We had, four or five weeks ago, a few words of controversy with the
_Christian Union_ as to the comparative morality of the Prussians
and Americans, or, rather, their comparative religiousness--meaning
by religiousness a disposition "to serve others and live as in God's
sight;" in other words, unselfishness and spirituality. We let it
drop, from the feeling that the question whether the Americans or
Prussians were the better men was only a part, and a very small
part, of the larger question. How do we discover which of any two
nations is the purer in its life or in its aims? and, is not any
judgment we form about it likely to be very defective, owing to the
inevitable incompleteness of our premises? We are not now going to
try to fix the place of either Prussia or the United States in the
scale of morality, but to point out some reasons why all comparisons
between them should be made by Americans with exceeding care and
humility. There is hardly any field of inquiry in which even the
best-informed man is likely to fall into so many errors; first,
because there is no field in which the vision is so much affected by
prejudices of education and custom; and, secondly, because there is
none in which the things we see are so likely to create erroneous
impressions about the things we do not see. But we may add that it
is a field which no intelligent and sensible man ever explores
without finding his charity greatly stimulated.
Let us give some illustrations of the errors into which people
are apt to fall in it. Count Gasparin, a French Protestant, and
as spiritually minded a man as breathed, once talking with an
American friend expressed in strong terms his sense of the pain
it caused him that Mr. Lincoln should have been at the theatre
when he was killed, not, the friend found, because he objected in
the least to theatre-going, but because it was the evening of
Good Friday--a day which the Continental Calvinists "keep" with
great solemnity, but to which American non-episcopal Protestants
pay no attention whatever. Count Gasparin, on the other hand,
would have no hesitation in taking a ride on Sunday, or going to
a public promenade after church hours, and, from seeing him
there, his American friend would draw deductions just as
unfavorable to the Count's religious character as the Count
himself drew with regard to Mr. Lincoln's.
Take, again, the question of drinking beer and wine. There is a
large body of very excellent men in America who, from a long
contemplation of the evils wrought by excessive indulgence in
intoxicating drinks, have worked themselves up to a state of mind
about all use of such drinks which is really discreditable to
reasonable beings, leads to the most serious platform excesses,
and is perfectly incomprehensible to Continental Europeans. To
the former, the drinking even of lager beer connotes, as the
logicians say, ever so many other vices--grossness and sensuality
of nature, extravagance, indifference to home pleasures,
repugnance to steady industry, and a disregard of the precepts of
religion and morality. To many of them a German workman, and his
wife and children, sitting in a beer-garden on a summer's
evening, which to European moralists and economists is one of the
most pleasing sights in the world, is a revolting spectacle,
which calls for the interference of the police. Now, if you go to
a beer-garden in Berlin you may, any Sunday afternoon, see
doctors of divinity--none of your rationalists--but doctors of
real divinity, to whom American theologians go to be taught,
doing this very thing, and, what is worse, smoking pipes. An
American who applied to this the same course of reasoning which
he would apply to a similar scene in America, would simply be
guilty of outrageous folly. If he argued from it that the German
doctor was selfish, or did not "live as in the sight of God," the
whole process would be a model of absurdity.
Foreigners have drawn, on the other hand, from the American
"diligence in business," conclusions with regard to American
character far more uncomplimentary than those the _Christian Union_
has expressed with regard to the Prussians. There are not a few
religious and moral and cultivated circles in Europe in which the
suggestion that Americans, as a nation, were characterized by
thoughtfulness for others and a sense of God's presence would be
received with derisive laughter, owing to the application to the
phenomena of American society of the process of reasoning on which,
we fear, the _Union_ relies. Down to the war, so candid and
perspicacious a man as John Stuart Mill might have been included in
this class. The earlier editions of his "Elements of Political
Economy" contained a contemptuous statement that one sex in America
was entirely given up to "dollar-hunting" and the other to "breeding
dollar-hunters." In other words, he held that the American people
were plunged in the grossest materialism, and he doubtless based
this opinion on that intense application of the men to commercial
and industrial pursuits which we see all around us, which no church
finds fault with, but which, we know, bad as its effects are on art
and literature, really coexists with great generosity, sympathy,
public spirit, and ideality.
Take, again, the matter of chastity, on which the _Union_
touched. We grant at the outset that wherever you have classes,
the women of the lower class suffer more or less from the men of
the upper class, and anybody who says that seductions, accomplished
through the effect on female vanity of the addresses of "superiors
in station," while almost unknown here, are very numerous in Europe,
would find plenty of facts to support him. But, on the other hand,
an attempt made to persuade a Frenchman that the familiar
intercourse which the young people of both sexes in this country
enjoy was generally pure, would fail in ninety-nine cases out of
a hundred. That it should be pure is opposed to all his experience
of human nature, both male and female; and the result of your
argument with him would be that he would conclude either that you
were an extraordinarily simple person, or took him for one.
