THE GROWTH OF HONESTY
The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon--America's Resemblance to
Japan--A German View--Can Americans Lie?--Honesty as the Best
Policy--Religious Sentiment--Moral and Immoral Railway
Managers--A Struggle for Self-Preservation--Gentlemen in
Business--Peculation among Railway Servants--How the Old Order
Changes, Yielding Place to New--The Strain on British
Machinery--Americans as Story-Tellers--The Incredibility of
the Actual.
My desire is to contribute, if possible, something towards the
establishment of a better understanding between the two peoples by
correcting certain misapprehensions which exist in the mind of each in
regard to the other. At the present moment we are concerned with the
particular misapprehension which exists in the English mind in regard to
the commercial ethics--the average level of common honesty--in the
masses of American business men. I have endeavoured to show, first, that
the majority of Englishmen have, even though unconsciously, a
fundamental misconception of the character of the American people,
arising primarily from the absence of a recognised aristocracy in the
United States:--that, in fact, the two peoples are, in the construction
of their social fabrics, much more alike than the Englishman generally
assumes. I have endeavoured to show, next, that if we were entirely
without any knowledge of, or any prejudices in regard to, the code of
commercial ethics at present existing in either country, but had to
deduce for ourselves _a priori_ from what we knew of the part which
commerce and business played in the social life of the two countries the
probable degree of morality which would be found in the respective
codes, we should be forced to look for a higher standard in the United
States than in England. We have seen how it comes that Englishmen have,
justifiably and even unavoidably, acquired the erroneous notions which
they have acquired, first, from the fact that, in the rough days of the
past, American business morality was, at least in certain parts of the
country, looser than that which prevailed in the older-established and
better constituted society of the England of the same day (and in the
older communities of the United States itself); and, second, from the
fact that the chief channel through which Englishmen must necessarily
derive their contemporary ideas on the subject, namely, the American
press, is, by reason of qualities peculiar to itself, not to be trusted
to correct the misapprehensions which exist. Finally, we have seen that
there exist in certain American minds some mistaken notions, not much
dissimilar in character to those which I am trying to point out are
present in the minds of Englishmen, about the character of a
considerable section of the people of Great Britain; and if Americans
can be thus mistaken about England, there is no inherent improbability
in the suggestion that Englishmen may be analogously mistaken about the
United States.
The English people has had abundant justification in the past for
arriving at the conclusion that in many of the qualities which go to
make a great and manly race it stands first among the peoples of the
earth. The belief of Englishmen in their own moral superiority as a
people is justified by the course of history, and is proven every day
afresh by the attitudes of other races,--especially by the behaviour in
their choice of friends, when compelled to choose as between England and
other European powers, of the peoples more or less unlike the
Anglo-Saxon in their civilisations in the remoter corners of the world.
It is to the eternal honour of England that in countless out-of-the-way
places, peoples more or less savage have learned to accept the word of a
British official or trader as a thing to be trusted, and have grown
quick to distinguish between him and his rivals of other European
nationalities. There has been abundant testimony to the respect which
the British character has won from the world,--from the frank admiration
of the Prince-Chancellor for the "Parole de Gentleman" to the unshakable
confidence of the far red Indian in the faith of a "King George Man";
from the trust of an Indian native in the word of a Sahib to the dying
injunction to his successor of one of the greatest of the Afghan Ameers:
"Trust the English. Do not fight them. They are good friends and bad
enemies."[349:1] And the most solemn oath, I believe, which an Arab can
take is to swear that what he says is as "true as the word of an
Englishman."
But, granting all that has happened in the past, and recognising that
British honour and the sacredness of the British word have stood above
those of any other peoples, the American nation of to-day is a new
factor in the situation. It did not exist at the time when the old
comparisons were made. I have suggested elsewhere that the popular
American contempt for the English climate is only an inheritance of the
opinions based on a comparison of that climate with the climates of
Southern Europe. If the climate of certain parts--of the greater
part--of the United States had then been a factor to be taken into
consideration, English skies would have had at least one fellow to share
with them the opprobrium of the world. So in the matter of commercial
morality; we are thinking and speaking in terms of a day that has gone,
when other standards governed.
Englishmen have been very willing, within the last year or two, to
believe in the revolution which has taken place in the character of
another people, less akin to them than the Americans and farther away.
