THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
I
Recapitulatory
I do not know if I am conveying to any extent the picture of America
as I see it, the vast rich various continent, the gigantic energetic
process of development, the acquisitive successes, the striving
failures, the multitudes of those rising and falling who come between,
all set in a texture of spacious countryside, animate with pleasant
timber homes, of clangorous towns that bristle to the skies, of great
exploitation districts and crowded factories, of wide deserts and
mine-torn mountains, and huge half-tamed rivers. I have tried to make
the note of immigration grow slowly to a dominating significance in
this panorama, and with that, to make more and more evident my sense
of the need of a creative assimilation, the cry for synthetic effort,
lest all this great being, this splendid promise of a new world,
should decay into a vast unprogressive stagnation of unhappiness and
disorder. I have hinted at failures and cruelties, I have put into the
accumulating details of my vision, children America blights, men she
crushes, fine hopes she disappoints and destroys. I have found a place
for the questioning figure of the South, the sorrowful interrogation
of the outcast colored people. These are but the marginal shadows of
a process in its totality magnificent, but they exist, they go on to
mingle in her destinies.
Then I have tried to show, too, the conception I have formed of the
great skein of industrial competition that has been tightening and
becoming more and more involved through all this century-long age,
the age of blind growth, that draws now towards its end; until the
process threatens to throttle individual freedom and individual
enterprise altogether. And of a great mental uneasiness and discontent,
unprecedented in the history of the American mind, that promises
in the near future some general and conscious endeavor to arrest
this unanticipated strangulation of freedom and free living, some
widespread struggle, of I know not what constructive power, with the
stains and disorders and indignities that oppress and grow larger in
the national consciousness. I perceive more and more that in coming
to America I have chanced upon a time of peculiar significance. The
note of disillusionment sounds everywhere. America, for the first time
in her history, is taking thought about herself, and ridding herself
of long-cherished illusions. I have already mentioned (in Chapter
VIII.) the memorable literature of self-examination that has come
into being during the last decade. Hitherto American thought has been
extraordinarily localized; there has been no national press, in the
sense that the press of London or Paris is national. Americans knew of
America as a whole, mainly as the flag. Beneath the flag America is
lost among constituent States and cities. All her newspapers have been,
by English standards, "local" papers, preoccupied by local affairs,
and taking an intensely localized point of view. A national newspaper
for America would be altogether too immense an enterprise. Only since
1896, and in the form of weekly and monthly ten-cent magazines, have
the rudiments of a national medium of expression appeared, and appeared
to voice strange pregnant doubts. I had an interesting talk with Mr.
Brisben Walker upon this new development. To him the first ten-cent
magazine, _The Cosmopolitan_, was due, and he was naturally glad to
tell me of the growth of this vehicle. To-day there is an aggregate
circulation of ten millions of these magazines; they supply fiction, no
doubt, and much of light interesting ephemeral matter, but not one of
them is without its element of grave public discussion. I do not wish
to make too much of this particular development, but regard it as a
sign of new interests, of keen curiosities.
Now I must confess when I consider this ocean of readers I find the
fears I have expressed of some analogical development of American
affairs towards the stagnant commercialism of China, or towards
a plutocratic imperialism and decadence of the Roman type, look
singularly flimsy. Upon its present lines, and supposing there were
no new sources of mental supply and energy, I do firmly believe that
America might conceivably come more and more under the control of a
tacitly organized and exhausting plutocracy, be swamped by a swelling
tide of ignorant and unassimilable labor immigrants, decline towards
violence and social misery, fall behind Europe in education and
intelligence, and cease to lead civilization. In such a decay Cæsarism
would be a most probable and natural phase, Cæsarism and a splitting
into contending Cæsarisms. Come but a little sinking from intelligence
towards coarseness and passion, and the South will yet endeavor to
impose servitude anew upon its colored people, or secede--that trouble
is not yet over. A little darkening and impoverishment of outlook and
New York would split from New England, and Colorado from the East. An
illiterate, short-sighted America would be America doomed. But America
is not illiterate; there are these great unprecedented reservoirs of
intelligence and understanding, these millions of people who follow
the process with an increasing comprehension. It is these millions of
readers who make the American problem, and the problem of Europe and
the world to-day, unique and incalculable, who provide a cohesive and
reasonable and pacifying medium the Old World did not know.
