ADVANCE, CHICAGO!
Chicago possesses one exceedingly good hotel. We know this by
experience. The other hotels in the city may be equally good, but we
shall never try them. Having found one almost perfect hotel, we shall,
whenever we visit that city again, go back to it. But I expect that all
the other hotels there are good too, very good; for Chicago appears to
take an interest in its hotels. In most cities, perhaps in all other
cities, hotels are good or bad according as their managers are efficient
or the reverse. The city itself does not care about its hotels any more
than it cares about its bootmakers. A London bootmaker might provide
very bad leather for the soles of a stranger's boots. "The Times" would
not deal with that bootmaker in a special article. It might be very
difficult to obtain hot water in one of the great London hotels—I have
seen it stated, on the authority of an American, that it is very
difficult—but London itself does not care whether it is or not. The
soling of boots and the comfort of casual guests are, according to the
generally prevailing view, affairs best settled between the people
directly interested, the traveler on the one hand and the bootmaker or
manager on the other. No one else thinks that he has a right to
interfere.
Chicago takes a different view. It has a sense of civic responsibility
for its hotels, possibly also for its bootmakers. I did not try the
bootmakers and therefore cannot say anything certainly about them. But I
am sure about the hotels. It happened that there was a letter awaiting
my arrival at the hotel, the very excellent hotel, in which we stayed.
This letter was not immediately delivered to me. I believe that I ought
to have asked for it, that the hotel manager expects guests to ask for
letters, and that I had no reasonable ground of complaint when the
letter was not delivered to me. Nor did I complain. I am far too meek a
man to complain about anything in a large hotel. I am desperately afraid
of hotel officials. They are all much grander than I am and occupy far
more important positions in the world. I should not grumble if a
princess trod on my toe. Princesses have a right, owing to the splendour
of their position, to trample on me. But I would rather grumble at a
princess than complain to a head waiter or the clerk in charge of the
offices of a large hotel. Princesses are common clay compared to these
functionaries. But even if I were a very brave man, and even if I
believed that one man was as good as another and I the equal of the
manager of a large hotel, I should not have complained about the failure
to deliver that letter. The hotel when we were there was very full, and
full of the most important kind of people, doctors. It was not to be
expected that such a trifle as a letter for me would engage the
attention of anybody.
Next morning there was a paragraph in one of the leading Chicago papers
about my letter and the manager of the hotel was told plainly, in clear
print, that he must do his business better than he did. I was astonished
when the manager, taking me solemnly apart, showed me the paragraph,
astonished and terror-stricken. I apologized at once for daring to have
a letter addressed to me at his hotel. I apologized for not asking for
it when I arrived. I apologized for the trouble his staff had been put
to in carrying the letter up to my room in the end. Then I stopped
apologizing because, to my amazement, the manager began. He apologized
so amply that I came gradually to feel as if I were not entirely in the
wrong. Also I realized why it is that this hotel—and no doubt all the
others in Chicago—is so superlatively good. Chicago keeps an eye on
them. The press is alive to the fact that every citizen of a great city,
even a hotel manager, should do not merely his duty but more, should
practice counsels of perfection, perform works of supererogation,
deliver letters which are not asked for.
The incident is in itself unimportant, but it seems to me to illustrate
the spirit of Chicago. It is a great city and is determined to get
things done right. It has besides, and this is its rare distinction, an
unfaltering conviction that it can get things done right. Most
communities are conscious of some limitations of their powers. For
Chicago there are no limitations at all anywhere. Whatever ought to be
done Chicago will do. Nothing is too small, nothing too great to be
attempted and carried through. It may be an insignificant matter, like
the comfort of a helpless and foolish stranger. It may be a problem
against which civilized society has broken its teeth for centuries, like
the evil of prostitution. Chicago is convinced that it can be got right
and Chicago means to do it.
I admire this sublime self-confidence. I ought always to be happy when I
am among men who have it, because I was born in Belfast and the first
air I breathed was charged with exactly this same intensely bracing
ozone of strong-willedness.
Belfast is very like Chicago. If a Belfast man were taken while asleep
and transported on a magic carpet to Chicago, he would not, on waking
up, feel that anything very strange had happened to him. The outward
circumstances of life would indeed be different, but he would find
himself in all essential respects at home. He would talk to men who said
"We will," with a conviction that their "We will" is the last word which
can or need be said on any subject; just as he had all his life before
talked to men who said, "We won't," with the same certainty that beyond
their "We won't" there was nothing.
