WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Alarms and Discursions
All Things Considered
The Ballad of the White Horse
Charles Dickens
The Flying Inn
George Bernard Shaw
Heretics
The Innocence of Father Brown
Manalive
The Man Who Was Thursday
The Napoleon of Netting Hill: A Romance
Orthodoxy
Poems
A Short History of England
The Superstition of Divorce
Tremendous Trifles
The Uses of Diversity
Varied Types
What s .Wrong with the World
The Wisdom of Father Brown
WHAT I SAW
IN AMERICA
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
Author of "HERETICS," etc.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1922
61 1
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Iiro.
PBINTED IN U. fl. A.
H ? / D 7 *r
VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
INQHAMTON AND NEW YORK
CONTENTS
PAGB
WHAT is AMERICA? . . . . : .. . .., . . i
A MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 19
A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 33
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS , 47
SOME AMERICAN CITIES ...... . ... 63
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY . , . .79
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 95
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS . ., 118
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 141
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION . . 158
THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 176
THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS ...... 188
Is THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? ......... 201
LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES . .*, . . .. ,.. . . 214
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE . . . .... . 226
A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT ........ 243
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA ......... 257
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND . . ... . .* . * . 270
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY . . . . , ... * . 284
491094
WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
WHAT IS AMERICA?
I HAVE never managed to lose my old conviction that
travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make
a double effort of moral humility and imaginative
energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed
there is something touching and even tragic about the
thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed
at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and
clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Sur-
biton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and
see what they looked like. This is not meant for non
sense ; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense,
which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at
home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an
inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any
man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the
inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long
as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling
figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labour
and love their children and die, he was thinking the fun
damental truth about them. By going to look at their un
familiar manners and customs he is inviting them to dis
guise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many
modern internationalists talk as if men of different na
tionalities had only to meet and mix and understand each
other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger
l
X
2 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at
the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.
Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction;
but most travellers are so much amused that they refuse
to be instructed. I do not blame them for being amused ;
it is perfecty natural to be amused at a Dutchman for
being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where
they are wrong is that they take their own amusement
seriously. They base on it their serious ideas of inter
national instruction. It was said that the Englishman
takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising
foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He
comes to scoff and does not remain to pray, but rather to
excommunicate. Hence in international relations there
is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But
I believe that there is a better way which largely consists
of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which
is actually founded on differences. To hint at some such
better way is the only excuse of this book.
* Let me begin my American impressions with two im
pressions I had before I went to America. One was an
incident and the other an idea; and when taken together
they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principle is
that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny
because it is foreign; the second is that he should be
ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny. The
reaction of his senses and superficial habits of mind
against something new, and to him abnormal, is a per
fectly healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines
that mere unf amiliarity can possibly prove anything about
inferiority is a very inadequate mind. It is inadequate
even in criticising things that may really be inferior to the
things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro
WHAT IS AMERICA? 3
for Having a black face than to sneer at him for having
a sloping skull. It is proportionally even more prefer
able to laugh rather than judge in dealing with highly
civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning two
working examples of what I felt about America before I
saw it ; the sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy
as a joke, and the sort of thing he has a duty to under
stand and respect, because it is the explanation of the
joke.
When I went to the American consulate to regularise
my passports, I was capable of expecting the American
consulate to be American. Embassies and consulates are
by tradition like islands of the soil for which they stand ;
and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a
truth. I have seen the unmistakable French official living
on omelettes and a little wine and serving his sacred ab
stractions under the last palm-trees fringing a desert. In
the heat and noise of quarrelling Turks and Egyptians, I
have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own
shower-bath, on the listless amiability of the English
gentleman. The officials I interviewed were very Ameri
can, especially in being very polite; for whatever may
have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I
have always found Americans by far the politest people in
the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up,
to all appearances like other forms I had filled up in other
passport offices. But in reality it was very different from
any form I had ever filled up in my life. At least it was a
little like a freer form of the game called Confessions
which my friends and I invented in our youth ; an exami
nation paper containing questions like, If you saw a rhi
noceros in the front garden, what would you do ? One
of my friends, I remember, wrote, Take the pledge/
4 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
But that is another story, and might bring Mr. Pussyfoot
Johnson on the scene before his time.
One of the questions on the paper was, Are you an
anarchist? To which a detached philosopher would
naturally feel inclined to answer, What the devil has that
to do with you ? Are you an atheist ? along with some
playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what
constitutes an a^x 7 ?- Then there was the question,
Are you in favour of subverting the government of the
United States by force? Against this I should write,
I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour
and not the beginning/ The inquisitor, in his more than
morbid curiosity, had then written down, Are you a po-
lygamist? The answer to this is, No such luck or Not
such a fool, according to our experience of the other sex .
But perhaps a better answer would be that given to W. T.
Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, Shall
I slay my brother Boer? the answer that ran, Never
interfere in family matters. But among many things
that amused me almost to the point of treating the form
thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of
the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it
respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado,
seeking to slip into America with official papers under
official protection, and sitting down to write with a beauti
ful gravity, I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish
to destroy you. Or, I intend to subvert by force the
government of the United States as soon as possible,
sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket
into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity. Or again,
Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my forty-seven
wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as
secretaries. There seems to be a certain simplicity of
WHAT IS AMERICA? 5
mind about these answers ; and it is reassuring to know
that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good
that the police have only to ask them questions and they
are certain to tell no lies.
Now* that is the model of the sort of foreign practice,
founded on foreign problems, at which a man s first im
pulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have I any intention of
apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly en
titled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it
incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh
at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he
comprehended it. The very fact of its un familiarity and
mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes
that make people so different from himself, and that with
out merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.
Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would
be easy enough to suggest that in this America has intro
duced a quite abnormal spirit of inquisition; an interfer
ence with liberty unknown among all the ancient despot
isms and aristocracies. About that there will be some
thing to be said later ; but superficially it is true that this
degree of officialism is comparatively unique. In a jour
ney which I took only the year before I had occasion to
have my papers passed by governments which many
worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with
corsairs and assassins ; I have stood on the other side of
Jordan, in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the
police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the
brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether I
had come to subvert the power of the Shereef ; and they
did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal
views on the ethical basis of civil authority. These minis
ters of ancient Moslem despotism did not care about
6 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
whether I was an anarchist ; and naturally would not have
minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was
probably a polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic
autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion, to
judge me by my actions; they, did not inquire into my
thoughts. They held* their power as limited to the limita
tion of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory.
It would be easy to argue here th*at Western democracy
persecutes where even Eastern despotism tolerates or
emancipates. It would be easy to develop the fancy that,
as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the
American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inqui
sition.
Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally
wrong ; and the traveller only too often does stop at that
point. He has found something to make him laugh, and
he will not suiffer it to make him think. And the remedy
is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, to
unlaugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is
something unique and curious about this American inqui
sition into our abstract opinions, but rather to continue the
train of thought, and follow the admirable advice of
Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, It is not much good thinking
of a thing unless you think it out/ It is not to deny that
American officialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to
inquire what it really is which makes America peculiar,
or which is peculiar to America. In short, it is to get
some ultimate idea of what America is; and the answer
to that question will reveal something much deeper and
grander and more worthy of our intelligent interest.
It may have seemed something less than a compliment
to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish
Inquisition. But oddly enough, it does involve a truth,
V
WHAT IS AMERICA? 7
and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a compli
ment. The American Constitution does resemble the
Spanish Inquisition in this : that it is founded on a creed.
America is the only nation in the world that is founded
on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and
even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independ
ence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is
also theoretical politics and also great literature. It
enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice,
that governments exist to give them that justice, and that
their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does
condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference con
demn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the
ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are de
rived. Nobody expects a modern political system to pro
ceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in
the matter of God and Government it is naturally God
whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there
is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human
things.
Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest
thing in the world. In its nature it is as broad as its
scheme for a brotherhood of all men. In its nature it is
limited by its definition of the nature of all men. This
was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said
to exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely
substitute something else for Jewish religion or Greek
philosophy. It was truly said to be a net drawing in of
all kinds; but a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of
Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of the most
disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and
true among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may
have been narrow about theology, it could not confess to
8 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
being narrow about nationality or ethnology. The Span
ish Inquisition might be admittedly Inquisitorial ; but the
Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such
a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own
creed, had to be broader than his own empire. He might
burn a philosopher because he was heterodox ; but he must
accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we
see, even in modern times, that the same Church which
is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for
making savages priests. Now in a much vaguer and
more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the
same idea at the back of the great American experiment;
the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which
has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that meta
phor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and
a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melt
ing-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced
on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain
in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites
all men to become citizens ; but it implies the dogma that
there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its
primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious
because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a
cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich
Islander. And in something of the same spirit the Amer
ican may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he can
not exclude a Turk.
Now for America this is no idle theory. It may have
been theoretical, though it was thoroughly sincere, when
that great Virginian gentleman declared it in surround
ings that still had something of the character of an Eng
lish countryside. It is not merely theoretical now.
There is nothing to prevent America being literally in-
WHAT IS AMERICA? 9
vaded by Turks, as she is invaded by Jews or Bulgars.
In the most exquisitely inconsequent of the Bab Ballads,
we are told concerning Pasha Bailey Ben :
One morning knocked at half-past eight
A tall Red Indian at his gate.
In Turkey, as you r p raps aware.
Red Indians are extremely rare.
But the converse need by no means be true. There is
nothing in the nature of things to prevent an emigration
of Turks increasing and multiplying on the plains where
the Red Indians wandered ; there is nothing to necessitate
the Turks being extremely rare. The Red Indians, alas,
arc likely to be rarer. And as I much prefer Red Indians
to Turks, not to mention Jews, I speak without prejudice;
but the point here is that America, partly by original
theory and partly by historical accident, does lie open to
racial admixtures which most countries would think incon
gruous or comic. That is why it is only fair to read any
American definitions or rules in a certain light, and
relatively to a rather unique position. It is not fair to
compare the position of those who may meet Turks in
the back street with that of those who have never met
Turks except in the Bab Ballads. It is not fair simply to
compare America with England in its regulations about
the Turk. In short, it is not fair to do what almost every
Englishman probably does ; to look at the American inter
national examination paper, and laugh and be satisfied
with saying, We don t have any of that nonsense in Eng
land/
We do not havta any of that nonsense in England be
cause we have never attempted to have any of that phil
osophy in England. And, above all, because we have the
io WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
enormous advantage of feeling it natural to be national,
because there is nothing else to be. England in these days
is not well governed ; England is not well educated ; Eng
land suffers from wealth and poverty that are not well
distributed. But England is English; esto perpetua.
England is English as France is French or Ireland is
Irish; the great mass of men taking certain national tra
ditions for granted. Now this gives us a totally different
and a very much easier task. We have not got an inqui
sition, because we have not got a creed ; but it is arguable
that we do not need a creed, because we have got a char
acter. In any of the old nations the national unity is
preserved by the national type. Because we have a type
we do not need to have a test.
Take that innocent question, Are you an anarchist?
which is intrinsically quite as impudent as Are you an
optimist? or Are you a philanthropist? I am not dis
cussing here whether these things are right, but whether
most of us are in a position to know them rightly. Now
it is quite true that most Englishmen do not find it nec
essary to go about all day asking each other whether they
are anarchists. It is quite true that the phrase occurs on
no British forms that I have seen. But this is not only
because most of the Englishmen are not anarchists. It
is even more because even the anarchists are Englishmen.
For instance, it would be easy to make fun of the Amer
ican formula by noting that the cap would fit all sorts
of bald academic heads. It might well be maintained
that Herbert Spencer was an anarchist. It is practi
cally certain that Auberon Herbert was an anarchist.
But Herbert Spencer was an extraordinary typical
Englishman of the Nonconformist middle class. And
Auberon Herbert was an extraordinarily typical English
WHAT IS AMERICA? n
aristocrat of the old and genuine aristocracy. Every
one knew in his head that the squire would not throw a
bomb at the Queen, and the Nonconformist would not
throw a bomb at anybody. Evc-ry one knew that there
was something subconscious in a man like Auberon
Herbert, which would have come out only in throwing
bombs at the enemies of England; as it did come out in
his son and namesake, the generous and unforgotten, who
fell flinging bombs from the sky far beyond the German
line. Every one knows that normally, in the last resort,
the English gentleman is patriotic. Every one knows
that the English Nonconformist is national even when
he denies that he is patriotic. Nothing is more notable
indeed than the fact that nobody is more stamped with
the mark of his own nation than the man who says that
there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobden
the International Man ; but no man could be more English
than Cobden. Everybody recognises Tolstoy as the
iconoclast of all patriotism; but nobody could be more
Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries where there
are these national types, the types may be allowed to
hold any theories. Even if they hold certain theories
they are unlikely to do certain things. So the conscien
tious objector, in the English sense, may be and is one
of the peculiar by-products of England. But the con
scientious objector will probably have a conscientious
objection to throwing bombs. <
Now I am very far from intending to imply that
these American tests are good tests or that there is no
danger of tyranny becoming the temptation of America.
I shall have something to say later on about that temp
tation or tendency. Nor do I say that they apply con
sistently this conception of a nation with the soul of a
12 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
church, protected by religious and not racial selection.
If they did apply that principle consistently, they would
have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the
democratic ideal ; an excellent thing but a rather improb
able one. What I say is that when we realize that this
principle exists at all, we see the whole position in a
totally different perspective. We say that the Ameri
cans arc doing something heroic or doing something in
sane, or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fash
ion, instead of simply wondering what the devil they are
doing.
When we realise the democratic design of such a cos
mopolitan commonwealth, and compare it with our insu
lar reliance or instincts, we see at once why such a thing
has to be not only democratic but dogmatic. We see
why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intoler
ant. Any one can see the practical point by merely
transferring into private life a problem like that of the
two academic anarchists, who might by a coincidence
be called the two Herberts. Suppose a man said,
Buffle, my old Oxford tutor, wants to meet you; I wish
you d ask him down for a day or two. He has the
oddest opinions, but he s very stimulating/ It would
not occur to us that the oddity of the Oxford don s
opinions would lead him to blow up the house; because
the Oxford don is an English type. Suppose some
body said, Do let me bring old Colonel Robinson down
for the week-end; he s a bit of crank but quite inter
esting. We should not anticipate the colonel running
amuck with a carving-knife and offering up human
sacrifice in the garden; for these are not among the
daily habits of an old English colonel; and because we
know his habits, we do not care about his opinions.
WHAT IS AMERICA? 13
But suppose somebody offered to bring a person from
the interior of Kamskatka to stay with us for a week
or two, and added that his religion was a very extraor
dinary religion, we should feel a little more inquisitive
about what kind of religion it was. If somebody wished
to add a Hairy Ainu to the family party at Christmas,
explaining that his point of view was so individual and
interesting, we should want to know a little more about
it and him. We should be tempted to draw up as fan
tastic an examination paper as that presented to the emi
grant going to America. We should ask what a Hairy
Ainu was, and how hairy he was, and above all what
sort of Ainu he was. Would etiquette require us to
ask him to bring his wife? And if we did ask him to
bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? In
short, as in the American formula, is he a polygamist?
Merely as a point of houskeeping and accommodation
the question is not irrelevant. Is the Hairy Ainu content
with hair, or does he wear any clothes? If the police
insist on his wearing clothes, will he recognise the author
ity of the police? In short, as in the American formula,
is he an anarchist?
Of course this generalisation about America, like
other historical things, is subject to all sorts of cross
divisions and exceptions, to be considered in their place.
The negroes are a special problem, because of what
white men in the past did to them. The Japanese are
a special problem, because of what men fear that they
in the future may do to white men. The Jews are a
special problem, because of what they and the Gentiles,
in the past, present and future, seem to have the habit of
doing to each other. But the point is noft that nothing
exists in America except this idea; it is that nothing
14 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
like this idea exists anywhere except in America. This
idea is not internationalism; on the contrary it is decid
edly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic, and
wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans.
But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of
any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is
unique is not America but what is called Americanisation.
We understand nothing till we understand the amazing
ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy
Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousands of
French cooks or Italian organ grinders. France is
not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or
German prisoners of war. America is the one place in
the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, pos
sible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I
have pointed out, is not internationalisation. It would be
truer to say it is the nationalisation of the international
ised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a
nation out of exiles. This is what at once illuminates
and softens the moral regulations which we may really
think faddist or fanatical. They are abnormal; but in
one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless
is abnormal. In short, it has long been recognised that
America was an asylum. It is only since Prohibition
that it has looked a little like a lunatic asylum.
It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that
I stood with the official paper in my hand and these
thoughts in my head. It was while I stood on English
soil that I passed through the two stages of smiling and
then sympathising; of realising that my momentary
amusement, at being asked if I were not an Anarchist,
was partly due to the fact that I was not an American.
And in truth I think there are some things a man ought
WHAT IS AMERICA? 15
to know about America before he sees it. What we know
of a country beforehand may not affect what we see
that it is; but it will vitally affect what we appreciate it
for being, because it will vitally affect what we expected it
to be. I can honestly say that I had never expected
America to be what nine- tenths of the newspaper
critics invariably assume it to be. I never thought
it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that
it was more and more thronged with crowds of very
different colonists. During the war I felt that the
very worst propaganda for the Allies was the propa
ganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out that in
one way America is nearer to Europe than England is.
if she is not nearer to Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohe
mians. In my New York hotel the head waiter in the di
ning-room was a Bohemian ; the head waiter in the grill
room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the
end of the street which for us are at the ends of the earth.
I did my best to persuade my countrymen not to appeal to
the American as if he were a rather dowdy Englishman,
who had been rusticating in the provinces and had not
heard the latest news about the town. I shall record later
some of those arresting realities which the traveller does
not expect ; and which, in some cases I fear, he actually
does not see because he does not expect. I shall try to
do justice to the psychology of what Mr. Belloc has called
Eye-Openers in Travel/ But there are some things
about America that a man ought to see even with his
eyes shut. One is that a state that came into existence
solely through its repudiation and abhorrence of the
British Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of
the British Constitution. Another is that the chief
mark of the Declaration of Independence is something
i6 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
that is not only absent from the British Constitution,
but something which all our constitutionalists have in
variably thanked God, with the j oiliest boasting and
bragging, that they had kept out of the British Consti
tution. It is the thing called abstraction or academic
logic. It is the thing which such jolly people call theory ;
and which those who can practice it call thought. And
the theory or thought is the very last to which English
people are accustomed, either by their social structure
or their traditional teaching. It is the theory of equality.
