VERDICT
Before I leave the jury of potent, grave and reverend Britishers to their
own reflections on the subject before them, it may be well to indulge in
a little summing-up.
I have shown that the fiery, untameable American is a creature of more
than doubtful antecedents, and that he conceals beneath a veneer of
smartness and originality several qualities of mind and heart that are
not greatly to his credit. I have shown that his destiny would seem to
lie in the direction of a reversion to a condition of pseudo-barbarism
which will in many respects identify him with the aboriginal possessors
of his country. Already the face, features and body of him are becoming
plainly Red-Indianised. Already his talk contains hints and suggestions
of “war-paint,” the “war-path,” the “tomahawk” and the getting of
“scalps.” If I mistake not the rest is bound soon to follow.
I have shown also that the American woman, in so far as she is exhibited
to us in London, and on the Continent of Europe, is a somewhat frivolous
female, and not always comely; smart, possibly, and lively, possibly,
but on the whole disposed to be too smart and too lively. I have given
you a peep at the American millionaire, and found him wanting in
everything but money, and not invariably too well provided with that. I
have pointed out that American advertising, whether for the sake of gain
or of notoriety, is a shameless, blatant and undesirable affair. For the
first time in history I have set it on record that the Americans eat too
many pea-nuts. I have run the rule over their painful attempts at the
dramatic art, and proved that in this important connection they have been
responsible for many banalities and futilities, and that their average of
performance is far below that of the rest of the theatre-using world. I
have demonstrated, also, that their real metier is the giddy tenth-rate
circus, ablast with drums and the roaring of wild beasts, the snuffling
of freaks, and the shrieking mirth of the vulgar. I have paid a passing
tribute to the integrity and blamelessness of their sportsmen. And I have
warned them solemnly about pork. What more can be expected of me?
It is more than likely that I shall be told that I have chosen for the
subject of my remarks a rather stodgy type of American, which is rapidly
giving place to a saner, wholesomer, and pleasanter type, resulting from
the spread of culture and a modification of manners on the best European
plans. To this I reply that I have spoken of the American exactly as he
seems to me to be, and judged him on the numerous samples which have
hitherto come my way. That there must be some residuum of sound and
serious people in the United States seems probable, but I have never been
to the United States.
Can anyone point to anything in the world that America is accomplishing
which is purely and simply calculated to serve the highest interests of
the human race? Can you look upon her trusts, her general methods of
finance, her social and industrial system, her bosses, her political
parties, the administration of her law, her press, her religious
mountebanks, her quacks and charlatans of all conditions, and pronounce
them to be good? Is it not the fact that these, in common with pretty
well the whole of the remainder of her institutions, are not only
defective, but a great deal more defective than one’s right to expect in
view of the exceptional natural resources of the country and her great
energy and wealth?
You are at liberty to answer these questions in any way you please; but
the conviction of myself and a by no means inconsiderable number of other
persons will remain the same.
It is clear that if the Americans are going to take that exalted position
among the nations to which they are for ever laying claim, they will be
compelled to get rid of a great many excrescences of temperament which
they seem now only too busy developing and emphasising by every means in
their power.
Is it possible for them, in the nature of things, so to disencumber
themselves?
Will they ever become a really free country, dethrone the millionaire and
the boss and acknowledge honesty as a political virtue?
Will they ever put silencers on the yellow press and elect a
congressional committee to examine the gangrenous decay of their wit and
the dropsical growth of their emotions?
Will they ever make a point of keeping their women at home and give
practical proof of their pride in the peaches by marrying them themselves?
Will they ever learn the English language which was the best thing
imported in the “Mayflower”?
Will they ever get rid of the climatic influences that compel them to
speak and sing through their noses?
Will they ever quote their astounding President at anything but a
discount or realise that he is their greatest national asset?
Will they ever place a prohibitive tariff on noise and lynch
sensation-mongers as they do niggers?
Will their playwrights ever learn the difference between a phonograph
record and a play and will their audiences ever learn to appreciate
acting when they see it?
Will they ever discover that sport is not merely a business of record
breaking and that business and football, I class the two together, are
not the sports of the stone age in which the vanquished was not only
overthrown but subsequently utterly consumed?
Will they ever give up pea-nuts?
Will they ever cease from the blind cultivation of pork?
I trow not.
And as these chapters are intended a great deal more for the English than
for the Americans, I may say here and now that it is the Englishman’s
plain duty to himself and to the race to refrain as far as in him lies
from the easy sin of imitation. In his admiration and envy for the
magical and almost uncanny successes of his American brother, let him not
be carried away with the stupid notion that it is possible for him to go
forth and do likewise. For one thing, he hasn’t got the climate; and for
another he hasn’t got either the pea-nuts or the pork.
Let the Englishman, therefore, be content to remain unreservedly and
unsophisticatedly English. When he sees an American adaptation or
invasion—whether commercial, social, religious, or otherwise—coming his
way, let him frown it down, pass by it and flee from it. Such things may
seem simple and innocuous and desirable enough in themselves, they may
tickle the imagination, and they may even appear to be for the distinct
betterment of mankind. But in the aggregate they must of necessity tend
to the Americanisation of this Country—and that is an evil which every
Britisher ought to be prepared to make any sacrifice to avoid.
If any profit worth having is to come out of the present welter it will
come by the Anglicisation of America, and not by the Americanisation of
England. The Americans themselves recognise the weight and importance
of this fact. Some of them are already wearing eye-glasses. They smile
in their sleeves at our readiness to adopt the least admirable of their
multifarious foolish ways. When an American meets an Englishman who is
trying to run his business or his household or other of his affairs after
American models, and particularly when he meets an Englishman who looks
upon the Americans as his superiors and masters at the game of life, he
is sheerly, if unavowedly, amazed. He knows what America is, he knows in
his heart what America means, and if it lay in his power to choose the
place to which he will go when he dies, that place would not be Chicago,
nor would it be even Paris, but a clean, free, un-Americanised England.
But with all their usually enormous and often brilliant faults—that
amaze, even if they do not stagger humanity—the Americans are a nation
of Cæsars. In every field of activity they have scored many triumphs.
But they are not satisfied with acquisition and conquest on a colossal
scale, they want to surpass all previous records in ancient or modern
times. They are endowed with an inherent genius for arriving at their
destination, and the destination they have set down for themselves in the
national time-table is one in keeping with their vast and great country,
whose mission it seems to be to make Europe and the world sit-up.
Therefore, within the next decade or two, I should not be surprised to
see a very much larger splash of purple on the map of the earth—and to
see it called the American Empire.
[Illustration]
UNWIN BROS., LTD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND WOKING.