The Twentieth Century American Part 16

It is perhaps inevitable that Americans should frequently be irritated by the tone of the comments in English papers on the lynchings of negroes which occur in the South. Some of these incidents are barbarous and disgraceful beyond any possibility of palliation, but it is certain that if Englishmen understood the conditions in the South better they would also understand that in some cases it is extremely difficult to blame the lynchers. Many of those people who in London (or in Boston) are loudest in condemnation of outrages upon the negro would if they lived in certain sections of the South not only sympathise with but partic.i.p.ate in the unlawful proceedings.

It has already been mentioned that among the men in New Orleans who a.s.sisted at the summary execution of the Italian Mafiotes there were, it is believed, an ex-Governor of the State and a Judge: men, that is to say, as civilised and of as humane sentiments as the members of any club in Pall Mall. They were not bloodthirsty ruffians, but gentlemen who did what they did from a stern sense of necessity. It has been my lot to live for a while in a community in which the maintenance of law and order depended entirely on a self-const.i.tuted Vigilance Committee; and the operations of that committee were not only salutary but necessary.

It has also been my lot to live in a community where the upholders of law and order were not strong enough to organise a Vigilance Committee.

I have been one of three or four who behind closed doors earnestly canva.s.sed the possibilities of forming such an organisation, and neither I nor any of the others (among whom I remember were included one attorney-at-law and one mining engineer and surveyor) would have hesitated to serve on such a committee could it have been made of sufficient strength to achieve any useful purpose, but the disparity between our numbers and those of the "bad men" who at that time controlled the community was too obvious to give us any hope of being able to enforce our authority. There may, therefore, be conditions of society infinitely worse than those where order is preserved by lynch law; and I make no doubt that neither I myself nor any fellow-member of my London Club would, if living in one of the bad black districts of the South, act otherwise than do the Southern whites who live there now.

What is deplorable is not the spirit which prompts the acts of summary justice (I am speaking only of one cla.s.s of Southern "outrage") but the conditions which make the perpetration of those acts the only practicable way of rendering life livable for white people; and for the responsibility for these conditions we must go back either to the inst.i.tution of slavery itself (for which it should be remembered that England was to blame) or to the follies and pa.s.sions of half a century ago which gave the negro the suffrage and put him on a plane of political equality with his late masters.[303:1] If, since then, the problem has grown more, rather than less, difficult, it has not been so much by the fault of the Southern white, living under conditions in which only one line of conduct has been open to him, as of Northern philanthropists and negro sympathisers who have helped to keep alive in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the coloured population ideas and ambitions which can never be realised.

The people of the North have of late years come to understand the South better, and whereas what I have said above would, twenty years ago, have found few sympathisers in any Northern city, I believe that to-day it expresses the opinion of the large majority of Northern men. I also believe that the necessary majority could be secured to repeal so much of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Const.i.tution as would be necessary to undo the mistake which has been committed. It is true that in some Southern States the majority of the blacks are practically disfranchised now; but it would remove a constant cause of friction and of political chicanery if the fact were recognised frankly that it is not possible to contemplate the possibility of the negro ever becoming the politically dominant race in any community where white people live.

There is no reason to believe that the two races cannot live together comfortably even though the blacks be in a large majority, but there must be no question of white control of the local government and of the machinery of justice.

Taking away the franchise from the negro would not, of course, put an end to many of the social difficulties of the situation, but, the present false relations between the two being abolished, those difficulties are no more than have to be dealt with in every community.

There would be a chance for the negroes as a race to develop into useful members of the community, _as negroes_, filling the stations of negroes and doing negroes' work, along such lines as those on which Mr. Booker Washington is working. The English have had a wide experience of native races in all parts of the world and they have not yet found the problem of living with them and of holding at least their respect, together with some measure of their active good-will, anywhere insoluble. To an Englishman it does not seem that it should be insoluble in the United States. He is rather inclined to think that the rapidity with which the negro of the South would work out his economic salvation, if once the political difficulty were removed, would depend chiefly on the ability of the race to produce a continuity of men like Mr. Booker Washington, with, perhaps, the concurrent ability of the north to produce men (shall I say, like the late W. H. Baldwin?) to co-operate with the leaders and teachers of the blacks and to interpret them and their work to the country.

