It is, I think, evident that in America the danger to the industrial independence of the individual which might arise from the aggregation of wealth in a few hands is much greater than in England. The power would be capable of greater abuse; the evils which would flow from such abuse would be greater. It is not wealth, but the abuse of it that he is attacking, says President Roosevelt—not the wealthy class, but the "wealthy criminal class." The distinction has not been digested by those in England who rail against American methods or who write of American politics. It is necessary—or so it seems to a large number of the American people—that extraordinary checks should be put upon the possibility of the abuse of wealth in the United States, such as do not exist or are not needed (or at least we have heard no energetic demand for them) in England. As a political fact there is need of especial vigilance in the United States lest corporate power be abused. As a commercial fact it is merely preposterous to rail at the modern tendency to consolidation and amalgamation as specifically "American."
It is probably safe to say that if the United States had such a social counterweight as is furnished in England by the throne and the recognised aristocracy, the growth of what is called "trust-power" would be viewed to-day with comparative unconcern. At all events England is able to view with something like unconcern the conditions, as they exist in England, worse than, as has been said, the trust power is humanly capable of imposing on the American people in another half-century of unhindered growth. Which, American readers will please understand, is not a suggestion that the United States would be benefited, even commercially, by the institution of a monarchy.
Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Englishmen long ago acquired the idea that American business methods in what may be called large affairs were too often unscrupulous; and of such methods, there were certainly examples. I have explained why the temptations to, and the opportunities for, dishonesty were very great in the earlier days and it would be impossible to find language too severe to characterise many of the things which were done—not once, but again and again—in the manipulation of railways, the stealing of public lands, and the plundering of the public treasury. The dog deserved as bad a name as he received. But that dog died. The Americans themselves stoned him to death—with precisely the same ferocity as they have recently exhibited when they discovered, as they feared, some of his litter in the Chicago packing houses—or a year before in the offices of certain insurance companies. The present generation of Americans may not be any better men than their fathers (let us hope that they are, if only for the reputation of the vast immigration of Englishmen and Scotchmen which has poured into the country) but at least they are much less tempted. They live under a new social code. They have nothing like the same opportunity for successful dishonesty and immeasurably greater chance of punishment, whether visited on them by the law or by the opinion of their fellows, if unsuccessful or found out. It is not fair that the new dog should be damned to drag around the old dog's name.
There is an excellent analogy in which the relations of the two peoples are reversed.
Americans are largely of the opinion that the British aristocracy is a disreputable class. They gave that dog its name too; and there have been individual scandals enough in the past to justify it. It is useless for an Englishman living in America to endeavour to modify this opinion in even a small circle, for it is only a question of time—probably of a very short time—before some peer turns up in the divorce court and the Englishmen's friends will send him newspaper clippings containing the Court Report and will hail him on street corners and at the club with: "How about your British aristocracy now?"
Americans cannot see the British peerage as a whole; they only hear of those who thrust themselves into unsavoury notoriety. So Englishmen get no view of the American business community in its entirety, but only read with relish the occasional scandal. Of the two, the American has the better, or at least more frequent, justification for his error than has the Englishman; but it is a pity that the two cannot somehow agree to an exchange. Perhaps a treaty might be entered into (if it were not for the United States Senate) which, when ratified, should be published in all newspapers and posted in all public places in both countries, setting forth that:
"In consideration of the Party of the Second Part hereafter cherishing a belief in the marital fidelity and general moral purity of all members of the British peerage, their wives, heirs, daughters, and near relations, and further agreeing that when, by any unfortunate mishap, any individual member of the said Peerage or his wife, daughter, or other relation shall have been discovered and publicly shown to have offended against the marriage laws or otherwise violated the canons of common decency, to understand and take it for granted that such mishap, offence, or violation is a quite exceptional occurrence owing to the unexplainable depravity of the individual and that it in no way reflects upon the other members of the said Peerage, whether in the mass or individually, or their wives, daughters, or near relations: Therefore the Party of the First Part hereby agrees to decline to give any credence whatsoever to any story, remark, or reflection to the discredit of the general honesty of the American commercial classes or public men, but agrees that he will hereafter assume them to be trustworthy and truthful whether individually or in the mass, except in such cases as shall have been publicly proven to the contrary, and that he will always understand and declare that such isolated cases are purely sporadic and not in any way to be taken as evidences either of an epidemic or of a general low state of public morality, but that on the contrary the said American commercial classes do, whether in the mass or individually, hate and despise an occasional scoundrel among them as heartily as would the Party of the First Part hate and despise such a scoundrel if found among his own people—as, he confesses, does occasionally occur."
Nonsense? Of course it is nonsense. But the desirable thing is that Englishmen should be brought to understand that after all it is but an inconsiderable portion of the American business community that is permanently employed in the manufacture of wooden nutmegs, in selling canned horrors for food, or in watering railway shares, and that Americans should believe that there are quite a large number of men of high birth in England who are only infrequently engaged in either beating their own wives or running away with those of other men.
The brief confessional clause at the conclusion of the above draft I take to be an important portion of the document. It is not necessary that a similar confession should be incorporated in the behalf of the Party of the Second Part, not because there are no family scandals in America, but because, in the absence of a peerage, it is not easy to tell when a divorce or other scandal occurs among the aristocracy. "Scandal in High Life" is such a tempting heading to a column that the American newspapers are generous in their interpretation of the term and many a man and woman, on getting into trouble, must have been surprised to learn for the first time that their ambitions had been realised, unknown to themselves, and that they did indeed belong to that class which they had for so long yearned to enter.