Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

I. AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT

A little less than two years ago—on the 14 July, 1919, to be exact—it fell to my lot, as an officer attached to one of the many military missions in Paris, to “assist,” from a reserved seat in a balcony of the Hotel Astoria, at the défilé, or triumphal entry of the Allied troops into Paris.

The march à Berlin not having eventuated owing to the upset in schedule brought about by the entry of dispassionate allies at the eleventh hour, it was felt that the French must be offered something in exchange, and this took the happy form of a sort of community march along the route once desecrated by Prussian hoof-beats—a vast military corbeille of the allied contingents, with flags, drums, trumpets, and all the rest of the paraphernalia that had been kept in cold storage during four years of gas, shell, and barbed wire. Such a défilé, it was calculated, would be something more than a frugal gratification to the French army and people. It would offer to the world at large, through the medium of a now unmuzzled press, a striking object lesson in allied good feeling and similarity of aims.

My purpose in referring to the défilé is merely to record one unrehearsed incident in it but I would say in passing that the affair, “for an affair,” as the French say, was extraordinarily well stage-managed. A particularly happy thought was the marshalling of the allied contingents by alphabetical order. This not only obviated any international pique on what we all wanted to be France’s day, but left the lead of the procession where everybody, in the rapture of delivery, was well content it should remain. Handled with a little tact, the alphabet had once more justified itself as an impartial guide:

B is for Britain, Great.
A is for America, United States of.

* * * * *

For impressiveness I frankly and freely allot the palm to what it was the fashion then to term the American effort. Different contingents were impressive in different ways. The Republican Guard, jack-booted, with buckskin breeches, gleaming helmets, flowing crinières, and sabres au clair, lent just the right subtle touch of the épopée of Austerlitz and Jena to make us feel 1871 had been an evil dream; the Highlanders, the voice of the hydra squalling and clanging from their immemorial pipes, stirred all sorts of atavistic impulses and memories. Nevertheless, had I been present that day in Paris as a newspaper man instead of as the humblest and most obscure of soldiers, neither one nor the other would have misled my journalistic instinct. I should have put the lead of my “story” where alphabetical skill had put the lead of the procession—in the American infantry.

In front the generalissimo, martial and urbane, on a bright coated horse that pranced, curvetted, “passaged” from side to side under a practised hand. At his back the band, its monster uncurved horns of brass blaring out the Broadway air before which “over there” the walls of pacifism had toppled into dust in a day. Behind them, platoon by platoon, the clean shaved, physically perfect fighting youth of the great republic. All six feet high—there was not one, it was whispered, but had earned his place in the contingent by a rigorous physical selection: moving with the alignment of pistons in some deadly machine—they had been drilled, we were told, intensively for a month back. In spotless khaki, varnished trench helmets, spick and span, scarcely touched by the withering breath of war. Whenever the procession was checked, platoon after platoon moved on to the regulation distance and marked time. When it resumed, they opened out link by link with the same almost inhuman precision, and resumed their portentous progress. How others saw them you shall hear, but to me they were no mere thousand fighting men; rather the head of a vast battering ram, the simple threat of which, aimed at the over-taxed heart of the German Empire, had ended war. A French planton of the Astoria staff, who had edged his way into the ticketed group was at my back. “Les voilà qui les attendaient,” he almost whispered. “Look what was waiting for them.”

The next balcony to mine had been reserved for the civil employés of British missions, and here was gathered a little knot of average English men and women—stenographers, typists, clerks, cogs of commercialism pressed into the mechanical work of post-war settlement. As the Americans moved on after one of the impressive checks of which I have just spoken, something caught my ears that made me turn my head quickly, even from a spectacle every lost moment of which I grudged. It was, of all sounds that come from the human heart, the lowest and the most ominous—the sound that makes the unwary walker through tropical long grass look swiftly round his feet and take a firmer grasp on the stick he has been wise enough to carry.

It is impossible—it is inconceivable—and it’s true. On this great day of international congratulation, one of the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was hissing the other.

* * * * *

I spoke about the matter later to a friend and former chief, whom I liked but whose position and character were no guarantee of tact or good judgment. I said I thought it rather an ominous incident, but he refused to be “rattled.” With that British imperturbability which Americans have noted and filed on the card index of their impressions he dismissed the whole thing as of slight import.

