American papers, he would
+be a rash Englishman whose patriotism would persuade him to prophesy
+that the London papers would be any more scholarly, more refined, or
+more chastened in tone than are the papers of New York or Chicago.
+
+And while the Englishman is generally ready to draw unfavourable
+inferences from the undeniably unpleasant features of the majority of
+American daily papers, he seldom stops to draw analogous inferences from
+a comparison of the American and English monthly magazines. Great
+Britain produces no magazines to compare with _Harper's_, _The Century_,
+or _Scribner's_. Those three magazines combined have, I believe, a
+number of readers in the United States equalling the aggregate
+circulation of the London penny dailies; which is a point that is worth
+consideration. When, moreover, the cheaper magazines became a
+possibility, how came it that such publications as _McClure's_ and _The
+Cosmopolitan_ arose? The illustrated magazines of the United States are
+indeed a fact of profound significance, for which the Englishman when he
+measures the taste and intellectuality of the American people by its
+press makes no allowance. Magazines of the same excellence cannot find
+the same support in England. At least two earnest attempts have been
+made in late years to establish English monthlies which would compare
+with any of the three first mentioned above, and both attempts have
+failed.
+
+What has been said about the much more representative character of the
+American daily press--the fact that the same papers are read by a vastly
+larger proportion of the population--brings us face to face with a
+root-fact which vitiates almost any attempt at a rough and ready
+comparison between the peoples. In America, there exist the counterparts
+of every class of man who is to be found in England--men as refined, men
+no less crass and brutal--some as vulgar and some as full of the pride
+of birth. Most Englishmen will be surprised to hear that the American,
+democrat though he is, is as a rule more proud of an ancestor who fought
+in the Revolutionary War than is an Englishman of one who fought in the
+Wars of the Roses. I am sure that he sets more store by a direct and
+authentic descent from one of the company of the _Mayflower_ than the
+Englishman does by an equally direct and authentic line back to the days
+of William the Conqueror. Incidentally it may be said that the American
+will talk more about it. But while in America all classes exist, they
+are not fenced apart, as in England, in fact any more than they are in
+theory. The American people (_pace_ the leaders of the New York Four
+Hundred) "comes mixed"; dip in where you will and you bring up all sorts
+of fish. In England if you go into educated society, you are likely to
+meet almost exclusively educated people--or at least people with the
+stamp of educated manners. Sir Gorgius Midas is not of course inexorably
+barred from the society of duchesses. Her Grace of Pentonville must have
+met him frequently. But in America the duchesses have to rub shoulders
+with him every day. And--which is worth noting--their husbands also rub
+shoulders with his wife.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Which brings us to the second root-fact, which is almost as disturbing
+and confounding to casual observation as the first, namely, the much
+larger part in the intellectual life of the country played by women in
+America. Intellectuality or culture in its narrower sense--meaning a
+familiarity with art and letters--is not commonly regarded by Englishmen
+as an essential possession in a wife. The lack of it is certainly not
+considered by the American woman a cardinal offence in a husband. I know
+many American men who, on being consulted on any matter of literary or
+artistic taste, say at once: "I don't know. I leave all that to my
+wife."
+
+An Englishman in an English house, looking at the family portraits, may
+ask his hostess who painted a certain picture.
+
+"I don't know," she will say, "I must ask my husband. Will, who is the
+portrait of your grandfather by--the one over there in his robes?"
+
+"Raeburn," says Will.
+
+"Of course," says the wife. "I never can remember the artists' names;
+they are so confusing--especially the English ones."
+
+The Englishman thinks no worse of her; but the American woman,
+listening, wishes that she had a portrait of her husband's grandfather
+by Raeburn and opines that she would know the artist's name.
+
+The same Englishman goes to America and, being entertained, asks a
+similar question of his host.
+
+"I don't know," says the man, "I must ask my wife. Mary, who painted
+that picture over there--the big tree and the blue sky?"
+
+"Rousseau," says Mary.
+
+"Of course," says the husband. "I never can remember the names of these
+fellows. They mix me all up--especially the French ones."
+
+And the Englishman returning home tells his friends of the queer fellow
+with whom he dined over there--"an awfully good chap, you know"--who
+owned all sorts of jolly paintings--Rousseaux and things--and did not
+even know the names of the artists: "Had to ask his wife, by Jove!"
+
+It is not for one moment claimed that there are not in England many
+women fully as cultured as the most cultured and fairest Americans; that
+there are not many Englishwomen much better informed, much more widely
+read, than their husbands. The phenomenon, however, is not nearly as
+common as in America, where, it has already been suggested, it is
+probably the result of the fact that the women have at the outset
+received precisely the same education as the men and, since leaving
+school or college, have had more leisure, being less engrossed in
+business and material things.
+
+But this feminine predominance in matters of æsthetics in the United
+States does not as a rule increase the Englishman's opinion of the
+intellectuality or culture of the people as a whole. He still judges
+only by the men. Indeed, he is not entirely disposed to like so much
+intellectuality in women--such interest in politics, educational
+matters, art, and literature. Not having been accustomed to it he rather
+disapproves of it. Blue regimentals are only fit for the blue horse or
+the artillery.
+
+The Englishman in an American house meets a man more rough and less
+polished than a man holding a similar position in society would be in
+England; and he thinks poorly of American society in consequence. He
+also meets that man's wife, who shows a familiarity with art, letters,
+and public affairs vastly more comprehensive than he would expect to
+find in a woman of similar position in England. But he does not
+therefore strike a balance and re-cast his estimate of American society,
+any more than in his estimate of the American press he makes allowance
+for the American magazines. He only thinks that the woman's knowledge is
+rather out of place and conjectures it to be probably superficial.
+Wherein he is no less one-sided in his prejudice than the American who
+will not believe in English humour because he cannot understand it.
+
+Philistinism is undoubtedly more on the surface in educated society in
+the United States than in Great Britain; but in England outside that
+society it is nearly all Philistinism. Step down from a social class in
+England, and you come to a new and lower level of refinement and
+information. In America the people still "come mixed."
+
+Twenty-five years ago in England, you did not expect a stock-broker, and
+to-day you do not expect a haberdasher (even though he may have been
+knighted), to know whether Botticelli is a wine or a cheese. In America,
+because the Englishman meets that stock-broker or that haberdasher in a
+society in which he would not be likely to meet him in England, he does
+expect him to know; and I suspect that if a census were taken there
+would be found more stock-brokers and haberdashers in America than in
+England who do know something of Botticelli. I am quite certain that
+more of their wives do. Matthew Arnold spoke not too pleasantly of the
+curious sensation that he experienced in addressing a bookseller in
+America as "General." The "bookseller" in question was a man widely
+respected in the United States, the head of a great house of publishers
+and booksellers, a conspicuously public-spirited citizen, and a _bona
+fide_ General who saw stern service in the Civil War. To Englishmen,
+knowing nothing of the background, the mere fact as stated by Matthew
+Arnold is curious.
+
+But if civil war were to break out in Great Britain--England and Wales
+against Scotland and Ireland--and the conflict assumed such titanic
+proportions that single armies of a million men took the field, then
+would Tennyson's "smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue" indeed have to "leap
+from his counter and till and strike, were it but with his cheating
+yard-wand, home." The entire population of England that was not
+actually needed at home would be compelled to take the field, and in the
+slaughter (it is curious how little English men know of the terrific
+proportions of the conflict between the North and South) the demand for
+officers would be so great that there would not be enough men of
+previous training to fill the places. Men would rise from the ranks by
+merit and among those who rose to be generals there might well be a
+publisher or bookseller or two. On the termination of the war, the
+soldiers would turn from their soldiering to their old trades and it
+might be General Murray or General Macmillan or General Bumpus; and the
+thing would not then be strange to English ears.
+
+An American story tells how, soon after the close of the Civil War, a
+stranger asked a farmer if he needed any labourers; and the farmer
+replied in the negative. He had just taken on three new ones, he said,
+all of them disbanded soldiers. One, he added, had been a private, one a
+captain, and one a full-blown colonel.
+
+"And how do you find them?" asked the other.
+
+"The private's a first-class workman," said the farmer, "and the captain
+he isn't bad."
+
+"And the colonel?"
+
+"Well, I don't want to say nothing agin a man as fit as a colonel in the
+war," said the farmer, "but I know I ain't hiring no brigadier-generals
+if they come this way."
+
+They are growing old now, and fewer, the men who held commissions in the
+war that ended over forty years ago; but during those forty years there
+has been no community, no trade or profession or calling, in which they
+have not been to be found, indistinguishable from their civilian
+colleagues, except by the tiny button in the lapels of their coats.
+Until Mr. Roosevelt, (and he won his spurs in another war) there has
+been no man elected President of the United States, except Mr.
+Cleveland, the one Democrat, who had not a distinguished record as an
+officer in the Union armies--Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and
+McKinley were all soldiers. You may still see that little button in many
+pulpits. Farmers wear it, and cabinet ministers, millionaires, and
+mechanics.
+
+The Anglo-Saxon is a fighting breed. The population of the British Isles
+sprang from the loins of successive waves of fighting men. It was not
+the weaklings of the Danes or Normans, Jutes, Saxons, or Angles who came
+to conquer Britain, but the bold, the hardy, the venturesome of each
+tribe or people. It was not the mere mixture of bloods that made the
+English character what it was, the race a race of empire builders; it
+was because of each blood there came to Britain only of the most
+adventurous. And through the centuries it has been the constant stress
+and training of the perpetual turmoil in which the people have lived
+that have kept the stock from degeneration. There has never been a time
+in English history, save when the people have been struggling in wars
+among themselves, when there has been an English family that has not at
+any given moment had sons or fathers, uncles or cousins out somewhere
+doing the work of the Empire.
+
+     And some are drowned in deep water,
+       And some in sight of shore,
+     And word goes back to the weary wife
+       And ever she sends more.
+
+     For since that wife had gate or gear
+       And hearth and garth and bield
+     She willed her sons to the white Harvest,
+       And that is a bitter yield.
+
+           .   .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+     The good wife's sons come home again
+       With little into their hands,
+     But the lore o' men that ha' dealt wi' men
+       In the new and naked lands,
+
+     But the faith o' men that ha' brothered men
+       By more than the easy breath,
+     And the eyes o' men that ha' read wi' men
+       In the open book of death.[188:1]
+
+I have already explained how far Americans are from understanding the
+British Empire. It is a pity; they would understand Englishmen better
+and like them better. And what the building of the Empire and the
+keeping of it have done for Englishmen, the Civil War did in large
+measure for the Americans. Even the struggle with their own wilderness
+might not have sufficed to keep the people hard and sound of heart and
+limb through a century of peace and growing prosperity. The Civil War is
+already beginning to slip into the farther reaches of the people's
+memory; but twenty-five years ago the echoes of the guns had hardly died
+away--the minds of the people were still inspired. It was an awful, and
+a splendid, experience for the nation. It is not necessary, with
+Emerson, "always to respect war hereafter"; but there have been times
+when it has seemed to me that I would rather be able to wear that little
+tri-colour button of the American Loyal Legion than any other
+decoration in the world.[189:1]
+
+It is the great compensation of war that it does not breed in a people
+only a fighting spirit. All history shows that it is in the mental
+exhilaration and the moral uplift after a period of war successfully
+waged that a people puts forth the best that is in it, in the production
+of works of art and in its literature. It is an old legend--older than
+Omar--that the most beautiful flowers spring from the blood of heroes.
+And it is true. When the genius of a nation has been ploughed up with
+cannon-shot and bayonets and watered with blood--then it is that it
+breaks into the most nearly perfect blossom. It has been so through all
+history, back beyond the times of gun and bayonet, when spears and
+swords were the plough-shares, as far as we can see and doubtless
+farther. In America, the necessities of the case compelled the people to
+turn first to material works; it was to the civilising of their
+continent, the repairing of their shattered commercial and industrial
+structure (shattered when it was yet only half built), that their new
+inspiration had perforce to turn first. But there was impetus enough for
+that and to spare, and, after satisfying their mere physical needs, they
+swept on with a sort of inspired hunger for things to satisfy their
+minds and souls. Europeans are accustomed to think that the American
+desire for culture is something superficial--something put on for
+appearance's sake; and nothing could well be farther from the truth. It
+is an intense, deep-seated, national craving. War on the scale of the
+Civil War ploughs deep. It may be impossible for a nation to make itself
+cultivated--to grow century-old shrubberies and five-century-old
+turf--in ten years or forty; and when the Americans in their ravening
+famine reach out to grasp at once all that is good and beautiful in the
+world, it may be that at first they cannot assimilate all that they draw
+to them--they can grasp, but not absorb. To that extent there may be
+much that is superficial in American culture. But every year and every
+day they are sucking the nourishment deeper--the influences are
+penetrating, percolating, permeating the soil of their natures (yes, I
+know that I am running two metaphors abreast, but let them run)--and it
+is a mistake to conclude because in some places the culture lies only on
+the surface that there are not others where it has already sunk through
+and through. Above all is it a mistake to suppose that the emotion
+itself is shallow or that the yearning is not as deep as their--or any
+human--natures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is possible that some critics may be found cavilling enough to accuse
+me of inconsistency in thus celebrating the praise of War in a work
+which is avowedly intended for the promotion of Peace. Carlyle wisely,
+if somewhat brutally, pointed out that if an Oliver Cromwell be
+assassinated "it is certain you may get a cart-load of turnips from his
+carcase." But one does not therefore advocate regicide for the sake of
+the kitchen-gardens.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[167:1] What is said above--or at least what can be read between the
+lines--may throw some light on the fact, on which the English press
+happens as I write to be commenting in some perplexity, that whereas
+certain Australians among the Rhodes scholars have distinguished
+themselves conspicuously in the schools, the only honours that have
+fallen to Americans have been those of the athletic field. Those
+journals which have inferred therefrom a lack of aptitude for
+scholarship on the part of American youth in general may be amiss in
+their diagnosis.
+
+[169:1] To avoid misapprehension, let me say that, as an Oxford man, I
+have all the Oxford prejudices as fully developed as any Englishman
+could wish. Rather a year of Oxford than five of Harvard or ten of
+Minnesota. How much of this is sentiment, and worthless, and how much
+reason, it would be hard to say and is immaterial. The personal
+prepossession need not blind one either to the greatness of the work
+which the other institutions do, nor to the defensibility of that point
+of view which sets other qualities, in an institution the professed
+object of which is to educate and to fit youths for life, above even
+those possessed by Oxford or Cambridge.
+
+[171:1] In 1906, under a stricter definition of the term "periodical,"
+the privilege of sending as second-class matter books issued at regular
+intervals was withdrawn.
+
+[188:1] Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea Wife" (_The Seven Seas_).
+
+[189:1] The Loyal Legion is the society of those who held commissions as
+officers on the side of the North. The Grand Army of the Republic is the
+society which includes all ranks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A COMPARISON IN CULTURE
+
+     The Advantage of Youth--Japanese Eclecticism and American--The
+     Craving for the Best--_Cyrano de Bergerac_--Verestschagin--
+     Music and the Drama--Culture by Paroxysms--Mr. Gladstone and
+     the Japanese--Anglo-Saxon Crichtons--Americans as Linguists--
+     England's Past and America's Future--Americanisms in Speech--
+     Why they are Disappearing in America--And Appearing in
+     England--The Press and the Copyright Laws--A Look into the
+     Future.
+
+
+Ruskin, speaking of the United States, said that he could never bring
+himself to live in a country so unfortunate as to possess no castles.
+But, with its obvious disadvantages, youth in a nation has also
+compensations. Max O'Rell says that to be American is to be both fresh
+and mature, and I have certainly known many Americans who were fresh.
+The shoulders are too young for the head to be very old. But when a
+man--let us say an Englishman of sixty--full of worldly wisdom, having
+travelled much and seen many men and cities, looks on a young man, just
+out of the university, perhaps, very keen on his profession, very
+certain of making his way in the world, with a hundred interests in what
+seem to the other "new-fangled" things--telephones and typewriters and
+bicycles and radio-activity and motor cars, things unknown to the old
+man's youth,--talking of philosophies and theories and principles which
+were not taught at college when the other was an undergraduate, the
+elder is likely to think that the young man's judgment is sadly crude
+and raw, that his education has been altogether too diffused and made up
+of smatterings of too many things, and to say to himself that the old
+sound, simple ways were better. Yet it may be--is it not almost
+certain?--that the youth has had the training which will give him a
+wider outlook than his father ever had, and will make him a broader man.
+
+In our grandfathers' days, a man of reasonable culture could come
+approximately near to knowing all that then was known and worth the
+knowing. The wisdom and science of the world could be included in the
+compass of a modest bookshelf. But the province of human knowledge has
+become so wide that, however much "general information" a man may have,
+he can truly know nothing unless he studies it as a specialist. It is,
+perhaps, largely as a reaction against the Jacksonian theory of
+universal competence that the avowed ideal of American education to-day
+is to cultivate the student's power of concentration--to give him a
+survey, elementary but sound, of as wide a field as possible, but above
+all to teach him so to use his mind that to whatever corner of that
+field he may turn for his walk in life, he will be able to focus all his
+intellect upon it--to concentrate and bring to bear all his energies on
+whatever tussock or mole-hill it may be out of which he has to dig his
+fortune. When the youth steps out into life, it may be that his actual
+store of knowledge is superficial--a smattering of too many things--but
+superficiality is precisely the one quality which, in theory at least,
+his training has been calculated not to produce. Englishmen know that
+the American throws tremendous energy and earnestness into his business.
+They know that he throws the same earnestness into his sports. Is it not
+reasonable to suppose that he will be no less earnest in the study of
+Botticelli? And it is a great advantage (which the American nation
+shares with the American youth) to have the products, the literature,
+the art, the institutions of the whole world to choose from, with
+practically no traditions to hamper the choice.
+
+When the Japanese determined to adopt Western ways, seeing that so only
+could they hold their own against the peoples of the West, they did not
+model their civilisation on that of any one European country. They sent
+the most intelligent of their young men abroad into every country, each
+with a mission to study certain things in that country; and so,
+gathering for comparison the ways of thought and the institutions of all
+peoples, they were able to pick and choose from each what seemed best to
+them and to reject all else. They did not propose to make themselves a
+nation of imitation Englishmen or Germans or Americans. "But," we can
+imagine them saying, "if we take whatever is best in each country we
+ought surely to be able to make ourselves into a nation better than
+any." They modelled their navy on the British, but not their army, nor
+their banking system, nor did they copy much from British commercial or
+industrial methods--nor did they take the British system of education.
+
+The United States has been less free to choose. The Japanese had a new
+house, quite empty, and they could do their furnishing all at once. The
+American nation, though young, has, after all, a century of domestic
+life behind it, in the course of which it has accumulated a certain
+amount of furniture in the form of institutions, prejudices, and
+traditions, some of which are fixtures and could not be torn out of the
+structure if the nation wished it; others, though movable, possess
+associations for the sake of which it would not part with them if it
+could. Fortunately, however, the house has been much built on to of late
+years and what goods, or bads, are already amassed can all be stowed
+away in a single east wing. All the main building (the eastern wing used
+to be the main building, but it is not now), and particularly the
+western end and the annex to the north, are new and empty, to be
+decorated and furnished as the owner pleases. And while the owner, like
+a sensible man, intends to do all that he can to encourage home
+manufactures, he does not hesitate to go as far afield as he likes to
+fill a nook with something better than anything that can be turned out
+at home.
+
+Nothing strikes an Englishman more, after he comes to know the people,
+than this eclectic habit, paradoxically combined as it is with an
+intense--an over-noisy--patriotism. "The best," the American is fond of
+saying, "is good enough for me"; and it never occurs to him that he has
+not entire right to the best wherever he may find it. In England it is
+only a small part of the population which considers itself entitled to
+the best of anything. The rest of the people may covet, but the best
+belongs to "their betters." The American knows no "betters." He comes to
+England and walks, as of right, into the best hotels, the best
+restaurants, the best seats at the theatres--and the best society. He
+buys, so far as his purse permits, and often his purse permits a great
+deal, the best works of art. The consequence is that the world brings
+him of its best. It may defraud him once in a while into buying an
+imitation or a second-class article patched up; but, on the whole, the
+American people has something like the best of the world to choose from.
+And what is true of the palpable and material things is equally true of
+the intangible and intellectual.
+
+Englishmen have long been familiar with one aspect of this fact, in the
+honours which America has in the past been ready to shower on any
+visiting Englishman of distinction: in the extraordinary number of
+dollars that she has been willing to pay to hear him lecture. Of this
+particular commodity--the lecturing Englishman--the people has been
+fairly sated; but because Americans are no longer eager to lionise any
+English author or artist with some measure of a London reputation, it
+does not by any means imply that they are not still seeking for, and
+grappling, the best in art and letters wherever they can find it. They
+only doubt whether the Englishman who comes to lecture is, after all,
+the best.
+
+A Frenchman has pronounced American society to be the wittiest in the
+world. A German has said that more people read Dante in Boston than in
+Berlin. I take it that many more read Shakespeare in the United States
+than in Great Britain--and they certainly try harder to understand him.
+Nor need it be denied that they have to try harder. Without any
+knowledge of actual sales, I have no doubt that the number of copies of
+the works of any continental European author, of anything like a
+first-class reputation, sold in America is vastly greater than the
+number sold in England. Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Sienkiewicz, Ibsen,
+Maeterlinck, Fogazzaro, Jokai, Haeckel, Nietzsche--I give the names at
+random as they come--of any one of these there is immeasurably more of a
+"cult" in the United States than in England--a far larger proportion of
+the population makes some effort to master what is worth mastering in
+each. Rodin's works--his name at least and photographs of his
+masterpieces--are familiar to tens of thousands of Americans belonging
+to classes which in England never heard of him. Helleu's drawings were
+almost a commonplace of American illustrated literature six years before
+one educated Englishman in a hundred knew his name. Zörn's etchings are
+almost as well known in the United States as Whistler's. Englishmen
+remain curiously engrossed in English things.
+
+It may be a very disputable judgment to say that the most nearly
+Shakespearian literary production of modern times--at least of those
+which have gained any measure of fame--is M. Rostand's _Cyrano de
+Bergerac_. Immediately on its publication it was greeted in America with
+hardly less enthusiasm than in Paris; and within a few weeks it became
+the chief topic of conversation at a thousand dinner tables. In a few
+months I had seen the play acted by three different companies--all
+admirable, scholarly productions, of which the most famous and most
+"authorised" was by no means the best--and soon thereafter I came to
+England, for a short visit, but with the determination to find time to
+make the trip to Paris to see M. Coquelin as "Cyrano." I found
+Englishmen--educated Englishmen, including not a few authors and
+critics to whom I spoke--practically unaware of the existence of such a
+play. Of those who had heard of it and read _critiques_, I met not one
+who had read the work itself. Some time after, Sir Charles Wyndham
+produced it in London and it was, I believe, not a success. To-day
+_Cyrano de Bergerac_ (I am speaking of it not as an acting play but as
+literature) is practically unknown even to educated Englishmen, except
+such as make French literature their special study.
+
+_Cyrano_ may or may not be on a level with any but the greatest of
+Shakespeare's plays (it is evident from his other work that M. Rostand
+is not a Shakespeare) but that it was an immeasurably finer thing than
+ninety-nine per cent of the books of the year which English people were
+reading that winter on the advice of English critics is beyond question.
+The nation which was reading and discussing M. Rostand's work was
+conspicuously better engaged than the nation which was reading and
+discussing the English novels of the season.
+
+Again when poor Vasili Verestschagin met his death so tragically off
+Port Arthur, his name meant little or nothing to the great majority of
+educated Englishmen, though there had been exhibitions of his work in
+London--the same exhibitions as were made throughout the larger cities
+of the United States. In America regret for him was wide-spread and
+personal, for he stood for something definite in American eyes--rather
+unfortunately, perhaps, in one way, because Verestschagin, too, had
+painted those miserable sepoys being eternally blown from British guns.
+
+The general English misapprehension of the present condition of art and
+literature in America sometimes shows itself in unexpected places. I
+have a great love for _Punch_. Since the time when the beautifying of
+its front cover with gamboge and vermilion and emerald green constituted
+the chief solace of wet days in the nursery, I doubt if, in the course
+of forty years, I have missed reading one dozen copies of the London
+_Charivari_. After a period of exile in regions where current literature
+is unobtainable one of the chief delights of a return to civilisation is
+"catching up" with the back numbers of _Punch_; nor, in spite of gibes
+to the contrary, has the paper ever been more brilliant than under its
+present editorship. Yet _Punch_ in this present week of September 11,
+1907, represents an American woman, apparently an American woman of
+wealth and position (at all events she is at the time touring in Italy),
+as saying on hearing an air from _Il Trovatore_: "Say, these Italians
+ain't vurry original. Guess I've heard that tune on our street organs in
+New York ever since I was a gurl."
+
+The weaknesses of the peoples of other nations are fair game; but it is
+the essence of just caricature that it should have some verisimilitude.
+_Punch_ could not publish that drawing with the accompanying legend
+unless it was the belief of the editor or the staff that such a solecism
+was more or less likely to proceed from the mouth of such an American as
+is depicted; which is precisely the error of the Frenchman who believes
+that Englishmen sell their wives at Smithfield. Thirty years ago, the
+lampoon would have had some justification; but at the present time both
+the actual number and the percentage of women who are familiar with the
+Italian operas is, I believe, vastly greater in America than in
+England. This statement will undoubtedly be received with incredulity by
+the majority of Englishmen who know nothing about the United States; but
+no one who does know the people of the country will dispute it. In
+England, the opera is still, for all the changes that have occurred in
+the last quarter of a century, largely a pleasure of a limited class. It
+may be (and personally I believe) that in that class there is a larger
+number of true musicians who know the operas well and love them
+appreciatively than is to be found in the United States; but the number
+of people who have a reasonable acquaintance with the majority of
+operas, and are familiar with the best known airs from each and with the
+general characteristics of the various composers, is immensely larger in
+America. It is only the same fact that we have confronted so often
+before--the fact of the greater homogeneousness or uniformity of tastes
+and pursuits in the American people.
+
+It must be clearly understood, here as elsewhere, that I am not
+comparing merely the people of New York with the people of London, but
+the people of the whole United States of all classes, urban and
+provincial, industrial and peasant, East and West, with the whole
+population of all classes in the British Isles; for a large percentage
+of the mistakes which Englishmen make about America arises from the fact
+that they insist on comparing the educated classes of London with such
+people as they may chance to have met in New York or one or two Eastern
+cities, under the impression that they are thereby drawing a comparison
+between the two peoples. Senator Hoar's opinion of Matthew Arnold has
+been already quoted; and the truth is that very few Englishmen who have
+written about America have lived in the country long enough to grasp how
+much of the United States lies on the other side of the North River. Not
+only does not New York alone, but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
+Washington combined do not bear anything like the same relation to
+America as a whole as London bears to the British Isles. Englishmen take
+no account of, for they have not seen and no one has reported to them,
+the intense craving for and striving after culture and self-improvement
+which exists (and has existed for a generation) not only in such larger
+cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New Orleans,
+but in many hundreds of smaller communities scattered from the Atlantic
+to the Pacific. One must have such a vision of the United States as a
+whole as will enable him to imagine all this endeavour, now dissipated
+over so vast a stretch of country, as all massed together into a
+territory no larger than the British Isles before he can arrive at an
+intelligent basis of comparison between the peoples. What is centralised
+in England in America is diffused over half a continent and much less
+easily measurable.
+
+It happens that as I am correcting the proofs of the chapter the London
+newspapers of the day (January 25, 1908) contain announcements of the
+death in New York of Edward MacDowell. He was often spoken of as "the
+American Grieg"; but it was a phrase which irritated many good musical
+critics in America, for the reason that they considered their countryman
+the greater man of the two. They would have had Grieg spoken of as the
+Norwegian MacDowell. In that judgment they may have been right or they
+may have been wrong; but it is characteristic of the attitudes of the
+British and American peoples that, whereas the people of the United
+States know Grieg better than he is known in England (that is to say,
+that a larger proportion of the people, outside the classes which
+professedly account themselves musical, have more or less acquaintance
+with his music), just as they know the work of half a dozen English
+composers, MacDowell, though he had played his pianoforte concertos in
+London, remained almost unknown in England outside of strictly musical
+circles. It is certain that had MacDowell been an Englishman he would
+have been immensely better known in America than, being an American, he
+ever was in England.
+
+In the kindred field of the drama the general English idea of the
+American stage is based chiefly on acquaintance with that noisy type of
+"musical comedy" of which so many specimens have in recent years been
+brought to England from the other side of the Atlantic. It is as if
+Americans judged English literature by Miss Marie Corelli and Guy
+Thorne. Those things are brought to England because they are opined by
+the managers to be the sort of thing that England wants or which is
+likely to succeed in England, not because they are what America
+considers her best product. To attempt any comparison of the living
+playwrights or actors in the two countries would be a thorny and
+perilous undertaking; and if any comparison is to be made at all it must
+be done lightly and as far as possible examples must be drawn from those
+who are no longer actively on the boards. Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary
+Anderson) has deliberately put on record her opinion of Miss Clara
+Morris as "the greatest emotional actress I ever saw." It is not likely
+that when Madame de Navarro pronounced that estimate she was forgetting
+either Miss Terry or Mrs. Campbell--or Mesdames Rejane and Bernhardt or
+Signora Duse. Madame de Navarro is no mean judge: and those who have
+read Miss Morris's wonderful book, _Life on the Stage_, will think the
+judgment in this case not incredible.
+
+Similarly I believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has
+just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholarship,
+restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an
+English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is
+in his class. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living
+English actor could have approached, and I gravely doubt whether England
+would have furnished a public who would have appreciated it in
+sufficient numbers to make its presentation a success if it had been
+achieved in London.
+
+It was said that in any effort to arrive at an estimate of American
+culture, or to state that culture in terms of English culture, we should
+have to find landmarks in trifles. All these things are such trifles.
+Let us concede that _Cyrano_ is not the greatest literature, nor is
+Verestschagin's work the highest art; still neither the one nor the
+other is properly a negligible quantity in the sum-total of the creative
+work of the generation. There may be many American women who do not know
+their Verdi, and it may be that Madame de Navarro's estimate of Miss
+Morris, mine of Mr. Mansfield, and that of certain American critics of
+Edward MacDowell are equally at fault; but it still remains absurd to
+take ignorance of the Italian operas as characteristic of American
+women or to talk contemptuously, as many Englishmen do, of the American
+theatre, because they have no knowledge of it beyond what they have seen
+of the one class of production from _The Belle of New York_ to _The
+Prince of Pilsen_, or of American music, because their acquaintance with
+it begins and ends with Sousa and the writers of "coon songs."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will be urged that successive "crazes" for individual artists or
+authors, for particular productions or even isolated schools, are no
+evidence of any general culture. Conceding this, it remains impossible
+to avoid the question: supposing a nation or an individual to spend each
+successive six months in a new enthusiasm--six months on Plato and
+Aristotelianism,--six months, taking the _Light of Asia_, Mr. Sinnett,
+and _Kim_ as a starting point, on Buddhism and esoteric philosophy,--six
+months, inspired by Fitzgerald, on Omar, Persian literature and history
+and the various ramifications thereof,--six months on M. Rodin, his
+relation to the art of sculpture in general and particularly to the
+sculpture of the Greeks,--a similar six months devoted to Mr. Watt with
+like excursions into his environment, proximate and remote,--six months
+to Millet, Barbizon, and the history of French painting,--six months of
+Russian art with Verestschagin and six with Russian literature and
+politics working outwards from Count Tolstoi,--six months of philosophic
+speculation radiating from Haeckel,--six months absorbed in Japanese
+art,--six months burrowing in Egyptian excavations and Egyptian
+history--the question is, I say, supposing a nation or an individual to
+have passed through twenty such spasms (of which I have suggested ten,
+every one of which ten is a subject which I have in my own experience
+known to become the rage in America more or less wide-spread and for a
+greater or lesser period) and supposing that nation or that individual
+to be possessed of extraordinary earnestness and power of concentration,
+with a great desire to learn, how far will that nation or that
+individual have travelled on the road toward something approaching
+culture? Let it be granted that the individual or the nation starts with
+something less of the æsthetic temperament, less well grounded in, or
+disposed towards, artistic or literary study than the average Englishman
+who has made decent use of his opportunities at school, at the
+university, and in the surroundings of his every-day life; the
+intellectual condition of that individual or nation will not at the end
+of the ten years of successive _furores_ be the same intellectual
+condition as that of the Englishman who, after leaving college, has
+spent ten years in the ordinary educated society of England, but it is
+probable that, besides the accumulation of a great quantity of
+information, some not entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards
+of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth
+remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has
+declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there is
+conspicuously more culture.
+
+When the Englishman hears the American, and especially the American
+woman, slip so glibly from Rodin to Rameses, from Kant to kakemonos, he
+dubs her superficial. Perhaps she is, considering only the actual
+knowledge possessed compared with the potentiality of knowledge on any
+one of the topics. There is a story which has been fitted to many
+persons and many occasions, but which thirty years ago was told of Mr.
+Gladstone, though for all I know it may go back to generations before he
+was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where
+among the guests was a distinguished Japanese; and, as not seldom
+happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with
+fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which
+Japan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was
+asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man,"
+he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know all about everything
+in the world except Japan. He knows nothing at all about Japan."
+
+The specialist in a single subject can always find the holes in the
+information on that subject of the "universal specialist." But it is
+worth noticing that, like almost every other salient trait of the
+American character, this American desire to become a universal
+specialist--this reaching after the all-culture and all-knowledge--is an
+essentially Anglo-Saxon or English characteristic. The German may be
+content to spend his whole life laboriously probing into one small hole.
+The Frenchman (let me say again that I thoroughly recognise that all
+national generalisations are unsound) will cheerfully wave aside with a
+_la-la-la_ whole realms of knowledge which do not interest him. But all
+Englishmen and all Americans would be Crichtons and Sydneys if they
+could. And--perhaps on the principle of setting a thief to catch a
+thief--although the all-round man is the ideal of both peoples, each is
+equally suspicious of an intellectual rotundity (in another person) too
+nearly complete.
+
+Americans rather like to repeat that story of Mr. Gladstone, when the
+talk is of English culture.
+
+The American as a rule is a better linguist than the Englishman,--he is
+quicker, that is, to pick up a modern language and likely to speak it
+with a better accent. "Never trust an Englishman who speaks French
+without an English accent," said Prince Bismarck; and the remark,
+however unjust it may be to an occasional individual, showed a shrewd
+insight into the English character. There is always to be recognised the
+fact that there are tens--perhaps hundreds--of thousands of Englishmen
+who speak Hindustani, Pushtu, or the language of any one of a hundred
+remote peoples with whom the Empire has traffic, while the American has
+had no contact with other peoples which called for a knowledge of any
+tongue but his own, except that in a small way some Spanish has been
+useful. But so far as European languages go, the Englishman, in more or
+less constant and intimate relation with each of the peoples of Europe,
+has been so well satisfied of his own superiority to each that it has
+seemed vastly more fitting that they should learn his language than that
+he should trouble to learn theirs. Under any circumstances, is it not
+obviously easier for each one of the European peoples to learn to talk
+English than for the Englishman to learn eight European tongues with
+eighty miscellaneous dialects?
+
+When an Englishman does learn a foreign language, it is most commonly
+for literary or scholastic purposes, rather than (with the exception of
+French in certain classes) for conversational use. The American on the
+other hand, having had no need of languages in the past, coming now in
+contact with the world, sees that there are three or four languages of
+Europe which it is most desirable that he should know, if only for
+commercial purposes; and a language learned for commercial purposes must
+be mastered colloquially and idiomatically. The American is not
+distracted by the need of Sanskrit or of any one of the numerous more or
+less primitive tongues which a certain proportion of the English people
+must acquire if the business of the Empire is to go on. Nor is his
+vision confused by seeing all the European tongues jumbled, as it were,
+together before him at too close range. He can distinguish which are the
+essential or desirable languages for his purposes; and the rising
+generation of Americans is learning those languages more generally, and
+in a more practical way, than is the rising generation of Englishmen.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And yet we have not crossed that morass;--nor perhaps, however superior
+in folly we may be to the angels, is it desirable that we should in
+plain daylight. We have at most found some slight vantage-ground: thrown
+up a mole-hill of a Pisgah from which we can attain a distant view of
+what lies beyond the swamp, even if perchance we have taken some mirages
+and _ignes fatui_ for solid landscape and actual illuminations.
+
+The ambitions and ideals of the two peoples are fundamentally alike; nor
+is there so great a difference as appears on the surface in their method
+of striving to attain those ideals and realise those ambitions, albeit
+the American uses certain tools (modern he calls them, the Englishman
+preferring to say new-fangled) to which the Englishman's hands have not
+taken kindly. It is natural that the English nation, having a so much
+larger past, should be more influenced by it than the American. It is
+natural that the American, conscious that his national character has but
+just shaped itself out of the void, with all the future before it,
+should look more to the present and the future than the Englishman.
+
+The Englishman prefers to turn almost exclusively to the study of
+antiquity--the art and philosophies and letters of past ages--for the
+foundation of his work, and thence to push on between almost strictly
+British lines. The American seeks rather to absorb only so much of the
+wisdom and taste of antiquity as may serve for an intelligent
+comprehension of the world-art, the world-philosophies, the
+world-literature of to-day, and then, borrowing what he will from each
+department of those, to strive on that foundation to build something
+better than any. There are many scholars and students in America who
+would prefer to see the people less eager to push on. There are many
+thinkers and educators in England who hold that English scholarship and
+training dwell altogether too much in the past and that it were better
+if England would look more abroad and would give larger attention to the
+conditions of modern life--the conditions which her youth will have to
+meet in the coming generation.
+
+If an American were asked which of the two peoples was the more
+cultivated, the more widely informed, he would probably say: "You
+fellows have been longer at the game than we have. You've had more
+experience in the business; but we believe we've got every bit as good
+raw material as you and a blamed sight better machinery. Also we are
+more in earnest and work that machinery harder than you. Maybe we are
+not turning out as good goods yet--and maybe we are. But it's a dead
+sure thing that if we aren't yet, we're going to."
+
+A common index to the degree of cultivation in any people is found in
+their everyday language--their spoken speech; but here again in
+considering America from the British standpoint we have to be careful or
+we may be entrapped into the same fallacy as threatens us when we
+propose to judge the United States by its newspapers. In the first place
+the right of any people to invent new forms of verbal currency to meet
+the requirements of its colloquial exchange must be conceded. There was
+a time when an Americanism in speech was condemned in England because it
+was American. When so many of the Americanisms of ten years ago are
+incorporated in the daily speech even of educated Englishmen to-day, it
+would be affectation to put forward such a plea nowadays. Going deeper
+than this, we undoubtedly find that the educated Englishman to-day
+speaks with more precision than the educated American. The educated
+Englishman speaks the language of what I have already called the public
+school and university class. But while the Englishman speaks the
+language of that class, the American speaks the language of the whole
+people. That is not, of course, entirely true, for there are grades of
+speech in the United States, but it is relatively true--true for the
+purpose of a comparison with the conditions in Great Britain. The
+Englishman may be surprised at the number of solecisms committed in the
+course of an hour's talk by a well-to-do New Yorker whom he has met in
+the company of gentlemen in England. He would perhaps be more surprised
+to find a mechanic from the far West commit no more. The tongue of
+educated Englishmen is not the tongue of the masses--nor is it a
+difference in accent only, but in form, in taste, in grammar, and in
+thought. If in England the well-to-do and gentle classes had commercial
+transactions only among themselves, it is probable that a currency
+composed only of gold and silver would suffice for their needs; copper
+is introduced into the coinage to meet the requirements of the poor.
+American speech has its elements of copper for the same reason--that all
+may be able to deal in it, to give and take change in its terms. It is
+the same fact as we have met before, of the greater homogeneousness of
+the American people--the levelling power (for want of a better phrase)
+of a democracy.
+
+The Englishman may object, and with justice, that because an educated
+man must incorporate into his speech words and phrases and forms which
+are necessary for communication with the vulgar, there is no reason why
+he should not be able to reserve those forms and phrases for use with
+the vulgar only. A gentleman does not pay half-a-crown, lost at the card
+table to a friend, in coppers. Why cannot the educated American keep his
+speech silver and gold for educated ears? All of which is just. There
+are people in the United States who speak with a preciseness equal to
+that of the most exacting of English precisians, but they are not fenced
+off as in England within the limits of a specified class; while the
+common speech of the American people, which is used by a majority of
+those who would in England come within the limits of that fenced area,
+is much more careless in form and phrase than the speech of educated
+Englishmen. It may be urged that it is much less careless, and better
+and vastly more uniform, than any one of the innumerable forms of speech
+employed by the various lower classes in England; which is true. The
+level of speech is better in America; but the speech of the educated and
+well-to-do is generally much better in England. All this, however (which
+is mere commonplace) may be conceded, but, though educated Americans may
+use a more debased speech than educated Englishmen, the point is that it
+is not safe to argue therefrom to an inferiority in culture in America;
+because the American uses his speech for other and wider purposes than
+the Englishman. The different American classes, just as they dress
+alike, read the same newspapers and magazines, and, within limits, eat
+the same food, so they speak the same language. It is unjust to compare
+that language with the language used in England only by the educated
+classes.
+
+But, what is an infinitely larger fact, the inferiority of the American
+speech to the English is daily and rapidly disappearing. Twenty years
+ago, practically all American speech fell provincially on educated
+English ears. That is far from being the case to-day; and what is most
+interesting is that the alteration has not come about as the result of a
+change in the diction of Americans only. The change has been in
+Englishmen also. To whatever extent American speech may have improved,
+it is certain also that English speech has become much less
+precise--much less uniform among the educated and "gentlemanly"
+classes--and English ears are consequently less exacting.
+
+With the gradual elimination of class distinctions in England, or rather
+with the blurring of the lines which separate one class from another, a
+multitude of persons pass for "gentlemen" in England to-day who could
+not have dreamed--and whose fathers certainly did not dream--of being
+counted among the gentry thirty-five years ago. The fact may be for good
+or ill; but one consequence has been that the newcomers, thrusting up
+into the circles above them, have taken with them the speech of their
+former associates, so that one hears now, in nominally polite circles,
+tones of voice, forms of speech, and the expression of points of view
+which would have been impossible in the youth of people who are now no
+more than middle-aged.
+
+There was a time when the dress proclaimed the man of quality at once.
+That distinction began to pass away with the disappearance of silk and
+ruffles and wigs from masculine costume. For a century longer, the
+shibboleths of voice and manner kept their force. But now those too are
+going; and the result is that the English speech of the educated class
+has become less precise and less uniform. The same speech is now common
+to a larger proportion of the people. In the days when nearly all the
+members of educated society--we are speaking of the men only, for they
+only counted in those days--had been to one or other of the same "seven
+great public schools" (which not one public school man in a hundred can
+name correctly to-day) and to one or other of the same two universities,
+they kept for use among themselves all through their after life the
+forms of speech, the catchwords, the classical references which passed
+current in their school and undergraduate days. It was a free-masonry of
+speech on which the outsider could not intrude. To-day, when not a
+quarter of the members of the same circles have been to one of those
+same seven schools nor a half to the same universities, when at least a
+quarter have been to no recognised classical school at all, it is
+impossible that the same free-masonry should prevail. There were a
+hundred trite classical quotations (no great evidence of scholarship,
+but made jestingly familiar by the old school curricula) which our
+fathers could use with safety in any chance company of the society to
+which they were accustomed; but even the most familiar of them would be
+a parlous experiment in small talk to-day. They have vanished from
+common conversation even more completely than they have disappeared from
+the debates of the House of Commons. And this is only a type of the
+change which has come over the educated speech of England, which we may
+regret or we may welcome. It may be sad that the English gentleman
+should speak in less literary form than he did thirty years ago, but the
+loss may be outweighed many times by the fact that so much larger a
+proportion of the people speak the same speech as he--not so refined as
+his used to be, but materially better than the majority of those who use
+it to-day could then have shaped their lips to frame. Few Englishmen at
+least would acquiesce in the opinion that it showed a decay of culture
+in England--that the people were more ignorant or less educated. It may
+not be safe to draw an analogous conclusion in the case of the American
+people.
+
+A story well-known to most Englishmen has to do with the man who,
+arriving at Waterloo station to take a train, went into the refreshment
+room for a cup of coffee. In his haste he spilled the coffee over his
+shirt front and thereupon fell to incontinent cursing of "this d----d
+London and South-Western Railway."
+
+An American variant of, or pendant to, the same story tells of the
+Eastern man who approached Salt Lake City on foot and sat by the wayside
+to rest. By ill luck he sat upon an ants' nest. Shortly he rose
+anathematising the "lustful Mormon city" and turned his face eastward
+once more, a Mormon-hater to the end of his days.
+
+Not much less illogical is an Englishman I know who, having spent some
+three weeks in the United States, loathes the people and all the
+institutions thereof, almost solely (though the noise of the elevated
+trains in New York has something to do with it) because he found that
+they applied the name of "robin" to what he calls "a cursed great
+thrush-beast." Nearly every English visitor to the United States has
+been irritated at first by discovering this, or some similar fact; but
+it is not necessary on that account to hate the American people, to
+express contempt for their art and literature, and to belittle their
+commercial greatness and all the splendours of their history.[214:1]
+Rather ought Englishmen to like this application by the early colonists
+to the objects of their new environment of the cherished names of the
+well-known things of home. It shows that they carried with them into the
+wilderness in their hearts a love of English lane and hedgerow, and
+strove to soften the savagery of their new surroundings by finding in
+the common wild things the familiar birds and flowers which had grown
+dear to them in far-off peaceful English villages.
+
+We will not now potter again over the well-trodden paths of the
+differences in phraseology in the two peoples which have been so
+fruitful a source of "impressions" in successive generations of English
+visitors to the United States, for the thing grows absurd when "car,"
+and "store," and "sidewalk," and "elevator" are commonplaces on the lips
+of every London cockney; nor is there any need here to thread again the
+mazes of the well-worn discussion as to how far the peculiarities of
+modern American speech are only good old English forms which have
+survived in the New World after disappearance from their original
+haunts.[215:1] The subject is worth referring to, however, for the very
+reason that its discussion _has_ become almost absurd,--because by a
+process which has been going on, as we have already said, on both sides
+of the ocean simultaneously, the differences themselves are
+disappearing, the tongues of the two peoples are coming together and
+coalescing once more. The two currents into which the stream divided
+which flowed from that original well of English are drawing
+together--are, indeed, already so close that it will be but a very short
+time when the word "Americanism" as applied to a peculiarity in language
+will have ceased to be used in England. The "Yankee twang" and the
+"strong English accent" will survive in the two countries respectively
+for some time yet; but the written and spoken language of the two
+nations will be--already almost is--the same, and English visitors to
+the United States will have lost one fruitful source of impressions.
+
+The process has been going on in both countries, but in widely different
+forms. And this seems to me a peculiarly significant fact. In America
+the language of the people is constantly and steadily tending to
+improve; and this tendency is, Englishmen should note, the result of a
+deliberate and conscious effort at improvement on the part of the
+people. This can hardly be insisted upon too strongly.
+
+The majority of "Americanisms" in speech were in their origin mere
+provincialisms--modes of expression and pronunciation which had sprung
+up unchecked in the isolated communities of a scattered people. They
+grew with the growth of the communities, until they threatened to graft
+themselves permanently on the speech of the nation. The United States is
+no longer a country of isolated and scattered communities. After the
+Civil War, and partly as a result thereof, but still more as a result of
+the knitting together of the whole country by the building of the
+American railway system, with the consequent sudden increase in
+intimacy of communication between all parts, there developed in the
+people a new sense of national unity. England saw a revolution in her
+means of communication when railways superseded stage-coaches and when
+the penny post was established; but no revolution comparable to that
+which has taken place in the United States in the present generation.
+Prior to 1880--really until 1883--Portland, Oregon, was hardly less
+removed from Portland, Maine, than Capetown is from Liverpool to-day,
+and the discomforts of travel from one to the other were incomparably
+greater. Now they are morally closer together than London and Aberdeen,
+in as much as nowhere between the Atlantic and Pacific is there any such
+consciousness of racial difference as separates the Scots from the
+English.
+
+The work of federation begun by the original thirteen colonies is not
+yet completed, for the individuality of the several States is destined
+to go on being continuously more merged--until it will finally be almost
+obliterated--in the Federal whole; but it may be said that in the last
+twenty-five years, and not until then, has the American people become
+truly unified--an entity conscious of its oneness and of its commercial
+greatness in that oneness, thinking common thoughts, co-operating in
+common ambitions, and speaking a common speech. Into that speech were at
+first absorbed, as has been said, the peculiarities, localisms, and
+provincialisms which had inevitably grown up in different sections in
+the days of non-communication. But precisely those same causes--the
+settlement of the country, the construction of the railways, the
+development of the natural resources--which contributed to the
+unification and laid the foundations of the greatness, produced, with
+wealth and leisure, new ambitions in the people. The desire for art and
+literature and, what we have called the all-culture, was no new growth,
+but an instinct inherited from the original English stock. Quickened it
+must have been by the moral uplifting of the people by the Civil War,
+but, as we have already seen, for some time after the close of that war
+the whole energies of the people were necessarily devoted to material
+things. Only with the completion of the repairing of the ravages of that
+war, and with the almost coincident settlement of the last great waste
+tracts of the country, were the people free to reach out after things
+immaterial and æsthetic; and only with the accession of wealth, which
+again these same causes produced, came the possibility of gratifying the
+craving for those things. And in the longing for self-improvement and
+self-culture, thus newly inspired and for the first time truly national,
+one of the things to which the people turned with characteristic
+earnestness was the improvement of the common speech. The nation has set
+itself purposefully and with determination to purify and prevent the
+further corruption of its language.
+
+The movement towards "simplification" of the spelling may or may not be
+in the direction of purification, but it will be observed that the
+movement itself could not have come into being without the national
+desire for improvement. The American speech is now the speech of a
+solidified and great nation; and it cannot be permitted to retain the
+inelegancies and colloquialisms which were not intolerable, perhaps, in
+the dialect of a locality in the days when that locality had but
+restricted intercourse with other parts of the country. This effort to
+purify the common tongue is conscious, avowed, and sympathised with in
+all parts of the country alike.
+
+When any point of literary or grammatical form is under discussion in a
+leading American newspaper to-day, the dominant note is that of a purism
+more strict than will appear in a similar discussion in England. In many
+American newspaper offices the rules of "style" forbid the use of
+certain words and phrases which are accepted without question in the
+best London journals. There have of course always been circles--as,
+notoriously, in and around Boston, and, less notoriously but no less
+truly, in Philadelphia and New York--wherein the speech, whether written
+or spoken, has been as scrupulous in form and grammar as in the most
+scholarly circles in Great Britain. These circles corresponded to what
+we have called the public-school and university class of England, and,
+no more than it, did they speak the common speech of their country. Only
+now is the people as a whole consciously striving after an uplifting of
+such common speech.
+
+In England, on the other hand, the process that has been going on has
+been quite involuntary and is as yet almost entirely unconscious.
+
+We have spoken so far of only one factor in that process--namely, the
+democratisation of the English people which is in progress and the
+blurring of the lines between the classes. Co-operating with this are
+other forces. Just as the most well-bred persons can afford on occasions
+to be most careless of their manners--just as only an old-established
+aristocracy can be truly reckless of the character of new associates
+whom it may please to take up--so it may be that the well-educated man,
+confident of his impeccability and altogether off his guard, more
+readily absorbs into his daily speech cant phrases and even solecisms
+than the half-educated who is ever watchful lest he slip. The American
+has a way of writing, figuratively, with a dictionary at his elbow and a
+grammar within reach. There are few educated Englishmen who do not
+consider their own authority--the authority drawn from their school and
+university training--superior to that of any dictionary or grammar,
+especially of any American one.[220:1] So it has come about that, while
+the tendency of the American people is constantly to become more exact
+and more accurate in its written and spoken speech, the English tendency
+is no less constantly towards a growing laxity; and while the American
+has been sternly and conscientiously at work pruning the inelegancies
+out of his language, the Briton has been lightheartedly taking these
+same inelegancies to himself. It is obviously impossible that such a
+twofold tendency can go on for long without the gulf between the quality
+of the respective languages becoming appreciably narrower.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The American writers who now occupy places on the staffs of London
+journals are thoroughly deserving of their places. They have earned
+these and retain them on the ground of their capacity as news gatherers,
+and through the brilliancy of their descriptive writing. They possess
+what is described as "newspaper ability" as opposed to "literary
+ability." It is, nevertheless, the fact that in the majority of the
+newspaper offices, the "copy" of these writers is permitted to pass
+through the press with an immunity from interference on the part either
+of editor or proof-reader, which, a decade back, would not have been
+possible in any London office. Thus the British public, unwarned and
+unconscious, is daily absorbing at its breakfast table, and in the
+morning and evening trains, American newspaper English, which is the
+output of English newspaper offices. It is not now contended that this
+English is any worse than the public would be likely to receive from the
+same class of English writers, but the fact itself is to be noted. I am
+not prepared to agree with Mr. Andrew Lang in holding the English writer
+necessarily blameworthy who "in serious work introduces, needlessly,
+into our tongue an American phrase." Such introductions, however
+needless, may materially enrich the language, and I should, even with
+the permission of Mr. Lang, extend the same latitude to the introduction
+of Scotticisms.
+
+A more important matter for consideration is the present condition of
+the copyright laws of the two countries. English publishers understand
+well enough why it is occasionally cheaper, or, taking all the
+conditions together, more advantageous to have put into type in the
+United States rather than in Great Britain the work of a standard
+English novelist, and to bring the English edition into print from a
+duplicate set of American plates. On the other hand, it is exceptional
+for a novel, or for any book by an American writer, to be put into type
+in England for publication in both countries. For the purpose of
+bringing the text of such books into line with the requirements of
+English readers, it is the practice of the leading American publishers
+to have one division of their composing-rooms allotted to typesetting by
+the English standard, with the use by the proof-readers of an English
+dictionary. It occasionally happens, however, that the attention of
+these proof-readers to the task of securing an English text limits
+itself to a few typical examples, such as spelling "colour" with a "u"
+and seeing that "centre" does not appear as "center," while all that
+constitutes the essence of American style, as compared with the English
+style, is passed unmolested and without change.
+
+Such a result is, doubtless, inevitable in the case of a work by an
+American writer who has his own idea of literary expression and his own
+standard of what constitutes literary style, but the resulting text not
+infrequently gives ground for criticism on the part of English
+reviewers, and for some feeling of annoyance on the part of cultivated
+English readers.
+
+In the case of books by English authors which are put into type in
+American printing-offices, there is, of course, no question of
+modification of style or of form of expression, but with these, as
+stated, the proof-readers are not always successful in eliminating
+entirely the American forms of spelling.
+
+The English publisher, even though he give a personal reading to the
+book in the form in which it finally leaves his hands, (and, in the
+majority of cases, having read it once in manuscript, he declines to go
+over the pages a second time, but contents himself with a cursory
+investigation of the detail of "colour," of "centre,") is not
+infrequently dissatisfied, but it is too late for any changes in the
+text, and he can only let the volume go out. In the case of books
+printed in England from plates made in America, there is nothing at all
+to warn the reader; while in the case of books bound in England from
+sheets actually printed in the United States, there is nothing which the
+reader is likely to notice; and in nine cases out of ten the Englishman
+is unconscious that he is reading anything but an English book. The
+critic may understand, and the man who has lived long in the United
+States and who can recognise the characteristics of American diction,
+assuredly will understand, but these form, of course, a very small class
+in the community; and when the rest of the public is constantly reading
+American writing without a thought that it is other than English
+writing, it is hardly strange that American forms of speech creep daily
+more and more largely into the English tongue. What is really strange is
+that the educational authorities have been prepared to accept and to
+utilise in English schools many American educational books carrying
+American forms of speech and American spelling.
+
+The morality or the wisdom of the English copyright laws is not at the
+moment under discussion, but it is my own opinion (which I believe to be
+the opinion of every Englishman who has given any attention to the
+matter) that not on any ground of literary criticism, or because of any
+canons of taste, but merely as a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence
+to England, and for the sake of securing additional employment for
+British labour, the laws of copyright are in no less radical and urgent
+need of amendment than the English postal laws. What we are here
+concerned with, however, is the effect of the present condition of these
+laws as one of the contributory factors which are co-operating to lessen
+the difference, once so wide and now so narrow, between the American and
+the English tongue.
+
+Nor can there be any doubt of the result of this twofold process if it
+be allowed to continue indefinitely, working in England towards a
+democratisation and Americanisation of the speech, and in America
+towards a higher standard of taste, based on earlier English literary
+models. The two currents, once divergent, now so closely confluent, will
+meet; but will they continue to flow on in one stream? Or will the same
+tendencies persist, so that the currents will cross and again diverge,
+occupying inverse positions?
+
+In a hundred years from now, when, as a result of the apparently
+inevitable growth of the United States in wealth, in power, and in
+influence, its speech and all other of its institutions will come to be
+held in the highest esteem, is it possible that Londoners may vehemently
+put forward their claim to speak purer American than the Americans
+themselves--just as many Americans assert to-day that their speech is
+nearer to the speech of Elizabethan England than is the speech of modern
+Englishmen? Is it possible that it will be only in the common language
+of Englishmen that philologists will be able to find surviving the racy,
+good old American words and phrases of the last decades of the
+nineteenth century--a period which will be to American literature what
+the Elizabethan Age is to English. It may, of course, be absurd, but
+already there are certain individual Americanisms which have long been
+_taboo_ in every reputable office in the United States, but are used
+cheerfully and without comment in London dailies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once more it seems necessary to take precaution lest I be interpreted as
+having said more than I really have said. It would be a mere
+impertinence to affect to pronounce a general judgment on the level of
+culture or of achievement of the two peoples in all fields of art and
+effort; and the most that an individual can do is to take such isolated
+examples drawn from one or from the other, as may serve in particular
+matters as some sort of a standard of measurement. What I am striving to
+convey to the average English reader is, of course, not an impression of
+any inferiority in the English, but only the fact that the Englishman's
+present estimate of the American is almost grotesquely inadequate.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[214:1] Mr. Archer, I find, has this delightful story: "A friend of mine
+returned from a short tour in the United States, declaring that he
+heartily disliked the country and would never go back again. Enquiry as
+to the grounds of his dissatisfaction elicited no more definite or
+damning charge than that 'they' (a collective pronoun presumed to cover
+the whole American people) hung up his trousers instead of folding
+them--or _vice versa_, for I am heathen enough not to remember which is
+the orthodox process."
+
+[215:1] But I cannot resist recording my astonishment at finding in Ben
+Jonson the phrase "to have a good time" used in precisely the sense in
+which the American girl employs it to-day, or at learning from Macaulay
+that Bishop Cooper in the time of Queen Elizabeth spoke of a "platform"
+in its exact modern American political meaning.
+
+[220:1] Though it is worth noting that incomparably the best dictionary
+of the English language yet completed is an American one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+POLITICS AND POLITICIANS
+
+     The "English-American" Vote--The Best People in Politics--What
+     Politics Means in America--Where Corruption Creeps in--The
+     Danger in England--A Presidential Nomination for Sale--Buying
+     Legislation--Could it Occur in England?--A Delectable Alderman--
+     Taxation while you Wait--Perils that England Escapes--The
+     Morality of Congress--Political Corruption and the Irish--
+     Democrat and Republican.
+
+
+The American people ought cordially to cherish Englishmen who come to
+the United States to live, if only for the reason that they have never
+organised for political purposes. In every election, all over the United
+States, one hears of the Irish vote, the German vote, the Scandinavian
+vote, the Italian vote, the French vote, the Polish vote, the Hebrew
+vote, and many other votes, each representing a _clientêle_ which has to
+be conciliated or cajoled. But none has ever yet heard of the English
+vote or of an "English-American" element in the population. It is not
+that the Englishman, whether a naturalised American or not, does not
+take as keen an interest in the politics of the country as the people of
+any other nation; on the contrary, he is incomparably better equipped
+than any other to take that interest intelligently. But he plays his
+part as if it were in the politics of his own country, guided by
+precisely the same considerations as the American voters around
+him.[227:1]
+
+The individual Irishman or German will often take pride in splitting off
+from the people of his own blood in matters political and voting "as an
+American." It never occurs to the Englishman to do otherwise. The
+Irishman and the German will often boast, or you will hear it claimed
+for them, that they become assimilated quickly and that "in time," or
+"in the second generation," they are good Americans. The Englishman
+needs no assimilation; but feels himself to be, almost from the day when
+he lands (provided that he comes to live and not as a tourist), of one
+substance and colour with the people about him. Not seldom he is rather
+annoyed that those around him, remembering that he is English, seem to
+expect of him the sentiments of a "foreigner," which he in no way feels.
+
+More than once, it is true, during my residence in America I have been
+approached by individuals or by committees, with invitations to
+associate myself with some proposed political organisation of Englishmen
+"to make our weight felt;" but in justice to those who have made the
+suggestion it should be said that it has always been the outcome of
+exasperation at a moment either when Fenianism was peculiarly rampant in
+the neighbourhood, or when members of other nationalities were doing
+their best to create ill-will between Great Britain and the United
+States. The idea of organising, as the members of other nationalities
+have organised, for the mere purpose of sharing in the party plunder,
+has, I believe, never been seriously contemplated by any Englishmen in
+America; though there are many communities in which their vote might
+well give them the balance of power. It would, as a rule, be easier to
+pick out--say, in Chicago--a Southerner who had lived in the North for
+ten years than an Englishman who had lived there for the same length of
+time. It would certainly be safer to guess the Southerner's party
+affiliation.
+
+The ideas of Englishmen in England about American politics are vague.
+They have a general notion that there is a great deal of politics in
+America, that it is mostly corrupt, and that "the best people" do not
+take any interest in it. As for the last proposition, it is only locally
+or partially true, and quite untrue in the sense in which the Englishman
+understands it.
+
+The word "politics" means two entirely separate things in England and in
+the United States. Understanding the word in its English sense, it is
+conspicuously untrue that the "best people" in America do not take at
+least as much an interest in politics as the "best people" take in
+England. Selecting as a representative of the "best people" of America,
+any citizen eminent in his particular community--capitalist, landed
+proprietor or "real-estate owner," banker, manufacturer, lawyer, railway
+president, or what not,--that man as a usual thing takes a very active
+interest in politics, and not in the politics of the nation only, but of
+his State and his municipality. He is known to be a pillar of one party
+or the other; he gives liberally of his own funds and of the funds of
+his firm or company to the party treasury[229:1]; he is consulted by,
+and advises with, the local committees; representatives of the national
+committees or from other parts of the State call upon him for
+information; he concerns himself intimately with the appointments to
+political office made from his section of the country; he attends public
+meetings and entertains visiting speakers at his house; as far as may be
+judicious (and sometimes much further), he endeavours by his example or
+precept to influence the votes and ways of thought of those in his
+service. The chances of his being sent to Congress or to the Senate, of
+his becoming a cabinet minister, being appointed to a foreign mission,
+or accepting a position on some commission of a public character, are
+vastly greater than with the man of corresponding position in England.
+So far from not taking an interest in politics, as Englishmen understand
+the phrase, he is commonly a most energetic and valuable supporter of
+his party.
+
+But--and here is the nub of the matter--politics in America include
+whole strata of political work which are scarcely understood in England.
+When the English visitor is told in the United States that "our best
+people will not take any interest in politics," it is usually in the
+office of a financier, or at a fashionable dinner table, in New York or
+some other of the great cities. What is intended to be conveyed to him
+is that the "best people" will not take part in the active work in
+municipal politics or in that portion of the national politics which
+falls within the municipal area. The millionaire, the gentleman of
+refinement and leisure, will not "take off his coat" and attend primary
+meetings, or make tours of the saloons and meet Tammany or "the City
+Hall gang" on its own ground. As a matter of fact it is rather
+surprising to see how often he does it; but it is spasmodically and in
+occasional fits of enthusiasm for Reform, "with a large R." And,
+whatever temporary value these intermittent efforts may have (and they
+have great value, if only as a warning to the "gangs" that it is
+possible to go too far), they are in the long run of little avail
+against the constant daily and nightly work of the members of a
+"machine" to whom that work means daily bread.
+
+I have said that it is surprising to see how often these "best people"
+do go down into the slums and begin work at the beginning; and the
+tendency to do so is growing more and more frequent. The reproach that
+they do not do it enough has not the force to-day that once it had.
+Meanwhile in England there is little complaint that the same people do
+not do that particular work, for the excellent reason that that work
+does not exist to be done. It would only be tedious here to go into an
+elaborate explanation of why it does not exist. The reason is to be
+found in the differences in the political structure of the two
+countries--in the much more representative character of the government
+(or rather of the methods of election to office) in America--in the
+multiplication of Federal, State, county, and municipal
+office-holders--in the larger number of offices, including many which
+are purely judicial, which are elective, and which are filled by party
+candidates elected by a partisan vote--in the identification of national
+and municipal politics all over the country.
+
+Of all these causes, it is probably the last which is fundamentally most
+operative. The local democracy, local republicanism everywhere, is a
+part of the national Democratic or Republican organisation. The party as
+a whole is composed of these municipal units. Each municipal campaign is
+conducted with an eye to the general fortunes of the party in the State
+or the nation; and the same power that appoints a janitor in a city hall
+may dictate the selection of a presidential candidate.
+
+Until very recently, this phenomenon was practically unknown in England.
+The "best person"--he who "took an interest in politics" as a Liberal or
+as a Conservative--was no more concerned, as Liberal or Conservative, in
+the election of his town officers than he was accustomed to take part in
+the weekly sing-song at the village public house. National politics did
+not touch municipal politics. Within the last two decades or so,
+however, there has been a marked change, and not in London and a few
+large cities alone.
+
+Englishmen who have been accustomed to believe that the high standard of
+purity in English public life, as compared with what was supposed to be
+the standard in America, was chiefly owing to the divorcement of the
+two, are not altogether gratified at the change or easy in their mind as
+to the future. London is still a long way from having such an
+organisation as Tammany Hall in either the Moderate or Progressive
+party; but it is not easy to see what insuperable obstacles would exist
+to the formation of such an organisation, with certain limitations, if a
+great and unscrupulous political genius should arise among the members
+of either party in the London County Council and should bend his
+energies to the task. It is not, of course, necessary that, because
+Englishmen are approximating to the American system in this particular,
+they should be unable to avoid adopting its worst American abuses. But
+it will do no harm if Englishmen in general recognise that what is, it
+is to be hoped, still far from inevitable, was a short time ago
+impossible. If Great Britain must admit an influence which has, even
+though only incidentally, bred pestilence and corruption elsewhere, it
+might be well to take in time whatever sanitary and preventive measures
+may be available against similar consequences.[232:1]
+
+Meanwhile in the United States there is continually being raised, in
+ever increasing volume, the cry for the separation of local and national
+politics. It is true that small headway has yet been made towards any
+tangible reform; but the desire is there. Again, therefore, it is
+curious that in politics, as in so many other things, there are two
+currents setting in precisely opposing directions in the two
+countries--in America a reaction against corruptions which have crept in
+during the season of growth and ferment and an attempt to return to
+something of the simplicity of earlier models, and, simultaneously in
+England, hardly a danger, but a possibility of sliding into a danger, of
+admitting precisely those abuses of which the United States is
+endeavouring to purge itself. The tendencies at work are exactly
+analogous to those which, as we have seen, are operating to modify the
+respective modes of speech of the two peoples. What the ultimate effect
+of either force will be, it is impossible even to conjecture. But it is
+unpleasant for an Englishman to consider even the remotest possibility
+of a time coming, though long after he himself is dead, when the people
+of America will draw awful warnings from the corrupt state of politics
+in England, and bless themselves that in the United States the municipal
+rings which dominate and scourge the great cities in England are
+unknown.
+
+At present that time is far distant, and there can be no reasonable
+doubt that there is much more corruption in public affairs in the United
+States than in England. The possibilities of corruption are greater,
+because there are so many more men whose influence or vote may be worth
+buying; but it is to be feared that the evil does not exceed merely in
+proportion to the excess of opportunity. Granted that bribery and the
+use of undue influence are most obvious and most rampant in those
+spheres which have not their counterpart in Great Britain--in municipal
+wards and precincts, in county conventions and State legislatures--it
+still remains that the taint has spread upwards into other regions which
+in English politics are pure. There is every reason to think that the
+Englishman is justified in his belief that the motives which guide his
+public men and the principles which govern his public policy are, on the
+whole, higher than those which guide and inspire and govern the men or
+policies of any other nation. Bismarck's (if it was Bismarck's)
+confidence in the _parole de gentleman_ is still justified. In America,
+a similar faith in matters of politics would at times be sorely tried.
+
+Perhaps as good an illustration as could be cited of the greater
+possibilities of corruption in the United States, is contained in a
+statement of the fact that a very few thousand dollars would at one time
+have sufficed to prevent Mr. Bryan from becoming the Democratic
+candidate for the Presidency in 1896. This is not mere hearsay, for I am
+able to speak from knowledge which was not acquired after the event. Nor
+for one moment is it suggested that Mr. Bryan himself was thus easily
+corruptible, nor even that those who immediately nominated him could
+have been purchased for the sum mentioned.
+
+The fact is that for a certain specified sum the leaders of a particular
+county convention were willing to elect an anti-Bryan delegation. The
+delegation then elected would unquestionably control the State
+convention subsequently to be held; and the delegation to be elected
+again at that convention would have a very powerful influence in
+shaping the action of the National Convention at St. Louis. The
+situation was understood and the facts not disputed. Those to whom the
+application for the money was made took all things into consideration
+and determined that it was not worth it; that it would be better to let
+things slide. They slid. If those gentlemen had foreseen the full volume
+of the avalanche that was coming, I think that the money would have been
+found.
+
+It was, however, better as it was. The motives which prompted the
+refusal of the money were, as I was told, not motives of morality. It
+was not any objection to the act of bribery, but a mere question of
+expediency. It was not considered that the "goods" were worth the money.
+But, as always, it was better for the country that the immoral act was
+not done. The Free Silver poison was working in the blood of the body
+politic, and it was better to let the malady come to a head and fight it
+strenuously than to drive it back and let it go on with its work of
+internal corruption. Looking back now it is easy to see that the fight
+of 1896 must have come at some time, and it was best that it came when
+it did. The gentlemen who declined to produce the few thousand dollars
+asked of them (the sum was fifteen thousand dollars, if I remember
+rightly, or three thousand pounds) would, a few weeks later, have given
+twice the sum to have the opportunity back again. Now, I imagine, they
+are well content that they acted as they did.
+
+As illustrating the methods which are not infrequent in connection with
+the work of the State legislatures, I may mention that I once acted
+(without premeditation) as witness to the depositing of two thousand
+dollars in gold coin in a box at a safety deposit vault, by the
+representative of a great corporation, the key of which box was
+afterwards handed to a member of the local State legislature. The vote
+and influence of that member were necessary for the defeat of certain
+bills--bills, be it said, iniquitous in themselves--which would have
+cost that particular corporation many times two thousand dollars; and
+two thousand dollars was the sum at which that legislator valued the
+aforesaid vote and influence.
+
+It is not always necessary to take so much precaution to secure secrecy
+as was needed in this case. The recklessness with which State
+legislators sometimes accept cheques and other easily traceable media of
+exchange is a little bewildering, until one understands how secure they
+really are from any risk of information being lodged against them. A
+certain venerable legislator in one of the North-western States some
+years ago gained considerable notoriety, of a confidential kind, by
+being the only member of his party in the legislature at the time who
+declined to accept his share in a distribution which was going on of the
+mortgage bonds of a certain railway company. It was not high principle
+nor any absurd punctiliousness on his part that made him decline. "In my
+youth," said he to the representative of the railway company, "I was an
+earnest anti-slavery man and I still recoil from bonds." It was said
+that he received his proportion of the pool in a more negotiable form.
+
+It would be easy, even from my own individual knowledge, to multiply
+stories of this class; but the effect would only be to mislead the
+English reader, while the American is already familiar with such
+stories in sufficiency. The object is not to insist upon the fact that
+there is corruption in American public life, but rather to show what
+kind of corruption it is, and that it is largely of a kind the
+opportunity for indulgence in which does not exist in England. The
+method of nominating candidates for Parliament in England removes the
+temptation to "influence" primaries and bribe delegations. In the
+absence of State legislatures, railway and other corporations are not
+exposed to the same system of blackmail.
+
+Let us suppose that each county in England had its legislature of two
+chambers, as every State has in America, the members of these
+legislatures being elected necessarily only from constituencies in which
+they lived, so that a slum district of a town was obliged to elect a
+slum-resident, a village a resident of that village; let us further
+suppose that by the mixture of races in the population certain districts
+could by mere preponderance of the votes be expected to elect only a
+German, a Scandinavian, or an Irishman--in each case a man who had been
+perhaps, but a few years before, an immigrant drawn from a low class in
+the population of his own country; give that legislature almost
+unbridled power over all business institutions within the borders of the
+county, including the determination of rates of charge on that portion
+of the lines of great railway companies which lay within the county
+borders--is there not danger that that power would be frequently abused?
+When one party, after a long term of trial in opposition, found itself
+suddenly in control of both houses, would it always refrain from using
+its power for the gratification of party purposes, for revenge, and for
+the assistance of its own supporters? Local feeling sometimes becomes,
+even in England, much inflamed against a given railway company, or some
+large employer of labour, or great landlord, whether justly or not. It
+may be that in the case of a railway, the rates of fare are considered
+high, the train service bad, or the accommodations at the stations poor.
+At such a time a local legislature would be likely to pass almost any
+bill that was introduced to hurt that railway company, merely as a means
+of bringing pressure to bear upon it to correct the supposed
+shortcomings. It obviously then becomes only too easy for an
+unscrupulous member to bring forward a bill which will have plausible
+colour of public-spirited motive, and which if it became a law would
+cost the railway company untold inconvenience and many tens of thousands
+of pounds; and the railway company can have that bill withdrawn or
+"sidetracked" for a mere couple of hundred.
+
+Personally I am thankful to say that I have such confidence in the
+sterling quality of the fibre of the English people (so long as it is
+free, as it is in England, from Irish or other alien influence) as to
+believe that, even under these circumstances, and with all these
+possibilities of wrong-doing, the local legislatures would remain
+reasonably honest. But what might come with long use and practice, long
+exposure to temptation, it is not easy to say. Some things occur in the
+colonies which are not comforting. If, then, the corruption in American
+politics be great, the evil is due rather to the system than to any
+inherent inferiority in the native honesty of the people. Their
+integrity, if it falls, has the excuse of abundant temptation.
+
+The most instructive experience, I think, which I myself had of the
+disregard of morality in the realm of municipal politics was received
+when I associated myself, sentimentally rather than actively, with a
+movement at a certain election directed towards the defeat of one who
+was probably the most corrupt alderman in what was at the time perhaps
+the corruptest city in the United States. Of the man's entire depravity,
+from a political point of view, there was not the least question among
+either his friends or his enemies. Nominally a Democrat, his vote and
+policy were never guided by any other consideration than those of his
+own pocket. On an alderman's salary (which he spent several times over
+in his personal expenditure each year), without other business or
+visible means of making money, he had grown wealthy--wealthy enough to
+make his contributions to campaign funds run into the thousands of
+dollars,--wealthy enough to be able always to forget to take change for
+a five-dollar or a ten-dollar bill when buying anything in his own
+ward,--wealthy enough to distribute regularly (was it five hundred or a
+thousand?) turkeys every Thanksgiving Day among his constituents. No one
+pretended to suggest that his money was drawn from any other source than
+from the public funds, from blackmail, and from the sale of his vote and
+influence in the City Council. In that Council he had held his seat
+unassailably for many years through all the shifting and changing of
+parties in power. But a spirit of reform was abroad and certain
+public-spirited persons decided that it was time that the scandal of his
+continuance in office should be stopped. The same conclusion had been
+arrived at by various campaign managers and bodies of independent and
+upright citizens on divers preceding occasions, without any result worth
+mentioning. But at last it seemed that the time had come. There were
+various encouraging signs and portents in the political heavens and all
+auguries were favourable. There were, it is true, experienced
+politicians who shook their heads. They blessed us and wished us well.
+They even contributed liberally to our campaign fund; but the most
+experienced among them were not hopeful.
+
+It was a vigorous campaign--on our side; with meetings, brass bands,
+constant house-to-house canvassing, and processions _ad libitum_. On the
+other side, there was no campaign at all to speak of; only the man whom
+we were seeking to unseat spent some portion of every day and the whole
+of every night going about the ward from saloon to saloon, always
+forgetting the change for those five-dollar and ten-dollar bills, always
+willing to cheer lustily when one of our processions went by, and, as we
+heard, daily increasing his orders for turkeys for the approaching
+Thanksgiving season.
+
+So far as the saloon keepers, the gamblers, the owners and patrons of
+disorderly houses went, we had no hope of winning their allegiance; but,
+after all, they were a small numerical minority of the voters of the
+ward. The majority consisted of low-class Italians, unskilled labourers,
+and it was their votes that must decide the issue. There was not one of
+them who was not thoroughly talked to, as well as every member of his
+family of a reasoning age. There was not one who did not fully recognise
+that the alderman was a thief and an entirely immoral scamp; but their
+labour was farmed by, perhaps, half a dozen Italian contractors. These
+men were the Alderman's henchmen. As long as he continued in the
+Council, he was able to keep their men employed--on municipal works and
+on the work of the various railway and other large corporations which he
+was able to blackmail. We, on our part, had obtained promises of
+employment, from friends of decent government regardless of politics in
+all parts of the city, for approximately as many men as could possibly
+be thrown out of work in case of an upheaval. But of what use were
+these, more or less unverifiable, promises, when on the eve of the
+election the half a dozen contractors (who of course had grown rich with
+their alderman's continuance in office) gave each individual labourer in
+the ward to understand clearly that if the present alderman was defeated
+each one of them would have to go and live somewhere--live or
+starve,--for not one stroke of work would they ever get so long as they
+lived in that ward?
+
+It was, as I have said, a vigorous campaign on our side; and the
+Delectable One was re-elected by something more than his usual majority.
+On the night of the election it was reported--though this may have been
+mere rumour--that the bills which he laid on the counter of each saloon
+in the ward (and always forgot to take any change) were of the value of
+fifty dollars each. That was some years ago, but I understand that he is
+still in that same City Council, representing that same ward.
+
+It was in the same city that one year I received notice of my personal
+property tax, the amount assessed against me being about ten times
+higher than it ought to have been. Experience had taught me that it was
+useless to make any protest against small impositions, but a
+multiplication of my obligations by tenfold was not to be submitted to
+without a struggle. I wrote therefore to the proper authority, making
+protest, and was told that the matter would be investigated. After a
+lapse of some days, I was invited to call at the City Hall. There I was
+informed by one of the subordinate officials that it was undoubtedly a
+case of malice--that the assessment had been made by either a personal
+or a political enemy. I was then taken to see the Chief. The Chief was a
+corpulent Irishman of the worst type. My guide leaned over him and in an
+undertone, but not so low that I did not hear, gave him a brief _résumé_
+of the story, stating that it was undoubtedly a case of intentional
+injustice, and concluding with an account of myself and my interests
+which showed that the speaker had taken no little trouble to post
+himself upon the subject. He emphasised the fact of my association with
+the press. At this point for the first time the Chief evinced some
+interest in the tale. His intelligence responded to the word
+"newspapers" as promptly as if an electrical current had suddenly been
+switched into his system. "H'm! newspapers!" he grunted. Then, heaving
+his bulk half round in his chair so as partially to face me----
+
+"This is a mistake," he said. "We will say no more about it. Your
+assessment's cancelled."
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said, "I have no objection to paying one-tenth of
+the amount. If an '0' is cut off the end----"
+
+"That's all right," he said. "The whole thing is cut off."
+
+I made another protest, but he waved me away and my guide led me from
+the room. Because it was opined that, through the press, I might be able
+to make myself objectionable if the imposition was persisted in, I paid
+no tax at all that year. Which was every whit as immoral as the original
+offence.
+
+Stories of this class it would be easy to multiply indefinitely; but
+again I say that it is not my desire to insist on the corruptness which
+exists in American political life, but rather to explain to English
+readers what the nature of that corruptness is and in what spheres of
+the political life of the country it is able to find lodgment. What I
+have endeavoured to illustrate is, first, how the peculiar political
+system of the United States may, under some exceptional conditions, make
+it possible for even the nomination of a President to be treated as a
+matter of purchase, though the candidate himself and those who
+immediately surround him may be of incorruptible integrity; second, the
+unrivalled opportunities for bribery and other forms of political
+wrong-doing furnished by the existence of the State legislatures, with
+their eight thousand members, drawn necessarily from all ranks and
+elements of the population, and possessing exceptional power over the
+commercial affairs of the people of their respective States; and, third,
+the methods by which, in certain large cities, power is attained, used,
+and abused by the municipal "bosses" of all degrees, a condition of
+affairs which is in large measure only made possible by the
+identification of local and national politics and political parties. In
+each case the conditions which make the corruption possible do not exist
+in England, even though in the last named (the identification of local
+with national politics and parties) the tendency in Great Britain is
+distinctly in the direction of the American model. It is, perhaps, an
+inevitable result of the working of the Anglo-Saxon "particularistic"
+spirit, which ultimately rebels against any form of national government
+or of national politics in which the individual and the individual of
+each locality, is debarred from making his voice heard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As for the corruptness which is supposed to exist in Congress itself,
+this I believe to be largely a matter of partisan gossip and newspaper
+talk. It may be that every Congress contains among its members a few
+whose integrity is not beyond the temptation of a direct monetary bribe;
+and it would perhaps be curious if it were not so. But it is the opinion
+of the best informed that the direct bribery of a member of either the
+Senate or the House is extremely rare. It happens, probably, all too
+frequently that members consent to acquire at a low figure shares in
+undertakings which are likely to be favourably affected by legislation
+for which they vote, in the expectation or hope of profit therefrom; but
+it is exceedingly difficult to say in any given case whether a member's
+vote has been influenced by his financial interest (whether, on public
+grounds, he would not have voted as he did under any circumstances), and
+at what point the mere employment of sound business judgment ends and
+the prostitution of legislative influence begins. The same may be said
+of the accusations so commonly made against members of making use of
+information which they acquire in the committee room for purposes of
+speculation.
+
+Washington, during the sessions of Congress is full of "lobbyists"--_i.
+e._, men who have no other reason for their presence at the capital
+than to further the progress of legislation in which they are interested
+or who are sent there for the purpose by others who have such an
+interest; but it is my conviction (and I know it is that of others
+better informed than myself) that the instances wherein the labours of a
+lobbyist go beyond the use of legitimate argument in favour of entirely
+meritorious measures are immensely fewer than the reader of the
+sensational press might suppose. The American National Legislature is,
+indeed, a vastly purer body than demagogues, or the American press,
+would have an outsider believe.
+
+There is no doubt that large manufacturing and commercial concerns do
+exert themselves to secure the election to the House, and perhaps to the
+Senate, of persons who are practically their direct representatives,
+their chief business in Congress being the shaping of favourable
+legislation or the warding off of that which would be disadvantageous to
+the interests which are behind them. Undoubtedly also such large
+concerns, or associated groups of them, can bring considerable pressure
+to bear upon individual members in divers ways, and there have been
+notorious cases wherein it has been shown that this pressure has been
+unscrupulously used. Except in the case of the railways, which have only
+a secondary interest in tariff legislation, this particular abuse must
+be charged to the account of the protective policy, and its development
+in some measure would perhaps be inevitable in any country where a
+similar policy prevailed.
+
+In the British Parliament there are, of course, few important lines of
+trade or industry which are not abundantly represented, and both Houses
+contain railway directors and others who speak frankly as the
+representatives of railway interests, and lose thereby nothing of the
+respect of the country or their fellow-members. It is not possible here
+to explain in detail why the assumption, which prevails in America, that
+a railway company is necessarily a public enemy, and that any argument
+in favour of such a corporation is an argument against the public
+welfare, does not obtain in England. It will be necessary later on not
+only to refer to the fact that fear of capitalism is immensely stronger
+in America than it is in England, but also to explain why there is good
+reason why it should be so. For the present, it is enough to note that
+it is possible for members of Parliament to do, without incurring a
+shadow of suspicion of their integrity, things which would damn a member
+of Congress irreparably in the eyes alike of his colleagues and of the
+country. There is hardly a railway bill passed through Parliament the
+supporters of which would not in its passage through Congress have to
+run the gauntlet of all manner of insinuation and abuse; and when the
+sensational press of the United States raises a hue and cry of "Steal!"
+in regard to a particular measure, the Englishman (until he understands
+the difference in the conditions in the two countries) may be bewildered
+by finding on investigation that the bill is one entirely praiseworthy
+which would pass through Parliament as a matter of course, the only
+justification for the outcry being that the legislation is likely,
+perhaps most indirectly, to prove advantageous to some particular
+industry or locality. The fact that the measure is just and deserving of
+support on merely patriotic grounds is immaterial, when party capital
+can be made from such an outcry. I have on more than one occasion known
+entirely undeserved suffering to be inflicted in this way on men of the
+highest character who were acting from none but disinterested motives;
+and he who would have traffic with large affairs in the United States
+must early learn to grow callous to newspaper abuse.
+
+In wider and more general ways than have yet been noticed, however, the
+members of Congress are subjected to undue influences in a measure far
+beyond anything known to the members of Parliament.
+
+In the colonial days, governors not seldom complained of the law by
+which members of the provincial assemblies could only be elected to sit
+for the towns or districts in which they actually resided. The same law
+once prevailed in England, but it was repealed in the time of George
+III., and had been disregarded in practice since the days of
+Elizabeth.[247:1] Under the Constitution of the United States it is,
+however, still necessary that a member of Congress should be a resident
+(or "inhabitant") of the State from which he is elected. In some States
+it is the law that he must reside in the particular district of the
+State which elects him, and custom has made this the rule in all. A
+candidate rejected by his own constituency, therefore, cannot stand for
+another; and it follows that a member who desires to continue in public
+life must hold the good will of his particular locality.
+
+So entirely is this accepted as a matter of course that any other system
+(the British system for instance) seems to the great majority of
+Americans quite unnatural and absurd; and it has the obvious immediate
+advantage that each member does more truly "represent" his particular
+constituents than is likely to be the case when he sits for a borough or
+a Division in which he may never have set foot until he began to canvas
+it. On the other hand, it is an obvious disadvantage that when a member
+for any petty local reason forfeits the good will of his own
+constituency, his services, no matter how valuable they may be, are
+permanently lost to the State.
+
+The term for which a member of the Lower House is elected in America is
+only two years, so that a member who has any ambition for a continuous
+legislative career must, almost from the day of his election, begin to
+consider the chance of being re-elected. As this depends altogether on
+his ability to hold the gratitude of his one constituency, it is
+inevitable that he should become more or less engrossed in the effort to
+serve the local needs; and a constituency, or the party leaders in a
+constituency, generally, indeed, measure a man's availability for
+re-election by what is called his "usefulness."
+
+If you ask a politician of local authority whether the sitting member is
+a good one, he will reply, "No; he hasn't any influence at Washington at
+all. He can't do a thing for us!" Or, "Yes, he's pretty good; he seems
+to get things through all right." The "things" which the member "gets
+through" may be the appointment of residents of the district to minor
+government positions, the securing of appropriations of public moneys
+for such works as the dredging or widening of a river channel to the
+advantage of the district or the improvement of the local harbour, and
+the passage of bills providing for the erection in the district of new
+post-offices or other government buildings. Many other measures may, of
+course, be of direct local interest; but a member's chief opportunities
+for earning the gratitude of his constituency fall under the three
+categories enumerated.
+
+It is obvious that two years is too short a term for any but an
+exceptionally gifted man to make his mark, either in the eyes of his
+colleagues or of his constituency, by conspicuous national services.
+Even if achieved, it is doubtful if in the eyes of the majority of the
+constituencies (or the leaders in those constituencies) any such
+impalpable distinction would be held to compensate for a demonstrated
+inability to get the proper share of local advantages. The result is
+that while the member of Parliament may be said to consider himself
+primarily as a member of his party and his chief business to be that of
+co-operating with that party in securing the conduct of National affairs
+according to the party beliefs, the member of Congress considers himself
+primarily as the representative of his district and his chief business
+to be the securing for that district of as many plums from the Federal
+pie as possible.
+
+Out of these conditions has developed the prevalence of log-rolling in
+Congress: "You vote for my post-office and I'll help you with your
+harbour appropriation." Such exchange of courtesies is continual and, I
+think, universal. The annual River and Harbour Bill (which last year
+appropriated $25,414,000 of public money for all manner of works in all
+corners of the country) is an amazing legislative product.
+
+Another result is that the individual member must hold himself
+constantly alert to find what his "people" at home want: always on the
+lookout for signs of approval or disapproval from his constituency. And
+the constituency on its side does not hesitate to let him know just what
+it thinks of him and precisely what jobs it requires him to do at any
+given moment. Nor is it the constituency as a whole, through its
+recognised party leaders, which alone thinks that it has a right to
+instruct, direct, or influence its representative, but individuals of
+sufficient political standing to consider themselves entitled to have
+their private interest looked after, manufacturing and business concerns
+the payrolls of which support a large number of voters, labour unions,
+and all sorts of societies and organisations of various kinds--they one
+and all assert their right to advise the Congressman in his policies or
+to call for his assistance in furthering their particular ends, under
+threat, tacit or expressed, of the loss of their support when he seeks
+re-election. The English member of Parliament thinks that he is
+subjected to a sufficiency of pressure of this particular sort; but he
+has not to bear one-tenth of what is daily meted out to his American
+_confrère_, nor is he under any similar necessity of paying attention to
+it.
+
+Under such conditions it is evident that a Congressman can have but a
+restricted liberty to act or vote according to his individual
+convictions. It is only human that, in matters which are not of great
+national import, a man should at times be willing to believe that his
+personal opinions may be wrong when adherence to those opinions would
+wreck his political career. So the Congressman too commonly acquires a
+habit of subservience which is assuredly not wholesome either for the
+individual or for the country; and sometimes the effort to trim sails to
+catch every favouring breeze has curious oblique results. As an
+instance of this may be cited the action taken by Congress in regard to
+the army canteen. A year or more back, the permission to army posts to
+retain within their own limits and subject to the supervision of the
+post authorities, a canteen for the use of soldiers, was abolished. The
+soldiers have since been compelled to do their drinking outside, and, as
+a result, this drinking has been done without control or supervision,
+and has produced much more serious demoralisation. The action of
+Congress was taken in the face of an earnest and nearly unanimous
+protest from experienced army officers--the men, that is, who were
+directly concerned with the problem in question. The Congressmen acted
+as they did under the pressure of the Woman's Christian Temperance
+Union, and with the dread lest a vote for the canteen should be
+interpreted as a vote for liquor, and should stand in the way of their
+own political success.
+
+From what has been said it will be seen that the member of Congress is
+compelled to give a deplorably large proportion of his time and thought
+to paltry local matters, leaving a deplorably small portion of either to
+be devoted to national questions; while in the exercise of his functions
+as a legislator he is likely to be influenced by a variety of motives
+which ought to be quite impertinent and are often unworthy. These things
+however seem to be almost inevitable results of the national political
+structure. The individual corruptibility of the members of either House
+(their readiness, that is to be influenced by any considerations, other
+than that of their re-election, of their own interests, financial or
+otherwise), I believe to be grossly exaggerated in the popular mind.
+Certainly a stranger is likely to get the idea that the Congress is a
+much less honourable and less earnest body than it is.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The subject of the corruptness of the public service in the larger
+cities brings up again a matter which has been already touched upon,
+namely the extent to which this corruptness is in its origin Irish and
+not an indigenous American growth. Under the favourable influences of
+American political conditions the Irish have developed exceptional
+capacity for leadership (a capacity which they are also showing in some
+of the British colonies) and they do not generally use their ability or
+their powers for the good of the community. The rapidity with which the
+Irish immigrant blossoms into political authority is a commonplace of
+American journalism:
+
+     "Ere the steamer that brought him had got out of hearing,
+      He was Alderman Mike introducing a bill."
+
+It is commonly held by Americans that all political corruptness in the
+United States (certainly all municipal wickedness) is chargeable to
+Irish influence; but it is a position not easy to maintain in the face
+of the example of the city of Philadelphia, the government of which has
+from the beginning been chiefly in the hands of Americans, many of whom
+have been members of the oldest and best Philadelphia families. Yet the
+administration of Philadelphia has been as corrupt and as openly
+disregardful of the welfare of the community as ever was that of New
+York. While Irishmen are generally Democrats, both Philadelphia and the
+State of Pennsylvania, are overwhelmingly Republican and devoted to the
+protective policy under which so many of the industries of the State
+have prospered exceedingly. Those who have fought for the cause of
+municipal reform in Philadelphia find that, while the masses of the
+people of the city would prefer good government, it is almost impossible
+to get them to reject an official candidate of the Republican party. The
+Republican "bosses" have thus been able to impose on the city officials
+of the worst kind, who have served them faithfully to the disaster of
+the community.[253:1] None the less, notwithstanding particular
+exceptions, it is a fact that as a general rule the corrupt
+maladministration of affairs in American cities is the direct result of
+Irish influence.
+
+The opportunities of the Irish leaders for securing control of the city
+administration, or of certain important and lucrative divisions of this
+administration, have been furthered, particularly in such cities as New
+York and San Francisco, by the influence they are able to gain over
+bodies of immigrants who are also in the fold of the Roman Catholic
+Church, and who, on the ground of difference of language and other
+causes, have less quickness of perception of their own political
+opportunities. The Irish leaders have been able to direct in very large
+measure the votes of the Italians (more particularly the Italians from
+the South), the Bohemians, and the other groups of immigrants from
+Catholic communities. As the Irish immigration has decreased both
+absolutely and relatively, the numbers of voters supporting the
+leadership of the bosses of Tammany Hall and of the similar
+organisations in Chicago and San Francisco have been made good, and in
+fact substantially increased, by the addition of Catholic voters of
+other nationalities.
+
+I wish the English reader to grasp fully the significance of these facts
+before he allows the stories which he hears of the municipal immorality
+which exists in the United States to colour too deeply his estimate of
+the character of the American people. That immorality is chiefly Irish
+in its origin and is made continuously possible by the ascendency of the
+Irish over masses of other non-Anglo-Saxon peoples. The Celts were never
+a race of individual workers either as agriculturists or in handicraft.
+That "law of intense personal labour" which is the foundation of the
+strength of the Anglo-Saxon communities never commanded their full
+obedience, as the history of Ireland and the condition of the country
+to-day abundantly testify. It is not, then, the fault of the individual
+Irishman that when he migrates to America, instead of going out to the
+frontier to "grow up" with the territory or taking himself to
+agricultural work in the great districts of the West which are always
+calling for workers, he prefers to remain in the cities to engage when
+possible in the public service, or, failing that, to enter the domestic
+service of a private employer.
+
+It should not be necessary to say (except that Irish-American
+susceptibilities are sometimes extraordinarily sensitive) that I share
+to the full that admiration which all people feel for the best traits in
+the Irish character; but, in spite of individual exceptions, I urge that
+it is not in the nature of the race to become good and helpful citizens
+according to Anglo-Saxon ideals, and that, as far as those qualities are
+concerned which have made the greatness of the United States, the
+contribution from the Irish element has been inconsiderable. The
+deftness of the Irishman in political organisation and his lack of
+desire for individual independence, as a result of which he turns either
+to the organising of a governing machine or to some form of personal
+service (in either case merging his own individuality) is as much
+foreign to the American spirit as is the docility of the less
+intelligent class of Germans under their political leaders--a docility
+which, until very recently has caused the German voters in America to be
+used in masses almost without protest.
+
+It is the Anglo-Saxon, or English, spirit which has played the dominant
+part in moulding the government of the United States, which has made the
+nation what it is, which to-day controls its social usages. The Irish
+invasion of the political field may fairly be said to be in its essence
+an alien invasion; and, while it may be to the discredit of the American
+people that they have allowed themselves in the past to be so engrossed
+in other matters that they have permitted that invasion to attain the
+success which it has attained, I do not fear that in the long run the
+masterful Anglo-Saxon spirit will suffer itself to be permanently
+over-ridden (any more than it has allowed itself to be kept in permanent
+subjection in England), even in the large cities where the Anglo-Saxon
+voter is in a small minority. Ultimately it will throw off the incubus.
+In the meanwhile it is unjust that Englishmen or other Europeans should
+accept as evidence of native American frailty instances of municipal
+abuses and of corrupt methods in a city like New York, where it has not
+been by native Americans that those abuses and those methods were
+originated or that their perpetuation is made possible. On the contrary
+the American minority fights strenuously against them, and I am not sure
+that, being such a minority as it is, it has not made as good a fight as
+is practicable under most difficult conditions. The American people as a
+whole should not be judged by the conditions to which a portion of it
+submits unwillingly in certain narrow areas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be well to explain here (for it is a subject on which the
+Englishman who has lived in America is often consulted) that the
+Republican party may roughly be said to be the equivalent of the
+Conservative party in England, while the Democrats are the Liberals. It
+happens that a precisely reverse notion has (or had until very recent
+years) some vogue in England, the misconception being an inheritance
+from the times of the American Civil War.
+
+British sympathy was not nearly so exclusively with the South at the
+time of the war as is generally supposed in the United States; none the
+less, the ruling and aristocratic classes in England did largely wish to
+see the success of the Southern armies. The Southerner, it was
+understood, was a gentleman, a man of mettle and spirit, and in many
+cases the direct descendant of an old English Cavalier family; while the
+Northerners were for the most part but humdrum and commercially minded
+people who inherited the necessarily somewhat bigoted, if excellent,
+characteristics of their Dutch, Puritan, or Quaker ancestors. The view
+had at least sufficient historical basis to serve as an excuse if not
+as a justification. So it came about that those classes which came to
+form the backbone of the Conservative party were largely sympathisers
+with the South; and, after the war, that sympathy naturally descended to
+the Democratic party rather than to the Northern Republicans. Except,
+however, in one particular the fundamental sentiments which make a man a
+Republican or a Democrat to-day have nothing to do with the issues of
+war times.
+
+I do not know that any one has successfully defined the fundamental
+difference either between a Conservative and a Liberal, or between a
+Republican and a Democrat, nor have I any desire to attempt it; and
+where both parties in each country are in a constant state of flux and
+give-and-take, such a definition would perhaps be impossible. It may be
+that Ruskin came as near to it as is practicable when he spoke of
+himself as "a Tory of the old school,--the school of Homer and Sir
+Walter Scott."
+
+Many people in either country accept their political opinions ready made
+from their fathers, their early teachers, or their chance friends, and
+remain all their lives believing themselves to belong to--and voting
+for--a party with which they have essentially nothing in sympathy. If
+one were to say that a Conservative was a supporter of the Throne and
+the Established Church, a Jingo in foreign politics, an Imperialist in
+colonial matters, an advocate of a strong navy and a disbeliever in free
+trade, tens of thousands of Conservatives might object to having
+assigned to them one or all of these sentiments, and tens of thousands
+of Liberals might insist on laying claim to any of them. Precisely so is
+it in America. None the less the Republican party in the mass is the
+party which believes in a strong Federal government, as opposed to the
+independence of the several States; it is a party which believes in the
+principle of a protective tariff; it conducted the Cuban War and is a
+party of Imperial expansion; it is the party which has in general the
+confidence of the business interests of the country and fought for and
+secured the maintenance of the gold standard of currency. It is obvious
+that, however blurred the party lines may be in individual cases, the
+man who in England is by instinct and conviction a Conservative, must in
+America by the same impulse be a Republican.
+
+In both countries there is, moreover, a large element which furnishes
+the chief support to the miscellaneous third parties which succeed each
+other in public attention and whenever the lines are sharply drawn
+between the two great parties, the bulk of these can be trusted to go to
+the Liberal side in England and to the Democratic side in America. Nor
+is it by accident that the Irish in America are mostly Democrats.
+
+I am acutely aware of the inadequacy of such an analysis as the
+foregoing and that many readers will have cause to be dissatisfied with
+what I say; but I have known many Englishmen of Conservative leanings
+who have come to the United States understanding that they would find
+themselves in sympathy with the Democrats and have been bewildered at
+being compelled to call themselves Republicans. Whatever the individual
+policy of one or the other party may be at a given moment, ultimately
+and fundamentally the English Conservative, especially the English Tory,
+is a Republican, and the Liberal, especially the Radical, is a
+Democrat. Both Homer and Sir Walter Scott to-day would (if they found
+themselves in America) be Republicans.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[227:1] For myself, I confess that my interest began somewhat
+prematurely. I had been in the country but a few months and had taken no
+steps towards naturalisation when I voted at an election in a small town
+in a Northwestern Territory where I had been living only for a week or
+two. My vote was quite illegal; but my friends (and every one in a small
+frontier town is one's friend) were all going to vote and told me to
+come along and vote too. The election, which was of the most friendly
+character, like the election of a club committee, proved to be closely
+contested, one man getting in (as City Attorney or Town Clerk or
+something) only by a single vote--my vote. Since then, the Territory has
+become a populous State, the frontier town has some hundred thousand
+inhabitants, and the gentleman whom I elected has been for some years a
+respected member of the United States Senate. I have never seen any
+cause to regret that illegal vote.
+
+[229:1] The laws governing expenditures for electoral purposes, and the
+conduct of elections generally, are stricter in England than in the
+United States, and I think it is not to be questioned that there is much
+less bribery of voters. Largely owing to the exertions of Mr. Roosevelt,
+however, laws are now being enacted which will make it more difficult
+for campaign managers to raise the large funds which have heretofore
+been obtainable for election purposes.
+
+[232:1] In as much as a demand that the control of the police force
+should be vested in the County Council has appeared in the programme of
+one political party in London, it may be well to call the attention of
+Englishmen to the fact that it is precisely the association of politics
+with the police which gives to American municipal rings their chief
+power for evil.
+
+[247:1] See Bryce, _The American Commonwealth_, vol. i., p. 188.
+
+[253:1] Inasmuch as I have twice within a small space referred to evils
+which incidentally grow out of the protective system, lest it be thought
+that I am influenced by any partisan feeling, I had better state that my
+personal sympathies are strongly Republican and Protectionist.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+AMERICAN POLITICS IN ENGLAND
+
+     The System of Parties--Interdependence of National and Local
+     Organisations--The Federal Government and Sovereign States--The
+     Boss of Warwickshire--The Unit System--Prime Minister Crooks--
+     Lanark and the Nation--New York and Tammany Hall--America's
+     Superior Opportunities for Wickedness--But England is Catching
+     up--Campaign Reminiscences--The "Hell-box"--Politics in a
+     Gravel-pit--Mr. Hearst and Mr. Bryan.
+
+
+The subject of this chapter will, perhaps, be more easy of comprehension
+to the English reader if he will for a moment surrender his imagination
+into my charge while we transfer to England certain political conditions
+of the United States.
+
+There are in the first place, then, the great political parties, in the
+nation and in Parliament (Congress); with the fact always to be borne in
+mind that the members of Congress are not nominated by any central
+committee or association, but are selected and nominated by the people
+of each district. A candidate is not "sent down" to contest a given
+constituency. He is a resident of that constituency, selected in small
+local meetings by the voters themselves.
+
+Next, every County (State) has its own machinery of government,
+including a Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, and other County officials as
+well as a bi-cameral Legislature, with a membership ranging from seventy
+in some Counties to over three hundred in others. In these County
+Legislatures and governments, parties are split on precisely the same
+lines as in the nation and in Parliament. Members of the House of
+Commons have usually qualified for election by a previous term in the
+County Legislature, while members of the House of Lords are actually
+elected direct, not by the people in the mass, but by the members of the
+County Legislatures only, each county sending to Westminster two members
+so elected. Nor is it to be supposed that these County governments are
+governments in name only.
+
+It is not easy to imagine that in England the Counties, each with its
+separate and sovereign government, preceded the National Government and
+voluntarily called it into existence only as a federation of themselves.
+But that, we must for the present understand, was indeed the course of
+history; and when that federation was formed, the various Counties
+entrusted to the Central Government only a strictly limited list of
+powers. The Central Government was authorised to treat with foreign
+nations in the name of the United Counties; to maintain a standing army
+of limited size, and to create a navy; to establish postal routes,
+regardless of County boundaries; to regulate commerce between the
+different Counties, to care for the national coast line and all
+navigable waters within the national dominions, and to levy taxes for
+national purposes. All powers not thus specifically conceded to the
+central authority were, in theory at least, reserved by the individual
+Counties to themselves; and to-day a County government, except that it
+cannot interfere with the postal service within its borders, nor erect
+custom-houses on its County lines to levy taxes on goods coming in from
+neighbouring Counties, is practically a sovereign government within its
+own territory.
+
+It is only within the last ten years that the right of the Central
+Government--the Crown--to use the King's troops to protect from violence
+the King's property, in the shape of the Royal mails, in defiance of the
+wishes of the Governor of a County, was established by a decision of the
+Supreme Court. The Governor protested that the suppression of mobs and
+tumults within his County borders was his business, his County police
+and militia being the proper instruments for the purpose, and for the
+Crown to intervene without his request and sanction was an invasion of
+the sovereign dignity of the County.
+
+Although so much has been said on this subject by various English
+writers, from Mr. Bryce downwards, few Englishmen, I think, have
+comprehended the theoretical significance of this independence of the
+individual States, and fewer still grasp its practical importance.
+Perhaps the most instructive illustration of what it means is to be
+found in the dilemma in which the American government has, on two
+occasions in recent years, found itself from its inability to compel a
+particular State to observe the national treaty obligations to a foreign
+power.
+
+The former of the two cases arose in Louisiana when a number of citizens
+of New Orleans (including not only leading bankers and merchants but
+also, it is said, at least one ex-Governor of the State and one Judge),
+finding that a jury could not, because of terrorisation, be found to
+convict certain murderers, Italians and members of the Mafia, took the
+murderers out of gaol and hanged them in a public square in broad
+daylight. The Italian government demanded the punishment of the
+lynchers, and the American government had to confess itself entirely
+unable to comply with the request. Whether it would have given the
+satisfaction if it could is another question; but the dealing with the
+criminals was a matter solely for the Louisiana State authorities, and
+the Federal Government had no power to interfere with them or to dictate
+what they should do. The only way in which it could have obtained
+jurisdiction over the offenders would have been by sending Federal
+troops into the State to take them by force, a proceeding which the
+State of Louisiana would certainly have resisted by force, and civil war
+would have followed. Ultimately, the United States, without
+acknowledging any liability in the matter, paid to the Italian
+government a certain sum of money as a voluntary _solatium_ to the
+widows and families of those who had been killed, and the incident was
+closed.
+
+The second case, which has recently strained so seriously the relations
+between the United States and Japan, arose with the State of California,
+which refused to extend to Japanese subjects the privileges to which
+they are unquestionably entitled under the "most favoured nation" clause
+of the treaty between the two governments. It is a matter which cannot
+be dealt with fully here without too long a digression from the path of
+our present argument, and will be referred to later. It is enough for
+the present to point out that once again the National Government--or
+what we have called the Crown--has been seen to be entirely incapable,
+without recourse to civil war, of compelling an individual State--or
+County--to respect the national word when pledged to a treaty with a
+foreign power.[264:1]
+
+The States then, or Counties, are independent units, in each of which
+there exists a complete party organisation of each of the great parties,
+which organisations control the destinies of the parties within the
+County borders and have no concern whatever with the party fortunes
+outside. The great parties in the nation and in Parliament must look to
+the organisations within the several Counties for their support and
+existence. The loss of a County, say Hampshire, by the local
+Conservative organisation will mean to the Conservative party in the
+nation not merely that the members to be elected to the lower house of
+Parliament by the Hampshire constituencies will be Liberal, but that the
+County Legislature will elect two Liberal Peers to the upper house as
+well; and it is likely that in one or other of the two houses parties
+may be so evenly balanced that the loss of the members from the one
+County may overthrow the government's working majority. Moreover, the
+loss of the County in the local County election will probably mean the
+loss of that County's vote at the next presidential election, which may
+result in the entire dethronement of the party from power.
+
+Wherefore it is obviously necessary that the party as a whole--in the
+nation and in Congress--should do all that it can to help and strengthen
+the party leaders in the County. This it does in contests believed to be
+critical, and particularly just in advance of a national election, by
+contributing to the local campaign funds when a purely County (State)
+election is in progress (with which, of course, the national party ought
+theoretically to have nothing to do) and in divers other ways; but
+especially by judicious use of the national patronage in making
+appointments to office when the party is in power.
+
+The President--or let us say the Prime Minister--would rarely presume to
+appoint a postmaster at Winchester or Petersfield, or a collector of the
+port of Portsmouth or Southampton, without the advice and consent of the
+Hampshire Peers or Senators. And the advice of the Hampshire Peers, we
+may be sure, would be shaped in accordance with their personal political
+interests or by considerations of the welfare of the party in the
+County. They would not be likely to recommend for preferment either a
+member of the opposite party or a member of their own party who was a
+personal opponent. Moreover, besides the appointments in the County
+itself, there are many posts in the government offices in Whitehall, as
+well as a number of consulates and other more remote positions, to be
+filled. In spite of much that has been done to make the United States
+civil service independent of party politics, it remains that the bulk of
+these posts are necessarily still filled on recommendations made by the
+Congressmen or party leaders from the respective Counties, and again it
+is the good of the party inside those Counties which inspires those
+recommendations.
+
+Thus we see how the national party when in power is able to fatten and
+strengthen the hands of the party organisations within the several
+Counties; and strengthen them it must, for if they lose control of the
+voters within their territory then is the national party itself ruined
+and dethroned.
+
+And below the County party organisations, the County governments, are
+the organisations and governments in the cities, which again are split
+on precisely the same lines of cleavage. The City Council of Petersfield
+or Midhurst is divided into Conservatives and Liberals precisely as the
+Hampshire Legislature or the Parliament at Westminster. Jealousies often
+arise between the County organisations and those in the cities. The
+influence of Birmingham might well become overpowering in the
+Warwickshire Legislature, whereby it would be difficult for any but a
+resident of Birmingham to become Governor of the County or to be elected
+to the House of Lords. If the Birmingham municipal organisation chanced
+to be controlled by a strong hand, it is not difficult to see how he
+might impose his will upon the County Legislature and the County party
+organisation, how he might claim more than his share of the sweets and
+spoils of office for his immediate friends and colleagues in the city,
+to the disgust of the other parts of the County. For the most part,
+however, such quarrels, between the city and County organisations of the
+same party, when they arise, are but lovers' quarrels, rarely pushed to
+the point of endangering the unity of the party in the State at election
+time.
+
+But now if we remember what was said at first, that no candidates for
+Parliament or other elected functionaries are "sent down" by a central
+organisation, but all are "sent up" from the bottom, the impulse
+starting from small meetings in public-house parlours and the like (in
+the case of cities, meetings being held by "precincts" to elect
+delegates to a meeting of the "ward," which meeting again elects
+delegates to the meeting of the city), when we see how the city can
+coerce the County and the County sway the nation, then we have also no
+difficulty in seeing how it is, as has been said already, that the same
+power that appoints a janitor in a town-hall may dictate the nomination
+of a President. Even more than the County organisation is to the
+national party, is the city organisation to the County. The party, both
+as a national and as a County organisation, must fatten and strengthen
+the hands of the city machine. Thus comes it that such an alderman as
+the Delectable One is unassailable. His power reaches far beyond the
+city. The party organisation in the city cannot dispense with him,
+because he can be relied upon always to carry his ward, and that ward
+may be necessary, not to the city machine only, but to the County and
+the nation.
+
+It is hardly necessary to explain that in a general election in England
+the party which is returned to power need not necessarily have a
+majority of the votes throughout the country. A party may win ten seats
+by majorities of less than a hundred in each and lose one, being therein
+in a minority of a thousand; with the result that, with fewer votes than
+were cast for its opponents, it will have a clear majority of nine in
+the eleven seats. This is of course well understood.
+
+But in an American general or presidential election, this anomaly is
+immensely aggravated by the fact that the electoral unit is not a city
+or a borough but a whole County or State. The various States have a
+voice in proportion to their population, but that vote is cast as a
+unit. A majority of ten votes in New York carries the entire
+thirty-seven votes of that State, while a majority of one thousand in
+Montana only counts three. There are forty-six States in the Republic,
+but the thirteen most populous possess more than half the votes, and a
+presidential candidate who received the votes of those thirteen, though
+each was won by only the narrowest majority, would be elected over an
+antagonist who carried the other thirty-three States, though in each of
+the thirty-three his majority might be overwhelming. Bearing this in
+mind, we see at once what immense importance may, in a doubtful
+election, attach to the control of a single populous State.
+
+If in an English election, similarly conducted, the country was known to
+be so equally divided that the vote of Warwickshire, with, perhaps,
+twenty votes, would certainly decide the issue, the man who could
+control Warwickshire would practically control the country. We have seen
+further, however, that the man who controls Warwickshire will probably
+be the man who controls Birmingham. He may be the Mayor of Birmingham,
+or, more likely, the chairman (or "boss") of the municipal machine who
+nominated and elected the Mayor and whose puppet the Mayor practically
+is. It then becomes evident that the man who can sway the politics of
+the nation is not merely the man who controls the single County of
+Warwickshire, but the man who, inside that County, controls the single
+city.
+
+To go a step below that again, the control of the city may depend
+entirely on the control of a given ward in the city. That ward may
+contain a very large labouring vote, by reason of the existence of a
+number of big factories within its limits. Unless that labouring vote
+can be polled for the Liberal party, the ward will not go Liberal, and
+without it the city will be lost. The loss of the city involves the loss
+of the County, and the loss of the County means the loss of the nation.
+The man therefore who by his personal influence, or by his leadership in
+a perfectly organised party machine in one ward of Birmingham, can be
+relied on to call out the full Liberal strength in that one ward of a
+single city may be absolutely indispensable to the success of the party
+in the country as a whole. And it is even conceivable that that man
+again may be dependent on one of his own henchmen, the "Captain" of a
+single precinct in the ward or the man who has the ear and confidence of
+the hands in the largest of the factories.
+
+Let me not be understood as saying that the personal influence of an
+individual may not be extremely powerful in an English election; and
+that power may rest, similarly, on his popularity in, and consequent
+ability to carry with him into the party fold, one particular district.
+But there is not the same established form of County government on
+avowedly national lines, nor the same city government, as in America,
+through which that influence can make itself definitely and continuously
+felt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We will state the situation in another way, which will make it clear to
+Englishmen from another point of view:
+
+Let it be imagined that at the next general election in England, the
+decision is to be arrived at by a direct vote of the country as a whole
+for a Conservative or a Liberal Prime Minister. Instead of each County
+and borough electing its members of Parliament (they will do that only
+incidentally) the real struggle will take the form of a direct contest
+between two men. Each of the great parties will choose its own
+candidate, and the Conservatives have already nominated Mr. Balfour. It
+remains for the Liberals to name their man who is to run against Mr.
+Balfour. The selection is to be made in a National Convention, to be
+held in Manchester, at which each County will be represented by a number
+of delegates proportioned to its population. Those delegates have
+already been elected in each County by local meetings within the
+Counties themselves, and in nearly every case the delegations so elected
+will come into the Convention Hall at Manchester prepared to vote and
+act as a unit. Whether that has been arrived at by choice of the
+individual Counties when they elected their delegations or whether the
+Convention itself has decided the matter by adopting the "unit rule"
+does not matter. The fact is that each county will be compelled to vote
+in a body, _i. e._, that if London has forty votes and Kent twenty,
+those forty votes or those twenty will have to be cast solidly for some
+one man. They cannot be split into thirty votes for one man and ten for
+another; or into fifteen for one man and one each for five other men.
+
+The Convention meets and it is plain from the first that the two
+strongest candidates are Lord Rosebery and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
+There are scattering votes for Mr. Morley and Mr. Asquith, each of them
+getting the vote of one or more small Counties. But after the first
+ballot, which is always more or less preliminary, it is apparent that
+neither of those gentlemen can hope to be chosen, so the Counties which
+voted for them, having expressed their preference, proceed on the next
+ballot to give their suffrages either to Lord Rosebery or to Sir Henry.
+The second ballot is completed. Every County has voted, with the result
+that (out of a total vote of 521, of which 261 are necessary for a
+choice) there are 248 votes for Lord Rosebery and 253 for Sir Henry
+Campbell-Bannerman. But there is still one County which has not voted
+for either. Kent at both ballots has cast its twenty votes for Mr. Will
+Crooks. The reason why Kent does this is because the representatives
+from Woolwich and the neighbourhood are a numerical majority of the Kent
+delegation and those men are devoted to Mr. Crooks.
+
+The third ballot produces the same result: Rosebery 248; Bannerman, 253;
+Crooks, 20. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh ballots show no change
+except that once in a while Rutland with three votes and Merioneth with
+four have amused themselves or caused a temporary flutter by swinging
+their votes from one side to the other or, perhaps, again casting them
+for Mr. Morley or Mr. Asquith. There is a deadlock. The Convention
+becomes impatient. The evening wears on and midnight arrives and still
+there is no change. Neither Lord Rosebery nor Sir Henry can get the
+extra dozen votes that are needed: still with regularity when the name
+of Kent is called the leader of the delegation rises and responds "Kent
+casts twenty votes for William Crooks."
+
+At last in the small hours of the morning something happens. How it has
+been arrived at nobody seems to know; but when the roll is called for
+the thirteenth time, Norfolk, heretofore loyal to Sir Henry, suddenly
+votes for Crooks. Tremendous excitement follows. The word goes round
+that Campbell-Bannerman is beaten; his friends have given up and it is
+useless to vote for him any longer. Meanwhile in the course of the
+evening feeling between the supporters of Sir Henry and the Roseberyites
+has grown so bitter that whatever the deserting Bannermanites do, they
+will not help to elect Lord Rosebery. Here and there a Scotch County
+remains firm to its leader, but Oxford swings off to Mr. Morley;
+Suffolk, amid yells that make it difficult to tell who the vote is cast
+for, follows Norfolk and plumps for Crooks. Sussex brings in Mr. Asquith
+again and Warwickshire goes for Crooks. Amid breathless silence the
+result of the thirteenth ballot is read out: Rosebery, 248; Crooks, 96;
+Morley, 72; Asquith, 50; Bannerman, 43; etc.
+
+The fourteenth ballot begins. "Aberdeen!" calls the Chairman. The head
+of the Aberdeen delegation stands up in a suspense so tense that it
+almost hurts. "Aberdeen casts seventeen votes for Mr. Will Crooks!" In
+an instant the whole hall is filled with maniacs. County after County
+rushes to range itself on the winning side. Before the roll is more than
+half completed it is evident that Crooks must be chosen. Thereafter
+there is no dissentient voice. The ballot is interrupted by a voice
+which is known to belong to Lord Rosebery's personal representative. He
+moves that the nomination of Mr. Crooks be made unanimous. In a din
+wherein no voice can be heard the erstwhile leader of the Bannermanite
+forces is seen waving his arms and is known to be seconding the motion.
+In ten minutes the hall is singing _God Save the King_ and Mr. Will
+Crooks is the chosen candidate of the Liberal party to oppose Mr.
+Balfour at the coming election.
+
+That is not materially different from what happened when Mr. Bryan was
+first nominated for the Presidency against Mr. McKinley--except that it
+did not take so long to accomplish. I have said that Mr. Bryan's
+nomination could have been defeated if a certain local delegation had
+been "attended to" in advance. What is to be noted is that Mr. Crooks
+has been nominated simply because he had a hold which could not be
+shaken on a small but compact body of men at Woolwich. It is true that
+it is not often that so dramatic a thing would happen as the nomination
+of Mr. Crooks himself but more frequently an arrangement--a "trade" or
+"deal"--would be entered into by which in consideration of the Crooks
+vote being thrown to one or other of the leading candidates, in the
+event of the latter's defeating Mr. Balfour and being elected to the
+Premiership, certain political advantages, in the form of appointments
+to office and "patronage" generally, would accrue, not necessarily to
+Mr. Crooks himself, but to his "machine," the citizens of Woolwich, and
+the Liberal party in the County of Kent at large. We see here how the
+local "boss" may become all-powerful in national affairs (and this is of
+course only one of fifty ways) and how the interdependence of the party
+in the nation with the party organisation in the County or the
+municipality tends to the fattening of the latter and, it must be added,
+the debauching of all three.
+
+At the last general election in England, in January, 1906, there is no
+doubt that the Conservative party owed the loss of a large number of
+seats merely to the fact that it had been in office for so long, without
+serious conflict, that the local party organisations had not merely
+grown rusty but were practically defunct. In the United States the same
+thing, in anything like the same degree, would be impossible, because
+between the periods of the general elections (which themselves come
+every four years) come the State and municipal elections for the
+purposes of which the local party organisations are kept in continuous
+and more or less active existence. A State or a city may, of course, be
+so confirmedly Republican or Democratic that, even though elections be
+frequent, the ruling party organisation will become, in a measure, soft
+and careless, but it can never sink altogether out of fighting
+condition. When a general election comes round, each great party in the
+nation possesses--or organises for the occasion--a national committee as
+well as a national campaign organisation; but that committee and that
+national organisation co-operate with the local organisations in each
+State and city and it is the local organisations that really do the
+work--the same organisations as conduct the fight, in intermediate
+years, for the election of members to the State Legislature or of a
+mayor and aldermen. And each of those local organisations necessarily
+tends to come under the control of a recognised "boss."
+
+Let us see another of the fifty ways in which, as has been said, one of
+these local bosses may be all-powerful in national affairs. A general
+election is approaching in Great Britain, and, as before, the Liberal
+party is in doubt whether to select as its candidate for the
+Premiership Lord Rosebery or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The political
+complexion of almost every County is known and there is no chance of
+changing that complexion--a condition, be it said, which exists in
+America in the case of a large majority of the States. It is evident
+that at the coming election the vote is going to be extremely close, the
+most important of the "doubtful" Counties being Lanarkshire, which has
+25 votes; which 25 votes will of course be governed by the course of the
+working population of Glasgow. Whichever party can secure Lanarkshire's
+vote will probably be successful; so that the destiny of the country
+really depends on the temper of the labouring men of Glasgow. Glasgow
+has, let us suppose, a strong and well-organised local Liberal "machine"
+which carried the city at the last municipal election, so that the mayor
+and a large majority of the aldermen of Glasgow are Liberals to-day; and
+the dictator or "boss" of this machine is (we are merely using a name
+for the sake of illustration) Lord Inverclyde. Lord Inverclyde does not
+believe that Lord Rosebery is the right man for the Premiership. So he
+lets his views be known to the Liberal National Committee. "I am, as you
+know," he says, "a strong Liberal; but frankly I would rather see Mr.
+Balfour made Prime Minister than Lord Rosebery. Glasgow will not vote
+for Lord Rosebery. The party can nominate any other man whom it pleases
+and we will elect him. I will undertake to carry Lanark for Sir Henry or
+Mr. Morley or anybody else; but I warn you that if Lord Rosebery is
+nominated, we will 'knife' him"--that being the euphonious phrase used
+to describe the operation when a party leader or party machine turns
+against any particular candidate nominated by the party.
+
+What are the party leaders to do in such a case? To nominate Lord
+Rosebery after that warning (Lord Inverclyde is known to be a man of his
+word) will be merely to invite defeat at the election; consequently,
+though he may be the actual preference of a large majority of the
+Liberals of the country, Lord Rosebery does not get the nomination. It
+goes to some one who can carry Lanarkshire,--some one, that is, who is
+pleasing to the boss of the local machine of Glasgow. It would be not
+unlikely that the national leaders might resent the dictation of Lord
+Inverclyde and might (but not until after the election was safely over)
+start intriguing in Glasgow politics to have him dethroned from the
+position of local "boss,"--might, in fact, begin "knifing" him in turn.
+Whether they would succeed in their object before another general
+election supervened would depend on the security of his hold on the
+local Liberal organisation; and that would depend on his personal
+ability as a politician and--very largely--on his unscrupulousness. For
+it may, I think, be stated as an axiom that no man can long retain his
+hold as "boss" of the machine in a large city except by questionable
+methods,--methods which sometimes involve dishonesty. He must--no matter
+whether he likes it or not--use his patronage and his power to advance
+unworthy men; and he must in some measure show leniency to certain forms
+of lawlessness. Otherwise the influence of the saloons, gamblers,
+keepers of disorderly houses, and all the other non-law-abiding elements
+will be thrown against him with sufficient weight to work his downfall.
+
+Unscrupulousness and friendship with wickedness in the slums of a city
+may thus be the direct road to influence in the councils of the national
+party. When it is remembered that not a few large cities, and therefore
+some States, are practically controlled, through the balance of power,
+by voters of an alien nationality, it is further plain how such an alien
+vote may become a serious factor in the politics of the nation. Thus is
+the German element very strong in Milwaukee, and the Scandinavian
+element in the towns and State of Minnesota. Thus the Irish influence
+has been almost paramount in New York, though now outnumbered by
+Germans, Italians, and others; and it is there, in New York, that the
+conditions which we have imagined in connection with Glasgow and Lord
+Inverclyde are actually being almost exactly repeated in American
+Democratic politics as often as a general election comes round.
+
+You may frequently hear it said in America that "as goes New York, so
+goes the country"; which is to say that in a presidential election the
+party which carries New York will carry the nation. In theory this is
+not necessarily so, although it is evident that New York's thirty-six
+votes in the electoral college must be an important contribution to the
+support of a candidate. In practice it has proven itself a good rule,
+partly by reason of the importance of those thirty-six votes, but more,
+perhaps, because the popular impetus which sways one part of the country
+is likely to be felt in others--that, in fact, New York goes as the
+country goes.
+
+But let us assume that the New York vote is really essential to the
+election of a candidate--that the vote in the country as a whole is
+evidently so evenly divided that whichever candidate can win New York
+must be elected the next President. Tammany Hall is a purely local
+organisation of the Democratic party in New York City. New York State,
+outside the city, is normally Republican, but many times the great
+Democratic majority in the Metropolitan district has swamped a
+Republican majority in the rest of the State. That Democratic vote in
+the Metropolitan district can only be properly "brought out" and
+controlled by Tammany; so that the cordial support of Tammany Hall,
+though, as has been said, it is in reality a strictly local
+organisation, and as such is probably the worst and most corrupt
+organisation (as it is also the best managed) that has been built up in
+the country, may be absolutely vital to the success of a Democratic
+presidential candidate. Tammany is practically an autocracy, the power
+of the Chief being almost absolute. England and English society have had
+some acquaintance with one Chief, and do not like him. But, as Chief of
+Tammany Hall, it is easy to see how even a coarse-grained Irishman may
+become for a time influential in American national affairs--even to the
+dictating of a nominee for the Presidency.
+
+I am not prepared to say that under the same conditions the same things
+could occur in England. What I am saying is that they do occur in the
+United States under conditions which do not exist in England; and, while
+it may be that British civic virtue would be proof against the manifold
+temptations of a similar political system, we have no sufficient data to
+justify us in being sure of it, nor is it wise or charitable to assume
+that because a certain number of American politicians yield to
+temptations which Englishmen have never experienced, therefore the
+people are of a less rigid virtue. Mr. Bryce has recorded his opinion
+that the mass of the public servants in America are no more corrupt than
+those in England. I prefer not to agree with him for, if it was true
+when he wrote it, the Americans to-day must be much the better, because
+since then there has unquestionably been an enormous improvement in the
+United States, while we have no evidence of a corresponding improvement
+in England. I believe, not only that many more public men are corrupt in
+America than in England, but that a larger proportion of the public men
+are corrupt, which, however, need not imply a lower standard of
+political incorruptibility: only that there are much greater
+opportunities of going wrong.
+
+It is interesting to note, moreover, that in the public service the
+opportunities of malfeasance in public officers in Great Britain are
+increasing rapidly and, moreover, in precisely those lines wherein they
+have proved most demoralising in America. I have elsewhere recorded the
+apprehension with which many Englishmen cannot help regarding the
+closeness of the relations which are growing up between the national and
+local party organisations, but in addition to this the urban public
+bodies are coming to play a vastly larger rôle in the life of the
+people, while the multiplication of electric car lines and similar
+enterprises is exposing the members of those bodies to somewhat the same
+class of untoward influence as has so often proven fatal to the civic
+virtue of similar bodies in America. Whether, as a result, any large
+number of cases of individual frailty have exposed themselves, probably
+only those immediately interested know; the exposure at least has not
+reached the general public.
+
+It may not, however, be amiss to remember that a century and a half ago,
+when the conditions in the two countries were widely different from what
+they are to-day, Benjamin Franklin, coming to England, was shocked and
+astounded at the corruption then prevalent in English public life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The procedure of an American presidential campaign has been sufficiently
+often described for the benefit of English readers. Suffice it to say
+that it is devastating, at times almost titanic. I have had some
+experience of the amenities of political campaigning in England, but the
+most bitterly contested fight in England never produces anything like
+the intensity of passion that is let loose in the quadrennial upheavals
+in the United States.
+
+It was my lot to be closely associated with the conduct of a national
+campaign--as bitterly fought a campaign as the country has seen since
+the days of the war,--namely that of 1896 when Mr. Bryan was the
+candidate of the Free Silver Democracy. Early in the fight I began to
+receive abusive letters, for which a large and capacious drawer was
+provided in the office, into which they were tossed as they came, on the
+chance of their containing some reading which might be interesting when
+the trouble was over. As the fight waxed, they came by every post and in
+every form, ranging from mere incoherent personal abuse to threats of
+assassination. Hundreds of them were entirely insane: many hundred more
+the work, on the face of them, of anarchists pure and simple. A large
+proportion of them were written in red ink, and in many--very
+many--cases the passions of the writers had got so far beyond their
+control that you could see where they had broken their pens in the
+futile effort to make written words curse harder than they would. The
+receptacle in which they were placed was officially known in the office
+as the Chamber of Horrors, but it was, I think, universally spoken of
+among the staff as the "Hell-box." Before the end of the campaign,
+capacious though it was, it was crowded to overflowing, and hardly a
+document that was not as venomous as human wrath could make it.
+Incidentally I wish to say that never was a campaign--at least as far as
+my colleagues in our particular department were concerned--more purely
+in the interest of public morality, without any sort of selfish aims,
+and less deserving of abuse. What the correspondence of a presidential
+candidate himself must be in like circumstances, it is horrible to
+think.[281:1]
+
+The intense feverishness of the campaign is of course increased by the
+vastness of the country, the tremendous distances over which the
+national organisation has to endeavour to exercise control, and the
+immense diversity in the conditions of the people and communities to
+whom appeal has to be made. The voting takes place all over the country
+on the same day; and it must be remembered that the area of the United
+States (not counting Alaska or any external dependencies) is so great
+that it reaches from west to east about as far as from London to
+Teheran, and north and south from London to below the southern boundary
+of Morocco. The difficulty of organisation over such an area can,
+perhaps, be imagined. In the course of the campaign there came in one
+day in my mail a letter written on a torn half of a railway time-card.
+It ran:
+
+     "DEAR SIR--There is sixty-five of us here working in a gravel
+     pit and we was going to vote solid for Bryan and Free Silver.
+     Some of your books [_i. e._, campaign leaflets, etc.] was
+     thrown to us out of a passing train. We have organised a Club
+     and will cast sixty-five votes for William McKinley.--Yours,
+     etc."
+
+So far as those sixty-five were concerned our chief interest thereafter
+lay in seeing that the existence of that gravel-pit was never discovered
+by the enemy. A faith which had been so speedily and unanimously
+embraced might perhaps not have been unassailable.
+
+Before leaving this subject it may be well to say a few words on a
+recent election in New York which excited, perhaps, more interest in
+England than any American political event of late years. The eminence
+which Mr. Hearst has won is an entirely deplorable thing, which has been
+made possible by the fact, already sufficiently dwelt upon, that
+political power in the United States is so largely exerted from the
+bottom up. In their comments on the incident after the event, however,
+English papers missed some of its significance. Most English writers
+spoke of Mr. Hearst's appeal to the forces of discontent as a new
+phenomenon and drew therefrom grave inferences as to what would happen
+next in the United States. The fact is that the phenomenon is not new in
+any way. Mr. Hearst, in but a slightly different form, appealed to
+precisely the same passions as Mr. Bryan aroused--the same as every
+demagogue has appealed to throughout, at least, the northern and western
+sections of the country any time in this generation. Mr. Hearst began
+from the East and Mr. Bryan from the West, but in all essentials the
+appeal was the same. And Mr. Hearst was not elected. And Mr. Bryan was
+not elected. What will happen next will be that the next man who makes
+the same appeal will not be elected also.
+
+It is the allegory of the river and its ripples over again. Englishmen
+need not despair of the United States, for the great body of the people
+is extraordinarily conservative and well-poised. In America, man never
+is, but always to be, cursed. Dreadful things are on the eve of
+happening, and never happen. There is a great saving fund of
+common-sense in the people--a sense which probably rests as much on the
+fact that they are as a whole conspicuously well-to-do as on anything
+else--which as the last resort shrinks from radicalism. In spite of the
+yellow press, in spite of all the Socialist and Anarchist talk, in spite
+of corruption and brass bands and torchlight processions, when the
+people as a whole is called upon to speak the final word, that word has
+never yet been wrong. Perhaps some day it will be, for all peoples go
+mad at times; but the nation is normally sound and sane, with a sanity
+that is peculiarly like that of the English.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[264:1] I trust that, because, for the purpose of making an illustration
+which will bring the matter home familiarly to English minds, I speak of
+the States as English Counties, I shall not be suspected of thinking (as
+some writers appear to have thought) that there is really any historical
+or structural analogy between the two.
+
+[281:1] None the less my friendly American critic (already quoted)
+holds, and remains firm in, the opinion that "however strenuous the
+fighting, the political issues produce no such social changes or
+personal differences in the United States as have frequently obtained in
+England, say at the time of the leadership of Gladstone, or more
+recently, in connection with the 'tariff reform' of Chamberlain." It is
+his contention that Americans take their politics on the whole more
+good-humouredly than has always been found possible by their English
+cousins, and that when the campaign is over, there is more readiness in
+the United States than in England to let pass into oblivion any
+bitterness that may have found expression during the fighting.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+SOME QUESTIONS OF THE MOMENT
+
+     Sovereign States and the Federal Government--California and
+     the Senate--The Constitutional Powers of Congress and the
+     President--Government by Interpretation--President Roosevelt
+     as an Inspiration to the People--A New Conception of the
+     Presidential Office--"Teddy" and the "'fraid strap"--Mr.
+     Roosevelt and the Corporations--As a Politician--His
+     Imperiousness--The Negro Problem--The Americanism of the
+     South.
+
+
+It was said that it would be necessary to refer again to the subject of
+the relations of the General Government to the several States, as
+illustrated by the New Orleans incident and the treatment of the
+Japanese on the Pacific Coast; and the first thing to be said is that no
+well-wisher of the United States living in Europe can help deploring the
+fact that the General Government has not the power to compel all parties
+to the Union to observe the treaties to which the faith of the nation as
+a whole has been pledged. It is a matter on which the apologist for the
+United States abroad has, when challenged, no defence. Few people in
+other countries do not consider the present situation unworthy of the
+United States; and I believe that a large majority of the American
+people--certainly a majority of the people east of the Rocky
+Mountains--is of the same opinion.
+
+It is no excuse to urge that when another Power enters into treaty
+relations with the United States it does so with its eyes open and with
+a knowledge of the peculiarities of the American Constitution. This is
+an argument which belongs to the backwoods stage of American
+statesmanship. In the past, it is true, the United States has been in a
+measure the spoilt child among the nations and has been permitted to sit
+somewhat loosely to the observance of those formalities which other
+Powers have recognised as binding on themselves; but the time has gone
+by when the United States can claim, or ought to be willing to accept,
+any especial indulgences. It cannot at once assert its right to rank as
+one of the Great Powers and affect to enter into treaties on equal terms
+with other nations, and at the same time admit that it is unable to
+honour its signature to those treaties.
+
+This, I say, is the general opinion of thinking men in other countries;
+but, however desirable it may be that the General Government should have
+the power to compel the individual States to comply with the
+requirements of the national undertakings, it is difficult, so long as
+the several States continue jealous of their sovereignty without regard
+to the national honour, to see how the end is to be arrived at.
+
+The first obvious fact is that all treaties are made by the President
+"by and with the advice and consent of the Senate" and no treaty is
+valid until ratified by a vote of the Senate in which "two thirds of the
+Senators present concur." The Senate occupies a peculiar position in the
+scheme of government. It does not represent either the nation as a whole
+nor, like the House of Representatives, the people as a whole. The
+Senate represents the individual States each acting in its sovereign
+capacity[287:1]; and the voice of the Senate is the voice of those
+States as separate entities. When the Senate passes upon any question it
+has been passed upon by each several State and it is not easy to see how
+any particular State can claim to be exempt from the responsibility of
+any vote of the Senate as a whole.
+
+It would appear to follow of necessity that when the Senate has by a
+formal two-thirds vote ratified a treaty, every State is bound to accept
+all the obligations of that treaty, not merely as part of the nation but
+as a separate unit. The provision in the Constitution which makes the
+vote of the Senate on any treaty necessary can have no other intent than
+to bind the several States themselves. As a matter of historical
+accuracy it had no other intent when it was framed.
+
+In the particular case of the Japanese treaty, the time for the State of
+California to have made its attitude known was surely when the treaty
+passed the Senate. The California Senators, or the people of the State,
+had then two honest courses open to them. They could have let it be
+known unequivocally that they did not propose to hold themselves bound
+by the action of the Senate but would, if any attempt were made to force
+them to comply with the terms of the treaty, secede from the Union; or
+they could have determined there and then to abide loyally by the terms
+of the treaty and no matter at what cost to the State, or at what
+sacrifice of their _amour propre_, to see that all the rights provided
+in the treaty were accorded to Japanese within the State. Either of
+these courses would have been honest; and Japanese who came to
+California would have come with their eyes open. The course which was
+followed, of allowing them to settle in the State in the expectation of
+receiving that treatment to which the faith of the United States was
+pledged, and then denying them that treatment, was distinctly dishonest.
+
+If, however, the State of California, or any other individual State,
+refuses to acknowledge the responsibilities which it has assumed by the
+vote of the Chamber of which its representatives are members, there
+appears no way in which the Federal Government can compel such
+acknowledgment except those of force and what the believers in the
+extreme doctrine of State Sovereignty consider Constitutional
+Usurpation.
+
+It has in many cases been necessary as the conditions of the country
+have changed so to interpret the phrases of the Constitution as to give
+to the General Government powers which cannot have been contemplated by
+the framers of that instrument. In this case there is every evidence,
+however, that the framers did intend that the General Government should
+have precisely those powers which it now desires--or that the individual
+States should be subject to precisely those responsibilities which they
+now seek to evade--and if any sentence in the Constitution can be so
+interpreted as to give to the General Government the power to compel
+States to respect the treaties made by the nation, it seems unnecessary
+to shrink from putting such interpretation upon it.
+
+Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to "regulate commerce
+with foreign nations"--and commerce is a term which has many
+meanings--as well as "to define and punish offences against the law of
+nations" and to "make all laws which shall be necessary for carrying
+into execution the foregoing powers." The President is invested with the
+power, "by and with the advice of the Senate, to make treaties," and he
+is charged with the duty of taking "care that the laws be faithfully
+executed." It would seem that among these provisions there is specific
+authority enough to cover the case, if the will to use that authority be
+there. And I believe that in a large majority of the people the will is
+there.
+
+It would appear to be competent for Congress to "define" any failure on
+the part of the citizens of any State to comply with whatever
+requirements in the treatment of foreigners may be imposed on them by a
+treaty into which the nation has entered, as an "offence against the law
+of nations." This power of "definition" on the part of Congress is quite
+unhampered. So also is the power "to make all laws which shall be
+necessary and proper for carrying into execution" the powers of
+definition and punishment. And it would be the duty of the President and
+the Federal Courts to take care that the laws were executed.
+
+If there would be any "usurpation" involved in such an interpretation of
+the phrases of the Constitution it is certainly less--much less, when
+regard is had to the intention of the framers of the Constitution--than
+other "usurpations" which have been effected, and sometimes without
+protest from the individual States; as, for instance, by the expansion
+of the right to regulate commerce between the several States into an
+authority to deal with all manner of details of the control of railways
+of which the framers of the Constitution never contemplated the
+existence. It cannot even remotely be compared with such an extension of
+the Federal power as would be involved in the translation of the
+authority to "establish post-offices and post-roads" as empowering the
+government to take an even larger measure of control over those
+railroads than can be compassed under the right to regulate commerce--a
+translation which seems to have the approval of President Roosevelt.
+
+Incidentally it may be remarked that it would be peculiarly interesting
+if, at this day, that authority to construct post-roads should thus be
+invoked to give the General Government new powers of wide scope, when we
+remember that it was this same provision of the Constitution which stood
+sponsor for the very earliest steps which, in the construction of the
+Cumberland Road and other military or post routes, the young republic
+took in the path of practical federalism.
+
+To those Americans who received the cause of State Sovereignty as a
+trust from their fathers and grandfathers before them, the cause
+doubtless appears a noble one; but to the outsider, unbiassed by such
+inherited sentiment, it seems evident, first, that the cause, however
+noble, is also hopeless; and, second, that it is unreasonable that in
+the forlorn effort to preserve one particular shred of a fabric already
+so tattered, the United States as a nation should be exposed to frequent
+dangers of friction with other Powers, and, what is more serious, should
+be made, once in every decade or so, to stand before the world in the
+position of a trader who repudiates his obligations.
+
+And if I seem to speak on what is after all a domestic subject with
+undue vehemence (as I cannot hope that I shall not seem to do to the
+minds of residents on the Pacific Coast), it is only because it is
+impossible for an earnest well-wisher of the United States living abroad
+not to feel acutely (while it does not seem to me that Americans at home
+are sensible) how much the country suffers in the estimate of other
+peoples by its present anomalous position. When two business concerns in
+the United States enter into any agreement, each assumes the other to be
+able to control its own agents and representatives, nor will it accept a
+plea of inability to control them as excuse for breach of contract.
+
+It may be that a select circle of the statesmen and foreign office
+officials in other countries are familiar with the intricacies of the
+American Constitution, but the masses of the people cannot be expected
+so to be, any more than the masses of the American people are adepts in
+the constitutions of those other countries. And it is, unfortunately,
+the masses which form and give expression to public opinion. In these
+days it is not by the diplomacies of ambassadors or the courtesies of
+monarchs that friendships and enmities are created between nations. The
+feelings of one people towards another are shaped in curious and
+intangible ways by phrases, sentiments, ideas--often trivial in
+themselves--which pass current in the press or travel from mouth to
+mouth. It is a pity that the United States should in this particular
+expose itself to the contempt of lesser peoples, giving them excuse for
+speaking lightly of it as of a nation which does not keep faith. It does
+not conduce to increase the illuminating power of the example of America
+for the enlightenment of the world.
+
+It might be well also if Americans would ask themselves what they would
+do if a number of American citizens were subjected to outrage (whether
+they were murdered as in New Orleans, or merely forced to submit to
+indignities and inconvenience as in California) in some South American
+republic, which put forward the plea that under its constitution it was
+unable to control the people or coerce the administration of the
+particular province in which the offences were committed. Would the
+United States accept the plea? Or if the outrages were perpetrated in
+one of the self-governing colonies of Great Britain and the British
+Government repudiated liability in the matter? The United States, if I
+understand the people at all, would not hesitate to have recourse to
+force to endeavour to compel Great Britain to acknowledge her
+responsibility.
+
+In the matter of the relation of the general government to the several
+States the most important factor to be considered at the present moment
+is undoubtedly the personality of President Roosevelt, and any attempt
+to make intelligible the change which has come over the United States of
+recent years would be futile without some recognition of the part which
+he has played therein. Mr. Roosevelt has been credited with being the
+author of "a revival of the sense of civic virtue" in the American
+people. Certainly he has been, by his example, a powerful agent in
+directing into channels of reform the exuberant energy and enthusiasm
+which have inspired the people since the great increase in material
+prosperity and the physical unification of the country bred in it its
+quickened sense of national life. In the period of activity and
+expansiveness--one is almost tempted to say explosiveness--which
+followed the Cuban war, such a man was needed to guide at least a part
+of the national energy into paths of wholesome self-criticism and
+reformation. He set before the youth of the country ideals of patriotism
+and of civic rectitude which were none the less inspiring because easily
+intelligible and even commonplace.[293:1] The ideals have, it is true,
+since then, perhaps inevitably and surely not by his will, been dragged
+about in the none too clean mud of party politics; but the impetus which
+he gave, before his single voice became largely drowned in the factional
+hubbub around him, endures and will endure. Whatever comes, the American
+people is a different people and a better people for his preaching and
+example.
+
+Moreover, what touches the question of State sovereignty nearly, he has
+given a new character to the Presidential office. I have expressed
+elsewhere my belief that the process of the federalising of the country,
+the concentration of power in the central government, must proceed
+further than it has yet gone; but it is difficult now to measure, what
+history will see clearly enough, how much Mr. Roosevelt has contributed
+to the hastening of the process. No President, one is tempted to say
+since Washington, but certainly since Lincoln, has had anything like
+the same conception of the Presidential functions as Mr. Roosevelt,
+coupled with the courage to insist upon the acceptance of that
+conception by the country. Whether for good or ill the office of
+President must always stand for more, reckoned as a force in the
+national concerns, than it did before it was occupied by Mr. Roosevelt.
+A weak President may fail to hold anything like Mr. Roosevelt's
+authority; but the office must for a long time at least be more
+authoritative, and I think more honourable, for the work which he has
+done in it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I first came in contact with Mr. Roosevelt some twenty-five years ago,
+when his personality already pervaded the country from the Bad Lands of
+Dakota to the Rocky Mountains. I had a great desire to meet this person
+about whom, not only in his early life but, as it were, in his very
+presence, myth was already clustering,--a desire which was almost
+immediately gratified by chance,--but the particular detail about him
+which at the time made most impression on my mind was that he was the
+reputed inventor of the "'fraid strap." The "'fraid strap" is--or was--a
+short thong, perhaps two feet in length, fastened to the front of the
+clumsy saddle, which, at signs of contumacy in one's pony, one could,
+with a couple of hitches, wrap round his hand, in such a way as to
+increase immensely the chance of a continuity of connection with his
+seat. The pony of the Plains in those days was not as a rule a gentle
+beast, and I was moved to gratitude to the inventor of the "'fraid
+strap"--though whether it was really Mr. Roosevelt's idea or not it is
+(without confession from himself) impossible to guess, for, as I have
+said, he was already, though present almost a half-mythical person to
+the men of the north-western prairie country.
+
+What vexed me no little at the time was that it was with some effort
+that I could get his name right. I could not remember whether it was
+Teddy Roosevelt or Roosy Teddevelt. The name now is familiar to all the
+world; but then it struck strangely on untrained English ears and to me
+it seemed quite as reasonable whichever way one twisted it round. Mr.
+Jacob Riis (or Mr. Leupp) has protested against the President of the
+United States being called "Teddy" and we have his word for it that Mr.
+Roosevelt's own intimates have never thought of addressing him otherwise
+than as "Theodore." Doubtless this is correct (certainly I know men who
+assure me that they call him "Theodore" now) but at least the more
+friendly "Teddy" has, as is proved by that confusion in my mind of a
+quarter of a century ago, the justification of long prescription. Nor am
+I sure that it has not been a fortunate thing both for Mr. Roosevelt and
+the country that his name has been Teddy to the multitude. I doubt if
+the men of the West, the rough-riders and the plainsmen, would give so
+much of their hearts to Theodore.
+
+It is not easy to estimate the value, or otherwise, of Mr. Roosevelt's
+work in that capacity in which he has of late come to be best known to
+the world, namely as an opponent of the Trusts; but it is a pity that so
+many English newspapers habitually represent him as an enemy of all
+concentrated wealth. He has been called "the first Aristocrat to be
+elected President." Whether that be strictly true or not, he belongs
+distinctly to the aristocratic class and his sympathies are naturally
+with that class. His instincts are not destructive. No one, I have
+reason to believe, has a shrewder estimate of the worthlessness of the
+majority of those politicians who use his name as a cloak for their
+attacks on all accumulated wealth than he. It is only necessary to read
+his speeches to see how constantly he has insisted that it is not
+wealth, but the abuse of it, which he antagonises: "We draw the line not
+against wealth, but against misconduct." He has many times protested
+against the "outcry against men of wealth," for most of which he has
+declared "there is but the scantiest justification." Again and again he
+has proclaimed his desire not to hurt the honest corporation, "but we
+need not be over-tender about sparing the dishonest."[296:1]
+
+One of the chief difficulties in the practical application of his
+policies has been that the Government cannot have the power to punish
+dishonest corporations without first being entrusted with a measure of
+control over all corporate operations, the concession of which control
+the honest corporations have felt compelled to resist. Nor is it
+possible to say that their resistance has not been justified. However
+wisely and forbearingly Mr. Roosevelt himself might use whatever power
+was placed in his hands, there has been little in the experience of the
+corporations in America to make them believe that they can trust either
+office-holders in general or, for any long term, the Government itself.
+Dispassionate students of the railway problem in the United States are
+aware that there is nothing which the corporations have done to the
+injury of the public worse than the wanton and gratuitous injuries which
+have been done by the politicians, by the State governments, and even on
+occasions by the Federal Government itself, to the corporations. If
+particular railway companies have at times abused the power of which
+they were possessed as monopolising the transportation to and from a
+certain section of the country, that abuse has not excelled in
+wantonness and immorality the abuses of their power over the
+corporations of which several of the Western States have been
+systematically guilty. There has been little encouragement to the
+corporations to submit themselves to any larger measure of public
+control than has been necessary; and the lessons of the past have shown
+that it would be injudicious for the railways to surrender
+uncomplainingly to the State governments authority which the British
+companies can leave to the Board of Trade without misgiving. And there
+was a time when the national Interstate Commerce Commission was, if more
+honest, not much less prejudiced in its dealing with the corporations
+subject to its authority than were the governments or railway
+commissions of the individual States.
+
+Mr. Roosevelt's desire may have been (as it is) only to protect the
+people against the misuse of their power by dishonest corporations; and
+the honest corporations would be no less glad than Mr. Roosevelt himself
+to see the dishonest brought to book. But in the necessity of resisting
+(or what has seemed to the corporations the necessity of resisting) the
+extensions of the federal power which were requisite before reform could
+be achieved, the honest have been compelled to make common cause with
+the dishonest, so that the President has, in particular details, been
+forced into an attitude of hostility towards all corporations (and the
+corporations have for the most part been forced to put themselves in an
+attitude of antagonism to him) in spite of their natural sympathies and
+common interests.
+
+The result has been unfortunate for business interests generally because
+the mere fact that the President was "against the companies" (no matter
+on what grounds, or whether he was against them all or only against
+some) has encouraged throughout the country the anti-corporation feeling
+which needed no encouragement. Any time these forty years, or since the
+early days of the Granger agitation, the shortest road to notoriety and
+political advancement (at least in any of the Western States) has been
+by abuse of the railroad companies. A thousand politicians and
+newspapers all over the country are eager to seize on any phrase or
+pronouncement of the President which can be interpreted as giving
+countenance to the particular anti-railroad campaign at the moment in
+progress in their own locality. A vast number of people are interested
+in distorting, or in interpreting partially, whatever is said at the
+White House, so that any phrase, regardless of its context,--each
+individual act, without reference to its conditions,--which could be
+represented as an encouragement to the anti-capitalist crusade has been
+seized upon and made the most of. All over the West there have always,
+in this generation, been a sufficient number of persons only too
+anxious, for selfish reasons, to inflame hostility against the railroad
+companies or against men of wealth; but only within the last few years
+has it been possible for the most unscrupulous demagogue to find colour
+and justification for whatever he has chosen to preach in the example
+and precept of the President--and of a President whose example and
+precept have counted for more with the masses of the people than have
+those of any occupant of the White House since the war. In this way Mr.
+Roosevelt has done more harm than could have been accomplished by a much
+worse man.
+
+If the corporations have suffered, the course of events has been
+unfortunate too for Mr. Roosevelt. No one is better aware than he of the
+misrepresentation to which he is subjected and the unscrupulous use
+which is made of his example; and it is impossible that at times it can
+fail to be very bitter. It must also be bitter to find arrayed against
+him many men whose friendship he must value and whose co-operation in
+his work it must seem to him that he ought to have. It happens that his
+is not a character which is swayed by such considerations one hair's
+breadth from the course which he has marked out for himself; but it is
+deplorable that a very large proportion of precisely that class of men
+in which Mr. Roosevelt ought (or at least is justified in thinking that
+he ought) to find his strongest allies have felt themselves compelled to
+become his most determined opponents, while those interests which ought
+(or at least are justified in thinking that they ought) to to find in
+Mr. Roosevelt, as the occupant of the White House, their strongest
+bulwark against an unreasoning popular hostility only see that that
+hostility is immensely inflamed and strengthened by his course and
+example. The conditions are injurious to the business interests of the
+country and weaken Mr. Roosevelt's influence for good.
+
+Yet it seems impossible--or certainly impossible for one on the
+outside--to place the responsibility anywhere except on those general
+conditions of the country which make possible both the misrepresentation
+of the position of the President and the wide-spread hostility to the
+corporations, or on those laxities in political and commercial morality
+in the past which have put it in the power alternately of the politician
+to plunder the railways and the railways to prey upon the people. In the
+ill-regulated conditions of the days of ferment there grew up abuses,
+both in politics and in commerce, which can only be rooted out with much
+wrenching of old ties and tearing of the roots of things; but it is
+worth an Englishman's understanding that the fact that this wrenching
+and this tearing are now in progress is only an evidence of that effort
+at self-improvement, an effort determined and conscious, which, as we
+have already seen more than once, the American people is making.
+Whatever certain sections of the American press, certain politicians, or
+certain financial interests, may desire the world to think, there is no
+need for those at a distance to see in the present conflict evidence
+either of a wicked and radically destructive disposition in the
+President or of an approaching disintegration of the American commercial
+fabric.
+
+Meanwhile, as has been said, one result has been to weaken Mr.
+Roosevelt's personal influence for good. I have been assured by men of
+undoubted truthfulness, who are at the head of large financial
+interests, that he has, in the last few years, become as tricky and
+unscrupulous in his political methods as the oldest political
+campaigner; a statement which I believe to be entirely mistaken.
+"Practical politics," said Mr. Roosevelt once, "is not dirty politics.
+On the contrary in the long run the politics of fraud and treachery is
+unpractical politics, and the most practical of all politicians is the
+one who is clean and decent and upright." There is no evidence which I
+have been able to find that Mr. Roosevelt does not now believe this as
+thoroughly and act upon it as consistently as when he first entered the
+New York State Legislature.
+
+A more reasonable accusation against him, which is made by many of his
+best friends, is that his imperious will and his confidence in his own
+opinions make him at times unjust and intolerant in his judgment of
+others. There have been occasions when he has seemed over-ready to
+accuse others of bad faith without other ground than his own opinion or
+the recollection of what has occurred at an interview. He may have been
+right; but it is certain that he has alienated the friendship of not a
+few good men by the vehemence and positiveness with which he has
+asserted his views. And anything, independent of all questions of party,
+which weakens his influence is, for the country's sake, a thing to be
+deplored.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The negro question has contributed not a little to Mr. Roosevelt's
+difficulties, as it has to the misunderstanding of the American people
+in England. I know intelligent Englishmen who have visited the United
+States and honestly believe that in the not very distant future the
+country will again be torn with civil war, a war of black against white,
+which will imperil the permanence of the Republic no less seriously than
+did the former struggle. I do not think that the apprehension is shared
+by many intelligent Americans.
+
+It is perhaps inevitable that Americans should frequently be irritated
+by the tone of the comments in English papers on the lynchings of
+negroes which occur in the South. Some of these incidents are barbarous
+and disgraceful beyond any possibility of palliation, but it is certain
+that if Englishmen understood the conditions in the South better they
+would also understand that in some cases it is extremely difficult to
+blame the lynchers. Many of those people who in London (or in Boston)
+are loudest in condemnation of outrages upon the negro would if they
+lived in certain sections of the South not only sympathise with but
+participate in the unlawful proceedings.
+
+It has already been mentioned that among the men in New Orleans who
+assisted at the summary execution of the Italian Mafiotes there were, it
+is believed, an ex-Governor of the State and a Judge: men, that is to
+say, as civilised and of as humane sentiments as the members of any club
+in Pall Mall. They were not bloodthirsty ruffians, but gentlemen who did
+what they did from a stern sense of necessity. It has been my lot to
+live for a while in a community in which the maintenance of law and
+order depended entirely on a self-constituted Vigilance Committee; and
+the operations of that committee were not only salutary but necessary.
+It has also been my lot to live in a community where the upholders of
+law and order were not strong enough to organise a Vigilance Committee.
+I have been one of three or four who behind closed doors earnestly
+canvassed the possibilities of forming such an organisation, and neither
+I nor any of the others (among whom I remember were included one
+attorney-at-law and one mining engineer and surveyor) would have
+hesitated to serve on such a committee could it have been made of
+sufficient strength to achieve any useful purpose, but the disparity
+between our numbers and those of the "bad men" who at that time
+controlled the community was too obvious to give us any hope of being
+able to enforce our authority. There may, therefore, be conditions of
+society infinitely worse than those where order is preserved by lynch
+law; and I make no doubt that neither I myself nor any fellow-member of
+my London Club would, if living in one of the bad black districts of the
+South, act otherwise than do the Southern whites who live there now.
+
+What is deplorable is not the spirit which prompts the acts of summary
+justice (I am speaking only of one class of Southern "outrage") but the
+conditions which make the perpetration of those acts the only
+practicable way of rendering life livable for white people; and for the
+responsibility for these conditions we must go back either to the
+institution of slavery itself (for which it should be remembered that
+England was to blame) or to the follies and passions of half a century
+ago which gave the negro the suffrage and put him on a plane of
+political equality with his late masters.[303:1] If, since then, the
+problem has grown more, rather than less, difficult, it has not been so
+much by the fault of the Southern white, living under conditions in
+which only one line of conduct has been open to him, as of Northern
+philanthropists and negro sympathisers who have helped to keep alive in
+the breasts of the coloured population ideas and ambitions which can
+never be realised.
+
+The people of the North have of late years come to understand the South
+better, and whereas what I have said above would, twenty years ago, have
+found few sympathisers in any Northern city, I believe that to-day it
+expresses the opinion of the large majority of Northern men. I also
+believe that the necessary majority could be secured to repeal so much
+of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution as would
+be necessary to undo the mistake which has been committed. It is true
+that in some Southern States the majority of the blacks are practically
+disfranchised now; but it would remove a constant cause of friction and
+of political chicanery if the fact were recognised frankly that it is
+not possible to contemplate the possibility of the negro ever becoming
+the politically dominant race in any community where white people live.
+There is no reason to believe that the two races cannot live together
+comfortably even though the blacks be in a large majority, but there
+must be no question of white control of the local government and of the
+machinery of justice.
+
+Taking away the franchise from the negro would not, of course, put an
+end to many of the social difficulties of the situation, but, the
+present false relations between the two being abolished, those
+difficulties are no more than have to be dealt with in every community.
+There would be a chance for the negroes as a race to develop into useful
+members of the community, _as negroes_, filling the stations of negroes
+and doing negroes' work, along such lines as those on which Mr. Booker
+Washington is working. The English have had a wide experience of native
+races in all parts of the world and they have not yet found the problem
+of living with them and of holding at least their respect, together with
+some measure of their active good-will, anywhere insoluble. To an
+Englishman it does not seem that it should be insoluble in the United
+States. He is rather inclined to think that the rapidity with which the
+negro of the South would work out his economic salvation, if once the
+political difficulty were removed, would depend chiefly on the ability
+of the race to produce a continuity of men like Mr. Booker Washington,
+with, perhaps, the concurrent ability of the north to produce men (shall
+I say, like the late W. H. Baldwin?) to co-operate with the leaders and
+teachers of the blacks and to interpret them and their work to the
+country.
+
+The Englishman in England is chiefly impressed by the stories of
+Southern outrages upon the blacks and he gets therefrom an erroneous
+idea of the character of the Southern white. An Englishman who studies
+the situation on the spot is likely to acquire great sympathy with the
+Southern white and to condemn only the political ineptitude which has
+made the existing conditions possible.
+
+Whether Mr. Roosevelt's course has been the one best adapted to
+facilitate a solution of the difficulties it would be idle to enquire.
+The laws being as they are, and he being the kind of man he is and, as
+President, entrusted with the duty of seeing that the laws are
+faithfully executed, he could not have taken a different line. Another
+man (and an equally good man) might have refrained from making one or
+two of his appointments and from entertaining Mr. Washington at the
+White House. But if Mr. Roosevelt did not do precisely those things, he
+would not do fifty other of the things which have most endeared him to
+the people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this connection, it may be that there will be readers who will think
+that in many things which I say, when generalising about the American
+people as a whole, I fail to take into proper account the South and
+characteristics of such of the people of the South as are distinctively
+Southern. It is not from any lack of acquaintance with the South; still
+less from any lack of admiration of or affection for it. But what has
+been said of New York may in a way be said of the South, for whatever
+therein is typically Southern to-day is not typically American; and all
+that is typically Southern is moreover rapidly disappearing. In the
+tremendous activity of the new national life which has been infused into
+the country as a result of its solidification and knitting together of
+the last thirty years, there is no longer room for sectional divergences
+of character. They are overwhelmed, absorbed, obliterated; and the
+really vital parts of the South are no longer Southern but American.
+What has the spirit of Atlanta in Georgia, of Birmingham in Alabama, of
+any town in the South-west, from St. Louis to Galveston, to do with the
+typical spirit of the South? However strong Southern _sentiment_ may
+still be, what is there of the Southern _spirit_ even in Richmond or in
+Louisville? I need hardly say that America produces no finer men than
+the best Virginian or the best Kentuckian, but, with all his Southern
+love and his hot rhetoric, the man of this generation who is a leader
+among his fellows in Kentucky or in Virginia is so by virtue of the
+American spirit that is in him and not by virtue of any of the dying
+spirit of the old South.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[287:1] Mr. Bryce felicitously speaks of the Senate as "a sort of
+Congress of Ambassadors from the respective States" (_The American
+Commonwealth_, vol. 1, page 110).
+
+[293:1] "He stands for the commonplace virtues; he is great along lines
+on which each one of us can be great if he wills and dares" (_Theodore
+Roosevelt, the Man and Citizen_, by Jacob A. Riis). Mr. Roosevelt has
+spoken of himself as "a very ordinary man." A pleasant story is told by
+Mr. Riis of the lady who said: "I have always wanted to make Roosevelt
+out a hero, but somehow, every time he did something that seemed really
+great, it turned out, upon looking at it closely, that it was only just
+the right thing to do."
+
+[296:1] See his _Addresses and Presidential Messages_, with an
+introduction by Henry Cabot Lodge (Putnams, 1904).
+
+[303:1] To those who would understand the negro question and the
+mistakes of the people of the North during the Reconstruction period (to
+which the present generation owes the legacy of the problem in its acute
+form) I commend the reading of Mr. James Ford Rhodes's _History of the
+United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home
+Rule in the South in 1877_ (Macmillan).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+COMMERCIAL MORALITY
+
+     Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?--An American
+     Peerage--Senators and other Aristocrats--Trade and the British
+     Upper Classes--Two Views of a Business Career--America's Wild
+     Oats--The Packing House Scandals--"American Methods" in
+     Business--A Countryman and Some Eggs--A New Dog--The Morals of
+     British Peers--A Contract of Mutual Confidence--Embalmed Beef,
+     Re-mounts, and War Stores--The Yellow Press and Mr. Hearst--
+     American View of the House of Lords.
+
+
+It would seem to be inevitable that any general diffusion of corruption
+in political circles should act deleteriously on the morals of the whole
+community. It will therefore seem almost absurd to Englishmen to
+question whether on the whole the code of commercial ethics in
+America--the standard of morals which prevails in the every-day
+transaction of business--is higher or lower than that which prevails in
+Great Britain. The answer must be almost a matter of course. But,
+setting aside any expression of individual opinion and all preconceived
+ideas based on personal experience, let us look at the situation and
+see, if we can, what, judging only from the circumstances of the two
+countries, would be likely to be the relative conditions evolved in
+each. To do this it will be necessary first to clear away a common
+misapprehension in the minds of Englishmen.
+
+It is somehow generally assumed--for the most part unconsciously and
+without any formulation of the notion in the individual mind--that
+American society is a sort of truncated pyramid: that it is cut off
+short--stops in mid-air--before it gets to the top. Because there are no
+titles in the United States, therefore there are no Upper Classes;
+because there is no Aristocracy therefore there is nothing that
+corresponds to the individual Aristocrat.[309:1] If there were a peerage
+in the United States, the country would have its full complement of
+Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, and the rest. And--this is the
+point--they would be precisely the same men as lead America to-day;--but
+how differently Englishmen would regard them!
+
+The middle-class Englishman, when he says that he is no respecter of
+titles and declares that it does not make any difference to him whether
+a man be a Lord or not, may think he is speaking the truth. It is even
+conceivable that there are some so happily constituted as to be able to
+chat equally unconcernedly with a Duke and with their wife's cousin, the
+land agent. Such men, I presume, exist in the British middle classes.
+But the fact remains that in the mass and, as it were, at a distance the
+effect of titles on the imagination of the British people is
+extraordinarily powerful.
+
+That the men in America are precisely the same men, though they have no
+titles, as they would be if they had, is best shown by the example of
+Americans who have crossed the Canadian border. If Sir William Van Horne
+had not gone to Canada in 1881 or thereabouts, he would still be plain
+"Bill" Van Horne and just as wonderful a man as he is to-day. On the
+other hand if fortune had happened to place Mr. James J. Hill a little
+farther north--in Winnipeg instead of in St. Paul--it is just as certain
+that he would to-day be Lord Manitoba (or some such title) as that his
+early associates George Stephen and Donald Smith are now Lord Mount
+Stephen and Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. But somehow--it were
+useless to deny it--Englishmen would think of him as quite a different
+man. Mr. C. M. Hays in Montreal is still what he was in St.
+Louis--Charlie Hays. He will not change his nature when he becomes Lord
+Muskoka.
+
+And what is true of a few individuals is no less true all over the
+United States. In the immediate neighbourhood of Mr. Hill, there should
+be at least one peerage in the Washburn family and a couple of
+baronetcies among the Pillsburys. Chicago would have of course one Duke
+in the head of the McCormick family, Mr. Marshall Field would have died
+Earl Dearborn, and Mr. Hughitt might be Viscount Calumet. In New York
+Lord Waldorf would be the title of the eldest son of the (at present
+third) Duke of Astoria. The Vanderbilt marquisate--of Hudson
+probably--would be a generation more recent. So throughout the country,
+from Maine to Mississippi, from Lord Penobscot to the Marquis of Biloxi,
+there would be a peerage in each of the good old houses--the Adamses,
+the Cabots, and the Quincys, the Livingstons, the Putnams, and
+Stuyvesants, the Carters and Randolphs and Jeffersons and Lees.
+
+Americans will say: "Thank Heaven and the wisdom of our Anglo-Saxon
+forefathers that it is not so!" If it were so, however, a good deal of
+British misunderstanding of the United States would be removed. Nor will
+it be contended that any of the Americans whom Englishmen have known
+best--Mr. Bayard, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Choate, or Mr. Whitelaw Reid, or
+General Horace Porter--would be other than ornaments to any aristocracy
+in the world. It would be idle to enquire whether Mr. Roosevelt or Mr.
+Chamberlain, Mr. Cleveland or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. Root or
+Lord Rosebery, Mr. Olney or Sir Edward Grey were the better man, for
+every Englishman will probably at once concede that the United States
+does somehow manage to produce individuals of as fine a type as England
+herself. But what no Englishman confesses in his heart is that there is
+any class of these men--that there is as good an upper stratum to
+society there as in England. These remarkable individuals can only be
+explained as being what naturalists call a "sport"--mere freaks and
+accidents. This idea exists in the English mind solely, I believe, from
+the lack of titles in America; which is because the colonists were
+inspired by Anglo-Saxon and not by Norman ideas. Had Englishmen been
+accustomed for a generation or two to have relations, diplomatic and
+commercial, not with Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith, but with Lord Savannah
+and the Earl of Chicopee, the idea would never have taken root. And if
+Englishmen knew the United States better, they would be astonished to
+find how frequent these "sports" and accidents seem to be. And it must
+be remembered that the country does at least produce excellent Duchesses
+and Countesses in not inadequate numbers.
+
+Because American society is not officially stratified like a medicine
+glass and there is, ostensibly at least, no social hierarchy, Englishmen
+would do well to disabuse themselves of the idea that therefore the
+people consists entirely of the lower middle class, with a layer of
+unassimilated foreign anarchists below and a few native and accidental
+geniuses thrusting themselves above. Democracy, at least in the United
+States, is not nearly so thorough a leveller as at a first glance it
+appears. You will, it is true, often hear in America the statement that
+it is "four generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves," which is
+to say that one man, from the farm or the workshop, builds up a fortune;
+his son, being born in the days of little things and bred in the school
+of thrift, holds it together; but his sons in turn, surrounded from
+their childhood with wealth and luxury, have lost the old stern fibre
+and they slip quickly back down the steep path which their grandfather
+climbed with so much toil. But no less often will you hear the statement
+that "blood will tell."
+
+In a democracy the essential principle of which is that every man shall
+have an equal chance of getting to the top, it is a matter of course
+that that top stratum will be constantly changing. The idea of anything
+in the nature of an hereditary privileged class is abhorrent to the
+mind of every good American. If he had to have an official Aristocracy,
+he would insist on a brand new one with each generation; or more likely
+that it should be re-elected every four years. We are not now discussing
+the advantages or disadvantages of the hereditary principle; the point
+that I desire to make is that at any given time American society,
+instead of being truncated and headless, has the equivalent of an
+aristocracy, whether the first, second, third, or fifth generation of
+nobility, just as abundant and complete as if it were properly labelled
+and classified into Dukes, Marquises, Viscounts, and the rest. And this
+aristocracy is quite independent of any social _cachet_, whether of the
+New York Four Hundred or of any other authority.
+
+It is a commonly accepted maxim among thoughtful Americans that the
+United States Senate is as much superior to the House of Lords as the
+House of Representatives is inferior to the House of Commons. One may,
+or may not, agree with that dictum; but it is worth noticing that, in
+the opinion of Americans themselves, it is, at least, not by comparison
+with the hereditary aristocracy that they show to any disadvantage.
+
+Nor need one accept the opinion (in which many eminent Englishmen
+coincide with the universal American belief) that the United States
+Supreme Court is the ablest as well as the greatest judicial tribunal in
+the world. But when one looks at the membership of that Court and at the
+majority of the members of the Senate (especially those members from the
+older States which hold to some tradition of fixity of tenure), when one
+sees the men who constitute the Cabinets of successive Presidents and
+those who fill the more distinguished diplomatic posts, when, further,
+one becomes acquainted with the class of men from which, all over the
+country, the presidents and attorneys of the great railway corporations
+and banks and similar institutions are drawn (all of which offices, it
+will be noticed, with the exception of the senatorships, are filled by
+nomination or appointment and not by popular election)--when one looks
+at, sees, and becomes acquainted with all these, he will begin to
+correct his impressions as to the non-existence of an American
+aristocracy which, though innocent of heraldry, can fairly be matched
+against the British.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The average Englishman looks at America and sees a people wherein there
+is no recognised aristocracy nor any titles. Also he sees that it is,
+through all its classes, a commercial people, immersed in business.
+Therefore he concludes that it is similar to what the English people
+would be if cut off at the top of the classes engaged in business and
+with all the upper classes wiped out. It will be much nearer the truth
+if he considers the people as a whole to be class for class just like
+the English people, subject to the accident that there are no titles,
+but with the difference that all classes, including the untitled Dukes
+and Marquises and Earls, take to business as to their natural element.
+The parallel may not be perfect; but it is incomparably more nearly
+exact than the alternative and general impression.
+
+It is of course necessary to recognise how rapidly the constitution of
+English society is changing, how old traditions are dying out, and in
+accordance with the Anglo-Saxon instinct the social scheme is tending
+to assimilate itself to the American model. The facts in outline are
+almost too familiar to be worth mentioning, except perhaps for the
+benefit of some American readers, for Americans in England are
+continually puzzled by anomalies which they see in English society. In
+my childhood I was taught that no gentleman could buy or sell anything
+for profit and preserve either his self-respect or the respect of his
+fellows. The only conceivable exceptions--and I think I was not informed
+of them at too early an age--were that a gentleman might deal in horses
+or in wines and still remain, if somewhat shaded, a gentleman; the
+reason being that a knowledge of either horses or wines was a
+gentlemanly accomplishment. The indulgence extended to the vendor of
+wines did not extend to the maker or seller of beer. I remember the
+resentment of the school when the sons of a certain wealthy brewer were
+admitted; and those boys had, I imagine, a cheerless time of it in their
+schooldays. The eldest of those boys, being now the head of the family,
+is to-day a peer. But at that time, though brewers or brewers' sons
+might be admitted grudgingly to the company of gentlemen, they were not
+gentlemen themselves. An aunt or a cousin who married a manufacturer, a
+merchant, or a broker--no matter how rich or in how large a way of
+business--was coldly regarded, if not actually cut, by the rest of the
+family. There are many families--though hardly now a class--in which the
+same traditions persist, but even the families in which the horror of
+trade is as great as ever make an exception as a rule in favour of trade
+conducted in the United States. The American may be pardoned for being
+bewildered when in an aristocracy which is forbidden, so he is told, to
+make money in trade, he finds no lack of individuals who are willing to
+take shares in any trading concern in which money in sufficient
+quantities may be made. The person who will not speak to an English
+farmer except as to an inferior, sends his own sons to the Colonies or
+to the United States to farm. These things, however, are, to Englishmen,
+mere platitudes. But though all are familiar with the change which is
+passing over the British people, few Englishmen, perhaps, have realised
+how rapidly the peerage itself is coming to be a trade-representing
+body. Of seventeen peers of recent creation, taken at random, nine owe
+their money and peerages to business, and the present holders of the
+title were themselves brought up to a business career. It may not be
+long before the English aristocracy will be as universally occupied in
+business as is the American; and it will be as natural for an Earl to go
+to his office as it is for the American millionaire (perhaps the father
+of the Countess) to do so to-day.
+
+In spite of all the change that has taken place, however, it still
+remains very difficult for the English gentleman, or member of a gentle
+family, to engage actively in business--certainly in trade--without
+being made to feel that he is stepping down into a lower sphere where
+there is a new and vitiated atmosphere. The code of ethics, he
+understands, is not that to which he is accustomed at his club and in
+his country house. He trusts that it will not be necessary to forget
+that he himself is a gentleman, but at least he will have to remember
+that his associates are only business men.
+
+The American aristocrat, on the other hand, takes to business as being
+the most attractive and honourable career. Setting aside all question of
+money-making, he believes it to be (and his father tells him that it is)
+the best life for him. Idleness is not good for any man. He will enjoy
+his annual month or two of shooting or fishing or yachting all the
+better for having spent the last ten or eleven months in hard work.
+Moreover, immersion in affairs will keep him active and alert and in
+touch with his fellow-men, besides being in itself one of the largest
+and most fascinating of pastimes. There is also the money; but when
+business is put on this level, money has a tendency to become only one
+among many objects. In England no man can with any grace pretend that he
+goes into business for any other reason than to make money. In America a
+man goes into it in order to gain standing and respect and make a
+reputation.
+
+Under these conditions, to return to our original point, in which
+country, putting other things aside, would one naturally expect to find
+the better code of business morals? Let us, if we can, consider the
+matter, as has been said before, without preconceived ideas or
+individual bias; let us imagine that we are speaking of two countries in
+which we have no personal stake whatever. If in any two such
+countries--in Gombroonia and Tigrosylvania, let us say--we should see
+two peoples approximately matched, of one tongue and having similar
+political ideals, not visibly unequal in strength, in abilities, or in
+the individual sense of honour, and if in one we should further see the
+aristocracy regarding the pursuit of commerce as a thing beneath and
+unworthy of them, in which they could not engage without contamination,
+while in the other it was followed as the most honourable of
+careers,--in which of the two should we expect to find the higher code
+of commercial ethics?
+
+It does not seem to me that there can be any doubt as to the answer.
+Other things being equal, and as a matter of theory only, business in
+the United States ought to be ruled by much higher standards of conduct
+than in England.
+
+Before proceeding to an analysis of any particular conditions, there is
+one further general consideration which I would urge on the attention of
+English readers, most of whom have preconceived ideas on this subject
+already formed.
+
+I am not among those who believe that trade or commerce of ordinary
+kinds either requires or tends to develop great intellectuality in those
+engaged in it. Indeed, my opinion (for which I am willing to be abused)
+is that any considerable measure of intellect is a hindrance to success
+in retail trade or in commerce on a small scale. It is a thesis which
+some one might develop at leisure, showing that it is not merely not
+creditable for a man to make money in trade but that it is an explicit
+avowal of intellectual poverty. Whence, of course, it follows that the
+London tradesman who grows rich and retires to the country or suburbs to
+build himself a statelier mansion is more justly an object of pity, if
+not of contempt, than is often consciously acknowledged. Any imaginative
+quality or breadth of vision which contributes to distract the mind of a
+tradesman from the one transaction immediately in hand and the immediate
+financial results thereof is a disqualification. I state my views thus
+in their extreme form lest the English reader should think that I
+entertain too much respect (or too little contempt) for the purely
+commercial brain. At the same time the English reader will concede that
+commercial enterprises and industrial undertakings may be on such a
+scale as to offer full exercise to the largest intellects.
+
+As an illustration of this: Cecil Rhodes grew, as we know, wealthy from
+the proceeds of vast undertakings; but men closely associated with him
+have assured me that Rhodes was a very indifferent "business man." We
+may, I think, take it for certain that if Rhodes had been condemned to
+conduct a retail grocery he would have conducted it to speedy
+irretrievable disaster. We are probably all agreed that the conduct of a
+small grocery does not require fineness of intellect; most English
+readers, I think, will follow me in believing that success in such a
+sphere of life implies at least an imperfect intellectual development.
+On the other hand enterprises truly Rhodian do call for intellectual
+grasp of the largest.
+
+The consideration which I wish to urge is that business in the United
+States during the period of growth and settlement of the country has
+been largely on Rhodian lines. The great enterprises by which the
+country has been developed, and on which most of the large fortunes of
+individual Americans are based have been of truly imperial proportions.
+The flinging of railways across thousands of miles of wilderness
+(England has made peers of the men who did it in Canada) with the laying
+out of cities and the peopling of provinces; the building of great
+fleets of boats upon the lakes; the vast mining schemes in remote and
+inaccessible regions of the country; lumbering enterprises which (even
+though not always honestly) dealt with virgin forests by the hundreds
+of square miles; "bonanza" wheat farming and the huge systems of grain
+elevators for the handling of the wheat and the conveyance of it to the
+market or the mill; cattle ranching on a stupendous scale (perhaps even
+the collecting of those cattle in their thousands daily for slaughter in
+the packing houses); the irrigating of wide tracts of desert;--these
+things and such as these are the "businesses" out of which the Americans
+of the last and present generations have largely made their fortunes.
+And they are enterprises, most of them, not unworthy to rank with
+Chartered Companies and the construction of railways from the North to
+the South of Africa.
+
+Not only this, but something of the same qualities of spaciousness, as
+of trafficking between large horizons, attach to almost all lines of
+business in the United States,--to many which in England are necessarily
+humdrum and commonplace. Almost every Englishman has been surprised on
+making the acquaintance of an accidental American (no "magnate" or
+"captain of industry" but an ordinary business man) to learn that though
+he is no more than the manufacturer of some matter-of-fact article, his
+operations are on a confusing scale and that, with branch offices in
+three or four towns and agents in a dozen more, his daily dealings are
+transacted over an area reaching three thousand miles from his home
+office, in which the interposition of prairies, mountain ranges, and
+chains of lakes are but incidents. Business in the United States has
+almost necessarily something of the romance of remote and adventurous
+enterprises.
+
+It has been said (and the point is worth insisting on) that the
+Englishman cannot pretend that he goes into business with any other
+object than to make money. His motives are on the face of them mercenary
+if not sordid. The American is impelled primarily by quite other
+ambitions. Similarly, when the Englishman thinks of business, the image
+which he conjures up in his mind is of a dull commonplace like, on lines
+so long established and well-defined that they can embrace little of
+novelty or of enterprise; a sedentary life of narrow outlook from the
+unexhilarating atmosphere of a London office or shop. To the American,
+except in small or retail trade in the large cities, the conditions of
+business are widely different. All around him, lies, both actually and
+figuratively, new ground, wilderness almost, inviting him to turn
+Argonaut. The mere vastness and newness of the country make it full of
+allurement to adventure, the rewards of which are larger and more
+immediate than can be hoped for in older and more straitened
+communities.
+
+It has been said that the American people was, by its long period of
+isolation and self-communion, made to become, in its outlook on the
+policies of the world, a provincial people; but that the very
+provincialism had something of dignity in it from the mere fact that it
+was continent-wide. So it is with American business. The exigencies of
+their circumstances have made the American people a commercial people;
+but whereas in England a commercial life may not offer scope for any
+intellectual activity and may even have a necessary tendency to stunt
+the mentality of any one engaged in it, business in the United States
+offers exercise to a much larger gamut of abilities and, by its mere
+range and variety, instead of dwarfing has a tendency to keep those
+abilities trained and alert. A business in England has not approximately
+the same large theatre of operation or the same variety of incident as a
+business of the same turn over in America. It is almost the difference
+between the man who furnishes his larder by going out to his farmyard
+and wringing the necks of tame ducks therein, and him who must snatch
+the same supply with his gun from the wild flocks in the wilderness.
+
+But, indeed, no argument should be needed on the subject; for one solid
+fact with which almost every Englishman is familiar is that in any
+American (let us use the word) shopkeeper whom he may meet travelling in
+Europe there is a certain mental alertness, freshness, and vigour,
+however objectionably they may at times display themselves--which are at
+least not characteristic of the English shopkeeping class.
+
+Just, then, as we have seen that, if we knew nothing about the peoples
+of the two countries, beyond the broad outlines of their respective
+social structures, we should be compelled, other things being equal, to
+look for a higher code of commercial morality in America than in
+England, so, when we see one further fact, namely that of the difference
+in the conditions under which business is conducted, we must naturally,
+other things being equal, look for a livelier intellect and a higher
+grade of mentality in the American than in the English business man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unfortunately other things never are equal. First, there is the taint of
+the political corruption in America which must, as has been said, in
+some measure contaminate the community. Then, England is an old
+country, with all the machinery of society running in long-accustomed
+grooves; above all it is a wealthy country and the first among creditor
+nations, to whose interest it has been, and is, to see that every bond
+and every engagement be literally and exactly carried out. The United
+States in the nineteenth century was young and undisciplined, with all
+the ardour of youth going out to conquer the world, seeing all things in
+rose-colour, but, for the present,--poor. It was, like any other youth
+confident of the golden future, lavish alike in its borrowings and its
+spendings, over-careless of forms and formalities. Happily the
+confidence in the future has been justified and ten times justified, and
+it is rich--richer than it yet knows--with resources larger even than it
+has learned properly to appraise or control. Whatever obligations it
+incurred in the headlong past are trifles to it now,--a few hundreds of
+college debts to a man who has come into millions. And with its position
+now assured it has grown jealous of its credit, national and individual.
+
+It was inevitable that the heedless days should beget indiscretions, the
+memories of which smart to-day. It was inevitable that amid so much
+recklessness and easy faith there should be some wrong-doing. Above all,
+was it inevitable that in the realisation of its dreams, when wealth and
+power grew and money came pouring into it, there should be bred in the
+people an extraordinary and unwholesome love of speculation which in
+turn opened their opportunities to the gambler and the confidence-man of
+all kinds and sizes. They flourished in the land,--the man who wrecked
+railways and issued fictitious millions of "securities," the man who
+robbed the government of moneys destined for the support of Indians or
+the establishment of postal routes in the farther West, the man who
+salted mines, the "land-grabber" and the "timber-shark" who dealt not in
+acres but in hundreds of square miles, the bogus trust company, and the
+fraudulent land and investment agent. When even the smallest community
+begins to "boom," the people of the community lose their heads and the
+harvest ripens to the sickle of the swindler. And the entire United
+States--sometimes in one part, sometimes in another, sometimes all
+together,--with only an occasional and short-lived panic to check the
+madness, boomed continuously for half a century.
+
+It is still booming, but with wealth, established institutions, and
+invested capital, have come comparative soberness and a sense of
+responsibility. The spirit which governs American industrial life to-day
+is quite other than that which ruled it two or three decades ago. The
+United States has sown its wild oats. It was a generous sowing,
+certainly, for the land was wide and the soil rich. But that harvest has
+been all but garnered and the country is now for the most part given
+over to more legitimate crops.
+
+[Tares still spring up among the wheat. The commercial community is not
+yet as well ordered as that of England or another older country; and
+since the foregoing paragraphs were written, the panic which fell upon
+the United States in the closing months of 1907 has occurred. The
+country had enjoyed a decade of extraordinary financial prosperity, in
+the course of which, in the spirit of speculation which has already been
+mentioned, all values had been forced to too high a level, credits had
+been extended beyond the margin of safety, and the volume of business
+transactions had swollen to such bulk in proportion to the amount of
+actual monetary wealth in existence that any shock to public confidence,
+any nervousness resulting in a contraction of the circulating medium,
+could not fail to produce catastrophe. The shock came; as sooner or
+later it had to come. In the stern period of struggle and retrenchment
+which followed, all the weak spots in the financial and industrial
+fabric of the country have been laid bare and, while depression and
+distress have spread over the whole United States, until all parts are
+equally involved, not only have the exposures of anything approaching
+dishonest or illegitimate methods been few, but the way in which the
+business communities at large have stood the strain has shown that there
+is nothing approaching unsoundness in the general business conditions.
+With the system of credit shattered and with hardly circulating medium
+enough to conduct the necessary petty transactions of everyday life, the
+country is already recovering confidence and feeling its way back to
+normal conditions. The results have not been approximately as bad as
+those which followed the panic of 1893; and the difference is an index
+to the immensely greater stability of the country's industries.
+Meanwhile there was at first (and still exists) a feeling of intense
+indignation in all parts of the country that so much suffering should
+have been thrown upon the whole people by the misbehaviour of a small
+circle of men in New York. The experience, however painful, will in the
+long run be salutary. It will be salutary in the first place for the
+obvious reason that business will have to start again conservatively and
+with inflated values reduced to something below normal levels. But it
+will be even more salutary for the less obvious reason that it has
+intensified the already acute disgust of the business men of the country
+as a whole with what are known as "Wall Street methods." Englishmen
+generally have an idea that Wall Street methods are the methods of all
+the United States; and, while they have had impressed upon them every
+detail of those financial irregularities in the small New York clique
+which precipitated the catastrophe, they have heard and know nothing of
+the coolness and cheery resolution with which the crisis has been faced
+by the commercial classes as a whole.]
+
+England has not yet forgotten the disclosures in the matter of the
+Chicago packing houses. That the light which was then turned on that
+industry revealed conditions that were in some details inconceivably
+shocking, is hardly to be doubted: and I trust that those are mistaken
+who say that if similar investigation had been made into the methods of
+certain English establishments, before warning was given, the state of
+affairs would have been found not much different. What is certain,
+however, is that the English public received an exaggerated idea of the
+extent of the abuses. In part, this was a necessary result of the
+exigencies of journalism. A large majority of the newspapers even of
+London--certainly those which reach a large majority of the
+readers--prefer sensationalism. Even those which are anxious in such
+cases to be fair and temperate are sadly hampered both by the
+limitations of space in their own columns and by the costliness of
+telegraphic correspondence. It is inevitable that the most conservative
+and judicial of correspondents should transmit to his papers whatever
+are the most striking items--revelations--accusations in an indictment
+such as was then framed against the packers. The more damning details
+are the best news. On the other hand he cannot, save to a ridiculously
+disproportionate extent, transmit the extenuating circumstances, the
+individual denials, the local atmosphere. Telegraph tolls are heavy and
+space is straitened while atmosphere and extenuating circumstances are
+not news at all. An Englishman is generally astonished when he reads the
+accounts of some conspicuous divorce case or great financial scandal in
+England as they appear in the American (or for that matter the French or
+German) papers, with the editorial comments thereupon. In the picture of
+any event happening at a great distance the readers of even the
+best-intentioned journals necessarily have presented to their view only
+the highest lights and the blackest shadows. In this instance a certain
+section of the American press--what is specifically known as the
+"yellow" press--had strong motives, of a political kind, for making the
+case against the packers as bad as possible. It is unfortunate that many
+of the London newspapers look much too largely to that particular class
+of American paper for their American news and their views on current
+American events.
+
+If we assume that any reasonable proportion of the accusations made
+against the packing houses were true of some one or other establishment,
+it still remains that a considerable proportion of the American business
+community is otherwise engaged than in the canning of meats. There is a
+story well known in America of a countryman who entered a train with a
+packet of eggs, none too fresh, in his coat-tail pocket. He sat down
+upon them; but deemed it best to continue sitting rather than give the
+contents a chance to run down his person. Meanwhile the smell permeated
+through the car and at last the passenger sitting immediately behind the
+countryman saw whence the unpleasantness arose. Whereupon he fell to
+abusing the other.
+
+"Thunder!" exclaimed the countryman. "What have you got to complain of?
+You've only got the smell. _I'm sitting in it!_"
+
+This is much how Americans feel in regard to foreign criticisms of the
+packing house scandals. Whatever wrong-doing there may have been in
+individual establishments in this one industry in Chicago, is no more to
+be taken as typical of the commercial ethics of the American people than
+the discovery of a fraudulent trader or group of traders in one
+particular line in Manchester or Glasgow would imply that the British
+trading public was corrupt. The mere ruthlessness with which, in this
+case, the wrong-doers were exposed ought in itself to be a sufficient
+evidence to outsiders that the American public is no more willingly
+tolerant of dishonesty than any other people. Judged, indeed, by that
+criterion, surely no other country can detest wrong-doing so
+whole-heartedly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And I wish here to protest against the habit which the worst section of
+the English newspapers has adopted during the last year or so of holding
+"American methods" in business up to contempt. It is true that it is not
+done with any idea of directing hostility against the United States; and
+those who use the catchword so freely would undoubtedly much prefer to
+speak of "German methods" or even "French" or "Russian methods," if they
+could. All that is meant is that the methods are un-English and alien;
+but whether the intention is to lessen the public good-will towards the
+United States or not, that must inevitably be the effect. Even if it
+were not, the American public is abundantly justified in resenting it.
+
+The idea that America is trust-ridden to the extent popularly supposed
+in England has been carefully fostered by those extreme journals in
+America already referred to (it is impossible not to speak of them as
+the Yellow Press) for personal and political reasons--reasons which
+Englishmen would comprehend if they understood better the present
+political situation in the United States. The idea has been encouraged
+by divers English "impressionist" authors and writers on the English
+press who, with a superficial knowledge of American affairs, have caught
+the jargon of the same school of American journalist-politicians. It has
+been further confirmed by a misunderstanding of the attitude and policy
+of President Roosevelt himself, which has already been sufficiently
+dealt with.
+
+England is, in the American sense, much more "trust-ridden" than the
+United States. It is not merely that (as any reference to statistics
+will show) wealth is less concentrated in America than in England--that
+nothing like the same proportion of the capital of the country is lodged
+in a few hands--for that, inasmuch as the majority of large fortunes in
+Great Britain are not commercial in their origin, might mean little; but
+in business the opportunity for the small trader and the man without
+backing to win to independence is a hundred times greater in America,
+while the control exercised by "rings" and "cliques" over certain large
+industries in England and over the access to certain large markets is, I
+think, much more complete than has been attained, except most
+temporarily, by any trust or ring in the United States, except, as in
+the case of oil, where artificial monopoly has been assisted by natural
+conditions.
+
+The tendency in the United States even in the last twenty years has not
+been in the direction of a concentration of wealth, but towards its
+diffusion in a degree unparalleled in any country in the world. The
+point in which the United States is economically almost immeasurably
+superior to England is not in the number of her big fortunes but in the
+enormously greater well-to-do-ness of the middle classes--the vastly
+larger number of persons of moderate affluence, who are in the enjoyment
+of incomes which in England would class them among the reasonably rich.
+
+Consolidation and amalgamation are the necessary and unavoidable
+tendencies of modern business. As surely as the primitive partnership
+succeeded individual effort and as, later, corporations were created to
+enlarge the sphere of partnerships, so is it certain that the industrial
+units which will fight for control of trade in the much larger markets
+of the modern world will represent vastly larger aggregations of capital
+than (except in extraordinary and generally state-aided institutions)
+were dreamed of fifty years ago. That must be accepted as a certainty.
+It does not by any means necessarily follow that this process entails a
+concentration of wealth in fewer hands; on the contrary the larger a
+corporation is, the wider proportionally, as a general rule, is the
+circle of the shareholders in whom the property is vested. But
+presuming the commercial growth of the United States to continue for
+half a century yet on the lines on which it has developed in the last
+two decades, the country will then, not so much by any concentration of
+wealth, but by the mere filling up of the commercial field (so that by
+increase in the intensity of competition the opportunity for the small
+or new trader to force his way to the surface will be more curtailed,
+and the gulf between owner or employer and non-owner or employed will
+become greater and more permanent)--if, I say, that growth should
+continue for another fifty years then will the conditions in America
+approximate to those in England. This it is against which the masses in
+America are more or less blindly and unconsciously fighting to-day. The
+comparison with European conditions is generally not formulated in the
+individual mind; but an approach to those conditions is what the masses
+of America see--or think they see--in the tendency towards greater
+aggregations of corporate power. It is not the process of aggregation,
+but the protest against it, which is peculiar to the United States: not
+the trust-power but the hatred of it.
+
+This being so, for Englishmen or other Europeans to speak of all
+manifestations of the process itself as "American" is not a little
+absurd. Besides which, to so speak of it in the tone which is generally
+adopted is extremely impolite to a kindred people whose good-will
+Englishmen ought to, and do, desire to keep.
+
+The thing is best illustrated by taking a single example. The term
+"Trust" is, of course, very vaguely used, being generally taken, quite
+apart from its proper significance, to mean any form of combination,
+corporate aggregation, or working agreement which tends to extend
+control of a company or individual, or group of companies or
+individuals, over a larger proportion of a particular trade or industry.
+In the United States, with the possible exception of the Standard Oil
+Company (which is not properly a trust), the form of corporate power
+against which there has been the most bitterness is that of the
+railways, and the specific form of railway organisation most fiercely
+attacked has been the Pool or Joint Purse--which is, in all essentials,
+a true trust. In 1887 the formation of a Pool, or Joint Purse Agreement,
+was made illegal in the United States; but Englishmen can have no
+conception of the popular hatred of the word "Pools" which exists in
+America or of the obloquy which has been heaped upon railway companies
+for entering into them. Few Englishmen on the other hand have any clear
+idea of what a Joint Purse Agreement is; and they jog along contentedly
+ignorant that this iniquitous engine for their oppression is in daily
+use by the British railway companies.
+
+My personal belief is that the prohibition of pools in America was a
+mistake: that it would have been better for the country from the first
+to have authorised, even encouraged, their formation, as in England,
+under efficient governmental supervision. But the point is that the
+majority of the American people thought otherwise and no other
+manifestation of the trust-tendency has been more virulently attacked
+than the--to English ideas--harmless institution of a joint purse. And
+whether the American people ultimately acted wisely or unwisely, they
+were justified in regarding any form of association or agreement between
+railways with more apprehension than would be reasonable in England. It
+is not possible here to explain why this is so, except to say broadly
+that the longer distances in America and the lack of other forms of
+transportation render an American community, especially in the West,
+more dependent upon the railway than is the case in England. The
+conditions give the railway company a larger control over, or influence
+in, the well-being of the people.
+
+An excellent illustration of the difference in the point of view of the
+two peoples has been furnished since the above was written by the
+announcements, within a few weeks of each other in December 1907, of the
+formation of two "working agreements" between British railway
+companies,--that namely between the Great Northern and Great Central
+railways and that between the North British and Caledonian. In the
+former case the Boards of Directors of the two companies merely
+constituted themselves a Joint Committee to operate the two railways
+conjointly. In the latter, not many details of the agreement were made
+public, except that it was intended to control competition in all
+classes of traffic and, as the first fruits thereof, there was an
+immediate and not unimportant increase in certain classes of passenger
+rates. Neither agreement has, I think, yet received the sanction of the
+proper authorities, but the public generally received the announcement
+of both with approval amounting almost to enthusiasm. Of these
+agreements the former, certainly, and presumably the latter, would be
+flagrantly illegal in the United States. If, moreover, an attempt were
+made in America to arrive at the same ends in some roundabout way which
+would avoid technical illegality, the outburst of popular indignation
+would make it impossible. Personally I sympathise with the English view
+and believe both agreements to be not only just and proper but in the
+public interest; but it is certain that they would have created such an
+uproar in the United States that English newspapers would inevitably
+have reflected the disturbance, and English readers would have been
+convinced that once more the Directorates of American railways were
+engaged in a nefarious attempt to use the power of capital for the
+plundering and oppression of the public. In the still more recent debate
+(February 1908) in the House of Commons, the views expressed by both Mr.
+Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law in favour of the lessening of competition
+between railway companies would have exposed them to the hysterical
+abuse of a large part of the American press. Both those gentlemen would
+have been openly accused of being the tools of (if not actually
+subsidised by) the corporations, and (but for Mr. Bonar Law's company)
+Mr. Lloyd George's attitude would, I think, be sufficient to ruin an
+Administration. These statements contain no reflection on the American
+point of view. The conditions are such that that point of view may, in
+America, be the right one. But the absurdity is that Englishmen hear
+these things, or read of them as being said in the United States, and
+thereupon assume that terrible offences are being perpetrated; whereas
+nothing is being done which in England would not receive the approval of
+the majority of sensible men and be temperately applauded by the
+spokesmen of both the great parties in Parliament. It is not, I say
+again, the Trust-power, but the hatred of it, which is peculiar to
+America.
+
+The same is true of the field as a whole. Things harmless in England
+might be very dangerous in America. We have so far considered the trust
+power only as a commercial and industrial factor--in its tendency, by
+crystallisation or consolidation in the higher strata, to depress the
+economic status of the industrial masses and to make the emergence of
+the individual trader into independence more difficult. In this aspect
+capital is immensely more dominant in England than in America. But there
+is a political side to the problem.
+
+In the United States, owing to the absence of a throne and an
+established aristocracy, there is, as it were, no counterpoise to the
+power of wealth. This is, in practice, the chief virtue of the throne in
+the British constitution, that, in its capacity as the Fountain of
+Honour, it prevents wealth from becoming the dominant power in the
+country and thereby (which Americans are slow to understand) is the most
+democratic of forces, protecting the proletariat in some measure against
+the possibility of unhindered oppression by an omnipotent capitalism.
+The English masses are already by the mere impenetrability of the
+commercial structure above them much worse off than the corresponding
+masses in the United States. What their condition might be if for a
+generation the social restraint put upon wealth by the power of the
+throne and the established aristocracy were to be relaxed, it is not
+pleasant to consider. Nor need it be considered.[335:1]
+
+It is, I think, evident that in America the danger to the industrial
+independence of the individual which might arise from the aggregation of
+wealth in a few hands is much greater than in England. The power would
+be capable of greater abuse; the evils which would flow from such abuse
+would be greater. It is not wealth, but the abuse of it that he is
+attacking, says President Roosevelt--not the wealthy class, but the
+"wealthy criminal class." The distinction has not been digested by those
+in England who rail against American methods or who write of American
+politics. It is necessary--or so it seems to a large number of the
+American people--that extraordinary checks should be put upon the
+possibility of the abuse of wealth in the United States, such as do not
+exist or are not needed (or at least we have heard no energetic demand
+for them) in England. As a political fact there is need of especial
+vigilance in the United States lest corporate power be abused. As a
+commercial fact it is merely preposterous to rail at the modern tendency
+to consolidation and amalgamation as specifically "American."
+
+It is probably safe to say that if the United States had such a social
+counterweight as is furnished in England by the throne and the
+recognised aristocracy, the growth of what is called "trust-power" would
+be viewed to-day with comparative unconcern. At all events England is
+able to view with something like unconcern the conditions, as they exist
+in England, worse than, as has been said, the trust power is humanly
+capable of imposing on the American people in another half-century of
+unhindered growth. Which, American readers will please understand, is
+not a suggestion that the United States would be benefited, even
+commercially, by the institution of a monarchy.
+
+Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Englishmen long ago acquired the
+idea that American business methods in what may be called large affairs
+were too often unscrupulous; and of such methods, there were certainly
+examples. I have explained why the temptations to, and the opportunities
+for, dishonesty were very great in the earlier days and it would be
+impossible to find language too severe to characterise many of the
+things which were done--not once, but again and again--in the
+manipulation of railways, the stealing of public lands, and the
+plundering of the public treasury. The dog deserved as bad a name as he
+received. But that dog died. The Americans themselves stoned him to
+death--with precisely the same ferocity as they have recently exhibited
+when they discovered, as they feared, some of his litter in the Chicago
+packing houses--or a year before in the offices of certain insurance
+companies. The present generation of Americans may not be any better men
+than their fathers (let us hope that they are, if only for the
+reputation of the vast immigration of Englishmen and Scotchmen which has
+poured into the country) but at least they are much less tempted. They
+live under a new social code. They have nothing like the same
+opportunity for successful dishonesty and immeasurably greater chance of
+punishment, whether visited on them by the law or by the opinion of
+their fellows, if unsuccessful or found out. It is not fair that the new
+dog should be damned to drag around the old dog's name.
+
+There is an excellent analogy in which the relations of the two peoples
+are reversed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Americans are largely of the opinion that the British aristocracy is a
+disreputable class. They gave that dog its name too; and there have been
+individual scandals enough in the past to justify it. It is useless for
+an Englishman living in America to endeavour to modify this opinion in
+even a small circle, for it is only a question of time--probably of a
+very short time--before some peer turns up in the divorce court and the
+Englishmen's friends will send him newspaper clippings containing the
+Court Report and will hail him on street corners and at the club with:
+"How about your British aristocracy now?"
+
+Americans cannot see the British peerage as a whole; they only hear of
+those who thrust themselves into unsavoury notoriety. So Englishmen get
+no view of the American business community in its entirety, but only
+read with relish the occasional scandal. Of the two, the American has
+the better, or at least more frequent, justification for his error than
+has the Englishman; but it is a pity that the two cannot somehow agree
+to an exchange. Perhaps a treaty might be entered into (if it were not
+for the United States Senate) which, when ratified, should be published
+in all newspapers and posted in all public places in both countries,
+setting forth that:
+
+     "IN CONSIDERATION of the Party of the Second Part hereafter
+     cherishing a belief in the marital fidelity and general moral
+     purity of all members of the British peerage, their wives,
+     heirs, daughters, and near relations, and further agreeing
+     that when, by any unfortunate mishap, any individual member of
+     the said Peerage or his wife, daughter, or other relation
+     shall have been discovered and publicly shown to have offended
+     against the marriage laws or otherwise violated the canons of
+     common decency, to understand and take it for granted that
+     such mishap, offence, or violation is a quite exceptional
+     occurrence owing to the unexplainable depravity of the
+     individual and that it in no way reflects upon the other
+     members of the said Peerage, whether in the mass or
+     individually, or their wives, daughters, or near relations:
+     THEREFORE the Party of the First Part hereby agrees to decline
+     to give any credence whatsoever to any story, remark, or
+     reflection to the discredit of the general honesty of the
+     American commercial classes or public men, but agrees that he
+     will hereafter assume them to be trustworthy and truthful
+     whether individually or in the mass, except in such cases as
+     shall have been publicly proven to the contrary, and that he
+     will always understand and declare that such isolated cases
+     are purely sporadic and not in any way to be taken as
+     evidences either of an epidemic or of a general low state of
+     public morality, but that on the contrary the said American
+     commercial classes do, whether in the mass or individually,
+     hate and despise an occasional scoundrel among them as
+     heartily as would the Party of the First Part hate and despise
+     such a scoundrel if found among his own people--as, he
+     confesses, does occasionally occur."
+
+Nonsense? Of course it is nonsense. But the desirable thing is that
+Englishmen should be brought to understand that after all it is but an
+inconsiderable portion of the American business community that is
+permanently employed in the manufacture of wooden nutmegs, in selling
+canned horrors for food, or in watering railway shares, and that
+Americans should believe that there are quite a large number of men of
+high birth in England who are only infrequently engaged in either
+beating their own wives or running away with those of other men.
+
+The brief confessional clause at the conclusion of the above draft I
+take to be an important portion of the document. It is not necessary
+that a similar confession should be incorporated in the behalf of the
+Party of the Second Part, not because there are no family scandals in
+America, but because, in the absence of a peerage, it is not easy to
+tell when a divorce or other scandal occurs among the aristocracy.
+"Scandal in High Life" is such a tempting heading to a column that the
+American newspapers are generous in their interpretation of the term and
+many a man and woman, on getting into trouble, must have been surprised
+to learn for the first time that their ambitions had been realised,
+unknown to themselves, and that they did indeed belong to that class
+which they had for so long yearned to enter.
+
+This fact also is worth considering, namely, that whereas in England it
+is not impossible that there may be more scandals of a financial sort,
+both in official circles and outside, than the public ever hears of
+through the press; it is reasonably certain that in America the press
+publishes full details of a good many more scandals than ever occur.
+
+This peculiarity of the American press (for it is still peculiar to
+America, in degree at least, if not in kind) does not arise from any
+set purpose of blackening the reputation of the country in the eyes of
+the outside world, but is entirely the result of "enterprise," of
+individual ambition, and the extremity of partisan enthusiasm. Other
+nations may be quite certain that they hear all the worst that is to be
+told of the people of the United States. Out of the Spanish war arose
+what came to be known as the "embalmed beef" scandal. American soldiers
+in Cuba were furnished with a quantity of rations which, by the time
+they reached the front and an effort was made to serve them out, were
+entirely unfit for human consumption. Undoubtedly much suffering was
+thereby caused to the men and probably some disease. But, equally
+undoubtedly, the catastrophe arose from an error in judgment and not
+from dishonesty of contractors or of any government official. But, as
+the incident was handled by a section of the American press, it might
+well, had the two great parties at the time been more evenly balanced in
+public favour, have resulted in the ruin of the reputation of an
+administration and the overthrow of the Republican party at the next
+election.
+
+If the Re-mount scandals and the Army Stores scandals which arose out of
+England's South African war had occurred in America, I doubt if any
+party could have stood against the storm that would have been provoked,
+and, deriving their ideas of the affairs from the cabled reports,
+Englishmen of all classes would still be shaking their heads over the
+inconceivable dishonesty in the American public service and the
+deplorable standard of honour in the American army. It may be necessary
+and wholesome for a people that occasionally certain kinds of dirty
+linen should be washed in public; but the speciality of the American
+"yellow press"[342:1] is the skill which it shows in soiling clean linen
+in private in order to bring it out into the streets to wash.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+POSTSCRIPT--Reference has been made in the foregoing chapter to the
+British peerage and I now propose to have the temerity to enter a
+serious protest against the tone in which even the thoughtful American
+commonly refers to the House of Lords. I cherish no such hopeless
+ambition as that of inducing the American newspaper paragrapher to
+surrender his traditional right to make fun of a British peer on any and
+every occasion. I am speaking now to the more serious teachers of the
+American people; for it is a deplorable fact that even the best of those
+teachers when speaking of the House of Lords use language which is
+generally flippant, nearly always contemptuous, and not uncommonly
+uninformed.
+
+My own belief (and I think it is that of the majority of thinking
+Englishmen) is that if the discussion in the House of Lords on any large
+question be laid side by side with the debate on the same question in
+the House of Commons and the two be read concurrently, it will almost
+invariably be seen that the speeches in the Upper House show a marked
+superiority in breadth of view, expression and grasp of the larger
+aspects and the underlying principles of the subject. I believe that
+such a debate in the House of Lords is characterised by more ability and
+thoroughness than the debate on a similar question in either the Senate
+or the House of Representatives. It does not appear from the respective
+membership of the chambers how it could well be otherwise.
+
+Let us from memory give a list of the more conspicuous members of the
+present House of Peers whose names are likely to be known to American
+readers, to wit: the Dukes of Devonshire and Norfolk; the Marquises of
+Ripon and Landsdowne; Earls Roberts, Rosebery, Elgin, Northbrook, Crewe,
+Carrington, Cromer, Kimberley, Minto, Halsbury, Spencer; Viscounts,
+Wolseley, Goschen, Esher, Kitchener of Khartoum, St. Aldwyn
+(Hicks-Beach), Milner, Cross; the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
+Bishop of London; Lords Lister, Alverstone, Curzon of Kedleston, Mount
+Stephen, Strathcona and Mount Royal, Avebury, Loreburn, and Rayleigh.