The Englishman in England is chiefly impressed by the stories of Southern outrages upon the blacks and he gets therefrom an erroneous idea of the character of the Southern white. An Englishman who studies the situation on the spot is likely to acquire great sympathy with the Southern white and to condemn only the political inept.i.tude which has made the existing conditions possible.

Whether Mr. Roosevelt's course has been the one best adapted to facilitate a solution of the difficulties it would be idle to enquire.

The laws being as they are, and he being the kind of man he is and, as President, entrusted with the duty of seeing that the laws are faithfully executed, he could not have taken a different line. Another man (and an equally good man) might have refrained from making one or two of his appointments and from entertaining Mr. Washington at the White House. But if Mr. Roosevelt did not do precisely those things, he would not do fifty other of the things which have most endeared him to the people.

In this connection, it may be that there will be readers who will think that in many things which I say, when generalising about the American people as a whole, I fail to take into proper account the South and characteristics of such of the people of the South as are distinctively Southern. It is not from any lack of acquaintance with the South; still less from any lack of admiration of or affection for it. But what has been said of New York may in a way be said of the South, for whatever therein is typically Southern to-day is not typically American; and all that is typically Southern is moreover rapidly disappearing. In the tremendous activity of the new national life which has been infused into the country as a result of its solidification and knitting together of the last thirty years, there is no longer room for sectional divergences of character. They are overwhelmed, absorbed, obliterated; and the really vital parts of the South are no longer Southern but American.

What has the spirit of Atlanta in Georgia, of Birmingham in Alabama, of any town in the South-west, from St. Louis to Galveston, to do with the typical spirit of the South? However strong Southern _sentiment_ may still be, what is there of the Southern _spirit_ even in Richmond or in Louisville? I need hardly say that America produces no finer men than the best Virginian or the best Kentuckian, but, with all his Southern love and his hot rhetoric, the man of this generation who is a leader among his fellows in Kentucky or in Virginia is so by virtue of the American spirit that is in him and not by virtue of any of the dying spirit of the old South.

FOOTNOTES:

[287:1] Mr. Bryce felicitously speaks of the Senate as "a sort of Congress of Amba.s.sadors from the respective States" (_The American Commonwealth_, vol. 1, page 110).

[293:1] "He stands for the commonplace virtues; he is great along lines on which each one of us can be great if he wills and dares" (_Theodore Roosevelt, the Man and Citizen_, by Jacob A. Riis). Mr. Roosevelt has spoken of himself as "a very ordinary man." A pleasant story is told by Mr. Riis of the lady who said: "I have always wanted to make Roosevelt out a hero, but somehow, every time he did something that seemed really great, it turned out, upon looking at it closely, that it was only just the right thing to do."

[296:1] See his _Addresses and Presidential Messages_, with an introduction by Henry Cabot Lodge (Putnams, 1904).

[303:1] To those who would understand the negro question and the mistakes of the people of the North during the Reconstruction period (to which the present generation owes the legacy of the problem in its acute form) I commend the reading of Mr. James Ford Rhodes's _History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home Rule in the South in 1877_ (Macmillan).

CHAPTER XII

COMMERCIAL MORALITY

Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?--An American Peerage--Senators and other Aristocrats--Trade and the British Upper Cla.s.ses--Two Views of a Business Career--America's Wild Oats--The Packing House Scandals--"American Methods" in Business--A Countryman and Some Eggs--A New Dog--The Morals of British Peers--A Contract of Mutual Confidence--Embalmed Beef, Re-mounts, and War Stores--The Yellow Press and Mr. Hearst-- American View of the House of Lords.

