TWO SIDES OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER
Europe's Undervaluation of America's Fighting Power--The
Americans as Sailors--The Nation's Greatest Asset--Self-reliance
of the People--The Making of a Doctor--And of a Surveyor--
Society in the Rough--New York and the Country--An Anglo-Saxon
Trait--America's Unpreparedness--American Consuls and
Diplomats--A Homogeneous People--The Value of a Common
Speech--America more Anglo-Saxon than Britain--Mr. Wells and
the Future in America.
One circumstance ought in itself to convince Americans that cowardice or
fear has no share in the greater outspokenness of England's good-will
during these later years, namely that when Great Britain showed her
sympathy with the United States at the time of the Spanish War,
Englishmen largely believed that they were giving that sympathy to the
weaker Power,[60:1]--weaker, that is as far as organised fighting
strength, immediately available, was concerned. It is a century or two
since Englishmen did Spain the compliment of being afraid of her. How
then, in 1895, could they have had any fear of the United States?
Few Europeans, indeed, have any conception of the fighting power of the
United States, for it is not large on paper. Nor is an Englishman likely
to make special allowance for the fighting efficiency of either the
ships or the men, for the reason that, in spite of experiences which
might have bred misgivings (English memory for such matters is short),
it remains to him unthinkable that, in the last resort, any men or still
less any ships will prove--man for man and gun for gun--better than his
own. He might be glad to concede that 25,000 American troops are the
equivalent of 50,000 Germans or 100,000 Cossacks, or that two American
men of war should be counted as the equivalent of three Italian. He
makes no such concession when it comes to a comparison with British
troops or British ships. What then can there be in the fighting strength
of the United States, for all the figures that she has to show, to breed
in him a suggestion of fear?
This is a statement which will irritate many a patriotic American, who
will say that it is the same old British superciliousness. But it should
not irritate; and if the American understood the Englishman better and
the spirit which inspires him, he would like it. The Englishman prefers
not to regard the American troops or ships as potentially hostile, and
Great Britain has sufficient to do in measuring the strength of her
possible enemies. As for the people of the United States, he opines that
they know their own business. They are best able to judge how many ships
and how many men under arms will serve their purpose. England would,
indeed, be glad to see the United States with a few more ships than she
has, but--it is none of England's business. Englishmen can only wish her
luck and hope that she is making no mistake in her calculations and go
on about their own affairs, which are pressing enough. At the same time
if the United States should prove to have miscalculated and should ever
need . . .--well, England has a ship or two herself.
It would be a gain for the world if Americans would only understand!
* * * * *
The Englishman of the present generation knows practically nothing of
the Americans as a maritime nation; and again let me say that this
arises not from superciliousness or any intentional neglect, but merely
from the fact that the matter is one beyond his horizon. He is so
familiar with the fact that Britain rules the waves that he has no
notion that whenever opportunity of comparison has offered the Americans
have generally shown themselves (if there has been anything to choose)
the better sailors of the two. Every English reader will probably read
that sentence again to see if he has not misunderstood it. The truth is
that Englishmen have forgotten the incidents of the Revolutionary War
almost as completely as they have forgotten those of the War of 1812;
Paul Jones is as meaningless a name to them as Andrew Jackson. While it
is true that American historians have given the American people, up to
the present generation, an unfortunately exaggerated idea of the heroism
of the patriot forces and have held the British troops up to all manner
of unmerited odium, it is also true that English historians, while the
less partial of the two, have perhaps been over-careful not to err in
the same direction. Not until the last twenty years--hardly until the
last four or five--have there been accessible to the public of the two
countries the materials for forming a just judgment on the incidents of
the war. It must be confessed that there is at least nothing in the
evidence to permit the Englishman to think that a hundred years ago the
home-bred Briton could either sail or fight his ships better than the
Colonial. Nor has the Englishman as a rule any idea that in the middle
of the nineteenth century the American commercial flag was rapidly
ousting the British flag from the seas. Even with a knowledge of the
facts, it is still hard for us to-day to comprehend.
So amazing was the growth of the mercantile marine of the young
republic--such qualities did the Americans show as shipbuilders, as
sailors, and as merchants--that in 1860, the American mercantile marine
was greater in tonnage and number of vessels than that of all other
nations of the world combined, except Great Britain, and almost equal to
that of Great Britain herself. These were of course the days of glory of
the American clipper. It appeared then inevitable that in a few years
the Stars and Stripes--a flag but little more than half a century
old--would be the first commercial flag of the world; and but for the
outbreak of the Civil War, it is at least probable that by now
Englishmen would have grown accustomed to recognising that not they but
another people were the real lords of the ocean's commerce. When the
Civil War broke out, the tonnage of American registered vessels was
something over five and one-half millions; and when the war closed it
was practically non-existent. The North was able to draw from its
merchant service for the purposes of war no fewer than six hundred
vessels of an aggregate tonnage of over a million and carrying seventy
thousand men. Those ships and men went a long way towards turning the
tide of victory to the North; but when peace was made the American
commercial flag had disappeared from the seas.
It would be out of place here to go into a statement of the causes which
co-operated with the substitution of iron for wood in shipbuilding to
make it hard at first for America to regain her lost position, or into a
discussion of the incomprehensible apathy (incomprehensible if one did
not know the ways of American legislation) which successive Congresses
have shown in the matter.
