We arrived home in safety after a rather stormy and uneventful voyage.
On board the ship we met a number of Lake Mohonk acquaintances, and
therefore the atmosphere which you tried to create for me surrounded me
even in mid ocean, and consequently you ought to be happy and contented.
When we reached Washington half-cooked, for even your excellent
provisions for our comfort were unavailing against your terrific summer
heat, your friend and his automobile were at the station; just such a
friend and such an automobile as met us dozens of times before.
If anything, this friend was a little more persistent than the other
species, for we were taken up and down and in and out, to everything
within fifty miles of Washington. We shook hands with half your
congressmen some of them seem to be professional hand-shakers, and my
hand aches at the thought of it.
State Secretary Bryan received me most affably and talked about his
peace treaties. He didn't give me much chance to do any talking myself.
He seems so genuinely American; by that I mean simple and childlike in
many things, and complex and difficult to understand in others.
He is neither a humbug as some of your papers say, nor a prophet as he
thinks himself. His faith in humanity and in himself is pathetically
colossal.
It is amusing to find that you Americans, and you are the most American
of them all--you Americans who have invented cash registers and time
clocks, those symbols of unfaith in humanity, are so full of faith in
your relation to big, national and international problems.
Your optimism may, after all, be due to your ignorance, coupled with the
fact that you are living in a land vast and isolated, which has not
quite exhausted its resources and opportunities. The most materialistic
people on earth in your relationship to each other, you leap into
remarkable idealism in the sphere of politics and diplomacy. If it is
true that "God takes care of children and fools," then God is taking
wonderfully good care of you Americans, who seem to me to be both.
In our country we would put a man of Mr. Bryan's type in charge of an
orphan asylum, and feel that the children would be safe with him at
least till their twelfth year; and yet I know that he has done vigorous
fighting, and I shall give him a chapter in my book about America, which
as you know I intend to write and have already begun.
It was quite a change of atmosphere when I went from the Department of
State to the White House. The President's secretary seems to me a man of
large calibre, kind, yet firm. A man to like and yet to fear; just the
kind of person a great man needs as a buffer against his friends, and as
a guard against his enemies. The atmosphere of the White House is
dignified, yet not cold; democratic, yet reserved; you feel that it is a
place of power.
Above everything else you have done for me I want to thank you for
making it possible for me to meet President Wilson. He is not at all the
type of man I expected to find. There is nothing pedantic about him and
I do not know a man in any of our universities like him. He is not as
easy to analyze as Mr. Bryan, he is by far the greater, more complex
and stronger nature. He has the firmness which rulers should possess,
and may be too unyielding when once he has made up his mind to anything.
He knows more than Mr. Bryan but is not as dogmatic, not nearly as
friendly, and yet I came nearer to that which I sought in him, and I
think I understood him better. He let me do all the talking, but asked
all manner of questions; yet he told me more that way than Mr. Bryan,
who did all the talking.
If President Wilson is a politician, he is a new kind which I have never
met before. I think he has made many mistakes, which of course is
natural. There is only one of your presidents who never made mistakes,
and that was President Roosevelt. He made blunders, which he had the
pugnacity and the sheer physical courage to turn into political capital,
and then blundered again.
President Wilson was in the midst of the Mexican muddle when I saw him,
yet he seemed to me very well poised, and bearing his many burdens, not
like a martyr or a saint, but as a really strong man ought to bear
them.
Of course you do not believe that I took your eulogies of America "_fur
baare Muenze_" (at their face value). There are two Americas and you are
living in but one of them. Your America lies in the high altitudes of
Lake Mohonk, Hull House, and Grinnell College. The other America which
you tried to hide from me I saw, just because you tried to hide it. It
is sordid, base, selfish, and above all strong; but that you do not seem
to know.
You have _modified_ my view of America, but you have not _changed_ it.
You are still a big experiment as a nation, and I am not sure that it
will be a successful one. You have nothing to teach us in government,
business or education. Just one thing I envy you--your faith in your
unfinished country and in yourself as a force in its making.
As you know, I do not share your faith; especially do I not believe that
one individual or many individuals can change the course of empires.
You think yourself citizen, king and priest; but you are merely an
atom, a conscious atom of course, and in that and that alone, in that
you are conscious, and know yourself a part of the whole and believe
yourself an effective part of it, lies happiness. I enjoyed hearing you
talk about the American Spirit; you talked about the soul of a country
as if you had seen it and felt it and loved it.
My dear friend, you do not know your own soul, nor the stuff out of
which it is made, and yet in your American conceit you talk about the
soul of a country. It was an interesting psychological study to watch
you, and it gave me much amusement as well as something to think about.
I enjoyed you most of all in your own little town, your college and your
hospitable, beautiful home. I feared you would burst from pride and
complacency as you interpreted the "American Spirit" from that little
place; a speck, and not even a well-defined speck, on the map of your
country.
You, a world traveller, have at last become a really narrow provincial,
I should say a very happy one, as provincials always are. You wanted me
to see your country through the June atmosphere of your Commencement; a
democratic, peaceful, rose-laden America. I saw it through the smoke and
grime of Chicago, the crowded tenements of New York, the injustice of
your courts and the corruption of your politics.
Yet I am glad I saw _your_ America, and I want to thank you for your
ardent endeavor to show it to me as you want it to be, and not as it is.
My wife sends her thanks and greetings. She received more benefit out of
her visit than I. I have had to promise to remodel the house, and put in
another bathroom which is to be between our bedrooms. The new bathtub
must be porcelain and we are to have an instantaneous heater. She still
talks a good deal of the "_gute_ cornflecks" and "grep frut" which we
both enjoyed so much. Above all she remembers the courtesy of the men,
and if the servant did not place her chair for her at table, I fear I
should now have to do it.
America certainly is a Paradise for women, but it is "_Die Hoelle_" for
men.
Remember that when you and any of your family come to Berlin you are to
be our guests. I trust you will come soon, for conditions over here look
dubious, and the war, "_der grosse Krieg_," may come before we know it.
_Herzliche Gruesse von Haus zu Haus._
_Auf Wiedersehen._