WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA
The title I have chosen for this chapter is indiscreet, and, as some readers may think, misleading. At least it needs this explanation—that there is no absolute point of view in England about the United States. "England" does not think (a statement not intended to be humorous at the expense of my own people) any more than any nation may be said to think in a single unanimous way about any subject under the sun. England is a collection of individuals and groups of individuals, each with different points of view or shades of view, based upon certain ideals and knowledge, or upon passion, ignorance, elementary common sense, or elementary stupidity, like the United States and every country on earth.
It would convey an utterly false impression to analyze and expound the opinions of one such class, or to give as a general truth a few individual opinions. One can only get at something like the truth by following the drift of current thought, by contrasting national characteristics, and by striking a balance between extremes of thought. It is that which I propose to do in this chapter, frankly, and without fear of giving offense, because to my mind insincerity on a subject like this does more harm than good.
I will not disguise, therefore, at the outset, that after the armistice which followed the Great War huge numbers of people in England became annoyed, bitter, and unfriendly to the United States. The causes of that unkindness of sentiment were to some extent natural and inevitable, owing to the state of mind in England at that time. They had their foundations in the patriotism and emotion of a people who had just emerged from the crudest ordeal which had ever called to their endurance in history. When American soldiers, sailors, politicians, and patriots said, "Well, boys, we won the war!" which, in their enthusiasm for great achievements, they could hardly avoid saying at public banquets or welcomes home, where every word is not measured to the sensibilities of other people or to the exact truth, English folk were hurt. They were not only hurt, but they were angry. Mothers of boys in mean streets, or rural villages, or great mansions, reading these words in newspapers which gave them irritating prominence, said, "So they think that we did nothing in the years before they came to France!" and some mothers thought of the boys who had died in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, and they hated the thought that Americans should claim the victory which so many English, Scottish, Irish, Canadians, Australians, New-Zealanders, South-Africans, and French had gained most of all by long-suffering, immense sacrifice, and hideous losses.
They did not know, though I for one tried to tell them, that all over the United States American people did not forget, even in their justified enthusiasm for the valor of their own men and the immense power they had prepared to hurl against the enemy, that France and England had borne the brunt of the war in the long years when Germany was at her strongest.
A friend of mine—an English officer—was in a New York hotel on Armistice Night, when emotion and patriotic enthusiasm were high—and hot. A young American mounted a chair, waving the Stars and Stripes. He used the good old phrase: "Well, boys, we won the war! The enemy fell to pieces as soon as the doughboys came along. England and France could not do the trick without us. We taught 'em how to fight and how to win!"
My friend smiled, sat tight, and said nothing. He remembered a million dead in British ranks, untold and unrecorded heroism, the first French victory of the Marne, the years of epic fighting when French and British troops had hurled themselves against the German lines and strained his war-machine. But it was Armistice Night, and in New York, and the "Yanks" had done jolly well, and they had a right to jubilation for their share in victory. Let the boy shout, and good luck to him. But an American rose from his chair and pushed his way toward my friend.
"I'm ashamed to hear such rant before British and French officers," he said, holding out his hand. "We know that our share is not as great as yours, within a thousand miles."
Those were chivalrous words. They represented the conviction, I am sure, of millions of Americans of the more thoughtful type, who would not allow themselves to be swept away beyond the just merits of their national achievements, even by the fervor of the moment.
But in England people only knew the boast and not the modesty. Because some Americans claimed too much, the English of the lower and less intelligent classes belittled the real share of victory which belonged to America, and became resentful. It was so in France as in England. It was lamentable, but almost unavoidable, and when this resentment and this sullen denial of American victory became known in the United States, passed over the wires by newspaper correspondents, it naturally aroused counter-action, equal bitterness, and then we were in a vicious circle, abominable in its effect upon mutual understanding and liking.
All that, however, was limited to the masses, for the most part certainly, and was only used as poison propaganda by the gutter press on both sides of the Atlantic. Educated people in both countries understood the folly and squalor of that stuff, and discounted it accordingly.
What was more serious in its effect upon the intelligent classes was the refusal of the Senate to ratify the Peace Treaty and its repudiation of President Wilson's authority. I have already dealt in previous writings with that aspect of affairs, and have tried to prove my understanding of the American view. But there is also an English view, which Americans should know and understand.