“Very natural, I dare say. Fine show all the same. Perhaps your friends on the other balcony thought they were slopping over in front.”

“‘Slopping over...?’”

“Well—going a little too far. Efficiency and all that. Bit out of step with the rest of the procession.”

I have often wondered since whether this homely phrase, uttered by a simple soldier man, did not come nearer to the root of the divergence between British and American character than all the mystifying and laborious estimates which nine out of ten of our great or near-great writers seem to think is due at a certain period in their popularity.

To achieve discord, you see, it is not necessary that two instruments should play different tunes. It is quite sufficient that the tempo of one should differ from the tempo of the other. All I want to indicate in the brief space which the scope of this work, leaves at my disposal are just a few of the conjunctures at which I think the beat of the national heart, here and across the Atlantic, is likely to find itself out of accord.

* * * * *

Englishmen do not emigrate to the United States in any large numbers, and it is many years since their arrival contributed anything but an insignificant racial element to the “melting pot.” They do not come partly because their own Colonies offer a superior attraction, and partly because British labour is now aware that the economic stress is fiercer in the larger country and the material rewards proportionately no greater. Those who still come, come as a rule prepared to take executive positions, or as specialists in their several lines. Their unwillingness to assume American citizenship is notorious, and I think significant; but it is only within quite recent years that it has been made any ground of accusation—and among the class with which their activities bring them into closest contact it is, or was until a year or two ago, tacitly and tactfully ignored. During a review of the “foreign element” in Boston to which I was assigned two years before the war, I found business men of British birth not only reluctant to yield “copy” but resentful of the publicity to which the enterprise of my journal was subjecting them.

There are many reasons why eminent English writers and publicists are of little value in arriving at an estimate of “how Americans strike an Englishman.” While not asserting anything so crude as that commercial motives are felt as a restraining force when the temptation arises to pass adverse judgment on the things they see and hear, it is evident that the conditions under which they come—men of achievement in their own country accredited to men of achievement here—keep them isolated from much that is restless, unstable, but vitally significant in American life. None of them, so far as I know, have had the courage or the enterprise to come to America, unheralded and anonymous, and to pay with a few months of economic struggle for an estimate that might have real value.

To this lack of real contact between the masses in America and Great Britain is due the intrinsic falsity of the language in which the racial bond is celebrated on the occasions when some political crisis calls for its reiteration. It is felt easier and safer to utter it in consecrated clichés—to refer to the specific gravity of blood and water, or the philological roots of the medium used by Milton and Arthur Brisbane. The banality, the insincerity, of the public utterances at the time that America’s entry into the European struggle first loomed as a possible solution of the agony on the Western Front was almost unbelievable. Any one who cares to turn up the files of the great dailies between September, 1916, and March, 1918, may find them for himself.

To a mind not clouded by the will to believe, this constant invocation of common aims, this perpetual tug at the bond to ensure that it has not parted overnight, would be strong corroboration of a suspicion that the two vessels were drifting apart, borne on currents that flow in different directions. It is not upon the after-dinner banalities of wealthy and class-conscious “pilgrims” nor the sonorous platitudes of discredited laggards on the political scene, still less is it upon the sporting proclivities of titled hoydens and hawbucks to whom American sweat and dollars have arrived in a revivifying stream, that we shall have to rely should the cable really part and the two great vessels of State grope for one another on a dark and uncharted sea. It is upon the sheer and unassisted fact of how American and Englishman like or dislike one another.

It is a truism almost too stale to restate that we are standing to-day on the threshold of great changes. What is not so well realized is that many of these changes have already taken place. The passing of gold in shipment after shipment from the Eastern to the Western side of the Atlantic and the feverish hunt for new and untapped sources of exploitation are only the outward signs of a profound European impoverishment in which Britain for the first time in her history has been called upon to bear her full share. The strikes and lock-outs that have followed the peace in such rapid succession might possibly be written off as inevitable sequelæ of a great war. The feeble response to the call for production as a means of salvation, the general change in the English temper faced with its heavy task are far more vital and significant matters. They seem to mark a shift in moral values—a change in the faith by which nations, each in the sphere that character and circumstance allot, wax and flourish.

