that the Democratic party was democratic with a small d. In Mr. Wilson
it was transfigured, his friends would say into a higher and his foes
into a hazier thing. And the Republican reaction against him, even where
it has been healthy, has also been hazy. In fact, it has been not so
much the victory of a political party as a relapse into repose after
certain political passions; and in that sense there is a truth in the
strange phrase about normalcy; in the sense that there is nothing more
normal than going to sleep. But an even larger truth is this; it is most
likely that America is no longer concentrated on these faction fights at
all, but is considering certain large problems upon which those factions
hardly troubled to take sides. They are too large even to be classified
as foreign policy distinct from domestic policy. They are so large as to
be inside as well as outside the state. From an English standpoint the
most obvious example is the Irish; for the Irish problem is not a
British problem, but also an American problem. And this is true even of
the great external enigma of Japan. The Japanese question may be a part
of foreign policy for America, but it is a part of domestic policy for
California. And the same is true of that other intense and intelligent
Eastern people, the genius and limitations of which have troubled the
world so much longer. What the Japs are in California, the Jews are in
America. That is, they are a piece of foreign policy that has become
imbedded in domestic policy; something which is found inside but still
has to be regarded from the outside. On these great international
matters I doubt if Americans got much guidance from their party system;
especially as most of these questions have grown very recently and
rapidly to enormous size. Men are left free to judge of them with fresh
minds. And that is the truth in the statement that the Washington
Conference has opened the gates of a new world.
On the relations to England and Ireland I will not attempt to dwell
adequately here. I have already noted that my first interview was with
an Irishman, and my first impression from that interview a vivid sense
of the importance of Ireland in Anglo-American relations; and I have
said something of the Irish problem, prematurely and out of its proper
order, under the stress of that sense of urgency. Here I will only add
two remarks about the two countries respectively. A great many British
journalists have recently imagined that they were pouring oil upon the
troubled waters, when they were rather pouring out oil to smooth the
downward path; and to turn the broad road to destruction into a
butter-slide. They seem to have no notion of what to do, except to say
what they imagine the very stupidest of their readers would be pleased
to hear, and conceal whatever the most intelligent of their readers
would probably like to know. They therefore informed the public that
'the majority of Americans' had abandoned all sympathy with Ireland,
because of its alleged sympathy with Germany; and that this majority of
Americans was now ardently in sympathy with its English brothers across
the sea. Now to begin with, such critics have no notion of what they are
saying when they talk about the majority of Americans. To anybody who
has happened to look in, let us say, on the city of Omaha, Nebraska, the
remark will have something enormous and overwhelming about it. It is
like saying that the majority of the inhabitants of China would agree
with the Chinese Ambassador in a preference for dining at the Savoy
rather than the Ritz. There are millions and millions of people living
in those great central plains of the North American Continent of whom
it would be nearer the truth to say that they have never heard of
England, or of Ireland either, than to say that their first emotional
movement is a desire to come to the rescue of either of them. It is
perfectly true that the more monomaniac sort of Sinn Feiner might
sometimes irritate this innocent and isolated American spirit by being
pro-Irish. It is equally true that a traditional Bostonian or Virginian
might irritate it by being pro-English. The only difference is that
large numbers of pure Irishmen are scattered in those far places, and
large numbers of pure Englishmen are not. But it is truest of all to say
that neither England nor Ireland so much as crosses the mind of most of
them once in six months. Painting up large notices of 'Watch Us Grow,'
making money by farming with machinery, together with an occasional
hold-up with six-shooters and photographs of a beautiful murderess or
divorcée, fill up the round of their good and happy lives, and fleet the
time carelessly as in the golden age.
But putting aside all this vast and distant democracy, which is the real
'majority of Americans,' and confining ourselves to that older culture
on the eastern coast which the critics probably had in mind, we shall
find the case more comforting but not to be covered with cheap and false
comfort. Now it is perfectly true that any Englishman coming to this
eastern coast, as I did, finds himself not only most warmly welcomed as
a guest, but most cordially complimented as an Englishman. Men recall
with pride the branches of their family that belong to England or the
English counties where they were rooted; and there are enthusiasms for
English literature and history which are as spontaneous as patriotism
itself. Something of this may be put down to a certain promptitude and
flexibility in all American kindness, which is never sufficiently stodgy
to be called good nature. The Englishman does sometimes wonder whether
if he had been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered remote
Russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Muscovite great-grandmother;
or whether if he had come from Iceland, they would not have known as
much about Icelandic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence of
Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the proportions of the case
he will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that a
number of educated Americans are very warmly and sincerely sympathetic
with England.