Chicago is, indeed, greater than Belfast, not merely in the number of
its inhabitants and the importance of its business, but in the fact that
it asserts where Belfast denies. It is a greater and harder thing to say
"Yes" than "No." But there is a spiritual kinship between the two places
in that both of them mean what they say and are quite sure that they can
make good their "yes" and "no" against the world. If all the rest of
America finds itself up against Chicago as the British empire is at
present up against Belfast, the result will be the bewilderment of the
rest of America.
I was in Chicago only for a short time. I did not see any of the things
which visitors usually see there. I went there with certain prejudices.
I had read, like every one else, Mr. Upton Sinclair's account of the
slaughter of pigs in Chicago. I had read several times over the late Mr.
Frank Norris's "The Pit." I had read and heard many things about the
wonderful work of Miss Jane Addams. I had a vague idea that Chicago was
both better and worse than other places, that God and the devil had
joined battle there more definitely than elsewhere, that the points at
issue were plainer, that there was something nearer to a straight fight
in Chicago between good and evil than we find in other places.
"We are here," says Matthew Arnold, "as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies strive by night."
In Chicago I felt the armies would be less ignorant, the alarms a little
less confused. I am not sure now that this is so. It may be quite as
hard in Chicago as it is anywhere else to find out quite certainly what
is right; which, in certain tangled matters, is God's side and which the
devil's. But I do not believe that the Chicago man, any more than the
Belfast man, is tormented with the paralysis of indecision. He may and
very likely will do a great many things which will turn out in the end
not to be good things. But he will do them quite unfalteringly. When,
having done them, he has time to look round at the far side of them, he
may discover that there was some mistake about them somewhere. Then he
will undo them and do something else instead with the same vigorous
conviction. He will, in any case, keep on doing things and believing in
them.
I was in a large bookseller's shop while I was in Chicago. It was so
large that it was impossible to discover with any certainty what pleases
Chicago most in the way of literature. There seemed to me to be copies
of every book I had ever heard of waiting there for buyers, and, I
presume, they would not wait unless buyers were likely to come. But I
was struck with the very large number of books dealing with those
subjects which may be classed roughly under the term Eugenics. There
were more of these books in that shop than I had ever seen before. I
should not have guessed that there were so many in the world. I may, of
course, have received a wrong impression. This particular shop had its
books arranged according to subjects. There was not, as generally in
England and Ireland, a counter devoted to the latest publications, or a
series of shelves given over to books priced at a shilling. In this shop
all books on economics, for example, whether old or new, cheap or dear,
were in one place; all books on music in another; and so forth. The idea
underlying the arrangement being that a customer knows more or less the
subject he wants to read about and is pleased to find all books on that
subject ready waiting for him in rows. Our idea, on the other hand, that
which underlies the arrangements of our shops, is that a customer wants,
perhaps a new book, perhaps a ten-and-sixpenny book, perhaps a shilling
book, without minding much what the book is about. He is best suited by
finding all the new books in one place, all the ten-and-sixpenny books
in another, and all the shilling books in a third. I do not know which
is the better plan, but that adopted in the Chicago shop has the effect
of making the casual customer realize the very large number of books
there are on every subject. I may therefore have been deceived about the
popularity of books on eugenics in Chicago. There may be no more on sale
there than elsewhere. But I think there are. Of some of these books
there were very large numbers, twenty or thirty copies of a single book
all standing in a row. Plainly it was anticipated that there were in
Chicago twenty or thirty people who would want that particular book. I
never, in any book shop elsewhere, saw more than five or six copies of a
eugenic book in stock at the same time. I also noticed that the majority
of these books were cheap; not detailed and elaborate treatises on, let
us say, Weissmannism and the mechanism of heredity; but short handbooks,
statements of conclusions supposed to be arrived at and practical advice
suited to plain people. I formed the opinion that the study of eugenics
is popular in Chicago, more popular than elsewhere, and that a good many
people believe that some good is to be got out of knowing what science
has to teach on these subjects.
I was told by a man who ought to have known that these books are
steadily becoming more popular. The demand for them was very small five
years ago. It is very large now and becoming steadily larger. This seems
to me a very interesting thing. For a long time people were content just
to take children as they came, and they did not bother much about the
hows and the whys of the business. Grown-up men and women did not indeed
believe that storks dropped babies down chimneys or that doctors brought
them in bags. But they might just as well have believed these things for
all the difference such knowledge as they had made in their way of
conducting the business. Their philosophy was summed up in a proverb.
"When God sends the mouth He sends the food to fill it." To go further
into details struck people, twenty years ago, as rather a disgusting
proceeding.
