The Twentieth Century American Part 17

It has been said (and the point is worth insisting on) that the Englishman cannot pretend that he goes into business with any other object than to make money. His motives are on the face of them mercenary if not sordid. The American is impelled primarily by quite other ambitions. Similarly, when the Englishman thinks of business, the image which he conjures up in his mind is of a dull commonplace like, on lines so long established and well-defined that they can embrace little of novelty or of enterprise; a sedentary life of narrow outlook from the unexhilarating atmosphere of a London office or shop. To the American, except in small or retail trade in the large cities, the conditions of business are widely different. All around him, lies, both actually and figuratively, new ground, wilderness almost, inviting him to turn Argonaut. The mere vastness and newness of the country make it full of allurement to adventure, the rewards of which are larger and more immediate than can be hoped for in older and more straitened communities.

It has been said that the American people was, by its long period of isolation and self-communion, made to become, in its outlook on the policies of the world, a provincial people; but that the very provincialism had something of dignity in it from the mere fact that it was continent-wide. So it is with American business. The exigencies of their circ.u.mstances have made the American people a commercial people; but whereas in England a commercial life may not offer scope for any intellectual activity and may even have a necessary tendency to stunt the mentality of any one engaged in it, business in the United States offers exercise to a much larger gamut of abilities and, by its mere range and variety, instead of dwarfing has a tendency to keep those abilities trained and alert. A business in England has not approximately the same large theatre of operation or the same variety of incident as a business of the same turn over in America. It is almost the difference between the man who furnishes his larder by going out to his farmyard and wringing the necks of tame ducks therein, and him who must s.n.a.t.c.h the same supply with his gun from the wild flocks in the wilderness.

But, indeed, no argument should be needed on the subject; for one solid fact with which almost every Englishman is familiar is that in any American (let us use the word) shopkeeper whom he may meet travelling in Europe there is a certain mental alertness, freshness, and vigour, however objectionably they may at times display themselves--which are at least not characteristic of the English shopkeeping cla.s.s.

Just, then, as we have seen that, if we knew nothing about the peoples of the two countries, beyond the broad outlines of their respective social structures, we should be compelled, other things being equal, to look for a higher code of commercial morality in America than in England, so, when we see one further fact, namely that of the difference in the conditions under which business is conducted, we must naturally, other things being equal, look for a livelier intellect and a higher grade of mentality in the American than in the English business man.

Unfortunately other things never are equal. First, there is the taint of the political corruption in America which must, as has been said, in some measure contaminate the community. Then, England is an old country, with all the machinery of society running in long-accustomed grooves; above all it is a wealthy country and the first among creditor nations, to whose interest it has been, and is, to see that every bond and every engagement be literally and exactly carried out. The United States in the nineteenth century was young and undisciplined, with all the ardour of youth going out to conquer the world, seeing all things in rose-colour, but, for the present,--poor. It was, like any other youth confident of the golden future, lavish alike in its borrowings and its spendings, over-careless of forms and formalities. Happily the confidence in the future has been justified and ten times justified, and it is rich--richer than it yet knows--with resources larger even than it has learned properly to appraise or control. Whatever obligations it incurred in the headlong past are trifles to it now,--a few hundreds of college debts to a man who has come into millions. And with its position now a.s.sured it has grown jealous of its credit, national and individual.

It was inevitable that the heedless days should beget indiscretions, the memories of which smart to-day. It was inevitable that amid so much recklessness and easy faith there should be some wrong-doing. Above all, was it inevitable that in the realisation of its dreams, when wealth and power grew and money came pouring into it, there should be bred in the people an extraordinary and unwholesome love of speculation which in turn opened their opportunities to the gambler and the confidence-man of all kinds and sizes. They flourished in the land,--the man who wrecked railways and issued fict.i.tious millions of "securities," the man who robbed the government of moneys destined for the support of Indians or the establishment of postal routes in the farther West, the man who salted mines, the "land-grabber" and the "timber-shark" who dealt not in acres but in hundreds of square miles, the bogus trust company, and the fraudulent land and investment agent. When even the smallest community begins to "boom," the people of the community lose their heads and the harvest ripens to the sickle of the swindler. And the entire United States--sometimes in one part, sometimes in another, sometimes all together,--with only an occasional and short-lived panic to check the madness, boomed continuously for half a century.

