ENGLISH AND AMERICAN EDUCATION
The Rhodes Scholarships--"Pullulating Colleges"--Are American
Universities Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?--Other Educational
Forces--The Postal Laws--Ten-cent Magazines and Cheap Books--
Pigs in Chicago--The Press of England and America Compared--
Mixed Society--Educated Women--Generals as Booksellers--And as
Farmhands--The Value of War to a People.
It may be presumed that when Cecil Rhodes conceived the idea of
establishing the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford, it did not occur to him
that Americans might not care to come to Oxford--might think their own
universities superior to the English. Nor is it likely that there will
in the immediate future be any dearth of students anxious to take those
scholarships, for the mere selection has a certain amount of _kudos_
attaching to it and, at worst, the residence abroad should be of
advantage to any young American not destined to plunge at once into a
business life. If it were a mere question of the education to be
received, it is much to be feared that the great majority of Americans,
unless quite unable to attend one of their own universities, would
politely decline to come to England. At the time when the terms of the
will were made public, a good many unpleasant things were said in the
American press; and it was only the admiration of Americans for Mr.
Rhodes (who appealed to their imagination as no other Englishman,
except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, has appealed in the last fifty years),
coupled with the fact that he was dead, that prevented the foundation of
the scholarships from being greeted with resentment rather than
gratitude.
There was a time, of course, when the name of Oxford sounded very large
in American ears; and it will probably be a surprise to Englishmen to be
told that to-day the great majority of Americans would place not only
Harvard and Yale, but probably also several other American universities,
ahead of either Oxford or Cambridge. Nor is this the opinion only of the
ignorant. Trained educational authorities who come from the United
States to Europe to study the methods of higher education in the various
countries, seldom hesitate to say that the education to be obtained at
many of the minor Western colleges in America is fully as good as that
offered by either of the great English universities, while that of
Harvard and Yale is far superior to it.[167:1] And it must be remembered
that education itself, as an art, is incomparably more studied, and more
systematically studied in America than in England.
Matthew Arnold spoke of the "pullulating colleges and universities" of
America--"the multitude of institutions the promoters of which delude
themselves by taking seriously, but which no serious man can so take";
and he would be surprised to see to what purpose some of those
institutions have "pullulated" in the eighteen years that have passed
since he wrote--to note into what lusty and umbrageous plants have grown
such institutions as the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, though
one of those is further west by some distance than he ever penetrated.
That these or any other colleges have more students than either Oxford
or Cambridge need not mean much; and they cannot of course acquire in
twenty years the old, history-saturated atmosphere. Against that are to
be set the facts that the students undoubtedly work, on the average,
much harder than do English undergraduates and that the teaching staffs
are possessed of an enthusiasm, an earnestness, a determination not
merely to fill chairs but to get results, which would be almost "bad
form" in some Common (or Combination) Rooms in England. Wealth,
moreover, and magnificence of endowment can go a considerable way
towards even the creation of an atmosphere--not the same atmosphere as
that of Oxford or Cambridge, it is true; for no money can make another
Addison's Walk out of Prairie Avenue, or convert the Mississippi by St.
Anthony's Falls into new "Backs."
"We may build ourselves more gorgeous habitations,
Fill our rooms with painting and with sculpture,
We cannot buy with gold the old associations----."
But an atmosphere may be created wholly scholastic, and well calculated
to excite emulation and inspire the ambition of youths.
Nor is it by any means certain that the American people would desire to
create the atmosphere of an old-world university if they could. The
atmosphere of Oxford produces, as none other could, certain qualities;
but are they the qualities which, if England were starting to make her
universities anew, she would set in the forefront of her
endeavour?[169:1] Are they really the qualities most desirable even in
an Englishman to-day? Are they approximately the qualities most likely
to equip a man to play the noblest part in the life of modern America?
The majority of American educators would answer unhesitatingly in the
negative. There are things attaching to Oxford and Cambridge which they
would dearly love to be able to transplant to their own country, but
which, they recognise, nothing but the passage of the centuries can
give. Those things are unattainable; and, frankly, if they could only be
attained by transplanting with them many other attributes of English
university life, they would rather forego them altogether.