Now we have all, everywhere, grown out of this primitive innocence. We
have been driven away from our old casual ways of reproducing ourselves,
and are forced to think about what we are doing. There is nothing very
interesting or curious about this. It is simply a rather unpleasant
fact. What is interesting is that Chicago seems to be thinking more than
the rest of us, is at all events more interested than the rest of us in
the range of subjects which I have very roughly called eugenics. Chicago
is, apparently, buying more books on these subjects, and presumably buys
them in order to read them. Is this a symptom of the existence of a
latent vein of weakness in Chicago?
I am not a very good judge of a question of this sort. The whole subject
of Eugenics and all the other subjects which are associated with it are
extremely distasteful to me. I like to think of young men and young
women falling in love with each other and getting married because they
are in love without considering overmuch the almost inevitable
consequences until these are forced upon them. I fancy that in an
entirely healthy community things would be managed in this way, and that
the result, generally speaking and taking a wide number of cases into
consideration, would be a race of wholesome, sound children, fairly well
endowed with natural powers and fitted to meet the struggle of life. But
Chicago evidently thinks otherwise. The subject of Eugenics is studied
there, and, as a consequence of the study, a number of clergy of various
churches have declared that they will not marry people who are suffering
from certain diseases. They have all reason on their side. I admit it. I
have nothing to urge against them except an old-fashioned prejudice in
favor of the fullest possible liberty to the individual. Yet I cannot
help feeling that it is not a sign of strength in a community that it
should think very much about these things. A man seldom worries about
his digestion or reads books about his stomach until his stomach and his
digestion have gone wrong and begun to worry him. A great interest in
what is going on in our insides is either a sign that things are not
going on properly or else a deliberate invitation to our insides to give
us trouble. It is the same with the community. But I should not like to
think that anything either is or soon will be the matter with Chicago.
It would be a lamentable loss to the world if Chicago's definite "I
will" were to weaken, if the native hue of this magnificent,
self-confident resolution were to be sicklied o'er with a pale cast of
thought.
At present, at all events, there is very little sign of any such
disaster. It happened that while we were in Chicago there was some sort
of Congress of literary men. They dined together, of course, as all
civilized men do when they meet to take counsel together on any subject
except the making of laws. In all probability laws would be better made
if Parliaments were dining clubs; but this is too wide a subject for me
to discuss. The literary men who met in Chicago had a dinner, and I was
highly honored by receiving an invitation to it. I wish it had been
possible for me to be there. I could not manage it, but I did the next
best thing, I read the report of the proceedings in the papers on the
following morning. One speaker said that he looked forward to the day
when Chicago would be the world center of literature, music and art. He
was not, of course, a stranger, one of the literary men who had gathered
there from various parts of America. He was a citizen of Chicago. No
stranger would have ventured to say so magnificent a thing. As long as
Chicago says things like that, simply and unaffectedly, and believes
them, Chicago can study eugenics as much as it likes, might even devote
itself to Christian Science or take to Spiritualism. It would still
remain strong and sane. For this was not a silly boast, made in the name
of a community which knows nothing of literature, music or art. Chicago
knows perfectly well what literature is and what art is. Chicago
understands what England has done in literature and art, what France has
done, what Germany has done. Chicago has even a very good idea of what
Athens did. If I were to say that I looked forward to inventing a
perfect flying machine I should be a fool, because I know nothing
whatever about flying machines and have not the dimmest idea of what the
difficulties of making them are. If Chicago were as ignorant about
literature and art as I am about aeronautics, its hope of becoming the
world center of these things would be fit matter for a comic paper. What
makes this boast so impressive is just the fact that Chicago knows quite
well what it means.
There are no bounds to what a man can do except his own self-distrust.
There is nothing beyond the reach of a city which unfalteringly believes
in itself. No other city believes in itself quite so whole-heartedly as
Chicago does, and I expect Chicago _will_ be the world center of
literature, music and art. There is nothing to stop it, unless indeed
Chicago itself gives up the idea and chooses to be something else
instead. It may, I hope it will, decide to be the New Jerusalem, with
gates of pearl and streets of gold and a tree of life growing in the
midst of it. Then Chicago will be the New Jerusalem and I shall humbly
sue to be admitted as a citizen. My petition will, I am sure, be
granted, for the hospitality of the people of Chicago seems to me to
exceed, if that be possible, the hospitality of other parts of America.
I am not sure that I should be altogether happy there, even under the
new, perfected conditions of life; but perhaps I may. I was indeed born
in Belfast, and as a young man shared its spirit. That gives me hope.
But I left Belfast early in life. I have dwelt much among other peoples,
and learned self-distrust. It may be too late for me to go back to my
youth and learn confidence again. If it is too late, I shall not be
really happy in Chicago.