COMMERCIAL MORALITY
Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?--An American
Peerage--Senators and other Aristocrats--Trade and the British
Upper Classes--Two Views of a Business Career--America's Wild
Oats--The Packing House Scandals--"American Methods" in
Business--A Countryman and Some Eggs--A New Dog--The Morals of
British Peers--A Contract of Mutual Confidence--Embalmed Beef,
Re-mounts, and War Stores--The Yellow Press and Mr. Hearst--
American View of the House of Lords.
It would seem to be inevitable that any general diffusion of corruption
in political circles should act deleteriously on the morals of the whole
community. It will therefore seem almost absurd to Englishmen to
question whether on the whole the code of commercial ethics in
America--the standard of morals which prevails in the every-day
transaction of business--is higher or lower than that which prevails in
Great Britain. The answer must be almost a matter of course. But,
setting aside any expression of individual opinion and all preconceived
ideas based on personal experience, let us look at the situation and
see, if we can, what, judging only from the circumstances of the two
countries, would be likely to be the relative conditions evolved in
each. To do this it will be necessary first to clear away a common
misapprehension in the minds of Englishmen.
It is somehow generally assumed--for the most part unconsciously and
without any formulation of the notion in the individual mind--that
American society is a sort of truncated pyramid: that it is cut off
short--stops in mid-air--before it gets to the top. Because there are no
titles in the United States, therefore there are no Upper Classes;
because there is no Aristocracy therefore there is nothing that
corresponds to the individual Aristocrat.[309:1] If there were a peerage
in the United States, the country would have its full complement of
Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, and the rest. And--this is the
point--they would be precisely the same men as lead America to-day;--but
how differently Englishmen would regard them!
The middle-class Englishman, when he says that he is no respecter of
titles and declares that it does not make any difference to him whether
a man be a Lord or not, may think he is speaking the truth. It is even
conceivable that there are some so happily constituted as to be able to
chat equally unconcernedly with a Duke and with their wife's cousin, the
land agent. Such men, I presume, exist in the British middle classes.
But the fact remains that in the mass and, as it were, at a distance the
effect of titles on the imagination of the British people is
extraordinarily powerful.
That the men in America are precisely the same men, though they have no
titles, as they would be if they had, is best shown by the example of
Americans who have crossed the Canadian border. If Sir William Van Horne
had not gone to Canada in 1881 or thereabouts, he would still be plain
"Bill" Van Horne and just as wonderful a man as he is to-day. On the
other hand if fortune had happened to place Mr. James J. Hill a little
farther north--in Winnipeg instead of in St. Paul--it is just as certain
that he would to-day be Lord Manitoba (or some such title) as that his
early associates George Stephen and Donald Smith are now Lord Mount
Stephen and Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. But somehow--it were
useless to deny it--Englishmen would think of him as quite a different
man. Mr. C. M. Hays in Montreal is still what he was in St.
Louis--Charlie Hays. He will not change his nature when he becomes Lord
Muskoka.
And what is true of a few individuals is no less true all over the
United States. In the immediate neighbourhood of Mr. Hill, there should
be at least one peerage in the Washburn family and a couple of
baronetcies among the Pillsburys. Chicago would have of course one Duke
in the head of the McCormick family, Mr. Marshall Field would have died
Earl Dearborn, and Mr. Hughitt might be Viscount Calumet. In New York
Lord Waldorf would be the title of the eldest son of the (at present
third) Duke of Astoria. The Vanderbilt marquisate--of Hudson
probably--would be a generation more recent. So throughout the country,
from Maine to Mississippi, from Lord Penobscot to the Marquis of Biloxi,
there would be a peerage in each of the good old houses--the Adamses,
the Cabots, and the Quincys, the Livingstons, the Putnams, and
Stuyvesants, the Carters and Randolphs and Jeffersons and Lees.
Americans will say: "Thank Heaven and the wisdom of our Anglo-Saxon
forefathers that it is not so!" If it were so, however, a good deal of
British misunderstanding of the United States would be removed. Nor will
it be contended that any of the Americans whom Englishmen have known
best--Mr. Bayard, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Choate, or Mr. Whitelaw Reid, or
General Horace Porter--would be other than ornaments to any aristocracy
in the world. It would be idle to enquire whether Mr. Roosevelt or Mr.
Chamberlain, Mr. Cleveland or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. Root or
Lord Rosebery, Mr. Olney or Sir Edward Grey were the better man, for
every Englishman will probably at once concede that the United States
does somehow manage to produce individuals of as fine a type as England
herself. But what no Englishman confesses in his heart is that there is
any class of these men--that there is as good an upper stratum to
society there as in England. These remarkable individuals can only be
explained as being what naturalists call a "sport"--mere freaks and
accidents. This idea exists in the English mind solely, I believe, from
the lack of titles in America; which is because the colonists were
inspired by Anglo-Saxon and not by Norman ideas. Had Englishmen been
accustomed for a generation or two to have relations, diplomatic and
commercial, not with Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith, but with Lord Savannah
and the Earl of Chicopee, the idea would never have taken root. And if
Englishmen knew the United States better, they would be astonished to
find how frequent these "sports" and accidents seem to be. And it must
be remembered that the country does at least produce excellent Duchesses
and Countesses in not inadequate numbers.
Because American society is not officially stratified like a medicine
glass and there is, ostensibly at least, no social hierarchy, Englishmen
would do well to disabuse themselves of the idea that therefore the
people consists entirely of the lower middle class, with a layer of
unassimilated foreign anarchists below and a few native and accidental
geniuses thrusting themselves above. Democracy, at least in the United
States, is not nearly so thorough a leveller as at a first glance it
appears. You will, it is true, often hear in America the statement that
it is "four generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves," which is
to say that one man, from the farm or the workshop, builds up a fortune;
his son, being born in the days of little things and bred in the school
of thrift, holds it together; but his sons in turn, surrounded from
their childhood with wealth and luxury, have lost the old stern fibre
and they slip quickly back down the steep path which their grandfather
climbed with so much toil. But no less often will you hear the statement
that "blood will tell."
