intensify as his historical origins recede further and further into
the past. It is idle to speculate on what might have happened had the
development of his country remained normal and homogeneous, as, up to
the Civil War, it admittedly did. It is an even less grateful task to
look back on the literature of the Transcendental period and register
all that American thought seems to have lost since in subtlety and
essential catholicity. What is really important is to realize that
not only the language but the essence of Occidental civilization has
called for simplification, for sacrifice, year by year. It is hard to
see what other choice has lain before the American, as wave after wave
of immigration diluted his homogeneity, than to put his concepts into
terms easily understood and quickly grasped, with the philological
economy of the traveller’s pocket manual and the categorical precision
of the drill book. If in the very nature of things, this evangel is
oftener pointed with a threat than made palatable with the honey of
reason and sympathy, the task and not the taskmaster is to blame. On
no other country has ever been imposed similar drudgery on a similar
scale. It is idle to talk about the spiritual contribution of the
foreigner when his first duty is to cast that contribution into the
discard. It is futile to appeal to his traditions where the barrier of
language rears itself in a few years between parents who have never
learnt the new tongue and children who are unable or ashamed to speak
the old.
But such a régime cannot endure for many years without a profound
influence, not only on those to whom it is prescribed, but on those
who administer it. The most heaven-born leader of men, put into a
receiving depot to which monthly and fortnightly contingents of bemused
recruits arrive, quickly deteriorates into something like a glorified
and commissioned drill sergeant. The schoolmaster is notoriously a
social failure in circles where intercourse must be held on the level
to which the elevation of his _estrade_ has dishabituated him. Exact
values--visions, to use a word that misuse has made hateful--disappear
under a multiplicity of minor tasks. It is one of the revenges taken by
fate that those who must harass and drive become harassed and sterile
in turn.
No one yet, so far as I know, has sought to place this amazing
simplification in its true relation to the aridity of American life,
an aridity so marked that it creates a positive thirst for softer and
milder civilizations, not only in the foreigner who has tasted of
them, but at a certain moment in their life in almost every one of the
native born whose work lies outside the realm of material production.
It is not that in England, as in every community, entire classes do
not exist who seek material success by the limitation of interests
and the retrenchment of sympathies. But in so doing they sacrifice
to a domestic, not a national God; they follow personal not racial
proclivities. There is no conscious subscription to a national ideal
in their abandonment of æsthetic impulses. Side by side with them
live other men whose apparent contentment with insecure and unstable
lives at once redresses their pride and curtails their influence. They
are conscious of the existence around them of a whole alien world,
the material returns from which are negligible but in which other
men somehow manage to achieve a fullness of experience and maintain
self-respect. This other world reacts not only on employer but on
employed. For the worker it abates the fervour and stress of his task,
lends meaning and justification to his demand for leisure in the face
of economic demands that threaten or deny. No one in England has yet
dared to erect into an evangel the obvious truth that poor men must
work. No compulsion sets the mental attitude a man may choose when
faced with his task. The speeder-up and the efficiency expert is
hateful and alien. “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” may seem
a loose and questionable phrase, but its implications go very deep. It
sets a boundary mark on the frontier between flesh and spirit by which
encroachments are registered as they occur.
In America no such frontier exists. Here the invasion seems to be
complete. The spirit that would disentangle material from immaterial
aims wanders baffled and perplexed through a maze of loftily conceived
phrases and exhortations each one of which holds the promise of rescue
from the drudgery of visionless life, yet each one of which leads back
to an altar where production is enthroned as God. Manuals and primers,
one had almost written psalters, pour out from the printing presses
in which such words as “inspiration,” “dedication,” “consecration”
urge American youth not to the renunciation of material aims but to
their intensive pursuit. This naïve and simple creed is quite free of
self-consciousness or hypocrisy. In its occasional abrupt transitions
from the language of prayer to such conscience-searching questions
as “Could you hold down a $100.00 a week job?” or “Would you hire
yourself?” no lapse from the sublime to the ridiculous, far less to the
squalid, is felt. It has the childlike gravity and reverence of all
religions that are held in the heart.