What I began to feel, with a certain creeping chill, was that they were
only too sympathetic with England. The word sympathetic has sometimes
rather a double sense. The impression I received was that all these
chivalrous Southerners and men mellow with Bostonian memories were
_rallying_ to England. They were on the defensive; and it was poor old
England that they were defending. Their attitude implied that somebody
or something was leaving her undefended, or finding her indefensible.
The burden of that hearty chorus was that England was not so black as
she was painted; it seemed clear that somewhere or other she was being
painted pretty black. But there was something else that made me
uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously
forgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well as
morality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and
cold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land.
Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never during
the great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and
commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly that
note in a human voice. England was being _pitied_. I, as an Englishman,
was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be
an object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full of
the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. But
the anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an
end.
It is not my business here to expound my view of English politics, still
less of European politics or the politics of the world; but to put down
a few impressions of American travel. On many points of European
politics the impression will be purely negative; I am sure that most
Americans have no notion of the position of France or the position of
Poland. But if English readers want the truth, I am sure this is the
truth about their notion of the position of England. They are wondering,
or those who are watching are wondering, whether the term of her success
is come and she is going down the dark road after Prussia. Many are
sorry if this is so; some are glad if it is so; but all are seriously
considering the probability of its being so. And herein lay especially
the horrible folly of our Black-and-Tan terrorism over the Irish people.
I have noted that the newspapers told us that America had been chilled
in its Irish sympathies by Irish detachment during the war. It is the
painful truth that any advantage we might have had from this we
ourselves immediately proceeded to destroy. Ireland _might_ have put
herself wrong with America by her attitude about Belgium, if England had
not instantly proceeded to put herself more wrong by her attitude
towards Ireland. It is quite true that two blacks do not make a white;
but you cannot send a black to reproach people with tolerating
blackness; and this is quite as true when one is a Black Brunswicker and
the other a Black-and-Tan. It is true that since then England has made
surprisingly sweeping concessions; concessions so large as to increase
the amazement that the refusal should have been so long. But
unfortunately the combination of the two rather clinches the conception
of our decline. If the concession had come before the terror, it would
have looked like an attempt to emancipate, and would probably have
succeeded. Coming so abruptly after the terror, it looked only like an
attempt to tyrannise, and an attempt that failed. It was partly an
inheritance from a stupid tradition, which tried to combine what it
called firmness with what it called conciliation; as if when we made up
our minds to soothe a man with a five-pound note, we always took care to
undo our own action by giving him a kick as well. The English politician
has often done that; though there is nothing to be said of such a fool,
except that he has wasted a fiver. But in this case he gave the kick
first, received a kicking in return, and _then_ gave up the money; and
it was hard for the bystanders to say anything except that he had been
badly beaten. The combination and sequence of events seems almost as if
it were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous parallel. The first
action looked only too like the invasion of Belgium, and the second like
the evacuation of Belgium. So that vast and silent crowd in the West
looked at the British Empire, as men look at a great tower that has
begun to lean. Thus it was that while I found real pleasure, I could not
find unrelieved consolation in the sincere compliments paid to my
country by so many cultivated Americans; their memories of homely
corners of historic counties from which their fathers came, of the
cathedral that dwarfs the town, or the inn at the turning of the road.
There was something in their voices and the look in their eyes which
from the first disturbed me. So I have heard good Englishmen, who died
afterwards the death of soldiers, cry aloud in 1914, 'It seems
impossible, of those jolly Bavarians!' or, 'I will never believe it,
when I think of the time I had at Heidelberg!'
But there are other things besides the parallel of Prussia or the
problem of Ireland. The American press is much freer than our own; the
American public is much more familiar with the discussion of corruption
than our own; and it is much more conscious of the corruption of our
politics than we are. Almost any man in America may speak of the Marconi
Case; many a man in England does not even know what it means. Many
imagine that it had something to do with the propriety of politicians
speculating on the Stock Exchange. So that it means a great deal to
Americans to say that one figure in that drama is ruling India and
another is ruling Palestine. And this brings me to another problem,
which is also dealt with much more openly in America than in England. I
mention it here only because it is a perfect model of the
misunderstandings in the modern world. If any one asks for an example
of exactly how the important part of every story is left out, and even
the part that is reported is not understood, he could hardly have a
stronger case than the story of Henry Ford of Detroit.