It would seem to be inevitable that any general diffusion of corruption in political circles should act deleteriously on the morals of the whole community. It will therefore seem almost absurd to Englishmen to question whether on the whole the code of commercial ethics in America--the standard of morals which prevails in the every-day transaction of business--is higher or lower than that which prevails in Great Britain. The answer must be almost a matter of course. But, setting aside any expression of individual opinion and all preconceived ideas based on personal experience, let us look at the situation and see, if we can, what, judging only from the circ.u.mstances of the two countries, would be likely to be the relative conditions evolved in each. To do this it will be necessary first to clear away a common misapprehension in the minds of Englishmen.

It is somehow generally a.s.sumed--for the most part unconsciously and without any formulation of the notion in the individual mind--that American society is a sort of truncated pyramid: that it is cut off short--stops in mid-air--before it gets to the top. Because there are no t.i.tles in the United States, therefore there are no Upper Cla.s.ses; because there is no Aristocracy therefore there is nothing that corresponds to the individual Aristocrat.[309:1] If there were a peerage in the United States, the country would have its full complement of Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, and the rest. And--this is the point--they would be precisely the same men as lead America to-day;--but how differently Englishmen would regard them!

The middle-cla.s.s Englishman, when he says that he is no respecter of t.i.tles and declares that it does not make any difference to him whether a man be a Lord or not, may think he is speaking the truth. It is even conceivable that there are some so happily const.i.tuted as to be able to chat equally unconcernedly with a Duke and with their wife's cousin, the land agent. Such men, I presume, exist in the British middle cla.s.ses.

But the fact remains that in the ma.s.s and, as it were, at a distance the effect of t.i.tles on the imagination of the British people is extraordinarily powerful.

That the men in America are precisely the same men, though they have no t.i.tles, as they would be if they had, is best shown by the example of Americans who have crossed the Canadian border. If Sir William Van Horne had not gone to Canada in 1881 or thereabouts, he would still be plain "Bill" Van Horne and just as wonderful a man as he is to-day. On the other hand if fortune had happened to place Mr. James J. Hill a little farther north--in Winnipeg instead of in St. Paul--it is just as certain that he would to-day be Lord Manitoba (or some such t.i.tle) as that his early a.s.sociates George Stephen and Donald Smith are now Lord Mount Stephen and Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. But somehow--it were useless to deny it--Englishmen would think of him as quite a different man. Mr. C. M. Hays in Montreal is still what he was in St.

Louis--Charlie Hays. He will not change his nature when he becomes Lord Muskoka.

And what is true of a few individuals is no less true all over the United States. In the immediate neighbourhood of Mr. Hill, there should be at least one peerage in the Washburn family and a couple of baronetcies among the Pillsburys. Chicago would have of course one Duke in the head of the McCormick family, Mr. Marshall Field would have died Earl Dearborn, and Mr. Hughitt might be Viscount Calumet. In New York Lord Waldorf would be the t.i.tle of the eldest son of the (at present third) Duke of Astoria. The Vanderbilt marquisate--of Hudson probably--would be a generation more recent. So throughout the country, from Maine to Mississippi, from Lord Pen.o.bscot to the Marquis of Biloxi, there would be a peerage in each of the good old houses--the Adamses, the Cabots, and the Quincys, the Livingstons, the Putnams, and Stuyvesants, the Carters and Randolphs and Jeffersons and Lees.

Americans will say: "Thank Heaven and the wisdom of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers that it is not so!" If it were so, however, a good deal of British misunderstanding of the United States would be removed. Nor will it be contended that any of the Americans whom Englishmen have known best--Mr. Bayard, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Choate, or Mr. Whitelaw Reid, or General Horace Porter--would be other than ornaments to any aristocracy in the world. It would be idle to enquire whether Mr. Roosevelt or Mr.

