WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDON

MCMXXII

Printed in Great Britain by T. And A. CONSTABLE LTD. At the EdinburghUniversity Press

_Contents_

 PAGE

WHAT IS AMERICA? 1

A MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 19

A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 33

IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 47

SOME AMERICAN CITIES 63

IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 80

THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 97

PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 121

PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 145

FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 163

THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 182

THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 195

IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 208

LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 222

WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 235

A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 253

THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 267

THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 281

THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 295

_What is America?_

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows themind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility andimaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed thereis something touching and even tragic about the thought of thethoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampsteador Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see whatthey looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meantfor the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bondthat he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is ratheran inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may beinside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and drawdangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in theabstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely asthose who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking thefundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliarmanners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves infantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as ifmen of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understandeach other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger--the momentwhen they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which ameeting meant a duel. 

Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travellersare so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blamethem for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at aDutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they arewrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on ittheir serious ideas of international instruction. It was said that theEnglishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despisingforeigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoffand does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence ininternational relations there is far too little laughing, and far toomuch sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largelyconsists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which isactually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is theonly excuse of this book. 

Let me begin my American impressions with two impressions I had before Iwent to America. One was an incident and the other an idea; and whentaken together they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principleis that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it isforeign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrongbecause it is funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habitsof mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectlyhealthy reaction. But the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliaritycan possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind. It is inadequate even in criticising things that may really be inferiorto the things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro forhaving a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. Itis proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge indealing with highly civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginningtwo working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it; thesort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort ofthing he has a duty to understand and respect, because it is theexplanation of the joke. 

When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I wascapable of expecting the American consulate to be American. Embassiesand consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which theystand; and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. Ihave seen the unmistakable French official living on omelettes and alittle wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the lastpalm-trees fringing a desert. In the heat and noise of quarrelling Turksand Egyptians, I have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his ownshower-bath, on the listless amiability of the English gentleman. Theofficials I interviewed were very American, especially in being verypolite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of MartinChuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people inthe world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to allappearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled upin my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the gamecalled 'Confessions' which my friends and I invented in our youth; anexamination paper containing questions like, 'If you saw a rhinocerosin the front garden, what would you do?' One of my friends, I remember, wrote, 'Take the pledge. ' But that is another story, and might bring Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time. 

One of the questions on the paper was, 'Are you an anarchist?' To whicha detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, 'Whatthe devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?' along with someplayful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an[Greek: archê]. Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour ofsubverting the government of the United States by force?' Against this Ishould write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tourand not the beginning. ' The inquisitor, in his more than morbidcuriosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer tothis is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool, ' according to ourexperience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be thatgiven to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, 'ShallI slay my brother Boer?'--the answer that ran, 'Never interfere infamily matters. ' But among many things that amused me almost to thepoint of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing wasthe thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat itrespectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slipinto America with official papers under official protection, and sittingdown to write with a beautiful gravity, 'I am an anarchist. I hate youall and wish to destroy you. ' Or, 'I intend to subvert by force thegovernment of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the longsheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliestopportunity. ' Or again, 'Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and myforty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised assecretaries. ' There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about theseanswers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamistsare so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions andthey are certain to tell no lies. 

Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded on foreignproblems, at which a man's first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor haveI any intention of apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectlyentitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find itincomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it asincomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. Thevery fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinkingabout the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, andthat without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself. 

Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enoughto suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spiritof inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all theancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be somethingto be said later; but superficially it is true that this degree ofofficialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only theyear before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments whichmany worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs andassassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruledby a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that onewondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whetherI had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibitthe faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis ofcivil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did notcare about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not haveminded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably apolygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, inthe old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquireinto my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation ofpractice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy toargue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Easterndespotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop thefancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, theAmerican Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition. 

Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally wrong; and thetraveller only too often does stop at that point. He has found somethingto make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think. And theremedy is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, tounlaugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is something uniqueand curious about this American inquisition into our abstract opinions, but rather to continue the train of thought, and follow the admirableadvice of Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, 'It is not much good thinking of athing unless you think it out. ' It is not to deny that Americanofficialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to inquire what itreally is which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to America. In short, it is to get some ultimate idea of what America _is_; and theanswer to that question will reveal something much deeper and granderand more worthy of our intelligent interest. 

It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare theAmerican Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, itdoes involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve acompliment. The American Constitution does resemble the SpanishInquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the onlynation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forthwith dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration ofIndependence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is alsotheoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that allmen are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to givethem that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. Itcertainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemnatheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authorityfrom whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modernpolitical system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claimis taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not aboutdivine, at least about human things. 

Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in theworld. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood ofall men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature ofall men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said toexclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitutesomething else for Jewish religion or Greek philosophy. It was trulysaid to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certainpattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even ofthe most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and trueamong others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrowtouching theology, it could not confess to being narrow aboutnationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition might be admittedlyInquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to bebroader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he washeterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. Andwe see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed formaking sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now ina much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of thesame idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experimentof a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to amelting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of acertain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. Themelting-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines ofJeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until itbecomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but itimplies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, sofar as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religiousbecause it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And insomething of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk. 

Now for America this is no idle theory. It may have been theoretical, though it was thoroughly sincere, when that great Virginian gentlemandeclared it in surroundings that still had something of the character ofan English countryside. It is not merely theoretical now. There isnothing to prevent America being literally invaded by Turks, as she isinvaded by Jews or Bulgars. In the most exquisitely inconsequent of the_Bab Ballads_, we are told concerning Pasha Bailey Ben:--

 One morning knocked at half-past eight A tall Red Indian at his gate. In Turkey, as you 'r' p'raps aware, Red Indians are extremely rare. 

But the converse need by no means be true. There is nothing in thenature of things to prevent an emigration of Turks increasing andmultiplying on the plains where the Red Indians wandered; there isnothing to necessitate the Turks being extremely rare. The Red Indians, alas, are likely to be rarer. And as I much prefer Red Indians to Turks, not to mention Jews, I speak without prejudice; but the point here isthat America, partly by original theory and partly by historicalaccident, does lie open to racial admixtures which most countries wouldthink incongruous or comic. That is why it is only fair to read anyAmerican definitions or rules in a certain light, and relatively to arather unique position. It is not fair to compare the position of thosewho may meet Turks in the back street with that of those who have nevermet Turks except in the _Bab Ballads_. It is not fair simply to compareAmerica with England in its regulations about the Turk. In short, it isnot fair to do what almost every Englishman probably does; to look atthe American international examination paper, and laugh and be satisfiedwith saying, 'We don't have any of that nonsense in England. '

We do not have any of that nonsense in England because we have neverattempted to have any of that philosophy in England. And, above all, because we have the enormous advantage of feeling it natural to benational, because there is nothing else to be. England in these days isnot well governed; England is not well educated; England suffers fromwealth and poverty that are not well distributed. But England isEnglish; _esto perpetua_. England is English as France is French orIreland Irish; the great mass of men taking certain national traditionsfor granted. Now this gives us a totally different and a very mucheasier task. We have not got an inquisition, because we have not got acreed; but it is arguable that we do not need a creed, because we havegot a character. In any of the old nations the national unity ispreserved by the national type. Because we have a type we do not need tohave a test. 

Take that innocent question, 'Are you an anarchist?' which isintrinsically quite as impudent as 'Are you an optimist?' or 'Are you aphilanthropist?' I am not discussing here whether these things areright, but whether most of us are in a position to know them rightly. Now it is quite true that most Englishmen do not find it necessary to goabout all day asking each other whether they are anarchists. It is quitetrue that the phrase occurs on no British forms that I have seen. Butthis is not only because most of the Englishmen are not anarchists. Itis even more because even the anarchists are Englishmen. For instance, it would be easy to make fun of the American formula by noting that thecap would fit all sorts of bald academic heads. It might well bemaintained that Herbert Spencer was an anarchist. It is practicallycertain that Auberon Herbert was an anarchist. But Herbert Spencer wasan extraordinarily typical Englishman of the Nonconformist middle class. And Auberon Herbert was an extraordinarily typical English aristocrat ofthe old and genuine aristocracy. Every one knew in his heart that thesquire would not throw a bomb at the Queen, and the Nonconformist wouldnot throw a bomb at anybody. Every one knew that there was somethingsubconscious in a man like Auberon Herbert, which would have come outonly in throwing bombs at the enemies of England; as it did come out inhis son and namesake, the generous and unforgotten, who fell flingingbombs from the sky far beyond the German line. Every one knows thatnormally, in the last resort, the English gentleman is patriotic. Everyone knows that the English Nonconformist is national even when he deniesthat he is patriotic. Nothing is more notable indeed than the fact thatnobody is more stamped with the mark of his own nation than the man whosays that there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobden theInternational Man; but no man could be more English than Cobden. Everybody recognises Tolstoy as the iconoclast of all patriotism; butnobody could be more Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries wherethere are these national types, the types may be allowed to hold anytheories. Even if they hold certain theories, they are unlikely to docertain things. So the conscientious objector, in the English sense, may be and is one of the peculiar by-products of England. But theconscientious objector will probably have a conscientious objection tothrowing bombs. 

Now I am very far from intending to imply that these American tests aregood tests, or that there is no danger of tyranny becoming thetemptation of America. I shall have something to say later on about thattemptation or tendency. Nor do I say that they apply consistently thisconception of a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religiousand not racial selection. If they did apply that principle consistently, they would have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny thedemocratic ideal; an excellent thing but a rather improbable one. What Isay is that when we realise that this principle exists at all, we seethe whole position in a totally different perspective. We say that theAmericans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, ordoing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simplywondering what the devil they are doing. 

When we realise the democratic design of such a cosmopolitancommonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, wesee at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic. We see why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant. Anyone can see the practical point by merely transferring into private lifea problem like that of the two academic anarchists, who might by acoincidence be called the two Herberts. Suppose a man said, 'Buffle, myold Oxford tutor, wants to meet you; I wish you'd ask him down for a dayor two. He has the oddest opinions, but he's very stimulating. ' It wouldnot occur to us that the oddity of the Oxford don's opinions would leadhim to blow up the house; because the Oxford don is an English type. Suppose somebody said, 'Do let me bring old Colonel Robinson down forthe week-end; he's a bit of a crank but quite interesting. ' We shouldnot anticipate the colonel running amuck with a carving-knife andoffering up human sacrifice in the garden; for these are not among thedaily habits of an old English colonel; and because we know his habits, we do not care about his opinions. But suppose somebody offered to bringa person from the interior of Kamskatka to stay with us for a week ortwo, and added that his religion was a very extraordinary religion, weshould feel a little more inquisitive about what kind of religion itwas. If somebody wished to add a Hairy Ainu to the family party atChristmas, explaining that his point of view was so individual andinteresting, we should want to know a little more about it and him. Weshould be tempted to draw up as fantastic an examination paper as thatpresented to the emigrant going to America. We should ask what a HairyAinu was, and how hairy he was, and above all what sort of Ainu he was. Would etiquette require us to ask him to bring his wife? And if we didask him to bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? In short, asin the American formula, is he a polygamist? Merely as a point ofhousekeeping and accommodation the question is not irrelevant. Is theHairy Ainu content with hair, or does he wear any clothes? If the policeinsist on his wearing clothes, will he recognise the authority of thepolice? In short, as in the American formula, is he an anarchist?

Of course this generalisation about America, like other historicalthings, is subject to all sorts of cross divisions and exceptions, tobe considered in their place. The negroes are a special problem, becauseof what white men in the past did to them. The Japanese are a specialproblem, because of what men fear that they in the future may do towhite men. The Jews are a special problem, because of what they and theGentiles, in the past, present, and future, seem to have the habit ofdoing to each other. But the point is not that nothing exists in Americaexcept this idea; it is that nothing like this idea exists anywhereexcept in America. This idea is not internationalism; on the contrary itis decidedly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic, and wish tomake their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea ofmaking a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. Ina word, what is unique is not America but what is calledAmericanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazingambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are nottrying to Anglicise thousands of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers orGerman prisoners of war. America is the one place in the world wherethis process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is _not_ internationalisation. It would be truer to say it is the nationalisation of theinternationalised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation outof exiles. This is what at once illuminates and softens the moralregulations which we may really think faddist or fanatical. They areabnormal; but in one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless isabnormal. In short, it has long been recognised that America was anasylum. It is only since Prohibition that it has looked a little like alunatic asylum. 

It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that I stood with theofficial paper in my hand and these thoughts in my head. It was while Istood on English soil that I passed through the two stages of smilingand then sympathising; of realising that my momentary amusement, atbeing asked if I were not an Anarchist, was partly due to the fact thatI was not an American. And in truth I think there are some things a manought to know about America before he sees it. What we know of a countrybeforehand may not affect what we see that it is; but it will vitallyaffect what we appreciate it for being, because it will vitally affectwhat we expect it to be. I can honestly say that I had never expectedAmerica to be what nine-tenths of the newspaper critics invariablyassume it to be. I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very differentcolonists. During the war I felt that the very worst propaganda for theAllies was the propaganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point outthat in one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. If she isnot nearer to Bulgaria, she is nearer to Bulgars; if she is not nearerto Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohemians. In my New York hotel the headwaiter in the dining-room was a Bohemian; the head waiter in thegrill-room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the end of thestreet which for us are at the ends of the earth. I did my best topersuade my countrymen not to appeal to the American as if he were arather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces andhad not heard the latest news about the town. I shall record later someof those arresting realities which the traveller does not expect; andwhich, in some cases I fear, he actually does not see because he doesnot expect. I shall try to do justice to the psychology of what Mr. Belloc has called 'Eye-Openers in Travel. ' But there are some thingsabout America that a man ought to see even with his eyes shut. One isthat a state that came into existence solely through its repudiation andabhorrence of the British Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy ofthe British Constitution. Another is that the chief mark of theDeclaration of Independence is something that is not only absent fromthe British Constitution, but something which all our constitutionalistshave invariably thanked God, with the jolliest boasting and bragging, that they had kept out of the British Constitution. It is the thingcalled abstraction or academic logic. It is the thing which such jollypeople call theory; and which those who can practise it call thought. And the theory or thought is the very last to which English people areaccustomed, either by their social structure or their traditionalteaching. It is the theory of equality. It is the pure classicconception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen, and that no man should endure to be anything less. It is by no meansespecially intelligible to an Englishman, who tends at his best to thevirtues of the gentleman and at his worst to the vices of the snob. Theidealism of England, or if you will the romance of England, has not beenprimarily the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of America, wemay safely say, still revolves entirely round the citizen and hisromance. The realities are quite another matter, and we shall considerin its place the question of whether the ideal will be able to shapethe realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal isbesieged by inequalities of the most towering and insane description inthe industrial and economic field. It may be devoured by moderncapitalism, perhaps the worst inequality that ever existed among men. Ofall that we shall speak later. But citizenship is still the Americanideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but thereis no ideal opposed to that ideal. American plutocracy has never gotitself respected like English aristocracy. Citizenship is the Americanideal; and it has never been the English ideal. But it is surely anideal that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect in anEnglishman, if he will condescend to be also a man. In this vision ofmoulding many peoples into the visible image of the citizen, he may seea spiritual adventure which he can admire from the outside, at least asmuch as he admires the valour of the Moslems and much more than headmires the virtues of the Middle Ages. He need not set himself todevelop equality, but he need not set himself to misunderstand it. Hemay at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he maypossibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. Hemay realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all menbeing equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believebut cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals bywhich all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignityas intangible as death. He may at least be a philosopher and see thatequality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed scepticswho, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne intawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, withunwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion. 

In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extremedisproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing ofchanging lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies anddistortions. We find a man famous and cannot live long enough to findhim forgotten; we see a race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay. It is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men;it is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. It is whenmen have seen and suffered much and come at the end of more elaborateexperiments, that they see men as men under an equal light of death anddaily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being many. Nor is itin vain that these Western democrats have sought the blazonry of theirflag in that great multitude of immortal lights that endure behind thefires we see, and gathered them into the corner of Old Glory whoseground is like the glittering night. For veritably, in the spirit aswell as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill ourskies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; and whereverthe old shadow stoops upon the earth, the stars return. 

_A Meditation in a New York Hotel_

All this must begin with an apology and not an apologia. When I wentwandering about the States disguised as a lecturer, I was well awarethat I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I was even inthe worst possible position to be a sight-seer. A lecturer to Americanaudiences can hardly be in the holiday mood of a sight-seer. It israther the audience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a rathermelancholy sight. Some say that people come to see the lecturer and notto hear him; in which case it seems rather a pity that he should disturband distress their minds with a lecture. He might merely display himselfon a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like amonster in a menagerie. The circus elephant is not expected to make aspeech. But it is equally true that the circus elephant is not allowedto write a book. His impressions of travel would be somewhat sketchy andperhaps a little over-specialised. In merely travelling from circus tocircus he would, so to speak, move in rather narrow circles. Jumbo thegreat elephant (with whom I am hardly so ambitious as to comparemyself), before he eventually went to the Barnum show, passed aconsiderable and I trust happy part of his life in Regent's Park. But ifhe had written a book on England, founded on his impressions of the Zoo, it might have been a little disproportionate and even misleading in itsversion of the flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine thatlions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows andcountry lanes, or that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native toour landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologise inanticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like theelephant, I may have seen too much of a special enclosure where aspecial sort of lions are gathered together. I may exaggerate theterritorial, as distinct from the vertical space occupied by thespiritual giraffe; for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an exampleof Uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking, a high-brow. Above all, I shall probably make generalisations that are much too general; and areinsufficient through being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt all myimpressions are subject; and among them the negative generalisation withwhich I shall begin this rambling meditation on American hotels. 

In all my American wanderings I never saw such a thing as an inn. Theymay exist; but they do not arrest the traveller upon every road as theydo in England and in Europe. The saloons no longer existed when I wasthere, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxicants to thewealthier classes. But we feel that the saloons have been there; if onemay so express it, their absence is still present. They remain in thestructure of the street and the idiom of the language. But the saloonswere not inns. If they had been inns, it would have been far harder evenfor the power of modern plutocracy to root them out. There will be avery different chase when the White Hart is hunted to the forests orwhen the Red Lion turns to bay. But people could not feel about theAmerican saloon as they will feel about the English inns. They could notfeel that the Prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chuckingChaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the Mermaid. In justiceto the American Prohibitionists it must be realised that they were notdoing quite such desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon aspecially poisonous sort of place. They did feel that drinking-placeswere used only as drug-shops. So they have effected the greatreconstruction, by which it will be necessary to use only drug-shops asdrinking-places. But I am not dealing here with the problem ofProhibition except in so far as it is involved in the statement that thesaloons were in no sense inns. Secondly, of course, there are thehotels. There are indeed. There are hotels toppling to the stars, hotelscovering the acreage of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like amob of Babylonian or Assyrian monuments; but the hotels also are notinns. 

Broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in America. The pattern of it, which is a very rational pattern, is repeated in cities as remote fromeach other as the capitals of European empires. You may find that hotelrising among the red blooms of the warm spring woods of Nebraska, orwhitened with Canadian snows near the eternal noise of Niagara. Andbefore touching on this solid and simple pattern itself, I may remarkthat the same system of symmetry runs through all the details of theinterior. As one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel floor is likeanother hotel floor. If the passage outside your bedroom door, orhallway as it is called, contains, let us say, a small table with agreen vase and a stuffed flamingo, or some trifle of the sort, you maybe perfectly certain that there is exactly the same table, vase, andflamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that toweringhabitation. This is where it differs most perhaps from the crookedlandings and unexpected levels of the old English inns, even when theycall themselves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a magicmultiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these suites. It seemed tosuggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. I oncemyself entertained the notion of a story, in which a man was to beprevented from entering his house (the scene of some crime or calamity)by people who painted and furnished the next house to look exactly likeit; the assimilation going to the most fantastic lengths, such asaltering the numbering of houses in the street. I came to America andfound an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for the enactment of myphantasmal fraud. I offer the skeleton of my story with all humility tosome of the admirable lady writers of detective stories in America, toMiss Carolyn Wells, or Miss Mary Roberts Rhinehart, or Mrs. A. K. Greenof the unforgotten Leavenworth Case. Surely it might be possible for theunsophisticated Nimrod K. Moose, of Yellow Dog Flat, to come to New Yorkand be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions or recurrences. Surely something tells me that his beautiful daughter, the Rose of RedMurder Gulch, might seek for him in vain amid the apparentlyunmistakable surroundings of the thirty-second floor, while he was beingquietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty-third floor, an agentof the Green Claw (that formidable organisation); and all because thetwo floors looked exactly alike to the virginal Western eye. Theoriginal point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped walkedinto his own house after all, in spite of it being differently paintedand numbered, simply because he was absent-minded and used to taking acertain number of mechanical steps. This would not work in the hotel;because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real tameness ofmachinery, that even when we talk of a man turning mechanically we onlytalk metaphorically; for it is something that a mechanism cannot do. ButI think there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose in theNew York hotel. And that is unfortunately a rather fatal one. It is thatfar away in the remote desolation of Yellow Dog, among those outlyingand outlandish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset, thereis undoubtedly an hotel of exactly the same sort, with all its floorsexactly the same. 

Anyhow the general plan of the American hotel is commonly the same, and, as I have said, it is a very sound one so far as it goes. When I firstwent into one of the big New York hotels, the first impression wascertainly its bigness. It was called the Biltmore; and I wondered howmany national humorists had made the obvious comment of wishing they hadbuilt less. But it was not merely the Babylonian size and scale of suchthings, it was the way in which they are used. They are used almost aspublic streets, or rather as public squares. My first impression wasthat I was in some sort of high street or market-place during a carnivalor a revolution. True, the people looked rather rich for a revolutionand rather grave for a carnival; but they were congested in great crowdsthat moved slowly like people passing through an overcrowded railwaystation. Even in the dizzy heights of such a sky-scraper there could notpossibly be room for all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even todine in it. And, as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever exceptdrift into it and drift out again. Most of them had no more to do withthe hotel than I have with Buckingham Palace. I have never been inBuckingham Palace, and I have very seldom, thank God, been in the bighotels of this type that exist in London or Paris. But I cannot believethat mobs are perpetually pouring through the Hotel Cecil or the Savoyin this fashion, calmly coming in at one door and going out of theother. But this fact is part of the fundamental structure of theAmerican hotel; it is built upon a compromise that makes it possible. The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public streets andtreated as a public square. But above it and all round it runs anotherfloor in the form of a sort of deep gallery, furnished more luxuriouslyand looking down on the moving mobs beneath. No one is allowed on thisfloor except the guests or clients of the hotel. As I have been one ofthem myself, I trust it is not unsympathetic to compare them to activeanthropoids who can climb trees, and so look down in safety on the herdsor packs of wilder animals wandering and prowling below. Of course thereare modifications of this architectural plan, but they are generallyapproximations to it; it is the plan that seems to suit the social lifeof the American cities. There is generally something like a ground floorthat is more public, a half-floor or gallery above that is more private, and above that the bulk of the block of bedrooms, the huge hive with itsinnumerable and identical cells. 

The ladder of ascent in this tower is of course the lift, or, as it iscalled, the elevator. With all that we hear of American hustle andhurry it is rather strange that Americans seem to like more than we doto linger upon long words. And indeed there is an element of delay intheir diction and spirit, very little understood, which I may discusselsewhere. Anyhow they say elevator when we say lift, just as they sayautomobile when we say motor and stenographer when we say typist, orsometimes (by a slight confusion) typewriter. Which reminds me ofanother story that never existed, about a man who was accused of havingmurdered and dismembered his secretary when he had only taken his typingmachine to pieces; but we must not dwell on these digressions. TheAmericans may have another reason for giving long and ceremonious titlesto the lift. When first I came among them I had a suspicion that theypossessed and practised a new and secret religion, which was the cult ofthe elevator. I fancied they worshipped the lift, or at any rateworshipped in the lift. The details or data of this suspicion it werenow vain to collect, as I have regretfully abandoned it, except in sofar as they illustrate the social principles underlying the structuralplan of the building. Now an American gentleman invariably takes off hishat in the lift. He does not take off his hat in the hotel, even if itis crowded with ladies. But he always so salutes a lady in the elevator;and this marks the difference of atmosphere. The lift is a room, but thehotel is a street. But during my first delusion, of course, I assumedthat he uncovered in this tiny temple merely because he was in church. There is something about the very word elevator that expresses a greatdeal of his vague but idealistic religion. Perhaps that flying chapelwill eventually be ritualistically decorated like a chapel; possiblywith a symbolic scheme of wings. Perhaps a brief religious service willbe held in the elevator as it ascends; in a few well-chosen wordstouching the Utmost for the Highest. Possibly he would consent even tocall the elevator a lift, if he could call it an uplift. There would beno difficulty, except what I cannot but regard as the chief moralproblem of all optimistic modernism. I mean the difficulty of imagininga lift which is free to go up, if it is not also free to go down. 

I think I know my American friends and acquaintances too well toapologise for any levity in these illustrations. Americans make fun oftheir own institutions; and their own journalism is full of suchfanciful conjectures. The tall building is itself artistically akin tothe tall story. The very word sky-scraper is an admirable example of anAmerican lie. But I can testify quite as eagerly to the solid andsensible advantages of the symmetrical hotel. It is not only a patternof vases and stuffed flamingoes; it is also an equally accurate patternof cupboards and baths. It is a dignified and humane custom to have abathroom attached to every bedroom; and my impulse to sing the praisesof it brought me once at least into a rather quaint complication. Ithink it was in the city of Dayton; anyhow I remember there was aLaundry Convention going on in the same hotel, in a room verypatriotically and properly festooned with the stars and stripes, anddoubtless full of promise for the future of laundering. I wasinterviewed on the roof, within earshot of this debate, and may havebeen the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow, afteranswering the usual questions about Labour, the League of Nations, thelength of ladies' dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in arhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. Theeditor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of hiscontributor's 'story, ' and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such asjustice, freedom, the abstract disapproval of sweating, swindling, andthe like, paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eyebrightened. 'That's the only copy in the whole thing, ' he said, 'ABath-Tub in Every Home. ' So these words appeared in enormous lettersabove my portrait in the paper. It will be noted that, like many thingsthat practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. What Ihad commended as new and national was a bathroom in every bedroom. Evenfeudal and moss-grown England is not entirely ignorant of an occasionalbath-tub in the home. But what gave me great joy was what followed. Idiscovered with delight that many people, glancing rapidly at myportrait with its prodigious legend, imagined that it was a commercialadvertisement, and that I was a very self-advertising commercialtraveller. When I walked about the streets, I was supposed to betravelling in bath-tubs. Consider the caption of the portrait, and youwill see how similar it is to the true commercial slogan: 'We offer aBath-Tub in Every Home. ' And this charming error was doubtless clinchedby the fact that I had been found haunting the outer courts of thetemple of the ancient Guild of Lavenders. I never knew how many sharedthe impression; I regret to say that I only traced it with certainty intwo individuals. But I understand that it included the idea that I hadcome to the town to attend the Laundry Convention, and had made aneloquent speech to that senate, no doubt exhibiting my tubs. 

Such was the penalty of too passionate and unrestrained an admirationfor American bathrooms; yet the connection of ideas, howeverinconsequent, does cover the part of social practice for which theseAmerican institutions can really be praised. About everything likelaundry or hot and cold water there is not only organisation, but whatdoes not always or perhaps often go with it, efficiency. Americans areparticular about these things of dress and decorum; and it is a virtuewhich I very seriously recognise, though I find it very hard to emulate. But with them it is a virtue; it is not a mere convention, still less amere fashion. It is really related to human dignity rather than tosocial superiority. The really glorious thing about the American is thathe does not dress like a gentleman; he dresses like a citizen or acivilised man. His Puritanic particularity on certain points is reallydetachable from any definite social ambitions; these things are not apart of getting into society but merely of keeping out of savagery. Those millions and millions of middling people, that huge middle classespecially of the Middle West, are not near enough to any aristocracyeven to be sham aristocrats, or to be real snobs. But their standardsare secure; and though I do not really travel in a bath-tub, or believein the bath-tub philosophy and religion, I will not on this matterrecoil misanthropically from them: I prefer the tub of Dayton to the tubof Diogenes. On these points there is really something a million timesbetter than efficiency, and that is something like equality. 

In short, the American hotel is not America; but it is American. In somerespects it is as American as the English inn is English. And it issymbolic of that society in this among other things: that it does tendtoo much to uniformity; but that that very uniformity disguises not alittle natural dignity. The old Romans boasted that their republic was anation of kings. If we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we mightvery well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings, of every man witha gold crown on his head or an ivory sceptre in his hand. But it isarguable that we ought not to grow tired of the repetition of crowns andsceptres, any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars. Thewhole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorband animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitmanwould be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism alist of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms. I do notsneer at the generous effort of the giant; though I think, when all issaid, that it is a criticism of modern machinery that the effort shouldbe gigantic as well as generous. 

While there is so much repetition there is little repose. It is thepattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wall-paper; a pattern of figuresrunning and even leaping like the figures in a zoetrope. But even in thegroups where there was no hustle there was often something ofhomelessness. I do not mean merely that they were not dining at home;but rather that they were not at home even when dining, and dining attheir favourite hotel. They would frequently start up and dart from theroom at a summons from the telephone. It may have been fanciful, but Icould not help feeling a breath of home, as from a flap or flutter ofSt. George's Cross, when I first sat down in a Canadian hostelry, andread the announcement that no such telephonic or other summonses wereallowed in the dining-room. It may have been a coincidence, and theremay be American hotels with this merciful proviso and Canadian hotelswithout it; but the thing was symbolic even if it was not evidential. Ifelt as if I stood indeed upon English soil, in a place where peopleliked to have their meals in peace. 

The process of the summons is called 'paging, ' and consists of sending alittle boy with a large voice through all the halls and corridors of thebuilding, making them resound with a name. The custom is common, ofcourse, in clubs and hotels even in England; but in England it is a merewhisper compared with the wail with which the American page repeats theformula of 'Calling Mr. So and So. ' I remember a particularly crowded_parterre_ in the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of Pittsburg, through which wandered a youth with a voice the like of which I havenever heard in the land of the living, a voice like the cry of a lostspirit, saying again and again for ever, 'Carling Mr. Anderson. ' Onefelt that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps there never had beenany Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps he and every one else wandered inan abyss of bottomless scepticism; and he was but the victim of one outof numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a shadow withshadows and wailed by impassable streams. This is not exactly myphilosophy, but I feel sure it was his. And it is a mood that mayfrequently visit the mind in the centres of highly active and successfulindustrial civilisation. 

Such are the first idle impressions of the great American hotel, gainedby sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its driftingcrowds with thoughts equally drifting. The first impression is ofsomething enormous and rather unnatural, an impression that is graduallytempered by experience of the kindliness and even the tameness of somuch of that social order. But I should not be recording the sensationswith sincerity, if I did not touch in passing the note of somethingunearthly about that vast system to an insular traveller who sees it forthe first time. It is as if he were wandering in another world among thefixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal Utopia of the future. 

Yet I am not certain; and perhaps the best of all news is that nothingis really new. I sometimes have a fancy that many of these new things innew countries are but the resurrections of old things which have beenwickedly killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. I have looked overthe sea of little tables in some light and airy open-air café; and mythoughts have gone back to the plain wooden bench and wooden table thatstands solitary and weather-stained outside so many neglected Englishinns. We talk of experimenting in the French café, as of some fresh andalmost impudent innovation. But our fathers had the French café, in thesense of the free-and-easy table in the sun and air. The only differencewas that French democracy was allowed to develop its café, or multiplyits tables, while English plutocracy prevented any such popular growth. Perhaps there are other examples of old types and patterns, lost in theold oligarchy and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with a hintthat the new structures are not so very new; and that they remind me ofsomething very old. As I look from the balcony floor the crowds seem tofloat away and the colours to soften and grow pale, and I know I am inone of the simplest and most ancestral of human habitations. I amlooking down from the old wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn. This new architectural model, which I have described, is after all oneof the oldest European models, now neglected in Europe and especially inEngland. It was the theatre in which were enacted innumerable picaresquecomedies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from Sancho Panza toSam Weller. It served as the apparatus, like some gigantic toy set up inbricks and timber, for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis. The very terms of the original game were taken from the inn courtyard, and the players scored accordingly as they hit the buttery-hatch or theroof. Singular speculations hover in my mind as the scene darkens andthe quadrangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night. Someday perhaps this huge structure will be found standing in a solitudelike a skeleton; and it will be the skeleton of the Spotted Dog or theBlue Boar. It will wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be atavern. I do not know whether men will play tennis on its ground floor, with various scores and prizes for hitting the electric fan, or thelift, or the head waiter. Perhaps the very words will only remain aspart of some such rustic game. Perhaps the electric fan will no longerbe electric and the elevator will no longer elevate, and the waiter willonly wait to be hit. But at least it is only by the decay of modernplutocracy, which seems already to have begun, that the secret of thestructure even of this plutocratic palace can stand revealed. And afterlong years, when its lights are extinguished and only the long shadowsinhabit its halls and vestibules, there may come a new noise likethunder; of D'Artagnan knocking at the door. 

_A Meditation in Broadway_

When I had looked at the lights of Broadway by night, I made to myAmerican friends an innocent remark that seemed for some reason to amusethem. I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope ofcoloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of thetwo most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire. Isaid to them, in my simplicity, 'What a glorious garden of wonders thiswould be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read. '

Here it is but a text for a further suggestion. But let us suppose thatthere does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant, of the sort calledscornfully an illiterate peasant; by those who think that insisting onpeople reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies whoread in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. On thisprinciple indeed, a peasant merely acquainted with things of littlepractical use to mankind, such as ploughing, cutting wood, or growingvegetables, would very probably be excluded; and it is not for us tocriticise from the outside the philosophy of those who would keep outthe farmer and let in the forger. But let us suppose, if only for thesake of argument, that the peasant is walking under the artificial sunsand stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has escaped to theland of liberty upon some general rumour and romance of the story ofits liberation, but without being yet able to understand the arbitrarysigns of its alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar higherthan the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood broader than Broadway. Realising that he had arrived on an evening of exceptional festivity, worthy to be blazoned with all this burning heraldry, he would pleasehimself by guessing what great proclamation or principle of the Republichung in the sky like a constellation or rippled across the street like acomet. He would be shrewd enough to guess that the three festoonsfringed with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for'Government of the People, For the People, By the People'; for it mustobviously be that, unless it were 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. ' Hisshrewdness would perhaps be a little shaken if he knew that the triadstood for 'Tang Tonic To-day; Tang Tonic To-morrow; Tang Tonic All theTime. ' He will soon identify a restless ribbon of red lettering, red hotand rebellious, as the saying, 'Give me liberty or give me death. ' Hewill fail to identify it as the equally famous saying, 'Skyoline HasGout Beaten to a Frazzle. ' Therefore it was that I desired the peasantto walk down that grove of fiery trees, under all that golden foliage, and fruits like monstrous jewels, as innocent as Adam before the Fall. He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming sword or the purpleand peacock plumage of the seraphim; so long as he did not go near theTree of Knowledge. 

In other words, if once he went to school it would be all up; and indeedI fear in any case he would soon discover his error. If he stood wildlywaving his hat for liberty in the middle of the road as Chunk Chutneypicked itself out in ruby stars upon the sky, he would impede theexcellent but extremely rigid traffic system of New York. If he fell onhis knees before a sapphire splendour, and began saying an Ave Mariaunder a mistaken association, he would be conducted kindly but firmly byan Irish policeman to a more authentic shrine. But though the foreignsimplicity might not long survive in New York, it is quite a mistake tosuppose that such foreign simplicity cannot enter New York. He may beexcluded for being illiterate, but he cannot be excluded for beingignorant, nor for being innocent. Least of all can he be excluded forbeing wiser in his innocence than the world in its knowledge. There ishere indeed more than one distinction to be made. New York is acosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans. Most of themasses in New York have a nation, whether or no it be the nation towhich New York belongs. Those who are Americanised are American, andvery patriotically American. Those who are not thus nationalised are notin the least internationalised. They simply continue to be themselves;the Irish are Irish; the Jews are Jewish; and all sorts of other tribescarry on the traditions of remote European valleys almost untouched. Inshort, there is a sort of slender bridge between their old country andtheir new, which they either cross or do not cross, but which theyseldom simply occupy. They are exiles or they are citizens; there is nomoment when they are cosmopolitans. But very often the exiles bring withthem not only rooted traditions, but rooted truths. 

Indeed it is to a great extent the thought of these strange souls incrude American garb that gives a meaning to the masquerade of New York. In the hotel where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a Bohemian;and I am glad to say that he called himself a Bohemian. I have alreadyprotested sufficiently, before American audiences, against the pedantryof perpetually talking about Czecho-Slovakia. I suggested to my Americanfriends that the abandonment of the word Bohemian in its historicalsense might well extend to its literary and figurative sense. We mightbe expected to say, 'I'm afraid Henry has got into very Czecho-Slovakianhabits lately, ' or 'Don't bother to dress; it's quite a Czecho-Slovakianaffair. ' Anyhow my Bohemian would have nothing to do with such nonsense;he called himself a son of Bohemia, and spoke as such in his criticismsof America, which were both favourable and unfavourable. He was a squatman, with a sturdy figure and a steady smile; and his eyes were likedark pools in the depth of a darker forest, but I do not think he hadever been deceived by the lights of Broadway. 

But I found something like my real innocent abroad, my real peasantamong the sky-signs, in another part of the same establishment. He was amuch leaner man, equally dark, with a hook nose, hungry face, and fierceblack moustaches. He also was a waiter, and was in the costume of awaiter, which is a smarter edition of the costume of a lecturer. As hewas serving me with clam chowder or some such thing, I fell into speechwith him and he told me he was a Bulgar. I said something like, 'I'mafraid I don't know as much as I ought to about Bulgaria. I suppose mostof your people are agricultural, aren't they?' He did not stir an inchfrom his regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice andsaid, 'Yes. From the earth we come and to the earth we return; whenpeople get away from that they are lost. '

To hear such a thing said by the waiter was alone an epoch in the lifeof an unfortunate writer of fantastic novels. To see him clear away theclam chowder like an automaton, and bring me more iced water like anautomaton or like nothing on earth except an American waiter (for pilingup ice is the cold passion of their lives), and all this after havinguttered something so dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and sostartlingly true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the pictureof the peasant admiring Broadway. So he passed, with his artificialclothes and manners, lit up with all the ghastly artificial light of thehotel, and all the ghastly artificial life of the city; and his heartwas like his own remote and rocky valley, where those unchanging wordswere carved as on a rock. 

I do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the question thisraises about the Americanisation of the Bulgar. It has many aspects, ofsome of which most Englishmen and even some Americans are ratherunconscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a loyalty to land couldnot be Americanised in New York; but it is not so certain that he couldnot be Americanised in America. We might almost say that a peasantry ishidden in the heart of America. So far as our impressions go, it is asecret. It is rather an open secret; covering only some thousand squaremiles of open prairie. But for most of our countrymen it is somethinginvisible, unimagined, and unvisited; the simple truth that where allthose acres are there is agriculture, and where all that agriculture isthere is considerable tendency towards distributive or decentlyequalised property, as in a peasantry. On the other hand, there arethose who say that the Bulgar will never be Americanised, that he onlycomes to be a waiter in America that he may afford to return to be apeasant in Bulgaria. I cannot decide this issue, and indeed I did notintroduce it to this end. I was led to it by a certain line ofreflection that runs along the Great White Way, and I will continue tofollow it. The criticism, if we could put it rightly, not only coversmore than New York but more than the whole New World. Any argumentagainst it is quite as valid against the largest and richest cities ofthe Old World, against London or Liverpool or Frankfort or Belfast. Butit is in New York that we see the argument most clearly, because we seethe thing thus towering into its own turrets and breaking into its ownfireworks. 

I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the modern city with itssky-scrapers and sky-signs. I mean that which laments the loss of beautyand its sacrifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of thetruth. Years ago, when people used to say the Salvation Army doubtlesshad good intentions, but we must all deplore its methods, I pointed outthat the very contrary is the case. Its method, the method of drums anddemocratic appeal, is that of the Franciscans or any other march of theChurch Militant. It was precisely its aims that were dubious, with theirdissenting morality and despotic finance. It is somewhat the same withthings like the sky-signs in Broadway. The aesthete must not ask me tomingle my tears with his, because these things are merely useful andugly. For I am not specially inclined to think them ugly; but I amstrongly inclined to think them useless. As a matter of art for art'ssake, they seem to me rather artistic. As a form of practical socialwork they seem to me stark stupid waste. If Mr. Bilge is rich enough tobuild a tower four hundred feet high and give it a crown of goldencrescents and crimson stars, in order to draw attention to hismanufacture of the Paradise Tooth Paste or The Seventh Heaven Cigar, Ido not feel the least disposition to thank him for any serious form ofsocial service. I have never tried the Seventh Heaven Cigar; indeed apremonition moves me towards the belief that I shall go down to the dustwithout trying it. I have every reason to doubt whether it does anyparticular good to those who smoke it, or any good to anybody exceptthose who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge's usefulness consists in beinguseful to Mr. Bilge, and all the rest is illusion and sentimentalism. But because I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to theprofanity of saying that fire is only fire? Shall I blaspheme crimsonstars any more than crimson sunsets, or deny that those moons are goldenany more than that this grass is green? If a child saw these colouredlights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other colouredtoys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, todance in respectful imitation of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of somuch sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, that Ishould be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportionreturn to extinguish them. I fear the day is breaking, and the broaddaylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all thisdelightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and allsorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, andtheir stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial, useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, evenwhen they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They willnot be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests andpeasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements. Only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation ofmen could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. People who area little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent, seethe rather simple joke; and are not impressed by this or any other formof self-praise. Almost any other men in almost any other age would haveseen the joke. If you had said to a man in the Stone Age, 'Ugg says Uggmakes the best stone hatchets, ' he would have perceived a lack ofdetachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you had saidto a medieval peasant, 'Robert the Bowyer proclaims, with three blastsof a horn, that he makes good bows, ' the peasant would have said, 'Well, of course he does, ' and thought about something more important. It isonly among people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerismthat so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever havebeen tried at all. And if ever we have again, as for other reasons Icannot but hope we shall, a more democratic distribution of property anda more agricultural basis of national life, it would seem at first sightonly too likely that all this beautiful superstition will perish, andthe fairyland of Broadway with all its varied rainbows fade away. Forsuch people the Seventh Heaven Cigar, like the nineteenth-century city, will have ended in smoke. And even the smoke of it will have vanished. 

But the next stage of reflection brings us back to the peasant lookingat the lights of Broadway. It is not true to say in the strict sensethat the peasant has never seen such things before. The truth is that hehas seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much larger purpose. Peasants also have their ritual and ornament, but it is to adorn morereal things. Apart from our first fancy about the peasant who could notread, there is no doubt about what would be apparent to a peasant whocould read, and who could understand. For him also fire is sacred, forhim also colour is symbolic. But where he sets up a candle to light thelittle shrine of St. Joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred candles tolight the Seventh Heaven Cigar. He is used to the colours in churchwindows showing red for martyrs or blue for madonnas; but here he canonly conclude that all the colours of the rainbow belong to Mr. Bilge. Now upon the aesthetic side he might well be impressed; but it isexactly on the social and even scientific side that he has a right tocriticise. If he were a Chinese peasant, for instance, and came from aland of fireworks, he would naturally suppose that he had happened toarrive at a great firework display in celebration of something; perhapsthe Sacred Emperor's birthday, or rather birthnight. It would graduallydawn on the Chinese philosopher that the Emperor could hardly be bornevery night. And when he learnt the truth the philosopher, if he was aphilosopher, would be a little disappointed . .. Possibly a littledisdainful. 

Compare, for instance, these everlasting fireworks with the damp squibsand dying bonfires of Guy Fawkes Day. That quaint and even queernational festival has been fading for some time out of English life. Still, it was a national festival, in the double sense that itrepresented some sort of public spirit pursued by some sort of popularimpulse. People spent money on the display of fireworks; they did notget money by it. And the people who spent money were often those who hadvery little money to spend. It had something of the glorious andfanatical character of making the poor poorer. It did not, like theadvertisements, have only the mean and materialistic character of makingthe rich richer. In short, it came from the people and it appealed tothe nation. The historical and religious cause in which it originated isnot mine; and I think it has perished partly through being tied to ahistorical theory for which there is no future. I think this isillustrated in the very fact that the ceremonial is merely negative anddestructive. Negation and destruction are very noble things as far asthey go, and when they go in the right direction; and the popularexpression of them has always something hearty and human about it. Ishall not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism, whetherliterary or musical, to bear upon the little boys who drag about abolster and a paper mask, calling out

 Guy Fawkes Guy Hit him in the eye. 