A year or so back, the nation seemed to have made up its mind in earnest
to take hold of the problem of the restoration of its commercial marine;
but the defeat in the early part of 1907 of the Ship Subsidies Bill left
the situation much where it was when President Grant, President
Harrison, and President McKinley, in turn, attempted to arouse Congress
to the necessity of action; except that with the passage of time
conditions only become worse and reform necessarily more difficult. The
Ship Subsidies Bill was defeated largely by the votes of the
representatives of the Mississippi Valley and the Middle Western States,
and to an outsider the opposition of those regions looked very much
like a manifestation of selfishness and lack of patriotism, on the part
of the inland population jealous of the seaboard States. In the East,
various reasons were given at the time for the failure of the measure. I
happened myself to be travelling then through the States of the
Mississippi Valley, and I discussed the situation with people whom I
met, and particularly with politicians. The explanations which I
received fell into one of two categories. Some said: "It is true that
the Mississippi Valley and the West have little direct interest in our
shipbuilding industry, but none the less we should like to see our
merchant marine encouraged and built up. The trouble is that we have
from experience acquired a profound distrust of a certain 'gang' in the
Senate [and here would often follow the names of certain four or five
well-known Senators, chiefly from the East], and the mere fact that
these Senators were backing this particular bill was enough to convince
us Westerners that it included a 'steal.'"
Others took this ground: "The Mississippi Valley and the West believe in
the general principle of Protection, but we think that our legislation
has carried this principle far enough. We should now prefer to see a
little easing off. We do not believe that the right way to develop our
commercial marine is, first by our tariff laws to make it impossible for
us to build or operate ships in competition with other countries and
then to be obliged, in order to equalise things, to have recourse to
bounties. What we want is a modification of our law which will help us,
in the first instance, to build and to run the ships at a reasonable
price. When a bill to that effect comes along, the Mississippi Valley
will be found all right."
Not a few of the voters in the East, also cordially interested in any
plan that seemed to them promising and equitable for building up the
American commercial marine, took the ground that it was an absurdity to
build up barriers against foreign trade by enacting a tariff bill, such
as the Dingley measure, with higher duties than the country had ever
known, and then to attempt to overcome that barrier by means of bounty
measures, which must themselves constitute a fresh form of taxation on
the general public.
The mass of the people, in fact, are in sympathy with the movement to
encourage American shipping, but, for sectional or other reasons, a
large proportion of them objected to the particular form in which the
end was sought to be reached in the last Congress. So long as the voice
and opinion of Mr. Roosevelt have any weight, it is not to be expected
that the subject is going to be allowed to drop; and with his strength
of will and determination of character it is at least not improbable
that, where successive Presidents before him have failed, he will,
whether still in the Presidential chair or not, ultimately succeed, and
that not the smallest of the reasons for gratitude to him which future
generations of Americans will recognise will be that he helped to
recreate the nation's merchant marine. At present, less than nine
percent of the American foreign commerce is carried in American bottoms,
a situation which is not only sufficiently humiliating to a people who
but a short while ago hoped to dominate the carrying trade of all
countries but also, what perhaps hurts the Americans almost as much as
the injury to their pride, absurdly wasteful and unbusinesslike.
English shipping circles may take the prospect of efforts being made by
the United States to recover some measure of its lost prestige seriously
or not: but it would be inadvisable to admit as a factor in their
calculations any theory as to the inability of the Americans either to
build ships or sail them as well as the best. With the growth of an
American merchant marine--if a growth comes--will come also the obvious
need of a larger navy; and other nations might do well to remember that
Americans have never yet shown any inability to fight their ships, any
more than they have to build or sail them.
In basing any estimate of the fighting strength of the United States on
the figures of her army or navy as they look on paper, the people of
other nations--Englishmen no less than any--leave out of sight, because
they have no standard for measuring, that remarkable attribute of the
American character, which is the greatest of the national assets, the
combination of self-reliance and resourceful ingenuity which seems to
make the individual American equal to almost any fortune. It is
remarkable, but not beyond explanation. It is an essentially Anglo-Saxon
trait. The British have always possessed it in a degree, if inferior to
the present day American, at least in excess of other peoples. The
history of the Empire bears witness to it on every page and it is in
truth one of the most fundamentally English things in the American
character. But the conditions of their life have developed it in
Americans beyond any need which the Englishman has felt. The latter,
living at home amid the established institutions of a society which
moves on its way evenly and without friction regardless of any effort
or action on his part, has had no occasion for those qualities on which
the American's success, his life, have commonly depended from day to day
amid the changing emergencies of a frontier life. The American of any
generation previous to that which is now growing up has seldom known
what it meant to choose a profession or a vocation in life; but must
needs do the work that came to him, and, without apprenticeship or
training, turn to whatever craft has offered.
The notion that every American is, without any special training, by mere
gift of birthright, competent to any task that may be set him, is
commonly said to have come in with Andrew Jackson; and President Eliot,
of Harvard, has dubbed it a "vulgar conceit."[68:1] It is undoubtedly a
dangerous doctrine to become established as a tenet of national belief
and least of all men can the head of a great institution for the
training of the nation's youth afford to encourage it. None the less,
when the American character is compared with that of any European
people, it has, if not justification, at least considerable excuse.
* * * * *
Once into a new mining camp in the West there drove in the same
"stage-coach" two young men who became friends on the journey. Each was
out to seek his fortune and each hoped to find it in the new community.
