The Twentieth Century American Part 5

The quality which Mr. Wells--seeing only its individual manifestations, quite baffled and unable to look beyond the individuals to any vision of the people as a whole (he travelled over a ludicrously small portion of the country)--sums up as a "lack of sense of the State" is in truth the cardinal quality which has made the greatness of the United States--and of England. It is precisely because the peoples rely on individual effort and not on the State that they have become greater than all other peoples. That is their peculiar political excellence--that they are not for ever framing schemes for a paternal all-embracing State, but are content to work each in his own sphere, a.s.serting his own independence and individuality, from the things as they are, little by little towards the things as they ought to be.

If Mr. Wells had prevailed on any typical American to sit down and write what, as he understood it, his people were working to accomplish, the latter would have written something like this:

"We have got the basis of a form of government under which, when perfected, the individual will have larger liberty and better opportunity to a.s.sert himself than he has ever had in any country since organised states have existed. We have a people which enjoys to-day more of the material comforts of life than any other people on earth, and the chief political problem with which we are wrestling to-day is to see that that enjoyment is confirmed to them in perpetuity--not taken from them or hampered or limited by any power of an oppressive capitalism. We are spending more money, more energy, more earnest thought on the study of education as a science or art and on the endowment of educational establishments than any other people; as a result we hope that the next generation of Americans, besides being the most materially blessed, will be the most educated and intelligent of peoples. We are doing all we can to weed out dishonesty from our commercial dealings. In the period of our growth there was necessarily some laxity in our business ethics, but we are doing the best we know how to improve that, and we believe that on the whole our methods of doing business are calculated to produce more honest men than those in vogue in other countries. What we hope to make of our future therefore is to produce a nation of individuals freer, better off, and more honest than the world has yet seen. When that people comes it can manage its own government."

Not only are these, I fear, larger national aims than the average Englishman dares to propose to himself, but they are, I venture to say, much more definitely formulated in the "typical American's" mind. If Mr.

Wells desires to find a people which considers it the duty of good citizenship to go about to fashion first the roofs and walls, rafters, cornices, and chimney-pots of a governmental structure, relying on the State afterwards to legislate comfort and culture and virtue into the people, he visited the wrong quarter of the globe. In the Latin races he will find the "sense of the State" luxuriantly developed.

Mr. Wells appears infinitely distressed by his failure to find any unified national feeling in the American people--by "the chaotic condition of the American Will"--by "the dispersal of power"--by the fact that "Americans knew of America mainly as the Flag." Which is a most curiously complete demonstration of the inadequacy of his judgment.

If Mr. Wells had seen the United States twenty-five years ago, ten years ago, and five years ago, before his present visit, the one thing that would have most impressed him would have been the amazing growth of the sense of national unity. Mr. Wells looks superficially upon the country as it is to-day and finds society more chaotic, distances larger, sentiment less crystallised than--_mirabile!_--in the older countries of Europe, and is plunged in despair. Had he had any knowledge of America's past conditions by which to measure the momentary phase in which he found the people, he would have known that exactly that thing of which he most deplores the absence is the thing which, in the last thirty years, has grown with more wonderful rapidity than anything else in all this country of wonderful growths.

The mere fact of this development of national feeling is a thing which will necessarily call for attention as we go on; for the present it is enough to say that Mr. Wells could hardly have exposed more calamitously the superficial and cursory quality of his "study" of the country.[92:1]

As a man may not be able to see the forest because of the trees, so Mr.

Wells is as one who has stood by a great river's bank for a few minutes and has not seen the river for the flash of the ripples in the sun, the swirl of an eddy here and there, the flotsam swinging by on the current; and he has gone away and prattled of the ripples and the eddy and the floating branch. The great flow of the river down below does not expose itself to the vision of three minutes. He only comes to understand it who lives by the river for awhile, sits down by it and studies it--sees it in flood and drought--swims in it, bathes in it. Then he will forget the ripples and the branches and will come to know something of the steadiness of purpose, the depth and strength of it, its unity and its power. Nothing but a little more experience would enable Mr. Wells to see the national feeling of the American people.

Literature contains few pictures more delightful than that of Mr. Wells, drawn by himself, standing with Mr. Putnam--Herbert Putnam of all people!--in the Congressional Library at Washington and saying (let me quote): "'With all this,' I asked him 'why doesn't the place _think_?'

