already said enough of the cause which is really realistic. The real
power behind Prohibition is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing
employers who wish to get the last inch of work out of their workmen.
But before the progress of modern plutocracy had reached this stage,
there was a predetermining cause for which there was a much better case.
The whole business began with the problem of black labour. I have not
attempted in this book to deal adequately with the question of the
negro. I have refrained for a reason that may seem somewhat sensational;
that I do not think I have anything particularly valuable to say or
suggest. I do not profess to understand this singularly dark and
intricate matter; and I see no use in men who have no solution filling
up the gap with sentimentalism. The chief thing that struck me about the
coloured people I saw was their charming and astonishing cheerfulness.
My sense of pathos was appealed to much more by the Red Indians; and
indeed I wish I had more space here to do justice to the Red Indians.
They did heroic service in the war; and more than justified their
glorious place in the day-dreams and nightmares of our boyhood. But the
negro problem certainly demands more study than a sight-seer could give
it; and this book is controversial enough about things that I have
really considered, without permitting it to exhibit me as a sight-seer
who shoots at sight. But I believe that it was always common ground to
people of common sense that the enslavement and importation of negroes
had been the crime and catastrophe of American history. The only
difference was originally that one side thought that, the crime once
committed, the only reparation was their freedom; while the other
thought that, the crime once committed, the only safety was their
slavery. It was only comparatively lately, by a process I shall have to
indicate elsewhere, that anything like a positive case for slavery
became possible. Now among the many problems of the presence of an alien
and at least recently barbaric figure among the citizens, there was a
very real problem of drink. Drink certainly has a very exceptionally
destructive effect upon negroes in their native countries; and it was
alleged to have a peculiarly demoralising effect upon negroes in the
United States; to call up the passions that are the particular
temptation of the race and to lead to appalling outrages that are
followed by appalling popular vengeance. However this may be, many of
the states of the American Union, which first forbade liquor to
citizens, meant simply to forbid it to negroes. But they had not the
moral courage to deny that negroes are citizens. About all their
political expedients necessarily hung the load that hangs so heavy on
modern politics; hypocrisy. The superior race had to rule by a sort of
secret society organised against the inferior. The American politicians
dared not disfranchise the negroes; so they coerced everybody in theory
and only the negroes in practice. The drinking of the white men became
as much a conspiracy as the shooting by the white horsemen of the
Ku-Klux Klan. And in that connection, it may be remarked in passing that
the comparison illustrates the idiocy of supposing that the moral sense
of mankind will ever support the prohibition of drinking as if it were
something like the prohibition of shooting. Shooting in America is
liable to take a free form, and sometimes a very horrible form; as when
private bravos were hired to kill workmen in the capitalistic interests
of that pure patron of disarmament, Carnegie. But when some of the rich
Americans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with,
because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we may
well be disposed to smile. When I was there, at any rate, they were
using them up very fast; and with no apparent fears about the supply.
But if the Ku-Klux Klan had started suddenly shooting everybody they
didn't like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they were
only using up the stocks of their ammunition, left over from the Civil
War, it seems probable that there would at least have been a little
curiosity about how much they had left. There might at least have been
occasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. It is even
conceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it.
No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly because
the rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, but
partly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of this
particular rule. And the truth is, as I have indicated, that it was
originally established as an exception and not as a rule. The
emancipated negro was an exception in the community, and a certain plan
was, rightly or wrongly, adopted to meet his case. A law was made
professedly for everybody and practically only for him. Prohibition is
only important as marking the transition by which the trick, tried
successfully on black labour, could be extended to all labour. We in
England have no right to be Pharisaic at the expense of the Americans in
this matter; for we have tried the same trick in a hundred forms. The
true philosophical defence of the modern oppression of the poor would be
to say frankly that we have ruled them so badly that they are unfit to
rule themselves. But no modern oligarch is enough of a man to say this.