In a democracy the essential principle of which is that every man shall
have an equal chance of getting to the top, it is a matter of course
that that top stratum will be constantly changing. The idea of anything
in the nature of an hereditary privileged class is abhorrent to the
mind of every good American. If he had to have an official Aristocracy,
he would insist on a brand new one with each generation; or more likely
that it should be re-elected every four years. We are not now discussing
the advantages or disadvantages of the hereditary principle; the point
that I desire to make is that at any given time American society,
instead of being truncated and headless, has the equivalent of an
aristocracy, whether the first, second, third, or fifth generation of
nobility, just as abundant and complete as if it were properly labelled
and classified into Dukes, Marquises, Viscounts, and the rest. And this
aristocracy is quite independent of any social _cachet_, whether of the
New York Four Hundred or of any other authority.
It is a commonly accepted maxim among thoughtful Americans that the
United States Senate is as much superior to the House of Lords as the
House of Representatives is inferior to the House of Commons. One may,
or may not, agree with that dictum; but it is worth noticing that, in
the opinion of Americans themselves, it is, at least, not by comparison
with the hereditary aristocracy that they show to any disadvantage.
Nor need one accept the opinion (in which many eminent Englishmen
coincide with the universal American belief) that the United States
Supreme Court is the ablest as well as the greatest judicial tribunal in
the world. But when one looks at the membership of that Court and at the
majority of the members of the Senate (especially those members from the
older States which hold to some tradition of fixity of tenure), when one
sees the men who constitute the Cabinets of successive Presidents and
those who fill the more distinguished diplomatic posts, when, further,
one becomes acquainted with the class of men from which, all over the
country, the presidents and attorneys of the great railway corporations
and banks and similar institutions are drawn (all of which offices, it
will be noticed, with the exception of the senatorships, are filled by
nomination or appointment and not by popular election)--when one looks
at, sees, and becomes acquainted with all these, he will begin to
correct his impressions as to the non-existence of an American
aristocracy which, though innocent of heraldry, can fairly be matched
against the British.
* * * * *
The average Englishman looks at America and sees a people wherein there
is no recognised aristocracy nor any titles. Also he sees that it is,
through all its classes, a commercial people, immersed in business.
Therefore he concludes that it is similar to what the English people
would be if cut off at the top of the classes engaged in business and
with all the upper classes wiped out. It will be much nearer the truth
if he considers the people as a whole to be class for class just like
the English people, subject to the accident that there are no titles,
but with the difference that all classes, including the untitled Dukes
and Marquises and Earls, take to business as to their natural element.
The parallel may not be perfect; but it is incomparably more nearly
exact than the alternative and general impression.
It is of course necessary to recognise how rapidly the constitution of
English society is changing, how old traditions are dying out, and in
accordance with the Anglo-Saxon instinct the social scheme is tending
to assimilate itself to the American model. The facts in outline are
almost too familiar to be worth mentioning, except perhaps for the
benefit of some American readers, for Americans in England are
continually puzzled by anomalies which they see in English society. In
my childhood I was taught that no gentleman could buy or sell anything
for profit and preserve either his self-respect or the respect of his
fellows. The only conceivable exceptions--and I think I was not informed
of them at too early an age--were that a gentleman might deal in horses
or in wines and still remain, if somewhat shaded, a gentleman; the
reason being that a knowledge of either horses or wines was a
gentlemanly accomplishment. The indulgence extended to the vendor of
wines did not extend to the maker or seller of beer. I remember the
resentment of the school when the sons of a certain wealthy brewer were
admitted; and those boys had, I imagine, a cheerless time of it in their
schooldays. The eldest of those boys, being now the head of the family,
is to-day a peer. But at that time, though brewers or brewers' sons
might be admitted grudgingly to the company of gentlemen, they were not
gentlemen themselves. An aunt or a cousin who married a manufacturer, a
merchant, or a broker--no matter how rich or in how large a way of
business--was coldly regarded, if not actually cut, by the rest of the
family. There are many families--though hardly now a class--in which the
same traditions persist, but even the families in which the horror of
trade is as great as ever make an exception as a rule in favour of trade
conducted in the United States. The American may be pardoned for being
bewildered when in an aristocracy which is forbidden, so he is told, to
make money in trade, he finds no lack of individuals who are willing to
take shares in any trading concern in which money in sufficient
quantities may be made. The person who will not speak to an English
farmer except as to an inferior, sends his own sons to the Colonies or
to the United States to farm. These things, however, are, to Englishmen,
mere platitudes. But though all are familiar with the change which is
passing over the British people, few Englishmen, perhaps, have realised
how rapidly the peerage itself is coming to be a trade-representing
body. Of seventeen peers of recent creation, taken at random, nine owe
their money and peerages to business, and the present holders of the
title were themselves brought up to a business career. It may not be
long before the English aristocracy will be as universally occupied in
business as is the American; and it will be as natural for an Earl to go
to his office as it is for the American millionaire (perhaps the father
of the Countess) to do so to-day.
In spite of all the change that has taken place, however, it still
remains very difficult for the English gentleman, or member of a gentle
family, to engage actively in business--certainly in trade--without
being made to feel that he is stepping down into a lower sphere where
there is a new and vitiated atmosphere. The code of ethics, he
understands, is not that to which he is accustomed at his club and in
his country house. He trusts that it will not be necessary to forget
that he himself is a gentleman, but at least he will have to remember
that his associates are only business men.
The American aristocrat, on the other hand, takes to business as being
the most attractive and honourable career. Setting aside all question of
money-making, he believes it to be (and his father tells him that it is)
the best life for him. Idleness is not good for any man. He will enjoy
his annual month or two of shooting or fishing or yachting all the
better for having spent the last ten or eleven months in hard work.
Moreover, immersion in affairs will keep him active and alert and in
touch with his fellow-men, besides being in itself one of the largest
and most fascinating of pastimes. There is also the money; but when
business is put on this level, money has a tendency to become only one
among many objects. In England no man can with any grace pretend that he
goes into business for any other reason than to make money. In America a
man goes into it in order to gain standing and respect and make a
reputation.
Under these conditions, to return to our original point, in which
country, putting other things aside, would one naturally expect to find
the better code of business morals? Let us, if we can, consider the
matter, as has been said before, without preconceived ideas or
individual bias; let us imagine that we are speaking of two countries in
which we have no personal stake whatever. If in any two such
countries--in Gombroonia and Tigrosylvania, let us say--we should see
two peoples approximately matched, of one tongue and having similar
political ideals, not visibly unequal in strength, in abilities, or in
the individual sense of honour, and if in one we should further see the
aristocracy regarding the pursuit of commerce as a thing beneath and
unworthy of them, in which they could not engage without contamination,
while in the other it was followed as the most honourable of
careers,--in which of the two should we expect to find the higher code
of commercial ethics?
