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.
