The Twentieth Century American Part 22

Many times in the United States in the old days have I done exactly what that American then wished to do in London. Finding myself compelled to spend a night at some crude and unfamiliar Western town, I have made enquiries at the hotel as to the shooting--duck or prairie chicken--in the neighbourhood. Hiring a gun of the local gunsmith and buying a hundred cartridges, one then secured a trap with a driver, who probably brought his own gun and shot also (probably better than oneself), but who certainly knew the ground. The best ground might be three or five or ten miles out--open prairie where chicken were plentiful, or a string of prairie lakes or "sloughs" (p.r.o.nounced "sloo") with duck-pa.s.ses between.

That evening one came home, hungry and happy as a hunter ought to be, with perhaps half a dozen brace of spike-tailed grouse (the common "chicken" of the Northwestern States) or ten or a dozen duck--mallard, widgeon, pintail, two kinds of teal, with, it might be, a couple of red-heads or canvas-backs,--or, not improbably, a magnificent Canada goose as the spoils.

With the settlement of the country, the multiplication of shooters, and the increase in the number of "gun-clubs," which have now included most of the easily accessible duck-grounds in the country in their private preserves, the possibilities of those delightful days are growing fewer, but even now there are many parts of the West where the stranger can still do as I have done many times.

Though the people had so few outdoor games, the great majority of Americans, except the less well-to-do of the city-dwellers of the Eastern States, have been accustomed to handle gun and rod from their childhood. The gun may at first have been a rusty old muzzle-loader, and the rod a "pole" cut from the bank of the stream with a live gra.s.shopper for bait; and there are few better weapons to teach a boy to be a keen sportsman. The birds that he shot were game--duck or geese, turkeys, quail, grouse, or snipe--and the fish that he caught were mostly game fish--trout and ba.s.s. It is true that the American generally shoots foxes; so does the Englishman when he goes to the Colonies where there are no hounds and too many foxes, with game birds which he wishes kept for his own shooting, and domestic chickens which he destines for his own table. On the other hand the American does not mount a miniature cannon in a punt and shoot waterfowl by wholesale when sitting on the water. It is only the gunner for the market, the man who makes his living by it, who does that, and the laws do their best to stop even him. The American sportsman who cannot get his duck fairly on the wing with a 12- or 16-bore prefers not to get them at all. "But," objects the English wildfowl shooter, "suppose the birds are not get-at-able in any other way?" "So much," the American would retort, "the better for the birds. They have earned their lives; get them like a sportsman or let them go."

The time may not be far away--and many Englishmen will be glad when it comes--when to kill waterfowl at rest with a duck gun will no longer be considered a "sport" that a gentleman can engage in in England. Perhaps fox-hunting will become so popular in the United States that foxes will be generally preserved. The sportsmen of each country will then think better of those of the other. Meanwhile it would be pleasanter if each would believe that such little seemingly unsportsmanlike peculiarities that the other may have developed are only the accidents of his environment, and that under the same circ.u.mstances there is not a pin to choose between their sportsmanship.

Reference has more than once been made to the quality which looks to English eyes so much like semi-professionalism in American sport. It is a delicate subject, in handling which susceptibilities on one side or the other may easily be hurt.

The intense earnestness and concentration of the American on his one sport--for most Americans are specialists in one only--does not commend itself to English amateurs. The exclusiveness, which seems to be suspicious of foul play, and the stringent training system of certain American crews at Henley have been out of harmony with all the traditions of the great Regatta and have caused much ill feeling, some of which has occasionally come to the surface. Some of the proceedings of American polo teams have not coincided with what is ordinarily considered, in England, the behaviour of gentlemen in matters of amateur sport. On the other hand, Americans universally believe that Lord Dunraven acted in a most unsportsmanlike manner in the unfortunate cup scandal; and in one case they are--or were at the time--convinced that one of their crews was unfairly treated at Henley. Honours therefore on the surface are fairly easy; and, while every Englishman knows that both the American charges quoted are absurd, every American is no less of the opinion that the English grounds of complaint are altogether unreasonable.

We must remember that after all a good many of the best English golfers and lawn-tennis players do nothing else in life but golf or play lawn-tennis. And this tendency to specialise is undoubtedly increasing.

