I only wish with all my heart [she wrote] that the Punch cartoon is wholly undeserved, or that your kind "apologia" is wholly deserved. I have never been "too proud to fight," but a great deal too proud to wear laurels I haven't earned. Personally, I think the drubbing we are getting is wholesome and likely to do good. We have been given praise ad nauseam, and, to be honest, you can never compete with us on that ground. We can praise ourselves in terms that would silence any competitors....
I wish, too, that I could believe that the "beggars from Europe" had either their hats or their bags stuffed with dollars. I'm afraid you have spoken to the Americans, not to the beggars. I was one myself. I went home in April, prouder of my country than I had ever been, jealous of its good repute, and painfully anxious that it should live up to its reputation. I fear I found that people were not only tired of generosity, but wholly indifferent to the impressions being so widely circulated in the press—that France had been guilty of every form of petty ingratitude, that the atrocities of Great Britain in Ireland outdid the Germans in Belgium and France. A minority everywhere was struggling against the tide, with dignity, and the generosity I had so securely counted on from my own people. But the collections being made for the Serbians, for instance, were despairingly small. Belgian Relief had been turned into Serbian Relief groups, and from New York to California I heard the same tale—and, alas, experienced it—people were tired of giving, tired of the war. In New York I was invited to speak before a well-known Women's Club—I was "a guest of honor." I accepted, and spoke for ten minutes, and a woman at a table near by begged me to take up an immediate contribution. I was not at all anxious to do so, for it seemed a very base advantage to take of a luncheon invitation, so I referred her to the president. A contribution was taken up by a small group of women, all fashionably dressed, with pearl or "near-pearl," and the result was exactly $19.40. As there were between 200 and 300 women present in the ballroom, I was inexpressibly shocked, and sternly suggested that the president should announce the sum for which I should have to account, and her speech was mildly applauded. All through my trip I felt bewilderment. I had just come from Belgium and France, and the contrast oppressed me. I had the saddest kind of disillusionment, relieved by the most beautiful instances of charity and unselfishness.
Even in regard to the Relief of Belgium too much stress is laid on our generosity and a false impression has gone abroad—an impression nothing can ever eradicate. The organization of the B. R. F. was American, but Mr. Hoover never failed to underline how much of the fund came from Great Britain and Canada. In fact, the Belgian women embroidered their touching little phrases of gratitude to the Americans, as I myself saw, on Canadian flour sacks. During the first year or so the contributions of Americans were wholly incommensurate with our wealth and prosperity, and a letter from Gertrude Atherton a year after the war scourged us for our indifference even then.
Mr. Balfour's revelation that Great Britain had contributed £35,000,000 toward the relief of Austria, etc., made my heart go down still farther. I have tried to believe that my experience was due to something lacking in myself. People were so enchantingly kind, so ready to give me large and expensive lunches, dinners, teas—but they would not be induced to refrain from the lunches and contribute the cost of them toward my cause....
I hope you will pardon this long effusion. Like most Americans who have served abroad I feel we came in too late, we failed to stay on the ground to clear up afterward, and now we are indulging in the most wicked propaganda against our late allies—France as well as England. Personally, I realize that if we had contributed twenty times as much I should still not feel we had done enough. If you were not so confirmed a friend of America, I could never write as I have done, but just because you reach such an enormous public, because your influence is so great, I am anxious that America should not be given undue praise—which she does not herself credit—and that the disastrous results of her policy (if we have one) should be printed clear for her to read and profit by.
That is a sincere, painful, and beautiful letter, and I think it ought to be read in the United States, not because I indorse its charge against America's lack of generosity—I cannot do that—but because it exculpates England and France of unreasoning disappointment, and is also the cry of a generous American soul, moved by the sufferings of Europe, and eager that her people should help more, and not less, in the reconstruction of the world. The English people did not take her view that the Americans had not done enough or were tired of generosity. It must be admitted by those who followed our press that, apart from two gutter journals, there was a full recognition of what the United States had done, and continual reminders that no policy would be tolerated which did not have as its basis Anglo-American friendship.
Upon quite another level of argument is the criticism of American psychology and political evolution expressed by various English writers upon their return from visits to the United States, and a fairly close acquaintance with the character of American democracy as it was revealed during the war, and afterward. The judgment of these writers does not affect public opinion, because it does not reach down to the masses. It is confined rather to the student type of mind, and probably has remained unnoticed by the average man and woman in the United States. It is, however, very interesting because it seeks to forecast the future of America as a world power and as a democracy. The chief charge leveled against the intellectual tendency of the United States may be summed up in one word, "intolerance." Men like George Bernard Shaw, J. A. Hobson, and H. W. Massingham do not find in their study of the American temperament or in the American form of government the sense of liberty with which the people of the United States credit themselves, and with which all republican democracies are credited by the proletariat in European countries.