He seemed, discreetly, to consider it did."

Mr. Putnam is fortunately always discreet. Otherwise it would be pleasant to know what _he_ thought--of his questioner.

_Note._--On the subject of the h.o.m.ogeneousness of the American people, see Appendix A.

FOOTNOTES:

[60:1] As a statement of this nature is always liable to be challenged let me say that it is based on the opinions expressed in conversation by the correspondents of English papers who came to America at that time in an endeavour to reach Cuba. They certainly did not antic.i.p.ate that the American fleet would be able to stand against the Spanish. And, lest American readers should be in danger of taking offence at this, let it be remembered with how much apprehension the arrival of Admiral Cervera's ships was awaited along the eastern coast and how cheaply excellent seaside houses were to be acquired that year. Events have moved so rapidly since then (above all has the position of the United States in the world changed so much) that it is not easy now to conjure up the circ.u.mstances and sentiments of those days. If Americans generally erred as widely as they did in their estimate of the Spanish sea-power as compared with their own, it is not surprising that Englishmen erred perhaps a little more.

[68:1] _History of the United States_, by James Ford Rhodes, vol. vi.

[88:1] Mr. Crosland has written since; but he has fortunately not been taken sufficiently seriously by the American people even to cause them annoyance.

[89:1] _The Future in America_, by H. G. Wells, 1906.

[92:1] The futility of this kind of impressionist criticism is well ill.u.s.trated by the fact that almost simultaneously with the appearance of Mr. Wells' book, a distinguished Canadian (Mr. Wilfred Campbell) was recording his impressions of a visit to England and said: "The people of Britain leave national and social affairs too much in the hands of such men [professional politicians]. There is a sad lack of the education of the people in the direction of a common patriotism. . . . She must get back to the sane idea that it is only as a nation and through the national ideal that she can help humanity. . . . She has great men in all walks of life; she has still the highest-toned Press in the world; she has . . . the most ideal legislature, she has great universities and churches with the finest and greatest Christian ideals. But none of these influences are used, as they should be, for the general national good. They work separately, or too much as individuals. It is only the leavening of these inst.i.tutions with a large spirit of the national destiny that will lift Britain . . . out of its present material slough." (_The Outlook_, November 17, 1906.) These words are almost a paraphrase of Mr. Wells' indictment of the United States.

CHAPTER IV

MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS

America's Bigness--A New Atlantis--The Effect of Expansion on a People--A Family Estranged--Parsnips--An American Woman in England--An Englishman in America--International Caricatures--Shibboleths: dropped H's and a "tw.a.n.g"--Matthew Arnold's Clothes--The Honourable S---- B----.

"John Bull with plenty of elbow-room" was the phrase. It does not necessarily follow that the widest lands breed the finest people; and there is worthless territory enough in the United States to cut up into two or three Englands. Yet no patriotic American would wish one rod, pole, or perch of it away, whether of the Bad Lands, the Florida Swamps, the Alkali Plains of the Southwest, or the most sterile and inaccessible regions of the Rockies. If of no other use, each, merely as an instrument of discipline, has contributed something to the hardening of the fibre of the people; and good and bad together the domain of the United States is very large. Englishmen are aware of the fact, merely as a fact; but they seldom seem to appreciate its full significance.

Let us consider for a minute what would be the effect on the British people if it suddenly came into possession of such an estate. We are not talking now of distant colonies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa--these may be equal together to more than another United States, and they are working out their own destiny. The inhabitants of each are a band of British men and women just as were the early inhabitants of the United States and as, essentially, the people of the United States still remain to-day. Each of those bands will follow its own path and work its own miracles--whether greater than that which the people of the United States has wrought or not, only later generations will know. Each of these, though British still and always, is launched on its individual career; and it is not of them that we are speaking now, but of the Englishmen who remain at home, of the present-day population of the British Isles.