The promptitude with which the British masses have accepted the fact
that, in certain of the virtues on which Englishmen have most peculiarly
prided themselves in the past, the Japanese are their superiors, has
been curiously un-British. There should be no greater difficulty in
believing that another revolution, much more gradual and less
picturesque, and by so much the more easily credible, has taken place in
the American character. The evidence in favour of the one is, rightly
viewed, no less strong than that in favour of the other. It would have
been impossible for the Japanese to have carried on the recent war as
they did had they not been possessed of the virtues of courage and
patriotism in the highest degree. It would have been equally impossible
for the Americans to have built up their immense trade in competition
with the great commercial powers of the world, unless they had in an
equally high degree possessed the virtue of commercial honesty. No one
ought to know better than the English business man that a great national
commercial fabric is not built up by fraud or trickery.
On this subject Professor Muensterberg,[351:1] striving to eradicate
from the minds of his German countrymen the same tendency to
underestimate the honesty of American business men, says (and let me say
that neither my opinion, nor the form in which it is expressed, was
borrowed from him): "It is naive to suppose that the economic strength
of America has been built up through underhanded competition, without
respect to law or justice, and impelled by nothing but a barbarous and
purely material ambition. One might better suppose that the twenty-story
office buildings on lower Broadway are supported by the flag-stones in
the street. . . . The colossal fabric of American industry is able to
tower so high only because it has its foundations on the hard rock of
honest conviction."
"It has been well said," says the same author, "that the American has no
talent for lying, and distrust of a man's word strikes the Yankee as
specifically European." Now in England "an American lie" has stood
almost as a proverb; yet the German writer is entirely in earnest,
though personally I do not agree with him. He sees the symptoms, but the
diagnosis is wrong. The American has an excellent talent for lying, but
in business he has learned that falsehood and deception are poor
commercial weapons. Business which is obtained by fraud, any American
will tell you, "doesn't stick"; and as every American in his business is
looking always to the future, he prefers, merely as a matter of
prudence, that his foundations shall be sound.
All society is a struggle for the survival of the fittest; and in crude
and early forms of society, it is the strongest who proves himself most
fit. In savage communities--and Europe was savage until after the feudal
days--it is the big man and brutal who comes to the top. In the savage
days of American commerce, which, at least for the West, ended only a
generation back, it was too often the man who could go out and subdue
the wilderness and beat down opposition, who rode rough-shod over his
competitors and used whatever weapons, whether of mere brute strength or
fraud, with the greatest ferocity and unscrupulousness, who made his
mark and his fortune. But in a settled and complex commercial community
it is no longer the strongest who is most fit; it is the most honest.
The American commercial community as a whole, in spite of occasional
exceptions and in defiance of the cynicism of the press, has grasped
this fact and has accepted the business standards of the world at large.
Let me not be interpreted as implying that there are any fewer Americans
than there are Englishmen who live rightly from the fear of God or for
the sake of their own self-respect. The conclusion of most observers has
been that the American people is more religious than the English, that
the temperament, more nervous and more emotional, is more susceptible to
religious influence. It may be so. It is a subject on which the evidence
is necessarily so intangible--on which an individual judgment is likely
to be so entirely dependent on individual observation in a narrow
field--that comparison becomes extremely difficult. My own opinion would
be that there is at least as much real religious feeling in England as
in the United States, and certainly more in Scotland than in either;
but that the churches in America are more active as organisations and
more efficient agents in behalf of morality.
But we are now speaking of the business community as a whole, and the
force which ultimately keeps the ethics of every business community pure
is, I imagine, the same, namely that without honesty the community
itself cannot live or prosper and that, with normal ability, he who is
most honest prospers most. American business was dishonest before
society had settled down and knitted itself together.
The change which has come over the American business world can perhaps
best be made clear to English readers by taking a single example; and it
must necessarily be an example from a field with which I am familiar.
