who came from Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the Huguenots who came from La
Rochelle and Rouen were distinctly not tree-dwellers nor troglodytes.
They were people who had the habits and preferences of a well-ordered
life in cities of habitation, where the current of existence was
tranquil and regular except when disturbed by the storms of war or
religious persecution. And those who came from the country districts,
from the little villages of Normandy and Poitou and Languedoc, of
Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and Cornwall, of Friesland and Utrecht, of
the Rhenish Palatinate, and of the north of Ireland, were not soldiers
of fortune and adventurers. They were for the most part peaceable
farmers, whose ideal of earthly felicity was the well-filled barn and
the comfortable fireside.
There were people of a different sort, of course, among the settlers of
America. England sent a good many of her bankrupts, incurable idlers,
masterless men, sons of Belial, across the ocean in the early days. Some
writers say that she sent as many as 50,000 of them. Among the
immigrants of other nations there were doubtless many "who left their
country for their country's good." It is silly to indulge in illusions
in regard to the angelic purity and unmixed virtue of the original
American stock.
But the elements of turbulence and disorder were always, and are still,
in the minority. Whatever interruption they caused in the development of
a civilized and decent life was local and transient. The steady
sentiment of the people who were in control was in favour of common
order and social coöperation.
There is a significant passage in the diary of John Adams, written just
after the outbreak of mob violence against the loyalists in 1775. A man
had stopped him, as he was riding along the highway, to congratulate him
on the fury which the patriots and their congress had stirred up, and
the general dissolution of the bonds of order.
"Oh, Mr. Adams, what great things have you and your colleagues done for
us. We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no courts of
justice now in this province, and I hope there will never be another."
Upon which the indignant Adams comments: "Is this the object for which I
have been contending, said I to myself, for I rode along without any
answer to this wretch; are these the sentiments of such people, and how
many of them are there in this country? Half the nation for what I know:
for half the nation are debtors, if not more; and these have been in all
countries the sentiments of debtors. If the power of the country should
get into such hands, and there is great danger that it will, to what
purpose have we sacrificed our time, our health, and everything else?"
But the fears of the sturdy old Puritan and patriot were not realized.
It was not into the hands of such men as he despised and dreaded, nor
even into the hands of such men as Mr. Rudyard Kipling's imaginary
American,
"Enslaved, illogical, elate ...
Unkempt, disreputable, vast,"
that the power of the country fell. It was into the hands of men of a
very different type, intelligent as well as independent, sober as well
as self-reliant, inheritors of principles well-matured and defined,
friends of liberty in all their policies, but at the bottom of their
hearts lovers and seekers of tranquil order.
I hear the spirit of these men speaking in the words of him who was the
chosen leader of the people in peace and in war. Washington retired from
his unequalled public service with the sincere declaration that he
wished for nothing better than to partake, "in the midst of my
fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free
government, the ever favourite object of my heart, and the happy reward,
as I trust, of our mutual cares, labours, and dangers."
In these nobly simple and eloquent words, the great American expresses
clearly the fourth factor in the making of his country,--_the love of
common order_. Here we see, in the mild light of unconscious
self-revealment, one of the chief ends which the Spirit of America
desires and seeks. Not merely a self-reliant life, not merely a life of
equal opportunity for all, not merely an active, energetic life in which
the free-will of the individual has full play, but also a life shared
with one's fellow-citizens under the benign influence of good laws, a
life which is controlled by principles of harmony and fruitful in
efforts coöperant to a common end, a life _rangée, ordonnée, et
solidaire_,--this is the American ideal.
With what difficulty men worked out this ideal in outward things in the
early days we can hardly imagine. Those little communities, scattered
along the edge of the wilderness, had no easy task to establish and
maintain physical orderliness. Nature has her own order, no doubt, but
her ways are different from man's ways; she is reluctant to submit to
his control; she does not like to have her hair trimmed and her garments
confined; she even communicates to man, in his first struggles with her,
a little of her own carelessness, her own apparently reckless and
wasteful way of doing things. "Rough and ready" is a necessary maxim of
the frontier. It is hard to make a new country or a log cabin look neat.
