American parent towards his child is not far to seek. It is almost
undoubtedly one of the direct consequences of the circumambient spirit
of democracy. The American is so accustomed to recognise the essential
equality of others that he sometimes carries a good thing to excess.
This spirit is seen in his dealings with underlings of all kinds, who
are rarely addressed with the bluntness and brusqueness of the older
civilisations. Hence the father and mother are apt to lay almost too
much stress on the separate and individual entity of their child, to
shun too scrupulously anything approaching the violent coercion of
another's will. That the results are not more disastrous seems owing
to a saving quality in the child himself. The characteristic American
shrewdness and common sense do their work. A badly brought up American
child introduced into a really well-regulated family soon takes his
cue from his surroundings, adapts himself to his new conditions, and
sheds his faults as a snake its skin. The whole process may tend to
increase the individuality of the child; but the cost is often great,
the consequences hard for the child itself. American parents are
doubtless more familiar than others with the plaintive remonstrance:
"Why did you not bring me up more strictly? Why did you give me so
much of my own way?" The present type of the American child may be
described as one of the experiments of democracy; that he is not a
necessary type is proved by the by no means insignificant number of
excellently trained children in the United States, of whom it has
never been asserted that they make any less truly democratic citizens
than their more pampered playmates.
The idea of establishing summer camps for schoolchildren may not have
originated in the United States--it was certainly put into operation
in Switzerland and France several years ago; but the most
characteristic and highly organised institution of the kind is the
George Junior Republic at Freeville, near Ithaca, in the State of New
York, and some account of this attempt to recognise the "rights of
children," and develop the political capacity of boys and girls, may
form an appropriate ending to this chapter. The republic was
established by Mr. William R. George, in 1895. It occupies a large
tent and several wooden buildings on a farm forty-eight acres in
extent. In summer it accommodates about two hundred boys and girls
between the ages of twelve and seventeen; and about forty of these
remain in residence throughout the year. The republic is
self-governing, and its economic basis is one of honest industry.
Every citizen has to earn his living, and his work is paid for with
the tin currency of the republic. Half of the day is devoted to work,
the other half to recreation. The boys are employed in farming and
carpentry; the girls sew, cook, and so on. The rates of wages vary
from 50 cents to 90 cents a day according to the grade of work.
Ordinary meals cost about 10 cents, and a night's lodging the same;
but those who have the means and the inclination may have more
sumptuous meals for 25 cents, or board at the "Waldorf" for about $4
(16s.) a week. As the regular work offered to all is paid for at rates
amply sufficient to cover the expenses of board and lodging, the idle
and improvident have either to go without or make up for their neglect
by overtime work. Those who save money receive its full value on
leaving the republic, in clothes and provisions to take back to their
homes in the slums of New York. Some boys have been known to save $50
(£10) in the two months of summer work. The republic has its own
legislature, court-house, jail, schools, and the like. The legislature
has two branches. The members of the lower house are elected by ballot
weekly, those of the senate fortnightly. Each grade of labour elects
one member and one senator for every twelve constituents. Offences
against the laws of the republic are stringently dealt with, and the
jail, with its bread-and-water diet, is a by no means pleasant
experience. The police force consists of thirteen boys and two girls;
the office of "cop," with its wages of 90 cents a day, is eagerly
coveted, but cannot be obtained without the passing of a stiff civil
service examination.
So far this interesting experiment is said by good authorities to have
worked well. It is not a socialistic or Utopian scheme, but frankly
accepts existing conditions and tries to make the best of them. It is
not by any means merely "playing at house." The children have to do
genuine work, and learn habits of real industry, thrift,
self-restraint, and independence. The measures discussed by the
legislature are not of the debating society order, but actually affect
the personal welfare of the two hundred citizens. It has, for example,
been found necessary to impose a duty of twenty-five per cent. "on all
stuff brought in to be sold," so as to protect the native farmer.
Female suffrage has been tried, but did not work well, and was
discarded, largely through the votes of the girls themselves.
The possible disadvantages connected with an experiment of this kind
easily suggest themselves; but since the "precocity" of the American
child is a recognised fact, it is perhaps well that it should be
turned into such unobjectionable channels.
VI
International Misapprehensions and National Differences
Some years ago I was visiting the cyclorama of Niagara Falls in London
and listening to the intelligent description of the scene given by the
"lecturer." In the course of this he pointed out Goat Island, the
wooded islet that parts the headlong waters of the Niagara like a
coulter and shears them into the separate falls of the American and
Canadian shores. Behind me stood an English lady who did not quite
catch what the lecturer said, and turned to her husband in surprise.