At the time I am writing this chapter, and for some months previously, England has been irritated with the United States because of a sense of having been "let down" over the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations by American action. I think that irritation has been to some extent justified. When President Wilson came to London he received, as I have told elsewhere, the most enthusiastic and triumphant ovation that has ever been given to a foreign visitor by the population of that great old city. The cheers that rose in storms about him were shouted not only because his personality seemed to us then to have the biggest and most hopeful qualities of leadership in the world, but because he was, as we thought, the authorized representative of the United States, to whom, through him, we gave homage. It was only months afterward, when the Peace Treaty had been signed and when the League of Nations (Wilson's child) had been established, that we were told that Wilson was not the authorized representative of the United States, that the American Senate did not recognize his authority to pledge the country to the terms of the treaty, and that the signature to the document was not worth ten cents. That made us look pretty foolish. It made France and Italy and other powers, who had yielded in many of their demands in order to satisfy President Wilson's principles, feel pretty mad. It made a laughingstock of the new-born League of Nations. It was the most severe blow to the prospects of world peace and reconstruction. In England, as I know, there were vast numbers of people who regarded the Peace Treaty as one of the most clumsy, illogical, and dangerous documents ever drawn up by a body of diplomats. I am one of those who think so. But that has nothing to do with the refusal of the Senate to acknowledge Wilson's signature.
The character of the clauses which created a series of international blunders leading inevitably to new wars unless they are altered during the next decade was not the cause of the Senate's "reservations." The American Senators did not seem to be worried about that aspect of the treaty. Their only worry was to safeguard the United States from any responsibility in Europe, and to protect their own traditional powers against an autocratic President. However right they may have been, it must at least be acknowledged by every broad-minded American that we in Europe were put completely "into the cart" by this action, and had some excuse for annoyance. All this is now past history, and no doubt before this book is published many other things will have happened as a consequence of the events which followed so rapidly upon the Peace of Versailles, so that what I am now writing will read like historical reminiscence. But it will always remain a painful chapter, and it will only be by mutual forbearance and the most determined efforts of people of good will on both sides of the Atlantic that the growth of a most lamentable misunderstanding between our two peoples in consequence of those unfortunate episodes will be prevented.
Another cause of popular discontent with the United States was the rather abrupt statement of Mr. Carter Glass, Secretary of the Treasury, that the United States would not grant any more loans to Europe so long as she failed to readjust her financial situation by necessary taxation, economy, and production.
The general (and in my opinion unjustified) anger aroused by this statement was expressed by a cartoon in Punch called "Another Reservation." It was a picture of a very sinister-looking Uncle Sam turning his back upon a starving woman and child who appeal to his charity, and he says: "Very sad case. But I'm afraid she ain't trying."
Mr. Punch is a formidable person in England, and by his barbed wit may destroy any public man or writing man who lays himself open to ridicule, but I ventured to risk that by denouncing the cartoon as unjust and unfair in spirit and fact. I pointed out that since the beginning of the war the United States had shown an immense, untiring, and inexhaustible generosity toward the suffering peoples of Europe, and reminded England how under Mr. Hoover's organization the American Relief Committee had fed the Belgian and French populations behind the German lines, and how afterward they had poured food into Poland, Serbia, Austria, and other starving countries. That challenge I made against Mr. Punch was supported by large numbers of English people who wrote to me expressing their agreement and their gratitude to America. They deplored the spirit of the cartoon and the evil nature of so many attacks in low-class journals of England against the United States, whose own gutter press was at the same time publishing most scurrilous abuse of us. But among the letters I received was one from an American lady which I will quote now, because it startled me at the time, and provides, in spite of its bitterness, some slight excuse for the criticism which was aroused in England at the time. If an American could feel like that, scourging her own people too much (as I think), it is more pardonable that English sentiment should have been a little ruffled by America's threat to abandon Europe.
I only wish with all my heart [she wrote] that the Punch cartoon is wholly undeserved, or that your kind "apologia" is wholly deserved. I have never been "too proud to fight," but a great deal too proud to wear laurels I haven't earned. Personally, I think the drubbing we are getting is wholesome and likely to do good. We have been given praise ad nauseam, and, to be honest, you can never compete with us on that ground. We can praise ourselves in terms that would silence any competitors....
