earnest to have business rules. If we wish to understand him, we must
compare him not with the French shopkeeper when he plays dominoes, but
with the same French shopkeeper when he works the guns or mans the
trenches as a conscript soldier. Everybody used to the punctilious
Prussian standard of uniform and parade has noticed the roughness and
apparent laxity of the French soldier, the looseness of his clothes, the
unsightliness of his heavy knapsack, in short his inferiority in every
detail of the business of war except fighting. There he is much too
swift to be smart. He is much too practical to be precise. By a strange
illusion which can lift pork-packing almost to the level of patriotism,
the American has the same free rhythm in his romance of business. He
varies his conduct not to suit the clock but to suit the case. He gives
more time to more important and less time to less important things; and
he makes up his time-table as he goes along. Suppose he has three
appointments; the first, let us say, is some mere trifle of erecting a
tower twenty storeys high and exhibiting a sky-sign on the top of it;
the second is a business discussion about the possibility of printing
advertisements of soft drinks on the table-napkins at a restaurant; the
third is attending a conference to decide how the populace can be
prevented from using chewing-gum and the manufacturers can still manage
to sell it. He will be content merely to glance at the sky-sign as he
goes by in a trolley-car or an automobile; he will then settle down to
the discussion with his partner about the table-napkins, each speaker
indulging in long monologues in turn; a peculiarity of much American
conversation. Now if in the middle of one of these monologues, he
suddenly thinks that the vacant space of the waiter's shirt-front might
also be utilised to advertise the Gee Whiz Ginger Champagne, he will
instantly follow up the new idea in all its aspects and possibilities,
in an even longer monologue; and will never think of looking at his
watch while he is rapturously looking at his waiter. The consequence is
that he will come late into the great social movement against
chewing-gum, where an Englishman would probably have arrived at the
proper hour. But though the Englishman's conduct is more proper, it need
not be in all respects more practical. The Englishman's rules are better
for the business of life, but not necessarily for the life of business.
And it is true that for many of these Americans business is the
business of life. It is really also, as I have said, the romance of
life. We shall admire or deplore this spirit, accordingly as we are glad
to see trade irradiated with so much poetry, or sorry to see so much
poetry wasted on trade. But it does make many people happy, like any
other hobby; and one is disposed to add that it does fill their
imaginations like any other delusion. For the true criticism of all this
commercial romance would involve a criticism of this historic phase of
commerce. These people are building on the sand, though it shines like
gold, and for them like fairy gold; but the world will remember the
legend about fairy gold. Half the financial operations they follow deal
with things that do not even exist; for in that sense all finance is a
fairy tale. Many of them are buying and selling things that do nothing
but harm; but it does them good to buy and sell them. The claim of the
romantic salesman is better justified than he realises. Business really
is romance; for it is not reality.
There is one real advantage that America has over England, largely due
to its livelier and more impressionable ideal. America does not think
that stupidity is practical. It does not think that ideas are merely
destructive things. It does not think that a genius is only a person to
be told to go away and blow his brains out; rather it would open all its
machinery to the genius and beg him to blow his brains in. It might
attempt to use a natural force like Blake or Shelley for very ignoble
purposes; it would be quite capable of asking Blake to take his tiger
and his golden lions round as a sort of Barnum's Show, or Shelley to
hang his stars and haloed clouds among the lights of Broadway. But it
would not assume that a natural force is useless, any more than that
Niagara is useless. And there is a very definite distinction here
touching the intelligence of the trader, whatever we may think of either
course touching the intelligence of the artist. It is one thing that
Apollo should be employed by Admetus, although he is a god. It is quite
another thing that Apollo should always be sacked by Admetus, because he
is a god. Now in England, largely owing to the accident of a rivalry and
therefore a comparison with France, there arose about the end of the
eighteenth century an extraordinary notion that there was some sort of
connection between dullness and success. What the Americans call a
bonehead became what the English call a hard-headed man. The merchants
of London evinced their contempt for the fantastic logicians of Paris by
living in a permanent state of terror lest somebody should set the
Thames on fire. In this as in much else it is much easier to understand
the Americans if we connect them with the French who were their allies
than with the English who were their enemies. There are a great many
Franco-American resemblances which the practical Anglo-Saxons are of
course too hard-headed (or boneheaded) to see. American history is
haunted with the shadow of the Plebiscitary President; they have a
tradition of classical architecture for public buildings. Their cities
are planned upon the squares of Paris and not upon the labyrinth of
London. They call their cities Corinth and Syracuse, as the French
called their citizens Epaminondas and Timoleon. Their soldiers wore the
French kepi; and they make coffee admirably, and do not make tea at all.
