never copies anything that is really worth copying. Nations never
_learn_ anything from each other in this way. We have many things to
learn from America; but we only listen to those Americans who have still
to learn them. Thus, for instance, we do not import the small farm but
only the big shop. In other words, we hear nothing of the democracy of
the Middle West, but everything of the plutocracy of the middleman, who
is probably as unpopular in the Middle West as the miller in the Middle
Ages. If Mr. Elihu K. Pike could be transplanted bodily from the
neighbourhood of his home town of Marathon, Neb., with his farm and his
frame-house and all its fittings, and they could be set down exactly in
the spot now occupied by Selfridge's (which could be easily cleared away
for the purpose), I think we could really get a great deal of good by
watching him, even if the watching were inevitably a little too like
watching a wild beast in a cage or an insect under a glass case. Urban
crowds could collect every day behind a barrier or railing, and gaze at
Mr. Pike pottering about all day in his ancient and autochthonous
occupations. We could see him growing Indian corn with all the gravity
of an Indian; though it is impossible to imagine Mrs. Pike blessing the
cornfield in the manner of Minnehaha. As I have said, there is a certain
lack of humane myth and mysticism about this Puritan peasantry. But we
could see him transforming the maize into pop-corn, which is a very
pleasant domestic ritual and pastime, and is the American equivalent of
the glory of roasting chestnuts. Above all, many of us would learn for
the first time that a man can really live and walk about upon something
more productive than a pavement; and that when he does so he can really
be a free man, and have no lord but the law. Instead of that, America
can give nothing to London but those multiple modern shops, of which it
has too many already. I know that many people entertain the innocent
illusion that big shops are more efficient than small ones; but that is
only because the big combinations have the monopoly of advertisement as
well as trade. The big shop is not in the least remarkable for
efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. It is
secure in its reputation for always sacking the wrong man. A big shop,
considered as a place to shop in, is simply a village of small shops
roofed in to keep out the light and air; and one in which none of the
shopkeepers is really responsible for his shop. If any one has any
doubts on this matter, since I have mentioned it, let him consider this
fact: that in practice we never do apply this method of commercial
combination to anything that matters very much. We do not go to the
surgical department of the Stores to have a portion of our brain removed
by a delicate operation; and then pass on to the advocacy department to
employ one or any of its barristers, when we are in temporary danger of
being hanged. We go to men who own their own tools and are responsible
for the use of their own talents. And the same truth applies to that
other modern method of advertisement, which has also so largely fallen
across us like the gigantic shadow of America. Nations do not arm
themselves for a mortal struggle by remembering which sort of submarine
they have seen most often on the hoardings. They can do it about
something like soap, precisely because a nation will not perish by
having a second-rate sort of soap, as it might by having a second-rate
sort of submarine. A nation may indeed perish slowly by having a
second-rate sort of food or drink or medicine; but that is another and
much longer story, and the story is not ended yet. But nobody wins a
great battle at a great crisis because somebody has told him that
Cadgerboy's Cavalry Is the Best. It may be that commercial enterprise
will eventually cover these fields also, and advertisement-agents will
provide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons of the soldier.
When that happens, the armies will be defeated and the patients will
die. But though we modern people are indeed patients, in the sense of
being merely receptive and accepting things with astonishing patience,
we are not dead yet; and we have lingering gleams of sanity.
For the best things do not travel. As I appear here as a traveller, I
may say with all modesty that the best people do not travel either. Both
in England and America the normal people are the national people; and I
repeat that I think they are growing more and more national. I do not
think the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan theories; and I am sure
I do not want it bridged by all this slang journalism and blatant
advertisement. I have called all that commercial publicity the gigantic
shadow of America. It may be the shadow of America, but it is not the
light of America. The light lies far beyond, a level light upon the
lands of sunset, where it shines upon wide places full of a very simple
and a very happy people; and those who would see it must seek for it.
_Lincoln and Lost Causes_
It has already been remarked here that the English know a great deal
about past American literature, but nothing about past American history.