To this day in America, even in the regions which have been long
settled, one finds nothing like the excellent trimness, the precise and
methodical arrangement, of the little farmsteads of the Savoy among
which these lectures were written. My memory often went back, last
summer, from those tiny unfenced crops laid out like the squares of a
chess-board in the valleys, from those rich pastures hanging like green
velvet on the steep hillsides, from those carefully tended forests of
black firs, from those granges with the little sticks of wood so neatly
piled along their sides under the shelter of the overhanging eaves, to
the straggling fences, the fallow fields, the unkempt meadows, the
denuded slopes, the shaggy underbrush, the tumbled woodpiles, and the
general signs of waste and disorder which may be seen in so many farming
districts of the United States. I asked myself how I could venture to
assure a French audience, in spite of such apparent evidences to the
contrary, that the love of order was a strong factor in the American
spirit.
But then I began to remember that those farms of New England and New
York and New Jersey were won only a few generations ago from a trackless
and savage wilderness; that the breadth of their acres had naturally
tempted the farmer to neglect the less fruitful for the more productive;
that Nature herself had put a larger premium upon energy than upon
parsimony in these first efforts to utilize her resources; and that,
after all, what I wished to describe and prove was not an outward
triumph of universal orderliness in material things, but an inward
desire of order, the wish to have a common life well arranged and
regulated, tranquil and steady.
Here I began to see my way more clear. Those farms of eastern America,
which would look to a foreigner so rude and ill-kept, have nourished a
race of men and women in whom regularity and moral steadiness and
consideration of the common welfare have been characteristic traits.
Their villages and towns, with few exceptions, are well cared for
physically; and socially, to use a phrase which I heard from one of my
guides in Maine, they are "as calm as a clock." They have their Village
Improvement Societies, their Lyceum Lecture Courses, their Public
Libraries, their churches (often more than they need), and their
schoolhouses, usually the finest of all their buildings. They have
poured into the great cities, year after year, an infusion of strong and
pure American blood which has been of the highest value, not only in
filling the arteries of industry and trade and the professions with a
fresh current of vigorous life, but also in promoting the rapid
assimilation of the mass of foreign immigrants. They have sent out a
steady flood of westward-moving population which has carried with it the
ideals and institutions, the customs and the habits, of common order and
social coöperation.
On the crest of the advancing wave, to be sure, there is a picturesque
touch of foam and fury. The first comers, the prospectors, miners,
ranchers, land-grabbers, lumbermen, adventurers, are often rough and
turbulent, careless of the amenities, and much given to the profanities.
But they are the men who break the way and open the path. Behind them
come the settlers bringing the steady life.
I could wish the intelligent foreigner to see the immense corn-fields of
Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas, the vast wheat-fields of the Northwest,
miles and miles of green and golden harvest, cultivated, reaped, and
garnered with a skill and accuracy which resembles the movements of a
mighty army. I could wish him to see the gardens and orchards of the
Pacific slope, miles and miles of opulent bloom and fruitage, watered by
a million streams, more fertile than the paradise of Damascus. I could
wish him to see the towns and little cities which have grown up as if by
magic everywhere, each one developing an industry, a social life, a
civic consciousness of its own, in forms which, though often bare and
simple, are almost always regular and respectable even to the point of
monotony. Then perhaps he would believe that the race which has done
these things in a hundred years has a real and deep instinct of common
order.