Chamberlain, Mr. Cleveland or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. Root or Lord Rosebery, Mr. Olney or Sir Edward Grey were the better man, for every Englishman will probably at once concede that the United States does somehow manage to produce individuals of as fine a type as England herself. But what no Englishman confesses in his heart is that there is any cla.s.s of these men--that there is as good an upper stratum to society there as in England. These remarkable individuals can only be explained as being what naturalists call a "sport"--mere freaks and accidents. This idea exists in the English mind solely, I believe, from the lack of t.i.tles in America; which is because the colonists were inspired by Anglo-Saxon and not by Norman ideas. Had Englishmen been accustomed for a generation or two to have relations, diplomatic and commercial, not with Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith, but with Lord Savannah and the Earl of Chicopee, the idea would never have taken root. And if Englishmen knew the United States better, they would be astonished to find how frequent these "sports" and accidents seem to be. And it must be remembered that the country does at least produce excellent d.u.c.h.esses and Countesses in not inadequate numbers.

Because American society is not officially stratified like a medicine gla.s.s and there is, ostensibly at least, no social hierarchy, Englishmen would do well to disabuse themselves of the idea that therefore the people consists entirely of the lower middle cla.s.s, with a layer of una.s.similated foreign anarchists below and a few native and accidental geniuses thrusting themselves above. Democracy, at least in the United States, is not nearly so thorough a leveller as at a first glance it appears. You will, it is true, often hear in America the statement that it is "four generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves," which is to say that one man, from the farm or the workshop, builds up a fortune; his son, being born in the days of little things and bred in the school of thrift, holds it together; but his sons in turn, surrounded from their childhood with wealth and luxury, have lost the old stern fibre and they slip quickly back down the steep path which their grandfather climbed with so much toil. But no less often will you hear the statement that "blood will tell."

In a democracy the essential principle of which is that every man shall have an equal chance of getting to the top, it is a matter of course that that top stratum will be constantly changing. The idea of anything in the nature of an hereditary privileged cla.s.s is abhorrent to the mind of every good American. If he had to have an official Aristocracy, he would insist on a brand new one with each generation; or more likely that it should be re-elected every four years. We are not now discussing the advantages or disadvantages of the hereditary principle; the point that I desire to make is that at any given time American society, instead of being truncated and headless, has the equivalent of an aristocracy, whether the first, second, third, or fifth generation of n.o.bility, just as abundant and complete as if it were properly labelled and cla.s.sified into Dukes, Marquises, Viscounts, and the rest. And this aristocracy is quite independent of any social _cachet_, whether of the New York Four Hundred or of any other authority.

It is a commonly accepted maxim among thoughtful Americans that the United States Senate is as much superior to the House of Lords as the House of Representatives is inferior to the House of Commons. One may, or may not, agree with that dictum; but it is worth noticing that, in the opinion of Americans themselves, it is, at least, not by comparison with the hereditary aristocracy that they show to any disadvantage.

Nor need one accept the opinion (in which many eminent Englishmen coincide with the universal American belief) that the United States Supreme Court is the ablest as well as the greatest judicial tribunal in the world. But when one looks at the membership of that Court and at the majority of the members of the Senate (especially those members from the older States which hold to some tradition of fixity of tenure), when one sees the men who const.i.tute the Cabinets of successive Presidents and those who fill the more distinguished diplomatic posts, when, further, one becomes acquainted with the cla.s.s of men from which, all over the country, the presidents and attorneys of the great railway corporations and banks and similar inst.i.tutions are drawn (all of which offices, it will be noticed, with the exception of the senatorships, are filled by nomination or appointment and not by popular election)--when one looks at, sees, and becomes acquainted with all these, he will begin to correct his impressions as to the non-existence of an American aristocracy which, though innocent of heraldry, can fairly be matched against the British.

The average Englishman looks at America and sees a people wherein there is no recognised aristocracy nor any t.i.tles. Also he sees that it is, through all its cla.s.ses, a commercial people, immersed in business.

Therefore he concludes that it is similar to what the English people would be if cut off at the top of the cla.s.ses engaged in business and with all the upper cla.s.ses wiped out. It will be much nearer the truth if he considers the people as a whole to be cla.s.s for cla.s.s just like the English people, subject to the accident that there are no t.i.tles, but with the difference that all cla.s.ses, including the unt.i.tled Dukes and Marquises and Earls, take to business as to their natural element.