I wish, too, that I could believe that the "beggars from Europe" had either their hats or their bags stuffed with dollars. I'm afraid you have spoken to the Americans, not to the beggars. I was one myself. I went home in April, prouder of my country than I had ever been, jealous of its good repute, and painfully anxious that it should live up to its reputation. I fear I found that people were not only tired of generosity, but wholly indifferent to the impressions being so widely circulated in the press—that France had been guilty of every form of petty ingratitude, that the atrocities of Great Britain in Ireland outdid the Germans in Belgium and France. A minority everywhere was struggling against the tide, with dignity, and the generosity I had so securely counted on from my own people. But the collections being made for the Serbians, for instance, were despairingly small. Belgian Relief had been turned into Serbian Relief groups, and from New York to California I heard the same tale—and, alas, experienced it—people were tired of giving, tired of the war. In New York I was invited to speak before a well-known Women's Club—I was "a guest of honor." I accepted, and spoke for ten minutes, and a woman at a table near by begged me to take up an immediate contribution. I was not at all anxious to do so, for it seemed a very base advantage to take of a luncheon invitation, so I referred her to the president. A contribution was taken up by a small group of women, all fashionably dressed, with pearl or "near-pearl," and the result was exactly $19.40. As there were between 200 and 300 women present in the ballroom, I was inexpressibly shocked, and sternly suggested that the president should announce the sum for which I should have to account, and her speech was mildly applauded. All through my trip I felt bewilderment. I had just come from Belgium and France, and the contrast oppressed me. I had the saddest kind of disillusionment, relieved by the most beautiful instances of charity and unselfishness.
Even in regard to the Relief of Belgium too much stress is laid on our generosity and a false impression has gone abroad—an impression nothing can ever eradicate. The organization of the B. R. F. was American, but Mr. Hoover never failed to underline how much of the fund came from Great Britain and Canada. In fact, the Belgian women embroidered their touching little phrases of gratitude to the Americans, as I myself saw, on Canadian flour sacks. During the first year or so the contributions of Americans were wholly incommensurate with our wealth and prosperity, and a letter from Gertrude Atherton a year after the war scourged us for our indifference even then.
Mr. Balfour's revelation that Great Britain had contributed £35,000,000 toward the relief of Austria, etc., made my heart go down still farther. I have tried to believe that my experience was due to something lacking in myself. People were so enchantingly kind, so ready to give me large and expensive lunches, dinners, teas—but they would not be induced to refrain from the lunches and contribute the cost of them toward my cause....
I hope you will pardon this long effusion. Like most Americans who have served abroad I feel we came in too late, we failed to stay on the ground to clear up afterward, and now we are indulging in the most wicked propaganda against our late allies—France as well as England. Personally, I realize that if we had contributed twenty times as much I should still not feel we had done enough. If you were not so confirmed a friend of America, I could never write as I have done, but just because you reach such an enormous public, because your influence is so great, I am anxious that America should not be given undue praise—which she does not herself credit—and that the disastrous results of her policy (if we have one) should be printed clear for her to read and profit by.
That is a sincere, painful, and beautiful letter, and I think it ought to be read in the United States, not because I indorse its charge against America's lack of generosity—I cannot do that—but because it exculpates England and France of unreasoning disappointment, and is also the cry of a generous American soul, moved by the sufferings of Europe, and eager that her people should help more, and not less, in the reconstruction of the world. The English people did not take her view that the Americans had not done enough or were tired of generosity. It must be admitted by those who followed our press that, apart from two gutter journals, there was a full recognition of what the United States had done, and continual reminders that no policy would be tolerated which did not have as its basis Anglo-American friendship.
Upon quite another level of argument is the criticism of American psychology and political evolution expressed by various English writers upon their return from visits to the United States, and a fairly close acquaintance with the character of American democracy as it was revealed during the war, and afterward. The judgment of these writers does not affect public opinion, because it does not reach down to the masses. It is confined rather to the student type of mind, and probably has remained unnoticed by the average man and woman in the United States. It is, however, very interesting because it seeks to forecast the future of America as a world power and as a democracy. The chief charge leveled against the intellectual tendency of the United States may be summed up in one word, "intolerance." Men like George Bernard Shaw, J. A. Hobson, and H. W. Massingham do not find in their study of the American temperament or in the American form of government the sense of liberty with which the people of the United States credit themselves, and with which all republican democracies are credited by the proletariat in European countries.