But the peculiarly American quality in this instinct is its
individualism. It does not wish to be organized. It wishes to organize
itself. It craves form, but it dislikes formality. It prizes and
cherishes the sense of voluntary effort more than the sense of
obedience. It has its eye fixed on the end which it desires, a peaceable
and steady life, a tranquil and prosperous community. It sometimes
overlooks the means which are indirectly and obscurely serviceable to
that end. It is inclined to be suspicious of any routine or convention
whose direct practical benefit is not self-evident. It has a slight
contempt for etiquette and manners as superficial things. Its ideal is
not elegance, but utility; not a dress-parade, but a march in
comradeship toward a common goal. It is reluctant to admit the value of
the parade even as a discipline and preparation for the march. Often it
demands so much liberty for the individual that the smooth interaction
of the different parts of the community is disturbed or broken.
The fabric of common order in America is sound and strong at the centre.
The pattern is well-marked, and the threads are firmly woven. But the
edges are ragged and unfinished. Many of our best cities have a fringe
of ugliness and filth around them which is like a torn and bedraggled
petticoat on a woman otherwise well dressed.
Approaching New York, or Cincinnati, or Pittsburg, or Chicago, you pass
first through a delightful region, where the homes of the prosperous are
spread upon the hills, reminding you of a circle of Paradise; and then
through a region of hideous disorder and new ruins, which has the aspect
of a circle of Purgatory, and makes you doubt whether it is safe to go
any farther for fear you may come to a worse place. This neglected belt
of hideous suburbs around some of the richest cities in the world is
typical and symbolical. It speaks of the haste with which things have
been done; of the tendency to overlook detail, provided the main purpose
is accomplished; of the lack of thoroughness, and the indifference to
appearance, which are common American faults. It suggests, also, the
resistance which a strong spirit of individualism offers to civic
supervision and control; the tenacity with which men cling to their
supposed right to keep their houses in dirt and disorder; the difficulty
of making them comply with general laws of sanitation and public
improvement; and the selfishness with which land-owners will leave their
neglected property to disfigure the city from whose growth they expect
in ten or twenty years to reap a large profit.
Yet, as a matter of fact, this very typical mark of an imperfect sense
of the value of physical neatness and orderliness in American life is
not growing, but diminishing. The fringes of the cities are not nearly
as bad as they were thirty or forty years ago. In many of them,--notably
in Philadelphia and Boston and some of the western cities,--beauty has
taken the place of ugliness. Parks and playgrounds have been created
where formerly there were only waste places filled with rubbish.
Tumble-down shanties give way to long rows of trim little houses. Even
the factories cease to look like dingy prisons and put on an air of
self-respect. Nuisances are abolished. The country can draw near to the
city without holding its nose.
This gradual improvement, also, is symbolical. It speaks of
individualism becoming conscious of its own defects and dangers. It
speaks of an effort on the part of the more intelligent and
public-spirited citizens to better the conditions of life for all. It
speaks of a deep instinct in the people which responds to these efforts
and supports them with the necessary laws and enactments. It speaks most
of all, I hope, of that underlying sense of common order which is one of
the qualities of the Spirit of America.
Let me illustrate this, first, by some observations on the average
American crowd.
The obvious thing about it which the foreigner is likely to notice is
its good humour. It is largely made up of native optimists, who think
the world is not a bad place to live in, and who have a cheerful
expectation that they are going to get along in it. Although it is
composed of rather excitable individuals, as a mass it is not easily
thrown into passion or confusion. The emotion to which it responds most
quickly is neither anger nor fear, but laughter.
But it has another trait still more striking, and that is its capacity
for self-organization. Watch it in front of a ticket-office, and see how
quickly and instinctively it forms "the line." No police are needed. The
crowd takes care of itself. Every man finds his place, and the order
once established is strictly maintained by the whole crowd. The man who
tries to break it is laughed at and hustled out.
When an accident happens in the street, the throng gathers in a moment.
But it is not merely curious. It is promptly helpful. There is some one
to sit on the head of the fallen horse,--a dozen hands to unbuckle the
harness; if a litter is needed for the wounded man, it is quickly
improvised, and he is carried into the nearest shop, while some one
sends a "hurry call" for the doctor and the ambulance.