Each had his belongings in a "valise" and in each "valise" among those
belongings was a "shingle," or name-plate, bearing each the name of its
respective owner followed by the words "Attorney at Law." The young men
compared their shingles and considered. The small camp would not need
two lawyers, even if it would provide a living for one. So they
"matched" coins (the American equivalent of tossing up) to see which of
the two should erase "Attorney at Law" from his sign and substitute
"Doctor of Medicine." Which is history; as also is the following:
In another mining camp, some twenty-three years ago, there was at first
no surveyor. Men paced off the boundaries of their claims and went to
work as fancy inclined them, and in the town which began to grow up
houses were built at random regardless of any street-line and with no
finnicking considerations of a building frontage. So a young fellow
whose claim was unpromising sent out to civilisation for a set of
instruments (he had never seen a transit or a level before) and began
business as a surveyor. He used to come to me secretly that I might
figure out for him the cubic contents of a ditch or the superficial area
of a wall. He could barely write and knew no arithmetic at all; but he
worked most of the night as well as all the day, and when the town took
to itself a form of organised government he was appointed official
surveyor and within a few weeks thereafter was made surveyor to the
county. I doubt not that G---- T---- is rich and prosperous to-day.
On a certain wharf, no matter where, lounged half a dozen seamen when to
them came the owner of a vessel. It was in the days of '49 when anything
that could be made to float was being put into commission in the
California trade, and men who could navigate were scarce.
"Can any of you men" said the newcomer "take a boat out for me to San
Francisco?"
"I'll do it, sir" said one stepping forward.
"Thunder, Bill!" exclaimed a comrade in an undertone, "you don't know
nothing about navigating."
"Shut your mouth," said Bill. "Maybe I don't know nothing now, but you
bet I will by the time I get to 'Frisco."
The same spirit guides almost every young American who drifts West to
tackle hopefully whatever job the gods may send. The cases wherein he
has any destiny marked out for him or any especial preference as to the
lines on which his future career shall run (except that he may hope
ultimately to be President of the United States) are comparatively few.
In ten years, he may be a grocer or a banker or a dry-goods merchant or
a real-estate man or a lawyer. Whatever he is, more likely than not ten
years later he will be something else.
"What is your trade?" is the first question which an Englishman asks of
an applicant for employment; and the answer will probably be truthful
and certainly unimaginative.
"What can you do?" the American enquires under the same circumstances.
"'Most anything. What have you got to do?" is commonly the reply.
It is an extraordinarily impressive experience for an Englishman to go
out from the old-established well-formulated ways of the club-life and
street-life of London, to assist in--not merely to watch but to
co-operate in--the organisation of society in the wilderness: to see a
town grow up--indeed, so far as his clumsy ability in the handling of an
ax will permit, to help to build it; to join the handful of men,
bearded, roughly clad, and unlettered most of them, proceeding
deliberately to the fashioning of the framework of government, the
election of town officers, the appointment of a sheriff, and the
necessary provisions, rough but not inadequate, for dealing with the
grosser forms of crime. Quickly thereafter, in the case which I have
especially in mind, came the formation of the county government and,
simultaneously therewith, the opportunity (automatically and by mere
right of the number of the population) to elect a representative to the
Territorial Legislature. In the first year, however, this last privilege
had to be pretermitted. The Territorial laws required that any member
must have been resident in the district from which he came for not less
than six months prior to his election and must be able to read and
write; and, as cruel chance would have it, among the first prospectors
to find their way into the new diggings in the preceding winter, who
alone could comply with the required term of residence, not one could
write his name. Had but one been able to do it ever so crudely--could
one but have made a reasonable pretence of an ability to stumble through
the opening paragraphs of the Constitution of the United States,--that
man would inevitably and unanimously have been elected a full-blown
Legislator. As it was, the new district was perforce compelled to go
without representation in the Territorial Capital.
"But," it will be objected, and by no one more quickly than by the
American of the Eastern States, "All Americans do not go through these
experiences. How many New Yorkers have helped to organise a new mining
town?" Not many, certainly; and that is one of the reasons why New York
is, perhaps, the least representative section of all the United States.
But though the American of to-day may not have had to do these things,
his father and his grandfather had to. The necessity has long ago left
New York, but Illinois was not far removed from the circumstances of
frontier life when Abraham Lincoln was a youth; and the men who laid the
foundations of Minneapolis, and Kansas City, and Omaha, and Duluth, are
still alive. The frontiersman is latent in every American.
For the benefit of many Englishmen who think that they have been to the
United States, when as a matter of fact they have only been to New York,
it may be as well to explain why New York City is the least typically
American of all parts of the country. There are some who go back as far
as Revolutionary days for the explanation, and point out that even then
New York was more loyalist than patriot; one might go even farther back
and show that New York always had a conspicuously large non-Anglo-Saxon
element. But there is no need to go back even to the Revolution. In the
century that has passed since then, the essential characteristics of the
American character have been the products of the work which the people
had to do in the subduing of the wilderness and of the isolation of the
country--of its segregation from contact with the outside world. New
York has been the one point in America farthest removed from the
wilderness and most in touch with Europe, and it has been there that the
chief forces which have moulded the American character have been least
operative. The things in a New Yorker which are most characteristic of
his New-Yorkship are least characteristically American, and among these
is a much greater friendliness towards Great Britain than is to be found
elsewhere except in one or two towns of specialised traits. This is not
in any way to depreciate the position of New York as the greatest and
most influential city in the United States, as well as (whatever may
have been the relative standing of it and Boston up to twenty years ago)
the literary and artistic centre of the country; and I do not know that
any city of the world has a sight more impressive in its way than
upper-middle New York--that is to say, than Fifth Avenue from Madison
Square to the Park. But the English visitor who acquires his ideas of
American sentiments from what he hears in New York dining-rooms or in
Wall Street offices, is likely to go far astray. There is an
instructive, if hackneyed, story of the little girl whose father boasted
that she had travelled all over the United States. "Dear me!" said the
recipient of the information, "she has travelled a great deal for one of
her age!" "Yes, sir! all over the United States--all, except east of
Chicago."
