If two fruit-growers have adjoining orchards and, for the purpose of making a display at an agricultural show, one spends months of careful nourishing, training, and pruning of certain trees wherefrom he selects with care the finest of his fruit, while the other without preparation goes out haphazard to his orchard and reaches for the first fruit that he sees, it is probable that, judging by their exhibits, the public will get an erroneous idea of the characters of the orchards as a whole. And this is precisely the difference between the representatives whom the United States sends abroad and those sent to be displayed beside them by other nations.
There is no recognised diplomatic service in the United States, no school for the training of consular representatives, no training or nurturing or pruning of any sort. The fundamental objection of the American people to the creation of any permanent privileged class, has made the thing impossible in the past, while, under the system of party patronage, practically the entire representation of the country abroad—commercial as well as diplomatic—is changed with each change of government. The American cannot count on holding an appointment abroad for more than four years; and while four years is altogether too short a term to be considered a career, it is over-long for a holiday. So in addition to the lack of any trained class from which to draw, even among the untrained the choice is much restricted by the undesirability of the conditions of the service itself.
Though the conditions have improved immensely of late years, the fact remains that the consular service as a whole is not fairly to be compared on equal terms with that of other countries; and the majority of appointments are still made as the reward for minor services to the party in power. Nor are the conditions which govern the appointments to the less important diplomatic posts much different; but Great Britain has abundant cause to be aware that when the place is one which appeals to the ambition of first-class men, first-class men enough are forthcoming; though even Ambassadors to London are generally lacking in any special training or experience up to the time of their appointment.
Sydney Smith's phrase has been often enough quoted—that when a woman makes a public speech, we admire her as we admire a dog that stands upon its hind legs, not because she does it well, but because she does it at all. Congress includes among its members many curious individuals and, as a unit, it does queer things at times. State legislatures are sometimes strange looking bodies of men and on occasions they achieve legislation which moves the country to mirth. The representatives of the nation abroad make blunders which contribute not a little to the gaiety of the world. But the thing to admire is that they do these things at all—that the legislators, whether Federal or State, and the members of the consular service, appointed or elected as they are, and from the classes which they represent, do somehow manage to form legislative bodies which, year in and year out, will bear comparison well enough with other Parliaments, and do in one way and another succeed in giving their country a service abroad which is far from despicable as compared with that of other peoples, nor all devoid of dignity. The fact that results are not immeasurably worse than they are is no small tribute to the adaptability of the American character. There is no other national character which could stand the same test.
In the absence of any especially trained or officially dedicated class, the American people in the mass provides an amazing quantity of not impossible material out of which legislators and consuls may be made—just as it might equally well be made into whatever should happen to be required.
And this fact strikes at the root of a common misapprehension in the minds of foreigners as to the constitution of the American people, a misapprehension which is fostered by what is written by other foreigners after inadequate observation.
Much is thus written of the so-called heterogeneousness of the people of America. The Englishman who visits the United States for a few weeks only, commonly comes away with an idea that the New Yorker is the American people; whereas we have seen why it is that good American authorities maintain that in all the width and depth of the continent there is no aggregation of persons so little representative of the American people as a whole as the inhabitants of New York. After the Englishman has been in the United States for some months or a year or two, he grows bewildered and reaches the conclusion that there is no common American type—nothing but a patchwork of unassimilated units. In which conclusion he is just as mistaken as he was at first. There does exist a clearly defined and homogeneous American type.
Let us suppose that all the negroes had been swept as with some vast net down and away into the Gulf of Mexico; that the Irishmen had been gathered out of the cities and deposited back into the Atlantic; that the Germans had been rounded up towards their fellows in Chicago and Milwaukee and then tipped gently into Lake Michigan, while the Scandinavians, having been assembled in Minnesota, had been edged courteously over the Canadian border;—when all this had been done, there would still remain the great American People. Of this great People there would remain certain local variations—in parts of the South, in New England, on the plains—but each clearly recognisable as a variety only, differing but superficially and in substance possessing well-defined all the generic and specific attributes of the race.
If the entire membership of the Chicago Club were to be transferred bodily to the Manhattan Club-house in New York, and all the members of the Manhattan were simultaneously made to migrate from Fifth Avenue to Michigan Avenue, the club servants, beyond missing some familiar faces, would not find much difference. Could any man, waking from a trance, tell by the men surrounding him whether he was in the Duquesne Club at Pittsburgh or the Minnesota Club in St. Paul? And, if it be urged that the select club-membership represents a small circle of the population only, would the disturbance be much greater if the entire populations of Erie and Minneapolis and Kansas City were to execute a three-cornered "general post" or if Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine, swapped inhabitants? How long would it take the inhabitants of any one town to settle down in their new environment and go to work on precisely the same lines as their predecessors whom they dislodged? The novelty would, I think, be even less than if Manchester and Birmingham were miraculously made to execute a similar change in a night.
I do not underrate the magnitude of the problem presented to the people of America by the immense volume of immigration from alien races, and chiefly from the most undesirable strata in those races, of the last few years. On the other hand, I have no shadow of doubt of the ability of the people to cope with the problem and to succeed in assimilating to itself all the elements in this great influx while itself remaining unchanged.
