Tuxedo has been spoken of as a millionaire's colony. It is a settlement, if not of millionaires, at all events of wealthy people. The park, an immense tract of land, is owned by the club. Ground for building can be obtained only by those who are elected members of the club and who are prepared to spend a certain sum as a minimum on the building of their houses. In theory the place is reserved for people who either do or will know each other socially, who are approximately on the same level as regards wealth and who all want to meet each other frequently, for one purpose or another, in the club. In practice, certain difficulties necessarily arise. A man may be elected a member of the club and build a house. He may be a thoroughly desirable person, but in course of time he dies. His son may be very undesirable, or his son may sell the house to some one whom the club is not willing to admit to membership. But Tuxedo society, instead of becoming, as might have been expected, a very narrow clique, seems to be singularly broad minded and tolerant. The difficulty of preserving the character of the place and keeping a large society together as, in all its essentials, a club, is very much less than might be expected. The place is extremely interesting to any observer of American social life. The club regulates everything. It runs a private police force for the park. It keeps up roads. It supplies electric light and, what is hardly less necessary in America, ice to all the houses. It levies, though I suppose without any actual legal warrant, regular rates. The fact that the experiment was not wrecked long ago on the rocks of snobbery goes to show that society in America is singularly fluid compared to that of any European country. That a considerable number of people should want to live together in such a way is a witness to the sociability of America. No other country club has realized its ideal as the club at Tuxedo has, but every country club—and you find them all over America—has something of the spirit of Tuxedo.
Tuxedo is immensely interesting in another way. Nowhere else in the world, I suppose, is it possible to see so many different kinds of domestic architecture gathered together in a comparatively small space. A walk round the shores of the lake gives you an opportunity of seeing houses built in the dignified and spacious colonial style, a happy modification of the English Georgian. Beside one of these, close to it, may be a house like that of a Mexican rancher, and the hill behind is crowned with a French château. There are houses which must have had Italian models, others which suggest memories of Tudor manor houses, others built after the fashion of Queen Anne's time. There are houses whose architects evidently had an eclectic appreciation of all the houses built anywhere or at any time, who had tried to embody the most desirable features of very various styles in one building. The general effect of a view of Tuxedo is exceedingly bewildering at first, but almost every house is the expression of some individual tastes, either good or bad. An architect may start, apparently very often does start, with the idea of building a house with twelve rooms in it at a cost of four thousand pounds. Having thus settled size and price, he may go ahead, trusting to luck about the appearance. Or an architect may start with the idea of building a house in a certain style, or to express some feeling, dignity, homeliness, grandeur, or anything else. The architects who built the Tuxedo houses all seem to have gone to work on the latter plan.
If the Tuxedo experiment in social life fails and the club goes into liquidation, the United States Government might do worse than buy the whole place as it stands and turn it into a college of domestic architecture. The students could, without traveling more than a mile or two, study every known kind of country house. But, indeed, a college of this sort seems less needed in America than anywhere else. It is not only the insides of the houses which are well planned. The outsides of the newer houses are for the most part beautiful to look at. And one can see them, there being no walls.
CHAPTER XII
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS
The municipal elections in New York which resulted in the defeat of Tammany were fought out with great vigor in all the usual ways. There were speeches, bands and flags. The newspapers were full of the sayings of the different candidates, and the leader writers of each party seemed to be highly successful in cornering the speakers of the other party. It was shown clearly every day that orators shamelessly contradicted themselves, went back on their own principles, and must, if they had any respect for logic or decency, either retract their latest remarks or explain them. All this was very interesting to us. It would have been interesting to any one. It was particularly interesting to us because it was almost new to us. Elections are, I suppose, fought in more or less the same way everywhere; but in Connaught we hardly ever have elections. An independent candidate bubbles up occasionally, but as a rule we are content to return to Parliament the proper man, that is to say the man whom somebody, we never quite know who, says we ought to return.
