As We Are and As We May Be

by Walter Besant

The attack on Panama, the beginning of the Colonies, the exiles for religion, the long struggle with the French, the driving back of the Indians: it was a very fine drama—the Romance of America—in ever so many acts, and twice as many tableaux, that this boy saw. And always on the stage, now like Drake, now like Raleigh, now like Miles Standish, now like Captain John Smith, he saw a young Englishman, performing prodigies of valour and bearing a charmed life. Yet, do not think that it was a play with nothing but fighting in it. There were the Dutch burghers of New Amsterdam, under Walter the Doubter, or the renowned Peter Stuyvesant; there was Rip Van Winkle on the Catskill Mountains; there were the king-killers, hiding in the rocks beside Newhaven; there were the witch trials of Salem; there was the peaceful village of Concord, from which came voices that echoed round and round the world; there was the Lake, lying still and silent, ringed by its woods, where the solitary student of Nature loved to sit and watch and meditate. Hundreds of things, too many to mention, were acted on that boy's imaginary stage and lived in his brain as much as if he had himself played a part in them.

As that boy grew up, the memory of this long pageant survived; there fell upon him the desire to see some of the places; such a desire, if it is not gratified, dies away into a feeble spark—but it can always be blown again into a flame. This year the chance came to the boy, now a graybeard, to see these places; and the spark flared up again, into a bright, consuming flame.

I have seen my Land of Romance; I have travelled for a few weeks among the New England places, and, with a sigh of satisfaction and relief, I say with Kingsley: 'At Last!'

This romance, which belonged to my boyhood, and has grown up with me, and will never leave me, once belonged then, more or less, to the whole of the English people. Except with those who, like me, have been fed with the poetry and the literature of America, this romance is impossible. I suppose that it can never come again. Something better and more stable, however, may yet come to us, when the United States and Great Britain will be allied in amity as firm as that which now holds together those Federated States. The thing is too vast, it is too important, to be achieved in a day, or in a generation. But it will come—it will come; it must come—it must come; Asia and Europe may become Chinese or Cossack, but our people shall rule over every other land, and all the islands, and every sea.

II.-THE LAND OF REALITY

When a man has received kindnesses unexpected and recognition unlooked for from strangers and people in a foreign country on whom he had no kind of claim, it seems a mean and pitiful thing in that man to sit down in cold blood and pick out the faults and imperfections, if he can descry any, in that country. The 'cad with a kodak'—where did I find that happy collocation?—is to be found everywhere; that is quite certain; every traveller, as is well known, feels himself justified after six weeks of a country to sit in judgment upon that country and its institutions, its manners, its customs and its society; he constitutes himself an authority upon that country for the rest of his life. Do we not know the man who 'has been there'? Lord Palmerston knew him. 'Beware,' he used to say, 'of the man who has been there!' As Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs he was privileged to make quite a circle of acquaintance with the men who 'had been there'; and he estimated their experience at its true value.

The man who has been there very seldom speaks its language with so much ease as to understand all classes; he has therefore no real chance of seeing and understanding things otherwise than as they seem. When an Englishman travels in America, however, he can speak the language. Therefore, he thinks that he really does understand the things he sees. Does he? Let us consider. To understand the true meaning of things in any strange land is not to see certain things by themselves, but to be able to see them in their relation to other things. Thus, the question of price must be taken with the question of wage; that of supply with that of demand; that of things done with the national opinion on such things; that of the continued existence of certain recognised evils with, the conditions and exigencies of the time; and so on. Before an observer can understand the relative value of this or that he must make a long and sometimes a profound study of the history of the country, the growth of the people, and the present condition of the nation. It is obvious that it is given to very few visitors to conduct such an investigation. Most of them have no time; very, very few have the intellectual grasp necessary for an undertaking of this magnitude. It is obvious, therefore, that the criticism of a two months' traveller must be worthless generally, and impertinent almost always. The kodak, you see, in the bands of the cads, produces mischievous and misleading pictures.

Let us take one or two familiar instances of the dangers of hasty objection. Nothing worries the average American visitor to Great Britain more than the House of Lords, and, generally, the national distinctions. He sees very plainly that the House of Lords no longer represents an aristocracy of ancient descent, because by far the greater number of peers belong to modern creations and new families, chiefly of the trading class; that it no longer represents the men of whom the country has most reason to be proud, because out of the whole domain of science, letters, and art there have been but two creations in the history of the peerage. He sees, also, that an Englishman has, apparently, only to make enough money in order to command a peerage for himself, and the elevation to a separate caste of himself and his children forever. Again, as regards the lower distinctions, he perceives that they are given for this reason and for that reason; but he knows nothing at all of the services rendered to the State by the dozens of knights made every year, while he can see very well that the men of real distinction, whom he does know, never get any distinctions at all. These difficulties perplex and irritate him. Probably he goes home with a hasty generalization.

But the answer to these objections is not difficult. Without posing as a champion of the House of Lords, one may point out that it is a very ancient and deep-rooted institution; that to pull it up would cost an immense deal of trouble; that it gives us a second or upper house quite free from the acknowledged dangers of popular election; that the lords have long ceased to oppose themselves to changes once clearly and unmistakably demanded by the nation; that the hereditary powers actually exercised by the very small number of peers who sit in the House do give us an average exhibition of brain power quite equal to that found in the House of Commons, in which are the six hundred chosen delegates of the people; that, as regards the elevation of rich men, a poor man cannot well accept a peerage, because custom does not permit a peer to work for his livelihood; that it is necessary to create new peers continually, in order to keep as close a connection as possible between the Lords and the Commons; e.g., if a peer has a hundred brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins, they are all commoners and he is the one peer, so that for six hundred peers there may be a hundred thousand people closely allied to the House of Lords. Again, as to the habitual contempt with which the advisers of the Crown pass over the men who by their science, art, and literature bring honour upon their generation, the answer is, that when the newspaper press thinks fit to take up the subject and becomes as jealous over the national distinctions as they are now over the national finances, the thing will get itself righted. And not till then. I instance this point and these objections as illustrating what is often said, and thought, by American visitors who record their first impressions.

The same kind of danger, of course, awaits the English traveller in America. If he is an unwise traveller, he will note, for admiring or indignant quotation, many a thing which the wise traveller notes only with a query and the intention of finding out, if he can, what it means or why it is permitted. The first questions, in fact, for the student of manners and laws are why a thing is permitted, encouraged, or practised; how the thing in consideration affects the people who practise it, and how they regard it. Thus, to go back to ancient history, English people, forty years ago, could not understand how slavery was allowed to continue in the States. We ourselves had virtuously given freedom to all our slaves; why should not the Americans? We had not grown up under the institution, you see; we had little personal knowledge of the negro; we believed that, in spite of the discouraging examples in Hayti and in our own Jamaica, there was a splendid future for the black, if only he could be free and educated. Again, none of our people realized, until the Civil War actually broke out, the enormous magnitude of the interests involved; we had read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and our hearts glowed with virtuous indignation; we could not understand the enormous difficulties of the question. Finally, we succeeded in enraging the South against us before the war began, because of our continual outcry against slavery; and in enraging the North after the war began, by reason of our totally unexpected Southern sympathies. It is a curious history of wrongheadedness and ignorance.