It is the pure classic conception that no man must aspire
to be anything more than a citizen, and that no man
should endure to be anything less. It is by no means
especially intelligible to an Englishman, who tends at
his best to the virtues of the gentleman and at his worst
to the vices of the snob. The idealism of England, or if
you will the romance of England, has not been primarily
the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of
A merica, we may safely say, still revolves entirely round
the citizen and his romance. The realities are quite an
other matter, and we shall consider* in its place the ques
tion of whether the ideal will be able to shape the realities
or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal
is besieged by inequalities of the most towering and insane
description in the industrial and economic field. It may
be devoured by modern capitalism, perhaps the worst
inequality that ever existed among men. Of all that we
shall speak later. But citizenship is still the American
ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that
ideal ; but there is no ideal opposed to that ideal. Ameri
can plutocracy has never got itself respected like English
aristocracy. Citizenship is the American ideal; and it
has never been the English ideal. But it is surely an ideal
WHAT IS AMERICA? 17
that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect
in an Englishman, if he will condescend to be also a man.
In this vision of moulding many peoples into the visible
image of the citizen, he may see a spiritual adventure
which he can admire from the outside at least as much as
he admires the valour of the Moslems and much more
than he admires the virtue of the Middle Ages. He
need not set himself to develop equality, but he need not
set himself to misunderstand it. He may at least under
stand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may pos
sibly find some assistance in this task by reading what
they said. He may realise that equality is not somecrude
fairy tale about all men being equally tall or equally
tricky; which we not only cannot believe but cannot
believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals
by which all men have a value invariable and indestruct
ible and a dignity as intangible as death. He may at
least be a philosopher and see that equality is an idea;
and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics who,
having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad
champagne in tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other
twenty times over, with unwearied iteration, that equal
ity is an illusion.
In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The
extreme disproportion between men, that we seem to
see in life, is a thing of changing lights and lengthening
shadows, a twilight full of fancies and distortions. We
find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find
him forgotten ; we see a race dominant and cannot linger
to see it decay. It is the experience of men that always
returns to the equality of men; it is the average that
ultimately justifies the average man. It is when men
have seen and suffered much and come at the end of
i8 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
more elaborate experiments, that they see men under an
equal light of death and daily laughter; and none the less
mysterious for being many. Nor is it in vain that these
Western democrats have sought the blazonry of their
flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that en
dure behind the fires we see, and gathered them into the
corner of Old Glory whose ground is like the glittering
night. For veritably, in the spirit as well as in the
symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our
skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration;
and wherever the old shadow stoops upon the earth, the
stars return.
A MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL
ALL this must begin with an apology and not an
apologia. When I went wandering about the
States disguised as a lecturer, I was well aware
that 1 was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I
was even in the worst possible position to be a sight-seer.
A lecturer to American audiences can hardly be in the
holiday mood of a sight-seer. It is rather the au
dience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a
rather melancholy sight. Some say that people come
to see the lecturer and not to hear him; in which case
it seems rather a pity that he should disturb and dis
tress their minds with a lecture. He might merely ex
hibit himself on a stand or platform for a stipulated
sum; or be exhibited like a monster in a menagerie.
The circus elephant is not expected to make a speech.
But it is equally true that the circus elephant is
not allowed to write a book. His impressions of
travel would be somewhat sketchy and perhaps a little
over-specialised. In merely travelling from circus to
circus he would, so to speak, move in rather narrow
circles. Jumbo the great elephant (with whom I am
hardly so ambitious as to compare myself), before he
eventually went to the Barnum show, passed a consider
able and I trust happy part of his life in the Regent s
Park. But if he had written a book on England,
founded on his impressions of the Zoo, it might have
been a little disproportionate and even misleading in its
version of the flora and fauna of that country. He
might imagine that lions and leopards were commoner
19
20 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
than they are in our hedgerows and country lanes, or
that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to our
landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apolo
gise in anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in
this work. Like the elephant, I may have seen too
much of a special enclosure where a special sort of lions
are gathered together. I may exaggerate the territorial,
as distinct from the vertical space occupied by the spirit
ual giraffe ; for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an
example of Uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking,
a high-brow. Above all, I shall probably make generali
sations that are much too general; and are insufficient
through being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt all
my impressions are subject; and among them the
negative generalisation with which I shall begin this
rambling meditation on American hotels.
In all my American wanderings I never saw such a
thing as an inn. They may exist ; but they do not arrest
the traveller upon every road as they do in England and
in Europe. The saloons no longer existed when I was
there, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxi
cants to the wealthier classes. But we feel that the
saloons have been there; if one maay so express it, their
absence is still present. They remain in the structure of
the streets and the idiom of the language. But the
saloons were not inns. If they had been inns, it would
have been far harder even for the power of modern
plutocracy to root them out. There will be a very
different chase when the White Hart is hunted to the
forests or when the Red Lion turns to bay. But people
could not feel about the American saloon as they will
feel about the English inns. They could not feel that
the Prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chucking
MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 21
Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the
Mermaid. In justice to the American Prohibitionists it
must be realised that they were not doing quite such
desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon a
specially poisonous sort of place. They did feel that
drinking-places were used only as drug-shops. So they
have effected the great reconstruction, by which it will be
necessary to use only drug-shops as drinking-places.
But I am not dealing here with the problem of Prohi
bition except in so far as it is involved in the statement
that the saloons were in no sense inns. Secondly, of
course, there are the hotels. There are indeed. There
are hotels toppling to the stars, hotels covering the acre
age of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like a
mob of Babylonian or Assyrian monuments; but the
hotels also are not inns.
Broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in America.
The pattern of it, which is a very rational pattern, is
repeated in cities as remote from each other as the
capitals of European empires. You may find that hotel
rising among the red blooms of the warm spring woods
of Nebraska, or whitened with Canadian snows near the
eternal noise of Niagara. And before touching on this
solid and simple pattern itself, I may remark that the same
system of symmetry runs through all the details of the
interior. As one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel
floor is like another hotel floor. If the passage outside
your bedroom door, or hallway as it is called, contains,
let us say, a small table with a green vase and a stuffed
flamingo, or some trifle of the sort, you may be perfectly
icertain that there is exactly the same table, vase, and
flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that
towering habitation. This is where it differs most
22 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
perhaps from the crooking landings and unexpected
levels of the old English inns, even when they call them
selves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a
magic multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these
suites. It seemed to suggest the still atmosphere of
some eerie psychological story. I once myself enter
tained the notion of a story, in which a man was to be
prevented from entering his house (the scene of some
crime or calamity) by people who painted and furnished
the next house to look exactly like it; the assimilation
going to the most fantastic lengths, such as altering the
numbering of houses in the street. I came to America
and found an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for
the enactment of my phantasmal fraud. I offer the
skeleton of my story with all humility to some of the
admirable lady writers of detective stories in America, to
Miss Carolyn Wells, or Miss Mary Roberts Rinehart, or
Mrs. A. K. Green of the unforgotten Leavenworth Case.
Surely it might be possible for the unsophisticated Nim-
rod K. Moose, of Yellow Dog Flat, to come to New
York and be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions
or recurrences. Surely something tells me that his
beautiful daughter, the Rose of Red Murder Gulch, might
seek for him in vain amid the apparently unmistakable
surroundings of the thirty-second floor, while he was
being quietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty-
third floor, an agent of the Green Claw (that formidable
organisation) ; and all because the two floors looked
exactly alike to the virginal Western eye. The original
point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped
walked into his own house after all, in spite of it being
differently painted and numbered, simply because he was
absent-minded and used to taking a certain number of
MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 23
mechanical steps. This would not work in a hotel;
because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real
tameness of machinery, that even when we talk of a man
turning mechanically we only talk metaphorically; for it
is something that a mechanism cannot do. But I think
there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose
in the New York hotel. And that is unfortunately a
rather fatal one. It is that far away in the remote des
olation of Yellow Dog, among those outlying and out
landish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset,
there is undoubtedly an hotel of exactly the same sort,
with all its floors exactly the same.
Anyhow the general plan of the American hotel is com
monly the same, and, as I have said, it is a very sound
one so far as it goes. When I first went into one of the
big New York hotels, the first impression was certainly
its bigness. It was called the Biltmore ; and I wondered
how many national humorists had made the obvious com
ment of wishing they had built less. But it was not
merely the Babylonian size and scale of such things, it
was the way in which they are used. They are used al
most as public streets, or rather as public squares. My
first impression was that I was in some sort of high street
or market-place during a carnival or a revolution. True,
the people looked rather rich for a revolution and rather
grave for a carnival; but they were congested in great
crowds that moved slowly like people passing through an
overcrowded railway station. Even in the dizzy heights
of such a sky-scraper there could not possibly be room for
all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even to dine in it.
And, as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever ex
cept drift into it and drift out again. Most of them had
no more to do with the hotel than I have with Bucking-
24 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
ham Palace. I have never been in Buckingham Palace,
and I have very seldom, thank God, been in the big hotels
of this type that exist in London or P aris. But I cannot
believe that mobs are perpetually pouring through the
Hotel Cecil or the Savoy in this fashion, calmly coming
in at one door and going out of the other. But this fact
is part of the fundamental structure of the American
hotel ; it is built upon a compromise Jthat makes it possible.
The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public
streets and treated as a public square. But above it and
all round it runs another floor in the form of a sort of
deep gallery, furnished more luxuriously and looking
down on the moving mobs beneath. No one is allowed
on this floor except the guests or clients of the hotel.
As I have been one of them myself, I trust it is not un
sympathetic to compare them to active anthropoids who
can climb trees, and so look down in safety on the herds
or packs of wilder animals wandering and prowling
below. Of course there are modifications of architect
ural plan, but they are generally approximations to it;
it is the plan that seems to suit the social life of the
American cities. There is generally something like a
ground floor that is more public, a half-floor or gallery
above that is more private, and above that the bulk of
the block of bedrooms, the huge hive with its innumer
able and identical cells.
The ladder of ascent in this tower is of course the lift,
or, as it is called, the elevator. With all that we hear o
American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that
Americans seem to like more than we do to linger upon
long words. And indeed there is an element of delay in
their diction and spirit, very little understood, which I
may discuss elsewhere. Anyhow they say elevator when
MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 25
we say lift, just as they say automobile when we say
motor and stenographer when we say typist, or sometimes
(by a slight confusion) typewriter. Which reminds me
of another story that never existed, about a man who was
accused of having murdered and dismembered his secre
tary when he had only taken his typing machine to pieces ;
but we must not dwell on these digressions. The Ameri
cans may have another reason for giving long and cere
monious titles to the lift. When first I came among them
I had a suspicion that they possessed and practised a new
and secret religion, which was the cult of the elevator.
I fancied they worshipped the lift, or at any rate wor
shipped in the lift. The details or data of this suspicion
it were now vain to collect, as I have regretfully aban
doned it, except in so far as they illustrate the social prin
ciples underlying the structural plan of the building.
Now an American gentleman invariably takes off his hat
in the lift. He does not take off his hat in the hotel, even
if it is crowded with ladies. But he always so salutes a
lady in the elevator ; and this marks the difference of at
mosphere. The lift is a room, but the hotel is a street.
But during my first delusion, of course, I assumed that he
uncovered in this tiny temple merely because he was in
church. There is something about the very word eleva
tor that expresses a great deal of his vague but idealistic
religion. Perhaps that flying chapel will eventually be
ritualistically decorated like a chapel ; possibly with a sym
bolic scheme of wings. Perhaps a brief religious service
will be held in the elevator as it ascends ; in a few well-
chosen words touching the Utmost for the Highest.
Possibly he would consent even to call the elevator a lift,
if he could call it an uplift. There would be no diffi
culty, except what I cannot but regard as the chief moral
26 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
problem of all optimistic modernism. I mean the diffi
culty of imagining a lift which is free to go up, if it
is not also free to go down.
I think I know T my American friends and acquaint
ances too well to apologise for any levity in these illus
trations. Americans make fun of their own institutions ;
and their own journalism is full of such fanciful conjec
tures. The tall building is itself artistically akin to the
tall story. The very word skyscraper is an admirable
example of an American lie. But I can testify quite
as eagerly to the solid and sensible advantages of the
symmetrical hotel. It is not only a pattern of vases
and stuffed flamingoes; it is also an equally accurate
pattern of cupboards and baths. It is a dignified and
humane custom to have a bathroom attached to every
bedroom ; and my impulse to sing the praises of it brought
me once at least into a rather quaint complication. I
think it was in the city of Dayton; anyhow I remember
there was a Laundry Convention going on in the same
hotel, in a room very patriotically and properly festooned
with the stars and stripes, and doubtless full of promise
for the future of laundering. I was interviewed on the
roof, within earshot of this debate, and may have been
the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow,
after answering the usual questions about Labour, the
League of Nations, the length of ladies dresses, and
other great matters, I took refuge in a rhapsody of warm
and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The
editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the
column of his contributor s story, and seeing nothing
but metaphysical terms such as justice, freedom, the ab
stract disapproval of sweating, swindling, and the like,
paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eye
MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEU 27
brightened. That s the only copy in the whole thing/
he said, A Bath-Tub in Every Home/ So these words
appeared in enormous letters above my portrait in the
paper. It will be noted that, like many things that
practical men make a great point of, they miss the point.
What I had commended as new and national was a
bathroom in every bedroom. Even feudal and moss-
grown England is not entirely ignorant of an occasional
bath-tub in the home. But what gave me great joy was
what followed. I discovered with delight that many
people, glancing rapidly at my portrait with its prodig
ious legend, imagined that it was a commercial advertise
ment, and that I was a very self -advertising commercial
traveller. When I walked about the streets, I was sup
posed to be travelling in bath-tubs. Consider the caption
of the portrait, and you will see how similar it is to the
true commercial slogan : We offer a Bath-Tub in Every
Home/ And this charming error was doubtless clinched
by the fact that I had been found haunting the outer
courts of the temple of the ancient guild of Lavenders.
I never knew how many shared the impression; I regret
to say that I only traced it with certainty in two individ
uals. But I understand that it included the idea that I
had come to the town to attend the Laundry Convention,
and had made an eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt
exhibiting my tubs.
vSuch was the penalty of too passionate and unre
strained an admiration for American bathrooms; yet
the connection of ideas, however inconsequent, does cover
the part of social practice for which these American
institutions can really be praised. About everything like
laundry or hot and cold water there is not only organ
isation, but what does not always or perhaps often go with
28 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
it, efficiency. Americans are particular about these things
of dress and decorum; and it is a virtue which I very
seriously recognise, though I find it very hard to emulate.
But with them it is a virtue ; it is not a mere convention,
still less a mere fashion. It is really related to human
dignity rather than to social superiority. The really
glorious thing about the American is that he does not
dress like a gentleman; he dresses like a citizen or a
civilised man. Puritan particularity on certain points
is really detachable from any definite social ambitions;
these things are not a part of getting into society but
merely of keeping out of savagery. Those millions
and millions of middling people, that huge middle class
especially of the Middle West, are not near enough to
any aristocracy even to be sham aristocrats, or to be real
snobs. But their standards are secure; and though I
do not really travel in a bath-tub, or believe in the bath
tub philosophy and religion, I will not on this matter
recoil misanthropically from them: I prefer the tub of
Dayton to the tub of Diogenes. On these points there
is really something a million times better than efficiency,
and that is something like equality.
In short, the American hotel is not America; but it is
American. In some respects it is as American as the
English inn is English. And it is symbolic of that
society in this among other things: that it does tend
too much to uniformity; but that that very uniformity
disguises not a little natural dignity. The old Romans
boasted that their republic was a nation of kings. If
we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we might
very well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings,
of every man with a gold crown on his head or an ivory
sceptre in his hand. But it is arguable that we ought not
MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEU 29
to grow tired of the repetition of crowns and sceptres,
any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars.
The whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really
an effort to absorb and animate these multitudinous
modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman would be quite
capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a
list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bath
rooms. I do not sneer at the generous effort of the
giant ; though I think, when all is said, that it is criticism
of modern machinery that the effort should be gigantic
as well as generous.
While there is so much repetition there is little repose.
It is the pattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wall
paper; a pattern of figures running and even leaping
like the figures in a zoetrope. But even in the groups
where there was no hustle there was often something
of homelessness. I do not mean merely that they were
not dining at home; but rather that they were not at
home even when dining, and dining at their favourite
hotel. They would frequently start up and dart from
the room at a summons from the telephone. It may
have been fanciful, but I could not help feeling a breath
of home, as from a flap or flutter of St. George s
cross, when I first sat down in a Canadian hostelry, and
read the announcement that no such telephonic or other
summonses were allowed in the dining-room. It may
have been a coincidence, and there may be American
hotels with this merciful proviso and Canadian hotels
without it; but the thing was symbolic even if it was not
evidential. I felt as if I stood indeed upon English
soil, in a place where people liked to have their meals in
peace.
The process of the summons is called paging, and
30 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
consists of sending a little boy with a large voice through
all the halls and corridors of the building, making them
resound with a name. The custom is common, of course,
in clubs and hotels even in England ; but in England it is
a mere whisper compared with the wail with which the
American page repeats the formula of Calling Mr. So
and So/ I remember a particularly crowded parterre in
the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of
Pittsburg, through which wandered a youth with a voice
the like of which I have never heard in the land of the
living, a voice like the cry of a lost spirit, saying again
and again for ever, Carling Mr. Anderson. One felt
that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps there
never had been any Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps
he and every one else wandered in an abyss of bottom
less scepticism; and he was but the victim of one out of
numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a
shadow with shadows and wailed by impassable streams.
This is not exactly my philosophy, but I feel sure it was
his. And it is a mood that may frequently visit the
mind in the centres of highly active and successful in
dustrial civilisation.
Such are the first idle impressions of the great Ameri
can hotel, gained by sitting for the first time in its gallery
and gazing on its drifting crowds with thoughts equally
drifting. The first impression is of something enormous
and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually
tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the
tameness of so much of that social order. But I should
not be recording the sensations with sincerity, if I did not
touch in passing the note of something unearthly about
ithat vast system to an insular traveller who sees it for the
first time. It is as if fre were wandering in another
MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 31
world among the fixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal
Utopia of the future.
Yet I am not certain; and perhaps the best of all news
is that nothing is really new. I sometimes have a fancy
that many of these new things in new countries are but
the resurrections of old things which have been wickedly
killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. I have looked
over the sea of little tables in some light and airy open-
air cafe; and my thoughts have gone back to the plain
wooden bench and wooden table that stands solitary and
weather-stained outside so many neglected English inns.