II
Birth Struggles of a Common Mind
You see, my hero in the confused drama of human life is intelligence;
intelligence inspired by constructive passion. There is a demi-god
imprisoned in mankind. All human history presents itself to me as
the unconscious or half-unconscious struggle of human thought to
emerge from the sightless interplay of instinct, individual passion,
prejudice, and ignorance. One sees this diviner element groping after
law and order and fine arrangement, like a thing blind and half-buried,
in ancient Egypt, in ancient Judæa, in ancient Greece. It embodies
its purpose in religions, invents the disciplines of morality, the
reminders of ritual. It loses itself and becomes confused. It wearies
and rests. In Plato, for the first time, one discovers it conscious and
open-eyed, trying, indeed, to take hold of life and control it. Then it
goes under, and becomes again a convulsive struggle, an inco-ordinated
gripping and leaving, a muttering of literature and art, until the
coming of our own times. Most painful and blundering of demi-gods it
seems through all that space of years, with closed eyes and feverish
effort. And now again it is clear to the minds of many men that they
may lay hold upon and control the destiny of their kind....
It is strange, it is often grotesque to mark how the reviving racial
consciousness finds expression to-day. Now it startles itself into a
new phase of self-knowledge by striking a note from this art, and now
by striking one from that. It breaks out in fiction that is ostensibly
written only to amuse, it creeps into after-dinner discussions,
and invades a press which is economically no more than a system of
advertisement sheets proclaiming the price of the thing that is.
Presently it is on the stage; the music-hall even is not safe from it.
Youths walk in the streets to-day, talking together of things that were
once the ultimate speculation of philosophy. I am no contemner of the
present. To me it appears a time of immense and wonderful beginnings.
New ideas are organizing themselves out of the little limited efforts
of innumerable men. Never was there an age so intellectually prolific
and abundant as this in the aggregate is. It is true, indeed, that
we who write and think and investigate to-day, present nothing to
compare with the magnificent reputations and intensely individualized
achievements of the impressive personalities of the past. None the
less is it true that taken all together we signify infinitely more.
We no longer pose ourselves for admiration, high priests and princes
of letters in a world of finite achievement; we admit ourselves no
more than pages bearing the train of a Queen--but a Queen of limitless
power. The knowledge we co-ordinate, the ideas we build together, the
growing blaze in which we are willingly consumed, are wider and higher
and richer in promise than anything the world has had before....
When one takes count of the forces of intelligence upon which we
may rely in the great conflict against matter, brute instinct, and
individualistic disorder, to make the new social state, when we
consider the organizing forms that emerge already from the general
vague confusion, we find apparent in every modern state three chief
series of developments. There is first the thinking and investigatory
elements that grow constantly more important in our university
life, the enlarging recognition of the need of a systematic issue
of university publications, books, periodicals, and of sustained
and fertilizing discussion. Then there is the greater, cruder,
and bolder sea of mental activities outside academic limits, the
amateurs, the free lances of thought and inquiry, the writers and
artists, the innumerable ill-disciplined, untrained, but interested
and well-meaning people who write and talk. They find their medium
in contemporary literature, in journalism, in organizations for the
propaganda of opinion. And, thirdly, there is the immense, nearly
universally diffused system of education which, inadequately enough,
serves to spread the new ideas as they are elaborated, which does, at
any rate by its preparatory work, render them accessible. All these
new manifestations of mind embody themselves in material forms, in
class-rooms and laboratories, in libraries, and a vast machinery of
book and newspaper production and distribution.
Consider the new universities that spring up all over America.
Almost imperceptibly throughout the past century, little by little,
the conception of a university has changed, until now it is nearly
altogether changed. The old-time university was a collection of learned
men; it believed that all the generalizations had been made, all the
fundamental things said; it had no vistas towards the future; it
existed for teaching and exercises, and more than half implied what
Dr. Johnson, for example, believed, that secular degeneration was the
rule of human life. All that, you know, has gone; every university,
even Oxford (though, poor pretentious dear, she still professes to read
and think metaphysics in "the original" Greek) admits the conception
of a philosophy that progresses, that broadens and intensifies, age
by age. But to come to America is to come to a country far more alive
to the thinking and knowledge-making function of universities than
Great Britain. One splendidly endowed foundation, the Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, exists only for research, and that was the first
intention of Chicago University also. In sociology, in pedagogics, in
social psychology, these vital sciences for the modern state, America
is producing an amount of work which, however trivial in proportion to
the task before her, is at any rate immense in comparison with our own
British output....
