MATSUE, September, 1894.
DEAR HENDRICK,--If ever I must go to America, I hope I can keep out
of New York. The great nightmare of it always dwells with me,--moos
at me in the night, especially in the time of earthquakes. Of London
I should be much less afraid. But in such great cities I do not think
a literary man can write any literature. Certainly not if he has to
stay in the heart of the clockwork. Society withers him up--unless he
have been born into the manner of it; and the complexities of the vast
life about him he never could learn. Fancy a good romance about Wall
Street,--so written that the public could understand it! There is, of
course, a tremendous romance there; but only a financier can really know
the machinery, and his knowledge is technical. But what can the mere
littérateur do, walled up to heaven in a world of mathematical mystery
and machinery! Your own city of Albany is a paradise compared to the
metropolis: you are really very fortunate--very, very happy to be able
to live at home.
Of course, there is a philosophy of good manners--too much of it, eh?
There is Emerson, all suggestive,--but touching eternal truths in his
essays on conduct, behaviour, etc.; and there is Spencer, who traces
back the history of nearly all good manners to the earliest period of
savagery and perpetual war. (You know about the origin of the bow, of
our forms of address, and of the forms of prayer.) Politeness survives
longest and develops most elaborately under militant conditions, and
diminishes in exact proportion as militancy decreases. That there
should be less politeness in America than in other countries, and less
in the Northern States than in the Southern, might be expected. This
was true as to both conditions: it is now true probably only as to the
first. With the growth of industrialism,--the sense of equal chances,
at least of equal rights before the law,--the abolition of class
distinctions,--fine manners vanish more or less. Nevertheless I fancy
that under all the American roughness and lack of delicacy, or of that
politeness which means "benevolence in small things," there is growing
up a vast, deep feeling of human brotherhood,--of genuine kindliness,
which may show itself later under stabler conditions. All now is
unsettled. It is said that nearly all our _formal_ politeness must
eventually disappear under conditions of industrialism, and be replaced
by something more real and more agreeable,--kindly consideration, and
natural desire to please. But that will be in ages and ages only after
we are dead. There must be an end of all fighting first,--of cruelty in
competition, and this cannot happen until with intellectual expansion,
population ceases to so increase as to enforce competition without mercy.
The tendency now (referring to what you said about trusts) seems to
point indeed to what Spencer calls "The Coming Slavery." Monopolies
and trusts must continue to grow and multiply,--must eventually tend
to coalesce,--must ultimately hold all. Bellamy's ideas will be partly
carried out, but in no paradisaical manner. The State itself will
become the one monstrous trust. Socialism will be promised all, and
be compelled to work against its own ends unconsciously. The edifice
is even now being reared in which every man will be a veritable slave
to the State,--the State itself a universal monopoly, or trust. Then
every life will be regulated to infinitesimal details, and the working
population of the whole West find themselves situated just as men in
factories or on railroads are situated. The trust will be nominally
for the universal benefit, and must for a time so seem to be. But just
so surely as human nature is not perfect, just so surely will the
directing class eventually exploit the wonderful situation,--just as
some Roman rulers exploited the world. Assuredly anarchy will eventuate;
but first,--in spite of all that human wisdom can do,--nations will
pass under the most fearful tyranny ever known. And perhaps centuries
of persistent effort will scarcely suffice to burst the fetters which
Socialism now seeks to impose on human society;--the machinery will be
too frightfully perfect, too harmonious in operation, too absolutely
exact and of one piece,--to be easily attacked. As well try with
naked hands to pierce the side of an iron-clad. The law, the police,
the military power, religious influence, commercial and industrial
interests,--all will be as One, working to preserve the form of the new
socialism. To seek redress, to demand change, were then sheer madness.
And even the power to flee away out of the land, to dwell among beasts
and birds, might be denied. Liberty of opinion, which we all boast
of now, would be then less possible than in the time of the sway of
Torquemada....
You have heard of the Japanese facile victories by land and sea. I
should not be surprised to hear of their winning every engagement, and
capturing Pekin. But what the end will be for the country, who can
say? The whole thing is the last huge effort of the race for national
independence. Under the steady torturing pressure of our industrial
civilization,--being robbed every year by unjust treaties,--Japan has
determined to show her military power to the world by attacking her old
teacher, China. At the same time she has asked and obtained from England
such revision of the treaty as would not only protect her against
the danger of large fresh investments of foreign capital, but would
probably result in driving existing capital away. I cannot think that
the United States will be short-sighted enough to grant the same terms.
For instance, though the country is to be opened to foreign settlement,
no Englishman can hold land except on lease; and the lease, by Japanese
law, expires with the death of the lessor. So that if I build a stone
house, and my landlord die in twenty years after, I must be at the
mercy of his heir, or carry away my house on my back.
It is an ugly business, this war. It may leave Japan absolutely
independent, as in the days of Ieyasu. But will that be best for her?
I am no longer sure. The people are still good. The upper classes are
becoming corrupt. The old courtesy, the old faith, the old kindness are
vanishing like snow in sun.
Ever affectionately,
LAFCADIO HEARN.