The Bronx is different. The Bronx is beginning again, at a stage earlier than art, and beginning better. It is a place for those who have learnt that physical righteousness has got to be the basis of all future progress. It is a place to which the fit will be attracted, and where the fit will survive. It has rather a harsh quality. It reminded me of a phrase used by an American at the head of an enormous business. He had been explaining to me how he tried a man in one department, and, if he did not shine in that, then in another, and in another, and so on. "And if you find in the end that he's honest but not efficient?" I asked. "Then," was the answer, "we think he's entitled to die, and we fire him."
The Bronx presented itself to me as a place where the right of the inefficient to expire would be cheerfully recognized. The district that I inspected was certainly, as I say, for the fit. Efficiency in physical essentials was inculcated—and practised—by the landlord-company, whose constant aim seemed to be to screw up higher and higher the self-respect of its tenants. That the landlord-company was not a band of philanthropists, but a capitalistic group in search of dividends, I would readily admit. But that it should find its profit in the business of improving the standard of existence and appealing to the pride of the folk was to me a wondrous sign of the essential vigor of American civilization, and a proof that public spirit, unostentatious as a coral insect, must after all have long been at work somewhere.
Compare the East Side with the Bronx fully, and one may see, perhaps roughly, a symbol of what is going forward in America. Nothing, I should imagine, could be more interesting to a sociological observer than that actual creation of a city of homes as I saw it in the Bronx. I saw the home complete, and I saw the home incomplete, with wall-papers not on, with the roof not on. Why, I even saw, further out, the ground being leveled and the solid rock drilled where now, most probably, actual homes are inhabited and babies have been born! And I saw further than that. Nailed against a fine and ancient tree, in the midst of a desolate waste, I saw a board with these words: "A new Subway station will be erected on this corner." There are legendary people who have eyes to see the grass growing. I have seen New York growing. It was a hopeful sight, too.
At this point my impressions of America come to an end, for the present. Were I to assert, in the phrase conventionally proper to such an occasion, that no one can be more sensible than myself of the manifold defects, omissions, inexactitudes, gross errors, and general lack of perspective which my narrative exhibits, I should assert the thing which is not. I have not the slightest doubt that a considerable number of persons are more sensible than myself of my shortcomings; for on the subject of America I do not even know enough to be fully aware of my own ignorance. Still, I am fairly sensible of the enormous imperfection and rashness of this book. When I regard the map and see the trifling extent of the ground that I covered—a scrap tucked away in the northeast corner of the vast multi-colored territory—I marvel at the assurance I displayed in choosing my title. Indeed, I have yet to see your United States. Any Englishman visiting the country for the second time, having begun with New York, ought to go round the world and enter by San Francisco, seeing Seattle before Baltimore and Denver before Chicago. His perspective might thus be corrected in a natural manner, and the process would in various ways be salutary. It is a nice question how many of the opinions formed on the first visit—and especially the most convinced and positive opinions—would survive the ordeal of the second.
As for these brief chapters, I hereby announce that I am not prepared ultimately to stand by any single view which they put forward. There is naught in them which is not liable to be recanted. The one possible justification of them is that they offer to the reader the one thing that, in the very nature of the case, a mature and accustomed observer could not offer—namely, an immediate account (as accurate as I could make it) of the first tremendous impact of the United States on a mind receptive and unprejudiced. The greatest social historian, the most conscientious writer, could not recapture the sensations of that first impact after further intercourse had scattered them.
THE END