=Drift of the Day=
From my station here on the housetop my gaze wanders out over acres of
roofs--the leaded coverings of hotels, apartment-houses, and office
buildings. They rear themselves beneath and around me as the lesser
peaks of the Himalayas seen from Mount Everest. My eyes ache with the
diversity of their shapes, the eccentricity of their styles, the
irregularity of their altitudes. No man viewing them can continue
blind to the independence of the American citizen, to the ostentation
of his right of personal selection, to his individual caprice. They
stand, a brick-and-iron commentary upon the competing ambitions of two
generations of townsmen.
A hulking, twenty-story modernity stands side by side with a dwarfish,
Dutch anachronism, but neither possesses any right of precedence over
the other. They are equal in the eyes of the proletary. Classic and
nondescript, marble and brick, granite and iron, unite to form the
most heterogeneous collection of fashions the earth's surface anywhere
exhibits. Even Milton's blind eyes pictured nothing so fantastic as
this architectural chaos of Manhattan, so hopeless of eventual order.
And yet are there not lacking signs that the quaint pot-pourri of
whimsicalities will one day coalesce into a well-defined, artistic
composition, a twentieth century City Beautiful. God grant its
attainment be not unduly protracted!
But it is with the insides of this vast confusion of buildings I am
presently concerned. As the buildings are, so are the
inhabitants--little and big, tall and short, honestly constructed and
jerry built, old fashioned and up to date, aping the fashions of a
dozen civilizations. In any one of these great structures will be
found the representatives of a dozen nations, born to a dozen tongues,
yet all conversing in a common English, covering their motley
nationalities with a common Americanism, united in their loyalty to
the Republic. In the diversity of its constituents lies the strength
of the American nation.
No European section of the American community sufficiently
preponderates over its fellows to affect the national sympathy toward
foreign Powers. Irish counteracts English opinion; German sonship is
balanced by the filial sentiment of the Latin races--the Slavs and
the Russian Jews have no European predilections. Consequently,
American foreign policy is dictated by Americans for the benefit of
Americans, without reference to the warring interests in Europe or in
Asia. The men who lead in the United States are men who, for the most
part, have not voyaged beyond the confines of the United States. All
of their attention upon affairs of State is cast inward upon their own
land, is absolutely self-centred. The resultant national policy is the
most selfish, but the most formidable in the world of nations.
American and Briton are alike co-heirs to the common Anglo-Saxon
heritage, but they are brothers who differ as materially in
temperament as in ambition and in creed. The Briton is daily becoming
more cosmopolitan, his outlook more world-wide. The shadow of the
village pump has departed from his statecraft, and his political
horizon girdles the earth. But the American remains intensely
introspective, suspicious of foreign influence, interested solely in
his world of the Western Hemisphere.
In Britain are Little Englanders who dread every step the nation makes
in outward expansion, but there are here no Little Americanders. The
Little Englanders doubt the nation's power to hold the nation's
possessions. Here, in the United States, are men who question the
advisability of penetrating into world politics, but no man among them
has doubt of the nation's power to keep whatever territory the Star
Spangled Banner once has floated over. They are merely jealous,
jealous of the absolute isolation of their commonwealth, quick to
resent any remotest possibility of interference with it.
In every American's ears rings the music of assured success, the
certainty of a rich inheritance laid up for him and his children's
children in the internal resources of his country. In many an
Englishman's ears sound only the doleful croakings of the prophets,
the sinister rumblings of approaching doom. Though his pessimism be in
great part born of his climate, it has had a very real effect upon his
statecraft. It has driven him outward to find hope and sunshine
abroad, in his colonies, and in India. It has made of the race a
nation of expansionists, reaping where they have not sown, gathering
where they have not strawed.
It is otherwise here with us under a sky that would make of Job an
optimist. All around are light and color, the evidences of life and
hope. Here the whites are white, and not a dirty drab. The streets
glisten clean in the sunlight, and every window is a reflector of glad
promise. In London, choked with fog, and grimy with soot-dust, the
Englishman cannot see the future for smoke, cannot extract a gleam of
hope from the sodden, mud-soaked thoroughfares. To be sanguine here on
my housetop is to be natural and in harmony with my surroundings. To
be hilarious in the Strand is to be unnatural, to court detention in a
police cell or a lunatic asylum. There is a wide gulf separating Sandy
Hook from Land's End, but a still wider between Pennsylvania Avenue
and the Westminster Bridge Road.
And so those who have dreamed of Anglo-American alliances awake to
find themselves deceived by the very intensity of their desires. The
bloodship between the nations is itself the surest deterrent of
alliance. Just as in the Church marriage between nigh kinsmen is
forbidden, so political marriage between the British and American
nations can never be. The United States is possessed of a single
idea--the consolidation and enrichment of the United States. No
interest is permitted to clash with that paramount national ambition.
To that end all share in the pomp and vanities of the world is
sacrificed; her ambassadors tolerated, not supported; her Secretary of
State snubbed; her President jealously watched in all his exchanges of
courtesy with foreign Powers. United States citizens may be maltreated
and murdered in Bulgaria or in China, the United States will not go to
war on their behalf. Her mission is confined to the Western
Hemisphere, and over its borders no insult, no cajolery will avail to
tempt her. Within her own sphere her temper is quick, and her arm
strong to avenge. Across the ocean she is long suffering and slow to
anger.
Down here at my feet the American is engaged in his nation-building
somewhat less satisfactorily than out in the wide world beyond. A
nation compounded of a dozen alien races may unite on matters of
foreign policy, but in that is no warranty of harmony at home.
Domestic strife is as bitter here as in Germany or Britain or France.
I watch from my housetop men marching in processions of protest; I
read of strikes; I hear of an infinity of rude wranglings, of senators
battling on the floor of the forum, of disputes in the sacred halls of
Tammany. Not yet has the Irish lamb lain down with the Virginian lion.
It were strange were it otherwise in a land where the city man has
destroyed the home. The American has shown no great genius for the
domestic virtues. He has hauled down the homes of his ancestors, has
builded in their stead vast apartment-houses and tenement
buildings--steam-heated Towers of Babel. Into each of these he has
packed the population of a European market-town, has left the children
to grow up on the roofs and staircases, the babies to find a blessed
release through rickety fire-escapes. When a fit of reform has touched
him, he has stirred up the garbage of the Tenderloin and the Red Light
District, has spread it broadcast over his cities to poison his wife
and his daughter.
No, the American has still much to learn of domestic politics. Let him
sit with me here any night on my housetop and he will see the sad
effects of sectarian reform and newspaper hysteria. He will see the
creatures of the Tenderloin at home on Broadway and Fifth Avenue
where, twelve months ago, their presence was unknown. He will see the
policeman on the beat neglect the broken lock of my house door that
haply he may learn something of the doings of his fellow constable. He
will see a whole civil service turned into a bureau of information, a
department of espionage. He will see the entire machinery of city
government made ineffectual in the sacred name of Reform.
It was an American who made immortal the simple phrase: "There's no
place like home." Verily, one must take a long day's journey from New
York ere he discover a place in any essential comparable with the home
of our childhood's prattle, the home with its mother and its mother
love, its rosy boys and its sweet faced lasses. That home has been
handed over to the house-breakers, to make way for modern buildings,
for improvements on the surroundings that made our mothers and our
wives.
Sitting here on the housetop, one wonders if those residential
skyscrapers are indeed rooted in the foul pit of Acheron. If built in
the proportions of the iceberg, they must reach well into the bowels
of Tophet and thence derive the evil that is in them.