Meanwhile it will never be rooted out of the American character and in departments of sport where it, and it alone, will bring pre-eminence, Englishmen will either have to do as Americans do or, sooner or later, consent to be defeated. There is nothing in the practice at which the Englishman can fairly cavil. Americans have still much the fewer sports; and it is the national habit to take up one and concentrate on it with all one's might.[420:1]

A more difficult aspect of the situation has to do with the question of the definition of "gentleman-amateur"; the fact being, of course, that the same definition has not the same significance in the two countries.

The radical difficulty lies in the fact that the word "gentleman" in its English sense of a man of gentle birth has no application to America.

Let this not be understood as a statement that there are any fewer gentlemen in America or that the word is not used. But its usage is not re-inforced, its limits are not defined, as in England, by any line of cleavage in the social system. A large number of the gentlemen of America are farmers' sons; more than half are the sons of men who commenced life in very humble positions, and nearly all are the sons of men who are engaged in trade or in business, the majority of them being destined to go into trade or business (and to begin at the beginning) themselves. In England, of course, the process of the obliteration of the old line is going on with great rapidity. In America, on the other hand, there is a tendency towards the drawing of a somewhat corresponding line. But the fact remains that at present there exists this fundamental distinction and the consequence is that Englishmen continue to find among American "amateurs" and in teams of American "gentlemen," individuals who would not be accepted into the same categories in England.

But what Englishmen should endeavour to understand is that the man who on the surface seems to belong to a cla.s.s which in England would be objectionable in the company of gentlemen probably has none of those characteristics which would make him objectionable were he English. He has far more of the characteristics of a gentleman than of the other qualities. The qualities which go to make a "gentleman," even in the English sense, are many and complex; but the a.s.sumption is that they are all present in the man who bears the public school and university stamp.

The Englishman is accustomed to accept the presence or absence of one or a few of those qualities in an individual as evidence of the presence or absence of them all. In judging other Englishmen, the rule works satisfactorily. But in America, with its different social system, the qualities are not tied up in the same bundles, so that the same inference fails. The same, or a similar, peculiarity of voice or speech or manner or dress or birth does not denote--much less does it connote--the same or similar things in representatives of the two peoples. Particular Englishmen have learned this often enough in individual cases. How often has it not happened that an Englishman, meeting an American first as a stranger, not even being informed that he is an American, has, judging from some one external characteristic, turned from him as being an Undesirable, only to be introduced to him later, or meet him under other conditions, and find in him one of the best fellows that he ever met? The thing is happening every day. Very often, with a little more knowledge or a little clearer understanding, Englishmen would know that their judgment of some American amateur athlete is shockingly unjust. To bar him out would be incomparably more unjust to him than his inclusion is unjust to any antagonist.

This of course does not touch the fact--which is a fact--that in America what answers to the gentleman-amateur in England is drawn from a much larger proportion of the people. This does not however mean, when rightly viewed, what Englishmen generally think it means, that Americans go down into other--and presumably not legitimate--cla.s.ses for their recruits. It only means that a very much larger proportion of the people belong to one cla.s.s. There is no point at which an arbitrary line can be drawn. This is in truth only another way of saying what has been said already more than once, that the American people is really more h.o.m.ogeneous than the English, or rather is h.o.m.ogeneous over a larger part of its area, so that the type-American represents a greater proportion of the people of the United States than the type-Briton represents of the people of the British Isles.

This is obviously in the realm of sport so much to America's advantage.

It is not a condition against which the Englishman has any right to protest, any more than he has to move amendments to the Const.i.tution of the United States. When better comprehended, Englishmen will accept it without either resentment or regret. The United States has a larger population than Great Britain: so much the better for the United States. Also a larger proportion of that population must be admitted into the category of gentleman-amateur in sport; so much the more the better for them.

But, curiously enough, this condition has its inherent drawback, which not impossibly more than compensates for its advantages. The fact that young Americans grow up so much of a cla.s.s involves the essential fact that the enormous majority of them are educated at the Public Schools, that is at the Board Schools or Government Schools or whatever they would be called if their precise counterpart existed in England. The United States has not (the fact has been touched on before) any group of inst.i.tutions comparable to the great schools of England. A few excellent schools there are which bear some resemblance to the English models, but they are not numerous enough to go any way towards leavening the nation.