* * * * *
In the course of a long term of residence in the United States, this
adaptability, this readiness to turn to whatever seems at the time to
offer the best "opening" (which is so conspicuously a national trait but
is not especially noticeable in the typical New Yorker) becomes so
familiar that it ceases to be worth comment. I have seen among my own
friends journalists become hotel managers, advertising solicitors turn
to "real estate agents," merchants translated straight into responsible
positions in the executive departments of railway companies, and railway
men become merchants and bankers, editors change into engineers and
engineers into editors, and lawyers into anything from ambassadors to
hotel clerks. I am not now speaking in praise of these conditions or of
the results in individual cases. The point to be noticed is that the
people among whom these conditions prevail must in the long run develop
into a people of extraordinary resourcefulness and versatility. And in
the individual cases, the results are not nearly as deplorable as an
Englishman might suppose or as they would be if the raw material
consisted of home-staying Englishmen.
The trait however is, as has been said, essentially an Anglo-Saxon
trait--an English trait--and the colonial Englishman develops the same
qualities in a not incomparable degree. The Canadian and the New
Zealander acquire a like unconquerable soul, but the Englishman at home
is not much impressed thereby, chiefly for the reason that he is almost
as ignorant of the Canadian and the New Zealander as he is of the
American, and with the same benevolent ignorance.
In the individual citizen of the United States, he recognises the
quality in a vague way. "Yankee ingenuity" is familiar to him and he is
interested in, and amused at, the imperturbability with which the
individual American--and especially the individual American
woman--confronts and rises at least equal to whatever new and unheard of
conditions he (or she) may find himself (or herself) placed among in
England. But just as the American will not from the likability and
kindliness of individual Englishmen draw any general inference as to the
likability and kindliness of the nation, so the Englishman or other
European rarely gives to these occasional attributes, which he sees
reproduced again and again in particular Americans, their proper value
as the manifestations of a national trait of the first importance, a
trait which makes the people unquestionably formidable as competitors in
peace and would make them correspondingly formidable as antagonists in
war. The trait is, as I have said, perhaps the most precious of all the
American national assets.
Great Britain has recently had abundant evidence of the difficulty of
turning out all the paraphernalia of victory ready made and is now
making earnest effort to guard against the necessity of attempting it
again. But the rules which apply to European peoples do not apply, with
anything like equal force, to America. England in the South African war
found by no means despicable fighting material almost ready made in her
colonial troops; and that same material, certainly not inferior, America
can supply in almost unlimited quantities. From the West and portions of
the South, the United States can at any time draw immense numbers of men
who, in the training of their frontier life, their ability to ride and
shoot, their habituation to privations of every kind, possess all those
qualities which made the Boers formidable, with the better moral fibre
of the Anglo-Saxon to back them.
But this quality of resourcefulness and self-reliance is not a mere
matter of the moral or physical qualities of the individual. Its spirit
permeates the nation as a unit. The machinery of the government will
always move in emergencies more quickly than that of any European
country; and unpreparedness becomes a vastly less serious matter. The
standing army of the United States, in spite of the events of the last
few years, remains little more than a Federal police force; and with no
mercantile marine to protect and no colonies, there has been till lately
no need of an American navy. But the European who measures the
unpreparedness of the nation in the terms of the unpreparedness of his
own, or any other European, country, not taking into account the
colonial character of the population, the alertness and audacity of the
national mind, the resourcefulness and confident self-reliance of the
people, is likely to fall into error.
The reverse of the medal is, perhaps, more familiar to Europeans, under
the form of what has generally been called the characteristic American
lack of the sentiment of reverence. The lack is indubitably there--is
necessarily there; for what the Englishman does not commonly understand
is that that lack is not a positive quality in itself. It is but the
reflection, as it were, or complement, of the national self-reliance.
How should the American in his new country, with his "Particularist"
spirit, his insistence on the independence and sovereignty of the
individual, seem to Europeans other than lacking in reverence?
It is true that now, by mere passage of years, there are monuments in
the United States which are beginning to gather the dignity and respect
which naturally attach to age. The American of the present day has great
veneration for the wisdom of the Fathers of the Republic, much love for
the old buildings which are associated with the birth of the nation.
Even the events of the Civil War are beginning to put on something of
the majesty of antiquity, but there are still alive too many of the
combatants in that war--who are obviously but commonplace men--for the
figures of any but some three or four of the greatest of the actors to
have yet assumed anything like heroic proportions. For the rest, what is
there in the country which the living American has not made himself, or
which his fathers did not make? The fabric of society is of too new a
weaving, he knows too well the trick of it, for it to be wonderful in
his eyes.
Lack of reverence is only a symptom of the American's strength--not
admirable in itself, yet, as the index to something admirable, not,
perhaps, altogether to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack
of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of
imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful.
The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman.
The American national character is, indeed, a finer thing than the
European generally supposes. The latter sees only occasional facets and
angles, offshoots and outgrowths, some of them not desirable but even
grotesque in themselves, while those elements which unify and harmonise
the whole are likely to escape him. The blunders of American
diplomats--the _gaucheries_ and ignorances of American consular
representatives--these are familiar subjects to Europeans; on them many
a travelling Englishman has based his rather contemptuous opinion of the
culture of the American people as a whole. But it is unsafe to argue
from the inferiority of the representative to the inferiority of the
thing represented.