But I admit it is a disadvantage that they have not a saint or hero tocrown in effigy as well as a traitor to burn in effigy. I admit thatpopular Protestantism has become too purely negative for people towreathe in flowers the statue of Mr. Kensit or even of Dr. Clifford. Ido not disguise my preference for popular Catholicism; which still hasstatues that can be wreathed in flowers. I wish our national feast offireworks revolved round something positive and popular. I wish thebeauty of a Catherine Wheel were displayed to the glory of St. Catherine. I should not especially complain if Roman candles were reallyRoman candles. But this negative character does not destroy the nationalcharacter; which began at least in disinterested faith and has ended atleast in disinterested fun. There is nothing disinterested at all aboutthe new commercial fireworks. There is nothing so dignified as a dingyguy among the lights of Broadway. In that thoroughfare, indeed, the veryword guy has another and milder significance. An American friendcongratulated me on the impression I produced on a lady interviewer, observing, 'She says you're a regular guy. ' This puzzled me a little atthe time. 'Her description is no doubt correct, ' I said, 'but I confessthat it would never have struck me as specially complimentary. ' But itappears that it is one of the most graceful of compliments, in theoriginal American. A guy in America is a colourless term for a humanbeing. All men are guys, being endowed by their Creator with certain . .. But I am misled by another association. And a regular guy means, Ipresume, a reliable or respectable guy. The point here, however, is thatthe guy in the grotesque English sense does represent the dilapidatedremnant of a real human tradition of symbolising real historic ideals bythe sacramental mystery of fire. It is a great fall from the lowest ofthese lowly bonfires to the highest of the modern sky-signs. The newillumination does not stand for any national ideal at all; and what isyet more to the point, it does not come from any popular enthusiasm atall. That is where it differs from the narrowest national Protestantismof the English institution. Mobs have risen in support of No Popery; nomobs are likely to rise in defence of the New Puffery. Many a poor crazyOrangeman has died saying, 'To Hell with the Pope'; it is doubtfulwhether any man will ever, with his last breath, frame the ecstaticwords, 'Try Hugby's Chewing Gum. ' These modern and mercantile legendsare imposed upon us by a mercantile minority, and we are merely passiveto the suggestion. The hypnotist of high finance or big business merelywrites his commands in heaven with a finger of fire. All men really areguys, in the sense of dummies. We are only the victims of hispyrotechnic violence; and it is he who hits us in the eye. 

This is the real case against that modern society that is symbolised bysuch art and architecture. It is not that it is toppling, but that it istop-heavy. It is not that it is vulgar, but rather that it is notpopular. In other words, the democratic ideal of countries like America, while it is still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issuewith another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things onearth the most undemocratic. America is not alone in possessing theindustrialism, but she is alone in emphasising the ideal that striveswith industrialism. Industrial capitalism and ideal democracy areeverywhere in controversy; but perhaps only here are they in conflict. France has a democratic ideal; but France is not industrial. England andGermany are industrial; but England and Germany are not reallydemocratic. Of course when I speak here of industrialism I speak ofgreat industrial areas; there is, as will be noted later, another sideto all these countries; there is in America itself not only a great dealof agricultural society, but a great deal of agricultural equality;just as there are still peasants in Germany and may some day again bepeasants in England. But the point is that the ideal and its enemy thereality are here crushed very close to each other in the high, narrowcity; and that the sky-scraper is truly named because its top, toweringin such insolence, is scraping the stars off the American sky, the veryheaven of the American spirit. 

That seems to me the main outline of the whole problem. In the firstchapter of this book, I have emphasised the fact that equality is stillthe ideal though no longer the reality of America. I should like toconclude this one by emphasising the fact that the reality of moderncapitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even splendours thatmight well stagger the wavering and impressionable modern spirit. Uponthe issue of that struggle depends the question of whether this newgreat civilisation continues to exist, and even whether any one cares ifit exists or not. I have already used the parable of the American flag, and the stars that stand for a multitudinous equality; I might here takethe opposite symbol of these artificial and terrestrial stars flaming onthe forehead of the commercial city; and note the peril of the lastillusion, which is that the artificial stars may seem to fill theheavens, and the real stars to have faded from sight. But I am contentfor the moment to reaffirm the merely imaginative pleasure of thosedizzy turrets and dancing fires. If those nightmare buildings werereally all built for nothing, how noble they would be! The fact thatthey were really built for something need not unduly depress us for amoment, or drag down our soaring fancies. There is something about thesevertical lines that suggests a sort of rush upwards, as of greatcataracts topsy-turvy. I have spoken of fireworks, but here I shouldrather speak of rockets. There is only something underneath the mindmurmuring that nothing remains at last of a flaming rocket except afalling stick. I have spoken of Babylonian perspectives, and of wordswritten with a fiery finger, like that huge unhuman finger that wrote onBelshazzar's wall. .. . But what did it write on Belshazzar's wall?. .. Iam content once more to end on a note of doubt and a rather darksympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, farup in the divine vacuum of the night. 

'From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when people get awayfrom that they are lost. '

_Irish and other Interviewers_

It is often asked what should be the first thing that a man sees when helands in a foreign country; but I think it should be the vision of hisown country. At least when I came into New York Harbour, a sort of greyand green cloud came between me and the towers with multitudinouswindows, white in the winter sunlight; and I saw an old brown housestanding back among the beech-trees at home, the house of only one amongmany friends and neighbours, but one somehow so sunken in the very heartof England as to be unconscious of her imperial or internationalposition, and out of the sound of her perilous seas. But what made mostclear the vision that revisited me was something else. Before we touchedland the men of my own guild, the journalists and reporters, had alreadyboarded the ship like pirates. And one of them spoke to me in an accentthat I knew; and thanked me for all I had done for Ireland. And it wasat that moment that I knew most vividly that what I wanted was to dosomething for England. 

Then, as it chanced, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and sawthat the great bronze was gleaming green in the morning light. I hadmade all the obvious jokes about the statue of Liberty. I found it had asoothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to urge, as apoint of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to theFrench, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine. I proposedthat the last liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libationbefore it. And then I suddenly remembered that this Liberty was still insome sense enlightening the world, or one part of the world; was a lampfor one sort of wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. To onepersecuted people at least this land had really been an asylum; even ifrecent legislation (as I have said) had made them think it a lunaticasylum. They had made it so much their home that the very colour of thecountry seemed to change with the infusion; as the bronze of the greatstatue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green. 

It is a commonplace that the Englishman has been stupid in his relationswith the Irish; but he has been far more stupid in his relations withthe Americans on the subject of the Irish. His propaganda has been worsethan his practice; and his defence more ill-considered than the mostindefensible things that it was intended to defend. There is in thismatter a curious tangle of cross-purposes, which only a parallel examplecan make at all clear. And I will note the point here, because it issome testimony to its vivid importance that it was really the first Ihad to discuss on American soil with an American citizen. In a doublesense I touched Ireland before I came to America. I will take animaginary instance from another controversy; in order to show how theapology can be worse than the action. The best we can say for ourselvesis worse than the worst that we can do. 

There was a time when English poets and other publicists could always beinspired with instantaneous indignation about the persecuted Jews inRussia. We have heard less about them since we heard more about thepersecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great many middle-classEnglishmen already who wish that Trotsky had been persecuted a littlemore. But even in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a curiousfashion; and unconsciously distinguished between the Jews whom they hadnever seen, in Warsaw, and the Jews whom they had often seen inWhitechapel. It seemed to be assumed that, by a curious coincidence, Russia possessed not only the very worst Anti-Semites but the very bestSemites. A moneylender in London might be like Judas Iscariot; but amoneylender in Moscow must be like Judas Maccabaeus. 

Nevertheless there remained in our common sense an unconscious butfundamental comprehension of the unity of Israel; a sense that somethings could be said, and some could not be said, about the Jews as awhole. Suppose that even in those days, to say nothing of these, anEnglish protest against Russian Anti-Semitism had been answered by theRussian Anti-Semites, and suppose the answer had been somewhat asfollows:--

'It is all very well for foreigners to complain of our denying civicrights to our Jewish subjects; but we know the Jews better than they do. They are a barbarous people, entirely primitive, and very like thesimple savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers. It isquite impossible to make them understand ordinary numbers, to saynothing of simple economics. They do not realise the meaning or thevalue of money. No Jew anywhere in the world can get into his stupidhead the notion of a bargain, or of exchanging one thing for another. Their hopeless incapacity for commerce or finance would retard theprogress of our people, would prevent the spread of any sort of economiceducation, would keep the whole country on a level lower than that ofthe most prehistoric methods of barter. What Russia needs most is amercantile middle class; and it is unjust to ask us to swamp its smallbeginnings in thousands of these rude tribesmen, who cannot do a sum ofsimple addition, or understand the symbolic character of a threepennybit. We might as well be asked to give civic rights to cows and pigs asto this unhappy, half-witted race who can no more count than the beastsof the field. In every intellectual exercise they are hopelesslyincompetent; no Jew can play chess; no Jew can learn languages; no Jewhas ever appeared in the smallest part in any theatrical performance; noJew can give or take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument. These people are our subjects; and we understand them. We accept fullresponsibility for treating such troglodytes on our own terms. '

It would not be entirely convincing. It would sound a little far-fetchedand unreal. But it would sound exactly like our utterances about theIrish, as they sound to all Americans, and rather especially toAnti-Irish Americans. That is exactly the impression we produce on thepeople of the United States when we say, as we do say in substance, something like this: 'We mean no harm to the poor dear Irish, so dreamy, so irresponsible, so incapable of order or organisation. If we were towithdraw from their country they would only fight among themselves; theyhave no notion of how to rule themselves. There is something charmingabout their unpracticability, about their very incapacity for the coarsebusiness of politics. But for their own sakes it is impossible to leavethese emotional visionaries to ruin themselves in the attempt to rulethemselves. They are like children; but they are our own children, andwe understand them. We accept full responsibility for acting as theirparents and guardians. '

Now the point is not only that this view of the Irish is false, but thatit is the particular view that the Americans know to be false. While weare saying that the Irish could not organise, the Americans arecomplaining, often very bitterly, of the power of Irish organisation. While we say that the Irishman could not rule himself, the Americans aresaying, more or less humorously, that the Irishman rules them. A highlyintelligent professor said to me in Boston, 'We have solved the Irishproblem here; we have an entirely independent Irish Government. ' Whilewe are complaining, in an almost passionate manner, of the impotence ofmere cliques of idealists and dreamers, they are complaining, often in avery indignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses andbullies. There are a great many Americans who pity the Irish, verynaturally and very rightly, for the historic martyrdom which theirpatriotism has endured. But there are a great many Americans who do notpity the Irish in the least. They would be much more likely to pity theEnglish; only this particular way of talking tends rather to make themdespise the English. Thus both the friends of Ireland and the foes ofIreland tend to be the foes of England. We make one set of enemies byour action, and another by our apology. 

It is a thing that can from time to time be found in history; amisunderstanding that really has a moral. The English excuse would carrymuch more weight if it had more sincerity and more humility. There area considerable number of people in the United States who couldsympathise with us, if we would say frankly that we fear the Irish. Those who thus despise our pity might possibly even respect our fear. The argument I have often used in other places comes back withprodigious and redoubled force, after hearing anything of Americanopinion; the argument that the only reasonable or reputable excuse forthe English is the excuse of a patriotic sense of peril; and that theUnionist, if he must be a Unionist, should use that and no other. Whenthe Unionist has said that he dare not let loose against himself acaptive he has so cruelly wronged, he has said all that he has to say;all that he has ever had to say; all that he will ever have to say. Heis like a man who has sent a virile and rather vindictive rival unjustlyto penal servitude; and who connives at the continuance of the sentence, not because he himself is particularly vindictive, but because he isafraid of what the convict will do when he comes out of prison. This isnot exactly a moral strength, but it is a very human weakness; and thatis the most that can be said for it. All other talk, about Celtic frenzyor Catholic superstition, is cant invented to deceive himself or todeceive the world. But the vital point to realise is that it is cantthat cannot possibly deceive the American world. In the matter of theIrishman the American is not to be deceived. It is not merely true tosay that he knows better. It is equally true to say that he knows worse. He knows vices and evils in the Irishman that are entirely hidden in thehazy vision of the Englishman. He knows that our unreal slanders areinconsistent even with the real sins. To us Ireland is a shadowy Isle ofSunset, like Atlantis, about which we can make up legends. To him it isa positive ward or parish in the heart of his huge cities, likeWhitechapel; about which even we cannot make legends but only lies. And, as I have said, there are some lies we do not tell even aboutWhitechapel. We do not say it is inhabited by Jews too stupid to countor know the value of a coin. 

The first thing for any honest Englishman to send across the sea isthis; that the English have not the shadow of a notion of what they areup against in America. They have never even heard of the batteries ofalmost brutal energy, of which I had thus touched a live wire evenbefore I landed. People talk about the hypocrisy of England in dealingwith a small nationality. What strikes me is the stupidity of England insupposing that she is dealing with a small nationality; when she isreally dealing with a very large nationality. She is dealing with anationality that often threatens, even numerically, to dominate all theother nationalities of the United States. The Irish are not decaying;they are not unpractical; they are scarcely even scattered; they are noteven poor. They are the most powerful and practical world-combinationwith whom we can decide to be friends or foes; and that is why I thoughtfirst of that still and solid brown house in Buckinghamshire, standingback in the shadow of the trees. 

Among my impressions of America I have deliberately put first the figureof the Irish-American interviewer, standing on the shore more symbolicthan the statue of Liberty. The Irish interviewer's importance for theEnglish lay in the fact of his being an Irishman, but there was alsoconsiderable interest in the circumstance of his being an interviewer. And as certain wild birds sometimes wing their way far out to sea andare the first signal of the shore, so the first Americans the travellermeets are often American interviewers; and they are generally birds of afeather, and they certainly flock together. In this respect, there is aslight difference in the etiquette of the craft in the two countries, which I was delighted to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. If I could atthat moment have flown back to Fleet Street I am happy to reflect thatnobody in the world would in the least wish to interview me. I shouldattract no more attention than the stone griffin opposite the LawCourts; both monsters being grotesque but also familiar. But supposingfor the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview me, it isfairly certain that the fact of one paper publishing such an interviewwould rather prevent the other papers from doing so. The repetition ofthe same views of the same individual in two places would be consideredrather bad journalism; it would have an air of stolen thunder, not tosay stage thunder. 

But in America the fact of my landing and lecturing was evidentlyregarded in the same light as a murder or a great fire, or any otherterrible but incurable catastrophe, a matter of interest to all pressmenconcerned with practical events. One of the first questions I was askedwas how I should be disposed to explain the wave of crime in New York. Naturally I replied that it might possibly be due to the number ofEnglish lecturers who had recently landed. In the mood of the moment itseemed possible that, if they had all been interviewed, regrettableincidents might possibly have taken place. But this was only the mood ofthe moment, and even as a mood did not last more than a moment. Andsince it has reference to a rather common and a rather unjust conceptionof American journalism, I think it well to take it first as a fallacy tobe refuted, though the refutation may require a rather longer approach. 

I have generally found that the traveller fails to understand a foreigncountry, through treating it as a tendency and not as a balance. But ifa thing were always tending in one direction it would soon tend todestruction. Everything that merely progresses finally perishes. Everynation, like every family, exists upon a compromise, and commonly arather eccentric compromise; using the word 'eccentric' in the sense ofsomething that is somehow at once crazy and healthy. Now the foreignercommonly sees some feature that he thinks fantastic without seeing thefeature that balances it. The ordinary examples are obvious enough. AnEnglishman dining inside a hotel on the boulevards thinks the Frencheccentric in refusing to open a window. But he does not think theEnglish eccentric in refusing to carry their chairs and tables out on tothe pavement in Ludgate Circus. An Englishman will go poking about inlittle Swiss or Italian villages, in wild mountains or in remoteislands, demanding tea; and never reflects that he is like a Chinamanwho should enter all the wayside public-houses in Kent and Sussex anddemand opium. But the point is not merely that he demands what he cannotexpect to enjoy; it is that he ignores even what he does enjoy. He doesnot realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, _vinordinaire_, which to him should be a glorious jest like the phrase'common gold' or 'daily diamonds. ' These are the simple and self-evidentcases; but there are many more subtle cases of the same thing; of thetendency to see that the nation fills up its own gap with its ownsubstitute; or corrects its own extravagance with its own precaution. The national antidote generally grows wild in the woods side by sidewith the national poison. If it did not, all the natives would be dead. For it is so, as I have said, that nations necessarily die of theundiluted poison called progress. 

It is so in this much-abused and over-abused example of the Americanjournalist. The American interviewers really have exceedingly goodmanners for the purposes of their trade, granted that it is necessary topursue their trade. And even what is called their hustling method cantruly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways; for if they hustlein, they also hustle out. It may not at first sight seem the verywarmest compliment to a gentleman to congratulate him on the fact thathe soon goes away. But it really is a tribute to his perfection in avery delicate social art; and I am quite serious when I say that in thisrespect the interviewers are artists. It might be more difficult for anEnglishman to come to the point, particularly the sort of point whichAmerican journalists are supposed, with some exaggeration, to aim at. Itmight be more difficult for an Englishman to ask a total stranger on thespur of the moment for the exact inscription on his mother's grave; butI really think that if an Englishman once got so far as that he would govery much farther, and certainly go on very much longer. The Englishmanwould approach the churchyard by a rather more wandering woodland path;but if once he had got to the grave I think he would have much moredisposition, so to speak, to sit down on it. Our own nationaltemperament would find it decidedly more difficult to disconnect whenconnections had really been established. Possibly that is the reason whyour national temperament does not establish them. I suspect that thereal reason that an Englishman does not talk is that he cannot leave offtalking. I suspect that my solitary countrymen, hiding in separaterailway compartments, are not so much retiring as a race of Trappists asescaping from a race of talkers. 

However this may be, there is obviously something of practical advantagein the ease with which the American butterfly flits from flower toflower. He may in a sense force his acquaintance on us, but he does notforce himself on us. Even when, to our prejudices, he seems to insist onknowing us, at least he does not insist on our knowing him. It may be, to some sensibilities, a bad thing that a total stranger should talk asif he were a friend, but it might possibly be worse if he insisted onbeing a friend before he would talk like one. To a great deal of theinterviewing, indeed much the greater part of it, even this criticismdoes not apply; there is nothing which even an Englishman of extremesensibility could regard as particularly private; the questions involvedare generally entirely public, and treated with not a little publicspirit. But my only reason for saying here what can be said even for theworst exceptions is to point out this general and neglected principle;that the very thing that we complain of in a foreigner generally carrieswith it its own foreign cure. American interviewing is generally veryreasonable, and it is always very rapid. And even those to whom talkingto an intelligent fellow creature is as horrible as having a tooth outmay still admit that American interviewing has many of the qualities ofAmerican dentistry. 

Another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration ofthe vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between thearticles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore thatdistinction. The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seenin American 'stories' have always been in the headlines. And theheadlines are written by somebody else; some solitary and savage cyniclocked up in the office, hating all mankind, and raging and revenginghimself at random, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman cansafely be let loose to wander about the town. 

For instance, I talked to two decidedly thoughtful fellow journalistsimmediately on my arrival at a town in which there had been some labourtroubles. I told them my general view of Labour in the very largest andperhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that the one greattruth to be taught to the middle classes was that Capitalism was itselfa crisis, and a passing crisis; that it was not so much that it wasbreaking down as that it had never really stood up. Slaveries couldlast, and peasantries could last; but wage-earning communities couldhardly even live, and were already dying. 

All this moral and even metaphysical generalisation was most fairly andmost faithfully reproduced by the interviewer, who had actually heard itcasually and idly spoken. But on the top of this column of politicalphilosophy was the extraordinary announcement in enormous letters, 'Chesterton Takes Sides in Trolley Strike. ' This was inaccurate. When Ispoke I not only did not know that there was any trolley strike, but Idid not know what a trolley strike was. I should have had an indistinctidea that a large number of citizens earned their living by carryingthings about in wheel-barrows, and that they had desisted from thebeneficent activities. Any one who did not happen to be a journalist, orknow a little about journalism, American and English, would havesupposed that the same man who wrote the article had suddenly gone madand written the title. But I know that we have here to deal with twodifferent types of journalists; and the man who writes the headlines Iwill not dare to describe; for I have not seen him except in dreams. 

Another innocent complication is that the interviewer does sometimestranslate things into his native language. It would not seem odd that aFrench interviewer should translate them into French; and it is certainthat the American interviewer sometimes translates them into American. Those who imagine the two languages to be the same are more innocentthan any interviewer. To take one out of the twenty examples, some ofwhich I have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had said that Ihad the reputation of being a nut. I should be flattered but faintlysurprised at such a tribute to my dress and dashing exterior. I shouldafterwards be sobered and enlightened by discovering that in America anut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile person. And as Ihave here to translate their American phrase into English, it may bevery defensible that they should translate my English phrases intoAmerican. Anyhow they often do translate them into American. In answerto the usual question about Prohibition I had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact withit, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always breakit. From the printed interview it appeared that I had said, 'Prohibition! All matter of dollar sign. ' This is almost avowedtranslation, like a French translation. Nobody can suppose that it wouldcome natural to an Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about adollar sign--whatever that may be. It is exactly as if he had made metalk about the Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre as 'a cent plain, and twocents coloured' or condemned a parsimonious policy as dime-wise anddollar-foolish. Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatestAmerican writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said, but aftermentioning several names, I said that the greatest natural genius andartistic force was probably Walt Whitman. The printed interview is moreprecise; and students of my literary and conversational style will beinterested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt Whitman was your onereal red-blooded man. ' Here again I hardly think the translation canhave been quite unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware thatI do not talk like that, but I fancy that the same fact would havedawned on the journalist to whom I had been talking. And even thistrivial point carries with it the two truths which must be, I fear, therather monotonous moral of these pages. The first is that America andEngland can be far better friends when sharply divided than whenshapelessly amalgamated. These two journalists were false reporters, butthey were true translators. They were not so much interviewers asinterpreters. And the second is that in any such difference it is oftenwholesome to look beneath the surface for a superiority. For ability totranslate does imply ability to understand; and many of thesejournalists really did understand. I think there are many Englishjournalists who would be more puzzled by so simple an idea as theplutocratic foundation of Prohibition. But the American knew at oncethat I meant it was a matter of dollar sign; probably because he knewvery well that it is. 

Then again there is a curious convention by which American interviewingmakes itself out much worse than it is. The reports are far more rowdyand insolent than the conversations. This is probably a part of the factthat a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to somevulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. It must always begrasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality. It is an ideal when it is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligentyoung man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, will askfor an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his livingsubject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly fortwenty minutes, and go noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper nextmorning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and pursued hisvictim on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore fromhim replies to all sorts of bald and ruthless questions printed in largeblack letters. I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notionof how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the paper nextmorning. I had no notion I had been on the rack of an inquisitor until Isaw it in plain print; and then of course I believed it, with a faithand docility unknown in any previous epoch of history. An interestingessay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vicesthan they possess; and it might deal more fully with the Americanpressman, who is a harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort ofhighway-robber in print. 

I have turned this chapter into something like a defence ofinterviewers, because I really think they are made to bear too much ofthe burden of the bad developments of modern journalism. But I am veryfar from meaning to suggest that those bad developments are not verybad. So far from wishing to minimise the evil, I would in a real senserather magnify it. I would suggest that the evil itself is a much largerand more fundamental thing; and that to deal with it by abusing poorjournalists, doing their particular and perhaps peculiar duty, is likedealing with a pestilence by rubbing at one of the spots. What is wrongwith the modern world will not be righted by attributing the wholedisease to each of its symptoms in turn; first to the tavern and then tothe cinema and then to the reporter's room. The evil of journalism isnot in the journalists. It is not in the poor men on the lower level ofthe profession, but in the rich men at the top of the profession; orrather in the rich men who are too much on top of the profession even tobelong to it. The trouble with newspapers is the Newspaper Trust, as thetrouble might be with a Wheat Trust, without involving a vilification ofall the people who grow wheat. It is the American plutocracy and not theAmerican press. What is the matter with the modern world is not modernheadlines or modern films or modern machinery. What is the matter withthe modern world is the modern world; and the cure will come fromanother. 

_Some American Cities_

There is one point, almost to be called a paradox, to be noted about NewYork; and that is that in one sense it is really new. The term veryseldom has any relevance to the reality. The New Forest is nearly as oldas the Conquest, and the New Theology is nearly as old as the Creed. Things have been offered to me as the new thought that might moreproperly be called the old thoughtlessness; and the thing we call theNew Poor Law is already old enough to know better. But there is a sensein which New York is always new; in the sense that it is always beingrenewed. A stranger might well say that the chief industry of thecitizens consists of destroying their city; but he soon realises thatthey always start it all over again with undiminished energy and hope. At first I had a fancy that they never quite finished putting up a bigbuilding without feeling that it was time to pull it down again; andthat somebody began to dig up the first foundations while somebody elsewas putting on the last tiles. This fills the whole of this brilliantand bewildering place with a quite unique and unparalleled air of rapidruin. Ruins spring up so suddenly like mushrooms, which with us are thegrowth of age like mosses, that one half expects to see ivy climbingquickly up the broken walls as in the nightmare of the Time Machine, orin some incredibly accelerated cinema. 

There is no sight in any country that raises my own spirits so much asa scaffolding. It is a tragedy that they always take the scaffoldingaway, and leave us nothing but a mere building. If they would only takethe building away and leave us a beautiful scaffolding, it would in mostcases be a gain to the loveliness of earth. If I could analyse what itis that lifts the heart about the lightness and clarity of such a whiteand wooden skeleton, I could explain what it is that is really charmingabout New York; in spite of its suffering from the curse ofcosmopolitanism and even the provincial superstition of progress. It ispartly that all this destruction and reconstruction is an unexhaustedartistic energy; but it is partly also that it is an artistic energythat does not take itself too seriously. It is first because man is herea carpenter; and secondly because he is a stage carpenter. Indeed thereis about the whole scene the spirit of scene-shifting. It thereforetouches whatever nerve in us has since childhood thrilled at alltheatrical things. But the picture will be imperfect unless we realisesomething which gives it unity and marks its chief difference from theclimate and colours of Western Europe. We may say that the back-sceneremains the same. The sky remained, and in the depths of winter itseemed to be blue with summer; and so clear that I almost flatteredmyself that clouds were English products like primroses. An Americanwould probably retort on my charge of scene-shifting by saying that atleast he only shifted the towers and domes of the earth; and that inEngland it is the heavens that are shifty. And indeed we have changesfrom day to day that would seem to him as distinct as differentmagic-lantern slides; one view showing the Bay of Naples and the nextthe North Pole. I do not mean, of course, that there are no changes inAmerican weather; but as a matter of proportion it is true that the mostunstable part of our scenery is the most stable part of theirs. Indeedwe might almost be pardoned the boast that Britain alone reallypossesses the noble thing called weather; most other countries having tobe content with climate. It must be confessed, however, that they oftenare content with it. And the beauty of New York, which is considerable, is very largely due to the clarity that brings out the colours of variedbuildings against the equal colour of the sky. Strangely enough I foundmyself repeating about this vista of the West two vivid lines in whichMr. W. B. Yeats has called up a vision of the East:--

 And coloured like the eastern birds At evening in their rainless skies. 

To invoke a somewhat less poetic parallel, even the untravelledEnglishman has probably seen American posters and trade advertisementsof a patchy and gaudy kind, in which a white house or a yellow motor-carare cut out as in cardboard against a sky like blue marble. I used tothink it was only New Art, but I found that it is really New York. 

It is not for nothing that the very nature of local character has gainedthe nickname of local colour. Colour runs through all our experience;and we all know that our childhood found talismanic gems in the verypaints in the paint-box, or even in their very names. And just as thevery name of 'crimson lake' really suggested to me some sanguine andmysterious mere, dark yet red as blood, so the very name of 'burntsienna' became afterwards tangled up in my mind with the notion ofsomething traditional and tragic; as if some such golden Italian cityhad really been darkened by many conflagrations in the wars of mediaevaldemocracy. Now if one had the caprice of conceiving some city exactlycontrary to one thus seared and seasoned by fire, its colour might becalled up to a childish fancy by the mere name of 'raw umber'; and sucha city is New York. I used to be puzzled by the name of 'raw umber, 'being unable to imagine the effect of fried umber or stewed umber. Butthe colours of New York are exactly in that key; and might be adumbratedby phrases like raw pink or raw yellow. It is really in a sense likesomething uncooked; or something which the satiric would callhalf-baked. And yet the effect is not only beautiful, it is evendelicate. I had no name for this nuance; until I saw that somebody hadwritten of 'the pastel-tinted towers of New York'; and I knew that thename had been found. There are no paints dry enough to describe all thatdry light; and it is not a box of colours but of crayons. If theEnglishman returning to England is moved at the sight of a block ofwhite chalk, the American sees rather a bundle of chalks. Nor can Iimagine anything more moving. Fairy tales are told to children about acountry where the trees are like sugar-sticks and the lakes liketreacle, but most children would feel almost as greedy for a fairylandwhere the trees were like brushes of green paint and the hills were ofcoloured chalks. 

But here what accentuates this arid freshness is the fragmentary look ofthe continual reconstruction and change. The strong daylight findseverywhere the broken edges of things, and the sort of hues we see innewly-turned earth or the white sections of trees. And it is in thisrespect that the local colour can literally be taken as local character. For New York considered in itself is primarily a place of unrest, andthose who sincerely love it, as many do, love it for the romance of itsrestlessness. A man almost looks at a building as he passes to wonderwhether it will be there when he comes back from his walk; and the doubtis part of an indescribable notion, as of a white nightmare of daylight, which is increased by the very numbering of the streets, with its tangleof numerals which at first makes an English head reel. The detail ismerely a symbol; and when he is used to it he can see that it is, likethe most humdrum human customs, both worse and better than his own. '271West 52nd Street' is the easiest of all addresses to find, but thehardest of all addresses to remember. He who is, like myself, soconstituted as necessarily to lose any piece of paper he has particularreason to preserve, will find himself wishing the place were called'Pine Crest' or 'Heather Crag' like any unobtrusive villa in Streatham. But his sense of some sort of incalculable calculations, as of thevision of a mad mathematician, is rooted in a more real impression. Hisfirst feeling that his head is turning round is due to something reallydizzy in the movement of a life that turns dizzily like a wheel. Ifthere be in the modern mind something paradoxical that can find peace inchange, it is here that it has indeed built its habitation or rather isstill building and unbuilding it. One might fancy that it changes ineverything and that nothing endures but its invisible name; and even itsname, as I have said, seems to make a boast of novelty. 

That is something like a sincere first impression of the atmosphere ofNew York. Those who think that is the atmosphere of America have nevergot any farther than New York. We might almost say that they have neverentered America, any more than if they had been detained likeundesirable aliens at Ellis Island. And indeed there are a good manyundesirable aliens detained in Manhattan Island too. But of that I willnot speak, being myself an alien with no particular pretensions to bedesirable. Anyhow, such is New York; but such is not the New World. Thegreat American Republic contains very considerable varieties, and ofthese varieties I necessarily saw far too little to allow me togeneralise. But from the little I did see, I should venture on thegeneralisation that the great part of America is singularly and evenstrikingly unlike New York. It goes without saying that New York is veryunlike the vast agricultural plains and small agricultural towns of theMiddle West, which I did see. It may be conjectured with some confidencethat it is very unlike what is called the Wild and sometimes the WoollyWest, which I did not see. But I am here comparing New York, not withthe newer states of the prairie or the mountains, but with the otherolder cities of the Atlantic coast. And New York, as it seems to me, isquite vitally different from the other historic cities of America. It isso different that it shows them all for the moment in a false light, asa long white searchlight will throw a light that is fantastic andtheatrical upon ancient and quiet villages folded in the everlastinghills. Philadelphia and Boston and Baltimore are more like those quietvillages than they are like New York. 

If I were to call this book 'The Antiquities of America, ' I should giverise to misunderstanding and possibly to annoyance. And yet the doublesense in such words is an undeserved misfortune for them. We talk ofPlato or the Parthenon or the Greek passion for beauty as parts of theantique, but hardly of the antiquated. When we call them ancient it isnot because they have perished, but rather because they have survived. In the same way I heard some New Yorkers refer to Philadelphia orBaltimore as 'dead towns. ' They mean by a dead town a town that has hadthe impudence not to die. Such people are astonished to find an ancientthing alive, just as they are now astonished, and will be increasinglyastonished, to find Poland or the Papacy or the French nation stillalive. And what I mean by Philadelphia and Baltimore being alive isprecisely what these people mean by their being dead; it is continuity;it is the presence of the life first breathed into them and of thepurpose of their being; it is the benediction of the founders of thecolonies and the fathers of the republic. This tradition is truly to becalled life; for life alone can link the past and the future. It merelymeans that as what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day, sowhat is done to-day will make some difference to-morrow. In New York itis difficult to feel that any day will make any difference. Thesemoderns only die daily without power to rise from the dead. But I cantruly claim that in coming into some of these more stable cities of theStates I felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion whichis satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt inAmerica what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I haveseldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when Isaw from afar off, above the vast grey labyrinth of Philadelphia, greatPenn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioneda new world; and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at theturning of a lane, a league from my own door. 

For this aspect of America is rather neglected in the talk aboutelectricity and headlines. Needless to say, the modern vulgarity ofavarice and advertisement sprawls all over Philadelphia or Boston; butso it does over Winchester or Canterbury. But most people know thatthere is something else to be found in Canterbury or Winchester; manypeople know that it is rather more interesting; and some people knowthat Alfred can still walk in Winchester and that St. Thomas atCanterbury was killed but did not die. It is at least as possible for aPhiladelphian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for anEnglishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and of Becket. Tradition does notmean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that thedead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundredyears ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feelin New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago. And thesethings did and do matter. Quakerism is not my favourite creed; but onthat day when William Penn stood unarmed upon that spot and made histreaty with the Red Indians, his creed of humanity did have a triumphand a triumph that has not turned back. The praise given to him is not apriggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions haveillogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists have been rather unfair toPenn even in picking their praises; and they generally forget thattoleration cuts both ways and that an open mind is open on all sides. Those who deify him for consenting to bargain with the savages cannotforgive him for consenting to bargain with the Stuarts. And the same istrue of the other city, yet more closely connected with the tolerantexperiment of the Stuarts. The state of Maryland was the firstexperiment in religious freedom in human history. Lord Baltimore and hisCatholics were a long march ahead of William Penn and his Quakers onwhat is now called the path of progress. That the first religioustoleration ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Catholics isone of those little informing details with which our Victorian historiesdid not exactly teem. But when I went into my hotel at Baltimore andfound two priests waiting to see me, I was moved in a new fashion, for Ifelt that I touched the end of a living chain. Nor was the impressionaccidental; it will always remain with me with a mixture of gratitudeand grief, for they brought a message of welcome from a great Americanwhose name I had known from childhood and whose career was drawing toits close; for it was but a few days after I left the city that Ilearned that Cardinal Gibbons was dead. 

On the top of a hill on one side of the town stood the first monumentraised after the Revolution to Washington. Beyond it was a new monumentsaluting in the name of Lafayette the American soldiers who fellfighting in France in the Great War. Between them were steps and stoneseats, and I sat down on one of them and talked to two children who wereclambering about the bases of the monument. I felt a profound andradiant peace in the thought that they at any rate were not going to mylecture. It made me happy that in that talk neither they nor I had anynames. I was full of that indescribable waking vision of the strangenessof life, and especially of the strangeness of locality; of how we findplaces and lose them; and see faces for a moment in a far-off land, andit is equally mysterious if we remember and mysterious if we forget. Ihad even stirring in my head the suggestion of some verses that I shallnever finish--

 If I ever go back to Baltimore The city of Maryland. 

But the poem would have to contain far too much; for I was thinking of athousand things at once; and wondering what the children would be liketwenty years after and whether they would travel in white goods or beinterested in oil, and I was not untouched (it may be said) by the factthat a neighbouring shop had provided the only sample of the substancecalled 'tea' ever found on the American continent; and in front of mesoared up into the sky on wings of stone the column of all those highhopes of humanity a hundred years ago; and beyond there were lightedcandles in the chapels and prayers in the ante-chambers, where perhapsalready a Prince of the Church was dying. Only on a later page can Ieven attempt to comb out such a tangle of contrasts, which is indeed thetangle of America and this mortal life; but sitting there on that stoneseat under that quiet sky, I had some experience of the throngingthousands of living thoughts and things, noisy and numberless as birds, that give its everlasting vivacity and vitality to a dead town. 

Two other cities I visited which have this particular type oftraditional character, the one being typical of the North and the otherof the South. At least I may take as convenient anti-types the towns ofBoston and St. Louis; and we might add Nashville as being a shade moretruly southern than St. Louis. To the extreme South, in the sense ofwhat is called the Black Belt, I never went at all. Now Englishtravellers expect the South to be somewhat traditional; but they are notprepared for the aspects of Boston in the North which are even more so. If we wished only for an antic of antithesis, we might say that on oneside the places are more prosaic than the names and on the other thenames are more prosaic than the places. St. Louis is a fine town, and werecognise a fine instinct of the imagination that set on the hilloverlooking the river the statue of that holy horseman who haschristened the city. But the city is not as beautiful as its name; itcould not be. Indeed these titles set up a standard to which the mostsplendid spires and turrets could not rise, and below which thecommercial chimneys and sky-signs conspicuously sink. We should think itodd if Belfast had borne the name of Joan of Arc. We should be slightlyshocked if the town of Johannesburg happened to be called Jesus Christ. But few have noted a blasphemy, or even a somewhat challengingbenediction, to be found in the very name of San Francisco. 

But on the other hand a place like Boston is much more beautiful thanits name. And, as I have suggested, an Englishman's general information, or lack of information, leaves him in some ignorance of the type ofbeauty that turns up in that type of place. He has heard so much aboutthe purely commercial North as against the agricultural andaristocratic South, and the traditions of Boston and Philadelphia arerather too tenuous and delicate to be seen from across the Atlantic. Buthere also there are traditions and a great deal of traditionalism. Thecircle of old families, which still meets with a certain exclusivenessin Philadelphia, is the sort of thing that we in England should expectto find rather in New Orleans. The academic aristocracy of Boston, whichOliver Wendell Holmes called the Brahmins, is still a reality though itwas always a minority and is now a very small minority. An epigram, invented by Yale at the expense of Harvard, describes it as very smallindeed:--

 Here is to jolly old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, Where Cabots speak only to Lowells, and Lowells speak only to God. 

But an aristocracy must be a minority, and it is arguable that thesmaller it is the better. I am bound to say, however, that thedistinguished Dr. Cabot, the present representative of the family, brokethrough any taboo that may tie his affections to his Creator and to MissAmy Lowell, and broadened his sympathies so indiscriminately as to showkindness and hospitality to so lost a being as an English lecturer. Butif the thing is hardly a limit it is very living as a memory; and Bostonon this side is very much a place of memories. It would be paying it avery poor compliment merely to say that parts of it reminded me ofEngland; for indeed they reminded me of English things that have largelyvanished from England. There are old brown houses in the corners ofsquares and streets that are like glimpses of a man's forgottenchildhood; and when I saw the long path with posts where the Autocratmay be supposed to have walked with the schoolmistress, I felt I hadcome to the land where old tales come true. 

I pause in this place upon this particular aspect of America because itis very much missed in a mere contrast with England. I need not say thatif I felt it even about slight figures of fiction, I felt it even moreabout solid figures of history. Such ghosts seemed particularly solid inthe Southern States, precisely because of the comparative quietude andleisure of the atmosphere of the South. It was never more vivid to methan when coming in, at a quiet hour of the night, into thecomparatively quiet hotel at Nashville in Tennessee, and mounting to adim and deserted upper floor where I found myself before a fadedpicture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of AndrewJackson, watchful like a white eagle. 

At that moment, perhaps, I was in more than one sense alone. MostEnglishmen know a good deal of American fiction, and nothing whatever ofAmerican history. They know more about the autocrat of thebreakfast-table than about the autocrat of the army and the people, theone great democratic despot of modern times; the Napoleon of the NewWorld. The only notion the English public ever got about Americanpolitics they got from a novel, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_; and to say theleast of it, it was no exception to the prevalence of fiction over fact. Hundreds of us have heard of Tom Sawyer for one who has heard of CharlesSumner; and it is probable that most of us could pass a more detailedexamination about Toddy and Budge than about Lincoln and Lee. But inthe case of Andrew Jackson it may be that I felt a special sense ofindividual isolation; for I believe that there are even fewer amongEnglishmen than among Americans who realise that the energy of thatgreat man was largely directed towards saving us from the chief evilwhich destroys the nations to-day. He sought to cut down, as with asword of simplicity, the new and nameless enormity of finance; and hemust have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were behindhim, because all the politicians were against him. The end of thatstruggle is not yet; but if the bank is stronger than the sword or thesceptre of popular sovereignty, the end will be the end of democracy. Itwill have to choose between accepting an acknowledged dictator andaccepting dictation which it dare not acknowledge. The process will havebegun by giving power to people and refusing to give them their titles;and it will have ended by giving the power to people who refuse to giveus their names. 

But I have a special reason for ending this chapter on the name of thegreat popular dictator who made war on the politicians and thefinanciers. This chapter does not profess to touch on one in twenty ofthe interesting cities of America, even in this particular aspect oftheir relation to the history of America, which is so much neglected inEngland. If that were so, there would be a great deal to say even aboutthe newest of them; Chicago, for instance, is certainly something morethan the mere pork-packing yard that English tradition suggests; and ithas been building a boulevard not unworthy of its splendid position onits splendid lake. But all these cities are defiled and even diseasedwith industrialism. It is due to the Americans to remember that theyhave deliberately preserved one of their cities from such defilement andsuch disease. And that is the presidential city, which stands in theAmerican mind for the same ideal as the President; the idea of theRepublic that rises above modern money-getting and endures. There hasreally been an effort to keep the White House white. No factories areallowed in that town; no more than the necessary shops are tolerated. Itis a beautiful city; and really retains something of that classicalserenity of the eighteenth century in which the Fathers of the Republicmoved. With all respect to the colonial place of that name, I do notsuppose that Wellington is particularly like Wellington. But Washingtonreally is like Washington. 

In this, as in so many things, there is no harm in our criticisingforeigners, if only we would also criticise ourselves. In other words, the world might need even less of its new charity, if it had a littlemore of the old humility. When we complain of American individualism, weforget that we have fostered it by ourselves having far less of thisimpersonal ideal of the Republic or commonwealth as a whole. When wecomplain, very justly, for instance, of great pictures passing into thepossession of American magnates, we ought to remember that we paved theway for it by allowing them all to accumulate in the possession ofEnglish magnates. It is bad that a public treasure should be in thepossession of a private man in America, but we took the first step inlightly letting it disappear into the private collection of a man inEngland. I know all about the genuine national tradition which treatedthe aristocracy as constituting the state; but these very foreignpurchases go to prove that we ought to have had a state independent ofthe aristocracy. It is true that rich Americans do sometimes covet themonuments of our culture in a fashion that rightly revolts us as vulgarand irrational. They are said sometimes to want to take whole buildingsaway with them; and too many of such buildings are private and for sale. There were wilder stories of a millionaire wishing to transplantGlastonbury Abbey and similar buildings as if they were portable shrubsin pots. It is obvious that it is nonsense as well as vandalism toseparate Glastonbury Abbey from Glastonbury. I can understand a manvenerating it as a ruin; and I can understand a man despising it as arubbish-heap. But it is senseless to insult a thing in order toidolatrise it; it is meaningless to desecrate the shrine in order toworship the stones. That sort of thing is the bad side of Americanappetite and ambition; and we are perfectly right to see it not only asa deliberate blasphemy but as an unconscious buffoonery. But there isanother side to the American tradition, which is really too much lackingin our own tradition. And it is illustrated in this idea of preservingWashington as a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personalcommerce. Nobody could buy the White House or the Washington Monument;it may be hinted (as by an inhabitant of Glastonbury) that nobody wantsto; but nobody could if he did want to. There is really a certain air ofserenity and security about the place, lacking in every other Americantown. It is increased, of course, by the clear blue skies of thathalf-southern province, from which smoke has been banished. The effectis not so much in the mere buildings, though they are classical andoften beautiful. But whatever else they have built, they have built agreat blue dome, the largest dome in the world. And the place doesexpress something in the inconsistent idealism of this strange people;and here at least they have lifted it higher than all the sky-scrapers, and set it in a stainless sky. 

_In the American Country_

The sharpest pleasure of a traveller is in finding the things which hedid not expect, but which he might have expected to expect. I mean thethings that are at once so strange and so obvious that they must havebeen noticed, yet somehow they have not been noted. Thus I had heard athousand things about Jerusalem before I ever saw it; I had heardrhapsodies and disparagements of every description. Modern rationalisticcritics, with characteristic consistency, had blamed it for itsaccumulated rubbish and its modern restoration, for its antiquatedsuperstition and its up-to-date vulgarity. But somehow the oneimpression that had never pierced through their description was thesimple and single impression of a city on a hill, with walls coming tothe very edge of slopes that were almost as steep as walls; the turretedcity which crowns a cone-shaped hill in so many mediaeval landscapes. One would suppose that this was at once the plainest and mostpicturesque of all the facts; yet somehow, in my reading, I had alwayslost it amid a mass of minor facts that were merely details. We knowthat a city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; and yet it would seemthat it is exactly the hill that is hid; though perhaps it is only hidfrom the wise and the understanding. I had a similar and simpleimpression when I discovered America. I cannot avoid the phrase; for itwould really seem that each man discovers it for himself. 

