CONTENTS.

PAGE
The Proposition[7]
Millionaires[19]
Humourists[29]
The American Woman[37]
Literature[45]
The President[55]
Advertisement[61]
The Pea-nut Mind[71]
The Drama[81]
Sport[91]
Hogs[101]
Verdict[109]

COPYRIGHT 1907
BY
A. F. THOMPSON
IN
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
AND IN
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND

All Rights Reserved

CHAPTER I
The Proposition

“And what, prithee, hath overtaken Guy?”

“Guy—why Guy diced and drabbed and ruffled away his inheritance, and to save his neck took shipping for the tobacco plantations where, they say, he married a daughter of Lo, the poor Indian, and none hath since heard of him.”

This is the kind of talk that one could hear in the clubs of London a matter of, say, two hundred and fifty years ago. In plain terms, Guy, poor devil, being a wastrel,—and a broken wastrel at that—had betaken himself to America, there probably to found one of the “fine old Virginia families” of which American writers, and particularly American fictional writers, are so prone to babble.

America, of course, was really started not by the Indians or Columbus, but by the Pilgrim Fathers, assisted and backed up by several cargoes of blue-brained and cleverblooded spirits from the British Isles, whose minds were full of theology and whose souls were full of tea. I shall be told that it is unkind of me to make such remarks.

But, quite apart from all questions of kindness, it is desirable that you know something of the antecedents of a man before you set about a proper estimate of him. If you wish to understand him thoroughly, you must never let sleeping dogs lie nor allow bygones to be bygones. It is notorious that the average frantic Fourth of July American is an adept at showing the best side of himself and his institutions to an admiring world. If you are to believe him the first American was Christopher Columbus, whose name in this connection I had hoped not to mention. But Don Columbus made the mistake of “discovering America.” For the accomplishment of this feat the Americans bestow upon his memory unqualified pæans. Really, of course, the fact that Columbus steered his leaky lugger desperately for Coney Island and Long Branch, when he had the rest of the world—including China and Gozo—before him where to choose, proves that so far from being a hero and a man of genius, he was a dull and evilly disposed person.

According to the bumptious, khaki-tinted gentleman from Indiana too, the Pilgrim Fathers already referred to were high-minded, blameless, and entirely disinterested saints, incapable of hurting a fly or causing butter to melt north of the colour line. They “inaugurated America for conscience sake, sir, and you can bet your pile that I am proud to have them for ancestors.” In which connection I shall pass no rude observation, contenting myself rather with the hint that the reader who wishes to acquaint himself with the true inwardness of the Pilgrim Fathers and their doings in America should look up some of the serious literature on the subject. The Americans, be it noted, read that literature very privately, and neither in the basket nor in the store.

I might proceed indefinitely on these lines of disillusion for Master Phineas B. Flubdub; but as it is not my particular business to amuse him inordinately, I shall desist.

In Europe, or at any rate in England, there is a disposition on the part of the sandblind to look upon the United States and the people who dwell in them with an eye of amused wonderment, as well as admiration. For reasons that are not difficult to appreciate America has never been taken quite seriously by the superior European. In spite of all her boasting and shouting, in spite of her e-normous population and her equally e-normous wealth, in spite of the fact that there is a U.S. Army and a U.S. Navy that can lick creation, and that the U.S. also boasts of a reeking, shrieking press, together with the most gaudy and scintillating “Courts of Justice” that ever delighted civilisation, no person in Europe believes in the back of his mind that the land of hustle and bluff is a nation of any weight where nations count, or that she is capable of exercising the smallest direct or indirect influence upon the manners, customs, tendencies, or destiny of haughty feudal Europe.

The Americans are hot stuff. They go in for cut-throat finance and lime-light lynchings, their swindles are beautiful, their fortunes colossal, and their corruption is picturesque. They have a wonderful country. It is theirs and not ours, and they are welcome to do as they like in it. They can never hurt us. Knowing this, the Englishman sleeps snugly of nights, and when he meets a “Yank” in London or on the Riviera or in Paris, he smiles to himself, professes to be tickled, tolerates him if there be occasion for it, grapples him to his bosom with hooks of steel if there is money in it, and parts from him pretty much in the mood of a man who has been inspecting a new motor car.