If two fruit-growers have adjoining orchards and, for the purpose of
making a display at an agricultural show, one spends months of careful
nourishing, training, and pruning of certain trees wherefrom he selects
with care the finest of his fruit, while the other without preparation
goes out haphazard to his orchard and reaches for the first fruit that
he sees, it is probable that, judging by their exhibits, the public will
get an erroneous idea of the characters of the orchards as a whole. And
this is precisely the difference between the representatives whom the
United States sends abroad and those sent to be displayed beside them by
other nations.
There is no recognised diplomatic service in the United States, no
school for the training of consular representatives, no training or
nurturing or pruning of any sort. The fundamental objection of the
American people to the creation of any permanent privileged class, has
made the thing impossible in the past, while, under the system of party
patronage, practically the entire representation of the country
abroad--commercial as well as diplomatic--is changed with each change of
government. The American cannot count on holding an appointment abroad
for more than four years; and while four years is altogether too short a
term to be considered a career, it is over-long for a holiday. So in
addition to the lack of any trained class from which to draw, even among
the untrained the choice is much restricted by the undesirability of the
conditions of the service itself.
Though the conditions have improved immensely of late years, the fact
remains that the consular service as a whole is not fairly to be
compared on equal terms with that of other countries; and the majority
of appointments are still made as the reward for minor services to the
party in power. Nor are the conditions which govern the appointments to
the less important diplomatic posts much different; but Great Britain
has abundant cause to be aware that when the place is one which appeals
to the ambition of first-class men, first-class men enough are
forthcoming; though even Ambassadors to London are generally lacking in
any special training or experience up to the time of their appointment.
Sydney Smith's phrase has been often enough quoted--that when a woman
makes a public speech, we admire her as we admire a dog that stands upon
its hind legs, not because she does it well, but because she does it at
all. Congress includes among its members many curious individuals and,
as a unit, it does queer things at times. State legislatures are
sometimes strange looking bodies of men and on occasions they achieve
legislation which moves the country to mirth. The representatives of the
nation abroad make blunders which contribute not a little to the gaiety
of the world. But the thing to admire is that they do these things at
all--that the legislators, whether Federal or State, and the members of
the consular service, appointed or elected as they are, and from the
classes which they represent, do somehow manage to form legislative
bodies which, year in and year out, will bear comparison well enough
with other Parliaments, and do in one way and another succeed in giving
their country a service abroad which is far from despicable as compared
with that of other peoples, nor all devoid of dignity. The fact that
results are not immeasurably worse than they are is no small tribute to
the adaptability of the American character. There is no other national
character which could stand the same test.
In the absence of any especially trained or officially dedicated class,
the American people in the mass provides an amazing quantity of not
impossible material out of which legislators and consuls may be
made--just as it might equally well be made into whatever should happen
to be required.
And this fact strikes at the root of a common misapprehension in the
minds of foreigners as to the constitution of the American people, a
misapprehension which is fostered by what is written by other foreigners
after inadequate observation.
Much is thus written of the so-called heterogeneousness of the people of
America. The Englishman who visits the United States for a few weeks
only, commonly comes away with an idea that the New Yorker is the
American people; whereas we have seen why it is that good American
authorities maintain that in all the width and depth of the continent
there is no aggregation of persons so little representative of the
American people as a whole as the inhabitants of New York. After the
Englishman has been in the United States for some months or a year or
two, he grows bewildered and reaches the conclusion that there is no
common American type--nothing but a patchwork of unassimilated units. In
which conclusion he is just as mistaken as he was at first. There does
exist a clearly defined and homogeneous American type.
Let us suppose that all the negroes had been swept as with some vast net
down and away into the Gulf of Mexico; that the Irishmen had been
gathered out of the cities and deposited back into the Atlantic; that
the Germans had been rounded up towards their fellows in Chicago and
Milwaukee and then tipped gently into Lake Michigan, while the
Scandinavians, having been assembled in Minnesota, had been edged
courteously over the Canadian border;--when all this had been done,
there would still remain the great American People. Of this great People
there would remain certain local variations--in parts of the South, in
New England, on the plains--but each clearly recognisable as a variety
only, differing but superficially and in substance possessing
well-defined all the generic and specific attributes of the race.
If the entire membership of the Chicago Club were to be transferred
bodily to the Manhattan Club-house in New York, and all the members of
the Manhattan were simultaneously made to migrate from Fifth Avenue to
Michigan Avenue, the club servants, beyond missing some familiar faces,
would not find much difference. Could any man, waking from a trance,
tell by the men surrounding him whether he was in the Duquesne Club at
Pittsburgh or the Minnesota Club in St. Paul? And, if it be urged that
the select club-membership represents a small circle of the population
only, would the disturbance be much greater if the entire populations of
Erie and Minneapolis and Kansas City were to execute a three-cornered
"general post" or if Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine, swapped
inhabitants? How long would it take the inhabitants of any one town to
settle down in their new environment and go to work on precisely the
same lines as their predecessors whom they dislodged? The novelty would,
I think, be even less than if Manchester and Birmingham were
miraculously made to execute a similar change in a night.