Thus I had heard a great deal, before I saw them, about the tall anddominant buildings of New York. I agree that they have an instant effecton the imagination; which I think is increased by the situation in whichthey stand, and out of which they arose. They are all the moreimpressive because the building, while it is vertically so vast, ishorizontally almost narrow. New York is an island, and has all theintensive romance of an island. It is a thing of almost infinite heightupon very finite foundations. It is almost like a lofty lighthouse upona lonely rock. But this story of the sky-scrapers, which I had oftenheard, would by itself give a curiously false impression of the freshestand most curious characteristic of American architecture. Told only interms of these great towers of stone and brick in the big industrialcities, the story would tend too much to an impression of something coldand colossal like the monuments of Asia. It would suggest a modernBabylon altogether too Babylonian. It would imply that a man of the newworld was a sort of new Pharaoh, who built not so much a pyramid as apagoda of pyramids. It would suggest houses built by mammoths out ofmountains; the cities reared by elephants in their own elephantineschool of architecture. And New York does recall the most famous of allsky-scrapers--the tower of Babel. She recalls it none the less becausethere is no doubt about the confusion of tongues. But in truth the veryreverse is true of most of the buildings in America. I had no soonerpassed out into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston than Ibegan to see something else quite contrary and far more curious. I sawforests upon forests of small houses stretching away to the horizon asliteral forests do; villages and towns and cities. And they were, inanother sense, literally like forests. They were all made of wood. Itwas almost as fantastic to an English eye as if they had been all madeof cardboard. I had long outlived the silly old joke that referred toAmericans as if they all lived in the backwoods. But, in a sense, ifthey do not live in the woods, they are not yet out of the wood. 

I do not say this in any sense as a criticism. As it happens, I amparticularly fond of wood. Of all the superstitions which our fatherstook lightly enough to love, the most natural seems to me the notion itis lucky to touch wood. Some of them affect me the less assuperstitions, because I feel them as symbols. If humanity had reallythought Friday unlucky it would have talked about bad Friday instead ofgood Friday. And while I feel the thrill of thirteen at a table, I amnot so sure that it is the most miserable of all human fates to fill theplaces of the Twelve Apostles. But the idea that there was somethingcleansing or wholesome about the touching of wood seems to me one ofthose ideas which are truly popular, because they are truly poetic. Itis probable enough that the conception came originally from the healingof the wood of the Cross; but that only clinches the divine coincidence. It is like that other divine coincidence that the Victim was acarpenter, who might almost have made His own cross. Whether we take themystical or the mythical explanation, there is obviously a very deepconnection between the human working in wood and such plain and patheticmysticism. It gives something like a touch of the holy childishness tothe tale, as if that terrible engine could be a toy. In the same fashiona child fancies that mysterious and sinister horse, which was thedownfall of Troy, as something plain and staring, and perhaps spotted, like his own rocking-horse in the nursery. 

It might be said symbolically that Americans have a taste forrocking-horses, as they certainly have a taste for rocking-chairs. Aflippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in thematter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair maystill be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I thinkthere is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spiritthat is childish in the good sense of the word; something that isinnocent, and easily pleased. It is not altogether untrue, still less isit unfriendly, to say that the landscape seems to be dotted with dolls'houses. It is the true tragedy of every fallen son of Adam that he hasgrown too big to live in a doll's house. These things seem somehow toescape the irony of time by not even challenging it; they are tootemporary even to be merely temporal. These people are not buildingtombs; they are not, as in the fine image of Mrs. Meynell's poem, merelybuilding ruins. It is not easy to imagine the ruins of a doll's house;and that is why a doll's house is an everlasting habitation. How far itpromises a political permanence is a matter for further discussion; I amonly describing the mood of discovery; in which all these cottages builtof lath, like the palaces of a pantomime, really seemed coloured likethe clouds of morning; which are both fugitive and eternal. 

There is also in all this an atmosphere that comes in another sense fromthe nursery. We hear much of Americans being educated on Englishliterature; but I think few Americans realise how much English childrenhave been educated on American literature. It is true, and it isinevitable, that they can only be educated on rather old-fashionedAmerican literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of his plays, noted trulythe limitations of the young American millionaire, and especially thestaleness of his English culture; but there is necessarily another sideto it. If the American talked more of Macaulay than of Nietzsche, weshould probably talk more of Emerson than of Ezra Pound. Whether thisstaleness is necessarily a disadvantage is, of course, a differentquestion. But, in any case, it is true that the old American books wereoften the books of our childhood, even in the literal sense of the booksof our nursery. I know few men in England who have not left theirboyhood to some extent lost and entangled in the forests of _HuckleberryFinn_. I know few women in England, from the most revolutionarySuffragette to the most carefully preserved Early Victorian, who willnot confess to having passed a happy childhood with the Little Women ofMiss Alcott. _Helen's Babies_ was the first and by far the best book inthe modern scriptures of baby-worship. And about all this old-fashionedAmerican literature there was an undefinable savour that satisfied, andeven fed, our growing minds. Perhaps it was the smell of growing things;but I am far from certain that it was not simply the smell of wood. Nowthat all the memory comes back to me, it seems to come back heavy in ahundred forms with the fragrance and the touch of timber. There was theperpetual reference to the wood-pile, the perpetual background of thewoods. There was something crude and clean about everything; somethingfresh and strange about those far-off houses, to which I could not thenhave put a name. Indeed, many things become clear in this wilderness ofwood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even in fantasy. Iwill not go so far as to say that it shortened the transition from LogCabin to White House; as if the White House were itself made of whitewood (as Oliver Wendell Holmes said), 'that cuts like cheese, but lastslike iron for things like these. ' But I will say that the experienceilluminates some other lines by Holmes himself:--

 Little I ask, my wants are few, I only ask a hut of stone. 

I should not have known, in England, that he was already asking for agood deal even in asking for that. In the presence of this wooden worldthe very combination of words seems almost a contradiction, like a hutof marble, or a hovel of gold. 

It was therefore with an almost infantile pleasure that I looked at allthis promising expansion of fresh-cut timber and thought of the housingshortage at home. I know not by what incongruous movement of the mindthere swept across me, at the same moment, the thought of thingsancestral and hoary with the light of ancient dawns. The last warbrought back body-armour; the next war may bring back bows and arrows. And I suddenly had a memory of old wooden houses in London; and a modelof Shakespeare's town. 

It is possible indeed that such Elizabethan memories may receive a checkor a chill when the traveller comes, as he sometimes does, to theoutskirts of one of these strange hamlets of new frame-houses, and isconfronted with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, 'Watch UsGrow. ' He can always imagine that he sees the timbers swelling beforehis eyes like pumpkins in some super-tropical summer. But he may haveformed the conviction that no such proclamation could be found outsideShakespeare's town. And indeed there is a serious criticism here, to anyone who knows history; since the things that grow are not always thethings that remain; and pumpkins of that expansiveness have a tendencyto burst. I was always told that Americans were harsh, hustling, ratherrude and perhaps vulgar; but they were very practical and the futurebelonged to them. I confess I felt a fine shade of difference; I likedthe Americans; I thought they were sympathetic, imaginative, and full offine enthusiasms; the one thing I could not always feel clear about wastheir future. I believe they were happier in their frame-houses thanmost people in most houses; having democracy, good education, and ahobby of work; the one doubt that did float across me was somethinglike, 'Will all this be here at all in two hundred years?' That was thefirst impression produced by the wooden houses that seemed like thewaggons of gipsies; it is a serious impression, but there is an answerto it. It is an answer that opens on the traveller more and more as hegoes westward, and finds the little towns dotted about the vast centralprairies. And the answer is agriculture. Wooden houses may or may notlast; but farms will last; and farming will always last. 

The houses may look like gipsy caravans on a heath or common; but theyare not on a heath or common. They are on the most productive andprosperous land, perhaps, in the modern world. The houses might falldown like shanties, but the fields would remain; and whoever tillsthose fields will count for a great deal in the affairs of humanity. They are already counting for a great deal, and possibly for too much, in the affairs of America. The real criticism of the Middle West isconcerned with two facts, neither of which has been yet adequatelyappreciated by the educated class in England. The first is that the turnof the world has come, and the turn of the agricultural countries withit. That is the meaning of the resurrection of Ireland; that is themeaning of the practical surrender of the Bolshevist Jews to the Russianpeasants. The other is that in most places these peasant societies carryon what may be called the Catholic tradition. The Middle West is perhapsthe one considerable place where they still carry on the Puritantradition. But the Puritan tradition was originally a tradition of thetown; and the second truth about the Middle West turns largely on itsmoral relation to the town. As I shall suggest presently, there is muchin common between this agricultural society of America and the greatagricultural societies of Europe. It tends, as the agricultural societynearly always does, to some decent degree of democracy. The agriculturalsociety tends to the agrarian law. But in Puritan America there is anadditional problem, which I can hardly explain without a periphrasis. 

There was a time when the progress of the cities seemed to mock thedecay of the country. It is more and more true, I think, to-day that itis rather the decay of the cities that seems to poison the progress andpromise of the countryside. The cinema boasts of being a substitute forthe tavern, but I think it a very bad substitute. I think so quite apartfrom the question about fermented liquor. Nobody enjoys cinemas morethan I, but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even to listen, and in a tavern he has to talk. Occasionally, I admit, he has to fight;but he need never move at the movies. Thus in the real village inn arethe real village politics, while in the other are only the remote andunreal metropolitan politics. And those central city politics are notonly cosmopolitan politics but corrupt politics. They corrupt everythingthat they reach, and this is the real point about many perplexingquestions. 

For instance, so far as I am concerned, it is the whole point aboutfeminism and the factory. It is very largely the point about feminismand many other callings, apparently more cultured than the factory, suchas the law court and the political platform. When I see women so wildlyanxious to tie themselves to all this machinery of the modern city myfirst feeling is not indignation, but that dark and ominous sort of pitywith which we should see a crowd rushing to embark in a leaking shipunder a lowering storm. When I see wives and mothers going in forbusiness government I not only regard it as a bad business but as abankrupt business. It seems to me very much as if the peasant women, just before the French Revolution, had insisted on being made duchessesor (as is quite as logical and likely) on being made dukes. 

It is as if those ragged women, instead of crying out for bread, hadcried out for powder and patches. By the time they were wearing themthey would be the only people wearing them. For powder and patches soonwent out of fashion, but bread does not go out of fashion. In the sameway, if women desert the family for the factory, they may find they haveonly done it for a deserted factory. It would have been very unwise ofthe lower orders to claim all the privileges of the higher orders in thelast days of the French monarchy. It would have been very laborious tolearn the science of heraldry or the tables of precedence when all suchthings were at once most complicated and most moribund. It would betiresome to be taught all those tricks just when the whole bag of trickswas coming to an end. A French satirist might have written a fineapologue about Jacques Bonhomme coming up to Paris in his wooden shoesand demanding to be made Gold Stick in Waiting in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; but I fear the stick in waiting would bewaiting still. 

One of the first topics on which I heard conversation turning in Americawas that of a very interesting book called _Main Street_, which involvesmany of these questions of the modern industrial and the eternalfeminine. It is simply the story, or perhaps rather the study than thestory, of a young married woman in one of the multitudinous little townson the great central plains of America; and of a sort of strugglebetween her own more restless culture and the provincial prosperity ofher neighbours. There are a number of true and telling suggestions inthe book, but the one touch which I found tingling in the memory of manyreaders was the last sentence, in which the master of the house, withunshaken simplicity, merely asks for the whereabouts of some domesticimplement; I think it was a screw-driver. It seems to me a harmlessrequest, but from the way people talked about it one might suppose hehad asked for a screw-driver to screw down the wife in her coffin. And agreat many advanced persons would tell us that wooden house in whichshe lived really was like a wooden coffin. But this appears to me to betaking a somewhat funereal view of the life of humanity. 

For, after all, on the face of it at any rate, this is merely the lifeof humanity, and even the life which all humanitarians have striven togive to humanity. Revolutionists have treated it not only as the normalbut even as the ideal. Revolutionary wars have been waged to establishthis; revolutionary heroes have fought, and revolutionary martyrs havedied, only to build such a wooden house for such a worthy family. Menhave taken the sword and perished by the sword in order that the poorgentleman might have liberty to look for his screw-driver. For there ishere a fact about America that is almost entirely unknown in England. The English have not in the least realised the real strength of America. We in England hear a great deal, we hear far too much, about theeconomic energy of industrial America, about the money of Mr. Morgan, orthe machinery of Mr. Edison. We never realise that while we in Englandsuffer from the same sort of successes in capitalism and clockwork, wehave not got what the Americans have got; something at least to balanceit in the way of a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms dottedwith small freeholders. For the reason I shall mention in a moment, theyare not perhaps in the fullest and finest sense a peasantry. But theyare in the practical and political sense a pure peasantry, in that theircomparative equality is a true counterweight to the toppling injusticeof the towns. 

And, even in places like that described as Main Street, that comparativeequality can immediately be felt. The men may be provincials, but theyare certainly citizens; they consult on a common basis. And I repeatthat in this, after all, they do achieve what many prophets andrighteous men have died to achieve. This plain village, fairlyprosperous, fairly equal, untaxed by tyrants and untroubled by wars, isafter all the place which reformers have regarded as their aim; wheneverreformers have used their wits sufficiently to have any aim. The marchto Utopia, the march to the Earthly Paradise, the march to the NewJerusalem, has been very largely the march to Main Street. And thelatest modern sensation is a book written to show how wretched it is tolive there. 

All this is true, and I think the lady might be more contented in hercoffin, which is more comfortably furnished than most of the coffinswhere her fellow creatures live. Nevertheless, there is an answer tothis, or at least a modification of it. There is a case for the lady anda case against the gentleman and the screw-driver. And when we havenoted what it really is, we have noted the real disadvantage in asituation like that of modern America, and especially the Middle West. And with that we come back to the truth with which I started thisspeculation; the truth that few have yet realised, but of which I, forone, am more and more convinced--that industrialism is spreading becauseit is decaying; that only the dust and ashes of its dissolution arechoking up the growth of natural things everywhere and turning the greenworld grey. 

In this relative agricultural equality the Americans of the Middle Westare far in advance of the English of the twentieth century. It is nottheir fault if they are still some centuries behind the English of thetwelfth century. But the defect by which they fall short of being a truepeasantry is that they do not produce their own spiritual food, in thesame sense as their own material food. They do not, like somepeasantries, create other kinds of culture besides the kind calledagriculture. Their culture comes from the great cities; and that iswhere all the evil comes from. 

If a man had gone across England in the Middle Ages, or even acrossEurope in more recent times, he would have found a culture which showedits vitality by its variety. We know the adventures of the threebrothers in the old fairy tales who passed across the endless plain fromcity to city, and found one kingdom ruled by a wizard and another wastedby a dragon, one people living in castles of crystal and another sittingby fountains of wine. These are but legendary enlargements of the realadventures of a traveller passing from one patch of peasantry toanother, and finding women wearing strange head-dresses and men singingnew songs. 

A traveller in America would be somewhat surprised if he found thepeople in the city of St. Louis all wearing crowns and crusading armourin honour of their patron saint. He might even feel some faint surpriseif he found all the citizens of Philadelphia clad in a compositecostume, combining that of a Quaker with that of a Red Indian, in honourof the noble treaty of William Penn. Yet these are the sort of local andtraditional things that would really be found giving variety to thevalleys of mediaeval Europe. I myself felt a perfectly genuine andgenerous exhilaration of freedom and fresh enterprise in new places likeOklahoma. But you would hardly find in Oklahoma what was found inOberammergau. What goes to Oklahoma is not the peasant play, but thecinema. And the objection to the cinema is not so much that it goes toOklahoma as that it does not come from Oklahoma. In other words, thesepeople have on the economic side a much closer approach than we have toeconomic freedom. It is not for us, who have allowed our land to bestolen by squires and then vulgarised by sham squires, to sneer at suchcolonists as merely crude and prosaic. They at least have really keptsomething of the simplicity and, therefore, the dignity of democracy;and that democracy may yet save their country even from the calamitiesof wealth and science. 

But, while these farmers do not need to become industrial in order tobecome industrious, they do tend to become industrial in so far as theybecome intellectual. Their culture, and to some great extent theircreed, do come along the railroads from the great modern urban centres, and bring with them a blast of death and a reek of rotting things. It isthat influence that alone prevents the Middle West from progressingtowards the Middle Ages. 

For, after all, linked up in a hundred legends of the Middle Ages, maybe found a symbolic pattern of hammers and nails and saws; and there isno reason why they should not have also sanctified screw-drivers. Thereis no reason why the screw-driver that seemed such a trifle to theauthor should not have been borne in triumph down Main Street like asword of state, in some pageant of the Guild of St. Joseph of theCarpenters or St. Dunstan of the Smiths. It was the Catholic poetry andpiety that filled common life with something that is lacking in theworthy and virile democracy of the West. Nor are Americans ofintelligence so ignorant of this as some may suppose. There is anadmirable society called the Mediaevalists in Chicago; whose name andaddress will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the soulagainst the environment. With the national heartiness they blazon theirnote-paper with heraldry and the hues of Gothic windows; with thenational high spirits they assume the fancy dress of friars; but any onewho should essay to laugh at them instead of with them would find outhis mistake. For many of them do really know a great deal aboutmediaevalism; much more than I do, or most other men brought up on anisland that is crowded with its cathedrals. Something of the same spiritmay be seen in the beautiful new plans and buildings of Yale, deliberately modelled not on classical harmony but on Gothicirregularity and surprise. The grace and energy of the mediaevalarchitecture resurrected by a man like Mr. R. A. Cram of Boston hasbehind it not merely artistic but historical and ethical enthusiasm; anenthusiasm for the Catholic creed which made mediaeval civilisation. Even on the huge Puritan plains of the Middle West the influence straysin the strangest fashion. And it is notable that among the pessimisticepitaphs of the Spoon River Anthology, in that churchyard compared withwhich most churchyards are cheery, among the suicides and secretdrinkers and monomaniacs and hideous hypocrites of that happy village, almost the only record of respect and a recognition of wider hopes isdedicated to the Catholic priest. 

But Main Street is Main Street in the main. Main Street is Modern Streetin its multiplicity of mildly half-educated people; and all thesehistoric things are a thousand miles from them. They have not heard theancient noise either of arts or arms; the building of the cathedral orthe marching of the crusade. But at least they have not deliberatelyslandered the crusade and defaced the cathedral. And if they have notproduced the peasant arts, they can still produce the peasant crafts. They can sow and plough and reap and live by these everlasting things;nor shall the foundations of their state be moved. And the memory ofthose colossal fields, of those fruitful deserts, came back the morereadily into my mind because I finished these reflections in the veryheart of a modern industrial city, if it can be said to have a heart. Itwas in fact an English industrial city, but it struck me that it mightvery well be an American one. And it also struck me that we yield rathertoo easily to America the dusty palm of industrial enterprise, and feelfar too little apprehension about greener and fresher vegetables. Thereis a story of an American who carefully studied all the sights of Londonor Rome or Paris, and came to the conclusion that 'it had nothing onMinneapolis. ' It seems to me that Minneapolis has nothing on Manchester. There were the same grey vistas of shops full of rubber tyres andmetallic appliances; a man felt that he might walk a day without seeinga blade of grass; the whole horizon was so infinite with efficiency. Thefactory chimneys might have been Pittsburg; the sky-signs might havebeen New York. One looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for asky-sign but in a sense for a sign, for some sentence of significanceand judgment; by the instinct that makes any man in such a scene seekfor the only thing that has not been made by men. But even that wasillogical, for it was night, and I could only expect to see the stars, which might have reminded me of Old Glory; but that was not the signthat oppressed me. All the ground was a wilderness of stone and all thebuildings a forest of brick; I was far in the interior of a labyrinth oflifeless things. Only, looking up, between two black chimneys and atelegraph pole, I saw vast and far and faint, as the first men saw it, the silver pattern of the Plough. 

_The American Business Man_

It is a commonplace that men are all agreed in using symbols, and alldiffer about the meaning of the symbols. It is obvious that a Russianrepublican might come to identify the eagle as a bird of empire andtherefore a bird of prey. But when he ultimately escaped to the land ofthe free, he might find the same bird on the American coinage figuringas a bird of freedom. Doubtless, he might find many other things tosurprise him in the land of the free, and many calculated to make himthink that the bird, if not imperial, was at least rather imperious. ButI am not discussing those exceptional details here. It is equallyobvious that a Russian reactionary might cross the world with a vow ofvengeance against the red flag. But that authoritarian might have somedifficulties with the authorities, if he shot a man for using the redflag on the railway between Willesden and Clapham Junction. 

But, of course, the difficulty about symbols is generally much moresubtle than in these simple cases. I have remarked elsewhere that thefirst thing which a traveller should write about is the thing which hehas not read about. It may be a small or secondary thing, but it is athing that he has seen and not merely expected to see. 

I gave the example of the great multitude of wooden houses in America;we might say of wooden towns and wooden cities. But after he has seensuch things, his next duty is to see the meaning of them; and here agreat deal of complication and controversy is possible. The thingprobably does not mean what he first supposes it to mean on the face ofit; but even on the face of it, it might mean many different and evenopposite things. 

For instance, a wooden house might suggest an almost savage solitude; arude shanty put together by a pioneer in a forest; or it might mean avery recent and rapid solution of the housing problem, conducted cheaplyand therefore on a very large scale. A wooden house might suggest thevery newest thing in America or one of the very oldest things inEngland. It might mean a grey ruin at Stratford or a white exhibition atEarl's Court. 

It is when we come to this interpretation of international symbols thatwe make most of the international mistakes. Without the smallest errorof detail, I will promise to prove that Oriental women are independentbecause they wear trousers, or Oriental men subject because they wearskirts. Merely to apply it to this case, I will take the example of twovery commonplace and trivial objects of modern life--a walking stick anda fur coat. 

As it happened, I travelled about America with two sticks, like aJapanese nobleman with his two swords. I fear the simile is too stately. I bore more resemblance to a cripple with two crutches or a highlyineffectual version of the devil on two sticks. I carried them bothbecause I valued them both, and did not wish to risk losing either ofthem in my erratic travels. One is a very plain grey stick from thewoods of Buckinghamshire, but as I took it with me to Palestine itpartakes of the character of a pilgrim's staff. When I can say that Ihave taken the same stick to Jerusalem and to Chicago, I think the stickand I may both have a rest. The other, which I value even more, wasgiven me by the Knights of Columbus at Yale, and I wish I could thinkthat their chivalric title allowed me to regard it as a sword. 

Now, I do not know whether the Americans I met, struck by the fastidiousfoppery of my dress and appearance, concluded that it is the custom ofelegant English dandies to carry two walking sticks. But I do know thatit is much less common among Americans than among Englishmen to carryeven one. The point, however, is not merely that more sticks are carriedby Englishmen than by Americans; it is that the sticks which are carriedby Americans stand for something entirely different. 

In America a stick is commonly called a cane, and it has about itsomething of the atmosphere which the poet described as the nice conductof the clouded cane. It would be an exaggeration to say that when thecitizens of the United States see a man carrying a light stick, theydeduce that if he does that he does nothing else. But there is about ita faint flavour of luxury and lounging, and most of the energeticcitizens of this energetic society avoid it by instinct. 

Now, in an Englishman like myself, carrying a stick may imply lounging, but it does not imply luxury, and I can say with some firmness that itdoes not imply dandyism. In a great many Englishmen it means the veryopposite even of lounging. By one of those fantastic paradoxes whichare the mystery of nationality, a walking stick often actually meanswalking. It frequently suggests the very reverse of the beau with hisclouded cane; it does not suggest a town type, but rather specially acountry type. It rather implies the kind of Englishman who tramps aboutin lanes and meadows and knocks the tops off thistles. It suggests thesort of man who has carried the stick through his native woods, andperhaps even cut it in his native woods. 

There are plenty of these vigorous loungers, no doubt, in the ruralparts of America, but the idea of a walking stick would not especiallysuggest them to Americans; it would not call up such figures like afairy wand. It would be easy to trace back the difference to manyEnglish origins, possibly to aristocratic origins, to the idea of theold squire, a man vigorous and even rustic, but trained to hold auseless staff rather than a useful tool. It might be suggested thatAmerican citizens do at least so far love freedom as to like to havetheir hands free. It might be suggested, on the other hand, that theykeep their hands for the handles of many machines. And that the hand ona handle is less free than the hand on a stick or even a tool. But theseagain are controversial questions and I am only noting a fact. 

If an Englishman wished to imagine more or less exactly what theimpression is, and how misleading it is, he could find something like aparallel in what he himself feels about a fur coat. When I first foundmyself among the crowds on the main floor of a New York hotel, my ratherexaggerated impression of the luxury of the place was largely producedby the number of men in fur coats, and what we should consider ratherostentatious fur coats, with all the fur outside. 

Now an Englishman has a number of atmospheric but largely accidentalassociations in connection with a fur coat. I will not say that hethinks a man in a fur coat must be a wealthy and wicked man; but I dosay that in his own ideal and perfect vision a wealthy and wicked manwould wear a fur coat. Thus I had the sensation of standing in a surgingmob of American millionaires, or even African millionaires; for themillionaires of Chicago must be like the Knights of the Round Tablecompared with the millionaires of Johannesburg. 

But, as a matter of fact, the man in the fur coat was not even anAmerican millionaire, but simply an American. It did not signify luxury, but rather necessity, and even a harsh and almost heroic necessity. Orson probably wore a fur coat; and he was brought up by bears, but notthe bears of Wall Street. Eskimos are generally represented as a furryfolk; but they are not necessarily engaged in delicate financialoperations, even in the typical and appropriate occupation calledfreezing out. And if the American is not exactly an arctic travellerrushing from pole to pole, at least he is often literally fleeing fromice to ice. He has to make a very extreme distinction between outdoorand indoor clothing. He has to live in an icehouse outside and ahothouse inside; so hot that he may be said to construct an icehouseinside that. He turns himself into an icehouse and warms himself againstthe cold until he is warm enough to eat ices. But the point is that thesame coat of fur which in England would indicate the sybarite life mayhere very well indicate the strenuous life; just as the same walkingstick which would here suggest a lounger would in England suggest aplodder and almost a pilgrim. 

And these two trifles are types which I should like to put, by way ofproviso and apology, at the very beginning of any attempt at a record ofany impressions of a foreign society. They serve merely to illustratethe most important impression of all, the impression of how false allimpressions may be. I suspect that most of the very false impressionshave come from the careful record of very true facts. They have comefrom the fatal power of observing the facts without being able toobserve the truth. They came from seeing the symbol with the most vividclarity and being blind to all that it symbolises. It is as if a man whoknew no Greek should imagine that he could read a Greek inscriptionbecause he took the Greek R for an English P or the Greek long E for anEnglish H. I do not mention this merely as a criticism on other people'simpressions of America, but as a criticism on my own. I wish it to beunderstood that I am well aware that all my views are subject to thissort of potential criticism, and that even when I am certain of thefacts I do not profess to be certain of the deductions. 

In this chapter I hope to point out how a misunderstanding of this kindaffects the common impression, not altogether unfounded, that theAmericans talk about dollars. But for the moment I am merely anxious toavoid a similar misunderstanding when I talk about Americans. About thedogmas of democracy, about the right of a people to its own symbols, whether they be coins or customs, I am convinced, and no longer to beshaken. But about the meaning of those symbols, in silver or othersubstances, I am always open to correction. That error is the price wepay for the great glory of nationality. And in this sense I am quiteready, at the start, to warn my own readers against my own opinions. 

The fact without the truth is futile; indeed the fact without the truthis false. I have already noted that this is especially true touching ourobservations of a strange country; and it is certainly true touching onesmall fact which has swelled into a large fable. I mean the fable aboutAmerica commonly summed up in the phrase about the Almighty Dollar. I donot think the dollar is almighty in America; I fancy many things aremightier, including many ideals and some rather insane ideals. But Ithink it might be maintained that the dollar has another of theattributes of deity. If it is not omnipotent it is in a senseomnipresent. Whatever Americans think about dollars, it is, I think, relatively true that they talk about dollars. If a mere mechanicalrecord could be taken by the modern machinery of dictaphones andstenography, I do not think it probable that the mere word 'dollars'would occur more often in any given number of American conversationsthan the mere word 'pounds' or 'shillings' in a similar number ofEnglish conversations. And these statistics, like nearly all statistics, would be utterly useless and even fundamentally false. It is as if weshould calculate that the word 'elephant' had been mentioned a certainnumber of times in a particular London street, or so many times moreoften than the word 'thunderbolt' had been used in Stoke Poges. Doubtless there are statisticians capable of carefully collecting thosestatistics also; and doubtless there are scientific social reformerscapable of legislating on the basis of them. They would probably arguefrom the elephantine imagery of the London street that such and such apercentage of the householders were megalomaniacs and required medicalcare and police coercion. And doubtless their calculations, like nearlyall such calculations, would leave out the only important point; as thatthe street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Zoo, or was yetmore happily situated under the benignant shadow of the Elephant andCastle. And in the same way the mechanical calculation about the mentionof dollars is entirely useless unless we have some moral understandingof why they are mentioned. It certainly does not mean merely a love ofmoney; and if it did, a love of money may mean a great many verydifferent and even contrary things. The love of money is very differentin a peasant or in a pirate, in a miser or in a gambler, in a greatfinancier or in a man doing some practical and productive work. Now thisdifference in the conversation of American and English business menarises, I think, from certain much deeper things in the American whichare generally not understood by the Englishman. It also arises from muchdeeper things in the Englishman, of which the Englishman is even moreignorant. 

To begin with, I fancy that the American, quite apart from any love ofmoney, has a great love of measurement. He will mention the exact sizeor weight of things, in a way which appears to us as irrelevant. It isas if we were to say that a man came to see us carrying three feet ofwalking stick and four inches of cigar. It is so in cases that have nopossible connection with any avarice or greed for gain. An American willpraise the prodigal generosity of some other man in giving up his ownestate for the good of the poor. But he will generally say that thephilanthropist gave them a 200-acre park, where an Englishman wouldthink it quite sufficient to say that he gave them a park. There issomething about this precision which seems suitable to the Americanatmosphere; to the hard sunlight, and the cloudless skies, and theglittering detail of the architecture and the landscape; just as thevaguer English version is consonant to our mistier and moreimpressionist scenery. It is also connected perhaps with something moreboyish about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the passionateparticularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms ofregiments, the rigs of ships, or even the colours of tram tickets. It isa certain godlike appetite for things, as distinct from thoughts. 

But there is also, of course, a much deeper cause of the difference; andit can easily be deduced by noting the real nature of the differenceitself. When two business men in a train are talking about dollars I amnot so foolish as to expect them to be talking about the philosophy ofSt. Thomas Aquinas. But if they were two English business men I shouldnot expect them to be talking about business. Probably it would be aboutsome sport; and most probably some sport in which they themselves neverdreamed of indulging. The approximate difference is that the Americantalks about his work and the Englishman about his holidays. His ideal isnot labour but leisure. Like every other national characteristic, thisis not primarily a point for praise or blame; in essence it involvesneither and in effect it involves both. It is certainly connected withthat snobbishness which is the great sin of English society. TheEnglishman does love to conceive himself as a sort of country gentleman;and his castles in the air are all castles in Scotland rather than inSpain. For, as an ideal, a Scotch castle is as English as a Welshrarebit or an Irish stew. And if he talks less about money I fear it issometimes because in one sense he thinks more of it. Money is a mysteryin the old and literal sense of something too sacred for speech. Gold isa god; and like the god of some agnostics has no name and is worshippedonly in his works. It is true in a sense that the English gentlemanwishes to have enough money to be able to forget it. But it may bequestioned whether he does entirely forget it. As against this weaknessthe American has succeeded, at the price of a great deal of crudity andclatter, in making general a very real respect for work. He has partlydisenchanted the dangerous glamour of the gentleman, and in that sensehas achieved some degree of democracy; which is the most difficultachievement in the world. 

On the other hand, there is a good side to the Englishman's day-dream ofleisure, and one which the American spirit tends to miss. It may beexpressed in the word 'holiday' or still better in the word 'hobby. ' TheEnglishman, in his character of Robin Hood, really has got two stringsto his bow. Indeed the Englishman really is well represented by RobinHood; for there is always something about him that may literally becalled outlawed, in the sense of being extra-legal or outside the rules. A Frenchman said of Browning that his centre was not in the middle; andit may be said of many an Englishman that his heart is not where histreasure is. Browning expressed a very English sentiment when he said:--

 I like to know a butcher paints, A baker rhymes for his pursuit, Candlestick-maker much acquaints His soul with song, or haply mute Blows out his brains upon the flute. 

Stevenson touched on the same insular sentiment when he said that manymen he knew, who were meat-salesmen to the outward eye, might in thelife of contemplation sit with the saints. Now the extraordinaryachievement of the American meat-salesman is that his poetic enthusiasmcan really be for meat sales; not for money but for meat. An Americancommercial traveller asked me, with a religious fire in his eyes, whether I did not think that salesmanship could be an art. In Englandthere are many salesmen who are sincerely fond of art; but seldom of theart of salesmanship. Art is with them a hobby; a thing of leisure andliberty. That is why the English traveller talks, if not of art, then ofsport. That is why the two city men in the London train, if they are nottalking about golf, may be talking about gardening. If they are nottalking about dollars, or the equivalent of dollars, the reason liesmuch deeper than any superficial praise or blame touching the desire forwealth. In the English case, at least, it lies very deep in the Englishspirit. Many of the greatest English things have had this lighter andlooser character of a hobby or a holiday experiment. Even a masterpiecehas often been a by-product. The works of Shakespeare come out socasually that they can be attributed to the most improbable people; evento Bacon. The sonnets of Shakespeare are picked up afterwards as if outof a wastepaper basket. The immortality of Dr. Johnson does not rest onthe written leaves he collected, but entirely on the words he wasted, the words he scattered to the winds. So great a thing as Pickwick isalmost a kind of accident; it began as something secondary and grew intosomething primary and pre-eminent. It began with mere words written toillustrate somebody else's pictures; and swelled like an epic expandedfrom an epigram. It might almost be said that in the case of Pickwickthe author began as the servant of the artist. But, as in the same storyof Pickwick, the servant became greater than the master. Thisincalculable and accidental quality, like all national qualities, hasits strength and weakness; but it does represent a certain reserve fundof interests in the Englishman's life; and distinguishes him from theother extreme type, of the millionaire who works till he drops, or whodrops because he stops working. It is the great achievement of Americancivilisation that in that country it really is not cant to talk aboutthe dignity of labour. There is something that might almost be calledthe sanctity of labour; but it is subject to the profound law that whenanything less than the highest becomes a sanctity, it tends also tobecome a superstition. When the candlestick-maker does not blow out hisbrains upon the flute there is always a danger that he may blow them outsomewhere else, owing to depressed conditions in the candlestick market. 

Now certainly one of the first impressions of America, or at any rateof New York, which is by no means the same thing as America, is that ofa sort of mob of business men, behaving in many ways in a fashion verydifferent from that of the swarms of London city men who go up every dayto the city. They sit about in groups with Red-Indian gravity, as ifpassing the pipe of peace; though, in fact, most of them are smokingcigars and some of them are eating cigars. The latter strikes me as oneof the most peculiar of transatlantic tastes, more peculiar than that ofchewing gum. A man will sit for hours consuming a cigar as if it were asugar-stick; but I should imagine it to be a very disagreeablesugar-stick. Why he attempts to enjoy a cigar without lighting it I donot know; whether it is a more economical way of carrying a mere symbolof commercial conversation; or whether something of the same queeroutlandish morality that draws such a distinction between beer andginger beer draws an equally ethical distinction between touchingtobacco and lighting it. For the rest, it would be easy to make a merelyexternal sketch full of things equally strange; for this can always bedone in a strange country. I allow for the fact of all foreignerslooking alike; but I fancy that all those hard-featured faces, withspectacles and shaven jaws, do look rather alike, because they all liketo make their faces hard. And with the mention of their mental attitudewe realise the futility of any such external sketch. Unless we can seethat these are something more than men smoking cigars and talking aboutdollars we had much better not see them at all. 

It is customary to condemn the American as a materialist because of hisworship of success. But indeed this very worship, like any worship, even devil-worship, proves him rather a mystic than a materialist. TheFrenchman who retires from business when he has money enough to drinkhis wine and eat his omelette in peace might much more plausibly becalled a materialist by those who do not prefer to call him a man ofsense. But Americans do worship success in the abstract, as a sort ofideal vision. They follow success rather than money; they follow moneyrather than meat and drink. If their national life in one sense is aperpetual game of poker, they are playing excitedly for chips orcounters as well as for coins. And by the ultimate test of materialenjoyment, like the enjoyment of an omelette, even a coin is itself acounter. The Yankee cannot eat chips as the Frenchman can eat chippedpotatoes; but neither can he swallow red cents as the Frenchman swallowsred wine. Thus when people say of a Yankee that he worships the dollar, they pay a compliment to his fine spirituality more true and delicatethan they imagine. The dollar is an idol because it is an image; but itis an image of success and not of enjoyment. 

That this romance is also a religion is shown in the fact that there isa queer sort of morality attached to it. The nearest parallel to it issomething like the sense of honour in the old duelling days. There isnot a material but a distinctly moral savour about the impliedobligation to collect dollars or to collect chips. We hear too much inEngland of the phrase about 'making good'; for no sensible Englishmanfavours the needless interlarding of English with scraps of foreignlanguages. But though it means nothing in English, it means somethingvery particular in American. There is a fine shade of distinctionbetween succeeding and making good, precisely because there must alwaysbe a sort of ethical echo in the word good. America does vaguely feel aman making good as something analogous to a man being good or a mandoing good. It is connected with his serious self-respect and his senseof being worthy of those he loves. Nor is this curious crude idealismwholly insincere even when it drives him to what some of us would callstealing; any more than the duellist's honour was insincere when itdrove him to what some would call murder. A very clever American playwhich I once saw acted contained a complete working model of thismorality. A girl was loyal to, but distressed by, her engagement to ayoung man on whom there was a sort of cloud of humiliation. Theatmosphere was exactly what it would have been in England if he had beenaccused of cowardice or card-sharping. And there was nothing whateverthe matter with the poor young man except that some rotten mine or otherin Arizona had not 'made good. ' Now in England we should either be belowor above that ideal of good. If we were snobs, we should be content toknow that he was a gentleman of good connections, perhaps too muchaccustomed to private means to be expected to be businesslike. If wewere somewhat larger-minded people, we should know that he might be aswise as Socrates and as splendid as Bayard and yet be unfitted, perhapsone should say therefore be unfitted, for the dismal and dirty gamblingof modern commerce. But whether we were snobbish enough to admire himfor being an idler, or chivalrous enough to admire him for being anoutlaw, in neither case should we ever really and in our hearts despisehim for being a failure. For it is this inner verdict of instinctiveidealism that is the point at issue. Of course there is nothing new, orpeculiar to the new world, about a man's engagement practically failingthrough his financial failure. An English girl might easily drop a manbecause he was poor, or she might stick to him faithfully and defiantlyalthough he was poor. The point is that this girl was faithful but shewas not defiant; that is, she was not proud. The whole psychology of thesituation was that she shared the weird worldly idealism of her family, and it was wounded as her patriotism would have been wounded if he hadbetrayed his country. To do them justice, there was nothing to show thatthey would have had any real respect for a royal duke who had inheritedmillions; what the simple barbarians wanted was a man who could 'makegood. ' That the process of making good would probably drag him throughthe mire of everything bad, that he would make good by bluffing, lying, swindling, and grinding the faces of the poor, did not seem to troublethem in the least. Against this fanaticism there is this shadow of trutheven in the fiction of aristocracy; that a gentleman may at least beallowed to be good without being bothered to make it. 

Another objection to the phrase about the almighty dollar is that it isan almighty phrase, and therefore an almighty nuisance. I mean that itis made to explain everything, and to explain everything much too well;that is, much too easily. It does not really help people to understand aforeign country; but it gives them the fatal illusion that they dounderstand it. Dollars stood for America as frogs stood for France;because it was necessary to connect particular foreigners withsomething, or it would be so easy to confuse a Moor with a Montenegrinor a Russian with a Red Indian. The only cure for this sort of satisfiedfamiliarity is the shock of something really unfamiliar. When people cansee nothing at all in American democracy except a Yankee running after adollar, then the only thing to do is to trip them up as they run afterthe Yankee, or run away with their notion of the Yankee, by the obstacleof certain odd and obstinate facts that have no relation to that notion. And, as a matter of fact, there are a number of such obstacles to anysuch generalisation; a number of notable facts that have to bereconciled somehow to our previous notions. It does not matter for thispurpose whether the facts are favourable or unfavourable, or whether thequalities are merits or defects; especially as we do not even understandthem sufficiently to say which they are. The point is that we arebrought to a pause, and compelled to attempt to understand them ratherbetter than we do. We have found the one thing that we did not expect;and therefore the one thing that we cannot explain. And we are moved toan effort, probably an unsuccessful effort, to explain it. 

For instance, Americans are very unpunctual. That is the last thing thata critic expects who comes to condemn them for hustling and haggling andvulgar ambition. But it is almost the first fact that strikes thespectator on the spot. The chief difference between the humdrum Englishbusiness man and the hustling American business man is that the hustlingAmerican business man is always late. Of course there is a great deal ofdifference between coming late and coming too late. But I noticed thefashion first in connection with my own lectures; touching which Icould heartily recommend the habit of coming too late. I could easilyunderstand a crowd of commercial Americans not coming to my lectures atall; but there was something odd about their coming in a crowd, and thecrowd being expected to turn up some time after the appointed hour. Themanagers of these lectures (I continue to call them lectures out ofcourtesy to myself) often explained to me that it was quite useless tobegin properly until about half an hour after time. Often people werestill coming in three-quarters of an hour or even an hour after time. Not that I objected to that, as some lecturers are said to do; it seemedto me an agreeable break in the monotony; but as a characteristic of apeople mostly engaged in practical business, it struck me as curious andinteresting. I have grown accustomed to being the most unbusinesslikeperson in any given company; and it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltationto find I was not the most unpunctual person in that company. I wasafterwards told by many Americans that my impression was quite correct;that American unpunctuality was really very prevalent, and extended tomuch more important things. But at least I was not content to lump thisalong with all sorts of contrary things that I did not happen to like, and call it America. I am not sure of what it really means, but I ratherfancy that though it may seem the very reverse of the hustling, it hasthe same origin as the hustling. The American is not punctual because heis not punctilious. He is impulsive, and has an impulse to stay as wellas an impulse to go. For, after all, punctuality belongs to the sameorder of ideas as punctuation; and there is no punctuation intelegrams. The order of clocks and set hours which English business hasalways observed is a good thing in its own way; indeed I think that in alarger sense it is better than the other way. But it is better becauseit is a protection against hustling, not a promotion of it. In otherwords, it is better because it is more civilised; as a great Venetianmerchant prince clad in cloth of gold was more civilised; or an oldEnglish merchant drinking port in an oak-panelled room was morecivilised; or a little French shopkeeper shutting up his shop to playdominoes is more civilised. And the reason is that the American has theromance of business and is monomaniac, while the Frenchman has theromance of life and is sane. But the romance of business really is aromance, and the Americans are really romantic about it. And thatromance, though it revolves round pork or petrol, is really like alove-affair in this; that it involves not only rushing but alsolingering. 

The American is too busy to have business habits. He is also too much inearnest to have business rules. If we wish to understand him, we mustcompare him not with the French shopkeeper when he plays dominoes, butwith the same French shopkeeper when he works the guns or mans thetrenches as a conscript soldier. Everybody used to the punctiliousPrussian standard of uniform and parade has noticed the roughness andapparent laxity of the French soldier, the looseness of his clothes, theunsightliness of his heavy knapsack, in short his inferiority in everydetail of the business of war except fighting. There he is much tooswift to be smart. He is much too practical to be precise. By a strangeillusion which can lift pork-packing almost to the level of patriotism, the American has the same free rhythm in his romance of business. Hevaries his conduct not to suit the clock but to suit the case. He givesmore time to more important and less time to less important things; andhe makes up his time-table as he goes along. Suppose he has threeappointments; the first, let us say, is some mere trifle of erecting atower twenty storeys high and exhibiting a sky-sign on the top of it;the second is a business discussion about the possibility of printingadvertisements of soft drinks on the table-napkins at a restaurant; thethird is attending a conference to decide how the populace can beprevented from using chewing-gum and the manufacturers can still manageto sell it. He will be content merely to glance at the sky-sign as hegoes by in a trolley-car or an automobile; he will then settle down tothe discussion with his partner about the table-napkins, each speakerindulging in long monologues in turn; a peculiarity of much Americanconversation. Now if in the middle of one of these monologues, hesuddenly thinks that the vacant space of the waiter's shirt-front mightalso be utilised to advertise the Gee Whiz Ginger Champagne, he willinstantly follow up the new idea in all its aspects and possibilities, in an even longer monologue; and will never think of looking at hiswatch while he is rapturously looking at his waiter. The consequence isthat he will come late into the great social movement againstchewing-gum, where an Englishman would probably have arrived at theproper hour. But though the Englishman's conduct is more proper, it neednot be in all respects more practical. The Englishman's rules are betterfor the business of life, but not necessarily for the life of business. And it is true that for many of these Americans business is thebusiness of life. It is really also, as I have said, the romance oflife. We shall admire or deplore this spirit, accordingly as we are gladto see trade irradiated with so much poetry, or sorry to see so muchpoetry wasted on trade. But it does make many people happy, like anyother hobby; and one is disposed to add that it does fill theirimaginations like any other delusion. For the true criticism of all thiscommercial romance would involve a criticism of this historic phase ofcommerce. These people are building on the sand, though it shines likegold, and for them like fairy gold; but the world will remember thelegend about fairy gold. Half the financial operations they follow dealwith things that do not even exist; for in that sense all finance is afairy tale. Many of them are buying and selling things that do nothingbut harm; but it does them good to buy and sell them. The claim of theromantic salesman is better justified than he realises. Business reallyis romance; for it is not reality. 