It is to the Public Schools that, in the ma.s.s, the English gentleman-amateur owes his training, not only in sports but in many other things besides: especially in those things which stamp on him the mark by which he is recognised as belonging to his right cla.s.s through life. The American, as has been said, is not so stamped; but in missing that stamp--or in failing to receive it--he necessarily missed also all that discipline and training in games which the Public School gave to the Englishman. The very same cause as gives America an advantage in the numbers from which she can draw her amateur athletes, also forbids that these recruits should have had the same advantages of early training as fall to the Englishman.

The thing is about as broad as it is long. It is not difficult to imagine that the great schools might never have come into existence in England, so that a larger proportion of the population than is now the case would be educated at some intermediate inst.i.tutions, at the Grammar Schools let us say, when the English gentleman-amateur athletes--the polo, golf, and tennis teams and the crews that row at Henley--would be drawn from a larger circle of the population, and the individuals would not bear as close a superficial resemblance, one to the other, as they do to-day. They would in fact be more like the members of American athletic teams as Englishmen know them. The question is whether England would gain or lose in athletic efficiency. When Englishmen find something to cavil at in an individual American amateur or in an American amateur team or crew, would it not be better to stop and consider whether the disadvantages which compel America to be represented by such an individual or team or crew, do not outweigh the advantages which enable her to use him or them? If the United States were to develop the same educational machinery as exists in England, which would stamp practically all their gentlemen-amateurs with the same hall-mark, as they are so stamped in England, and would at the same time give them the English public-school boy's training in games, would not England, as a mere matter of athletic rivalry, be worse off instead of better?

For the purpose of pointing the moral of the essential likeness of the American and English characters, as contrasted with those of other peoples, reference has already been made to Professor Munsterberg and his book. It is an excellent book; but what English writer would think it necessary to inform English readers that "the American student recreates himself on the athletic field rather than in the ale-house"?

We know something of the life of a German student; but it is only when a German himself says a thing like that that he illuminates in a flash the abyss which yawns between the moral qualities of the youth of his country and the young American or young Englishman.

Again the same author speaks on the subject of the Anglo-Saxon love of fair play (the sporting instinct, I have called it) as follows:

"The demand for 'fair play' dominates the whole American people, and shapes public opinion in all matters whether large or small. And with this finally goes the belief in the self-respect and integrity of one's neighbour. The American cannot understand how Europeans" (Continental Europeans, if you please, Mr. Munsterberg!) "so often reinforce their statements with explicit mention of their honour which is at stake, as if the hearer was likely to feel a doubt of it; and even American children are often apt to wonder at young people abroad who quarrel at play and at once suspect one another of some unfairness. The American system does not wait for years of discretion to come before exerting its influence; it makes itself felt in the nursery, where already the word of one child is never doubted by his playmates."

There is an excellent American slang word, which is "poppyc.o.c.k." The Century Dictionary speaks disrespectfully of it as a "United States vulgarism," but personally I consider it a first-cla.s.s word. The Century Dictionary defines it as meaning, "Trivial talk; nonsense; stuff and rubbish," which is about as near as a dictionary can get to the elusive meaning of any slang word. English readers will understand the exact shade of meaning of the word when I say that the paragraph above quoted is most excellent and precise poppyc.o.c.k. Every American who read that paragraph when the book was published must have chuckled inwardly, just as every Englishman would chuckle. But the point which I wish to emphasise is that it is not at all poppyc.o.c.k from the author's point of view. I doubt not that his countrymen have been most edified by that excellent dictum, and the trouble is that one could never make a typical German understand wherein it is wrong. No, Mr. Munsterberg, it is not that the sentence is untrue--far be it from me to suggest such a thing.

It is merely absurd; and you, sir, will never, never, never comprehend why it is so.

It is in the presence of such a remark, seriously made by so excellently capable a foreigner, that the Englishman and American ought to be able to shake hands and realise how much of a kin they are and how far removed from some other peoples.