They seem inclined to believe, indeed, that America has less liberty in the way of free opinion and free speech than the English under their hereditary monarchy, and that the spirit of the people is harshly intolerant of minorities and nonconforming individuals, or of any idea contrary to the general popular opinion of the times. Some of these critics see in the "Statue of Liberty" in New York Harbor a figure of mockery behind which is individualism enchained by an autocratic oligarchy and trampled underfoot by the intolerance of the masses. They produce in proof of this not only the position of an American President, with greater power over the legislature than any constitutional king, but the mass violence of the majority in its refusal to admit any difference of opinion with regard to war aims during the time of war fever, and the tyrannical action of the Executive in its handling of labor disputes and industrial leaders, during and after the war.
It is, I think, true that as soon as America entered the war there was no liberty of opinion allowed in the United States. There was no tolerance of "conscientious objectors" nor mercy toward people who from religious motives, or intellectual crankiness, were antagonistic to the use of armed might. People who did not subscribe to the Red Cross funds were marked down, I am told, dismissed from their posts, and socially ruined. Many episodes of that kind were reported, and startled the advanced radicals in England who had regarded the United States as the land of liberty. Americans may retort that we did not give gentle treatment to our own "conscientious objectors," and that is true. Many of them were put into prison and roughly handled, but on the other hand there was a formal, though insincere, acknowledgment that even in time of war there should be liberty of conscience, and a clause to that effect was passed by Parliament. In spite also of the severity of censorship, and the martial law that was enforced by the Defense of the Realm Act, there was, I believe, a greater freedom of criticism allowed to the press than would have been tolerated by the United States. Periodicals like the Nation and the New Statesman, even newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Morning Post, indulged in violent criticism of the conduct of the war, the methods of the War Cabinet, the action and military policy of leaders like Lord Kitchener, and the failure of military campaigns in the Dardanelles and other places. No breath of criticism against American leadership or generalship was admitted to the American press, and their war correspondents were censored with far greater severity than their English comrades, who were permitted to describe, very fully, reverses as well as successes in the fields of war.
What, however, has startled the advanced wing of English political thought more than all that is the ruthless way in which the United States government has dealt with labor disputes and labor leaders since the war. The wholesale arrests and deportations of men accused of revolutionary propaganda seem to these sympathizers with revolutionary ideals as gross in their violation of liberty as the British government's coercion of Ireland. These people believe that American democracy has failed in the essential principle which alone justifies democracy, a toleration of minorities of opinion and of the absolute liberty of the individual within the law. They say that even in England there is greater liberty, in spite of its mediæval structure. In Hyde Park on Sunday morning one may hear speeches which would cause broken heads and long terms of imprisonment if uttered in New York. Labor, they say, would rise in instant and general revolt if any of their men were treated with the tyranny which befalls labor leaders in the United States.
To my mind a great deal of this criticism is due to a misconception of the meaning of democracy. In England it was a tradition of liberal thought that democracy meant not only the right of the people to govern themselves, but the right of the individual or of any body of men to express their disagreement with the policy of the state, or with the majority opinion, or with any idea which annoyed them in any way. But, as we have seen by recent history, democratic rule does not mean individual liberty. Democracy is government by the majority of the people, and that majority will be less tolerant of dissent than autocracy itself, which can often afford to give greater liberty of expression to the minority because of its inherent strength. The Russian Soviet government, which professes to be the most democratic form of government in the world, is utterly intolerant of minorities. I suppose there is less individual liberty in Russia than in any other country, because disagreement with the state opinion is looked upon as treachery to the majority rule. So in the United States, which is a real democracy, in spite of the power of capital, there is less toleration of eccentric notions than in England, especially when the majority of Americans are overwhelmed by a general impulse of enthusiasm or passion, such as happened when they went into the war. The people of the minority are then regarded as enemies of the state, traitors to their fellow-citizens, and outlaws. They are crushed accordingly by the weight of mass opinion, which is ruthless and merciless, with more authority and power than the decree of a king or the law of an aristocratic form of government.
Although disagreeing to some extent with those who criticize the American sense of liberty, I do believe that there is a danger in the United States of an access of popular intolerance, and sudden gusts of popular passion, which may sweep the country and lead to grave trouble. Being the greatest democracy in the world, it is subject to the weakness of democracy as well as endowed with its strength, and to my mind the essential weakness of democracy is due to the unsteadiness and feverishness of public opinion. When the impulse of public opinion happens to be right it is the most splendid and vital force in the world, and no obstacle can stand against it. The idealism of a people attains almost supernatural force. But if it happens to be wrong it may lead to national and world disaster.