What Englishmen most value in their universities is not any
book-learning which is to be acquired thereat, so much as the manners
and rules for the conduct of life which are supposed to be imparted in a
university course,--manners and rules which are of an essentially
aristocratic tendency. Without wishing to push a point too far, it is
worth noting that that aristocratic tendency is purely Norman, quite out
of harmony with the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon. It would never occur to
an Anglo-Saxon, pure and simple, to make his university anything else
than an institution for scholastic training, in which every individual
should be taught as much, and as equally, as possible. The last thing
that would occur to him would be to make it a weapon of aristocracy or
an institution for perpetuating class distinctions. The aim and effect
of the English universities in the past has been chiefly to keep the
upper classes uppermost.
That there are too many "universities" in America no one--least of all
an educated American--denies; but with the vast distances and immense
population of the country there is room for, perhaps, more than Matthew
Arnold eighteen years ago could have foreseen, and not a few of those
establishments which in his day he would doubtless have unhesitatingly
classed among those which could not be taken seriously, have more than
justified their existence.
To the superiority of the American public school system over the
English, considered merely as an instrumentality for the general
education of the masses of a people, and not for the production of any
especially privileged or cultivated class, is generally ascribed the
confessedly higher average of intelligence and capacity among (to use a
phrase which is ostensibly meaningless in America) the lower orders. But
the educational system of the country has been by no means the only
factor in producing this result; and it may be worth while merely as a
matter of record, and not without interest to American readers, to note
what some of those other factors have been during the last twenty
years--factors so temporary and so elusive that even now they are in
danger of being forgotten.
First among these factors I would set the American postal laws, an
essential feature of which is the extraordinarily low rates at which
periodical literature may be transmitted. A magazine which may be sent
to any place in the United States for from an eighth of a penny to a
farthing, according to its weight, will cost for postage in England from
two-pence-halfpenny to fourpence. It is not the mere difference in cost
of the postage to the subscriber that counts, but the low American rate
has permitted the adoption by the publishers of a system impossible to
English magazine-makers, a system which has had the effect of making
magazines, at least as good as the English sixpenny monthlies, the
staple reading matter of whole classes of the population, the classes
corresponding to which in England never read anything but a local
weekly, or halfpenny daily, paper. It might be that the reading matter
of a magazine would not be much superior to that of a small weekly
paper. But at least it encourages somewhat more sustained reading and,
what is the great fact, it accustoms the reader to handling something
_in the form of a book_. That is the virtue. A people weaned from the
broad-sheets by magazines readily takes next to book-reading.
Moreover, under the American plan, books themselves, if issued
periodically, used to have the same postal advantages as the
magazines.[171:1] A so-called "library" of the classical English,
writers could be published at the rate of a book a month, call itself a
periodical, and be sent through the post in precisely the same way. The
works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, or anybody else could be published
in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly parts. If in monthly parts at
sixpence, the cost to the subscriber would be practically the same as
that of a monthly magazine, only that the reader would accumulate at the
rate of twelve volumes a year--and read at the rate of one a month--the
works of Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Of course much worthless
literature, fiction of the trashiest, has been circulated in the same
way--much more perhaps than of the better class. But even so, the
reading matter was superior to that previously accessible, and the vital
fact still remains that the people acquired the habit of book-reading.
