Englishmen do not emigrate to the United States in any large numbers, and it is many years since their arrival contributed anything but an insignificant racial element to the “melting pot.” They do not come partly because their own Colonies offer a superior attraction, and partly because British labour is now aware that the economic stress is fiercer in the larger country and the material rewards proportionately no greater. Those who still come, come as a rule prepared to take executive positions, or as specialists in their several lines. Their unwillingness to assume American citizenship is notorious, and I think significant; but it is only within quite recent years that it has been made any ground of accusation—and among the class with which their activities bring them into closest contact it is, or was until a year or two ago, tacitly and tactfully ignored. During a review of the “foreign element” in Boston to which I was assigned two years before the war, I found business men of British birth not only reluctant to yield “copy” but resentful of the publicity to which the enterprise of my journal was subjecting them.
There are many reasons why eminent English writers and publicists are of little value in arriving at an estimate of “how Americans strike an Englishman.” While not asserting anything so crude as that commercial motives are felt as a restraining force when the temptation arises to pass adverse judgment on the things they see and hear, it is evident that the conditions under which they come—men of achievement in their own country accredited to men of achievement here—keep them isolated from much that is restless, unstable, but vitally significant in American life. None of them, so far as I know, have had the courage or the enterprise to come to America, unheralded and anonymous, and to pay with a few months of economic struggle for an estimate that might have real value.
To this lack of real contact between the masses in America and Great Britain is due the intrinsic falsity of the language in which the racial bond is celebrated on the occasions when some political crisis calls for its reiteration. It is felt easier and safer to utter it in consecrated clichés—to refer to the specific gravity of blood and water, or the philological roots of the medium used by Milton and Arthur Brisbane. The banality, the insincerity, of the public utterances at the time that America’s entry into the European struggle first loomed as a possible solution of the agony on the Western Front was almost unbelievable. Any one who cares to turn up the files of the great dailies between September, 1916, and March, 1918, may find them for himself.
To a mind not clouded by the will to believe, this constant invocation of common aims, this perpetual tug at the bond to ensure that it has not parted overnight, would be strong corroboration of a suspicion that the two vessels were drifting apart, borne on currents that flow in different directions. It is not upon the after-dinner banalities of wealthy and class-conscious “pilgrims” nor the sonorous platitudes of discredited laggards on the political scene, still less is it upon the sporting proclivities of titled hoydens and hawbucks to whom American sweat and dollars have arrived in a revivifying stream, that we shall have to rely should the cable really part and the two great vessels of State grope for one another on a dark and uncharted sea. It is upon the sheer and unassisted fact of how American and Englishman like or dislike one another.
It is a truism almost too stale to restate that we are standing to-day on the threshold of great changes. What is not so well realized is that many of these changes have already taken place. The passing of gold in shipment after shipment from the Eastern to the Western side of the Atlantic and the feverish hunt for new and untapped sources of exploitation are only the outward signs of a profound European impoverishment in which Britain for the first time in her history has been called upon to bear her full share. The strikes and lock-outs that have followed the peace in such rapid succession might possibly be written off as inevitable sequelæ of a great war. The feeble response to the call for production as a means of salvation, the general change in the English temper faced with its heavy task are far more vital and significant matters. They seem to mark a shift in moral values—a change in the faith by which nations, each in the sphere that character and circumstance allot, wax and flourish.
Confronted with inevitable competition by a nation more populous, more cohesive, and richer than itself, it seems to me that there are three courses which the older section of the English race may elect to follow. One is war, before the forces grow too disparate, and on the day that war is declared one phase of our civilization will end. It will really not matter much, to the world at large, who wins an Anglo-American world conflict. The second, which is being preached in and out of season by our politicians and publicists, who seldom, however, dare to speak their full thought, is a girding up of the national loins, a renewed consecration to the gospel of effort, a curtailment, if necessary—though this is up to now only vaguely hinted—of political liberties bestowed in easier and less strenuous days. The third course may easily be guessed. It is a persistence in proclivities, always latent as I believe in the English temperament, but which have only revealed themselves openly since the great war, a clearer questioning of values till now held as unimpeachable, a readier ear to the muttering and murmuring of the masses in Continental Europe, internationalism—revolution. No thoughtful man in England to-day denies the danger. Even references to that saving factor, the “common sense of the British workman,” no longer allays the spectre of a problem the issues of which have only to be stated to stand forth in all their hopeless irreconcilability. Years ago, long before the shadow fell on the world, in a moment of depression or inspiration, I wrote that cravings were stirring in the human heart on the very eve of the day when the call would be to sacrifice. That is the riddle, nakedly stated, to which workers and rulers alike are asked to find an answer to-day.
In this choice that lies before the British worker a great deal may depend upon how American experiments and American achievements strike him. In England now there is no escaping from the big transatlantic sister. Politicians use her example as a justification; employers hold up her achievements as a reproach. A British premier dare not face the House of Commons on an “Irish night” unequipped with artful analogies culled from the history of the war of secession. The number of bricks per hour America’s bricklayers will lay or the tons of coal per week her stolid colliers will hew are the despair of the contractor face to face with the loafing and pleasure-loving native born. You will hear no more jokes to-day in high coalition places over her political machine replacing regularly and without the litter and disorder of a general election tweedledum Democrat by a tweedledee Republican. She is recognized—and this, I think, is the final value placed upon her by the entire ruling and possessing classes in my own country—as better equipped in her institutions, her character, and her population for the big economic struggle that is ahead of us.
This is the secret of the unceasing court paid to Washington by all countries, but pre-eminently by Britain. It is not fear of her power, nor hunger for her money bags and harvests, nor desire to be “on the band-wagon,” as light-hearted cartoonists see it, that prompts the nervous susceptibility and the instantaneous response to anything that will offend those in high places on the banks of the Potomac. It is the sense, among all men with a strong interest in maintaining the present economic order, that the support in their own countries is crumbling under their hands, and that that fresh support, stronger and surer, is to be found in a new country with a simpler faith and a cleaner, or at any rate a shorter, record. To fight proletarianism with democracy is a method so obvious and safe that one only wonders its discovery had to wait upon to-day. Its salient characteristic is a newly aroused interest and enthusiasm in one country for the political forces that seem to make stability their watchword in the other. The coalition has become the hero of the New York Times and Tribune—the triumph of the Republican party was hailed almost as a national victory in the London Times and Birmingham Post. Intransigeance in foreign policies finds ready forgiveness in London; in return, a blind eye is turned to schemes of territorial aggrandisement at Washington.
If a flaw is to be discerned in what at first sight seems a perfectly adjusted instrument for international comity, it is that this new Anglo-American understanding seems to be founded on class rather than on national sympathy. Even offhand some inherent inconsistency would seem to be sensed from the fact that the appeal of the great republic comes most home, in the parent country, to the class that is least attached to democratic forms and the most fearful of change. References to America arouse no enthusiasm at meetings of the labour element in England, and it is still felt unwise to expose the Union Jack to possible humiliation in parades on a large scale in New York or Chicago. A sympathy that flowers into rhetoric at commercial banquets or at meetings of the archæologically inclined may have its roots in the soundest political wisdom. But to infer from such demonstrations of class solidarity any national community of thought or aim is both unwarranted and unsafe. This much is evident, that should a class subversion, always possible in a country the political fluidity of which is great, leave the destinies of Great Britain in the hands of the class that is silent or hostile to-day when the name of America is mentioned, an entire re-statement of Anglo-American unity would become necessary, in terms palatable to the average Englishman.
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