There is one real advantage that America has over England, largely dueto its livelier and more impressionable ideal. America does not thinkthat stupidity is practical. It does not think that ideas are merelydestructive things. It does not think that a genius is only a person tobe told to go away and blow his brains out; rather it would open all itsmachinery to the genius and beg him to blow his brains in. It mightattempt to use a natural force like Blake or Shelley for very ignoblepurposes; it would be quite capable of asking Blake to take his tigerand his golden lions round as a sort of Barnum's Show, or Shelley tohang his stars and haloed clouds among the lights of Broadway. But itwould not assume that a natural force is useless, any more than thatNiagara is useless. And there is a very definite distinction heretouching the intelligence of the trader, whatever we may think of eithercourse touching the intelligence of the artist. It is one thing thatApollo should be employed by Admetus, although he is a god. It is quiteanother thing that Apollo should always be sacked by Admetus, because heis a god. Now in England, largely owing to the accident of a rivalry andtherefore a comparison with France, there arose about the end of theeighteenth century an extraordinary notion that there was some sort ofconnection between dullness and success. What the Americans call abonehead became what the English call a hard-headed man. The merchantsof London evinced their contempt for the fantastic logicians of Paris byliving in a permanent state of terror lest somebody should set theThames on fire. In this as in much else it is much easier to understandthe Americans if we connect them with the French who were their alliesthan with the English who were their enemies. There are a great manyFranco-American resemblances which the practical Anglo-Saxons are ofcourse too hard-headed (or boneheaded) to see. American history ishaunted with the shadow of the Plebiscitary President; they have atradition of classical architecture for public buildings. Their citiesare planned upon the squares of Paris and not upon the labyrinth ofLondon. They call their cities Corinth and Syracuse, as the Frenchcalled their citizens Epaminondas and Timoleon. Their soldiers wore theFrench kepi; and they make coffee admirably, and do not make tea at all. But of all the French elements in America the most French is this realpracticality. They know that at certain times the most businesslike ofall qualities is 'l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours del'audace. ' The publisher may induce the poet to do a pot-boiler; but thepublisher would cheerfully allow the poet to set the Mississippi onfire, if it would boil his particular pot. It is not so much thatEnglishmen are stupid as that they are afraid of being clever; and it isnot so much that Americans are clever as that they do not try to be anystupider than they are. The fire of French logic has burnt that out ofAmerica as it has burnt it out of Europe, and of almost every placeexcept England. This is one of the few points on which Englishinsularity really is a disadvantage. It is the fatal notion that theonly sort of commonsense is to be found in compromise, and that the onlysort of compromise is to be found in confusion. This must be clearlydistinguished from the commonplace about the utilitarian world notrising to the invisible values of genius. Under this philosophy theutilitarian does not see the utility of genius, even when it is quitevisible. He does not see it, not because he is a utilitarian, butbecause he is an idealist whose ideal is dullness. For some time theEnglish aspired to be stupid, prayed and hoped with soaring spiritualambition to be stupid. But with all their worship of success, they didnot succeed in being stupid. The natural talents of a great andtraditional nation were always breaking out in spite of them. In spiteof the merchants of London, Turner did set the Thames on fire. In spiteof our repeatedly explained preference for realism to romance, Europepersisted in resounding with the name of Byron. And just when we hadmade it perfectly clear to the French that we despised all theirflamboyant tricks, that we were a plain prosaic people and there was nofantastic glory or chivalry about us, the very shaft we sent againstthem shone with the name of Nelson, a shooting and a falling star. 

_Presidents and Problems_

All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen. All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen. This difference, deep and perhaps ineradicable in the temperaments ofthe two peoples, explains a thousand things in their literature andtheir laws. The American national poet praised his people for theirreadiness 'to _rise_ against the never-ending audacity of electedpersons. ' The English national anthem is content to say heartily, butalmost hastily, 'Confound their politics, ' and then more cheerfully, asif changing the subject, 'God Save the King. ' For this is especially thesecret of the monarch or chief magistrate in the two countries. They armthe President with the powers of a King, that he may be a nuisance inpolitics. We deprive the King even of the powers of a President, lest heshould remind us of a politician. We desire to forget the never-endingaudacity of elected persons; and with us therefore it really never doesend. That is the practical objection to our own habit of changing thesubject, instead of changing the ministry. The King, as the Irish witobserved, is not a subject; but in that sense the English crowned headis not a King. He is a popular figure intended to remind us of theEngland that politicians do not remember; the England of horses andships and gardens and good fellowship. The Americans have no suchpurely social symbol; and it is rather the root than the result of thisthat their social luxury, and especially their sport, are a littlelacking in humanity and humour. It is the American, much more than theEnglishman, who takes his pleasures sadly, not to say savagely. 

The genuine popularity of constitutional monarchs, in parliamentarycountries, can be explained by any practical example. Let us supposethat great social reform, The Compulsory Haircutting Act, has just begunto be enforced. The Compulsory Haircutting Act, as every good citizenknows, is a statute which permits any person to grow his hair to anylength, in any wild or wonderful shape, so long as he is registered witha hairdresser who charges a shilling. But it imposes a universalclose-shave (like that which is found so hygienic during a curativedetention at Dartmoor) on all who are registered only with a barber whocharges threepence. Thus, while the ornamental classes can continue toornament the street with Piccadilly weepers or chin-beards if theychoose, the working classes demonstrate the care with which the Stateprotects them by going about in a fresher, cooler, and cleanercondition; a condition which has the further advantage of revealing at aglance that outline of the criminal skull, which is so common amongthem. The Compulsory Haircutting Act is thus in every way a compact andconvenient example of all our current laws about education, sport, liquor and liberty in general. Well, the law has passed and the masses, insensible to its scientific value, are still murmuring against it. Theignorant peasant maiden is averse to so extreme a fashion of bobbing herhair; and does not see how she can even be a flapper with nothing toflap. Her father, his mind already poisoned by Bolshevists, begins towonder who the devil does these things, and why. In proportion as heknows the world of to-day, he guesses that the real origin may be quiteobscure, or the real motive quite corrupt. The pressure may have comefrom anybody who has gained power or money anyhow. It may come from theforeign millionaire who owns all the expensive hairdressing saloons; itmay come from some swindler in the cutlery trade who has contracted tosell a million bad razors. Hence the poor man looks about him withsuspicion in the street; knowing that the lowest sneak or the loudestsnob he sees may be directing the government of his country. Anybody mayhave to do with politics; and this sort of thing is politics. Suddenlyhe catches sight of a crowd, stops, and begins wildly to cheer acarriage that is passing. The carriage contains the one person who hascertainly not originated any great scientific reform. He is the onlyperson in the commonwealth who is not allowed to cut off other people'shair, or to take away other people's liberties. He at least is kept outof politics; and men hold him up as they did an unspotted victim toappease the wrath of the gods. He is their King, and the only man theyknow is not their ruler. We need not be surprised that he is popular, knowing how they are ruled. 

The popularity of a President in America is exactly the opposite. TheAmerican Republic is the last mediaeval monarchy. It is intended thatthe President shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling. If the hairis cut he is the haircutter, the magistrate that bears not the razor invain. All the popular Presidents, Jackson and Lincoln and Roosevelt, have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not asconstitutional monarchs. In short, the names have become curiouslyinterchanged; and as a historical reality it is the President who oughtto be called a King. 

But it is not only true that the President could correctly be called aKing. It is also true that the King might correctly be called aPresident. We could hardly find a more exact description of him than tocall him a President. What is expected in modern times of a modernconstitutional monarch is emphatically that he should preside. We expecthim to take the throne exactly as if he were taking the chair. Thechairman does not move the motion or resolution, far less vote it; he isnot supposed even to favour it. He is expected to please everybody byfavouring nobody. The primary essentials of a President or Chairman arethat he should be treated with ceremonial respect, that he should bepopular in his personality and yet impersonal in his opinions, and thathe should actually be a link between all the other persons by beingdifferent from all of them. This is exactly what is demanded of theconstitutional monarch in modern times. It is exactly the opposite tothe American position; in which the President does not preside at all. He moves; and the thing he moves may truly be called a motion; for thenational idea is perpetual motion. Technically it is called a message;and might often actually be called a menace. Thus we may truly say thatthe King presides and the President reigns. Some would prefer to saythat the President rules; and some Senators and members of Congresswould prefer to say that he rebels. But there is no doubt that he moves;he does not take the chair or even the stool, but rather the stump. 

Some people seem to suppose that the fall of President Wilson was adenial of this almost despotic ideal in America. As a matter of fact itwas the strongest possible assertion of it. The idea is that thePresident shall take responsibility and risk; and responsibility meansbeing blamed, and risk means the risk of being blamed. The theory isthat things are done by the President; and if things go wrong, or arealleged to go wrong, it is the fault of the President. This does notinvalidate, but rather ratifies the comparison with true monarchs suchas the mediaeval monarchs. Constitutional princes are seldom deposed;but despots were often deposed. In the simpler races of sunnier lands, such as Turkey, they were commonly assassinated. Even in our own historya King often received the same respectful tribute to the responsibilityand reality of his office. But King John was attacked because he wasstrong, not because he was weak. Richard the Second lost the crownbecause the crown was a trophy, not because it was a trifle. AndPresident Wilson was deposed because he had used a power which is such, in its nature, that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. As amatter of fact, of course, it is easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's realunpopularity, and still more easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's realfailure. There are a great many people in America who justify andapplaud him; and what is yet more interesting, who justify him not onpacifist and idealistic, but on patriotic and even military grounds. Itis especially insisted by some that his demonstration, which seemedfutile as a threat against Mexico, was a very far-sighted preparationfor the threat against Prussia. But in so far as the democracy diddisagree with him, it was but the occasional and inevitable result ofthe theory by which the despot has to anticipate the democracy. 

Thus the American King and the English President are the very oppositeof each other; yet they are both the varied and very nationalindications of the same contemporary truth. It is the great wearinessand contempt that have fallen upon common politics in both countries. Itmay be answered, with some show of truth, that the new AmericanPresident represents a return to common politics; and that in that sensehe marks a real rebuke to the last President and his more uncommonpolitics. And it is true that many who put Mr. Harding in power regardhim as the symbol of something which they call normalcy; which mayroughly be translated into English by the word normality. And by thisthey do mean, more or less, the return to the vague capitalistconservatism of the nineteenth century. They might call Mr. Harding aVictorian if they had ever lived under Victoria. Perhaps these people doentertain the extraordinary notion that the nineteenth century wasnormal. But there are very few who think so, and even they will notthink so long. The blunder is the beginning of nearly all our presenttroubles. The nineteenth century was the very reverse of normal. Itsuffered a most unnatural strain in the combination of politicalequality in theory with extreme economic inequality in practice. Capitalism was not a normalcy but an abnormalcy. Property is normal, andis more normal in proportion as it is universal. Slavery may be normaland even natural, in the sense that a bad habit may be second nature. But Capitalism was never anything so human as a habit; we may say it wasnever anything so good as a bad habit. It was never a custom; for mennever grew accustomed to it. It was never even conservative; for beforeit was even created wise men had realised that it could not beconserved. It was from the first a problem; and those who will not evenadmit the Capitalist problem deserve to get the Bolshevist solution. Allthings considered, I cannot say anything worse of them than that. 

The recent Presidential election preserved some trace of the old PartySystem of America; but its tradition has very nearly faded like that ofthe Party System of England. It is easy for an Englishman to confessthat he never quite understood the American Party System. It wouldperhaps be more courageous in him, and more informing, to confess thathe never really understood the British Party System. The planks in thetwo American platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected andramshackle; but our own party was as much of a patchwork, and indeed Ithink even more so. Everybody knows that the two American factions werecalled 'Democrat' and 'Republican. ' It does not at all cover the case toidentify the former with Liberals and the latter with Conservatives. TheDemocrats are the party of the South and have some true tradition fromthe Southern aristocracy and the defence of Secession and State Rights. The Republicans rose in the North as the party of Lincoln, largelycondemning slavery. But the Republicans are also the party of Tariffs, and are at least accused of being the party of Trusts. The Democrats arethe party of Free Trade; and in the great movement of twenty years agothe party of Free Silver. The Democrats are also the party of the Irish;and the stones they throw at Trusts are retorted by stones thrown atTammany. It is easy to see all these things as curiously sporadic andbewildering; but I am inclined to think that they are as a whole morecoherent and rational than our own old division of Liberals andConservatives. There is even more doubt nowadays about what is theconnecting link between the different items in the old British partyprogrammes. I have never been able to understand why being in favour ofProtection should have anything to do with being opposed to Home Rule;especially as most of the people who were to receive Home Rule werethemselves in favour of Protection. I could never see what giving peoplecheap bread had to do with forbidding them cheap beer; or why the partywhich sympathises with Ireland cannot sympathise with Poland. I cannotsee why Liberals did not liberate public-houses or Conservativesconserve crofters. I do not understand the principle upon which thecauses were selected on both sides; and I incline to think that it waswith the impartial object of distributing nonsense equally on bothsides. Heaven knows there is enough nonsense in American politics too;towering and tropical nonsense like a cyclone or an earthquake. But whenall is said, I incline to think that there was more spiritual andatmospheric cohesion in the different parts of the American party thanin those of the English party; and I think this unity was all the morereal because it was more difficult to define. The Republican partyoriginally stood for the triumph of the North, and the North stood forthe nineteenth century; that is for the characteristic commercialexpansion of the nineteenth century; for a firm faith in the profit andprogress of its great and growing cities, its division of labour, itsindustrial science, and its evolutionary reform. The Democratic partystood more loosely for all the elements that doubted whether thisdevelopment was democratic or was desirable; all that looked back toJeffersonian idealism and the serene abstractions of the eighteenthcentury, or forward to Bryanite idealism and some simplified Utopiafounded on grain rather than gold. Along with this went, not at allunnaturally, the last and lingering sentiment of the Southern squires, who remembered a more rural civilisation that seemed by comparisonromantic. Along with this went, quite logically, the passions and thepathos of the Irish, themselves a rural civilisation, whose basis is areligion or what the nineteenth century tended to call a superstition. Above all, it was perfectly natural that this tone of thought shouldfavour local liberties, and even a revolt on behalf of local liberties, and should distrust the huge machine of centralised power called theUnion. In short, something very near the truth was said by a suicidallysilly Republican orator, who was running Blaine for the Presidency, whenhe denounced the Democratic party as supported by 'Rome, rum, andrebellion. ' They seem to me to be three excellent things in their place;and that is why I suspect that I should have belonged to the Democraticparty, if I had been born in America when there was a Democratic party. But I fancy that by this time even this general distinction has becomevery dim. If I had been an American twenty years ago, in the time of thegreat Free Silver campaign, I should certainly never have hesitated foran instant about my sympathies or my side. My feelings would have beenexactly those that are nobly expressed by Mr. Vachell Lindsay, in a poembearing the characteristic title of 'Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan. ' And, by the way, nobody can begin to sympathise with America whose soul doesnot to some extent begin to swing and dance to the drums and gongs ofMr. Vachell Lindsay's great orchestra; which has the note of his wholenation in this: that a refined person can revile it a hundred times overas violent and brazen and barbarous and absurd, but not as insincere;there is something in it, and that something is the soul of many millionmen. But the poet himself, in the political poem referred to, speaks ofBryan's fall over Free Silver as 'defeat of my boyhood, defeat of mydream'; and it is only too probable that the cause has fallen as well asthe candidate. The William Jennings Bryan of later years is not the manwhom I should have seen in my youth, with the visionary eyes of Mr. Vachell Lindsay. He has become a commonplace Pacifist, which is in itsnature the very opposite of a revolutionist; for if men will fightrather than sacrifice humanity on a golden cross, it cannot be wrong forthem to resist its being sacrificed to an iron cross. I came into veryindirect contact with Mr. Bryan when I was in America, in a fashion thatmade me realise how hard it has become to recover the illusions of aBryanite. I believe that my lecture agent was anxious to arrange adebate, and I threw out a sort of loose challenge to the effect thatwoman's suffrage had weakened the position of woman; and while I wasaway in the wilds of Oklahoma my lecture agent (a man of blood-curdlingcourage and enterprise) asked Mr. Bryan to debate with me. Now Mr. Bryanis one of the greatest orators of modern history, and there is noconceivable reason why he should trouble to debate with a wanderinglecturer. But as a matter of fact he expressed himself in the mostmagnanimous and courteous terms about my personal position, but said (asI understood) that it would be improper to debate on female suffrage asit was already a part of the political system. And when I heard that, Icould not help a sigh; for I recognised something that I knew only toowell on the front benches of my own beloved land. The great and gloriousdemagogue had degenerated into a statesman. I had never expected for amoment that the great orator could be bothered to debate with me at all;but it had never occurred to me, as a general moral principle, that twoeducated men were for ever forbidden to talk sense about a particulartopic, because a lot of other people had already voted on it. What isthe matter with that attitude is the loss of the freedom of the mind. There can be no liberty of thought unless it is ready to unsettle whathas recently been settled, as well as what has long been settled. We areperpetually being told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong manwho will do things. What is wanted is a strong man who will undo things;and that will be a real test of strength. 

Anyhow, we could have believed, in the time of the Free Silver fight, that the Democratic party was democratic with a small d. In Mr. Wilsonit was transfigured, his friends would say into a higher and his foesinto a hazier thing. And the Republican reaction against him, even whereit has been healthy, has also been hazy. In fact, it has been not somuch the victory of a political party as a relapse into repose aftercertain political passions; and in that sense there is a truth in thestrange phrase about normalcy; in the sense that there is nothing morenormal than going to sleep. But an even larger truth is this; it is mostlikely that America is no longer concentrated on these faction fights atall, but is considering certain large problems upon which those factionshardly troubled to take sides. They are too large even to be classifiedas foreign policy distinct from domestic policy. They are so large as tobe inside as well as outside the state. From an English standpoint themost obvious example is the Irish; for the Irish problem is not aBritish problem, but also an American problem. And this is true even ofthe great external enigma of Japan. The Japanese question may be a partof foreign policy for America, but it is a part of domestic policy forCalifornia. And the same is true of that other intense and intelligentEastern people, the genius and limitations of which have troubled theworld so much longer. What the Japs are in California, the Jews are inAmerica. That is, they are a piece of foreign policy that has becomeimbedded in domestic policy; something which is found inside but stillhas to be regarded from the outside. On these great internationalmatters I doubt if Americans got much guidance from their party system;especially as most of these questions have grown very recently andrapidly to enormous size. Men are left free to judge of them with freshminds. And that is the truth in the statement that the WashingtonConference has opened the gates of a new world. 

On the relations to England and Ireland I will not attempt to dwelladequately here. I have already noted that my first interview was withan Irishman, and my first impression from that interview a vivid senseof the importance of Ireland in Anglo-American relations; and I havesaid something of the Irish problem, prematurely and out of its properorder, under the stress of that sense of urgency. Here I will only addtwo remarks about the two countries respectively. A great many Britishjournalists have recently imagined that they were pouring oil upon thetroubled waters, when they were rather pouring out oil to smooth thedownward path; and to turn the broad road to destruction into abutter-slide. They seem to have no notion of what to do, except to saywhat they imagine the very stupidest of their readers would be pleasedto hear, and conceal whatever the most intelligent of their readerswould probably like to know. They therefore informed the public that'the majority of Americans' had abandoned all sympathy with Ireland, because of its alleged sympathy with Germany; and that this majority ofAmericans was now ardently in sympathy with its English brothers acrossthe sea. Now to begin with, such critics have no notion of what they aresaying when they talk about the majority of Americans. To anybody whohas happened to look in, let us say, on the city of Omaha, Nebraska, theremark will have something enormous and overwhelming about it. It islike saying that the majority of the inhabitants of China would agreewith the Chinese Ambassador in a preference for dining at the Savoyrather than the Ritz. There are millions and millions of people livingin those great central plains of the North American Continent of whomit would be nearer the truth to say that they have never heard ofEngland, or of Ireland either, than to say that their first emotionalmovement is a desire to come to the rescue of either of them. It isperfectly true that the more monomaniac sort of Sinn Feiner mightsometimes irritate this innocent and isolated American spirit by beingpro-Irish. It is equally true that a traditional Bostonian or Virginianmight irritate it by being pro-English. The only difference is thatlarge numbers of pure Irishmen are scattered in those far places, andlarge numbers of pure Englishmen are not. But it is truest of all to saythat neither England nor Ireland so much as crosses the mind of most ofthem once in six months. Painting up large notices of 'Watch Us Grow, 'making money by farming with machinery, together with an occasionalhold-up with six-shooters and photographs of a beautiful murderess ordivorcée, fill up the round of their good and happy lives, and fleet thetime carelessly as in the golden age. 

But putting aside all this vast and distant democracy, which is the real'majority of Americans, ' and confining ourselves to that older cultureon the eastern coast which the critics probably had in mind, we shallfind the case more comforting but not to be covered with cheap and falsecomfort. Now it is perfectly true that any Englishman coming to thiseastern coast, as I did, finds himself not only most warmly welcomed asa guest, but most cordially complimented as an Englishman. Men recallwith pride the branches of their family that belong to England or theEnglish counties where they were rooted; and there are enthusiasms forEnglish literature and history which are as spontaneous as patriotismitself. Something of this may be put down to a certain promptitude andflexibility in all American kindness, which is never sufficiently stodgyto be called good nature. The Englishman does sometimes wonder whetherif he had been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered remoteRussian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Muscovite great-grandmother;or whether if he had come from Iceland, they would not have known asmuch about Icelandic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence ofIcelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the proportions of the casehe will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that anumber of educated Americans are very warmly and sincerely sympatheticwith England. 

What I began to feel, with a certain creeping chill, was that they wereonly too sympathetic with England. The word sympathetic has sometimesrather a double sense. The impression I received was that all thesechivalrous Southerners and men mellow with Bostonian memories were_rallying_ to England. They were on the defensive; and it was poor oldEngland that they were defending. Their attitude implied that somebodyor something was leaving her undefended, or finding her indefensible. The burden of that hearty chorus was that England was not so black asshe was painted; it seemed clear that somewhere or other she was beingpainted pretty black. But there was something else that made meuncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterouslyforgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well asmorality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot andcold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land. Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never duringthe great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power andcommerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly thatnote in a human voice. England was being _pitied_. I, as an Englishman, was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to bean object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full ofthe mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. Butthe anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at anend. 

It is not my business here to expound my view of English politics, stillless of European politics or the politics of the world; but to put downa few impressions of American travel. On many points of Europeanpolitics the impression will be purely negative; I am sure that mostAmericans have no notion of the position of France or the position ofPoland. But if English readers want the truth, I am sure this is thetruth about their notion of the position of England. They are wondering, or those who are watching are wondering, whether the term of her successis come and she is going down the dark road after Prussia. Many aresorry if this is so; some are glad if it is so; but all are seriouslyconsidering the probability of its being so. And herein lay especiallythe horrible folly of our Black-and-Tan terrorism over the Irish people. I have noted that the newspapers told us that America had been chilledin its Irish sympathies by Irish detachment during the war. It is thepainful truth that any advantage we might have had from this weourselves immediately proceeded to destroy. Ireland _might_ have putherself wrong with America by her attitude about Belgium, if England hadnot instantly proceeded to put herself more wrong by her attitudetowards Ireland. It is quite true that two blacks do not make a white;but you cannot send a black to reproach people with toleratingblackness; and this is quite as true when one is a Black Brunswicker andthe other a Black-and-Tan. It is true that since then England has madesurprisingly sweeping concessions; concessions so large as to increasethe amazement that the refusal should have been so long. Butunfortunately the combination of the two rather clinches the conceptionof our decline. If the concession had come before the terror, it wouldhave looked like an attempt to emancipate, and would probably havesucceeded. Coming so abruptly after the terror, it looked only like anattempt to tyrannise, and an attempt that failed. It was partly aninheritance from a stupid tradition, which tried to combine what itcalled firmness with what it called conciliation; as if when we made upour minds to soothe a man with a five-pound note, we always took care toundo our own action by giving him a kick as well. The English politicianhas often done that; though there is nothing to be said of such a fool, except that he has wasted a fiver. But in this case he gave the kickfirst, received a kicking in return, and _then_ gave up the money; andit was hard for the bystanders to say anything except that he had beenbadly beaten. The combination and sequence of events seems almost as ifit were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous parallel. The firstaction looked only too like the invasion of Belgium, and the second likethe evacuation of Belgium. So that vast and silent crowd in the Westlooked at the British Empire, as men look at a great tower that hasbegun to lean. Thus it was that while I found real pleasure, I could notfind unrelieved consolation in the sincere compliments paid to mycountry by so many cultivated Americans; their memories of homelycorners of historic counties from which their fathers came, of thecathedral that dwarfs the town, or the inn at the turning of the road. There was something in their voices and the look in their eyes whichfrom the first disturbed me. So I have heard good Englishmen, who diedafterwards the death of soldiers, cry aloud in 1914, 'It seemsimpossible, of those jolly Bavarians!' or, 'I will never believe it, when I think of the time I had at Heidelberg!'

But there are other things besides the parallel of Prussia or theproblem of Ireland. The American press is much freer than our own; theAmerican public is much more familiar with the discussion of corruptionthan our own; and it is much more conscious of the corruption of ourpolitics than we are. Almost any man in America may speak of the MarconiCase; many a man in England does not even know what it means. Manyimagine that it had something to do with the propriety of politiciansspeculating on the Stock Exchange. So that it means a great deal toAmericans to say that one figure in that drama is ruling India andanother is ruling Palestine. And this brings me to another problem, which is also dealt with much more openly in America than in England. Imention it here only because it is a perfect model of themisunderstandings in the modern world. If any one asks for an exampleof exactly how the important part of every story is left out, and eventhe part that is reported is not understood, he could hardly have astronger case than the story of Henry Ford of Detroit. 

When I was in Detroit I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ford, and itreally was a pleasure. He is a man quite capable of views which I thinksilly to the point of insanity; but he is not the vulgar benevolentboss. It must be admitted that he is a millionaire; but he cannot reallybe convicted of being a philanthropist. He is not a man who merely wantsto run people; it is rather his views that run him, and perhaps run awaywith him. He has a distinguished and sensitive face; he really inventedthings himself, unlike most men who profit by inventions; he issomething of an artist and not a little of a fighter. A man of that typeis always capable of being wildly wrong, especially in the sectarianatmosphere of America; and Mr. Ford has been wrong before and may bewrong now. He is chiefly known in England for a project which I thinkvery preposterous; that of the Peace Ship, which came to Europe duringthe war. But he is not known in England at all in connection with a muchmore important campaign, which he has conducted much more recently andwith much more success; a campaign against the Jews like one of theAnti-Semitic campaigns of the Continent. Now any one who knows anythingof America knows exactly what the Peace Ship would be like. It was anational combination of imagination and ignorance, which has at leastsome of the beauty of innocence. Men living in those huge, hedgelessinland plains know nothing about frontiers or the tragedy of a fight forfreedom; they know nothing of alarum and armaments or the peril of ahigh civilisation poised like a precious statue within reach of a mailedfist. They are accustomed to a cosmopolitan citizenship, in which men ofall bloods mingle and in which men of all creeds are counted equal. Their highest moral boast is humanitarianism; their highest mental boastis enlightenment. In a word, they are the very last men in the world whowould seem likely to pride themselves on a prejudice against the Jews. They have no religion in particular, except a sincere sentiment whichthey would call 'true Christianity, ' and which specially forbids anattack on the Jews. They have a patriotism which prides itself onassimilating all types, including the Jews. Mr. Ford is a pure productof this pacific world, as was sufficiently proved by his pacifism. If aman of that sort has discovered that there is a Jewish problem, it isbecause there is a Jewish problem. It is certainly not because there isan Anti-Jewish prejudice. For if there had been any amount of suchracial and religious prejudice, he would have been about the very lastsort of man to have it. His particular part of the world would have beenthe very last place to produce it. We may well laugh at the Peace Ship, and its wild course and inevitable shipwreck; but remember that its verywildness was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle ofFront-de-Boeuf. Everything that made him Anti-War should haveprevented him from being Anti-Semite. We may mock him for being mad onpeace; but we cannot say that he was so mad on peace that he made war onIsrael. 

It happened that, when I was in America, I had just published somestudies on Palestine; and I was besieged by Rabbis lamenting my'prejudice. ' I pointed out that they would have got hold of the wrongword, even if they had not got hold of the wrong man. As a point ofpersonal autobiography, I do not happen to be a man who dislikes Jews;though I believe that some men do. I have had Jews among my mostintimate and faithful friends since my boyhood, and I hope to have themtill I die. But even if I did have a dislike of Jews, it would beillogical to call that dislike a prejudice. Prejudice is a very lucidLatin word meaning the bias which a man has before he considers a case. I might be said to be prejudiced against a Hairy Ainu because of hisname, for I have never been on terms of such intimacy with him as tocorrect my preconceptions. But if after moving about in the modern worldand meeting Jews, knowing Jews, doing business with Jews, and readingand hearing about Jews, I came to the conclusion that I did not likeJews, my conclusion certainly would not be a prejudice. It would simplybe an opinion; and one I should be perfectly entitled to hold; though asa matter of fact I do not hold it. No extravagance of hatred merelyfollowing on _experience_ of Jews can properly be called a prejudice. 

Now the point is that this new American Anti-Semitism springs fromexperience and nothing but experience. There is no prejudice for it tospring from. Or rather the prejudice is all the other way. All thetraditions of that democracy, and very creditable traditions too, are infavour of toleration and a sort of idealistic indifference. Thesympathies in which these nineteenth-century people were reared were allagainst Front-de-Boeuf and in favour of Rebecca. They inherited aprejudice against Anti-Semitism; a prejudice of Anti-Anti-Semitism. These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as theymight have struck oil; because it is _there_, and not even because theywere looking for it. Their view of the problem, like their use of theoil, is not always satisfactory; and with parts of it I entirelydisagree. But the point is that the thing which I call a problem, andothers call a prejudice, has now appeared in broad daylight in a newcountry where there is no priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancientsuperstition to explain it. It has appeared because it _is_ a problem;and those are the best friends of the Jews, including many of the Jewsthemselves, who are trying to find a solution. That is the meaning ofthe incident of Mr. Henry Ford of Detroit; and you will hardly hear anintelligible word about it in England. 

The talk of prejudice against the Japs is not unlike the talk ofprejudice against the Jews. Only in this case our indifference hasreally the excuse of ignorance. We used to lecture the Russians foroppressing the Jews, before we heard the word Bolshevist and began tolecture them for being oppressed by the Jews. In the same way we havelong lectured the Californians for oppressing the Japs, without allowingfor the possibility of their foreseeing that the oppression may soon bethe other way. As in the other case, it may be a persecution but it isnot a prejudice. The Californians know more about the Japanese than wedo; and our own colonists when they are placed in the same positiongenerally say the same thing. I will not attempt to deal adequately herewith the vast international and diplomatic problems which arise with thename of the new power in the Far East. It is possible that Japan, havingimitated European militarism, may imitate European pacifism. I cannothonestly pretend to know what the Japanese mean by the one any more thanby the other. But when Englishmen, especially English Liberals likemyself, take a superior and censorious attitude towards Americans andespecially Californians, I am moved to make a final remark. When aconsiderable number of Englishmen talk of the grave contending claims ofour friendship with Japan and our friendship with America, when theyfinally tend in a sort of summing up to dwell on the superior virtues ofJapan, I may be permitted to make a single comment. 

We are perpetually boring the world and each other with talk about thebonds that bind us to America. We are perpetually crying aloud thatEngland and America are very much alike, especially England. We arealways insisting that the two are identical in all the things in whichthey most obviously differ. We are always saying that both stand fordemocracy, when we should not consent to stand their democracy for halfa day. We are always saying that at least we are all Anglo-Saxons, whenwe are descended from Romans and Normans and Britons and Danes, and theyare descended from Irishmen and Italians and Slavs and Germans. We tella people whose very existence is a revolt against the British Crown thatthey are passionately devoted to the British Constitution. We tell anation whose whole policy has been isolation and independence that withus she can bear safely the White Man's Burden of universal empire. Wetell a continent crowded with Irishmen to thank God that the Saxon canalways rule the Celt. We tell a populace whose very virtues are lawlessthat together we uphold the Reign of Law. We recognise our ownlaw-abiding character in people who make laws that neither they noranybody else can abide. We congratulate them on clinging to all theyhave cast away, and on imitating everything which they came intoexistence to insult. And when we have established all these nonsensicalanalogies with a nonexistent nation, we wait until there is a crisis inwhich we really are at one with America, and then we falter and threatento fail her. In a battle where we really are of one blood, the blood ofthe great white race throughout the world, when we really have onelanguage, the fundamental alphabet of Cadmus and the script of Rome, when we really do represent the same reign of law, the common conscienceof Christendom and the morals of men baptized, when we really have animplicit faith and honour and type of freedom to summon up our souls aswith trumpets--_then_ many of us begin to weaken and waver and wonderwhether there is not something very nice about little yellow men, whoseheroic stories revolve round polygamy and suicide, and whose heroes woretwo swords and worshipped the ancestors of the Mikado. 

_Prohibition in Fact and Fancy_

I went to America with some notion of not discussing Prohibition. But Isoon found that well-to-do Americans were only too delighted to discussit over the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, todispense with the nuts. I am far from sneering at this; having a generalphilosophy which need not here be expounded, but which may be symbolisedby saying that monkeys can enjoy nuts but only men can enjoy wine. Butif I am to deal with Prohibition, there is no doubt of the first thingto be said about it. The first thing to be said about it is that it doesnot exist. It is to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate itwas intended to be enforced among the poor; though even among them Ifancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced among the rich;and I doubt whether it was intended to be. I suspect that this hasalways happened whenever this negative notion has taken hold of someparticular province or tribe. Prohibition never prohibits. It never hasin history; not even in Moslem history; and it never will. Mahomet atleast had the argument of a climate and not the interest of a class. Butif a test is needed, consider what part of Moslem culture has passedpermanently into our own modern culture. You will find the one Moslempoem that has really pierced is a Moslem poem in praise of wine. Thecrown of all the victories of the Crescent is that nobody reads theKoran and everybody reads the Rubaiyat. 

Most of us remember with satisfaction an old picture in _Punch_, representing a festive old gentleman in a state of collapse on thepavement, and a philanthropic old lady anxiously calling the attentionof a cabman to the calamity. The old lady says, 'I'm sure this poorgentleman is ill, ' and the cabman replies with fervour, 'Ill! I wish I'ad 'alf 'is complaint. '

We talk about unconscious humour; but there is such a thing asunconscious seriousness. Flippancy is a flower whose roots are oftenunderground in the subconsciousness. Many a man talks sense when hethinks he is talking nonsense; touches on a conflict of ideas as if itwere only a contradiction of language, or really makes a parallel whenhe means only to make a pun. Some of the _Punch_ jokes of the bestperiod are examples of this; and that quoted above is a very strongexample of it. The cabman meant what he said; but he said a great dealmore than he meant. His utterance contained fine philosophical doctrinesand distinctions of which he was not perhaps entirely conscious. Thespirit of the English language, the tragedy and comedy of the conditionof the English people, spoke through him as the god spoke through ateraph-head or brazen mask of oracle. And the oracle is an omen; and insome sense an omen of doom. 

Observe, to begin with, the sobriety of the cabman. Note his measure, his moderation; or to use the yet truer term, his temperance. He onlywishes to have half the old gentleman's complaint. The old gentleman iswelcome to the other half, along with all the other pomps and luxuriesof his superior social station. There is nothing Bolshevist or evenCommunist about the temperance cabman. He might almost be calledDistributist, in the sense that he wishes to distribute the oldgentleman's complaint more equally between the old gentleman andhimself. And, of course, the social relations there represented are verymuch truer to life than it is fashionable to suggest. By the realism ofthis picture Mr. Punch made amends for some more snobbish pictures, withthe opposite social moral. It will remain eternally among his realglories that he exhibited a picture in which the cabman was sober andthe gentleman was drunk. Despite many ideas to the contrary, it wasemphatically a picture of real life. The truth is subject to thesimplest of all possible tests. If the cabman were really and trulydrunk he would not be a cabman, for he could not drive a cab. If he hadthe whole of the old gentleman's complaint, he would be sitting happilyon the pavement beside the old gentleman; a symbol of social equalityfound at last, and the levelling of all classes of mankind. I do not saythat there has never been such a monster known as a drunken cabman; I donot say that the driver may not sometimes have approximated imprudentlyto three-quarters of the complaint, instead of adhering to his severebut wise conception of half of it. But I do say that most men of theworld, if they spoke sincerely, could testify to more examples ofhelplessly drunken gentlemen put inside cabs than of helplessly drunkendrivers on top of them. Philanthropists and officials, who never look atpeople but only at papers, probably have a mass of social statistics tothe contrary; founded on the simple fact that cabmen can becross-examined about their habits and gentlemen cannot. Social workersprobably have the whole thing worked out in sections and compartments, showing how the extreme intoxication of cabmen compares with theparallel intoxication of costermongers; or measuring the drunkenness ofa dustman against the drunkenness of a crossing-sweeper. But there ismore practical experience embodied in the practical speech of theEnglish; and in the proverb that says 'as drunk as a lord. '

Now Prohibition, whether as a proposal in England or a pretence inAmerica, simply means that the man who has drunk less shall have nodrink, and the man who has drunk more shall have all the drink. It meansthat the old gentleman shall be carried home in the cab drunker thanever; but that, in order to make it quite safe for him to drink toexcess, the man who drives him shall be forbidden to drink even inmoderation. That is what it means; that is all it means; that is all itever will mean. It tends to that in Moslem countries; where theluxurious and advanced drink champagne, while the poor and fanaticaldrink water. It means that in modern America; where the wealthy are allat this moment sipping their cocktails, and discussing how much harderlabourers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity. This is what it means and all it means; and men are divided about itaccording to whether they believe in a certain transcendental conceptcalled 'justice, ' expressed in a more mystical paradox as the equalityof men. So long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as you arerich and really confident of remaining so, you can have Prohibition andbe as drunk as you choose. 

I see that some remarks by the Rev. R. J. Campbell, dealing with socialconditions in America, are reported in the press. They include someobservations about Sinn Fein in which, as in most of Mr. Campbell'sallusions to Ireland, it is not difficult to detect his dismal origin, or the acrid smell of the smoke of Belfast. But the remarks aboutAmerica are valuable in the objective sense, over and above theirphilosophy. He believes that Prohibition will survive and be a success, nor does he seem himself to regard the prospect with any specialdisfavour. But he frankly and freely testifies to the truth I haveasserted; that Prohibition does not prohibit, so far as the wealthy areconcerned. He testifies to constantly seeing wine on the table, as willany other grateful guest of the generous hospitality of America; and heimplies humorously that he asked no questions about the story told himof the old stocks in the cellars. So there is no dispute about thefacts; and we come back as before to the principles. Is Mr. Campbellcontent with a Prohibition which is another name for Privilege? If so, he has simply absorbed along with his new theology a new morality whichis different from mine. But he does state both sides of the inequalitywith equal logic and clearness; and in these days of intellectual fogthat alone is like a ray of sunshine. 

Now my primary objection to Prohibition is not based on any argumentsagainst it, but on the one argument for it. I need nothing more for itscondemnation than the only thing that is said in its defence. It is saidby capitalists all over America; and it is very clearly and correctlyreported by Mr. Campbell himself. The argument is that employees workharder, and therefore employers get richer. That this idea should betaken calmly, by itself, as the test of a problem of liberty, is initself a final testimony to the presence of slavery. It shows thatpeople have completely forgotten that there is any other test except theservile test. Employers are willing that workmen should have exercise, as it may help them to do more work. They are even willing that workmenshould have leisure; for the more intelligent capitalists can see thatthis also really means that they can do more work. But they are not inany way willing that workmen should have fun; for fun only increases thehappiness and not the utility of the worker. Fun is freedom; and in thatsense is an end in itself. It concerns the man not as a worker but as acitizen, or even as a soul; and the soul in that sense is an end initself. That a man shall have a reasonable amount of comedy and poetryand even fantasy in his life is part of his spiritual health, which isfor the service of God; and not merely for his mechanical health, whichis now bound to the service of man. The very test adopted has all theservile implication; the test of what we can get out of him, instead ofthe test of what he can get out of life. 

Mr. Campbell is reported to have suggested, doubtless rather as aconjecture than a prophecy, that England may find it necessary to becometeetotal in order to compete commercially with the efficiency andeconomy of teetotal America. Well, in the eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries there was in America one of the most economical andefficient of all forms of labour. It did not happen to be feasible forthe English to compete with it by copying it. There were so manyhumanitarian prejudices about in those days. But economically thereseems to be no reason why a man should not have prophesied that Englandwould be forced to adopt American Slavery then, as she is urged to adoptAmerican Prohibition now. Perhaps such a prophet would have prophesiedrightly. Certainly it is not impossible that universal Slavery mighthave been the vision of Calhoun as universal Prohibition seems to be thevision of Campbell. The old England of 1830 would have said that such aplea for slavery was monstrous; but what would it have said of a pleafor enforced water-drinking? Nevertheless, the nobler Servile State ofCalhoun collapsed before it could spread to Europe. And there is alwaysthe hope that the same may happen to the far more materialistic Utopiaof Mr. Campbell and Soft Drinks. 

Abstract morality is very important; and it may well clear the mind toconsider what would be the effect of Prohibition in America, if it wereintroduced there. It would, of course, be a decisive departure from thetradition of the Declaration of Independence. Those who deny that arehardly serious enough to demand attention. It is enough to say that theyare reduced to minimising that document in defence of Prohibition, exactly as the slave-owners were reduced to minimising it in defence ofSlavery. They are reduced to saying that the Fathers of the Republicmeant no more than that they would not be ruled by a king. And they areobviously open to the reply which Lincoln gave to Douglas on the slaveryquestion; that if that great charter was limited to certain events inthe eighteenth century, it was hardly worth making such a fuss about inthe nineteenth--or in the twentieth. But they are also open to anotherreply which is even more to the point, when they pretend thatJefferson's famous preamble only means to say that monarchy is wrong. They are maintaining that Jefferson only meant to say something that hedoes not say at all. The great preamble does not say that allmonarchical government must be wrong; on the contrary, it rather impliesthat most government is right. It speaks of human governments in generalas justified by the necessity of defending certain personal rights. Isee no reason whatever to suppose that it would not include any royalgovernment that does defend those rights. Still less do I doubt what itwould say of a republican government that does destroy those rights. 

But what are those rights? Sophists can always debate about theirdegree; but even sophists cannot debate about their direction. Nobody inhis five wits will deny that Jeffersonian democracy wished to give thelaw a general control in more public things, but the citizens a moregeneral liberty in private things. Wherever we draw the line, libertycan only be personal liberty; and the most personal liberties must atleast be the last liberties we lose. But to-day they are the firstliberties we lose. It is not a question of drawing the line in the rightplace, but of beginning at the wrong end. What are the rights of man, ifthey do not include the normal right to regulate his own health, inrelation to the normal risks of diet and daily life? Nobody can pretendthat beer is a poison as prussic acid is a poison; that all the millionsof civilised men who drank it all fell down dead when they had touchedit. Its use and abuse is obviously a matter of judgment; and there canbe no personal liberty, if it is not a matter of private judgment. Itis not in the least a question of drawing the line between liberty andlicence. If this is licence, there is no such thing as liberty. It isplainly impossible to find any right more individual or intimate. To saythat a man has a right to a vote, but not a right to a voice about thechoice of his dinner, is like saying that he has a right to his hat butnot a right to his head. 