It is still booming, but with wealth, established inst.i.tutions, and invested capital, have come comparative soberness and a sense of responsibility. The spirit which governs American industrial life to-day is quite other than that which ruled it two or three decades ago. The United States has sown its wild oats. It was a generous sowing, certainly, for the land was wide and the soil rich. But that harvest has been all but garnered and the country is now for the most part given over to more legitimate crops.

[Tares still spring up among the wheat. The commercial community is not yet as well ordered as that of England or another older country; and since the foregoing paragraphs were written, the panic which fell upon the United States in the closing months of 1907 has occurred. The country had enjoyed a decade of extraordinary financial prosperity, in the course of which, in the spirit of speculation which has already been mentioned, all values had been forced to too high a level, credits had been extended beyond the margin of safety, and the volume of business transactions had swollen to such bulk in proportion to the amount of actual monetary wealth in existence that any shock to public confidence, any nervousness resulting in a contraction of the circulating medium, could not fail to produce catastrophe. The shock came; as sooner or later it had to come. In the stern period of struggle and retrenchment which followed, all the weak spots in the financial and industrial fabric of the country have been laid bare and, while depression and distress have spread over the whole United States, until all parts are equally involved, not only have the exposures of anything approaching dishonest or illegitimate methods been few, but the way in which the business communities at large have stood the strain has shown that there is nothing approaching unsoundness in the general business conditions.

With the system of credit shattered and with hardly circulating medium enough to conduct the necessary petty transactions of everyday life, the country is already recovering confidence and feeling its way back to normal conditions. The results have not been approximately as bad as those which followed the panic of 1893; and the difference is an index to the immensely greater stability of the country's industries.

Meanwhile there was at first (and still exists) a feeling of intense indignation in all parts of the country that so much suffering should have been thrown upon the whole people by the misbehaviour of a small circle of men in New York. The experience, however painful, will in the long run be salutary. It will be salutary in the first place for the obvious reason that business will have to start again conservatively and with inflated values reduced to something below normal levels. But it will be even more salutary for the less obvious reason that it has intensified the already acute disgust of the business men of the country as a whole with what are known as "Wall Street methods." Englishmen generally have an idea that Wall Street methods are the methods of all the United States; and, while they have had impressed upon them every detail of those financial irregularities in the small New York clique which precipitated the catastrophe, they have heard and know nothing of the coolness and cheery resolution with which the crisis has been faced by the commercial cla.s.ses as a whole.]

England has not yet forgotten the disclosures in the matter of the Chicago packing houses. That the light which was then turned on that industry revealed conditions that were in some details inconceivably shocking, is hardly to be doubted: and I trust that those are mistaken who say that if similar investigation had been made into the methods of certain English establishments, before warning was given, the state of affairs would have been found not much different. What is certain, however, is that the English public received an exaggerated idea of the extent of the abuses. In part, this was a necessary result of the exigencies of journalism. A large majority of the newspapers even of London--certainly those which reach a large majority of the readers--prefer sensationalism. Even those which are anxious in such cases to be fair and temperate are sadly hampered both by the limitations of s.p.a.ce in their own columns and by the costliness of telegraphic correspondence. It is inevitable that the most conservative and judicial of correspondents should transmit to his papers whatever are the most striking items--revelations--accusations in an indictment such as was then framed against the packers. The more d.a.m.ning details are the best news. On the other hand he cannot, save to a ridiculously disproportionate extent, transmit the extenuating circ.u.mstances, the individual denials, the local atmosphere. Telegraph tolls are heavy and s.p.a.ce is straitened while atmosphere and extenuating circ.u.mstances are not news at all. An Englishman is generally astonished when he reads the accounts of some conspicuous divorce case or great financial scandal in England as they appear in the American (or for that matter the French or German) papers, with the editorial comments thereupon. In the picture of any event happening at a great distance the readers of even the best-intentioned journals necessarily have presented to their view only the highest lights and the blackest shadows. In this instance a certain section of the American press--what is specifically known as the "yellow" press--had strong motives, of a political kind, for making the case against the packers as bad as possible. It is unfortunate that many of the London newspapers look much too largely to that particular cla.s.s of American paper for their American news and their views on current American events.