But its God is a jealous God. No faltering in his service, no divided
allegiance is permitted. His rewards are concrete and his punishments
can be overwhelming. For open rebellion, outlawry; for secret revolt,
contempt and misunderstanding are his inevitable visitations. For
this reason those who escape into heresy not unfrequently lose their
integrity and are gibbeted or pilloried for the edification of the
faithful. The man who will not serve because the service starves and
stunts his soul is all too likely to find himself dependent for company
upon the man who will not serve because his will is too weak or his
habits too dissipated.
That this service is a hard one, its most ardent advocates make no
attempt to conceal. Its very stringency is made the text of appeals for
ever and ever fresh efficiency, intensive training, specialization.
“The pace they must travel is so swift,” one advocate of strenuousness
warns his disciples, “competition has become so fierce that brains
and vision are not enough. One must have the _punch_ to put things
through.” The impression grows that the American business man, new
style, is a sombre gladiator, equipped for his struggle by rigorous
physical and mental discipline. The impression is helped by a host
of axioms, plain and pictured, that feature a sort of new cant of
virility. “Red-blooded men,” “Two-fisted men,” “Men who do things,”
“Get-there fellows,” are a few headliners in this gospel of push and
shove.
The service is made still more difficult by its uncertainty, since no
gospel of efficiency can greatly change the proportion of rewards,
though it can make the contest harder and the marking higher. Year in
year out, while competition intensifies and resources are fenced off,
insecurity of employment remains, an evil tradition from days when
opportunity was really boundless and competition could be escaped by
a move of a few score miles Westward. Continuity in one employment
still remains the exception rather than the rule, and when death or
retirement reveals an instance it is still thought worthy of space in
local journals. “Can you use me?” remains the customary gambit for the
seeker after employment. The contempt of a settled prospect, of routine
work, the conception of business as something to work _up_ rather
than to work _at_ is still latent in the imagination of atavistic and
ambitious young America. Of late years this restlessness, even though
in so worthy a cause as “getting on,” has been felt as a hindrance to
full efficiency, and the happy idea has been conceived of applying the
adventurous element of competition at home. Territorial or departmental
spheres are allotted within or without the “concern” to each employé;
the results attained by A, B, and C are then totalled, analyzed,
charted, and posted in conspicuous places where all may see, admire,
and take warning. In the majority of up-to-date houses “suggestions”
for the expansion or improvement of the business are not only welcomed
but expected, and the employé who does not produce them in reasonable
bulk and quality is slated for the “discard.” When inventiveness
tires, “shake-ups” on a scale unknown in England take place, and new
aspirants eager to “make good” step into the shoes of the old. The
business athletes strain and pant toward the goal. There is no rest for
the young man “consecrated” to merchandising effort. Like the fly in
the fable, he must struggle and swim until the milk around his legs is
churned into the butter of executive position.
The American press, hybrid, highly coloured, and often written by men
of erratic genius who prefer the poor rewards of news writing to the
commercial yoke, conveys but a partial idea of this absorption of an
entire race in a single function. A far more vivid impression is to be
gained from the “house organs,” and publicity pamphlets which pour from
the press in an unceasing stream and the production of which within
recent years has become a large and lucrative industry. Here articles
and symposia on such themes as “Building Character into Salesmanship,”
“Hidden Forces that bring Sales,” and “Capitalizing Individuality,”
often adorned with half-tones of tense and joyless faces, recur on
every page. No sanctuary is inviolable, no recess unexplored. The
demand of the commercial God is for the soul, and he will be content
with no less.