I gathered the impression that elections must be an exciting sport for those engaged in them. I do not think that the "pomp and circumstance" of the business, the outward manifestations of activity, can make much difference to the result. Speeches, for instance, are certainly thrilling things to make, and I can understand how it is that orators welcome elections as heaven sent opportunities for the exercise of their art. But the people who listen to the speeches always seem to have their minds made up beforehand whether they agree with the speaker or not. They know what he is going to say and are prepared with hoots or cheers. I never heard of any one who came to hoot remaining to cheer. I doubt whether there is a single modern instance of a speech having affected the destiny of a vote. A very good speech might indeed produce some effect if it were not that there is always an equally good speech made at the same time on the other side. Election speeches are like tug boats pulling different ways at the opposite ends of a large ship. They neutralize each other and the ship drifts gently, sideways, with the tide.
It cannot be seriously maintained that bands or flags help voters to make up their minds. In nine cases out of ten it is impossible to tell for which side a band is playing, and therefore unlikely that it will draw voters to one side rather than the other. In the tenth case, when the band, by selecting some particular tune, makes its meaning clear, the music is not of a quality which moves the listener to any feeling of gratitude to the candidate who pays for it. I should, I think, feel bound to vote for a man who gave me "panem et circenses," but I should expect good bread and an attractive circus. I should not dream of voting for a candidate who provided me with inferior music. The flags are a real addition to the gaiety of city life. The ordinary elector loves to see them fluttering about. But the ordinary elector is not by any means a fool. He knows that the flags will be taken down very soon after the election is over. If any candidate promised to keep his flags flying as a permanent decoration of the city streets he might capture a few votes. But we all know that none of them will do anything as useful as that.
Nor do I think that the editors of newspapers produce much effect by showing up the inconsistencies of politicians and pinning them down to-day, when they are driven to say something quite different, to the things which, under stress of other circumstances, they said yesterday. It does not take a clever man, like a newspaper editor, to corner a politician. Any fool can do that, and the performance of an obviously easy trick does not move an audience at all. An acrobat who merely hops across the stage on one leg gets no applause and the box office returns fall away. The thing is too easy. It is the man who does something really hard, balances himself on the end of an umbrella and juggles with twenty balls at once, who attracts the public. If a newspaper editor at an election time would, instead of showing up the other side, offer proofs that the men on his own side are consistent, logical and high-principled, he would have enormous influence with the voters. "Any one," so the ordinary man would reason, "who can prove things like that about politicians must be amazingly clever. If he is amazingly clever, far cleverer than I ever hope to be, then there is a strong probability that his side is the right one. I shall vote for it." The ordinary man, so we ought to recollect, is not nearly such a fool as is generally supposed. He is quite capable of reasoning, and he would reason, I am sure, just in the way I have suggested, if he were given a chance.
The keen interest which we took in the showy side of electioneering made us diligent readers of the newspapers. We were rewarded beyond our hopes. We came across, on the very evening of the election itself, a little paragraph, tucked away in a corner, which we might very easily have missed if we had been less earnest students. In a certain district in New York, so this paragraph told us, there was a queue of voters waiting outside a polling station. Among them was a man who was known to be or was suspected of being hostile to Tammany. It was likely that he would cast his vote on the other side. There were, looking thoughtfully at the queue, certain men described by the newspaper as "gangsters" in the pay of the Tammany organization. They seized the voter whose principles seemed to them objectionable and dragged him out of the queue, plainly in order to prevent his recording his vote. So far there was nothing of very special interest in the paragraph. We knew beforehand—even in Ireland we know this—that voters are a good deal influenced by the strength of the party machine. The strength is seldom displayed in its nakedly physical form on this side of the Atlantic, but it is always there and is really the determining force in most elections. It was the thing which happened next which gave the incident its value. A university student who happened to be engaged in social work in the neighborhood saw what was done. He was one man and there were several "gangsters," but he attacked them at once. He was, as might be supposed, as he himself must surely have foreseen, worsted in the fray which followed. The gangsters, after the manner of their kind, mauled, beat and kicked him to such an extent that he had to be carried to a hospital. It did not appear that this university student was a party man, eager for the triumph of his side as the gangsters were for the victory of theirs. He seems to have acted on the simple principle that a man who has a right to vote ought not to be interfered with in the exercise of that right. He was on the side of justice and liberty. He was not concerned with politics of either kind.
I do not know what happened to that student afterwards. I searched the papers in vain for any further reference to the incident. I wanted to know whether the voter voted in the end. I wanted to know what was done to the gangsters. I wanted to know whether the student recovered from his injuries or not. I wanted, above all, to know whether anyone recognized how fine a thing that student did. I never discovered another paragraph about the incident.