For like all virile cynicism it would have an element of humility; which
would not mix with the necessary element of hypocrisy. So we proceed,
just as the Americans do, to make a law for everybody and then evade it
for ourselves. We have not the honesty to say that the rich may bet
because they can afford it; so we forbid any man to bet in any place;
and then say that a place is not a place. It is exactly as if there were
an American law allowing a negro to be murdered because he is not a man
within the meaning of the Act. We have not the honesty to drive the poor
to school because they are ignorant; so we pretend to drive everybody;
and then send inspectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. We
apply the same ingenuous principle; and are quite as undemocratic as
Western democracy. Nevertheless there is an element in the American case
which cannot be present in ours; and this chapter may well conclude upon
so important a change.
America can now say with pride that she has abolished the colour bar. In
this matter the white labourer and the black labourer have at last been
put upon an equal social footing. White labour is every bit as much
enslaved as black labour; and is actually enslaved by a method and a
model only intended for black labour. We might think it rather odd if
the exact regulations about flogging negroes were reproduced as a plan
for punishing strikers; or if industrial arbitration issued its reports
in the precise terminology of the Fugitive Slave Law. But this is in
essentials what has happened; and one could almost fancy some negro orgy
of triumph, with the beating of gongs and all the secret violence of
Voodoo, crying aloud to some ancestral Mumbo Jumbo that the Poor White
Trash was being treated according to its name.
_Fads and Public Opinion_
A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is
perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a
reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was a
foreigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my own
laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner
have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant
to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous
ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humour is
generally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are
so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to
consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have
arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And,
rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from the
failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is
humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be
the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke.
The English and the American types of humour are in one way directly
contrary. The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination,
piling one house on another in a tower like that of a sky-scraper. The
most English humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man returning to
the earth his mother in a homely fashion; as when he sits down suddenly
on a butter-slide. English farce describes a man as being in a hole.
American fantasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as being
up a tree. The former is to be found in the cockney comic songs that
concern themselves with hanging out the washing or coming home with the
milk. The latter is to be found in those fantastic yarns about machines
that turn live pigs into pig-skin purses or burning cities that serve to
hatch an egg. But it will be inevitable, when the two come first into
contact, that the bathos will sound like vulgarity and the extravagance
will sound like boasting.
Suppose an American soldier said to an English soldier in the trenches,
'The Kaiser may want a place in the sun; I reckon he won't have a place
in the solar system when we begin to hustle.' The English soldier will
very probably form the impression that this is arrogance; an impression
based on the extraordinary assumption that the American means what he
says. The American has merely indulged in a little art for art's sake,
and abstract adventure of the imagination; he has told an American short
story. But the Englishman, not understanding this, will think the other
man is boasting, and reflecting on the insufficiency of the English
effort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like, 'Oh,
you'll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and asking
for a kipper with your tea.' And it is quite likely that the American
will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty
answered in so personal a fashion. Being an American, he will probably
have a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife; and may object to her
being called an old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under the
extraordinary delusion that talking of the old woman really means that
the woman is old. Possibly he thinks the mysterious demand for a kipper
carries with it some charge of ill-treating his wife; which his national
sense of honour swiftly resents. But the real cross-purposes come from
the contrary direction of the two exaggerations, the American making
life more wild and impossible than it is, and the Englishman making it
more flat and farcical than it is; the one escaping from the house of
life by a skylight and the other by a trap-door.
This difficulty of different humours is a very practical one for
practical people. Most of those who profess to remove all international
differences are not practical people. Most of the phrases offered for
the reconciliation of severally patriotic peoples are entirely serious
and even solemn phrases. But human conversation is not conducted in
those phrases. The normal man on nine occasions out of ten is rather a
flippant man. And the normal man is almost always the national man.
Patriotism is the most popular of all the virtues. The drier sort of
democrats who despise it have the democracy against them in every
country in the world. Hence their international efforts seldom go any
farther than to effect an international reconciliation of all
internationalists. But we have not solved the normal and popular problem
until we have an international reconciliation of all nationalists.