+Let me emphasise the fact that this is not intended to be a list of the
+ablest members of the House, but only a list of able members something
+of whose reputation and achievements is likely to be known to the
+intelligent American reader. If the list were being compiled for English
+readers, it would have to be twice as long; but, as it stands, I submit
+that it is a list which cannot approximately be paralleled from among
+the members of the House of Commons or from among the members of the
+Senate and House of Representatives combined. I take it to be
+incontrovertible that a list representing such eminence and so great
+accomplishment in so many fields (theology, statesmanship, war,
+literature, government, science, and affairs) could not be produced from
+the legislative chambers of any single country in the world.
+
+The mistake which Americans make is that they confuse the hereditary
+principle with the House of Lords. The former is, of course, spurned by
+every good American and no one denies his right to express his
+disapproval thereof in such terms as he sees fit. But few Americans
+appear to make sufficient allowance for the fact that whatever the House
+of Lords suffers at any given time by the necessary inclusion among its
+members (as a result of its hereditary constitution) of a proportion of
+men who are quite unfit to be members of any legislative body (and these
+are the members of the British peerage with whom America is most
+familiar) is much more than counterbalanced by the ability to introduce
+into the membership a continuous current of the most distinguished and
+capable men in every field of activity, whose services could not
+otherwise (and cannot in the United States) be similarly commanded by
+the State.
+
+We have seen how in the United States a man can only win his way to the
+House of Representatives, and hardly more easily to the Senate, without
+earning the favour of the local politicians and "bosses" of his
+constituency, and how, when he is elected, his tenure of office is
+likely to be short and must be always precarious. It is probable that in
+the United States not one of the distinguished men whose names are given
+in the above list would (with the possible exception of two or three who
+have devoted their lives to politics) be included in either chamber.
+They would, so far as public service is concerned (unless they were
+given cabinet positions or held seats upon the bench), be lost to the
+State.
+
+It is, of course, impossible that Americans should keep in touch with
+the proceedings of the House of Lords; nor is there any reason why they
+should. The number of Americans, resident at home, who in the course of
+their lives have read _in extenso_ any single debate in that House must
+be extremely small; and first-hand knowledge of the House Americans can
+hardly have. Then, of the English publicists or statesmen who visit the
+United States it is perhaps inevitable that those whose conversation on
+political topics Americans (especially American economic thinkers and
+sociologists) should find most congenial are those of an advanced
+Liberal or Radical--even semi-Republican--complexion. I have chanced to
+have the opportunity of seeing how much certain American economists of
+the rising school (which has done such admirable work as a whole) have
+been influenced by the views of particular Englishmen of this class. I
+should like to mention names, but not a few readers will be able to
+supply them for themselves. It has not appeared to occur to the American
+disciples of these men that the views which they impart on English
+political subjects are purely partisan, and generally very extreme,
+views. Their opinions of the House of Lords no more represent the
+judgment of England on the subject than the opinions of an extreme Free
+Trade Democrat represent the views of America on the subject of
+Protection.
+
+Merely as a matter of manners and good taste, it would, I think, be well
+if Americans endeavoured to arrive at and express a better understanding
+of the legislative work of the Lords. Englishmen have not much more
+regard for the principle of a quadrennially elected President than
+Americans have for an hereditary aristocracy; but they do not habitually
+permit that lack of regard to degenerate into the use of contemptuous
+language about individual Presidents. Even in contemplating the result
+of what seems to them so preposterous a system as that of electing a
+judiciary by popular party vote, Englishmen have generally confined
+themselves to a complimentary expression of surprise that the results
+are not worse than they are. Surely, while being as truculent as they
+please in their attitude towards the hereditary principle, it would be
+well if Americans would similarly endeavour to dissociate their
+detestation of that principle from their feelings for the actual
+personnel of the House of Lords. There is a good deal both in the
+constitution and work of the House to command the respect even of the
+citizens of a republic.
+
+I address this protest directly to American economic and sociological
+writers in the hope that, recognising that it comes from one who is not
+unsympathetic, some of them may be influenced to speak less heedlessly
+on the subject than is their wont. I may add that these remarks are
+suggested by certain passages in the recently published book of an
+American author for whom, elsewhere in this volume, I express, as I
+feel, sincere respect.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[309:1] It is delightful to find, some weeks after this was written,
+that Mr. Wells makes precisely this common blunder and states it in
+almost the exact words that I have used later on. His excuse lies in the
+fact that, as he says, he had it "in his mind before ever he crossed the
+Atlantic"; but that hardly excuses his failure to disabuse himself after
+he was across. Most curious is it that Mr. Wells appears to think that
+this erroneous notion is a discovery of his own and he enlarges on it
+and expounds it at some length; the truth being, as I say above, that it
+is the common opinion of all uninformed Englishmen. Mr. Wells is in fact
+voicing an almost universal--even if unformulated--national prejudice,
+but it is a pity that he took it over to America and brought it back
+again.
+
+[335:1] The reader will, of course, understand that the political or
+industrial power of capital is entirely a separate thing from the
+ability of wealth to buy luxury, deference or social recognition for its
+possessor. In this particular there is little to choose between the two
+and curiously enough, each country has been called by visitors from the
+other the "paradise of the wealthy."
+
+[342:1] Englishmen often ask the meaning of the phrase "the yellow
+press." The history of it is as follows: In 1895, Mr. W. R. Hearst,
+having had experience as a journalist in California, purchased the New
+York _Journal_, which was at the time a more or less unsuccessful
+publication, and, spending money lavishly, converted it into the most
+enterprising, as well as the most sensational, paper that New York or
+any other American city had ever seen. In catering to the prejudices of
+the mass of the people, he invaded the province of the New York _World_.
+In the "war" between the two which followed, one began and the other
+immediately adopted the plan of using yellow ink in the printing of
+certain cartoons (or pictures of the _Ally Sloper_ type) with which they
+adorned certain pages of their Sunday editions especially. The term
+"yellow press" was applied at first only to those two papers, but soon
+extended to include other publications which copied their general style.
+The yellow ink was, I believe, actually first employed by the _World_;
+but the _Journal_ was the aggressor in the fight and in most particulars
+it was that paper which set the pace, and it, or Mr. Hearst, rightly
+bears the responsibility for the creation of yellow journalism.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE GROWTH OF HONESTY
+
+     The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon--America's Resemblance to
+     Japan--A German View--Can Americans Lie?--Honesty as the Best
+     Policy--Religious Sentiment--Moral and Immoral Railway
+     Managers--A Struggle for Self-Preservation--Gentlemen in
+     Business--Peculation among Railway Servants--How the Old Order
+     Changes, Yielding Place to New--The Strain on British
+     Machinery--Americans as Story-Tellers--The Incredibility of
+     the Actual.
+
+
+My desire is to contribute, if possible, something towards the
+establishment of a better understanding between the two peoples by
+correcting certain misapprehensions which exist in the mind of each in
+regard to the other. At the present moment we are concerned with the
+particular misapprehension which exists in the English mind in regard to
+the commercial ethics--the average level of common honesty--in the
+masses of American business men. I have endeavoured to show, first, that
+the majority of Englishmen have, even though unconsciously, a
+fundamental misconception of the character of the American people,
+arising primarily from the absence of a recognised aristocracy in the
+United States:--that, in fact, the two peoples are, in the construction
+of their social fabrics, much more alike than the Englishman generally
+assumes. I have endeavoured to show, next, that if we were entirely
+without any knowledge of, or any prejudices in regard to, the code of
+commercial ethics at present existing in either country, but had to
+deduce for ourselves _a priori_ from what we knew of the part which
+commerce and business played in the social life of the two countries the
+probable degree of morality which would be found in the respective
+codes, we should be forced to look for a higher standard in the United
+States than in England. We have seen how it comes that Englishmen have,
+justifiably and even unavoidably, acquired the erroneous notions which
+they have acquired, first, from the fact that, in the rough days of the
+past, American business morality was, at least in certain parts of the
+country, looser than that which prevailed in the older-established and
+better constituted society of the England of the same day (and in the
+older communities of the United States itself); and, second, from the
+fact that the chief channel through which Englishmen must necessarily
+derive their contemporary ideas on the subject, namely, the American
+press, is, by reason of qualities peculiar to itself, not to be trusted
+to correct the misapprehensions which exist. Finally, we have seen that
+there exist in certain American minds some mistaken notions, not much
+dissimilar in character to those which I am trying to point out are
+present in the minds of Englishmen, about the character of a
+considerable section of the people of Great Britain; and if Americans
+can be thus mistaken about England, there is no inherent improbability
+in the suggestion that Englishmen may be analogously mistaken about the
+United States.
+
+The English people has had abundant justification in the past for
+arriving at the conclusion that in many of the qualities which go to
+make a great and manly race it stands first among the peoples of the
+earth. The belief of Englishmen in their own moral superiority as a
+people is justified by the course of history, and is proven every day
+afresh by the attitudes of other races,--especially by the behaviour in
+their choice of friends, when compelled to choose as between England and
+other European powers, of the peoples more or less unlike the
+Anglo-Saxon in their civilisations in the remoter corners of the world.
+It is to the eternal honour of England that in countless out-of-the-way
+places, peoples more or less savage have learned to accept the word of a
+British official or trader as a thing to be trusted, and have grown
+quick to distinguish between him and his rivals of other European
+nationalities. There has been abundant testimony to the respect which
+the British character has won from the world,--from the frank admiration
+of the Prince-Chancellor for the "Parole de Gentleman" to the unshakable
+confidence of the far red Indian in the faith of a "King George Man";
+from the trust of an Indian native in the word of a Sahib to the dying
+injunction to his successor of one of the greatest of the Afghan Ameers:
+"Trust the English. Do not fight them. They are good friends and bad
+enemies."[349:1] And the most solemn oath, I believe, which an Arab can
+take is to swear that what he says is as "true as the word of an
+Englishman."
+
+But, granting all that has happened in the past, and recognising that
+British honour and the sacredness of the British word have stood above
+those of any other peoples, the American nation of to-day is a new
+factor in the situation. It did not exist at the time when the old
+comparisons were made. I have suggested elsewhere that the popular
+American contempt for the English climate is only an inheritance of the
+opinions based on a comparison of that climate with the climates of
+Southern Europe. If the climate of certain parts--of the greater
+part--of the United States had then been a factor to be taken into
+consideration, English skies would have had at least one fellow to share
+with them the opprobrium of the world. So in the matter of commercial
+morality; we are thinking and speaking in terms of a day that has gone,
+when other standards governed.
+
+Englishmen have been very willing, within the last year or two, to
+believe in the revolution which has taken place in the character of
+another people, less akin to them than the Americans and farther away.
+The promptitude with which the British masses have accepted the fact
+that, in certain of the virtues on which Englishmen have most peculiarly
+prided themselves in the past, the Japanese are their superiors, has
+been curiously un-British. There should be no greater difficulty in
+believing that another revolution, much more gradual and less
+picturesque, and by so much the more easily credible, has taken place in
+the American character. The evidence in favour of the one is, rightly
+viewed, no less strong than that in favour of the other. It would have
+been impossible for the Japanese to have carried on the recent war as
+they did had they not been possessed of the virtues of courage and
+patriotism in the highest degree. It would have been equally impossible
+for the Americans to have built up their immense trade in competition
+with the great commercial powers of the world, unless they had in an
+equally high degree possessed the virtue of commercial honesty. No one
+ought to know better than the English business man that a great national
+commercial fabric is not built up by fraud or trickery.
+
+On this subject Professor Münsterberg,[351:1] striving to eradicate
+from the minds of his German countrymen the same tendency to
+underestimate the honesty of American business men, says (and let me say
+that neither my opinion, nor the form in which it is expressed, was
+borrowed from him): "It is naïve to suppose that the economic strength
+of America has been built up through underhanded competition, without
+respect to law or justice, and impelled by nothing but a barbarous and
+purely material ambition. One might better suppose that the twenty-story
+office buildings on lower Broadway are supported by the flag-stones in
+the street. . . . The colossal fabric of American industry is able to
+tower so high only because it has its foundations on the hard rock of
+honest conviction."
+
+"It has been well said," says the same author, "that the American has no
+talent for lying, and distrust of a man's word strikes the Yankee as
+specifically European." Now in England "an American lie" has stood
+almost as a proverb; yet the German writer is entirely in earnest,
+though personally I do not agree with him. He sees the symptoms, but the
+diagnosis is wrong. The American has an excellent talent for lying, but
+in business he has learned that falsehood and deception are poor
+commercial weapons. Business which is obtained by fraud, any American
+will tell you, "doesn't stick"; and as every American in his business is
+looking always to the future, he prefers, merely as a matter of
+prudence, that his foundations shall be sound.
+
+All society is a struggle for the survival of the fittest; and in crude
+and early forms of society, it is the strongest who proves himself most
+fit. In savage communities--and Europe was savage until after the feudal
+days--it is the big man and brutal who comes to the top. In the savage
+days of American commerce, which, at least for the West, ended only a
+generation back, it was too often the man who could go out and subdue
+the wilderness and beat down opposition, who rode rough-shod over his
+competitors and used whatever weapons, whether of mere brute strength or
+fraud, with the greatest ferocity and unscrupulousness, who made his
+mark and his fortune. But in a settled and complex commercial community
+it is no longer the strongest who is most fit; it is the most honest.
+The American commercial community as a whole, in spite of occasional
+exceptions and in defiance of the cynicism of the press, has grasped
+this fact and has accepted the business standards of the world at large.
+
+Let me not be interpreted as implying that there are any fewer Americans
+than there are Englishmen who live rightly from the fear of God or for
+the sake of their own self-respect. The conclusion of most observers has
+been that the American people is more religious than the English, that
+the temperament, more nervous and more emotional, is more susceptible to
+religious influence. It may be so. It is a subject on which the evidence
+is necessarily so intangible--on which an individual judgment is likely
+to be so entirely dependent on individual observation in a narrow
+field--that comparison becomes extremely difficult. My own opinion would
+be that there is at least as much real religious feeling in England as
+in the United States, and certainly more in Scotland than in either;
+but that the churches in America are more active as organisations and
+more efficient agents in behalf of morality.
+
+But we are now speaking of the business community as a whole, and the
+force which ultimately keeps the ethics of every business community pure
+is, I imagine, the same, namely that without honesty the community
+itself cannot live or prosper and that, with normal ability, he who is
+most honest prospers most. American business was dishonest before
+society had settled down and knitted itself together.
+
+The change which has come over the American business world can perhaps
+best be made clear to English readers by taking a single example; and it
+must necessarily be an example from a field with which I am familiar.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is in my possession an interesting document, being one of the (I
+think) two original manuscript copies of the famous "Gentleman's
+Agreement," bearing the signatures of the parties thereto, which was
+entered into by the Presidents or Chairmen of a number of railway
+companies at Mr. Pierpont Morgan's house in New York in 1891. In the
+year following the signing of the Agreement, I was in London in
+connection with affairs which necessitated rather prolonged interviews
+with many of the Chairmen or General Managers of the British
+railways,--Sir George Findlay, Sir Edward Watkin, Mr. J. Staats Forbes,
+and others. With all of them the mutual relations existing between
+railway companies in the two countries respectively formed one of the
+chief topics of our conversations, and that at that time the good faith
+and loyalty of attitude of one company towards another were much
+greater in England than in America it is not possible to question.
+British companies are subject to a restraining influence which does not
+exist in the United States, in the parliamentary control which is
+exercised over them. Every company of any size has, with more or less
+frequency, to go to Parliament for new powers or privileges, and any
+Chairman or Board of Directors which established a reputation for
+untrustworthiness in dealings with other companies would probably be
+able to expect few favours from the next Parliamentary Committee. But
+(although the two last of the gentlemen whose names I have mentioned
+were notoriously parties to a peculiarly bitter railway war) I believe
+that the motives which have chiefly operated to make the managers of
+English companies observe faith with each other better than the American
+have ever succeeded in doing, are chiefly the traditional motives of a
+high sense of personal honour--the fact that they were gentlemen first
+and business men afterwards.
+
+The circumstances which led up to the formation of the Gentlemen's
+Agreement were almost inconceivable to English railway operators. The
+railways, it must always be borne in mind, have been the chief
+civilisers of the American continent. It is by their instrumentality
+that the Great American Desert of half a century ago is to-day among the
+richest and most prosperous agricultural countries in the world. The
+railways have always thrust out ahead of the settler into whatever
+territory, by reason of the potential fertility of its soil or for other
+causes, has held out promise of some day becoming populated. Along the
+railway the population has then flowed. In forcing its way westward
+each company in its course has sought to tap with its lines the richest
+strips of territory: all alike endeavoured to obtain a share of the
+traffic originating from a point where a thriving town was already
+established or topographical conditions pointed out a promising site. As
+the American laws impose practically no restrictions on railway
+construction it necessarily followed that certain districts and certain
+favourable strategic points were invaded by more lines than could
+possibly be justified either by the traffic of the moment or the
+prospective traffic of many years to come. This was conspicuously the
+case in the region Northwestward from Chicago. Business which might have
+furnished a reasonable revenue to two companies was called upon to
+support six or seven and the competition for that business became
+intense,--all the more intense because, unlike English railway
+companies, few American railways in their early days have had any
+material reserve of capital to draw upon. They have had to earn their
+living as they went, out of current receipts, or submit to liquidation.
+
+The officials in charge of the Traffic Departments of each company had
+to justify their retention in their positions by somehow getting more
+than their share of the business, and the temptations to offer whatever
+inducements were necessary to get that business amounted almost to
+compulsion. Without it, not the particular official only, but his
+company, would be extinguished. The situation was further aggravated by
+the fact that the goods that were to be carried were largely staples
+shipped in large quantities by individual shippers--millers, owners of
+packing houses, mining companies from the one end, and coal and oil
+companies from the other. One of these companies might be able to offer
+a railway more business in the course of a year than it could hope to
+get from all the small traders on its lines combined--enough to amount
+almost to affluence if it could be secured at the regularly authorised
+rates. The keenness of the competition to secure the patronage of these
+large shippers can be imagined; for it was, between the companies, a
+struggle for actual existence. All that the shipper had to do was to
+wait while the companies underbid each other, each in turn cutting off a
+slice from the margin of profit that would result from the carrying of
+the traffic until, not infrequently and in some notorious cases, not
+only was that margin entirely whittled away but the traffic was finally
+carried at a figure which meant a heavy loss to the carrier. The extent
+to which the Standard Oil Company has profited by this necessity on the
+part of the railways to get the business of a large shipping concern at
+almost any price, rather than allow its cars and motive power to remain
+idle, has been made sufficiently public.
+
+In some measure the companies were able to protect themselves by the
+making of pooling (or joint-purse) arrangements between themselves; but
+the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Law in 1887 made pooling
+illegal. The companies endeavoured to frame agreements which would not
+be repugnant to the law but would take the place of the pools; but it
+was impossible to attach any penalties to infringements of such
+agreements and under pressure of the necessity of self-preservation, no
+agreement, however solemnly entered into, was strong enough to restrain
+the parties. The Passenger Agents framed agreements to control the
+passenger traffic and the Freight Agents made agreements to control the
+goods traffic, and both were equally futile. Then the Traffic Managers
+made agreements to cover both classes of business, which held no longer
+than the others. So the General Managers tried their hands. But the
+inexorable exigencies of the situation remained. Each official was still
+confronted with the same dilemma: he must either secure more business
+than he was entitled to or he--and his company--must starve. And the
+agreements made by General Managers bound no better than those which
+Passenger Agents or Traffic Managers had made before. Then it was that
+the Gentlemen stepped in.
+
+The Gentlemen, it should be explained, were the Presidents and Chairmen
+of the Boards of the respective companies. They, it was hoped, would be
+able to reach an agreement which, if once their names were signed to it,
+would hold. The meeting, as has been said, was held at Mr. Pierpont
+Morgan's house[358:1] and an agreement was in fact arrived at and
+signed, as has been said, in duplicate. It is lamentable to have to
+record that that agreement--except in so far as it set a precedent for
+other meetings of the same gentlemen, which in turn led to others out of
+which finally grew large movements in the direction of joint ownerships
+and consolidations of interests which have helped materially to make the
+conditions more tolerable--except for that, the Gentlemen's Agreement
+did no more good, and it lasted not appreciably longer, than any of the
+others which had been made by mere officials.
+
+Englishmen will all agree that it is unthinkable that the Chairmen of
+the great British railway companies could meet and give their words _as
+gentlemen_ that each of their companies would observe certain rules in
+the conduct of its business and that a few weeks thereafter it should
+become evident that no single company was keeping the word so pledged.
+But it would be just as absurd to question the personal integrity or
+sense of honour of such men as Mr. Marvin Hughitt, Mr. E. W. Winter, Mr.
+W. H. Truesdale, and the others, as it would be to question that of the
+most upright man in England. The fact is that the conditions are almost
+unthinkable to Englishmen. No company, in becoming party to the
+agreement, had surrendered its right to retaliate when another violated
+the provisions. The actual conduct of the business of the companies--the
+quoting of the rates to secure the traffic--was in the hands of a host
+of subordinate officials, and when a rate is cut it is not cut openly,
+but in secret and by circuitous devices. It was, on subsequent
+investigation, always impossible to tell where the demoralisation had
+begun, amid the cloud of charges, counter-charges, and denials. There
+was not one of the subordinate officials but declared (and seemingly
+proved) that he had acted only in retaliation and self-defence. As there
+was no way of obtaining evidence from the shippers, in whose favour the
+concessions had been made, it was impossible to sift out the truth. Each
+Chairman or President could only say that he had entire confidence in
+his own staff. There was no visible remedy except to discharge the
+entire membership of the Traffic Departments of all the companies
+simultaneously and get new men, to the number of several hundreds, who
+would be no better able to accomplish the impossible than their
+predecessors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My reason for going into this, I fear, somewhat tedious narration is
+that British distrust of American commercial honesty was originally
+created, perhaps, more than by anything else, by the scandals which were
+notoriously associated with the early history of railways in the United
+States. It is not desired here either to insist on the occurrence of
+those scandals or to palliate them. The point is that the conditions
+which made those scandals possible (of which the incapacity on the part
+of the North-western lines to keep faith with each other may be regarded
+as symptomatic) were concomitants of a particular stage only in the
+development of the country. Competition must always exist in any
+business community; but in the desperate form of a breathless,
+day-to-day struggle for bare existence it need only exist among railway
+companies where lines have been built in excess of the needs of the
+population. With the increase in population and the growth of trade the
+asperity of the conditions necessarily becomes mitigated, until at last,
+when the traffic has assumed proportions which will afford all
+competitors alike a reasonable profit on their shares, the management
+ceases to be exposed to any more temptation than besets the Boards of
+the great British companies. Not a few railway companies in the United
+States have arrived at that delectable condition--are indeed now more
+happily circumstanced than any English company--and among them are some
+the names of which, not many years ago, were mere synonyms for
+dishonesty. In the North-western territory of which I have spoken the
+fact that the current values of all railway shares had on the average
+increased (until the occurrence of the financial crisis of the close of
+1907) by about three hundred per cent. in the last ten years is
+eloquent.
+
+In the old days the wrong-doing which was rampant, through excess of
+opportunity and more than abundant temptation, in the higher circles,
+ran also through all grades of the service; and there was one case at
+least of a railway company which used in fact to have to discharge all
+its servants of a certain class at intervals of once a month or
+thereabouts. The Northern Pacific Railway line was opened across the
+continent in 1883, and during the next twelve months it was my fortune
+to have to travel over the western portion of the road somewhat
+frequently. The company had a regularly established tariff of charges,
+and tickets from any one station to another could be bought at the
+booking offices just as on any other railway line in America or England.
+But few people bought tickets. The line was divided, of course, into
+divisions, of so many hundreds of miles each, the train being in charge
+of one conductor (or guard) to the end of his division, where he turned
+it over to his successor for the next division. It was the business of
+the conductor to take up the tickets, or collect the fares, while the
+train was running, and it was well understood among regular passengers
+on the line that each conductor expected to receive one dollar to the
+end of his division, no matter at what point a passenger entered the
+train. The conductor merely walked through the cars collecting silver
+dollars, of which he subsequently apportioned to the treasury of the
+company as many as he saw fit. They were probably not many.
+
+On one occasion I stood at a booking-office and, speaking through the
+small window, asked the clerk for a ticket to a certain place. The
+conductor of the train, already waiting in the station, had strolled
+into the office and heard my request.
+
+"Don't you buy a ticket!" said he to me. "I can let you travel cheaper
+than he can, can't I, Bill?"--this last being addressed to the clerk
+behind the window; and Bill looked out through the hole and said he
+guessed that was so.
+
+The company, as I have said, used to discharge its conductors with
+regularity, or they resigned, at intervals depending on the periods at
+which accounts were made up, but it was said in those days that there
+was not a town between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast which did
+not contain a drinking saloon owned by an ex-Northern Pacific conductor,
+and established out of the profits that he had made during his brief
+term of service.
+
+In the American railway carriages, the method of communication between
+passengers and the engine, in case of emergency, is by what is known as
+the "bell-cord" which runs from end to end of the train, suspended from
+the middle of the ceiling of each car in a series of swinging rings. The
+cord sways loosely in the air to each motion of the train like a
+slackened clothes-line in a gale. On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé
+Railway the story used to be told that at the end of the day the
+conductors would toss each coin received into the air to see if it would
+balance on the bell-cord. The coins which balanced went to the company;
+those which did not, the conductor took as his own.
+
+That, be it noted, was the state of affairs some twenty-four years ago.
+I question if there is much more peculation on the part of the employees
+of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé to-day than there is on the part
+of the servants of the Great Western of England or any other British
+company.
+
+The place where the conductor advised me not to buy a ticket had then a
+few yards of planking laid on the prairie for a platform and a small
+shed as a station building. The town consisted of three or four brick
+buildings and a huddle of wooden shanties. To-day it is one of the
+twenty most populous cities in the United States with tall office
+buildings, broad busy streets, and sumptuous private residences. I used
+to have excellent trout-fishing in what is now the centre of a great
+town. Where the air to-day is filled with the hum of wheels and the roar
+of machinery, then was only open prairie innocent of any evidence of
+human occupation beyond some three or four things like dog-kennels badly
+built of loose lattice-work on the river's bank. These were the red
+Indians' Turkish baths.
+
+The old code of morality has vanished with the red Indian and the
+trout-fishing. In the early days of that town there used to be nobody to
+maintain public order but an efficient Vigilance Committee, which
+executed justice by the simple process of hanging persons whom the
+public disliked, and which was still in nominal existence when I was
+there. Now the city has the proper complement of courts, from the United
+States Court downwards, and a bar which has already furnished one or two
+members to the United States Senate. Of course this has happened in the
+very far West but the change which has come over New York in the same
+length of time is no less astonishing if less picturesque. It is as
+unjust to compare the morals or manners of the American people of to-day
+with those of even three decades ago as it would be to compare the state
+of twentieth-century society in New Zealand with the old convict days.
+In one generation Japan has stepped from the days of feudalism to the
+twentieth century. America, in all that goes to constitute civilisation,
+has in the last twenty-five years jumped, according to European canons,
+at least a hundred.
+
+Certain outward manifestations of the change which has been wrought, the
+peoples of Europe have been unable to ignore;--the immense growth in the
+power of the United States as a nation, her invasion of the markets of
+the world even in lines wherein, twenty years ago, the internal markets
+of America herself were at the mercy of British manufacturers, the
+splendid generosity which individual citizens of the United States are
+showing in buying wherever they can all that is most beautiful or
+precious among the treasures of the Old World for the enrichment of
+their museums and galleries at home--these things the people of Europe
+cannot help but see. It would be well if they would strive also to
+understand the development of the moral forces which underlies these
+things, which alone has made them possible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What has been the course of events in England in the same period? I have
+already said that I believe that Englishmen justly earned the reputation
+of being the most upright of all peoples in their commercial dealings;
+and for the sake of the context perhaps Americans who have had little
+opportunity of gauging the opinions of the world will accept it as true.
+It is probable that the world has seen no finer set of men engaged in
+commerce than those who laid the foundations of England's commercial
+greatness; and I imagine that there are more honest men in England
+to-day than ever there were--more men of what is, it will be noticed,
+instructively called "old-fashioned" honesty. Yet no one will be quicker
+than just one of these "old-fashioned" honest men to declare that the
+standard of commercial morality in England is deteriorating.
+
+The truth is that a vast new trading community has sprung up with new
+ideas which no longer accepts the old canons or submits to the old
+authority. The old maxims pass current; there is the same talk of honest
+goods and honest methods, but under stress of keener competition and the
+pressure of the more rapid movement of modern life, there is more
+temptation to allow products to deteriorate, greater difficulty in
+living always up to the old rigid standards. The words "English made" no
+longer carry, even to English minds, the old guarantee of excellence.
+
+In no small measure it may be that it is the example and influence of
+America itself which is working the mischief; which by no means implies
+that American example and influence must in themselves be bad. American
+methods, both in the production and sale of goods, might be wholly good,
+but the attempt to graft them upon established English practice might
+have nothing but deplorable results. It is not necessarily the fault of
+the new wine if old bottles fail to hold it. One factory may have the
+capacity to turn out one thousand of a given article, all of the highest
+quality and workmanship, _per diem_. If a factory with one tenth the
+capacity strains itself to compete and turns out the same number of
+articles of the same kind in the same time, something will be wrong with
+the quality of those articles. I am not prepared to say that in any
+given line English manufacturers are overstraining the capacity of their
+plants to the sacrifice of the quality of their goods in their effort to
+keep pace with American rate of production; but I do most earnestly
+believe that something analogous to it is happening in the commercial
+field as a whole, and that neither English commercial morality nor the
+quality of English-made goods has been improved by the necessity of
+meeting the intense competition of the world-markets to-day, with an
+industrial organisation which grew up under other and more leisurely
+conditions.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+POSTSCRIPT.--Not necessarily as a serious contribution to my argument
+but rather as a gloss on Professor Münsterberg's remark that the
+American has no talent for lying, I have often wondered how far the
+Americans reputation for veracity has been injured by their ability as
+story-tellers. "Story" it must be remembered is used in two senses. The
+American has the reputation of being the best narrator in the world; and
+he loves to narrate about his own country--especially the big things in
+it. In nine cases out of ten, when he is speaking of those big things,
+he is conscientiously truthful; but not seldom it happens that what may
+be a mere commonplace to the American seems incredible to the English
+listener unacquainted with the United States and unable to give the
+facts as narrated their due proportion in the landscape.
+
+More than a quarter of a century ago, when electric light was still a
+very new thing to Londoners, an American casually told myself and three
+or four others that the small town from which he came in the far
+Northwest of America was lighted entirely by a coronal of electric
+lights of some prodigious candle-power on the top of a mast, erected in
+the centre of the town, of a, to us, incredible height. It was, at the
+time, quite unbelievable; but in less than a year chance took me all the
+way to that identical little town in the far Northwest, and what the
+American had said was strictly true--true, I doubt not, to a single
+candle-power and to a fraction of a foot of mast. And a costly and
+indifferent method of lighting, for a whole town, it may be remarked, it
+was.
+
+In an earlier stage of my youth I lost all confidence in an elderly and
+eminently respectable friend of the family who had travelled much
+because he once informed me that the Japanese watered their horses out
+of spoons. Of course I knew that the old gentleman was a liar.
+
+An American travelling in an English railway carriage fell into
+conversation with the other occupants, who were Englishmen. Among divers
+pieces of information about things in the United States which he gave
+them he told (it was at the time when the steel construction of high
+buildings was still a novelty) of a twenty-storey "sky-scraper" which he
+passed daily on his way to and from his office on which, to save time,
+the walls were being put up simultaneously at, perhaps, the second,
+eighth, and fifteenth floors, working upwards from each point, the
+intervening floors being in the meanwhile left untouched. He explained
+that, in the system of steel construction, the walls did not support the
+building; that being done by the skeleton framework of metal, on which
+the walls were subsequently hung as a screen. They might, theoretically,
+be of paper; though as a matter of fact the material used was generally
+terra-cotta or some fire-proof brick. The American said that it was
+queer to see a house being built at the eighth storey in midair, as it
+were, with nothing but the thin steel supports and open sky below.
+
+"I should imagine it would look very queer," said the Englishman whom he
+was addressing, with obvious coolness; and the American was entirely
+aware that every person in that carriage regarded him as a typical
+American liar. Time passed and the carriage relapsed into silence, each
+of the occupants becoming immersed in such reading-matter as he had with
+him. Suddenly one of them aroused the others with the ejaculation:
+
+"By Jove! If here isn't a picture of that very building you were talking
+of!"
+
+It was a _Graphic_ or _Illustrated London News_, or some other such
+undoubtedly trustworthy London paper which he was reading, and he passed
+it round for the inspection of the rest of the company. The American
+looked at it. It was not his particular building but it did as well,
+and there was the photograph before them, with the walls complete, to
+window casing and every detail of ornament, on the eighth and ninth
+floors, while not a brick had been laid from the second storey to the
+seventh. A god from the machine had intervened to save the American's
+reputation. Often have I seen incredulity steal over the faces of a
+well-bred company in England at some statement from an American of a
+fact in itself commonplace enough, when no such providential
+corroboration was forthcoming.
+
+Curiously enough, the true Yankee in America, especially of the rural
+districts, has the same distrust of the veracity of the Western American
+as the Englishman generally has of the Yankee himself (in which he
+includes all Americans). I had been living for some years in Minnesota
+when, standing one day on the platform of the railway station at, I
+think, Schenectady, in New York State, I was addressed by one who was
+evidently a farmer in the neighbourhood. Learning that I had just come
+from Minnesota he referred to the two towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
+"Right lively towns," he had heard them to be. "And how many people
+might there be in the two together?" he asked. "About a quarter of a
+million," I replied--the number being some few thousand less than the
+figure given by the last census. The farmer, perhaps, had not heard
+anything of the two towns for ten or a dozen years, when their
+population had been not much more than a third of what it had grown to
+at that time; and he looked at me. He did not say anything; he merely
+looked at me, long and fixedly. Then he deliberately turned his back and
+walked to the other end of the platform as far as possible from my
+contaminating influence. I was never so explicitly and categorically
+called a liar in my life; and he doubtless went home and told his family
+of the magnificent Western exaggerator whom he had met "down to the
+depot." I fear the American reputation often suffers no less unjustly in
+England.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[349:1] Even up to a quarter of a century ago, there was at least one
+corner of the United States, near to the Canadian border, where among
+Indians not yet rounded up or blanketed the old feeling still existed,
+so that an Englishman, proclaiming himself a "King George Man," could go
+and hunt and fish safely, sure of the friendship and protection of the
+red man, while an American would not have been safe for a night. The
+subject of the relations between the British and the Indian tribes in
+Revolutionary times has, of course, been provocative of much bitterness
+in the hearts of Americans; but happily their own historians of a later
+day have shown that this bitterness has only been partially justified.
+There was not much to choose between Patriots and Loyalists. Those who
+know the Indian know also that the universal liking for the Englishman
+cannot have rested only on motives of political expediency or from
+temporary alliances made in Revolutionary times. They must have had
+abundant proof of the loyalty and trustworthiness of Englishmen before
+so deep-rooted a sentiment could have been created. The contrast, of
+course, was not with the American colonist, but with the French. The
+colonists, too, were King George Men once.
+
+[351:1] Yes; I am aware that elsewhere I quote Professor Münsterberg
+without enthusiasm, but on another class of subject. Except for the
+limitations which his national characteristics and upbringing impose
+upon him (and for the fact that he seems to be unacquainted with the
+West) the Professor has written a just and clear-sighted estimate of the
+American character. We do not look to a German for a proper
+understanding of the sporting instinct, as British and Americans
+understand it, nor perhaps for views that will coincide with ours on the
+subject of morality in the youth of either sex. But the laws of common
+honesty are the same in all countries. A German is as well able to
+estimate the commercial morality of a people as an Englishman, however
+little he may be qualified to talk about their games or about the
+_nuances_ in the masculine attitude towards women.
+
+[358:1] That meeting has an incidental historical interest from the fact
+that it was then that Mr. Morgan first stepped into the public view as a
+financial power. Up to that time, his name was not particularly well
+known outside of New York or the financial circles immediately connected
+with New York. Most Western papers found it necessary to explain to
+their readers (if they could) who the Mr. Morgan was at whose house the
+meeting was being held.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A CONTRAST IN PRINCIPLES
+
+     The Commercial Power of the United States--British Workmanship--
+     Tin-tacks and Conservatism--A Prophetic Frenchman--Imperialism
+     in Trade--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit--About Chaperons--"Insist
+     upon Thyself"--English and American Banks--Dealing in Futures--
+     Dog Eat Dog--Two Letters--Commercial Octopods--Trusts in
+     America and England--The Standard Oil Company--And Solicitors--
+     Legal Chaperons--The Sanctity of Stamped Paper--Conclusions--
+     American Courts of Justice--Do "Honest" Traders Exist?
+
+
+The Englishman, even the Englishman with industrial experience and
+commercial training, generally, when he makes a short visit to the
+United States, comes away with a certain distrust of the stability of
+the American commercial fabric--a distrust which he cannot altogether
+explain to himself. The rapidity of movement, the vastness of the
+results, these things are before his eyes; but there insists on
+obtruding itself a sense of unsubstantiality. Habituated to English
+surroundings, with their ages-old traditions, the rugged deep-rooted
+institutions, the deliberate revolutions of all the fly-wheels of a
+long-constituted society, he cannot believe that the mushroom
+establishments, thrust up as it were from the soil of a continent which
+is yet one half but partially broken wilderness, have permanence. He
+cannot deny the magnitude or the excellence of the work that is being
+done now, at this moment, under his eyes; but it all has too much the
+seeming of unreality, as though suspended in midair, unsupported. He
+misses the foundations of centuries of civilisation below and the lines
+of shafting running back into the past. Often, it is to be feared,
+having all his life been accustomed to see power exerted only in
+cumbersome processes and through old-fashioned channels, he has come to
+regard the cumbersomeness and the antiquity as necessary conditions of
+such exertion--nay, even to confuse them with the sources of the power
+themselves. It will be remembered that the first pig that was roasted in
+China was roasted by the accidental burning down of a house; and for a
+long time the Chinese supposed that only by burning down a house was it
+possible to come at roast pig. Finally arose a great philosopher ("like
+our Locke") who discovered that it was not necessary to burn houses, but
+that pigs might be cooked by much less costly and more rapid methods.
+Unquestionably many of those who had been accustomed to house-burning
+must have looked at the new and summary culinary processes with profound
+distrust. It may even be asserted with confidence that many of the older
+generation died unconverted, though pig-roasting over all sorts of
+makeshift fires had been going on around them for some years.
+
+After a more or less prolonged residence in the United States, the
+Englishman finds his distrust lessening. He in turn becomes accustomed
+to doing without those traditions, those foundations, those lines of
+shafting, which once he considered so essential to all sound
+workmanship. When in due time he returns to England he is not seldom
+amazed to see how many of the things which he was wont to regard as
+effective links in the machinery are really no more than waste parts
+which do but retard the motion and cause loss of power. It is not
+difficult to make machinery so complicated that the power exhausts
+itself in overcoming the resistance of belts and pulleys and cogs.
+
+I had lived in the United States for many years before I ceased to cling
+to the notion--which I never hesitated to impart cheerfully to Americans
+when occasion offered--that though American workmen turned out goods
+that served their purpose well enough, for really sound and honest
+workmanship you had, after all, to come to England. It was only after I
+had been back in England and had experience of the ways of English
+workmen once more that doubts began to accumulate. English furniture
+makers told me that England nowadays did not produce such well-made or
+solid furniture as pieces that I showed them from America, and which are
+made in America in wholesale quantities. English picture-frame makers
+marvelled at the costliness of material and the excellence of the work
+in American frames. A Sackville Street tailor begged me to leave in his
+hands for a few days longer some clothes which he was pressing for me,
+made in a far Western State, in order that he might keep them--where
+they then were--hanging in his work-room as an object-lesson to his men
+in how work ought to be done. These are but isolated instances out of
+many which have bred misgiving in one who for many years cherished the
+conviction that a British-made article was always the best. That English
+workmen should be slower, less quick-minded, more loth to take up new
+ideas, or to make things as you wanted them and not as they had always
+made them--these things I had expected to find, and found less often
+than I had expected. But that the English workman did ultimately produce
+a better and more trustworthy article--that I never doubted, till I
+found it, from the confessions of the workmen and manufacturers
+themselves, far from necessarily true.
+
+Few Englishmen returning to England after many years of residence in the
+United States (unless perchance they have lived on a ranch where their
+contact with the industrial or commercial life of the people has been
+slight) do not find themselves more or less frequently appealed to for
+opinions, in giving which they are compelled, however reluctantly, to
+pose as prophets, warning their countrymen to flee from the wrath to
+come, telling them that they underestimate the commercial power of the
+United States. Sometimes it may be that there will be some one in the
+company who has spent some few weeks, perhaps, in the United States.
+"Now, I don't agree with you there," this traveller will say. "When I
+was in the States, I saw . ." He saw, in fact, pigs being roasted at a
+commonplace sort of fire, made for the purpose, of logs and sticks and
+coal and things, whereas everybody knows that no pig can be duly roasted
+unless chimney stacks and window-casings and front-door handles be mixed
+up with the combustibles. And the others present take comfort and are
+convinced that the Old Country is a long way from going to the dogs as
+yet. Of course she is, bless her! But it is not many years since an
+eminently distinguished authority on iron and steel (was he not
+President of the Iron and Steel Association?), after having made a tour
+of the United States, assured British manufacturers that they had
+nothing to fear from American competition in the steel trade. It was
+some years earlier that Chatham declared that he would not allow the
+American colonies to manufacture even one hobnail for themselves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have no desire now to join the band of those who are urging England so
+insistently to "wake up." This is not the place for such evangelism, for
+that is not the gospel which this book is intended to spread. None the
+less one story I must tell, told to me many years ago in America by one
+who claimed to have had some part in the transactions; a story that has
+to do with (let us say, to avoid hurting any susceptibilities) the sale
+of tin-tacks to Japan. And whether the story is true or not, it is at
+least well found.
+
+England, then, had had for years a monopoly of the sale of tin-tacks to
+the Japanese, when a trader in Japan became impressed with the fact that
+the traffic was badly handled. The tacks came out from England in
+packages made to suit the needs of the English market. They were
+labelled, quite truthfully of course, "Best English Tacks," and each
+package contained an ounce, two ounces, or four ounces in weight, and
+was priced in plain figures at so much in English money. The trader had
+continual trouble with those packages. His customers were always wanting
+them to be split up. They wanted two or three _sen_ worth--not four
+pennyworth; also they did not care about ounces. So the trader, starting
+for a visit to England, had some labels written in Japanese characters,
+and when he arrived in England he went to the manufacturers and
+explained matters. He showed them the labels that he had had written and
+said:
+
+"The Japanese trade is worth considering and worth taking some little
+trouble to retain; but the people dislike your present packages and I
+have to spend most of my time splitting up packages and counting tacks.
+If you will make your packages into two thirds of an ounce each and put
+a label like that on them, you will be giving the people what they want
+and can understand, and it will save a lot of trouble all around."
+
+But the manufacturers, one after another, shook their heads. They could
+not read the label. They never had put any such outlandish stuff on
+anything going out of their works, nor had their fathers before them.
+The Japanese ought to be satisfied with the fact that they were getting
+the Best English Tacks and not be unreasonable about it. And the trader
+exhausted himself with argument and became discouraged.
+
+He returned to Japan _via_ the United States, and stopped to see the
+nearest tack-manufacturer. He showed him the label and told his story.
+
+"Looks blamed queer!" said the manufacturer, "but you say that's what
+they want out there? Let's catch a Jap and see if he can read the
+thing."
+
+So a clerk was sent out to fetch a Japanese, which he did.
+
+"How' do, John?" said the manufacturer to the new arrival. (Chinese and
+Japanese alike were all "John" to the American until a few years ago.)
+"You can read that, eh?"
+
+The Japanese smiled, looked at the label and read it aloud.
+
+"All straight goods, eh, John?" asked the manufacturer. The Japanese
+answered in the affirmative and retired.
+
+Then the manufacturer called for his manager.
+
+"Mr. Smith," he said, as the manager came in, "this is Mr. Brown of
+Tokio, Japan. He tells me that if we do up tacks in two third of an
+ounce lots and stick that label on each package, we might do some good
+business out there. That label--it don't matter which is the top of the
+thing--calls for a price that figures out to us at about two cents a
+pound more than our regular export rates. I want this gentleman to have
+a trial lot shipped out to him and he'll see what he can do. Just go
+ahead will you and see to it?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the manager; and when the trader sailed from San
+Francisco a couple of weeks later the same vessel carried out a trial
+order of tacks consigned to him at Tokio, made up in two thirds of an
+ounce packages with mysterious hieroglyphics on the labels. It only took
+the trader a few days, after his return, to satisfy himself that the
+sooner he cabled the American manufacturer to duplicate the order the
+better. There never has been anybody in the American works who has been
+able to read what is on that label; but when instructions were given for
+printing new labels after six months of trial the order was for a
+quarter of a million, and British manufacturers were astonished to
+discover that by some unexplainable chicanery they had lost the Japanese
+market for tacks.
+
+I have said that I do not know whether the story is true or not; but
+fifty similar stories are. And in the aggregate they explain a good
+deal.
+
+But let me say again that the conservatism of British manufacturers is
+not now my theme. But I do most earnestly believe that Englishmen as a
+whole--even English traders and manufacturers--unwisely underestimate
+the commercial power of the United States. What the United States has
+accomplished in the invasion of the world's markets in the last ten
+years (since the trade revival of 1896-97) is only a foretaste of what
+is to come. So far from there being anything unsubstantial--any danger
+of lack of staying power, any want of reserve force--the power has
+hardly yet begun to exert itself. Of Europeans who have recently written
+upon the subject, it seems to me that none has shown a truer
+appreciation of the situation than M. Gabriel Hanotaux, the former
+French Minister for Foreign Affairs.[378:1] He sees the shadow of
+America's commercial domination already falling across Europe; and, so
+far as France is concerned, he discerns only two directions from which
+help can come. He pleads with young Frenchmen to travel more, so that
+the rising generation may be less ignorant of the commercial conditions
+of the modern world and may see more clearly what it is that they have
+to fight, and, second, he points to the Colonial Empire of France, with
+an area not much inferior to that of the United States, and believes
+that therein may be laid the foundations of a commercial power which
+will be not unable to cope even with that of America.
+
+It may be only the arrogance and superciliousness of the Anglo-Saxon
+that prevent one sharing the sanguineness of M. Hanotaux as to any
+relief coming to the help of France from these two sources, for British
+hopes can only lie in analogous directions. Englishmen also need to
+understand better the conditions which have to be met and the power of
+their competitors; and it is the young men who must learn. Also, if it
+be impossible that the British Isles should hold their own against the
+United States, there appears no reason why the British Empire should not
+be abundantly able to do so.
+
+It is not easy for one who has not lived all his life in England to
+share the satisfaction with which the English papers commonly welcome
+the intelligence that some great American manufacturing concern is
+establishing branch works in Canada. It is well for Canada that such
+works should be established; but it is pitiable for the Empire that it
+should be left to the United States to establish them. British capital
+was the chief instrumentality with which the United States was enabled
+to build its own railways and conduct the other great enterprises for
+the development of the resources of its mighty West, and it is, from the
+point of view of a British Imperialist, deplorable that British
+capitalists should not now be ready to take those risks for the sake of
+the Empire which American capital is willing to take with no other
+incentive than the probable trade profits.
+
+His conservatism, it should be noticed, has a tendency to fall away from
+the Englishman when he goes out from the environment and atmosphere of
+the British Isles. The Canadian, or the Englishman who has gone to
+Canada young enough to imbibe the colonial spirit, is not easily to be
+distinguished from the citizen of the United States in his ways of
+doing business. Even the Anglo-Indian refuses to subject himself, in
+India, to all the cumbersome formalities with which he is compelled to
+conduct any business transaction when at home. Mr. Kipling in one of his
+latest stories has given us a delightful picture of the bafflement of
+the Australasian Minister struggling to bring his Great Idea for the
+Good of his Colony and the Empire to the attention of the officials in
+Whitehall.
+
+The encumbering conservatism which now hangs upon the wheels of British
+commerce is no part of--no legitimate offshoot of--the English genius.
+It is a fungoid and quite alien growth, which has fastened upon that
+genius, taking advantage of its frailties. Englishmen, we hear, are slow
+to change and to move; yet they have always moved more quickly than
+other European peoples as the Empire stands to prove. And if the people
+of Great Britain had the remodelling of their society to do over again
+to-day, they, following their native instincts, would hardly rebuild it
+on its present lines. With the same "elbow room" they would, it may be
+suspected, produce something but little dissimilar (except in the
+monarchical form of government) from that which has been evolved in the
+United States.
+
+When Englishmen, looking at the progress of the United States, doubt its
+permanence--when they distrust the substantiality or the honesty in the
+workmanship in the American commercial fabric--it might be well if they
+would say to themselves that the men who are doing these things are only
+Englishmen with other larger opportunities. Behind all this that meets
+the eye is the same old Anglo-Saxon spirit of pluck and energy which
+made Great Britain great when she was younger and had in turn her larger
+opportunities. Above all, that pluck and energy are unhampered by
+tradition and precedent in exerting themselves in whatever direction may
+be most advantageous; and to be unhampered does not necessarily mean
+freedom only to go wrong.
+
+An American girl once explained why it was much pleasanter to have a
+chaperon than to be without one:
+
+"If I am allowed about alone," she explained, "I feel that I am on my
+honour and can never do a thing that I would not like mama to see; but
+when a chaperon is with me, the responsibility for my behaviour is
+shifted to her. It is her duty to keep me straight. I have a right to be
+just as bad as I can without her catching me."
+
+The tendency of American business life is first to develop the
+individuality and initiative of a man and, second, to put him, as it
+were, on his honour. It is, of course, of the essence of a democracy
+that each man should be encouraged to develop whatever good may be in
+him and to receive recognition therefor; but there have been other
+factors at work in the shaping of the American character besides the
+form of government. Chief among these factors have been the work which
+Americans have had to do in subduing their own continent and that they
+have had to do it unaided and in isolation. Washington Irving has a
+delightful sentence somewhere (in _Astoria_ I think) about the
+frontiersman hewing his way through the back woods and developing his
+character by "bickering with bears." "The frontiersmen, by their
+conquest of nature, had come to despise the strength of all enemies,"
+says Dr. Sparks in his _History of the United States_. It was only to be
+expected, it was indeed inevitable, that the first of American
+thinkers--the man whose philosophy caught the national fancy and has
+done more towards the moulding of a national temperament than, perhaps,
+any man who ever wrote, should have been before all things the Apostle
+of the Individual. "Insist upon Thyself!" Emerson says--not once, but it
+runs as a refrain through everything he wrote or thought. "Always do
+what you are afraid to do!" "The Lord will not make his works manifest
+by a coward." "God hates a coward." "America is only another name for
+Opportunity." My quotations come from random memory, but the spirit is
+right. It is the spirit which Americans have been obliged to have since
+the days when the Fathers walked to meeting in fear of Indian arrows.
+And they need it yet. It has become an inheritance with them and it,
+more than anything else, shapes the form and method of their politics
+and above all of their business conduct.
+
+I have said elsewhere that in society (except only in certain circles in
+certain cities of the East) it is the individual character and
+achievements of the man himself that count; neither his father nor his
+grandfather matters--nor do his brothers and sisters. And it is the same
+in business. I am not saying that good credentials and strong friends
+are not of use to any man; but without friends or credentials, the man
+who has an idea which is commercially valuable will find a market in
+which to sell it. If he has the ability to exploit it himself and the
+power to convince others of his integrity, he will find capital ready
+to back him. It is difficult to explain in words to those accustomed to
+the traditions of English business how this principle underlies and
+permeates American business in all its modes.
+
+One example of it--trivial enough, but it will serve for
+illustration--which visiting Englishmen are likely to be confronted
+with, perhaps to their great inconvenience, is in the bank practice in
+the matter of cheques. There is, as is well known, no "crossing" of
+cheques in America, but all cheques are "open"; and many an Englishman
+has gone confidently to the bank on which it was drawn with a cheque,
+the signature to which he knew to be good, and has expected to have the
+money paid over the counter to him without a word. All that the English
+paying teller needs to be satisfied of is that the signature of the
+drawer is genuine and that there is money enough to the credit of the
+account to meet the cheque. But the Englishman in the strange American
+bank finds that the document in his hands is practically useless, no
+matter how good the signature or how large the account on which it is
+drawn, unless he himself--the person who presents the cheque--is known
+to the bank officials. "Can you identify yourself, sir?" The Englishman
+usually feels inclined to take the question as an impertinence; but he
+produces cards and envelopes from his pocket--the name on his
+handkerchief--anything to show that he is the person in whose favour the
+cheque is drawn. Perhaps in this way he can satisfy the bank official.
+Perhaps he will have to go away and bring back somebody who will
+identify him. It is the _personality of the individual with whom the
+business is done_ that the American system takes into account.[384:1]
+
+It is, as I have said, a trivial point, but it suffices. Vastly more
+important is the whole banking practice in America. This is no place to
+go into the details at the controversy which has raged around the merits
+and demerits of the American banking system. In the financial panic of
+1893 something over 700 banks suspended payment in the United States. At
+such seasons, especially, but more or less at all times, a great
+proportion of the best authorities in the United States believe that it
+would be better for the country if the Scotch--or the Canadian
+adaptation of the Scotch--system were to take the place of that now in
+vogue. Possibly they are right. The gain of having the small local banks
+in out-of-the-way places possess all the stability of branches of a
+great central house is obvious, both in the increase of security to
+depositors in time of financial stress and also in the ability of such a
+house to lend money at lower rates of interest than is possible to the
+poorer institution with its smaller capital which has no connections and
+no resources beyond what are locally in evidence. It may be questioned,
+however, whether the country as a whole would not lose much more than it
+would gain by the less complete identification of the bank with local
+interests. It would be inevitable that in many cases the local manager
+would be restrained by the greater conservatism of the authorities of
+the central house from lending support to local enterprises, which he
+would extend if acting only by and for himself as an independent member
+of the local business community. It is difficult to see how the country
+as a whole could have developed in the measure that it has under any
+system differing much from that which it has had.
+
+In theory it may be that the functions of a bank are precisely the same
+in Great Britain and in America. In practice different functions have
+become dominant in the two. In England a bank's chief business is to
+furnish a safe depository for the funds of its clients. In America its
+chief business is to assist--of course with an eye to its own profit and
+only within limits to which it can safely go--the local business
+community in extending and developing its business. The American
+business man looks upon the bank as his best friend. If his business be
+sound and he be sensible, he gives the proper bank official an insight
+into his affairs far more intimate and confidential than the Englishman
+usually thinks of doing. He invites the bank's confidence and in turn
+the bank helps him beyond the limits of his established credit line in
+whatever may be considered a legitimate emergency. In any small town
+whenever a new enterprise of any public importance is to be started, the
+bank is expected to take shares and otherwise assist in promoting a
+movement which is for the common good. The credits which American
+banks--especially in the West--give to their customers are astoundingly
+liberal according to an English banker's standards. Sometimes of
+course they make mistakes and have to pocket losses. When a storm
+breaks, moreover (as in the case already quoted of the panic of 1893),
+they may be unable to call in their loans in time to take care
+of their liabilities. But that they have been a tremendous--an
+incalculable--factor in the general advancement of the country cannot be
+questioned.
+
+The difference between the parts played by the banks in the two
+countries rests of course on two fundamental differences in the
+condition of the countries themselves. The first of these is the fact
+that while England is a country of accumulated wealth and large fortunes
+which need safeguarding, America has until recently been a country of
+small realised wealth but immense natural resources which needed
+developing. The policy of the banks has been shaped to meet the demands
+of the situation.
+
+In the second place (and too much stress cannot be laid upon this in any
+comparison of the business-life of the two peoples) the American is
+always trading on a rising market. This is true of the individual and
+true of the nation. Temporary fluctuations there are of course, but
+after every setback the country has only gone ahead faster than before.
+The man with faith in the future, provided only that he looked far
+enough ahead to be protected against temporary times of depression, has
+always won. Just as the railway companies push their lines out into the
+wilderness, confident of the population that will follow, and are never
+disappointed, so in all other lines the man who is always in advance,
+who does not wait for the demand to be there before he enlarges his
+plant to meet it, but who sees it coming and is ready for it when it
+comes--the man who has always acted in the belief that the future will
+be bigger than the present,--that man has never failed to reap his
+reward. Of course the necessary danger in such a condition is that of
+over-speculation. But nearly every man who amasses wealth or wins large
+commercial success in the United States habitually takes risks which
+would be folly in England. They are not folly in him, because the
+universal growth of the country, dragging with it and buoying up all
+industries and all values, as it goes, is on his side. It is inevitable
+that there should result a national temperament more buoyant, more
+enterprising, more alert.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is important, too, is that whereas in England the field is already
+more or less full and was handed down to the present generation well
+occupied, so that new industries can, as it were, only be erected on the
+ruins of old, and a site has to be cleared of one factory before another
+can be built (all of which is, in a measure, only relative and
+metaphorical), in the United States there is always room for the
+newcomers. New population is pouring in to create new markets: new
+resources are being developed to provide the raw material for new
+industries; there is abundance of new land, new cities, new sites
+whereon the new factories can be built. This is why "America" and
+"opportunity" are interchangeable terms; why young men need never lack
+friends or backing or the chance to be the architects of their own
+fortunes. Society can afford to encourage the individual to assert
+himself, because there is space for and need of him.
+
+From this flow certain corollaries from which we may draw direct
+comparison between the respective spirits in which business in the two
+countries is carried on. In the first place, in consequence of the more
+crowded condition of the field and the greater intensity of
+competition, the business community in England is much more ruthless,
+much less helpful, in the behaviour of its members one towards the
+other. It is not a mere matter of the more exacting scrutiny of credits,
+of the more rigid insistence on the exact fulfilment of a bond (provided
+that bond be stamped), but it colours unconsciously the whole tone of
+thought and language of the people. There are two principles on which
+business may be conducted, known in America respectively as the "Live
+and let live" principle, and the "Dog eat dog" principle. There was
+until recently in existence in the United States one guild, or
+association, representing a purely parasitical trade--that of
+ticket-scalping--which was fortunately practically peculiar to the
+United States. This concern had deliberately adopted the legend "Dog eat
+dog" as its motto and two bull-dogs fighting as its crest; but in doing
+so its purpose was to proclaim that the guild was an Ishmaelite among
+business men and lived avowedly in defiance of the accepted canons of
+trade. On the other hand one meets in America with the words "Live and
+let live" as a trademark, or motto, on every hand and on the lips of the
+people. Few men in America but could cite cases which they know wherein
+men have gone out of their way to help their bitterest competitor when
+they knew that he needed help. The belief in co-operation, on which
+follows a certain comradeship, as a business principle is ingrained in
+the people.
+
+I was once given two letters to read, of which one was a copy and the
+other an original. The circumstances which led up to the writing of them
+were as follows: Two rich men, A. and B., had been engaged in a
+business duel. It was desperate--_à outrance_,--dealing in large
+figures; and each man had to call up all his reserves and put out all
+his strength. At last the end came and A. was beaten--beaten and ruined.
+Then the letters passed which I quote from memory:
+
+     "DEAR MR. B.:
+
+     "I know when I'm beaten and if I was quite sure you wouldn't
+     kick a man when he's down, I would come round to see you and
+     grovel. As perhaps you can guess, I am in a bad way.
+
+                                                "Yours truly, A."
+
+     "DEAR A.:
+
+     "There's no need to grovel. Come around to my house after
+     supper to-morrow night and let us see what we can do together
+     to put you straight.
+
+                                                "Yours truly, B."
+
+I need hardly say that it was the second letter of which I saw the
+original, or that it was A. who showed them to me, when they were
+already several years old but still treasured, and A. was a wealthy man
+again as a result of that meeting after dinner. A. told me briefly what
+passed at that meeting. "He gave me a little more than half a million,"
+he said. "Of course he has had it back long ago; but he did not know
+that he would get it at the time and he took no note or other security
+from me. At the time it was practically a gift of five hundred thousand
+dollars."
+
+And as I write I can almost hear the English reader saying, "Pooh! the
+same things are done times without number in England." And I can hear
+the American, still smarting under the recollection of some needlessly
+cruel and unfair thrust from the hands of a competitor, smile cynically
+and say that he would like to tell me certain things that he knows. Of
+course there are exceptions on either side. It takes, as the American is
+so fond of saying, "all kinds of men to make a world." It is the same
+old difficulty of generalising about a nation or drawing up an
+indictment against a whole people. But I do not think that any man who
+has engaged for any length of time in business in both countries, who
+has lived in each sufficiently to absorb the spirit of the respective
+communities, will dissent from what I have said. Many Englishmen,
+without knowledge of business in England, go to America and find the
+atmosphere harder and less friendly than they were accustomed to at
+home, and come to quite another conclusion. But they are comparing
+American business life with the social club-and-country-house life of
+home. Let them acquire the same experience of business circles in
+England, and then compare the tone with that of business circles in
+America, and they will change their opinions.
+
+Let me recall again what was said above as to the difference in the
+motives which may impel a man to go into business or trade in the two
+countries. An Englishman cannot well pretend that he does it with any
+other purpose than to make money. The American hopes to make money too,
+but he takes up business as an honourable career and for the sake of
+winning standing and reputation among his fellows. This being so,
+business in America has a tendency to become more of a game or a
+pastime--to be followed with the whole heart certainly--but in a measure
+for itself, and not alone for the stakes to be won. It is not difficult
+to see how, in this spirit, it may be easier to forego those stakes--to
+let the actual money slip--when once you have won the game.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is necessary to refer briefly again to the subject of trusts. In
+England a great corporation which was able to demonstrate beyond dispute
+that it had materially cheapened the cost of any staple article to the
+public, and further showed that when, in the process of extending its
+operations, it of necessity wiped out any smaller business concerns, it
+never failed to provide the owners or partners of those concerns with
+managerial positions which secured to them a larger income than they
+could have hoped to earn as individual traders, and moreover took into
+their service the employees of the disbanded concerns at equal
+salaries,--such a corporation would generally be regarded by the English
+people as a public benefactor and as a philanthropically and charitably
+disposed institution. In America the former consideration has some
+weight, though not much; the latter none at all.
+
+When a trust takes into its service those men whom it has destroyed as
+individual traders, the fact remains that their industrial independence
+has been crushed. The individual can no longer "insist upon himself." He
+is subordinate and no longer free. One of the first principles of
+American business life, the encouragement of individual initiative, has
+been violated, and nothing will atone for it.
+
+The Standard Oil Company can, I believe, prove beyond possibility of
+contradiction that the result of its operations has been to reduce
+immensely the cost of oil to the public, as well as to give facilities
+in the way of distribution of the product which unassociated enterprise
+could never have furnished. It can also show that in many, and, I
+imagine, in the majority, of cases, it has endeavoured to repair by
+offers of employment of various sorts whatever injuries it has done to
+individuals by ruining their business. But these things constitute no
+defence in the eyes of the American people.
+
+There is the additional ground of public hostility that the weapons
+employed to crush competitors have often been illegal weapons. Without
+the assistance of the railway companies (which was given in violation of
+the law) the Standard Oil Company might have been unable to win more
+than one of its battles; but this fact, while it furnishes a handle
+against the company and exposes a side of it which may prove to be
+vulnerable, and is therefore kept to the front in any public indictment
+of the company's methods, is an immaterial factor in the popular
+feeling. Few Americans (or Englishmen) will not accept a reduced rate
+from a railway company when they can get it. Whatever actual bitterness
+may be felt by the average man against the Standard Oil Company because
+it procured rebates on its freight bills is rather the bitterness of
+jealousy than of an outraged sense of morality. The real bitterness--and
+very bitter it is--is caused by the fact that the company has crushed
+out so many individuals. On similar ground nothing approaching the same
+intensity of feeling could be engendered in the British public.
+
+Let us now recur for a moment to the views of the young woman quoted
+above on the interesting topic of chaperons. We have seen that
+insistence on the individuality is a conspicuous--perhaps it is the most
+conspicuous--trait of the American character. Encouraged by the wider
+horizon and more ample elbow-room and assisted by the something more
+than tolerant good-will of his business associates, colleagues, or
+competitors, the individual, once insisted on, has every chance to
+develop and become prosperous and rich. Everything helps a man in
+America to strike out for himself, to walk alone, and to dispense with a
+chaperon. The Englishman is chaperoned at almost every step of his
+business career; and I am not speaking now of the chaperonage of his
+colleagues, of his fellows in the community, or of his elders among whom
+he grows up and, generally, in spite of whom the young man must make his
+way to the top. There is another much more significant form of
+chaperonage in English business circles, of which it is difficult to
+speak without provoking hostility.
+
+The English business world is solicitor-cursed. I mean by this no
+reflection on solicitors either individually or in the mass. I am making
+no reference to such cases as there have been of misappropriation by
+solicitors here and there of funds entrusted to their charge, nor to
+their methods of making charges, which are preposterous but not of their
+choosing. Let us grant that, given the necessity of solicitors at all,
+Great Britain is blessed in that she has so capable and upright and in
+all ways admirable a set of men to fill the offices and do the work.
+What I am attacking is solicitordom as an institution.
+
+It is not merely that there are no solicitors, as such, in the United
+States, for it might well be that the general practising lawyers who
+fill their places, so far as their places have to be filled, might be
+just as serious an incubus on business as solicitordom is on the
+business of London to-day. Names are immaterial. The essential fact is
+that the spirit and the conditions which make solicitors a necessity in
+England do not exist in America. I do not propose to go into any
+comparison in the differences in legal procedure in the two countries;
+not being a lawyer, I should undoubtedly make blunders if I did. What is
+important is that a man who is accustomed to walking alone does not
+think of turning to his legal adviser at every step. Great corporations
+and large business concerns have of course their counsel, their
+attorneys, and even their "general solicitors." But the ordinary
+American engaged in trade or business in a small or moderate way gets
+along from year's end to year's end, perhaps for his lifetime, without
+legal services. I am speaking only on conjecture when I say that, taking
+the country as a whole, outside of the large corporations or among rich
+men, over ninety per cent. of the legal documents--leases, agreements,
+contracts, articles of partnership, articles of incorporation, bills of
+sale, and deeds of transfer--are executed by the individuals concerned
+without reference to a lawyer. Probably not less than three fourths of
+the actual transactions in the purchase of land, houses, businesses, or
+other property are similarly concluded without assistance. "What do we
+need of a lawyer?" one man will ask the other and the other will
+immediately agree that they need one not at all.
+
+Of course troubles often arise which would have been prevented had the
+documents been drawn up by a competent hand. The constitutional
+reluctance to go to a lawyer is sometimes carried to lengths that are
+absurd. But I do not believe that the amount of litigation which arises
+from that cause is in any way comparable to that which is avoided by the
+mere fact that legal aid is outside the mental horizon. The men who
+conduct most of the affairs of life directly without legal help are most
+likely to adjust differences when they arise in the same way. That is a
+matter of opinion, however, based only on reasonable analogy, which I
+can advance no figures to support; but what is not matter of opinion,
+but matter of certainty, is, first, that the general gain in the
+rapidity of business movement is incalculable, and, second, that
+business as a whole is relieved of the vast burden of solicitors'
+charges.
+
+The American, accustomed to the ways of his own people, on becoming
+engaged in business in London is astounded, first, at the disposition of
+the Englishman to turn for legal guidance in almost every step he takes,
+second, at the stupendous sums of money which are paid for services
+which in his opinion are entirely superfluous, and, finally, at the
+terrible loss of time incurred in the conclusion of any transaction by
+the waiting for the drafting and redrafting and amending and engrossing
+and recording of interminable documents which are a bewilderment and an
+annoyance to him.
+
+The Englishman often says that American business methods are slip-shod;
+and possibly that is the right word. But Englishmen should not for a
+moment deceive themselves into thinking that the American envies the
+Englishman the superior niceties of his ways or would think himself or
+his condition likely to be improved by an exchange. An example of
+difference in the practice of the two countries which has so often been
+used as to be fairly hackneyed (and therefore perhaps stands the better
+chance of carrying conviction than a more original, if better,
+illustration) is drawn from the theory which governs the building of
+locomotive engines in the two countries.
+
+The American usually builds his engine to do a certain specified service
+and to last a reasonable length of time. During that time he proposes to
+get all the work out of it that he can--to wear it out in fact--feeling
+well assured that, when that time expires, either the character of the
+service to be performed will have altered or such improvements will have
+been introduced into the science of locomotive construction as will make
+it cheaper to replace the old engine with one of later build. The
+Englishman commonly builds his engines as if they were to last for all
+time. There are many engines working on English railways now, the
+American contemporaries of which were scrapped twenty years ago. The
+Englishman takes pride in their antiquity, as showing the excellence of
+the workmanship which was put into them. The American thinks it would
+have been incomparably better to have thrown the old things away long
+ago and replaced them with others of recent building which would be more
+efficient.
+
+The same principle runs through most things in American life, where they
+rarely build for posterity, preferring to adapt the article to the work
+it has to perform, expecting to supersede it when the time comes with
+something better. If a thing suffices, it suffices; whether it be a
+locomotive or a contract. "What is the use," the American asks, "when
+you can come to an agreement with a fellow in ten minutes and draw up
+your contract with him that afternoon,--what is the use of calling in
+your solicitors to negotiate and then paying them heavily to keep you
+waiting for weeks while they draft documents? We shall have had the
+contract running a month and be making money out of it before the
+lawyers would get through talking."
+
+Out of this divergence in point of view and practice have of course
+grown other differences. One thing is that the American courts have
+necessarily come to adopt more liberal views in the interpretation of
+contracts than the English; they are to a greater extent inclined to
+look more to the intent than to the letter and to attach more weight to
+verbal evidence in eliciting what the intent was. No stamping of
+documents being necessary in America, the documents calling themselves
+contracts, and which are upheld as such, which appear in American courts
+are frequently of a remarkable description; but I have a suspicion that
+on the whole the American, in this particular, comes as near to getting
+justice on the average as does the Englishman.
+
+And the point is that I believe it to be inevitable that the habit of
+doing without lawyers in the daily conduct of business, the habit of
+relying on oneself and dealing with another man direct, must in the long
+run breed a higher standard of individual business integrity.
+Englishmen, relying always on their solicitors' advice, are too tempted
+to consider that so long as they are on the right side of the law they
+are honest. It is a shifting of the responsibility to the chaperon;
+whereas, if alone, you would be compelled to act on your honour.
+
+What I think and hope is the last word that I have to say on this rather
+difficult subject has to do with the matter already mentioned, namely
+the absence of the necessity of stamping documents in America.
+Englishmen will remember that the Americans always have evinced a
+dislike of stamps and stamp duties and acts relating thereto. Of late
+years the necessity of meeting the expenses of the Spanish war did for a
+while compel the raising of additional internal revenue by means of
+documentary and other stamps. The people submitted to it, but they hated
+it; and hated it afresh as often as they drew or saw a cheque with the
+two-cent stamp upon it. The act was repealed as speedily as possible and
+the stamping of papers has for six years now been unknown.
+
+I think--and I am not now stating any acknowledged fact, but only
+appealing to the reader's common-sense--that it is again inevitable that
+where a superior sanctity attaches to stamped paper a people must in the
+long run come to think too lightly of that which is unstamped. I do not
+say that the individual Englishman has as yet come to think too lightly
+of his word or bond because it is informal, but I do think there is
+danger of it. The words "Can we hold him?" or (what is infinitely worse)
+"Can he hold us?" spring somewhat readily to the lips of the business
+man of this generation in England.
+
+Continual dependence on the law and the man of law, and an extra respect
+for paper because it is legal, have--they surely cannot fail to have--a
+tendency to breed in the mind a disregard for what is not of a
+strictly legal or actionable character. It is Utopian to dream of a
+state of society where no law will be needed but every man's written
+and spoken word will be a law to him; but it is not difficult to imagine
+a state of society in which there is such universal dependence on the
+law in all emergencies that the individual conscience will become
+weakened--pauperised--atrophied--and unable to stand alone.
+
+That is, as I have said, the last point that I wish to make on this
+subject; and the reader will please notice that I have nowhere said that
+I consider American commercial morality at the present day to be higher
+than English. Nor do I think that it is. Incontestably it is but a
+little while since the English standard was appreciably the higher of
+the two. I have cited from my own memory instances of conditions which
+existed in America only twenty years ago in support of the fact--though
+no proof is needed--that this is so. I by no means underestimate the
+fineness of the traditions of British commerce or the number of men
+still living who hold to those traditions. On the other hand, better
+judges than I believe that the standard of morality in English business
+circles is declining. In America it is certainly and rapidly improving.
+
+Present English ideas about American commercial ethics are founded on a
+knowledge of facts, correct enough at the time, which existed before the
+improvement had made anything like the headway that it has, which facts
+no longer exist. I have roughly compared in outline some of the
+essential qualities of the atmosphere in which, and some of the
+conditions under which, the business men in the two countries live and
+do their business, showing that in the United States there is a much
+more marked tendency to insist on the character of the individual and a
+much larger opportunity for the individuality to develop itself; and
+that in certain particulars there are in England inherited social
+conditions and institutions which it would appear cannot fail to hamper
+the spirit of self-reliance, on which self-respect is ultimately
+dependent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And the conclusion? For the most part my readers must draw it for
+themselves. My own opinion is that, whatever the relative standing of
+the two countries may be to-day, it is hardly conceivable that, by the
+course on which each is travelling, in another generation American
+commercial integrity will not stand the higher of the two. The
+conditions in America are making for the shaping of a sterner type of
+man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Postscript._--The opinion has been expressed in the foregoing pages
+that in one particular the American on the average comes as near to
+getting justice in his courts as does the Englishman. I have also given
+expression to my great respect, which I think is shared by everyone who
+knows anything of it, for the United States Supreme Court. Also I have
+spoken disparagingly of the English institution of solicitordom. But
+these isolated expressions of opinion on particular points must not be
+interpreted as a statement that American laws and procedure are on the
+whole comparable to the English. I do not believe that they are. None
+the less Englishmen have as a rule such vague notions upon this subject
+that some explanatory comment seems to be desirable.
+
+Especially do few Englishmen (not lawyers or students of the subject)
+recognise that the abuses in the administration of justice in America,
+of which they hear so much, do not occur in the United States courts,
+but in the local courts of the several States. So far as the United
+States (_i. e._, the Federal) Courts are concerned I believe that the
+character and capacity of the judges (all of whom are appointed and not
+elected) compare favourably with those of English judges. It is in the
+State courts, the judges of which are generally elected, that the
+shortcomings appear; and while it might be reasonable to expect that a
+great State like New York or Massachusetts should have a code of laws
+and an administration of justice not inferior to those of Great Britain,
+it is perhaps scarcely fair to expect as much of each of the 46 States,
+many of which are as yet young and thinly populated.
+
+The chief vice of the State courts arises, of course, from the fact that
+the judges are elected by a partisan vote; from which it follows almost
+of necessity that there will be among them not a few who in their
+official actions will be amenable to the influence of party pressure. It
+is perhaps also inevitable that under such a system there will not
+seldom find their way to the bench men of such inferior character that
+they will be directly reachable by private bribes; though this, I
+believe, seldom occurs. The State courts, however, labour under other
+disadvantages.
+
+We have seen how Congressmen are hampered in the execution of their
+duties by the constant calls upon their time made by the leaders of
+their party, or other influential interests, in their constituencies.
+The same is true on a smaller scale of members of the State
+legislatures. Congress and the legislatures of the several States alike
+are moreover limited by the restrictions of written constitutions. The
+British Parliament is paramount; but the United States legislatures are
+always operating under fear of conflict with the Constitution. Their
+spheres are limited, so that they can only legislate on certain subjects
+and within certain lines; while finally the country has grown so fast,
+the conditions of society have changed with such rapidity, that it has
+been inherently difficult for lawmaking bodies to keep pace with the
+increasing complexity of the social and industrial fabric.
+
+If the limitations of space did not forbid, it would be interesting to
+show how this fact, more than any other (and not any willingness to
+leave loopholes for dishonesty) makes possible such offences as those
+which, committed by certain financial institutions in New York, were the
+immediate precipitating cause of the recent panic. Growth has been so
+rapid that, with the best will in the world to erect safeguards against
+malfeasance, weak spots in the barricades are, as it were, only
+discovered after they have been taken advantage of. With the
+preoccupation of the legislators stable doors are only found to be open
+by the fact that the horses are already in the street.
+
+But, after all has been said in extenuation, there remain many things in
+American State laws for which one may find explanation but not much
+excuse.
+
+Reference has already been made to the entirely immoral attitude of many
+of the State legislatures towards corporations, especially towards
+railway companies; and in some of the Western States prejudice against
+accumulated wealth is so strong that it is practically impossible for a
+rich man or corporation to get a verdict against a poor man. It would
+be easy to cite cases from one's personal experience wherein jurors have
+frankly explained their rendering of a verdict in obvious contradiction
+of the weight of evidence, by the mere statement that the losing party
+"could stand it" while the other could not. Of a piece with this is a
+class of legislation which has been abundant in Western States, where
+the legislators as well as most of the residents of the States have been
+poor, giving extraordinary advantages to debtors and making the
+collection of debts practically impossible. In some cases such
+legislation has defeated itself by compelling capitalists to refuse to
+invest, and wholesale traders to refuse to give credit, inside the
+State.
+
+Yet another source of corruption in legislation is to be found in the
+mere numerousness of the States themselves. It may obviously inure to
+the advantage of the revenues of a particular State to be especially
+lenient in matters which involve the payment of fees. It is evidently
+desirable that a check should be put on the reckless incorporation of
+companies with unlimited share capital, the usual form of such a check
+being, of course, the graduation of the fee for incorporation in
+proportion to such capital. One State which has laws more generous than
+any of its neighbours in this particular is likely to attract to it the
+incorporation of all the companies of any magnitude from those States,
+the formal compliance with the requirements of having a statutory
+office, and of holding an annual meeting, in that State being a matter
+of small moment. Similar considerations may govern one State in enacting
+laws facilitating the obtaining of divorce.
+
+There are, then, obviously many causes which make the attainment of
+either an uniform or a satisfactory code of jurisprudence in all States
+alike extremely difficult of attainment. It will only be arrived at by,
+on the one hand, the extension of the Federal authority and, on the
+other the increase in population and wealth (and, consequently, a sense
+of responsibility) in those States which at present are less forward
+than their neighbours. But, again, it is worth insisting on the fact
+that the faults are faults of the several States and not of the United
+States. They do not imply either a lack of a sense of justice in the
+people as a whole or any willingness to make wrong-doing easy. But it is
+extremely difficult for the public opinion of the rest of the country to
+bring any pressure to bear on the legislature of one recalcitrant State.
+The desire to insist on its own independence is indeed so strong in
+every State that any attempt at outside interference must almost
+inevitably result only in developing resistance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And again I find myself regretfully in direct conflict with Mr. Wells.
+But it is not easy to take his meditations on American commercial
+morality in entire seriousness.
+
+"In the highly imaginative theory that underlies the reality of an
+individualistic society," he says (_The Future in America_, p. 168),
+"there is such a thing as honest trading. In practice I don't believe
+there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to have a fixed quality
+called their value, and honest trading is I am told the exchange of
+things of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by honest trading and
+therefore nobody can grow rich by it." And more to the same effect.
+
+A trader buys one thousand of a given article per month from the
+manufacturer at ninepence an article and sells them to his customers at
+tenpence. The extra penny is his payment for acting as purveyor, and the
+customers recognise that it is an equitable charge which they pay
+contentedly. That is honest trading; and the trader makes a profit of a
+trifle over four pounds a month, or fifty pounds a year.
+
+Another trader purveys the same article, buying it from the same
+manufacturer, but owing to the possession of larger capital, better
+talent for organisation, and more enterprise, he sells, not one
+thousand, but one million per month. Instead of selling them at
+tenpence, however, he sells them at ninepence half-penny; thereby making
+his customers a present of one half-penny, taking to himself only one
+half of the sum to which they have already consented as a just charge
+for the services which he renders. Supposing that he pays the same price
+as the other trader for his goods (which, buying by the million, he
+would not do), he makes a profit of some £2083 a month, or £25,000 a
+year. Evidently he grows rich.
+
+This is the rudimentary principle of modern business; but because one
+man becomes rich, though he gives the public the same service for less
+charge than honest men, Mr. Wells says that he cannot be honest.
+
+If two men discover simultaneously gold mines of equal value, and one,
+being timid and conservative, puts twenty men to work while the other
+puts a thousand, and each makes a profit of one shilling a day on each
+man's labour, it is evident that while one enjoys an income of a pound a
+day for himself the other makes fifty times as much. It is not only
+obvious that the latter is just as honest as the former, but he can
+well afford to pay his men a shilling or two a week more in wages. He
+can afford to build them model homes and give them reading-rooms and
+recreation grounds, which the other cannot.
+
+Others, besides Mr. Wells, lose their heads when they contemplate large
+fortunes made in business; but the elementary lesson to be learned is
+not merely that such large fortunes are likely to be as "honestly"
+acquired as the smaller ones, but also that the man who trades on the
+larger scale is--or has the potentiality of being--the greater
+benefactor to the community, not merely by being able to furnish the
+people with goods at a lower price but also by his ability to employ
+more labour and to surround his workmen with better material conditions.
+
+The tendency of modern business industry to agglutinate into large units
+is, as has been said, inevitable; but, what is better worth noting, like
+all natural developments from healthy conditions, it is a thing
+inherently beneficent. That the larger power is capable of greater abuse
+than the smaller is also evident; and against that abuse it is that the
+American people is now struggling to safeguard itself. But to assail all
+trading on a scale which produces great wealth as "dishonest" is both
+impertinent (it is Mr. Wells's own word, applied to himself) and absurd.
+
+The aggregate effect of the great consolidations in America and in
+England alike (of the "trusts" in fact) has so far been to cheapen
+immensely the price of most of the staples of life to the people; and
+that will always be the tendency of all consolidations which stop at any
+point short of monopoly. And that an artificial monopoly (not based on
+a natural monopoly) can ever be made effective in any staple for more
+than the briefest space of time has yet to be demonstrated.
+
+The other consideration, of the destruction of the independence of the
+individual, remains; but that lies outside Mr. Wells' range.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[378:1] Preface to the _Encyclopædia of Trade between the United States
+and France_, prepared by the Société du Repertoire Général du Commerce.
+
+[384:1] I do not know whether the story is true or not that Signor
+Caruso was compelled, in default of other means of identification in a
+New York bank, to lift up his voice and sing to the satisfaction of the
+bank officials. As has been remarked, this is not the first time that
+gold has been given in exchange for notes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE PEOPLES AT PLAY
+
+     American Sport Twenty-five Years Ago--The Power of Golf--A
+     Look Ahead--Britain, Mother of Sports--Buffalo in New York--And
+     Pheasants on Clapham Common--Shooting Foxes and the "Sport" of
+     Wild-fowling--The Amateur in American Sport--At Henley--And at
+     Large--Teutonic Poppycock.
+
+
+In "An Error in the Fourth Dimension," Kipling tells how one Wilton
+Sargent, an American, came to live in England and earnestly laboured to
+make himself more English than the English. He learned diligently to do
+many things most un-American:--"Last mystery of all he learned to
+golf--well; and when an American knows the innermost meaning of '_Don't
+press, slow back and keep your eye on the ball_,' he is, for practical
+purposes, de-nationalised." Some six years after that was written an
+American golfer became Amateur Champion of Great Britain. Yes; I know
+that Mr. Travis was not born in the United States, but _qua_ golfer he
+is American pure and simple. Which shows the danger of too hasty
+generalisation, even on the part of a genius. And it shows more. When he
+wrote those words Kipling was fully justified by the facts as they
+stood. It is the fault of the character of the American people, which
+frustrates prophecy.
+
+Twenty-five years ago there was no amateur sport in America--none. Men,
+it is true, went off and shot ("hunted" as Americans call it) and fished
+and yachted for a few days, or weeks, in summer or autumn, in a rather
+rough-and-ready sort of way. Also, when at college they played baseball
+and football and, perhaps, they rowed. After leaving college there was
+probably not one young American in a hundred who entered a boat or
+played a game of either football or baseball on an average of once in a
+year. The people as a whole had no open-air games. Baseball was chiefly
+professional. Cricket had a certain foothold in Philadelphia and on
+Staten Island, but it was an exotic sport, as it remains to-day, failing
+entirely to enlist the sympathies of the multitude. Polo was not played.
+Lawn tennis had been introduced, but had made little headway. In all
+America there were, I think, three racquet courts, which were used
+chiefly by visiting Englishmen, and not one tennis court. Lacrosse was
+quite unknown, and as for the "winter sports" of snow-shoeing, ski-ing,
+ice-boating, curling, and tobogganing, they were practised only here and
+there by a few (except for the "coasting" of children) as rather a
+curious fad.
+
+It was a strange experience for an Englishman in those days, fond of his
+games, to go from his clubs and the society of his fellows at home, to
+mix in the same class of society in America. As in the circles that he
+had left behind him, so there, the conversation was still largely on
+sporting topics, but while in England men talked of the games in which
+they played themselves and of the feats and experiences of their
+friends, in the leading young men's clubs of New York--the Union, the
+Knickerbocker, and the Calumet--the talk was solely of professional
+sport: of the paid baseball nines, of prize fighters (Sullivan was then
+just rising to his glory), and professional scullers (those were the
+days of Hanlan), and the like. No man talked of his own doings or of
+those of his friends, for he and his friends did nothing, except perhaps
+to spar for an hour or so once or twice a week, or go through
+perfunctory gymnastics for their figures' sakes.
+
+Until a dozen years ago the situation had not materially changed. Lawn
+tennis had made some headway, but the thing that wrought the revolution
+was the coming of golf. It may be doubted if ever in history has any
+single sport, pastime, or pursuit so modified the habits, and even the
+character, of a people in an equal space of time as golf has modified
+those of the people of the United States.
+
+Enough has already been written of the enthusiasm with which the
+Americans took up the game itself, of the social prestige which it at
+once obtained, of the colossal sums of money that have been lavished on
+the making of courses, of the sumptuousness of the club-houses that have
+sprung up all over the land. That golf is in itself a fascinating game,
+is sufficiently proved in England, where it has drawn so many thousands
+of devotees away from cricket, football, lawn tennis, and other sports.
+But can we imagine what the result might have been if there had been in
+Great Britain no cricket, or football, or other sports, so that all the
+game-loving enthusiasm of the nation had been free to turn itself loose
+into that one channel? And this is just what did happen in America. Golf
+had a clear field and a strenuous sport-loving nation, devoid of
+open-air games, at its mercy.
+
+The result was not merely that people took to playing golf and that
+young men neglected their offices and millionaires stretched unwonted
+muscles in scrambling over bunkers. Golf taught the American people to
+play games. It took them out from their great office-buildings and from
+their five-o'clock cocktails at the club, into the open air; and they
+found that the open air was good. So around nearly every golf club other
+sports grew up. Polo grounds were laid out by the side of the links,
+croquet lawns appeared on one side of the club-house and lawn-tennis
+nets arose on the other, while traps for the clay-pigeon shooters were
+placed safely off in a corner.
+
+Golf came precisely at the moment when the people were ready for it.
+Just as America, having in a measure completed the exploitation of her
+own continent and developed a manufacturing power beyond the resources
+of consumption in her people, was commercially ripe for the invasion of
+the markets of the world; just as she came, in her overflowing wealth
+and power, to a recognition of her greatness as a nation, and was
+politically ripe for an Imperial policy of colonial expansion; just as,
+tired of the loose code of ethics of the scrambling days, when the
+country was still one half wilderness and none had time to care for the
+public conscience, she was morally ripe for the wonderful revival which
+has set in in the ethics of politics and commerce and of which Mr.
+Roosevelt has been and is the chief apostle: so, by the individual
+richness of her citizens, giving larger leisure in which to cultivate
+other pleasures than those which their offices or homes could afford,
+she was ripe for the coming of the day of open-air games. And having
+turned to them, she threw herself into their pursuit with the ardour
+and singleness of purpose which are characteristic of the people and
+which, as applied to games, seem to English eyes to savour almost of
+professionalism. As a matter of fact they are only the manifestations of
+an essential trait of the American character.
+
+The result was that almost at the same time as an American player was
+winning the British Amateur Golf Championship, an American polo team was
+putting All England on her mettle at Hurlingham, and it was not with any
+wider margin than was necessary for comfort that Great Britain retained
+the honours in lawn tennis, which she has since lost to one of her own
+colonies.
+
+It is curious that this awakening of the amateur sporting spirit in the
+United States should have come just at the time when many excellent
+judges were bewailing the growing popularity of professional sport in
+England. Any day now, one may hear complaints that the British youth is
+giving up playing games himself for the purpose of watching professional
+wrestlers or football games or county cricket matches. My personal
+opinion is that there is no need to worry. The growing interest in
+exhibition games reacts in producing a larger number of youths who
+strive to become players. Not only in spite of, but largely because of,
+the greater spectacular attraction of both football and cricket than in
+years gone by, there is an immensely larger number of players of
+both--and of all other--games than there ever was before. It is little
+more than a score of years since Association football, at least, was
+practically the monopoly of a few public schools and of the members of
+the two Universities--of "gentlemen" in fact. Any loss which the nation
+can have suffered from the tendency to sit on benches and applaud
+professional players must have been made up a thousand times over in the
+benefit to the national physique from the spreading of the game into
+wide classes which formerly regarded it, much as they might fox-hunting,
+as a pastime reserved only for their "betters."
+
+It is none the less interesting and instructive that in this field as in
+so many others the directly opposite tendencies should be at work in the
+two countries: that just when America is beginning to learn the delight
+of being a game-loving nation and amateur sport is thriving, not yet to
+the detriment of, but in proportions at least which stand fair
+comparison with, professional, the cry should be raised in England that
+Englishmen are forgetting to play games themselves in their eagerness to
+watch others do them better. Here, as in other things, the gap between
+the habits of the two peoples is narrowing rapidly. They have not yet
+met; for in England the time and attention given to games and sports by
+amateurs is still incomparably greater than on the other side. But that
+the advancing lines will meet--and even cross--seems probable. And when
+they have crossed, what then? Will America ever oust Great Britain from
+the position which she holds as the Mother of Sports and the athletic
+centre of the world?
+
+Some things, it appears, one can predict with certainty. America has
+already taken to herself a disagreeable number of the records in track
+athletics; and she will take more. On the links the performance of Mr.
+Travis, isolated as yet, is only a warning of many similar experiences
+in the future. In a few years it will be very hard for any visiting golf
+team of less than All England or All Scotland strength to win many
+matches against American clubs on their home courses; and the United
+States will be able to send a team over here that will be beaten only by
+All England--or perhaps will not be beaten by All Britain. At polo the
+Americans will go on hammering away till they produce a team that can
+stand unconquered at Hurlingham. It will be very long before they can
+turn out a dozen teams to match the best English dozen; but by mere
+force of concentration and by the practice of that quality which, as has
+already been said, looks so like professionalism to English eyes, one
+team to rival the English best they will send over. In lawn tennis it
+cannot be long before a pair of Americans will do what an Australian
+pair did in 1907, just as the United States already holds the Ladies'
+Championship; and England is going to have some difficulty in recovering
+her honours at court tennis. In rifle shooting America must be expected
+to beat England oftener than England beats America; but the edge will be
+taken off any humiliation that there might be by the fact that Britain
+will have Colonial teams as good as either.
+
+And when all this has happened, will England's position be shaken? Not
+one whit! Not though the _America's_ cup never crosses the Atlantic and
+though sooner or later an American college crew succeeds--as surely, for
+their pluck, they deserve to succeed--in imitating the Belgians and
+carrying off the Grand at Henley. There remain games and sports enough
+which the United States will never take up seriously, at which if she
+did she would be debarred by climatic conditions or other causes from
+ever threatening British supremacy.
+
+The glory of England lies in the fact that she "takes on" the best of
+all the nations of the world at their own games. It is not the United
+States only, but all her Colonies and every country of Europe that turn
+to Great Britain as to their best antagonist in whatever sport they find
+themselves proficient. Just now England's brow is somewhat bare of
+laurels, but year in and year out Britain will continue to win the
+majority of contests in her meetings with all the world; and if she lose
+at times, is it not better to have rivals good enough to make her extend
+herself? And is it not sufficient for her pride that she, one people,
+should win--if it be only--half of all the world's honours?
+
+Meanwhile Englishmen can afford to rejoice ungrudgingly at the new
+spirit which has been born in the United States. Each year the number of
+"events" in which an international contest is possible increases. The
+time may not be far away when there will be almost as long a list of
+Anglo-American annual contests as there is now between Oxford and
+Cambridge. But it will be a very long time before the United States can
+displace Great Britain from the pre-eminence which she holds--and the
+wonderful character of which, I think, few Englishmen appreciate. Before
+that time comes such other sweeping changes will probably have come over
+the map of the world and the relations of the peoples that Britain's
+displacement will have lost all significance.
+
+And Englishmen can always remember that, whatever triumphs the
+Americans may win in the domain of sport, they win them by virtue of the
+English blood that is in them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is, of course, inevitable that in many particulars the American and
+English ideas of sport should be widely different. There is an old, old
+story in America of the Englishman who arrived in New York and, on the
+day after his arrival, got out his rifle and proceeded to make enquiries
+of the hotel people as to the best direction in which to start out to
+find buffalo--the nearest buffalo at the time being, perhaps, two
+thousand miles away. It is a story which has contributed not a little to
+contempt of the Britisher in many an innocent American mind. It happens
+that in my own experience I have known precisely that same blunder made
+by an American in England.
+
+I had met an American friend, with whom I have shot in America, at his
+hotel on the evening of his arrival in London one day in November. In
+the course of conversation I mentioned that the shooting season was in
+full swing.
+
+"Good," he said. "Let me hire a gun somewhere to-morrow and let's go
+out, if you've nothing to do, and have some shooting."
+
+Nothing, he opined, would be simpler, or more agreeable, than to drive
+out--or possibly take a train--to some wild spot in the vicinity of
+London--Clapham Common perhaps--and spend a day among the pheasants. It
+was precisely the Englishman and his buffalo--the prehistoric instinct
+of the race ("What a beautiful day! Let us go and kill something!")
+blossoming amid unfamiliar conditions. My American friend wanted to
+kill an English pheasant. He had heard much of them as the best of
+game-birds. He had eaten them, much refrigerated, in New York and found
+them good. And he knew nothing of preserving and of a land that is all
+parcelled out into parks and gardens and spinneys. Why not then go out
+and enjoy ourselves? Before he left England he had some pheasant
+shooting, and it is rarely that a man on his first day at those
+conspicuous but evasive fowl renders as good an account of himself as
+did he. Similarly every American with a sound sporting instinct must
+hope that that traditional Englishman ultimately got his buffalo.
+
+Many times in the United States in the old days have I done exactly what
+that American then wished to do in London. Finding myself compelled to
+spend a night at some crude and unfamiliar Western town, I have made
+enquiries at the hotel as to the shooting--duck or prairie chicken--in
+the neighbourhood. Hiring a gun of the local gunsmith and buying a
+hundred cartridges, one then secured a trap with a driver, who probably
+brought his own gun and shot also (probably better than oneself), but
+who certainly knew the ground. The best ground might be three or five or
+ten miles out--open prairie where chicken were plentiful, or a string of
+prairie lakes or "sloughs" (pronounced "sloo") with duck-passes between.
+That evening one came home, hungry and happy as a hunter ought to be,
+with perhaps half a dozen brace of spike-tailed grouse (the common
+"chicken" of the Northwestern States) or ten or a dozen duck--mallard,
+widgeon, pintail, two kinds of teal, with, it might be, a couple of
+red-heads or canvas-backs,--or, not improbably, a magnificent Canada
+goose as the spoils.
+
+With the settlement of the country, the multiplication of shooters, and
+the increase in the number of "gun-clubs," which have now included most
+of the easily accessible duck-grounds in the country in their private
+preserves, the possibilities of those delightful days are growing fewer,
+but even now there are many parts of the West where the stranger can
+still do as I have done many times.
+
+Though the people had so few outdoor games, the great majority of
+Americans, except the less well-to-do of the city-dwellers of the
+Eastern States, have been accustomed to handle gun and rod from their
+childhood. The gun may at first have been a rusty old muzzle-loader, and
+the rod a "pole" cut from the bank of the stream with a live grasshopper
+for bait; and there are few better weapons to teach a boy to be a keen
+sportsman. The birds that he shot were game--duck or geese, turkeys,
+quail, grouse, or snipe--and the fish that he caught were mostly game
+fish--trout and bass. It is true that the American generally shoots
+foxes; so does the Englishman when he goes to the Colonies where there
+are no hounds and too many foxes, with game birds which he wishes kept
+for his own shooting, and domestic chickens which he destines for his
+own table. On the other hand the American does not mount a miniature
+cannon in a punt and shoot waterfowl by wholesale when sitting on the
+water. It is only the gunner for the market, the man who makes his
+living by it, who does that, and the laws do their best to stop even
+him. The American sportsman who cannot get his duck fairly on the wing
+with a 12- or 16-bore prefers not to get them at all. "But," objects
+the English wildfowl shooter, "suppose the birds are not get-at-able in
+any other way?" "So much," the American would retort, "the better for
+the birds. They have earned their lives; get them like a sportsman or
+let them go."
+
+The time may not be far away--and many Englishmen will be glad when it
+comes--when to kill waterfowl at rest with a duck gun will no longer be
+considered a "sport" that a gentleman can engage in in England. Perhaps
+fox-hunting will become so popular in the United States that foxes will
+be generally preserved. The sportsmen of each country will then think
+better of those of the other. Meanwhile it would be pleasanter if each
+would believe that such little seemingly unsportsmanlike peculiarities
+that the other may have developed are only the accidents of his
+environment, and that under the same circumstances there is not a pin to
+choose between their sportsmanship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Reference has more than once been made to the quality which looks to
+English eyes so much like semi-professionalism in American sport. It is
+a delicate subject, in handling which susceptibilities on one side or
+the other may easily be hurt.
+
+The intense earnestness and concentration of the American on his one
+sport--for most Americans are specialists in one only--does not commend
+itself to English amateurs. The exclusiveness, which seems to be
+suspicious of foul play, and the stringent training system of certain
+American crews at Henley have been out of harmony with all the
+traditions of the great Regatta and have caused much ill feeling, some
+of which has occasionally come to the surface. Some of the proceedings
+of American polo teams have not coincided with what is ordinarily
+considered, in England, the behaviour of gentlemen in matters of amateur
+sport. On the other hand, Americans universally believe that Lord
+Dunraven acted in a most unsportsmanlike manner in the unfortunate cup
+scandal; and in one case they are--or were at the time--convinced that
+one of their crews was unfairly treated at Henley. Honours therefore on
+the surface are fairly easy; and, while every Englishman knows that both
+the American charges quoted are absurd, every American is no less of the
+opinion that the English grounds of complaint are altogether
+unreasonable.
+
+We must remember that after all a good many of the best English golfers
+and lawn-tennis players do nothing else in life but golf or play
+lawn-tennis. And this tendency to specialise is undoubtedly increasing.
+Meanwhile it will never be rooted out of the American character and in
+departments of sport where it, and it alone, will bring pre-eminence,
+Englishmen will either have to do as Americans do or, sooner or later,
+consent to be defeated. There is nothing in the practice at which the
+Englishman can fairly cavil. Americans have still much the fewer sports;
+and it is the national habit to take up one and concentrate on it with
+all one's might.[420:1]
+
+A more difficult aspect of the situation has to do with the question of
+the definition of "gentleman-amateur"; the fact being, of course, that
+the same definition has not the same significance in the two countries.
+The radical difficulty lies in the fact that the word "gentleman" in its
+English sense of a man of gentle birth has no application to America.
+Let this not be understood as a statement that there are any fewer
+gentlemen in America or that the word is not used. But its usage is not
+re-inforced, its limits are not defined, as in England, by any line of
+cleavage in the social system. A large number of the gentlemen of
+America are farmers' sons; more than half are the sons of men who
+commenced life in very humble positions, and nearly all are the sons of
+men who are engaged in trade or in business, the majority of them being
+destined to go into trade or business (and to begin at the beginning)
+themselves. In England, of course, the process of the obliteration of
+the old line is going on with great rapidity. In America, on the other
+hand, there is a tendency towards the drawing of a somewhat
+corresponding line. But the fact remains that at present there exists
+this fundamental distinction and the consequence is that Englishmen
+continue to find among American "amateurs" and in teams of American
+"gentlemen," individuals who would not be accepted into the same
+categories in England.
+
+But what Englishmen should endeavour to understand is that the man who
+on the surface seems to belong to a class which in England would be
+objectionable in the company of gentlemen probably has none of those
+characteristics which would make him objectionable were he English. He
+has far more of the characteristics of a gentleman than of the other
+qualities. The qualities which go to make a "gentleman," even in the
+English sense, are many and complex; but the assumption is that they are
+all present in the man who bears the public school and university stamp.
+The Englishman is accustomed to accept the presence or absence of one or
+a few of those qualities in an individual as evidence of the presence or
+absence of them all. In judging other Englishmen, the rule works
+satisfactorily. But in America, with its different social system, the
+qualities are not tied up in the same bundles, so that the same
+inference fails. The same, or a similar, peculiarity of voice or speech
+or manner or dress or birth does not denote--much less does it
+connote--the same or similar things in representatives of the two
+peoples. Particular Englishmen have learned this often enough in
+individual cases. How often has it not happened that an Englishman,
+meeting an American first as a stranger, not even being informed that he
+is an American, has, judging from some one external characteristic,
+turned from him as being an Undesirable, only to be introduced to him
+later, or meet him under other conditions, and find in him one of the
+best fellows that he ever met? The thing is happening every day. Very
+often, with a little more knowledge or a little clearer understanding,
+Englishmen would know that their judgment of some American amateur
+athlete is shockingly unjust. To bar him out would be incomparably more
+unjust to him than his inclusion is unjust to any antagonist.
+
+This of course does not touch the fact--which is a fact--that in America
+what answers to the gentleman-amateur in England is drawn from a much
+larger proportion of the people. This does not however mean, when
+rightly viewed, what Englishmen generally think it means, that Americans
+go down into other--and presumably not legitimate--classes for their
+recruits. It only means that a very much larger proportion of the people
+belong to one class. There is no point at which an arbitrary line can be
+drawn. This is in truth only another way of saying what has been said
+already more than once, that the American people is really more
+homogeneous than the English, or rather is homogeneous over a larger
+part of its area, so that the type-American represents a greater
+proportion of the people of the United States than the type-Briton
+represents of the people of the British Isles.
+
+This is obviously in the realm of sport so much to America's advantage.
+It is not a condition against which the Englishman has any right to
+protest, any more than he has to move amendments to the Constitution of
+the United States. When better comprehended, Englishmen will accept it
+without either resentment or regret. The United States has a larger
+population than Great Britain: so much the better for the United
+States. Also a larger proportion of that population must be admitted
+into the category of gentleman-amateur in sport; so much the more the
+better for them.
+
+But, curiously enough, this condition has its inherent drawback, which
+not impossibly more than compensates for its advantages. The fact that
+young Americans grow up so much of a class involves the essential fact
+that the enormous majority of them are educated at the Public Schools,
+that is at the Board Schools or Government Schools or whatever they
+would be called if their precise counterpart existed in England. The
+United States has not (the fact has been touched on before) any group of
+institutions comparable to the great schools of England. A few excellent
+schools there are which bear some resemblance to the English models, but
+they are not numerous enough to go any way towards leavening the nation.
+It is to the Public Schools that, in the mass, the English
+gentleman-amateur owes his training, not only in sports but in many
+other things besides: especially in those things which stamp on him the
+mark by which he is recognised as belonging to his right class through
+life. The American, as has been said, is not so stamped; but in missing
+that stamp--or in failing to receive it--he necessarily missed also all
+that discipline and training in games which the Public School gave to
+the Englishman. The very same cause as gives America an advantage in the
+numbers from which she can draw her amateur athletes, also forbids that
+these recruits should have had the same advantages of early training as
+fall to the Englishman.
+
+The thing is about as broad as it is long. It is not difficult to
+imagine that the great schools might never have come into existence in
+England, so that a larger proportion of the population than is now the
+case would be educated at some intermediate institutions, at the Grammar
+Schools let us say, when the English gentleman-amateur athletes--the
+polo, golf, and tennis teams and the crews that row at Henley--would be
+drawn from a larger circle of the population, and the individuals would
+not bear as close a superficial resemblance, one to the other, as they
+do to-day. They would in fact be more like the members of American
+athletic teams as Englishmen know them. The question is whether England
+would gain or lose in athletic efficiency. When Englishmen find
+something to cavil at in an individual American amateur or in an
+American amateur team or crew, would it not be better to stop and
+consider whether the disadvantages which compel America to be
+represented by such an individual or team or crew, do not outweigh the
+advantages which enable her to use him or them? If the United States
+were to develop the same educational machinery as exists in England,
+which would stamp practically all their gentlemen-amateurs with the same
+hall-mark, as they are so stamped in England, and would at the same time
+give them the English public-school boy's training in games, would not
+England, as a mere matter of athletic rivalry, be worse off instead of
+better?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the purpose of pointing the moral of the essential likeness of the
+American and English characters, as contrasted with those of other
+peoples, reference has already been made to Professor Münsterberg and
+his book. It is an excellent book; but what English writer would think
+it necessary to inform English readers that "the American student
+recreates himself on the athletic field rather than in the ale-house"?
+We know something of the life of a German student; but it is only when a
+German himself says a thing like that that he illuminates in a flash the
+abyss which yawns between the moral qualities of the youth of his
+country and the young American or young Englishman.
+
+Again the same author speaks on the subject of the Anglo-Saxon love of
+fair play (the sporting instinct, I have called it) as follows:
+
+"The demand for 'fair play' dominates the whole American people, and
+shapes public opinion in all matters whether large or small. And with
+this finally goes the belief in the self-respect and integrity of one's
+neighbour. The American cannot understand how Europeans" (Continental
+Europeans, if you please, Mr. Münsterberg!) "so often reinforce their
+statements with explicit mention of their honour which is at stake, as
+if the hearer was likely to feel a doubt of it; and even American
+children are often apt to wonder at young people abroad who quarrel at
+play and at once suspect one another of some unfairness. The American
+system does not wait for years of discretion to come before exerting its
+influence; it makes itself felt in the nursery, where already the word
+of one child is never doubted by his playmates."
+
+There is an excellent American slang word, which is "poppycock." The
+Century Dictionary speaks disrespectfully of it as a "United States
+vulgarism," but personally I consider it a first-class word. The Century
+Dictionary defines it as meaning, "Trivial talk; nonsense; stuff and
+rubbish," which is about as near as a dictionary can get to the elusive
+meaning of any slang word. English readers will understand the exact
+shade of meaning of the word when I say that the paragraph above quoted
+is most excellent and precise poppycock. Every American who read that
+paragraph when the book was published must have chuckled inwardly, just
+as every Englishman would chuckle. But the point which I wish to
+emphasise is that it is not at all poppycock from the author's point of
+view. I doubt not that his countrymen have been most edified by that
+excellent dictum, and the trouble is that one could never make a typical
+German understand wherein it is wrong. No, Mr. Münsterberg, it is not
+that the sentence is untrue--far be it from me to suggest such a thing.
+It is merely absurd; and you, sir, will never, never, never comprehend
+why it is so.
+
+It is in the presence of such a remark, seriously made by so excellently
+capable a foreigner, that the Englishman and American ought to be able
+to shake hands and realise how much of a kin they are and how far
+removed from some other peoples.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have dwelt on this subject of the games of the two peoples at what may
+seem to many an unnecessary length, because I do not think its
+importance can well be exaggerated. It is not only desirable, but it is
+necessary, for a thorough mutual liking between them that there should
+be no friction in matters of sport. No incident has, I believe, occurred
+of late years which did so much harm to the relations between the
+peoples as did the Dunraven episode in connection with the _America's_
+cup races. I should be inclined to say that it did more harm (I am not
+blaming Lord Dunraven) than the Venezuelan incident.
+
+On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the more recent attempts to
+recover the cup, and the spirit in which they have been conducted, have
+not contributed as much as, say, the attitude of England in the Spanish
+War to the increased liking for Great Britain which has made itself
+manifest in the United States of recent years. Few Englishmen, probably,
+understand how much is made of such matters in the American press. The
+love of sport is in the blood of both peoples and neither can altogether
+like the other until it believes it to have the same generous sporting
+instincts and the same clean methods as itself. As a matter of fact,
+they do--as in so many other traits--stand out conspicuously alike from
+among all other peoples, but neither will give the other full credit for
+this, till each learns to see below such slight surface appearances as
+at present provoke occasional ill-will in one party or the other. Fuller
+understanding will come with time and with it entire cordiality.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[420:1] Though immaterial to the argument, it may be as well to state
+that my personal sympathies are entirely with the English practice. In
+the matter of college athletics especially the spirit in which certain
+sports (especially football and, in not much less degree, rowing and
+baseball) are followed at some of the American universities, is entirely
+distasteful to me. On the other hand, I know nothing more creditable to
+the English temperament than the spirit in which the contests in the
+corresponding sports are conducted between the great English
+universities. And this feeling is shared, I know, by some (and I believe
+by most) of those Americans who, as Rhodes scholars or otherwise, have
+had an opportunity of coming to understand at first hand the difference
+between the practice in the two countries. But this is an individual
+prepossession only; against which stands the fact that my experience of
+Americans who have won notoriety in athletics at one or other of the
+American universities, is that they are unspoiled by the system through
+which they have passed and possess just as sensitive and generous a
+sporting instinct as the best men turned out by Oxford or Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
+
+     A New Way of Making Friends--The Desirability of an Alliance--
+     For the Sake of Both Peoples--And of All the World--The Family
+     Resemblance--Mutual Misunderstandings--American Conception of
+     the British Character--English Misapprehension of Americans--
+     Foreign Influences in the United States--Why Politicians
+     Hesitate--An Appeal to the People--And to Cæsar.
+
+
+At first sight it may not seem the likeliest way to make two people care
+for each other to go laboriously about to tell each how the other
+underestimates his virtues. Don Pedro's wile would appear to be the more
+direct--to tell Benedick how Beatrice doted on him, and Beatrice how
+Benedick was dying for her love. I have always had my doubts, however,
+about the success of that alliance.
+
+In the case of two peoples so much alike as the English and the
+American, between whom friendship and alliance would be so entirely in
+accord with eternal fitness, who are yet held apart by misunderstanding
+on the part of each of the other's character, there seems no better way
+than to face the misunderstandings frankly and to endeavour to make each
+see how unjustly it undervalues the other's good qualities or
+overestimates its faults. At present neither Americans nor Englishmen
+understand what good fellows the others are. Least of all do they
+understand how essentially they are the same kind of good fellows.
+
+In summarising the contents of the foregoing pages, there is no need
+here to rehearse, except in barest outline, the arguments in favour of
+alliance between the countries. The fact that war between them is an
+ever-present possibility ought in itself to suffice--war which could
+hardly fail to be more sanguinary and destructive than any war that the
+world has known. The danger of such a war is greater, perhaps, than the
+people of either country recognises, certainly greater than most
+Englishmen imagine. The people of England do not understand the
+warlike--though so peace-loving--character of the American nation. It is
+just as warlike as, though no less peace-loving than, the English,
+without the restraint of that good-will which the English feel for the
+United States; without, moreover, the check, to which every European
+country is always subjected, of the fear of complications with other
+Powers. The American people, as a whole, it cannot be too earnestly
+impressed on Englishmen, have no such good-will towards Great Britain as
+Englishmen feel for them; and not even English reluctance to draw the
+sword, nor the protests of the better informed and the more well-to-do
+people in the United States would be able to restrain what Mr. Cleveland
+calls "the plain people of the land" if they once made up their mind to
+fight.
+
+Apart from the possibility of war between the two nations themselves,
+there is the constant peril, to which both are exposed, of conflict
+forced upon them by the aggressions of other Powers. That peril is
+always present to both, to the United States now no less--perhaps even
+more--than to Great Britain. The fact that neither need fear a trial of
+strength with any other Power or any union of Powers, is beside the
+question. Consciousness of its own strength is no guarantee to any
+nation that it will not be forced into conflict. Rather, by making it
+certain that it, at least, will not draw back, does it close up one
+possible avenue of escape from catastrophe when a crisis threatens.
+
+But beyond all this--apart from, and vastly greater than, the
+considerations of the interest or the security of either Great Britain
+or the United States--is the claim of humanity. The two peoples have it
+in their hands to give to the whole world no less a gift than that of
+Universal and Perpetual Peace. It involves no self-sacrifice, the giving
+of this wonderful boon, for the two peoples themselves would share in
+the benefit no less than other peoples, and they would be the richer by
+the giving. It involves hardly any effort, for they have but to hold out
+their hands together and give. It matters not that the world has not
+appealed to them. The fact remains that they can do this thing and they
+alone; and it is for them to ask their own consciences whether any
+considerations of pride, any prejudice, any absorption in their own
+affairs--any consideration actual or conceivable--can justify them in
+holding back. Still more does it rest with the American people--usually
+so quick to respond to high ideals--to ask its conscience whether any
+consideration, actual or conceivable, can justify it in refusal when
+Great Britain is willing--anxious--to do her share.
+
+That such an alliance must some day come is, I believe, not
+questionable. That it has not already come is due only to the
+misunderstanding by each people of the character of the other.
+Primarily, the two peoples do not understand how closely akin--how of
+one kind--they are, how alike they are in their virtues, and how their
+failings are but the defects of the same inherited qualities, even
+though shaped to somewhat diverse manifestations by differences of
+environment. Two brothers seldom recognise their likeness one to the
+other, until either looks at the other beside a stranger. Members of one
+family do not easily perceive the family resemblance which they share;
+rather are they aware only of the individual differences. But strangers
+see the likeness, and in their eyes the differences often disappear. So
+Englishmen and Americans only come to a realisation of their resemblance
+when either compares the other critically with a foreign people.
+Foreigners, however, see the likeness when they look at the two
+together. And those foreigners who know only one of the peoples will
+sketch the character of that people so that it might be taken for a
+portrait of the other. In all essentials the characters are the same; in
+minor attributes only, such as exist between the individual members of
+any family, do they differ.
+
+Not only does neither people understand with any clearness how like it
+is to the other, but each is under many misapprehensions--some trivial,
+some vital--in regard to the other's temperament and ways of life. These
+misapprehensions are the result chiefly of the geographical remoteness
+of the lands, so that intimate contact between anything like an
+appreciable portion of the two peoples has been impossible; and, when
+thus separated by so wide a sea, Great Britain has been too consumedly
+engrossed in the affairs of the world to be able to give much time or
+thought to the United States, while America has been too isolated from
+that world, too absorbed in her own affairs, to be able to look at
+England in anything like true perspective.
+
+Arising thus from different causes, the errors of the two peoples in
+regard to each other have taken different forms. Great Britain, always
+at passes with a more or less hostile Europe, has never lost her
+original feeling of kinship with, or good-will towards, the United
+States. There has been no time when she would not gladly have improved
+her knowledge of, and friendship with, the other, had she at any time
+been free from the anxieties of the peril of war with one Power or
+another, from the burden of concern for her Empire in India, from the
+weight of her responsibilities in regard to Australia, South Africa,
+Egypt, and the various other parts of Britain over seas. Engrossed as
+she has been with things of immediate moment to her existence, she has
+been perforce compelled to take the good-will of the remote United
+States for granted, and to assume that there was no need to voice her
+own. Until at last she was awakened with a rudeness of awakening that
+shocked and staggered her.
+
+For the United States had had no such constant burden of anxiety, no
+perpetual friction with other peoples, to keep her occupied. Rather,
+sitting aloof in her isolation she had looked upon all the Powers of
+Europe as actors in a great drama with which she had no other than a
+spectacular concern. Only of all the Powers, by the very accident of
+common origin, by the mere circumstances of the joint occupation of the
+continent, Great Britain alone has been constantly near enough to the
+United States to impinge at times upon her sphere of development, to rub
+against her, to stand in her way. Great Britain herself has hardly known
+that this was so. But it has had the effect to make Great Britain in the
+mind of the United States the one foreign Power most potentially
+hostile.
+
+In aloofness and silence, ignorant of the world, the American people
+nursed its wrath and brooded over the causes of offence which have
+seemed so large to it, though so trivial or so unintentional on the part
+of England, till the minds of the majority of the people held nothing
+but ill-feeling and contempt in response to England's good-will towards
+them. And always the United States has had those at her elbow who were
+willing--nay, for their own interests, eager--to play upon her wounded
+feelings and to exaggerate every wrong and every slight, however small
+or imaginary, placed upon her by Great Britain.
+
+Thus the two peoples not only misunderstand each other but they
+misunderstand each other in different ways. They look at each other from
+widely sundered points of view and in diverse spirits. The people of the
+United States dislike and distrust Great Britain. They cannot believe
+that Great Britain's good-will for them is sincere. The expressions of
+that good-will, neglected while the American people was comparatively
+weak and finding expression now when it is strong, the majority of
+Americans imagine to be no more than the voice of fear. That alone shows
+their ignorance of England--their obliviousness of the kinship of the
+peoples. The two are of one origin and each may take it for granted that
+neither will ever be afraid of the other--or of any other earthly
+Power. That is not one of the failings of the stock.
+
+The American people has thus never attained to any right view of the
+British Empire. By the accident of the war which gave the nation birth,
+the name "British" became a name of reproach in American ears. They have
+never since been able to look at Great Britain save through the
+cross-lights of their own interests, which have distorted their vision,
+while there have always been those at hand poisoning the national mind
+against the English. So they think of the British Empire as a bloody and
+brutal thing: of her rule of India in particular as a rule of barbarity
+and cruel force. Of late years American writers have come to tell
+Americans the truth; namely, that if the power of Great Britain were to
+be wiped out to-morrow and all her monuments were to perish except only
+those that she has built in India, the historians of future generations,
+looking only to those monuments in India, would pronounce Great Britain
+to have been, of all the Powers that have held great Empire since the
+beginning of time, the largest benefactor to the human race. But of this
+the American people as a whole knows nothing. It only knows that sepoys
+were blown from the mouths of British guns. So Englishmen, know that
+negroes in the South are lynched.
+
+And as the American people has formed no comprehension of the British
+Empire as a whole and is without any understanding of its spirit, so it
+has drawn for itself a caricature of the British character. As the
+Empire is brutal and sanguinary, so is the individual bullying and
+overbearing and coarse. The idea was originally inherited from
+England's old enemies in Europe. It was a reflection of the opinion of
+the French; but it has been confirmed by the frankness of criticism of
+English travellers of all things in the United States. Americans do not
+recognise that by their own sensitiveness and anxiety for the judgment
+of others--a necessary, if morbid, result of their isolation and
+self-absorption--they invited the criticism, even if they did not excuse
+its occasional ill-breeding; nor has it occurred to them that the habit
+of outspoken criticism of all foreign things is a common inheritance of
+the two peoples and that they themselves are even more garrulously, if
+less bluntly--even more vaingloriously, if less arrogantly--frank in
+their habit of comment even than the English.
+
+The same isolation and self-absorption as bred in them their
+sensitiveness to the opinions of others, made the Americans also unduly
+proud of such traits or accomplishments as strangers found to praise in
+them. This in itself might be good for a nation; but, so far as their
+understanding of Englishmen is concerned, it has unfortunately led them
+to suppose that those characteristics which they possess in so eminent a
+degree are proportionately lacking in the English character, which
+thereby incurs their contempt. Having been over-complimented on their
+own humour, they have determined that the Englishman is slow-witted,
+with no sense of fun--an opinion in itself so lacking in appreciation of
+its own absurdity as to be self-confounding. Too well assured of their
+own chivalrousness (a foible which they share with all peoples) they
+know the Englishman to be a domestic tyrant, incapable of true reverence
+of womanhood. Proud, not without reason, of their own form of
+government, wherein there is no room for a titled aristocracy, they
+delight in holding the peerage of Great Britain up to contempt (withal
+that there is a curious unconfessed strain of jealousy mingling
+therewith), and piecing together, like a child playing with bricks, the
+not too infrequent appearances of individual peers in the divorce or
+bankruptcy courts, they have constructed a fantastic image of the
+British aristocracy as a whole, wherein every member appears as either a
+_roué_ or a spendthrift. Because they are--and have been so much told
+that they are--so full of push and energy themselves, they believe
+Englishmen to be ponderous and without enterprise; whereas if, instead
+of keeping their eyes and minds permanently intent on their own
+achievements, they had looked more abroad, they would have seen that,
+magnificent as has been the work which they have done in the upbuilding
+of their own nation and wonderful as is the fabric of their greatness,
+there has simultaneously been evoked out of chaos a British Empire,
+vaster than their own estate, and which is only not so near completion
+as their own structure in proportion as it is on a larger ground plan,
+inspired by larger ideas and involving greater (as well as infinitely
+more diffused) labour in its uprearing.
+
+The statement of these facts involves no impugnment of American
+urbanity, American wit, American chivalry, or American enterprise. Only
+they are not so unique as Americans, in their isolation, conceive them
+to be. There are, in fact, others. It might not even be worth saying so
+much, if it were not that the belief in their uniqueness has necessarily
+resulted in American minds in a depreciation of the English character,
+which by so much helps to keep the two peoples estranged. Americans will
+be vastly more ready to believe in their English kinship, to like the
+English people, and to welcome a British alliance if they once get it
+into their heads that the English, as a nation, are just as fearless,
+just as chivalrous, no less fond of a joke or more depraved, nor much
+less enterprising or more careless of the feelings of others than
+themselves. That they think of Englishmen as they do to-day is not to be
+wondered at, and no blame attaches to them; for it is but a necessary
+result of causes which are easily seen. But the time has come when some
+effort to correct the errors in their vision is possible and
+desirable--not merely because they are unfair to Englishmen, which might
+be immaterial, and is no more than a fair exchange of discourtesies, but
+because the misunderstandings obstruct that good-will which would be
+such an untellable blessing, not only to the two peoples themselves, but
+to all the human race.
+
+I am well aware that many American readers will say: "What is the man
+talking of? I do not think of Englishmen like that!" Of course you do
+not, excellent and educated reader--especially if you have travelled
+much in Great Britain or if you are a member of those refined and
+cultured classes (what certain American democrats would call the
+"silk-stocking element") which constitute the select and entirely
+charming society of most of the older cities of the Atlantic seaboard as
+well as of some of the larger communities throughout the country. If,
+belonging to those classes, you do not happen to have made it your
+business, either as a politician or a newspaper man, to be in close
+touch with the real sentiments of the masses of the country as a whole,
+you scarcely believe that anybody in America--except a few Irishmen and
+Germans--does think like that. If, however, you happen to be a good
+"mixer" in politics or have enjoyed the austerities of an apprenticeship
+in journalism,--if in fact you know the sentiments of your countrymen, I
+need not argue with you. Nor perhaps are very many Americans of any
+class conscious of holding all these views at once. None the less, if a
+composite photograph could be made of the typical Englishman as he is
+figured in the minds of, let us say, twenty millions of the American
+people--excluding negroes, Indians, and foreigners--the resultant figure
+would be little dissimilar from the sketch which I have made.
+
+And I have said that, in holding these ideas, the Americans do but make
+a fair exchange of discourtesies; for the Englishman has likewise queer
+notions of the typical American. There is always this vast difference,
+however, that the Englishman is predisposed to like the American. In
+spite of his ignorance he feels a great--and, in view of that ignorance,
+an almost inexplicable--good-will for him. But it is not inexplicable,
+for once more the causes of his misapprehensions are easily traced.
+
+First, there has been the eternal pre-occupation of the English people
+with the affairs of other parts of the world. When Great Britain has
+been so inextricably involved with the policies of all the earth that
+almost any day news might come from Calcutta, from Berlin, from St.
+Petersburg, from Pekin, or Teheran, or from almost any point in Asia,
+Africa, or Australia, which would shake the Empire to its foundation,
+how could the people spare time to become intimately acquainted with
+the United States? Of coarse Englishmen talk of the "State of Chicago,"
+and--as I heard an English peasant not long ago--of "Yankee earls."
+
+During all these years individual Americans have come to England in
+large numbers and have been duly noted and observed; but what the people
+of any nation notices in the casually arriving representatives of any
+other is not the points wherein the visitors resemble themselves, but
+the points of difference. In the case of Americans coming to England the
+fundamental traits are all resemblances and therefore escape notice,
+while only the differences--which by that very fact stand proclaimed as
+non-essentials--attract attention. So it is that the English people,
+having had acquaintance with a number of typical New Englanders, have
+drawn their conclusion as to the universality of one strong nasal
+American accent; they think the American people garrulously outspoken in
+criticism, with a rather offensive boastfulness, without any
+consciousness that precisely that same trait in themselves, in a
+slightly different form, is one of the chief causes why Englishmen are
+not conspicuously popular in any European country. From peculiarities of
+dress and manner which are not familiar to him in the product of his own
+public schools and universities, the Englishman has been inclined to
+think that the American people is not, even in its "better classes," a
+population of gentlemen.
+
+Moreover, many Englishmen go to the United States--the vast majority for
+a stay of a few days or weeks, or a month or two--and they tell their
+friends, or the public at large in print, all about America and its
+people. It is not given to every one to be able, in the course of a few
+weeks or a month or two, to see below the surface indications down to
+the root-traits of a people--a feat which becomes of necessity the more
+difficult when those root-traits are one's own root-traits and the
+fundamental traits of one's own people at home, while on the surface are
+all manner of queer, confusing dazzlements of local peculiarities which
+jump to the stranger's vision and set him blinking. Yet more difficult
+does the feat appear when it is realised that the American people is
+scattered over a continent some three thousand miles across--so that San
+Francisco is little nearer to New York than is Liverpool--and that the
+section of the people with whom the Englishman necessarily comes first
+and, unless he penetrates both far and deep into the people, most
+closely in contact is precisely that class from which it is least safe
+to draw conclusions as to the thoughts, manners, or politics of the
+people as a whole. Therefore it is that one of the most acute observers
+informed Europe that in America "a gentleman had only to take to
+politics to become immediately _déclassé_"--which, speaking of the
+politics of the country as a whole, is purely absurd. The visiting
+Englishman has generally found the whole sphere of municipal and local
+politics a novel field to him and has naturally been interested. Probing
+it, he comes upon all manner of tales of corruption and wickedness. He
+does not see that the body of American "politics," as the word is
+understood in England, is moderately free from these taints, but he
+tells the world of the corruption in that sphere of politics which he
+has studied merely because it does not exist at home and is new to him;
+and all the world knows that American politics are indescribably
+corrupt.
+
+Similarly the visiting European goes into polite society and is amazed
+at the peculiar qualities of some of the persons whom he meets there. He
+tells stories about those peculiar people, but the background of the
+society, against which these people stood out so clearly, a background
+which is so much like his own at home, almost escapes his notice or is
+too uninteresting and familiar to talk about. There is no one to explain
+fully to the English people that while in England educated society keeps
+pretty well to itself, there are in America no hurdles--or none that a
+lively animal may not easily leap--to keep the black sheep away from the
+white, or the white from straying off anywhere among the black, so that
+a large part of the English people has imbibed the notion that there are
+really no refined or cultured circles in the United States.
+
+Whenever a financial fraud of a large size is discovered in America, the
+world is told of it, just as certainly as it is told when an English
+peer finds his way to the divorce court; but nobody expounds to the
+nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most
+American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the
+drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the
+English people have come to think of American business ethics as being
+too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware
+that only in most exceptional cases can great or permanent individual
+commercial success be won by fraud, and that nothing but fundamental
+honesty will serve as the basis for a great national trade such as the
+United States has built up.
+
+Visiting Englishmen are bewildered by the strange types of peoples whom
+they see upon the streets and by the talk which they hear of "German
+elements" and "French elements" and "Scandinavian elements" in the
+population. But they do not as a rule see that these various "elements,"
+when in the first generation of citizenship, are but a fringe upon the
+fabric of society, and when in the second or third generation they have
+a tendency to become entirely swallowed up and to merge all their
+national characteristics by absorption in the Anglo-Saxon stock; and
+that apart from and unheeding all these irrelevant appendages, the great
+American people goes on its way, homogeneous, unruffled, and English at
+bottom.
+
+Finally Englishmen read American newspapers and, not understanding the
+different relation in which those newspapers stand to the people, they
+compare with them the normal English papers and draw inferences which
+are quite unjust. Similar inferences no less unjust may be drawn from
+hearing the speech of a certain number of well-to-do Americans,
+belonging, as Englishmen opine, to the class of "gentlemen."
+
+These misunderstandings do less harm to the Englishman than to the
+American, inasmuch as the Englishman has that predisposition to national
+cordiality which the American has not. But, though the Englishman's
+mistakes do not influence his good-will to the United States, though he
+himself attaches no serious importance to them, his utterance of them is
+taken seriously by the Americans themselves and does not tend to the
+promotion of international good feeling. Therefore it is that it is no
+less desirable that English misconceptions of the United States should
+be corrected than it is that the American people should be brought to a
+juster appreciation of the British character and Empire.
+
+It is in America, doubtless, that missionary work is most needed,
+inasmuch as all England would at any minute welcome an American alliance
+with enthusiasm; while in the United States any public suggestion of
+such an alliance never fails to provoke immediate and vehement protest.
+It is true that that protest issues primarily from the Irish and German
+elements; and it may seem absurd that the American people as a whole
+should suffer itself to be swayed in a matter of so national a character
+by a minority which is not only comparatively unimportant in numbers,
+but which the true American majority regards with some irritability as
+distinctly alien.
+
+There are a large number of constituencies in the United States,
+however, where the Irish and German votes, individually or in
+combination, hold the balance of power in the electorate, and not only
+must many individual members of Congress hesitate to antagonise so
+influential a section of their constituents, but it is even questionable
+whether the united and harmonious action of those two elements might
+not, under certain conditions, be able to unseat a sufficient number of
+such individual members as to change the political complexion of one or
+both of the Houses of Congress, and even, in a close election, of the
+Administration itself. Nor is it necessary to repeat again that when the
+anti-British outcry is raised, though primarily by a minority and an
+alien minority, it finds a response in the breasts of a vast number of
+good Americans in whom the traditional dislike of England, though
+latent, still persists solely by reason of misapprehension and
+misunderstandings. Therefore it is that so many of the best Americans,
+who in their hearts know well how desirable an alliance with England
+would be, are content to deprecate its discussion and to say that things
+are well enough as they are; though again I say that things are never
+well enough so long as they might be better. However desirable such an
+alliance may be, however much to the benefit of the nation, it would,
+they say, be bad politics to bring it forward as a party question. And
+to bring it forward without its becoming from the outset a party
+question would be plainly impossible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But would it be bad politics? Can it ever, in the long run, be bad
+politics to champion any cause which is great and good? It might be that
+it would be difficult for an individual member of Congress to come
+forward as the active advocate of a British alliance and not lose his
+seat; but in the end, the man who did it, or the party which did it,
+would surely win. When two peoples have a dislike of each other based on
+intimate knowledge by each of the other's character, to rise as the
+champion of their alliance might be hopeless; but when two peoples are
+held apart only by misunderstanding and by lack of perception of the
+boons that alliance between them would bring, it can need but courage
+and earnestness to carry conviction to the people and to bring success.
+
+In such a cause there is one man in America to whom one's thoughts of
+necessity turn; and he is hampered by being President of the United
+States. Perhaps when his present term of office is over Mr. Roosevelt,
+instead of seeking the honourable seclusion which so often engulfs
+ex-Presidents, will find ready to his hand a task more than worthy of
+the man who was instrumental in bringing peace to Russia and Japan,--a
+task in the execution of which it would be far from being a disadvantage
+that he is as cordially regarded in Germany as he is in England and has
+himself great good-will towards the German Empire. Any movement on the
+part of Great Britain in company with any European nation could only be
+regarded by Germany as a conspiracy against herself: nothing that
+England or France or Japan--or any Englishman, Frenchman, or
+Japanese--could say or do would be received otherwise than with
+suspicion and resentment. But, after all, the good of humanity must come
+before any aspirations on the part of the German Empire, and it is the
+American people which must speak, though it speaks through the mouth of
+its President. If the American people makes up its mind that its
+interest and its duty alike dictate that it should join hands with
+England in the cause of peace, neither Germany nor any Power can do
+otherwise than acquiesce.
+
+It is no novelty, either in the United States or in other countries, for
+considerations of temporary political expediency to stand in the way of
+the welfare of the people, nor is there any particular reason why an
+American politician should attach any importance to the desires of
+England. But we find ourselves again confronted with the same old
+question, whether the American people as a whole, who have often shown
+an ability to rise above party politics, can find any excuse for setting
+any consideration, either of individual or partisan interest, above the
+welfare of all the world. Yet once more: It is for Americans
+individually to ask their consciences whether any considerations
+whatever, actual or conceivable, justify them in withholding from all
+humanity the boon which it is in their power, and theirs alone, to
+give,--the blessing of Universal and Perpetual Peace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And yet, when this much has been said, it seems that so little has been
+told. It was pointed out, in one of the earlier chapters, how the people
+of each country in looking at the people of the other are apt to see
+only the provoking little peculiarities of speech or manner on the
+surface, overlooking the strength of the characteristics which underlie
+them. So, in these pages, it seems that we, in analysing the individual
+traits, have failed to get any vision of the character of either people
+as a whole. It is the trees again which obscure the view of the forest.
+
+We have arrived at no general impression of the British Empire or of the
+British people. We have shown nothing of the majesty of that Empire; of
+its dignity in the eyes of a vast variety of peoples; of the high
+ambitions (unspoken, after the way of the English, but none the less
+earnest), which have inspired and still inspire it; of its maintenance
+of the standards of justice and fair dealing; of its tolerance or the
+patience with which it strives to guide the darkened peoples towards the
+light. Nothing has been said of the splendid service which the Empire
+receives from the sons of the Sea Wife; yet certainly the world has seen
+nothing comparable to the Colonial services of Great Britain, of which
+the Indian Civil Service stands as the type.
+
+Nor have we said anything of the British people, with its
+steadfastness, in spite of occasional frenzies, its sanity, and its
+silent acceptance, and almost automatic practice, of a high level of
+personal and political morality. Above all we have seen nothing of the
+sweetness of the home life of the English country people, whereof the
+more well-to-do lead lives of wide sympathies, much refinement, and
+great goodness; while the poor under difficult conditions, hold fast to
+a self-respecting decency, little changed since the days when from among
+them, there went out the early settlers to the New England over seas,
+which never fails, notwithstanding individual weaknesses, to win the
+regard of one who lives among them.
+
+So of the American people; we have conveyed no adequate impression of
+the manly optimism, the courageous confidence in the ultimate virtue of
+goodness and sound principles, on which the belief in the destiny of
+their own country is based. The nation has prospered by its virtues.
+Every page of their history preaches to the people that it is honesty
+and faith and loyalty which succeed, and they believe in their future
+greatness because they believe themselves to possess, and hope to hold
+to, those virtues as in the past.
+
+It may be that, living in the silences and solitudes of the frontier and
+the wilderness, they have found the greater need of ready speech when
+communication has offered. It may be that the mere necessity of planning
+together the framework of their society and of building up their State
+out of chaos has imposed on them the necessity of more outspokenness.
+Certainly they have discarded, or have not assumed, the reticence of the
+modern English of England; and much of this freedom of utterance
+Europeans misinterpret, much (because the fashion of it is strange to
+themselves) they believe to be insincere. In which judgments they are
+quite wrong. The American people are profoundly sincere and intensely in
+earnest.
+
+Since the establishment of the Republic, in the necessity of civilizing
+a continent, in the breathless struggle of the Civil War, in the
+rapidity with which society has been compelled to organize itself, in
+the absorption and assimilation of the continuous stream of foreign
+immigrants, the people have always been at grips with problems of
+immediate, almost desperate urgency; and they have never lost, or come
+near to losing, heart or courage. They have learned above all things the
+lesson of the efficacy of work. They have acquired the habit of action.
+Self-reliance has been bred in them. They know that in the haste of the
+days of ferment abuses grew up and went unchecked; and they know that in
+that same haste they missed some of the elegancies which a more
+leisurely and easier life might have given opportunity to acquire. But
+for a generation back, they have been earnestly striving to eradicate
+those abuses and to lift themselves, their speech, their manners, their
+art and literature to, at least, a level with the highest. It has been
+impossible in these pages (it would perhaps be impossible in any pages)
+to give any unified picture of this national character with its
+activity, its self-reliance, its belief in the homely virtues and its
+earnest ambition to make the best of itself. But of the future of a
+people with such a character there need be no misgivings, and Americans
+are justified in the confidence in their destiny.
+
+What is needed is that these two peoples holding, with similar
+steadfastness, to the same high ideals, pushing on such closely parallel
+lines in advance of all other peoples, should come to see more clearly
+how near of kin they are and how much the world loses by any lack of
+unison in their effort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once more let me ask readers to turn back and read again the paragraphs
+from other pens with which this book is introduced.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX. (See Chapter III., pp. 81, _sqq._)
+
+
+This book was almost ready for the press when Dr. Albert Shaw's
+collection of essays was published under the title of _The Outlook for
+the Average Man_. Dr. Shaw is one of America's most lucid thinkers and
+he contributes what I take to be a new (though once stated an obviously
+true) explanation of what I have spoken of as the homogeneousness of the
+American people. The West, as we all know, was largely settled from the
+East. That is to say that a family or a member of a family in New York
+moved westward to Illinois, thence in the next generation to Minnesota,
+thence again to Montana or Oregon. A similar movement went on down the
+whole depth of the United States, families established in North Carolina
+migrating first to Kentucky, then to Ohio, so to Texas, and finally on
+to California. All parts of the country therefore have, as the nucleus
+of their population, people of precisely the same stock, habits, and
+ways of thought. The West was settled "not by radiation of influence
+from the older centres, but by the actual transplantation of the men and
+women." Dr. Shaw proceeds:
+
+"England is not large in area and the people are generally regarded as
+homogeneous in their insularity. But as a matter of fact the populations
+of the different parts of England are scarcely at all acquainted in any
+other part. Thus the Yorkshireman would only by the rarest chance have
+relatives living in Kent or Cornwall. The intimacy between North
+Carolina and Missouri, for example, is incomparably greater than that
+between one part of England and another part. In like manner, the people
+of the North of France know very little of those of the South of France,
+or even of those living in districts not at all remote. Exactly the same
+thing is true of Italy and Germany, and is characteristic of almost
+every other European land. As compared with other countries, we in
+America are literally a band of brothers."--_The Outlook for the Average
+Man_, pages 104, 105.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+A
+
+     _Academy_, newspaper, the, 159
+
+     Alderman, election of an, 239;
+       "Mike," 252
+
+     Alliance, Anglo-American, desirable, 7, 430
+
+     Alliances, entangling, what they mean, 5
+
+     Amateurs, in sport, 421
+
+     American accent, the, 106
+
+     American dislike of England, 43, 46, 98 _sqq._, 112, 430
+
+     American journalists in London, 220
+
+     "American methods," in business, 328
+
+     American people, the, a bellicose people, 8;
+       its fondness for ideal, 10;
+       sensitive to criticism, 34;
+       dislike of subterfuges, 34;
+       an Anglo-Saxon people, 37, 87, 140;
+       and its leading men, 48;
+       foreign elements in, 58, 80, 227, 443;
+       self-reliant, 67;
+       resourceful, 70;
+       homogeneous, 80, 211, 451;
+       quick to move, 87;
+       "sense of the state" in, 89;
+       its ambitions, 90;
+       character of, influenced by the country, 97;
+       likes round numbers, 105;
+       its provincialism, 113;
+       its isolation, 116, 434;
+       effect of criticism on, 115, 157;
+       its attitude toward women, 119 _sqq._;
+       its insularity, 146;
+       manners of, 147;
+       pushfulness, 148;
+       did not invent all progress, 151;
+       humour of, 152;
+       its literature, 157;
+       science, 159;
+       art, 160;
+       architecture, 160;
+       its self-confidence, 164;
+       factors in the education of, 171;
+       influence of the Civil War on, 188;
+       its hunger for culture, 189;
+       not superficial, 193, 204;
+       eclecticism, 194;
+       musical knowledge of, 199;
+       drama of, 201;
+       takes culture in paroxysms, 203;
+       looks to the future, 208;
+       political corruption in, 234;
+       great parties in, 256;
+       political sanity of, 284;
+       purifying itself, 300, 324, 336, 353, 364;
+       aristocracy in, 309;
+       shrinks from European commercial conditions, 331;
+       hatred of trusts, 331;
+       misrepresented by its press, 340;
+       contempt for hereditary legislators, 346;
+       commercial integrity, 351;
+       religious feeling in, 353;
+       insistence of an individuality, 382;
+       a character sketch, 448
+
+     American speech, uniformity of, 85, 209
+
+     Americanisms, in English speech, 209;
+       their origin in America, 216;
+       disappearing, 224
+
+     Americans, at home in England, 36;
+       fraternise with English abroad, 38;
+       and "foreigners," 39;
+       as sailors, 62;
+       their ambitions, 90;
+       in London, 106;
+       ignorant of foreign affairs, 113;
+       treatment of women, 119 _sqq._;
+       their insularity, 146;
+       energy, 148;
+       humour, 152;
+       what they think of English universities, 169;
+       pride of family in, 181;
+       know no "betters," 194;
+       ambitious of versatility, 205;
+       as linguists, 206;
+       purists in speech, 219;
+       cannot lie, 352;
+       as story-tellers, 366;
+       non-litigious, 394;
+       do not build for posterity, 396;
+       dislike stamps, 398;
+       as sportsmen, 409
+
+     _Anglais, l'_, 2, 37, 141
+
+     Anglomania, 163
+
+     Anglo-Saxon, family likeness, the, 35, 432;
+       particularist spirit, 37;
+       versatility, 74;
+       spirit in America, 87, 244;
+       superiority, 118;
+       attitude towards women, 140;
+       ideals in education, 170;
+       a fighting race, 187;
+       ambition to be versatile, 205;
+       and Celt in politics, 254;
+       superior morality of, 349;
+       pluck and energy, 381;
+       the sporting instinct, 426
+
+     Anstey, F. L., his German professor, 156
+
+     Archer, Wm., on the Anglo-Saxon type, 38;
+       on the American's outlook on the world, 97;
+       on pressing clothes, 214
+
+     Architecture, American, 160
+
+     Aristocracy, in the U. S., 309;
+       the British disreputable, 338, 442
+
+     Arnold, Matthew, his judgment of Americans, 108;
+       his clothes, 108;
+       on American colleges, 167;
+       on American newspapers, 177;
+       on generals as booksellers, 185
+
+     Art, American, 160;
+       feminine knowledge of, 182
+
+     Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad, the, 363
+
+     Athletics in England and America, 420
+
+     Atlantis, a new, 94
+
+
+B
+
+     Baldwin, W. H., 305
+
+     Banks, American and English, 383
+
+     Barnard College, 142
+
+     Bears, bickering with, 381
+
+     Bell-cord, divination by the, 363
+
+     Benedick and Beatrice, 429
+
+     Bonds, recoiling from, 236
+
+     Books, advantage of reading, 172;
+       ease of buying, in America, 174;
+       prices of, 175;
+       publishing American, in England, 221
+
+     Booksellers as soldiers, 185
+
+     Bosses in politics, 239, 252, 274
+
+     Boston, culture of, 195, 219
+
+     Botticelli, 185
+
+     Brewers as gentlemen, 315
+
+     Bribery in American politics, 234
+
+     "British," hatred of the name, 57
+
+     British bondholders, 52
+
+     British commerce, 52
+
+     British Empire, American misunderstanding of, 20, 112, 151, 435;
+       its size, 437;
+       its beauty, 447
+
+     Bryan, W. J., first nomination of, 234, 273;
+       and W. R. Hearst, 283
+
+     Bryce, James, on American electoral system, 247;
+       on State sovereignty, 262;
+       on political corruption, 279;
+       on the U. S. Senate, 287
+
+     Buffalo in New York, 416
+
+     Buildings, tall, built in sections, 368
+
+     Burke, Edward, in Ireland, 101;
+       indictment against a whole people, 101
+
+     Business, as a career, 317;
+       its effect on mentality, 318;
+       the romance of American, 319;
+       frauds in, 324;
+       the tendency of modern, to consolidations, 330;
+       speculation in America, 386;
+       less ruthless in America, 388;
+       slipshod, 395;
+       principles of modern, 404
+
+
+C
+
+     California, the Japanese in, 263, 287
+
+     Cambon, M. Paul, 139
+
+     Campbell, Wilfred, in England, 92
+
+     Canada, American investments in, 379
+
+     Canadian opinion of England, 92;
+       resemblance to Americans, 379
+
+     Carlyle, Thomas, 190
+
+     Caruso, Signor, 384
+
+     Celts, non-Anglo-Saxon, 254
+
+     Century Club, the, 103
+
+     _Champagne Standard, The_, 147
+
+     Chaperons, 381, 393
+
+     Chatham and American manufactures, 375
+
+     Cheques, cashing, 383
+
+     Chicago, pride in itself, 163;
+       pigs in, 177
+
+     Civil War, the navy in the, 64;
+       causes of, 11;
+       magnitude of, 186;
+       its value to the people, 188, 218
+
+     Classics, American reprints of English, 174
+
+     Cleveland, Grover, on Venezuela, 43, 109
+
+     Climate, the English, 121, 350
+
+     Co-education, its effect on the sexes, 127;
+       in America, 142
+
+     Colonies, destiny of British, 94
+
+     Colquhoun, A. R., 113
+
+     Commercial morality, 308
+
+     Concord school, the, 157
+
+     Congress, corruption in, 244;
+       compared with Parliament, 246, 249;
+       more honest than supposed, 252;
+       powers of, 289;
+       best men excluded from, 345
+
+     Congressmen, how influenced, 247, 251;
+       how elected, 247;
+       log-rolling among, 249;
+       hampered by the Constitution, 402
+
+     Conkling, Roscoe, 148
+
+     Constitution, U. S., growth of, 6;
+       interpretation of, 288;
+       and Congress, 402
+
+     Consular service, the American, 78
+
+     Contract, a proposed international, 338
+
+     Convention, a National Liberal, 270
+
+     Copyright laws, English, faulty, 221
+
+     Corporations, Mr. Roosevelt and the, 296;
+       persecuted by individual States, 403
+
+     Corruption, in municipal affairs, 232, 239, 242;
+       in national affairs, 234;
+       in State legislatures, 235;
+       in English counties, 237;
+       in Congress, 244;
+       in the railway service, 361
+
+     Court, U. S. Supreme, 400
+
+     Criticism, English, of America, 116, 157;
+       American, of England, 117
+
+     Croker, Richard, 278
+
+     Cromwell as a fertiliser, 190
+
+     Crooks, William, elected Premier, 271
+
+     Crosland, W. H., 88
+
+     Cuba as a cause of war, 12
+
+     Cyrano de Bergerac, 196, 202
+
+
+D
+
+     Debtors favoured by laws, 403
+
+     Democrats correspond to Liberals, 256
+
+     Demolins, Edmond, on Anglo-Saxon superiority, 2;
+       on _l'Anglais_, 37
+
+     Doctor, the making of a, 69
+
+     "Dog eat dog," 388
+
+     Domestic and imported goods, 163
+
+     Drama, the, in England and America, 201
+
+     Drunkenness, in London, 131
+
+     Dunne, F. P., 154
+
+
+E
+
+     Education, in England and America, 166;
+       object of American, 193
+
+     Elections, purity of, 229 (note);
+       municipal, 239;
+       to Congress, 241;
+       of a Prime Minister, 265;
+       the last English general, 274;
+       virulence of American, 281
+
+     Electric light, towns lighted by, 367
+
+     Embalmed beef scandals, 341
+
+     Emerson, R. W., on the Civil War, 188;
+       the apostle of the individual, 382
+
+     English-made goods, 365, 373
+
+     English society, changes in, 314
+
+     English "style" in printing, 221
+
+     Englishmen, local varieties of, 85;
+       effect of expansion on, 95;
+       feeling of, toward Americans, 99, 434;
+       as specialists, 105;
+       dropping their H's, 106;
+       check-suited, 108;
+       their cosmopolitanism, 114;
+       as husbands, 123;
+       insularity of, 145;
+       as grumblers, 149;
+       lecturing, 195;
+       as linguists, 206;
+       study of antiquity, 208;
+       careless of speech, 220;
+       in American politics, 226;
+       in English politics, 231;
+       political integrity of, 238, 278;
+       and business, 321;
+       misunderstand American people, 347;
+       the world's admiration of, 349;
+       religious feeling in, 353;
+       sense of honour in, 359;
+       commercial morality of, 365;
+       distrust American industrial stability, 371;
+       as investors in U. S. and Canada, 379;
+       slowness of, 380;
+       as sportsmen, 415;
+       admirable qualities of, 448
+
+     European plan, the, 104
+
+     Exhibition, an American, in London, 161
+
+
+F
+
+     Federal Government, the, and Illinois, 262;
+       and Louisiana, 262;
+       and California, 263;
+       powers of, 288
+
+     Federalism, progress of, in America, 217
+
+     Feminism, 139
+
+     Ferguson, 133
+
+     _Fliegende Blätter_, 153
+
+     Football in England, 412
+
+     Foreign elements in the American people, 58, 80, 82, 138, 226
+
+     Forty-fourth Regiment, the, 40
+
+     France, England's _entente_ with, 8;
+       and American commerce, 378
+
+     Franklin, Benjamin, his _Autobiography_, 157;
+       and English political morality, 280
+
+     Frauds in American business, 324
+
+     Free silver, poison, the, 235;
+       campaign of 1896, 280
+
+     Freeman, E. A., on the Englishman of America, 42
+
+     Frenchmen, opinions of, 2, 36, 37, 92, 139, 177, 378;
+       attitude towards women, 120;
+       towards learning, 205
+
+     Frontier life, as a discipline, 72, 381
+
+
+G
+
+     _Gentleman_, Bismarck's _parole de_, 234
+
+     Gentlemen, brewers as, 315;
+       and business men, 316;
+       in sport, 420
+
+     Gentlemen's agreement, the, 354
+
+     George, Lloyd, 334
+
+     Germans, outnumber Irish in N. Y., 58;
+       attitude toward women, 120, 140;
+       humour of, 153;
+       laboriousness of, 205;
+       in politics, 226, 255;
+       as judges of honesty, 351 (note);
+       in sport, 426
+
+     Germany, ambitions of, 29;
+       Monroe Doctrine aimed at, 46
+
+     Gibson, C. D., 160
+
+     Girl, the American, 130
+
+     Gladstone, W. E., American admiration for, 167;
+       on Japan, 205
+
+     Golf, the power of, 409
+
+     Granger agitation, the, 298
+
+     Gravel-pit, politics in a, 282
+
+     Great Britain, peaceful disposition of, 8, 23;
+       pride of, 14, 61;
+       desires alliance with U. S., 19;
+       American hostility to, in 1895, 46;
+       its nearness to America geographically, 50;
+       commercially, 52;
+       historically, 54;
+       America's only enemy, 55;
+       its army in S. Africa, 75;
+       diversity of tongues in, 85;
+       Norman influence in, 87;
+       Canadian opinion of, 92;
+       miraculously enlarged, 94;
+       insularity of, 145;
+       luck of, 149;
+       cannot be judged from London, 150;
+       class distinctions disappearing, 212;
+       politics in, 231;
+       municipal bosses in, 232;
+       American conditions transplanted to, 237, 266;
+       electing a Prime Minister in, 270;
+       municipal politics in, 279;
+       becoming democratised, 314;
+       a creditor nation, 323;
+       trust-ridden, 329;
+       wealth of, 386;
+       solicitor-cursed, 393;
+       as the mother of sports, 414;
+       preoccupation of, 433
+
+     "Grieg, the American," 200
+
+
+H
+
+     Hague, Conference at The, 17
+
+     Hanotaux, Gabriel, on American commerce, 378
+
+     Harrison, Benjamin, 47
+
+     Hays, C. M., 310
+
+     Hearst, W. R., and England, 46;
+       bad influence of, 282;
+       inventor of the yellow press, 342 (note)
+
+     Hell-box, the, 281
+
+     Helleu, Paul, 196
+
+     Higginson, T. W., on American temperament, 2
+
+     Hill, James J., 310
+
+     Hoar, U. S. Senator, on England, 1;
+       on the hatred of the British, 57
+
+     Homer as a Tory, 257
+
+     Homogeneousness of the American people, 83, 211, 451
+
+     Hotel, the Fifth Avenue, 122
+
+     Hotels, ladies' entrances to, 120
+
+     Howells, W. D., 147
+
+     Hughitt, Marvin, 311, 359
+
+     Humour, American and English, 152
+
+
+I
+
+     Ideals, American devotion to, 10
+
+     Illinois and the Federal Government, 262
+
+     Immigration problem, the, 81
+
+     India, 112
+
+     Indians, red, regard of, for Englishmen, 349;
+       in the war of Independence, 350 (note);
+       Turkish baths of, 363
+
+     Individuality, American insistence on, 382, 391
+
+     Insularity, English and American, 145
+
+     International sentiments, how formed, 291
+
+     Ireland, Burke's feeling for, 101
+
+     Irish, the influence of, against England, 58, 444;
+       attitude towards women, 140;
+       vote in politics, 227;
+       as a corrupting influence, 252;
+       non-Anglo-Saxon, 254;
+       lack independence, 255;
+       in New York, 277
+
+     Irving, Washington, on frontiersmen, 381
+
+     Italians, in municipal politics, 241, 253;
+       lynched in New Orleans, 262
+
+
+J
+
+     James, Henry, 155
+
+     Japan, England's alliance with, 8;
+       its eclectic method, 193;
+       Mr. Gladstone on, 205;
+       and California, 263, 287;
+       tin-tacks for, 375
+
+     Japanese, in California, 263;
+       British admiration of, 351;
+       watering their horses, 367;
+       as "John," 376
+
+     Johnson, Samuel, 132
+
+     Joint purses, 332
+
+     Jonson, Ben, 215
+
+     Justice in American courts, 400
+
+
+K
+
+     King George men, 349
+
+     Kipling, Rudyard, his "type-writer girl," 132;
+       "The Sea Wife," 187;
+       "The Monkey-Puzzler," 380;
+       "An Error in the Fourth Dimension," 408
+
+
+L
+
+     La Farge, John, 103, 161
+
+     Lang, Andrew, on Americanisms, 221
+
+     Law, Bonar, 334
+
+     Legislators must read and write, 71
+
+     Legislatures, quality of American State, 79, 401
+
+     Letters, two, 389
+
+     Lewis, Alfred Henry, 154
+
+     Liberals, English, and Democrats, 256;
+       influence of, on American thought, 346
+
+     "Liberty, that damned absurd word," 10
+
+     _Life_, New York, 129, 162
+
+     Literature, English ignorance of American, 157
+
+     Litigation, American dislike of, 394
+
+     "Live and let live," 388
+
+     Lobbyists, 244
+
+     Locomotives, temporary and permanent, 396
+
+     Log-rolling, 249
+
+     London, foreign affairs in, 114;
+       Strand improvements, 151;
+       "raining in," 163;
+       a Tammany Hall in, 232
+
+     Lord, Englishmen's love of a, 309
+
+     Lords, the House of, and the U. S. Senate, 313;
+       a defence of, 342
+
+     Louisiana and the Federal Government, 262
+
+     Loyal Legion, the, 187, 189
+
+     Luck, English belief in, 108
+
+     Lying, American ability in, 352
+
+     Lynchings, 302
+
+
+M
+
+     MacDowell, Edward, 200
+
+     Mafia in New Orleans, 263
+
+     Magazines, American, 160, 171, 180
+
+     Mansfield, Richard, 202
+
+     Max O'Rell, on John Bull and Jonathan, 36, 92;
+       on American newspapers, 177
+
+     Merchant marine, the American, 63
+
+     Mexico, possible annexation of, 27
+
+     Mining camp life, 70, 132
+
+     "Molly-be-damned," 134
+
+     Monopolies, artificial and natural, 407
+
+     Moore, _Zeluco_, 119
+
+     Morality, of the two people, sexual, 120;
+       political, _see under_ Corruption;
+       commercial, 308, 400;
+       sporting, 426
+
+     Morgan, Pierpont, 358
+
+     Mormons and ants, 214
+
+     Morris, Clara, 201
+
+     Mount Stephen, Lord, 310
+
+     Municipal politics, 231, 239, 242
+
+     Münsterberg, Hugo, on England, 36;
+       on American commercial ethics, 351;
+       on sport, 426
+
+     Music in England and America, 198
+
+
+N
+
+     N---- G----, 125
+
+     Navarro, Madame de, 201
+
+     Navigating, how to learn, 70
+
+     Navy, the American, 62
+
+     Negro problem, the, 301
+
+     New Orleans, battle of, 41;
+       the Mafia in, 263
+
+     New York, not typically American, 72;
+       proud of London, 163;
+       culture of, 219;
+       Irish influence in, 256;
+       in national politics, 277
+
+     Newspapers, American and English, 177;
+       sensationalism in, 326;
+       peculiarities of American, 340
+
+     Norman influence in England, 87
+
+     Northern Pacific Railroad, the, 361
+
+     Norton, James, 163
+
+
+O
+
+     Operas, American knowledge of, 198
+
+     Opportunity, America and, 387
+
+     Oxenstiern, Count, 149
+
+     Oxford, value of, 169
+
+
+P
+
+     Packing-house scandals, 326
+
+     Panic, financial, the, of 1907, 325, 402
+
+     Parliament, railway influence in, 246;
+       compared with Congress, 249, 344
+
+     Parsnips, 102
+
+     Parties, the two great, in America, 256;
+       interdependence of national and local organisations, 264
+
+     Patronage, party, 265
+
+     Peace, universal, the possibility of, 13, 32, 431
+
+     Peerage, an American, 310;
+       democracy of the British, 316;
+       morals of, 338
+
+     Pheasants in London, 416
+
+     Philadelphia, corruption in, 252
+
+     Philistinism in England and America, 185
+
+     Pigs, in Chicago, 177;
+       how to roast, 372
+
+     Pilgrims, the Society of, 47
+
+     Platform in American sense, 215
+
+     Poet's Corner, 132
+
+     Police, corruption through the, 232
+
+     Politics, American, the foreign vote in, 227, 443;
+       the "best people" in, 228, 441;
+       what it means in America, 230;
+       municipal, 231;
+       Republican and Democrat, meaning of, 256;
+       national and municipal, 264;
+       President Roosevelt in, 300
+
+     Polo, American, 412
+
+     Pooling, railway, 332, 357
+
+     Poppycock, 426
+
+     Postal laws, 171
+
+     Posters, American humour and, 155
+
+     Presidency, Mr. Roosevelt and the, 293
+
+     Protection, policy of, 65, 245, 253
+
+     Publishers, American and English, 222
+
+     _Punch_, London, 152, 198
+
+     Putnam, Herbert, and H. G. Wells, 93
+
+
+R
+
+     Railways, oppression of, by States, 297, 403;
+       pooling by, 332;
+       working agreements in English, 333;
+       English and American attitude towards, contrasted, 334;
+       morality on American, 355;
+       and English, 359;
+       peculation on, 361;
+       and the Standard Oil Co., 392
+
+     Reed, E. T., 154
+
+     Reich, Dr. Emil, 126
+
+     Religious feeling of the two peoples, 353
+
+     Re-mount scandal, 341
+
+     Representative system, the, 247
+
+     Republican party, the, in Philadelphia, 252;
+       corresponds to English conservatives, 256
+
+     Reverence, American lack of, 48, 76
+
+     Rhodes, Cecil, 319
+
+     Rhodes scholarships, 166
+
+     River and harbour bills, 249
+
+     Robin, the American, 215
+
+     Robinson, Philip, on Chicago, 177
+
+     Rodin, A., 196
+
+     Roman Catholic Church in relation to women, 140
+
+     Roosevelt, imaginary telegram from, 16;
+       and the merchant marine, 66;
+       and purity of elections, 229 (note);
+       and post-route doctrine, 290;
+       his influence for good, 293;
+       his commonplace virtues, 293 (note);
+       inventor of the "'fraid strap," 294;
+       "Teddy" or "Theodore," 295;
+       an aristocrat, 295;
+       and the corporations, 296;
+       misrepresentation of, 298;
+       as a politician, 300;
+       his imperiousness, 301;
+       and the negro problem, 305;
+       and wealth, 336;
+       as peacemaker, 445
+
+     Rostand, M. E., 196
+
+     Ruskin, John, price of his books, 175;
+       on America's lack of castles, 191;
+       on Tories, 257
+
+     Russia, England's agreement with, 8
+
+
+S
+
+     S---- B----, the Hon., 108
+
+     Sailors, British and American, fraternise, 39;
+       Americans as, 63
+
+     Schools, American, 170;
+       English, 176
+
+     Schurz, Carl, on American intelligence, 2
+
+     Schuyler, Montgomery, 103
+
+     Scotland, religious feeling in, 354
+
+     Sea-wife's sons, the, 187
+
+     Senate, the, its place in the Constitution, 286;
+       treaty-making power of, 287;
+       and the House of Lords, 313
+
+     Sepoys, blown from cannon, 112
+
+     Shakespeare in America, 195
+
+     Shaw, Albert, 451
+
+     Ship subsidies, 64
+
+     Shooting in America, 418
+
+     Sky-scrapers, 368
+
+     Speculation in America, 387
+
+     Smith, Sydney, on women speaking, 79
+
+     Society, American, mixed, 182, 442
+
+     Soldiers, American and British, in China, 39;
+       compared, 61;
+       material for, in U. S., 75;
+       British, in S. Africa, 75;
+       as farm hands, 186;
+       as Presidents, 187
+
+     Solicitors, 393
+
+     South, the dying spirit of the, 306
+
+     Southerners, in Northern States, 228;
+       lynchings by, 303
+
+     Spanish war, the, reasons for, 11;
+       England's feeling in, 60;
+       effect on the American people, 113
+
+     Sparks, Edwin E., on frontiersmen, 382
+
+     Speech, uniformity of American, 85;
+       American and English compared, 209, 219;
+       purism in, 219
+
+     Sport, amateur, in America, 409
+
+     Stage, the American, 201
+
+     Stamp tax, American dislike of, 398
+
+     Stamped paper, 398
+
+     Standard Oil Co., 391
+
+     State legislatures, corruption in, 235;
+       shortcomings of, 401
+
+     States, governments of the, 260;
+       sovereignty of, 261, 285, 290;
+       and English counties, 264 (note);
+       justice in, 401
+
+     Steel, American competition in, 375
+
+     Steevens, G. W., on Anglo-American alliance, 3;
+       on American feeling for England, 100
+
+     Stenographers as hostesses, 132
+
+     Stevenson, R. L., on American speech, 85
+
+     Strap, the 'fraid, 294
+
+     Strathcona and Mount Royal, Lord, 310
+
+     Style, American and English literary, 221
+
+     Superficiality of Americans, 193, 204
+
+     Surveyor, the making of a, 69
+
+
+T
+
+     _Table d'hôte_ in America, 104
+
+     Tammany Hall, 278
+
+     Taxes, corrupt assessment of, 242
+
+     Thackeray, W. M., on Anglo-American friendship, 1
+
+     Thomas, Miss M. Carey, 143
+
+     Thoreau, his _Walden_, 157
+
+     Throne, the British, as a democratic force, 335
+
+     Tin-tacks for Japan, 375
+
+     Travis, W. J., 408
+
+     Treaties, inability of U. S. to enforce, 263, 285;
+       how made in America, 286
+
+     Truesdale, W. H., 359
+
+     Trusts, Mr. Roosevelt and the, 295;
+       in England and America, 329, 334, 391;
+       beneficial, 406
+
+
+U
+
+     Unit rule, the, 267, 270
+
+     United States, the, has become a world-power, 6;
+       in danger of war, 8;
+       power of, 14;
+       expansion of, 24;
+       further from England than England from it, 50;
+       the future of, 90;
+       size of, 94;
+       the equal of Great Britain, 163;
+       unification of, 217;
+       politics in, 227;
+       Congress of, 244;
+       and Italy, 262;
+       and Japan, 263;
+       its treaty relations with other powers, 286;
+       a peerage in, 310;
+       its reckless youth, 323;
+       has sown its wild oats, 324;
+       growth of, 364;
+       commercial power of, 371;
+       a debtor nation, 384
+
+     Universities, American and English, 167
+
+     Usurpation by the general government, 289
+
+
+V
+
+     Van Horne, Sir William, 310
+
+     Venezuelan incident, the, 43, 156
+
+     Verestschagin, Vasili, 197, 202
+
+     Vigilance Committees, 302, 364
+
+     Vote, foreign in America, the, 227
+
+     Voting, premature, 227
+
+
+W
+
+     Wall Street methods, 326
+
+     War stores scandal, 341
+
+     Washington, Booker, 305
+
+     Wealth, President Roosevelt and, 296;
+       its diffusion in America, 330;
+       no counterpoise to, in U. S., 335;
+       purchasing power of, in England and America, 335 (note);
+       prejudice against, 403
+
+     Wells, H. G., on American "sense of the State," 89;
+       on the lack of an upper class in America, 309 (note);
+       on trade, 404
+
+     West, the feeling of, for the East, 73;
+       English ignorance of, 200;
+       Yankee distrust of, 369
+
+     West Indies, transfer to the U. S., 32
+
+     West Point, incident at, 41
+
+     Whiskey and literature, 175
+
+     Wild-fowling, 418
+
+     Winter, E. W., 359
+
+     Woman, an American, in England, 103;
+       in Westminster Abbey, 132;
+       in a mining camp, 133;
+       on a train, 134
+
+     Women, American attitude toward, 119 _sqq._;
+       in the streets of cities, 120;
+       English, in America, 122;
+       English treatment of, 123;
+       the morality of married, 129;
+       adaptability of American, 137;
+       their share in civic life, 137;
+       Anglo-Saxon attitude toward, 140;
+       effect of co-education on, 143;
+       culture of American, 182;
+       musical knowledge of American, 198
+
+     _World_, the N. Y., 342 (note)
+
+
+Y
+
+     Yankee, the real, 369;
+       earls, 440
+
+     Yellow press, the, 327, 340, 342 (note)
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The following words use an oe ligature in the original:
+
+     manoeuvres       phoenixes
+
+The following corrections have been made to the text:
+
+     Page 85: the Americans _homogeneous_[original has
+     _homoeogeneous_] over a much larger
+
+     Page 101: Americans will protest against being called[original
+     has call] a homogeneous
+
+     Page 118: It is less offensive than[original has that] the
+     mature
+
+     Page 153: Englishmen do not know the meaning of a
+     joke.[153:1][Footnote anchor is missing in original]
+
+     Page 153: the clubs of Great Britain[original has Britian]
+
+     Page 208: he has not entire right to the best
+     wherever[original has where-ever hyphenated across a line
+     break] he may find it
+
+     Page 252: a stranger is[original has as] likely to get the
+     idea
+
+     Page 321: conditions of business are widely different.[period
+     is missing in original]
+
+     Page 354: copies of the famous "Gentleman's
+     Agreement,"[original has single quote]
+
+     Page 389: "[quotation mark missing in original]DEAR A.:
+
+     Page 453, under the entry for American people,
+     eclecticism,[comma missing in original] 194
+
+     Page 457: Helleu[original has Hellen], Paul, 196
+
+     Footnote 287-1: _The American Commonwealth_, vol. 1[original
+     has extraneous period], page 110
+
+On page 193, the original reads "... be able to remember when the _Daily
+Telegraph_ created, by appealing...." There should be a word of
+explanation after "created".
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Twentieth Century American, by 
+H. Perry Robinson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN ***
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Twentieth Century American, by H. Perry Robinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Twentieth Century American
+       Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great
+              Anglo-Saxon Nations
+
+Author: H. Perry Robinson
+
+Release Date: November 26, 2009 [EBook #30549]
+
+Language: EN
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Michael Zeug, Lisa Reigel,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="notebox">
+<p>Transcriber's Notes: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been
+left as in the original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have
+been corrected. A complete <a href="#TN">list</a> follows the text. Ellipses
+match the original.</p>
+
+<p>Click on the page number to see an image of the page.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="gap"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i"></a>[<a href="./images/i.png">i</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<div class="titlebox">
+<p class="smallgap">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>The Twentieth<br />
+Century American</h1>
+
+<h2>Being</h2>
+
+<h2>A Comparative Study of the Peoples of<br />
+the Two Great Anglo-Saxon Nations</h2>
+
+<p class="gapline">&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="p4">BY</p>
+
+<h3>H. PERRY ROBINSON</h3>
+
+<p class="p4">AUTHOR OF "MEN BORN EQUAL," "THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY<br />
+OF A BLACK BEAR," ETC.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img src="./images/titlepage.png" width="45%" alt="bookplate titled The Many not the Few" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>The Chautauqua Press<br />
+CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK<br />
+MCMXI</h4>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="gap"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii"></a>[<a href="./images/ii.png">ii</a>]</span></p>
+<p class="p3"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1908</span></p>
+
+<p class="p4">BY</p>
+
+<p class="p3">G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="p4">The Knickerbocker Press, New York</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="gap"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii"></a>[<a href="./images/iii.png">iii</a>]</span></p>
+<p class="scctr">To</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">Those Readers,</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">Whether English or American,</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">who</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">agree with whatever is said in the</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">following pages in laudation of</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">their own Country</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">This Book</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">is Inscribed in the hope</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">that they will be equally ready to accept</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">whatever they find in praise</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">of</p>
+
+<p class="scctr">The Other.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv"></a>[<a href="./images/iv.png">iv</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<div class="img">
+<a href="./images/frontisbig.png">
+<img src="./images/frontistb.png" width="40%" alt="map of The British Isles and the United States" title="The British Isles and the United States" /><br /></a>
+
+<span class="caption">The British Isles and the United States.<br />
+A Comparison (see <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Chapter IV.</a>)</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v"></a>[<a href="./images/v.png">v</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>PREFATORY NOTE</h2>
+
+<p>There are already many books about America; but the majority of these
+have been written by Englishmen after so brief an acquaintance with the
+country that it is doubtful whether they contribute much to English
+knowledge of the subject.</p>
+
+<p>My reason for adding another volume to the list is the hope of being
+able to do something to promote a better understanding between the
+peoples, having as an excuse the fact that I have lived in the United
+States for nearly twenty years, under conditions which have given rather
+exceptional opportunities of intimacy with the people of various parts
+of the country socially, in business, and in politics. Wherever my
+judgment is wrong it is not from lack of abundant chance to learn the
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>Except in one instance&mdash;very early in the book&mdash;I have avoided the use
+of statistics, in spite of frequent temptation to refer to them to
+fortify arguments which must without them appear to be merely the
+expression of an individual opinion.</p>
+
+<p class="author">H. P. R.</p>
+
+<p style="padding-left: 1.5em;">February, 1908.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi"></a>[<a href="./images/vi.png">vi</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii"></a>[<a href="./images/vii.png">vii</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<div class="centered">
+<table summary="Table of Contents" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" border="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER I</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdright" colspan="2" style="font-size: 60%;">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">An Anglo-American Alliance</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_5">5</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">The Avoidance of Entangling Alliances&mdash;What the Injunction
+Meant&mdash;What it Cannot Mean To-day&mdash;The Interests of the United
+States, no less than those of England, Demand an Alliance&mdash;But
+Larger Interests than those of the Two Peoples are
+Involved&mdash;American Responsiveness to Ideals&mdash;The Greatest
+Ideal of All, Universal Peace: the Practicability of its
+Attainment&mdash;America's Responsibility&mdash;Misconceptions of the
+British Empire&mdash;Germany's Position&mdash;American Susceptibilities.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER II</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">The Difference in Point of View</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">The Anglo-Saxon Family Likeness&mdash;How Frenchmen and Germans
+View it&mdash;Englishmen, Americans, and "Foreigners"&mdash;An Echo of
+the War of 1812&mdash;An Anglo-American Conflict
+Unthinkable&mdash;American Feeling for England&mdash;The Venezuelan
+Incident&mdash;The Pilgrims and Some Secret History&mdash;Why Americans
+still Hate England&mdash;Great Britain's Nearness to the United
+States Geographically&mdash;Commercially&mdash;Historically&mdash;England's
+Foreign Ill-wishers in America.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER III</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Two Sides of the American Character</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">Europe's Undervaluation of America's Fighting Power&mdash;The
+Americans as Sailors&mdash;The Nation's Greatest
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii"></a>[<a href="./images/viii.png">viii</a>]</span>Asset&mdash;Self-reliance of the People&mdash;The Making of a
+Doctor&mdash;And of a Surveyor&mdash;Society in the Rough&mdash;New York and
+the Country&mdash;An Anglo-Saxon Trait&mdash;America's
+Unpreparedness&mdash;American Consuls and Diplomats&mdash;A Homogeneous
+People&mdash;The Value of a Common Speech&mdash;America more Anglo-Saxon
+than Britain&mdash;Mr. Wells and the Future in America.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER IV</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Mutual Misunderstandings</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_94">94</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">America's Bigness&mdash;A New Atlantis&mdash;The Effect of Expansion on
+a People&mdash;A Family Estranged&mdash;Parsnips&mdash;An American Woman in
+England&mdash;An Englishman in America&mdash;International
+Caricatures&mdash;Shibboleths: dropped H's and a "twang"&mdash;Matthew
+Arnold's Clothes&mdash;The Honourable S&mdash;&mdash; B&mdash;&mdash;.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER V</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">The American Attitude towards Women</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">The Isolation of the United States&mdash;American Ignorance of the
+World&mdash;Sensitiveness to Criticism&mdash;Exaggeration of their Own
+Virtues&mdash;The Myth of American Chivalrousness&mdash;Whence it
+Originated&mdash;The Climatic Myth&mdash;International
+Marriages&mdash;English Manners and American&mdash;The View of Womanhood
+in Youth&mdash;Co-education of the Sexes&mdash;Conjugal Morality&mdash;The
+Artistic Sense in American Women&mdash;Two Stenographers&mdash;An
+Incident of Camp-Life&mdash;"Molly-be-damned"&mdash;A Nice Way of
+Travelling&mdash;How do they do it?&mdash;Women in Public Life&mdash;The
+Conditions which Co-operate&mdash;The Anglo-Saxon Spirit again.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER VI</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">English Humour and American Art</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">American Insularity&mdash;A Conkling Story&mdash;English Humour and
+American Critics&mdash;American Literature and English Critics&mdash;The
+American Novel in England&mdash;And American Art&mdash;Wanted, an
+American Exhibition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix"></a>[<a href="./images/ix.png">ix</a>]</span>&mdash;The Revolution in the American Point of
+View&mdash;"Raining in London"&mdash;Domestic and Imported Goods.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER VII</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">English and American Education</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_166">166</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">The Rhodes Scholarships&mdash;"Pullulating Colleges"&mdash;Are American
+Colleges Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?&mdash;Other Educational
+Forces&mdash;The Postal Laws&mdash;Ten-cent Magazines and Cheap
+Books&mdash;Pigs in Chicago&mdash;The Press of England and America
+Compared&mdash;Mixed Society&mdash;Educated Women&mdash;Generals as
+Booksellers&mdash;And as Farmhands&mdash;The Value of War to a People.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER VIII</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">A Comparison in Culture</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">The Advantage of Youth&mdash;Japanese Eclecticism and American&mdash;The
+Craving for the Best&mdash;<i>Cyrano de
+Bergerac</i>&mdash;Verestschagin&mdash;Culture by Paroxysms&mdash;Mr. Gladstone
+and the Japanese&mdash;Anglo-Saxon Crichtons&mdash;Americans as
+Linguists&mdash;England's Past and America's Future&mdash;Americanisms
+in Speech&mdash;Why They are Disappearing in America&mdash;And Appearing
+in England&mdash;The Press and the Copyright Laws&mdash;A Look into the
+Future.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER IX</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Politics and Politicians</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">The "English-American" Vote&mdash;The Best People in Politics&mdash;What
+Politics Means in America&mdash;Where Corruption Creeps in&mdash;The
+Danger in England&mdash;A Presidential Nomination for Sale&mdash;Buying
+Legislation&mdash;Could it Occur in England?&mdash;A Delectable
+Alderman&mdash;Taxation while you Wait&mdash;Perils that England
+Escapes&mdash;The Morality of Congress&mdash;Political Corruption of the
+Irish&mdash;Democrat and Republican.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x"></a>[<a href="./images/x.png">x</a>]</span>CHAPTER X</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">American Politics in England</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_260">260</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">The System of Parties&mdash;Interdependence of National and Local
+Organisations&mdash;The Federal Government and Sovereign
+States&mdash;The Boss of Warwickshire&mdash;The Unit System&mdash;Prime
+Minister Crooks&mdash;Lanark and the Nation&mdash;New York and Tammany
+Hall&mdash;America's Superior Opportunities for Wickedness&mdash;How
+England Is Catching up&mdash;Campaign Reminiscences&mdash;The
+"Hell-box"&mdash;Politics in a Gravel-pit&mdash;Mr. Hearst and Mr.
+Bryan.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER XI</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Some Questions of the Moment</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_285">285</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">Sovereign States and the Federal Government&mdash;California and
+the Senate&mdash;The Constitutional Powers of Congress and the
+President&mdash;Government by Interpretation&mdash;President Roosevelt
+as an Inspiration to the People&mdash;A New Conception of the
+Presidential Office&mdash;"Teddy" and the "fraid strap"&mdash;Mr.
+Roosevelt and the Corporations&mdash;As a Politician&mdash;His
+Imperiousness&mdash;The Negro Problem&mdash;The Americanism of the
+South.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER XII</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Commercial Morality</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_308">308</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?&mdash;An American
+Peerage&mdash;Senators and other Aristocrats&mdash;Trade and the British
+Upper Classes&mdash;Two Views of a Business Career&mdash;America's Wild
+Oats&mdash;The Packing House Scandals&mdash;"American Methods" in
+Business&mdash;A Countryman and Some Eggs&mdash;A New Dog&mdash;The Morals of
+British Peers&mdash;A Contract of Mutual Confidence&mdash;Embalmed Beef,
+Re-mounts, and War Stores&mdash;The Yellow Press and Mr.
+Hearst&mdash;American View of the House of Lords.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi"></a>[<a href="./images/xi.png">xi</a>]</span>CHAPTER XIII</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">The Growth of Honesty</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_347">347</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon&mdash;America's Resemblance to
+Japan&mdash;A German View&mdash;Can Americans Lie?&mdash;Honesty as the Best
+Policy&mdash;Religious Sentiment&mdash;Moral and Immoral Railway
+Managers&mdash;A Struggle for Self-preservation&mdash;Gentlemen in
+Business&mdash;Peculation among Railway Servants&mdash;How the Old Order
+Changes, Yielding Place to New&mdash;The Strain on British
+Machinery&mdash;Americans as Story-Tellers&mdash;The Incredibility of
+the Actual.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER XIV</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">A Contrast in Principles</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_371">371</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">The Commercial Power of the United States&mdash;British
+Workmanship&mdash;Tin-tacks and Conservatism&mdash;A Prophetic
+Frenchman&mdash;Imperialism in Trade&mdash;The Anglo-Saxon Spirit&mdash;About
+Chaperons&mdash;"Insist upon Thyself"&mdash;English and American
+Banks&mdash;Dealing in Futures&mdash;Dog Eat Dog&mdash;Two
+Letters&mdash;Commercial Octopods&mdash;Trusts in America and
+England&mdash;The Standard Oil Company&mdash;And Solicitors&mdash;Legal
+Chaperons&mdash;The Sanctity of Stamped Paper&mdash;Conclusions&mdash;Do
+"Honest" Traders Exist?</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER XV</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">The Peoples at Play</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_408">408</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock">American Sport Twenty-five Years Ago&mdash;The Power of Golf&mdash;A
+Look Ahead&mdash;Britain, Mother of Sports&mdash;Buffalo in New
+York&mdash;And Pheasants on Clapham Common&mdash;Shooting Foxes and the
+"Sport" of Wild-fowling&mdash;The Amateur in American Sport&mdash;At
+Henley&mdash;And at Large&mdash;Teutonic Poppycock.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER XVI</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Summary and Conclusion</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_429">429</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><p class="tableblock"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii"></a>[<a href="./images/xii.png">xii</a>]</span>A New Way of Making Friends&mdash;The Desirability of an
+Alliance&mdash;For the Sake of Both Peoples&mdash;And of all the
+World&mdash;The Family Resemblance&mdash;Mutual
+Misunderstandings&mdash;American Conception of the British
+Character&mdash;English Misapprehension of Americans&mdash;Foreign
+Influences in the United States&mdash;Why Politicians Hesitate&mdash;An
+Appeal to the People&mdash;And to C&aelig;sar.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Appendix</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_451">451</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Index</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_453">453</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii"></a>[<a href="./images/xiii.png">xiii</a>]</span></p>
+<h1>The Twentieth Century American</h1>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv"></a>[<a href="./images/xiv.png">xiv</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a>[<a href="./images/1.png">1</a>]</span></p>
+<h1>The Twentieth Century<br />
+American</h1>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>If I can say anything to show that my name is really
+Makepeace, and to increase the source of love between the two
+countries, then please, God, I will.</i>"&mdash;W. M. Thackeray, in
+<i>Letters to an American Family</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Certainly there is nothing like England, and there never has
+been anything like England in the world. Her wonderful
+history, her wonderful literature, her beautiful architecture,
+the historic and poetic associations which cluster about every
+street and river and mountain and valley, her vigorous life,
+the sweetness and beauty of her women, the superb manhood of
+her men, her Navy, her gracious hospitality, and her lofty
+pride&mdash;although some single race of men may have excelled her
+in some single particular&mdash;make up a combination never
+equalled in the world.</i>"&mdash;The late United States Senator Hoar,
+in <i>An Autobiography of Seventy Years</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>The result of the organisation of the American colonies into
+a state, and of the bringing together of the diverse
+communities contained in these colonies, was the creation not
+merely of a new nation, but of a new temperament. How far this
+temperament was to arise from a change of climate, and how far
+from a new political organisation, no one could then foresee,
+nor is its origin yet fully analysed; but the fact itself is
+now coming to be more and more recognised. It may be that
+Nature said at about that time: 'Thus far the English is my
+best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; now for another
+turning of the globe, and for a further novelty. We <span class="pagenum" style="font-style: normal;"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a>[<a href="./images/2.png">2</a>]</span>need
+something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman; let
+us lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process.
+Put in one drop more of nervous fluid and make the American.'
+With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human
+race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organised type of
+mankind was born.</i>"&mdash;Thomas Wentworth Higginson, <i>Atlantic
+Monthly</i>, 1886.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>The foreign observer in America is at once struck by the
+fact that the average of intelligence, as that intelligence
+manifests itself in the spirit of inquiry, in the interest
+taken in a great variety of things, and in alertness of
+judgment, is much higher among the masses in the United States
+than anywhere else. This is certainly not owing to any
+superiority of the public school system in this country&mdash;or,
+if such superiority exists, not to that alone&mdash;but rather to
+the fact that in the United States the individual is
+constantly brought into interested contact with a greater
+variety of things and is admitted to active participation in
+the exercise of functions which in other countries are left to
+the care of a superior authority. I have frequently been
+struck by the remarkable expansion of the horizon effected by
+a few years of American life, in the minds of immigrants who
+had come from somewhat benighted regions, and by the mental
+enterprise and keen discernment with which they took hold of
+problems to which, in their comparatively torpid condition in
+their native countries, they had never given thought. It is
+true that in the large cities with congested population,
+self-government as an educator does not always bring the most
+desirable results, partly owing to the circumstance that
+government, in its various branches, is there further removed
+from the individual, so that he comes into contact with it and
+exercises his influence upon it only through various, and
+sometimes questionable, intermediary agencies which frequently
+exert a very demoralising influence.</i>"&mdash;Carl Schurz's
+<i>Memoirs</i>, II, 79.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Anglo-Saxon Superiority! Although we do not all acknowledge
+it, we all have to bear it, and we all dread it; the
+apprehension, the suspicion, and sometimes the hatred provoked
+by l'Anglais proclaim the fact loudly enough. We cannot go one
+step in the world without coming across the Anglo-Saxon.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. He
+rules America by Canada and the United States; <span class="pagenum" style="font-style: normal;"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a>[<a href="./images/3.png">3</a>]</span>Africa by
+Egypt and the Cape; Asia by India and Burmah; Australasia by
+Australia and New Zealand; Europe and the whole world, by his
+trade and industries and by his policy.</i>"&mdash;M. Edmond Demolins
+in <i>Anglo-Saxon Superiority</i> "<i>&Agrave; quoi tient la Sup&eacute;riorit&eacute; des
+Anglo-Saxons?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>It may be asking too much, but if statesmanship could kindly
+arrange it, I confess I should like to see, before I die, a
+war in which Britain and the United States in a just quarrel
+might tackle the world. After that we should have no more
+difficulty about America. For if the Americans never forget an
+injury, they ever remember a service.</i>"&mdash;The late G. W.
+Steevens in <i>The Land of the Dollar</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a>[<a href="./images/4.png">4</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a>[<a href="./images/5.png">5</a>]</span></p>
+<h1>The Twentieth Century<br />
+American</h1>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">An Anglo-American Alliance</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Avoidance of Entangling Alliances&mdash;What the Injunction
+Meant&mdash;What it Cannot Mean To-day&mdash;The Interests of the United
+States, no less than those of England, Demand an Alliance&mdash;But
+Larger Interests than those of the Two Peoples are
+Involved&mdash;American Responsiveness to Ideals&mdash;The Greatest
+Ideal of All, Universal Peace: the Practicability of its
+Attainment&mdash;America's Responsibility&mdash;Misconceptions of the
+British Empire&mdash;Germany's Position&mdash;American Susceptibilities.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The American nation, for all that it is young and lacks reverence, still
+worships the maxims and rules of conduct laid down by the Fathers of the
+Republic; and among those rules of conduct, there is none the wisdom of
+which is more generally accepted by the people than that which enjoins
+the avoidance of "entangling alliances" with foreign Powers. But not
+only has the United States changed much in late years, but the world in
+its political relations and sentiments has changed also and the place of
+the United States has changed in it. That sacred instrument, the
+Constitution <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a>[<a href="./images/6.png">6</a>]</span>itself, holds chiefly by virtue of what is new in it.
+Whatever is unaltered, or is not interpreted in a sense quite other than
+the framers intended, is to-day comparatively unimportant. It must be
+so. It would be impossible that any code or constitution drawn up to
+meet the needs of the original States, in the phase of civilisation and
+amid the social conditions which then prevailed, could be suited to the
+national life of a Great Power in the twentieth century. In internal
+affairs, there is hardly a function of Government, scarcely a relation
+between the different branches of the Government itself, or between the
+Government and any of the several States, or between the Government and
+the people, which is not unlike what the framers of the Constitution
+intended or what they imagined that it would be.</p>
+
+<p>But it is in external affairs that the nation must find, indeed has
+found, the old rules most inadequate. The policy of non-association
+which was desirable, even essential, to the young, weak state, whose
+only prospect of safety lay in a preservation of that isolation which
+her geographical position made possible to her, is and must be
+impracticable in a World-Power. Within the last decade, the United
+States has stepped out from her solitude to take the place which
+rightfully belongs to her among the great peoples. By the acquirement of
+her colonial dependencies, still more by the inevitable exigencies of
+her commerce, she has chosen (as she had no other choice) to make
+herself an interested party in the affairs of all parts of the world.
+All the conditions that made the old policy best for her have vanished.</p>
+
+<p>A child is rightly forbidden by his nurse to make <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a>[<a href="./images/7.png">7</a>]</span>acquaintance with
+other children in the street; but this child has grown to manhood and
+gone out into the world to seek&mdash;and has found&mdash;his fortune. The old
+policy of isolation has been cast aside, till nothing remains of it but
+a few old formul&aelig; which have no virtue&mdash;not even significance&mdash;now that
+all the conditions to which they applied are gone. The United States has
+been compelled to make alliances (some, as when she co-operated with the
+other Powers in China, of the most "entangling" kind), and still the old
+phrase holds its spell on the popular mind.</p>
+
+<p>The injunction was originally intended to prevent the young Republic
+from being drawn into the wars with which Europe at the time was rent,
+by taking sides with any one party against any other. It was levelled
+not against alliances, but against entanglements. It was framed, and
+wisely framed, to secure to the United States the peace and isolation
+necessary to her development. The isolation is no longer either possible
+or desirable, but peace remains both. The nation would in fact be living
+more closely up to the spirit of the injunction by entering into an
+alliance which would secure peace and make entanglements impossible,
+than she is when she leaves herself and the world exposed to the
+constant menace of war, merely for the sake of seeming to comply with
+the letter of a maxim which is now meaningless. If Washington were alive
+to-day, it does not seem to me possible to doubt that he would favour a
+new English treaty, even though he might have more difficulty in
+compelling Congress to accept his views than he had once before.</p>
+
+<p>As the case stands, the United States may easily become involved in war
+with any one of the Great <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a>[<a href="./images/8.png">8</a>]</span>Powers, no matter how pacific or benevolent
+her intentions may be. There are at least three Powers with which a
+trivial incident might precipitate a conflict at almost any time; while
+the possibilities of friction which might develop into open hostilities
+with some one of the lesser states are almost innumerable. It is beside
+the question to say that the United States need have no fear of the
+result: indeed that very fact contributes largely to the danger. It is
+ever the man who can fight, and knows it, who gets into trouble. Every
+American who has lived much in the farther West knows that he who would
+keep clear of difficulties had best not carry a revolver. In its very
+self-confidence&mdash;a self-confidence amply justified by its strength&mdash;the
+American people is, measured by the standards of other nations, an
+eminently bellicose people&mdash;much more bellicose than it supposes.</p>
+
+<p>Great Britain's alliance with Japan has with reasonable certainty, so
+far as danger of conflict between any two of the Great Powers is
+concerned, secured the peace of Asia for some time to come. The
+understanding between Great Britain and France goes some way towards
+assuring the peace of Europe, of which the imminent <i>rapprochement</i> with
+Russia (which all thinking Englishmen desire<a name="FNanchor_8:1_1" id="FNanchor_8:1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_8:1_1" class="fnanchor">[8:1]</a>) will constitute a
+further guarantee. But an alliance between Great Britain and the United
+States would secure the peace of the world. There is but one European
+Power now which could embark on a war with either Great Britain or the
+United States with any shadow of justification for hopefulness as to the
+result; and no combination of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a>[<a href="./images/9.png">9</a>]</span>Powers could deceive itself into
+believing that it could make head against the two combined or would dare
+to disturb the peace between themselves when the two allies bade them be
+still.</p>
+
+<p>In the days of her youth,&mdash;which lasted up to the closing decade of the
+nineteenth century,&mdash;provided that she did not thrust herself needlessly
+into the quarrels of Europe, her mere geographical position sufficed to
+secure to America the peace which she required. The Atlantic Ocean, her
+own mountain chains and wildernesses, these were bulwarks enough. She
+has, by pressure of her own destiny, been compelled to come out from
+behind these safeguards to rub shoulders every day with all the world.
+If she still desires peace, she will be more likely to realise that
+desire by seeking other shields. Nor must any American reader
+misunderstand me, for I believe that I estimate the fighting power of
+the United States more highly than most native-born Americans. She needs
+no help in playing her part in the world; but no amount of
+self-confidence, no ability to fight, if once the fight be on, will
+serve to protect her from having quarrels thrust upon her&mdash;not
+necessarily in wilfulness by any individual antagonist but by mere force
+of circumstance. Considered from the standpoint of her own expediency,
+an alliance with Great Britain would give to the United States an
+absolute guarantee that for as many years as she pleased she would be
+free to devote all her energies to the development of her own resources
+and the increase of her commerce.</p>
+
+<p>But there are other considerations far larger than that of her own
+expediency. This is no question of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a>[<a href="./images/10.png">10</a>]</span>the selfish interests either of the
+United States or of Great Britain. There is no people more responsive
+than the American to high ideals. Englishmen often find it hard to
+believe that an American is not talking mere fustian when he gives
+honest expression to his sentiments; but from the foundation of the
+Republic certain large ideas&mdash;Liberty, Freedom of Conscience,
+Equality&mdash;have somehow been made to seem very real things to the
+American mind. Whether the Englishman does not in his heart prize just
+as dearly as the American the things which these words signify, is
+another matter; it is not the Englishman's habit to formulate them even
+to himself, much less to talk about them to others. Most Englishmen have
+large sympathy with Captain Gamble who, bewailing the unrest in Canada
+at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, complained that the Colonials
+talked too much about "that damned absurd word Liberty."<a name="FNanchor_10:1_2" id="FNanchor_10:1_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_10:1_2" class="fnanchor">[10:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is rarely that an English political campaign is fought for a
+principle or for an abstract idea, and equally rarely that in America
+the watchword on one side or the other is not some such high-sounding
+phrase as Englishmen rather shrink from using. It is true that behind
+that phrase may be clustered a cowering crowd of petty individual
+interests; the fact remains that it is the phrase itself&mdash;the large
+Idea&mdash;on which orators and party managers rely to secure their hold on
+the imaginations of the mass of the people. It does not necessarily
+imply any superior morality on the part of the Americans; but is an
+accident of the different conditions prevailing in the two countries.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a>[<a href="./images/11.png">11</a>]</span></p><p>British politics are infinitely more complex than American, and foreign
+affairs play a much larger part in public controversies. The people of
+the United States have been throughout their history able to confine
+their attention almost wholly to their home affairs, and in those home
+affairs, the mere vastness of the country, with the diverse and
+conflicting interests of the various parts, has made it as a rule
+impossible to frame any appeal to the minds of the voters as a whole
+except in terms of some abstract idea. An appeal to the self-interests
+of the people in the aggregate in any matter of domestic policy is
+almost unformulable, because the interest of each section conflicts with
+the interest of others; whence it has necessarily followed that the
+American people has grown accustomed to be led by large
+phrases&mdash;disciplined to follow the flag of an ideal.</p>
+
+<p>Not all the early colonists who emigrated, even to New England, went
+solely for conscience' sake. Under the cloak of the lofty principle for
+which the Revolutionary War was fought there were, again, concealed all
+manner of personal ambitions, sectional jealousies, and partisan
+intrigues. It was in truth (as more than one American historian has
+pointed out) a party strife and not a war of peoples. The precipitating
+cause of the Civil War was not the desire to abolish slavery, but the
+bitterness aroused by the political considerations of the advantage
+given to one party or the other by the establishment or
+non-establishment of slavery in a new territory. The motive which
+impelled the United States to make war on Spain was not, as most
+Europeans believe, any desire for an extension of territory, any more
+than <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a>[<a href="./images/12.png">12</a>]</span>it was, as some Americans would say, a yearning to avenge the
+blowing up of the <i>Maine</i>; it was the necessity of putting an end to the
+disturbed state of affairs in Cuba, which was a constant source of
+annoyance, as well as of trouble and expense, to the United States
+Government. If a neighbour makes a disturbance before your house and
+brings his family quarrels to your doorstep, you must after a time ask
+him to stop; and when, after a sufficient number of askings, he fails to
+comply with your request, it is justifiable to use force to make him.
+That was America's justification&mdash;the real ground on which she went to
+war with Spain. But the thing which actually inflamed the mind of the
+American people was the belief that the Spanish treatment of Cuba was
+brutal and barbarous. It was an indignation no less fine than that which
+set England in a blaze in the days of the Bulgarian atrocities. The war
+may been a war of expediency on the part of the Government; it was a
+Crusade in the eyes of the people. Thus it may be easy to show that at
+each crisis in its history there was something besides the nobility of a
+Cause or the grandeur of a Principle which impelled the American nation
+on the course which it took, but it has always been love of the Cause or
+devotion to the Principle which has swayed the masses of the people.</p>
+
+<p>And this people now has it in its power to do an infinitely finer thing
+than ever it did when it established Liberty of Conscience, or founded a
+republic on broader foundations than had been laid before, or abolished
+slavery within its borders, or when it won Cuba's independence of what
+it believed to be an inhuman tyranny. I believe that it has it in its
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>[<a href="./images/13.png">13</a>]</span>power to do no less a thing than to abolish war for ever&mdash;to give to
+the peoples of the earth the blessing of Perpetual Peace. The question
+for it to ask itself is whether it can, with any shadow of
+justification, refuse to take this step and withhold this boon from
+humanity.</p>
+
+<p>If it does refuse and wars continue&mdash;if, within the coming decade, war
+should break out, whether actually involving the United States itself or
+not, more bloody and destructive than any that the world has seen&mdash;and
+if then the facts should be presented to posterity for judgment,&mdash;will
+the American people be held guiltless? It is improbable that the case
+ever could be so presented, for there is none to put the United States
+on trial, none to draw an indictment, none to prosecute. The world has
+not turned to the United States to ask that it be saved; no one has
+arisen to point at the United States and say, "Thou art the one to do
+this thing." The historians of another generation will have no
+depositions before them on which to base a verdict. But if the facts are
+as stated and the United States knows them to be so, does the lack of
+common knowledge of them make her responsibility any the less? It
+remains that the nation has the power to do this, and it alone among
+nations.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The first idea of most Americans, when a hard and fast alliance with
+Great Britain is suggested to them, usually formulates itself in the
+statement that they have no wish to be made into a cat's-paw for pulling
+England's chestnuts out of the fire. America has no desire to be drawn
+into England's quarrels. Until less than ten years ago, there was
+justification for the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>[<a href="./images/14.png">14</a>]</span>point of view; for while England seemed to be
+ever on the brink of war, the United States lived peacefully in her
+far-off Valley of Avilion. But the map of the world has changed, and
+while the United States has left her seclusion and come out to play her
+part in the world-politics, England has been buttressing herself with
+friendships, until it is at least arguable whether the United States is
+not the more exposed to danger of the two. But it is no question now of
+being dragged into other people's quarrels; but of making all
+quarrelling impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Again, the American will say that the United States needs no allies. She
+can hold her own; let Great Britain do the same. And again I say that it
+is no question now of whether either Power can hold its own against the
+world or not. Great Britain, Americans should understand, has no more
+fear for herself than has the United States. England "does not seek
+alliances: she grants them." There is not only no single European Power,
+but there is no probable combination of European Powers, which England
+does not in her heart serenely believe herself quite competent to deal
+with. British pride has grown no less in the last three hundred years:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Come the four corners of the World in arms<br /></span>
+<span class="i0i">And we shall shock them."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Americans should disabuse themselves finally of the idea that if England
+desires an alliance with the United States it is because she has any
+fear that she may need help against any other enemy. Englishmen are too
+well satisfied with themselves for that (with precisely the same kind of
+self-satisfaction as the United States <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>[<a href="./images/15.png">15</a>]</span>suffers from), and much too
+confident that, in whatever may arise, it will be the other fellow who
+will need help. But if England has no misgiving as to her ability to
+take care of herself when trouble comes, she is far from being ashamed
+to say that she would infinitely prefer that trouble should not come,
+either to her or to another, and she would join&mdash;oh, so gladly!&mdash;with
+the United States (as for a partial attainment of the same end she has
+already joined with France on the one hand and with Japan on the other)
+to make sure that it should never come. Has the United States any right
+to refuse to enter into such an alliance&mdash;an alliance which would not be
+entangling, but which would make entanglements impossible?</p>
+
+<p>At Christmas time in 1906, the following suggestion was made in the
+London correspondence of an American paper<a name="FNanchor_15:1_3" id="FNanchor_15:1_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_15:1_3" class="fnanchor">[15:1]</a>:</p>
+
+<p>"The new ideals which mankind has set before itself, the infinitely
+larger enlightenment and education of the masses, the desperate struggle
+which every civilised people is waging against all forms of social
+suffering and vice within itself, the mere complexity of modern commerce
+with its all-absorbing interest&mdash;these things all cry aloud for peace.
+War does not belong to this phase of civilisation. Least of all can it
+have any appeal to the two peoples in whom the spirit of the Twentieth
+Century is most manifest. Of all peoples, Great Britain and the United
+States have most cause to desire peace.</p>
+
+<p>"There should be a Christmas message sent from the White House which
+should run something like this:</p>
+
+<p class="sectctrsc"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>[<a href="./images/16.png">16</a>]</span>
+"To His Majesty King Edward the Seventh:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"To your majesty, to her majesty the Queen, and to the people
+of the British empire, I desire to express the best wishes of
+myself and of the people of the United States. At the same
+time, I wish to assure your majesty that you will have both
+the sympathy and the practical support of the American people
+in such action as it may seem right to you and to the British
+people to take in the direction of securing to the nations of
+the world that peace of which your majesty has always shown
+yourself so earnest an advocate.</p>
+
+
+<p class="author">"(Signed), <span class="smcap">Theodore Roosevelt</span>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Some such an answer as this would be returned:</p>
+
+<p class="sectctrsc">"To His Excellency the President of the United States:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"In acknowledging with gratitude the expression of good wishes
+to ourselves, to her majesty the Queen, and to the people of
+the British empire of yourself and the population of the
+United States, I desire most cordially to reciprocate the
+sentiments of good will. Even more cordially and gratefully, I
+acknowledge the assurance of sympathy and support of the great
+American people in action directed to securing peace to the
+nations of the world. It will be my immediate care to propose
+such a course of joint action between us as may secure that
+blessing to all peoples in the course of the coming year.</p>
+
+<p class="author">"(Signed), <span class="smcap">Edward</span>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Does anybody doubt that, if the two nations bent themselves to the task
+in earnest, universal peace could be so secured to all the peoples of
+the earth in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a>[<a href="./images/17.png">17</a>]</span>course of the coming year? And if it is in truth in
+their power to do this thing, how can either conceivably convince itself
+that it is not its duty?</p>
+
+<p>"And what a Christmas the world would have in 1907!"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Does any one doubt it? Does any one doubt that, if the two peoples were
+in earnest, though the thing might not be brought about in one year, it
+is far from improbable that it could be achieved in two years or three?
+Since the paragraphs which I have quoted were published, a year has
+passed and for a large part of that year the Conference has been in
+session at The Hague; and of the results of that Conference it is not
+easy for either an Englishman or an American to speak with patience.
+Does any one doubt that if the two Governments had set themselves
+determinedly, from the beginning of the <i>pourparlers</i>, to reach the one
+definite goal those results might have been very different?</p>
+
+<p>During the last few years, the two Powers, each acting in her own way,
+have done more to establish peace on earth than has been done by all the
+other Powers in all time; and I most earnestly believe that it only
+needs that they should say with one voice that there shall be no more
+wars and there will be none. Nor am I ignoring the complexities of the
+situation; but I believe that all the details, the first step once
+taken, would settle themselves with unexpected facility through the
+medium of international tribunals. Of course this will be called
+visionary: but whosoever is tempted so to call it, let him read history
+in the records of contemporary writers and see how visionary all great
+forward movements in the progress of the world have seemed until the
+time came when the thing was to be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>[<a href="./images/18.png">18</a>]</span>accomplished. What we are now
+discussing seems visionary because of its unfamiliarity. It has the
+formidableness of the unknown. The impossible, once accomplished, looks
+simple enough in retrospect. The fact is that never before has there
+been a time when boundaries all over the world have been so nearly
+established&mdash;when there were so few points outstanding likely to embroil
+any two of the Great Powers in conflict&mdash;so few national ambitions
+struggling for appeasement. It is easy not to realise this unless one
+studies the field in detail: easy to fail to see how near is the
+attainment of universal peace.</p>
+
+<p>The Councils of the Powers have in the past been so hampered by the
+traditions of a tortuous diplomacy, so tossed and perturbed within by
+the cross-currents of intrigue, that they have shown themselves almost
+childishly incapable of arriving at clear-cut decisions. Old policies,
+old formul&aelig;, old jealousies, old dynastic influences still hold control
+of the majority of the chancelleries of Continental Europe, and these
+things it is that have made questions simple in themselves seem complex
+and incapable of solution. But there is nothing to be settled involving
+larger territorial interests or more beset with delicacies than many
+questions with which the Supreme Court of the United States has had to
+deal&mdash;none so large as to seem formidable to his Majesty's Privy Council
+or to the House of Lords. And under the guidance of Great Britain and
+the United States acting in unison, assured in advance of the sympathy
+of France and Japan and of whatever other Powers would welcome the new
+order of things, a Hague committee or other international tribunal could
+be made a businesslike organisation working <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a>[<a href="./images/19.png">19</a>]</span>directly for results,&mdash;as
+directly as the board of directors of any commercial corporation. And it
+is with those who consider this impracticable that the onus lies of
+pointing out the direction from which insuperable resistance is to be
+expected,&mdash;from which particular Powers in Europe, in Asia, or in
+Central or South America.</p>
+
+<p>The ultimate domination of the world by the Anglo-Saxon (let us call him
+so) seems to be reasonably assured; and no less assured is it that at
+some time wars will cease. The question for both Englishmen and
+Americans to ask themselves is whether, recognising the responsibility
+that already rests upon it, the Anglo-Saxon race dare or can for
+conscience' sake&mdash;or still more, whether one branch of it when the other
+be willing to push on, dare or can for conscience' sake&mdash;hang back and
+postpone the advent of the Universal Peace, which it is in its power to
+bring about to-day, no matter what the motives of jealousy, of
+self-interest, or of self-distrust may be that restrain it.</p>
+
+<p>It has been assumed in all that has been said that the onus of refusal
+rests solely on the United States; as indeed it does. Great Britain, it
+will be objected, has asked for no alliance. Nor has she. Great Britain
+does not put herself in the position of suing for a friendship which may
+be denied; and is there any doubt that if Great Britain had at any time
+asked openly for such an alliance she would have been refused? Would she
+not be bluntly refused to-day? Great men on either side&mdash;but never, be
+it noted, an Englishman except for the purpose of agreeing with an
+American who has already spoken&mdash;have said many times that a formal
+alliance is not desirable: that things are going well enough as they are
+and that it is best to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>[<a href="./images/20.png">20</a>]</span>wait. Things are never going well enough, so
+long as they might go better. And these men who say it speak only with
+an eye to the interests of the two countries, not considering the
+greater stake of the happiness of the world at large; and even so (I say
+it with deference) they know in their own minds that if indeed the thing
+should become suddenly feasible, neither they nor any thinking man, with
+the good of humanity at heart, would dare to raise a voice against it or
+would dream of doing other than rejoice. It is only because it has
+seemed impossible that it has been best to do without it; and it is
+impossible only because the people of the United States have not yet
+realised the responsibilities of the new position which they hold in the
+councils of the world, but are still bound by the prejudices of the days
+of little things, still slaves&mdash;they of all people!&mdash;to an old and
+outworn formula. They have not yet comprehended that within their arm's
+reach there lies an achievement greater than has ever been given to a
+nation to accomplish, and that they have but to take one step forward to
+enter on a destiny greater than anything foreshadowed even in the
+promise of their own wonderful history.</p>
+
+<p>And when those who would be their coadjutors are willing and waiting and
+beckoning them on, have they any right to hold back? Is it anything
+other than moral cowardice if they do?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I wish that each individual American would give one hour's unprejudiced
+study to the British Empire,&mdash;would sit down with a map of the world
+before him and, summoning to his assistance such knowledge of history as
+he has and bearing in mind the conditions <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a>[<a href="./images/21.png">21</a>]</span>of his own country, endeavour
+to arrive at some idea of what it is that Englishmen have done in the
+world, what are the present circumstances of the Empire, what its aims
+and ambitions. I do not think that the ordinarily educated and
+intelligent American knows how ignorant he is of the nation which has
+played so large a part in the history of his own country and of which he
+talks so often and with so little restraint. The ignorance of Englishmen
+of America is another matter which will be referred to in its place. For
+the present, what is to be desired is that the American should get some
+elementary grasp of the character of Great Britain and her dependencies
+as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place it is worth pointing out that the Empire is as much
+bigger than the United States as the United States is bigger than the
+British Isles. I am not now talking of mere geographical dimensions, but
+of the political schemes of the two nations. Americans commonly speak of
+theirs as a young country&mdash;as the youngest of the Great Powers,&mdash;but in
+every true sense the British Empire is vastly younger. The United States
+has an established form of government which has been the same for a
+hundred years and, all good Americans hope, will remain unchanged for
+centuries to come. The British Empire is still groping inchoate: it is
+all makeshift and endeavour. It is in about that stage of growth in
+which the United States found herself when her transcontinental railways
+were still unbuilt, when she had not yet digested Texas or California,
+and the greater part of the West remained unsettled and unsurveyed.</p>
+
+<p>If the American will look to the north, he will see Canada in
+approximately the phase in her material <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a>[<a href="./images/22.png">22</a>]</span>progress which the United
+States had reached in, let us say, 1880 to 1885. Australia and New
+Zealand are somewhat further behind; South Africa further still. Behind
+that again are the various scattered portions of the Over-Sea Dominions
+in divers states of political pupilhood. In some there are not even yet
+the foundations on which a Constitutional or commercial structure can be
+built. And while each unit has to be led or encouraged along the path of
+individual development, beyond all is the great vision which every
+imperially-thinking Englishman sets before himself&mdash;the vision of a
+Federation of all the parts&mdash;a Federation not unlike that which the
+United States has enjoyed for over a hundred years (save that Englishmen
+hope that there will always be a monarchy at the centre) but which, as
+has been said, is almost incomparably larger in conception than was the
+Union of the States and requires correspondingly greater labour in its
+accomplishment.</p>
+
+<p>If the American will now consider the conditions of the growth of his
+own country, he will recognise that the only thing which made that
+growth possible was the fact that the people was undistracted by foreign
+complications. The one great need of the nation was Peace. It was to
+attain this that the policy of non-entanglement was formulated. Without
+it, the people could not have devoted its energies with a single mind to
+the gigantic task of its own development.</p>
+
+<p>But the task before the British Empire is more gigantic; the need of
+peace more urgent. It is more urgent, not merely in proportion to the
+additional magnitude and complexity of the task to be done, but is
+thrice multiplied by the conditions of the modern world. The British
+Empire must needs achieve its <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>[<a href="./images/23.png">23</a>]</span>industrial consolidation in the teeth of
+a commercial competition a thousand times fiercer than anything which
+America knew in her young days. The United States grew to greatness in a
+secluded nursery. Great Britain must bring up her children in the
+streets and on the high seas, under the eyes and exposed to the
+seductions of the peoples of all the world.</p>
+
+<p>The American is a reasoning being. A much larger portion of the American
+people is habituated to reason for itself&mdash;to think independently&mdash;to
+form and to abide by its individual judgment&mdash;than of any other people
+in the world. No political fact is more familiar to the American people
+than the immense advantage which it derived, during the period of its
+internal development, from its enjoyment of external peace. Will not the
+American people, then, reasoning from analogy, believe that, under more
+compelling conditions, England also earnestly desires external peace?</p>
+
+<p>I can almost hear the retort leaping to the lips of the American reader
+who holds the traditional view of the British Empire. "It is all very
+well for you to talk of peace now!" I hear him say. "Now that the world
+is pretty well divided up and you have grabbed the greater part of it.