Confronted with inevitable competition by a nation more populous, more cohesive, and richer than itself, it seems to me that there are three courses which the older section of the English race may elect to follow. One is war, before the forces grow too disparate, and on the day that war is declared one phase of our civilization will end. It will really not matter much, to the world at large, who wins an Anglo-American world conflict. The second, which is being preached in and out of season by our politicians and publicists, who seldom, however, dare to speak their full thought, is a girding up of the national loins, a renewed consecration to the gospel of effort, a curtailment, if necessary—though this is up to now only vaguely hinted—of political liberties bestowed in easier and less strenuous days. The third course may easily be guessed. It is a persistence in proclivities, always latent as I believe in the English temperament, but which have only revealed themselves openly since the great war, a clearer questioning of values till now held as unimpeachable, a readier ear to the muttering and murmuring of the masses in Continental Europe, internationalism—revolution. No thoughtful man in England to-day denies the danger. Even references to that saving factor, the “common sense of the British workman,” no longer allays the spectre of a problem the issues of which have only to be stated to stand forth in all their hopeless irreconcilability. Years ago, long before the shadow fell on the world, in a moment of depression or inspiration, I wrote that cravings were stirring in the human heart on the very eve of the day when the call would be to sacrifice. That is the riddle, nakedly stated, to which workers and rulers alike are asked to find an answer to-day.

In this choice that lies before the British worker a great deal may depend upon how American experiments and American achievements strike him. In England now there is no escaping from the big transatlantic sister. Politicians use her example as a justification; employers hold up her achievements as a reproach. A British premier dare not face the House of Commons on an “Irish night” unequipped with artful analogies culled from the history of the war of secession. The number of bricks per hour America’s bricklayers will lay or the tons of coal per week her stolid colliers will hew are the despair of the contractor face to face with the loafing and pleasure-loving native born. You will hear no more jokes to-day in high coalition places over her political machine replacing regularly and without the litter and disorder of a general election tweedledum Democrat by a tweedledee Republican. She is recognized—and this, I think, is the final value placed upon her by the entire ruling and possessing classes in my own country—as better equipped in her institutions, her character, and her population for the big economic struggle that is ahead of us.

This is the secret of the unceasing court paid to Washington by all countries, but pre-eminently by Britain. It is not fear of her power, nor hunger for her money bags and harvests, nor desire to be “on the band-wagon,” as light-hearted cartoonists see it, that prompts the nervous susceptibility and the instantaneous response to anything that will offend those in high places on the banks of the Potomac. It is the sense, among all men with a strong interest in maintaining the present economic order, that the support in their own countries is crumbling under their hands, and that that fresh support, stronger and surer, is to be found in a new country with a simpler faith and a cleaner, or at any rate a shorter, record. To fight proletarianism with democracy is a method so obvious and safe that one only wonders its discovery had to wait upon to-day. Its salient characteristic is a newly aroused interest and enthusiasm in one country for the political forces that seem to make stability their watchword in the other. The coalition has become the hero of the New York Times and Tribune—the triumph of the Republican party was hailed almost as a national victory in the London Times and Birmingham Post. Intransigeance in foreign policies finds ready forgiveness in London; in return, a blind eye is turned to schemes of territorial aggrandisement at Washington.

If a flaw is to be discerned in what at first sight seems a perfectly adjusted instrument for international comity, it is that this new Anglo-American understanding seems to be founded on class rather than on national sympathy. Even offhand some inherent inconsistency would seem to be sensed from the fact that the appeal of the great republic comes most home, in the parent country, to the class that is least attached to democratic forms and the most fearful of change. References to America arouse no enthusiasm at meetings of the labour element in England, and it is still felt unwise to expose the Union Jack to possible humiliation in parades on a large scale in New York or Chicago. A sympathy that flowers into rhetoric at commercial banquets or at meetings of the archæologically inclined may have its roots in the soundest political wisdom. But to infer from such demonstrations of class solidarity any national community of thought or aim is both unwarranted and unsafe. This much is evident, that should a class subversion, always possible in a country the political fluidity of which is great, leave the destinies of Great Britain in the hands of the class that is silent or hostile to-day when the name of America is mentioned, an entire re-statement of Anglo-American unity would become necessary, in terms palatable to the average Englishman.