In countries like England public opinion is still controlled and checked by a system of heavy drag wheels, which is an intolerable nuisance when one wants to get moving. But that system is very useful when there are rocks ahead and the ship of state has to steer a careful course. Our constitutional monarchy, our hereditary chamber composed of men who do not hold their office by popular vote, our traditional and old-fashioned school of diplomacy, our social castes dominated by those on top who are conservative and cautious because of their possessions and privileges, are abominably hindering to ardent souls who want quick progress, but they are also a national safeguard against wild men. The British system of government, and the social structure rising by a series of caste gradations to the topmost ranks, are capable of tremendous reforms and changes being made gradually, and without any violent convulsion or break with tradition.
I am of opinion that this is not so in the United States, owing to the greater pressure of mass emotion. If, owing to the effects of war throughout the world, altering the economic conditions of life and the psychology of peoples, there is a demand for radical alteration in the conditions of labor within the United States, and for a different distribution of wealth (as there is bound to be), it is, in the opinion of many observers, almost certain that these changes will be effected after a period of greater violence in America than in England. The clash between capital and labor, they think, will be more direct and more ruthless in its methods of conflict on both sides. It will not be eased by the numerous differences of social class, shading off one into the other, which one finds in a less democratic country like mine, where the old aristocratic families and the country landowning families, below the aristocracy, are bound up traditionally with the sentiment of the agricultural population, and where the middle classes in the cities are sympathetic on the one hand with the just demands of the wage-earning crowd, and, on the other hand, by snobbishness, by romanticism, by intellectual association, and by financial ambitions with the governing, and moneyed, régime.
There are students of life in the United States who forecast two possible ways of development in the future history of the American people. Neither of them is pleasant to contemplate, and I hope that neither is true, but I think there is a shade of truth in them, and that they are sufficiently possible to be considered seriously as dangers ahead.
The first vision of these minor prophets (and gloomy souls) is a social revolution in the United States on Bolshevik lines, leading through civil strife between the forces of the wage-earning classes and the profit-holding classes to anarchy as fierce, as wild, and as bloody as that in Russia during the Reign of Terror.
They see Fifth Avenue swept by machine-gun fire, and its rich shops sacked, and some of its skyscrapers rising in monstrous bonfires to lick the sky with flames.
They see cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland in the hands of revolutionary committees of workmen after wild scenes of pillage and mob passion.
They see the rich daughters of millionaires stripped of their furs and their pearls and roughly handled by hordes of angry men, hungry after long strikes and lockouts, desperate because of a long and undecided warfare with the strong and organized powers of law and of capital.
Their vision is rather hazy about the outcome of this imaginary civil war, but of its immense, far-reaching anarchy they have no doubt, with the certainty that prophets have until the progress of history proves them to be false.
Let me say for myself that I do not pose as a prophet nor believe this particular prophecy in its lurid details. But I do believe that there may be considerable social strife in the United States for various reasons. One reason which stares one in the face is the immense, flaunting, and dangerous luxury of the wealthy classes in cities like New York. It is provocative and challenging to masses of wage-earners who find prices rising against them quicker than their wages rise, and who wish not only for a greater share of the proceeds of their labor, but also a larger control of the management and machinery of labor. The fight, if it comes, is just as much for control as for profit, and resistance on the part of capital will be fierce and ruthless on that point.
American society—the high caste of millionaires and semi-millionaires, and demi-semi-millionaires—is perhaps rather careless in its display of wealth and in its open manifestations of luxury. The long, unending line of automobiles that go crawling down Fifth Avenue and rushing down Riverside Drive, on any evening of the year, revealing women all aglitter with diamonds, with priceless furs round their white shoulders, in gowns that have cost the year's income of a working family, has no parallel in any capital of Europe. There is no such pageant of wealth in London or Paris. In no capital is there such luxury as one finds in New York hotels, mansions, and ballrooms. The evidence of money is overwhelming and oppressive. The generosity of many of these wealthy people, their own simplicity, good humor, and charm, are not safeguards against the envy and the hatred of those who struggle hard for a living wage and for a security in life which is harder still to get.
When I was in America I found a consciousness of this among the rich people, with some of whom I came in touch. They were afraid of the future. They saw trouble ahead, and they seemed anxious to build bridges between the ranks of labor and their own class. The wisest among them did not adopt the stiff-necked attitude of complete hostility to the demands of labor for a more equal share of profit and of governance. One or two men I met remembered the days when they were at the bottom of the ladder, and said, "Those fellows are right.... I'm going half-way to meet them."
