It is said that two million of these people died. That is Nansen’s figures. That twenty million did not die is due to the magnificent work of the A.R.A. and the Save the Children Fund who, against all political prejudice and for humanity’s sake, achieved a great rescue of these stricken folk. As I have said, the A.R.A. alone fed ten million people a day in the famine area, and I pay a tribute here to the courage and efficiency and devotion of those young Americans whose work I saw, and of whose friendship I am proud. Our people did less, having less means, but it was work well and nobly done in the spirit of Christianity kept alight in a dark and cruel world, which is this jungle of Europe.
XXV
In the spring of 1919, while the Peace Conference was sitting in Paris, I made my first visit to the United States, and lectured in many American cities. I went there again in 1920 and 1921, and on the third visit traveled from New York to San Francisco.
I regard these American visits as the greatest experience of my life, apart from the War, and they added enormously to the knowledge of world forces and the human problem which I had been studying among the peoples of Europe. I was, and still remain, convinced that the United States will shape, for good or ill—and I believe for good—the future destiny of the world, for these people, in the mass, have a dynamic energy, a clear-cut quality of character, and a power not only of material wealth, but of practical idealism, from which an enormous impetus may be given to human progress, in the direction of the common well-being, international peace, liberty, decency, and average prosperity of individual life.
During those three visits, when I talked with innumerable men and women of great intelligence and honesty of thought, I was “made wise,” as they call it, to many of the darker aspects of American life. I was not unconscious of a strong strain of intolerance; a dangerous gulf between the very rich and—not the very poor, there are few of those—but well-paid, speeded-up, ugly-living, dissatisfied labor; something rather hysterical in mass emotion when worked up by the wire-pullers and the spellbinders; and the noisy, blatant, loud-mouthed boasting vulgarity of the mob. I saw the unloveliness of “Main Street,” I met “Babbitt” in his club, parlor car, and private house. But though I did not shut my eyes to all that, and much more than that—a good deal of it belongs to civilization as well as to the United States—I saw also the qualities that outweigh these defects, and, in my judgment, contain a great hope for the world. I met, everywhere, numbers of men and women who have what seems to me a clean, sane, level-headed outlook on life and its problems. They believe in peace, in a good chance for the individual, in a decent standard of life for all people, in honesty and truth. They are impatient of dirt, however picturesque, of ruin, however romantic, of hampering tradition, however ancient. They are, in the mass, common-sense, practical, and good-natured folk, who, in the business of life, cut formalities and get down to the job.
But behind all that common sense and their practicality, they are deeply sentimental, simply and sincerely emotional, quick to respond to any call upon their pity or their charity, and when stirred that way, enormously generous. I agree with General Swinton, the inventor of the “Tanks” who, after a tour in the United States, told me, with a touch of exaggeration, that he thought the Americans, as a nation, were the only idealists left in the world. Europe is cynical, remembering too much history, and suffering too much disillusionment. The United States, looking always to the future, and not much backward to the past, is hopeful, confident of human progress, and strangely and wonderfully eager to find a philosopher’s stone of human happiness, for which we, in Europe, have almost abandoned search.
I think that, as a people, they are more ready than any other to do some great work of rescue for humanity (I have told how they fed ten million people a day in Russia), and to adopt and carry out an ideal on behalf of humanity in the way of peace and reconstruction, at some personal sacrifice to themselves. That is possible at least in the United States, and it may almost be said that it is impossible in any other nation.
As a personal experience, my first visit to the United States was exciting and rather overwhelming, in an extremely pleasant way, except for my extreme nervousness. For the first time in my life I was made to believe (except for secret doubts and a sense of humor) that I was a person of some importance. By good fortune, of which I was not aware until my arrival in New York, I had gained the good opinion, and almost personal popularity, of an immense American public from coast to coast. I do not minimize the pleasure of that, the real joy of it, for there is no reward in the world so good to a man who for years has been an obscure writer, as to realize at last that his words have been read and remembered, with emotion, by millions of fellow mortals, almost by a whole nation—and this had happened to me. It happened by the great luck that since the entry of the United States into the War my daily dispatches from the Western front had been published in The New York Times, and a syndicate of newspapers covering the whole country. Day after day during those years of enormous history, I appeared with the grape fruit and the cereal at millions of American breakfast tables, and because of the things I had to tell, and perhaps, a little, the way in which I told them (I tried to give the picture and the pity of the things I saw), I got home to the bosom and business (to use Francis Bacon’s words) of the American merchant, lawyer, and city man, to the lady whom he provides with a Packard or a Ford (according to his rung on the social ladder) and to the bright young thing who is beginning to take an interest in the drama of life outside her dancing school or her college rooms. My articles were read on lonely farms, in tenement houses, by Irish servant girls, Slav foundry workers, German metal workers, clerks and telephone girls, as well as by all manner of folk in Fifth Avenue, Riverside Drive, and the Main Street of many towns. I am not making a boast of that, for if I had written like an archangel instead of like a war correspondent (there’s a difference), I should not have secured those readers unless The New York Times and its syndicate had stepped in where angels fear to tread—in Chicago, and other American cities. But it was my luck, and, as I say, pleasant and encouraging.