But of all the French elements in America the most French is this real
practicality. They know that at certain times the most businesslike of
all qualities is 'l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de
l'audace.' The publisher may induce the poet to do a pot-boiler; but the
publisher would cheerfully allow the poet to set the Mississippi on
fire, if it would boil his particular pot. It is not so much that
Englishmen are stupid as that they are afraid of being clever; and it is
not so much that Americans are clever as that they do not try to be any
stupider than they are. The fire of French logic has burnt that out of
America as it has burnt it out of Europe, and of almost every place
except England. This is one of the few points on which English
insularity really is a disadvantage. It is the fatal notion that the
only sort of commonsense is to be found in compromise, and that the only
sort of compromise is to be found in confusion. This must be clearly
distinguished from the commonplace about the utilitarian world not
rising to the invisible values of genius. Under this philosophy the
utilitarian does not see the utility of genius, even when it is quite
visible. He does not see it, not because he is a utilitarian, but
because he is an idealist whose ideal is dullness. For some time the
English aspired to be stupid, prayed and hoped with soaring spiritual
ambition to be stupid. But with all their worship of success, they did
not succeed in being stupid. The natural talents of a great and
traditional nation were always breaking out in spite of them. In spite
of the merchants of London, Turner did set the Thames on fire. In spite
of our repeatedly explained preference for realism to romance, Europe
persisted in resounding with the name of Byron. And just when we had
made it perfectly clear to the French that we despised all their
flamboyant tricks, that we were a plain prosaic people and there was no
fantastic glory or chivalry about us, the very shaft we sent against
them shone with the name of Nelson, a shooting and a falling star.
_Presidents and Problems_
All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen.
All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.
This difference, deep and perhaps ineradicable in the temperaments of
the two peoples, explains a thousand things in their literature and
their laws. The American national poet praised his people for their
readiness 'to _rise_ against the never-ending audacity of elected
persons.' The English national anthem is content to say heartily, but
almost hastily, 'Confound their politics,' and then more cheerfully, as
if changing the subject, 'God Save the King.' For this is especially the
secret of the monarch or chief magistrate in the two countries. They arm
the President with the powers of a King, that he may be a nuisance in
politics. We deprive the King even of the powers of a President, lest he
should remind us of a politician. We desire to forget the never-ending
audacity of elected persons; and with us therefore it really never does
end. That is the practical objection to our own habit of changing the
subject, instead of changing the ministry. The King, as the Irish wit
observed, is not a subject; but in that sense the English crowned head
is not a King. He is a popular figure intended to remind us of the
England that politicians do not remember; the England of horses and
ships and gardens and good fellowship. The Americans have no such
purely social symbol; and it is rather the root than the result of this
that their social luxury, and especially their sport, are a little
lacking in humanity and humour. It is the American, much more than the
Englishman, who takes his pleasures sadly, not to say savagely.