In America, the part thus played by some of the periodical libraries was
of much importance, but it was probably not comparable to the influence
of the ten-cent magazine. In the United States itself, the immense
beneficence of that influence has hardly been appreciated. The magazines
came into vogue, and the people accepted the fact as they accept the
popularity of a new form of "breakfast food." The quickening of the
national intelligence which resulted was no more immediate, no more
readily traceable or conspicuous to the public eye, than would be the
improvement in the national stamina which might result from the
introduction of some new article of diet. A change which takes five or
ten years to work itself out is lost sight of, becomes invisible, amid
the jostling activities of a national life like the American. Moreover,
several causes were contributing to the same end and, had any one
stopped to endeavour to do it, it would not have been at any time easy
to unravel the threads and show what proportion of the fabric was woven
by each; but if it had been possible to affix an intellect-meter to the
aggregate brain of the American people during the last twenty years, of
such ingenious mechanism that it would have shown not only what the
increase in total mental power had been but also what proportions of
that increase were ascribable to the various contributing
causes--education, colonial expansion, commercial growth, ten-cent
magazines, and so forth--and if, further, the "readings" of that meter
could be interpreted into terms of increase in national energy, national
productiveness, national success, I do not think that Parliament would
lose one unnecessary day in passing the legislation necessary to reform
the English postal laws.
* * * * *
One other point is worth dwelling upon--equally trivial in seeming,
equally important in its essence--which is the selling of books by the
great department stores, the big general shops, in America. Taking all
classes of the British population together and both sexes--artisans and
their wives, peasants in country districts, slum residents in London and
other large cities,--what proportion of the population of the British
Isles do of set purpose go into a bookseller's shop once a year or once
in their lives? Is it ten per cent.--or five per cent.--or two per
cent.? The exact proportion is immaterial; but the number must be very
small. In America some years ago, the owners of department stores and
publishers found that there was considerable profit to be made in the
handling of books--cheap reprints of good books in particular. The
combined booksellers' and stationers' shops in the cities of the United
States are in themselves more frequent and more attractive than in
England: and I am going back to the days before the drug-store library
which is as yet too recent an institution to have had an easily
measurable influence. But incomparably more influential than these, in
bringing the multitude in immediate contact with literature, have been
the department stores, of almost every one of which the "book and
stationery" department is a conspicuously attractive, and generally most
profitable, feature. Here every man or woman who goes to do any shopping
is brought immediately within range of the temptation to buy books--is
involuntarily seduced into a bookshop where the wares are temptingly
displayed and artfully pressed on the attention of customers. New books
of all kinds are sold at the best possible discount; but what was of
chief importance was the institution of the cheap libraries of the
"Classics"--tables heaped with them in paper at fourpence, piles of them
shoulder high in cloth at ninepence, shelves laden with them in
glittering backs and by no means despicable in typography at one and
sevenpence. Thus simultaneously with the inculcation of the book-reading
habit by the magazines came the facility for book-buying, and, always
remembering the difference in the scale of prices in the two countries,
it was easy for the woman doing her household shopping to fall a victim
to the importunities of the salesman and lavish an extra eighteen or
thirty-eight cents on a copy of _The Scarlet Letter_ or _Ivanhoe_,
Irving's _Alhambra_, or _Bleak House_, to take home as a surprise. In
this way, whole classes in America, the English counterparts of which
rarely read anything more formidable than a penny paper, acquired the
habit of book-buying and the ambition to form a small library. The
benefit to the people cannot be computed.
Incidentally, as we know, not a little injustice was done to English
authors by the pirating of their books, without recompense, while the
copyright still lived. It was after I went to America, though I had
heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford, that I first read _Fors Clavigera_ and
_Sesame and Lilies_ in Lovell's Library, at five-pence a volume, and,
about the same time, Tolstoi's _War and Peace_ in the _Franklin Square
Library_, at the same price. Of older works, I can still remember Lamb
and part of De Quincey, _Don Quixote_ and _Rasselas_ (those four for
some reason stand out in my mind from their fellows in the row), all
bought for the modest ten-cent piece per volume--the price of two daily
newspapers (for all newspapers in America then cost five cents) or one
blacking of one's shoes. Much has, of course, been done of late years in
England in popularising the "Classics" in the form of cheap libraries;
but the facilities for buying the books--or rather the temptations to do
so--are incomparably less, while the relative prices remain higher.
Even at fourpence halfpenny (supposing them to be purchasable at the
price) Lamb's Essays still cost more in London than a drink of whiskey.
In America, more than twenty years ago, the whiskey cost half as much
again as the book.