* * * * *

This average Englishman is a highly complicated being. Through the overlay which industrialism has imposed on him, he has preserved to quite an extraordinary extent the asperities, the generosities, the occasional eccentricities of the days when he was a free man in a free land. No melting process has ever subdued the sharp bright hues of his individuality into the universal, all-pervading drab that is the result of blending primary colours. No man who has employed him to useful purpose has ever succeeded in reducing his personality to the proportions of a number on a brass tag. The pirate and rover who looked upon Roman villadom and found it not good, the archer who brought the steel-clad hierarchy of France toppling from their blooded horses at Crécy and Agincourt, the churl who struck off the heads of lawyers in Westminster Palace yard survive in him.

If I am stressing this kink in the British character it is because one of its results has been to make the Englishman of all men the least impressed by scale, and the one to whom appeals made on the size of an experiment or the vastness of a vision will evoke the least response, and especially because I think I perceive a tendency to approach him in the interests of Anglo-American unity precisely from the angle that will awake antagonism where co-operation is sought. The attachment of the Englishman to little things and to hidden things, which no one except Chesterton has had the insight to perceive, or at all events which Chesterton was the first to place in its full relation to his inconsistencies, explains his strangely detached attitude to that British Empire of which his country is the core. Its discovery as an entity calling for a special quality in thought and action dates no further back than that strange interlude in history, when the personality of Roosevelt and the vision of Kipling held the imagination of the world.

This refusal to be impressed by greatness, whether his own or others’, has its disadvantages, but at least it has one saving element. It leaves an Englishman quite capable of perceiving that it is possible for a thing to be grandiose in scale and mean in quality. It leaves intact his frank and childlike confidence that the little things of the world confound the strong; his implicit conviction that David will always floor Goliath, and that Jack’s is the destined sword to smite off the giant’s head. The grotesqueness of the Kaiser’s upturned moustaches, the inadequacy of a mythical “William the Weed” to achieve results that would count, were his guiding lights to victory, the touchstones by which he tested in advance the vast machine that finally cracked and broke under its own weight. It was the “contemptible” little army of shopmen and colliers which seized his imagination and held his affection throughout, not the efficient mechanical naval machine that fought one great sea battle, which was a revelation of the risks inherent in its own monstrousness and complexity, and made its headquarters in Scapa Flow. I recall the comments heard at the time of Jutland in the artillery camp where fate had throwm me. They served to confirm a dawning conviction that the navy, while it still awes and impresses, lost its hold on the British heart the day wooden walls were exchanged for iron and steel. It is perhaps the “silent service” to-day because its appeal awakes so little response. It has been specialized and magnified out of the average Englishman’s power to love it.

In America the contrary seems the case. The American heart appears to go out to bulk, to scale, and to efficiency. The American has neither the time nor the temperament to test and weigh. His affections, even his loyalties, seem to be at the mercy of aspects that impose and impress. I know no other country where the word “big” is used so constantly as a token of affection. Every community has its “Big Tims,” “Big Bills,” “Big Jacks,” great hearty fellows who gambol and spout on public occasions with the abandonment of a school of whales. Gargantuan “Babe Ruth,” mountainous Jack Dempsey are the idols of its sport-loving crowds. “Mammoth in character,” the qualification which on the lips of the late Mr. Morgan Richards stirred laughter throughout England, is to the American no inconsequential or slipshod phrase. He does perceive a character and justification in bigness. It was perhaps to this trait in his mental make-up that the puzzling shift of allegiance to the beginning of the great war was due. The scale and completeness of the German effort laid hold of his imagination to an extent that only those who spent the first few months of agonizing doubt in the West and the Middle West can appreciate. Something that was obscurely akin, something that transcended racial affinities and antipathies, awoke in him at the steady ordered flow of the field-grey legions Westward, so adequately pictured for him by Richard Harding Davis. He is quite merciless to defeat.