The genuine popularity of constitutional monarchs, in parliamentary
countries, can be explained by any practical example. Let us suppose
that great social reform, The Compulsory Haircutting Act, has just begun
to be enforced. The Compulsory Haircutting Act, as every good citizen
knows, is a statute which permits any person to grow his hair to any
length, in any wild or wonderful shape, so long as he is registered with
a hairdresser who charges a shilling. But it imposes a universal
close-shave (like that which is found so hygienic during a curative
detention at Dartmoor) on all who are registered only with a barber who
charges threepence. Thus, while the ornamental classes can continue to
ornament the street with Piccadilly weepers or chin-beards if they
choose, the working classes demonstrate the care with which the State
protects them by going about in a fresher, cooler, and cleaner
condition; a condition which has the further advantage of revealing at a
glance that outline of the criminal skull, which is so common among
them. The Compulsory Haircutting Act is thus in every way a compact and
convenient example of all our current laws about education, sport,
liquor and liberty in general. Well, the law has passed and the masses,
insensible to its scientific value, are still murmuring against it. The
ignorant peasant maiden is averse to so extreme a fashion of bobbing her
hair; and does not see how she can even be a flapper with nothing to
flap. Her father, his mind already poisoned by Bolshevists, begins to
wonder who the devil does these things, and why. In proportion as he
knows the world of to-day, he guesses that the real origin may be quite
obscure, or the real motive quite corrupt. The pressure may have come
from anybody who has gained power or money anyhow. It may come from the
foreign millionaire who owns all the expensive hairdressing saloons; it
may come from some swindler in the cutlery trade who has contracted to
sell a million bad razors. Hence the poor man looks about him with
suspicion in the street; knowing that the lowest sneak or the loudest
snob he sees may be directing the government of his country. Anybody may
have to do with politics; and this sort of thing is politics. Suddenly
he catches sight of a crowd, stops, and begins wildly to cheer a
carriage that is passing. The carriage contains the one person who has
certainly not originated any great scientific reform. He is the only
person in the commonwealth who is not allowed to cut off other people's
hair, or to take away other people's liberties. He at least is kept out
of politics; and men hold him up as they did an unspotted victim to
appease the wrath of the gods. He is their King, and the only man they
know is not their ruler. We need not be surprised that he is popular,
knowing how they are ruled.
The popularity of a President in America is exactly the opposite. The
American Republic is the last mediaeval monarchy. It is intended that
the President shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling. If the hair
is cut he is the haircutter, the magistrate that bears not the razor in
vain. All the popular Presidents, Jackson and Lincoln and Roosevelt,
have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not as
constitutional monarchs. In short, the names have become curiously
interchanged; and as a historical reality it is the President who ought
to be called a King.
But it is not only true that the President could correctly be called a
King. It is also true that the King might correctly be called a
President. We could hardly find a more exact description of him than to
call him a President. What is expected in modern times of a modern
constitutional monarch is emphatically that he should preside. We expect
him to take the throne exactly as if he were taking the chair. The
chairman does not move the motion or resolution, far less vote it; he is
not supposed even to favour it. He is expected to please everybody by
favouring nobody. The primary essentials of a President or Chairman are
that he should be treated with ceremonial respect, that he should be
popular in his personality and yet impersonal in his opinions, and that
he should actually be a link between all the other persons by being
different from all of them. This is exactly what is demanded of the
constitutional monarch in modern times. It is exactly the opposite to
the American position; in which the President does not preside at all.
He moves; and the thing he moves may truly be called a motion; for the
national idea is perpetual motion. Technically it is called a message;
and might often actually be called a menace. Thus we may truly say that
the King presides and the President reigns. Some would prefer to say
that the President rules; and some Senators and members of Congress
would prefer to say that he rebels. But there is no doubt that he moves;
he does not take the chair or even the stool, but rather the stump.
Some people seem to suppose that the fall of President Wilson was a
denial of this almost despotic ideal in America. As a matter of fact it
was the strongest possible assertion of it. The idea is that the
President shall take responsibility and risk; and responsibility means
being blamed, and risk means the risk of being blamed. The theory is
that things are done by the President; and if things go wrong, or are
alleged to go wrong, it is the fault of the President. This does not
invalidate, but rather ratifies the comparison with true monarchs such
as the mediaeval monarchs. Constitutional princes are seldom deposed;
but despots were often deposed. In the simpler races of sunnier lands,
such as Turkey, they were commonly assassinated. Even in our own history
a King often received the same respectful tribute to the responsibility
and reality of his office. But King John was attacked because he was
strong, not because he was weak. Richard the Second lost the crown
because the crown was a trophy, not because it was a trifle. And
President Wilson was deposed because he had used a power which is such,
in its nature, that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. As a
matter of fact, of course, it is easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's real
unpopularity, and still more easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's real
failure. There are a great many people in America who justify and
applaud him; and what is yet more interesting, who justify him not on
pacifist and idealistic, but on patriotic and even military grounds. It
is especially insisted by some that his demonstration, which seemed
futile as a threat against Mexico, was a very far-sighted preparation
for the threat against Prussia. But in so far as the democracy did
disagree with him, it was but the occasional and inevitable result of
the theory by which the despot has to anticipate the democracy.