We talk of experimenting in the French cafe, as of some
fresh and almost impudent innovation. But our fathers
had the French cafe, in the sense of the free-and-easy
table in the sun and air. The only difference was that
French democracy was allowed to develop its cafe, or
multiply its tables, while English plutocracy prevented
any such popular growth. Perhaps there are other ex
amples of old types and patterns, lost in the old oligarchy
and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with
a hint that the new structures are not so very new : and
that they remind me of something very old. As I look
from the balcony floors the crowds seem to float away
and the colours to soften and grow pale, and I know
I am in one of the simplest and most ancestral of
human habitations. I am looking down from the old
wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn. This
new architectural model, which I have described, is after
all one of the oldest European models, now neglected in
Europe and especially in England. It was the theatre
in which were enchanted innumerable picaresque com
edies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from
Sancho Panza to Sam Weller. It served as the appa-
32 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
ratus, like some gigantic toy set up in bricks and timber,
for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis. The
very terms of the original game were taken from the
inn courtyard, and the players scored accordingly as they
hit the buttery-hatch or the roof. Singular speculations
hover in my mind as the scene darkens and the quad
rangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night.
Some day perhaps this huge structure will be found
standing in a solitude like a skeleton; and it will be the
skeleton of the Spotted Dog or the Blue Boar. It will
wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be a tavern.
I do not know whether men will play tennis on its ground
"floor, with various scores and prizes for hitting the elec
tric fan, or the lift, 6Y the head waiter. Perhaps the very
words will only remain as part of some such rustic
game. Perhaps the electric fan will no longer be elec
tric and the elevator will no longer elevate, and the
waiter will only wait to be hit. But at least it is only
by the decay of modern plutocracy, which seems already
to have begun, that the secret of the structure even of
this plutocratic palace can stand revealed. And after
long years, when its lights are extinguished and only the
long shadows inhabit its halls and vestibules, there may
come a new noise like thunder ; of D Artagnan knocking
at the door.
A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY
WHEN I had looked at the lights of Broad
way by night, I made to my American
friends an innocent remark that seemed for
some reason to amuse them. I had looked, not without
joy, at that long kaleidoscope of coloured lights arranged
in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising
everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency
of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts
of God; colour and fire. I said to them, in my simplicity,
What a glorious garden of wonders this would be,
to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to
read/
Here it is but a text for a further suggestion. But
let us suppose that there does walk down this flaming
avenue a peasant, of the sort called scornfully an illiter
ate peasant ; by those who think that insisting on .people
reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies
who read in all languages and the forgers who write
in all hands. On this principle indeed, a peasant merely
acquainted with things of little practical use to mankind,
such as ploughing, cutting wood, or growing vegetables,
would very probably be excluded ; and it is not for us to
criticise from the outside the philosophy of those who
would keep out the farmer and let in the forger. But
let us suppose, if only for the sake of argument, that
the peasant is walking under the artificial suns and
stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has es
caped to the land of liberty upon some general rumour
and romance of the story of its liberation, but without
33
34 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
being yet able to understand the arbitrary signs of its
alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar
higher than the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood
broader than Broadway. Realising that he had arrived
on an evening of exceptional festivity, worthy to be bla
zoned with all this burning heraldry, he would please
himself by guessing what great proclamation or prin
ciple of the Republic hung in the sky like a constellation
or rippled across the street like a comet. He would be
shrewd enough to guess that the three festoons fringed
with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for
Government of the People, For the People, By the
People ; for it must obviously be that, unless it were
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity/ His shrewdness would
perhaps be a little shaken if he knew that the triad stood
for Tang Tonic To-day; Tang Tonic To-morrow;
Tang Tonic All the Time. 1 He will soon identify a
restless ribbon of red lettering, red hot and rebellious,
as the saying, Give me liberty or give me death/ He
will fail to identify it as the equally famous saying,
Skyoline Has Gout Beaten to a Frazzle/ Therefore it
was that I desired the peasant to walk down that grove
of fiery trees, under all that golden foliage and fruits
like monstrous jewels, as innocent as Adam before the
Fall. He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming
sword or the purple and peacock plumage of the sera
phim; so long as he did not go near the Tree of
Knowledge.
In other words, if once he went to school it would be
all up; and indeed I fear in any case he would soon
discover his error. If he stood wildly waving his hat
for liberty in the middle of the road as Chunk Chutney
picked itself out in ruby stars upon the sky, he would
A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 35
impede the excellent but extremely rigid traffic system,
of New York. If he fell on his knees before a sapphire
splendour, and began saying an Ave Maria under a
mistaken association, he would be conducted kindly but
firmly by an Irish policeman to a more authentic shrine.
But though the foreign simplicity might not long survive
in New York, it is quite a mistake to suppose that such
foreign simplicity cannot enter New York. He may be
excluded for being illiterate, but he cannot be excluded
for being ignorant, nor for being innocent. Least of
all can he be excluded for being wiser in his innocence
than the world in its knowledge. There is here indeed
more than one distinction to be made. New York is a
cosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans.
Most of the masses in New York have a nation, whether
or no it be the nation to which New York belongs.
.Those who are Americanised are American, and very
patriotically American. Those who are not thus nation
alised are not in the least internationalised. They
simply continue to be themselves; the Irish are Irish;
the Jews are Jewish; and all sorts of other tribes carry
on the traditions of remote European valleys almost un
touched. In short, there is a sort of slender bridge
between their old country and their new, which they
either cross or do not cross, but which they seldom simply
occupy. They are exiles or they are citizens ; there is no
moment when they are cosmopolitans. But very often
the exiles bring with them not only rooted traditions,
but rooted truths.
Indeed it is to a great extent the thought of these
strange souls in crude American garb that gives a
meaning to the masquerade of New York. In the hotel
where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a
36 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
Bohemian; and I am glad to say that he called himself
a Bohemian. I have already protested sufficiently,
before American audiences, against the pedantry of
perpetually talking about Czecho-Slovakia. I suggested
to my American friends that the abandonment of the
word Bohemian in its historical sense might well extend
to its literary and figurative sense. We might be
expected to say, Tm afraid Henry has got into very
Czecho-Slovakian habits lately, or Don t bother to
dress; it s quite a Czecho-Slovakian affair. Anyhow
my Bohemian would have nothing to do with such non
sense; he called himself a son of Bohemia, and spoke as
such in his criticisms of America, which were both fa
vourable and unfavourable. He was a squat man, with a
sturdy figure and a steady smile ; and his eyes were like
dark pools in the depth of a darker forest; but I do not
think he had ever been deceived by the lights of
Broadway.
But I found something like my real innocent abroad,
my real peasant among the sky-signs, in another part of
the same establishment. He was a much leaner man,
equally dark, with a hook nose, hungry face, and fierce
black moustaches. He also was a waiter, and was in the
costume of a waiter, which is a smarter edition of the
costume of a lecturer. As he was serving me with clam
chowder or some such thing, I fell into speech with him
and he told me he was a Bulgar. I said something like,
Tm afraid I don r t know as much as I ought to about
Bulgaria. I suppose most of your people are agricul
tural, aren t they? He did not stir an inch from his
regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice
and said, Yes. From the earth we come and to the
A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 37
earth we return; when people get away from that they
are lost/
To hear such a thing said by the waiter was alone an
epoch in the life of an unfortunate writer of fantastic
novels. To see him clear away the clam chowder like
an automaton, and bring me more iced water like an
automaton or like nothing on earth except an American
waiter (for piling up ice is the cold passion of their
lives), and all this after having uttered something so
dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and so startlingly
true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the
picture of the peasant admiring Broadway. So he
passed, with his artificial clothes and manners, lit up
with all the ghastly artificial light of the hotel, and all
the ghastly artificial life of the city; and his heart was
like his own remote and rocky valley, where those un
changing words were carved as on a rock.
I do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the
question this raises about the Americanisation of the
Bulgar. It has many aspects, of some of which most
Englishmen and even some Americans are rather un
conscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a
loyalty to land could not be Americanised in New York ;
but it is not so certain that he could not be Americanised
in America. We might almost say that a peasantry is
hidden in the heart of America. So far as our impres
sions go, it is a secret. It is rather an open secret ; cover
ing only some thousand square miles of open prairie.
But for most of our countrymen it is something invis
ible, unimagined, and unvisited; the simple truth that
where all those acres are there is agriculture, and where
all that agriculture is there is considerable tendency
38 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
towards distributive or decently equalised property, as in
a peasantry. On the other hand, there are those who
say that the Bulgar will never be Americanised, that he
only comes to be a waiter in America that he may afford
to return to be a peasant in Bulgaria. I cannot decide
this issue, and indeed I did not introduce it to this end.
I was led to it by a certain line of reflection that runs
along the Great White Way, and I will continue to
follow it. The criticism, if we could put it rightly, not
only covers more than New York but more than the
whole New World. Any argument against it is quite as
valid against the largest and richest cities of the Old
W r orld, against London or Liverpool or Frankfort or
Belfast. But it is in New York that we see the argu
ment most clearly, because we see the thing thus towering
into its own turrets and breaking into its own fire
works.
I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the
modern city with its sky-scrapers and sky-signs. I
mean that which laments the loss of beauty and its sac
rifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of the
truth. Years ago, when people used to say the Sal
vation Army doubtless had good intentions, but we
must all deplore its methods, I pointed out that the very
contrary is the case. Its method, the method of drums
and democratic appeal, is that of the Franciscans or
any other march of the Church Militant. It was pre
cisely its aims that were dubious, with their dissenting
morality and despotic finance. It is somewhat the same
with things like the sky-signs in Broadway. The aes
thete must not ask me to mingle my tears with his, be
cause these things are merely useful and ugly. For I
am not specially inclined to think them ugly; but I am
A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 39
strongly inclined to think them useless. As a matter
of art for art s sake, they seem to me rather artistic.
As a form of practical social work they seem to me
stark stupid waste. If Mr. Bilge is rich eftough to
build a tower four hundred feet high and give it
a crown of golden crescents and crimson stars, in order
to draw attention to his manufacture of the Paradise
Tooth Paste or the Seventh Heaven Cigar, I do not
feel the least disposition to thank him for any serious
form of social service. I have never tried the Seventh
Heaven Cigar; indeed a premonition moves me towards
the belief that I shall go down to the dust without trying
it. I have every reason to doubt whether it does any par
ticular good to those who smoke it, or any good to any
body except those who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge s
usefulness consists in being useful to Mr. Bilge, and all
the rest is illusion and sentimentalism. But because
I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the pro
fanity of saying that fire is only fire? Shall I blas
pheme crimson stars any more than crimson sunsets,
or deny that those moons are golden any more than
that this grass is green? If a child saw these coloured
lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any
other coloured toys; and it is the duty of every poet,
and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imita
tion of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of so much
sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city,
that I should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a
sense of proportion return to extinguish them. I
fear the day is breaking, and the broad daylight of
tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this
delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peas
ants and priests and all sorts of practical and sensible
40 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
people are coming back into power, and their stern
realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial,
useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh
Heaven Cigar, even when they see it shining as with
stars in the seventh heaven. They will not be affected
by advertisements, any more than the priests and peas
ants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by
advertisements. Only a very soft-headed, sentimental
and rather servile generation df men could possibly
be affected by advertisements at all. People who are
a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually
independent, see the rather simple joke; and are not
impressed by this or any other form of self-praise.
Almost any other men in almost any other age would
have seen the joke. If you had said to a man in the
Stone Age, Ugg says Ugg makes the best stone hatch
ets/ he would have perceived a lack of detachment
and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you
had said to a medieval peasant, Robert the Bowyer
proclaims, with three blasts of a horn, that he makes
good bows, the peasant would have said, Well, of
course he does, and thought about something more im
portant. It is only among people whose minds have
been weakened by a sort of mesmerism that so trans
parent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have
been tried at all. And if ever we have again, as for
other reasons I cannot but hope we shall, a more
democratic distribution of property and a more agri
cultural basis of national life, it would seem at first
sight only too likely that all this beautiful superstition
will perish, and the fairyland of Broadway with all
its varied rainbows fade away. For such people the
Seventh Heaven Cigar, like the nineteenth-century
A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 41
city, will have ended in smoke. And even the smoke
of it will have vanished,
But the next stage of reflection brings us back to
the peasant looking at the lights of Broadway. It is
not true to say in the strict sense that the peasant has
never seen such things before. The truth is that he
has seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much
larger purpose. Peasants also have their ritual and
ornament, but it is to adorn more real things. Apart
from our first fancy about the peasant who could not
read, there is no doubt about what would be apparent
to a peasant who could read, and who could under
stand. For him also fire is sacred, for him also colour
is symbolic. But where he sets up a candle to light the
little shrine of St. Joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred
candles to light the Seventh Heaven Cigar. He is used
to the colours in church windows showing red for
martyrs or blue for madonnas; but here he can only
conclude that all the colours of the rainbow belong to
Mr. Bilge. Now upon the aesthetic side he might well
be impressed; but it is exactly on the social and even
scientific side that he has a right to criticise. If he were
a Chinese peasant, for instance, and came from a land
of fireworks, he would naturally suppose that he had
happened to arrive at a great fireworks display in cele
bration of something; perhaps the Sacred Emperor s
birthday, or rather birthnight. It would gradually dawn
on the Chinese philosopher that the Emperor could hardly
be born every night. And when he learnt the truth the
philosopher, if he was a philosopher, would be a little
disappointed . . . possibly a little disdainful.
Compare, for instance, these everlasting fireworks
with the damp squibs and dying bonfires of Guy Fawkes
42 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
Day. That quaint and even queer national festival has
been fading for some time out of English life. Still, it
was a national festival, in the double sense that it rep
resented some sort of public spirit pursued by some sort
of popular impulse. People spent money on the display
of fireworks; they did not get money by it. And the
people who spent money were often those who had very-
little money to spend. It had something of the
glorious and fanatical character of making the poor
poorer. It did not, like the advertisements, have only the
mean and materialistic character of making the rich
richer. In short, it came from the people and it ap
pealed to the nation. The historical and religious cause
in which it originated is not mine; and I think it has
perished partly through being tied to a historical theory
for which there is no future. I think this is illustrated
in the very fact that the ceremonial is merely negative
and destructive. Negation and destruction are very
noble things as far as they go, and when they go in the
right direction; and the popular expression of them has
always something hearty and human about it. I shall
not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism,
whether literary or musical, to bear upon the little boys
who drag about a bolster and a paper mask, calling out
Guy Fawkes Guy
Hit him in the eye.
But I admit it is a disadvantage that they have not a
saint or hero to crown in effigy as well as a traitor to
burn in effigy. I admit that popular Protestantism has
become too purely negative for people to vreathe in
flowers the statue of Mr. Kensit or even of Tr. Clifford.
I do not disguise my preference for popular Catholicism ;
A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 43
which still has statues that can be wreathed in flowers.
I wish our national feast of fireworks revolved round
something positive and popular. I wish the beauty of
a Catherine Wheel were displayed to the glory of St.
Catherine. I should not especially complain if Roman
candles were really Roman candles. But this negative
character does not destroy the national character; which
began at least in disinterested faith and has ended at
least in disinterested fun. There is nothing disin
terested at all about the new commercial fireworks.
There is nothing so dignified as a dingy guy among the
lights of Broadway. In that thoroughfare, indeed, the
very word guy has another and milder significance. An
American friend congratulated me on the impression I
had produced on a lady interviewer, observing, She says
you re a regular guy/ This puzzled me a little at the
time. Her description is no doubt correct/ I said, but
I confess that it would never have struck me as specially
complimentary/ But it appears that it is one of the most
graceful of compliments, in the original American. A
guy in America is a colourless term for a human being.
All men are guys, being endowed by their Creator with
certain . . . but I am misled by another association.
And a regular guy means, I presume, a reliable or re
spectable guy. The point here, however, is that the guy
in the grotesque English sense does represent the di
lapidated remnant of a real human tradition of sym
bolising real historic ideals by the sacramental mystery of
fire. It is a great fall from the lowest of these lowly
bonfires to the highest of the modern sky-signs. The new
illumination does not stand for any national ideal at all ;
and what is yet more to the point, it does not come from
any popular enthusiasm at all. That is where it differs
44 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
from the narrowest national Protestantism of the Eng
lish institution. Mobs have risen in support of No
Popery; no mobs are likely to rise in defence of the New
Puffery. Many a poor, crazy Orangeman has died say
ing, To Hell with the Pope ; it is doubtful whether any
man will ever, with his last breath, frame the ecstatic
words, Try Hugby s Chewing Gum/ These modern
and mercantile legends are imposed upon us by a mer
cantile minority, and we are merely passive to the sug
gestion. The hypnotist of high finance or big business
merely writes his commands in heaven with a finger of
fire. All men really are guys, in the sense of dummies.
We are only the victims of his pyrotechnic violence ; and
it is he who hits us in the eye.
This is the real case against that modern society that
rs symbolised by such art and architecture. It is not that
it is toppling, but that it is top-heavy. It is not that it is
vulgar, but rather that it is not popular. * In other words,
the democratic ideal of countries like America, while it is
still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issue
with another tendency, an industrial progress which is of
all things on earth the most undemocratic. America is
not alone in possessing the industrialism, but she is alone
in emphasising the ideal that strives with industrialism.
Industrial capitalism and ideal democracy are everywhere
in controversy ; but perhaps only here are they in conflict.
France has a democratic ideal; but France is not indus
trial. England and Germany are industrial ; but England
and Germany are not really democratic. Of course
when I speak here of industrialism I speak of great in
dustrial areas ; there is, as will be noted later, another side
to all these countries ; there is in America itself not only a
great deal of agricultural society, but a great deal of
A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 45
agricultural equality; just as there are still peasants in
Germany and may some day again be peasants in Eng
land. But the point is that the ideal and its enemy the
reality are here crushed very close to each other in the
high, narrow city ; and that the sky-scraper is truly named
because its top, towering in such insolence, is scraping
the stars off the American sky, the very heaven of the
American spirit.
That seems to me the main outline of the whole prob
lem. In the first chapter of this book, I have emphasised
the fact that equality is still the ideal though no longer
the reality of America. I should like to conclude this
one by emphasising the fact that the reality of modern
capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even
splendours that might well stagger the wavering and im
pressionable modern spirit. Upon the issue of that
struggle depends the question of whether this new great
civilisation continues to exist, and even whether any one
cares if it exists or not. I have already used the parable
of the American flag, and the stars that stand for a multi
tudinous equality; I might here take the opposite symbol
of these artificial and terrestrial stars flaming on the fore
head of the commercial city; and note the peril of the
last illusion, which is that the artificial stars may seem to
fill the heavens, and the real stars to have faded from
sight. But I am content for the moment to reaffirm the
merely imaginative pleasure of those dizzy turrets and
dancing fires. If those nightmare buildings were really
all built for nothing, how noble they would be! The
fact that they were really built for something need not
unduly depress us for a moment, or drag down our soar
ing fancies. There is something about these vertical lines
that suggests a sort of rush upwards, as of great cataracts
46 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
topsy-turvy. I have spoken of fireworks, but here I
should rather speak of rockets. There is only some
thing underneath the mind murmuring that nothing re
mains at last of a flaming rocket except a falling stick.