+You haven't talked much of peace in the past." And here we are
+confronted at once with the fundamental misconception of the British
+Empire and the British character which has worked deplorable harm in the
+American national sentiment towards England.</p>
+
+<p>First, it is worth remarking that with the exception of the Crimean War
+(which even the most prejudiced American will not regard as a war of
+aggression or as a thing for which England should be blamed) Great
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>[<a href="./images/24.png">24</a>]</span>Britain has not been engaged in hostilities with any European Power
+since the days of Napoleon. Nor can it be contended that England's share
+in the Napoleonic wars was of England's seeking. Since then, if she has
+avoided hostilities it has not been for lack of opportunity. The people
+which, with Britain's intricate complexity of interests, amid all the
+turmoils and jealousies of Europe, has kept the peace for a century can
+scarcely have been seeking war.</p>
+
+<p>And again the American will say: "That's all right; I am not talking of
+Europe. You've been fighting all over the world all the time. There has
+never been a year when you have not been licking some little tin-pot
+king and freezing on to his possessions."</p>
+
+<p>Americans are rather proud&mdash;justly proud&mdash;of the way in which their
+power has spread from within the narrow limits of the original thirteen
+States till it has dominated half a continent. It has, indeed, been a
+splendid piece of work. But what the American is loth to acknowledge is
+that that growth was as truly a colonising movement&mdash;a process of
+imperial expansion&mdash;as has been the growth of the British Empire. Of
+late years, American historical writers have been preaching this fact;
+but the American people has not grasped it. Moreover there were tin-pot
+kings already ruling America. Sioux, Nez Perc&eacute;, or Cree&mdash;Zulu, Ashanti,
+or Burmese: the names do not matter. And when the expansive energy of
+the American people reached the oceans, it could no more stop than it
+could stop at the Mississippi. Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico
+were as inevitable as Louisiana and Texas. And the acquisition of the
+two last-named was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>[<a href="./images/25.png">25</a>]</span>precisely as imperial a process as the acquisition
+of the others. It is only the leap over-seas that, quite illogically,
+gives the latter, to American eyes, a different seeming. It matters not
+whether you vault a boundary pillar on the plain, a river, a mountain
+barrier, or seven thousand miles of sea-water. The process is the same.
+Nor in any of the cases was the forward movement other than commendable
+and inevitable. It was the necessary manifestation of the unrestrainable
+centrifugal impulse of the Anglo-Saxon.</p>
+
+<p>The impulse which sent the first English colonists to North America sent
+them also to Australia, to India and the uttermost parts of the earth.
+The same impulse drove the American colonists westward, northward,
+southward, in whatever direction they met no restraining force equal to
+their own expansive energy. It drove them to the Pacific, to the Rio
+Grande, to the Sault Ste. Marie; and it has driven them over oceans into
+the Arctic Circle, to the shores of Asia, down the Caribbean. And as it
+drove them it drove also those Englishmen who were left at home and they
+too spread on all lines of least resistance. But no American (I have
+never met one, though I must have talked on the subject to hundreds)
+will agree that the dispersal of the Englishmen left at home was as
+legitimate, as necessary, and every whit as peaceful as the dispersal of
+those Englishmen who went first and made their new home in America.</p>
+
+<p>With the acquisition of over-sea dominions of their own, many Americans
+are coming to comprehend something of the powerlessness of a great
+people in the grip of its destiny. They are also beginning to understand
+that the ruling and civilising of savage and alien peoples <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>[<a href="./images/26.png">26</a>]</span>is not
+either all comfort or all profit. If Americans were given the option
+to-day to take more Philippines, would they take them? Great Britain has
+been familiar with <i>her</i> Philippines for half a century and more. Does
+America suppose that she also did not learn her lesson? Will not
+Americans understand with what utter reluctance she has been compelled
+again and again to take more? Some day Americans will come to believe
+that England no more desired to annex Burmah than the United States
+deliberately planned to take the Philippines; that Englishmen were as
+content to leave the Transvaal and the Orange Free State alone as ever
+Americans were to be without Hawaii or Puerto Rico. Egypt was forced
+upon Great Britain precisely as Cuba is being foisted on America
+to-day&mdash;and every Englishman hopes that the United States will be able
+to do as much for the Cubans as Great Britain has done for the
+Egyptians.</p>
+
+<p>Great Britain would always vastly prefer&mdash;has always vastly
+preferred&mdash;to keep a friendly independent state upon her borders rather
+than be compelled to take over the burden of administration. The former
+involves less labour and more profit; it retains moreover a barrier
+between the British boundaries and those of any potentially hostile
+Power upon the other side. England has shown this in India itself and in
+Afghanistan. She tried to show it in South Africa. She has shown it in
+Thibet. More conclusively than anywhere perhaps she has shown it in the
+Federated Malay States&mdash;of which probably but few Americans know even
+the name, but where more, it may be, than anywhere are Englishmen
+working out their ambition&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>[<a href="./images/27.png">27</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">"To make the world a better place<br /></span>
+<span class="i0i">Where'er the English go."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It might happen that, under a weak and incompetent successor to
+President Diaz, Mexico would relapse into the conditions of half a
+century ago and the situation along the border be rendered intolerable
+to Americans. Sooner or later the United States would be compelled to
+protest and, protests being unheeded, to interfere. The incompetence of
+the Mexican Government continuing, America would be obliged to establish
+a protectorate, if not over the whole country, at least over that
+portion the orderly behaviour of which was necessary to her own peace.
+Thereafter annexation might follow. Now, at no stage of this process
+would Englishmen, looking on, accuse the United States of greediness, of
+bullying, or of deliberately planning to gratify an earth-hunger. They,
+from experience, understand. But when the same thing occurs on the
+British frontiers in Asia or South Africa, Americans make no effort to
+understand. "England is up to the same old game," they say. "One more
+morsel down the lion's throat."</p>
+
+<p>I am well aware of the depth of the prejudice against which I am
+arguing. The majority of Americans are so accustomed to consider their
+own expansion across the continent, and beyond, as one of the finest
+episodes in the march of human progress (as it is) and the growth of the
+British Empire as a mere succession of wanton and brutal outrages on
+helpless and benighted peoples, that the immediate impulse of the vast
+majority of American readers will be to treat a comparison between the
+two with ridicule. Minnesota Massacres and the Indian Mutiny&mdash;Cetewayo
+and Sitting Bull&mdash;Aguinaldo <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>[<a href="./images/28.png">28</a>]</span>and the Mahdi&mdash;Egypt and Cuba; the time
+will come when Americans will understand. It is a pity that prejudice
+should blind them now.</p>
+
+<p>And if the American reader will refer to the map, which presumably lies
+open before him, he might consider in what part of the world it is that
+England is now bent on a policy of aggression&mdash;where it is that
+collision with any Power threatens. In Asia? England's course in regard
+to Afghanistan and Thibet surely shows that she is content with her
+present boundaries, while her alliance with Japan and the
+<i>rapprochement</i> with Russia at which she aims should be evidences enough
+of her desire for peace! In Africa? Where is it that spheres of
+influence are not delimited? That there will be disturbances, ferments,
+which will have to be suppressed at one time and another at various
+points within the British sphere is likely&mdash;as likely as it was that
+similar disturbances would occur in the United States so long as any
+considerable number of Indians went loose unblanketed,&mdash;but what room is
+left for anything approaching serious war? With the problem of the
+mixture of races and the necessity of building up the structure of a
+state, does not England before all things need peace both in the south
+and north? In America? In Australia? With whom? That perils may arise at
+almost any point&mdash;in mid-ocean even, far away from any land&mdash;of course
+we recognise; but Americans can hardly fail to see, with the map before
+them, that England cannot seek them, but must earnestly desire to avoid
+them as she has avoided them with any European Power for this last
+century. To borrow a happy phrase, Great Britain is in truth a
+"Saturated Power." She has been compelled to shoulder burdens which she
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a>[<a href="./images/29.png">29</a>]</span>would feign have avoided, to assume obligations which were not of her
+creating and which she fulfils with reluctance. And she can assume no
+more, or, if she must, will do it only with the utmost unwillingness.
+What she needs is peace.</p>
+
+<p>And now one must go as delicately as is compatible with making one's
+meaning clear.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There is one Power in Europe whose ambitions are a menace to the peace
+of the world&mdash;one only. I do not think that Americans as a rule
+understand this, but it is true and there can be no harm in saying so,
+for neither in her press nor in the mouths of her statesmen are those
+ambitions denied by that Power herself. Indeed they are insisted on to
+the taxpayer as the reason why she needs so powerful an army and a
+fleet. It is not suggested that Germany's ambitions are other than
+legitimate and inevitable: it would be difficult for either Englishman
+or American to say that with grace. I am not arguing against Germany; I
+am arguing for Peace.</p>
+
+<p>Germany says frankly enough that she is cooped up within boundaries
+which are intolerable&mdash;that she is an "imprisoned Power." She argues,
+still with perfect frankness, that it was a mere accident that, to her
+misfortune, she came into being as a great Power too late to be able to
+get her proper share of the earth's surface, wherein her people might
+expand and put forth their surplus energy. The time when there was
+earth's surface to choose was already gone. But that fact has in no way
+lessened the need of expansion or destroyed the energy. She must burst
+her prison walls, she says. It would have been better could she have
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a>[<a href="./images/30.png">30</a>]</span>flowed out quietly into unoccupied land&mdash;as the United States has done
+and as Great Britain has done&mdash;but that being impossible, she must flow
+where she can. And ringed around her are other Powers, great or small,
+which bar her way. Therefore she needs the army and the fleet. It is
+logical and it is candid.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that the Franco-Russian Alliance makes the bursting of her
+banks difficult in what might seem to be the most natural direction. The
+Anglo-French <i>entente</i> and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance&mdash;perhaps even
+more Germany's own partnership in the Triple Alliance with Italy and
+Austria&mdash;also constitute obstacles which at least necessitate something
+more of an army and more of a fleet than might otherwise have been
+sufficient for her purpose. But those barriers are not in the long run
+going to avert the fulfilment of&mdash;or at least the endeavour to
+fulfil&mdash;that purpose.</p>
+
+<p>There is only one instrumentality, humanly speaking,&mdash;one Power,&mdash;which
+can ultimately prevent Germany from using that army and that fleet for
+the ends for which they are being created; and that instrumentality
+happens to be the United States. It is difficult to see how Germany can
+make any break for freedom without coming in conflict not only with one
+of the Great Powers but with a combination of two or more. It is
+improbable that she will attempt the enterprise without at least the
+benevolent neutrality of the United States. Assurances of positive
+sympathy would probably go a long way towards encouraging her to the
+hazard. But if the United States should range herself definitely on the
+side of peace the venture would become preposterous.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>[<a href="./images/31.png">31</a>]</span></p><p>I am not arguing against Germany; I am arguing for Peace. Least of all
+am I arguing for an American alliance for England in the event of
+Germany's dash for liberty taking an untoward direction. England needs
+no help. What does need help is Peace&mdash;the Peace of Europe&mdash;the Peace of
+the World.</p>
+
+<p>There is no talk now of stifling Germany's ambitions: of standing in the
+way of her legitimate aspirations. It may be that under other
+conditions, under a different form of government, or even under another
+individual ruler, those aspirations and ambitions would not appear to
+the German people so vital as they do now. They certainly do not appear
+so to an outsider; and the German people is far from being of one mind
+on the subject. But assuming the majority of Germans to know their own
+business best, and granting it to be essential that the people should
+have some larger sphere, under their own flag, in which to attain to
+their proper growth, if they were compelled to drop war as the means for
+obtaining that larger sphere out of their calculations, it would not
+mean that those ambitions and aspirations would have to go unsatisfied.
+Violence is not the only means of obtaining what one wants.</p>
+
+<p>There was a time when, as between individuals, if one man desired a
+thing which his neighbour possessed he went with a club and took it; but
+civilised society has abandoned physical force as a medium for the
+exchange of commodities and has substituted barter. If physical force
+were once discountenanced among nations, any nation which needed a thing
+badly enough could always get it. Everybody who had facilities for sale
+would be glad to sell, if the price was sufficiently high. It is not
+unlikely that, in an age of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a>[<a href="./images/32.png">32</a>]</span>compulsory peace, Germany would be able to
+acquire all that she desires at a less price than the expenditure of
+blood and treasure which would be necessary in a war. It would almost
+certainly cost her less than the price of war added to the capitalised
+annual burden of the up-keep of her army and navy.<a name="FNanchor_32:1_4" id="FNanchor_32:1_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_32:1_4" class="fnanchor">[32:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>But the real cost of war does not fall upon the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>[<a href="./images/33.png">33</a>]</span>individual nation. And
+for the last time let me say that I am not arguing against Germany: I am
+arguing for Peace. It has been necessary to discuss Germany's position
+because she is at the moment the only factor in the situation which
+makes for war. All other Powers are satisfied, or could be satisfied,
+with their present boundaries. Outside of the German Empire, the whole
+civilised world earnestly desires peace. It may be that Great Britain,
+acting in concert with France, Russia, and Japan, will in the near
+future be able to take a longer step towards securing that peace for the
+world than seems at present credible. But England's natural coadjutor is
+the United States. The United States has but to take one step and the
+thing is done. It is a <i>r&ocirc;le</i> which ought to appeal to the American
+people. It is certainly one for the assumption of which all posterity
+would bless the name of America.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Critics will, of course, ridicule this offhand dismissing in a few
+sentences of the largest of world problems. Each one of several
+propositions which I have advanced breaks rudely ground where angels
+might fear to tread; each one ought to be put forth cautiously with much
+preamble and historical introduction, to be circuitously argued through
+several hundred pages; but that cannot be done here because those
+propositions are not the main topic of this book. At the same time they
+must be stated, however baldly, because they represent the basis on
+which my plea for any immediate Anglo-American co-operation in the cause
+of peace must rest.</p>
+
+<p>I am also fully conscious of the hostility which almost everything that
+I say will provoke from one or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>[<a href="./images/34.png">34</a>]</span>another section of the American people,
+but I am not addressing the irreconcilables of any foreign element of
+the population of the United States. I am talking to the reasoning,
+intelligent mass of the two peoples as a whole. The subject of an
+Anglo-American alliance is one of which it is the fashion to hush up any
+attempt at the discussion in public. It must be spoken of in whispers.
+It is better&mdash;so the argument runs&mdash;to let American good-will to England
+grow of itself; an effort to hasten it will but hurt American
+susceptibilities.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place this idea rests largely on an exaggerated estimate of
+the power of the Irish politician, a power which happily is coming every
+day to be more nearly a thing of the past,&mdash;"tending," as Carlyle says,
+"visibly not to be." In the second place, I believe that I understand
+American susceptibilities; and they will not be hurt by any one who
+shows that he does understand. What the American resents bitterly is the
+arrogant and superficial criticism of the foreigner who sums up the
+characteristics and destiny of the nation after a few weeks of
+observation. Moreover, Americans do not as a rule like whispering or the
+attempt to come at things by by-paths&mdash;in which they much resemble the
+English. When they want a thing they commonly ask for it&mdash;distinctly.
+When they think a thing ought to be done they prefer to say
+so&mdash;unequivocally. They have not much love for the circuitousnesses of
+diplomacy; and if England desires American co-operation in what is a
+great and noble cause she had much better ask for it&mdash;bluntly.</p>
+
+<p>Personally I wish that forty million Englishmen would stand up and shout
+the request all at once.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8:1_1" id="Footnote_8:1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8:1_1"><span class="label">[8:1]</span></a> Since this was written, the Anglo-Russian agreement has
+been arrived at.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10:1_2" id="Footnote_10:1_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10:1_2"><span class="label">[10:1]</span></a> Justin H. Smith, <i>Our Struggle for the Fourteenth
+Colony</i>, Putnams, 1907.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15:1_3" id="Footnote_15:1_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15:1_3"><span class="label">[15:1]</span></a> <i>The Bellman</i>, Minneapolis, Dec. 22, 1906.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32:1_4" id="Footnote_32:1_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32:1_4"><span class="label">[32:1]</span></a> A point which there is no space to dwell upon here but
+which I would commend to the more leisurely consideration of
+readers&mdash;especially American readers&mdash;is that under a <i>r&eacute;gime</i> of
+physical force there can in fact be hardly any transfer of commodities
+at all. What a man has, he holds, whether his need of it be greater than
+another's, or whether he needs it not at all. There is no inducement to
+part with it and pride compels him to hold; so that only the strongest
+can come by the possession of anything that he desires. If the dollar
+were substituted for the club in the dealings of nations, the transfer
+of commodities would forthwith become simplified, and such incidents as
+the purchase of Alaska and the cession of Heligoland, instead of
+standing as isolated examples of international accommodation, would
+become customary. To take an example which will bring the matter home at
+once, many imperialist Englishmen on visiting the West Indies have
+become convinced that certain of England's possessions in those regions
+could with advantage to all parties be transferred to the United States.
+But so long as the military idea reigns&mdash;so long as an island must be
+regarded primarily as an outpost, a possible naval base, a strategic
+point&mdash;so long will the obstacles to such a transfer remain. As soon as
+war was put outside the range of possibilities, commercial principles
+would begin to operate and those territories, however much or little
+they might be worth, would be acquired by the United States. The same
+thing would happen in all parts of the world. Possessions, instead of
+being held by those who could hold them, would tend to pass to those who
+needed them or to whom they logically belonged by geographical relation,
+and neither Germany's legitimate aspirations nor those of any other
+country would need to go unsatisfied.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>[<a href="./images/35.png">35</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Difference in Point of View</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Anglo-Saxon Family Likeness&mdash;How Frenchmen and Germans
+View it&mdash;Englishmen, Americans, and "Foreigners"&mdash;An Echo of
+the War of 1812&mdash;An Anglo-American Conflict
+Unthinkable&mdash;American Feeling for England&mdash;The Venezuelan
+Incident&mdash;The Pilgrims and Some Secret History&mdash;Why Americans
+still Hate England&mdash;Great Britain's Nearness to the United
+States Geographically&mdash;Commercially&mdash;Historically&mdash;England's
+Foreign Ill-wishers in America.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The one thing chiefly needed to make both Englishmen and Americans
+desire an alliance is that they should come to know each other better.
+They would then be astonished to find not only how much they liked each
+other, but how closely each was already in sympathy with the other's
+ways of life and thought and how inconsiderable were the differences
+between them. Some one (I thought it was Mr. Freeman, but I cannot find
+the passage in his writings) has said that it would be a good way of
+judging an Englishman's knowledge of the world to notice whether, on
+first visiting America, he was most struck by the differences between
+the two peoples or by their resemblances. When an intelligent American
+has travelled for any time on the Continent of Europe, in contact with
+peoples who are truly "foreign" to him, he feels on arriving in London
+almost as if he were at home again. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>[<a href="./images/36.png">36</a>]</span>The more an Englishman moves among
+other peoples, the more he is impressed, on reaching the United States,
+with his kinship to those among whom he finds himself. Nor is it in
+either case wholly, or even chiefly, a matter of a common speech.</p>
+
+<p>"Jonathan," says Max O'Rell, "is but John Bull expanded&mdash;John Bull with
+plenty of elbow room." And the same thing is said again and again in
+different phraseology by various Continental writers. It is said most
+impressively by those who do not put it into words at all, as by
+Professor M&uuml;nsterberg<a name="FNanchor_36:1_5" id="FNanchor_36:1_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_36:1_5" class="fnanchor">[36:1]</a> who is apparently not familiar with England,
+but shows no lack of willingness to dislike her. There is therefore no
+intentional comparison between the two peoples, but the writer's point
+of view has absorbing interest to an Englishman who knows both
+countries. More than once he remarks with admiration or astonishment on
+traits of the American character or institutions in the United States
+which the Englishman would necessarily take for granted, because they
+are precisely the same as those to which he has been accustomed at home.
+Writing for a German public, the Professor draws morals from American
+life which delight an English reader by their na&iuml;ve and elementary
+superfluousness. In all unconsciousness, Professor M&uuml;nsterberg has
+written a most valuable essay on the essential kinship of the British
+and American peoples as contrasted with his own.</p>
+
+<p>Two brothers will commonly be aware only of the differences between
+them&mdash;the unlikeness of their features, the dissimilarities in their
+tastes or capabilities,&mdash;yet the world at large may have difficulty in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>[<a href="./images/37.png">37</a>]</span>distinguishing them apart. While they are conscious only of their
+individual differences, to the neighbours all else disappears in the
+family resemblance. So it is that Max O'Rell sees how like the American
+is to the Englishman more clearly than Mark Twain: Professor M&uuml;nsterberg
+has involuntarily traced the features of the one in the lineaments of
+the other with a surer hand than Matthew Arnold or Mr. Bryce.</p>
+
+<p>When, in his remarkable book, M. Demolins uses the term Anglo-Saxon, he
+speaks indifferently at one time of Englishmen and at another of
+Americans. The peoples are to him one and indistinguishable. Their
+greatness is a common greatness based on qualities which are the
+inheritance of their Anglo-Saxon origin. Chief among these qualities,
+the foundation-stone of their greatness, is the devotion to what we will
+follow him in calling the "Particularistic" form of society,&mdash;a society,
+that is, in which the individual predominates over the community, and
+not the community over the individual; a society which aims at
+"establishing each child in its full independence." This is, a Frenchman
+sees, eminently characteristic of the English and the Americans, in
+contrast with other peoples, with those which hold a republican form of
+government no less than those which live under an autocracy. And it is
+peculiarly Saxon in its origin,&mdash;not derived from the Celt or Norman or
+Dane. These latter belonged (as do the peoples sprung from, or allied
+to, them to-day) to that class of people which places the community
+above the individual, which looks instinctively to the State or the
+government for initiative. The Saxons alone (a people of earnest
+individual workers, agriculturalists and craftsmen) relied always on the
+initiative <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>[<a href="./images/38.png">38</a>]</span>and impulse of the individual&mdash;what M. Demolins calls "the
+law of intense personal labour"&mdash;and it was by virtue of this quality
+that they eventually won social supremacy over the other races in
+Britain. It is by virtue of the same quality that the Americans have
+been enabled to subdue their continent and build up the fabric of the
+United States. It is this quality, says the French writer almost
+brutally, which makes the German and Latin races to-day stand to
+<i>L'Anglais</i> in about the same relation as the Oriental and the Redskin
+stand to the European. And when M. Demolins speaks of <i>L'Anglais</i>, he
+means the American as much as the "Englishman of Britain." It is a
+convenient term and, so essentially one are they in his eyes, there is
+no need to distinguish between the peoples. Mr. William Archer's remark
+is worth quoting, that "It is amazing how unessential has been the
+change produced in the Anglo-Saxon type and temperament [in America] by
+the influences of climate or the admixtures of foreign blood."<a name="FNanchor_38:1_6" id="FNanchor_38:1_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_38:1_6" class="fnanchor">[38:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>When individual Englishmen and Americans are thrown together in strange
+parts of the world, they seldom fail to foregather as members of one
+race. There may be four traders living isolated in some remote port; but
+though the Russian may speak English with less "accent" than the
+American and though the German may have lived for some years in New
+York, it is not to the society of the German or the Russian that the
+American or the Englishman instinctively <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a>[<a href="./images/39.png">39</a>]</span>turns for companionship. The
+two former have but the common terms of speech; the Englishman and the
+American use also common terms of thought and feeling.</p>
+
+<p>The people who know this best are the officers and men of the British
+and American navies, who are accustomed to find themselves thrown with
+the sailors of all nations in all sorts of waters; and wherever they are
+thus thrown together, the men who sail under the Stars and Stripes and
+those who fly the Union Jack are friends. I have talked with a good many
+British sailors (not officers) and it is good to hear the tone of
+respect in which they speak of the American navy, as compared with
+certain others.</p>
+
+<p>The opportunities for similar companionship among the men of the armies
+of the two nations are fewer, but when the allied forces entered China
+the comradeship which arose between the American and British troops, to
+the exclusion of all others, is notorious. Every night after mess,
+British officers sought the American lines and <i>vice versa</i>. The
+Americans have the credit of having invented that rigorous development
+of martial law, by which, as soon as British officers came within their
+lines, sentries were posted with orders not to let them pass out again
+unless accompanied by an American officer. Thus the guests could not
+escape from hospitality till such hour as their hosts pleased.</p>
+
+<p>Some ten years ago military representatives of various nations were
+present by invitation at certain man&oelig;uvres of the Indian army, and
+one night, when an official entertainment was impending, the United
+States officers were guests at the mess of a British regiment. Dinner
+being over, the colonel pushed his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>[<a href="./images/40.png">40</a>]</span>chair back and, turning to the
+American on his right, said in all innocence:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, come along! It's time to go and help to receive these d&mdash;&mdash;d
+foreigners."</p>
+
+<p>An incident less obviously <i>&agrave; propos</i>, but which seems to me to strike
+very truly the common chord of kinship of character between the races,
+was told me by a well-known American painter of naval and military
+subjects. He was the guest of the Forty-fourth (Essex) at, I think,
+Gibraltar, when in the course of dinner the British officer on his right
+broke a silence with the casual remark:</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder whether we shall ever have another smack at you fellows."</p>
+
+<p>The American was not unnaturally surprised.</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Do you want it?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No; we should hate to fight you of course, but then, you know, the
+Forty-fourth was at New Orleans."</p>
+
+<p>It appealed to the American&mdash;not merely the pride in the regiment that
+still smarted under the blow of ninety years ago, but still more the
+feeling towards himself, as an American, that prompted the Englishman to
+speak in terms which he knew that he would never have dreamed of using
+under similar circumstances to the representative of any "foreign"
+nation. The Englishman had no fear that the American would
+misunderstand. It appealed to the latter so much that after his return
+to the United States, being called upon to speak at some entertainment
+or function at West Point, when, besides the cadets, there were many
+officers of the United States Army in the room, he told the story.
+Instantly, as he finished, a simultaneous cry from several places in the
+hall called for "Three <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a>[<a href="./images/41.png">41</a>]</span>cheers for the Forty-fourth!" There was no
+Englishman in the company, but, as he told me the story, never had he
+heard so instantaneous, so crashing a response to any call, as then when
+the whole room leaped to its feet and cheered the old enemies who had
+not forgotten.<a name="FNanchor_41:1_7" id="FNanchor_41:1_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_41:1_7" class="fnanchor">[41:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is not my wish here to discuss even the possibility of war between
+Great Britain and the United States. The thing is too horrible to be
+considered as even the remotest of contingencies&mdash;the "Unpardonable
+War," indeed, as Mr. James Barnes has called it. None the less, there is
+always greater danger of such a war than any Englishman imagines or than
+many Americans would like to confess. However true it may be that it
+takes two to make a quarrel, it is none the less true that if one party
+be bent upon quarrelling it is always possible for him to go to lengths
+of irritation <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a>[<a href="./images/42.png">42</a>]</span>and insult which must ultimately provoke the most
+peaceful and reluctant of antagonists. However pacific and reluctant to
+fight Great Britain might be at the outset, she is not conspicuously
+lacking in national pride or in sensitiveness to encroachments on the
+national honour.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Freeman makes the shrewd remark that "the American feels a greater
+distinction between himself and the Englishman of Britain than the
+Englishman of Britain feels between himself and the American," which
+remains entirely true to-day, in spite of the seemingly paradoxical fact
+that the American knows more of English history and English politics
+than the Englishman knows of the politics and history of the United
+States. This by no means implies that the American knows more of the
+English character than the Englishman knows of his. On the contrary, the
+Americans have seen infinitely less of the world than Englishmen, and
+however many of the bare facts of English history and English politics
+they may know, they are strangely ignorant of the atmosphere to which
+those facts belong, and have never learned how much more foreign to them
+other foreign nations are. The individual American will take the
+individual Englishman into his friendship&mdash;will even accept him as a
+sort of a relative&mdash;but as a political entity Great Britain is almost as
+much a foreign nation as any.</p>
+
+<p>The casual Englishman visiting the United States for but a short time
+will probably not discover this fact. He only knows that he is cordially
+received himself&mdash;even more cordially, he feels, than he deserves&mdash;and
+most probably those persons, especially the ladies, whom he meets will
+assure him that they <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a>[<a href="./images/43.png">43</a>]</span>are "devoted" to England. He may not have time to
+discover that that devotion is not universal. Only after a while, in all
+probability, will the fact as stated by Mr. Freeman dawn upon him, and
+he will somehow be aware that with all the charming hospitality that he
+receives he is in some way treated as more of a foreigner than he is
+conscious of being. It is necessary that he should have some extended
+residence in the country&mdash;unless his visit happens to coincide with such
+an incident as the Venezuelan controversy or the outbreak of the Boer
+War&mdash;before things group themselves in at all their right perspective
+before his eyes. The intensity of the feeling displayed at the time of
+the Venezuelan incident came as a shock to Englishmen at home; but those
+who had lived for any length of time in America (west of New York) were
+not surprised. It is probable that the greater number of the American
+people at that time wished for war, and believed that it was nothing but
+cowardice on the part of Great Britain&mdash;her constitutional dislike of
+fighting anybody of her own size, as a number of the papers pleasantly
+phrased it&mdash;that prevented their wish from being gratified.</p>
+
+<p>The concluding paragraphs of ex-President Cleveland's treatise on this
+subject are illuminating. In 1895, as I have said, a majority of the
+American people unquestionably wished to fight; but that numerical
+majority included perhaps a minority of the native-born Americans, a
+small minority certainly of the richer or more well-to-do among them,
+and an almost infinitesimal proportion of the best educated of the
+native-born. This is what Mr. Cleveland says:</p>
+
+<p>"Those among us who most loudly reprehended <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a>[<a href="./images/44.png">44</a>]</span>and bewailed our vigorous
+assertion of the Monroe Doctrine were the timid ones who feared personal
+financial loss, or those engaged in speculation and stock-gambling, in
+buying much beyond their ability to pay, and generally in living by
+their wits [<i>sic</i>]. The patriotism of such people traverses exclusively
+the pocket nerve.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But these things are as nothing when weighed
+against the sublime patriotism and devotion to their nation's honour
+exhibited by the great mass of our countrymen&mdash;the plain people of the
+land.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Not for a moment did their Government know the lack of their
+strong and stalwart support.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. It [the incident] has given us a better
+place in the respect and consideration of the people of all nations, and
+especially of Great Britain; it has again confirmed our confidence in
+the overwhelming prevalence among our citizens of disinterested devotion
+to our nation's honour; and last, but by no means least, it has taught
+us where to look in the ranks of our countrymen for the best
+patriotism."<a name="FNanchor_44:1_8" id="FNanchor_44:1_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_44:1_8" class="fnanchor">[44:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cleveland, now that he is no longer in active politics, holds, as he
+deserves, a secure place in the affections of the American people. But
+at the time when this treatise was published, he was a not impossible
+nominee of the Democratic party for another term as President; and the
+"plain people of the land" have a surprising number of votes. Mr.
+Cleveland knows his own people and knows that with a large portion of
+them war with England would in 1895 have been popular. It is significant
+also that he still thought it worth while to insist upon this fact at
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a>[<a href="./images/45.png">45</a>]</span>time when this treatise was given to the world in a volume; and
+that was as late as 1904, very shortly before the Democratic party
+selected its nominee for the Presidential contest of that year. It is
+possible that if Mr. Cleveland had been that nominee instead of Justice
+Parker, one of the leading features of his campaign would have been a
+vigorous insistence on the Monroe Doctrine, as interpreted by himself,
+with especial reference to Great Britain.</p>
+
+<p>Englishmen are inclined (so far as they think about the matter at all)
+to flatter themselves that the ill-feeling which blazed so suddenly into
+flame twelve years ago was more or less effectually quenched by Great
+Britain's assistance to the United States at the time of the Spanish
+War. Those Englishmen who watched the course of opinion in America at
+the time of the Boer War must have had some misgivings. It is evident
+that so good a judge as Mr. Cleveland believed, as late as 1904, that
+hostility to Great Britain was still a policy which would commend itself
+to the "plain people of the land."</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the war fever in 1895 was stronger in the West than in
+the Eastern States. A traveller crossing the United States at that time
+would have found the idea of hostilities with England being treated as
+something of a joke in cultivated circles in New York, but among the
+people in general to the West of Buffalo and Pittsburg it was terrible
+earnest. A curious point, moreover, which I think I have never seen
+stated in England, is that many good men in the Democratic Party at that
+time stood by President Cleveland, though sincerely friendly to Great
+Britain; the truth being that they did not believe that war with
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a>[<a href="./images/46.png">46</a>]</span>England was seriously to be apprehended, while another Power was at the
+moment seeking to obtain a foothold in South America, for whose benefit
+a "vigorous assertion of the Monroe Doctrine" was much to be desired.
+The thunders of the famous message indeed were, in the minds of many
+excellent Americans in the East, directed not against Great Britain but
+against Germany.</p>
+
+<p>None the less it should be noted that it was in the hope of influencing
+the voters in a local election in New York that Mr. Hearst, as recently
+as in November, 1907, thought it worth while to appeal to the
+"traditional hatred" of Great Britain. However little else Mr. Hearst
+may have to commend him, he cannot be said to be out of touch with the
+sentiments of the more ignorant masses of the people of New York. That
+he failed did not signify that he was mistaken as to the extent or
+intensity of the prejudice to which he appealed, but only that the cry
+was raised too late and too obviously as an electioneering trick in a
+campaign which was already lost.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of what happened during the Spanish War, in spite of every
+effort that England has made to convince America of her friendliness, in
+spite of the improvement which has taken place in the feelings of (what,
+without offence, I venture to call) the upper classes in America towards
+Great Britain, the fact still remains that, with a large portion of the
+people, war with England would be popular.</p>
+
+<p>That is, perhaps, to state the case somewhat brutally. Let me rather say
+that, if any pretext should arise, the minds of the masses of the
+American people could more easily be inflamed to the point of desiring
+war with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a>[<a href="./images/47.png">47</a>]</span>England than they could to the point of desiring war with any
+other nation. It is bitter to have to say it&mdash;horrible to think it. I
+know also that many Americans will not agree with me; but I do not think
+that among them will be many of those whose business it is, either as
+politicians or as journalists, to be in touch with the sentiments of the
+people.</p>
+
+<p>Let me not be suspected of failing to attach sufficient importance to
+those public expressions of international amity which we hear so
+frequently, couched in such charming phraseology, at the dinners given
+by the Pilgrims, either in London or New York, and on similar occasions.
+The Pilgrims are doing excellent work, as also are other similar
+societies in less conspicuous ways. The fact has, I believe, never been
+published, but can be told now without indiscretion, that a movement was
+on foot some twelve years ago for the organisation of an Anglo-American
+League, on a scale much more ambitious than that of the Pilgrims or any
+other of the existing societies. Certain members of the British Ministry
+of the time had been approached and had welcomed the movement with
+cordiality, and the active support of a number of men of corresponding
+public repute in various parts of the United States had been similarly
+enlisted. It was expected (though I think the official request had not
+been made) that the Prince of Wales (now his Majesty King Edward VII.)
+would be the President of the English branch of the League, while
+ex-President Harrison was to have acted in a similar capacity in
+America. By a grim pleasantry of Fate, the letter from England conveying
+final and official information of the approval of the aforesaid
+Ministers, and arranging for the publication <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a>[<a href="./images/48.png">48</a>]</span>of the first formal
+overture from the United States (for the movement was to be made to
+appear to emanate therefrom) arrived in America on the very day of the
+appearance&mdash;and readers will remember how totally unexpected the
+appearance was&mdash;of Mr. Cleveland's Venezuelan message. What would have
+been the effect upon the crisis which then ensued if the organisation of
+the League had been but a few weeks further advanced, is an interesting
+subject for speculation. That, after a year or two of preparation, the
+movement should have been beaten by so totally unforeseen a complication
+at, as it were, the very winning post, was a little absurd. Thereafter,
+the right moment for proceeding with the organisation on the same lines
+never again presented itself.</p>
+
+<p>Englishmen must not make the mistake of attaching the same value to the
+nice things which are said by prominent Americans on public or
+semi-public occasions as they attach to similar utterances by
+Englishmen. It is not, of course, intended to imply that the American
+speakers are not individually sincere; but no American can act as the
+spokesman for his people in such a matter with the same authority as can
+be assumed by a properly qualified Englishman. One of the chief
+manifestations of the characteristic national lack of the sentiment of
+reverence is the disregard which the American masses entertain for the
+opinions of their "leading" men, whether in public life or not. The
+English people is accustomed, within certain limits, to repose
+confidence in its leaders and to suffer them in truth to lead; so that a
+small handful of men can within limits speak for the English people.
+They can voice the public sentiments, or, when they speak, the people
+will modify its <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a>[<a href="./images/49.png">49</a>]</span>sentiments to accord with their utterances. There is no
+man or set of men who can similarly speak for the American people; and
+no one is better aware of that fact than the American, however honoured
+by his countrymen, when he gives expression in London to the cordiality
+of his own feelings for Great Britain and expresses guardedly his
+conviction that a recurrence of trouble between the peoples will never
+again be possible. For one thing, public opinion is not centralised in
+America as it is in England. If not <i>tot homines</i>, at least <i>tot
+civitates</i>; and each State, each class and community, instinctively
+objects to any one presuming to speak for it (a prejudice based
+presumably on political tradition) except its own locally elected
+representative, and even he must be specifically instructed <i>ad hoc</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Only the good-humoured common-sense of British diplomacy prevented war
+at the time of the Venezuelan incident; and it may be that the same
+influence would be strong enough to prevent it again. But it is
+desirable that Englishmen should understand that just as they were
+astounded at the bitterness against them which manifested itself then,
+so they might be no less astounded again. It is, of course, difficult
+for Englishmen to believe. It must necessarily be hard to believe that
+one is hated by a person whom one likes. It happens to be just as
+difficult for the mass of Americans (again I should like to say the
+lower mass) to believe that Englishmen as a whole really like them. In
+1895, the American masses believed that England's attitude was the
+result of cowardice, pure and simple. Knowing their own feeling towards
+Great Britain, they neither could nor would believe that she was then
+influenced by a sincere and almost brotherly good-will&mdash;that, without
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a>[<a href="./images/50.png">50</a>]</span>one shadow of fear, Englishmen refused to consider war with the United
+States as possible because it had never occurred to them that the United
+States was other than a friendly nation&mdash;barely by one degree of kinship
+farther removed than one of Great Britain's larger colonies.</p>
+
+<p>And this is the first great obstacle that stands in the way of a proper
+understanding between the peoples&mdash;not merely the fact that the American
+nation is so far from having any affection for Great Britain, but the
+fact that the two peoples regard each other so differently that neither
+understands, or is other than reluctant to believe in, the attitude of
+the other. For the benefit of the English reader, rather than the
+American, it may be well to explain this at some length.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The essential fact is that America, New York or Washington, has been in
+the past, and still is in only a slightly less degree, much farther from
+London than London is from New York or Washington. This is true
+historically and commercially&mdash;and geographically, in everything except
+the mere matter of miles. The American for generations looked at the
+world through London, whereas when the Englishman turned his vision to
+New York almost the whole world intervened.</p>
+
+<p>Geographically, the nearest soil to the United States is British soil.
+Along the whole northern border of the country lies the Dominion of
+Canada, without, for a distance of some two thousand miles, any visible
+line of demarcation, so that the American may walk upon the prairie and
+not know at what moment his foot passes from his own soil to the soil of
+Great Britain. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a>[<a href="./images/51.png">51</a>]</span>One of the chief lines of railway from New York to
+Chicago passes for half its length over Canadian ground; the effect
+being precisely as if the Englishman to go from London to Birmingham
+were to run for half the distance over a corner of France. A large
+proportion of the produce of the wheat-fields of the North-western
+States, of Minnesota and the two Dakotas, finds its way to New York over
+the Canadian Pacific Railway and from New York is shipped, probably in
+British bottoms, to Liverpool. When the American sails outward from New
+York or other eastern port, if he goes north he arrives only at
+Newfoundland or Nova Scotia; if he puts out to southward, the first land
+that he finds is the Bermudas. If he makes for Europe, it is generally
+at Liverpool or Southampton that he disembarks. On his very threshold in
+all directions, lies land over which floats the Union Jack and the same
+flag flies over half the vessels in the harbours of his own coasts.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult for the Englishman to understand how near Great Britain
+has always been to the citizen of the United States, for to the
+Englishman himself the United States is a distant region, which he does
+not visit unless of set purpose he makes up his mind to go there. He
+must undertake a special journey, and a long one, lying apart from his
+ordinary routes of travel. The American cannot, save with difficulty and
+by circuitous routes, escape from striking British soil whenever he
+leaves his home. It confronts him on all sides and bars his way to all
+the world. Is it to be wondered at that he thinks of Englishmen
+otherwise than as Englishmen think of him?</p>
+
+<p>Yet this mere matter of geographical proximity is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a>[<a href="./images/52.png">52</a>]</span>trivial compared to
+the nearness of Great Britain in other ways.</p>
+
+<p>Commercially&mdash;and it must be remembered how large a part matters of
+commerce play in the life and thoughts of the people of the United
+States&mdash;until recently America traded with the world almost entirely
+through Great Britain. It is not the produce of the Western wheat-fields
+only that is carried abroad in British bottoms, but the great bulk of
+the commerce of the United States must even now find its way to the
+outer world in ships which carry the Union Jack, and in doing so must
+pay the toll of its freight charges to Great Britain. If a New York
+manufacturer sells goods to South America itself, the chances are that
+those goods will be shipped to Liverpool and reshipped to their
+destination&mdash;each time in British vessels&mdash;and the payment therefor will
+be made by exchange on London, whereby the British banker profits only
+in less degree than the British ship-owner. In financial matters, New
+York has had contact with the outer world practically only through
+London. Until recently, no great corporate enterprise could be floated
+in America without the assistance of English capital, so that for years
+the "British Bondholder," who, by the interest which he drew (or often
+did not draw) upon his bonds, was supposed to be sucking the life-blood
+out of the American people, has been, until the trusts arose, the
+favourite bogey with which the American demagogue has played upon the
+feelings of his audiences. Now, happily, with more wealth at home,
+animosity has been diverted to the native trusts.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that of late years the United States has been striking out to
+win a world-commerce of her own; <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a>[<a href="./images/53.png">53</a>]</span>that by way of the Pacific she is
+building up a trade free, in part at least, from British domination;
+that she is making earnest efforts to develop her mercantile marine, so
+that her own commerce may in some fair measure be carried under her own
+flag; that New York is fast becoming a financial centre powerful enough
+to be able to disregard the dictation&mdash;and promising ere long to be a
+rival&mdash;of London; that during the last decade, America has been
+relieving England of vast quantities of her bonds and shares, heretofore
+held in London, and that the wealth of her people has increased so
+rapidly that she can find within herself the capital for her industries
+and (except in times like the recent panic) need no longer go abroad to
+beg. It is also true that of recent years England has become not a
+little uneasy at the growing volume of American trade, even within the
+borders of the British Isles themselves; but this newly developed
+uneasiness in British minds, however well grounded, can bear no
+comparison to the feeling of antagonism towards England&mdash;an antagonism
+compounded of mingled respect and resentment&mdash;which Americans of the
+older generation have had borne in upon them from youth up. To
+Englishmen, the growing commercial power of the United States is a new
+phenomenon, not yet altogether recognised and only half-understood; for
+they have been for so long accustomed to consider themselves the rulers
+of the sea-borne trade of the world that it is with difficulty that they
+comprehend that their supremacy can be seriously threatened. To the
+American, on the other hand, British commercial supremacy has, at least
+since 1862, been an incontrovertible and disheartening fact. The huge
+bulk of British commerce and British wealth has loomed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a>[<a href="./images/54.png">54</a>]</span>so large as to
+shut out his view of all the world; it has hemmed him in on all sides,
+obstructed him, towered over him. And all the while, as he grew richer,
+he has seen that Great Britain only profited the more, by interest on
+his bonds, by her freight charges, by her profit on exchange. How is it
+possible that under such conditions the American can think about or feel
+towards England as the Englishman has thought about and felt towards
+him?</p>
+
+<p>Yet even now not one half has been told. We have seen that the
+geographical proximity of Great Britain and the overshadowing bulk of
+British commerce could not fail&mdash;neither separately could fail&mdash;to
+create in American minds an attitude towards England different from the
+natural attitude of Englishmen towards the United States; but both these
+influences together, powerful though each may be, are almost unimportant
+compared to the factor which most of all colours, and must colour, the
+American's view of Great Britain,&mdash;and that is the influence of the
+history of his own country.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the United States as an independent nation goes back no
+more than one hundred and thirty years, a space to be spanned by two
+human lives; so that events of even her very earliest years are still
+recent history and the sentiments evoked by those events have not yet
+had time to die. In the days of the childhood of fathers of men still
+living (the thing is possible, so recent is it) the nation was born out
+of the throes of a desperate struggle with Great Britain&mdash;a struggle
+which left the name "British" a word of loathing and contempt to
+American ears. American history proper begins with hatred of England:
+nor has there been <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a>[<a href="./images/55.png">55</a>]</span>anything in the course of that history, until the
+present decade, calculated to tend to modify that hatred in any material
+degree.</p>
+
+<p>During the nineteenth century, the United States, except for the war
+with Spain at its close, had little contact with foreign Powers. She
+lived isolated, concentrating all her energies on the developing of her
+own resources and the work of civilising a continent. Foreign
+complications scarcely came within the range of her vision. The Mexican
+War was hardly a foreign war. The only war with another nation in the
+whole course of the century was that with Great Britain in 1812.
+Reference has already been made to the English ignorance of the War of
+1812; but to the American it was the chief event in the foreign politics
+of his country during the first century and a quarter of its existence,
+and the Englishman's ignorance thereof moves him either to irritation or
+to amusement according to his temperament. In the American Civil War,
+British sympathy with the South was unhappily exaggerated in American
+eyes by the <i>Alabama</i> incident. The North speedily forgave the South;
+but it has not yet entirely forgiven Great Britain.</p>
+
+<p>The other chief events of American history have nearly all, directly or
+indirectly, tended to keep Great Britain before the minds of the people
+as the one foreign Power with whom armed conflict was an ever-present
+possibility. The cession of her North American territory on the part of
+France only served to accentuate England's position as the sole rival of
+the United States upon the continent. Alaska was purchased from Russia;
+but Russia has long ago been almost forgotten in the transaction while
+it was with Great <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a>[<a href="./images/56.png">56</a>]</span>Britain that the troublesome question of the Alaskan
+boundary arose. And through all the years there have been recurring at
+intervals, not too far apart, various minor causes of friction between
+the two peoples,&mdash;in the Newfoundland fisheries question on the east and
+the seal fisheries on the west, with innumerable difficulties arising
+out of the common frontier line on the north or out of British relations
+(as in the case of Venezuela) with South American peoples.</p>
+
+<p>If an Englishman were asked what had been the chief events in the
+external affairs of England during the nineteenth century he would say:
+the Napoleonic wars, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the China,
+Ashanti, Afghan, Zulu, Soudan, Burmese, and Boer wars, the occupation of
+Egypt, the general expansion of the Empire in Africa&mdash;and what not else
+besides. He would not mention the United States. To the American the
+history of his country has chiefly to do with Great Britain.</p>
+
+<p>Just as geographically British territory surrounds and abuts on the
+United States on almost every side; just as commercially Great Britain
+has always hemmed in, dominated, and overshadowed the United States, so,
+historically, Great Britain has been the one and constant enemy, actual
+or potential, and her power a continual menace. How is it possible that
+the American should think of England as the Englishman thinks of the
+United States?</p>
+
+<p>There have, moreover, been constantly at work in America forces the
+chief object of which has been to keep alive hostility to Great Britain.
+Of native Americans who trace their family back to colonial days, there
+are still some among the older generation in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a>[<a href="./images/57.png">57</a>]</span>whom the old hatred of the
+Revolutionary War yet burns so strongly that they would not, when at
+work on the old family farm in, let us say, Vermont, be very seriously
+surprised on some fine morning to see a party of red-coated Hessians
+come round the angle of the hill. There are those living whose chief
+pastime as boys was to fight imaginary battles with the loathed British
+in and out among the old farm-buildings&mdash;buildings which yet bear upon
+them, perhaps, the marks of real British bullets fired in the real
+war.<a name="FNanchor_57:1_9" id="FNanchor_57:1_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_57:1_9" class="fnanchor">[57:1]</a> And those boys, moving West as they came to manhood, carried
+the same spirit, the same inherited dislike of the name "British," into
+the cities of the Mississippi Valley, across the prairies and over the
+mountains to the Pacific slope. But it is not the real American&mdash;except
+one here and there on the old New England homestead&mdash;who talks much of
+his anti-British feeling. It is the imported American who has refused to
+allow the old hostility to die but has kept pouring contumely on the
+British name and insisted on the incorporation of an "anti-British"
+plank in his party platform to catch the votes of the citizens of his
+own nationality at each succeeding election.</p>
+
+<p>Englishmen are generally aware of the importance in American politics of
+the Irish vote. It is probable, indeed, that, particularly as far as the
+conditions of the last few years are concerned, the importance of that
+vote has been magnified to the English mind. In <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a>[<a href="./images/58.png">58</a>]</span>certain localities, and
+more particularly in a few of the larger cities, it is still, of course,
+an important factor by its mere numbers; but even in the cities in which
+the Irish vote is still most in evidence at elections, the influx during
+the past decade from all parts of Europe of immigrants who in the course
+of the five-years term become voters has, of necessity, lessened its
+relative importance.</p>
+
+<p>In New York City, for instance, through which pass annually some
+nineteen twentieths of all the immigrants coming into the country, the
+foreign elements other than Irish&mdash;German, Italian (mainly from the less
+educated portions of the Peninsula), Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Hebrew,
+Roumanian, etc.,&mdash;now far outnumber the Irish. In New York, indeed, the
+Germans are alone more numerous; but the Irish have always shown a
+larger interest in, and a greater capacity for, political action, so
+that they still retain an influence out of all proportion to their
+voting number. On the other hand the Irish, or their leaders, have
+maintained so corrupt a standard of political action (so that a large
+proportion of the evils from which the affairs of certain of the larger
+American cities suffer to-day may be justly charged to their methods and
+influence) that it is uncertain whether their abuse of Great Britain
+does not, in the minds of certain, and those not the worst, classes of
+the people react rather to create good-will towards England than to
+increase hostility.</p>
+
+<p>The power of the Irish vote as an anti-British force, then, is
+undoubtedly overrated in England; but it must be borne in mind that some
+of the other foreign elements in the population which on many questions
+may act as a counterpoise to the Irish are not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a>[<a href="./images/59.png">59</a>]</span>themselves conspicuously
+friendly to England. If we hear too much of the Irish in America, we
+hear perhaps too little of some of the other peoples. And the point
+which I would impress on the English reader is that he cannot expect the
+American to feel towards England as he himself feels towards the United
+States. The American people came in the first instance justly by its
+hatred of the name "British," and there have not since been at work any
+forces sufficiently powerful to obliterate that hatred, while there have
+been some operating to keep it alive.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36:1_5" id="Footnote_36:1_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36:1_5"><span class="label">[36:1]</span></a> <i>The Americans</i>, by Hugo M&uuml;nsterberg, 1905.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38:1_6" id="Footnote_38:1_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38:1_6"><span class="label">[38:1]</span></a> <i>America To-day</i>, by William Archer (1900). Mr. Archer's
+study of the American people is in my opinion the most sympathetic and
+comprehending which has been written by an Englishman.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41:1_7" id="Footnote_41:1_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41:1_7"><span class="label">[41:1]</span></a> The battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812, is not
+one of those incidents in English history which Englishmen generally
+insist on remembering, and it may be as well to explain to English
+readers that it was on that occasion that an inferior force of American
+riflemen (a "backwoods rabble" a British officer called them before the
+engagement) repulsed a British attack, from behind improvised
+earthworks, with a loss to the attacking force of 3300 killed and
+wounded, and at a cost to themselves of 13 wounded and 8 killed&mdash;or 21
+casualties in all. Of the Forty-fourth (Essex) Regiment 816 men went
+into action, and after less than thirty minutes 134 were able to line
+up. The Ninety-third (Sutherland) Highlanders suffered even more
+severely. Of 1008 officers and men only 132 came out unhurt. The battle
+was fought after peace had been concluded, so that the lives were thrown
+away to no purpose. The British had to deliver a direct frontal attack
+over level ground, penned in by a lake on one side and a swamp on the
+other. It was the same lesson, in even bloodier characters, as was
+taught on several occasions in South Africa.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44:1_8" id="Footnote_44:1_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44:1_8"><span class="label">[44:1]</span></a> <i>Presidential Problems</i>, by Grover Cleveland, p. 281
+(New York, 1904).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57:1_9" id="Footnote_57:1_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57:1_9"><span class="label">[57:1]</span></a> I had written this before reading Senator Hoar's
+Reminiscences in which, in speaking of his own youth, he tells how
+"Every boy imagined himself a soldier and his highest conception of
+glory was to 'lick the British'" (<i>An Autobiography of Seventy Years</i>).</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a>[<a href="./images/60.png">60</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Two Sides of the American Character</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Europe's Undervaluation of America's Fighting Power&mdash;The
+Americans as Sailors&mdash;The Nation's Greatest
+Asset&mdash;Self-reliance of the People&mdash;The Making of a
+Doctor&mdash;And of a Surveyor&mdash;Society in the Rough&mdash;New York and
+the Country&mdash;An Anglo-Saxon Trait&mdash;America's
+Unpreparedness&mdash;American Consuls and Diplomats&mdash;A Homogeneous
+People&mdash;The Value of a Common Speech&mdash;America more Anglo-Saxon
+than Britain&mdash;Mr. Wells and the Future in America.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>One circumstance ought in itself to convince Americans that cowardice or
+fear has no share in the greater outspokenness of England's good-will
+during these later years, namely that when Great Britain showed her
+sympathy with the United States at the time of the Spanish War,
+Englishmen largely believed that they were giving that sympathy to the
+weaker Power,<a name="FNanchor_60:1_10" id="FNanchor_60:1_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_60:1_10" class="fnanchor">[60:1]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a>[<a href="./images/61.png">61</a>]</span>&mdash;weaker, that is as far as organised fighting
+strength, immediately available, was concerned. It is a century or two
+since Englishmen did Spain the compliment of being afraid of her. How
+then, in 1895, could they have had any fear of the United States?</p>
+
+<p>Few Europeans, indeed, have any conception of the fighting power of the
+United States, for it is not large on paper. Nor is an Englishman likely
+to make special allowance for the fighting efficiency of either the
+ships or the men, for the reason that, in spite of experiences which
+might have bred misgivings (English memory for such matters is short),
+it remains to him unthinkable that, in the last resort, any men or still
+less any ships will prove&mdash;man for man and gun for gun&mdash;better than his
+own. He might be glad to concede that 25,000 American troops are the
+equivalent of 50,000 Germans or 100,000 Cossacks, or that two American
+men of war should be counted as the equivalent of three Italian. He
+makes no such concession when it comes to a comparison with British
+troops or British ships. What then can there be in the fighting strength
+of the United States, for all the figures that she has to show, to breed
+in him a suggestion of fear?</p>
+
+<p>This is a statement which will irritate many a patriotic American, who
+will say that it is the same old British superciliousness. But it should
+not irritate; and if the American understood the Englishman better and
+the spirit which inspires him, he would like it. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a>[<a href="./images/62.png">62</a>]</span>Englishman prefers
+not to regard the American troops or ships as potentially hostile, and
+Great Britain has sufficient to do in measuring the strength of her
+possible enemies. As for the people of the United States, he opines that
+they know their own business. They are best able to judge how many ships
+and how many men under arms will serve their purpose. England would,
+indeed, be glad to see the United States with a few more ships than she
+has, but&mdash;it is none of England's business. Englishmen can only wish her
+luck and hope that she is making no mistake in her calculations and go
+on about their own affairs, which are pressing enough. At the same time
+if the United States should prove to have miscalculated and should ever
+need .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&mdash;well, England has a ship or two herself.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a gain for the world if Americans would only understand!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The Englishman of the present generation knows practically nothing of
+the Americans as a maritime nation; and again let me say that this
+arises not from superciliousness or any intentional neglect, but merely
+from the fact that the matter is one beyond his horizon. He is so
+familiar with the fact that Britain rules the waves that he has no
+notion that whenever opportunity of comparison has offered the Americans
+have generally shown themselves (if there has been anything to choose)
+the better sailors of the two. Every English reader will probably read
+that sentence again to see if he has not misunderstood it. The truth is
+that Englishmen have forgotten the incidents of the Revolutionary War
+almost as completely as they have forgotten those of the War of 1812;
+Paul Jones is as meaningless a name to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a>[<a href="./images/63.png">63</a>]</span>them as Andrew Jackson. While it
+is true that American historians have given the American people, up to
+the present generation, an unfortunately exaggerated idea of the heroism
+of the patriot forces and have held the British troops up to all manner
+of unmerited odium, it is also true that English historians, while the
+less partial of the two, have perhaps been over-careful not to err in
+the same direction. Not until the last twenty years&mdash;hardly until the
+last four or five&mdash;have there been accessible to the public of the two
+countries the materials for forming a just judgment on the incidents of
+the war. It must be confessed that there is at least nothing in the
+evidence to permit the Englishman to think that a hundred years ago the
+home-bred Briton could either sail or fight his ships better than the
+Colonial. Nor has the Englishman as a rule any idea that in the middle
+of the nineteenth century the American commercial flag was rapidly
+ousting the British flag from the seas. Even with a knowledge of the
+facts, it is still hard for us to-day to comprehend.</p>
+
+<p>So amazing was the growth of the mercantile marine of the young
+republic&mdash;such qualities did the Americans show as shipbuilders, as
+sailors, and as merchants&mdash;that in 1860, the American mercantile marine
+was greater in tonnage and number of vessels than that of all other
+nations of the world combined, except Great Britain, and almost equal to
+that of Great Britain herself. These were of course the days of glory of
+the American clipper. It appeared then inevitable that in a few years
+the Stars and Stripes&mdash;a flag but little more than half a century
+old&mdash;would be the first commercial flag of the world; and but for the
+outbreak <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a>[<a href="./images/64.png">64</a>]</span>of the Civil War, it is at least probable that by now
+Englishmen would have grown accustomed to recognising that not they but
+another people were the real lords of the ocean's commerce. When the
+Civil War broke out, the tonnage of American registered vessels was
+something over five and one-half millions; and when the war closed it
+was practically non-existent. The North was able to draw from its
+merchant service for the purposes of war no fewer than six hundred
+vessels of an aggregate tonnage of over a million and carrying seventy
+thousand men. Those ships and men went a long way towards turning the
+tide of victory to the North; but when peace was made the American
+commercial flag had disappeared from the seas.</p>
+
+<p>It would be out of place here to go into a statement of the causes which
+co-operated with the substitution of iron for wood in shipbuilding to
+make it hard at first for America to regain her lost position, or into a
+discussion of the incomprehensible apathy (incomprehensible if one did
+not know the ways of American legislation) which successive Congresses
+have shown in the matter.</p>
+
+<p>A year or so back, the nation seemed to have made up its mind in earnest
+to take hold of the problem of the restoration of its commercial marine;
+but the defeat in the early part of 1907 of the Ship Subsidies Bill left
+the situation much where it was when President Grant, President
+Harrison, and President McKinley, in turn, attempted to arouse Congress
+to the necessity of action; except that with the passage of time
+conditions only become worse and reform necessarily more difficult. The
+Ship Subsidies Bill was defeated largely by the votes of the
+representatives of the Mississippi Valley and the Middle Western States,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a>[<a href="./images/65.png">65</a>]</span>and to an outsider the opposition of those regions looked very much
+like a manifestation of selfishness and lack of patriotism, on the part
+of the inland population jealous of the seaboard States. In the East,
+various reasons were given at the time for the failure of the measure. I
+happened myself to be travelling then through the States of the
+Mississippi Valley, and I discussed the situation with people whom I
+met, and particularly with politicians. The explanations which I
+received fell into one of two categories. Some said: "It is true that
+the Mississippi Valley and the West have little direct interest in our
+shipbuilding industry, but none the less we should like to see our
+merchant marine encouraged and built up. The trouble is that we have
+from experience acquired a profound distrust of a certain 'gang' in the
+Senate [and here would often follow the names of certain four or five
+well-known Senators, chiefly from the East], and the mere fact that
+these Senators were backing this particular bill was enough to convince
+us Westerners that it included a 'steal.'"</p>
+
+<p>Others took this ground: "The Mississippi Valley and the West believe in
+the general principle of Protection, but we think that our legislation
+has carried this principle far enough. We should now prefer to see a
+little easing off. We do not believe that the right way to develop our
+commercial marine is, first by our tariff laws to make it impossible for
+us to build or operate ships in competition with other countries and
+then to be obliged, in order to equalise things, to have recourse to
+bounties. What we want is a modification of our law which will help us,
+in the first instance, to build and to run the ships at a reasonable
+price. When <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a>[<a href="./images/66.png">66</a>]</span>a bill to that effect comes along, the Mississippi Valley
+will be found all right."</p>
+
+<p>Not a few of the voters in the East, also cordially interested in any
+plan that seemed to them promising and equitable for building up the
+American commercial marine, took the ground that it was an absurdity to
+build up barriers against foreign trade by enacting a tariff bill, such
+as the Dingley measure, with higher duties than the country had ever
+known, and then to attempt to overcome that barrier by means of bounty
+measures, which must themselves constitute a fresh form of taxation on
+the general public.</p>
+
+<p>The mass of the people, in fact, are in sympathy with the movement to
+encourage American shipping, but, for sectional or other reasons, a
+large proportion of them objected to the particular form in which the
+end was sought to be reached in the last Congress. So long as the voice
+and opinion of Mr. Roosevelt have any weight, it is not to be expected
+that the subject is going to be allowed to drop; and with his strength
+of will and determination of character it is at least not improbable
+that, where successive Presidents before him have failed, he will,
+whether still in the Presidential chair or not, ultimately succeed, and
+that not the smallest of the reasons for gratitude to him which future
+generations of Americans will recognise will be that he helped to
+recreate the nation's merchant marine. At present, less than nine
+percent of the American foreign commerce is carried in American bottoms,
+a situation which is not only sufficiently humiliating to a people who
+but a short while ago hoped to dominate the carrying trade of all
+countries but also, what perhaps hurts the Americans almost as much as
+the injury to their pride, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a>[<a href="./images/67.png">67</a>]</span>absurdly wasteful and unbusinesslike.
+English shipping circles may take the prospect of efforts being made by
+the United States to recover some measure of its lost prestige seriously
+or not: but it would be inadvisable to admit as a factor in their
+calculations any theory as to the inability of the Americans either to
+build ships or sail them as well as the best. With the growth of an
+American merchant marine&mdash;if a growth comes&mdash;will come also the obvious
+need of a larger navy; and other nations might do well to remember that
+Americans have never yet shown any inability to fight their ships, any
+more than they have to build or sail them.</p>
+
+<p>In basing any estimate of the fighting strength of the United States on
+the figures of her army or navy as they look on paper, the people of
+other nations&mdash;Englishmen no less than any&mdash;leave out of sight, because
+they have no standard for measuring, that remarkable attribute of the
+American character, which is the greatest of the national assets, the
+combination of self-reliance and resourceful ingenuity which seems to
+make the individual American equal to almost any fortune. It is
+remarkable, but not beyond explanation. It is an essentially Anglo-Saxon
+trait. The British have always possessed it in a degree, if inferior to
+the present day American, at least in excess of other peoples. The
+history of the Empire bears witness to it on every page and it is in
+truth one of the most fundamentally English things in the American
+character. But the conditions of their life have developed it in
+Americans beyond any need which the Englishman has felt. The latter,
+living at home amid the established institutions of a society which
+moves on its way evenly and without <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a>[<a href="./images/68.png">68</a>]</span>friction regardless of any effort
+or action on his part, has had no occasion for those qualities on which
+the American's success, his life, have commonly depended from day to day
+amid the changing emergencies of a frontier life. The American of any
+generation previous to that which is now growing up has seldom known
+what it meant to choose a profession or a vocation in life; but must
+needs do the work that came to him, and, without apprenticeship or
+training, turn to whatever craft has offered.</p>
+
+<p>The notion that every American is, without any special training, by mere
+gift of birthright, competent to any task that may be set him, is
+commonly said to have come in with Andrew Jackson; and President Eliot,
+of Harvard, has dubbed it a "vulgar conceit."<a name="FNanchor_68:1_11" id="FNanchor_68:1_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_68:1_11" class="fnanchor">[68:1]</a> It is undoubtedly a
+dangerous doctrine to become established as a tenet of national belief
+and least of all men can the head of a great institution for the
+training of the nation's youth afford to encourage it. None the less,
+when the American character is compared with that of any European
+people, it has, if not justification, at least considerable excuse.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Once into a new mining camp in the West there drove in the same
+"stage-coach" two young men who became friends on the journey. Each was
+out to seek his fortune and each hoped to find it in the new community.
+Each had his belongings in a "valise" and in each "valise" among those
+belongings was a "shingle," or name-plate, bearing each the name of its
+respective owner followed by the words "Attorney at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a>[<a href="./images/69.png">69</a>]</span>Law." The young men
+compared their shingles and considered. The small camp would not need
+two lawyers, even if it would provide a living for one. So they
+"matched" coins (the American equivalent of tossing up) to see which of
+the two should erase "Attorney at Law" from his sign and substitute
+"Doctor of Medicine." Which is history; as also is the following:</p>
+
+<p>In another mining camp, some twenty-three years ago, there was at first
+no surveyor. Men paced off the boundaries of their claims and went to
+work as fancy inclined them, and in the town which began to grow up
+houses were built at random regardless of any street-line and with no
+finnicking considerations of a building frontage. So a young fellow
+whose claim was unpromising sent out to civilisation for a set of
+instruments (he had never seen a transit or a level before) and began
+business as a surveyor. He used to come to me secretly that I might
+figure out for him the cubic contents of a ditch or the superficial area
+of a wall. He could barely write and knew no arithmetic at all; but he
+worked most of the night as well as all the day, and when the town took
+to itself a form of organised government he was appointed official
+surveyor and within a few weeks thereafter was made surveyor to the
+county. I doubt not that G&mdash;&mdash; T&mdash;&mdash; is rich and prosperous to-day.</p>
+
+<p>On a certain wharf, no matter where, lounged half a dozen seamen when to
+them came the owner of a vessel. It was in the days of '49 when anything
+that could be made to float was being put into commission in the
+California trade, and men who could navigate were scarce.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a>[<a href="./images/70.png">70</a>]</span></p><p>"Can any of you men" said the newcomer "take a boat out for me to San
+Francisco?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll do it, sir" said one stepping forward.</p>
+
+<p>"Thunder, Bill!" exclaimed a comrade in an undertone, "you don't know
+nothing about navigating."</p>
+
+<p>"Shut your mouth," said Bill. "Maybe I don't know nothing now, but you
+bet I will by the time I get to 'Frisco."</p>
+
+<p>The same spirit guides almost every young American who drifts West to
+tackle hopefully whatever job the gods may send. The cases wherein he
+has any destiny marked out for him or any especial preference as to the
+lines on which his future career shall run (except that he may hope
+ultimately to be President of the United States) are comparatively few.
+In ten years, he may be a grocer or a banker or a dry-goods merchant or
+a real-estate man or a lawyer. Whatever he is, more likely than not ten
+years later he will be something else.</p>
+
+<p>"What is your trade?" is the first question which an Englishman asks of
+an applicant for employment; and the answer will probably be truthful
+and certainly unimaginative.</p>
+
+<p>"What can you do?" the American enquires under the same circumstances.
+"'Most anything. What have you got to do?" is commonly the reply.</p>
+
+<p>It is an extraordinarily impressive experience for an Englishman to go
+out from the old-established well-formulated ways of the club-life and
+street-life of London, to assist in&mdash;not merely to watch but to
+co-operate in&mdash;the organisation of society in the wilderness: to see a
+town grow up&mdash;indeed, so far as his clumsy ability in the handling of an
+ax will permit, to help to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a>[<a href="./images/71.png">71</a>]</span>build it; to join the handful of men,
+bearded, roughly clad, and unlettered most of them, proceeding
+deliberately to the fashioning of the framework of government, the
+election of town officers, the appointment of a sheriff, and the
+necessary provisions, rough but not inadequate, for dealing with the
+grosser forms of crime. Quickly thereafter, in the case which I have
+especially in mind, came the formation of the county government and,
+simultaneously therewith, the opportunity (automatically and by mere
+right of the number of the population) to elect a representative to the
+Territorial Legislature. In the first year, however, this last privilege
+had to be pretermitted. The Territorial laws required that any member
+must have been resident in the district from which he came for not less
+than six months prior to his election and must be able to read and
+write; and, as cruel chance would have it, among the first prospectors
+to find their way into the new diggings in the preceding winter, who
+alone could comply with the required term of residence, not one could
+write his name. Had but one been able to do it ever so crudely&mdash;could
+one but have made a reasonable pretence of an ability to stumble through
+the opening paragraphs of the Constitution of the United States,&mdash;that
+man would inevitably and unanimously have been elected a full-blown
+Legislator. As it was, the new district was perforce compelled to go
+without representation in the Territorial Capital.</p>
+
+<p>"But," it will be objected, and by no one more quickly than by the
+American of the Eastern States, "All Americans do not go through these
+experiences. How many New Yorkers have helped to organise a new mining
+town?" Not many, certainly; and that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a>[<a href="./images/72.png">72</a>]</span>is one of the reasons why New York
+is, perhaps, the least representative section of all the United States.
+But though the American of to-day may not have had to do these things,
+his father and his grandfather had to. The necessity has long ago left
+New York, but Illinois was not far removed from the circumstances of
+frontier life when Abraham Lincoln was a youth; and the men who laid the
+foundations of Minneapolis, and Kansas City, and Omaha, and Duluth, are
+still alive. The frontiersman is latent in every American.</p>
+
+<p>For the benefit of many Englishmen who think that they have been to the
+United States, when as a matter of fact they have only been to New York,
+it may be as well to explain why New York City is the least typically
+American of all parts of the country. There are some who go back as far
+as Revolutionary days for the explanation, and point out that even then
+New York was more loyalist than patriot; one might go even farther back
+and show that New York always had a conspicuously large non-Anglo-Saxon
+element. But there is no need to go back even to the Revolution. In the
+century that has passed since then, the essential characteristics of the
+American character have been the products of the work which the people
+had to do in the subduing of the wilderness and of the isolation of the
+country&mdash;of its segregation from contact with the outside world. New
+York has been the one point in America farthest removed from the
+wilderness and most in touch with Europe, and it has been there that the
+chief forces which have moulded the American character have been least
+operative. The things in a New Yorker which are most characteristic of
+his New-Yorkship are least characteristically American, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a>[<a href="./images/73.png">73</a>]</span>among these
+is a much greater friendliness towards Great Britain than is to be found
+elsewhere except in one or two towns of specialised traits. This is not
+in any way to depreciate the position of New York as the greatest and
+most influential city in the United States, as well as (whatever may
+have been the relative standing of it and Boston up to twenty years ago)
+the literary and artistic centre of the country; and I do not know that
+any city of the world has a sight more impressive in its way than
+upper-middle New York&mdash;that is to say, than Fifth Avenue from Madison
+Square to the Park. But the English visitor who acquires his ideas of
+American sentiments from what he hears in New York dining-rooms or in
+Wall Street offices, is likely to go far astray. There is an
+instructive, if hackneyed, story of the little girl whose father boasted
+that she had travelled all over the United States. "Dear me!" said the
+recipient of the information, "she has travelled a great deal for one of
+her age!" "Yes, sir! all over the United States&mdash;all, except east of
+Chicago."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In the course of a long term of residence in the United States, this
+adaptability, this readiness to turn to whatever seems at the time to
+offer the best "opening" (which is so conspicuously a national trait but
+is not especially noticeable in the typical New Yorker) becomes so
+familiar that it ceases to be worth comment. I have seen among my own
+friends journalists become hotel managers, advertising solicitors turn
+to "real estate agents," merchants translated straight into responsible
+positions in the executive departments of railway companies, and railway
+men become <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a>[<a href="./images/74.png">74</a>]</span>merchants and bankers, editors change into engineers and
+engineers into editors, and lawyers into anything from ambassadors to
+hotel clerks. I am not now speaking in praise of these conditions or of
+the results in individual cases. The point to be noticed is that the
+people among whom these conditions prevail must in the long run develop
+into a people of extraordinary resourcefulness and versatility. And in
+the individual cases, the results are not nearly as deplorable as an
+Englishman might suppose or as they would be if the raw material
+consisted of home-staying Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p>The trait however is, as has been said, essentially an Anglo-Saxon
+trait&mdash;an English trait&mdash;and the colonial Englishman develops the same
+qualities in a not incomparable degree. The Canadian and the New
+Zealander acquire a like unconquerable soul, but the Englishman at home
+is not much impressed thereby, chiefly for the reason that he is almost
+as ignorant of the Canadian and the New Zealander as he is of the
+American, and with the same benevolent ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>In the individual citizen of the United States, he recognises the
+quality in a vague way. "Yankee ingenuity" is familiar to him and he is
+interested in, and amused at, the imperturbability with which the
+individual American&mdash;and especially the individual American
+woman&mdash;confronts and rises at least equal to whatever new and unheard of
+conditions he (or she) may find himself (or herself) placed among in
+England. But just as the American will not from the likability and
+kindliness of individual Englishmen draw any general inference as to the
+likability and kindliness of the nation, so the Englishman or other
+European rarely gives to these occasional attributes, which he sees
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a>[<a href="./images/75.png">75</a>]</span>reproduced again and again in particular Americans, their proper value
+as the manifestations of a national trait of the first importance, a
+trait which makes the people unquestionably formidable as competitors in
+peace and would make them correspondingly formidable as antagonists in
+war. The trait is, as I have said, perhaps the most precious of all the
+American national assets.</p>
+
+<p>Great Britain has recently had abundant evidence of the difficulty of
+turning out all the paraphernalia of victory ready made and is now
+making earnest effort to guard against the necessity of attempting it
+again. But the rules which apply to European peoples do not apply, with
+anything like equal force, to America. England in the South African war
+found by no means despicable fighting material almost ready made in her
+colonial troops; and that same material, certainly not inferior, America
+can supply in almost unlimited quantities. From the West and portions of
+the South, the United States can at any time draw immense numbers of men
+who, in the training of their frontier life, their ability to ride and
+shoot, their habituation to privations of every kind, possess all those
+qualities which made the Boers formidable, with the better moral fibre
+of the Anglo-Saxon to back them.</p>
+
+<p>But this quality of resourcefulness and self-reliance is not a mere
+matter of the moral or physical qualities of the individual. Its spirit
+permeates the nation as a unit. The machinery of the government will
+always move in emergencies more quickly than that of any European
+country; and unpreparedness becomes a vastly less serious matter. The
+standing army of the United States, in spite of the events of the last
+few <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a>[<a href="./images/76.png">76</a>]</span>years, remains little more than a Federal police force; and with no
+mercantile marine to protect and no colonies, there has been till lately
+no need of an American navy. But the European who measures the
+unpreparedness of the nation in the terms of the unpreparedness of his
+own, or any other European, country, not taking into account the
+colonial character of the population, the alertness and audacity of the
+national mind, the resourcefulness and confident self-reliance of the
+people, is likely to fall into error.</p>
+
+<p>The reverse of the medal is, perhaps, more familiar to Europeans, under
+the form of what has generally been called the characteristic American
+lack of the sentiment of reverence. The lack is indubitably there&mdash;is
+necessarily there; for what the Englishman does not commonly understand
+is that that lack is not a positive quality in itself. It is but the
+reflection, as it were, or complement, of the national self-reliance.
+How should the American in his new country, with his "Particularist"
+spirit, his insistence on the independence and sovereignty of the
+individual, seem to Europeans other than lacking in reverence?</p>
+
+<p>It is true that now, by mere passage of years, there are monuments in
+the United States which are beginning to gather the dignity and respect
+which naturally attach to age. The American of the present day has great
+veneration for the wisdom of the Fathers of the Republic, much love for
+the old buildings which are associated with the birth of the nation.
+Even the events of the Civil War are beginning to put on something of
+the majesty of antiquity, but there are still alive too many of the
+combatants in that war&mdash;who are obviously but commonplace men&mdash;for the
+figures of any but <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a>[<a href="./images/77.png">77</a>]</span>some three or four of the greatest of the actors to
+have yet assumed anything like heroic proportions. For the rest, what is
+there in the country which the living American has not made himself, or
+which his fathers did not make? The fabric of society is of too new a
+weaving, he knows too well the trick of it, for it to be wonderful in
+his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Lack of reverence is only a symptom of the American's strength&mdash;not
+admirable in itself, yet, as the index to something admirable, not,
+perhaps, altogether to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack
+of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of
+imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful.
+The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>The American national character is, indeed, a finer thing than the
+European generally supposes. The latter sees only occasional facets and
+angles, offshoots and outgrowths, some of them not desirable but even
+grotesque in themselves, while those elements which unify and harmonise
+the whole are likely to escape him. The blunders of American
+diplomats&mdash;the <i>gaucheries</i> and ignorances of American consular
+representatives&mdash;these are familiar subjects to Europeans; on them many
+a travelling Englishman has based his rather contemptuous opinion of the
+culture of the American people as a whole. But it is unsafe to argue
+from the inferiority of the representative to the inferiority of the
+thing represented.</p>
+
+<p>If two fruit-growers have adjoining orchards and, for the purpose of
+making a display at an agricultural show, one spends months of careful
+nourishing, training, and pruning of certain trees wherefrom he selects
+with care <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a>[<a href="./images/78.png">78</a>]</span>the finest of his fruit, while the other without preparation
+goes out haphazard to his orchard and reaches for the first fruit that
+he sees, it is probable that, judging by their exhibits, the public will
+get an erroneous idea of the characters of the orchards as a whole. And
+this is precisely the difference between the representatives whom the
+United States sends abroad and those sent to be displayed beside them by
+other nations.</p>
+
+<p>There is no recognised diplomatic service in the United States, no
+school for the training of consular representatives, no training or
+nurturing or pruning of any sort. The fundamental objection of the
+American people to the creation of any permanent privileged class, has
+made the thing impossible in the past, while, under the system of party
+patronage, practically the entire representation of the country
+abroad&mdash;commercial as well as diplomatic&mdash;is changed with each change of
+government. The American cannot count on holding an appointment abroad
+for more than four years; and while four years is altogether too short a
+term to be considered a career, it is over-long for a holiday. So in
+addition to the lack of any trained class from which to draw, even among
+the untrained the choice is much restricted by the undesirability of the
+conditions of the service itself.</p>
+
+<p>Though the conditions have improved immensely of late years, the fact
+remains that the consular service as a whole is not fairly to be
+compared on equal terms with that of other countries; and the majority
+of appointments are still made as the reward for minor services to the
+party in power. Nor are the conditions which govern the appointments to
+the less important diplomatic posts much different; but Great Britain
+has <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a>[<a href="./images/79.png">79</a>]</span>abundant cause to be aware that when the place is one which appeals
+to the ambition of first-class men, first-class men enough are
+forthcoming; though even Ambassadors to London are generally lacking in
+any special training or experience up to the time of their appointment.</p>
+
+<p>Sydney Smith's phrase has been often enough quoted&mdash;that when a woman
+makes a public speech, we admire her as we admire a dog that stands upon
+its hind legs, not because she does it well, but because she does it at
+all. Congress includes among its members many curious individuals and,
+as a unit, it does queer things at times. State legislatures are
+sometimes strange looking bodies of men and on occasions they achieve
+legislation which moves the country to mirth. The representatives of the
+nation abroad make blunders which contribute not a little to the gaiety
+of the world. But the thing to admire is that they do these things at
+all&mdash;that the legislators, whether Federal or State, and the members of
+the consular service, appointed or elected as they are, and from the
+classes which they represent, do somehow manage to form legislative
+bodies which, year in and year out, will bear comparison well enough
+with other Parliaments, and do in one way and another succeed in giving
+their country a service abroad which is far from despicable as compared
+with that of other peoples, nor all devoid of dignity. The fact that
+results are not immeasurably worse than they are is no small tribute to
+the adaptability of the American character. There is no other national
+character which could stand the same test.</p>
+
+<p>In the absence of any especially trained or officially dedicated class,
+the American people in the mass <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a>[<a href="./images/80.png">80</a>]</span>provides an amazing quantity of not
+impossible material out of which legislators and consuls may be
+made&mdash;just as it might equally well be made into whatever should happen
+to be required.</p>
+
+<p>And this fact strikes at the root of a common misapprehension in the
+minds of foreigners as to the constitution of the American people, a
+misapprehension which is fostered by what is written by other foreigners
+after inadequate observation.</p>
+
+<p>Much is thus written of the so-called heterogeneousness of the people of
+America. The Englishman who visits the United States for a few weeks
+only, commonly comes away with an idea that the New Yorker is the
+American people; whereas we have seen why it is that good American
+authorities maintain that in all the width and depth of the continent
+there is no aggregation of persons so little representative of the
+American people as a whole as the inhabitants of New York. After the
+Englishman has been in the United States for some months or a year or
+two, he grows bewildered and reaches the conclusion that there is no
+common American type&mdash;nothing but a patchwork of unassimilated units. In
+which conclusion he is just as mistaken as he was at first. There does
+exist a clearly defined and homogeneous American type.</p>
+
+<p>Let us suppose that all the negroes had been swept as with some vast net
+down and away into the Gulf of Mexico; that the Irishmen had been
+gathered out of the cities and deposited back into the Atlantic; that
+the Germans had been rounded up towards their fellows in Chicago and
+Milwaukee and then tipped gently into Lake Michigan, while the
+Scandinavians, having been assembled in Minnesota, had been edged
+courteously <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a>[<a href="./images/81.png">81</a>]</span>over the Canadian border;&mdash;when all this had been done,
+there would still remain the great American People. Of this great People
+there would remain certain local variations&mdash;in parts of the South, in
+New England, on the plains&mdash;but each clearly recognisable as a variety
+only, differing but superficially and in substance possessing
+well-defined all the generic and specific attributes of the race.</p>
+
+<p>If the entire membership of the Chicago Club were to be transferred
+bodily to the Manhattan Club-house in New York, and all the members of
+the Manhattan were simultaneously made to migrate from Fifth Avenue to
+Michigan Avenue, the club servants, beyond missing some familiar faces,
+would not find much difference. Could any man, waking from a trance,
+tell by the men surrounding him whether he was in the Duquesne Club at
+Pittsburgh or the Minnesota Club in St. Paul? And, if it be urged that
+the select club-membership represents a small circle of the population
+only, would the disturbance be much greater if the entire populations of
+Erie and Minneapolis and Kansas City were to execute a three-cornered
+"general post" or if Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine, swapped
+inhabitants? How long would it take the inhabitants of any one town to
+settle down in their new environment and go to work on precisely the
+same lines as their predecessors whom they dislodged? The novelty would,
+I think, be even less than if Manchester and Birmingham were
+miraculously made to execute a similar change in a night.</p>
+
+<p>I do not underrate the magnitude of the problem presented to the people
+of America by the immense volume of immigration from alien races, and
+chiefly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a>[<a href="./images/82.png">82</a>]</span>from the most undesirable strata in those races, of the last
+few years. On the other hand, I have no shadow of doubt of the ability
+of the people to cope with the problem and to succeed in assimilating to
+itself all the elements in this great influx while itself remaining
+unchanged.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that the American himself constantly overestimates the
+influence on his national character of the immigration of the past. To
+persons living in New York, especially if, from philanthropic motives or
+otherwise, they are brought at all into immediate contact with the
+incoming hordes as they arrive, this stream of immigration may well be a
+terrifying thing. Those who are in daily touch with it can hardly fail
+to be oppressed by it, till it gets upon their nerves and breeds
+nightmares; and to such I have more than once recommended that they
+would do well to take a holiday of six months; journey through the West,
+and so come to a realisation of the magnitude of their country and
+correct their point of view. With every mile that one recedes from
+Castle Garden, the phenomenon grows less appalling: the cloud which was
+dense enough to blacken New York harbour makes not a veil to stop one
+ray of sunlight when shredded out over the Mississippi Valley and the
+Western plains.</p>
+
+<p>A bucket of sewage (or of Eau de Cologne), however formidable in itself,
+makes very little difference when tipped into the St. Lawrence River. It
+is, of course, a portentous fact that some twenty millions of foreigners
+should have come into the country to settle in the course of half a
+century; but, after all, the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a>[<a href="./images/83.png">83</a>]</span>process of assimilation has been
+constantly and successfully at work throughout those fifty years, and I
+think the figures will show that in no one year (not even in 1906, when
+the volume of immigration was the largest and contained the greatest
+proportion of the distinctly "undesirable" elements), if we set against
+the totals the number of those aliens returning to their own countries
+and deduct those who have come from the English-speaking countries, has
+the influx amounted to three quarters of one per cent of the entire
+population of the country.</p>
+
+<p>So far, the dilution of the original character of the people by the
+injection of the foreign elements has been curiously slight, and while
+recognising that the inflow of the last few years has been more serious,
+both in quantity and character, than at any previous period, there does
+not seem to me any reason for questioning the ability of the country to
+absorb and assimilate it without any impairment of the fundamental
+qualities of the people. That at certain points near the seaboard, or in
+places where the newly introduced aliens become congested in masses of
+industrial workers, they present a local problem of extreme difficulty
+may be granted, but I think that those who are in contact with these
+local problems are inclined to exaggerate the general or national
+danger. The dominating American type will persist, as it persists
+to-day; the people will remain, in all that is essential, an Anglo-Saxon
+and a homogeneous people.</p>
+
+<p>In one sense&mdash;and that the essential one&mdash;the American people is more
+homogeneous than the English. What individuals among them may have been
+in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a>[<a href="./images/84.png">84</a>]</span>last generation does not matter. The point is here:&mdash;When one
+speaks of the "average Englishman" (as, without regard to grammar, we
+persist in doing) what he really means is the typical representative of
+a comparatively small section of the population, from the middle, or
+upper middle, classes upward. It is the same when one speaks of
+Frenchmen. When he says "the average Frenchman dresses," or "thinks," or
+"talks" in such and such a way, he merely means that so does the normal
+specimen of a class including only a few hundred thousand men, and those
+city dwellers, dress or think or speak. The figure is excusable because
+(apart from the fact that an "average" of the entire population would be
+quite unfindable) the comparatively small class does indeed guide, rule,
+and, practically, think for, the whole population. So far as foreign
+countries are concerned, they represent the policy and mode of thought
+of the nation. The great numerical majority is practically negligible.</p>
+
+<p>The same is true of the people of the United States, but with this
+difference, that the class represented by the "average"&mdash;the class of
+which, when grouped together, it is possible to find a reasonably
+typical representative&mdash;includes in the United States a vastly larger
+proportion of the whole people than is the case in other countries. It
+would not be possible to find a common mental or moral divisor for the
+members of Parliament in the aggregate, and an equal number of Norfolk
+fishermen or Cornish miners. They are not to be stated in common terms.
+But no such incongruity exists between the members of Congress, Michigan
+lumbermen, and the men of the Texas plains.</p>
+
+<p>It may be that within the smaller circle in England, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a>[<a href="./images/85.png">85</a>]</span>the
+individuals&mdash;thanks to the public schools and the universities&mdash;are more
+nearly identical and the type specimen would more closely represent the
+whole. But as soon as we get outside the circle, much greater
+divergences appear. The English are <i>homogeneous</i> over a small area: the
+Americans <i>homogeneous</i> over a much larger.</p>
+
+<p>"You may go all over the States," said Robert Louis Stevenson (and
+Americans will, for love of the man, pardon his calling their country
+"the States") "and&mdash;setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of
+foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese&mdash;you shall scarce meet with so
+marked a difference of accent as in forty miles between Edinburgh and
+Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and
+Aberdeen." And Stevenson understates the case. There are differences of
+speech in America, but at the most they remain so slight that, after
+all, the resident in one section will rather pride himself on his
+acuteness in recognising the intonation of the stranger as being that of
+some other&mdash;of the South, it may be, or of New England. An educated
+Londoner has difficulty in understanding even the London cockney.
+Suffolk, Cornish, or Lancashire&mdash;these are almost foreign tongues to
+him. The American of the South has at least no difficulty in
+understanding the New Englander: the New Yorker does not have to make
+the Californian repeat each sentence that he utters.</p>
+
+<p>And this similarity of tongue&mdash;this universal mutual
+comprehensibility&mdash;is a fact of great importance to the nation. It must
+tend to rapidity of communication&mdash;to greater uniformity of thought&mdash;to
+much greater readiness in the people to concentrate as a nation on one
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a>[<a href="./images/86.png">86</a>]</span>idea or one object. How much does England not lose&mdash;there is no way of
+measuring, but the amount must be very great&mdash;by the fact that
+communication of thought is practically impossible between people who
+are neighbours? How much would it not contribute to the national
+alertness, to national efficiency, if the local dialects could be swept
+away and the peasantry and gentry of all England&mdash;nay of the British
+Isles&mdash;talk together easily in one tongue? It is impossible not to
+believe that this ease in the interchange of ideas must in itself
+contribute greatly to uniformity of thought and character in a people.
+Possessing it, it is not easy to see how the American people could have
+failed to become more homogeneous than the English.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a deeper reason for their homogeneousness. The American
+people is not only an English people; it is much more Anglo-Saxon than
+the English themselves. We have already seen how the essential quality
+of both peoples is an Anglo-Saxon quality&mdash;what has been called (and the
+phrase will do as well as any other) their "Particularist" instinct. The
+Angles and Saxons (with some modification in the former) were tribes of
+individual workers, sprung from the soil, rooted in it, accustomed
+always to rely on individual labour and individual impulse rather than
+on the initiative, the protection, or the assistance of the State or the
+community. The constitutional history of England is little more than the
+story of the steps by which the Anglo-Saxon, by the strength which this
+quality gave him, came to dominate the other races which invaded or
+settled in Britain and finally worked his way up to and through the
+Norman crust which, as it were, overlay the country.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a>[<a href="./images/87.png">87</a>]</span></p><p>In England many institutions are of course Norman. An hereditary
+aristocracy, the laws of primogeniture and entail&mdash;these are Norman. By
+the help of them the Norman hoped to perpetuate his authority over the
+Saxon herd; and failed. Magna Charta, Cromwell, the Roundheads, the
+Puritans, the spirit of nonconformity, most of the limitations of the
+power of the Throne, the industrial and commercial greatness of
+Britain&mdash;these things are Anglo-Saxon. The American colonists (however
+many individuals of Norman blood were among them) were Anglo-Saxon; they
+came from the Anglo-Saxon body of the people and carried with them the
+Anglo-Saxon spirit. They did not reproduce in their new environment an
+hereditary aristocracy, a law of primogeniture or of entail. It is
+probable that no single English colony to-day, if suddenly cut loose
+from the Empire and left to fashion its form of society anew, would
+reproduce any one of these things. In the United States the Anglo-Saxon
+spirit went to work without Norman assistance or (as we choose to view
+it) Norman encumbrances. The Anglo-Saxon spirit is still working in
+England&mdash;never perhaps has its operation been more powerfully visible
+than in the trend of thought of the last few years. It is working also
+in the United States; but, because it there works independently of
+Norman traditions, it works faster.</p>
+
+<p>In many things&mdash;in almost everything, as we shall see&mdash;the two peoples
+are progressing along precisely the same path, a path other than that
+which other nations are treading. In many things&mdash;in almost
+everything&mdash;the United States moves the more rapidly. It seems at first
+a contradiction in terms to say that the Americans are an English people
+and then to show that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a>[<a href="./images/88.png">88</a>]</span>in many individual matters the English people is
+approximating to American models. It is in truth no contradiction; and
+the explanation is obvious. Both are impelled by the same spirit, the
+same motives, the same ambitions; but in England that spirit, those
+motives and ambitions work against greater resistance.</p>
+
+<p>What looks at first like a peculiar departure on the part of the
+American people will again and again, on investigation, be found to be
+only the English spirit shooting ahead faster than it can advance in
+England. When, in a particular matter, it appears as if England was
+coming to conform to American precedent, it is, in truth only that,
+having given the impulse to America, she herself is following with less
+speed than the younger runner, but with such speed as she can.</p>
+
+<p>If we bear this fact in mind we shall see how it is illustrated, borne
+out, supported by a score of things that it falls in our way to notice;
+as it is by many hundred things that lie outside our present province.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>We shall have occasion to notice hereafter how in the past the American
+disposition to dislike England has been fed by the headlong and
+superficial criticism of American affairs by English "literary"
+visitors; and it is unfortunate that the latest<a name="FNanchor_88:1_12" id="FNanchor_88:1_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_88:1_12" class="fnanchor">[88:1]</a> English visitor to
+write on the United States has hurt American susceptibilities almost as
+keenly as any of his predecessors. With all its brilliant qualities, few
+more superficial "studies" of American affairs have been given to the
+world than that of Mr. H. G. Wells.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a>[<a href="./images/89.png">89</a>]</span></p><p>Mr. Wells, by his own account, went about the country confronting all
+comers with the questions, "What are you going to make of your future?"
+.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. "What is the American Utopia, how much Will is there shaping to
+attain it?" This, he says, was the conundrum to find an answer to which
+he crossed the Atlantic, and he is much depressed because he failed in
+his search. "When one talks to an American of his national purpose he
+seems a little at a loss"; and when he comes to sum up his conclusions:
+"What seems to me the most significant and pregnant thing of all is .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+best indicated by saying that the typical American has no 'sense of the
+State.'"<a name="FNanchor_89:1_13" id="FNanchor_89:1_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_89:1_13" class="fnanchor">[89:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>Has Mr. Wells ever gone about England asking Englishmen the same
+question: "What are you going to make of your future?" How much less "at
+a loss" does he anticipate that he would find them? Mr. Wells apparently
+expected to find every American with a card in his vest pocket
+containing a complete scheme of an American Utopia. He was disappointed
+because the government at Washington was not inviting bids for roofing
+in the country and laying the portion north of Mason and Dixon's Line
+with hot-water pipes.</p>
+
+<p>The quality which Mr. Wells&mdash;seeing only its individual manifestations,
+quite baffled and unable to look beyond the individuals to any vision of
+the people as a whole (he travelled over a ludicrously small portion of
+the country)&mdash;sums up as a "lack of sense of the State" is in truth the
+cardinal quality which has made the greatness of the United States&mdash;and
+of England. It is precisely because the peoples rely on individual
+effort <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a>[<a href="./images/90.png">90</a>]</span>and not on the State that they have become greater than all
+other peoples. That is their peculiar political excellence&mdash;that they
+are not for ever framing schemes for a paternal all-embracing State, but
+are content to work each in his own sphere, asserting his own
+independence and individuality, from the things as they are, little by
+little towards the things as they ought to be.</p>
+
+<p>If Mr. Wells had prevailed on any typical American to sit down and write
+what, as he understood it, his people were working to accomplish, the
+latter would have written something like this:</p>
+
+<p>"We have got the basis of a form of government under which, when
+perfected, the individual will have larger liberty and better
+opportunity to assert himself than he has ever had in any country since
+organised states have existed. We have a people which enjoys to-day more
+of the material comforts of life than any other people on earth, and the
+chief political problem with which we are wrestling to-day is to see
+that that enjoyment is confirmed to them in perpetuity&mdash;not taken from
+them or hampered or limited by any power of an oppressive capitalism. We
+are spending more money, more energy, more earnest thought on the study
+of education as a science or art and on the endowment of educational
+establishments than any other people; as a result we hope that the next
+generation of Americans, besides being the most materially blessed, will
+be the most educated and intelligent of peoples. We are doing all we can
+to weed out dishonesty from our commercial dealings. In the period of
+our growth there was necessarily some laxity in our business ethics, but
+we are doing the best we know how to improve that, and we believe that
+on the whole our <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a>[<a href="./images/91.png">91</a>]</span>methods of doing business are calculated to produce
+more honest men than those in vogue in other countries. What we hope to
+make of our future therefore is to produce a nation of individuals
+freer, better off, and more honest than the world has yet seen. When
+that people comes it can manage its own government."</p>
+
+<p>Not only are these, I fear, larger national aims than the average
+Englishman dares to propose to himself, but they are, I venture to say,
+much more definitely formulated in the "typical American's" mind. If Mr.
+Wells desires to find a people which considers it the duty of good
+citizenship to go about to fashion first the roofs and walls, rafters,
+cornices, and chimney-pots of a governmental structure, relying on the
+State afterwards to legislate comfort and culture and virtue into the
+people, he visited the wrong quarter of the globe. In the Latin races he
+will find the "sense of the State" luxuriantly developed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wells appears infinitely distressed by his failure to find any
+unified national feeling in the American people&mdash;by "the chaotic
+condition of the American Will"&mdash;by "the dispersal of power"&mdash;by the
+fact that "Americans knew of America mainly as the Flag." Which is a
+most curiously complete demonstration of the inadequacy of his judgment.</p>
+
+<p>If Mr. Wells had seen the United States twenty-five years ago, ten years
+ago, and five years ago, before his present visit, the one thing that
+would have most impressed him would have been the amazing growth of the
+sense of national unity. Mr. Wells looks superficially upon the country
+as it is to-day and finds society more chaotic, distances larger,
+sentiment less crystallised than&mdash;<i>mirabile!</i>&mdash;in the older countries of
+Europe, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a>[<a href="./images/92.png">92</a>]</span>is plunged in despair. Had he had any knowledge of
+America's past conditions by which to measure the momentary phase in
+which he found the people, he would have known that exactly that thing
+of which he most deplores the absence is the thing which, in the last
+thirty years, has grown with more wonderful rapidity than anything else
+in all this country of wonderful growths.</p>
+
+<p>The mere fact of this development of national feeling is a thing which
+will necessarily call for attention as we go on; for the present it is
+enough to say that Mr. Wells could hardly have exposed more calamitously
+the superficial and cursory quality of his "study" of the country.<a name="FNanchor_92:1_14" id="FNanchor_92:1_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_92:1_14" class="fnanchor">[92:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>As a man may not be able to see the forest because of the trees, so Mr.
+Wells is as one who has stood by a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a>[<a href="./images/93.png">93</a>]</span>great river's bank for a few minutes
+and has not seen the river for the flash of the ripples in the sun, the
+swirl of an eddy here and there, the flotsam swinging by on the current;
+and he has gone away and prattled of the ripples and the eddy and the
+floating branch. The great flow of the river down below does not expose
+itself to the vision of three minutes. He only comes to understand it
+who lives by the river for awhile, sits down by it and studies it&mdash;sees
+it in flood and drought&mdash;swims in it, bathes in it. Then he will forget
+the ripples and the branches and will come to know something of the
+steadiness of purpose, the depth and strength of it, its unity and its
+power. Nothing but a little more experience would enable Mr. Wells to
+see the national feeling of the American people.</p>
+
+<p>Literature contains few pictures more delightful than that of Mr. Wells,
+drawn by himself, standing with Mr. Putnam&mdash;Herbert Putnam of all
+people!&mdash;in the Congressional Library at Washington and saying (let me
+quote): "'With all this,' I asked him 'why doesn't the place <i>think</i>?'
+He seemed, discreetly, to consider it did."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Putnam is fortunately always discreet. Otherwise it would be
+pleasant to know what <i>he</i> thought&mdash;of his questioner.</p>
+
+<p class="section"><i>Note.</i>&mdash;On the subject of the homogeneousness of the American
+people, see <a href="#APPENDIX">Appendix A</a>.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60:1_10" id="Footnote_60:1_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60:1_10"><span class="label">[60:1]</span></a> As a statement of this nature is always liable to be
+challenged let me say that it is based on the opinions expressed in
+conversation by the correspondents of English papers who came to America
+at that time in an endeavour to reach Cuba. They certainly did not
+anticipate that the American fleet would be able to stand against the
+Spanish. And, lest American readers should be in danger of taking
+offence at this, let it be remembered with how much apprehension the
+arrival of Admiral Cervera's ships was awaited along the eastern coast
+and how cheaply excellent seaside houses were to be acquired that year.
+Events have moved so rapidly since then (above all has the position of
+the United States in the world changed so much) that it is not easy now
+to conjure up the circumstances and sentiments of those days. If
+Americans generally erred as widely as they did in their estimate of the
+Spanish sea-power as compared with their own, it is not surprising that
+Englishmen erred perhaps a little more.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68:1_11" id="Footnote_68:1_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68:1_11"><span class="label">[68:1]</span></a> <i>History of the United States</i>, by James Ford Rhodes,
+vol. vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88:1_12" id="Footnote_88:1_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88:1_12"><span class="label">[88:1]</span></a> Mr. Crosland has written since; but he has fortunately
+not been taken sufficiently seriously by the American people even to
+cause them annoyance.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89:1_13" id="Footnote_89:1_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89:1_13"><span class="label">[89:1]</span></a> <i>The Future in America</i>, by H. G. Wells, 1906.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92:1_14" id="Footnote_92:1_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92:1_14"><span class="label">[92:1]</span></a> The futility of this kind of impressionist criticism is
+well illustrated by the fact that almost simultaneously with the
+appearance of Mr. Wells' book, a distinguished Canadian (Mr. Wilfred
+Campbell) was recording his impressions of a visit to England and said:
+"The people of Britain leave national and social affairs too much in the
+hands of such men [professional politicians]. There is a sad lack of the
+education of the people in the direction of a common patriotism.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. She
+must get back to the sane idea that it is only as a nation and through
+the national ideal that she can help humanity.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. She has great men in
+all walks of life; she has still the highest-toned Press in the world;
+she has .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. the most ideal legislature, she has great universities and
+churches with the finest and greatest Christian ideals. But none of
+these influences are used, as they should be, for the general national
+good. They work separately, or too much as individuals. It is only the
+leavening of these institutions with a large spirit of the national
+destiny that will lift Britain .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. out of its present material slough."
+(<i>The Outlook</i>, November 17, 1906.) These words are almost a paraphrase
+of Mr. Wells' indictment of the United States.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a>[<a href="./images/94.png">94</a>]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Mutual Misunderstandings</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>America's Bigness&mdash;A New Atlantis&mdash;The Effect of Expansion on
+a People&mdash;A Family Estranged&mdash;Parsnips&mdash;An American Woman in
+England&mdash;An Englishman in America&mdash;International
+Caricatures&mdash;Shibboleths: dropped H's and a "twang"&mdash;Matthew
+Arnold's Clothes&mdash;The Honourable S&mdash;&mdash; B&mdash;&mdash;.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>"John Bull with plenty of elbow-room" was the phrase. It does not
+necessarily follow that the widest lands breed the finest people; and
+there is worthless territory enough in the United States to cut up into
+two or three Englands. Yet no patriotic American would wish one rod,
+pole, or perch of it away, whether of the Bad Lands, the Florida Swamps,
+the Alkali Plains of the Southwest, or the most sterile and inaccessible
+regions of the Rockies. If of no other use, each, merely as an
+instrument of discipline, has contributed something to the hardening of
+the fibre of the people; and good and bad together the domain of the
+United States is very large. Englishmen are aware of the fact, merely as
+a fact; but they seldom seem to appreciate its full significance.</p>
+
+<p>Let us consider for a minute what would be the effect on the British
+people if it suddenly came into possession of such an estate. We are not
+talking now of distant colonies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South
+Africa&mdash;these may be equal together to more <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a>[<a href="./images/95.png">95</a>]</span>than another United States,
+and they are working out their own destiny. The inhabitants of each are
+a band of British men and women just as were the early inhabitants of
+the United States and as, essentially, the people of the United States
+still remain to-day. Each of those bands will follow its own path and
+work its own miracles&mdash;whether greater than that which the people of the
+United States has wrought or not, only later generations will know. Each
+of these, though British still and always, is launched on its individual
+career; and it is not of them that we are speaking now, but of the
+Englishmen who remain at home, of the present-day population of the
+British Isles.</p>
+
+<p>What would be the result if suddenly the limits of the British Isles
+were to be miraculously expanded? What would happen if the floor of the
+ocean heaved itself up and Great Britain awoke to find the coast of
+Cornwall and Wales mysteriously reaching westward, the Irish Sea no more
+than a Hudson River which barely kept the shores of Lancashire and
+Cumberland from touching Ireland,&mdash;an Ireland of which the western
+coast&mdash;the coast of Munster and Connaught&mdash;was prolonged a thousand
+leagues towards the setting sun; while the west coast of the north of
+Scotland, Ross and Sutherland, had absorbed the Hebrides and stretched
+unbroken into two thousand miles of plain and mountain range&mdash;Britain no
+longer but Atlantis come again and all British soil? It was to nothing
+less miraculous that the thirteen original States fell heir. And what
+would be the effect on the British race?</p>
+
+<p>Coal and iron, silver and gold, rivers full of fish, forest and prairie
+teeming with game, pasture for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a>[<a href="./images/96.png">96</a>]</span>millions of cattle, wheat land and corn
+land, cotton land and orchard for any man who chose to take them;&mdash;the
+wretches struggling and stifling in the London slums having nothing to
+do but grasp axe and rifle and go out to subdue the wilderness;&mdash;farms,
+not by the half-acre, but by the hundred acres for every one of the
+unemployed. Is it possible to doubt that the race would be strengthened,
+not materially only, but in its moral qualities,&mdash;that Englishmen in
+another generation would not only be a wealthier and a more powerful
+people but a healthier, lustier, nobler? How then are we to suppose that
+just such a change, such an uplifting, has not come about in that other
+British people to whom all this has happened, who came into their
+wonderful birthright four generations ago and for a century and a
+quarter have been fashioning it to their will and being fashioned by it
+after the will of Another? By what process of logic, English reader, are
+you going to convince yourself that this race&mdash;your own with larger
+opportunities&mdash;is not the finer race of the two?</p>
+
+<p>I have not, be it observed, expressed the opinion that the American
+national character is finer than the English; only that it is finer than
+the European commonly supposes. Nor am I expressing such an opinion now
+but only setting forth certain elementary considerations for the
+reader's judgment. When the European sees in the individual American, or
+in a dozen individual Americans, certain peculiarities, inelegancies,
+and sometimes even impertinences&mdash;call them what you will,&mdash;he is too
+prone to think that these are the essentials of the American character.
+The essentials of the American character are the essentials of the
+English character&mdash;with elbow-room. "While the outlook of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a>[<a href="./images/97.png">97</a>]</span>the New
+Yorker is wider than ours," says Mr. Archer, "his standpoint is the
+same." In that elbow-room, with that wider outlook, it is likely that
+new offshoots from the character will have developed&mdash;excrescences, not
+perhaps in themselves always lovely&mdash;but if we remember what the trunk
+is from which they spring, or what it was, we shall probably think
+better, or less, of those excrescences, while remembering also the
+likelihood that in the larger room and richer soil the trunk itself may
+also have expanded and strengthened and solidified.</p>
+
+<p>The English reader might decide for himself what justification there is
+for supposing that the character of that offset from the British stock
+which, a century and a quarter ago, was put in possession of this
+magnificent estate should have deteriorated rather than improved as
+compared with the character of that portion of the stock which remained
+rooted in the old soil hemmed in between the ancient boundaries.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There have been, of course, many other influences at work in the
+moulding of the American character, besides the mere vastness of his
+continent; but the fact remains that this has been immensely the most
+powerful of all the factors. English originally, the American is still
+English in his essentials, modified chiefly by the circumstances of his
+material environment, the magnificence of his estate, the width of his
+horizons, the disciplining of his nature by the Titanic struggle with
+the physical conditions of the wilderness and the necessary development
+of those qualities of resourcefulness, buoyancy, and self-reliance which
+the exigencies of that struggle have demanded. Moreover, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a>[<a href="./images/98.png">98</a>]</span>what is almost
+the most important item of all, his entire national life has been lived,
+and that struggle conducted, in practical isolation from all contact
+with other peoples. Immigrants, indeed, from all of them, the United
+States has constantly been receiving; but as a nation the American
+people has been singularly segregated from the rest of the earth,
+blessedly free from friction with, and dependence on, other countries.
+As we have seen, it has had no friction with any Power except Great
+Britain; and with Great Britain itself so little that Englishmen hardly
+recall that it has occurred.</p>
+
+<p>It may be worth while to stop one minute to rehearse and to re-enforce
+the points which so far it has been my aim to make.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>For their own sakes, anything like conflict between the two nations is
+not to be dreamed of; but, for the world's sake, an intimate alliance
+between them in the cause of peace would be the most blessed conceivable
+thing. There is every justification for such an alliance, not merely in
+the incalculable benefits that would result, but in the original kinship
+of the peoples, the permanent and fundamental sympathy of their natures,
+and their community of ambitions and ways of thought. Unfortunately
+these reasons for union have been obscured by a century of aloofness, so
+that to-day neither people fully understands the other and they look,
+one at the other, from widely different standpoints. By reason chiefly
+of their isolation, in which they have had little contact with other
+peoples, the Americans have come to think of Great Britain as little
+less foreign (and by the accidents of their history as even more
+hostile) than any other Power. Still acknowledging <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a>[<a href="./images/99.png">99</a>]</span>as an historical
+fact the original kinship, they, like many a son who has gone out into
+the world and prospered exceedingly, take pleasure chiefly in
+contemplating how far they have travelled since they struck out for
+themselves and how many characteristics they have developed which were
+not part of the inheritance from the old stock. Dwelling on these they
+have become blind to the essential family likeness to that old stock
+which still remains their dominant trait. Moreover, seeing how during
+all these years the old folk have let them go their own way, seemingly
+indifferent to their future, at times, intentionally or not, making that
+future none the easier of accomplishment, they have come to nurse a
+resentment against those at home and will not believe that the family
+still bears them an affectionate good-will quite other than it feels for
+even the best-liked of the friends who are not of the same descent.</p>
+
+<p>On England's part, she saw the younger ones go out into the world with
+regret, strove to restrain them unwisely, obstinately, unfairly&mdash;and
+failed. Since then she has been very busy, supremely occupied with her
+own affairs. The young ones who had gone out into the world in, as
+seemed to her, such headstrong fashion, for all that she knows now that
+she was wrong, have been doing well, and she has always been glad to
+hear it, but&mdash;well, they were a long way off. At times she has thought
+that the young ones were somewhat too pushing&mdash;too anxious to get on
+regardless of her or others' welfare,&mdash;and half-heartedly (not all
+unintentionally, but certainly with no thought of alienating the
+affection of the others) she has interfered or passively stood in the
+young folk's way. At last the day came when she was horrified to find
+that the younger branch&mdash;very prosperous <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a>[<a href="./images/100.png">100</a>]</span>and independent now&mdash;had not
+only ceased to regard her as a mother but had come almost to the point
+of holding her as an enemy. It was at first incredible and she strove as
+best she could to put matters right and to explain how foreign to her
+wishes it was and how unnatural it seemed to her that there should be
+any approach to ill-feeling between them. But she does not convince the
+other, partly because she herself has in her turn grown out of touch
+with that other's ideas. At intervals she has met members of the younger
+branch who have come home to visit and she has discovered all sorts of
+new tricks of manner, new ways of speech, new points of view that they
+have picked up in their new surroundings, and, like the members of the
+younger branch themselves, she sees more of these little things than she
+does of the character that is behind them. Her vision of the family
+likeness is blurred by the intrusion of provoking little points of
+difference. She sees the mannerisms, but the strength of the qualities
+of which they are manifestations escapes her.</p>
+
+<p>So it comes about that the two are at cross purposes. "We may call this
+country Daughter," wrote G. W. Steevens, "she does not call us Mother."
+The elder sincerely desires the affection of the younger&mdash;sincerely
+feels affection herself; but is hampered in making the other realise her
+sincerity by a constant desire to criticise those little foreign ways
+that the other has acquired. Just so does a parent obscure her love for
+a son by deploring the strange manners which he picks up at school; just
+so is she blinded to his real qualities as a man, because he will insist
+on giving his time to messing about with machinery instead of settling
+down properly to study for the Church.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a>[<a href="./images/101.png">101</a>]</span></p><p>Burke (was it not?) spoke of his love for Ireland as "dearer than could
+be justified to reason." Englishmen might well have difficulty in
+justifying to their reason their affection for America; for to hear an
+Englishman speak of American peculiarities and eccentricities, it would
+often seem that to love such men would be pure unreason. But these
+criticisms are no true index to the British national feeling for the
+Americans as a people. Does a brother not love his sister because he
+says rude things about her little failings? Americans hear the
+criticisms and, their own hearts being alienated from Great Britain,
+cannot believe that Britishers have any affection for them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I am well aware that I make&mdash;and can make&mdash;no general statement from
+which many readers, both in England and America, will not dissent.
+Englishmen will arise to say that they do not love America; and
+Americans&mdash;many Americans&mdash;will vow with their hands on their hearts
+that they have the greatest affection for Great Britain. Vast numbers of
+Americans will protest against being called a homogeneous people, and a
+vast number more against the accusation of being still essentially
+English; the fact being that it is no easier now than it was in the days
+of Burke (I am sure of my author this time) to "draw up an indictment
+against a whole people." A composite photograph is commonly only an
+indifferent likeness of any of the individuals&mdash;least of all will the
+individual be likely to recognise it as a portrait of himself. But the
+type-character will stand out clearly&mdash;especially to the eyes of others
+not of the type. Most of the notions of Englishmen about Americans are
+drawn from the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a>[<a href="./images/102.png">102</a>]</span>casual contact with individual Americans in England
+(where from contrast with their surroundings the little peculiarities
+stand out most conspicuously) or from the hasty "impressions" of
+visitors who have looked only on the surface&mdash;and but a small portion of
+that. Even, I am aware, after a lifetime spent in studying the two
+peoples, in pondering on their likenesses and unlikenesses and striving
+to measure the feeling of each for the other, there is always danger of
+talking what I will ask to be permitted to call "parsnips."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When I first went to the United States I carried with me a commission
+from certain highly reputable English papers to incorporate my
+"impressions" in occasional letters. Among the earliest facts of any
+moment which I was enabled to communicate to English readers was that
+the middle classes in America (I was careful to explain what the "middle
+classes" were in a country where none existed)&mdash;that the middle classes,
+I say, lived almost entirely on parsnips. I had not arrived at this
+important ethnological fact with any undue haste. I had already lived in
+the United States for some three months, half of which time had been
+spent in New York hotels and boarding houses and half in Northern New
+York and rural New England, where, staying at farms or at the houses of
+families in the smaller towns to which I bore letters of introduction, I
+flattered myself that I had probed deep&mdash;Oh, ever so deep!&mdash;below the
+surface and had come to understand the people as they lived in their own
+homes. And my ripened judgment was that the bulk of the well-to-do
+people of the country supported life chiefly by consumption of parsnips.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a>[<a href="./images/103.png">103</a>]</span></p><p>Some fifteen years later I was at supper at the Century Club in New
+York and the small party at our table as we discussed the scalloped
+oysters (which are one of the pillars of the Century) included a
+well-known American author and journalist and an even better known and
+much-loved artist. But why should I not mention their names? They were
+Montgomery Schuyler and John La Farge. Both had been to Europe that
+year&mdash;La Farge to pay his first visit to Italy, while Schuyler, whether
+with or without La Farge I forget, had made a somewhat extensive trip
+through rural England in, I think, a dog-cart. The conversation ran
+chiefly on their experiences and suddenly Schuyler turned to me with:
+"Here, you Englishman, why do the middle classes of England live chiefly
+on parsnips?"</p>
+
+<p>The thing is incredible&mdash;except that it happened. Schuyler, no less than
+I fifteen years before, spoke in the fulness of conviction arising from
+what he, no less than I, believed to have been wide and adequate
+experience. The memory of that experience has made me tolerant of the
+cocksure generalisations with which the Englishman who has visited
+America, or the American who has been in England, for a few months
+delights to regale his compatriots on his return. Quite recently a
+charming American woman who is good enough to count me among her
+friends, was in London for the first time in her life. She is perhaps as
+typical a representative of Western American womanhood&mdash;distinctively
+Western&mdash;as could be found; very good to look upon, warm-hearted,
+fearless and earnest in her truth-loving, straightforward life. But in
+voice, in manner, and in frankness of speech she is peculiarly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a>[<a href="./images/104.png">104</a>]</span>and
+essentially Western. She loved England and English people, so she told
+me at the Carlton on the eve of her return to America,&mdash;just loved them,
+but English women (and I can see her wrinkling her eyebrows at me to
+give emphasis to what she said) were so <i>dreadfully</i> outspoken: they did
+say such <i>awful</i> things! I thought I knew the one Englishwoman from
+whose conversation she had derived this idea and remembering my own
+parsnips, I forgave her. She has, since her return, I doubt not, dwelt
+often to her friends on this amazing frankness of speech in
+Englishwomen. And if she only knew what twenty Englishwomen thought of
+her outspokenness!</p>
+
+<p>Not long ago I heard an eminent member of the medical profession in
+London, who had just returned from a trip to Canada and the United
+States with representatives of the British Medical Association, telling
+a ring of interested listeners all about the politics, geography,
+manners, and customs of the people of America. Among other things he
+explained that in America there was no such thing known as a <i>table d'
+h&ocirc;te</i>; all your meals at hotels and restaurants had to be ordered <i>&agrave; la
+carte</i>. "I should have thought," he said, "that a good <i>table d' h&ocirc;te</i>
+at an hotel in New York and other towns would pay. It would be a
+novelty." It may be well to explain to English readers who do not know
+America, that fifteen years ago a meal <i>&agrave; la carte</i> was, and over a
+large part of the country still is, practically unknown in the United
+States. The system of buying one's board and lodging in installments is
+known in America as "the European plan."</p>
+
+<p>If it would not be too long a digression, I would explain how this is a
+cardinal principle of the American <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a>[<a href="./images/105.png">105</a>]</span>business mind. The disposition of
+every American is to take over a whole contract <i>en bloc</i>, which in
+England, where every man is a specialist, would be split into twenty
+different transactions. The American thinks in round numbers: "What will
+the whole thing come to?" he asks; while the Englishman wants to know
+the items. This habit permeates American life in every department. It is
+labour-saving. Few things amuse or irritate the American visitor to
+England more than the having to pay individually for a number of small
+conveniences which at home he is accustomed to have "thrown in"; and the
+first time when he is presented with an English hotel bill (I am not
+speaking of the modern semi-American hotels in London) with its infinite
+list of items, is an experience that he never forgets.</p>
+
+<p>All of which is only to explain that the distinguished physician, when
+he spoke of the absence of <i>tables d'h&ocirc;te</i> in America, was talking
+parsnips. His experience had been limited to a few hotels and
+restaurants in New York and one or two other large towns.</p>
+
+<p>If only it were possible to catch in some great "receiver" or "coherer,"
+or some similar instrument, all the things that were said in London in
+the course of twenty-four hours about the United States by people who
+had been there, and all the things that were said in New York in the
+same period about England by people of equal experience, and set them
+down side by side, it would make entertaining reading. The wonder is,
+not that we misunderstand each other as much as we do, but that somehow
+we escape a vast mutual, international contempt.</p>
+
+<p>Several times in the course of my residence in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a>[<a href="./images/106.png">106</a>]</span>United States I have
+had said to me: "What! Are you an Englishman? But you don't drop your
+H's!"</p>
+
+<p>Which is ridiculous, is it not, English reader? But before you smile at
+it, permit me to explain that it is no whit worse than when you
+say:&mdash;"What! Are you an American? But you don't speak with an accent!"
+Or possibly you call it a "twang" or you say "speak through your nose."</p>
+
+<p>You may be dining, English reader, at, let us say, the Carlton or Savoy
+when a party of Americans comes into the room&mdash;Americans of the kind
+that every one knows for Americans as soon as he sees or hears them. The
+women are admirably dressed&mdash;perhaps a shade too admirably&mdash;and the
+costumes of the men irreproachable. But there is that something of
+manner, of walk, of voice which draws all eyes to them as they advance
+to their table, and the room is hushed as they arrange their seats.
+"Those horrid Americans!" says one of your party and no one protests.
+But at the next table to you there is seated another party of delightful
+people&mdash;low-voiced, well-mannered, excellently bred in every tone and
+movement. You wonder dimly if you have not met them somewhere. At all
+events you would very much like to meet them. They are infinitely more
+distressed than you at the behaviour of the American party which has
+just come in&mdash;because they are Americans also. And I may add that they
+will not be in the least flattered, if you should be lucky enough to
+meet them, by your telling them that you "never would have thought it."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, English reader, you have lived long enough in some other
+country than England to have learned what a loathsome thing the
+travelling Englishman often <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a>[<a href="./images/107.png">107</a>]</span>appears. Possibly you have been privileged
+to hear the frank and unofficial opinion of some native of that
+country&mdash;an opinion not intended for your ears, but addressed to a
+compatriot of the speaker&mdash;of English people in general, based upon his
+experience of those whom he has seen. Such an experience is quite
+illuminating. I know few things more offensive than the behaviour of a
+certain class of German when he is in Paris. The noisy, nasal American
+at the Carlton or Savoy is no more representative of America than the
+loud-voiced, check-suited Englishman at Delmonico's or the
+Waldorf-Astoria is the man by whom you wish your nation to be judged. It
+may be a purposeful provision of a higher Power that the people of all
+countries should appear unprepossessing when they are abroad, for the
+fostering in each nation of the spirit of patriotism; for why should any
+of us be patriots if all the foreigners who came to our shores were as
+inoffensive as ourselves? The truth is that those who are inoffensive
+pass unnoticed. It is the occasional caricature&mdash;the parody&mdash;of the
+national type that catches our eye; and on him we too often base our
+judgment of a whole people.</p>
+
+<p>Those Englishmen who only England know are inclined to think that the
+check-suited fellow countryman is a creation of the French and German
+comic press. Those who have lived outside of England for some
+considerable number of years have learned better. The late Senator Hoar
+in his <i>Autobiography of Seventy Years</i> has some very shrewd remarks
+about Matthew Arnold. The Senator had a cordial regard for Matthew
+Arnold&mdash;"a huge liking" he calls his feeling,&mdash;and he has this
+delightful sentence in regard <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a>[<a href="./images/108.png">108</a>]</span>to him: "I do not mean to say that his
+three lectures on translating Homer are the greatest literary work of
+our time. But I think, on the whole, that I should rather have the pair
+of intellectual eyes which can see Homer as he saw him, than any other
+mental quality I can think of." "But"&mdash;and mark this&mdash;"Mr. Arnold has
+never seemed to me fortunate in his judgment about Americans .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The
+trouble with Mr. Arnold is that he never travelled in the United States
+when on this side of the Atlantic.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. He visited a great City or two,
+but never made himself acquainted with the American people. He never
+knew the sources of our power or the spirit of our people."</p>
+
+<p>Senator Hoar, with a generous nature made thrice generous by the
+mellowness of years, speaking of the man he hugely liked, tempered the
+truth to a more than paternal mildness. But it is the truth. Matthew
+Arnold, to put it bluntly, was wrong-headed in his judgment of America
+and Americans to a degree which one living long in the United States
+only comes slowly and reluctantly to understand. And if he so erred, how
+shall all the lesser teachers from whom England gets its knowledge of
+America keep straight?</p>
+
+<p>But what the American people really objected to in Matthew Arnold was
+not any blundering things that he said of them, but the fact that he
+wore on inappropriate occasions in New York a brown checked suit.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And across all the gulf of more than twenty years there looms up in my
+memory&mdash;"looms like some Homer-rock or Troy-tree"&mdash;the figure of the
+Hon. S&mdash;&mdash;y B&mdash;&mdash;l flaunting his mustard coloured suit, gridironed with
+a four-inch check, across three thousand <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a>[<a href="./images/109.png">109</a>]</span>miles of continent, to the
+delight of cities, filling prairies with wonder and moving the Rocky
+Mountains to undisguised mirth. And how could we others explain that he,
+with his undeniably John-Bull-like breadth of shoulder and ruddy face,
+was not a fair sample of the British aristocrat? Was he not an
+Honourable and the son of a Baron and the "real thing" in every way? I
+have no doubt that there still live in the prairie towns of North Dakota
+and in the recesses of the mountains of Montana hundreds of men and
+women, grown old now, who through all the mists of the years still
+remember that lamentable figure; and to them, though they may have seen
+and barely noticed ten thousand Englishmen since, the typical Britisher
+still remains the Hon. S&mdash;&mdash;y B&mdash;&mdash;l.</p>
+
+<p>It is not possible to say how far the influence of one man may extend. I
+verily believe that twenty years ago those clothes of Matthew Arnold
+stood for more in America's estimate of England than the <i>Alabama</i>
+incident. Ex-President Cleveland, as we have seen, speaks of the
+"sublime patriotism and devotion to their nation's honour" of the "plain
+people of the land" who backed him up when war with Great Britain seemed
+to be so near. But I wonder in how many breasts the desire for war was
+inspired not by patriotism but by memory of the Hon. S&mdash;&mdash;y B&mdash;&mdash;l. And
+when the Englishman thinks of the possibility of war with the United
+States, with whom is it that he pictures himself as fighting? Some one
+individual American, whom he has seen in London, drunk perhaps,
+certainly noisy and offensive. Such a one stands in the mind of many an
+Englishman who has not travelled as the type of the whole people of the
+United States.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a>[<a href="./images/110.png">110</a>]</span></p><p>If it were possible for the two peoples to come to know each other as
+they really are&mdash;if one half of the population of each country could for
+a season change places with one half of the other, so that all the
+individuals of both nations would be acquainted with the ways and
+thoughts of the other, not as the comic artists draw them, nor as they
+are when they are abroad, but as they live their daily lives at
+home&mdash;then indeed would all thought of difference between the two
+disappear, and war between them be as impossible as war between Surrey
+and Kent.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a>[<a href="./images/111.png">111</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The American Attitude Towards Women</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Isolation of the United States&mdash;American Ignorance of the
+World&mdash;Sensitiveness to Criticism&mdash;Exaggeration of their Own
+Virtues&mdash;The Myth of American Chivalrousness&mdash;Whence it
+Originated&mdash;The Climatic Myth&mdash;International
+Marriages&mdash;English Manners and American&mdash;The View of Womanhood
+in Youth&mdash;Co-education of the Sexes&mdash;Conjugal Morality&mdash;The
+Artistic Sense in American Women&mdash;Two Stenographers&mdash;An
+Incident of Camp-Life&mdash;"Molly-be-damned"&mdash;A Nice Way of
+Travelling&mdash;How do they do it?&mdash;Women in Public Life&mdash;The
+Conditions which Co-operate&mdash;The Anglo-Saxon Spirit again.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>It will be roughly true to say that the Englishman's misunderstanding of
+America is generally the result of misinformation&mdash;of "parsnips"&mdash;of
+having had reported to him things which are superficial and untrue;
+whereas the American's misunderstanding of England is chiefly the result
+of his absorption in his own affairs and lack of a standard of
+comparison. The Americans as a people have been until recently, and
+still are in only a moderately less degree, peculiarly ignorant of other
+peoples and of the ways of the world.</p>
+
+<p>This has been unfortunate, so far as their judgment of England is
+concerned, in two ways,&mdash;first, as has already been said, because they
+have had no opportunity of measuring Great Britain against other
+nations, so that one and all are equally foreign, and second and more
+positively, in the general misconception in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a>[<a href="./images/112.png">112</a>]</span>American mind as to the
+character and aims of the British Empire and the temper of British rule.
+From the same authorities, the popular histories and school manuals, as
+supplied the American people for so long with their ideas of the conduct
+of the British troops in the Revolutionary War, they also learned of
+India and the British; and the one fact which every American, twenty
+years ago, knew about British India was that the English blew Sepoys
+from the mouths of cannon. Every American youth saw in his school
+history a picture of the thing being done. It helped to point the moral
+of British brutalities in the War of Independence and it was beaten into
+the plastic young minds until an impression was made which was never
+effaced. Of late years not a few Americans have arisen to tell the
+people something of the truth about British rule in India&mdash;of its
+uprightness, its beneficence, its tolerance,&mdash;but it will be a
+generation yet before the people as a whole has any approximate
+conception of the facts.</p>
+
+<p>It was in no way to the discredit of the American people&mdash;and enormously
+to their advantage&mdash;that they were for so long ignorant of the world.
+How should they have been otherwise when separated from that world by
+three thousand miles of ocean? They had, moreover, in the problems
+connected with the establishment of their own government, and the
+expansion of that government across the continent, enough to occupy
+their thoughts and energies. For a century the people lived
+self-concentrated, introspective, their minds filled only with thoughts
+of themselves. If foreign affairs were discussed at all it was in
+curiously childlike and impracticable terms. The nation grew <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a>[<a href="./images/113.png">113</a>]</span>up a
+nation of provincials (there is no other word for it), with a
+provincialism which was somewhat modified, but still provincial, in the
+cities of the Atlantic coast, and which, after all, had a dignity of its
+own from the mere fact that it was continent-wide.</p>
+
+<p>The Spanish-American War brought the people suddenly into contact with
+the things of Europe and widened their horizon. The war itself was only
+an accident; for the growth of American commerce, the increase of
+wealth, the uncontainable expansive force of their industrial energy,
+must have compelled a departure from the old isolation under any
+circumstances. The quarrel with Spain did but furnish, as it were, a
+definite taking-off place for the leap which had to be made.<a name="FNanchor_113:1_15" id="FNanchor_113:1_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_113:1_15" class="fnanchor">[113:1]</a>
+Since then, foreign politics and foreign affairs have acquired a new
+interest for Americans. They are no longer topics entirely alien from
+their every-day life and thoughts. It would still be absurd to pretend
+that the affairs of Europe (or for that matter of Asia) have anything
+like the interest for Americans that they have for Europeans, or that
+the educated American is not as a rule still seriously uninformed on
+many matters (all except the bare bones of facts and dates) of
+geography, of ethnology, of world-politics which are elementary matters
+to the Englishman of corresponding education;<a name="FNanchor_113:2_16" id="FNanchor_113:2_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_113:2_16" class="fnanchor">[113:2]</a> but with their
+<i>d&eacute;but</i> as a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a>[<a href="./images/114.png">114</a>]</span>World-Power&mdash;above all with the acquisition of their
+colonial dependencies&mdash;Americans have become (I use the phrase in all
+courtesy) immensely more intelligent in their outlook on the affairs of
+the world. With a longer experience of the difficulties of colonial
+government, they will also come to appreciate more nearly at its true
+value the work which Great Britain has done for humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Americans may retort that their knowledge of Europe was at least no
+scantier than the Englishman's knowledge of America, and the mistakes of
+travelling Englishmen in regard to the size, the character, and the
+constitution of the country have been a fruitful source of American
+witticism. But why should Englishmen <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a>[<a href="./images/115.png">115</a>]</span>know anything of the United
+States? The affairs of the United States were, after all, however big,
+the affairs of the United States and not of any other part of the rest
+of the world; while the affairs of Europe were the affairs of all the
+world outside of the United States. Undoubtedly the American could
+fairly offset the Englishman's ignorance of America against the
+American's ignorance of England; but what has never failed to strike an
+Englishman is the American's ignorance of other parts of the world,
+which might be regarded as common to both. They were not common to both;
+for, as has been said, since the beginning of her history, which has
+stretched over some centuries, England has been constantly mixed up with
+the affairs, not only of Europe, but of the remoter parts of the earth,
+while the United States for the single century of her history has lived
+insulated and almost solely intent on her own affairs. So though the
+American has no adequate retort against the Englishman for his
+ignorance, he need not defend it. It has been an accident of his
+geographical situation and needs no more apology than the Rocky
+Mountains. But, like the Rocky Mountains, it is a fact which has had a
+distinct influence on his character. It is probably unavoidable that a
+people&mdash;as an individual&mdash;which lives a segregated life, with its
+thoughts turned almost wholly on itself, should come to exaggerate,
+perhaps its own weaknesses, but certainly its virtues.</p>
+
+<p>The boy who lives secluded from companionship, when he goes out into the
+world, will find not merely that he is diffident and sensitive about his
+own defects, real or imaginary, but that he is different from other
+people. It may take him all his life to learn&mdash;perhaps <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a>[<a href="./images/116.png">116</a>]</span>he will never
+learn&mdash;that his emotional and intellectual experiences are no prodigies
+of sentiment and ph&oelig;nixes of thought, but the common experiences of
+half his fellows. It has been such a life of seclusion that the American
+people lived&mdash;though they hardly know it (and perhaps some American
+readers will resent the statement), because the mere fact of their
+seclusion has prevented them from seeing how secluded, as compared with
+other peoples, they have been. It is true that individual Americans of
+the well-to-do classes travel more (and more intelligently) than any
+other people except the English; but this, as leavening the nation, is a
+small off-set against the daily lack of mental contact with foreign
+affairs at home.</p>
+
+<p>But if this sheltered boy be further occasionally subjected to the
+inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world&mdash;a candid
+and outspoken elderly relative&mdash;he is likely to become, on the one hand,
+morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame,
+and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride in whatever is awarded
+praise.</p>
+
+<p>Both these tendencies have been acutely developed in the American
+character&mdash;an extraordinary sensitiveness to criticism by outsiders of
+certain national foibles, and a no less conspicuous belief in the heroic
+proportions of their good qualities. For surely no people has ever been
+blessed in its seclusion with such an abundance of criticism of singular
+candour. The frank brutality with which the travelling Englishman has
+made his opinions known on any peculiar trait or unusual institution
+which he has been pleased to think that he has noticed in the United
+States has been vastly more ill-mannered than anything in the manners of
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a>[<a href="./images/117.png">117</a>]</span>Americans themselves on which he has animadverted so freely. The
+thing most comparable to it&mdash;most nearly as ill-mannered&mdash;is, perhaps,
+the frank brutality with which the travelling American expresses
+himself&mdash;and herself&mdash;in regard to things in Europe. In it, in fact, we
+see again another aspect of the same fundamentally English trait,&mdash;the
+insistence on the sovereignty of the individual&mdash;and Americans come by
+it legitimately. Every time that they display it they do but make
+confession of their original Anglo-Saxon descent and essentially English
+nature. The Englishman in America has, however, had some excuse for his
+readiness to criticise, in the interest, the anxiety, with which, at
+least until recent years, the Americans have invited his opinions. But
+if that has gone some way to justify his expression of those opinions,
+it has furnished no sort of excuse for the lack of tact and breeding
+which he has shown in the process. The American does not commonly wait
+for the invitation.</p>
+
+<p>"My! But isn't that quaint! Now in America we .&nbsp;.&nbsp;." etc. So speaks an
+uncultivated American on seeing something that strikes him&mdash;or her&mdash;as
+novel in London, not unkindly critical, but anxious to give information
+about his country&mdash;and uninvited. But whereas the Englishman is so
+accustomed to the abuse and criticism of other peoples that the harmless
+chatter of the American ripples more or less unheeded by him, the
+American, less case-hardened in his isolation, hears the Englishman's
+bluntly worded expression of contempt, and it hurts. It does not hurt
+nearly as much now as it did twenty years ago; but the harm has largely
+been done.</p>
+
+<p>The harm would not be so serious but for the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a>[<a href="./images/118.png">118</a>]</span>American sensitiveness
+bred of his seclusion,&mdash;if that is (at the risk of seeming to repeat
+myself I must again say) he knew enough of the world to know that he
+himself has precisely the same critical inclination as the Englishman
+and that it is a trait inherited from common ancestors. The Anglo-Saxon
+race acquired early in its life the conviction that it was a trifle
+better than any other section of the human kind. And it is justified.
+We&mdash;Americans and Englishmen alike&mdash;hold that we are better than any
+other people. That the root-trait has developed somewhat differently in
+the two portions of the family is an accident.</p>
+
+<p>The Englishman&mdash;who, when at home, has himself lived, not entirely
+secluded, but in a measure shut off from contact with other peoples&mdash;by
+continual going abroad and never-ceasing friction with his neighbours,
+by perpetual disheartenment with the perplexities of his colonial
+empire, has become less of a critic than a grumbler; and to do him
+justice he is, in speech, infinitely more contemptuous of his own
+government than he is of the American or any other. The American on the
+contrary remains cheerfully, light-heartedly, garrulously critical. He
+comes out in the world and gazes on it young-eyed, and he prattles: "My
+father is bigger than your father, and my sister has longer hair than
+yours, and my money box is larger than yours." It is neither unkindly
+meant nor, by Englishmen, very unkindly taken. It is less offensive than
+the mature, corrosive sullenness of the Englishman; but it is the same
+thing. "The French foot-guards are dressed in blue and all the marching
+regiments in white; which has a very foolish appearance. And as for blue
+regimentals, it is only fit for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a>[<a href="./images/119.png">119</a>]</span>the blue horse or the Artillery," says
+the footman in Moore's <i>Zeluco</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, when he has been praised, the lad has plumed himself unduly
+on the thing that found approval. He would not do it now; for the
+American people of to-day is, as it were, grown up; but, again, the harm
+has been done. Americans rarely make the mistake of underestimating the
+excellence of their virtues. Nor is it their fault, but that of their
+critics.</p>
+
+<p>The American people labours under delusions about its own character and
+qualities in several notable particulars. It exaggerates its own energy
+and spirit of enterprise, its sense of humour and its chivalrousness
+towards women. That it should be aware that it possesses each of these
+qualities in a considerable degree would do no harm, for self-esteem is
+good for a nation; but it believes that it possesses them to the
+exclusion of the rest of mankind. And that is unfortunate; for it makes
+the individual American assume the lack of these qualities in the
+English and thereby decreases his estimate of the English character. I
+am not endeavouring to reduce the American's good opinion of
+himself&mdash;only to make him think better of the Englishman by assuring him
+that in each of these particulars there is remarkably little to choose
+between them. And what excellence he has in each he owes to the fact
+that he is in the main English in origin.</p>
+
+<p>That Americans should think that they have a higher respect for
+womanhood than any other people is not surprising; for every other
+people thinks precisely the same thing. They would be unique among
+peoples if they thought otherwise. Frenchman, German, Italian,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a>[<a href="./images/120.png">120</a>]</span>Spaniard, Greek&mdash;each and every one who has not had his eyes opened by
+travel and knowledge of the world believes, with no less sincerity of
+conviction than the American, that to him alone of all peoples has it
+been vouchsafed to know how duly to reverence the divine feminine. To
+the Englishman it seems that the German not seldom treats his wife much
+as if she were a cow; and he is sometimes distressed at the way in
+which, for all the pretty things he says to her, the Frenchman, not of
+the labouring classes only, will allow his wife to work for and wait on
+him. While the language which an Italian can, on occasions, use towards
+the partner of his joys is, to English ears, appalling. But each goes on
+serenely satisfied of his own superiority. You others, you may pay
+lip-service, yes; but deep down, in the heart of hearts&mdash;<i>we</i> know. The
+American has as good a right to this same foible as any other; but what
+is to be noted is that whereas Englishmen laugh at the pretensions of
+Continental peoples, they have been willing to accept the chivalry of
+the American at his own valuation: the fact being that the valuation is
+not originally American, but was made by the travelling Englishmen of
+the past who communicated their appraisement to the people at home as
+well as to the American whom they complimented. Englishmen of the
+present day have accepted the belief as an inheritance and without
+question; for it was at least a generation and a half ago that the myth
+first obtained vogue, and the two facts most commonly adduced in its
+support by the English visitors who spread it were, first, that women
+could walk about the streets of New York or any other American city,
+unattended and at such hours as pleased them, without being insulted;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a>[<a href="./images/121.png">121</a>]</span>and, second (absurdly enough), the provision of special "ladies'
+entrances" to hotels, which seem to have enormously impressed several
+English visitors to the United States who afterwards wrote their
+"impressions."</p>
+
+<p>For the first of these, it is a mere matter of local custom and police
+regulation. When it is understood that in certain streets of certain
+cities, at certain hours of the day, no women walk unattended except
+such as desire to be insulted, it is probable that other women, who go
+there in ignorance, will suffer inconvenience. Nor has the difference in
+local custom any bearing whatever on the respective morality of
+different localities. These things are arranged differently in different
+countries; that is all. Moreover, in this particular a great change has
+come over American cities in late years, nor are all American cities or
+all English by any means alike.</p>
+
+<p>A similar change has come in the matter of "ladies' entrances" to
+hotels. If the provision of the separate doors was a sign of peculiar
+chivalry, are we then to conclude that their disappearance shows that
+chivalry is decaying? By no means. It only means that the hotels are
+improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was
+built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly
+from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all
+hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged
+and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side,
+came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women
+should frequent that common entrance. Had a hotel constructed and
+managed on the same principles been set down in any English town, women
+would have <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a>[<a href="./images/122.png">122</a>]</span>declined to use it at all, nor would Englishmen have
+expected their womenfolk to do so. Americans avoided the difficulty by
+creating the "ladies' entrance." But it was no evidence of superior
+chivalry on the part of the people that, having devised a place not fit
+for woman's occupancy and more unpleasant than was to be found in any
+other part of the world, they provided (albeit rather inadequate) means
+by which women could avoid visiting it.</p>
+
+<p>Once I saw two young English girls&mdash;sweet girls, tall and graceful, with
+English roses blooming in their cheeks&mdash;come down-stairs in the evening,
+after dinner, as they might have done in any hotel to which they had
+been accustomed in Europe, to the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New
+York. It was a time of some political excitement and there are enough
+men living now who remember what the Fifth Avenue Hotel used to be at
+such seasons twenty years ago. The girls&mdash;it was probably their first
+night on American soil and they could not stand being cooped up in their
+room upstairs all the evening&mdash;made their way to the nearest seat and
+sat down clinging each to the other's hand. Around them surged perhaps a
+hundred men, chewing, spitting, smoking, slapping each other on the
+backs, and laughing coarsely. The girls gazed in wonder and with visibly
+increasing embarrassment for perhaps five minutes, before they slipped
+away, the roses in their cheeks doubly carmine and still clinging each
+to the other's hand.</p>
+
+<p>For the benefit of my companion (whose appearance indicated an
+Englishman) an American on an adjoining seat held forth to his friends
+on what he called the "indecency" of the conduct of the girls in coming
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a>[<a href="./images/123.png">123</a>]</span>down to the public hall and the "effrontery" of Englishwomen in
+general.</p>
+
+<p>In hotels of the modern type there is no need for women to use a
+separate entrance or to draw their skirts aside and hurry through the
+public passages. But it is sad if we must conclude that the building of
+such hotels is an evidence of dying national chivalry.</p>
+
+<p>Every American firmly believes that he individually, as well as each of
+his countrymen, has by heritage a truer respect for womanhood than the
+peoples of less happy countries are able to appreciate. But many
+Americans also believe that every Englishman is rough and brutal to his
+wife, who does daily all manner of menial offices for him, a belief
+which is probably akin to the climatic fiction and of Continental
+origin. In the old days, when there was no United States of America, the
+peoples of the sunny countries of Southern Europe jibed at the English
+climate; and with ample justification. English writers have never denied
+that justification&mdash;in comparison with Southern Europe; and volumes
+could be compiled of extracts from English literature, from Shakespeare
+downwards, in abuse of British fog and mist and rain. But because Nice
+and Naples are entitled to give themselves airs, under what patent do
+Chicago and Pittsburgh claim the same right? Why should Englishmen
+submit uncomplainingly when Milwaukee and Duluth arrogate to themselves
+the privilege of sneering at them which was conceded originally and
+willingly enough to Cannes? Riverside in California, Columbia in South
+Carolina, Colorado Springs or Old Point Comfort&mdash;these, and such as
+they, may boast, and no one has ground for protest; but it is time to
+"call for credentials" when <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a>[<a href="./images/124.png">124</a>]</span>Buffalo, New Haven, and St. Paul and the
+rest propose to come in in the same company. If, in the beginning of
+things, English writers had had to compare the British climate not with
+that of Europe but with the northern part of the United States, the
+references to it in English literature would constitute a hymn of
+thanksgiving.</p>
+
+<p>As the case stands, however, the people of all parts of the United
+States alike, in many of which mere existence is a hardship for some
+months in the year, are firmly convinced that the inhabitants of the
+British Isles are in comparison with themselves profoundly to be pitied
+for their deplorable climate; and it is probable that the prevailing
+idea as to the Englishman's habitual treatment of his wife has much the
+same origin. It is an inheritance of the Continental belief that John
+Bull sold his womenfolk at Smithfield. The frequency of international
+marriages and the continued stream of travel across the Atlantic is, of
+course, beginning to correct the popular American point of view, but
+there are still millions of honest and intelligent people in the United
+States who, when they read that an American girl is going to be married
+to an Englishman, pity her from their hearts in the belief that, for the
+sake of a coronet or some such bauble, she is selling herself to become
+a sort of domestic drudge.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally also even international marriages turn out unhappily; and
+whenever that is the case the American people hear of it in luxuriant
+detail. But of the thousands of happy unions nothing is said. Not many
+years ago there was a conspicuous case, wherein an American woman, whom
+the people of the United States loved much as Englishmen loved the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a>[<a href="./images/125.png">125</a>]</span>Empress Frederick or the Princess Alice, failed to find happiness with
+an English husband. Of the rights and wrongs of that case, neither I nor
+the American people in the mass know anything, but it is the generally
+accepted belief in the United States that the lady's husband was some
+degrees worse than Bluebeard. I would not venture to hazard a guess at
+the number of times that I have heard a conversation on this subject
+clinched with the argument: "Well, now, look at N&mdash;&mdash; G&mdash;&mdash;!" Against
+that one instance the stories of a thousand American women who are
+living happy lives in Europe would not weigh. If they do not confess
+their unhappiness, indeed, "it is probably only because they are proud,
+as a free-born American girl should be, and would die rather than to let
+others know the humiliations to which they are subjected."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, you Englishmen!" an American woman will say, "your manners are
+better than our American men's and you are politer to us in little
+things. But you despise us in your hearts!" It is an argument which, in
+anything less than a lifetime, there is no way of disproving. American
+men also, of course, habitually comfort themselves with the same
+assurance, viz.,&mdash;that with less outward show of courtesy, they cherish
+in their hearts a higher ideal of womanhood than an Englishman can
+attain to. Precisely at what point this possession of a higher ideal
+begins to manifest itself in externals does not appear. After twenty
+years of intimacy in American homes I have failed to find any trace of
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Let me not be misunderstood! I know scores of beautiful homes in the
+United States, in many widely <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a>[<a href="./images/126.png">126</a>]</span>sundered cities, where the men are as
+courteous, as chivalrous, as devoted to their wives&mdash;and where the women
+are as sweet and tender to, and as wholly wrapped up in, their
+husbands&mdash;as in any homes on earth. As I write, the faces of men and
+women rise before me, from many thousand miles away, whom I admire and
+love as much as one can admire and love one's fellow-beings. There are
+these homes I hope and believe&mdash;there are noble men and beautiful women
+finding and making for themselves and each other the highest happiness
+of which our nature is capable&mdash;in every country. But we are not now
+speaking of the few or of the best individuals, but of averages; and
+after twenty years of opportunity for observing I have entirely failed
+to find justification for believing that there is any peculiar inward
+grace in the American which belies the difference in his outward manner.</p>
+
+<p>This is, of course, only an individual opinion,<a name="FNanchor_126:1_17" id="FNanchor_126:1_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_126:1_17" class="fnanchor">[126:1]</a> which is
+necessarily subject to correction by any one who may have had superior
+opportunities for forming a trustworthy judgment. I contend, however,
+not as a matter of opinion, but as what seems to me to be a certainty,
+that whatever may be the inward feeling in regard to the other sex on
+the part of the men of either nation after they have arrived at mature
+years, the young Englishman, as he comes to manhood, possesses a much
+higher ideal of womanhood than is possessed by the young <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a>[<a href="./images/127.png">127</a>]</span>American of
+corresponding age. And I hold to this positively in spite of the fact
+that many Americans possessing a large knowledge of transatlantic
+conditions may very possibly not admit it.</p>
+
+<p>I rejoice to believe that to the majority of English youths of decent
+bringing up at the age at which they commonly leave the public school to
+go to the university, womanhood still is a very white and sacred thing,
+in presence of which a mere man or boy can but be bashful and awkward
+from very reverence and consciousness of inferiority, even as it surely
+was a quarter of a century ago and as, at the same time, it as surely
+was not to the youth of the United States. Again, of course, in both
+countries there are differences between individuals, differences between
+sets and cliques; but I am not mistaken about the tone of the English
+youth of my own day nor am I mistaken about the tone of the American
+youths, of the corresponding class, with whom I have come in intimate
+contact in the United States. Their language about, their whole mental
+attitude towards, woman was during my first years in America an
+amazement and a shock to me. It has never ceased to be other than
+repellent.</p>
+
+<p>The greater freedom of contact allowed to the youth of both sexes in the
+United States, and above all the co-educational institutions (especially
+those of a higher grade), must of course have some effect, whether for
+good or ill. It may be that the early-acquired knowledge of the American
+youth is in the long run salutary; that his image of womanhood is, as is
+claimed, more "practical," and likely to form a better basis for
+happiness in life, than the dream and illusion of the English boy; but
+here we get into a quagmire of mere <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a>[<a href="./images/128.png">128</a>]</span>speculation in which no individual
+opinion has any virtue whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>I am well aware also of the serious offence that will be given to
+innumerable good and earnest people in the United States by what I now
+say. This is no place to discuss the question of co-education. I am
+speaking only of one aspect of it, and even if it were to be granted
+that in that one aspect its results are evil, that evil may very
+possibly be outweighed many times over by the good which flows from it
+in other directions. Even in expressing the opinion that there is this
+one evil result, I am conscious that I shall call down upon myself much
+indignation and some contempt. It will be said that I have not studied
+the subject scientifically (which may be true) and that I am not
+acquainted with what the statistics show (which is less true), and that
+my observation has been prejudiced and superficial. Let me say however
+that I have been brought to the conclusions to which I have been forced
+not by prejudice but against prejudice and when I would have much
+preferred to feel otherwise. Let me also say that my condemnation is not
+directed against the elementary public schools so much as against that
+more select class of co-educational establishments for pupils of less
+juvenile years. It would, I think, be interesting to know what
+percentage of the girls at present at a given number of such
+establishments are the daughters of parents&mdash;fathers especially&mdash;who
+were at those same institutions in their youth. It is a subject
+which&mdash;so amazed was I, coming with an English-trained mind, at certain
+things which were said in incidental conversation&mdash;I sought a good many
+opportunities of enquiring into; with the result that I <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a>[<a href="./images/129.png">129</a>]</span>know that there
+are some parents who, though they had fifty daughters, would never allow
+one to go to the institutions at which they themselves spent some years.
+And this condemnation covers, to my present memory, five separate
+institutions scattered from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"If you marry an American girl," says <i>Life</i>&mdash;I quote from memory,&mdash;"you
+may be sure that you will not be the first man she has kissed. If you
+marry an English one, you may be certain you will not be the last."</p>
+
+<p>Whether this is true, viz., that, granting that the American girl is,
+before marriage, exposed to more temptation than her English sister, the
+latter more than makes up for it in the freedom of married life, is
+another quagmire. No statistics, whether of marriage, of divorce, or of
+the ratio of increase in population, are of any use as a guide. Each man
+or woman, who has had any opportunity of judging, will be guided solely
+by the narrow circle of his or her personal experience; and I know that
+the man whose opinion on the subject I would most regard holds exactly
+opposite views to myself&mdash;and what my own may be I trust I may be
+excused from stating. But while on the subject of the relative conjugal
+morality of the two peoples opinions will differ widely with individual
+experience, I have never met a shadow of disagreement in competent
+opinion in regard to the facts about the youth of the two countries. It
+may be, as I have heard a clever woman say, that the way for a member of
+her sex to get the greatest enjoyment out of life is to be brought up in
+America and married in England. If so <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a>[<a href="./images/130.png">130</a>]</span>let us rejoice that so many
+charming women choose the way which opens to them the possibility of the
+greatest felicity.</p>
+
+<p>There is, of course, a widespread impression in England that American
+women as a rule are not womanly. The average American girl acquires when
+young a self-possession and an ability to converse in company which
+Englishwomen only, and then not always, acquire much later in life.
+Therefore the American girl appears, to English eyes, to be "forward,"
+and she is assumed to possess all the vices which go with "forwardness"
+in an English maiden. Which is entirely unjust. Let us remember that
+there is hardly a girl growing up in England to-day who would not have
+been considered forward and ill-mannered to an almost intolerable degree
+by her great-grandmother. But that the girls of to-day are any the less
+womanly, in all that is sweet and essential in womanliness, than any
+generation of their ancestors, I for one do not believe. Nor do I
+believe that in another generation, when they will perhaps, as a matter
+of course, possess all the social precocity (as it seems to us) of the
+American girl of to-day, they will thereby be any the less true and
+tender women than their mothers.</p>
+
+<p>In particular, are American girls supposed to be so commercially
+case-hardened that their artistic sensibilities have been destroyed. A
+notorious American "revivalist" some years ago returned from a
+much-advertised trip to England and told his American congregations of
+the sinfulness which he had seen in the Old World. Among other things he
+had seen, so he said, more tipsy men and women in the streets of London
+in (I think) a month than he had seen in the streets of his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a>[<a href="./images/131.png">131</a>]</span>native town
+of Topeka, Kansas, in some&mdash;no matter what&mdash;large number of years. Very
+possibly he was right. But he omitted to say that he had also seen
+several million more sober ones. A population of 6,000,000 frequently
+contains more drunkards than one of 30,000. It also contains more
+metaphysicians. On the same principle it is entirely likely that the
+American girl, who talks so much, says many more foolish things than the
+English one who, if she can help it, never talks at all. The American
+girl is only a girl after all, and because she has acquired a
+conversational fluency which the Englishwoman will only arrive at twenty
+years later, it is not just to suppose that she must also have acquired
+an additional twenty years' maturity of mind.</p>
+
+<p>Most English readers are familiar with the picture of the American girl
+who flits through Europe seeing nothing in the Parthenon or in Whitehall
+beyond an inferiority in size and splendour to the last new insurance
+company's building in New York. She has been a favourite character in
+fiction, and the name of the artist who first imagined her has long been
+lost. Perhaps she was Daisy Miller's grandmother. In reality, in spite
+of that lack of reverence which is undoubtedly a national American
+characteristic, the average American woman has an almost passionate love
+for those glories of antiquity which her own country necessarily lacks,
+such as few Englishwomen are capable of feeling.</p>
+
+<p>"How in our hearts we envy you the mere names of your streets!" said an
+American woman to me once. It is not easy for an English man or woman to
+conceive what romance and wonder cluster round the names of Fleet Street
+and the Mall to the minds of many educated <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a>[<a href="./images/132.png">132</a>]</span>Americans. We, if we are
+away from them for half a dozen years, long for them in our exile and
+rejoice in them on our return. The American of sensibility feels that
+he&mdash;and more especially she&mdash;has been cut off from them for as many
+generations and adores them with an ardour proportionately magnified.
+But he (or she) would not exchange Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Euclid
+Avenue or the Lake Shore Drive, as the case may be, for all London.</p>
+
+<p>It was once my fortune to show over Westminster Abbey an American woman
+whose name, by reason of her works&mdash;sound practical common-sense
+works,&mdash;has come to be known throughout the United States, and I heard
+"the wings of the dead centuries beat about her ears." I took her to
+Poet's Corner. She turned herself slowly about and looked at the names
+carved on either side of her, and then looked down and saw the names
+that lay graven beneath her feet; and she dropped sobbing on her knees
+upon the pavement. Johnson was not kind to the American colonies in his
+life. Those tears which fell upon his name, where it is cut into the
+slab of paving, were part of America's revenge.</p>
+
+<p>We all remember Kipling's "type-writer girl" in San Francisco,&mdash;"the
+young lady who in England would be a Person,"&mdash;who suddenly quoted at
+him Th&eacute;ophile Gautier. It is an incident which many Englishmen have read
+with incredulity, but which has nothing curious in it to the American
+mind. A stenographer in my own offices subsequently, I have heard,
+married a rich owner of race-horses and her dinners I understand are
+delightful. She was an excellent stenographer.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a>[<a href="./images/133.png">133</a>]</span></p><p>In all frontier communities, where women are few and the primitive
+instincts have freer play than in more artificial societies, there
+blossoms a certain rough and ready chivalrousness which sets respect of
+womanhood above all laws and makes every man a self-constituted champion
+of the sex. This may be seen in a thousand communities scattered over
+the farther West; but it is no outgrowth of the American character, for
+it flourishes in all new societies in all parts of the world, no matter
+to what nationality the men of those societies belong.</p>
+
+<p>In a certain mining camp, late at night, a man&mdash;a man of some means, the
+son of a banker in a neighbouring town&mdash;was walking with a woman.
+Neither was sober and the woman fell to the ground. The man kicked her
+and told her to get up. As she did not comply he cursed her and kicked
+her again. Then chanced to come along one Ferguson, a gambler and a
+notoriously "bad man," who bade the other stop abusing the woman,
+whereupon he was promptly told to go to &mdash;&mdash; and mind his own business.
+Ferguson replied that if the other touched the woman again he would
+shoot him. It was at this point that the altercation brought me out of
+my cabin, for the thing was happening almost where my doorstep (had I
+had a doorstep) ought to have been. The banker's son paid no heed to the
+warning, and once more proceeded to kick the woman. Thereupon Ferguson
+shot him. And, with the weapon which Ferguson carried and his ability as
+a marksman, when he shot, it might be safely regarded as final.</p>
+
+<p>No attempt was made to punish Ferguson. The deputy sheriff, arriving on
+the scene, heard his story <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a>[<a href="./images/134.png">134</a>]</span>and mine and those of one or two others who
+had heard or seen more or less of what passed; and Ferguson was a free
+man. Nor was there any shadow of a suggestion in camp that justice
+should take any other course. The fact was established that the dead man
+had been abusing a woman. Ferguson had only done what any other man in
+camp must have done under the same circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>And while the banker's son was a person of some standing, there was
+certainly nothing in her whom he had maltreated, beyond her mere
+womanhood, to constitute a claim on one grain of respect.</p>
+
+<p>I trust that I am not reflecting on the chivalry of the camp when I
+record the fact that the name by which the lady was universally known
+was "Molly-be-damned." The camp, to a man, idolised her.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>One of my earliest revelations of the capacity of the American woman was
+vouchsafed to me in this way:</p>
+
+<p>A party of us, perhaps fifteen in all, had travelled a distance of some
+two thousand miles to assist at the opening of a new line of railway in
+the remote Northwest. We duly arrived at the little mountain town at
+which the junction was to be made between the line running up from the
+south and that running down from the north, over which we had come. The
+ceremony of driving the last spike was conducted with due solemnity,
+after which a "banquet" was given to us by the Mayor and citizens of the
+small community. After the banquet&mdash;which was really a luncheon&mdash;we
+again boarded our train to complete the run to the southern end of the
+line, a number of the citizens of the town with their wives accompanying
+us on the jaunt. It <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a>[<a href="./images/135.png">135</a>]</span>chanced to be my privilege to escort to the car,
+and for the remainder of the journey to sit beside, the wife of the
+editor of the local paper. She was pretty, charming, and admirably
+dressed. We talked of many things,&mdash;of America and England, of the red
+Indians, and of books,&mdash;when in a pause in the conversation she
+remarked:</p>
+
+<p>"I think this is such a nice way of travelling, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>It puzzled me. What did she mean? Was she referring to the fact that we
+were on a special train composed of private cars, or what? The truth did
+not at first occur to me&mdash;that she was referring to railway travelling
+as a whole, it being the first time that she had ever been on or seen a
+train. Explanations followed. She had been brought by her parents, soon
+after the close of the Civil War, when two or three years old, across
+the plains in a prairie schooner (the high-topped waggon in which the
+pioneers used to make their westward pilgrimage), taking some four
+months for the trip from the old home in, I think, Kentucky. At all
+events she was a Southerner. Since then during her whole life she had
+known no surroundings but those of the little mining settlement huddled
+in among the mountains, her longest trips from home having been for a
+distance of thirty or forty miles on horseback or on a buckboard. She
+had lived all her life in log cabins and never known what it meant to
+have a servant. She read French and Italian, but could not take any
+interest in German. She sketched and painted, and was incomparably
+better informed on matters of art than I, though she knew the Masters
+only, of course, through the medium of prints and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a>[<a href="./images/136.png">136</a>]</span>engravings. What she
+most dearly longed to do in all the world was to see a theatre&mdash;Irving
+for choice&mdash;and to hear some one of the Italian operas, with the
+libretti of which, as well as the music, so far as her piano would
+interpret for her, she was already familiar.</p>
+
+<p>Now at last the railway had come and she was, from that day forward,
+within some six days' travelling of New York; and her husband had
+faithfully promised that they should go East together for at least three
+or four weeks that winter. And as she sat and talked in her soft
+Southern voice, there in the heart of the wilds which had been all the
+world to her, she might, so far as a mere man's eyes could judge, have
+been dropped down in any country house in England to be a conspicuously
+charming member of any charming house-party.</p>
+
+<p>Familiarity with similar instances, though I think with none more
+striking, has robbed the miracle, so far as its mere outward
+manifestation is concerned, of something of its wonder; but the inward
+marvel of it remains as inexplicable as ever. By what power or instinct
+do they do it? With nothing of inheritance, so far as can be judged, to
+justify any aspirations towards the good or beautiful, among the poorest
+and hardest of surroundings, with none but the most meagre of
+educational facilities, by what inherent quality is it that the American
+woman, not now and again only, but in her tens of thousands, rises to
+such an instinctive comprehension of what is good and worth while in
+life, that she becomes, not through any external influence, but by mere
+process of her own development, the equal of those who have spent their
+lives amid all that is most beautifying and elevating of what <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a>[<a href="./images/137.png">137</a>]</span>the world
+has to afford? When she takes her place, graciously and composedly, as
+the mistress of some historic home or amid the surroundings of a Court,
+we say that it is her "adaptability." But adaptability can do no more
+than raise one to the level of one's surroundings&mdash;not above them. Is it
+ambition? But whence derived? And by what so tutored and guided that it
+reaches only for what is good? How is it tempered that she remains all
+pure womanly at the last?</p>
+
+<p>It may be that the extent to which, especially in the Western States,
+American women of wealth and position are called upon to bear their
+share in public work&mdash;in the management of art societies, the building
+of art buildings and public libraries, the endowment and conduct of
+hospitals, and in educational work of all kinds&mdash;gives them such an
+opportunity of showing the qualities which are in them, as is denied to
+their English sisters of similar position but who live in older
+established communities. And there are, of course, women in England who
+lead lives as beautiful and as beneficent as are lived anywhere upon
+earth. The miracle is that the American woman&mdash;and, again I say, not now
+and again but in her tens of thousands&mdash;becomes what she is out of the
+environment in which her youth has so often been lived.</p>
+
+<p>It will be necessary later to refer to the larger part played by
+American women, as compared with English, in the intellectual life of
+the country,&mdash;a matter which itself has, as will be noticed, no little
+bearing on the question of the merits and demerits of the co-education
+of the sexes. The best intellectual work, the best literary work, the
+best artistic work, is still probably done by the men in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a>[<a href="./images/138.png">138</a>]</span>United
+States; but an immensely larger part of that work is done by women than
+in England, and in ordinary society (outside of the professional
+literary and artistic circles) it is the women who are generally best
+informed, as will be seen, on literature and art. To which is to be
+added the fact that they take a much livelier and more intelligent
+interest than do the majority of Englishwomen in public affairs, and
+assume a more considerable share of the work of a public or quasi-public
+character in educational and similar matters. It might be supposed that
+this greater prominence of women in the national life of the country was
+in itself a proof that men deferred more to them and placed them on a
+higher level; but when analysed it will be found far from being any such
+proof. Rather is woman's position an evidence of, and a result of, man's
+neglect. By which it is not intended to imply any discourteous or
+inconsiderate neglect; but merely that American men have been, and still
+are, of necessity more busy than Englishmen, more absorbed in their own
+work, whereby women have been left to live their own lives and thrown on
+their own resources much more than in England. The mere pre-occupation
+of the men, moreover, necessarily leaves much work undone which, for the
+good of society, must be done; and women have seized the opportunity of
+doing it. They have been especially ready to do so, inasmuch as the
+spirit of work and of pushfulness is in the atmosphere about them, and
+they have been educated at the same schools as the men. The contempt of
+men for idleness, in a stage of society when there was more than enough
+work for all men to do, necessarily extended to the women. It is not
+good, in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a>[<a href="./images/139.png">139</a>]</span>United States, for any one, woman hardly more than man, to
+be idle.</p>
+
+<p>Women being compelled to organise their own lives for themselves, they
+carried into that organisation the spirit of energy and enthusiasm which
+filled the air of the young and growing communities. Finding work to
+their hands to do, they have done it&mdash;taking, and in the process fitting
+themselves to take, a much more prominent part in the communal life than
+is borne by their sisters in England or than those sisters are to-day,
+in the mass, qualified to assume. Precisely so (as often in English
+history) do women, in some beleaguered city or desperately pressed
+outpost, turn soldiers. No share in, or credit for, the result is to be
+assigned to any peculiar forethought, deference, or chivalrousness on
+the part of the men, their fellows in the fight. It is to the women that
+credit belongs.</p>
+
+<p>And while we are thus comparing the position of women in America with
+their position in England, it is to be noted that so excellent an
+authority among Frenchmen as M. Paul Cambon, in speaking of the position
+of women in England, uses precisely the same terms as an Englishman must
+use when speaking of the conditions in America. Americans have gone a
+step farther&mdash;are a shade more "Feminist"&mdash;than the English, impelled,
+as has been seen, by the peculiar conditions of their growing
+communities in a new land. But it is only a step and accidental.</p>
+
+<p>Englishmen looking at America are prone to see only that step, whereas
+what Frenchmen or other Continental Europeans see is that both
+Englishmen and Americans together have travelled far, and are still
+travelling fast, on a path quite other than that which <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a>[<a href="./images/140.png">140</a>]</span>is followed by
+the rest of the peoples. In their view, the single step is
+insignificant. What is obvious is that in both is working the same
+Anglo-Saxon trait&mdash;the tendency to insist upon the independence of the
+individual. Feminism&mdash;the spirit of feminine progress&mdash;is repugnant to
+the Roman Catholic Church; and we would not look to see it developing
+strongly in Roman Catholic countries. But, what is more important, it is
+repugnant to all peoples which set the community or the state or the
+government before the individual, that is to say to all peoples except
+the Anglo-Saxon.</p>
+
+<p>We see here again, as we shall see in many things, how powerless have
+been all other racial elements in the United States to modify the
+English character of the people. The weight of all those elements must
+be, and, so far as they have any weight, is directly against the
+American tendency to feminine predominance. All the Germans, all the
+Irish, all the Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, or other foreigners who
+are in the United States to-day or have ever come to the United States
+have not, as Germans, or Irish, or Frenchmen, contributed among them one
+particle, one smallest impulse, to the position which women hold in the
+life of the country to-day; rather has it been achieved in defiance of
+the instincts and ideas of each of those by the English spirit which
+works irrepressibly in the people. There could hardly be stronger
+testimony to the dominating quality of that spirit. One may approve of
+the conditions as they have been evolved; or one may not. One may be
+Feminist or anti-Feminist. But whether it be for good or evil, the
+position which women hold in the United States to-day they hold by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a>[<a href="./images/141.png">141</a>]</span>virtue of the fact that the American people is <i>Anglais</i>&mdash;an English or
+Anglo-Saxon people.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And in spite of all the precautions that I have taken to make myself
+clear and to avoid offence, I feel that some word of explanation, lest I
+be misunderstood, is still needed. It is not here said that American men
+do not place woman on a higher plane than any Continental European
+people. I earnestly believe that both branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock
+do hold to a higher ideal of womanhood than some (and for all I know to
+the contrary, than all) of the peoples of Europe. What I am denying is
+that Americans have any greater reverence for women, any higher
+chivalrousness, than Englishmen. And this denial I make not with any
+desire to belittle the chivalry of American men but only in the
+endeavour to correct the popular American impression about Englishmen,
+which does not contribute to the promotion of that good-will which ought
+to exist between the peoples. I am not suggesting that Americans should
+think less of themselves, only that, with wider knowledge, they would
+think better of Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p>And, on the subject of co-education, it seems that yet another word is
+needed, for since this chapter was put into type, it has had the
+advantage of being read by an American friend whose opinion on any
+subject must be valuable, and who has given especial attention to
+educational matters. He thinks it would be judicious that I should make
+it clearer than I have done that, in what I have said, I am not
+criticising the American co-educational system in any aspect save one.
+He writes:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a>[<a href="./images/142.png">142</a>]</span></p><p>"The essential purpose of the system of co-education which had been
+adopted, not only in the State universities supported by public funds,
+but in certain colleges of earlier date, such as Oberlin, in Ohio, and
+in comparatively recent institutions like Cornell University, of New
+York, is to secure for the women facilities for training and for
+intellectual development not less adequate than those provided for the
+men.</p>
+
+<p>"It was contended that if any provision for higher education for women
+was to be made, it was only equitable, and in fact essential, that such
+provision should be of the best. It was not practicable with the
+resources available in new communities, to double up the machinery for
+college education, and if the women were not to be put off with
+instructors of a cheaper and poorer grade and with inadequate
+collections and laboratories, they must be admitted to a share of the
+service of the instructors, and in the use of the collections, of the
+great institutions.</p>
+
+<p>"It is further contended by well-informed people that what they call a
+natural relation between the sexes, such as comes up in the competitive
+work of university life, so far from furthering, has the result of
+lessening the risk of immature sentiment and of undesirable flirtations.
+By the use of the college system, the advantages of these larger
+facilities can be secured to women, and have in fact been secured
+without any sacrifice of the separate life of the women students.</p>
+
+<p>"In Columbia University, for instance (in New York City), the women
+students belong to Barnard College. This college is one of the seven
+colleges that constitute Columbia University: but it possesses a
+separate <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a>[<a href="./images/143.png">143</a>]</span>foundation and a faculty of its own. The women students have
+the advantage of the university collections and of a large number of the
+university lectures. The relation between the college and the university
+is in certain respects similar to that of Newnham and Girton with the
+University of Cambridge, with the essential difference that Barnard
+College constitutes, as stated, an integral part of the university, and
+that the Barnard students are entitled to secure their university
+degrees from A.B. to Ph.D."</p>
+
+<p>From the above it is by no means certain that on the one point on which
+I have dwelt, his opinion coincides with mine; and the best explanation
+thereof that I can offer is that while he knows certain parts of the
+country and some institutions better than I, I know certain parts of the
+country and some institutions better than he. And we will "let it go at
+that."</p>
+
+<p>As for the rest, for the general economic advantages of the
+co-educational system to the community, I think I am prepared to go as
+far as almost anyone. I am even inclined to follow Miss M. Carey Thomas,
+the President of Bryn Mawr College, who attributes the industrial
+progress of the United States largely to the fact that the men of the
+country have such well-educated mothers. It seems to me a not
+unreasonable or extravagant suggestion. I am certainly of the opinion
+that the conversational fluency and mental alertness of the American
+woman, as well as in large measure her capacity for bearing her share in
+the civic labour, are largely the result of the fact that she has in
+most cases had precisely the same education as her brothers.</p>
+
+<p>At present I believe that something more than one-half (56 per cent.) of
+the pupils in all the elementary <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a>[<a href="./images/144.png">144</a>]</span>and secondary schools, whether public
+or private, in the United States are girls; and that the system is
+permanently established cannot be questioned. What are known as the
+State universities, that is to say universities which are supported
+entirely, or almost entirely, by State grants, or by annual taxes
+ordered through State legislation, have from their first foundation been
+available for women students as well as for men. The citizens, who, as
+taxpayers, were contributing the funds required for the foundation and
+the maintenance of these institutions, took the ground, very naturally,
+that all who contributed should have the same rights in the educational
+advantages to be secured. It was impossible from the American point of
+view to deny to a man whose family circle included only daughters the
+university education, given at public expense, which was available for
+the family of sons.</p>
+
+<p>Co-education had its beginning in most parts of the United States in the
+fact that in the frontier communities there were often not enough boy
+pupils to support a school nor was there enough money to maintain a
+separate school for girls; but what began experimentally and as a matter
+of necessity has long become an integral part of the American social
+system. So far from losing ground it is continually (and never more
+rapidly than in recent years) gaining in the Universities as well as in
+the schools, in private as well as public institutions.</p>
+
+<p>But, as I said in first approaching the subject, the merits or demerits
+of co-education are not a topic which comes within the scope of this
+book. It was necessary to refer to it only as it impinged on the general
+question of the relation of the sexes.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113:1_15" id="Footnote_113:1_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113:1_15"><span class="label">[113:1]</span></a> The English reader will find this explained at length
+in Mr. A. R. Colquhoun's work, <i>Greater America</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113:2_16" id="Footnote_113:2_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113:2_16"><span class="label">[113:2]</span></a> That Americans may understand more clearly what I mean
+and, so understanding, see that I speak without intention to offend, I
+quote from the list of "arrangements" in London for the forthcoming
+week, as given in to-day's London <i>Times</i>, those items which have a
+peculiarly cosmopolitan or extra-British character:
+</p><p>
+Friday&mdash;Pilgrims' Club, dinner to Lord Curzon of Kedleston, ex-Viceroy
+of India.
+</p><p>
+Saturday&mdash;Lyceum Club, dinner in honour of France to meet the French
+Ambassador and members of the Embassy, etc.
+</p><p>
+Sunday&mdash;Te Deum for Greek Independence, Greek Church, Moscow Road.
+</p><p>
+Monday&mdash;Royal Geographical Society, Sir Henry MacMahon on "Recent
+Exploration and Survey in Seistan."
+</p><p>
+Tuesday&mdash;Royal Colonial Institute, dinner and meeting. Royal Asiatic
+Society, Major Vost on "Kapilavastu." China Association, dinner to
+Prince Tsai-tse and his colleagues, Mr. R. S. Grundy, C. B., presiding.
+</p><p>
+Wednesday&mdash;Central Asian Society, Mr. A. Hamilton on "The Oxus River."
+Japan Society, Professor J. Takakusu on "Buddhism as we Find it in
+Japan."
+</p><p>
+This, it should be explained, is not a good week, because it is "out of
+the season," but the list will, I fancy, as it stands suffice to give
+American readers an idea of the extent to which London is in touch with
+the interests of all the world&mdash;an idea of how, by comparison, it is
+impossible to speak of New York (and still more of America as a whole)
+as being other than non-cosmopolitan, or in a not offensive sense,
+provincial.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126:1_17" id="Footnote_126:1_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126:1_17"><span class="label">[126:1]</span></a> It is worth remarking that Dr. Emil Reich (whose
+opinion I quote not because I attach any value to it personally, but in
+deference to the judgment of those who do) prophesies that the "silent
+war" between men and women in the United States "will soon become so
+acute that it will cease to be silent." It is to be borne in mind, of
+course, that the Doctor's experience in the United States has as yet
+been but inconsiderable.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a>[<a href="./images/145.png">145</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">English Humour and American Art</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>American Insularity&mdash;A Conkling Story&mdash;English Humour and
+American Critics&mdash;American Literature and English Critics&mdash;The
+American Novel in England&mdash;And American Art&mdash;Wanted, an
+American Exhibition&mdash;The Revolution in the American Point of
+View&mdash;"Raining in London"&mdash;Domestic and Imported Goods.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>It is no uncommon thing to hear an American speak of British
+insularity&mdash;the Englishman's "insular prejudices" or his "insular
+conceit." On one occasion I took the opportunity of interrupting a man
+who, I was sure, did not know what "insular" might mean, to ask for an
+explanation.</p>
+
+<p>"Insular?" he said. "It's the same as insolent&mdash;only more so."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Flings at Britain's "insularity" were (like the climatic myth)
+originally of Continental European origin; and from the Continental
+European point of view, the phrase, both in fact and metaphor, was
+justified. England <i>is</i> an island. So far as the Continent of Europe is
+concerned, it is <i>the</i> island. And undoubtedly the fact of their insular
+position, with the isolation which it entailed, has had a marked
+influence on the national temperament of Englishmen. Ringed about with
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a>[<a href="./images/146.png">146</a>]</span>silver sea, they had an opportunity to meditate at leisure on their
+superiority to other peoples, an opportunity which, if not denied, was
+at least restricted in the case of peoples only separated from
+neighbours of a different race by an invisible frontier line, a well
+bridged stream, or a mountain range pierced by abundant passes. Their
+insularity bred in the English a disposition different from the
+dispositions of the Continental peoples just as undeniably as it kept
+them aloof from those peoples geographically.</p>
+
+<p>Vastly more than Great Britain, has the United States been isolated
+since her birth. England has been cut off from other civilisations by
+twenty miles of sea; America by three thousand. As a physical fact, the
+"insularity" of America is immensely more obvious and more nearly
+complete than that of Britain; and it is no less so as a moral fact. It
+is true that America's island is a continent; but this superiority in
+size has only resulted in producing more kinds of insularity than in
+England. The American character is, in all the moral connotation of the
+word, pronouncedly more insular than the British.</p>
+
+<p>Like the English, except that they were much more effectively staked off
+from the rest of the world, the Americans have found the marvel of their
+own superiority to all mankind a fit and pleasing subject for
+contemplation. Perhaps there was a time when Englishmen used to go about
+the world talking of it; but for some generations back, having settled
+the fact of their greatness entirely to their satisfaction, they have
+ceased to put it into words, merely accepting it as the mainspring of
+their conduct in all relations with other peoples, and without, it is to
+be feared, much regard <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a>[<a href="./images/147.png">147</a>]</span>for those other peoples' feelings. Americans are
+still in the boasting stage. Mr. Howells has said that every American
+when he goes abroad goes not as an individual citizen but as an envoy.
+He walks wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. It is only the insularity of
+the Britisher magnified many times.</p>
+
+<p>It is as if there were gathered in a room a dozen or so of well-bred
+persons, talking such small talk as will pass the time and hurt no
+susceptibilities. It may be that the Englishman in his small talk is
+unduly dogmatic, but in the main he complies with the usages of the
+circle and helps the game along. To them enters a newcomer who will hear
+nothing of what the others have to say&mdash;will take no share in the
+discussion of topics of common interest&mdash;but insists on telling the
+company of his personal achievements. It may be all true; though the
+others will not believe it. But the accomplishments of the members of
+the present company are not at the moment the subject of conversation;
+nor is it a theme under any circumstances which it is good manners to
+introduce. This is what not a few American people are doing daily up and
+down through the length and breadth of Europe; and they must pardon
+Europe if, occasionally, it yawns, or if at times it expresses its
+opinions of American manners in terms not soothing to American ears.</p>
+
+<p>"The American contribution to the qualities of nations is hurry," says
+the author of <i>The Champagne Standard</i>, and this has enough truth to let
+it pass as an epigram; but many Americans have a notion that their
+contribution is neither more nor less than All Progress. With their eyes
+turned chiefly upon themselves, they have seen beyond a doubt what a
+splendid, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a>[<a href="./images/148.png">148</a>]</span>energetic, pushful people they are, and they have talked it
+all over one with another. Moreover, have not many visitors, though
+finding much to criticise, complimented them always on their rapidity of
+thought and action? So they have come to believe that they monopolise
+those happy attributes and, going abroad, whenever they see&mdash;it may be
+in England, or in Germany&mdash;an evidence of energy and force, they say:
+"Truly the world is becoming Americanised!" Bless their insular hearts!
+America did not invent the cosmic forces.</p>
+
+<p>When the first suspension bridge was thrown over Niagara, there was a
+great and tumultuous opening ceremony, such as the Americans love, and
+many of the great ones of the United States assembled to do honour to
+the occasion, and among them was Roscoe Conkling. Conkling was one of
+the most brilliant public men whom America has produced: a man of
+commanding, even beautiful, presence and of, perhaps, unparalleled
+vanity. He had been called (by an opponent) a human peacock. After the
+ceremonies attending the opening of the bridge had been concluded,
+Conkling, with many others, was at the railway station waiting to
+depart; but, though others were there, he did not mingle with them, but
+strutted and plumed himself for their benefit, posing that they might
+get the full effect of all his majesty.</p>
+
+<p>One of the station porters was so impressed that, stepping up to another
+who was hurrying by trundling a load of luggage, he jerked his thumb in
+Conkling's direction and:</p>
+
+<p>"Who's that feller?" he asked. "Is he the man as built the bridge?"</p>
+
+<p>The other studied the great man a moment.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a>[<a href="./images/149.png">149</a>]</span></p><p>"Thunder! No," said he. "He's the man as made the Falls."</p>
+
+<p>It is curious that with their sense of humour Americans should so
+persistently force Europeans into the frame of mind of that railway
+porter. The Englishman, in his assurance of his own greatness, has come
+to depreciate the magnitude of whatever work he does; nor is it
+altogether a pose or an affectation. He sees the vastness of the British
+Empire and the amazing strides which have been made in the last two
+generations, and wonders how it all came about. He knows how
+proverbially blundering are British diplomacy and British
+administration, so he puts it all down to the luck of the nation and
+goes grumbling contentedly on his way. There is no country in which
+policies have been so haphazard and unstable, or ways of administration
+so crude and so empirical, as in the United States. "Go forth, my son,"
+said Oxenstiern, "go forth and see with how little wisdom the world is
+governed"; and on such a quest, it is doubtful if any civilised country
+has offered a more promising field for consideration than did the United
+States from, say, the close of the Civil War to less than a decade ago.
+All thinking Americans recognise this fact to the full; but whereas the
+Englishman sees only the blunders that he has made and marvels at the
+luck that pulled him through, the American generally ignores the luck
+and is more likely to believe that whatever has been achieved is the
+result of his peculiar virtues.</p>
+
+<p>I never heard an American ascribe the success of any national
+undertaking to the national luck. The Englishman on the other hand is
+for ever speaking <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a>[<a href="./images/150.png">150</a>]</span>of the "luck of the British Army," and the "luck that
+pulls England through."</p>
+
+<p>And there is one point which I have never seen stated but which is worth
+the consideration of Americans. It has already been said that it would
+be of great benefit if the American people knew more of the British
+Empire as a whole. They have had an advantage in appreciating the
+magnitude of their own accomplishments in the fact that their work has
+all to be done at home. They have had the outward signs of their
+progress constantly before their eyes. It is true that the United States
+is a large country; but it is continuous. No oceans intervene between
+New York and Illinois, or between Illinois and Colorado; and the people
+as a whole is kept well informed of what the people is doing.</p>
+
+<p>The American comes to London and he sees things which he regards with
+contemptuous amusement much as the Englishman might regard some peculiar
+old-world institution in a sleepy Dutch community. The great work which
+is always being done in London is not easy to see; there is so much of
+Old London (not only in a material sense) that the new does not always
+leap to the eye. The man who estimates the effective energy of the
+British people by what he sees in London, makes an analogous mistake to
+that of the Englishman who judges the sentiments of America by what is
+told him by his charming friends in New York. The American who would get
+any notion of British enterprise or British energy must go afield&mdash;to
+the Upper Nile and Equatorial Africa, to divers parts of Asia and
+Australia. He cannot see the Assouan dam, the Cape to Cairo Railway, the
+Indian <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a>[<a href="./images/151.png">151</a>]</span>irrigation works, from the Carlton Hotel, any more than a
+foreigner can measure the destiny of the American people by dining at
+the Waldorf-Astoria.</p>
+
+<p>This is a point which will bear insisting on. Not long ago an American
+stood with me and gazed on the work which was being done in the Strand
+Improvement undertaking, and he said that it was a big thing. "But," he
+added thoughtfully, "it does not come up to what we have on hand in the
+Panama Canal." I pointed out that the Panama Canal was not being cut
+through the heart of New York City and apparently the suggestion was new
+to him. The American rarely understands that the British Isles are no
+more&mdash;rather less&mdash;than the thirteen original states. Canada and India
+are the British Illinois and Florida, Australia and New Zealand
+represent the West from Texas to Montana, while South Africa is the
+British Pacific Slope; just as Egypt may stand for Cuba, and Burma and
+what-not-else set against Alaska and the Philippines. Many times I have
+known Americans in England to make jest of the British railways,
+comparing them in mileage with the transcontinental lines of their own
+country. But the British Transcontinental lines are thrown from Cairo to
+the Cape, from Quebec to Vancouver, from Brisbane to Adelaide and
+Peshawar to Madras. The people of the United States take legitimate
+pride in the growth of the great institutions of learning which have
+sprung up all over the West; but there are points of interest of which
+they take less account, in similar institutions in, say, Sydney and
+Allahabad.</p>
+
+<p>It is not necessary to say that I do not underestimate the energy of the
+American character. I have <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a>[<a href="./images/152.png">152</a>]</span>seen too much of the people, am familiar
+with too many sections of the country, and have watched it all growing
+before my eyes too fast to do that. But I think that the American
+exaggerates those qualities in himself at the expense of other peoples,
+and he would acquire a new kind of respect for Englishmen&mdash;the respect
+which one good workman necessarily feels for another&mdash;if he knew more of
+the British Empire.</p>
+
+<p>A precisely similar exaggeration of his own quality has been bred by
+similar causes in the American mind in his estimate of his national
+sense of humour. I am not denying the excellence of American humour, for
+I have in my library a certain shelf to which I go whenever I feel dull,
+and for the books on which I can never be sufficiently grateful. The
+American's exaggeration of his own funniness is not positive but
+comparative. Just as he is tempted to regard himself as the original
+patentee of human progress, and the first apostle of efficiency, so he
+is very ready to believe that he has been given something like a
+monopoly among peoples of the sense of humour. With a little more
+humour, he would undoubtedly have been saved from this particular error.
+Especially are the Americans convinced that there is no humour in
+Englishmen. Germans and Frenchmen may possess humour of an inferior
+sort, but not Englishmen. It is my belief that in the American clubs
+where I find copies of <i>Fliegende Bl&auml;tter</i> and the <i>Journal Amusant</i>,
+these papers are much more read than <i>Punch</i>, and in not a few cases, I
+fear, by men who have but slight understanding of the languages in which
+they are printed. Indeed, <i>Punch</i> is a permanent, hebdomadally-recurrent
+proof to American readers that Englishmen do not know the meaning <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a>[<a href="./images/153.png">153</a>]</span>of a
+joke.<a name="FNanchor_153:1_18" id="FNanchor_153:1_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_153:1_18" class="fnanchor">[153:1]</a> Americans, of course, do not understand more than a small
+proportion of the pages of <i>Punch</i> any more than they would understand
+those pages if they were printed in Chinese; but because <i>Punch</i> is
+printed in English they think that they do understand it, and because
+they cannot see the jokes, they conclude that the jokes are not there.</p>
+
+<p>A certain proportion of American witticisms are recondite to English
+readers for precisely similar reasons, but the American belief is that
+when an Englishman fails to understand an American joke, it is because
+he has no sense of humour; when an American cannot understand an English
+one, it is because the joke is not funny. It is a view of the situation
+eminently gratifying to Americans; but it is curious that their sense of
+humour does not save them from it.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever American humour may be, it is not subtle. It has a
+pushfulness&mdash;a certain flamboyant self-assertiveness&mdash;which it shares
+with some other things in the United States; and, however fine the
+quality of mind required to produce it, a rudimentary appreciative sense
+will commonly suffice for its apprehension. The chances are, when any
+foreigner fails to catch the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a>[<a href="./images/154.png">154</a>]</span>point of an American joke or story, that
+it is due to something other than a lack of perceptive capability.</p>
+
+<p>What I take to be (with apologies to Mr. Dunne) the greatest individual
+achievement in humorous writing that has been produced in America in
+recent years, the Wolfville series of books of Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis,
+is practically incomprehensible to English readers, not from any lack of
+capacity on their part, but from the difficulties of the dialect and
+still more from the strangeness of the atmosphere. In the same way the
+Tablets of the scribe Azit Tigleth Miphansi must indeed be but ancient
+Egyptian to Americans. But it would not occur to an Englishman to say,
+because Americans have not within their reach the necessary data for a
+comprehension of Mr. Reed, that, therefore, they do not understand a
+joke. Still less because he himself falls away baffled from the Old
+Cattleman does the Englishman conclude that the Wolfville books are not
+funny. He merely deplores his inability to get on terms with his author.
+The English public indeed is curiously ready to accept whatever is said
+to be funny and comes from America as being in truth humorous even if
+largely unintelligible; but few Americans would give credit for the
+existence of humour in those parts of an English book outside their ken.
+Yet I think, if it were possible to get the opinion of an impartial jury
+on the subject, their verdict would be that the number of humorous
+writers of approximately the first or second class is materially greater
+in England than in the United States to-day. I am sure that the sense of
+humour in the average of educated Englishmen is keener, subtler, and
+eminently more catholic than it is in men of the corresponding class in
+the United States. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a>[<a href="./images/155.png">155</a>]</span>The Atlantic Ocean, if the Americans would but
+believe it, washes pebbles up on the beaches of its eastern shores no
+less than upon the western.<a name="FNanchor_155:1_19" id="FNanchor_155:1_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_155:1_19" class="fnanchor">[155:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>American humour [distinctively American humour, for there are humorous
+writers in America whose genius shows nothing characteristically
+American; but among those who are distinctively American I should class
+nearly all the writers who are best known to-day, Mr. Clemens (Mark
+Twain), Mr. Dunne, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Lorimer, Mr. Ade]&mdash;this distinctively
+American humour, then, stands in something the same relation to other
+forms of <i>spirituellisme</i> as the work of the poster artist occupies to
+other forms of pictorial art. Poster designing may demand a very high
+quality of art, and the American workmen are the Cherets, Grassets,
+Muchas, of their craft. Few of them do ordinary painting, whether in oil
+or water colour. Fewer still use the etcher's needle. None that I am
+aware of attempts miniatures&mdash;except Mr. Henry James, who, if Americans
+may be believed, is not an American, and he has invented a department of
+art for himself more microscopic in detail than that of any miniaturist.
+The real American humourist, however small his canvas, strives for the
+same broad effects.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the quality of posters to be elusive. Their appeal is to the
+multitude, and it must be instantaneous. It is easily conceivable that a
+person of an educated artistic sense might stand before a poster and
+find <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a>[<a href="./images/156.png">156</a>]</span>himself entirely unable to comprehend it, because the thing
+portrayed might be something altogether outside his experience. His
+failure would be no indictment either of his perceptivity or of the
+merit of the work of art.</p>
+
+<p>It is a pity that Americans as a rule do not consider this, for I know
+few things that would so much increase American respect for Englishmen
+in the mass as the discovery that the latter were not the ponderous
+persons they supposed, but even keener-witted than themselves. At the
+time of the Venezuelan incident, it is probable that more than all the
+laborious protests of good men on both sides of the ocean, more than all
+the petitions and the interchange of assurances of good-will between
+societies in either country, the thing that did most to allay American
+resentment and bring the American people to its senses was that
+delightful message sent (was it not?) by the London Stock Exchange to
+their <i>confr&egrave;res</i> in New York, begging the latter to see that when the
+British fleet arrived in New York harbour there should be no crowding by
+excursion steamers. Like Mr. Anstey's dear German professor, who had
+once laboriously constructed a joke and purposed, when he had ample
+leisure, to go about to &aelig;dificate a second, will Americans please
+believe that Englishmen too, if given time, can certainly make others?</p>
+
+<p>And need I say again that in each of the things that I have said,
+whether on the subject of American chivalry, American energy, or
+American humour, I am not decrying the American's qualities but only
+striving to increase his respect for Englishmen?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Now let us look at the other side of the picture. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a>[<a href="./images/157.png">157</a>]</span>Just as undue
+flattery awoke in the American people an exaggerated notion of their
+chivalry and their sense of humour, so the reiteration of savage and
+contemptuous criticism made them depreciate their general literary
+ability. It goes farther back than the "Who ever reads an American
+book?" Three quarters of a century earlier the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> (I am
+indebted for the quotation to Mr. Sparks) asked: "Why should Americans
+write books when a six-weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue
+our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads? Prairies,
+steamboats, gristmills are their natural objects for centuries to come."</p>
+
+<p>Franklin's <i>Autobiography</i> and Thoreau's <i>Walden</i> are only just, within
+the last few years, beginning to find their way into English popular
+reprints of the "classics." Few Englishmen would listen with patience to
+an argument that the contribution to literature of the Concord school
+was of greater or more permanent value than, let us say, the work of the
+Lake Poets. So little thought have Englishmen given to the literature of
+the United States, that they commonly assume any author who wrote in
+English to be, as a matter of course, an Englishman. It is only the
+uneducated among the educated classes who do not know that Longfellow
+was an American&mdash;though I have met such,&mdash;but among the educated a small
+percentage only, I imagine, would remember, unless suggestion was made
+to them, that, for instance, Motley and Bancroft among historians, or
+Agassiz and Audubon among men of science (even though one was born in
+Switzerland) were Americans. To the vast majority, of course, such names
+are names and nothing more, which may not be particularly reprehensible.
+But while on the one hand a general <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a>[<a href="./images/158.png">158</a>]</span>indifference to American literature
+as a whole has carried with it a lack of acquaintance with individual
+writers, that lack of acquaintance with the individuals naturally
+reacted to confirm disbelief in the existence of any respectable body of
+American literature. And the chilling and century-long contempt of the
+English public and of English critics for all American writing produced
+its result in a national exaggeration in American minds of their own
+shortcomings. Only within the last ten years have Americans as a whole
+come to believe that the work of an American writer (excepting only a
+very small group) can be on a plane with that of Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p>In England the situation has also changed. American novelists now enjoy
+a vogue in England that would have seemed almost incredible two decades
+ago. At that time the English public did not look to America for its
+fiction, while Americans did look to England; and each new book by a
+well-known English novelist was as certain of its reception in the
+United States as&mdash;perhaps more certain than it was&mdash;in England. That has
+changed. There are not more than half a dozen writers of fiction in
+England to-day of such authority that whatever they write is of
+necessity accepted by the American public. Americans turn now first to
+their own writers&mdash;a dozen or a score of them&mdash;and only then do they
+seek the English book, always provided that, no matter whose the name
+may be that it bears, it has won the approval of their own critics on
+its merits. They no longer take it for granted that the best work of
+their own authors is as a matter of course inferior to the work of a
+well-known Englishman. It may not be many years before the American
+public will be so <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a>[<a href="./images/159.png">159</a>]</span>much preoccupied with its own literary output&mdash;before
+that output will be so amply sufficient for all its needs&mdash;that it will
+become as contemptuously indifferent to English literature of the day as
+Englishmen have, in the past, shown themselves to the product of
+American writers. There is, perhaps, no other field in which the
+increase of the confidence of the nation in itself is more marked than
+in the honour which Americans now pay to their own writers.</p>
+
+<p>It is worth noticing that the English appreciation of American
+literature as yet hardly extends beyond works of fiction. Specialists in
+various departments of historical research and the natural sciences know
+what admirable work is being done in the same fields by individual
+workers in the United States; but hardly yet has the specialist&mdash;still
+less has the general public&mdash;formed any adequate conception of the great
+mass of that work in those two fields, still less of its quality.
+Englishmen do not yet take seriously either American research or
+American scholarship. It would be absurd to count noses to prove that
+there were more competent historians writing&mdash;more scientific
+investigators searching into the mysteries&mdash;in America than in England
+or vice versa; but this I take to be an undoubted fact, namely, that men
+of science in more than one field in other countries are beginning to
+look rather to the United States than to Great Britain for sound and
+original work.</p>
+
+<p>The English ignorance of American literature extends even more markedly
+to other departments of productive art.<a name="FNanchor_159:1_20" id="FNanchor_159:1_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_159:1_20" class="fnanchor">[159:1]</a> The ordinary educated and
+art-loving <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a>[<a href="./images/160.png">160</a>]</span>Englishman would be sore put to it to name any single
+American painter or draughtsman, living or dead, except Mr. C. D.
+Gibson. Whistler and Sargent, of course, are not counted as Americans.
+There is not a single American sculptor whose name is known to one in a
+hundred of, again I say, educated and art-loving Englishmen, though I
+take it to be indisputable that the United States has produced more
+sculptors of individual genius in the last half-century than Great
+Britain. American architecture conveys to the educated and art-loving
+Englishman no other idea than that of twenty-storey "sky-scrapers" built
+of steel and glass. Richardson is not even a name to him. He knows
+nothing of all the beauty and virility of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a>[<a href="./images/161.png">161</a>]</span>work that has been done
+in the last thirty years. In the minor arts, he may have heard of
+Rookwood pottery and have a vague notion that the Americans turn out
+some quite original things in silver work; but of American stained
+glass&mdash;of Tiffany and La Farge&mdash;he has never heard. It would do England
+a world of good&mdash;it would do international relations a world of good&mdash;if
+a thoroughly representative exhibition of American painting and
+sculpture could be made in London. I commend the idea to some one
+competent to handle it; for it would, I think, be profitable to its
+promoters. It would certainly be a revelation to Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p>The English indifference to&mdash;nay, disbelief in the existence
+of&mdash;American art is precisely on a par with the American incredulity in
+the matter of British humour; and the removal of each of the
+misconceptions would tend to the increase of international good-will.
+Americans believe the British Empire to be a sanguinary and ferocious
+thing. They believe themselves to be possessed of a sense of humour, a
+sense of chivalry, and an energy quite lacking in the Englishman; and
+each one of the illusions counts for a good deal in the American
+national lack of liking for Great Britain. Similarly, Englishmen believe
+Americans to be a money-loving people without respectable achievement in
+art or literature. I am not sure that it would make the Englishman like
+the American any the more if the point of view were corrected, but at
+least he would like him more intelligently, and it would prevent him
+from saying things&mdash;in themselves entirely good-humoured and quite
+unintentionally offensive&mdash;which hurt American feelings. We cannot
+correct an <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a>[<a href="./images/162.png">162</a>]</span>error without recognising frankly that it exists, and the
+first step towards making the American and the Englishman understand
+what the other really is must be to help each to see how mistaken he is
+in supposing the other to be what he is not.</p>
+
+<p>That the American should hold the opinions that he does of England is no
+matter of reproach. Not only is it natural, but inevitable. Absorbed as
+he has been with his own affairs and his own history, and viewing Great
+Britain only in her occasional relations thereto, seeing nothing of her
+in her private life or of her position and policies in the world at
+large, how could the American have other than a distorted view of
+her&mdash;how could she assume right proportions or be posed in right
+perspective? Nor is the Englishman any more to be blamed. America has
+been beyond and below his horizon, and among the travellers' tales that
+have come to him of her people and her institutions has been much
+misinformation; and if he has not yet&mdash;as in the realms of literature
+and art&mdash;come to any realisation of America's true achievements, how
+should he have done so, when Americans themselves have only just shaken
+off the morbid sensitiveness and diffidence of their youth, and have so
+recently arrived at some partial comprehension of those achievements
+themselves?</p>
+
+<p>Probably the most successful joke which <i>Life</i> ever achieved (Americans
+will please believe that it is not with any disrespect that I explain to
+English readers that <i>Life</i> is the <i>Punch</i> of New York), successful,
+that is, measured by the continent-wide hilarity which it provoked, had
+relation to the New York dandy who turned up the bottoms of his trousers
+because it <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a>[<a href="./images/163.png">163</a>]</span>was "raining in London." That was published&mdash;at a
+guess&mdash;some twenty years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Some ten years later a Chicagoan (one James Norton&mdash;he died, alas! all
+too soon afterwards) leaped into something like national notoriety by a
+certain speech which he delivered at a semi-public dinner in New York.
+In introducing Mr. Norton as coming from Chicago the chairman had made
+playful reference to the supposed characteristic lack of modesty of
+Chicagoans and their pride in their city. Norton, in acknowledgment,
+confessed that there was justice in the accusation. Chicagoans, he said,
+were proud of their city. They had a right to be. They were as proud of
+Chicago as New Yorkers were of London! And the quip ran from mouth to
+mouth across the continent.</p>
+
+<p>It would be too much to say that those jokes are meaningless to-day, but
+to the younger generation of Americans they have lost most of their
+point, for Anglomania has ceased to be the term of reproach that once it
+was&mdash;it has, at least, dropped from daily use&mdash;partly because the
+official relations of the country with Great Britain have so much
+improved, but much more because the United States has come to consider
+herself as Great Britain's equal and, in the new consciousness of her
+greatness, the idea of toadying to England has lost its sting. It is
+already difficult to throw one's mind back to the conditions of twenty
+years ago&mdash;to remember the deference which (in New York and the larger
+cities at least) was paid to English ideas, English manners, English
+styles in dress&mdash;the enthusiasm with which any literary man was received
+who had some pretension to an English reputation&mdash;the disrepute in which
+all "domestic" manufactured articles were held <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a>[<a href="./images/164.png">164</a>]</span>throughout the country
+in comparison with the "imported," which generally meant English. In all
+manufactured products this was so nearly universal that "domestic" was
+almost synonymous with inferior and "imported" with superior grades of
+goods. That an immense proportion of American manufactured articles were
+sold in the United States masquerading as "imported"&mdash;and therefore
+commanding a better price&mdash;goes without saying, and in some lines, in
+which the British reputation was too well established and well deserved
+to be easily shaken, the practice still survives; but in the great
+majority of things, the American now prefers his home-made article, not
+merely from motives of patriotism but because he believes that it is the
+better article. It is not within our present province to discuss how far
+this opinion is correct, or how far the policy of protection, by
+assisting manufacturers to obtain control of their own markets and so
+distract attention from imported goods, has helped to bring about the
+change. The point is that the change has taken place. And, so far as the
+ordinary commodities of commerce are concerned, the Englishman is in a
+measure aware of what has occurred. He could not be otherwise with the
+figures of his trade with the United States before him. Nor can he
+conceal from himself the fact that the change of opinion in America may
+have some justification when he sees how many things of American
+manufacture he himself uses daily and prefers&mdash;patriotism
+notwithstanding&mdash;to the British-made article.</p>
+
+<p>But Englishmen have little conception as yet that the same revolution
+has taken place in regard to the less material&mdash;less easily
+exploited&mdash;commodities of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a>[<a href="./images/165.png">165</a>]</span>art and literature. American novels and the
+drawings of Mr. Gibson have made their way in England in the wake of
+American boots and American sweetmeats; but Americans would be unwilling
+to believe that their creative ability ends with the production of
+Western romances and drawings of the American girl.</p>
+
+<p>Until recent years, the volume as well as the quality of the literary
+and artistic output of Great Britain was vastly superior to that of the
+United States. The two were not comparable; but they are comparable
+to-day, though England is as yet unaware of it. In time, Englishmen will
+awake to a realisation of the fact; but what the relative standing of
+the two countries will be by that time it is impossible to say.
+Englishmen would, perhaps, not find it to their disadvantage, and it
+would certainly (if not done in too condescending a spirit) not be
+displeasing to the people of the United States, if they began, even now,
+to take a livelier interest in the work that the other is doing.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_153:1_18" id="Footnote_153:1_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_153:1_18"><span class="label">[153:1]</span></a> At this point my American friend, to the value of whose
+criticisms I have already paid tribute, interjects marginally: "none the
+less <i>Fliegende Bl&auml;tter</i> presents more real humour in a week than is to
+be found in <i>Punch</i> in a month." To which I can but make the obvious
+reply that I have already said that Americans think so. He points out,
+however, further that, while the Munich paper is always to be found in
+the higher-class American clubs, it is comparatively infrequent in the
+clubs of Great Britain, which is undoubtedly true; and that is a subject
+(the relative breadth of outlook on the world-literature of the day in
+the two countries) which will necessarily receive attention later on.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_155:1_19" id="Footnote_155:1_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_155:1_19"><span class="label">[155:1]</span></a> Lest any American readers should assume that some
+personal feeling is responsible for my point of view (which would
+entirely destroy any value in my argument) it seems necessary to explain
+that I have become calloused to being told that I am the only Englishman
+the speaker ever met with an American sense of humour. Sometimes I have
+taken it as a compliment.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_159:1_20" id="Footnote_159:1_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_159:1_20"><span class="label">[159:1]</span></a> It is merely pathetic to find such a paper as the
+London <i>Academy</i> at this late day summing up the American &aelig;sthetic
+impulse as follows: "Their culture is now a borrowed thing animated by
+no life of its own. Their art is become a reflection of French art,
+their literature a reflection of English literature, their learning a
+reflection of German learning. A velleity of taste in their women of the
+richer class seems to be all that maintains in their country the
+semblance of a high, serious, and disinterested passion for the things
+of the mind."
+</p><p>
+It would be interesting to learn from the <i>Academy</i> what school of
+English writers it is that the American humourists "reflect," who among
+English novelists are the models for the present school of Western
+fiction, where in English historiography is to be found the prototype of
+the great histories of their country, collaborated or otherwise, which
+the Americans are now producing, which journals published in England are
+responsible for American newspapers, what English magazine is so happy
+as to be the father of the <i>Century</i>, <i>Harper's</i>, or <i>Scribner's</i>. The
+truth is that the writer in the Academy, like most Englishmen, knows
+nothing of American literature as a whole, or he would know that,
+whether good or bad, the one quality which it surely possesses is that
+it is individual and peculiar to the people. The <i>Academy</i>, it is only
+fair to say, has recently changed hands and I am not sure that under its
+present direction it would make the same mistake.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a>[<a href="./images/166.png">166</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">English and American Education</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Rhodes Scholarships&mdash;"Pullulating Colleges"&mdash;Are American
+Universities Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?&mdash;Other
+Educational Forces&mdash;The Postal Laws&mdash;Ten-cent Magazines and
+Cheap Books&mdash;Pigs in Chicago&mdash;The Press of England and America
+Compared&mdash;Mixed Society&mdash;Educated Women&mdash;Generals as
+Booksellers&mdash;And as Farmhands&mdash;The Value of War to a People.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>It may be presumed that when Cecil Rhodes conceived the idea of
+establishing the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford, it did not occur to him
+that Americans might not care to come to Oxford&mdash;might think their own
+universities superior to the English. Nor is it likely that there will
+in the immediate future be any dearth of students anxious to take those
+scholarships, for the mere selection has a certain amount of <i>kudos</i>
+attaching to it and, at worst, the residence abroad should be of
+advantage to any young American not destined to plunge at once into a
+business life. If it were a mere question of the education to be
+received, it is much to be feared that the great majority of Americans,
+unless quite unable to attend one of their own universities, would
+politely decline to come to England. At the time when the terms of the
+will were made public, a good many unpleasant things were said in the
+American press; and it was only the admiration of Americans for Mr.
+Rhodes (who appealed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a>[<a href="./images/167.png">167</a>]</span>to their imagination as no other Englishman,
+except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, has appealed in the last fifty years),
+coupled with the fact that he was dead, that prevented the foundation of
+the scholarships from being greeted with resentment rather than
+gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>There was a time, of course, when the name of Oxford sounded very large
+in American ears; and it will probably be a surprise to Englishmen to be
+told that to-day the great majority of Americans would place not only
+Harvard and Yale, but probably also several other American universities,
+ahead of either Oxford or Cambridge. Nor is this the opinion only of the
+ignorant. Trained educational authorities who come from the United
+States to Europe to study the methods of higher education in the various
+countries, seldom hesitate to say that the education to be obtained at
+many of the minor Western colleges in America is fully as good as that
+offered by either of the great English universities, while that of
+Harvard and Yale is far superior to it.<a name="FNanchor_167:1_21" id="FNanchor_167:1_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_167:1_21" class="fnanchor">[167:1]</a> And it must be remembered
+that education itself, as an art, is incomparably more studied, and more
+systematically studied in America than in England.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew Arnold spoke of the "pullulating colleges <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a>[<a href="./images/168.png">168</a>]</span>and universities" of
+America&mdash;"the multitude of institutions the promoters of which delude
+themselves by taking seriously, but which no serious man can so take";
+and he would be surprised to see to what purpose some of those
+institutions have "pullulated" in the eighteen years that have passed
+since he wrote&mdash;to note into what lusty and umbrageous plants have grown
+such institutions as the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, though
+one of those is further west by some distance than he ever penetrated.