When I was in Detroit I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ford, and it
really was a pleasure. He is a man quite capable of views which I think
silly to the point of insanity; but he is not the vulgar benevolent
boss. It must be admitted that he is a millionaire; but he cannot really
be convicted of being a philanthropist. He is not a man who merely wants
to run people; it is rather his views that run him, and perhaps run away
with him. He has a distinguished and sensitive face; he really invented
things himself, unlike most men who profit by inventions; he is
something of an artist and not a little of a fighter. A man of that type
is always capable of being wildly wrong, especially in the sectarian
atmosphere of America; and Mr. Ford has been wrong before and may be
wrong now. He is chiefly known in England for a project which I think
very preposterous; that of the Peace Ship, which came to Europe during
the war. But he is not known in England at all in connection with a much
more important campaign, which he has conducted much more recently and
with much more success; a campaign against the Jews like one of the
Anti-Semitic campaigns of the Continent. Now any one who knows anything
of America knows exactly what the Peace Ship would be like. It was a
national combination of imagination and ignorance, which has at least
some of the beauty of innocence. Men living in those huge, hedgeless
inland plains know nothing about frontiers or the tragedy of a fight for
freedom; they know nothing of alarum and armaments or the peril of a
high civilisation poised like a precious statue within reach of a mailed
fist. They are accustomed to a cosmopolitan citizenship, in which men of
all bloods mingle and in which men of all creeds are counted equal.
Their highest moral boast is humanitarianism; their highest mental boast
is enlightenment. In a word, they are the very last men in the world who
would seem likely to pride themselves on a prejudice against the Jews.
They have no religion in particular, except a sincere sentiment which
they would call 'true Christianity,' and which specially forbids an
attack on the Jews. They have a patriotism which prides itself on
assimilating all types, including the Jews. Mr. Ford is a pure product
of this pacific world, as was sufficiently proved by his pacifism. If a
man of that sort has discovered that there is a Jewish problem, it is
because there is a Jewish problem. It is certainly not because there is
an Anti-Jewish prejudice. For if there had been any amount of such
racial and religious prejudice, he would have been about the very last
sort of man to have it. His particular part of the world would have been
the very last place to produce it. We may well laugh at the Peace Ship,
and its wild course and inevitable shipwreck; but remember that its very
wildness was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle of
Front-de-Boeuf. Everything that made him Anti-War should have
prevented him from being Anti-Semite. We may mock him for being mad on
peace; but we cannot say that he was so mad on peace that he made war on
Israel.
It happened that, when I was in America, I had just published some
studies on Palestine; and I was besieged by Rabbis lamenting my
'prejudice.' I pointed out that they would have got hold of the wrong
word, even if they had not got hold of the wrong man. As a point of
personal autobiography, I do not happen to be a man who dislikes Jews;
though I believe that some men do. I have had Jews among my most
intimate and faithful friends since my boyhood, and I hope to have them
till I die. But even if I did have a dislike of Jews, it would be
illogical to call that dislike a prejudice. Prejudice is a very lucid
Latin word meaning the bias which a man has before he considers a case.
I might be said to be prejudiced against a Hairy Ainu because of his
name, for I have never been on terms of such intimacy with him as to
correct my preconceptions. But if after moving about in the modern world
and meeting Jews, knowing Jews, doing business with Jews, and reading
and hearing about Jews, I came to the conclusion that I did not like
Jews, my conclusion certainly would not be a prejudice. It would simply
be an opinion; and one I should be perfectly entitled to hold; though as
a matter of fact I do not hold it. No extravagance of hatred merely
following on _experience_ of Jews can properly be called a prejudice.
Now the point is that this new American Anti-Semitism springs from
experience and nothing but experience. There is no prejudice for it to
spring from. Or rather the prejudice is all the other way. All the
traditions of that democracy, and very creditable traditions too, are in
favour of toleration and a sort of idealistic indifference. The
sympathies in which these nineteenth-century people were reared were all
against Front-de-Boeuf and in favour of Rebecca. They inherited a
prejudice against Anti-Semitism; a prejudice of Anti-Anti-Semitism.
These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as they
might have struck oil; because it is _there_, and not even because they
were looking for it. Their view of the problem, like their use of the
oil, is not always satisfactory; and with parts of it I entirely
disagree. But the point is that the thing which I call a problem, and
others call a prejudice, has now appeared in broad daylight in a new
country where there is no priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancient
superstition to explain it. It has appeared because it _is_ a problem;
and those are the best friends of the Jews, including many of the Jews
themselves, who are trying to find a solution. That is the meaning of
the incident of Mr. Henry Ford of Detroit; and you will hardly hear an
intelligible word about it in England.