What would be the result if suddenly the limits of the British Isles were to be miraculously expanded? What would happen if the floor of the ocean heaved itself up and Great Britain awoke to find the coast of Cornwall and Wales mysteriously reaching westward, the Irish Sea no more than a Hudson River which barely kept the sh.o.r.es of Lancashire and c.u.mberland from touching Ireland,--an Ireland of which the western coast--the coast of Munster and Connaught--was prolonged a thousand leagues towards the setting sun; while the west coast of the north of Scotland, Ross and Sutherland, had absorbed the Hebrides and stretched unbroken into two thousand miles of plain and mountain range--Britain no longer but Atlantis come again and all British soil? It was to nothing less miraculous that the thirteen original States fell heir. And what would be the effect on the British race?

Coal and iron, silver and gold, rivers full of fish, forest and prairie teeming with game, pasture for millions of cattle, wheat land and corn land, cotton land and orchard for any man who chose to take them;--the wretches struggling and stifling in the London slums having nothing to do but grasp axe and rifle and go out to subdue the wilderness;--farms, not by the half-acre, but by the hundred acres for every one of the unemployed. Is it possible to doubt that the race would be strengthened, not materially only, but in its moral qualities,--that Englishmen in another generation would not only be a wealthier and a more powerful people but a healthier, l.u.s.tier, n.o.bler? How then are we to suppose that just such a change, such an uplifting, has not come about in that other British people to whom all this has happened, who came into their wonderful birthright four generations ago and for a century and a quarter have been fashioning it to their will and being fashioned by it after the will of Another? By what process of logic, English reader, are you going to convince yourself that this race--your own with larger opportunities--is not the finer race of the two?

I have not, be it observed, expressed the opinion that the American national character is finer than the English; only that it is finer than the European commonly supposes. Nor am I expressing such an opinion now but only setting forth certain elementary considerations for the reader's judgment. When the European sees in the individual American, or in a dozen individual Americans, certain peculiarities, inelegancies, and sometimes even impertinences--call them what you will,--he is too p.r.o.ne to think that these are the essentials of the American character.

The essentials of the American character are the essentials of the English character--with elbow-room. "While the outlook of the New Yorker is wider than ours," says Mr. Archer, "his standpoint is the same." In that elbow-room, with that wider outlook, it is likely that new offshoots from the character will have developed--excrescences, not perhaps in themselves always lovely--but if we remember what the trunk is from which they spring, or what it was, we shall probably think better, or less, of those excrescences, while remembering also the likelihood that in the larger room and richer soil the trunk itself may also have expanded and strengthened and solidified.

The English reader might decide for himself what justification there is for supposing that the character of that offset from the British stock which, a century and a quarter ago, was put in possession of this magnificent estate should have deteriorated rather than improved as compared with the character of that portion of the stock which remained rooted in the old soil hemmed in between the ancient boundaries.

There have been, of course, many other influences at work in the moulding of the American character, besides the mere vastness of his continent; but the fact remains that this has been immensely the most powerful of all the factors. English originally, the American is still English in his essentials, modified chiefly by the circ.u.mstances of his material environment, the magnificence of his estate, the width of his horizons, the disciplining of his nature by the t.i.tanic struggle with the physical conditions of the wilderness and the necessary development of those qualities of resourcefulness, buoyancy, and self-reliance which the exigencies of that struggle have demanded. Moreover, what is almost the most important item of all, his entire national life has been lived, and that struggle conducted, in practical isolation from all contact with other peoples. Immigrants, indeed, from all of them, the United States has constantly been receiving; but as a nation the American people has been singularly segregated from the rest of the earth, blessedly free from friction with, and dependence on, other countries.

As we have seen, it has had no friction with any Power except Great Britain; and with Great Britain itself so little that Englishmen hardly recall that it has occurred.

It may be worth while to stop one minute to rehea.r.s.e and to re-enforce the points which so far it has been my aim to make.