All of which is in the nature of a digression, but it has not led us far
from the main road, for the object that I am aiming at is to convey to
the English reader some idea of what the forces are which are at work on
the education of the American people. The Englishman generally knows
that in the United States there is nothing analogous to the great public
schools of England--Winchester, Westminster, Eton, and the rest--and
that they have a host of more or less absurd universities in no way to
be compared to Oxford or Cambridge. The American, as has been said,
challenges the latter statement bluntly; while, as for the public
schools, he maintains that it is not the American ideal (if he wished to
fortify his position, he might say it was not an Anglo-Saxon ideal) to
produce a limited privileged and cultivated class, but that the aim is
to educate the whole nation to the highest level; that, barring such
qualities as their mere selectness may enable the great English schools
to give to their pupils, the national high schools of America do, as a
matter of fact, prepare pupils just as efficiently for the university as
do the English institutions, while the great system of common schools
secures for the mass of the people a much better education than is given
in England to the same classes. Added to which, various other causes
co-operate with the avowedly educational instrumentalities to produce a
higher level of intellectual alertness and a more general love of
reading in the people.
And what is the result? Is the American people as well educated or as
well informed or as well cultivated as the English? To endeavour to
make a comparison between the two is to traverse a very morass, full of
holes, swamps, sloughs, creeks, inlets, quicksands, and pitfalls of
divers and terrifying natures. If it is to be threaded at all, it must
be only with the greatest caution and, at times, indirectness.
* * * * *
The charming English writer, the author of _Sinners and Saints_,
affected, on alighting from the train in the railway station at Chicago,
to be immensely surprised by the fact that there was not a pig in sight.
"I had thought," he said, "Chicago was all pigs." There are a good many
English still of the same opinion.
The one institution in any country of which the foreigner sees most, and
by which perhaps every people is, if unwittingly, most commonly judged
by other peoples, is its press; and it is difficult for a superficial
observer to believe that the nation which produces the newspapers of
America is either an educated or a cultivated nation. Max O'Rell's
comment on the American press is delightful: "Beyond the date, few
statements are reliable." Matthew Arnold called the American newspapers
"an awful symptom"--"the worst features in the life of the United
States." Americans also--the best Americans--have a great dislike of the
London papers.
The fact is that merely as newspapers (as gatherers of news) the
American papers are probably the best in the world. What repels the
Englishman is primarily the form in which the news is dressed--the
loudness, the sensationalism but if he can overcome his repugnance to
these things sufficiently to be able to judge the paper as a whole, he
will find, apart from the amazing quantity of "news" which it contains,
a large amount of literary matter of a high order. I am not for one
moment claiming that the American paper (not the worst and loudest,
which are contemptible, nor the best, which are almost as
non-sensational as the best London papers, but the average American
daily paper) is, or ought to be, as acceptable reading to a cultivated
man--still less to a refined woman--as almost any one of the penny, or
some halfpenny, London papers. But the point that I would make and which
I would insist on very earnestly is that the two do not stand for the
same thing in relation to the peoples which they respectively represent.
We have seen the same thing before in comparing the consular and
diplomatic services of the two countries. Just as in the United States
the consuls are plucked at random from the body of the people, whereas
in England they are a carefully selected and thoroughly trained class by
themselves, so the press of the United States represents the people in
its entirety, whereas the English press represents only the educated
class. The London papers (I am omitting consideration of certain
halfpenny papers) are not talking for the people as a whole, nor to the
people as a whole. Consciously or unconsciously they are addressing
themselves always to the comparatively small circle of the educated
class. When they speak of the peasant or the working man, even of the
tradesman, they discuss him as a third person: it is not to him that
they are talking. They use a language which is not his language; they
assume in their reader information, sentiments, modes of thought, which
belong not to him, but only to the educated class--that class which,
whether each individual thereof has been to a public school and a
university or not, is saturated with the public school and university
traditions.
It was said before that the English people has a disposition to be
guided by the voice of authority--to follow its leaders--as the American
people has not. The English newspaper speaks to the educated class,
trusting, not always with justification, that opinion once formulated in
that class will be communicated downwards and accepted by the people.
