Thence arises the curious circumstance, most mystifying to foreigners, that a good share of the really progressive legislation in Great Britain of the last half-century has been led by young gentlemen from Oxford and Cambridge who have no more intention of becoming part of the proletariate than of leaving off their collars and going without baths. Bismarck was an out-and-out conservative who for his own nefarious ends furthered what a Rhode Island Republican or an Ulster Tory would call radical measures. But Lord Robert Cecil in our own day is a convinced aristocrat, as befits a son of Lord Salisbury, who is more sincerely effective than many Liberals in various movements which we are accustomed to call reform.
The conservative-liberal is quite a different animal and far commoner, far more familiar to Americans, even if they have never called him by that name. His habitat is America, and thanks to the populousness of this country, he is beginning to have a very important influence outside of his habitat. To define him is difficult, but for purposes of rough classification he may be said to be the man whose native liberal instincts have been crystallized by a combination of interesting circumstances—and sometimes petrified. He is the man who was born a liberal in a liberal country and intends to remain as he was born. He is the man who will fight for the freedom proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence against any later manifestation of the revolutionary spirit. He believes in conserving in unaltered purity the principles of life, government, and industry that his forefathers rightly believed to be liberal. In brief, he is a revolutionary turned policeman, a progressive who stands pat upon his progress, a conservative-liberal. I believe that he is our closest approximation to a typical American mind.
Whether familiar or not, the effects of this political disease—for it is a disease, a hardening of the arteries of the mind—are easily observable all about us in the America of to-day. Indeed, we see them so frequently that they awaken no surprise, are scarcely seen at all in any intellectual sense of the word. They are like our clear atmosphere, our mixture of races, our hurried steps—things we scarcely notice until an outsider speaks of them. I am not an outsider. I am so much a part of America that I find it difficult to detach myself from a mood that is mine in common with many other Americans. And yet, once one sees it plainly, the educated conservatism of liberal America becomes portentous, a unique political phenomenon.
I think that this peculiarity of our political thinking first became evident to me on an ocean voyage in war-time. There were a score or so of Americans on board, members, most of them, of various government missions, picked business men, picked professional men, thoroughly intelligent, intensely practical, and entirely American. They were democratic, too, as we use the word in America; that is, good “mixers,” free from snobbery, and nothing new in action was alien to their sympathies. They could remold you a business or a legal practice in half an hour’s conversation; tear down an organization and build it up again between cigars. Their committee meetings went off like machine-guns, whereas the English officers and trade diplomats, when they got together, snarled themselves in set speeches and motions and took an afternoon to get anywhere. The English, indeed, seemed puzzled and a little dazed by the ease with which the Americans seized upon and put through reorganization of any kind. They seemed positively to leap at change, so long as basic ideas were not involved. “Nothing,” said an Indian colonel, “is sacred to them. They would scrap the empire and build a new one—on paper—at sixty miles an hour.”
He was quite wrong. The system my countrymen lived by permitted change, urged change, up to a certain point. They would demolish a ten-story building to erect one of twenty or scrap thousands of machines in order to adopt a better process, but when it came to principles and institutions they were conservative. The founders of their social and political order had been almost a century ahead of the times. The instruments of life and of government they had provided had served with slight modifications for the free-moving America of the nineteenth century. It had been a game for Americans, and a splendid one, to realize the liberality and democracy possible under the Constitution, to work out the independence available for the common man in a rich and undeveloped country in which his political power guaranteed him every advantage that could be gained in a capitalistic system, including the acquisition of capital. It had been a splendid game, and our wits had been sharpened, our faculties strengthened, our prosperity fortified, our self-confidence enormously increased in playing it. Given our rules, we could play the game more resourcefully than any other people on earth. And they were wise rules, which provided for growth, but not for a different kind of contest. We were so sure that America stood for freedom, independence, and liberality in general that we could not take seriously people who did not believe in democracy, nor conceive that there might be an idea of democracy different from our own.
Indeed, on board that ship, a curious experience came to all of us, Englishmen, Americans, and I, the humble observer, when in the course of argument or conference the theories of life upon which we were variously living came momentarily into view. The Americans, it was clear, were certain that they were the most progressive people in the world. This certainty was like the fixed dogma of a Roman Catholic; it gave them elasticity and daring. Being sure of their principles, so sure as to be almost unaware of them, they ignored precedents, and solved or dismissed problems with equal ease. They made plans for a league of nations, they approved of a temporary autocracy for the President, they put the labor question on a business basis, and so disposed of it; they were afraid of nothing but a failure to act and act quickly. Nevertheless, as they talked and worked with the English, it became increasingly evident that their road ended in a wall.
There were walls on the English road, too—walls of caste thinking and social privilege that seemed as ridiculous as a moat around an office building. Our wall was invisible to most of us, and as a body we never tried to pass it at all. It was the end wall of our liberal ideas, beyond which, if we thought of it at all, presumably lay socialism, anarchy, chaos.
Just that far the American mind, like some light tank, ran, surmounting everything, taking to the fields if the road was blocked, turning, backing, doing everything but stop; only to halt dead at the invisible barrier, and zigzag away again. By such a free-moving process within the limits of law we had scrambled across a continent in turbulent, individualistic exploitation, and yet had built a sound political system carefully and well. And there we had stopped, convinced that we had solved the problem of democracy and equal opportunity for all. This explains why America is twenty years behind the best of Europe in social and economic reform. (To be sure, Europe needed reform more than we did). This is what it is to be a conservative-liberal.
The Englishman is different. He is much more likely to be an obstinate Tory, blocking all advance, and living, as far as he is able, by a system as antiquated as feudalism; or if not a Tory, then an out-and-out radical eager for a legal revolution. But in either case he knows what different-minded men are thinking; and if there is a wall on his road, he looks over it. If he is a Tory, he understands radicalism and fights it because he prefers an inequality that favors him to a more logical system that might be personally disagreeable. If he is a radical, he understands Toryism. But the American conservative-liberal acknowledges no opinion except his own. He insists, in the words of a contemporary statesman, that the American system, as founded by our forefathers, is the best in the world, and he is not interested in others. There are a thousand proofs that it is not the best possible system even for America, and plenty of them are in print—proofs advanced by capitalists as well as labor leaders, by Catholics as well as socialists; but they do not trouble him, because he neither hears nor reads them. It is easier to call the writer a crank or a Bolshevik.
This is the liberal-conservative mind that will not look beyond its own fixed principles and refuses to understand those who differ from it; that suffers a kind of paralysis when confronted by genuine radicalism. The American college undergraduate has it to perfection. Bubbling over with energy, ready for anything in the practical world of struggle or adventure, he is as confident and as careful of the ideas he has inherited as a girl of her reputation. He is armored against new thinking. The American business man fairly professes it. He speculates in material things with an abandon that makes a Frenchman pale; but new principles in the relations of trade to general welfare, questions of unearned increment, first bore and then, if pressed home, frighten him.