"Rhode Island? Well, I knew Rhode Island was one of the smallest
States, but I had no idea it was so small as that!" On another
occasion an Englishman, invited to smile at the idea of a
fellow-countryman that the Rocky Mountains flanked the west bank of
the Hudson, exclaimed: "How absurd! The Rocky Mountains must be at
least two hundred miles from the Hudson." Even so intelligent a
traveller and so friendly a critic as Miss Florence Marryat (Mrs.
Francis Lean), in her desire to do justice to the amplitude of the
American continent, gravely asserts that "Pennsylvania covers a tract
of land larger than England, France, Spain, and Germany all put
together," the real fact being that even the smallest of the countries
named is much larger than the State, while the combined area of the
four is more than fourteen times as great. Texas, the largest State in
the Union, is not so very much more extensive than either Germany or
France.
An analogous want of acquaintance with the mental geography of America
was shown by the English lady whom Mr. Freeman heard explaining to a
cultivated American friend who Sir Walter Scott was, and what were the
titles of his chief works.
It is to such international ignorance as this that much, if not most,
of the British want of appreciation of the United States may be
traced; just as the acute critic may see in the complacent and
persistent misspelling of English names by the leading journals of
Paris an index of that French attitude of indifference towards
foreigners that involved the possibility of a Sedan. It is not,
perhaps, easy to adduce exactly parallel instances of American
ignorance of Great Britain, though Mr. Henry James, who probably knows
his England better than nine out of ten Englishmen, describes Lord
Lambeth, the eldest son of a duke, as himself a member of the House of
Lords ("An International Episode"). It was amusing to find when _meine
Wenigkeit_ was made the object of a lesson in a Massachusetts school,
that many of the children knew the name England only in connection
with their own New England home. Nor, I fear, can it be denied that
much of the historical teaching in the primary schools of the United
States gives a somewhat one-sided view of the past relations between
the mother country and her revolted daughter. The American child is
not taught as much as he ought to be that the English people of to-day
repudiate the attitude of the aristocratic British government of 1770
as strongly as Americans themselves.
The American, however, must not plume himself too much on his superior
knowledge. Shameful as the British ignorance of America often is, a
corresponding American ignorance of Great Britain would be vastly more
shameful. An American cannot understand himself unless he knows
something of his origins beyond the seas; the geography and history of
an American child must perforce include the history and geography of
the British Isles. For a Briton, however, knowledge of America is
rather one of the highly desirable things than one of the absolutely
indispensable. It would certainly betoken a certain want of humanity
in me if I failed to take any interest in the welfare of my sons and
daughters who had emigrated to New Zealand; but it is evident that for
the conduct of my own life a knowledge of their doings is not so
essential for me as a knowledge of what my father was and did. The
American of Anglo-Saxon stock visiting Westminster Abbey seems
paralleled alone by the Greek of Syracuse or Magna Græcia visiting the
Acropolis of Athens; and the experience of either is one that less
favoured mortals may unfeignedly envy. But the American and the
Syracusan alike would be wrong were he to feel either scorn or elation
at the superiority of the guest's knowledge of the host over the
host's knowledge of the guest.
However that may be, and whatever latitude we allow to the proverbial
connection of familiarity and contempt, there seems little reason to
doubt that closer knowledge of one another will but increase the
mutual sympathy and esteem of the Briton and the American. The former
will find that Brother Jonathan is not so exuberantly and perpetually
starred-and-striped as the comic cartoonist would have us believe;
and the American will find that John Bull does not always wear
top-boots or invariably wield a whip. Things that from a distance seem
preposterous and even revolting will often assume a very different
guise when seen in their native environment and judged by their
inevitable conditions. It is not always true that "_coelum non
animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_" that is, if we allow ourselves
to translate "_animum_" in its Ciceronian sense of "opinion."[9] To
hold this view does not make any excessive demand on our optimism.
There seems absolutely no reason why in this particular case the line
of cleavage between one's likes and one's dislikes should coincide
with that of foreign and native birth. The very word "foreign" rings
false in this connection. It is often easier to recognise a brother in
a New Yorker than in a Yorkshireman, while, alas! it is only
theoretically and in a mood of long-drawn-out aspiration that we can
love our alien-tongued European neighbour as ourselves.
