I need hardly say that it was the second letter of which I saw the original, or that it was A. who showed them to me, when they were already several years old but still treasured, and A. was a wealthy man again as a result of that meeting after dinner. A. told me briefly what passed at that meeting. "He gave me a little more than half a million," he said. "Of course he has had it back long ago; but he did not know that he would get it at the time and he took no note or other security from me. At the time it was practically a gift of five hundred thousand dollars."
And as I write I can almost hear the English reader saying, "Pooh! the same things are done times without number in England." And I can hear the American, still smarting under the recollection of some needlessly cruel and unfair thrust from the hands of a competitor, smile cynically and say that he would like to tell me certain things that he knows. Of course there are exceptions on either side. It takes, as the American is so fond of saying, "all kinds of men to make a world." It is the same old difficulty of generalising about a nation or drawing up an indictment against a whole people. But I do not think that any man who has engaged for any length of time in business in both countries, who has lived in each sufficiently to absorb the spirit of the respective communities, will dissent from what I have said. Many Englishmen, without knowledge of business in England, go to America and find the atmosphere harder and less friendly than they were accustomed to at home, and come to quite another conclusion. But they are comparing American business life with the social club-and-country-house life of home. Let them acquire the same experience of business circles in England, and then compare the tone with that of business circles in America, and they will change their opinions.
Let me recall again what was said above as to the difference in the motives which may impel a man to go into business or trade in the two countries. An Englishman cannot well pretend that he does it with any other purpose than to make money. The American hopes to make money too, but he takes up business as an honourable career and for the sake of winning standing and reputation among his fellows. This being so, business in America has a tendency to become more of a game or a pastime—to be followed with the whole heart certainly—but in a measure for itself, and not alone for the stakes to be won. It is not difficult to see how, in this spirit, it may be easier to forego those stakes—to let the actual money slip—when once you have won the game.
It is necessary to refer briefly again to the subject of trusts. In England a great corporation which was able to demonstrate beyond dispute that it had materially cheapened the cost of any staple article to the public, and further showed that when, in the process of extending its operations, it of necessity wiped out any smaller business concerns, it never failed to provide the owners or partners of those concerns with managerial positions which secured to them a larger income than they could have hoped to earn as individual traders, and moreover took into their service the employees of the disbanded concerns at equal salaries,—such a corporation would generally be regarded by the English people as a public benefactor and as a philanthropically and charitably disposed institution. In America the former consideration has some weight, though not much; the latter none at all.
When a trust takes into its service those men whom it has destroyed as individual traders, the fact remains that their industrial independence has been crushed. The individual can no longer "insist upon himself." He is subordinate and no longer free. One of the first principles of American business life, the encouragement of individual initiative, has been violated, and nothing will atone for it.
The Standard Oil Company can, I believe, prove beyond possibility of contradiction that the result of its operations has been to reduce immensely the cost of oil to the public, as well as to give facilities in the way of distribution of the product which unassociated enterprise could never have furnished. It can also show that in many, and, I imagine, in the majority, of cases, it has endeavoured to repair by offers of employment of various sorts whatever injuries it has done to individuals by ruining their business. But these things constitute no defence in the eyes of the American people.
There is the additional ground of public hostility that the weapons employed to crush competitors have often been illegal weapons. Without the assistance of the railway companies (which was given in violation of the law) the Standard Oil Company might have been unable to win more than one of its battles; but this fact, while it furnishes a handle against the company and exposes a side of it which may prove to be vulnerable, and is therefore kept to the front in any public indictment of the company's methods, is an immaterial factor in the popular feeling. Few Americans (or Englishmen) will not accept a reduced rate from a railway company when they can get it. Whatever actual bitterness may be felt by the average man against the Standard Oil Company because it procured rebates on its freight bills is rather the bitterness of jealousy than of an outraged sense of morality. The real bitterness—and very bitter it is—is caused by the fact that the company has crushed out so many individuals. On similar ground nothing approaching the same intensity of feeling could be engendered in the British public.
Let us now recur for a moment to the views of the young woman quoted above on the interesting topic of chaperons. We have seen that insistence on the individuality is a conspicuous—perhaps it is the most conspicuous—trait of the American character. Encouraged by the wider horizon and more ample elbow-room and assisted by the something more than tolerant good-will of his business associates, colleagues, or competitors, the individual, once insisted on, has every chance to develop and become prosperous and rich. Everything helps a man in America to strike out for himself, to walk alone, and to dispense with a chaperon. The Englishman is chaperoned at almost every step of his business career; and I am not speaking now of the chaperonage of his colleagues, of his fellows in the community, or of his elders among whom he grows up and, generally, in spite of whom the young man must make his way to the top. There is another much more significant form of chaperonage in English business circles, of which it is difficult to speak without provoking hostility.
The English business world is solicitor-cursed. I mean by this no reflection on solicitors either individually or in the mass. I am making no reference to such cases as there have been of misappropriation by solicitors here and there of funds entrusted to their charge, nor to their methods of making charges, which are preposterous but not of their choosing. Let us grant that, given the necessity of solicitors at all, Great Britain is blessed in that she has so capable and upright and in all ways admirable a set of men to fill the offices and do the work. What I am attacking is solicitordom as an institution.