As an illustration of this: Cecil Rhodes grew, as we know, wealthy from the proceeds of vast undertakings; but men closely associated with him have assured me that Rhodes was a very indifferent "business man." We may, I think, take it for certain that if Rhodes had been condemned to conduct a retail grocery he would have conducted it to speedy irretrievable disaster. We are probably all agreed that the conduct of a small grocery does not require fineness of intellect; most English readers, I think, will follow me in believing that success in such a sphere of life implies at least an imperfect intellectual development. On the other hand enterprises truly Rhodian do call for intellectual grasp of the largest.
The consideration which I wish to urge is that business in the United States during the period of growth and settlement of the country has been largely on Rhodian lines. The great enterprises by which the country has been developed, and on which most of the large fortunes of individual Americans are based have been of truly imperial proportions. The flinging of railways across thousands of miles of wilderness (England has made peers of the men who did it in Canada) with the laying out of cities and the peopling of provinces; the building of great fleets of boats upon the lakes; the vast mining schemes in remote and inaccessible regions of the country; lumbering enterprises which (even though not always honestly) dealt with virgin forests by the hundreds of square miles; "bonanza" wheat farming and the huge systems of grain elevators for the handling of the wheat and the conveyance of it to the market or the mill; cattle ranching on a stupendous scale (perhaps even the collecting of those cattle in their thousands daily for slaughter in the packing houses); the irrigating of wide tracts of desert;—these things and such as these are the "businesses" out of which the Americans of the last and present generations have largely made their fortunes. And they are enterprises, most of them, not unworthy to rank with Chartered Companies and the construction of railways from the North to the South of Africa.
Not only this, but something of the same qualities of spaciousness, as of trafficking between large horizons, attach to almost all lines of business in the United States,—to many which in England are necessarily humdrum and commonplace. Almost every Englishman has been surprised on making the acquaintance of an accidental American (no "magnate" or "captain of industry" but an ordinary business man) to learn that though he is no more than the manufacturer of some matter-of-fact article, his operations are on a confusing scale and that, with branch offices in three or four towns and agents in a dozen more, his daily dealings are transacted over an area reaching three thousand miles from his home office, in which the interposition of prairies, mountain ranges, and chains of lakes are but incidents. Business in the United States has almost necessarily something of the romance of remote and adventurous enterprises.
It has been said (and the point is worth insisting on) that the Englishman cannot pretend that he goes into business with any other object than to make money. His motives are on the face of them mercenary if not sordid. The American is impelled primarily by quite other ambitions. Similarly, when the Englishman thinks of business, the image which he conjures up in his mind is of a dull commonplace like, on lines so long established and well-defined that they can embrace little of novelty or of enterprise; a sedentary life of narrow outlook from the unexhilarating atmosphere of a London office or shop. To the American, except in small or retail trade in the large cities, the conditions of business are widely different. All around him, lies, both actually and figuratively, new ground, wilderness almost, inviting him to turn Argonaut. The mere vastness and newness of the country make it full of allurement to adventure, the rewards of which are larger and more immediate than can be hoped for in older and more straitened communities.
It has been said that the American people was, by its long period of isolation and self-communion, made to become, in its outlook on the policies of the world, a provincial people; but that the very provincialism had something of dignity in it from the mere fact that it was continent-wide. So it is with American business. The exigencies of their circumstances have made the American people a commercial people; but whereas in England a commercial life may not offer scope for any intellectual activity and may even have a necessary tendency to stunt the mentality of any one engaged in it, business in the United States offers exercise to a much larger gamut of abilities and, by its mere range and variety, instead of dwarfing has a tendency to keep those abilities trained and alert. A business in England has not approximately the same large theatre of operation or the same variety of incident as a business of the same turn over in America. It is almost the difference between the man who furnishes his larder by going out to his farmyard and wringing the necks of tame ducks therein, and him who must snatch the same supply with his gun from the wild flocks in the wilderness.
But, indeed, no argument should be needed on the subject; for one solid fact with which almost every Englishman is familiar is that in any American (let us use the word) shopkeeper whom he may meet travelling in Europe there is a certain mental alertness, freshness, and vigour, however objectionably they may at times display themselves—which are at least not characteristic of the English shopkeeping class.
Just, then, as we have seen that, if we knew nothing about the peoples of the two countries, beyond the broad outlines of their respective social structures, we should be compelled, other things being equal, to look for a higher code of commercial morality in America than in England, so, when we see one further fact, namely that of the difference in the conditions under which business is conducted, we must naturally, other things being equal, look for a livelier intellect and a higher grade of mentality in the American than in the English business man.
Unfortunately other things never are equal. First, there is the taint of the political corruption in America which must, as has been said, in some measure contaminate the community. Then, England is an old country, with all the machinery of society running in long-accustomed grooves; above all it is a wealthy country and the first among creditor nations, to whose interest it has been, and is, to see that every bond and every engagement be literally and exactly carried out. The United States in the nineteenth century was young and undisciplined, with all the ardour of youth going out to conquer the world, seeing all things in rose-colour, but, for the present,—poor. It was, like any other youth confident of the golden future, lavish alike in its borrowings and its spendings, over-careless of forms and formalities. Happily the confidence in the future has been justified and ten times justified, and it is rich—richer than it yet knows—with resources larger even than it has learned properly to appraise or control. Whatever obligations it incurred in the headlong past are trifles to it now,—a few hundreds of college debts to a man who has come into millions. And with its position now assured it has grown jealous of its credit, national and individual.
It was inevitable that the heedless days should beget indiscretions, the memories of which smart to-day. It was inevitable that amid so much recklessness and easy faith there should be some wrong-doing. Above all, was it inevitable that in the realisation of its dreams, when wealth and power grew and money came pouring into it, there should be bred in the people an extraordinary and unwholesome love of speculation which in turn opened their opportunities to the gambler and the confidence-man of all kinds and sizes. They flourished in the land,—the man who wrecked railways and issued fictitious millions of "securities," the man who robbed the government of moneys destined for the support of Indians or the establishment of postal routes in the farther West, the man who salted mines, the "land-grabber" and the "timber-shark" who dealt not in acres but in hundreds of square miles, the bogus trust company, and the fraudulent land and investment agent. When even the smallest community begins to "boom," the people of the community lose their heads and the harvest ripens to the sickle of the swindler. And the entire United States—sometimes in one part, sometimes in another, sometimes all together,—with only an occasional and short-lived panic to check the madness, boomed continuously for half a century.