I have spoken of Babylonian perspectives, and of words
written with a fiery finger, like that huge unhuman finger
that wrote on Belshazzar s wall. . . . But what did it
write on Belshazzar s wall ? . . . I am content once more
to end on a note of doubt and a rather dark sympathy
with those many-coloured solar systems turning so
dizzily, far up in the divine vacuum of the night.
From the earth we come and to the earth we return;
when people get away from that they are lost.
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS
IT is often asked what should be the first thing that a
man sees when he lands in a foreign country; but I
think it should be the vision of his own country.
At least when I came into New York Harbour, a sort of
grey and green cloud came between me and the towers
with multitudinous windows, white in the winter sun
light; and I saw an old brown house standing back
among the beech-trees at home, the house of only one
among many friends and neighbours, but one somehow
so sunken in the very heart of England as to be uncon
scious of her imperial or international position, and out
of sound of her perilous seas. But what made most
clear the vision that revisited me was something else.
Before we touched land the men of my own guild, the
journalists and reporters, had already boarded the ship
like pirates. And one of them spoke to me in an accent
that I knew ; and thanked me for all I had done for Ire
land. And it was at that moment that I knew most
vividly that what I wanted was to do something for
England.
Then, as it chanced, I looked across at the statue of
Liberty, and saw that the great bronze was gleaming
green in the morning light. I had made all the obvious
jokes about the statue of Liberty. I found it had a
soothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to
urge, as a point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to
be given back to the French, a vicious race abandoned
to the culture of the vine. I proposed that the last
47
48 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libation
before it. And then I suddenly remembered that this
Liberty was still in some sense enlightening the world,
or one part of the world; was a lamp for one sort of
wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. To one perse
cuted people at least this land had really been an asylum ;
even if recent legislation (as I have said) had made them
think it a lunatic asylum. They had made it so much
their home that the very colour of the country seemed to
change with the infusion; as the bronze of the great
statue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green.
It is a commonplace that the Englishman has been
stupid in his relations with the Irish ; but he has been far
more stupid in his relations with the Americans on the
subject of the Irish. His propaganda has been worse
than his practice; and his defence more ill-considered
than the most indefensible things that it was intended to
defend. There is in this matter a curious tangle of
cross-purposes, which only a parallel example can make
at all clear. And I will note the point here, because it
is some testimony to its vivid importance that it was
really the first I had to discuss on American soil with an
American citizen. In a double sense I touched Ireland
before I came to America. I will take an imaginary in
stance from another controversy; in order to show how
the apology can be worse than the action. The best we
can say for ourselves is worse than the worst that we
can do.
There was a time when English poets and other
.publicists could always be inspired with instantaneous
indignation about the persecuted Jews in Russia. We
have heard less about them since we heard more about
the persecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 49
many middle-class Englishmen already who wish that
Trotsky had been persecuted a little more. But even
in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a
curious fashion; and unconsciously distinguished be
tween the Jews whom they had never seen, in Warsaw,
and the Jew whom they had often seen in Whitechapel.
It seemed to be assumed that, by a curious coincidence,
Russia possessed not only the very worst Anti-Semites
but the very best Semites. A moneylender in London
might be like Judas Iscariot; but a moneylender in Mos
cow must be like Judas Maccabaeus.
Nevertheless there remained in our common sense an
unconscious but fundamental comprehension of the unity
of Israel; a sense that some things could be said, and
some could not be said, about the Jews as a whole. Sup
pose that even in those days, to say nothing of these, an
English protest against Russian Anti-Semitism had been
answered by the Russian Anti-Semites, and suppose the
answer had been somewhat as follows :
It is all very well for foreigners to complain of our
denying civic rights to our Jewish subjects ; but we know
the Jews better than they do. They are a barbarous
people, entirely primitive, and very like the simple
savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers.
It is quite impossible to make them understand ordinary
numbers, to say nothing of simple economics. They do
not realise the meaning or the value of money. No Jew
anywhere in the world can get into his stupid head the
notion of a bargain, or of exchanging one thing for
another. Their hopeless incapacity for commerce or
finance would retard the progress of our people, would
prevent the spread of any sort of economic education,
would keep the whole country on a level lower than
50 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
that of the most prehistoric methods of barter. What
Russia needs most is a mercantile middle class ; and it is
unjust to ask us to swamp its small beginnings in
thousands of these rude tribesmen, who cannot do a sum
of simple addition, or understand the symbolic character
of a threepenny bit, We might as well be asked to give
civic rights to cows and pigs as to this unhappy half
witted race who can no more count than the beasts of
the field. In every intellectual exercise they are hope
lessly incompetent; no Jew can play chess; no Jew can
learn languages ; no Jew has ever appeared in the smallest
part in any theatrical performance; no Jew can give or
. take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument.
These people are our subjects ; and we must understand
them. We accept full responsibility for treating such
troglodytes on our own terms/
It would not be entirely convincing. It would sound
a little far-fetched and unreal. But it would sound
exactly like our utterances about the Irish, as they sound
to all Americans, and rather especially to Anti-Irish
Americans. That is exactly the impression we produce
on the people of the United States when we say, as we
do say in substance, something like this: We mean no
harm to the poor dear Irish, so dreamy, so irresponsible,
so incapable of order or organisation. If we were to
withdraw from their country they would only fight
among themselves; they have no notion of how to rule
themselves. There is something charming about their
unpracticability, about their very incapacity for the
coarse business of politics. But for their own sakes it
is impossible to leave these emotional visionaries to ruin
themselves in the attempt to rule themselves, They are
like children; but they are our own children, and we
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 51
understand them. We accept full responsibility for
acting as their parents and guardians,
Now the point is not only that this view of the Irish is
false, but that it is the particular view that the Americans
know to be false. While we are saying that the Irish
could not organise, the Americans are complaining, often
very bitterly, of the power of Irish organisation, While
we say that the Irishman could not rule himself, the
Americans are saying, more or less humorously, that the
Irishman rules them. A highly intelligent professor
said to me in Boston, We have solved the Irish problem
here; we have an entirely independent Irish Govern
ment. While we are complaining, in an almost passion
ate manner, of the impotence of mere cliques of idealists
and dreamers, they are complaining, often in a very in
dignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses
and bullies. There are a great many Americans who
pity the Irish, very naturally and very rightly, for the
historic martyrdom which their patriotism has endured.
[But there are a great many Americans who do not pity
the Irish in the least. They would be much more likery
to pity the English; only this particular way of talking
tends rather to make them despise the English. Thus
both the friends of Ireland and the foes of Ireland tend
to be the foes of England. We make one set of enemies
by our action, and another by our apology.
It is a thing that can from time to time be found ifi
history; a misunderstanding that really has a moral.
The English excuse would carry much more weight if
it had more sincerity and more humility. There are a
considerable number of people in the United States who
could sympathise with us, if we would say frankly that
we fear the Irish. Those who thus despise our pity
52 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
might possibly even respect our fear. The argument I
have often used in other places comes back with prodi
gious and redoubled force, after hearing anything of
American opinion ; the argument that the only reasonable
or reputable excuse for the English is the excuse of a pa
triotic sense of peril ; and that the Unionist, if he must be
a Unionist, should use that and no other. When the
Unionist has said that he dare not let loose against him
self a captive he has so cruelly wronged, he has said all
that he has to say ; all that he has ever had to say ; all that
he will ever have to say. He is like a man who has sent
a virile and rather vindictive rival unjustly to penal
servitude; and who connives at the continuance of the
sentence, not because he himself is particularly vindic
tive, but because he is afraid of what the convict will do
when he comes out of prison. This is not exactly a
moral strength, but it is a very human weakness; and
that is the most that can be said for it. All other talk,
about Celtic frenzy or Catholic superstition, is cant in
vented to deceive himself or to deceive the world. But
the vital point to realise is that it is cant that cannot pos
sibly deceive the American world. In the matter of the
Irishman the American is not to be deceived. It is not
merely true to say that he knows better. It is equally
true to say that he knows worse. He knows vices and
evils in the Irishman that are entirely hidden in the hazy
vision of the Englishman. He knows that our unreal
slanders are inconsistent even with the real sins. To us
Ireland is a shadowy Isle of Sunset, like Atlantis, about
which we can make up legends. To him it is a positive
ward or parish in the heart of his huge cities, like White-
chapel; about which even we cannot make legends but
only lies. And, as I have said, there are some lies we do
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 53
not tell even about Whitechapel. We do not say it is in
habited by Jews too stupid to count or know the value of
a coin.
The first thing for any honest Englishman to send
across the sea is this; that the English have not the
shadow of a notion of what they are up against in Amer
ica. They have never even heard of the batteries of
almost brutal energy, of which I had thus touched a live
wire even before I landed. People talk about the hypoc
risy of England in dealing with a small nationality.
What strikes me is the stupidity of England in supposing
that she is dealing with a small nationality; when she is
really dealing with a very large nationality. She is deal
ing with a nationality that often threatens, even numeri
cally, to dominate all the other nationalities of the United
States. The Irish are not decaying; they are not un
practical; they are scarcely even scattered; they are not
even poor. They are the most powerful and practical
world-combination with whom we can decide to be
friends or foes; and that is why I thought first of that
still and solid brown house in Buckinghamshire, standing
back in the shadow of the trees.
Among my impressions of America I have deliberately
put first the figure of the Irish- American interviewer,
standing on the shore more symbolic than the statue of
Liberty. The Irish interviewer s importance for the
English lay in the fact of his being an Irishman, but
there was also considerable interest in the circumstance
of his being an interviewer. And as certain wild birds
sometimes wing their way far out to sea and are the first
signal of the shore, so the first Americans the traveller
meets are often American interviewers ; and they are gen
erally birds of a feather, and they certainly flock together.
54 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
In this respect, there is a slight difference in the etiquette
of the craft in the two countries, which I was delighted
to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. If I could at that
moment have flown back to Fleet Street I am happy to
reflect that nobody in the world would in the least wish to
interview me. I should attract no more attention than
the stone griffin opposite the Law Courts ; both monsters
; being grotesque but also familiar. But supposing for
the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview
me, it Is fairly certain that the fact of one paper publish
ing such an interview would rather prevent the other
papers from doing so. The repetition of the same views
of the same individual in two places would be considered
rather bad journalism; it would have an air of stolen
thunder, not to say stage thunder.
But in America the fact of my landing and lecturing
was evidently regarded in the same light as a murder or
a great fire, or any other terrible but incurable catastro
phe, a matter of interest to all pressmen concerned with
practical events. One of the first questions I was asked
was how I should be disposed to explain the wave
of crime in New York. Naturally I replied that it might
possibly be due to the number of English lecturers who
had recently landed. In the mood of the moment it
seemed possible that, if they had all been interviewed,
regrettable incidents might possibly have taken place.
But this was only the mood of the moment, and even as
a mood did not last more than a moment. And since it
has reference to a rather common and a rather unjust
conception of American journalism, I think it well to
take it first as a fallacy to be refuted, though the refuta
tion may require a rather long approach.
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 53
I have generally found that the traveller fails to under
stand a foreign country, through treating it as a tendency
and not as a balance. But if a thing were always tend
ing in one direction it would soon tend to destruction.
Everything that merely progresses finally perishes.
Every nation, like every family, exists upon a compro
mise, and commonly a rather eccentric compromise;
using the word eccentric in the sense of something that
is somehow at once crazy and healthy. Now the for
eigner commonly sees some feature that he thinks fantas
tic without seeing the feature that balances it. The ordi
nary examples are obvious enough. An Englishman
dining inside an hotel on the boulevards thinks the
French eccentric in refusing to open a window. But he
does not think the English eccentric in refusing to carry
"their chairs and tables out on to the pavement in Ludgate
Circus. An Englishman will go poking about in little
Swiss or Italian villages, in wild mountains or in remote
islands, demanding tea; and never reflects that he is like
a Chinaman who should enter all the wayside publio
houses in Kent or Sussex and demand opium. But the
point is not merely that he demands what he cannot ex
pect to enjoy; it is that he ignores even what he does en
joy. He does not realise the sublime and starry paradox
of the phrase, vin ordinaire, which to him should be a
glorious jest like the phrase common gold or daily dia
monds. These are the simple and self-evident cases;
but there are many more subtle cases of the same thing;
of the tendency to see that the nation fills up its own gap
with its own substitute ; or corrects its own extravagance
with its own precaution. The national antidote gener
ally grows wild in the woods side by side with the na-
56 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
tional poison. If it did not, all the natives would be
dead. For it is so, as I have said, that nations necessarily
die of the undiluted poison called progress.
It is so in this much-abused and over-abused example
of the American journalist. / The American interviewers
really have exceedingly good manners for the purposes
of their trade, granted that it is necessary to pursue their
trade. And even what is called their hustling method
can truly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways ;
for if they hustle in, they also hustle out. It may not at
first sight seem the very warmest compliment to a gentle
man to congratulate him on the fact that he soon goes
away. But it really is a tribute to his perfection in a
very delicate social art; and I am quite serious when I
say that in this respect the interviewers are artists. It
might be more difficult for an Englishman to come to
the point, particularly the sort of point which American
journalists are supposed, with some exaggeration, to aim
at. It might be more difficult for an Englishman to ask
a total stranger on the spur of the moment for the exact
inscription on his mother s grave; but I really think that
if an Englishman once got so far as that he would go
very much farther, and certainly go on very much
longer. The Englishman would approach the church
yard by a rather more wandering woodland path ; but if
once he had got to the grave I think he would have much
more disposition, so to speak, to sit down on it. Our
own national temperament would find it decidedly more
difficult to disconnect when connections had really been
established. Possibly that is the reason why our na
tional temperament does not establish them. I suspect
that the real reason that an Englishman does not talk is
that he cannot leave off talking. I suspect that my soli-
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 57
tary countrymen, hiding in separate railway compart
ments, are not so much retiring .as a race of Trappists
as escaping from a race of. talkers.
However this may be, there is obviously something
of practical advantage in the ease with which the Ameri
can butterfly flits from flower to flower. He may in a
sense force his acquaintance on us, but he does not force
himself on us. Even when, to our prejudices, he seems
to insist on knowing us, "at least he does not insist on our
knowing him. It may be, to some sensibilities, a bad
thing that a total stranger should talk as if he were a
friend, but it might possibly be worse if he insisted on
being a friend before he would talk like one. To a great
deal of the interviewing 1 , indeed much the greater part of
it, even this criticism does not apply; there is nothing
which even an Englishman of extreme sensibility could
regard as particularly private ; the questions involved are
generally entirely public, and treated with not a little
public spirit. But my only reason for saying here what
can be said even for the worst exceptions is to point out
this g eneral and neglected principle; that the very thing
that we complain of in a foreigner generally carries with
it its own foreign cure. American interviewing is gen
erally very reasonable, and it is always very rapid. And
even those to whom talking to an intelligent fellow crea
ture is as horrible as having a tooth out may still admit
that American interviewing has many of the qualities of
American dentistry.
Another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this
exaggeration of the vulgarity and curiosity of the press,
is the distinction between the articles and the headlines ;
or rather the tendency to ignore that distinction. The
few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen in
58 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
American stories have always beeri in the headlines.
And the headlines are written by somebody else; some
solitary and savage cynic locked up in the office, hating
all mankind, and raging and revenging himself at ran
dom, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman can
Safely be let loose to wander about the town.
For instance, I talked to two decidedly thoughtful
fellow journalists immediately on my arrival at a town
in which there had been some labour troubles. I told
them my general view of Labour in the very largest and
perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that
the one great truth to be taught to the middle classes was
that Capitalism was itself a crisis, and a passing crisis;
that it was not so much that it was breaking down as that
it had never really stood up. Slaveries could last, and
peasantries could last; but wage-earning communities
could hardly even live, and were already dying.
All this moral and even metaphysical generalisation
was most fairly and most faithfully reproduced by the in
terviewer, who had actually heard it casually and idly
spoken. But on the top of this column of political phil
osophy was the extraordinary announcement in enor
mous letters, Chesterton Takes Sides in Trolley Strike/
This was inaccurate. When I spoke I not only did not
know that there was any trolley strike, but I did not know
What a trolley strike was. I should have had an indistinct
idea that a large number of citizens earned their living
by carrying things about in wheel-barrows, and that they
had desisted from the beneficent activities. Any one
who did not happen to be a journalist, or know a little
about journalism, American and English, would have
Supposed that the Same man who wrote the article had
Suddenly gone mad and written the title. But I know
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 59
that we have here to deal with two different types of
journalists ; and the man who writes the headlines I will
not dare to describe; for I have not seen him except in
dreams^
Another innocent complication is that the interviewer
does sometimes translate things into his native language.
It would not seem odd that a French interviewer should
translate them into French; and it is certain that the
American interviewer sometimes translates them into
American. Those who imagine the two languages to be
the same are more innocent than any interviewer. To
take one out of the twenty examples, some of which I
have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had
said that I had the reputation of being a nut. I should
be flattered but faintly surprised at such a tribute to my
dress and dashing exterior. I should afterwards be so
bered and enlightened by discovering that in America
a nut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile
person. And as I have here to translate their Aimerican
phrase into English, it may be very defensible that they
should translate my English phrases into American.
Anyhow they often do translate them into American.
In answer to the usual question about Prohibition I
had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dull
ness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is
a law that the rich make knowing they can always break
it. From the printed interview it appeared that I had
said, Prohibition ! All matter of dollar sign/ This
is almost avowed translation, like a French translation.
Nobody can suppose that it would come natural to an
Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a dollar
sign whatever that may be. It is exactly as if he had
made me talk about the Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre
60 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
as a cent plain, and two cents coloured or condemned
a parsimonious policy as dime-wise and dollar- foolish.
Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest
American writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said,
but after mentioning several names, I said that the
greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably
Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more precise;
and -students of my literary and conversational style
will be interested to know that I said, See here, Walt
Whitman was your one real red-blooded man. Here
again I hardly think the translation can have been quite
unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware
that I do not talk like that, but I fancy that the same
fact would have dawned on the journalist to whom I
had been talking. And even this trivial point carries
with it the two truths which must be, I fear, the rather
monotonous moral of these pages. The first is that
America and England can be far better friends when
sharply divided than when shapelessly amalgamated.
These two journalists were false reporters, but they
were true translators. They were not so much inter
viewers as interpreters. And the second is that in any
such difference it is often wholesome to look beneath
the surface for a superiority. For ability to translate
does imply ability to understand; and many of these
journalists really did understand. I think there are many
English journalists who would be more puzzled by so
simple an idea as the plutocratic foundation of Prohibi
tion. But the American knew at once that I meant it
was a matter of dollar sign; probably because he knew
very well that it is.
Then again there is a curious convention by which
American interviewing makes itself out much worse than
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 61
it is. The reports are far more rowdy and insolent than
the conversations. This is probably a part of the fact
that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and
to some vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal.