They do not know either, of course, as well as they know the present
American advertising, which is the least important of the three. But it
is worth noting once more how little they know of the history, and how
illogically that little is chosen. They have heard, no doubt, of the
fame and the greatness of Henry Clay. He is a cigar. But it would be
unwise to cross-examine any Englishman, who may be consuming that luxury
at the moment, about the Missouri Compromise or the controversies with
Andrew Jackson. And just as the statesman of Kentucky is a cigar, so the
state of Virginia is a cigarette. But there is perhaps one exception, or
half-exception, to this simple plan. It would perhaps be an exaggeration
to say that Plymouth Rock is a chicken. Any English person keeping
chickens, and chiefly interested in Plymouth Rocks considered as
chickens, would nevertheless have a hazy sensation of having seen the
word somewhere before. He would feel subconsciously that the Plymouth
Rock had not always been a chicken. Indeed, the name connotes something
not only solid but antiquated; and is not therefore a very tactful name
for a chicken. There would rise up before him something memorable in
the haze that he calls his history; and he would see the history books
of his boyhood and old engravings of men in steeple-crowned hats
struggling with sea-waves or Red Indians. The whole thing would suddenly
become clear to him if (by a simple reform) the chickens were called
Pilgrim Fathers.
Then he would remember all about it. The Pilgrim Fathers were champions
of religious liberty; and they discovered America. It is true that he
has also heard of a man called Christopher Columbus; but that was in
connection with an egg. He has also heard of somebody known as Sir
Walter Raleigh; and though his principal possession was a cloak, it is
also true that he had a potato, not to mention a pipe of tobacco. Can it
be possible that he brought it from Virginia, where the cigarettes come
from? Gradually the memories will come back and fit themselves together
for the average hen-wife who learnt history at the English elementary
schools, and who has now something better to do. Even when the narrative
becomes consecutive, it will not necessarily become correct. It is not
strictly true to say that the Pilgrim Fathers discovered America. But it
is quite as true as saying that they were champions of religious
liberty. If we said that they were martyrs who would have died
heroically in torments rather than tolerate any religious liberty, we
should be talking something like sense about them, and telling the real
truth that is their due. The whole Puritan movement, from the Solemn
League and Covenant to the last stand of the last Stuarts, was a
struggle _against_ religious toleration, or what they would have called
religious indifference. The first religious equality on earth was
established by a Catholic cavalier in Maryland. Now there is nothing in
this to diminish any dignity that belongs to any real virtues and
virilities in the Pilgrim Fathers; on the contrary, it is rather to the
credit of their consistency and conviction. But there is no doubt that
the note of their whole experiment in New England was intolerance, and
even inquisition. And there is no doubt that New England was then only
the newest and not the oldest of these colonial experiments. At least
two Cavaliers had been in the field before any Puritans. And they had
carried with them much more of the atmosphere and nature of the normal
Englishman than any Puritan could possibly carry. They had established
it especially in Virginia, which had been founded by a great Elizabethan
and named after the great Elizabeth. Before there was any New England in
the North, there was something very like Old England in the South.
Relatively speaking, there is still.
Whenever the anniversary of the _Mayflower_ comes round, there is a
chorus of Anglo-American congratulation and comradeship, as if this at
least were a matter on which all can agree. But I knew enough about
America, even before I went there, to know that there are a good many
people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a
protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of
Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and
why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record
that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes
Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America
until it was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the first great
Presidents and most of the Fathers of the Republic. Its adherence to
the Southern side in the war made it a great war, and for a long time a
doubtful war. And in the leader of the Southern armies it produced what
is perhaps the one modern figure that may come to shine like St. Louis
in the lost battle, or Hector dying before holy Troy.