+That these or any other colleges have more students than either Oxford
+or Cambridge need not mean much; and they cannot of course acquire in
+twenty years the old, history-saturated atmosphere. Against that are to
+be set the facts that the students undoubtedly work, on the average,
+much harder than do English undergraduates and that the teaching staffs
+are possessed of an enthusiasm, an earnestness, a determination not
+merely to fill chairs but to get results, which would be almost "bad
+form" in some Common (or Combination) Rooms in England. Wealth,
+moreover, and magnificence of endowment can go a considerable way
+towards even the creation of an atmosphere&mdash;not the same atmosphere as
+that of Oxford or Cambridge, it is true; for no money can make another
+Addison's Walk out of Prairie Avenue, or convert the Mississippi by St.
+Anthony's Falls into new "Backs."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We may build ourselves more gorgeous habitations,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1i">Fill our rooms with painting and with sculpture,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0i">We cannot buy with gold the old associations&mdash;&mdash;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But an atmosphere may be created wholly scholastic, and well calculated
+to excite emulation and inspire the ambition of youths.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a>[<a href="./images/169.png">169</a>]</span></p><p>Nor is it by any means certain that the American people would desire to
+create the atmosphere of an old-world university if they could. The
+atmosphere of Oxford produces, as none other could, certain qualities;
+but are they the qualities which, if England were starting to make her
+universities anew, she would set in the forefront of her
+endeavour?<a name="FNanchor_169:1_22" id="FNanchor_169:1_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_169:1_22" class="fnanchor">[169:1]</a> Are they really the qualities most desirable even in
+an Englishman to-day? Are they approximately the qualities most likely
+to equip a man to play the noblest part in the life of modern America?
+The majority of American educators would answer unhesitatingly in the
+negative. There are things attaching to Oxford and Cambridge which they
+would dearly love to be able to transplant to their own country, but
+which, they recognise, nothing but the passage of the centuries can
+give. Those things are unattainable; and, frankly, if they could only be
+attained by transplanting with them many other attributes of English
+university life, they would rather forego them altogether.</p>
+
+<p>What Englishmen most value in their universities is not any
+book-learning which is to be acquired thereat, so much as the manners
+and rules for the conduct of life which are supposed to be imparted in a
+university <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a>[<a href="./images/170.png">170</a>]</span>course,&mdash;manners and rules which are of an essentially
+aristocratic tendency. Without wishing to push a point too far, it is
+worth noting that that aristocratic tendency is purely Norman, quite out
+of harmony with the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon. It would never occur to
+an Anglo-Saxon, pure and simple, to make his university anything else
+than an institution for scholastic training, in which every individual
+should be taught as much, and as equally, as possible. The last thing
+that would occur to him would be to make it a weapon of aristocracy or
+an institution for perpetuating class distinctions. The aim and effect
+of the English universities in the past has been chiefly to keep the
+upper classes uppermost.</p>
+
+<p>That there are too many "universities" in America no one&mdash;least of all
+an educated American&mdash;denies; but with the vast distances and immense
+population of the country there is room for, perhaps, more than Matthew
+Arnold eighteen years ago could have foreseen, and not a few of those
+establishments which in his day he would doubtless have unhesitatingly
+classed among those which could not be taken seriously, have more than
+justified their existence.</p>
+
+<p>To the superiority of the American public school system over the
+English, considered merely as an instrumentality for the general
+education of the masses of a people, and not for the production of any
+especially privileged or cultivated class, is generally ascribed the
+confessedly higher average of intelligence and capacity among (to use a
+phrase which is ostensibly meaningless in America) the lower orders. But
+the educational system of the country has been by no means the only
+factor in producing this result; and it may be worth <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a>[<a href="./images/171.png">171</a>]</span>while merely as a
+matter of record, and not without interest to American readers, to note
+what some of those other factors have been during the last twenty
+years&mdash;factors so temporary and so elusive that even now they are in
+danger of being forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>First among these factors I would set the American postal laws, an
+essential feature of which is the extraordinarily low rates at which
+periodical literature may be transmitted. A magazine which may be sent
+to any place in the United States for from an eighth of a penny to a
+farthing, according to its weight, will cost for postage in England from
+two-pence-halfpenny to fourpence. It is not the mere difference in cost
+of the postage to the subscriber that counts, but the low American rate
+has permitted the adoption by the publishers of a system impossible to
+English magazine-makers, a system which has had the effect of making
+magazines, at least as good as the English sixpenny monthlies, the
+staple reading matter of whole classes of the population, the classes
+corresponding to which in England never read anything but a local
+weekly, or halfpenny daily, paper. It might be that the reading matter
+of a magazine would not be much superior to that of a small weekly
+paper. But at least it encourages somewhat more sustained reading and,
+what is the great fact, it accustoms the reader to handling something
+<i>in the form of a book</i>. That is the virtue. A people weaned from the
+broad-sheets by magazines readily takes next to book-reading.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, under the American plan, books themselves, if issued
+periodically, used to have the same postal advantages as the
+magazines.<a name="FNanchor_171:1_23" id="FNanchor_171:1_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_171:1_23" class="fnanchor">[171:1]</a> A so-called "library" <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a>[<a href="./images/172.png">172</a>]</span>of the classical English,
+writers could be published at the rate of a book a month, call itself a
+periodical, and be sent through the post in precisely the same way. The
+works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, or anybody else could be published
+in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly parts. If in monthly parts at
+sixpence, the cost to the subscriber would be practically the same as
+that of a monthly magazine, only that the reader would accumulate at the
+rate of twelve volumes a year&mdash;and read at the rate of one a month&mdash;the
+works of Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Of course much worthless
+literature, fiction of the trashiest, has been circulated in the same
+way&mdash;much more perhaps than of the better class. But even so, the
+reading matter was superior to that previously accessible, and the vital
+fact still remains that the people acquired the habit of book-reading.</p>
+
+<p>In America, the part thus played by some of the periodical libraries was
+of much importance, but it was probably not comparable to the influence
+of the ten-cent magazine. In the United States itself, the immense
+beneficence of that influence has hardly been appreciated. The magazines
+came into vogue, and the people accepted the fact as they accept the
+popularity of a new form of "breakfast food." The quickening of the
+national intelligence which resulted was no more immediate, no more
+readily traceable or conspicuous to the public eye, than would be the
+improvement in the national stamina which might result from the
+introduction of some new article of diet. A change <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a>[<a href="./images/173.png">173</a>]</span>which takes five or
+ten years to work itself out is lost sight of, becomes invisible, amid
+the jostling activities of a national life like the American. Moreover,
+several causes were contributing to the same end and, had any one
+stopped to endeavour to do it, it would not have been at any time easy
+to unravel the threads and show what proportion of the fabric was woven
+by each; but if it had been possible to affix an intellect-meter to the
+aggregate brain of the American people during the last twenty years, of
+such ingenious mechanism that it would have shown not only what the
+increase in total mental power had been but also what proportions of
+that increase were ascribable to the various contributing
+causes&mdash;education, colonial expansion, commercial growth, ten-cent
+magazines, and so forth&mdash;and if, further, the "readings" of that meter
+could be interpreted into terms of increase in national energy, national
+productiveness, national success, I do not think that Parliament would
+lose one unnecessary day in passing the legislation necessary to reform
+the English postal laws.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>One other point is worth dwelling upon&mdash;equally trivial in seeming,
+equally important in its essence&mdash;which is the selling of books by the
+great department stores, the big general shops, in America. Taking all
+classes of the British population together and both sexes&mdash;artisans and
+their wives, peasants in country districts, slum residents in London and
+other large cities,&mdash;what proportion of the population of the British
+Isles do of set purpose go into a bookseller's shop once a year or once
+in their lives? Is it ten per cent.&mdash;or five per cent.&mdash;or two per
+cent.? The exact <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a>[<a href="./images/174.png">174</a>]</span>proportion is immaterial; but the number must be very
+small. In America some years ago, the owners of department stores and
+publishers found that there was considerable profit to be made in the
+handling of books&mdash;cheap reprints of good books in particular. The
+combined booksellers' and stationers' shops in the cities of the United
+States are in themselves more frequent and more attractive than in
+England: and I am going back to the days before the drug-store library
+which is as yet too recent an institution to have had an easily
+measurable influence. But incomparably more influential than these, in
+bringing the multitude in immediate contact with literature, have been
+the department stores, of almost every one of which the "book and
+stationery" department is a conspicuously attractive, and generally most
+profitable, feature. Here every man or woman who goes to do any shopping
+is brought immediately within range of the temptation to buy books&mdash;is
+involuntarily seduced into a bookshop where the wares are temptingly
+displayed and artfully pressed on the attention of customers. New books
+of all kinds are sold at the best possible discount; but what was of
+chief importance was the institution of the cheap libraries of the
+"Classics"&mdash;tables heaped with them in paper at fourpence, piles of them
+shoulder high in cloth at ninepence, shelves laden with them in
+glittering backs and by no means despicable in typography at one and
+sevenpence. Thus simultaneously with the inculcation of the book-reading
+habit by the magazines came the facility for book-buying, and, always
+remembering the difference in the scale of prices in the two countries,
+it was easy for the woman doing her household shopping to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a>[<a href="./images/175.png">175</a>]</span>fall a victim
+to the importunities of the salesman and lavish an extra eighteen or
+thirty-eight cents on a copy of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> or <i>Ivanhoe</i>,
+Irving's <i>Alhambra</i>, or <i>Bleak House</i>, to take home as a surprise. In
+this way, whole classes in America, the English counterparts of which
+rarely read anything more formidable than a penny paper, acquired the
+habit of book-buying and the ambition to form a small library. The
+benefit to the people cannot be computed.</p>
+
+<p>Incidentally, as we know, not a little injustice was done to English
+authors by the pirating of their books, without recompense, while the
+copyright still lived. It was after I went to America, though I had
+heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford, that I first read <i>Fors Clavigera</i> and
+<i>Sesame and Lilies</i> in Lovell's Library, at five-pence a volume, and,
+about the same time, Tolstoi's <i>War and Peace</i> in the <i>Franklin Square
+Library</i>, at the same price. Of older works, I can still remember Lamb
+and part of De Quincey, <i>Don Quixote</i> and <i>Rasselas</i> (those four for
+some reason stand out in my mind from their fellows in the row), all
+bought for the modest ten-cent piece per volume&mdash;the price of two daily
+newspapers (for all newspapers in America then cost five cents) or one
+blacking of one's shoes. Much has, of course, been done of late years in
+England in popularising the "Classics" in the form of cheap libraries;
+but the facilities for buying the books&mdash;or rather the temptations to do
+so&mdash;are incomparably less, while the relative prices remain higher.</p>
+
+<p>Even at fourpence halfpenny (supposing them to be purchasable at the
+price) Lamb's Essays still cost more in London than a drink of whiskey.
+In America, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a>[<a href="./images/176.png">176</a>]</span>more than twenty years ago, the whiskey cost half as much
+again as the book.</p>
+
+<p>All of which is in the nature of a digression, but it has not led us far
+from the main road, for the object that I am aiming at is to convey to
+the English reader some idea of what the forces are which are at work on
+the education of the American people. The Englishman generally knows
+that in the United States there is nothing analogous to the great public
+schools of England&mdash;Winchester, Westminster, Eton, and the rest&mdash;and
+that they have a host of more or less absurd universities in no way to
+be compared to Oxford or Cambridge. The American, as has been said,
+challenges the latter statement bluntly; while, as for the public
+schools, he maintains that it is not the American ideal (if he wished to
+fortify his position, he might say it was not an Anglo-Saxon ideal) to
+produce a limited privileged and cultivated class, but that the aim is
+to educate the whole nation to the highest level; that, barring such
+qualities as their mere selectness may enable the great English schools
+to give to their pupils, the national high schools of America do, as a
+matter of fact, prepare pupils just as efficiently for the university as
+do the English institutions, while the great system of common schools
+secures for the mass of the people a much better education than is given
+in England to the same classes. Added to which, various other causes
+co-operate with the avowedly educational instrumentalities to produce a
+higher level of intellectual alertness and a more general love of
+reading in the people.</p>
+
+<p>And what is the result? Is the American people as well educated or as
+well informed or as well <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a>[<a href="./images/177.png">177</a>]</span>cultivated as the English? To endeavour to
+make a comparison between the two is to traverse a very morass, full of
+holes, swamps, sloughs, creeks, inlets, quicksands, and pitfalls of
+divers and terrifying natures. If it is to be threaded at all, it must
+be only with the greatest caution and, at times, indirectness.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The charming English writer, the author of <i>Sinners and Saints</i>,
+affected, on alighting from the train in the railway station at Chicago,
+to be immensely surprised by the fact that there was not a pig in sight.
+"I had thought," he said, "Chicago was all pigs." There are a good many
+English still of the same opinion.</p>
+
+<p>The one institution in any country of which the foreigner sees most, and
+by which perhaps every people is, if unwittingly, most commonly judged
+by other peoples, is its press; and it is difficult for a superficial
+observer to believe that the nation which produces the newspapers of
+America is either an educated or a cultivated nation. Max O'Rell's
+comment on the American press is delightful: "Beyond the date, few
+statements are reliable." Matthew Arnold called the American newspapers
+"an awful symptom"&mdash;"the worst features in the life of the United
+States." Americans also&mdash;the best Americans&mdash;have a great dislike of the
+London papers.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that merely as newspapers (as gatherers of news) the
+American papers are probably the best in the world. What repels the
+Englishman is primarily the form in which the news is dressed&mdash;the
+loudness, the sensationalism but if he can overcome his repugnance to
+these things sufficiently to be able to judge the paper as a whole, he
+will find, apart from the amazing quantity of "news" which it contains,
+a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a>[<a href="./images/178.png">178</a>]</span>large amount of literary matter of a high order. I am not for one
+moment claiming that the American paper (not the worst and loudest,
+which are contemptible, nor the best, which are almost as
+non-sensational as the best London papers, but the average American
+daily paper) is, or ought to be, as acceptable reading to a cultivated
+man&mdash;still less to a refined woman&mdash;as almost any one of the penny, or
+some halfpenny, London papers. But the point that I would make and which
+I would insist on very earnestly is that the two do not stand for the
+same thing in relation to the peoples which they respectively represent.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen the same thing before in comparing the consular and
+diplomatic services of the two countries. Just as in the United States
+the consuls are plucked at random from the body of the people, whereas
+in England they are a carefully selected and thoroughly trained class by
+themselves, so the press of the United States represents the people in
+its entirety, whereas the English press represents only the educated
+class. The London papers (I am omitting consideration of certain
+halfpenny papers) are not talking for the people as a whole, nor to the
+people as a whole. Consciously or unconsciously they are addressing
+themselves always to the comparatively small circle of the educated
+class. When they speak of the peasant or the working man, even of the
+tradesman, they discuss him as a third person: it is not to him that
+they are talking. They use a language which is not his language; they
+assume in their reader information, sentiments, modes of thought, which
+belong not to him, but only to the educated class&mdash;that class which,
+whether each individual thereof has been to a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a>[<a href="./images/179.png">179</a>]</span>public school and a
+university or not, is saturated with the public school and university
+traditions.</p>
+
+<p>It was said before that the English people has a disposition to be
+guided by the voice of authority&mdash;to follow its leaders&mdash;as the American
+people has not. The English newspaper speaks to the educated class,
+trusting, not always with justification, that opinion once formulated in
+that class will be communicated downwards and accepted by the people.
+The American newspaper endeavours to speak to the people direct.</p>
+
+<p>That English papers are immensely more democratic than once they were
+goes without saying. A man need not be much past middle age to be able
+to remember when the <i>Daily Telegraph</i> created, by appealing to, a whole
+new stratum of newspaper readers. The same thing has been done again
+more recently by the halfpenny papers, some of which come approximately
+near to being adapted to the intelligences, and representing the tastes,
+of the whole population, or at least the urban population, down to the
+lowest grade. But it is not by those papers that England would like to
+be judged. Yet when Englishmen draw inferences about the American people
+from the papers which they see, they are doing what is intrinsically as
+unjust. It would be no less unjust to take the first hundred men that
+one met with, on Broadway or State Street, and compare them&mdash;their
+intellectuality and culture&mdash;with one hundred members of the London
+university clubs.</p>
+
+<p>Let us also remember here what was said of the Anglo-Saxon spirit&mdash;that
+spirit which is so essentially non-aristocratic, holding all men equal
+in their independence. We have seen how this spirit is more untrammelled
+and works faster in the United States <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a>[<a href="./images/180.png">180</a>]</span>than in England; but where, in
+any case, it has moved ahead among Americans the tendency in England
+generally is to follow in the same lines, not in imitation of America
+but by the impulse of the common genius of the peoples.</p>
+
+<p>The American dailies, even the leading dailies, are made practically for
+those hundred men on Broadway; the London penny papers are addressed in
+the main to the university class. Judging from the present trend of
+events in England it may not be altogether chimerical to imagine a time
+when in London only two or three papers will hold to the class tradition
+and will still speak exclusively in the language of the upper classes
+(as a small number of papers in New York do to-day), while the great
+body of the English press will have followed the course of the American
+publishers; and when the English papers are frankly adapted to the
+tastes and intelligence of as large a proportion of the English people
+as are now catered for by the majority of the American papers, he would
+be a rash Englishman whose patriotism would persuade him to prophesy
+that the London papers would be any more scholarly, more refined, or
+more chastened in tone than are the papers of New York or Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>And while the Englishman is generally ready to draw unfavourable
+inferences from the undeniably unpleasant features of the majority of
+American daily papers, he seldom stops to draw analogous inferences from
+a comparison of the American and English monthly magazines. Great
+Britain produces no magazines to compare with <i>Harper's</i>, <i>The Century</i>,
+or <i>Scribner's</i>. Those three magazines combined have, I believe, a
+number of readers in the United States <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a>[<a href="./images/181.png">181</a>]</span>equalling the aggregate
+circulation of the London penny dailies; which is a point that is worth
+consideration. When, moreover, the cheaper magazines became a
+possibility, how came it that such publications as <i>McClure's</i> and <i>The
+Cosmopolitan</i> arose? The illustrated magazines of the United States are
+indeed a fact of profound significance, for which the Englishman when he
+measures the taste and intellectuality of the American people by its
+press makes no allowance. Magazines of the same excellence cannot find
+the same support in England. At least two earnest attempts have been
+made in late years to establish English monthlies which would compare
+with any of the three first mentioned above, and both attempts have
+failed.</p>
+
+<p>What has been said about the much more representative character of the
+American daily press&mdash;the fact that the same papers are read by a vastly
+larger proportion of the population&mdash;brings us face to face with a
+root-fact which vitiates almost any attempt at a rough and ready
+comparison between the peoples. In America, there exist the counterparts
+of every class of man who is to be found in England&mdash;men as refined, men
+no less crass and brutal&mdash;some as vulgar and some as full of the pride
+of birth. Most Englishmen will be surprised to hear that the American,
+democrat though he is, is as a rule more proud of an ancestor who fought
+in the Revolutionary War than is an Englishman of one who fought in the
+Wars of the Roses. I am sure that he sets more store by a direct and
+authentic descent from one of the company of the <i>Mayflower</i> than the
+Englishman does by an equally direct and authentic line back to the days
+of William the Conqueror. Incidentally it may be said that the American
+will talk <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a>[<a href="./images/182.png">182</a>]</span>more about it. But while in America all classes exist, they
+are not fenced apart, as in England, in fact any more than they are in
+theory. The American people (<i>pace</i> the leaders of the New York Four
+Hundred) "comes mixed"; dip in where you will and you bring up all sorts
+of fish. In England if you go into educated society, you are likely to
+meet almost exclusively educated people&mdash;or at least people with the
+stamp of educated manners. Sir Gorgius Midas is not of course inexorably
+barred from the society of duchesses. Her Grace of Pentonville must have
+met him frequently. But in America the duchesses have to rub shoulders
+with him every day. And&mdash;which is worth noting&mdash;their husbands also rub
+shoulders with his wife.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Which brings us to the second root-fact, which is almost as disturbing
+and confounding to casual observation as the first, namely, the much
+larger part in the intellectual life of the country played by women in
+America. Intellectuality or culture in its narrower sense&mdash;meaning a
+familiarity with art and letters&mdash;is not commonly regarded by Englishmen
+as an essential possession in a wife. The lack of it is certainly not
+considered by the American woman a cardinal offence in a husband. I know
+many American men who, on being consulted on any matter of literary or
+artistic taste, say at once: "I don't know. I leave all that to my
+wife."</p>
+
+<p>An Englishman in an English house, looking at the family portraits, may
+ask his hostess who painted a certain picture.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," she will say, "I must ask my <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a>[<a href="./images/183.png">183</a>]</span>husband. Will, who is the
+portrait of your grandfather by&mdash;the one over there in his robes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Raeburn," says Will.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," says the wife. "I never can remember the artists' names;
+they are so confusing&mdash;especially the English ones."</p>
+
+<p>The Englishman thinks no worse of her; but the American woman,
+listening, wishes that she had a portrait of her husband's grandfather
+by Raeburn and opines that she would know the artist's name.</p>
+
+<p>The same Englishman goes to America and, being entertained, asks a
+similar question of his host.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," says the man, "I must ask my wife. Mary, who painted
+that picture over there&mdash;the big tree and the blue sky?"</p>
+
+<p>"Rousseau," says Mary.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," says the husband. "I never can remember the names of these
+fellows. They mix me all up&mdash;especially the French ones."</p>
+
+<p>And the Englishman returning home tells his friends of the queer fellow
+with whom he dined over there&mdash;"an awfully good chap, you know"&mdash;who
+owned all sorts of jolly paintings&mdash;Rousseaux and things&mdash;and did not
+even know the names of the artists: "Had to ask his wife, by Jove!"</p>
+
+<p>It is not for one moment claimed that there are not in England many
+women fully as cultured as the most cultured and fairest Americans; that
+there are not many Englishwomen much better informed, much more widely
+read, than their husbands. The phenomenon, however, is not nearly as
+common as in America, where, it has already been suggested, it is
+probably the result of the fact that the women have at the outset
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a>[<a href="./images/184.png">184</a>]</span>received precisely the same education as the men and, since leaving
+school or college, have had more leisure, being less engrossed in
+business and material things.</p>
+
+<p>But this feminine predominance in matters of &aelig;sthetics in the United
+States does not as a rule increase the Englishman's opinion of the
+intellectuality or culture of the people as a whole. He still judges
+only by the men. Indeed, he is not entirely disposed to like so much
+intellectuality in women&mdash;such interest in politics, educational
+matters, art, and literature. Not having been accustomed to it he rather
+disapproves of it. Blue regimentals are only fit for the blue horse or
+the artillery.</p>
+
+<p>The Englishman in an American house meets a man more rough and less
+polished than a man holding a similar position in society would be in
+England; and he thinks poorly of American society in consequence. He
+also meets that man's wife, who shows a familiarity with art, letters,
+and public affairs vastly more comprehensive than he would expect to
+find in a woman of similar position in England. But he does not
+therefore strike a balance and re-cast his estimate of American society,
+any more than in his estimate of the American press he makes allowance
+for the American magazines. He only thinks that the woman's knowledge is
+rather out of place and conjectures it to be probably superficial.
+Wherein he is no less one-sided in his prejudice than the American who
+will not believe in English humour because he cannot understand it.</p>
+
+<p>Philistinism is undoubtedly more on the surface in educated society in
+the United States than in Great <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a>[<a href="./images/185.png">185</a>]</span>Britain; but in England outside that
+society it is nearly all Philistinism. Step down from a social class in
+England, and you come to a new and lower level of refinement and
+information. In America the people still "come mixed."</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-five years ago in England, you did not expect a stock-broker, and
+to-day you do not expect a haberdasher (even though he may have been
+knighted), to know whether Botticelli is a wine or a cheese. In America,
+because the Englishman meets that stock-broker or that haberdasher in a
+society in which he would not be likely to meet him in England, he does
+expect him to know; and I suspect that if a census were taken there
+would be found more stock-brokers and haberdashers in America than in
+England who do know something of Botticelli. I am quite certain that
+more of their wives do. Matthew Arnold spoke not too pleasantly of the
+curious sensation that he experienced in addressing a bookseller in
+America as "General." The "bookseller" in question was a man widely
+respected in the United States, the head of a great house of publishers
+and booksellers, a conspicuously public-spirited citizen, and a <i>bona
+fide</i> General who saw stern service in the Civil War. To Englishmen,
+knowing nothing of the background, the mere fact as stated by Matthew
+Arnold is curious.</p>
+
+<p>But if civil war were to break out in Great Britain&mdash;England and Wales
+against Scotland and Ireland&mdash;and the conflict assumed such titanic
+proportions that single armies of a million men took the field, then
+would Tennyson's "smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue" indeed have to "leap
+from his counter and till and strike, were it but with his cheating
+yard-wand, home." <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a>[<a href="./images/186.png">186</a>]</span>The entire population of England that was not
+actually needed at home would be compelled to take the field, and in the
+slaughter (it is curious how little English men know of the terrific
+proportions of the conflict between the North and South) the demand for
+officers would be so great that there would not be enough men of
+previous training to fill the places. Men would rise from the ranks by
+merit and among those who rose to be generals there might well be a
+publisher or bookseller or two. On the termination of the war, the
+soldiers would turn from their soldiering to their old trades and it
+might be General Murray or General Macmillan or General Bumpus; and the
+thing would not then be strange to English ears.</p>
+
+<p>An American story tells how, soon after the close of the Civil War, a
+stranger asked a farmer if he needed any labourers; and the farmer
+replied in the negative. He had just taken on three new ones, he said,
+all of them disbanded soldiers. One, he added, had been a private, one a
+captain, and one a full-blown colonel.</p>
+
+<p>"And how do you find them?" asked the other.</p>
+
+<p>"The private's a first-class workman," said the farmer, "and the captain
+he isn't bad."</p>
+
+<p>"And the colonel?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't want to say nothing agin a man as fit as a colonel in the
+war," said the farmer, "but I know I ain't hiring no brigadier-generals
+if they come this way."</p>
+
+<p>They are growing old now, and fewer, the men who held commissions in the
+war that ended over forty years ago; but during those forty years there
+has been no community, no trade or profession or calling, in which they
+have not been to be found, indistinguishable <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a>[<a href="./images/187.png">187</a>]</span>from their civilian
+colleagues, except by the tiny button in the lapels of their coats.
+Until Mr. Roosevelt, (and he won his spurs in another war) there has
+been no man elected President of the United States, except Mr.
+Cleveland, the one Democrat, who had not a distinguished record as an
+officer in the Union armies&mdash;Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and
+McKinley were all soldiers. You may still see that little button in many
+pulpits. Farmers wear it, and cabinet ministers, millionaires, and
+mechanics.</p>
+
+<p>The Anglo-Saxon is a fighting breed. The population of the British Isles
+sprang from the loins of successive waves of fighting men. It was not
+the weaklings of the Danes or Normans, Jutes, Saxons, or Angles who came
+to conquer Britain, but the bold, the hardy, the venturesome of each
+tribe or people. It was not the mere mixture of bloods that made the
+English character what it was, the race a race of empire builders; it
+was because of each blood there came to Britain only of the most
+adventurous. And through the centuries it has been the constant stress
+and training of the perpetual turmoil in which the people have lived
+that have kept the stock from degeneration. There has never been a time
+in English history, save when the people have been struggling in wars
+among themselves, when there has been an English family that has not at
+any given moment had sons or fathers, uncles or cousins out somewhere
+doing the work of the Empire.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And some are drowned in deep water,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And some in sight of shore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And word goes back to the weary wife<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And ever she sends more.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a>[<a href="./images/188.png">188</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">For since that wife had gate or gear<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And hearth and garth and bield<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She willed her sons to the white Harvest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And that is a bitter yield.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3"><b>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;.</b><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The good wife's sons come home again<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With little into their hands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the lore o' men that ha' dealt wi' men<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In the new and naked lands,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But the faith o' men that ha' brothered men<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By more than the easy breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the eyes o' men that ha' read wi' men<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In the open book of death.<a name="FNanchor_188:1_24" id="FNanchor_188:1_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_188:1_24" class="fnanchor">[188:1]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I have already explained how far Americans are from understanding the
+British Empire. It is a pity; they would understand Englishmen better
+and like them better. And what the building of the Empire and the
+keeping of it have done for Englishmen, the Civil War did in large
+measure for the Americans. Even the struggle with their own wilderness
+might not have sufficed to keep the people hard and sound of heart and
+limb through a century of peace and growing prosperity. The Civil War is
+already beginning to slip into the farther reaches of the people's
+memory; but twenty-five years ago the echoes of the guns had hardly died
+away&mdash;the minds of the people were still inspired. It was an awful, and
+a splendid, experience for the nation. It is not necessary, with
+Emerson, "always to respect war hereafter"; but there have been times
+when it has seemed to me that I would rather be able to wear that little
+tri-colour button <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a>[<a href="./images/189.png">189</a>]</span>of the American Loyal Legion than any other
+decoration in the world.<a name="FNanchor_189:1_25" id="FNanchor_189:1_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_189:1_25" class="fnanchor">[189:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is the great compensation of war that it does not breed in a people
+only a fighting spirit. All history shows that it is in the mental
+exhilaration and the moral uplift after a period of war successfully
+waged that a people puts forth the best that is in it, in the production
+of works of art and in its literature. It is an old legend&mdash;older than
+Omar&mdash;that the most beautiful flowers spring from the blood of heroes.
+And it is true. When the genius of a nation has been ploughed up with
+cannon-shot and bayonets and watered with blood&mdash;then it is that it
+breaks into the most nearly perfect blossom. It has been so through all
+history, back beyond the times of gun and bayonet, when spears and
+swords were the plough-shares, as far as we can see and doubtless
+farther. In America, the necessities of the case compelled the people to
+turn first to material works; it was to the civilising of their
+continent, the repairing of their shattered commercial and industrial
+structure (shattered when it was yet only half built), that their new
+inspiration had perforce to turn first. But there was impetus enough for
+that and to spare, and, after satisfying their mere physical needs, they
+swept on with a sort of inspired hunger for things to satisfy their
+minds and souls. Europeans are accustomed to think that the American
+desire for culture is something superficial&mdash;something put on for
+appearance's sake; and nothing could well be farther from the truth. It
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a>[<a href="./images/190.png">190</a>]</span>is an intense, deep-seated, national craving. War on the scale of the
+Civil War ploughs deep. It may be impossible for a nation to make itself
+cultivated&mdash;to grow century-old shrubberies and five-century-old
+turf&mdash;in ten years or forty; and when the Americans in their ravening
+famine reach out to grasp at once all that is good and beautiful in the
+world, it may be that at first they cannot assimilate all that they draw
+to them&mdash;they can grasp, but not absorb. To that extent there may be
+much that is superficial in American culture. But every year and every
+day they are sucking the nourishment deeper&mdash;the influences are
+penetrating, percolating, permeating the soil of their natures (yes, I
+know that I am running two metaphors abreast, but let them run)&mdash;and it
+is a mistake to conclude because in some places the culture lies only on
+the surface that there are not others where it has already sunk through
+and through. Above all is it a mistake to suppose that the emotion
+itself is shallow or that the yearning is not as deep as their&mdash;or any
+human&mdash;natures.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It is possible that some critics may be found cavilling enough to accuse
+me of inconsistency in thus celebrating the praise of War in a work
+which is avowedly intended for the promotion of Peace. Carlyle wisely,
+if somewhat brutally, pointed out that if an Oliver Cromwell be
+assassinated "it is certain you may get a cart-load of turnips from his
+carcase." But one does not therefore advocate regicide for the sake of
+the kitchen-gardens.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_167:1_21" id="Footnote_167:1_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_167:1_21"><span class="label">[167:1]</span></a> What is said above&mdash;or at least what can be read
+between the lines&mdash;may throw some light on the fact, on which the
+English press happens as I write to be commenting in some perplexity,
+that whereas certain Australians among the Rhodes scholars have
+distinguished themselves conspicuously in the schools, the only honours
+that have fallen to Americans have been those of the athletic field.
+Those journals which have inferred therefrom a lack of aptitude for
+scholarship on the part of American youth in general may be amiss in
+their diagnosis.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_169:1_22" id="Footnote_169:1_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_169:1_22"><span class="label">[169:1]</span></a> To avoid misapprehension, let me say that, as an Oxford
+man, I have all the Oxford prejudices as fully developed as any
+Englishman could wish. Rather a year of Oxford than five of Harvard or
+ten of Minnesota. How much of this is sentiment, and worthless, and how
+much reason, it would be hard to say and is immaterial. The personal
+prepossession need not blind one either to the greatness of the work
+which the other institutions do, nor to the defensibility of that point
+of view which sets other qualities, in an institution the professed
+object of which is to educate and to fit youths for life, above even
+those possessed by Oxford or Cambridge.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_171:1_23" id="Footnote_171:1_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_171:1_23"><span class="label">[171:1]</span></a> In 1906, under a stricter definition of the term
+"periodical," the privilege of sending as second-class matter books
+issued at regular intervals was withdrawn.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_188:1_24" id="Footnote_188:1_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_188:1_24"><span class="label">[188:1]</span></a> Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea Wife" (<i>The Seven Seas</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_189:1_25" id="Footnote_189:1_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_189:1_25"><span class="label">[189:1]</span></a> The Loyal Legion is the society of those who held
+commissions as officers on the side of the North. The Grand Army of the
+Republic is the society which includes all ranks.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a>[<a href="./images/191.png">191</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">A Comparison in Culture</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Advantage of Youth&mdash;Japanese Eclecticism and American&mdash;The
+Craving for the Best&mdash;<i>Cyrano de
+Bergerac</i>&mdash;Verestschagin&mdash;Music and the Drama&mdash;Culture by
+Paroxysms&mdash;Mr. Gladstone and the Japanese&mdash;Anglo-Saxon
+Crichtons&mdash;Americans as Linguists&mdash;England's Past and
+America's Future&mdash;Americanisms in Speech&mdash;Why they are
+Disappearing in America&mdash;And Appearing in England&mdash;The Press
+and the Copyright Laws&mdash;A Look into the Future.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Ruskin, speaking of the United States, said that he could never bring
+himself to live in a country so unfortunate as to possess no castles.
+But, with its obvious disadvantages, youth in a nation has also
+compensations. Max O'Rell says that to be American is to be both fresh
+and mature, and I have certainly known many Americans who were fresh.
+The shoulders are too young for the head to be very old. But when a
+man&mdash;let us say an Englishman of sixty&mdash;full of worldly wisdom, having
+travelled much and seen many men and cities, looks on a young man, just
+out of the university, perhaps, very keen on his profession, very
+certain of making his way in the world, with a hundred interests in what
+seem to the other "new-fangled" things&mdash;telephones and typewriters and
+bicycles and radio-activity and motor cars, things unknown to the old
+man's youth,&mdash;talking of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a>[<a href="./images/192.png">192</a>]</span>philosophies and theories and principles which
+were not taught at college when the other was an undergraduate, the
+elder is likely to think that the young man's judgment is sadly crude
+and raw, that his education has been altogether too diffused and made up
+of smatterings of too many things, and to say to himself that the old
+sound, simple ways were better. Yet it may be&mdash;is it not almost
+certain?&mdash;that the youth has had the training which will give him a
+wider outlook than his father ever had, and will make him a broader man.</p>
+
+<p>In our grandfathers' days, a man of reasonable culture could come
+approximately near to knowing all that then was known and worth the
+knowing. The wisdom and science of the world could be included in the
+compass of a modest bookshelf. But the province of human knowledge has
+become so wide that, however much "general information" a man may have,
+he can truly know nothing unless he studies it as a specialist. It is,
+perhaps, largely as a reaction against the Jacksonian theory of
+universal competence that the avowed ideal of American education to-day
+is to cultivate the student's power of concentration&mdash;to give him a
+survey, elementary but sound, of as wide a field as possible, but above
+all to teach him so to use his mind that to whatever corner of that
+field he may turn for his walk in life, he will be able to focus all his
+intellect upon it&mdash;to concentrate and bring to bear all his energies on
+whatever tussock or mole-hill it may be out of which he has to dig his
+fortune. When the youth steps out into life, it may be that his actual
+store of knowledge is superficial&mdash;a smattering of too many things&mdash;but
+superficiality is precisely the one quality <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a>[<a href="./images/193.png">193</a>]</span>which, in theory at least,
+his training has been calculated not to produce. Englishmen know that
+the American throws tremendous energy and earnestness into his business.
+They know that he throws the same earnestness into his sports. Is it not
+reasonable to suppose that he will be no less earnest in the study of
+Botticelli? And it is a great advantage (which the American nation
+shares with the American youth) to have the products, the literature,
+the art, the institutions of the whole world to choose from, with
+practically no traditions to hamper the choice.</p>
+
+<p>When the Japanese determined to adopt Western ways, seeing that so only
+could they hold their own against the peoples of the West, they did not
+model their civilisation on that of any one European country. They sent
+the most intelligent of their young men abroad into every country, each
+with a mission to study certain things in that country; and so,
+gathering for comparison the ways of thought and the institutions of all
+peoples, they were able to pick and choose from each what seemed best to
+them and to reject all else. They did not propose to make themselves a
+nation of imitation Englishmen or Germans or Americans. "But," we can
+imagine them saying, "if we take whatever is best in each country we
+ought surely to be able to make ourselves into a nation better than
+any." They modelled their navy on the British, but not their army, nor
+their banking system, nor did they copy much from British commercial or
+industrial methods&mdash;nor did they take the British system of education.</p>
+
+<p>The United States has been less free to choose. The Japanese had a new
+house, quite empty, and they <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194"></a>[<a href="./images/194.png">194</a>]</span>could do their furnishing all at once. The
+American nation, though young, has, after all, a century of domestic
+life behind it, in the course of which it has accumulated a certain
+amount of furniture in the form of institutions, prejudices, and
+traditions, some of which are fixtures and could not be torn out of the
+structure if the nation wished it; others, though movable, possess
+associations for the sake of which it would not part with them if it
+could. Fortunately, however, the house has been much built on to of late
+years and what goods, or bads, are already amassed can all be stowed
+away in a single east wing. All the main building (the eastern wing used
+to be the main building, but it is not now), and particularly the
+western end and the annex to the north, are new and empty, to be
+decorated and furnished as the owner pleases. And while the owner, like
+a sensible man, intends to do all that he can to encourage home
+manufactures, he does not hesitate to go as far afield as he likes to
+fill a nook with something better than anything that can be turned out
+at home.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing strikes an Englishman more, after he comes to know the people,
+than this eclectic habit, paradoxically combined as it is with an
+intense&mdash;an over-noisy&mdash;patriotism. "The best," the American is fond of
+saying, "is good enough for me"; and it never occurs to him that he has
+not entire right to the best wherever he may find it. In England it is
+only a small part of the population which considers itself entitled to
+the best of anything. The rest of the people may covet, but the best
+belongs to "their betters." The American knows no "betters." He comes to
+England and walks, as of right, into the best hotels, the best
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195"></a>[<a href="./images/195.png">195</a>]</span>restaurants, the best seats at the theatres&mdash;and the best society. He
+buys, so far as his purse permits, and often his purse permits a great
+deal, the best works of art. The consequence is that the world brings
+him of its best. It may defraud him once in a while into buying an
+imitation or a second-class article patched up; but, on the whole, the
+American people has something like the best of the world to choose from.
+And what is true of the palpable and material things is equally true of
+the intangible and intellectual.</p>
+
+<p>Englishmen have long been familiar with one aspect of this fact, in the
+honours which America has in the past been ready to shower on any
+visiting Englishman of distinction: in the extraordinary number of
+dollars that she has been willing to pay to hear him lecture. Of this
+particular commodity&mdash;the lecturing Englishman&mdash;the people has been
+fairly sated; but because Americans are no longer eager to lionise any
+English author or artist with some measure of a London reputation, it
+does not by any means imply that they are not still seeking for, and
+grappling, the best in art and letters wherever they can find it. They
+only doubt whether the Englishman who comes to lecture is, after all,
+the best.</p>
+
+<p>A Frenchman has pronounced American society to be the wittiest in the
+world. A German has said that more people read Dante in Boston than in
+Berlin. I take it that many more read Shakespeare in the United States
+than in Great Britain&mdash;and they certainly try harder to understand him.
+Nor need it be denied that they have to try harder. Without any
+knowledge of actual sales, I have no doubt that the number of copies of
+the works of any continental European <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></a>[<a href="./images/196.png">196</a>]</span>author, of anything like a
+first-class reputation, sold in America is vastly greater than the
+number sold in England. Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Sienkiewicz, Ibsen,
+Maeterlinck, Fogazzaro, Jokai, Haeckel, Nietzsche&mdash;I give the names at
+random as they come&mdash;of any one of these there is immeasurably more of a
+"cult" in the United States than in England&mdash;a far larger proportion of
+the population makes some effort to master what is worth mastering in
+each. Rodin's works&mdash;his name at least and photographs of his
+masterpieces&mdash;are familiar to tens of thousands of Americans belonging
+to classes which in England never heard of him. Helleu's drawings were
+almost a commonplace of American illustrated literature six years before
+one educated Englishman in a hundred knew his name. Z&ouml;rn's etchings are
+almost as well known in the United States as Whistler's. Englishmen
+remain curiously engrossed in English things.</p>
+
+<p>It may be a very disputable judgment to say that the most nearly
+Shakespearian literary production of modern times&mdash;at least of those
+which have gained any measure of fame&mdash;is M. Rostand's <i>Cyrano de
+Bergerac</i>. Immediately on its publication it was greeted in America with
+hardly less enthusiasm than in Paris; and within a few weeks it became
+the chief topic of conversation at a thousand dinner tables. In a few
+months I had seen the play acted by three different companies&mdash;all
+admirable, scholarly productions, of which the most famous and most
+"authorised" was by no means the best&mdash;and soon thereafter I came to
+England, for a short visit, but with the determination to find time to
+make the trip to Paris to see M. Coquelin as "Cyrano." I found
+Englishmen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></a>[<a href="./images/197.png">197</a>]</span>&mdash;educated Englishmen, including not a few authors and
+critics to whom I spoke&mdash;practically unaware of the existence of such a
+play. Of those who had heard of it and read <i>critiques</i>, I met not one
+who had read the work itself. Some time after, Sir Charles Wyndham
+produced it in London and it was, I believe, not a success. To-day
+<i>Cyrano de Bergerac</i> (I am speaking of it not as an acting play but as
+literature) is practically unknown even to educated Englishmen, except
+such as make French literature their special study.</p>
+
+<p><i>Cyrano</i> may or may not be on a level with any but the greatest of
+Shakespeare's plays (it is evident from his other work that M. Rostand
+is not a Shakespeare) but that it was an immeasurably finer thing than
+ninety-nine per cent of the books of the year which English people were
+reading that winter on the advice of English critics is beyond question.
+The nation which was reading and discussing M. Rostand's work was
+conspicuously better engaged than the nation which was reading and
+discussing the English novels of the season.</p>
+
+<p>Again when poor Vasili Verestschagin met his death so tragically off
+Port Arthur, his name meant little or nothing to the great majority of
+educated Englishmen, though there had been exhibitions of his work in
+London&mdash;the same exhibitions as were made throughout the larger cities
+of the United States. In America regret for him was wide-spread and
+personal, for he stood for something definite in American eyes&mdash;rather
+unfortunately, perhaps, in one way, because Verestschagin, too, had
+painted those miserable sepoys being eternally blown from British guns.</p>
+
+<p>The general English misapprehension of the present <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></a>[<a href="./images/198.png">198</a>]</span>condition of art and
+literature in America sometimes shows itself in unexpected places. I
+have a great love for <i>Punch</i>. Since the time when the beautifying of
+its front cover with gamboge and vermilion and emerald green constituted
+the chief solace of wet days in the nursery, I doubt if, in the course
+of forty years, I have missed reading one dozen copies of the London
+<i>Charivari</i>. After a period of exile in regions where current literature
+is unobtainable one of the chief delights of a return to civilisation is
+"catching up" with the back numbers of <i>Punch</i>; nor, in spite of gibes
+to the contrary, has the paper ever been more brilliant than under its
+present editorship. Yet <i>Punch</i> in this present week of September 11,
+1907, represents an American woman, apparently an American woman of
+wealth and position (at all events she is at the time touring in Italy),
+as saying on hearing an air from <i>Il Trovatore</i>: "Say, these Italians
+ain't vurry original. Guess I've heard that tune on our street organs in
+New York ever since I was a gurl."</p>
+
+<p>The weaknesses of the peoples of other nations are fair game; but it is
+the essence of just caricature that it should have some verisimilitude.
+<i>Punch</i> could not publish that drawing with the accompanying legend
+unless it was the belief of the editor or the staff that such a solecism
+was more or less likely to proceed from the mouth of such an American as
+is depicted; which is precisely the error of the Frenchman who believes
+that Englishmen sell their wives at Smithfield. Thirty years ago, the
+lampoon would have had some justification; but at the present time both
+the actual number and the percentage of women who are familiar with the
+Italian operas is, I believe, vastly greater in America <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></a>[<a href="./images/199.png">199</a>]</span>than in
+England. This statement will undoubtedly be received with incredulity by
+the majority of Englishmen who know nothing about the United States; but
+no one who does know the people of the country will dispute it. In
+England, the opera is still, for all the changes that have occurred in
+the last quarter of a century, largely a pleasure of a limited class. It
+may be (and personally I believe) that in that class there is a larger
+number of true musicians who know the operas well and love them
+appreciatively than is to be found in the United States; but the number
+of people who have a reasonable acquaintance with the majority of
+operas, and are familiar with the best known airs from each and with the
+general characteristics of the various composers, is immensely larger in
+America. It is only the same fact that we have confronted so often
+before&mdash;the fact of the greater homogeneousness or uniformity of tastes
+and pursuits in the American people.</p>
+
+<p>It must be clearly understood, here as elsewhere, that I am not
+comparing merely the people of New York with the people of London, but
+the people of the whole United States of all classes, urban and
+provincial, industrial and peasant, East and West, with the whole
+population of all classes in the British Isles; for a large percentage
+of the mistakes which Englishmen make about America arises from the fact
+that they insist on comparing the educated classes of London with such
+people as they may chance to have met in New York or one or two Eastern
+cities, under the impression that they are thereby drawing a comparison
+between the two peoples. Senator Hoar's opinion of Matthew Arnold has
+been already quoted; and the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></a>[<a href="./images/200.png">200</a>]</span>truth is that very few Englishmen who have
+written about America have lived in the country long enough to grasp how
+much of the United States lies on the other side of the North River. Not
+only does not New York alone, but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
+Washington combined do not bear anything like the same relation to
+America as a whole as London bears to the British Isles. Englishmen take
+no account of, for they have not seen and no one has reported to them,
+the intense craving for and striving after culture and self-improvement
+which exists (and has existed for a generation) not only in such larger
+cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New Orleans,
+but in many hundreds of smaller communities scattered from the Atlantic
+to the Pacific. One must have such a vision of the United States as a
+whole as will enable him to imagine all this endeavour, now dissipated
+over so vast a stretch of country, as all massed together into a
+territory no larger than the British Isles before he can arrive at an
+intelligent basis of comparison between the peoples. What is centralised
+in England in America is diffused over half a continent and much less
+easily measurable.</p>
+
+<p>It happens that as I am correcting the proofs of the chapter the London
+newspapers of the day (January 25, 1908) contain announcements of the
+death in New York of Edward MacDowell. He was often spoken of as "the
+American Grieg"; but it was a phrase which irritated many good musical
+critics in America, for the reason that they considered their countryman
+the greater man of the two. They would have had Grieg spoken of as the
+Norwegian MacDowell. In that judgment they may have been right or they
+may have <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></a>[<a href="./images/201.png">201</a>]</span>been wrong; but it is characteristic of the attitudes of the
+British and American peoples that, whereas the people of the United
+States know Grieg better than he is known in England (that is to say,
+that a larger proportion of the people, outside the classes which
+professedly account themselves musical, have more or less acquaintance
+with his music), just as they know the work of half a dozen English
+composers, MacDowell, though he had played his pianoforte concertos in
+London, remained almost unknown in England outside of strictly musical
+circles. It is certain that had MacDowell been an Englishman he would
+have been immensely better known in America than, being an American, he
+ever was in England.</p>
+
+<p>In the kindred field of the drama the general English idea of the
+American stage is based chiefly on acquaintance with that noisy type of
+"musical comedy" of which so many specimens have in recent years been
+brought to England from the other side of the Atlantic. It is as if
+Americans judged English literature by Miss Marie Corelli and Guy
+Thorne. Those things are brought to England because they are opined by
+the managers to be the sort of thing that England wants or which is
+likely to succeed in England, not because they are what America
+considers her best product. To attempt any comparison of the living
+playwrights or actors in the two countries would be a thorny and
+perilous undertaking; and if any comparison is to be made at all it must
+be done lightly and as far as possible examples must be drawn from those
+who are no longer actively on the boards. Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary
+Anderson) has deliberately put on record her opinion of Miss Clara
+Morris as "the greatest <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></a>[<a href="./images/202.png">202</a>]</span>emotional actress I ever saw." It is not likely
+that when Madame de Navarro pronounced that estimate she was forgetting
+either Miss Terry or Mrs. Campbell&mdash;or Mesdames Rejane and Bernhardt or
+Signora Duse. Madame de Navarro is no mean judge: and those who have
+read Miss Morris's wonderful book, <i>Life on the Stage</i>, will think the
+judgment in this case not incredible.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly I believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has
+just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholarship,
+restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an
+English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is
+in his class. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living
+English actor could have approached, and I gravely doubt whether England
+would have furnished a public who would have appreciated it in
+sufficient numbers to make its presentation a success if it had been
+achieved in London.</p>
+
+<p>It was said that in any effort to arrive at an estimate of American
+culture, or to state that culture in terms of English culture, we should
+have to find landmarks in trifles. All these things are such trifles.
+Let us concede that <i>Cyrano</i> is not the greatest literature, nor is
+Verestschagin's work the highest art; still neither the one nor the
+other is properly a negligible quantity in the sum-total of the creative
+work of the generation. There may be many American women who do not know
+their Verdi, and it may be that Madame de Navarro's estimate of Miss
+Morris, mine of Mr. Mansfield, and that of certain American critics of
+Edward MacDowell are equally at fault; but it still remains absurd to
+take ignorance of the Italian operas as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></a>[<a href="./images/203.png">203</a>]</span>characteristic of American
+women or to talk contemptuously, as many Englishmen do, of the American
+theatre, because they have no knowledge of it beyond what they have seen
+of the one class of production from <i>The Belle of New York</i> to <i>The
+Prince of Pilsen</i>, or of American music, because their acquaintance with
+it begins and ends with Sousa and the writers of "coon songs."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It will be urged that successive "crazes" for individual artists or
+authors, for particular productions or even isolated schools, are no
+evidence of any general culture. Conceding this, it remains impossible
+to avoid the question: supposing a nation or an individual to spend each
+successive six months in a new enthusiasm&mdash;six months on Plato and
+Aristotelianism,&mdash;six months, taking the <i>Light of Asia</i>, Mr. Sinnett,
+and <i>Kim</i> as a starting point, on Buddhism and esoteric philosophy,&mdash;six
+months, inspired by Fitzgerald, on Omar, Persian literature and history
+and the various ramifications thereof,&mdash;six months on M. Rodin, his
+relation to the art of sculpture in general and particularly to the
+sculpture of the Greeks,&mdash;a similar six months devoted to Mr. Watt with
+like excursions into his environment, proximate and remote,&mdash;six months
+to Millet, Barbizon, and the history of French painting,&mdash;six months of
+Russian art with Verestschagin and six with Russian literature and
+politics working outwards from Count Tolstoi,&mdash;six months of philosophic
+speculation radiating from Haeckel,&mdash;six months absorbed in Japanese
+art,&mdash;six months burrowing in Egyptian excavations and Egyptian
+history&mdash;the question is, I say, supposing a nation or an individual to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></a>[<a href="./images/204.png">204</a>]</span>have passed through twenty such spasms (of which I have suggested ten,
+every one of which ten is a subject which I have in my own experience
+known to become the rage in America more or less wide-spread and for a
+greater or lesser period) and supposing that nation or that individual
+to be possessed of extraordinary earnestness and power of concentration,
+with a great desire to learn, how far will that nation or that
+individual have travelled on the road toward something approaching
+culture? Let it be granted that the individual or the nation starts with
+something less of the &aelig;sthetic temperament, less well grounded in, or
+disposed towards, artistic or literary study than the average Englishman
+who has made decent use of his opportunities at school, at the
+university, and in the surroundings of his every-day life; the
+intellectual condition of that individual or nation will not at the end
+of the ten years of successive <i>furores</i> be the same intellectual
+condition as that of the Englishman who, after leaving college, has
+spent ten years in the ordinary educated society of England, but it is
+probable that, besides the accumulation of a great quantity of
+information, some not entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards
+of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth
+remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has
+declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there is
+conspicuously more culture.</p>
+
+<p>When the Englishman hears the American, and especially the American
+woman, slip so glibly from Rodin to Rameses, from Kant to kakemonos, he
+dubs her superficial. Perhaps she is, considering only the actual
+knowledge possessed compared with the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205"></a>[<a href="./images/205.png">205</a>]</span>potentiality of knowledge on any
+one of the topics. There is a story which has been fitted to many
+persons and many occasions, but which thirty years ago was told of Mr.
+Gladstone, though for all I know it may go back to generations before he
+was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where
+among the guests was a distinguished Japanese; and, as not seldom
+happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with
+fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which
+Japan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was
+asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man,"
+he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know all about everything
+in the world except Japan. He knows nothing at all about Japan."</p>
+
+<p>The specialist in a single subject can always find the holes in the
+information on that subject of the "universal specialist." But it is
+worth noticing that, like almost every other salient trait of the
+American character, this American desire to become a universal
+specialist&mdash;this reaching after the all-culture and all-knowledge&mdash;is an
+essentially Anglo-Saxon or English characteristic. The German may be
+content to spend his whole life laboriously probing into one small hole.
+The Frenchman (let me say again that I thoroughly recognise that all
+national generalisations are unsound) will cheerfully wave aside with a
+<i>la-la-la</i> whole realms of knowledge which do not interest him. But all
+Englishmen and all Americans would be Crichtons and Sydneys if they
+could. And&mdash;perhaps on the principle of setting a thief to catch a
+thief&mdash;although the all-round man is the ideal of both peoples, each is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206"></a>[<a href="./images/206.png">206</a>]</span>equally suspicious of an intellectual rotundity (in another person) too
+nearly complete.</p>
+
+<p>Americans rather like to repeat that story of Mr. Gladstone, when the
+talk is of English culture.</p>
+
+<p>The American as a rule is a better linguist than the Englishman,&mdash;he is
+quicker, that is, to pick up a modern language and likely to speak it
+with a better accent. "Never trust an Englishman who speaks French
+without an English accent," said Prince Bismarck; and the remark,
+however unjust it may be to an occasional individual, showed a shrewd
+insight into the English character. There is always to be recognised the
+fact that there are tens&mdash;perhaps hundreds&mdash;of thousands of Englishmen
+who speak Hindustani, Pushtu, or the language of any one of a hundred
+remote peoples with whom the Empire has traffic, while the American has
+had no contact with other peoples which called for a knowledge of any
+tongue but his own, except that in a small way some Spanish has been
+useful. But so far as European languages go, the Englishman, in more or
+less constant and intimate relation with each of the peoples of Europe,
+has been so well satisfied of his own superiority to each that it has
+seemed vastly more fitting that they should learn his language than that
+he should trouble to learn theirs. Under any circumstances, is it not
+obviously easier for each one of the European peoples to learn to talk
+English than for the Englishman to learn eight European tongues with
+eighty miscellaneous dialects?</p>
+
+<p>When an Englishman does learn a foreign language, it is most commonly
+for literary or scholastic purposes, rather than (with the exception of
+French in certain classes) for conversational use. The American on the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207"></a>[<a href="./images/207.png">207</a>]</span>other hand, having had no need of languages in the past, coming now in
+contact with the world, sees that there are three or four languages of
+Europe which it is most desirable that he should know, if only for
+commercial purposes; and a language learned for commercial purposes must
+be mastered colloquially and idiomatically. The American is not
+distracted by the need of Sanskrit or of any one of the numerous more or
+less primitive tongues which a certain proportion of the English people
+must acquire if the business of the Empire is to go on. Nor is his
+vision confused by seeing all the European tongues jumbled, as it were,
+together before him at too close range. He can distinguish which are the
+essential or desirable languages for his purposes; and the rising
+generation of Americans is learning those languages more generally, and
+in a more practical way, than is the rising generation of Englishmen.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And yet we have not crossed that morass;&mdash;nor perhaps, however superior
+in folly we may be to the angels, is it desirable that we should in
+plain daylight. We have at most found some slight vantage-ground: thrown
+up a mole-hill of a Pisgah from which we can attain a distant view of
+what lies beyond the swamp, even if perchance we have taken some mirages
+and <i>ignes fatui</i> for solid landscape and actual illuminations.</p>
+
+<p>The ambitions and ideals of the two peoples are fundamentally alike; nor
+is there so great a difference as appears on the surface in their method
+of striving to attain those ideals and realise those ambitions, albeit
+the American uses certain tools (modern he calls <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208"></a>[<a href="./images/208.png">208</a>]</span>them, the Englishman
+preferring to say new-fangled) to which the Englishman's hands have not
+taken kindly. It is natural that the English nation, having a so much
+larger past, should be more influenced by it than the American. It is
+natural that the American, conscious that his national character has but
+just shaped itself out of the void, with all the future before it,
+should look more to the present and the future than the Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>The Englishman prefers to turn almost exclusively to the study of
+antiquity&mdash;the art and philosophies and letters of past ages&mdash;for the
+foundation of his work, and thence to push on between almost strictly
+British lines. The American seeks rather to absorb only so much of the
+wisdom and taste of antiquity as may serve for an intelligent
+comprehension of the world-art, the world-philosophies, the
+world-literature of to-day, and then, borrowing what he will from each
+department of those, to strive on that foundation to build something
+better than any. There are many scholars and students in America who
+would prefer to see the people less eager to push on. There are many
+thinkers and educators in England who hold that English scholarship and
+training dwell altogether too much in the past and that it were better
+if England would look more abroad and would give larger attention to the
+conditions of modern life&mdash;the conditions which her youth will have to
+meet in the coming generation.</p>
+
+<p>If an American were asked which of the two peoples was the more
+cultivated, the more widely informed, he would probably say: "You
+fellows have been longer at the game than we have. You've had more
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209"></a>[<a href="./images/209.png">209</a>]</span>experience in the business; but we believe we've got every bit as good
+raw material as you and a blamed sight better machinery. Also we are
+more in earnest and work that machinery harder than you. Maybe we are
+not turning out as good goods yet&mdash;and maybe we are. But it's a dead
+sure thing that if we aren't yet, we're going to."</p>
+
+<p>A common index to the degree of cultivation in any people is found in
+their everyday language&mdash;their spoken speech; but here again in
+considering America from the British standpoint we have to be careful or
+we may be entrapped into the same fallacy as threatens us when we
+propose to judge the United States by its newspapers. In the first place
+the right of any people to invent new forms of verbal currency to meet
+the requirements of its colloquial exchange must be conceded. There was
+a time when an Americanism in speech was condemned in England because it
+was American. When so many of the Americanisms of ten years ago are
+incorporated in the daily speech even of educated Englishmen to-day, it
+would be affectation to put forward such a plea nowadays. Going deeper
+than this, we undoubtedly find that the educated Englishman to-day
+speaks with more precision than the educated American. The educated
+Englishman speaks the language of what I have already called the public
+school and university class. But while the Englishman speaks the
+language of that class, the American speaks the language of the whole
+people. That is not, of course, entirely true, for there are grades of
+speech in the United States, but it is relatively true&mdash;true for the
+purpose of a comparison with the conditions in Great Britain. The
+Englishman may be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"></a>[<a href="./images/210.png">210</a>]</span>surprised at the number of solecisms committed in the
+course of an hour's talk by a well-to-do New Yorker whom he has met in
+the company of gentlemen in England. He would perhaps be more surprised
+to find a mechanic from the far West commit no more. The tongue of
+educated Englishmen is not the tongue of the masses&mdash;nor is it a
+difference in accent only, but in form, in taste, in grammar, and in
+thought. If in England the well-to-do and gentle classes had commercial
+transactions only among themselves, it is probable that a currency
+composed only of gold and silver would suffice for their needs; copper
+is introduced into the coinage to meet the requirements of the poor.
+American speech has its elements of copper for the same reason&mdash;that all
+may be able to deal in it, to give and take change in its terms. It is
+the same fact as we have met before, of the greater homogeneousness of
+the American people&mdash;the levelling power (for want of a better phrase)
+of a democracy.</p>
+
+<p>The Englishman may object, and with justice, that because an educated
+man must incorporate into his speech words and phrases and forms which
+are necessary for communication with the vulgar, there is no reason why
+he should not be able to reserve those forms and phrases for use with
+the vulgar only. A gentleman does not pay half-a-crown, lost at the card
+table to a friend, in coppers. Why cannot the educated American keep his
+speech silver and gold for educated ears? All of which is just. There
+are people in the United States who speak with a preciseness equal to
+that of the most exacting of English precisians, but they are not fenced
+off as in England within the limits of a specified class; while the
+common <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"></a>[<a href="./images/211.png">211</a>]</span>speech of the American people, which is used by a majority of
+those who would in England come within the limits of that fenced area,
+is much more careless in form and phrase than the speech of educated
+Englishmen. It may be urged that it is much less careless, and better
+and vastly more uniform, than any one of the innumerable forms of speech
+employed by the various lower classes in England; which is true. The
+level of speech is better in America; but the speech of the educated and
+well-to-do is generally much better in England. All this, however (which
+is mere commonplace) may be conceded, but, though educated Americans may
+use a more debased speech than educated Englishmen, the point is that it
+is not safe to argue therefrom to an inferiority in culture in America;
+because the American uses his speech for other and wider purposes than
+the Englishman. The different American classes, just as they dress
+alike, read the same newspapers and magazines, and, within limits, eat
+the same food, so they speak the same language. It is unjust to compare
+that language with the language used in England only by the educated
+classes.</p>
+
+<p>But, what is an infinitely larger fact, the inferiority of the American
+speech to the English is daily and rapidly disappearing. Twenty years
+ago, practically all American speech fell provincially on educated
+English ears. That is far from being the case to-day; and what is most
+interesting is that the alteration has not come about as the result of a
+change in the diction of Americans only. The change has been in
+Englishmen also. To whatever extent American speech may have improved,
+it is certain also that English <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212"></a>[<a href="./images/212.png">212</a>]</span>speech has become much less
+precise&mdash;much less uniform among the educated and "gentlemanly"
+classes&mdash;and English ears are consequently less exacting.</p>
+
+<p>With the gradual elimination of class distinctions in England, or rather
+with the blurring of the lines which separate one class from another, a
+multitude of persons pass for "gentlemen" in England to-day who could
+not have dreamed&mdash;and whose fathers certainly did not dream&mdash;of being
+counted among the gentry thirty-five years ago. The fact may be for good
+or ill; but one consequence has been that the newcomers, thrusting up
+into the circles above them, have taken with them the speech of their
+former associates, so that one hears now, in nominally polite circles,
+tones of voice, forms of speech, and the expression of points of view
+which would have been impossible in the youth of people who are now no
+more than middle-aged.</p>
+
+<p>There was a time when the dress proclaimed the man of quality at once.
+That distinction began to pass away with the disappearance of silk and
+ruffles and wigs from masculine costume. For a century longer, the
+shibboleths of voice and manner kept their force. But now those too are
+going; and the result is that the English speech of the educated class
+has become less precise and less uniform. The same speech is now common
+to a larger proportion of the people. In the days when nearly all the
+members of educated society&mdash;we are speaking of the men only, for they
+only counted in those days&mdash;had been to one or other of the same "seven
+great public schools" (which not one public school man in a hundred can
+name correctly to-day) and to one or other of the same two universities,
+they kept for use among themselves all <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213"></a>[<a href="./images/213.png">213</a>]</span>through their after life the
+forms of speech, the catchwords, the classical references which passed
+current in their school and undergraduate days. It was a free-masonry of
+speech on which the outsider could not intrude. To-day, when not a
+quarter of the members of the same circles have been to one of those
+same seven schools nor a half to the same universities, when at least a
+quarter have been to no recognised classical school at all, it is
+impossible that the same free-masonry should prevail. There were a
+hundred trite classical quotations (no great evidence of scholarship,
+but made jestingly familiar by the old school curricula) which our
+fathers could use with safety in any chance company of the society to
+which they were accustomed; but even the most familiar of them would be
+a parlous experiment in small talk to-day. They have vanished from
+common conversation even more completely than they have disappeared from
+the debates of the House of Commons. And this is only a type of the
+change which has come over the educated speech of England, which we may
+regret or we may welcome. It may be sad that the English gentleman
+should speak in less literary form than he did thirty years ago, but the
+loss may be outweighed many times by the fact that so much larger a
+proportion of the people speak the same speech as he&mdash;not so refined as
+his used to be, but materially better than the majority of those who use
+it to-day could then have shaped their lips to frame. Few Englishmen at
+least would acquiesce in the opinion that it showed a decay of culture
+in England&mdash;that the people were more ignorant or less educated. It may
+not be safe to draw an analogous conclusion in the case of the American
+people.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214"></a>[<a href="./images/214.png">214</a>]</span></p><p>A story well-known to most Englishmen has to do with the man who,
+arriving at Waterloo station to take a train, went into the refreshment
+room for a cup of coffee. In his haste he spilled the coffee over his
+shirt front and thereupon fell to incontinent cursing of "this d&mdash;&mdash;d
+London and South-Western Railway."</p>
+
+<p>An American variant of, or pendant to, the same story tells of the
+Eastern man who approached Salt Lake City on foot and sat by the wayside
+to rest. By ill luck he sat upon an ants' nest. Shortly he rose
+anathematising the "lustful Mormon city" and turned his face eastward
+once more, a Mormon-hater to the end of his days.</p>
+
+<p>Not much less illogical is an Englishman I know who, having spent some
+three weeks in the United States, loathes the people and all the
+institutions thereof, almost solely (though the noise of the elevated
+trains in New York has something to do with it) because he found that
+they applied the name of "robin" to what he calls "a cursed great
+thrush-beast." Nearly every English visitor to the United States has
+been irritated at first by discovering this, or some similar fact; but
+it is not necessary on that account to hate the American people, to
+express contempt for their art and literature, and to belittle their
+commercial greatness and all the splendours of their history.<a name="FNanchor_214:1_26" id="FNanchor_214:1_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_214:1_26" class="fnanchor">[214:1]</a>
+Rather ought <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215"></a>[<a href="./images/215.png">215</a>]</span>Englishmen to like this application by the early colonists
+to the objects of their new environment of the cherished names of the
+well-known things of home. It shows that they carried with them into the
+wilderness in their hearts a love of English lane and hedgerow, and
+strove to soften the savagery of their new surroundings by finding in
+the common wild things the familiar birds and flowers which had grown
+dear to them in far-off peaceful English villages.</p>
+
+<p>We will not now potter again over the well-trodden paths of the
+differences in phraseology in the two peoples which have been so
+fruitful a source of "impressions" in successive generations of English
+visitors to the United States, for the thing grows absurd when "car,"
+and "store," and "sidewalk," and "elevator" are commonplaces on the lips
+of every London cockney; nor is there any need here to thread again the
+mazes of the well-worn discussion as to how far the peculiarities of
+modern American speech are only good old English forms which have
+survived in the New World after disappearance from their original
+haunts.<a name="FNanchor_215:1_27" id="FNanchor_215:1_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_215:1_27" class="fnanchor">[215:1]</a> The subject is worth referring to, however, for the very
+reason that its discussion <i>has</i> become almost absurd,&mdash;because by a
+process which has been going on, as we have already said, on both sides
+of the ocean simultaneously, the differences themselves are
+disappearing, the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216"></a>[<a href="./images/216.png">216</a>]</span>tongues of the two peoples are coming together and
+coalescing once more. The two currents into which the stream divided
+which flowed from that original well of English are drawing
+together&mdash;are, indeed, already so close that it will be but a very short
+time when the word "Americanism" as applied to a peculiarity in language
+will have ceased to be used in England. The "Yankee twang" and the
+"strong English accent" will survive in the two countries respectively
+for some time yet; but the written and spoken language of the two
+nations will be&mdash;already almost is&mdash;the same, and English visitors to
+the United States will have lost one fruitful source of impressions.</p>
+
+<p>The process has been going on in both countries, but in widely different
+forms. And this seems to me a peculiarly significant fact. In America
+the language of the people is constantly and steadily tending to
+improve; and this tendency is, Englishmen should note, the result of a
+deliberate and conscious effort at improvement on the part of the
+people. This can hardly be insisted upon too strongly.</p>
+
+<p>The majority of "Americanisms" in speech were in their origin mere
+provincialisms&mdash;modes of expression and pronunciation which had sprung
+up unchecked in the isolated communities of a scattered people. They
+grew with the growth of the communities, until they threatened to graft
+themselves permanently on the speech of the nation. The United States is
+no longer a country of isolated and scattered communities. After the
+Civil War, and partly as a result thereof, but still more as a result of
+the knitting together of the whole country by the building of the
+American railway system, with the consequent sudden increase <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217"></a>[<a href="./images/217.png">217</a>]</span>in
+intimacy of communication between all parts, there developed in the
+people a new sense of national unity. England saw a revolution in her
+means of communication when railways superseded stage-coaches and when
+the penny post was established; but no revolution comparable to that
+which has taken place in the United States in the present generation.
+Prior to 1880&mdash;really until 1883&mdash;Portland, Oregon, was hardly less
+removed from Portland, Maine, than Capetown is from Liverpool to-day,
+and the discomforts of travel from one to the other were incomparably
+greater. Now they are morally closer together than London and Aberdeen,
+in as much as nowhere between the Atlantic and Pacific is there any such
+consciousness of racial difference as separates the Scots from the
+English.</p>
+
+<p>The work of federation begun by the original thirteen colonies is not
+yet completed, for the individuality of the several States is destined
+to go on being continuously more merged&mdash;until it will finally be almost
+obliterated&mdash;in the Federal whole; but it may be said that in the last
+twenty-five years, and not until then, has the American people become
+truly unified&mdash;an entity conscious of its oneness and of its commercial
+greatness in that oneness, thinking common thoughts, co-operating in
+common ambitions, and speaking a common speech. Into that speech were at
+first absorbed, as has been said, the peculiarities, localisms, and
+provincialisms which had inevitably grown up in different sections in
+the days of non-communication. But precisely those same causes&mdash;the
+settlement of the country, the construction of the railways, the
+development of the natural resources&mdash;which contributed to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218"></a>[<a href="./images/218.png">218</a>]</span>the
+unification and laid the foundations of the greatness, produced, with
+wealth and leisure, new ambitions in the people. The desire for art and
+literature and, what we have called the all-culture, was no new growth,
+but an instinct inherited from the original English stock. Quickened it
+must have been by the moral uplifting of the people by the Civil War,
+but, as we have already seen, for some time after the close of that war
+the whole energies of the people were necessarily devoted to material
+things. Only with the completion of the repairing of the ravages of that
+war, and with the almost coincident settlement of the last great waste
+tracts of the country, were the people free to reach out after things
+immaterial and &aelig;sthetic; and only with the accession of wealth, which
+again these same causes produced, came the possibility of gratifying the
+craving for those things. And in the longing for self-improvement and
+self-culture, thus newly inspired and for the first time truly national,
+one of the things to which the people turned with characteristic
+earnestness was the improvement of the common speech. The nation has set
+itself purposefully and with determination to purify and prevent the
+further corruption of its language.</p>
+
+<p>The movement towards "simplification" of the spelling may or may not be
+in the direction of purification, but it will be observed that the
+movement itself could not have come into being without the national
+desire for improvement. The American speech is now the speech of a
+solidified and great nation; and it cannot be permitted to retain the
+inelegancies and colloquialisms which were not intolerable, perhaps, in
+the dialect of a locality in the days when that locality had <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219"></a>[<a href="./images/219.png">219</a>]</span>but
+restricted intercourse with other parts of the country. This effort to
+purify the common tongue is conscious, avowed, and sympathised with in
+all parts of the country alike.</p>
+
+<p>When any point of literary or grammatical form is under discussion in a
+leading American newspaper to-day, the dominant note is that of a purism
+more strict than will appear in a similar discussion in England. In many
+American newspaper offices the rules of "style" forbid the use of
+certain words and phrases which are accepted without question in the
+best London journals. There have of course always been circles&mdash;as,
+notoriously, in and around Boston, and, less notoriously but no less
+truly, in Philadelphia and New York&mdash;wherein the speech, whether written
+or spoken, has been as scrupulous in form and grammar as in the most
+scholarly circles in Great Britain. These circles corresponded to what
+we have called the public-school and university class of England, and,
+no more than it, did they speak the common speech of their country. Only
+now is the people as a whole consciously striving after an uplifting of
+such common speech.</p>
+
+<p>In England, on the other hand, the process that has been going on has
+been quite involuntary and is as yet almost entirely unconscious.</p>
+
+<p>We have spoken so far of only one factor in that process&mdash;namely, the
+democratisation of the English people which is in progress and the
+blurring of the lines between the classes. Co-operating with this are
+other forces. Just as the most well-bred persons can afford on occasions
+to be most careless of their manners&mdash;just as only an old-established
+aristocracy can be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220"></a>[<a href="./images/220.png">220</a>]</span>truly reckless of the character of new associates
+whom it may please to take up&mdash;so it may be that the well-educated man,
+confident of his impeccability and altogether off his guard, more
+readily absorbs into his daily speech cant phrases and even solecisms
+than the half-educated who is ever watchful lest he slip. The American
+has a way of writing, figuratively, with a dictionary at his elbow and a
+grammar within reach. There are few educated Englishmen who do not
+consider their own authority&mdash;the authority drawn from their school and
+university training&mdash;superior to that of any dictionary or grammar,
+especially of any American one.<a name="FNanchor_220:1_28" id="FNanchor_220:1_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_220:1_28" class="fnanchor">[220:1]</a> So it has come about that, while
+the tendency of the American people is constantly to become more exact
+and more accurate in its written and spoken speech, the English tendency
+is no less constantly towards a growing laxity; and while the American
+has been sternly and conscientiously at work pruning the inelegancies
+out of his language, the Briton has been lightheartedly taking these
+same inelegancies to himself. It is obviously impossible that such a
+twofold tendency can go on for long without the gulf between the quality
+of the respective languages becoming appreciably narrower.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The American writers who now occupy places on the staffs of London
+journals are thoroughly deserving of their places. They have earned
+these and retain them on the ground of their capacity as news gatherers,
+and through the brilliancy of their descriptive <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221"></a>[<a href="./images/221.png">221</a>]</span>writing. They possess
+what is described as "newspaper ability" as opposed to "literary
+ability." It is, nevertheless, the fact that in the majority of the
+newspaper offices, the "copy" of these writers is permitted to pass
+through the press with an immunity from interference on the part either
+of editor or proof-reader, which, a decade back, would not have been
+possible in any London office. Thus the British public, unwarned and
+unconscious, is daily absorbing at its breakfast table, and in the
+morning and evening trains, American newspaper English, which is the
+output of English newspaper offices. It is not now contended that this
+English is any worse than the public would be likely to receive from the
+same class of English writers, but the fact itself is to be noted. I am
+not prepared to agree with Mr. Andrew Lang in holding the English writer
+necessarily blameworthy who "in serious work introduces, needlessly,
+into our tongue an American phrase." Such introductions, however
+needless, may materially enrich the language, and I should, even with
+the permission of Mr. Lang, extend the same latitude to the introduction
+of Scotticisms.</p>
+
+<p>A more important matter for consideration is the present condition of
+the copyright laws of the two countries. English publishers understand
+well enough why it is occasionally cheaper, or, taking all the
+conditions together, more advantageous to have put into type in the
+United States rather than in Great Britain the work of a standard
+English novelist, and to bring the English edition into print from a
+duplicate set of American plates. On the other hand, it is exceptional
+for a novel, or for any book by an American writer, to be put into type
+in England for publication in both <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222"></a>[<a href="./images/222.png">222</a>]</span>countries. For the purpose of
+bringing the text of such books into line with the requirements of
+English readers, it is the practice of the leading American publishers
+to have one division of their composing-rooms allotted to typesetting by
+the English standard, with the use by the proof-readers of an English
+dictionary. It occasionally happens, however, that the attention of
+these proof-readers to the task of securing an English text limits
+itself to a few typical examples, such as spelling "colour" with a "u"
+and seeing that "centre" does not appear as "center," while all that
+constitutes the essence of American style, as compared with the English
+style, is passed unmolested and without change.</p>
+
+<p>Such a result is, doubtless, inevitable in the case of a work by an
+American writer who has his own idea of literary expression and his own
+standard of what constitutes literary style, but the resulting text not
+infrequently gives ground for criticism on the part of English
+reviewers, and for some feeling of annoyance on the part of cultivated
+English readers.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of books by English authors which are put into type in
+American printing-offices, there is, of course, no question of
+modification of style or of form of expression, but with these, as
+stated, the proof-readers are not always successful in eliminating
+entirely the American forms of spelling.</p>
+
+<p>The English publisher, even though he give a personal reading to the
+book in the form in which it finally leaves his hands, (and, in the
+majority of cases, having read it once in manuscript, he declines to go
+over the pages a second time, but contents himself with a cursory
+investigation of the detail of "colour," <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223"></a>[<a href="./images/223.png">223</a>]</span>of "centre,") is not
+infrequently dissatisfied, but it is too late for any changes in the
+text, and he can only let the volume go out. In the case of books
+printed in England from plates made in America, there is nothing at all
+to warn the reader; while in the case of books bound in England from
+sheets actually printed in the United States, there is nothing which the
+reader is likely to notice; and in nine cases out of ten the Englishman
+is unconscious that he is reading anything but an English book. The
+critic may understand, and the man who has lived long in the United
+States and who can recognise the characteristics of American diction,
+assuredly will understand, but these form, of course, a very small class
+in the community; and when the rest of the public is constantly reading
+American writing without a thought that it is other than English
+writing, it is hardly strange that American forms of speech creep daily
+more and more largely into the English tongue. What is really strange is
+that the educational authorities have been prepared to accept and to
+utilise in English schools many American educational books carrying
+American forms of speech and American spelling.</p>
+
+<p>The morality or the wisdom of the English copyright laws is not at the
+moment under discussion, but it is my own opinion (which I believe to be
+the opinion of every Englishman who has given any attention to the
+matter) that not on any ground of literary criticism, or because of any
+canons of taste, but merely as a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence
+to England, and for the sake of securing additional employment for
+British labour, the laws of copyright are in no less radical and urgent
+need of amendment than the English postal <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224"></a>[<a href="./images/224.png">224</a>]</span>laws. What we are here
+concerned with, however, is the effect of the present condition of these
+laws as one of the contributory factors which are co-operating to lessen
+the difference, once so wide and now so narrow, between the American and
+the English tongue.</p>
+
+<p>Nor can there be any doubt of the result of this twofold process if it
+be allowed to continue indefinitely, working in England towards a
+democratisation and Americanisation of the speech, and in America
+towards a higher standard of taste, based on earlier English literary
+models. The two currents, once divergent, now so closely confluent, will
+meet; but will they continue to flow on in one stream? Or will the same
+tendencies persist, so that the currents will cross and again diverge,
+occupying inverse positions?</p>
+
+<p>In a hundred years from now, when, as a result of the apparently
+inevitable growth of the United States in wealth, in power, and in
+influence, its speech and all other of its institutions will come to be
+held in the highest esteem, is it possible that Londoners may vehemently
+put forward their claim to speak purer American than the Americans
+themselves&mdash;just as many Americans assert to-day that their speech is
+nearer to the speech of Elizabethan England than is the speech of modern
+Englishmen? Is it possible that it will be only in the common language
+of Englishmen that philologists will be able to find surviving the racy,
+good old American words and phrases of the last decades of the
+nineteenth century&mdash;a period which will be to American literature what
+the Elizabethan Age is to English. It may, of course, be absurd, but
+already there are certain individual Americanisms which have long been
+<i>taboo</i> in every reputable office in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225"></a>[<a href="./images/225.png">225</a>]</span>the United States, but are used
+cheerfully and without comment in London dailies.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Once more it seems necessary to take precaution lest I be interpreted as
+having said more than I really have said. It would be a mere
+impertinence to affect to pronounce a general judgment on the level of
+culture or of achievement of the two peoples in all fields of art and
+effort; and the most that an individual can do is to take such isolated
+examples drawn from one or from the other, as may serve in particular
+matters as some sort of a standard of measurement. What I am striving to
+convey to the average English reader is, of course, not an impression of
+any inferiority in the English, but only the fact that the Englishman's
+present estimate of the American is almost grotesquely inadequate.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_214:1_26" id="Footnote_214:1_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_214:1_26"><span class="label">[214:1]</span></a> Mr. Archer, I find, has this delightful story: "A
+friend of mine returned from a short tour in the United States,
+declaring that he heartily disliked the country and would never go back
+again. Enquiry as to the grounds of his dissatisfaction elicited no more
+definite or damning charge than that 'they' (a collective pronoun
+presumed to cover the whole American people) hung up his trousers
+instead of folding them&mdash;or <i>vice versa</i>, for I am heathen enough not to
+remember which is the orthodox process."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_215:1_27" id="Footnote_215:1_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_215:1_27"><span class="label">[215:1]</span></a> But I cannot resist recording my astonishment at
+finding in Ben Jonson the phrase "to have a good time" used in precisely
+the sense in which the American girl employs it to-day, or at learning
+from Macaulay that Bishop Cooper in the time of Queen Elizabeth spoke of
+a "platform" in its exact modern American political meaning.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_220:1_28" id="Footnote_220:1_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_220:1_28"><span class="label">[220:1]</span></a> Though it is worth noting that incomparably the best
+dictionary of the English language yet completed is an American one.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226"></a>[<a href="./images/226.png">226</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>POLITICS AND POLITICIANS</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The "English-American" Vote&mdash;The Best People in Politics&mdash;What
+Politics Means in America&mdash;Where Corruption Creeps in&mdash;The
+Danger in England&mdash;A Presidential Nomination for Sale&mdash;Buying
+Legislation&mdash;Could it Occur in England?&mdash;A Delectable
+Alderman&mdash;Taxation while you Wait&mdash;Perils that England
+Escapes&mdash;The Morality of Congress&mdash;Political Corruption and
+the Irish&mdash;Democrat and Republican.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The American people ought cordially to cherish Englishmen who come to
+the United States to live, if only for the reason that they have never
+organised for political purposes. In every election, all over the United
+States, one hears of the Irish vote, the German vote, the Scandinavian
+vote, the Italian vote, the French vote, the Polish vote, the Hebrew
+vote, and many other votes, each representing a <i>client&ecirc;le</i> which has to
+be conciliated or cajoled. But none has ever yet heard of the English
+vote or of an "English-American" element in the population. It is not
+that the Englishman, whether a naturalised American or not, does not
+take as keen an interest in the politics of the country as the people of
+any other nation; on the contrary, he is incomparably better equipped
+than any other to take that interest intelligently. But he plays his
+part as if it were in the politics of his own country, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227"></a>[<a href="./images/227.png">227</a>]</span>guided by
+precisely the same considerations as the American voters around
+him.<a name="FNanchor_227:1_29" id="FNanchor_227:1_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_227:1_29" class="fnanchor">[227:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>The individual Irishman or German will often take pride in splitting off
+from the people of his own blood in matters political and voting "as an
+American." It never occurs to the Englishman to do otherwise. The
+Irishman and the German will often boast, or you will hear it claimed
+for them, that they become assimilated quickly and that "in time," or
+"in the second generation," they are good Americans. The Englishman
+needs no assimilation; but feels himself to be, almost from the day when
+he lands (provided that he comes to live and not as a tourist), of one
+substance and colour with the people about him. Not seldom he is rather
+annoyed that those around him, remembering that he is English, seem to
+expect of him the sentiments of a "foreigner," which he in no way feels.</p>
+
+<p>More than once, it is true, during my residence in America I have been
+approached by individuals or by <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228"></a>[<a href="./images/228.png">228</a>]</span>committees, with invitations to
+associate myself with some proposed political organisation of Englishmen
+"to make our weight felt;" but in justice to those who have made the
+suggestion it should be said that it has always been the outcome of
+exasperation at a moment either when Fenianism was peculiarly rampant in
+the neighbourhood, or when members of other nationalities were doing
+their best to create ill-will between Great Britain and the United
+States. The idea of organising, as the members of other nationalities
+have organised, for the mere purpose of sharing in the party plunder,
+has, I believe, never been seriously contemplated by any Englishmen in
+America; though there are many communities in which their vote might
+well give them the balance of power. It would, as a rule, be easier to
+pick out&mdash;say, in Chicago&mdash;a Southerner who had lived in the North for
+ten years than an Englishman who had lived there for the same length of
+time. It would certainly be safer to guess the Southerner's party
+affiliation.</p>
+
+<p>The ideas of Englishmen in England about American politics are vague.
+They have a general notion that there is a great deal of politics in
+America, that it is mostly corrupt, and that "the best people" do not
+take any interest in it. As for the last proposition, it is only locally
+or partially true, and quite untrue in the sense in which the Englishman
+understands it.</p>
+
+<p>The word "politics" means two entirely separate things in England and in
+the United States. Understanding the word in its English sense, it is
+conspicuously untrue that the "best people" in America do not take at
+least as much an interest in politics as the "best people" take in
+England. Selecting as a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229"></a>[<a href="./images/229.png">229</a>]</span>representative of the "best people" of America,
+any citizen eminent in his particular community&mdash;capitalist, landed
+proprietor or "real-estate owner," banker, manufacturer, lawyer, railway
+president, or what not,&mdash;that man as a usual thing takes a very active
+interest in politics, and not in the politics of the nation only, but of
+his State and his municipality. He is known to be a pillar of one party
+or the other; he gives liberally of his own funds and of the funds of
+his firm or company to the party treasury<a name="FNanchor_229:1_30" id="FNanchor_229:1_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_229:1_30" class="fnanchor">[229:1]</a>; he is consulted by,
+and advises with, the local committees; representatives of the national
+committees or from other parts of the State call upon him for
+information; he concerns himself intimately with the appointments to
+political office made from his section of the country; he attends public
+meetings and entertains visiting speakers at his house; as far as may be
+judicious (and sometimes much further), he endeavours by his example or
+precept to influence the votes and ways of thought of those in his
+service. The chances of his being sent to Congress or to the Senate, of
+his becoming a cabinet minister, being appointed to a foreign mission,
+or accepting a position on some commission of a public character, are
+vastly greater than with the man of corresponding position in England.
+So far from not taking an interest in politics, as Englishmen understand
+the phrase, he is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230"></a>[<a href="./images/230.png">230</a>]</span>commonly a most energetic and valuable supporter of
+his party.</p>
+
+<p>But&mdash;and here is the nub of the matter&mdash;politics in America include
+whole strata of political work which are scarcely understood in England.
+When the English visitor is told in the United States that "our best
+people will not take any interest in politics," it is usually in the
+office of a financier, or at a fashionable dinner table, in New York or
+some other of the great cities. What is intended to be conveyed to him
+is that the "best people" will not take part in the active work in
+municipal politics or in that portion of the national politics which
+falls within the municipal area. The millionaire, the gentleman of
+refinement and leisure, will not "take off his coat" and attend primary
+meetings, or make tours of the saloons and meet Tammany or "the City
+Hall gang" on its own ground. As a matter of fact it is rather
+surprising to see how often he does it; but it is spasmodically and in
+occasional fits of enthusiasm for Reform, "with a large R." And,
+whatever temporary value these intermittent efforts may have (and they
+have great value, if only as a warning to the "gangs" that it is
+possible to go too far), they are in the long run of little avail
+against the constant daily and nightly work of the members of a
+"machine" to whom that work means daily bread.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that it is surprising to see how often these "best people"
+do go down into the slums and begin work at the beginning; and the
+tendency to do so is growing more and more frequent. The reproach that
+they do not do it enough has not the force to-day that once it had.
+Meanwhile in England there is little complaint that the same people do
+not do that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231"></a>[<a href="./images/231.png">231</a>]</span>particular work, for the excellent reason that that work
+does not exist to be done. It would only be tedious here to go into an
+elaborate explanation of why it does not exist. The reason is to be
+found in the differences in the political structure of the two
+countries&mdash;in the much more representative character of the government
+(or rather of the methods of election to office) in America&mdash;in the
+multiplication of Federal, State, county, and municipal
+office-holders&mdash;in the larger number of offices, including many which
+are purely judicial, which are elective, and which are filled by party
+candidates elected by a partisan vote&mdash;in the identification of national
+and municipal politics all over the country.</p>
+
+<p>Of all these causes, it is probably the last which is fundamentally most
+operative. The local democracy, local republicanism everywhere, is a
+part of the national Democratic or Republican organisation. The party as
+a whole is composed of these municipal units. Each municipal campaign is
+conducted with an eye to the general fortunes of the party in the State
+or the nation; and the same power that appoints a janitor in a city hall
+may dictate the selection of a presidential candidate.</p>
+
+<p>Until very recently, this phenomenon was practically unknown in England.
+The "best person"&mdash;he who "took an interest in politics" as a Liberal or
+as a Conservative&mdash;was no more concerned, as Liberal or Conservative, in
+the election of his town officers than he was accustomed to take part in
+the weekly sing-song at the village public house. National politics did
+not touch municipal politics. Within the last two decades or so,
+however, there has been a marked <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232"></a>[<a href="./images/232.png">232</a>]</span>change, and not in London and a few
+large cities alone.</p>
+
+<p>Englishmen who have been accustomed to believe that the high standard of
+purity in English public life, as compared with what was supposed to be
+the standard in America, was chiefly owing to the divorcement of the
+two, are not altogether gratified at the change or easy in their mind as
+to the future. London is still a long way from having such an
+organisation as Tammany Hall in either the Moderate or Progressive
+party; but it is not easy to see what insuperable obstacles would exist
+to the formation of such an organisation, with certain limitations, if a
+great and unscrupulous political genius should arise among the members
+of either party in the London County Council and should bend his
+energies to the task. It is not, of course, necessary that, because
+Englishmen are approximating to the American system in this particular,
+they should be unable to avoid adopting its worst American abuses. But
+it will do no harm if Englishmen in general recognise that what is, it
+is to be hoped, still far from inevitable, was a short time ago
+impossible. If Great Britain must admit an influence which has, even
+though only incidentally, bred pestilence and corruption elsewhere, it
+might be well to take in time whatever sanitary and preventive measures
+may be available against similar consequences.<a name="FNanchor_232:1_31" id="FNanchor_232:1_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_232:1_31" class="fnanchor">[232:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile in the United States there is continually <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233"></a>[<a href="./images/233.png">233</a>]</span>being raised, in
+ever increasing volume, the cry for the separation of local and national
+politics. It is true that small headway has yet been made towards any
+tangible reform; but the desire is there. Again, therefore, it is
+curious that in politics, as in so many other things, there are two
+currents setting in precisely opposing directions in the two
+countries&mdash;in America a reaction against corruptions which have crept in
+during the season of growth and ferment and an attempt to return to
+something of the simplicity of earlier models, and, simultaneously in
+England, hardly a danger, but a possibility of sliding into a danger, of
+admitting precisely those abuses of which the United States is
+endeavouring to purge itself. The tendencies at work are exactly
+analogous to those which, as we have seen, are operating to modify the
+respective modes of speech of the two peoples. What the ultimate effect
+of either force will be, it is impossible even to conjecture. But it is
+unpleasant for an Englishman to consider even the remotest possibility
+of a time coming, though long after he himself is dead, when the people
+of America will draw awful warnings from the corrupt state of politics
+in England, and bless themselves that in the United States the municipal
+rings which dominate and scourge the great cities in England are
+unknown.</p>
+
+<p>At present that time is far distant, and there can be no reasonable
+doubt that there is much more corruption in public affairs in the United
+States than in England. The possibilities of corruption are greater,
+because there are so many more men whose influence or vote may be worth
+buying; but it is to be feared that the evil does not exceed merely in
+proportion to the excess of opportunity. Granted that bribery and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234"></a>[<a href="./images/234.png">234</a>]</span>the
+use of undue influence are most obvious and most rampant in those
+spheres which have not their counterpart in Great Britain&mdash;in municipal
+wards and precincts, in county conventions and State legislatures&mdash;it
+still remains that the taint has spread upwards into other regions which
+in English politics are pure. There is every reason to think that the
+Englishman is justified in his belief that the motives which guide his
+public men and the principles which govern his public policy are, on the
+whole, higher than those which guide and inspire and govern the men or
+policies of any other nation. Bismarck's (if it was Bismarck's)
+confidence in the <i>parole de gentleman</i> is still justified. In America,
+a similar faith in matters of politics would at times be sorely tried.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps as good an illustration as could be cited of the greater
+possibilities of corruption in the United States, is contained in a
+statement of the fact that a very few thousand dollars would at one time
+have sufficed to prevent Mr. Bryan from becoming the Democratic
+candidate for the Presidency in 1896. This is not mere hearsay, for I am
+able to speak from knowledge which was not acquired after the event. Nor
+for one moment is it suggested that Mr. Bryan himself was thus easily
+corruptible, nor even that those who immediately nominated him could
+have been purchased for the sum mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that for a certain specified sum the leaders of a particular
+county convention were willing to elect an anti-Bryan delegation. The
+delegation then elected would unquestionably control the State
+convention subsequently to be held; and the delegation to be elected
+again at that convention would have a very <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235"></a>[<a href="./images/235.png">235</a>]</span>powerful influence in
+shaping the action of the National Convention at St. Louis. The
+situation was understood and the facts not disputed. Those to whom the
+application for the money was made took all things into consideration
+and determined that it was not worth it; that it would be better to let
+things slide. They slid. If those gentlemen had foreseen the full volume
+of the avalanche that was coming, I think that the money would have been
+found.</p>
+
+<p>It was, however, better as it was. The motives which prompted the
+refusal of the money were, as I was told, not motives of morality. It
+was not any objection to the act of bribery, but a mere question of
+expediency. It was not considered that the "goods" were worth the money.
+But, as always, it was better for the country that the immoral act was
+not done. The Free Silver poison was working in the blood of the body
+politic, and it was better to let the malady come to a head and fight it
+strenuously than to drive it back and let it go on with its work of
+internal corruption. Looking back now it is easy to see that the fight
+of 1896 must have come at some time, and it was best that it came when
+it did. The gentlemen who declined to produce the few thousand dollars
+asked of them (the sum was fifteen thousand dollars, if I remember
+rightly, or three thousand pounds) would, a few weeks later, have given
+twice the sum to have the opportunity back again. Now, I imagine, they
+are well content that they acted as they did.</p>
+
+<p>As illustrating the methods which are not infrequent in connection with
+the work of the State legislatures, I may mention that I once acted
+(without premeditation) as witness to the depositing of two thousand
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236"></a>[<a href="./images/236.png">236</a>]</span>dollars in gold coin in a box at a safety deposit vault, by the
+representative of a great corporation, the key of which box was
+afterwards handed to a member of the local State legislature. The vote
+and influence of that member were necessary for the defeat of certain
+bills&mdash;bills, be it said, iniquitous in themselves&mdash;which would have
+cost that particular corporation many times two thousand dollars; and
+two thousand dollars was the sum at which that legislator valued the
+aforesaid vote and influence.</p>
+
+<p>It is not always necessary to take so much precaution to secure secrecy
+as was needed in this case. The recklessness with which State
+legislators sometimes accept cheques and other easily traceable media of
+exchange is a little bewildering, until one understands how secure they
+really are from any risk of information being lodged against them. A
+certain venerable legislator in one of the North-western States some
+years ago gained considerable notoriety, of a confidential kind, by
+being the only member of his party in the legislature at the time who
+declined to accept his share in a distribution which was going on of the
+mortgage bonds of a certain railway company. It was not high principle
+nor any absurd punctiliousness on his part that made him decline. "In my
+youth," said he to the representative of the railway company, "I was an
+earnest anti-slavery man and I still recoil from bonds." It was said
+that he received his proportion of the pool in a more negotiable form.</p>
+
+<p>It would be easy, even from my own individual knowledge, to multiply
+stories of this class; but the effect would only be to mislead the
+English reader, while the American is already familiar with such
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237"></a>[<a href="./images/237.png">237</a>]</span>stories in sufficiency. The object is not to insist upon the fact that
+there is corruption in American public life, but rather to show what
+kind of corruption it is, and that it is largely of a kind the
+opportunity for indulgence in which does not exist in England. The
+method of nominating candidates for Parliament in England removes the
+temptation to "influence" primaries and bribe delegations. In the
+absence of State legislatures, railway and other corporations are not
+exposed to the same system of blackmail.</p>
+
+<p>Let us suppose that each county in England had its legislature of two
+chambers, as every State has in America, the members of these
+legislatures being elected necessarily only from constituencies in which
+they lived, so that a slum district of a town was obliged to elect a
+slum-resident, a village a resident of that village; let us further
+suppose that by the mixture of races in the population certain districts
+could by mere preponderance of the votes be expected to elect only a
+German, a Scandinavian, or an Irishman&mdash;in each case a man who had been
+perhaps, but a few years before, an immigrant drawn from a low class in
+the population of his own country; give that legislature almost
+unbridled power over all business institutions within the borders of the
+county, including the determination of rates of charge on that portion
+of the lines of great railway companies which lay within the county
+borders&mdash;is there not danger that that power would be frequently abused?
+When one party, after a long term of trial in opposition, found itself
+suddenly in control of both houses, would it always refrain from using
+its power for the gratification of party purposes, for revenge, and for
+the assistance of its own <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238"></a>[<a href="./images/238.png">238</a>]</span>supporters? Local feeling sometimes becomes,
+even in England, much inflamed against a given railway company, or some
+large employer of labour, or great landlord, whether justly or not. It
+may be that in the case of a railway, the rates of fare are considered
+high, the train service bad, or the accommodations at the stations poor.
+At such a time a local legislature would be likely to pass almost any
+bill that was introduced to hurt that railway company, merely as a means
+of bringing pressure to bear upon it to correct the supposed
+shortcomings. It obviously then becomes only too easy for an
+unscrupulous member to bring forward a bill which will have plausible
+colour of public-spirited motive, and which if it became a law would
+cost the railway company untold inconvenience and many tens of thousands
+of pounds; and the railway company can have that bill withdrawn or
+"sidetracked" for a mere couple of hundred.</p>
+
+<p>Personally I am thankful to say that I have such confidence in the
+sterling quality of the fibre of the English people (so long as it is
+free, as it is in England, from Irish or other alien influence) as to
+believe that, even under these circumstances, and with all these
+possibilities of wrong-doing, the local legislatures would remain
+reasonably honest. But what might come with long use and practice, long
+exposure to temptation, it is not easy to say. Some things occur in the
+colonies which are not comforting. If, then, the corruption in American
+politics be great, the evil is due rather to the system than to any
+inherent inferiority in the native honesty of the people. Their
+integrity, if it falls, has the excuse of abundant temptation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239"></a>[<a href="./images/239.png">239</a>]</span></p><p>The most instructive experience, I think, which I myself had of the
+disregard of morality in the realm of municipal politics was received
+when I associated myself, sentimentally rather than actively, with a
+movement at a certain election directed towards the defeat of one who
+was probably the most corrupt alderman in what was at the time perhaps
+the corruptest city in the United States. Of the man's entire depravity,
+from a political point of view, there was not the least question among
+either his friends or his enemies. Nominally a Democrat, his vote and
+policy were never guided by any other consideration than those of his
+own pocket. On an alderman's salary (which he spent several times over
+in his personal expenditure each year), without other business or
+visible means of making money, he had grown wealthy&mdash;wealthy enough to
+make his contributions to campaign funds run into the thousands of
+dollars,&mdash;wealthy enough to be able always to forget to take change for
+a five-dollar or a ten-dollar bill when buying anything in his own
+ward,&mdash;wealthy enough to distribute regularly (was it five hundred or a
+thousand?) turkeys every Thanksgiving Day among his constituents. No one
+pretended to suggest that his money was drawn from any other source than
+from the public funds, from blackmail, and from the sale of his vote and
+influence in the City Council. In that Council he had held his seat
+unassailably for many years through all the shifting and changing of
+parties in power. But a spirit of reform was abroad and certain
+public-spirited persons decided that it was time that the scandal of his
+continuance in office should be stopped. The same conclusion had been
+arrived at by various campaign <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240"></a>[<a href="./images/240.png">240</a>]</span>managers and bodies of independent and
+upright citizens on divers preceding occasions, without any result worth
+mentioning. But at last it seemed that the time had come. There were
+various encouraging signs and portents in the political heavens and all
+auguries were favourable. There were, it is true, experienced
+politicians who shook their heads. They blessed us and wished us well.
+They even contributed liberally to our campaign fund; but the most
+experienced among them were not hopeful.</p>
+
+<p>It was a vigorous campaign&mdash;on our side; with meetings, brass bands,
+constant house-to-house canvassing, and processions <i>ad libitum</i>. On the
+other side, there was no campaign at all to speak of; only the man whom
+we were seeking to unseat spent some portion of every day and the whole
+of every night going about the ward from saloon to saloon, always
+forgetting the change for those five-dollar and ten-dollar bills, always
+willing to cheer lustily when one of our processions went by, and, as we
+heard, daily increasing his orders for turkeys for the approaching
+Thanksgiving season.</p>
+
+<p>So far as the saloon keepers, the gamblers, the owners and patrons of
+disorderly houses went, we had no hope of winning their allegiance; but,
+after all, they were a small numerical minority of the voters of the
+ward. The majority consisted of low-class Italians, unskilled labourers,
+and it was their votes that must decide the issue. There was not one of
+them who was not thoroughly talked to, as well as every member of his
+family of a reasoning age. There was not one who did not fully recognise
+that the alderman was a thief and an entirely immoral scamp; but their
+labour was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241"></a>[<a href="./images/241.png">241</a>]</span>farmed by, perhaps, half a dozen Italian contractors. These
+men were the Alderman's henchmen. As long as he continued in the
+Council, he was able to keep their men employed&mdash;on municipal works and
+on the work of the various railway and other large corporations which he
+was able to blackmail. We, on our part, had obtained promises of
+employment, from friends of decent government regardless of politics in
+all parts of the city, for approximately as many men as could possibly
+be thrown out of work in case of an upheaval. But of what use were
+these, more or less unverifiable, promises, when on the eve of the
+election the half a dozen contractors (who of course had grown rich with
+their alderman's continuance in office) gave each individual labourer in
+the ward to understand clearly that if the present alderman was defeated
+each one of them would have to go and live somewhere&mdash;live or
+starve,&mdash;for not one stroke of work would they ever get so long as they
+lived in that ward?</p>
+
+<p>It was, as I have said, a vigorous campaign on our side; and the
+Delectable One was re-elected by something more than his usual majority.
+On the night of the election it was reported&mdash;though this may have been
+mere rumour&mdash;that the bills which he laid on the counter of each saloon
+in the ward (and always forgot to take any change) were of the value of
+fifty dollars each. That was some years ago, but I understand that he is
+still in that same City Council, representing that same ward.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the same city that one year I received notice of my personal
+property tax, the amount assessed against me being about ten times
+higher than it ought to have been. Experience had taught me that it was
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242"></a>[<a href="./images/242.png">242</a>]</span>useless to make any protest against small impositions, but a
+multiplication of my obligations by tenfold was not to be submitted to
+without a struggle. I wrote therefore to the proper authority, making
+protest, and was told that the matter would be investigated. After a
+lapse of some days, I was invited to call at the City Hall. There I was
+informed by one of the subordinate officials that it was undoubtedly a
+case of malice&mdash;that the assessment had been made by either a personal
+or a political enemy. I was then taken to see the Chief. The Chief was a
+corpulent Irishman of the worst type. My guide leaned over him and in an
+undertone, but not so low that I did not hear, gave him a brief <i>r&eacute;sum&eacute;</i>
+of the story, stating that it was undoubtedly a case of intentional
+injustice, and concluding with an account of myself and my interests
+which showed that the speaker had taken no little trouble to post
+himself upon the subject. He emphasised the fact of my association with
+the press. At this point for the first time the Chief evinced some
+interest in the tale. His intelligence responded to the word
+"newspapers" as promptly as if an electrical current had suddenly been
+switched into his system. "H'm! newspapers!" he grunted. Then, heaving
+his bulk half round in his chair so as partially to face me&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"This is a mistake," he said. "We will say no more about it. Your
+assessment's cancelled."</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," I said, "I have no objection to paying one-tenth of
+the amount. If an '0' is cut off the end&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right," he said. "The whole thing is cut off."</p>
+
+<p>I made another protest, but he waved me away and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243"></a>[<a href="./images/243.png">243</a>]</span>my guide led me from
+the room. Because it was opined that, through the press, I might be able
+to make myself objectionable if the imposition was persisted in, I paid
+no tax at all that year. Which was every whit as immoral as the original
+offence.</p>
+
+<p>Stories of this class it would be easy to multiply indefinitely; but
+again I say that it is not my desire to insist on the corruptness which
+exists in American political life, but rather to explain to English
+readers what the nature of that corruptness is and in what spheres of
+the political life of the country it is able to find lodgment. What I
+have endeavoured to illustrate is, first, how the peculiar political
+system of the United States may, under some exceptional conditions, make
+it possible for even the nomination of a President to be treated as a
+matter of purchase, though the candidate himself and those who
+immediately surround him may be of incorruptible integrity; second, the
+unrivalled opportunities for bribery and other forms of political
+wrong-doing furnished by the existence of the State legislatures, with
+their eight thousand members, drawn necessarily from all ranks and
+elements of the population, and possessing exceptional power over the
+commercial affairs of the people of their respective States; and, third,
+the methods by which, in certain large cities, power is attained, used,
+and abused by the municipal "bosses" of all degrees, a condition of
+affairs which is in large measure only made possible by the
+identification of local and national politics and political parties. In
+each case the conditions which make the corruption possible do not exist
+in England, even though in the last named (the identification of local
+with national politics and parties) the tendency in Great <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244"></a>[<a href="./images/244.png">244</a>]</span>Britain is
+distinctly in the direction of the American model. It is, perhaps, an
+inevitable result of the working of the Anglo-Saxon "particularistic"
+spirit, which ultimately rebels against any form of national government
+or of national politics in which the individual and the individual of
+each locality, is debarred from making his voice heard.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>As for the corruptness which is supposed to exist in Congress itself,
+this I believe to be largely a matter of partisan gossip and newspaper
+talk. It may be that every Congress contains among its members a few
+whose integrity is not beyond the temptation of a direct monetary bribe;
+and it would perhaps be curious if it were not so. But it is the opinion
+of the best informed that the direct bribery of a member of either the
+Senate or the House is extremely rare. It happens, probably, all too
+frequently that members consent to acquire at a low figure shares in
+undertakings which are likely to be favourably affected by legislation
+for which they vote, in the expectation or hope of profit therefrom; but
+it is exceedingly difficult to say in any given case whether a member's
+vote has been influenced by his financial interest (whether, on public
+grounds, he would not have voted as he did under any circumstances), and
+at what point the mere employment of sound business judgment ends and
+the prostitution of legislative influence begins. The same may be said
+of the accusations so commonly made against members of making use of
+information which they acquire in the committee room for purposes of
+speculation.</p>
+
+<p>Washington, during the sessions of Congress is full of "lobbyists"&mdash;<i>i.
+e.</i>, men who have no other reason <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245"></a>[<a href="./images/245.png">245</a>]</span>for their presence at the capital
+than to further the progress of legislation in which they are interested
+or who are sent there for the purpose by others who have such an
+interest; but it is my conviction (and I know it is that of others
+better informed than myself) that the instances wherein the labours of a
+lobbyist go beyond the use of legitimate argument in favour of entirely
+meritorious measures are immensely fewer than the reader of the
+sensational press might suppose. The American National Legislature is,
+indeed, a vastly purer body than demagogues, or the American press,
+would have an outsider believe.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that large manufacturing and commercial concerns do
+exert themselves to secure the election to the House, and perhaps to the
+Senate, of persons who are practically their direct representatives,
+their chief business in Congress being the shaping of favourable
+legislation or the warding off of that which would be disadvantageous to
+the interests which are behind them. Undoubtedly also such large
+concerns, or associated groups of them, can bring considerable pressure
+to bear upon individual members in divers ways, and there have been
+notorious cases wherein it has been shown that this pressure has been
+unscrupulously used. Except in the case of the railways, which have only
+a secondary interest in tariff legislation, this particular abuse must
+be charged to the account of the protective policy, and its development
+in some measure would perhaps be inevitable in any country where a
+similar policy prevailed.</p>
+
+<p>In the British Parliament there are, of course, few important lines of
+trade or industry which are not abundantly represented, and both Houses
+contain <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246"></a>[<a href="./images/246.png">246</a>]</span>railway directors and others who speak frankly as the
+representatives of railway interests, and lose thereby nothing of the
+respect of the country or their fellow-members. It is not possible here
+to explain in detail why the assumption, which prevails in America, that
+a railway company is necessarily a public enemy, and that any argument
+in favour of such a corporation is an argument against the public
+welfare, does not obtain in England. It will be necessary later on not
+only to refer to the fact that fear of capitalism is immensely stronger
+in America than it is in England, but also to explain why there is good
+reason why it should be so. For the present, it is enough to note that
+it is possible for members of Parliament to do, without incurring a
+shadow of suspicion of their integrity, things which would damn a member
+of Congress irreparably in the eyes alike of his colleagues and of the
+country. There is hardly a railway bill passed through Parliament the
+supporters of which would not in its passage through Congress have to
+run the gauntlet of all manner of insinuation and abuse; and when the
+sensational press of the United States raises a hue and cry of "Steal!"
+in regard to a particular measure, the Englishman (until he understands
+the difference in the conditions in the two countries) may be bewildered
+by finding on investigation that the bill is one entirely praiseworthy
+which would pass through Parliament as a matter of course, the only
+justification for the outcry being that the legislation is likely,
+perhaps most indirectly, to prove advantageous to some particular
+industry or locality. The fact that the measure is just and deserving of
+support on merely patriotic grounds is immaterial, when party capital
+can be made from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247"></a>[<a href="./images/247.png">247</a>]</span>such an outcry. I have on more than one occasion known
+entirely undeserved suffering to be inflicted in this way on men of the
+highest character who were acting from none but disinterested motives;
+and he who would have traffic with large affairs in the United States
+must early learn to grow callous to newspaper abuse.</p>
+
+<p>In wider and more general ways than have yet been noticed, however, the
+members of Congress are subjected to undue influences in a measure far
+beyond anything known to the members of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>In the colonial days, governors not seldom complained of the law by
+which members of the provincial assemblies could only be elected to sit
+for the towns or districts in which they actually resided. The same law
+once prevailed in England, but it was repealed in the time of George
+III., and had been disregarded in practice since the days of
+Elizabeth.<a name="FNanchor_247:1_32" id="FNanchor_247:1_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_247:1_32" class="fnanchor">[247:1]</a> Under the Constitution of the United States it is,
+however, still necessary that a member of Congress should be a resident
+(or "inhabitant") of the State from which he is elected. In some States
+it is the law that he must reside in the particular district of the
+State which elects him, and custom has made this the rule in all. A
+candidate rejected by his own constituency, therefore, cannot stand for
+another; and it follows that a member who desires to continue in public
+life must hold the good will of his particular locality.</p>
+
+<p>So entirely is this accepted as a matter of course that any other system
+(the British system for instance) seems to the great majority of
+Americans quite unnatural and absurd; and it has the obvious immediate
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248"></a>[<a href="./images/248.png">248</a>]</span>advantage that each member does more truly "represent" his particular
+constituents than is likely to be the case when he sits for a borough or
+a Division in which he may never have set foot until he began to canvas
+it. On the other hand, it is an obvious disadvantage that when a member
+for any petty local reason forfeits the good will of his own
+constituency, his services, no matter how valuable they may be, are
+permanently lost to the State.</p>
+
+<p>The term for which a member of the Lower House is elected in America is
+only two years, so that a member who has any ambition for a continuous
+legislative career must, almost from the day of his election, begin to
+consider the chance of being re-elected. As this depends altogether on
+his ability to hold the gratitude of his one constituency, it is
+inevitable that he should become more or less engrossed in the effort to
+serve the local needs; and a constituency, or the party leaders in a
+constituency, generally, indeed, measure a man's availability for
+re-election by what is called his "usefulness."</p>
+
+<p>If you ask a politician of local authority whether the sitting member is
+a good one, he will reply, "No; he hasn't any influence at Washington at
+all. He can't do a thing for us!" Or, "Yes, he's pretty good; he seems
+to get things through all right." The "things" which the member "gets
+through" may be the appointment of residents of the district to minor
+government positions, the securing of appropriations of public moneys
+for such works as the dredging or widening of a river channel to the
+advantage of the district or the improvement of the local harbour, and
+the passage of bills providing for the erection in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249"></a>[<a href="./images/249.png">249</a>]</span>district of new
+post-offices or other government buildings. Many other measures may, of
+course, be of direct local interest; but a member's chief opportunities
+for earning the gratitude of his constituency fall under the three
+categories enumerated.</p>
+
+<p>It is obvious that two years is too short a term for any but an
+exceptionally gifted man to make his mark, either in the eyes of his
+colleagues or of his constituency, by conspicuous national services.
+Even if achieved, it is doubtful if in the eyes of the majority of the
+constituencies (or the leaders in those constituencies) any such
+impalpable distinction would be held to compensate for a demonstrated
+inability to get the proper share of local advantages. The result is
+that while the member of Parliament may be said to consider himself
+primarily as a member of his party and his chief business to be that of
+co-operating with that party in securing the conduct of National affairs
+according to the party beliefs, the member of Congress considers himself
+primarily as the representative of his district and his chief business
+to be the securing for that district of as many plums from the Federal
+pie as possible.</p>
+
+<p>Out of these conditions has developed the prevalence of log-rolling in
+Congress: "You vote for my post-office and I'll help you with your
+harbour appropriation." Such exchange of courtesies is continual and, I
+think, universal. The annual River and Harbour Bill (which last year
+appropriated $25,414,000 of public money for all manner of works in all
+corners of the country) is an amazing legislative product.</p>
+
+<p>Another result is that the individual member must hold himself
+constantly alert to find what his "people" at home want: always on the
+lookout for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250"></a>[<a href="./images/250.png">250</a>]</span>signs of approval or disapproval from his constituency. And
+the constituency on its side does not hesitate to let him know just what
+it thinks of him and precisely what jobs it requires him to do at any
+given moment. Nor is it the constituency as a whole, through its
+recognised party leaders, which alone thinks that it has a right to
+instruct, direct, or influence its representative, but individuals of
+sufficient political standing to consider themselves entitled to have
+their private interest looked after, manufacturing and business concerns
+the payrolls of which support a large number of voters, labour unions,
+and all sorts of societies and organisations of various kinds&mdash;they one
+and all assert their right to advise the Congressman in his policies or
+to call for his assistance in furthering their particular ends, under
+threat, tacit or expressed, of the loss of their support when he seeks
+re-election. The English member of Parliament thinks that he is
+subjected to a sufficiency of pressure of this particular sort; but he
+has not to bear one-tenth of what is daily meted out to his American
+<i>confr&egrave;re</i>, nor is he under any similar necessity of paying attention to
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Under such conditions it is evident that a Congressman can have but a
+restricted liberty to act or vote according to his individual
+convictions. It is only human that, in matters which are not of great
+national import, a man should at times be willing to believe that his
+personal opinions may be wrong when adherence to those opinions would
+wreck his political career. So the Congressman too commonly acquires a
+habit of subservience which is assuredly not wholesome either for the
+individual or for the country; and sometimes the effort to trim sails to
+catch every favouring breeze has <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251"></a>[<a href="./images/251.png">251</a>]</span>curious oblique results. As an
+instance of this may be cited the action taken by Congress in regard to
+the army canteen. A year or more back, the permission to army posts to
+retain within their own limits and subject to the supervision of the
+post authorities, a canteen for the use of soldiers, was abolished. The
+soldiers have since been compelled to do their drinking outside, and, as
+a result, this drinking has been done without control or supervision,
+and has produced much more serious demoralisation. The action of
+Congress was taken in the face of an earnest and nearly unanimous
+protest from experienced army officers&mdash;the men, that is, who were
+directly concerned with the problem in question. The Congressmen acted
+as they did under the pressure of the Woman's Christian Temperance
+Union, and with the dread lest a vote for the canteen should be
+interpreted as a vote for liquor, and should stand in the way of their
+own political success.</p>
+
+<p>From what has been said it will be seen that the member of Congress is
+compelled to give a deplorably large proportion of his time and thought
+to paltry local matters, leaving a deplorably small portion of either to
+be devoted to national questions; while in the exercise of his functions
+as a legislator he is likely to be influenced by a variety of motives
+which ought to be quite impertinent and are often unworthy. These things
+however seem to be almost inevitable results of the national political
+structure. The individual corruptibility of the members of either House
+(their readiness, that is to be influenced by any considerations, other
+than that of their re-election, of their own interests, financial or
+otherwise), I believe to be grossly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252"></a>[<a href="./images/252.png">252</a>]</span>exaggerated in the popular mind.
+Certainly a stranger is likely to get the idea that the Congress is a
+much less honourable and less earnest body than it is.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The subject of the corruptness of the public service in the larger
+cities brings up again a matter which has been already touched upon,
+namely the extent to which this corruptness is in its origin Irish and
+not an indigenous American growth. Under the favourable influences of
+American political conditions the Irish have developed exceptional
+capacity for leadership (a capacity which they are also showing in some
+of the British colonies) and they do not generally use their ability or
+their powers for the good of the community. The rapidity with which the
+Irish immigrant blossoms into political authority is a commonplace of
+American journalism:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ere the steamer that brought him had got out of hearing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He was Alderman Mike introducing a bill."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is commonly held by Americans that all political corruptness in the
+United States (certainly all municipal wickedness) is chargeable to
+Irish influence; but it is a position not easy to maintain in the face
+of the example of the city of Philadelphia, the government of which has
+from the beginning been chiefly in the hands of Americans, many of whom
+have been members of the oldest and best Philadelphia families. Yet the
+administration of Philadelphia has been as corrupt and as openly
+disregardful of the welfare of the community as ever was that of New
+York. While Irishmen are generally Democrats, both Philadelphia and the
+State of Pennsylvania, are overwhelmingly Republican and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253"></a>[<a href="./images/253.png">253</a>]</span>devoted to the
+protective policy under which so many of the industries of the State
+have prospered exceedingly. Those who have fought for the cause of
+municipal reform in Philadelphia find that, while the masses of the
+people of the city would prefer good government, it is almost impossible
+to get them to reject an official candidate of the Republican party. The
+Republican "bosses" have thus been able to impose on the city officials
+of the worst kind, who have served them faithfully to the disaster of
+the community.<a name="FNanchor_253:1_33" id="FNanchor_253:1_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_253:1_33" class="fnanchor">[253:1]</a> None the less, notwithstanding particular
+exceptions, it is a fact that as a general rule the corrupt
+maladministration of affairs in American cities is the direct result of
+Irish influence.</p>
+
+<p>The opportunities of the Irish leaders for securing control of the city
+administration, or of certain important and lucrative divisions of this
+administration, have been furthered, particularly in such cities as New
+York and San Francisco, by the influence they are able to gain over
+bodies of immigrants who are also in the fold of the Roman Catholic
+Church, and who, on the ground of difference of language and other
+causes, have less quickness of perception of their own political
+opportunities. The Irish leaders have been able to direct in very large
+measure the votes of the Italians (more particularly the Italians from
+the South), the Bohemians, and the other groups of immigrants from
+Catholic communities. As the Irish immigration has decreased both
+absolutely and relatively, the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254"></a>[<a href="./images/254.png">254</a>]</span>numbers of voters supporting the
+leadership of the bosses of Tammany Hall and of the similar
+organisations in Chicago and San Francisco have been made good, and in
+fact substantially increased, by the addition of Catholic voters of
+other nationalities.</p>
+
+<p>I wish the English reader to grasp fully the significance of these facts
+before he allows the stories which he hears of the municipal immorality
+which exists in the United States to colour too deeply his estimate of
+the character of the American people. That immorality is chiefly Irish
+in its origin and is made continuously possible by the ascendency of the
+Irish over masses of other non-Anglo-Saxon peoples. The Celts were never
+a race of individual workers either as agriculturists or in handicraft.
+That "law of intense personal labour" which is the foundation of the
+strength of the Anglo-Saxon communities never commanded their full
+obedience, as the history of Ireland and the condition of the country
+to-day abundantly testify. It is not, then, the fault of the individual
+Irishman that when he migrates to America, instead of going out to the
+frontier to "grow up" with the territory or taking himself to
+agricultural work in the great districts of the West which are always
+calling for workers, he prefers to remain in the cities to engage when
+possible in the public service, or, failing that, to enter the domestic
+service of a private employer.</p>
+
+<p>It should not be necessary to say (except that Irish-American
+susceptibilities are sometimes extraordinarily sensitive) that I share
+to the full that admiration which all people feel for the best traits in
+the Irish character; but, in spite of individual exceptions, I urge that
+it is not in the nature of the race to become good and helpful <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255"></a>[<a href="./images/255.png">255</a>]</span>citizens
+according to Anglo-Saxon ideals, and that, as far as those qualities are
+concerned which have made the greatness of the United States, the
+contribution from the Irish element has been inconsiderable. The
+deftness of the Irishman in political organisation and his lack of
+desire for individual independence, as a result of which he turns either
+to the organising of a governing machine or to some form of personal
+service (in either case merging his own individuality) is as much
+foreign to the American spirit as is the docility of the less
+intelligent class of Germans under their political leaders&mdash;a docility
+which, until very recently has caused the German voters in America to be
+used in masses almost without protest.</p>
+
+<p>It is the Anglo-Saxon, or English, spirit which has played the dominant
+part in moulding the government of the United States, which has made the
+nation what it is, which to-day controls its social usages. The Irish
+invasion of the political field may fairly be said to be in its essence
+an alien invasion; and, while it may be to the discredit of the American
+people that they have allowed themselves in the past to be so engrossed
+in other matters that they have permitted that invasion to attain the
+success which it has attained, I do not fear that in the long run the
+masterful Anglo-Saxon spirit will suffer itself to be permanently
+over-ridden (any more than it has allowed itself to be kept in permanent
+subjection in England), even in the large cities where the Anglo-Saxon
+voter is in a small minority. Ultimately it will throw off the incubus.
+In the meanwhile it is unjust that Englishmen or other Europeans should
+accept as evidence of native American frailty instances of municipal
+abuses and of corrupt methods <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256"></a>[<a href="./images/256.png">256</a>]</span>in a city like New York, where it has not
+been by native Americans that those abuses and those methods were
+originated or that their perpetuation is made possible. On the contrary
+the American minority fights strenuously against them, and I am not sure
+that, being such a minority as it is, it has not made as good a fight as
+is practicable under most difficult conditions. The American people as a
+whole should not be judged by the conditions to which a portion of it
+submits unwillingly in certain narrow areas.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It may be well to explain here (for it is a subject on which the
+Englishman who has lived in America is often consulted) that the
+Republican party may roughly be said to be the equivalent of the
+Conservative party in England, while the Democrats are the Liberals. It
+happens that a precisely reverse notion has (or had until very recent
+years) some vogue in England, the misconception being an inheritance
+from the times of the American Civil War.</p>
+
+<p>British sympathy was not nearly so exclusively with the South at the
+time of the war as is generally supposed in the United States; none the
+less, the ruling and aristocratic classes in England did largely wish to
+see the success of the Southern armies. The Southerner, it was
+understood, was a gentleman, a man of mettle and spirit, and in many
+cases the direct descendant of an old English Cavalier family; while the
+Northerners were for the most part but humdrum and commercially minded
+people who inherited the necessarily somewhat bigoted, if excellent,
+characteristics of their Dutch, Puritan, or Quaker ancestors. The view
+had at least sufficient historical basis to serve as an <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257"></a>[<a href="./images/257.png">257</a>]</span>excuse if not
+as a justification. So it came about that those classes which came to
+form the backbone of the Conservative party were largely sympathisers
+with the South; and, after the war, that sympathy naturally descended to
+the Democratic party rather than to the Northern Republicans. Except,
+however, in one particular the fundamental sentiments which make a man a
+Republican or a Democrat to-day have nothing to do with the issues of
+war times.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know that any one has successfully defined the fundamental
+difference either between a Conservative and a Liberal, or between a
+Republican and a Democrat, nor have I any desire to attempt it; and
+where both parties in each country are in a constant state of flux and
+give-and-take, such a definition would perhaps be impossible. It may be
+that Ruskin came as near to it as is practicable when he spoke of
+himself as "a Tory of the old school,&mdash;the school of Homer and Sir
+Walter Scott."</p>
+
+<p>Many people in either country accept their political opinions ready made
+from their fathers, their early teachers, or their chance friends, and
+remain all their lives believing themselves to belong to&mdash;and voting
+for&mdash;a party with which they have essentially nothing in sympathy. If
+one were to say that a Conservative was a supporter of the Throne and
+the Established Church, a Jingo in foreign politics, an Imperialist in
+colonial matters, an advocate of a strong navy and a disbeliever in free
+trade, tens of thousands of Conservatives might object to having
+assigned to them one or all of these sentiments, and tens of thousands
+of Liberals might insist on laying claim to any of them. Precisely so is
+it in America. None the less the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258"></a>[<a href="./images/258.png">258</a>]</span>Republican party in the mass is the
+party which believes in a strong Federal government, as opposed to the
+independence of the several States; it is a party which believes in the
+principle of a protective tariff; it conducted the Cuban War and is a
+party of Imperial expansion; it is the party which has in general the
+confidence of the business interests of the country and fought for and
+secured the maintenance of the gold standard of currency. It is obvious
+that, however blurred the party lines may be in individual cases, the
+man who in England is by instinct and conviction a Conservative, must in
+America by the same impulse be a Republican.</p>
+
+<p>In both countries there is, moreover, a large element which furnishes
+the chief support to the miscellaneous third parties which succeed each
+other in public attention and whenever the lines are sharply drawn
+between the two great parties, the bulk of these can be trusted to go to
+the Liberal side in England and to the Democratic side in America. Nor
+is it by accident that the Irish in America are mostly Democrats.</p>
+
+<p>I am acutely aware of the inadequacy of such an analysis as the
+foregoing and that many readers will have cause to be dissatisfied with
+what I say; but I have known many Englishmen of Conservative leanings
+who have come to the United States understanding that they would find
+themselves in sympathy with the Democrats and have been bewildered at
+being compelled to call themselves Republicans. Whatever the individual
+policy of one or the other party may be at a given moment, ultimately
+and fundamentally the English Conservative, especially the English Tory,
+is a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259"></a>[<a href="./images/259.png">259</a>]</span>Republican, and the Liberal, especially the Radical, is a
+Democrat. Both Homer and Sir Walter Scott to-day would (if they found
+themselves in America) be Republicans.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_227:1_29" id="Footnote_227:1_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_227:1_29"><span class="label">[227:1]</span></a> For myself, I confess that my interest began somewhat
+prematurely. I had been in the country but a few months and had taken no
+steps towards naturalisation when I voted at an election in a small town
+in a Northwestern Territory where I had been living only for a week or
+two. My vote was quite illegal; but my friends (and every one in a small
+frontier town is one's friend) were all going to vote and told me to
+come along and vote too. The election, which was of the most friendly
+character, like the election of a club committee, proved to be closely
+contested, one man getting in (as City Attorney or Town Clerk or
+something) only by a single vote&mdash;my vote. Since then, the Territory has
+become a populous State, the frontier town has some hundred thousand
+inhabitants, and the gentleman whom I elected has been for some years a
+respected member of the United States Senate. I have never seen any
+cause to regret that illegal vote.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_229:1_30" id="Footnote_229:1_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_229:1_30"><span class="label">[229:1]</span></a> The laws governing expenditures for electoral purposes,
+and the conduct of elections generally, are stricter in England than in
+the United States, and I think it is not to be questioned that there is
+much less bribery of voters. Largely owing to the exertions of Mr.
+Roosevelt, however, laws are now being enacted which will make it more
+difficult for campaign managers to raise the large funds which have
+heretofore been obtainable for election purposes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_232:1_31" id="Footnote_232:1_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_232:1_31"><span class="label">[232:1]</span></a> In as much as a demand that the control of the police
+force should be vested in the County Council has appeared in the
+programme of one political party in London, it may be well to call the
+attention of Englishmen to the fact that it is precisely the association
+of politics with the police which gives to American municipal rings
+their chief power for evil.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_247:1_32" id="Footnote_247:1_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_247:1_32"><span class="label">[247:1]</span></a> See Bryce, <i>The American Commonwealth</i>, vol. i., p.
+188.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_253:1_33" id="Footnote_253:1_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_253:1_33"><span class="label">[253:1]</span></a> Inasmuch as I have twice within a small space referred
+to evils which incidentally grow out of the protective system, lest it
+be thought that I am influenced by any partisan feeling, I had better
+state that my personal sympathies are strongly Republican and
+Protectionist.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260"></a>[<a href="./images/260.png">260</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">American Politics in England</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The System of Parties&mdash;Interdependence of National and Local
+Organisations&mdash;The Federal Government and Sovereign
+States&mdash;The Boss of Warwickshire&mdash;The Unit System&mdash;Prime
+Minister Crooks&mdash;Lanark and the Nation&mdash;New York and Tammany
+Hall&mdash;America's Superior Opportunities for Wickedness&mdash;But
+England is Catching up&mdash;Campaign Reminiscences&mdash;The
+"Hell-box"&mdash;Politics in a Gravel-pit&mdash;Mr. Hearst and Mr.
+Bryan.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The subject of this chapter will, perhaps, be more easy of comprehension
+to the English reader if he will for a moment surrender his imagination
+into my charge while we transfer to England certain political conditions
+of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>There are in the first place, then, the great political parties, in the
+nation and in Parliament (Congress); with the fact always to be borne in
+mind that the members of Congress are not nominated by any central
+committee or association, but are selected and nominated by the people
+of each district. A candidate is not "sent down" to contest a given
+constituency. He is a resident of that constituency, selected in small
+local meetings by the voters themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Next, every County (State) has its own machinery of government,
+including a Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, and other County officials as
+well as a bi-cameral Legislature, with a membership ranging from seventy
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261"></a>[<a href="./images/261.png">261</a>]</span>in some Counties to over three hundred in others. In these County
+Legislatures and governments, parties are split on precisely the same
+lines as in the nation and in Parliament. Members of the House of
+Commons have usually qualified for election by a previous term in the
+County Legislature, while members of the House of Lords are actually
+elected direct, not by the people in the mass, but by the members of the
+County Legislatures only, each county sending to Westminster two members
+so elected. Nor is it to be supposed that these County governments are
+governments in name only.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy to imagine that in England the Counties, each with its
+separate and sovereign government, preceded the National Government and
+voluntarily called it into existence only as a federation of themselves.
+But that, we must for the present understand, was indeed the course of
+history; and when that federation was formed, the various Counties
+entrusted to the Central Government only a strictly limited list of
+powers. The Central Government was authorised to treat with foreign
+nations in the name of the United Counties; to maintain a standing army
+of limited size, and to create a navy; to establish postal routes,
+regardless of County boundaries; to regulate commerce between the
+different Counties, to care for the national coast line and all
+navigable waters within the national dominions, and to levy taxes for
+national purposes. All powers not thus specifically conceded to the
+central authority were, in theory at least, reserved by the individual
+Counties to themselves; and to-day a County government, except that it
+cannot interfere with the postal service within its borders, nor <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262"></a>[<a href="./images/262.png">262</a>]</span>erect
+custom-houses on its County lines to levy taxes on goods coming in from
+neighbouring Counties, is practically a sovereign government within its
+own territory.</p>
+
+<p>It is only within the last ten years that the right of the Central
+Government&mdash;the Crown&mdash;to use the King's troops to protect from violence
+the King's property, in the shape of the Royal mails, in defiance of the
+wishes of the Governor of a County, was established by a decision of the
+Supreme Court. The Governor protested that the suppression of mobs and
+tumults within his County borders was his business, his County police
+and militia being the proper instruments for the purpose, and for the
+Crown to intervene without his request and sanction was an invasion of
+the sovereign dignity of the County.</p>
+
+<p>Although so much has been said on this subject by various English
+writers, from Mr. Bryce downwards, few Englishmen, I think, have
+comprehended the theoretical significance of this independence of the
+individual States, and fewer still grasp its practical importance.
+Perhaps the most instructive illustration of what it means is to be
+found in the dilemma in which the American government has, on two
+occasions in recent years, found itself from its inability to compel a
+particular State to observe the national treaty obligations to a foreign
+power.</p>
+
+<p>The former of the two cases arose in Louisiana when a number of citizens
+of New Orleans (including not only leading bankers and merchants but
+also, it is said, at least one ex-Governor of the State and one Judge),
+finding that a jury could not, because of terrorisation, be found to
+convict certain murderers, Italians <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263"></a>[<a href="./images/263.png">263</a>]</span>and members of the Mafia, took the
+murderers out of gaol and hanged them in a public square in broad
+daylight. The Italian government demanded the punishment of the
+lynchers, and the American government had to confess itself entirely
+unable to comply with the request. Whether it would have given the
+satisfaction if it could is another question; but the dealing with the
+criminals was a matter solely for the Louisiana State authorities, and
+the Federal Government had no power to interfere with them or to dictate
+what they should do. The only way in which it could have obtained
+jurisdiction over the offenders would have been by sending Federal
+troops into the State to take them by force, a proceeding which the
+State of Louisiana would certainly have resisted by force, and civil war
+would have followed. Ultimately, the United States, without
+acknowledging any liability in the matter, paid to the Italian
+government a certain sum of money as a voluntary <i>solatium</i> to the
+widows and families of those who had been killed, and the incident was
+closed.</p>
+
+<p>The second case, which has recently strained so seriously the relations
+between the United States and Japan, arose with the State of California,
+which refused to extend to Japanese subjects the privileges to which
+they are unquestionably entitled under the "most favoured nation" clause
+of the treaty between the two governments. It is a matter which cannot
+be dealt with fully here without too long a digression from the path of
+our present argument, and will be referred to later. It is enough for
+the present to point out that once again the National Government&mdash;or
+what we have called the Crown&mdash;has been seen to be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264"></a>[<a href="./images/264.png">264</a>]</span>entirely incapable,
+without recourse to civil war, of compelling an individual State&mdash;or
+County&mdash;to respect the national word when pledged to a treaty with a
+foreign power.<a name="FNanchor_264:1_34" id="FNanchor_264:1_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_264:1_34" class="fnanchor">[264:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>The States then, or Counties, are independent units, in each of which
+there exists a complete party organisation of each of the great parties,
+which organisations control the destinies of the parties within the
+County borders and have no concern whatever with the party fortunes
+outside. The great parties in the nation and in Parliament must look to
+the organisations within the several Counties for their support and
+existence. The loss of a County, say Hampshire, by the local
+Conservative organisation will mean to the Conservative party in the
+nation not merely that the members to be elected to the lower house of
+Parliament by the Hampshire constituencies will be Liberal, but that the
+County Legislature will elect two Liberal Peers to the upper house as
+well; and it is likely that in one or other of the two houses parties
+may be so evenly balanced that the loss of the members from the one
+County may overthrow the government's working majority. Moreover, the
+loss of the County in the local County election will probably mean the
+loss of that County's vote at the next presidential election, which may
+result in the entire dethronement of the party from power.</p>
+
+<p>Wherefore it is obviously necessary that the party <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265"></a>[<a href="./images/265.png">265</a>]</span>as a whole&mdash;in the
+nation and in Congress&mdash;should do all that it can to help and strengthen
+the party leaders in the County. This it does in contests believed to be
+critical, and particularly just in advance of a national election, by
+contributing to the local campaign funds when a purely County (State)
+election is in progress (with which, of course, the national party ought
+theoretically to have nothing to do) and in divers other ways; but
+especially by judicious use of the national patronage in making
+appointments to office when the party is in power.</p>
+
+<p>The President&mdash;or let us say the Prime Minister&mdash;would rarely presume to
+appoint a postmaster at Winchester or Petersfield, or a collector of the
+port of Portsmouth or Southampton, without the advice and consent of the
+Hampshire Peers or Senators. And the advice of the Hampshire Peers, we
+may be sure, would be shaped in accordance with their personal political
+interests or by considerations of the welfare of the party in the
+County. They would not be likely to recommend for preferment either a
+member of the opposite party or a member of their own party who was a
+personal opponent. Moreover, besides the appointments in the County
+itself, there are many posts in the government offices in Whitehall, as
+well as a number of consulates and other more remote positions, to be
+filled. In spite of much that has been done to make the United States
+civil service independent of party politics, it remains that the bulk of
+these posts are necessarily still filled on recommendations made by the
+Congressmen or party leaders from the respective Counties, and again it
+is the good of the party inside those Counties which inspires those
+recommendations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266"></a>[<a href="./images/266.png">266</a>]</span></p><p>Thus we see how the national party when in power is able to fatten and
+strengthen the hands of the party organisations within the several
+Counties; and strengthen them it must, for if they lose control of the
+voters within their territory then is the national party itself ruined
+and dethroned.</p>
+
+<p>And below the County party organisations, the County governments, are
+the organisations and governments in the cities, which again are split
+on precisely the same lines of cleavage. The City Council of Petersfield
+or Midhurst is divided into Conservatives and Liberals precisely as the
+Hampshire Legislature or the Parliament at Westminster. Jealousies often
+arise between the County organisations and those in the cities. The
+influence of Birmingham might well become overpowering in the
+Warwickshire Legislature, whereby it would be difficult for any but a
+resident of Birmingham to become Governor of the County or to be elected
+to the House of Lords. If the Birmingham municipal organisation chanced
+to be controlled by a strong hand, it is not difficult to see how he
+might impose his will upon the County Legislature and the County party
+organisation, how he might claim more than his share of the sweets and
+spoils of office for his immediate friends and colleagues in the city,
+to the disgust of the other parts of the County. For the most part,
+however, such quarrels, between the city and County organisations of the
+same party, when they arise, are but lovers' quarrels, rarely pushed to
+the point of endangering the unity of the party in the State at election
+time.</p>
+
+<p>But now if we remember what was said at first, that no candidates for
+Parliament or other elected <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267"></a>[<a href="./images/267.png">267</a>]</span>functionaries are "sent down" by a central
+organisation, but all are "sent up" from the bottom, the impulse
+starting from small meetings in public-house parlours and the like (in
+the case of cities, meetings being held by "precincts" to elect
+delegates to a meeting of the "ward," which meeting again elects
+delegates to the meeting of the city), when we see how the city can
+coerce the County and the County sway the nation, then we have also no
+difficulty in seeing how it is, as has been said already, that the same
+power that appoints a janitor in a town-hall may dictate the nomination
+of a President. Even more than the County organisation is to the
+national party, is the city organisation to the County. The party, both
+as a national and as a County organisation, must fatten and strengthen
+the hands of the city machine. Thus comes it that such an alderman as
+the Delectable One is unassailable. His power reaches far beyond the
+city. The party organisation in the city cannot dispense with him,
+because he can be relied upon always to carry his ward, and that ward
+may be necessary, not to the city machine only, but to the County and
+the nation.</p>
+
+<p>It is hardly necessary to explain that in a general election in England
+the party which is returned to power need not necessarily have a
+majority of the votes throughout the country. A party may win ten seats
+by majorities of less than a hundred in each and lose one, being therein
+in a minority of a thousand; with the result that, with fewer votes than
+were cast for its opponents, it will have a clear majority of nine in
+the eleven seats. This is of course well understood.</p>
+
+<p>But in an American general or presidential election, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268"></a>[<a href="./images/268.png">268</a>]</span>this anomaly is
+immensely aggravated by the fact that the electoral unit is not a city
+or a borough but a whole County or State. The various States have a
+voice in proportion to their population, but that vote is cast as a
+unit. A majority of ten votes in New York carries the entire
+thirty-seven votes of that State, while a majority of one thousand in
+Montana only counts three. There are forty-six States in the Republic,
+but the thirteen most populous possess more than half the votes, and a
+presidential candidate who received the votes of those thirteen, though
+each was won by only the narrowest majority, would be elected over an
+antagonist who carried the other thirty-three States, though in each of
+the thirty-three his majority might be overwhelming. Bearing this in
+mind, we see at once what immense importance may, in a doubtful
+election, attach to the control of a single populous State.</p>
+
+<p>If in an English election, similarly conducted, the country was known to
+be so equally divided that the vote of Warwickshire, with, perhaps,
+twenty votes, would certainly decide the issue, the man who could
+control Warwickshire would practically control the country. We have seen
+further, however, that the man who controls Warwickshire will probably
+be the man who controls Birmingham. He may be the Mayor of Birmingham,
+or, more likely, the chairman (or "boss") of the municipal machine who
+nominated and elected the Mayor and whose puppet the Mayor practically
+is. It then becomes evident that the man who can sway the politics of
+the nation is not merely the man who controls the single County of
+Warwickshire, but the man who, inside that County, controls the single
+city.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269"></a>[<a href="./images/269.png">269</a>]</span></p><p>To go a step below that again, the control of the city may depend
+entirely on the control of a given ward in the city. That ward may
+contain a very large labouring vote, by reason of the existence of a
+number of big factories within its limits. Unless that labouring vote
+can be polled for the Liberal party, the ward will not go Liberal, and
+without it the city will be lost. The loss of the city involves the loss
+of the County, and the loss of the County means the loss of the nation.
+The man therefore who by his personal influence, or by his leadership in
+a perfectly organised party machine in one ward of Birmingham, can be
+relied on to call out the full Liberal strength in that one ward of a
+single city may be absolutely indispensable to the success of the party
+in the country as a whole. And it is even conceivable that that man
+again may be dependent on one of his own henchmen, the "Captain" of a
+single precinct in the ward or the man who has the ear and confidence of
+the hands in the largest of the factories.</p>
+
+<p>Let me not be understood as saying that the personal influence of an
+individual may not be extremely powerful in an English election; and
+that power may rest, similarly, on his popularity in, and consequent
+ability to carry with him into the party fold, one particular district.
+But there is not the same established form of County government on
+avowedly national lines, nor the same city government, as in America,
+through which that influence can make itself definitely and continuously
+felt.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>We will state the situation in another way, which will make it clear to
+Englishmen from another point of view:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270"></a>[<a href="./images/270.png">270</a>]</span></p><p>Let it be imagined that at the next general election in England, the
+decision is to be arrived at by a direct vote of the country as a whole
+for a Conservative or a Liberal Prime Minister. Instead of each County
+and borough electing its members of Parliament (they will do that only
+incidentally) the real struggle will take the form of a direct contest
+between two men. Each of the great parties will choose its own
+candidate, and the Conservatives have already nominated Mr. Balfour. It
+remains for the Liberals to name their man who is to run against Mr.
+Balfour. The selection is to be made in a National Convention, to be
+held in Manchester, at which each County will be represented by a number
+of delegates proportioned to its population. Those delegates have
+already been elected in each County by local meetings within the
+Counties themselves, and in nearly every case the delegations so elected
+will come into the Convention Hall at Manchester prepared to vote and
+act as a unit. Whether that has been arrived at by choice of the
+individual Counties when they elected their delegations or whether the
+Convention itself has decided the matter by adopting the "unit rule"
+does not matter. The fact is that each county will be compelled to vote
+in a body, <i>i. e.</i>, that if London has forty votes and Kent twenty,
+those forty votes or those twenty will have to be cast solidly for some
+one man. They cannot be split into thirty votes for one man and ten for
+another; or into fifteen for one man and one each for five other men.</p>
+
+<p>The Convention meets and it is plain from the first that the two
+strongest candidates are Lord Rosebery and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
+There are scattering votes for Mr. Morley and Mr. Asquith, each <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271"></a>[<a href="./images/271.png">271</a>]</span>of them
+getting the vote of one or more small Counties. But after the first
+ballot, which is always more or less preliminary, it is apparent that
+neither of those gentlemen can hope to be chosen, so the Counties which
+voted for them, having expressed their preference, proceed on the next
+ballot to give their suffrages either to Lord Rosebery or to Sir Henry.
+The second ballot is completed. Every County has voted, with the result
+that (out of a total vote of 521, of which 261 are necessary for a
+choice) there are 248 votes for Lord Rosebery and 253 for Sir Henry
+Campbell-Bannerman. But there is still one County which has not voted
+for either. Kent at both ballots has cast its twenty votes for Mr. Will
+Crooks. The reason why Kent does this is because the representatives
+from Woolwich and the neighbourhood are a numerical majority of the Kent
+delegation and those men are devoted to Mr. Crooks.</p>
+
+<p>The third ballot produces the same result: Rosebery 248; Bannerman, 253;
+Crooks, 20. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh ballots show no change
+except that once in a while Rutland with three votes and Merioneth with
+four have amused themselves or caused a temporary flutter by swinging
+their votes from one side to the other or, perhaps, again casting them
+for Mr. Morley or Mr. Asquith. There is a deadlock. The Convention
+becomes impatient. The evening wears on and midnight arrives and still
+there is no change. Neither Lord Rosebery nor Sir Henry can get the
+extra dozen votes that are needed: still with regularity when the name
+of Kent is called the leader of the delegation rises and responds "Kent
+casts twenty votes for William Crooks."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272"></a>[<a href="./images/272.png">272</a>]</span></p><p>At last in the small hours of the morning something happens. How it has
+been arrived at nobody seems to know; but when the roll is called for
+the thirteenth time, Norfolk, heretofore loyal to Sir Henry, suddenly
+votes for Crooks. Tremendous excitement follows. The word goes round
+that Campbell-Bannerman is beaten; his friends have given up and it is
+useless to vote for him any longer. Meanwhile in the course of the
+evening feeling between the supporters of Sir Henry and the Roseberyites
+has grown so bitter that whatever the deserting Bannermanites do, they
+will not help to elect Lord Rosebery. Here and there a Scotch County
+remains firm to its leader, but Oxford swings off to Mr. Morley;
+Suffolk, amid yells that make it difficult to tell who the vote is cast
+for, follows Norfolk and plumps for Crooks. Sussex brings in Mr. Asquith
+again and Warwickshire goes for Crooks. Amid breathless silence the
+result of the thirteenth ballot is read out: Rosebery, 248; Crooks, 96;
+Morley, 72; Asquith, 50; Bannerman, 43; etc.</p>
+
+<p>The fourteenth ballot begins. "Aberdeen!" calls the Chairman. The head
+of the Aberdeen delegation stands up in a suspense so tense that it
+almost hurts. "Aberdeen casts seventeen votes for Mr. Will Crooks!" In
+an instant the whole hall is filled with maniacs. County after County
+rushes to range itself on the winning side. Before the roll is more than
+half completed it is evident that Crooks must be chosen. Thereafter
+there is no dissentient voice. The ballot is interrupted by a voice
+which is known to belong to Lord Rosebery's personal representative. He
+moves that the nomination of Mr. Crooks be made unanimous. In a din
+wherein no voice can be heard the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273"></a>[<a href="./images/273.png">273</a>]</span>erstwhile leader of the Bannermanite
+forces is seen waving his arms and is known to be seconding the motion.
+In ten minutes the hall is singing <i>God Save the King</i> and Mr. Will
+Crooks is the chosen candidate of the Liberal party to oppose Mr.
+Balfour at the coming election.</p>
+
+<p>That is not materially different from what happened when Mr. Bryan was
+first nominated for the Presidency against Mr. McKinley&mdash;except that it
+did not take so long to accomplish. I have said that Mr. Bryan's
+nomination could have been defeated if a certain local delegation had
+been "attended to" in advance. What is to be noted is that Mr. Crooks
+has been nominated simply because he had a hold which could not be
+shaken on a small but compact body of men at Woolwich. It is true that
+it is not often that so dramatic a thing would happen as the nomination
+of Mr. Crooks himself but more frequently an arrangement&mdash;a "trade" or
+"deal"&mdash;would be entered into by which in consideration of the Crooks
+vote being thrown to one or other of the leading candidates, in the
+event of the latter's defeating Mr. Balfour and being elected to the
+Premiership, certain political advantages, in the form of appointments
+to office and "patronage" generally, would accrue, not necessarily to
+Mr. Crooks himself, but to his "machine," the citizens of Woolwich, and
+the Liberal party in the County of Kent at large. We see here how the
+local "boss" may become all-powerful in national affairs (and this is of
+course only one of fifty ways) and how the interdependence of the party
+in the nation with the party organisation in the County or the
+municipality tends to the fattening of the latter and, it must be added,
+the debauching of all three.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274"></a>[<a href="./images/274.png">274</a>]</span></p><p>At the last general election in England, in January, 1906, there is no
+doubt that the Conservative party owed the loss of a large number of
+seats merely to the fact that it had been in office for so long, without
+serious conflict, that the local party organisations had not merely
+grown rusty but were practically defunct. In the United States the same
+thing, in anything like the same degree, would be impossible, because
+between the periods of the general elections (which themselves come
+every four years) come the State and municipal elections for the
+purposes of which the local party organisations are kept in continuous
+and more or less active existence. A State or a city may, of course, be
+so confirmedly Republican or Democratic that, even though elections be
+frequent, the ruling party organisation will become, in a measure, soft
+and careless, but it can never sink altogether out of fighting
+condition. When a general election comes round, each great party in the
+nation possesses&mdash;or organises for the occasion&mdash;a national committee as
+well as a national campaign organisation; but that committee and that
+national organisation co-operate with the local organisations in each
+State and city and it is the local organisations that really do the
+work&mdash;the same organisations as conduct the fight, in intermediate
+years, for the election of members to the State Legislature or of a
+mayor and aldermen. And each of those local organisations necessarily
+tends to come under the control of a recognised "boss."</p>
+
+<p>Let us see another of the fifty ways in which, as has been said, one of
+these local bosses may be all-powerful in national affairs. A general
+election is approaching in Great Britain, and, as before, the Liberal
+party <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275"></a>[<a href="./images/275.png">275</a>]</span>is in doubt whether to select as its candidate for the
+Premiership Lord Rosebery or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The political
+complexion of almost every County is known and there is no chance of
+changing that complexion&mdash;a condition, be it said, which exists in
+America in the case of a large majority of the States. It is evident
+that at the coming election the vote is going to be extremely close, the
+most important of the "doubtful" Counties being Lanarkshire, which has
+25 votes; which 25 votes will of course be governed by the course of the
+working population of Glasgow. Whichever party can secure Lanarkshire's
+vote will probably be successful; so that the destiny of the country
+really depends on the temper of the labouring men of Glasgow. Glasgow
+has, let us suppose, a strong and well-organised local Liberal "machine"
+which carried the city at the last municipal election, so that the mayor
+and a large majority of the aldermen of Glasgow are Liberals to-day; and
+the dictator or "boss" of this machine is (we are merely using a name
+for the sake of illustration) Lord Inverclyde. Lord Inverclyde does not
+believe that Lord Rosebery is the right man for the Premiership. So he
+lets his views be known to the Liberal National Committee. "I am, as you
+know," he says, "a strong Liberal; but frankly I would rather see Mr.
+Balfour made Prime Minister than Lord Rosebery. Glasgow will not vote
+for Lord Rosebery. The party can nominate any other man whom it pleases
+and we will elect him. I will undertake to carry Lanark for Sir Henry or
+Mr. Morley or anybody else; but I warn you that if Lord Rosebery is
+nominated, we will 'knife' him"&mdash;that being the euphonious phrase used
+to describe the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276"></a>[<a href="./images/276.png">276</a>]</span>operation when a party leader or party machine turns
+against any particular candidate nominated by the party.</p>
+
+<p>What are the party leaders to do in such a case? To nominate Lord
+Rosebery after that warning (Lord Inverclyde is known to be a man of his
+word) will be merely to invite defeat at the election; consequently,
+though he may be the actual preference of a large majority of the
+Liberals of the country, Lord Rosebery does not get the nomination. It
+goes to some one who can carry Lanarkshire,&mdash;some one, that is, who is
+pleasing to the boss of the local machine of Glasgow. It would be not
+unlikely that the national leaders might resent the dictation of Lord
+Inverclyde and might (but not until after the election was safely over)
+start intriguing in Glasgow politics to have him dethroned from the
+position of local "boss,"&mdash;might, in fact, begin "knifing" him in turn.
+Whether they would succeed in their object before another general
+election supervened would depend on the security of his hold on the
+local Liberal organisation; and that would depend on his personal
+ability as a politician and&mdash;very largely&mdash;on his unscrupulousness. For
+it may, I think, be stated as an axiom that no man can long retain his
+hold as "boss" of the machine in a large city except by questionable
+methods,&mdash;methods which sometimes involve dishonesty. He must&mdash;no matter
+whether he likes it or not&mdash;use his patronage and his power to advance
+unworthy men; and he must in some measure show leniency to certain forms
+of lawlessness. Otherwise the influence of the saloons, gamblers,
+keepers of disorderly houses, and all the other non-law-abiding elements
+will be thrown against him with sufficient weight to work his downfall.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277"></a>[<a href="./images/277.png">277</a>]</span></p><p>Unscrupulousness and friendship with wickedness in the slums of a city
+may thus be the direct road to influence in the councils of the national
+party. When it is remembered that not a few large cities, and therefore
+some States, are practically controlled, through the balance of power,
+by voters of an alien nationality, it is further plain how such an alien
+vote may become a serious factor in the politics of the nation. Thus is
+the German element very strong in Milwaukee, and the Scandinavian
+element in the towns and State of Minnesota. Thus the Irish influence
+has been almost paramount in New York, though now outnumbered by
+Germans, Italians, and others; and it is there, in New York, that the
+conditions which we have imagined in connection with Glasgow and Lord
+Inverclyde are actually being almost exactly repeated in American
+Democratic politics as often as a general election comes round.</p>
+
+<p>You may frequently hear it said in America that "as goes New York, so
+goes the country"; which is to say that in a presidential election the
+party which carries New York will carry the nation. In theory this is
+not necessarily so, although it is evident that New York's thirty-six
+votes in the electoral college must be an important contribution to the
+support of a candidate. In practice it has proven itself a good rule,
+partly by reason of the importance of those thirty-six votes, but more,
+perhaps, because the popular impetus which sways one part of the country
+is likely to be felt in others&mdash;that, in fact, New York goes as the
+country goes.</p>
+
+<p>But let us assume that the New York vote is really essential to the
+election of a candidate&mdash;that the vote <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278"></a>[<a href="./images/278.png">278</a>]</span>in the country as a whole is
+evidently so evenly divided that whichever candidate can win New York
+must be elected the next President. Tammany Hall is a purely local
+organisation of the Democratic party in New York City. New York State,
+outside the city, is normally Republican, but many times the great
+Democratic majority in the Metropolitan district has swamped a
+Republican majority in the rest of the State. That Democratic vote in
+the Metropolitan district can only be properly "brought out" and
+controlled by Tammany; so that the cordial support of Tammany Hall,
+though, as has been said, it is in reality a strictly local
+organisation, and as such is probably the worst and most corrupt
+organisation (as it is also the best managed) that has been built up in
+the country, may be absolutely vital to the success of a Democratic
+presidential candidate. Tammany is practically an autocracy, the power
+of the Chief being almost absolute. England and English society have had
+some acquaintance with one Chief, and do not like him. But, as Chief of
+Tammany Hall, it is easy to see how even a coarse-grained Irishman may
+become for a time influential in American national affairs&mdash;even to the
+dictating of a nominee for the Presidency.</p>
+
+<p>I am not prepared to say that under the same conditions the same things
+could occur in England. What I am saying is that they do occur in the
+United States under conditions which do not exist in England; and, while
+it may be that British civic virtue would be proof against the manifold
+temptations of a similar political system, we have no sufficient data to
+justify us in being sure of it, nor is it wise or charitable to assume
+that because a certain number of American <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279"></a>[<a href="./images/279.png">279</a>]</span>politicians yield to
+temptations which Englishmen have never experienced, therefore the
+people are of a less rigid virtue. Mr. Bryce has recorded his opinion
+that the mass of the public servants in America are no more corrupt than
+those in England. I prefer not to agree with him for, if it was true
+when he wrote it, the Americans to-day must be much the better, because
+since then there has unquestionably been an enormous improvement in the
+United States, while we have no evidence of a corresponding improvement
+in England. I believe, not only that many more public men are corrupt in
+America than in England, but that a larger proportion of the public men
+are corrupt, which, however, need not imply a lower standard of
+political incorruptibility: only that there are much greater
+opportunities of going wrong.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to note, moreover, that in the public service the
+opportunities of malfeasance in public officers in Great Britain are
+increasing rapidly and, moreover, in precisely those lines wherein they
+have proved most demoralising in America. I have elsewhere recorded the
+apprehension with which many Englishmen cannot help regarding the
+closeness of the relations which are growing up between the national and
+local party organisations, but in addition to this the urban public
+bodies are coming to play a vastly larger r&ocirc;le in the life of the
+people, while the multiplication of electric car lines and similar
+enterprises is exposing the members of those bodies to somewhat the same
+class of untoward influence as has so often proven fatal to the civic
+virtue of similar bodies in America. Whether, as a result, any large
+number of cases of individual frailty have exposed themselves, probably
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280"></a>[<a href="./images/280.png">280</a>]</span>only those immediately interested know; the exposure at least has not
+reached the general public.</p>
+
+<p>It may not, however, be amiss to remember that a century and a half ago,
+when the conditions in the two countries were widely different from what
+they are to-day, Benjamin Franklin, coming to England, was shocked and
+astounded at the corruption then prevalent in English public life.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The procedure of an American presidential campaign has been sufficiently
+often described for the benefit of English readers. Suffice it to say
+that it is devastating, at times almost titanic. I have had some
+experience of the amenities of political campaigning in England, but the
+most bitterly contested fight in England never produces anything like
+the intensity of passion that is let loose in the quadrennial upheavals
+in the United States.</p>
+
+<p>It was my lot to be closely associated with the conduct of a national
+campaign&mdash;as bitterly fought a campaign as the country has seen since
+the days of the war,&mdash;namely that of 1896 when Mr. Bryan was the
+candidate of the Free Silver Democracy. Early in the fight I began to
+receive abusive letters, for which a large and capacious drawer was
+provided in the office, into which they were tossed as they came, on the
+chance of their containing some reading which might be interesting when
+the trouble was over. As the fight waxed, they came by every post and in
+every form, ranging from mere incoherent personal abuse to threats of
+assassination. Hundreds of them were entirely insane: many hundred more
+the work, on the face of them, of anarchists pure and simple. A large
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281"></a>[<a href="./images/281.png">281</a>]</span>proportion of them were written in red ink, and in many&mdash;very
+many&mdash;cases the passions of the writers had got so far beyond their
+control that you could see where they had broken their pens in the
+futile effort to make written words curse harder than they would. The
+receptacle in which they were placed was officially known in the office
+as the Chamber of Horrors, but it was, I think, universally spoken of
+among the staff as the "Hell-box." Before the end of the campaign,
+capacious though it was, it was crowded to overflowing, and hardly a
+document that was not as venomous as human wrath could make it.
+Incidentally I wish to say that never was a campaign&mdash;at least as far as
+my colleagues in our particular department were concerned&mdash;more purely
+in the interest of public morality, without any sort of selfish aims,
+and less deserving of abuse. What the correspondence of a presidential
+candidate himself must be in like circumstances, it is horrible to
+think.<a name="FNanchor_281:1_35" id="FNanchor_281:1_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_281:1_35" class="fnanchor">[281:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>The intense feverishness of the campaign is of course increased by the
+vastness of the country, the tremendous distances over which the
+national <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282"></a>[<a href="./images/282.png">282</a>]</span>organisation has to endeavour to exercise control, and the
+immense diversity in the conditions of the people and communities to
+whom appeal has to be made. The voting takes place all over the country
+on the same day; and it must be remembered that the area of the United
+States (not counting Alaska or any external dependencies) is so great
+that it reaches from west to east about as far as from London to
+Teheran, and north and south from London to below the southern boundary
+of Morocco. The difficulty of organisation over such an area can,
+perhaps, be imagined. In the course of the campaign there came in one
+day in my mail a letter written on a torn half of a railway time-card.
+It ran:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Sir</span>&mdash;There is sixty-five of us here working in a gravel
+pit and we was going to vote solid for Bryan and Free Silver.
+Some of your books [<i>i. e.</i>, campaign leaflets, etc.] was
+thrown to us out of a passing train. We have organised a Club
+and will cast sixty-five votes for William McKinley.&mdash;Yours,
+etc."</p></div>
+
+<p>So far as those sixty-five were concerned our chief interest thereafter
+lay in seeing that the existence of that gravel-pit was never discovered
+by the enemy. A faith which had been so speedily and unanimously
+embraced might perhaps not have been unassailable.</p>
+
+<p>Before leaving this subject it may be well to say a few words on a
+recent election in New York which excited, perhaps, more interest in
+England than any American political event of late years. The eminence
+which Mr. Hearst has won is an entirely deplorable thing, which has been
+made possible by the fact, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283"></a>[<a href="./images/283.png">283</a>]</span>already sufficiently dwelt upon, that
+political power in the United States is so largely exerted from the
+bottom up. In their comments on the incident after the event, however,
+English papers missed some of its significance. Most English writers
+spoke of Mr. Hearst's appeal to the forces of discontent as a new
+phenomenon and drew therefrom grave inferences as to what would happen
+next in the United States. The fact is that the phenomenon is not new in
+any way. Mr. Hearst, in but a slightly different form, appealed to
+precisely the same passions as Mr. Bryan aroused&mdash;the same as every
+demagogue has appealed to throughout, at least, the northern and western
+sections of the country any time in this generation. Mr. Hearst began
+from the East and Mr. Bryan from the West, but in all essentials the
+appeal was the same. And Mr. Hearst was not elected. And Mr. Bryan was
+not elected. What will happen next will be that the next man who makes
+the same appeal will not be elected also.</p>
+
+<p>It is the allegory of the river and its ripples over again. Englishmen
+need not despair of the United States, for the great body of the people
+is extraordinarily conservative and well-poised. In America, man never
+is, but always to be, cursed. Dreadful things are on the eve of
+happening, and never happen. There is a great saving fund of
+common-sense in the people&mdash;a sense which probably rests as much on the
+fact that they are as a whole conspicuously well-to-do as on anything
+else&mdash;which as the last resort shrinks from radicalism. In spite of the
+yellow press, in spite of all the Socialist and Anarchist talk, in spite
+of corruption and brass bands and torchlight processions, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284"></a>[<a href="./images/284.png">284</a>]</span>when the
+people as a whole is called upon to speak the final word, that word has
+never yet been wrong. Perhaps some day it will be, for all peoples go
+mad at times; but the nation is normally sound and sane, with a sanity
+that is peculiarly like that of the English.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_264:1_34" id="Footnote_264:1_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_264:1_34"><span class="label">[264:1]</span></a> I trust that, because, for the purpose of making an
+illustration which will bring the matter home familiarly to English
+minds, I speak of the States as English Counties, I shall not be
+suspected of thinking (as some writers appear to have thought) that
+there is really any historical or structural analogy between the two.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_281:1_35" id="Footnote_281:1_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_281:1_35"><span class="label">[281:1]</span></a> None the less my friendly American critic (already
+quoted) holds, and remains firm in, the opinion that "however strenuous
+the fighting, the political issues produce no such social changes or
+personal differences in the United States as have frequently obtained in
+England, say at the time of the leadership of Gladstone, or more
+recently, in connection with the 'tariff reform' of Chamberlain." It is
+his contention that Americans take their politics on the whole more
+good-humouredly than has always been found possible by their English
+cousins, and that when the campaign is over, there is more readiness in
+the United States than in England to let pass into oblivion any
+bitterness that may have found expression during the fighting.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285"></a>[<a href="./images/285.png">285</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>SOME QUESTIONS OF THE MOMENT</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Sovereign States and the Federal Government&mdash;California and
+the Senate&mdash;The Constitutional Powers of Congress and the
+President&mdash;Government by Interpretation&mdash;President Roosevelt
+as an Inspiration to the People&mdash;A New Conception of the
+Presidential Office&mdash;"Teddy" and the "'fraid strap"&mdash;Mr.
+Roosevelt and the Corporations&mdash;As a Politician&mdash;His
+Imperiousness&mdash;The Negro Problem&mdash;The Americanism of the
+South.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>It was said that it would be necessary to refer again to the subject of
+the relations of the General Government to the several States, as
+illustrated by the New Orleans incident and the treatment of the
+Japanese on the Pacific Coast; and the first thing to be said is that no
+well-wisher of the United States living in Europe can help deploring the
+fact that the General Government has not the power to compel all parties
+to the Union to observe the treaties to which the faith of the nation as
+a whole has been pledged. It is a matter on which the apologist for the
+United States abroad has, when challenged, no defence. Few people in
+other countries do not consider the present situation unworthy of the
+United States; and I believe that a large majority of the American
+people&mdash;certainly a majority of the people east of the Rocky
+Mountains&mdash;is of the same opinion.</p>
+
+<p>It is no excuse to urge that when another Power <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286"></a>[<a href="./images/286.png">286</a>]</span>enters into treaty
+relations with the United States it does so with its eyes open and with
+a knowledge of the peculiarities of the American Constitution. This is
+an argument which belongs to the backwoods stage of American
+statesmanship. In the past, it is true, the United States has been in a
+measure the spoilt child among the nations and has been permitted to sit
+somewhat loosely to the observance of those formalities which other
+Powers have recognised as binding on themselves; but the time has gone
+by when the United States can claim, or ought to be willing to accept,
+any especial indulgences. It cannot at once assert its right to rank as
+one of the Great Powers and affect to enter into treaties on equal terms
+with other nations, and at the same time admit that it is unable to
+honour its signature to those treaties.</p>
+
+<p>This, I say, is the general opinion of thinking men in other countries;
+but, however desirable it may be that the General Government should have
+the power to compel the individual States to comply with the
+requirements of the national undertakings, it is difficult, so long as
+the several States continue jealous of their sovereignty without regard
+to the national honour, to see how the end is to be arrived at.</p>
+
+<p>The first obvious fact is that all treaties are made by the President
+"by and with the advice and consent of the Senate" and no treaty is
+valid until ratified by a vote of the Senate in which "two thirds of the
+Senators present concur." The Senate occupies a peculiar position in the
+scheme of government. It does not represent either the nation as a whole
+nor, like the House of Representatives, the people as a whole. The
+Senate represents the individual States each acting in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287"></a>[<a href="./images/287.png">287</a>]</span>its sovereign
+capacity<a name="FNanchor_287:1_36" id="FNanchor_287:1_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_287:1_36" class="fnanchor">[287:1]</a>; and the voice of the Senate is the voice of those
+States as separate entities. When the Senate passes upon any question it
+has been passed upon by each several State and it is not easy to see how
+any particular State can claim to be exempt from the responsibility of
+any vote of the Senate as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>It would appear to follow of necessity that when the Senate has by a
+formal two-thirds vote ratified a treaty, every State is bound to accept
+all the obligations of that treaty, not merely as part of the nation but
+as a separate unit. The provision in the Constitution which makes the
+vote of the Senate on any treaty necessary can have no other intent than
+to bind the several States themselves. As a matter of historical
+accuracy it had no other intent when it was framed.</p>
+
+<p>In the particular case of the Japanese treaty, the time for the State of
+California to have made its attitude known was surely when the treaty
+passed the Senate. The California Senators, or the people of the State,
+had then two honest courses open to them. They could have let it be
+known unequivocally that they did not propose to hold themselves bound
+by the action of the Senate but would, if any attempt were made to force
+them to comply with the terms of the treaty, secede from the Union; or
+they could have determined there and then to abide loyally by the terms
+of the treaty and no matter at what cost to the State, or at what
+sacrifice of their <i>amour propre</i>, to see that all the rights provided
+in the treaty were accorded to Japanese within the State. Either of
+these <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288"></a>[<a href="./images/288.png">288</a>]</span>courses would have been honest; and Japanese who came to
+California would have come with their eyes open. The course which was
+followed, of allowing them to settle in the State in the expectation of
+receiving that treatment to which the faith of the United States was
+pledged, and then denying them that treatment, was distinctly dishonest.</p>
+
+<p>If, however, the State of California, or any other individual State,
+refuses to acknowledge the responsibilities which it has assumed by the
+vote of the Chamber of which its representatives are members, there
+appears no way in which the Federal Government can compel such
+acknowledgment except those of force and what the believers in the
+extreme doctrine of State Sovereignty consider Constitutional
+Usurpation.</p>
+
+<p>It has in many cases been necessary as the conditions of the country
+have changed so to interpret the phrases of the Constitution as to give
+to the General Government powers which cannot have been contemplated by
+the framers of that instrument. In this case there is every evidence,
+however, that the framers did intend that the General Government should
+have precisely those powers which it now desires&mdash;or that the individual
+States should be subject to precisely those responsibilities which they
+now seek to evade&mdash;and if any sentence in the Constitution can be so
+interpreted as to give to the General Government the power to compel
+States to respect the treaties made by the nation, it seems unnecessary
+to shrink from putting such interpretation upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to "regulate commerce
+with foreign nations"&mdash;and commerce is a term which has many
+meanings&mdash;as well as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289"></a>[<a href="./images/289.png">289</a>]</span>"to define and punish offences against the law of
+nations" and to "make all laws which shall be necessary for carrying
+into execution the foregoing powers." The President is invested with the
+power, "by and with the advice of the Senate, to make treaties," and he
+is charged with the duty of taking "care that the laws be faithfully
+executed." It would seem that among these provisions there is specific
+authority enough to cover the case, if the will to use that authority be
+there. And I believe that in a large majority of the people the will is
+there.</p>
+
+<p>It would appear to be competent for Congress to "define" any failure on
+the part of the citizens of any State to comply with whatever
+requirements in the treatment of foreigners may be imposed on them by a
+treaty into which the nation has entered, as an "offence against the law
+of nations." This power of "definition" on the part of Congress is quite
+unhampered. So also is the power "to make all laws which shall be
+necessary and proper for carrying into execution" the powers of
+definition and punishment. And it would be the duty of the President and
+the Federal Courts to take care that the laws were executed.</p>
+
+<p>If there would be any "usurpation" involved in such an interpretation of
+the phrases of the Constitution it is certainly less&mdash;much less, when
+regard is had to the intention of the framers of the Constitution&mdash;than
+other "usurpations" which have been effected, and sometimes without
+protest from the individual States; as, for instance, by the expansion
+of the right to regulate commerce between the several States into an
+authority to deal with all manner of details of the control of railways
+of which the framers of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290"></a>[<a href="./images/290.png">290</a>]</span>Constitution never contemplated the
+existence. It cannot even remotely be compared with such an extension of
+the Federal power as would be involved in the translation of the
+authority to "establish post-offices and post-roads" as empowering the
+government to take an even larger measure of control over those
+railroads than can be compassed under the right to regulate commerce&mdash;a
+translation which seems to have the approval of President Roosevelt.</p>
+
+<p>Incidentally it may be remarked that it would be peculiarly interesting
+if, at this day, that authority to construct post-roads should thus be
+invoked to give the General Government new powers of wide scope, when we
+remember that it was this same provision of the Constitution which stood
+sponsor for the very earliest steps which, in the construction of the
+Cumberland Road and other military or post routes, the young republic
+took in the path of practical federalism.</p>
+
+<p>To those Americans who received the cause of State Sovereignty as a
+trust from their fathers and grandfathers before them, the cause
+doubtless appears a noble one; but to the outsider, unbiassed by such
+inherited sentiment, it seems evident, first, that the cause, however
+noble, is also hopeless; and, second, that it is unreasonable that in
+the forlorn effort to preserve one particular shred of a fabric already
+so tattered, the United States as a nation should be exposed to frequent
+dangers of friction with other Powers, and, what is more serious, should
+be made, once in every decade or so, to stand before the world in the
+position of a trader who repudiates his obligations.</p>
+
+<p>And if I seem to speak on what is after all a domestic subject with
+undue vehemence (as I cannot hope <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291"></a>[<a href="./images/291.png">291</a>]</span>that I shall not seem to do to the
+minds of residents on the Pacific Coast), it is only because it is
+impossible for an earnest well-wisher of the United States living abroad
+not to feel acutely (while it does not seem to me that Americans at home
+are sensible) how much the country suffers in the estimate of other
+peoples by its present anomalous position. When two business concerns in
+the United States enter into any agreement, each assumes the other to be
+able to control its own agents and representatives, nor will it accept a
+plea of inability to control them as excuse for breach of contract.</p>
+
+<p>It may be that a select circle of the statesmen and foreign office
+officials in other countries are familiar with the intricacies of the
+American Constitution, but the masses of the people cannot be expected
+so to be, any more than the masses of the American people are adepts in
+the constitutions of those other countries. And it is, unfortunately,
+the masses which form and give expression to public opinion. In these
+days it is not by the diplomacies of ambassadors or the courtesies of
+monarchs that friendships and enmities are created between nations. The
+feelings of one people towards another are shaped in curious and
+intangible ways by phrases, sentiments, ideas&mdash;often trivial in
+themselves&mdash;which pass current in the press or travel from mouth to
+mouth. It is a pity that the United States should in this particular
+expose itself to the contempt of lesser peoples, giving them excuse for
+speaking lightly of it as of a nation which does not keep faith. It does
+not conduce to increase the illuminating power of the example of America
+for the enlightenment of the world.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292"></a>[<a href="./images/292.png">292</a>]</span></p><p>It might be well also if Americans would ask themselves what they would
+do if a number of American citizens were subjected to outrage (whether
+they were murdered as in New Orleans, or merely forced to submit to
+indignities and inconvenience as in California) in some South American
+republic, which put forward the plea that under its constitution it was
+unable to control the people or coerce the administration of the
+particular province in which the offences were committed. Would the
+United States accept the plea? Or if the outrages were perpetrated in
+one of the self-governing colonies of Great Britain and the British
+Government repudiated liability in the matter? The United States, if I
+understand the people at all, would not hesitate to have recourse to
+force to endeavour to compel Great Britain to acknowledge her
+responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>In the matter of the relation of the general government to the several
+States the most important factor to be considered at the present moment
+is undoubtedly the personality of President Roosevelt, and any attempt
+to make intelligible the change which has come over the United States of
+recent years would be futile without some recognition of the part which
+he has played therein. Mr. Roosevelt has been credited with being the
+author of "a revival of the sense of civic virtue" in the American
+people. Certainly he has been, by his example, a powerful agent in
+directing into channels of reform the exuberant energy and enthusiasm
+which have inspired the people since the great increase in material
+prosperity and the physical unification of the country bred in it its
+quickened sense of national life. In the period of activity and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293"></a>[<a href="./images/293.png">293</a>]</span>expansiveness&mdash;one is almost tempted to say explosiveness&mdash;which
+followed the Cuban war, such a man was needed to guide at least a part
+of the national energy into paths of wholesome self-criticism and
+reformation. He set before the youth of the country ideals of patriotism
+and of civic rectitude which were none the less inspiring because easily
+intelligible and even commonplace.<a name="FNanchor_293:1_37" id="FNanchor_293:1_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_293:1_37" class="fnanchor">[293:1]</a> The ideals have, it is true,
+since then, perhaps inevitably and surely not by his will, been dragged
+about in the none too clean mud of party politics; but the impetus which
+he gave, before his single voice became largely drowned in the factional
+hubbub around him, endures and will endure. Whatever comes, the American
+people is a different people and a better people for his preaching and
+example.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, what touches the question of State sovereignty nearly, he has
+given a new character to the Presidential office. I have expressed
+elsewhere my belief that the process of the federalising of the country,
+the concentration of power in the central government, must proceed
+further than it has yet gone; but it is difficult now to measure, what
+history will see clearly enough, how much Mr. Roosevelt has contributed
+to the hastening of the process. No President, one is tempted to say
+since Washington, but certainly since <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294"></a>[<a href="./images/294.png">294</a>]</span>Lincoln, has had anything like
+the same conception of the Presidential functions as Mr. Roosevelt,
+coupled with the courage to insist upon the acceptance of that
+conception by the country. Whether for good or ill the office of
+President must always stand for more, reckoned as a force in the
+national concerns, than it did before it was occupied by Mr. Roosevelt.
+A weak President may fail to hold anything like Mr. Roosevelt's
+authority; but the office must for a long time at least be more
+authoritative, and I think more honourable, for the work which he has
+done in it.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I first came in contact with Mr. Roosevelt some twenty-five years ago,
+when his personality already pervaded the country from the Bad Lands of
+Dakota to the Rocky Mountains. I had a great desire to meet this person
+about whom, not only in his early life but, as it were, in his very
+presence, myth was already clustering,&mdash;a desire which was almost
+immediately gratified by chance,&mdash;but the particular detail about him
+which at the time made most impression on my mind was that he was the
+reputed inventor of the "'fraid strap." The "'fraid strap" is&mdash;or was&mdash;a
+short thong, perhaps two feet in length, fastened to the front of the
+clumsy saddle, which, at signs of contumacy in one's pony, one could,
+with a couple of hitches, wrap round his hand, in such a way as to
+increase immensely the chance of a continuity of connection with his
+seat. The pony of the Plains in those days was not as a rule a gentle
+beast, and I was moved to gratitude to the inventor of the "'fraid
+strap"&mdash;though whether it was really Mr. Roosevelt's idea or not it is
+(without confession from himself) impossible to guess, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295"></a>[<a href="./images/295.png">295</a>]</span>for, as I have
+said, he was already, though present almost a half-mythical person to
+the men of the north-western prairie country.</p>
+
+<p>What vexed me no little at the time was that it was with some effort
+that I could get his name right. I could not remember whether it was
+Teddy Roosevelt or Roosy Teddevelt. The name now is familiar to all the
+world; but then it struck strangely on untrained English ears and to me
+it seemed quite as reasonable whichever way one twisted it round. Mr.
+Jacob Riis (or Mr. Leupp) has protested against the President of the
+United States being called "Teddy" and we have his word for it that Mr.
+Roosevelt's own intimates have never thought of addressing him otherwise
+than as "Theodore." Doubtless this is correct (certainly I know men who
+assure me that they call him "Theodore" now) but at least the more
+friendly "Teddy" has, as is proved by that confusion in my mind of a
+quarter of a century ago, the justification of long prescription. Nor am
+I sure that it has not been a fortunate thing both for Mr. Roosevelt and
+the country that his name has been Teddy to the multitude. I doubt if
+the men of the West, the rough-riders and the plainsmen, would give so
+much of their hearts to Theodore.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy to estimate the value, or otherwise, of Mr. Roosevelt's
+work in that capacity in which he has of late come to be best known to
+the world, namely as an opponent of the Trusts; but it is a pity that so
+many English newspapers habitually represent him as an enemy of all
+concentrated wealth. He has been called "the first Aristocrat to be
+elected President." Whether that be strictly true or not, he belongs
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296"></a>[<a href="./images/296.png">296</a>]</span>distinctly to the aristocratic class and his sympathies are naturally
+with that class. His instincts are not destructive. No one, I have
+reason to believe, has a shrewder estimate of the worthlessness of the
+majority of those politicians who use his name as a cloak for their
+attacks on all accumulated wealth than he. It is only necessary to read
+his speeches to see how constantly he has insisted that it is not
+wealth, but the abuse of it, which he antagonises: "We draw the line not
+against wealth, but against misconduct." He has many times protested
+against the "outcry against men of wealth," for most of which he has
+declared "there is but the scantiest justification." Again and again he
+has proclaimed his desire not to hurt the honest corporation, "but we
+need not be over-tender about sparing the dishonest."<a name="FNanchor_296:1_38" id="FNanchor_296:1_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_296:1_38" class="fnanchor">[296:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>One of the chief difficulties in the practical application of his
+policies has been that the Government cannot have the power to punish
+dishonest corporations without first being entrusted with a measure of
+control over all corporate operations, the concession of which control
+the honest corporations have felt compelled to resist. Nor is it
+possible to say that their resistance has not been justified. However
+wisely and forbearingly Mr. Roosevelt himself might use whatever power
+was placed in his hands, there has been little in the experience of the
+corporations in America to make them believe that they can trust either
+office-holders in general or, for any long term, the Government itself.
+Dispassionate students of the railway problem in the United States are
+aware that there is nothing which <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297"></a>[<a href="./images/297.png">297</a>]</span>the corporations have done to the
+injury of the public worse than the wanton and gratuitous injuries which
+have been done by the politicians, by the State governments, and even on
+occasions by the Federal Government itself, to the corporations. If
+particular railway companies have at times abused the power of which
+they were possessed as monopolising the transportation to and from a
+certain section of the country, that abuse has not excelled in
+wantonness and immorality the abuses of their power over the
+corporations of which several of the Western States have been
+systematically guilty. There has been little encouragement to the
+corporations to submit themselves to any larger measure of public
+control than has been necessary; and the lessons of the past have shown
+that it would be injudicious for the railways to surrender
+uncomplainingly to the State governments authority which the British
+companies can leave to the Board of Trade without misgiving. And there
+was a time when the national Interstate Commerce Commission was, if more
+honest, not much less prejudiced in its dealing with the corporations
+subject to its authority than were the governments or railway
+commissions of the individual States.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Roosevelt's desire may have been (as it is) only to protect the
+people against the misuse of their power by dishonest corporations; and
+the honest corporations would be no less glad than Mr. Roosevelt himself
+to see the dishonest brought to book. But in the necessity of resisting
+(or what has seemed to the corporations the necessity of resisting) the
+extensions of the federal power which were requisite before reform could
+be achieved, the honest have been compelled to make common cause with
+the dishonest, so that the President <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298"></a>[<a href="./images/298.png">298</a>]</span>has, in particular details, been
+forced into an attitude of hostility towards all corporations (and the
+corporations have for the most part been forced to put themselves in an
+attitude of antagonism to him) in spite of their natural sympathies and
+common interests.</p>
+
+<p>The result has been unfortunate for business interests generally because
+the mere fact that the President was "against the companies" (no matter
+on what grounds, or whether he was against them all or only against
+some) has encouraged throughout the country the anti-corporation feeling
+which needed no encouragement. Any time these forty years, or since the
+early days of the Granger agitation, the shortest road to notoriety and
+political advancement (at least in any of the Western States) has been
+by abuse of the railroad companies. A thousand politicians and
+newspapers all over the country are eager to seize on any phrase or
+pronouncement of the President which can be interpreted as giving
+countenance to the particular anti-railroad campaign at the moment in
+progress in their own locality. A vast number of people are interested
+in distorting, or in interpreting partially, whatever is said at the
+White House, so that any phrase, regardless of its context,&mdash;each
+individual act, without reference to its conditions,&mdash;which could be
+represented as an encouragement to the anti-capitalist crusade has been
+seized upon and made the most of. All over the West there have always,
+in this generation, been a sufficient number of persons only too
+anxious, for selfish reasons, to inflame hostility against the railroad
+companies or against men of wealth; but only within the last few years
+has it been possible for the most unscrupulous demagogue to find colour
+and justification for whatever <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299"></a>[<a href="./images/299.png">299</a>]</span>he has chosen to preach in the example
+and precept of the President&mdash;and of a President whose example and
+precept have counted for more with the masses of the people than have
+those of any occupant of the White House since the war. In this way Mr.
+Roosevelt has done more harm than could have been accomplished by a much
+worse man.</p>
+
+<p>If the corporations have suffered, the course of events has been
+unfortunate too for Mr. Roosevelt. No one is better aware than he of the
+misrepresentation to which he is subjected and the unscrupulous use
+which is made of his example; and it is impossible that at times it can
+fail to be very bitter. It must also be bitter to find arrayed against
+him many men whose friendship he must value and whose co-operation in
+his work it must seem to him that he ought to have. It happens that his
+is not a character which is swayed by such considerations one hair's
+breadth from the course which he has marked out for himself; but it is
+deplorable that a very large proportion of precisely that class of men
+in which Mr. Roosevelt ought (or at least is justified in thinking that
+he ought) to find his strongest allies have felt themselves compelled to
+become his most determined opponents, while those interests which ought
+(or at least are justified in thinking that they ought) to to find in
+Mr. Roosevelt, as the occupant of the White House, their strongest
+bulwark against an unreasoning popular hostility only see that that
+hostility is immensely inflamed and strengthened by his course and
+example. The conditions are injurious to the business interests of the
+country and weaken Mr. Roosevelt's influence for good.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it seems impossible&mdash;or certainly impossible for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300"></a>[<a href="./images/300.png">300</a>]</span>one on the
+outside&mdash;to place the responsibility anywhere except on those general
+conditions of the country which make possible both the misrepresentation
+of the position of the President and the wide-spread hostility to the
+corporations, or on those laxities in political and commercial morality
+in the past which have put it in the power alternately of the politician
+to plunder the railways and the railways to prey upon the people. In the
+ill-regulated conditions of the days of ferment there grew up abuses,
+both in politics and in commerce, which can only be rooted out with much
+wrenching of old ties and tearing of the roots of things; but it is
+worth an Englishman's understanding that the fact that this wrenching
+and this tearing are now in progress is only an evidence of that effort
+at self-improvement, an effort determined and conscious, which, as we
+have already seen more than once, the American people is making.
+Whatever certain sections of the American press, certain politicians, or
+certain financial interests, may desire the world to think, there is no
+need for those at a distance to see in the present conflict evidence
+either of a wicked and radically destructive disposition in the
+President or of an approaching disintegration of the American commercial
+fabric.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, as has been said, one result has been to weaken Mr.
+Roosevelt's personal influence for good. I have been assured by men of
+undoubted truthfulness, who are at the head of large financial
+interests, that he has, in the last few years, become as tricky and
+unscrupulous in his political methods as the oldest political
+campaigner; a statement which I believe to be entirely mistaken.
+"Practical politics," said Mr. Roosevelt once, "is not dirty politics.
+On the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301"></a>[<a href="./images/301.png">301</a>]</span>contrary in the long run the politics of fraud and treachery is
+unpractical politics, and the most practical of all politicians is the
+one who is clean and decent and upright." There is no evidence which I
+have been able to find that Mr. Roosevelt does not now believe this as
+thoroughly and act upon it as consistently as when he first entered the
+New York State Legislature.</p>
+
+<p>A more reasonable accusation against him, which is made by many of his
+best friends, is that his imperious will and his confidence in his own
+opinions make him at times unjust and intolerant in his judgment of
+others. There have been occasions when he has seemed over-ready to
+accuse others of bad faith without other ground than his own opinion or
+the recollection of what has occurred at an interview. He may have been
+right; but it is certain that he has alienated the friendship of not a
+few good men by the vehemence and positiveness with which he has
+asserted his views. And anything, independent of all questions of party,
+which weakens his influence is, for the country's sake, a thing to be
+deplored.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The negro question has contributed not a little to Mr. Roosevelt's
+difficulties, as it has to the misunderstanding of the American people
+in England. I know intelligent Englishmen who have visited the United
+States and honestly believe that in the not very distant future the
+country will again be torn with civil war, a war of black against white,
+which will imperil the permanence of the Republic no less seriously than
+did the former struggle. I do not think that the apprehension is shared
+by many intelligent Americans.</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps inevitable that Americans should <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302"></a>[<a href="./images/302.png">302</a>]</span>frequently be irritated
+by the tone of the comments in English papers on the lynchings of
+negroes which occur in the South. Some of these incidents are barbarous
+and disgraceful beyond any possibility of palliation, but it is certain
+that if Englishmen understood the conditions in the South better they
+would also understand that in some cases it is extremely difficult to
+blame the lynchers. Many of those people who in London (or in Boston)
+are loudest in condemnation of outrages upon the negro would if they
+lived in certain sections of the South not only sympathise with but
+participate in the unlawful proceedings.</p>
+
+<p>It has already been mentioned that among the men in New Orleans who
+assisted at the summary execution of the Italian Mafiotes there were, it
+is believed, an ex-Governor of the State and a Judge: men, that is to
+say, as civilised and of as humane sentiments as the members of any club
+in Pall Mall. They were not bloodthirsty ruffians, but gentlemen who did
+what they did from a stern sense of necessity. It has been my lot to
+live for a while in a community in which the maintenance of law and
+order depended entirely on a self-constituted Vigilance Committee; and
+the operations of that committee were not only salutary but necessary.
+It has also been my lot to live in a community where the upholders of
+law and order were not strong enough to organise a Vigilance Committee.
+I have been one of three or four who behind closed doors earnestly
+canvassed the possibilities of forming such an organisation, and neither
+I nor any of the others (among whom I remember were included one
+attorney-at-law and one mining engineer and surveyor) would have
+hesitated to serve on such a committee could it <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303"></a>[<a href="./images/303.png">303</a>]</span>have been made of
+sufficient strength to achieve any useful purpose, but the disparity
+between our numbers and those of the "bad men" who at that time
+controlled the community was too obvious to give us any hope of being
+able to enforce our authority. There may, therefore, be conditions of
+society infinitely worse than those where order is preserved by lynch
+law; and I make no doubt that neither I myself nor any fellow-member of
+my London Club would, if living in one of the bad black districts of the
+South, act otherwise than do the Southern whites who live there now.</p>
+
+<p>What is deplorable is not the spirit which prompts the acts of summary
+justice (I am speaking only of one class of Southern "outrage") but the
+conditions which make the perpetration of those acts the only
+practicable way of rendering life livable for white people; and for the
+responsibility for these conditions we must go back either to the
+institution of slavery itself (for which it should be remembered that
+England was to blame) or to the follies and passions of half a century
+ago which gave the negro the suffrage and put him on a plane of
+political equality with his late masters.<a name="FNanchor_303:1_39" id="FNanchor_303:1_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_303:1_39" class="fnanchor">[303:1]</a> If, since then, the
+problem has grown more, rather than less, difficult, it has not been so
+much by the fault of the Southern white, living under conditions in
+which only one line of conduct has been open to him, as of Northern
+philanthropists and negro sympathisers who <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304"></a>[<a href="./images/304.png">304</a>]</span>have helped to keep alive in
+the breasts of the coloured population ideas and ambitions which can
+never be realised.</p>
+
+<p>The people of the North have of late years come to understand the South
+better, and whereas what I have said above would, twenty years ago, have
+found few sympathisers in any Northern city, I believe that to-day it
+expresses the opinion of the large majority of Northern men. I also
+believe that the necessary majority could be secured to repeal so much
+of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution as would
+be necessary to undo the mistake which has been committed. It is true
+that in some Southern States the majority of the blacks are practically
+disfranchised now; but it would remove a constant cause of friction and
+of political chicanery if the fact were recognised frankly that it is
+not possible to contemplate the possibility of the negro ever becoming
+the politically dominant race in any community where white people live.
+There is no reason to believe that the two races cannot live together
+comfortably even though the blacks be in a large majority, but there
+must be no question of white control of the local government and of the
+machinery of justice.</p>
+
+<p>Taking away the franchise from the negro would not, of course, put an
+end to many of the social difficulties of the situation, but, the
+present false relations between the two being abolished, those
+difficulties are no more than have to be dealt with in every community.
+There would be a chance for the negroes as a race to develop into useful
+members of the community, <i>as negroes</i>, filling the stations of negroes
+and doing negroes' work, along such lines as those on which Mr. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305"></a>[<a href="./images/305.png">305</a>]</span>Booker
+Washington is working. The English have had a wide experience of native
+races in all parts of the world and they have not yet found the problem
+of living with them and of holding at least their respect, together with
+some measure of their active good-will, anywhere insoluble. To an
+Englishman it does not seem that it should be insoluble in the United
+States. He is rather inclined to think that the rapidity with which the
+negro of the South would work out his economic salvation, if once the
+political difficulty were removed, would depend chiefly on the ability
+of the race to produce a continuity of men like Mr. Booker Washington,
+with, perhaps, the concurrent ability of the north to produce men (shall
+I say, like the late W. H. Baldwin?) to co-operate with the leaders and
+teachers of the blacks and to interpret them and their work to the
+country.</p>
+
+<p>The Englishman in England is chiefly impressed by the stories of
+Southern outrages upon the blacks and he gets therefrom an erroneous
+idea of the character of the Southern white. An Englishman who studies
+the situation on the spot is likely to acquire great sympathy with the
+Southern white and to condemn only the political ineptitude which has
+made the existing conditions possible.</p>
+
+<p>Whether Mr. Roosevelt's course has been the one best adapted to
+facilitate a solution of the difficulties it would be idle to enquire.
+The laws being as they are, and he being the kind of man he is and, as
+President, entrusted with the duty of seeing that the laws are
+faithfully executed, he could not have taken a different line. Another
+man (and an equally good man) might have refrained from making one or
+two of his appointments <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306"></a>[<a href="./images/306.png">306</a>]</span>and from entertaining Mr. Washington at the
+White House. But if Mr. Roosevelt did not do precisely those things, he
+would not do fifty other of the things which have most endeared him to
+the people.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In this connection, it may be that there will be readers who will think
+that in many things which I say, when generalising about the American
+people as a whole, I fail to take into proper account the South and
+characteristics of such of the people of the South as are distinctively
+Southern. It is not from any lack of acquaintance with the South; still
+less from any lack of admiration of or affection for it. But what has
+been said of New York may in a way be said of the South, for whatever
+therein is typically Southern to-day is not typically American; and all
+that is typically Southern is moreover rapidly disappearing. In the
+tremendous activity of the new national life which has been infused into
+the country as a result of its solidification and knitting together of
+the last thirty years, there is no longer room for sectional divergences
+of character. They are overwhelmed, absorbed, obliterated; and the
+really vital parts of the South are no longer Southern but American.
+What has the spirit of Atlanta in Georgia, of Birmingham in Alabama, of
+any town in the South-west, from St. Louis to Galveston, to do with the
+typical spirit of the South? However strong Southern <i>sentiment</i> may
+still be, what is there of the Southern <i>spirit</i> even in Richmond or in
+Louisville? I need hardly say that America produces no finer men than
+the best Virginian or the best Kentuckian, but, with all his Southern
+love and his hot rhetoric, the man of this generation who is a leader
+among his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307"></a>[<a href="./images/307.png">307</a>]</span>fellows in Kentucky or in Virginia is so by virtue of the
+American spirit that is in him and not by virtue of any of the dying
+spirit of the old South.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_287:1_36" id="Footnote_287:1_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_287:1_36"><span class="label">[287:1]</span></a> Mr. Bryce felicitously speaks of the Senate as "a sort
+of Congress of Ambassadors from the respective States" (<i>The American
+Commonwealth</i>, vol. 1, page 110).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_293:1_37" id="Footnote_293:1_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_293:1_37"><span class="label">[293:1]</span></a> "He stands for the commonplace virtues; he is great
+along lines on which each one of us can be great if he wills and dares"
+(<i>Theodore Roosevelt, the Man and Citizen</i>, by Jacob A. Riis). Mr.
+Roosevelt has spoken of himself as "a very ordinary man." A pleasant
+story is told by Mr. Riis of the lady who said: "I have always wanted to
+make Roosevelt out a hero, but somehow, every time he did something that
+seemed really great, it turned out, upon looking at it closely, that it
+was only just the right thing to do."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_296:1_38" id="Footnote_296:1_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_296:1_38"><span class="label">[296:1]</span></a> See his <i>Addresses and Presidential Messages</i>, with an
+introduction by Henry Cabot Lodge (Putnams, 1904).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_303:1_39" id="Footnote_303:1_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_303:1_39"><span class="label">[303:1]</span></a> To those who would understand the negro question and
+the mistakes of the people of the North during the Reconstruction period
+(to which the present generation owes the legacy of the problem in its
+acute form) I commend the reading of Mr. James Ford Rhodes's <i>History of
+the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home
+Rule in the South in 1877</i> (Macmillan).</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308"></a>[<a href="./images/308.png">308</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Commercial Morality</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?&mdash;An American
+Peerage&mdash;Senators and other Aristocrats&mdash;Trade and the British
+Upper Classes&mdash;Two Views of a Business Career&mdash;America's Wild
+Oats&mdash;The Packing House Scandals&mdash;"American Methods" in
+Business&mdash;A Countryman and Some Eggs&mdash;A New Dog&mdash;The Morals of
+British Peers&mdash;A Contract of Mutual Confidence&mdash;Embalmed Beef,
+Re-mounts, and War Stores&mdash;The Yellow Press and Mr.
+Hearst&mdash;American View of the House of Lords.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>It would seem to be inevitable that any general diffusion of corruption
+in political circles should act deleteriously on the morals of the whole
+community. It will therefore seem almost absurd to Englishmen to
+question whether on the whole the code of commercial ethics in
+America&mdash;the standard of morals which prevails in the every-day
+transaction of business&mdash;is higher or lower than that which prevails in
+Great Britain. The answer must be almost a matter of course. But,
+setting aside any expression of individual opinion and all preconceived
+ideas based on personal experience, let us look at the situation and
+see, if we can, what, judging only from the circumstances of the two
+countries, would be likely to be the relative conditions evolved in
+each. To do this it will be necessary first to clear away a common
+misapprehension in the minds of Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309"></a>[<a href="./images/309.png">309</a>]</span></p><p>It is somehow generally assumed&mdash;for the most part unconsciously and
+without any formulation of the notion in the individual mind&mdash;that
+American society is a sort of truncated pyramid: that it is cut off
+short&mdash;stops in mid-air&mdash;before it gets to the top. Because there are no
+titles in the United States, therefore there are no Upper Classes;
+because there is no Aristocracy therefore there is nothing that
+corresponds to the individual Aristocrat.<a name="FNanchor_309:1_40" id="FNanchor_309:1_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_309:1_40" class="fnanchor">[309:1]</a> If there were a peerage
+in the United States, the country would have its full complement of
+Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, and the rest. And&mdash;this is the
+point&mdash;they would be precisely the same men as lead America to-day;&mdash;but
+how differently Englishmen would regard them!</p>
+
+<p>The middle-class Englishman, when he says that he is no respecter of
+titles and declares that it does not make any difference to him whether
+a man be a Lord or not, may think he is speaking the truth. It is even
+conceivable that there are some so happily constituted as to be able to
+chat equally unconcernedly with a Duke and with their wife's cousin, the
+land agent. Such men, I presume, exist in the British middle <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310"></a>[<a href="./images/310.png">310</a>]</span>classes.
+But the fact remains that in the mass and, as it were, at a distance the
+effect of titles on the imagination of the British people is
+extraordinarily powerful.</p>
+
+<p>That the men in America are precisely the same men, though they have no
+titles, as they would be if they had, is best shown by the example of
+Americans who have crossed the Canadian border. If Sir William Van Horne
+had not gone to Canada in 1881 or thereabouts, he would still be plain
+"Bill" Van Horne and just as wonderful a man as he is to-day. On the
+other hand if fortune had happened to place Mr. James J. Hill a little
+farther north&mdash;in Winnipeg instead of in St. Paul&mdash;it is just as certain
+that he would to-day be Lord Manitoba (or some such title) as that his
+early associates George Stephen and Donald Smith are now Lord Mount
+Stephen and Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. But somehow&mdash;it were
+useless to deny it&mdash;Englishmen would think of him as quite a different
+man. Mr. C. M. Hays in Montreal is still what he was in St.
+Louis&mdash;Charlie Hays. He will not change his nature when he becomes Lord
+Muskoka.</p>
+
+<p>And what is true of a few individuals is no less true all over the
+United States. In the immediate neighbourhood of Mr. Hill, there should
+be at least one peerage in the Washburn family and a couple of
+baronetcies among the Pillsburys. Chicago would have of course one Duke
+in the head of the McCormick family, Mr. Marshall Field would have died
+Earl Dearborn, and Mr. Hughitt might be Viscount Calumet. In New York
+Lord Waldorf would be the title of the eldest son of the (at present
+third) Duke of Astoria. The Vanderbilt marquisate&mdash;of Hudson
+probably&mdash;would <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311"></a>[<a href="./images/311.png">311</a>]</span>be a generation more recent. So throughout the country,
+from Maine to Mississippi, from Lord Penobscot to the Marquis of Biloxi,
+there would be a peerage in each of the good old houses&mdash;the Adamses,
+the Cabots, and the Quincys, the Livingstons, the Putnams, and
+Stuyvesants, the Carters and Randolphs and Jeffersons and Lees.</p>
+
+<p>Americans will say: "Thank Heaven and the wisdom of our Anglo-Saxon
+forefathers that it is not so!" If it were so, however, a good deal of
+British misunderstanding of the United States would be removed. Nor will
+it be contended that any of the Americans whom Englishmen have known
+best&mdash;Mr. Bayard, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Choate, or Mr. Whitelaw Reid, or
+General Horace Porter&mdash;would be other than ornaments to any aristocracy
+in the world. It would be idle to enquire whether Mr. Roosevelt or Mr.
+Chamberlain, Mr. Cleveland or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. Root or
+Lord Rosebery, Mr. Olney or Sir Edward Grey were the better man, for
+every Englishman will probably at once concede that the United States
+does somehow manage to produce individuals of as fine a type as England
+herself. But what no Englishman confesses in his heart is that there is
+any class of these men&mdash;that there is as good an upper stratum to
+society there as in England. These remarkable individuals can only be
+explained as being what naturalists call a "sport"&mdash;mere freaks and
+accidents. This idea exists in the English mind solely, I believe, from
+the lack of titles in America; which is because the colonists were
+inspired by Anglo-Saxon and not by Norman ideas. Had Englishmen been
+accustomed for a generation or two to have relations, diplomatic and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312"></a>[<a href="./images/312.png">312</a>]</span>commercial, not with Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith, but with Lord Savannah
+and the Earl of Chicopee, the idea would never have taken root. And if
+Englishmen knew the United States better, they would be astonished to
+find how frequent these "sports" and accidents seem to be. And it must
+be remembered that the country does at least produce excellent Duchesses
+and Countesses in not inadequate numbers.</p>
+
+<p>Because American society is not officially stratified like a medicine
+glass and there is, ostensibly at least, no social hierarchy, Englishmen
+would do well to disabuse themselves of the idea that therefore the
+people consists entirely of the lower middle class, with a layer of
+unassimilated foreign anarchists below and a few native and accidental
+geniuses thrusting themselves above. Democracy, at least in the United
+States, is not nearly so thorough a leveller as at a first glance it
+appears. You will, it is true, often hear in America the statement that
+it is "four generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves," which is
+to say that one man, from the farm or the workshop, builds up a fortune;
+his son, being born in the days of little things and bred in the school
+of thrift, holds it together; but his sons in turn, surrounded from
+their childhood with wealth and luxury, have lost the old stern fibre
+and they slip quickly back down the steep path which their grandfather
+climbed with so much toil. But no less often will you hear the statement
+that "blood will tell."</p>
+
+<p>In a democracy the essential principle of which is that every man shall
+have an equal chance of getting to the top, it is a matter of course
+that that top stratum will be constantly changing. The idea of anything
+in the nature of an hereditary privileged class is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313"></a>[<a href="./images/313.png">313</a>]</span>abhorrent to the
+mind of every good American. If he had to have an official Aristocracy,
+he would insist on a brand new one with each generation; or more likely
+that it should be re-elected every four years. We are not now discussing
+the advantages or disadvantages of the hereditary principle; the point
+that I desire to make is that at any given time American society,
+instead of being truncated and headless, has the equivalent of an
+aristocracy, whether the first, second, third, or fifth generation of
+nobility, just as abundant and complete as if it were properly labelled
+and classified into Dukes, Marquises, Viscounts, and the rest. And this
+aristocracy is quite independent of any social <i>cachet</i>, whether of the
+New York Four Hundred or of any other authority.</p>
+
+<p>It is a commonly accepted maxim among thoughtful Americans that the
+United States Senate is as much superior to the House of Lords as the
+House of Representatives is inferior to the House of Commons. One may,
+or may not, agree with that dictum; but it is worth noticing that, in
+the opinion of Americans themselves, it is, at least, not by comparison
+with the hereditary aristocracy that they show to any disadvantage.</p>
+
+<p>Nor need one accept the opinion (in which many eminent Englishmen
+coincide with the universal American belief) that the United States
+Supreme Court is the ablest as well as the greatest judicial tribunal in
+the world. But when one looks at the membership of that Court and at the
+majority of the members of the Senate (especially those members from the
+older States which hold to some tradition of fixity of tenure), when one
+sees the men who constitute the Cabinets of successive Presidents and
+those who fill the more <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314"></a>[<a href="./images/314.png">314</a>]</span>distinguished diplomatic posts, when, further,
+one becomes acquainted with the class of men from which, all over the
+country, the presidents and attorneys of the great railway corporations
+and banks and similar institutions are drawn (all of which offices, it
+will be noticed, with the exception of the senatorships, are filled by
+nomination or appointment and not by popular election)&mdash;when one looks
+at, sees, and becomes acquainted with all these, he will begin to
+correct his impressions as to the non-existence of an American
+aristocracy which, though innocent of heraldry, can fairly be matched
+against the British.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The average Englishman looks at America and sees a people wherein there
+is no recognised aristocracy nor any titles. Also he sees that it is,
+through all its classes, a commercial people, immersed in business.
+Therefore he concludes that it is similar to what the English people
+would be if cut off at the top of the classes engaged in business and
+with all the upper classes wiped out. It will be much nearer the truth
+if he considers the people as a whole to be class for class just like
+the English people, subject to the accident that there are no titles,
+but with the difference that all classes, including the untitled Dukes
+and Marquises and Earls, take to business as to their natural element.
+The parallel may not be perfect; but it is incomparably more nearly
+exact than the alternative and general impression.</p>
+
+<p>It is of course necessary to recognise how rapidly the constitution of
+English society is changing, how old traditions are dying out, and in
+accordance with the Anglo-Saxon instinct the social scheme is tending
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315"></a>[<a href="./images/315.png">315</a>]</span>to assimilate itself to the American model. The facts in outline are
+almost too familiar to be worth mentioning, except perhaps for the
+benefit of some American readers, for Americans in England are
+continually puzzled by anomalies which they see in English society. In
+my childhood I was taught that no gentleman could buy or sell anything
+for profit and preserve either his self-respect or the respect of his
+fellows. The only conceivable exceptions&mdash;and I think I was not informed
+of them at too early an age&mdash;were that a gentleman might deal in horses
+or in wines and still remain, if somewhat shaded, a gentleman; the
+reason being that a knowledge of either horses or wines was a
+gentlemanly accomplishment. The indulgence extended to the vendor of
+wines did not extend to the maker or seller of beer. I remember the
+resentment of the school when the sons of a certain wealthy brewer were
+admitted; and those boys had, I imagine, a cheerless time of it in their
+schooldays. The eldest of those boys, being now the head of the family,
+is to-day a peer. But at that time, though brewers or brewers' sons
+might be admitted grudgingly to the company of gentlemen, they were not
+gentlemen themselves. An aunt or a cousin who married a manufacturer, a
+merchant, or a broker&mdash;no matter how rich or in how large a way of
+business&mdash;was coldly regarded, if not actually cut, by the rest of the
+family. There are many families&mdash;though hardly now a class&mdash;in which the
+same traditions persist, but even the families in which the horror of
+trade is as great as ever make an exception as a rule in favour of trade
+conducted in the United States. The American may be pardoned for being
+bewildered when in an aristocracy <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316"></a>[<a href="./images/316.png">316</a>]</span>which is forbidden, so he is told, to
+make money in trade, he finds no lack of individuals who are willing to
+take shares in any trading concern in which money in sufficient
+quantities may be made. The person who will not speak to an English
+farmer except as to an inferior, sends his own sons to the Colonies or
+to the United States to farm. These things, however, are, to Englishmen,
+mere platitudes. But though all are familiar with the change which is
+passing over the British people, few Englishmen, perhaps, have realised
+how rapidly the peerage itself is coming to be a trade-representing
+body. Of seventeen peers of recent creation, taken at random, nine owe
+their money and peerages to business, and the present holders of the
+title were themselves brought up to a business career. It may not be
+long before the English aristocracy will be as universally occupied in
+business as is the American; and it will be as natural for an Earl to go
+to his office as it is for the American millionaire (perhaps the father
+of the Countess) to do so to-day.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of all the change that has taken place, however, it still
+remains very difficult for the English gentleman, or member of a gentle
+family, to engage actively in business&mdash;certainly in trade&mdash;without
+being made to feel that he is stepping down into a lower sphere where
+there is a new and vitiated atmosphere. The code of ethics, he
+understands, is not that to which he is accustomed at his club and in
+his country house. He trusts that it will not be necessary to forget
+that he himself is a gentleman, but at least he will have to remember
+that his associates are only business men.</p>
+
+<p>The American aristocrat, on the other hand, takes <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317"></a>[<a href="./images/317.png">317</a>]</span>to business as being
+the most attractive and honourable career. Setting aside all question of
+money-making, he believes it to be (and his father tells him that it is)
+the best life for him. Idleness is not good for any man. He will enjoy
+his annual month or two of shooting or fishing or yachting all the
+better for having spent the last ten or eleven months in hard work.