* * * * *
There is in my possession an interesting document, being one of the (I
think) two original manuscript copies of the famous "Gentleman's
Agreement," bearing the signatures of the parties thereto, which was
entered into by the Presidents or Chairmen of a number of railway
companies at Mr. Pierpont Morgan's house in New York in 1891. In the
year following the signing of the Agreement, I was in London in
connection with affairs which necessitated rather prolonged interviews
with many of the Chairmen or General Managers of the British
railways,--Sir George Findlay, Sir Edward Watkin, Mr. J. Staats Forbes,
and others. With all of them the mutual relations existing between
railway companies in the two countries respectively formed one of the
chief topics of our conversations, and that at that time the good faith
and loyalty of attitude of one company towards another were much
greater in England than in America it is not possible to question.
British companies are subject to a restraining influence which does not
exist in the United States, in the parliamentary control which is
exercised over them. Every company of any size has, with more or less
frequency, to go to Parliament for new powers or privileges, and any
Chairman or Board of Directors which established a reputation for
untrustworthiness in dealings with other companies would probably be
able to expect few favours from the next Parliamentary Committee. But
(although the two last of the gentlemen whose names I have mentioned
were notoriously parties to a peculiarly bitter railway war) I believe
that the motives which have chiefly operated to make the managers of
English companies observe faith with each other better than the American
have ever succeeded in doing, are chiefly the traditional motives of a
high sense of personal honour--the fact that they were gentlemen first
and business men afterwards.
The circumstances which led up to the formation of the Gentlemen's
Agreement were almost inconceivable to English railway operators. The
railways, it must always be borne in mind, have been the chief
civilisers of the American continent. It is by their instrumentality
that the Great American Desert of half a century ago is to-day among the
richest and most prosperous agricultural countries in the world. The
railways have always thrust out ahead of the settler into whatever
territory, by reason of the potential fertility of its soil or for other
causes, has held out promise of some day becoming populated. Along the
railway the population has then flowed. In forcing its way westward
each company in its course has sought to tap with its lines the richest
strips of territory: all alike endeavoured to obtain a share of the
traffic originating from a point where a thriving town was already
established or topographical conditions pointed out a promising site. As
the American laws impose practically no restrictions on railway
construction it necessarily followed that certain districts and certain
favourable strategic points were invaded by more lines than could
possibly be justified either by the traffic of the moment or the
prospective traffic of many years to come. This was conspicuously the
case in the region Northwestward from Chicago. Business which might have
furnished a reasonable revenue to two companies was called upon to
support six or seven and the competition for that business became
intense,--all the more intense because, unlike English railway
companies, few American railways in their early days have had any
material reserve of capital to draw upon. They have had to earn their
living as they went, out of current receipts, or submit to liquidation.
The officials in charge of the Traffic Departments of each company had
to justify their retention in their positions by somehow getting more
than their share of the business, and the temptations to offer whatever
inducements were necessary to get that business amounted almost to
compulsion. Without it, not the particular official only, but his
company, would be extinguished. The situation was further aggravated by
the fact that the goods that were to be carried were largely staples
shipped in large quantities by individual shippers--millers, owners of
packing houses, mining companies from the one end, and coal and oil
companies from the other. One of these companies might be able to offer
a railway more business in the course of a year than it could hope to
get from all the small traders on its lines combined--enough to amount
almost to affluence if it could be secured at the regularly authorised
rates. The keenness of the competition to secure the patronage of these
large shippers can be imagined; for it was, between the companies, a
struggle for actual existence. All that the shipper had to do was to
wait while the companies underbid each other, each in turn cutting off a
slice from the margin of profit that would result from the carrying of
the traffic until, not infrequently and in some notorious cases, not
only was that margin entirely whittled away but the traffic was finally
carried at a figure which meant a heavy loss to the carrier. The extent
to which the Standard Oil Company has profited by this necessity on the
part of the railways to get the business of a large shipping concern at
almost any price, rather than allow its cars and motive power to remain
idle, has been made sufficiently public.
In some measure the companies were able to protect themselves by the
making of pooling (or joint-purse) arrangements between themselves; but
the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Law in 1887 made pooling
illegal. The companies endeavoured to frame agreements which would not
be repugnant to the law but would take the place of the pools; but it
was impossible to attach any penalties to infringements of such
agreements and under pressure of the necessity of self-preservation, no
agreement, however solemnly entered into, was strong enough to restrain
the parties. The Passenger Agents framed agreements to control the
passenger traffic and the Freight Agents made agreements to control the
goods traffic, and both were equally futile. Then the Traffic Managers
made agreements to cover both classes of business, which held no longer
than the others. So the General Managers tried their hands. But the
inexorable exigencies of the situation remained. Each official was still
confronted with the same dilemma: he must either secure more business
than he was entitled to or he--and his company--must starve. And the
agreements made by General Managers bound no better than those which
Passenger Agents or Traffic Managers had made before. Then it was that
the Gentlemen stepped in.