Nothing conceived on such a scale can indulge complexities. Its ideals must be ample, rugged, and primitive, adequate to the vast task. Hence the velocity, the thoroughness, the apparent ruthlessness with which American enterprises are put through. It is the fashion among a certain school of thought to call America the country of inhibitions. But there is little inhibition to be perceived on that side of his temperament, which the American has chosen to cultivate, leaving all else to those who find perverse attraction in weed and ruin. His language—and he is amazingly vocal—is as simple and direct as his thought. The appeals and admonitions of his leaders reverberate from vast and resonant lungs. They are calculated rather to carry far than to penetrate deeply. They are statements and re-statements rather than arguments. If their verbiage often aims at and sometimes seems to attain the sublime, if the American leader is forever dedicating, consecrating, inspiring something, the altitude is like the elevation given a shell in order that it may travel further. The nimble presentation of antithesis of a Lloyd George, the dagger-play of sarcasm of an Asquith, are conspicuously absent from the speeches of American leaders. There is something arrogant and ominous, like the clenching of a fist before the arm is raised, in this sonorous presentation of a faith already securely rooted in the hearts of all its hearers.

This primitiveness and single-mindedness of the American seem to intensify as his historical origins recede further and further into the past. It is idle to speculate on what might have happened had the development of his country remained normal and homogeneous, as, up to the Civil War, it admittedly did. It is an even less grateful task to look back on the literature of the Transcendental period and register all that American thought seems to have lost since in subtlety and essential catholicity. What is really important is to realize that not only the language but the essence of Occidental civilization has called for simplification, for sacrifice, year by year. It is hard to see what other choice has lain before the American, as wave after wave of immigration diluted his homogeneity, than to put his concepts into terms easily understood and quickly grasped, with the philological economy of the traveller’s pocket manual and the categorical precision of the drill book. If in the very nature of things, this evangel is oftener pointed with a threat than made palatable with the honey of reason and sympathy, the task and not the taskmaster is to blame. On no other country has ever been imposed similar drudgery on a similar scale. It is idle to talk about the spiritual contribution of the foreigner when his first duty is to cast that contribution into the discard. It is futile to appeal to his traditions where the barrier of language rears itself in a few years between parents who have never learnt the new tongue and children who are unable or ashamed to speak the old.

But such a régime cannot endure for many years without a profound influence, not only on those to whom it is prescribed, but on those who administer it. The most heaven-born leader of men, put into a receiving depot to which monthly and fortnightly contingents of bemused recruits arrive, quickly deteriorates into something like a glorified and commissioned drill sergeant. The schoolmaster is notoriously a social failure in circles where intercourse must be held on the level to which the elevation of his estrade has dishabituated him. Exact values—visions, to use a word that misuse has made hateful—disappear under a multiplicity of minor tasks. It is one of the revenges taken by fate that those who must harass and drive become harassed and sterile in turn.

No one yet, so far as I know, has sought to place this amazing simplification in its true relation to the aridity of American life, an aridity so marked that it creates a positive thirst for softer and milder civilizations, not only in the foreigner who has tasted of them, but at a certain moment in their life in almost every one of the native born whose work lies outside the realm of material production. It is not that in England, as in every community, entire classes do not exist who seek material success by the limitation of interests and the retrenchment of sympathies. But in so doing they sacrifice to a domestic, not a national God; they follow personal not racial proclivities. There is no conscious subscription to a national ideal in their abandonment of æsthetic impulses. Side by side with them live other men whose apparent contentment with insecure and unstable lives at once redresses their pride and curtails their influence. They are conscious of the existence around them of a whole alien world, the material returns from which are negligible but in which other men somehow manage to achieve a fullness of experience and maintain self-respect. This other world reacts not only on employer but on employed. For the worker it abates the fervour and stress of his task, lends meaning and justification to his demand for leisure in the face of economic demands that threaten or deny. No one in England has yet dared to erect into an evangel the obvious truth that poor men must work. No compulsion sets the mental attitude a man may choose when faced with his task. The speeder-up and the efficiency expert is hateful and alien. “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” may seem a loose and questionable phrase, but its implications go very deep. It sets a boundary mark on the frontier between flesh and spirit by which encroachments are registered as they occur.

In America no such frontier exists. Here the invasion seems to be complete. The spirit that would disentangle material from immaterial aims wanders baffled and perplexed through a maze of loftily conceived phrases and exhortations each one of which holds the promise of rescue from the drudgery of visionless life, yet each one of which leads back to an altar where production is enthroned as God. Manuals and primers, one had almost written psalters, pour out from the printing presses in which such words as “inspiration,” “dedication,” “consecration” urge American youth not to the renunciation of material aims but to their intensive pursuit. This naïve and simple creed is quite free of self-consciousness or hypocrisy. In its occasional abrupt transitions from the language of prayer to such conscience-searching questions as “Could you hold down a $100.00 a week job?” or “Would you hire yourself?” no lapse from the sublime to the ridiculous, far less to the squalid, is felt. It has the childlike gravity and reverence of all religions that are held in the heart.