If we a.s.sume that any reasonable proportion of the accusations made against the packing houses were true of some one or other establishment, it still remains that a considerable proportion of the American business community is otherwise engaged than in the canning of meats. There is a story well known in America of a countryman who entered a train with a packet of eggs, none too fresh, in his coat-tail pocket. He sat down upon them; but deemed it best to continue sitting rather than give the contents a chance to run down his person. Meanwhile the smell permeated through the car and at last the pa.s.senger sitting immediately behind the countryman saw whence the unpleasantness arose. Whereupon he fell to abusing the other.

"Thunder!" exclaimed the countryman. "What have you got to complain of?

You've only got the smell. _I'm sitting in it!_"

This is much how Americans feel in regard to foreign criticisms of the packing house scandals. Whatever wrong-doing there may have been in individual establishments in this one industry in Chicago, is no more to be taken as typical of the commercial ethics of the American people than the discovery of a fraudulent trader or group of traders in one particular line in Manchester or Glasgow would imply that the British trading public was corrupt. The mere ruthlessness with which, in this case, the wrong-doers were exposed ought in itself to be a sufficient evidence to outsiders that the American public is no more willingly tolerant of dishonesty than any other people. Judged, indeed, by that criterion, surely no other country can detest wrong-doing so whole-heartedly.

And I wish here to protest against the habit which the worst section of the English newspapers has adopted during the last year or so of holding "American methods" in business up to contempt. It is true that it is not done with any idea of directing hostility against the United States; and those who use the catchword so freely would undoubtedly much prefer to speak of "German methods" or even "French" or "Russian methods," if they could. All that is meant is that the methods are un-English and alien; but whether the intention is to lessen the public good-will towards the United States or not, that must inevitably be the effect. Even if it were not, the American public is abundantly justified in resenting it.

The idea that America is trust-ridden to the extent popularly supposed in England has been carefully fostered by those extreme journals in America already referred to (it is impossible not to speak of them as the Yellow Press) for personal and political reasons--reasons which Englishmen would comprehend if they understood better the present political situation in the United States. The idea has been encouraged by divers English "impressionist" authors and writers on the English press who, with a superficial knowledge of American affairs, have caught the jargon of the same school of American journalist-politicians. It has been further confirmed by a misunderstanding of the att.i.tude and policy of President Roosevelt himself, which has already been sufficiently dealt with.

England is, in the American sense, much more "trust-ridden" than the United States. It is not merely that (as any reference to statistics will show) wealth is less concentrated in America than in England--that nothing like the same proportion of the capital of the country is lodged in a few hands--for that, inasmuch as the majority of large fortunes in Great Britain are not commercial in their origin, might mean little; but in business the opportunity for the small trader and the man without backing to win to independence is a hundred times greater in America, while the control exercised by "rings" and "cliques" over certain large industries in England and over the access to certain large markets is, I think, much more complete than has been attained, except most temporarily, by any trust or ring in the United States, except, as in the case of oil, where artificial monopoly has been a.s.sisted by natural conditions.

The tendency in the United States even in the last twenty years has not been in the direction of a concentration of wealth, but towards its diffusion in a degree unparalleled in any country in the world. The point in which the United States is economically almost immeasurably superior to England is not in the number of her big fortunes but in the enormously greater well-to-do-ness of the middle cla.s.ses--the vastly larger number of persons of moderate affluence, who are in the enjoyment of incomes which in England would cla.s.s them among the reasonably rich.

Consolidation and amalgamation are the necessary and unavoidable tendencies of modern business. As surely as the primitive partnership succeeded individual effort and as, later, corporations were created to enlarge the sphere of partnerships, so is it certain that the industrial units which will fight for control of trade in the much larger markets of the modern world will represent vastly larger aggregations of capital than (except in extraordinary and generally state-aided inst.i.tutions) were dreamed of fifty years ago. That must be accepted as a certainty.

It does not by any means necessarily follow that this process entails a concentration of wealth in fewer hands; on the contrary the larger a corporation is, the wider proportionally, as a general rule, is the circle of the shareholders in whom the property is vested. But presuming the commercial growth of the United States to continue for half a century yet on the lines on which it has developed in the last two decades, the country will then, not so much by any concentration of wealth, but by the mere filling up of the commercial field (so that by increase in the intensity of compet.i.tion the opportunity for the small or new trader to force his way to the surface will be more curtailed, and the gulf between owner or employer and non-owner or employed will become greater and more permanent)--if, I say, that growth should continue for another fifty years then will the conditions in America approximate to those in England. This it is against which the ma.s.ses in America are more or less blindly and unconsciously fighting to-day. The comparison with European conditions is generally not formulated in the individual mind; but an approach to those conditions is what the ma.s.ses of America see--or think they see--in the tendency towards greater aggregations of corporate power. It is not the process of aggregation, but the protest against it, which is peculiar to the United States: not the trust-power but the hatred of it.