For their own sakes, anything like conflict between the two nations is not to be dreamed of; but, for the world's sake, an intimate alliance between them in the cause of peace would be the most blessed conceivable thing. There is every justification for such an alliance, not merely in the incalculable benefits that would result, but in the original kinship of the peoples, the permanent and fundamental sympathy of their natures, and their community of ambitions and ways of thought. Unfortunately these reasons for union have been obscured by a century of aloofness, so that to-day neither people fully understands the other and they look, one at the other, from widely different standpoints. By reason chiefly of their isolation, in which they have had little contact with other peoples, the Americans have come to think of Great Britain as little less foreign (and by the accidents of their history as even more hostile) than any other Power. Still acknowledging as an historical fact the original kinship, they, like many a son who has gone out into the world and prospered exceedingly, take pleasure chiefly in contemplating how far they have travelled since they struck out for themselves and how many characteristics they have developed which were not part of the inheritance from the old stock. Dwelling on these they have become blind to the essential family likeness to that old stock which still remains their dominant trait. Moreover, seeing how during all these years the old folk have let them go their own way, seemingly indifferent to their future, at times, intentionally or not, making that future none the easier of accomplishment, they have come to nurse a resentment against those at home and will not believe that the family still bears them an affectionate good-will quite other than it feels for even the best-liked of the friends who are not of the same descent.

On England's part, she saw the younger ones go out into the world with regret, strove to restrain them unwisely, obstinately, unfairly--and failed. Since then she has been very busy, supremely occupied with her own affairs. The young ones who had gone out into the world in, as seemed to her, such headstrong fashion, for all that she knows now that she was wrong, have been doing well, and she has always been glad to hear it, but--well, they were a long way off. At times she has thought that the young ones were somewhat too pushing--too anxious to get on regardless of her or others' welfare,--and half-heartedly (not all unintentionally, but certainly with no thought of alienating the affection of the others) she has interfered or pa.s.sively stood in the young folk's way. At last the day came when she was horrified to find that the younger branch--very prosperous and independent now--had not only ceased to regard her as a mother but had come almost to the point of holding her as an enemy. It was at first incredible and she strove as best she could to put matters right and to explain how foreign to her wishes it was and how unnatural it seemed to her that there should be any approach to ill-feeling between them. But she does not convince the other, partly because she herself has in her turn grown out of touch with that other's ideas. At intervals she has met members of the younger branch who have come home to visit and she has discovered all sorts of new tricks of manner, new ways of speech, new points of view that they have picked up in their new surroundings, and, like the members of the younger branch themselves, she sees more of these little things than she does of the character that is behind them. Her vision of the family likeness is blurred by the intrusion of provoking little points of difference. She sees the mannerisms, but the strength of the qualities of which they are manifestations escapes her.

So it comes about that the two are at cross purposes. "We may call this country Daughter," wrote G. W. Steevens, "she does not call us Mother."

The elder sincerely desires the affection of the younger--sincerely feels affection herself; but is hampered in making the other realise her sincerity by a constant desire to criticise those little foreign ways that the other has acquired. Just so does a parent obscure her love for a son by deploring the strange manners which he picks up at school; just so is she blinded to his real qualities as a man, because he will insist on giving his time to messing about with machinery instead of settling down properly to study for the Church.

Burke (was it not?) spoke of his love for Ireland as "dearer than could be justified to reason." Englishmen might well have difficulty in justifying to their reason their affection for America; for to hear an Englishman speak of American peculiarities and eccentricities, it would often seem that to love such men would be pure unreason. But these criticisms are no true index to the British national feeling for the Americans as a people. Does a brother not love his sister because he says rude things about her little failings? Americans hear the criticisms and, their own hearts being alienated from Great Britain, cannot believe that Britishers have any affection for them.

I am well aware that I make--and can make--no general statement from which many readers, both in England and America, will not dissent.

Englishmen will arise to say that they do not love America; and Americans--many Americans--will vow with their hands on their hearts that they have the greatest affection for Great Britain. Vast numbers of Americans will protest against being called a h.o.m.ogeneous people, and a vast number more against the accusation of being still essentially English; the fact being that it is no easier now than it was in the days of Burke (I am sure of my author this time) to "draw up an indictment against a whole people." A composite photograph is commonly only an indifferent likeness of any of the individuals--least of all will the individual be likely to recognise it as a portrait of himself. But the type-character will stand out clearly--especially to the eyes of others not of the type. Most of the notions of Englishmen about Americans are drawn from the casual contact with individual Americans in England (where from contrast with their surroundings the little peculiarities stand out most conspicuously) or from the hasty "impressions" of visitors who have looked only on the surface--and but a small portion of that. Even, I am aware, after a lifetime spent in studying the two peoples, in pondering on their likenesses and unlikenesses and striving to measure the feeling of each for the other, there is always danger of talking what I will ask to be permitted to call "parsnips."

