CHAPTER I
The Proposition
“And what, prithee, hath overtaken Guy?”
“Guy—why Guy diced and drabbed and ruffled away his inheritance, and to save his neck took shipping for the tobacco plantations where, they say, he married a daughter of Lo, the poor Indian, and none hath since heard of him.”
This is the kind of talk that one could hear in the clubs of London a matter of, say, two hundred and fifty years ago. In plain terms, Guy, poor devil, being a wastrel,—and a broken wastrel at that—had betaken himself to America, there probably to found one of the “fine old Virginia families” of which American writers, and particularly American fictional writers, are so prone to babble.
America, of course, was really started not by the Indians or Columbus, but by the Pilgrim Fathers, assisted and backed up by several cargoes of blue-brained and cleverblooded spirits from the British Isles, whose minds were full of theology and whose souls were full of tea. I shall be told that it is unkind of me to make such remarks.
But, quite apart from all questions of kindness, it is desirable that you know something of the antecedents of a man before you set about a proper estimate of him. If you wish to understand him thoroughly, you must never let sleeping dogs lie nor allow bygones to be bygones. It is notorious that the average frantic Fourth of July American is an adept at showing the best side of himself and his institutions to an admiring world. If you are to believe him the first American was Christopher Columbus, whose name in this connection I had hoped not to mention. But Don Columbus made the mistake of “discovering America.” For the accomplishment of this feat the Americans bestow upon his memory unqualified pæans. Really, of course, the fact that Columbus steered his leaky lugger desperately for Coney Island and Long Branch, when he had the rest of the world—including China and Gozo—before him where to choose, proves that so far from being a hero and a man of genius, he was a dull and evilly disposed person.
According to the bumptious, khaki-tinted gentleman from Indiana too, the Pilgrim Fathers already referred to were high-minded, blameless, and entirely disinterested saints, incapable of hurting a fly or causing butter to melt north of the colour line. They “inaugurated America for conscience sake, sir, and you can bet your pile that I am proud to have them for ancestors.” In which connection I shall pass no rude observation, contenting myself rather with the hint that the reader who wishes to acquaint himself with the true inwardness of the Pilgrim Fathers and their doings in America should look up some of the serious literature on the subject. The Americans, be it noted, read that literature very privately, and neither in the basket nor in the store.
I might proceed indefinitely on these lines of disillusion for Master Phineas B. Flubdub; but as it is not my particular business to amuse him inordinately, I shall desist.
In Europe, or at any rate in England, there is a disposition on the part of the sandblind to look upon the United States and the people who dwell in them with an eye of amused wonderment, as well as admiration. For reasons that are not difficult to appreciate America has never been taken quite seriously by the superior European. In spite of all her boasting and shouting, in spite of her e-normous population and her equally e-normous wealth, in spite of the fact that there is a U.S. Army and a U.S. Navy that can lick creation, and that the U.S. also boasts of a reeking, shrieking press, together with the most gaudy and scintillating “Courts of Justice” that ever delighted civilisation, no person in Europe believes in the back of his mind that the land of hustle and bluff is a nation of any weight where nations count, or that she is capable of exercising the smallest direct or indirect influence upon the manners, customs, tendencies, or destiny of haughty feudal Europe.