This being so, for Englishmen or other Europeans to speak of all manifestations of the process itself as "American" is not a little absurd. Besides which, to so speak of it in the tone which is generally adopted is extremely impolite to a kindred people whose good-will Englishmen ought to, and do, desire to keep.

The thing is best ill.u.s.trated by taking a single example. The term "Trust" is, of course, very vaguely used, being generally taken, quite apart from its proper significance, to mean any form of combination, corporate aggregation, or working agreement which tends to extend control of a company or individual, or group of companies or individuals, over a larger proportion of a particular trade or industry.

In the United States, with the possible exception of the Standard Oil Company (which is not properly a trust), the form of corporate power against which there has been the most bitterness is that of the railways, and the specific form of railway organisation most fiercely attacked has been the Pool or Joint Purse--which is, in all essentials, a true trust. In 1887 the formation of a Pool, or Joint Purse Agreement, was made illegal in the United States; but Englishmen can have no conception of the popular hatred of the word "Pools" which exists in America or of the obloquy which has been heaped upon railway companies for entering into them. Few Englishmen on the other hand have any clear idea of what a Joint Purse Agreement is; and they jog along contentedly ignorant that this iniquitous engine for their oppression is in daily use by the British railway companies.

My personal belief is that the prohibition of pools in America was a mistake: that it would have been better for the country from the first to have authorised, even encouraged, their formation, as in England, under efficient governmental supervision. But the point is that the majority of the American people thought otherwise and no other manifestation of the trust-tendency has been more virulently attacked than the--to English ideas--harmless inst.i.tution of a joint purse. And whether the American people ultimately acted wisely or unwisely, they were justified in regarding any form of a.s.sociation or agreement between railways with more apprehension than would be reasonable in England. It is not possible here to explain why this is so, except to say broadly that the longer distances in America and the lack of other forms of transportation render an American community, especially in the West, more dependent upon the railway than is the case in England. The conditions give the railway company a larger control over, or influence in, the well-being of the people.

An excellent ill.u.s.tration of the difference in the point of view of the two peoples has been furnished since the above was written by the announcements, within a few weeks of each other in December 1907, of the formation of two "working agreements" between British railway companies,--that namely between the Great Northern and Great Central railways and that between the North British and Caledonian. In the former case the Boards of Directors of the two companies merely const.i.tuted themselves a Joint Committee to operate the two railways conjointly. In the latter, not many details of the agreement were made public, except that it was intended to control compet.i.tion in all cla.s.ses of traffic and, as the first fruits thereof, there was an immediate and not unimportant increase in certain cla.s.ses of pa.s.senger rates. Neither agreement has, I think, yet received the sanction of the proper authorities, but the public generally received the announcement of both with approval amounting almost to enthusiasm. Of these agreements the former, certainly, and presumably the latter, would be flagrantly illegal in the United States. If, moreover, an attempt were made in America to arrive at the same ends in some roundabout way which would avoid technical illegality, the outburst of popular indignation would make it impossible. Personally I sympathise with the English view and believe both agreements to be not only just and proper but in the public interest; but it is certain that they would have created such an uproar in the United States that English newspapers would inevitably have reflected the disturbance, and English readers would have been convinced that once more the Directorates of American railways were engaged in a nefarious attempt to use the power of capital for the plundering and oppression of the public. In the still more recent debate (February 1908) in the House of Commons, the views expressed by both Mr.

Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law in favour of the lessening of compet.i.tion between railway companies would have exposed them to the hysterical abuse of a large part of the American press. Both those gentlemen would have been openly accused of being the tools of (if not actually subsidised by) the corporations, and (but for Mr. Bonar Law's company) Mr. Lloyd George's att.i.tude would, I think, be sufficient to ruin an Administration. These statements contain no reflection on the American point of view. The conditions are such that that point of view may, in America, be the right one. But the absurdity is that Englishmen hear these things, or read of them as being said in the United States, and thereupon a.s.sume that terrible offences are being perpetrated; whereas nothing is being done which in England would not receive the approval of the majority of sensible men and be temperately applauded by the spokesmen of both the great parties in Parliament. It is not, I say again, the Trust-power, but the hatred of it, which is peculiar to America.