Thus the American King and the English President are the very opposite
of each other; yet they are both the varied and very national
indications of the same contemporary truth. It is the great weariness
and contempt that have fallen upon common politics in both countries. It
may be answered, with some show of truth, that the new American
President represents a return to common politics; and that in that sense
he marks a real rebuke to the last President and his more uncommon
politics. And it is true that many who put Mr. Harding in power regard
him as the symbol of something which they call normalcy; which may
roughly be translated into English by the word normality. And by this
they do mean, more or less, the return to the vague capitalist
conservatism of the nineteenth century. They might call Mr. Harding a
Victorian if they had ever lived under Victoria. Perhaps these people do
entertain the extraordinary notion that the nineteenth century was
normal. But there are very few who think so, and even they will not
think so long. The blunder is the beginning of nearly all our present
troubles. The nineteenth century was the very reverse of normal. It
suffered a most unnatural strain in the combination of political
equality in theory with extreme economic inequality in practice.
Capitalism was not a normalcy but an abnormalcy. Property is normal, and
is more normal in proportion as it is universal. Slavery may be normal
and even natural, in the sense that a bad habit may be second nature.
But Capitalism was never anything so human as a habit; we may say it was
never anything so good as a bad habit. It was never a custom; for men
never grew accustomed to it. It was never even conservative; for before
it was even created wise men had realised that it could not be
conserved. It was from the first a problem; and those who will not even
admit the Capitalist problem deserve to get the Bolshevist solution. All
things considered, I cannot say anything worse of them than that.
The recent Presidential election preserved some trace of the old Party
System of America; but its tradition has very nearly faded like that of
the Party System of England. It is easy for an Englishman to confess
that he never quite understood the American Party System. It would
perhaps be more courageous in him, and more informing, to confess that
he never really understood the British Party System. The planks in the
two American platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected and
ramshackle; but our own party was as much of a patchwork, and indeed I
think even more so. Everybody knows that the two American factions were
called 'Democrat' and 'Republican.' It does not at all cover the case to
identify the former with Liberals and the latter with Conservatives. The
Democrats are the party of the South and have some true tradition from
the Southern aristocracy and the defence of Secession and State Rights.
The Republicans rose in the North as the party of Lincoln, largely
condemning slavery. But the Republicans are also the party of Tariffs,
and are at least accused of being the party of Trusts. The Democrats are
the party of Free Trade; and in the great movement of twenty years ago
the party of Free Silver. The Democrats are also the party of the Irish;
and the stones they throw at Trusts are retorted by stones thrown at
Tammany. It is easy to see all these things as curiously sporadic and
bewildering; but I am inclined to think that they are as a whole more
coherent and rational than our own old division of Liberals and
Conservatives. There is even more doubt nowadays about what is the
connecting link between the different items in the old British party
programmes. I have never been able to understand why being in favour of
Protection should have anything to do with being opposed to Home Rule;
especially as most of the people who were to receive Home Rule were
themselves in favour of Protection. I could never see what giving people
cheap bread had to do with forbidding them cheap beer; or why the party
which sympathises with Ireland cannot sympathise with Poland. I cannot
see why Liberals did not liberate public-houses or Conservatives
conserve crofters. I do not understand the principle upon which the
causes were selected on both sides; and I incline to think that it was
with the impartial object of distributing nonsense equally on both
sides. Heaven knows there is enough nonsense in American politics too;
towering and tropical nonsense like a cyclone or an earthquake. But when
all is said, I incline to think that there was more spiritual and
atmospheric cohesion in the different parts of the American party than
in those of the English party; and I think this unity was all the more
real because it was more difficult to define. The Republican party
originally stood for the triumph of the North, and the North stood for
the nineteenth century; that is for the characteristic commercial
expansion of the nineteenth century; for a firm faith in the profit and
progress of its great and growing cities, its division of labour, its
industrial science, and its evolutionary reform. The Democratic party
stood more loosely for all the elements that doubted whether this
development was democratic or was desirable; all that looked back to
Jeffersonian idealism and the serene abstractions of the eighteenth
century, or forward to Bryanite idealism and some simplified Utopia
founded on grain rather than gold. Along with this went, not at all
unnaturally, the last and lingering sentiment of the Southern squires,
who remembered a more rural civilisation that seemed by comparison
romantic. Along with this went, quite logically, the passions and the
pathos of the Irish, themselves a rural civilisation, whose basis is a
religion or what the nineteenth century tended to call a superstition.
