In spite of this, the nation expends an unduly large part of its profits in personal adornment, in luxuries of the toilet, in horses and carriages and expensive residences. The American is bound to have the best, and feels himself lowered if he has to take the second best. The most expensive seats in an auditorium are always the best filled, and the opera is thinly attended only when it is given at reduced prices. It is just in the most expensive hotels that one has to engage a room beforehand. Everywhere that expenditure can be observed by others, the American would rather renounce a pleasure entirely than enjoy it in a modest way. He wants to appear everywhere as a prosperous and substantial person, and therefore has a decided tendency to live beyond his means. Extravagance is, therefore, a great national trait. Everything, whether large or small, is done with a free hand. In the kitchen of the ordinary man much is thrown away which the European carefully saves for his nourishment; and in the kitchens of the government officials a hundred thousand cooks are at work, as if there were every day a banquet. Even when the American economizes he is fundamentally extravagant. His favourite way of saving is by buying a life insurance policy; but when one sees how many millions of dollars such companies spend in advertising and otherwise competing with one another, and what prodigious amounts they take in, one cannot doubt that they also are a means of saving for wealthy men, who, after all, do not know what real economy is.
If the whole outward life is pervaded by this pioneer spirit of self-initiative, there is another factor which is not to be overlooked; it is the neglect of the æsthetic. Any one who loves beauty desires to see his ideal realized at the present moment, and the present itself becomes for him expressive of the past, while the man whose only desire is to be active as an economic factor looks only into the future. The bare present is almost valueless, since it is that which has to be overcome; it is the material which the enterprising spirit has to shape creatively into something else. The pioneer cannot be interested in the present as a survivor of the past; it shows to him only that which is to do, and admonishes his soul to prepare for new achievement. On Italian soil one’s eye is offended by every false note in the general harmony. The present, in which the past still lives, fills one’s consciousness, and the repose of æsthetic contemplation is the chief emotion. But a man who rushes from one undertaking to another seeks no unity or harmony in the present; his retina is not sensitive to ugliness, because his eye is forever peering into the future; and if the present were to be complete and finished, the enterprising spirit would regret such perfection and account it a loss—a restriction of his freedom, an end to his creation. It would mean mere pleasure and not action. In this sense the American expresses his pure idealism in speaking of the “glory of the imperfect.”
The Italian is not to be disparaged for being unlike the American and for letting his eye rest on pleasing contours without asking what new undertakings could be devised to make reality express his own spirit of initiative. One must also not blame the American if he does not scrutinize his vistas with the eye of a Florentine, if he is not offended by the ugly remains of his nation’s past, the scaffolding of civilization, or if he looks at them with pride, noting how restlessly his countrymen have stuck to their work in order to shape a future from the past. In fact, one can hardly take a step in the New World without everywhere coming on some crying contrast between mighty growth and the oppressive remains of outgrown or abortive activities. As one comes down the monumental steps of the Metropolitan Museum, in which priceless treasures of art are collected, one sees in front of one a wretched, tumbled-down hut where sundry refreshments are sold, on a dirty building-lot with a broken fence. It looks as if it had been brought from the annual county fair of some remote district into this wealthiest street of the world.
Of course such a thing is strikingly offensive, but it disturbs only a person who is not looking with the eye of the American, who can therefore not understand the true ethical meaning of American culture, its earnest looking forward into the future. If the incomplete past no longer met the American’s eye in all its poverty and ugliness and smallness, he would have lost the mainspring of his life. That which is complete does not interest him, while that which he can still work on wholly fascinates and absorbs him. It is true here, as in every department of American life, that superficial polish would be only an imitation of success; friction and that which is æsthetically disorganized, but for this very reason ethically valuable, give to his life its significance and to his industry its incomparable progress.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Economic Rise
Introite, nam et hic dii sunt—here, too, the gods are on their throne. The exploiting of the country, the opening of the mines, the building of factories and railroads, trade and barter, are not in question here as the mere means of livelihood, but as a spontaneous and creative labour, which is undertaken specifically in the interests of progress. In this confession of faith we have found the significance of American industrial life, in the spirit of self-initiative its greatest strength. Only such men as desire to take part in the economic era of creation, to meet their neighbours openly and trustingly and to rely on their spoken word, in short, to believe in the intrinsic worth of industry—only such men can weave the wonderful fabric of New World industry. A race of men carrying on commerce merely in order to live, feeling no idealism impelling them to industry, would never, even in this richly-endowed America, have produced such tangible results or gained such power.
Nevertheless, the country itself must not be forgotten by reason of its inhabitants. It was the original inducement to the inhabitants to turn so industriously to the spade and plough. Where the spade has dug, it has brought up silver and gold, coal and iron; and where the plough has turned, it has evoked a mammoth growth of wheat and corn. Seas and rivers, bays and mountains have produced a happy configuration of the land and pointed out the routes for traffic; oil-wells have flown freely, and the waterpower is inexhaustible; the supply of fish and fowl, the harvests of tropical fruits and of cotton have been sufficient to supply the world. And all this was commenced by nature, before the first American set his foot on the continent.
And while it was the lavish hand of nature which first brought prosperity to the inhabitants, this prosperity became, in its turn, a new stimulus to the economic exploitation of further natural resources. It provided the capital for new undertakings; it also helped on the extraordinary growth of economic demand, it made the farmer and the artisan the best patrons of thriving industries, and made the economic circulatory system pulsate with increasing strength through the national organization.
There are, besides the purely economic conditions, certain political and administrative ones. American history has developed in a free atmosphere such as cannot be had in countries with ancient traditions, and which, even in the New World, at least in the eastern part of it, is disappearing day by day. Of course, such elbow-room has not been an unqualified blessing. It has been attended by evils and has made sacrifices necessary. But these have always touched the individual. The community has gained by the freedom of economic conditions. For instance, railroads, such as were built through the whole West during the pioneer years of America, would not be permitted for a moment by a German government. Such flimsy bridges, such rough-and-ready road-beds, such inadequate precautions on crossings were everywhere a serious menace; but those who were injured were soon forgotten, while the economic blessings of the new railroads which transported hundreds of thousands of people into uninhabited regions, and left them to gather the treasure of the soil, continued. They could never have been built if people had waited until they were able to construct by approved methods. After the great pioneer railroads had accomplished their mission, the time came when they were replaced by better structures. And they have been built over many times, until to-day the traffic is sufficiently safe. It still belongs, in a way, to the confession of faith of this religion of self-initiative that each man shall be free to risk not only his property, but also his own life, for the sake of enterprise. No board of commissioners may interfere to tell an American not to skirt a precipice.
Such instances of complete freedom, where life and limb are unsafe, disappear day by day. Guide-posts are put at every railroad crossing, and civil authorities take more and more interest in safety appliances for factories and in the security of city buildings; in fact, hygienic regulations in some Eastern cities to-day go even further than they go in Germany. Nevertheless, in such matters as involve not dangers, but merely traditions or preferences, a large amount of democratic freedom can still be had in the New World. Over the broad prairies there are no signs lawfully warning persons to turn to the right and not to walk on the grass. The American himself not only regards this country as the land of “unlimited possibilities,” but more specially he regards the European Continent as the country of impossible limitations. Bureaucracy is to his mind the worst enemy of industrial life, because it everywhere provides the most trivial obstacles to that spirit of adventure and daring which seeks to press on into the future; and in the end it is sure to bring all enterprise to a standstill. It is important for this freedom that the whole economic legislation is regulated, first of all, not by the Union, but by the several states, and that thus every variety of industrial life going on in any state shall be so well represented that every attempt to bring up artificial restraints shall be nipped in the bud.