When I first went to the United States I carried with me a commission from certain highly reputable English papers to incorporate my "impressions" in occasional letters. Among the earliest facts of any moment which I was enabled to communicate to English readers was that the middle cla.s.ses in America (I was careful to explain what the "middle cla.s.ses" were in a country where none existed)--that the middle cla.s.ses, I say, lived almost entirely on parsnips. I had not arrived at this important ethnological fact with any undue haste. I had already lived in the United States for some three months, half of which time had been spent in New York hotels and boarding houses and half in Northern New York and rural New England, where, staying at farms or at the houses of families in the smaller towns to which I bore letters of introduction, I flattered myself that I had probed deep--Oh, ever so deep!--below the surface and had come to understand the people as they lived in their own homes. And my ripened judgment was that the bulk of the well-to-do people of the country supported life chiefly by consumption of parsnips.

Some fifteen years later I was at supper at the Century Club in New York and the small party at our table as we discussed the scalloped oysters (which are one of the pillars of the Century) included a well-known American author and journalist and an even better known and much-loved artist. But why should I not mention their names? They were Montgomery Schuyler and John La Farge. Both had been to Europe that year--La Farge to pay his first visit to Italy, while Schuyler, whether with or without La Farge I forget, had made a somewhat extensive trip through rural England in, I think, a dog-cart. The conversation ran chiefly on their experiences and suddenly Schuyler turned to me with: "Here, you Englishman, why do the middle cla.s.ses of England live chiefly on parsnips?"

The thing is incredible--except that it happened. Schuyler, no less than I fifteen years before, spoke in the fulness of conviction arising from what he, no less than I, believed to have been wide and adequate experience. The memory of that experience has made me tolerant of the c.o.c.ksure generalisations with which the Englishman who has visited America, or the American who has been in England, for a few months delights to regale his compatriots on his return. Quite recently a charming American woman who is good enough to count me among her friends, was in London for the first time in her life. She is perhaps as typical a representative of Western American womanhood--distinctively Western--as could be found; very good to look upon, warm-hearted, fearless and earnest in her truth-loving, straightforward life. But in voice, in manner, and in frankness of speech she is peculiarly and essentially Western. She loved England and English people, so she told me at the Carlton on the eve of her return to America,--just loved them, but English women (and I can see her wrinkling her eyebrows at me to give emphasis to what she said) were so _dreadfully_ outspoken: they did say such _awful_ things! I thought I knew the one Englishwoman from whose conversation she had derived this idea and remembering my own parsnips, I forgave her. She has, since her return, I doubt not, dwelt often to her friends on this amazing frankness of speech in Englishwomen. And if she only knew what twenty Englishwomen thought of her outspokenness!

Not long ago I heard an eminent member of the medical profession in London, who had just returned from a trip to Canada and the United States with representatives of the British Medical a.s.sociation, telling a ring of interested listeners all about the politics, geography, manners, and customs of the people of America. Among other things he explained that in America there was no such thing known as a _table d'

hote_; all your meals at hotels and restaurants had to be ordered _a la carte_. "I should have thought," he said, "that a good _table d' hote_ at an hotel in New York and other towns would pay. It would be a novelty." It may be well to explain to English readers who do not know America, that fifteen years ago a meal _a la carte_ was, and over a large part of the country still is, practically unknown in the United States. The system of buying one's board and lodging in installments is known in America as "the European plan."

If it would not be too long a digression, I would explain how this is a cardinal principle of the American business mind. The disposition of every American is to take over a whole contract _en bloc_, which in England, where every man is a specialist, would be split into twenty different transactions. The American thinks in round numbers: "What will the whole thing come to?" he asks; while the Englishman wants to know the items. This habit permeates American life in every department. It is labour-saving. Few things amuse or irritate the American visitor to England more than the having to pay individually for a number of small conveniences which at home he is accustomed to have "thrown in"; and the first time when he is presented with an English hotel bill (I am not speaking of the modern semi-American hotels in London) with its infinite list of items, is an experience that he never forgets.

All of which is only to explain that the distinguished physician, when he spoke of the absence of _tables d'hote_ in America, was talking parsnips. His experience had been limited to a few hotels and restaurants in New York and one or two other large towns.

If only it were possible to catch in some great "receiver" or "coherer,"