If capital goes anything like half-way, there will be no bloody conflict in the United States. But there will be revolution, not less radical because not violent. That meeting half-way between capital and labor in the United States would be the greatest revolution the modern world has seen.
That, then, is one of the ways in which English observers see the future of the United States. The other way they suggest would be a great calamity for the world. It is the way of militarism—a most grisly thought!
It is argued by those who take this line of prophecy that democracy is no enemy of war. On the contrary, they say, a democracy like that of the United States, virile, easily moved to emotion, passionate, sure of its strength, jealous of its honor, and quick to resent any fancied insult, is more liable to catch the war fever than nations controlled by cautious diplomats and by hereditary rulers. It is generally believed now that the Great War in Europe which ravaged so many countries was not made by the peoples on either side, and that it did not happen until the rival powers on top desired it to happen and pressed the buttons and spoke the spell-words which called the armies to the colors. It is probable, and almost certain, that it would not have happened at all if the peoples had been left to themselves, if the decision of war and peace had been in their hands, and if their passions had not been artificially roused and educated. But that is no argument, some think, against the warlike character of strong democracies. The ancient Greeks were a great democracy, but they were the most ardent warriors of their world, and fought for markets, sea supremacy, and racial prestige.
So some people believe that the United States may adopt a philosophy of militarism challenging the sea-power of the British Empire, by adding Mexico to her dominions, and by capturing the strategic points of the world's trade routes. They see in the ease with which the United States adopted military service in the late war and the rapid, efficient way in which an immense army was raised and trained a menace to the future of the world, because what was done once to crush the enemy of France and England may be done again if France or England arouse the hostility of the American people. The intense self-confidence of the Americans, their latent contempt of European peoples, their quickness to take affront at fancied slights worked up by an unscrupulous press, their consciousness of the military power that was organized but only partially used in the recent war, and their growing belief that they are a people destined to take and hold the leadership of the world, constitute, in the opinion of some nervous onlookers, a psychology which may lead the United States into tremendous and terrible adventures. I have heard it stated by many people not wholly insane that the next world war will be mainly a duel between the United States and the British Empire.
They are not wholly insane, the people who say these things over the dinner-table or in the club smoking-room, yet to my mind such opinions verge on insanity. It is of course always possible that any nation may lose all sense of reason and play the wild beast, as Germany did. It is always possible that by some overwhelming popular passion any nation may be stricken with war fever. But of all nations in the world I think the people of the United States are least likely to behave in that way, especially after their experience in the European war.
The men who went back were under no illusions as to the character of modern warfare. They hated it. They had seen its devilishness. They were convinced of its idiocy, and in every American home to which they returned were propagandists against war as an argument or as a romance. Apart from that, it is almost certain that militarism of an aggressive kind is repugnant to the tradition and instinct of the American people. They have no use for "shining armor" and all the old shibboleths of war's pomp and pageantry which put a spell on European peoples. The military tradition based on the falsity of war's "glory" is not in their spirit or in their blood. They will fight for the safety of civilization, as it was threatened in 1914, for the rescue of free peoples menaced by brutal destruction, and they will fight, as all brave people will fight, to safeguard their own women and children and liberty.
But I do not believe that the American people will ever indulge in aggressive warfare for the sake of imperial ambitions or for world domination. Their spirit of adventure finds scope in higher ideals, in the victories of science and commerce, in the organization of every-day life, in the triumph of industry, in the development of the natural sources of wealth which belong to their great country and their ardent individuality. They believe in peace, if we may judge by their history and tradition, and non-interference with the outside world. Their hostility to the peace terms and to certain clauses in the League of Nations was due to a deep-seated distrust of entanglements with foreign troubles, jealousies, and rivalries, and the spirit of the United States, so far from desiring "mandates" over great populations outside the frontiers of its own people, harked back to the old faith in a "splendid isolation" free from imperial responsibilities. The people were perhaps too cautious and too reserved. They risked the chance they had of reshaping the structure of human society to a higher level of common sense and liberty. They made "reservations" which caused the withdrawal of their representatives from the council-chamber of the Allied nations. But that was due not merely, I think, to party politics or the passionate rivalry of statesmen. Truly and instinctively, it was due to the desire of the American people to draw back to their own frontiers and to work out their own destiny in peace, neither interfering nor being interfered with, according to their traditional and popular policy.