This demand implies a revised conception of the relation between
employé and employer. The old contract under which time and effort
were hired for so many hours a day at a stated remuneration, leaving
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness outside those hours a
matter of personal predilection, is now abrogated, or at least sharply
questioned. It is recognized, and with entire logic, that the measure
of accomplishment within working hours will depend largely on the
environment amid which hours of recreation are spent; and that though
detection of inefficiency is a task of keen brains that seldom fail,
this detection, in the nature of things, may not take place until
damage has been done the commercial structure. This is the real
inwardness of a whole new gospel of “Welfare” and “Uplift,” under whose
dispensation employés are provided with simple and tested specifics
for recreation, with the watchful and benevolent eye of department
heads upon them, in which it is presumed and stated with entire candour
that the physical, moral, and mental efficiency of the staffs and
“salesforce” has become the concern of the organization that has
allotted them a place in its economy. The organism works, plays, rests,
moves on together.
Nothing is more terrifying, as that master of terror, Edgar Allan
Poe, perceived, than an organism that is at once mean and colossal.
Properties of efficiency and adaptation to one definite end are
bestowed in an eminent degree only on the lower orders of animal life.
With rigid bodies, encasing organs that are designed for simple,
metabolic purposes, armed with an elaborate mechanism of claws, hinges,
borers, valves, and suckers the lepidoptera are living tools that fly
or creep. Absorbed in one tireless function, with all distractions of
love and war delegated to specialized subspecies, they neither love,
hate, nor rebel. As the scale ascends, efficiency dwindles, until in
the litter and loneliness of the den, lazy domesticity with dam and
cubs, the joy of prey hunt and love hunt, between the belly pinch of
hunger and the sleep of repletion, the lives of the big carnivora pass
in a sheer joy of living for living’s sake until the gun of the hunter
ends the day dream.
It has been left for man--hapless and inventive--to realize a life
that touches both ends of the scale, to feel at his heart the pull of
hive-life and jungle-life in turn. Something of the ant and something
of the tiger lurks in every normal human creature. If he has immense
powers of assertion, his faculty for abdication seems to be as
limitless. It is just this dual nature in man that makes prophecy as to
what “will happen the world” so difficult and unsafe. But one prophecy
may be ventured on and that is, that in proportion as acquiescence or
revolt seize the imaginations of separated nations will those nations
coalesce or drift apart into antagonism.
If a life spent during the last twenty years between England and
the United States is any title to judge, I should say that at the
present moment the dominant note in America is acquiescence in, and in
England revolt against the inordinate demands of commercialism. Here,
to all appearances, the surrender for the moment is complete. There
are revolts, but they are sporadic and misguided and their speedy
suppression seems to stir no indignation and to awaken no thrill of
common danger among the body of workers. Strikes confined to wage
issues are treated more indulgently, but even they are generally
strangled at their birth by injunctions, and a sour or hostile attitude
of authority makes success difficult. In any display of opposition
to established conditions, even when based on the most technical
grounds, authority appears to sense a challenge to larger issues and
to meet them half way with a display of force that to an Englishman
appears strangely over-adequate. It is evident the ground is being
tested. Interpretations of liberty that date from easier and roomier
days are under revision, and where they are found at variance with
a conception of society as a disciplined and productive force, they
are being roughly retrenched. The prevailing character of the labour
mass, at once heterogeneous and amorphous, makes it a safe and ductile
medium for almost any social experiment. “If you don’t like it, go
back,” is an argument to which no answer has been found. Native-born
labour shares in the universal dis-esteem and takes refuge from it
in aristocratic and doctrinaire federations whose ineffectiveness is
apparent whenever a labour issue arises. For the rebel who, under these
conditions, chooses to fight on, rougher methods are found. He may
become _fera natura_. Tarring and feathering, ducking and rubbing with
acid, and deportation from State to State may be his portion. Under any
social condition conformity is the easiest course. When the prison cell
and social pillory are its alternatives, to resist requires a degree
of fanatical courage and interior moral resources possessed only by a
handful of men in a generation.