But its God is a jealous God. No faltering in his service, no divided allegiance is permitted. His rewards are concrete and his punishments can be overwhelming. For open rebellion, outlawry; for secret revolt, contempt and misunderstanding are his inevitable visitations. For this reason those who escape into heresy not unfrequently lose their integrity and are gibbeted or pilloried for the edification of the faithful. The man who will not serve because the service starves and stunts his soul is all too likely to find himself dependent for company upon the man who will not serve because his will is too weak or his habits too dissipated.

That this service is a hard one, its most ardent advocates make no attempt to conceal. Its very stringency is made the text of appeals for ever and ever fresh efficiency, intensive training, specialization. “The pace they must travel is so swift,” one advocate of strenuousness warns his disciples, “competition has become so fierce that brains and vision are not enough. One must have the punch to put things through.” The impression grows that the American business man, new style, is a sombre gladiator, equipped for his struggle by rigorous physical and mental discipline. The impression is helped by a host of axioms, plain and pictured, that feature a sort of new cant of virility. “Red-blooded men,” “Two-fisted men,” “Men who do things,” “Get-there fellows,” are a few headliners in this gospel of push and shove.

The service is made still more difficult by its uncertainty, since no gospel of efficiency can greatly change the proportion of rewards, though it can make the contest harder and the marking higher. Year in year out, while competition intensifies and resources are fenced off, insecurity of employment remains, an evil tradition from days when opportunity was really boundless and competition could be escaped by a move of a few score miles Westward. Continuity in one employment still remains the exception rather than the rule, and when death or retirement reveals an instance it is still thought worthy of space in local journals. “Can you use me?” remains the customary gambit for the seeker after employment. The contempt of a settled prospect, of routine work, the conception of business as something to work up rather than to work at is still latent in the imagination of atavistic and ambitious young America. Of late years this restlessness, even though in so worthy a cause as “getting on,” has been felt as a hindrance to full efficiency, and the happy idea has been conceived of applying the adventurous element of competition at home. Territorial or departmental spheres are allotted within or without the “concern” to each employé; the results attained by A, B, and C are then totalled, analyzed, charted, and posted in conspicuous places where all may see, admire, and take warning. In the majority of up-to-date houses “suggestions” for the expansion or improvement of the business are not only welcomed but expected, and the employé who does not produce them in reasonable bulk and quality is slated for the “discard.” When inventiveness tires, “shake-ups” on a scale unknown in England take place, and new aspirants eager to “make good” step into the shoes of the old. The business athletes strain and pant toward the goal. There is no rest for the young man “consecrated” to merchandising effort. Like the fly in the fable, he must struggle and swim until the milk around his legs is churned into the butter of executive position.

The American press, hybrid, highly coloured, and often written by men of erratic genius who prefer the poor rewards of news writing to the commercial yoke, conveys but a partial idea of this absorption of an entire race in a single function. A far more vivid impression is to be gained from the “house organs,” and publicity pamphlets which pour from the press in an unceasing stream and the production of which within recent years has become a large and lucrative industry. Here articles and symposia on such themes as “Building Character into Salesmanship,” “Hidden Forces that bring Sales,” and “Capitalizing Individuality,” often adorned with half-tones of tense and joyless faces, recur on every page. No sanctuary is inviolable, no recess unexplored. The demand of the commercial God is for the soul, and he will be content with no less.

This demand implies a revised conception of the relation between employé and employer. The old contract under which time and effort were hired for so many hours a day at a stated remuneration, leaving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness outside those hours a matter of personal predilection, is now abrogated, or at least sharply questioned. It is recognized, and with entire logic, that the measure of accomplishment within working hours will depend largely on the environment amid which hours of recreation are spent; and that though detection of inefficiency is a task of keen brains that seldom fail, this detection, in the nature of things, may not take place until damage has been done the commercial structure. This is the real inwardness of a whole new gospel of “Welfare” and “Uplift,” under whose dispensation employés are provided with simple and tested specifics for recreation, with the watchful and benevolent eye of department heads upon them, in which it is presumed and stated with entire candour that the physical, moral, and mental efficiency of the staffs and “salesforce” has become the concern of the organization that has allotted them a place in its economy. The organism works, plays, rests, moves on together.