And, truth to tell, in the guileless, sight-seeing, rush-about American whom the Englishman encounters on his own midden, there does not appear to be anything which is either very outrageous or very formidable. All you see of him is a somewhat undersized, loosely built human biped, with a fat jowl, straight hair, a nobby suit, a little round white or brown felt hat—and a guide-book. Of course, there is also the smart swagger American, accompanied by a feminine entourage of peaches and dreams. But usually your man from Yankeeland has with him a plain, up-and-down, sad sort of woman who might have stepped out of Noah’s ark—and that is the end of it. When he engages you in conversation, which he commonly insists upon doing, he blows foolishly about his own Country, admits that yours “hez the bulge in antiques,” says that he is glad that he came over, and sticking out his finger in the direction of the woman, remarks: “This is Mrs. Sarah B. Gazabo, my wife.” The real “insides” of the man never strike you, partly because you are busy loathing his accent and admiring his ginger, and partly because he has left his vital concerns, his private essence and sheer Americanisms “way back to hum.” All Americans imported for us by Thos. Cook & Son and his imitators are of this order. For them England is a place in which to tread softly and speak low, or at any rate as low as possible. They visit us in the same spirit that a prize-fighter might visit a cemetery, and though the casual observer would scarcely suspect it, their intention is to be subdued, sober, decorous, and civil.

Eight times out of nine the American is a fine specimen of a manly man, but it is the ninth that is such a wonder. We, the obtuse and effete people of Great Britain, now and again wake up suddenly to the circumstance that we have been the victims of an American invasion. Such a ghastly conviction may at any moment overtake the best of us, for no class of society knows whose turn is likely to be next. There was an American invasion of the turf a year or two back, and English sport is sore and poor about it to this day. There have been sundry social invasions which those most directly concerned find it difficult to forget, and at the present moment we are in the thick of a theatrical invasion which is not doing us an appreciable amount of good. The fact of these invasions and of their always unpleasant consequences so far as the invaded are involved is, in my judgment, a fact of the most serious import to Englishmen.

I shall for a moment drop the American as he seems to be, and regard him as he actually is. What can one record of him that is to his credit? Imprimus: He has devoted three hundred years more or less to the frantic and bloodthirsty pursuit of the Almighty Dollar. Item: During those three hundred years more or less he has done absolutely nothing but pursue dollars. Item: He is still pursuing them. Item: But he makes the best husband in the world, and places woman in the high place to which she is so amply entitled. I will put so much to the credit side, though I make no doubt that there are people in the world who will find themselves unable to commend me for doing it.

Now for the obverse or discredit side. I shall ask you to note:

(1) That the Americans are the only nation who are ruled by a bureaucracy of millionaires and at the same time croon themselves into a state of vacuous coma to the touching strains of “vox populi, vox dei!”

(2) That they are the originators of the yelling yellow press, the pioneers of the New Humour and the apostles of the New Pathos.

(3) That they are the only civilised people who make a point of exporting the finest specimens of their womankind to foreign countries, included in a consignment of cold dollars calculated pro rata with the antiquity, decay and general worthlessness of the name which the former take in exchange.

(4) That having inherited, borrowed or stolen a beautiful language, they wilfully and of set purpose degrade, distort and misspell it apparently for the sole purpose of saving money in type-setting.

(5) That out of twenty-six Presidents of the United States, three have met death at the hands of the assassin.[1]

(6) That having by sheer accident or because of the care and forethought, which Providence has for fools, become possessed of a President who is a man among men and a ninety horse-power statesman with direct drive on all speeds, they allow him to be handicapped by a spectacular gang of undesirable citizens.

(7) That they consider no function, public or private, sacred or profane, to be complete without a newspaper correspondent, a lime-light photographer, and a sky-sign contractor.

(8) That willingly and of their own unfettered volition they have thrown back to the customs of their aboriginal ancestors in the matter of diet, which diet is rapidly reducing them morally, physically and intellectually to the level of primordial protoplasms.

(9) That they are the only nation who in civilised times rate noise above all else, save dollars, and who in their theatres acclaim as the greatest actor or play the one that in the shortest time makes the greatest uproar for the smallest reason.

(10) That they have resolved their sports and pastimes into business propositions in which the avowed aim and object of every competitor is the utter destruction of his opponent by any means that can be found, devised or conceived.

(11) That they are the only nation who in civilised times have been happy and content to sink their individuality in an all pervading and evil smelling atmosphere of hog and by-products.

