The Spirit of America Part 8

This brings me to the last point of which I wish to speak: the result of will-power and work in the production of wealth, and the real status of the Almighty Dollar in the United States.

The enormous increase of wealth has been accompanied by an extraordinary concentration of it in forms which make it more powerful and impressive.

Moody's _Manual of Corporation Statistics_ says that there are four hundred and forty large industrial, franchise, and transportation trusts, of an important and active character, with a floating capital of over twenty billion dollars. When we remember that each of these corporations is in the eye of the law a person, and is able to act as a person in financial, industrial, and political affairs, we begin to see the tremendous significance of the figures.

But we must remember also that the growth of individual fortunes and of family estates has been equally extraordinary. Millionnaires are no longer counted. It is the multi-millionnaires who hold the centre of the stage. The _New York World Almanac_ gives a list of sixteen of these families of vast wealth, tracing the descent of their children and grandchildren with scrupulous care, as if for an _Almanach de Gotha_. I suppose that another list might be made twice as large,--three or four times as large,--who knows how large,--of people whose fortune runs up into the tens of millions.

These men have a vast power in American finance and industry, not only by the personal possession of money, but also through the control of the great trusts, railroads, banks, in which they have invested it. The names of many of them are familiar throughout the country. Their comings and goings, their doings, opinions, and tastes are set forth in the newspapers. Their houses, their establishments, in some cases are palatial; in other cases they are astonishingly plain and modest. But however that may be, the men themselves, as a cla.s.s, are prominent, they are talked about, they hold the public attention.

What is the nature of this attention? Is it the culminating rite in the worship of the Almighty Dollar? No; it is an attention of curiosity, of natural interest, of critical consideration.

The dollar _per se_ is no more almighty in America than it is anywhere else. It has just the same kind of power that the franc has in France, that the pound has in England: the power to buy the things that can be bought. There are foolish people in every country who worship money for its own sake. There are ambitious people in every country who worship money because they have an exaggerated idea of what it can buy. But the characteristic thing in the att.i.tude of the Americans toward money is this: not that they adore the dollar, but that they admire the energy, the will-power, by which the dollar has been won.

They consider the multi-millionnaire much less as the possessor of an enormous fortune than as the successful leader of great enterprises in the world of affairs, a master of the steel industry, the head of a great railway system, the developer of the production of mineral oil, the organizer of large concerns which promote general prosperity. He represents to them achievement, force, courage, tireless will-power.

A man who is very rich merely by inheritance, who has no manifest share in the activities of the country, has quite a different place in their attention. They are entertained, or perhaps shocked, by his expenditures, but they regard him lightly.

It is the man who does things, and does them largely, in whom they take a serious interest. They are inclined, perhaps, to pardon him for things that ought not to be pardoned, because they feel so strongly the fascination of his potent will, his practical efficiency.

It is not the might of the dollar that impresses them, it is the might of the man who wins the dollar magnificently by the development of American industry.

This, I a.s.sure you, is the characteristic att.i.tude of the typical American toward wealth. It does not confer a social status by itself in the United States any more than it does in England or in France. But it commands public attention by its relation to national will-power.

Of late there has come into this attention a new note of more searching inquiry, of sharper criticism, in regard to the use of great wealth.

Is it employed for generous and n.o.ble ends, for the building and endowment of hospitals, of public museums, libraries, and art galleries, for the support of schools and universities, for the education of the negro? Then the distributer is honoured.

Is it devoted even to some less popular purpose, like Egyptian excavations, or polar expeditions, or the endowment of some favourite study,--some object which the ma.s.s of the people do not quite understand, but which they vaguely recognize as having an ideal air?

Then the donor is respected even by the people who wonder why he does that particular thing.

Is it merely h.o.a.rded, or used for selfish and extravagant luxury? Then the possessor is regarded with suspicion, with hostility, or with half-humorous contempt.

There is, in fact, as much difference in the comparative standing of multi-millionnaires in America as there is in the comparative standing of lawyers or politicians. Even in the same family, when a great fortune is divided, the heir who makes a good and fine use of the inheritance receives the tribute of affection and praise, while the heir who h.o.a.rds it, or squanders it ign.o.bly, receives only the tribute of notoriety,--which is quite a different thing. The power of discrimination has not been altogether blinded by the glitter of gold.

The soul of the people in America accepts the law of the moral dividend which says _Richesse oblige_.