I do not underrate the magnitude of the problem presented to the people
of America by the immense volume of immigration from alien races, and
chiefly from the most undesirable strata in those races, of the last
few years. On the other hand, I have no shadow of doubt of the ability
of the people to cope with the problem and to succeed in assimilating to
itself all the elements in this great influx while itself remaining
unchanged.
It seems to me that the American himself constantly overestimates the
influence on his national character of the immigration of the past. To
persons living in New York, especially if, from philanthropic motives or
otherwise, they are brought at all into immediate contact with the
incoming hordes as they arrive, this stream of immigration may well be a
terrifying thing. Those who are in daily touch with it can hardly fail
to be oppressed by it, till it gets upon their nerves and breeds
nightmares; and to such I have more than once recommended that they
would do well to take a holiday of six months; journey through the West,
and so come to a realisation of the magnitude of their country and
correct their point of view. With every mile that one recedes from
Castle Garden, the phenomenon grows less appalling: the cloud which was
dense enough to blacken New York harbour makes not a veil to stop one
ray of sunlight when shredded out over the Mississippi Valley and the
Western plains.
A bucket of sewage (or of Eau de Cologne), however formidable in itself,
makes very little difference when tipped into the St. Lawrence River. It
is, of course, a portentous fact that some twenty millions of foreigners
should have come into the country to settle in the course of half a
century; but, after all, the process of assimilation has been
constantly and successfully at work throughout those fifty years, and I
think the figures will show that in no one year (not even in 1906, when
the volume of immigration was the largest and contained the greatest
proportion of the distinctly "undesirable" elements), if we set against
the totals the number of those aliens returning to their own countries
and deduct those who have come from the English-speaking countries, has
the influx amounted to three quarters of one per cent of the entire
population of the country.
So far, the dilution of the original character of the people by the
injection of the foreign elements has been curiously slight, and while
recognising that the inflow of the last few years has been more serious,
both in quantity and character, than at any previous period, there does
not seem to me any reason for questioning the ability of the country to
absorb and assimilate it without any impairment of the fundamental
qualities of the people. That at certain points near the seaboard, or in
places where the newly introduced aliens become congested in masses of
industrial workers, they present a local problem of extreme difficulty
may be granted, but I think that those who are in contact with these
local problems are inclined to exaggerate the general or national
danger. The dominating American type will persist, as it persists
to-day; the people will remain, in all that is essential, an Anglo-Saxon
and a homogeneous people.
In one sense--and that the essential one--the American people is more
homogeneous than the English. What individuals among them may have been
in the last generation does not matter. The point is here:--When one
speaks of the "average Englishman" (as, without regard to grammar, we
persist in doing) what he really means is the typical representative of
a comparatively small section of the population, from the middle, or
upper middle, classes upward. It is the same when one speaks of
Frenchmen. When he says "the average Frenchman dresses," or "thinks," or
"talks" in such and such a way, he merely means that so does the normal
specimen of a class including only a few hundred thousand men, and those
city dwellers, dress or think or speak. The figure is excusable because
(apart from the fact that an "average" of the entire population would be
quite unfindable) the comparatively small class does indeed guide, rule,
and, practically, think for, the whole population. So far as foreign
countries are concerned, they represent the policy and mode of thought
of the nation. The great numerical majority is practically negligible.
The same is true of the people of the United States, but with this
difference, that the class represented by the "average"--the class of
which, when grouped together, it is possible to find a reasonably
typical representative--includes in the United States a vastly larger
proportion of the whole people than is the case in other countries. It
would not be possible to find a common mental or moral divisor for the
members of Parliament in the aggregate, and an equal number of Norfolk
fishermen or Cornish miners. They are not to be stated in common terms.
But no such incongruity exists between the members of Congress, Michigan
lumbermen, and the men of the Texas plains.
It may be that within the smaller circle in England, the
individuals--thanks to the public schools and the universities--are more
nearly identical and the type specimen would more closely represent the
whole. But as soon as we get outside the circle, much greater
divergences appear. The English are _homogeneous_ over a small area: the
Americans _homogeneous_ over a much larger.
"You may go all over the States," said Robert Louis Stevenson (and
Americans will, for love of the man, pardon his calling their country
"the States") "and--setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of
foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese--you shall scarce meet with so
marked a difference of accent as in forty miles between Edinburgh and
Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and
Aberdeen." And Stevenson understates the case. There are differences of
speech in America, but at the most they remain so slight that, after
all, the resident in one section will rather pride himself on his
acuteness in recognising the intonation of the stranger as being that of
some other--of the South, it may be, or of New England. An educated
Londoner has difficulty in understanding even the London cockney.
Suffolk, Cornish, or Lancashire--these are almost foreign tongues to
him. The American of the South has at least no difficulty in
understanding the New Englander: the New Yorker does not have to make
the Californian repeat each sentence that he utters.
And this similarity of tongue--this universal mutual
comprehensibility--is a fact of great importance to the nation. It must
tend to rapidity of communication--to greater uniformity of thought--to
much greater readiness in the people to concentrate as a nation on one
idea or one object. How much does England not lose--there is no way of
measuring, but the amount must be very great--by the fact that
communication of thought is practically impossible between people who
are neighbours? How much would it not contribute to the national
alertness, to national efficiency, if the local dialects could be swept
away and the peasantry and gentry of all England--nay of the British
Isles--talk together easily in one tongue? It is impossible not to
believe that this ease in the interchange of ideas must in itself
contribute greatly to uniformity of thought and character in a people.
Possessing it, it is not easy to see how the American people could have
failed to become more homogeneous than the English.