The same is true of the field as a whole. Things harmless in England might be very dangerous in America. We have so far considered the trust power only as a commercial and industrial factor--in its tendency, by crystallisation or consolidation in the higher strata, to depress the economic status of the industrial ma.s.ses and to make the emergence of the individual trader into independence more difficult. In this aspect capital is immensely more dominant in England than in America. But there is a political side to the problem.

In the United States, owing to the absence of a throne and an established aristocracy, there is, as it were, no counterpoise to the power of wealth. This is, in practice, the chief virtue of the throne in the British const.i.tution, that, in its capacity as the Fountain of Honour, it prevents wealth from becoming the dominant power in the country and thereby (which Americans are slow to understand) is the most democratic of forces, protecting the proletariat in some measure against the possibility of unhindered oppression by an omnipotent capitalism.

The English ma.s.ses are already by the mere impenetrability of the commercial structure above them much worse off than the corresponding ma.s.ses in the United States. What their condition might be if for a generation the social restraint put upon wealth by the power of the throne and the established aristocracy were to be relaxed, it is not pleasant to consider. Nor need it be considered.[335:1]

It is, I think, evident that in America the danger to the industrial independence of the individual which might arise from the aggregation of wealth in a few hands is much greater than in England. The power would be capable of greater abuse; the evils which would flow from such abuse would be greater. It is not wealth, but the abuse of it that he is attacking, says President Roosevelt--not the wealthy cla.s.s, but the "wealthy criminal cla.s.s." The distinction has not been digested by those in England who rail against American methods or who write of American politics. It is necessary--or so it seems to a large number of the American people--that extraordinary checks should be put upon the possibility of the abuse of wealth in the United States, such as do not exist or are not needed (or at least we have heard no energetic demand for them) in England. As a political fact there is need of especial vigilance in the United States lest corporate power be abused. As a commercial fact it is merely preposterous to rail at the modern tendency to consolidation and amalgamation as specifically "American."

It is probably safe to say that if the United States had such a social counterweight as is furnished in England by the throne and the recognised aristocracy, the growth of what is called "trust-power" would be viewed to-day with comparative unconcern. At all events England is able to view with something like unconcern the conditions, as they exist in England, worse than, as has been said, the trust power is humanly capable of imposing on the American people in another half-century of unhindered growth. Which, American readers will please understand, is not a suggestion that the United States would be benefited, even commercially, by the inst.i.tution of a monarchy.

Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Englishmen long ago acquired the idea that American business methods in what may be called large affairs were too often unscrupulous; and of such methods, there were certainly examples. I have explained why the temptations to, and the opportunities for, dishonesty were very great in the earlier days and it would be impossible to find language too severe to characterise many of the things which were done--not once, but again and again--in the manipulation of railways, the stealing of public lands, and the plundering of the public treasury. The dog deserved as bad a name as he received. But that dog died. The Americans themselves stoned him to death--with precisely the same ferocity as they have recently exhibited when they discovered, as they feared, some of his litter in the Chicago packing houses--or a year before in the offices of certain insurance companies. The present generation of Americans may not be any better men than their fathers (let us hope that they are, if only for the reputation of the vast immigration of Englishmen and Scotchmen which has poured into the country) but at least they are much less tempted. They live under a new social code. They have nothing like the same opportunity for successful dishonesty and immeasurably greater chance of punishment, whether visited on them by the law or by the opinion of their fellows, if unsuccessful or found out. It is not fair that the new dog should be d.a.m.ned to drag around the old dog's name.

There is an excellent a.n.a.logy in which the relations of the two peoples are reversed.

Americans are largely of the opinion that the British aristocracy is a disreputable cla.s.s. They gave that dog its name too; and there have been individual scandals enough in the past to justify it. It is useless for an Englishman living in America to endeavour to modify this opinion in even a small circle, for it is only a question of time--probably of a very short time--before some peer turns up in the divorce court and the Englishmen's friends will send him newspaper clippings containing the Court Report and will hail him on street corners and at the club with: "How about your British aristocracy now?"