Here I might stop, were it not for the fact that still another factor is coming into the att.i.tude of the American people toward great wealth, concentrated wealth. There is a growing apprehension that the will-power of one man may be so magnified and extended by the enormous acc.u.mulation of the results of his energy and skill as to interfere with the free exercise of the will-power of other men. There is a feeling that great trusts carry within themselves the temptation to industrial oppression, that the liberty of individual initiative may be threatened, that the private man may find himself in a kind of bondage to these immense and potent artificial personalities created by the law.

Beyond a doubt this feeling is spreading. Beyond a doubt it will lead to some peaceful effort to regulate and control the great corporations in their methods. And if that fails, what then? Probably an effort to make the concentration of large wealth in a few hands more difficult if not impossible. And if that fails, what then? Who knows? But I think it is not likely to be anything of the nature of communism.

The ruling pa.s.sion of America is not equality, but personal freedom for every man to exercise his will-power under a system of self-reliance and fair play.

V

COMMON ORDER AND SOCIAL COoPERATION

V

COMMON ORDER AND SOCIAL COoPERATION

It is a little strange, and yet it seems to be true, that for a long time America was better understood by the French than by the English.

This may be partly due to the fact that the French are more idealistic and more excitable than the English; in both of which qualities the Americans resemble them. It may also be due in part to the fact that the American Revolution was in a certain sense a family quarrel. A prolonged conflict of wills between the older and the younger members of the same household develops prejudices which do not easily subside. The very closeness of the family relation intensifies the misunderstanding. The seniors find it extremely difficult to comprehend the motives of the juniors, or to believe that they are really grown up. They seem like naughty and self-confident children. A person outside of the family is much more likely to see matters in their true light.

At all events, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Dr.

Samuel Johnson was calling the Americans "a race of convicts, who ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging," and declaring that he was willing to love all mankind _except the Americans_, whom he described as "Rascals--Robbers--Pirates," a Frenchman, named Crevecoeur, who had lived some twenty years in New York, gave a different portrait of the same subject.

"What then is the American," he asks, "this new man? He is either a European or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a Frenchwoman, and whose present four sons have now wives of four different nations.... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great ma.s.s of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the East. They will finish the great circle."

This is the language of compliment, of course. It is the saying of a very polite prophet; and even in prophecy one is inclined to like pleasant manners. Yet that is not the reason why it seems to Americans to come much nearer to the truth than Dr. Johnson's remarks, or Charles d.i.c.kens's _American Notes_, or Mrs. Trollope's _Domestic Manners of the Americans_. It is because the Frenchman has been clear-sighted enough to recognize that the Americans started out in life with an inheritance of civilized ideals, manners, apt.i.tudes, and powers, and that these did not all come from one stock, but were a.s.sembled from several storehouses. This fact, as I have said before, is fundamental to a right understanding of American character and history. But it is particularly important to the subject of this lecture: _the sentiment of common order_, and the building-up of a settled, decent, sane life in the community.

Suppose, for example, that a family of barbarians, either from some native impulse, or under the influence of foreign visitors, should begin to civilize themselves. Their course would be slow, irregular, and often eccentric. It would alternate between servile imitation and wild originality. Sometimes it would resemble the costume of that Australian chief who arrayed himself in a stove-pipe hat and polished boots and was quite unconscious of the need of the intermediate garments.

But suppose we take an example of another kind,--let us say such a family as that which was made famous fifty years ago by a well-known work of juvenile fiction, _The Swiss Family Robinson_. They are shipwrecked on a desert island. They carry ash.o.r.e with them their tastes, their habits, their ideas of what is desirable and right and fitting for decent people in the common life. It is because their souls are not naked that they do not wish their bodies to become so. It is because there is already a certain order and proportion in their minds that they organize their tasks and their time. The problem before them is not to think out a civilized existence, but to realize one which already exists within them, and to do this with the materials which they find on their island, and with the tools and implements which they save from their wrecked ship.

Here you have precisely the problem which confronted the Americans. They began housekeeping in a wild land, but not as wild people. An English lady once asked Eugene Field of Chicago whether he knew anything about his ancestors. "Not much, madam," he replied, "but I believe that mine lived in trees when they were first caught." This was an ill.u.s.tration of conveying truth by its opposite.

The English Pilgrims who came from Norwich and Plymouth, the Hollanders who came from Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the Huguenots who came from La Roch.e.l.le and Rouen were distinctly not tree-dwellers nor troglodytes.