On the other hand, we believe the German, who thinks nothing of
drinking as much wine or beer as he cares for, draws from the
conduct of the American young woman whom he sees abroad, and from
what he reads in our papers about "free love," Indiana divorces,
abortion, and what not, conclusions with regard to American chastity
very different from those of the _Union_; and, if you sought to meet
him in discussion, he would overwhelm you with facts and cases
which, looked at apart from the general tenor of American life and
manners, it would be very hard to dispose of. He would say, for
instance, that we are not, perhaps, guilty of as many violations of
the marriage vows as Europeans; but that we make it so light a vow
that, instead of violating it, we get it abrogated, and then follow
our will; and then he would come down on us with boarding-house and
hotel life, and other things of the same kind, which might make us
despise him, but would make it a little difficult to get rid of him.
There is probably no minor point of manners which does more to
create unfavorable impressions of Europeans among the best class
of Americans--morally the best, we mean--than the importance
attached by the former to their eating and drinking; while there
is nothing which does more to spread in Europe impressions
unfavorable to American civilization than the indifference of
Americans, and, we may add, as regards the progressive portion of
American society--cultivated indifference--to the quality of
their meals and the time of eating them. In no European country
is moderate enjoyment of the pleasures of the table considered
incompatible with high moral aims, or even a sincerely religious
character; but a man to whom his dinner was of serious importance
would find his position in an assembly of American reformers very
precarious. The German or Frenchman or Englishman, indeed, treats
a man's views of food, and his disposition or indisposition to
eat it in company with his fellows as an indication of his place
in civilization. Savages love to eat alone, and it has been
observed in partially civilized communities relapsing into
barbarism, that one of the first indications of their decline was
the abandonment of regular meals on tables, and a tendency on the
part of the individuals to retire to secret places with their
victuals. This is probably a remnant of the old aboriginal
instinct which we still see in domesticated dogs, and was,
doubtless, implanted for the protection of the species in times
when everybody looked on his neighbor's bone with a hungry eye,
and the man with the strong hand was apt to have the fullest
stomach. Accordingly, there is in Europe, and indeed everywhere,
a tendency to regard the growth of a delicacy in eating, and
close attention to the time and manner of serving meals and their
cookery, and the use of them as promoters of social intercourse,
as an indication of moral as well as material progress. To a
large number of people here, on the other hand, the bolting of
food--ten-minute dinners, for instance--and general unconsciousness
of "what is on the table," is a sign of preoccupation with serious
things. It may be; but the German love of food is not necessarily a
sign of grossness, and that "overfed" appearance, of which the
_Union_ spoke, is not necessarily a sign of inefficiency, any more
than leanness or cadaverousness is a sign of efficiency. There is
certainly some power of hard work in King William's army, and,
indeed, we could hardly point to a better illustration of the truth,
that all the affairs of men, whether political, social, or
religious, depend for their condition largely on the state of the
digestion.
Honesty, by which we mean that class of virtues which Cicero
includes in the term _bona fides_, has, to a considerable extent,
owing, we think, to the peculiar humanitarian character which the
circumstances of the country have given to the work of reform, been
subordinated in the United States to brotherly kindness. Now, this
right to arrange the virtues according to a scale of its own, is
something which not only every age, but every nation, has claimed,
and, accordingly, we find that each community, in forming its
judgment of a man's character, gives a different degree of weight to
different features of it. Keeping a mistress would probably,
anywhere in the United States, damage a man's reputation far more
seriously than fraudulent bankruptcy; while horse-stealing, which in
New England would be a comparatively trifling offence, out in
Montana is a far fouler thing than murder. But in the European
scale, honesty still occupies the first place. Bearing this in mind,
it is worth any man's while who proposes to pass judgment on the
morality of any foreign country, to consider what is the impression
produced on foreign opinion about American morality by the story of
the Erie Railroad, by the career of Fisk, by the condition of the
judicial bench in the commercial capital of the country, by the
charges of corruption brought against such men as Trumbull and
Fessenden at the time of the impeachment trial; by the comically
prominent and beloved position which Butler has held for some years
in our best moral circles, and by the condition of the civil
service.
The truth is that it is almost impossible for anybody to compare
one nation with another fairly, unless he possesses complete
familiarity with the national life of both, and therefore can
distinguish isolated facts from symptomatic facts.
The reason why some of the phenomena of American society which
shock foreigners greatly, do not shock even the best Americans so
much, is not that the latter have become hardened to them--though
this counts for something--but that they know of various
counteracting and compensating phenomena which prevent, or are
sure to prevent, them in the long run from doing the mischief
which they seem to threaten. In other words, they understand the
checks and balances of their society as well as its tendencies.
Anybody who considers these things will be careful how he
denounces people whose manners differ from his own for want of
spirituality or morality, and we may add that any historical
student engaged in comparing the morality of the age in which he
lives with that of any other age which he knows only through
chronicles, will do well to exercise the same caution for the
same reasons.