It does not seem to me that there can be any doubt as to the answer.
Other things being equal, and as a matter of theory only, business in
the United States ought to be ruled by much higher standards of conduct
than in England.
Before proceeding to an analysis of any particular conditions, there is
one further general consideration which I would urge on the attention of
English readers, most of whom have preconceived ideas on this subject
already formed.
I am not among those who believe that trade or commerce of ordinary
kinds either requires or tends to develop great intellectuality in those
engaged in it. Indeed, my opinion (for which I am willing to be abused)
is that any considerable measure of intellect is a hindrance to success
in retail trade or in commerce on a small scale. It is a thesis which
some one might develop at leisure, showing that it is not merely not
creditable for a man to make money in trade but that it is an explicit
avowal of intellectual poverty. Whence, of course, it follows that the
London tradesman who grows rich and retires to the country or suburbs to
build himself a statelier mansion is more justly an object of pity, if
not of contempt, than is often consciously acknowledged. Any imaginative
quality or breadth of vision which contributes to distract the mind of a
tradesman from the one transaction immediately in hand and the immediate
financial results thereof is a disqualification. I state my views thus
in their extreme form lest the English reader should think that I
entertain too much respect (or too little contempt) for the purely
commercial brain. At the same time the English reader will concede that
commercial enterprises and industrial undertakings may be on such a
scale as to offer full exercise to the largest intellects.
As an illustration of this: Cecil Rhodes grew, as we know, wealthy from
the proceeds of vast undertakings; but men closely associated with him
have assured me that Rhodes was a very indifferent "business man." We
may, I think, take it for certain that if Rhodes had been condemned to
conduct a retail grocery he would have conducted it to speedy
irretrievable disaster. We are probably all agreed that the conduct of a
small grocery does not require fineness of intellect; most English
readers, I think, will follow me in believing that success in such a
sphere of life implies at least an imperfect intellectual development.
On the other hand enterprises truly Rhodian do call for intellectual
grasp of the largest.
The consideration which I wish to urge is that business in the United
States during the period of growth and settlement of the country has
been largely on Rhodian lines. The great enterprises by which the
country has been developed, and on which most of the large fortunes of
individual Americans are based have been of truly imperial proportions.
The flinging of railways across thousands of miles of wilderness
(England has made peers of the men who did it in Canada) with the laying
out of cities and the peopling of provinces; the building of great
fleets of boats upon the lakes; the vast mining schemes in remote and
inaccessible regions of the country; lumbering enterprises which (even
though not always honestly) dealt with virgin forests by the hundreds
of square miles; "bonanza" wheat farming and the huge systems of grain
elevators for the handling of the wheat and the conveyance of it to the
market or the mill; cattle ranching on a stupendous scale (perhaps even
the collecting of those cattle in their thousands daily for slaughter in
the packing houses); the irrigating of wide tracts of desert;--these
things and such as these are the "businesses" out of which the Americans
of the last and present generations have largely made their fortunes.
And they are enterprises, most of them, not unworthy to rank with
Chartered Companies and the construction of railways from the North to
the South of Africa.
Not only this, but something of the same qualities of spaciousness, as
of trafficking between large horizons, attach to almost all lines of
business in the United States,--to many which in England are necessarily
humdrum and commonplace. Almost every Englishman has been surprised on
making the acquaintance of an accidental American (no "magnate" or
"captain of industry" but an ordinary business man) to learn that though
he is no more than the manufacturer of some matter-of-fact article, his
operations are on a confusing scale and that, with branch offices in
three or four towns and agents in a dozen more, his daily dealings are
transacted over an area reaching three thousand miles from his home
office, in which the interposition of prairies, mountain ranges, and
chains of lakes are but incidents. Business in the United States has
almost necessarily something of the romance of remote and adventurous
enterprises.
It has been said (and the point is worth insisting on) that the
Englishman cannot pretend that he goes into business with any other
object than to make money. His motives are on the face of them mercenary
if not sordid. The American is impelled primarily by quite other
ambitions. Similarly, when the Englishman thinks of business, the image
which he conjures up in his mind is of a dull commonplace like, on lines
so long established and well-defined that they can embrace little of
novelty or of enterprise; a sedentary life of narrow outlook from the
unexhilarating atmosphere of a London office or shop. To the American,
except in small or retail trade in the large cities, the conditions of
business are widely different. All around him, lies, both actually and
figuratively, new ground, wilderness almost, inviting him to turn
Argonaut. The mere vastness and newness of the country make it full of
allurement to adventure, the rewards of which are larger and more
immediate than can be hoped for in older and more straitened
communities.
It has been said that the American people was, by its long period of
isolation and self-communion, made to become, in its outlook on the
policies of the world, a provincial people; but that the very
provincialism had something of dignity in it from the mere fact that it
was continent-wide. So it is with American business. The exigencies of
their circumstances have made the American people a commercial people;
but whereas in England a commercial life may not offer scope for any
intellectual activity and may even have a necessary tendency to stunt
the mentality of any one engaged in it, business in the United States
offers exercise to a much larger gamut of abilities and, by its mere
range and variety, instead of dwarfing has a tendency to keep those
abilities trained and alert. A business in England has not approximately
the same large theatre of operation or the same variety of incident as a
business of the same turn over in America. It is almost the difference
between the man who furnishes his larder by going out to his farmyard
and wringing the necks of tame ducks therein, and him who must snatch
the same supply with his gun from the wild flocks in the wilderness.
But, indeed, no argument should be needed on the subject; for one solid
fact with which almost every Englishman is familiar is that in any
American (let us use the word) shopkeeper whom he may meet travelling in
Europe there is a certain mental alertness, freshness, and vigour,
however objectionably they may at times display themselves--which are at
least not characteristic of the English shopkeeping class.
Just, then, as we have seen that, if we knew nothing about the peoples
of the two countries, beyond the broad outlines of their respective
social structures, we should be compelled, other things being equal, to
look for a higher code of commercial morality in America than in
England, so, when we see one further fact, namely that of the difference
in the conditions under which business is conducted, we must naturally,
other things being equal, look for a livelier intellect and a higher
grade of mentality in the American than in the English business man.