But there is a deeper reason for their homogeneousness. The American
people is not only an English people; it is much more Anglo-Saxon than
the English themselves. We have already seen how the essential quality
of both peoples is an Anglo-Saxon quality--what has been called (and the
phrase will do as well as any other) their "Particularist" instinct. The
Angles and Saxons (with some modification in the former) were tribes of
individual workers, sprung from the soil, rooted in it, accustomed
always to rely on individual labour and individual impulse rather than
on the initiative, the protection, or the assistance of the State or the
community. The constitutional history of England is little more than the
story of the steps by which the Anglo-Saxon, by the strength which this
quality gave him, came to dominate the other races which invaded or
settled in Britain and finally worked his way up to and through the
Norman crust which, as it were, overlay the country.
In England many institutions are of course Norman. An hereditary
aristocracy, the laws of primogeniture and entail--these are Norman. By
the help of them the Norman hoped to perpetuate his authority over the
Saxon herd; and failed. Magna Charta, Cromwell, the Roundheads, the
Puritans, the spirit of nonconformity, most of the limitations of the
power of the Throne, the industrial and commercial greatness of
Britain--these things are Anglo-Saxon. The American colonists (however
many individuals of Norman blood were among them) were Anglo-Saxon; they
came from the Anglo-Saxon body of the people and carried with them the
Anglo-Saxon spirit. They did not reproduce in their new environment an
hereditary aristocracy, a law of primogeniture or of entail. It is
probable that no single English colony to-day, if suddenly cut loose
from the Empire and left to fashion its form of society anew, would
reproduce any one of these things. In the United States the Anglo-Saxon
spirit went to work without Norman assistance or (as we choose to view
it) Norman encumbrances. The Anglo-Saxon spirit is still working in
England--never perhaps has its operation been more powerfully visible
than in the trend of thought of the last few years. It is working also
in the United States; but, because it there works independently of
Norman traditions, it works faster.
In many things--in almost everything, as we shall see--the two peoples
are progressing along precisely the same path, a path other than that
which other nations are treading. In many things--in almost
everything--the United States moves the more rapidly. It seems at first
a contradiction in terms to say that the Americans are an English people
and then to show that in many individual matters the English people is
approximating to American models. It is in truth no contradiction; and
the explanation is obvious. Both are impelled by the same spirit, the
same motives, the same ambitions; but in England that spirit, those
motives and ambitions work against greater resistance.
What looks at first like a peculiar departure on the part of the
American people will again and again, on investigation, be found to be
only the English spirit shooting ahead faster than it can advance in
England. When, in a particular matter, it appears as if England was
coming to conform to American precedent, it is, in truth only that,
having given the impulse to America, she herself is following with less
speed than the younger runner, but with such speed as she can.
If we bear this fact in mind we shall see how it is illustrated, borne
out, supported by a score of things that it falls in our way to notice;
as it is by many hundred things that lie outside our present province.
* * * * *
We shall have occasion to notice hereafter how in the past the American
disposition to dislike England has been fed by the headlong and
superficial criticism of American affairs by English "literary"
visitors; and it is unfortunate that the latest[88:1] English visitor to
write on the United States has hurt American susceptibilities almost as
keenly as any of his predecessors. With all its brilliant qualities, few
more superficial "studies" of American affairs have been given to the
world than that of Mr. H. G. Wells.
Mr. Wells, by his own account, went about the country confronting all
comers with the questions, "What are you going to make of your future?"
. . . "What is the American Utopia, how much Will is there shaping to
attain it?" This, he says, was the conundrum to find an answer to which
he crossed the Atlantic, and he is much depressed because he failed in
his search. "When one talks to an American of his national purpose he
seems a little at a loss"; and when he comes to sum up his conclusions:
"What seems to me the most significant and pregnant thing of all is
. . . best indicated by saying that the typical American has no 'sense
of the State.'"[89:1]
Has Mr. Wells ever gone about England asking Englishmen the same
question: "What are you going to make of your future?" How much less "at
a loss" does he anticipate that he would find them? Mr. Wells apparently
expected to find every American with a card in his vest pocket
containing a complete scheme of an American Utopia. He was disappointed
because the government at Washington was not inviting bids for roofing
in the country and laying the portion north of Mason and Dixon's Line
with hot-water pipes.
The quality which Mr. Wells--seeing only its individual manifestations,
quite baffled and unable to look beyond the individuals to any vision of
the people as a whole (he travelled over a ludicrously small portion of
the country)--sums up as a "lack of sense of the State" is in truth the
cardinal quality which has made the greatness of the United States--and
of England. It is precisely because the peoples rely on individual
effort and not on the State that they have become greater than all
other peoples. That is their peculiar political excellence--that they
are not for ever framing schemes for a paternal all-embracing State, but
are content to work each in his own sphere, asserting his own
independence and individuality, from the things as they are, little by
little towards the things as they ought to be.
If Mr. Wells had prevailed on any typical American to sit down and write
what, as he understood it, his people were working to accomplish, the
latter would have written something like this:
"We have got the basis of a form of government under which, when
perfected, the individual will have larger liberty and better
opportunity to assert himself than he has ever had in any country since
organised states have existed. We have a people which enjoys to-day more
of the material comforts of life than any other people on earth, and the
chief political problem with which we are wrestling to-day is to see
that that enjoyment is confirmed to them in perpetuity--not taken from
them or hampered or limited by any power of an oppressive capitalism. We
are spending more money, more energy, more earnest thought on the study
of education as a science or art and on the endowment of educational
establishments than any other people; as a result we hope that the next
generation of Americans, besides being the most materially blessed, will
be the most educated and intelligent of peoples. We are doing all we can
to weed out dishonesty from our commercial dealings. In the period of
our growth there was necessarily some laxity in our business ethics, but
we are doing the best we know how to improve that, and we believe that
on the whole our methods of doing business are calculated to produce
more honest men than those in vogue in other countries. What we hope to
make of our future therefore is to produce a nation of individuals
freer, better off, and more honest than the world has yet seen. When
that people comes it can manage its own government."