Above all, it was perfectly natural that this tone of thought should
favour local liberties, and even a revolt on behalf of local liberties,
and should distrust the huge machine of centralised power called the
Union. In short, something very near the truth was said by a suicidally
silly Republican orator, who was running Blaine for the Presidency, when
he denounced the Democratic party as supported by 'Rome, rum, and
rebellion.' They seem to me to be three excellent things in their place;
and that is why I suspect that I should have belonged to the Democratic
party, if I had been born in America when there was a Democratic party.
But I fancy that by this time even this general distinction has become
very dim. If I had been an American twenty years ago, in the time of the
great Free Silver campaign, I should certainly never have hesitated for
an instant about my sympathies or my side. My feelings would have been
exactly those that are nobly expressed by Mr. Vachell Lindsay, in a poem
bearing the characteristic title of 'Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.' And,
by the way, nobody can begin to sympathise with America whose soul does
not to some extent begin to swing and dance to the drums and gongs of
Mr. Vachell Lindsay's great orchestra; which has the note of his whole
nation in this: that a refined person can revile it a hundred times over
as violent and brazen and barbarous and absurd, but not as insincere;
there is something in it, and that something is the soul of many million
men. But the poet himself, in the political poem referred to, speaks of
Bryan's fall over Free Silver as 'defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my
dream'; and it is only too probable that the cause has fallen as well as
the candidate. The William Jennings Bryan of later years is not the man
whom I should have seen in my youth, with the visionary eyes of Mr.
Vachell Lindsay. He has become a commonplace Pacifist, which is in its
nature the very opposite of a revolutionist; for if men will fight
rather than sacrifice humanity on a golden cross, it cannot be wrong for
them to resist its being sacrificed to an iron cross. I came into very
indirect contact with Mr. Bryan when I was in America, in a fashion that
made me realise how hard it has become to recover the illusions of a
Bryanite. I believe that my lecture agent was anxious to arrange a
debate, and I threw out a sort of loose challenge to the effect that
woman's suffrage had weakened the position of woman; and while I was
away in the wilds of Oklahoma my lecture agent (a man of blood-curdling
courage and enterprise) asked Mr. Bryan to debate with me. Now Mr. Bryan
is one of the greatest orators of modern history, and there is no
conceivable reason why he should trouble to debate with a wandering
lecturer. But as a matter of fact he expressed himself in the most
magnanimous and courteous terms about my personal position, but said (as
I understood) that it would be improper to debate on female suffrage as
it was already a part of the political system. And when I heard that, I
could not help a sigh; for I recognised something that I knew only too
well on the front benches of my own beloved land. The great and glorious
demagogue had degenerated into a statesman. I had never expected for a
moment that the great orator could be bothered to debate with me at all;
but it had never occurred to me, as a general moral principle, that two
educated men were for ever forbidden to talk sense about a particular
topic, because a lot of other people had already voted on it. What is
the matter with that attitude is the loss of the freedom of the mind.
There can be no liberty of thought unless it is ready to unsettle what
has recently been settled, as well as what has long been settled. We are
perpetually being told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong man
who will do things. What is wanted is a strong man who will undo things;
and that will be a real test of strength.