It is very difficult to see how humour can be translated at all. When
Sam Weller is in the Fleet Prison and Mrs. Weller and Mr. Stiggins sit
on each side of the fireplace and weep and groan with sympathy, old Mr.
Weller observes, 'Vell, Sammy, I hope you find your spirits rose by this
'ere lively visit.' I have never looked up this passage in the popular
and successful French version of _Pickwick_; but I confess I am curious
as to what French past-participle conveys the precise effect of the word
'rose.' A translator has not only to give the right translation of the
right word but the right translation of the wrong word. And in the same
way I am quite prepared to suspect that there are English jokes which an
Englishman must enjoy in his own rich and romantic solitude, without
asking for the sympathy of an American. But Englishmen are generally
only too prone to claim this fine perception, without seeing that the
fine edge of it cuts both ways. I have begun this chapter on the note of
national humour because I wish to make it quite clear that I realise how
easily a foreigner may take something seriously that is not serious.
When I think something in America is really foolish, it may be I that am
made a fool of. It is the first duty of a traveller to allow for this;
but it seems to be the very last thing that occurs to some travellers.
But when I seek to say something of what may be called the fantastic
side of America, I allow beforehand that some of it may be meant to be
fantastic. And indeed it is very difficult to believe that some of it is
meant to be serious. But whether or no there is a joke, there is
certainly an inconsistency; and it is an inconsistency in the moral
make-up of America which both puzzles and amuses me.
The danger of democracy is not anarchy but convention. There is even a
sort of double meaning in the word 'convention'; for it is also used for
the most informal and popular sort of parliament; a parliament not
summoned by any king. The Americans come together very easily without
any king; but their coming together is in every sense a convention, and
even a very conventional convention. In a democracy riot is rather the
exception and respectability certainly the rule. And though a
superficial sight-seer should hesitate about all such generalisations,
and certainly should allow for enormous exceptions to them, he does
receive a general impression of unity verging on uniformity. Thus
Americans all dress well; one might almost say that American women all
look well; but they do not, as compared with Europeans, look very
different. They are in the fashion; too much in the fashion even to be
conspicuously fashionable. Of course there are patches, both Bohemian
and Babylonian, of which this is not true, but I am talking of the
general tone of a whole democracy. I have said there is more
respectability than riot; but indeed in a deeper sense the same spirit
is behind both riot and respectability. It is the same social force that
makes it possible for the respectable to boycott a man and for the
riotous to lynch him. I do not object to it being called 'the herd
instinct,' so long as we realise that it is a metaphor and not an
explanation.
Public opinion can be a prairie fire. It eats up everything that opposes
it; and there is the grandeur as well as the grave disadvantages of a
natural catastrophe in that national unity. Pacifists who complained in
England of the intolerance of patriotism have no notion of what
patriotism can be like. If they had been in America, after America had
entered the war, they would have seen something which they have always
perhaps subconsciously dreaded, and would then have beyond all their
worst dreams detested; and the name of it is democracy. They would have
found that there are disadvantages in birds of a feather flocking
together; and that one of them follows on a too complacent display of
the white feather. The truth is that a certain flexible sympathy with
eccentrics of this kind is rather one of the advantages of an
aristocratic tradition. The imprisonment of Mr. Debs, the American
Pacifist, which really was prolonged and oppressive, would probably have
been shortened in England where his opinions were shared by aristocrats
like Mr. Bertrand Russell and Mr. Ponsonby. A man like Lord Hugh Cecil
could be moved to the defence of conscientious objectors, partly by a
true instinct of chivalry; but partly also by the general feeling that a
gentleman may very probably have aunts and uncles who are quite as mad.
He takes the matter personally, in the sense of being able to imagine
the psychology of the persons. But democracy is no respecter of persons.