The parallel may not be perfect; but it is incomparably more nearly exact than the alternative and general impression.

It is of course necessary to recognise how rapidly the const.i.tution of English society is changing, how old traditions are dying out, and in accordance with the Anglo-Saxon instinct the social scheme is tending to a.s.similate itself to the American model. The facts in outline are almost too familiar to be worth mentioning, except perhaps for the benefit of some American readers, for Americans in England are continually puzzled by anomalies which they see in English society. In my childhood I was taught that no gentleman could buy or sell anything for profit and preserve either his self-respect or the respect of his fellows. The only conceivable exceptions--and I think I was not informed of them at too early an age--were that a gentleman might deal in horses or in wines and still remain, if somewhat shaded, a gentleman; the reason being that a knowledge of either horses or wines was a gentlemanly accomplishment. The indulgence extended to the vendor of wines did not extend to the maker or seller of beer. I remember the resentment of the school when the sons of a certain wealthy brewer were admitted; and those boys had, I imagine, a cheerless time of it in their schooldays. The eldest of those boys, being now the head of the family, is to-day a peer. But at that time, though brewers or brewers' sons might be admitted grudgingly to the company of gentlemen, they were not gentlemen themselves. An aunt or a cousin who married a manufacturer, a merchant, or a broker--no matter how rich or in how large a way of business--was coldly regarded, if not actually cut, by the rest of the family. There are many families--though hardly now a cla.s.s--in which the same traditions persist, but even the families in which the horror of trade is as great as ever make an exception as a rule in favour of trade conducted in the United States. The American may be pardoned for being bewildered when in an aristocracy which is forbidden, so he is told, to make money in trade, he finds no lack of individuals who are willing to take shares in any trading concern in which money in sufficient quant.i.ties may be made. The person who will not speak to an English farmer except as to an inferior, sends his own sons to the Colonies or to the United States to farm. These things, however, are, to Englishmen, mere plat.i.tudes. But though all are familiar with the change which is pa.s.sing over the British people, few Englishmen, perhaps, have realised how rapidly the peerage itself is coming to be a trade-representing body. Of seventeen peers of recent creation, taken at random, nine owe their money and peerages to business, and the present holders of the t.i.tle were themselves brought up to a business career. It may not be long before the English aristocracy will be as universally occupied in business as is the American; and it will be as natural for an Earl to go to his office as it is for the American millionaire (perhaps the father of the Countess) to do so to-day.

In spite of all the change that has taken place, however, it still remains very difficult for the English gentleman, or member of a gentle family, to engage actively in business--certainly in trade--without being made to feel that he is stepping down into a lower sphere where there is a new and vitiated atmosphere. The code of ethics, he understands, is not that to which he is accustomed at his club and in his country house. He trusts that it will not be necessary to forget that he himself is a gentleman, but at least he will have to remember that his a.s.sociates are only business men.

The American aristocrat, on the other hand, takes to business as being the most attractive and honourable career. Setting aside all question of money-making, he believes it to be (and his father tells him that it is) the best life for him. Idleness is not good for any man. He will enjoy his annual month or two of shooting or fishing or yachting all the better for having spent the last ten or eleven months in hard work.

Moreover, immersion in affairs will keep him active and alert and in touch with his fellow-men, besides being in itself one of the largest and most fascinating of pastimes. There is also the money; but when business is put on this level, money has a tendency to become only one among many objects. In England no man can with any grace pretend that he goes into business for any other reason than to make money. In America a man goes into it in order to gain standing and respect and make a reputation.

Under these conditions, to return to our original point, in which country, putting other things aside, would one naturally expect to find the better code of business morals? Let us, if we can, consider the matter, as has been said before, without preconceived ideas or individual bias; let us imagine that we are speaking of two countries in which we have no personal stake whatever. If in any two such countries--in Gombroonia and Tigrosylvania, let us say--we should see two peoples approximately matched, of one tongue and having similar political ideals, not visibly unequal in strength, in abilities, or in the individual sense of honour, and if in one we should further see the aristocracy regarding the pursuit of commerce as a thing beneath and unworthy of them, in which they could not engage without contamination, while in the other it was followed as the most honourable of careers,--in which of the two should we expect to find the higher code of commercial ethics?

