Observe, "that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me," puts the Briton in a static order of things. He is in his little shop, or at the forge, or in the coal yard. Within his sight is the Norman tower of the village church. He is known to the priest by his name and his job. He is part of the priests' cure of souls. His life is functionised at the village altar and not at the far shrines of ambition. He belongs to the peasant world. Even though he is English he is as the Russian, "one of God's faithful slaves."
Thousands of English, Scotch, and Irish, simple souls, say their prayers to God each night, not because they are pillars of a chapel or have lately been "saved," but because they have been brought up in that way of life and in that relation to God. They pray God sometimes in anguish that they may be helped to do their duty. They say the Lord's Prayer, not as a patter, but with the stark simplicity which you associate with the grey wall of the old church.
These village folk of ours are like old trees. Close your eyes to the visible and open them to the invisible world, and you see the young man of to-day as the stem, his father as the branch, his grandfather the greater branch. You see in the shadow rising out of the earth the ancient trunk. You think of many people, and yet it is not father and grandfather, and grandfather and great-grandfather, and so on, but one tree, the name of which is the young man leafing in the world of to-day. That man is no shoot, no seedling, he has behind him the consciousness of the vast umbrageous oak. When he says "Our Father, which art in heaven," the voice comes out of the depths of the earth, and it comes from father and grandfather, and from greybeard after greybeard standing behind one another's shoulders, innumerably.
The place to which it shall please God to call you is not a definite locality in the United States of America; the dream of wealth is dreamed inside each cottage door. Each man is intent on getting on, on realising something new. He is revolving in his mind ways of doing more business; of doing what he has more quickly, more economically; ways of "boosting," ways of buying. Our customers buy from us: his customers trade with him—they enter into harmony with him. Store-keepers and customers sing together like gnats over the oak trees; they make things hum. There is a feeling that whether buying or selling you are getting forward.
The British, however, put a great question-mark in front of this American life. Do those who are striving know what they want in the end of ends? Do those toiling in the wood know what is on the other side?
The late Price Collier remarked that the German thinks he has done something when he has an idea and the Frenchman when he has made an epigram; it may be inferred that the American thinks he has done something when he has made his pile. The ultimate earthly prize for "boosting" and bargaining is a vulgar solatium,—a big house, an abundant person, a few gold rings, an adorned wife, a high-power touring car. Out in those wider spaces where lagging and outdistanced competitors are not taken into your counsel you still handle business. But now it is in "graft" that you deal. You are engineering trusts, and cornering commodities, you develop political "pull," you own saloons, and have ledgers full of the bought votes of Italians and Slavs.
You are great ... sitting at the steering-wheel of this great ramshackle political and commercial machine, your coat off and your immaculate lawn sleeves tucked up above your elbows, you own to wolfish-eyed reporters that you have an enormous appetite for work and zest for life.
And yet....
What is the crown? You die in the midst of it. There is no goal, no priceless treasure that even in the death-struggle your hands grasp after.
Some of your children are going in for a life of pleasure. They go to be the envy of waiters and hotel-porters and all people waiting about for tips, but often to be the laughing-stock of the cultured. One of your sweet but simple-souled daughters is going to marry a broken-down English peer. He will not marry her for less than a million dollars. In the old store where you began business, gossiping over bacon and flour, you would have looked rather blank if some one had said that a foreigner would consent to marry your daughter only on the payment of an indemnity.