It is no respecter of them, either in the bad and servile or in the good
and sympathetic sense. And Debs was nothing to democracy. He was but one
of the millions. This is a real problem, or question in the balance,
touching different forms of government; which is, of course, quite
neglected by the idealists who merely repeat long words. There was
during the war a society called the Union of Democratic Control, which
would have been instantly destroyed anywhere where democracy had any
control, or where there was any union. And in this sense the United
States have most emphatically got a union. Nevertheless I think there is
something rather more subtle than this simple popular solidity behind
the assimilation of American citizens to each other. There is something
even in the individual ideals that drives towards this social sympathy.
And it is here that we have to remember that biological fancies like the
herd instinct are only figures of speech, and cannot really cover
anything human. For the Americans are in some ways a very self-conscious
people. To compare their social enthusiasm to a stampede of cattle is to
ask us to believe in a bull writing a diary or a cow looking in a
looking-glass. Intensely sensitive by their very vitality, they are
certainly conscious of criticism and not merely of a blind and brutal
appetite. But the peculiar point about them is that it is this very
vividness in the self that often produces the similarity. It may be that
when they are unconscious they are like bulls and cows. But it is when
they are self-conscious that they are like each other.
Individualism is the death of individuality. It is so, if only because
it is an 'ism.' Many Americans become almost impersonal in their worship
of personality. Where their natural selves might differ, their ideal
selves tend to be the same. Anybody can see what I mean in those strong
self-conscious photographs of American business men that can be seen in
any American magazine. Each may conceive himself to be a solitary
Napoleon brooding at St. Helena; but the result is a multitude of
Napoleons brooding all over the place. Each of them must have the eyes
of a mesmerist; but the most weak-minded person cannot be mesmerised by
more than one millionaire at a time. Each of the millionaires must
thrust forward his jaw, offering (if I may say so) to fight the world
with the same weapon as Samson. Each of them must accentuate the length
of his chin, especially, of course, by always being completely
clean-shaven. It would be obviously inconsistent with Personality to
prefer to wear a beard. These are of course fantastic examples on the
fringe of American life; but they do stand for a certain assimilation,
not through brute gregariousness, but rather through isolated dreaming.
And though it is not always carried so far as this, I do think it is
carried too far. There is not quite enough unconsciousness to produce
real individuality. There is a sort of worship of will-power in the
abstract, so that people are actually thinking about how they can will,
more than about what they want. To this I do think a certain corrective
could be found in the nature of English eccentricity. Every man in his
humour is most interesting when he is unconscious of his humour; or at
least when he is in an intermediate stage between humour in the old
sense of oddity and in the new sense of irony. Much is said in these
days against negative morality; and certainly most Americans would show
a positive preference for positive morality. The virtues they venerate
collectively are very active virtues; cheerfulness and courage and vim,
otherwise zip, also pep and similar things. But it is sometimes
forgotten that negative morality is freer than positive morality.
Negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pattern, of which
the lines or cords constrict at longer intervals. A man like Dr. Johnson
could grow in his own way to his own stature in the net of the Ten
Commandments; precisely because he was convinced there were only ten of
them. He was not compressed into the mould of positive beauty, like
that of the Apollo Belvedere or the American citizen.
This criticism is sometimes true even of the American woman, who is
certainly a much more delightful person than the mesmeric millionaire
with his shaven jaw. Interviewers in the United States perpetually asked
me what I thought of American women, and I confessed a distaste for such
generalisations which I have not managed to lose. The Americans, who are
the most chivalrous people in the world, may perhaps understand me; but
I can never help feeling that there is something polygamous about
talking of women in the plural at all; something unworthy of any
American except a Mormon. Nevertheless, I think the exaggeration I
suggest does extend in a less degree to American women, fascinating as
they are. I think they too tend too much to this cult of impersonal
personality. It is a description easy to exaggerate even by the faintest
emphasis; for all these things are subtle and subject to striking
individual exceptions. To complain of people for being brave and bright
and kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And
yet there is something in the background that can only be expressed by a
symbol, something that is not shallowness but a neglect of the
subconsciousness and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can
be missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starry
candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over
me, in a wordless wave, that I should like to see a sulky woman. How she
would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full
of older stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate
proportion even in the most detached description. But the same thing
was in the mind of a white-bearded old man I met in New York, an Irish
exile and a wonderful talker, who stared up at the tower of gilded
galleries of the great hotel, and said with that spontaneous movement of
style which is hardly heard except from Irish talkers: 'And I have been
in a village in the mountains where the people could hardly read or
write; but all the men were like soldiers, and all the women had pride.'