The American newspaper endeavours to speak to the people direct.
That English papers are immensely more democratic than once they were
goes without saying. A man need not be much past middle age to be able
to remember when the _Daily Telegraph_ created, by appealing to, a whole
new stratum of newspaper readers. The same thing has been done again
more recently by the halfpenny papers, some of which come approximately
near to being adapted to the intelligences, and representing the tastes,
of the whole population, or at least the urban population, down to the
lowest grade. But it is not by those papers that England would like to
be judged. Yet when Englishmen draw inferences about the American people
from the papers which they see, they are doing what is intrinsically as
unjust. It would be no less unjust to take the first hundred men that
one met with, on Broadway or State Street, and compare them--their
intellectuality and culture--with one hundred members of the London
university clubs.
Let us also remember here what was said of the Anglo-Saxon spirit--that
spirit which is so essentially non-aristocratic, holding all men equal
in their independence. We have seen how this spirit is more untrammelled
and works faster in the United States than in England; but where, in
any case, it has moved ahead among Americans the tendency in England
generally is to follow in the same lines, not in imitation of America
but by the impulse of the common genius of the peoples.
The American dailies, even the leading dailies, are made practically for
those hundred men on Broadway; the London penny papers are addressed in
the main to the university class. Judging from the present trend of
events in England it may not be altogether chimerical to imagine a time
when in London only two or three papers will hold to the class tradition
and will still speak exclusively in the language of the upper classes
(as a small number of papers in New York do to-day), while the great
body of the English press will have followed the course of the American
publishers; and when the English papers are frankly adapted to the
tastes and intelligence of as large a proportion of the English people
as are now catered for by the majority of the American papers, he would
be a rash Englishman whose patriotism would persuade him to prophesy
that the London papers would be any more scholarly, more refined, or
more chastened in tone than are the papers of New York or Chicago.
And while the Englishman is generally ready to draw unfavourable
inferences from the undeniably unpleasant features of the majority of
American daily papers, he seldom stops to draw analogous inferences from
a comparison of the American and English monthly magazines. Great
Britain produces no magazines to compare with _Harper's_, _The Century_,
or _Scribner's_. Those three magazines combined have, I believe, a
number of readers in the United States equalling the aggregate
circulation of the London penny dailies; which is a point that is worth
consideration. When, moreover, the cheaper magazines became a
possibility, how came it that such publications as _McClure's_ and _The
Cosmopolitan_ arose? The illustrated magazines of the United States are
indeed a fact of profound significance, for which the Englishman when he
measures the taste and intellectuality of the American people by its
press makes no allowance. Magazines of the same excellence cannot find
the same support in England. At least two earnest attempts have been
made in late years to establish English monthlies which would compare
with any of the three first mentioned above, and both attempts have
failed.
What has been said about the much more representative character of the
American daily press--the fact that the same papers are read by a vastly
larger proportion of the population--brings us face to face with a
root-fact which vitiates almost any attempt at a rough and ready
comparison between the peoples. In America, there exist the counterparts
of every class of man who is to be found in England--men as refined, men
no less crass and brutal--some as vulgar and some as full of the pride
of birth. Most Englishmen will be surprised to hear that the American,
democrat though he is, is as a rule more proud of an ancestor who fought
in the Revolutionary War than is an Englishman of one who fought in the
Wars of the Roses. I am sure that he sets more store by a direct and
authentic descent from one of the company of the _Mayflower_ than the
Englishman does by an equally direct and authentic line back to the days
of William the Conqueror. Incidentally it may be said that the American
will talk more about it. But while in America all classes exist, they
are not fenced apart, as in England, in fact any more than they are in
theory. The American people (_pace_ the leaders of the New York Four
Hundred) "comes mixed"; dip in where you will and you bring up all sorts
of fish. In England if you go into educated society, you are likely to
meet almost exclusively educated people--or at least people with the
stamp of educated manners. Sir Gorgius Midas is not of course inexorably
barred from the society of duchesses. Her Grace of Pentonville must have
met him frequently. But in America the duchesses have to rub shoulders
with him every day. And--which is worth noting--their husbands also rub
shoulders with his wife.
