The Twentieth Century American Part 23

The statement of these facts involves no impugnment of American urbanity, American wit, American chivalry, or American enterprise. Only they are not so unique as Americans, in their isolation, conceive them to be. There are, in fact, others. It might not even be worth saying so much, if it were not that the belief in their uniqueness has necessarily resulted in American minds in a depreciation of the English character, which by so much helps to keep the two peoples estranged. Americans will be vastly more ready to believe in their English kinship, to like the English people, and to welcome a British alliance if they once get it into their heads that the English, as a nation, are just as fearless, just as chivalrous, no less fond of a joke or more depraved, nor much less enterprising or more careless of the feelings of others than themselves. That they think of Englishmen as they do to-day is not to be wondered at, and no blame attaches to them; for it is but a necessary result of causes which are easily seen. But the time has come when some effort to correct the errors in their vision is possible and desirable--not merely because they are unfair to Englishmen, which might be immaterial, and is no more than a fair exchange of discourtesies, but because the misunderstandings obstruct that good-will which would be such an untellable blessing, not only to the two peoples themselves, but to all the human race.

I am well aware that many American readers will say: "What is the man talking of? I do not think of Englishmen like that!" Of course you do not, excellent and educated reader--especially if you have travelled much in Great Britain or if you are a member of those refined and cultured cla.s.ses (what certain American democrats would call the "silk-stocking element") which const.i.tute the select and entirely charming society of most of the older cities of the Atlantic seaboard as well as of some of the larger communities throughout the country. If, belonging to those cla.s.ses, you do not happen to have made it your business, either as a politician or a newspaper man, to be in close touch with the real sentiments of the ma.s.ses of the country as a whole, you scarcely believe that anybody in America--except a few Irishmen and Germans--does think like that. If, however, you happen to be a good "mixer" in politics or have enjoyed the austerities of an apprenticeship in journalism,--if in fact you know the sentiments of your countrymen, I need not argue with you. Nor perhaps are very many Americans of any cla.s.s conscious of holding all these views at once. None the less, if a composite photograph could be made of the typical Englishman as he is figured in the minds of, let us say, twenty millions of the American people--excluding negroes, Indians, and foreigners--the resultant figure would be little dissimilar from the sketch which I have made.

And I have said that, in holding these ideas, the Americans do but make a fair exchange of discourtesies; for the Englishman has likewise queer notions of the typical American. There is always this vast difference, however, that the Englishman is predisposed to like the American. In spite of his ignorance he feels a great--and, in view of that ignorance, an almost inexplicable--good-will for him. But it is not inexplicable, for once more the causes of his misapprehensions are easily traced.

First, there has been the eternal pre-occupation of the English people with the affairs of other parts of the world. When Great Britain has been so inextricably involved with the policies of all the earth that almost any day news might come from Calcutta, from Berlin, from St.

Petersburg, from Pekin, or Teheran, or from almost any point in Asia, Africa, or Australia, which would shake the Empire to its foundation, how could the people spare time to become intimately acquainted with the United States? Of coa.r.s.e Englishmen talk of the "State of Chicago,"

and--as I heard an English peasant not long ago--of "Yankee earls."

During all these years individual Americans have come to England in large numbers and have been duly noted and observed; but what the people of any nation notices in the casually arriving representatives of any other is not the points wherein the visitors resemble themselves, but the points of difference. In the case of Americans coming to England the fundamental traits are all resemblances and therefore escape notice, while only the differences--which by that very fact stand proclaimed as non-essentials--attract attention. So it is that the English people, having had acquaintance with a number of typical New Englanders, have drawn their conclusion as to the universality of one strong nasal American accent; they think the American people garrulously outspoken in criticism, with a rather offensive boastfulness, without any consciousness that precisely that same trait in themselves, in a slightly different form, is one of the chief causes why Englishmen are not conspicuously popular in any European country. From peculiarities of dress and manner which are not familiar to him in the product of his own public schools and universities, the Englishman has been inclined to think that the American people is not, even in its "better cla.s.ses," a population of gentlemen.