The foregoing are merely a few of the main counts in the indictment. Behind every one of them lies a history of gaiety, graft, dyspepsia, bossism, fakery, flamboyancy, hysteria, vociferation brain storms and dementia Americana of the most disconcerting and entertaining kind. The details are on record, and I do not propose to harrow the reader’s feelings with examples of them. I shall suggest simply that it is questionable whether any other known race of men, white or black, has managed to pack into three centuries such a volume of unthinkable excitement and picturesque iniquity as can be rightfully and without exaggeration laid at the door of these abounding Americans.

A certain Western city has been described by a friendly visitor as “hell with the lid off.” For the greater part of her existence as a nation that description might with justice have been applied to all America, and I am by no means sure that it is not still applicable. It would seem that under the inspiring ægis of the much-vaunted American constitution the whole of the vices of civilised man have become grossly and incredibly intensified. For unscrupulousness, insincerity, cynicism, and the pure worship of mammon the United States stands without rival among the nations to-day.

I believe the man lied who said there is not an institution in the country—political, social, economic or even religious—that is not based on a species of ingrained rottenness and not infested with the worm of corruption and the scrawl of scandal. But there is no national aspiration that does not have at the back of it the root idea that the sole duty of an American man is to get rich and to get rich quick. There are few standards of American life that are not gold standards and few kinds of American effort that are not directed towards the rapid acquisition of other people’s money.

It can be proved out of the history books that, broadly speaking, your average American is a nondescript and nefarious hybrid composed of three parts promoter, three parts missionary, three parts slave-driver, and one part Indian. On this unsavoury soil the worst passions of the soaring human animal have grown and run hoggishly to seed. Out of such blood nothing that is honest or of good report could be expected to rise. And when we in England, as has been the tendency in the past few years, condescend to the adoption of American methods and American notions, and applaud rather than rebuke American smartness and American impudence, there can be no question whatever that we are on the toboggan. The gradual Americanisation of this grand old country is not only flattering to American vanity, but gratifying to American greed. As I shall presently show, America has no more love for England than would easily cover a threepenny-bit, and her insatiable cry is for markets, markets, markets—a howl in which she is dulcetly supported by her dear friend Germany. The causes for alarm in so far as they affect the larger concrete issues are as yet comparatively slight. But it behoves every Englishman to meditate on the possibility that Macaulay’s New Zealander may in the long run turn out to be an American.

[1] This is a greater percentage than has obtained in the case of the Czars of Russia, and in America there are no Nihilists or at any rate none who are actively opposed to the American Presidency.

CHAPTER II
Millionaires

The population of the United States, according to the last census returns, is about a hundred millions. Names in American directories invariably begin with Aarons and end with Zaccharia, and millionaires are marked with a star—thus *. In a town, or—as the puffed up merchant in stars and stripes would call it a city—of fifty thousand inhabitants you will find that the local directory stars quite twenty-five thousand as millionaires.

It is pretty certain that fully ninety-nine per cent. of these bloated plutocrats do not know where the next dollar is coming from. I have it on the authority of an American that “in introducing a man in high American society the introducer thinks it proper to say, ‘This is Obadiah S. Bluggs of Squedunk, Wis.—one of the richest men in the city. He’s worth his million dollars—ain’t you, Obadiah? And he’s president of a National Bank and owns a block of buildings on the main street. His wife has the largest diamonds in the northern part of the State, and his daughter, Miss Mamie Bluggs, gets her gowns in Paris, and uses lorgnettes.’ Such words of recommendation, I am told, move Mr. Bluggs to a profound delight. Within five minutes half the men present—this is true even of the most exclusive circles—will cluster around Mr. Bluggs to sell things to him; champagne, a horse, shares in a bogus mining company, or to ask him if Miss Bluggs is engaged, whether she is a blonde or a brunette, and whether he, Bluggs, thinks it is worth the questioner’s while to run up to Squedunk, Wis., take Miss Bluggs out buggy riding and size her up one afternoon.”

It is highly probable that Mr. Millionaire Bluggs possesses no ready cash whatever, though he is prepared to discuss five-million dollar propositions in the loudest tones and in any quantity, and it is probable, too, that Miss Bluggs is neither a blonde nor a brunette that matters, but an ordinary good strong country girl whose principal diet is pumpkin pie and chewing gum, and whose single go-to-party gown was bought in Paris truly but fell to the lot of Miss Mamie Bluggs at third hand and at bed-rock bargain-day price, at the corner store in Squedunk, Wis.