Prohibition, therefore, plainly violates the rights of man, if there areany rights of man. What its supporters really mean is that there arenone. And in suggesting this, they have all the advantages that everysceptic has when he supports a negation. That sort of ultimatescepticism can only be retorted upon itself, and we can point out tothem that they can no more prove the right of the city to be oppressivethan we can prove the right of the citizen to be free. In the primarymetaphysics of such a claim, it would surely be easier to make it outfor a single conscious soul than for an artificial social combination. If there are no rights of men, what are the rights of nations? Perhaps anation has no claim to self-government. Perhaps it has no claim to goodgovernment. Perhaps it has no claim to any sort of government or anysort of independence. Perhaps they will say _that_ is not implied in theDeclaration of Independence. But without going deep into my reasons forbelieving in natural rights, or rather in supernatural rights (andJefferson certainly states them as supernatural), I am content here tonote that a man's treatment of his own body, in relation to traditionaland ordinary opportunities for bodily excess, is as near to hisself-respect as social coercion can possibly go; and that when that isgone there is nothing left. If coercion applies to that, it applies toeverything; and in the future of this controversy it obviously willapply to everything. When I was in America, people were already applyingit to tobacco. I never can see why they should not apply it to talking. Talking often goes with tobacco as it goes with beer; and what is morerelevant, talking may often lead both to beer and tobacco. Talking oftendrives a man to drink, both negatively in the form of nagging andpositively in the form of bad company. If the American Puritan is soanxious to be a _censor morum_, he should obviously put a stop to theevil communications that really corrupt good manners. He shouldreintroduce the Scold's Bridle among the other Blue Laws for a land ofblue devils. He should gag all gay deceivers and plausible cynics; heshould cut off all flattering lips and the tongue that speaketh proudthings. Nobody can doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world isdone simply by talking. Jefferson and the old democrats allowed peopleto talk, not because they were unaware of this fact, but because theywere fettered by this old fancy of theirs about freedom and the rightsof man. But since we have already abandoned that doctrine in a finalfashion, I cannot see why the new principle should not be appliedintelligently; and in that case it would be applied to the control ofconversation. The State would provide us with forms already filled upwith the subjects suitable for us to discuss at breakfast; perhapsallowing us a limited number of epigrams each. Perhaps we should have tomake a formal application in writing, to be allowed to make a joke thathad just occurred to us in conversation. And the committee wouldconsider it in due course. Perhaps it would be effected in a morepractical fashion, and the private citizens would be shut up as thepublic-houses were shut up. Perhaps they would all wear gags, which thepoliceman would remove at stated hours; and their mouths would be openedfrom one to three, as now in England even the public-houses are fromtime to time accessible to the public. To some this will soundfantastic; but not so fantastic as Jefferson would have thoughtProhibition. But there is one sense in which it is indeed fantastic, forby hypothesis it leaves out the favouritism that is the fundamental ofthe whole matter. The only sense in which we can say that logic willnever go so far as this is that logic will never go the length ofequality. It is perfectly possible that the same forces that haveforbidden beer may go on to forbid tobacco. But they will in a specialand limited sense forbid tobacco--but not cigars. Or at any rate notexpensive cigars. In America, where large numbers of ordinary men smokerather ordinary cigars, there would be doubtless a good opportunity ofpenalising a very ordinary pleasure. But the Havanas of the millionairewill be all right. So it will be if ever the Puritans bring back theScold's Bridle and the statutory silence of the populace. It will onlybe the populace that is silent. The politicians will go on talking. 

These I believe to be the broad facts of the problem of Prohibition; butit would not be fair to leave it without mentioning two other causeswhich, if not defences, are at least excuses. The first is thatProhibition was largely passed in a sort of fervour or fever ofself-sacrifice, which was a part of the passionate patriotism of Americain the war. As I have remarked elsewhere, those who have any notion ofwhat that national unanimity was like will smile when they see Americamade a model of mere international idealism. Prohibition was partly asort of patriotic renunciation; for the popular instinct, like everypoetic instinct, always tends at great crises to great gestures ofrenunciation. But this very fact, while it makes the inhumanity far morehuman, makes it far less final and convincing. Men cannot remainstanding stiffly in such symbolical attitudes; nor can a permanentpolicy be founded on something analogous to flinging a gauntlet oruttering a battle-cry. We might as well expect all the Yale students toremain through life with their mouths open, exactly as they were whenthey uttered the college yell. It would be as reasonable as to expectthem to remain through life with their mouths shut, while the wine-cupwhich has been the sacrament of all poets and lovers passed round amongall the youth of the world. This point appeared very plainly in adiscussion I had with a very thoughtful and sympathetic American critic, a clergyman writing in an Anglo-Catholic magazine. He put the sentimentof these healthier Prohibitionists, which had so much to do with thepassing of Prohibition, by asking, 'May not a man who is asked to giveup his blood for his country be asked to give up his beer for hiscountry?' And this phrase clearly illuminates all the limitations of thecase. I have never denied, in principle, that it might in some abnormalcrisis be lawful for a government to lock up the beer, or to lock up thebread. In that sense I am quite prepared to treat the sacrifice of beerin the same way as the sacrifice of blood. But is my American criticreally ready to treat the sacrifice of blood in the same way as thesacrifice of beer? Is bloodshed to be as prolonged and protracted asProhibition? Is the normal noncombatant to shed his gore as often as hemisses his drink? I can imagine people submitting to a specialregulation, as I can imagine them serving in a particular war. I doindeed despise the political knavery that deliberately passes drinkregulations as war measures and then preserves them as peace measures. But that is not a question of whether drink and drunkenness are wrong, but of whether lying and swindling are wrong. But I never denied thatthere might need to be exceptional sacrifices for exceptional occasions;and war is in its nature an exception. Only, if war is the exception, why should Prohibition be the rule? If the surrender of beer is worthyto be compared to the shedding of blood, why then blood ought to beflowing for ever like a fountain in the public squares of Philadelphiaand New York. If my critic wants to complete his parallel, he must drawup rather a remarkable programme for the daily life of the ordinarycitizens. He must suppose that, through all their lives, they areparaded every day at lunch time and prodded with bayonets to show thatthey will shed their blood for their country. He must suppose that everyevening, after a light repast of poison gas and shrapnel, they are madeto go to sleep in a trench under a permanent drizzle of shell-fire. Itis surely obvious that if this were the normal life of the citizen, thecitizen would have no normal life. The common sense of the thing is thatsacrifices of this sort are admirable but abnormal. It is not normal forthe State to be perpetually regulating our days with the discipline of afighting regiment; and it is not normal for the State to be perpetuallyregulating our diet with the discipline of a famine. To say that everycitizen must be subject to control in such bodily things is like sayingthat every Christian ought to tear himself with red-hot pincers becausethe Christian martyrs did their duty in time of persecution. A man has aright to control his body, though in a time of martyrdom he may give hisbody to be burned; and a man has a right to control his bodily health, though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. Thus, though the patriotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence thatcomes back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it proves only thatProhibition ought to be ephemeral, unless war ought to be eternal. 

The other excuse is much less romantic and much more realistic. I havealready said enough of the cause which is really realistic. The realpower behind Prohibition is simply the plutocratic power of the pushingemployers who wish to get the last inch of work out of their workmen. But before the progress of modern plutocracy had reached this stage, there was a predetermining cause for which there was a much better case. The whole business began with the problem of black labour. I have notattempted in this book to deal adequately with the question of thenegro. I have refrained for a reason that may seem somewhat sensational;that I do not think I have anything particularly valuable to say orsuggest. I do not profess to understand this singularly dark andintricate matter; and I see no use in men who have no solution fillingup the gap with sentimentalism. The chief thing that struck me about thecoloured people I saw was their charming and astonishing cheerfulness. My sense of pathos was appealed to much more by the Red Indians; andindeed I wish I had more space here to do justice to the Red Indians. They did heroic service in the war; and more than justified theirglorious place in the day-dreams and nightmares of our boyhood. But thenegro problem certainly demands more study than a sight-seer could giveit; and this book is controversial enough about things that I havereally considered, without permitting it to exhibit me as a sight-seerwho shoots at sight. But I believe that it was always common ground topeople of common sense that the enslavement and importation of negroeshad been the crime and catastrophe of American history. The onlydifference was originally that one side thought that, the crime oncecommitted, the only reparation was their freedom; while the otherthought that, the crime once committed, the only safety was theirslavery. It was only comparatively lately, by a process I shall have toindicate elsewhere, that anything like a positive case for slaverybecame possible. Now among the many problems of the presence of an alienand at least recently barbaric figure among the citizens, there was avery real problem of drink. Drink certainly has a very exceptionallydestructive effect upon negroes in their native countries; and it wasalleged to have a peculiarly demoralising effect upon negroes in theUnited States; to call up the passions that are the particulartemptation of the race and to lead to appalling outrages that arefollowed by appalling popular vengeance. However this may be, many ofthe states of the American Union, which first forbade liquor tocitizens, meant simply to forbid it to negroes. But they had not themoral courage to deny that negroes are citizens. About all theirpolitical expedients necessarily hung the load that hangs so heavy onmodern politics; hypocrisy. The superior race had to rule by a sort ofsecret society organised against the inferior. The American politiciansdared not disfranchise the negroes; so they coerced everybody in theoryand only the negroes in practice. The drinking of the white men becameas much a conspiracy as the shooting by the white horsemen of theKu-Klux Klan. And in that connection, it may be remarked in passing thatthe comparison illustrates the idiocy of supposing that the moral senseof mankind will ever support the prohibition of drinking as if it weresomething like the prohibition of shooting. Shooting in America isliable to take a free form, and sometimes a very horrible form; as whenprivate bravos were hired to kill workmen in the capitalistic interestsof that pure patron of disarmament, Carnegie. But when some of the richAmericans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with, because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we maywell be disposed to smile. When I was there, at any rate, they wereusing them up very fast; and with no apparent fears about the supply. But if the Ku-Klux Klan had started suddenly shooting everybody theydidn't like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they wereonly using up the stocks of their ammunition, left over from the CivilWar, it seems probable that there would at least have been a littlecuriosity about how much they had left. There might at least have beenoccasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. It is evenconceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it. 

No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly becausethe rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, butpartly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of thisparticular rule. And the truth is, as I have indicated, that it wasoriginally established as an exception and not as a rule. Theemancipated negro was an exception in the community, and a certain planwas, rightly or wrongly, adopted to meet his case. A law was madeprofessedly for everybody and practically only for him. Prohibition isonly important as marking the transition by which the trick, triedsuccessfully on black labour, could be extended to all labour. We inEngland have no right to be Pharisaic at the expense of the Americans inthis matter; for we have tried the same trick in a hundred forms. Thetrue philosophical defence of the modern oppression of the poor would beto say frankly that we have ruled them so badly that they are unfit torule themselves. But no modern oligarch is enough of a man to say this. For like all virile cynicism it would have an element of humility; whichwould not mix with the necessary element of hypocrisy. So we proceed, just as the Americans do, to make a law for everybody and then evade itfor ourselves. We have not the honesty to say that the rich may betbecause they can afford it; so we forbid any man to bet in any place;and then say that a place is not a place. It is exactly as if there werean American law allowing a negro to be murdered because he is not a manwithin the meaning of the Act. We have not the honesty to drive the poorto school because they are ignorant; so we pretend to drive everybody;and then send inspectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. Weapply the same ingenuous principle; and are quite as undemocratic asWestern democracy. Nevertheless there is an element in the American casewhich cannot be present in ours; and this chapter may well conclude uponso important a change. 

America can now say with pride that she has abolished the colour bar. Inthis matter the white labourer and the black labourer have at last beenput upon an equal social footing. White labour is every bit as muchenslaved as black labour; and is actually enslaved by a method and amodel only intended for black labour. We might think it rather odd ifthe exact regulations about flogging negroes were reproduced as a planfor punishing strikers; or if industrial arbitration issued its reportsin the precise terminology of the Fugitive Slave Law. But this is inessentials what has happened; and one could almost fancy some negro orgyof triumph, with the beating of gongs and all the secret violence ofVoodoo, crying aloud to some ancestral Mumbo Jumbo that the Poor WhiteTrash was being treated according to its name. 

_Fads and Public Opinion_

A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He isperfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in areverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was aforeigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my ownlaughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreignerhave finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meantto be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerousground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humour isgenerally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists areso careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war toconsider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to havearisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And, rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from thefailure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he ishumorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to bethe worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke. 

The English and the American types of humour are in one way directlycontrary. The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination, piling one house on another in a tower like that of a sky-scraper. Themost English humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man returning tothe earth his mother in a homely fashion; as when he sits down suddenlyon a butter-slide. English farce describes a man as being in a hole. American fantasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as beingup a tree. The former is to be found in the cockney comic songs thatconcern themselves with hanging out the washing or coming home with themilk. The latter is to be found in those fantastic yarns about machinesthat turn live pigs into pig-skin purses or burning cities that serve tohatch an egg. But it will be inevitable, when the two come first intocontact, that the bathos will sound like vulgarity and the extravagancewill sound like boasting. 

Suppose an American soldier said to an English soldier in the trenches, 'The Kaiser may want a place in the sun; I reckon he won't have a placein the solar system when we begin to hustle. ' The English soldier willvery probably form the impression that this is arrogance; an impressionbased on the extraordinary assumption that the American means what hesays. The American has merely indulged in a little art for art's sake, and abstract adventure of the imagination; he has told an American shortstory. But the Englishman, not understanding this, will think the otherman is boasting, and reflecting on the insufficiency of the Englisheffort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like, 'Oh, you'll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and askingfor a kipper with your tea. ' And it is quite likely that the Americanwill be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beautyanswered in so personal a fashion. Being an American, he will probablyhave a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife; and may object to herbeing called an old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under theextraordinary delusion that talking of the old woman really means thatthe woman is old. Possibly he thinks the mysterious demand for a kippercarries with it some charge of ill-treating his wife; which his nationalsense of honour swiftly resents. But the real cross-purposes come fromthe contrary direction of the two exaggerations, the American makinglife more wild and impossible than it is, and the Englishman making itmore flat and farcical than it is; the one escaping from the house oflife by a skylight and the other by a trap-door. 

This difficulty of different humours is a very practical one forpractical people. Most of those who profess to remove all internationaldifferences are not practical people. Most of the phrases offered forthe reconciliation of severally patriotic peoples are entirely seriousand even solemn phrases. But human conversation is not conducted inthose phrases. The normal man on nine occasions out of ten is rather aflippant man. And the normal man is almost always the national man. Patriotism is the most popular of all the virtues. The drier sort ofdemocrats who despise it have the democracy against them in everycountry in the world. Hence their international efforts seldom go anyfarther than to effect an international reconciliation of allinternationalists. But we have not solved the normal and popular problemuntil we have an international reconciliation of all nationalists. 

It is very difficult to see how humour can be translated at all. WhenSam Weller is in the Fleet Prison and Mrs. Weller and Mr. Stiggins siton each side of the fireplace and weep and groan with sympathy, old Mr. Weller observes, 'Vell, Sammy, I hope you find your spirits rose by this'ere lively visit. ' I have never looked up this passage in the popularand successful French version of _Pickwick_; but I confess I am curiousas to what French past-participle conveys the precise effect of the word'rose. ' A translator has not only to give the right translation of theright word but the right translation of the wrong word. And in the sameway I am quite prepared to suspect that there are English jokes which anEnglishman must enjoy in his own rich and romantic solitude, withoutasking for the sympathy of an American. But Englishmen are generallyonly too prone to claim this fine perception, without seeing that thefine edge of it cuts both ways. I have begun this chapter on the note ofnational humour because I wish to make it quite clear that I realise howeasily a foreigner may take something seriously that is not serious. When I think something in America is really foolish, it may be I that ammade a fool of. It is the first duty of a traveller to allow for this;but it seems to be the very last thing that occurs to some travellers. But when I seek to say something of what may be called the fantasticside of America, I allow beforehand that some of it may be meant to befantastic. And indeed it is very difficult to believe that some of it ismeant to be serious. But whether or no there is a joke, there iscertainly an inconsistency; and it is an inconsistency in the moralmake-up of America which both puzzles and amuses me. 

The danger of democracy is not anarchy but convention. There is even asort of double meaning in the word 'convention'; for it is also used forthe most informal and popular sort of parliament; a parliament notsummoned by any king. The Americans come together very easily withoutany king; but their coming together is in every sense a convention, andeven a very conventional convention. In a democracy riot is rather theexception and respectability certainly the rule. And though asuperficial sight-seer should hesitate about all such generalisations, and certainly should allow for enormous exceptions to them, he doesreceive a general impression of unity verging on uniformity. ThusAmericans all dress well; one might almost say that American women alllook well; but they do not, as compared with Europeans, look verydifferent. They are in the fashion; too much in the fashion even to beconspicuously fashionable. Of course there are patches, both Bohemianand Babylonian, of which this is not true, but I am talking of thegeneral tone of a whole democracy. I have said there is morerespectability than riot; but indeed in a deeper sense the same spiritis behind both riot and respectability. It is the same social force thatmakes it possible for the respectable to boycott a man and for theriotous to lynch him. I do not object to it being called 'the herdinstinct, ' so long as we realise that it is a metaphor and not anexplanation. 

Public opinion can be a prairie fire. It eats up everything that opposesit; and there is the grandeur as well as the grave disadvantages of anatural catastrophe in that national unity. Pacifists who complained inEngland of the intolerance of patriotism have no notion of whatpatriotism can be like. If they had been in America, after America hadentered the war, they would have seen something which they have alwaysperhaps subconsciously dreaded, and would then have beyond all theirworst dreams detested; and the name of it is democracy. They would havefound that there are disadvantages in birds of a feather flockingtogether; and that one of them follows on a too complacent display ofthe white feather. The truth is that a certain flexible sympathy witheccentrics of this kind is rather one of the advantages of anaristocratic tradition. The imprisonment of Mr. Debs, the AmericanPacifist, which really was prolonged and oppressive, would probably havebeen shortened in England where his opinions were shared by aristocratslike Mr. Bertrand Russell and Mr. Ponsonby. A man like Lord Hugh Cecilcould be moved to the defence of conscientious objectors, partly by atrue instinct of chivalry; but partly also by the general feeling that agentleman may very probably have aunts and uncles who are quite as mad. He takes the matter personally, in the sense of being able to imaginethe psychology of the persons. But democracy is no respecter of persons. It is no respecter of them, either in the bad and servile or in the goodand sympathetic sense. And Debs was nothing to democracy. He was but oneof the millions. This is a real problem, or question in the balance, touching different forms of government; which is, of course, quiteneglected by the idealists who merely repeat long words. There wasduring the war a society called the Union of Democratic Control, whichwould have been instantly destroyed anywhere where democracy had anycontrol, or where there was any union. And in this sense the UnitedStates have most emphatically got a union. Nevertheless I think there issomething rather more subtle than this simple popular solidity behindthe assimilation of American citizens to each other. There is somethingeven in the individual ideals that drives towards this social sympathy. And it is here that we have to remember that biological fancies like theherd instinct are only figures of speech, and cannot really coveranything human. For the Americans are in some ways a very self-consciouspeople. To compare their social enthusiasm to a stampede of cattle is toask us to believe in a bull writing a diary or a cow looking in alooking-glass. Intensely sensitive by their very vitality, they arecertainly conscious of criticism and not merely of a blind and brutalappetite. But the peculiar point about them is that it is this veryvividness in the self that often produces the similarity. It may be thatwhen they are unconscious they are like bulls and cows. But it is whenthey are self-conscious that they are like each other. 

Individualism is the death of individuality. It is so, if only becauseit is an 'ism. ' Many Americans become almost impersonal in their worshipof personality. Where their natural selves might differ, their idealselves tend to be the same. Anybody can see what I mean in those strongself-conscious photographs of American business men that can be seen inany American magazine. Each may conceive himself to be a solitaryNapoleon brooding at St. Helena; but the result is a multitude ofNapoleons brooding all over the place. Each of them must have the eyesof a mesmerist; but the most weak-minded person cannot be mesmerised bymore than one millionaire at a time. Each of the millionaires mustthrust forward his jaw, offering (if I may say so) to fight the worldwith the same weapon as Samson. Each of them must accentuate the lengthof his chin, especially, of course, by always being completelyclean-shaven. It would be obviously inconsistent with Personality toprefer to wear a beard. These are of course fantastic examples on thefringe of American life; but they do stand for a certain assimilation, not through brute gregariousness, but rather through isolated dreaming. And though it is not always carried so far as this, I do think it iscarried too far. There is not quite enough unconsciousness to producereal individuality. There is a sort of worship of will-power in theabstract, so that people are actually thinking about how they can will, more than about what they want. To this I do think a certain correctivecould be found in the nature of English eccentricity. Every man in hishumour is most interesting when he is unconscious of his humour; or atleast when he is in an intermediate stage between humour in the oldsense of oddity and in the new sense of irony. Much is said in thesedays against negative morality; and certainly most Americans would showa positive preference for positive morality. The virtues they veneratecollectively are very active virtues; cheerfulness and courage and vim, otherwise zip, also pep and similar things. But it is sometimesforgotten that negative morality is freer than positive morality. Negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pattern, of whichthe lines or cords constrict at longer intervals. A man like Dr. Johnsoncould grow in his own way to his own stature in the net of the TenCommandments; precisely because he was convinced there were only ten ofthem. He was not compressed into the mould of positive beauty, likethat of the Apollo Belvedere or the American citizen. 

This criticism is sometimes true even of the American woman, who iscertainly a much more delightful person than the mesmeric millionairewith his shaven jaw. Interviewers in the United States perpetually askedme what I thought of American women, and I confessed a distaste for suchgeneralisations which I have not managed to lose. The Americans, who arethe most chivalrous people in the world, may perhaps understand me; butI can never help feeling that there is something polygamous abouttalking of women in the plural at all; something unworthy of anyAmerican except a Mormon. Nevertheless, I think the exaggeration Isuggest does extend in a less degree to American women, fascinating asthey are. I think they too tend too much to this cult of impersonalpersonality. It is a description easy to exaggerate even by the faintestemphasis; for all these things are subtle and subject to strikingindividual exceptions. To complain of people for being brave and brightand kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. Andyet there is something in the background that can only be expressed by asymbol, something that is not shallowness but a neglect of thesubconsciousness and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that canbe missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starrycandelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came overme, in a wordless wave, that I should like to see a sulky woman. How shewould walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces fullof older stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicateproportion even in the most detached description. But the same thingwas in the mind of a white-bearded old man I met in New York, an Irishexile and a wonderful talker, who stared up at the tower of gildedgalleries of the great hotel, and said with that spontaneous movement ofstyle which is hardly heard except from Irish talkers: 'And I have beenin a village in the mountains where the people could hardly read orwrite; but all the men were like soldiers, and all the women had pride. '

It sounds like a poem about an Earthly Paradise to say that in this landthe old women can be more beautiful than the young. Indeed, I think WaltWhitman, the national poet, has a line somewhere almost precisely tothat effect. It sounds like a parody upon Utopia, and the image of thelion lying down with the lamb, to say it is a place where a man mightalmost fall in love with his mother-in-law. But there is nothing inwhich the finer side of American gravity and good feeling does morehonourably exhibit itself than in a certain atmosphere around the olderwomen. It is not a cant phrase to say that they grow old gracefully; forthey do really grow old. In this the national optimism really has in itthe national courage. The old women do not dress like young women; theyonly dress better. There is another side to this feminine dignity in theold, sometimes a little lost in the young, with which I shall dealpresently. The point for the moment is that even Whitman's truly poeticvision of the beautiful old women suffers a little from that bewilderingmultiplicity and recurrence that is indeed the whole theme of Whitman. It is like the green eternity of Leaves of Grass. When I think of theeccentric spinsters and incorrigible grandmothers of my own country, Icannot imagine that any one of them could possibly be mistaken foranother, even at a glance. And in comparison I feel as if I had beentravelling in an Earthly Paradise of more decorative harmonies; and Iremember only a vast cloud of grey and pink as of the plumage ofcherubim in an old picture. But on second thoughts, I think this may beonly the inevitable effect of visiting any country in a swift andsuperficial fashion; and that the grey and pink cloud is probably anillusion, like the spinning prairies scattered by the wheel of thetrain. 

Anyhow there is enough of this equality, and of a certain social unityfavourable to sanity, to make the next point about America very much ofa puzzle. It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seenan answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy shouldproduce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of humandignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny. I amnot referring solely or even specially to Prohibition, which I discusselsewhere. Prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore nextdoor to a religion; it has some imaginable connection with moralquestions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. But those who ask us tomodel ourselves on the States which punish the sin of drink forget thatthere are States which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking acigarette in the open air. The same American atmosphere that permitsProhibition permits of people being punished for kissing each other. Inother words, there are States psychologically capable of making a man aconvict for wearing a blue neck-tie or having a green front-door, oranything else that anybody chooses to fancy. There is an Americanatmosphere in which people may some day be shot for shaking hands, orhanged for writing a post-card. 

As for the sort of thing to which I refer, the American newspapers arefull of it and there is no name for it but mere madness. Indeed it isnot only mad, but it calls itself mad. To mention but one example out ofmany, it was actually boasted that some lunatics were teaching childrento take care of their health. And it was proudly added that the childrenwere 'health-mad. ' That it is not exactly the object of all mentalhygiene to make people mad did not occur to them; and they may still beengaged in their earnest labours to teach babies to be valetudinariansand hypochondriacs in order to make them healthy. In such cases, we maysay that the modern world is too ridiculous to be ridiculed. You cannotcaricature a caricature. Imagine what a satirist of saner days wouldhave made of the daily life of a child of six, who was actually admittedto be mad on the subject of his own health. These are not days in whichthat great extravaganza could be written; but I dimly see some of itsepisodes like uncompleted dreams. I see the child pausing in the middleof a cart-wheel, or when he has performed three-quarters of acart-wheel, and consulting a little note-book about the amount ofexercise per diem. I see him pausing half-way up a tree, or when he hasclimbed exactly one-third of a tree; and then producing a clinicalthermometer to take his own temperature. But what would be the good ofimaginative logic to prove the madness of such people, when theythemselves praise it for being mad?

There is also the cult of the Infant Phenomenon, of which Dickens madefun and of which educationalists make fusses. When I was in Americaanother newspaper produced a marvellous child of six who had theintellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and apparently oneon which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understandand even to employ the word 'annihilate. ' When asked to say somethingproving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, 'Whencommon sense comes in, superstition is annihilated. ' In reply to which, by way of showing that I also am as intelligent as a child of twelve, and there is no arrested development about me, I will say in the sameelegant diction, 'When psychological education comes in, common sense isannihilated. ' Everybody seems to be sitting round this child in anadoring fashion. It did not seem to occur to anybody that we do notparticularly want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilatingsuperstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk like a child oftwelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a man of fifty, or even a manof fifty to talk like a fool. And on the principle of hoping that alittle girl of six will have a massive and mature brain, there is everyreason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a magnificent andbushy beard. 

Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among Americancranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforcepsychoanalysis--that is, enforce confession without absolution. And Iconfess I cannot connect this feature with the genuine democratic spiritof the mass. I can only suggest, in concluding this chapter, twopossible causes rather peculiar to America, which may have made thisgreat democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this somanifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea. 

The first historical cause is Puritanism; but not Puritanism merely inthe sense of Prohibitionism. The truth is that prohibitions might havedone far less harm as prohibitions, if a vague association had notarisen, on some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition andprogress. And it was the progress that did the harm, not theprohibition. Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if theycan be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under ProgressivePuritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is notlimitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in therestriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict therestriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; moreand more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; forit is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith ofthe future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thusthe worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so muchPuritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis butby subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it wasbound to choose the smallest piece. There is in America, I believe, alarge religious body that has felt it right to separate itself fromChristendom because it cannot believe in the morality of wearingbuttons. I do not know how the schism arose; but it is easy to suppose, for the sake of argument, that there had originally existed some Puritanbody which condemned the frivolity of ribbons though not of buttons. Iwas going to say of badges but not buttons; but on reflection I cannotbring myself to believe that any American, however insane, would objectto wearing badges. But the point is that as the holy spirit ofprogressive prophesy rested on the first sect because it had invented anew objection to ribbons, so that holy spirit would then pass from it tothe new sect who invented a further objection to buttons. And from themit must inevitably pass to any rebel among them who shall choose to riseand say that he disapproves of trousers because of the existence oftrouser-buttons. Each secession in turn must be right because it isrecent, and progress must progress by growing smaller and smaller. Thatis the progressive theory, the legacy of seventeenth-centurysectarianism, the dogma implied in much modern politics, and the evidentenemy of democracy. Democracy is reproached with saying that themajority is always right. But progress says that the minority is alwaysright. Progressives are prophets; and fortunately not all the people areprophets. Thus in the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianismanybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over thepeople. If he chooses to say that drinking is always wrong, or thatkissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, peopleare afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting theirown great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of theancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to somethingthat is dead, they appeal to something that may never be born. 

There is another cause of this strange servile disease in Americandemocracy. It is to be found in American feminism, and feminist Americais an entirely different thing from feminine America. I should say thatthe overwhelming majority of American girls laugh at their femalepoliticians at least as much as the majority of American men despisetheir male politicians. But though the aggressive feminists are aminority, they are in this atmosphere which I have tried to analyse; theatmosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about the minority. Andit is this superstition of seriousness that constitutes the most solidobstacle and exception to the general and almost conventional pressureof public opinion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, aswas Abolitionism before the Civil War, or Pro-Germanism in the GreatWar, or the suggestion of racial admixture in the South at all times, then the fad meets far less mercy than anywhere else in the world; it issnowed under and swept away. But when it does not thus directlychallenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious halo of hopefulsolemnity surrounds it, merely because it is a fad, but above all if itis a feminine fad. The earnest lady-reformer who really utters a warningagainst the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be walking clothedin light, like a prophetess. Perhaps it is something of the holy aureolewhich the East sees shining around an idiot. 

But I think there is another explanation, feminine rather than feminist, and proceeding from normal women and not from abnormal idiots. It issomething that involves an old controversy, but one upon which I havenot, like so many politicians, changed my opinion. It concerns theparticular fashion in which women tend to regard, or rather todisregard, the formal and legal rights of the citizen. In so far as thisis a bias, it is a bias in the directly opposite direction from that nowlightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history going about, according to which women in the past have always been in the position ofslaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always beenin the position of despots. They have been despotic because they ruledin an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to beconstitutional. You cannot grant a constitution to a nursery; nor canbabies assemble like barons and extort a Great Charter. Tommy cannotplead a Habeas Corpus against going to bed; and an infant cannot betried by twelve other infants before he is put in the corner. And asthere can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension offeminism means that there shall be no more laws or liberties in a statethan there are in a nursery. The woman does not really regard men ascitizens but as children. She may, if she is a humanitarian, love allmankind; but she does not respect it. Still less does she respect itsvotes. Now a man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is adanger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science being made theexcuse for every trick of tyranny and interference. Anybody who is notan anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street;but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way downthe chimney or even under the bed. In other words, it is a danger ofturning the policeman into a sort of benevolent burglar. Against thisprotests are already being made, and will increasingly be made, if menretain any instinct of independence or dignity at all. But to complainof the woman interfering in the home will always sound like complainingof the oyster intruding into the oyster-shell. To object that she hastoo much power over education will seem like objecting to a hen havingtoo much to do with eggs. She has already been given an almostirresponsible power over a limited region in these things; and if thatpower is made infinite it will be even more irresponsible. If she addsto her own power in the family all these alien fads external to thefamily, her power will not only be irresponsible but insane. She will besomething which may well be called a nightmare of the nursery; a madmother. But the point is that she will be mad about other nurseries aswell as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The results will beinteresting; but at least it is certain that under this softeninginfluence government of the people, by the people, for the people, willmost assuredly perish from the earth. 

But there is always another possibility. Hints of it may be noted hereand there like muffled gongs of doom. The other day some peoplepreaching some low trick or other, for running away from the glory ofmotherhood, were suddenly silenced in New York; by a voice of deep anddemocratic volume. The prigs who potter about the great plains arepygmies dancing round a sleeping giant. That which sleeps, so far asthey are concerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intolerancein the soul of America. At present the masses in the Middle West areindifferent to such fancies or faintly attracted by them, as fashions ofculture from the great cities. But any day it may not be so; somelunatic may cut across their economic rights or their strange and buriedreligion; and then he will see something. He will find himself runninglike a nigger who has wronged a white woman or a man who has set theprairie on fire. He will see something which the politicians fan in itssleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many reactionarieshave cursed with the name of the mob, but which in any case has hadunder its feet the crowns of many kings. It was said that the voice ofthe people is the voice of God; and this at least is certain, that itcan be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics of theirarrogance shall stiffen before something enormous, such as towers in thelast words that Job heard out of the whirlwind; and a voice they neverknew shall tell them that his name is Leviathan, and he is lord over allthe children of pride. 

_The Extraordinary American_

When I was in America I had the feeling that it was far more foreignthan France or even than Ireland. And by foreign I mean fascinatingrather than repulsive. I mean that element of strangeness which marksthe frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveller himself thealmost eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there more clearly than incountries counted as more remote from us, in race or religion, a paradoxthat is one of the great truths of travel. 

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have foundsomething that we do not understand. So long as we find the charactereasy to read, we are reading into it our own character. If when we seean event we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be prettycertain that we had ourselves prepared the explanation before we saw theevent. It follows from this that the best picture of a foreign peoplecan probably be found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event ofwhich the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably throw somelight on the truth. I will therefore take from my American experiencesone isolated incident, which certainly could not have happened in anyother country I have ever clapped eyes on. I have really no notion ofwhat it meant. I have heard even from Americans about five differentconjectures about its meaning. But though I do not understand it, I dosincerely believe that if I did understand it, I should understandAmerica. 

It happened in the city of Oklahoma, which would require a book toitself, even considered as a background. The State of Oklahoma is adistrict in the south-west recently reclaimed from the Red Indianterritory. What many, quite incorrectly, imagine about all America isreally true of Oklahoma. It is proud of having no history. It is glowingwith the sense of having a great future--and nothing else. People arejust as likely to boast of an old building in Nashville as in Norwich;people are just as proud of old families in Boston as in Bath. But inOklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal structure, arrogantlyaffirming that it wasn't there last week. It was against the colours ofthis crude stage scenery, as of a pantomime city of pasteboard, that thefantastic figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note ofinterrogation. I was strolling down the main street of the city, andlooking in at a paper-stall vivid with the news of crime, when astranger addressed me; and asked me, quite politely but with a curiousair of having authority to put the question, what I was doing in thatcity. 

He was a lean brown man, having rather the look of a shabby tropicaltraveller, with a grey moustache and a lively and alert eye. But themost singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was coveredwith a multitude of shining metallic emblems made in the shape of starsand crescents. I was well accustomed by this time to Americans adorningthe lapels of their coats with little symbols of various societies; itis a part of the American passion for the ritual of comradeship. Thereis nothing that an American likes so much as to have a secret societyand to make no secret of it. But in this case, if I may put it so, therash of symbolism seemed to have broken out all over the man, in afashion that indicated that the fever was far advanced. Of this minormystery, however, his first few sentences offered a provisionalexplanation. In answer to his question, touching my business inOklahoma, I replied with restraint that I was lecturing. To which hereplied without restraint, but rather with an expansive and radiantpride, 'I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy. '

So far a certain wild rationality seemed to light up the affair. I knewit was unusual, in my own country, for the Astronomer Royal to walk downthe Strand with his coat plastered all over with the Solar System. Indeed, it was unusual for any English astronomical lecturer toadvertise the subject of his lectures in this fashion. But though itwould be unusual, it would not necessarily be unreasonable. In fact, Ithink it might add to the colour and variety of life, if specialists didadopt this sort of scientific heraldry. I should like to be able torecognise an entomologist at sight by the decorative spiders andcockroaches crawling all over his coat and waistcoat. I should like tosee a conchologist in a simple costume of shells. An osteopath, Isuppose, would be agreeably painted so as to resemble a skeleton, whilea botanist would enliven the street with the appearance of aJack-in-the-Green. So while I regarded the astronomical lecturer in theastronomical coat as a figure distinguishable, by a high degree ofdifferentiation, from the artless astronomers of my island home (enoughtheir simple loveliness for me) I saw in him nothing illogical, butrather an imaginative extreme of logic. And then came another turn ofthe wheel of topsy-turvydom, and all the logic was scattered to thewind. 

Expanding his starry bosom and standing astraddle, with the air of onewho owned the street, the strange being continued, 'Yes, I am lecturingon astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, palaeontology, embryology, eschatology, ' and so on in a thunderous roll of theoretical sciencesapparently beyond the scope of any single university, let alone anysingle professor. Having thus introduced himself, however, he got tobusiness. He apologised with true American courtesy for havingquestioned me at all, and excused it on the ground of his own exactingresponsibilities. I imagined him to mean the responsibility ofsimultaneously occupying the chairs of all the faculties alreadymentioned. But these apparently were trifles to him, and something farmore serious was clouding his brow. 

'I feel it to be my duty, ' he said, 'to acquaint myself with anystranger visiting this city; and it is an additional pleasure to welcomehere a member of the Upper Ten. ' I assured him earnestly that I knewnothing about the Upper Ten, except that I did not belong to them; Ifelt, not without alarm, that the Upper Ten might be another secretsociety. He waved my abnegation aside and continued, 'I have a greatresponsibility in watching over this city. My friend the mayor and Ihave a great responsibility. ' And then an extraordinary thing happened. Suddenly diving his hand into his breast-pocket, he flashed somethingbefore my eyes like a hand-mirror; something which disappeared againalmost as soon as it appeared. In that flash I could only see that itwas some sort of polished metal plate, with some letters engraved on itlike a monogram. But the reward of a studious and virtuous life, whichhas been spent chiefly in the reading of American detective stories, shone forth for me in that hour of trial; I received at last the prizeof a profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders intenth-rate magazines. I remembered who it was who in the Yankeedetective yarn flashes before the eyes of Slim Jim or the Lone HandCrook a badge of metal sometimes called a shield. Assuming all thedesperate composure of Slim Jim himself, I replied, 'You mean you areconnected with the police authorities here, don't you? Well, if I commita murder here, I'll let you know. ' Whereupon that astonishing man waveda hand in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a dancingmaster; and said, 'Oh, those are not things we expect from members ofthe Upper Ten. '

Then that moving constellation moved away, disappearing in the darktides of humanity, as the vision passed away down the dark tides fromSir Galahad and, starlike, mingled with the stars. 

That is the problem I would put to all Americans, and to all who claimto understand America. Who and what was that man? Was he an astronomer?Was he a detective? Was he a wandering lunatic? If he was a lunatic whothought he was an astronomer, why did he have a badge to prove he was adetective? If he was a detective pretending to be an astronomer, why didhe tell a total stranger that he was a detective two minutes aftersaying he was an astronomer? If he wished to watch over the city in aquiet and unobtrusive fashion, why did he blazon himself all over withall the stars of the sky, and profess to give public lectures on all thesubjects of the world? Every wise and well-conducted student of murderstories is acquainted with the notion of a policeman in plain clothes. But nobody could possibly say that this gentleman was in plain clothes. Why not wear his uniform, if he was resolved to show every stranger inthe street his badge? Perhaps after all he had no uniform; for theselands were but recently a wild frontier rudely ruled by vigilancecommittees. Some Americans suggested to me that he was the Sheriff; theregular hard-riding, free-shooting Sheriff of Bret Harte and myboyhood's dreams. Others suggested that he was an agent of the Ku-KluxKlan, that great nameless revolution of the revival of which there wererumours at the time; and that the symbol he exhibited was theirs. Butwhether he was a sheriff acting for the law, or a conspirator againstthe law, or a lunatic entirely outside the law, I agree with the formerconjectures upon one point. I am perfectly certain he had something elsein his pocket besides a badge. And I am perfectly certain that undercertain circumstances he would have handled it instantly, and shot medead between the gay bookstall and the crowded trams. And that is thelast touch to the complexity; for though in that country it often seemsthat the law is made by a lunatic, you never know when the lunatic maynot shoot you for keeping it. Only in the presence of that citizen ofOklahoma I feel I am confronted with the fullness and depth of themystery of America. Because I understand nothing, I recognise the thingthat we call a nation; and I salute the flag. 

But even in connection with this mysterious figure there is a moralwhich affords another reason for mentioning him. Whether he was asheriff or an outlaw, there was certainly something about him thatsuggested the adventurous violence of the old border life of America;and whether he was connected with the police or no, there was certainlyviolence enough in his environment to satisfy the most ardent policeman. The posters in the paper-shop were placarded with the verdict in theHamon trial; a _cause célèbre_ which reached its crisis in Oklahomawhile I was there. Senator Hamon had been shot by a girl whom he hadwronged, and his widow demanded justice, or what might fairly be calledvengeance. There was very great excitement culminating in the girl'sacquittal. Nor did the Hamon case appear to be entirely exceptional inthat breezy borderland. The moment the town had received the news thatClara Smith was free, newsboys rushed down the street shouting, 'Doublestabbing outrage near Oklahoma, ' or 'Banker's throat cut on MainStreet, ' or otherwise resuming their regular mode of life. It seemed asmuch as to say, 'Do not imagine that our local energies are exhausted inshooting a Senator, ' or 'Come, now, the world is young, even if ClaraSmith is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of Oklahoma is not yet cold. '

But my particular reason for mentioning the matter is this. Despite myfriend's mystical remarks about the Upper Ten, he lived in an atmosphereof something that was at least the very reverse of a respect forpersons. Indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his socialcompliment that smacked, strangely enough, of that egalitarian soil. Ina vaguely aristocratic country like England, people would never dreamof telling a total stranger that he was a member of the Upper Ten. Forone thing, they would be afraid that he might be. Real snobbishness isnever vulgar; for it is intended to please the refined. Nobody licks theboots of a duke, if only because the duke does not like his bootscleaned in that way. Nobody embraces the knees of a marquis, because itwould embarrass that nobleman. And nobody tells him he is a member ofthe Upper Ten, because everybody is expected to know it. But there is amuch more subtle kind of snobbishness pervading the atmosphere of anysociety trial in England. And the first thing that struck me was thetotal absence of that atmosphere in the trial at Oklahoma. Mr. Hamon waspresumably a member of the Upper Ten, if there is such a thing. He was amember of the Senate or Upper House in the American Parliament; he was amillionaire and a pillar of the Republican party, which might be calledthe respectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a possiblePresident. And the speeches of Clara Smith's counsel, who was known bythe delightfully Oklahomite title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enoughin all conscience; but they left very little of my friend's illusionthat members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of crimes. Nero andBorgia were quite presentable people compared with Senator Hamon whenWild Bill McLean had done with him. But the difference was deeper, andeven in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain tone aboutEnglish trials, which does at least begin with a certain scepticismabout people prominent in public life being abominable in private life. People do vaguely doubt the criminality of 'a man in that position';that is, the position of the Marquise de Brinvilliers or the Marquis deSade. _Prima facie_, it would be an advantage to the Marquis de Sadethat he was a marquis. But it was certainly against Hamon that he was amillionaire. Wild Bill did not minimise him as a bankrupt or anadventurer; he insisted on the solidity and size of his fortune, he mademountains out of the 'Hamon millions, ' as if they made the matter muchworse; as indeed I think they do. But that is because I happen to sharea certain political philosophy with Wild Bill and other wild buffaloesof the prairies. In other words, there is really present here ademocratic instinct against the domination of wealth. It does notprevent wealth from dominating; but it does prevent the domination frombeing regarded with any affection or loyalty. Despite the man in thestarry coat, the Americans have not really any illusions about the UpperTen. McLean was appealing to an implicit public opinion when he peltedthe Senator with his gold. 

But something more is involved. I became conscious, as I have beenconscious in reading the crime novels of America, that the millionairewas taken as a type and not an individual. This is the great difference;that America recognises rich crooks as a _class_. Any Englishman mightrecognise them as individuals. Any English romance may turn on a crimein high life; in which the baronet is found to have poisoned his wife, or the elusive burglar turns out to be the bishop. But the English arenot always saying, either in romance or reality, 'What's to be done, ifour food is being poisoned by all these baronets?' They do not murmur inindignation, 'If bishops will go on burgling like this, something mustbe done. ' The whole point of the English romance is the exceptionalcharacter of a crime in high life. That is not the tone of Americannovels or American newspapers or American trials like the trial inOklahoma. Americans may be excited when a millionaire crook is caught, as when any other crook is caught; but it is at his being caught, not athis being discovered. To put the matter shortly, England recognises acriminal class at the bottom of the social scale. America alsorecognises a criminal class at the top of the social scale. In both, forvarious reasons, it may be difficult for the criminals to be convicted;but in America the upper class of criminals is recognised. In bothAmerica and England, of course, it exists. 

This is an assumption at the back of the American mind which makes agreat difference in many ways; and in my opinion a difference for thebetter. I wrote merely fancifully just now about bishops being burglars;but there is a story in New York, illustrating this, which really doesin a sense attribute a burglary to a bishop. The story was that anAnglican Lord Spiritual, of the pompous and now rather antiquatedschool, was pushing open the door of a poor American tenement with allthe placid patronage of the squire and rector visiting the cottagers, when a gigantic Irish policeman came round the corner and hit him acrack over the head with a truncheon on the assumption that he was ahouse-breaker. I hope that those who laugh at the story see that thelaugh is not altogether against the policeman; and that it is not onlythe policeman, but rather the bishop, who had failed to recognise somefine logical distinctions. The bishop, being a learned man, might wellbe called upon (when he had sufficiently recovered from the knock onthe head) to define what is the exact difference between a house-breakerand a home-visitor; and why the home-visitor should not be regarded as ahouse-breaker when he will not behave as a guest. An impartialintelligence will be much less shocked at the policeman's disrespect forthe home-visitor than by the home-visitor's disrespect for the home. 