The talk of prejudice against the Japs is not unlike the talk of
prejudice against the Jews. Only in this case our indifference has
really the excuse of ignorance. We used to lecture the Russians for
oppressing the Jews, before we heard the word Bolshevist and began to
lecture them for being oppressed by the Jews. In the same way we have
long lectured the Californians for oppressing the Japs, without allowing
for the possibility of their foreseeing that the oppression may soon be
the other way. As in the other case, it may be a persecution but it is
not a prejudice. The Californians know more about the Japanese than we
do; and our own colonists when they are placed in the same position
generally say the same thing. I will not attempt to deal adequately here
with the vast international and diplomatic problems which arise with the
name of the new power in the Far East. It is possible that Japan, having
imitated European militarism, may imitate European pacifism. I cannot
honestly pretend to know what the Japanese mean by the one any more than
by the other. But when Englishmen, especially English Liberals like
myself, take a superior and censorious attitude towards Americans and
especially Californians, I am moved to make a final remark. When a
considerable number of Englishmen talk of the grave contending claims of
our friendship with Japan and our friendship with America, when they
finally tend in a sort of summing up to dwell on the superior virtues of
Japan, I may be permitted to make a single comment.
We are perpetually boring the world and each other with talk about the
bonds that bind us to America. We are perpetually crying aloud that
England and America are very much alike, especially England. We are
always insisting that the two are identical in all the things in which
they most obviously differ. We are always saying that both stand for
democracy, when we should not consent to stand their democracy for half
a day. We are always saying that at least we are all Anglo-Saxons, when
we are descended from Romans and Normans and Britons and Danes, and they
are descended from Irishmen and Italians and Slavs and Germans. We tell
a people whose very existence is a revolt against the British Crown that
they are passionately devoted to the British Constitution. We tell a
nation whose whole policy has been isolation and independence that with
us she can bear safely the White Man's Burden of universal empire. We
tell a continent crowded with Irishmen to thank God that the Saxon can
always rule the Celt. We tell a populace whose very virtues are lawless
that together we uphold the Reign of Law. We recognise our own
law-abiding character in people who make laws that neither they nor
anybody else can abide. We congratulate them on clinging to all they
have cast away, and on imitating everything which they came into
existence to insult. And when we have established all these nonsensical
analogies with a nonexistent nation, we wait until there is a crisis in
which we really are at one with America, and then we falter and threaten
to fail her. In a battle where we really are of one blood, the blood of
the great white race throughout the world, when we really have one
language, the fundamental alphabet of Cadmus and the script of Rome,
when we really do represent the same reign of law, the common conscience
of Christendom and the morals of men baptized, when we really have an
implicit faith and honour and type of freedom to summon up our souls as
with trumpets--_then_ many of us begin to weaken and waver and wonder
whether there is not something very nice about little yellow men, whose
heroic stories revolve round polygamy and suicide, and whose heroes wore
two swords and worshipped the ancestors of the Mikado.
_Prohibition in Fact and Fancy_
I went to America with some notion of not discussing Prohibition. But I
soon found that well-to-do Americans were only too delighted to discuss
it over the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, to
dispense with the nuts. I am far from sneering at this; having a general
philosophy which need not here be expounded, but which may be symbolised
by saying that monkeys can enjoy nuts but only men can enjoy wine. But
if I am to deal with Prohibition, there is no doubt of the first thing
to be said about it. The first thing to be said about it is that it does
not exist. It is to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it
was intended to be enforced among the poor; though even among them I
fancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced among the rich;
and I doubt whether it was intended to be. I suspect that this has
always happened whenever this negative notion has taken hold of some
particular province or tribe. Prohibition never prohibits. It never has
in history; not even in Moslem history; and it never will. Mahomet at
least had the argument of a climate and not the interest of a class. But
if a test is needed, consider what part of Moslem culture has passed
permanently into our own modern culture. You will find the one Moslem
poem that has really pierced is a Moslem poem in praise of wine. The
crown of all the victories of the Crescent is that nobody reads the
Koran and everybody reads the Rubaiyat.
Most of us remember with satisfaction an old picture in _Punch_,
representing a festive old gentleman in a state of collapse on the
pavement, and a philanthropic old lady anxiously calling the attention
of a cabman to the calamity. The old lady says, 'I'm sure this poor
gentleman is ill,' and the cabman replies with fervour, 'Ill! I wish I
'ad 'alf 'is complaint.'