It must always be grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal
even more than it is a reality. It is an ideal when it
is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligent young
man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles,
will ask for an interview with unimpeachable politeness,
wait for his living subject with unimpeachable patience,
talk to him quite sensibly for twenty minutes, and go
noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper next morning
you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and
pursued his victim on to the roof or dragged him from
under the bed, and tore from! him replies to all sorts of
bald and ruthless questions printed in large black letters.
I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion
of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the
paper next morning. I had no notion I had been on the
rack of an inquisitor until I saw it in plain print; and
then of course I believed it, with a faith and docility
unknown in any previous epoch of history. An inter
esting essay might be written upon points upon which
nations affect more vices than they possess ; and it might
deal more fully with the American pressman, who is a
harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of high
way-robber in print.
I have turned this chapter into something like a defence
of interviewers, because I really think they are made to
bear too much of the burden of the bad developments of
modern journalism. But I am very far from meaning
to suggest that those bad developments are not very bad.
So far from wishing to minimise the evil, I would in
62 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
a real sense rather magnify it. I would suggest that
the evil itself is a much larger and more fundamental
thing; and that to deal with it by abusing poor journalists,
doing their particular and perhaps peculiar duty, is like
dealing with a pestilence by rubbing at one of the spots.
What is wrong with the modern world will not be righted
by attributing the whole disease to each of its symptoms
in turn; first to the tavern and then to the cinema and
then to the reporter s room. The evil of journalism is
not in the journalists. It is not in the poor men on the
lowest level of the profession, but in the rich men at
the top of the profession ; or rather in the rich men who
are too much on top of the profession even to belong to
it. The trouble with newspapers is the Newspaper Trust,
as the trouble might be with a Wheat Trust, without
involving a vilification of all tne people who grow wheat.
It is the American plutocracy and not the American press.
What is the matter with the modern world is not modern
headlines or modern films or modern machinery. What
is the matter with the modern world is the modern world ;
and the cure will come from another.
SOME AMERICAN CITIES
THERE is one point, almost to be called a para
dox, to be noted about New York; and that is
that in one sense it is really new. The term
very seldom has any relevance to the reality. The New
Forest is nearly as old as the Conquest, and the New
Theology is nearly as old as the Creed. Things have
been offered to me as the new thought that might more
(properly be called the old thoughtlessness ; and the thing
we call the New Poor Law is already old enough to
know better. But there is a sense in which New York
is always new; in the sense that it is always being re
newed. A stranger might well say that the chief in
dustry of the citizens consists of destroying their city;
but he soon realises that they always start it all over
again with undimmished energy and hope. At first I
had a fancy that they never quite finished putting up
a big building without feeling that it was time to pull it
down again ; and that somebody began to dig up the first
foundations while somebody else was putting on the last
tiles. This fills the whole of this brilliant and bewilder
ing place with a quite unique and unparalleled air of rapid
ruin. Ruins spring up so suddenly like mushrooms,
which with us are the growth of age like mosses, that one
half expects to see ivy climbing quickly up the broken
walls as in the nightmare of the Time Machine, or in
some incredibly accelerated cinema.
There is no sight in any country that raises my own
spirits so much as a scaffolding. It is a tragedy that
63
64 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
they always take the scaffolding away, and leave us
nothing but a mere* building. If they would only take
the building away and leave us a beautiful scaffolding, it
would in most cases be a gain to the loveliness of earth.
If I could analyse what it is that lifts the heart about
the lightness and clarity of such a white and wooden
skeleton, I could explain what it is that is really charm
ing about New York; in spite o*f its suffering from the
curse of cosmopolitanism and even the provincial super
stition of progress. It is partly that all this destruction
and reconstruction is an unexhausted artistic energy; but
it is partly also that it is an artistic energy that does
not take itself too seriously. It is first because man is
here a carpenter; and secondly because he is a stage car
penter. Indeed there is about the whole scene the spirit
of scene-shifting. It therefore touches whatever nerve
t in us has since childhood thrilled at all theatrical things.
But the picture will be imperfect unless we realise some
thing which gives it unity and marks its chief difference
from the climate and colours of Western Europe. We
may say that the back-scene remains the same. The
sky remained, and in the depths of winter it seemed to be
blue with summer; and so clear that I almost flattered
myself that clouds were English products like primroses.
An American would probably retort on my charge of
scene-shifting by saying that at least he only shifted the
towers and domes of the earth; and that in England it is
the heavens that are shifty. And indeed we have
changes from day to day that would seem to him as
distinct as different magic-lantern slides; one view
showing the Bay of Naples and the next the North Pole.
I do not mean, of course, that there are no changes in
American weather; but as a matter of proportion it is
SOME AMERICAN CITIES 65
true that the most unstable part of our scenery is the
most stable part of theirs. Indeed we might almost be
pardoned the boast that Britain alone really possesses the
noble thing called weather; most other countries having
to be content with climate. It must be confessed, how
ever, that they often are content with it. And the beauty
of New York, which is considerable, is very largely due
to the clarity that brings out the colours of varied build
ings against the equal colour of the sky. Strangely
enough I found myself repeating about this vista of the
West two vivid lines in which Mr. W. B. Yeats has called
up a vision of the East :
And coloured like the eastern birds
At evening in their rainless skies.
To invoke a somewhat less poetic parallel, even the
untravelled Englishman has probably seen American
posters and trade advertisements of a patchy and gaudy
kind, in which a white house or a yellow motor-car are
cut out as in a cardboard against a sky like blue marble.
I used to think it was only New Art, but I found that it
is really New York.
It is not for nothing that the very nature of local
character has gained the nickname of local colour.
Colour runs through all our experience ; -and we all know
that our childhood found talismanic gems in the very
paints in the paint-box, or even in their very names.
And just as the very name of crimson lake really sug
gested to me some sanguine and mysterious mere, dark
yet red as blood, so the very name of burnt sienna
became afterwards tangled up in my mind with the
notion of something traditional and tragic; as if some
such golden Italian city had really been darkened by
66 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
many conflagrations in the wars of mediaeval de
mocracy. Now if one had the caprice of conceiving some
city exactly contrary to one thus seared and seasoned by
fire, its colour might be called up to a childish fancy by
the mere name of raw umber ; and such a city is New
York. I used to be puzzled by the name of raw umber/
being unable to imagine the effect of fried umber or
stewed umber. But the colours of New York are exactly
in that key; and might be adumbrated by phrases like
raw pink or raw yellow. It is really in a sense like
something uncooked; or something which the satiric
would call half-baked. And yet the effect is not only
beautiful, it is even delicate. I had no name for this
nuance; until I saw that somebody had written of the
pastel-tinted towers of New York ; and I knew that the
name had been found. There are no paints dry enough
to describe all that dry light ; and it is not a box of
colours but of crayons. If the Englishman returning to
England is moved at the sight of a block of white chalk,
the American sees rather a bundle of chalks. Nor can I
imagine anything more moving. Fairy tales are told to
children about a country where the trees are like sugar-
sticks and the lakes like treacle, but most children would
feel almost as greedy for a fairyland where the trees
were like brushes of green paint and the hills were of
coloured chajks^
But here what accentuates the arid freshness is the
fragmentary look of the continual reconstruction and
change. The strong daylight finds everywhere the
broken edges of things, and the sort of hues we see in
newly-turned earth or the white sections of trees. And
it is in this respect that the local colour can literally be
taken as local character. For New York considered in
SOME AMERICAN CITIES 67
itself is primarily a place of unrest, and those who sin
cerely love it, as many do, love it for the romance of its
restlessness. A man almost looks at a building as he
passes to wonder whether it will be there when he comes
back from his walk; and the doubt is part of an inde
scribable notion, as of a white nightmare of daylight,
which is increased by the very numbering of the streets,
with its tangle of numerals which at first makes an Eng
lish head reel. The detail is merely a symbol; and
when he is used to it he can see that it is, like the most
humdrum human customs, both worse and better than
his own. 271 West 52nd Street is the easiest of all
addresses to find, but the hardest of all addresses to
remember. He who is, like myself, so constituted as
necessarily to lose any piece of paper he has particular
reason to preserve, will find himself wishing the place
were called Tine Crest* or Heather Crag like any unob
trusive villa in Streatham. But his sense of some sort
of incalculable calculations, as of the vision of a mad
mathematician, is rooted in a more real impression. His
first feeling that his head is turning round is due to
something really dizzy in the movement of a life that
turns dizzily like a wheel. If there be in the modern
mind something paradoxical that can find peace in
change, it is here that it has indeed built its habitation or
rather is still building and unbuilding it. One might
fancy that it changes in everything and that nothing en
dures but its invisible name; and even its name, as I
have said, seems to make a boast of novelty.
That is something like a sincere first impression of the
atmosphere of New York. Those who think that is the
atmosphere of America have never got any farther than
New York. We might almost say that they have never
68 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
entered America, any more than if they had been de
tained like undesirable aliens at Ellis Island. And in
deed there are a good many undesirable aliens detained
on Manhattan Island too. But of that I will not speak,
being myself an alien with no particular pretentions to
be desirable. Anyhow, such is New York; but such is
not the New World. The great American Republic
contains very considerable varieties, and of these varie
ties, I necessarily saw far too little to allow me to gen
eralise. But from the little I did see, I should venture
on the generalisation that the great part of America is
singularly and even strikingly unlike New York. It
goes without saying that New York is very unlike the
vast agricultural plains and small agricultural towns of
the Middle West, which I did see. It may be conject
ured with some confidence that it is very unlike what is
called the Wild and sometimes the Woolly West, which
I did not see. But I am here comparing New York, not
with the newer states of the prairie or the mountains,
but with the other older cities of the Atlantic coast.
And New York, as it seems to me, is quite vitally differ
ent from the other historic cities of America. It is so
different that it shows them all for the moment in a false
light, as a long white searchlight will throw a light that
is fantastic and theatrical upon ancient and quiet villages
folded in the everlasting hills. Philadelphia and Boston
and Baltimore are more like those quiet villages than they
are like New York.
If I were to call this book The Antiquities of
America, I should give rise to misunderstanding and
possibly to annoyance. And yet the double sense in
such words is an undeserved misfortune for them. We
talk of Plato or the Parthenon or the Greek passion for
SOME AMERICAN CITIES 69
beauty as parts of the antique, but hardly of the anti
quated. When we call them ancient it ig not because
they have perished, but rather because they have sur
vived. In the same way I hear some New Yorkers refer
to Philadelphia or Baltimore as dead towns/ They
mean by a dead town a town that has had the impudence
not to die. Such people are astonished to find an ancient
thing alive, just as they are now astonished, and will be
increasingly astonished, to find Poland or the Papacy or
the French nation still alive. And what I mean by Phil
adelphia and Baltimore being alive is precisely what
these people mean by their being dead; it is continuity; it
is the presence of the life first breathed into them and of
the purpose of their being; it is the benediction of the
founders of the colonies and the fathers of the republic.
This tradition is truly to be called life; for life alone can
link the past and the future. It merely means that as
what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day,
so what is done to-day will make some difference to
morrow. In New York it is difficult to feel that any day
will make any difference. These moderns only die daily
without power to rise from the dead. But I can truly
claim that in coming into some of these more stable cities
of the States I felt something quite sincerely of that his
toric emotion which is. satisfied in the eternal cities of the
Mediterranean. I felt in America what many Ameri
cans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I have seldom
had that sentiment stirred more, simply and directly than
when I saw from afar off, above that vast grey labyrinth
of Philadelphia, great Penn upon his pinnacle like the
graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world;
and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the
turning of a lane, a league from my own door.
70 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
For this aspect of America is rather neglected in the
talk about electricity and headlines. Needless to say, the
modern vulgarity of avarice and advertisement sprawls
all over Philadelphia or Boston ; but so it does over Win
chester or Canterbury. But most people know that there
is something else to be found in Canterbury or Winches
ter; many people know that it is rather more interesting;
and some people know that Alfred can still walk in Win
chester and that St. Thomas at Canterbury was killed
but did not die. It is at least as possible for a Philadel-
phian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for an
Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and .of Becket.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean
that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It
means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred
years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I
never could feel in New York that it mattered what any
body did an hour ago. And these things did and do mat
ter. Quakerism is not my favourite creed; but on that
day when William Penn stood unarmed upon that spot
and made his treaty with the Red Indians, his creed of
humanity did have a triumph and a triumph that has not
turned back. The praise given to him is not a priggish
fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions
have illogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists have
been rather unfair to Penn even in picking their praises;
and they generally forget that toleration cuts both ways
and that an open mind is open on all sides. Those who
deify him for consenting to bargain with the savages
cannot forgive him for consenting to bargain with the
Stuarts. And the same is true of the other city, yet
more closely connected with the tolerant experiment of
the Stuarts. The state of Maryland was the first ex-
SOME AMERICAN CITIES 71
periment in religious freedom in human history. Lord
Baltimore and his Catholics were a long march ahead
of William Penn and his Quakers on what is now called
the path of progress. That the first religious toleration
ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Cath
olics is one of those little informing details with which
our Victorian histories did not exactly teem. But when
I went into my hotel at Baltimore and found two priests
waiting to see me, I was moved in a new fashion, for
I felt that I touched the end of a living chain. Nor
was the impression accidental ; it will always remain with
me with a mixture of gratitude and grief, for they
brought a message of welcome from a great American
whose name I had known from childhood and whose
career was drawing to its close; for it was but a few
days after I left the city that I learned that Cardinal Gib
bons was dead.
On the top of a hill on one side of the town stood
the first monument raised after the Revolution to
Washington. Beyond it was a new monument saluting
in the name of Lafayette the American soldiers who
fell fighting in France in the Great War. Between
them were steps and stone seats, and I sat down on
one of them and talked to two children who were
clambering about the bases of the monument. I felt
a profound and radiant peace in the thought that they
at any rate were not going to my lecture. It made
me happy that in that talk neither they nor I had any
names. I was full of that indescribable waking vision
of the strangeness of life, and especially of the strange
ness of locality; of how we find places and lose them;
and see faces for a moment in a far-off land, and it is
equally mysterious if we remember and mysterious if we
72 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
forget. I had even stirring in my head the suggestion
of some verses that I shall never finish
If I ever go back to Baltimore
The city of Maryland.
But the poem would have to contain far too much;
for I was thinking of a thousand things at once; and
wondering what the children would be like twenty
years after and whether they would travel in white goods
or be interested in oil, and I was not untouched
(it may be said) by the fact that a neighbouring shop
had provided the only sample of the substance called
tea ever found on the American continent; and in
front of me soared up into the sky on wings of stone
the column of all those high hopes of humanity a
hundred years ago; and beyond there were lighted
candles in the chapels and prayers in the ante-chambers,
where perhaps already a Prince of the Church was
dying. Only on a later page can I even attempt to
comb out such a tangle of contrasts, which is indeed
the tangle of America and this mortal life; but sitting
there on that stone seat under that quiet sky, I had
some experience of the thronging thousands of living
thoughts and things, noisy and numberless as birds,
that give its everlasting vivacity and vitality to a dead
town.
Two other cities I visited which have this particular
type of traditional character, the one being typical of
the North and the other of the South. At least I
may take as convenient anti-types the towns of Boston
and St. Louis; and we might add Nashville as being
a shade more truly southern than St. Louis. To the
extreme South, in the sense of what is called the Black
SOME AMERICAN CITIES 73
Belt, I never went at all. Now English travellers
expect the South to be somewhat traditional; but they
are not prepared for the aspects of Boston in the
North which are even more so. If we wished only for
an antic of antithesis, we might say that on one side
the places are more prosaic than the names and on
the other the names are more prosaic than the places.
St. Louis is a fine town, and we recognise a fine
instinct of the imagination that set on the hill over
looking the river the statue of that holy horseman
who has christened the city. But the city is not as
beautiful as its name; it could not be. Indeed these
titles set up a standard to which the most splendid
spires and turrets could not rise, and below which the
commercial chimneys and sky-signs conspicuously sink.
We should think it odd if Belfast had borne the name
of Joan of Arc. We should be slightly shocked if the
town of Johannesburg happened to be called Jesus Christ.
But few have noted a blasphemy, or even a somewhat
challenging benediction, to be found in the very name of
San Francisco.
But on the other hand a place like Boston is much
more beautiful than its name. And, as I have suggested,
an Englishman s general information, or lack of infor
mation, leaves him in some ignorance of the type of
beauty that turns up in that type of place. He has heard
so much about the purely commercial North as against
the agricultural and aristocratic South, and the traditions
of Boston and Phildelphia are rather too tenuous and
delicate to be seen from across the Atlantic. But here
also there are traditions and a great deal of tradi
tionalism. The circle of old families, which still meets
with a certain exclusiveness in Philadelphia, is the sort
74 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
of thing that we in England should expect to find rather
in New Orleans. The academic aristocracy of Boston,
which Oliver Wendell Holmes called the Brahmins, is still
a reality though it was always a minority and is now a
very small minority. An epigram, invented by Yale at
the expense of Harvard, describes it as very small in
deed :
Here is to jolly old Boston, the home of the bean and the
cod,
Where Cabots speak only to Lowells, and Lowells speak
only to God.
But an aristocracy must be a minority, and it is arguable
that the smaller it is the better. I am bound to say,
however, that the distinguished Dr. Cabot, the present
representative of the family, broke through any taboo
that may tie his affections to his Creator and to Miss
Amy Lowell, and broadened his sympathies so indis
criminately as to show kindness and hospitality to so
lost a being as an English lecturer. But if the thing
is hardly a limit it is very living as a memory; and
Boston on this side is very much a place of memories.
It would be paying it a very poor compliment merely
to say that parts of it reminded me of England; for
indeed they reminded me of English things that have
largely vanished from England. There are old brown
houses in the corners of squares and streets that are
like glimpses of a man s forgotten childhood; and when
I saw the log path with posts where the Autocrat may
be supposed to have walked with the schoolmistress,
I felt I had come to the land where old tales come true.
I pause in this place upon this particular aspect of
America because it is very much missed in a mere con-
SOME AMERICAN CITIES 75
trast with England. I need not say that if I felt it
even about slight figures of fiction, I felt it even more
about solid figures of history. Such ghosts seemed par
ticularly solid in the Southern States, precisely because
of the comparative quietude and leisure of the atmos
phere of the South. It was never more vivid to me
than when coming, at a quiet hour of the night, into the
comparatively quiet hotel at Nashville in Tennessee, and
mounting to a dim and deserted upper floor where I
found myself before a faded picture ; and from the dark
canvas looked forth the face of Andrew Jackson, watch
ful like a white eagle.