I have dwelt on this subject of the games of the two peoples at what may seem to many an unnecessary length, because I do not think its importance can well be exaggerated. It is not only desirable, but it is necessary, for a thorough mutual liking between them that there should be no friction in matters of sport. No incident has, I believe, occurred of late years which did so much harm to the relations between the peoples as did the Dunraven episode in connection with the _America's_ cup races. I should be inclined to say that it did more harm (I am not blaming Lord Dunraven) than the Venezuelan incident.

On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the more recent attempts to recover the cup, and the spirit in which they have been conducted, have not contributed as much as, say, the att.i.tude of England in the Spanish War to the increased liking for Great Britain which has made itself manifest in the United States of recent years. Few Englishmen, probably, understand how much is made of such matters in the American press. The love of sport is in the blood of both peoples and neither can altogether like the other until it believes it to have the same generous sporting instincts and the same clean methods as itself. As a matter of fact, they do--as in so many other traits--stand out conspicuously alike from among all other peoples, but neither will give the other full credit for this, till each learns to see below such slight surface appearances as at present provoke occasional ill-will in one party or the other. Fuller understanding will come with time and with it entire cordiality.

FOOTNOTES:

[420:1] Though immaterial to the argument, it may be as well to state that my personal sympathies are entirely with the English practice. In the matter of college athletics especially the spirit in which certain sports (especially football and, in not much less degree, rowing and baseball) are followed at some of the American universities, is entirely distasteful to me. On the other hand, I know nothing more creditable to the English temperament than the spirit in which the contests in the corresponding sports are conducted between the great English universities. And this feeling is shared, I know, by some (and I believe by most) of those Americans who, as Rhodes scholars or otherwise, have had an opportunity of coming to understand at first hand the difference between the practice in the two countries. But this is an individual prepossession only; against which stands the fact that my experience of Americans who have won notoriety in athletics at one or other of the American universities, is that they are unspoiled by the system through which they have pa.s.sed and possess just as sensitive and generous a sporting instinct as the best men turned out by Oxford or Cambridge.

CHAPTER XVI

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

A New Way of Making Friends--The Desirability of an Alliance-- For the Sake of Both Peoples--And of All the World--The Family Resemblance--Mutual Misunderstandings--American Conception of the British Character--English Misapprehension of Americans-- Foreign Influences in the United States--Why Politicians Hesitate--An Appeal to the People--And to Caesar.

At first sight it may not seem the likeliest way to make two people care for each other to go laboriously about to tell each how the other underestimates his virtues. Don Pedro's wile would appear to be the more direct--to tell Bened.i.c.k how Beatrice doted on him, and Beatrice how Bened.i.c.k was dying for her love. I have always had my doubts, however, about the success of that alliance.

In the case of two peoples so much alike as the English and the American, between whom friendship and alliance would be so entirely in accord with eternal fitness, who are yet held apart by misunderstanding on the part of each of the other's character, there seems no better way than to face the misunderstandings frankly and to endeavour to make each see how unjustly it undervalues the other's good qualities or overestimates its faults. At present neither Americans nor Englishmen understand what good fellows the others are. Least of all do they understand how essentially they are the same kind of good fellows.

In summarising the contents of the foregoing pages, there is no need here to rehea.r.s.e, except in barest outline, the arguments in favour of alliance between the countries. The fact that war between them is an ever-present possibility ought in itself to suffice--war which could hardly fail to be more sanguinary and destructive than any war that the world has known. The danger of such a war is greater, perhaps, than the people of either country recognises, certainly greater than most Englishmen imagine. The people of England do not understand the warlike--though so peace-loving--character of the American nation. It is just as warlike as, though no less peace-loving than, the English, without the restraint of that good-will which the English feel for the United States; without, moreover, the check, to which every European country is always subjected, of the fear of complications with other Powers. The American people, as a whole, it cannot be too earnestly impressed on Englishmen, have no such good-will towards Great Britain as Englishmen feel for them; and not even English reluctance to draw the sword, nor the protests of the better informed and the more well-to-do people in the United States would be able to restrain what Mr. Cleveland calls "the plain people of the land" if they once made up their mind to fight.

Apart from the possibility of war between the two nations themselves, there is the constant peril, to which both are exposed, of conflict forced upon them by the aggressions of other Powers. That peril is always present to both, to the United States now no less--perhaps even more--than to Great Britain. The fact that neither need fear a trial of strength with any other Power or any union of Powers, is beside the question. Consciousness of its own strength is no guarantee to any nation that it will not be forced into conflict. Rather, by making it certain that it, at least, will not draw back, does it close up one possible avenue of escape from catastrophe when a crisis threatens.