Until about forty years ago, the whole work of fighting fire in the
cities was left to voluntary effort. Companies of citizens were formed,
like social or political clubs, which purchased fire-engines, and
organized themselves into a brigade ready to come at the first alarm of
a conflagration. The crowd came with them and helped. I have seen a
church on Sunday morning emptied of all its able-bodied young men by the
ringing of the fire-bell. It is true that there was a keen rivalry among
these voluntary fire-fighters which sometimes led them to fight one
another on their way to a conflagration. But out of these free
associations have grown the paid fire-departments of the large cities,
with their fine tradition of courage and increased efficiency.
If you wish to see an American crowd in its most extraordinary aspect,
you should go to a political convention for the nomination of a
President. The streets swarming with people, all hurrying in one
direction, talking loudly, laughing, cheering; the vast, barn-like hall
draped with red, white, and blue bunting, and packed with 12,000 of the
200,000 folks who have tried to get into it; the thousand delegates
sitting together in solid cohorts according to the States which they
represent, each cohort ready to shout and cheer and vote as one man for
its "favourite son"; the officers on the far-away platform, Lilliputian
figures facing, directing, dominating this Brobdignagian mass of
humanity; the buzzing of the audience in the intervals of business; the
alternate waves of excitement and uneasiness that sweep over it; the
long speeches, the dull speeches, the fiery speeches, the outbreaks of
laughter and applause, the coming and going of messengers, the waving of
flags and banners,--what does it all mean? What reason or order is there
in it? What motives guide and control this big, good-natured crowd?
Wait. You are at the Republican Convention in Chicago. The leadership of
Mr. Roosevelt in the party is really the point in dispute, though not a
word has been said about it. A lean, clean-cut, incisive man is
speaking, the Chairman of the convention. Presently he shoots out a
sentence referring to "the best abused and the most popular man in
America." As if it were a signal given by a gun, that phrase lets loose
a storm, a tempest of applause for Roosevelt,--cheers, yells, bursts of
song, the blowing of brass-bands, the roaring of megaphones, the waving
of flags; more cheers like volleys of musketry; a hurricane of vocal
enthusiasm, dying down for a moment to break out in a new place,
redoubling itself in vigour as if it had just begun, shaking the rafters
and making the bunting flutter in the wind. For forty-seven minutes by
the clock that American crowd pours out its concerted enthusiasm, and
makes a new "record" for the length of a political demonstration.
Now change the scene to Denver, a couple of weeks later. The Democrats
are holding their convention. You are in the same kind of a hall, only a
little larger, filled with the same kind of a crowd, only more of it.
The leadership of Mr. Bryan is the point in dispute, and everybody knows
it. Presently a speaker on the platform mentions "the peerless son of
Nebraska" and pauses as if he expected a reply. It comes like an
earthquake. The crowd breaks into a long, indescribable, incredible
tumult of applause, just like the other one, but lasting now for more
than eighty minutes,--a new "record" of demonstration.
What are these scenes at which you have assisted? The meetings of two
entirely voluntary associations of American citizens, who have agreed to
work together for political purposes. And what are these masses of
people who are capable of cheering in unison for three-quarters of an
hour, or an hour and a quarter? Just two American crowds showing their
enthusiasm for their favourites.
What does it all prove?
Nothing,--I think,--except an extraordinary capacity for
self-organization.
But the Spirit of America shows the sense of common order in much deeper
and more significant things than the physical smoothing and polishing of
town and country, or than the behaviour of an average crowd. It is of
these more important things that I wish to give some idea.
It has been said that the first instinct of the Americans, confronted by
a serious difficulty or problem, is to appoint a committee and form a
society. Whether this be true or not, I am sure that many, if not most,
of the advances in moral and social order in the United States during
the last thirty or forty years have been begun and promoted in this way.
It is, in fact, the natural way in a conservative republic.