* * * * *
Unfortunately other things never are equal. First, there is the taint of
the political corruption in America which must, as has been said, in
some measure contaminate the community. Then, England is an old
country, with all the machinery of society running in long-accustomed
grooves; above all it is a wealthy country and the first among creditor
nations, to whose interest it has been, and is, to see that every bond
and every engagement be literally and exactly carried out. The United
States in the nineteenth century was young and undisciplined, with all
the ardour of youth going out to conquer the world, seeing all things in
rose-colour, but, for the present,--poor. It was, like any other youth
confident of the golden future, lavish alike in its borrowings and its
spendings, over-careless of forms and formalities. Happily the
confidence in the future has been justified and ten times justified, and
it is rich--richer than it yet knows--with resources larger even than it
has learned properly to appraise or control. Whatever obligations it
incurred in the headlong past are trifles to it now,--a few hundreds of
college debts to a man who has come into millions. And with its position
now assured it has grown jealous of its credit, national and individual.
It was inevitable that the heedless days should beget indiscretions, the
memories of which smart to-day. It was inevitable that amid so much
recklessness and easy faith there should be some wrong-doing. Above all,
was it inevitable that in the realisation of its dreams, when wealth and
power grew and money came pouring into it, there should be bred in the
people an extraordinary and unwholesome love of speculation which in
turn opened their opportunities to the gambler and the confidence-man of
all kinds and sizes. They flourished in the land,--the man who wrecked
railways and issued fictitious millions of "securities," the man who
robbed the government of moneys destined for the support of Indians or
the establishment of postal routes in the farther West, the man who
salted mines, the "land-grabber" and the "timber-shark" who dealt not in
acres but in hundreds of square miles, the bogus trust company, and the
fraudulent land and investment agent. When even the smallest community
begins to "boom," the people of the community lose their heads and the
harvest ripens to the sickle of the swindler. And the entire United
States--sometimes in one part, sometimes in another, sometimes all
together,--with only an occasional and short-lived panic to check the
madness, boomed continuously for half a century.
It is still booming, but with wealth, established institutions, and
invested capital, have come comparative soberness and a sense of
responsibility. The spirit which governs American industrial life to-day
is quite other than that which ruled it two or three decades ago. The
United States has sown its wild oats. It was a generous sowing,
certainly, for the land was wide and the soil rich. But that harvest has
been all but garnered and the country is now for the most part given
over to more legitimate crops.
[Tares still spring up among the wheat. The commercial community is not
yet as well ordered as that of England or another older country; and
since the foregoing paragraphs were written, the panic which fell upon
the United States in the closing months of 1907 has occurred. The
country had enjoyed a decade of extraordinary financial prosperity, in
the course of which, in the spirit of speculation which has already been
mentioned, all values had been forced to too high a level, credits had
been extended beyond the margin of safety, and the volume of business
transactions had swollen to such bulk in proportion to the amount of
actual monetary wealth in existence that any shock to public confidence,
any nervousness resulting in a contraction of the circulating medium,
could not fail to produce catastrophe. The shock came; as sooner or
later it had to come. In the stern period of struggle and retrenchment
which followed, all the weak spots in the financial and industrial
fabric of the country have been laid bare and, while depression and
distress have spread over the whole United States, until all parts are
equally involved, not only have the exposures of anything approaching
dishonest or illegitimate methods been few, but the way in which the
business communities at large have stood the strain has shown that there
is nothing approaching unsoundness in the general business conditions.
With the system of credit shattered and with hardly circulating medium
enough to conduct the necessary petty transactions of everyday life, the
country is already recovering confidence and feeling its way back to
normal conditions. The results have not been approximately as bad as
those which followed the panic of 1893; and the difference is an index
to the immensely greater stability of the country's industries.
Meanwhile there was at first (and still exists) a feeling of intense
indignation in all parts of the country that so much suffering should
have been thrown upon the whole people by the misbehaviour of a small
circle of men in New York. The experience, however painful, will in the
long run be salutary. It will be salutary in the first place for the
obvious reason that business will have to start again conservatively and
with inflated values reduced to something below normal levels. But it
will be even more salutary for the less obvious reason that it has
intensified the already acute disgust of the business men of the country
as a whole with what are known as "Wall Street methods." Englishmen
generally have an idea that Wall Street methods are the methods of all
the United States; and, while they have had impressed upon them every
detail of those financial irregularities in the small New York clique
which precipitated the catastrophe, they have heard and know nothing of
the coolness and cheery resolution with which the crisis has been faced
by the commercial classes as a whole.]
England has not yet forgotten the disclosures in the matter of the
Chicago packing houses. That the light which was then turned on that
industry revealed conditions that were in some details inconceivably
shocking, is hardly to be doubted: and I trust that those are mistaken
who say that if similar investigation had been made into the methods of
certain English establishments, before warning was given, the state of
affairs would have been found not much different. What is certain,
however, is that the English public received an exaggerated idea of the
extent of the abuses. In part, this was a necessary result of the
exigencies of journalism. A large majority of the newspapers even of
London--certainly those which reach a large majority of the
readers--prefer sensationalism. Even those which are anxious in such
cases to be fair and temperate are sadly hampered both by the
limitations of space in their own columns and by the costliness of
telegraphic correspondence. It is inevitable that the most conservative
and judicial of correspondents should transmit to his papers whatever
are the most striking items--revelations--accusations in an indictment
such as was then framed against the packers. The more damning details
are the best news. On the other hand he cannot, save to a ridiculously
disproportionate extent, transmit the extenuating circumstances, the
individual denials, the local atmosphere. Telegraph tolls are heavy and
space is straitened while atmosphere and extenuating circumstances are
not news at all. An Englishman is generally astonished when he reads the
accounts of some conspicuous divorce case or great financial scandal in
England as they appear in the American (or for that matter the French or
German) papers, with the editorial comments thereupon. In the picture of
any event happening at a great distance the readers of even the
best-intentioned journals necessarily have presented to their view only
the highest lights and the blackest shadows. In this instance a certain
section of the American press--what is specifically known as the
"yellow" press--had strong motives, of a political kind, for making the
case against the packers as bad as possible. It is unfortunate that many
of the London newspapers look much too largely to that particular class
of American paper for their American news and their views on current
American events.