They were people who had the habits and preferences of a well-ordered life in cities of habitation, where the current of existence was tranquil and regular except when disturbed by the storms of war or religious persecution. And those who came from the country districts, from the little villages of Normandy and Poitou and Languedoc, of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and Cornwall, of Friesland and Utrecht, of the Rhenish Palatinate, and of the north of Ireland, were not soldiers of fortune and adventurers. They were for the most part peaceable farmers, whose ideal of earthly felicity was the well-filled barn and the comfortable fireside.

There were people of a different sort, of course, among the settlers of America. England sent a good many of her bankrupts, incurable idlers, masterless men, sons of Belial, across the ocean in the early days. Some writers say that she sent as many as 50,000 of them. Among the immigrants of other nations there were doubtless many "who left their country for their country's good." It is silly to indulge in illusions in regard to the angelic purity and unmixed virtue of the original American stock.

But the elements of turbulence and disorder were always, and are still, in the minority. Whatever interruption they caused in the development of a civilized and decent life was local and transient. The steady sentiment of the people who were in control was in favour of common order and social cooperation.

There is a significant pa.s.sage in the diary of John Adams, written just after the outbreak of mob violence against the loyalists in 1775. A man had stopped him, as he was riding along the highway, to congratulate him on the fury which the patriots and their congress had stirred up, and the general dissolution of the bonds of order.

"Oh, Mr. Adams, what great things have you and your colleagues done for us. We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no courts of justice now in this province, and I hope there will never be another."

Upon which the indignant Adams comments: "Is this the object for which I have been contending, said I to myself, for I rode along without any answer to this wretch; are these the sentiments of such people, and how many of them are there in this country? Half the nation for what I know: for half the nation are debtors, if not more; and these have been in all countries the sentiments of debtors. If the power of the country should get into such hands, and there is great danger that it will, to what purpose have we sacrificed our time, our health, and everything else?"

But the fears of the st.u.r.dy old Puritan and patriot were not realized.

It was not into the hands of such men as he despised and dreaded, nor even into the hands of such men as Mr. Rudyard Kipling's imaginary American,

"Enslaved, illogical, elate ...

Unkempt, disreputable, vast,"

that the power of the country fell. It was into the hands of men of a very different type, intelligent as well as independent, sober as well as self-reliant, inheritors of principles well-matured and defined, friends of liberty in all their policies, but at the bottom of their hearts lovers and seekers of tranquil order.

I hear the spirit of these men speaking in the words of him who was the chosen leader of the people in peace and in war. Washington retired from his unequalled public service with the sincere declaration that he wished for nothing better than to partake, "in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever favourite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labours, and dangers."

In these n.o.bly simple and eloquent words, the great American expresses clearly the fourth factor in the making of his country,--_the love of common order_. Here we see, in the mild light of unconscious self-revealment, one of the chief ends which the Spirit of America desires and seeks. Not merely a self-reliant life, not merely a life of equal opportunity for all, not merely an active, energetic life in which the free-will of the individual has full play, but also a life shared with one's fellow-citizens under the benign influence of good laws, a life which is controlled by principles of harmony and fruitful in efforts cooperant to a common end, a life _rangee, ordonnee, et solidaire_,--this is the American ideal.

With what difficulty men worked out this ideal in outward things in the early days we can hardly imagine. Those little communities, scattered along the edge of the wilderness, had no easy task to establish and maintain physical orderliness. Nature has her own order, no doubt, but her ways are different from man's ways; she is reluctant to submit to his control; she does not like to have her hair trimmed and her garments confined; she even communicates to man, in his first struggles with her, a little of her own carelessness, her own apparently reckless and wasteful way of doing things. "Rough and ready" is a necessary maxim of the frontier. It is hard to make a new country or a log cabin look neat.

To this day in America, even in the regions which have been long settled, one finds nothing like the excellent trimness, the precise and methodical arrangement, of the little farmsteads of the Savoy among which these lectures were written. My memory often went back, last summer, from those tiny unfenced crops laid out like the squares of a chess-board in the valleys, from those rich pastures hanging like green velvet on the steep hillsides, from those carefully tended forests of black firs, from those granges with the little sticks of wood so neatly piled along their sides under the shelter of the overhanging eaves, to the straggling fences, the fallow fields, the unkempt meadows, the denuded slopes, the s.h.a.ggy underbrush, the tumbled woodpiles, and the general signs of waste and disorder which may be seen in so many farming districts of the United States. I asked myself how I could venture to a.s.sure a French audience, in spite of such apparent evidences to the contrary, that the love of order was a strong factor in the American spirit.