* * * * *
Which brings us to the second root-fact, which is almost as disturbing
and confounding to casual observation as the first, namely, the much
larger part in the intellectual life of the country played by women in
America. Intellectuality or culture in its narrower sense--meaning a
familiarity with art and letters--is not commonly regarded by Englishmen
as an essential possession in a wife. The lack of it is certainly not
considered by the American woman a cardinal offence in a husband. I know
many American men who, on being consulted on any matter of literary or
artistic taste, say at once: "I don't know. I leave all that to my
wife."
An Englishman in an English house, looking at the family portraits, may
ask his hostess who painted a certain picture.
"I don't know," she will say, "I must ask my husband. Will, who is the
portrait of your grandfather by--the one over there in his robes?"
"Raeburn," says Will.
"Of course," says the wife. "I never can remember the artists' names;
they are so confusing--especially the English ones."
The Englishman thinks no worse of her; but the American woman,
listening, wishes that she had a portrait of her husband's grandfather
by Raeburn and opines that she would know the artist's name.
The same Englishman goes to America and, being entertained, asks a
similar question of his host.
"I don't know," says the man, "I must ask my wife. Mary, who painted
that picture over there--the big tree and the blue sky?"
"Rousseau," says Mary.
"Of course," says the husband. "I never can remember the names of these
fellows. They mix me all up--especially the French ones."
And the Englishman returning home tells his friends of the queer fellow
with whom he dined over there--"an awfully good chap, you know"--who
owned all sorts of jolly paintings--Rousseaux and things--and did not
even know the names of the artists: "Had to ask his wife, by Jove!"
It is not for one moment claimed that there are not in England many
women fully as cultured as the most cultured and fairest Americans; that
there are not many Englishwomen much better informed, much more widely
read, than their husbands. The phenomenon, however, is not nearly as
common as in America, where, it has already been suggested, it is
probably the result of the fact that the women have at the outset
received precisely the same education as the men and, since leaving
school or college, have had more leisure, being less engrossed in
business and material things.
But this feminine predominance in matters of aesthetics in the United
States does not as a rule increase the Englishman's opinion of the
intellectuality or culture of the people as a whole. He still judges
only by the men. Indeed, he is not entirely disposed to like so much
intellectuality in women--such interest in politics, educational
matters, art, and literature. Not having been accustomed to it he rather
disapproves of it. Blue regimentals are only fit for the blue horse or
the artillery.
The Englishman in an American house meets a man more rough and less
polished than a man holding a similar position in society would be in
England; and he thinks poorly of American society in consequence. He
also meets that man's wife, who shows a familiarity with art, letters,
and public affairs vastly more comprehensive than he would expect to
find in a woman of similar position in England. But he does not
therefore strike a balance and re-cast his estimate of American society,
any more than in his estimate of the American press he makes allowance
for the American magazines. He only thinks that the woman's knowledge is
rather out of place and conjectures it to be probably superficial.
Wherein he is no less one-sided in his prejudice than the American who
will not believe in English humour because he cannot understand it.
Philistinism is undoubtedly more on the surface in educated society in
the United States than in Great Britain; but in England outside that
society it is nearly all Philistinism. Step down from a social class in
England, and you come to a new and lower level of refinement and
information. In America the people still "come mixed."
Twenty-five years ago in England, you did not expect a stock-broker, and
to-day you do not expect a haberdasher (even though he may have been
knighted), to know whether Botticelli is a wine or a cheese. In America,
because the Englishman meets that stock-broker or that haberdasher in a
society in which he would not be likely to meet him in England, he does
expect him to know; and I suspect that if a census were taken there
would be found more stock-brokers and haberdashers in America than in
England who do know something of Botticelli. I am quite certain that
more of their wives do. Matthew Arnold spoke not too pleasantly of the
curious sensation that he experienced in addressing a bookseller in
America as "General." The "bookseller" in question was a man widely
respected in the United States, the head of a great house of publishers
and booksellers, a conspicuously public-spirited citizen, and a _bona
fide_ General who saw stern service in the Civil War. To Englishmen,
knowing nothing of the background, the mere fact as stated by Matthew
Arnold is curious.