Not only are these, I fear, larger national aims than the average
Englishman dares to propose to himself, but they are, I venture to say,
much more definitely formulated in the "typical American's" mind. If Mr.
Wells desires to find a people which considers it the duty of good
citizenship to go about to fashion first the roofs and walls, rafters,
cornices, and chimney-pots of a governmental structure, relying on the
State afterwards to legislate comfort and culture and virtue into the
people, he visited the wrong quarter of the globe. In the Latin races he
will find the "sense of the State" luxuriantly developed.
Mr. Wells appears infinitely distressed by his failure to find any
unified national feeling in the American people--by "the chaotic
condition of the American Will"--by "the dispersal of power"--by the
fact that "Americans knew of America mainly as the Flag." Which is a
most curiously complete demonstration of the inadequacy of his judgment.
If Mr. Wells had seen the United States twenty-five years ago, ten years
ago, and five years ago, before his present visit, the one thing that
would have most impressed him would have been the amazing growth of the
sense of national unity. Mr. Wells looks superficially upon the country
as it is to-day and finds society more chaotic, distances larger,
sentiment less crystallised than--_mirabile!_--in the older countries of
Europe, and is plunged in despair. Had he had any knowledge of
America's past conditions by which to measure the momentary phase in
which he found the people, he would have known that exactly that thing
of which he most deplores the absence is the thing which, in the last
thirty years, has grown with more wonderful rapidity than anything else
in all this country of wonderful growths.
The mere fact of this development of national feeling is a thing which
will necessarily call for attention as we go on; for the present it is
enough to say that Mr. Wells could hardly have exposed more calamitously
the superficial and cursory quality of his "study" of the country.[92:1]
As a man may not be able to see the forest because of the trees, so Mr.
Wells is as one who has stood by a great river's bank for a few minutes
and has not seen the river for the flash of the ripples in the sun, the
swirl of an eddy here and there, the flotsam swinging by on the current;
and he has gone away and prattled of the ripples and the eddy and the
floating branch. The great flow of the river down below does not expose
itself to the vision of three minutes. He only comes to understand it
who lives by the river for awhile, sits down by it and studies it--sees
it in flood and drought--swims in it, bathes in it. Then he will forget
the ripples and the branches and will come to know something of the
steadiness of purpose, the depth and strength of it, its unity and its
power. Nothing but a little more experience would enable Mr. Wells to
see the national feeling of the American people.
Literature contains few pictures more delightful than that of Mr. Wells,
drawn by himself, standing with Mr. Putnam--Herbert Putnam of all
people!--in the Congressional Library at Washington and saying (let me
quote): "'With all this,' I asked him 'why doesn't the place _think_?'
He seemed, discreetly, to consider it did."
Mr. Putnam is fortunately always discreet. Otherwise it would be
pleasant to know what _he_ thought--of his questioner.
_Note._--On the subject of the homogeneousness of the American
people, see Appendix A.
FOOTNOTES:
[60:1] As a statement of this nature is always liable to be challenged
let me say that it is based on the opinions expressed in conversation by
the correspondents of English papers who came to America at that time in
an endeavour to reach Cuba. They certainly did not anticipate that the
American fleet would be able to stand against the Spanish. And, lest
American readers should be in danger of taking offence at this, let it
be remembered with how much apprehension the arrival of Admiral
Cervera's ships was awaited along the eastern coast and how cheaply
excellent seaside houses were to be acquired that year. Events have
moved so rapidly since then (above all has the position of the United
States in the world changed so much) that it is not easy now to conjure
up the circumstances and sentiments of those days. If Americans
generally erred as widely as they did in their estimate of the Spanish
sea-power as compared with their own, it is not surprising that
Englishmen erred perhaps a little more.
[68:1] _History of the United States_, by James Ford Rhodes, vol. vi.
[88:1] Mr. Crosland has written since; but he has fortunately not been
taken sufficiently seriously by the American people even to cause them
annoyance.
[89:1] _The Future in America_, by H. G. Wells, 1906.
[92:1] The futility of this kind of impressionist criticism is well
illustrated by the fact that almost simultaneously with the appearance
of Mr. Wells' book, a distinguished Canadian (Mr. Wilfred Campbell) was
recording his impressions of a visit to England and said: "The people of
Britain leave national and social affairs too much in the hands of such
men [professional politicians]. There is a sad lack of the education of
the people in the direction of a common patriotism. . . . She must get
back to the sane idea that it is only as a nation and through the
national ideal that she can help humanity. . . . She has great men in
all walks of life; she has still the highest-toned Press in the world;
she has . . . the most ideal legislature, she has great universities and
churches with the finest and greatest Christian ideals. But none of
these influences are used, as they should be, for the general national
good. They work separately, or too much as individuals. It is only the
leavening of these institutions with a large spirit of the national
destiny that will lift Britain . . . out of its present material
slough." (_The Outlook_, November 17, 1906.) These words are almost a
paraphrase of Mr. Wells' indictment of the United States.