The Gentlemen, it should be explained, were the Presidents and Chairmen
of the Boards of the respective companies. They, it was hoped, would be
able to reach an agreement which, if once their names were signed to it,
would hold. The meeting, as has been said, was held at Mr. Pierpont
Morgan's house[358:1] and an agreement was in fact arrived at and
signed, as has been said, in duplicate. It is lamentable to have to
record that that agreement--except in so far as it set a precedent for
other meetings of the same gentlemen, which in turn led to others out of
which finally grew large movements in the direction of joint ownerships
and consolidations of interests which have helped materially to make the
conditions more tolerable--except for that, the Gentlemen's Agreement
did no more good, and it lasted not appreciably longer, than any of the
others which had been made by mere officials.
Englishmen will all agree that it is unthinkable that the Chairmen of
the great British railway companies could meet and give their words _as
gentlemen_ that each of their companies would observe certain rules in
the conduct of its business and that a few weeks thereafter it should
become evident that no single company was keeping the word so pledged.
But it would be just as absurd to question the personal integrity or
sense of honour of such men as Mr. Marvin Hughitt, Mr. E. W. Winter, Mr.
W. H. Truesdale, and the others, as it would be to question that of the
most upright man in England. The fact is that the conditions are almost
unthinkable to Englishmen. No company, in becoming party to the
agreement, had surrendered its right to retaliate when another violated
the provisions. The actual conduct of the business of the companies--the
quoting of the rates to secure the traffic--was in the hands of a host
of subordinate officials, and when a rate is cut it is not cut openly,
but in secret and by circuitous devices. It was, on subsequent
investigation, always impossible to tell where the demoralisation had
begun, amid the cloud of charges, counter-charges, and denials. There
was not one of the subordinate officials but declared (and seemingly
proved) that he had acted only in retaliation and self-defence. As there
was no way of obtaining evidence from the shippers, in whose favour the
concessions had been made, it was impossible to sift out the truth. Each
Chairman or President could only say that he had entire confidence in
his own staff. There was no visible remedy except to discharge the
entire membership of the Traffic Departments of all the companies
simultaneously and get new men, to the number of several hundreds, who
would be no better able to accomplish the impossible than their
predecessors.
* * * * *
My reason for going into this, I fear, somewhat tedious narration is
that British distrust of American commercial honesty was originally
created, perhaps, more than by anything else, by the scandals which were
notoriously associated with the early history of railways in the United
States. It is not desired here either to insist on the occurrence of
those scandals or to palliate them. The point is that the conditions
which made those scandals possible (of which the incapacity on the part
of the North-western lines to keep faith with each other may be regarded
as symptomatic) were concomitants of a particular stage only in the
development of the country. Competition must always exist in any
business community; but in the desperate form of a breathless,
day-to-day struggle for bare existence it need only exist among railway
companies where lines have been built in excess of the needs of the
population. With the increase in population and the growth of trade the
asperity of the conditions necessarily becomes mitigated, until at last,
when the traffic has assumed proportions which will afford all
competitors alike a reasonable profit on their shares, the management
ceases to be exposed to any more temptation than besets the Boards of
the great British companies. Not a few railway companies in the United
States have arrived at that delectable condition--are indeed now more
happily circumstanced than any English company--and among them are some
the names of which, not many years ago, were mere synonyms for
dishonesty. In the North-western territory of which I have spoken the
fact that the current values of all railway shares had on the average
increased (until the occurrence of the financial crisis of the close of
1907) by about three hundred per cent. in the last ten years is
eloquent.
In the old days the wrong-doing which was rampant, through excess of
opportunity and more than abundant temptation, in the higher circles,
ran also through all grades of the service; and there was one case at
least of a railway company which used in fact to have to discharge all
its servants of a certain class at intervals of once a month or
thereabouts. The Northern Pacific Railway line was opened across the
continent in 1883, and during the next twelve months it was my fortune
to have to travel over the western portion of the road somewhat
frequently. The company had a regularly established tariff of charges,
and tickets from any one station to another could be bought at the
booking offices just as on any other railway line in America or England.