III
Columbia University
I did my amateurish and transitory best to see something of the
American universities. There was Columbia. Thither I went with a
letter to Professor Giddings, whose sociological writings are world
famous. I found him busy with a secretary in a businesslike little
room, stowed away somewhere under the dome of the magnificent building
of the university library. He took me round the opulent spaces, the
fine buildings of Columbia.... I suppose it is inevitable that a
visitor should see the constituents of a university out of proportion,
but I came away with an impression overwhelmingly architectural. The
library dome, I confess, was fine, and the desks below well filled with
students, the books were abundant, well arranged, and well tended. But
I recall marble staircases, I recall great wastes of marble steps, I
recall, in particular, students' baths of extraordinary splendor, and
I do not recall anything like an equivalent effect of large leisure
and dignity for intellectual men. Professor Giddings seemed driven and
busy, the few men I met there appeared all to have a lot of immediate
work to do. It occurred to me in Columbia, as it occurred to me later
in the University of Chicago, that the disposition of the university
founder is altogether too much towards buildings and memorial
inscriptions, and all too little towards the more difficult and far
more valuable end of putting men of pre-eminent ability into positions
of stimulated leisure. This is not a distinctly American effect. In
Oxford, just as much as in Columbia, nay, far more! you find stone and
student lording it over the creative mental thing; the dons go about
like some sort of little short-coated parasite, pointing respectfully
to tower and façade, which have, in truth, no reason for existing
except to shelter them. Columbia is almost as badly off for means
of publication as Oxford, and quite as poor in inducements towards
creative work. Professors talk in an altogether British way of getting
work done in the vacation.
Moreover, there was an effect of remoteness about Columbia. It may
have been the quality of a blue still morning of sunshine that invaded
my impression. I came up out of the crowded tumult of New York to it,
with a sense of the hooting, hurrying traffics of the wide harbor, the
teeming East Side, the glitter of spending, the rush of finance, the
whole headlong process of America, behind me. I came out of the subway
station into wide still streets. It was very spacious, very dignified,
very quiet. Well, I want the universities of the modern state to be
more aggressive. I want to think of a Columbia University of a less
detached appearance, even if she is less splendidly clad. I want to
think of her as sitting up there, cheek on hand, with knitted brows,
brooding upon the millions below. I want to think of all the best minds
conceivable going to and fro--thoughts and purposes in her organized
mind. And when she speaks that busy world should listen....
As a matter of fact, much of that busy world still regards a professor
as something between a dealer in scientific magic and a crank, and a
university as an institution every good American should be honestly
proud of and avoid.
IV
Harvard
Harvard, too, is detached, though not quite with the same immediacy
of contrast. Harvard reminded me very much of my first impressions of
Oxford. One was taken about in the same way to see this or that point
of view. Much of Harvard is Georgian red brick, that must have seemed
very ripe and venerable until a year or so ago one bitter winter killed
all the English ivy. There are students' clubs, after the fashion of
the Oxford Union, but finer and better equipped; there is an amazing
Germanic museum, the gift of the present Emperor, that does, in a
concentrated form, present all that is flamboyant of Germany; there are
noble museums and libraries, and very many fine and dignified aspects
and spaces, and an abundant intellectual life. Harvard is happily free
from the collegiate politics that absorb most of the surplus mental
energy of Oxford and Cambridge, and the professors can and do meet and
talk. At Harvard men count. I was condoled with on all hands in my
disappointment that I could not meet Professor William James--he was
still in California--and I had the good fortune to meet and talk to
President Eliot, who is, indeed, a very considerable voice in American
affairs. To me he talked quite readily and frankly of a very living
subject, the integrity of the press in relation to the systematic and
successful efforts of the advertising chemists and druggists to stifle
exposures of noxious proprietary articles. He saw the problem as the
subtle play of group psychology it is; there was none of that feeble
horror of these troubles as "modern and vulgar" that one would expect
in an English university leader. I fell into a great respect for his
lean fine face and figure, his deliberate voice, his open, balanced,
and constructive mind. He was the first man I had met who had any
suggestion of a force and quality that might stand up to and prevail
against the forces of acquisition and brute trading. He bore himself
as though some sure power were behind him, unlike many other men I met
who criticised abuses abusively, or in the key of facetious despair. He
had very much of that fine aristocratic quality one finds cropping up
so frequently among Americans of old tradition, an aristocratic quality
that is free from either privilege or pretension....