Apart from individual theorists, of the "cranky" kind, the main body of intellectual opinion in England, as far as I know it, looks to the United States as the arbitrator of the world's destiny, and the leader of the world's democracies, on peaceful and idealistic lines. There is a conviction among many of us—not killed by the controversy over the Peace Treaty—that the spirit of the American people as a whole is guided by an innate common sense free from antiquated spell-words, facing the facts of life shrewdly and honestly, and leaning always to the side of popular liberty against all tyrannies of castes, dynasties, and intolerance. Aloof from the historical enmities that still divide the nations of Europe, yet not aloof in sympathy with the sufferings, the strivings, and the sentiment of those peoples, the United States is able to play the part of a reconciling power, in any league of nations, with a detached and disinterested judgment. It is above all because it is disinterested that Europe has faith and trust in its sense of justice. It is not out for empire, for revenge, or for diplomatic vanity. Its people are supporters of President Wilson's ideal of "open covenants openly arrived at," and of the "self-determination of nations," however violently they challenge the authority by which their President pledged them to definite clauses in an unpopular contract. They are a friendly and not unfriendly folk in their instincts and in their methods. They respond quickly and generously to any appeal to honest sentiment, though they have no patience with hypocrisy. They are realists, and hate sham, pose, and falsehood. Give them "a square deal" and they will be scrupulous to a high standard of business morality. Because of the infusion of foreign blood in their democracy which has been slowly produced from the great melting-pot of nations, they are subject to all the sensibilities of the human race and not narrowly fixed to one racial idea or type of mind. The Celt, the Slav, the Saxon, the Teuton, the Hebrew, and the Latin strains are present in the subconsciousness of the American people, so that they are capable of an enormous range of sympathy with human nature in its struggle upward to the light. They are the new People of Destiny in the world of progress, because after their early adventures of youth, their time of preparation, their immense turbulent growth, their forging of tools, and training of soul, they stand now in their full strength and maturity, powerful with the power of a great, free, confident people.
To some extent, and I think in an increasing way, the old supremacy which Europe had is passing westward. Europe is stricken, tired, and poor. America is hearty, healthy, and rich. Intellectually it is still boyish and young and raw. There is the wisdom as well as the sadness of old age in Europe. We have more subtlety of brain, more delicate sense of art, a literature more expressive of the complicated emotions which belong to an old heritage of civilization, luxury, and philosophy. But I look for a Golden Age of literature and art in America which shall be like our Elizabethan period, fresh and spring-like, and rich in vitality and promise. I am bound to believe that out of the fusion of races in America, and out of their present period of wealth and power, and out of this new awakening to the problems of life outside their own country, there will come great minds, and artists, and leaders of thought, surpassing any that have yet revealed themselves. All our reading of history points to that evolution. The flowering-time of America seems due to arrive, after its growing pains.
Be that as it may, it is clear, at least, that the destiny of the American people is now marked out for the great mission of leading the world to a new phase of civilization. By the wealth they have, and by their power for good or evil, they have a controlling influence in the reshaping of the world after its convulsions. They cannot escape from that power, even though they shrink from its responsibility. Their weight thrown one way or the other will turn the scale of all the balance of the world's desires. People of destiny, they have the choice of arranging the fate of many peoples. By their action they may plunge the world into strife again or settle its peace. They may kill or cure. They may be reconcilers or destroyers. They may be kind or cruel. It is a terrific power for any people to hold. If I were a citizen of the United States I should be afraid—afraid lest my country should by passion, or by ignorance, or by sheer carelessness take the wrong way.
I think some Americans have that fear. I have met some who are anxious and distressed. But I think that the majority of Americans do not realize the power that has come to them nor their new place in the world. They have a boisterous sense of importance and prestige, but rather as a young college man is aware of his lustiness and vitality without considering the duties and the dangers that have come to him with manhood. They are inclined to a false humility, saying: "We aren't our brothers' keepers, anyway. We needn't go fussing around. Let's keep to our own job and let the other people settle their own affairs." But meanwhile the other people know that American policy, American decisions, the American attitude in world problems, will either make or mar them. It is essential for the safety of the world, and of civilization itself, that the United States should realize its responsibilities and fulfill the destiny that has come to it by the evolution of history. To those whom I call the People of Destiny I humbly write the words: Let the world have peace.