Again, it is characteristic that while the modern English know nothing
about Lee they do know something about Lincoln; and nearly all that they
know is wrong. They know nothing of his Southern connections, nothing of
his considerable Southern sympathy, nothing of the meaning of his
moderation in face of the problem of slavery, now lightly treated as
self-evident. Above all, they know nothing about the respect in which
Lincoln was quite un-English, was indeed the very reverse of English;
and can be understood better if we think of him as a Frenchman, since it
seems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an American. I mean
his lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical
truths in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from being a
merely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that he
reviewed and revelled in academic abstractions, even while he could not
apply them to practical life. He loved to repeat that slavery was
intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that something ought to
be done while it was impossible to do it. This was probably very
bewildering to his brother-politicians; for politicians always whitewash
what they do not destroy. But for all that this inconsistent consistency
beat the politicians at their own game, and this abstracted logic proved
the most practical of all. For when the chance did come to do something,
there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell
from the clear heights of heaven; it had not been tossed about and lost
like a common missile in the market-place. The matter is worth
mentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger modern question. A
wise man's attitude towards industrial capitalism will be very like
Lincoln's attitude towards slavery. That is, he will manage to endure
capitalism; but he will not endure a defence of capitalism. He will
recognise the value, not only of knowing what he is doing, but of
knowing what he would like to do. He will recognise the importance of
having a thing clearly labelled in his own mind as bad, long before the
opportunity comes to abolish it. He may recognise the risk of even worse
things in immediate abolition, as Lincoln did in abolitionism. He will
not call all business men brutes, any more than Lincoln would call all
planters demons; because he knows they are not. He will regard many
alternatives to capitalism as crude and inhuman, as Lincoln regarded
John Brown's raid; because they are. But he will clear his _mind_ from
cant about capitalism; he will have no doubt of what is the truth about
Trusts and Trade Combines and the concentration of capital; and it is
the truth that they endure under one of the ironic silences of heaven,
over the pageants and the passing triumphs of hell.
But the name of Lincoln has a more immediate reference to the
international matters I am considering here. His name has been much
invoked by English politicians and journalists in connection with the
quarrel with Ireland. And if we study the matter, we shall hardly admire
the tact and sagacity of those journalists and politicians.
History is an eternal tangle of cross-purposes; and we could not take a
clearer case, or rather a more complicated case, of such a tangle, than
the facts lying behind a political parallel recently mentioned by many
politicians. I mean the parallel between the movement for Irish
independence and the attempted secession of the Southern Confederacy in
America. Superficially any one might say that the comparison is natural
enough; and that there is much in common between the quarrel of the
North and South in Ireland and the quarrel of the North and South in
America. In both cases the South was on the whole agricultural, the
North on the whole industrial. True, the parallel exaggerates the
position of Belfast; to complete it we must suppose the whole Federal
system to have consisted of Pittsburg. In both the side that was more
successful was felt by many to be less attractive. In both the same
political terms were used, such as the term 'Union' and 'Unionism.' An
ordinary Englishman comes to America, knowing these main lines of
American history, and knowing that the American knows the similar main
lines of Irish history. He knows that there are strong champions of
Ireland in America; possibly he also knows that there are very genuine
champions of England in America. By every possible historical analogy,
he would naturally expect to find the pro-Irish in the South and the
pro-English in the North. As a matter of fact, he finds almost exactly
the opposite. He finds Boston governed by Irishmen, and Nashville
containing people more pro-English than Englishmen. He finds Virginians
not only of British blood, like George Washington, but of British
opinions almost worthy of George the Third.
But I do not say this, as will be seen in a moment, as a criticism of
the comparative Toryism of the South. I say it as a criticism of the
superlative stupidity of English propaganda. On another page I remark on
the need for a new sort of English propaganda; a propaganda that should
be really English and have some remote reference to England. Now if it
were a matter of making foreigners feel the real humours and humanities
of England, there are no Americans so able or willing to do it as the
Americans of the Southern States. As I have already hinted, some of them
are so loyal to the English humanities, that they think it their duty to
defend even the English inhumanities. New England is turning into New
Ireland. But Old England can still be faintly traced in Old Dixie. It
contains some of the best things that England herself has had, and
therefore (of course) the things that England herself has lost, or is
trying to lose. But above all, as I have said, there are people in these
places whose historic memories and family traditions really hold them to
us, not by alliance but by affection. Indeed, they have the affection in
spite of the alliance. They love us in spite of our compliments and
courtesies and hands across the sea; all our ambassadorial salutations
and speeches cannot kill their love. They manage even to respect us in
spite of the shady Jew stockbrokers we send them as English envoys, or
the 'efficient' men, who are sent out to be tactful with foreigners
because they have been too tactless with trades unionists. This type of
traditional American, North or South, really has some traditions
connecting him with England; and though he is now in a very small
minority, I cannot imagine why England should wish to make it smaller.