If we assume that any reasonable proportion of the accusations made
against the packing houses were true of some one or other establishment,
it still remains that a considerable proportion of the American business
community is otherwise engaged than in the canning of meats. There is a
story well known in America of a countryman who entered a train with a
packet of eggs, none too fresh, in his coat-tail pocket. He sat down
upon them; but deemed it best to continue sitting rather than give the
contents a chance to run down his person. Meanwhile the smell permeated
through the car and at last the passenger sitting immediately behind the
countryman saw whence the unpleasantness arose. Whereupon he fell to
abusing the other.
"Thunder!" exclaimed the countryman. "What have you got to complain of?
You've only got the smell. _I'm sitting in it!_"
This is much how Americans feel in regard to foreign criticisms of the
packing house scandals. Whatever wrong-doing there may have been in
individual establishments in this one industry in Chicago, is no more to
be taken as typical of the commercial ethics of the American people than
the discovery of a fraudulent trader or group of traders in one
particular line in Manchester or Glasgow would imply that the British
trading public was corrupt. The mere ruthlessness with which, in this
case, the wrong-doers were exposed ought in itself to be a sufficient
evidence to outsiders that the American public is no more willingly
tolerant of dishonesty than any other people. Judged, indeed, by that
criterion, surely no other country can detest wrong-doing so
whole-heartedly.
* * * * *
And I wish here to protest against the habit which the worst section of
the English newspapers has adopted during the last year or so of holding
"American methods" in business up to contempt. It is true that it is not
done with any idea of directing hostility against the United States; and
those who use the catchword so freely would undoubtedly much prefer to
speak of "German methods" or even "French" or "Russian methods," if they
could. All that is meant is that the methods are un-English and alien;
but whether the intention is to lessen the public good-will towards the
United States or not, that must inevitably be the effect. Even if it
were not, the American public is abundantly justified in resenting it.
The idea that America is trust-ridden to the extent popularly supposed
in England has been carefully fostered by those extreme journals in
America already referred to (it is impossible not to speak of them as
the Yellow Press) for personal and political reasons--reasons which
Englishmen would comprehend if they understood better the present
political situation in the United States. The idea has been encouraged
by divers English "impressionist" authors and writers on the English
press who, with a superficial knowledge of American affairs, have caught
the jargon of the same school of American journalist-politicians. It has
been further confirmed by a misunderstanding of the attitude and policy
of President Roosevelt himself, which has already been sufficiently
dealt with.
England is, in the American sense, much more "trust-ridden" than the
United States. It is not merely that (as any reference to statistics
will show) wealth is less concentrated in America than in England--that
nothing like the same proportion of the capital of the country is lodged
in a few hands--for that, inasmuch as the majority of large fortunes in
Great Britain are not commercial in their origin, might mean little; but
in business the opportunity for the small trader and the man without
backing to win to independence is a hundred times greater in America,
while the control exercised by "rings" and "cliques" over certain large
industries in England and over the access to certain large markets is, I
think, much more complete than has been attained, except most
temporarily, by any trust or ring in the United States, except, as in
the case of oil, where artificial monopoly has been assisted by natural
conditions.
The tendency in the United States even in the last twenty years has not
been in the direction of a concentration of wealth, but towards its
diffusion in a degree unparalleled in any country in the world. The
point in which the United States is economically almost immeasurably
superior to England is not in the number of her big fortunes but in the
enormously greater well-to-do-ness of the middle classes--the vastly
larger number of persons of moderate affluence, who are in the enjoyment
of incomes which in England would class them among the reasonably rich.
Consolidation and amalgamation are the necessary and unavoidable
tendencies of modern business. As surely as the primitive partnership
succeeded individual effort and as, later, corporations were created to
enlarge the sphere of partnerships, so is it certain that the industrial
units which will fight for control of trade in the much larger markets
of the modern world will represent vastly larger aggregations of capital
than (except in extraordinary and generally state-aided institutions)
were dreamed of fifty years ago. That must be accepted as a certainty.
It does not by any means necessarily follow that this process entails a
concentration of wealth in fewer hands; on the contrary the larger a
corporation is, the wider proportionally, as a general rule, is the
circle of the shareholders in whom the property is vested. But
presuming the commercial growth of the United States to continue for
half a century yet on the lines on which it has developed in the last
two decades, the country will then, not so much by any concentration of
wealth, but by the mere filling up of the commercial field (so that by
increase in the intensity of competition the opportunity for the small
or new trader to force his way to the surface will be more curtailed,
and the gulf between owner or employer and non-owner or employed will
become greater and more permanent)--if, I say, that growth should
continue for another fifty years then will the conditions in America
approximate to those in England. This it is against which the masses in
America are more or less blindly and unconsciously fighting to-day. The
comparison with European conditions is generally not formulated in the
individual mind; but an approach to those conditions is what the masses
of America see--or think they see--in the tendency towards greater
aggregations of corporate power. It is not the process of aggregation,
but the protest against it, which is peculiar to the United States: not
the trust-power but the hatred of it.
This being so, for Englishmen or other Europeans to speak of all
manifestations of the process itself as "American" is not a little
absurd. Besides which, to so speak of it in the tone which is generally
adopted is extremely impolite to a kindred people whose good-will
Englishmen ought to, and do, desire to keep.
The thing is best illustrated by taking a single example. The term
"Trust" is, of course, very vaguely used, being generally taken, quite
apart from its proper significance, to mean any form of combination,
corporate aggregation, or working agreement which tends to extend
control of a company or individual, or group of companies or
individuals, over a larger proportion of a particular trade or industry.
In the United States, with the possible exception of the Standard Oil
Company (which is not properly a trust), the form of corporate power
against which there has been the most bitterness is that of the
railways, and the specific form of railway organisation most fiercely
attacked has been the Pool or Joint Purse--which is, in all essentials,
a true trust. In 1887 the formation of a Pool, or Joint Purse Agreement,
was made illegal in the United States; but Englishmen can have no
conception of the popular hatred of the word "Pools" which exists in
America or of the obloquy which has been heaped upon railway companies
for entering into them. Few Englishmen on the other hand have any clear
idea of what a Joint Purse Agreement is; and they jog along contentedly
ignorant that this iniquitous engine for their oppression is in daily
use by the British railway companies.