Americans cannot see the British peerage as a whole; they only hear of those who thrust themselves into unsavoury notoriety. So Englishmen get no view of the American business community in its entirety, but only read with relish the occasional scandal. Of the two, the American has the better, or at least more frequent, justification for his error than has the Englishman; but it is a pity that the two cannot somehow agree to an exchange. Perhaps a treaty might be entered into (if it were not for the United States Senate) which, when ratified, should be published in all newspapers and posted in all public places in both countries, setting forth that:

"IN CONSIDERATION of the Party of the Second Part hereafter cherishing a belief in the marital fidelity and general moral purity of all members of the British peerage, their wives, heirs, daughters, and near relations, and further agreeing that when, by any unfortunate mishap, any individual member of the said Peerage or his wife, daughter, or other relation shall have been discovered and publicly shown to have offended against the marriage laws or otherwise violated the canons of common decency, to understand and take it for granted that such mishap, offence, or violation is a quite exceptional occurrence owing to the unexplainable depravity of the individual and that it in no way reflects upon the other members of the said Peerage, whether in the ma.s.s or individually, or their wives, daughters, or near relations: THEREFORE the Party of the First Part hereby agrees to decline to give any credence whatsoever to any story, remark, or reflection to the discredit of the general honesty of the American commercial cla.s.ses or public men, but agrees that he will hereafter a.s.sume them to be trustworthy and truthful whether individually or in the ma.s.s, except in such cases as shall have been publicly proven to the contrary, and that he will always understand and declare that such isolated cases are purely sporadic and not in any way to be taken as evidences either of an epidemic or of a general low state of public morality, but that on the contrary the said American commercial cla.s.ses do, whether in the ma.s.s or individually, hate and despise an occasional scoundrel among them as heartily as would the Party of the First Part hate and despise such a scoundrel if found among his own people--as, he confesses, does occasionally occur."

Nonsense? Of course it is nonsense. But the desirable thing is that Englishmen should be brought to understand that after all it is but an inconsiderable portion of the American business community that is permanently employed in the manufacture of wooden nutmegs, in selling canned horrors for food, or in watering railway shares, and that Americans should believe that there are quite a large number of men of high birth in England who are only infrequently engaged in either beating their own wives or running away with those of other men.

The brief confessional clause at the conclusion of the above draft I take to be an important portion of the doc.u.ment. It is not necessary that a similar confession should be incorporated in the behalf of the Party of the Second Part, not because there are no family scandals in America, but because, in the absence of a peerage, it is not easy to tell when a divorce or other scandal occurs among the aristocracy.

"Scandal in High Life" is such a tempting heading to a column that the American newspapers are generous in their interpretation of the term and many a man and woman, on getting into trouble, must have been surprised to learn for the first time that their ambitions had been realised, unknown to themselves, and that they did indeed belong to that cla.s.s which they had for so long yearned to enter.

This fact also is worth considering, namely, that whereas in England it is not impossible that there may be more scandals of a financial sort, both in official circles and outside, than the public ever hears of through the press; it is reasonably certain that in America the press publishes full details of a good many more scandals than ever occur.

This peculiarity of the American press (for it is still peculiar to America, in degree at least, if not in kind) does not arise from any set purpose of blackening the reputation of the country in the eyes of the outside world, but is entirely the result of "enterprise," of individual ambition, and the extremity of partisan enthusiasm. Other nations may be quite certain that they hear all the worst that is to be told of the people of the United States. Out of the Spanish war arose what came to be known as the "embalmed beef" scandal. American soldiers in Cuba were furnished with a quant.i.ty of rations which, by the time they reached the front and an effort was made to serve them out, were entirely unfit for human consumption. Undoubtedly much suffering was thereby caused to the men and probably some disease. But, equally undoubtedly, the catastrophe arose from an error in judgment and not from dishonesty of contractors or of any government official. But, as the incident was handled by a section of the American press, it might well, had the two great parties at the time been more evenly balanced in public favour, have resulted in the ruin of the reputation of an administration and the overthrow of the Republican party at the next election.

If the Re-mount scandals and the Army Stores scandals which arose out of England's South African war had occurred in America, I doubt if any party could have stood against the storm that would have been provoked, and, deriving their ideas of the affairs from the cabled reports, Englishmen of all cla.s.ses would still be shaking their heads over the inconceivable dishonesty in the American public service and the deplorable standard of honour in the American army. It may be necessary and wholesome for a people that occasionally certain kinds of dirty linen should be washed in public; but the speciality of the American "yellow press"[342:1] is the skill which it shows in soiling clean linen in private in order to bring it out into the streets to wash.