England once sympathised with the South. The South still sympathises
with England. It would seem that the South, or some elements in the
South, had rather the advantage of us in political firmness and
fidelity; but it does not follow that that fidelity will stand every
shock. And at this moment, and in this matter, of all things in the
world, our political propagandists must try to bolster British
Imperialism up, by kicking Southern Secession when it is down. The
English politicians eagerly point out that we shall be justified in
crushing Ireland exactly as Sumner and Stevens crushed the most English
part of America. It does not seem to occur to them that this comparison
between the Unionist triumph in America and a Unionist triumph in
Britain is rather hard upon our particular sympathisers, who did not
triumph. When England exults in Lincoln's victory over his foes, she is
exulting in his victory over her own friends. If her diplomacy continues
as delicate and chivalrous as it is at present, they may soon be her
only friends. England will be defending herself at the expense of her
only defenders. But however this may be, it is as well to bear witness
to some of the elements of my own experience; and I can answer for it,
at least, that there are some people in the South who will not be
pleased at being swept into the rubbish heap of history as rebels and
ruffians; and who will not, I regret to say, by any means enjoy even
being classed with Fenians and Sinn Feiners.
Now touching the actual comparison between the conquest of the
Confederacy and the conquest of Ireland, there are, of course, a good
many things to be said which politicians cannot be expected to
understand. Strange to say, it is not certain that a lost cause was
never worth winning; and it would be easy to argue that the world lost
very much indeed when that particular cause was lost. These are not days
in which it is exactly obvious that an agricultural society was more
dangerous than an industrial one. And even Southern slavery had this one
moral merit, that it was decadent; it has this one historic advantage,
that it is dead. The Northern slavery, industrial slavery, or what is
called wage slavery, is not decaying but increasing; and the end of it
is not yet. But in any case, it would be well for us to realise that the
reproach of resembling the Confederacy does not ring in all ears as an
unanswerable condemnation. It is scarcely a self-evident or sufficient
argument, to some hearers, even to prove that the English are as
delicate and philanthropic as Sherman, still less that the Irish are as
criminal and lawless as Lee. Nor will it soothe every single soul on the
American continent to say that the English victory in Ireland will be
followed by a reconstruction, like the reconstruction exhibited in the
film called 'The Birth of a Nation.' And, indeed, there is a further
inference from that fine panorama of the exploits of the Ku-Klux Klan.
It would be easy, as I say, to turn the argument entirely in favour of
the Confederacy. It would be easy to draw the moral, not that the
Southern Irish are as wrong as the Southern States, but that the
Southern States were as right as the Southern Irish. But upon the whole,
I do not incline to accept the parallel in that sense any more than in
the opposite sense. For reasons I have already given elsewhere, I do
believe that in the main Abraham Lincoln was right. But right in what?
If Lincoln was right, he was right in guessing that there was not
really a Northern nation and a Southern nation, but only one American
nation. And if he has been proved right, he has been proved right by the
fact that men in the South, as well as the North, do now feel a
patriotism for that American nation. His wisdom, if it really was
wisdom, was justified not by his opponents being conquered, but by their
being converted. Now, if the English politicians must insist on this
parallel, they ought to see that the parallel is fatal to themselves.
The very test which proved Lincoln right has proved them wrong. The very
judgment which may have justified him quite unquestionably condemns
them. We have again and again conquered Ireland, and have never come an
inch nearer to converting Ireland. We have had not one Gettysburg, but
twenty Gettysburgs; but we have had no Union. And that is where, as I
have remarked, it is relevant to remember that flying fantastic vision
on the films that told so many people what no histories have told them.