My personal belief is that the prohibition of pools in America was a
mistake: that it would have been better for the country from the first
to have authorised, even encouraged, their formation, as in England,
under efficient governmental supervision. But the point is that the
majority of the American people thought otherwise and no other
manifestation of the trust-tendency has been more virulently attacked
than the--to English ideas--harmless institution of a joint purse. And
whether the American people ultimately acted wisely or unwisely, they
were justified in regarding any form of association or agreement between
railways with more apprehension than would be reasonable in England. It
is not possible here to explain why this is so, except to say broadly
that the longer distances in America and the lack of other forms of
transportation render an American community, especially in the West,
more dependent upon the railway than is the case in England. The
conditions give the railway company a larger control over, or influence
in, the well-being of the people.
An excellent illustration of the difference in the point of view of the
two peoples has been furnished since the above was written by the
announcements, within a few weeks of each other in December 1907, of the
formation of two "working agreements" between British railway
companies,--that namely between the Great Northern and Great Central
railways and that between the North British and Caledonian. In the
former case the Boards of Directors of the two companies merely
constituted themselves a Joint Committee to operate the two railways
conjointly. In the latter, not many details of the agreement were made
public, except that it was intended to control competition in all
classes of traffic and, as the first fruits thereof, there was an
immediate and not unimportant increase in certain classes of passenger
rates. Neither agreement has, I think, yet received the sanction of the
proper authorities, but the public generally received the announcement
of both with approval amounting almost to enthusiasm. Of these
agreements the former, certainly, and presumably the latter, would be
flagrantly illegal in the United States. If, moreover, an attempt were
made in America to arrive at the same ends in some roundabout way which
would avoid technical illegality, the outburst of popular indignation
would make it impossible. Personally I sympathise with the English view
and believe both agreements to be not only just and proper but in the
public interest; but it is certain that they would have created such an
uproar in the United States that English newspapers would inevitably
have reflected the disturbance, and English readers would have been
convinced that once more the Directorates of American railways were
engaged in a nefarious attempt to use the power of capital for the
plundering and oppression of the public. In the still more recent debate
(February 1908) in the House of Commons, the views expressed by both Mr.
Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law in favour of the lessening of competition
between railway companies would have exposed them to the hysterical
abuse of a large part of the American press. Both those gentlemen would
have been openly accused of being the tools of (if not actually
subsidised by) the corporations, and (but for Mr. Bonar Law's company)
Mr. Lloyd George's attitude would, I think, be sufficient to ruin an
Administration. These statements contain no reflection on the American
point of view. The conditions are such that that point of view may, in
America, be the right one. But the absurdity is that Englishmen hear
these things, or read of them as being said in the United States, and
thereupon assume that terrible offences are being perpetrated; whereas
nothing is being done which in England would not receive the approval of
the majority of sensible men and be temperately applauded by the
spokesmen of both the great parties in Parliament. It is not, I say
again, the Trust-power, but the hatred of it, which is peculiar to
America.
The same is true of the field as a whole. Things harmless in England
might be very dangerous in America. We have so far considered the trust
power only as a commercial and industrial factor--in its tendency, by
crystallisation or consolidation in the higher strata, to depress the
economic status of the industrial masses and to make the emergence of
the individual trader into independence more difficult. In this aspect
capital is immensely more dominant in England than in America. But there
is a political side to the problem.
In the United States, owing to the absence of a throne and an
established aristocracy, there is, as it were, no counterpoise to the
power of wealth. This is, in practice, the chief virtue of the throne in
the British constitution, that, in its capacity as the Fountain of
Honour, it prevents wealth from becoming the dominant power in the
country and thereby (which Americans are slow to understand) is the most
democratic of forces, protecting the proletariat in some measure against
the possibility of unhindered oppression by an omnipotent capitalism.
The English masses are already by the mere impenetrability of the
commercial structure above them much worse off than the corresponding
masses in the United States. What their condition might be if for a
generation the social restraint put upon wealth by the power of the
throne and the established aristocracy were to be relaxed, it is not
pleasant to consider. Nor need it be considered.[335:1]
It is, I think, evident that in America the danger to the industrial
independence of the individual which might arise from the aggregation of
wealth in a few hands is much greater than in England. The power would
be capable of greater abuse; the evils which would flow from such abuse
would be greater. It is not wealth, but the abuse of it that he is
attacking, says President Roosevelt--not the wealthy class, but the
"wealthy criminal class." The distinction has not been digested by those
in England who rail against American methods or who write of American
politics. It is necessary--or so it seems to a large number of the
American people--that extraordinary checks should be put upon the
possibility of the abuse of wealth in the United States, such as do not
exist or are not needed (or at least we have heard no energetic demand
for them) in England. As a political fact there is need of especial
vigilance in the United States lest corporate power be abused. As a
commercial fact it is merely preposterous to rail at the modern tendency
to consolidation and amalgamation as specifically "American."
It is probably safe to say that if the United States had such a social
counterweight as is furnished in England by the throne and the
recognised aristocracy, the growth of what is called "trust-power" would
be viewed to-day with comparative unconcern. At all events England is
able to view with something like unconcern the conditions, as they exist
in England, worse than, as has been said, the trust power is humanly
capable of imposing on the American people in another half-century of
unhindered growth. Which, American readers will please understand, is
not a suggestion that the United States would be benefited, even
commercially, by the institution of a monarchy.
Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Englishmen long ago acquired the
idea that American business methods in what may be called large affairs
were too often unscrupulous; and of such methods, there were certainly
examples. I have explained why the temptations to, and the opportunities
for, dishonesty were very great in the earlier days and it would be
impossible to find language too severe to characterise many of the
things which were done--not once, but again and again--in the
manipulation of railways, the stealing of public lands, and the
plundering of the public treasury. The dog deserved as bad a name as he
received. But that dog died. The Americans themselves stoned him to
death--with precisely the same ferocity as they have recently exhibited
when they discovered, as they feared, some of his litter in the Chicago
packing houses--or a year before in the offices of certain insurance
companies. The present generation of Americans may not be any better men
than their fathers (let us hope that they are, if only for the
reputation of the vast immigration of Englishmen and Scotchmen which has
poured into the country) but at least they are much less tempted. They
live under a new social code. They have nothing like the same
opportunity for successful dishonesty and immeasurably greater chance of
punishment, whether visited on them by the law or by the opinion of
their fellows, if unsuccessful or found out. It is not fair that the new
dog should be damned to drag around the old dog's name.
There is an excellent analogy in which the relations of the two peoples
are reversed.