[Illustrations: HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE]
At Harvard, too, I met Professor Münsterberg, one of the few writers
of standing who have attempted a general review of the American
situation. He is a tall fair German, but newly annexed to America,
with a certain diplomatic quality in his personality, standing almost
consciously, as it were, for Germany in America, and for America in
Germany. He has written a book for either people, because hitherto they
have seen each other too much through English media ("von Englischen
linseln retouchiert"), and he has done much to spread the conception
of a common quality and sympathy between Germany and America. "Blood,"
he says in this connection, "is thicker than water, but ... printer's
ink is thicker than blood." England is too aristocratic, France too
shockingly immoral, Russia too absolutist to be the sympathetic and
similar friend of America, and so, by a process of exhaustion, Germany
remains the one power on earth capable of an "inner understanding."
(Also he has drawn an alluring parallel between President Roosevelt
and the Emperor William to complete the approximation of "die beiden
Edelnationen"). I had read all this, and was interested to encounter
him therefore at a Harvard table in a circle of his colleagues,
agreeable and courteous, and still scarcely more assimilated than the
brightly new white Germanic museum among the red brick traditions of
Kirkland and Cambridge streets....
Harvard impresses me altogether as a very living factor in the present
American outlook, not only when I was in Cambridge, but in the way the
place _tells_ in New York, in Chicago, in Washington. It has a living
and contemporary attitude, and it is becoming more and more audible.
Harvard opinion influences the magazines and affects the press, at
least in the East, to an increasing extent. It may, in the near future,
become still more rapidly audible. Professor Eliot is now full of
years and honor, and I found in New York, in Boston, in Washington,
that his successor was being discussed. In all these cities I met
people disposed to believe that if President Roosevelt does not become
President of the United States for a further term, he may succeed
President Eliot. Now that I have seen President Roosevelt it seems to
me that this might have a most extraordinary effect in accelerating the
reaction upon the people of America of the best and least mercenary of
their national thought. Already he is exerting an immense influence in
the advertisement of new ideas and ideals. But of President Roosevelt I
shall write more fully later....
V
Chicago University
Chicago University, too, is a splendid place of fine buildings and
green spaces and trees, with a great going to and fro of students, a
wonderful contrast to the dark congestions of the mercantile city to
the north. To all the disorganization of that it is even physically
antagonistic, and I could think as I went about it that already this
new organization has produced such writing as Veblen's admirable
ironies (_The Theory of Business Enterprise_, for example), and such
sociological work as that of Zueblin and Albion Small. I went through
the vigorous and admirably equipped pedagogic department, which is
evidently a centre of thought and stimulus for the whole teaching
profession of Illinois; I saw a library of sociology and economics
beyond anything that London can boast; I came upon little groups of
students working amid piles of books in a businesslike manner, and
if at times in other sections this suggestion was still insistent
that thought was as yet only "moving in" and, as it were, getting the
carpets down, it was equally clear that thought was going to live
freely and spaciously, to an unprecedented extent, so soon as things
were in order.
[Illustration: A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY]
I visited only these three great foundations, each in its materially
embodiment already larger, wealthier, and more hopeful than any
contemporary British institution, and it required an effort to realize
that they were but a portion of the embattled universities of America,
that I had not seen Yale nor Princeton nor Cornell nor Leland Stanford
nor any Western State university, not a tithe, indeed, of America's
drilling levies in the coming war of thought against chaos. I am in no
way equipped to estimate the value of the drilling; I have been unable
to get any conception how far these tens of thousands of students
in these institutions are really _alive_ intellectually, are really
inquiring, discussing, reading, and criticising; I have no doubt the
great numbers of them spend many hours after the fashion of one roomful
I saw intent upon a blackboard covered with Greek; but allowing the
utmost for indolence, games, distractions, and waste of time and energy
upon unfruitful and obsolete studies, the fact of this great increasing
proportion of minds at least a little trained in things immaterial,
a little exercised in the critical habit, remains a fact to put over
against that million and a half child workers who can barely have
learned to read--the other side, the redeeming side of the American
prospect.
VI
A Voice from Cornell
I am impressed by the evident consciousness of the American
universities of the rôle they have to play in America's future. They
seem to me pervaded by the constructive spirit. They are intelligently
antagonistic to lethargic and self-indulgent traditions, to disorder,
and disorderly institutions. It is from the universities that the
deliberate invasion of the political machine by independent men
of honor and position--of whom President Roosevelt is the type
and chief--proceeds. Mr. George Iles has called my attention to a
remarkable address made so long ago as the year 1883 before the Yale
Alumni, by President Andrew D. White (the first president), of
Cornell, who was afterwards American Ambassador at St. Petersburg
and Berlin. President White was a member of the class of '53, and he
addressed himself particularly to the men of that year. His title was
"The Message of the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth," and it is
full of a spirit that grows and spreads throughout American life, that
may ultimately spread throughout the life of the whole nation, a spirit
of criticism and constructive effort, of a scope and quality the world
has never seen before. The new class of '83 are the messengers.