But few people bought tickets. The line was divided, of course, into
divisions, of so many hundreds of miles each, the train being in charge
of one conductor (or guard) to the end of his division, where he turned
it over to his successor for the next division. It was the business of
the conductor to take up the tickets, or collect the fares, while the
train was running, and it was well understood among regular passengers
on the line that each conductor expected to receive one dollar to the
end of his division, no matter at what point a passenger entered the
train. The conductor merely walked through the cars collecting silver
dollars, of which he subsequently apportioned to the treasury of the
company as many as he saw fit. They were probably not many.
On one occasion I stood at a booking-office and, speaking through the
small window, asked the clerk for a ticket to a certain place. The
conductor of the train, already waiting in the station, had strolled
into the office and heard my request.
"Don't you buy a ticket!" said he to me. "I can let you travel cheaper
than he can, can't I, Bill?"--this last being addressed to the clerk
behind the window; and Bill looked out through the hole and said he
guessed that was so.
The company, as I have said, used to discharge its conductors with
regularity, or they resigned, at intervals depending on the periods at
which accounts were made up, but it was said in those days that there
was not a town between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast which did
not contain a drinking saloon owned by an ex-Northern Pacific conductor,
and established out of the profits that he had made during his brief
term of service.
In the American railway carriages, the method of communication between
passengers and the engine, in case of emergency, is by what is known as
the "bell-cord" which runs from end to end of the train, suspended from
the middle of the ceiling of each car in a series of swinging rings. The
cord sways loosely in the air to each motion of the train like a
slackened clothes-line in a gale. On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe
Railway the story used to be told that at the end of the day the
conductors would toss each coin received into the air to see if it would
balance on the bell-cord. The coins which balanced went to the company;
those which did not, the conductor took as his own.
That, be it noted, was the state of affairs some twenty-four years ago.
I question if there is much more peculation on the part of the employees
of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe to-day than there is on the part
of the servants of the Great Western of England or any other British
company.
The place where the conductor advised me not to buy a ticket had then a
few yards of planking laid on the prairie for a platform and a small
shed as a station building. The town consisted of three or four brick
buildings and a huddle of wooden shanties. To-day it is one of the
twenty most populous cities in the United States with tall office
buildings, broad busy streets, and sumptuous private residences. I used
to have excellent trout-fishing in what is now the centre of a great
town. Where the air to-day is filled with the hum of wheels and the roar
of machinery, then was only open prairie innocent of any evidence of
human occupation beyond some three or four things like dog-kennels badly
built of loose lattice-work on the river's bank. These were the red
Indians' Turkish baths.
The old code of morality has vanished with the red Indian and the
trout-fishing. In the early days of that town there used to be nobody to
maintain public order but an efficient Vigilance Committee, which
executed justice by the simple process of hanging persons whom the
public disliked, and which was still in nominal existence when I was
there. Now the city has the proper complement of courts, from the United
States Court downwards, and a bar which has already furnished one or two
members to the United States Senate. Of course this has happened in the
very far West but the change which has come over New York in the same
length of time is no less astonishing if less picturesque. It is as
unjust to compare the morals or manners of the American people of to-day
with those of even three decades ago as it would be to compare the state
of twentieth-century society in New Zealand with the old convict days.
In one generation Japan has stepped from the days of feudalism to the
twentieth century. America, in all that goes to constitute civilisation,
has in the last twenty-five years jumped, according to European canons,
at least a hundred.
Certain outward manifestations of the change which has been wrought, the
peoples of Europe have been unable to ignore;--the immense growth in the
power of the United States as a nation, her invasion of the markets of
the world even in lines wherein, twenty years ago, the internal markets
of America herself were at the mercy of British manufacturers, the
splendid generosity which individual citizens of the United States are
showing in buying wherever they can all that is most beautiful or
precious among the treasures of the Old World for the enrichment of
their museums and galleries at home--these things the people of Europe
cannot help but see. It would be well if they would strive also to
understand the development of the moral forces which underlies these
things, which alone has made them possible.