But that story smacks of the western soil, precisely because of theelement of brutality there is in it. In England snobbishness and socialoppression are much subtler and softer; the manifestations of them atleast are more mellow and humane. In comparison there is indeedsomething which people call ruthless about the air of America, especially the American cities. The bishop may push open the doorwithout an apology, but he would not break open the door with atruncheon; but the Irish policeman's truncheon hits both ways. It may bebrutal to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop; but thedifference and distinction is that it might really be brutal to thebishop. It is because there is after all, at the back of all thatbarbarism, a sort of a negative belief in the brotherhood of men, a darkdemocratic sense that men are really men and nothing more, that thecoarse and even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly asoligarchic bureaucracies are resented. There is a sense in whichcorruption is not so narrow as nepotism. It is upon this queer cynicalcharity, and even humility, that it has been possible to rear so highand uphold so long that tower of brass, Tammany Hall. The modern policesystem is in spirit the most inhuman in history, and its evil belongsto an age and not to a nation. But some American police methods are evilpast all parallel; and the detective can be more crooked than a hundredcrooks. But in the States it is not only possible that the policeman isworse than the convict, it is by no means certain that he thinks that heis any better. In the popular stories of O. Henry there are lightallusions to tramps being kicked out of hotels which will make anyChristian seek relief in strong language and a trust in heaven--not tosay in hell. And yet books even more popular than O. Henry's are thoseof the 'sob-sisterhood' who swim in lachrymose lakes after love-lornspinsters, who pass their lives in reclaiming and consoling such tramps. There are in this people two strains of brutality and sentimentalismwhich I do not understand, especially where they mingle; but I am fairlysure they both work back to the dim democratic origin. The Irishpoliceman does not confine himself fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops;his truncheon finds plenty of poor people's heads to hit; and yet Ibelieve on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with poor people not to befound in the police of more aristocratic states. I believe he also readsand weeps over the stories of the spinsters and the reclaimed tramps; infact, there is much of such pathos in an American magazine (my solecompanion on many happy railway journeys) which is not only devoted todetective stories, but apparently edited by detectives. In these storiesalso there is the honest, popular astonishment at the Upper Tenexpressed by the astronomical detective, if indeed he was a detectiveand not a demon from the dark Red-Indian forests that faded to thehorizon behind him. But I have set him as the head and text of thischapter because with these elements of the Third Degree of devilry andthe Seventh Heaven of sentimentalism I touch on elements that I do notunderstand; and when I do not understand, I say so. 

_The Republican in the Ruins_

The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone; especially toa wood-cut or a lithographic stone. Modern people put their trust inpictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the mostsuperstitious ever put it in religious pictures. They publish a portraitof the Missing Link as if he were the Missing Man, for whom the policeare always advertising; for all the world as if the anthropoid had beenphotographed before he absconded. The scientific diagram may be ahypothesis; it may be a fancy; it may be a forgery. But it is always anidol in the true sense of an image; and an image in the true sense of athing mastering the imagination and not the reason. The power of thesetalismanic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern humanity. We can neverforget that we have seen a portrait of the Missing Link; though weshould instantly detect the lapse of logic into superstition, if we weretold that the old Greek agnostics had made a statue of the Unknown God. But there is a still stranger fashion in which we fall victims to thesame trick of fancy. We accept in a blind and literal spirit, not onlyimages of speculation, but even figures of speech. The nineteenthcentury prided itself on having lost its faith in myths, and proceededto put all its faith in metaphors. It dismissed the old doctrines aboutthe way of life and the light of the world; and then it proceeded totalk as if the light of truth were really and literally a light, thatcould be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path ofprogress were really and truly a path, to be found by merely followingour noses. Thus the purpose of God is an idea, true or false; but thepurpose of Nature is merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no Godthere is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative instinct, spoke ofthe purpose of God with a grand agnosticism, as something too large tobe seen, something reaching out to worlds and to eternities, they speakof the purpose of Nature in particular and practical problems of curingbabies or cutting up rabbits. This power of the modern metaphor must beunderstood, by way of an introduction, if we are to understand one ofthe chief errors, at once evasive and pervasive, which perplex theproblem of America. 

America is always spoken of as a young nation; and whether or no this bea valuable and suggestive metaphor, very few people notice that it is ametaphor at all. If somebody said that a certain deserving charity hadjust gone into trousers, we should recognise that it was a figure ofspeech, and perhaps a rather surprising figure of speech. If somebodysaid that a daily paper had recently put its hair up, we should know itcould only be a metaphor, and possibly a rather strained metaphor. Yetthese phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly be meant bycalling a corporate association of all sorts of people 'young'; that is, that a certain institution has only existed for a certain time. I am notnow denying that such a corporate nationality may happen to have apsychology comparatively analogous to the psychology of youth. I am noteven denying that America has it. I am only pointing out, to begin with, that we must free ourselves from the talismanic tyranny of a metaphorwhich we do not recognise as a metaphor. Men realised that the oldmystical doctrines were mystical; they do not realise that the newmetaphors are metaphorical. They have some sort of hazy notion thatAmerican society must be growing, must be promising, must have thevirtues of hope or the faults of ignorance, merely _because_ it has onlyhad a separate existence since the eighteenth century. And that isexactly like saying that a new chapel must be growing taller, or that alimited liability company will soon have its second teeth. 

Now in truth this particular conception of American hopefulness would beanything but hopeful for America. If the argument really were, as it isstill vaguely supposed to be, that America must have a long life beforeit, because it only started in the eighteenth century, we should find avery fatal answer by looking at the other political systems that didstart in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was called theAge of Reason; and there is a very real sense in which the other systemswere indeed started in a spirit of reason. But starting from reason hasnot saved them from ruin. If we survey the Europe of to-day with realclarity and historic comprehension, we shall see that it is preciselythe most recent and the most rationalistic creations that have beenruined. The two great States which did most definitely and emphaticallydeserve to be called modern states were Prussia and Russia. There was noreal Prussia before Frederick the Great; no real Russian Empire beforePeter the Great. Both those innovators recognised themselves asrationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminatebarbarism; and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not dofor themselves. They did not, like the kings of England or France orSpain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that was the symbol of a historicand patriotic people. In this sense there was no Russia but only anEmperor of Russia. In this sense Prussia was a kingdom before it was anation; if it ever was a nation. But anyhow both men were particularlymodern in their whole mood and mind. They were modern to the extent ofbeing not only anti-traditional, but almost anti-patriotic. Peter forcedthe science of the West on Russia to the regret of many Russians. Frederick talked the French of Voltaire and not the German of Luther. The two experiments were entirely in the spirit of Voltaireanrationalism; they were built in broad daylight by men who believed innothing but the light of common day; and already their day is done. 

If then the promise of America were in the fact that she is one of thelatest births of progress, we should point out that it is exactly thelatest born that were the first to die. If in this sense she is praisedas young, it may be answered that the young have died young, and havenot lived to be old. And if this be confused with the argument that shecame in an age of clarity and scepticism, uncontaminated by oldsuperstitions, it could still be retorted that the works of superstitionhave survived the works of scepticism. But the truth is, of course, thatthe real quality of America is much more subtle and complex than this;and is mixed not only of good and bad, and rational and mystical, butalso of old and new. That is what makes the task of tracing the trueproportions of American life so interesting and so impossible. 

To begin with, such a metaphor is always as distracting as a mixedmetaphor. It is a double-edged tool that cuts both ways; andconsequently opposite ways. We use the same word 'young' to mean twoopposite extremes. We mean something at an early stage of growth, andalso something having the latest fruits of growth. We might call acommonwealth young if it conducted all its daily conversation bywireless telegraphy; meaning that it was progressive. But we might alsocall it young if it conducted all its industry with chipped flints;meaning that it was primitive. These two meanings of youth arehopelessly mixed up when the word is applied to America. But what ismore curious, the two elements really are wildly entangled in America. America is in some ways what is called in advance of the times, and insome ways what is called behind the times; but it seems a littleconfusing to convey both notions by the same word. 

On the one hand, Americans often are successful in the last inventions. And for that very reason they are often neglectful of the last but one. It is true of men in general, dealing with things in general, that whilethey are progressing in one thing, such as science, they are going backin another thing, such as art. What is less fully realised is that thisis true even as between different methods of science. The perfection ofwireless telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imperfection ofwires. The very enthusiasm of American science brings this out veryvividly. The telephone in New York works miracles all day long. Repliesfrom remote places come as promptly as in a private talk; nobody cutsanybody off; nobody says, 'Sorry you've been troubled. ' But then thepostal service of New York does not work at all. At least I could neverdiscover it working. Letters lingered in it for days and days, as insome wild village of the Pyrenees. When I asked a taxi-driver to driveme to a post-office, a look of far-off vision and adventure came intohis eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post-office somewhere nearWest Ninety-Seventh Street. Men are not efficient in everything, butonly in the fashionable thing. This may be a mark of the march ofscience; it does certainly in one sense deserve the description ofyouth. We can imagine a very young person forgetting the old toy in theexcitement of a new one. 

But on the other hand, American manners contain much that is calledyoung in the contrary sense; in the sense of an earlier stage ofhistory. There are whole patches and particular aspects that seem to mequite Early Victorian. I cannot help having this sensation, forinstance, about the arrangement for smoking in the railway carriages. There are no smoking carriages, as a rule; but a corner of each of thegreat cars is curtained off mysteriously, that a man may go behind thecurtain and smoke. Nobody thinks of a woman doing so. It is regarded asa dark, bohemian, and almost brutally masculine indulgence; exactly asit was regarded by the dowagers in Thackeray's novels. Indeed, this isone of the many such cases in which extremes meet; the extremes ofstuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. The American dowager is sorrythat tobacco was ever introduced; and the American suffragette andsocial reformer is considering whether tobacco ought not to beabolished. The tone of American society suggests some sort ofcompromise, by which women will be allowed to smoke, but men forbiddento do so. 

In one respect, however, America is very old indeed. In one respectAmerica is more historic than England; I might almost say morearchaeological than England. The record of one period of the past, morally remote and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a moreperfect form as a pagan city is preserved at Pompeii. In a more generalsense, of course, it is easy to exaggerate the contrast as a merecontrast between the old world and the new. There is a superficialsatire about the millionaire's daughter who has recently become the wifeof an aristocrat; but there is a rather more subtle satire in thequestion of how long the aristocrat has been aristocratic. There isoften much misplaced mockery of a marriage between an upstart's daughterand a decayed relic of feudalism; when it is really a marriage betweenan upstart's daughter and an upstart's grandson. The sentimentalsocialist often seems to admit the blue blood of the nobleman, even whenhe wants to shed it; just as he seems to admit the marvellous brains ofthe millionaire, even when he wants to blow them out. Unfortunately (inthe interests of social science, of course) the sentimental socialistnever does go so far as bloodshed or blowing out brains; otherwise thecolour and quality of both blood and brains would probably be adisappointment to him. There are certainly more American families thatreally came over in the _Mayflower_ than English families that reallycame over with the Conqueror; and an English county family clearlydating from the time of the _Mayflower_ would be considered a verytraditional and historic house. Nevertheless, there are ancient thingsin England, though the aristocracy is hardly one of them. There arebuildings, there are institutions, there are even ideas in England whichdo preserve, as in a perfect pattern, some particular epoch of the past, and even of the remote past. A man could study the Middle Ages inLincoln as well as in Rouen; in Canterbury as well as in Cologne. Evenof the Renaissance the same is true, at least on the literary side; ifShakespeare was later he was also greater than Ronsard. But the point isthat the spirit and philosophy of the periods were present in fullnessand in freedom. The guildsmen were as Christian in England as they wereanywhere; the poets were as pagan in England as they were anywhere. Personally I do not admit that the men who served patrons were freerthan those who served patron saints. But each fashion had its own kindof freedom; and the point is that the English, in each case, had thefullness of that kind of freedom. But there was another ideal of freedomwhich the English never had at all; or, anyhow, never expressed at all. There was another ideal, the soul of another epoch, round which we builtno monuments and wrote no masterpieces. You will find no traces of it inEngland; but you will find them in America. 

The thing I mean was the real religion of the eighteenth century. Itsreligion, in the more defined sense, was generally Deism, as inRobespierre or Jefferson. In the more general way of morals andatmosphere it was rather Stoicism, as in the suicide of Wolfe Tone. Ithad certain very noble and, as some would say, impossible ideals; asthat a politician should be poor, and should be proud of being poor. Itknew Latin; and therefore insisted on the strange fancy that theRepublic should be a public thing. Its Republican simplicity wasanything but a silly pose; unless all martyrdom is a silly pose. Even ofthe prigs and fanatics of the American and French Revolutions we canoften say, as Stevenson said of an American, that 'thrift and courageglowed in him. ' And its virtue and value for us is that it did rememberthe things we now most tend to forget; from the dignity of liberty tothe danger of luxury. It did really believe in self-determination, inthe self-determination of the self, as well as of the state. And itsdetermination was really determined. In short, it believed inself-respect; and it is strictly true even of its rebels and regicidesthat they desired chiefly to be respectable. But there were in it themarks of religion as well as respectability; it had a creed; it had acrusade. Men died singing its songs; men starved rather than writeagainst its principles. And its principles were liberty, equality, andfraternity, or the dogmas of the Declaration of Independence. This wasthe idea that redeemed the dreary negations of the eighteenth century;and there are still corners of Philadelphia or Boston or Baltimore wherewe can feel so suddenly in the silence its plain garb and formalmanners, that the walking ghost of Jefferson would hardly surprise us. 

There is not the ghost of such a thing in England. In England the realreligion of the eighteenth century never found freedom or scope. Itnever cleared a space in which to build that cold and classic buildingcalled the Capitol. It never made elbow-room for that free if sometimesfrigid figure called the Citizen. 

In eighteenth-century England he was crowded out, partly perhaps by therelics of better things of the past, but largely at least by thepresence of much worse things in the present. The worst things kept outthe best things of the eighteenth century. The ground was occupied bylegal fictions; by a godless Erastian church and a powerless Hanoverianking. Its realities were an aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumesmade to match Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but florid. Itwas a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox that prevented that greatman from being a glorious exception. It is therefore well for us torealise that there is something in history which we did not experience;and therefore probably something in Americans that we do not understand. There was this idealism at the very beginning of their individualism. There was a note of heroic publicity and honourable poverty whichlingers in the very name of Cincinnati. 

But I have another and special reason for noting this historical fact;the fact that we English never made anything upon the model of acapitol, while we can match anybody with the model of a cathedral. It isfar from improbable that the latter model may again be a working model. For I have myself felt, naturally and for a long time, a warm sympathywith both those past ideals, which seem to some so incompatible. I havefelt the attraction of the red cap as well as the red cross, of theMarseillaise as well as the Magnificat. And even when they were infurious conflict I have never altogether lost my sympathy for either. But in the conflict between the Republic[1] and the Church, the pointoften made against the Church seems to me much more of a point againstthe Republic. It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that Ivenerate as something beautiful but belonging to the past. In fact Ifeel exactly the same sort of sad respect for the republican ideal thatmany mid-Victorian free-thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The mostsincere poets of that period were largely divided between those whoinsisted, like Arnold and Clough, that Christianity might be a ruin, butafter all it must be treated as a picturesque ruin; and those, likeSwinburne, who insisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but afterall it must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan temple ofpolitical liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other; and I fancyI am one of the few who still take off their hats in that ruined temple. That is why I went about looking for the fading traces of that lostcause, in the old-world atmosphere of the new world. 

But I do not, as a fact, feel that the cathedral is a ruin; I doubt if Ishould feel it even if I wished to lay it in ruins. I doubt if Mr. M'Cabe really thinks that Catholicism is dying, though he might deceivehimself into saying so. Nobody could be naturally moved to say that thecrowded cathedral of St. Patrick in New York was a ruin, or even thatthe unfinished Anglo-Catholic cathedral at Washington was a ruin, thoughit is not yet a church; or that there is anything lost or lingeringabout the splendid and spirited Gothic churches springing up under theinspiration of Mr. Cram of Boston. As a matter of feeling, as a matterof fact, as a matter quite apart from theory or opinion, it is not inthe religious centres that we now have the feeling of somethingbeautiful but receding, of something loved but lost. It is exactly inthe spaces cleared and levelled by America for the large and soberreligion of the eighteenth century; it is where an old house inPhiladelphia contains an old picture of Franklin, or where the men ofMaryland raised above their city the first monument of Washington. It isthere that I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted, whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead, and all save he departed. Itis then that I feel as if I were the last Republican. 

But when I say that the Republic of the Age of Reason is now a ruin, Ishould rather say that at its best it is a ruin. At its worst it hascollapsed into a death-trap or is rotting like a dunghill. What is thereal Republic of our day as distinct from the ideal Republic of ourfathers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with worms; withthose parasites, the professional politicians? I was re-readingSwinburne's bitter but not ignoble poem, 'Before a Crucifix, ' in whichhe bids Christ, or the ecclesiastical image of Christ, stand out of theway of the onward march of a political idealism represented by UnitedItaly or the French Republic. I was struck by the strange and ironicexactitude with which every taunt he flings at the degradation of theold divine ideal would now fit the degradation of his own human ideal. The time has already come when we can ask his Goddess of Liberty, asrepresented by the actual Liberals, 'Have _you_ filled full men'sstarved-out souls; have _you_ brought freedom on the earth?' For everyengine in which these old free-thinkers firmly and confidently trustedhas itself become an engine of oppression and even of class oppression. Its free parliament has become an oligarchy. Its free press has become amonopoly. If the pure Church has been corrupted in the course of twothousand years, what about the pure Republic that has rotted into afilthy plutocracy in less than a hundred?

 O, hidden face of man, whereover The years have woven a viewless veil, If thou wert verily man's lover What did thy love or blood avail? Thy blood the priests make poison of; And in gold shekels coin thy love. 

Which has most to do with shekels to-day, the priests or thepoliticians? Can we say in any special sense nowadays that clergymen, assuch, make a poison out of the blood of the martyrs? Can we say it inanything like the real sense, in which we do say that yellow journalistsmake a poison out of the blood of the soldiers?

But I understand how Swinburne felt when confronted by the image of thecarven Christ, and, perplexed by the contrast between its claims and itsconsequences, he said his strange farewell to it, hastily indeed, butnot without regret, not even really without respect. I felt the samemyself when I looked for the last time on the Statue of Liberty. 

FOOTNOTE:

[1] In the conclusion of this chapter I mean by the Republicnot merely the American Republic, but the whole modern representativesystem, as in France or even in England. 

_Is the Atlantic Narrowing?_

A certain kind of question is asked very earnestly in our time. Becauseof a certain logical quality in it, connected with premises and data, itis very difficult to answer. Thus people will ask what is the hiddenweakness in the Celtic race that makes them everywhere fail or fadeaway; or how the Germans contrived to bring all their organisation intoa state of such perfect efficiency; and what was the significance of therecent victory of Prussia. Or they will ask by what stages the modernworld has abandoned all belief in miracles; and the modern newspapersceased to print any news of murders. They will ask why English politicsare free from corruption; or by what mental and moral training certainmillionaires were enabled to succeed by sheer force of character; inshort, they will ask why plutocrats govern well and how it is that pigsfly, spreading their pink pinions to the breeze or delighting us as theytwitter and flutter from tree to tree. The logical difficulty ofanswering these questions is connected with an old story about Charlesthe Second and a bowl of goldfish, and with another anecdote about agentleman who was asked, 'When did you leave off beating your wife?' Butthere is something analogous to it in the present discussions about theforces drawing England and America together. It seems as if thereasoners hardly went far enough back in their argument, or tooktrouble enough to disentangle their assumptions. They are still movingwith the momentum of the peculiar nineteenth-century notion of progress;of certain very simple tendencies perpetually increasing and needing nospecial analysis. It is so with the international _rapprochement_ I haveto consider here. 

In other places I have ventured to express a doubt about whether nationscan be drawn together by an ancient rumour about races; by a sort ofprehistoric chit-chat or the gossip of the Stone Age. I have venturedfarther; and even expressed a doubt about whether they ought to be drawntogether, or rather dragged together, by the brute violence of theengines of science and speed. But there is yet another horrible doubthaunting my morbid mind, which it will be better for my constitution toconfess frankly. And that is the doubt about whether they are beingdrawn together at all. 

It has long been a conversational commonplace among the enlightened thatall countries are coming closer and closer to each other. It was aconversational commonplace among the enlightened, somewhere about theyear 1913, that all wars were receding farther and farther into abarbaric past. There is something about these sayings that seems simpleand familiar and entirely satisfactory when we say them; they are ofthat consoling sort which we can say without any of the mental pain ofthinking what we are saying. But if we turn our attention from thephrases we use to the facts that we talk about, we shall realise atleast that there are a good many facts on the other side and examplespointing the other way. For instance, it does happen occasionally, fromtime to time, that people talk about Ireland. He would be a veryhilarious humanitarian who should maintain that Ireland and England havebeen more and more assimilated during the last hundred years. The veryname of Sinn Fein is an answer to it, and the very language in whichthat phrase is spoken. Curran and Sheil would no more have dreamed ofuttering the watchword of 'Repeal' in Gaelic than of uttering it inZulu. Grattan could hardly have brought himself to believe that the realrepeal of the Union would actually be signed in London in the strangescript as remote as the snaky ornament of the Celtic crosses. It wouldhave seemed like Washington signing the Declaration of Independence inthe picture-writing of the Red Indians. Ireland has clearly grown awayfrom England; and her language, literature, and type of patriotism arefar less English than they were. On the other hand, no one will pretendthat the mass of modern Englishmen are much nearer to talking Gaelic ordecorating Celtic crosses. A hundred years ago it was perfectly naturalthat Byron and Moore should walk down the street arm in arm. Even thesight of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. W. B. Yeats walking down the streetarm in arm would now arouse some remark. 

I could give any number of other examples of the same new estrangementof nations. I could cite the obvious facts that Norway and Sweden partedcompany not very long ago, that Austria and Hungary have again becomeseparate states. I could point to the mob of new nations that havestarted up after the war; to the fact that the great empires are nownearly all broken up; that the Russian Empire no longer directs Poland, that the Austrian Empire no longer directs Bohemia, that the TurkishEmpire no longer directs Palestine. Sinn Fein is the separatism of theIrish. Zionism is the separatism of the Jews. But there is one simpleand sufficing example, which is here more to my purpose, and is at leastequally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening national differencebetween the Americans and the English. 

Let me test it first by my individual experience in the matter ofliterature. When I was a boy I read a book like _The Autocrat of theBreakfast-Table_ exactly as I read another book like _The Book ofSnobs_. I did not think of it as an American book, but simply as a book. Its wit and idiom were like those of the English literary tradition; andits few touches of local colour seemed merely accidental, like those ofan Englishman who happened to be living in Switzerland or Sweden. Myfather and my father's friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book;so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance like _Gulliver's Travels_or _Tristram Shandy_. Its language was as English as Ruskin, and a greatdeal more English than Carlyle. Well, I have seen in later years analmost equally wide and well-merited popularity of the stories of O. Henry. But never for one moment could I or any one else reading themforget that they were stories by an American about America. The veryfirst fact about them is that they are told with an American accent, that is, in the unmistakable tones of a brilliant and fascinatingforeigner. And the same is true of every other recent work of which thefame has managed to cross the Atlantic. We did not say that _The SpoonRiver Anthology_ was a new book, but that it was a new book fromAmerica. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reportedfrom Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the'Elegy in a Country Churchyard. ' People in England who heard of MainStreet were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with theprincipal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire orBuckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I practically identified theboarding-house of the Autocrat with any boarding-house I happened toknow in Brompton or Brighton. No doubt there were differences; but thepoint is that the differences did not pierce the consciousness or prickthe illusion. I said to myself, 'People are like this inboarding-houses, ' not 'People are like this in Boston. '

This can be seen even in the simple matter of language, especially inthe sense of slang. Take, for instance, the delightful sketch in thecauserie of Oliver Wendell Holmes; the character of the young man calledJohn. He is the very modern type in every modern country who doesspecialise in slang. He is the young fellow who is something in theCity; the everyday young man of the Gilbertian song, with a stick and apipe and a half-bred black-and-tan. In every country he is at once wittyand commonplace. In every country, therefore, he tends both to thevivacity and the vulgarity of slang. But when he appeared in Holmes'sbook, his language was not very different from what it would have beenin a Brighton instead of a Boston boarding-house; or, in short, if theyoung man called John had more commonly been called 'Arry. If he hadappeared in a modern American book, his language would have been almostliterally unintelligible. At the least an Englishman would have had toread some of the best sentences twice, as he sometimes has to read thedizzy and involved metaphors of O. Henry. Nor is it an answer that thisdepended on the personalities of the particular writers. A comparisonbetween the real journalism of the time of Holmes and the realjournalism of the time of Henry reveals the same thing. It is theexpansion of a slight difference of style into a luxuriant difference ofidiom; and the process continued indefinitely would certainly produce atotally different language. After a few centuries the signatures ofAmerican ambassadors would look as fantastic as Gaelic, and the veryname of the Republic be as strange as Sinn Fein. 

It is true that there has been on the surface a certain amount of giveand take; or at least, as far as the English are concerned, of takerather than give. But it is true that it was once all the other way; andindeed the one thing is something like a just nemesis of the other. Indeed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular, when we come tothink of it. It began in a certain atmosphere and spirit of certainwell-meaning people who talked about the English-speaking race; and wereapparently indifferent to how the English was spoken, whether in theaccent of a Jamaican negro or a convict from Botany Bay. It was theirlogical tendency to say that Dante was a Dago. It was their logicalpunishment to say that Disraeli was an Englishman. Now there may havebeen a period when this Anglo-American amalgamation included more orless equal elements from England and America. It never included thelarger elements, or the more valuable elements of either. But, on thewhole, I think it true to say that it was not an allotment but aninterchange of parts; and that things first went all one way and thenall the other. People began by telling the Americans that they owed alltheir past triumphs to England; which was false. They ended up bytelling the English that they would owe all their future triumphs toAmerica; which is if possible still more false. Because we chose toforget that New York had been New Amsterdam, we are now in danger offorgetting that London is not New York. Because we insisted that Chicagowas only a pious imitation of Chiswick, we may yet see Chiswick aninferior imitation of Chicago. Our Anglo-Saxon historians attempted thatconquest in which Howe and Burgoyne had failed, and with infinitely lessjustification on their side. They attempted the great crime of theAnglicisation of America. They have called down the punishment of theAmericanisation of England. We must not murmur; but it is a heavypunishment. 

It may lift a little of its load, however, if we look at it moreclosely; we shall then find that though it is very much on top of us, itis only on top. In that sense such Americanisation as there is is verysuperficial. For instance, there is a certain amount of American slangpicked up at random; it appears in certain pushing types of journalismand drama. But we may easily dwell too much on this tragedy; of peoplewho have never spoken English beginning to speak American. I am far fromsuggesting that American, like any other foreign language, may notfrequently contribute to the common culture of the world phrases forwhich there is no substitute; there are French phrases so used inEngland and English phrases in France. The word 'high-brow, ' forinstance, is a real discovery and revelation, a new and necessary namefor something that walked nameless but enormous in the modern world, ashaft of light and a stroke of lightning. That comes from America andbelongs to the world, as much as 'The Raven' or _The Scarlet Letter_ orthe novels of Henry James belong to the world. In fact, I can imagineHenry James originating it in the throes of self-expression, andbringing out a word like 'high-browed, ' with a sort of gentle jerk, atthe end of searching sentences which groped sensitively until they foundthe phrase. But most of the American slang that is borrowed seems to beborrowed for no particular reason. It either has no point or the pointis lost by translation into another context and culture. It is eithersomething which does not need any grotesque and exaggerativedescription, or of which there already exists a grotesque andexaggerative description more native to our tongue and soil. Forinstance, I cannot see that the strong and simple expression 'Now it isfor you to pull the police magistrate's nose' is in any way strengthenedby saying, 'Now it is up to you to pull the police magistrate's nose. 'When Tennyson says of the men of the Light Brigade 'Theirs but to do anddie, ' the expression seems to me perfectly lucid. 'Up to them to do anddie' would alter the metre without especially clarifying the meaning. This is an example of ordinary language being quite adequate; but thereis a further difficulty that even wild slang comes to sound likeordinary language. Very often the English have already as humorous andfanciful idiom of their own, only that through habit it has lost itshumour. When Keats wrote the line, 'What pipes and timbrels, what wildecstasy!' I am willing to believe that the American humorist would haveexpressed the same sentiment by beginning the sentence with 'Somepipe!' When that was first said, somewhere in the wilds of Colorado, itwas really funny; involving a powerful understatement and the suggestionof a mere sample. If a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird, and we find it is an ostrich, there will be considerable point in theColorado satirist saying inquiringly, 'Some bird?' as if he wereoffering us a small slice of a small plover. But if we go back to thisroot and rationale of a joke, the English language already containsquite as good a joke. It is not necessary to say, 'Some bird'; there isa far finer irony in the old expression, 'Something like a bird. ' Itsuggests that the speaker sees something faintly and strangely birdlikeabout a bird; that it remotely and almost irrationally reminds him of abird; and that there is about ostrich plumes a yard long something likethe faint and delicate traces of a feather. It has every quality ofimaginative irony, except that nobody even imagines it to be ironical. All that happens is that people get tired of that turn of phrase, takeup a foreign phrase and get tired of that, without realising the pointof either. All that happens is that a number of weary people who used tosay, 'Something like a bird, ' now say, 'Some bird, ' with undiminishedweariness. But they might just as well use dull and decent English; forin both cases they are only using jocular language without seeing thejoke. 

There is indeed a considerable trade in the transplantation of theseAmerican jokes to England just now. They generally pine and die in ourclimate, or they are dead before their arrival; but we cannot be certainthat they were never alive. There is a sort of unending frieze orscroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before the Britishpublic, about a hen-pecked husband, which is indistinguishable to theeye from an actual self-repeating pattern like that of the Greek Key, but which is imported as if it were as precious and irreplaceable as theElgin Marbles. Advertisement and syndication make mountains out of themost funny little mole-hills; but no doubt the mole-hills arepicturesque enough in their own landscape. In any case there is nothingso national as humour; and many things, like many people, can behumorous enough when they are at home. But these American jokes areboomed as solemnly as American religions; and their supporters gravelytestify that they are funny, without seeing the fun of it for a moment. This is partly perhaps the spirit of spontaneous institutionalism inAmerican democracy, breaking out in the wrong place. They make humour aninstitution; and a man will be set to tell an anecdote as if to play theviolin. But when the story is told in America it really is amusing; andwhen these jokes are reprinted in England they are often not evenintelligible. With all the stupidity of the millionaire and themonopolist, the enterprising proprietor prints jokes in England whichare necessarily unintelligible to nearly every English person; jokesreferring to domestic and local conditions quite peculiar to America. Isaw one of these narrative caricatures the other day in which the wholeof the joke (what there was of it) turned on the astonishment of ahousewife at the absurd notion of not having an ice-box. It is perfectlytrue that nearly every ordinary American housewife possesses an ice-box. An ordinary English housewife would no more expect to possess anice-box than to possess an iceberg. And it would be about as sensible totow an iceberg to an English port all the way from the North Pole, as totrail that one pale and frigid joke to Fleet Street all the way from theNew York papers. It is the same with a hundred other advertisements andadaptations. I have already confessed that I took a considerable delightin the dancing illuminations of Broadway--in Broadway. Everything thereis suitable to them, the vast interminable thoroughfare, the topplinghouses, the dizzy and restless spirit of the whole city. It is a city ofdissolving views, and one may almost say a city in everlastingdissolution. But I do not especially admire a burning fragment ofBroadway stuck up opposite the old Georgian curve of Regent Street. Iwould as soon express sympathy with the Republic of Switzerland byerecting a small Alp, with imitation snow, in the middle of St. James'sPark. 

But all this commercial copying is very superficial; and above all, itnever copies anything that is really worth copying. Nations never_learn_ anything from each other in this way. We have many things tolearn from America; but we only listen to those Americans who have stillto learn them. Thus, for instance, we do not import the small farm butonly the big shop. In other words, we hear nothing of the democracy ofthe Middle West, but everything of the plutocracy of the middleman, whois probably as unpopular in the Middle West as the miller in the MiddleAges. If Mr. Elihu K. Pike could be transplanted bodily from theneighbourhood of his home town of Marathon, Neb. , with his farm and hisframe-house and all its fittings, and they could be set down exactly inthe spot now occupied by Selfridge's (which could be easily cleared awayfor the purpose), I think we could really get a great deal of good bywatching him, even if the watching were inevitably a little too likewatching a wild beast in a cage or an insect under a glass case. Urbancrowds could collect every day behind a barrier or railing, and gaze atMr. Pike pottering about all day in his ancient and autochthonousoccupations. We could see him growing Indian corn with all the gravityof an Indian; though it is impossible to imagine Mrs. Pike blessing thecornfield in the manner of Minnehaha. As I have said, there is a certainlack of humane myth and mysticism about this Puritan peasantry. But wecould see him transforming the maize into pop-corn, which is a verypleasant domestic ritual and pastime, and is the American equivalent ofthe glory of roasting chestnuts. Above all, many of us would learn forthe first time that a man can really live and walk about upon somethingmore productive than a pavement; and that when he does so he can reallybe a free man, and have no lord but the law. Instead of that, Americacan give nothing to London but those multiple modern shops, of which ithas too many already. I know that many people entertain the innocentillusion that big shops are more efficient than small ones; but that isonly because the big combinations have the monopoly of advertisement aswell as trade. The big shop is not in the least remarkable forefficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. It issecure in its reputation for always sacking the wrong man. A big shop, considered as a place to shop in, is simply a village of small shopsroofed in to keep out the light and air; and one in which none of theshopkeepers is really responsible for his shop. If any one has anydoubts on this matter, since I have mentioned it, let him consider thisfact: that in practice we never do apply this method of commercialcombination to anything that matters very much. We do not go to thesurgical department of the Stores to have a portion of our brain removedby a delicate operation; and then pass on to the advocacy department toemploy one or any of its barristers, when we are in temporary danger ofbeing hanged. We go to men who own their own tools and are responsiblefor the use of their own talents. And the same truth applies to thatother modern method of advertisement, which has also so largely fallenacross us like the gigantic shadow of America. Nations do not armthemselves for a mortal struggle by remembering which sort of submarinethey have seen most often on the hoardings. They can do it aboutsomething like soap, precisely because a nation will not perish byhaving a second-rate sort of soap, as it might by having a second-ratesort of submarine. A nation may indeed perish slowly by having asecond-rate sort of food or drink or medicine; but that is another andmuch longer story, and the story is not ended yet. But nobody wins agreat battle at a great crisis because somebody has told him thatCadgerboy's Cavalry Is the Best. It may be that commercial enterprisewill eventually cover these fields also, and advertisement-agents willprovide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons of the soldier. When that happens, the armies will be defeated and the patients willdie. But though we modern people are indeed patients, in the sense ofbeing merely receptive and accepting things with astonishing patience, we are not dead yet; and we have lingering gleams of sanity. 

For the best things do not travel. As I appear here as a traveller, Imay say with all modesty that the best people do not travel either. Bothin England and America the normal people are the national people; and Irepeat that I think they are growing more and more national. I do notthink the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan theories; and I am sureI do not want it bridged by all this slang journalism and blatantadvertisement. I have called all that commercial publicity the giganticshadow of America. It may be the shadow of America, but it is not thelight of America. The light lies far beyond, a level light upon thelands of sunset, where it shines upon wide places full of a very simpleand a very happy people; and those who would see it must seek for it. 

_Lincoln and Lost Causes_

It has already been remarked here that the English know a great dealabout past American literature, but nothing about past American history. They do not know either, of course, as well as they know the presentAmerican advertising, which is the least important of the three. But itis worth noting once more how little they know of the history, and howillogically that little is chosen. They have heard, no doubt, of thefame and the greatness of Henry Clay. He is a cigar. But it would beunwise to cross-examine any Englishman, who may be consuming that luxuryat the moment, about the Missouri Compromise or the controversies withAndrew Jackson. And just as the statesman of Kentucky is a cigar, so thestate of Virginia is a cigarette. But there is perhaps one exception, orhalf-exception, to this simple plan. It would perhaps be an exaggerationto say that Plymouth Rock is a chicken. Any English person keepingchickens, and chiefly interested in Plymouth Rocks considered aschickens, would nevertheless have a hazy sensation of having seen theword somewhere before. He would feel subconsciously that the PlymouthRock had not always been a chicken. Indeed, the name connotes somethingnot only solid but antiquated; and is not therefore a very tactful namefor a chicken. There would rise up before him something memorable inthe haze that he calls his history; and he would see the history booksof his boyhood and old engravings of men in steeple-crowned hatsstruggling with sea-waves or Red Indians. The whole thing would suddenlybecome clear to him if (by a simple reform) the chickens were calledPilgrim Fathers. 

Then he would remember all about it. The Pilgrim Fathers were championsof religious liberty; and they discovered America. It is true that hehas also heard of a man called Christopher Columbus; but that was inconnection with an egg. He has also heard of somebody known as SirWalter Raleigh; and though his principal possession was a cloak, it isalso true that he had a potato, not to mention a pipe of tobacco. Can itbe possible that he brought it from Virginia, where the cigarettes comefrom? Gradually the memories will come back and fit themselves togetherfor the average hen-wife who learnt history at the English elementaryschools, and who has now something better to do. Even when the narrativebecomes consecutive, it will not necessarily become correct. It is notstrictly true to say that the Pilgrim Fathers discovered America. But itis quite as true as saying that they were champions of religiousliberty. If we said that they were martyrs who would have diedheroically in torments rather than tolerate any religious liberty, weshould be talking something like sense about them, and telling the realtruth that is their due. The whole Puritan movement, from the SolemnLeague and Covenant to the last stand of the last Stuarts, was astruggle _against_ religious toleration, or what they would have calledreligious indifference. The first religious equality on earth wasestablished by a Catholic cavalier in Maryland. Now there is nothing inthis to diminish any dignity that belongs to any real virtues andvirilities in the Pilgrim Fathers; on the contrary, it is rather to thecredit of their consistency and conviction. But there is no doubt thatthe note of their whole experiment in New England was intolerance, andeven inquisition. And there is no doubt that New England was then onlythe newest and not the oldest of these colonial experiments. At leasttwo Cavaliers had been in the field before any Puritans. And they hadcarried with them much more of the atmosphere and nature of the normalEnglishman than any Puritan could possibly carry. They had establishedit especially in Virginia, which had been founded by a great Elizabethanand named after the great Elizabeth. Before there was any New England inthe North, there was something very like Old England in the South. Relatively speaking, there is still. 

Whenever the anniversary of the _Mayflower_ comes round, there is achorus of Anglo-American congratulation and comradeship, as if this atleast were a matter on which all can agree. But I knew enough aboutAmerica, even before I went there, to know that there are a good manypeople there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote aprotest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state ofVirginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; andwhy a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a recordthat begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includesWashington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of Americauntil it was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the first greatPresidents and most of the Fathers of the Republic. Its adherence tothe Southern side in the war made it a great war, and for a long time adoubtful war. And in the leader of the Southern armies it produced whatis perhaps the one modern figure that may come to shine like St. Louisin the lost battle, or Hector dying before holy Troy. 

Again, it is characteristic that while the modern English know nothingabout Lee they do know something about Lincoln; and nearly all that theyknow is wrong. They know nothing of his Southern connections, nothing ofhis considerable Southern sympathy, nothing of the meaning of hismoderation in face of the problem of slavery, now lightly treated asself-evident. Above all, they know nothing about the respect in whichLincoln was quite un-English, was indeed the very reverse of English;and can be understood better if we think of him as a Frenchman, since itseems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an American. I meanhis lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematicaltruths in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from being amerely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that hereviewed and revelled in academic abstractions, even while he could notapply them to practical life. He loved to repeat that slavery wasintolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that something ought tobe done while it was impossible to do it. This was probably verybewildering to his brother-politicians; for politicians always whitewashwhat they do not destroy. But for all that this inconsistent consistencybeat the politicians at their own game, and this abstracted logic provedthe most practical of all. For when the chance did come to do something, there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fellfrom the clear heights of heaven; it had not been tossed about and lostlike a common missile in the market-place. The matter is worthmentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger modern question. Awise man's attitude towards industrial capitalism will be very likeLincoln's attitude towards slavery. That is, he will manage to endurecapitalism; but he will not endure a defence of capitalism. He willrecognise the value, not only of knowing what he is doing, but ofknowing what he would like to do. He will recognise the importance ofhaving a thing clearly labelled in his own mind as bad, long before theopportunity comes to abolish it. He may recognise the risk of even worsethings in immediate abolition, as Lincoln did in abolitionism. He willnot call all business men brutes, any more than Lincoln would call allplanters demons; because he knows they are not. He will regard manyalternatives to capitalism as crude and inhuman, as Lincoln regardedJohn Brown's raid; because they are. But he will clear his _mind_ fromcant about capitalism; he will have no doubt of what is the truth aboutTrusts and Trade Combines and the concentration of capital; and it isthe truth that they endure under one of the ironic silences of heaven, over the pageants and the passing triumphs of hell. 

But the name of Lincoln has a more immediate reference to theinternational matters I am considering here. His name has been muchinvoked by English politicians and journalists in connection with thequarrel with Ireland. And if we study the matter, we shall hardly admirethe tact and sagacity of those journalists and politicians. 

History is an eternal tangle of cross-purposes; and we could not take aclearer case, or rather a more complicated case, of such a tangle, thanthe facts lying behind a political parallel recently mentioned by manypoliticians. I mean the parallel between the movement for Irishindependence and the attempted secession of the Southern Confederacy inAmerica. Superficially any one might say that the comparison is naturalenough; and that there is much in common between the quarrel of theNorth and South in Ireland and the quarrel of the North and South inAmerica. In both cases the South was on the whole agricultural, theNorth on the whole industrial. True, the parallel exaggerates theposition of Belfast; to complete it we must suppose the whole Federalsystem to have consisted of Pittsburg. In both the side that was moresuccessful was felt by many to be less attractive. In both the samepolitical terms were used, such as the term 'Union' and 'Unionism. ' Anordinary Englishman comes to America, knowing these main lines ofAmerican history, and knowing that the American knows the similar mainlines of Irish history. He knows that there are strong champions ofIreland in America; possibly he also knows that there are very genuinechampions of England in America. By every possible historical analogy, he would naturally expect to find the pro-Irish in the South and thepro-English in the North. As a matter of fact, he finds almost exactlythe opposite. He finds Boston governed by Irishmen, and Nashvillecontaining people more pro-English than Englishmen. He finds Virginiansnot only of British blood, like George Washington, but of Britishopinions almost worthy of George the Third. 

But I do not say this, as will be seen in a moment, as a criticism ofthe comparative Toryism of the South. I say it as a criticism of thesuperlative stupidity of English propaganda. On another page I remark onthe need for a new sort of English propaganda; a propaganda that shouldbe really English and have some remote reference to England. Now if itwere a matter of making foreigners feel the real humours and humanitiesof England, there are no Americans so able or willing to do it as theAmericans of the Southern States. As I have already hinted, some of themare so loyal to the English humanities, that they think it their duty todefend even the English inhumanities. New England is turning into NewIreland. But Old England can still be faintly traced in Old Dixie. Itcontains some of the best things that England herself has had, andtherefore (of course) the things that England herself has lost, or istrying to lose. But above all, as I have said, there are people in theseplaces whose historic memories and family traditions really hold them tous, not by alliance but by affection. Indeed, they have the affection inspite of the alliance. They love us in spite of our compliments andcourtesies and hands across the sea; all our ambassadorial salutationsand speeches cannot kill their love. They manage even to respect us inspite of the shady Jew stockbrokers we send them as English envoys, orthe 'efficient' men, who are sent out to be tactful with foreignersbecause they have been too tactless with trades unionists. This type oftraditional American, North or South, really has some traditionsconnecting him with England; and though he is now in a very smallminority, I cannot imagine why England should wish to make it smaller. England once sympathised with the South. The South still sympathiseswith England. It would seem that the South, or some elements in theSouth, had rather the advantage of us in political firmness andfidelity; but it does not follow that that fidelity will stand everyshock. And at this moment, and in this matter, of all things in theworld, our political propagandists must try to bolster BritishImperialism up, by kicking Southern Secession when it is down. TheEnglish politicians eagerly point out that we shall be justified incrushing Ireland exactly as Sumner and Stevens crushed the most Englishpart of America. It does not seem to occur to them that this comparisonbetween the Unionist triumph in America and a Unionist triumph inBritain is rather hard upon our particular sympathisers, who did nottriumph. When England exults in Lincoln's victory over his foes, she isexulting in his victory over her own friends. If her diplomacy continuesas delicate and chivalrous as it is at present, they may soon be heronly friends. England will be defending herself at the expense of heronly defenders. But however this may be, it is as well to bear witnessto some of the elements of my own experience; and I can answer for it, at least, that there are some people in the South who will not bepleased at being swept into the rubbish heap of history as rebels andruffians; and who will not, I regret to say, by any means enjoy evenbeing classed with Fenians and Sinn Feiners. 

