It may not, however, be amiss to remember that a century and a half ago, when the conditions in the two countries were widely different from what they are to-day, Benjamin Franklin, coming to England, was shocked and astounded at the corruption then prevalent in English public life.
The procedure of an American presidential campaign has been sufficiently often described for the benefit of English readers. Suffice it to say that it is devastating, at times almost titanic. I have had some experience of the amenities of political campaigning in England, but the most bitterly contested fight in England never produces anything like the intensity of passion that is let loose in the quadrennial upheavals in the United States.
It was my lot to be closely associated with the conduct of a national campaign—as bitterly fought a campaign as the country has seen since the days of the war,—namely that of 1896 when Mr. Bryan was the candidate of the Free Silver Democracy. Early in the fight I began to receive abusive letters, for which a large and capacious drawer was provided in the office, into which they were tossed as they came, on the chance of their containing some reading which might be interesting when the trouble was over. As the fight waxed, they came by every post and in every form, ranging from mere incoherent personal abuse to threats of assassination. Hundreds of them were entirely insane: many hundred more the work, on the face of them, of anarchists pure and simple. A large proportion of them were written in red ink, and in many—very many—cases the passions of the writers had got so far beyond their control that you could see where they had broken their pens in the futile effort to make written words curse harder than they would. The receptacle in which they were placed was officially known in the office as the Chamber of Horrors, but it was, I think, universally spoken of among the staff as the "Hell-box." Before the end of the campaign, capacious though it was, it was crowded to overflowing, and hardly a document that was not as venomous as human wrath could make it. Incidentally I wish to say that never was a campaign—at least as far as my colleagues in our particular department were concerned—more purely in the interest of public morality, without any sort of selfish aims, and less deserving of abuse. What the correspondence of a presidential candidate himself must be in like circumstances, it is horrible to think.[281:1]
The intense feverishness of the campaign is of course increased by the vastness of the country, the tremendous distances over which the national organisation has to endeavour to exercise control, and the immense diversity in the conditions of the people and communities to whom appeal has to be made. The voting takes place all over the country on the same day; and it must be remembered that the area of the United States (not counting Alaska or any external dependencies) is so great that it reaches from west to east about as far as from London to Teheran, and north and south from London to below the southern boundary of Morocco. The difficulty of organisation over such an area can, perhaps, be imagined. In the course of the campaign there came in one day in my mail a letter written on a torn half of a railway time-card. It ran:
"Dear Sir—There is sixty-five of us here working in a gravel pit and we was going to vote solid for Bryan and Free Silver. Some of your books [i. e., campaign leaflets, etc.] was thrown to us out of a passing train. We have organised a Club and will cast sixty-five votes for William McKinley.—Yours, etc."
So far as those sixty-five were concerned our chief interest thereafter lay in seeing that the existence of that gravel-pit was never discovered by the enemy. A faith which had been so speedily and unanimously embraced might perhaps not have been unassailable.
Before leaving this subject it may be well to say a few words on a recent election in New York which excited, perhaps, more interest in England than any American political event of late years. The eminence which Mr. Hearst has won is an entirely deplorable thing, which has been made possible by the fact, already sufficiently dwelt upon, that political power in the United States is so largely exerted from the bottom up. In their comments on the incident after the event, however, English papers missed some of its significance. Most English writers spoke of Mr. Hearst's appeal to the forces of discontent as a new phenomenon and drew therefrom grave inferences as to what would happen next in the United States. The fact is that the phenomenon is not new in any way. Mr. Hearst, in but a slightly different form, appealed to precisely the same passions as Mr. Bryan aroused—the same as every demagogue has appealed to throughout, at least, the northern and western sections of the country any time in this generation. Mr. Hearst began from the East and Mr. Bryan from the West, but in all essentials the appeal was the same. And Mr. Hearst was not elected. And Mr. Bryan was not elected. What will happen next will be that the next man who makes the same appeal will not be elected also.
It is the allegory of the river and its ripples over again. Englishmen need not despair of the United States, for the great body of the people is extraordinarily conservative and well-poised. In America, man never is, but always to be, cursed. Dreadful things are on the eve of happening, and never happen. There is a great saving fund of common-sense in the people—a sense which probably rests as much on the fact that they are as a whole conspicuously well-to-do as on anything else—which as the last resort shrinks from radicalism. In spite of the yellow press, in spite of all the Socialist and Anarchist talk, in spite of corruption and brass bands and torchlight processions, when the people as a whole is called upon to speak the final word, that word has never yet been wrong. Perhaps some day it will be, for all peoples go mad at times; but the nation is normally sound and sane, with a sanity that is peculiarly like that of the English.