But if civil war were to break out in Great Britain--England and Wales
against Scotland and Ireland--and the conflict assumed such titanic
proportions that single armies of a million men took the field, then
would Tennyson's "smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue" indeed have to "leap
from his counter and till and strike, were it but with his cheating
yard-wand, home." The entire population of England that was not
actually needed at home would be compelled to take the field, and in the
slaughter (it is curious how little English men know of the terrific
proportions of the conflict between the North and South) the demand for
officers would be so great that there would not be enough men of
previous training to fill the places. Men would rise from the ranks by
merit and among those who rose to be generals there might well be a
publisher or bookseller or two. On the termination of the war, the
soldiers would turn from their soldiering to their old trades and it
might be General Murray or General Macmillan or General Bumpus; and the
thing would not then be strange to English ears.
An American story tells how, soon after the close of the Civil War, a
stranger asked a farmer if he needed any labourers; and the farmer
replied in the negative. He had just taken on three new ones, he said,
all of them disbanded soldiers. One, he added, had been a private, one a
captain, and one a full-blown colonel.
"And how do you find them?" asked the other.
"The private's a first-class workman," said the farmer, "and the captain
he isn't bad."
"And the colonel?"
"Well, I don't want to say nothing agin a man as fit as a colonel in the
war," said the farmer, "but I know I ain't hiring no brigadier-generals
if they come this way."
They are growing old now, and fewer, the men who held commissions in the
war that ended over forty years ago; but during those forty years there
has been no community, no trade or profession or calling, in which they
have not been to be found, indistinguishable from their civilian
colleagues, except by the tiny button in the lapels of their coats.
Until Mr. Roosevelt, (and he won his spurs in another war) there has
been no man elected President of the United States, except Mr.
Cleveland, the one Democrat, who had not a distinguished record as an
officer in the Union armies--Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and
McKinley were all soldiers. You may still see that little button in many
pulpits. Farmers wear it, and cabinet ministers, millionaires, and
mechanics.
The Anglo-Saxon is a fighting breed. The population of the British Isles
sprang from the loins of successive waves of fighting men. It was not
the weaklings of the Danes or Normans, Jutes, Saxons, or Angles who came
to conquer Britain, but the bold, the hardy, the venturesome of each
tribe or people. It was not the mere mixture of bloods that made the
English character what it was, the race a race of empire builders; it
was because of each blood there came to Britain only of the most
adventurous. And through the centuries it has been the constant stress
and training of the perpetual turmoil in which the people have lived
that have kept the stock from degeneration. There has never been a time
in English history, save when the people have been struggling in wars
among themselves, when there has been an English family that has not at
any given moment had sons or fathers, uncles or cousins out somewhere
doing the work of the Empire.
And some are drowned in deep water,
And some in sight of shore,
And word goes back to the weary wife
And ever she sends more.
For since that wife had gate or gear
And hearth and garth and bield
She willed her sons to the white Harvest,
And that is a bitter yield.
. . . . . . .
The good wife's sons come home again
With little into their hands,
But the lore o' men that ha' dealt wi' men
In the new and naked lands,
But the faith o' men that ha' brothered men
By more than the easy breath,
And the eyes o' men that ha' read wi' men
In the open book of death.[188:1]
I have already explained how far Americans are from understanding the
British Empire. It is a pity; they would understand Englishmen better
and like them better. And what the building of the Empire and the
keeping of it have done for Englishmen, the Civil War did in large
measure for the Americans. Even the struggle with their own wilderness
might not have sufficed to keep the people hard and sound of heart and
limb through a century of peace and growing prosperity. The Civil War is
already beginning to slip into the farther reaches of the people's
memory; but twenty-five years ago the echoes of the guns had hardly died
away--the minds of the people were still inspired. It was an awful, and
a splendid, experience for the nation. It is not necessary, with
Emerson, "always to respect war hereafter"; but there have been times
when it has seemed to me that I would rather be able to wear that little
tri-colour button of the American Loyal Legion than any other
decoration in the world.[189:1]
It is the great compensation of war that it does not breed in a people
only a fighting spirit. All history shows that it is in the mental
exhilaration and the moral uplift after a period of war successfully
waged that a people puts forth the best that is in it, in the production
of works of art and in its literature. It is an old legend--older than
Omar--that the most beautiful flowers spring from the blood of heroes.