+Moreover, immersion in affairs will keep him active and alert and in
+touch with his fellow-men, besides being in itself one of the largest
+and most fascinating of pastimes. There is also the money; but when
+business is put on this level, money has a tendency to become only one
+among many objects. In England no man can with any grace pretend that he
+goes into business for any other reason than to make money. In America a
+man goes into it in order to gain standing and respect and make a
+reputation.</p>
+
+<p>Under these conditions, to return to our original point, in which
+country, putting other things aside, would one naturally expect to find
+the better code of business morals? Let us, if we can, consider the
+matter, as has been said before, without preconceived ideas or
+individual bias; let us imagine that we are speaking of two countries in
+which we have no personal stake whatever. If in any two such
+countries&mdash;in Gombroonia and Tigrosylvania, let us say&mdash;we should see
+two peoples approximately matched, of one tongue and having similar
+political ideals, not visibly unequal in strength, in abilities, or in
+the individual sense of honour, and if in one we should further see the
+aristocracy regarding the pursuit of commerce as a thing beneath and
+unworthy of them, in which they could not engage without contamination,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318"></a>[<a href="./images/318.png">318</a>]</span>while in the other it was followed as the most honourable of
+careers,&mdash;in which of the two should we expect to find the higher code
+of commercial ethics?</p>
+
+<p>It does not seem to me that there can be any doubt as to the answer.
+Other things being equal, and as a matter of theory only, business in
+the United States ought to be ruled by much higher standards of conduct
+than in England.</p>
+
+<p>Before proceeding to an analysis of any particular conditions, there is
+one further general consideration which I would urge on the attention of
+English readers, most of whom have preconceived ideas on this subject
+already formed.</p>
+
+<p>I am not among those who believe that trade or commerce of ordinary
+kinds either requires or tends to develop great intellectuality in those
+engaged in it. Indeed, my opinion (for which I am willing to be abused)
+is that any considerable measure of intellect is a hindrance to success
+in retail trade or in commerce on a small scale. It is a thesis which
+some one might develop at leisure, showing that it is not merely not
+creditable for a man to make money in trade but that it is an explicit
+avowal of intellectual poverty. Whence, of course, it follows that the
+London tradesman who grows rich and retires to the country or suburbs to
+build himself a statelier mansion is more justly an object of pity, if
+not of contempt, than is often consciously acknowledged. Any imaginative
+quality or breadth of vision which contributes to distract the mind of a
+tradesman from the one transaction immediately in hand and the immediate
+financial results thereof is a disqualification. I state my views thus
+in their extreme form lest the English reader should think that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319"></a>[<a href="./images/319.png">319</a>]</span>I
+entertain too much respect (or too little contempt) for the purely
+commercial brain. At the same time the English reader will concede that
+commercial enterprises and industrial undertakings may be on such a
+scale as to offer full exercise to the largest intellects.</p>
+
+<p>As an illustration of this: Cecil Rhodes grew, as we know, wealthy from
+the proceeds of vast undertakings; but men closely associated with him
+have assured me that Rhodes was a very indifferent "business man." We
+may, I think, take it for certain that if Rhodes had been condemned to
+conduct a retail grocery he would have conducted it to speedy
+irretrievable disaster. We are probably all agreed that the conduct of a
+small grocery does not require fineness of intellect; most English
+readers, I think, will follow me in believing that success in such a
+sphere of life implies at least an imperfect intellectual development.
+On the other hand enterprises truly Rhodian do call for intellectual
+grasp of the largest.</p>
+
+<p>The consideration which I wish to urge is that business in the United
+States during the period of growth and settlement of the country has
+been largely on Rhodian lines. The great enterprises by which the
+country has been developed, and on which most of the large fortunes of
+individual Americans are based have been of truly imperial proportions.
+The flinging of railways across thousands of miles of wilderness
+(England has made peers of the men who did it in Canada) with the laying
+out of cities and the peopling of provinces; the building of great
+fleets of boats upon the lakes; the vast mining schemes in remote and
+inaccessible regions of the country; lumbering enterprises which (even
+though not always honestly) dealt <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320"></a>[<a href="./images/320.png">320</a>]</span>with virgin forests by the hundreds
+of square miles; "bonanza" wheat farming and the huge systems of grain
+elevators for the handling of the wheat and the conveyance of it to the
+market or the mill; cattle ranching on a stupendous scale (perhaps even
+the collecting of those cattle in their thousands daily for slaughter in
+the packing houses); the irrigating of wide tracts of desert;&mdash;these
+things and such as these are the "businesses" out of which the Americans
+of the last and present generations have largely made their fortunes.
+And they are enterprises, most of them, not unworthy to rank with
+Chartered Companies and the construction of railways from the North to
+the South of Africa.</p>
+
+<p>Not only this, but something of the same qualities of spaciousness, as
+of trafficking between large horizons, attach to almost all lines of
+business in the United States,&mdash;to many which in England are necessarily
+humdrum and commonplace. Almost every Englishman has been surprised on
+making the acquaintance of an accidental American (no "magnate" or
+"captain of industry" but an ordinary business man) to learn that though
+he is no more than the manufacturer of some matter-of-fact article, his
+operations are on a confusing scale and that, with branch offices in
+three or four towns and agents in a dozen more, his daily dealings are
+transacted over an area reaching three thousand miles from his home
+office, in which the interposition of prairies, mountain ranges, and
+chains of lakes are but incidents. Business in the United States has
+almost necessarily something of the romance of remote and adventurous
+enterprises.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said (and the point is worth insisting on) <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321"></a>[<a href="./images/321.png">321</a>]</span>that the
+Englishman cannot pretend that he goes into business with any other
+object than to make money. His motives are on the face of them mercenary
+if not sordid. The American is impelled primarily by quite other
+ambitions. Similarly, when the Englishman thinks of business, the image
+which he conjures up in his mind is of a dull commonplace like, on lines
+so long established and well-defined that they can embrace little of
+novelty or of enterprise; a sedentary life of narrow outlook from the
+unexhilarating atmosphere of a London office or shop. To the American,
+except in small or retail trade in the large cities, the conditions of
+business are widely different. All around him, lies, both actually and
+figuratively, new ground, wilderness almost, inviting him to turn
+Argonaut. The mere vastness and newness of the country make it full of
+allurement to adventure, the rewards of which are larger and more
+immediate than can be hoped for in older and more straitened
+communities.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that the American people was, by its long period of
+isolation and self-communion, made to become, in its outlook on the
+policies of the world, a provincial people; but that the very
+provincialism had something of dignity in it from the mere fact that it
+was continent-wide. So it is with American business. The exigencies of
+their circumstances have made the American people a commercial people;
+but whereas in England a commercial life may not offer scope for any
+intellectual activity and may even have a necessary tendency to stunt
+the mentality of any one engaged in it, business in the United States
+offers exercise to a much larger gamut of abilities and, by its mere
+range and variety, instead of dwarfing has <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322"></a>[<a href="./images/322.png">322</a>]</span>a tendency to keep those
+abilities trained and alert. A business in England has not approximately
+the same large theatre of operation or the same variety of incident as a
+business of the same turn over in America. It is almost the difference
+between the man who furnishes his larder by going out to his farmyard
+and wringing the necks of tame ducks therein, and him who must snatch
+the same supply with his gun from the wild flocks in the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>But, indeed, no argument should be needed on the subject; for one solid
+fact with which almost every Englishman is familiar is that in any
+American (let us use the word) shopkeeper whom he may meet travelling in
+Europe there is a certain mental alertness, freshness, and vigour,
+however objectionably they may at times display themselves&mdash;which are at
+least not characteristic of the English shopkeeping class.</p>
+
+<p>Just, then, as we have seen that, if we knew nothing about the peoples
+of the two countries, beyond the broad outlines of their respective
+social structures, we should be compelled, other things being equal, to
+look for a higher code of commercial morality in America than in
+England, so, when we see one further fact, namely that of the difference
+in the conditions under which business is conducted, we must naturally,
+other things being equal, look for a livelier intellect and a higher
+grade of mentality in the American than in the English business man.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Unfortunately other things never are equal. First, there is the taint of
+the political corruption in America which must, as has been said, in
+some measure contaminate the community. Then, England is an old
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323"></a>[<a href="./images/323.png">323</a>]</span>country, with all the machinery of society running in long-accustomed
+grooves; above all it is a wealthy country and the first among creditor
+nations, to whose interest it has been, and is, to see that every bond
+and every engagement be literally and exactly carried out. The United
+States in the nineteenth century was young and undisciplined, with all
+the ardour of youth going out to conquer the world, seeing all things in
+rose-colour, but, for the present,&mdash;poor. It was, like any other youth
+confident of the golden future, lavish alike in its borrowings and its
+spendings, over-careless of forms and formalities. Happily the
+confidence in the future has been justified and ten times justified, and
+it is rich&mdash;richer than it yet knows&mdash;with resources larger even than it
+has learned properly to appraise or control. Whatever obligations it
+incurred in the headlong past are trifles to it now,&mdash;a few hundreds of
+college debts to a man who has come into millions. And with its position
+now assured it has grown jealous of its credit, national and individual.</p>
+
+<p>It was inevitable that the heedless days should beget indiscretions, the
+memories of which smart to-day. It was inevitable that amid so much
+recklessness and easy faith there should be some wrong-doing. Above all,
+was it inevitable that in the realisation of its dreams, when wealth and
+power grew and money came pouring into it, there should be bred in the
+people an extraordinary and unwholesome love of speculation which in
+turn opened their opportunities to the gambler and the confidence-man of
+all kinds and sizes. They flourished in the land,&mdash;the man who wrecked
+railways and issued fictitious millions of "securities," the man who
+robbed the government of moneys <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324"></a>[<a href="./images/324.png">324</a>]</span>destined for the support of Indians or
+the establishment of postal routes in the farther West, the man who
+salted mines, the "land-grabber" and the "timber-shark" who dealt not in
+acres but in hundreds of square miles, the bogus trust company, and the
+fraudulent land and investment agent. When even the smallest community
+begins to "boom," the people of the community lose their heads and the
+harvest ripens to the sickle of the swindler. And the entire United
+States&mdash;sometimes in one part, sometimes in another, sometimes all
+together,&mdash;with only an occasional and short-lived panic to check the
+madness, boomed continuously for half a century.</p>
+
+<p>It is still booming, but with wealth, established institutions, and
+invested capital, have come comparative soberness and a sense of
+responsibility. The spirit which governs American industrial life to-day
+is quite other than that which ruled it two or three decades ago. The
+United States has sown its wild oats. It was a generous sowing,
+certainly, for the land was wide and the soil rich. But that harvest has
+been all but garnered and the country is now for the most part given
+over to more legitimate crops.</p>
+
+<p>[Tares still spring up among the wheat. The commercial community is not
+yet as well ordered as that of England or another older country; and
+since the foregoing paragraphs were written, the panic which fell upon
+the United States in the closing months of 1907 has occurred. The
+country had enjoyed a decade of extraordinary financial prosperity, in
+the course of which, in the spirit of speculation which has already been
+mentioned, all values had been forced to too high a level, credits had
+been extended beyond the margin <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325"></a>[<a href="./images/325.png">325</a>]</span>of safety, and the volume of business
+transactions had swollen to such bulk in proportion to the amount of
+actual monetary wealth in existence that any shock to public confidence,
+any nervousness resulting in a contraction of the circulating medium,
+could not fail to produce catastrophe. The shock came; as sooner or
+later it had to come. In the stern period of struggle and retrenchment
+which followed, all the weak spots in the financial and industrial
+fabric of the country have been laid bare and, while depression and
+distress have spread over the whole United States, until all parts are
+equally involved, not only have the exposures of anything approaching
+dishonest or illegitimate methods been few, but the way in which the
+business communities at large have stood the strain has shown that there
+is nothing approaching unsoundness in the general business conditions.
+With the system of credit shattered and with hardly circulating medium
+enough to conduct the necessary petty transactions of everyday life, the
+country is already recovering confidence and feeling its way back to
+normal conditions. The results have not been approximately as bad as
+those which followed the panic of 1893; and the difference is an index
+to the immensely greater stability of the country's industries.
+Meanwhile there was at first (and still exists) a feeling of intense
+indignation in all parts of the country that so much suffering should
+have been thrown upon the whole people by the misbehaviour of a small
+circle of men in New York. The experience, however painful, will in the
+long run be salutary. It will be salutary in the first place for the
+obvious reason that business will have to start again conservatively and
+with inflated values reduced to something <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326"></a>[<a href="./images/326.png">326</a>]</span>below normal levels. But it
+will be even more salutary for the less obvious reason that it has
+intensified the already acute disgust of the business men of the country
+as a whole with what are known as "Wall Street methods." Englishmen
+generally have an idea that Wall Street methods are the methods of all
+the United States; and, while they have had impressed upon them every
+detail of those financial irregularities in the small New York clique
+which precipitated the catastrophe, they have heard and know nothing of
+the coolness and cheery resolution with which the crisis has been faced
+by the commercial classes as a whole.]</p>
+
+<p>England has not yet forgotten the disclosures in the matter of the
+Chicago packing houses. That the light which was then turned on that
+industry revealed conditions that were in some details inconceivably
+shocking, is hardly to be doubted: and I trust that those are mistaken
+who say that if similar investigation had been made into the methods of
+certain English establishments, before warning was given, the state of
+affairs would have been found not much different. What is certain,
+however, is that the English public received an exaggerated idea of the
+extent of the abuses. In part, this was a necessary result of the
+exigencies of journalism. A large majority of the newspapers even of
+London&mdash;certainly those which reach a large majority of the
+readers&mdash;prefer sensationalism. Even those which are anxious in such
+cases to be fair and temperate are sadly hampered both by the
+limitations of space in their own columns and by the costliness of
+telegraphic correspondence. It is inevitable that the most conservative
+and judicial of correspondents should transmit to his papers whatever
+are the most <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327"></a>[<a href="./images/327.png">327</a>]</span>striking items&mdash;revelations&mdash;accusations in an indictment
+such as was then framed against the packers. The more damning details
+are the best news. On the other hand he cannot, save to a ridiculously
+disproportionate extent, transmit the extenuating circumstances, the
+individual denials, the local atmosphere. Telegraph tolls are heavy and
+space is straitened while atmosphere and extenuating circumstances are
+not news at all. An Englishman is generally astonished when he reads the
+accounts of some conspicuous divorce case or great financial scandal in
+England as they appear in the American (or for that matter the French or
+German) papers, with the editorial comments thereupon. In the picture of
+any event happening at a great distance the readers of even the
+best-intentioned journals necessarily have presented to their view only
+the highest lights and the blackest shadows. In this instance a certain
+section of the American press&mdash;what is specifically known as the
+"yellow" press&mdash;had strong motives, of a political kind, for making the
+case against the packers as bad as possible. It is unfortunate that many
+of the London newspapers look much too largely to that particular class
+of American paper for their American news and their views on current
+American events.</p>
+
+<p>If we assume that any reasonable proportion of the accusations made
+against the packing houses were true of some one or other establishment,
+it still remains that a considerable proportion of the American business
+community is otherwise engaged than in the canning of meats. There is a
+story well known in America of a countryman who entered a train with a
+packet of eggs, none too fresh, in his coat-tail pocket. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328"></a>[<a href="./images/328.png">328</a>]</span>He sat down
+upon them; but deemed it best to continue sitting rather than give the
+contents a chance to run down his person. Meanwhile the smell permeated
+through the car and at last the passenger sitting immediately behind the
+countryman saw whence the unpleasantness arose. Whereupon he fell to
+abusing the other.</p>
+
+<p>"Thunder!" exclaimed the countryman. "What have you got to complain of?
+You've only got the smell. <i>I'm sitting in it!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>This is much how Americans feel in regard to foreign criticisms of the
+packing house scandals. Whatever wrong-doing there may have been in
+individual establishments in this one industry in Chicago, is no more to
+be taken as typical of the commercial ethics of the American people than
+the discovery of a fraudulent trader or group of traders in one
+particular line in Manchester or Glasgow would imply that the British
+trading public was corrupt. The mere ruthlessness with which, in this
+case, the wrong-doers were exposed ought in itself to be a sufficient
+evidence to outsiders that the American public is no more willingly
+tolerant of dishonesty than any other people. Judged, indeed, by that
+criterion, surely no other country can detest wrong-doing so
+whole-heartedly.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And I wish here to protest against the habit which the worst section of
+the English newspapers has adopted during the last year or so of holding
+"American methods" in business up to contempt. It is true that it is not
+done with any idea of directing hostility against the United States; and
+those who use the catchword so freely would undoubtedly much prefer <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329"></a>[<a href="./images/329.png">329</a>]</span>to
+speak of "German methods" or even "French" or "Russian methods," if they
+could. All that is meant is that the methods are un-English and alien;
+but whether the intention is to lessen the public good-will towards the
+United States or not, that must inevitably be the effect. Even if it
+were not, the American public is abundantly justified in resenting it.</p>
+
+<p>The idea that America is trust-ridden to the extent popularly supposed
+in England has been carefully fostered by those extreme journals in
+America already referred to (it is impossible not to speak of them as
+the Yellow Press) for personal and political reasons&mdash;reasons which
+Englishmen would comprehend if they understood better the present
+political situation in the United States. The idea has been encouraged
+by divers English "impressionist" authors and writers on the English
+press who, with a superficial knowledge of American affairs, have caught
+the jargon of the same school of American journalist-politicians. It has
+been further confirmed by a misunderstanding of the attitude and policy
+of President Roosevelt himself, which has already been sufficiently
+dealt with.</p>
+
+<p>England is, in the American sense, much more "trust-ridden" than the
+United States. It is not merely that (as any reference to statistics
+will show) wealth is less concentrated in America than in England&mdash;that
+nothing like the same proportion of the capital of the country is lodged
+in a few hands&mdash;for that, inasmuch as the majority of large fortunes in
+Great Britain are not commercial in their origin, might mean little; but
+in business the opportunity for the small trader and the man without
+backing to win to independence is a hundred times greater in America,
+while the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330"></a>[<a href="./images/330.png">330</a>]</span>control exercised by "rings" and "cliques" over certain large
+industries in England and over the access to certain large markets is, I
+think, much more complete than has been attained, except most
+temporarily, by any trust or ring in the United States, except, as in
+the case of oil, where artificial monopoly has been assisted by natural
+conditions.</p>
+
+<p>The tendency in the United States even in the last twenty years has not
+been in the direction of a concentration of wealth, but towards its
+diffusion in a degree unparalleled in any country in the world. The
+point in which the United States is economically almost immeasurably
+superior to England is not in the number of her big fortunes but in the
+enormously greater well-to-do-ness of the middle classes&mdash;the vastly
+larger number of persons of moderate affluence, who are in the enjoyment
+of incomes which in England would class them among the reasonably rich.</p>
+
+<p>Consolidation and amalgamation are the necessary and unavoidable
+tendencies of modern business. As surely as the primitive partnership
+succeeded individual effort and as, later, corporations were created to
+enlarge the sphere of partnerships, so is it certain that the industrial
+units which will fight for control of trade in the much larger markets
+of the modern world will represent vastly larger aggregations of capital
+than (except in extraordinary and generally state-aided institutions)
+were dreamed of fifty years ago. That must be accepted as a certainty.
+It does not by any means necessarily follow that this process entails a
+concentration of wealth in fewer hands; on the contrary the larger a
+corporation is, the wider proportionally, as a general rule, is the
+circle of the shareholders in whom <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331"></a>[<a href="./images/331.png">331</a>]</span>the property is vested. But
+presuming the commercial growth of the United States to continue for
+half a century yet on the lines on which it has developed in the last
+two decades, the country will then, not so much by any concentration of
+wealth, but by the mere filling up of the commercial field (so that by
+increase in the intensity of competition the opportunity for the small
+or new trader to force his way to the surface will be more curtailed,
+and the gulf between owner or employer and non-owner or employed will
+become greater and more permanent)&mdash;if, I say, that growth should
+continue for another fifty years then will the conditions in America
+approximate to those in England. This it is against which the masses in
+America are more or less blindly and unconsciously fighting to-day. The
+comparison with European conditions is generally not formulated in the
+individual mind; but an approach to those conditions is what the masses
+of America see&mdash;or think they see&mdash;in the tendency towards greater
+aggregations of corporate power. It is not the process of aggregation,
+but the protest against it, which is peculiar to the United States: not
+the trust-power but the hatred of it.</p>
+
+<p>This being so, for Englishmen or other Europeans to speak of all
+manifestations of the process itself as "American" is not a little
+absurd. Besides which, to so speak of it in the tone which is generally
+adopted is extremely impolite to a kindred people whose good-will
+Englishmen ought to, and do, desire to keep.</p>
+
+<p>The thing is best illustrated by taking a single example. The term
+"Trust" is, of course, very vaguely used, being generally taken, quite
+apart from its proper significance, to mean any form of combination,
+corporate <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332"></a>[<a href="./images/332.png">332</a>]</span>aggregation, or working agreement which tends to extend
+control of a company or individual, or group of companies or
+individuals, over a larger proportion of a particular trade or industry.
+In the United States, with the possible exception of the Standard Oil
+Company (which is not properly a trust), the form of corporate power
+against which there has been the most bitterness is that of the
+railways, and the specific form of railway organisation most fiercely
+attacked has been the Pool or Joint Purse&mdash;which is, in all essentials,
+a true trust. In 1887 the formation of a Pool, or Joint Purse Agreement,
+was made illegal in the United States; but Englishmen can have no
+conception of the popular hatred of the word "Pools" which exists in
+America or of the obloquy which has been heaped upon railway companies
+for entering into them. Few Englishmen on the other hand have any clear
+idea of what a Joint Purse Agreement is; and they jog along contentedly
+ignorant that this iniquitous engine for their oppression is in daily
+use by the British railway companies.</p>
+
+<p>My personal belief is that the prohibition of pools in America was a
+mistake: that it would have been better for the country from the first
+to have authorised, even encouraged, their formation, as in England,
+under efficient governmental supervision. But the point is that the
+majority of the American people thought otherwise and no other
+manifestation of the trust-tendency has been more virulently attacked
+than the&mdash;to English ideas&mdash;harmless institution of a joint purse. And
+whether the American people ultimately acted wisely or unwisely, they
+were justified in regarding any form of association or agreement between
+railways <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333"></a>[<a href="./images/333.png">333</a>]</span>with more apprehension than would be reasonable in England. It
+is not possible here to explain why this is so, except to say broadly
+that the longer distances in America and the lack of other forms of
+transportation render an American community, especially in the West,
+more dependent upon the railway than is the case in England. The
+conditions give the railway company a larger control over, or influence
+in, the well-being of the people.</p>
+
+<p>An excellent illustration of the difference in the point of view of the
+two peoples has been furnished since the above was written by the
+announcements, within a few weeks of each other in December 1907, of the
+formation of two "working agreements" between British railway
+companies,&mdash;that namely between the Great Northern and Great Central
+railways and that between the North British and Caledonian. In the
+former case the Boards of Directors of the two companies merely
+constituted themselves a Joint Committee to operate the two railways
+conjointly. In the latter, not many details of the agreement were made
+public, except that it was intended to control competition in all
+classes of traffic and, as the first fruits thereof, there was an
+immediate and not unimportant increase in certain classes of passenger
+rates. Neither agreement has, I think, yet received the sanction of the
+proper authorities, but the public generally received the announcement
+of both with approval amounting almost to enthusiasm. Of these
+agreements the former, certainly, and presumably the latter, would be
+flagrantly illegal in the United States. If, moreover, an attempt were
+made in America to arrive at the same ends in some roundabout way which
+would avoid technical <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334"></a>[<a href="./images/334.png">334</a>]</span>illegality, the outburst of popular indignation
+would make it impossible. Personally I sympathise with the English view
+and believe both agreements to be not only just and proper but in the
+public interest; but it is certain that they would have created such an
+uproar in the United States that English newspapers would inevitably
+have reflected the disturbance, and English readers would have been
+convinced that once more the Directorates of American railways were
+engaged in a nefarious attempt to use the power of capital for the
+plundering and oppression of the public. In the still more recent debate
+(February 1908) in the House of Commons, the views expressed by both Mr.
+Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law in favour of the lessening of competition
+between railway companies would have exposed them to the hysterical
+abuse of a large part of the American press. Both those gentlemen would
+have been openly accused of being the tools of (if not actually
+subsidised by) the corporations, and (but for Mr. Bonar Law's company)
+Mr. Lloyd George's attitude would, I think, be sufficient to ruin an
+Administration. These statements contain no reflection on the American
+point of view. The conditions are such that that point of view may, in
+America, be the right one. But the absurdity is that Englishmen hear
+these things, or read of them as being said in the United States, and
+thereupon assume that terrible offences are being perpetrated; whereas
+nothing is being done which in England would not receive the approval of
+the majority of sensible men and be temperately applauded by the
+spokesmen of both the great parties in Parliament. It is not, I say
+again, the Trust-power, but the hatred of it, which is peculiar to
+America.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335"></a>[<a href="./images/335.png">335</a>]</span></p><p>The same is true of the field as a whole. Things harmless in England
+might be very dangerous in America. We have so far considered the trust
+power only as a commercial and industrial factor&mdash;in its tendency, by
+crystallisation or consolidation in the higher strata, to depress the
+economic status of the industrial masses and to make the emergence of
+the individual trader into independence more difficult. In this aspect
+capital is immensely more dominant in England than in America. But there
+is a political side to the problem.</p>
+
+<p>In the United States, owing to the absence of a throne and an
+established aristocracy, there is, as it were, no counterpoise to the
+power of wealth. This is, in practice, the chief virtue of the throne in
+the British constitution, that, in its capacity as the Fountain of
+Honour, it prevents wealth from becoming the dominant power in the
+country and thereby (which Americans are slow to understand) is the most
+democratic of forces, protecting the proletariat in some measure against
+the possibility of unhindered oppression by an omnipotent capitalism.
+The English masses are already by the mere impenetrability of the
+commercial structure above them much worse off than the corresponding
+masses in the United States. What their condition might be if for a
+generation the social restraint put upon wealth by the power of the
+throne and the established aristocracy were to be relaxed, it is not
+pleasant to consider. Nor need it be considered.<a name="FNanchor_335:1_41" id="FNanchor_335:1_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_335:1_41" class="fnanchor">[335:1]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336"></a>[<a href="./images/336.png">336</a>]</span></p><p>It is, I think, evident that in America the danger to the industrial
+independence of the individual which might arise from the aggregation of
+wealth in a few hands is much greater than in England. The power would
+be capable of greater abuse; the evils which would flow from such abuse
+would be greater. It is not wealth, but the abuse of it that he is
+attacking, says President Roosevelt&mdash;not the wealthy class, but the
+"wealthy criminal class." The distinction has not been digested by those
+in England who rail against American methods or who write of American
+politics. It is necessary&mdash;or so it seems to a large number of the
+American people&mdash;that extraordinary checks should be put upon the
+possibility of the abuse of wealth in the United States, such as do not
+exist or are not needed (or at least we have heard no energetic demand
+for them) in England. As a political fact there is need of especial
+vigilance in the United States lest corporate power be abused. As a
+commercial fact it is merely preposterous to rail at the modern tendency
+to consolidation and amalgamation as specifically "American."</p>
+
+<p>It is probably safe to say that if the United States had such a social
+counterweight as is furnished in England by the throne and the
+recognised aristocracy, the growth of what is called "trust-power" would
+be viewed to-day with comparative unconcern. At all events England is
+able to view with something like unconcern the conditions, as they exist
+in England, worse than, as has been said, the trust power is humanly
+capable of imposing on the American people <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337"></a>[<a href="./images/337.png">337</a>]</span>in another half-century of
+unhindered growth. Which, American readers will please understand, is
+not a suggestion that the United States would be benefited, even
+commercially, by the institution of a monarchy.</p>
+
+<p>Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Englishmen long ago acquired the
+idea that American business methods in what may be called large affairs
+were too often unscrupulous; and of such methods, there were certainly
+examples. I have explained why the temptations to, and the opportunities
+for, dishonesty were very great in the earlier days and it would be
+impossible to find language too severe to characterise many of the
+things which were done&mdash;not once, but again and again&mdash;in the
+manipulation of railways, the stealing of public lands, and the
+plundering of the public treasury. The dog deserved as bad a name as he
+received. But that dog died. The Americans themselves stoned him to
+death&mdash;with precisely the same ferocity as they have recently exhibited
+when they discovered, as they feared, some of his litter in the Chicago
+packing houses&mdash;or a year before in the offices of certain insurance
+companies. The present generation of Americans may not be any better men
+than their fathers (let us hope that they are, if only for the
+reputation of the vast immigration of Englishmen and Scotchmen which has
+poured into the country) but at least they are much less tempted. They
+live under a new social code. They have nothing like the same
+opportunity for successful dishonesty and immeasurably greater chance of
+punishment, whether visited on them by the law or by the opinion of
+their fellows, if unsuccessful or found out. It is not fair that the new
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338"></a>[<a href="./images/338.png">338</a>]</span>dog should be damned to drag around the old dog's name.</p>
+
+<p>There is an excellent analogy in which the relations of the two peoples
+are reversed.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Americans are largely of the opinion that the British aristocracy is a
+disreputable class. They gave that dog its name too; and there have been
+individual scandals enough in the past to justify it. It is useless for
+an Englishman living in America to endeavour to modify this opinion in
+even a small circle, for it is only a question of time&mdash;probably of a
+very short time&mdash;before some peer turns up in the divorce court and the
+Englishmen's friends will send him newspaper clippings containing the
+Court Report and will hail him on street corners and at the club with:
+"How about your British aristocracy now?"</p>
+
+<p>Americans cannot see the British peerage as a whole; they only hear of
+those who thrust themselves into unsavoury notoriety. So Englishmen get
+no view of the American business community in its entirety, but only
+read with relish the occasional scandal. Of the two, the American has
+the better, or at least more frequent, justification for his error than
+has the Englishman; but it is a pity that the two cannot somehow agree
+to an exchange. Perhaps a treaty might be entered into (if it were not
+for the United States Senate) which, when ratified, should be published
+in all newspapers and posted in all public places in both countries,
+setting forth that:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<span class="smcap">In consideration</span> of the Party of the Second Part hereafter
+cherishing a belief in the marital fidelity <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339"></a>[<a href="./images/339.png">339</a>]</span>and general moral
+purity of all members of the British peerage, their wives,
+heirs, daughters, and near relations, and further agreeing
+that when, by any unfortunate mishap, any individual member of
+the said Peerage or his wife, daughter, or other relation
+shall have been discovered and publicly shown to have offended
+against the marriage laws or otherwise violated the canons of
+common decency, to understand and take it for granted that
+such mishap, offence, or violation is a quite exceptional
+occurrence owing to the unexplainable depravity of the
+individual and that it in no way reflects upon the other
+members of the said Peerage, whether in the mass or
+individually, or their wives, daughters, or near relations:
+<span class="smcap">Therefore</span> the Party of the First Part hereby agrees to decline
+to give any credence whatsoever to any story, remark, or
+reflection to the discredit of the general honesty of the
+American commercial classes or public men, but agrees that he
+will hereafter assume them to be trustworthy and truthful
+whether individually or in the mass, except in such cases as
+shall have been publicly proven to the contrary, and that he
+will always understand and declare that such isolated cases
+are purely sporadic and not in any way to be taken as
+evidences either of an epidemic or of a general low state of
+public morality, but that on the contrary the said American
+commercial classes do, whether in the mass or individually,
+hate and despise an occasional scoundrel among them as
+heartily as would the Party of the First Part hate and despise
+such a scoundrel if found among his own people&mdash;as, he
+confesses, does occasionally occur."</p></div>
+
+<p>Nonsense? Of course it is nonsense. But the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340"></a>[<a href="./images/340.png">340</a>]</span>desirable thing is that
+Englishmen should be brought to understand that after all it is but an
+inconsiderable portion of the American business community that is
+permanently employed in the manufacture of wooden nutmegs, in selling
+canned horrors for food, or in watering railway shares, and that
+Americans should believe that there are quite a large number of men of
+high birth in England who are only infrequently engaged in either
+beating their own wives or running away with those of other men.</p>
+
+<p>The brief confessional clause at the conclusion of the above draft I
+take to be an important portion of the document. It is not necessary
+that a similar confession should be incorporated in the behalf of the
+Party of the Second Part, not because there are no family scandals in
+America, but because, in the absence of a peerage, it is not easy to
+tell when a divorce or other scandal occurs among the aristocracy.
+"Scandal in High Life" is such a tempting heading to a column that the
+American newspapers are generous in their interpretation of the term and
+many a man and woman, on getting into trouble, must have been surprised
+to learn for the first time that their ambitions had been realised,
+unknown to themselves, and that they did indeed belong to that class
+which they had for so long yearned to enter.</p>
+
+<p>This fact also is worth considering, namely, that whereas in England it
+is not impossible that there may be more scandals of a financial sort,
+both in official circles and outside, than the public ever hears of
+through the press; it is reasonably certain that in America the press
+publishes full details of a good many more scandals than ever occur.</p>
+
+<p>This peculiarity of the American press (for it is still peculiar to
+America, in degree at least, if not in kind) <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341"></a>[<a href="./images/341.png">341</a>]</span>does not arise from any
+set purpose of blackening the reputation of the country in the eyes of
+the outside world, but is entirely the result of "enterprise," of
+individual ambition, and the extremity of partisan enthusiasm. Other
+nations may be quite certain that they hear all the worst that is to be
+told of the people of the United States. Out of the Spanish war arose
+what came to be known as the "embalmed beef" scandal. American soldiers
+in Cuba were furnished with a quantity of rations which, by the time
+they reached the front and an effort was made to serve them out, were
+entirely unfit for human consumption. Undoubtedly much suffering was
+thereby caused to the men and probably some disease. But, equally
+undoubtedly, the catastrophe arose from an error in judgment and not
+from dishonesty of contractors or of any government official. But, as
+the incident was handled by a section of the American press, it might
+well, had the two great parties at the time been more evenly balanced in
+public favour, have resulted in the ruin of the reputation of an
+administration and the overthrow of the Republican party at the next
+election.</p>
+
+<p>If the Re-mount scandals and the Army Stores scandals which arose out of
+England's South African war had occurred in America, I doubt if any
+party could have stood against the storm that would have been provoked,
+and, deriving their ideas of the affairs from the cabled reports,
+Englishmen of all classes would still be shaking their heads over the
+inconceivable dishonesty in the American public service and the
+deplorable standard of honour in the American army. It may be necessary
+and wholesome for a people that occasionally certain kinds of dirty
+linen should be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342"></a>[<a href="./images/342.png">342</a>]</span>washed in public; but the speciality of the American
+"yellow press"<a name="FNanchor_342:1_42" id="FNanchor_342:1_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_342:1_42" class="fnanchor">[342:1]</a> is the skill which it shows in soiling clean linen
+in private in order to bring it out into the streets to wash.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Postscript</span>&mdash;Reference has been made in the foregoing chapter to the
+British peerage and I now propose to have the temerity to enter a
+serious protest against the tone in which even the thoughtful American
+commonly refers to the House of Lords. I cherish no such hopeless
+ambition as that of inducing the American newspaper paragrapher to
+surrender his traditional right to make fun of a British peer on any and
+every occasion. I am speaking now to the more serious teachers of the
+American people; for it is a deplorable fact that even the best of those
+teachers when speaking of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343"></a>[<a href="./images/343.png">343</a>]</span>the House of Lords use language which is
+generally flippant, nearly always contemptuous, and not uncommonly
+uninformed.</p>
+
+<p>My own belief (and I think it is that of the majority of thinking
+Englishmen) is that if the discussion in the House of Lords on any large
+question be laid side by side with the debate on the same question in
+the House of Commons and the two be read concurrently, it will almost
+invariably be seen that the speeches in the Upper House show a marked
+superiority in breadth of view, expression and grasp of the larger
+aspects and the underlying principles of the subject. I believe that
+such a debate in the House of Lords is characterised by more ability and
+thoroughness than the debate on a similar question in either the Senate
+or the House of Representatives. It does not appear from the respective
+membership of the chambers how it could well be otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>Let us from memory give a list of the more conspicuous members of the
+present House of Peers whose names are likely to be known to American
+readers, to wit: the Dukes of Devonshire and Norfolk; the Marquises of
+Ripon and Landsdowne; Earls Roberts, Rosebery, Elgin, Northbrook, Crewe,
+Carrington, Cromer, Kimberley, Minto, Halsbury, Spencer; Viscounts,
+Wolseley, Goschen, Esher, Kitchener of Khartoum, St. Aldwyn
+(Hicks-Beach), Milner, Cross; the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
+Bishop of London; Lords Lister, Alverstone, Curzon of Kedleston, Mount
+Stephen, Strathcona and Mount Royal, Avebury, Loreburn, and Rayleigh.
+Let me emphasise the fact that this is not intended to be a list of the
+ablest members of the House, but only a list of able members something
+of whose reputation and achievements is likely to be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344"></a>[<a href="./images/344.png">344</a>]</span>known to the
+intelligent American reader. If the list were being compiled for English
+readers, it would have to be twice as long; but, as it stands, I submit
+that it is a list which cannot approximately be paralleled from among
+the members of the House of Commons or from among the members of the
+Senate and House of Representatives combined. I take it to be
+incontrovertible that a list representing such eminence and so great
+accomplishment in so many fields (theology, statesmanship, war,
+literature, government, science, and affairs) could not be produced from
+the legislative chambers of any single country in the world.</p>
+
+<p>The mistake which Americans make is that they confuse the hereditary
+principle with the House of Lords. The former is, of course, spurned by
+every good American and no one denies his right to express his
+disapproval thereof in such terms as he sees fit. But few Americans
+appear to make sufficient allowance for the fact that whatever the House
+of Lords suffers at any given time by the necessary inclusion among its
+members (as a result of its hereditary constitution) of a proportion of
+men who are quite unfit to be members of any legislative body (and these
+are the members of the British peerage with whom America is most
+familiar) is much more than counterbalanced by the ability to introduce
+into the membership a continuous current of the most distinguished and
+capable men in every field of activity, whose services could not
+otherwise (and cannot in the United States) be similarly commanded by
+the State.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen how in the United States a man can only win his way to the
+House of Representatives, and hardly more easily to the Senate, without
+earning the favour of the local politicians and "bosses" of his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345"></a>[<a href="./images/345.png">345</a>]</span>constituency, and how, when he is elected, his tenure of office is
+likely to be short and must be always precarious. It is probable that in
+the United States not one of the distinguished men whose names are given
+in the above list would (with the possible exception of two or three who
+have devoted their lives to politics) be included in either chamber.
+They would, so far as public service is concerned (unless they were
+given cabinet positions or held seats upon the bench), be lost to the
+State.</p>
+
+<p>It is, of course, impossible that Americans should keep in touch with
+the proceedings of the House of Lords; nor is there any reason why they
+should. The number of Americans, resident at home, who in the course of
+their lives have read <i>in extenso</i> any single debate in that House must
+be extremely small; and first-hand knowledge of the House Americans can
+hardly have. Then, of the English publicists or statesmen who visit the
+United States it is perhaps inevitable that those whose conversation on
+political topics Americans (especially American economic thinkers and
+sociologists) should find most congenial are those of an advanced
+Liberal or Radical&mdash;even semi-Republican&mdash;complexion. I have chanced to
+have the opportunity of seeing how much certain American economists of
+the rising school (which has done such admirable work as a whole) have
+been influenced by the views of particular Englishmen of this class. I
+should like to mention names, but not a few readers will be able to
+supply them for themselves. It has not appeared to occur to the American
+disciples of these men that the views which they impart on English
+political subjects are purely partisan, and generally very extreme,
+views. Their opinions of the House of Lords no more represent <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346"></a>[<a href="./images/346.png">346</a>]</span>the
+judgment of England on the subject than the opinions of an extreme Free
+Trade Democrat represent the views of America on the subject of
+Protection.</p>
+
+<p>Merely as a matter of manners and good taste, it would, I think, be well
+if Americans endeavoured to arrive at and express a better understanding
+of the legislative work of the Lords. Englishmen have not much more
+regard for the principle of a quadrennially elected President than
+Americans have for an hereditary aristocracy; but they do not habitually
+permit that lack of regard to degenerate into the use of contemptuous
+language about individual Presidents. Even in contemplating the result
+of what seems to them so preposterous a system as that of electing a
+judiciary by popular party vote, Englishmen have generally confined
+themselves to a complimentary expression of surprise that the results
+are not worse than they are. Surely, while being as truculent as they
+please in their attitude towards the hereditary principle, it would be
+well if Americans would similarly endeavour to dissociate their
+detestation of that principle from their feelings for the actual
+personnel of the House of Lords. There is a good deal both in the
+constitution and work of the House to command the respect even of the
+citizens of a republic.</p>
+
+<p>I address this protest directly to American economic and sociological
+writers in the hope that, recognising that it comes from one who is not
+unsympathetic, some of them may be influenced to speak less heedlessly
+on the subject than is their wont. I may add that these remarks are
+suggested by certain passages in the recently published book of an
+American author for whom, elsewhere in this volume, I express, as I
+feel, sincere respect.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_309:1_40" id="Footnote_309:1_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_309:1_40"><span class="label">[309:1]</span></a> It is delightful to find, some weeks after this was
+written, that Mr. Wells makes precisely this common blunder and states
+it in almost the exact words that I have used later on. His excuse
+lies in the fact that, as he says, he had it "in his mind before
+ever he crossed the Atlantic"; but that hardly excuses his failure
+to disabuse himself after he was across. Most curious is it that Mr.
+Wells appears to think that this erroneous notion is a discovery of
+his own and he enlarges on it and expounds it at some length; the
+truth being, as I say above, that it is the common opinion of all
+uninformed Englishmen. Mr. Wells is in fact voicing an almost
+universal&mdash;even if unformulated&mdash;national prejudice, but it is a pity
+that he took it over to America and brought it back again.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_335:1_41" id="Footnote_335:1_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_335:1_41"><span class="label">[335:1]</span></a> The reader will, of course, understand that the
+political or industrial power of capital is entirely a separate thing
+from the ability of wealth to buy luxury, deference or social
+recognition for its possessor. In this particular there is little to
+choose between the two and curiously enough, each country has been
+called by visitors from the other the "paradise of the wealthy."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_342:1_42" id="Footnote_342:1_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_342:1_42"><span class="label">[342:1]</span></a> Englishmen often ask the meaning of the phrase "the
+yellow press." The history of it is as follows: In 1895, Mr. W. R.
+Hearst, having had experience as a journalist in California, purchased
+the New York <i>Journal</i>, which was at the time a more or less
+unsuccessful publication, and, spending money lavishly, converted it
+into the most enterprising, as well as the most sensational, paper that
+New York or any other American city had ever seen. In catering to the
+prejudices of the mass of the people, he invaded the province of the New
+York <i>World</i>. In the "war" between the two which followed, one began and
+the other immediately adopted the plan of using yellow ink in the
+printing of certain cartoons (or pictures of the <i>Ally Sloper</i> type)
+with which they adorned certain pages of their Sunday editions
+especially. The term "yellow press" was applied at first only to those
+two papers, but soon extended to include other publications which copied
+their general style. The yellow ink was, I believe, actually first
+employed by the <i>World</i>; but the <i>Journal</i> was the aggressor in the
+fight and in most particulars it was that paper which set the pace, and
+it, or Mr. Hearst, rightly bears the responsibility for the creation of
+yellow journalism.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347"></a>[<a href="./images/347.png">347</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Growth of Honesty</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon&mdash;America's Resemblance to
+Japan&mdash;A German View&mdash;Can Americans Lie?&mdash;Honesty as the Best
+Policy&mdash;Religious Sentiment&mdash;Moral and Immoral Railway
+Managers&mdash;A Struggle for Self-Preservation&mdash;Gentlemen in
+Business&mdash;Peculation among Railway Servants&mdash;How the Old Order
+Changes, Yielding Place to New&mdash;The Strain on British
+Machinery&mdash;Americans as Story-Tellers&mdash;The Incredibility of
+the Actual.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>My desire is to contribute, if possible, something towards the
+establishment of a better understanding between the two peoples by
+correcting certain misapprehensions which exist in the mind of each in
+regard to the other. At the present moment we are concerned with the
+particular misapprehension which exists in the English mind in regard to
+the commercial ethics&mdash;the average level of common honesty&mdash;in the
+masses of American business men. I have endeavoured to show, first, that
+the majority of Englishmen have, even though unconsciously, a
+fundamental misconception of the character of the American people,
+arising primarily from the absence of a recognised aristocracy in the
+United States:&mdash;that, in fact, the two peoples are, in the construction
+of their social fabrics, much more alike than the Englishman generally
+assumes. I have endeavoured to show, next, that if we were <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348"></a>[<a href="./images/348.png">348</a>]</span>entirely
+without any knowledge of, or any prejudices in regard to, the code of
+commercial ethics at present existing in either country, but had to
+deduce for ourselves <i>a priori</i> from what we knew of the part which
+commerce and business played in the social life of the two countries the
+probable degree of morality which would be found in the respective
+codes, we should be forced to look for a higher standard in the United
+States than in England. We have seen how it comes that Englishmen have,
+justifiably and even unavoidably, acquired the erroneous notions which
+they have acquired, first, from the fact that, in the rough days of the
+past, American business morality was, at least in certain parts of the
+country, looser than that which prevailed in the older-established and
+better constituted society of the England of the same day (and in the
+older communities of the United States itself); and, second, from the
+fact that the chief channel through which Englishmen must necessarily
+derive their contemporary ideas on the subject, namely, the American
+press, is, by reason of qualities peculiar to itself, not to be trusted
+to correct the misapprehensions which exist. Finally, we have seen that
+there exist in certain American minds some mistaken notions, not much
+dissimilar in character to those which I am trying to point out are
+present in the minds of Englishmen, about the character of a
+considerable section of the people of Great Britain; and if Americans
+can be thus mistaken about England, there is no inherent improbability
+in the suggestion that Englishmen may be analogously mistaken about the
+United States.</p>
+
+<p>The English people has had abundant justification in the past for
+arriving at the conclusion that in many <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349"></a>[<a href="./images/349.png">349</a>]</span>of the qualities which go to
+make a great and manly race it stands first among the peoples of the
+earth. The belief of Englishmen in their own moral superiority as a
+people is justified by the course of history, and is proven every day
+afresh by the attitudes of other races,&mdash;especially by the behaviour in
+their choice of friends, when compelled to choose as between England and
+other European powers, of the peoples more or less unlike the
+Anglo-Saxon in their civilisations in the remoter corners of the world.
+It is to the eternal honour of England that in countless out-of-the-way
+places, peoples more or less savage have learned to accept the word of a
+British official or trader as a thing to be trusted, and have grown
+quick to distinguish between him and his rivals of other European
+nationalities. There has been abundant testimony to the respect which
+the British character has won from the world,&mdash;from the frank admiration
+of the Prince-Chancellor for the "Parole de Gentleman" to the unshakable
+confidence of the far red Indian in the faith of a "King George Man";
+from the trust of an Indian native in the word of a Sahib to the dying
+injunction to his successor of one of the greatest of the Afghan Ameers:
+"Trust the English. Do not fight them. They are good friends and bad
+enemies."<a name="FNanchor_349:1_43" id="FNanchor_349:1_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_349:1_43" class="fnanchor">[349:1]</a> And the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350"></a>[<a href="./images/350.png">350</a>]</span>most solemn oath, I believe, which an Arab can
+take is to swear that what he says is as "true as the word of an
+Englishman."</p>
+
+<p>But, granting all that has happened in the past, and recognising that
+British honour and the sacredness of the British word have stood above
+those of any other peoples, the American nation of to-day is a new
+factor in the situation. It did not exist at the time when the old
+comparisons were made. I have suggested elsewhere that the popular
+American contempt for the English climate is only an inheritance of the
+opinions based on a comparison of that climate with the climates of
+Southern Europe. If the climate of certain parts&mdash;of the greater
+part&mdash;of the United States had then been a factor to be taken into
+consideration, English skies would have had at least one fellow to share
+with them the opprobrium of the world. So in the matter of commercial
+morality; we are thinking and speaking in terms of a day that has gone,
+when other standards governed.</p>
+
+<p>Englishmen have been very willing, within the last year or two, to
+believe in the revolution which has taken place in the character of
+another people, less <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351"></a>[<a href="./images/351.png">351</a>]</span>akin to them than the Americans and farther away.
+The promptitude with which the British masses have accepted the fact
+that, in certain of the virtues on which Englishmen have most peculiarly
+prided themselves in the past, the Japanese are their superiors, has
+been curiously un-British. There should be no greater difficulty in
+believing that another revolution, much more gradual and less
+picturesque, and by so much the more easily credible, has taken place in
+the American character. The evidence in favour of the one is, rightly
+viewed, no less strong than that in favour of the other. It would have
+been impossible for the Japanese to have carried on the recent war as
+they did had they not been possessed of the virtues of courage and
+patriotism in the highest degree. It would have been equally impossible
+for the Americans to have built up their immense trade in competition
+with the great commercial powers of the world, unless they had in an
+equally high degree possessed the virtue of commercial honesty. No one
+ought to know better than the English business man that a great national
+commercial fabric is not built up by fraud or trickery.</p>
+
+<p>On this subject Professor M&uuml;nsterberg,<a name="FNanchor_351:1_44" id="FNanchor_351:1_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_351:1_44" class="fnanchor">[351:1]</a> striving to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352"></a>[<a href="./images/352.png">352</a>]</span>eradicate
+from the minds of his German countrymen the same tendency to
+underestimate the honesty of American business men, says (and let me say
+that neither my opinion, nor the form in which it is expressed, was
+borrowed from him): "It is na&iuml;ve to suppose that the economic strength
+of America has been built up through underhanded competition, without
+respect to law or justice, and impelled by nothing but a barbarous and
+purely material ambition. One might better suppose that the twenty-story
+office buildings on lower Broadway are supported by the flag-stones in
+the street.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The colossal fabric of American industry is able to tower
+so high only because it has its foundations on the hard rock of honest
+conviction."</p>
+
+<p>"It has been well said," says the same author, "that the American has no
+talent for lying, and distrust of a man's word strikes the Yankee as
+specifically European." Now in England "an American lie" has stood
+almost as a proverb; yet the German writer is entirely in earnest,
+though personally I do not agree with him. He sees the symptoms, but the
+diagnosis is wrong. The American has an excellent talent for lying, but
+in business he has learned that falsehood and deception are poor
+commercial weapons. Business which is obtained by fraud, any American
+will tell you, "doesn't stick"; and as every American in his business is
+looking always to the future, he prefers, merely as a matter of
+prudence, that his foundations shall be sound.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353"></a>[<a href="./images/353.png">353</a>]</span></p><p>All society is a struggle for the survival of the fittest; and in crude
+and early forms of society, it is the strongest who proves himself most
+fit. In savage communities&mdash;and Europe was savage until after the feudal
+days&mdash;it is the big man and brutal who comes to the top. In the savage
+days of American commerce, which, at least for the West, ended only a
+generation back, it was too often the man who could go out and subdue
+the wilderness and beat down opposition, who rode rough-shod over his
+competitors and used whatever weapons, whether of mere brute strength or
+fraud, with the greatest ferocity and unscrupulousness, who made his
+mark and his fortune. But in a settled and complex commercial community
+it is no longer the strongest who is most fit; it is the most honest.
+The American commercial community as a whole, in spite of occasional
+exceptions and in defiance of the cynicism of the press, has grasped
+this fact and has accepted the business standards of the world at large.</p>
+
+<p>Let me not be interpreted as implying that there are any fewer Americans
+than there are Englishmen who live rightly from the fear of God or for
+the sake of their own self-respect. The conclusion of most observers has
+been that the American people is more religious than the English, that
+the temperament, more nervous and more emotional, is more susceptible to
+religious influence. It may be so. It is a subject on which the evidence
+is necessarily so intangible&mdash;on which an individual judgment is likely
+to be so entirely dependent on individual observation in a narrow
+field&mdash;that comparison becomes extremely difficult. My own opinion would
+be that there is at least as much real religious feeling in England as
+in the United States, and certainly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354"></a>[<a href="./images/354.png">354</a>]</span>more in Scotland than in either;
+but that the churches in America are more active as organisations and
+more efficient agents in behalf of morality.</p>
+
+<p>But we are now speaking of the business community as a whole, and the
+force which ultimately keeps the ethics of every business community pure
+is, I imagine, the same, namely that without honesty the community
+itself cannot live or prosper and that, with normal ability, he who is
+most honest prospers most. American business was dishonest before
+society had settled down and knitted itself together.</p>
+
+<p>The change which has come over the American business world can perhaps
+best be made clear to English readers by taking a single example; and it
+must necessarily be an example from a field with which I am familiar.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There is in my possession an interesting document, being one of the (I
+think) two original manuscript copies of the famous "Gentleman's
+Agreement," bearing the signatures of the parties thereto, which was
+entered into by the Presidents or Chairmen of a number of railway
+companies at Mr. Pierpont Morgan's house in New York in 1891. In the
+year following the signing of the Agreement, I was in London in
+connection with affairs which necessitated rather prolonged interviews
+with many of the Chairmen or General Managers of the British
+railways,&mdash;Sir George Findlay, Sir Edward Watkin, Mr. J. Staats Forbes,
+and others. With all of them the mutual relations existing between
+railway companies in the two countries respectively formed one of the
+chief topics of our conversations, and that at that time the good faith
+and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355"></a>[<a href="./images/355.png">355</a>]</span>loyalty of attitude of one company towards another were much
+greater in England than in America it is not possible to question.
+British companies are subject to a restraining influence which does not
+exist in the United States, in the parliamentary control which is
+exercised over them. Every company of any size has, with more or less
+frequency, to go to Parliament for new powers or privileges, and any
+Chairman or Board of Directors which established a reputation for
+untrustworthiness in dealings with other companies would probably be
+able to expect few favours from the next Parliamentary Committee. But
+(although the two last of the gentlemen whose names I have mentioned
+were notoriously parties to a peculiarly bitter railway war) I believe
+that the motives which have chiefly operated to make the managers of
+English companies observe faith with each other better than the American
+have ever succeeded in doing, are chiefly the traditional motives of a
+high sense of personal honour&mdash;the fact that they were gentlemen first
+and business men afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>The circumstances which led up to the formation of the Gentlemen's
+Agreement were almost inconceivable to English railway operators. The
+railways, it must always be borne in mind, have been the chief
+civilisers of the American continent. It is by their instrumentality
+that the Great American Desert of half a century ago is to-day among the
+richest and most prosperous agricultural countries in the world. The
+railways have always thrust out ahead of the settler into whatever
+territory, by reason of the potential fertility of its soil or for other
+causes, has held out promise of some day becoming populated. Along the
+railway the population <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356"></a>[<a href="./images/356.png">356</a>]</span>has then flowed. In forcing its way westward
+each company in its course has sought to tap with its lines the richest
+strips of territory: all alike endeavoured to obtain a share of the
+traffic originating from a point where a thriving town was already
+established or topographical conditions pointed out a promising site. As
+the American laws impose practically no restrictions on railway
+construction it necessarily followed that certain districts and certain
+favourable strategic points were invaded by more lines than could
+possibly be justified either by the traffic of the moment or the
+prospective traffic of many years to come. This was conspicuously the
+case in the region Northwestward from Chicago. Business which might have
+furnished a reasonable revenue to two companies was called upon to
+support six or seven and the competition for that business became
+intense,&mdash;all the more intense because, unlike English railway
+companies, few American railways in their early days have had any
+material reserve of capital to draw upon. They have had to earn their
+living as they went, out of current receipts, or submit to liquidation.</p>
+
+<p>The officials in charge of the Traffic Departments of each company had
+to justify their retention in their positions by somehow getting more
+than their share of the business, and the temptations to offer whatever
+inducements were necessary to get that business amounted almost to
+compulsion. Without it, not the particular official only, but his
+company, would be extinguished. The situation was further aggravated by
+the fact that the goods that were to be carried were largely staples
+shipped in large quantities by individual shippers&mdash;millers, owners of
+packing houses, mining companies <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357"></a>[<a href="./images/357.png">357</a>]</span>from the one end, and coal and oil
+companies from the other. One of these companies might be able to offer
+a railway more business in the course of a year than it could hope to
+get from all the small traders on its lines combined&mdash;enough to amount
+almost to affluence if it could be secured at the regularly authorised
+rates. The keenness of the competition to secure the patronage of these
+large shippers can be imagined; for it was, between the companies, a
+struggle for actual existence. All that the shipper had to do was to
+wait while the companies underbid each other, each in turn cutting off a
+slice from the margin of profit that would result from the carrying of
+the traffic until, not infrequently and in some notorious cases, not
+only was that margin entirely whittled away but the traffic was finally
+carried at a figure which meant a heavy loss to the carrier. The extent
+to which the Standard Oil Company has profited by this necessity on the
+part of the railways to get the business of a large shipping concern at
+almost any price, rather than allow its cars and motive power to remain
+idle, has been made sufficiently public.</p>
+
+<p>In some measure the companies were able to protect themselves by the
+making of pooling (or joint-purse) arrangements between themselves; but
+the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Law in 1887 made pooling
+illegal. The companies endeavoured to frame agreements which would not
+be repugnant to the law but would take the place of the pools; but it
+was impossible to attach any penalties to infringements of such
+agreements and under pressure of the necessity of self-preservation, no
+agreement, however solemnly entered into, was strong enough to restrain
+the parties. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358"></a>[<a href="./images/358.png">358</a>]</span>Passenger Agents framed agreements to control the
+passenger traffic and the Freight Agents made agreements to control the
+goods traffic, and both were equally futile. Then the Traffic Managers
+made agreements to cover both classes of business, which held no longer
+than the others. So the General Managers tried their hands. But the
+inexorable exigencies of the situation remained. Each official was still
+confronted with the same dilemma: he must either secure more business
+than he was entitled to or he&mdash;and his company&mdash;must starve. And the
+agreements made by General Managers bound no better than those which
+Passenger Agents or Traffic Managers had made before. Then it was that
+the Gentlemen stepped in.</p>
+
+<p>The Gentlemen, it should be explained, were the Presidents and Chairmen
+of the Boards of the respective companies. They, it was hoped, would be
+able to reach an agreement which, if once their names were signed to it,
+would hold. The meeting, as has been said, was held at Mr. Pierpont
+Morgan's house<a name="FNanchor_358:1_45" id="FNanchor_358:1_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_358:1_45" class="fnanchor">[358:1]</a> and an agreement was in fact arrived at and
+signed, as has been said, in duplicate. It is lamentable to have to
+record that that agreement&mdash;except in so far as it set a precedent for
+other meetings of the same gentlemen, which in turn led to others out of
+which finally grew <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359"></a>[<a href="./images/359.png">359</a>]</span>large movements in the direction of joint ownerships
+and consolidations of interests which have helped materially to make the
+conditions more tolerable&mdash;except for that, the Gentlemen's Agreement
+did no more good, and it lasted not appreciably longer, than any of the
+others which had been made by mere officials.</p>
+
+<p>Englishmen will all agree that it is unthinkable that the Chairmen of
+the great British railway companies could meet and give their words <i>as
+gentlemen</i> that each of their companies would observe certain rules in
+the conduct of its business and that a few weeks thereafter it should
+become evident that no single company was keeping the word so pledged.
+But it would be just as absurd to question the personal integrity or
+sense of honour of such men as Mr. Marvin Hughitt, Mr. E. W. Winter, Mr.
+W. H. Truesdale, and the others, as it would be to question that of the
+most upright man in England. The fact is that the conditions are almost
+unthinkable to Englishmen. No company, in becoming party to the
+agreement, had surrendered its right to retaliate when another violated
+the provisions. The actual conduct of the business of the companies&mdash;the
+quoting of the rates to secure the traffic&mdash;was in the hands of a host
+of subordinate officials, and when a rate is cut it is not cut openly,
+but in secret and by circuitous devices. It was, on subsequent
+investigation, always impossible to tell where the demoralisation had
+begun, amid the cloud of charges, counter-charges, and denials. There
+was not one of the subordinate officials but declared (and seemingly
+proved) that he had acted only in retaliation and self-defence. As there
+was no way of obtaining evidence from the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360"></a>[<a href="./images/360.png">360</a>]</span>shippers, in whose favour the
+concessions had been made, it was impossible to sift out the truth. Each
+Chairman or President could only say that he had entire confidence in
+his own staff. There was no visible remedy except to discharge the
+entire membership of the Traffic Departments of all the companies
+simultaneously and get new men, to the number of several hundreds, who
+would be no better able to accomplish the impossible than their
+predecessors.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My reason for going into this, I fear, somewhat tedious narration is
+that British distrust of American commercial honesty was originally
+created, perhaps, more than by anything else, by the scandals which were
+notoriously associated with the early history of railways in the United
+States. It is not desired here either to insist on the occurrence of
+those scandals or to palliate them. The point is that the conditions
+which made those scandals possible (of which the incapacity on the part
+of the North-western lines to keep faith with each other may be regarded
+as symptomatic) were concomitants of a particular stage only in the
+development of the country. Competition must always exist in any
+business community; but in the desperate form of a breathless,
+day-to-day struggle for bare existence it need only exist among railway
+companies where lines have been built in excess of the needs of the
+population. With the increase in population and the growth of trade the
+asperity of the conditions necessarily becomes mitigated, until at last,
+when the traffic has assumed proportions which will afford all
+competitors alike a reasonable profit on their shares, the management
+ceases to be exposed to any <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361"></a>[<a href="./images/361.png">361</a>]</span>more temptation than besets the Boards of
+the great British companies. Not a few railway companies in the United
+States have arrived at that delectable condition&mdash;are indeed now more
+happily circumstanced than any English company&mdash;and among them are some
+the names of which, not many years ago, were mere synonyms for
+dishonesty. In the North-western territory of which I have spoken the
+fact that the current values of all railway shares had on the average
+increased (until the occurrence of the financial crisis of the close of
+1907) by about three hundred per cent. in the last ten years is
+eloquent.</p>
+
+<p>In the old days the wrong-doing which was rampant, through excess of
+opportunity and more than abundant temptation, in the higher circles,
+ran also through all grades of the service; and there was one case at
+least of a railway company which used in fact to have to discharge all
+its servants of a certain class at intervals of once a month or
+thereabouts. The Northern Pacific Railway line was opened across the
+continent in 1883, and during the next twelve months it was my fortune
+to have to travel over the western portion of the road somewhat
+frequently. The company had a regularly established tariff of charges,
+and tickets from any one station to another could be bought at the
+booking offices just as on any other railway line in America or England.
+But few people bought tickets. The line was divided, of course, into
+divisions, of so many hundreds of miles each, the train being in charge
+of one conductor (or guard) to the end of his division, where he turned
+it over to his successor for the next division. It was the business of
+the conductor to take up the tickets, or collect the fares, while the
+train was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362"></a>[<a href="./images/362.png">362</a>]</span>running, and it was well understood among regular passengers
+on the line that each conductor expected to receive one dollar to the
+end of his division, no matter at what point a passenger entered the
+train. The conductor merely walked through the cars collecting silver
+dollars, of which he subsequently apportioned to the treasury of the
+company as many as he saw fit. They were probably not many.</p>
+
+<p>On one occasion I stood at a booking-office and, speaking through the
+small window, asked the clerk for a ticket to a certain place. The
+conductor of the train, already waiting in the station, had strolled
+into the office and heard my request.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you buy a ticket!" said he to me. "I can let you travel cheaper
+than he can, can't I, Bill?"&mdash;this last being addressed to the clerk
+behind the window; and Bill looked out through the hole and said he
+guessed that was so.</p>
+
+<p>The company, as I have said, used to discharge its conductors with
+regularity, or they resigned, at intervals depending on the periods at
+which accounts were made up, but it was said in those days that there
+was not a town between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast which did
+not contain a drinking saloon owned by an ex-Northern Pacific conductor,
+and established out of the profits that he had made during his brief
+term of service.</p>
+
+<p>In the American railway carriages, the method of communication between
+passengers and the engine, in case of emergency, is by what is known as
+the "bell-cord" which runs from end to end of the train, suspended from
+the middle of the ceiling of each car in a series of swinging rings. The
+cord sways loosely in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363"></a>[<a href="./images/363.png">363</a>]</span>the air to each motion of the train like a
+slackened clothes-line in a gale. On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa F&eacute;
+Railway the story used to be told that at the end of the day the
+conductors would toss each coin received into the air to see if it would
+balance on the bell-cord. The coins which balanced went to the company;
+those which did not, the conductor took as his own.</p>
+
+<p>That, be it noted, was the state of affairs some twenty-four years ago.
+I question if there is much more peculation on the part of the employees
+of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa F&eacute; to-day than there is on the part
+of the servants of the Great Western of England or any other British
+company.</p>
+
+<p>The place where the conductor advised me not to buy a ticket had then a
+few yards of planking laid on the prairie for a platform and a small
+shed as a station building. The town consisted of three or four brick
+buildings and a huddle of wooden shanties. To-day it is one of the
+twenty most populous cities in the United States with tall office
+buildings, broad busy streets, and sumptuous private residences. I used
+to have excellent trout-fishing in what is now the centre of a great
+town. Where the air to-day is filled with the hum of wheels and the roar
+of machinery, then was only open prairie innocent of any evidence of
+human occupation beyond some three or four things like dog-kennels badly
+built of loose lattice-work on the river's bank. These were the red
+Indians' Turkish baths.</p>
+
+<p>The old code of morality has vanished with the red Indian and the
+trout-fishing. In the early days of that town there used to be nobody to
+maintain public <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364"></a>[<a href="./images/364.png">364</a>]</span>order but an efficient Vigilance Committee, which
+executed justice by the simple process of hanging persons whom the
+public disliked, and which was still in nominal existence when I was
+there. Now the city has the proper complement of courts, from the United
+States Court downwards, and a bar which has already furnished one or two
+members to the United States Senate. Of course this has happened in the
+very far West but the change which has come over New York in the same
+length of time is no less astonishing if less picturesque. It is as
+unjust to compare the morals or manners of the American people of to-day
+with those of even three decades ago as it would be to compare the state
+of twentieth-century society in New Zealand with the old convict days.
+In one generation Japan has stepped from the days of feudalism to the
+twentieth century. America, in all that goes to constitute civilisation,
+has in the last twenty-five years jumped, according to European canons,
+at least a hundred.</p>
+
+<p>Certain outward manifestations of the change which has been wrought, the
+peoples of Europe have been unable to ignore;&mdash;the immense growth in the
+power of the United States as a nation, her invasion of the markets of
+the world even in lines wherein, twenty years ago, the internal markets
+of America herself were at the mercy of British manufacturers, the
+splendid generosity which individual citizens of the United States are
+showing in buying wherever they can all that is most beautiful or
+precious among the treasures of the Old World for the enrichment of
+their museums and galleries at home&mdash;these things the people of Europe
+cannot help but see. It would be well if they would strive also to
+understand the development of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365"></a>[<a href="./images/365.png">365</a>]</span>the moral forces which underlies these
+things, which alone has made them possible.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>What has been the course of events in England in the same period? I have
+already said that I believe that Englishmen justly earned the reputation
+of being the most upright of all peoples in their commercial dealings;
+and for the sake of the context perhaps Americans who have had little
+opportunity of gauging the opinions of the world will accept it as true.
+It is probable that the world has seen no finer set of men engaged in
+commerce than those who laid the foundations of England's commercial
+greatness; and I imagine that there are more honest men in England
+to-day than ever there were&mdash;more men of what is, it will be noticed,
+instructively called "old-fashioned" honesty. Yet no one will be quicker
+than just one of these "old-fashioned" honest men to declare that the
+standard of commercial morality in England is deteriorating.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that a vast new trading community has sprung up with new
+ideas which no longer accepts the old canons or submits to the old
+authority. The old maxims pass current; there is the same talk of honest
+goods and honest methods, but under stress of keener competition and the
+pressure of the more rapid movement of modern life, there is more
+temptation to allow products to deteriorate, greater difficulty in
+living always up to the old rigid standards. The words "English made" no
+longer carry, even to English minds, the old guarantee of excellence.</p>
+
+<p>In no small measure it may be that it is the example and influence of
+America itself which is working the mischief; which by no means implies
+that American <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366"></a>[<a href="./images/366.png">366</a>]</span>example and influence must in themselves be bad. American
+methods, both in the production and sale of goods, might be wholly good,
+but the attempt to graft them upon established English practice might
+have nothing but deplorable results. It is not necessarily the fault of
+the new wine if old bottles fail to hold it. One factory may have the
+capacity to turn out one thousand of a given article, all of the highest
+quality and workmanship, <i>per diem</i>. If a factory with one tenth the
+capacity strains itself to compete and turns out the same number of
+articles of the same kind in the same time, something will be wrong with
+the quality of those articles. I am not prepared to say that in any
+given line English manufacturers are overstraining the capacity of their
+plants to the sacrifice of the quality of their goods in their effort to
+keep pace with American rate of production; but I do most earnestly
+believe that something analogous to it is happening in the commercial
+field as a whole, and that neither English commercial morality nor the
+quality of English-made goods has been improved by the necessity of
+meeting the intense competition of the world-markets to-day, with an
+industrial organisation which grew up under other and more leisurely
+conditions.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Postscript.</span>&mdash;Not necessarily as a serious contribution to my argument
+but rather as a gloss on Professor M&uuml;nsterberg's remark that the
+American has no talent for lying, I have often wondered how far the
+Americans reputation for veracity has been injured by their ability as
+story-tellers. "Story" it must be remembered is used in two senses. The
+American has the reputation of being the best narrator in the world; and
+he loves <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367"></a>[<a href="./images/367.png">367</a>]</span>to narrate about his own country&mdash;especially the big things in
+it. In nine cases out of ten, when he is speaking of those big things,
+he is conscientiously truthful; but not seldom it happens that what may
+be a mere commonplace to the American seems incredible to the English
+listener unacquainted with the United States and unable to give the
+facts as narrated their due proportion in the landscape.</p>
+
+<p>More than a quarter of a century ago, when electric light was still a
+very new thing to Londoners, an American casually told myself and three
+or four others that the small town from which he came in the far
+Northwest of America was lighted entirely by a coronal of electric
+lights of some prodigious candle-power on the top of a mast, erected in
+the centre of the town, of a, to us, incredible height. It was, at the
+time, quite unbelievable; but in less than a year chance took me all the
+way to that identical little town in the far Northwest, and what the
+American had said was strictly true&mdash;true, I doubt not, to a single
+candle-power and to a fraction of a foot of mast. And a costly and
+indifferent method of lighting, for a whole town, it may be remarked, it
+was.</p>
+
+<p>In an earlier stage of my youth I lost all confidence in an elderly and
+eminently respectable friend of the family who had travelled much
+because he once informed me that the Japanese watered their horses out
+of spoons. Of course I knew that the old gentleman was a liar.</p>
+
+<p>An American travelling in an English railway carriage fell into
+conversation with the other occupants, who were Englishmen. Among divers
+pieces of information about things in the United States which he <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368"></a>[<a href="./images/368.png">368</a>]</span>gave
+them he told (it was at the time when the steel construction of high
+buildings was still a novelty) of a twenty-storey "sky-scraper" which he
+passed daily on his way to and from his office on which, to save time,
+the walls were being put up simultaneously at, perhaps, the second,
+eighth, and fifteenth floors, working upwards from each point, the
+intervening floors being in the meanwhile left untouched. He explained
+that, in the system of steel construction, the walls did not support the
+building; that being done by the skeleton framework of metal, on which
+the walls were subsequently hung as a screen. They might, theoretically,
+be of paper; though as a matter of fact the material used was generally
+terra-cotta or some fire-proof brick. The American said that it was
+queer to see a house being built at the eighth storey in midair, as it
+were, with nothing but the thin steel supports and open sky below.</p>
+
+<p>"I should imagine it would look very queer," said the Englishman whom he
+was addressing, with obvious coolness; and the American was entirely
+aware that every person in that carriage regarded him as a typical
+American liar. Time passed and the carriage relapsed into silence, each
+of the occupants becoming immersed in such reading-matter as he had with
+him. Suddenly one of them aroused the others with the ejaculation:</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove! If here isn't a picture of that very building you were talking
+of!"</p>
+
+<p>It was a <i>Graphic</i> or <i>Illustrated London News</i>, or some other such
+undoubtedly trustworthy London paper which he was reading, and he passed
+it round for the inspection of the rest of the company. The American
+looked at it. It was not his particular building but it <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369"></a>[<a href="./images/369.png">369</a>]</span>did as well,
+and there was the photograph before them, with the walls complete, to
+window casing and every detail of ornament, on the eighth and ninth
+floors, while not a brick had been laid from the second storey to the
+seventh. A god from the machine had intervened to save the American's
+reputation. Often have I seen incredulity steal over the faces of a
+well-bred company in England at some statement from an American of a
+fact in itself commonplace enough, when no such providential
+corroboration was forthcoming.</p>
+
+<p>Curiously enough, the true Yankee in America, especially of the rural
+districts, has the same distrust of the veracity of the Western American
+as the Englishman generally has of the Yankee himself (in which he
+includes all Americans). I had been living for some years in Minnesota
+when, standing one day on the platform of the railway station at, I
+think, Schenectady, in New York State, I was addressed by one who was
+evidently a farmer in the neighbourhood. Learning that I had just come
+from Minnesota he referred to the two towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
+"Right lively towns," he had heard them to be. "And how many people
+might there be in the two together?" he asked. "About a quarter of a
+million," I replied&mdash;the number being some few thousand less than the
+figure given by the last census. The farmer, perhaps, had not heard
+anything of the two towns for ten or a dozen years, when their
+population had been not much more than a third of what it had grown to
+at that time; and he looked at me. He did not say anything; he merely
+looked at me, long and fixedly. Then he deliberately turned his back and
+walked to the other end of the platform as far as possible from my
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370"></a>[<a href="./images/370.png">370</a>]</span>contaminating influence. I was never so explicitly and categorically
+called a liar in my life; and he doubtless went home and told his family
+of the magnificent Western exaggerator whom he had met "down to the
+depot." I fear the American reputation often suffers no less unjustly in
+England.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_349:1_43" id="Footnote_349:1_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_349:1_43"><span class="label">[349:1]</span></a> Even up to a quarter of a century ago, there was at
+least one corner of the United States, near to the Canadian border,
+where among Indians not yet rounded up or blanketed the old feeling
+still existed, so that an Englishman, proclaiming himself a "King George
+Man," could go and hunt and fish safely, sure of the friendship and
+protection of the red man, while an American would not have been safe
+for a night. The subject of the relations between the British and the
+Indian tribes in Revolutionary times has, of course, been provocative of
+much bitterness in the hearts of Americans; but happily their own
+historians of a later day have shown that this bitterness has only been
+partially justified. There was not much to choose between Patriots and
+Loyalists. Those who know the Indian know also that the universal liking
+for the Englishman cannot have rested only on motives of political
+expediency or from temporary alliances made in Revolutionary times. They
+must have had abundant proof of the loyalty and trustworthiness of
+Englishmen before so deep-rooted a sentiment could have been created.
+The contrast, of course, was not with the American colonist, but with
+the French. The colonists, too, were King George Men once.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_351:1_44" id="Footnote_351:1_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_351:1_44"><span class="label">[351:1]</span></a> Yes; I am aware that elsewhere I quote Professor
+M&uuml;nsterberg without enthusiasm, but on another class of subject. Except
+for the limitations which his national characteristics and upbringing
+impose upon him (and for the fact that he seems to be unacquainted with
+the West) the Professor has written a just and clear-sighted estimate of
+the American character. We do not look to a German for a proper
+understanding of the sporting instinct, as British and Americans
+understand it, nor perhaps for views that will coincide with ours on the
+subject of morality in the youth of either sex. But the laws of common
+honesty are the same in all countries. A German is as well able to
+estimate the commercial morality of a people as an Englishman, however
+little he may be qualified to talk about their games or about the
+<i>nuances</i> in the masculine attitude towards women.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_358:1_45" id="Footnote_358:1_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_358:1_45"><span class="label">[358:1]</span></a> That meeting has an incidental historical interest from
+the fact that it was then that Mr. Morgan first stepped into the public
+view as a financial power. Up to that time, his name was not
+particularly well known outside of New York or the financial circles
+immediately connected with New York. Most Western papers found it
+necessary to explain to their readers (if they could) who the Mr. Morgan
+was at whose house the meeting was being held.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371"></a>[<a href="./images/371.png">371</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">A Contrast in Principles</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Commercial Power of the United States&mdash;British
+Workmanship&mdash;Tin-tacks and Conservatism&mdash;A Prophetic
+Frenchman&mdash;Imperialism in Trade&mdash;The Anglo-Saxon Spirit&mdash;About
+Chaperons&mdash;"Insist upon Thyself"&mdash;English and American
+Banks&mdash;Dealing in Futures&mdash;Dog Eat Dog&mdash;Two
+Letters&mdash;Commercial Octopods&mdash;Trusts in America and
+England&mdash;The Standard Oil Company&mdash;And Solicitors&mdash;Legal
+Chaperons&mdash;The Sanctity of Stamped
+Paper&mdash;Conclusions&mdash;American Courts of Justice&mdash;Do "Honest"
+Traders Exist?</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The Englishman, even the Englishman with industrial experience and
+commercial training, generally, when he makes a short visit to the
+United States, comes away with a certain distrust of the stability of
+the American commercial fabric&mdash;a distrust which he cannot altogether
+explain to himself. The rapidity of movement, the vastness of the
+results, these things are before his eyes; but there insists on
+obtruding itself a sense of unsubstantiality. Habituated to English
+surroundings, with their ages-old traditions, the rugged deep-rooted
+institutions, the deliberate revolutions of all the fly-wheels of a
+long-constituted society, he cannot believe that the mushroom
+establishments, thrust up as it were from the soil of a continent which
+is yet one half but partially broken wilderness, have permanence. He
+cannot deny the magnitude or the excellence of the work that is being
+done now, at this <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372"></a>[<a href="./images/372.png">372</a>]</span>moment, under his eyes; but it all has too much the
+seeming of unreality, as though suspended in midair, unsupported. He
+misses the foundations of centuries of civilisation below and the lines
+of shafting running back into the past. Often, it is to be feared,
+having all his life been accustomed to see power exerted only in
+cumbersome processes and through old-fashioned channels, he has come to
+regard the cumbersomeness and the antiquity as necessary conditions of
+such exertion&mdash;nay, even to confuse them with the sources of the power
+themselves. It will be remembered that the first pig that was roasted in
+China was roasted by the accidental burning down of a house; and for a
+long time the Chinese supposed that only by burning down a house was it
+possible to come at roast pig. Finally arose a great philosopher ("like
+our Locke") who discovered that it was not necessary to burn houses, but
+that pigs might be cooked by much less costly and more rapid methods.
+Unquestionably many of those who had been accustomed to house-burning
+must have looked at the new and summary culinary processes with profound
+distrust. It may even be asserted with confidence that many of the older
+generation died unconverted, though pig-roasting over all sorts of
+makeshift fires had been going on around them for some years.</p>
+
+<p>After a more or less prolonged residence in the United States, the
+Englishman finds his distrust lessening. He in turn becomes accustomed
+to doing without those traditions, those foundations, those lines of
+shafting, which once he considered so essential to all sound
+workmanship. When in due time he returns to England he is not seldom
+amazed to see how many <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373"></a>[<a href="./images/373.png">373</a>]</span>of the things which he was wont to regard as
+effective links in the machinery are really no more than waste parts
+which do but retard the motion and cause loss of power. It is not
+difficult to make machinery so complicated that the power exhausts
+itself in overcoming the resistance of belts and pulleys and cogs.</p>
+
+<p>I had lived in the United States for many years before I ceased to cling
+to the notion&mdash;which I never hesitated to impart cheerfully to Americans
+when occasion offered&mdash;that though American workmen turned out goods
+that served their purpose well enough, for really sound and honest
+workmanship you had, after all, to come to England. It was only after I
+had been back in England and had experience of the ways of English
+workmen once more that doubts began to accumulate. English furniture
+makers told me that England nowadays did not produce such well-made or
+solid furniture as pieces that I showed them from America, and which are
+made in America in wholesale quantities. English picture-frame makers
+marvelled at the costliness of material and the excellence of the work
+in American frames. A Sackville Street tailor begged me to leave in his
+hands for a few days longer some clothes which he was pressing for me,
+made in a far Western State, in order that he might keep them&mdash;where
+they then were&mdash;hanging in his work-room as an object-lesson to his men
+in how work ought to be done. These are but isolated instances out of
+many which have bred misgiving in one who for many years cherished the
+conviction that a British-made article was always the best. That English
+workmen should be slower, less quick-minded, more loth to take up new
+ideas, or to make things as you wanted them and not as they had <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374"></a>[<a href="./images/374.png">374</a>]</span>always
+made them&mdash;these things I had expected to find, and found less often
+than I had expected. But that the English workman did ultimately produce
+a better and more trustworthy article&mdash;that I never doubted, till I
+found it, from the confessions of the workmen and manufacturers
+themselves, far from necessarily true.</p>
+
+<p>Few Englishmen returning to England after many years of residence in the
+United States (unless perchance they have lived on a ranch where their
+contact with the industrial or commercial life of the people has been
+slight) do not find themselves more or less frequently appealed to for
+opinions, in giving which they are compelled, however reluctantly, to
+pose as prophets, warning their countrymen to flee from the wrath to
+come, telling them that they underestimate the commercial power of the
+United States. Sometimes it may be that there will be some one in the
+company who has spent some few weeks, perhaps, in the United States.
+"Now, I don't agree with you there," this traveller will say. "When I
+was in the States, I saw .&nbsp;." He saw, in fact, pigs being roasted at a
+commonplace sort of fire, made for the purpose, of logs and sticks and
+coal and things, whereas everybody knows that no pig can be duly roasted
+unless chimney stacks and window-casings and front-door handles be mixed
+up with the combustibles. And the others present take comfort and are
+convinced that the Old Country is a long way from going to the dogs as
+yet. Of course she is, bless her! But it is not many years since an
+eminently distinguished authority on iron and steel (was he not
+President of the Iron and Steel Association?), after having made a tour
+of the United States, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375"></a>[<a href="./images/375.png">375</a>]</span>assured British manufacturers that they had
+nothing to fear from American competition in the steel trade. It was
+some years earlier that Chatham declared that he would not allow the
+American colonies to manufacture even one hobnail for themselves.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I have no desire now to join the band of those who are urging England so
+insistently to "wake up." This is not the place for such evangelism, for
+that is not the gospel which this book is intended to spread. None the
+less one story I must tell, told to me many years ago in America by one
+who claimed to have had some part in the transactions; a story that has
+to do with (let us say, to avoid hurting any susceptibilities) the sale
+of tin-tacks to Japan. And whether the story is true or not, it is at
+least well found.</p>
+
+<p>England, then, had had for years a monopoly of the sale of tin-tacks to
+the Japanese, when a trader in Japan became impressed with the fact that
+the traffic was badly handled. The tacks came out from England in
+packages made to suit the needs of the English market. They were
+labelled, quite truthfully of course, "Best English Tacks," and each
+package contained an ounce, two ounces, or four ounces in weight, and
+was priced in plain figures at so much in English money. The trader had
+continual trouble with those packages. His customers were always wanting
+them to be split up. They wanted two or three <i>sen</i> worth&mdash;not four
+pennyworth; also they did not care about ounces. So the trader, starting
+for a visit to England, had some labels written in Japanese characters,
+and when he arrived in England he went to the manufacturers <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376"></a>[<a href="./images/376.png">376</a>]</span>and
+explained matters. He showed them the labels that he had had written and
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"The Japanese trade is worth considering and worth taking some little
+trouble to retain; but the people dislike your present packages and I
+have to spend most of my time splitting up packages and counting tacks.
+If you will make your packages into two thirds of an ounce each and put
+a label like that on them, you will be giving the people what they want
+and can understand, and it will save a lot of trouble all around."</p>
+
+<p>But the manufacturers, one after another, shook their heads. They could
+not read the label. They never had put any such outlandish stuff on
+anything going out of their works, nor had their fathers before them.
+The Japanese ought to be satisfied with the fact that they were getting
+the Best English Tacks and not be unreasonable about it. And the trader
+exhausted himself with argument and became discouraged.</p>
+
+<p>He returned to Japan <i>via</i> the United States, and stopped to see the
+nearest tack-manufacturer. He showed him the label and told his story.</p>
+
+<p>"Looks blamed queer!" said the manufacturer, "but you say that's what
+they want out there? Let's catch a Jap and see if he can read the
+thing."</p>
+
+<p>So a clerk was sent out to fetch a Japanese, which he did.</p>
+
+<p>"How' do, John?" said the manufacturer to the new arrival. (Chinese and
+Japanese alike were all "John" to the American until a few years ago.)
+"You can read that, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>The Japanese smiled, looked at the label and read it aloud.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377"></a>[<a href="./images/377.png">377</a>]</span></p><p>"All straight goods, eh, John?" asked the manufacturer. The Japanese
+answered in the affirmative and retired.</p>
+
+<p>Then the manufacturer called for his manager.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Smith," he said, as the manager came in, "this is Mr. Brown of
+Tokio, Japan. He tells me that if we do up tacks in two third of an
+ounce lots and stick that label on each package, we might do some good
+business out there. That label&mdash;it don't matter which is the top of the
+thing&mdash;calls for a price that figures out to us at about two cents a
+pound more than our regular export rates. I want this gentleman to have
+a trial lot shipped out to him and he'll see what he can do. Just go
+ahead will you and see to it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir," said the manager; and when the trader sailed from San
+Francisco a couple of weeks later the same vessel carried out a trial
+order of tacks consigned to him at Tokio, made up in two thirds of an
+ounce packages with mysterious hieroglyphics on the labels. It only took
+the trader a few days, after his return, to satisfy himself that the
+sooner he cabled the American manufacturer to duplicate the order the
+better. There never has been anybody in the American works who has been
+able to read what is on that label; but when instructions were given for
+printing new labels after six months of trial the order was for a
+quarter of a million, and British manufacturers were astonished to
+discover that by some unexplainable chicanery they had lost the Japanese
+market for tacks.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that I do not know whether the story is true or not; but
+fifty similar stories are. And in the aggregate they explain a good
+deal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378"></a>[<a href="./images/378.png">378</a>]</span></p><p>But let me say again that the conservatism of British manufacturers is
+not now my theme. But I do most earnestly believe that Englishmen as a
+whole&mdash;even English traders and manufacturers&mdash;unwisely underestimate
+the commercial power of the United States. What the United States has
+accomplished in the invasion of the world's markets in the last ten
+years (since the trade revival of 1896-97) is only a foretaste of what
+is to come. So far from there being anything unsubstantial&mdash;any danger
+of lack of staying power, any want of reserve force&mdash;the power has
+hardly yet begun to exert itself. Of Europeans who have recently written
+upon the subject, it seems to me that none has shown a truer
+appreciation of the situation than M. Gabriel Hanotaux, the former
+French Minister for Foreign Affairs.<a name="FNanchor_378:1_46" id="FNanchor_378:1_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_378:1_46" class="fnanchor">[378:1]</a> He sees the shadow of
+America's commercial domination already falling across Europe; and, so
+far as France is concerned, he discerns only two directions from which
+help can come. He pleads with young Frenchmen to travel more, so that
+the rising generation may be less ignorant of the commercial conditions
+of the modern world and may see more clearly what it is that they have
+to fight, and, second, he points to the Colonial Empire of France, with
+an area not much inferior to that of the United States, and believes
+that therein may be laid the foundations of a commercial power which
+will be not unable to cope even with that of America.</p>
+
+<p>It may be only the arrogance and superciliousness of the Anglo-Saxon
+that prevent one sharing the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379"></a>[<a href="./images/379.png">379</a>]</span>sanguineness of M. Hanotaux as to any
+relief coming to the help of France from these two sources, for British
+hopes can only lie in analogous directions. Englishmen also need to
+understand better the conditions which have to be met and the power of
+their competitors; and it is the young men who must learn. Also, if it
+be impossible that the British Isles should hold their own against the
+United States, there appears no reason why the British Empire should not
+be abundantly able to do so.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy for one who has not lived all his life in England to
+share the satisfaction with which the English papers commonly welcome
+the intelligence that some great American manufacturing concern is
+establishing branch works in Canada. It is well for Canada that such
+works should be established; but it is pitiable for the Empire that it
+should be left to the United States to establish them. British capital
+was the chief instrumentality with which the United States was enabled
+to build its own railways and conduct the other great enterprises for
+the development of the resources of its mighty West, and it is, from the
+point of view of a British Imperialist, deplorable that British
+capitalists should not now be ready to take those risks for the sake of
+the Empire which American capital is willing to take with no other
+incentive than the probable trade profits.</p>
+
+<p>His conservatism, it should be noticed, has a tendency to fall away from
+the Englishman when he goes out from the environment and atmosphere of
+the British Isles. The Canadian, or the Englishman who has gone to
+Canada young enough to imbibe the colonial spirit, is not easily to be
+distinguished from the citizen <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380"></a>[<a href="./images/380.png">380</a>]</span>of the United States in his ways of
+doing business. Even the Anglo-Indian refuses to subject himself, in
+India, to all the cumbersome formalities with which he is compelled to
+conduct any business transaction when at home. Mr. Kipling in one of his
+latest stories has given us a delightful picture of the bafflement of
+the Australasian Minister struggling to bring his Great Idea for the
+Good of his Colony and the Empire to the attention of the officials in
+Whitehall.</p>
+
+<p>The encumbering conservatism which now hangs upon the wheels of British
+commerce is no part of&mdash;no legitimate offshoot of&mdash;the English genius.
+It is a fungoid and quite alien growth, which has fastened upon that
+genius, taking advantage of its frailties. Englishmen, we hear, are slow
+to change and to move; yet they have always moved more quickly than
+other European peoples as the Empire stands to prove. And if the people
+of Great Britain had the remodelling of their society to do over again
+to-day, they, following their native instincts, would hardly rebuild it
+on its present lines. With the same "elbow room" they would, it may be
+suspected, produce something but little dissimilar (except in the
+monarchical form of government) from that which has been evolved in the
+United States.</p>
+
+<p>When Englishmen, looking at the progress of the United States, doubt its
+permanence&mdash;when they distrust the substantiality or the honesty in the
+workmanship in the American commercial fabric&mdash;it might be well if they
+would say to themselves that the men who are doing these things are only
+Englishmen with other larger opportunities. Behind all this that meets
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381"></a>[<a href="./images/381.png">381</a>]</span>the eye is the same old Anglo-Saxon spirit of pluck and energy which
+made Great Britain great when she was younger and had in turn her larger
+opportunities. Above all, that pluck and energy are unhampered by
+tradition and precedent in exerting themselves in whatever direction may
+be most advantageous; and to be unhampered does not necessarily mean
+freedom only to go wrong.</p>
+
+<p>An American girl once explained why it was much pleasanter to have a
+chaperon than to be without one:</p>
+
+<p>"If I am allowed about alone," she explained, "I feel that I am on my
+honour and can never do a thing that I would not like mama to see; but
+when a chaperon is with me, the responsibility for my behaviour is
+shifted to her. It is her duty to keep me straight. I have a right to be
+just as bad as I can without her catching me."</p>
+
+<p>The tendency of American business life is first to develop the
+individuality and initiative of a man and, second, to put him, as it
+were, on his honour. It is, of course, of the essence of a democracy
+that each man should be encouraged to develop whatever good may be in
+him and to receive recognition therefor; but there have been other
+factors at work in the shaping of the American character besides the
+form of government. Chief among these factors have been the work which
+Americans have had to do in subduing their own continent and that they
+have had to do it unaided and in isolation. Washington Irving has a
+delightful sentence somewhere (in <i>Astoria</i> I think) about the
+frontiersman hewing his way through the back woods and developing his
+character by "bickering with bears." "The frontiersmen, by their
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382"></a>[<a href="./images/382.png">382</a>]</span>conquest of nature, had come to despise the strength of all enemies,"
+says Dr. Sparks in his <i>History of the United States</i>. It was only to be
+expected, it was indeed inevitable, that the first of American
+thinkers&mdash;the man whose philosophy caught the national fancy and has
+done more towards the moulding of a national temperament than, perhaps,
+any man who ever wrote, should have been before all things the Apostle
+of the Individual. "Insist upon Thyself!" Emerson says&mdash;not once, but it
+runs as a refrain through everything he wrote or thought. "Always do
+what you are afraid to do!" "The Lord will not make his works manifest
+by a coward." "God hates a coward." "America is only another name for
+Opportunity." My quotations come from random memory, but the spirit is
+right. It is the spirit which Americans have been obliged to have since
+the days when the Fathers walked to meeting in fear of Indian arrows.
+And they need it yet. It has become an inheritance with them and it,
+more than anything else, shapes the form and method of their politics
+and above all of their business conduct.</p>
+
+<p>I have said elsewhere that in society (except only in certain circles in
+certain cities of the East) it is the individual character and
+achievements of the man himself that count; neither his father nor his
+grandfather matters&mdash;nor do his brothers and sisters. And it is the same
+in business. I am not saying that good credentials and strong friends
+are not of use to any man; but without friends or credentials, the man
+who has an idea which is commercially valuable will find a market in
+which to sell it. If he has the ability to exploit it himself and the
+power to convince others of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383"></a>[<a href="./images/383.png">383</a>]</span>his integrity, he will find capital ready
+to back him. It is difficult to explain in words to those accustomed to
+the traditions of English business how this principle underlies and
+permeates American business in all its modes.</p>
+
+<p>One example of it&mdash;trivial enough, but it will serve for
+illustration&mdash;which visiting Englishmen are likely to be confronted
+with, perhaps to their great inconvenience, is in the bank practice in
+the matter of cheques. There is, as is well known, no "crossing" of
+cheques in America, but all cheques are "open"; and many an Englishman
+has gone confidently to the bank on which it was drawn with a cheque,
+the signature to which he knew to be good, and has expected to have the
+money paid over the counter to him without a word. All that the English
+paying teller needs to be satisfied of is that the signature of the
+drawer is genuine and that there is money enough to the credit of the
+account to meet the cheque. But the Englishman in the strange American
+bank finds that the document in his hands is practically useless, no
+matter how good the signature or how large the account on which it is
+drawn, unless he himself&mdash;the person who presents the cheque&mdash;is known
+to the bank officials. "Can you identify yourself, sir?" The Englishman
+usually feels inclined to take the question as an impertinence; but he
+produces cards and envelopes from his pocket&mdash;the name on his
+handkerchief&mdash;anything to show that he is the person in whose favour the
+cheque is drawn. Perhaps in this way he can satisfy the bank official.
+Perhaps he will have to go away and bring back somebody who will
+identify him. It is the <i>personality of the individual with whom the
+business <span class="pagenum" style="font-style: normal;"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384"></a>[<a href="./images/384.png">384</a>]</span>is done</i> that the American system takes into account.<a name="FNanchor_384:1_47" id="FNanchor_384:1_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_384:1_47" class="fnanchor">[384:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is, as I have said, a trivial point, but it suffices. Vastly more
+important is the whole banking practice in America. This is no place to
+go into the details at the controversy which has raged around the merits
+and demerits of the American banking system. In the financial panic of
+1893 something over 700 banks suspended payment in the United States. At
+such seasons, especially, but more or less at all times, a great
+proportion of the best authorities in the United States believe that it
+would be better for the country if the Scotch&mdash;or the Canadian
+adaptation of the Scotch&mdash;system were to take the place of that now in
+vogue. Possibly they are right. The gain of having the small local banks
+in out-of-the-way places possess all the stability of branches of a
+great central house is obvious, both in the increase of security to
+depositors in time of financial stress and also in the ability of such a
+house to lend money at lower rates of interest than is possible to the
+poorer institution with its smaller capital which has no connections and
+no resources beyond what are locally in evidence. It may be questioned,
+however, whether the country as a whole would not lose much more than it
+would gain by the less complete identification of the bank with local
+interests. It would be inevitable that in many cases the local manager
+would be restrained by the greater <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385"></a>[<a href="./images/385.png">385</a>]</span>conservatism of the authorities of
+the central house from lending support to local enterprises, which he
+would extend if acting only by and for himself as an independent member
+of the local business community. It is difficult to see how the country
+as a whole could have developed in the measure that it has under any
+system differing much from that which it has had.</p>
+
+<p>In theory it may be that the functions of a bank are precisely the same
+in Great Britain and in America. In practice different functions have
+become dominant in the two. In England a bank's chief business is to
+furnish a safe depository for the funds of its clients. In America its
+chief business is to assist&mdash;of course with an eye to its own profit and
+only within limits to which it can safely go&mdash;the local business
+community in extending and developing its business. The American
+business man looks upon the bank as his best friend. If his business be
+sound and he be sensible, he gives the proper bank official an insight
+into his affairs far more intimate and confidential than the Englishman
+usually thinks of doing. He invites the bank's confidence and in turn
+the bank helps him beyond the limits of his established credit line in
+whatever may be considered a legitimate emergency. In any small town
+whenever a new enterprise of any public importance is to be started, the
+bank is expected to take shares and otherwise assist in promoting a
+movement which is for the common good. The credits which American
+banks&mdash;especially in the West&mdash;give to their customers are astoundingly
+liberal according to an English banker's standards. Sometimes of
+course they make mistakes and have to pocket losses. When a storm
+breaks, moreover (as in the case already quoted <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386"></a>[<a href="./images/386.png">386</a>]</span>of the panic of 1893),
+they may be unable to call in their loans in time to take care
+of their liabilities. But that they have been a tremendous&mdash;an
+incalculable&mdash;factor in the general advancement of the country cannot be
+questioned.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between the parts played by the banks in the two
+countries rests of course on two fundamental differences in the
+condition of the countries themselves. The first of these is the fact
+that while England is a country of accumulated wealth and large fortunes
+which need safeguarding, America has until recently been a country of
+small realised wealth but immense natural resources which needed
+developing. The policy of the banks has been shaped to meet the demands
+of the situation.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place (and too much stress cannot be laid upon this in any
+comparison of the business-life of the two peoples) the American is
+always trading on a rising market. This is true of the individual and
+true of the nation. Temporary fluctuations there are of course, but
+after every setback the country has only gone ahead faster than before.
+The man with faith in the future, provided only that he looked far
+enough ahead to be protected against temporary times of depression, has
+always won. Just as the railway companies push their lines out into the
+wilderness, confident of the population that will follow, and are never
+disappointed, so in all other lines the man who is always in advance,
+who does not wait for the demand to be there before he enlarges his
+plant to meet it, but who sees it coming and is ready for it when it
+comes&mdash;the man who has always acted in the belief that the future will
+be bigger than the present,&mdash;that man has never failed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387"></a>[<a href="./images/387.png">387</a>]</span>to reap his
+reward. Of course the necessary danger in such a condition is that of
+over-speculation. But nearly every man who amasses wealth or wins large
+commercial success in the United States habitually takes risks which
+would be folly in England. They are not folly in him, because the
+universal growth of the country, dragging with it and buoying up all
+industries and all values, as it goes, is on his side. It is inevitable
+that there should result a national temperament more buoyant, more
+enterprising, more alert.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>What is important, too, is that whereas in England the field is already
+more or less full and was handed down to the present generation well
+occupied, so that new industries can, as it were, only be erected on the
+ruins of old, and a site has to be cleared of one factory before another
+can be built (all of which is, in a measure, only relative and
+metaphorical), in the United States there is always room for the
+newcomers. New population is pouring in to create new markets: new
+resources are being developed to provide the raw material for new
+industries; there is abundance of new land, new cities, new sites
+whereon the new factories can be built. This is why "America" and
+"opportunity" are interchangeable terms; why young men need never lack
+friends or backing or the chance to be the architects of their own
+fortunes. Society can afford to encourage the individual to assert
+himself, because there is space for and need of him.</p>
+
+<p>From this flow certain corollaries from which we may draw direct
+comparison between the respective spirits in which business in the two
+countries is carried on. In the first place, in consequence of the more
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388"></a>[<a href="./images/388.png">388</a>]</span>crowded condition of the field and the greater intensity of
+competition, the business community in England is much more ruthless,
+much less helpful, in the behaviour of its members one towards the
+other. It is not a mere matter of the more exacting scrutiny of credits,
+of the more rigid insistence on the exact fulfilment of a bond (provided
+that bond be stamped), but it colours unconsciously the whole tone of
+thought and language of the people. There are two principles on which
+business may be conducted, known in America respectively as the "Live
+and let live" principle, and the "Dog eat dog" principle. There was
+until recently in existence in the United States one guild, or
+association, representing a purely parasitical trade&mdash;that of
+ticket-scalping&mdash;which was fortunately practically peculiar to the
+United States. This concern had deliberately adopted the legend "Dog eat
+dog" as its motto and two bull-dogs fighting as its crest; but in doing
+so its purpose was to proclaim that the guild was an Ishmaelite among
+business men and lived avowedly in defiance of the accepted canons of
+trade. On the other hand one meets in America with the words "Live and
+let live" as a trademark, or motto, on every hand and on the lips of the
+people. Few men in America but could cite cases which they know wherein
+men have gone out of their way to help their bitterest competitor when
+they knew that he needed help. The belief in co-operation, on which
+follows a certain comradeship, as a business principle is ingrained in
+the people.</p>
+
+<p>I was once given two letters to read, of which one was a copy and the
+other an original. The circumstances which led up to the writing of them
+were as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389"></a>[<a href="./images/389.png">389</a>]</span>follows: Two rich men, A. and B., had been engaged in a
+business duel. It was desperate&mdash;<i>&agrave; outrance</i>,&mdash;dealing in large
+figures; and each man had to call up all his reserves and put out all
+his strength. At last the end came and A. was beaten&mdash;beaten and ruined.
+Then the letters passed which I quote from memory:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Mr. B.:</span></p>
+
+<p>"I know when I'm beaten and if I was quite sure you wouldn't
+kick a man when he's down, I would come round to see you and
+grovel. As perhaps you can guess, I am in a bad way.</p>
+
+<p class="author">"Yours truly, A."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="section"><span class="smcap">Dear A.:</span></p>
+
+<p>"There's no need to grovel. Come around to my house after
+supper to-morrow night and let us see what we can do together
+to put you straight.</p>
+
+<p class="author">"Yours truly, B."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I need hardly say that it was the second letter of which I saw the
+original, or that it was A. who showed them to me, when they were
+already several years old but still treasured, and A. was a wealthy man
+again as a result of that meeting after dinner. A. told me briefly what
+passed at that meeting. "He gave me a little more than half a million,"
+he said. "Of course he has had it back long ago; but he did not know
+that he would get it at the time and he took no note or other security
+from me. At the time it was practically a gift of five hundred thousand
+dollars."</p>
+
+<p>And as I write I can almost hear the English reader saying, "Pooh! the
+same things are done times without number in England." And I can hear
+the American, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390"></a>[<a href="./images/390.png">390</a>]</span>still smarting under the recollection of some needlessly
+cruel and unfair thrust from the hands of a competitor, smile cynically
+and say that he would like to tell me certain things that he knows. Of
+course there are exceptions on either side. It takes, as the American is
+so fond of saying, "all kinds of men to make a world." It is the same
+old difficulty of generalising about a nation or drawing up an
+indictment against a whole people. But I do not think that any man who
+has engaged for any length of time in business in both countries, who
+has lived in each sufficiently to absorb the spirit of the respective
+communities, will dissent from what I have said. Many Englishmen,
+without knowledge of business in England, go to America and find the
+atmosphere harder and less friendly than they were accustomed to at
+home, and come to quite another conclusion. But they are comparing
+American business life with the social club-and-country-house life of
+home. Let them acquire the same experience of business circles in
+England, and then compare the tone with that of business circles in
+America, and they will change their opinions.</p>
+
+<p>Let me recall again what was said above as to the difference in the
+motives which may impel a man to go into business or trade in the two
+countries. An Englishman cannot well pretend that he does it with any
+other purpose than to make money. The American hopes to make money too,
+but he takes up business as an honourable career and for the sake of
+winning standing and reputation among his fellows. This being so,
+business in America has a tendency to become more of a game or a
+pastime&mdash;to be followed with the whole heart certainly&mdash;but in a measure
+for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391"></a>[<a href="./images/391.png">391</a>]</span>itself, and not alone for the stakes to be won. It is not difficult
+to see how, in this spirit, it may be easier to forego those stakes&mdash;to
+let the actual money slip&mdash;when once you have won the game.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It is necessary to refer briefly again to the subject of trusts. In
+England a great corporation which was able to demonstrate beyond dispute
+that it had materially cheapened the cost of any staple article to the
+public, and further showed that when, in the process of extending its
+operations, it of necessity wiped out any smaller business concerns, it
+never failed to provide the owners or partners of those concerns with
+managerial positions which secured to them a larger income than they
+could have hoped to earn as individual traders, and moreover took into
+their service the employees of the disbanded concerns at equal
+salaries,&mdash;such a corporation would generally be regarded by the English
+people as a public benefactor and as a philanthropically and charitably
+disposed institution. In America the former consideration has some
+weight, though not much; the latter none at all.</p>
+
+<p>When a trust takes into its service those men whom it has destroyed as
+individual traders, the fact remains that their industrial independence
+has been crushed. The individual can no longer "insist upon himself." He
+is subordinate and no longer free. One of the first principles of
+American business life, the encouragement of individual initiative, has
+been violated, and nothing will atone for it.</p>
+
+<p>The Standard Oil Company can, I believe, prove beyond possibility of
+contradiction that the result of its operations has been to reduce
+immensely the cost <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392"></a>[<a href="./images/392.png">392</a>]</span>of oil to the public, as well as to give facilities
+in the way of distribution of the product which unassociated enterprise
+could never have furnished. It can also show that in many, and, I
+imagine, in the majority, of cases, it has endeavoured to repair by
+offers of employment of various sorts whatever injuries it has done to
+individuals by ruining their business. But these things constitute no
+defence in the eyes of the American people.</p>
+
+<p>There is the additional ground of public hostility that the weapons
+employed to crush competitors have often been illegal weapons. Without
+the assistance of the railway companies (which was given in violation of
+the law) the Standard Oil Company might have been unable to win more
+than one of its battles; but this fact, while it furnishes a handle
+against the company and exposes a side of it which may prove to be
+vulnerable, and is therefore kept to the front in any public indictment
+of the company's methods, is an immaterial factor in the popular
+feeling. Few Americans (or Englishmen) will not accept a reduced rate
+from a railway company when they can get it. Whatever actual bitterness
+may be felt by the average man against the Standard Oil Company because
+it procured rebates on its freight bills is rather the bitterness of
+jealousy than of an outraged sense of morality. The real bitterness&mdash;and
+very bitter it is&mdash;is caused by the fact that the company has crushed
+out so many individuals. On similar ground nothing approaching the same
+intensity of feeling could be engendered in the British public.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now recur for a moment to the views of the young woman quoted
+above on the interesting topic of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393"></a>[<a href="./images/393.png">393</a>]</span>chaperons. We have seen that
+insistence on the individuality is a conspicuous&mdash;perhaps it is the most
+conspicuous&mdash;trait of the American character. Encouraged by the wider
+horizon and more ample elbow-room and assisted by the something more
+than tolerant good-will of his business associates, colleagues, or
+competitors, the individual, once insisted on, has every chance to
+develop and become prosperous and rich. Everything helps a man in
+America to strike out for himself, to walk alone, and to dispense with a
+chaperon. The Englishman is chaperoned at almost every step of his
+business career; and I am not speaking now of the chaperonage of his
+colleagues, of his fellows in the community, or of his elders among whom
+he grows up and, generally, in spite of whom the young man must make his
+way to the top. There is another much more significant form of
+chaperonage in English business circles, of which it is difficult to
+speak without provoking hostility.</p>
+
+<p>The English business world is solicitor-cursed. I mean by this no
+reflection on solicitors either individually or in the mass. I am making
+no reference to such cases as there have been of misappropriation by
+solicitors here and there of funds entrusted to their charge, nor to
+their methods of making charges, which are preposterous but not of their
+choosing. Let us grant that, given the necessity of solicitors at all,
+Great Britain is blessed in that she has so capable and upright and in
+all ways admirable a set of men to fill the offices and do the work.
+What I am attacking is solicitordom as an institution.</p>
+
+<p>It is not merely that there are no solicitors, as such, in the United
+States, for it might well be that the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394"></a>[<a href="./images/394.png">394</a>]</span>general practising lawyers who
+fill their places, so far as their places have to be filled, might be
+just as serious an incubus on business as solicitordom is on the
+business of London to-day. Names are immaterial. The essential fact is
+that the spirit and the conditions which make solicitors a necessity in
+England do not exist in America. I do not propose to go into any
+comparison in the differences in legal procedure in the two countries;
+not being a lawyer, I should undoubtedly make blunders if I did. What is
+important is that a man who is accustomed to walking alone does not
+think of turning to his legal adviser at every step. Great corporations
+and large business concerns have of course their counsel, their
+attorneys, and even their "general solicitors." But the ordinary
+American engaged in trade or business in a small or moderate way gets
+along from year's end to year's end, perhaps for his lifetime, without
+legal services. I am speaking only on conjecture when I say that, taking
+the country as a whole, outside of the large corporations or among rich
+men, over ninety per cent. of the legal documents&mdash;leases, agreements,
+contracts, articles of partnership, articles of incorporation, bills of
+sale, and deeds of transfer&mdash;are executed by the individuals concerned
+without reference to a lawyer. Probably not less than three fourths of
+the actual transactions in the purchase of land, houses, businesses, or
+other property are similarly concluded without assistance. "What do we
+need of a lawyer?" one man will ask the other and the other will
+immediately agree that they need one not at all.</p>
+
+<p>Of course troubles often arise which would have been prevented had the
+documents been drawn up by <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395"></a>[<a href="./images/395.png">395</a>]</span>a competent hand. The constitutional
+reluctance to go to a lawyer is sometimes carried to lengths that are
+absurd. But I do not believe that the amount of litigation which arises
+from that cause is in any way comparable to that which is avoided by the
+mere fact that legal aid is outside the mental horizon. The men who
+conduct most of the affairs of life directly without legal help are most
+likely to adjust differences when they arise in the same way. That is a
+matter of opinion, however, based only on reasonable analogy, which I
+can advance no figures to support; but what is not matter of opinion,
+but matter of certainty, is, first, that the general gain in the
+rapidity of business movement is incalculable, and, second, that
+business as a whole is relieved of the vast burden of solicitors'
+charges.</p>
+
+<p>The American, accustomed to the ways of his own people, on becoming
+engaged in business in London is astounded, first, at the disposition of
+the Englishman to turn for legal guidance in almost every step he takes,
+second, at the stupendous sums of money which are paid for services
+which in his opinion are entirely superfluous, and, finally, at the
+terrible loss of time incurred in the conclusion of any transaction by
+the waiting for the drafting and redrafting and amending and engrossing
+and recording of interminable documents which are a bewilderment and an
+annoyance to him.</p>
+
+<p>The Englishman often says that American business methods are slip-shod;
+and possibly that is the right word. But Englishmen should not for a
+moment deceive themselves into thinking that the American envies the
+Englishman the superior niceties of his ways or would think himself or
+his condition likely to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396"></a>[<a href="./images/396.png">396</a>]</span>be improved by an exchange. An example of
+difference in the practice of the two countries which has so often been
+used as to be fairly hackneyed (and therefore perhaps stands the better
+chance of carrying conviction than a more original, if better,
+illustration) is drawn from the theory which governs the building of
+locomotive engines in the two countries.</p>
+
+<p>The American usually builds his engine to do a certain specified service
+and to last a reasonable length of time. During that time he proposes to
+get all the work out of it that he can&mdash;to wear it out in fact&mdash;feeling
+well assured that, when that time expires, either the character of the
+service to be performed will have altered or such improvements will have
+been introduced into the science of locomotive construction as will make
+it cheaper to replace the old engine with one of later build. The
+Englishman commonly builds his engines as if they were to last for all
+time. There are many engines working on English railways now, the
+American contemporaries of which were scrapped twenty years ago. The
+Englishman takes pride in their antiquity, as showing the excellence of
+the workmanship which was put into them. The American thinks it would
+have been incomparably better to have thrown the old things away long
+ago and replaced them with others of recent building which would be more
+efficient.</p>
+
+<p>The same principle runs through most things in American life, where they
+rarely build for posterity, preferring to adapt the article to the work
+it has to perform, expecting to supersede it when the time comes with
+something better. If a thing suffices, it suffices; whether it be a
+locomotive or a contract. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397"></a>[<a href="./images/397.png">397</a>]</span>"What is the use," the American asks, "when
+you can come to an agreement with a fellow in ten minutes and draw up
+your contract with him that afternoon,&mdash;what is the use of calling in
+your solicitors to negotiate and then paying them heavily to keep you
+waiting for weeks while they draft documents? We shall have had the
+contract running a month and be making money out of it before the
+lawyers would get through talking."</p>
+
+<p>Out of this divergence in point of view and practice have of course
+grown other differences. One thing is that the American courts have
+necessarily come to adopt more liberal views in the interpretation of
+contracts than the English; they are to a greater extent inclined to
+look more to the intent than to the letter and to attach more weight to
+verbal evidence in eliciting what the intent was. No stamping of
+documents being necessary in America, the documents calling themselves
+contracts, and which are upheld as such, which appear in American courts
+are frequently of a remarkable description; but I have a suspicion that
+on the whole the American, in this particular, comes as near to getting
+justice on the average as does the Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>And the point is that I believe it to be inevitable that the habit of
+doing without lawyers in the daily conduct of business, the habit of
+relying on oneself and dealing with another man direct, must in the long
+run breed a higher standard of individual business integrity.
+Englishmen, relying always on their solicitors' advice, are too tempted
+to consider that so long as they are on the right side of the law they
+are honest. It is a shifting of the responsibility to the chaperon;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398"></a>[<a href="./images/398.png">398</a>]</span>whereas, if alone, you would be compelled to act on your honour.</p>
+
+<p>What I think and hope is the last word that I have to say on this rather
+difficult subject has to do with the matter already mentioned, namely
+the absence of the necessity of stamping documents in America.
+Englishmen will remember that the Americans always have evinced a
+dislike of stamps and stamp duties and acts relating thereto. Of late
+years the necessity of meeting the expenses of the Spanish war did for a
+while compel the raising of additional internal revenue by means of
+documentary and other stamps. The people submitted to it, but they hated
+it; and hated it afresh as often as they drew or saw a cheque with the
+two-cent stamp upon it. The act was repealed as speedily as possible and
+the stamping of papers has for six years now been unknown.</p>
+
+<p>I think&mdash;and I am not now stating any acknowledged fact, but only
+appealing to the reader's common-sense&mdash;that it is again inevitable that
+where a superior sanctity attaches to stamped paper a people must in the
+long run come to think too lightly of that which is unstamped. I do not
+say that the individual Englishman has as yet come to think too lightly
+of his word or bond because it is informal, but I do think there is
+danger of it. The words "Can we hold him?" or (what is infinitely worse)
+"Can he hold us?" spring somewhat readily to the lips of the business
+man of this generation in England.</p>
+
+<p>Continual dependence on the law and the man of law, and an extra respect
+for paper because it is legal, have&mdash;they surely cannot fail to have&mdash;a
+tendency to breed in the mind a disregard for what is not of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399"></a>[<a href="./images/399.png">399</a>]</span>
+strictly legal or actionable character. It is Utopian to dream of a
+state of society where no law will be needed but every man's written
+and spoken word will be a law to him; but it is not difficult to imagine
+a state of society in which there is such universal dependence on the
+law in all emergencies that the individual conscience will become
+weakened&mdash;pauperised&mdash;atrophied&mdash;and unable to stand alone.</p>
+
+<p>That is, as I have said, the last point that I wish to make on this
+subject; and the reader will please notice that I have nowhere said that
+I consider American commercial morality at the present day to be higher
+than English. Nor do I think that it is. Incontestably it is but a
+little while since the English standard was appreciably the higher of
+the two. I have cited from my own memory instances of conditions which
+existed in America only twenty years ago in support of the fact&mdash;though
+no proof is needed&mdash;that this is so. I by no means underestimate the
+fineness of the traditions of British commerce or the number of men
+still living who hold to those traditions. On the other hand, better
+judges than I believe that the standard of morality in English business
+circles is declining. In America it is certainly and rapidly improving.</p>
+
+<p>Present English ideas about American commercial ethics are founded on a
+knowledge of facts, correct enough at the time, which existed before the
+improvement had made anything like the headway that it has, which facts
+no longer exist. I have roughly compared in outline some of the
+essential qualities of the atmosphere in which, and some of the
+conditions under which, the business men in the two countries live and
+do their business, showing that in the United States <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400"></a>[<a href="./images/400.png">400</a>]</span>there is a much
+more marked tendency to insist on the character of the individual and a
+much larger opportunity for the individuality to develop itself; and
+that in certain particulars there are in England inherited social
+conditions and institutions which it would appear cannot fail to hamper
+the spirit of self-reliance, on which self-respect is ultimately
+dependent.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And the conclusion? For the most part my readers must draw it for
+themselves. My own opinion is that, whatever the relative standing of
+the two countries may be to-day, it is hardly conceivable that, by the
+course on which each is travelling, in another generation American
+commercial integrity will not stand the higher of the two. The
+conditions in America are making for the shaping of a sterner type of
+man.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><i>Postscript.</i>&mdash;The opinion has been expressed in the foregoing pages
+that in one particular the American on the average comes as near to
+getting justice in his courts as does the Englishman. I have also given
+expression to my great respect, which I think is shared by everyone who
+knows anything of it, for the United States Supreme Court. Also I have
+spoken disparagingly of the English institution of solicitordom. But
+these isolated expressions of opinion on particular points must not be
+interpreted as a statement that American laws and procedure are on the
+whole comparable to the English. I do not believe that they are. None
+the less Englishmen have as a rule such vague notions upon this subject
+that some explanatory comment seems to be desirable.</p>
+
+<p>Especially do few Englishmen (not lawyers or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401"></a>[<a href="./images/401.png">401</a>]</span>students of the subject)
+recognise that the abuses in the administration of justice in America,
+of which they hear so much, do not occur in the United States courts,
+but in the local courts of the several States. So far as the United
+States (<i>i. e.</i>, the Federal) Courts are concerned I believe that the
+character and capacity of the judges (all of whom are appointed and not
+elected) compare favourably with those of English judges. It is in the
+State courts, the judges of which are generally elected, that the
+shortcomings appear; and while it might be reasonable to expect that a
+great State like New York or Massachusetts should have a code of laws
+and an administration of justice not inferior to those of Great Britain,
+it is perhaps scarcely fair to expect as much of each of the 46 States,
+many of which are as yet young and thinly populated.</p>
+
+<p>The chief vice of the State courts arises, of course, from the fact that
+the judges are elected by a partisan vote; from which it follows almost
+of necessity that there will be among them not a few who in their
+official actions will be amenable to the influence of party pressure. It
+is perhaps also inevitable that under such a system there will not
+seldom find their way to the bench men of such inferior character that
+they will be directly reachable by private bribes; though this, I
+believe, seldom occurs. The State courts, however, labour under other
+disadvantages.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen how Congressmen are hampered in the execution of their
+duties by the constant calls upon their time made by the leaders of
+their party, or other influential interests, in their constituencies.
+The same is true on a smaller scale of members of the State
+legislatures. Congress and the legislatures of the several <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402"></a>[<a href="./images/402.png">402</a>]</span>States alike
+are moreover limited by the restrictions of written constitutions. The
+British Parliament is paramount; but the United States legislatures are
+always operating under fear of conflict with the Constitution. Their
+spheres are limited, so that they can only legislate on certain subjects
+and within certain lines; while finally the country has grown so fast,
+the conditions of society have changed with such rapidity, that it has
+been inherently difficult for lawmaking bodies to keep pace with the
+increasing complexity of the social and industrial fabric.</p>
+
+<p>If the limitations of space did not forbid, it would be interesting to
+show how this fact, more than any other (and not any willingness to
+leave loopholes for dishonesty) makes possible such offences as those
+which, committed by certain financial institutions in New York, were the
+immediate precipitating cause of the recent panic. Growth has been so
+rapid that, with the best will in the world to erect safeguards against
+malfeasance, weak spots in the barricades are, as it were, only
+discovered after they have been taken advantage of. With the
+preoccupation of the legislators stable doors are only found to be open
+by the fact that the horses are already in the street.</p>
+
+<p>But, after all has been said in extenuation, there remain many things in
+American State laws for which one may find explanation but not much
+excuse.</p>
+
+<p>Reference has already been made to the entirely immoral attitude of many
+of the State legislatures towards corporations, especially towards
+railway companies; and in some of the Western States prejudice against
+accumulated wealth is so strong that it is practically impossible for a
+rich man or corporation to get <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403"></a>[<a href="./images/403.png">403</a>]</span>a verdict against a poor man. It would
+be easy to cite cases from one's personal experience wherein jurors have
+frankly explained their rendering of a verdict in obvious contradiction
+of the weight of evidence, by the mere statement that the losing party
+"could stand it" while the other could not. Of a piece with this is a
+class of legislation which has been abundant in Western States, where
+the legislators as well as most of the residents of the States have been
+poor, giving extraordinary advantages to debtors and making the
+collection of debts practically impossible. In some cases such
+legislation has defeated itself by compelling capitalists to refuse to
+invest, and wholesale traders to refuse to give credit, inside the
+State.</p>
+
+<p>Yet another source of corruption in legislation is to be found in the
+mere numerousness of the States themselves. It may obviously inure to
+the advantage of the revenues of a particular State to be especially
+lenient in matters which involve the payment of fees. It is evidently
+desirable that a check should be put on the reckless incorporation of
+companies with unlimited share capital, the usual form of such a check
+being, of course, the graduation of the fee for incorporation in
+proportion to such capital. One State which has laws more generous than
+any of its neighbours in this particular is likely to attract to it the
+incorporation of all the companies of any magnitude from those States,
+the formal compliance with the requirements of having a statutory
+office, and of holding an annual meeting, in that State being a matter
+of small moment. Similar considerations may govern one State in enacting
+laws facilitating the obtaining of divorce.</p>
+
+<p>There are, then, obviously many causes which make <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404"></a>[<a href="./images/404.png">404</a>]</span>the attainment of
+either an uniform or a satisfactory code of jurisprudence in all States
+alike extremely difficult of attainment. It will only be arrived at by,
+on the one hand, the extension of the Federal authority and, on the
+other the increase in population and wealth (and, consequently, a sense
+of responsibility) in those States which at present are less forward
+than their neighbours. But, again, it is worth insisting on the fact
+that the faults are faults of the several States and not of the United
+States. They do not imply either a lack of a sense of justice in the
+people as a whole or any willingness to make wrong-doing easy. But it is
+extremely difficult for the public opinion of the rest of the country to
+bring any pressure to bear on the legislature of one recalcitrant State.
+The desire to insist on its own independence is indeed so strong in
+every State that any attempt at outside interference must almost
+inevitably result only in developing resistance.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And again I find myself regretfully in direct conflict with Mr. Wells.
+But it is not easy to take his meditations on American commercial
+morality in entire seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>"In the highly imaginative theory that underlies the reality of an
+individualistic society," he says (<i>The Future in America</i>, p. 168),
+"there is such a thing as honest trading. In practice I don't believe
+there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to have a fixed quality
+called their value, and honest trading is I am told the exchange of
+things of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by honest trading and
+therefore nobody can grow rich by it." And more to the same effect.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405"></a>[<a href="./images/405.png">405</a>]</span></p><p>A trader buys one thousand of a given article per month from the
+manufacturer at ninepence an article and sells them to his customers at
+tenpence. The extra penny is his payment for acting as purveyor, and the
+customers recognise that it is an equitable charge which they pay
+contentedly. That is honest trading; and the trader makes a profit of a
+trifle over four pounds a month, or fifty pounds a year.</p>
+
+<p>Another trader purveys the same article, buying it from the same
+manufacturer, but owing to the possession of larger capital, better
+talent for organisation, and more enterprise, he sells, not one
+thousand, but one million per month. Instead of selling them at
+tenpence, however, he sells them at ninepence half-penny; thereby making
+his customers a present of one half-penny, taking to himself only one
+half of the sum to which they have already consented as a just charge
+for the services which he renders. Supposing that he pays the same price
+as the other trader for his goods (which, buying by the million, he
+would not do), he makes a profit of some &pound;2083 a month, or &pound;25,000 a
+year. Evidently he grows rich.</p>
+
+<p>This is the rudimentary principle of modern business; but because one
+man becomes rich, though he gives the public the same service for less
+charge than honest men, Mr. Wells says that he cannot be honest.</p>
+
+<p>If two men discover simultaneously gold mines of equal value, and one,
+being timid and conservative, puts twenty men to work while the other
+puts a thousand, and each makes a profit of one shilling a day on each
+man's labour, it is evident that while one enjoys an income of a pound a
+day for himself the other makes fifty times as much. It is not only
+obvious <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406"></a>[<a href="./images/406.png">406</a>]</span>that the latter is just as honest as the former, but he can
+well afford to pay his men a shilling or two a week more in wages. He
+can afford to build them model homes and give them reading-rooms and
+recreation grounds, which the other cannot.</p>
+
+<p>Others, besides Mr. Wells, lose their heads when they contemplate large
+fortunes made in business; but the elementary lesson to be learned is
+not merely that such large fortunes are likely to be as "honestly"
+acquired as the smaller ones, but also that the man who trades on the
+larger scale is&mdash;or has the potentiality of being&mdash;the greater
+benefactor to the community, not merely by being able to furnish the
+people with goods at a lower price but also by his ability to employ
+more labour and to surround his workmen with better material conditions.</p>
+
+<p>The tendency of modern business industry to agglutinate into large units
+is, as has been said, inevitable; but, what is better worth noting, like
+all natural developments from healthy conditions, it is a thing
+inherently beneficent. That the larger power is capable of greater abuse
+than the smaller is also evident; and against that abuse it is that the
+American people is now struggling to safeguard itself. But to assail all
+trading on a scale which produces great wealth as "dishonest" is both
+impertinent (it is Mr. Wells's own word, applied to himself) and absurd.</p>
+
+<p>The aggregate effect of the great consolidations in America and in
+England alike (of the "trusts" in fact) has so far been to cheapen
+immensely the price of most of the staples of life to the people; and
+that will always be the tendency of all consolidations which stop at any
+point short of monopoly. And that an <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407"></a>[<a href="./images/407.png">407</a>]</span>artificial monopoly (not based on
+a natural monopoly) can ever be made effective in any staple for more
+than the briefest space of time has yet to be demonstrated.</p>
+
+<p>The other consideration, of the destruction of the independence of the
+individual, remains; but that lies outside Mr. Wells' range.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_378:1_46" id="Footnote_378:1_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_378:1_46"><span class="label">[378:1]</span></a> Preface to the <i>Encyclop&aelig;dia of Trade between the
+United States and France</i>, prepared by the Soci&eacute;t&eacute; du Repertoire G&eacute;n&eacute;ral
+du Commerce.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_384:1_47" id="Footnote_384:1_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_384:1_47"><span class="label">[384:1]</span></a> I do not know whether the story is true or not that
+Signor Caruso was compelled, in default of other means of identification
+in a New York bank, to lift up his voice and sing to the satisfaction of
+the bank officials. As has been remarked, this is not the first time
+that gold has been given in exchange for notes.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408"></a>[<a href="./images/408.png">408</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Peoples at Play</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>American Sport Twenty-five Years Ago&mdash;The Power of Golf&mdash;A
+Look Ahead&mdash;Britain, Mother of Sports&mdash;Buffalo in New
+York&mdash;And Pheasants on Clapham Common&mdash;Shooting Foxes and the
+"Sport" of Wild-fowling&mdash;The Amateur in American Sport&mdash;At
+Henley&mdash;And at Large&mdash;Teutonic Poppycock.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>In "An Error in the Fourth Dimension," Kipling tells how one Wilton
+Sargent, an American, came to live in England and earnestly laboured to
+make himself more English than the English. He learned diligently to do
+many things most un-American:&mdash;"Last mystery of all he learned to
+golf&mdash;well; and when an American knows the innermost meaning of '<i>Don't
+press, slow back and keep your eye on the ball</i>,' he is, for practical
+purposes, de-nationalised." Some six years after that was written an
+American golfer became Amateur Champion of Great Britain. Yes; I know
+that Mr. Travis was not born in the United States, but <i>qua</i> golfer he
+is American pure and simple. Which shows the danger of too hasty
+generalisation, even on the part of a genius. And it shows more. When he
+wrote those words Kipling was fully justified by the facts as they
+stood. It is the fault of the character of the American people, which
+frustrates prophecy.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-five years ago there was no amateur sport <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409"></a>[<a href="./images/409.png">409</a>]</span>in America&mdash;none. Men,
+it is true, went off and shot ("hunted" as Americans call it) and fished
+and yachted for a few days, or weeks, in summer or autumn, in a rather
+rough-and-ready sort of way. Also, when at college they played baseball
+and football and, perhaps, they rowed. After leaving college there was
+probably not one young American in a hundred who entered a boat or
+played a game of either football or baseball on an average of once in a
+year. The people as a whole had no open-air games. Baseball was chiefly
+professional. Cricket had a certain foothold in Philadelphia and on
+Staten Island, but it was an exotic sport, as it remains to-day, failing
+entirely to enlist the sympathies of the multitude. Polo was not played.
+Lawn tennis had been introduced, but had made little headway. In all
+America there were, I think, three racquet courts, which were used
+chiefly by visiting Englishmen, and not one tennis court. Lacrosse was
+quite unknown, and as for the "winter sports" of snow-shoeing, ski-ing,
+ice-boating, curling, and tobogganing, they were practised only here and
+there by a few (except for the "coasting" of children) as rather a
+curious fad.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange experience for an Englishman in those days, fond of his
+games, to go from his clubs and the society of his fellows at home, to
+mix in the same class of society in America. As in the circles that he
+had left behind him, so there, the conversation was still largely on
+sporting topics, but while in England men talked of the games in which
+they played themselves and of the feats and experiences of their
+friends, in the leading young men's clubs of New York&mdash;the Union, the
+Knickerbocker, and the Calumet&mdash;the talk <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410"></a>[<a href="./images/410.png">410</a>]</span>was solely of professional
+sport: of the paid baseball nines, of prize fighters (Sullivan was then
+just rising to his glory), and professional scullers (those were the
+days of Hanlan), and the like. No man talked of his own doings or of
+those of his friends, for he and his friends did nothing, except perhaps
+to spar for an hour or so once or twice a week, or go through
+perfunctory gymnastics for their figures' sakes.</p>
+
+<p>Until a dozen years ago the situation had not materially changed. Lawn
+tennis had made some headway, but the thing that wrought the revolution
+was the coming of golf. It may be doubted if ever in history has any
+single sport, pastime, or pursuit so modified the habits, and even the
+character, of a people in an equal space of time as golf has modified
+those of the people of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>Enough has already been written of the enthusiasm with which the
+Americans took up the game itself, of the social prestige which it at
+once obtained, of the colossal sums of money that have been lavished on
+the making of courses, of the sumptuousness of the club-houses that have
+sprung up all over the land. That golf is in itself a fascinating game,
+is sufficiently proved in England, where it has drawn so many thousands
+of devotees away from cricket, football, lawn tennis, and other sports.
+But can we imagine what the result might have been if there had been in
+Great Britain no cricket, or football, or other sports, so that all the
+game-loving enthusiasm of the nation had been free to turn itself loose
+into that one channel? And this is just what did happen in America. Golf
+had a clear field and a strenuous sport-loving nation, devoid of
+open-air games, at its mercy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411"></a>[<a href="./images/411.png">411</a>]</span></p><p>The result was not merely that people took to playing golf and that
+young men neglected their offices and millionaires stretched unwonted
+muscles in scrambling over bunkers. Golf taught the American people to
+play games. It took them out from their great office-buildings and from
+their five-o'clock cocktails at the club, into the open air; and they
+found that the open air was good. So around nearly every golf club other
+sports grew up. Polo grounds were laid out by the side of the links,
+croquet lawns appeared on one side of the club-house and lawn-tennis
+nets arose on the other, while traps for the clay-pigeon shooters were
+placed safely off in a corner.</p>
+
+<p>Golf came precisely at the moment when the people were ready for it.
+Just as America, having in a measure completed the exploitation of her
+own continent and developed a manufacturing power beyond the resources
+of consumption in her people, was commercially ripe for the invasion of
+the markets of the world; just as she came, in her overflowing wealth
+and power, to a recognition of her greatness as a nation, and was
+politically ripe for an Imperial policy of colonial expansion; just as,
+tired of the loose code of ethics of the scrambling days, when the
+country was still one half wilderness and none had time to care for the
+public conscience, she was morally ripe for the wonderful revival which
+has set in in the ethics of politics and commerce and of which Mr.
+Roosevelt has been and is the chief apostle: so, by the individual
+richness of her citizens, giving larger leisure in which to cultivate
+other pleasures than those which their offices or homes could afford,
+she was ripe for the coming of the day of open-air games. And having
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412"></a>[<a href="./images/412.png">412</a>]</span>turned to them, she threw herself into their pursuit with the ardour
+and singleness of purpose which are characteristic of the people and
+which, as applied to games, seem to English eyes to savour almost of
+professionalism. As a matter of fact they are only the manifestations of
+an essential trait of the American character.</p>
+
+<p>The result was that almost at the same time as an American player was
+winning the British Amateur Golf Championship, an American polo team was
+putting All England on her mettle at Hurlingham, and it was not with any
+wider margin than was necessary for comfort that Great Britain retained
+the honours in lawn tennis, which she has since lost to one of her own
+colonies.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious that this awakening of the amateur sporting spirit in the
+United States should have come just at the time when many excellent
+judges were bewailing the growing popularity of professional sport in
+England. Any day now, one may hear complaints that the British youth is
+giving up playing games himself for the purpose of watching professional
+wrestlers or football games or county cricket matches. My personal
+opinion is that there is no need to worry. The growing interest in
+exhibition games reacts in producing a larger number of youths who
+strive to become players. Not only in spite of, but largely because of,
+the greater spectacular attraction of both football and cricket than in
+years gone by, there is an immensely larger number of players of
+both&mdash;and of all other&mdash;games than there ever was before. It is little
+more than a score of years since Association football, at least, was
+practically the monopoly of a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413"></a>[<a href="./images/413.png">413</a>]</span>few public schools and of the members of
+the two Universities&mdash;of "gentlemen" in fact. Any loss which the nation
+can have suffered from the tendency to sit on benches and applaud
+professional players must have been made up a thousand times over in the
+benefit to the national physique from the spreading of the game into
+wide classes which formerly regarded it, much as they might fox-hunting,
+as a pastime reserved only for their "betters."</p>
+
+<p>It is none the less interesting and instructive that in this field as in
+so many others the directly opposite tendencies should be at work in the
+two countries: that just when America is beginning to learn the delight
+of being a game-loving nation and amateur sport is thriving, not yet to
+the detriment of, but in proportions at least which stand fair
+comparison with, professional, the cry should be raised in England that
+Englishmen are forgetting to play games themselves in their eagerness to
+watch others do them better. Here, as in other things, the gap between
+the habits of the two peoples is narrowing rapidly. They have not yet
+met; for in England the time and attention given to games and sports by
+amateurs is still incomparably greater than on the other side. But that
+the advancing lines will meet&mdash;and even cross&mdash;seems probable. And when
+they have crossed, what then? Will America ever oust Great Britain from
+the position which she holds as the Mother of Sports and the athletic
+centre of the world?</p>
+
+<p>Some things, it appears, one can predict with certainty. America has
+already taken to herself a disagreeable number of the records in track
+athletics; and she will take more. On the links the performance of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414"></a>[<a href="./images/414.png">414</a>]</span>Mr.
+Travis, isolated as yet, is only a warning of many similar experiences
+in the future. In a few years it will be very hard for any visiting golf
+team of less than All England or All Scotland strength to win many
+matches against American clubs on their home courses; and the United
+States will be able to send a team over here that will be beaten only by
+All England&mdash;or perhaps will not be beaten by All Britain. At polo the
+Americans will go on hammering away till they produce a team that can
+stand unconquered at Hurlingham. It will be very long before they can
+turn out a dozen teams to match the best English dozen; but by mere
+force of concentration and by the practice of that quality which, as has
+already been said, looks so like professionalism to English eyes, one
+team to rival the English best they will send over. In lawn tennis it
+cannot be long before a pair of Americans will do what an Australian
+pair did in 1907, just as the United States already holds the Ladies'
+Championship; and England is going to have some difficulty in recovering
+her honours at court tennis. In rifle shooting America must be expected
+to beat England oftener than England beats America; but the edge will be
+taken off any humiliation that there might be by the fact that Britain
+will have Colonial teams as good as either.</p>
+
+<p>And when all this has happened, will England's position be shaken? Not
+one whit! Not though the <i>America's</i> cup never crosses the Atlantic and
+though sooner or later an American college crew succeeds&mdash;as surely, for
+their pluck, they deserve to succeed&mdash;in imitating the Belgians and
+carrying off the Grand at Henley. There remain games and sports enough
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415"></a>[<a href="./images/415.png">415</a>]</span>which the United States will never take up seriously, at which if she
+did she would be debarred by climatic conditions or other causes from
+ever threatening British supremacy.</p>
+
+<p>The glory of England lies in the fact that she "takes on" the best of
+all the nations of the world at their own games. It is not the United
+States only, but all her Colonies and every country of Europe that turn
+to Great Britain as to their best antagonist in whatever sport they find
+themselves proficient. Just now England's brow is somewhat bare of
+laurels, but year in and year out Britain will continue to win the
+majority of contests in her meetings with all the world; and if she lose
+at times, is it not better to have rivals good enough to make her extend
+herself? And is it not sufficient for her pride that she, one people,
+should win&mdash;if it be only&mdash;half of all the world's honours?</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Englishmen can afford to rejoice ungrudgingly at the new
+spirit which has been born in the United States. Each year the number of
+"events" in which an international contest is possible increases. The
+time may not be far away when there will be almost as long a list of
+Anglo-American annual contests as there is now between Oxford and
+Cambridge. But it will be a very long time before the United States can
+displace Great Britain from the pre-eminence which she holds&mdash;and the
+wonderful character of which, I think, few Englishmen appreciate. Before
+that time comes such other sweeping changes will probably have come over
+the map of the world and the relations of the peoples that Britain's
+displacement will have lost all significance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416"></a>[<a href="./images/416.png">416</a>]</span></p><p>And Englishmen can always remember that, whatever triumphs the
+Americans may win in the domain of sport, they win them by virtue of the
+English blood that is in them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It is, of course, inevitable that in many particulars the American and
+English ideas of sport should be widely different. There is an old, old
+story in America of the Englishman who arrived in New York and, on the
+day after his arrival, got out his rifle and proceeded to make enquiries
+of the hotel people as to the best direction in which to start out to
+find buffalo&mdash;the nearest buffalo at the time being, perhaps, two
+thousand miles away. It is a story which has contributed not a little to
+contempt of the Britisher in many an innocent American mind. It happens
+that in my own experience I have known precisely that same blunder made
+by an American in England.</p>
+
+<p>I had met an American friend, with whom I have shot in America, at his
+hotel on the evening of his arrival in London one day in November. In
+the course of conversation I mentioned that the shooting season was in
+full swing.</p>
+
+<p>"Good," he said. "Let me hire a gun somewhere to-morrow and let's go
+out, if you've nothing to do, and have some shooting."</p>
+
+<p>Nothing, he opined, would be simpler, or more agreeable, than to drive
+out&mdash;or possibly take a train&mdash;to some wild spot in the vicinity of
+London&mdash;Clapham Common perhaps&mdash;and spend a day among the pheasants. It
+was precisely the Englishman and his buffalo&mdash;the prehistoric instinct
+of the race ("What a beautiful day! Let us go and kill something!")
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417"></a>[<a href="./images/417.png">417</a>]</span>blossoming amid unfamiliar conditions. My American friend wanted to
+kill an English pheasant. He had heard much of them as the best of
+game-birds. He had eaten them, much refrigerated, in New York and found
+them good. And he knew nothing of preserving and of a land that is all
+parcelled out into parks and gardens and spinneys. Why not then go out
+and enjoy ourselves? Before he left England he had some pheasant
+shooting, and it is rarely that a man on his first day at those
+conspicuous but evasive fowl renders as good an account of himself as
+did he. Similarly every American with a sound sporting instinct must
+hope that that traditional Englishman ultimately got his buffalo.</p>
+
+<p>Many times in the United States in the old days have I done exactly what
+that American then wished to do in London. Finding myself compelled to
+spend a night at some crude and unfamiliar Western town, I have made
+enquiries at the hotel as to the shooting&mdash;duck or prairie chicken&mdash;in
+the neighbourhood. Hiring a gun of the local gunsmith and buying a
+hundred cartridges, one then secured a trap with a driver, who probably
+brought his own gun and shot also (probably better than oneself), but
+who certainly knew the ground. The best ground might be three or five or
+ten miles out&mdash;open prairie where chicken were plentiful, or a string of
+prairie lakes or "sloughs" (pronounced "sloo") with duck-passes between.
+That evening one came home, hungry and happy as a hunter ought to be,
+with perhaps half a dozen brace of spike-tailed grouse (the common
+"chicken" of the Northwestern States) or ten or a dozen duck&mdash;mallard,
+widgeon, pintail, two kinds of teal, with, it might be, a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418"></a>[<a href="./images/418.png">418</a>]</span>couple of
+red-heads or canvas-backs,&mdash;or, not improbably, a magnificent Canada
+goose as the spoils.</p>
+
+<p>With the settlement of the country, the multiplication of shooters, and
+the increase in the number of "gun-clubs," which have now included most
+of the easily accessible duck-grounds in the country in their private
+preserves, the possibilities of those delightful days are growing fewer,
+but even now there are many parts of the West where the stranger can
+still do as I have done many times.</p>
+
+<p>Though the people had so few outdoor games, the great majority of
+Americans, except the less well-to-do of the city-dwellers of the
+Eastern States, have been accustomed to handle gun and rod from their
+childhood. The gun may at first have been a rusty old muzzle-loader, and
+the rod a "pole" cut from the bank of the stream with a live grasshopper
+for bait; and there are few better weapons to teach a boy to be a keen
+sportsman. The birds that he shot were game&mdash;duck or geese, turkeys,
+quail, grouse, or snipe&mdash;and the fish that he caught were mostly game
+fish&mdash;trout and bass. It is true that the American generally shoots
+foxes; so does the Englishman when he goes to the Colonies where there
+are no hounds and too many foxes, with game birds which he wishes kept
+for his own shooting, and domestic chickens which he destines for his
+own table. On the other hand the American does not mount a miniature
+cannon in a punt and shoot waterfowl by wholesale when sitting on the
+water. It is only the gunner for the market, the man who makes his
+living by it, who does that, and the laws do their best to stop even
+him. The American sportsman who cannot get his duck fairly on the wing
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419"></a>[<a href="./images/419.png">419</a>]</span>with a 12- or 16-bore prefers not to get them at all. "But," objects
+the English wildfowl shooter, "suppose the birds are not get-at-able in
+any other way?" "So much," the American would retort, "the better for
+the birds. They have earned their lives; get them like a sportsman or
+let them go."</p>
+
+<p>The time may not be far away&mdash;and many Englishmen will be glad when it
+comes&mdash;when to kill waterfowl at rest with a duck gun will no longer be
+considered a "sport" that a gentleman can engage in in England. Perhaps
+fox-hunting will become so popular in the United States that foxes will
+be generally preserved. The sportsmen of each country will then think
+better of those of the other. Meanwhile it would be pleasanter if each
+would believe that such little seemingly unsportsmanlike peculiarities
+that the other may have developed are only the accidents of his
+environment, and that under the same circumstances there is not a pin to
+choose between their sportsmanship.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Reference has more than once been made to the quality which looks to
+English eyes so much like semi-professionalism in American sport. It is
+a delicate subject, in handling which susceptibilities on one side or
+the other may easily be hurt.</p>
+
+<p>The intense earnestness and concentration of the American on his one
+sport&mdash;for most Americans are specialists in one only&mdash;does not commend
+itself to English amateurs. The exclusiveness, which seems to be
+suspicious of foul play, and the stringent training system of certain
+American crews at Henley have been out of harmony with all the
+traditions of the great <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420"></a>[<a href="./images/420.png">420</a>]</span>Regatta and have caused much ill feeling, some
+of which has occasionally come to the surface. Some of the proceedings
+of American polo teams have not coincided with what is ordinarily
+considered, in England, the behaviour of gentlemen in matters of amateur
+sport. On the other hand, Americans universally believe that Lord
+Dunraven acted in a most unsportsmanlike manner in the unfortunate cup
+scandal; and in one case they are&mdash;or were at the time&mdash;convinced that
+one of their crews was unfairly treated at Henley. Honours therefore on
+the surface are fairly easy; and, while every Englishman knows that both
+the American charges quoted are absurd, every American is no less of the
+opinion that the English grounds of complaint are altogether
+unreasonable.</p>
+
+<p>We must remember that after all a good many of the best English golfers
+and lawn-tennis players do nothing else in life but golf or play
+lawn-tennis. And this tendency to specialise is undoubtedly increasing.
+Meanwhile it will never be rooted out of the American character and in
+departments of sport where it, and it alone, will bring pre-eminence,
+Englishmen will either have to do as Americans do or, sooner or later,
+consent to be defeated. There is nothing in the practice at which the
+Englishman can fairly cavil. Americans have still much the fewer sports;
+and it is the national habit to take up one and concentrate on it with
+all one's might.<a name="FNanchor_420:1_48" id="FNanchor_420:1_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_420:1_48" class="fnanchor">[420:1]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421"></a>[<a href="./images/421.png">421</a>]</span></p><p>A more difficult aspect of the situation has to do with the question of
+the definition of "gentleman-amateur"; the fact being, of course, that
+the same definition has not the same significance in the two countries.
+The radical difficulty lies in the fact that the word "gentleman" in its
+English sense of a man of gentle birth has no application to America.
+Let this not be understood as a statement that there are any fewer
+gentlemen in America or that the word is not used. But its usage is not
+re-inforced, its limits are not defined, as in England, by any line of
+cleavage in the social system. A large number of the gentlemen of
+America are farmers' sons; more than half are the sons of men who
+commenced life in very humble positions, and nearly all are the sons of
+men who are engaged in trade or in business, the majority of them being
+destined to go into trade or business (and to begin at the beginning)
+themselves. In England, of course, the process of the obliteration of
+the old line is going on with great rapidity. In America, on the other
+hand, there is a tendency towards the drawing of a somewhat
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422"></a>[<a href="./images/422.png">422</a>]</span>corresponding line. But the fact remains that at present there exists
+this fundamental distinction and the consequence is that Englishmen
+continue to find among American "amateurs" and in teams of American
+"gentlemen," individuals who would not be accepted into the same
+categories in England.</p>
+
+<p>But what Englishmen should endeavour to understand is that the man who
+on the surface seems to belong to a class which in England would be
+objectionable in the company of gentlemen probably has none of those
+characteristics which would make him objectionable were he English. He
+has far more of the characteristics of a gentleman than of the other
+qualities. The qualities which go to make a "gentleman," even in the
+English sense, are many and complex; but the assumption is that they are
+all present in the man who bears the public school and university stamp.
+The Englishman is accustomed to accept the presence or absence of one or
+a few of those qualities in an individual as evidence of the presence or
+absence of them all. In judging other Englishmen, the rule works
+satisfactorily. But in America, with its different social system, the
+qualities are not tied up in the same bundles, so that the same
+inference fails. The same, or a similar, peculiarity of voice or speech
+or manner or dress or birth does not denote&mdash;much less does it
+connote&mdash;the same or similar things in representatives of the two
+peoples. Particular Englishmen have learned this often enough in
+individual cases. How often has it not happened that an Englishman,
+meeting an American first as a stranger, not even being informed that he
+is an American, has, judging from some one external characteristic,
+turned from him as being an Undesirable, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423"></a>[<a href="./images/423.png">423</a>]</span>only to be introduced to him
+later, or meet him under other conditions, and find in him one of the
+best fellows that he ever met? The thing is happening every day. Very
+often, with a little more knowledge or a little clearer understanding,
+Englishmen would know that their judgment of some American amateur
+athlete is shockingly unjust. To bar him out would be incomparably more
+unjust to him than his inclusion is unjust to any antagonist.</p>
+
+<p>This of course does not touch the fact&mdash;which is a fact&mdash;that in America
+what answers to the gentleman-amateur in England is drawn from a much
+larger proportion of the people. This does not however mean, when
+rightly viewed, what Englishmen generally think it means, that Americans
+go down into other&mdash;and presumably not legitimate&mdash;classes for their
+recruits. It only means that a very much larger proportion of the people
+belong to one class. There is no point at which an arbitrary line can be
+drawn. This is in truth only another way of saying what has been said
+already more than once, that the American people is really more
+homogeneous than the English, or rather is homogeneous over a larger
+part of its area, so that the type-American represents a greater
+proportion of the people of the United States than the type-Briton
+represents of the people of the British Isles.</p>
+
+<p>This is obviously in the realm of sport so much to America's advantage.
+It is not a condition against which the Englishman has any right to
+protest, any more than he has to move amendments to the Constitution of
+the United States. When better comprehended, Englishmen will accept it
+without either resentment or regret. The United States has a larger
+population than <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424"></a>[<a href="./images/424.png">424</a>]</span>Great Britain: so much the better for the United
+States. Also a larger proportion of that population must be admitted
+into the category of gentleman-amateur in sport; so much the more the
+better for them.</p>
+
+<p>But, curiously enough, this condition has its inherent drawback, which
+not impossibly more than compensates for its advantages. The fact that
+young Americans grow up so much of a class involves the essential fact
+that the enormous majority of them are educated at the Public Schools,
+that is at the Board Schools or Government Schools or whatever they
+would be called if their precise counterpart existed in England. The
+United States has not (the fact has been touched on before) any group of
+institutions comparable to the great schools of England. A few excellent
+schools there are which bear some resemblance to the English models, but
+they are not numerous enough to go any way towards leavening the nation.
+It is to the Public Schools that, in the mass, the English
+gentleman-amateur owes his training, not only in sports but in many
+other things besides: especially in those things which stamp on him the
+mark by which he is recognised as belonging to his right class through
+life. The American, as has been said, is not so stamped; but in missing
+that stamp&mdash;or in failing to receive it&mdash;he necessarily missed also all
+that discipline and training in games which the Public School gave to
+the Englishman. The very same cause as gives America an advantage in the
+numbers from which she can draw her amateur athletes, also forbids that
+these recruits should have had the same advantages of early training as
+fall to the Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>The thing is about as broad as it is long. It is not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425"></a>[<a href="./images/425.png">425</a>]</span>difficult to
+imagine that the great schools might never have come into existence in
+England, so that a larger proportion of the population than is now the
+case would be educated at some intermediate institutions, at the Grammar
+Schools let us say, when the English gentleman-amateur athletes&mdash;the
+polo, golf, and tennis teams and the crews that row at Henley&mdash;would be
+drawn from a larger circle of the population, and the individuals would
+not bear as close a superficial resemblance, one to the other, as they
+do to-day. They would in fact be more like the members of American
+athletic teams as Englishmen know them. The question is whether England
+would gain or lose in athletic efficiency. When Englishmen find
+something to cavil at in an individual American amateur or in an
+American amateur team or crew, would it not be better to stop and
+consider whether the disadvantages which compel America to be
+represented by such an individual or team or crew, do not outweigh the
+advantages which enable her to use him or them? If the United States
+were to develop the same educational machinery as exists in England,
+which would stamp practically all their gentlemen-amateurs with the same
+hall-mark, as they are so stamped in England, and would at the same time
+give them the English public-school boy's training in games, would not
+England, as a mere matter of athletic rivalry, be worse off instead of
+better?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>For the purpose of pointing the moral of the essential likeness of the
+American and English characters, as contrasted with those of other
+peoples, reference has already been made to Professor M&uuml;nsterberg and
+his book. It is an excellent book; but what English <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426"></a>[<a href="./images/426.png">426</a>]</span>writer would think
+it necessary to inform English readers that "the American student
+recreates himself on the athletic field rather than in the ale-house"?
+We know something of the life of a German student; but it is only when a
+German himself says a thing like that that he illuminates in a flash the
+abyss which yawns between the moral qualities of the youth of his
+country and the young American or young Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>Again the same author speaks on the subject of the Anglo-Saxon love of
+fair play (the sporting instinct, I have called it) as follows:</p>
+
+<p>"The demand for 'fair play' dominates the whole American people, and
+shapes public opinion in all matters whether large or small. And with
+this finally goes the belief in the self-respect and integrity of one's
+neighbour. The American cannot understand how Europeans" (Continental
+Europeans, if you please, Mr. M&uuml;nsterberg!) "so often reinforce their
+statements with explicit mention of their honour which is at stake, as
+if the hearer was likely to feel a doubt of it; and even American
+children are often apt to wonder at young people abroad who quarrel at
+play and at once suspect one another of some unfairness. The American
+system does not wait for years of discretion to come before exerting its
+influence; it makes itself felt in the nursery, where already the word
+of one child is never doubted by his playmates."</p>
+
+<p>There is an excellent American slang word, which is "poppycock." The
+Century Dictionary speaks disrespectfully of it as a "United States
+vulgarism," but personally I consider it a first-class word. The Century
+Dictionary defines it as meaning, "Trivial talk; <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427"></a>[<a href="./images/427.png">427</a>]</span>nonsense; stuff and
+rubbish," which is about as near as a dictionary can get to the elusive
+meaning of any slang word. English readers will understand the exact
+shade of meaning of the word when I say that the paragraph above quoted
+is most excellent and precise poppycock. Every American who read that
+paragraph when the book was published must have chuckled inwardly, just
+as every Englishman would chuckle. But the point which I wish to
+emphasise is that it is not at all poppycock from the author's point of
+view. I doubt not that his countrymen have been most edified by that
+excellent dictum, and the trouble is that one could never make a typical
+German understand wherein it is wrong. No, Mr. M&uuml;nsterberg, it is not
+that the sentence is untrue&mdash;far be it from me to suggest such a thing.
+It is merely absurd; and you, sir, will never, never, never comprehend
+why it is so.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the presence of such a remark, seriously made by so excellently
+capable a foreigner, that the Englishman and American ought to be able
+to shake hands and realise how much of a kin they are and how far
+removed from some other peoples.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I have dwelt on this subject of the games of the two peoples at what may
+seem to many an unnecessary length, because I do not think its
+importance can well be exaggerated. It is not only desirable, but it is
+necessary, for a thorough mutual liking between them that there should
+be no friction in matters of sport. No incident has, I believe, occurred
+of late years which did so much harm to the relations between the
+peoples as did the Dunraven episode in connection with the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428"></a>[<a href="./images/428.png">428</a>]</span><i>America's</i>
+cup races. I should be inclined to say that it did more harm (I am not
+blaming Lord Dunraven) than the Venezuelan incident.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the more recent attempts to
+recover the cup, and the spirit in which they have been conducted, have
+not contributed as much as, say, the attitude of England in the Spanish
+War to the increased liking for Great Britain which has made itself
+manifest in the United States of recent years. Few Englishmen, probably,
+understand how much is made of such matters in the American press. The
+love of sport is in the blood of both peoples and neither can altogether
+like the other until it believes it to have the same generous sporting
+instincts and the same clean methods as itself. As a matter of fact,
+they do&mdash;as in so many other traits&mdash;stand out conspicuously alike from
+among all other peoples, but neither will give the other full credit for
+this, till each learns to see below such slight surface appearances as
+at present provoke occasional ill-will in one party or the other. Fuller
+understanding will come with time and with it entire cordiality.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_420:1_48" id="Footnote_420:1_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_420:1_48"><span class="label">[420:1]</span></a> Though immaterial to the argument, it may be as well to
+state that my personal sympathies are entirely with the English
+practice. In the matter of college athletics especially the spirit in
+which certain sports (especially football and, in not much less degree,
+rowing and baseball) are followed at some of the American universities,
+is entirely distasteful to me. On the other hand, I know nothing more
+creditable to the English temperament than the spirit in which the
+contests in the corresponding sports are conducted between the great
+English universities. And this feeling is shared, I know, by some (and I
+believe by most) of those Americans who, as Rhodes scholars or
+otherwise, have had an opportunity of coming to understand at first hand
+the difference between the practice in the two countries. But this is an
+individual prepossession only; against which stands the fact that my
+experience of Americans who have won notoriety in athletics at one or
+other of the American universities, is that they are unspoiled by the
+system through which they have passed and possess just as sensitive and
+generous a sporting instinct as the best men turned out by Oxford or
+Cambridge.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429"></a>[<a href="./images/429.png">429</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Summary and Conclusion</span></h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A New Way of Making Friends&mdash;The Desirability of an
+Alliance&mdash;For the Sake of Both Peoples&mdash;And of All the
+World&mdash;The Family Resemblance&mdash;Mutual
+Misunderstandings&mdash;American Conception of the British
+Character&mdash;English Misapprehension of Americans&mdash;Foreign
+Influences in the United States&mdash;Why Politicians Hesitate&mdash;An
+Appeal to the People&mdash;And to C&aelig;sar.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>At first sight it may not seem the likeliest way to make two people care
+for each other to go laboriously about to tell each how the other
+underestimates his virtues. Don Pedro's wile would appear to be the more
+direct&mdash;to tell Benedick how Beatrice doted on him, and Beatrice how
+Benedick was dying for her love. I have always had my doubts, however,
+about the success of that alliance.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of two peoples so much alike as the English and the
+American, between whom friendship and alliance would be so entirely in
+accord with eternal fitness, who are yet held apart by misunderstanding
+on the part of each of the other's character, there seems no better way
+than to face the misunderstandings frankly and to endeavour to make each
+see how unjustly it undervalues the other's good qualities or
+overestimates its faults. At present neither Americans nor Englishmen
+understand what good fellows the others are. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430"></a>[<a href="./images/430.png">430</a>]</span>Least of all do they
+understand how essentially they are the same kind of good fellows.</p>
+
+<p>In summarising the contents of the foregoing pages, there is no need
+here to rehearse, except in barest outline, the arguments in favour of
+alliance between the countries. The fact that war between them is an
+ever-present possibility ought in itself to suffice&mdash;war which could
+hardly fail to be more sanguinary and destructive than any war that the
+world has known. The danger of such a war is greater, perhaps, than the
+people of either country recognises, certainly greater than most
+Englishmen imagine. The people of England do not understand the
+warlike&mdash;though so peace-loving&mdash;character of the American nation. It is
+just as warlike as, though no less peace-loving than, the English,
+without the restraint of that good-will which the English feel for the
+United States; without, moreover, the check, to which every European
+country is always subjected, of the fear of complications with other
+Powers. The American people, as a whole, it cannot be too earnestly
+impressed on Englishmen, have no such good-will towards Great Britain as
+Englishmen feel for them; and not even English reluctance to draw the
+sword, nor the protests of the better informed and the more well-to-do
+people in the United States would be able to restrain what Mr. Cleveland
+calls "the plain people of the land" if they once made up their mind to
+fight.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the possibility of war between the two nations themselves,
+there is the constant peril, to which both are exposed, of conflict
+forced upon them by the aggressions of other Powers. That peril is
+always present to both, to the United States now no less<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431"></a>[<a href="./images/431.png">431</a>]</span>&mdash;perhaps even
+more&mdash;than to Great Britain. The fact that neither need fear a trial of
+strength with any other Power or any union of Powers, is beside the
+question. Consciousness of its own strength is no guarantee to any
+nation that it will not be forced into conflict. Rather, by making it
+certain that it, at least, will not draw back, does it close up one
+possible avenue of escape from catastrophe when a crisis threatens.</p>
+
+<p>But beyond all this&mdash;apart from, and vastly greater than, the
+considerations of the interest or the security of either Great Britain
+or the United States&mdash;is the claim of humanity. The two peoples have it
+in their hands to give to the whole world no less a gift than that of
+Universal and Perpetual Peace. It involves no self-sacrifice, the giving
+of this wonderful boon, for the two peoples themselves would share in
+the benefit no less than other peoples, and they would be the richer by
+the giving. It involves hardly any effort, for they have but to hold out
+their hands together and give. It matters not that the world has not
+appealed to them. The fact remains that they can do this thing and they
+alone; and it is for them to ask their own consciences whether any
+considerations of pride, any prejudice, any absorption in their own
+affairs&mdash;any consideration actual or conceivable&mdash;can justify them in
+holding back. Still more does it rest with the American people&mdash;usually
+so quick to respond to high ideals&mdash;to ask its conscience whether any
+consideration, actual or conceivable, can justify it in refusal when
+Great Britain is willing&mdash;anxious&mdash;to do her share.</p>
+
+<p>That such an alliance must some day come is, I believe, not
+questionable. That it has not already come <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432"></a>[<a href="./images/432.png">432</a>]</span>is due only to the
+misunderstanding by each people of the character of the other.
+Primarily, the two peoples do not understand how closely akin&mdash;how of
+one kind&mdash;they are, how alike they are in their virtues, and how their
+failings are but the defects of the same inherited qualities, even
+though shaped to somewhat diverse manifestations by differences of
+environment. Two brothers seldom recognise their likeness one to the
+other, until either looks at the other beside a stranger. Members of one
+family do not easily perceive the family resemblance which they share;
+rather are they aware only of the individual differences. But strangers
+see the likeness, and in their eyes the differences often disappear. So
+Englishmen and Americans only come to a realisation of their resemblance
+when either compares the other critically with a foreign people.
+Foreigners, however, see the likeness when they look at the two
+together. And those foreigners who know only one of the peoples will
+sketch the character of that people so that it might be taken for a
+portrait of the other. In all essentials the characters are the same; in
+minor attributes only, such as exist between the individual members of
+any family, do they differ.</p>
+
+<p>Not only does neither people understand with any clearness how like it
+is to the other, but each is under many misapprehensions&mdash;some trivial,
+some vital&mdash;in regard to the other's temperament and ways of life. These
+misapprehensions are the result chiefly of the geographical remoteness
+of the lands, so that intimate contact between anything like an
+appreciable portion of the two peoples has been impossible; and, when
+thus separated by so wide a sea, Great Britain <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433"></a>[<a href="./images/433.png">433</a>]</span>has been too consumedly
+engrossed in the affairs of the world to be able to give much time or
+thought to the United States, while America has been too isolated from
+that world, too absorbed in her own affairs, to be able to look at
+England in anything like true perspective.</p>
+
+<p>Arising thus from different causes, the errors of the two peoples in
+regard to each other have taken different forms. Great Britain, always
+at passes with a more or less hostile Europe, has never lost her
+original feeling of kinship with, or good-will towards, the United
+States. There has been no time when she would not gladly have improved
+her knowledge of, and friendship with, the other, had she at any time
+been free from the anxieties of the peril of war with one Power or
+another, from the burden of concern for her Empire in India, from the
+weight of her responsibilities in regard to Australia, South Africa,
+Egypt, and the various other parts of Britain over seas. Engrossed as
+she has been with things of immediate moment to her existence, she has
+been perforce compelled to take the good-will of the remote United
+States for granted, and to assume that there was no need to voice her
+own. Until at last she was awakened with a rudeness of awakening that
+shocked and staggered her.</p>
+
+<p>For the United States had had no such constant burden of anxiety, no
+perpetual friction with other peoples, to keep her occupied. Rather,
+sitting aloof in her isolation she had looked upon all the Powers of
+Europe as actors in a great drama with which she had no other than a
+spectacular concern. Only of all the Powers, by the very accident of
+common origin, by the mere circumstances of the joint occupation of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434"></a>[<a href="./images/434.png">434</a>]</span>continent, Great Britain alone has been constantly near enough to the
+United States to impinge at times upon her sphere of development, to rub
+against her, to stand in her way. Great Britain herself has hardly known
+that this was so. But it has had the effect to make Great Britain in the
+mind of the United States the one foreign Power most potentially
+hostile.</p>
+
+<p>In aloofness and silence, ignorant of the world, the American people
+nursed its wrath and brooded over the causes of offence which have
+seemed so large to it, though so trivial or so unintentional on the part
+of England, till the minds of the majority of the people held nothing
+but ill-feeling and contempt in response to England's good-will towards
+them. And always the United States has had those at her elbow who were
+willing&mdash;nay, for their own interests, eager&mdash;to play upon her wounded
+feelings and to exaggerate every wrong and every slight, however small
+or imaginary, placed upon her by Great Britain.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the two peoples not only misunderstand each other but they
+misunderstand each other in different ways. They look at each other from
+widely sundered points of view and in diverse spirits. The people of the
+United States dislike and distrust Great Britain. They cannot believe
+that Great Britain's good-will for them is sincere. The expressions of
+that good-will, neglected while the American people was comparatively
+weak and finding expression now when it is strong, the majority of
+Americans imagine to be no more than the voice of fear. That alone shows
+their ignorance of England&mdash;their obliviousness of the kinship of the
+peoples. The two are of one origin and each may take it for granted that
+neither will ever be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435"></a>[<a href="./images/435.png">435</a>]</span>afraid of the other&mdash;or of any other earthly
+Power. That is not one of the failings of the stock.</p>
+
+<p>The American people has thus never attained to any right view of the
+British Empire. By the accident of the war which gave the nation birth,
+the name "British" became a name of reproach in American ears. They have
+never since been able to look at Great Britain save through the
+cross-lights of their own interests, which have distorted their vision,
+while there have always been those at hand poisoning the national mind
+against the English. So they think of the British Empire as a bloody and
+brutal thing: of her rule of India in particular as a rule of barbarity
+and cruel force. Of late years American writers have come to tell
+Americans the truth; namely, that if the power of Great Britain were to
+be wiped out to-morrow and all her monuments were to perish except only
+those that she has built in India, the historians of future generations,
+looking only to those monuments in India, would pronounce Great Britain
+to have been, of all the Powers that have held great Empire since the
+beginning of time, the largest benefactor to the human race. But of this
+the American people as a whole knows nothing. It only knows that sepoys
+were blown from the mouths of British guns. So Englishmen, know that
+negroes in the South are lynched.</p>
+
+<p>And as the American people has formed no comprehension of the British
+Empire as a whole and is without any understanding of its spirit, so it
+has drawn for itself a caricature of the British character. As the
+Empire is brutal and sanguinary, so is the individual bullying and
+overbearing and coarse. The idea was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436"></a>[<a href="./images/436.png">436</a>]</span>originally inherited from
+England's old enemies in Europe. It was a reflection of the opinion of
+the French; but it has been confirmed by the frankness of criticism of
+English travellers of all things in the United States. Americans do not
+recognise that by their own sensitiveness and anxiety for the judgment
+of others&mdash;a necessary, if morbid, result of their isolation and
+self-absorption&mdash;they invited the criticism, even if they did not excuse
+its occasional ill-breeding; nor has it occurred to them that the habit
+of outspoken criticism of all foreign things is a common inheritance of
+the two peoples and that they themselves are even more garrulously, if
+less bluntly&mdash;even more vaingloriously, if less arrogantly&mdash;frank in
+their habit of comment even than the English.</p>
+
+<p>The same isolation and self-absorption as bred in them their
+sensitiveness to the opinions of others, made the Americans also unduly
+proud of such traits or accomplishments as strangers found to praise in
+them. This in itself might be good for a nation; but, so far as their
+understanding of Englishmen is concerned, it has unfortunately led them
+to suppose that those characteristics which they possess in so eminent a
+degree are proportionately lacking in the English character, which
+thereby incurs their contempt. Having been over-complimented on their
+own humour, they have determined that the Englishman is slow-witted,
+with no sense of fun&mdash;an opinion in itself so lacking in appreciation of
+its own absurdity as to be self-confounding. Too well assured of their
+own chivalrousness (a foible which they share with all peoples) they
+know the Englishman to be a domestic tyrant, incapable of true reverence
+of womanhood. Proud, not without reason, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437"></a>[<a href="./images/437.png">437</a>]</span>of their own form of
+government, wherein there is no room for a titled aristocracy, they
+delight in holding the peerage of Great Britain up to contempt (withal
+that there is a curious unconfessed strain of jealousy mingling
+therewith), and piecing together, like a child playing with bricks, the
+not too infrequent appearances of individual peers in the divorce or
+bankruptcy courts, they have constructed a fantastic image of the
+British aristocracy as a whole, wherein every member appears as either a
+<i>rou&eacute;</i> or a spendthrift. Because they are&mdash;and have been so much told
+that they are&mdash;so full of push and energy themselves, they believe
+Englishmen to be ponderous and without enterprise; whereas if, instead
+of keeping their eyes and minds permanently intent on their own
+achievements, they had looked more abroad, they would have seen that,
+magnificent as has been the work which they have done in the upbuilding
+of their own nation and wonderful as is the fabric of their greatness,
+there has simultaneously been evoked out of chaos a British Empire,
+vaster than their own estate, and which is only not so near completion
+as their own structure in proportion as it is on a larger ground plan,
+inspired by larger ideas and involving greater (as well as infinitely
+more diffused) labour in its uprearing.</p>
+
+<p>The statement of these facts involves no impugnment of American
+urbanity, American wit, American chivalry, or American enterprise. Only
+they are not so unique as Americans, in their isolation, conceive them
+to be. There are, in fact, others. It might not even be worth saying so
+much, if it were not that the belief in their uniqueness has necessarily
+resulted in American minds in a depreciation of the English <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438"></a>[<a href="./images/438.png">438</a>]</span>character,
+which by so much helps to keep the two peoples estranged. Americans will
+be vastly more ready to believe in their English kinship, to like the
+English people, and to welcome a British alliance if they once get it
+into their heads that the English, as a nation, are just as fearless,
+just as chivalrous, no less fond of a joke or more depraved, nor much
+less enterprising or more careless of the feelings of others than
+themselves. That they think of Englishmen as they do to-day is not to be
+wondered at, and no blame attaches to them; for it is but a necessary
+result of causes which are easily seen. But the time has come when some
+effort to correct the errors in their vision is possible and
+desirable&mdash;not merely because they are unfair to Englishmen, which might
+be immaterial, and is no more than a fair exchange of discourtesies, but
+because the misunderstandings obstruct that good-will which would be
+such an untellable blessing, not only to the two peoples themselves, but
+to all the human race.</p>
+
+<p>I am well aware that many American readers will say: "What is the man
+talking of? I do not think of Englishmen like that!" Of course you do
+not, excellent and educated reader&mdash;especially if you have travelled
+much in Great Britain or if you are a member of those refined and
+cultured classes (what certain American democrats would call the
+"silk-stocking element") which constitute the select and entirely
+charming society of most of the older cities of the Atlantic seaboard as
+well as of some of the larger communities throughout the country. If,
+belonging to those classes, you do not happen to have made it your
+business, either as a politician or a newspaper man, to be in close
+touch with the real sentiments <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439"></a>[<a href="./images/439.png">439</a>]</span>of the masses of the country as a whole,
+you scarcely believe that anybody in America&mdash;except a few Irishmen and
+Germans&mdash;does think like that. If, however, you happen to be a good
+"mixer" in politics or have enjoyed the austerities of an apprenticeship
+in journalism,&mdash;if in fact you know the sentiments of your countrymen, I
+need not argue with you. Nor perhaps are very many Americans of any
+class conscious of holding all these views at once. None the less, if a
+composite photograph could be made of the typical Englishman as he is
+figured in the minds of, let us say, twenty millions of the American
+people&mdash;excluding negroes, Indians, and foreigners&mdash;the resultant figure
+would be little dissimilar from the sketch which I have made.</p>
+
+<p>And I have said that, in holding these ideas, the Americans do but make
+a fair exchange of discourtesies; for the Englishman has likewise queer
+notions of the typical American. There is always this vast difference,
+however, that the Englishman is predisposed to like the American. In
+spite of his ignorance he feels a great&mdash;and, in view of that ignorance,
+an almost inexplicable&mdash;good-will for him. But it is not inexplicable,
+for once more the causes of his misapprehensions are easily traced.</p>
+
+<p>First, there has been the eternal pre-occupation of the English people
+with the affairs of other parts of the world. When Great Britain has
+been so inextricably involved with the policies of all the earth that
+almost any day news might come from Calcutta, from Berlin, from St.
+Petersburg, from Pekin, or Teheran, or from almost any point in Asia,
+Africa, or Australia, which would shake the Empire to its foundation,
+how could <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440"></a>[<a href="./images/440.png">440</a>]</span>the people spare time to become intimately acquainted with
+the United States? Of coarse Englishmen talk of the "State of Chicago,"
+and&mdash;as I heard an English peasant not long ago&mdash;of "Yankee earls."</p>
+
+<p>During all these years individual Americans have come to England in
+large numbers and have been duly noted and observed; but what the people
+of any nation notices in the casually arriving representatives of any
+other is not the points wherein the visitors resemble themselves, but
+the points of difference. In the case of Americans coming to England the
+fundamental traits are all resemblances and therefore escape notice,
+while only the differences&mdash;which by that very fact stand proclaimed as
+non-essentials&mdash;attract attention. So it is that the English people,
+having had acquaintance with a number of typical New Englanders, have
+drawn their conclusion as to the universality of one strong nasal
+American accent; they think the American people garrulously outspoken in
+criticism, with a rather offensive boastfulness, without any
+consciousness that precisely that same trait in themselves, in a
+slightly different form, is one of the chief causes why Englishmen are
+not conspicuously popular in any European country. From peculiarities of
+dress and manner which are not familiar to him in the product of his own
+public schools and universities, the Englishman has been inclined to
+think that the American people is not, even in its "better classes," a
+population of gentlemen.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, many Englishmen go to the United States&mdash;the vast majority for
+a stay of a few days or weeks, or a month or two&mdash;and they tell their
+friends, or the public at large in print, all about America and its
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441"></a>[<a href="./images/441.png">441</a>]</span>people. It is not given to every one to be able, in the course of a few
+weeks or a month or two, to see below the surface indications down to
+the root-traits of a people&mdash;a feat which becomes of necessity the more
+difficult when those root-traits are one's own root-traits and the
+fundamental traits of one's own people at home, while on the surface are
+all manner of queer, confusing dazzlements of local peculiarities which
+jump to the stranger's vision and set him blinking. Yet more difficult
+does the feat appear when it is realised that the American people is
+scattered over a continent some three thousand miles across&mdash;so that San
+Francisco is little nearer to New York than is Liverpool&mdash;and that the
+section of the people with whom the Englishman necessarily comes first
+and, unless he penetrates both far and deep into the people, most
+closely in contact is precisely that class from which it is least safe
+to draw conclusions as to the thoughts, manners, or politics of the
+people as a whole. Therefore it is that one of the most acute observers
+informed Europe that in America "a gentleman had only to take to
+politics to become immediately <i>d&eacute;class&eacute;</i>"&mdash;which, speaking of the
+politics of the country as a whole, is purely absurd. The visiting
+Englishman has generally found the whole sphere of municipal and local
+politics a novel field to him and has naturally been interested. Probing
+it, he comes upon all manner of tales of corruption and wickedness. He
+does not see that the body of American "politics," as the word is
+understood in England, is moderately free from these taints, but he
+tells the world of the corruption in that sphere of politics which he
+has studied merely because it does not exist at home and is new to him;
+and all <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442"></a>[<a href="./images/442.png">442</a>]</span>the world knows that American politics are indescribably
+corrupt.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly the visiting European goes into polite society and is amazed
+at the peculiar qualities of some of the persons whom he meets there. He
+tells stories about those peculiar people, but the background of the
+society, against which these people stood out so clearly, a background
+which is so much like his own at home, almost escapes his notice or is
+too uninteresting and familiar to talk about. There is no one to explain
+fully to the English people that while in England educated society keeps
+pretty well to itself, there are in America no hurdles&mdash;or none that a
+lively animal may not easily leap&mdash;to keep the black sheep away from the
+white, or the white from straying off anywhere among the black, so that
+a large part of the English people has imbibed the notion that there are
+really no refined or cultured circles in the United States.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever a financial fraud of a large size is discovered in America, the
+world is told of it, just as certainly as it is told when an English
+peer finds his way to the divorce court; but nobody expounds to the
+nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most
+American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the
+drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the
+English people have come to think of American business ethics as being
+too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware
+that only in most exceptional cases can great or permanent individual
+commercial success be won by fraud, and that nothing but fundamental
+honesty will serve as the basis for a great national trade such as the
+United States has built up.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443"></a>[<a href="./images/443.png">443</a>]</span></p><p>Visiting Englishmen are bewildered by the strange types of peoples whom
+they see upon the streets and by the talk which they hear of "German
+elements" and "French elements" and "Scandinavian elements" in the
+population. But they do not as a rule see that these various "elements,"
+when in the first generation of citizenship, are but a fringe upon the
+fabric of society, and when in the second or third generation they have
+a tendency to become entirely swallowed up and to merge all their
+national characteristics by absorption in the Anglo-Saxon stock; and
+that apart from and unheeding all these irrelevant appendages, the great
+American people goes on its way, homogeneous, unruffled, and English at
+bottom.</p>
+
+<p>Finally Englishmen read American newspapers and, not understanding the
+different relation in which those newspapers stand to the people, they
+compare with them the normal English papers and draw inferences which
+are quite unjust. Similar inferences no less unjust may be drawn from
+hearing the speech of a certain number of well-to-do Americans,
+belonging, as Englishmen opine, to the class of "gentlemen."</p>
+
+<p>These misunderstandings do less harm to the Englishman than to the
+American, inasmuch as the Englishman has that predisposition to national
+cordiality which the American has not. But, though the Englishman's
+mistakes do not influence his good-will to the United States, though he
+himself attaches no serious importance to them, his utterance of them is
+taken seriously by the Americans themselves and does not tend to the
+promotion of international good feeling. Therefore it is that it is no
+less desirable that English misconceptions of the United States should
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444"></a>[<a href="./images/444.png">444</a>]</span>be corrected than it is that the American people should be brought to a
+juster appreciation of the British character and Empire.</p>
+
+<p>It is in America, doubtless, that missionary work is most needed,
+inasmuch as all England would at any minute welcome an American alliance
+with enthusiasm; while in the United States any public suggestion of
+such an alliance never fails to provoke immediate and vehement protest.
+It is true that that protest issues primarily from the Irish and German
+elements; and it may seem absurd that the American people as a whole
+should suffer itself to be swayed in a matter of so national a character
+by a minority which is not only comparatively unimportant in numbers,
+but which the true American majority regards with some irritability as
+distinctly alien.</p>
+
+<p>There are a large number of constituencies in the United States,
+however, where the Irish and German votes, individually or in
+combination, hold the balance of power in the electorate, and not only
+must many individual members of Congress hesitate to antagonise so
+influential a section of their constituents, but it is even questionable
+whether the united and harmonious action of those two elements might
+not, under certain conditions, be able to unseat a sufficient number of
+such individual members as to change the political complexion of one or
+both of the Houses of Congress, and even, in a close election, of the
+Administration itself. Nor is it necessary to repeat again that when the
+anti-British outcry is raised, though primarily by a minority and an
+alien minority, it finds a response in the breasts of a vast number of
+good Americans in whom the traditional dislike of England, though
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445"></a>[<a href="./images/445.png">445</a>]</span>latent, still persists solely by reason of misapprehension and
+misunderstandings. Therefore it is that so many of the best Americans,
+who in their hearts know well how desirable an alliance with England
+would be, are content to deprecate its discussion and to say that things
+are well enough as they are; though again I say that things are never
+well enough so long as they might be better. However desirable such an
+alliance may be, however much to the benefit of the nation, it would,
+they say, be bad politics to bring it forward as a party question. And
+to bring it forward without its becoming from the outset a party
+question would be plainly impossible.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But would it be bad politics? Can it ever, in the long run, be bad
+politics to champion any cause which is great and good? It might be that
+it would be difficult for an individual member of Congress to come
+forward as the active advocate of a British alliance and not lose his
+seat; but in the end, the man who did it, or the party which did it,
+would surely win. When two peoples have a dislike of each other based on
+intimate knowledge by each of the other's character, to rise as the
+champion of their alliance might be hopeless; but when two peoples are
+held apart only by misunderstanding and by lack of perception of the
+boons that alliance between them would bring, it can need but courage
+and earnestness to carry conviction to the people and to bring success.</p>
+
+<p>In such a cause there is one man in America to whom one's thoughts of
+necessity turn; and he is hampered by being President of the United
+States. Perhaps when his present term of office is over Mr. Roosevelt,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446"></a>[<a href="./images/446.png">446</a>]</span>instead of seeking the honourable seclusion which so often engulfs
+ex-Presidents, will find ready to his hand a task more than worthy of
+the man who was instrumental in bringing peace to Russia and Japan,&mdash;a
+task in the execution of which it would be far from being a disadvantage
+that he is as cordially regarded in Germany as he is in England and has
+himself great good-will towards the German Empire. Any movement on the
+part of Great Britain in company with any European nation could only be
+regarded by Germany as a conspiracy against herself: nothing that
+England or France or Japan&mdash;or any Englishman, Frenchman, or
+Japanese&mdash;could say or do would be received otherwise than with
+suspicion and resentment. But, after all, the good of humanity must come
+before any aspirations on the part of the German Empire, and it is the
+American people which must speak, though it speaks through the mouth of
+its President. If the American people makes up its mind that its
+interest and its duty alike dictate that it should join hands with
+England in the cause of peace, neither Germany nor any Power can do
+otherwise than acquiesce.</p>
+
+<p>It is no novelty, either in the United States or in other countries, for
+considerations of temporary political expediency to stand in the way of
+the welfare of the people, nor is there any particular reason why an
+American politician should attach any importance to the desires of
+England. But we find ourselves again confronted with the same old
+question, whether the American people as a whole, who have often shown
+an ability to rise above party politics, can find any excuse for setting
+any consideration, either of individual or partisan interest, above the
+welfare of all the world. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447"></a>[<a href="./images/447.png">447</a>]</span>Yet once more: It is for Americans
+individually to ask their consciences whether any considerations
+whatever, actual or conceivable, justify them in withholding from all
+humanity the boon which it is in their power, and theirs alone, to
+give,&mdash;the blessing of Universal and Perpetual Peace.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And yet, when this much has been said, it seems that so little has been
+told. It was pointed out, in one of the earlier chapters, how the people
+of each country in looking at the people of the other are apt to see
+only the provoking little peculiarities of speech or manner on the
+surface, overlooking the strength of the characteristics which underlie
+them. So, in these pages, it seems that we, in analysing the individual
+traits, have failed to get any vision of the character of either people
+as a whole. It is the trees again which obscure the view of the forest.</p>
+
+<p>We have arrived at no general impression of the British Empire or of the
+British people. We have shown nothing of the majesty of that Empire; of
+its dignity in the eyes of a vast variety of peoples; of the high
+ambitions (unspoken, after the way of the English, but none the less
+earnest), which have inspired and still inspire it; of its maintenance
+of the standards of justice and fair dealing; of its tolerance or the
+patience with which it strives to guide the darkened peoples towards the
+light. Nothing has been said of the splendid service which the Empire
+receives from the sons of the Sea Wife; yet certainly the world has seen
+nothing comparable to the Colonial services of Great Britain, of which
+the Indian Civil Service stands as the type.</p>
+
+<p>Nor have we said anything of the British people, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448"></a>[<a href="./images/448.png">448</a>]</span>with its
+steadfastness, in spite of occasional frenzies, its sanity, and its
+silent acceptance, and almost automatic practice, of a high level of
+personal and political morality. Above all we have seen nothing of the
+sweetness of the home life of the English country people, whereof the
+more well-to-do lead lives of wide sympathies, much refinement, and
+great goodness; while the poor under difficult conditions, hold fast to
+a self-respecting decency, little changed since the days when from among
+them, there went out the early settlers to the New England over seas,
+which never fails, notwithstanding individual weaknesses, to win the
+regard of one who lives among them.</p>
+
+<p>So of the American people; we have conveyed no adequate impression of
+the manly optimism, the courageous confidence in the ultimate virtue of
+goodness and sound principles, on which the belief in the destiny of
+their own country is based. The nation has prospered by its virtues.
+Every page of their history preaches to the people that it is honesty
+and faith and loyalty which succeed, and they believe in their future
+greatness because they believe themselves to possess, and hope to hold
+to, those virtues as in the past.</p>
+
+<p>It may be that, living in the silences and solitudes of the frontier and
+the wilderness, they have found the greater need of ready speech when
+communication has offered. It may be that the mere necessity of planning
+together the framework of their society and of building up their State
+out of chaos has imposed on them the necessity of more outspokenness.
+Certainly they have discarded, or have not assumed, the reticence of the
+modern English of England; and much <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449"></a>[<a href="./images/449.png">449</a>]</span>of this freedom of utterance
+Europeans misinterpret, much (because the fashion of it is strange to
+themselves) they believe to be insincere. In which judgments they are
+quite wrong. The American people are profoundly sincere and intensely in
+earnest.</p>
+
+<p>Since the establishment of the Republic, in the necessity of civilizing
+a continent, in the breathless struggle of the Civil War, in the
+rapidity with which society has been compelled to organize itself, in
+the absorption and assimilation of the continuous stream of foreign
+immigrants, the people have always been at grips with problems of
+immediate, almost desperate urgency; and they have never lost, or come
+near to losing, heart or courage. They have learned above all things the
+lesson of the efficacy of work. They have acquired the habit of action.
+Self-reliance has been bred in them. They know that in the haste of the
+days of ferment abuses grew up and went unchecked; and they know that in
+that same haste they missed some of the elegancies which a more
+leisurely and easier life might have given opportunity to acquire. But
+for a generation back, they have been earnestly striving to eradicate
+those abuses and to lift themselves, their speech, their manners, their
+art and literature to, at least, a level with the highest. It has been
+impossible in these pages (it would perhaps be impossible in any pages)
+to give any unified picture of this national character with its
+activity, its self-reliance, its belief in the homely virtues and its
+earnest ambition to make the best of itself. But of the future of a
+people with such a character there need be no misgivings, and Americans
+are justified in the confidence in their destiny.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450"></a>[<a href="./images/450.png">450</a>]</span></p><p>What is needed is that these two peoples holding, with similar
+steadfastness, to the same high ideals, pushing on such closely parallel
+lines in advance of all other peoples, should come to see more clearly
+how near of kin they are and how much the world loses by any lack of
+unison in their effort.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Once more let me ask readers to turn back and read again the paragraphs
+from other pens with which this book is introduced.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451"></a>[<a href="./images/451.png">451</a>]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX" id="APPENDIX"></a>APPENDIX. <span style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 70%;">(See Chapter III., pp. <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <i>sqq.</i>)</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>This book was almost ready for the press when Dr. Albert Shaw's
+collection of essays was published under the title of <i>The Outlook for
+the Average Man</i>. Dr. Shaw is one of America's most lucid thinkers and
+he contributes what I take to be a new (though once stated an obviously
+true) explanation of what I have spoken of as the homogeneousness of the
+American people. The West, as we all know, was largely settled from the
+East. That is to say that a family or a member of a family in New York
+moved westward to Illinois, thence in the next generation to Minnesota,
+thence again to Montana or Oregon. A similar movement went on down the
+whole depth of the United States, families established in North Carolina
+migrating first to Kentucky, then to Ohio, so to Texas, and finally on
+to California. All parts of the country therefore have, as the nucleus
+of their population, people of precisely the same stock, habits, and
+ways of thought. The West was settled "not by radiation of influence
+from the older centres, but by the actual transplantation of the men and
+women." Dr. Shaw proceeds:</p>
+
+<p>"England is not large in area and the people are generally regarded as
+homogeneous in their insularity. But as a matter of fact the populations
+of the different parts of England are scarcely at all acquainted in any
+other part. Thus the Yorkshireman would only by <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452"></a>[<a href="./images/452.png">452</a>]</span>the rarest chance have
+relatives living in Kent or Cornwall. The intimacy between North
+Carolina and Missouri, for example, is incomparably greater than that
+between one part of England and another part. In like manner, the people
+of the North of France know very little of those of the South of France,
+or even of those living in districts not at all remote. Exactly the same
+thing is true of Italy and Germany, and is characteristic of almost
+every other European land. As compared with other countries, we in
+America are literally a band of brothers."&mdash;<i>The Outlook for the Average
+Man</i>, pages 104, 105.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453"></a>[<a href="./images/453.png">453</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+<ul class="list">
+<li class="indexletter">A</li>
+
+<li><i>Academy</i>, newspaper, the, <a href="#Footnote_159:1_20">159</a></li>
+
+<li>Alderman, election of an, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">"Mike," <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li>Alliance, Anglo-American, desirable, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a></li>
+
+<li>Alliances, entangling, what they mean, <a href="#Page_5">5</a></li>
+
+<li>Amateurs, in sport, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li>American accent, the, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+<li>American dislike of England, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a> <i>sqq.</i>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a></li>
+
+<li>American journalists in London, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+<li>"American methods," in business, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li>American people, the, a bellicose people, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its fondness for ideal, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">sensitive to criticism, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">dislike of subterfuges, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">an Anglo-Saxon people, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and its leading men, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">foreign elements in, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">self-reliant, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">resourceful, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">homogeneous, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">quick to move, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">"sense of the state" in, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its ambitions, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">character of, influenced by the country, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">likes round numbers, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its provincialism, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its isolation, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">effect of criticism on, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its attitude toward women, <a href="#Page_119">119</a> <i>sqq.</i>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its insularity, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">manners of, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">pushfulness, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">did not invent all progress, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">humour of, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its literature, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">science, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">art, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">architecture, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its self-confidence, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">factors in the education of, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">influence of the Civil War on, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its hunger for culture, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">not superficial, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">eclecticism, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">musical knowledge of, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">drama of, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">takes culture in paroxysms, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">looks to the future, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">political corruption in, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">great parties in, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">political sanity of, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">purifying itself, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">aristocracy in, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">shrinks from European commercial conditions, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">hatred of trusts, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">misrepresented by its press, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">contempt for hereditary legislators, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">commercial integrity, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">religious feeling in, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">insistence of an individuality, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">a character sketch, <a href="#Page_448">448</a></li>
+
+<li>American speech, uniformity of, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a></li>
+
+<li>Americanisms, in English speech, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">their origin in America, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">disappearing, <a href="#Page_224">224</a></li>
+
+<li>Americans, at home in England, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">fraternise with English abroad, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and "foreigners," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as sailors, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">their ambitions, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454"></a>[<a href="./images/454.png">454</a>]</span>in London, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">ignorant of foreign affairs, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">treatment of women, <a href="#Page_119">119</a> <i>sqq.</i>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">their insularity, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">energy, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">humour, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">what they think of English universities, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">pride of family in, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">know no "betters," <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">ambitious of versatility, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as linguists, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">purists in speech, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">cannot lie, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as story-tellers, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">non-litigious, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">do not build for posterity, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">dislike stamps, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as sportsmen, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li>
+
+<li><i>Anglais, l'</i>, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li>
+
+<li>Anglomania, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+<li>Anglo-Saxon, family likeness, the, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">particularist spirit, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">versatility, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">spirit in America, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">superiority, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">attitude towards women, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">ideals in education, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">a fighting race, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">ambition to be versatile, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and Celt in politics, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">superior morality of, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">pluck and energy, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the sporting instinct, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li>Anstey, F. L., his German professor, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li>Archer, Wm., on the Anglo-Saxon type, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on the American's outlook on the world, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on pressing clothes, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+<li>Architecture, American, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+<li>Aristocracy, in the U. S., <a href="#Page_309">309</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the British disreputable, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li>Arnold, Matthew, his judgment of Americans, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">his clothes, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on American colleges, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on American newspapers, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on generals as booksellers, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+<li>Art, American, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">feminine knowledge of, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+<li>Atchison, Topeka, and Santa F&eacute; Railroad, the, <a href="#Page_363">363</a></li>
+
+<li>Athletics in England and America, <a href="#Page_420">420</a></li>
+
+<li>Atlantis, a new, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">B</li>
+
+<li>Baldwin, W. H., <a href="#Page_305">305</a></li>
+
+<li>Banks, American and English, <a href="#Page_383">383</a></li>
+
+<li>Barnard College, <a href="#Page_142">142</a></li>
+
+<li>Bears, bickering with, <a href="#Page_381">381</a></li>
+
+<li>Bell-cord, divination by the, <a href="#Page_363">363</a></li>
+
+<li>Benedick and Beatrice, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li>Bonds, recoiling from, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+
+<li>Books, advantage of reading, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">ease of buying, in America, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">prices of, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">publishing American, in England, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+<li>Booksellers as soldiers, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+<li>Bosses in politics, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li>Boston, culture of, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li>Botticelli, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+<li>Brewers as gentlemen, <a href="#Page_315">315</a></li>
+
+<li>Bribery in American politics, <a href="#Page_234">234</a></li>
+
+<li>"British," hatred of the name, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+<li>British bondholders, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+
+<li>British commerce, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+
+<li>British Empire, American misunderstanding of, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its size, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its beauty, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+
+<li>Bryan, W. J., first nomination of, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and W. R. Hearst, <a href="#Page_283">283</a></li>
+
+<li>Bryce, James, on American electoral system, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on State sovereignty, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on political corruption, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on the U. S. Senate, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li>Buffalo in New York, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455"></a>[<a href="./images/455.png">455</a>]</span>Buildings, tall, built in sections, <a href="#Page_368">368</a></li>
+
+<li>Burke, Edward, in Ireland, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">indictment against a whole people, <a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+
+<li>Business, as a career, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its effect on mentality, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the romance of American, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">frauds in, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the tendency of modern, to consolidations, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">speculation in America, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">less ruthless in America, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">slipshod, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">principles of modern, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">C</li>
+
+<li>California, the Japanese in, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li>Cambon, M. Paul, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li>Campbell, Wilfred, in England, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+
+<li>Canada, American investments in, <a href="#Page_379">379</a></li>
+
+<li>Canadian opinion of England, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">resemblance to Americans, <a href="#Page_379">379</a></li>
+
+<li>Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></li>
+
+<li>Caruso, Signor, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li>Celts, non-Anglo-Saxon, <a href="#Page_254">254</a></li>
+
+<li>Century Club, the, <a href="#Page_103">103</a></li>
+
+<li><i>Champagne Standard, The</i>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a></li>
+
+<li>Chaperons, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a></li>
+
+<li>Chatham and American manufactures, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li>Cheques, cashing, <a href="#Page_383">383</a></li>
+
+<li>Chicago, pride in itself, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">pigs in, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li>Civil War, the navy in the, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">causes of, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">magnitude of, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its value to the people, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li>Classics, American reprints of English, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+<li>Cleveland, Grover, on Venezuela, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+
+<li>Climate, the English, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></li>
+
+<li>Co-education, its effect on the sexes, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in America, <a href="#Page_142">142</a></li>
+
+<li>Colonies, destiny of British, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li>Colquhoun, A. R., <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+<li>Commercial morality, <a href="#Page_308">308</a></li>
+
+<li>Concord school, the, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li>Congress, corruption in, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">compared with Parliament, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">more honest than supposed, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">powers of, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">best men excluded from, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li>Congressmen, how influenced, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">how elected, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">log-rolling among, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">hampered by the Constitution, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li>Conkling, Roscoe, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+<li>Constitution, U. S., growth of, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">interpretation of, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and Congress, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li>Consular service, the American, <a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+
+<li>Contract, a proposed international, <a href="#Page_338">338</a></li>
+
+<li>Convention, a National Liberal, <a href="#Page_270">270</a></li>
+
+<li>Copyright laws, English, faulty, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+<li>Corporations, Mr. Roosevelt and the, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">persecuted by individual States, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li><a name="Corruption" id="Corruption"></a>Corruption, in municipal affairs, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in national affairs, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in State legislatures, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in English counties, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in Congress, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in the railway service, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></li>
+
+<li>Court, U. S. Supreme, <a href="#Page_400">400</a></li>
+
+<li>Criticism, English, of America, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">American, of England, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+
+<li>Croker, Richard, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li>
+
+<li>Cromwell as a fertiliser, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></li>
+
+<li>Crooks, William, elected Premier, <a href="#Page_271">271</a></li>
+
+<li>Crosland, W. H., <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456"></a>[<a href="./images/456.png">456</a>]</span>Cuba as a cause of war, <a href="#Page_12">12</a></li>
+
+<li>Cyrano de Bergerac, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">D</li>
+
+<li>Debtors favoured by laws, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li>Democrats correspond to Liberals, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li>Demolins, Edmond, on Anglo-Saxon superiority, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on <i>l'Anglais</i>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+<li>Doctor, the making of a, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+
+<li>"Dog eat dog," <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li>Domestic and imported goods, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+<li>Drama, the, in England and America, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li>Drunkenness, in London, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+
+<li>Dunne, F. P., <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">E</li>
+
+<li>Education, in England and America, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">object of American, <a href="#Page_193">193</a></li>
+
+<li>Elections, purity of, <a href="#Footnote_229:1_30">229 (note)</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">municipal, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">to Congress, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">of a Prime Minister, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the last English general, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">virulence of American, <a href="#Page_281">281</a></li>
+
+<li>Electric light, towns lighted by, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li>Embalmed beef scandals, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li>Emerson, R. W., on the Civil War, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the apostle of the individual, <a href="#Page_382">382</a></li>
+
+<li>English-made goods, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a></li>
+
+<li>English society, changes in, <a href="#Page_314">314</a></li>
+
+<li>English "style" in printing, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+<li>Englishmen, local varieties of, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">effect of expansion on, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">feeling of, toward Americans, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as specialists, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">dropping their H's, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">check-suited, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">their cosmopolitanism, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as husbands, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">insularity of, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as grumblers, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">lecturing, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as linguists, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">study of antiquity, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">careless of speech, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in American politics, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in English politics, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">political integrity of, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and business, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">misunderstand American people, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the world's admiration of, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">religious feeling in, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">sense of honour in, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">commercial morality of, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">distrust American industrial stability, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as investors in U. S. and Canada, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">slowness of, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as sportsmen, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">admirable qualities of, <a href="#Page_448">448</a></li>
+
+<li>European plan, the, <a href="#Page_104">104</a></li>
+
+<li>Exhibition, an American, in London, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">F</li>
+
+<li>Federal Government, the, and Illinois, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and Louisiana, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and California, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">powers of, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+
+<li>Federalism, progress of, in America, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li>Feminism, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li>Ferguson, <a href="#Page_133">133</a></li>
+
+<li><i>Fliegende Bl&auml;tter</i>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+
+<li>Football in England, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li>
+
+<li>Foreign elements in the American people, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a></li>
+
+<li>Forty-fourth Regiment, the, <a href="#Page_40">40</a></li>
+
+<li>France, England's <i>entente</i> with, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and American commerce, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li>Franklin, Benjamin, his <i>Autobiography</i>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and English political morality, <a href="#Page_280">280</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457"></a>[<a href="./images/457.png">457</a>]</span>Frauds in American business, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+
+<li>Free silver, poison, the, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">campaign of 1896, <a href="#Page_280">280</a></li>
+
+<li>Freeman, E. A., on the Englishman of America, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></li>
+
+<li>Frenchmen, opinions of, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">attitude towards women, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">towards learning, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li>Frontier life, as a discipline, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">G</li>
+
+<li><i>Gentleman</i>, Bismarck's <i>parole de</i>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a></li>
+
+<li>Gentlemen, brewers as, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and business men, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in sport, <a href="#Page_420">420</a></li>
+
+<li>Gentlemen's agreement, the, <a href="#Page_354">354</a></li>
+
+<li>George, Lloyd, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li>Germans, outnumber Irish in N. Y., <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">attitude toward women, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">humour of, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">laboriousness of, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in politics, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as judges of honesty, <a href="#Footnote_351:1_44">351 (note)</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in sport, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li>Germany, ambitions of, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Monroe Doctrine aimed at, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+<li>Gibson, C. D., <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+<li>Girl, the American, <a href="#Page_130">130</a></li>
+
+<li>Gladstone, W. E., American admiration for, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on Japan, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li>Golf, the power of, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li>
+
+<li>Granger agitation, the, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+
+<li>Gravel-pit, politics in a, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li>
+
+<li>Great Britain, peaceful disposition of, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">pride of, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">desires alliance with U. S., <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">American hostility to, in 1895, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its nearness to America geographically, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">commercially, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">historically, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">America's only enemy, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its army in S. Africa, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">diversity of tongues in, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Norman influence in, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Canadian opinion of, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">miraculously enlarged, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">insularity of, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">luck of, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">cannot be judged from London, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">class distinctions disappearing, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">politics in, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">municipal bosses in, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">American conditions transplanted to, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">electing a Prime Minister in, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">municipal politics in, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">becoming democratised, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">a creditor nation, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">trust-ridden, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">wealth of, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">solicitor-cursed, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as the mother of sports, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">preoccupation of, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li>"Grieg, the American," <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">H</li>
+
+<li>Hague, Conference at The, <a href="#Page_17">17</a></li>
+
+<li>Hanotaux, Gabriel, on American commerce, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li>Harrison, Benjamin, <a href="#Page_47">47</a></li>
+
+<li>Hays, C. M., <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li>Hearst, W. R., and England, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">bad influence of, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">inventor of the yellow press, <a href="#Footnote_342:1_42">342 (note)</a></li>
+
+<li>Hell-box, the, <a href="#Page_281">281</a></li>
+
+<li>Helleu, Paul, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+
+<li>Higginson, T. W., on American temperament, <a href="#Page_2">2</a></li>
+
+<li>Hill, James J., <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li>Hoar, U. S. Senator, on England, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on the hatred of the British, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+<li>Homer as a Tory, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>
+
+<li>Homogeneousness of the American people, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a></li>
+
+<li>Hotel, the Fifth Avenue, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458"></a>[<a href="./images/458.png">458</a>]</span>Hotels, ladies' entrances to, <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+
+<li>Howells, W. D., <a href="#Page_147">147</a></li>
+
+<li>Hughitt, Marvin, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a></li>
+
+<li>Humour, American and English, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">I</li>
+
+<li>Ideals, American devotion to, <a href="#Page_10">10</a></li>
+
+<li>Illinois and the Federal Government, <a href="#Page_262">262</a></li>
+
+<li>Immigration problem, the, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li>India, <a href="#Page_112">112</a></li>
+
+<li>Indians, red, regard of, for Englishmen, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in the war of Independence, <a href="#Footnote_349:1_43">350 (note)</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Turkish baths of, <a href="#Page_363">363</a></li>
+
+<li>Individuality, American insistence on, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>, <a href="#Page_391">391</a></li>
+
+<li>Insularity, English and American, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li>
+
+<li>International sentiments, how formed, <a href="#Page_291">291</a></li>
+
+<li>Ireland, Burke's feeling for, <a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+
+<li>Irish, the influence of, against England, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">attitude towards women, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">vote in politics, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as a corrupting influence, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">non-Anglo-Saxon, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">lack independence, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in New York, <a href="#Page_277">277</a></li>
+
+<li>Irving, Washington, on frontiersmen, <a href="#Page_381">381</a></li>
+
+<li>Italians, in municipal politics, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">lynched in New Orleans, <a href="#Page_262">262</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">J</li>
+
+<li>James, Henry, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+<li>Japan, England's alliance with, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its eclectic method, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Mr. Gladstone on, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and California, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">tin-tacks for, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li>Japanese, in California, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">British admiration of, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">watering their horses, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as "John," <a href="#Page_376">376</a></li>
+
+<li>Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+
+<li>Joint purses, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li>Jonson, Ben, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li>Justice in American courts, <a href="#Page_400">400</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">K</li>
+
+<li>King George men, <a href="#Page_349">349</a></li>
+
+<li>Kipling, Rudyard, his "type-writer girl," <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">"The Sea Wife," <a href="#Page_187">187</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">"The Monkey-Puzzler," <a href="#Page_380">380</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">"An Error in the Fourth Dimension," <a href="#Page_408">408</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">L</li>
+
+<li>La Farge, John, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+<li>Lang, Andrew, on Americanisms, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+<li>Law, Bonar, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li>Legislators must read and write, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+
+<li>Legislatures, quality of American State, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li>Letters, two, <a href="#Page_389">389</a></li>
+
+<li>Lewis, Alfred Henry, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+<li>Liberals, English, and Democrats, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">influence of, on American thought, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li>"Liberty, that damned absurd word," <a href="#Page_10">10</a></li>
+
+<li><i>Life</i>, New York, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+
+<li>Literature, English ignorance of American, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li>Litigation, American dislike of, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li>
+
+<li>"Live and let live," <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li>Lobbyists, <a href="#Page_244">244</a></li>
+
+<li>Locomotives, temporary and permanent, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li>
+
+<li>Log-rolling, <a href="#Page_249">249</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459"></a>[<a href="./images/459.png">459</a>]</span>London, foreign affairs in, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Strand improvements, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">"raining in," <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">a Tammany Hall in, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li>
+
+<li>Lord, Englishmen's love of a, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li>Lords, the House of, and the U. S. Senate, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">a defence of, <a href="#Page_342">342</a></li>
+
+<li>Louisiana and the Federal Government, <a href="#Page_262">262</a></li>
+
+<li>Loyal Legion, the, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+
+<li>Luck, English belief in, <a href="#Page_108">108</a></li>
+
+<li>Lying, American ability in, <a href="#Page_352">352</a></li>
+
+<li>Lynchings, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">M</li>
+
+<li>MacDowell, Edward, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+<li>Mafia in New Orleans, <a href="#Page_263">263</a></li>
+
+<li>Magazines, American, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+
+<li>Mansfield, Richard, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+
+<li>Max O'Rell, on John Bull and Jonathan, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on American newspapers, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li>Merchant marine, the American, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+
+<li>Mexico, possible annexation of, <a href="#Page_27">27</a></li>
+
+<li>Mining camp life, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+
+<li>"Molly-be-damned," <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+
+<li>Monopolies, artificial and natural, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li>Moore, <i>Zeluco</i>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+
+<li>Morality, of the two people, sexual, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">political, <i>see under</i> <a href="#Corruption">Corruption</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">commercial, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">sporting, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li>Morgan, Pierpont, <a href="#Page_358">358</a></li>
+
+<li>Mormons and ants, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+<li>Morris, Clara, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li>Mount Stephen, Lord, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li>Municipal politics, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></li>
+
+<li>M&uuml;nsterberg, Hugo, on England, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on American commercial ethics, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on sport, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li>Music in England and America, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">N</li>
+
+<li>N&mdash;&mdash; G&mdash;&mdash;, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li>
+
+<li>Navarro, Madame de, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li>Navigating, how to learn, <a href="#Page_70">70</a></li>
+
+<li>Navy, the American, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+
+<li>Negro problem, the, <a href="#Page_301">301</a></li>
+
+<li>New Orleans, battle of, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the Mafia in, <a href="#Page_263">263</a></li>
+
+<li>New York, not typically American, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">proud of London, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">culture of, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Irish influence in, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in national politics, <a href="#Page_277">277</a></li>
+
+<li>Newspapers, American and English, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">sensationalism in, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">peculiarities of American, <a href="#Page_340">340</a></li>
+
+<li>Norman influence in England, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+<li>Northern Pacific Railroad, the, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></li>
+
+<li>Norton, James, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">O</li>
+
+<li>Operas, American knowledge of, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+
+<li>Opportunity, America and, <a href="#Page_387">387</a></li>
+
+<li>Oxenstiern, Count, <a href="#Page_149">149</a></li>
+
+<li>Oxford, value of, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">P</li>
+
+<li>Packing-house scandals, <a href="#Page_326">326</a></li>
+
+<li>Panic, financial, the, of 1907, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li>Parliament, railway influence in, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">compared with Congress, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a></li>
+
+<li>Parsnips, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+
+<li>Parties, the two great, in America, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">interdependence of national and local organisations, <a href="#Page_264">264</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460"></a>[<a href="./images/460.png">460</a>]</span>Patronage, party, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></li>
+
+<li>Peace, universal, the possibility of, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li>Peerage, an American, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">democracy of the British, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">morals of, <a href="#Page_338">338</a></li>
+
+<li>Pheasants in London, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li>
+
+<li>Philadelphia, corruption in, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li>Philistinism in England and America, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+<li>Pigs, in Chicago, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">how to roast, <a href="#Page_372">372</a></li>
+
+<li>Pilgrims, the Society of, <a href="#Page_47">47</a></li>
+
+<li>Platform in American sense, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li>Poet's Corner, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+
+<li>Police, corruption through the, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li>
+
+<li>Politics, American, the foreign vote in, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the "best people" in, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">what it means in America, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">municipal, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Republican and Democrat, meaning of, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">national and municipal, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">President Roosevelt in, <a href="#Page_300">300</a></li>
+
+<li>Polo, American, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li>
+
+<li>Pooling, railway, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li>Poppycock, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li>Postal laws, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li>
+
+<li>Posters, American humour and, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+<li>Presidency, Mr. Roosevelt and the, <a href="#Page_293">293</a></li>
+
+<li>Protection, policy of, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a></li>
+
+<li>Publishers, American and English, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+<li><i>Punch</i>, London, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+
+<li>Putnam, Herbert, and H. G. Wells, <a href="#Page_93">93</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">R</li>
+
+<li>Railways, oppression of, by States, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">pooling by, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">working agreements in English, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">English and American attitude towards, contrasted, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">morality on American, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and English, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">peculation on, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and the Standard Oil Co., <a href="#Page_392">392</a></li>
+
+<li>Reed, E. T., <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+<li>Reich, Dr. Emil, <a href="#Page_126">126</a></li>
+
+<li>Religious feeling of the two peoples, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li>Re-mount scandal, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li>Representative system, the, <a href="#Page_247">247</a></li>
+
+<li>Republican party, the, in Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">corresponds to English conservatives, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li>Reverence, American lack of, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li>Rhodes, Cecil, <a href="#Page_319">319</a></li>
+
+<li>Rhodes scholarships, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li>
+
+<li>River and harbour bills, <a href="#Page_249">249</a></li>
+
+<li>Robin, the American, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li>Robinson, Philip, on Chicago, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li>Rodin, A., <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+
+<li>Roman Catholic Church in relation to women, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+
+<li>Roosevelt, imaginary telegram from, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and the merchant marine, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and purity of elections, <a href="#Footnote_229:1_30">229 (note)</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and post-route doctrine, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">his influence for good, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">his commonplace virtues, <a href="#Footnote_293:1_37">293 (note)</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">inventor of the "'fraid strap," <a href="#Page_294">294</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">"Teddy" or "Theodore," <a href="#Page_295">295</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">an aristocrat, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and the corporations, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">misrepresentation of, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as a politician, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">his imperiousness, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and the negro problem, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and wealth, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as peacemaker, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li>Rostand, M. E., <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+
+<li>Ruskin, John, price of his books, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</li>
+<li><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461"></a>[<a href="./images/461.png">461</a>]</span>on America's lack of castles, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on Tories, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>
+
+<li>Russia, England's agreement with, <a href="#Page_8">8</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">S</li>
+
+<li>S&mdash;&mdash; B&mdash;&mdash;, the Hon., <a href="#Page_108">108</a></li>
+
+<li>Sailors, British and American, fraternise, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Americans as, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+
+<li>Schools, American, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">English, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li>Schurz, Carl, on American intelligence, <a href="#Page_2">2</a></li>
+
+<li>Schuyler, Montgomery, <a href="#Page_103">103</a></li>
+
+<li>Scotland, religious feeling in, <a href="#Page_354">354</a></li>
+
+<li>Sea-wife's sons, the, <a href="#Page_187">187</a></li>
+
+<li>Senate, the, its place in the Constitution, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">treaty-making power of, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and the House of Lords, <a href="#Page_313">313</a></li>
+
+<li>Sepoys, blown from cannon, <a href="#Page_112">112</a></li>
+
+<li>Shakespeare in America, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+
+<li>Shaw, Albert, <a href="#Page_451">451</a></li>
+
+<li>Ship subsidies, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+
+<li>Shooting in America, <a href="#Page_418">418</a></li>
+
+<li>Sky-scrapers, <a href="#Page_368">368</a></li>
+
+<li>Speculation in America, <a href="#Page_387">387</a></li>
+
+<li>Smith, Sydney, on women speaking, <a href="#Page_79">79</a></li>
+
+<li>Society, American, mixed, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li>Soldiers, American and British, in China, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">compared, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">material for, in U. S., <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">British, in S. Africa, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as farm hands, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">as Presidents, <a href="#Page_187">187</a></li>
+
+<li>Solicitors, <a href="#Page_393">393</a></li>
+
+<li>South, the dying spirit of the, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+
+<li>Southerners, in Northern States, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">lynchings by, <a href="#Page_303">303</a></li>
+
+<li>Spanish war, the, reasons for, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">England's feeling in, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">effect on the American people, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+<li>Sparks, Edwin E., on frontiersmen, <a href="#Page_382">382</a></li>
+
+<li>Speech, uniformity of American, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">American and English compared, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">purism in, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li>Sport, amateur, in America, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li>
+
+<li>Stage, the American, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li>Stamp tax, American dislike of, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li>Stamped paper, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li>Standard Oil Co., <a href="#Page_391">391</a></li>
+
+<li>State legislatures, corruption in, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">shortcomings of, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li>States, governments of the, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">sovereignty of, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and English counties, <a href="#Footnote_264:1_34">264 (note)</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">justice in, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li>Steel, American competition in, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li>Steevens, G. W., on Anglo-American alliance, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on American feeling for England, <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+
+<li>Stenographers as hostesses, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+
+<li>Stevenson, R. L., on American speech, <a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+
+<li>Strap, the 'fraid, <a href="#Page_294">294</a></li>
+
+<li>Strathcona and Mount Royal, Lord, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li>Style, American and English literary, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+<li>Superficiality of Americans, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a></li>
+
+<li>Surveyor, the making of a, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">T</li>
+
+<li><i>Table d'h&ocirc;te</i> in America, <a href="#Page_104">104</a></li>
+
+<li>Tammany Hall, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li>
+
+<li>Taxes, corrupt assessment of, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462"></a>[<a href="./images/462.png">462</a>]</span>Thackeray, W. M., on Anglo-American friendship, <a href="#Page_1">1</a></li>
+
+<li>Thomas, Miss M. Carey, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+<li>Thoreau, his <i>Walden</i>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li>Throne, the British, as a democratic force, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li>Tin-tacks for Japan, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li>Travis, W. J., <a href="#Page_408">408</a></li>
+
+<li>Treaties, inability of U. S. to enforce, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">how made in America, <a href="#Page_286">286</a></li>
+
+<li>Truesdale, W. H., <a href="#Page_359">359</a></li>
+
+<li>Trusts, Mr. Roosevelt and the, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in England and America, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">beneficial, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">U</li>
+
+<li>Unit rule, the, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a></li>
+
+<li>United States, the, has become a world-power, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in danger of war, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">power of, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">expansion of, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">further from England than England from it, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the future of, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">size of, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the equal of Great Britain, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">unification of, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">politics in, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Congress of, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and Italy, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">and Japan, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its treaty relations with other powers, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">a peerage in, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its reckless youth, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">has sown its wild oats, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">growth of, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">commercial power of, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">a debtor nation, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li>Universities, American and English, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+<li>Usurpation by the general government, <a href="#Page_289">289</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">V</li>
+
+<li>Van Horne, Sir William, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li>Venezuelan incident, the, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li>Verestschagin, Vasili, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+
+<li>Vigilance Committees, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a></li>
+
+<li>Vote, foreign in America, the, <a href="#Page_227">227</a></li>
+
+<li>Voting, premature, <a href="#Page_227">227</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">W</li>
+
+<li>Wall Street methods, <a href="#Page_326">326</a></li>
+
+<li>War stores scandal, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li>Washington, Booker, <a href="#Page_305">305</a></li>
+
+<li>Wealth, President Roosevelt and, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">its diffusion in America, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">no counterpoise to, in U. S., <a href="#Page_335">335</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">purchasing power of, in England and America, <a href="#Footnote_335:1_41">335 (note)</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">prejudice against, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li>Wells, H. G., on American "sense of the State," <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on the lack of an upper class in America, <a href="#Footnote_309:1_40">309 (note)</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on trade, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+<li>West, the feeling of, for the East, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">English ignorance of, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Yankee distrust of, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></li>
+
+<li>West Indies, transfer to the U. S., <a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+
+<li>West Point, incident at, <a href="#Page_41">41</a></li>
+
+<li>Whiskey and literature, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li>Wild-fowling, <a href="#Page_418">418</a></li>
+
+<li>Winter, E. W., <a href="#Page_359">359</a></li>
+
+<li>Woman, an American, in England, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in Westminster Abbey, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in a mining camp, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">on a train, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+
+<li>Women, American attitude toward, <a href="#Page_119">119</a> <i>sqq.</i>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">in the streets of cities, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">English, in America, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">English treatment of, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">the morality of married, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">adaptability of American, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">their share in civic life, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">Anglo-Saxon attitude toward, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463"></a>[<a href="./images/463.png">463</a>]</span>effect of co-education on, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">culture of American, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">musical knowledge of American, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+
+<li><i>World</i>, the N. Y., <a href="#Footnote_342:1_42">342 (note)</a></li>
+
+
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li class="indexletter">Y</li>
+
+<li>Yankee, the real, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;</li>
+  <li class="listsubitem">earls, <a href="#Page_440">440</a></li>
+
+<li>Yellow press, the, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>, <a href="#Footnote_342:1_42">342 (note)</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="notebox">
+<a name="TN" id="TN"></a><h2>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES</h2>
+
+
+<p>Pages iv, vi, xiv, and 4 are blank in the original.</p>
+
+<p>The following corrections have been made to the text:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Page 85: the Americans <i>homogeneous</i>[original has
+<i>homoeogeneous</i>] over a much larger</p>
+
+<p>Page 101: Americans will protest against being called[original
+has call] a homogeneous</p>
+
+<p>Page 118: It is less offensive than[original has that] the
+mature</p>
+
+<p>Page 153: Englishmen do not know the meaning of a
+joke.[153-1][footnote anchor is missing in original</p>
+
+<p>Page 153: the clubs of Great Britain[original has Britian]</p>
+
+<p>Page 208: he has not entire right to the best
+wherever[original has where-ever hyphenated across a line
+break] he may find it</p>
+
+<p>Page 252: a stranger is[original has as] likely to get the
+idea</p>
+
+<p>Page 321: conditions of business are widely different.[period
+is missing in original]</p>
+
+<p>Page 354: copies of the famous "Gentleman's
+Agreement,"[original has single quote]</p>
+
+<p>Page 389: "[quotation mark missing in original]<span class="smcap">Dear A.:</span></p>
+
+<p>Page 453, under the entry for American people,
+eclecticism,[comma missing in original] 194</p>
+
+<p>Page 457: Helleu[original has Hellen], Paul, 196</p>
+
+<p>Footnote 287-1: <i>The American Commonwealth</i>, vol. 1[original
+has extraneous period], page 110</p></div>
+
+<p>On page 193, the original reads "... be able to remember when the <i>Daily
+Telegraph</i> created, by appealing...." There should be a word of
+explanation after "created".</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Twentieth Century American, by 
+H. Perry Robinson
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+Project Gutenberg's The Twentieth Century American, by H. Perry Robinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Twentieth Century American
+       Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great
+       Anglo-Saxon Nations
+
+Author: H. Perry Robinson
+
+Release Date: November 26, 2009 [EBook #30549]
+
+Language: EN
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Michael Zeug, Lisa Reigel,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been
+left as in the original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have
+been corrected. A complete list follows the text.