The man who wishes to form a sound judgment of another is bound to
attain as great a measure as possible of accurate self-knowledge, not
merely to understand the reaction of the foreign character when
brought into relation with his own, but also to make allowance for
fundamental differences of taste and temperament. The golden rule of
judging others by ourselves can easily become a dull and leaden
despotism if we insist that what _we_ should think and feel on a given
occasion ought also to be the thoughts and actions of the Frenchman,
the German, or the American. There are, perhaps, no more pregnant
sentences in Mr. Bryce's valuable book than those in which he warns
his British readers against the assumption that the same phenomena in
two different countries must imply the same sort of causes. Thus, an
equal amount of corruption among British politicians, or an equal
amount of vulgarity in the British press, would argue a much greater
degree of rottenness in the general social system than the same
phenomena in the United States. So, too, some of the characteristic
British vices are, so to say, of a spontaneous, involuntary,
semi-unconscious growth, and the American observer would commit a
grievous error if he ascribed them to as deliberate an intent to do
evil as the same tendencies would betoken in his own land. Neither
Briton nor American can do full justice to the other unless each
recognises that the other is fashioned of a somewhat different clay.
The strong reasons, material and otherwise, why Great Britain and the
United States should be friends need not be enumerated here. In spite
of some recent and highly unexpected shocks, the tendencies that make
for amity seem to me to be steadily increasing in strength and
volume.[10] It is the American in the making rather than the matured
native product that, as a rule, is guilty of blatant denunciation of
Great Britain; and it is usually the untravelled and preëminently
insular Briton alone that is utterly devoid of sympathy for his
American cousins. The American, as has often been pointed out, has
become vastly more pleasant to deal with since his country has won an
undeniable place among the foremost nations of the globe. The
epidermis of Brother Jonathan has toughened as he has grown in
stature, and now that he can look over the heads of most of his
compeers he regards the sting of a gnat as little as the best of them.
Perhaps not _quite_ so little as John Bull, whose indifference to
criticism and silent assurance of superiority are possibly as far
wrong in the one direction as a too irritable skin is in the other.
Of the books written about the United States in the last score of
years by European writers of any weight, there are few which have not
helped to dissipate the grotesquely one-sided view of America formerly
held in the Old World. Preëminent among such books is, of course, the
"American Commonwealth" of Mr. James Bryce; but such writers as Mr.
Freeman, M. Paul Bourget, Sir George Campbell, Mr. William Sanders,
Miss Catherine Bates, Mme. Blanc, Miss Emily Faithful, M. Paul de
Rousiers, Max O'Rell, and Mr. Stevens have all, in their several
degrees and to their several audiences, worked to the same end. It
may, however, be worth while mentioning one or two literary
performances of a somewhat different character, merely to remind my
British readers of the sort of thing we have done to exasperate our
American cousins in quite recent times, and so help them to understand
the why and wherefore of certain traces of resentment still lingering
beyond the Atlantic. In 1884 Sir Lepel Griffin, a distinguished Indian
official, published a record of his visit to the United States, under
the title of "The Great Republic." Perhaps this volume might have been
left to the obscurity which has befallen it, were it not that Mr.
Matthew Arnold lent it a fictitious importance by taking as the text
for some of his own remarks on America Sir Lepel's assertion that he
knew of no civilised country, Russia possibly excepted, where he
should less like to live than the United States. To me it seems a book
most admirably adapted to infuriate even a less sensitive folk than
the Americans. I do not in the least desire to ascribe to Sir Lepel
Griffin a deliberate design to be offensive; but it is just his calm,
supercilious Philistinism, aggravated no doubt by his many years'
experience as a ruler of submissive Orientals, that makes it no less a
pleasure than a duty for a free and intelligent republican to resent
and defy his criticisms.
Can, for instance, anything more wantonly and pointlessly insulting be
imagined than his assertion that an intelligent and well-informed
American would probably name the pork-packing of Chicago as the thing
_best worth seeing_ in the United States? After that it is not
surprising that he considers American scenery singularly tame and
unattractive, and that he finds female beauty (can his standard for
this have been Orientalised?) very rare. He predicts that it would be
impossible to maintain the Yellowstone National Park as such, and
asserts that it was only a characteristic spirit of swagger and
braggadocio that prompted this attempt at an impossible ideal. He also
seems to think lynching an any-day possibility in the streets of New
York. The value of his forecasts may, however, be discounted by his
prophecy in the same book that the London County Council would be
merely a glorified vestry, utterly indifferent to the public interest,
and unlikely to attract any candidates of distinction!