* * * * *
Americans are largely of the opinion that the British aristocracy is a
disreputable class. They gave that dog its name too; and there have been
individual scandals enough in the past to justify it. It is useless for
an Englishman living in America to endeavour to modify this opinion in
even a small circle, for it is only a question of time--probably of a
very short time--before some peer turns up in the divorce court and the
Englishmen's friends will send him newspaper clippings containing the
Court Report and will hail him on street corners and at the club with:
"How about your British aristocracy now?"
Americans cannot see the British peerage as a whole; they only hear of
those who thrust themselves into unsavoury notoriety. So Englishmen get
no view of the American business community in its entirety, but only
read with relish the occasional scandal. Of the two, the American has
the better, or at least more frequent, justification for his error than
has the Englishman; but it is a pity that the two cannot somehow agree
to an exchange. Perhaps a treaty might be entered into (if it were not
for the United States Senate) which, when ratified, should be published
in all newspapers and posted in all public places in both countries,
setting forth that:
"IN CONSIDERATION of the Party of the Second Part hereafter
cherishing a belief in the marital fidelity and general moral
purity of all members of the British peerage, their wives,
heirs, daughters, and near relations, and further agreeing
that when, by any unfortunate mishap, any individual member of
the said Peerage or his wife, daughter, or other relation
shall have been discovered and publicly shown to have offended
against the marriage laws or otherwise violated the canons of
common decency, to understand and take it for granted that
such mishap, offence, or violation is a quite exceptional
occurrence owing to the unexplainable depravity of the
individual and that it in no way reflects upon the other
members of the said Peerage, whether in the mass or
individually, or their wives, daughters, or near relations:
THEREFORE the Party of the First Part hereby agrees to decline
to give any credence whatsoever to any story, remark, or
reflection to the discredit of the general honesty of the
American commercial classes or public men, but agrees that he
will hereafter assume them to be trustworthy and truthful
whether individually or in the mass, except in such cases as
shall have been publicly proven to the contrary, and that he
will always understand and declare that such isolated cases
are purely sporadic and not in any way to be taken as
evidences either of an epidemic or of a general low state of
public morality, but that on the contrary the said American
commercial classes do, whether in the mass or individually,
hate and despise an occasional scoundrel among them as
heartily as would the Party of the First Part hate and despise
such a scoundrel if found among his own people--as, he
confesses, does occasionally occur."
Nonsense? Of course it is nonsense. But the desirable thing is that
Englishmen should be brought to understand that after all it is but an
inconsiderable portion of the American business community that is
permanently employed in the manufacture of wooden nutmegs, in selling
canned horrors for food, or in watering railway shares, and that
Americans should believe that there are quite a large number of men of
high birth in England who are only infrequently engaged in either
beating their own wives or running away with those of other men.
The brief confessional clause at the conclusion of the above draft I
take to be an important portion of the document. It is not necessary
that a similar confession should be incorporated in the behalf of the
Party of the Second Part, not because there are no family scandals in
America, but because, in the absence of a peerage, it is not easy to
tell when a divorce or other scandal occurs among the aristocracy.
"Scandal in High Life" is such a tempting heading to a column that the
American newspapers are generous in their interpretation of the term and
many a man and woman, on getting into trouble, must have been surprised
to learn for the first time that their ambitions had been realised,
unknown to themselves, and that they did indeed belong to that class
which they had for so long yearned to enter.
This fact also is worth considering, namely, that whereas in England it
is not impossible that there may be more scandals of a financial sort,
both in official circles and outside, than the public ever hears of
through the press; it is reasonably certain that in America the press
publishes full details of a good many more scandals than ever occur.
This peculiarity of the American press (for it is still peculiar to
America, in degree at least, if not in kind) does not arise from any
set purpose of blackening the reputation of the country in the eyes of
the outside world, but is entirely the result of "enterprise," of
individual ambition, and the extremity of partisan enthusiasm. Other
nations may be quite certain that they hear all the worst that is to be
told of the people of the United States. Out of the Spanish war arose
what came to be known as the "embalmed beef" scandal. American soldiers
in Cuba were furnished with a quantity of rations which, by the time
they reached the front and an effort was made to serve them out, were
entirely unfit for human consumption. Undoubtedly much suffering was
thereby caused to the men and probably some disease. But, equally
undoubtedly, the catastrophe arose from an error in judgment and not
from dishonesty of contractors or of any government official. But, as
the incident was handled by a section of the American press, it might
well, had the two great parties at the time been more evenly balanced in
public favour, have resulted in the ruin of the reputation of an
administration and the overthrow of the Republican party at the next
election.
If the Re-mount scandals and the Army Stores scandals which arose out of
England's South African war had occurred in America, I doubt if any
party could have stood against the storm that would have been provoked,
and, deriving their ideas of the affairs from the cabled reports,
Englishmen of all classes would still be shaking their heads over the
inconceivable dishonesty in the American public service and the
deplorable standard of honour in the American army. It may be necessary
and wholesome for a people that occasionally certain kinds of dirty
linen should be washed in public; but the speciality of the American
"yellow press"[342:1] is the skill which it shows in soiling clean linen
in private in order to bring it out into the streets to wash.
* * * * *
POSTSCRIPT--Reference has been made in the foregoing chapter to the
British peerage and I now propose to have the temerity to enter a
serious protest against the tone in which even the thoughtful American
commonly refers to the House of Lords. I cherish no such hopeless
ambition as that of inducing the American newspaper paragrapher to
surrender his traditional right to make fun of a British peer on any and
every occasion. I am speaking now to the more serious teachers of the
American people; for it is a deplorable fact that even the best of those
teachers when speaking of the House of Lords use language which is
generally flippant, nearly always contemptuous, and not uncommonly
uninformed.
My own belief (and I think it is that of the majority of thinking
Englishmen) is that if the discussion in the House of Lords on any large
question be laid side by side with the debate on the same question in
the House of Commons and the two be read concurrently, it will almost
invariably be seen that the speeches in the Upper House show a marked
superiority in breadth of view, expression and grasp of the larger
aspects and the underlying principles of the subject. I believe that
such a debate in the House of Lords is characterised by more ability and
thoroughness than the debate on a similar question in either the Senate
or the House of Representatives. It does not appear from the respective
membership of the chambers how it could well be otherwise.