Now touching the actual comparison between the conquest of theConfederacy and the conquest of Ireland, there are, of course, a goodmany things to be said which politicians cannot be expected tounderstand. Strange to say, it is not certain that a lost cause wasnever worth winning; and it would be easy to argue that the world lostvery much indeed when that particular cause was lost. These are not daysin which it is exactly obvious that an agricultural society was moredangerous than an industrial one. And even Southern slavery had this onemoral merit, that it was decadent; it has this one historic advantage, that it is dead. The Northern slavery, industrial slavery, or what iscalled wage slavery, is not decaying but increasing; and the end of itis not yet. But in any case, it would be well for us to realise that thereproach of resembling the Confederacy does not ring in all ears as anunanswerable condemnation. It is scarcely a self-evident or sufficientargument, to some hearers, even to prove that the English are asdelicate and philanthropic as Sherman, still less that the Irish are ascriminal and lawless as Lee. Nor will it soothe every single soul on theAmerican continent to say that the English victory in Ireland will befollowed by a reconstruction, like the reconstruction exhibited in thefilm called 'The Birth of a Nation. ' And, indeed, there is a furtherinference from that fine panorama of the exploits of the Ku-Klux Klan. It would be easy, as I say, to turn the argument entirely in favour ofthe Confederacy. It would be easy to draw the moral, not that theSouthern Irish are as wrong as the Southern States, but that theSouthern States were as right as the Southern Irish. But upon the whole, I do not incline to accept the parallel in that sense any more than inthe opposite sense. For reasons I have already given elsewhere, I dobelieve that in the main Abraham Lincoln was right. But right in what?

If Lincoln was right, he was right in guessing that there was notreally a Northern nation and a Southern nation, but only one Americannation. And if he has been proved right, he has been proved right by thefact that men in the South, as well as the North, do now feel apatriotism for that American nation. His wisdom, if it really waswisdom, was justified not by his opponents being conquered, but by theirbeing converted. Now, if the English politicians must insist on thisparallel, they ought to see that the parallel is fatal to themselves. The very test which proved Lincoln right has proved them wrong. The veryjudgment which may have justified him quite unquestionably condemnsthem. We have again and again conquered Ireland, and have never come aninch nearer to converting Ireland. We have had not one Gettysburg, buttwenty Gettysburgs; but we have had no Union. And that is where, as Ihave remarked, it is relevant to remember that flying fantastic visionon the films that told so many people what no histories have told them. I heard when I was in America rumours of the local reappearance of theKu-Klux Klan; but the smallness and mildness of the manifestation, ascompared with the old Southern or the new Irish case, is alone asufficient example of the exception that proves the rule. To approximateto any resemblance to recent Irish events, we must imagine the Ku-KluxKlan riding again in more than the terrors of that vision, wild as thewind, white as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. If there werereally such a revival of the Southern action, there would equally be arevival of the Southern argument. It would be clear that Lee was rightand Lincoln was wrong; that the Southern States were national and wereas indestructible as nations. If the South were as rebellious asIreland, the North would be as wrong as England. 

But I desire a new English diplomacy that will exhibit, not the thingsin which England is wrong but the things in which England is right. AndEngland is right in England, just as she is wrong in Ireland; and it isexactly that rightness of a real nation in itself that it is at oncemost difficult and most desirable to explain to foreigners. Now theIrishman, and to some extent the American, has remained alien toEngland, largely because he does not truly realise that the Englishmanloves England, still less can he really imagine why the Englishman lovesEngland. That is why I insist on the stupidity of ignoring and insultingthe opinions of those few Virginians and other Southerners who reallyhave some inherited notion of why Englishmen love England; and even loveit in something of the same fashion themselves. Politicians who do notknow the English spirit when they see it at home, cannot of course beexpected to recognise it abroad. Publicists are eloquently praisingAbraham Lincoln, for all the wrong reasons; but fundamentally for thatworst and vilest of all reasons--that he succeeded. None of them seemsto have the least notion of how to look for England in England; and theywould see something fantastic in the figure of a traveller who found itelsewhere, or anywhere but in New England. And it is well, perhaps, thatthey have not yet found England where it is hidden in England; for ifthey found it, they would kill it. 

All I am concerned to consider here is the inevitable failure of thissort of Anglo-American propaganda to create a friendship. To praiseLincoln as an Englishman is about as appropriate as if we were praisingLincoln as an English town. We are talking about something totallydifferent. And indeed the whole conversation is rather like some suchcross-purposes about some such word as 'Lincoln'; in which one partyshould be talking about the President and the other about the cathedral. It is like some wild bewilderment in a farce, with one man wondering howa President could have a church-spire, and the other wondering how achurch could have a chin-beard. And the moral is the moral on which Iwould insist everywhere in this book; that the remedy is to be found indisentangling the two and not in entangling them further. You could notproduce a democrat of the logical type of Lincoln merely out of themoral materials that now make up an English cathedral town, like that onwhich Old Tom of Lincoln looks down. But on the other hand, it is quitecertain that a hundred Abraham Lincolns, working for a hundred years, could not build Lincoln Cathedral. And the farcical allegory of anattempt to make Old Tom and Old Abe embrace to the glory of theillogical Anglo-Saxon language is but a symbol of something that isalways being attempted, and always attempted in vain. It is not bymutual imitation that the understanding can come. It is not by erectingNew York sky-scrapers in London that New York can learn the sacredsignificance of the towers of Lincoln. It is not by English dukesimporting the daughters of American millionaires that England can getany glimpse of the democratic dignity of American men. I have the bestof all reasons for knowing that a stranger can be welcomed in America;and just as he is courteously treated in the country as a stranger, sohe should always be careful to treat it as a strange land. That sort ofimaginative respect, as for something different and even distant, is theonly beginning of any attachment between patriotic peoples. The Englishtraveller may carry with him at least one word of his own great languageand literature; and whenever he is inclined to say of anything 'This ispassing strange, ' he may remember that it was no inconsiderableEnglishman who appended to it the answer, 'And therefore as a strangergive it welcome. '

_Wells and the World State_

There was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate thepast, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation. Some of themost brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. J. L. Garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientificaviators luminously discussed the new science. Among their gracefulfelicitations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or a notewas struck, which I myself can never hear, even in the most harmlessafter-dinner speech, without an impulse to leap up and yell, and smashthe decanters and wreck the dinner-table. 

Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury; and never since have Ibeen able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. I heard itwhen Bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that warwould become too horrible for patriots to endure. It sounded to me likesaying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist, that would finally cure me of loving my dog. And I felt it again whenall these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about theinevitable effect of aviation in bridging the Atlantic, and establishingalliance and affection between England and America. 

I resent the suggestion that a machine can make me bad. But I resentquite equally the suggestion that a machine can make me good. It mightbe the unfortunate fact that a coolness had arisen between myself andMr. Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa and gardennext to mine; and I might even be largely to blame for it. But ifsomebody told me that a new kind of lawn-mower had just been invented, of so cunning a structure that I should be forced to become abosom-friend of Mr. Blenkinsop whether I liked it or not, I should bevery much annoyed. I should be moved to say that if that was the onlyway of cutting my grass I would not cut my grass, but continue to cut myneighbour. Or suppose the difference were even less defensible; supposea man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife. And supposesomebody told him that the introduction of an entirely newvacuum-cleaner would compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with hiswife. It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors that vacuum. Reasonably spirited human beings will not be ordered about by bicyclesand sewing-machines; and a sane man will not be made good, let alonebad, by the things he has himself made. I have occasionally dictated toa typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a typewriter, even of thenewest and most complicated mechanism; nor have I ever met a typewriter, however complex, that attempted such a tyranny. 

Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such talk of theaeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as distances; and aninternational aviation abolishing nationalities. This and nothing elsewas really implied in one speaker's prediction that such aviation willalmost necessitate an Anglo-American friendship. Incidentally, I mayremark, it is not a true suggestion even in the practical andmaterialistic sense; and the speaker's phrase refuted the speaker'sargument. He said that international relations must be more friendlywhen men can get from England to America in a day. Well, men can alreadyget from England to Germany in a day; and the result was a mutualinvitation of which the formalities lasted for five years. Men could getfrom the coast of England to the coast of France very quickly, throughnearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling witharms against each other. They could get there very quickly when Nelsonwent down by that Burford Inn to embark for Trafalgar; they could getthere very quickly when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp atBoulogne that filled England with alarums of invasion. Are these theamiable and pacific relations which will unite England and America, whenEnglishmen can get to America in a day? The shortening of the distanceseems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate thatendless guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in theMiddle Ages; when French invaders carried away the bells of Rye, and themen of those flats of East Sussex gloriously pursued and recovered them. I do not know whether American privateers, landing at Liverpool, wouldcarry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitutefor the superstitious symbols of the past. I know not if the English, onripe reflection, would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back. Butanyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot fight eachother because they are near to each other; and if it were true, therewould never have been any such thing as border warfare in the world. Asa fact, border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which itwas most difficult to bring under control. And our own traditionalposition in face of this new logic is somewhat disconcerting. We havealways supposed ourselves safer because we were insular and thereforeisolated. We have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on havingenjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbours. And now theyare telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up withour neighbours. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers, becausea frontier only produces fighting; and now we are trusting to a frontieras the only thing that will produce friendship. But, as a matter offact, and for a far deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier willnot produce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship. And wemust look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that producesfriendliness. 

But apart from this fallacy about the facts, I feel, as I say, a strongabstract anger against the idea, or what some would call the ideal. Ifit were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, even ifthey were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think it themost tragic truth in the world. A man so improved would be, in anexceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it. But in truth hecannot be so completely coerced into good; and in so far as he isincompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. Ofthe financial characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophersin such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is evil. Thelight in their bodies is darkness, and the highest objects of such menare the lowest objects of ordinary men. Their peace is mere safety, their friendship is mere trade; their international friendship is mereinternational trade. The best we can say of that school of capitalism isthat it will be unsuccessful. It has every other vice, but it is notpractical. It has at least the impossibility of idealism; and so far asremoteness can carry it, that Inferno is indeed a Utopia. All thevisible manifestations of these men are materialistic; but at leasttheir visions will not materialise. The worst we suffer; but the best weshall at any rate escape. We may continue to endure the realities ofcosmopolitan capitalism; but we shall be spared its ideals. 

But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats whose vision takesso vulgar a form. I am interested in the same thing when it takes a farmore subtle form, in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm likeMr. H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells tosuggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are toembrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is aman who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy themotley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which heproposes is too much determined by this old nightmare ofnecessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities anddifferences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else(and I think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed bythe instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. In effect, menmust abandon patriotism or they will be murdered by science. After this, surely no one can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientificover other types of training. Greek may be a good thing or no; butnobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point, everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burned up like Semele, or poisoned like Socrates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may notbe idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study ofphilosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students tomanufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that evenlogicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to bethe only branch of study in which people have to be waved back fromperfection as from a pestilence. But my business is not with thescientific dangers which alarm Mr. Wells, but with the remedy heproposes for them; or rather with the relation of that remedy to thefoundation and the future of America. Now it is not too much to say thatMr. Wells finds his model in America. The World State is to be theUnited States of the World. He answers almost all objections to thepracticability of such a peace among states, by pointing out that theAmerican States have such a peace, and by adding, truly enough, thatanother turn of history might easily have seen them broken up by war. The pattern of the World State is to be found in the New World. 

Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests forthe American Constitution, while leaving out the most successful thingin that Constitution. The point appeared in answer to a question whichmany, like myself, must have put in this matter; the question ofdespotism and democracy. I cannot understand any democrat not seeing thedanger of so distant and indirect a system of government. It is hardenough anywhere to get representatives to represent. It is hard enoughto get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town, even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in thestreet, and could kick them down the street if they liked. What the sametown councillors would be like if they were ruling all theirfellow-creatures from the North Pole or the New Jerusalem, is a visionof Oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Tamberlane. Thisdifficulty in all representative government is felt everywhere, and notleast in America. But I think that if there is one truth apparent insuch a choice of evils, it is that monarchy is at least better thanoligarchy; and that where we have to act on a large scale, the mostgenuine popularity can gather round a particular person like a Pope or aPresident of the United States, or even a dictator like Caesar orNapoleon, rather than round a more or less corrupt committee which canonly be defined as an obscure oligarchy. And in that sense any oligarchyis obscure. For people to continue to trust twenty-seven men it isnecessary, as a preliminary formality, that people should have heard ofthem. And there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has heard aseverybody in France had heard of Napoleon, as all Catholics have heardof the Pope or all Americans have heard of the President. I think themass of ordinary Americans do really elect their President; and evenwhere they cannot control him at least they watch him, and in the longrun they judge him. I think, therefore, that the American Constitutionhas a real popular institution in the Presidency. But Mr. Wells wouldappear to want the American Constitution without the Presidency. If Iunderstand his words rightly, he seems to want the great democracywithout its popular institution. Alluding to this danger, that theWorld State might be a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirelyin the sense of autocracy. He asks whether the President of the WorldState would not be rather too tremendous a person, and seems to suggestin answer that there need not even be any such person. He seems to implythat the committee controlling the planet could meet almost without anyone in the chair, certainly without any one on the throne. I cannotimagine anything more manifestly made to be a tyranny than such anacephalous aristocracy. But while Mr. Wells's decision seems to mestrange, his reason for it seems to me still more extraordinary. 

He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in his World Statebecause 'there will be no wars and no diplomacy. ' A World State oughtdoubtless to go round the world; and going round the world seems to be agood training for arguing in a circle. Obviously there will be no warsand no war-diplomacy if something has the power to prevent them; and wecannot deduce that the something will not want any power. It is ratheras if somebody, urging that the Germans could only be defeated byuniting the Allied commands under Marshal Foch, had said that after allit need not offend the British Generals because the French supremacyneed only be a fiction, the Germans being defeated. We should naturallysay that the German defeat would only be a reality because the Alliedcommand was not a fiction. So the universal peace would only be areality if the World State were not a fiction. And it could not be evena state if it were not a government. This argument amounts to saying, first that the World State will be needed because it is strong, andthen that it may safely be weak because it will not be needed. 

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy. I do not say it isincompatible with it; but any combination of the two will be acompromise between the two. The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city becausethey know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizenwho has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remoteand altogether alien cities. All Irishmen may know roughly the same sortof things about Ireland; but it is absurd to say they all know the samethings about Iceland, when they may include a scholar steeped inIcelandic sagas or a sailor who has been to Iceland. To make allpolitics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. Ifyour political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you dependof necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who havebeen to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and moreselect minority who have come back. 

Given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over large areas, Ithink the nearest thing to democracy is despotism. At any rate I thinkit is some sort of more or less independent monarchy, such as AndrewJackson created in America. And I believe it is true to say that the twomen whom the modern world really and almost reluctantly regards withimpersonal respect, as clothed by their office with something historicand honourable, are the Pope and the President of the United States. 

But to admire the United States as the United States is one thing. Toadmire them as the World State is quite another. The attempt of Mr. Wells to make America a sort of model for the federation of all the freenations of the earth, though it is international in intention, is reallyas narrowly national, in the bad sense, as the desire of Mr. Kipling tocover the world with British Imperialism, or of Professor Treitschke tocover it with Prussian Pan-Germanism. Not being schoolboys, we no longerbelieve that everything can be settled by painting the map red. Nor do Ibelieve it can be done by painting it blue with white spots, even ifthey are called stars. The insufficiency of British Imperialism does notlie in the fact that it has always been applied by force of arms. As amatter of fact, it has not. It has been effected largely by commerce, bycolonisation of comparatively empty places, by geographical discoveryand diplomatic bargain. Whether it be regarded as praise or blame, it iscertainly the truth that among all the things that have calledthemselves empires, the British has been perhaps the least purelymilitary, and has least both of the special guilt and the special glorythat goes with militarism. The insufficiency of British Imperialism isnot that it is imperial, let alone military. The insufficiency ofBritish Imperialism is that it is British; when it is not merely Jewish. It is that just as a man is no more than a man, so a nation is no morethan a nation; and any nation is inadequate as an international model. Any state looks small when it occupies the whole earth. Any polity isnarrow as soon as it is as wide as the world. It would be just the sameif Ireland began to paint the map green or Montenegro were to paint itblack. The objection to spreading anything all over the world is that, among other things, you have to spread it very thin. 

But America, which Mr. Wells takes as a model, is in another senserather a warning. Mr. Wells says very truly that there was a moment inhistory when America might well have broken up into independent stateslike those of Europe. He seems to take it for granted that it was in allrespects an advantage that this was avoided. Yet there is surely a case, however mildly we put it, for a certain importance in the world stillattaching to Europe. There are some who find France as interesting asFlorida; and who think they can learn as much about history and humanityin the marble cities of the Mediterranean as in the wooden towns of theMiddle West. Europe may have been divided, but it was certainly notdestroyed; nor has its peculiar position in the culture of the worldbeen destroyed. Nothing has yet appeared capable of completely eclipsingit, either in its extension in America or its imitation in Japan. Butthe immediate point here is perhaps a more important one. There is nowno creed accepted as embodying the common sense of all Europe, as theCatholic creed was accepted as embodying it in mediaeval times. There isno culture broadly superior to all others, as the Mediterranean culturewas superior to that of the barbarians in Roman times. If Europe wereunited in modern times, it would probably be by the victory of one ofits types over others, possibly over all the others. And when Americawas united finally in the nineteenth century, it _was_ by the victory ofone of its types over others. It is not yet certain that this victorywas a good thing. It is not yet certain that the world will be betterfor the triumph of the North over the Southern traditions of America. It may yet turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of the NorthGermans over the Southern traditions of Germany and of Europe. 

The men who will not face this fact are men whose minds are not free. They are more crushed by Progress than any pietists by Providence. Theyare not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was allfor the best. Now Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is atheory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. Itis a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence farmore miraculous than a miracle. If there be no purpose, or if thepurpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almostinsanely unlikely that there should be in history a period of steady anduninterrupted progress; or in other words a period in which poorbewildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications, without makinga single mistake. What has to be hammered into the heads of most normalnewspaper-readers to-day is that Man has made a great many mistakes. Modern Man has made a great many mistakes. Indeed, in the case of thatprogressive and pioneering character, one is sometimes tempted to saythat he has made nothing but mistakes. Calvinism was a mistake, andCapitalism was a mistake, and Teutonism and the flattery of the Northerntribes were mistakes. In the French the persecution of Catholicism bythe politicians was a mistake, as they found out in the Great War; whenthe memory gave Irish or Italian Catholics an excuse for hanging back. In England the loss of agriculture and therefore of food-supply in war, and the power to stand a siege, was a mistake. And in America theintroduction of the negroes was a mistake; but it may yet be found thatthe sacrifice of the Southern white man to them was even more of amistake. 

The reason of this doubt is in one word. We have not yet seen the end ofthe whole industrial experiment; and there are already signs of itcoming to a bad end. It may end in Bolshevism. It is more likely to endin the Servile State. Indeed, the two things are not so different assome suppose, and they grow less different every day. The Bolshevistshave already called in Capitalists to help them to crush the freepeasants. The Capitalists are quite likely to call in Labour Leaders towhitewash their compromise as social reform or even Socialism. Thecosmopolitan Jews who are the Communists in the East will not find it sovery hard to make a bargain with the cosmopolitan Jews who areCapitalists in the West. The Western Jews would be willing to admit anominal Socialism. The Eastern Jews have already admitted that theirSocialism is nominal. It was the Bolshevist leader himself who said, 'Russia is again a Capitalist country. ' But whoever makes the bargain, and whatever is its precise character, the substance of it will beservile. It will be servile in the only rational and reliable sense;that is, an arrangement by which a mass of men are ensured shelter andlivelihood, in return for being subjected to a law which obliges them tocontinue to labour. Of course it will not be called the Servile State;it is very probable that it will be called the Socialist State. Butnobody seems to realise how very near all the industrial countries areto it. At any moment it may appear in the simple form of compulsoryarbitration; for compulsory arbitration dealing with private employersis by definition slavery. When workmen receive unemployment pay, and atthe same time arouse more and more irritation by going on strike, it mayseem very natural to give them the unemployment pay for good and forbidthem the strike for good; and the combination of those two things is bydefinition slavery. And Trotsky can beat any Trust magnate as astrike-breaker; for he does not even pretend that his compulsory labouris a free bargain. If Trotsky and the Trust magnate come to a workingcompromise, that compromise will be a Servile State. But it will also bethe supreme and by far the most constructive and conclusive result ofthe industrial movement in history; of the power of machinery or money;of the huge populations of the modern cities; of scientific inventionsand resources; of all the things before which the agricultural societyof the Southern Confederacy went down. But even those who cannot seethat commercialism may end in the triumph of slavery can see that theNorthern victory has to a great extent ended in the triumph ofcommercialism. And the point at the moment is that this did definitelymean, even at the time, the triumph of one American type over anotherAmerican type; just as much as any European war might mean the triumphof one European type over another. A victory of England over Francewould be a victory of merchants over peasants; and the victory ofNortherners over Southerners was a victory of merchants over squires. Sothat that very unity, which Mr. Wells contrasts so favourably with war, was not only itself due to a war, but to a war which had one of the mostquestionable and even perilous of the results of war. That result was achange in the balance of power, the predominance of a particularpartner, the exaltation of a particular example, the eclipse ofexcellent traditions when the defeated lost their internationalinfluence. In short, it made exactly the same sort of difference ofwhich we speak when we say that 1870 was a disaster to Europe, or thatit was necessary to fight Prussia lest she should Prussianise the wholeworld. America would have been very different if the leadership hadremained with Virginia. The world would have been very different ifAmerica had been very different. It is quite reasonable to rejoice thatthe issue went as it did; indeed, as I have explained elsewhere, forother reasons I do on the whole rejoice in it. But it is certainly notself-evident that it is a matter for rejoicing. One type of Americanstate conquered and subjugated another type of American state; and thevirtues and value of the latter were very largely lost to the world. Soif Mr. Wells insists on the parallel of a United States of Europe, hemust accept the parallel of a Civil War of Europe. He must suppose thatthe peasant countries crush the industrial countries or vice versa; andthat one or other of them becomes the European tradition to the neglectof the other. The situation which seems to satisfy him so completely inAmerica is, after all, the situation which would result in Europe if theGermanic Empires, let us say, had entirely arrested the specialdevelopment of the Slavs; or if the influence of France had reallybroken off short under a blow from Britain. The Old South had qualitiesof humane civilisation which have not sufficiently survived; or at anyrate have not sufficiently spread. It is true that the decline of theagricultural South has been considerably balanced by the growth of theagricultural West. It is true, as I have occasion to emphasise inanother place, that the West does give the New America something that isnearly a normal peasantry, as a pendant to the industrial towns. Butthis is not an answer; it is rather an augmentation of the argument. Inso far as America is saved it is saved by being patchy; and would beruined if the Western patch had the same fate as the Southern patch. When all is said, therefore, the advantages of American unification arenot so certain that we can apply them to a world unification. The doubtcould be expressed in a great many ways and by a great many examples. For that matter, it is already being felt that the supremacy of theMiddle West in politics is inflicting upon other localities exactly thesort of local injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling tobe free. It has already inflicted what amounts to religious persecution, or the imposition of an alien morality, on the wine-growing civilisationof California. In a word, the American system is a good one asgovernments go; but it is too large, and the world will not be improvedby making it larger. And for this reason alone I should reject thissecond method of uniting England and America; which is not onlyAmericanising England, but Americanising everything else. 

But the essential reason is that a type of culture came out on top inAmerica and England in the nineteenth century, which cannot and wouldnot be tolerated on top of the world. To unite all the systems at thetop, without improving and simplifying their social organisation below, would be to tie all the tops of the trees together where they riseabove a dense and poisonous jungle, and make the jungle darker thanbefore. To create such a cosmopolitan political platform would be tobuild a roof above our own heads to shut out the sunlight, on which onlyusurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk about in the sun. Thisis no moment when industrial intellectualism can inflict such anartificial oppression upon the world. Industrialism itself is coming tosee dark days, and its future is very doubtful. It is split from end toend with strikes and struggles for economic life, in which the poor notonly plead that they are starving, but even the rich can only plead thatthey are bankrupt. The peasantries are growing not only more prosperousbut more politically effective; the Russian moujik has held up theBolshevist Government of Moscow and Petersburg; a huge concession hasbeen made by England to Ireland; the League of Nations has decided forPoland against Prussia. It is not certain that industrialism will notwither even in its own field; it is certain that its intellectual ideaswill not be allowed to cover every field; and this sort of cosmopolitanculture is one of its ideas. Industrialism itself may perish; or on theother hand industrialism itself may survive, by some searching andscientific reform that will really guarantee economic security to all. It may really purge itself of the accidental maladies of anarchy andfamine; and continue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively cleanand humanely shielded machine; at any rate no longer as a man-eatingmachine. Capitalism may clear itself of its worst corruptions by suchreform as is open to it; by creating humane and healthy conditions forlabour, and setting the labouring classes to work under a lucid andrecognised law. It may make Pittsburg one vast model factory for all whowill model themselves upon factories; and may give to all men and womenin its employment a clear social status in which they can be contentedand secure. And on the day when that social security is established forthe masses, when industrial capitalism has achieved this larger and morelogical organisation and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy andironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely hover over allthose graves in the Wilderness where lay the bones of so many gallantgentlemen; men who had also from their youth known and upheld such asocial stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade and aslave a slave. 

_A New Martin Chuzzlewit_

The aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest this thesis; that thevery worst way of helping Anglo-American friendship is to be anAnglo-American. There is only one thing lower, of course, which is beingan Anglo-Saxon. It is lower, because at least Englishmen do exist andAmericans do exist; and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imaginean American and an Englishman in some way blended together. But ifAngles and Saxons ever did exist, they are all fortunately dead now; andthe wildest imagination cannot form the weakest idea of what sort ofmonster would be made by mixing one with the other. But my thesis isthat the whole hope, and the only hope, lies not in mixing two thingstogether, but rather in cutting them very sharply asunder. That is theonly way in which two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outsideeach other to appreciate and admire each other. So long as they aredifferent and yet supposed to be the same, there can be nothing but adivided mind and a staggering balance. It may be that in the firsttwilight of time man and woman walked about as one quadruped. But ifthey did, I am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked and kickedup its heels. Then the flaming sword of some angel divided them, andthey fell in love with each other. 

Should the reader require an example a little more within historicalrange, or a little more subject to critical tests, than the aboveprehistoric anecdote (which I need not say was revealed to me in avision) it would be easy enough to supply them both in a hypotheticaland a historical form. It is obvious enough in a general way that if webegin to subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will notonly be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous, superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland andSwitzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountainguides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy;it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration ofHolland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparisonbetween them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes againstthe sea, it will be equally clear that the injustice falls the otherway; it will also be clear that the situation of Switzerland on the maphas received insufficient study. In both cases there will not only berivalry but very unbalanced and unjust rivalry; in both cases, therefore, there will not only be enmity but very bitter or insolentenmity. But so long as the two are sharply divided there can be noenmity because there can be no rivalry. Nobody can argue about whetherthe Swiss climb mountains better than the Dutch build dykes; just asnobody can argue about whether a triangle is more triangular than acircle is round. 

This fancy example is alphabetically and indeed artificially simple;but, having used it for convenience, I could easily give similarexamples not of fancy but of fact. I had occasion recently to attend theChristmas festivity of a club in London for the exiles of one of theScandinavian nations. When I entered the room the first thing thatstruck my eye, and greatly raised my spirits, was that the room wasdotted with the colours of peasant costumes and the specimens of peasantcraftsmanship. There were, of course, other costumes and other crafts inevidence; there were men dressed like myself (only better) in the garbof the modern middle classes; there was furniture like the furniture ofany other room in London. Now, according to the ideal formula of theordinary internationalist, these things that we had in common ought tohave moved me to a sense of the kinship of all civilisation. I ought tohave felt that as the Scandinavian gentleman wore a collar and tie, andI also wore a collar and tie, we were brothers and nothing could comebetween us. I ought to have felt that we were standing for the sameprinciples of truth because we were wearing the same pair of trousers;or rather, to speak with more precision, similar pairs of trousers. Anyhow, the pair of trousers, that cloven pennon, ought to have floatedin fancy over my head as the banner of Europe or the League of Nations. I am constrained to confess that no such rush of emotions overcame me;and the topic of trousers did not float across my mind at all. So far asthose things were concerned, I might have remained in a mood of mortalenmity, and cheerfully shot or stabbed the best dressed gentleman in theroom. Precisely what did warm my heart with an abrupt affection for thatnorthern nation was the very thing that is utterly and indeed lamentablylacking in my own nation. It was something corresponding to the onegreat gap in English history, corresponding to the one great blot onEnglish civilisation. It was the spiritual presence of a peasantry, dressed according to its own dignity, and expressing itself by its owncreations. 

The sketch of America left by Charles Dickens is generally regarded assomething which is either to be used as a taunt or covered with anapology. Doubtless it was unduly critical, even of the America of thatday; yet curiously enough it may well be the text for a truereconciliation at the present day. It is true that in this, as in otherthings, the Dickensian exaggeration is itself exaggerated. It is alsotrue that, while it is over-emphasised, it is not allowed for. Dickenstended too much to describe the United States as a vast lunatic asylum;but partly because he had a natural inspiration and imagination suitedto the description of lunatic asylums. As it was his finest poetic fancythat created a lunatic over the garden wall, so it was his fancy thatcreated a lunatic over the western sea. To read some of the complaints, one would fancy that Dickens had deliberately invented a low andfarcical America to be a contrast to his high and exalted England. It issuggested that he showed America as full of rowdy bullies like HannibalChollop, or ridiculous wind-bags like Elijah Pogram, while England wasfull of refined and sincere spirits like Jonas Chuzzlewit, Chevy Slime, Montague Tigg, and Mr. Pecksniff. If _Martin Chuzzlewit_ makes America alunatic asylum, what in the world does it make England? We can only saya criminal lunatic asylum. The truth is, of course, that Dickens sodescribed them because he had a genius for that sort of description; forthe making of almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as Quilp orFagin. He made these Americans absurd because he was an artist inabsurdity; and no artist can help finding hints everywhere for his ownpeculiar art. In a word, he created a laughable Pogram for the samereason that he created a laughable Pecksniff; and that was only becauseno other creature could have created them. 

It is often said that we learn to love the characters in romances as ifthey were characters in real life. I wish we could sometimes love thecharacters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There area great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and evenappreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in astory. _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is itself indeed an unsatisfactory and evenunfortunate example; for it is, among its author's other works, a ratherunusually harsh and hostile story. I do not suggest that we should feeltowards an American friend that exact shade or tint of tenderness thatwe feel towards Mr. Hannibal Chollop. Our enjoyment of the foreignershould rather resemble our enjoyment of Pickwick than our enjoyment ofPecksniff. But there is this amount of appropriateness even in theparticular example; that Dickens did show in both countries how men canbe made amusing to each other. So far the point is not that he made funof America, but that he got fun out of America. And, as I have alreadypointed out, he applied exactly the same method of selection andexaggeration to England. In the other English stories, written in a moreamiable mood, he applied it in a more amiable manner; but he could applyit to an American too, when he was writing in that mood and manner. Wecan see it in the witty and withering criticism delivered by the Yankeetraveller in the musty refreshment room of Mugby Junction; a genuineexample of a genuinely American fun and freedom satirising a genuinelyBritish stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody expects the American travellerto admire the refreshments at Mugby Junction; but he might admire therefreshment at one of the Pickwickian inns, especially if it containedPickwick. Nobody expects Pickwick to like Pogram; but he might like theAmerican who made fun of Mugby Junction. But the point is that, while hesupported him in making fun, he would also think him funny. The twocomic characters could admire each other, but they would also be amusedat each other. And the American would think the Englishman funny becausehe was English; and a very good reason too. The Englishman would thinkthe American amusing because he was American; nor can I imagine a betterground for his amusement. 

Now many will debate on the psychological possibility of such afriendship founded on reciprocal ridicule, or rather on a comedy ofcomparisons. But I will say of this harmony of humours what Mr. H. G. Wells says of his harmony of states in the unity of his World State. Ifit be truly impossible to have such a peace, then there is nothingpossible except war. If we cannot have friends in this fashion, then weshall sooner or later have enemies in some other fashion. There is nohope in the pompous impersonalities of internationalism. 

And this brings us to the real and relevant mistake of Dickens. It wasnot in thinking his Americans funny, but in thinking them foolishbecause they were funny. In this sense it will be noticed that Dickens'sAmerican sketches are almost avowedly superficial; they are descriptionsof public life and not private life. Mr. Jefferson Brick had no privatelife. But Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit undoubtedly had a private life; and evenkept some parts of it exceeding private. Mr. Pecksniff was also adomestic character; so was Mr. Quilp. Mr. Pecksniff and Mr. Quilp hadslightly different ways of surprising their families; Mr. Pecksniff byplayfully observing 'Boh!' when he came home; Mr. Quilp by coming homeat all. But we can form no picture of how Mr. Hannibal Chollop playfullysurprised his family; possibly by shooting at them; possibly by notshooting at them. We can only say that he would rather surprise us byhaving a family at all. We do not know how the Mother of the ModernGracchi managed the Modern Gracchi; for her maternity was rather apublic than a private office. We have no romantic moonlit scenes of thelove-making of Elijah Pogram, to balance against the love story of SethPecksniff. These figures are all in a special sense theatrical; allfacing one way and lit up by a public limelight. Their ridiculouscharacters are detachable from their real characters, if they have anyreal characters. And the author might perfectly well be right about whatis ridiculous, and wrong about what is real. He might be as right insmiling at the Pograms and the Bricks as in smiling at the Pickwicks andthe Boffins. And he might still be as wrong in seeing Mr. Pogram as ahypocrite as the great Buzfuz was wrong in seeing Mr. Pickwick as amonster of revolting heartlessness and systematic villainy. He mightstill be as wrong in thinking Jefferson Brick a charlatan and a cheat aswas that great disciple of Lavater, Mrs. Wilfer, in tracing everywrinkle of evil cunning in the face of Mrs. Boffin. For Mr. Pickwick'sspectacles and gaiters and Mrs. Boffin's bonnets and boudoir are afterall superficial jokes; and might be equally well seen whatever we sawbeneath them. A man may smile and smile and be a villain; but a man mayalso make us smile and not be a villain. He may make us smile and noteven be a fool. He may make us roar with laughter and be an exceedinglywise man. 

Now that is the paradox of America which Dickens never discovered. Elijah Pogram was far more fantastic than his satirist thought; and themost grotesque feature of Brick and Chollop was hidden from him. Thereally strange thing was that Pogram probably did say, 'Rough he may be. So air our bars. Wild he may be. So air our buffalers, ' and yet was aperfectly intelligent and public-spirited citizen while he said it. Theextraordinary thing is that Jefferson Brick may really have said, 'Thelibation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood, ' and yetJefferson Brick may have served freedom, resisting unto blood. Therereally has been a florid school of rhetoric in the United States whichhas made it quite possible for serious and sensible men to say suchthings. It is amusing simply as a difference of idiom or costume isalways amusing; just as English idiom and English costume are amusing toAmericans. But about this kind of difference there can be no kind ofdoubt. So sturdy not to say stuffy a materialist as Ingersoll could sayof so shoddy not to say shady a financial politician as Blaine, 'Like anarméd warrior, like a pluméd knight, James G. Blaine strode down thehall of Congress, and flung his spear full and true at the shield ofevery enemy of his country and every traducer of his fair name. 'Compared with that, the passage about bears and buffaloes, which Mr. Pogram delivered in defence of the defaulting post-master, is really avery reasonable and appropriate statement. For bears and buffaloes arewild and rough and in that sense free; while pluméd knights do not throwtheir lances about like the assegais of Zulus. And the defaultingpost-master was at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion asJames G. Blaine of the Little Rock Railway. But anybody who had treatedIngersoll or Blaine merely as a fool and a figure of fun would have veryrapidly found out his mistake. But Dickens did not know Brick or Cholloplong enough to find out his mistake. It need not be denied that, evenafter a full understanding, he might still have found things to smile ator to criticise. I do not insist on his admitting that Hannibal Chollopwas as great a hero as Hannibal, or that Elijah Pogram was as true aprophet as Elijah. But I do say very seriously that they had somethingabout their atmosphere and situation that made possible a sort ofheroism and even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural atthat period in that Merry England whose comedy and common sense we sumup under the name of Dickens. When we joke about the name of HannibalChollop, we might remember of what nation was the general who dismissedhis defeated soldiers at Appomatox with words which the historian hasjustly declared to be worthy of Hannibal: 'We have fought through thiswar together. I have done my best for you. ' It is not fair to forgetJefferson, or even Jefferson Davis, entirely in favour of JeffersonBrick. 

For all these three things, good, bad, and indifferent, go together toform something that Dickens missed, merely because the England of histime most disastrously missed it. In this case, as in every case, theonly way to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to measurethe defect of our own country. For in this matter the human mind is thevictim of a curious little unconscious trick, the cause of nearly allinternational dislikes. A man treats his own faults as original sin andsupposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposesthat men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simplefoundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realisethat they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided hisvices as well as his virtues. His own faults are things with which he isso much at home that he at once forgets and assumes them abroad. He isso faintly conscious of them in himself that he is not even conscious ofthe absence of them in other people. He assumes that they are there sothat he does not see that they are not there. The Englishman takes itfor granted that a Frenchman will have all the English faults. Then hegoes on to be seriously angry with the Frenchman for having dared tocomplicate them by the French faults. The notion that the Frenchman hasthe French faults and _not_ the English faults is a paradox too wild tocross his mind. 

He is like an old Chinaman who should laugh at Europeans for wearingludicrous top-hats and curling up their pig-tails inside them; becauseobviously all men have pig-tails, as all monkeys have tails. Or he islike an old Chinese lady who should justly deride the high-heeled shoesof the West, considering them a needless addition to the sufficientlytight and secure bandaging of the foot; for, of course, all women bindup their feet, as all women bind up their hair. What these Celestialthinkers would not think of, or allow for, is the wild possibility thatwe do not have pig-tails although we do have top-hats, or that ourladies are not silly enough to have Chinese feet, though they are sillyenough to have high-heeled shoes. Nor should we necessarily have come aninch nearer to the Chinese extravagances even if the chimney-pot hatrose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had evolved into asort of stilts. By the same fallacy the Englishman will not only cursethe French peasant as a miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar. That is, he will first complain of the man having the surliness of anindependent man, and then accuse him of having the servility of adependent one. Just as the hypothetical Chinaman cannot believe that wehave top-hats but not pig-tails, so the Englishman cannot believe thatpeasants are not snobs even when they are savages. Or he sees that aParis paper is violent and sensational; and then supposes that somemillionaire owns twenty such papers and runs them as a newspaper trust. Surely the Yellow Press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow, as the British Empire to paint it red. It never occurs to such a criticthat the French paper is violent because it is personal, and personalbecause it belongs to a real and responsible person, and not to a ringof nameless millionaires. It is a pamphlet, and not an anonymouspamphlet. In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illustrated;the situation in which the black man first assumes that all mankind isblack, and then accuses the rest of the artificial vice of paintingtheir faces red and yellow, or the hypocrisy of white-washingthemselves after the fashion of whited sepulchres. The particular caseof it now before us is that of the English misunderstanding of America;and it is based, as in all these cases, on the English misunderstandingof England. 

For the truth is that England has suffered of late from not havingenough of the free shooting of Hannibal Chollop; from not understandingenough that the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood. The prosperous Englishman will not admit this; but then the prosperousEnglishman will not admit that he has suffered from anything. That iswhat he is suffering from. Until lately at least he refused to realisethat many of his modern habits had been bad habits, the worst of thembeing contentment. For all the real virtue in contentment evaporates, when the contentment is only satisfaction and the satisfaction is onlyself-satisfaction. Now it is perfectly true that America and not Englandhas seen the most obvious and outrageous official denials of liberty. But it is equally true that it has seen the most obvious flouting ofsuch official nonsense, far more obvious than any similar evasions inEngland. And nobody who knows the subconscious violence of the Americancharacter would ever be surprised if the weapons of Chollop began to beused in that most lawful lawlessness. It is perfectly true that thelibation of freedom must sometimes be drunk in blood, and never more(one would think) than when mad millionaires forbid it to be drunk inbeer. But America, as compared with England, is the country where onecan still fancy men obtaining the libation of beer by the libation ofblood. Vulgar plutocracy is almost omnipotent in both countries; but Ithink there is now more kick of reaction against it in America than inEngland. The Americans may go mad when they make laws; but they recovertheir reason when they disobey them. I wish I could believe that therewas as much of that destructive repentance in England; as indeed therecertainly was when Cobbett wrote. It faded gradually like a dying firethrough the Victorian era; and it was one of the very few realities thatDickens did not understand. But any one who does understand it will knowthat the days of Cobbett saw the last lost fight for English democracy;and that if he had stood at that turning of the historic road, he wouldhave wished a better fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against thefirst machinery, and luck to the Luddite fires. 

Anyhow, what is wanted is a new Martin Chuzzlewit, told by a wiser MarkTapley. It is typical of something sombre and occasionally stale in themood of Dickens when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is notreally very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow of Sam Weller. Butif Dickens had written it in a happier mood, there might have been atruer meaning in Mark Tapley's happiness. For it is true that thisillogical good humour amid unreason and disorder is one of the realvirtues of the English people. It is the real advantage they have inthat adventure all over the world, which they were recently andreluctantly induced to call an Empire. That receptive ridicule remainswith them as a secret pleasure when they are colonists--or convicts. Dickens might have written another version of the great romance, and onein which America was really seen gaily by Mark instead of gloomily byMartin. Mark Tapley might really have made the best of America. ThenAmerica would have lived and danced before us like Pickwick's England, afairyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters, and we might stillhave sympathised as much with the rhetoric of Lafayette Kettle as withthe rhetoric of Wilkins Micawber, or with the violence of Chollop aswith the violence of Boythorn. That new Martin Chuzzlewit will never bewritten; and the loss of it is more tragic than the loss of _EdwinDrood_. But every man who has travelled in America has seen glimpses andepisodes in that untold tale; and far away on the Red-Indian frontiersor in the hamlets in the hills of Pennsylvania, there are people whom Imet for a few hours or for a few moments, whom I none the less sincerelylike and respect because I cannot but smile as I think of them. But theconverse is also true; they have probably forgotten me; but if theyremember they laugh. 

_The Spirit of America_

I suggest that diplomatists of the internationalist school should spendsome of their money on staging farces and comedies of cross-purposes, founded on the curious and prevalent idea that England and America havethe same language. I know, of course, that we both inherit the glorioustongue of Shakespeare, not to mention the tune of the musical glasses;but there have been moments when I thought that if we spoke Greek andthey spoke Latin we might understand each other better. For Greek andLatin are at least fixed, while American at least is still very fluid. Ido not know the American language, and therefore I do not claim todistinguish between the American language and the American slang. But Iknow that highly theatrical developments might follow on taking thewords as part of the English slang or the English language. I havealready given the example of calling a person 'a regular guy, ' which inthe States is a graceful expression of respect and esteem, but which onthe stage, properly handled, might surely lead the way towards a divorceor duel or something lively. Sometimes coincidence merely clinches amistake, as it so often clinches a misprint. Every proof-reader knowsthat the worst misprint is not that which makes nonsense but that whichmakes sense; not that which is obviously wrong but that which ishideously right. He who has essayed to write 'he got the book, ' and hasfound it rendered mysteriously as 'he got the boob' is pensivelyresigned. It is when it is rendered quite lucidly as 'he got the boot'that he is moved to a more passionate mood of regret. I have hadconversations in which this sort of accident would have wholly misledme, if another accident had not come to the rescue. An American friendof mine was telling me of his adventures as a cinema-producer down inthe south-west where real Red Indians were procurable. He said thatcertain Indians were 'very bad actors. ' It passed for me as a veryordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural deficiency. It wouldhardly seem a crushing criticism to say that some wild Arab chieftainwas not very good at imitating a farmyard; or that the Grand Llama ofThibet was rather clumsy at making paper boats. But the remark might benatural in a man travelling in paper boats, or touring with an invisiblefarmyard for his menagerie. As my friend was a cinema-producer, Isupposed he meant that the Indians were bad cinema actors. But thephrase has really a high and austere moral meaning, which my levity hadwholly missed. A bad actor means a man whose actions are bad or morallyreprehensible. So that I might have embraced a Red Indian who wasdripping with gore, or covered with atrocious crimes, imagining therewas nothing the matter with him beyond a mistaken choice of thetheatrical profession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, notto mention a cinema play. Surely a New England village maiden might findherself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish'Little Blue Bison, ' merely through her mistaken sympathy with hisfinancial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me glimpses of allsorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theatres;but this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must be curbed. There is one example, however, of this complication of language actuallyused in contrary senses, about which the same figure can be used toillustrate a more serious fact. 

Suppose that, in such an international interlude, an English girl and anAmerican girl are talking about the fiancé of the former, who is comingto call. The English girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on thestage), the American girl will of course have short hair and skirts andwill be cynical; Americans being more completely free from cynicism thanany people in the world. It is the great glory of Americans that theyare not cynical; for that matter, English aristocrats are hardly everhaughty; they understand the game much better than that. But on thestage, anyhow, the American girl may say, referring to her friend'sfiancé, with a cynical wave of the cigarette, 'I suppose he's bound tocome and see you. ' And at this the blue blood of the Vere de Veres willboil over; the English lady will be deeply wounded and insulted at thesuggestion that her lover only comes to see her because he is forced todo so. A staggering stage quarrel will then ensue, and things will gofrom bad to worse; until the arrival of an Interpreter who can talk bothEnglish and American. He stands between the two ladies waving two pocketdictionaries, and explains the error on which the quarrel turns. It isvery simple; like the seed of all tragedies. In English 'he is bound tocome and see you' means that he is obliged or constrained to come andsee you. In American it does not. In American it means that he is benton coming to see you, that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and willsurmount any obstacle to do it. The two young ladies will then embraceas the curtain falls. 