Where public opinion rules, expressing itself more or less correctly in
popular suffrage, no real reform can be accomplished without first
winning the opinion of the public in its favour. Those who believe in
the reform must get together in order to do this. They must gather their
evidence, present their arguments, show why and how certain things ought
to be done, and urge the point until the public sees it.
Then, in some cases, legislation follows. The moral sense, or it may be
merely the practical common sense, _le gros bon sens de ménage_, of the
community, takes shape in some formal statute or enactment. A State or
municipal board or commission is appointed, and the reform passes from
the voluntary to the organic stage. The association or committee which
promoted it disappears in a blaze of congratulation, or perhaps
continues its existence to watch the enforcement of the new laws.
But there is another class of cases in which no formal legislation seems
to be adequate to meet the evils, or in which the process of law-making
is impeded or perhaps altogether prevented by the American system of
dividing the power between the national, State, and local governments.
Here the private association of public-spirited citizens must act as a
compensating force in the body politic. It must take what it can get in
the way of partial organic reform, and supply what is lacking by
voluntary coöperation.
There is still a third class of evils which seem to have their roots not
in the structure of society, but in human nature itself, and for these
the typical American believes that the only amelioration is a steady and
friendly effort by men of good-will. He does not look for the
establishment of the millennium by statute. He does not think that the
impersonal State can strengthen character, bind up broken hearts, or be
a nursing mother to the ignorant, the wounded, and the helpless. For
this work there must always be a personal service, a volunteer service,
a service to which men and women are bound, not by authority, but by the
inward ties of philanthropy and religion.
Now these three kinds of voluntary coöperation for the bettering of the
common order are not peculiar to America. One finds them in every nation
that has the seed of progress in its mind or the vision of the _civitas
Dei_ in its soul,--and nowhere more than in France. The French have a
genius for society and a passion for societies. But I am not sure that
they understand how much the Americans resemble them in the latter
respect, and how much has been accomplished in the United States by way
of voluntary social coöperation under an individualistic system.
Take the subject of hospitals. I was reading the other day a statement
by M. Jules Huret:--
"At Pittsburg, the industrial hell, which contains 60,000
Italians, and 300,000 Slavs, Croats, Hungarians, etc., in the city
and its suburbs,--at Pittsburg, capital of the Steel Trust, which
distributes 700 millions of interest and dividends every
year,--there is no free hospital!"
This is wonderfully incorrect. There are thirty-three hospitals at
Pittsburgh, fifteen public and eighteen private. In 1908, thirteen of
these hospitals treated over ten thousand free patients, at a cost of
more than three hundred thousand dollars.
In New York there are more than forty hospitals, of which six are
municipal institutions, while the others are incorporated by
associations of citizens and supported largely by benevolent gifts; and
more than forty free dispensaries for the treatment of patients and the
distribution of medicines. In fact, the dispensaries increased so
rapidly, a few years ago, that the regular physicians complained that
their business was unfairly reduced. They said that prosperous people
went to the dispensary to save expense; and they humbly suggested that
no patient who wore diamonds should be received for free treatment.
In the United States in 1903 there were 1500 hospitals costing about
$29,000,000 a year for maintenance: $9,000,000 of this came from public
funds, and the remaining $20,000,000 from charitable gifts and from
paying patients. One-third of the patients were in public institutions,
the other two-thirds in hospitals under private or religious control.
There is not a city of any consequence in America which is without good
hospital accommodations; and there are few countries in the world where
it is more comfortable for a stranger to break a leg or have a mild
attack of appendicitis. All this goes to show that the Americans
recognize the care of the sick and wounded as a part of the common
order. They perceive that the State never has been, and probably never
will be, able to do all that is needed without the help of benevolent
individuals, religious bodies, and philanthropic societies.
How generously this help is given in America, not only for hospitals,
but for all other objects of benevolence, may be seen from the fact that
the public gifts and bequests of private citizens for the year 1907
amounted to more than $100,000,000.