The diplomat smiled. “I have heard that before,” said he. “But, my dear friend, they are representative. Your country has changed and you do not realize it. You are deceived, not we. You are like the Romans who thought they had a republic when, in fact, the republic had been dead five hundred years. Think a moment. What sort of men did you formerly send to us as diplomats? And what sort of men do you send now? What has become of the old horror of court dress and rank and precedence which they used to exhibit? You cannot deny that your diplomats are representative. And are they not of the same class as these ladies and gentlemen about us here, so obviously delighted with themselves and their aristocratic company, with themselves because of their company?”
There is much truth in the diplomat’s comments on the state of European public sentiment toward America. And the change is, as he said, due to better acquaintance. Europe thinks it has discovered that as soon as an American rises in prosperity above the mass of his fellow-citizens, he enters an actual ruling class that dictates and disdains the laws, uses them for enriching himself and for exploiting the mass of his fellow-countrymen. Europe thinks that as soon as he reaches this stage he turns his eyes longingly toward the Old World monarchies and begins to plan to become as nearly like the aristocrats as possible. He may not flaunt his power—he must respect republican forms. But he may, and does, flaunt his wealth. And in Europe he can get open recognition of his superior rank when such recognition as it gets at home is indirect and more or less secret.
Thousands of Americans live in Europe. Every considerable city on the Continent has its American colony, and year by year these colonies grow apace. Americans—chiefly the women—have intermarried everywhere into the European nobility. Nearly all these expatriated Americans are people of means; many of them are rich. They lead lives of industrious idleness. Many of them frankly express their contempt for the country from which they draw their incomes, the country but for which they would be miserable peasants, sweating for the amusement of some European land-holder.
It is fortunate that their dislike of their native land has been strong enough to take them away and to keep them away; it is a pity that the migrating impulse does not seize upon more of their kind. The world has room for idlers—it has room for all sorts of people. But America has no room for them. That great workshop wants no idlers obstructing the aisles and hindering the toilers at their tasks. That would be a sorry day for us when our rapidly growing leisure class should “civilize” and “refine” America into an agreeable place of residence for “ladies” and “gentlemen” of the European pattern.
These Americans who have “outgrown” their country serve to confirm Europe in the suspicions raised by the news that has reached it of stupendous aristocratic changes in the American people, of rotten political machines ruled by the rich, of toll-gates set up on every highway of American trade and commerce for the tax-gatherers of plutocracy, of a people fatuously imagining that it is free because it can go to the polls and freely choose which of two sets of candidates shielded by the plutocracy shall make and execute the laws. This brings up the whole subject of our relations with “abroad”—and the social and political meaning and tendency of those relations.
A few years ago Paris was the paradise of Americans, especially of the Americans of wealth. It is so no longer. It is now for them a mere stopping-place for buying clothes—a pause en route to the true, fashionable, American Mecca, London. A few years ago Americans, except those of the ordinary sight-seeing, mind-improving kind, loathed London. They knew few people there—and, like Vienna, London is an impossible place for the stranger in search of amusement; if he does not know natives, is not invited to their houses, a soundless desert is a cheerful, companionable place in comparison. Further, such English as the rich, fashionable, amusement-hunting American knew—that is, such Englishmen “of the right sort”—were about as friendly and sociable as they are to their servants. But that was before the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance.”
The change came with the British discovery that the American multi-millionaire and the American heiress were not, as had been supposed, rarities found only occasionally after long search through trackless and vast wildernesses of “unspeakable bounders,” but were deposited in “the States” in quantities, were easily accessible, were yearning for high society, for aristocracy, for titled friends, for titled alliances. This was tidings of great joy to the English aristocracy. For an aristocrat may not work; and no matter how heavily “endowed” a title may be, values will shrink as time passes—not to speak of those savage “death duties” which the rascally Liberals enacted to the infuriating of the upper classes, who yet dare not repeal them.
The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” began forthwith. Scores of English upper-class families opened their hearts and their hearths to their “cousins across the sea.” The more American friends one accumulated the more likely was one to find an American multi-millionaire or so among them, or at least to be by way of getting into touch with American multi-millionaires or within “touching” distance of them.
To realize to what an extent the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” was and is based upon this notion, one must realize how all-powerful the upper class is in England, and how inarticulate, how socially, politically and in every public way insignificant, are the English masses, including the bulk of the middle classes. When you speak of English public sentiment you mean the sentiment of the London drawing-rooms. They are filled with the governing class, which constitutes parliaments and ministries; they dominate the journalists, who are either of the upper class or desperately struggling to get into it; they also dominate the masses who have been trained by centuries of unbroken custom to bow before rank and title.
There were excellent reasons in international politics for England’s turning favorable, friendly, even enthusiastic eyes upon America. But there could not have been this present passionate, personal love, this daily and hourly working of that toothless old saw, “blood is thicker than water,” had there not existed a reason which appealed directly to the personal and family self-interest of every member of nearly every upper-class family in England.