At that moment, perhaps, I was in more than one
sense alone. Most Englishmen know a good deal of
American fiction, and nothing whatever of American
history. They know more about the autocrat of the
breakfast-table than about the autocrat of the army and
the people, the one great democratic despot of modern
times; the Napoleon of the New World. The only
notion the English public ever got about American politics
they got from a novel, Uncle Tom s Cabin; and to say
the least of it, it was no exception to the prevalence
of fiction over fact. Hundreds of us have heard of Tom
Sawyer for one who had heard of Charles Sumner; and
it is probable that most of us could pass a more detailed
examination about Toddy and Budge than about Lincoln
and Lee. But in the case of Andrew Jackson it may be
that I felt a special sense of individual isolation; for
I believe that there are even fewer among Englishmen
than among Americans who realise that the energy of
that great man was largely directed towards saving us
from the chief evil which destroys the nations to-day.
He sought to cut down, as with a sword of simplicity,
76 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
the new and nameless enormity of finance; and he must
have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were
behind him, because all the politicians were against him.
The end of that struggle is not yet; but if the bank is
stronger than the sword or the sceptre of popular sov
ereignty, the end will be the end of democracy. It will
have to choose between accepting an acknowledged dic
tator and accepting dictation which it dare not acknowl
edge. The process will have begun by giving power to
people and refusing to give them their titles; and it
will have ended by giving the power to people who refuse
to give us their names.
But I have a special reason for ending this chapter
on the name of the great popular dictator who made
war on the politicians and the financiers. This chapter
does not profess to touch on one in twenty of the
interesting cities of America, even in this particular
aspect of their relation to the history of America, which
is so much neglected in England. If that were so, there
would be a great deal to say even about the newest of
them ; Chicago, for instance, is certainly something more
than the mere pork-packing yard that English tradition
suggests; and it has been building a boulevard not un
worthy of its splendid position on its splendid lake.
But all these cities are defiled and even diseased with in
dustrialism. It is due to the Americans to remember that
they have deliberately preserved one of their cities from
such defilement and such disease. And that is the pres
idential city, which stands in the American mind for
the same ideal as the President; the idea of the Republic
that rises above modern money-making and endures.
There has really been an effort to keep the White House
white. No factories are allowed in that town; no more
SOME AMERICAN CITIES 77
than the necessary shops are tolerated. It is a beautiful
city; and really retains something of that classical
serenity of the eighteenth century in which the Fathers
of the Republic moved. With all respect to the colonial
place of that name, I do not suppose that Wellington
is particularly like Wellington. But Washington really
is like Washington.
In this, as in so many things, there is no harm in our
criticising foreigners, if only we would also criticise
ourselves. In other words, the world might need even
less of its new charity, if it had a little more of the old
humility. When we complain of American individual
ism, we forget that we have fostered it by ourselves
having far less of this impersonal ideal of the Republic
or commonwealth as a whole. When we complain, very
justly, for instance, of great pictures passing into the
possession of American magnates, we ought to remember
that we paved the way for it by allowing them all to
accumulate in the possession of English magnates. It
is bad that a public treasure should be in the possession
of a private man in America, but we took the first step ini
lightly letting it disappear into the private collection of
a man in England. I know all about the genuine na
tional tradition which treated the aristocracy as constitut
ing the state ; but these very foreign purchases go to prove
that we ought to have had a state independent of the
aristocracy. It is true that rich Americans do some
times covet the monuments of our culture in a fashion
that rightly revolts us as vulgar and irrational. They
are said sometimes to want to take whole buildings away
with them; and too many of such buildings are private
and for sale. There were wilder stories of a millionaire
wishing to transplant Glastonbury Abbey and similar
78 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
buildings as if they were portable shrubs in pots. It is
obvious that it is nonsense as well as vandalism to sepa
rate Glastonbury Abbey from Glastonbury. I can un
derstand a man venerating it as a ruin ; and I can under
stand a man despising it as a rubbish-heap. But it is
senseless to insult a thing in order to idolatrise it; it is
meaningless to desecrate the shrine in order to worship
the stones. That sort of thing is the bad side of Ameri
can appetite and ambition; and we are perfectly right
to see it not only as a deliberate blasphemy but as an
unconscious buffoonery. But there is another side to
the American tradition, which is really too much lacking
in our own tradition. And it is illustrated in this idea
of preserving Washington as a sort of paradise of im
personal politics without personal commerce. Nobody
could buy the White House or the Washington Monu
ment; it may be hinted (as by an inhabitant of Glaston
bury) that nobody wants to; but nobody could if he did
want to. There is really a certain air of serenity and
security about the place, lacking in every other American
town. It is increased, of course, by the clear blue skies
iof that half-southern province, from which smoke has
been banished. The effect is not so much in the mere
buildings, though they are classical and often beautiful.
But whatever else they have built, they have built a great
blue dome, the largest dome in the world. And the place
does express something in the inconsistent idealism of
this strange people; and here at least they have lifted it
higher than all the sky-scrapers, and set it in a stainless
sky.
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY
THE sharpest pleasure of a traveller is in finding
the things which he did not expect, but which he
might have expected to expect. I mean the
things that are at once so strange and so obvious that
they must have been noticed, yet somehow they have not
been noted. Thus I had heard a thousand things about
Jerusalem before I ever saw it; I had heard rhapsodies
and disparagements of every description. Modern ra
tionalistic critics, with characteristic consistency, had
blamed it for its accumulated rubbish and its modern
restoration, for its antiquated superstition and its up-to-
date vulgarity. But somehow the one impression that
had never pierced through their description was the
simple and single impression of a city on a hill, with
walls coming to the very edge of slopes that were almost
as steep as walls ; the turreted city which crowns a cone-
shaped hill in so many mediaeval landscapes. One would
suppose that this was at once the plainest and most pic
turesque of all the facts ; yet somehow, in my reading,
I had always lost it amid a mass of minor facts that were
merely details. We know that a city that is set upon a
hill cannot be hid ; and yet it would seem that it is exactly
the hill that is hid ; though perhaps it is only hid from the
wise and the understanding. I had a similar and simple
impression when I discovered America. I cannot avoid
the phrase; for it would really seem that each man dis
covers it for himself.
Thus I had heard a great deal, before I saw them.
79
8o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
about the tall and dominant buildings of New York.
I agree that they have an instant effect on the imagina
tion; which I think is increased by the situation in which
they stand, and out of which they arose. They are all
the more impressive because the building, while it is
vertically so vast, is horizontally almost narrow. New
York is an island, and has all the intensive romance
of an island. It is a thing of almost infinite height
upon very finite foundations. It is almost like a
lofty lighthouse upon a lonely rock. But this story
of the sky-scrapers, which I had often heard, would by
itself give a curiously false impression of the freshest
and most curious characteristic of American architec
ture. Told only in terms of these great towers of
stone and brick in the big industrial cities, the story
would tend too much to an impression of something
cold and colossal like the monuments of Asia. It would
suggest a modern Babylon altogether too Babylonian. It
would imply that a man of the new world was a sort of
new Pharaoh, who built not so much a pyramid as a
pagoda of pyramids. It would suggest houses built by
mammoths out of mountains; the cities reared by
elephants in their own elephantine school of architec
ture. And New York does recall the most famous of all
sky-scrapers the tower of Babel. She recalls it none the
less because there is no doubt about the confusion of
tongues. But in truth the very reverse is true of most of
the buildings in America. I had no sooner passed out
into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston
than I began to see something else quite contrary and far
more curious. I saw forests tipon forests of small
houses stretching away to the horizon as literal forests
do; villages and towns and cities. And they were, in
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 81
another sense, literally like forests. They were all made
of wood. It was almost as fantastic to an English eye
as if they had been all made of cardboard. I had long
outlived the silly old joke that referred to Americans as
if they all lived in the backwoods. But, in a sense, if
they do not live in the woods they are not yet out of the
wood, /
I do not say this in any sense as a censure. As it
happens, I am particularly fond of wood. Of all the
superstitions which our fathers took lightly enough to
love, the most natural seems to me the notion it is lucky
to touch wood. Some of them affect me the less as
superstitions, because I feel them as symbols. If
humanity had really thought Friday unlucky it would
have talked about bad Friday instead of good Friday.
And while I feel the thrill of thirteen at a table, I am
not so sure that it is the most miserable of all human fates
to fill the places of the Twelve Apostles. But the idea
that there was something cleansing or wholesome about
the touching of wood seems to me one of those ideas
which are truly popular, because they are truly poetic.
It is probable enough that the conception came originally
from the healing of the wood of the Cross ; but that only
clinches the divine coincidence. It is like that other
divine coincidence that the Victim was a carpenter, who
might almost have made His own cross. Whether we
take the mystical or the mythical explanation, there is
obviously a very deep connection between the human
working in wood and such plain and pathetic mysticism.
It gives something like a touch of the holy childishness to
the tale, as if that terrible engine could be a toy. In the
same fashion a child fancies that mysterious and sinister
horse, which was the downfall of Troy, as something
82 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
plain and staring, and perhaps spotted, like his own rock
ing-horse in the nursery.
f If might be said symbolically that Americans have a
taste for rocking-horses, as they certainly have a taste
for rocking-chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that
they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are
sitting down, they neeid not be sitting still. Something
of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in
the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the
rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism
of the rocking-horse. I think there is behind all this
fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is
childish in the good sense of the word; something that
is innocent, and easily pleased. It is not altogether un
true, still less is it unamiable, to say that the landscape
seems to be dotted with dolls houses. It is the true
tragedy of every fallen son of Adam that he has grown
too big to live in a dolls house. These things seem
somehow to escape the irony of time by not even chal
lenging it ; they are too temporary even to be merely tem
poral. These people are not building tombs; they are
not, as in the fine image of Mrs. Meynell s poem, merely
building ruins. It is not easy to imagine the ruins of a
dolls house; and that is why a dolls house is an ever
lasting habitation. How far it promises a political per
manence is a matter for further discussion; I am only
describing the mood of discovery; in which all these
cottages built of lath, like the palaces of a pantomime,
really seemed coloured like the clouds of morning;
which are both fugitive and eternal.
There is also in all this an atmosphere that comes in
another sense from the nufsery. We hear much of
Americans being educated on English literature; but I
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 83
think few Americans realise how much English children
have been educated on American literature. It is true,
and it is inevitable, that they can only be educated on
rather old-fashioned American literature. Mr. Bernard
Shaw, in one of his plays, noted truly the limitations of
the young American millionaire, and especially the stale-
ness of his English culture; but there is necessarily
another side to it. If the American talked more of
Macaulay than of Nietzsche, we should probably talk
more of Emerson than of Ezra Pound. Whether this
staleness is necessarily a disadvantage is, of course, a
different question. But, in any case, it is true that the
old American books were often the books of our child
hood, even in the literal sense of the books of our nurs
ery. I know few men in England who have not left
t heir boyhood to some extent lost and entangled in the
forests of Huckleberry Finn. I know few women in
England, from the most revolutionary Suffragette to the
most carefully preserved Early Victorian, who will not
confess to having passed a happy childhood with the
Little Women of Miss Alcott. Helen s Babies was the
first and by far the best book in the modern scriptures
of baby-worship. And about all this old-fashioned
American literature there was an undefinable savour that
satisfied, and even pleased, our growing minds. Per
haps it was the smell of growing things; but I am far
from certain that it was not simply the smell of wood.
Now that all the memory comes back to me, it seems to
come back heavy in a hundred forms with the fragrance
and the touch of timber. There was the perpetual ref
erence to the wood-pile, the perpetual background of the
woods. There was something crude and clean about
everything; something fresh and strange about those
84 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA ;3.
far-off houses, to which I could not then have put a name.
Indeed, many things become clear in this wilderness of
wood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even
in fantasy. I will not go so far as to say that it short
ened the transition from Log Cabin to White House; as
if the White House were itself made of white wood
(as Oliver Wendell Holmes said), that cuts like cheese,
but lasts like iron for things like these. But I will say
that the experience illuminates some other lines by
Holmes himself:
Little I ask, my wants are few,
I only ask a hut of stone.
I should not have known, in England, that he was al
ready asking for a good deal even in asking for that. In
the presence of this wooden world the very combination
of words seems almost a contradiction, like a hut of
marble, or a hovel of gold.
It was therefore with an almost infantile pleasure that
I looked at all this promising expansion of fresh-cut
timber and thought of the housing shortage at home, I
know not by what incongruous movement of the mind
there swept across me, at the same moment, the thought
of things ancestral and hoary with the light of ancient
dawns. The last war brought back body-arrnour ; the
next war may bring back bows and arrows. And I
suddenly had a memory of old wooden houses in Lon
don; and a model of Shakespeare s town.
It is possible indee d that such Elizabethan memories
may receive a check or a chill when the traveller comes,
as he sometimes does, to the outskirts of one of these
strange hamlets of new frame-houses, and is confronted
with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, Watch Us
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 85
Grow. He can always imagine that he sees the timbers
swelling before his eyes like pumpkins in some super-
tropical summer. But he may have formed the convic
tion that no such proclamation could be found outside
Shakespeare s toWn. And indeed there is a serious criti
cism here, to any one who knows history; since the things
that grow are not always the things that remain; and
pumpkins of that expansiveness have a tendency to burst.
I was always told that Americans were harsh, hustling,
rather rude and perhaps vulgar; but they were very
practical and the future belonged to them. I confess I
felt a fine shade of difference ; I liked the Americans ; I
thought they were sympathetic, imaginative, and full of
fine enthusiasms; the one thing I could not always feel
clear about was their future. I believe they were happier
in their frame-houses than most people in most houses;
having democracy, good education, and a hobby of work;
the one doubt that did float across me was something like,
Will all this be here at all in two hundred years ? That
was the first impression produced by the wooden houses
that seemed like the waggons of gipsies; it is a serious
impression, but there is an answer to it. It is an answer
that opens on the traveller more and more as he
goes westward, and finds the little towns dotted about
the vast central prairies. And the answer is agriculture.
Wooden houses may or may not last ; but farms will last ;
and farming will always last.
The houses may look like gipsy caravans on a heath or
common ; but they are not on a heath or common. They
are on the most productive and prosperous land, perhaps,
in the modern world. The houses might fall down like
shanties, but the fields would remain; and whoever tills
those fields will count for a great deal in the affairs of
86 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
humanity. They are already counting for a great deal,
and possibly for too much, in the affairs of America.
The real criticism of the Middle West is concerned with
two facts, neither of which has been yet adequately ap
preciated by the educated class in England. The first is
that the turn of the world has come, and the turn of the
agricultural countries with it. That is the meaning of
the resurrection of Ireland; that is the meaning of
the practical surrender of the Bolshevist Jews to the Rus
sian peasants. The other is that in most places these
peasant societies carry on what may be called the Catholic
tradition. The Middle West is perhaps the one consid
erable place where they still carry on the Puritan tra
dition. But the Puritan tradition was originally a tra
dition of the town ; and the second truth about the Middle
West turns largely on its moral relation to the town. As
I shall suggest presently, there is much in common be
tween this agricultural society of America and the great
agricultural societies of Europe. It tends, as the agri
cultural society nearly always does, to some decent degree
of democracy. The agricultural society tends to the
agrarian law. But in Puritan America there is an addi
tional problem, which I can hardly explain without a peri
phrasis.
There was a time when the progress of the cities
seemed to mock the decay of the country. It is more
and more true, I think, to-day that it is rather the decay
of the cities that seems to poison the progress and prom
ise of the countryside. The cinema boasts of being a
substitute for the tavern, but I think it a very bad sub
stitute. I think so quite apart from the question about
fermented liquor. Nobody enjoys cinemas more than I,
but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 87
to listen, and in a .tavern he has to talk. Occasionally, I
admit, he has to fight; but he need never move at the
movies. Thus in the real village inn are the real village
politics, while in the other are only the remote and unreal
metropolitan politics. And those central city politics
are not only cosmopolitan politics but corrupt politics.
They corrupt everything that they reach, and this is the
real point about many perplexing questions*.
For instance, so far as I am concerned, it is the whole
point about feminism and the factory. It is very
largely the point about feminism and many other callings,
apparently more cultured than the factory, such as the
law court and the political platform. When I see
women so wildly anxious to tie themselves to all this
machinery of the modern city my first feeling is not in
dignation, but that dark and ominous sort of pity with
which we should see a crowd rushing to embark in a leak
ing ship under a lowering storm. When I see wives and
mothers going in for business government I not only re
gard it as a bad business but as a bankrupt business. It
seems to me very much as if the peasant women, just be
fore the French revolution, had insisted on being made
duchesses or (as is quite as logical and likely) on being
made dukes.
It is as if those ragged women, instead of crying out
for bread, had cried out for powder and patches. By the
time they were wearing them they would be the only
people wearing them. For powder and patches soon
went out of fashion, but bread does not go out of fashion.
In the same way, if women desert the family for the fac
tory, they may find they have only done it for a deserted
factory. It would have been very unwise of the lower
orders to claim all the privileges of the higher orders in
88 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
the last days of the French monarchy. It would have
been very laborious to learn the science of heraldry or the
tables of precedence when all such things were at once
most complicated and most moribund. It would be tire
some to be taught all those tricks just when the whole bag
of tricks was coming to an end. A French satirist might
have written a fine apologue about Jacques Bonhomme
coming up to Paris in his wooden shoes and demanding
to be made Gold Stick in Waiting in the name of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity; but I fear the stick in waiting
would be waiting still.
One of the first topics on which I heard a conversation
turning in America was that of a, very interesting book
called Main Street, which involves many of these ques
tions of the modern industrial and eternal feminine. It
is simply the story, or perhaps rather the study than the
story, of a young married woman in one of the multi
tudinous little towns on the great central plains of Amer
ica; and of a sort of struggle between her own more rest
less culture and the provincial prosperity of her neigh
bours. There are a number of true and telling sugges
tions in the book, but the one touch which I found tin
gling in the memory of many readers was the last sen
tence, in which the master of the house, with unshaken
simplicity, merely asks for the whereabouts of some
domestic implement; I think it was a screw-driver. It
seems to me a harmless request, but from the way people
talked about it one might suppose he had asked for a
screw-driver to screw down the wife in her comn. And
a great many advanced persons would tell us that the
wooden house in which she lived really was like a wooden
coffin. But this appears to me to be taking a somewhat
funereal view of the life of humanity.