* * * * *
What has been the course of events in England in the same period? I have
already said that I believe that Englishmen justly earned the reputation
of being the most upright of all peoples in their commercial dealings;
and for the sake of the context perhaps Americans who have had little
opportunity of gauging the opinions of the world will accept it as true.
It is probable that the world has seen no finer set of men engaged in
commerce than those who laid the foundations of England's commercial
greatness; and I imagine that there are more honest men in England
to-day than ever there were--more men of what is, it will be noticed,
instructively called "old-fashioned" honesty. Yet no one will be quicker
than just one of these "old-fashioned" honest men to declare that the
standard of commercial morality in England is deteriorating.
The truth is that a vast new trading community has sprung up with new
ideas which no longer accepts the old canons or submits to the old
authority. The old maxims pass current; there is the same talk of honest
goods and honest methods, but under stress of keener competition and the
pressure of the more rapid movement of modern life, there is more
temptation to allow products to deteriorate, greater difficulty in
living always up to the old rigid standards. The words "English made" no
longer carry, even to English minds, the old guarantee of excellence.
In no small measure it may be that it is the example and influence of
America itself which is working the mischief; which by no means implies
that American example and influence must in themselves be bad. American
methods, both in the production and sale of goods, might be wholly good,
but the attempt to graft them upon established English practice might
have nothing but deplorable results. It is not necessarily the fault of
the new wine if old bottles fail to hold it. One factory may have the
capacity to turn out one thousand of a given article, all of the highest
quality and workmanship, _per diem_. If a factory with one tenth the
capacity strains itself to compete and turns out the same number of
articles of the same kind in the same time, something will be wrong with
the quality of those articles. I am not prepared to say that in any
given line English manufacturers are overstraining the capacity of their
plants to the sacrifice of the quality of their goods in their effort to
keep pace with American rate of production; but I do most earnestly
believe that something analogous to it is happening in the commercial
field as a whole, and that neither English commercial morality nor the
quality of English-made goods has been improved by the necessity of
meeting the intense competition of the world-markets to-day, with an
industrial organisation which grew up under other and more leisurely
conditions.
* * * * *
POSTSCRIPT.--Not necessarily as a serious contribution to my argument
but rather as a gloss on Professor Muensterberg's remark that the
American has no talent for lying, I have often wondered how far the
Americans reputation for veracity has been injured by their ability as
story-tellers. "Story" it must be remembered is used in two senses. The
American has the reputation of being the best narrator in the world; and
he loves to narrate about his own country--especially the big things in
it. In nine cases out of ten, when he is speaking of those big things,
he is conscientiously truthful; but not seldom it happens that what may
be a mere commonplace to the American seems incredible to the English
listener unacquainted with the United States and unable to give the
facts as narrated their due proportion in the landscape.
More than a quarter of a century ago, when electric light was still a
very new thing to Londoners, an American casually told myself and three
or four others that the small town from which he came in the far
Northwest of America was lighted entirely by a coronal of electric
lights of some prodigious candle-power on the top of a mast, erected in
the centre of the town, of a, to us, incredible height. It was, at the
time, quite unbelievable; but in less than a year chance took me all the
way to that identical little town in the far Northwest, and what the
American had said was strictly true--true, I doubt not, to a single
candle-power and to a fraction of a foot of mast. And a costly and
indifferent method of lighting, for a whole town, it may be remarked, it
was.
In an earlier stage of my youth I lost all confidence in an elderly and
eminently respectable friend of the family who had travelled much
because he once informed me that the Japanese watered their horses out
of spoons. Of course I knew that the old gentleman was a liar.
An American travelling in an English railway carriage fell into
conversation with the other occupants, who were Englishmen. Among divers
pieces of information about things in the United States which he gave
them he told (it was at the time when the steel construction of high
buildings was still a novelty) of a twenty-storey "sky-scraper" which he
passed daily on his way to and from his office on which, to save time,
the walls were being put up simultaneously at, perhaps, the second,
eighth, and fifteenth floors, working upwards from each point, the
intervening floors being in the meanwhile left untouched. He explained
that, in the system of steel construction, the walls did not support the
building; that being done by the skeleton framework of metal, on which
the walls were subsequently hung as a screen. They might, theoretically,
be of paper; though as a matter of fact the material used was generally
terra-cotta or some fire-proof brick. The American said that it was
queer to see a house being built at the eighth storey in midair, as it
were, with nothing but the thin steel supports and open sky below.