Now when I was lecturing in America I was often told, in a radiant andcongratulatory manner, that such and such a person was bound to come andhear me lecture. It seemed a very cruel form of conscription, and Icould not understand what authority could have made it compulsory. Inthe course of discovering my error, however, I thought I began tounderstand certain American ideas and instincts that lie behind thisAmerican idiom. For as I have urged before, and shall often urge again, the road to international friendship is through really understandingjokes. It is in a sense through taking jokes seriously. It is quitelegitimate to laugh at a man who walks down the street in three whitehats and a green dressing gown, because it is unfamiliar; but after allthe man has _some_ reason for what he does; and until we know the reasonwe do not understand the story, or even understand the joke. So theoutlander will always seem outlandish in custom or costume; but seriousrelations depend on our getting beyond the fact of difference to thethings wherein it differs. A good symbolical figure for all this may befound among the people who say, perhaps with a self-revealingsimplicity, that they are bound to go to a lecture. 

If I were asked for a single symbolic figure summing up the whole ofwhat seems eccentric and interesting about America to an Englishman, Ishould be satisfied to select that one lady who complained of Mrs. Asquith's lecture and wanted her money back. I do not mean that she wastypically American in complaining; far from it. I, for one, have a greatand guilty knowledge of all that amiable American audiences will endurewithout complaint. I do not mean that she was typically American inwanting her money; quite the contrary. That sort of American spendsmoney rather than hoards it; and when we convict them of vulgarity weacquit them of avarice. Where she was typically American, summing up atruth individual and indescribable in any other way, is that she usedthese words: 'I've risen from a sick-bed to come and hear her, and Iwant my money back. '

The element in that which really amuses an Englishman is precisely theelement which, properly analysed, ought to make him admire an American. But my point is that only by going through the amusement can he reachthe admiration. The amusement is in the vision of a tragic sacrifice forwhat is avowedly a rather trivial object. Mrs. Asquith is a candid ladyof considerable humour; and I feel sure she does not regard theexperience of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for which thesick should thus suffer martyrdom. She also is English; and had no otherclaim but to amuse Americans and possibly to be amused by them. Thisbeing so, it is rather as if somebody said, 'I have risked my life infire and pestilence to find my way to the music hall, ' or, 'I havefasted forty days in the wilderness sustained by the hope of seeingTotty Toddles do her new dance. ' And there is something rather moresubtle involved here. There is something in an Englishman which wouldmake him feel faintly ashamed of saying that he had fasted to hearTotty Toddles, or risen from a sick-bed to hear Mrs. Asquith. He wouldfeel that it was undignified to confess that he had wanted mereamusement so much; and perhaps that he had wanted anything so much. Hewould not like, so to speak, to be seen rushing down the street afterTotty Toddles, or after Mrs. Asquith, or perhaps after anybody. Butthere is something in it distinct from a mere embarrassment at admittingenthusiasm. He might admit the enthusiasm if the object seemed tojustify it; he might perfectly well be serious about a serious thing. But he cannot understand a person being proud of serious sacrifices forwhat is not a serious thing. He does not like to admit that a littlething can excite him; that he can lose his breath in running, or losehis balance in reaching, after something that might be called silly. 

Now that is where the American is fundamentally different. To him theenthusiasm itself is meritorious. To him the excitement itself isdignified. He counts it a part of his manhood to fast or fight or risefrom a bed of sickness for something, or possibly for anything. Hisideal is not to be a lock that only a worthy key can open, but a 'livewire' that anything can touch or anybody can use. In a word, there is adifference in the very definition of virility and therefore of virtue. Alive wire is not only active, it is also sensitive. Thus sensibilitybecomes actually a part of virility. Something more is involved than thevulgar simplification of the American as the irresistible force and theEnglishman as the immovable post. As a fact, those who speak of suchthings nowadays generally mean by something irresistible somethingsimply immovable, or at least something unalterable, motionless even inmotion, like a cannon ball; for a cannon ball is as dead as a cannon. Prussian militarism was praised in that way--until it met a French forceof about half its size on the banks of the Marne. But that is not whatan American means by energy; that sort of Prussian energy is onlymonotony without repose. American energy is not a soulless machine; forit is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. It is a very smallbox for so big a thing; but it is not an empty box. But the point isthat he is not only proud of his energy, he is proud of his excitement. He is not ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in hismanly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel of his machine breaksfour billion butterflies an hour. 

That is the point about American sport; that it is not in the leastsportive. It is because it is not very sportive that we sometimes say itis not very sporting. It has the vices of a religion. It has all theparadox of original sin in the service of aboriginal faith. It issometimes untruthful because it is sincere. It is sometimes treacherousbecause it is loyal. Men lie and cheat for it as they lied for theirlords in a feudal conspiracy, or cheated for their chieftains in aHighland feud. We may say that the vassal readily committed treason; butit is equally true that he readily endured torture. So does the Americanathlete endure torture. Not only the self-sacrifice but the solemnity ofthe American athlete is like that of the American Indian. The athletesin the States have the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, thegreat historical nation without a sense of humour. They suffer anascetic régime not to be matched in any monasticism and hardly in anymilitarism. If any tradition of these things remains in a saner age, they will probably be remembered as a mysterious religious order offakirs or dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted in honourof Hercules or Castor and Pollux. And that is really the spiritualatmosphere though the gods have vanished; and the religion issubconscious and therefore irrational. For the problem of the modernworld is that it has continued to be religious when it has ceased to berational. Americans really would starve to win a cocoa-nut shy. Theywould fast or bleed to win a race of paper boats on a pond. They wouldrise from a sick-bed to listen to Mrs. Asquith. 

But it is the real reason that interests me here. It is certainly notthat Americans are so stupid as not to know that cocoa-nuts are onlycocoa-nuts and paper boats only made of paper. Americans are, on anaverage, rather more intelligent than Englishmen; and they are wellaware that Hercules is a myth and that Mrs. Asquith is something of amythologist. It is not that they do not know that the object is small initself; it is that they do really believe that the enthusiasm is greatin itself. They admire people for being impressionable. They admirepeople for being excited. An American so struggling for somedisproportionate trifle (like one of my lectures) really feels in amystical way that he is right, because it is his whole morality to bekeen. So long as he wants something very much, whatever it is, he feelshe has his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of societybehind him, and God and the whole universe behind him. Wedged on one legin a hot crowd at a trivial lecture, he has self-respect; his dignityis at rest. That is what he means when he says he is bound to come tothe lecture. 

Now the Englishman is fond of occasional larks. But these things are notlarks; nor are they occasional. It is the essential of the Englishman'slark that he should think it a lark; that he should laugh at it evenwhen he does it. Being English myself, I like it; but being Englishmyself, I know it is connected with weaknesses as well as merits. In itsirony there is condescension and therefore embarrassment. This patronageis allied to the patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratictradition of society. The larks are a variant of laziness because ofleisure; and the leisure is a variant of the security and even supremacyof the gentleman. When an undergraduate at Oxford smashes half a hundredwindows he is well aware that the incident is merely a trifle. He can betrusted to explain to his parents and guardians that it was merely atrifle. He does not say, even in the American sense, that he was boundto smash the windows. He does not say that he had risen from a sick-bedto smash the windows. He does not especially think he has risen at all;he knows he has descended (though with delight, like one diving orsliding down the banisters) to something flat and farcical and full ofthe English taste for the bathos. He has collapsed into somethingentirely commonplace; though the owners of the windows may possibly notthink so. This rather indescribable element runs through a hundredEnglish things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound ofproper names; so that even the yearning lover in a lyric yearns forsomebody named Sally rather than Salome, and for a place called Wappingrather than a place called Westermain. Even in the relapse intorowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There is also what isso large a part of comfort; carelessness. The undergraduate breakswindows because he does not care about windows, not because he does careabout more fresh air like a hygienist, or about more light like a Germanpoet. Still less does he heroically smash a hundred windows because theycome between him and the voice of Mrs. Asquith. But least of all does hedo it because he seriously prides himself on the energy apart from itsaim, and on the will-power that carries it through. He is not 'bound' tosmash the windows, even in the sense of being bent upon it. He is notbound at all but rather relaxed; and his violence is not only arelaxation but a laxity. Finally, this is shown in the fact that he onlysmashes windows when he is in the mood to smash windows; when somefortunate conjunction of stars and all the tints and nuances of naturewhisper to him that it would be well to smash windows. But the Americanis always ready, at any moment, to waste his energies on the wilder andmore suicidal course of going to lectures. And this is because to himsuch excitement is not a mood but a moral ideal. As I note in anotherconnection, much of the English mystery would be clear to Americans ifthey understood the word 'mood. ' Englishmen are very moody, especiallywhen they smash windows. But I doubt if many Americans understandexactly what we mean by the mood; especially the passive mood. 

It is only by trying to get some notion of all this that an Englishmancan enjoy the final crown and fruit of all international friendship;which is really liking an American to be American. If we only think thatparts of him are excellent because parts of him are English, it would befar more sensible to stop at home and possibly enjoy the society of awhole complete Englishman. But anybody who does understand this can takethe same pleasure in an American being American that he does in athunderbolt being swift and a barometer being sensitive. He can see thata vivid sensibility and vigilance really radiate outwards through allthe ramifications of machinery and even of materialism. He can see thatthe American uses his great practical powers upon very smallprovocation; but he can also see that there is a kind of sense ofhonour, like that of a duellist, in his readiness to be provoked. Indeed, there is some parallel between the American man of action, however vulgar his aims, and the old feudal idea of the gentleman with asword at his side. The gentleman may have been proud of being strong orsturdy; he may too often have been proud of being thick-headed; but hewas not proud of being thick-skinned. On the contrary, he was proud ofbeing thin-skinned. He also seriously thought that sensitiveness was apart of masculinity. It may be very absurd to read of two Irishgentlemen trying to kill each other for trifles, or of twoIrish-American millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash. But thevery pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose illustrates the sameconception; which may be called the virtue of excitability. And it isreally this, and not any rubbish about iron will-power and masterfulmentality, that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos and itsindustrial ideals. Being a live wire does not mean that the nervesshould be like wires; but rather that the very wires should be likenerves. 

Another approximation to the truth would be to say that an American isreally not ashamed of curiosity. It is not so simple as it looks. Menwill carry off curiosity with various kinds of laughter and bravado, just as they will carry off drunkenness or bankruptcy. But very fewpeople are really proud of lying on a door-step, and very few people arereally proud of longing to look through a key-hole. I do not speak oflooking through it, which involves questions of honour and self-control;but few people feel that even the desire is dignified. Now I fancy theAmerican, at least by comparison with the Englishman, does feel that hiscuriosity is consistent with his dignity, because dignity is consistentwith vivacity. He feels it is not merely the curiosity of Paul Pry, butthe curiosity of Christopher Columbus. He is not a spy but an explorer;and he feels his greatness rather grow with his refusal to turn back, asa traveller might feel taller and taller as he neared the source of theNile or the North-West Passage. Many an Englishman has had that feelingabout discoveries in dark continents; but he does not often have itabout discoveries in daily life. The one type does believe in theindignity and the other in the dignity of the detective. It has nothingto do with ethics in the merely external sense. It involves noparticular comparison in practical morals and manners. It is somethingin the whole poise and posture of the self; of the way a man carrieshimself. For men are not only affected by what they are; but still more, when they are fools, by what they think they are; and when they arewise, by what they wish to be. 

There are truths that have almost become untrue by becoming untruthful. There are statements so often stale and insincere that one hesitates touse them, even when they stand for something more subtle. This pointabout curiosity is not the conventional complaint against the Americaninterviewer. It is not the ordinary joke against the American child. Andin the same way I feel the danger of it being identified with the cantabout 'a young nation' if I say that it has some of the attractions, notof American childhood, but of real childhood. There is some truth in thetradition that the children of wealthy Americans tend to be tooprecocious and luxurious. But there is a sense in which we can reallysay that if the children are like adults, the adults are like children. And that sense is in the very best sense of childhood. It is somethingwhich the modern world does not understand. It is something that modernAmericans do not understand, even when they possess it; but I think theydo possess it. 

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripturewhich he now most commonly quotes is, 'The kingdom of heaven is withinyou. ' That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees andprigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas increation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peacethat passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to itis that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as alittle child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; butthe childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. Itis the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what isoutside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and hisappetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say thatthe whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for itsomewhere else. 

_The Spirit of England_

Nine times out of ten a man's broad-mindedness is necessarily thenarrowest thing about him. This is not particularly paradoxical; it is, when we come to think of it, quite inevitable. His vision of his ownvillage may really be full of varieties; and even his vision of his ownnation may have a rough resemblance to the reality. But his vision ofthe world is probably smaller than the world. His vision of the universeis certainly much smaller than the universe. Hence he is never soinadequate as when he is universal; he is never so limited as when hegeneralises. This is the fallacy in the many modern attempts at acreedless creed, at something variously described as essentialChristianity or undenominational religion or a world faith to embraceall the faiths in the world. It is that every sectarian is moresectarian in his unsectarianism than he is in his sect. The emancipationof a Baptist is a very Baptist emancipation. The charity of a Buddhistis a very Buddhist charity, and very different from Christian charity. When a philosophy embraces everything it generally squeezes everything, and squeezes it out of shape; when it digests it necessarilyassimilates. When a theosophist absorbs Christianity it is rather as acannibal absorbs Christian missionaries. In this sense it is evenpossible for the larger thing to be swallowed by the smaller; and formen to move about not only in a Clapham sect but in a Clapham cosmosunder Clapham moon and stars. 

But if this danger exists for all men, it exists especially for theEnglishman. The Englishman is never so insular as when he is imperial;except indeed when he is international. In private life he is a goodfriend and in practical politics generally a good ally. But theoreticalpolitics are more practical than practical politics. And in theoreticalpolitics the Englishman is the worst ally the world ever saw. This isall the more curious because he has passed so much of his historicallife in the character of an ally. He has been in twenty great alliancesand never understood one of them. He has never been farther away fromEuropean politics than when he was fighting heroically in the thick ofthem. I myself think that this splendid isolation is sometimes reallysplendid; so long as it is isolation and does not imagine itself to beimperialism or internationalism. With the idea of being international, with the idea of being imperial, comes the frantic and farcical idea ofbeing impartial. Generally speaking, men are never so mean and false andhypocritical as when they are occupied in being impartial. They areperforming the first and most typical of all the actions of the devil;they are claiming the throne of God. Even when it is not hypocrisy butonly mental confusion, it is always a confusion worse and worseconfounded. We see it in the impartial historians of the Victorian Age, who now seem far more Victorian than the partial historians. Hallamwrote about the Middle Ages; but Hallam was far less mediaeval thanMacaulay; for Macaulay was at least a fighter. Huxley had more mediaevalsympathies than Herbert Spencer for the same reason; that Huxley was afighter. They both fought in many ways for the limitations of their ownrationalistic epoch; but they were nearer the truth than the men whosimply assumed those limitations as rational. The war of thecontroversionalists was a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters. And in the same way the Englishman never cuts a less convincing figurebefore other nations than when he tries to arbitrate between them. 

I have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity of savingAnglo-American friendship, a necessity which I myself feel rather toostrongly to be satisfied with the ambassadorial and editorial style ofachieving it. I have already said that the worst style of all is to beAnglo-American; or, as the more illiterate would express, to beAnglo-Saxon. I am more and more convinced that the way for theEnglishman to do it is to be English; but to know that he is English andnot everything else as well. Thus the only sincere answer to Irishnationalism is English nationalism, which is a reality; and not Englishimperialism, which is a reactionary fiction, or Englishinternationalism, which is a revolutionary one. 

For the English are reviled for their imperialism because they are notimperialistic. They dislike it, which is the real reason why they do itbadly; and they do it badly, which is the real reason why they aredisliked when they do it. Nobody calls France imperialistic because shehas absorbed Brittany. But everybody calls England imperialistic becauseshe has not absorbed Ireland. The Englishman is fixed and frozen forever in the attitude of a ruthless conqueror; not because he hasconquered such people, but because he has not conquered them; but he isalways trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy of a better cause. For the really native and vigorous part of what is unfortunately calledthe British Empire is not an empire at all, and does not consist ofthese conquered provinces at all. It is not an empire but an adventure;which is probably a much finer thing. It was not the power of makingstrange countries similar to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeingstrange countries because they were different from our own. Theadventurer did indeed, like the third son, set out to seek his fortune, but not primarily to alter other people's fortunes; he wished to tradewith people rather than to rule them. But as the other people remaineddifferent from him, so did he remain different from them. The adventurersaw a thousand strange things and remained a stranger. He was theRobinson Crusoe on a hundred desert islands; and on each he remained asinsular as on his own island. 

What is wanted for the cause of England to-day is an Englishman withenough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as theinside. That is, we need somebody who will do for the English what hasnever been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish peasantryor even any savage tribe. We want people who can make Englandattractive; quite apart from disputes about whether England is strong orweak. We want somebody to explain, not that England is everywhere, butwhat England is anywhere; not that England is or is not really dying, but why we do not want her to die. For this purpose the official andconventional compliments or claims can never get any farther thanpompous abstractions about Law and Justice and Truth; the ideals whichEngland accepts as every civilised state accepts them, and violates asevery civilised state violates them. That is not the way in which thepicture of any people has ever been painted on the sympatheticimagination of the world. Enthusiasts for old Japan did not tell us thatthe Japs recognised the existence of abstract morality; but that theylived in paper houses or wrote letters with paint-brushes. Men whowished to interest us in Arabs did not confine themselves to saying thatthey are monotheists or moralists; they filled our romances with therush of Arab steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. What wewant is somebody who will do for the Englishman with his front gardenwhat was done for the Jap and his paper house; who shall understand theEnglishman with his dog as well as the Arab with his horse. In a word, what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that really wantsdoing. It is to make England attractive as a nationality, and even as asmall nationality. 

For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love each otherbecause they are alike. They will never really do that unless they arereally alike; and then they will not be nations. Nations can love eachother as men and women love each other, not because they are alike butbecause they are different. It can easily be shown, I fancy, that inevery case where a real public sympathy was aroused for some unfortunateforeign people, it has always been accompanied with a particular andpositive interest in their most foreign customs and their most foreignexternals. The man who made a romance of the Scotch High-lander made aromance of his kilt and even of his dirk; the friend of the Red Indianswas interested in picture writing and had some tendency to beinterested in scalping. To take a more serious example, such nations asSerbia had been largely commended to international consideration by thestudy of Serbian epics, or Serbian songs. The epoch of negroemancipation was also the epoch of negro melodies. Those who wept overUncle Tom also laughed over Uncle Remus. And just as the admiration forthe Redskin almost became an apology for scalping, the mysteriousfascination of the African has sometimes almost led us into the fringesof the black forest of Voodoo. But the sort of interest that is felteven in the scalp-hunter and the cannibal, the torturer and thedevil-worshipper, that sort of interest has never been felt in theEnglishman. 

And this is the more extraordinary because the Englishman is really veryinteresting. He is interesting in a special degree in this specialmanner; he is interesting because he is individual. No man in the worldis more misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordinarysense national. A description of English life must be a description ofprivate life. In that sense there is no public life. In that sense thereis no public opinion. There have never been those prairie fires ofpublic opinion in England which often sweep over America. At any rate, there have never been any such popular revolutions since the popularrevolutions of the Middle Ages. The English are a nation of amateurs;they are even a nation of eccentrics. An Englishman is never moreEnglish than when he is considered a lunatic by the other Englishmen. This can be clearly seen in a figure like Dr. Johnson, who has becomenational not by being normal but by being extraordinary. To express thismysterious people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges andheavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gardens with large fences, and why they alone among Christians have kept quite consistently thegreat Christian glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange andstimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words, who study thesouls of strange peoples. That would be the true way to create afriendship between England and America, or between England and anythingelse; yes, even between England and Ireland. For this justice at leasthas already been done to Ireland; and as an indignant patriot I demand amore equal treatment for the two nations. 

I have already noted the commonplace that in order to teachinternationalism we must talk nationalism. We must make the nations asnations less odious or mysterious to each other. We do not make men loveeach other by describing a monster with a million arms and legs, but bydescribing the men as men, with their separate and even solitaryemotions. As this has a particular application to the emotions of theEnglishman, I will return to the topic once more. Now Americans have apower that is the soul and success of democracy, the power ofspontaneous social organisation. Their high spirits, their humane idealsare really creative, they abound in unofficial institutions; we mightalmost say in unofficial officialism. Nobody who has felt the presenceof all the leagues and guilds and college clubs will deny that Whitmanwas national when he said he would build states and cities out of thelove of comrades. When all this communal enthusiasm collides with theEnglishman, it too often seems literally to leave him cold. They say heis reserved; they possibly think he is rude. And the Englishman, havingbeen taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take thecriticism as a compliment. He admits that he is reserved because he isstern and strong; or even that he is rude because he is shrewd andcandid. But as a fact he is not rude and not especially reserved; atleast reserve is not the meaning of his reluctance. The real differencelies, I think, in the fact that American high spirits are not only highbut level; that the hilarious American spirit is like a plateau, and thehumorous English spirit like a ragged mountain range. 

The Englishman is moody; which does not in the least mean that theEnglishman is morose. Dickens, as we all feel in reading his books, wasboisterously English. Dickens was moody when he wrote _Oliver Twist_;but he was also moody when he wrote _Pickwick_. That is, he was inanother and much healthier mood. The mood was normal to him in the sensethat nine times out of ten he felt and wrote in that humorous andhilarious mood. But he was, if ever there was one, a man of moods; andall the more of a typical Englishman for being a man of moods. But itwas because of this, almost entirely, that he had a misunderstandingwith America. 

In America there are no moods, or there is only one mood. It is the samewhether it is called hustle or uplift; whether we regard it as theheroic love of comrades or the last hysteria of the herd instinct. Ithas been said of the typical English aristocrats of the Governmentoffices that they resemble certain ornamental fountains and play fromten till four; and it is true that an Englishman, even an Englisharistocrat, is not always inclined to play any more than to work. ButAmerican sociability is not like the Trafalgar fountains. It is likeNiagara. It never stops, under the silent stars or the rolling storms. There seems always to be the same human heat and pressure behind it; itis like the central heating of hotels as explained in the advertisementsand announcements. The temperature can be regulated; but it is not. Andit is always rather overpowering for an Englishman, whose mood changeslike his own mutable and shifting sky. The English mood is very like theEnglish weather; it is a nuisance and a national necessity. 

If any one wishes to understand the quarrel between Dickens and theAmericans, let him turn to that chapter in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, in whichyoung Martin has to receive endless defiles and deputations of totalstrangers each announced by name and demanding formal salutation. Thereare several things to be noticed about this incident. To begin with, itdid not happen to Martin Chuzzlewit; but it did happen to CharlesDickens. Dickens is incorporating almost without alteration a passagefrom a diary in the middle of a story; as he did when he included theadmirable account of the prison petition of John Dickens as the prisonpetition of Wilkins Micawber. There is no particular reason why even thegregarious Americans should so throng the portals of a perfectly obscuresteerage passenger like young Chuzzlewit. There was every reason whythey should throng the portals of the author of _Pickwick_ and _OliverTwist_. And no doubt they did. If I may be permitted the aleatory image, you bet they did. Similar troops of sociable human beings have visitedmuch more insignificant English travellers in America, with some of whomI am myself acquainted. I myself have the luck to be a little morestodgy and less sensitive than many of my countrymen; and certainly lesssensitive than Dickens. But I know what it was that annoyed him aboutthat unending and unchanging stream of American visitors; it was theunending and unchanging stream of American sociability and high spirits. A people living on such a lofty but level tableland do not understandthe ups and downs of the English temperament; the temper of a nation ofeccentrics or (as they used to be called) of humorists. There issomething very national in the very name of the old play of _Every Manin His Humour_. But the play more often acted in real life is 'Every ManOut of His Humour. ' It is true, as Matthew Arnold said, that anEnglishman wants to do as he likes; but it is not always true even thathe likes what he likes. An Englishman can be friendly and yet not feelfriendly. Or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. Or he canfeel hospitable and yet not welcome those whom he really loves. He canthink, almost with tears of tenderness, about people at a distance whowould be bores if they came in at the door. 

American sociability sweeps away any such subtlety. It cannot beexpected to understand the paradox or perversity of the Englishman, whothus can feel friendly and avoid friends. That is the truth in thesuggestion that Dickens was sentimental. It means that he probably feltmost sociable when he was solitary. In all these attempts to describethe indescribable, to indicate the real but unconscious differencesbetween the two peoples, I have tried to balance my words without theirrelevant bias of praise and blame. Both characteristics always cutboth ways. On one side this comradeship makes possible a certaincommunal courage, a democratic derision of rich men in high places, that is not easy in our smaller and more stratified society. On theother hand the Englishman has certainly more liberty, if less equalityand fraternity. But the richest compensation of the Englishman is noteven in the word 'liberty, ' but rather in the word 'poetry. ' That humourof escape or seclusion, that genial isolation, that healing of woundedfriendship by what Christian Science would call absent treatment, thatis the best atmosphere of all for the creation of great poetry; and outof that came 'bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang' and'Thou wast not made for death, immortal bird. ' In this sense it isindeed true that poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity; which maybe extended to mean affection remembered in loneliness. There is in it aspirit not only of detachment but even of distance; a spirit which doesdesire, as in the old English rhyme, to be not only over the hills butalso far away. In other words, in so far as it is true that theEnglishman is an exception to the great truth of Aristotle, it isbecause he is not so near to Aristotle as he is to Homer. In so far ashe is not by nature a political animal, it is because he is a poeticalanimal. We see it in his relations to the other animals; his quaint andalmost illogical love of dogs and horses and dependants whose politicalrights cannot possibly be defined in logic. Many forms of hunting orfishing are but an excuse for the same thing which the shamelessliterary man does without any excuse. Sport is speechless poetry. Itwould be easy for a foreigner, by taking a few liberties with the facts, to make a satire about the sort of silent Shelley who decides ultimatelyto shoot the skylark. It would be easy to answer these poeticsuggestions by saying that he himself might be responsible for ruiningthe choirs where late the sweet birds sang, or that the immortal birdwas likely to be mortal when he was out with his gun. But theseinternational satires are never just; and the real relations of anEnglishman and an English bird are far more delicate. It would beequally easy and equally unjust to suggest a similar satire againstAmerican democracy; and represent Americans merely as birds of a featherwho can do nothing but flock together. But this would leave out the factthat at least it is not the white feather; that democracy is capable ofdefiance and of death for an idea. Touching the souls of great nations, these criticisms are generally false because they are critical. 

But when we are quite sure that we rejoice in a nation's strength, thenand not before we are justified in judging its weakness. I am quite surethat I rejoice in any democratic success without _arrière pensée_; andnobody who knows me will credit me with a covert sneer at civicequality. And this being granted, I do think there is a danger in thegregariousness of American society. The danger of democracy is notanarchy; on the contrary, it is monotony. And it is touching this thatall my experience has increased my conviction that a great deal that iscalled female emancipation has merely been the increase of femaleconvention. Now the males of every community are far too conventional;it was the females who were individual and criticised the conventions ofthe tribe. If the females become conventional also, there is a danger ofindividuality being lost. This indeed is not peculiar to America; it iscommon to the whole modern industrial world, and to everything whichsubstitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the State for the personalatmosphere of the home. But it is emphasised in America by the curiouscontradiction that Americans do in theory value and even venerate theindividual. But individualism is still the foe of individuality. Wheremen are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy eachother. They become featureless by 'featuring' the same part. Personality, in becoming a conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal. Inthis respect perhaps there is really something to be learnt from theEnglishman with his turn or twist in the direction of private life. Those who have travelled in such a fashion as to see all the Americanhotels and none of the American houses are sometimes driven to theexcess of saying that the Americans have no private life. But even ifthe exaggeration has a hint of truth, we must balance it with thecorresponding truth; that the English have no public life. They on theirside have still to learn the meaning of the public thing, the republic;and how great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption when the veryState itself has become a State secret. 

The English are patriotic; but patriotism is the unconscious form ofnationalism. It is being national without understanding the meaning of anation. The Americans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept movingtoo much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations tosuperficiality and fashion; too much aware of outside opinion and withtoo much appetite for outside criticism. But the English are much toounconscious; and would be the better for an increase in many forms ofconsciousness, including consciousness of sin. But even their sin isignorance of their real virtue. The most admirable English things arenot the things that are most admired by the English, or for which theEnglish admire themselves. They are things now blindly neglected and indaily danger of being destroyed. It is all the worse that they should bedestroyed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. Thatis why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism forthe English; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as thenature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasantcostume in the Netherlands that it is unique; but the good things ofEngland really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars andrevolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. The particular kindof beauty there is in an English village, the particular kind of humourthere is in an English public-house, are things that cannot be found inlands where the village is far more simply and equally governed, orwhere the vine is far more honourably served and praised. Yet we shallnot save them by merely sinking into them with the conservative sort ofcontentment, even if the commercial rapacity of our plutocratic reformswould allow us to do so. We must in a sense get far away from England inorder to behold her; we must rise above patriotism in order to bepractically patriotic; we must have some sense of more varied and remotethings before these vanishing virtues can be seen suddenly for what theyare; almost as one might fancy that a man would have to rise to thedizziest heights of the divine understanding before he saw, as from apeak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing soul. 

_The Future of Democracy_

The title of this final chapter requires an apology. I do not need to bereminded, alas, that the whole book requires an apology. It is writtenin accordance with a ritual or custom in which I could see no particularharm, and which gives me a very interesting subject, but a custom whichit would be not altogether easy to justify in logic. Everybody who goesto America for a short time is expected to write a book; and nearlyeverybody does. A man who takes a holiday at Trouville or Dieppe is notconfronted on his return with the question, 'When is your book on Francegoing to appear?' A man who betakes himself to Switzerland for thewinter sports is not instantly pinned by the statement, 'I suppose yourHistory of the Helvetian Republic is coming out this spring?' Lecturing, at least my kind of lecturing, is not much more serious or meritoriousthan ski-ing or sea-bathing; and it happens to afford the holiday-makerfar less opportunity of seeing the daily life of the people. Of all thisI am only too well aware; and my only defence is that I am at leastsincere in my enjoyment and appreciation of America, and equally sincerein my interest in its most serious problem, which I think a very seriousproblem indeed; the problem of democracy in the modern world. Democracymay be a very obvious and facile affair for plutocrats and politicianswho only have to use it as a rhetorical term. But democracy is a veryserious problem for democrats. I certainly do not apologise for the worddemocracy; but I do apologise for the word future. I am no Futurist; andany conjectures I make must be taken with the grain of salt which isindeed the salt of the earth; the decent and moderate humility whichcomes from a belief in free will. That faith is in itself a divinedoubt. I do not believe in any of the scientific predictions aboutmankind; I notice that they always fail to predict any of the purelyhuman developments of men; I also notice that even their successes provethe same truth as their failures; for their successful predictions arenot about men but about machines. But there are two things which a manmay reasonably do, in stating the probabilities of a problem, which donot involve any claim to be a prophet. The first is to tell the truth, and especially the neglected truth, about the tendencies that havealready accumulated in human history; any miscalculation about whichmust at least mislead us in any case. We cannot be certain of beingright about the future; but we can be almost certain of being wrongabout the future, if we are wrong about the past. The other thing thathe can do is to note what ideas necessarily go together by their ownnature; what ideas will triumph together or fall together. Hence itfollows that this final chapter must consist of two things. The first isa summary of what has really happened to the idea of democracy in recenttimes; the second a suggestion of the fundamental doctrine which isnecessary for its triumph at any time. 

The last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democraticidea. If there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears aparadox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taughthistory, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of intellectualinquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiationof heresies, it would have been found that the original republicanorthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, andbackslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and convictionwas towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the AmericanRepublic was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal. ' Itwas then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort ofconviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote ofpeoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders. These men encountered various difficulties and made various compromisesin relation to the practical politics of their time; in England theypreserved aristocracy; in America they preserved slavery. But thoughthey had more difficulties, they had less doubts. Since their timedemocracy has been steadily disintegrated by doubts; and these politicaldoubts have been contemporary with and often identical with religiousdoubts. This fact could be followed over almost the whole field of themodern world; in this place it will be more appropriate to take thegreat American example of slavery. I have found traces in all sorts ofintelligent quarters of an extraordinary idea that all the Fathers ofthe Republic owned black men like beasts of burden because they knew nobetter, until the light of liberty was revealed to them by John Brownand Mrs. Beecher Stowe. One of the best weekly papers in England saidrecently that even those who drew up the Declaration of Independence didnot include negroes in its generalisation about humanity. This is quiteconsistent with the current convention, in which we were all brought up;the theory that the heart of humanity broadens in ever larger circles ofbrotherhood, till we pass from embracing a black man to adoring a blackbeetle. Unfortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts ofAmerican history. The facts show that, in this problem of the Old South, the eighteenth century was _more_ liberal than the nineteenth century. There was _more_ sympathy for the negro in the school of Jefferson thanin the school of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson, in the dark estate of hissimple Deism, said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble, remembering that God is just. His fellow Southerners, after a century ofthe world's advance, said that slavery in itself was good, when they didnot go farther and say that negroes in themselves were bad. And theywere supported in this by the great and growing modern suspicion thatnature is unjust. Difficulties seemed inevitably to delay justice, tothe mind of Jefferson; but so they did to the mind of Lincoln. But thatthe slave was human and the servitude inhuman--that was, if anything, clearer to Jefferson than to Lincoln. The fact is that the utterseparation and subordination of the black like a beast was a _progress_;it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; atriumph of science over superstition. It was 'the way the world wasgoing, ' as Matthew Arnold reverentially remarked in some connection;perhaps as part of a definition of God. Anyhow, it was not Jefferson'sdefinition of God. He fancied, in his far-off patriarchal way, a Fatherwho had made all men brothers; and brutally unbrotherly as was thepractice, such democratical Deists never dreamed of denying the theory. It was not until the scientific sophistries began that brotherhood wasreally disputed. Gobineau, who began most of the modern talk about thesuperiority and inferiority of racial stocks, was seized upon eagerly bythe less generous of the slave-owners and trumpeted as a new truth ofscience and a new defence of slavery. It was not really until the dawnof Darwinism, when all our social relations began to smell of themonkey-house, that men thought of the barbarian as only a first and thebaboon as a second cousin. The full servile philosophy has been a modernand even a recent thing; made in an age whose invisible deity was theMissing Link. The Missing Link was a true metaphor in more ways thanone; and most of all in its suggestion of a chain. 

By a symbolic coincidence, indeed, slavery grew more brazen and brutalunder the encouragement of more than one movement of the progressivesort. Its youth was renewed for it by the industrial prosperity ofLancashire; and under that influence it became a commercial andcompetitive instead of a patriarchal and customary thing. We may saywith no exaggerative irony that the unconscious patrons of slavery wereHuxley and Cobden. The machines of Manchester were manufacturing a greatmany more things than the manufacturers knew or wanted to know; but theywere certainly manufacturing the fetters of the slave, doubtless out ofthe best quality of steel and iron. But this is a minor illustration ofthe modern tendency, as compared with the main stream of scepticismwhich was destroying democracy. Evolution became more and more a visionof the break-up of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenthcentury the genius of its greatest scientific romancer saw it end in theanthropophagous antics of the Time Machine. So far from evolutionlifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at leastwith a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the case ofthe American negroes, it may be remarked, it does at any rate permit thepreliminary course of roasting them. All this materialistic hardening, which replaced the remorse of Jefferson, was part of the growingevolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race, or rather that there was really no such thing as the human race. TheSouth had begun by agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. TheSouth ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the emancipation ofmonkeys. 

That is what had happened to the democratic ideal in a hundred years. Anybody can test it by comparing the final phase, I will not say withthe ideal of Jefferson, but with the ideal of Johnson. There was farmore horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century Tory like Dr. Johnsonthan in a nineteenth-century Democrat like Stephen Douglas. StephenDouglas may be mentioned because he is a very representative type of theage of evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents, like CecilRhodes, human and hopeful in a truly American fashion, and as aconsequence cold and careless rather than hostile in the matter of theold mystical doctrines of equality. He 'did not care whether slavery wasvoted up or voted down. ' His great opponent Lincoln did indeed carevery much. But it was an intense individual conviction with Lincolnexactly as it was with Johnson. I doubt if the spirit of the age was notmuch more behind Douglas and his westward expansion of the white race. Iam sure that more and more men were coming to be in the particularmental condition of Douglas; men in whom the old moral and mysticalideals had been undermined by doubt but only with a negative effect ofindifference. Their positive convictions were all concerned with whatsome called progress and some imperialism. It is true that there was asincere sectional enthusiasm against slavery in the North; and that theslaves were actually emancipated in the nineteenth century. But I doubtwhether the Abolitionists would ever have secured Abolition. Abolitionwas a by-product of the Civil War; which was fought for quite otherreasons. Anyhow, if slavery had somehow survived to the age of Rhodesand Roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, I doubt if the slaves wouldever have been emancipated at all. Certainly if it had survived till themodern movement for the Servile State, they would never have beenemancipated at all. Why should the world take the chains off the blackman when it was just putting them on the white? And in so far as we owethe change to Lincoln, we owe it to Jefferson. Exactly what gives itsreal dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking aprimitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up thetables of an ancient law, _against_ the trend of the nineteenth century;repeating, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men arecreated equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc. , ' to ageneration that was more and more disposed to say something like this:'We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that allthings looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredityand environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs, ' and soon. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have foundeda state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would neverhave overthrown a slave state. What it did do, as I have said, was toproduce some very wonderful literary and artistic flights of scepticalimagination. The world did have new visions, if they were visions ofmonsters in the moon and Martians striding about like spiders as tall asthe sky, and the workmen and capitalists becoming two separate species, so that one could devour the other as gaily and greedily as a catdevours a bird. No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells andhis original departure in fantastic fiction; to these nightmares thatwere the last apocalypse of the nineteenth century. They meant that thebottom had fallen out of the mind at last, that the bridge ofbrotherhood had broken down in the modern brain, letting up from thechasms this infernal light like a dawn. All had grown dizzy with degreeand relativity; so that there would not be so very much differencebetween eating dog and eating darkie, or between eating darkie andeating dago. There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubtthat we were the superior sort. 

Against all this irresistible force stood one immovable post. Againstall this dance of doubt and degree stood something that can best besymbolised by a simple example. An ape cannot be a priest, but a negrocan be a priest. The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially theCatholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irrevocably to themanhood of all men. Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils itcould not save itself even by surrender. It could not gradually dilutedemocracy, as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. There stood, in fact or in possibility, the solid and smiling figure of a blackbishop. And he was either a man claiming the most towering spiritualprivileges of a man, or he was the mere buffoonery and blasphemy of amonkey in a mitre. That is the point about Christian and Catholicdemocracy; it is not that it is necessarily at any moment moredemocratic, it is that its indestructible minimum of democracy really isindestructible. And by the nature of things that mystical democracy wasdestined to survive, when every other sort of democracy was free todestroy itself. And whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenlymoved to save itself, it always grasps at rag or tag of that oldtradition that alone is sure of itself. Hundreds have heard the storyabout the mediaeval demagogue who went about repeating the rhyme

 When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?

Many have doubtless offered the obvious answer to the question, 'TheSerpent. ' But few seem to have noticed what would be the more modernanswer to the question, if that innocent agitator went about propoundingit. 'Adam never delved and Eve never span, for the simple reason thatthey never existed. They are fragments of a Chaldeo-Babylonian mythos, and Adam is only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pronounced Uttu. For thereal beginning of humanity we refer you to Darwin's _Origin ofSpecies_. ' And then the modern man would go on to justify plutocracy tothe mediaeval man by talking about the Struggle for Life and theSurvival of the Fittest; and how the strongest man seized authority bymeans of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman by behaving like a cad. Now I do not base my beliefs on the theology of John Ball, or on theliteral and materialistic reading of the text of Genesis; though I thinkthe story of Adam and Eve infinitely less absurd and unlikely than thatof the prehistoric 'strongest man' who could fight a hundred men. But Ido note the fact that the idealism of the leveller could be put in theform of an appeal to Scripture, and could not be put in the form of anappeal to Science. And I do note also that democrats were still drivento make the same appeal even in the very century of Science. Tennysonwas, if ever there was one, an evolutionist in his vision and anaristocrat in his sympathies. He was always boasting that John Bull wasevolutionary and not revolutionary, even as these Frenchmen. He did notpretend to have any creed beyond faintly trusting the larger hope. Butwhen human dignity is really in danger, John Bull has to use the sameold argument as John Ball. He tells Lady Clara Vere de Vere that 'thegardener Adam and his wife smile at the claim of long descent'; theirown descent being by no means long. Lady Clara might surely have scoredoff him pretty smartly by quoting from 'Maud' and 'In Memoriam' aboutevolution and the eft that was lord of valley and hill. But Tennyson hasevidently forgotten all about Darwin and the long descent of man. Ifthis was true of an evolutionist like Tennyson, it was naturally tentimes truer of a revolutionist like Jefferson. The Declaration ofIndependence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God createdall men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, theywere certainly evolved unequal. 

There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divineorigin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern worldwill find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort ofsentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds. Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose ofconstraining the tyrant. An idealist may say to a capitalist, 'Don't yousometimes feel in the rich twilight, when the lights twinkle from thedistant hamlet in the hills, that all humanity is a holy family?' But itis equally possible for the capitalist to reply with brevity anddecision, 'No, I don't, ' and there is no more disputing about it furtherthan about the beauty of a fading cloud. And the modern world of moodsis a world of clouds, even if some of them are thunderclouds. 

For I have only taken here, as a convenient working model, the case ofnegro slavery; because it was long peculiar to America and is popularlyassociated with it. It is more and more obvious that the line is nolonger running between black and white but between rich and poor. As Ihave already noted in the case of Prohibition, the very same argumentsof the inevitable suicide of the ignorant, of the impossibility offreedom for the unfit, which were once applied to barbarians broughtfrom Africa are now applied to citizens born in America. It is arguedeven by industrialists that industrialism has produced a class submergedbelow the status of emancipated mankind. They imply that the MissingLink is no longer missing, even from England or the Northern States, andthat the factories have manufactured their own monkeys. Scientifichypotheses about the feeble-minded and the criminal type will supply themasters of the modern world with more and more excuses for denying thedogma of equality in the case of white labour as well as black. And anyman who knows the world knows perfectly well that to tell themillionaires, or their servants, that they are disappointing thesentiments of Thomas Jefferson, or disregarding a creed composed in theeighteenth century, will be about as effective as telling them that theyare not observing the creed of St. Athanasius or keeping the rule of St. Benedict. 

The world cannot keep its own ideals. The secular order cannot makesecure any one of its own noble and natural conceptions of secularperfection. That will be found, as time goes on, the ultimate argumentfor a Church independent of the world and the secular order. What hasbecome of all those ideal figures from the Wise Man of the Stoics to thedemocratic Deist of the eighteenth century? What has become of all thatpurely human hierarchy of chivalry, with its punctilious pattern of thegood knight, its ardent ambition in the young squire? The very name ofknight has come to represent the petty triumph of a profiteer, and thevery word squire the petty tyranny of a landlord. What has become of allthat golden liberality of the Humanists, who found on the hightablelands of the culture of Hellas the very balance of repose in beautythat is most lacking in the modern world? The very Greek language thatthey loved has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons, and amere cock-shy for cheap and half-educated utilitarians, who make it asymbol of superstition and reaction. We have lived to see a time whenthe heroic legend of the Republic and the Citizen, which seemed toJefferson the eternal youth of the world, has begun to grow old in itsturn. We cannot recover the earthly estate of knighthood, to which allthe colours and complications of heraldry seemed as fresh and natural asflowers. We cannot re-enact the intellectual experiences of theHumanists, for whom the Greek grammar was like the song of a bird inspring. The more the matter is considered the clearer it will seem thatthese old experiences are now only alive, where they have found alodgment in the Catholic tradition of Christendom, and made themselvesfriends for ever. St. Francis is the only surviving troubadour. St. Thomas More is the only surviving Humanist. St. Louis is the onlysurviving knight. 

It would be the worst sort of insincerity, therefore, to conclude evenso hazy an outline of so great and majestic a matter as the Americandemocratic experiment, without testifying my belief that to this alsothe same ultimate test will come. So far as that democracy becomes orremains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic. In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedlyundemocratic. Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyondthe feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or atleast of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathenslavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely inmethod but in aim; since they are but the negations of the humanappetites of property and personality. Eighteenth-century ideals, formulated in eighteenth-century language, have no longer in themselvesthe power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those documentsdepended upon Deism; their real strength will survive in men who arestill Deists; and the men who are still Deists are more than Deists. Menwill more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy ifthere is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning inanything if the universe has not a centre of significance and anauthority that is the author of our rights. There is truth in everyancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy thatfinds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts ofJove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for themas for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vulturesmay linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocratsexistence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the landof legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry wentforth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.