I have no desire to suggest that the millionaires of America as a body are in straitened or difficult circumstances, or that an American here and there has not succeeded in amassing vast sums of money. But I assert flatly that the great majority of them are not within a mile of being anything like so rich as they pretend to be, and that, taking millionaire for millionaire, they are an entirely Brummagem and specious company. They maintain all the appearances of riches, not on solid bullion or property, but on a little paper. They come like water and like wind they go. Since millionairedom became fashionable, New York State alone must have produced, literally, thousands of them.

Of the real authentic untraversable American millionaire, one is inclined to speak with bated breath and whispered humbleness. There are three men of means in America at the time of writing who will probably be remembered for the wealth they possess as long as this weary world holds together. The virginal chaste names of them, need one say, are John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie. No doubt there are others, such as the Vanderbilts and the Goulds, and Mr. Astor and Mr. Harriman, and that great patron of the drama, Mr. John Cory, whose wealth transcends the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind coming in together. But it is on Messrs. Rockefeller, Morgan and Carnegie that the brunt and burden and glitter and glory of real unlimited and omnipotent millionairedom has fallen. Mr. Rockefeller, indeed, is commonly credited with being the richest and most powerful capitalist in the world. So rich is he, and so enormous are his accumulations of earned and unearned increment, that he is rapidly becoming the overlord of all the other millionaires, who even now are, to a great extent, playing with his money and must, to a corresponding extent, do his bidding.

Of Mr. Rockefeller the world knows next to nothing, excepting that he is fabulously and pitifully rich, that he has absolutely no hirsute covering for his stupendous brains, that he suffers from indigestion, and that he plays golf and teaches a Sunday school in a Nonconformist place of worship. Every other morning he appears to present to this or that American city a few odd millions “for educational purposes,” the which millions are promptly spurned by the local authority as “tainted money,” but ultimately accepted “in the interests of the industrial class.”

Probably Mr. Rockefeller is the best abused man on this footstool. He has been variously described as a thief, a ghoul, a bloodsucker, a murderer, a miser, a cannibal, a wrecker, a tiger, a devastator, a jackal, and a wolf. All the notice he takes is blandly to play golf and unobtrusively to dodge the lawyers and officers of the law who desire to bring him to book for the alleged malpractices of the Standard Oil Trust. Yet you have to remember that this placid, smiling, hairless old gentleman of sixty-five, “with a glad hand for everyone,” takes out of the United States an income greater than the incomes of all the Royal Families of all Europe, and that, in addition to his controlling interest in the Standard Oil Trust, which last year paid dividends to the tune of fifty million dollars, he owns the entire Electric Light and Gas Plants of New York City, controls the American iron industry, has almost complete control of the railways and copper mines, and of the largest banks in New York and throughout the country. The which sad data go to show that he is at once a wicked man and a foolish, and that the American people are even wickeder and more foolish. You can never bring an American to see that there is no conceivable advantage in possessing too much money; and in spite of his “shattered nerves,” “enfeebled mind,” and “unenviable reputation,” there is not a man in America who would not jump at the chance of standing in the shoes of Jawn D.

As for Mr. Pierpont Morgan, he is chiefly noted as the head and front of a Steel Trust that is making money at the rate of one hundred and forty million dollars per year, and as a gentleman who has a pretty taste in pictures and objects of art. Mr. Morgan is a man with a large and poetic imagination. It was he who conceived the noble idea of Americanising the British Transatlantic carrying trade by buying up the principal fleets engaged in it. In this deal, as in most other American-English deals, the American came forth to shear and got shorn. The woolly, bleating, unsuspicious Britisher sold his vessels at inflated figures, snickered in his sleeve, and built new ones with some of the money. Mr. Morgan is a frequent and welcome visitor to these shores, and the London picture dealers and their touts no doubt do very well out of him. But if you say “Liverpool” to him he goes hot all over.

For a bonne-bouche I have kept Mr. Andrew Carnegie, of Skibo Castle and sundry other addresses. Mr. Carnegie has the misfortune to be a Scotch American—surely the least admirable of the less admirable types of humanity. He will live in men’s memories as the sturdy, forthright Scot who managed one of the most desperate strikes that ever took place in America from the safe vantage ground of his native heath. It must be remembered that in spite of his ridiculous possessions Mr. Carnegie is an avowed democrat, and the author of a book that makes him out to be quite a benevolently minded philosopher. But during all the terrors of the Homestead lock-out, he lay snug at his shooting box of Rannoch, N.B., and refused to say a word that would tend to still the storm, although he knew that blood was being shed at Homestead, and that his own partner, Mr. Frick, had been seriously wounded.