And it is true. When the genius of a nation has been ploughed up with
cannon-shot and bayonets and watered with blood--then it is that it
breaks into the most nearly perfect blossom. It has been so through all
history, back beyond the times of gun and bayonet, when spears and
swords were the plough-shares, as far as we can see and doubtless
farther. In America, the necessities of the case compelled the people to
turn first to material works; it was to the civilising of their
continent, the repairing of their shattered commercial and industrial
structure (shattered when it was yet only half built), that their new
inspiration had perforce to turn first. But there was impetus enough for
that and to spare, and, after satisfying their mere physical needs, they
swept on with a sort of inspired hunger for things to satisfy their
minds and souls. Europeans are accustomed to think that the American
desire for culture is something superficial--something put on for
appearance's sake; and nothing could well be farther from the truth. It
is an intense, deep-seated, national craving. War on the scale of the
Civil War ploughs deep. It may be impossible for a nation to make itself
cultivated--to grow century-old shrubberies and five-century-old
turf--in ten years or forty; and when the Americans in their ravening
famine reach out to grasp at once all that is good and beautiful in the
world, it may be that at first they cannot assimilate all that they draw
to them--they can grasp, but not absorb. To that extent there may be
much that is superficial in American culture. But every year and every
day they are sucking the nourishment deeper--the influences are
penetrating, percolating, permeating the soil of their natures (yes, I
know that I am running two metaphors abreast, but let them run)--and it
is a mistake to conclude because in some places the culture lies only on
the surface that there are not others where it has already sunk through
and through. Above all is it a mistake to suppose that the emotion
itself is shallow or that the yearning is not as deep as their--or any
human--natures.
* * * * *
It is possible that some critics may be found cavilling enough to accuse
me of inconsistency in thus celebrating the praise of War in a work
which is avowedly intended for the promotion of Peace. Carlyle wisely,
if somewhat brutally, pointed out that if an Oliver Cromwell be
assassinated "it is certain you may get a cart-load of turnips from his
carcase." But one does not therefore advocate regicide for the sake of
the kitchen-gardens.
FOOTNOTES:
[167:1] What is said above--or at least what can be read between the
lines--may throw some light on the fact, on which the English press
happens as I write to be commenting in some perplexity, that whereas
certain Australians among the Rhodes scholars have distinguished
themselves conspicuously in the schools, the only honours that have
fallen to Americans have been those of the athletic field. Those
journals which have inferred therefrom a lack of aptitude for
scholarship on the part of American youth in general may be amiss in
their diagnosis.
[169:1] To avoid misapprehension, let me say that, as an Oxford man, I
have all the Oxford prejudices as fully developed as any Englishman
could wish. Rather a year of Oxford than five of Harvard or ten of
Minnesota. How much of this is sentiment, and worthless, and how much
reason, it would be hard to say and is immaterial. The personal
prepossession need not blind one either to the greatness of the work
which the other institutions do, nor to the defensibility of that point
of view which sets other qualities, in an institution the professed
object of which is to educate and to fit youths for life, above even
those possessed by Oxford or Cambridge.
[171:1] In 1906, under a stricter definition of the term "periodical,"
the privilege of sending as second-class matter books issued at regular
intervals was withdrawn.
[188:1] Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea Wife" (_The Seven Seas_).
[189:1] The Loyal Legion is the society of those who held commissions as
officers on the side of the North. The Grand Army of the Republic is the
society which includes all ranks.