"To a few tottering old men of our dear class of '53 it will be granted
to look with straining eyes over the boundary into the twentieth
century; but even these can do little to make themselves heard then.
Most of us shall not see it. But before us and around us; nay, in our
own families are the men who shall see it. The men who go forth from
these dear shades to-morrow are girding themselves for it. Often as I
have stood in the presence of such bands of youthful messengers I have
never been able to resist a feeling of awe, as in my boyhood when I
stood before men who were soon to see Palestine and the Far East, or
the Golden Gates of the West, and the islands of the Pacific. The old
story of St. Fillipo Neri at Rome comes back to me, who, in the days
of the Elizabethan persecutions, made men bring him out into the open
air and set him opposite the door of the Papal College of Rome, that
he might look into the faces of the English students, destined to go
forth to triumph or to martyrdom for the faith in far-off, heretic
England."
I cannot forbear from quoting further from this address; it is all so
congenial to my own beliefs. Indeed, I like to think of that gathering
of young men and old as if it were still existing, as though the old
fellows of '53 were still sitting, listening and looking up responsive
to this appeal that comes down to us. I fancy President White on the
platform before them, a little figure in the perspective of a quarter
of a century, but still quite clearly audible, delivering his periods
to that now indistinguishable audience:
"What, then, is to be done? Mercantilism, necessitated at first by our
circumstances and position, has been in the main a great blessing. It
has been so under a simple law of history. How shall it be prevented
from becoming in obedience to a similar inexorable law, a curse?
"Here, in the answer to this question, it seems to me, is the most
important message from this century to the next.
"For the great thing to be done is neither more nor less than to
develop _other_ great elements of civilization now held in check, which
shall take their rightful place in the United States, which shall
modify the mercantile spirit, ... which shall make the history of our
country something greater and broader than anything we have reached, or
ever can reach, under the sway of mercantilism alone.
"What shall be those counter elements of civilization? Monarchy,
aristocracy, militarism we could not have if we would, we would not
have if we could. What shall we have?
"I answer simply that we must do all that we can to rear greater
fabrics of religious, philosophic thought, literary thought,
scientific, artistic, political thought to summon young men more and
more into these fields, not as a matter of taste or social opportunity,
but as a patriotic duty; to hold before them not the incentive of
mere gain or of mere pleasure or of mere reputation, but the ideal
of a new and higher civilization. The greatest work which the coming
century has to do in this country is to build up an aristocracy of
thought and feeling which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of
mercantilism. I would have more and more the appeal made to every young
man who feels within him the ability to do good or great things in any
of these higher fields, to devote his powers to them as a sacred duty,
no matter how strongly the mercantile or business spirit may draw him.
I would have the idea preached early and late....
"And as the guardian of such a movement, ... I would strengthen at
every point this venerable university, and others like it throughout
the country. Remiss, indeed, have the graduates and friends of our own
honored Yale been in their treatment of her. She has never had the
means to do a tithe of what she might do. She ought to be made strong
enough, with more departments, more professors, more fellowships, to
become one of a series of great rallying points or fortresses, and
to hold always concentrated here a strong army, ever active against
mercantilism, materialism, and Philistinism....
"But, after all, the effort to create these new counterpoising,
modifying elements of a greater civilization must be begun in the
individual man, and especially in the youth who feels within himself
the power to think, the power to write, the power to carve the
marble, to paint, to leave something behind him better than dollars.
In the individual minds and hearts and souls of the messengers who
are preparing for the next century is a source of regeneration. They
must form an ideal of religion higher than that of a life devoted to
grasping and grinding and griping, with a whine for mercy at the end of
it. They must form an ideal of science higher than that of increasing
the production of iron or cotton. They must form an ideal of literature
and of art higher than that of pandering to the latest prejudice or
whimsey. And they must form an ideal of man himself worthy of that
century into which are to be poured the accumulations of this. So shall
material elements be brought to their proper place, made stronger for
good, made harmless for evil. So shall we have that development of new
and greater elements, that balance of principles which shall make this
republic greater than anything of which we now can dream."