An almost equal display of Philistinism--perhaps greater in proportion
to its length--is exhibited by an article entitled "Twelve Hours of
New York," published by Count Gleichen in _Murray's Magazine_
(February, 1890). This energetic young man succeeded (in his own
belief) in seeing all the sights of New York in the time indicated by
the title of his article, and apparently met nothing to his taste
except the Hoffman House bar and the large rugs with which the
cab-horses were swathed. He found his hotel a den of incivility and
his dinner "a squashy, sloppy meal." He wishes he had spent the day in
Canada instead. He is great in his scorn for the "glue kettle" helmets
of the New York police, and for the ferry-boats in the harbour, to
which he vastly prefers what he wittily and originally styles the
"common or garden steamer." His feet, in his own elegant phrase, felt
"like a jelly" after four hours of New York pavement. What are the
Americans to think of us when they find one of our innermost and most
aristocratic circle writing stuff like this under the ægis of,
perhaps, the foremost of British publishers?
As a third instance of the ingratiating manner in which Englishmen
write of Americans, we may take the following paragraph from "Travel
and Talk," an interesting record of much journeying by that well-known
London clergyman, the Rev. H.R. Haweis: "Among the numerous kind
attentions I was favoured with and somewhat embarrassed by was the
assiduous hospitality of another singular lady, _also since dead_. I
allude to Mrs. Barnard, the wife of the venerable principal of
Columbia College, a well-known and admirably appointed educational
institution in New York. This good lady was bent upon our staying at
the college, and hunted us from house to house until we took up our
abode with her, and, I confess, I found her rather amusing at first,
and I am sure she meant most kindly. But there was an inconceivable
fidgetiness about her, and an incapacity to let people alone, or even
listen to anything they said in answer to her questions, which poured
as from a quick-firing gun, that became at last intolerable." Comment
on this passage would be entirely superfluous; but I cannot help
drawing attention to the supreme touch of gracefulness added by the
three words I have italicised.
There is one English critic of American life whose opinion cannot be
treated cavalierly--least of all by those who feel, as I do, how
inestimable is our debt to him as a leader in the paths of sweetness
and light. But even in the presence of Matthew Arnold I desire to
preserve the attitude of "_nullius addictus jurare in verba
magistri_," and I cannot but believe that his estimate of America,
while including much that is subtle, clear-sighted, and tonic, is in
certain respects inadequate and misleading. He unfortunately committed
the mistake of writing on the United States before visiting the
country, and had made up his mind in advance that it was almost
exclusively peopled by, and entirely run in the interests of, the
British dissenting Philistine with a difference.
It is the more to be regretted that he adopted this attitude of
premature judgment of American characteristics because it is only too
prevalent among his less distinguished fellow-countrymen. From this
position of _parti pris_, maintained with all his own inimitable
suavity and grace, it seems to me that he was never wholly able to
advance (or retire), though he candidly admitted that he found the
difference between the British and American Philistine vastly greater
than he anticipated. The members of his preconceived syllogism seem to
be somewhat as follows: the money-making and comfort-loving classes in
England are essentially Philistine; the United States as a nation is
given over to money-making; _ergo_, its inhabitants must all be
Philistines. Furthermore, the British Philistines are to a very large
extent dissenters: the United States has no established church;
_ergo_, it must be the Paradise of the dissenter.
This line of argument ignores the fact that the stolid
self-satisfaction in materialistic comfort, which he defines as the
essence of Philistinism, is _not_ a predominant trait in the American
class in which our English experience would lead us to look for it.
The American man of business, with his restless discontent and
nervous, over-strained pursuit of wealth, may not be a more inspiring
object than his British brother, but he has little of the smugness
which Mr. Arnold has taught us to associate with the label of
Philistinism. And his womankind is perhaps even less open to this
particular reproach. Mr. Arnold ignores a whole far-reaching series of
American social phenomena which have practically nothing in common
with British nonconformity, and lets a similarity of nomenclature
blind him too much to the differentiation of entirely novel
conditions. The Methodist "Moonshiner" of Tennessee is hardly cast in
the same mould as the deacon of a London Little Bethel; and even the
most legitimate children of the Puritans have not descended from the
common stock in parallel lines in England and America.