+
+Words surrounded by _underscores_ are in italics in the original.
+Ellipses match the original. A row of asterisks represents a thought
+break.
+
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                           The Twentieth                            |
+  |                          Century American                          |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                               Being                                |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |               A Comparative Study of the Peoples of                |
+  |                 the Two Great Anglo-Saxon Nations                  |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                 BY                                 |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                         H. PERRY ROBINSON                          |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |           AUTHOR OF "MEN BORN EQUAL," "THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY           |
+  |                       OF A BLACK BEAR," ETC.                       |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                           [Illustration]                           |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                        The Chautauqua Press                        |
+  |                        CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK                        |
+  |                               MCMXI                                |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+                           COPYRIGHT, 1908
+
+                                  BY
+
+                         G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+
+
+                  The Knickerbocker Press, New York
+
+
+
+
+                                  TO
+
+                            THOSE READERS,
+
+                     WHETHER ENGLISH OR AMERICAN,
+
+                                 WHO
+
+                  AGREE WITH WHATEVER IS SAID IN THE
+
+                   FOLLOWING PAGES IN LAUDATION OF
+
+                          THEIR OWN COUNTRY
+
+                              THIS BOOK
+
+                       IS INSCRIBED IN THE HOPE
+
+              THAT THEY WILL BE EQUALLY READY TO ACCEPT
+
+                     WHATEVER THEY FIND IN PRAISE
+
+                                  OF
+
+                              THE OTHER.
+
+
+[Illustration: The British Isles and the United States.
+
+A Comparison (see Chapter IV.)]
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+There are already many books about America; but the majority of these
+have been written by Englishmen after so brief an acquaintance with the
+country that it is doubtful whether they contribute much to English
+knowledge of the subject.
+
+My reason for adding another volume to the list is the hope of being
+able to do something to promote a better understanding between the
+peoples, having as an excuse the fact that I have lived in the United
+States for nearly twenty years, under conditions which have given rather
+exceptional opportunities of intimacy with the people of various parts
+of the country socially, in business, and in politics. Wherever my
+judgment is wrong it is not from lack of abundant chance to learn the
+truth.
+
+Except in one instance--very early in the book--I have avoided the use
+of statistics, in spite of frequent temptation to refer to them to
+fortify arguments which must without them appear to be merely the
+expression of an individual opinion.
+
+                                                         H. P. R.
+
+February, 1908.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+     AN ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE                                        5
+
+     The Avoidance of Entangling Alliances--What the Injunction
+     Meant--What it Cannot Mean To-day--The Interests of the United
+     States, no less than those of England, Demand an Alliance--But
+     Larger Interests than those of the Two Peoples are
+     Involved--American Responsiveness to Ideals--The Greatest
+     Ideal of All, Universal Peace: the Practicability of its
+     Attainment--America's Responsibility--Misconceptions of the
+     British Empire--Germany's Position--American Susceptibilities.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+     THE DIFFERENCE IN POINT OF VIEW                                  35
+
+     The Anglo-Saxon Family Likeness--How Frenchmen and Germans
+     View it--Englishmen, Americans, and "Foreigners"--An Echo of
+     the War of 1812--An Anglo-American Conflict Unthinkable--
+     American Feeling for England--The Venezuelan Incident--The
+     Pilgrims and Some Secret History--Why Americans still Hate
+     England--Great Britain's Nearness to the United States
+     Geographically--Commercially--Historically--England's Foreign
+     Ill-wishers in America.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+     TWO SIDES OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER                              60
+
+     Europe's Undervaluation of America's Fighting Power--The
+     Americans as Sailors--The Nation's Greatest Asset--Self-reliance
+     of the People--The Making of a Doctor--And of a Surveyor--
+     Society in the Rough--New York and the Country--An Anglo-Saxon
+     Trait--America's Unpreparedness--American Consuls and Diplomats--
+     A Homogeneous People--The Value of a Common Speech--America
+     more Anglo-Saxon than Britain--Mr. Wells and the Future in
+     America.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+     MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS                                         94
+
+     America's Bigness--A New Atlantis--The Effect of Expansion on
+     a People--A Family Estranged--Parsnips--An American Woman in
+     England--An Englishman in America--International Caricatures--
+     Shibboleths: dropped H's and a "twang"--Matthew Arnold's
+     Clothes--The Honourable S---- B----.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+     THE AMERICAN ATTITUDE TOWARDS WOMEN                             111
+
+     The Isolation of the United States--American Ignorance of the
+     World--Sensitiveness to Criticism--Exaggeration of their Own
+     Virtues--The Myth of American Chivalrousness--Whence it
+     Originated--The Climatic Myth--International Marriages--English
+     Manners and American--The View of Womanhood in Youth--
+     Co-education of the Sexes--Conjugal Morality--The Artistic
+     Sense in American Women--Two Stenographers--An Incident of
+     Camp-Life--"Molly-be-damned"--A Nice Way of Travelling--How do
+     they do it?--Women in Public Life--The Conditions which
+     Co-operate--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit again.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+     ENGLISH HUMOUR AND AMERICAN ART                                 145
+
+     American Insularity--A Conkling Story--English Humour and
+     American Critics--American Literature and English Critics--The
+     American Novel in England--And American Art--Wanted, an
+     American Exhibition--The Revolution in the American Point of
+     View--"Raining in London"--Domestic and Imported Goods.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+     ENGLISH AND AMERICAN EDUCATION                                  166
+
+     The Rhodes Scholarships--"Pullulating Colleges"--Are American
+     Colleges Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?--Other Educational
+     Forces--The Postal Laws--Ten-cent Magazines and Cheap Books--
+     Pigs in Chicago--The Press of England and America Compared--
+     Mixed Society--Educated Women--Generals as Booksellers--And as
+     Farmhands--The Value of War to a People.
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+     A COMPARISON IN CULTURE                                         191
+
+     The Advantage of Youth--Japanese Eclecticism and American--The
+     Craving for the Best--_Cyrano de Bergerac_--Verestschagin--
+     Culture by Paroxysms--Mr. Gladstone and the Japanese--Anglo-Saxon
+     Crichtons--Americans as Linguists--England's Past and America's
+     Future--Americanisms in Speech--Why They are Disappearing in
+     America--And Appearing in England--The Press and the Copyright
+     Laws--A Look into the Future.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+     POLITICS AND POLITICIANS                                        226
+
+     The "English-American" Vote--The Best People in Politics--What
+     Politics Means in America--Where Corruption Creeps in--The
+     Danger in England--A Presidential Nomination for Sale--Buying
+     Legislation--Could it Occur in England?--A Delectable Alderman--
+     Taxation while you Wait--Perils that England Escapes--The
+     Morality of Congress--Political Corruption of the Irish--
+     Democrat and Republican.
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+     AMERICAN POLITICS IN ENGLAND                                    260
+
+     The System of Parties--Interdependence of National and Local
+     Organisations--The Federal Government and Sovereign States--
+     The Boss of Warwickshire--The Unit System--Prime Minister
+     Crooks--Lanark and the Nation--New York and Tammany Hall--
+     America's Superior Opportunities for Wickedness--How England
+     Is Catching up--Campaign Reminiscences--The "Hell-box"--Politics
+     in a Gravel-pit--Mr. Hearst and Mr. Bryan.
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+     SOME QUESTIONS OF THE MOMENT                                    285
+
+     Sovereign States and the Federal Government--California and
+     the Senate--The Constitutional Powers of Congress and the
+     President--Government by Interpretation--President Roosevelt
+     as an Inspiration to the People--A New Conception of the
+     Presidential Office--"Teddy" and the "fraid strap"--Mr.
+     Roosevelt and the Corporations--As a Politician--His
+     Imperiousness--The Negro Problem--The Americanism of the South.
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+     COMMERCIAL MORALITY                                             308
+
+     Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?--An American
+     Peerage--Senators and other Aristocrats--Trade and the British
+     Upper Classes--Two Views of a Business Career--America's Wild
+     Oats--The Packing House Scandals--"American Methods" in
+     Business--A Countryman and Some Eggs--A New Dog--The Morals of
+     British Peers--A Contract of Mutual Confidence--Embalmed Beef,
+     Re-mounts, and War Stores--The Yellow Press and Mr. Hearst--
+     American View of the House of Lords.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+     THE GROWTH OF HONESTY                                           347
+
+     The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon--America's Resemblance to
+     Japan--A German View--Can Americans Lie?--Honesty as the Best
+     Policy--Religious Sentiment--Moral and Immoral Railway
+     Managers--A Struggle for Self-preservation--Gentlemen in
+     Business--Peculation among Railway Servants--How the Old
+     Order Changes, Yielding Place to New--The Strain on British
+     Machinery--Americans as Story-Tellers--The Incredibility of
+     the Actual.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+     A CONTRAST IN PRINCIPLES                                        371
+
+     The Commercial Power of the United States--British Workmanship--
+     Tin-tacks and Conservatism--A Prophetic Frenchman--Imperialism
+     in Trade--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit--About Chaperons--"Insist upon
+     Thyself"--English and American Banks--Dealing in Futures--Dog
+     Eat Dog--Two Letters--Commercial Octopods--Trusts in America
+     and England--The Standard Oil Company--And Solicitors--Legal
+     Chaperons--The Sanctity of Stamped Paper--Conclusions--Do
+     "Honest" Traders Exist?
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+     THE PEOPLES AT PLAY                                             408
+
+     American Sport Twenty-five Years Ago--The Power of Golf--A
+     Look Ahead--Britain, Mother of Sports--Buffalo in New York--
+     And Pheasants on Clapham Common--Shooting Foxes and the
+     "Sport" of Wild-fowling--The Amateur in American Sport--At
+     Henley--And at Large--Teutonic Poppycock.
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+     SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION                                          429
+
+     A New Way of Making Friends--The Desirability of an Alliance--
+     For the Sake of Both Peoples--And of all the World--The Family
+     Resemblance--Mutual Misunderstandings--American Conception of
+     the British Character--English Misapprehension of Americans--
+     Foreign Influences in the United States--Why Politicians
+     Hesitate--An Appeal to the People--And to Caesar.
+
+
+     APPENDIX                                                        451
+
+     INDEX                                                           453
+
+
+
+
+The Twentieth Century
+American
+
+
+     "_If I can say anything to show that my name is really
+     Makepeace, and to increase the source of love between the two
+     countries, then please, God, I will._"--W. M. Thackeray, in
+     _Letters to an American Family_.
+
+     "_Certainly there is nothing like England, and there never has
+     been anything like England in the world. Her wonderful
+     history, her wonderful literature, her beautiful architecture,
+     the historic and poetic associations which cluster about every
+     street and river and mountain and valley, her vigorous life,
+     the sweetness and beauty of her women, the superb manhood of
+     her men, her Navy, her gracious hospitality, and her lofty
+     pride--although some single race of men may have excelled her
+     in some single particular--make up a combination never
+     equalled in the world._"--The late United States Senator Hoar,
+     in _An Autobiography of Seventy Years_.
+
+     "_The result of the organisation of the American colonies into
+     a state, and of the bringing together of the diverse
+     communities contained in these colonies, was the creation not
+     merely of a new nation, but of a new temperament. How far this
+     temperament was to arise from a change of climate, and how far
+     from a new political organisation, no one could then foresee,
+     nor is its origin yet fully analysed; but the fact itself is
+     now coming to be more and more recognised. It may be that
+     Nature said at about that time: 'Thus far the English is my
+     best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; now for another
+     turning of the globe, and for a further novelty. We need
+     something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman; let
+     us lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process.
+     Put in one drop more of nervous fluid and make the American.'
+     With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human
+     race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organised type of
+     mankind was born._"--Thomas Wentworth Higginson, _Atlantic
+     Monthly_, 1886.
+
+     "_The foreign observer in America is at once struck by the
+     fact that the average of intelligence, as that intelligence
+     manifests itself in the spirit of inquiry, in the interest
+     taken in a great variety of things, and in alertness of
+     judgment, is much higher among the masses in the United States
+     than anywhere else. This is certainly not owing to any
+     superiority of the public school system in this country--or,
+     if such superiority exists, not to that alone--but rather to
+     the fact that in the United States the individual is
+     constantly brought into interested contact with a greater
+     variety of things and is admitted to active participation in
+     the exercise of functions which in other countries are left to
+     the care of a superior authority. I have frequently been
+     struck by the remarkable expansion of the horizon effected by
+     a few years of American life, in the minds of immigrants who
+     had come from somewhat benighted regions, and by the mental
+     enterprise and keen discernment with which they took hold of
+     problems to which, in their comparatively torpid condition in
+     their native countries, they had never given thought. It is
+     true that in the large cities with congested population,
+     self-government as an educator does not always bring the most
+     desirable results, partly owing to the circumstance that
+     government, in its various branches, is there further removed
+     from the individual, so that he comes into contact with it and
+     exercises his influence upon it only through various, and
+     sometimes questionable, intermediary agencies which frequently
+     exert a very demoralising influence._"--Carl Schurz's
+     _Memoirs_, II, 79.
+
+     "_Anglo-Saxon Superiority! Although we do not all acknowledge
+     it, we all have to bear it, and we all dread it; the
+     apprehension, the suspicion, and sometimes the hatred provoked
+     by l'Anglais proclaim the fact loudly enough. We cannot go one
+     step in the world without coming across the Anglo-Saxon. . . .
+     He rules America by Canada and the United States; Africa by
+     Egypt and the Cape; Asia by India and Burmah; Australasia by
+     Australia and New Zealand; Europe and the whole world, by his
+     trade and industries and by his policy._"--M. Edmond Demolins
+     in _Anglo-Saxon Superiority_ "_A quoi tient la Superiorite des
+     Anglo-Saxons?_"
+
+     "_It may be asking too much, but if statesmanship could kindly
+     arrange it, I confess I should like to see, before I die, a
+     war in which Britain and the United States in a just quarrel
+     might tackle the world. After that we should have no more
+     difficulty about America. For if the Americans never forget an
+     injury, they ever remember a service._"--The late G. W.
+     Steevens in _The Land of the Dollar_.
+
+
+
+
+The Twentieth Century
+American
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+AN ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE
+
+     The Avoidance of Entangling Alliances--What the Injunction
+     Meant--What it Cannot Mean To-day--The Interests of the United
+     States, no less than those of England, Demand an Alliance--But
+     Larger Interests than those of the Two Peoples are Involved--
+     American Responsiveness to Ideals--The Greatest Ideal of All,
+     Universal Peace: the Practicability of its Attainment--
+     America's Responsibility--Misconceptions of the British
+     Empire--Germany's Position--American Susceptibilities.
+
+
+The American nation, for all that it is young and lacks reverence, still
+worships the maxims and rules of conduct laid down by the Fathers of the
+Republic; and among those rules of conduct, there is none the wisdom of
+which is more generally accepted by the people than that which enjoins
+the avoidance of "entangling alliances" with foreign Powers. But not
+only has the United States changed much in late years, but the world in
+its political relations and sentiments has changed also and the place of
+the United States has changed in it. That sacred instrument, the
+Constitution itself, holds chiefly by virtue of what is new in it.
+Whatever is unaltered, or is not interpreted in a sense quite other than
+the framers intended, is to-day comparatively unimportant. It must be
+so. It would be impossible that any code or constitution drawn up to
+meet the needs of the original States, in the phase of civilisation and
+amid the social conditions which then prevailed, could be suited to the
+national life of a Great Power in the twentieth century. In internal
+affairs, there is hardly a function of Government, scarcely a relation
+between the different branches of the Government itself, or between the
+Government and any of the several States, or between the Government and
+the people, which is not unlike what the framers of the Constitution
+intended or what they imagined that it would be.
+
+But it is in external affairs that the nation must find, indeed has
+found, the old rules most inadequate. The policy of non-association
+which was desirable, even essential, to the young, weak state, whose
+only prospect of safety lay in a preservation of that isolation which
+her geographical position made possible to her, is and must be
+impracticable in a World-Power. Within the last decade, the United
+States has stepped out from her solitude to take the place which
+rightfully belongs to her among the great peoples. By the acquirement of
+her colonial dependencies, still more by the inevitable exigencies of
+her commerce, she has chosen (as she had no other choice) to make
+herself an interested party in the affairs of all parts of the world.
+All the conditions that made the old policy best for her have vanished.
+
+A child is rightly forbidden by his nurse to make acquaintance with
+other children in the street; but this child has grown to manhood and
+gone out into the world to seek--and has found--his fortune. The old
+policy of isolation has been cast aside, till nothing remains of it but
+a few old formulae which have no virtue--not even significance--now that
+all the conditions to which they applied are gone. The United States has
+been compelled to make alliances (some, as when she co-operated with the
+other Powers in China, of the most "entangling" kind), and still the old
+phrase holds its spell on the popular mind.
+
+The injunction was originally intended to prevent the young Republic
+from being drawn into the wars with which Europe at the time was rent,
+by taking sides with any one party against any other. It was levelled
+not against alliances, but against entanglements. It was framed, and
+wisely framed, to secure to the United States the peace and isolation
+necessary to her development. The isolation is no longer either possible
+or desirable, but peace remains both. The nation would in fact be living
+more closely up to the spirit of the injunction by entering into an
+alliance which would secure peace and make entanglements impossible,
+than she is when she leaves herself and the world exposed to the
+constant menace of war, merely for the sake of seeming to comply with
+the letter of a maxim which is now meaningless. If Washington were alive
+to-day, it does not seem to me possible to doubt that he would favour a
+new English treaty, even though he might have more difficulty in
+compelling Congress to accept his views than he had once before.
+
+As the case stands, the United States may easily become involved in war
+with any one of the Great Powers, no matter how pacific or benevolent
+her intentions may be. There are at least three Powers with which a
+trivial incident might precipitate a conflict at almost any time; while
+the possibilities of friction which might develop into open hostilities
+with some one of the lesser states are almost innumerable. It is beside
+the question to say that the United States need have no fear of the
+result: indeed that very fact contributes largely to the danger. It is
+ever the man who can fight, and knows it, who gets into trouble. Every
+American who has lived much in the farther West knows that he who would
+keep clear of difficulties had best not carry a revolver. In its very
+self-confidence--a self-confidence amply justified by its strength--the
+American people is, measured by the standards of other nations, an
+eminently bellicose people--much more bellicose than it supposes.
+
+Great Britain's alliance with Japan has with reasonable certainty, so
+far as danger of conflict between any two of the Great Powers is
+concerned, secured the peace of Asia for some time to come. The
+understanding between Great Britain and France goes some way towards
+assuring the peace of Europe, of which the imminent _rapprochement_ with
+Russia (which all thinking Englishmen desire[8:1]) will constitute a
+further guarantee. But an alliance between Great Britain and the United
+States would secure the peace of the world. There is but one European
+Power now which could embark on a war with either Great Britain or the
+United States with any shadow of justification for hopefulness as to the
+result; and no combination of Powers could deceive itself into
+believing that it could make head against the two combined or would dare
+to disturb the peace between themselves when the two allies bade them be
+still.
+
+In the days of her youth,--which lasted up to the closing decade of the
+nineteenth century,--provided that she did not thrust herself needlessly
+into the quarrels of Europe, her mere geographical position sufficed to
+secure to America the peace which she required. The Atlantic Ocean, her
+own mountain chains and wildernesses, these were bulwarks enough. She
+has, by pressure of her own destiny, been compelled to come out from
+behind these safeguards to rub shoulders every day with all the world.
+If she still desires peace, she will be more likely to realise that
+desire by seeking other shields. Nor must any American reader
+misunderstand me, for I believe that I estimate the fighting power of
+the United States more highly than most native-born Americans. She needs
+no help in playing her part in the world; but no amount of
+self-confidence, no ability to fight, if once the fight be on, will
+serve to protect her from having quarrels thrust upon her--not
+necessarily in wilfulness by any individual antagonist but by mere force
+of circumstance. Considered from the standpoint of her own expediency,
+an alliance with Great Britain would give to the United States an
+absolute guarantee that for as many years as she pleased she would be
+free to devote all her energies to the development of her own resources
+and the increase of her commerce.
+
+But there are other considerations far larger than that of her own
+expediency. This is no question of the selfish interests either of the
+United States or of Great Britain. There is no people more responsive
+than the American to high ideals. Englishmen often find it hard to
+believe that an American is not talking mere fustian when he gives
+honest expression to his sentiments; but from the foundation of the
+Republic certain large ideas--Liberty, Freedom of Conscience,
+Equality--have somehow been made to seem very real things to the
+American mind. Whether the Englishman does not in his heart prize just
+as dearly as the American the things which these words signify, is
+another matter; it is not the Englishman's habit to formulate them even
+to himself, much less to talk about them to others. Most Englishmen have
+large sympathy with Captain Gamble who, bewailing the unrest in Canada
+at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, complained that the Colonials
+talked too much about "that damned absurd word Liberty."[10:1]
+
+It is rarely that an English political campaign is fought for a
+principle or for an abstract idea, and equally rarely that in America
+the watchword on one side or the other is not some such high-sounding
+phrase as Englishmen rather shrink from using. It is true that behind
+that phrase may be clustered a cowering crowd of petty individual
+interests; the fact remains that it is the phrase itself--the large
+Idea--on which orators and party managers rely to secure their hold on
+the imaginations of the mass of the people. It does not necessarily
+imply any superior morality on the part of the Americans; but is an
+accident of the different conditions prevailing in the two countries.
+
+British politics are infinitely more complex than American, and foreign
+affairs play a much larger part in public controversies. The people of
+the United States have been throughout their history able to confine
+their attention almost wholly to their home affairs, and in those home
+affairs, the mere vastness of the country, with the diverse and
+conflicting interests of the various parts, has made it as a rule
+impossible to frame any appeal to the minds of the voters as a whole
+except in terms of some abstract idea. An appeal to the self-interests
+of the people in the aggregate in any matter of domestic policy is
+almost unformulable, because the interest of each section conflicts with
+the interest of others; whence it has necessarily followed that the
+American people has grown accustomed to be led by large
+phrases--disciplined to follow the flag of an ideal.
+
+Not all the early colonists who emigrated, even to New England, went
+solely for conscience' sake. Under the cloak of the lofty principle for
+which the Revolutionary War was fought there were, again, concealed all
+manner of personal ambitions, sectional jealousies, and partisan
+intrigues. It was in truth (as more than one American historian has
+pointed out) a party strife and not a war of peoples. The precipitating
+cause of the Civil War was not the desire to abolish slavery, but the
+bitterness aroused by the political considerations of the advantage
+given to one party or the other by the establishment or
+non-establishment of slavery in a new territory. The motive which
+impelled the United States to make war on Spain was not, as most
+Europeans believe, any desire for an extension of territory, any more
+than it was, as some Americans would say, a yearning to avenge the
+blowing up of the _Maine_; it was the necessity of putting an end to the
+disturbed state of affairs in Cuba, which was a constant source of
+annoyance, as well as of trouble and expense, to the United States
+Government. If a neighbour makes a disturbance before your house and
+brings his family quarrels to your doorstep, you must after a time ask
+him to stop; and when, after a sufficient number of askings, he fails to
+comply with your request, it is justifiable to use force to make him.
+That was America's justification--the real ground on which she went to
+war with Spain. But the thing which actually inflamed the mind of the
+American people was the belief that the Spanish treatment of Cuba was
+brutal and barbarous. It was an indignation no less fine than that which
+set England in a blaze in the days of the Bulgarian atrocities. The war
+may been a war of expediency on the part of the Government; it was a
+Crusade in the eyes of the people. Thus it may be easy to show that at
+each crisis in its history there was something besides the nobility of a
+Cause or the grandeur of a Principle which impelled the American nation
+on the course which it took, but it has always been love of the Cause or
+devotion to the Principle which has swayed the masses of the people.
+
+And this people now has it in its power to do an infinitely finer thing
+than ever it did when it established Liberty of Conscience, or founded a
+republic on broader foundations than had been laid before, or abolished
+slavery within its borders, or when it won Cuba's independence of what
+it believed to be an inhuman tyranny. I believe that it has it in its
+power to do no less a thing than to abolish war for ever--to give to
+the peoples of the earth the blessing of Perpetual Peace. The question
+for it to ask itself is whether it can, with any shadow of
+justification, refuse to take this step and withhold this boon from
+humanity.
+
+If it does refuse and wars continue--if, within the coming decade, war
+should break out, whether actually involving the United States itself or
+not, more bloody and destructive than any that the world has seen--and
+if then the facts should be presented to posterity for judgment,--will
+the American people be held guiltless? It is improbable that the case
+ever could be so presented, for there is none to put the United States
+on trial, none to draw an indictment, none to prosecute. The world has
+not turned to the United States to ask that it be saved; no one has
+arisen to point at the United States and say, "Thou art the one to do
+this thing." The historians of another generation will have no
+depositions before them on which to base a verdict. But if the facts are
+as stated and the United States knows them to be so, does the lack of
+common knowledge of them make her responsibility any the less? It
+remains that the nation has the power to do this, and it alone among
+nations.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first idea of most Americans, when a hard and fast alliance with
+Great Britain is suggested to them, usually formulates itself in the
+statement that they have no wish to be made into a cat's-paw for pulling
+England's chestnuts out of the fire. America has no desire to be drawn
+into England's quarrels. Until less than ten years ago, there was
+justification for the point of view; for while England seemed to be
+ever on the brink of war, the United States lived peacefully in her
+far-off Valley of Avilion. But the map of the world has changed, and
+while the United States has left her seclusion and come out to play her
+part in the world-politics, England has been buttressing herself with
+friendships, until it is at least arguable whether the United States is
+not the more exposed to danger of the two. But it is no question now of
+being dragged into other people's quarrels; but of making all
+quarrelling impossible.
+
+Again, the American will say that the United States needs no allies. She
+can hold her own; let Great Britain do the same. And again I say that it
+is no question now of whether either Power can hold its own against the
+world or not. Great Britain, Americans should understand, has no more
+fear for herself than has the United States. England "does not seek
+alliances: she grants them." There is not only no single European Power,
+but there is no probable combination of European Powers, which England
+does not in her heart serenely believe herself quite competent to deal
+with. British pride has grown no less in the last three hundred years:
+
+     "Come the four corners of the World in arms
+      And we shall shock them."
+
+Americans should disabuse themselves finally of the idea that if England
+desires an alliance with the United States it is because she has any
+fear that she may need help against any other enemy. Englishmen are too
+well satisfied with themselves for that (with precisely the same kind of
+self-satisfaction as the United States suffers from), and much too
+confident that, in whatever may arise, it will be the other fellow who
+will need help. But if England has no misgiving as to her ability to
+take care of herself when trouble comes, she is far from being ashamed
+to say that she would infinitely prefer that trouble should not come,
+either to her or to another, and she would join--oh, so gladly!--with
+the United States (as for a partial attainment of the same end she has
+already joined with France on the one hand and with Japan on the other)
+to make sure that it should never come. Has the United States any right
+to refuse to enter into such an alliance--an alliance which would not be
+entangling, but which would make entanglements impossible?
+
+At Christmas time in 1906, the following suggestion was made in the
+London correspondence of an American paper[15:1]:
+
+"The new ideals which mankind has set before itself, the infinitely
+larger enlightenment and education of the masses, the desperate struggle
+which every civilised people is waging against all forms of social
+suffering and vice within itself, the mere complexity of modern commerce
+with its all-absorbing interest--these things all cry aloud for peace.
+War does not belong to this phase of civilisation. Least of all can it
+have any appeal to the two peoples in whom the spirit of the Twentieth
+Century is most manifest. Of all peoples, Great Britain and the United
+States have most cause to desire peace.
+
+"There should be a Christmas message sent from the White House which
+should run something like this:
+
+     "TO HIS MAJESTY KING EDWARD THE SEVENTH:
+
+     "To your majesty, to her majesty the Queen, and to the people
+     of the British empire, I desire to express the best wishes of
+     myself and of the people of the United States. At the same
+     time, I wish to assure your majesty that you will have both
+     the sympathy and the practical support of the American people
+     in such action as it may seem right to you and to the British
+     people to take in the direction of securing to the nations of
+     the world that peace of which your majesty has always shown
+     yourself so earnest an advocate.
+
+                                   "(Signed), THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
+
+"Some such an answer as this would be returned:
+
+     "TO HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:
+
+     "In acknowledging with gratitude the expression of good wishes
+     to ourselves, to her majesty the Queen, and to the people of
+     the British empire of yourself and the population of the
+     United States, I desire most cordially to reciprocate the
+     sentiments of good will. Even more cordially and gratefully, I
+     acknowledge the assurance of sympathy and support of the great
+     American people in action directed to securing peace to the
+     nations of the world. It will be my immediate care to propose
+     such a course of joint action between us as may secure that
+     blessing to all peoples in the course of the coming year.
+
+                                               "(Signed), EDWARD.
+
+"Does anybody doubt that, if the two nations bent themselves to the task
+in earnest, universal peace could be so secured to all the peoples of
+the earth in the course of the coming year? And if it is in truth in
+their power to do this thing, how can either conceivably convince itself
+that it is not its duty?
+
+"And what a Christmas the world would have in 1907!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Does any one doubt it? Does any one doubt that, if the two peoples were
+in earnest, though the thing might not be brought about in one year, it
+is far from improbable that it could be achieved in two years or three?
+Since the paragraphs which I have quoted were published, a year has
+passed and for a large part of that year the Conference has been in
+session at The Hague; and of the results of that Conference it is not
+easy for either an Englishman or an American to speak with patience.
+Does any one doubt that if the two Governments had set themselves
+determinedly, from the beginning of the _pourparlers_, to reach the one
+definite goal those results might have been very different?
+
+During the last few years, the two Powers, each acting in her own way,
+have done more to establish peace on earth than has been done by all the
+other Powers in all time; and I most earnestly believe that it only
+needs that they should say with one voice that there shall be no more
+wars and there will be none. Nor am I ignoring the complexities of the
+situation; but I believe that all the details, the first step once
+taken, would settle themselves with unexpected facility through the
+medium of international tribunals. Of course this will be called
+visionary: but whosoever is tempted so to call it, let him read history
+in the records of contemporary writers and see how visionary all great
+forward movements in the progress of the world have seemed until the
+time came when the thing was to be accomplished. What we are now
+discussing seems visionary because of its unfamiliarity. It has the
+formidableness of the unknown. The impossible, once accomplished, looks
+simple enough in retrospect. The fact is that never before has there
+been a time when boundaries all over the world have been so nearly
+established--when there were so few points outstanding likely to embroil
+any two of the Great Powers in conflict--so few national ambitions
+struggling for appeasement. It is easy not to realise this unless one
+studies the field in detail: easy to fail to see how near is the
+attainment of universal peace.
+
+The Councils of the Powers have in the past been so hampered by the
+traditions of a tortuous diplomacy, so tossed and perturbed within by
+the cross-currents of intrigue, that they have shown themselves almost
+childishly incapable of arriving at clear-cut decisions. Old policies,
+old formulae, old jealousies, old dynastic influences still hold control
+of the majority of the chancelleries of Continental Europe, and these
+things it is that have made questions simple in themselves seem complex
+and incapable of solution. But there is nothing to be settled involving
+larger territorial interests or more beset with delicacies than many
+questions with which the Supreme Court of the United States has had to
+deal--none so large as to seem formidable to his Majesty's Privy Council
+or to the House of Lords. And under the guidance of Great Britain and
+the United States acting in unison, assured in advance of the sympathy
+of France and Japan and of whatever other Powers would welcome the new
+order of things, a Hague committee or other international tribunal could
+be made a businesslike organisation working directly for results,--as
+directly as the board of directors of any commercial corporation. And it
+is with those who consider this impracticable that the onus lies of
+pointing out the direction from which insuperable resistance is to be
+expected,--from which particular Powers in Europe, in Asia, or in
+Central or South America.
+
+The ultimate domination of the world by the Anglo-Saxon (let us call him
+so) seems to be reasonably assured; and no less assured is it that at
+some time wars will cease. The question for both Englishmen and
+Americans to ask themselves is whether, recognising the responsibility
+that already rests upon it, the Anglo-Saxon race dare or can for
+conscience' sake--or still more, whether one branch of it when the other
+be willing to push on, dare or can for conscience' sake--hang back and
+postpone the advent of the Universal Peace, which it is in its power to
+bring about to-day, no matter what the motives of jealousy, of
+self-interest, or of self-distrust may be that restrain it.
+
+It has been assumed in all that has been said that the onus of refusal
+rests solely on the United States; as indeed it does. Great Britain, it
+will be objected, has asked for no alliance. Nor has she. Great Britain
+does not put herself in the position of suing for a friendship which may
+be denied; and is there any doubt that if Great Britain had at any time
+asked openly for such an alliance she would have been refused? Would she
+not be bluntly refused to-day? Great men on either side--but never, be
+it noted, an Englishman except for the purpose of agreeing with an
+American who has already spoken--have said many times that a formal
+alliance is not desirable: that things are going well enough as they are
+and that it is best to wait. Things are never going well enough, so
+long as they might go better. And these men who say it speak only with
+an eye to the interests of the two countries, not considering the
+greater stake of the happiness of the world at large; and even so (I say
+it with deference) they know in their own minds that if indeed the thing
+should become suddenly feasible, neither they nor any thinking man, with
+the good of humanity at heart, would dare to raise a voice against it or
+would dream of doing other than rejoice. It is only because it has
+seemed impossible that it has been best to do without it; and it is
+impossible only because the people of the United States have not yet
+realised the responsibilities of the new position which they hold in the
+councils of the world, but are still bound by the prejudices of the days
+of little things, still slaves--they of all people!--to an old and
+outworn formula. They have not yet comprehended that within their arm's
+reach there lies an achievement greater than has ever been given to a
+nation to accomplish, and that they have but to take one step forward to
+enter on a destiny greater than anything foreshadowed even in the
+promise of their own wonderful history.
+
+And when those who would be their coadjutors are willing and waiting and
+beckoning them on, have they any right to hold back? Is it anything
+other than moral cowardice if they do?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wish that each individual American would give one hour's unprejudiced
+study to the British Empire,--would sit down with a map of the world
+before him and, summoning to his assistance such knowledge of history as
+he has and bearing in mind the conditions of his own country, endeavour
+to arrive at some idea of what it is that Englishmen have done in the
+world, what are the present circumstances of the Empire, what its aims
+and ambitions. I do not think that the ordinarily educated and
+intelligent American knows how ignorant he is of the nation which has
+played so large a part in the history of his own country and of which he
+talks so often and with so little restraint. The ignorance of Englishmen
+of America is another matter which will be referred to in its place. For
+the present, what is to be desired is that the American should get some
+elementary grasp of the character of Great Britain and her dependencies
+as a whole.
+
+In the first place it is worth pointing out that the Empire is as much
+bigger than the United States as the United States is bigger than the
+British Isles. I am not now talking of mere geographical dimensions, but
+of the political schemes of the two nations. Americans commonly speak of
+theirs as a young country--as the youngest of the Great Powers,--but in
+every true sense the British Empire is vastly younger. The United States
+has an established form of government which has been the same for a
+hundred years and, all good Americans hope, will remain unchanged for
+centuries to come. The British Empire is still groping inchoate: it is
+all makeshift and endeavour. It is in about that stage of growth in
+which the United States found herself when her transcontinental railways
+were still unbuilt, when she had not yet digested Texas or California,
+and the greater part of the West remained unsettled and unsurveyed.
+
+If the American will look to the north, he will see Canada in
+approximately the phase in her material progress which the United
+States had reached in, let us say, 1880 to 1885. Australia and New
+Zealand are somewhat further behind; South Africa further still. Behind
+that again are the various scattered portions of the Over-Sea Dominions
+in divers states of political pupilhood. In some there are not even yet
+the foundations on which a Constitutional or commercial structure can be
+built. And while each unit has to be led or encouraged along the path of
+individual development, beyond all is the great vision which every
+imperially-thinking Englishman sets before himself--the vision of a
+Federation of all the parts--a Federation not unlike that which the
+United States has enjoyed for over a hundred years (save that Englishmen
+hope that there will always be a monarchy at the centre) but which, as
+has been said, is almost incomparably larger in conception than was the
+Union of the States and requires correspondingly greater labour in its
+accomplishment.
+
+If the American will now consider the conditions of the growth of his
+own country, he will recognise that the only thing which made that
+growth possible was the fact that the people was undistracted by foreign
+complications. The one great need of the nation was Peace. It was to
+attain this that the policy of non-entanglement was formulated. Without
+it, the people could not have devoted its energies with a single mind to
+the gigantic task of its own development.
+
+But the task before the British Empire is more gigantic; the need of
+peace more urgent. It is more urgent, not merely in proportion to the
+additional magnitude and complexity of the task to be done, but is
+thrice multiplied by the conditions of the modern world. The British
+Empire must needs achieve its industrial consolidation in the teeth of
+a commercial competition a thousand times fiercer than anything which
+America knew in her young days. The United States grew to greatness in a
+secluded nursery. Great Britain must bring up her children in the
+streets and on the high seas, under the eyes and exposed to the
+seductions of the peoples of all the world.
+
+The American is a reasoning being. A much larger portion of the American
+people is habituated to reason for itself--to think independently--to
+form and to abide by its individual judgment--than of any other people
+in the world. No political fact is more familiar to the American people
+than the immense advantage which it derived, during the period of its
+internal development, from its enjoyment of external peace. Will not the
+American people, then, reasoning from analogy, believe that, under more
+compelling conditions, England also earnestly desires external peace?
+
+I can almost hear the retort leaping to the lips of the American reader
+who holds the traditional view of the British Empire. "It is all very
+well for you to talk of peace now!" I hear him say. "Now that the world
+is pretty well divided up and you have grabbed the greater part of it.
+You haven't talked much of peace in the past." And here we are
+confronted at once with the fundamental misconception of the British
+Empire and the British character which has worked deplorable harm in the
+American national sentiment towards England.
+
+First, it is worth remarking that with the exception of the Crimean War
+(which even the most prejudiced American will not regard as a war of
+aggression or as a thing for which England should be blamed) Great
+Britain has not been engaged in hostilities with any European Power
+since the days of Napoleon. Nor can it be contended that England's share
+in the Napoleonic wars was of England's seeking. Since then, if she has
+avoided hostilities it has not been for lack of opportunity. The people
+which, with Britain's intricate complexity of interests, amid all the
+turmoils and jealousies of Europe, has kept the peace for a century can
+scarcely have been seeking war.
+
+And again the American will say: "That's all right; I am not talking of
+Europe. You've been fighting all over the world all the time. There has
+never been a year when you have not been licking some little tin-pot
+king and freezing on to his possessions."
+
+Americans are rather proud--justly proud--of the way in which their
+power has spread from within the narrow limits of the original thirteen
+States till it has dominated half a continent. It has, indeed, been a
+splendid piece of work. But what the American is loth to acknowledge is
+that that growth was as truly a colonising movement--a process of
+imperial expansion--as has been the growth of the British Empire. Of
+late years, American historical writers have been preaching this fact;
+but the American people has not grasped it. Moreover there were tin-pot
+kings already ruling America. Sioux, Nez Perce, or Cree--Zulu, Ashanti,
+or Burmese: the names do not matter. And when the expansive energy of
+the American people reached the oceans, it could no more stop than it
+could stop at the Mississippi. Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico
+were as inevitable as Louisiana and Texas. And the acquisition of the
+two last-named was precisely as imperial a process as the acquisition
+of the others. It is only the leap over-seas that, quite illogically,
+gives the latter, to American eyes, a different seeming. It matters not
+whether you vault a boundary pillar on the plain, a river, a mountain
+barrier, or seven thousand miles of sea-water. The process is the same.
+Nor in any of the cases was the forward movement other than commendable
+and inevitable. It was the necessary manifestation of the unrestrainable
+centrifugal impulse of the Anglo-Saxon.
+
+The impulse which sent the first English colonists to North America sent
+them also to Australia, to India and the uttermost parts of the earth.
+The same impulse drove the American colonists westward, northward,
+southward, in whatever direction they met no restraining force equal to
+their own expansive energy. It drove them to the Pacific, to the Rio
+Grande, to the Sault Ste. Marie; and it has driven them over oceans into
+the Arctic Circle, to the shores of Asia, down the Caribbean. And as it
+drove them it drove also those Englishmen who were left at home and they
+too spread on all lines of least resistance. But no American (I have
+never met one, though I must have talked on the subject to hundreds)
+will agree that the dispersal of the Englishmen left at home was as
+legitimate, as necessary, and every whit as peaceful as the dispersal of
+those Englishmen who went first and made their new home in America.
+
+With the acquisition of over-sea dominions of their own, many Americans
+are coming to comprehend something of the powerlessness of a great
+people in the grip of its destiny. They are also beginning to understand
+that the ruling and civilising of savage and alien peoples is not
+either all comfort or all profit. If Americans were given the option
+to-day to take more Philippines, would they take them? Great Britain has
+been familiar with _her_ Philippines for half a century and more. Does
+America suppose that she also did not learn her lesson? Will not
+Americans understand with what utter reluctance she has been compelled
+again and again to take more? Some day Americans will come to believe
+that England no more desired to annex Burmah than the United States
+deliberately planned to take the Philippines; that Englishmen were as
+content to leave the Transvaal and the Orange Free State alone as ever
+Americans were to be without Hawaii or Puerto Rico. Egypt was forced
+upon Great Britain precisely as Cuba is being foisted on America
+to-day--and every Englishman hopes that the United States will be able
+to do as much for the Cubans as Great Britain has done for the
+Egyptians.
+
+Great Britain would always vastly prefer--has always vastly
+preferred--to keep a friendly independent state upon her borders rather
+than be compelled to take over the burden of administration. The former
+involves less labour and more profit; it retains moreover a barrier
+between the British boundaries and those of any potentially hostile
+Power upon the other side. England has shown this in India itself and in
+Afghanistan. She tried to show it in South Africa. She has shown it in
+Thibet. More conclusively than anywhere perhaps she has shown it in the
+Federated Malay States--of which probably but few Americans know even
+the name, but where more, it may be, than anywhere are Englishmen
+working out their ambition--
+
+     "To make the world a better place
+      Where'er the English go."
+
+It might happen that, under a weak and incompetent successor to
+President Diaz, Mexico would relapse into the conditions of half a
+century ago and the situation along the border be rendered intolerable
+to Americans. Sooner or later the United States would be compelled to
+protest and, protests being unheeded, to interfere. The incompetence of
+the Mexican Government continuing, America would be obliged to establish
+a protectorate, if not over the whole country, at least over that
+portion the orderly behaviour of which was necessary to her own peace.
+Thereafter annexation might follow. Now, at no stage of this process
+would Englishmen, looking on, accuse the United States of greediness, of
+bullying, or of deliberately planning to gratify an earth-hunger. They,
+from experience, understand. But when the same thing occurs on the
+British frontiers in Asia or South Africa, Americans make no effort to
+understand. "England is up to the same old game," they say. "One more
+morsel down the lion's throat."
+
+I am well aware of the depth of the prejudice against which I am
+arguing. The majority of Americans are so accustomed to consider their
+own expansion across the continent, and beyond, as one of the finest
+episodes in the march of human progress (as it is) and the growth of the
+British Empire as a mere succession of wanton and brutal outrages on
+helpless and benighted peoples, that the immediate impulse of the vast
+majority of American readers will be to treat a comparison between the
+two with ridicule. Minnesota Massacres and the Indian Mutiny--Cetewayo
+and Sitting Bull--Aguinaldo and the Mahdi--Egypt and Cuba; the time
+will come when Americans will understand. It is a pity that prejudice
+should blind them now.
+
+And if the American reader will refer to the map, which presumably lies
+open before him, he might consider in what part of the world it is that
+England is now bent on a policy of aggression--where it is that
+collision with any Power threatens. In Asia? England's course in regard
+to Afghanistan and Thibet surely shows that she is content with her
+present boundaries, while her alliance with Japan and the
+_rapprochement_ with Russia at which she aims should be evidences enough
+of her desire for peace! In Africa? Where is it that spheres of
+influence are not delimited? That there will be disturbances, ferments,
+which will have to be suppressed at one time and another at various
+points within the British sphere is likely--as likely as it was that
+similar disturbances would occur in the United States so long as any
+considerable number of Indians went loose unblanketed,--but what room is
+left for anything approaching serious war? With the problem of the
+mixture of races and the necessity of building up the structure of a
+state, does not England before all things need peace both in the south
+and north? In America? In Australia? With whom? That perils may arise at
+almost any point--in mid-ocean even, far away from any land--of course
+we recognise; but Americans can hardly fail to see, with the map before
+them, that England cannot seek them, but must earnestly desire to avoid
+them as she has avoided them with any European Power for this last
+century. To borrow a happy phrase, Great Britain is in truth a
+"Saturated Power." She has been compelled to shoulder burdens which she
+would feign have avoided, to assume obligations which were not of her
+creating and which she fulfils with reluctance. And she can assume no
+more, or, if she must, will do it only with the utmost unwillingness.
+What she needs is peace.
+
+And now one must go as delicately as is compatible with making one's
+meaning clear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is one Power in Europe whose ambitions are a menace to the peace
+of the world--one only. I do not think that Americans as a rule
+understand this, but it is true and there can be no harm in saying so,
+for neither in her press nor in the mouths of her statesmen are those
+ambitions denied by that Power herself. Indeed they are insisted on to
+the taxpayer as the reason why she needs so powerful an army and a
+fleet. It is not suggested that Germany's ambitions are other than
+legitimate and inevitable: it would be difficult for either Englishman
+or American to say that with grace. I am not arguing against Germany; I
+am arguing for Peace.
+
+Germany says frankly enough that she is cooped up within boundaries
+which are intolerable--that she is an "imprisoned Power." She argues,
+still with perfect frankness, that it was a mere accident that, to her
+misfortune, she came into being as a great Power too late to be able to
+get her proper share of the earth's surface, wherein her people might
+expand and put forth their surplus energy. The time when there was
+earth's surface to choose was already gone. But that fact has in no way
+lessened the need of expansion or destroyed the energy. She must burst
+her prison walls, she says. It would have been better could she have
+flowed out quietly into unoccupied land--as the United States has done
+and as Great Britain has done--but that being impossible, she must flow
+where she can. And ringed around her are other Powers, great or small,
+which bar her way. Therefore she needs the army and the fleet. It is
+logical and it is candid.
+
+It is evident that the Franco-Russian Alliance makes the bursting of her
+banks difficult in what might seem to be the most natural direction. The
+Anglo-French _entente_ and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance--perhaps even
+more Germany's own partnership in the Triple Alliance with Italy and
+Austria--also constitute obstacles which at least necessitate something
+more of an army and more of a fleet than might otherwise have been
+sufficient for her purpose. But those barriers are not in the long run
+going to avert the fulfilment of--or at least the endeavour to
+fulfil--that purpose.
+
+There is only one instrumentality, humanly speaking,--one Power,--which
+can ultimately prevent Germany from using that army and that fleet for
+the ends for which they are being created; and that instrumentality
+happens to be the United States. It is difficult to see how Germany can
+make any break for freedom without coming in conflict not only with one
+of the Great Powers but with a combination of two or more. It is
+improbable that she will attempt the enterprise without at least the
+benevolent neutrality of the United States. Assurances of positive
+sympathy would probably go a long way towards encouraging her to the
+hazard. But if the United States should range herself definitely on the
+side of peace the venture would become preposterous.
+
+I am not arguing against Germany; I am arguing for Peace. Least of all
+am I arguing for an American alliance for England in the event of
+Germany's dash for liberty taking an untoward direction. England needs
+no help. What does need help is Peace--the Peace of Europe--the Peace of
+the World.
+
+There is no talk now of stifling Germany's ambitions: of standing in the
+way of her legitimate aspirations. It may be that under other
+conditions, under a different form of government, or even under another
+individual ruler, those aspirations and ambitions would not appear to
+the German people so vital as they do now. They certainly do not appear
+so to an outsider; and the German people is far from being of one mind
+on the subject. But assuming the majority of Germans to know their own
+business best, and granting it to be essential that the people should
+have some larger sphere, under their own flag, in which to attain to
+their proper growth, if they were compelled to drop war as the means for
+obtaining that larger sphere out of their calculations, it would not
+mean that those ambitions and aspirations would have to go unsatisfied.
+Violence is not the only means of obtaining what one wants.
+
+There was a time when, as between individuals, if one man desired a
+thing which his neighbour possessed he went with a club and took it; but
+civilised society has abandoned physical force as a medium for the
+exchange of commodities and has substituted barter. If physical force
+were once discountenanced among nations, any nation which needed a thing
+badly enough could always get it. Everybody who had facilities for sale
+would be glad to sell, if the price was sufficiently high. It is not
+unlikely that, in an age of compulsory peace, Germany would be able to
+acquire all that she desires at a less price than the expenditure of
+blood and treasure which would be necessary in a war. It would almost
+certainly cost her less than the price of war added to the capitalised
+annual burden of the up-keep of her army and navy.[32:1]
+
+But the real cost of war does not fall upon the individual nation. And
+for the last time let me say that I am not arguing against Germany: I am
+arguing for Peace. It has been necessary to discuss Germany's position
+because she is at the moment the only factor in the situation which
+makes for war. All other Powers are satisfied, or could be satisfied,
+with their present boundaries. Outside of the German Empire, the whole
+civilised world earnestly desires peace. It may be that Great Britain,
+acting in concert with France, Russia, and Japan, will in the near
+future be able to take a longer step towards securing that peace for the
+world than seems at present credible. But England's natural coadjutor is
+the United States. The United States has but to take one step and the
+thing is done. It is a _role_ which ought to appeal to the American
+people. It is certainly one for the assumption of which all posterity
+would bless the name of America.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Critics will, of course, ridicule this offhand dismissing in a few
+sentences of the largest of world problems. Each one of several
+propositions which I have advanced breaks rudely ground where angels
+might fear to tread; each one ought to be put forth cautiously with much
+preamble and historical introduction, to be circuitously argued through
+several hundred pages; but that cannot be done here because those
+propositions are not the main topic of this book. At the same time they
+must be stated, however baldly, because they represent the basis on
+which my plea for any immediate Anglo-American co-operation in the cause
+of peace must rest.
+
+I am also fully conscious of the hostility which almost everything that
+I say will provoke from one or another section of the American people,
+but I am not addressing the irreconcilables of any foreign element of
+the population of the United States. I am talking to the reasoning,
+intelligent mass of the two peoples as a whole. The subject of an
+Anglo-American alliance is one of which it is the fashion to hush up any
+attempt at the discussion in public. It must be spoken of in whispers.
+It is better--so the argument runs--to let American good-will to England
+grow of itself; an effort to hasten it will but hurt American
+susceptibilities.
+
+In the first place this idea rests largely on an exaggerated estimate of
+the power of the Irish politician, a power which happily is coming every
+day to be more nearly a thing of the past,--"tending," as Carlyle says,
+"visibly not to be." In the second place, I believe that I understand
+American susceptibilities; and they will not be hurt by any one who
+shows that he does understand. What the American resents bitterly is the
+arrogant and superficial criticism of the foreigner who sums up the
+characteristics and destiny of the nation after a few weeks of
+observation. Moreover, Americans do not as a rule like whispering or the
+attempt to come at things by by-paths--in which they much resemble the
+English. When they want a thing they commonly ask for it--distinctly.
+When they think a thing ought to be done they prefer to say
+so--unequivocally. They have not much love for the circuitousnesses of
+diplomacy; and if England desires American co-operation in what is a
+great and noble cause she had much better ask for it--bluntly.
+
+Personally I wish that forty million Englishmen would stand up and shout
+the request all at once.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8:1] Since this was written, the Anglo-Russian agreement has been
+arrived at.
+
+[10:1] Justin H. Smith, _Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony_,
+Putnams, 1907.
+
+[15:1] _The Bellman_, Minneapolis, Dec. 22, 1906.
+
+[32:1] A point which there is no space to dwell upon here but which I
+would commend to the more leisurely consideration of readers--especially
+American readers--is that under a _regime_ of physical force there can
+in fact be hardly any transfer of commodities at all. What a man has, he
+holds, whether his need of it be greater than another's, or whether he
+needs it not at all. There is no inducement to part with it and pride
+compels him to hold; so that only the strongest can come by the
+possession of anything that he desires. If the dollar were substituted
+for the club in the dealings of nations, the transfer of commodities
+would forthwith become simplified, and such incidents as the purchase of
+Alaska and the cession of Heligoland, instead of standing as isolated
+examples of international accommodation, would become customary. To take
+an example which will bring the matter home at once, many imperialist
+Englishmen on visiting the West Indies have become convinced that
+certain of England's possessions in those regions could with advantage
+to all parties be transferred to the United States. But so long as the
+military idea reigns--so long as an island must be regarded primarily as
+an outpost, a possible naval base, a strategic point--so long will the
+obstacles to such a transfer remain. As soon as war was put outside the
+range of possibilities, commercial principles would begin to operate and
+those territories, however much or little they might be worth, would be
+acquired by the United States. The same thing would happen in all parts
+of the world. Possessions, instead of being held by those who could hold
+them, would tend to pass to those who needed them or to whom they
+logically belonged by geographical relation, and neither Germany's
+legitimate aspirations nor those of any other country would need to go
+unsatisfied.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE DIFFERENCE IN POINT OF VIEW
+
+     The Anglo-Saxon Family Likeness--How Frenchmen and Germans
+     View it--Englishmen, Americans, and "Foreigners"--An Echo of
+     the War of 1812--An Anglo-American Conflict Unthinkable--
+     American Feeling for England--The Venezuelan Incident--The
+     Pilgrims and Some Secret History--Why Americans still Hate
+     England--Great Britain's Nearness to the United States
+     Geographically--Commercially--Historically--England's Foreign
+     Ill-wishers in America.
+
+
+The one thing chiefly needed to make both Englishmen and Americans
+desire an alliance is that they should come to know each other better.
+They would then be astonished to find not only how much they liked each
+other, but how closely each was already in sympathy with the other's
+ways of life and thought and how inconsiderable were the differences
+between them. Some one (I thought it was Mr. Freeman, but I cannot find
+the passage in his writings) has said that it would be a good way of
+judging an Englishman's knowledge of the world to notice whether, on
+first visiting America, he was most struck by the differences between
+the two peoples or by their resemblances. When an intelligent American
+has travelled for any time on the Continent of Europe, in contact with
+peoples who are truly "foreign" to him, he feels on arriving in London
+almost as if he were at home again. The more an Englishman moves among
+other peoples, the more he is impressed, on reaching the United States,
+with his kinship to those among whom he finds himself. Nor is it in
+either case wholly, or even chiefly, a matter of a common speech.
+
+"Jonathan," says Max O'Rell, "is but John Bull expanded--John Bull with
+plenty of elbow room." And the same thing is said again and again in
+different phraseology by various Continental writers. It is said most
+impressively by those who do not put it into words at all, as by
+Professor Muensterberg[36:1] who is apparently not familiar with England,
+but shows no lack of willingness to dislike her. There is therefore no
+intentional comparison between the two peoples, but the writer's point
+of view has absorbing interest to an Englishman who knows both
+countries. More than once he remarks with admiration or astonishment on
+traits of the American character or institutions in the United States
+which the Englishman would necessarily take for granted, because they
+are precisely the same as those to which he has been accustomed at home.
+Writing for a German public, the Professor draws morals from American
+life which delight an English reader by their naive and elementary
+superfluousness. In all unconsciousness, Professor Muensterberg has
+written a most valuable essay on the essential kinship of the British
+and American peoples as contrasted with his own.
+
+Two brothers will commonly be aware only of the differences between
+them--the unlikeness of their features, the dissimilarities in their
+tastes or capabilities,--yet the world at large may have difficulty in
+distinguishing them apart. While they are conscious only of their
+individual differences, to the neighbours all else disappears in the
+family resemblance. So it is that Max O'Rell sees how like the American
+is to the Englishman more clearly than Mark Twain: Professor Muensterberg
+has involuntarily traced the features of the one in the lineaments of
+the other with a surer hand than Matthew Arnold or Mr. Bryce.
+
+When, in his remarkable book, M. Demolins uses the term Anglo-Saxon, he
+speaks indifferently at one time of Englishmen and at another of
+Americans. The peoples are to him one and indistinguishable. Their
+greatness is a common greatness based on qualities which are the
+inheritance of their Anglo-Saxon origin. Chief among these qualities,
+the foundation-stone of their greatness, is the devotion to what we will
+follow him in calling the "Particularistic" form of society,--a society,
+that is, in which the individual predominates over the community, and
+not the community over the individual; a society which aims at
+"establishing each child in its full independence." This is, a Frenchman
+sees, eminently characteristic of the English and the Americans, in
+contrast with other peoples, with those which hold a republican form of
+government no less than those which live under an autocracy. And it is
+peculiarly Saxon in its origin,--not derived from the Celt or Norman or
+Dane. These latter belonged (as do the peoples sprung from, or allied
+to, them to-day) to that class of people which places the community
+above the individual, which looks instinctively to the State or the
+government for initiative. The Saxons alone (a people of earnest
+individual workers, agriculturalists and craftsmen) relied always on the
+initiative and impulse of the individual--what M. Demolins calls "the
+law of intense personal labour"--and it was by virtue of this quality
+that they eventually won social supremacy over the other races in
+Britain. It is by virtue of the same quality that the Americans have
+been enabled to subdue their continent and build up the fabric of the
+United States. It is this quality, says the French writer almost
+brutally, which makes the German and Latin races to-day stand to
+_L'Anglais_ in about the same relation as the Oriental and the Redskin
+stand to the European. And when M. Demolins speaks of _L'Anglais_, he
+means the American as much as the "Englishman of Britain." It is a
+convenient term and, so essentially one are they in his eyes, there is
+no need to distinguish between the peoples. Mr. William Archer's remark
+is worth quoting, that "It is amazing how unessential has been the
+change produced in the Anglo-Saxon type and temperament [in America] by
+the influences of climate or the admixtures of foreign blood."[38:1]
+
+When individual Englishmen and Americans are thrown together in strange
+parts of the world, they seldom fail to foregather as members of one
+race. There may be four traders living isolated in some remote port; but
+though the Russian may speak English with less "accent" than the
+American and though the German may have lived for some years in New
+York, it is not to the society of the German or the Russian that the
+American or the Englishman instinctively turns for companionship. The
+two former have but the common terms of speech; the Englishman and the
+American use also common terms of thought and feeling.
+
+The people who know this best are the officers and men of the British
+and American navies, who are accustomed to find themselves thrown with
+the sailors of all nations in all sorts of waters; and wherever they are
+thus thrown together, the men who sail under the Stars and Stripes and
+those who fly the Union Jack are friends. I have talked with a good many
+British sailors (not officers) and it is good to hear the tone of
+respect in which they speak of the American navy, as compared with
+certain others.
+
+The opportunities for similar companionship among the men of the armies
+of the two nations are fewer, but when the allied forces entered China
+the comradeship which arose between the American and British troops, to
+the exclusion of all others, is notorious. Every night after mess,
+British officers sought the American lines and _vice versa_. The
+Americans have the credit of having invented that rigorous development
+of martial law, by which, as soon as British officers came within their
+lines, sentries were posted with orders not to let them pass out again
+unless accompanied by an American officer. Thus the guests could not
+escape from hospitality till such hour as their hosts pleased.
+
+Some ten years ago military representatives of various nations were
+present by invitation at certain manoeuvres of the Indian army, and
+one night, when an official entertainment was impending, the United
+States officers were guests at the mess of a British regiment. Dinner
+being over, the colonel pushed his chair back and, turning to the
+American on his right, said in all innocence:
+
+"Well, come along! It's time to go and help to receive these d----d
+foreigners."
+
+An incident less obviously _a propos_, but which seems to me to strike
+very truly the common chord of kinship of character between the races,
+was told me by a well-known American painter of naval and military
+subjects. He was the guest of the Forty-fourth (Essex) at, I think,
+Gibraltar, when in the course of dinner the British officer on his right
+broke a silence with the casual remark:
+
+"I wonder whether we shall ever have another smack at you fellows."
+
+The American was not unnaturally surprised.
+
+"Why? Do you want it?" he asked.
+
+"No; we should hate to fight you of course, but then, you know, the
+Forty-fourth was at New Orleans."
+
+It appealed to the American--not merely the pride in the regiment that
+still smarted under the blow of ninety years ago, but still more the
+feeling towards himself, as an American, that prompted the Englishman to
+speak in terms which he knew that he would never have dreamed of using
+under similar circumstances to the representative of any "foreign"
+nation. The Englishman had no fear that the American would
+misunderstand. It appealed to the latter so much that after his return
+to the United States, being called upon to speak at some entertainment
+or function at West Point, when, besides the cadets, there were many
+officers of the United States Army in the room, he told the story.
+Instantly, as he finished, a simultaneous cry from several places in the
+hall called for "Three cheers for the Forty-fourth!" There was no
+Englishman in the company, but, as he told me the story, never had he
+heard so instantaneous, so crashing a response to any call, as then when
+the whole room leaped to its feet and cheered the old enemies who had
+not forgotten.[41:1]
+
+It is not my wish here to discuss even the possibility of war between
+Great Britain and the United States. The thing is too horrible to be
+considered as even the remotest of contingencies--the "Unpardonable
+War," indeed, as Mr. James Barnes has called it. None the less, there is
+always greater danger of such a war than any Englishman imagines or than
+many Americans would like to confess. However true it may be that it
+takes two to make a quarrel, it is none the less true that if one party
+be bent upon quarrelling it is always possible for him to go to lengths
+of irritation and insult which must ultimately provoke the most
+peaceful and reluctant of antagonists. However pacific and reluctant to
+fight Great Britain might be at the outset, she is not conspicuously
+lacking in national pride or in sensitiveness to encroachments on the
+national honour.
+
+Mr. Freeman makes the shrewd remark that "the American feels a greater
+distinction between himself and the Englishman of Britain than the
+Englishman of Britain feels between himself and the American," which
+remains entirely true to-day, in spite of the seemingly paradoxical fact
+that the American knows more of English history and English politics
+than the Englishman knows of the politics and history of the United
+States. This by no means implies that the American knows more of the
+English character than the Englishman knows of his. On the contrary, the
+Americans have seen infinitely less of the world than Englishmen, and
+however many of the bare facts of English history and English politics
+they may know, they are strangely ignorant of the atmosphere to which
+those facts belong, and have never learned how much more foreign to them
+other foreign nations are. The individual American will take the
+individual Englishman into his friendship--will even accept him as a
+sort of a relative--but as a political entity Great Britain is almost as
+much a foreign nation as any.
+
+The casual Englishman visiting the United States for but a short time
+will probably not discover this fact. He only knows that he is cordially
+received himself--even more cordially, he feels, than he deserves--and
+most probably those persons, especially the ladies, whom he meets will
+assure him that they are "devoted" to England. He may not have time to
+discover that that devotion is not universal. Only after a while, in all
+probability, will the fact as stated by Mr. Freeman dawn upon him, and
+he will somehow be aware that with all the charming hospitality that he
+receives he is in some way treated as more of a foreigner than he is
+conscious of being. It is necessary that he should have some extended
+residence in the country--unless his visit happens to coincide with such
+an incident as the Venezuelan controversy or the outbreak of the Boer
+War--before things group themselves in at all their right perspective
+before his eyes. The intensity of the feeling displayed at the time of
+the Venezuelan incident came as a shock to Englishmen at home; but those
+who had lived for any length of time in America (west of New York) were
+not surprised. It is probable that the greater number of the American
+people at that time wished for war, and believed that it was nothing but
+cowardice on the part of Great Britain--her constitutional dislike of
+fighting anybody of her own size, as a number of the papers pleasantly
+phrased it--that prevented their wish from being gratified.
+
+The concluding paragraphs of ex-President Cleveland's treatise on this
+subject are illuminating. In 1895, as I have said, a majority of the
+American people unquestionably wished to fight; but that numerical
+majority included perhaps a minority of the native-born Americans, a
+small minority certainly of the richer or more well-to-do among them,
+and an almost infinitesimal proportion of the best educated of the
+native-born. This is what Mr. Cleveland says:
+
+"Those among us who most loudly reprehended and bewailed our vigorous
+assertion of the Monroe Doctrine were the timid ones who feared personal
+financial loss, or those engaged in speculation and stock-gambling, in
+buying much beyond their ability to pay, and generally in living by
+their wits [_sic_]. The patriotism of such people traverses exclusively
+the pocket nerve. . . . But these things are as nothing when weighed
+against the sublime patriotism and devotion to their nation's honour
+exhibited by the great mass of our countrymen--the plain people of the
+land. . . . Not for a moment did their Government know the lack of their
+strong and stalwart support. . . . It [the incident] has given us a
+better place in the respect and consideration of the people of all
+nations, and especially of Great Britain; it has again confirmed our
+confidence in the overwhelming prevalence among our citizens of
+disinterested devotion to our nation's honour; and last, but by no means
+least, it has taught us where to look in the ranks of our countrymen for
+the best patriotism."[44:1]
+
+Mr. Cleveland, now that he is no longer in active politics, holds, as he
+deserves, a secure place in the affections of the American people. But
+at the time when this treatise was published, he was a not impossible
+nominee of the Democratic party for another term as President; and the
+"plain people of the land" have a surprising number of votes. Mr.
+Cleveland knows his own people and knows that with a large portion of
+them war with England would in 1895 have been popular. It is significant
+also that he still thought it worth while to insist upon this fact at
+the time when this treatise was given to the world in a volume; and
+that was as late as 1904, very shortly before the Democratic party
+selected its nominee for the Presidential contest of that year. It is
+possible that if Mr. Cleveland had been that nominee instead of Justice
+Parker, one of the leading features of his campaign would have been a
+vigorous insistence on the Monroe Doctrine, as interpreted by himself,
+with especial reference to Great Britain.
+
+Englishmen are inclined (so far as they think about the matter at all)
+to flatter themselves that the ill-feeling which blazed so suddenly into
+flame twelve years ago was more or less effectually quenched by Great
+Britain's assistance to the United States at the time of the Spanish
+War. Those Englishmen who watched the course of opinion in America at
+the time of the Boer War must have had some misgivings. It is evident
+that so good a judge as Mr. Cleveland believed, as late as 1904, that
+hostility to Great Britain was still a policy which would commend itself
+to the "plain people of the land."
+
+It is true that the war fever in 1895 was stronger in the West than in
+the Eastern States. A traveller crossing the United States at that time
+would have found the idea of hostilities with England being treated as
+something of a joke in cultivated circles in New York, but among the
+people in general to the West of Buffalo and Pittsburg it was terrible
+earnest. A curious point, moreover, which I think I have never seen
+stated in England, is that many good men in the Democratic Party at that
+time stood by President Cleveland, though sincerely friendly to Great
+Britain; the truth being that they did not believe that war with
+England was seriously to be apprehended, while another Power was at the
+moment seeking to obtain a foothold in South America, for whose benefit
+a "vigorous assertion of the Monroe Doctrine" was much to be desired.
+The thunders of the famous message indeed were, in the minds of many
+excellent Americans in the East, directed not against Great Britain but
+against Germany.
+
+None the less it should be noted that it was in the hope of influencing
+the voters in a local election in New York that Mr. Hearst, as recently
+as in November, 1907, thought it worth while to appeal to the
+"traditional hatred" of Great Britain. However little else Mr. Hearst
+may have to commend him, he cannot be said to be out of touch with the
+sentiments of the more ignorant masses of the people of New York. That
+he failed did not signify that he was mistaken as to the extent or
+intensity of the prejudice to which he appealed, but only that the cry
+was raised too late and too obviously as an electioneering trick in a
+campaign which was already lost.
+
+In spite of what happened during the Spanish War, in spite of every
+effort that England has made to convince America of her friendliness, in
+spite of the improvement which has taken place in the feelings of (what,
+without offence, I venture to call) the upper classes in America towards
+Great Britain, the fact still remains that, with a large portion of the
+people, war with England would be popular.
+
+That is, perhaps, to state the case somewhat brutally. Let me rather say
+that, if any pretext should arise, the minds of the masses of the
+American people could more easily be inflamed to the point of desiring
+war with England than they could to the point of desiring war with any
+other nation. It is bitter to have to say it--horrible to think it. I
+know also that many Americans will not agree with me; but I do not think
+that among them will be many of those whose business it is, either as
+politicians or as journalists, to be in touch with the sentiments of the
+people.
+
+Let me not be suspected of failing to attach sufficient importance to
+those public expressions of international amity which we hear so
+frequently, couched in such charming phraseology, at the dinners given
+by the Pilgrims, either in London or New York, and on similar occasions.
+The Pilgrims are doing excellent work, as also are other similar
+societies in less conspicuous ways. The fact has, I believe, never been
+published, but can be told now without indiscretion, that a movement was
+on foot some twelve years ago for the organisation of an Anglo-American
+League, on a scale much more ambitious than that of the Pilgrims or any
+other of the existing societies. Certain members of the British Ministry
+of the time had been approached and had welcomed the movement with
+cordiality, and the active support of a number of men of corresponding
+public repute in various parts of the United States had been similarly
+enlisted. It was expected (though I think the official request had not
+been made) that the Prince of Wales (now his Majesty King Edward VII.)
+would be the President of the English branch of the League, while
+ex-President Harrison was to have acted in a similar capacity in
+America. By a grim pleasantry of Fate, the letter from England conveying
+final and official information of the approval of the aforesaid
+Ministers, and arranging for the publication of the first formal
+overture from the United States (for the movement was to be made to
+appear to emanate therefrom) arrived in America on the very day of the
+appearance--and readers will remember how totally unexpected the
+appearance was--of Mr. Cleveland's Venezuelan message. What would have
+been the effect upon the crisis which then ensued if the organisation of
+the League had been but a few weeks further advanced, is an interesting
+subject for speculation. That, after a year or two of preparation, the
+movement should have been beaten by so totally unforeseen a complication
+at, as it were, the very winning post, was a little absurd. Thereafter,
+the right moment for proceeding with the organisation on the same lines
+never again presented itself.
+
+Englishmen must not make the mistake of attaching the same value to the
+nice things which are said by prominent Americans on public or
+semi-public occasions as they attach to similar utterances by
+Englishmen. It is not, of course, intended to imply that the American
+speakers are not individually sincere; but no American can act as the
+spokesman for his people in such a matter with the same authority as can
+be assumed by a properly qualified Englishman. One of the chief
+manifestations of the characteristic national lack of the sentiment of
+reverence is the disregard which the American masses entertain for the
+opinions of their "leading" men, whether in public life or not. The
+English people is accustomed, within certain limits, to repose
+confidence in its leaders and to suffer them in truth to lead; so that a
+small handful of men can within limits speak for the English people.
+They can voice the public sentiments, or, when they speak, the people
+will modify its sentiments to accord with their utterances. There is no
+man or set of men who can similarly speak for the American people; and
+no one is better aware of that fact than the American, however honoured
+by his countrymen, when he gives expression in London to the cordiality
+of his own feelings for Great Britain and expresses guardedly his
+conviction that a recurrence of trouble between the peoples will never
+again be possible. For one thing, public opinion is not centralised in
+America as it is in England. If not _tot homines_, at least _tot
+civitates_; and each State, each class and community, instinctively
+objects to any one presuming to speak for it (a prejudice based
+presumably on political tradition) except its own locally elected
+representative, and even he must be specifically instructed _ad hoc_.
+
+Only the good-humoured common-sense of British diplomacy prevented war
+at the time of the Venezuelan incident; and it may be that the same
+influence would be strong enough to prevent it again. But it is
+desirable that Englishmen should understand that just as they were
+astounded at the bitterness against them which manifested itself then,
+so they might be no less astounded again. It is, of course, difficult
+for Englishmen to believe. It must necessarily be hard to believe that
+one is hated by a person whom one likes. It happens to be just as
+difficult for the mass of Americans (again I should like to say the
+lower mass) to believe that Englishmen as a whole really like them. In
+1895, the American masses believed that England's attitude was the
+result of cowardice, pure and simple. Knowing their own feeling towards
+Great Britain, they neither could nor would believe that she was then
+influenced by a sincere and almost brotherly good-will--that, without
+one shadow of fear, Englishmen refused to consider war with the United
+States as possible because it had never occurred to them that the United
+States was other than a friendly nation--barely by one degree of kinship
+farther removed than one of Great Britain's larger colonies.
+
+And this is the first great obstacle that stands in the way of a proper
+understanding between the peoples--not merely the fact that the American
+nation is so far from having any affection for Great Britain, but the
+fact that the two peoples regard each other so differently that neither
+understands, or is other than reluctant to believe in, the attitude of
+the other. For the benefit of the English reader, rather than the
+American, it may be well to explain this at some length.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The essential fact is that America, New York or Washington, has been in
+the past, and still is in only a slightly less degree, much farther from
+London than London is from New York or Washington. This is true
+historically and commercially--and geographically, in everything except
+the mere matter of miles. The American for generations looked at the
+world through London, whereas when the Englishman turned his vision to
+New York almost the whole world intervened.
+
+Geographically, the nearest soil to the United States is British soil.
+Along the whole northern border of the country lies the Dominion of
+Canada, without, for a distance of some two thousand miles, any visible
+line of demarcation, so that the American may walk upon the prairie and
+not know at what moment his foot passes from his own soil to the soil of
+Great Britain. One of the chief lines of railway from New York to
+Chicago passes for half its length over Canadian ground; the effect
+being precisely as if the Englishman to go from London to Birmingham
+were to run for half the distance over a corner of France. A large
+proportion of the produce of the wheat-fields of the North-western
+States, of Minnesota and the two Dakotas, finds its way to New York over
+the Canadian Pacific Railway and from New York is shipped, probably in
+British bottoms, to Liverpool. When the American sails outward from New
+York or other eastern port, if he goes north he arrives only at
+Newfoundland or Nova Scotia; if he puts out to southward, the first land
+that he finds is the Bermudas. If he makes for Europe, it is generally
+at Liverpool or Southampton that he disembarks. On his very threshold in
+all directions, lies land over which floats the Union Jack and the same
+flag flies over half the vessels in the harbours of his own coasts.
+
+It is difficult for the Englishman to understand how near Great Britain
+has always been to the citizen of the United States, for to the
+Englishman himself the United States is a distant region, which he does
+not visit unless of set purpose he makes up his mind to go there. He
+must undertake a special journey, and a long one, lying apart from his
+ordinary routes of travel. The American cannot, save with difficulty and
+by circuitous routes, escape from striking British soil whenever he
+leaves his home. It confronts him on all sides and bars his way to all
+the world. Is it to be wondered at that he thinks of Englishmen
+otherwise than as Englishmen think of him?
+
+Yet this mere matter of geographical proximity is trivial compared to
+the nearness of Great Britain in other ways.
+
+Commercially--and it must be remembered how large a part matters of
+commerce play in the life and thoughts of the people of the United
+States--until recently America traded with the world almost entirely
+through Great Britain. It is not the produce of the Western wheat-fields
+only that is carried abroad in British bottoms, but the great bulk of
+the commerce of the United States must even now find its way to the
+outer world in ships which carry the Union Jack, and in doing so must
+pay the toll of its freight charges to Great Britain. If a New York
+manufacturer sells goods to South America itself, the chances are that
+those goods will be shipped to Liverpool and reshipped to their
+destination--each time in British vessels--and the payment therefor will
+be made by exchange on London, whereby the British banker profits only
+in less degree than the British ship-owner. In financial matters, New
+York has had contact with the outer world practically only through
+London. Until recently, no great corporate enterprise could be floated
+in America without the assistance of English capital, so that for years
+the "British Bondholder," who, by the interest which he drew (or often
+did not draw) upon his bonds, was supposed to be sucking the life-blood
+out of the American people, has been, until the trusts arose, the
+favourite bogey with which the American demagogue has played upon the
+feelings of his audiences. Now, happily, with more wealth at home,
+animosity has been diverted to the native trusts.
+
+It is true that of late years the United States has been striking out to
+win a world-commerce of her own; that by way of the Pacific she is
+building up a trade free, in part at least, from British domination;
+that she is making earnest efforts to develop her mercantile marine, so
+that her own commerce may in some fair measure be carried under her own
+flag; that New York is fast becoming a financial centre powerful enough
+to be able to disregard the dictation--and promising ere long to be a
+rival--of London; that during the last decade, America has been
+relieving England of vast quantities of her bonds and shares, heretofore
+held in London, and that the wealth of her people has increased so
+rapidly that she can find within herself the capital for her industries
+and (except in times like the recent panic) need no longer go abroad to
+beg. It is also true that of recent years England has become not a
+little uneasy at the growing volume of American trade, even within the
+borders of the British Isles themselves; but this newly developed
+uneasiness in British minds, however well grounded, can bear no
+comparison to the feeling of antagonism towards England--an antagonism
+compounded of mingled respect and resentment--which Americans of the
+older generation have had borne in upon them from youth up. To
+Englishmen, the growing commercial power of the United States is a new
+phenomenon, not yet altogether recognised and only half-understood; for
+they have been for so long accustomed to consider themselves the rulers
+of the sea-borne trade of the world that it is with difficulty that they
+comprehend that their supremacy can be seriously threatened. To the
+American, on the other hand, British commercial supremacy has, at least
+since 1862, been an incontrovertible and disheartening fact. The huge
+bulk of British commerce and British wealth has loomed so large as to
+shut out his view of all the world; it has hemmed him in on all sides,
+obstructed him, towered over him. And all the while, as he grew richer,
+he has seen that Great Britain only profited the more, by interest on
+his bonds, by her freight charges, by her profit on exchange. How is it
+possible that under such conditions the American can think about or feel
+towards England as the Englishman has thought about and felt towards
+him?
+
+Yet even now not one half has been told. We have seen that the
+geographical proximity of Great Britain and the overshadowing bulk of
+British commerce could not fail--neither separately could fail--to
+create in American minds an attitude towards England different from the
+natural attitude of Englishmen towards the United States; but both these
+influences together, powerful though each may be, are almost unimportant
+compared to the factor which most of all colours, and must colour, the
+American's view of Great Britain,--and that is the influence of the
+history of his own country.
+
+The history of the United States as an independent nation goes back no
+more than one hundred and thirty years, a space to be spanned by two
+human lives; so that events of even her very earliest years are still
+recent history and the sentiments evoked by those events have not yet
+had time to die. In the days of the childhood of fathers of men still
+living (the thing is possible, so recent is it) the nation was born out
+of the throes of a desperate struggle with Great Britain--a struggle
+which left the name "British" a word of loathing and contempt to
+American ears. American history proper begins with hatred of England:
+nor has there been anything in the course of that history, until the
+present decade, calculated to tend to modify that hatred in any material
+degree.
+
+During the nineteenth century, the United States, except for the war
+with Spain at its close, had little contact with foreign Powers. She
+lived isolated, concentrating all her energies on the developing of her
+own resources and the work of civilising a continent. Foreign
+complications scarcely came within the range of her vision. The Mexican
+War was hardly a foreign war. The only war with another nation in the
+whole course of the century was that with Great Britain in 1812.
+Reference has already been made to the English ignorance of the War of
+1812; but to the American it was the chief event in the foreign politics
+of his country during the first century and a quarter of its existence,
+and the Englishman's ignorance thereof moves him either to irritation or
+to amusement according to his temperament. In the American Civil War,
+British sympathy with the South was unhappily exaggerated in American
+eyes by the _Alabama_ incident. The North speedily forgave the South;
+but it has not yet entirely forgiven Great Britain.
+
+The other chief events of American history have nearly all, directly or
+indirectly, tended to keep Great Britain before the minds of the people
+as the one foreign Power with whom armed conflict was an ever-present
+possibility. The cession of her North American territory on the part of
+France only served to accentuate England's position as the sole rival of
+the United States upon the continent. Alaska was purchased from Russia;
+but Russia has long ago been almost forgotten in the transaction while
+it was with Great Britain that the troublesome question of the Alaskan
+boundary arose. And through all the years there have been recurring at
+intervals, not too far apart, various minor causes of friction between
+the two peoples,--in the Newfoundland fisheries question on the east and
+the seal fisheries on the west, with innumerable difficulties arising
+out of the common frontier line on the north or out of British relations
+(as in the case of Venezuela) with South American peoples.
+
+If an Englishman were asked what had been the chief events in the
+external affairs of England during the nineteenth century he would say:
+the Napoleonic wars, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the China,
+Ashanti, Afghan, Zulu, Soudan, Burmese, and Boer wars, the occupation of
+Egypt, the general expansion of the Empire in Africa--and what not else
+besides. He would not mention the United States. To the American the
+history of his country has chiefly to do with Great Britain.
+
+Just as geographically British territory surrounds and abuts on the
+United States on almost every side; just as commercially Great Britain
+has always hemmed in, dominated, and overshadowed the United States, so,
+historically, Great Britain has been the one and constant enemy, actual
+or potential, and her power a continual menace. How is it possible that
+the American should think of England as the Englishman thinks of the
+United States?
+
+There have, moreover, been constantly at work in America forces the
+chief object of which has been to keep alive hostility to Great Britain.
+Of native Americans who trace their family back to colonial days, there
+are still some among the older generation in whom the old hatred of the
+Revolutionary War yet burns so strongly that they would not, when at
+work on the old family farm in, let us say, Vermont, be very seriously
+surprised on some fine morning to see a party of red-coated Hessians
+come round the angle of the hill. There are those living whose chief
+pastime as boys was to fight imaginary battles with the loathed British
+in and out among the old farm-buildings--buildings which yet bear upon
+them, perhaps, the marks of real British bullets fired in the real
+war.[57:1] And those boys, moving West as they came to manhood, carried
+the same spirit, the same inherited dislike of the name "British," into
+the cities of the Mississippi Valley, across the prairies and over the
+mountains to the Pacific slope. But it is not the real American--except
+one here and there on the old New England homestead--who talks much of
+his anti-British feeling. It is the imported American who has refused to
+allow the old hostility to die but has kept pouring contumely on the
+British name and insisted on the incorporation of an "anti-British"
+plank in his party platform to catch the votes of the citizens of his
+own nationality at each succeeding election.
+
+Englishmen are generally aware of the importance in American politics of
+the Irish vote. It is probable, indeed, that, particularly as far as the
+conditions of the last few years are concerned, the importance of that
+vote has been magnified to the English mind. In certain localities, and
+more particularly in a few of the larger cities, it is still, of course,
+an important factor by its mere numbers; but even in the cities in which
+the Irish vote is still most in evidence at elections, the influx during
+the past decade from all parts of Europe of immigrants who in the course
+of the five-years term become voters has, of necessity, lessened its
+relative importance.
+
+In New York City, for instance, through which pass annually some
+nineteen twentieths of all the immigrants coming into the country, the
+foreign elements other than Irish--German, Italian (mainly from the less
+educated portions of the Peninsula), Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Hebrew,
+Roumanian, etc.,--now far outnumber the Irish. In New York, indeed, the
+Germans are alone more numerous; but the Irish have always shown a
+larger interest in, and a greater capacity for, political action, so
+that they still retain an influence out of all proportion to their
+voting number. On the other hand the Irish, or their leaders, have
+maintained so corrupt a standard of political action (so that a large
+proportion of the evils from which the affairs of certain of the larger
+American cities suffer to-day may be justly charged to their methods and
+influence) that it is uncertain whether their abuse of Great Britain
+does not, in the minds of certain, and those not the worst, classes of
+the people react rather to create good-will towards England than to
+increase hostility.
+
+The power of the Irish vote as an anti-British force, then, is
+undoubtedly overrated in England; but it must be borne in mind that some
+of the other foreign elements in the population which on many questions
+may act as a counterpoise to the Irish are not themselves conspicuously
+friendly to England. If we hear too much of the Irish in America, we
+hear perhaps too little of some of the other peoples. And the point
+which I would impress on the English reader is that he cannot expect the
+American to feel towards England as he himself feels towards the United
+States. The American people came in the first instance justly by its
+hatred of the name "British," and there have not since been at work any
+forces sufficiently powerful to obliterate that hatred, while there have
+been some operating to keep it alive.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[36:1] _The Americans_, by Hugo Muensterberg, 1905.
+
+[38:1] _America To-day_, by William Archer (1900). Mr. Archer's study of
+the American people is in my opinion the most sympathetic and
+comprehending which has been written by an Englishman.
+
+[41:1] The battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812, is not one of
+those incidents in English history which Englishmen generally insist on
+remembering, and it may be as well to explain to English readers that it
+was on that occasion that an inferior force of American riflemen (a
+"backwoods rabble" a British officer called them before the engagement)
+repulsed a British attack, from behind improvised earthworks, with a
+loss to the attacking force of 3300 killed and wounded, and at a cost to
+themselves of 13 wounded and 8 killed--or 21 casualties in all. Of the
+Forty-fourth (Essex) Regiment 816 men went into action, and after less
+than thirty minutes 134 were able to line up. The Ninety-third
+(Sutherland) Highlanders suffered even more severely. Of 1008 officers
+and men only 132 came out unhurt. The battle was fought after peace had
+been concluded, so that the lives were thrown away to no purpose. The
+British had to deliver a direct frontal attack over level ground, penned
+in by a lake on one side and a swamp on the other. It was the same
+lesson, in even bloodier characters, as was taught on several occasions
+in South Africa.
+
+[44:1] _Presidential Problems_, by Grover Cleveland, p. 281 (New York,
+1904).
+
+[57:1] I had written this before reading Senator Hoar's Reminiscences in
+which, in speaking of his own youth, he tells how "Every boy imagined
+himself a soldier and his highest conception of glory was to 'lick the
+British'" (_An Autobiography of Seventy Years_).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TWO SIDES OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER
+
+     Europe's Undervaluation of America's Fighting Power--The
+     Americans as Sailors--The Nation's Greatest Asset--Self-reliance
+     of the People--The Making of a Doctor--And of a Surveyor--
+     Society in the Rough--New York and the Country--An Anglo-Saxon
+     Trait--America's Unpreparedness--American Consuls and
+     Diplomats--A Homogeneous People--The Value of a Common
+     Speech--America more Anglo-Saxon than Britain--Mr. Wells and
+     the Future in America.
+
+
+One circumstance ought in itself to convince Americans that cowardice or
+fear has no share in the greater outspokenness of England's good-will
+during these later years, namely that when Great Britain showed her
+sympathy with the United States at the time of the Spanish War,
+Englishmen largely believed that they were giving that sympathy to the
+weaker Power,[60:1]--weaker, that is as far as organised fighting
+strength, immediately available, was concerned. It is a century or two
+since Englishmen did Spain the compliment of being afraid of her. How
+then, in 1895, could they have had any fear of the United States?
+
+Few Europeans, indeed, have any conception of the fighting power of the
+United States, for it is not large on paper. Nor is an Englishman likely
+to make special allowance for the fighting efficiency of either the
+ships or the men, for the reason that, in spite of experiences which
+might have bred misgivings (English memory for such matters is short),
+it remains to him unthinkable that, in the last resort, any men or still
+less any ships will prove--man for man and gun for gun--better than his
+own. He might be glad to concede that 25,000 American troops are the
+equivalent of 50,000 Germans or 100,000 Cossacks, or that two American
+men of war should be counted as the equivalent of three Italian. He
+makes no such concession when it comes to a comparison with British
+troops or British ships. What then can there be in the fighting strength
+of the United States, for all the figures that she has to show, to breed
+in him a suggestion of fear?
+
+This is a statement which will irritate many a patriotic American, who
+will say that it is the same old British superciliousness. But it should
+not irritate; and if the American understood the Englishman better and
+the spirit which inspires him, he would like it. The Englishman prefers
+not to regard the American troops or ships as potentially hostile, and
+Great Britain has sufficient to do in measuring the strength of her
+possible enemies. As for the people of the United States, he opines that
+they know their own business. They are best able to judge how many ships
+and how many men under arms will serve their purpose. England would,
+indeed, be glad to see the United States with a few more ships than she
+has, but--it is none of England's business. Englishmen can only wish her
+luck and hope that she is making no mistake in her calculations and go
+on about their own affairs, which are pressing enough. At the same time
+if the United States should prove to have miscalculated and should ever
+need . . .--well, England has a ship or two herself.
+
+It would be a gain for the world if Americans would only understand!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Englishman of the present generation knows practically nothing of
+the Americans as a maritime nation; and again let me say that this
+arises not from superciliousness or any intentional neglect, but merely
+from the fact that the matter is one beyond his horizon. He is so
+familiar with the fact that Britain rules the waves that he has no
+notion that whenever opportunity of comparison has offered the Americans
+have generally shown themselves (if there has been anything to choose)
+the better sailors of the two. Every English reader will probably read
+that sentence again to see if he has not misunderstood it. The truth is
+that Englishmen have forgotten the incidents of the Revolutionary War
+almost as completely as they have forgotten those of the War of 1812;
+Paul Jones is as meaningless a name to them as Andrew Jackson. While it
+is true that American historians have given the American people, up to
+the present generation, an unfortunately exaggerated idea of the heroism
+of the patriot forces and have held the British troops up to all manner
+of unmerited odium, it is also true that English historians, while the
+less partial of the two, have perhaps been over-careful not to err in
+the same direction. Not until the last twenty years--hardly until the
+last four or five--have there been accessible to the public of the two
+countries the materials for forming a just judgment on the incidents of
+the war. It must be confessed that there is at least nothing in the
+evidence to permit the Englishman to think that a hundred years ago the
+home-bred Briton could either sail or fight his ships better than the
+Colonial. Nor has the Englishman as a rule any idea that in the middle
+of the nineteenth century the American commercial flag was rapidly
+ousting the British flag from the seas. Even with a knowledge of the
+facts, it is still hard for us to-day to comprehend.
+
+So amazing was the growth of the mercantile marine of the young
+republic--such qualities did the Americans show as shipbuilders, as
+sailors, and as merchants--that in 1860, the American mercantile marine
+was greater in tonnage and number of vessels than that of all other
+nations of the world combined, except Great Britain, and almost equal to
+that of Great Britain herself. These were of course the days of glory of
+the American clipper. It appeared then inevitable that in a few years
+the Stars and Stripes--a flag but little more than half a century
+old--would be the first commercial flag of the world; and but for the
+outbreak of the Civil War, it is at least probable that by now
+Englishmen would have grown accustomed to recognising that not they but
+another people were the real lords of the ocean's commerce. When the
+Civil War broke out, the tonnage of American registered vessels was
+something over five and one-half millions; and when the war closed it
+was practically non-existent. The North was able to draw from its
+merchant service for the purposes of war no fewer than six hundred
+vessels of an aggregate tonnage of over a million and carrying seventy
+thousand men. Those ships and men went a long way towards turning the
+tide of victory to the North; but when peace was made the American
+commercial flag had disappeared from the seas.
+
+It would be out of place here to go into a statement of the causes which
+co-operated with the substitution of iron for wood in shipbuilding to
+make it hard at first for America to regain her lost position, or into a
+discussion of the incomprehensible apathy (incomprehensible if one did
+not know the ways of American legislation) which successive Congresses
+have shown in the matter.
+
+A year or so back, the nation seemed to have made up its mind in earnest
+to take hold of the problem of the restoration of its commercial marine;
+but the defeat in the early part of 1907 of the Ship Subsidies Bill left
+the situation much where it was when President Grant, President
+Harrison, and President McKinley, in turn, attempted to arouse Congress
+to the necessity of action; except that with the passage of time
+conditions only become worse and reform necessarily more difficult. The
+Ship Subsidies Bill was defeated largely by the votes of the
+representatives of the Mississippi Valley and the Middle Western States,
+and to an outsider the opposition of those regions looked very much
+like a manifestation of selfishness and lack of patriotism, on the part
+of the inland population jealous of the seaboard States. In the East,
+various reasons were given at the time for the failure of the measure. I
+happened myself to be travelling then through the States of the
+Mississippi Valley, and I discussed the situation with people whom I
+met, and particularly with politicians. The explanations which I
+received fell into one of two categories. Some said: "It is true that
+the Mississippi Valley and the West have little direct interest in our
+shipbuilding industry, but none the less we should like to see our
+merchant marine encouraged and built up. The trouble is that we have
+from experience acquired a profound distrust of a certain 'gang' in the
+Senate [and here would often follow the names of certain four or five
+well-known Senators, chiefly from the East], and the mere fact that
+these Senators were backing this particular bill was enough to convince
+us Westerners that it included a 'steal.'"
+
+Others took this ground: "The Mississippi Valley and the West believe in
+the general principle of Protection, but we think that our legislation
+has carried this principle far enough. We should now prefer to see a
+little easing off. We do not believe that the right way to develop our
+commercial marine is, first by our tariff laws to make it impossible for
+us to build or operate ships in competition with other countries and
+then to be obliged, in order to equalise things, to have recourse to
+bounties. What we want is a modification of our law which will help us,
+in the first instance, to build and to run the ships at a reasonable
+price. When a bill to that effect comes along, the Mississippi Valley
+will be found all right."
+
+Not a few of the voters in the East, also cordially interested in any
+plan that seemed to them promising and equitable for building up the
+American commercial marine, took the ground that it was an absurdity to
+build up barriers against foreign trade by enacting a tariff bill, such
+as the Dingley measure, with higher duties than the country had ever
+known, and then to attempt to overcome that barrier by means of bounty
+measures, which must themselves constitute a fresh form of taxation on
+the general public.
+
+The mass of the people, in fact, are in sympathy with the movement to
+encourage American shipping, but, for sectional or other reasons, a
+large proportion of them objected to the particular form in which the
+end was sought to be reached in the last Congress. So long as the voice
+and opinion of Mr. Roosevelt have any weight, it is not to be expected
+that the subject is going to be allowed to drop; and with his strength
+of will and determination of character it is at least not improbable
+that, where successive Presidents before him have failed, he will,
+whether still in the Presidential chair or not, ultimately succeed, and
+that not the smallest of the reasons for gratitude to him which future
+generations of Americans will recognise will be that he helped to
+recreate the nation's merchant marine. At present, less than nine
+percent of the American foreign commerce is carried in American bottoms,
+a situation which is not only sufficiently humiliating to a people who
+but a short while ago hoped to dominate the carrying trade of all
+countries but also, what perhaps hurts the Americans almost as much as
+the injury to their pride, absurdly wasteful and unbusinesslike.
+English shipping circles may take the prospect of efforts being made by
+the United States to recover some measure of its lost prestige seriously
+or not: but it would be inadvisable to admit as a factor in their
+calculations any theory as to the inability of the Americans either to
+build ships or sail them as well as the best. With the growth of an
+American merchant marine--if a growth comes--will come also the obvious
+need of a larger navy; and other nations might do well to remember that
+Americans have never yet shown any inability to fight their ships, any
+more than they have to build or sail them.
+
+In basing any estimate of the fighting strength of the United States on
+the figures of her army or navy as they look on paper, the people of
+other nations--Englishmen no less than any--leave out of sight, because
+they have no standard for measuring, that remarkable attribute of the
+American character, which is the greatest of the national assets, the
+combination of self-reliance and resourceful ingenuity which seems to
+make the individual American equal to almost any fortune. It is
+remarkable, but not beyond explanation. It is an essentially Anglo-Saxon
+trait. The British have always possessed it in a degree, if inferior to
+the present day American, at least in excess of other peoples. The
+history of the Empire bears witness to it on every page and it is in
+truth one of the most fundamentally English things in the American
+character. But the conditions of their life have developed it in
+Americans beyond any need which the Englishman has felt. The latter,
+living at home amid the established institutions of a society which
+moves on its way evenly and without friction regardless of any effort
+or action on his part, has had no occasion for those qualities on which
+the American's success, his life, have commonly depended from day to day
+amid the changing emergencies of a frontier life. The American of any
+generation previous to that which is now growing up has seldom known
+what it meant to choose a profession or a vocation in life; but must
+needs do the work that came to him, and, without apprenticeship or
+training, turn to whatever craft has offered.
+
+The notion that every American is, without any special training, by mere
+gift of birthright, competent to any task that may be set him, is
+commonly said to have come in with Andrew Jackson; and President Eliot,
+of Harvard, has dubbed it a "vulgar conceit."[68:1] It is undoubtedly a
+dangerous doctrine to become established as a tenet of national belief
+and least of all men can the head of a great institution for the
+training of the nation's youth afford to encourage it. None the less,
+when the American character is compared with that of any European
+people, it has, if not justification, at least considerable excuse.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once into a new mining camp in the West there drove in the same
+"stage-coach" two young men who became friends on the journey. Each was
+out to seek his fortune and each hoped to find it in the new community.
+Each had his belongings in a "valise" and in each "valise" among those
+belongings was a "shingle," or name-plate, bearing each the name of its
+respective owner followed by the words "Attorney at Law." The young men
+compared their shingles and considered. The small camp would not need
+two lawyers, even if it would provide a living for one. So they
+"matched" coins (the American equivalent of tossing up) to see which of
+the two should erase "Attorney at Law" from his sign and substitute
+"Doctor of Medicine." Which is history; as also is the following:
+
+In another mining camp, some twenty-three years ago, there was at first
+no surveyor. Men paced off the boundaries of their claims and went to
+work as fancy inclined them, and in the town which began to grow up
+houses were built at random regardless of any street-line and with no
+finnicking considerations of a building frontage. So a young fellow
+whose claim was unpromising sent out to civilisation for a set of
+instruments (he had never seen a transit or a level before) and began
+business as a surveyor. He used to come to me secretly that I might
+figure out for him the cubic contents of a ditch or the superficial area
+of a wall. He could barely write and knew no arithmetic at all; but he
+worked most of the night as well as all the day, and when the town took
+to itself a form of organised government he was appointed official
+surveyor and within a few weeks thereafter was made surveyor to the
+county. I doubt not that G---- T---- is rich and prosperous to-day.
+
+On a certain wharf, no matter where, lounged half a dozen seamen when to
+them came the owner of a vessel. It was in the days of '49 when anything
+that could be made to float was being put into commission in the
+California trade, and men who could navigate were scarce.
+
+"Can any of you men" said the newcomer "take a boat out for me to San
+Francisco?"
+
+"I'll do it, sir" said one stepping forward.
+
+"Thunder, Bill!" exclaimed a comrade in an undertone, "you don't know
+nothing about navigating."
+
+"Shut your mouth," said Bill. "Maybe I don't know nothing now, but you
+bet I will by the time I get to 'Frisco."
+
+The same spirit guides almost every young American who drifts West to
+tackle hopefully whatever job the gods may send. The cases wherein he
+has any destiny marked out for him or any especial preference as to the
+lines on which his future career shall run (except that he may hope
+ultimately to be President of the United States) are comparatively few.
+In ten years, he may be a grocer or a banker or a dry-goods merchant or
+a real-estate man or a lawyer. Whatever he is, more likely than not ten
+years later he will be something else.
+
+"What is your trade?" is the first question which an Englishman asks of
+an applicant for employment; and the answer will probably be truthful
+and certainly unimaginative.
+
+"What can you do?" the American enquires under the same circumstances.
+"'Most anything. What have you got to do?" is commonly the reply.
+
+It is an extraordinarily impressive experience for an Englishman to go
+out from the old-established well-formulated ways of the club-life and
+street-life of London, to assist in--not merely to watch but to
+co-operate in--the organisation of society in the wilderness: to see a
+town grow up--indeed, so far as his clumsy ability in the handling of an
+ax will permit, to help to build it; to join the handful of men,
+bearded, roughly clad, and unlettered most of them, proceeding
+deliberately to the fashioning of the framework of government, the
+election of town officers, the appointment of a sheriff, and the
+necessary provisions, rough but not inadequate, for dealing with the
+grosser forms of crime. Quickly thereafter, in the case which I have
+especially in mind, came the formation of the county government and,
+simultaneously therewith, the opportunity (automatically and by mere
+right of the number of the population) to elect a representative to the
+Territorial Legislature. In the first year, however, this last privilege
+had to be pretermitted. The Territorial laws required that any member
+must have been resident in the district from which he came for not less
+than six months prior to his election and must be able to read and
+write; and, as cruel chance would have it, among the first prospectors
+to find their way into the new diggings in the preceding winter, who
+alone could comply with the required term of residence, not one could
+write his name. Had but one been able to do it ever so crudely--could
+one but have made a reasonable pretence of an ability to stumble through
+the opening paragraphs of the Constitution of the United States,--that
+man would inevitably and unanimously have been elected a full-blown
+Legislator. As it was, the new district was perforce compelled to go
+without representation in the Territorial Capital.
+
+"But," it will be objected, and by no one more quickly than by the
+American of the Eastern States, "All Americans do not go through these
+experiences. How many New Yorkers have helped to organise a new mining
+town?" Not many, certainly; and that is one of the reasons why New York
+is, perhaps, the least representative section of all the United States.
+But though the American of to-day may not have had to do these things,
+his father and his grandfather had to. The necessity has long ago left
+New York, but Illinois was not far removed from the circumstances of
+frontier life when Abraham Lincoln was a youth; and the men who laid the
+foundations of Minneapolis, and Kansas City, and Omaha, and Duluth, are
+still alive. The frontiersman is latent in every American.
+
+For the benefit of many Englishmen who think that they have been to the
+United States, when as a matter of fact they have only been to New York,
+it may be as well to explain why New York City is the least typically
+American of all parts of the country. There are some who go back as far
+as Revolutionary days for the explanation, and point out that even then
+New York was more loyalist than patriot; one might go even farther back
+and show that New York always had a conspicuously large non-Anglo-Saxon
+element. But there is no need to go back even to the Revolution. In the
+century that has passed since then, the essential characteristics of the
+American character have been the products of the work which the people
+had to do in the subduing of the wilderness and of the isolation of the
+country--of its segregation from contact with the outside world. New
+York has been the one point in America farthest removed from the
+wilderness and most in touch with Europe, and it has been there that the
+chief forces which have moulded the American character have been least
+operative. The things in a New Yorker which are most characteristic of
+his New-Yorkship are least characteristically American, and among these
+is a much greater friendliness towards Great Britain than is to be found
+elsewhere except in one or two towns of specialised traits. This is not
+in any way to depreciate the position of New York as the greatest and
+most influential city in the United States, as well as (whatever may
+have been the relative standing of it and Boston up to twenty years ago)
+the literary and artistic centre of the country; and I do not know that
+any city of the world has a sight more impressive in its way than
+upper-middle New York--that is to say, than Fifth Avenue from Madison
+Square to the Park. But the English visitor who acquires his ideas of
+American sentiments from what he hears in New York dining-rooms or in
+Wall Street offices, is likely to go far astray. There is an
+instructive, if hackneyed, story of the little girl whose father boasted
+that she had travelled all over the United States. "Dear me!" said the
+recipient of the information, "she has travelled a great deal for one of
+her age!" "Yes, sir! all over the United States--all, except east of
+Chicago."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the course of a long term of residence in the United States, this
+adaptability, this readiness to turn to whatever seems at the time to
+offer the best "opening" (which is so conspicuously a national trait but
+is not especially noticeable in the typical New Yorker) becomes so
+familiar that it ceases to be worth comment. I have seen among my own
+friends journalists become hotel managers, advertising solicitors turn
+to "real estate agents," merchants translated straight into responsible
+positions in the executive departments of railway companies, and railway
+men become merchants and bankers, editors change into engineers and
+engineers into editors, and lawyers into anything from ambassadors to
+hotel clerks. I am not now speaking in praise of these conditions or of
+the results in individual cases. The point to be noticed is that the
+people among whom these conditions prevail must in the long run develop
+into a people of extraordinary resourcefulness and versatility. And in
+the individual cases, the results are not nearly as deplorable as an
+Englishman might suppose or as they would be if the raw material
+consisted of home-staying Englishmen.
+
+The trait however is, as has been said, essentially an Anglo-Saxon
+trait--an English trait--and the colonial Englishman develops the same
+qualities in a not incomparable degree. The Canadian and the New
+Zealander acquire a like unconquerable soul, but the Englishman at home
+is not much impressed thereby, chiefly for the reason that he is almost
+as ignorant of the Canadian and the New Zealander as he is of the
+American, and with the same benevolent ignorance.
+
+In the individual citizen of the United States, he recognises the
+quality in a vague way. "Yankee ingenuity" is familiar to him and he is
+interested in, and amused at, the imperturbability with which the
+individual American--and especially the individual American
+woman--confronts and rises at least equal to whatever new and unheard of
+conditions he (or she) may find himself (or herself) placed among in
+England. But just as the American will not from the likability and
+kindliness of individual Englishmen draw any general inference as to the
+likability and kindliness of the nation, so the Englishman or other
+European rarely gives to these occasional attributes, which he sees
+reproduced again and again in particular Americans, their proper value
+as the manifestations of a national trait of the first importance, a
+trait which makes the people unquestionably formidable as competitors in
+peace and would make them correspondingly formidable as antagonists in
+war. The trait is, as I have said, perhaps the most precious of all the
+American national assets.
+
+Great Britain has recently had abundant evidence of the difficulty of
+turning out all the paraphernalia of victory ready made and is now
+making earnest effort to guard against the necessity of attempting it
+again. But the rules which apply to European peoples do not apply, with
+anything like equal force, to America. England in the South African war
+found by no means despicable fighting material almost ready made in her
+colonial troops; and that same material, certainly not inferior, America
+can supply in almost unlimited quantities. From the West and portions of
+the South, the United States can at any time draw immense numbers of men
+who, in the training of their frontier life, their ability to ride and
+shoot, their habituation to privations of every kind, possess all those
+qualities which made the Boers formidable, with the better moral fibre
+of the Anglo-Saxon to back them.
+
+But this quality of resourcefulness and self-reliance is not a mere
+matter of the moral or physical qualities of the individual. Its spirit
+permeates the nation as a unit. The machinery of the government will
+always move in emergencies more quickly than that of any European
+country; and unpreparedness becomes a vastly less serious matter. The
+standing army of the United States, in spite of the events of the last
+few years, remains little more than a Federal police force; and with no
+mercantile marine to protect and no colonies, there has been till lately
+no need of an American navy. But the European who measures the
+unpreparedness of the nation in the terms of the unpreparedness of his
+own, or any other European, country, not taking into account the
+colonial character of the population, the alertness and audacity of the
+national mind, the resourcefulness and confident self-reliance of the
+people, is likely to fall into error.
+
+The reverse of the medal is, perhaps, more familiar to Europeans, under
+the form of what has generally been called the characteristic American
+lack of the sentiment of reverence. The lack is indubitably there--is
+necessarily there; for what the Englishman does not commonly understand
+is that that lack is not a positive quality in itself. It is but the
+reflection, as it were, or complement, of the national self-reliance.
+How should the American in his new country, with his "Particularist"
+spirit, his insistence on the independence and sovereignty of the
+individual, seem to Europeans other than lacking in reverence?
+
+It is true that now, by mere passage of years, there are monuments in
+the United States which are beginning to gather the dignity and respect
+which naturally attach to age. The American of the present day has great
+veneration for the wisdom of the Fathers of the Republic, much love for
+the old buildings which are associated with the birth of the nation.
+Even the events of the Civil War are beginning to put on something of
+the majesty of antiquity, but there are still alive too many of the
+combatants in that war--who are obviously but commonplace men--for the
+figures of any but some three or four of the greatest of the actors to
+have yet assumed anything like heroic proportions. For the rest, what is
+there in the country which the living American has not made himself, or
+which his fathers did not make? The fabric of society is of too new a
+weaving, he knows too well the trick of it, for it to be wonderful in
+his eyes.
+
+Lack of reverence is only a symptom of the American's strength--not
+admirable in itself, yet, as the index to something admirable, not,
+perhaps, altogether to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack
+of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of
+imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful.
+The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman.
+
+The American national character is, indeed, a finer thing than the
+European generally supposes. The latter sees only occasional facets and
+angles, offshoots and outgrowths, some of them not desirable but even
+grotesque in themselves, while those elements which unify and harmonise
+the whole are likely to escape him. The blunders of American
+diplomats--the _gaucheries_ and ignorances of American consular
+representatives--these are familiar subjects to Europeans; on them many
+a travelling Englishman has based his rather contemptuous opinion of the
+culture of the American people as a whole. But it is unsafe to argue
+from the inferiority of the representative to the inferiority of the
+thing represented.
+
+If two fruit-growers have adjoining orchards and, for the purpose of
+making a display at an agricultural show, one spends months of careful
+nourishing, training, and pruning of certain trees wherefrom he selects
+with care the finest of his fruit, while the other without preparation
+goes out haphazard to his orchard and reaches for the first fruit that
+he sees, it is probable that, judging by their exhibits, the public will
+get an erroneous idea of the characters of the orchards as a whole. And
+this is precisely the difference between the representatives whom the
+United States sends abroad and those sent to be displayed beside them by
+other nations.
+
+There is no recognised diplomatic service in the United States, no
+school for the training of consular representatives, no training or
+nurturing or pruning of any sort. The fundamental objection of the
+American people to the creation of any permanent privileged class, has
+made the thing impossible in the past, while, under the system of party
+patronage, practically the entire representation of the country
+abroad--commercial as well as diplomatic--is changed with each change of
+government. The American cannot count on holding an appointment abroad
+for more than four years; and while four years is altogether too short a
+term to be considered a career, it is over-long for a holiday. So in
+addition to the lack of any trained class from which to draw, even among
+the untrained the choice is much restricted by the undesirability of the
+conditions of the service itself.
+
+Though the conditions have improved immensely of late years, the fact
+remains that the consular service as a whole is not fairly to be
+compared on equal terms with that of other countries; and the majority
+of appointments are still made as the reward for minor services to the
+party in power. Nor are the conditions which govern the appointments to
+the less important diplomatic posts much different; but Great Britain
+has abundant cause to be aware that when the place is one which appeals
+to the ambition of first-class men, first-class men enough are
+forthcoming; though even Ambassadors to London are generally lacking in
+any special training or experience up to the time of their appointment.
+
+Sydney Smith's phrase has been often enough quoted--that when a woman
+makes a public speech, we admire her as we admire a dog that stands upon
+its hind legs, not because she does it well, but because she does it at
+all. Congress includes among its members many curious individuals and,
+as a unit, it does queer things at times. State legislatures are
+sometimes strange looking bodies of men and on occasions they achieve
+legislation which moves the country to mirth. The representatives of the
+nation abroad make blunders which contribute not a little to the gaiety
+of the world. But the thing to admire is that they do these things at
+all--that the legislators, whether Federal or State, and the members of
+the consular service, appointed or elected as they are, and from the
+classes which they represent, do somehow manage to form legislative
+bodies which, year in and year out, will bear comparison well enough
+with other Parliaments, and do in one way and another succeed in giving
+their country a service abroad which is far from despicable as compared
+with that of other peoples, nor all devoid of dignity. The fact that
+results are not immeasurably worse than they are is no small tribute to
+the adaptability of the American character. There is no other national
+character which could stand the same test.
+
+In the absence of any especially trained or officially dedicated class,
+the American people in the mass provides an amazing quantity of not
+impossible material out of which legislators and consuls may be
+made--just as it might equally well be made into whatever should happen
+to be required.
+
+And this fact strikes at the root of a common misapprehension in the
+minds of foreigners as to the constitution of the American people, a
+misapprehension which is fostered by what is written by other foreigners
+after inadequate observation.
+
+Much is thus written of the so-called heterogeneousness of the people of
+America. The Englishman who visits the United States for a few weeks
+only, commonly comes away with an idea that the New Yorker is the
+American people; whereas we have seen why it is that good American
+authorities maintain that in all the width and depth of the continent
+there is no aggregation of persons so little representative of the
+American people as a whole as the inhabitants of New York. After the
+Englishman has been in the United States for some months or a year or
+two, he grows bewildered and reaches the conclusion that there is no
+common American type--nothing but a patchwork of unassimilated units. In
+which conclusion he is just as mistaken as he was at first. There does
+exist a clearly defined and homogeneous American type.
+
+Let us suppose that all the negroes had been swept as with some vast net
+down and away into the Gulf of Mexico; that the Irishmen had been
+gathered out of the cities and deposited back into the Atlantic; that
+the Germans had been rounded up towards their fellows in Chicago and
+Milwaukee and then tipped gently into Lake Michigan, while the
+Scandinavians, having been assembled in Minnesota, had been edged
+courteously over the Canadian border;--when all this had been done,
+there would still remain the great American People. Of this great People
+there would remain certain local variations--in parts of the South, in
+New England, on the plains--but each clearly recognisable as a variety
+only, differing but superficially and in substance possessing
+well-defined all the generic and specific attributes of the race.
+
+If the entire membership of the Chicago Club were to be transferred
+bodily to the Manhattan Club-house in New York, and all the members of
+the Manhattan were simultaneously made to migrate from Fifth Avenue to
+Michigan Avenue, the club servants, beyond missing some familiar faces,
+would not find much difference. Could any man, waking from a trance,
+tell by the men surrounding him whether he was in the Duquesne Club at
+Pittsburgh or the Minnesota Club in St. Paul? And, if it be urged that
+the select club-membership represents a small circle of the population
+only, would the disturbance be much greater if the entire populations of
+Erie and Minneapolis and Kansas City were to execute a three-cornered
+"general post" or if Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine, swapped
+inhabitants? How long would it take the inhabitants of any one town to
+settle down in their new environment and go to work on precisely the
+same lines as their predecessors whom they dislodged? The novelty would,
+I think, be even less than if Manchester and Birmingham were
+miraculously made to execute a similar change in a night.
+
+I do not underrate the magnitude of the problem presented to the people
+of America by the immense volume of immigration from alien races, and
+chiefly from the most undesirable strata in those races, of the last
+few years. On the other hand, I have no shadow of doubt of the ability
+of the people to cope with the problem and to succeed in assimilating to
+itself all the elements in this great influx while itself remaining
+unchanged.
+
+It seems to me that the American himself constantly overestimates the
+influence on his national character of the immigration of the past. To
+persons living in New York, especially if, from philanthropic motives or
+otherwise, they are brought at all into immediate contact with the
+incoming hordes as they arrive, this stream of immigration may well be a
+terrifying thing. Those who are in daily touch with it can hardly fail
+to be oppressed by it, till it gets upon their nerves and breeds
+nightmares; and to such I have more than once recommended that they
+would do well to take a holiday of six months; journey through the West,
+and so come to a realisation of the magnitude of their country and
+correct their point of view. With every mile that one recedes from
+Castle Garden, the phenomenon grows less appalling: the cloud which was
+dense enough to blacken New York harbour makes not a veil to stop one
+ray of sunlight when shredded out over the Mississippi Valley and the
+Western plains.
+
+A bucket of sewage (or of Eau de Cologne), however formidable in itself,
+makes very little difference when tipped into the St. Lawrence River. It
+is, of course, a portentous fact that some twenty millions of foreigners
+should have come into the country to settle in the course of half a
+century; but, after all, the process of assimilation has been
+constantly and successfully at work throughout those fifty years, and I
+think the figures will show that in no one year (not even in 1906, when
+the volume of immigration was the largest and contained the greatest
+proportion of the distinctly "undesirable" elements), if we set against
+the totals the number of those aliens returning to their own countries
+and deduct those who have come from the English-speaking countries, has
+the influx amounted to three quarters of one per cent of the entire
+population of the country.
+
+So far, the dilution of the original character of the people by the
+injection of the foreign elements has been curiously slight, and while
+recognising that the inflow of the last few years has been more serious,
+both in quantity and character, than at any previous period, there does
+not seem to me any reason for questioning the ability of the country to
+absorb and assimilate it without any impairment of the fundamental
+qualities of the people. That at certain points near the seaboard, or in
+places where the newly introduced aliens become congested in masses of
+industrial workers, they present a local problem of extreme difficulty
+may be granted, but I think that those who are in contact with these
+local problems are inclined to exaggerate the general or national
+danger. The dominating American type will persist, as it persists
+to-day; the people will remain, in all that is essential, an Anglo-Saxon
+and a homogeneous people.
+
+In one sense--and that the essential one--the American people is more
+homogeneous than the English. What individuals among them may have been
+in the last generation does not matter. The point is here:--When one
+speaks of the "average Englishman" (as, without regard to grammar, we
+persist in doing) what he really means is the typical representative of
+a comparatively small section of the population, from the middle, or
+upper middle, classes upward. It is the same when one speaks of
+Frenchmen. When he says "the average Frenchman dresses," or "thinks," or
+"talks" in such and such a way, he merely means that so does the normal
+specimen of a class including only a few hundred thousand men, and those
+city dwellers, dress or think or speak. The figure is excusable because
+(apart from the fact that an "average" of the entire population would be
+quite unfindable) the comparatively small class does indeed guide, rule,
+and, practically, think for, the whole population. So far as foreign
+countries are concerned, they represent the policy and mode of thought
+of the nation. The great numerical majority is practically negligible.
+
+The same is true of the people of the United States, but with this
+difference, that the class represented by the "average"--the class of
+which, when grouped together, it is possible to find a reasonably
+typical representative--includes in the United States a vastly larger
+proportion of the whole people than is the case in other countries. It
+would not be possible to find a common mental or moral divisor for the
+members of Parliament in the aggregate, and an equal number of Norfolk
+fishermen or Cornish miners. They are not to be stated in common terms.
+But no such incongruity exists between the members of Congress, Michigan
+lumbermen, and the men of the Texas plains.
+
+It may be that within the smaller circle in England, the
+individuals--thanks to the public schools and the universities--are more
+nearly identical and the type specimen would more closely represent the
+whole. But as soon as we get outside the circle, much greater
+divergences appear. The English are _homogeneous_ over a small area: the
+Americans _homogeneous_ over a much larger.
+
+"You may go all over the States," said Robert Louis Stevenson (and
+Americans will, for love of the man, pardon his calling their country
+"the States") "and--setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of
+foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese--you shall scarce meet with so
+marked a difference of accent as in forty miles between Edinburgh and
+Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and
+Aberdeen." And Stevenson understates the case. There are differences of
+speech in America, but at the most they remain so slight that, after
+all, the resident in one section will rather pride himself on his
+acuteness in recognising the intonation of the stranger as being that of
+some other--of the South, it may be, or of New England. An educated
+Londoner has difficulty in understanding even the London cockney.
+Suffolk, Cornish, or Lancashire--these are almost foreign tongues to
+him. The American of the South has at least no difficulty in
+understanding the New Englander: the New Yorker does not have to make
+the Californian repeat each sentence that he utters.
+
+And this similarity of tongue--this universal mutual
+comprehensibility--is a fact of great importance to the nation. It must
+tend to rapidity of communication--to greater uniformity of thought--to
+much greater readiness in the people to concentrate as a nation on one
+idea or one object. How much does England not lose--there is no way of
+measuring, but the amount must be very great--by the fact that
+communication of thought is practically impossible between people who
+are neighbours? How much would it not contribute to the national
+alertness, to national efficiency, if the local dialects could be swept
+away and the peasantry and gentry of all England--nay of the British
+Isles--talk together easily in one tongue? It is impossible not to
+believe that this ease in the interchange of ideas must in itself
+contribute greatly to uniformity of thought and character in a people.
+Possessing it, it is not easy to see how the American people could have
+failed to become more homogeneous than the English.
+
+But there is a deeper reason for their homogeneousness. The American
+people is not only an English people; it is much more Anglo-Saxon than
+the English themselves. We have already seen how the essential quality
+of both peoples is an Anglo-Saxon quality--what has been called (and the
+phrase will do as well as any other) their "Particularist" instinct. The
+Angles and Saxons (with some modification in the former) were tribes of
+individual workers, sprung from the soil, rooted in it, accustomed
+always to rely on individual labour and individual impulse rather than
+on the initiative, the protection, or the assistance of the State or the
+community. The constitutional history of England is little more than the
+story of the steps by which the Anglo-Saxon, by the strength which this
+quality gave him, came to dominate the other races which invaded or
+settled in Britain and finally worked his way up to and through the
+Norman crust which, as it were, overlay the country.
+
+In England many institutions are of course Norman. An hereditary
+aristocracy, the laws of primogeniture and entail--these are Norman. By
+the help of them the Norman hoped to perpetuate his authority over the
+Saxon herd; and failed. Magna Charta, Cromwell, the Roundheads, the
+Puritans, the spirit of nonconformity, most of the limitations of the
+power of the Throne, the industrial and commercial greatness of
+Britain--these things are Anglo-Saxon. The American colonists (however
+many individuals of Norman blood were among them) were Anglo-Saxon; they
+came from the Anglo-Saxon body of the people and carried with them the
+Anglo-Saxon spirit. They did not reproduce in their new environment an
+hereditary aristocracy, a law of primogeniture or of entail. It is
+probable that no single English colony to-day, if suddenly cut loose
+from the Empire and left to fashion its form of society anew, would
+reproduce any one of these things. In the United States the Anglo-Saxon
+spirit went to work without Norman assistance or (as we choose to view
+it) Norman encumbrances. The Anglo-Saxon spirit is still working in
+England--never perhaps has its operation been more powerfully visible
+than in the trend of thought of the last few years. It is working also
+in the United States; but, because it there works independently of
+Norman traditions, it works faster.
+
+In many things--in almost everything, as we shall see--the two peoples
+are progressing along precisely the same path, a path other than that
+which other nations are treading. In many things--in almost
+everything--the United States moves the more rapidly. It seems at first
+a contradiction in terms to say that the Americans are an English people
+and then to show that in many individual matters the English people is
+approximating to American models. It is in truth no contradiction; and
+the explanation is obvious. Both are impelled by the same spirit, the
+same motives, the same ambitions; but in England that spirit, those
+motives and ambitions work against greater resistance.
+
+What looks at first like a peculiar departure on the part of the
+American people will again and again, on investigation, be found to be
+only the English spirit shooting ahead faster than it can advance in
+England. When, in a particular matter, it appears as if England was
+coming to conform to American precedent, it is, in truth only that,
+having given the impulse to America, she herself is following with less
+speed than the younger runner, but with such speed as she can.
+
+If we bear this fact in mind we shall see how it is illustrated, borne
+out, supported by a score of things that it falls in our way to notice;
+as it is by many hundred things that lie outside our present province.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shall have occasion to notice hereafter how in the past the American
+disposition to dislike England has been fed by the headlong and
+superficial criticism of American affairs by English "literary"
+visitors; and it is unfortunate that the latest[88:1] English visitor to
+write on the United States has hurt American susceptibilities almost as
+keenly as any of his predecessors. With all its brilliant qualities, few
+more superficial "studies" of American affairs have been given to the
+world than that of Mr. H. G. Wells.
+
+Mr. Wells, by his own account, went about the country confronting all
+comers with the questions, "What are you going to make of your future?"
+. . . "What is the American Utopia, how much Will is there shaping to
+attain it?" This, he says, was the conundrum to find an answer to which
+he crossed the Atlantic, and he is much depressed because he failed in
+his search. "When one talks to an American of his national purpose he
+seems a little at a loss"; and when he comes to sum up his conclusions:
+"What seems to me the most significant and pregnant thing of all is
+. . . best indicated by saying that the typical American has no 'sense
+of the State.'"[89:1]
+
+Has Mr. Wells ever gone about England asking Englishmen the same
+question: "What are you going to make of your future?" How much less "at
+a loss" does he anticipate that he would find them? Mr. Wells apparently
+expected to find every American with a card in his vest pocket
+containing a complete scheme of an American Utopia. He was disappointed
+because the government at Washington was not inviting bids for roofing
+in the country and laying the portion north of Mason and Dixon's Line
+with hot-water pipes.
+
+The quality which Mr. Wells--seeing only its individual manifestations,
+quite baffled and unable to look beyond the individuals to any vision of
+the people as a whole (he travelled over a ludicrously small portion of
+the country)--sums up as a "lack of sense of the State" is in truth the
+cardinal quality which has made the greatness of the United States--and
+of England. It is precisely because the peoples rely on individual
+effort and not on the State that they have become greater than all
+other peoples. That is their peculiar political excellence--that they
+are not for ever framing schemes for a paternal all-embracing State, but
+are content to work each in his own sphere, asserting his own
+independence and individuality, from the things as they are, little by
+little towards the things as they ought to be.
+
+If Mr. Wells had prevailed on any typical American to sit down and write
+what, as he understood it, his people were working to accomplish, the
+latter would have written something like this:
+
+"We have got the basis of a form of government under which, when
+perfected, the individual will have larger liberty and better
+opportunity to assert himself than he has ever had in any country since
+organised states have existed. We have a people which enjoys to-day more
+of the material comforts of life than any other people on earth, and the
+chief political problem with which we are wrestling to-day is to see
+that that enjoyment is confirmed to them in perpetuity--not taken from
+them or hampered or limited by any power of an oppressive capitalism. We
+are spending more money, more energy, more earnest thought on the study
+of education as a science or art and on the endowment of educational
+establishments than any other people; as a result we hope that the next
+generation of Americans, besides being the most materially blessed, will
+be the most educated and intelligent of peoples. We are doing all we can
+to weed out dishonesty from our commercial dealings. In the period of
+our growth there was necessarily some laxity in our business ethics, but
+we are doing the best we know how to improve that, and we believe that
+on the whole our methods of doing business are calculated to produce
+more honest men than those in vogue in other countries. What we hope to
+make of our future therefore is to produce a nation of individuals
+freer, better off, and more honest than the world has yet seen. When
+that people comes it can manage its own government."
+
+Not only are these, I fear, larger national aims than the average
+Englishman dares to propose to himself, but they are, I venture to say,
+much more definitely formulated in the "typical American's" mind. If Mr.
+Wells desires to find a people which considers it the duty of good
+citizenship to go about to fashion first the roofs and walls, rafters,
+cornices, and chimney-pots of a governmental structure, relying on the
+State afterwards to legislate comfort and culture and virtue into the
+people, he visited the wrong quarter of the globe. In the Latin races he
+will find the "sense of the State" luxuriantly developed.
+
+Mr. Wells appears infinitely distressed by his failure to find any
+unified national feeling in the American people--by "the chaotic
+condition of the American Will"--by "the dispersal of power"--by the
+fact that "Americans knew of America mainly as the Flag." Which is a
+most curiously complete demonstration of the inadequacy of his judgment.
+
+If Mr. Wells had seen the United States twenty-five years ago, ten years
+ago, and five years ago, before his present visit, the one thing that
+would have most impressed him would have been the amazing growth of the
+sense of national unity. Mr. Wells looks superficially upon the country
+as it is to-day and finds society more chaotic, distances larger,
+sentiment less crystallised than--_mirabile!_--in the older countries of
+Europe, and is plunged in despair. Had he had any knowledge of
+America's past conditions by which to measure the momentary phase in
+which he found the people, he would have known that exactly that thing
+of which he most deplores the absence is the thing which, in the last
+thirty years, has grown with more wonderful rapidity than anything else
+in all this country of wonderful growths.
+
+The mere fact of this development of national feeling is a thing which
+will necessarily call for attention as we go on; for the present it is
+enough to say that Mr. Wells could hardly have exposed more calamitously
+the superficial and cursory quality of his "study" of the country.[92:1]
+
+As a man may not be able to see the forest because of the trees, so Mr.
+Wells is as one who has stood by a great river's bank for a few minutes
+and has not seen the river for the flash of the ripples in the sun, the
+swirl of an eddy here and there, the flotsam swinging by on the current;
+and he has gone away and prattled of the ripples and the eddy and the
+floating branch. The great flow of the river down below does not expose
+itself to the vision of three minutes. He only comes to understand it
+who lives by the river for awhile, sits down by it and studies it--sees
+it in flood and drought--swims in it, bathes in it. Then he will forget
+the ripples and the branches and will come to know something of the
+steadiness of purpose, the depth and strength of it, its unity and its
+power. Nothing but a little more experience would enable Mr. Wells to
+see the national feeling of the American people.
+
+Literature contains few pictures more delightful than that of Mr. Wells,
+drawn by himself, standing with Mr. Putnam--Herbert Putnam of all
+people!--in the Congressional Library at Washington and saying (let me
+quote): "'With all this,' I asked him 'why doesn't the place _think_?'
+He seemed, discreetly, to consider it did."
+
+Mr. Putnam is fortunately always discreet. Otherwise it would be
+pleasant to know what _he_ thought--of his questioner.
+
+     _Note._--On the subject of the homogeneousness of the American
+     people, see Appendix A.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[60:1] As a statement of this nature is always liable to be challenged
+let me say that it is based on the opinions expressed in conversation by
+the correspondents of English papers who came to America at that time in
+an endeavour to reach Cuba. They certainly did not anticipate that the
+American fleet would be able to stand against the Spanish. And, lest
+American readers should be in danger of taking offence at this, let it
+be remembered with how much apprehension the arrival of Admiral
+Cervera's ships was awaited along the eastern coast and how cheaply
+excellent seaside houses were to be acquired that year. Events have
+moved so rapidly since then (above all has the position of the United
+States in the world changed so much) that it is not easy now to conjure
+up the circumstances and sentiments of those days. If Americans
+generally erred as widely as they did in their estimate of the Spanish
+sea-power as compared with their own, it is not surprising that
+Englishmen erred perhaps a little more.
+
+[68:1] _History of the United States_, by James Ford Rhodes, vol. vi.
+
+[88:1] Mr. Crosland has written since; but he has fortunately not been
+taken sufficiently seriously by the American people even to cause them
+annoyance.
+
+[89:1] _The Future in America_, by H. G. Wells, 1906.
+
+[92:1] The futility of this kind of impressionist criticism is well
+illustrated by the fact that almost simultaneously with the appearance
+of Mr. Wells' book, a distinguished Canadian (Mr. Wilfred Campbell) was
+recording his impressions of a visit to England and said: "The people of
+Britain leave national and social affairs too much in the hands of such
+men [professional politicians]. There is a sad lack of the education of
+the people in the direction of a common patriotism. . . . She must get
+back to the sane idea that it is only as a nation and through the
+national ideal that she can help humanity. . . . She has great men in
+all walks of life; she has still the highest-toned Press in the world;
+she has . . . the most ideal legislature, she has great universities and
+churches with the finest and greatest Christian ideals. But none of
+these influences are used, as they should be, for the general national
+good. They work separately, or too much as individuals. It is only the
+leavening of these institutions with a large spirit of the national
+destiny that will lift Britain . . . out of its present material
+slough." (_The Outlook_, November 17, 1906.) These words are almost a
+paraphrase of Mr. Wells' indictment of the United States.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS
+
+     America's Bigness--A New Atlantis--The Effect of Expansion
+     on a People--A Family Estranged--Parsnips--An American
+     Woman in England--An Englishman in America--International
+     Caricatures--Shibboleths: dropped H's and a "twang"--Matthew
+     Arnold's Clothes--The Honourable S---- B----.
+
+
+"John Bull with plenty of elbow-room" was the phrase. It does not
+necessarily follow that the widest lands breed the finest people; and
+there is worthless territory enough in the United States to cut up into
+two or three Englands. Yet no patriotic American would wish one rod,
+pole, or perch of it away, whether of the Bad Lands, the Florida Swamps,
+the Alkali Plains of the Southwest, or the most sterile and inaccessible
+regions of the Rockies. If of no other use, each, merely as an
+instrument of discipline, has contributed something to the hardening of
+the fibre of the people; and good and bad together the domain of the
+United States is very large. Englishmen are aware of the fact, merely as
+a fact; but they seldom seem to appreciate its full significance.
+
+Let us consider for a minute what would be the effect on the British
+people if it suddenly came into possession of such an estate. We are not
+talking now of distant colonies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South
+Africa--these may be equal together to more than another United States,
+and they are working out their own destiny. The inhabitants of each are
+a band of British men and women just as were the early inhabitants of
+the United States and as, essentially, the people of the United States
+still remain to-day. Each of those bands will follow its own path and
+work its own miracles--whether greater than that which the people of the
+United States has wrought or not, only later generations will know. Each
+of these, though British still and always, is launched on its individual
+career; and it is not of them that we are speaking now, but of the
+Englishmen who remain at home, of the present-day population of the
+British Isles.
+
+What would be the result if suddenly the limits of the British Isles
+were to be miraculously expanded? What would happen if the floor of the
+ocean heaved itself up and Great Britain awoke to find the coast of
+Cornwall and Wales mysteriously reaching westward, the Irish Sea no more
+than a Hudson River which barely kept the shores of Lancashire and
+Cumberland from touching Ireland,--an Ireland of which the western
+coast--the coast of Munster and Connaught--was prolonged a thousand
+leagues towards the setting sun; while the west coast of the north of
+Scotland, Ross and Sutherland, had absorbed the Hebrides and stretched
+unbroken into two thousand miles of plain and mountain range--Britain no
+longer but Atlantis come again and all British soil? It was to nothing
+less miraculous that the thirteen original States fell heir. And what
+would be the effect on the British race?
+
+Coal and iron, silver and gold, rivers full of fish, forest and prairie
+teeming with game, pasture for millions of cattle, wheat land and corn
+land, cotton land and orchard for any man who chose to take them;--the
+wretches struggling and stifling in the London slums having nothing to
+do but grasp axe and rifle and go out to subdue the wilderness;--farms,
+not by the half-acre, but by the hundred acres for every one of the
+unemployed. Is it possible to doubt that the race would be strengthened,
+not materially only, but in its moral qualities,--that Englishmen in
+another generation would not only be a wealthier and a more powerful
+people but a healthier, lustier, nobler? How then are we to suppose that
+just such a change, such an uplifting, has not come about in that other
+British people to whom all this has happened, who came into their
+wonderful birthright four generations ago and for a century and a
+quarter have been fashioning it to their will and being fashioned by it
+after the will of Another? By what process of logic, English reader, are
+you going to convince yourself that this race--your own with larger
+opportunities--is not the finer race of the two?
+
+I have not, be it observed, expressed the opinion that the American
+national character is finer than the English; only that it is finer than
+the European commonly supposes. Nor am I expressing such an opinion now
+but only setting forth certain elementary considerations for the
+reader's judgment. When the European sees in the individual American, or
+in a dozen individual Americans, certain peculiarities, inelegancies,
+and sometimes even impertinences--call them what you will,--he is too
+prone to think that these are the essentials of the American character.
+The essentials of the American character are the essentials of the
+English character--with elbow-room. "While the outlook of the New
+Yorker is wider than ours," says Mr. Archer, "his standpoint is the
+same." In that elbow-room, with that wider outlook, it is likely that
+new offshoots from the character will have developed--excrescences, not
+perhaps in themselves always lovely--but if we remember what the trunk
+is from which they spring, or what it was, we shall probably think
+better, or less, of those excrescences, while remembering also the
+likelihood that in the larger room and richer soil the trunk itself may
+also have expanded and strengthened and solidified.
+
+The English reader might decide for himself what justification there is
+for supposing that the character of that offset from the British stock
+which, a century and a quarter ago, was put in possession of this
+magnificent estate should have deteriorated rather than improved as
+compared with the character of that portion of the stock which remained
+rooted in the old soil hemmed in between the ancient boundaries.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There have been, of course, many other influences at work in the
+moulding of the American character, besides the mere vastness of his
+continent; but the fact remains that this has been immensely the most
+powerful of all the factors. English originally, the American is still
+English in his essentials, modified chiefly by the circumstances of his
+material environment, the magnificence of his estate, the width of his
+horizons, the disciplining of his nature by the Titanic struggle with
+the physical conditions of the wilderness and the necessary development
+of those qualities of resourcefulness, buoyancy, and self-reliance which
+the exigencies of that struggle have demanded. Moreover, what is almost
+the most important item of all, his entire national life has been lived,
+and that struggle conducted, in practical isolation from all contact
+with other peoples. Immigrants, indeed, from all of them, the United
+States has constantly been receiving; but as a nation the American
+people has been singularly segregated from the rest of the earth,
+blessedly free from friction with, and dependence on, other countries.
+As we have seen, it has had no friction with any Power except Great
+Britain; and with Great Britain itself so little that Englishmen hardly
+recall that it has occurred.
+
+It may be worth while to stop one minute to rehearse and to re-enforce
+the points which so far it has been my aim to make.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For their own sakes, anything like conflict between the two nations is
+not to be dreamed of; but, for the world's sake, an intimate alliance
+between them in the cause of peace would be the most blessed conceivable
+thing. There is every justification for such an alliance, not merely in
+the incalculable benefits that would result, but in the original kinship
+of the peoples, the permanent and fundamental sympathy of their natures,
+and their community of ambitions and ways of thought. Unfortunately
+these reasons for union have been obscured by a century of aloofness, so
+that to-day neither people fully understands the other and they look,
+one at the other, from widely different standpoints. By reason chiefly
+of their isolation, in which they have had little contact with other
+peoples, the Americans have come to think of Great Britain as little
+less foreign (and by the accidents of their history as even more
+hostile) than any other Power. Still acknowledging as an historical
+fact the original kinship, they, like many a son who has gone out into
+the world and prospered exceedingly, take pleasure chiefly in
+contemplating how far they have travelled since they struck out for
+themselves and how many characteristics they have developed which were
+not part of the inheritance from the old stock. Dwelling on these they
+have become blind to the essential family likeness to that old stock
+which still remains their dominant trait. Moreover, seeing how during
+all these years the old folk have let them go their own way, seemingly
+indifferent to their future, at times, intentionally or not, making that
+future none the easier of accomplishment, they have come to nurse a
+resentment against those at home and will not believe that the family
+still bears them an affectionate good-will quite other than it feels for
+even the best-liked of the friends who are not of the same descent.
+
+On England's part, she saw the younger ones go out into the world with
+regret, strove to restrain them unwisely, obstinately, unfairly--and
+failed. Since then she has been very busy, supremely occupied with her
+own affairs. The young ones who had gone out into the world in, as
+seemed to her, such headstrong fashion, for all that she knows now that
+she was wrong, have been doing well, and she has always been glad to
+hear it, but--well, they were a long way off. At times she has thought
+that the young ones were somewhat too pushing--too anxious to get on
+regardless of her or others' welfare,--and half-heartedly (not all
+unintentionally, but certainly with no thought of alienating the
+affection of the others) she has interfered or passively stood in the
+young folk's way. At last the day came when she was horrified to find
+that the younger branch--very prosperous and independent now--had not
+only ceased to regard her as a mother but had come almost to the point
+of holding her as an enemy. It was at first incredible and she strove as
+best she could to put matters right and to explain how foreign to her
+wishes it was and how unnatural it seemed to her that there should be
+any approach to ill-feeling between them. But she does not convince the
+other, partly because she herself has in her turn grown out of touch
+with that other's ideas. At intervals she has met members of the younger
+branch who have come home to visit and she has discovered all sorts of
+new tricks of manner, new ways of speech, new points of view that they
+have picked up in their new surroundings, and, like the members of the
+younger branch themselves, she sees more of these little things than she
+does of the character that is behind them. Her vision of the family
+likeness is blurred by the intrusion of provoking little points of
+difference. She sees the mannerisms, but the strength of the qualities
+of which they are manifestations escapes her.
+
+So it comes about that the two are at cross purposes. "We may call this
+country Daughter," wrote G. W. Steevens, "she does not call us Mother."
+The elder sincerely desires the affection of the younger--sincerely
+feels affection herself; but is hampered in making the other realise her
+sincerity by a constant desire to criticise those little foreign ways
+that the other has acquired. Just so does a parent obscure her love for
+a son by deploring the strange manners which he picks up at school; just
+so is she blinded to his real qualities as a man, because he will insist
+on giving his time to messing about with machinery instead of settling
+down properly to study for the Church.
+
+Burke (was it not?) spoke of his love for Ireland as "dearer than could
+be justified to reason." Englishmen might well have difficulty in
+justifying to their reason their affection for America; for to hear an
+Englishman speak of American peculiarities and eccentricities, it would
+often seem that to love such men would be pure unreason. But these
+criticisms are no true index to the British national feeling for the
+Americans as a people. Does a brother not love his sister because he
+says rude things about her little failings? Americans hear the
+criticisms and, their own hearts being alienated from Great Britain,
+cannot believe that Britishers have any affection for them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am well aware that I make--and can make--no general statement from
+which many readers, both in England and America, will not dissent.
+Englishmen will arise to say that they do not love America; and
+Americans--many Americans--will vow with their hands on their hearts
+that they have the greatest affection for Great Britain. Vast numbers of
+Americans will protest against being called a homogeneous people, and a
+vast number more against the accusation of being still essentially
+English; the fact being that it is no easier now than it was in the days
+of Burke (I am sure of my author this time) to "draw up an indictment
+against a whole people." A composite photograph is commonly only an
+indifferent likeness of any of the individuals--least of all will the
+individual be likely to recognise it as a portrait of himself. But the
+type-character will stand out clearly--especially to the eyes of others
+not of the type. Most of the notions of Englishmen about Americans are
+drawn from the casual contact with individual Americans in England
+(where from contrast with their surroundings the little peculiarities
+stand out most conspicuously) or from the hasty "impressions" of
+visitors who have looked only on the surface--and but a small portion of
+that. Even, I am aware, after a lifetime spent in studying the two
+peoples, in pondering on their likenesses and unlikenesses and striving
+to measure the feeling of each for the other, there is always danger of
+talking what I will ask to be permitted to call "parsnips."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I first went to the United States I carried with me a commission
+from certain highly reputable English papers to incorporate my
+"impressions" in occasional letters. Among the earliest facts of any
+moment which I was enabled to communicate to English readers was that
+the middle classes in America (I was careful to explain what the "middle
+classes" were in a country where none existed)--that the middle classes,
+I say, lived almost entirely on parsnips. I had not arrived at this
+important ethnological fact with any undue haste. I had already lived in
+the United States for some three months, half of which time had been
+spent in New York hotels and boarding houses and half in Northern New
+York and rural New England, where, staying at farms or at the houses of
+families in the smaller towns to which I bore letters of introduction, I
+flattered myself that I had probed deep--Oh, ever so deep!--below the
+surface and had come to understand the people as they lived in their own
+homes. And my ripened judgment was that the bulk of the well-to-do
+people of the country supported life chiefly by consumption of parsnips.
+
+Some fifteen years later I was at supper at the Century Club in New
+York and the small party at our table as we discussed the scalloped
+oysters (which are one of the pillars of the Century) included a
+well-known American author and journalist and an even better known and
+much-loved artist. But why should I not mention their names? They were
+Montgomery Schuyler and John La Farge. Both had been to Europe that
+year--La Farge to pay his first visit to Italy, while Schuyler, whether
+with or without La Farge I forget, had made a somewhat extensive trip
+through rural England in, I think, a dog-cart. The conversation ran
+chiefly on their experiences and suddenly Schuyler turned to me with:
+"Here, you Englishman, why do the middle classes of England live chiefly
+on parsnips?"
+
+The thing is incredible--except that it happened. Schuyler, no less than
+I fifteen years before, spoke in the fulness of conviction arising from
+what he, no less than I, believed to have been wide and adequate
+experience. The memory of that experience has made me tolerant of the
+cocksure generalisations with which the Englishman who has visited
+America, or the American who has been in England, for a few months
+delights to regale his compatriots on his return. Quite recently a
+charming American woman who is good enough to count me among her
+friends, was in London for the first time in her life. She is perhaps as
+typical a representative of Western American womanhood--distinctively
+Western--as could be found; very good to look upon, warm-hearted,
+fearless and earnest in her truth-loving, straightforward life. But in
+voice, in manner, and in frankness of speech she is peculiarly and
+essentially Western. She loved England and English people, so she told
+me at the Carlton on the eve of her return to America,--just loved them,
+but English women (and I can see her wrinkling her eyebrows at me to
+give emphasis to what she said) were so _dreadfully_ outspoken: they did
+say such _awful_ things! I thought I knew the one Englishwoman from
+whose conversation she had derived this idea and remembering my own
+parsnips, I forgave her. She has, since her return, I doubt not, dwelt
+often to her friends on this amazing frankness of speech in
+Englishwomen. And if she only knew what twenty Englishwomen thought of
+her outspokenness!
+
+Not long ago I heard an eminent member of the medical profession in
+London, who had just returned from a trip to Canada and the United
+States with representatives of the British Medical Association, telling
+a ring of interested listeners all about the politics, geography,
+manners, and customs of the people of America. Among other things he
+explained that in America there was no such thing known as a _table d'
+hote_; all your meals at hotels and restaurants had to be ordered _a la
+carte_. "I should have thought," he said, "that a good _table d' hote_
+at an hotel in New York and other towns would pay. It would be a
+novelty." It may be well to explain to English readers who do not know
+America, that fifteen years ago a meal _a la carte_ was, and over a
+large part of the country still is, practically unknown in the United
+States. The system of buying one's board and lodging in installments is
+known in America as "the European plan."
+
+If it would not be too long a digression, I would explain how this is a
+cardinal principle of the American business mind. The disposition of
+every American is to take over a whole contract _en bloc_, which in
+England, where every man is a specialist, would be split into twenty
+different transactions. The American thinks in round numbers: "What will
+the whole thing come to?" he asks; while the Englishman wants to know
+the items. This habit permeates American life in every department. It is
+labour-saving. Few things amuse or irritate the American visitor to
+England more than the having to pay individually for a number of small
+conveniences which at home he is accustomed to have "thrown in"; and the
+first time when he is presented with an English hotel bill (I am not
+speaking of the modern semi-American hotels in London) with its infinite
+list of items, is an experience that he never forgets.
+
+All of which is only to explain that the distinguished physician, when
+he spoke of the absence of _tables d'hote_ in America, was talking
+parsnips. His experience had been limited to a few hotels and
+restaurants in New York and one or two other large towns.
+
+If only it were possible to catch in some great "receiver" or "coherer,"
+or some similar instrument, all the things that were said in London in
+the course of twenty-four hours about the United States by people who
+had been there, and all the things that were said in New York in the
+same period about England by people of equal experience, and set them
+down side by side, it would make entertaining reading. The wonder is,
+not that we misunderstand each other as much as we do, but that somehow
+we escape a vast mutual, international contempt.
+
+Several times in the course of my residence in the United States I have
+had said to me: "What! Are you an Englishman? But you don't drop your
+H's!"
+
+Which is ridiculous, is it not, English reader? But before you smile at
+it, permit me to explain that it is no whit worse than when you
+say:--"What! Are you an American? But you don't speak with an accent!"
+Or possibly you call it a "twang" or you say "speak through your nose."
+
+You may be dining, English reader, at, let us say, the Carlton or Savoy
+when a party of Americans comes into the room--Americans of the kind
+that every one knows for Americans as soon as he sees or hears them. The
+women are admirably dressed--perhaps a shade too admirably--and the
+costumes of the men irreproachable. But there is that something of
+manner, of walk, of voice which draws all eyes to them as they advance
+to their table, and the room is hushed as they arrange their seats.
+"Those horrid Americans!" says one of your party and no one protests.
+But at the next table to you there is seated another party of delightful
+people--low-voiced, well-mannered, excellently bred in every tone and
+movement. You wonder dimly if you have not met them somewhere. At all
+events you would very much like to meet them. They are infinitely more
+distressed than you at the behaviour of the American party which has
+just come in--because they are Americans also. And I may add that they
+will not be in the least flattered, if you should be lucky enough to
+meet them, by your telling them that you "never would have thought it."
+
+Perhaps, English reader, you have lived long enough in some other
+country than England to have learned what a loathsome thing the
+travelling Englishman often appears. Possibly you have been privileged
+to hear the frank and unofficial opinion of some native of that
+country--an opinion not intended for your ears, but addressed to a
+compatriot of the speaker--of English people in general, based upon his
+experience of those whom he has seen. Such an experience is quite
+illuminating. I know few things more offensive than the behaviour of a
+certain class of German when he is in Paris. The noisy, nasal American
+at the Carlton or Savoy is no more representative of America than the
+loud-voiced, check-suited Englishman at Delmonico's or the
+Waldorf-Astoria is the man by whom you wish your nation to be judged. It
+may be a purposeful provision of a higher Power that the people of all
+countries should appear unprepossessing when they are abroad, for the
+fostering in each nation of the spirit of patriotism; for why should any
+of us be patriots if all the foreigners who came to our shores were as
+inoffensive as ourselves? The truth is that those who are inoffensive
+pass unnoticed. It is the occasional caricature--the parody--of the
+national type that catches our eye; and on him we too often base our
+judgment of a whole people.
+
+Those Englishmen who only England know are inclined to think that the
+check-suited fellow countryman is a creation of the French and German
+comic press. Those who have lived outside of England for some
+considerable number of years have learned better. The late Senator Hoar
+in his _Autobiography of Seventy Years_ has some very shrewd remarks
+about Matthew Arnold. The Senator had a cordial regard for Matthew
+Arnold--"a huge liking" he calls his feeling,--and he has this
+delightful sentence in regard to him: "I do not mean to say that his
+three lectures on translating Homer are the greatest literary work of
+our time. But I think, on the whole, that I should rather have the pair
+of intellectual eyes which can see Homer as he saw him, than any other
+mental quality I can think of." "But"--and mark this--"Mr. Arnold has
+never seemed to me fortunate in his judgment about Americans . . . The
+trouble with Mr. Arnold is that he never travelled in the United States
+when on this side of the Atlantic. . . . He visited a great City or two,
+but never made himself acquainted with the American people. He never
+knew the sources of our power or the spirit of our people."
+
+Senator Hoar, with a generous nature made thrice generous by the
+mellowness of years, speaking of the man he hugely liked, tempered the
+truth to a more than paternal mildness. But it is the truth. Matthew
+Arnold, to put it bluntly, was wrong-headed in his judgment of America
+and Americans to a degree which one living long in the United States
+only comes slowly and reluctantly to understand. And if he so erred, how
+shall all the lesser teachers from whom England gets its knowledge of
+America keep straight?
+
+But what the American people really objected to in Matthew Arnold was
+not any blundering things that he said of them, but the fact that he
+wore on inappropriate occasions in New York a brown checked suit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And across all the gulf of more than twenty years there looms up in my
+memory--"looms like some Homer-rock or Troy-tree"--the figure of the
+Hon. S----y B----l flaunting his mustard coloured suit, gridironed with
+a four-inch check, across three thousand miles of continent, to the
+delight of cities, filling prairies with wonder and moving the Rocky
+Mountains to undisguised mirth. And how could we others explain that he,
+with his undeniably John-Bull-like breadth of shoulder and ruddy face,
+was not a fair sample of the British aristocrat? Was he not an
+Honourable and the son of a Baron and the "real thing" in every way? I
+have no doubt that there still live in the prairie towns of North Dakota
+and in the recesses of the mountains of Montana hundreds of men and
+women, grown old now, who through all the mists of the years still
+remember that lamentable figure; and to them, though they may have seen
+and barely noticed ten thousand Englishmen since, the typical Britisher
+still remains the Hon. S----y B----l.
+
+It is not possible to say how far the influence of one man may extend. I
+verily believe that twenty years ago those clothes of Matthew Arnold
+stood for more in America's estimate of England than the _Alabama_
+incident. Ex-President Cleveland, as we have seen, speaks of the
+"sublime patriotism and devotion to their nation's honour" of the "plain
+people of the land" who backed him up when war with Great Britain seemed
+to be so near. But I wonder in how many breasts the desire for war was
+inspired not by patriotism but by memory of the Hon. S----y B----l. And
+when the Englishman thinks of the possibility of war with the United
+States, with whom is it that he pictures himself as fighting? Some one
+individual American, whom he has seen in London, drunk perhaps,
+certainly noisy and offensive. Such a one stands in the mind of many an
+Englishman who has not travelled as the type of the whole people of the
+United States.
+
+If it were possible for the two peoples to come to know each other as
+they really are--if one half of the population of each country could for
+a season change places with one half of the other, so that all the
+individuals of both nations would be acquainted with the ways and
+thoughts of the other, not as the comic artists draw them, nor as they
+are when they are abroad, but as they live their daily lives at
+home--then indeed would all thought of difference between the two
+disappear, and war between them be as impossible as war between Surrey
+and Kent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE AMERICAN ATTITUDE TOWARDS WOMEN
+
+     The Isolation of the United States--American Ignorance of the
+     World--Sensitiveness to Criticism--Exaggeration of their Own
+     Virtues--The Myth of American Chivalrousness--Whence it
+     Originated--The Climatic Myth--International Marriages--
+     English Manners and American--The View of Womanhood in
+     Youth--Co-education of the Sexes--Conjugal Morality--The
+     Artistic Sense in American Women--Two Stenographers--An
+     Incident of Camp-Life--"Molly-be-damned"--A Nice Way of
+     Travelling--How do they do it?--Women in Public Life--The
+     Conditions which Co-operate--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit again.
+
+
+It will be roughly true to say that the Englishman's misunderstanding of
+America is generally the result of misinformation--of "parsnips"--of
+having had reported to him things which are superficial and untrue;
+whereas the American's misunderstanding of England is chiefly the result
+of his absorption in his own affairs and lack of a standard of
+comparison. The Americans as a people have been until recently, and
+still are in only a moderately less degree, peculiarly ignorant of other
+peoples and of the ways of the world.
+
+This has been unfortunate, so far as their judgment of England is
+concerned, in two ways,--first, as has already been said, because they
+have had no opportunity of measuring Great Britain against other
+nations, so that one and all are equally foreign, and second and more
+positively, in the general misconception in the American mind as to the
+character and aims of the British Empire and the temper of British rule.
+From the same authorities, the popular histories and school manuals, as
+supplied the American people for so long with their ideas of the conduct
+of the British troops in the Revolutionary War, they also learned of
+India and the British; and the one fact which every American, twenty
+years ago, knew about British India was that the English blew Sepoys
+from the mouths of cannon. Every American youth saw in his school
+history a picture of the thing being done. It helped to point the moral
+of British brutalities in the War of Independence and it was beaten into
+the plastic young minds until an impression was made which was never
+effaced. Of late years not a few Americans have arisen to tell the
+people something of the truth about British rule in India--of its
+uprightness, its beneficence, its tolerance,--but it will be a
+generation yet before the people as a whole has any approximate
+conception of the facts.
+
+It was in no way to the discredit of the American people--and enormously
+to their advantage--that they were for so long ignorant of the world.
+How should they have been otherwise when separated from that world by
+three thousand miles of ocean? They had, moreover, in the problems
+connected with the establishment of their own government, and the
+expansion of that government across the continent, enough to occupy
+their thoughts and energies. For a century the people lived
+self-concentrated, introspective, their minds filled only with thoughts
+of themselves. If foreign affairs were discussed at all it was in
+curiously childlike and impracticable terms. The nation grew up a
+nation of provincials (there is no other word for it), with a
+provincialism which was somewhat modified, but still provincial, in the
+cities of the Atlantic coast, and which, after all, had a dignity of its
+own from the mere fact that it was continent-wide.
+
+The Spanish-American War brought the people suddenly into contact with
+the things of Europe and widened their horizon. The war itself was only
+an accident; for the growth of American commerce, the increase of
+wealth, the uncontainable expansive force of their industrial energy,
+must have compelled a departure from the old isolation under any
+circumstances. The quarrel with Spain did but furnish, as it were, a
+definite taking-off place for the leap which had to be made.[113:1]
+Since then, foreign politics and foreign affairs have acquired a new
+interest for Americans. They are no longer topics entirely alien from
+their every-day life and thoughts. It would still be absurd to pretend
+that the affairs of Europe (or for that matter of Asia) have anything
+like the interest for Americans that they have for Europeans, or that
+the educated American is not as a rule still seriously uninformed on
+many matters (all except the bare bones of facts and dates) of
+geography, of ethnology, of world-politics which are elementary matters
+to the Englishman of corresponding education;[113:2] but with their
+_debut_ as a World-Power--above all with the acquisition of their
+colonial dependencies--Americans have become (I use the phrase in all
+courtesy) immensely more intelligent in their outlook on the affairs of
+the world. With a longer experience of the difficulties of colonial
+government, they will also come to appreciate more nearly at its true
+value the work which Great Britain has done for humanity.
+
+Americans may retort that their knowledge of Europe was at least no
+scantier than the Englishman's knowledge of America, and the mistakes of
+travelling Englishmen in regard to the size, the character, and the
+constitution of the country have been a fruitful source of American
+witticism. But why should Englishmen know anything of the United
+States? The affairs of the United States were, after all, however big,
+the affairs of the United States and not of any other part of the rest
+of the world; while the affairs of Europe were the affairs of all the
+world outside of the United States. Undoubtedly the American could
+fairly offset the Englishman's ignorance of America against the
+American's ignorance of England; but what has never failed to strike an
+Englishman is the American's ignorance of other parts of the world,
+which might be regarded as common to both. They were not common to both;
+for, as has been said, since the beginning of her history, which has
+stretched over some centuries, England has been constantly mixed up with
+the affairs, not only of Europe, but of the remoter parts of the earth,
+while the United States for the single century of her history has lived
+insulated and almost solely intent on her own affairs. So though the
+American has no adequate retort against the Englishman for his
+ignorance, he need not defend it. It has been an accident of his
+geographical situation and needs no more apology than the Rocky
+Mountains. But, like the Rocky Mountains, it is a fact which has had a
+distinct influence on his character. It is probably unavoidable that a
+people--as an individual--which lives a segregated life, with its
+thoughts turned almost wholly on itself, should come to exaggerate,
+perhaps its own weaknesses, but certainly its virtues.
+
+The boy who lives secluded from companionship, when he goes out into the
+world, will find not merely that he is diffident and sensitive about his
+own defects, real or imaginary, but that he is different from other
+people. It may take him all his life to learn--perhaps he will never
+learn--that his emotional and intellectual experiences are no prodigies
+of sentiment and phoenixes of thought, but the common experiences of
+half his fellows. It has been such a life of seclusion that the American
+people lived--though they hardly know it (and perhaps some American
+readers will resent the statement), because the mere fact of their
+seclusion has prevented them from seeing how secluded, as compared with
+other peoples, they have been. It is true that individual Americans of
+the well-to-do classes travel more (and more intelligently) than any
+other people except the English; but this, as leavening the nation, is a
+small off-set against the daily lack of mental contact with foreign
+affairs at home.
+
+But if this sheltered boy be further occasionally subjected to the
+inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world--a candid
+and outspoken elderly relative--he is likely to become, on the one hand,
+morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame,
+and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride in whatever is awarded
+praise.
+
+Both these tendencies have been acutely developed in the American
+character--an extraordinary sensitiveness to criticism by outsiders of
+certain national foibles, and a no less conspicuous belief in the heroic
+proportions of their good qualities. For surely no people has ever been
+blessed in its seclusion with such an abundance of criticism of singular
+candour. The frank brutality with which the travelling Englishman has
+made his opinions known on any peculiar trait or unusual institution
+which he has been pleased to think that he has noticed in the United
+States has been vastly more ill-mannered than anything in the manners of
+the Americans themselves on which he has animadverted so freely. The
+thing most comparable to it--most nearly as ill-mannered--is, perhaps,
+the frank brutality with which the travelling American expresses
+himself--and herself--in regard to things in Europe. In it, in fact, we
+see again another aspect of the same fundamentally English trait,--the
+insistence on the sovereignty of the individual--and Americans come by
+it legitimately. Every time that they display it they do but make
+confession of their original Anglo-Saxon descent and essentially English
+nature. The Englishman in America has, however, had some excuse for his
+readiness to criticise, in the interest, the anxiety, with which, at
+least until recent years, the Americans have invited his opinions. But
+if that has gone some way to justify his expression of those opinions,
+it has furnished no sort of excuse for the lack of tact and breeding
+which he has shown in the process. The American does not commonly wait
+for the invitation.
+
+"My! But isn't that quaint! Now in America we . . ." etc. So speaks an
+uncultivated American on seeing something that strikes him--or her--as
+novel in London, not unkindly critical, but anxious to give information
+about his country--and uninvited. But whereas the Englishman is so
+accustomed to the abuse and criticism of other peoples that the harmless
+chatter of the American ripples more or less unheeded by him, the
+American, less case-hardened in his isolation, hears the Englishman's
+bluntly worded expression of contempt, and it hurts. It does not hurt
+nearly as much now as it did twenty years ago; but the harm has largely
+been done.
+
+The harm would not be so serious but for the American sensitiveness
+bred of his seclusion,--if that is (at the risk of seeming to repeat
+myself I must again say) he knew enough of the world to know that he
+himself has precisely the same critical inclination as the Englishman
+and that it is a trait inherited from common ancestors. The Anglo-Saxon
+race acquired early in its life the conviction that it was a trifle
+better than any other section of the human kind. And it is justified.
+We--Americans and Englishmen alike--hold that we are better than any
+other people. That the root-trait has developed somewhat differently in
+the two portions of the family is an accident.
+
+The Englishman--who, when at home, has himself lived, not entirely
+secluded, but in a measure shut off from contact with other peoples--by
+continual going abroad and never-ceasing friction with his neighbours,
+by perpetual disheartenment with the perplexities of his colonial
+empire, has become less of a critic than a grumbler; and to do him
+justice he is, in speech, infinitely more contemptuous of his own
+government than he is of the American or any other. The American on the
+contrary remains cheerfully, light-heartedly, garrulously critical. He
+comes out in the world and gazes on it young-eyed, and he prattles: "My
+father is bigger than your father, and my sister has longer hair than
+yours, and my money box is larger than yours." It is neither unkindly
+meant nor, by Englishmen, very unkindly taken. It is less offensive than
+the mature, corrosive sullenness of the Englishman; but it is the same
+thing. "The French foot-guards are dressed in blue and all the marching
+regiments in white; which has a very foolish appearance. And as for blue
+regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the Artillery," says
+the footman in Moore's _Zeluco_.
+
+Similarly, when he has been praised, the lad has plumed himself unduly
+on the thing that found approval. He would not do it now; for the
+American people of to-day is, as it were, grown up; but, again, the harm
+has been done. Americans rarely make the mistake of underestimating the
+excellence of their virtues. Nor is it their fault, but that of their
+critics.
+
+The American people labours under delusions about its own character and
+qualities in several notable particulars. It exaggerates its own energy
+and spirit of enterprise, its sense of humour and its chivalrousness
+towards women. That it should be aware that it possesses each of these
+qualities in a considerable degree would do no harm, for self-esteem is
+good for a nation; but it believes that it possesses them to the
+exclusion of the rest of mankind. And that is unfortunate; for it makes
+the individual American assume the lack of these qualities in the
+English and thereby decreases his estimate of the English character. I
+am not endeavouring to reduce the American's good opinion of
+himself--only to make him think better of the Englishman by assuring him
+that in each of these particulars there is remarkably little to choose
+between them. And what excellence he has in each he owes to the fact
+that he is in the main English in origin.
+
+That Americans should think that they have a higher respect for
+womanhood than any other people is not surprising; for every other
+people thinks precisely the same thing. They would be unique among
+peoples if they thought otherwise. Frenchman, German, Italian,
+Spaniard, Greek--each and every one who has not had his eyes opened by
+travel and knowledge of the world believes, with no less sincerity of
+conviction than the American, that to him alone of all peoples has it
+been vouchsafed to know how duly to reverence the divine feminine. To
+the Englishman it seems that the German not seldom treats his wife much
+as if she were a cow; and he is sometimes distressed at the way in
+which, for all the pretty things he says to her, the Frenchman, not of
+the labouring classes only, will allow his wife to work for and wait on
+him. While the language which an Italian can, on occasions, use towards
+the partner of his joys is, to English ears, appalling. But each goes on
+serenely satisfied of his own superiority. You others, you may pay
+lip-service, yes; but deep down, in the heart of hearts--_we_ know. The
+American has as good a right to this same foible as any other; but what
+is to be noted is that whereas Englishmen laugh at the pretensions of
+Continental peoples, they have been willing to accept the chivalry of
+the American at his own valuation: the fact being that the valuation is
+not originally American, but was made by the travelling Englishmen of
+the past who communicated their appraisement to the people at home as
+well as to the American whom they complimented. Englishmen of the
+present day have accepted the belief as an inheritance and without
+question; for it was at least a generation and a half ago that the myth
+first obtained vogue, and the two facts most commonly adduced in its
+support by the English visitors who spread it were, first, that women
+could walk about the streets of New York or any other American city,
+unattended and at such hours as pleased them, without being insulted;
+and, second (absurdly enough), the provision of special "ladies'
+entrances" to hotels, which seem to have enormously impressed several
+English visitors to the United States who afterwards wrote their
+"impressions."
+
+For the first of these, it is a mere matter of local custom and police
+regulation. When it is understood that in certain streets of certain
+cities, at certain hours of the day, no women walk unattended except
+such as desire to be insulted, it is probable that other women, who go
+there in ignorance, will suffer inconvenience. Nor has the difference in
+local custom any bearing whatever on the respective morality of
+different localities. These things are arranged differently in different
+countries; that is all. Moreover, in this particular a great change has
+come over American cities in late years, nor are all American cities or
+all English by any means alike.
+
+A similar change has come in the matter of "ladies' entrances" to
+hotels. If the provision of the separate doors was a sign of peculiar
+chivalry, are we then to conclude that their disappearance shows that
+chivalry is decaying? By no means. It only means that the hotels are
+improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was
+built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly
+from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all
+hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged
+and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side,
+came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women
+should frequent that common entrance. Had a hotel constructed and
+managed on the same principles been set down in any English town, women
+would have declined to use it at all, nor would Englishmen have
+expected their womenfolk to do so. Americans avoided the difficulty by
+creating the "ladies' entrance." But it was no evidence of superior
+chivalry on the part of the people that, having devised a place not fit
+for woman's occupancy and more unpleasant than was to be found in any
+other part of the world, they provided (albeit rather inadequate) means
+by which women could avoid visiting it.
+
+Once I saw two young English girls--sweet girls, tall and graceful, with
+English roses blooming in their cheeks--come down-stairs in the evening,
+after dinner, as they might have done in any hotel to which they had
+been accustomed in Europe, to the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New
+York. It was a time of some political excitement and there are enough
+men living now who remember what the Fifth Avenue Hotel used to be at
+such seasons twenty years ago. The girls--it was probably their first
+night on American soil and they could not stand being cooped up in their
+room upstairs all the evening--made their way to the nearest seat and
+sat down clinging each to the other's hand. Around them surged perhaps a
+hundred men, chewing, spitting, smoking, slapping each other on the
+backs, and laughing coarsely. The girls gazed in wonder and with visibly
+increasing embarrassment for perhaps five minutes, before they slipped
+away, the roses in their cheeks doubly carmine and still clinging each
+to the other's hand.
+
+For the benefit of my companion (whose appearance indicated an
+Englishman) an American on an adjoining seat held forth to his friends
+on what he called the "indecency" of the conduct of the girls in coming
+down to the public hall and the "effrontery" of Englishwomen in
+general.
+
+In hotels of the modern type there is no need for women to use a
+separate entrance or to draw their skirts aside and hurry through the
+public passages. But it is sad if we must conclude that the building of
+such hotels is an evidence of dying national chivalry.
+
+Every American firmly believes that he individually, as well as each of
+his countrymen, has by heritage a truer respect for womanhood than the
+peoples of less happy countries are able to appreciate. But many
+Americans also believe that every Englishman is rough and brutal to his
+wife, who does daily all manner of menial offices for him, a belief
+which is probably akin to the climatic fiction and of Continental
+origin. In the old days, when there was no United States of America, the
+peoples of the sunny countries of Southern Europe jibed at the English
+climate; and with ample justification. English writers have never denied
+that justification--in comparison with Southern Europe; and volumes
+could be compiled of extracts from English literature, from Shakespeare
+downwards, in abuse of British fog and mist and rain. But because Nice
+and Naples are entitled to give themselves airs, under what patent do
+Chicago and Pittsburgh claim the same right? Why should Englishmen
+submit uncomplainingly when Milwaukee and Duluth arrogate to themselves
+the privilege of sneering at them which was conceded originally and
+willingly enough to Cannes? Riverside in California, Columbia in South
+Carolina, Colorado Springs or Old Point Comfort--these, and such as
+they, may boast, and no one has ground for protest; but it is time to
+"call for credentials" when Buffalo, New Haven, and St. Paul and the
+rest propose to come in in the same company. If, in the beginning of
+things, English writers had had to compare the British climate not with
+that of Europe but with the northern part of the United States, the
+references to it in English literature would constitute a hymn of
+thanksgiving.
+
+As the case stands, however, the people of all parts of the United
+States alike, in many of which mere existence is a hardship for some
+months in the year, are firmly convinced that the inhabitants of the
+British Isles are in comparison with themselves profoundly to be pitied
+for their deplorable climate; and it is probable that the prevailing
+idea as to the Englishman's habitual treatment of his wife has much the
+same origin. It is an inheritance of the Continental belief that John
+Bull sold his womenfolk at Smithfield. The frequency of international
+marriages and the continued stream of travel across the Atlantic is, of
+course, beginning to correct the popular American point of view, but
+there are still millions of honest and intelligent people in the United
+States who, when they read that an American girl is going to be married
+to an Englishman, pity her from their hearts in the belief that, for the
+sake of a coronet or some such bauble, she is selling herself to become
+a sort of domestic drudge.
+
+Occasionally also even international marriages turn out unhappily; and
+whenever that is the case the American people hear of it in luxuriant
+detail. But of the thousands of happy unions nothing is said. Not many
+years ago there was a conspicuous case, wherein an American woman, whom
+the people of the United States loved much as Englishmen loved the
+Empress Frederick or the Princess Alice, failed to find happiness with
+an English husband. Of the rights and wrongs of that case, neither I nor
+the American people in the mass know anything, but it is the generally
+accepted belief in the United States that the lady's husband was some
+degrees worse than Bluebeard. I would not venture to hazard a guess at
+the number of times that I have heard a conversation on this subject
+clinched with the argument: "Well, now, look at N---- G----!" Against
+that one instance the stories of a thousand American women who are
+living happy lives in Europe would not weigh. If they do not confess
+their unhappiness, indeed, "it is probably only because they are proud,
+as a free-born American girl should be, and would die rather than to let
+others know the humiliations to which they are subjected."
+
+"Oh, yes, you Englishmen!" an American woman will say, "your manners are
+better than our American men's and you are politer to us in little
+things. But you despise us in your hearts!" It is an argument which, in
+anything less than a lifetime, there is no way of disproving. American
+men also, of course, habitually comfort themselves with the same
+assurance, viz.,--that with less outward show of courtesy, they cherish
+in their hearts a higher ideal of womanhood than an Englishman can
+attain to. Precisely at what point this possession of a higher ideal
+begins to manifest itself in externals does not appear. After twenty
+years of intimacy in American homes I have failed to find any trace of
+it.
+
+Let me not be misunderstood! I know scores of beautiful homes in the
+United States, in many widely sundered cities, where the men are as
+courteous, as chivalrous, as devoted to their wives--and where the women
+are as sweet and tender to, and as wholly wrapped up in, their
+husbands--as in any homes on earth. As I write, the faces of men and
+women rise before me, from many thousand miles away, whom I admire and
+love as much as one can admire and love one's fellow-beings. There are
+these homes I hope and believe--there are noble men and beautiful women
+finding and making for themselves and each other the highest happiness
+of which our nature is capable--in every country. But we are not now
+speaking of the few or of the best individuals, but of averages; and
+after twenty years of opportunity for observing I have entirely failed
+to find justification for believing that there is any peculiar inward
+grace in the American which belies the difference in his outward manner.
+
+This is, of course, only an individual opinion,[126:1] which is
+necessarily subject to correction by any one who may have had superior
+opportunities for forming a trustworthy judgment. I contend, however,
+not as a matter of opinion, but as what seems to me to be a certainty,
+that whatever may be the inward feeling in regard to the other sex on
+the part of the men of either nation after they have arrived at mature
+years, the young Englishman, as he comes to manhood, possesses a much
+higher ideal of womanhood than is possessed by the young American of
+corresponding age. And I hold to this positively in spite of the fact
+that many Americans possessing a large knowledge of transatlantic
+conditions may very possibly not admit it.
+
+I rejoice to believe that to the majority of English youths of decent
+bringing up at the age at which they commonly leave the public school to
+go to the university, womanhood still is a very white and sacred thing,
+in presence of which a mere man or boy can but be bashful and awkward
+from very reverence and consciousness of inferiority, even as it surely
+was a quarter of a century ago and as, at the same time, it as surely
+was not to the youth of the United States. Again, of course, in both
+countries there are differences between individuals, differences between
+sets and cliques; but I am not mistaken about the tone of the English
+youth of my own day nor am I mistaken about the tone of the American
+youths, of the corresponding class, with whom I have come in intimate
+contact in the United States. Their language about, their whole mental
+attitude towards, woman was during my first years in America an
+amazement and a shock to me. It has never ceased to be other than
+repellent.
+
+The greater freedom of contact allowed to the youth of both sexes in the
+United States, and above all the co-educational institutions (especially
+those of a higher grade), must of course have some effect, whether for
+good or ill. It may be that the early-acquired knowledge of the American
+youth is in the long run salutary; that his image of womanhood is, as is
+claimed, more "practical," and likely to form a better basis for
+happiness in life, than the dream and illusion of the English boy; but
+here we get into a quagmire of mere speculation in which no individual
+opinion has any virtue whatsoever.
+
+I am well aware also of the serious offence that will be given to
+innumerable good and earnest people in the United States by what I now
+say. This is no place to discuss the question of co-education. I am
+speaking only of one aspect of it, and even if it were to be granted
+that in that one aspect its results are evil, that evil may very
+possibly be outweighed many times over by the good which flows from it
+in other directions. Even in expressing the opinion that there is this
+one evil result, I am conscious that I shall call down upon myself much
+indignation and some contempt. It will be said that I have not studied
+the subject scientifically (which may be true) and that I am not
+acquainted with what the statistics show (which is less true), and that
+my observation has been prejudiced and superficial. Let me say however
+that I have been brought to the conclusions to which I have been forced
+not by prejudice but against prejudice and when I would have much
+preferred to feel otherwise. Let me also say that my condemnation is not
+directed against the elementary public schools so much as against that
+more select class of co-educational establishments for pupils of less
+juvenile years. It would, I think, be interesting to know what
+percentage of the girls at present at a given number of such
+establishments are the daughters of parents--fathers especially--who
+were at those same institutions in their youth. It is a subject
+which--so amazed was I, coming with an English-trained mind, at certain
+things which were said in incidental conversation--I sought a good many
+opportunities of enquiring into; with the result that I know that there
+are some parents who, though they had fifty daughters, would never allow
+one to go to the institutions at which they themselves spent some years.
+And this condemnation covers, to my present memory, five separate
+institutions scattered from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"If you marry an American girl," says _Life_--I quote from memory,--"you
+may be sure that you will not be the first man she has kissed. If you
+marry an English one, you may be certain you will not be the last."
+
+Whether this is true, viz., that, granting that the American girl is,
+before marriage, exposed to more temptation than her English sister, the
+latter more than makes up for it in the freedom of married life, is
+another quagmire. No statistics, whether of marriage, of divorce, or of
+the ratio of increase in population, are of any use as a guide. Each man
+or woman, who has had any opportunity of judging, will be guided solely
+by the narrow circle of his or her personal experience; and I know that
+the man whose opinion on the subject I would most regard holds exactly
+opposite views to myself--and what my own may be I trust I may be
+excused from stating. But while on the subject of the relative conjugal
+morality of the two peoples opinions will differ widely with individual
+experience, I have never met a shadow of disagreement in competent
+opinion in regard to the facts about the youth of the two countries. It
+may be, as I have heard a clever woman say, that the way for a member of
+her sex to get the greatest enjoyment out of life is to be brought up in
+America and married in England. If so let us rejoice that so many
+charming women choose the way which opens to them the possibility of the
+greatest felicity.
+
+There is, of course, a widespread impression in England that American
+women as a rule are not womanly. The average American girl acquires when
+young a self-possession and an ability to converse in company which
+Englishwomen only, and then not always, acquire much later in life.
+Therefore the American girl appears, to English eyes, to be "forward,"
+and she is assumed to possess all the vices which go with "forwardness"
+in an English maiden. Which is entirely unjust. Let us remember that
+there is hardly a girl growing up in England to-day who would not have
+been considered forward and ill-mannered to an almost intolerable degree
+by her great-grandmother. But that the girls of to-day are any the less
+womanly, in all that is sweet and essential in womanliness, than any
+generation of their ancestors, I for one do not believe. Nor do I
+believe that in another generation, when they will perhaps, as a matter
+of course, possess all the social precocity (as it seems to us) of the
+American girl of to-day, they will thereby be any the less true and
+tender women than their mothers.
+
+In particular, are American girls supposed to be so commercially
+case-hardened that their artistic sensibilities have been destroyed. A
+notorious American "revivalist" some years ago returned from a
+much-advertised trip to England and told his American congregations of
+the sinfulness which he had seen in the Old World. Among other things he
+had seen, so he said, more tipsy men and women in the streets of London
+in (I think) a month than he had seen in the streets of his native town
+of Topeka, Kansas, in some--no matter what--large number of years. Very
+possibly he was right. But he omitted to say that he had also seen
+several million more sober ones. A population of 6,000,000 frequently
+contains more drunkards than one of 30,000. It also contains more
+metaphysicians. On the same principle it is entirely likely that the
+American girl, who talks so much, says many more foolish things than the
+English one who, if she can help it, never talks at all. The American
+girl is only a girl after all, and because she has acquired a
+conversational fluency which the Englishwoman will only arrive at twenty
+years later, it is not just to suppose that she must also have acquired
+an additional twenty years' maturity of mind.
+
+Most English readers are familiar with the picture of the American girl
+who flits through Europe seeing nothing in the Parthenon or in Whitehall
+beyond an inferiority in size and splendour to the last new insurance
+company's building in New York. She has been a favourite character in
+fiction, and the name of the artist who first imagined her has long been
+lost. Perhaps she was Daisy Miller's grandmother. In reality, in spite
+of that lack of reverence which is undoubtedly a national American
+characteristic, the average American woman has an almost passionate love
+for those glories of antiquity which her own country necessarily lacks,
+such as few Englishwomen are capable of feeling.
+
+"How in our hearts we envy you the mere names of your streets!" said an
+American woman to me once. It is not easy for an English man or woman to
+conceive what romance and wonder cluster round the names of Fleet Street
+and the Mall to the minds of many educated Americans. We, if we are
+away from them for half a dozen years, long for them in our exile and
+rejoice in them on our return. The American of sensibility feels that
+he--and more especially she--has been cut off from them for as many
+generations and adores them with an ardour proportionately magnified.
+But he (or she) would not exchange Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Euclid
+Avenue or the Lake Shore Drive, as the case may be, for all London.
+
+It was once my fortune to show over Westminster Abbey an American woman
+whose name, by reason of her works--sound practical common-sense
+works,--has come to be known throughout the United States, and I heard
+"the wings of the dead centuries beat about her ears." I took her to
+Poet's Corner. She turned herself slowly about and looked at the names
+carved on either side of her, and then looked down and saw the names
+that lay graven beneath her feet; and she dropped sobbing on her knees
+upon the pavement. Johnson was not kind to the American colonies in his
+life. Those tears which fell upon his name, where it is cut into the
+slab of paving, were part of America's revenge.
+
+We all remember Kipling's "type-writer girl" in San Francisco,--"the
+young lady who in England would be a Person,"--who suddenly quoted at
+him Theophile Gautier. It is an incident which many Englishmen have read
+with incredulity, but which has nothing curious in it to the American
+mind. A stenographer in my own offices subsequently, I have heard,
+married a rich owner of race-horses and her dinners I understand are
+delightful. She was an excellent stenographer.
+
+In all frontier communities, where women are few and the primitive
+instincts have freer play than in more artificial societies, there
+blossoms a certain rough and ready chivalrousness which sets respect of
+womanhood above all laws and makes every man a self-constituted champion
+of the sex. This may be seen in a thousand communities scattered over
+the farther West; but it is no outgrowth of the American character, for
+it flourishes in all new societies in all parts of the world, no matter
+to what nationality the men of those societies belong.
+
+In a certain mining camp, late at night, a man--a man of some means, the
+son of a banker in a neighbouring town--was walking with a woman.
+Neither was sober and the woman fell to the ground. The man kicked her
+and told her to get up. As she did not comply he cursed her and kicked
+her again. Then chanced to come along one Ferguson, a gambler and a
+notoriously "bad man," who bade the other stop abusing the woman,
+whereupon he was promptly told to go to ---- and mind his own business.
+Ferguson replied that if the other touched the woman again he would
+shoot him. It was at this point that the altercation brought me out of
+my cabin, for the thing was happening almost where my doorstep (had I
+had a doorstep) ought to have been. The banker's son paid no heed to the
+warning, and once more proceeded to kick the woman. Thereupon Ferguson
+shot him. And, with the weapon which Ferguson carried and his ability as
+a marksman, when he shot, it might be safely regarded as final.
+
+No attempt was made to punish Ferguson. The deputy sheriff, arriving on
+the scene, heard his story and mine and those of one or two others who
+had heard or seen more or less of what passed; and Ferguson was a free
+man. Nor was there any shadow of a suggestion in camp that justice
+should take any other course. The fact was established that the dead man
+had been abusing a woman. Ferguson had only done what any other man in
+camp must have done under the same circumstances.
+
+And while the banker's son was a person of some standing, there was
+certainly nothing in her whom he had maltreated, beyond her mere
+womanhood, to constitute a claim on one grain of respect.
+
+I trust that I am not reflecting on the chivalry of the camp when I
+record the fact that the name by which the lady was universally known
+was "Molly-be-damned." The camp, to a man, idolised her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One of my earliest revelations of the capacity of the American woman was
+vouchsafed to me in this way:
+
+A party of us, perhaps fifteen in all, had travelled a distance of some
+two thousand miles to assist at the opening of a new line of railway in
+the remote Northwest. We duly arrived at the little mountain town at
+which the junction was to be made between the line running up from the
+south and that running down from the north, over which we had come. The
+ceremony of driving the last spike was conducted with due solemnity,
+after which a "banquet" was given to us by the Mayor and citizens of the
+small community. After the banquet--which was really a luncheon--we
+again boarded our train to complete the run to the southern end of the
+line, a number of the citizens of the town with their wives accompanying
+us on the jaunt. It chanced to be my privilege to escort to the car,
+and for the remainder of the journey to sit beside, the wife of the
+editor of the local paper. She was pretty, charming, and admirably
+dressed. We talked of many things,--of America and England, of the red
+Indians, and of books,--when in a pause in the conversation she
+remarked:
+
+"I think this is such a nice way of travelling, don't you?"
+
+It puzzled me. What did she mean? Was she referring to the fact that we
+were on a special train composed of private cars, or what? The truth did
+not at first occur to me--that she was referring to railway travelling
+as a whole, it being the first time that she had ever been on or seen a
+train. Explanations followed. She had been brought by her parents, soon
+after the close of the Civil War, when two or three years old, across
+the plains in a prairie schooner (the high-topped waggon in which the
+pioneers used to make their westward pilgrimage), taking some four
+months for the trip from the old home in, I think, Kentucky. At all
+events she was a Southerner. Since then during her whole life she had
+known no surroundings but those of the little mining settlement huddled
+in among the mountains, her longest trips from home having been for a
+distance of thirty or forty miles on horseback or on a buckboard. She
+had lived all her life in log cabins and never known what it meant to
+have a servant. She read French and Italian, but could not take any
+interest in German. She sketched and painted, and was incomparably
+better informed on matters of art than I, though she knew the Masters
+only, of course, through the medium of prints and engravings. What she
+most dearly longed to do in all the world was to see a theatre--Irving
+for choice--and to hear some one of the Italian operas, with the
+libretti of which, as well as the music, so far as her piano would
+interpret for her, she was already familiar.
+
+Now at last the railway had come and she was, from that day forward,
+within some six days' travelling of New York; and her husband had
+faithfully promised that they should go East together for at least three
+or four weeks that winter. And as she sat and talked in her soft
+Southern voice, there in the heart of the wilds which had been all the
+world to her, she might, so far as a mere man's eyes could judge, have
+been dropped down in any country house in England to be a conspicuously
+charming member of any charming house-party.
+
+Familiarity with similar instances, though I think with none more
+striking, has robbed the miracle, so far as its mere outward
+manifestation is concerned, of something of its wonder; but the inward
+marvel of it remains as inexplicable as ever. By what power or instinct
+do they do it? With nothing of inheritance, so far as can be judged, to
+justify any aspirations towards the good or beautiful, among the poorest
+and hardest of surroundings, with none but the most meagre of
+educational facilities, by what inherent quality is it that the American
+woman, not now and again only, but in her tens of thousands, rises to
+such an instinctive comprehension of what is good and worth while in
+life, that she becomes, not through any external influence, but by mere
+process of her own development, the equal of those who have spent their
+lives amid all that is most beautifying and elevating of what the world
+has to afford? When she takes her place, graciously and composedly, as
+the mistress of some historic home or amid the surroundings of a Court,
+we say that it is her "adaptability." But adaptability can do no more
+than raise one to the level of one's surroundings--not above them. Is it
+ambition? But whence derived? And by what so tutored and guided that it
+reaches only for what is good? How is it tempered that she remains all
+pure womanly at the last?
+
+It may be that the extent to which, especially in the Western States,
+American women of wealth and position are called upon to bear their
+share in public work--in the management of art societies, the building
+of art buildings and public libraries, the endowment and conduct of
+hospitals, and in educational work of all kinds--gives them such an
+opportunity of showing the qualities which are in them, as is denied to
+their English sisters of similar position but who live in older
+established communities. And there are, of course, women in England who
+lead lives as beautiful and as beneficent as are lived anywhere upon
+earth. The miracle is that the American woman--and, again I say, not now
+and again but in her tens of thousands--becomes what she is out of the
+environment in which her youth has so often been lived.
+
+It will be necessary later to refer to the larger part played by
+American women, as compared with English, in the intellectual life of
+the country,--a matter which itself has, as will be noticed, no little
+bearing on the question of the merits and demerits of the co-education
+of the sexes. The best intellectual work, the best literary work, the
+best artistic work, is still probably done by the men in the United
+States; but an immensely larger part of that work is done by women than
+in England, and in ordinary society (outside of the professional
+literary and artistic circles) it is the women who are generally best
+informed, as will be seen, on literature and art. To which is to be
+added the fact that they take a much livelier and more intelligent
+interest than do the majority of Englishwomen in public affairs, and
+assume a more considerable share of the work of a public or quasi-public
+character in educational and similar matters. It might be supposed that
+this greater prominence of women in the national life of the country was
+in itself a proof that men deferred more to them and placed them on a
+higher level; but when analysed it will be found far from being any such
+proof. Rather is woman's position an evidence of, and a result of, man's
+neglect. By which it is not intended to imply any discourteous or
+inconsiderate neglect; but merely that American men have been, and still
+are, of necessity more busy than Englishmen, more absorbed in their own
+work, whereby women have been left to live their own lives and thrown on
+their own resources much more than in England. The mere pre-occupation
+of the men, moreover, necessarily leaves much work undone which, for the
+good of society, must be done; and women have seized the opportunity of
+doing it. They have been especially ready to do so, inasmuch as the
+spirit of work and of pushfulness is in the atmosphere about them, and
+they have been educated at the same schools as the men. The contempt of
+men for idleness, in a stage of society when there was more than enough
+work for all men to do, necessarily extended to the women. It is not
+good, in the United States, for any one, woman hardly more than man, to
+be idle.
+
+Women being compelled to organise their own lives for themselves, they
+carried into that organisation the spirit of energy and enthusiasm which
+filled the air of the young and growing communities. Finding work to
+their hands to do, they have done it--taking, and in the process fitting
+themselves to take, a much more prominent part in the communal life than
+is borne by their sisters in England or than those sisters are to-day,
+in the mass, qualified to assume. Precisely so (as often in English
+history) do women, in some beleaguered city or desperately pressed
+outpost, turn soldiers. No share in, or credit for, the result is to be
+assigned to any peculiar forethought, deference, or chivalrousness on
+the part of the men, their fellows in the fight. It is to the women that
+credit belongs.
+
+And while we are thus comparing the position of women in America with
+their position in England, it is to be noted that so excellent an
+authority among Frenchmen as M. Paul Cambon, in speaking of the position
+of women in England, uses precisely the same terms as an Englishman must
+use when speaking of the conditions in America. Americans have gone a
+step farther--are a shade more "Feminist"--than the English, impelled,
+as has been seen, by the peculiar conditions of their growing
+communities in a new land. But it is only a step and accidental.
+
+Englishmen looking at America are prone to see only that step, whereas
+what Frenchmen or other Continental Europeans see is that both
+Englishmen and Americans together have travelled far, and are still
+travelling fast, on a path quite other than that which is followed by
+the rest of the peoples. In their view, the single step is
+insignificant. What is obvious is that in both is working the same
+Anglo-Saxon trait--the tendency to insist upon the independence of the
+individual. Feminism--the spirit of feminine progress--is repugnant to
+the Roman Catholic Church; and we would not look to see it developing
+strongly in Roman Catholic countries. But, what is more important, it is
+repugnant to all peoples which set the community or the state or the
+government before the individual, that is to say to all peoples except
+the Anglo-Saxon.
+
+We see here again, as we shall see in many things, how powerless have
+been all other racial elements in the United States to modify the
+English character of the people. The weight of all those elements must
+be, and, so far as they have any weight, is directly against the
+American tendency to feminine predominance. All the Germans, all the
+Irish, all the Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, or other foreigners who
+are in the United States to-day or have ever come to the United States
+have not, as Germans, or Irish, or Frenchmen, contributed among them one
+particle, one smallest impulse, to the position which women hold in the
+life of the country to-day; rather has it been achieved in defiance of
+the instincts and ideas of each of those by the English spirit which
+works irrepressibly in the people. There could hardly be stronger
+testimony to the dominating quality of that spirit. One may approve of
+the conditions as they have been evolved; or one may not. One may be
+Feminist or anti-Feminist. But whether it be for good or evil, the
+position which women hold in the United States to-day they hold by
+virtue of the fact that the American people is _Anglais_--an English or
+Anglo-Saxon people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And in spite of all the precautions that I have taken to make myself
+clear and to avoid offence, I feel that some word of explanation, lest I
+be misunderstood, is still needed. It is not here said that American men
+do not place woman on a higher plane than any Continental European
+people. I earnestly believe that both branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock
+do hold to a higher ideal of womanhood than some (and for all I know to
+the contrary, than all) of the peoples of Europe. What I am denying is
+that Americans have any greater reverence for women, any higher
+chivalrousness, than Englishmen. And this denial I make not with any
+desire to belittle the chivalry of American men but only in the
+endeavour to correct the popular American impression about Englishmen,
+which does not contribute to the promotion of that good-will which ought
+to exist between the peoples. I am not suggesting that Americans should
+think less of themselves, only that, with wider knowledge, they would
+think better of Englishmen.
+
+And, on the subject of co-education, it seems that yet another word is
+needed, for since this chapter was put into type, it has had the
+advantage of being read by an American friend whose opinion on any
+subject must be valuable, and who has given especial attention to
+educational matters. He thinks it would be judicious that I should make
+it clearer than I have done that, in what I have said, I am not
+criticising the American co-educational system in any aspect save one.
+He writes:
+
+"The essential purpose of the system of co-education which had been
+adopted, not only in the State universities supported by public funds,
+but in certain colleges of earlier date, such as Oberlin, in Ohio, and
+in comparatively recent institutions like Cornell University, of New
+York, is to secure for the women facilities for training and for
+intellectual development not less adequate than those provided for the
+men.
+
+"It was contended that if any provision for higher education for women
+was to be made, it was only equitable, and in fact essential, that such
+provision should be of the best. It was not practicable with the
+resources available in new communities, to double up the machinery for
+college education, and if the women were not to be put off with
+instructors of a cheaper and poorer grade and with inadequate
+collections and laboratories, they must be admitted to a share of the
+service of the instructors, and in the use of the collections, of the
+great institutions.
+
+"It is further contended by well-informed people that what they call a
+natural relation between the sexes, such as comes up in the competitive
+work of university life, so far from furthering, has the result of
+lessening the risk of immature sentiment and of undesirable flirtations.
+By the use of the college system, the advantages of these larger
+facilities can be secured to women, and have in fact been secured
+without any sacrifice of the separate life of the women students.
+
+"In Columbia University, for instance (in New York City), the women
+students belong to Barnard College. This college is one of the seven
+colleges that constitute Columbia University: but it possesses a
+separate foundation and a faculty of its own. The women students have
+the advantage of the university collections and of a large number of the
+university lectures. The relation between the college and the university
+is in certain respects similar to that of Newnham and Girton with the
+University of Cambridge, with the essential difference that Barnard
+College constitutes, as stated, an integral part of the university, and
+that the Barnard students are entitled to secure their university
+degrees from A.B. to Ph.D."
+
+From the above it is by no means certain that on the one point on which
+I have dwelt, his opinion coincides with mine; and the best explanation
+thereof that I can offer is that while he knows certain parts of the
+country and some institutions better than I, I know certain parts of the
+country and some institutions better than he. And we will "let it go at
+that."
+
+As for the rest, for the general economic advantages of the
+co-educational system to the community, I think I am prepared to go as
+far as almost anyone. I am even inclined to follow Miss M. Carey Thomas,
+the President of Bryn Mawr College, who attributes the industrial
+progress of the United States largely to the fact that the men of the
+country have such well-educated mothers. It seems to me a not
+unreasonable or extravagant suggestion. I am certainly of the opinion
+that the conversational fluency and mental alertness of the American
+woman, as well as in large measure her capacity for bearing her share in
+the civic labour, are largely the result of the fact that she has in
+most cases had precisely the same education as her brothers.
+
+At present I believe that something more than one-half (56 per cent.) of
+the pupils in all the elementary and secondary schools, whether public
+or private, in the United States are girls; and that the system is
+permanently established cannot be questioned. What are known as the
+State universities, that is to say universities which are supported
+entirely, or almost entirely, by State grants, or by annual taxes
+ordered through State legislation, have from their first foundation been
+available for women students as well as for men. The citizens, who, as
+taxpayers, were contributing the funds required for the foundation and
+the maintenance of these institutions, took the ground, very naturally,
+that all who contributed should have the same rights in the educational
+advantages to be secured. It was impossible from the American point of
+view to deny to a man whose family circle included only daughters the
+university education, given at public expense, which was available for
+the family of sons.
+
+Co-education had its beginning in most parts of the United States in the
+fact that in the frontier communities there were often not enough boy
+pupils to support a school nor was there enough money to maintain a
+separate school for girls; but what began experimentally and as a matter
+of necessity has long become an integral part of the American social
+system. So far from losing ground it is continually (and never more
+rapidly than in recent years) gaining in the Universities as well as in
+the schools, in private as well as public institutions.
+
+But, as I said in first approaching the subject, the merits or demerits
+of co-education are not a topic which comes within the scope of this
+book. It was necessary to refer to it only as it impinged on the general
+question of the relation of the sexes.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[113:1] The English reader will find this explained at length in Mr. A.
+R. Colquhoun's work, _Greater America_.
+
+[113:2] That Americans may understand more clearly what I mean and, so
+understanding, see that I speak without intention to offend, I quote
+from the list of "arrangements" in London for the forthcoming week, as
+given in to-day's London _Times_, those items which have a peculiarly
+cosmopolitan or extra-British character:
+
+Friday--Pilgrims' Club, dinner to Lord Curzon of Kedleston, ex-Viceroy
+of India.
+
+Saturday--Lyceum Club, dinner in honour of France to meet the French
+Ambassador and members of the Embassy, etc.
+
+Sunday--Te Deum for Greek Independence, Greek Church, Moscow Road.
+
+Monday--Royal Geographical Society, Sir Henry MacMahon on "Recent
+Exploration and Survey in Seistan."
+
+Tuesday--Royal Colonial Institute, dinner and meeting. Royal Asiatic
+Society, Major Vost on "Kapilavastu." China Association, dinner to
+Prince Tsai-tse and his colleagues, Mr. R. S. Grundy, C. B., presiding.
+
+Wednesday--Central Asian Society, Mr. A. Hamilton on "The Oxus River."
+Japan Society, Professor J. Takakusu on "Buddhism as we Find it in
+Japan."
+
+This, it should be explained, is not a good week, because it is "out of
+the season," but the list will, I fancy, as it stands suffice to give
+American readers an idea of the extent to which London is in touch with
+the interests of all the world--an idea of how, by comparison, it is
+impossible to speak of New York (and still more of America as a whole)
+as being other than non-cosmopolitan, or in a not offensive sense,
+provincial.
+
+[126:1] It is worth remarking that Dr. Emil Reich (whose opinion I quote
+not because I attach any value to it personally, but in deference to the
+judgment of those who do) prophesies that the "silent war" between men
+and women in the United States "will soon become so acute that it will
+cease to be silent." It is to be borne in mind, of course, that the
+Doctor's experience in the United States has as yet been but
+inconsiderable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ENGLISH HUMOUR AND AMERICAN ART
+
+     American Insularity--A Conkling Story--English Humour and
+     American Critics--American Literature and English Critics--The
+     American Novel in England--And American Art--Wanted, an
+     American Exhibition--The Revolution in the American Point of
+     View--"Raining in London"--Domestic and Imported Goods.
+
+
+It is no uncommon thing to hear an American speak of British
+insularity--the Englishman's "insular prejudices" or his "insular
+conceit." On one occasion I took the opportunity of interrupting a man
+who, I was sure, did not know what "insular" might mean, to ask for an
+explanation.
+
+"Insular?" he said. "It's the same as insolent--only more so."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Flings at Britain's "insularity" were (like the climatic myth)
+originally of Continental European origin; and from the Continental
+European point of view, the phrase, both in fact and metaphor, was
+justified. England _is_ an island. So far as the Continent of Europe is
+concerned, it is _the_ island. And undoubtedly the fact of their insular
+position, with the isolation which it entailed, has had a marked
+influence on the national temperament of Englishmen. Ringed about with
+the silver sea, they had an opportunity to meditate at leisure on their
+superiority to other peoples, an opportunity which, if not denied, was
+at least restricted in the case of peoples only separated from
+neighbours of a different race by an invisible frontier line, a well
+bridged stream, or a mountain range pierced by abundant passes. Their
+insularity bred in the English a disposition different from the
+dispositions of the Continental peoples just as undeniably as it kept
+them aloof from those peoples geographically.
+
+Vastly more than Great Britain, has the United States been isolated
+since her birth. England has been cut off from other civilisations by
+twenty miles of sea; America by three thousand. As a physical fact, the
+"insularity" of America is immensely more obvious and more nearly
+complete than that of Britain; and it is no less so as a moral fact. It
+is true that America's island is a continent; but this superiority in
+size has only resulted in producing more kinds of insularity than in
+England. The American character is, in all the moral connotation of the
+word, pronouncedly more insular than the British.
+
+Like the English, except that they were much more effectively staked off
+from the rest of the world, the Americans have found the marvel of their
+own superiority to all mankind a fit and pleasing subject for
+contemplation. Perhaps there was a time when Englishmen used to go about
+the world talking of it; but for some generations back, having settled
+the fact of their greatness entirely to their satisfaction, they have
+ceased to put it into words, merely accepting it as the mainspring of
+their conduct in all relations with other peoples, and without, it is to
+be feared, much regard for those other peoples' feelings. Americans are
+still in the boasting stage. Mr. Howells has said that every American
+when he goes abroad goes not as an individual citizen but as an envoy.
+He walks wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. It is only the insularity of
+the Britisher magnified many times.
+
+It is as if there were gathered in a room a dozen or so of well-bred
+persons, talking such small talk as will pass the time and hurt no
+susceptibilities. It may be that the Englishman in his small talk is
+unduly dogmatic, but in the main he complies with the usages of the
+circle and helps the game along. To them enters a newcomer who will hear
+nothing of what the others have to say--will take no share in the
+discussion of topics of common interest--but insists on telling the
+company of his personal achievements. It may be all true; though the
+others will not believe it. But the accomplishments of the members of
+the present company are not at the moment the subject of conversation;
+nor is it a theme under any circumstances which it is good manners to
+introduce. This is what not a few American people are doing daily up and
+down through the length and breadth of Europe; and they must pardon
+Europe if, occasionally, it yawns, or if at times it expresses its
+opinions of American manners in terms not soothing to American ears.