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 89
For, after all, on the face of it at any rate, this is
merely the life of humanity, and even the life which all
humanitarians have striven to give to humanity. Revo
lutionists have treated it not only as the normal but even
as the ideal. Revolutionary wars have been waged to
establish this; revolutionary heroes have fought, and
revolutionary martyrs have died, only to build such
a wooden house for such a worthy family. Men have
taken the sword and perished by the sword in order that
the poor gentleman might have liberty to look for his
screw-driver. For there is here a fact abouj^America
that is almost entirely unknown in England. TThe Eng
lish have not in the least realised the real strength of
America. We fa England hear a great deal, we hear
far too much, about the economic energy of industrial
America, about the money of Mr. Morgan, or the
machinery of Mr. Edison. We never realise that while
we in England suffer from the same sort of successes
in capitalism and clockwork, we have not got what the
Americans have got; something at least to balance it
in the way of a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms
dotted with small freeholders. For the reason I shall
mention in a moment, they are not perhaps in the fullest
and finest sense a peasantry. But they are in the prac
tical and political sense a pure peasantry, in that their
comparative equality is a true counterweight to the top
pling injustice to the towns/;
And, even in places like tnat described as Main Street,
that comparative equality can immediately be felt. The
men may be provincials, but they are certainly citizens;
they consult on a common basis. And I repeat that in
this, after all, they do achieve what many prophets and
righteous men have died to achieve. This plain village,
90 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
fairly prosperous, fairly equal, untaxed by tyrants and
untroubled by wars, is after all the place which reformers
have regarded as their aim; whenever reformers have
used their wits sufficiently to have any aim. The march
to Utopia, the march to the Earthly Paradise, the march
to the New Jerusalem, has been very largely the march
to Main Street. And the latest modern sensation is a
book written to show how wretched it is to live there.
All this is true, and I think the lady might be more
contented in her coffin, which is more comfortably fur
nished than most of the coffins where her fellow crea
tures live. Nevertheless, there is an answer to this, or
at least a modification of it. There is a case for the
lady and a case against the gentleman and the screw
driver. And when we have noted what it really is we
have noted the real disadvantage in a situation like that
of modern America, and especially the Middle West.
And with that we come back to the truth with which I
started this speculation; the truth that few have yet
realised, but of which I, for one, am more and more
convinced that industrialism is spreading because it is
decaying; that only the dust and ashes of its dissolution
are choking up the growth of natural things everywhere
and turning the green world grey.
In this relative agricultural equality the Americans of
the Middle West are far in advance of the English of
the twentieth century. It is not their fault if they are
still some centuries behind the English of the twelfth
century. But the defect by which they fall short of
being a true peasantry is that they do not produce their
town spiritual food, in the same sense as their own
material food. They do not, like some peasantries, create
other kinds of culture besides the kind called agriculture.
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 91
Their culture comes from the great cities; and that is
where all the evil comes from.
If a man had gone across England in the Middle Ages,
or even across Europe in more recent times, he would
have found a culture which showed its vitality by its
variety. We know the adventures of the three brothers
in the old fairy tales who passed across the endless plain
from city to city, and found one kingdom ruled by a
wizard and another wasted by a dragon, one people liv
ing in castles of crystal and another sitting by fountains
of wine. These are but legendary enlargements of the
real adventures of a traveller passing from one patch of
peasantry to another and finding women wearing strange
head-dresses and men singing new songs.
A traveller in America would be somewhat surprised if
he found the people in the city of St. Louis all wearing
crowns and crusading armour in honour of their patron
saint. He might even feel some faint surprise if he
found all the citizens of Philadelphia clad in a composite
costume, combining that of a Quaker with that of a Red
Indian, in honour of the noble treaty of William P enn.
Yet these are the sort of local and traditional things that
would really be found giving variety to the valleys of
mediaeval Europe. I myself felt a perfectly genuine
and generous exhilaration of freedom and fresh enter
prise in new places like Oklahoma. But you would
hardly find in Oklahoma what was found in Oberam-
mergau. What goes to Oklahoma is not the peasant
play, but the cinema. And the objection to the cinema
is not so much that it goes to Oklahoma as that it does
not come from Oklahoma. In other words, these people
have on the economic side a much closer approach than
we have to economic freedom. It is not for us, who
92 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
have allowed our land to be stolen by squires and then
vulgarized by sham squires, to sneer at such colonists as
merely crude and prosaic. They at least have really
kept something of the simplicity and, therefore, the dig
nity of democracy; and that democracy may yet save
their country even from the calamities of wealth and
science.
But, while these farmers do not need to become in
dustrial in order to become industrious, they do tend to
become industrial in so far as they become intellectual.
Their culture, and to some great extent their creed, do
come along the railroads from the great modern urban
centres, and bring with them a blast of death and a reek
of rotting things. It is that influence that alone pre
vents the Middle West from progressing towards the
Middle Ages.
For, after all, linked up in a hundred legends of the
Middle Ages, may be found a symbolic pattern of ham
mers and nails and saws; and there is no reason why
they should not have also sanctified screw-drivers.
There is no reason why the screw-driver that seemed
such a trifle to the author should not have been borne in
triumph down Main Street like a sword of state, in some
pageant of the Guild of St. Joseph of the Carpenters or
St. Dunstan of the Smiths. It was the Catholic poetry
and piety that filled common life with something that is
lacking in the worthy and virile democracy of the West.
Nor are Americans of intelligence so ignorant of this as
some may suppose. There is an admirable society called
the Mediaevalists in Chicago; whose name and address
will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the
soul against the environment. With the national hearti
ness they blazon their note-paper with heraldry and the
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 93
hues of Gothic windows; with the national high spirits
they assume the fancy dress of friars; but any one who
should essay to laugh at them instead of with them would
find out his mistake. For many of them do really know
a great deal about mediaevalism ; much more than I do,
or most other men brought up on an island that is
crowded with its cathedrals. Something of the same
spirit may be seen in the beautiful new plans and build
ings of Yale, deliberately modelled not on classical har
mony but on Gothic irregularity and surprise. The
grace and energy of the mediaeval architecture resur
rected by a man like Professor Cram of Boston has be
hind it not merely artistic but historical and ethical en
thusiasm; an enthusiasm for the Catholic creed which
made mediaeval civilisation. Even on the huge Puritan
plains of Middle West the influence strays in the strang
est fashion. And it is notable that among the pessimistic
epitaphs of the Spoon River Anthology, in that church
yard compared with which most churchyards are cheery,
among the suicides and secret drinkers and monomaniacs
and hideous hypocrites of that happy village, almost the
only record of respect and a recognition of wider hopes
is dedicated to the Catholic priest.
But Main Street is Main Street in the main. Main
Street is Modern Street in its multiplicity of mildly half-
educated people; and all these historic things are a thou
sand miles from them. They have not heard the ancient
noise either of arts or arms ; the building of the cathe
dral or the marching of the crusade. But at least they
have not deliberately slandered the crusade and defaced
the cathedral. And if they have not produced the pea
sant arts, they can still produce the peasant crafts. They
can sow and plough and reap and live by these everlasting
94 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
things ; nor shall the foundations of their 4 state be moved.
And the memory of those colossal fields, of those fruitful
deserts, came back the more readily into my mind because
I finished these reflections in the very heart of a modern
industrial city, if it can be said to have a heart. It was in
fact an English industrial city, but it struck me that it
might very well be an American one. And it also stfuck
me that we yield rather too easily to America the dusty
palm of industrial enterprise, and feel far too little appre
hension about greener and fresher vegetables. There is a
story of an American who carefully studied all the sights
of London or Rome or Paris, and came to the conclusion
that it had nothing on Minneapolis/ It seems to me that
Minneapolis has nothing on Manchester. There were the
same grey vistas of shops full of rubber tyres and metallic
appliances ; a man felt that he might walk a day without
seeing a blade of grass; the whole horizon was so infi
nite with* efficiency. The factory chimneys might have
been Pittsburg ; the sky-signs might have been New York.
One looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for a
sky-sign but in a sense for a sign, for some sentence of
significance and judgment;. by the instinct that makes any
man in such a scene seek for the only thing that has not
been made by men. But even that was illogical, for it was
night, and I could only expect to see the stars, which might
have reminded* me of Old Glory ; but that was not the sign
that oppressed me. All the ground was a wilderness of
stone and all the buildings a forest of brick; I was far in
the interior of a labyrinth of lifeless things. Only, look
ing up, between two black chimneys and a telegraph pole,
I saw vast and far and faint, as the first men saw it, the
silver pattern of the Plough.
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN
IT is a commonplace that men are all agreed in using
symbols, and all differ about the meaning of the
symbols. It is obvious that a Russian republican
might come to identify the eagle as a bird of empire and
therefore a bird of prey. But when he .ultimately escaped
to the land of the free, he might find the same bird on
the American coinage figuring as a bird of freedom.
Doubtless, he might find many other things to surprise
him in the land of the free, and many calculated to make
him think that the bird, if not imperial, was at least rather
imperious.
But I am not discussing those exceptional details here.
It is equally obvious that a Russian reactionary might
cross the world with a vow of vengeance against the red
flag. But that authoritarian might have some difficulties
with the authorities if he shot a man for using the red
flag on the railway between Willesden and Clapham Junc
tion.
But, of course, the difficulty about symbols is generally
much more subtle than in these simple cases. I have re
marked elsewhere that the first thing which a traveller
should write about is the thing which he lias not read
about. It may be a small or secondary thing, but it is a
thing that he has seen and not merely expected to see.
I gave the example of the great multitude of wooden
houses in America; we might say of wooden towns and
wooden cities. But after he -has seen such things, his next
iduty is to see the meaning of them ; and here a great deal
95
96 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
of complication and controversy is possible. The thing
probably does not mean what he first supposes it to mean
on the face of it ; but even on the face of it, it might mean
many different and even opposite things.
For instance, a wooden house might suggest an almost
savage solitude ; a rude shanty put together by a pioneer in
a forest; or it might mean a very recent and rapid solu
tion of the housing problem, conducted cheaply and there
fore on a very large scale A wooden house might sug
gest the very newest thing in American or one of the
very oldest things in England. It might mean a grey
ruin at Stratford or a white exhibition at Earl s Court.
It is when we come to this interpretation of inter
national symbols that we make most of the international
mistakes. Without the smallest error of detail, I will
promise to prove -that Oriental women are independent
because they wear trousers, or Oriental men subject be
cause they wear skirts. Merely to apply it to this case, I
will take the example of two very commonplace and trivial
objects of modern life a walking stick and a fur coat.
As it happened, I travelled about America with two
sticks, like a Japanese nobleman with his two swords. I
fear the simile is too stately. I bore more resemblance to
a cripple with two crutches or a highly ineffectual version
of the devil on two sticks. I carried them both because
I valued them both, and did not wish to risk losing either
of them in my erratic travels. One is a very plain grey
stick from the woods of Buckinghamshire, but as I took it
with me to Palestine it partakes of the character of a pil
grim s staff. When I can say that I have taken the same
stick to Jerusalem and to Chicago, I think the stick and I
may both have a rest. The other, which I value even
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 97
more, was given me by the Knights of Columbus at Yale,
and I wish I could think that their .chivalric title allowed
me to regard it as a sword.
Now, I do not know whether the Americans I met,
struck by the fastidious foppery of my dress and appear
ance, concluded that it is the custom of elegant English
dandies to carry two walking sticks. But I do know that
it is much less common among Americans than among
Englishmen to carry even one. The point, however, is
not merely that more sticks are carried by Englishmen
than by Americans ; it is that the sticks which are carried
by Americans stand for something entirely different.
In America a stick is commonly called a cane, and it
Jias about it something of the atmosphere which the poet
described as the nice conduct of the clouded cane. It
would be an exaggeration to say that when the citizens of
the United States see a man carrying a light stick they
deduce that if he does that he does nothing else. But
there is about it a faint flavour of luxury and lounging,
and most of the energetic citizens of this energetic society
avoid it by instinct.
Now, in an Englishman like myself, carrying a stick
may imply lounging, but it does not imply luxury, and I
can say with some firmness that it does not imply dandy
ism. In a great many Englishmen it means the very
opposite even of lounging. By. one of those fantastic
paradoxes which are the mystery of nationality, a walk
ing stick often actually means walking. It frequently
suggests the very reverse of the beau with his clouded
cane ; it does not suggest a town type, but rathef specially
a country type. It rather implies the kind of English
man who tramps about in lanes and meadows and knocks
98 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
the tops off thistles. It suggests the sort of man who
has carried the stick through his native woods, and per
haps even cut it in his native woods.
Now there are plenty of these vigorous loungers, no
doubt, in the rural parts of America, but the idea of a
walking stick would not especially suggest them to
Americans ; it would not call up such figures like a fairy
wand. It would be easy ta trace back the difference to
many English origins, possibly to aristocratic origins, to
the idea of the old squire, a man vig orous and even rustic,
but trained to hold a useless staff rather than a useful
tool.
It might be suggested that American citizens do at
least so far love freedom as to like to have their hands
free. It might be suggested, on the other hand, that they
keep their hands for the handles of many machines. And
that the hand on a handle is less free than the hand on
a stick or even a tool. But these again are controversial
questions and I am only noting a fact.
If an Englishman wished to imagine more or less
exactly what the impression is, and how misleading it is,
he could find something like a parallel in what he himself
feels about a fur coat. When I first found myself among
the crowds on the main floor of a New York hotel, my
rather exaggerated impression of the luxury of the place
was largely produced by the number of men in fur coats,
and what we should consider rather ostentatious fur
coats, with all the fur outside.
Now an Englishman has a number of atmospheric but
largely accidental associations in connection with a fur
coat. I will not say that he thinks a man in a fur coat
must be a wealthy and wicked man ; but I do say that in
his own ideal and perfect vision a wealthy and wicked
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 99
man would wear a fur coat, Thus I had the sensation
of standing in a surging mob of American millionaires,
or even African millionaires; for the millionaires of
Chicago must be like the Knights of the Round Table
compared with the millionaires of Johannesburg,
B ut, as a matter of fact, the man in the fur coat was
not even an American millionaire, but simply an Ameri
can. It did not signify luxury, but rather necessity, and
even a harsh and almost heroic necessity. Orson prob
ably wore a fur coat; and he was brought up by bears,
but not the bears of Wall Street. Eskimos are generally
represented as a furry folk; but they are not necessarily
engaged in delicate financial operations, even in the typical
and appropriate occupation called freezing out. And if
the American is not exactly an arctic traveller rushing
from pole to pole, at least he is often literally fleeing from
ice to ice. He has to make a very extreme distinction be
tween outdoor and indoor clothing. He has to live in an
icehouse outside and a hothouse inside ; so hot that he may
be said to construct an icehouse inside that. He turns
himself into an icehouse and warms himself against the
cold until he is warm enough to eat ices. But the point
is that the same coat of fur which in England would in
dicate the sybarite life may here very well indicate strenu
ous life; just as the same walking stick which would here
suggest a lounger would in England suggest a plodder
and almost a pilgrim.
Now these two trifles are types -which I should like
to put, by way of proviso and apology, at the very begin
ning of any attempt at a record of any impressions of a
foreign society. They serve merely to illustrate the most
important impression of all, the impression of how false
all impressions may be. I suspect that most of the very
ioo WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
false impressions have come from careful record of very
true facts. They have come from the fatal power of
observing the facts without being able to observe the
truth. They came from seeing the symbol with the most
vivid clarity and being blind to all that it symbolises.
It is as if a man who knew no Greek should imagine
that he could read a Greek inscription because he took the
Greek R for an English P or the Greek long E for an
English H. I do not mention this merely as a criticism
o n other people s impressions of America, but as a criti
cism on my own. I wish it to be understood that I am
well aware that all my views are subject to this sort of
potential criticism, and that even when I am certain of the
facts I do not profess to be certain of the deductions.
In this chapter I hope to point out how a misunder
standing of this kind affects the common impression,
not altogether unfounded, that the Americans talk about
dollars. But for the -moment I am merely anxious to
avoid a similar misunderstanding when I talk abottt
Americans. About the dogmas of democracy, about
the right of a people to its own symbols, whether they be
coins or customs, I am convinced, and no longer to be
shaken. But about the meaning of those symbols, in
silver or other substances, I am always open to correction.
That error is the price we pay for the great glory of
nationality. And in this sense I am quite ready, at the
start, to warn my own readers against my own opinions.
/ The fact without the truth is futile; indeed the fact
without the truth is false. I have already noted that
this is especially true touching our observations of a
strange country; and it is certainly true touching one
small fact which has swelled into a large fable. I mean
the fable about America commonly summed up in the
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN- 101
phrase about the Almighty Dollar. I do not think the
dollar is almighty in America; I fancy many things are
mightier, including many ideals and some rather insane
ideals. But I think it might be maintained that the dollar
has another of the attributes of deity. If it is not om
nipotent it is in a sense omnipresent. Whatever Ameri
cans think about dollars, it is, I think, relatively true that
they talk about dollars. If a mere mechanical record
could be taken by the modern machinery of dictaphones
and stenography, I do not think it probable that the mere
word dollars would occur more often in any given num
ber of American conversations than the mere word
pounds or shillings in a similar number of English
conversations. And these statistics, like nearly all sta
tistics, would be utterly useless and even fundamentally
false. It is as if we should calculate that the word ele
phant had been mentioned a certain number of times in
a particular London street, or so many times more often
than the word thunderbolt had been used in Stoke Poges.
Doubtless there are statisticians capable of carefully col
lecting those statistics also ; and doubtless there are scien
tific social reformers capable of legislating on the basis of
them. They would probably argue from the elephan
tine imagery of the London street that such and such a
percentage of the householders were megalomaniacs and
required medical care and police coercion. And doubt
less their calculations, like nearly all such calculations,
would leave out the only important point; as that the
street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Zoo,
or was yet more happily situated under the benignant
shadow of the Elephant and Castle. And in the ame
way the mechanical calculation about the mention of
dollars is entirely useless unless we have some moral
WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
understanding, of why they are mentioned. It certainly
does not mean merely a love of money; and if it did, a
love of money may mean a great many very different and
even contrary things. The love of money is very differ
ent in a peasant or in a pirate*, in a miser or in a gambler,
in a great financier or. in a man doing some practical and
productive work. Now this difference in the conversation
of American and English business men arises, I think,
from certain much deeper things in the American which
are generally not understood by the Englishman. It also
arises from much deeper things in the Englishman, of
which the Englishman is even more ignorant.
To begin with, I fancy that the American, quite apart
from any love of money, has a great love of measure
ment. He will mention the exact size or weight of things
in a way which appears to us as irrelevant. It is as if
we were to say that a man came to see us carrying three
feet of walking stick and four inches of cigar. It is
so in cases that have no possible connection with any
avarice or greed for gain. An American will praise the
prodigal generosity of some other man in giving up his
own estate for the good of the poor. But he will gener
ally say that the philanthropist gave them a 2OO-acre
park, where an Englishman would think it quite suffi
cient to say that he gave them a park. There is some
thing about this precision which seems suitable to the
American atmosphere; to the hard sunlight, and the
cloudless skies, and the glittering detail of the architecture
and the landscape; just as the vaguer English version is
consonant to our mistier and more impressionist scenery.
It is also connected perhaps with something more boyish
about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the
passionate particularity with which a boy will distinguish
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 103
the uniforms of regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the
colours of tram tickets. It is a certain godlike appetite
for things, as distinct from thoughts.