Being a Scotchman it is impossible that Mr. Carnegie should have been a coward. Let me say rather that he was cautious and canny, and indisposed to take unnecessary risks. When the row was more or less over he told a representative of the Associated Press that “the deplorable events at Homestead had burst upon him like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. They had such a depressing effect upon him that he had to lay his book aside and resort to the lochs and moors, fishing from morning to night.” Which, on the face of it, is pawky Scots, and as who should say “the deplorable news of the death of my wife had such a depressing effect upon me that I had to go to a fancy dress ball and dance and dance till cock-crow.”

It will be seen, therefore, that in the main the American millionaires do not shine with any startling or blinding effulgence. With here and there an exception, they are common, vulgar, snobbish, undistinguished men who happen to have come out top-dog in a series of financial bruising matches in which few persons above the quality of a savage would have cared to engage. For the possession and administration of even reasonable wealth their qualification would seem to be of the meagrest. Outside the dull mechanical reduplication of their mammoth fortunes, their stunted intellects permit them only two very doubtful joys, namely, sensational house building and sensational charity. Mr. Morgan may be taken as the type of the house-proud money-snatcher. Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie are the charity-proud; and they have reaped the reward of the charity-proud—the colleges of the one being a by-word and a mockery in America, just as the “Free Libraries” of the other are a by-word and a nuisance in England.

I do not believe that in their heart of hearts the Americans themselves—that is, the great mass of the people—have any feeling of admiration for the gigantic money-grabbers who rule them. The American has just perception enough to discern that millionaires are not altogether the best possible kind of man. On the other hand, if you take away the country’s millionaires you have robbed her male population of one of its chief objects of envy and its chief subject of blurring conversation.

The shadow of each of the fascinating trinity that I have mentioned is as the shadow of a Colossus, and is so enormous that it is almost impossible to pick up an American newspaper or other publication in which they do not figure and figure prominently. Especially is this the case with respect to Mr. Rockefeller, upon whose doings or misdoings every scribbler in America has some comment to offer or some theory to base. The other day I came across a book of essays published in Boston, which contained a review of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace’s “Man’s Place in the Universe.” And right in the middle of it I found this passage: “When a little child looks out on the Earth he at first thinks it infinite. He looks upon it as unorganised and unrelated. Only with increasing age and understanding can he realise that it is finite and organised. So when Rockefeller as a lad went into the oil business it seemed to him that there was infinite scope for the extension of the oil business,” and so on and so forth. Clearly it is a mighty business to be Rockefeller!

CHAPTER III
Humourists

American humour has come to be a bugbear in England, pretty much like American canned meats.

Twenty years ago, when anybody on this side of the Atlantic wished to be rather crudely and shockingly amused, he sent to the libraries for something American. In that day and generation Mark Twain was at the zenith of his fame and powers, and the names of Artemus Ward and Josh Billings were names to conjure with. Autres temps autres moeurs. The popularity of Mark Twain has suffered woeful eclipse, and Artemus Ward and Mr. Billings have gone clean out of vogue, and are remembered only as the originators of a very tiresome kind of humour which depends on phonetic spelling for its more excruciating effects.

The fact is that America and England alike have been dosed to death with the lucubrations of handy scribblers who caught something of Mark Twain’s trick and pretended to something of his gift, and the label “American humourist” nowadays repels with an even greater insistence than it formerly attracted. Mr. Twain made desperate and valiant efforts to retrieve his waning popularity with a book called “A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.” If ever there was a piece of writing nicely calculated to tickle and make purr the fat-necked American here was the article. But it fizzled in the pan, failed in short to bring ’em on again. And it now belongs to the category of books that people have forgotten. So much for Mr. Twain, whom I admire, but of whom, nevertheless, I have taken leave to speak the truth.

Artemus Ward and Josh Billings are dead, and their souls, I trust, are with the saints; so that they will pardon me when I venture on the opinion that the humour they gave us was of the thinnest sort, and, taking into account the furore it created, extraordinarily ephemeral. However any person of sense came to accept the following for humour passes my comprehension:—