Let us from memory give a list of the more conspicuous members of the
present House of Peers whose names are likely to be known to American
readers, to wit: the Dukes of Devonshire and Norfolk; the Marquises of
Ripon and Landsdowne; Earls Roberts, Rosebery, Elgin, Northbrook, Crewe,
Carrington, Cromer, Kimberley, Minto, Halsbury, Spencer; Viscounts,
Wolseley, Goschen, Esher, Kitchener of Khartoum, St. Aldwyn
(Hicks-Beach), Milner, Cross; the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
Bishop of London; Lords Lister, Alverstone, Curzon of Kedleston, Mount
Stephen, Strathcona and Mount Royal, Avebury, Loreburn, and Rayleigh.
Let me emphasise the fact that this is not intended to be a list of the
ablest members of the House, but only a list of able members something
of whose reputation and achievements is likely to be known to the
intelligent American reader. If the list were being compiled for English
readers, it would have to be twice as long; but, as it stands, I submit
that it is a list which cannot approximately be paralleled from among
the members of the House of Commons or from among the members of the
Senate and House of Representatives combined. I take it to be
incontrovertible that a list representing such eminence and so great
accomplishment in so many fields (theology, statesmanship, war,
literature, government, science, and affairs) could not be produced from
the legislative chambers of any single country in the world.
The mistake which Americans make is that they confuse the hereditary
principle with the House of Lords. The former is, of course, spurned by
every good American and no one denies his right to express his
disapproval thereof in such terms as he sees fit. But few Americans
appear to make sufficient allowance for the fact that whatever the House
of Lords suffers at any given time by the necessary inclusion among its
members (as a result of its hereditary constitution) of a proportion of
men who are quite unfit to be members of any legislative body (and these
are the members of the British peerage with whom America is most
familiar) is much more than counterbalanced by the ability to introduce
into the membership a continuous current of the most distinguished and
capable men in every field of activity, whose services could not
otherwise (and cannot in the United States) be similarly commanded by
the State.
We have seen how in the United States a man can only win his way to the
House of Representatives, and hardly more easily to the Senate, without
earning the favour of the local politicians and "bosses" of his
constituency, and how, when he is elected, his tenure of office is
likely to be short and must be always precarious. It is probable that in
the United States not one of the distinguished men whose names are given
in the above list would (with the possible exception of two or three who
have devoted their lives to politics) be included in either chamber.
They would, so far as public service is concerned (unless they were
given cabinet positions or held seats upon the bench), be lost to the
State.
It is, of course, impossible that Americans should keep in touch with
the proceedings of the House of Lords; nor is there any reason why they
should. The number of Americans, resident at home, who in the course of
their lives have read _in extenso_ any single debate in that House must
be extremely small; and first-hand knowledge of the House Americans can
hardly have. Then, of the English publicists or statesmen who visit the
United States it is perhaps inevitable that those whose conversation on
political topics Americans (especially American economic thinkers and
sociologists) should find most congenial are those of an advanced
Liberal or Radical--even semi-Republican--complexion. I have chanced to
have the opportunity of seeing how much certain American economists of
the rising school (which has done such admirable work as a whole) have
been influenced by the views of particular Englishmen of this class. I
should like to mention names, but not a few readers will be able to
supply them for themselves. It has not appeared to occur to the American
disciples of these men that the views which they impart on English
political subjects are purely partisan, and generally very extreme,
views. Their opinions of the House of Lords no more represent the
judgment of England on the subject than the opinions of an extreme Free
Trade Democrat represent the views of America on the subject of
Protection.
Merely as a matter of manners and good taste, it would, I think, be well
if Americans endeavoured to arrive at and express a better understanding
of the legislative work of the Lords. Englishmen have not much more
regard for the principle of a quadrennially elected President than
Americans have for an hereditary aristocracy; but they do not habitually
permit that lack of regard to degenerate into the use of contemptuous
language about individual Presidents. Even in contemplating the result
of what seems to them so preposterous a system as that of electing a
judiciary by popular party vote, Englishmen have generally confined
themselves to a complimentary expression of surprise that the results
are not worse than they are. Surely, while being as truculent as they
please in their attitude towards the hereditary principle, it would be
well if Americans would similarly endeavour to dissociate their
detestation of that principle from their feelings for the actual
personnel of the House of Lords. There is a good deal both in the
constitution and work of the House to command the respect even of the
citizens of a republic.
I address this protest directly to American economic and sociological
writers in the hope that, recognising that it comes from one who is not
unsympathetic, some of them may be influenced to speak less heedlessly
on the subject than is their wont. I may add that these remarks are
suggested by certain passages in the recently published book of an
American author for whom, elsewhere in this volume, I express, as I
feel, sincere respect.
FOOTNOTES:
[309:1] It is delightful to find, some weeks after this was written,
that Mr. Wells makes precisely this common blunder and states it in
almost the exact words that I have used later on. His excuse lies in the
fact that, as he says, he had it "in his mind before ever he crossed the
Atlantic"; but that hardly excuses his failure to disabuse himself after
he was across. Most curious is it that Mr. Wells appears to think that
this erroneous notion is a discovery of his own and he enlarges on it
and expounds it at some length; the truth being, as I say above, that it
is the common opinion of all uninformed Englishmen. Mr. Wells is in fact
voicing an almost universal--even if unformulated--national prejudice,
but it is a pity that he took it over to America and brought it back
again.
[335:1] The reader will, of course, understand that the political or
industrial power of capital is entirely a separate thing from the
ability of wealth to buy luxury, deference or social recognition for its
possessor. In this particular there is little to choose between the two
and curiously enough, each country has been called by visitors from the
other the "paradise of the wealthy."
[342:1] Englishmen often ask the meaning of the phrase "the yellow
press." The history of it is as follows: In 1895, Mr. W. R. Hearst,
having had experience as a journalist in California, purchased the New
York _Journal_, which was at the time a more or less unsuccessful
publication, and, spending money lavishly, converted it into the most
enterprising, as well as the most sensational, paper that New York or
any other American city had ever seen. In catering to the prejudices of
the mass of the people, he invaded the province of the New York _World_.
In the "war" between the two which followed, one began and the other
immediately adopted the plan of using yellow ink in the printing of
certain cartoons (or pictures of the _Ally Sloper_ type) with which they
adorned certain pages of their Sunday editions especially. The term
"yellow press" was applied at first only to those two papers, but soon
extended to include other publications which copied their general style.
The yellow ink was, I believe, actually first employed by the _World_;
but the _Journal_ was the aggressor in the fight and in most particulars
it was that paper which set the pace, and it, or Mr. Hearst, rightly
bears the responsibility for the creation of yellow journalism.