To this conception of a disciplined community harnessed to the purpose
of production, thousands of the possessing and capitalistic classes
look wistfully from the other side of the Atlantic. But there are many
obstacles to its realization in England. The English proletarian is no
uprooted orphan, paying with docile and silent work for the citizenship
of his children and grandchildren. That great going concern, the
British Empire, is his personal work, built on the bones and cemented
with the blood of his forebears. His enfranchisement is as complete as
his disinheritance, and the impoverishment of his country, evidenced
in the stream of gold that pours Westward like arterial blood, has
not reached to his spirit. Even the Great War, with its revelation
to him of how ruthless and comprehensive the demands of the State on
the individual can be, has only reinforced his sense of being a very
deserving person and has added to the long debt which he is frankly
out to collect. The promises, the appeals to national pride and
tradition with which he had to be appeased while, for the first time
in his history, the yoke of universal service was laid upon his neck,
trip up the feet of his rulers to-day. It is difficult to tell him to
go elsewhere, for he “belongs” in England. Even suggestions that he
should emigrate wholesale to British colonies in order to relieve the
congested labour market are received with mocking laughter in which a
threat lurks. He is, I am sure, because I know him, looking on with a
certain sardonic relish and enjoyment at the flurries, the perplexities
of his rulers, their displays of force alternated with appeals to
sweet reason, their brave words succeeded by abject denials and
qualifications. He is waiting until the naked economic question, which
he knows well underlies all the rhodomontade of national greatness
and imperial heritage, shall be put to him. It will be a great and
momentous day when the Englishman is given his choice. A choice it must
be. The means to compulsion are not here.
* * * * *
To America just now Europeans as a whole must seem a helpless race,
bewildered actors in a vast and tragic blunder. To thousands of
Red Cross workers, Knights of Columbus, and welfare auxiliaries in
devastated districts, the spectacle of suffering and want must have
come home to reinforce impressions already gained from sights witnessed
at Ellis Island or Long Wharf. None the less, it is an historical
misfortune that the first real contact between the people of the two
continents should have come at a time when the older was bankrupt and
had little to show save the rags and tatters of its civilization. The
reverse of the tenderness to the stricken European abroad has been a
hardening of the heart to the immigrant at home, and it is difficult
for the American, schoolmaster and lawgiver to so many alien peoples
in his own country, to divest himself of a didactic character in his
foreign relations. To many countries he is “saying it with flour,” and
those who accept the dole can do little else than swallow the sermon.
Even to those countries who were his allies he does shine forth in a
certain splendour of righteousness. His sacrifice was deliberate--which
is, perhaps, its best excuse for being a little conscious. It was
self-imposed, and fifty thousand of his dead, wrested from productive
enterprises to lie in France, attest its sincerity. No Englishman,
at any rate, believes in his heart that its material reward, great
and inevitable as it is now seen to be, was the driving force at the
time the sacrifice was accepted. There are a host of reasons, some
creditable, others less so, that make Europe curb its restiveness under
American homilies.
With England the case is different. No one knows just how hard Britain
has been hit, but she is managing to put a good face on her wounds.
No relief organization from the big sister has landed its khaki-clad
apostles of hygiene and its grey-cloaked sisters of mercy on English
shores. The façade is intact, the old masters in possession. With a
few shifts and changes in political labelling that are a matter of
domestic concern, those who steered the big concern into the bankruptcy
of war are still entrusted with its extrication. No great subversion
stands as a witness of a change of national faith. The destinies, the
foreign relations, the aspects that attract or antagonize remain in the
hands of men who secured a fresh lease of power by a clever political
trick. The skeleton at the feast of racial reunion is not Ireland, nor
Mesopotamia, nor Yap, nor the control of the seas. It is the emergence
into political power, sooner or later, but inevitably from the very
nature of British political institutions, of the British proletariat.