But beyond all this--apart from, and vastly greater than, the considerations of the interest or the security of either Great Britain or the United States--is the claim of humanity. The two peoples have it in their hands to give to the whole world no less a gift than that of Universal and Perpetual Peace. It involves no self-sacrifice, the giving of this wonderful boon, for the two peoples themselves would share in the benefit no less than other peoples, and they would be the richer by the giving. It involves hardly any effort, for they have but to hold out their hands together and give. It matters not that the world has not appealed to them. The fact remains that they can do this thing and they alone; and it is for them to ask their own consciences whether any considerations of pride, any prejudice, any absorption in their own affairs--any consideration actual or conceivable--can justify them in holding back. Still more does it rest with the American people--usually so quick to respond to high ideals--to ask its conscience whether any consideration, actual or conceivable, can justify it in refusal when Great Britain is willing--anxious--to do her share.

That such an alliance must some day come is, I believe, not questionable. That it has not already come is due only to the misunderstanding by each people of the character of the other.

Primarily, the two peoples do not understand how closely akin--how of one kind--they are, how alike they are in their virtues, and how their failings are but the defects of the same inherited qualities, even though shaped to somewhat diverse manifestations by differences of environment. Two brothers seldom recognise their likeness one to the other, until either looks at the other beside a stranger. Members of one family do not easily perceive the family resemblance which they share; rather are they aware only of the individual differences. But strangers see the likeness, and in their eyes the differences often disappear. So Englishmen and Americans only come to a realisation of their resemblance when either compares the other critically with a foreign people.

Foreigners, however, see the likeness when they look at the two together. And those foreigners who know only one of the peoples will sketch the character of that people so that it might be taken for a portrait of the other. In all essentials the characters are the same; in minor attributes only, such as exist between the individual members of any family, do they differ.

Not only does neither people understand with any clearness how like it is to the other, but each is under many misapprehensions--some trivial, some vital--in regard to the other's temperament and ways of life. These misapprehensions are the result chiefly of the geographical remoteness of the lands, so that intimate contact between anything like an appreciable portion of the two peoples has been impossible; and, when thus separated by so wide a sea, Great Britain has been too consumedly engrossed in the affairs of the world to be able to give much time or thought to the United States, while America has been too isolated from that world, too absorbed in her own affairs, to be able to look at England in anything like true perspective.

Arising thus from different causes, the errors of the two peoples in regard to each other have taken different forms. Great Britain, always at pa.s.ses with a more or less hostile Europe, has never lost her original feeling of kinship with, or good-will towards, the United States. There has been no time when she would not gladly have improved her knowledge of, and friendship with, the other, had she at any time been free from the anxieties of the peril of war with one Power or another, from the burden of concern for her Empire in India, from the weight of her responsibilities in regard to Australia, South Africa, Egypt, and the various other parts of Britain over seas. Engrossed as she has been with things of immediate moment to her existence, she has been perforce compelled to take the good-will of the remote United States for granted, and to a.s.sume that there was no need to voice her own. Until at last she was awakened with a rudeness of awakening that shocked and staggered her.

For the United States had had no such constant burden of anxiety, no perpetual friction with other peoples, to keep her occupied. Rather, sitting aloof in her isolation she had looked upon all the Powers of Europe as actors in a great drama with which she had no other than a spectacular concern. Only of all the Powers, by the very accident of common origin, by the mere circ.u.mstances of the joint occupation of the continent, Great Britain alone has been constantly near enough to the United States to impinge at times upon her sphere of development, to rub against her, to stand in her way. Great Britain herself has hardly known that this was so. But it has had the effect to make Great Britain in the mind of the United States the one foreign Power most potentially hostile.

In aloofness and silence, ignorant of the world, the American people nursed its wrath and brooded over the causes of offence which have seemed so large to it, though so trivial or so unintentional on the part of England, till the minds of the majority of the people held nothing but ill-feeling and contempt in response to England's good-will towards them. And always the United States has had those at her elbow who were willing--nay, for their own interests, eager--to play upon her wounded feelings and to exaggerate every wrong and every slight, however small or imaginary, placed upon her by Great Britain.