+
+"The American contribution to the qualities of nations is hurry," says
+the author of _The Champagne Standard_, and this has enough truth to let
+it pass as an epigram; but many Americans have a notion that their
+contribution is neither more nor less than All Progress. With their eyes
+turned chiefly upon themselves, they have seen beyond a doubt what a
+splendid, energetic, pushful people they are, and they have talked it
+all over one with another. Moreover, have not many visitors, though
+finding much to criticise, complimented them always on their rapidity of
+thought and action? So they have come to believe that they monopolise
+those happy attributes and, going abroad, whenever they see--it may be
+in England, or in Germany--an evidence of energy and force, they say:
+"Truly the world is becoming Americanised!" Bless their insular hearts!
+America did not invent the cosmic forces.
+
+When the first suspension bridge was thrown over Niagara, there was a
+great and tumultuous opening ceremony, such as the Americans love, and
+many of the great ones of the United States assembled to do honour to
+the occasion, and among them was Roscoe Conkling. Conkling was one of
+the most brilliant public men whom America has produced: a man of
+commanding, even beautiful, presence and of, perhaps, unparalleled
+vanity. He had been called (by an opponent) a human peacock. After the
+ceremonies attending the opening of the bridge had been concluded,
+Conkling, with many others, was at the railway station waiting to
+depart; but, though others were there, he did not mingle with them, but
+strutted and plumed himself for their benefit, posing that they might
+get the full effect of all his majesty.
+
+One of the station porters was so impressed that, stepping up to another
+who was hurrying by trundling a load of luggage, he jerked his thumb in
+Conkling's direction and:
+
+"Who's that feller?" he asked. "Is he the man as built the bridge?"
+
+The other studied the great man a moment.
+
+"Thunder! No," said he. "He's the man as made the Falls."
+
+It is curious that with their sense of humour Americans should so
+persistently force Europeans into the frame of mind of that railway
+porter. The Englishman, in his assurance of his own greatness, has come
+to depreciate the magnitude of whatever work he does; nor is it
+altogether a pose or an affectation. He sees the vastness of the British
+Empire and the amazing strides which have been made in the last two
+generations, and wonders how it all came about. He knows how
+proverbially blundering are British diplomacy and British
+administration, so he puts it all down to the luck of the nation and
+goes grumbling contentedly on his way. There is no country in which
+policies have been so haphazard and unstable, or ways of administration
+so crude and so empirical, as in the United States. "Go forth, my son,"
+said Oxenstiern, "go forth and see with how little wisdom the world is
+governed"; and on such a quest, it is doubtful if any civilised country
+has offered a more promising field for consideration than did the United
+States from, say, the close of the Civil War to less than a decade ago.
+All thinking Americans recognise this fact to the full; but whereas the
+Englishman sees only the blunders that he has made and marvels at the
+luck that pulled him through, the American generally ignores the luck
+and is more likely to believe that whatever has been achieved is the
+result of his peculiar virtues.
+
+I never heard an American ascribe the success of any national
+undertaking to the national luck. The Englishman on the other hand is
+for ever speaking of the "luck of the British Army," and the "luck that
+pulls England through."
+
+And there is one point which I have never seen stated but which is worth
+the consideration of Americans. It has already been said that it would
+be of great benefit if the American people knew more of the British
+Empire as a whole. They have had an advantage in appreciating the
+magnitude of their own accomplishments in the fact that their work has
+all to be done at home. They have had the outward signs of their
+progress constantly before their eyes. It is true that the United States
+is a large country; but it is continuous. No oceans intervene between
+New York and Illinois, or between Illinois and Colorado; and the people
+as a whole is kept well informed of what the people is doing.
+
+The American comes to London and he sees things which he regards with
+contemptuous amusement much as the Englishman might regard some peculiar
+old-world institution in a sleepy Dutch community. The great work which
+is always being done in London is not easy to see; there is so much of
+Old London (not only in a material sense) that the new does not always
+leap to the eye. The man who estimates the effective energy of the
+British people by what he sees in London, makes an analogous mistake to
+that of the Englishman who judges the sentiments of America by what is
+told him by his charming friends in New York. The American who would get
+any notion of British enterprise or British energy must go afield--to
+the Upper Nile and Equatorial Africa, to divers parts of Asia and
+Australia. He cannot see the Assouan dam, the Cape to Cairo Railway, the
+Indian irrigation works, from the Carlton Hotel, any more than a
+foreigner can measure the destiny of the American people by dining at
+the Waldorf-Astoria.
+
+This is a point which will bear insisting on. Not long ago an American
+stood with me and gazed on the work which was being done in the Strand
+Improvement undertaking, and he said that it was a big thing. "But," he
+added thoughtfully, "it does not come up to what we have on hand in the
+Panama Canal." I pointed out that the Panama Canal was not being cut
+through the heart of New York City and apparently the suggestion was new
+to him. The American rarely understands that the British Isles are no
+more--rather less--than the thirteen original states. Canada and India
+are the British Illinois and Florida, Australia and New Zealand
+represent the West from Texas to Montana, while South Africa is the
+British Pacific Slope; just as Egypt may stand for Cuba, and Burma and
+what-not-else set against Alaska and the Philippines. Many times I have
+known Americans in England to make jest of the British railways,
+comparing them in mileage with the transcontinental lines of their own
+country. But the British Transcontinental lines are thrown from Cairo to
+the Cape, from Quebec to Vancouver, from Brisbane to Adelaide and
+Peshawar to Madras. The people of the United States take legitimate
+pride in the growth of the great institutions of learning which have
+sprung up all over the West; but there are points of interest of which
+they take less account, in similar institutions in, say, Sydney and
+Allahabad.
+
+It is not necessary to say that I do not underestimate the energy of the
+American character. I have seen too much of the people, am familiar
+with too many sections of the country, and have watched it all growing
+before my eyes too fast to do that. But I think that the American
+exaggerates those qualities in himself at the expense of other peoples,
+and he would acquire a new kind of respect for Englishmen--the respect
+which one good workman necessarily feels for another--if he knew more of
+the British Empire.
+
+A precisely similar exaggeration of his own quality has been bred by
+similar causes in the American mind in his estimate of his national
+sense of humour. I am not denying the excellence of American humour, for
+I have in my library a certain shelf to which I go whenever I feel dull,
+and for the books on which I can never be sufficiently grateful. The
+American's exaggeration of his own funniness is not positive but
+comparative. Just as he is tempted to regard himself as the original
+patentee of human progress, and the first apostle of efficiency, so he
+is very ready to believe that he has been given something like a
+monopoly among peoples of the sense of humour. With a little more
+humour, he would undoubtedly have been saved from this particular error.
+Especially are the Americans convinced that there is no humour in
+Englishmen. Germans and Frenchmen may possess humour of an inferior
+sort, but not Englishmen. It is my belief that in the American clubs
+where I find copies of _Fliegende Blaetter_ and the _Journal Amusant_,
+these papers are much more read than _Punch_, and in not a few cases, I
+fear, by men who have but slight understanding of the languages in which
+they are printed. Indeed, _Punch_ is a permanent, hebdomadally-recurrent
+proof to American readers that Englishmen do not know the meaning of a
+joke.[153:1] Americans, of course, do not understand more than a small
+proportion of the pages of _Punch_ any more than they would understand
+those pages if they were printed in Chinese; but because _Punch_ is
+printed in English they think that they do understand it, and because
+they cannot see the jokes, they conclude that the jokes are not there.
+
+A certain proportion of American witticisms are recondite to English
+readers for precisely similar reasons, but the American belief is that
+when an Englishman fails to understand an American joke, it is because
+he has no sense of humour; when an American cannot understand an English
+one, it is because the joke is not funny. It is a view of the situation
+eminently gratifying to Americans; but it is curious that their sense of
+humour does not save them from it.
+
+Whatever American humour may be, it is not subtle. It has a
+pushfulness--a certain flamboyant self-assertiveness--which it shares
+with some other things in the United States; and, however fine the
+quality of mind required to produce it, a rudimentary appreciative sense
+will commonly suffice for its apprehension. The chances are, when any
+foreigner fails to catch the point of an American joke or story, that
+it is due to something other than a lack of perceptive capability.
+
+What I take to be (with apologies to Mr. Dunne) the greatest individual
+achievement in humorous writing that has been produced in America in
+recent years, the Wolfville series of books of Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis,
+is practically incomprehensible to English readers, not from any lack of
+capacity on their part, but from the difficulties of the dialect and
+still more from the strangeness of the atmosphere. In the same way the
+Tablets of the scribe Azit Tigleth Miphansi must indeed be but ancient
+Egyptian to Americans. But it would not occur to an Englishman to say,
+because Americans have not within their reach the necessary data for a
+comprehension of Mr. Reed, that, therefore, they do not understand a
+joke. Still less because he himself falls away baffled from the Old
+Cattleman does the Englishman conclude that the Wolfville books are not
+funny. He merely deplores his inability to get on terms with his author.
+The English public indeed is curiously ready to accept whatever is said
+to be funny and comes from America as being in truth humorous even if
+largely unintelligible; but few Americans would give credit for the
+existence of humour in those parts of an English book outside their ken.
+Yet I think, if it were possible to get the opinion of an impartial jury
+on the subject, their verdict would be that the number of humorous
+writers of approximately the first or second class is materially greater
+in England than in the United States to-day. I am sure that the sense of
+humour in the average of educated Englishmen is keener, subtler, and
+eminently more catholic than it is in men of the corresponding class in
+the United States. The Atlantic Ocean, if the Americans would but
+believe it, washes pebbles up on the beaches of its eastern shores no
+less than upon the western.[155:1]
+
+American humour [distinctively American humour, for there are humorous
+writers in America whose genius shows nothing characteristically
+American; but among those who are distinctively American I should class
+nearly all the writers who are best known to-day, Mr. Clemens (Mark
+Twain), Mr. Dunne, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Lorimer, Mr. Ade]--this distinctively
+American humour, then, stands in something the same relation to other
+forms of _spirituellisme_ as the work of the poster artist occupies to
+other forms of pictorial art. Poster designing may demand a very high
+quality of art, and the American workmen are the Cherets, Grassets,
+Muchas, of their craft. Few of them do ordinary painting, whether in oil
+or water colour. Fewer still use the etcher's needle. None that I am
+aware of attempts miniatures--except Mr. Henry James, who, if Americans
+may be believed, is not an American, and he has invented a department of
+art for himself more microscopic in detail than that of any miniaturist.
+The real American humourist, however small his canvas, strives for the
+same broad effects.
+
+It is not the quality of posters to be elusive. Their appeal is to the
+multitude, and it must be instantaneous. It is easily conceivable that a
+person of an educated artistic sense might stand before a poster and
+find himself entirely unable to comprehend it, because the thing
+portrayed might be something altogether outside his experience. His
+failure would be no indictment either of his perceptivity or of the
+merit of the work of art.
+
+It is a pity that Americans as a rule do not consider this, for I know
+few things that would so much increase American respect for Englishmen
+in the mass as the discovery that the latter were not the ponderous
+persons they supposed, but even keener-witted than themselves. At the
+time of the Venezuelan incident, it is probable that more than all the
+laborious protests of good men on both sides of the ocean, more than all
+the petitions and the interchange of assurances of good-will between
+societies in either country, the thing that did most to allay American
+resentment and bring the American people to its senses was that
+delightful message sent (was it not?) by the London Stock Exchange to
+their _confreres_ in New York, begging the latter to see that when the
+British fleet arrived in New York harbour there should be no crowding by
+excursion steamers. Like Mr. Anstey's dear German professor, who had
+once laboriously constructed a joke and purposed, when he had ample
+leisure, to go about to aedificate a second, will Americans please
+believe that Englishmen too, if given time, can certainly make others?
+
+And need I say again that in each of the things that I have said,
+whether on the subject of American chivalry, American energy, or
+American humour, I am not decrying the American's qualities but only
+striving to increase his respect for Englishmen?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now let us look at the other side of the picture. Just as undue
+flattery awoke in the American people an exaggerated notion of their
+chivalry and their sense of humour, so the reiteration of savage and
+contemptuous criticism made them depreciate their general literary
+ability. It goes farther back than the "Who ever reads an American
+book?" Three quarters of a century earlier the _Edinburgh Review_ (I am
+indebted for the quotation to Mr. Sparks) asked: "Why should Americans
+write books when a six-weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue
+our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads? Prairies,
+steamboats, gristmills are their natural objects for centuries to come."
+
+Franklin's _Autobiography_ and Thoreau's _Walden_ are only just, within
+the last few years, beginning to find their way into English popular
+reprints of the "classics." Few Englishmen would listen with patience to
+an argument that the contribution to literature of the Concord school
+was of greater or more permanent value than, let us say, the work of the
+Lake Poets. So little thought have Englishmen given to the literature of
+the United States, that they commonly assume any author who wrote in
+English to be, as a matter of course, an Englishman. It is only the
+uneducated among the educated classes who do not know that Longfellow
+was an American--though I have met such,--but among the educated a small
+percentage only, I imagine, would remember, unless suggestion was made
+to them, that, for instance, Motley and Bancroft among historians, or
+Agassiz and Audubon among men of science (even though one was born in
+Switzerland) were Americans. To the vast majority, of course, such names
+are names and nothing more, which may not be particularly reprehensible.
+But while on the one hand a general indifference to American literature
+as a whole has carried with it a lack of acquaintance with individual
+writers, that lack of acquaintance with the individuals naturally
+reacted to confirm disbelief in the existence of any respectable body of
+American literature. And the chilling and century-long contempt of the
+English public and of English critics for all American writing produced
+its result in a national exaggeration in American minds of their own
+shortcomings. Only within the last ten years have Americans as a whole
+come to believe that the work of an American writer (excepting only a
+very small group) can be on a plane with that of Englishmen.
+
+In England the situation has also changed. American novelists now enjoy
+a vogue in England that would have seemed almost incredible two decades
+ago. At that time the English public did not look to America for its
+fiction, while Americans did look to England; and each new book by a
+well-known English novelist was as certain of its reception in the
+United States as--perhaps more certain than it was--in England. That has
+changed. There are not more than half a dozen writers of fiction in
+England to-day of such authority that whatever they write is of
+necessity accepted by the American public. Americans turn now first to
+their own writers--a dozen or a score of them--and only then do they
+seek the English book, always provided that, no matter whose the name
+may be that it bears, it has won the approval of their own critics on
+its merits. They no longer take it for granted that the best work of
+their own authors is as a matter of course inferior to the work of a
+well-known Englishman. It may not be many years before the American
+public will be so much preoccupied with its own literary output--before
+that output will be so amply sufficient for all its needs--that it will
+become as contemptuously indifferent to English literature of the day as
+Englishmen have, in the past, shown themselves to the product of
+American writers. There is, perhaps, no other field in which the
+increase of the confidence of the nation in itself is more marked than
+in the honour which Americans now pay to their own writers.
+
+It is worth noticing that the English appreciation of American
+literature as yet hardly extends beyond works of fiction. Specialists in
+various departments of historical research and the natural sciences know
+what admirable work is being done in the same fields by individual
+workers in the United States; but hardly yet has the specialist--still
+less has the general public--formed any adequate conception of the great
+mass of that work in those two fields, still less of its quality.
+Englishmen do not yet take seriously either American research or
+American scholarship. It would be absurd to count noses to prove that
+there were more competent historians writing--more scientific
+investigators searching into the mysteries--in America than in England
+or vice versa; but this I take to be an undoubted fact, namely, that men
+of science in more than one field in other countries are beginning to
+look rather to the United States than to Great Britain for sound and
+original work.
+
+The English ignorance of American literature extends even more markedly
+to other departments of productive art.[159:1] The ordinary educated and
+art-loving Englishman would be sore put to it to name any single
+American painter or draughtsman, living or dead, except Mr. C. D.
+Gibson. Whistler and Sargent, of course, are not counted as Americans.
+There is not a single American sculptor whose name is known to one in a
+hundred of, again I say, educated and art-loving Englishmen, though I
+take it to be indisputable that the United States has produced more
+sculptors of individual genius in the last half-century than Great
+Britain. American architecture conveys to the educated and art-loving
+Englishman no other idea than that of twenty-storey "sky-scrapers" built
+of steel and glass. Richardson is not even a name to him. He knows
+nothing of all the beauty and virility of the work that has been done
+in the last thirty years. In the minor arts, he may have heard of
+Rookwood pottery and have a vague notion that the Americans turn out
+some quite original things in silver work; but of American stained
+glass--of Tiffany and La Farge--he has never heard. It would do England
+a world of good--it would do international relations a world of good--if
+a thoroughly representative exhibition of American painting and
+sculpture could be made in London. I commend the idea to some one
+competent to handle it; for it would, I think, be profitable to its
+promoters. It would certainly be a revelation to Englishmen.
+
+The English indifference to--nay, disbelief in the existence
+of--American art is precisely on a par with the American incredulity in
+the matter of British humour; and the removal of each of the
+misconceptions would tend to the increase of international good-will.
+Americans believe the British Empire to be a sanguinary and ferocious
+thing. They believe themselves to be possessed of a sense of humour, a
+sense of chivalry, and an energy quite lacking in the Englishman; and
+each one of the illusions counts for a good deal in the American
+national lack of liking for Great Britain. Similarly, Englishmen believe
+Americans to be a money-loving people without respectable achievement in
+art or literature. I am not sure that it would make the Englishman like
+the American any the more if the point of view were corrected, but at
+least he would like him more intelligently, and it would prevent him
+from saying things--in themselves entirely good-humoured and quite
+unintentionally offensive--which hurt American feelings. We cannot
+correct an error without recognising frankly that it exists, and the
+first step towards making the American and the Englishman understand
+what the other really is must be to help each to see how mistaken he is
+in supposing the other to be what he is not.
+
+That the American should hold the opinions that he does of England is no
+matter of reproach. Not only is it natural, but inevitable. Absorbed as
+he has been with his own affairs and his own history, and viewing Great
+Britain only in her occasional relations thereto, seeing nothing of her
+in her private life or of her position and policies in the world at
+large, how could the American have other than a distorted view of
+her--how could she assume right proportions or be posed in right
+perspective? Nor is the Englishman any more to be blamed. America has
+been beyond and below his horizon, and among the travellers' tales that
+have come to him of her people and her institutions has been much
+misinformation; and if he has not yet--as in the realms of literature
+and art--come to any realisation of America's true achievements, how
+should he have done so, when Americans themselves have only just shaken
+off the morbid sensitiveness and diffidence of their youth, and have so
+recently arrived at some partial comprehension of those achievements
+themselves?
+
+Probably the most successful joke which _Life_ ever achieved (Americans
+will please believe that it is not with any disrespect that I explain to
+English readers that _Life_ is the _Punch_ of New York), successful,
+that is, measured by the continent-wide hilarity which it provoked, had
+relation to the New York dandy who turned up the bottoms of his trousers
+because it was "raining in London." That was published--at a
+guess--some twenty years ago.
+
+Some ten years later a Chicagoan (one James Norton--he died, alas! all
+too soon afterwards) leaped into something like national notoriety by a
+certain speech which he delivered at a semi-public dinner in New York.
+In introducing Mr. Norton as coming from Chicago the chairman had made
+playful reference to the supposed characteristic lack of modesty of
+Chicagoans and their pride in their city. Norton, in acknowledgment,
+confessed that there was justice in the accusation. Chicagoans, he said,
+were proud of their city. They had a right to be. They were as proud of
+Chicago as New Yorkers were of London! And the quip ran from mouth to
+mouth across the continent.
+
+It would be too much to say that those jokes are meaningless to-day, but
+to the younger generation of Americans they have lost most of their
+point, for Anglomania has ceased to be the term of reproach that once it
+was--it has, at least, dropped from daily use--partly because the
+official relations of the country with Great Britain have so much
+improved, but much more because the United States has come to consider
+herself as Great Britain's equal and, in the new consciousness of her
+greatness, the idea of toadying to England has lost its sting. It is
+already difficult to throw one's mind back to the conditions of twenty
+years ago--to remember the deference which (in New York and the larger
+cities at least) was paid to English ideas, English manners, English
+styles in dress--the enthusiasm with which any literary man was received
+who had some pretension to an English reputation--the disrepute in which
+all "domestic" manufactured articles were held throughout the country
+in comparison with the "imported," which generally meant English. In all
+manufactured products this was so nearly universal that "domestic" was
+almost synonymous with inferior and "imported" with superior grades of
+goods. That an immense proportion of American manufactured articles were
+sold in the United States masquerading as "imported"--and therefore
+commanding a better price--goes without saying, and in some lines, in
+which the British reputation was too well established and well deserved
+to be easily shaken, the practice still survives; but in the great
+majority of things, the American now prefers his home-made article, not
+merely from motives of patriotism but because he believes that it is the
+better article. It is not within our present province to discuss how far
+this opinion is correct, or how far the policy of protection, by
+assisting manufacturers to obtain control of their own markets and so
+distract attention from imported goods, has helped to bring about the
+change. The point is that the change has taken place. And, so far as the
+ordinary commodities of commerce are concerned, the Englishman is in a
+measure aware of what has occurred. He could not be otherwise with the
+figures of his trade with the United States before him. Nor can he
+conceal from himself the fact that the change of opinion in America may
+have some justification when he sees how many things of American
+manufacture he himself uses daily and prefers--patriotism
+notwithstanding--to the British-made article.
+
+But Englishmen have little conception as yet that the same revolution
+has taken place in regard to the less material--less easily
+exploited--commodities of art and literature. American novels and the
+drawings of Mr. Gibson have made their way in England in the wake of
+American boots and American sweetmeats; but Americans would be unwilling
+to believe that their creative ability ends with the production of
+Western romances and drawings of the American girl.
+
+Until recent years, the volume as well as the quality of the literary
+and artistic output of Great Britain was vastly superior to that of the
+United States. The two were not comparable; but they are comparable
+to-day, though England is as yet unaware of it. In time, Englishmen will
+awake to a realisation of the fact; but what the relative standing of
+the two countries will be by that time it is impossible to say.
+Englishmen would, perhaps, not find it to their disadvantage, and it
+would certainly (if not done in too condescending a spirit) not be
+displeasing to the people of the United States, if they began, even now,
+to take a livelier interest in the work that the other is doing.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[153:1] At this point my American friend, to the value of whose
+criticisms I have already paid tribute, interjects marginally: "none the
+less _Fliegende Blaetter_ presents more real humour in a week than is to
+be found in _Punch_ in a month." To which I can but make the obvious
+reply that I have already said that Americans think so. He points out,
+however, further that, while the Munich paper is always to be found in
+the higher-class American clubs, it is comparatively infrequent in the
+clubs of Great Britain, which is undoubtedly true; and that is a subject
+(the relative breadth of outlook on the world-literature of the day in
+the two countries) which will necessarily receive attention later on.
+
+[155:1] Lest any American readers should assume that some personal
+feeling is responsible for my point of view (which would entirely
+destroy any value in my argument) it seems necessary to explain that I
+have become calloused to being told that I am the only Englishman the
+speaker ever met with an American sense of humour. Sometimes I have
+taken it as a compliment.
+
+[159:1] It is merely pathetic to find such a paper as the London
+_Academy_ at this late day summing up the American aesthetic impulse as
+follows: "Their culture is now a borrowed thing animated by no life of
+its own. Their art is become a reflection of French art, their
+literature a reflection of English literature, their learning a
+reflection of German learning. A velleity of taste in their women of the
+richer class seems to be all that maintains in their country the
+semblance of a high, serious, and disinterested passion for the things
+of the mind."
+
+It would be interesting to learn from the _Academy_ what school of
+English writers it is that the American humourists "reflect," who among
+English novelists are the models for the present school of Western
+fiction, where in English historiography is to be found the prototype of
+the great histories of their country, collaborated or otherwise, which
+the Americans are now producing, which journals published in England are
+responsible for American newspapers, what English magazine is so happy
+as to be the father of the _Century_, _Harper's_, or _Scribner's_. The
+truth is that the writer in the Academy, like most Englishmen, knows
+nothing of American literature as a whole, or he would know that,
+whether good or bad, the one quality which it surely possesses is that
+it is individual and peculiar to the people. The _Academy_, it is only
+fair to say, has recently changed hands and I am not sure that under its
+present direction it would make the same mistake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ENGLISH AND AMERICAN EDUCATION
+
+     The Rhodes Scholarships--"Pullulating Colleges"--Are American
+     Universities Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?--Other Educational
+     Forces--The Postal Laws--Ten-cent Magazines and Cheap Books--
+     Pigs in Chicago--The Press of England and America Compared--
+     Mixed Society--Educated Women--Generals as Booksellers--And as
+     Farmhands--The Value of War to a People.
+
+
+It may be presumed that when Cecil Rhodes conceived the idea of
+establishing the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford, it did not occur to him
+that Americans might not care to come to Oxford--might think their own
+universities superior to the English. Nor is it likely that there will
+in the immediate future be any dearth of students anxious to take those
+scholarships, for the mere selection has a certain amount of _kudos_
+attaching to it and, at worst, the residence abroad should be of
+advantage to any young American not destined to plunge at once into a
+business life. If it were a mere question of the education to be
+received, it is much to be feared that the great majority of Americans,
+unless quite unable to attend one of their own universities, would
+politely decline to come to England. At the time when the terms of the
+will were made public, a good many unpleasant things were said in the
+American press; and it was only the admiration of Americans for Mr.
+Rhodes (who appealed to their imagination as no other Englishman,
+except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, has appealed in the last fifty years),
+coupled with the fact that he was dead, that prevented the foundation of
+the scholarships from being greeted with resentment rather than
+gratitude.
+
+There was a time, of course, when the name of Oxford sounded very large
+in American ears; and it will probably be a surprise to Englishmen to be
+told that to-day the great majority of Americans would place not only
+Harvard and Yale, but probably also several other American universities,
+ahead of either Oxford or Cambridge. Nor is this the opinion only of the
+ignorant. Trained educational authorities who come from the United
+States to Europe to study the methods of higher education in the various
+countries, seldom hesitate to say that the education to be obtained at
+many of the minor Western colleges in America is fully as good as that
+offered by either of the great English universities, while that of
+Harvard and Yale is far superior to it.[167:1] And it must be remembered
+that education itself, as an art, is incomparably more studied, and more
+systematically studied in America than in England.
+
+Matthew Arnold spoke of the "pullulating colleges and universities" of
+America--"the multitude of institutions the promoters of which delude
+themselves by taking seriously, but which no serious man can so take";
+and he would be surprised to see to what purpose some of those
+institutions have "pullulated" in the eighteen years that have passed
+since he wrote--to note into what lusty and umbrageous plants have grown
+such institutions as the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, though
+one of those is further west by some distance than he ever penetrated.
+That these or any other colleges have more students than either Oxford
+or Cambridge need not mean much; and they cannot of course acquire in
+twenty years the old, history-saturated atmosphere. Against that are to
+be set the facts that the students undoubtedly work, on the average,
+much harder than do English undergraduates and that the teaching staffs
+are possessed of an enthusiasm, an earnestness, a determination not
+merely to fill chairs but to get results, which would be almost "bad
+form" in some Common (or Combination) Rooms in England. Wealth,
+moreover, and magnificence of endowment can go a considerable way
+towards even the creation of an atmosphere--not the same atmosphere as
+that of Oxford or Cambridge, it is true; for no money can make another
+Addison's Walk out of Prairie Avenue, or convert the Mississippi by St.
+Anthony's Falls into new "Backs."
+
+     "We may build ourselves more gorgeous habitations,
+        Fill our rooms with painting and with sculpture,
+      We cannot buy with gold the old associations----."
+
+But an atmosphere may be created wholly scholastic, and well calculated
+to excite emulation and inspire the ambition of youths.
+
+Nor is it by any means certain that the American people would desire to
+create the atmosphere of an old-world university if they could. The
+atmosphere of Oxford produces, as none other could, certain qualities;
+but are they the qualities which, if England were starting to make her
+universities anew, she would set in the forefront of her
+endeavour?[169:1] Are they really the qualities most desirable even in
+an Englishman to-day? Are they approximately the qualities most likely
+to equip a man to play the noblest part in the life of modern America?
+The majority of American educators would answer unhesitatingly in the
+negative. There are things attaching to Oxford and Cambridge which they
+would dearly love to be able to transplant to their own country, but
+which, they recognise, nothing but the passage of the centuries can
+give. Those things are unattainable; and, frankly, if they could only be
+attained by transplanting with them many other attributes of English
+university life, they would rather forego them altogether.
+
+What Englishmen most value in their universities is not any
+book-learning which is to be acquired thereat, so much as the manners
+and rules for the conduct of life which are supposed to be imparted in a
+university course,--manners and rules which are of an essentially
+aristocratic tendency. Without wishing to push a point too far, it is
+worth noting that that aristocratic tendency is purely Norman, quite out
+of harmony with the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon. It would never occur to
+an Anglo-Saxon, pure and simple, to make his university anything else
+than an institution for scholastic training, in which every individual
+should be taught as much, and as equally, as possible. The last thing
+that would occur to him would be to make it a weapon of aristocracy or
+an institution for perpetuating class distinctions. The aim and effect
+of the English universities in the past has been chiefly to keep the
+upper classes uppermost.
+
+That there are too many "universities" in America no one--least of all
+an educated American--denies; but with the vast distances and immense
+population of the country there is room for, perhaps, more than Matthew
+Arnold eighteen years ago could have foreseen, and not a few of those
+establishments which in his day he would doubtless have unhesitatingly
+classed among those which could not be taken seriously, have more than
+justified their existence.
+
+To the superiority of the American public school system over the
+English, considered merely as an instrumentality for the general
+education of the masses of a people, and not for the production of any
+especially privileged or cultivated class, is generally ascribed the
+confessedly higher average of intelligence and capacity among (to use a
+phrase which is ostensibly meaningless in America) the lower orders. But
+the educational system of the country has been by no means the only
+factor in producing this result; and it may be worth while merely as a
+matter of record, and not without interest to American readers, to note
+what some of those other factors have been during the last twenty
+years--factors so temporary and so elusive that even now they are in
+danger of being forgotten.
+
+First among these factors I would set the American postal laws, an
+essential feature of which is the extraordinarily low rates at which
+periodical literature may be transmitted. A magazine which may be sent
+to any place in the United States for from an eighth of a penny to a
+farthing, according to its weight, will cost for postage in England from
+two-pence-halfpenny to fourpence. It is not the mere difference in cost
+of the postage to the subscriber that counts, but the low American rate
+has permitted the adoption by the publishers of a system impossible to
+English magazine-makers, a system which has had the effect of making
+magazines, at least as good as the English sixpenny monthlies, the
+staple reading matter of whole classes of the population, the classes
+corresponding to which in England never read anything but a local
+weekly, or halfpenny daily, paper. It might be that the reading matter
+of a magazine would not be much superior to that of a small weekly
+paper. But at least it encourages somewhat more sustained reading and,
+what is the great fact, it accustoms the reader to handling something
+_in the form of a book_. That is the virtue. A people weaned from the
+broad-sheets by magazines readily takes next to book-reading.
+
+Moreover, under the American plan, books themselves, if issued
+periodically, used to have the same postal advantages as the
+magazines.[171:1] A so-called "library" of the classical English,
+writers could be published at the rate of a book a month, call itself a
+periodical, and be sent through the post in precisely the same way. The
+works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, or anybody else could be published
+in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly parts. If in monthly parts at
+sixpence, the cost to the subscriber would be practically the same as
+that of a monthly magazine, only that the reader would accumulate at the
+rate of twelve volumes a year--and read at the rate of one a month--the
+works of Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Of course much worthless
+literature, fiction of the trashiest, has been circulated in the same
+way--much more perhaps than of the better class. But even so, the
+reading matter was superior to that previously accessible, and the vital
+fact still remains that the people acquired the habit of book-reading.
+
+In America, the part thus played by some of the periodical libraries was
+of much importance, but it was probably not comparable to the influence
+of the ten-cent magazine. In the United States itself, the immense
+beneficence of that influence has hardly been appreciated. The magazines
+came into vogue, and the people accepted the fact as they accept the
+popularity of a new form of "breakfast food." The quickening of the
+national intelligence which resulted was no more immediate, no more
+readily traceable or conspicuous to the public eye, than would be the
+improvement in the national stamina which might result from the
+introduction of some new article of diet. A change which takes five or
+ten years to work itself out is lost sight of, becomes invisible, amid
+the jostling activities of a national life like the American. Moreover,
+several causes were contributing to the same end and, had any one
+stopped to endeavour to do it, it would not have been at any time easy
+to unravel the threads and show what proportion of the fabric was woven
+by each; but if it had been possible to affix an intellect-meter to the
+aggregate brain of the American people during the last twenty years, of
+such ingenious mechanism that it would have shown not only what the
+increase in total mental power had been but also what proportions of
+that increase were ascribable to the various contributing
+causes--education, colonial expansion, commercial growth, ten-cent
+magazines, and so forth--and if, further, the "readings" of that meter
+could be interpreted into terms of increase in national energy, national
+productiveness, national success, I do not think that Parliament would
+lose one unnecessary day in passing the legislation necessary to reform
+the English postal laws.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One other point is worth dwelling upon--equally trivial in seeming,
+equally important in its essence--which is the selling of books by the
+great department stores, the big general shops, in America. Taking all
+classes of the British population together and both sexes--artisans and
+their wives, peasants in country districts, slum residents in London and
+other large cities,--what proportion of the population of the British
+Isles do of set purpose go into a bookseller's shop once a year or once
+in their lives? Is it ten per cent.--or five per cent.--or two per
+cent.? The exact proportion is immaterial; but the number must be very
+small. In America some years ago, the owners of department stores and
+publishers found that there was considerable profit to be made in the
+handling of books--cheap reprints of good books in particular. The
+combined booksellers' and stationers' shops in the cities of the United
+States are in themselves more frequent and more attractive than in
+England: and I am going back to the days before the drug-store library
+which is as yet too recent an institution to have had an easily
+measurable influence. But incomparably more influential than these, in
+bringing the multitude in immediate contact with literature, have been
+the department stores, of almost every one of which the "book and
+stationery" department is a conspicuously attractive, and generally most
+profitable, feature. Here every man or woman who goes to do any shopping
+is brought immediately within range of the temptation to buy books--is
+involuntarily seduced into a bookshop where the wares are temptingly
+displayed and artfully pressed on the attention of customers. New books
+of all kinds are sold at the best possible discount; but what was of
+chief importance was the institution of the cheap libraries of the
+"Classics"--tables heaped with them in paper at fourpence, piles of them
+shoulder high in cloth at ninepence, shelves laden with them in
+glittering backs and by no means despicable in typography at one and
+sevenpence. Thus simultaneously with the inculcation of the book-reading
+habit by the magazines came the facility for book-buying, and, always
+remembering the difference in the scale of prices in the two countries,
+it was easy for the woman doing her household shopping to fall a victim
+to the importunities of the salesman and lavish an extra eighteen or
+thirty-eight cents on a copy of _The Scarlet Letter_ or _Ivanhoe_,
+Irving's _Alhambra_, or _Bleak House_, to take home as a surprise. In
+this way, whole classes in America, the English counterparts of which
+rarely read anything more formidable than a penny paper, acquired the
+habit of book-buying and the ambition to form a small library. The
+benefit to the people cannot be computed.
+
+Incidentally, as we know, not a little injustice was done to English
+authors by the pirating of their books, without recompense, while the
+copyright still lived. It was after I went to America, though I had
+heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford, that I first read _Fors Clavigera_ and
+_Sesame and Lilies_ in Lovell's Library, at five-pence a volume, and,
+about the same time, Tolstoi's _War and Peace_ in the _Franklin Square
+Library_, at the same price. Of older works, I can still remember Lamb
+and part of De Quincey, _Don Quixote_ and _Rasselas_ (those four for
+some reason stand out in my mind from their fellows in the row), all
+bought for the modest ten-cent piece per volume--the price of two daily
+newspapers (for all newspapers in America then cost five cents) or one
+blacking of one's shoes. Much has, of course, been done of late years in
+England in popularising the "Classics" in the form of cheap libraries;
+but the facilities for buying the books--or rather the temptations to do
+so--are incomparably less, while the relative prices remain higher.
+
+Even at fourpence halfpenny (supposing them to be purchasable at the
+price) Lamb's Essays still cost more in London than a drink of whiskey.
+In America, more than twenty years ago, the whiskey cost half as much
+again as the book.
+
+All of which is in the nature of a digression, but it has not led us far
+from the main road, for the object that I am aiming at is to convey to
+the English reader some idea of what the forces are which are at work on
+the education of the American people. The Englishman generally knows
+that in the United States there is nothing analogous to the great public
+schools of England--Winchester, Westminster, Eton, and the rest--and
+that they have a host of more or less absurd universities in no way to
+be compared to Oxford or Cambridge. The American, as has been said,
+challenges the latter statement bluntly; while, as for the public
+schools, he maintains that it is not the American ideal (if he wished to
+fortify his position, he might say it was not an Anglo-Saxon ideal) to
+produce a limited privileged and cultivated class, but that the aim is
+to educate the whole nation to the highest level; that, barring such
+qualities as their mere selectness may enable the great English schools
+to give to their pupils, the national high schools of America do, as a
+matter of fact, prepare pupils just as efficiently for the university as
+do the English institutions, while the great system of common schools
+secures for the mass of the people a much better education than is given
+in England to the same classes. Added to which, various other causes
+co-operate with the avowedly educational instrumentalities to produce a
+higher level of intellectual alertness and a more general love of
+reading in the people.
+
+And what is the result? Is the American people as well educated or as
+well informed or as well cultivated as the English? To endeavour to
+make a comparison between the two is to traverse a very morass, full of
+holes, swamps, sloughs, creeks, inlets, quicksands, and pitfalls of
+divers and terrifying natures. If it is to be threaded at all, it must
+be only with the greatest caution and, at times, indirectness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The charming English writer, the author of _Sinners and Saints_,
+affected, on alighting from the train in the railway station at Chicago,
+to be immensely surprised by the fact that there was not a pig in sight.
+"I had thought," he said, "Chicago was all pigs." There are a good many
+English still of the same opinion.
+
+The one institution in any country of which the foreigner sees most, and
+by which perhaps every people is, if unwittingly, most commonly judged
+by other peoples, is its press; and it is difficult for a superficial
+observer to believe that the nation which produces the newspapers of
+America is either an educated or a cultivated nation. Max O'Rell's
+comment on the American press is delightful: "Beyond the date, few
+statements are reliable." Matthew Arnold called the American newspapers
+"an awful symptom"--"the worst features in the life of the United
+States." Americans also--the best Americans--have a great dislike of the
+London papers.
+
+The fact is that merely as newspapers (as gatherers of news) the
+American papers are probably the best in the world. What repels the
+Englishman is primarily the form in which the news is dressed--the
+loudness, the sensationalism but if he can overcome his repugnance to
+these things sufficiently to be able to judge the paper as a whole, he
+will find, apart from the amazing quantity of "news" which it contains,
+a large amount of literary matter of a high order. I am not for one
+moment claiming that the American paper (not the worst and loudest,
+which are contemptible, nor the best, which are almost as
+non-sensational as the best London papers, but the average American
+daily paper) is, or ought to be, as acceptable reading to a cultivated
+man--still less to a refined woman--as almost any one of the penny, or
+some halfpenny, London papers. But the point that I would make and which
+I would insist on very earnestly is that the two do not stand for the
+same thing in relation to the peoples which they respectively represent.
+
+We have seen the same thing before in comparing the consular and
+diplomatic services of the two countries. Just as in the United States
+the consuls are plucked at random from the body of the people, whereas
+in England they are a carefully selected and thoroughly trained class by
+themselves, so the press of the United States represents the people in
+its entirety, whereas the English press represents only the educated
+class. The London papers (I am omitting consideration of certain
+halfpenny papers) are not talking for the people as a whole, nor to the
+people as a whole. Consciously or unconsciously they are addressing
+themselves always to the comparatively small circle of the educated
+class. When they speak of the peasant or the working man, even of the
+tradesman, they discuss him as a third person: it is not to him that
+they are talking. They use a language which is not his language; they
+assume in their reader information, sentiments, modes of thought, which
+belong not to him, but only to the educated class--that class which,
+whether each individual thereof has been to a public school and a
+university or not, is saturated with the public school and university
+traditions.
+
+It was said before that the English people has a disposition to be
+guided by the voice of authority--to follow its leaders--as the American
+people has not. The English newspaper speaks to the educated class,
+trusting, not always with justification, that opinion once formulated in
+that class will be communicated downwards and accepted by the people.
+The American newspaper endeavours to speak to the people direct.
+
+That English papers are immensely more democratic than once they were
+goes without saying. A man need not be much past middle age to be able
+to remember when the _Daily Telegraph_ created, by appealing to, a whole
+new stratum of newspaper readers. The same thing has been done again
+more recently by the halfpenny papers, some of which come approximately
+near to being adapted to the intelligences, and representing the tastes,
+of the whole population, or at least the urban population, down to the
+lowest grade. But it is not by those papers that England would like to
+be judged. Yet when Englishmen draw inferences about the American people
+from the papers which they see, they are doing what is intrinsically as
+unjust. It would be no less unjust to take the first hundred men that
+one met with, on Broadway or State Street, and compare them--their
+intellectuality and culture--with one hundred members of the London
+university clubs.
+
+Let us also remember here what was said of the Anglo-Saxon spirit--that
+spirit which is so essentially non-aristocratic, holding all men equal
+in their independence. We have seen how this spirit is more untrammelled
+and works faster in the United States than in England; but where, in
+any case, it has moved ahead among Americans the tendency in England
+generally is to follow in the same lines, not in imitation of America
+but by the impulse of the common genius of the peoples.
+
+The American dailies, even the leading dailies, are made practically for
+those hundred men on Broadway; the London penny papers are addressed in
+the main to the university class. Judging from the present trend of
+events in England it may not be altogether chimerical to imagine a time
+when in London only two or three papers will hold to the class tradition
+and will still speak exclusively in the language of the upper classes
+(as a small number of papers in New York do to-day), while the great
+body of the English press will have followed the course of the American
+publishers; and when the English papers are frankly adapted to the
+tastes and intelligence of as large a proportion of the English people
+as are now catered for by the majority of the American papers, he would
+be a rash Englishman whose patriotism would persuade him to prophesy
+that the London papers would be any more scholarly, more refined, or
+more chastened in tone than are the papers of New York or Chicago.
+
+And while the Englishman is generally ready to draw unfavourable
+inferences from the undeniably unpleasant features of the majority of
+American daily papers, he seldom stops to draw analogous inferences from
+a comparison of the American and English monthly magazines. Great
+Britain produces no magazines to compare with _Harper's_, _The Century_,
+or _Scribner's_. Those three magazines combined have, I believe, a
+number of readers in the United States equalling the aggregate
+circulation of the London penny dailies; which is a point that is worth
+consideration. When, moreover, the cheaper magazines became a
+possibility, how came it that such publications as _McClure's_ and _The
+Cosmopolitan_ arose? The illustrated magazines of the United States are
+indeed a fact of profound significance, for which the Englishman when he
+measures the taste and intellectuality of the American people by its
+press makes no allowance. Magazines of the same excellence cannot find
+the same support in England. At least two earnest attempts have been
+made in late years to establish English monthlies which would compare
+with any of the three first mentioned above, and both attempts have
+failed.
+
+What has been said about the much more representative character of the
+American daily press--the fact that the same papers are read by a vastly
+larger proportion of the population--brings us face to face with a
+root-fact which vitiates almost any attempt at a rough and ready
+comparison between the peoples. In America, there exist the counterparts
+of every class of man who is to be found in England--men as refined, men
+no less crass and brutal--some as vulgar and some as full of the pride
+of birth. Most Englishmen will be surprised to hear that the American,
+democrat though he is, is as a rule more proud of an ancestor who fought
+in the Revolutionary War than is an Englishman of one who fought in the
+Wars of the Roses. I am sure that he sets more store by a direct and
+authentic descent from one of the company of the _Mayflower_ than the
+Englishman does by an equally direct and authentic line back to the days
+of William the Conqueror. Incidentally it may be said that the American
+will talk more about it. But while in America all classes exist, they
+are not fenced apart, as in England, in fact any more than they are in
+theory. The American people (_pace_ the leaders of the New York Four
+Hundred) "comes mixed"; dip in where you will and you bring up all sorts
+of fish. In England if you go into educated society, you are likely to
+meet almost exclusively educated people--or at least people with the
+stamp of educated manners. Sir Gorgius Midas is not of course inexorably
+barred from the society of duchesses. Her Grace of Pentonville must have
+met him frequently. But in America the duchesses have to rub shoulders
+with him every day. And--which is worth noting--their husbands also rub
+shoulders with his wife.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Which brings us to the second root-fact, which is almost as disturbing
+and confounding to casual observation as the first, namely, the much
+larger part in the intellectual life of the country played by women in
+America. Intellectuality or culture in its narrower sense--meaning a
+familiarity with art and letters--is not commonly regarded by Englishmen
+as an essential possession in a wife. The lack of it is certainly not
+considered by the American woman a cardinal offence in a husband. I know
+many American men who, on being consulted on any matter of literary or
+artistic taste, say at once: "I don't know. I leave all that to my
+wife."
+
+An Englishman in an English house, looking at the family portraits, may
+ask his hostess who painted a certain picture.
+
+"I don't know," she will say, "I must ask my husband. Will, who is the
+portrait of your grandfather by--the one over there in his robes?"
+
+"Raeburn," says Will.
+
+"Of course," says the wife. "I never can remember the artists' names;
+they are so confusing--especially the English ones."
+
+The Englishman thinks no worse of her; but the American woman,
+listening, wishes that she had a portrait of her husband's grandfather
+by Raeburn and opines that she would know the artist's name.
+
+The same Englishman goes to America and, being entertained, asks a
+similar question of his host.
+
+"I don't know," says the man, "I must ask my wife. Mary, who painted
+that picture over there--the big tree and the blue sky?"
+
+"Rousseau," says Mary.
+
+"Of course," says the husband. "I never can remember the names of these
+fellows. They mix me all up--especially the French ones."
+
+And the Englishman returning home tells his friends of the queer fellow
+with whom he dined over there--"an awfully good chap, you know"--who
+owned all sorts of jolly paintings--Rousseaux and things--and did not
+even know the names of the artists: "Had to ask his wife, by Jove!"
+
+It is not for one moment claimed that there are not in England many
+women fully as cultured as the most cultured and fairest Americans; that
+there are not many Englishwomen much better informed, much more widely
+read, than their husbands. The phenomenon, however, is not nearly as
+common as in America, where, it has already been suggested, it is
+probably the result of the fact that the women have at the outset
+received precisely the same education as the men and, since leaving
+school or college, have had more leisure, being less engrossed in
+business and material things.
+
+But this feminine predominance in matters of aesthetics in the United
+States does not as a rule increase the Englishman's opinion of the
+intellectuality or culture of the people as a whole. He still judges
+only by the men. Indeed, he is not entirely disposed to like so much
+intellectuality in women--such interest in politics, educational
+matters, art, and literature. Not having been accustomed to it he rather
+disapproves of it. Blue regimentals are only fit for the blue horse or
+the artillery.
+
+The Englishman in an American house meets a man more rough and less
+polished than a man holding a similar position in society would be in
+England; and he thinks poorly of American society in consequence. He
+also meets that man's wife, who shows a familiarity with art, letters,
+and public affairs vastly more comprehensive than he would expect to
+find in a woman of similar position in England. But he does not
+therefore strike a balance and re-cast his estimate of American society,
+any more than in his estimate of the American press he makes allowance
+for the American magazines. He only thinks that the woman's knowledge is
+rather out of place and conjectures it to be probably superficial.
+Wherein he is no less one-sided in his prejudice than the American who
+will not believe in English humour because he cannot understand it.
+
+Philistinism is undoubtedly more on the surface in educated society in
+the United States than in Great Britain; but in England outside that
+society it is nearly all Philistinism. Step down from a social class in
+England, and you come to a new and lower level of refinement and
+information. In America the people still "come mixed."
+
+Twenty-five years ago in England, you did not expect a stock-broker, and
+to-day you do not expect a haberdasher (even though he may have been
+knighted), to know whether Botticelli is a wine or a cheese. In America,
+because the Englishman meets that stock-broker or that haberdasher in a
+society in which he would not be likely to meet him in England, he does
+expect him to know; and I suspect that if a census were taken there
+would be found more stock-brokers and haberdashers in America than in
+England who do know something of Botticelli. I am quite certain that
+more of their wives do. Matthew Arnold spoke not too pleasantly of the
+curious sensation that he experienced in addressing a bookseller in
+America as "General." The "bookseller" in question was a man widely
+respected in the United States, the head of a great house of publishers
+and booksellers, a conspicuously public-spirited citizen, and a _bona
+fide_ General who saw stern service in the Civil War. To Englishmen,
+knowing nothing of the background, the mere fact as stated by Matthew
+Arnold is curious.
+
+But if civil war were to break out in Great Britain--England and Wales
+against Scotland and Ireland--and the conflict assumed such titanic
+proportions that single armies of a million men took the field, then
+would Tennyson's "smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue" indeed have to "leap
+from his counter and till and strike, were it but with his cheating
+yard-wand, home." The entire population of England that was not
+actually needed at home would be compelled to take the field, and in the
+slaughter (it is curious how little English men know of the terrific
+proportions of the conflict between the North and South) the demand for
+officers would be so great that there would not be enough men of
+previous training to fill the places. Men would rise from the ranks by
+merit and among those who rose to be generals there might well be a
+publisher or bookseller or two. On the termination of the war, the
+soldiers would turn from their soldiering to their old trades and it
+might be General Murray or General Macmillan or General Bumpus; and the
+thing would not then be strange to English ears.
+
+An American story tells how, soon after the close of the Civil War, a
+stranger asked a farmer if he needed any labourers; and the farmer
+replied in the negative. He had just taken on three new ones, he said,
+all of them disbanded soldiers. One, he added, had been a private, one a
+captain, and one a full-blown colonel.
+
+"And how do you find them?" asked the other.
+
+"The private's a first-class workman," said the farmer, "and the captain
+he isn't bad."
+
+"And the colonel?"
+
+"Well, I don't want to say nothing agin a man as fit as a colonel in the
+war," said the farmer, "but I know I ain't hiring no brigadier-generals
+if they come this way."
+
+They are growing old now, and fewer, the men who held commissions in the
+war that ended over forty years ago; but during those forty years there
+has been no community, no trade or profession or calling, in which they
+have not been to be found, indistinguishable from their civilian
+colleagues, except by the tiny button in the lapels of their coats.
+Until Mr. Roosevelt, (and he won his spurs in another war) there has
+been no man elected President of the United States, except Mr.
+Cleveland, the one Democrat, who had not a distinguished record as an
+officer in the Union armies--Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and
+McKinley were all soldiers. You may still see that little button in many
+pulpits. Farmers wear it, and cabinet ministers, millionaires, and
+mechanics.
+
+The Anglo-Saxon is a fighting breed. The population of the British Isles
+sprang from the loins of successive waves of fighting men. It was not
+the weaklings of the Danes or Normans, Jutes, Saxons, or Angles who came
+to conquer Britain, but the bold, the hardy, the venturesome of each
+tribe or people. It was not the mere mixture of bloods that made the
+English character what it was, the race a race of empire builders; it
+was because of each blood there came to Britain only of the most
+adventurous. And through the centuries it has been the constant stress
+and training of the perpetual turmoil in which the people have lived
+that have kept the stock from degeneration. There has never been a time
+in English history, save when the people have been struggling in wars
+among themselves, when there has been an English family that has not at
+any given moment had sons or fathers, uncles or cousins out somewhere
+doing the work of the Empire.
+
+     And some are drowned in deep water,
+       And some in sight of shore,
+     And word goes back to the weary wife
+       And ever she sends more.
+
+     For since that wife had gate or gear
+       And hearth and garth and bield
+     She willed her sons to the white Harvest,
+       And that is a bitter yield.
+
+           .   .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+     The good wife's sons come home again
+       With little into their hands,
+     But the lore o' men that ha' dealt wi' men
+       In the new and naked lands,
+
+     But the faith o' men that ha' brothered men
+       By more than the easy breath,
+     And the eyes o' men that ha' read wi' men
+       In the open book of death.[188:1]
+
+I have already explained how far Americans are from understanding the
+British Empire. It is a pity; they would understand Englishmen better
+and like them better. And what the building of the Empire and the
+keeping of it have done for Englishmen, the Civil War did in large
+measure for the Americans. Even the struggle with their own wilderness
+might not have sufficed to keep the people hard and sound of heart and
+limb through a century of peace and growing prosperity. The Civil War is
+already beginning to slip into the farther reaches of the people's
+memory; but twenty-five years ago the echoes of the guns had hardly died
+away--the minds of the people were still inspired. It was an awful, and
+a splendid, experience for the nation. It is not necessary, with
+Emerson, "always to respect war hereafter"; but there have been times
+when it has seemed to me that I would rather be able to wear that little
+tri-colour button of the American Loyal Legion than any other
+decoration in the world.[189:1]
+
+It is the great compensation of war that it does not breed in a people
+only a fighting spirit. All history shows that it is in the mental
+exhilaration and the moral uplift after a period of war successfully
+waged that a people puts forth the best that is in it, in the production
+of works of art and in its literature. It is an old legend--older than
+Omar--that the most beautiful flowers spring from the blood of heroes.
+And it is true. When the genius of a nation has been ploughed up with
+cannon-shot and bayonets and watered with blood--then it is that it
+breaks into the most nearly perfect blossom. It has been so through all
+history, back beyond the times of gun and bayonet, when spears and
+swords were the plough-shares, as far as we can see and doubtless
+farther. In America, the necessities of the case compelled the people to
+turn first to material works; it was to the civilising of their
+continent, the repairing of their shattered commercial and industrial
+structure (shattered when it was yet only half built), that their new
+inspiration had perforce to turn first. But there was impetus enough for
+that and to spare, and, after satisfying their mere physical needs, they
+swept on with a sort of inspired hunger for things to satisfy their
+minds and souls. Europeans are accustomed to think that the American
+desire for culture is something superficial--something put on for
+appearance's sake; and nothing could well be farther from the truth. It
+is an intense, deep-seated, national craving. War on the scale of the
+Civil War ploughs deep. It may be impossible for a nation to make itself
+cultivated--to grow century-old shrubberies and five-century-old
+turf--in ten years or forty; and when the Americans in their ravening
+famine reach out to grasp at once all that is good and beautiful in the
+world, it may be that at first they cannot assimilate all that they draw
+to them--they can grasp, but not absorb. To that extent there may be
+much that is superficial in American culture. But every year and every
+day they are sucking the nourishment deeper--the influences are
+penetrating, percolating, permeating the soil of their natures (yes, I
+know that I am running two metaphors abreast, but let them run)--and it
+is a mistake to conclude because in some places the culture lies only on
+the surface that there are not others where it has already sunk through
+and through. Above all is it a mistake to suppose that the emotion
+itself is shallow or that the yearning is not as deep as their--or any
+human--natures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is possible that some critics may be found cavilling enough to accuse
+me of inconsistency in thus celebrating the praise of War in a work
+which is avowedly intended for the promotion of Peace. Carlyle wisely,
+if somewhat brutally, pointed out that if an Oliver Cromwell be
+assassinated "it is certain you may get a cart-load of turnips from his
+carcase." But one does not therefore advocate regicide for the sake of
+the kitchen-gardens.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[167:1] What is said above--or at least what can be read between the
+lines--may throw some light on the fact, on which the English press
+happens as I write to be commenting in some perplexity, that whereas
+certain Australians among the Rhodes scholars have distinguished
+themselves conspicuously in the schools, the only honours that have
+fallen to Americans have been those of the athletic field. Those
+journals which have inferred therefrom a lack of aptitude for
+scholarship on the part of American youth in general may be amiss in
+their diagnosis.
+
+[169:1] To avoid misapprehension, let me say that, as an Oxford man, I
+have all the Oxford prejudices as fully developed as any Englishman
+could wish. Rather a year of Oxford than five of Harvard or ten of
+Minnesota. How much of this is sentiment, and worthless, and how much
+reason, it would be hard to say and is immaterial. The personal
+prepossession need not blind one either to the greatness of the work
+which the other institutions do, nor to the defensibility of that point
+of view which sets other qualities, in an institution the professed
+object of which is to educate and to fit youths for life, above even
+those possessed by Oxford or Cambridge.
+
+[171:1] In 1906, under a stricter definition of the term "periodical,"
+the privilege of sending as second-class matter books issued at regular
+intervals was withdrawn.
+
+[188:1] Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea Wife" (_The Seven Seas_).
+
+[189:1] The Loyal Legion is the society of those who held commissions as
+officers on the side of the North. The Grand Army of the Republic is the
+society which includes all ranks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A COMPARISON IN CULTURE
+
+     The Advantage of Youth--Japanese Eclecticism and American--The
+     Craving for the Best--_Cyrano de Bergerac_--Verestschagin--
+     Music and the Drama--Culture by Paroxysms--Mr. Gladstone and
+     the Japanese--Anglo-Saxon Crichtons--Americans as Linguists--
+     England's Past and America's Future--Americanisms in Speech--
+     Why they are Disappearing in America--And Appearing in
+     England--The Press and the Copyright Laws--A Look into the
+     Future.
+
+
+Ruskin, speaking of the United States, said that he could never bring
+himself to live in a country so unfortunate as to possess no castles.
+But, with its obvious disadvantages, youth in a nation has also
+compensations. Max O'Rell says that to be American is to be both fresh
+and mature, and I have certainly known many Americans who were fresh.
+The shoulders are too young for the head to be very old. But when a
+man--let us say an Englishman of sixty--full of worldly wisdom, having
+travelled much and seen many men and cities, looks on a young man, just
+out of the university, perhaps, very keen on his profession, very
+certain of making his way in the world, with a hundred interests in what
+seem to the other "new-fangled" things--telephones and typewriters and
+bicycles and radio-activity and motor cars, things unknown to the old
+man's youth,--talking of philosophies and theories and principles which
+were not taught at college when the other was an undergraduate, the
+elder is likely to think that the young man's judgment is sadly crude
+and raw, that his education has been altogether too diffused and made up
+of smatterings of too many things, and to say to himself that the old
+sound, simple ways were better. Yet it may be--is it not almost
+certain?--that the youth has had the training which will give him a
+wider outlook than his father ever had, and will make him a broader man.
+
+In our grandfathers' days, a man of reasonable culture could come
+approximately near to knowing all that then was known and worth the
+knowing. The wisdom and science of the world could be included in the
+compass of a modest bookshelf. But the province of human knowledge has
+become so wide that, however much "general information" a man may have,
+he can truly know nothing unless he studies it as a specialist. It is,
+perhaps, largely as a reaction against the Jacksonian theory of
+universal competence that the avowed ideal of American education to-day
+is to cultivate the student's power of concentration--to give him a
+survey, elementary but sound, of as wide a field as possible, but above
+all to teach him so to use his mind that to whatever corner of that
+field he may turn for his walk in life, he will be able to focus all his
+intellect upon it--to concentrate and bring to bear all his energies on
+whatever tussock or mole-hill it may be out of which he has to dig his
+fortune. When the youth steps out into life, it may be that his actual
+store of knowledge is superficial--a smattering of too many things--but
+superficiality is precisely the one quality which, in theory at least,
+his training has been calculated not to produce. Englishmen know that
+the American throws tremendous energy and earnestness into his business.
+They know that he throws the same earnestness into his sports. Is it not
+reasonable to suppose that he will be no less earnest in the study of
+Botticelli? And it is a great advantage (which the American nation
+shares with the American youth) to have the products, the literature,
+the art, the institutions of the whole world to choose from, with
+practically no traditions to hamper the choice.
+
+When the Japanese determined to adopt Western ways, seeing that so only
+could they hold their own against the peoples of the West, they did not
+model their civilisation on that of any one European country. They sent
+the most intelligent of their young men abroad into every country, each
+with a mission to study certain things in that country; and so,
+gathering for comparison the ways of thought and the institutions of all
+peoples, they were able to pick and choose from each what seemed best to
+them and to reject all else. They did not propose to make themselves a
+nation of imitation Englishmen or Germans or Americans. "But," we can
+imagine them saying, "if we take whatever is best in each country we
+ought surely to be able to make ourselves into a nation better than
+any." They modelled their navy on the British, but not their army, nor
+their banking system, nor did they copy much from British commercial or
+industrial methods--nor did they take the British system of education.
+
+The United States has been less free to choose. The Japanese had a new
+house, quite empty, and they could do their furnishing all at once. The
+American nation, though young, has, after all, a century of domestic
+life behind it, in the course of which it has accumulated a certain
+amount of furniture in the form of institutions, prejudices, and
+traditions, some of which are fixtures and could not be torn out of the
+structure if the nation wished it; others, though movable, possess
+associations for the sake of which it would not part with them if it
+could. Fortunately, however, the house has been much built on to of late
+years and what goods, or bads, are already amassed can all be stowed
+away in a single east wing. All the main building (the eastern wing used
+to be the main building, but it is not now), and particularly the
+western end and the annex to the north, are new and empty, to be
+decorated and furnished as the owner pleases. And while the owner, like
+a sensible man, intends to do all that he can to encourage home
+manufactures, he does not hesitate to go as far afield as he likes to
+fill a nook with something better than anything that can be turned out
+at home.
+
+Nothing strikes an Englishman more, after he comes to know the people,
+than this eclectic habit, paradoxically combined as it is with an
+intense--an over-noisy--patriotism. "The best," the American is fond of
+saying, "is good enough for me"; and it never occurs to him that he has
+not entire right to the best wherever he may find it. In England it is
+only a small part of the population which considers itself entitled to
+the best of anything. The rest of the people may covet, but the best
+belongs to "their betters." The American knows no "betters." He comes to
+England and walks, as of right, into the best hotels, the best
+restaurants, the best seats at the theatres--and the best society. He
+buys, so far as his purse permits, and often his purse permits a great
+deal, the best works of art. The consequence is that the world brings
+him of its best. It may defraud him once in a while into buying an
+imitation or a second-class article patched up; but, on the whole, the
+American people has something like the best of the world to choose from.
+And what is true of the palpable and material things is equally true of
+the intangible and intellectual.
+
+Englishmen have long been familiar with one aspect of this fact, in the
+honours which America has in the past been ready to shower on any
+visiting Englishman of distinction: in the extraordinary number of
+dollars that she has been willing to pay to hear him lecture. Of this
+particular commodity--the lecturing Englishman--the people has been
+fairly sated; but because Americans are no longer eager to lionise any
+English author or artist with some measure of a London reputation, it
+does not by any means imply that they are not still seeking for, and
+grappling, the best in art and letters wherever they can find it. They
+only doubt whether the Englishman who comes to lecture is, after all,
+the best.
+
+A Frenchman has pronounced American society to be the wittiest in the
+world. A German has said that more people read Dante in Boston than in
+Berlin. I take it that many more read Shakespeare in the United States
+than in Great Britain--and they certainly try harder to understand him.
+Nor need it be denied that they have to try harder. Without any
+knowledge of actual sales, I have no doubt that the number of copies of
+the works of any continental European author, of anything like a
+first-class reputation, sold in America is vastly greater than the
+number sold in England. Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Sienkiewicz, Ibsen,
+Maeterlinck, Fogazzaro, Jokai, Haeckel, Nietzsche--I give the names at
+random as they come--of any one of these there is immeasurably more of a
+"cult" in the United States than in England--a far larger proportion of
+the population makes some effort to master what is worth mastering in
+each. Rodin's works--his name at least and photographs of his
+masterpieces--are familiar to tens of thousands of Americans belonging
+to classes which in England never heard of him. Helleu's drawings were
+almost a commonplace of American illustrated literature six years before
+one educated Englishman in a hundred knew his name. Zoern's etchings are
+almost as well known in the United States as Whistler's. Englishmen
+remain curiously engrossed in English things.
+
+It may be a very disputable judgment to say that the most nearly
+Shakespearian literary production of modern times--at least of those
+which have gained any measure of fame--is M. Rostand's _Cyrano de
+Bergerac_. Immediately on its publication it was greeted in America with
+hardly less enthusiasm than in Paris; and within a few weeks it became
+the chief topic of conversation at a thousand dinner tables. In a few
+months I had seen the play acted by three different companies--all
+admirable, scholarly productions, of which the most famous and most
+"authorised" was by no means the best--and soon thereafter I came to
+England, for a short visit, but with the determination to find time to
+make the trip to Paris to see M. Coquelin as "Cyrano." I found
+Englishmen--educated Englishmen, including not a few authors and
+critics to whom I spoke--practically unaware of the existence of such a
+play. Of those who had heard of it and read _critiques_, I met not one
+who had read the work itself. Some time after, Sir Charles Wyndham
+produced it in London and it was, I believe, not a success. To-day
+_Cyrano de Bergerac_ (I am speaking of it not as an acting play but as
+literature) is practically unknown even to educated Englishmen, except
+such as make French literature their special study.
+
+_Cyrano_ may or may not be on a level with any but the greatest of
+Shakespeare's plays (it is evident from his other work that M. Rostand
+is not a Shakespeare) but that it was an immeasurably finer thing than
+ninety-nine per cent of the books of the year which English people were
+reading that winter on the advice of English critics is beyond question.
+The nation which was reading and discussing M. Rostand's work was
+conspicuously better engaged than the nation which was reading and
+discussing the English novels of the season.
+
+Again when poor Vasili Verestschagin met his death so tragically off
+Port Arthur, his name meant little or nothing to the great majority of
+educated Englishmen, though there had been exhibitions of his work in
+London--the same exhibitions as were made throughout the larger cities
+of the United States. In America regret for him was wide-spread and
+personal, for he stood for something definite in American eyes--rather
+unfortunately, perhaps, in one way, because Verestschagin, too, had
+painted those miserable sepoys being eternally blown from British guns.
+
+The general English misapprehension of the present condition of art and
+literature in America sometimes shows itself in unexpected places. I
+have a great love for _Punch_. Since the time when the beautifying of
+its front cover with gamboge and vermilion and emerald green constituted
+the chief solace of wet days in the nursery, I doubt if, in the course
+of forty years, I have missed reading one dozen copies of the London
+_Charivari_. After a period of exile in regions where current literature
+is unobtainable one of the chief delights of a return to civilisation is
+"catching up" with the back numbers of _Punch_; nor, in spite of gibes
+to the contrary, has the paper ever been more brilliant than under its
+present editorship. Yet _Punch_ in this present week of September 11,
+1907, represents an American woman, apparently an American woman of
+wealth and position (at all events she is at the time touring in Italy),
+as saying on hearing an air from _Il Trovatore_: "Say, these Italians
+ain't vurry original. Guess I've heard that tune on our street organs in
+New York ever since I was a gurl."
+
+The weaknesses of the peoples of other nations are fair game; but it is
+the essence of just caricature that it should have some verisimilitude.
+_Punch_ could not publish that drawing with the accompanying legend
+unless it was the belief of the editor or the staff that such a solecism
+was more or less likely to proceed from the mouth of such an American as
+is depicted; which is precisely the error of the Frenchman who believes
+that Englishmen sell their wives at Smithfield. Thirty years ago, the
+lampoon would have had some justification; but at the present time both
+the actual number and the percentage of women who are familiar with the
+Italian operas is, I believe, vastly greater in America than in
+England. This statement will undoubtedly be received with incredulity by
+the majority of Englishmen who know nothing about the United States; but
+no one who does know the people of the country will dispute it. In
+England, the opera is still, for all the changes that have occurred in
+the last quarter of a century, largely a pleasure of a limited class. It
+may be (and personally I believe) that in that class there is a larger
+number of true musicians who know the operas well and love them
+appreciatively than is to be found in the United States; but the number
+of people who have a reasonable acquaintance with the majority of
+operas, and are familiar with the best known airs from each and with the
+general characteristics of the various composers, is immensely larger in
+America. It is only the same fact that we have confronted so often
+before--the fact of the greater homogeneousness or uniformity of tastes
+and pursuits in the American people.
+
+It must be clearly understood, here as elsewhere, that I am not
+comparing merely the people of New York with the people of London, but
+the people of the whole United States of all classes, urban and
+provincial, industrial and peasant, East and West, with the whole
+population of all classes in the British Isles; for a large percentage
+of the mistakes which Englishmen make about America arises from the fact
+that they insist on comparing the educated classes of London with such
+people as they may chance to have met in New York or one or two Eastern
+cities, under the impression that they are thereby drawing a comparison
+between the two peoples. Senator Hoar's opinion of Matthew Arnold has
+been already quoted; and the truth is that very few Englishmen who have
+written about America have lived in the country long enough to grasp how
+much of the United States lies on the other side of the North River. Not
+only does not New York alone, but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
+Washington combined do not bear anything like the same relation to
+America as a whole as London bears to the British Isles. Englishmen take
+no account of, for they have not seen and no one has reported to them,
+the intense craving for and striving after culture and self-improvement
+which exists (and has existed for a generation) not only in such larger
+cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New Orleans,
+but in many hundreds of smaller communities scattered from the Atlantic
+to the Pacific. One must have such a vision of the United States as a
+whole as will enable him to imagine all this endeavour, now dissipated
+over so vast a stretch of country, as all massed together into a
+territory no larger than the British Isles before he can arrive at an
+intelligent basis of comparison between the peoples. What is centralised
+in England in America is diffused over half a continent and much less
+easily measurable.
+
+It happens that as I am correcting the proofs of the chapter the London
+newspapers of the day (January 25, 1908) contain announcements of the
+death in New York of Edward MacDowell. He was often spoken of as "the
+American Grieg"; but it was a phrase which irritated many good musical
+critics in America, for the reason that they considered their countryman
+the greater man of the two. They would have had Grieg spoken of as the
+Norwegian MacDowell. In that judgment they may have been right or they
+may have been wrong; but it is characteristic of the attitudes of the
+British and American peoples that, whereas the people of the United
+States know Grieg better than he is known in England (that is to say,
+that a larger proportion of the people, outside the classes which
+professedly account themselves musical, have more or less acquaintance
+with his music), just as they know the work of half a dozen English
+composers, MacDowell, though he had played his pianoforte concertos in
+London, remained almost unknown in England outside of strictly musical
+circles. It is certain that had MacDowell been an Englishman he would
+have been immensely better known in America than, being an American, he
+ever was in England.
+
+In the kindred field of the drama the general English idea of the
+American stage is based chiefly on acquaintance with that noisy type of
+"musical comedy" of which so many specimens have in recent years been
+brought to England from the other side of the Atlantic. It is as if
+Americans judged English literature by Miss Marie Corelli and Guy
+Thorne. Those things are brought to England because they are opined by
+the managers to be the sort of thing that England wants or which is
+likely to succeed in England, not because they are what America
+considers her best product. To attempt any comparison of the living
+playwrights or actors in the two countries would be a thorny and
+perilous undertaking; and if any comparison is to be made at all it must
+be done lightly and as far as possible examples must be drawn from those
+who are no longer actively on the boards. Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary
+Anderson) has deliberately put on record her opinion of Miss Clara
+Morris as "the greatest emotional actress I ever saw." It is not likely
+that when Madame de Navarro pronounced that estimate she was forgetting
+either Miss Terry or Mrs. Campbell--or Mesdames Rejane and Bernhardt or
+Signora Duse. Madame de Navarro is no mean judge: and those who have
+read Miss Morris's wonderful book, _Life on the Stage_, will think the
+judgment in this case not incredible.
+
+Similarly I believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has
+just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholarship,
+restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an
+English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is
+in his class. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living
+English actor could have approached, and I gravely doubt whether England
+would have furnished a public who would have appreciated it in
+sufficient numbers to make its presentation a success if it had been
+achieved in London.
+
+It was said that in any effort to arrive at an estimate of American
+culture, or to state that culture in terms of English culture, we should
+have to find landmarks in trifles. All these things are such trifles.
+Let us concede that _Cyrano_ is not the greatest literature, nor is
+Verestschagin's work the highest art; still neither the one nor the
+other is properly a negligible quantity in the sum-total of the creative
+work of the generation. There may be many American women who do not know
+their Verdi, and it may be that Madame de Navarro's estimate of Miss
+Morris, mine of Mr. Mansfield, and that of certain American critics of
+Edward MacDowell are equally at fault; but it still remains absurd to
+take ignorance of the Italian operas as characteristic of American
+women or to talk contemptuously, as many Englishmen do, of the American
+theatre, because they have no knowledge of it beyond what they have seen
+of the one class of production from _The Belle of New York_ to _The
+Prince of Pilsen_, or of American music, because their acquaintance with
+it begins and ends with Sousa and the writers of "coon songs."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will be urged that successive "crazes" for individual artists or
+authors, for particular productions or even isolated schools, are no
+evidence of any general culture. Conceding this, it remains impossible
+to avoid the question: supposing a nation or an individual to spend each
+successive six months in a new enthusiasm--six months on Plato and
+Aristotelianism,--six months, taking the _Light of Asia_, Mr. Sinnett,
+and _Kim_ as a starting point, on Buddhism and esoteric philosophy,--six
+months, inspired by Fitzgerald, on Omar, Persian literature and history
+and the various ramifications thereof,--six months on M. Rodin, his
+relation to the art of sculpture in general and particularly to the
+sculpture of the Greeks,--a similar six months devoted to Mr. Watt with
+like excursions into his environment, proximate and remote,--six months
+to Millet, Barbizon, and the history of French painting,--six months of
+Russian art with Verestschagin and six with Russian literature and
+politics working outwards from Count Tolstoi,--six months of philosophic
+speculation radiating from Haeckel,--six months absorbed in Japanese
+art,--six months burrowing in Egyptian excavations and Egyptian
+history--the question is, I say, supposing a nation or an individual to
+have passed through twenty such spasms (of which I have suggested ten,
+every one of which ten is a subject which I have in my own experience
+known to become the rage in America more or less wide-spread and for a
+greater or lesser period) and supposing that nation or that individual
+to be possessed of extraordinary earnestness and power of concentration,
+with a great desire to learn, how far will that nation or that
+individual have travelled on the road toward something approaching
+culture? Let it be granted that the individual or the nation starts with
+something less of the aesthetic temperament, less well grounded in, or
+disposed towards, artistic or literary study than the average Englishman
+who has made decent use of his opportunities at school, at the
+university, and in the surroundings of his every-day life; the
+intellectual condition of that individual or nation will not at the end
+of the ten years of successive _furores_ be the same intellectual
+condition as that of the Englishman who, after leaving college, has
+spent ten years in the ordinary educated society of England, but it is
+probable that, besides the accumulation of a great quantity of
+information, some not entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards
+of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth
+remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has
+declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there is
+conspicuously more culture.
+
+When the Englishman hears the American, and especially the American
+woman, slip so glibly from Rodin to Rameses, from Kant to kakemonos, he
+dubs her superficial. Perhaps she is, considering only the actual
+knowledge possessed compared with the potentiality of knowledge on any
+one of the topics. There is a story which has been fitted to many
+persons and many occasions, but which thirty years ago was told of Mr.
+Gladstone, though for all I know it may go back to generations before he
+was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where
+among the guests was a distinguished Japanese; and, as not seldom
+happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with
+fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which
+Japan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was
+asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man,"
+he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know all about everything
+in the world except Japan. He knows nothing at all about Japan."
+
+The specialist in a single subject can always find the holes in the
+information on that subject of the "universal specialist." But it is
+worth noticing that, like almost every other salient trait of the
+American character, this American desire to become a universal
+specialist--this reaching after the all-culture and all-knowledge--is an
+essentially Anglo-Saxon or English characteristic. The German may be
+content to spend his whole life laboriously probing into one small hole.
+The Frenchman (let me say again that I thoroughly recognise that all
+national generalisations are unsound) will cheerfully wave aside with a
+_la-la-la_ whole realms of knowledge which do not interest him. But all
+Englishmen and all Americans would be Crichtons and Sydneys if they
+could. And--perhaps on the principle of setting a thief to catch a
+thief--although the all-round man is the ideal of both peoples, each is
+equally suspicious of an intellectual rotundity (in another person) too
+nearly complete.
+
+Americans rather like to repeat that story of Mr. Gladstone, when the
+talk is of English culture.
+
+The American as a rule is a better linguist than the Englishman,--he is
+quicker, that is, to pick up a modern language and likely to speak it
+with a better accent. "Never trust an Englishman who speaks French
+without an English accent," said Prince Bismarck; and the remark,
+however unjust it may be to an occasional individual, showed a shrewd
+insight into the English character. There is always to be recognised the
+fact that there are tens--perhaps hundreds--of thousands of Englishmen
+who speak Hindustani, Pushtu, or the language of any one of a hundred
+remote peoples with whom the Empire has traffic, while the American has
+had no contact with other peoples which called for a knowledge of any
+tongue but his own, except that in a small way some Spanish has been
+useful. But so far as European languages go, the Englishman, in more or
+less constant and intimate relation with each of the peoples of Europe,
+has been so well satisfied of his own superiority to each that it has
+seemed vastly more fitting that they should learn his language than that
+he should trouble to learn theirs. Under any circumstances, is it not
+obviously easier for each one of the European peoples to learn to talk
+English than for the Englishman to learn eight European tongues with
+eighty miscellaneous dialects?
+
+When an Englishman does learn a foreign language, it is most commonly
+for literary or scholastic purposes, rather than (with the exception of
+French in certain classes) for conversational use. The American on the
+other hand, having had no need of languages in the past, coming now in
+contact with the world, sees that there are three or four languages of
+Europe which it is most desirable that he should know, if only for
+commercial purposes; and a language learned for commercial purposes must
+be mastered colloquially and idiomatically. The American is not
+distracted by the need of Sanskrit or of any one of the numerous more or
+less primitive tongues which a certain proportion of the English people
+must acquire if the business of the Empire is to go on. Nor is his
+vision confused by seeing all the European tongues jumbled, as it were,
+together before him at too close range. He can distinguish which are the
+essential or desirable languages for his purposes; and the rising
+generation of Americans is learning those languages more generally, and
+in a more practical way, than is the rising generation of Englishmen.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And yet we have not crossed that morass;--nor perhaps, however superior
+in folly we may be to the angels, is it desirable that we should in
+plain daylight. We have at most found some slight vantage-ground: thrown
+up a mole-hill of a Pisgah from which we can attain a distant view of
+what lies beyond the swamp, even if perchance we have taken some mirages
+and _ignes fatui_ for solid landscape and actual illuminations.
+
+The ambitions and ideals of the two peoples are fundamentally alike; nor
+is there so great a difference as appears on the surface in their method
+of striving to attain those ideals and realise those ambitions, albeit
+the American uses certain tools (modern he calls them, the Englishman
+preferring to say new-fangled) to which the Englishman's hands have not
+taken kindly. It is natural that the English nation, having a so much
+larger past, should be more influenced by it than the American. It is
+natural that the American, conscious that his national character has but
+just shaped itself out of the void, with all the future before it,
+should look more to the present and the future than the Englishman.
+
+The Englishman prefers to turn almost exclusively to the study of
+antiquity--the art and philosophies and letters of past ages--for the
+foundation of his work, and thence to push on between almost strictly
+British lines. The American seeks rather to absorb only so much of the
+wisdom and taste of antiquity as may serve for an intelligent
+comprehension of the world-art, the world-philosophies, the
+world-literature of to-day, and then, borrowing what he will from each
+department of those, to strive on that foundation to build something
+better than any. There are many scholars and students in America who
+would prefer to see the people less eager to push on. There are many
+thinkers and educators in England who hold that English scholarship and
+training dwell altogether too much in the past and that it were better
+if England would look more abroad and would give larger attention to the
+conditions of modern life--the conditions which her youth will have to
+meet in the coming generation.
+
+If an American were asked which of the two peoples was the more
+cultivated, the more widely informed, he would probably say: "You
+fellows have been longer at the game than we have. You've had more
+experience in the business; but we believe we've got every bit as good
+raw material as you and a blamed sight better machinery. Also we are
+more in earnest and work that machinery harder than you. Maybe we are
+not turning out as good goods yet--and maybe we are. But it's a dead
+sure thing that if we aren't yet, we're going to."
+
+A common index to the degree of cultivation in any people is found in
+their everyday language--their spoken speech; but here again in
+considering America from the British standpoint we have to be careful or
+we may be entrapped into the same fallacy as threatens us when we
+propose to judge the United States by its newspapers. In the first place
+the right of any people to invent new forms of verbal currency to meet
+the requirements of its colloquial exchange must be conceded. There was
+a time when an Americanism in speech was condemned in England because it
+was American. When so many of the Americanisms of ten years ago are
+incorporated in the daily speech even of educated Englishmen to-day, it
+would be affectation to put forward such a plea nowadays. Going deeper
+than this, we undoubtedly find that the educated Englishman to-day
+speaks with more precision than the educated American. The educated
+Englishman speaks the language of what I have already called the public
+school and university class. But while the Englishman speaks the
+language of that class, the American speaks the language of the whole
+people. That is not, of course, entirely true, for there are grades of
+speech in the United States, but it is relatively true--true for the
+purpose of a comparison with the conditions in Great Britain. The
+Englishman may be surprised at the number of solecisms committed in the
+course of an hour's talk by a well-to-do New Yorker whom he has met in
+the company of gentlemen in England. He would perhaps be more surprised
+to find a mechanic from the far West commit no more. The tongue of
+educated Englishmen is not the tongue of the masses--nor is it a
+difference in accent only, but in form, in taste, in grammar, and in
+thought. If in England the well-to-do and gentle classes had commercial
+transactions only among themselves, it is probable that a currency
+composed only of gold and silver would suffice for their needs; copper
+is introduced into the coinage to meet the requirements of the poor.
+American speech has its elements of copper for the same reason--that all
+may be able to deal in it, to give and take change in its terms. It is
+the same fact as we have met before, of the greater homogeneousness of
+the American people--the levelling power (for want of a better phrase)
+of a democracy.
+
+The Englishman may object, and with justice, that because an educated
+man must incorporate into his speech words and phrases and forms which
+are necessary for communication with the vulgar, there is no reason why
+he should not be able to reserve those forms and phrases for use with
+the vulgar only. A gentleman does not pay half-a-crown, lost at the card
+table to a friend, in coppers. Why cannot the educated American keep his
+speech silver and gold for educated ears? All of which is just. There
+are people in the United States who speak with a preciseness equal to
+that of the most exacting of English precisians, but they are not fenced
+off as in England within the limits of a specified class; while the
+common speech of the American people, which is used by a majority of
+those who would in England come within the limits of that fenced area,
+is much more careless in form and phrase than the speech of educated
+Englishmen. It may be urged that it is much less careless, and better
+and vastly more uniform, than any one of the innumerable forms of speech
+employed by the various lower classes in England; which is true. The
+level of speech is better in America; but the speech of the educated and
+well-to-do is generally much better in England. All this, however (which
+is mere commonplace) may be conceded, but, though educated Americans may
+use a more debased speech than educated Englishmen, the point is that it
+is not safe to argue therefrom to an inferiority in culture in America;
+because the American uses his speech for other and wider purposes than
+the Englishman. The different American classes, just as they dress
+alike, read the same newspapers and magazines, and, within limits, eat
+the same food, so they speak the same language. It is unjust to compare
+that language with the language used in England only by the educated
+classes.
+
+But, what is an infinitely larger fact, the inferiority of the American
+speech to the English is daily and rapidly disappearing. Twenty years
+ago, practically all American speech fell provincially on educated
+English ears. That is far from being the case to-day; and what is most
+interesting is that the alteration has not come about as the result of a
+change in the diction of Americans only. The change has been in
+Englishmen also. To whatever extent American speech may have improved,
+it is certain also that English speech has become much less
+precise--much less uniform among the educated and "gentlemanly"
+classes--and English ears are consequently less exacting.
+
+With the gradual elimination of class distinctions in England, or rather
+with the blurring of the lines which separate one class from another, a
+multitude of persons pass for "gentlemen" in England to-day who could
+not have dreamed--and whose fathers certainly did not dream--of being
+counted among the gentry thirty-five years ago. The fact may be for good
+or ill; but one consequence has been that the newcomers, thrusting up
+into the circles above them, have taken with them the speech of their
+former associates, so that one hears now, in nominally polite circles,
+tones of voice, forms of speech, and the expression of points of view
+which would have been impossible in the youth of people who are now no
+more than middle-aged.
+
+There was a time when the dress proclaimed the man of quality at once.
+That distinction began to pass away with the disappearance of silk and
+ruffles and wigs from masculine costume. For a century longer, the
+shibboleths of voice and manner kept their force. But now those too are
+going; and the result is that the English speech of the educated class
+has become less precise and less uniform. The same speech is now common
+to a larger proportion of the people. In the days when nearly all the
+members of educated society--we are speaking of the men only, for they
+only counted in those days--had been to one or other of the same "seven
+great public schools" (which not one public school man in a hundred can
+name correctly to-day) and to one or other of the same two universities,
+they kept for use among themselves all through their after life the
+forms of speech, the catchwords, the classical references which passed
+current in their school and undergraduate days. It was a free-masonry of
+speech on which the outsider could not intrude. To-day, when not a
+quarter of the members of the same circles have been to one of those
+same seven schools nor a half to the same universities, when at least a
+quarter have been to no recognised classical school at all, it is
+impossible that the same free-masonry should prevail. There were a
+hundred trite classical quotations (no great evidence of scholarship,
+but made jestingly familiar by the old school curricula) which our
+fathers could use with safety in any chance company of the society to
+which they were accustomed; but even the most familiar of them would be
+a parlous experiment in small talk to-day. They have vanished from
+common conversation even more completely than they have disappeared from
+the debates of the House of Commons. And this is only a type of the
+change which has come over the educated speech of England, which we may
+regret or we may welcome. It may be sad that the English gentleman
+should speak in less literary form than he did thirty years ago, but the
+loss may be outweighed many times by the fact that so much larger a
+proportion of the people speak the same speech as he--not so refined as
+his used to be, but materially better than the majority of those who use
+it to-day could then have shaped their lips to frame. Few Englishmen at
+least would acquiesce in the opinion that it showed a decay of culture
+in England--that the people were more ignorant or less educated. It may
+not be safe to draw an analogous conclusion in the case of the American
+people.
+
+A story well-known to most Englishmen has to do with the man who,
+arriving at Waterloo station to take a train, went into the refreshment
+room for a cup of coffee. In his haste he spilled the coffee over his
+shirt front and thereupon fell to incontinent cursing of "this d----d
+London and South-Western Railway."
+
+An American variant of, or pendant to, the same story tells of the
+Eastern man who approached Salt Lake City on foot and sat by the wayside
+to rest. By ill luck he sat upon an ants' nest. Shortly he rose
+anathematising the "lustful Mormon city" and turned his face eastward
+once more, a Mormon-hater to the end of his days.
+
+Not much less illogical is an Englishman I know who, having spent some
+three weeks in the United States, loathes the people and all the
+institutions thereof, almost solely (though the noise of the elevated
+trains in New York has something to do with it) because he found that
+they applied the name of "robin" to what he calls "a cursed great
+thrush-beast." Nearly every English visitor to the United States has
+been irritated at first by discovering this, or some similar fact; but
+it is not necessary on that account to hate the American people, to
+express contempt for their art and literature, and to belittle their
+commercial greatness and all the splendours of their history.[214:1]
+Rather ought Englishmen to like this application by the early colonists
+to the objects of their new environment of the cherished names of the
+well-known things of home. It shows that they carried with them into the
+wilderness in their hearts a love of English lane and hedgerow, and
+strove to soften the savagery of their new surroundings by finding in
+the common wild things the familiar birds and flowers which had grown
+dear to them in far-off peaceful English villages.
+
+We will not now potter again over the well-trodden paths of the
+differences in phraseology in the two peoples which have been so
+fruitful a source of "impressions" in successive generations of English
+visitors to the United States, for the thing grows absurd when "car,"
+and "store," and "sidewalk," and "elevator" are commonplaces on the lips
+of every London cockney; nor is there any need here to thread again the
+mazes of the well-worn discussion as to how far the peculiarities of
+modern American speech are only good old English forms which have
+survived in the New World after disappearance from their original
+haunts.[215:1] The subject is worth referring to, however, for the very
+reason that its discussion _has_ become almost absurd,--because by a
+process which has been going on, as we have already said, on both sides
+of the ocean simultaneously, the differences themselves are
+disappearing, the tongues of the two peoples are coming together and
+coalescing once more. The two currents into which the stream divided
+which flowed from that original well of English are drawing
+together--are, indeed, already so close that it will be but a very short
+time when the word "Americanism" as applied to a peculiarity in language
+will have ceased to be used in England. The "Yankee twang" and the
+"strong English accent" will survive in the two countries respectively
+for some time yet; but the written and spoken language of the two
+nations will be--already almost is--the same, and English visitors to
+the United States will have lost one fruitful source of impressions.
+
+The process has been going on in both countries, but in widely different
+forms. And this seems to me a peculiarly significant fact. In America
+the language of the people is constantly and steadily tending to
+improve; and this tendency is, Englishmen should note, the result of a
+deliberate and conscious effort at improvement on the part of the
+people. This can hardly be insisted upon too strongly.
+
+The majority of "Americanisms" in speech were in their origin mere
+provincialisms--modes of expression and pronunciation which had sprung
+up unchecked in the isolated communities of a scattered people. They
+grew with the growth of the communities, until they threatened to graft
+themselves permanently on the speech of the nation. The United States is
+no longer a country of isolated and scattered communities. After the
+Civil War, and partly as a result thereof, but still more as a result of
+the knitting together of the whole country by the building of the
+American railway system, with the consequent sudden increase in
+intimacy of communication between all parts, there developed in the
+people a new sense of national unity. England saw a revolution in her
+means of communication when railways superseded stage-coaches and when
+the penny post was established; but no revolution comparable to that
+which has taken place in the United States in the present generation.
+Prior to 1880--really until 1883--Portland, Oregon, was hardly less
+removed from Portland, Maine, than Capetown is from Liverpool to-day,
+and the discomforts of travel from one to the other were incomparably
+greater. Now they are morally closer together than London and Aberdeen,
+in as much as nowhere between the Atlantic and Pacific is there any such
+consciousness of racial difference as separates the Scots from the
+English.
+
+The work of federation begun by the original thirteen colonies is not
+yet completed, for the individuality of the several States is destined
+to go on being continuously more merged--until it will finally be almost
+obliterated--in the Federal whole; but it may be said that in the last
+twenty-five years, and not until then, has the American people become
+truly unified--an entity conscious of its oneness and of its commercial
+greatness in that oneness, thinking common thoughts, co-operating in
+common ambitions, and speaking a common speech. Into that speech were at
+first absorbed, as has been said, the peculiarities, localisms, and
+provincialisms which had inevitably grown up in different sections in
+the days of non-communication. But precisely those same causes--the
+settlement of the country, the construction of the railways, the
+development of the natural resources--which contributed to the
+unification and laid the foundations of the greatness, produced, with
+wealth and leisure, new ambitions in the people. The desire for art and
+literature and, what we have called the all-culture, was no new growth,
+but an instinct inherited from the original English stock. Quickened it
+must have been by the moral uplifting of the people by the Civil War,
+but, as we have already seen, for some time after the close of that war
+the whole energies of the people were necessarily devoted to material
+things. Only with the completion of the repairing of the ravages of that
+war, and with the almost coincident settlement of the last great waste
+tracts of the country, were the people free to reach out after things
+immaterial and aesthetic; and only with the accession of wealth, which
+again these same causes produced, came the possibility of gratifying the
+craving for those things. And in the longing for self-improvement and
+self-culture, thus newly inspired and for the first time truly national,
+one of the things to which the people turned with characteristic
+earnestness was the improvement of the common speech. The nation has set
+itself purposefully and with determination to purify and prevent the
+further corruption of its language.
+
+The movement towards "simplification" of the spelling may or may not be
+in the direction of purification, but it will be observed that the
+movement itself could not have come into being without the national
+desire for improvement. The American speech is now the speech of a
+solidified and great nation; and it cannot be permitted to retain the
+inelegancies and colloquialisms which were not intolerable, perhaps, in
+the dialect of a locality in the days when that locality had but
+restricted intercourse with other parts of the country. This effort to
+purify the common tongue is conscious, avowed, and sympathised with in
+all parts of the country alike.
+
+When any point of literary or grammatical form is under discussion in a
+leading American newspaper to-day, the dominant note is that of a purism
+more strict than will appear in a similar discussion in England. In many
+American newspaper offices the rules of "style" forbid the use of
+certain words and phrases which are accepted without question in the
+best London journals. There have of course always been circles--as,
+notoriously, in and around Boston, and, less notoriously but no less
+truly, in Philadelphia and New York--wherein the speech, whether written
+or spoken, has been as scrupulous in form and grammar as in the most
+scholarly circles in Great Britain. These circles corresponded to what
+we have called the public-school and university class of England, and,
+no more than it, did they speak the common speech of their country. Only
+now is the people as a whole consciously striving after an uplifting of
+such common speech.
+
+In England, on the other hand, the process that has been going on has
+been quite involuntary and is as yet almost entirely unconscious.
+
+We have spoken so far of only one factor in that process--namely, the
+democratisation of the English people which is in progress and the
+blurring of the lines between the classes. Co-operating with this are
+other forces. Just as the most well-bred persons can afford on occasions
+to be most careless of their manners--just as only an old-established
+aristocracy can be truly reckless of the character of new associates
+whom it may please to take up--so it may be that the well-educated man,
+confident of his impeccability and altogether off his guard, more
+readily absorbs into his daily speech cant phrases and even solecisms
+than the half-educated who is ever watchful lest he slip. The American
+has a way of writing, figuratively, with a dictionary at his elbow and a
+grammar within reach. There are few educated Englishmen who do not
+consider their own authority--the authority drawn from their school and
+university training--superior to that of any dictionary or grammar,
+especially of any American one.[220:1] So it has come about that, while
+the tendency of the American people is constantly to become more exact
+and more accurate in its written and spoken speech, the English tendency
+is no less constantly towards a growing laxity; and while the American
+has been sternly and conscientiously at work pruning the inelegancies
+out of his language, the Briton has been lightheartedly taking these
+same inelegancies to himself. It is obviously impossible that such a
+twofold tendency can go on for long without the gulf between the quality
+of the respective languages becoming appreciably narrower.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The American writers who now occupy places on the staffs of London
+journals are thoroughly deserving of their places. They have earned
+these and retain them on the ground of their capacity as news gatherers,
+and through the brilliancy of their descriptive writing. They possess
+what is described as "newspaper ability" as opposed to "literary
+ability." It is, nevertheless, the fact that in the majority of the
+newspaper offices, the "copy" of these writers is permitted to pass
+through the press with an immunity from interference on the part either
+of editor or proof-reader, which, a decade back, would not have been
+possible in any London office. Thus the British public, unwarned and
+unconscious, is daily absorbing at its breakfast table, and in the
+morning and evening trains, American newspaper English, which is the
+output of English newspaper offices. It is not now contended that this
+English is any worse than the public would be likely to receive from the
+same class of English writers, but the fact itself is to be noted. I am
+not prepared to agree with Mr. Andrew Lang in holding the English writer
+necessarily blameworthy who "in serious work introduces, needlessly,
+into our tongue an American phrase." Such introductions, however
+needless, may materially enrich the language, and I should, even with
+the permission of Mr. Lang, extend the same latitude to the introduction
+of Scotticisms.
+
+A more important matter for consideration is the present condition of
+the copyright laws of the two countries. English publishers understand
+well enough why it is occasionally cheaper, or, taking all the
+conditions together, more advantageous to have put into type in the
+United States rather than in Great Britain the work of a standard
+English novelist, and to bring the English edition into print from a
+duplicate set of American plates. On the other hand, it is exceptional
+for a novel, or for any book by an American writer, to be put into type
+in England for publication in both countries. For the purpose of
+bringing the text of such books into line with the requirements of
+English readers, it is the practice of the leading American publishers
+to have one division of their composing-rooms allotted to typesetting by
+the English standard, with the use by the proof-readers of an English
+dictionary. It occasionally happens, however, that the attention of
+these proof-readers to the task of securing an English text limits
+itself to a few typical examples, such as spelling "colour" with a "u"
+and seeing that "centre" does not appear as "center," while all that
+constitutes the essence of American style, as compared with the English
+style, is passed unmolested and without change.
+
+Such a result is, doubtless, inevitable in the case of a work by an
+American writer who has his own idea of literary expression and his own
+standard of what constitutes literary style, but the resulting text not
+infrequently gives ground for criticism on the part of English
+reviewers, and for some feeling of annoyance on the part of cultivated
+English readers.
+
+In the case of books by English authors which are put into type in
+American printing-offices, there is, of course, no question of
+modification of style or of form of expression, but with these, as
+stated, the proof-readers are not always successful in eliminating
+entirely the American forms of spelling.
+
+The English publisher, even though he give a personal reading to the
+book in the form in which it finally leaves his hands, (and, in the
+majority of cases, having read it once in manuscript, he declines to go
+over the pages a second time, but contents himself with a cursory
+investigation of the detail of "colour," of "centre,") is not
+infrequently dissatisfied, but it is too late for any changes in the
+text, and he can only let the volume go out. In the case of books
+printed in England from plates made in America, there is nothing at all
+to warn the reader; while in the case of books bound in England from
+sheets actually printed in the United States, there is nothing which the
+reader is likely to notice; and in nine cases out of ten the Englishman
+is unconscious that he is reading anything but an English book. The
+critic may understand, and the man who has lived long in the United
+States and who can recognise the characteristics of American diction,
+assuredly will understand, but these form, of course, a very small class
+in the community; and when the rest of the public is constantly reading
+American writing without a thought that it is other than English
+writing, it is hardly strange that American forms of speech creep daily
+more and more largely into the English tongue. What is really strange is
+that the educational authorities have been prepared to accept and to
+utilise in English schools many American educational books carrying
+American forms of speech and American spelling.
+
+The morality or the wisdom of the English copyright laws is not at the
+moment under discussion, but it is my own opinion (which I believe to be
+the opinion of every Englishman who has given any attention to the
+matter) that not on any ground of literary criticism, or because of any
+canons of taste, but merely as a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence
+to England, and for the sake of securing additional employment for
+British labour, the laws of copyright are in no less radical and urgent
+need of amendment than the English postal laws. What we are here
+concerned with, however, is the effect of the present condition of these
+laws as one of the contributory factors which are co-operating to lessen
+the difference, once so wide and now so narrow, between the American and
+the English tongue.
+
+Nor can there be any doubt of the result of this twofold process if it
+be allowed to continue indefinitely, working in England towards a
+democratisation and Americanisation of the speech, and in America
+towards a higher standard of taste, based on earlier English literary
+models. The two currents, once divergent, now so closely confluent, will
+meet; but will they continue to flow on in one stream? Or will the same
+tendencies persist, so that the currents will cross and again diverge,
+occupying inverse positions?
+
+In a hundred years from now, when, as a result of the apparently
+inevitable growth of the United States in wealth, in power, and in
+influence, its speech and all other of its institutions will come to be
+held in the highest esteem, is it possible that Londoners may vehemently
+put forward their claim to speak purer American than the Americans
+themselves--just as many Americans assert to-day that their speech is
+nearer to the speech of Elizabethan England than is the speech of modern
+Englishmen? Is it possible that it will be only in the common language
+of Englishmen that philologists will be able to find surviving the racy,
+good old American words and phrases of the last decades of the
+nineteenth century--a period which will be to American literature what
+the Elizabethan Age is to English. It may, of course, be absurd, but
+already there are certain individual Americanisms which have long been
+_taboo_ in every reputable office in the United States, but are used
+cheerfully and without comment in London dailies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once more it seems necessary to take precaution lest I be interpreted as
+having said more than I really have said. It would be a mere
+impertinence to affect to pronounce a general judgment on the level of
+culture or of achievement of the two peoples in all fields of art and
+effort; and the most that an individual can do is to take such isolated
+examples drawn from one or from the other, as may serve in particular
+matters as some sort of a standard of measurement. What I am striving to
+convey to the average English reader is, of course, not an impression of
+any inferiority in the English, but only the fact that the Englishman's
+present estimate of the American is almost grotesquely inadequate.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[214:1] Mr. Archer, I find, has this delightful story: "A friend of mine
+returned from a short tour in the United States, declaring that he
+heartily disliked the country and would never go back again. Enquiry as
+to the grounds of his dissatisfaction elicited no more definite or
+damning charge than that 'they' (a collective pronoun presumed to cover
+the whole American people) hung up his trousers instead of folding
+them--or _vice versa_, for I am heathen enough not to remember which is
+the orthodox process."
+
+[215:1] But I cannot resist recording my astonishment at finding in Ben
+Jonson the phrase "to have a good time" used in precisely the sense in
+which the American girl employs it to-day, or at learning from Macaulay
+that Bishop Cooper in the time of Queen Elizabeth spoke of a "platform"
+in its exact modern American political meaning.
+
+[220:1] Though it is worth noting that incomparably the best dictionary
+of the English language yet completed is an American one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+POLITICS AND POLITICIANS
+
+     The "English-American" Vote--The Best People in Politics--What
+     Politics Means in America--Where Corruption Creeps in--The
+     Danger in England--A Presidential Nomination for Sale--Buying
+     Legislation--Could it Occur in England?--A Delectable Alderman--
+     Taxation while you Wait--Perils that England Escapes--The
+     Morality of Congress--Political Corruption and the Irish--
+     Democrat and Republican.
+
+
+The American people ought cordially to cherish Englishmen who come to
+the United States to live, if only for the reason that they have never
+organised for political purposes. In every election, all over the United
+States, one hears of the Irish vote, the German vote, the Scandinavian
+vote, the Italian vote, the French vote, the Polish vote, the Hebrew
+vote, and many other votes, each representing a _clientele_ which has to
+be conciliated or cajoled. But none has ever yet heard of the English
+vote or of an "English-American" element in the population. It is not
+that the Englishman, whether a naturalised American or not, does not
+take as keen an interest in the politics of the country as the people of
+any other nation; on the contrary, he is incomparably better equipped
+than any other to take that interest intelligently. But he plays his
+part as if it were in the politics of his own country, guided by
+precisely the same considerations as the American voters around
+him.[227:1]
+
+The individual Irishman or German will often take pride in splitting off
+from the people of his own blood in matters political and voting "as an
+American." It never occurs to the Englishman to do otherwise. The
+Irishman and the German will often boast, or you will hear it claimed
+for them, that they become assimilated quickly and that "in time," or
+"in the second generation," they are good Americans. The Englishman
+needs no assimilation; but feels himself to be, almost from the day when
+he lands (provided that he comes to live and not as a tourist), of one
+substance and colour with the people about him. Not seldom he is rather
+annoyed that those around him, remembering that he is English, seem to
+expect of him the sentiments of a "foreigner," which he in no way feels.
+
+More than once, it is true, during my residence in America I have been
+approached by individuals or by committees, with invitations to
+associate myself with some proposed political organisation of Englishmen
+"to make our weight felt;" but in justice to those who have made the
+suggestion it should be said that it has always been the outcome of
+exasperation at a moment either when Fenianism was peculiarly rampant in
+the neighbourhood, or when members of other nationalities were doing
+their best to create ill-will between Great Britain and the United
+States. The idea of organising, as the members of other nationalities
+have organised, for the mere purpose of sharing in the party plunder,
+has, I believe, never been seriously contemplated by any Englishmen in
+America; though there are many communities in which their vote might
+well give them the balance of power. It would, as a rule, be easier to
+pick out--say, in Chicago--a Southerner who had lived in the North for
+ten years than an Englishman who had lived there for the same length of
+time. It would certainly be safer to guess the Southerner's party
+affiliation.
+
+The ideas of Englishmen in England about American politics are vague.
+They have a general notion that there is a great deal of politics in
+America, that it is mostly corrupt, and that "the best people" do not
+take any interest in it. As for the last proposition, it is only locally
+or partially true, and quite untrue in the sense in which the Englishman
+understands it.
+
+The word "politics" means two entirely separate things in England and in
+the United States. Understanding the word in its English sense, it is
+conspicuously untrue that the "best people" in America do not take at
+least as much an interest in politics as the "best people" take in
+England. Selecting as a representative of the "best people" of America,
+any citizen eminent in his particular community--capitalist, landed
+proprietor or "real-estate owner," banker, manufacturer, lawyer, railway
+president, or what not,--that man as a usual thing takes a very active
+interest in politics, and not in the politics of the nation only, but of
+his State and his municipality. He is known to be a pillar of one party
+or the other; he gives liberally of his own funds and of the funds of
+his firm or company to the party treasury[229:1]; he is consulted by,
+and advises with, the local committees; representatives of the national
+committees or from other parts of the State call upon him for
+information; he concerns himself intimately with the appointments to
+political office made from his section of the country; he attends public
+meetings and entertains visiting speakers at his house; as far as may be
+judicious (and sometimes much further), he endeavours by his example or
+precept to influence the votes and ways of thought of those in his
+service. The chances of his being sent to Congress or to the Senate, of
+his becoming a cabinet minister, being appointed to a foreign mission,
+or accepting a position on some commission of a public character, are
+vastly greater than with the man of corresponding position in England.
+So far from not taking an interest in politics, as Englishmen understand
+the phrase, he is commonly a most energetic and valuable supporter of
+his party.
+
+But--and here is the nub of the matter--politics in America include
+whole strata of political work which are scarcely understood in England.
+When the English visitor is told in the United States that "our best
+people will not take any interest in politics," it is usually in the
+office of a financier, or at a fashionable dinner table, in New York or
+some other of the great cities. What is intended to be conveyed to him
+is that the "best people" will not take part in the active work in
+municipal politics or in that portion of the national politics which
+falls within the municipal area. The millionaire, the gentleman of
+refinement and leisure, will not "take off his coat" and attend primary
+meetings, or make tours of the saloons and meet Tammany or "the City
+Hall gang" on its own ground. As a matter of fact it is rather
+surprising to see how often he does it; but it is spasmodically and in
+occasional fits of enthusiasm for Reform, "with a large R." And,
+whatever temporary value these intermittent efforts may have (and they
+have great value, if only as a warning to the "gangs" that it is
+possible to go too far), they are in the long run of little avail
+against the constant daily and nightly work of the members of a
+"machine" to whom that work means daily bread.
+
+I have said that it is surprising to see how often these "best people"
+do go down into the slums and begin work at the beginning; and the
+tendency to do so is growing more and more frequent. The reproach that
+they do not do it enough has not the force to-day that once it had.
+Meanwhile in England there is little complaint that the same people do
+not do that particular work, for the excellent reason that that work
+does not exist to be done. It would only be tedious here to go into an
+elaborate explanation of why it does not exist. The reason is to be
+found in the differences in the political structure of the two
+countries--in the much more representative character of the government
+(or rather of the methods of election to office) in America--in the
+multiplication of Federal, State, county, and municipal
+office-holders--in the larger number of offices, including many which
+are purely judicial, which are elective, and which are filled by party
+candidates elected by a partisan vote--in the identification of national
+and municipal politics all over the country.
+
+Of all these causes, it is probably the last which is fundamentally most
+operative. The local democracy, local republicanism everywhere, is a
+part of the national Democratic or Republican organisation. The party as
+a whole is composed of these municipal units. Each municipal campaign is
+conducted with an eye to the general fortunes of the party in the State
+or the nation; and the same power that appoints a janitor in a city hall
+may dictate the selection of a presidential candidate.
+
+Until very recently, this phenomenon was practically unknown in England.
+The "best person"--he who "took an interest in politics" as a Liberal or
+as a Conservative--was no more concerned, as Liberal or Conservative, in
+the election of his town officers than he was accustomed to take part in
+the weekly sing-song at the village public house. National politics did
+not touch municipal politics. Within the last two decades or so,
+however, there has been a marked change, and not in London and a few
+large cities alone.
+
+Englishmen who have been accustomed to believe that the high standard of
+purity in English public life, as compared with what was supposed to be
+the standard in America, was chiefly owing to the divorcement of the
+two, are not altogether gratified at the change or easy in their mind as
+to the future. London is still a long way from having such an
+organisation as Tammany Hall in either the Moderate or Progressive
+party; but it is not easy to see what insuperable obstacles would exist
+to the formation of such an organisation, with certain limitations, if a
+great and unscrupulous political genius should arise among the members
+of either party in the London County Council and should bend his
+energies to the task. It is not, of course, necessary that, because
+Englishmen are approximating to the American system in this particular,
+they should be unable to avoid adopting its worst American abuses. But
+it will do no harm if Englishmen in general recognise that what is, it
+is to be hoped, still far from inevitable, was a short time ago
+impossible. If Great Britain must admit an influence which has, even
+though only incidentally, bred pestilence and corruption elsewhere, it
+might be well to take in time whatever sanitary and preventive measures
+may be available against similar consequences.[232:1]
+
+Meanwhile in the United States there is continually being raised, in
+ever increasing volume, the cry for the separation of local and national
+politics. It is true that small headway has yet been made towards any
+tangible reform; but the desire is there. Again, therefore, it is
+curious that in politics, as in so many other things, there are two
+currents setting in precisely opposing directions in the two
+countries--in America a reaction against corruptions which have crept in
+during the season of growth and ferment and an attempt to return to
+something of the simplicity of earlier models, and, simultaneously in
+England, hardly a danger, but a possibility of sliding into a danger, of
+admitting precisely those abuses of which the United States is
+endeavouring to purge itself. The tendencies at work are exactly
+analogous to those which, as we have seen, are operating to modify the
+respective modes of speech of the two peoples. What the ultimate effect
+of either force will be, it is impossible even to conjecture. But it is
+unpleasant for an Englishman to consider even the remotest possibility
+of a time coming, though long after he himself is dead, when the people
+of America will draw awful warnings from the corrupt state of politics
+in England, and bless themselves that in the United States the municipal
+rings which dominate and scourge the great cities in England are
+unknown.
+
+At present that time is far distant, and there can be no reasonable
+doubt that there is much more corruption in public affairs in the United
+States than in England. The possibilities of corruption are greater,
+because there are so many more men whose influence or vote may be worth
+buying; but it is to be feared that the evil does not exceed merely in
+proportion to the excess of opportunity. Granted that bribery and the
+use of undue influence are most obvious and most rampant in those
+spheres which have not their counterpart in Great Britain--in municipal
+wards and precincts, in county conventions and State legislatures--it
+still remains that the taint has spread upwards into other regions which
+in English politics are pure. There is every reason to think that the
+Englishman is justified in his belief that the motives which guide his
+public men and the principles which govern his public policy are, on the
+whole, higher than those which guide and inspire and govern the men or
+policies of any other nation. Bismarck's (if it was Bismarck's)
+confidence in the _parole de gentleman_ is still justified. In America,
+a similar faith in matters of politics would at times be sorely tried.
+
+Perhaps as good an illustration as could be cited of the greater
+possibilities of corruption in the United States, is contained in a
+statement of the fact that a very few thousand dollars would at one time
+have sufficed to prevent Mr. Bryan from becoming the Democratic
+candidate for the Presidency in 1896. This is not mere hearsay, for I am
+able to speak from knowledge which was not acquired after the event. Nor
+for one moment is it suggested that Mr. Bryan himself was thus easily
+corruptible, nor even that those who immediately nominated him could
+have been purchased for the sum mentioned.
+
+The fact is that for a certain specified sum the leaders of a particular
+county convention were willing to elect an anti-Bryan delegation. The
+delegation then elected would unquestionably control the State
+convention subsequently to be held; and the delegation to be elected
+again at that convention would have a very powerful influence in
+shaping the action of the National Convention at St. Louis. The
+situation was understood and the facts not disputed. Those to whom the
+application for the money was made took all things into consideration
+and determined that it was not worth it; that it would be better to let
+things slide. They slid. If those gentlemen had foreseen the full volume
+of the avalanche that was coming, I think that the money would have been
+found.
+
+It was, however, better as it was. The motives which prompted the
+refusal of the money were, as I was told, not motives of morality. It
+was not any objection to the act of bribery, but a mere question of
+expediency. It was not considered that the "goods" were worth the money.
+But, as always, it was better for the country that the immoral act was
+not done. The Free Silver poison was working in the blood of the body
+politic, and it was better to let the malady come to a head and fight it
+strenuously than to drive it back and let it go on with its work of
+internal corruption. Looking back now it is easy to see that the fight
+of 1896 must have come at some time, and it was best that it came when
+it did. The gentlemen who declined to produce the few thousand dollars
+asked of them (the sum was fifteen thousand dollars, if I remember
+rightly, or three thousand pounds) would, a few weeks later, have given
+twice the sum to have the opportunity back again. Now, I imagine, they
+are well content that they acted as they did.
+
+As illustrating the methods which are not infrequent in connection with
+the work of the State legislatures, I may mention that I once acted
+(without premeditation) as witness to the depositing of two thousand
+dollars in gold coin in a box at a safety deposit vault, by the
+representative of a great corporation, the key of which box was
+afterwards handed to a member of the local State legislature. The vote
+and influence of that member were necessary for the defeat of certain
+bills--bills, be it said, iniquitous in themselves--which would have
+cost that particular corporation many times two thousand dollars; and
+two thousand dollars was the sum at which that legislator valued the
+aforesaid vote and influence.
+
+It is not always necessary to take so much precaution to secure secrecy
+as was needed in this case. The recklessness with which State
+legislators sometimes accept cheques and other easily traceable media of
+exchange is a little bewildering, until one understands how secure they
+really are from any risk of information being lodged against them. A
+certain venerable legislator in one of the North-western States some
+years ago gained considerable notoriety, of a confidential kind, by
+being the only member of his party in the legislature at the time who
+declined to accept his share in a distribution which was going on of the
+mortgage bonds of a certain railway company. It was not high principle
+nor any absurd punctiliousness on his part that made him decline. "In my
+youth," said he to the representative of the railway company, "I was an
+earnest anti-slavery man and I still recoil from bonds." It was said
+that he received his proportion of the pool in a more negotiable form.
+
+It would be easy, even from my own individual knowledge, to multiply
+stories of this class; but the effect would only be to mislead the
+English reader, while the American is already familiar with such
+stories in sufficiency. The object is not to insist upon the fact that
+there is corruption in American public life, but rather to show what
+kind of corruption it is, and that it is largely of a kind the
+opportunity for indulgence in which does not exist in England. The
+method of nominating candidates for Parliament in England removes the
+temptation to "influence" primaries and bribe delegations. In the
+absence of State legislatures, railway and other corporations are not
+exposed to the same system of blackmail.
+
+Let us suppose that each county in England had its legislature of two
+chambers, as every State has in America, the members of these
+legislatures being elected necessarily only from constituencies in which
+they lived, so that a slum district of a town was obliged to elect a
+slum-resident, a village a resident of that village; let us further
+suppose that by the mixture of races in the population certain districts
+could by mere preponderance of the votes be expected to elect only a
+German, a Scandinavian, or an Irishman--in each case a man who had been
+perhaps, but a few years before, an immigrant drawn from a low class in
+the population of his own country; give that legislature almost
+unbridled power over all business institutions within the borders of the
+county, including the determination of rates of charge on that portion
+of the lines of great railway companies which lay within the county
+borders--is there not danger that that power would be frequently abused?
+When one party, after a long term of trial in opposition, found itself
+suddenly in control of both houses, would it always refrain from using
+its power for the gratification of party purposes, for revenge, and for
+the assistance of its own supporters? Local feeling sometimes becomes,
+even in England, much inflamed against a given railway company, or some
+large employer of labour, or great landlord, whether justly or not. It
+may be that in the case of a railway, the rates of fare are considered
+high, the train service bad, or the accommodations at the stations poor.
+At such a time a local legislature would be likely to pass almost any
+bill that was introduced to hurt that railway company, merely as a means
+of bringing pressure to bear upon it to correct the supposed
+shortcomings. It obviously then becomes only too easy for an
+unscrupulous member to bring forward a bill which will have plausible
+colour of public-spirited motive, and which if it became a law would
+cost the railway company untold inconvenience and many tens of thousands
+of pounds; and the railway company can have that bill withdrawn or
+"sidetracked" for a mere couple of hundred.
+
+Personally I am thankful to say that I have such confidence in the
+sterling quality of the fibre of the English people (so long as it is
+free, as it is in England, from Irish or other alien influence) as to
+believe that, even under these circumstances, and with all these
+possibilities of wrong-doing, the local legislatures would remain
+reasonably honest. But what might come with long use and practice, long
+exposure to temptation, it is not easy to say. Some things occur in the
+colonies which are not comforting. If, then, the corruption in American
+politics be great, the evil is due rather to the system than to any
+inherent inferiority in the native honesty of the people. Their
+integrity, if it falls, has the excuse of abundant temptation.
+
+The most instructive experience, I think, which I myself had of the
+disregard of morality in the realm of municipal politics was received
+when I associated myself, sentimentally rather than actively, with a
+movement at a certain election directed towards the defeat of one who
+was probably the most corrupt alderman in what was at the time perhaps
+the corruptest city in the United States. Of the man's entire depravity,
+from a political point of view, there was not the least question among
+either his friends or his enemies. Nominally a Democrat, his vote and
+policy were never guided by any other consideration than those of his
+own pocket. On an alderman's salary (which he spent several times over
+in his personal expenditure each year), without other business or
+visible means of making money, he had grown wealthy--wealthy enough to
+make his contributions to campaign funds run into the thousands of
+dollars,--wealthy enough to be able always to forget to take change for
+a five-dollar or a ten-dollar bill when buying anything in his own
+ward,--wealthy enough to distribute regularly (was it five hundred or a
+thousand?) turkeys every Thanksgiving Day among his constituents. No one
+pretended to suggest that his money was drawn from any other source than
+from the public funds, from blackmail, and from the sale of his vote and
+influence in the City Council. In that Council he had held his seat
+unassailably for many years through all the shifting and changing of
+parties in power. But a spirit of reform was abroad and certain
+public-spirited persons decided that it was time that the scandal of his
+continuance in office should be stopped. The same conclusion had been
+arrived at by various campaign managers and bodies of independent and
+upright citizens on divers preceding occasions, without any result worth
+mentioning. But at last it seemed that the time had come. There were
+various encouraging signs and portents in the political heavens and all
+auguries were favourable. There were, it is true, experienced
+politicians who shook their heads. They blessed us and wished us well.
+They even contributed liberally to our campaign fund; but the most
+experienced among them were not hopeful.
+
+It was a vigorous campaign--on our side; with meetings, brass bands,
+constant house-to-house canvassing, and processions _ad libitum_. On the
+other side, there was no campaign at all to speak of; only the man whom
+we were seeking to unseat spent some portion of every day and the whole
+of every night going about the ward from saloon to saloon, always
+forgetting the change for those five-dollar and ten-dollar bills, always
+willing to cheer lustily when one of our processions went by, and, as we
+heard, daily increasing his orders for turkeys for the approaching
+Thanksgiving season.
+
+So far as the saloon keepers, the gamblers, the owners and patrons of
+disorderly houses went, we had no hope of winning their allegiance; but,
+after all, they were a small numerical minority of the voters of the
+ward. The majority consisted of low-class Italians, unskilled labourers,
+and it was their votes that must decide the issue. There was not one of
+them who was not thoroughly talked to, as well as every member of his
+family of a reasoning age. There was not one who did not fully recognise
+that the alderman was a thief and an entirely immoral scamp; but their
+labour was farmed by, perhaps, half a dozen Italian contractors. These
+men were the Alderman's henchmen. As long as he continued in the
+Council, he was able to keep their men employed--on municipal works and
+on the work of the various railway and other large corporations which he
+was able to blackmail. We, on our part, had obtained promises of
+employment, from friends of decent government regardless of politics in
+all parts of the city, for approximately as many men as could possibly
+be thrown out of work in case of an upheaval. But of what use were
+these, more or less unverifiable, promises, when on the eve of the
+election the half a dozen contractors (who of course had grown rich with
+their alderman's continuance in office) gave each individual labourer in
+the ward to understand clearly that if the present alderman was defeated
+each one of them would have to go and live somewhere--live or
+starve,--for not one stroke of work would they ever get so long as they
+lived in that ward?
+
+It was, as I have said, a vigorous campaign on our side; and the
+Delectable One was re-elected by something more than his usual majority.
+On the night of the election it was reported--though this may have been
+mere rumour--that the bills which he laid on the counter of each saloon
+in the ward (and always forgot to take any change) were of the value of
+fifty dollars each. That was some years ago, but I understand that he is
+still in that same City Council, representing that same ward.
+
+It was in the same city that one year I received notice of my personal
+property tax, the amount assessed against me being about ten times
+higher than it ought to have been. Experience had taught me that it was
+useless to make any protest against small impositions, but a
+multiplication of my obligations by tenfold was not to be submitted to
+without a struggle. I wrote therefore to the proper authority, making
+protest, and was told that the matter would be investigated. After a
+lapse of some days, I was invited to call at the City Hall. There I was
+informed by one of the subordinate officials that it was undoubtedly a
+case of malice--that the assessment had been made by either a personal
+or a political enemy. I was then taken to see the Chief. The Chief was a
+corpulent Irishman of the worst type. My guide leaned over him and in an
+undertone, but not so low that I did not hear, gave him a brief _resume_
+of the story, stating that it was undoubtedly a case of intentional
+injustice, and concluding with an account of myself and my interests
+which showed that the speaker had taken no little trouble to post
+himself upon the subject. He emphasised the fact of my association with
+the press. At this point for the first time the Chief evinced some
+interest in the tale. His intelligence responded to the word
+"newspapers" as promptly as if an electrical current had suddenly been
+switched into his system. "H'm! newspapers!" he grunted. Then, heaving
+his bulk half round in his chair so as partially to face me----
+
+"This is a mistake," he said. "We will say no more about it. Your
+assessment's cancelled."
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said, "I have no objection to paying one-tenth of
+the amount. If an '0' is cut off the end----"
+
+"That's all right," he said. "The whole thing is cut off."
+
+I made another protest, but he waved me away and my guide led me from
+the room. Because it was opined that, through the press, I might be able
+to make myself objectionable if the imposition was persisted in, I paid
+no tax at all that year. Which was every whit as immoral as the original
+offence.
+
+Stories of this class it would be easy to multiply indefinitely; but
+again I say that it is not my desire to insist on the corruptness which
+exists in American political life, but rather to explain to English
+readers what the nature of that corruptness is and in what spheres of
+the political life of the country it is able to find lodgment. What I
+have endeavoured to illustrate is, first, how the peculiar political
+system of the United States may, under some exceptional conditions, make
+it possible for even the nomination of a President to be treated as a
+matter of purchase, though the candidate himself and those who
+immediately surround him may be of incorruptible integrity; second, the
+unrivalled opportunities for bribery and other forms of political
+wrong-doing furnished by the existence of the State legislatures, with
+their eight thousand members, drawn necessarily from all ranks and
+elements of the population, and possessing exceptional power over the
+commercial affairs of the people of their respective States; and, third,
+the methods by which, in certain large cities, power is attained, used,
+and abused by the municipal "bosses" of all degrees, a condition of
+affairs which is in large measure only made possible by the
+identification of local and national politics and political parties. In
+each case the conditions which make the corruption possible do not exist
+in England, even though in the last named (the identification of local
+with national politics and parties) the tendency in Great Britain is
+distinctly in the direction of the American model. It is, perhaps, an
+inevitable result of the working of the Anglo-Saxon "particularistic"
+spirit, which ultimately rebels against any form of national government
+or of national politics in which the individual and the individual of
+each locality, is debarred from making his voice heard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As for the corruptness which is supposed to exist in Congress itself,
+this I believe to be largely a matter of partisan gossip and newspaper
+talk. It may be that every Congress contains among its members a few
+whose integrity is not beyond the temptation of a direct monetary bribe;
+and it would perhaps be curious if it were not so. But it is the opinion
+of the best informed that the direct bribery of a member of either the
+Senate or the House is extremely rare. It happens, probably, all too
+frequently that members consent to acquire at a low figure shares in
+undertakings which are likely to be favourably affected by legislation
+for which they vote, in the expectation or hope of profit therefrom; but
+it is exceedingly difficult to say in any given case whether a member's
+vote has been influenced by his financial interest (whether, on public
+grounds, he would not have voted as he did under any circumstances), and
+at what point the mere employment of sound business judgment ends and
+the prostitution of legislative influence begins. The same may be said
+of the accusations so commonly made against members of making use of
+information which they acquire in the committee room for purposes of
+speculation.
+
+Washington, during the sessions of Congress is full of "lobbyists"--_i.
+e._, men who have no other reason for their presence at the capital
+than to further the progress of legislation in which they are interested
+or who are sent there for the purpose by others who have such an
+interest; but it is my conviction (and I know it is that of others
+better informed than myself) that the instances wherein the labours of a
+lobbyist go beyond the use of legitimate argument in favour of entirely
+meritorious measures are immensely fewer than the reader of the
+sensational press might suppose. The American National Legislature is,
+indeed, a vastly purer body than demagogues, or the American press,
+would have an outsider believe.
+
+There is no doubt that large manufacturing and commercial concerns do
+exert themselves to secure the election to the House, and perhaps to the
+Senate, of persons who are practically their direct representatives,
+their chief business in Congress being the shaping of favourable
+legislation or the warding off of that which would be disadvantageous to
+the interests which are behind them. Undoubtedly also such large
+concerns, or associated groups of them, can bring considerable pressure
+to bear upon individual members in divers ways, and there have been
+notorious cases wherein it has been shown that this pressure has been
+unscrupulously used. Except in the case of the railways, which have only
+a secondary interest in tariff legislation, this particular abuse must
+be charged to the account of the protective policy, and its development
+in some measure would perhaps be inevitable in any country where a
+similar policy prevailed.
+
+In the British Parliament there are, of course, few important lines of
+trade or industry which are not abundantly represented, and both Houses
+contain railway directors and others who speak frankly as the
+representatives of railway interests, and lose thereby nothing of the
+respect of the country or their fellow-members. It is not possible here
+to explain in detail why the assumption, which prevails in America, that
+a railway company is necessarily a public enemy, and that any argument
+in favour of such a corporation is an argument against the public
+welfare, does not obtain in England. It will be necessary later on not
+only to refer to the fact that fear of capitalism is immensely stronger
+in America than it is in England, but also to explain why there is good
+reason why it should be so. For the present, it is enough to note that
+it is possible for members of Parliament to do, without incurring a
+shadow of suspicion of their integrity, things which would damn a member
+of Congress irreparably in the eyes alike of his colleagues and of the
+country. There is hardly a railway bill passed through Parliament the
+supporters of which would not in its passage through Congress have to
+run the gauntlet of all manner of insinuation and abuse; and when the
+sensational press of the United States raises a hue and cry of "Steal!"
+in regard to a particular measure, the Englishman (until he understands
+the difference in the conditions in the two countries) may be bewildered
+by finding on investigation that the bill is one entirely praiseworthy
+which would pass through Parliament as a matter of course, the only
+justification for the outcry being that the legislation is likely,
+perhaps most indirectly, to prove advantageous to some particular
+industry or locality. The fact that the measure is just and deserving of
+support on merely patriotic grounds is immaterial, when party capital
+can be made from such an outcry. I have on more than one occasion known
+entirely undeserved suffering to be inflicted in this way on men of the
+highest character who were acting from none but disinterested motives;
+and he who would have traffic with large affairs in the United States
+must early learn to grow callous to newspaper abuse.
+
+In wider and more general ways than have yet been noticed, however, the
+members of Congress are subjected to undue influences in a measure far
+beyond anything known to the members of Parliament.
+
+In the colonial days, governors not seldom complained of the law by
+which members of the provincial assemblies could only be elected to sit
+for the towns or districts in which they actually resided. The same law
+once prevailed in England, but it was repealed in the time of George
+III., and had been disregarded in practice since the days of
+Elizabeth.[247:1] Under the Constitution of the United States it is,
+however, still necessary that a member of Congress should be a resident
+(or "inhabitant") of the State from which he is elected. In some States
+it is the law that he must reside in the particular district of the
+State which elects him, and custom has made this the rule in all. A
+candidate rejected by his own constituency, therefore, cannot stand for
+another; and it follows that a member who desires to continue in public
+life must hold the good will of his particular locality.
+
+So entirely is this accepted as a matter of course that any other system
+(the British system for instance) seems to the great majority of
+Americans quite unnatural and absurd; and it has the obvious immediate
+advantage that each member does more truly "represent" his particular
+constituents than is likely to be the case when he sits for a borough or
+a Division in which he may never have set foot until he began to canvas
+it. On the other hand, it is an obvious disadvantage that when a member
+for any petty local reason forfeits the good will of his own
+constituency, his services, no matter how valuable they may be, are
+permanently lost to the State.
+
+The term for which a member of the Lower House is elected in America is
+only two years, so that a member who has any ambition for a continuous
+legislative career must, almost from the day of his election, begin to
+consider the chance of being re-elected. As this depends altogether on
+his ability to hold the gratitude of his one constituency, it is
+inevitable that he should become more or less engrossed in the effort to
+serve the local needs; and a constituency, or the party leaders in a
+constituency, generally, indeed, measure a man's availability for
+re-election by what is called his "usefulness."
+
+If you ask a politician of local authority whether the sitting member is
+a good one, he will reply, "No; he hasn't any influence at Washington at
+all. He can't do a thing for us!" Or, "Yes, he's pretty good; he seems
+to get things through all right." The "things" which the member "gets
+through" may be the appointment of residents of the district to minor
+government positions, the securing of appropriations of public moneys
+for such works as the dredging or widening of a river channel to the
+advantage of the district or the improvement of the local harbour, and
+the passage of bills providing for the erection in the district of new
+post-offices or other government buildings. Many other measures may, of
+course, be of direct local interest; but a member's chief opportunities
+for earning the gratitude of his constituency fall under the three
+categories enumerated.
+
+It is obvious that two years is too short a term for any but an
+exceptionally gifted man to make his mark, either in the eyes of his
+colleagues or of his constituency, by conspicuous national services.
+Even if achieved, it is doubtful if in the eyes of the majority of the
+constituencies (or the leaders in those constituencies) any such
+impalpable distinction would be held to compensate for a demonstrated
+inability to get the proper share of local advantages. The result is
+that while the member of Parliament may be said to consider himself
+primarily as a member of his party and his chief business to be that of
+co-operating with that party in securing the conduct of National affairs
+according to the party beliefs, the member of Congress considers himself
+primarily as the representative of his district and his chief business
+to be the securing for that district of as many plums from the Federal
+pie as possible.
+
+Out of these conditions has developed the prevalence of log-rolling in
+Congress: "You vote for my post-office and I'll help you with your
+harbour appropriation." Such exchange of courtesies is continual and, I
+think, universal. The annual River and Harbour Bill (which last year
+appropriated $25,414,000 of public money for all manner of works in all
+corners of the country) is an amazing legislative product.
+
+Another result is that the individual member must hold himself
+constantly alert to find what his "people" at home want: always on the
+lookout for signs of approval or disapproval from his constituency. And
+the constituency on its side does not hesitate to let him know just what
+it thinks of him and precisely what jobs it requires him to do at any
+given moment. Nor is it the constituency as a whole, through its
+recognised party leaders, which alone thinks that it has a right to
+instruct, direct, or influence its representative, but individuals of
+sufficient political standing to consider themselves entitled to have
+their private interest looked after, manufacturing and business concerns
+the payrolls of which support a large number of voters, labour unions,
+and all sorts of societies and organisations of various kinds--they one
+and all assert their right to advise the Congressman in his policies or
+to call for his assistance in furthering their particular ends, under
+threat, tacit or expressed, of the loss of their support when he seeks
+re-election. The English member of Parliament thinks that he is
+subjected to a sufficiency of pressure of this particular sort; but he
+has not to bear one-tenth of what is daily meted out to his American
+_confrere_, nor is he under any similar necessity of paying attention to
+it.
+
+Under such conditions it is evident that a Congressman can have but a
+restricted liberty to act or vote according to his individual
+convictions. It is only human that, in matters which are not of great
+national import, a man should at times be willing to believe that his
+personal opinions may be wrong when adherence to those opinions would
+wreck his political career. So the Congressman too commonly acquires a
+habit of subservience which is assuredly not wholesome either for the
+individual or for the country; and sometimes the effort to trim sails to
+catch every favouring breeze has curious oblique results. As an
+instance of this may be cited the action taken by Congress in regard to
+the army canteen. A year or more back, the permission to army posts to
+retain within their own limits and subject to the supervision of the
+post authorities, a canteen for the use of soldiers, was abolished. The
+soldiers have since been compelled to do their drinking outside, and, as
+a result, this drinking has been done without control or supervision,
+and has produced much more serious demoralisation. The action of
+Congress was taken in the face of an earnest and nearly unanimous
+protest from experienced army officers--the men, that is, who were
+directly concerned with the problem in question. The Congressmen acted
+as they did under the pressure of the Woman's Christian Temperance
+Union, and with the dread lest a vote for the canteen should be
+interpreted as a vote for liquor, and should stand in the way of their
+own political success.
+
+From what has been said it will be seen that the member of Congress is
+compelled to give a deplorably large proportion of his time and thought
+to paltry local matters, leaving a deplorably small portion of either to
+be devoted to national questions; while in the exercise of his functions
+as a legislator he is likely to be influenced by a variety of motives
+which ought to be quite impertinent and are often unworthy. These things
+however seem to be almost inevitable results of the national political
+structure. The individual corruptibility of the members of either House
+(their readiness, that is to be influenced by any considerations, other
+than that of their re-election, of their own interests, financial or
+otherwise), I believe to be grossly exaggerated in the popular mind.
+Certainly a stranger is likely to get the idea that the Congress is a
+much less honourable and less earnest body than it is.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The subject of the corruptness of the public service in the larger
+cities brings up again a matter which has been already touched upon,
+namely the extent to which this corruptness is in its origin Irish and
+not an indigenous American growth. Under the favourable influences of
+American political conditions the Irish have developed exceptional
+capacity for leadership (a capacity which they are also showing in some
+of the British colonies) and they do not generally use their ability or
+their powers for the good of the community. The rapidity with which the
+Irish immigrant blossoms into political authority is a commonplace of
+American journalism:
+
+     "Ere the steamer that brought him had got out of hearing,
+      He was Alderman Mike introducing a bill."
+
+It is commonly held by Americans that all political corruptness in the
+United States (certainly all municipal wickedness) is chargeable to
+Irish influence; but it is a position not easy to maintain in the face
+of the example of the city of Philadelphia, the government of which has
+from the beginning been chiefly in the hands of Americans, many of whom
+have been members of the oldest and best Philadelphia families. Yet the
+administration of Philadelphia has been as corrupt and as openly
+disregardful of the welfare of the community as ever was that of New
+York. While Irishmen are generally Democrats, both Philadelphia and the
+State of Pennsylvania, are overwhelmingly Republican and devoted to the
+protective policy under which so many of the industries of the State
+have prospered exceedingly. Those who have fought for the cause of
+municipal reform in Philadelphia find that, while the masses of the
+people of the city would prefer good government, it is almost impossible
+to get them to reject an official candidate of the Republican party. The
+Republican "bosses" have thus been able to impose on the city officials
+of the worst kind, who have served them faithfully to the disaster of
+the community.[253:1] None the less, notwithstanding particular
+exceptions, it is a fact that as a general rule the corrupt
+maladministration of affairs in American cities is the direct result of
+Irish influence.
+
+The opportunities of the Irish leaders for securing control of the city
+administration, or of certain important and lucrative divisions of this
+administration, have been furthered, particularly in such cities as New
+York and San Francisco, by the influence they are able to gain over
+bodies of immigrants who are also in the fold of the Roman Catholic
+Church, and who, on the ground of difference of language and other
+causes, have less quickness of perception of their own political
+opportunities. The Irish leaders have been able to direct in very large
+measure the votes of the Italians (more particularly the Italians from
+the South), the Bohemians, and the other groups of immigrants from
+Catholic communities. As the Irish immigration has decreased both
+absolutely and relatively, the numbers of voters supporting the
+leadership of the bosses of Tammany Hall and of the similar
+organisations in Chicago and San Francisco have been made good, and in
+fact substantially increased, by the addition of Catholic voters of
+other nationalities.
+
+I wish the English reader to grasp fully the significance of these facts
+before he allows the stories which he hears of the municipal immorality
+which exists in the United States to colour too deeply his estimate of
+the character of the American people. That immorality is chiefly Irish
+in its origin and is made continuously possible by the ascendency of the
+Irish over masses of other non-Anglo-Saxon peoples. The Celts were never
+a race of individual workers either as agriculturists or in handicraft.
+That "law of intense personal labour" which is the foundation of the
+strength of the Anglo-Saxon communities never commanded their full
+obedience, as the history of Ireland and the condition of the country
+to-day abundantly testify. It is not, then, the fault of the individual
+Irishman that when he migrates to America, instead of going out to the
+frontier to "grow up" with the territory or taking himself to
+agricultural work in the great districts of the West which are always
+calling for workers, he prefers to remain in the cities to engage when
+possible in the public service, or, failing that, to enter the domestic
+service of a private employer.
+
+It should not be necessary to say (except that Irish-American
+susceptibilities are sometimes extraordinarily sensitive) that I share
+to the full that admiration which all people feel for the best traits in
+the Irish character; but, in spite of individual exceptions, I urge that
+it is not in the nature of the race to become good and helpful citizens
+according to Anglo-Saxon ideals, and that, as far as those qualities are
+concerned which have made the greatness of the United States, the
+contribution from the Irish element has been inconsiderable. The
+deftness of the Irishman in political organisation and his lack of
+desire for individual independence, as a result of which he turns either
+to the organising of a governing machine or to some form of personal
+service (in either case merging his own individuality) is as much
+foreign to the American spirit as is the docility of the less
+intelligent class of Germans under their political leaders--a docility
+which, until very recently has caused the German voters in America to be
+used in masses almost without protest.
+
+It is the Anglo-Saxon, or English, spirit which has played the dominant
+part in moulding the government of the United States, which has made the
+nation what it is, which to-day controls its social usages. The Irish
+invasion of the political field may fairly be said to be in its essence
+an alien invasion; and, while it may be to the discredit of the American
+people that they have allowed themselves in the past to be so engrossed
+in other matters that they have permitted that invasion to attain the
+success which it has attained, I do not fear that in the long run the
+masterful Anglo-Saxon spirit will suffer itself to be permanently
+over-ridden (any more than it has allowed itself to be kept in permanent
+subjection in England), even in the large cities where the Anglo-Saxon
+voter is in a small minority. Ultimately it will throw off the incubus.
+In the meanwhile it is unjust that Englishmen or other Europeans should
+accept as evidence of native American frailty instances of municipal
+abuses and of corrupt methods in a city like New York, where it has not
+been by native Americans that those abuses and those methods were
+originated or that their perpetuation is made possible. On the contrary
+the American minority fights strenuously against them, and I am not sure
+that, being such a minority as it is, it has not made as good a fight as
+is practicable under most difficult conditions. The American people as a
+whole should not be judged by the conditions to which a portion of it
+submits unwillingly in certain narrow areas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be well to explain here (for it is a subject on which the
+Englishman who has lived in America is often consulted) that the
+Republican party may roughly be said to be the equivalent of the
+Conservative party in England, while the Democrats are the Liberals. It
+happens that a precisely reverse notion has (or had until very recent
+years) some vogue in England, the misconception being an inheritance
+from the times of the American Civil War.
+
+British sympathy was not nearly so exclusively with the South at the
+time of the war as is generally supposed in the United States; none the
+less, the ruling and aristocratic classes in England did largely wish to
+see the success of the Southern armies. The Southerner, it was
+understood, was a gentleman, a man of mettle and spirit, and in many
+cases the direct descendant of an old English Cavalier family; while the
+Northerners were for the most part but humdrum and commercially minded
+people who inherited the necessarily somewhat bigoted, if excellent,
+characteristics of their Dutch, Puritan, or Quaker ancestors. The view
+had at least sufficient historical basis to serve as an excuse if not
+as a justification. So it came about that those classes which came to
+form the backbone of the Conservative party were largely sympathisers
+with the South; and, after the war, that sympathy naturally descended to
+the Democratic party rather than to the Northern Republicans. Except,
+however, in one particular the fundamental sentiments which make a man a
+Republican or a Democrat to-day have nothing to do with the issues of
+war times.
+
+I do not know that any one has successfully defined the fundamental
+difference either between a Conservative and a Liberal, or between a
+Republican and a Democrat, nor have I any desire to attempt it; and
+where both parties in each country are in a constant state of flux and
+give-and-take, such a definition would perhaps be impossible. It may be
+that Ruskin came as near to it as is practicable when he spoke of
+himself as "a Tory of the old school,--the school of Homer and Sir
+Walter Scott."
+
+Many people in either country accept their political opinions ready made
+from their fathers, their early teachers, or their chance friends, and
+remain all their lives believing themselves to belong to--and voting
+for--a party with which they have essentially nothing in sympathy. If
+one were to say that a Conservative was a supporter of the Throne and
+the Established Church, a Jingo in foreign politics, an Imperialist in
+colonial matters, an advocate of a strong navy and a disbeliever in free
+trade, tens of thousands of Conservatives might object to having
+assigned to them one or all of these sentiments, and tens of thousands
+of Liberals might insist on laying claim to any of them. Precisely so is
+it in America. None the less the Republican party in the mass is the
+party which believes in a strong Federal government, as opposed to the
+independence of the several States; it is a party which believes in the
+principle of a protective tariff; it conducted the Cuban War and is a
+party of Imperial expansion; it is the party which has in general the
+confidence of the business interests of the country and fought for and
+secured the maintenance of the gold standard of currency. It is obvious
+that, however blurred the party lines may be in individual cases, the
+man who in England is by instinct and conviction a Conservative, must in
+America by the same impulse be a Republican.
+
+In both countries there is, moreover, a large element which furnishes
+the chief support to the miscellaneous third parties which succeed each
+other in public attention and whenever the lines are sharply drawn
+between the two great parties, the bulk of these can be trusted to go to
+the Liberal side in England and to the Democratic side in America. Nor
+is it by accident that the Irish in America are mostly Democrats.
+
+I am acutely aware of the inadequacy of such an analysis as the
+foregoing and that many readers will have cause to be dissatisfied with
+what I say; but I have known many Englishmen of Conservative leanings
+who have come to the United States understanding that they would find
+themselves in sympathy with the Democrats and have been bewildered at
+being compelled to call themselves Republicans. Whatever the individual
+policy of one or the other party may be at a given moment, ultimately
+and fundamentally the English Conservative, especially the English Tory,
+is a Republican, and the Liberal, especially the Radical, is a
+Democrat. Both Homer and Sir Walter Scott to-day would (if they found
+themselves in America) be Republicans.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[227:1] For myself, I confess that my interest began somewhat
+prematurely. I had been in the country but a few months and had taken no
+steps towards naturalisation when I voted at an election in a small town
+in a Northwestern Territory where I had been living only for a week or
+two. My vote was quite illegal; but my friends (and every one in a small
+frontier town is one's friend) were all going to vote and told me to
+come along and vote too. The election, which was of the most friendly
+character, like the election of a club committee, proved to be closely
+contested, one man getting in (as City Attorney or Town Clerk or
+something) only by a single vote--my vote. Since then, the Territory has
+become a populous State, the frontier town has some hundred thousand
+inhabitants, and the gentleman whom I elected has been for some years a
+respected member of the United States Senate. I have never seen any
+cause to regret that illegal vote.
+
+[229:1] The laws governing expenditures for electoral purposes, and the
+conduct of elections generally, are stricter in England than in the
+United States, and I think it is not to be questioned that there is much
+less bribery of voters. Largely owing to the exertions of Mr. Roosevelt,
+however, laws are now being enacted which will make it more difficult
+for campaign managers to raise the large funds which have heretofore
+been obtainable for election purposes.
+
+[232:1] In as much as a demand that the control of the police force
+should be vested in the County Council has appeared in the programme of
+one political party in London, it may be well to call the attention of
+Englishmen to the fact that it is precisely the association of politics
+with the police which gives to American municipal rings their chief
+power for evil.
+
+[247:1] See Bryce, _The American Commonwealth_, vol. i., p. 188.
+
+[253:1] Inasmuch as I have twice within a small space referred to evils
+which incidentally grow out of the protective system, lest it be thought
+that I am influenced by any partisan feeling, I had better state that my
+personal sympathies are strongly Republican and Protectionist.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+AMERICAN POLITICS IN ENGLAND
+
+     The System of Parties--Interdependence of National and Local
+     Organisations--The Federal Government and Sovereign States--The
+     Boss of Warwickshire--The Unit System--Prime Minister Crooks--
+     Lanark and the Nation--New York and Tammany Hall--America's
+     Superior Opportunities for Wickedness--But England is Catching
+     up--Campaign Reminiscences--The "Hell-box"--Politics in a
+     Gravel-pit--Mr. Hearst and Mr. Bryan.
+
+
+The subject of this chapter will, perhaps, be more easy of comprehension
+to the English reader if he will for a moment surrender his imagination
+into my charge while we transfer to England certain political conditions
+of the United States.
+
+There are in the first place, then, the great political parties, in the
+nation and in Parliament (Congress); with the fact always to be borne in
+mind that the members of Congress are not nominated by any central
+committee or association, but are selected and nominated by the people
+of each district. A candidate is not "sent down" to contest a given
+constituency. He is a resident of that constituency, selected in small
+local meetings by the voters themselves.
+
+Next, every County (State) has its own machinery of government,
+including a Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, and other County officials as
+well as a bi-cameral Legislature, with a membership ranging from seventy
+in some Counties to over three hundred in others. In these County
+Legislatures and governments, parties are split on precisely the same
+lines as in the nation and in Parliament. Members of the House of
+Commons have usually qualified for election by a previous term in the
+County Legislature, while members of the House of Lords are actually
+elected direct, not by the people in the mass, but by the members of the
+County Legislatures only, each county sending to Westminster two members
+so elected. Nor is it to be supposed that these County governments are
+governments in name only.
+
+It is not easy to imagine that in England the Counties, each with its
+separate and sovereign government, preceded the National Government and
+voluntarily called it into existence only as a federation of themselves.
+But that, we must for the present understand, was indeed the course of
+history; and when that federation was formed, the various Counties
+entrusted to the Central Government only a strictly limited list of
+powers. The Central Government was authorised to treat with foreign
+nations in the name of the United Counties; to maintain a standing army
+of limited size, and to create a navy; to establish postal routes,
+regardless of County boundaries; to regulate commerce between the
+different Counties, to care for the national coast line and all
+navigable waters within the national dominions, and to levy taxes for
+national purposes. All powers not thus specifically conceded to the
+central authority were, in theory at least, reserved by the individual
+Counties to themselves; and to-day a County government, except that it
+cannot interfere with the postal service within its borders, nor erect
+custom-houses on its County lines to levy taxes on goods coming in from
+neighbouring Counties, is practically a sovereign government within its
+own territory.
+
+It is only within the last ten years that the right of the Central
+Government--the Crown--to use the King's troops to protect from violence
+the King's property, in the shape of the Royal mails, in defiance of the
+wishes of the Governor of a County, was established by a decision of the
+Supreme Court. The Governor protested that the suppression of mobs and
+tumults within his County borders was his business, his County police
+and militia being the proper instruments for the purpose, and for the
+Crown to intervene without his request and sanction was an invasion of
+the sovereign dignity of the County.
+
+Although so much has been said on this subject by various English
+writers, from Mr. Bryce downwards, few Englishmen, I think, have
+comprehended the theoretical significance of this independence of the
+individual States, and fewer still grasp its practical importance.
+Perhaps the most instructive illustration of what it means is to be
+found in the dilemma in which the American government has, on two
+occasions in recent years, found itself from its inability to compel a
+particular State to observe the national treaty obligations to a foreign
+power.
+
+The former of the two cases arose in Louisiana when a number of citizens
+of New Orleans (including not only leading bankers and merchants but
+also, it is said, at least one ex-Governor of the State and one Judge),
+finding that a jury could not, because of terrorisation, be found to
+convict certain murderers, Italians and members of the Mafia, took the
+murderers out of gaol and hanged them in a public square in broad
+daylight. The Italian government demanded the punishment of the
+lynchers, and the American government had to confess itself entirely
+unable to comply with the request. Whether it would have given the
+satisfaction if it could is another question; but the dealing with the
+criminals was a matter solely for the Louisiana State authorities, and
+the Federal Government had no power to interfere with them or to dictate
+what they should do. The only way in which it could have obtained
+jurisdiction over the offenders would have been by sending Federal
+troops into the State to take them by force, a proceeding which the
+State of Louisiana would certainly have resisted by force, and civil war
+would have followed. Ultimately, the United States, without
+acknowledging any liability in the matter, paid to the Italian
+government a certain sum of money as a voluntary _solatium_ to the
+widows and families of those who had been killed, and the incident was
+closed.
+
+The second case, which has recently strained so seriously the relations
+between the United States and Japan, arose with the State of California,
+which refused to extend to Japanese subjects the privileges to which
+they are unquestionably entitled under the "most favoured nation" clause
+of the treaty between the two governments. It is a matter which cannot
+be dealt with fully here without too long a digression from the path of
+our present argument, and will be referred to later. It is enough for
+the present to point out that once again the National Government--or
+what we have called the Crown--has been seen to be entirely incapable,
+without recourse to civil war, of compelling an individual State--or
+County--to respect the national word when pledged to a treaty with a
+foreign power.[264:1]
+
+The States then, or Counties, are independent units, in each of which
+there exists a complete party organisation of each of the great parties,
+which organisations control the destinies of the parties within the
+County borders and have no concern whatever with the party fortunes
+outside. The great parties in the nation and in Parliament must look to
+the organisations within the several Counties for their support and
+existence. The loss of a County, say Hampshire, by the local
+Conservative organisation will mean to the Conservative party in the
+nation not merely that the members to be elected to the lower house of
+Parliament by the Hampshire constituencies will be Liberal, but that the
+County Legislature will elect two Liberal Peers to the upper house as
+well; and it is likely that in one or other of the two houses parties
+may be so evenly balanced that the loss of the members from the one
+County may overthrow the government's working majority. Moreover, the
+loss of the County in the local County election will probably mean the
+loss of that County's vote at the next presidential election, which may
+result in the entire dethronement of the party from power.
+
+Wherefore it is obviously necessary that the party as a whole--in the
+nation and in Congress--should do all that it can to help and strengthen
+the party leaders in the County. This it does in contests believed to be
+critical, and particularly just in advance of a national election, by
+contributing to the local campaign funds when a purely County (State)
+election is in progress (with which, of course, the national party ought
+theoretically to have nothing to do) and in divers other ways; but
+especially by judicious use of the national patronage in making
+appointments to office when the party is in power.
+
+The President--or let us say the Prime Minister--would rarely presume to
+appoint a postmaster at Winchester or Petersfield, or a collector of the
+port of Portsmouth or Southampton, without the advice and consent of the
+Hampshire Peers or Senators. And the advice of the Hampshire Peers, we
+may be sure, would be shaped in accordance with their personal political
+interests or by considerations of the welfare of the party in the
+County. They would not be likely to recommend for preferment either a
+member of the opposite party or a member of their own party who was a
+personal opponent. Moreover, besides the appointments in the County
+itself, there are many posts in the government offices in Whitehall, as
+well as a number of consulates and other more remote positions, to be
+filled. In spite of much that has been done to make the United States
+civil service independent of party politics, it remains that the bulk of
+these posts are necessarily still filled on recommendations made by the
+Congressmen or party leaders from the respective Counties, and again it
+is the good of the party inside those Counties which inspires those
+recommendations.
+
+Thus we see how the national party when in power is able to fatten and
+strengthen the hands of the party organisations within the several
+Counties; and strengthen them it must, for if they lose control of the
+voters within their territory then is the national party itself ruined
+and dethroned.
+
+And below the County party organisations, the County governments, are
+the organisations and governments in the cities, which again are split
+on precisely the same lines of cleavage. The City Council of Petersfield
+or Midhurst is divided into Conservatives and Liberals precisely as the
+Hampshire Legislature or the Parliament at Westminster. Jealousies often
+arise between the County organisations and those in the cities. The
+influence of Birmingham might well become overpowering in the
+Warwickshire Legislature, whereby it would be difficult for any but a
+resident of Birmingham to become Governor of the County or to be elected
+to the House of Lords. If the Birmingham municipal organisation chanced
+to be controlled by a strong hand, it is not difficult to see how he
+might impose his will upon the County Legislature and the County party
+organisation, how he might claim more than his share of the sweets and
+spoils of office for his immediate friends and colleagues in the city,
+to the disgust of the other parts of the County. For the most part,
+however, such quarrels, between the city and County organisations of the
+same party, when they arise, are but lovers' quarrels, rarely pushed to
+the point of endangering the unity of the party in the State at election
+time.
+
+But now if we remember what was said at first, that no candidates for
+Parliament or other elected functionaries are "sent down" by a central
+organisation, but all are "sent up" from the bottom, the impulse
+starting from small meetings in public-house parlours and the like (in
+the case of cities, meetings being held by "precincts" to elect
+delegates to a meeting of the "ward," which meeting again elects
+delegates to the meeting of the city), when we see how the city can
+coerce the County and the County sway the nation, then we have also no
+difficulty in seeing how it is, as has been said already, that the same
+power that appoints a janitor in a town-hall may dictate the nomination
+of a President. Even more than the County organisation is to the
+national party, is the city organisation to the County. The party, both
+as a national and as a County organisation, must fatten and strengthen
+the hands of the city machine. Thus comes it that such an alderman as
+the Delectable One is unassailable. His power reaches far beyond the
+city. The party organisation in the city cannot dispense with him,
+because he can be relied upon always to carry his ward, and that ward
+may be necessary, not to the city machine only, but to the County and
+the nation.
+
+It is hardly necessary to explain that in a general election in England
+the party which is returned to power need not necessarily have a
+majority of the votes throughout the country. A party may win ten seats
+by majorities of less than a hundred in each and lose one, being therein
+in a minority of a thousand; with the result that, with fewer votes than
+were cast for its opponents, it will have a clear majority of nine in
+the eleven seats. This is of course well understood.
+
+But in an American general or presidential election, this anomaly is
+immensely aggravated by the fact that the electoral unit is not a city
+or a borough but a whole County or State. The various States have a
+voice in proportion to their population, but that vote is cast as a
+unit. A majority of ten votes in New York carries the entire
+thirty-seven votes of that State, while a majority of one thousand in
+Montana only counts three. There are forty-six States in the Republic,
+but the thirteen most populous possess more than half the votes, and a
+presidential candidate who received the votes of those thirteen, though
+each was won by only the narrowest majority, would be elected over an
+antagonist who carried the other thirty-three States, though in each of
+the thirty-three his majority might be overwhelming. Bearing this in
+mind, we see at once what immense importance may, in a doubtful
+election, attach to the control of a single populous State.
+
+If in an English election, similarly conducted, the country was known to
+be so equally divided that the vote of Warwickshire, with, perhaps,
+twenty votes, would certainly decide the issue, the man who could
+control Warwickshire would practically control the country. We have seen
+further, however, that the man who controls Warwickshire will probably
+be the man who controls Birmingham. He may be the Mayor of Birmingham,
+or, more likely, the chairman (or "boss") of the municipal machine who
+nominated and elected the Mayor and whose puppet the Mayor practically
+is. It then becomes evident that the man who can sway the politics of
+the nation is not merely the man who controls the single County of
+Warwickshire, but the man who, inside that County, controls the single
+city.
+
+To go a step below that again, the control of the city may depend
+entirely on the control of a given ward in the city. That ward may
+contain a very large labouring vote, by reason of the existence of a
+number of big factories within its limits. Unless that labouring vote
+can be polled for the Liberal party, the ward will not go Liberal, and
+without it the city will be lost. The loss of the city involves the loss
+of the County, and the loss of the County means the loss of the nation.
+The man therefore who by his personal influence, or by his leadership in
+a perfectly organised party machine in one ward of Birmingham, can be
+relied on to call out the full Liberal strength in that one ward of a
+single city may be absolutely indispensable to the success of the party
+in the country as a whole. And it is even conceivable that that man
+again may be dependent on one of his own henchmen, the "Captain" of a
+single precinct in the ward or the man who has the ear and confidence of
+the hands in the largest of the factories.
+
+Let me not be understood as saying that the personal influence of an
+individual may not be extremely powerful in an English election; and
+that power may rest, similarly, on his popularity in, and consequent
+ability to carry with him into the party fold, one particular district.
+But there is not the same established form of County government on
+avowedly national lines, nor the same city government, as in America,
+through which that influence can make itself definitely and continuously
+felt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We will state the situation in another way, which will make it clear to
+Englishmen from another point of view:
+
+Let it be imagined that at the next general election in England, the
+decision is to be arrived at by a direct vote of the country as a whole
+for a Conservative or a Liberal Prime Minister. Instead of each County
+and borough electing its members of Parliament (they will do that only
+incidentally) the real struggle will take the form of a direct contest
+between two men. Each of the great parties will choose its own
+candidate, and the Conservatives have already nominated Mr. Balfour. It
+remains for the Liberals to name their man who is to run against Mr.
+Balfour. The selection is to be made in a National Convention, to be
+held in Manchester, at which each County will be represented by a number
+of delegates proportioned to its population. Those delegates have
+already been elected in each County by local meetings within the
+Counties themselves, and in nearly every case the delegations so elected
+will come into the Convention Hall at Manchester prepared to vote and
+act as a unit. Whether that has been arrived at by choice of the
+individual Counties when they elected their delegations or whether the
+Convention itself has decided the matter by adopting the "unit rule"
+does not matter. The fact is that each county will be compelled to vote
+in a body, _i. e._, that if London has forty votes and Kent twenty,
+those forty votes or those twenty will have to be cast solidly for some
+one man. They cannot be split into thirty votes for one man and ten for
+another; or into fifteen for one man and one each for five other men.
+
+The Convention meets and it is plain from the first that the two
+strongest candidates are Lord Rosebery and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
+There are scattering votes for Mr. Morley and Mr. Asquith, each of them
+getting the vote of one or more small Counties. But after the first
+ballot, which is always more or less preliminary, it is apparent that
+neither of those gentlemen can hope to be chosen, so the Counties which
+voted for them, having expressed their preference, proceed on the next
+ballot to give their suffrages either to Lord Rosebery or to Sir Henry.
+The second ballot is completed. Every County has voted, with the result
+that (out of a total vote of 521, of which 261 are necessary for a
+choice) there are 248 votes for Lord Rosebery and 253 for Sir Henry
+Campbell-Bannerman. But there is still one County which has not voted
+for either. Kent at both ballots has cast its twenty votes for Mr. Will
+Crooks. The reason why Kent does this is because the representatives
+from Woolwich and the neighbourhood are a numerical majority of the Kent
+delegation and those men are devoted to Mr. Crooks.
+
+The third ballot produces the same result: Rosebery 248; Bannerman, 253;
+Crooks, 20. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh ballots show no change
+except that once in a while Rutland with three votes and Merioneth with
+four have amused themselves or caused a temporary flutter by swinging
+their votes from one side to the other or, perhaps, again casting them
+for Mr. Morley or Mr. Asquith. There is a deadlock. The Convention
+becomes impatient. The evening wears on and midnight arrives and still
+there is no change. Neither Lord Rosebery nor Sir Henry can get the
+extra dozen votes that are needed: still with regularity when the name
+of Kent is called the leader of the delegation rises and responds "Kent
+casts twenty votes for William Crooks."
+
+At last in the small hours of the morning something happens. How it has
+been arrived at nobody seems to know; but when the roll is called for
+the thirteenth time, Norfolk, heretofore loyal to Sir Henry, suddenly
+votes for Crooks. Tremendous excitement follows. The word goes round
+that Campbell-Bannerman is beaten; his friends have given up and it is
+useless to vote for him any longer. Meanwhile in the course of the
+evening feeling between the supporters of Sir Henry and the Roseberyites
+has grown so bitter that whatever the deserting Bannermanites do, they
+will not help to elect Lord Rosebery. Here and there a Scotch County
+remains firm to its leader, but Oxford swings off to Mr. Morley;
+Suffolk, amid yells that make it difficult to tell who the vote is cast
+for, follows Norfolk and plumps for Crooks. Sussex brings in Mr. Asquith
+again and Warwickshire goes for Crooks. Amid breathless silence the
+result of the thirteenth ballot is read out: Rosebery, 248; Crooks, 96;
+Morley, 72; Asquith, 50; Bannerman, 43; etc.
+
+The fourteenth ballot begins. "Aberdeen!" calls the Chairman. The head
+of the Aberdeen delegation stands up in a suspense so tense that it
+almost hurts. "Aberdeen casts seventeen votes for Mr. Will Crooks!" In
+an instant the whole hall is filled with maniacs. County after County
+rushes to range itself on the winning side. Before the roll is more than
+half completed it is evident that Crooks must be chosen. Thereafter
+there is no dissentient voice. The ballot is interrupted by a voice
+which is known to belong to Lord Rosebery's personal representative. He
+moves that the nomination of Mr. Crooks be made unanimous. In a din
+wherein no voice can be heard the erstwhile leader of the Bannermanite
+forces is seen waving his arms and is known to be seconding the motion.
+In ten minutes the hall is singing _God Save the King_ and Mr. Will
+Crooks is the chosen candidate of the Liberal party to oppose Mr.
+Balfour at the coming election.
+
+That is not materially different from what happened when Mr. Bryan was
+first nominated for the Presidency against Mr. McKinley--except that it
+did not take so long to accomplish. I have said that Mr. Bryan's
+nomination could have been defeated if a certain local delegation had
+been "attended to" in advance. What is to be noted is that Mr. Crooks
+has been nominated simply because he had a hold which could not be
+shaken on a small but compact body of men at Woolwich. It is true that
+it is not often that so dramatic a thing would happen as the nomination
+of Mr. Crooks himself but more frequently an arrangement--a "trade" or
+"deal"--would be entered into by which in consideration of the Crooks
+vote being thrown to one or other of the leading candidates, in the
+event of the latter's defeating Mr. Balfour and being elected to the
+Premiership, certain political advantages, in the form of appointments
+to office and "patronage" generally, would accrue, not necessarily to
+Mr. Crooks himself, but to his "machine," the citizens of Woolwich, and
+the Liberal party in the County of Kent at large. We see here how the
+local "boss" may become all-powerful in national affairs (and this is of
+course only one of fifty ways) and how the interdependence of the party
+in the nation with the party organisation in the County or the
+municipality tends to the fattening of the latter and, it must be added,
+the debauching of all three.
+
+At the last general election in England, in January, 1906, there is no
+doubt that the Conservative party owed the loss of a large number of
+seats merely to the fact that it had been in office for so long, without
+serious conflict, that the local party organisations had not merely
+grown rusty but were practically defunct. In the United States the same
+thing, in anything like the same degree, would be impossible, because
+between the periods of the general elections (which themselves come
+every four years) come the State and municipal elections for the
+purposes of which the local party organisations are kept in continuous
+and more or less active existence. A State or a city may, of course, be
+so confirmedly Republican or Democratic that, even though elections be
+frequent, the ruling party organisation will become, in a measure, soft
+and careless, but it can never sink altogether out of fighting
+condition. When a general election comes round, each great party in the
+nation possesses--or organises for the occasion--a national committee as
+well as a national campaign organisation; but that committee and that
+national organisation co-operate with the local organisations in each
+State and city and it is the local organisations that really do the
+work--the same organisations as conduct the fight, in intermediate
+years, for the election of members to the State Legislature or of a
+mayor and aldermen. And each of those local organisations necessarily
+tends to come under the control of a recognised "boss."
+
+Let us see another of the fifty ways in which, as has been said, one of
+these local bosses may be all-powerful in national affairs. A general
+election is approaching in Great Britain, and, as before, the Liberal
+party is in doubt whether to select as its candidate for the
+Premiership Lord Rosebery or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The political
+complexion of almost every County is known and there is no chance of
+changing that complexion--a condition, be it said, which exists in
+America in the case of a large majority of the States. It is evident
+that at the coming election the vote is going to be extremely close, the
+most important of the "doubtful" Counties being Lanarkshire, which has
+25 votes; which 25 votes will of course be governed by the course of the
+working population of Glasgow. Whichever party can secure Lanarkshire's
+vote will probably be successful; so that the destiny of the country
+really depends on the temper of the labouring men of Glasgow. Glasgow
+has, let us suppose, a strong and well-organised local Liberal "machine"
+which carried the city at the last municipal election, so that the mayor
+and a large majority of the aldermen of Glasgow are Liberals to-day; and
+the dictator or "boss" of this machine is (we are merely using a name
+for the sake of illustration) Lord Inverclyde. Lord Inverclyde does not
+believe that Lord Rosebery is the right man for the Premiership. So he
+lets his views be known to the Liberal National Committee. "I am, as you
+know," he says, "a strong Liberal; but frankly I would rather see Mr.
+Balfour made Prime Minister than Lord Rosebery. Glasgow will not vote
+for Lord Rosebery. The party can nominate any other man whom it pleases
+and we will elect him. I will undertake to carry Lanark for Sir Henry or
+Mr. Morley or anybody else; but I warn you that if Lord Rosebery is
+nominated, we will 'knife' him"--that being the euphonious phrase used
+to describe the operation when a party leader or party machine turns
+against any particular candidate nominated by the party.
+
+What are the party leaders to do in such a case? To nominate Lord
+Rosebery after that warning (Lord Inverclyde is known to be a man of his
+word) will be merely to invite defeat at the election; consequently,
+though he may be the actual preference of a large majority of the
+Liberals of the country, Lord Rosebery does not get the nomination. It
+goes to some one who can carry Lanarkshire,--some one, that is, who is
+pleasing to the boss of the local machine of Glasgow. It would be not
+unlikely that the national leaders might resent the dictation of Lord
+Inverclyde and might (but not until after the election was safely over)
+start intriguing in Glasgow politics to have him dethroned from the
+position of local "boss,"--might, in fact, begin "knifing" him in turn.
+Whether they would succeed in their object before another general
+election supervened would depend on the security of his hold on the
+local Liberal organisation; and that would depend on his personal
+ability as a politician and--very largely--on his unscrupulousness. For
+it may, I think, be stated as an axiom that no man can long retain his
+hold as "boss" of the machine in a large city except by questionable
+methods,--methods which sometimes involve dishonesty. He must--no matter
+whether he likes it or not--use his patronage and his power to advance
+unworthy men; and he must in some measure show leniency to certain forms
+of lawlessness. Otherwise the influence of the saloons, gamblers,
+keepers of disorderly houses, and all the other non-law-abiding elements
+will be thrown against him with sufficient weight to work his downfall.
+
+Unscrupulousness and friendship with wickedness in the slums of a city
+may thus be the direct road to influence in the councils of the national
+party. When it is remembered that not a few large cities, and therefore
+some States, are practically controlled, through the balance of power,
+by voters of an alien nationality, it is further plain how such an alien
+vote may become a serious factor in the politics of the nation. Thus is
+the German element very strong in Milwaukee, and the Scandinavian
+element in the towns and State of Minnesota. Thus the Irish influence
+has been almost paramount in New York, though now outnumbered by
+Germans, Italians, and others; and it is there, in New York, that the
+conditions which we have imagined in connection with Glasgow and Lord
+Inverclyde are actually being almost exactly repeated in American
+Democratic politics as often as a general election comes round.
+
+You may frequently hear it said in America that "as goes New York, so
+goes the country"; which is to say that in a presidential election the
+party which carries New York will carry the nation. In theory this is
+not necessarily so, although it is evident that New York's thirty-six
+votes in the electoral college must be an important contribution to the
+support of a candidate. In practice it has proven itself a good rule,
+partly by reason of the importance of those thirty-six votes, but more,
+perhaps, because the popular impetus which sways one part of the country
+is likely to be felt in others--that, in fact, New York goes as the
+country goes.
+
+But let us assume that the New York vote is really essential to the
+election of a candidate--that the vote in the country as a whole is
+evidently so evenly divided that whichever candidate can win New York
+must be elected the next President. Tammany Hall is a purely local
+organisation of the Democratic party in New York City. New York State,
+outside the city, is normally Republican, but many times the great
+Democratic majority in the Metropolitan district has swamped a
+Republican majority in the rest of the State. That Democratic vote in
+the Metropolitan district can only be properly "brought out" and
+controlled by Tammany; so that the cordial support of Tammany Hall,
+though, as has been said, it is in reality a strictly local
+organisation, and as such is probably the worst and most corrupt
+organisation (as it is also the best managed) that has been built up in
+the country, may be absolutely vital to the success of a Democratic
+presidential candidate. Tammany is practically an autocracy, the power
+of the Chief being almost absolute. England and English society have had
+some acquaintance with one Chief, and do not like him. But, as Chief of
+Tammany Hall, it is easy to see how even a coarse-grained Irishman may
+become for a time influential in American national affairs--even to the
+dictating of a nominee for the Presidency.
+
+I am not prepared to say that under the same conditions the same things
+could occur in England. What I am saying is that they do occur in the
+United States under conditions which do not exist in England; and, while
+it may be that British civic virtue would be proof against the manifold
+temptations of a similar political system, we have no sufficient data to
+justify us in being sure of it, nor is it wise or charitable to assume
+that because a certain number of American politicians yield to
+temptations which Englishmen have never experienced, therefore the
+people are of a less rigid virtue. Mr. Bryce has recorded his opinion
+that the mass of the public servants in America are no more corrupt than
+those in England. I prefer not to agree with him for, if it was true
+when he wrote it, the Americans to-day must be much the better, because
+since then there has unquestionably been an enormous improvement in the
+United States, while we have no evidence of a corresponding improvement
+in England. I believe, not only that many more public men are corrupt in
+America than in England, but that a larger proportion of the public men
+are corrupt, which, however, need not imply a lower standard of
+political incorruptibility: only that there are much greater
+opportunities of going wrong.
+
+It is interesting to note, moreover, that in the public service the
+opportunities of malfeasance in public officers in Great Britain are
+increasing rapidly and, moreover, in precisely those lines wherein they
+have proved most demoralising in America. I have elsewhere recorded the
+apprehension with which many Englishmen cannot help regarding the
+closeness of the relations which are growing up between the national and
+local party organisations, but in addition to this the urban public
+bodies are coming to play a vastly larger role in the life of the
+people, while the multiplication of electric car lines and similar
+enterprises is exposing the members of those bodies to somewhat the same
+class of untoward influence as has so often proven fatal to the civic
+virtue of similar bodies in America. Whether, as a result, any large
+number of cases of individual frailty have exposed themselves, probably
+only those immediately interested know; the exposure at least has not
+reached the general public.
+
+It may not, however, be amiss to remember that a century and a half ago,
+when the conditions in the two countries were widely different from what
+they are to-day, Benjamin Franklin, coming to England, was shocked and
+astounded at the corruption then prevalent in English public life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The procedure of an American presidential campaign has been sufficiently
+often described for the benefit of English readers. Suffice it to say
+that it is devastating, at times almost titanic. I have had some
+experience of the amenities of political campaigning in England, but the
+most bitterly contested fight in England never produces anything like
+the intensity of passion that is let loose in the quadrennial upheavals
+in the United States.
+
+It was my lot to be closely associated with the conduct of a national
+campaign--as bitterly fought a campaign as the country has seen since
+the days of the war,--namely that of 1896 when Mr. Bryan was the
+candidate of the Free Silver Democracy. Early in the fight I began to
+receive abusive letters, for which a large and capacious drawer was
+provided in the office, into which they were tossed as they came, on the
+chance of their containing some reading which might be interesting when
+the trouble was over. As the fight waxed, they came by every post and in
+every form, ranging from mere incoherent personal abuse to threats of
+assassination. Hundreds of them were entirely insane: many hundred more
+the work, on the face of them, of anarchists pure and simple. A large
+proportion of them were written in red ink, and in many--very
+many--cases the passions of the writers had got so far beyond their
+control that you could see where they had broken their pens in the
+futile effort to make written words curse harder than they would. The
+receptacle in which they were placed was officially known in the office
+as the Chamber of Horrors, but it was, I think, universally spoken of
+among the staff as the "Hell-box." Before the end of the campaign,
+capacious though it was, it was crowded to overflowing, and hardly a
+document that was not as venomous as human wrath could make it.
+Incidentally I wish to say that never was a campaign--at least as far as
+my colleagues in our particular department were concerned--more purely
+in the interest of public morality, without any sort of selfish aims,
+and less deserving of abuse. What the correspondence of a presidential
+candidate himself must be in like circumstances, it is horrible to
+think.[281:1]
+
+The intense feverishness of the campaign is of course increased by the
+vastness of the country, the tremendous distances over which the
+national organisation has to endeavour to exercise control, and the
+immense diversity in the conditions of the people and communities to
+whom appeal has to be made. The voting takes place all over the country
+on the same day; and it must be remembered that the area of the United
+States (not counting Alaska or any external dependencies) is so great
+that it reaches from west to east about as far as from London to
+Teheran, and north and south from London to below the southern boundary
+of Morocco. The difficulty of organisation over such an area can,
+perhaps, be imagined. In the course of the campaign there came in one
+day in my mail a letter written on a torn half of a railway time-card.
+It ran:
+
+     "DEAR SIR--There is sixty-five of us here working in a gravel
+     pit and we was going to vote solid for Bryan and Free Silver.
+     Some of your books [_i. e._, campaign leaflets, etc.] was
+     thrown to us out of a passing train. We have organised a Club
+     and will cast sixty-five votes for William McKinley.--Yours,
+     etc."
+
+So far as those sixty-five were concerned our chief interest thereafter
+lay in seeing that the existence of that gravel-pit was never discovered
+by the enemy. A faith which had been so speedily and unanimously
+embraced might perhaps not have been unassailable.
+
+Before leaving this subject it may be well to say a few words on a
+recent election in New York which excited, perhaps, more interest in
+England than any American political event of late years. The eminence
+which Mr. Hearst has won is an entirely deplorable thing, which has been
+made possible by the fact, already sufficiently dwelt upon, that
+political power in the United States is so largely exerted from the
+bottom up. In their comments on the incident after the event, however,
+English papers missed some of its significance. Most English writers
+spoke of Mr. Hearst's appeal to the forces of discontent as a new
+phenomenon and drew therefrom grave inferences as to what would happen
+next in the United States. The fact is that the phenomenon is not new in
+any way. Mr. Hearst, in but a slightly different form, appealed to
+precisely the same passions as Mr. Bryan aroused--the same as every
+demagogue has appealed to throughout, at least, the northern and western
+sections of the country any time in this generation. Mr. Hearst began
+from the East and Mr. Bryan from the West, but in all essentials the
+appeal was the same. And Mr. Hearst was not elected. And Mr. Bryan was
+not elected. What will happen next will be that the next man who makes
+the same appeal will not be elected also.
+
+It is the allegory of the river and its ripples over again. Englishmen
+need not despair of the United States, for the great body of the people
+is extraordinarily conservative and well-poised. In America, man never
+is, but always to be, cursed. Dreadful things are on the eve of
+happening, and never happen. There is a great saving fund of
+common-sense in the people--a sense which probably rests as much on the
+fact that they are as a whole conspicuously well-to-do as on anything
+else--which as the last resort shrinks from radicalism. In spite of the
+yellow press, in spite of all the Socialist and Anarchist talk, in spite
+of corruption and brass bands and torchlight processions, when the
+people as a whole is called upon to speak the final word, that word has
+never yet been wrong. Perhaps some day it will be, for all peoples go
+mad at times; but the nation is normally sound and sane, with a sanity
+that is peculiarly like that of the English.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[264:1] I trust that, because, for the purpose of making an illustration
+which will bring the matter home familiarly to English minds, I speak of
+the States as English Counties, I shall not be suspected of thinking (as
+some writers appear to have thought) that there is really any historical
+or structural analogy between the two.
+
+[281:1] None the less my friendly American critic (already quoted)
+holds, and remains firm in, the opinion that "however strenuous the
+fighting, the political issues produce no such social changes or
+personal differences in the United States as have frequently obtained in
+England, say at the time of the leadership of Gladstone, or more
+recently, in connection with the 'tariff reform' of Chamberlain." It is
+his contention that Americans take their politics on the whole more
+good-humouredly than has always been found possible by their English
+cousins, and that when the campaign is over, there is more readiness in
+the United States than in England to let pass into oblivion any
+bitterness that may have found expression during the fighting.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+SOME QUESTIONS OF THE MOMENT
+
+     Sovereign States and the Federal Government--California and
+     the Senate--The Constitutional Powers of Congress and the
+     President--Government by Interpretation--President Roosevelt
+     as an Inspiration to the People--A New Conception of the
+     Presidential Office--"Teddy" and the "'fraid strap"--Mr.
+     Roosevelt and the Corporations--As a Politician--His
+     Imperiousness--The Negro Problem--The Americanism of the
+     South.
+
+
+It was said that it would be necessary to refer again to the subject of
+the relations of the General Government to the several States, as
+illustrated by the New Orleans incident and the treatment of the
+Japanese on the Pacific Coast; and the first thing to be said is that no
+well-wisher of the United States living in Europe can help deploring the
+fact that the General Government has not the power to compel all parties
+to the Union to observe the treaties to which the faith of the nation as
+a whole has been pledged. It is a matter on which the apologist for the
+United States abroad has, when challenged, no defence. Few people in
+other countries do not consider the present situation unworthy of the
+United States; and I believe that a large majority of the American
+people--certainly a majority of the people east of the Rocky
+Mountains--is of the same opinion.
+
+It is no excuse to urge that when another Power enters into treaty
+relations with the United States it does so with its eyes open and with
+a knowledge of the peculiarities of the American Constitution. This is
+an argument which belongs to the backwoods stage of American
+statesmanship. In the past, it is true, the United States has been in a
+measure the spoilt child among the nations and has been permitted to sit
+somewhat loosely to the observance of those formalities which other
+Powers have recognised as binding on themselves; but the time has gone
+by when the United States can claim, or ought to be willing to accept,
+any especial indulgences. It cannot at once assert its right to rank as
+one of the Great Powers and affect to enter into treaties on equal terms
+with other nations, and at the same time admit that it is unable to
+honour its signature to those treaties.
+
+This, I say, is the general opinion of thinking men in other countries;
+but, however desirable it may be that the General Government should have
+the power to compel the individual States to comply with the
+requirements of the national undertakings, it is difficult, so long as
+the several States continue jealous of their sovereignty without regard
+to the national honour, to see how the end is to be arrived at.
+
+The first obvious fact is that all treaties are made by the President
+"by and with the advice and consent of the Senate" and no treaty is
+valid until ratified by a vote of the Senate in which "two thirds of the
+Senators present concur." The Senate occupies a peculiar position in the
+scheme of government. It does not represent either the nation as a whole
+nor, like the House of Representatives, the people as a whole. The
+Senate represents the individual States each acting in its sovereign
+capacity[287:1]; and the voice of the Senate is the voice of those
+States as separate entities. When the Senate passes upon any question it
+has been passed upon by each several State and it is not easy to see how
+any particular State can claim to be exempt from the responsibility of
+any vote of the Senate as a whole.
+
+It would appear to follow of necessity that when the Senate has by a
+formal two-thirds vote ratified a treaty, every State is bound to accept
+all the obligations of that treaty, not merely as part of the nation but
+as a separate unit. The provision in the Constitution which makes the
+vote of the Senate on any treaty necessary can have no other intent than
+to bind the several States themselves. As a matter of historical
+accuracy it had no other intent when it was framed.
+
+In the particular case of the Japanese treaty, the time for the State of
+California to have made its attitude known was surely when the treaty
+passed the Senate. The California Senators, or the people of the State,
+had then two honest courses open to them. They could have let it be
+known unequivocally that they did not propose to hold themselves bound
+by the action of the Senate but would, if any attempt were made to force
+them to comply with the terms of the treaty, secede from the Union; or
+they could have determined there and then to abide loyally by the terms
+of the treaty and no matter at what cost to the State, or at what
+sacrifice of their _amour propre_, to see that all the rights provided
+in the treaty were accorded to Japanese within the State. Either of
+these courses would have been honest; and Japanese who came to
+California would have come with their eyes open. The course which was
+followed, of allowing them to settle in the State in the expectation of
+receiving that treatment to which the faith of the United States was
+pledged, and then denying them that treatment, was distinctly dishonest.
+
+If, however, the State of California, or any other individual State,
+refuses to acknowledge the responsibilities which it has assumed by the
+vote of the Chamber of which its representatives are members, there
+appears no way in which the Federal Government can compel such
+acknowledgment except those of force and what the believers in the
+extreme doctrine of State Sovereignty consider Constitutional
+Usurpation.
+
+It has in many cases been necessary as the conditions of the country
+have changed so to interpret the phrases of the Constitution as to give
+to the General Government powers which cannot have been contemplated by
+the framers of that instrument. In this case there is every evidence,
+however, that the framers did intend that the General Government should
+have precisely those powers which it now desires--or that the individual
+States should be subject to precisely those responsibilities which they
+now seek to evade--and if any sentence in the Constitution can be so
+interpreted as to give to the General Government the power to compel
+States to respect the treaties made by the nation, it seems unnecessary
+to shrink from putting such interpretation upon it.
+
+Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to "regulate commerce
+with foreign nations"--and commerce is a term which has many
+meanings--as well as "to define and punish offences against the law of
+nations" and to "make all laws which shall be necessary for carrying
+into execution the foregoing powers." The President is invested with the
+power, "by and with the advice of the Senate, to make treaties," and he
+is charged with the duty of taking "care that the laws be faithfully
+executed." It would seem that among these provisions there is specific
+authority enough to cover the case, if the will to use that authority be
+there. And I believe that in a large majority of the people the will is
+there.
+
+It would appear to be competent for Congress to "define" any failure on
+the part of the citizens of any State to comply with whatever
+requirements in the treatment of foreigners may be imposed on them by a
+treaty into which the nation has entered, as an "offence against the law
+of nations." This power of "definition" on the part of Congress is quite
+unhampered. So also is the power "to make all laws which shall be
+necessary and proper for carrying into execution" the powers of
+definition and punishment. And it would be the duty of the President and
+the Federal Courts to take care that the laws were executed.
+
+If there would be any "usurpation" involved in such an interpretation of
+the phrases of the Constitution it is certainly less--much less, when
+regard is had to the intention of the framers of the Constitution--than
+other "usurpations" which have been effected, and sometimes without
+protest from the individual States; as, for instance, by the expansion
+of the right to regulate commerce between the several States into an
+authority to deal with all manner of details of the control of railways
+of which the framers of the Constitution never contemplated the
+existence. It cannot even remotely be compared with such an extension of
+the Federal power as would be involved in the translation of the
+authority to "establish post-offices and post-roads" as empowering the
+government to take an even larger measure of control over those
+railroads than can be compassed under the right to regulate commerce--a
+translation which seems to have the approval of President Roosevelt.
+
+Incidentally it may be remarked that it would be peculiarly interesting
+if, at this day, that authority to construct post-roads should thus be
+invoked to give the General Government new powers of wide scope, when we
+remember that it was this same provision of the Constitution which stood
+sponsor for the very earliest steps which, in the construction of the
+Cumberland Road and other military or post routes, the young republic
+took in the path of practical federalism.
+
+To those Americans who received the cause of State Sovereignty as a
+trust from their fathers and grandfathers before them, the cause
+doubtless appears a noble one; but to the outsider, unbiassed by such
+inherited sentiment, it seems evident, first, that the cause, however
+noble, is also hopeless; and, second, that it is unreasonable that in
+the forlorn effort to preserve one particular shred of a fabric already
+so tattered, the United States as a nation should be exposed to frequent
+dangers of friction with other Powers, and, what is more serious, should
+be made, once in every decade or so, to stand before the world in the
+position of a trader who repudiates his obligations.
+
+And if I seem to speak on what is after all a domestic subject with
+undue vehemence (as I cannot hope that I shall not seem to do to the
+minds of residents on the Pacific Coast), it is only because it is
+impossible for an earnest well-wisher of the United States living abroad
+not to feel acutely (while it does not seem to me that Americans at home
+are sensible) how much the country suffers in the estimate of other
+peoples by its present anomalous position. When two business concerns in
+the United States enter into any agreement, each assumes the other to be
+able to control its own agents and representatives, nor will it accept a
+plea of inability to control them as excuse for breach of contract.
+
+It may be that a select circle of the statesmen and foreign office
+officials in other countries are familiar with the intricacies of the
+American Constitution, but the masses of the people cannot be expected
+so to be, any more than the masses of the American people are adepts in
+the constitutions of those other countries. And it is, unfortunately,
+the masses which form and give expression to public opinion. In these
+days it is not by the diplomacies of ambassadors or the courtesies of
+monarchs that friendships and enmities are created between nations. The
+feelings of one people towards another are shaped in curious and
+intangible ways by phrases, sentiments, ideas--often trivial in
+themselves--which pass current in the press or travel from mouth to
+mouth. It is a pity that the United States should in this particular
+expose itself to the contempt of lesser peoples, giving them excuse for
+speaking lightly of it as of a nation which does not keep faith. It does
+not conduce to increase the illuminating power of the example of America
+for the enlightenment of the world.
+
+It might be well also if Americans would ask themselves what they would
+do if a number of American citizens were subjected to outrage (whether
+they were murdered as in New Orleans, or merely forced to submit to
+indignities and inconvenience as in California) in some South American
+republic, which put forward the plea that under its constitution it was
+unable to control the people or coerce the administration of the
+particular province in which the offences were committed. Would the
+United States accept the plea? Or if the outrages were perpetrated in
+one of the self-governing colonies of Great Britain and the British
+Government repudiated liability in the matter? The United States, if I
+understand the people at all, would not hesitate to have recourse to
+force to endeavour to compel Great Britain to acknowledge her
+responsibility.
+
+In the matter of the relation of the general government to the several
+States the most important factor to be considered at the present moment
+is undoubtedly the personality of President Roosevelt, and any attempt
+to make intelligible the change which has come over the United States of
+recent years would be futile without some recognition of the part which
+he has played therein. Mr. Roosevelt has been credited with being the
+author of "a revival of the sense of civic virtue" in the American
+people. Certainly he has been, by his example, a powerful agent in
+directing into channels of reform the exuberant energy and enthusiasm
+which have inspired the people since the great increase in material
+prosperity and the physical unification of the country bred in it its
+quickened sense of national life. In the period of activity and
+expansiveness--one is almost tempted to say explosiveness--which
+followed the Cuban war, such a man was needed to guide at least a part
+of the national energy into paths of wholesome self-criticism and
+reformation. He set before the youth of the country ideals of patriotism
+and of civic rectitude which were none the less inspiring because easily
+intelligible and even commonplace.[293:1] The ideals have, it is true,
+since then, perhaps inevitably and surely not by his will, been dragged
+about in the none too clean mud of party politics; but the impetus which
+he gave, before his single voice became largely drowned in the factional
+hubbub around him, endures and will endure. Whatever comes, the American
+people is a different people and a better people for his preaching and
+example.
+
+Moreover, what touches the question of State sovereignty nearly, he has
+given a new character to the Presidential office. I have expressed
+elsewhere my belief that the process of the federalising of the country,
+the concentration of power in the central government, must proceed
+further than it has yet gone; but it is difficult now to measure, what
+history will see clearly enough, how much Mr. Roosevelt has contributed
+to the hastening of the process. No President, one is tempted to say
+since Washington, but certainly since Lincoln, has had anything like
+the same conception of the Presidential functions as Mr. Roosevelt,
+coupled with the courage to insist upon the acceptance of that
+conception by the country. Whether for good or ill the office of
+President must always stand for more, reckoned as a force in the
+national concerns, than it did before it was occupied by Mr. Roosevelt.
+A weak President may fail to hold anything like Mr. Roosevelt's
+authority; but the office must for a long time at least be more
+authoritative, and I think more honourable, for the work which he has
+done in it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I first came in contact with Mr. Roosevelt some twenty-five years ago,
+when his personality already pervaded the country from the Bad Lands of
+Dakota to the Rocky Mountains. I had a great desire to meet this person
+about whom, not only in his early life but, as it were, in his very
+presence, myth was already clustering,--a desire which was almost
+immediately gratified by chance,--but the particular detail about him
+which at the time made most impression on my mind was that he was the
+reputed inventor of the "'fraid strap." The "'fraid strap" is--or was--a
+short thong, perhaps two feet in length, fastened to the front of the
+clumsy saddle, which, at signs of contumacy in one's pony, one could,
+with a couple of hitches, wrap round his hand, in such a way as to
+increase immensely the chance of a continuity of connection with his
+seat. The pony of the Plains in those days was not as a rule a gentle
+beast, and I was moved to gratitude to the inventor of the "'fraid
+strap"--though whether it was really Mr. Roosevelt's idea or not it is
+(without confession from himself) impossible to guess, for, as I have
+said, he was already, though present almost a half-mythical person to
+the men of the north-western prairie country.
+
+What vexed me no little at the time was that it was with some effort
+that I could get his name right. I could not remember whether it was
+Teddy Roosevelt or Roosy Teddevelt. The name now is familiar to all the
+world; but then it struck strangely on untrained English ears and to me
+it seemed quite as reasonable whichever way one twisted it round. Mr.
+Jacob Riis (or Mr. Leupp) has protested against the President of the
+United States being called "Teddy" and we have his word for it that Mr.
+Roosevelt's own intimates have never thought of addressing him otherwise
+than as "Theodore." Doubtless this is correct (certainly I know men who
+assure me that they call him "Theodore" now) but at least the more
+friendly "Teddy" has, as is proved by that confusion in my mind of a
+quarter of a century ago, the justification of long prescription. Nor am
+I sure that it has not been a fortunate thing both for Mr. Roosevelt and
+the country that his name has been Teddy to the multitude. I doubt if
+the men of the West, the rough-riders and the plainsmen, would give so
+much of their hearts to Theodore.
+
+It is not easy to estimate the value, or otherwise, of Mr. Roosevelt's
+work in that capacity in which he has of late come to be best known to
+the world, namely as an opponent of the Trusts; but it is a pity that so
+many English newspapers habitually represent him as an enemy of all
+concentrated wealth. He has been called "the first Aristocrat to be
+elected President." Whether that be strictly true or not, he belongs
+distinctly to the aristocratic class and his sympathies are naturally
+with that class. His instincts are not destructive. No one, I have
+reason to believe, has a shrewder estimate of the worthlessness of the
+majority of those politicians who use his name as a cloak for their
+attacks on all accumulated wealth than he. It is only necessary to read
+his speeches to see how constantly he has insisted that it is not
+wealth, but the abuse of it, which he antagonises: "We draw the line not
+against wealth, but against misconduct." He has many times protested
+against the "outcry against men of wealth," for most of which he has
+declared "there is but the scantiest justification." Again and again he
+has proclaimed his desire not to hurt the honest corporation, "but we
+need not be over-tender about sparing the dishonest."[296:1]
+
+One of the chief difficulties in the practical application of his
+policies has been that the Government cannot have the power to punish
+dishonest corporations without first being entrusted with a measure of
+control over all corporate operations, the concession of which control
+the honest corporations have felt compelled to resist. Nor is it
+possible to say that their resistance has not been justified. However
+wisely and forbearingly Mr. Roosevelt himself might use whatever power
+was placed in his hands, there has been little in the experience of the
+corporations in America to make them believe that they can trust either
+office-holders in general or, for any long term, the Government itself.
+Dispassionate students of the railway problem in the United States are
+aware that there is nothing which the corporations have done to the
+injury of the public worse than the wanton and gratuitous injuries which
+have been done by the politicians, by the State governments, and even on
+occasions by the Federal Government itself, to the corporations. If
+particular railway companies have at times abused the power of which
+they were possessed as monopolising the transportation to and from a
+certain section of the country, that abuse has not excelled in
+wantonness and immorality the abuses of their power over the
+corporations of which several of the Western States have been
+systematically guilty. There has been little encouragement to the
+corporations to submit themselves to any larger measure of public
+control than has been necessary; and the lessons of the past have shown
+that it would be injudicious for the railways to surrender
+uncomplainingly to the State governments authority which the British
+companies can leave to the Board of Trade without misgiving. And there
+was a time when the national Interstate Commerce Commission was, if more
+honest, not much less prejudiced in its dealing with the corporations
+subject to its authority than were the governments or railway
+commissions of the individual States.
+
+Mr. Roosevelt's desire may have been (as it is) only to protect the
+people against the misuse of their power by dishonest corporations; and
+the honest corporations would be no less glad than Mr. Roosevelt himself
+to see the dishonest brought to book. But in the necessity of resisting
+(or what has seemed to the corporations the necessity of resisting) the
+extensions of the federal power which were requisite before reform could
+be achieved, the honest have been compelled to make common cause with
+the dishonest, so that the President has, in particular details, been
+forced into an attitude of hostility towards all corporations (and the
+corporations have for the most part been forced to put themselves in an
+attitude of antagonism to him) in spite of their natural sympathies and
+common interests.
+
+The result has been unfortunate for business interests generally because
+the mere fact that the President was "against the companies" (no matter
+on what grounds, or whether he was against them all or only against
+some) has encouraged throughout the country the anti-corporation feeling
+which needed no encouragement. Any time these forty years, or since the
+early days of the Granger agitation, the shortest road to notoriety and
+political advancement (at least in any of the Western States) has been
+by abuse of the railroad companies. A thousand politicians and
+newspapers all over the country are eager to seize on any phrase or
+pronouncement of the President which can be interpreted as giving
+countenance to the particular anti-railroad campaign at the moment in
+progress in their own locality. A vast number of people are interested
+in distorting, or in interpreting partially, whatever is said at the
+White House, so that any phrase, regardless of its context,--each
+individual act, without reference to its conditions,--which could be
+represented as an encouragement to the anti-capitalist crusade has been
+seized upon and made the most of. All over the West there have always,
+in this generation, been a sufficient number of persons only too
+anxious, for selfish reasons, to inflame hostility against the railroad
+companies or against men of wealth; but only within the last few years
+has it been possible for the most unscrupulous demagogue to find colour
+and justification for whatever he has chosen to preach in the example
+and precept of the President--and of a President whose example and
+precept have counted for more with the masses of the people than have
+those of any occupant of the White House since the war. In this way Mr.
+Roosevelt has done more harm than could have been accomplished by a much
+worse man.
+
+If the corporations have suffered, the course of events has been
+unfortunate too for Mr. Roosevelt. No one is better aware than he of the
+misrepresentation to which he is subjected and the unscrupulous use
+which is made of his example; and it is impossible that at times it can
+fail to be very bitter. It must also be bitter to find arrayed against
+him many men whose friendship he must value and whose co-operation in
+his work it must seem to him that he ought to have. It happens that his
+is not a character which is swayed by such considerations one hair's
+breadth from the course which he has marked out for himself; but it is
+deplorable that a very large proportion of precisely that class of men
+in which Mr. Roosevelt ought (or at least is justified in thinking that
+he ought) to find his strongest allies have felt themselves compelled to
+become his most determined opponents, while those interests which ought
+(or at least are justified in thinking that they ought) to to find in
+Mr. Roosevelt, as the occupant of the White House, their strongest
+bulwark against an unreasoning popular hostility only see that that
+hostility is immensely inflamed and strengthened by his course and
+example. The conditions are injurious to the business interests of the
+country and weaken Mr. Roosevelt's influence for good.
+
+Yet it seems impossible--or certainly impossible for one on the
+outside--to place the responsibility anywhere except on those general
+conditions of the country which make possible both the misrepresentation
+of the position of the President and the wide-spread hostility to the
+corporations, or on those laxities in political and commercial morality
+in the past which have put it in the power alternately of the politician
+to plunder the railways and the railways to prey upon the people. In the
+ill-regulated conditions of the days of ferment there grew up abuses,
+both in politics and in commerce, which can only be rooted out with much
+wrenching of old ties and tearing of the roots of things; but it is
+worth an Englishman's understanding that the fact that this wrenching
+and this tearing are now in progress is only an evidence of that effort
+at self-improvement, an effort determined and conscious, which, as we
+have already seen more than once, the American people is making.
+Whatever certain sections of the American press, certain politicians, or
+certain financial interests, may desire the world to think, there is no
+need for those at a distance to see in the present conflict evidence
+either of a wicked and radically destructive disposition in the
+President or of an approaching disintegration of the American commercial
+fabric.
+
+Meanwhile, as has been said, one result has been to weaken Mr.
+Roosevelt's personal influence for good. I have been assured by men of
+undoubted truthfulness, who are at the head of large financial
+interests, that he has, in the last few years, become as tricky and
+unscrupulous in his political methods as the oldest political
+campaigner; a statement which I believe to be entirely mistaken.
+"Practical politics," said Mr. Roosevelt once, "is not dirty politics.
+On the contrary in the long run the politics of fraud and treachery is
+unpractical politics, and the most practical of all politicians is the
+one who is clean and decent and upright." There is no evidence which I
+have been able to find that Mr. Roosevelt does not now believe this as
+thoroughly and act upon it as consistently as when he first entered the
+New York State Legislature.
+
+A more reasonable accusation against him, which is made by many of his
+best friends, is that his imperious will and his confidence in his own
+opinions make him at times unjust and intolerant in his judgment of
+others. There have been occasions when he has seemed over-ready to
+accuse others of bad faith without other ground than his own opinion or
+the recollection of what has occurred at an interview. He may have been
+right; but it is certain that he has alienated the friendship of not a
+few good men by the vehemence and positiveness with which he has
+asserted his views. And anything, independent of all questions of party,
+which weakens his influence is, for the country's sake, a thing to be
+deplored.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The negro question has contributed not a little to Mr. Roosevelt's
+difficulties, as it has to the misunderstanding of the American people
+in England. I know intelligent Englishmen who have visited the United
+States and honestly believe that in the not very distant future the
+country will again be torn with civil war, a war of black against white,
+which will imperil the permanence of the Republic no less seriously than
+did the former struggle. I do not think that the apprehension is shared
+by many intelligent Americans.
+
+It is perhaps inevitable that Americans should frequently be irritated
+by the tone of the comments in English papers on the lynchings of
+negroes which occur in the South. Some of these incidents are barbarous
+and disgraceful beyond any possibility of palliation, but it is certain
+that if Englishmen understood the conditions in the South better they
+would also understand that in some cases it is extremely difficult to
+blame the lynchers. Many of those people who in London (or in Boston)
+are loudest in condemnation of outrages upon the negro would if they
+lived in certain sections of the South not only sympathise with but
+participate in the unlawful proceedings.
+
+It has already been mentioned that among the men in New Orleans who
+assisted at the summary execution of the Italian Mafiotes there were, it
+is believed, an ex-Governor of the State and a Judge: men, that is to
+say, as civilised and of as humane sentiments as the members of any club
+in Pall Mall. They were not bloodthirsty ruffians, but gentlemen who did
+what they did from a stern sense of necessity. It has been my lot to
+live for a while in a community in which the maintenance of law and
+order depended entirely on a self-constituted Vigilance Committee; and
+the operations of that committee were not only salutary but necessary.
+It has also been my lot to live in a community where the upholders of
+law and order were not strong enough to organise a Vigilance Committee.
+I have been one of three or four who behind closed doors earnestly
+canvassed the possibilities of forming such an organisation, and neither
+I nor any of the others (among whom I remember were included one
+attorney-at-law and one mining engineer and surveyor) would have
+hesitated to serve on such a committee could it have been made of
+sufficient strength to achieve any useful purpose, but the disparity
+between our numbers and those of the "bad men" who at that time
+controlled the community was too obvious to give us any hope of being
+able to enforce our authority. There may, therefore, be conditions of
+society infinitely worse than those where order is preserved by lynch
+law; and I make no doubt that neither I myself nor any fellow-member of
+my London Club would, if living in one of the bad black districts of the
+South, act otherwise than do the Southern whites who live there now.
+
+What is deplorable is not the spirit which prompts the acts of summary
+justice (I am speaking only of one class of Southern "outrage") but the
+conditions which make the perpetration of those acts the only
+practicable way of rendering life livable for white people; and for the
+responsibility for these conditions we must go back either to the
+institution of slavery itself (for which it should be remembered that
+England was to blame) or to the follies and passions of half a century
+ago which gave the negro the suffrage and put him on a plane of
+political equality with his late masters.[303:1] If, since then, the
+problem has grown more, rather than less, difficult, it has not been so
+much by the fault of the Southern white, living under conditions in
+which only one line of conduct has been open to him, as of Northern
+philanthropists and negro sympathisers who have helped to keep alive in
+the breasts of the coloured population ideas and ambitions which can
+never be realised.
+
+The people of the North have of late years come to understand the South
+better, and whereas what I have said above would, twenty years ago, have
+found few sympathisers in any Northern city, I believe that to-day it
+expresses the opinion of the large majority of Northern men. I also
+believe that the necessary majority could be secured to repeal so much
+of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution as would
+be necessary to undo the mistake which has been committed. It is true
+that in some Southern States the majority of the blacks are practically
+disfranchised now; but it would remove a constant cause of friction and
+of political chicanery if the fact were recognised frankly that it is
+not possible to contemplate the possibility of the negro ever becoming
+the politically dominant race in any community where white people live.
+There is no reason to believe that the two races cannot live together
+comfortably even though the blacks be in a large majority, but there
+must be no question of white control of the local government and of the
+machinery of justice.
+
+Taking away the franchise from the negro would not, of course, put an
+end to many of the social difficulties of the situation, but, the
+present false relations between the two being abolished, those
+difficulties are no more than have to be dealt with in every community.
+There would be a chance for the negroes as a race to develop into useful
+members of the community, _as negroes_, filling the stations of negroes
+and doing negroes' work, along such lines as those on which Mr. Booker
+Washington is working. The English have had a wide experience of native
+races in all parts of the world and they have not yet found the problem
+of living with them and of holding at least their respect, together with
+some measure of their active good-will, anywhere insoluble. To an
+Englishman it does not seem that it should be insoluble in the United
+States. He is rather inclined to think that the rapidity with which the
+negro of the South would work out his economic salvation, if once the
+political difficulty were removed, would depend chiefly on the ability
+of the race to produce a continuity of men like Mr. Booker Washington,
+with, perhaps, the concurrent ability of the north to produce men (shall
+I say, like the late W. H. Baldwin?) to co-operate with the leaders and
+teachers of the blacks and to interpret them and their work to the
+country.
+
+The Englishman in England is chiefly impressed by the stories of
+Southern outrages upon the blacks and he gets therefrom an erroneous
+idea of the character of the Southern white. An Englishman who studies
+the situation on the spot is likely to acquire great sympathy with the
+Southern white and to condemn only the political ineptitude which has
+made the existing conditions possible.
+
+Whether Mr. Roosevelt's course has been the one best adapted to
+facilitate a solution of the difficulties it would be idle to enquire.
+The laws being as they are, and he being the kind of man he is and, as
+President, entrusted with the duty of seeing that the laws are
+faithfully executed, he could not have taken a different line. Another
+man (and an equally good man) might have refrained from making one or
+two of his appointments and from entertaining Mr. Washington at the
+White House. But if Mr. Roosevelt did not do precisely those things, he
+would not do fifty other of the things which have most endeared him to
+the people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this connection, it may be that there will be readers who will think
+that in many things which I say, when generalising about the American
+people as a whole, I fail to take into proper account the South and
+characteristics of such of the people of the South as are distinctively
+Southern. It is not from any lack of acquaintance with the South; still
+less from any lack of admiration of or affection for it. But what has
+been said of New York may in a way be said of the South, for whatever
+therein is typically Southern to-day is not typically American; and all
+that is typically Southern is moreover rapidly disappearing. In the
+tremendous activity of the new national life which has been infused into
+the country as a result of its solidification and knitting together of
+the last thirty years, there is no longer room for sectional divergences
+of character. They are overwhelmed, absorbed, obliterated; and the
+really vital parts of the South are no longer Southern but American.
+What has the spirit of Atlanta in Georgia, of Birmingham in Alabama, of
+any town in the South-west, from St. Louis to Galveston, to do with the
+typical spirit of the South? However strong Southern _sentiment_ may
+still be, what is there of the Southern _spirit_ even in Richmond or in
+Louisville? I need hardly say that America produces no finer men than
+the best Virginian or the best Kentuckian, but, with all his Southern
+love and his hot rhetoric, the man of this generation who is a leader
+among his fellows in Kentucky or in Virginia is so by virtue of the
+American spirit that is in him and not by virtue of any of the dying
+spirit of the old South.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[287:1] Mr. Bryce felicitously speaks of the Senate as "a sort of
+Congress of Ambassadors from the respective States" (_The American
+Commonwealth_, vol. 1, page 110).
+
+[293:1] "He stands for the commonplace virtues; he is great along lines
+on which each one of us can be great if he wills and dares" (_Theodore
+Roosevelt, the Man and Citizen_, by Jacob A. Riis). Mr. Roosevelt has
+spoken of himself as "a very ordinary man." A pleasant story is told by
+Mr. Riis of the lady who said: "I have always wanted to make Roosevelt
+out a hero, but somehow, every time he did something that seemed really
+great, it turned out, upon looking at it closely, that it was only just
+the right thing to do."
+
+[296:1] See his _Addresses and Presidential Messages_, with an
+introduction by Henry Cabot Lodge (Putnams, 1904).
+
+[303:1] To those who would understand the negro question and the
+mistakes of the people of the North during the Reconstruction period (to
+which the present generation owes the legacy of the problem in its acute
+form) I commend the reading of Mr. James Ford Rhodes's _History of the
+United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home
+Rule in the South in 1877_ (Macmillan).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+COMMERCIAL MORALITY
+
+     Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?--An American
+     Peerage--Senators and other Aristocrats--Trade and the British
+     Upper Classes--Two Views of a Business Career--America's Wild
+     Oats--The Packing House Scandals--"American Methods" in
+     Business--A Countryman and Some Eggs--A New Dog--The Morals of
+     British Peers--A Contract of Mutual Confidence--Embalmed Beef,
+     Re-mounts, and War Stores--The Yellow Press and Mr. Hearst--
+     American View of the House of Lords.
+
+
+It would seem to be inevitable that any general diffusion of corruption
+in political circles should act deleteriously on the morals of the whole
+community. It will therefore seem almost absurd to Englishmen to
+question whether on the whole the code of commercial ethics in
+America--the standard of morals which prevails in the every-day
+transaction of business--is higher or lower than that which prevails in
+Great Britain. The answer must be almost a matter of course. But,
+setting aside any expression of individual opinion and all preconceived
+ideas based on personal experience, let us look at the situation and
+see, if we can, what, judging only from the circumstances of the two
+countries, would be likely to be the relative conditions evolved in
+each. To do this it will be necessary first to clear away a common
+misapprehension in the minds of Englishmen.
+
+It is somehow generally assumed--for the most part unconsciously and
+without any formulation of the notion in the individual mind--that
+American society is a sort of truncated pyramid: that it is cut off
+short--stops in mid-air--before it gets to the top. Because there are no
+titles in the United States, therefore there are no Upper Classes;
+because there is no Aristocracy therefore there is nothing that
+corresponds to the individual Aristocrat.[309:1] If there were a peerage
+in the United States, the country would have its full complement of
+Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, and the rest. And--this is the
+point--they would be precisely the same men as lead America to-day;--but
+how differently Englishmen would regard them!
+
+The middle-class Englishman, when he says that he is no respecter of
+titles and declares that it does not make any difference to him whether
+a man be a Lord or not, may think he is speaking the truth. It is even
+conceivable that there are some so happily constituted as to be able to
+chat equally unconcernedly with a Duke and with their wife's cousin, the
+land agent. Such men, I presume, exist in the British middle classes.
+But the fact remains that in the mass and, as it were, at a distance the
+effect of titles on the imagination of the British people is
+extraordinarily powerful.
+
+That the men in America are precisely the same men, though they have no
+titles, as they would be if they had, is best shown by the example of
+Americans who have crossed the Canadian border. If Sir William Van Horne
+had not gone to Canada in 1881 or thereabouts, he would still be plain
+"Bill" Van Horne and just as wonderful a man as he is to-day. On the
+other hand if fortune had happened to place Mr. James J. Hill a little
+farther north--in Winnipeg instead of in St. Paul--it is just as certain
+that he would to-day be Lord Manitoba (or some such title) as that his
+early associates George Stephen and Donald Smith are now Lord Mount
+Stephen and Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. But somehow--it were
+useless to deny it--Englishmen would think of him as quite a different
+man. Mr. C. M. Hays in Montreal is still what he was in St.
+Louis--Charlie Hays. He will not change his nature when he becomes Lord
+Muskoka.
+
+And what is true of a few individuals is no less true all over the
+United States. In the immediate neighbourhood of Mr. Hill, there should
+be at least one peerage in the Washburn family and a couple of
+baronetcies among the Pillsburys. Chicago would have of course one Duke
+in the head of the McCormick family, Mr. Marshall Field would have died
+Earl Dearborn, and Mr. Hughitt might be Viscount Calumet. In New York
+Lord Waldorf would be the title of the eldest son of the (at present
+third) Duke of Astoria. The Vanderbilt marquisate--of Hudson
+probably--would be a generation more recent. So throughout the country,
+from Maine to Mississippi, from Lord Penobscot to the Marquis of Biloxi,
+there would be a peerage in each of the good old houses--the Adamses,
+the Cabots, and the Quincys, the Livingstons, the Putnams, and
+Stuyvesants, the Carters and Randolphs and Jeffersons and Lees.
+
+Americans will say: "Thank Heaven and the wisdom of our Anglo-Saxon
+forefathers that it is not so!" If it were so, however, a good deal of
+British misunderstanding of the United States would be removed. Nor will
+it be contended that any of the Americans whom Englishmen have known
+best--Mr. Bayard, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Choate, or Mr. Whitelaw Reid, or
+General Horace Porter--would be other than ornaments to any aristocracy
+in the world. It would be idle to enquire whether Mr. Roosevelt or Mr.