POSTSCRIPT--Reference has been made in the foregoing chapter to the British peerage and I now propose to have the temerity to enter a serious protest against the tone in which even the thoughtful American commonly refers to the House of Lords. I cherish no such hopeless ambition as that of inducing the American newspaper paragrapher to surrender his traditional right to make fun of a British peer on any and every occasion. I am speaking now to the more serious teachers of the American people; for it is a deplorable fact that even the best of those teachers when speaking of the House of Lords use language which is generally flippant, nearly always contemptuous, and not uncommonly uninformed.

My own belief (and I think it is that of the majority of thinking Englishmen) is that if the discussion in the House of Lords on any large question be laid side by side with the debate on the same question in the House of Commons and the two be read concurrently, it will almost invariably be seen that the speeches in the Upper House show a marked superiority in breadth of view, expression and grasp of the larger aspects and the underlying principles of the subject. I believe that such a debate in the House of Lords is characterised by more ability and thoroughness than the debate on a similar question in either the Senate or the House of Representatives. It does not appear from the respective membership of the chambers how it could well be otherwise.

Let us from memory give a list of the more conspicuous members of the present House of Peers whose names are likely to be known to American readers, to wit: the Dukes of Devonshire and Norfolk; the Marquises of Ripon and Landsdowne; Earls Roberts, Rosebery, Elgin, Northbrook, Crewe, Carrington, Cromer, Kimberley, Minto, Halsbury, Spencer; Viscounts, Wolseley, Goschen, Esher, Kitchener of Khartoum, St. Aldwyn (Hicks-Beach), Milner, Cross; the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London; Lords Lister, Alverstone, Curzon of Kedleston, Mount Stephen, Strathcona and Mount Royal, Avebury, Loreburn, and Rayleigh.

Let me emphasise the fact that this is not intended to be a list of the ablest members of the House, but only a list of able members something of whose reputation and achievements is likely to be known to the intelligent American reader. If the list were being compiled for English readers, it would have to be twice as long; but, as it stands, I submit that it is a list which cannot approximately be paralleled from among the members of the House of Commons or from among the members of the Senate and House of Representatives combined. I take it to be incontrovertible that a list representing such eminence and so great accomplishment in so many fields (theology, statesmanship, war, literature, government, science, and affairs) could not be produced from the legislative chambers of any single country in the world.

The mistake which Americans make is that they confuse the hereditary principle with the House of Lords. The former is, of course, spurned by every good American and no one denies his right to express his disapproval thereof in such terms as he sees fit. But few Americans appear to make sufficient allowance for the fact that whatever the House of Lords suffers at any given time by the necessary inclusion among its members (as a result of its hereditary const.i.tution) of a proportion of men who are quite unfit to be members of any legislative body (and these are the members of the British peerage with whom America is most familiar) is much more than counterbalanced by the ability to introduce into the membership a continuous current of the most distinguished and capable men in every field of activity, whose services could not otherwise (and cannot in the United States) be similarly commanded by the State.

We have seen how in the United States a man can only win his way to the House of Representatives, and hardly more easily to the Senate, without earning the favour of the local politicians and "bosses" of his const.i.tuency, and how, when he is elected, his tenure of office is likely to be short and must be always precarious. It is probable that in the United States not one of the distinguished men whose names are given in the above list would (with the possible exception of two or three who have devoted their lives to politics) be included in either chamber.

They would, so far as public service is concerned (unless they were given cabinet positions or held seats upon the bench), be lost to the State.

It is, of course, impossible that Americans should keep in touch with the proceedings of the House of Lords; nor is there any reason why they should. The number of Americans, resident at home, who in the course of their lives have read _in extenso_ any single debate in that House must be extremely small; and first-hand knowledge of the House Americans can hardly have. Then, of the English publicists or statesmen who visit the United States it is perhaps inevitable that those whose conversation on political topics Americans (especially American economic thinkers and sociologists) should find most congenial are those of an advanced Liberal or Radical--even semi-Republican--complexion. I have chanced to have the opportunity of seeing how much certain American economists of the rising school (which has done such admirable work as a whole) have been influenced by the views of particular Englishmen of this cla.s.s. I should like to mention names, but not a few readers will be able to supply them for themselves. It has not appeared to occur to the American disciples of these men that the views which they impart on English political subjects are purely partisan, and generally very extreme, views. Their opinions of the House of Lords no more represent the judgment of England on the subject than the opinions of an extreme Free Trade Democrat represent the views of America on the subject of Protection.