Moreover, many Englishmen go to the United States--the vast majority for a stay of a few days or weeks, or a month or two--and they tell their friends, or the public at large in print, all about America and its people. It is not given to every one to be able, in the course of a few weeks or a month or two, to see below the surface indications down to the root-traits of a people--a feat which becomes of necessity the more difficult when those root-traits are one's own root-traits and the fundamental traits of one's own people at home, while on the surface are all manner of queer, confusing dazzlements of local peculiarities which jump to the stranger's vision and set him blinking. Yet more difficult does the feat appear when it is realised that the American people is scattered over a continent some three thousand miles across--so that San Francisco is little nearer to New York than is Liverpool--and that the section of the people with whom the Englishman necessarily comes first and, unless he penetrates both far and deep into the people, most closely in contact is precisely that cla.s.s from which it is least safe to draw conclusions as to the thoughts, manners, or politics of the people as a whole. Therefore it is that one of the most acute observers informed Europe that in America "a gentleman had only to take to politics to become immediately _decla.s.se_"--which, speaking of the politics of the country as a whole, is purely absurd. The visiting Englishman has generally found the whole sphere of munic.i.p.al and local politics a novel field to him and has naturally been interested. Probing it, he comes upon all manner of tales of corruption and wickedness. He does not see that the body of American "politics," as the word is understood in England, is moderately free from these taints, but he tells the world of the corruption in that sphere of politics which he has studied merely because it does not exist at home and is new to him; and all the world knows that American politics are indescribably corrupt.

Similarly the visiting European goes into polite society and is amazed at the peculiar qualities of some of the persons whom he meets there. He tells stories about those peculiar people, but the background of the society, against which these people stood out so clearly, a background which is so much like his own at home, almost escapes his notice or is too uninteresting and familiar to talk about. There is no one to explain fully to the English people that while in England educated society keeps pretty well to itself, there are in America no hurdles--or none that a lively animal may not easily leap--to keep the black sheep away from the white, or the white from straying off anywhere among the black, so that a large part of the English people has imbibed the notion that there are really no refined or cultured circles in the United States.

Whenever a financial fraud of a large size is discovered in America, the world is told of it, just as certainly as it is told when an English peer finds his way to the divorce court; but n.o.body expounds to the nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the English people have come to think of American business ethics as being too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware that only in most exceptional cases can great or permanent individual commercial success be won by fraud, and that nothing but fundamental honesty will serve as the basis for a great national trade such as the United States has built up.

Visiting Englishmen are bewildered by the strange types of peoples whom they see upon the streets and by the talk which they hear of "German elements" and "French elements" and "Scandinavian elements" in the population. But they do not as a rule see that these various "elements,"

when in the first generation of citizenship, are but a fringe upon the fabric of society, and when in the second or third generation they have a tendency to become entirely swallowed up and to merge all their national characteristics by absorption in the Anglo-Saxon stock; and that apart from and unheeding all these irrelevant appendages, the great American people goes on its way, h.o.m.ogeneous, unruffled, and English at bottom.

Finally Englishmen read American newspapers and, not understanding the different relation in which those newspapers stand to the people, they compare with them the normal English papers and draw inferences which are quite unjust. Similar inferences no less unjust may be drawn from hearing the speech of a certain number of well-to-do Americans, belonging, as Englishmen opine, to the cla.s.s of "gentlemen."

These misunderstandings do less harm to the Englishman than to the American, inasmuch as the Englishman has that predisposition to national cordiality which the American has not. But, though the Englishman's mistakes do not influence his good-will to the United States, though he himself attaches no serious importance to them, his utterance of them is taken seriously by the Americans themselves and does not tend to the promotion of international good feeling. Therefore it is that it is no less desirable that English misconceptions of the United States should be corrected than it is that the American people should be brought to a juster appreciation of the British character and Empire.

It is in America, doubtless, that missionary work is most needed, inasmuch as all England would at any minute welcome an American alliance with enthusiasm; while in the United States any public suggestion of such an alliance never fails to provoke immediate and vehement protest.

It is true that that protest issues primarily from the Irish and German elements; and it may seem absurd that the American people as a whole should suffer itself to be swayed in a matter of so national a character by a minority which is not only comparatively unimportant in numbers, but which the true American majority regards with some irritability as distinctly alien.