It does not seem to me that there can be any doubt as to the answer.

Other things being equal, and as a matter of theory only, business in the United States ought to be ruled by much higher standards of conduct than in England.

Before proceeding to an a.n.a.lysis of any particular conditions, there is one further general consideration which I would urge on the attention of English readers, most of whom have preconceived ideas on this subject already formed.

I am not among those who believe that trade or commerce of ordinary kinds either requires or tends to develop great intellectuality in those engaged in it. Indeed, my opinion (for which I am willing to be abused) is that any considerable measure of intellect is a hindrance to success in retail trade or in commerce on a small scale. It is a thesis which some one might develop at leisure, showing that it is not merely not creditable for a man to make money in trade but that it is an explicit avowal of intellectual poverty. Whence, of course, it follows that the London tradesman who grows rich and retires to the country or suburbs to build himself a statelier mansion is more justly an object of pity, if not of contempt, than is often consciously acknowledged. Any imaginative quality or breadth of vision which contributes to distract the mind of a tradesman from the one transaction immediately in hand and the immediate financial results thereof is a disqualification. I state my views thus in their extreme form lest the English reader should think that I entertain too much respect (or too little contempt) for the purely commercial brain. At the same time the English reader will concede that commercial enterprises and industrial undertakings may be on such a scale as to offer full exercise to the largest intellects.

As an ill.u.s.tration of this: Cecil Rhodes grew, as we know, wealthy from the proceeds of vast undertakings; but men closely a.s.sociated with him have a.s.sured me that Rhodes was a very indifferent "business man." We may, I think, take it for certain that if Rhodes had been condemned to conduct a retail grocery he would have conducted it to speedy irretrievable disaster. We are probably all agreed that the conduct of a small grocery does not require fineness of intellect; most English readers, I think, will follow me in believing that success in such a sphere of life implies at least an imperfect intellectual development.

On the other hand enterprises truly Rhodian do call for intellectual grasp of the largest.

The consideration which I wish to urge is that business in the United States during the period of growth and settlement of the country has been largely on Rhodian lines. The great enterprises by which the country has been developed, and on which most of the large fortunes of individual Americans are based have been of truly imperial proportions.

The flinging of railways across thousands of miles of wilderness (England has made peers of the men who did it in Canada) with the laying out of cities and the peopling of provinces; the building of great fleets of boats upon the lakes; the vast mining schemes in remote and inaccessible regions of the country; lumbering enterprises which (even though not always honestly) dealt with virgin forests by the hundreds of square miles; "bonanza" wheat farming and the huge systems of grain elevators for the handling of the wheat and the conveyance of it to the market or the mill; cattle ranching on a stupendous scale (perhaps even the collecting of those cattle in their thousands daily for slaughter in the packing houses); the irrigating of wide tracts of desert;--these things and such as these are the "businesses" out of which the Americans of the last and present generations have largely made their fortunes.

And they are enterprises, most of them, not unworthy to rank with Chartered Companies and the construction of railways from the North to the South of Africa.

Not only this, but something of the same qualities of s.p.a.ciousness, as of trafficking between large horizons, attach to almost all lines of business in the United States,--to many which in England are necessarily humdrum and commonplace. Almost every Englishman has been surprised on making the acquaintance of an accidental American (no "magnate" or "captain of industry" but an ordinary business man) to learn that though he is no more than the manufacturer of some matter-of-fact article, his operations are on a confusing scale and that, with branch offices in three or four towns and agents in a dozen more, his daily dealings are transacted over an area reaching three thousand miles from his home office, in which the interposition of prairies, mountain ranges, and chains of lakes are but incidents. Business in the United States has almost necessarily something of the romance of remote and adventurous enterprises.