+Chamberlain, Mr. Cleveland or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. Root or
+Lord Rosebery, Mr. Olney or Sir Edward Grey were the better man, for
+every Englishman will probably at once concede that the United States
+does somehow manage to produce individuals of as fine a type as England
+herself. But what no Englishman confesses in his heart is that there is
+any class of these men--that there is as good an upper stratum to
+society there as in England. These remarkable individuals can only be
+explained as being what naturalists call a "sport"--mere freaks and
+accidents. This idea exists in the English mind solely, I believe, from
+the lack of titles in America; which is because the colonists were
+inspired by Anglo-Saxon and not by Norman ideas. Had Englishmen been
+accustomed for a generation or two to have relations, diplomatic and
+commercial, not with Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith, but with Lord Savannah
+and the Earl of Chicopee, the idea would never have taken root. And if
+Englishmen knew the United States better, they would be astonished to
+find how frequent these "sports" and accidents seem to be. And it must
+be remembered that the country does at least produce excellent Duchesses
+and Countesses in not inadequate numbers.
+
+Because American society is not officially stratified like a medicine
+glass and there is, ostensibly at least, no social hierarchy, Englishmen
+would do well to disabuse themselves of the idea that therefore the
+people consists entirely of the lower middle class, with a layer of
+unassimilated foreign anarchists below and a few native and accidental
+geniuses thrusting themselves above. Democracy, at least in the United
+States, is not nearly so thorough a leveller as at a first glance it
+appears. You will, it is true, often hear in America the statement that
+it is "four generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves," which is
+to say that one man, from the farm or the workshop, builds up a fortune;
+his son, being born in the days of little things and bred in the school
+of thrift, holds it together; but his sons in turn, surrounded from
+their childhood with wealth and luxury, have lost the old stern fibre
+and they slip quickly back down the steep path which their grandfather
+climbed with so much toil. But no less often will you hear the statement
+that "blood will tell."
+
+In a democracy the essential principle of which is that every man shall
+have an equal chance of getting to the top, it is a matter of course
+that that top stratum will be constantly changing. The idea of anything
+in the nature of an hereditary privileged class is abhorrent to the
+mind of every good American. If he had to have an official Aristocracy,
+he would insist on a brand new one with each generation; or more likely
+that it should be re-elected every four years. We are not now discussing
+the advantages or disadvantages of the hereditary principle; the point
+that I desire to make is that at any given time American society,
+instead of being truncated and headless, has the equivalent of an
+aristocracy, whether the first, second, third, or fifth generation of
+nobility, just as abundant and complete as if it were properly labelled
+and classified into Dukes, Marquises, Viscounts, and the rest. And this
+aristocracy is quite independent of any social _cachet_, whether of the
+New York Four Hundred or of any other authority.
+
+It is a commonly accepted maxim among thoughtful Americans that the
+United States Senate is as much superior to the House of Lords as the
+House of Representatives is inferior to the House of Commons. One may,
+or may not, agree with that dictum; but it is worth noticing that, in
+the opinion of Americans themselves, it is, at least, not by comparison
+with the hereditary aristocracy that they show to any disadvantage.
+
+Nor need one accept the opinion (in which many eminent Englishmen
+coincide with the universal American belief) that the United States
+Supreme Court is the ablest as well as the greatest judicial tribunal in
+the world. But when one looks at the membership of that Court and at the
+majority of the members of the Senate (especially those members from the
+older States which hold to some tradition of fixity of tenure), when one
+sees the men who constitute the Cabinets of successive Presidents and
+those who fill the more distinguished diplomatic posts, when, further,
+one becomes acquainted with the class of men from which, all over the
+country, the presidents and attorneys of the great railway corporations
+and banks and similar institutions are drawn (all of which offices, it
+will be noticed, with the exception of the senatorships, are filled by
+nomination or appointment and not by popular election)--when one looks
+at, sees, and becomes acquainted with all these, he will begin to
+correct his impressions as to the non-existence of an American
+aristocracy which, though innocent of heraldry, can fairly be matched
+against the British.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The average Englishman looks at America and sees a people wherein there
+is no recognised aristocracy nor any titles. Also he sees that it is,
+through all its classes, a commercial people, immersed in business.
+Therefore he concludes that it is similar to what the English people
+would be if cut off at the top of the classes engaged in business and
+with all the upper classes wiped out. It will be much nearer the truth
+if he considers the people as a whole to be class for class just like
+the English people, subject to the accident that there are no titles,
+but with the difference that all classes, including the untitled Dukes
+and Marquises and Earls, take to business as to their natural element.
+The parallel may not be perfect; but it is incomparably more nearly
+exact than the alternative and general impression.
+
+It is of course necessary to recognise how rapidly the constitution of
+English society is changing, how old traditions are dying out, and in
+accordance with the Anglo-Saxon instinct the social scheme is tending
+to assimilate itself to the American model. The facts in outline are
+almost too familiar to be worth mentioning, except perhaps for the
+benefit of some American readers, for Americans in England are
+continually puzzled by anomalies which they see in English society. In
+my childhood I was taught that no gentleman could buy or sell anything
+for profit and preserve either his self-respect or the respect of his
+fellows. The only conceivable exceptions--and I think I was not informed
+of them at too early an age--were that a gentleman might deal in horses
+or in wines and still remain, if somewhat shaded, a gentleman; the
+reason being that a knowledge of either horses or wines was a
+gentlemanly accomplishment. The indulgence extended to the vendor of
+wines did not extend to the maker or seller of beer. I remember the
+resentment of the school when the sons of a certain wealthy brewer were
+admitted; and those boys had, I imagine, a cheerless time of it in their
+schooldays. The eldest of those boys, being now the head of the family,
+is to-day a peer. But at that time, though brewers or brewers' sons
+might be admitted grudgingly to the company of gentlemen, they were not
+gentlemen themselves. An aunt or a cousin who married a manufacturer, a
+merchant, or a broker--no matter how rich or in how large a way of
+business--was coldly regarded, if not actually cut, by the rest of the
+family. There are many families--though hardly now a class--in which the
+same traditions persist, but even the families in which the horror of
+trade is as great as ever make an exception as a rule in favour of trade
+conducted in the United States. The American may be pardoned for being
+bewildered when in an aristocracy which is forbidden, so he is told, to
+make money in trade, he finds no lack of individuals who are willing to
+take shares in any trading concern in which money in sufficient
+quantities may be made. The person who will not speak to an English
+farmer except as to an inferior, sends his own sons to the Colonies or
+to the United States to farm. These things, however, are, to Englishmen,
+mere platitudes. But though all are familiar with the change which is
+passing over the British people, few Englishmen, perhaps, have realised
+how rapidly the peerage itself is coming to be a trade-representing
+body. Of seventeen peers of recent creation, taken at random, nine owe
+their money and peerages to business, and the present holders of the
+title were themselves brought up to a business career. It may not be
+long before the English aristocracy will be as universally occupied in
+business as is the American; and it will be as natural for an Earl to go
+to his office as it is for the American millionaire (perhaps the father
+of the Countess) to do so to-day.
+
+In spite of all the change that has taken place, however, it still
+remains very difficult for the English gentleman, or member of a gentle
+family, to engage actively in business--certainly in trade--without
+being made to feel that he is stepping down into a lower sphere where
+there is a new and vitiated atmosphere. The code of ethics, he
+understands, is not that to which he is accustomed at his club and in
+his country house. He trusts that it will not be necessary to forget
+that he himself is a gentleman, but at least he will have to remember
+that his associates are only business men.
+
+The American aristocrat, on the other hand, takes to business as being
+the most attractive and honourable career. Setting aside all question of
+money-making, he believes it to be (and his father tells him that it is)
+the best life for him. Idleness is not good for any man. He will enjoy
+his annual month or two of shooting or fishing or yachting all the
+better for having spent the last ten or eleven months in hard work.
+Moreover, immersion in affairs will keep him active and alert and in
+touch with his fellow-men, besides being in itself one of the largest
+and most fascinating of pastimes. There is also the money; but when
+business is put on this level, money has a tendency to become only one
+among many objects. In England no man can with any grace pretend that he
+goes into business for any other reason than to make money. In America a
+man goes into it in order to gain standing and respect and make a
+reputation.
+
+Under these conditions, to return to our original point, in which
+country, putting other things aside, would one naturally expect to find
+the better code of business morals? Let us, if we can, consider the
+matter, as has been said before, without preconceived ideas or
+individual bias; let us imagine that we are speaking of two countries in
+which we have no personal stake whatever. If in any two such
+countries--in Gombroonia and Tigrosylvania, let us say--we should see
+two peoples approximately matched, of one tongue and having similar
+political ideals, not visibly unequal in strength, in abilities, or in
+the individual sense of honour, and if in one we should further see the
+aristocracy regarding the pursuit of commerce as a thing beneath and
+unworthy of them, in which they could not engage without contamination,
+while in the other it was followed as the most honourable of
+careers,--in which of the two should we expect to find the higher code
+of commercial ethics?
+
+It does not seem to me that there can be any doubt as to the answer.
+Other things being equal, and as a matter of theory only, business in
+the United States ought to be ruled by much higher standards of conduct
+than in England.
+
+Before proceeding to an analysis of any particular conditions, there is
+one further general consideration which I would urge on the attention of
+English readers, most of whom have preconceived ideas on this subject
+already formed.
+
+I am not among those who believe that trade or commerce of ordinary
+kinds either requires or tends to develop great intellectuality in those
+engaged in it. Indeed, my opinion (for which I am willing to be abused)
+is that any considerable measure of intellect is a hindrance to success
+in retail trade or in commerce on a small scale. It is a thesis which
+some one might develop at leisure, showing that it is not merely not
+creditable for a man to make money in trade but that it is an explicit
+avowal of intellectual poverty. Whence, of course, it follows that the
+London tradesman who grows rich and retires to the country or suburbs to
+build himself a statelier mansion is more justly an object of pity, if
+not of contempt, than is often consciously acknowledged. Any imaginative
+quality or breadth of vision which contributes to distract the mind of a
+tradesman from the one transaction immediately in hand and the immediate
+financial results thereof is a disqualification. I state my views thus
+in their extreme form lest the English reader should think that I
+entertain too much respect (or too little contempt) for the purely
+commercial brain. At the same time the English reader will concede that
+commercial enterprises and industrial undertakings may be on such a
+scale as to offer full exercise to the largest intellects.
+
+As an illustration of this: Cecil Rhodes grew, as we know, wealthy from
+the proceeds of vast undertakings; but men closely associated with him
+have assured me that Rhodes was a very indifferent "business man." We
+may, I think, take it for certain that if Rhodes had been condemned to
+conduct a retail grocery he would have conducted it to speedy
+irretrievable disaster. We are probably all agreed that the conduct of a
+small grocery does not require fineness of intellect; most English
+readers, I think, will follow me in believing that success in such a
+sphere of life implies at least an imperfect intellectual development.
+On the other hand enterprises truly Rhodian do call for intellectual
+grasp of the largest.
+
+The consideration which I wish to urge is that business in the United
+States during the period of growth and settlement of the country has
+been largely on Rhodian lines. The great enterprises by which the
+country has been developed, and on which most of the large fortunes of
+individual Americans are based have been of truly imperial proportions.
+The flinging of railways across thousands of miles of wilderness
+(England has made peers of the men who did it in Canada) with the laying
+out of cities and the peopling of provinces; the building of great
+fleets of boats upon the lakes; the vast mining schemes in remote and
+inaccessible regions of the country; lumbering enterprises which (even
+though not always honestly) dealt with virgin forests by the hundreds
+of square miles; "bonanza" wheat farming and the huge systems of grain
+elevators for the handling of the wheat and the conveyance of it to the
+market or the mill; cattle ranching on a stupendous scale (perhaps even
+the collecting of those cattle in their thousands daily for slaughter in
+the packing houses); the irrigating of wide tracts of desert;--these
+things and such as these are the "businesses" out of which the Americans
+of the last and present generations have largely made their fortunes.
+And they are enterprises, most of them, not unworthy to rank with
+Chartered Companies and the construction of railways from the North to
+the South of Africa.
+
+Not only this, but something of the same qualities of spaciousness, as
+of trafficking between large horizons, attach to almost all lines of
+business in the United States,--to many which in England are necessarily
+humdrum and commonplace. Almost every Englishman has been surprised on
+making the acquaintance of an accidental American (no "magnate" or
+"captain of industry" but an ordinary business man) to learn that though
+he is no more than the manufacturer of some matter-of-fact article, his
+operations are on a confusing scale and that, with branch offices in
+three or four towns and agents in a dozen more, his daily dealings are
+transacted over an area reaching three thousand miles from his home
+office, in which the interposition of prairies, mountain ranges, and
+chains of lakes are but incidents. Business in the United States has
+almost necessarily something of the romance of remote and adventurous
+enterprises.
+
+It has been said (and the point is worth insisting on) that the
+Englishman cannot pretend that he goes into business with any other
+object than to make money. His motives are on the face of them mercenary
+if not sordid. The American is impelled primarily by quite other
+ambitions. Similarly, when the Englishman thinks of business, the image
+which he conjures up in his mind is of a dull commonplace like, on lines
+so long established and well-defined that they can embrace little of
+novelty or of enterprise; a sedentary life of narrow outlook from the
+unexhilarating atmosphere of a London office or shop. To the American,
+except in small or retail trade in the large cities, the conditions of
+business are widely different. All around him, lies, both actually and
+figuratively, new ground, wilderness almost, inviting him to turn
+Argonaut. The mere vastness and newness of the country make it full of
+allurement to adventure, the rewards of which are larger and more
+immediate than can be hoped for in older and more straitened
+communities.
+
+It has been said that the American people was, by its long period of
+isolation and self-communion, made to become, in its outlook on the
+policies of the world, a provincial people; but that the very
+provincialism had something of dignity in it from the mere fact that it
+was continent-wide. So it is with American business. The exigencies of
+their circumstances have made the American people a commercial people;
+but whereas in England a commercial life may not offer scope for any
+intellectual activity and may even have a necessary tendency to stunt
+the mentality of any one engaged in it, business in the United States
+offers exercise to a much larger gamut of abilities and, by its mere
+range and variety, instead of dwarfing has a tendency to keep those
+abilities trained and alert. A business in England has not approximately
+the same large theatre of operation or the same variety of incident as a
+business of the same turn over in America. It is almost the difference
+between the man who furnishes his larder by going out to his farmyard
+and wringing the necks of tame ducks therein, and him who must snatch
+the same supply with his gun from the wild flocks in the wilderness.
+
+But, indeed, no argument should be needed on the subject; for one solid
+fact with which almost every Englishman is familiar is that in any
+American (let us use the word) shopkeeper whom he may meet travelling in
+Europe there is a certain mental alertness, freshness, and vigour,
+however objectionably they may at times display themselves--which are at
+least not characteristic of the English shopkeeping class.
+
+Just, then, as we have seen that, if we knew nothing about the peoples
+of the two countries, beyond the broad outlines of their respective
+social structures, we should be compelled, other things being equal, to
+look for a higher code of commercial morality in America than in
+England, so, when we see one further fact, namely that of the difference
+in the conditions under which business is conducted, we must naturally,
+other things being equal, look for a livelier intellect and a higher
+grade of mentality in the American than in the English business man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unfortunately other things never are equal. First, there is the taint of
+the political corruption in America which must, as has been said, in
+some measure contaminate the community. Then, England is an old
+country, with all the machinery of society running in long-accustomed
+grooves; above all it is a wealthy country and the first among creditor
+nations, to whose interest it has been, and is, to see that every bond
+and every engagement be literally and exactly carried out. The United
+States in the nineteenth century was young and undisciplined, with all
+the ardour of youth going out to conquer the world, seeing all things in
+rose-colour, but, for the present,--poor. It was, like any other youth
+confident of the golden future, lavish alike in its borrowings and its
+spendings, over-careless of forms and formalities. Happily the
+confidence in the future has been justified and ten times justified, and
+it is rich--richer than it yet knows--with resources larger even than it
+has learned properly to appraise or control. Whatever obligations it
+incurred in the headlong past are trifles to it now,--a few hundreds of
+college debts to a man who has come into millions. And with its position
+now assured it has grown jealous of its credit, national and individual.
+
+It was inevitable that the heedless days should beget indiscretions, the
+memories of which smart to-day. It was inevitable that amid so much
+recklessness and easy faith there should be some wrong-doing. Above all,
+was it inevitable that in the realisation of its dreams, when wealth and
+power grew and money came pouring into it, there should be bred in the
+people an extraordinary and unwholesome love of speculation which in
+turn opened their opportunities to the gambler and the confidence-man of
+all kinds and sizes. They flourished in the land,--the man who wrecked
+railways and issued fictitious millions of "securities," the man who
+robbed the government of moneys destined for the support of Indians or
+the establishment of postal routes in the farther West, the man who
+salted mines, the "land-grabber" and the "timber-shark" who dealt not in
+acres but in hundreds of square miles, the bogus trust company, and the
+fraudulent land and investment agent. When even the smallest community
+begins to "boom," the people of the community lose their heads and the
+harvest ripens to the sickle of the swindler. And the entire United
+States--sometimes in one part, sometimes in another, sometimes all
+together,--with only an occasional and short-lived panic to check the
+madness, boomed continuously for half a century.
+
+It is still booming, but with wealth, established institutions, and
+invested capital, have come comparative soberness and a sense of
+responsibility. The spirit which governs American industrial life to-day
+is quite other than that which ruled it two or three decades ago. The
+United States has sown its wild oats. It was a generous sowing,
+certainly, for the land was wide and the soil rich. But that harvest has
+been all but garnered and the country is now for the most part given
+over to more legitimate crops.
+
+[Tares still spring up among the wheat. The commercial community is not
+yet as well ordered as that of England or another older country; and
+since the foregoing paragraphs were written, the panic which fell upon
+the United States in the closing months of 1907 has occurred. The
+country had enjoyed a decade of extraordinary financial prosperity, in
+the course of which, in the spirit of speculation which has already been
+mentioned, all values had been forced to too high a level, credits had
+been extended beyond the margin of safety, and the volume of business
+transactions had swollen to such bulk in proportion to the amount of
+actual monetary wealth in existence that any shock to public confidence,
+any nervousness resulting in a contraction of the circulating medium,
+could not fail to produce catastrophe. The shock came; as sooner or
+later it had to come. In the stern period of struggle and retrenchment
+which followed, all the weak spots in the financial and industrial
+fabric of the country have been laid bare and, while depression and
+distress have spread over the whole United States, until all parts are
+equally involved, not only have the exposures of anything approaching
+dishonest or illegitimate methods been few, but the way in which the
+business communities at large have stood the strain has shown that there
+is nothing approaching unsoundness in the general business conditions.
+With the system of credit shattered and with hardly circulating medium
+enough to conduct the necessary petty transactions of everyday life, the
+country is already recovering confidence and feeling its way back to
+normal conditions. The results have not been approximately as bad as
+those which followed the panic of 1893; and the difference is an index
+to the immensely greater stability of the country's industries.
+Meanwhile there was at first (and still exists) a feeling of intense
+indignation in all parts of the country that so much suffering should
+have been thrown upon the whole people by the misbehaviour of a small
+circle of men in New York. The experience, however painful, will in the
+long run be salutary. It will be salutary in the first place for the
+obvious reason that business will have to start again conservatively and
+with inflated values reduced to something below normal levels. But it
+will be even more salutary for the less obvious reason that it has
+intensified the already acute disgust of the business men of the country
+as a whole with what are known as "Wall Street methods." Englishmen
+generally have an idea that Wall Street methods are the methods of all
+the United States; and, while they have had impressed upon them every
+detail of those financial irregularities in the small New York clique
+which precipitated the catastrophe, they have heard and know nothing of
+the coolness and cheery resolution with which the crisis has been faced
+by the commercial classes as a whole.]
+
+England has not yet forgotten the disclosures in the matter of the
+Chicago packing houses. That the light which was then turned on that
+industry revealed conditions that were in some details inconceivably
+shocking, is hardly to be doubted: and I trust that those are mistaken
+who say that if similar investigation had been made into the methods of
+certain English establishments, before warning was given, the state of
+affairs would have been found not much different. What is certain,
+however, is that the English public received an exaggerated idea of the
+extent of the abuses. In part, this was a necessary result of the
+exigencies of journalism. A large majority of the newspapers even of
+London--certainly those which reach a large majority of the
+readers--prefer sensationalism. Even those which are anxious in such
+cases to be fair and temperate are sadly hampered both by the
+limitations of space in their own columns and by the costliness of
+telegraphic correspondence. It is inevitable that the most conservative
+and judicial of correspondents should transmit to his papers whatever
+are the most striking items--revelations--accusations in an indictment
+such as was then framed against the packers. The more damning details
+are the best news. On the other hand he cannot, save to a ridiculously
+disproportionate extent, transmit the extenuating circumstances, the
+individual denials, the local atmosphere. Telegraph tolls are heavy and
+space is straitened while atmosphere and extenuating circumstances are
+not news at all. An Englishman is generally astonished when he reads the
+accounts of some conspicuous divorce case or great financial scandal in
+England as they appear in the American (or for that matter the French or
+German) papers, with the editorial comments thereupon. In the picture of
+any event happening at a great distance the readers of even the
+best-intentioned journals necessarily have presented to their view only
+the highest lights and the blackest shadows. In this instance a certain
+section of the American press--what is specifically known as the
+"yellow" press--had strong motives, of a political kind, for making the
+case against the packers as bad as possible. It is unfortunate that many
+of the London newspapers look much too largely to that particular class
+of American paper for their American news and their views on current
+American events.
+
+If we assume that any reasonable proportion of the accusations made
+against the packing houses were true of some one or other establishment,
+it still remains that a considerable proportion of the American business
+community is otherwise engaged than in the canning of meats. There is a
+story well known in America of a countryman who entered a train with a
+packet of eggs, none too fresh, in his coat-tail pocket. He sat down
+upon them; but deemed it best to continue sitting rather than give the
+contents a chance to run down his person. Meanwhile the smell permeated
+through the car and at last the passenger sitting immediately behind the
+countryman saw whence the unpleasantness arose. Whereupon he fell to
+abusing the other.
+
+"Thunder!" exclaimed the countryman. "What have you got to complain of?
+You've only got the smell. _I'm sitting in it!_"
+
+This is much how Americans feel in regard to foreign criticisms of the
+packing house scandals. Whatever wrong-doing there may have been in
+individual establishments in this one industry in Chicago, is no more to
+be taken as typical of the commercial ethics of the American people than
+the discovery of a fraudulent trader or group of traders in one
+particular line in Manchester or Glasgow would imply that the British
+trading public was corrupt. The mere ruthlessness with which, in this
+case, the wrong-doers were exposed ought in itself to be a sufficient
+evidence to outsiders that the American public is no more willingly
+tolerant of dishonesty than any other people. Judged, indeed, by that
+criterion, surely no other country can detest wrong-doing so
+whole-heartedly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And I wish here to protest against the habit which the worst section of
+the English newspapers has adopted during the last year or so of holding
+"American methods" in business up to contempt. It is true that it is not
+done with any idea of directing hostility against the United States; and
+those who use the catchword so freely would undoubtedly much prefer to
+speak of "German methods" or even "French" or "Russian methods," if they
+could. All that is meant is that the methods are un-English and alien;
+but whether the intention is to lessen the public good-will towards the
+United States or not, that must inevitably be the effect. Even if it
+were not, the American public is abundantly justified in resenting it.
+
+The idea that America is trust-ridden to the extent popularly supposed
+in England has been carefully fostered by those extreme journals in
+America already referred to (it is impossible not to speak of them as
+the Yellow Press) for personal and political reasons--reasons which
+Englishmen would comprehend if they understood better the present
+political situation in the United States. The idea has been encouraged
+by divers English "impressionist" authors and writers on the English
+press who, with a superficial knowledge of American affairs, have caught
+the jargon of the same school of American journalist-politicians. It has
+been further confirmed by a misunderstanding of the attitude and policy
+of President Roosevelt himself, which has already been sufficiently
+dealt with.
+
+England is, in the American sense, much more "trust-ridden" than the
+United States. It is not merely that (as any reference to statistics
+will show) wealth is less concentrated in America than in England--that
+nothing like the same proportion of the capital of the country is lodged
+in a few hands--for that, inasmuch as the majority of large fortunes in
+Great Britain are not commercial in their origin, might mean little; but
+in business the opportunity for the small trader and the man without
+backing to win to independence is a hundred times greater in America,
+while the control exercised by "rings" and "cliques" over certain large
+industries in England and over the access to certain large markets is, I
+think, much more complete than has been attained, except most
+temporarily, by any trust or ring in the United States, except, as in
+the case of oil, where artificial monopoly has been assisted by natural
+conditions.
+
+The tendency in the United States even in the last twenty years has not
+been in the direction of a concentration of wealth, but towards its
+diffusion in a degree unparalleled in any country in the world. The
+point in which the United States is economically almost immeasurably
+superior to England is not in the number of her big fortunes but in the
+enormously greater well-to-do-ness of the middle classes--the vastly
+larger number of persons of moderate affluence, who are in the enjoyment
+of incomes which in England would class them among the reasonably rich.
+
+Consolidation and amalgamation are the necessary and unavoidable
+tendencies of modern business. As surely as the primitive partnership
+succeeded individual effort and as, later, corporations were created to
+enlarge the sphere of partnerships, so is it certain that the industrial
+units which will fight for control of trade in the much larger markets
+of the modern world will represent vastly larger aggregations of capital
+than (except in extraordinary and generally state-aided institutions)
+were dreamed of fifty years ago. That must be accepted as a certainty.
+It does not by any means necessarily follow that this process entails a
+concentration of wealth in fewer hands; on the contrary the larger a
+corporation is, the wider proportionally, as a general rule, is the
+circle of the shareholders in whom the property is vested. But
+presuming the commercial growth of the United States to continue for
+half a century yet on the lines on which it has developed in the last
+two decades, the country will then, not so much by any concentration of
+wealth, but by the mere filling up of the commercial field (so that by
+increase in the intensity of competition the opportunity for the small
+or new trader to force his way to the surface will be more curtailed,
+and the gulf between owner or employer and non-owner or employed will
+become greater and more permanent)--if, I say, that growth should
+continue for another fifty years then will the conditions in America
+approximate to those in England. This it is against which the masses in
+America are more or less blindly and unconsciously fighting to-day. The
+comparison with European conditions is generally not formulated in the
+individual mind; but an approach to those conditions is what the masses
+of America see--or think they see--in the tendency towards greater
+aggregations of corporate power. It is not the process of aggregation,
+but the protest against it, which is peculiar to the United States: not
+the trust-power but the hatred of it.
+
+This being so, for Englishmen or other Europeans to speak of all
+manifestations of the process itself as "American" is not a little
+absurd. Besides which, to so speak of it in the tone which is generally
+adopted is extremely impolite to a kindred people whose good-will
+Englishmen ought to, and do, desire to keep.
+
+The thing is best illustrated by taking a single example. The term
+"Trust" is, of course, very vaguely used, being generally taken, quite
+apart from its proper significance, to mean any form of combination,
+corporate aggregation, or working agreement which tends to extend
+control of a company or individual, or group of companies or
+individuals, over a larger proportion of a particular trade or industry.
+In the United States, with the possible exception of the Standard Oil
+Company (which is not properly a trust), the form of corporate power
+against which there has been the most bitterness is that of the
+railways, and the specific form of railway organisation most fiercely
+attacked has been the Pool or Joint Purse--which is, in all essentials,
+a true trust. In 1887 the formation of a Pool, or Joint Purse Agreement,
+was made illegal in the United States; but Englishmen can have no
+conception of the popular hatred of the word "Pools" which exists in
+America or of the obloquy which has been heaped upon railway companies
+for entering into them. Few Englishmen on the other hand have any clear
+idea of what a Joint Purse Agreement is; and they jog along contentedly
+ignorant that this iniquitous engine for their oppression is in daily
+use by the British railway companies.
+
+My personal belief is that the prohibition of pools in America was a
+mistake: that it would have been better for the country from the first
+to have authorised, even encouraged, their formation, as in England,
+under efficient governmental supervision. But the point is that the
+majority of the American people thought otherwise and no other
+manifestation of the trust-tendency has been more virulently attacked
+than the--to English ideas--harmless institution of a joint purse. And
+whether the American people ultimately acted wisely or unwisely, they
+were justified in regarding any form of association or agreement between
+railways with more apprehension than would be reasonable in England. It
+is not possible here to explain why this is so, except to say broadly
+that the longer distances in America and the lack of other forms of
+transportation render an American community, especially in the West,
+more dependent upon the railway than is the case in England. The
+conditions give the railway company a larger control over, or influence
+in, the well-being of the people.
+
+An excellent illustration of the difference in the point of view of the
+two peoples has been furnished since the above was written by the
+announcements, within a few weeks of each other in December 1907, of the
+formation of two "working agreements" between British railway
+companies,--that namely between the Great Northern and Great Central
+railways and that between the North British and Caledonian. In the
+former case the Boards of Directors of the two companies merely
+constituted themselves a Joint Committee to operate the two railways
+conjointly. In the latter, not many details of the agreement were made
+public, except that it was intended to control competition in all
+classes of traffic and, as the first fruits thereof, there was an
+immediate and not unimportant increase in certain classes of passenger
+rates. Neither agreement has, I think, yet received the sanction of the
+proper authorities, but the public generally received the announcement
+of both with approval amounting almost to enthusiasm. Of these
+agreements the former, certainly, and presumably the latter, would be
+flagrantly illegal in the United States. If, moreover, an attempt were
+made in America to arrive at the same ends in some roundabout way which
+would avoid technical illegality, the outburst of popular indignation
+would make it impossible. Personally I sympathise with the English view
+and believe both agreements to be not only just and proper but in the
+public interest; but it is certain that they would have created such an
+uproar in the United States that English newspapers would inevitably
+have reflected the disturbance, and English readers would have been
+convinced that once more the Directorates of American railways were
+engaged in a nefarious attempt to use the power of capital for the
+plundering and oppression of the public. In the still more recent debate
+(February 1908) in the House of Commons, the views expressed by both Mr.
+Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law in favour of the lessening of competition
+between railway companies would have exposed them to the hysterical
+abuse of a large part of the American press. Both those gentlemen would
+have been openly accused of being the tools of (if not actually
+subsidised by) the corporations, and (but for Mr. Bonar Law's company)
+Mr. Lloyd George's attitude would, I think, be sufficient to ruin an
+Administration. These statements contain no reflection on the American
+point of view. The conditions are such that that point of view may, in
+America, be the right one. But the absurdity is that Englishmen hear
+these things, or read of them as being said in the United States, and
+thereupon assume that terrible offences are being perpetrated; whereas
+nothing is being done which in England would not receive the approval of
+the majority of sensible men and be temperately applauded by the
+spokesmen of both the great parties in Parliament. It is not, I say
+again, the Trust-power, but the hatred of it, which is peculiar to
+America.
+
+The same is true of the field as a whole. Things harmless in England
+might be very dangerous in America. We have so far considered the trust
+power only as a commercial and industrial factor--in its tendency, by
+crystallisation or consolidation in the higher strata, to depress the
+economic status of the industrial masses and to make the emergence of
+the individual trader into independence more difficult. In this aspect
+capital is immensely more dominant in England than in America. But there
+is a political side to the problem.
+
+In the United States, owing to the absence of a throne and an
+established aristocracy, there is, as it were, no counterpoise to the
+power of wealth. This is, in practice, the chief virtue of the throne in
+the British constitution, that, in its capacity as the Fountain of
+Honour, it prevents wealth from becoming the dominant power in the
+country and thereby (which Americans are slow to understand) is the most
+democratic of forces, protecting the proletariat in some measure against
+the possibility of unhindered oppression by an omnipotent capitalism.
+The English masses are already by the mere impenetrability of the
+commercial structure above them much worse off than the corresponding
+masses in the United States. What their condition might be if for a
+generation the social restraint put upon wealth by the power of the
+throne and the established aristocracy were to be relaxed, it is not
+pleasant to consider. Nor need it be considered.[335:1]
+
+It is, I think, evident that in America the danger to the industrial
+independence of the individual which might arise from the aggregation of
+wealth in a few hands is much greater than in England. The power would
+be capable of greater abuse; the evils which would flow from such abuse
+would be greater. It is not wealth, but the abuse of it that he is
+attacking, says President Roosevelt--not the wealthy class, but the
+"wealthy criminal class." The distinction has not been digested by those
+in England who rail against American methods or who write of American
+politics. It is necessary--or so it seems to a large number of the
+American people--that extraordinary checks should be put upon the
+possibility of the abuse of wealth in the United States, such as do not
+exist or are not needed (or at least we have heard no energetic demand
+for them) in England. As a political fact there is need of especial
+vigilance in the United States lest corporate power be abused. As a
+commercial fact it is merely preposterous to rail at the modern tendency
+to consolidation and amalgamation as specifically "American."
+
+It is probably safe to say that if the United States had such a social
+counterweight as is furnished in England by the throne and the
+recognised aristocracy, the growth of what is called "trust-power" would
+be viewed to-day with comparative unconcern. At all events England is
+able to view with something like unconcern the conditions, as they exist
+in England, worse than, as has been said, the trust power is humanly
+capable of imposing on the American people in another half-century of
+unhindered growth. Which, American readers will please understand, is
+not a suggestion that the United States would be benefited, even
+commercially, by the institution of a monarchy.
+
+Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Englishmen long ago acquired the
+idea that American business methods in what may be called large affairs
+were too often unscrupulous; and of such methods, there were certainly
+examples. I have explained why the temptations to, and the opportunities
+for, dishonesty were very great in the earlier days and it would be
+impossible to find language too severe to characterise many of the
+things which were done--not once, but again and again--in the
+manipulation of railways, the stealing of public lands, and the
+plundering of the public treasury. The dog deserved as bad a name as he
+received. But that dog died. The Americans themselves stoned him to
+death--with precisely the same ferocity as they have recently exhibited
+when they discovered, as they feared, some of his litter in the Chicago
+packing houses--or a year before in the offices of certain insurance
+companies. The present generation of Americans may not be any better men
+than their fathers (let us hope that they are, if only for the
+reputation of the vast immigration of Englishmen and Scotchmen which has
+poured into the country) but at least they are much less tempted. They
+live under a new social code. They have nothing like the same
+opportunity for successful dishonesty and immeasurably greater chance of
+punishment, whether visited on them by the law or by the opinion of
+their fellows, if unsuccessful or found out. It is not fair that the new
+dog should be damned to drag around the old dog's name.
+
+There is an excellent analogy in which the relations of the two peoples
+are reversed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Americans are largely of the opinion that the British aristocracy is a
+disreputable class. They gave that dog its name too; and there have been
+individual scandals enough in the past to justify it. It is useless for
+an Englishman living in America to endeavour to modify this opinion in
+even a small circle, for it is only a question of time--probably of a
+very short time--before some peer turns up in the divorce court and the
+Englishmen's friends will send him newspaper clippings containing the
+Court Report and will hail him on street corners and at the club with:
+"How about your British aristocracy now?"
+
+Americans cannot see the British peerage as a whole; they only hear of
+those who thrust themselves into unsavoury notoriety. So Englishmen get
+no view of the American business community in its entirety, but only
+read with relish the occasional scandal. Of the two, the American has
+the better, or at least more frequent, justification for his error than
+has the Englishman; but it is a pity that the two cannot somehow agree
+to an exchange. Perhaps a treaty might be entered into (if it were not
+for the United States Senate) which, when ratified, should be published
+in all newspapers and posted in all public places in both countries,
+setting forth that:
+
+     "IN CONSIDERATION of the Party of the Second Part hereafter
+     cherishing a belief in the marital fidelity and general moral
+     purity of all members of the British peerage, their wives,
+     heirs, daughters, and near relations, and further agreeing
+     that when, by any unfortunate mishap, any individual member of
+     the said Peerage or his wife, daughter, or other relation
+     shall have been discovered and publicly shown to have offended
+     against the marriage laws or otherwise violated the canons of
+     common decency, to understand and take it for granted that
+     such mishap, offence, or violation is a quite exceptional
+     occurrence owing to the unexplainable depravity of the
+     individual and that it in no way reflects upon the other
+     members of the said Peerage, whether in the mass or
+     individually, or their wives, daughters, or near relations:
+     THEREFORE the Party of the First Part hereby agrees to decline
+     to give any credence whatsoever to any story, remark, or
+     reflection to the discredit of the general honesty of the
+     American commercial classes or public men, but agrees that he
+     will hereafter assume them to be trustworthy and truthful
+     whether individually or in the mass, except in such cases as
+     shall have been publicly proven to the contrary, and that he
+     will always understand and declare that such isolated cases
+     are purely sporadic and not in any way to be taken as
+     evidences either of an epidemic or of a general low state of
+     public morality, but that on the contrary the said American
+     commercial classes do, whether in the mass or individually,
+     hate and despise an occasional scoundrel among them as
+     heartily as would the Party of the First Part hate and despise
+     such a scoundrel if found among his own people--as, he
+     confesses, does occasionally occur."
+
+Nonsense? Of course it is nonsense. But the desirable thing is that
+Englishmen should be brought to understand that after all it is but an
+inconsiderable portion of the American business community that is
+permanently employed in the manufacture of wooden nutmegs, in selling
+canned horrors for food, or in watering railway shares, and that
+Americans should believe that there are quite a large number of men of
+high birth in England who are only infrequently engaged in either
+beating their own wives or running away with those of other men.
+
+The brief confessional clause at the conclusion of the above draft I
+take to be an important portion of the document. It is not necessary
+that a similar confession should be incorporated in the behalf of the
+Party of the Second Part, not because there are no family scandals in
+America, but because, in the absence of a peerage, it is not easy to
+tell when a divorce or other scandal occurs among the aristocracy.
+"Scandal in High Life" is such a tempting heading to a column that the
+American newspapers are generous in their interpretation of the term and
+many a man and woman, on getting into trouble, must have been surprised
+to learn for the first time that their ambitions had been realised,
+unknown to themselves, and that they did indeed belong to that class
+which they had for so long yearned to enter.
+
+This fact also is worth considering, namely, that whereas in England it
+is not impossible that there may be more scandals of a financial sort,
+both in official circles and outside, than the public ever hears of
+through the press; it is reasonably certain that in America the press
+publishes full details of a good many more scandals than ever occur.
+
+This peculiarity of the American press (for it is still peculiar to
+America, in degree at least, if not in kind) does not arise from any
+set purpose of blackening the reputation of the country in the eyes of
+the outside world, but is entirely the result of "enterprise," of
+individual ambition, and the extremity of partisan enthusiasm. Other
+nations may be quite certain that they hear all the worst that is to be
+told of the people of the United States. Out of the Spanish war arose
+what came to be known as the "embalmed beef" scandal. American soldiers
+in Cuba were furnished with a quantity of rations which, by the time
+they reached the front and an effort was made to serve them out, were
+entirely unfit for human consumption. Undoubtedly much suffering was
+thereby caused to the men and probably some disease. But, equally
+undoubtedly, the catastrophe arose from an error in judgment and not
+from dishonesty of contractors or of any government official. But, as
+the incident was handled by a section of the American press, it might
+well, had the two great parties at the time been more evenly balanced in
+public favour, have resulted in the ruin of the reputation of an
+administration and the overthrow of the Republican party at the next
+election.
+
+If the Re-mount scandals and the Army Stores scandals which arose out of
+England's South African war had occurred in America, I doubt if any
+party could have stood against the storm that would have been provoked,
+and, deriving their ideas of the affairs from the cabled reports,
+Englishmen of all classes would still be shaking their heads over the
+inconceivable dishonesty in the American public service and the
+deplorable standard of honour in the American army. It may be necessary
+and wholesome for a people that occasionally certain kinds of dirty
+linen should be washed in public; but the speciality of the American
+"yellow press"[342:1] is the skill which it shows in soiling clean linen
+in private in order to bring it out into the streets to wash.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+POSTSCRIPT--Reference has been made in the foregoing chapter to the
+British peerage and I now propose to have the temerity to enter a
+serious protest against the tone in which even the thoughtful American
+commonly refers to the House of Lords. I cherish no such hopeless
+ambition as that of inducing the American newspaper paragrapher to
+surrender his traditional right to make fun of a British peer on any and
+every occasion. I am speaking now to the more serious teachers of the
+American people; for it is a deplorable fact that even the best of those
+teachers when speaking of the House of Lords use language which is
+generally flippant, nearly always contemptuous, and not uncommonly
+uninformed.
+
+My own belief (and I think it is that of the majority of thinking
+Englishmen) is that if the discussion in the House of Lords on any large
+question be laid side by side with the debate on the same question in
+the House of Commons and the two be read concurrently, it will almost
+invariably be seen that the speeches in the Upper House show a marked
+superiority in breadth of view, expression and grasp of the larger
+aspects and the underlying principles of the subject. I believe that
+such a debate in the House of Lords is characterised by more ability and
+thoroughness than the debate on a similar question in either the Senate
+or the House of Representatives. It does not appear from the respective
+membership of the chambers how it could well be otherwise.
+
+Let us from memory give a list of the more conspicuous members of the
+present House of Peers whose names are likely to be known to American
+readers, to wit: the Dukes of Devonshire and Norfolk; the Marquises of
+Ripon and Landsdowne; Earls Roberts, Rosebery, Elgin, Northbrook, Crewe,
+Carrington, Cromer, Kimberley, Minto, Halsbury, Spencer; Viscounts,
+Wolseley, Goschen, Esher, Kitchener of Khartoum, St. Aldwyn
+(Hicks-Beach), Milner, Cross; the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
+Bishop of London; Lords Lister, Alverstone, Curzon of Kedleston, Mount
+Stephen, Strathcona and Mount Royal, Avebury, Loreburn, and Rayleigh.
+Let me emphasise the fact that this is not intended to be a list of the
+ablest members of the House, but only a list of able members something
+of whose reputation and achievements is likely to be known to the
+intelligent American reader. If the list were being compiled for English
+readers, it would have to be twice as long; but, as it stands, I submit
+that it is a list which cannot approximately be paralleled from among
+the members of the House of Commons or from among the members of the
+Senate and House of Representatives combined. I take it to be
+incontrovertible that a list representing such eminence and so great
+accomplishment in so many fields (theology, statesmanship, war,
+literature, government, science, and affairs) could not be produced from
+the legislative chambers of any single country in the world.
+
+The mistake which Americans make is that they confuse the hereditary
+principle with the House of Lords. The former is, of course, spurned by
+every good American and no one denies his right to express his
+disapproval thereof in such terms as he sees fit. But few Americans
+appear to make sufficient allowance for the fact that whatever the House
+of Lords suffers at any given time by the necessary inclusion among its
+members (as a result of its hereditary constitution) of a proportion of
+men who are quite unfit to be members of any legislative body (and these
+are the members of the British peerage with whom America is most
+familiar) is much more than counterbalanced by the ability to introduce
+into the membership a continuous current of the most distinguished and
+capable men in every field of activity, whose services could not
+otherwise (and cannot in the United States) be similarly commanded by
+the State.
+
+We have seen how in the United States a man can only win his way to the
+House of Representatives, and hardly more easily to the Senate, without
+earning the favour of the local politicians and "bosses" of his
+constituency, and how, when he is elected, his tenure of office is
+likely to be short and must be always precarious. It is probable that in
+the United States not one of the distinguished men whose names are given
+in the above list would (with the possible exception of two or three who
+have devoted their lives to politics) be included in either chamber.
+They would, so far as public service is concerned (unless they were
+given cabinet positions or held seats upon the bench), be lost to the
+State.
+
+It is, of course, impossible that Americans should keep in touch with
+the proceedings of the House of Lords; nor is there any reason why they
+should. The number of Americans, resident at home, who in the course of
+their lives have read _in extenso_ any single debate in that House must
+be extremely small; and first-hand knowledge of the House Americans can
+hardly have. Then, of the English publicists or statesmen who visit the
+United States it is perhaps inevitable that those whose conversation on
+political topics Americans (especially American economic thinkers and
+sociologists) should find most congenial are those of an advanced
+Liberal or Radical--even semi-Republican--complexion. I have chanced to
+have the opportunity of seeing how much certain American economists of
+the rising school (which has done such admirable work as a whole) have
+been influenced by the views of particular Englishmen of this class. I
+should like to mention names, but not a few readers will be able to
+supply them for themselves. It has not appeared to occur to the American
+disciples of these men that the views which they impart on English
+political subjects are purely partisan, and generally very extreme,
+views. Their opinions of the House of Lords no more represent the
+judgment of England on the subject than the opinions of an extreme Free
+Trade Democrat represent the views of America on the subject of
+Protection.
+
+Merely as a matter of manners and good taste, it would, I think, be well
+if Americans endeavoured to arrive at and express a better understanding
+of the legislative work of the Lords. Englishmen have not much more
+regard for the principle of a quadrennially elected President than
+Americans have for an hereditary aristocracy; but they do not habitually
+permit that lack of regard to degenerate into the use of contemptuous
+language about individual Presidents. Even in contemplating the result
+of what seems to them so preposterous a system as that of electing a
+judiciary by popular party vote, Englishmen have generally confined
+themselves to a complimentary expression of surprise that the results
+are not worse than they are. Surely, while being as truculent as they
+please in their attitude towards the hereditary principle, it would be
+well if Americans would similarly endeavour to dissociate their
+detestation of that principle from their feelings for the actual
+personnel of the House of Lords. There is a good deal both in the
+constitution and work of the House to command the respect even of the
+citizens of a republic.
+
+I address this protest directly to American economic and sociological
+writers in the hope that, recognising that it comes from one who is not
+unsympathetic, some of them may be influenced to speak less heedlessly
+on the subject than is their wont. I may add that these remarks are
+suggested by certain passages in the recently published book of an
+American author for whom, elsewhere in this volume, I express, as I
+feel, sincere respect.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[309:1] It is delightful to find, some weeks after this was written,
+that Mr. Wells makes precisely this common blunder and states it in
+almost the exact words that I have used later on. His excuse lies in the
+fact that, as he says, he had it "in his mind before ever he crossed the
+Atlantic"; but that hardly excuses his failure to disabuse himself after
+he was across. Most curious is it that Mr. Wells appears to think that
+this erroneous notion is a discovery of his own and he enlarges on it
+and expounds it at some length; the truth being, as I say above, that it
+is the common opinion of all uninformed Englishmen. Mr. Wells is in fact
+voicing an almost universal--even if unformulated--national prejudice,
+but it is a pity that he took it over to America and brought it back
+again.
+
+[335:1] The reader will, of course, understand that the political or
+industrial power of capital is entirely a separate thing from the
+ability of wealth to buy luxury, deference or social recognition for its
+possessor. In this particular there is little to choose between the two
+and curiously enough, each country has been called by visitors from the
+other the "paradise of the wealthy."
+
+[342:1] Englishmen often ask the meaning of the phrase "the yellow
+press." The history of it is as follows: In 1895, Mr. W. R. Hearst,
+having had experience as a journalist in California, purchased the New
+York _Journal_, which was at the time a more or less unsuccessful
+publication, and, spending money lavishly, converted it into the most
+enterprising, as well as the most sensational, paper that New York or
+any other American city had ever seen. In catering to the prejudices of
+the mass of the people, he invaded the province of the New York _World_.
+In the "war" between the two which followed, one began and the other
+immediately adopted the plan of using yellow ink in the printing of
+certain cartoons (or pictures of the _Ally Sloper_ type) with which they
+adorned certain pages of their Sunday editions especially. The term
+"yellow press" was applied at first only to those two papers, but soon
+extended to include other publications which copied their general style.
+The yellow ink was, I believe, actually first employed by the _World_;
+but the _Journal_ was the aggressor in the fight and in most particulars
+it was that paper which set the pace, and it, or Mr. Hearst, rightly
+bears the responsibility for the creation of yellow journalism.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE GROWTH OF HONESTY
+
+     The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon--America's Resemblance to
+     Japan--A German View--Can Americans Lie?--Honesty as the Best
+     Policy--Religious Sentiment--Moral and Immoral Railway
+     Managers--A Struggle for Self-Preservation--Gentlemen in
+     Business--Peculation among Railway Servants--How the Old Order
+     Changes, Yielding Place to New--The Strain on British
+     Machinery--Americans as Story-Tellers--The Incredibility of
+     the Actual.
+
+
+My desire is to contribute, if possible, something towards the
+establishment of a better understanding between the two peoples by
+correcting certain misapprehensions which exist in the mind of each in
+regard to the other. At the present moment we are concerned with the
+particular misapprehension which exists in the English mind in regard to
+the commercial ethics--the average level of common honesty--in the
+masses of American business men. I have endeavoured to show, first, that
+the majority of Englishmen have, even though unconsciously, a
+fundamental misconception of the character of the American people,
+arising primarily from the absence of a recognised aristocracy in the
+United States:--that, in fact, the two peoples are, in the construction
+of their social fabrics, much more alike than the Englishman generally
+assumes. I have endeavoured to show, next, that if we were entirely
+without any knowledge of, or any prejudices in regard to, the code of
+commercial ethics at present existing in either country, but had to
+deduce for ourselves _a priori_ from what we knew of the part which
+commerce and business played in the social life of the two countries the
+probable degree of morality which would be found in the respective
+codes, we should be forced to look for a higher standard in the United
+States than in England. We have seen how it comes that Englishmen have,
+justifiably and even unavoidably, acquired the erroneous notions which
+they have acquired, first, from the fact that, in the rough days of the
+past, American business morality was, at least in certain parts of the
+country, looser than that which prevailed in the older-established and
+better constituted society of the England of the same day (and in the
+older communities of the United States itself); and, second, from the
+fact that the chief channel through which Englishmen must necessarily
+derive their contemporary ideas on the subject, namely, the American
+press, is, by reason of qualities peculiar to itself, not to be trusted
+to correct the misapprehensions which exist. Finally, we have seen that
+there exist in certain American minds some mistaken notions, not much
+dissimilar in character to those which I am trying to point out are
+present in the minds of Englishmen, about the character of a
+considerable section of the people of Great Britain; and if Americans
+can be thus mistaken about England, there is no inherent improbability
+in the suggestion that Englishmen may be analogously mistaken about the
+United States.
+
+The English people has had abundant justification in the past for
+arriving at the conclusion that in many of the qualities which go to
+make a great and manly race it stands first among the peoples of the
+earth. The belief of Englishmen in their own moral superiority as a
+people is justified by the course of history, and is proven every day
+afresh by the attitudes of other races,--especially by the behaviour in
+their choice of friends, when compelled to choose as between England and
+other European powers, of the peoples more or less unlike the
+Anglo-Saxon in their civilisations in the remoter corners of the world.
+It is to the eternal honour of England that in countless out-of-the-way
+places, peoples more or less savage have learned to accept the word of a
+British official or trader as a thing to be trusted, and have grown
+quick to distinguish between him and his rivals of other European
+nationalities. There has been abundant testimony to the respect which
+the British character has won from the world,--from the frank admiration
+of the Prince-Chancellor for the "Parole de Gentleman" to the unshakable
+confidence of the far red Indian in the faith of a "King George Man";
+from the trust of an Indian native in the word of a Sahib to the dying
+injunction to his successor of one of the greatest of the Afghan Ameers:
+"Trust the English. Do not fight them. They are good friends and bad
+enemies."[349:1] And the most solemn oath, I believe, which an Arab can
+take is to swear that what he says is as "true as the word of an
+Englishman."
+
+But, granting all that has happened in the past, and recognising that
+British honour and the sacredness of the British word have stood above
+those of any other peoples, the American nation of to-day is a new
+factor in the situation. It did not exist at the time when the old
+comparisons were made. I have suggested elsewhere that the popular
+American contempt for the English climate is only an inheritance of the
+opinions based on a comparison of that climate with the climates of
+Southern Europe. If the climate of certain parts--of the greater
+part--of the United States had then been a factor to be taken into
+consideration, English skies would have had at least one fellow to share
+with them the opprobrium of the world. So in the matter of commercial
+morality; we are thinking and speaking in terms of a day that has gone,
+when other standards governed.
+
+Englishmen have been very willing, within the last year or two, to
+believe in the revolution which has taken place in the character of
+another people, less akin to them than the Americans and farther away.
+The promptitude with which the British masses have accepted the fact
+that, in certain of the virtues on which Englishmen have most peculiarly
+prided themselves in the past, the Japanese are their superiors, has
+been curiously un-British. There should be no greater difficulty in
+believing that another revolution, much more gradual and less
+picturesque, and by so much the more easily credible, has taken place in
+the American character. The evidence in favour of the one is, rightly
+viewed, no less strong than that in favour of the other. It would have
+been impossible for the Japanese to have carried on the recent war as
+they did had they not been possessed of the virtues of courage and
+patriotism in the highest degree. It would have been equally impossible
+for the Americans to have built up their immense trade in competition
+with the great commercial powers of the world, unless they had in an
+equally high degree possessed the virtue of commercial honesty. No one
+ought to know better than the English business man that a great national
+commercial fabric is not built up by fraud or trickery.
+
+On this subject Professor Muensterberg,[351:1] striving to eradicate
+from the minds of his German countrymen the same tendency to
+underestimate the honesty of American business men, says (and let me say
+that neither my opinion, nor the form in which it is expressed, was
+borrowed from him): "It is naive to suppose that the economic strength
+of America has been built up through underhanded competition, without
+respect to law or justice, and impelled by nothing but a barbarous and
+purely material ambition. One might better suppose that the twenty-story
+office buildings on lower Broadway are supported by the flag-stones in
+the street. . . . The colossal fabric of American industry is able to
+tower so high only because it has its foundations on the hard rock of
+honest conviction."
+
+"It has been well said," says the same author, "that the American has no
+talent for lying, and distrust of a man's word strikes the Yankee as
+specifically European." Now in England "an American lie" has stood
+almost as a proverb; yet the German writer is entirely in earnest,
+though personally I do not agree with him. He sees the symptoms, but the
+diagnosis is wrong. The American has an excellent talent for lying, but
+in business he has learned that falsehood and deception are poor
+commercial weapons. Business which is obtained by fraud, any American
+will tell you, "doesn't stick"; and as every American in his business is
+looking always to the future, he prefers, merely as a matter of
+prudence, that his foundations shall be sound.
+
+All society is a struggle for the survival of the fittest; and in crude
+and early forms of society, it is the strongest who proves himself most
+fit. In savage communities--and Europe was savage until after the feudal
+days--it is the big man and brutal who comes to the top. In the savage
+days of American commerce, which, at least for the West, ended only a
+generation back, it was too often the man who could go out and subdue
+the wilderness and beat down opposition, who rode rough-shod over his
+competitors and used whatever weapons, whether of mere brute strength or
+fraud, with the greatest ferocity and unscrupulousness, who made his
+mark and his fortune. But in a settled and complex commercial community
+it is no longer the strongest who is most fit; it is the most honest.
+The American commercial community as a whole, in spite of occasional
+exceptions and in defiance of the cynicism of the press, has grasped
+this fact and has accepted the business standards of the world at large.
+
+Let me not be interpreted as implying that there are any fewer Americans
+than there are Englishmen who live rightly from the fear of God or for
+the sake of their own self-respect. The conclusion of most observers has
+been that the American people is more religious than the English, that
+the temperament, more nervous and more emotional, is more susceptible to
+religious influence. It may be so. It is a subject on which the evidence
+is necessarily so intangible--on which an individual judgment is likely
+to be so entirely dependent on individual observation in a narrow
+field--that comparison becomes extremely difficult. My own opinion would
+be that there is at least as much real religious feeling in England as
+in the United States, and certainly more in Scotland than in either;
+but that the churches in America are more active as organisations and
+more efficient agents in behalf of morality.
+
+But we are now speaking of the business community as a whole, and the
+force which ultimately keeps the ethics of every business community pure
+is, I imagine, the same, namely that without honesty the community
+itself cannot live or prosper and that, with normal ability, he who is
+most honest prospers most. American business was dishonest before
+society had settled down and knitted itself together.
+
+The change which has come over the American business world can perhaps
+best be made clear to English readers by taking a single example; and it
+must necessarily be an example from a field with which I am familiar.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is in my possession an interesting document, being one of the (I
+think) two original manuscript copies of the famous "Gentleman's
+Agreement," bearing the signatures of the parties thereto, which was
+entered into by the Presidents or Chairmen of a number of railway
+companies at Mr. Pierpont Morgan's house in New York in 1891. In the
+year following the signing of the Agreement, I was in London in
+connection with affairs which necessitated rather prolonged interviews
+with many of the Chairmen or General Managers of the British
+railways,--Sir George Findlay, Sir Edward Watkin, Mr. J. Staats Forbes,
+and others. With all of them the mutual relations existing between
+railway companies in the two countries respectively formed one of the
+chief topics of our conversations, and that at that time the good faith
+and loyalty of attitude of one company towards another were much
+greater in England than in America it is not possible to question.
+British companies are subject to a restraining influence which does not
+exist in the United States, in the parliamentary control which is
+exercised over them. Every company of any size has, with more or less
+frequency, to go to Parliament for new powers or privileges, and any
+Chairman or Board of Directors which established a reputation for
+untrustworthiness in dealings with other companies would probably be
+able to expect few favours from the next Parliamentary Committee. But
+(although the two last of the gentlemen whose names I have mentioned
+were notoriously parties to a peculiarly bitter railway war) I believe
+that the motives which have chiefly operated to make the managers of
+English companies observe faith with each other better than the American
+have ever succeeded in doing, are chiefly the traditional motives of a
+high sense of personal honour--the fact that they were gentlemen first
+and business men afterwards.
+
+The circumstances which led up to the formation of the Gentlemen's
+Agreement were almost inconceivable to English railway operators. The
+railways, it must always be borne in mind, have been the chief
+civilisers of the American continent. It is by their instrumentality
+that the Great American Desert of half a century ago is to-day among the
+richest and most prosperous agricultural countries in the world. The
+railways have always thrust out ahead of the settler into whatever
+territory, by reason of the potential fertility of its soil or for other
+causes, has held out promise of some day becoming populated. Along the
+railway the population has then flowed. In forcing its way westward
+each company in its course has sought to tap with its lines the richest
+strips of territory: all alike endeavoured to obtain a share of the
+traffic originating from a point where a thriving town was already
+established or topographical conditions pointed out a promising site. As
+the American laws impose practically no restrictions on railway
+construction it necessarily followed that certain districts and certain
+favourable strategic points were invaded by more lines than could
+possibly be justified either by the traffic of the moment or the
+prospective traffic of many years to come. This was conspicuously the
+case in the region Northwestward from Chicago. Business which might have
+furnished a reasonable revenue to two companies was called upon to
+support six or seven and the competition for that business became
+intense,--all the more intense because, unlike English railway
+companies, few American railways in their early days have had any
+material reserve of capital to draw upon. They have had to earn their
+living as they went, out of current receipts, or submit to liquidation.
+
+The officials in charge of the Traffic Departments of each company had
+to justify their retention in their positions by somehow getting more
+than their share of the business, and the temptations to offer whatever
+inducements were necessary to get that business amounted almost to
+compulsion. Without it, not the particular official only, but his
+company, would be extinguished. The situation was further aggravated by
+the fact that the goods that were to be carried were largely staples
+shipped in large quantities by individual shippers--millers, owners of
+packing houses, mining companies from the one end, and coal and oil
+companies from the other. One of these companies might be able to offer
+a railway more business in the course of a year than it could hope to
+get from all the small traders on its lines combined--enough to amount
+almost to affluence if it could be secured at the regularly authorised
+rates. The keenness of the competition to secure the patronage of these
+large shippers can be imagined; for it was, between the companies, a
+struggle for actual existence. All that the shipper had to do was to
+wait while the companies underbid each other, each in turn cutting off a
+slice from the margin of profit that would result from the carrying of
+the traffic until, not infrequently and in some notorious cases, not
+only was that margin entirely whittled away but the traffic was finally
+carried at a figure which meant a heavy loss to the carrier. The extent
+to which the Standard Oil Company has profited by this necessity on the
+part of the railways to get the business of a large shipping concern at
+almost any price, rather than allow its cars and motive power to remain
+idle, has been made sufficiently public.
+
+In some measure the companies were able to protect themselves by the
+making of pooling (or joint-purse) arrangements between themselves; but
+the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Law in 1887 made pooling
+illegal. The companies endeavoured to frame agreements which would not
+be repugnant to the law but would take the place of the pools; but it
+was impossible to attach any penalties to infringements of such
+agreements and under pressure of the necessity of self-preservation, no
+agreement, however solemnly entered into, was strong enough to restrain
+the parties. The Passenger Agents framed agreements to control the
+passenger traffic and the Freight Agents made agreements to control the
+goods traffic, and both were equally futile. Then the Traffic Managers
+made agreements to cover both classes of business, which held no longer
+than the others. So the General Managers tried their hands. But the
+inexorable exigencies of the situation remained. Each official was still
+confronted with the same dilemma: he must either secure more business
+than he was entitled to or he--and his company--must starve. And the
+agreements made by General Managers bound no better than those which
+Passenger Agents or Traffic Managers had made before. Then it was that
+the Gentlemen stepped in.
+
+The Gentlemen, it should be explained, were the Presidents and Chairmen
+of the Boards of the respective companies. They, it was hoped, would be
+able to reach an agreement which, if once their names were signed to it,
+would hold. The meeting, as has been said, was held at Mr. Pierpont
+Morgan's house[358:1] and an agreement was in fact arrived at and
+signed, as has been said, in duplicate. It is lamentable to have to
+record that that agreement--except in so far as it set a precedent for
+other meetings of the same gentlemen, which in turn led to others out of
+which finally grew large movements in the direction of joint ownerships
+and consolidations of interests which have helped materially to make the
+conditions more tolerable--except for that, the Gentlemen's Agreement
+did no more good, and it lasted not appreciably longer, than any of the
+others which had been made by mere officials.
+
+Englishmen will all agree that it is unthinkable that the Chairmen of
+the great British railway companies could meet and give their words _as
+gentlemen_ that each of their companies would observe certain rules in
+the conduct of its business and that a few weeks thereafter it should
+become evident that no single company was keeping the word so pledged.
+But it would be just as absurd to question the personal integrity or
+sense of honour of such men as Mr. Marvin Hughitt, Mr. E. W. Winter, Mr.
+W. H. Truesdale, and the others, as it would be to question that of the
+most upright man in England. The fact is that the conditions are almost
+unthinkable to Englishmen. No company, in becoming party to the
+agreement, had surrendered its right to retaliate when another violated
+the provisions. The actual conduct of the business of the companies--the
+quoting of the rates to secure the traffic--was in the hands of a host
+of subordinate officials, and when a rate is cut it is not cut openly,
+but in secret and by circuitous devices. It was, on subsequent
+investigation, always impossible to tell where the demoralisation had
+begun, amid the cloud of charges, counter-charges, and denials. There
+was not one of the subordinate officials but declared (and seemingly
+proved) that he had acted only in retaliation and self-defence. As there
+was no way of obtaining evidence from the shippers, in whose favour the
+concessions had been made, it was impossible to sift out the truth. Each
+Chairman or President could only say that he had entire confidence in
+his own staff. There was no visible remedy except to discharge the
+entire membership of the Traffic Departments of all the companies
+simultaneously and get new men, to the number of several hundreds, who
+would be no better able to accomplish the impossible than their
+predecessors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My reason for going into this, I fear, somewhat tedious narration is
+that British distrust of American commercial honesty was originally
+created, perhaps, more than by anything else, by the scandals which were
+notoriously associated with the early history of railways in the United
+States. It is not desired here either to insist on the occurrence of
+those scandals or to palliate them. The point is that the conditions
+which made those scandals possible (of which the incapacity on the part
+of the North-western lines to keep faith with each other may be regarded
+as symptomatic) were concomitants of a particular stage only in the
+development of the country. Competition must always exist in any
+business community; but in the desperate form of a breathless,
+day-to-day struggle for bare existence it need only exist among railway
+companies where lines have been built in excess of the needs of the
+population. With the increase in population and the growth of trade the
+asperity of the conditions necessarily becomes mitigated, until at last,
+when the traffic has assumed proportions which will afford all
+competitors alike a reasonable profit on their shares, the management
+ceases to be exposed to any more temptation than besets the Boards of
+the great British companies. Not a few railway companies in the United
+States have arrived at that delectable condition--are indeed now more
+happily circumstanced than any English company--and among them are some
+the names of which, not many years ago, were mere synonyms for
+dishonesty. In the North-western territory of which I have spoken the
+fact that the current values of all railway shares had on the average
+increased (until the occurrence of the financial crisis of the close of
+1907) by about three hundred per cent. in the last ten years is
+eloquent.
+
+In the old days the wrong-doing which was rampant, through excess of
+opportunity and more than abundant temptation, in the higher circles,
+ran also through all grades of the service; and there was one case at
+least of a railway company which used in fact to have to discharge all
+its servants of a certain class at intervals of once a month or
+thereabouts. The Northern Pacific Railway line was opened across the
+continent in 1883, and during the next twelve months it was my fortune
+to have to travel over the western portion of the road somewhat
+frequently. The company had a regularly established tariff of charges,
+and tickets from any one station to another could be bought at the
+booking offices just as on any other railway line in America or England.
+But few people bought tickets. The line was divided, of course, into
+divisions, of so many hundreds of miles each, the train being in charge
+of one conductor (or guard) to the end of his division, where he turned
+it over to his successor for the next division. It was the business of
+the conductor to take up the tickets, or collect the fares, while the
+train was running, and it was well understood among regular passengers
+on the line that each conductor expected to receive one dollar to the
+end of his division, no matter at what point a passenger entered the
+train. The conductor merely walked through the cars collecting silver
+dollars, of which he subsequently apportioned to the treasury of the
+company as many as he saw fit. They were probably not many.
+
+On one occasion I stood at a booking-office and, speaking through the
+small window, asked the clerk for a ticket to a certain place. The
+conductor of the train, already waiting in the station, had strolled
+into the office and heard my request.
+
+"Don't you buy a ticket!" said he to me. "I can let you travel cheaper
+than he can, can't I, Bill?"--this last being addressed to the clerk
+behind the window; and Bill looked out through the hole and said he
+guessed that was so.
+
+The company, as I have said, used to discharge its conductors with
+regularity, or they resigned, at intervals depending on the periods at
+which accounts were made up, but it was said in those days that there
+was not a town between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast which did
+not contain a drinking saloon owned by an ex-Northern Pacific conductor,
+and established out of the profits that he had made during his brief
+term of service.
+
+In the American railway carriages, the method of communication between
+passengers and the engine, in case of emergency, is by what is known as
+the "bell-cord" which runs from end to end of the train, suspended from
+the middle of the ceiling of each car in a series of swinging rings. The
+cord sways loosely in the air to each motion of the train like a
+slackened clothes-line in a gale. On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe
+Railway the story used to be told that at the end of the day the
+conductors would toss each coin received into the air to see if it would
+balance on the bell-cord. The coins which balanced went to the company;
+those which did not, the conductor took as his own.
+
+That, be it noted, was the state of affairs some twenty-four years ago.
+I question if there is much more peculation on the part of the employees
+of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe to-day than there is on the part
+of the servants of the Great Western of England or any other British
+company.
+
+The place where the conductor advised me not to buy a ticket had then a
+few yards of planking laid on the prairie for a platform and a small
+shed as a station building. The town consisted of three or four brick
+buildings and a huddle of wooden shanties. To-day it is one of the
+twenty most populous cities in the United States with tall office
+buildings, broad busy streets, and sumptuous private residences. I used
+to have excellent trout-fishing in what is now the centre of a great
+town. Where the air to-day is filled with the hum of wheels and the roar
+of machinery, then was only open prairie innocent of any evidence of
+human occupation beyond some three or four things like dog-kennels badly
+built of loose lattice-work on the river's bank. These were the red
+Indians' Turkish baths.
+
+The old code of morality has vanished with the red Indian and the
+trout-fishing. In the early days of that town there used to be nobody to
+maintain public order but an efficient Vigilance Committee, which
+executed justice by the simple process of hanging persons whom the
+public disliked, and which was still in nominal existence when I was
+there. Now the city has the proper complement of courts, from the United
+States Court downwards, and a bar which has already furnished one or two
+members to the United States Senate. Of course this has happened in the
+very far West but the change which has come over New York in the same
+length of time is no less astonishing if less picturesque. It is as
+unjust to compare the morals or manners of the American people of to-day
+with those of even three decades ago as it would be to compare the state
+of twentieth-century society in New Zealand with the old convict days.
+In one generation Japan has stepped from the days of feudalism to the
+twentieth century. America, in all that goes to constitute civilisation,
+has in the last twenty-five years jumped, according to European canons,
+at least a hundred.
+
+Certain outward manifestations of the change which has been wrought, the
+peoples of Europe have been unable to ignore;--the immense growth in the
+power of the United States as a nation, her invasion of the markets of
+the world even in lines wherein, twenty years ago, the internal markets
+of America herself were at the mercy of British manufacturers, the
+splendid generosity which individual citizens of the United States are
+showing in buying wherever they can all that is most beautiful or
+precious among the treasures of the Old World for the enrichment of
+their museums and galleries at home--these things the people of Europe
+cannot help but see. It would be well if they would strive also to
+understand the development of the moral forces which underlies these
+things, which alone has made them possible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What has been the course of events in England in the same period? I have
+already said that I believe that Englishmen justly earned the reputation
+of being the most upright of all peoples in their commercial dealings;
+and for the sake of the context perhaps Americans who have had little
+opportunity of gauging the opinions of the world will accept it as true.
+It is probable that the world has seen no finer set of men engaged in
+commerce than those who laid the foundations of England's commercial
+greatness; and I imagine that there are more honest men in England
+to-day than ever there were--more men of what is, it will be noticed,
+instructively called "old-fashioned" honesty. Yet no one will be quicker
+than just one of these "old-fashioned" honest men to declare that the
+standard of commercial morality in England is deteriorating.
+
+The truth is that a vast new trading community has sprung up with new
+ideas which no longer accepts the old canons or submits to the old
+authority. The old maxims pass current; there is the same talk of honest
+goods and honest methods, but under stress of keener competition and the
+pressure of the more rapid movement of modern life, there is more
+temptation to allow products to deteriorate, greater difficulty in
+living always up to the old rigid standards. The words "English made" no
+longer carry, even to English minds, the old guarantee of excellence.
+
+In no small measure it may be that it is the example and influence of
+America itself which is working the mischief; which by no means implies
+that American example and influence must in themselves be bad. American
+methods, both in the production and sale of goods, might be wholly good,
+but the attempt to graft them upon established English practice might
+have nothing but deplorable results. It is not necessarily the fault of
+the new wine if old bottles fail to hold it. One factory may have the
+capacity to turn out one thousand of a given article, all of the highest
+quality and workmanship, _per diem_. If a factory with one tenth the
+capacity strains itself to compete and turns out the same number of
+articles of the same kind in the same time, something will be wrong with
+the quality of those articles. I am not prepared to say that in any
+given line English manufacturers are overstraining the capacity of their
+plants to the sacrifice of the quality of their goods in their effort to
+keep pace with American rate of production; but I do most earnestly
+believe that something analogous to it is happening in the commercial
+field as a whole, and that neither English commercial morality nor the
+quality of English-made goods has been improved by the necessity of
+meeting the intense competition of the world-markets to-day, with an
+industrial organisation which grew up under other and more leisurely
+conditions.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+POSTSCRIPT.--Not necessarily as a serious contribution to my argument
+but rather as a gloss on Professor Muensterberg's remark that the
+American has no talent for lying, I have often wondered how far the
+Americans reputation for veracity has been injured by their ability as
+story-tellers. "Story" it must be remembered is used in two senses. The
+American has the reputation of being the best narrator in the world; and
+he loves to narrate about his own country--especially the big things in
+it. In nine cases out of ten, when he is speaking of those big things,
+he is conscientiously truthful; but not seldom it happens that what may
+be a mere commonplace to the American seems incredible to the English
+listener unacquainted with the United States and unable to give the
+facts as narrated their due proportion in the landscape.
+
+More than a quarter of a century ago, when electric light was still a
+very new thing to Londoners, an American casually told myself and three
+or four others that the small town from which he came in the far
+Northwest of America was lighted entirely by a coronal of electric
+lights of some prodigious candle-power on the top of a mast, erected in
+the centre of the town, of a, to us, incredible height. It was, at the
+time, quite unbelievable; but in less than a year chance took me all the
+way to that identical little town in the far Northwest, and what the
+American had said was strictly true--true, I doubt not, to a single
+candle-power and to a fraction of a foot of mast. And a costly and
+indifferent method of lighting, for a whole town, it may be remarked, it
+was.
+
+In an earlier stage of my youth I lost all confidence in an elderly and
+eminently respectable friend of the family who had travelled much
+because he once informed me that the Japanese watered their horses out
+of spoons. Of course I knew that the old gentleman was a liar.
+
+An American travelling in an English railway carriage fell into
+conversation with the other occupants, who were Englishmen. Among divers
+pieces of information about things in the United States which he gave
+them he told (it was at the time when the steel construction of high
+buildings was still a novelty) of a twenty-storey "sky-scraper" which he
+passed daily on his way to and from his office on which, to save time,
+the walls were being put up simultaneously at, perhaps, the second,
+eighth, and fifteenth floors, working upwards from each point, the
+intervening floors being in the meanwhile left untouched. He explained
+that, in the system of steel construction, the walls did not support the
+building; that being done by the skeleton framework of metal, on which
+the walls were subsequently hung as a screen. They might, theoretically,
+be of paper; though as a matter of fact the material used was generally
+terra-cotta or some fire-proof brick. The American said that it was
+queer to see a house being built at the eighth storey in midair, as it
+were, with nothing but the thin steel supports and open sky below.
+
+"I should imagine it would look very queer," said the Englishman whom he
+was addressing, with obvious coolness; and the American was entirely
+aware that every person in that carriage regarded him as a typical
+American liar. Time passed and the carriage relapsed into silence, each
+of the occupants becoming immersed in such reading-matter as he had with
+him. Suddenly one of them aroused the others with the ejaculation:
+
+"By Jove! If here isn't a picture of that very building you were talking
+of!"
+
+It was a _Graphic_ or _Illustrated London News_, or some other such
+undoubtedly trustworthy London paper which he was reading, and he passed
+it round for the inspection of the rest of the company. The American
+looked at it. It was not his particular building but it did as well,
+and there was the photograph before them, with the walls complete, to
+window casing and every detail of ornament, on the eighth and ninth
+floors, while not a brick had been laid from the second storey to the
+seventh. A god from the machine had intervened to save the American's
+reputation. Often have I seen incredulity steal over the faces of a
+well-bred company in England at some statement from an American of a
+fact in itself commonplace enough, when no such providential
+corroboration was forthcoming.
+
+Curiously enough, the true Yankee in America, especially of the rural
+districts, has the same distrust of the veracity of the Western American
+as the Englishman generally has of the Yankee himself (in which he
+includes all Americans). I had been living for some years in Minnesota
+when, standing one day on the platform of the railway station at, I
+think, Schenectady, in New York State, I was addressed by one who was
+evidently a farmer in the neighbourhood. Learning that I had just come
+from Minnesota he referred to the two towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
+"Right lively towns," he had heard them to be. "And how many people
+might there be in the two together?" he asked. "About a quarter of a
+million," I replied--the number being some few thousand less than the
+figure given by the last census. The farmer, perhaps, had not heard
+anything of the two towns for ten or a dozen years, when their
+population had been not much more than a third of what it had grown to
+at that time; and he looked at me. He did not say anything; he merely
+looked at me, long and fixedly. Then he deliberately turned his back and
+walked to the other end of the platform as far as possible from my
+contaminating influence. I was never so explicitly and categorically
+called a liar in my life; and he doubtless went home and told his family
+of the magnificent Western exaggerator whom he had met "down to the
+depot." I fear the American reputation often suffers no less unjustly in
+England.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[349:1] Even up to a quarter of a century ago, there was at least one
+corner of the United States, near to the Canadian border, where among
+Indians not yet rounded up or blanketed the old feeling still existed,
+so that an Englishman, proclaiming himself a "King George Man," could go
+and hunt and fish safely, sure of the friendship and protection of the
+red man, while an American would not have been safe for a night. The
+subject of the relations between the British and the Indian tribes in
+Revolutionary times has, of course, been provocative of much bitterness
+in the hearts of Americans; but happily their own historians of a later
+day have shown that this bitterness has only been partially justified.
+There was not much to choose between Patriots and Loyalists. Those who
+know the Indian know also that the universal liking for the Englishman
+cannot have rested only on motives of political expediency or from
+temporary alliances made in Revolutionary times. They must have had
+abundant proof of the loyalty and trustworthiness of Englishmen before
+so deep-rooted a sentiment could have been created. The contrast, of
+course, was not with the American colonist, but with the French. The
+colonists, too, were King George Men once.
+
+[351:1] Yes; I am aware that elsewhere I quote Professor Muensterberg
+without enthusiasm, but on another class of subject. Except for the
+limitations which his national characteristics and upbringing impose
+upon him (and for the fact that he seems to be unacquainted with the
+West) the Professor has written a just and clear-sighted estimate of the
+American character. We do not look to a German for a proper
+understanding of the sporting instinct, as British and Americans
+understand it, nor perhaps for views that will coincide with ours on the
+subject of morality in the youth of either sex. But the laws of common
+honesty are the same in all countries. A German is as well able to
+estimate the commercial morality of a people as an Englishman, however
+little he may be qualified to talk about their games or about the
+_nuances_ in the masculine attitude towards women.
+
+[358:1] That meeting has an incidental historical interest from the fact
+that it was then that Mr. Morgan first stepped into the public view as a
+financial power. Up to that time, his name was not particularly well
+known outside of New York or the financial circles immediately connected
+with New York. Most Western papers found it necessary to explain to
+their readers (if they could) who the Mr. Morgan was at whose house the
+meeting was being held.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A CONTRAST IN PRINCIPLES
+
+     The Commercial Power of the United States--British Workmanship--
+     Tin-tacks and Conservatism--A Prophetic Frenchman--Imperialism
+     in Trade--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit--About Chaperons--"Insist
+     upon Thyself"--English and American Banks--Dealing in Futures--
+     Dog Eat Dog--Two Letters--Commercial Octopods--Trusts in
+     America and England--The Standard Oil Company--And Solicitors--
+     Legal Chaperons--The Sanctity of Stamped Paper--Conclusions--
+     American Courts of Justice--Do "Honest" Traders Exist?
+
+
+The Englishman, even the Englishman with industrial experience and
+commercial training, generally, when he makes a short visit to the
+United States, comes away with a certain distrust of the stability of
+the American commercial fabric--a distrust which he cannot altogether
+explain to himself. The rapidity of movement, the vastness of the
+results, these things are before his eyes; but there insists on
+obtruding itself a sense of unsubstantiality. Habituated to English
+surroundings, with their ages-old traditions, the rugged deep-rooted
+institutions, the deliberate revolutions of all the fly-wheels of a
+long-constituted society, he cannot believe that the mushroom
+establishments, thrust up as it were from the soil of a continent which
+is yet one half but partially broken wilderness, have permanence. He
+cannot deny the magnitude or the excellence of the work that is being
+done now, at this moment, under his eyes; but it all has too much the
+seeming of unreality, as though suspended in midair, unsupported. He
+misses the foundations of centuries of civilisation below and the lines
+of shafting running back into the past. Often, it is to be feared,
+having all his life been accustomed to see power exerted only in
+cumbersome processes and through old-fashioned channels, he has come to
+regard the cumbersomeness and the antiquity as necessary conditions of
+such exertion--nay, even to confuse them with the sources of the power
+themselves. It will be remembered that the first pig that was roasted in
+China was roasted by the accidental burning down of a house; and for a
+long time the Chinese supposed that only by burning down a house was it
+possible to come at roast pig. Finally arose a great philosopher ("like
+our Locke") who discovered that it was not necessary to burn houses, but
+that pigs might be cooked by much less costly and more rapid methods.
+Unquestionably many of those who had been accustomed to house-burning
+must have looked at the new and summary culinary processes with profound
+distrust. It may even be asserted with confidence that many of the older
+generation died unconverted, though pig-roasting over all sorts of
+makeshift fires had been going on around them for some years.
+
+After a more or less prolonged residence in the United States, the
+Englishman finds his distrust lessening. He in turn becomes accustomed
+to doing without those traditions, those foundations, those lines of
+shafting, which once he considered so essential to all sound
+workmanship. When in due time he returns to England he is not seldom
+amazed to see how many of the things which he was wont to regard as
+effective links in the machinery are really no more than waste parts
+which do but retard the motion and cause loss of power. It is not
+difficult to make machinery so complicated that the power exhausts
+itself in overcoming the resistance of belts and pulleys and cogs.
+
+I had lived in the United States for many years before I ceased to cling
+to the notion--which I never hesitated to impart cheerfully to Americans
+when occasion offered--that though American workmen turned out goods
+that served their purpose well enough, for really sound and honest
+workmanship you had, after all, to come to England. It was only after I
+had been back in England and had experience of the ways of English
+workmen once more that doubts began to accumulate. English furniture
+makers told me that England nowadays did not produce such well-made or
+solid furniture as pieces that I showed them from America, and which are
+made in America in wholesale quantities. English picture-frame makers
+marvelled at the costliness of material and the excellence of the work
+in American frames. A Sackville Street tailor begged me to leave in his
+hands for a few days longer some clothes which he was pressing for me,
+made in a far Western State, in order that he might keep them--where
+they then were--hanging in his work-room as an object-lesson to his men
+in how work ought to be done. These are but isolated instances out of
+many which have bred misgiving in one who for many years cherished the
+conviction that a British-made article was always the best. That English
+workmen should be slower, less quick-minded, more loth to take up new
+ideas, or to make things as you wanted them and not as they had always
+made them--these things I had expected to find, and found less often
+than I had expected. But that the English workman did ultimately produce
+a better and more trustworthy article--that I never doubted, till I
+found it, from the confessions of the workmen and manufacturers
+themselves, far from necessarily true.
+
+Few Englishmen returning to England after many years of residence in the
+United States (unless perchance they have lived on a ranch where their
+contact with the industrial or commercial life of the people has been
+slight) do not find themselves more or less frequently appealed to for
+opinions, in giving which they are compelled, however reluctantly, to
+pose as prophets, warning their countrymen to flee from the wrath to
+come, telling them that they underestimate the commercial power of the
+United States. Sometimes it may be that there will be some one in the
+company who has spent some few weeks, perhaps, in the United States.
+"Now, I don't agree with you there," this traveller will say. "When I
+was in the States, I saw . ." He saw, in fact, pigs being roasted at a
+commonplace sort of fire, made for the purpose, of logs and sticks and
+coal and things, whereas everybody knows that no pig can be duly roasted
+unless chimney stacks and window-casings and front-door handles be mixed
+up with the combustibles. And the others present take comfort and are
+convinced that the Old Country is a long way from going to the dogs as
+yet. Of course she is, bless her! But it is not many years since an
+eminently distinguished authority on iron and steel (was he not
+President of the Iron and Steel Association?), after having made a tour
+of the United States, assured British manufacturers that they had
+nothing to fear from American competition in the steel trade. It was
+some years earlier that Chatham declared that he would not allow the
+American colonies to manufacture even one hobnail for themselves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have no desire now to join the band of those who are urging England so
+insistently to "wake up." This is not the place for such evangelism, for
+that is not the gospel which this book is intended to spread. None the
+less one story I must tell, told to me many years ago in America by one
+who claimed to have had some part in the transactions; a story that has
+to do with (let us say, to avoid hurting any susceptibilities) the sale
+of tin-tacks to Japan. And whether the story is true or not, it is at
+least well found.
+
+England, then, had had for years a monopoly of the sale of tin-tacks to
+the Japanese, when a trader in Japan became impressed with the fact that
+the traffic was badly handled. The tacks came out from England in
+packages made to suit the needs of the English market. They were
+labelled, quite truthfully of course, "Best English Tacks," and each
+package contained an ounce, two ounces, or four ounces in weight, and
+was priced in plain figures at so much in English money. The trader had
+continual trouble with those packages. His customers were always wanting
+them to be split up. They wanted two or three _sen_ worth--not four
+pennyworth; also they did not care about ounces. So the trader, starting
+for a visit to England, had some labels written in Japanese characters,
+and when he arrived in England he went to the manufacturers and
+explained matters. He showed them the labels that he had had written and
+said:
+
+"The Japanese trade is worth considering and worth taking some little
+trouble to retain; but the people dislike your present packages and I
+have to spend most of my time splitting up packages and counting tacks.
+If you will make your packages into two thirds of an ounce each and put
+a label like that on them, you will be giving the people what they want
+and can understand, and it will save a lot of trouble all around."
+
+But the manufacturers, one after another, shook their heads. They could
+not read the label. They never had put any such outlandish stuff on
+anything going out of their works, nor had their fathers before them.
+The Japanese ought to be satisfied with the fact that they were getting
+the Best English Tacks and not be unreasonable about it. And the trader
+exhausted himself with argument and became discouraged.
+
+He returned to Japan _via_ the United States, and stopped to see the
+nearest tack-manufacturer. He showed him the label and told his story.
+
+"Looks blamed queer!" said the manufacturer, "but you say that's what
+they want out there? Let's catch a Jap and see if he can read the
+thing."
+
+So a clerk was sent out to fetch a Japanese, which he did.
+
+"How' do, John?" said the manufacturer to the new arrival. (Chinese and
+Japanese alike were all "John" to the American until a few years ago.)
+"You can read that, eh?"
+
+The Japanese smiled, looked at the label and read it aloud.
+
+"All straight goods, eh, John?" asked the manufacturer. The Japanese
+answered in the affirmative and retired.
+
+Then the manufacturer called for his manager.
+
+"Mr. Smith," he said, as the manager came in, "this is Mr. Brown of
+Tokio, Japan. He tells me that if we do up tacks in two third of an
+ounce lots and stick that label on each package, we might do some good
+business out there. That label--it don't matter which is the top of the
+thing--calls for a price that figures out to us at about two cents a
+pound more than our regular export rates. I want this gentleman to have
+a trial lot shipped out to him and he'll see what he can do. Just go
+ahead will you and see to it?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the manager; and when the trader sailed from San
+Francisco a couple of weeks later the same vessel carried out a trial
+order of tacks consigned to him at Tokio, made up in two thirds of an
+ounce packages with mysterious hieroglyphics on the labels. It only took
+the trader a few days, after his return, to satisfy himself that the
+sooner he cabled the American manufacturer to duplicate the order the
+better. There never has been anybody in the American works who has been
+able to read what is on that label; but when instructions were given for
+printing new labels after six months of trial the order was for a
+quarter of a million, and British manufacturers were astonished to
+discover that by some unexplainable chicanery they had lost the Japanese
+market for tacks.
+
+I have said that I do not know whether the story is true or not; but
+fifty similar stories are. And in the aggregate they explain a good
+deal.
+
+But let me say again that the conservatism of British manufacturers is
+not now my theme. But I do most earnestly believe that Englishmen as a
+whole--even English traders and manufacturers--unwisely underestimate
+the commercial power of the United States. What the United States has
+accomplished in the invasion of the world's markets in the last ten
+years (since the trade revival of 1896-97) is only a foretaste of what
+is to come. So far from there being anything unsubstantial--any danger
+of lack of staying power, any want of reserve force--the power has
+hardly yet begun to exert itself. Of Europeans who have recently written
+upon the subject, it seems to me that none has shown a truer
+appreciation of the situation than M. Gabriel Hanotaux, the former
+French Minister for Foreign Affairs.[378:1] He sees the shadow of
+America's commercial domination already falling across Europe; and, so
+far as France is concerned, he discerns only two directions from which
+help can come. He pleads with young Frenchmen to travel more, so that
+the rising generation may be less ignorant of the commercial conditions
+of the modern world and may see more clearly what it is that they have
+to fight, and, second, he points to the Colonial Empire of France, with
+an area not much inferior to that of the United States, and believes
+that therein may be laid the foundations of a commercial power which
+will be not unable to cope even with that of America.
+
+It may be only the arrogance and superciliousness of the Anglo-Saxon
+that prevent one sharing the sanguineness of M. Hanotaux as to any
+relief coming to the help of France from these two sources, for British
+hopes can only lie in analogous directions. Englishmen also need to
+understand better the conditions which have to be met and the power of
+their competitors; and it is the young men who must learn. Also, if it
+be impossible that the British Isles should hold their own against the
+United States, there appears no reason why the British Empire should not
+be abundantly able to do so.
+
+It is not easy for one who has not lived all his life in England to
+share the satisfaction with which the English papers commonly welcome
+the intelligence that some great American manufacturing concern is
+establishing branch works in Canada. It is well for Canada that such
+works should be established; but it is pitiable for the Empire that it
+should be left to the United States to establish them. British capital
+was the chief instrumentality with which the United States was enabled
+to build its own railways and conduct the other great enterprises for
+the development of the resources of its mighty West, and it is, from the
+point of view of a British Imperialist, deplorable that British
+capitalists should not now be ready to take those risks for the sake of
+the Empire which American capital is willing to take with no other
+incentive than the probable trade profits.
+
+His conservatism, it should be noticed, has a tendency to fall away from
+the Englishman when he goes out from the environment and atmosphere of
+the British Isles. The Canadian, or the Englishman who has gone to
+Canada young enough to imbibe the colonial spirit, is not easily to be
+distinguished from the citizen of the United States in his ways of
+doing business. Even the Anglo-Indian refuses to subject himself, in
+India, to all the cumbersome formalities with which he is compelled to
+conduct any business transaction when at home. Mr. Kipling in one of his
+latest stories has given us a delightful picture of the bafflement of
+the Australasian Minister struggling to bring his Great Idea for the
+Good of his Colony and the Empire to the attention of the officials in
+Whitehall.
+
+The encumbering conservatism which now hangs upon the wheels of British
+commerce is no part of--no legitimate offshoot of--the English genius.
+It is a fungoid and quite alien growth, which has fastened upon that
+genius, taking advantage of its frailties. Englishmen, we hear, are slow
+to change and to move; yet they have always moved more quickly than
+other European peoples as the Empire stands to prove. And if the people
+of Great Britain had the remodelling of their society to do over again
+to-day, they, following their native instincts, would hardly rebuild it
+on its present lines. With the same "elbow room" they would, it may be
+suspected, produce something but little dissimilar (except in the
+monarchical form of government) from that which has been evolved in the
+United States.
+
+When Englishmen, looking at the progress of the United States, doubt its
+permanence--when they distrust the substantiality or the honesty in the
+workmanship in the American commercial fabric--it might be well if they
+would say to themselves that the men who are doing these things are only
+Englishmen with other larger opportunities. Behind all this that meets
+the eye is the same old Anglo-Saxon spirit of pluck and energy which
+made Great Britain great when she was younger and had in turn her larger
+opportunities. Above all, that pluck and energy are unhampered by
+tradition and precedent in exerting themselves in whatever direction may
+be most advantageous; and to be unhampered does not necessarily mean
+freedom only to go wrong.
+
+An American girl once explained why it was much pleasanter to have a
+chaperon than to be without one:
+
+"If I am allowed about alone," she explained, "I feel that I am on my
+honour and can never do a thing that I would not like mama to see; but
+when a chaperon is with me, the responsibility for my behaviour is
+shifted to her. It is her duty to keep me straight. I have a right to be
+just as bad as I can without her catching me."
+
+The tendency of American business life is first to develop the
+individuality and initiative of a man and, second, to put him, as it
+were, on his honour. It is, of course, of the essence of a democracy
+that each man should be encouraged to develop whatever good may be in
+him and to receive recognition therefor; but there have been other
+factors at work in the shaping of the American character besides the
+form of government. Chief among these factors have been the work which
+Americans have had to do in subduing their own continent and that they
+have had to do it unaided and in isolation. Washington Irving has a
+delightful sentence somewhere (in _Astoria_ I think) about the
+frontiersman hewing his way through the back woods and developing his
+character by "bickering with bears." "The frontiersmen, by their
+conquest of nature, had come to despise the strength of all enemies,"
+says Dr. Sparks in his _History of the United States_. It was only to be
+expected, it was indeed inevitable, that the first of American
+thinkers--the man whose philosophy caught the national fancy and has
+done more towards the moulding of a national temperament than, perhaps,
+any man who ever wrote, should have been before all things the Apostle
+of the Individual. "Insist upon Thyself!" Emerson says--not once, but it
+runs as a refrain through everything he wrote or thought. "Always do
+what you are afraid to do!" "The Lord will not make his works manifest
+by a coward." "God hates a coward." "America is only another name for
+Opportunity." My quotations come from random memory, but the spirit is
+right. It is the spirit which Americans have been obliged to have since
+the days when the Fathers walked to meeting in fear of Indian arrows.
+And they need it yet. It has become an inheritance with them and it,
+more than anything else, shapes the form and method of their politics
+and above all of their business conduct.
+
+I have said elsewhere that in society (except only in certain circles in
+certain cities of the East) it is the individual character and
+achievements of the man himself that count; neither his father nor his
+grandfather matters--nor do his brothers and sisters. And it is the same
+in business. I am not saying that good credentials and strong friends
+are not of use to any man; but without friends or credentials, the man
+who has an idea which is commercially valuable will find a market in
+which to sell it. If he has the ability to exploit it himself and the
+power to convince others of his integrity, he will find capital ready
+to back him. It is difficult to explain in words to those accustomed to
+the traditions of English business how this principle underlies and
+permeates American business in all its modes.
+
+One example of it--trivial enough, but it will serve for
+illustration--which visiting Englishmen are likely to be confronted
+with, perhaps to their great inconvenience, is in the bank practice in
+the matter of cheques. There is, as is well known, no "crossing" of
+cheques in America, but all cheques are "open"; and many an Englishman
+has gone confidently to the bank on which it was drawn with a cheque,
+the signature to which he knew to be good, and has expected to have the
+money paid over the counter to him without a word. All that the English
+paying teller needs to be satisfied of is that the signature of the
+drawer is genuine and that there is money enough to the credit of the
+account to meet the cheque. But the Englishman in the strange American
+bank finds that the document in his hands is practically useless, no
+matter how good the signature or how large the account on which it is
+drawn, unless he himself--the person who presents the cheque--is known
+to the bank officials. "Can you identify yourself, sir?" The Englishman
+usually feels inclined to take the question as an impertinence; but he
+produces cards and envelopes from his pocket--the name on his
+handkerchief--anything to show that he is the person in whose favour the
+cheque is drawn. Perhaps in this way he can satisfy the bank official.
+Perhaps he will have to go away and bring back somebody who will
+identify him. It is the _personality of the individual with whom the
+business is done_ that the American system takes into account.[384:1]
+
+It is, as I have said, a trivial point, but it suffices. Vastly more
+important is the whole banking practice in America. This is no place to
+go into the details at the controversy which has raged around the merits
+and demerits of the American banking system. In the financial panic of
+1893 something over 700 banks suspended payment in the United States. At
+such seasons, especially, but more or less at all times, a great
+proportion of the best authorities in the United States believe that it
+would be better for the country if the Scotch--or the Canadian
+adaptation of the Scotch--system were to take the place of that now in
+vogue. Possibly they are right. The gain of having the small local banks
+in out-of-the-way places possess all the stability of branches of a
+great central house is obvious, both in the increase of security to
+depositors in time of financial stress and also in the ability of such a
+house to lend money at lower rates of interest than is possible to the
+poorer institution with its smaller capital which has no connections and
+no resources beyond what are locally in evidence. It may be questioned,
+however, whether the country as a whole would not lose much more than it
+would gain by the less complete identification of the bank with local
+interests. It would be inevitable that in many cases the local manager
+would be restrained by the greater conservatism of the authorities of
+the central house from lending support to local enterprises, which he
+would extend if acting only by and for himself as an independent member
+of the local business community. It is difficult to see how the country
+as a whole could have developed in the measure that it has under any
+system differing much from that which it has had.
+
+In theory it may be that the functions of a bank are precisely the same
+in Great Britain and in America. In practice different functions have
+become dominant in the two. In England a bank's chief business is to
+furnish a safe depository for the funds of its clients. In America its
+chief business is to assist--of course with an eye to its own profit and
+only within limits to which it can safely go--the local business
+community in extending and developing its business. The American
+business man looks upon the bank as his best friend. If his business be
+sound and he be sensible, he gives the proper bank official an insight
+into his affairs far more intimate and confidential than the Englishman
+usually thinks of doing. He invites the bank's confidence and in turn
+the bank helps him beyond the limits of his established credit line in
+whatever may be considered a legitimate emergency. In any small town
+whenever a new enterprise of any public importance is to be started, the
+bank is expected to take shares and otherwise assist in promoting a
+movement which is for the common good. The credits which American
+banks--especially in the West--give to their customers are astoundingly
+liberal according to an English banker's standards. Sometimes of
+course they make mistakes and have to pocket losses. When a storm
+breaks, moreover (as in the case already quoted of the panic of 1893),
+they may be unable to call in their loans in time to take care
+of their liabilities. But that they have been a tremendous--an
+incalculable--factor in the general advancement of the country cannot be
+questioned.
+
+The difference between the parts played by the banks in the two
+countries rests of course on two fundamental differences in the
+condition of the countries themselves. The first of these is the fact
+that while England is a country of accumulated wealth and large fortunes
+which need safeguarding, America has until recently been a country of
+small realised wealth but immense natural resources which needed
+developing. The policy of the banks has been shaped to meet the demands
+of the situation.
+
+In the second place (and too much stress cannot be laid upon this in any
+comparison of the business-life of the two peoples) the American is
+always trading on a rising market. This is true of the individual and
+true of the nation. Temporary fluctuations there are of course, but
+after every setback the country has only gone ahead faster than before.
+The man with faith in the future, provided only that he looked far
+enough ahead to be protected against temporary times of depression, has
+always won. Just as the railway companies push their lines out into the
+wilderness, confident of the population that will follow, and are never
+disappointed, so in all other lines the man who is always in advance,
+who does not wait for the demand to be there before he enlarges his
+plant to meet it, but who sees it coming and is ready for it when it
+comes--the man who has always acted in the belief that the future will
+be bigger than the present,--that man has never failed to reap his
+reward. Of course the necessary danger in such a condition is that of
+over-speculation. But nearly every man who amasses wealth or wins large
+commercial success in the United States habitually takes risks which
+would be folly in England. They are not folly in him, because the
+universal growth of the country, dragging with it and buoying up all
+industries and all values, as it goes, is on his side. It is inevitable
+that there should result a national temperament more buoyant, more
+enterprising, more alert.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is important, too, is that whereas in England the field is already
+more or less full and was handed down to the present generation well
+occupied, so that new industries can, as it were, only be erected on the
+ruins of old, and a site has to be cleared of one factory before another
+can be built (all of which is, in a measure, only relative and
+metaphorical), in the United States there is always room for the
+newcomers. New population is pouring in to create new markets: new
+resources are being developed to provide the raw material for new
+industries; there is abundance of new land, new cities, new sites
+whereon the new factories can be built. This is why "America" and
+"opportunity" are interchangeable terms; why young men need never lack
+friends or backing or the chance to be the architects of their own
+fortunes. Society can afford to encourage the individual to assert
+himself, because there is space for and need of him.
+
+From this flow certain corollaries from which we may draw direct
+comparison between the respective spirits in which business in the two
+countries is carried on. In the first place, in consequence of the more
+crowded condition of the field and the greater intensity of
+competition, the business community in England is much more ruthless,
+much less helpful, in the behaviour of its members one towards the
+other. It is not a mere matter of the more exacting scrutiny of credits,
+of the more rigid insistence on the exact fulfilment of a bond (provided
+that bond be stamped), but it colours unconsciously the whole tone of
+thought and language of the people. There are two principles on which
+business may be conducted, known in America respectively as the "Live
+and let live" principle, and the "Dog eat dog" principle. There was
+until recently in existence in the United States one guild, or
+association, representing a purely parasitical trade--that of
+ticket-scalping--which was fortunately practically peculiar to the
+United States. This concern had deliberately adopted the legend "Dog eat
+dog" as its motto and two bull-dogs fighting as its crest; but in doing
+so its purpose was to proclaim that the guild was an Ishmaelite among
+business men and lived avowedly in defiance of the accepted canons of
+trade. On the other hand one meets in America with the words "Live and
+let live" as a trademark, or motto, on every hand and on the lips of the
+people. Few men in America but could cite cases which they know wherein
+men have gone out of their way to help their bitterest competitor when
+they knew that he needed help. The belief in co-operation, on which
+follows a certain comradeship, as a business principle is ingrained in
+the people.
+
+I was once given two letters to read, of which one was a copy and the
+other an original. The circumstances which led up to the writing of them
+were as follows: Two rich men, A. and B., had been engaged in a
+business duel. It was desperate--_a outrance_,--dealing in large
+figures; and each man had to call up all his reserves and put out all
+his strength. At last the end came and A. was beaten--beaten and ruined.
+Then the letters passed which I quote from memory:
+
+     "DEAR MR. B.:
+
+     "I know when I'm beaten and if I was quite sure you wouldn't
+     kick a man when he's down, I would come round to see you and
+     grovel. As perhaps you can guess, I am in a bad way.
+
+                                                "Yours truly, A."
+
+     "DEAR A.:
+
+     "There's no need to grovel. Come around to my house after
+     supper to-morrow night and let us see what we can do together
+     to put you straight.
+
+                                                "Yours truly, B."
+
+I need hardly say that it was the second letter of which I saw the
+original, or that it was A. who showed them to me, when they were
+already several years old but still treasured, and A. was a wealthy man
+again as a result of that meeting after dinner. A. told me briefly what
+passed at that meeting. "He gave me a little more than half a million,"
+he said. "Of course he has had it back long ago; but he did not know
+that he would get it at the time and he took no note or other security
+from me. At the time it was practically a gift of five hundred thousand
+dollars."
+
+And as I write I can almost hear the English reader saying, "Pooh! the
+same things are done times without number in England." And I can hear
+the American, still smarting under the recollection of some needlessly
+cruel and unfair thrust from the hands of a competitor, smile cynically
+and say that he would like to tell me certain things that he knows. Of
+course there are exceptions on either side. It takes, as the American is
+so fond of saying, "all kinds of men to make a world." It is the same
+old difficulty of generalising about a nation or drawing up an
+indictment against a whole people. But I do not think that any man who
+has engaged for any length of time in business in both countries, who
+has lived in each sufficiently to absorb the spirit of the respective
+communities, will dissent from what I have said. Many Englishmen,
+without knowledge of business in England, go to America and find the
+atmosphere harder and less friendly than they were accustomed to at
+home, and come to quite another conclusion. But they are comparing
+American business life with the social club-and-country-house life of
+home. Let them acquire the same experience of business circles in
+England, and then compare the tone with that of business circles in
+America, and they will change their opinions.
+
+Let me recall again what was said above as to the difference in the
+motives which may impel a man to go into business or trade in the two
+countries. An Englishman cannot well pretend that he does it with any
+other purpose than to make money. The American hopes to make money too,
+but he takes up business as an honourable career and for the sake of
+winning standing and reputation among his fellows. This being so,
+business in America has a tendency to become more of a game or a
+pastime--to be followed with the whole heart certainly--but in a measure
+for itself, and not alone for the stakes to be won. It is not difficult
+to see how, in this spirit, it may be easier to forego those stakes--to
+let the actual money slip--when once you have won the game.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is necessary to refer briefly again to the subject of trusts. In
+England a great corporation which was able to demonstrate beyond dispute
+that it had materially cheapened the cost of any staple article to the
+public, and further showed that when, in the process of extending its
+operations, it of necessity wiped out any smaller business concerns, it
+never failed to provide the owners or partners of those concerns with
+managerial positions which secured to them a larger income than they
+could have hoped to earn as individual traders, and moreover took into
+their service the employees of the disbanded concerns at equal
+salaries,--such a corporation would generally be regarded by the English
+people as a public benefactor and as a philanthropically and charitably
+disposed institution. In America the former consideration has some
+weight, though not much; the latter none at all.
+
+When a trust takes into its service those men whom it has destroyed as
+individual traders, the fact remains that their industrial independence
+has been crushed. The individual can no longer "insist upon himself." He
+is subordinate and no longer free. One of the first principles of
+American business life, the encouragement of individual initiative, has
+been violated, and nothing will atone for it.
+
+The Standard Oil Company can, I believe, prove beyond possibility of
+contradiction that the result of its operations has been to reduce
+immensely the cost of oil to the public, as well as to give facilities
+in the way of distribution of the product which unassociated enterprise
+could never have furnished. It can also show that in many, and, I
+imagine, in the majority, of cases, it has endeavoured to repair by
+offers of employment of various sorts whatever injuries it has done to
+individuals by ruining their business. But these things constitute no
+defence in the eyes of the American people.
+
+There is the additional ground of public hostility that the weapons
+employed to crush competitors have often been illegal weapons. Without
+the assistance of the railway companies (which was given in violation of
+the law) the Standard Oil Company might have been unable to win more
+than one of its battles; but this fact, while it furnishes a handle
+against the company and exposes a side of it which may prove to be
+vulnerable, and is therefore kept to the front in any public indictment
+of the company's methods, is an immaterial factor in the popular
+feeling. Few Americans (or Englishmen) will not accept a reduced rate
+from a railway company when they can get it. Whatever actual bitterness
+may be felt by the average man against the Standard Oil Company because
+it procured rebates on its freight bills is rather the bitterness of
+jealousy than of an outraged sense of morality. The real bitterness--and
+very bitter it is--is caused by the fact that the company has crushed
+out so many individuals. On similar ground nothing approaching the same
+intensity of feeling could be engendered in the British public.
+
+Let us now recur for a moment to the views of the young woman quoted
+above on the interesting topic of chaperons. We have seen that
+insistence on the individuality is a conspicuous--perhaps it is the most
+conspicuous--trait of the American character. Encouraged by the wider
+horizon and more ample elbow-room and assisted by the something more
+than tolerant good-will of his business associates, colleagues, or
+competitors, the individual, once insisted on, has every chance to
+develop and become prosperous and rich. Everything helps a man in
+America to strike out for himself, to walk alone, and to dispense with a
+chaperon. The Englishman is chaperoned at almost every step of his
+business career; and I am not speaking now of the chaperonage of his
+colleagues, of his fellows in the community, or of his elders among whom
+he grows up and, generally, in spite of whom the young man must make his
+way to the top. There is another much more significant form of
+chaperonage in English business circles, of which it is difficult to
+speak without provoking hostility.
+
+The English business world is solicitor-cursed. I mean by this no
+reflection on solicitors either individually or in the mass. I am making
+no reference to such cases as there have been of misappropriation by
+solicitors here and there of funds entrusted to their charge, nor to
+their methods of making charges, which are preposterous but not of their
+choosing. Let us grant that, given the necessity of solicitors at all,
+Great Britain is blessed in that she has so capable and upright and in
+all ways admirable a set of men to fill the offices and do the work.
+What I am attacking is solicitordom as an institution.
+
+It is not merely that there are no solicitors, as such, in the United
+States, for it might well be that the general practising lawyers who
+fill their places, so far as their places have to be filled, might be
+just as serious an incubus on business as solicitordom is on the
+business of London to-day. Names are immaterial. The essential fact is
+that the spirit and the conditions which make solicitors a necessity in
+England do not exist in America. I do not propose to go into any
+comparison in the differences in legal procedure in the two countries;
+not being a lawyer, I should undoubtedly make blunders if I did. What is
+important is that a man who is accustomed to walking alone does not
+think of turning to his legal adviser at every step. Great corporations
+and large business concerns have of course their counsel, their
+attorneys, and even their "general solicitors." But the ordinary
+American engaged in trade or business in a small or moderate way gets
+along from year's end to year's end, perhaps for his lifetime, without
+legal services. I am speaking only on conjecture when I say that, taking
+the country as a whole, outside of the large corporations or among rich
+men, over ninety per cent. of the legal documents--leases, agreements,
+contracts, articles of partnership, articles of incorporation, bills of
+sale, and deeds of transfer--are executed by the individuals concerned
+without reference to a lawyer. Probably not less than three fourths of
+the actual transactions in the purchase of land, houses, businesses, or
+other property are similarly concluded without assistance. "What do we
+need of a lawyer?" one man will ask the other and the other will
+immediately agree that they need one not at all.
+
+Of course troubles often arise which would have been prevented had the
+documents been drawn up by a competent hand. The constitutional
+reluctance to go to a lawyer is sometimes carried to lengths that are
+absurd. But I do not believe that the amount of litigation which arises
+from that cause is in any way comparable to that which is avoided by the
+mere fact that legal aid is outside the mental horizon. The men who
+conduct most of the affairs of life directly without legal help are most
+likely to adjust differences when they arise in the same way. That is a
+matter of opinion, however, based only on reasonable analogy, which I
+can advance no figures to support; but what is not matter of opinion,
+but matter of certainty, is, first, that the general gain in the
+rapidity of business movement is incalculable, and, second, that
+business as a whole is relieved of the vast burden of solicitors'
+charges.
+
+The American, accustomed to the ways of his own people, on becoming
+engaged in business in London is astounded, first, at the disposition of
+the Englishman to turn for legal guidance in almost every step he takes,
+second, at the stupendous sums of money which are paid for services
+which in his opinion are entirely superfluous, and, finally, at the
+terrible loss of time incurred in the conclusion of any transaction by
+the waiting for the drafting and redrafting and amending and engrossing
+and recording of interminable documents which are a bewilderment and an
+annoyance to him.
+
+The Englishman often says that American business methods are slip-shod;
+and possibly that is the right word. But Englishmen should not for a
+moment deceive themselves into thinking that the American envies the
+Englishman the superior niceties of his ways or would think himself or
+his condition likely to be improved by an exchange. An example of
+difference in the practice of the two countries which has so often been
+used as to be fairly hackneyed (and therefore perhaps stands the better
+chance of carrying conviction than a more original, if better,
+illustration) is drawn from the theory which governs the building of
+locomotive engines in the two countries.
+
+The American usually builds his engine to do a certain specified service
+and to last a reasonable length of time. During that time he proposes to
+get all the work out of it that he can--to wear it out in fact--feeling
+well assured that, when that time expires, either the character of the
+service to be performed will have altered or such improvements will have
+been introduced into the science of locomotive construction as will make
+it cheaper to replace the old engine with one of later build. The
+Englishman commonly builds his engines as if they were to last for all
+time. There are many engines working on English railways now, the
+American contemporaries of which were scrapped twenty years ago. The
+Englishman takes pride in their antiquity, as showing the excellence of
+the workmanship which was put into them. The American thinks it would
+have been incomparably better to have thrown the old things away long
+ago and replaced them with others of recent building which would be more
+efficient.
+
+The same principle runs through most things in American life, where they
+rarely build for posterity, preferring to adapt the article to the work
+it has to perform, expecting to supersede it when the time comes with
+something better. If a thing suffices, it suffices; whether it be a
+locomotive or a contract. "What is the use," the American asks, "when
+you can come to an agreement with a fellow in ten minutes and draw up
+your contract with him that afternoon,--what is the use of calling in
+your solicitors to negotiate and then paying them heavily to keep you
+waiting for weeks while they draft documents? We shall have had the
+contract running a month and be making money out of it before the
+lawyers would get through talking."
+
+Out of this divergence in point of view and practice have of course
+grown other differences. One thing is that the American courts have
+necessarily come to adopt more liberal views in the interpretation of
+contracts than the English; they are to a greater extent inclined to
+look more to the intent than to the letter and to attach more weight to
+verbal evidence in eliciting what the intent was. No stamping of
+documents being necessary in America, the documents calling themselves
+contracts, and which are upheld as such, which appear in American courts
+are frequently of a remarkable description; but I have a suspicion that
+on the whole the American, in this particular, comes as near to getting
+justice on the average as does the Englishman.
+
+And the point is that I believe it to be inevitable that the habit of
+doing without lawyers in the daily conduct of business, the habit of
+relying on oneself and dealing with another man direct, must in the long
+run breed a higher standard of individual business integrity.
+Englishmen, relying always on their solicitors' advice, are too tempted
+to consider that so long as they are on the right side of the law they
+are honest. It is a shifting of the responsibility to the chaperon;
+whereas, if alone, you would be compelled to act on your honour.
+
+What I think and hope is the last word that I have to say on this rather
+difficult subject has to do with the matter already mentioned, namely
+the absence of the necessity of stamping documents in America.
+Englishmen will remember that the Americans always have evinced a
+dislike of stamps and stamp duties and acts relating thereto. Of late
+years the necessity of meeting the expenses of the Spanish war did for a
+while compel the raising of additional internal revenue by means of
+documentary and other stamps. The people submitted to it, but they hated
+it; and hated it afresh as often as they drew or saw a cheque with the
+two-cent stamp upon it. The act was repealed as speedily as possible and
+the stamping of papers has for six years now been unknown.
+
+I think--and I am not now stating any acknowledged fact, but only
+appealing to the reader's common-sense--that it is again inevitable that
+where a superior sanctity attaches to stamped paper a people must in the
+long run come to think too lightly of that which is unstamped. I do not
+say that the individual Englishman has as yet come to think too lightly
+of his word or bond because it is informal, but I do think there is
+danger of it. The words "Can we hold him?" or (what is infinitely worse)
+"Can he hold us?" spring somewhat readily to the lips of the business
+man of this generation in England.
+
+Continual dependence on the law and the man of law, and an extra respect
+for paper because it is legal, have--they surely cannot fail to have--a
+tendency to breed in the mind a disregard for what is not of a
+strictly legal or actionable character. It is Utopian to dream of a
+state of society where no law will be needed but every man's written
+and spoken word will be a law to him; but it is not difficult to imagine
+a state of society in which there is such universal dependence on the
+law in all emergencies that the individual conscience will become
+weakened--pauperised--atrophied--and unable to stand alone.
+
+That is, as I have said, the last point that I wish to make on this
+subject; and the reader will please notice that I have nowhere said that
+I consider American commercial morality at the present day to be higher
+than English. Nor do I think that it is. Incontestably it is but a
+little while since the English standard was appreciably the higher of
+the two. I have cited from my own memory instances of conditions which
+existed in America only twenty years ago in support of the fact--though
+no proof is needed--that this is so. I by no means underestimate the
+fineness of the traditions of British commerce or the number of men
+still living who hold to those traditions. On the other hand, better
+judges than I believe that the standard of morality in English business
+circles is declining. In America it is certainly and rapidly improving.
+
+Present English ideas about American commercial ethics are founded on a
+knowledge of facts, correct enough at the time, which existed before the
+improvement had made anything like the headway that it has, which facts
+no longer exist. I have roughly compared in outline some of the
+essential qualities of the atmosphere in which, and some of the
+conditions under which, the business men in the two countries live and
+do their business, showing that in the United States there is a much
+more marked tendency to insist on the character of the individual and a
+much larger opportunity for the individuality to develop itself; and
+that in certain particulars there are in England inherited social
+conditions and institutions which it would appear cannot fail to hamper
+the spirit of self-reliance, on which self-respect is ultimately
+dependent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And the conclusion? For the most part my readers must draw it for
+themselves. My own opinion is that, whatever the relative standing of
+the two countries may be to-day, it is hardly conceivable that, by the
+course on which each is travelling, in another generation American
+commercial integrity will not stand the higher of the two. The
+conditions in America are making for the shaping of a sterner type of
+man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Postscript._--The opinion has been expressed in the foregoing pages
+that in one particular the American on the average comes as near to
+getting justice in his courts as does the Englishman. I have also given
+expression to my great respect, which I think is shared by everyone who
+knows anything of it, for the United States Supreme Court. Also I have
+spoken disparagingly of the English institution of solicitordom. But
+these isolated expressions of opinion on particular points must not be
+interpreted as a statement that American laws and procedure are on the
+whole comparable to the English. I do not believe that they are. None
+the less Englishmen have as a rule such vague notions upon this subject
+that some explanatory comment seems to be desirable.
+
+Especially do few Englishmen (not lawyers or students of the subject)
+recognise that the abuses in the administration of justice in America,
+of which they hear so much, do not occur in the United States courts,
+but in the local courts of the several States. So far as the United
+States (_i. e._, the Federal) Courts are concerned I believe that the
+character and capacity of the judges (all of whom are appointed and not
+elected) compare favourably with those of English judges. It is in the
+State courts, the judges of which are generally elected, that the
+shortcomings appear; and while it might be reasonable to expect that a
+great State like New York or Massachusetts should have a code of laws
+and an administration of justice not inferior to those of Great Britain,
+it is perhaps scarcely fair to expect as much of each of the 46 States,
+many of which are as yet young and thinly populated.
+
+The chief vice of the State courts arises, of course, from the fact that
+the judges are elected by a partisan vote; from which it follows almost
+of necessity that there will be among them not a few who in their
+official actions will be amenable to the influence of party pressure. It
+is perhaps also inevitable that under such a system there will not
+seldom find their way to the bench men of such inferior character that
+they will be directly reachable by private bribes; though this, I
+believe, seldom occurs. The State courts, however, labour under other
+disadvantages.
+
+We have seen how Congressmen are hampered in the execution of their
+duties by the constant calls upon their time made by the leaders of
+their party, or other influential interests, in their constituencies.
+The same is true on a smaller scale of members of the State
+legislatures. Congress and the legislatures of the several States alike
+are moreover limited by the restrictions of written constitutions. The
+British Parliament is paramount; but the United States legislatures are
+always operating under fear of conflict with the Constitution. Their
+spheres are limited, so that they can only legislate on certain subjects
+and within certain lines; while finally the country has grown so fast,
+the conditions of society have changed with such rapidity, that it has
+been inherently difficult for lawmaking bodies to keep pace with the
+increasing complexity of the social and industrial fabric.
+
+If the limitations of space did not forbid, it would be interesting to
+show how this fact, more than any other (and not any willingness to
+leave loopholes for dishonesty) makes possible such offences as those
+which, committed by certain financial institutions in New York, were the
+immediate precipitating cause of the recent panic. Growth has been so
+rapid that, with the best will in the world to erect safeguards against
+malfeasance, weak spots in the barricades are, as it were, only
+discovered after they have been taken advantage of. With the
+preoccupation of the legislators stable doors are only found to be open
+by the fact that the horses are already in the street.
+
+But, after all has been said in extenuation, there remain many things in
+American State laws for which one may find explanation but not much
+excuse.
+
+Reference has already been made to the entirely immoral attitude of many
+of the State legislatures towards corporations, especially towards
+railway companies; and in some of the Western States prejudice against
+accumulated wealth is so strong that it is practically impossible for a
+rich man or corporation to get a verdict against a poor man. It would
+be easy to cite cases from one's personal experience wherein jurors have
+frankly explained their rendering of a verdict in obvious contradiction
+of the weight of evidence, by the mere statement that the losing party
+"could stand it" while the other could not. Of a piece with this is a
+class of legislation which has been abundant in Western States, where
+the legislators as well as most of the residents of the States have been
+poor, giving extraordinary advantages to debtors and making the
+collection of debts practically impossible. In some cases such
+legislation has defeated itself by compelling capitalists to refuse to
+invest, and wholesale traders to refuse to give credit, inside the
+State.
+
+Yet another source of corruption in legislation is to be found in the
+mere numerousness of the States themselves. It may obviously inure to
+the advantage of the revenues of a particular State to be especially
+lenient in matters which involve the payment of fees. It is evidently
+desirable that a check should be put on the reckless incorporation of
+companies with unlimited share capital, the usual form of such a check
+being, of course, the graduation of the fee for incorporation in
+proportion to such capital. One State which has laws more generous than
+any of its neighbours in this particular is likely to attract to it the
+incorporation of all the companies of any magnitude from those States,
+the formal compliance with the requirements of having a statutory
+office, and of holding an annual meeting, in that State being a matter
+of small moment. Similar considerations may govern one State in enacting
+laws facilitating the obtaining of divorce.
+
+There are, then, obviously many causes which make the attainment of
+either an uniform or a satisfactory code of jurisprudence in all States
+alike extremely difficult of attainment. It will only be arrived at by,
+on the one hand, the extension of the Federal authority and, on the
+other the increase in population and wealth (and, consequently, a sense
+of responsibility) in those States which at present are less forward
+than their neighbours. But, again, it is worth insisting on the fact
+that the faults are faults of the several States and not of the United
+States. They do not imply either a lack of a sense of justice in the
+people as a whole or any willingness to make wrong-doing easy. But it is
+extremely difficult for the public opinion of the rest of the country to
+bring any pressure to bear on the legislature of one recalcitrant State.
+The desire to insist on its own independence is indeed so strong in
+every State that any attempt at outside interference must almost
+inevitably result only in developing resistance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And again I find myself regretfully in direct conflict with Mr. Wells.
+But it is not easy to take his meditations on American commercial
+morality in entire seriousness.
+
+"In the highly imaginative theory that underlies the reality of an
+individualistic society," he says (_The Future in America_, p. 168),
+"there is such a thing as honest trading. In practice I don't believe
+there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to have a fixed quality
+called their value, and honest trading is I am told the exchange of
+things of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by honest trading and
+therefore nobody can grow rich by it." And more to the same effect.
+
+A trader buys one thousand of a given article per month from the
+manufacturer at ninepence an article and sells them to his customers at
+tenpence. The extra penny is his payment for acting as purveyor, and the
+customers recognise that it is an equitable charge which they pay
+contentedly. That is honest trading; and the trader makes a profit of a
+trifle over four pounds a month, or fifty pounds a year.
+
+Another trader purveys the same article, buying it from the same
+manufacturer, but owing to the possession of larger capital, better
+talent for organisation, and more enterprise, he sells, not one
+thousand, but one million per month. Instead of selling them at
+tenpence, however, he sells them at ninepence half-penny; thereby making
+his customers a present of one half-penny, taking to himself only one
+half of the sum to which they have already consented as a just charge
+for the services which he renders. Supposing that he pays the same price
+as the other trader for his goods (which, buying by the million, he
+would not do), he makes a profit of some L2083 a month, or L25,000 a
+year. Evidently he grows rich.
+
+This is the rudimentary principle of modern business; but because one
+man becomes rich, though he gives the public the same service for less
+charge than honest men, Mr. Wells says that he cannot be honest.
+
+If two men discover simultaneously gold mines of equal value, and one,
+being timid and conservative, puts twenty men to work while the other
+puts a thousand, and each makes a profit of one shilling a day on each
+man's labour, it is evident that while one enjoys an income of a pound a
+day for himself the other makes fifty times as much. It is not only
+obvious that the latter is just as honest as the former, but he can
+well afford to pay his men a shilling or two a week more in wages. He
+can afford to build them model homes and give them reading-rooms and
+recreation grounds, which the other cannot.
+
+Others, besides Mr. Wells, lose their heads when they contemplate large
+fortunes made in business; but the elementary lesson to be learned is
+not merely that such large fortunes are likely to be as "honestly"
+acquired as the smaller ones, but also that the man who trades on the
+larger scale is--or has the potentiality of being--the greater
+benefactor to the community, not merely by being able to furnish the
+people with goods at a lower price but also by his ability to employ
+more labour and to surround his workmen with better material conditions.
+
+The tendency of modern business industry to agglutinate into large units
+is, as has been said, inevitable; but, what is better worth noting, like
+all natural developments from healthy conditions, it is a thing
+inherently beneficent. That the larger power is capable of greater abuse
+than the smaller is also evident; and against that abuse it is that the
+American people is now struggling to safeguard itself. But to assail all
+trading on a scale which produces great wealth as "dishonest" is both
+impertinent (it is Mr. Wells's own word, applied to himself) and absurd.
+
+The aggregate effect of the great consolidations in America and in
+England alike (of the "trusts" in fact) has so far been to cheapen
+immensely the price of most of the staples of life to the people; and
+that will always be the tendency of all consolidations which stop at any
+point short of monopoly. And that an artificial monopoly (not based on
+a natural monopoly) can ever be made effective in any staple for more
+than the briefest space of time has yet to be demonstrated.
+
+The other consideration, of the destruction of the independence of the
+individual, remains; but that lies outside Mr. Wells' range.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[378:1] Preface to the _Encyclopaedia of Trade between the United States
+and France_, prepared by the Societe du Repertoire General du Commerce.
+
+[384:1] I do not know whether the story is true or not that Signor
+Caruso was compelled, in default of other means of identification in a
+New York bank, to lift up his voice and sing to the satisfaction of the
+bank officials. As has been remarked, this is not the first time that
+gold has been given in exchange for notes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE PEOPLES AT PLAY
+
+     American Sport Twenty-five Years Ago--The Power of Golf--A
+     Look Ahead--Britain, Mother of Sports--Buffalo in New York--And
+     Pheasants on Clapham Common--Shooting Foxes and the "Sport" of
+     Wild-fowling--The Amateur in American Sport--At Henley--And at
+     Large--Teutonic Poppycock.
+
+
+In "An Error in the Fourth Dimension," Kipling tells how one Wilton
+Sargent, an American, came to live in England and earnestly laboured to
+make himself more English than the English. He learned diligently to do
+many things most un-American:--"Last mystery of all he learned to
+golf--well; and when an American knows the innermost meaning of '_Don't
+press, slow back and keep your eye on the ball_,' he is, for practical
+purposes, de-nationalised." Some six years after that was written an
+American golfer became Amateur Champion of Great Britain. Yes; I know
+that Mr. Travis was not born in the United States, but _qua_ golfer he
+is American pure and simple. Which shows the danger of too hasty
+generalisation, even on the part of a genius. And it shows more. When he
+wrote those words Kipling was fully justified by the facts as they
+stood. It is the fault of the character of the American people, which
+frustrates prophecy.
+
+Twenty-five years ago there was no amateur sport in America--none. Men,
+it is true, went off and shot ("hunted" as Americans call it) and fished
+and yachted for a few days, or weeks, in summer or autumn, in a rather
+rough-and-ready sort of way. Also, when at college they played baseball
+and football and, perhaps, they rowed. After leaving college there was
+probably not one young American in a hundred who entered a boat or
+played a game of either football or baseball on an average of once in a
+year. The people as a whole had no open-air games. Baseball was chiefly
+professional. Cricket had a certain foothold in Philadelphia and on
+Staten Island, but it was an exotic sport, as it remains to-day, failing
+entirely to enlist the sympathies of the multitude. Polo was not played.
+Lawn tennis had been introduced, but had made little headway. In all
+America there were, I think, three racquet courts, which were used
+chiefly by visiting Englishmen, and not one tennis court. Lacrosse was
+quite unknown, and as for the "winter sports" of snow-shoeing, ski-ing,
+ice-boating, curling, and tobogganing, they were practised only here and
+there by a few (except for the "coasting" of children) as rather a
+curious fad.
+
+It was a strange experience for an Englishman in those days, fond of his
+games, to go from his clubs and the society of his fellows at home, to
+mix in the same class of society in America. As in the circles that he
+had left behind him, so there, the conversation was still largely on
+sporting topics, but while in England men talked of the games in which
+they played themselves and of the feats and experiences of their
+friends, in the leading young men's clubs of New York--the Union, the
+Knickerbocker, and the Calumet--the talk was solely of professional
+sport: of the paid baseball nines, of prize fighters (Sullivan was then
+just rising to his glory), and professional scullers (those were the
+days of Hanlan), and the like. No man talked of his own doings or of
+those of his friends, for he and his friends did nothing, except perhaps
+to spar for an hour or so once or twice a week, or go through
+perfunctory gymnastics for their figures' sakes.
+
+Until a dozen years ago the situation had not materially changed. Lawn
+tennis had made some headway, but the thing that wrought the revolution
+was the coming of golf. It may be doubted if ever in history has any
+single sport, pastime, or pursuit so modified the habits, and even the
+character, of a people in an equal space of time as golf has modified
+those of the people of the United States.
+
+Enough has already been written of the enthusiasm with which the
+Americans took up the game itself, of the social prestige which it at
+once obtained, of the colossal sums of money that have been lavished on
+the making of courses, of the sumptuousness of the club-houses that have
+sprung up all over the land. That golf is in itself a fascinating game,
+is sufficiently proved in England, where it has drawn so many thousands
+of devotees away from cricket, football, lawn tennis, and other sports.
+But can we imagine what the result might have been if there had been in
+Great Britain no cricket, or football, or other sports, so that all the
+game-loving enthusiasm of the nation had been free to turn itself loose
+into that one channel? And this is just what did happen in America. Golf
+had a clear field and a strenuous sport-loving nation, devoid of
+open-air games, at its mercy.
+
+The result was not merely that people took to playing golf and that
+young men neglected their offices and millionaires stretched unwonted
+muscles in scrambling over bunkers. Golf taught the American people to
+play games. It took them out from their great office-buildings and from
+their five-o'clock cocktails at the club, into the open air; and they
+found that the open air was good. So around nearly every golf club other
+sports grew up. Polo grounds were laid out by the side of the links,
+croquet lawns appeared on one side of the club-house and lawn-tennis
+nets arose on the other, while traps for the clay-pigeon shooters were
+placed safely off in a corner.
+
+Golf came precisely at the moment when the people were ready for it.
+Just as America, having in a measure completed the exploitation of her
+own continent and developed a manufacturing power beyond the resources
+of consumption in her people, was commercially ripe for the invasion of
+the markets of the world; just as she came, in her overflowing wealth
+and power, to a recognition of her greatness as a nation, and was
+politically ripe for an Imperial policy of colonial expansion; just as,
+tired of the loose code of ethics of the scrambling days, when the
+country was still one half wilderness and none had time to care for the
+public conscience, she was morally ripe for the wonderful revival which
+has set in in the ethics of politics and commerce and of which Mr.
+Roosevelt has been and is the chief apostle: so, by the individual
+richness of her citizens, giving larger leisure in which to cultivate
+other pleasures than those which their offices or homes could afford,
+she was ripe for the coming of the day of open-air games. And having
+turned to them, she threw herself into their pursuit with the ardour
+and singleness of purpose which are characteristic of the people and
+which, as applied to games, seem to English eyes to savour almost of
+professionalism. As a matter of fact they are only the manifestations of
+an essential trait of the American character.
+
+The result was that almost at the same time as an American player was
+winning the British Amateur Golf Championship, an American polo team was
+putting All England on her mettle at Hurlingham, and it was not with any
+wider margin than was necessary for comfort that Great Britain retained
+the honours in lawn tennis, which she has since lost to one of her own
+colonies.
+
+It is curious that this awakening of the amateur sporting spirit in the
+United States should have come just at the time when many excellent
+judges were bewailing the growing popularity of professional sport in
+England. Any day now, one may hear complaints that the British youth is
+giving up playing games himself for the purpose of watching professional
+wrestlers or football games or county cricket matches. My personal
+opinion is that there is no need to worry. The growing interest in
+exhibition games reacts in producing a larger number of youths who
+strive to become players. Not only in spite of, but largely because of,
+the greater spectacular attraction of both football and cricket than in
+years gone by, there is an immensely larger number of players of
+both--and of all other--games than there ever was before. It is little
+more than a score of years since Association football, at least, was
+practically the monopoly of a few public schools and of the members of
+the two Universities--of "gentlemen" in fact. Any loss which the nation
+can have suffered from the tendency to sit on benches and applaud
+professional players must have been made up a thousand times over in the
+benefit to the national physique from the spreading of the game into
+wide classes which formerly regarded it, much as they might fox-hunting,
+as a pastime reserved only for their "betters."
+
+It is none the less interesting and instructive that in this field as in
+so many others the directly opposite tendencies should be at work in the
+two countries: that just when America is beginning to learn the delight
+of being a game-loving nation and amateur sport is thriving, not yet to
+the detriment of, but in proportions at least which stand fair
+comparison with, professional, the cry should be raised in England that
+Englishmen are forgetting to play games themselves in their eagerness to
+watch others do them better. Here, as in other things, the gap between
+the habits of the two peoples is narrowing rapidly. They have not yet
+met; for in England the time and attention given to games and sports by
+amateurs is still incomparably greater than on the other side. But that
+the advancing lines will meet--and even cross--seems probable. And when
+they have crossed, what then? Will America ever oust Great Britain from
+the position which she holds as the Mother of Sports and the athletic
+centre of the world?
+
+Some things, it appears, one can predict with certainty. America has
+already taken to herself a disagreeable number of the records in track
+athletics; and she will take more. On the links the performance of Mr.
+Travis, isolated as yet, is only a warning of many similar experiences
+in the future. In a few years it will be very hard for any visiting golf
+team of less than All England or All Scotland strength to win many
+matches against American clubs on their home courses; and the United
+States will be able to send a team over here that will be beaten only by
+All England--or perhaps will not be beaten by All Britain. At polo the
+Americans will go on hammering away till they produce a team that can
+stand unconquered at Hurlingham. It will be very long before they can
+turn out a dozen teams to match the best English dozen; but by mere
+force of concentration and by the practice of that quality which, as has
+already been said, looks so like professionalism to English eyes, one
+team to rival the English best they will send over. In lawn tennis it
+cannot be long before a pair of Americans will do what an Australian
+pair did in 1907, just as the United States already holds the Ladies'
+Championship; and England is going to have some difficulty in recovering
+her honours at court tennis. In rifle shooting America must be expected
+to beat England oftener than England beats America; but the edge will be
+taken off any humiliation that there might be by the fact that Britain
+will have Colonial teams as good as either.
+
+And when all this has happened, will England's position be shaken? Not
+one whit! Not though the _America's_ cup never crosses the Atlantic and
+though sooner or later an American college crew succeeds--as surely, for
+their pluck, they deserve to succeed--in imitating the Belgians and
+carrying off the Grand at Henley. There remain games and sports enough
+which the United States will never take up seriously, at which if she
+did she would be debarred by climatic conditions or other causes from
+ever threatening British supremacy.
+
+The glory of England lies in the fact that she "takes on" the best of
+all the nations of the world at their own games. It is not the United
+States only, but all her Colonies and every country of Europe that turn
+to Great Britain as to their best antagonist in whatever sport they find
+themselves proficient. Just now England's brow is somewhat bare of
+laurels, but year in and year out Britain will continue to win the
+majority of contests in her meetings with all the world; and if she lose
+at times, is it not better to have rivals good enough to make her extend
+herself? And is it not sufficient for her pride that she, one people,
+should win--if it be only--half of all the world's honours?
+
+Meanwhile Englishmen can afford to rejoice ungrudgingly at the new
+spirit which has been born in the United States. Each year the number of
+"events" in which an international contest is possible increases. The
+time may not be far away when there will be almost as long a list of
+Anglo-American annual contests as there is now between Oxford and
+Cambridge. But it will be a very long time before the United States can
+displace Great Britain from the pre-eminence which she holds--and the
+wonderful character of which, I think, few Englishmen appreciate. Before
+that time comes such other sweeping changes will probably have come over
+the map of the world and the relations of the peoples that Britain's
+displacement will have lost all significance.
+
+And Englishmen can always remember that, whatever triumphs the
+Americans may win in the domain of sport, they win them by virtue of the
+English blood that is in them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is, of course, inevitable that in many particulars the American and
+English ideas of sport should be widely different. There is an old, old
+story in America of the Englishman who arrived in New York and, on the
+day after his arrival, got out his rifle and proceeded to make enquiries
+of the hotel people as to the best direction in which to start out to
+find buffalo--the nearest buffalo at the time being, perhaps, two
+thousand miles away. It is a story which has contributed not a little to
+contempt of the Britisher in many an innocent American mind. It happens
+that in my own experience I have known precisely that same blunder made
+by an American in England.
+
+I had met an American friend, with whom I have shot in America, at his
+hotel on the evening of his arrival in London one day in November. In
+the course of conversation I mentioned that the shooting season was in
+full swing.
+
+"Good," he said. "Let me hire a gun somewhere to-morrow and let's go
+out, if you've nothing to do, and have some shooting."
+
+Nothing, he opined, would be simpler, or more agreeable, than to drive
+out--or possibly take a train--to some wild spot in the vicinity of
+London--Clapham Common perhaps--and spend a day among the pheasants. It
+was precisely the Englishman and his buffalo--the prehistoric instinct
+of the race ("What a beautiful day! Let us go and kill something!")
+blossoming amid unfamiliar conditions. My American friend wanted to
+kill an English pheasant. He had heard much of them as the best of
+game-birds. He had eaten them, much refrigerated, in New York and found
+them good. And he knew nothing of preserving and of a land that is all
+parcelled out into parks and gardens and spinneys. Why not then go out
+and enjoy ourselves? Before he left England he had some pheasant
+shooting, and it is rarely that a man on his first day at those
+conspicuous but evasive fowl renders as good an account of himself as
+did he. Similarly every American with a sound sporting instinct must
+hope that that traditional Englishman ultimately got his buffalo.
+
+Many times in the United States in the old days have I done exactly what
+that American then wished to do in London. Finding myself compelled to
+spend a night at some crude and unfamiliar Western town, I have made
+enquiries at the hotel as to the shooting--duck or prairie chicken--in
+the neighbourhood. Hiring a gun of the local gunsmith and buying a
+hundred cartridges, one then secured a trap with a driver, who probably
+brought his own gun and shot also (probably better than oneself), but
+who certainly knew the ground. The best ground might be three or five or
+ten miles out--open prairie where chicken were plentiful, or a string of
+prairie lakes or "sloughs" (pronounced "sloo") with duck-passes between.
+That evening one came home, hungry and happy as a hunter ought to be,
+with perhaps half a dozen brace of spike-tailed grouse (the common
+"chicken" of the Northwestern States) or ten or a dozen duck--mallard,
+widgeon, pintail, two kinds of teal, with, it might be, a couple of
+red-heads or canvas-backs,--or, not improbably, a magnificent Canada
+goose as the spoils.
+
+With the settlement of the country, the multiplication of shooters, and
+the increase in the number of "gun-clubs," which have now included most
+of the easily accessible duck-grounds in the country in their private
+preserves, the possibilities of those delightful days are growing fewer,
+but even now there are many parts of the West where the stranger can
+still do as I have done many times.
+
+Though the people had so few outdoor games, the great majority of
+Americans, except the less well-to-do of the city-dwellers of the
+Eastern States, have been accustomed to handle gun and rod from their
+childhood. The gun may at first have been a rusty old muzzle-loader, and
+the rod a "pole" cut from the bank of the stream with a live grasshopper
+for bait; and there are few better weapons to teach a boy to be a keen
+sportsman. The birds that he shot were game--duck or geese, turkeys,
+quail, grouse, or snipe--and the fish that he caught were mostly game
+fish--trout and bass. It is true that the American generally shoots
+foxes; so does the Englishman when he goes to the Colonies where there
+are no hounds and too many foxes, with game birds which he wishes kept
+for his own shooting, and domestic chickens which he destines for his
+own table. On the other hand the American does not mount a miniature
+cannon in a punt and shoot waterfowl by wholesale when sitting on the
+water. It is only the gunner for the market, the man who makes his
+living by it, who does that, and the laws do their best to stop even
+him. The American sportsman who cannot get his duck fairly on the wing
+with a 12- or 16-bore prefers not to get them at all. "But," objects
+the English wildfowl shooter, "suppose the birds are not get-at-able in
+any other way?" "So much," the American would retort, "the better for
+the birds. They have earned their lives; get them like a sportsman or
+let them go."
+
+The time may not be far away--and many Englishmen will be glad when it
+comes--when to kill waterfowl at rest with a duck gun will no longer be
+considered a "sport" that a gentleman can engage in in England. Perhaps
+fox-hunting will become so popular in the United States that foxes will
+be generally preserved. The sportsmen of each country will then think
+better of those of the other. Meanwhile it would be pleasanter if each
+would believe that such little seemingly unsportsmanlike peculiarities
+that the other may have developed are only the accidents of his
+environment, and that under the same circumstances there is not a pin to
+choose between their sportsmanship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Reference has more than once been made to the quality which looks to
+English eyes so much like semi-professionalism in American sport. It is
+a delicate subject, in handling which susceptibilities on one side or
+the other may easily be hurt.
+
+The intense earnestness and concentration of the American on his one
+sport--for most Americans are specialists in one only--does not commend
+itself to English amateurs. The exclusiveness, which seems to be
+suspicious of foul play, and the stringent training system of certain
+American crews at Henley have been out of harmony with all the
+traditions of the great Regatta and have caused much ill feeling, some
+of which has occasionally come to the surface. Some of the proceedings
+of American polo teams have not coincided with what is ordinarily
+considered, in England, the behaviour of gentlemen in matters of amateur
+sport. On the other hand, Americans universally believe that Lord
+Dunraven acted in a most unsportsmanlike manner in the unfortunate cup
+scandal; and in one case they are--or were at the time--convinced that
+one of their crews was unfairly treated at Henley. Honours therefore on
+the surface are fairly easy; and, while every Englishman knows that both
+the American charges quoted are absurd, every American is no less of the
+opinion that the English grounds of complaint are altogether
+unreasonable.
+
+We must remember that after all a good many of the best English golfers
+and lawn-tennis players do nothing else in life but golf or play
+lawn-tennis. And this tendency to specialise is undoubtedly increasing.
+Meanwhile it will never be rooted out of the American character and in
+departments of sport where it, and it alone, will bring pre-eminence,
+Englishmen will either have to do as Americans do or, sooner or later,
+consent to be defeated. There is nothing in the practice at which the
+Englishman can fairly cavil. Americans have still much the fewer sports;
+and it is the national habit to take up one and concentrate on it with
+all one's might.[420:1]
+
+A more difficult aspect of the situation has to do with the question of
+the definition of "gentleman-amateur"; the fact being, of course, that
+the same definition has not the same significance in the two countries.
+The radical difficulty lies in the fact that the word "gentleman" in its
+English sense of a man of gentle birth has no application to America.
+Let this not be understood as a statement that there are any fewer
+gentlemen in America or that the word is not used. But its usage is not
+re-inforced, its limits are not defined, as in England, by any line of
+cleavage in the social system. A large number of the gentlemen of
+America are farmers' sons; more than half are the sons of men who
+commenced life in very humble positions, and nearly all are the sons of
+men who are engaged in trade or in business, the majority of them being
+destined to go into trade or business (and to begin at the beginning)
+themselves. In England, of course, the process of the obliteration of
+the old line is going on with great rapidity. In America, on the other
+hand, there is a tendency towards the drawing of a somewhat
+corresponding line. But the fact remains that at present there exists
+this fundamental distinction and the consequence is that Englishmen
+continue to find among American "amateurs" and in teams of American
+"gentlemen," individuals who would not be accepted into the same
+categories in England.
+
+But what Englishmen should endeavour to understand is that the man who
+on the surface seems to belong to a class which in England would be
+objectionable in the company of gentlemen probably has none of those
+characteristics which would make him objectionable were he English. He
+has far more of the characteristics of a gentleman than of the other
+qualities. The qualities which go to make a "gentleman," even in the
+English sense, are many and complex; but the assumption is that they are
+all present in the man who bears the public school and university stamp.
+The Englishman is accustomed to accept the presence or absence of one or
+a few of those qualities in an individual as evidence of the presence or
+absence of them all. In judging other Englishmen, the rule works
+satisfactorily. But in America, with its different social system, the
+qualities are not tied up in the same bundles, so that the same
+inference fails. The same, or a similar, peculiarity of voice or speech
+or manner or dress or birth does not denote--much less does it
+connote--the same or similar things in representatives of the two
+peoples. Particular Englishmen have learned this often enough in
+individual cases. How often has it not happened that an Englishman,
+meeting an American first as a stranger, not even being informed that he
+is an American, has, judging from some one external characteristic,
+turned from him as being an Undesirable, only to be introduced to him
+later, or meet him under other conditions, and find in him one of the
+best fellows that he ever met? The thing is happening every day. Very
+often, with a little more knowledge or a little clearer understanding,
+Englishmen would know that their judgment of some American amateur
+athlete is shockingly unjust. To bar him out would be incomparably more
+unjust to him than his inclusion is unjust to any antagonist.
+
+This of course does not touch the fact--which is a fact--that in America
+what answers to the gentleman-amateur in England is drawn from a much
+larger proportion of the people. This does not however mean, when
+rightly viewed, what Englishmen generally think it means, that Americans
+go down into other--and presumably not legitimate--classes for their
+recruits. It only means that a very much larger proportion of the people
+belong to one class. There is no point at which an arbitrary line can be
+drawn. This is in truth only another way of saying what has been said
+already more than once, that the American people is really more
+homogeneous than the English, or rather is homogeneous over a larger
+part of its area, so that the type-American represents a greater
+proportion of the people of the United States than the type-Briton
+represents of the people of the British Isles.
+
+This is obviously in the realm of sport so much to America's advantage.
+It is not a condition against which the Englishman has any right to
+protest, any more than he has to move amendments to the Constitution of
+the United States. When better comprehended, Englishmen will accept it
+without either resentment or regret. The United States has a larger
+population than Great Britain: so much the better for the United
+States. Also a larger proportion of that population must be admitted
+into the category of gentleman-amateur in sport; so much the more the
+better for them.
+
+But, curiously enough, this condition has its inherent drawback, which
+not impossibly more than compensates for its advantages. The fact that
+young Americans grow up so much of a class involves the essential fact
+that the enormous majority of them are educated at the Public Schools,
+that is at the Board Schools or Government Schools or whatever they
+would be called if their precise counterpart existed in England. The
+United States has not (the fact has been touched on before) any group of
+institutions comparable to the great schools of England. A few excellent
+schools there are which bear some resemblance to the English models, but
+they are not numerous enough to go any way towards leavening the nation.
+It is to the Public Schools that, in the mass, the English
+gentleman-amateur owes his training, not only in sports but in many
+other things besides: especially in those things which stamp on him the
+mark by which he is recognised as belonging to his right class through
+life. The American, as has been said, is not so stamped; but in missing
+that stamp--or in failing to receive it--he necessarily missed also all
+that discipline and training in games which the Public School gave to
+the Englishman. The very same cause as gives America an advantage in the
+numbers from which she can draw her amateur athletes, also forbids that
+these recruits should have had the same advantages of early training as
+fall to the Englishman.
+
+The thing is about as broad as it is long. It is not difficult to
+imagine that the great schools might never have come into existence in
+England, so that a larger proportion of the population than is now the
+case would be educated at some intermediate institutions, at the Grammar
+Schools let us say, when the English gentleman-amateur athletes--the
+polo, golf, and tennis teams and the crews that row at Henley--would be
+drawn from a larger circle of the population, and the individuals would
+not bear as close a superficial resemblance, one to the other, as they
+do to-day. They would in fact be more like the members of American
+athletic teams as Englishmen know them. The question is whether England
+would gain or lose in athletic efficiency. When Englishmen find
+something to cavil at in an individual American amateur or in an
+American amateur team or crew, would it not be better to stop and
+consider whether the disadvantages which compel America to be
+represented by such an individual or team or crew, do not outweigh the
+advantages which enable her to use him or them? If the United States
+were to develop the same educational machinery as exists in England,
+which would stamp practically all their gentlemen-amateurs with the same
+hall-mark, as they are so stamped in England, and would at the same time
+give them the English public-school boy's training in games, would not
+England, as a mere matter of athletic rivalry, be worse off instead of
+better?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the purpose of pointing the moral of the essential likeness of the
+American and English characters, as contrasted with those of other
+peoples, reference has already been made to Professor Muensterberg and
+his book. It is an excellent book; but what English writer would think
+it necessary to inform English readers that "the American student
+recreates himself on the athletic field rather than in the ale-house"?
+We know something of the life of a German student; but it is only when a
+German himself says a thing like that that he illuminates in a flash the
+abyss which yawns between the moral qualities of the youth of his
+country and the young American or young Englishman.
+
+Again the same author speaks on the subject of the Anglo-Saxon love of
+fair play (the sporting instinct, I have called it) as follows:
+
+"The demand for 'fair play' dominates the whole American people, and
+shapes public opinion in all matters whether large or small. And with
+this finally goes the belief in the self-respect and integrity of one's
+neighbour. The American cannot understand how Europeans" (Continental
+Europeans, if you please, Mr. Muensterberg!) "so often reinforce their
+statements with explicit mention of their honour which is at stake, as
+if the hearer was likely to feel a doubt of it; and even American
+children are often apt to wonder at young people abroad who quarrel at
+play and at once suspect one another of some unfairness. The American
+system does not wait for years of discretion to come before exerting its
+influence; it makes itself felt in the nursery, where already the word
+of one child is never doubted by his playmates."
+
+There is an excellent American slang word, which is "poppycock." The
+Century Dictionary speaks disrespectfully of it as a "United States
+vulgarism," but personally I consider it a first-class word. The Century
+Dictionary defines it as meaning, "Trivial talk; nonsense; stuff and
+rubbish," which is about as near as a dictionary can get to the elusive
+meaning of any slang word. English readers will understand the exact
+shade of meaning of the word when I say that the paragraph above quoted
+is most excellent and precise poppycock. Every American who read that
+paragraph when the book was published must have chuckled inwardly, just
+as every Englishman would chuckle. But the point which I wish to
+emphasise is that it is not at all poppycock from the author's point of
+view. I doubt not that his countrymen have been most edified by that
+excellent dictum, and the trouble is that one could never make a typical
+German understand wherein it is wrong. No, Mr. Muensterberg, it is not
+that the sentence is untrue--far be it from me to suggest such a thing.
+It is merely absurd; and you, sir, will never, never, never comprehend
+why it is so.
+
+It is in the presence of such a remark, seriously made by so excellently
+capable a foreigner, that the Englishman and American ought to be able
+to shake hands and realise how much of a kin they are and how far
+removed from some other peoples.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have dwelt on this subject of the games of the two peoples at what may
+seem to many an unnecessary length, because I do not think its
+importance can well be exaggerated. It is not only desirable, but it is
+necessary, for a thorough mutual liking between them that there should
+be no friction in matters of sport. No incident has, I believe, occurred
+of late years which did so much harm to the relations between the
+peoples as did the Dunraven episode in connection with the _America's_
+cup races. I should be inclined to say that it did more harm (I am not
+blaming Lord Dunraven) than the Venezuelan incident.
+
+On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the more recent attempts to
+recover the cup, and the spirit in which they have been conducted, have
+not contributed as much as, say, the attitude of England in the Spanish
+War to the increased liking for Great Britain which has made itself
+manifest in the United States of recent years. Few Englishmen, probably,
+understand how much is made of such matters in the American press. The
+love of sport is in the blood of both peoples and neither can altogether
+like the other until it believes it to have the same generous sporting
+instincts and the same clean methods as itself. As a matter of fact,
+they do--as in so many other traits--stand out conspicuously alike from
+among all other peoples, but neither will give the other full credit for
+this, till each learns to see below such slight surface appearances as
+at present provoke occasional ill-will in one party or the other. Fuller
+understanding will come with time and with it entire cordiality.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[420:1] Though immaterial to the argument, it may be as well to state
+that my personal sympathies are entirely with the English practice. In
+the matter of college athletics especially the spirit in which certain
+sports (especially football and, in not much less degree, rowing and
+baseball) are followed at some of the American universities, is entirely
+distasteful to me. On the other hand, I know nothing more creditable to
+the English temperament than the spirit in which the contests in the
+corresponding sports are conducted between the great English
+universities. And this feeling is shared, I know, by some (and I believe
+by most) of those Americans who, as Rhodes scholars or otherwise, have
+had an opportunity of coming to understand at first hand the difference
+between the practice in the two countries. But this is an individual
+prepossession only; against which stands the fact that my experience of
+Americans who have won notoriety in athletics at one or other of the
+American universities, is that they are unspoiled by the system through
+which they have passed and possess just as sensitive and generous a
+sporting instinct as the best men turned out by Oxford or Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
+
+     A New Way of Making Friends--The Desirability of an Alliance--
+     For the Sake of Both Peoples--And of All the World--The Family
+     Resemblance--Mutual Misunderstandings--American Conception of
+     the British Character--English Misapprehension of Americans--
+     Foreign Influences in the United States--Why Politicians
+     Hesitate--An Appeal to the People--And to Caesar.
+
+
+At first sight it may not seem the likeliest way to make two people care
+for each other to go laboriously about to tell each how the other
+underestimates his virtues. Don Pedro's wile would appear to be the more
+direct--to tell Benedick how Beatrice doted on him, and Beatrice how
+Benedick was dying for her love. I have always had my doubts, however,
+about the success of that alliance.
+
+In the case of two peoples so much alike as the English and the
+American, between whom friendship and alliance would be so entirely in
+accord with eternal fitness, who are yet held apart by misunderstanding
+on the part of each of the other's character, there seems no better way
+than to face the misunderstandings frankly and to endeavour to make each
+see how unjustly it undervalues the other's good qualities or
+overestimates its faults. At present neither Americans nor Englishmen
+understand what good fellows the others are. Least of all do they
+understand how essentially they are the same kind of good fellows.
+
+In summarising the contents of the foregoing pages, there is no need
+here to rehearse, except in barest outline, the arguments in favour of
+alliance between the countries. The fact that war between them is an
+ever-present possibility ought in itself to suffice--war which could
+hardly fail to be more sanguinary and destructive than any war that the
+world has known. The danger of such a war is greater, perhaps, than the
+people of either country recognises, certainly greater than most
+Englishmen imagine. The people of England do not understand the
+warlike--though so peace-loving--character of the American nation. It is
+just as warlike as, though no less peace-loving than, the English,
+without the restraint of that good-will which the English feel for the
+United States; without, moreover, the check, to which every European
+country is always subjected, of the fear of complications with other
+Powers. The American people, as a whole, it cannot be too earnestly
+impressed on Englishmen, have no such good-will towards Great Britain as
+Englishmen feel for them; and not even English reluctance to draw the
+sword, nor the protests of the better informed and the more well-to-do
+people in the United States would be able to restrain what Mr. Cleveland
+calls "the plain people of the land" if they once made up their mind to
+fight.
+
+Apart from the possibility of war between the two nations themselves,
+there is the constant peril, to which both are exposed, of conflict
+forced upon them by the aggressions of other Powers. That peril is
+always present to both, to the United States now no less--perhaps even
+more--than to Great Britain. The fact that neither need fear a trial of
+strength with any other Power or any union of Powers, is beside the
+question. Consciousness of its own strength is no guarantee to any
+nation that it will not be forced into conflict. Rather, by making it
+certain that it, at least, will not draw back, does it close up one
+possible avenue of escape from catastrophe when a crisis threatens.
+
+But beyond all this--apart from, and vastly greater than, the
+considerations of the interest or the security of either Great Britain
+or the United States--is the claim of humanity. The two peoples have it
+in their hands to give to the whole world no less a gift than that of
+Universal and Perpetual Peace. It involves no self-sacrifice, the giving
+of this wonderful boon, for the two peoples themselves would share in
+the benefit no less than other peoples, and they would be the richer by
+the giving. It involves hardly any effort, for they have but to hold out
+their hands together and give. It matters not that the world has not
+appealed to them. The fact remains that they can do this thing and they
+alone; and it is for them to ask their own consciences whether any
+considerations of pride, any prejudice, any absorption in their own
+affairs--any consideration actual or conceivable--can justify them in
+holding back. Still more does it rest with the American people--usually
+so quick to respond to high ideals--to ask its conscience whether any
+consideration, actual or conceivable, can justify it in refusal when
+Great Britain is willing--anxious--to do her share.
+
+That such an alliance must some day come is, I believe, not
+questionable. That it has not already come is due only to the
+misunderstanding by each people of the character of the other.
+Primarily, the two peoples do not understand how closely akin--how of
+one kind--they are, how alike they are in their virtues, and how their
+failings are but the defects of the same inherited qualities, even
+though shaped to somewhat diverse manifestations by differences of
+environment. Two brothers seldom recognise their likeness one to the
+other, until either looks at the other beside a stranger. Members of one
+family do not easily perceive the family resemblance which they share;
+rather are they aware only of the individual differences. But strangers
+see the likeness, and in their eyes the differences often disappear. So
+Englishmen and Americans only come to a realisation of their resemblance
+when either compares the other critically with a foreign people.
+Foreigners, however, see the likeness when they look at the two
+together. And those foreigners who know only one of the peoples will
+sketch the character of that people so that it might be taken for a
+portrait of the other. In all essentials the characters are the same; in
+minor attributes only, such as exist between the individual members of
+any family, do they differ.
+
+Not only does neither people understand with any clearness how like it
+is to the other, but each is under many misapprehensions--some trivial,
+some vital--in regard to the other's temperament and ways of life. These
+misapprehensions are the result chiefly of the geographical remoteness
+of the lands, so that intimate contact between anything like an
+appreciable portion of the two peoples has been impossible; and, when
+thus separated by so wide a sea, Great Britain has been too consumedly
+engrossed in the affairs of the world to be able to give much time or
+thought to the United States, while America has been too isolated from
+that world, too absorbed in her own affairs, to be able to look at
+England in anything like true perspective.
+
+Arising thus from different causes, the errors of the two peoples in
+regard to each other have taken different forms. Great Britain, always
+at passes with a more or less hostile Europe, has never lost her
+original feeling of kinship with, or good-will towards, the United
+States. There has been no time when she would not gladly have improved
+her knowledge of, and friendship with, the other, had she at any time
+been free from the anxieties of the peril of war with one Power or
+another, from the burden of concern for her Empire in India, from the
+weight of her responsibilities in regard to Australia, South Africa,
+Egypt, and the various other parts of Britain over seas. Engrossed as
+she has been with things of immediate moment to her existence, she has
+been perforce compelled to take the good-will of the remote United
+States for granted, and to assume that there was no need to voice her
+own. Until at last she was awakened with a rudeness of awakening that
+shocked and staggered her.
+
+For the United States had had no such constant burden of anxiety, no
+perpetual friction with other peoples, to keep her occupied. Rather,
+sitting aloof in her isolation she had looked upon all the Powers of
+Europe as actors in a great drama with which she had no other than a
+spectacular concern. Only of all the Powers, by the very accident of
+common origin, by the mere circumstances of the joint occupation of the
+continent, Great Britain alone has been constantly near enough to the
+United States to impinge at times upon her sphere of development, to rub
+against her, to stand in her way. Great Britain herself has hardly known
+that this was so. But it has had the effect to make Great Britain in the
+mind of the United States the one foreign Power most potentially
+hostile.
+
+In aloofness and silence, ignorant of the world, the American people
+nursed its wrath and brooded over the causes of offence which have
+seemed so large to it, though so trivial or so unintentional on the part
+of England, till the minds of the majority of the people held nothing
+but ill-feeling and contempt in response to England's good-will towards
+them. And always the United States has had those at her elbow who were
+willing--nay, for their own interests, eager--to play upon her wounded
+feelings and to exaggerate every wrong and every slight, however small
+or imaginary, placed upon her by Great Britain.
+
+Thus the two peoples not only misunderstand each other but they
+misunderstand each other in different ways. They look at each other from
+widely sundered points of view and in diverse spirits. The people of the
+United States dislike and distrust Great Britain. They cannot believe
+that Great Britain's good-will for them is sincere. The expressions of
+that good-will, neglected while the American people was comparatively
+weak and finding expression now when it is strong, the majority of
+Americans imagine to be no more than the voice of fear. That alone shows
+their ignorance of England--their obliviousness of the kinship of the
+peoples. The two are of one origin and each may take it for granted that
+neither will ever be afraid of the other--or of any other earthly
+Power. That is not one of the failings of the stock.
+
+The American people has thus never attained to any right view of the
+British Empire. By the accident of the war which gave the nation birth,
+the name "British" became a name of reproach in American ears. They have
+never since been able to look at Great Britain save through the
+cross-lights of their own interests, which have distorted their vision,
+while there have always been those at hand poisoning the national mind
+against the English. So they think of the British Empire as a bloody and
+brutal thing: of her rule of India in particular as a rule of barbarity
+and cruel force. Of late years American writers have come to tell
+Americans the truth; namely, that if the power of Great Britain were to
+be wiped out to-morrow and all her monuments were to perish except only
+those that she has built in India, the historians of future generations,
+looking only to those monuments in India, would pronounce Great Britain
+to have been, of all the Powers that have held great Empire since the
+beginning of time, the largest benefactor to the human race. But of this
+the American people as a whole knows nothing. It only knows that sepoys
+were blown from the mouths of British guns. So Englishmen, know that
+negroes in the South are lynched.
+
+And as the American people has formed no comprehension of the British
+Empire as a whole and is without any understanding of its spirit, so it
+has drawn for itself a caricature of the British character. As the
+Empire is brutal and sanguinary, so is the individual bullying and
+overbearing and coarse. The idea was originally inherited from
+England's old enemies in Europe. It was a reflection of the opinion of
+the French; but it has been confirmed by the frankness of criticism of
+English travellers of all things in the United States. Americans do not
+recognise that by their own sensitiveness and anxiety for the judgment
+of others--a necessary, if morbid, result of their isolation and
+self-absorption--they invited the criticism, even if they did not excuse
+its occasional ill-breeding; nor has it occurred to them that the habit
+of outspoken criticism of all foreign things is a common inheritance of
+the two peoples and that they themselves are even more garrulously, if
+less bluntly--even more vaingloriously, if less arrogantly--frank in
+their habit of comment even than the English.
+
+The same isolation and self-absorption as bred in them their
+sensitiveness to the opinions of others, made the Americans also unduly
+proud of such traits or accomplishments as strangers found to praise in
+them. This in itself might be good for a nation; but, so far as their
+understanding of Englishmen is concerned, it has unfortunately led them
+to suppose that those characteristics which they possess in so eminent a
+degree are proportionately lacking in the English character, which
+thereby incurs their contempt. Having been over-complimented on their
+own humour, they have determined that the Englishman is slow-witted,
+with no sense of fun--an opinion in itself so lacking in appreciation of
+its own absurdity as to be self-confounding. Too well assured of their
+own chivalrousness (a foible which they share with all peoples) they
+know the Englishman to be a domestic tyrant, incapable of true reverence
+of womanhood. Proud, not without reason, of their own form of
+government, wherein there is no room for a titled aristocracy, they
+delight in holding the peerage of Great Britain up to contempt (withal
+that there is a curious unconfessed strain of jealousy mingling
+therewith), and piecing together, like a child playing with bricks, the
+not too infrequent appearances of individual peers in the divorce or
+bankruptcy courts, they have constructed a fantastic image of the
+British aristocracy as a whole, wherein every member appears as either a
+_roue_ or a spendthrift. Because they are--and have been so much told
+that they are--so full of push and energy themselves, they believe
+Englishmen to be ponderous and without enterprise; whereas if, instead
+of keeping their eyes and minds permanently intent on their own
+achievements, they had looked more abroad, they would have seen that,
+magnificent as has been the work which they have done in the upbuilding
+of their own nation and wonderful as is the fabric of their greatness,
+there has simultaneously been evoked out of chaos a British Empire,
+vaster than their own estate, and which is only not so near completion
+as their own structure in proportion as it is on a larger ground plan,
+inspired by larger ideas and involving greater (as well as infinitely
+more diffused) labour in its uprearing.
+
+The statement of these facts involves no impugnment of American
+urbanity, American wit, American chivalry, or American enterprise. Only
+they are not so unique as Americans, in their isolation, conceive them
+to be. There are, in fact, others. It might not even be worth saying so
+much, if it were not that the belief in their uniqueness has necessarily
+resulted in American minds in a depreciation of the English character,
+which by so much helps to keep the two peoples estranged. Americans will
+be vastly more ready to believe in their English kinship, to like the
+English people, and to welcome a British alliance if they once get it
+into their heads that the English, as a nation, are just as fearless,
+just as chivalrous, no less fond of a joke or more depraved, nor much
+less enterprising or more careless of the feelings of others than
+themselves. That they think of Englishmen as they do to-day is not to be
+wondered at, and no blame attaches to them; for it is but a necessary
+result of causes which are easily seen. But the time has come when some
+effort to correct the errors in their vision is possible and
+desirable--not merely because they are unfair to Englishmen, which might
+be immaterial, and is no more than a fair exchange of discourtesies, but
+because the misunderstandings obstruct that good-will which would be
+such an untellable blessing, not only to the two peoples themselves, but
+to all the human race.
+
+I am well aware that many American readers will say: "What is the man
+talking of? I do not think of Englishmen like that!" Of course you do
+not, excellent and educated reader--especially if you have travelled
+much in Great Britain or if you are a member of those refined and
+cultured classes (what certain American democrats would call the
+"silk-stocking element") which constitute the select and entirely
+charming society of most of the older cities of the Atlantic seaboard as
+well as of some of the larger communities throughout the country. If,
+belonging to those classes, you do not happen to have made it your
+business, either as a politician or a newspaper man, to be in close
+touch with the real sentiments of the masses of the country as a whole,
+you scarcely believe that anybody in America--except a few Irishmen and
+Germans--does think like that. If, however, you happen to be a good
+"mixer" in politics or have enjoyed the austerities of an apprenticeship
+in journalism,--if in fact you know the sentiments of your countrymen, I
+need not argue with you. Nor perhaps are very many Americans of any
+class conscious of holding all these views at once. None the less, if a
+composite photograph could be made of the typical Englishman as he is
+figured in the minds of, let us say, twenty millions of the American
+people--excluding negroes, Indians, and foreigners--the resultant figure
+would be little dissimilar from the sketch which I have made.
+
+And I have said that, in holding these ideas, the Americans do but make
+a fair exchange of discourtesies; for the Englishman has likewise queer
+notions of the typical American. There is always this vast difference,
+however, that the Englishman is predisposed to like the American. In
+spite of his ignorance he feels a great--and, in view of that ignorance,
+an almost inexplicable--good-will for him. But it is not inexplicable,
+for once more the causes of his misapprehensions are easily traced.
+
+First, there has been the eternal pre-occupation of the English people
+with the affairs of other parts of the world. When Great Britain has
+been so inextricably involved with the policies of all the earth that
+almost any day news might come from Calcutta, from Berlin, from St.
+Petersburg, from Pekin, or Teheran, or from almost any point in Asia,
+Africa, or Australia, which would shake the Empire to its foundation,
+how could the people spare time to become intimately acquainted with
+the United States? Of coarse Englishmen talk of the "State of Chicago,"
+and--as I heard an English peasant not long ago--of "Yankee earls."
+
+During all these years individual Americans have come to England in
+large numbers and have been duly noted and observed; but what the people
+of any nation notices in the casually arriving representatives of any
+other is not the points wherein the visitors resemble themselves, but
+the points of difference. In the case of Americans coming to England the
+fundamental traits are all resemblances and therefore escape notice,
+while only the differences--which by that very fact stand proclaimed as
+non-essentials--attract attention. So it is that the English people,
+having had acquaintance with a number of typical New Englanders, have
+drawn their conclusion as to the universality of one strong nasal
+American accent; they think the American people garrulously outspoken in
+criticism, with a rather offensive boastfulness, without any
+consciousness that precisely that same trait in themselves, in a
+slightly different form, is one of the chief causes why Englishmen are
+not conspicuously popular in any European country. From peculiarities of
+dress and manner which are not familiar to him in the product of his own
+public schools and universities, the Englishman has been inclined to
+think that the American people is not, even in its "better classes," a
+population of gentlemen.
+
+Moreover, many Englishmen go to the United States--the vast majority for
+a stay of a few days or weeks, or a month or two--and they tell their
+friends, or the public at large in print, all about America and its
+people. It is not given to every one to be able, in the course of a few
+weeks or a month or two, to see below the surface indications down to
+the root-traits of a people--a feat which becomes of necessity the more
+difficult when those root-traits are one's own root-traits and the
+fundamental traits of one's own people at home, while on the surface are
+all manner of queer, confusing dazzlements of local peculiarities which
+jump to the stranger's vision and set him blinking. Yet more difficult
+does the feat appear when it is realised that the American people is
+scattered over a continent some three thousand miles across--so that San
+Francisco is little nearer to New York than is Liverpool--and that the
+section of the people with whom the Englishman necessarily comes first
+and, unless he penetrates both far and deep into the people, most
+closely in contact is precisely that class from which it is least safe
+to draw conclusions as to the thoughts, manners, or politics of the
+people as a whole. Therefore it is that one of the most acute observers
+informed Europe that in America "a gentleman had only to take to
+politics to become immediately _declasse_"--which, speaking of the
+politics of the country as a whole, is purely absurd. The visiting
+Englishman has generally found the whole sphere of municipal and local
+politics a novel field to him and has naturally been interested. Probing
+it, he comes upon all manner of tales of corruption and wickedness. He
+does not see that the body of American "politics," as the word is
+understood in England, is moderately free from these taints, but he
+tells the world of the corruption in that sphere of politics which he
+has studied merely because it does not exist at home and is new to him;
+and all the world knows that American politics are indescribably
+corrupt.
+
+Similarly the visiting European goes into polite society and is amazed
+at the peculiar qualities of some of the persons whom he meets there. He
+tells stories about those peculiar people, but the background of the
+society, against which these people stood out so clearly, a background
+which is so much like his own at home, almost escapes his notice or is
+too uninteresting and familiar to talk about. There is no one to explain
+fully to the English people that while in England educated society keeps
+pretty well to itself, there are in America no hurdles--or none that a
+lively animal may not easily leap--to keep the black sheep away from the
+white, or the white from straying off anywhere among the black, so that
+a large part of the English people has imbibed the notion that there are
+really no refined or cultured circles in the United States.
+
+Whenever a financial fraud of a large size is discovered in America, the
+world is told of it, just as certainly as it is told when an English
+peer finds his way to the divorce court; but nobody expounds to the
+nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most
+American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the
+drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the
+English people have come to think of American business ethics as being
+too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware
+that only in most exceptional cases can great or permanent individual
+commercial success be won by fraud, and that nothing but fundamental
+honesty will serve as the basis for a great national trade such as the
+United States has built up.
+
+Visiting Englishmen are bewildered by the strange types of peoples whom
+they see upon the streets and by the talk which they hear of "German
+elements" and "French elements" and "Scandinavian elements" in the
+population. But they do not as a rule see that these various "elements,"
+when in the first generation of citizenship, are but a fringe upon the
+fabric of society, and when in the second or third generation they have
+a tendency to become entirely swallowed up and to merge all their
+national characteristics by absorption in the Anglo-Saxon stock; and
+that apart from and unheeding all these irrelevant appendages, the great
+American people goes on its way, homogeneous, unruffled, and English at
+bottom.
+
+Finally Englishmen read American newspapers and, not understanding the
+different relation in which those newspapers stand to the people, they
+compare with them the normal English papers and draw inferences which
+are quite unjust. Similar inferences no less unjust may be drawn from
+hearing the speech of a certain number of well-to-do Americans,
+belonging, as Englishmen opine, to the class of "gentlemen."
+
+These misunderstandings do less harm to the Englishman than to the
+American, inasmuch as the Englishman has that predisposition to national
+cordiality which the American has not. But, though the Englishman's
+mistakes do not influence his good-will to the United States, though he
+himself attaches no serious importance to them, his utterance of them is
+taken seriously by the Americans themselves and does not tend to the
+promotion of international good feeling. Therefore it is that it is no
+less desirable that English misconceptions of the United States should
+be corrected than it is that the American people should be brought to a
+juster appreciation of the British character and Empire.
+
+It is in America, doubtless, that missionary work is most needed,
+inasmuch as all England would at any minute welcome an American alliance
+with enthusiasm; while in the United States any public suggestion of
+such an alliance never fails to provoke immediate and vehement protest.
+It is true that that protest issues primarily from the Irish and German
+elements; and it may seem absurd that the American people as a whole
+should suffer itself to be swayed in a matter of so national a character
+by a minority which is not only comparatively unimportant in numbers,
+but which the true American majority regards with some irritability as
+distinctly alien.
+
+There are a large number of constituencies in the United States,
+however, where the Irish and German votes, individually or in
+combination, hold the balance of power in the electorate, and not only
+must many individual members of Congress hesitate to antagonise so
+influential a section of their constituents, but it is even questionable
+whether the united and harmonious action of those two elements might
+not, under certain conditions, be able to unseat a sufficient number of
+such individual members as to change the political complexion of one or
+both of the Houses of Congress, and even, in a close election, of the
+Administration itself. Nor is it necessary to repeat again that when the
+anti-British outcry is raised, though primarily by a minority and an
+alien minority, it finds a response in the breasts of a vast number of
+good Americans in whom the traditional dislike of England, though
+latent, still persists solely by reason of misapprehension and
+misunderstandings. Therefore it is that so many of the best Americans,
+who in their hearts know well how desirable an alliance with England
+would be, are content to deprecate its discussion and to say that things
+are well enough as they are; though again I say that things are never
+well enough so long as they might be better. However desirable such an
+alliance may be, however much to the benefit of the nation, it would,
+they say, be bad politics to bring it forward as a party question. And
+to bring it forward without its becoming from the outset a party
+question would be plainly impossible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But would it be bad politics? Can it ever, in the long run, be bad
+politics to champion any cause which is great and good? It might be that
+it would be difficult for an individual member of Congress to come
+forward as the active advocate of a British alliance and not lose his
+seat; but in the end, the man who did it, or the party which did it,
+would surely win. When two peoples have a dislike of each other based on
+intimate knowledge by each of the other's character, to rise as the
+champion of their alliance might be hopeless; but when two peoples are
+held apart only by misunderstanding and by lack of perception of the
+boons that alliance between them would bring, it can need but courage
+and earnestness to carry conviction to the people and to bring success.
+
+In such a cause there is one man in America to whom one's thoughts of
+necessity turn; and he is hampered by being President of the United
+States. Perhaps when his present term of office is over Mr. Roosevelt,
+instead of seeking the honourable seclusion which so often engulfs
+ex-Presidents, will find ready to his hand a task more than worthy of
+the man who was instrumental in bringing peace to Russia and Japan,--a
+task in the execution of which it would be far from being a disadvantage
+that he is as cordially regarded in Germany as he is in England and has
+himself great good-will towards the German Empire. Any movement on the
+part of Great Britain in company with any European nation could only be
+regarded by Germany as a conspiracy against herself: nothing that
+England or France or Japan--or any Englishman, Frenchman, or
+Japanese--could say or do would be received otherwise than with
+suspicion and resentment. But, after all, the good of humanity must come
+before any aspirations on the part of the German Empire, and it is the
+American people which must speak, though it speaks through the mouth of
+its President. If the American people makes up its mind that its
+interest and its duty alike dictate that it should join hands with
+England in the cause of peace, neither Germany nor any Power can do
+otherwise than acquiesce.
+
+It is no novelty, either in the United States or in other countries, for
+considerations of temporary political expediency to stand in the way of
+the welfare of the people, nor is there any particular reason why an
+American politician should attach any importance to the desires of
+England. But we find ourselves again confronted with the same old
+question, whether the American people as a whole, who have often shown
+an ability to rise above party politics, can find any excuse for setting
+any consideration, either of individual or partisan interest, above the
+welfare of all the world. Yet once more: It is for Americans
+individually to ask their consciences whether any considerations
+whatever, actual or conceivable, justify them in withholding from all
+humanity the boon which it is in their power, and theirs alone, to
+give,--the blessing of Universal and Perpetual Peace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And yet, when this much has been said, it seems that so little has been
+told. It was pointed out, in one of the earlier chapters, how the people
+of each country in looking at the people of the other are apt to see
+only the provoking little peculiarities of speech or manner on the
+surface, overlooking the strength of the characteristics which underlie
+them. So, in these pages, it seems that we, in analysing the individual
+traits, have failed to get any vision of the character of either people
+as a whole. It is the trees again which obscure the view of the forest.
+
+We have arrived at no general impression of the British Empire or of the
+British people. We have shown nothing of the majesty of that Empire; of
+its dignity in the eyes of a vast variety of peoples; of the high
+ambitions (unspoken, after the way of the English, but none the less
+earnest), which have inspired and still inspire it; of its maintenance
+of the standards of justice and fair dealing; of its tolerance or the
+patience with which it strives to guide the darkened peoples towards the
+light. Nothing has been said of the splendid service which the Empire
+receives from the sons of the Sea Wife; yet certainly the world has seen
+nothing comparable to the Colonial services of Great Britain, of which
+the Indian Civil Service stands as the type.
+
+Nor have we said anything of the British people, with its
+steadfastness, in spite of occasional frenzies, its sanity, and its
+silent acceptance, and almost automatic practice, of a high level of
+personal and political morality. Above all we have seen nothing of the
+sweetness of the home life of the English country people, whereof the
+more well-to-do lead lives of wide sympathies, much refinement, and
+great goodness; while the poor under difficult conditions, hold fast to
+a self-respecting decency, little changed since the days when from among
+them, there went out the early settlers to the New England over seas,
+which never fails, notwithstanding individual weaknesses, to win the
+regard of one who lives among them.
+
+So of the American people; we have conveyed no adequate impression of
+the manly optimism, the courageous confidence in the ultimate virtue of
+goodness and sound principles, on which the belief in the destiny of
+their own country is based. The nation has prospered by its virtues.
+Every page of their history preaches to the people that it is honesty
+and faith and loyalty which succeed, and they believe in their future
+greatness because they believe themselves to possess, and hope to hold
+to, those virtues as in the past.
+
+It may be that, living in the silences and solitudes of the frontier and
+the wilderness, they have found the greater need of ready speech when
+communication has offered. It may be that the mere necessity of planning
+together the framework of their society and of building up their State
+out of chaos has imposed on them the necessity of more outspokenness.
+Certainly they have discarded, or have not assumed, the reticence of the
+modern English of England; and much of this freedom of utterance
+Europeans misinterpret, much (because the fashion of it is strange to
+themselves) they believe to be insincere. In which judgments they are
+quite wrong. The American people are profoundly sincere and intensely in
+earnest.
+
+Since the establishment of the Republic, in the necessity of civilizing
+a continent, in the breathless struggle of the Civil War, in the
+rapidity with which society has been compelled to organize itself, in
+the absorption and assimilation of the continuous stream of foreign
+immigrants, the people have always been at grips with problems of
+immediate, almost desperate urgency; and they have never lost, or come
+near to losing, heart or courage. They have learned above all things the
+lesson of the efficacy of work. They have acquired the habit of action.
+Self-reliance has been bred in them. They know that in the haste of the
+days of ferment abuses grew up and went unchecked; and they know that in
+that same haste they missed some of the elegancies which a more
+leisurely and easier life might have given opportunity to acquire. But
+for a generation back, they have been earnestly striving to eradicate
+those abuses and to lift themselves, their speech, their manners, their
+art and literature to, at least, a level with the highest. It has been
+impossible in these pages (it would perhaps be impossible in any pages)
+to give any unified picture of this national character with its
+activity, its self-reliance, its belief in the homely virtues and its
+earnest ambition to make the best of itself. But of the future of a
+people with such a character there need be no misgivings, and Americans
+are justified in the confidence in their destiny.
+
+What is needed is that these two peoples holding, with similar
+steadfastness, to the same high ideals, pushing on such closely parallel
+lines in advance of all other peoples, should come to see more clearly
+how near of kin they are and how much the world loses by any lack of
+unison in their effort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once more let me ask readers to turn back and read again the paragraphs
+from other pens with which this book is introduced.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX. (See Chapter III., pp. 81, _sqq._)
+
+
+This book was almost ready for the press when Dr. Albert Shaw's
+collection of essays was published under the title of _The Outlook for
+the Average Man_. Dr. Shaw is one of America's most lucid thinkers and
+he contributes what I take to be a new (though once stated an obviously
+true) explanation of what I have spoken of as the homogeneousness of the
+American people. The West, as we all know, was largely settled from the
+East. That is to say that a family or a member of a family in New York
+moved westward to Illinois, thence in the next generation to Minnesota,
+thence again to Montana or Oregon. A similar movement went on down the
+whole depth of the United States, families established in North Carolina
+migrating first to Kentucky, then to Ohio, so to Texas, and finally on
+to California. All parts of the country therefore have, as the nucleus
+of their population, people of precisely the same stock, habits, and
+ways of thought. The West was settled "not by radiation of influence
+from the older centres, but by the actual transplantation of the men and
+women." Dr. Shaw proceeds:
+
+"England is not large in area and the people are generally regarded as
+homogeneous in their insularity. But as a matter of fact the populations
+of the different parts of England are scarcely at all acquainted in any
+other part. Thus the Yorkshireman would only by the rarest chance have
+relatives living in Kent or Cornwall. The intimacy between North
+Carolina and Missouri, for example, is incomparably greater than that
+between one part of England and another part. In like manner, the people
+of the North of France know very little of those of the South of France,
+or even of those living in districts not at all remote. Exactly the same
+thing is true of Italy and Germany, and is characteristic of almost
+every other European land. As compared with other countries, we in
+America are literally a band of brothers."--_The Outlook for the Average
+Man_, pages 104, 105.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+A
+
+     _Academy_, newspaper, the, 159
+
+     Alderman, election of an, 239;
+       "Mike," 252
+
+     Alliance, Anglo-American, desirable, 7, 430
+
+     Alliances, entangling, what they mean, 5
+
+     Amateurs, in sport, 421
+
+     American accent, the, 106
+
+     American dislike of England, 43, 46, 98 _sqq._, 112, 430
+
+     American journalists in London, 220
+
+     "American methods," in business, 328
+
+     American people, the, a bellicose people, 8;
+       its fondness for ideal, 10;
+       sensitive to criticism, 34;
+       dislike of subterfuges, 34;
+       an Anglo-Saxon people, 37, 87, 140;
+       and its leading men, 48;
+       foreign elements in, 58, 80, 227, 443;
+       self-reliant, 67;
+       resourceful, 70;
+       homogeneous, 80, 211, 451;
+       quick to move, 87;
+       "sense of the state" in, 89;
+       its ambitions, 90;
+       character of, influenced by the country, 97;
+       likes round numbers, 105;
+       its provincialism, 113;
+       its isolation, 116, 434;
+       effect of criticism on, 115, 157;
+       its attitude toward women, 119 _sqq._;
+       its insularity, 146;
+       manners of, 147;
+       pushfulness, 148;
+       did not invent all progress, 151;
+       humour of, 152;
+       its literature, 157;
+       science, 159;
+       art, 160;
+       architecture, 160;
+       its self-confidence, 164;
+       factors in the education of, 171;
+       influence of the Civil War on, 188;
+       its hunger for culture, 189;
+       not superficial, 193, 204;
+       eclecticism, 194;
+       musical knowledge of, 199;
+       drama of, 201;
+       takes culture in paroxysms, 203;
+       looks to the future, 208;
+       political corruption in, 234;
+       great parties in, 256;
+       political sanity of, 284;
+       purifying itself, 300, 324, 336, 353, 364;
+       aristocracy in, 309;
+       shrinks from European commercial conditions, 331;
+       hatred of trusts, 331;
+       misrepresented by its press, 340;
+       contempt for hereditary legislators, 346;
+       commercial integrity, 351;
+       religious feeling in, 353;
+       insistence of an individuality, 382;
+       a character sketch, 448
+
+     American speech, uniformity of, 85, 209
+
+     Americanisms, in English speech, 209;
+       their origin in America, 216;
+       disappearing, 224
+
+     Americans, at home in England, 36;
+       fraternise with English abroad, 38;
+       and "foreigners," 39;
+       as sailors, 62;
+       their ambitions, 90;
+       in London, 106;
+       ignorant of foreign affairs, 113;
+       treatment of women, 119 _sqq._;
+       their insularity, 146;
+       energy, 148;
+       humour, 152;
+       what they think of English universities, 169;
+       pride of family in, 181;
+       know no "betters," 194;
+       ambitious of versatility, 205;
+       as linguists, 206;
+       purists in speech, 219;
+       cannot lie, 352;
+       as story-tellers, 366;
+       non-litigious, 394;
+       do not build for posterity, 396;
+       dislike stamps, 398;
+       as sportsmen, 409
+
+     _Anglais, l'_, 2, 37, 141
+
+     Anglomania, 163
+
+     Anglo-Saxon, family likeness, the, 35, 432;
+       particularist spirit, 37;
+       versatility, 74;
+       spirit in America, 87, 244;
+       superiority, 118;
+       attitude towards women, 140;
+       ideals in education, 170;
+       a fighting race, 187;
+       ambition to be versatile, 205;
+       and Celt in politics, 254;
+       superior morality of, 349;
+       pluck and energy, 381;
+       the sporting instinct, 426
+
+     Anstey, F. L., his German professor, 156
+
+     Archer, Wm., on the Anglo-Saxon type, 38;
+       on the American's outlook on the world, 97;
+       on pressing clothes, 214
+
+     Architecture, American, 160
+
+     Aristocracy, in the U. S., 309;
+       the British disreputable, 338, 442
+
+     Arnold, Matthew, his judgment of Americans, 108;
+       his clothes, 108;
+       on American colleges, 167;
+       on American newspapers, 177;
+       on generals as booksellers, 185
+
+     Art, American, 160;
+       feminine knowledge of, 182
+
+     Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, the, 363
+
+     Athletics in England and America, 420
+
+     Atlantis, a new, 94
+
+
+B
+
+     Baldwin, W. H., 305
+
+     Banks, American and English, 383
+
+     Barnard College, 142
+
+     Bears, bickering with, 381
+
+     Bell-cord, divination by the, 363
+
+     Benedick and Beatrice, 429
+
+     Bonds, recoiling from, 236
+
+     Books, advantage of reading, 172;
+       ease of buying, in America, 174;
+       prices of, 175;
+       publishing American, in England, 221
+
+     Booksellers as soldiers, 185
+
+     Bosses in politics, 239, 252, 274
+
+     Boston, culture of, 195, 219
+
+     Botticelli, 185
+
+     Brewers as gentlemen, 315
+
+     Bribery in American politics, 234
+
+     "British," hatred of the name, 57
+
+     British bondholders, 52
+
+     British commerce, 52
+
+     British Empire, American misunderstanding of, 20, 112, 151, 435;
+       its size, 437;
+       its beauty, 447
+
+     Bryan, W. J., first nomination of, 234, 273;
+       and W. R. Hearst, 283
+
+     Bryce, James, on American electoral system, 247;
+       on State sovereignty, 262;
+       on political corruption, 279;
+       on the U. S. Senate, 287
+
+     Buffalo in New York, 416
+
+     Buildings, tall, built in sections, 368
+
+     Burke, Edward, in Ireland, 101;
+       indictment against a whole people, 101
+
+     Business, as a career, 317;
+       its effect on mentality, 318;
+       the romance of American, 319;
+       frauds in, 324;
+       the tendency of modern, to consolidations, 330;
+       speculation in America, 386;
+       less ruthless in America, 388;
+       slipshod, 395;
+       principles of modern, 404
+
+
+C
+
+     California, the Japanese in, 263, 287
+
+     Cambon, M. Paul, 139
+
+     Campbell, Wilfred, in England, 92
+
+     Canada, American investments in, 379
+
+     Canadian opinion of England, 92;
+       resemblance to Americans, 379
+
+     Carlyle, Thomas, 190
+
+     Caruso, Signor, 384
+
+     Celts, non-Anglo-Saxon, 254
+
+     Century Club, the, 103
+
+     _Champagne Standard, The_, 147
+
+     Chaperons, 381, 393
+
+     Chatham and American manufactures, 375
+
+     Cheques, cashing, 383
+
+     Chicago, pride in itself, 163;
+       pigs in, 177
+
+     Civil War, the navy in the, 64;
+       causes of, 11;
+       magnitude of, 186;
+       its value to the people, 188, 218
+
+     Classics, American reprints of English, 174
+
+     Cleveland, Grover, on Venezuela, 43, 109
+
+     Climate, the English, 121, 350
+
+     Co-education, its effect on the sexes, 127;
+       in America, 142
+
+     Colonies, destiny of British, 94
+
+     Colquhoun, A. R., 113
+
+     Commercial morality, 308
+
+     Concord school, the, 157
+
+     Congress, corruption in, 244;
+       compared with Parliament, 246, 249;
+       more honest than supposed, 252;
+       powers of, 289;
+       best men excluded from, 345
+
+     Congressmen, how influenced, 247, 251;
+       how elected, 247;
+       log-rolling among, 249;
+       hampered by the Constitution, 402
+
+     Conkling, Roscoe, 148
+
+     Constitution, U. S., growth of, 6;
+       interpretation of, 288;
+       and Congress, 402
+
+     Consular service, the American, 78
+
+     Contract, a proposed international, 338
+
+     Convention, a National Liberal, 270
+
+     Copyright laws, English, faulty, 221
+
+     Corporations, Mr. Roosevelt and the, 296;
+       persecuted by individual States, 403
+
+     Corruption, in municipal affairs, 232, 239, 242;
+       in national affairs, 234;
+       in State legislatures, 235;
+       in English counties, 237;
+       in Congress, 244;
+       in the railway service, 361
+
+     Court, U. S. Supreme, 400
+
+     Criticism, English, of America, 116, 157;
+       American, of England, 117
+
+     Croker, Richard, 278
+
+     Cromwell as a fertiliser, 190
+
+     Crooks, William, elected Premier, 271
+
+     Crosland, W. H., 88
+
+     Cuba as a cause of war, 12
+
+     Cyrano de Bergerac, 196, 202
+
+
+D
+
+     Debtors favoured by laws, 403
+
+     Democrats correspond to Liberals, 256
+
+     Demolins, Edmond, on Anglo-Saxon superiority, 2;
+       on _l'Anglais_, 37
+
+     Doctor, the making of a, 69
+
+     "Dog eat dog," 388
+
+     Domestic and imported goods, 163
+
+     Drama, the, in England and America, 201
+
+     Drunkenness, in London, 131
+
+     Dunne, F. P., 154
+
+
+E
+
+     Education, in England and America, 166;
+       object of American, 193
+
+     Elections, purity of, 229 (note);
+       municipal, 239;
+       to Congress, 241;
+       of a Prime Minister, 265;
+       the last English general, 274;
+       virulence of American, 281
+
+     Electric light, towns lighted by, 367
+
+     Embalmed beef scandals, 341
+
+     Emerson, R. W., on the Civil War, 188;
+       the apostle of the individual, 382
+
+     English-made goods, 365, 373
+
+     English society, changes in, 314
+
+     English "style" in printing, 221
+
+     Englishmen, local varieties of, 85;
+       effect of expansion on, 95;
+       feeling of, toward Americans, 99, 434;
+       as specialists, 105;
+       dropping their H's, 106;
+       check-suited, 108;
+       their cosmopolitanism, 114;
+       as husbands, 123;
+       insularity of, 145;
+       as grumblers, 149;
+       lecturing, 195;
+       as linguists, 206;
+       study of antiquity, 208;
+       careless of speech, 220;
+       in American politics, 226;
+       in English politics, 231;
+       political integrity of, 238, 278;
+       and business, 321;
+       misunderstand American people, 347;
+       the world's admiration of, 349;
+       religious feeling in, 353;
+       sense of honour in, 359;
+       commercial morality of, 365;
+       distrust American industrial stability, 371;
+       as investors in U. S. and Canada, 379;
+       slowness of, 380;
+       as sportsmen, 415;
+       admirable qualities of, 448
+
+     European plan, the, 104
+
+     Exhibition, an American, in London, 161
+
+
+F
+
+     Federal Government, the, and Illinois, 262;
+       and Louisiana, 262;
+       and California, 263;
+       powers of, 288
+
+     Federalism, progress of, in America, 217
+
+     Feminism, 139
+
+     Ferguson, 133
+
+     _Fliegende Blaetter_, 153
+
+     Football in England, 412
+
+     Foreign elements in the American people, 58, 80, 82, 138, 226
+
+     Forty-fourth Regiment, the, 40
+
+     France, England's _entente_ with, 8;
+       and American commerce, 378
+
+     Franklin, Benjamin, his _Autobiography_, 157;
+       and English political morality, 280
+
+     Frauds in American business, 324
+
+     Free silver, poison, the, 235;
+       campaign of 1896, 280
+
+     Freeman, E. A., on the Englishman of America, 42
+
+     Frenchmen, opinions of, 2, 36, 37, 92, 139, 177, 378;
+       attitude towards women, 120;
+       towards learning, 205
+
+     Frontier life, as a discipline, 72, 381
+
+
+G
+
+     _Gentleman_, Bismarck's _parole de_, 234
+
+     Gentlemen, brewers as, 315;
+       and business men, 316;
+       in sport, 420
+
+     Gentlemen's agreement, the, 354
+
+     George, Lloyd, 334
+
+     Germans, outnumber Irish in N. Y., 58;
+       attitude toward women, 120, 140;
+       humour of, 153;
+       laboriousness of, 205;
+       in politics, 226, 255;
+       as judges of honesty, 351 (note);
+       in sport, 426
+
+     Germany, ambitions of, 29;
+       Monroe Doctrine aimed at, 46
+
+     Gibson, C. D., 160
+
+     Girl, the American, 130
+
+     Gladstone, W. E., American admiration for, 167;
+       on Japan, 205
+
+     Golf, the power of, 409
+
+     Granger agitation, the, 298
+
+     Gravel-pit, politics in a, 282
+
+     Great Britain, peaceful disposition of, 8, 23;
+       pride of, 14, 61;
+       desires alliance with U. S., 19;
+       American hostility to, in 1895, 46;
+       its nearness to America geographically, 50;
+       commercially, 52;
+       historically, 54;
+       America's only enemy, 55;
+       its army in S. Africa, 75;
+       diversity of tongues in, 85;
+       Norman influence in, 87;
+       Canadian opinion of, 92;
+       miraculously enlarged, 94;
+       insularity of, 145;
+       luck of, 149;
+       cannot be judged from London, 150;
+       class distinctions disappearing, 212;
+       politics in, 231;
+       municipal bosses in, 232;
+       American conditions transplanted to, 237, 266;
+       electing a Prime Minister in, 270;
+       municipal politics in, 279;
+       becoming democratised, 314;
+       a creditor nation, 323;
+       trust-ridden, 329;
+       wealth of, 386;
+       solicitor-cursed, 393;
+       as the mother of sports, 414;
+       preoccupation of, 433
+
+     "Grieg, the American," 200
+
+
+H
+
+     Hague, Conference at The, 17
+
+     Hanotaux, Gabriel, on American commerce, 378
+
+     Harrison, Benjamin, 47
+
+     Hays, C. M., 310
+
+     Hearst, W. R., and England, 46;
+       bad influence of, 282;
+       inventor of the yellow press, 342 (note)
+
+     Hell-box, the, 281
+
+     Helleu, Paul, 196
+
+     Higginson, T. W., on American temperament, 2
+
+     Hill, James J., 310
+
+     Hoar, U. S. Senator, on England, 1;
+       on the hatred of the British, 57
+
+     Homer as a Tory, 257
+
+     Homogeneousness of the American people, 83, 211, 451
+
+     Hotel, the Fifth Avenue, 122
+
+     Hotels, ladies' entrances to, 120
+
+     Howells, W. D., 147
+
+     Hughitt, Marvin, 311, 359
+
+     Humour, American and English, 152
+
+
+I
+
+     Ideals, American devotion to, 10
+
+     Illinois and the Federal Government, 262
+
+     Immigration problem, the, 81
+
+     India, 112
+
+     Indians, red, regard of, for Englishmen, 349;
+       in the war of Independence, 350 (note);
+       Turkish baths of, 363
+
+     Individuality, American insistence on, 382, 391
+
+     Insularity, English and American, 145
+
+     International sentiments, how formed, 291
+
+     Ireland, Burke's feeling for, 101
+
+     Irish, the influence of, against England, 58, 444;
+       attitude towards women, 140;
+       vote in politics, 227;
+       as a corrupting influence, 252;
+       non-Anglo-Saxon, 254;
+       lack independence, 255;
+       in New York, 277
+
+     Irving, Washington, on frontiersmen, 381
+
+     Italians, in municipal politics, 241, 253;
+       lynched in New Orleans, 262
+
+
+J
+
+     James, Henry, 155
+
+     Japan, England's alliance with, 8;
+       its eclectic method, 193;
+       Mr. Gladstone on, 205;
+       and California, 263, 287;
+       tin-tacks for, 375
+
+     Japanese, in California, 263;
+       British admiration of, 351;
+       watering their horses, 367;
+       as "John," 376
+
+     Johnson, Samuel, 132
+
+     Joint purses, 332
+
+     Jonson, Ben, 215
+
+     Justice in American courts, 400
+
+
+K
+
+     King George men, 349
+
+     Kipling, Rudyard, his "type-writer girl," 132;
+       "The Sea Wife," 187;
+       "The Monkey-Puzzler," 380;
+       "An Error in the Fourth Dimension," 408
+
+
+L
+
+     La Farge, John, 103, 161
+
+     Lang, Andrew, on Americanisms, 221
+
+     Law, Bonar, 334
+
+     Legislators must read and write, 71
+
+     Legislatures, quality of American State, 79, 401
+
+     Letters, two, 389
+
+     Lewis, Alfred Henry, 154
+
+     Liberals, English, and Democrats, 256;
+       influence of, on American thought, 346
+
+     "Liberty, that damned absurd word," 10
+
+     _Life_, New York, 129, 162
+
+     Literature, English ignorance of American, 157
+
+     Litigation, American dislike of, 394
+
+     "Live and let live," 388
+
+     Lobbyists, 244
+
+     Locomotives, temporary and permanent, 396
+
+     Log-rolling, 249
+
+     London, foreign affairs in, 114;
+       Strand improvements, 151;
+       "raining in," 163;
+       a Tammany Hall in, 232
+
+     Lord, Englishmen's love of a, 309
+
+     Lords, the House of, and the U. S. Senate, 313;
+       a defence of, 342
+
+     Louisiana and the Federal Government, 262
+
+     Loyal Legion, the, 187, 189
+
+     Luck, English belief in, 108
+
+     Lying, American ability in, 352
+
+     Lynchings, 302
+
+
+M
+
+     MacDowell, Edward, 200
+
+     Mafia in New Orleans, 263
+
+     Magazines, American, 160, 171, 180
+
+     Mansfield, Richard, 202
+
+     Max O'Rell, on John Bull and Jonathan, 36, 92;
+       on American newspapers, 177
+
+     Merchant marine, the American, 63
+
+     Mexico, possible annexation of, 27
+
+     Mining camp life, 70, 132
+
+     "Molly-be-damned," 134
+
+     Monopolies, artificial and natural, 407
+
+     Moore, _Zeluco_, 119
+
+     Morality, of the two people, sexual, 120;
+       political, _see under_ Corruption;
+       commercial, 308, 400;
+       sporting, 426
+
+     Morgan, Pierpont, 358
+
+     Mormons and ants, 214
+
+     Morris, Clara, 201
+
+     Mount Stephen, Lord, 310
+
+     Municipal politics, 231, 239, 242
+
+     Muensterberg, Hugo, on England, 36;
+       on American commercial ethics, 351;
+       on sport, 426
+
+     Music in England and America, 198
+
+
+N
+
+     N---- G----, 125
+
+     Navarro, Madame de, 201
+
+     Navigating, how to learn, 70
+
+     Navy, the American, 62
+
+     Negro problem, the, 301
+
+     New Orleans, battle of, 41;
+       the Mafia in, 263
+
+     New York, not typically American, 72;
+       proud of London, 163;
+       culture of, 219;
+       Irish influence in, 256;
+       in national politics, 277
+
+     Newspapers, American and English, 177;
+       sensationalism in, 326;
+       peculiarities of American, 340
+
+     Norman influence in England, 87
+
+     Northern Pacific Railroad, the, 361
+
+     Norton, James, 163
+
+
+O
+
+     Operas, American knowledge of, 198
+
+     Opportunity, America and, 387
+
+     Oxenstiern, Count, 149
+
+     Oxford, value of, 169
+
+
+P
+
+     Packing-house scandals, 326
+
+     Panic, financial, the, of 1907, 325, 402
+
+     Parliament, railway influence in, 246;
+       compared with Congress, 249, 344
+
+     Parsnips, 102
+
+     Parties, the two great, in America, 256;
+       interdependence of national and local organisations, 264
+
+     Patronage, party, 265
+
+     Peace, universal, the possibility of, 13, 32, 431
+
+     Peerage, an American, 310;
+       democracy of the British, 316;
+       morals of, 338
+
+     Pheasants in London, 416
+
+     Philadelphia, corruption in, 252
+
+     Philistinism in England and America, 185
+
+     Pigs, in Chicago, 177;
+       how to roast, 372
+
+     Pilgrims, the Society of, 47
+
+     Platform in American sense, 215
+
+     Poet's Corner, 132
+
+     Police, corruption through the, 232
+
+     Politics, American, the foreign vote in, 227, 443;
+       the "best people" in, 228, 441;
+       what it means in America, 230;
+       municipal, 231;
+       Republican and Democrat, meaning of, 256;
+       national and municipal, 264;
+       President Roosevelt in, 300
+
+     Polo, American, 412
+
+     Pooling, railway, 332, 357
+
+     Poppycock, 426
+
+     Postal laws, 171
+
+     Posters, American humour and, 155
+
+     Presidency, Mr. Roosevelt and the, 293
+
+     Protection, policy of, 65, 245, 253
+
+     Publishers, American and English, 222
+
+     _Punch_, London, 152, 198
+
+     Putnam, Herbert, and H. G. Wells, 93
+
+
+R
+
+     Railways, oppression of, by States, 297, 403;
+       pooling by, 332;
+       working agreements in English, 333;
+       English and American attitude towards, contrasted, 334;
+       morality on American, 355;
+       and English, 359;
+       peculation on, 361;
+       and the Standard Oil Co., 392
+
+     Reed, E. T., 154
+
+     Reich, Dr. Emil, 126
+
+     Religious feeling of the two peoples, 353
+
+     Re-mount scandal, 341
+
+     Representative system, the, 247
+
+     Republican party, the, in Philadelphia, 252;
+       corresponds to English conservatives, 256
+
+     Reverence, American lack of, 48, 76
+
+     Rhodes, Cecil, 319
+
+     Rhodes scholarships, 166
+
+     River and harbour bills, 249
+
+     Robin, the American, 215
+
+     Robinson, Philip, on Chicago, 177
+
+     Rodin, A., 196
+
+     Roman Catholic Church in relation to women, 140
+
+     Roosevelt, imaginary telegram from, 16;
+       and the merchant marine, 66;
+       and purity of elections, 229 (note);
+       and post-route doctrine, 290;
+       his influence for good, 293;
+       his commonplace virtues, 293 (note);
+       inventor of the "'fraid strap," 294;
+       "Teddy" or "Theodore," 295;
+       an aristocrat, 295;
+       and the corporations, 296;
+       misrepresentation of, 298;
+       as a politician, 300;
+       his imperiousness, 301;
+       and the negro problem, 305;
+       and wealth, 336;
+       as peacemaker, 445
+
+     Rostand, M. E., 196
+
+     Ruskin, John, price of his books, 175;
+       on America's lack of castles, 191;
+       on Tories, 257
+
+     Russia, England's agreement with, 8
+
+
+S
+
+     S---- B----, the Hon., 108
+
+     Sailors, British and American, fraternise, 39;
+       Americans as, 63
+
+     Schools, American, 170;
+       English, 176
+
+     Schurz, Carl, on American intelligence, 2
+
+     Schuyler, Montgomery, 103
+
+     Scotland, religious feeling in, 354
+
+     Sea-wife's sons, the, 187
+
+     Senate, the, its place in the Constitution, 286;
+       treaty-making power of, 287;
+       and the House of Lords, 313
+
+     Sepoys, blown from cannon, 112
+
+     Shakespeare in America, 195
+
+     Shaw, Albert, 451
+
+     Ship subsidies, 64
+
+     Shooting in America, 418
+
+     Sky-scrapers, 368
+
+     Speculation in America, 387
+
+     Smith, Sydney, on women speaking, 79
+
+     Society, American, mixed, 182, 442
+
+     Soldiers, American and British, in China, 39;
+       compared, 61;
+       material for, in U. S., 75;
+       British, in S. Africa, 75;
+       as farm hands, 186;
+       as Presidents, 187
+
+     Solicitors, 393
+
+     South, the dying spirit of the, 306
+
+     Southerners, in Northern States, 228;
+       lynchings by, 303
+
+     Spanish war, the, reasons for, 11;
+       England's feeling in, 60;
+       effect on the American people, 113
+
+     Sparks, Edwin E., on frontiersmen, 382
+
+     Speech, uniformity of American, 85;
+       American and English compared, 209, 219;
+       purism in, 219
+
+     Sport, amateur, in America, 409
+
+     Stage, the American, 201
+
+     Stamp tax, American dislike of, 398
+
+     Stamped paper, 398
+
+     Standard Oil Co., 391
+
+     State legislatures, corruption in, 235;
+       shortcomings of, 401
+
+     States, governments of the, 260;
+       sovereignty of, 261, 285, 290;
+       and English counties, 264 (note);
+       justice in, 401
+
+     Steel, American competition in, 375
+
+     Steevens, G. W., on Anglo-American alliance, 3;
+       on American feeling for England, 100
+
+     Stenographers as hostesses, 132
+
+     Stevenson, R. L., on American speech, 85
+
+     Strap, the 'fraid, 294
+
+     Strathcona and Mount Royal, Lord, 310
+
+     Style, American and English literary, 221
+
+     Superficiality of Americans, 193, 204
+
+     Surveyor, the making of a, 69
+
+
+T
+
+     _Table d'hote_ in America, 104
+
+     Tammany Hall, 278
+
+     Taxes, corrupt assessment of, 242
+
+     Thackeray, W. M., on Anglo-American friendship, 1
+
+     Thomas, Miss M. Carey, 143
+
+     Thoreau, his _Walden_, 157
+
+     Throne, the British, as a democratic force, 335
+
+     Tin-tacks for Japan, 375
+
+     Travis, W. J., 408
+
+     Treaties, inability of U. S. to enforce, 263, 285;
+       how made in America, 286
+
+     Truesdale, W. H., 359
+
+     Trusts, Mr. Roosevelt and the, 295;
+       in England and America, 329, 334, 391;
+       beneficial, 406
+
+
+U
+
+     Unit rule, the, 267, 270
+
+     United States, the, has become a world-power, 6;
+       in danger of war, 8;
+       power of, 14;
+       expansion of, 24;
+       further from England than England from it, 50;
+       the future of, 90;
+       size of, 94;
+       the equal of Great Britain, 163;
+       unification of, 217;
+       politics in, 227;
+       Congress of, 244;
+       and Italy, 262;
+       and Japan, 263;
+       its treaty relations with other powers, 286;
+       a peerage in, 310;
+       its reckless youth, 323;
+       has sown its wild oats, 324;
+       growth of, 364;
+       commercial power of, 371;
+       a debtor nation, 384
+
+     Universities, American and English, 167
+
+     Usurpation by the general government, 289
+
+
+V
+
+     Van Horne, Sir William, 310
+
+     Venezuelan incident, the, 43, 156
+
+     Verestschagin, Vasili, 197, 202
+
+     Vigilance Committees, 302, 364
+
+     Vote, foreign in America, the, 227
+
+     Voting, premature, 227
+
+
+W
+
+     Wall Street methods, 326
+
+     War stores scandal, 341
+
+     Washington, Booker, 305
+
+     Wealth, President Roosevelt and, 296;
+       its diffusion in America, 330;
+       no counterpoise to, in U. S., 335;
+       purchasing power of, in England and America, 335 (note);
+       prejudice against, 403
+
+     Wells, H. G., on American "sense of the State," 89;
+       on the lack of an upper class in America, 309 (note);
+       on trade, 404
+
+     West, the feeling of, for the East, 73;
+       English ignorance of, 200;
+       Yankee distrust of, 369
+
+     West Indies, transfer to the U. S., 32
+
+     West Point, incident at, 41
+
+     Whiskey and literature, 175
+
+     Wild-fowling, 418
+
+     Winter, E. W., 359
+
+     Woman, an American, in England, 103;
+       in Westminster Abbey, 132;
+       in a mining camp, 133;
+       on a train, 134
+
+     Women, American attitude toward, 119 _sqq._;
+       in the streets of cities, 120;
+       English, in America, 122;
+       English treatment of, 123;
+       the morality of married, 129;
+       adaptability of American, 137;
+       their share in civic life, 137;
+       Anglo-Saxon attitude toward, 140;
+       effect of co-education on, 143;
+       culture of American, 182;
+       musical knowledge of American, 198
+
+     _World_, the N. Y., 342 (note)
+
+
+Y
+
+     Yankee, the real, 369;
+       earls, 440
+
+     Yellow press, the, 327, 340, 342 (note)
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The following words use an oe ligature in the original:
+
+     manoeuvres       phoenixes
+
+The following corrections have been made to the text:
+
+     Page 85: the Americans _homogeneous_[original has
+     _homoeogeneous_] over a much larger
+
+     Page 101: Americans will protest against being called[original
+     has call] a homogeneous
+
+     Page 118: It is less offensive than[original has that] the
+     mature
+
+     Page 153: Englishmen do not know the meaning of a
+     joke.[153:1][Footnote anchor is missing in original]
+
+     Page 153: the clubs of Great Britain[original has Britian]
+
+     Page 208: he has not entire right to the best
+     wherever[original has where-ever hyphenated across a line
+     break] he may find it
+
+     Page 252: a stranger is[original has as] likely to get the
+     idea
+
+     Page 321: conditions of business are widely different.[period
+     is missing in original]
+
+     Page 354: copies of the famous "Gentleman's
+     Agreement,"[original has single quote]
+
+     Page 389: "[quotation mark missing in original]DEAR A.:
+
+     Page 453, under the entry for American people,
+     eclecticism,[comma missing in original] 194
+
+     Page 457: Helleu[original has Hellen], Paul, 196
+
+     Footnote 287-1: _The American Commonwealth_, vol. 1[original
+     has extraneous period], page 110
+
+On page 193, the original reads "... be able to remember when the _Daily
+Telegraph_ created, by appealing...." There should be a word of
+explanation after "created".
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Twentieth Century American, by
+H. Perry Robinson
+
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