"I should imagine it would look very queer," said the Englishman whom he
was addressing, with obvious coolness; and the American was entirely
aware that every person in that carriage regarded him as a typical
American liar. Time passed and the carriage relapsed into silence, each
of the occupants becoming immersed in such reading-matter as he had with
him. Suddenly one of them aroused the others with the ejaculation:
"By Jove! If here isn't a picture of that very building you were talking
of!"
It was a _Graphic_ or _Illustrated London News_, or some other such
undoubtedly trustworthy London paper which he was reading, and he passed
it round for the inspection of the rest of the company. The American
looked at it. It was not his particular building but it did as well,
and there was the photograph before them, with the walls complete, to
window casing and every detail of ornament, on the eighth and ninth
floors, while not a brick had been laid from the second storey to the
seventh. A god from the machine had intervened to save the American's
reputation. Often have I seen incredulity steal over the faces of a
well-bred company in England at some statement from an American of a
fact in itself commonplace enough, when no such providential
corroboration was forthcoming.
Curiously enough, the true Yankee in America, especially of the rural
districts, has the same distrust of the veracity of the Western American
as the Englishman generally has of the Yankee himself (in which he
includes all Americans). I had been living for some years in Minnesota
when, standing one day on the platform of the railway station at, I
think, Schenectady, in New York State, I was addressed by one who was
evidently a farmer in the neighbourhood. Learning that I had just come
from Minnesota he referred to the two towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
"Right lively towns," he had heard them to be. "And how many people
might there be in the two together?" he asked. "About a quarter of a
million," I replied--the number being some few thousand less than the
figure given by the last census. The farmer, perhaps, had not heard
anything of the two towns for ten or a dozen years, when their
population had been not much more than a third of what it had grown to
at that time; and he looked at me. He did not say anything; he merely
looked at me, long and fixedly. Then he deliberately turned his back and
walked to the other end of the platform as far as possible from my
contaminating influence. I was never so explicitly and categorically
called a liar in my life; and he doubtless went home and told his family
of the magnificent Western exaggerator whom he had met "down to the
depot." I fear the American reputation often suffers no less unjustly in
England.
FOOTNOTES:
[349:1] Even up to a quarter of a century ago, there was at least one
corner of the United States, near to the Canadian border, where among
Indians not yet rounded up or blanketed the old feeling still existed,
so that an Englishman, proclaiming himself a "King George Man," could go
and hunt and fish safely, sure of the friendship and protection of the
red man, while an American would not have been safe for a night. The
subject of the relations between the British and the Indian tribes in
Revolutionary times has, of course, been provocative of much bitterness
in the hearts of Americans; but happily their own historians of a later
day have shown that this bitterness has only been partially justified.
There was not much to choose between Patriots and Loyalists. Those who
know the Indian know also that the universal liking for the Englishman
cannot have rested only on motives of political expediency or from
temporary alliances made in Revolutionary times. They must have had
abundant proof of the loyalty and trustworthiness of Englishmen before
so deep-rooted a sentiment could have been created. The contrast, of
course, was not with the American colonist, but with the French. The
colonists, too, were King George Men once.
[351:1] Yes; I am aware that elsewhere I quote Professor Muensterberg
without enthusiasm, but on another class of subject. Except for the
limitations which his national characteristics and upbringing impose
upon him (and for the fact that he seems to be unacquainted with the
West) the Professor has written a just and clear-sighted estimate of the
American character. We do not look to a German for a proper
understanding of the sporting instinct, as British and Americans
understand it, nor perhaps for views that will coincide with ours on the
subject of morality in the youth of either sex. But the laws of common
honesty are the same in all countries. A German is as well able to
estimate the commercial morality of a people as an Englishman, however
little he may be qualified to talk about their games or about the
_nuances_ in the masculine attitude towards women.
[358:1] That meeting has an incidental historical interest from the fact
that it was then that Mr. Morgan first stepped into the public view as a
financial power. Up to that time, his name was not particularly well
known outside of New York or the financial circles immediately connected
with New York. Most Western papers found it necessary to explain to
their readers (if they could) who the Mr. Morgan was at whose house the
meeting was being held.