It sounds like a poem about an Earthly Paradise to say that in this land
the old women can be more beautiful than the young. Indeed, I think Walt
Whitman, the national poet, has a line somewhere almost precisely to
that effect. It sounds like a parody upon Utopia, and the image of the
lion lying down with the lamb, to say it is a place where a man might
almost fall in love with his mother-in-law. But there is nothing in
which the finer side of American gravity and good feeling does more
honourably exhibit itself than in a certain atmosphere around the older
women. It is not a cant phrase to say that they grow old gracefully; for
they do really grow old. In this the national optimism really has in it
the national courage. The old women do not dress like young women; they
only dress better. There is another side to this feminine dignity in the
old, sometimes a little lost in the young, with which I shall deal
presently. The point for the moment is that even Whitman's truly poetic
vision of the beautiful old women suffers a little from that bewildering
multiplicity and recurrence that is indeed the whole theme of Whitman.
It is like the green eternity of Leaves of Grass. When I think of the
eccentric spinsters and incorrigible grandmothers of my own country, I
cannot imagine that any one of them could possibly be mistaken for
another, even at a glance. And in comparison I feel as if I had been
travelling in an Earthly Paradise of more decorative harmonies; and I
remember only a vast cloud of grey and pink as of the plumage of
cherubim in an old picture. But on second thoughts, I think this may be
only the inevitable effect of visiting any country in a swift and
superficial fashion; and that the grey and pink cloud is probably an
illusion, like the spinning prairies scattered by the wheel of the
train.
Anyhow there is enough of this equality, and of a certain social unity
favourable to sanity, to make the next point about America very much of
a puzzle. It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen
an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy should
produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human
dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny. I am
not referring solely or even specially to Prohibition, which I discuss
elsewhere. Prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore next
door to a religion; it has some imaginable connection with moral
questions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to
model ourselves on the States which punish the sin of drink forget that
there are States which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking a
cigarette in the open air. The same American atmosphere that permits
Prohibition permits of people being punished for kissing each other. In
other words, there are States psychologically capable of making a man a
convict for wearing a blue neck-tie or having a green front-door, or
anything else that anybody chooses to fancy. There is an American
atmosphere in which people may some day be shot for shaking hands, or
hanged for writing a post-card.
As for the sort of thing to which I refer, the American newspapers are
full of it and there is no name for it but mere madness. Indeed it is
not only mad, but it calls itself mad. To mention but one example out of
many, it was actually boasted that some lunatics were teaching children
to take care of their health. And it was proudly added that the children
were 'health-mad.' That it is not exactly the object of all mental
hygiene to make people mad did not occur to them; and they may still be
engaged in their earnest labours to teach babies to be valetudinarians
and hypochondriacs in order to make them healthy. In such cases, we may
say that the modern world is too ridiculous to be ridiculed. You cannot
caricature a caricature. Imagine what a satirist of saner days would
have made of the daily life of a child of six, who was actually admitted
to be mad on the subject of his own health. These are not days in which
that great extravaganza could be written; but I dimly see some of its
episodes like uncompleted dreams. I see the child pausing in the middle
of a cart-wheel, or when he has performed three-quarters of a
cart-wheel, and consulting a little note-book about the amount of
exercise per diem. I see him pausing half-way up a tree, or when he has
climbed exactly one-third of a tree; and then producing a clinical
thermometer to take his own temperature. But what would be the good of
imaginative logic to prove the madness of such people, when they
themselves praise it for being mad?