I heard when I was in America rumours of the local reappearance of the
Ku-Klux Klan; but the smallness and mildness of the manifestation, as
compared with the old Southern or the new Irish case, is alone a
sufficient example of the exception that proves the rule. To approximate
to any resemblance to recent Irish events, we must imagine the Ku-Klux
Klan riding again in more than the terrors of that vision, wild as the
wind, white as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. If there were
really such a revival of the Southern action, there would equally be a
revival of the Southern argument. It would be clear that Lee was right
and Lincoln was wrong; that the Southern States were national and were
as indestructible as nations. If the South were as rebellious as
Ireland, the North would be as wrong as England.
But I desire a new English diplomacy that will exhibit, not the things
in which England is wrong but the things in which England is right. And
England is right in England, just as she is wrong in Ireland; and it is
exactly that rightness of a real nation in itself that it is at once
most difficult and most desirable to explain to foreigners. Now the
Irishman, and to some extent the American, has remained alien to
England, largely because he does not truly realise that the Englishman
loves England, still less can he really imagine why the Englishman loves
England. That is why I insist on the stupidity of ignoring and insulting
the opinions of those few Virginians and other Southerners who really
have some inherited notion of why Englishmen love England; and even love
it in something of the same fashion themselves. Politicians who do not
know the English spirit when they see it at home, cannot of course be
expected to recognise it abroad. Publicists are eloquently praising
Abraham Lincoln, for all the wrong reasons; but fundamentally for that
worst and vilest of all reasons--that he succeeded. None of them seems
to have the least notion of how to look for England in England; and they
would see something fantastic in the figure of a traveller who found it
elsewhere, or anywhere but in New England. And it is well, perhaps, that
they have not yet found England where it is hidden in England; for if
they found it, they would kill it.
All I am concerned to consider here is the inevitable failure of this
sort of Anglo-American propaganda to create a friendship. To praise
Lincoln as an Englishman is about as appropriate as if we were praising
Lincoln as an English town. We are talking about something totally
different. And indeed the whole conversation is rather like some such
cross-purposes about some such word as 'Lincoln'; in which one party
should be talking about the President and the other about the cathedral.
It is like some wild bewilderment in a farce, with one man wondering how
a President could have a church-spire, and the other wondering how a
church could have a chin-beard. And the moral is the moral on which I
would insist everywhere in this book; that the remedy is to be found in
disentangling the two and not in entangling them further. You could not
produce a democrat of the logical type of Lincoln merely out of the
moral materials that now make up an English cathedral town, like that on
which Old Tom of Lincoln looks down. But on the other hand, it is quite
certain that a hundred Abraham Lincolns, working for a hundred years,
could not build Lincoln Cathedral. And the farcical allegory of an
attempt to make Old Tom and Old Abe embrace to the glory of the
illogical Anglo-Saxon language is but a symbol of something that is
always being attempted, and always attempted in vain. It is not by
mutual imitation that the understanding can come. It is not by erecting
New York sky-scrapers in London that New York can learn the sacred
significance of the towers of Lincoln. It is not by English dukes
importing the daughters of American millionaires that England can get
any glimpse of the democratic dignity of American men. I have the best
of all reasons for knowing that a stranger can be welcomed in America;
and just as he is courteously treated in the country as a stranger, so
he should always be careful to treat it as a strange land. That sort of
imaginative respect, as for something different and even distant, is the
only beginning of any attachment between patriotic peoples. The English
traveller may carry with him at least one word of his own great language
and literature; and whenever he is inclined to say of anything 'This is
passing strange,' he may remember that it was no inconsiderable
Englishman who appended to it the answer, 'And therefore as a stranger
give it welcome.'
_Wells and the World State_
There was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate the
past, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation. Some of the
most brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. J. L.
Garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientific
aviators luminously discussed the new science. Among their graceful
felicitations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or a note
was struck, which I myself can never hear, even in the most harmless
after-dinner speech, without an impulse to leap up and yell, and smash
the decanters and wreck the dinner-table.
Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury; and never since have I
been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. I heard it
when Bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war
would become too horrible for patriots to endure. It sounded to me like
saying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist,
that would finally cure me of loving my dog. And I felt it again when
all these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about the
inevitable effect of aviation in bridging the Atlantic, and establishing
alliance and affection between England and America.