The best observer of England that ever was, he whose book about the
English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that
Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back
for him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits,
brought to bay by certain great English friends of his, who challenged
him to say whether there really were any Americans with an American
idea, and a theory of our future. “Thus challenged, I bethought myself
neither of Congress, neither of President nor of Cabinet Ministers, nor
of such as would make of America another Europe.... I opened the dogma
of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and
the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, It is true that
I have never yet seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand
for this truth, and yet ... ‘tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that
does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect
a clean revolution.... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of
the view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman;
that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London
or in Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, ‘_Messieurs, je n’en
vois pas la nécessité_.’” In other words, Emerson laid before his
great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be, of
philosophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance
than it would if now presented to the most respectable of his American
readers. Yet it is never to be forgotten that it was the English who,
with all their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to
which their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only form
of Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless indeed the
German Mennonites are the same as the earlier English Quakers were in
creed and life. In the pseudo-republic of the Cromwellian commonwealth
the English had a state as wholly without liberty, equality, and
fraternity as in the king-capped oligarchy they had before and have
had ever since. We may be sure that they will never have such another
commonwealth, or any resembling ours, which can no longer offer itself
as an eminent example.
The sort of Englishmen, of whose respect Americans can make surest are
those English thick-and-thin patriots who admire force and strength, and
believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon mission to possess the earth, and
to profit by its weaker peoples, not cruelly, not unkindly, yet
unquestionably. The Englishmen of whose disrespect we can make surest
are those who expect to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity in the
economic way, the political way having failed; who do not care whether
the head of the state is born or elected, is called “King” or called
“President,” since he will presently not be at all; who abhor war, and
believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and these only if they
work for a living. They have already had their will with the existing
English state, until now that state is far more the servant of the
people in fetching and carrying, in guarding them from hard masters
and succoring them in their need, than the republic which professes
to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. When one
encounters this sort of Englishman, one thinks silently of the child
labor in the South, of the monopolies in the North, of the companies
which govern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Englishman is
not silently thinking of them too. He is probably of the lower classes,
and one consoles one’s self as one can by holding one’s head higher in
better company, where, without secret self-contempt, one can be more
openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our increasing territory,
and our warlike adequacy to a first position among the nations of
the world. There is no fear that in such company one’s national
susceptibilities will be wounded, or that one will not be almost as much
admired for one’s money as at home. I do not say quite, because there
are still things in England even more admired than money. Certainly
a very rich American would be considered in such English society,
but certainly he would not be so much considered as an equally rich
Englishman who was also a duke.
I cannot name a nobleman of less rank, because I will not belittle my
rich countryman, but perhaps the English would think differently, and
would look upon him as lower than the latest peer or the newest knight
of the King’s creation. The King, who has no power, can do almost
anything in England; and his touch, which is no longer sovereign for
scrofula, can add dignity and give absolute standing to a man whose
achievements merit it, but who with us would fail of anything like it.
The English system is more logical than ours, but not so reasonable. The
English have seen from the beginning inequality and the rule of the few.
We can hardly prove that we see, in the future, equality and the rule
of the many. Yet our vision is doubtless prophetic, whatever obliquities
our frequent astigmatism may impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range
there is room for the play of any misgiving short of denial; but the
English cannot doubt the justice of what they have seen without forming
an eccentric relation to the actual fact. The Englishman who refuses the
formal recognition of his distinction by his prince is the anomaly,
not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone who declines a peerage is
anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of the English system, as
a true believer in the oligarchically administered monarchy, Gladstone
was illogical, and Tennyson was logical.