They seem inclined to believe, indeed, that America has less liberty in the way of free opinion and free speech than the English under their hereditary monarchy, and that the spirit of the people is harshly intolerant of minorities and nonconforming individuals, or of any idea contrary to the general popular opinion of the times. Some of these critics see in the "Statue of Liberty" in New York Harbor a figure of mockery behind which is individualism enchained by an autocratic oligarchy and trampled underfoot by the intolerance of the masses. They produce in proof of this not only the position of an American President, with greater power over the legislature than any constitutional king, but the mass violence of the majority in its refusal to admit any difference of opinion with regard to war aims during the time of war fever, and the tyrannical action of the Executive in its handling of labor disputes and industrial leaders, during and after the war.
It is, I think, true that as soon as America entered the war there was no liberty of opinion allowed in the United States. There was no tolerance of "conscientious objectors" nor mercy toward people who from religious motives, or intellectual crankiness, were antagonistic to the use of armed might. People who did not subscribe to the Red Cross funds were marked down, I am told, dismissed from their posts, and socially ruined. Many episodes of that kind were reported, and startled the advanced radicals in England who had regarded the United States as the land of liberty. Americans may retort that we did not give gentle treatment to our own "conscientious objectors," and that is true. Many of them were put into prison and roughly handled, but on the other hand there was a formal, though insincere, acknowledgment that even in time of war there should be liberty of conscience, and a clause to that effect was passed by Parliament. In spite also of the severity of censorship, and the martial law that was enforced by the Defense of the Realm Act, there was, I believe, a greater freedom of criticism allowed to the press than would have been tolerated by the United States. Periodicals like the Nation and the New Statesman, even newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Morning Post, indulged in violent criticism of the conduct of the war, the methods of the War Cabinet, the action and military policy of leaders like Lord Kitchener, and the failure of military campaigns in the Dardanelles and other places. No breath of criticism against American leadership or generalship was admitted to the American press, and their war correspondents were censored with far greater severity than their English comrades, who were permitted to describe, very fully, reverses as well as successes in the fields of war.
What, however, has startled the advanced wing of English political thought more than all that is the ruthless way in which the United States government has dealt with labor disputes and labor leaders since the war. The wholesale arrests and deportations of men accused of revolutionary propaganda seem to these sympathizers with revolutionary ideals as gross in their violation of liberty as the British government's coercion of Ireland. These people believe that American democracy has failed in the essential principle which alone justifies democracy, a toleration of minorities of opinion and of the absolute liberty of the individual within the law. They say that even in England there is greater liberty, in spite of its mediæval structure. In Hyde Park on Sunday morning one may hear speeches which would cause broken heads and long terms of imprisonment if uttered in New York. Labor, they say, would rise in instant and general revolt if any of their men were treated with the tyranny which befalls labor leaders in the United States.
To my mind a great deal of this criticism is due to a misconception of the meaning of democracy. In England it was a tradition of liberal thought that democracy meant not only the right of the people to govern themselves, but the right of the individual or of any body of men to express their disagreement with the policy of the state, or with the majority opinion, or with any idea which annoyed them in any way. But, as we have seen by recent history, democratic rule does not mean individual liberty. Democracy is government by the majority of the people, and that majority will be less tolerant of dissent than autocracy itself, which can often afford to give greater liberty of expression to the minority because of its inherent strength. The Russian Soviet government, which professes to be the most democratic form of government in the world, is utterly intolerant of minorities. I suppose there is less individual liberty in Russia than in any other country, because disagreement with the state opinion is looked upon as treachery to the majority rule. So in the United States, which is a real democracy, in spite of the power of capital, there is less toleration of eccentric notions than in England, especially when the majority of Americans are overwhelmed by a general impulse of enthusiasm or passion, such as happened when they went into the war. The people of the minority are then regarded as enemies of the state, traitors to their fellow-citizens, and outlaws. They are crushed accordingly by the weight of mass opinion, which is ruthless and merciless, with more authority and power than the decree of a king or the law of an aristocratic form of government.
Although disagreeing to some extent with those who criticize the American sense of liberty, I do believe that there is a danger in the United States of an access of popular intolerance, and sudden gusts of popular passion, which may sweep the country and lead to grave trouble. Being the greatest democracy in the world, it is subject to the weakness of democracy as well as endowed with its strength, and to my mind the essential weakness of democracy is due to the unsteadiness and feverishness of public opinion. When the impulse of public opinion happens to be right it is the most splendid and vital force in the world, and no obstacle can stand against it. The idealism of a people attains almost supernatural force. But if it happens to be wrong it may lead to national and world disaster.