There are a large number of const.i.tuencies in the United States, however, where the Irish and German votes, individually or in combination, hold the balance of power in the electorate, and not only must many individual members of Congress hesitate to antagonise so influential a section of their const.i.tuents, but it is even questionable whether the united and harmonious action of those two elements might not, under certain conditions, be able to unseat a sufficient number of such individual members as to change the political complexion of one or both of the Houses of Congress, and even, in a close election, of the Administration itself. Nor is it necessary to repeat again that when the anti-British outcry is raised, though primarily by a minority and an alien minority, it finds a response in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a vast number of good Americans in whom the traditional dislike of England, though latent, still persists solely by reason of misapprehension and misunderstandings. Therefore it is that so many of the best Americans, who in their hearts know well how desirable an alliance with England would be, are content to deprecate its discussion and to say that things are well enough as they are; though again I say that things are never well enough so long as they might be better. However desirable such an alliance may be, however much to the benefit of the nation, it would, they say, be bad politics to bring it forward as a party question. And to bring it forward without its becoming from the outset a party question would be plainly impossible.

But would it be bad politics? Can it ever, in the long run, be bad politics to champion any cause which is great and good? It might be that it would be difficult for an individual member of Congress to come forward as the active advocate of a British alliance and not lose his seat; but in the end, the man who did it, or the party which did it, would surely win. When two peoples have a dislike of each other based on intimate knowledge by each of the other's character, to rise as the champion of their alliance might be hopeless; but when two peoples are held apart only by misunderstanding and by lack of perception of the boons that alliance between them would bring, it can need but courage and earnestness to carry conviction to the people and to bring success.

In such a cause there is one man in America to whom one's thoughts of necessity turn; and he is hampered by being President of the United States. Perhaps when his present term of office is over Mr. Roosevelt, instead of seeking the honourable seclusion which so often engulfs ex-Presidents, will find ready to his hand a task more than worthy of the man who was instrumental in bringing peace to Russia and j.a.pan,--a task in the execution of which it would be far from being a disadvantage that he is as cordially regarded in Germany as he is in England and has himself great good-will towards the German Empire. Any movement on the part of Great Britain in company with any European nation could only be regarded by Germany as a conspiracy against herself: nothing that England or France or j.a.pan--or any Englishman, Frenchman, or j.a.panese--could say or do would be received otherwise than with suspicion and resentment. But, after all, the good of humanity must come before any aspirations on the part of the German Empire, and it is the American people which must speak, though it speaks through the mouth of its President. If the American people makes up its mind that its interest and its duty alike dictate that it should join hands with England in the cause of peace, neither Germany nor any Power can do otherwise than acquiesce.

It is no novelty, either in the United States or in other countries, for considerations of temporary political expediency to stand in the way of the welfare of the people, nor is there any particular reason why an American politician should attach any importance to the desires of England. But we find ourselves again confronted with the same old question, whether the American people as a whole, who have often shown an ability to rise above party politics, can find any excuse for setting any consideration, either of individual or partisan interest, above the welfare of all the world. Yet once more: It is for Americans individually to ask their consciences whether any considerations whatever, actual or conceivable, justify them in withholding from all humanity the boon which it is in their power, and theirs alone, to give,--the blessing of Universal and Perpetual Peace.

And yet, when this much has been said, it seems that so little has been told. It was pointed out, in one of the earlier chapters, how the people of each country in looking at the people of the other are apt to see only the provoking little peculiarities of speech or manner on the surface, overlooking the strength of the characteristics which underlie them. So, in these pages, it seems that we, in a.n.a.lysing the individual traits, have failed to get any vision of the character of either people as a whole. It is the trees again which obscure the view of the forest.

We have arrived at no general impression of the British Empire or of the British people. We have shown nothing of the majesty of that Empire; of its dignity in the eyes of a vast variety of peoples; of the high ambitions (unspoken, after the way of the English, but none the less earnest), which have inspired and still inspire it; of its maintenance of the standards of justice and fair dealing; of its tolerance or the patience with which it strives to guide the darkened peoples towards the light. Nothing has been said of the splendid service which the Empire receives from the sons of the Sea Wife; yet certainly the world has seen nothing comparable to the Colonial services of Great Britain, of which the Indian Civil Service stands as the type.

