Smuts now turned his thought to a subject not without interest for America, for he said:
"The world has been brought together by the press, by wireless, indeed by all communication which represents the last word in scientific development. Yet political institutions cling to old and archaic traditions. Take the Presidency of the United States. A man waits for four months before he is inaugurated. The incumbent may work untold mischief in the meantime. It is all due to the fact that in the days when the American Constitution was framed the stagecoach and the horse were the only means of conveyance. The world now travels by aeroplane and express train, yet the antiquated habits continue.
"So with political parties and peoples, the British Empire included. They need to be brought abreast of the times. The old pre-war British Empire, for example, is gone in the sense of colonies or subordinate nations clustering around one master nation. The British Empire itself is developing into a real League of Nations,—a group of partner peoples."
"What of America and the future?" I asked him.
"America is the leaven of the future," answered Smuts. "She is the life-blood of the League of Nations. Without her the League is stifled. America will give the League the peace temper. You Americans are a pacific people, slow to war but terrible and irresistible when you once get at it. The American is an individualist and in that new and inevitable internationalism the individual will stand out, the American pre-eminently."
Throughout this particular experience at Groote Schuur I could not help marvelling on the contrast that the man and the moment presented. We walked through a place of surpassing beauty. Ahead brooded the black mystery of the mountains and all around was a fragrant stillness broken only by the quick, almost passionate speech of this seer and thinker, animate with an inspiring ideal of public service, whose mind leaped from the high places of poetry and philosophy on to the hiving battlefield of world event. It seemed almost impossible that nine miles away at Capetown raged the storm that almost within the hour would again claim him as its central figure.
The Smuts statements that I have quoted were made long before the Presidential election in America. I do not know just what Smuts thinks of the landslide that overwhelmed the Wilson administration and with it that well-known Article X, but I do know that he genuinely hopes that the United States somehow will have a share in the new international stewardship of the world. He would welcome any order that would enable us to play our part.
No one can have contact with Smuts without feeling at once his intense admiration for America. One of his ambitions is to come to the United States. It is characteristic of him that he has no desire to see skyscrapers and subways. His primary interest is in the great farms of the West. "Your people," he once said to me, "have made farming a science and I wish that South Africa could emulate them. We have farms in vast area but we have not yet attained an adequate development."
I was amazed at his knowledge of American literature. He knows Hamilton backwards, has read diligently about the life and times of Washington, and is familiar with Irving, Poe, Hawthorne and Emerson. One reason why he admires the first American President is because he was a farmer. Smuts knows as much about rotation of crops and successful chicken raising as he does about law and politics. He said:
"I am an eighty per cent farmer and a Boer, and most people think a Boer is a barbarian."