Nothing is more terrifying, as that master of terror, Edgar Allan Poe, perceived, than an organism that is at once mean and colossal. Properties of efficiency and adaptation to one definite end are bestowed in an eminent degree only on the lower orders of animal life. With rigid bodies, encasing organs that are designed for simple, metabolic purposes, armed with an elaborate mechanism of claws, hinges, borers, valves, and suckers the lepidoptera are living tools that fly or creep. Absorbed in one tireless function, with all distractions of love and war delegated to specialized subspecies, they neither love, hate, nor rebel. As the scale ascends, efficiency dwindles, until in the litter and loneliness of the den, lazy domesticity with dam and cubs, the joy of prey hunt and love hunt, between the belly pinch of hunger and the sleep of repletion, the lives of the big carnivora pass in a sheer joy of living for living’s sake until the gun of the hunter ends the day dream.

It has been left for man—hapless and inventive—to realize a life that touches both ends of the scale, to feel at his heart the pull of hive-life and jungle-life in turn. Something of the ant and something of the tiger lurks in every normal human creature. If he has immense powers of assertion, his faculty for abdication seems to be as limitless. It is just this dual nature in man that makes prophecy as to what “will happen the world” so difficult and unsafe. But one prophecy may be ventured on and that is, that in proportion as acquiescence or revolt seize the imaginations of separated nations will those nations coalesce or drift apart into antagonism.

If a life spent during the last twenty years between England and the United States is any title to judge, I should say that at the present moment the dominant note in America is acquiescence in, and in England revolt against the inordinate demands of commercialism. Here, to all appearances, the surrender for the moment is complete. There are revolts, but they are sporadic and misguided and their speedy suppression seems to stir no indignation and to awaken no thrill of common danger among the body of workers. Strikes confined to wage issues are treated more indulgently, but even they are generally strangled at their birth by injunctions, and a sour or hostile attitude of authority makes success difficult. In any display of opposition to established conditions, even when based on the most technical grounds, authority appears to sense a challenge to larger issues and to meet them half way with a display of force that to an Englishman appears strangely over-adequate. It is evident the ground is being tested. Interpretations of liberty that date from easier and roomier days are under revision, and where they are found at variance with a conception of society as a disciplined and productive force, they are being roughly retrenched. The prevailing character of the labour mass, at once heterogeneous and amorphous, makes it a safe and ductile medium for almost any social experiment. “If you don’t like it, go back,” is an argument to which no answer has been found. Native-born labour shares in the universal dis-esteem and takes refuge from it in aristocratic and doctrinaire federations whose ineffectiveness is apparent whenever a labour issue arises. For the rebel who, under these conditions, chooses to fight on, rougher methods are found. He may become fera natura. Tarring and feathering, ducking and rubbing with acid, and deportation from State to State may be his portion. Under any social condition conformity is the easiest course. When the prison cell and social pillory are its alternatives, to resist requires a degree of fanatical courage and interior moral resources possessed only by a handful of men in a generation.

To this conception of a disciplined community harnessed to the purpose of production, thousands of the possessing and capitalistic classes look wistfully from the other side of the Atlantic. But there are many obstacles to its realization in England. The English proletarian is no uprooted orphan, paying with docile and silent work for the citizenship of his children and grandchildren. That great going concern, the British Empire, is his personal work, built on the bones and cemented with the blood of his forebears. His enfranchisement is as complete as his disinheritance, and the impoverishment of his country, evidenced in the stream of gold that pours Westward like arterial blood, has not reached to his spirit. Even the Great War, with its revelation to him of how ruthless and comprehensive the demands of the State on the individual can be, has only reinforced his sense of being a very deserving person and has added to the long debt which he is frankly out to collect. The promises, the appeals to national pride and tradition with which he had to be appeased while, for the first time in his history, the yoke of universal service was laid upon his neck, trip up the feet of his rulers to-day. It is difficult to tell him to go elsewhere, for he “belongs” in England. Even suggestions that he should emigrate wholesale to British colonies in order to relieve the congested labour market are received with mocking laughter in which a threat lurks. He is, I am sure, because I know him, looking on with a certain sardonic relish and enjoyment at the flurries, the perplexities of his rulers, their displays of force alternated with appeals to sweet reason, their brave words succeeded by abject denials and qualifications. He is waiting until the naked economic question, which he knows well underlies all the rhodomontade of national greatness and imperial heritage, shall be put to him. It will be a great and momentous day when the Englishman is given his choice. A choice it must be. The means to compulsion are not here.