Frankly I do not see, when this moment arrives, who is going to
put the gospel of American civilization into terms that will be, I
shall not say acceptable, but even significant, to the emancipated
British worker. Ruling classes in the older country who rely on
a steadying force from across the Atlantic in possible political
upheavals must have strange misgivings when they take account of
their own stewardship. It will be an ungrateful task to preach the
doctrine of salvation through work to a people that has tried it
out so logically and completely that the century which has seen the
commercial supremacy of their country has witnessed the progressive
impoverishment and proletarization of its people. Homilies on
discipline will sound strangely in the ears of those who, while America
was enjoying her brief carnival of spacious and fruitful endeavour in
a virgin land, went under an industrial yoke that has galled their
necks and stunted their physical growth. Appeals to pride of race
will have little meaning coming from a stock that has ceased through
self-indulgence or economic upward pressure to resist ethnologically
and whose characteristics are disappearing in the general amalgam.
The salient fact that stands out from all history is that
inordinateness of any sort has never failed to act upon the English
character as a challenge. His successes, whatever his libellists may
seek to believe, have seldom been against the small or weak. It has
been his destiny, in one recurrent crisis after another, to find
himself face to face with some claimant to world power, some “cock of
the walk.” To use a homely phrase, it has always been “up to him.”
And the vision of his adversary which has nerved his arm has always
been an excess in some quality easily understandable by the average
man. Bigotry is not the monopoly of the Spaniard, nor commercial greed
of the Hollander, nor vanity of the Frenchman, nor pomposity of the
German. It would be an easy task to convict the Englishman of some
share in each vice. Nevertheless history in the main has justified his
instinct for proportion, his dislike for “slopping over.” In something
far beyond the accepted phrase, the English struggle has been a
struggle for the “balance of power.”
HENRY L. STUART
II. AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT
The application of the term “shirt-sleeve” to American diplomacy
is perhaps the most concise expression of the conception we have
formed in Europe of life in the United States. We imagine that it is
only necessary to cross the Atlantic Ocean to find a people young
and vigorous in its emancipation from ancient forms and obsolete
ceremonies. The average visitor returns, after a brief tour through
the more urbane centres of European imitation, and tries to startle
us with a narrative in which a few picturesque crudities are supposed
to indicate the democratic ease of American civilization. His mind is
filled with an incoherent jumble of skyscrapers, express elevators,
ice water, chewing-gum, and elevated railroads, so that his inevitable
contribution to the literature relating to America becomes the
mere chronicle of a tourist’s experiences. Every deviation from
European practice is emphasized, and in proportion to the writer’s
consequent personal discomfort, he will conjure up a hideous picture
of uncouthness, whose effect is to confirm us in our estimate of
American progress ... or barbarism, as the case may be. If the critical
stranger happens to be a well-known poet or dramatist, he will probably
succeed in passing lightly over those minor inconveniences, which the
generosity of wealthy admirers has prevented him from experiencing at
first hand.
The consequence is that there is no subject more hopelessly involved in
a cloud of voluminous complaint and banal laudation than American life
as seen by the foreigner. Neither the enthusiasts nor the fault-finders
have contributed much of any assistance either to Europeans or to the
Americans themselves. The former accept America at its own valuation,
the latter complain of precisely those things upon which the average
citizen prides himself. It is not easy to decide which class of critics
has helped most effectively to perpetuate the legend of American
freedom; the minor commentators who hold democracy to be the cause of
every offence, or the higher critics, like Viscount Bryce, who, finding
no American commonwealth, proceeded to invent one. The objectors are
dismissed as witnesses to the incapacity of the servile European to
appreciate true liberty and equality; the well-disposed are gratefully
received as evangelists of a gospel to which Americans subscribe
without excessive introspection. There is something touching in the
gratitude felt towards the author of “The American Commonwealth.” Who
would have believed that a foreigner, and a Britisher at that, could
make a monument of such imposing brick with the straws of political
oratory in the United States?