Nor have we said anything of the British people, with its steadfastness, in spite of occasional frenzies, its sanity, and its silent acceptance, and almost automatic practice, of a high level of personal and political morality. Above all we have seen nothing of the sweetness of the home life of the English country people, whereof the more well-to-do lead lives of wide sympathies, much refinement, and great goodness; while the poor under difficult conditions, hold fast to a self-respecting decency, little changed since the days when from among them, there went out the early settlers to the New England over seas, which never fails, notwithstanding individual weaknesses, to win the regard of one who lives among them.

So of the American people; we have conveyed no adequate impression of the manly optimism, the courageous confidence in the ultimate virtue of goodness and sound principles, on which the belief in the destiny of their own country is based. The nation has prospered by its virtues.

Every page of their history preaches to the people that it is honesty and faith and loyalty which succeed, and they believe in their future greatness because they believe themselves to possess, and hope to hold to, those virtues as in the past.

It may be that, living in the silences and solitudes of the frontier and the wilderness, they have found the greater need of ready speech when communication has offered. It may be that the mere necessity of planning together the framework of their society and of building up their State out of chaos has imposed on them the necessity of more outspokenness.

Certainly they have discarded, or have not a.s.sumed, the reticence of the modern English of England; and much of this freedom of utterance Europeans misinterpret, much (because the fashion of it is strange to themselves) they believe to be insincere. In which judgments they are quite wrong. The American people are profoundly sincere and intensely in earnest.

Since the establishment of the Republic, in the necessity of civilizing a continent, in the breathless struggle of the Civil War, in the rapidity with which society has been compelled to organize itself, in the absorption and a.s.similation of the continuous stream of foreign immigrants, the people have always been at grips with problems of immediate, almost desperate urgency; and they have never lost, or come near to losing, heart or courage. They have learned above all things the lesson of the efficacy of work. They have acquired the habit of action.

Self-reliance has been bred in them. They know that in the haste of the days of ferment abuses grew up and went unchecked; and they know that in that same haste they missed some of the elegancies which a more leisurely and easier life might have given opportunity to acquire. But for a generation back, they have been earnestly striving to eradicate those abuses and to lift themselves, their speech, their manners, their art and literature to, at least, a level with the highest. It has been impossible in these pages (it would perhaps be impossible in any pages) to give any unified picture of this national character with its activity, its self-reliance, its belief in the homely virtues and its earnest ambition to make the best of itself. But of the future of a people with such a character there need be no misgivings, and Americans are justified in the confidence in their destiny.

What is needed is that these two peoples holding, with similar steadfastness, to the same high ideals, pushing on such closely parallel lines in advance of all other peoples, should come to see more clearly how near of kin they are and how much the world loses by any lack of unison in their effort.

Once more let me ask readers to turn back and read again the paragraphs from other pens with which this book is introduced.

APPENDIX. (See Chapter III., pp. 81, _sqq._)

This book was almost ready for the press when Dr. Albert Shaw's collection of essays was published under the t.i.tle of _The Outlook for the Average Man_. Dr. Shaw is one of America's most lucid thinkers and he contributes what I take to be a new (though once stated an obviously true) explanation of what I have spoken of as the h.o.m.ogeneousness of the American people. The West, as we all know, was largely settled from the East. That is to say that a family or a member of a family in New York moved westward to Illinois, thence in the next generation to Minnesota, thence again to Montana or Oregon. A similar movement went on down the whole depth of the United States, families established in North Carolina migrating first to Kentucky, then to Ohio, so to Texas, and finally on to California. All parts of the country therefore have, as the nucleus of their population, people of precisely the same stock, habits, and ways of thought. The West was settled "not by radiation of influence from the older centres, but by the actual transplantation of the men and women." Dr. Shaw proceeds:

"England is not large in area and the people are generally regarded as h.o.m.ogeneous in their insularity. But as a matter of fact the populations of the different parts of England are scarcely at all acquainted in any other part. Thus the Yorkshireman would only by the rarest chance have relatives living in Kent or Cornwall. The intimacy between North Carolina and Missouri, for example, is incomparably greater than that between one part of England and another part. In like manner, the people of the North of France know very little of those of the South of France, or even of those living in districts not at all remote. Exactly the same thing is true of Italy and Germany, and is characteristic of almost every other European land. As compared with other countries, we in America are literally a band of brothers."--_The Outlook for the Average Man_, pages 104, 105.