* * * * *

To America just now Europeans as a whole must seem a helpless race, bewildered actors in a vast and tragic blunder. To thousands of Red Cross workers, Knights of Columbus, and welfare auxiliaries in devastated districts, the spectacle of suffering and want must have come home to reinforce impressions already gained from sights witnessed at Ellis Island or Long Wharf. None the less, it is an historical misfortune that the first real contact between the people of the two continents should have come at a time when the older was bankrupt and had little to show save the rags and tatters of its civilization. The reverse of the tenderness to the stricken European abroad has been a hardening of the heart to the immigrant at home, and it is difficult for the American, schoolmaster and lawgiver to so many alien peoples in his own country, to divest himself of a didactic character in his foreign relations. To many countries he is “saying it with flour,” and those who accept the dole can do little else than swallow the sermon. Even to those countries who were his allies he does shine forth in a certain splendour of righteousness. His sacrifice was deliberate—which is, perhaps, its best excuse for being a little conscious. It was self-imposed, and fifty thousand of his dead, wrested from productive enterprises to lie in France, attest its sincerity. No Englishman, at any rate, believes in his heart that its material reward, great and inevitable as it is now seen to be, was the driving force at the time the sacrifice was accepted. There are a host of reasons, some creditable, others less so, that make Europe curb its restiveness under American homilies.

With England the case is different. No one knows just how hard Britain has been hit, but she is managing to put a good face on her wounds. No relief organization from the big sister has landed its khaki-clad apostles of hygiene and its grey-cloaked sisters of mercy on English shores. The façade is intact, the old masters in possession. With a few shifts and changes in political labelling that are a matter of domestic concern, those who steered the big concern into the bankruptcy of war are still entrusted with its extrication. No great subversion stands as a witness of a change of national faith. The destinies, the foreign relations, the aspects that attract or antagonize remain in the hands of men who secured a fresh lease of power by a clever political trick. The skeleton at the feast of racial reunion is not Ireland, nor Mesopotamia, nor Yap, nor the control of the seas. It is the emergence into political power, sooner or later, but inevitably from the very nature of British political institutions, of the British proletariat.

Frankly I do not see, when this moment arrives, who is going to put the gospel of American civilization into terms that will be, I shall not say acceptable, but even significant, to the emancipated British worker. Ruling classes in the older country who rely on a steadying force from across the Atlantic in possible political upheavals must have strange misgivings when they take account of their own stewardship. It will be an ungrateful task to preach the doctrine of salvation through work to a people that has tried it out so logically and completely that the century which has seen the commercial supremacy of their country has witnessed the progressive impoverishment and proletarization of its people. Homilies on discipline will sound strangely in the ears of those who, while America was enjoying her brief carnival of spacious and fruitful endeavour in a virgin land, went under an industrial yoke that has galled their necks and stunted their physical growth. Appeals to pride of race will have little meaning coming from a stock that has ceased through self-indulgence or economic upward pressure to resist ethnologically and whose characteristics are disappearing in the general amalgam.

The salient fact that stands out from all history is that inordinateness of any sort has never failed to act upon the English character as a challenge. His successes, whatever his libellists may seek to believe, have seldom been against the small or weak. It has been his destiny, in one recurrent crisis after another, to find himself face to face with some claimant to world power, some “cock of the walk.” To use a homely phrase, it has always been “up to him.” And the vision of his adversary which has nerved his arm has always been an excess in some quality easily understandable by the average man. Bigotry is not the monopoly of the Spaniard, nor commercial greed of the Hollander, nor vanity of the Frenchman, nor pomposity of the German. It would be an easy task to convict the Englishman of some share in each vice. Nevertheless history in the main has justified his instinct for proportion, his dislike for “slopping over.” In something far beyond the accepted phrase, the English struggle has been a struggle for the “balance of power.”

Henry L. Stuart