Thus the two peoples not only misunderstand each other but they misunderstand each other in different ways. They look at each other from widely sundered points of view and in diverse spirits. The people of the United States dislike and distrust Great Britain. They cannot believe that Great Britain's good-will for them is sincere. The expressions of that good-will, neglected while the American people was comparatively weak and finding expression now when it is strong, the majority of Americans imagine to be no more than the voice of fear. That alone shows their ignorance of England--their obliviousness of the kinship of the peoples. The two are of one origin and each may take it for granted that neither will ever be afraid of the other--or of any other earthly Power. That is not one of the failings of the stock.

The American people has thus never attained to any right view of the British Empire. By the accident of the war which gave the nation birth, the name "British" became a name of reproach in American ears. They have never since been able to look at Great Britain save through the cross-lights of their own interests, which have distorted their vision, while there have always been those at hand poisoning the national mind against the English. So they think of the British Empire as a b.l.o.o.d.y and brutal thing: of her rule of India in particular as a rule of barbarity and cruel force. Of late years American writers have come to tell Americans the truth; namely, that if the power of Great Britain were to be wiped out to-morrow and all her monuments were to perish except only those that she has built in India, the historians of future generations, looking only to those monuments in India, would p.r.o.nounce Great Britain to have been, of all the Powers that have held great Empire since the beginning of time, the largest benefactor to the human race. But of this the American people as a whole knows nothing. It only knows that sepoys were blown from the mouths of British guns. So Englishmen, know that negroes in the South are lynched.

And as the American people has formed no comprehension of the British Empire as a whole and is without any understanding of its spirit, so it has drawn for itself a caricature of the British character. As the Empire is brutal and sanguinary, so is the individual bullying and overbearing and coa.r.s.e. The idea was originally inherited from England's old enemies in Europe. It was a reflection of the opinion of the French; but it has been confirmed by the frankness of criticism of English travellers of all things in the United States. Americans do not recognise that by their own sensitiveness and anxiety for the judgment of others--a necessary, if morbid, result of their isolation and self-absorption--they invited the criticism, even if they did not excuse its occasional ill-breeding; nor has it occurred to them that the habit of outspoken criticism of all foreign things is a common inheritance of the two peoples and that they themselves are even more garrulously, if less bluntly--even more vaingloriously, if less arrogantly--frank in their habit of comment even than the English.

The same isolation and self-absorption as bred in them their sensitiveness to the opinions of others, made the Americans also unduly proud of such traits or accomplishments as strangers found to praise in them. This in itself might be good for a nation; but, so far as their understanding of Englishmen is concerned, it has unfortunately led them to suppose that those characteristics which they possess in so eminent a degree are proportionately lacking in the English character, which thereby incurs their contempt. Having been over-complimented on their own humour, they have determined that the Englishman is slow-witted, with no sense of fun--an opinion in itself so lacking in appreciation of its own absurdity as to be self-confounding. Too well a.s.sured of their own chivalrousness (a foible which they share with all peoples) they know the Englishman to be a domestic tyrant, incapable of true reverence of womanhood. Proud, not without reason, of their own form of government, wherein there is no room for a t.i.tled aristocracy, they delight in holding the peerage of Great Britain up to contempt (withal that there is a curious unconfessed strain of jealousy mingling therewith), and piecing together, like a child playing with bricks, the not too infrequent appearances of individual peers in the divorce or bankruptcy courts, they have constructed a fantastic image of the British aristocracy as a whole, wherein every member appears as either a _roue_ or a spendthrift. Because they are--and have been so much told that they are--so full of push and energy themselves, they believe Englishmen to be ponderous and without enterprise; whereas if, instead of keeping their eyes and minds permanently intent on their own achievements, they had looked more abroad, they would have seen that, magnificent as has been the work which they have done in the upbuilding of their own nation and wonderful as is the fabric of their greatness, there has simultaneously been evoked out of chaos a British Empire, vaster than their own estate, and which is only not so near completion as their own structure in proportion as it is on a larger ground plan, inspired by larger ideas and involving greater (as well as infinitely more diffused) labour in its uprearing.