But there is also, of course, a much deeper cause of the
difference ; and it can easily be deduced by noting the real
nature of the difference itself. When two business men
in a train are talking about dollars, I am not so foolish
as to expect them to be talking about the philosophy of
St. Thomas Aquinas. But if they were two English
business men I should not expect them to be talking
about business. Probably it would be about some sport ;
and most probably some sport in which they themselves
never dreamed of indulging. The approximate differ
ence is that the American talks about his work and the
Englishman about his holidays. His ideal is not labour
but leisure. Like every other national characteristic,
this is not primarily a point for praise or blame; in
essence it involves neither and in effect it involves both.
It is certainly connected with that snobbishness which is
the great sin of English society. The Englishman does
love to conceive himself as a sort of country gentleman;
and his castles in the air are all castles in Scotland rather
than in Spain. For, as an ideal, a Scotch castle is as
English as a Welsh rarebit or an Irish stew. And if he
talks less about money I fear it is mostly because in one
sense he thinks more of it. Money is a mystery in the
old and literal sense of something too sacred for speech,
Gold is a god; and like the god of some agnostics has no
name, and is worshipped only in his works. It is true in
a sense that the English gentleman wishes to -have enough
money to be able to forget it. But it may be questioned
whether he does entirely forget it. As against this
weakness the American has succeeded, at the price of a
104 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
great deal of crudity and clatter, in making general a
very real respect for work. He has partly disenchanted
the dangerous glamour of the gentleman, and in that
sense has achieved some degree of democracy; which is
the most difficult achievement in the world.
On the other hand, there is a good side to the English
man s day-dream of leisure, and one which the American
spirit tends to miss. It may be expressed in the word
holiday or still better in the word hobby. The
Englishman, in his character of Robin Hood, really has,
got two strings to his bow. Indeed the Englishman
really is well represented by Robin Hood; for there is
always something about him that may literally be called
outlawed, in the sense of being extra-legal or outside the
rules. A Frenchman said of Browning that his centre
was not in the middle; and it may be said of many an
Englishman that his heart is not where his treasure is.
Browning expressed a very English sentiment when he
said :
I like to know a butcher paints,
A baker rhymes for his pursuit,
Candlestick-maker much acquaints
His soul with song, or haply mute
Blows out his brains upon the flute.
Stevenson touched on the same insular sentiment when
he said that many men he knew, who were meat-salesmen
to the outward eye, might in the life of contemplation
sit with the saints. Now the extraordinary achieve
ment of the American meat-salesman is that his poetic
enthusiasm can really be for meat sales; not for money
but for -meat. An American commercial traveller asked
me, with a religious fire in his eye, whether I did not think
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 105
that salesmanship could be an art. In England there are
many salesmen who are sincerely fond of art ; but seldom
of the art of salesmanship. Art is with them a hobby;
a thing of leisure and liberty. That is why the English
traveller talks, if not of art, then of sport. That is why
the two city men in the London train, if they are not talk
ing about golf, may be talking about gardening. If they
are not talking about dollars, or the equivalent of dollars,
the reason lies much deeper than any superficial praise or
blame touching the desire for wealth. In the English
case, at least, it lies very deep in the English spirit.
Many of the greatest English things have had this lighter
and looser character of a hobby or a holiday experiment.
Even a masterpiece has often been a by-product. The
works of Shakespeare come out so casually that they can
be attributed to the most improbable people; even to
Bacon. The sonnets of Shakespeare are picked up after
wards as if out of a wastepaper basket. The immortal
ity of Dr. Johnson does not rest on the written leaves he
collected, but entirely on the words he wasted, the words
he scattered to the winds. So great a thing as Pickwick
is almost a kind of accident; it began as something sec
ondary and grew into something primary and pre
eminent. It began with mere words written to illustrate
somebody else s pictures ; and swelled like an epic ex
panded from an epigram. It might almost be said that
in the case of Pickwick the author began as the servant
of the artist. But, as in the same story of Pickwick, the
servant became greater than the master. This incalcu
lable and accidental quality, like all national qualities, has
its strength and weakness ; but it does represent a certain
reserve fund of interests in the Englishman s life; and
distinguishes him from the other extreme type, of the
106 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
millionaire who works till he drops, or who drops be
cause he stops working. It is the great achievement of
American civilisation that in that country it really is not
cant to talk about the dignity of labour. There is some
thing that might almost be called the sanctity of labour;
but it is subject to the profound law that when anything
less than the highest becomes a sanctity, it tends also to
become a superstition. When the candlestick-maker
does not blow out his brains upon the flute, there is
always a danger that he may blow them out somewhere
else, owing to depressing conditions in the candlestick
market*
Now certainly one of the first impressions of America,
ior at any rate of New York, which is by no means the
same thing as America, is that of a sort of mob of busi
ness men, behaving in many ways in a fashion very dif
ferent from that of the swarms of London city men who
go up every day to the city. They sit about in groups
with Red-Indian gravity, as if passing the pipe of peace;
though, in fact, most of them are smoking cigars and
some of them are eating cigars. The latter strikes me as
one of the most peculiar of transatlantic tastes, more pe
culiar than that of chewing gum. A man will sit for
hours consuming a cigar as if it were a sugar-stick; but
I should imagine it to be a very disagreeable sugar-stick.
Why he attempts to enjoy a cigar without lighting it I do
not know; whether it is a more economical way of carry
ing a mere symbol of commercial conservation; or
whether something of the same queer outlandish morality
that draws such a distinction between beer and ginger
beer draws an equally ethical distinction between touch
ing tobacco and lighting it. For the rest, it would be
easy to make a merely external sketch full of things
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 107
equally strange ; for this can always be done in a strange
country. I allow for the fact of all foreigners looking
alike ; but I fancy that all those hard-featured faces, with
spectacles and shaven jaws, do look rather alike, because
they all like to make their faces hard. And with the
mention of their mental attitude we realise the futility of
any such external sketch. Unless we can see that these
are something more than men smoking cigars and talking
about dollars, we had much better not see them at all.
It is customary to condemn the American as a mate
rialist because of his worship of success. But indeed
this very worship, like any worship, even devil-worship,
proves him rather a mystic than a materialist. The
Frenchman who retires front business, when he has
money enough to drink his wine and eat his omelette in
peace, might much more plausibly be called a materialist
by those who do not prefer to call him a man of sense.
But Americans do worship success in the abstract, as a
sort of ideal vision. They follow success rather than
money; they follow money rather than meat and drink.
If their national life in one sense is a perpetual game of
poker, they are playing excitedly for chips or counters
as well as for coins. And by the ultimate test of mate
rial enjoyment, like the enjoyment of an omelette, even a
coin is itself a counter. The Yankee cannot eat chips as
the Frenchman can eat chipped potatoes ; but neither can
he swallow red cents as the Frenchman swallows red
wine. Thus when people say of a Yankee that he wor
ships the dollar, they pay a compliment to his fine spirit
uality more true and delicate than they imagine. The
dollar is an idol because it is an image; but it is an im
age of success and not of enjoyment.
That this romance is also a religion is shown in the
io8 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
fact that there is a queer sort of morality attached to
it. The nearest parallel to it is something like the sense
of honour in tlje old duelling days. There is not a
material but a distinctly moral savour about the implied
obligation to collect dollars or to collect chips. We hear
too much in England of the phrase about making good ;
for no sensible Englishman favours the needless inter
larding of English with scraps of foreign languages.
But though it means nothing in English, it means some
thing very particular in American. There is a fine shade
of distinction between succeeding and making good, pre
cisely because there must always be a sort of ethical echo
in the word good. America does vaguely feel a man
making good as something analogous to a man being
good or a man doing good. It is connected with his
serious self-respect and his sense of being worthy of
those he loves. Nor is this curious crude idealism
wholly insincere even when it drives him to what some
of us would call stealing; any more than the duellist s
honour was insincere when it drove him to what some
would call murder. A very clever American play which
I once saw acted contained a complete working model of
this morality. A girl was loyal to, but distressed by, her
engagement to a young man on whom there was a sort of
cloud of humiliation. The atmosphere was exactly what
it would have been in England if he had been accused of
cowardice or card-sharping. And there was nothing
whatever the matter with the poor young man except that
some rotten mine or other in Arizona had not made
good/ Now in England we should either be below or
above that ideal of good. If we were snobs, we should
be content to know that he was a gentleman of good
connections, perhaps too much accustomed to private
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 109
means to be expected to be business-like. If we were
somewhat larger-minded people, we should know that he
might be as wise as Socrates and as splendid as Bayard
and yet be unfitted, perhaps one should say therefore be
unfitted, for the dismal and dirty gambling of modern
commerce. But whether we were snobbish enough to
admire him for being an idler, or chivalrous enough to
admire him for being an outlaw, in neither case should
we ever really and in our hearts despise him for being a
failure. For it is this inner verdict of instinctive ideal
ism that is the point at issue. Of course there is nothing
new, or peculiar to the new world, about a man s engage
ment practically failing through his financial failure.
An English girl might easily drop a man because he was
poor, or she might stick to him faithfully and defiantly
although he was poor. The point is that this girl was
faithful but she was not defiant; that is, she was not
proud. The whole psychology of the situation was that
she shared the weird worldly idealism of her family, and
it was wounded as her patriotism would have been
wounded if he had betrayed his country. To do them
justice, there was nothing to show that they would have
had any real respect for a royal duke who had inherited
millions; what the simple barbarians wanted was a man
who could make good. That the process of making
good would probably drag him through the mire of
everything bad, that he would make good by bluffing,
lying, swindling, and grinding the faces of the poor, did
not seem to trouble them in the least. Against this fa
naticism there is this shadow of truth even in the fiction
of aristocracy; that a gentleman may at least be allowed
to be good without being bothered to make it.
Another objection to the phrase about the almighty
i io WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
dollar is that it is an almighty phrase, and therefore an
almighty nuisance. I mean that it is made to explain
everything, and to explain everything much too well;
that is, much too easily. It does not really help people
to understand a foreign country; but it gives them the
fatal illusion that they do understand it. Dollars stood
for America as frogs stood for France; because it was
necessary to connect particular foreigners with some
thing, or it would be so easy to confuse a Moor with a
Montenegrin or a Russian with a Red Indian. The only
cure for this sort of satisfied familiarity is the shock of
something really unfamiliar. When people can see
nothing at all in American democracy except a Yankee
running after a dollar, then the only thing to do is to trip
them up as they run after the Yankee, or run away with
their notion of the Yankee, by the obstacle of certain odd
and obstinate facts that have no relation to that notion.
And, as a matter of fact, there are a number of such
obstacles to any such generalisation; a number of notable
facts that have to be reconciled somehow to our previous
notions. It does not matter for this purpose whether the
facts are favourable or unfavourable, or whether the
qualities are merits or defects; especially as we do not
even understand them sufficiently to say which they are.
The point is that we are brought to a pause, and com
pelled to attempt to understand them rather better than
we do. We have found the one thing that we did not
expect; and therefore the one thing that we cannot ex
plain. And we are moved to an effort, probably an un
successful effort, to explain it.
For instance, Americans are very unpunctual. That
is the last thing that a critic expects who comes to con
demn them for hustling and haggling and vulgar avarice.
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN mi
But it is almost the first fact that strikes the spectator on
the spot. The chief difference between the humdrum
English business man and the hustling American business
man is that the hustling American business man is
always late. Of course there is a great deal of difference
between coming late and coming too late. But I noticed
the fashion first in connection with my own lectures;
touching which I could heartily recommend the habit of
coming too late. I could easily understand a crowd of
commercial Americans not coming to my lectures at all;
but there was something odd about their coming in a
crowd, and the crowd being expected to turn up some
time after the appointed hour. The managers of these
lectures (I continue to call them lectures out of courtesy
to myself) often explained to me that it was quite use
less to begin properly until about half an hour after time.
Often people were still coming in three-quarters of an
hour or even an hour after time. Not that I objected to
that, as some lectures are said to do; it seemed to me
an agreeable break in the monotony ; but as a characteris
tic of a people mostly engaged in practical business, it
struck me as curious and interesting. I have grown ac
customed to being the most unbusinesslike person in any
given company,; and it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation
to find I was not the most unpunctual person in that com
pany. I was afterwards told by many Americans that
my impression was quite correct ; that American unpunc-
tuality was really very prevalent, and extended to much
more important things. But at least I was not content to
lump this along with all sorts of contrary things that I
did not happen to like, and call it America. I am not
sure of what it really means, but I rather fancy that
though it may seem the very reverse of the hustling, it
H2 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
has the same origin as the hustling. The American is
not punctual because he is not punctilious. He is im
pulsive, and has an impulse to stay as well as impulse to
go. For, after all, punctuality belongs to the same order
of ideas as punctuation; and there is no punctuation
in telegrams. The order of clocks and set hours
which English business has always observed is a good
thing in its own way; indeed I think that in a larger
sense it is better than the other way. But it is better
because it is a protection against hustling, not a promo
tion of it. In other words, it is better because it is more
civilised; as a great Venetian merchant prince clad in
cloth of gold was more civilised; or an old English
merchant drinking port in an oak-panelled room was
more civilised ; or a little French shopkeeper shutting up
his shop to play dominoes is more civilised. And the
reason is that the American has the romance of business
and is monomaniac, while the Frenchman has the ro
mance of life and is sane. But the romance of business
really is a romance, and the Americans are really roman
tic about it. And that romance, though it revolves
round pork or petrol, is really like a love-affair in this;
that it involves not only rushing but also lingering.
The American is too busy to have business habits.
He is also too much in 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. Every
body used to the punctilious Prussian standard of uni
form 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 infe-
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 113
riority in every detail of the business of war except fight
ing. 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 patri
otism, 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. Sup
pose 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 ad
vertisements 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 sud
denly 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 con
sequence is that he will come late into the great social
movement against chew,ing-gum, where an Englishman
would probably have arrived at the proper hour. But
though the Englishman s conduct is more proper, it need
ii4 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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, in proportion 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 dis
posed to add that it does fill their imaginations like any
other delusion. For the true criticism of all this com
mercial 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 sales
man 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 impression
able ideal. America does not think that stupidity is prac
tical. 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
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 115
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 art
ist. 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 acci
dent 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 connec
tion 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 classi
cal 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 Epaminon-
das 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
n6 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
French is this real practicality. They know that at cer
tain times the most businesslike of all qualities is
Taudace, et encore de Faudace, et toujours de 1 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 England 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 re
peatedly 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
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 117
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
LL good Americans wish to fight the represen
tatives 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 mon
arch 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 in
tended to remind us of the England that politicians do
not remember ; the England of horses and ships and gar
dens and good fellowship. The Americans have no such
purely social Symbol; and it is rather the root than the
118
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 119
result of this that their social luxury, and especially
their sport, are a little lacking in humanity and hu
mour. It is the American, much more than the Eng
lishman, who takes his pleasures sadly, not to say sav
agely.
The genuine popularity of constitutional monarchs, in
parliamentary countries, can be explained by any practi
cal 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 cura
tive 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 ig
norant 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
120 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 cor
rupt. 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 hair-
dressing 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 sus
picion 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 scien
tific reform. He is the only person in the common
wealth 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 medi
aeval 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
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 121
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 cor
rectly 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 mod
ern 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 perpet
ual 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. i
122 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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. Constitu
tional 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 wa weak. Richard the Second lost the
crown because the crown was a trophy, not because it
was a trifle. And President Wilson was deposed be
cause 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 exag
gerate 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 dem
onstration, 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 inevi-
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 123
table 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 con
temporary 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. Per
haps 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 univer
sal. Slavery may be normal and even natural, in the
sense that a bad habit may be a second nature. But Cap
italism 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.
124 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
It was never even conservative; for before it was even
created wise men had realised that it could not be con
served. 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. Every
body 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
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 125
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 betwen 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 them
selves 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 Conserva
tives 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 earth
quake. But when all is said, I incline to think that there
was more spiritual and atmospheric cohesion in the dif
ferent 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 cen
tury; for a firm faith in the profit and progress of its
great and growing cities, its division of labour, its indus
trial science, and its evolutionary reform. The Demo
cratic 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
126 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 roman
tic. 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 Elaine for the Presidency, when he de
nounced the Democratic party as supported by Rome,
rum, and rebellion. They seem to me to be three excel
lent 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 orches
tra; which has the note of his whole nation in this: that
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 127
a refined person can revile it a hundred times over as vul
gar 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
iFree 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 con
tact with Mr. Bryan when I was in America, in a fashion
that made me realise how 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 great
est 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
128 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
beloved land. The great and glorious demagogue had de
generated 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 gen
eral principle, that two educated men were for ever for
bidden 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.
Anyhow, we could have believed, in the time of the
Free Silver fight, that the Democratic party was demo
cratic 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 pas
sions; 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 consider
ing 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 out
side the state. From an English standpoint the most
obvious example is the Irish ; for the Irish problem is not
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 129
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 Cali
fornia. 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 be
come 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 pour
ing 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
130 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
be pleased to hear, and conceal whatever the most intelli
gent 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 adherently in sym
pathy 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 some
thing 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 pref
erence 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 some
times 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 oc
casional hold-up with six-shooters and photographs of
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 131
a beautiful murderess or divorcee, 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 Eng
lishman coming to this eastern coast, as I did, finds him
self 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 his
tory which are as spontaneous as patriotism itself.
Something of this may be put down to a certain promp
titude 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 re
mote Russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Musco
vite great-grandmother; or whether if he had come from
Iceland, they would not have known as much about Ice
landic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence
of Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the pro
portions of the case he will dismiss this conjecture, and
come to the conclusion that a number of educated Ameri
cans 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
I 3 2 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 com
plex 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 poli
tics the impression will be purely negative ; I am sure that
most Americans have no notion of the position of France
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 133
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 peo
ple. I have noted that the newspapers told us that Amer
ica had been chilled in its Irish sympathies by Irish detach
ment 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 amaze
ment 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 suc
ceeded. 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 tradi
tion, which tried to combine what it called firmness with
what it called conciliation; as if when we made up our
I 3 4 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 any
thing except that he had been badly beaten. The com
bination and sequence of events seems almost as if it
were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous par
allel. 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 pleas
ure, 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 cathe
dral 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 impos
sible of those jolly Bavarians P or, T will never believe it,
when I think of the time I had at Heidelberg !
But there are other things besides the parallel of Prus
sia 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 talk of the Marconi Case; many a man in England
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 135
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
I 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 in
vented 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 atmos
phere of America; and Mr. Ford has been wrong before
and may be wrong now. He is chiefly known in Eng
land 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
136 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 imag
ination and ignorance, which has at least some of the
beauty of innocence. Men living in those huge hedge-
less inland plains know nothing about frontiers or the
tragedy of a fight for freedom; they know nothing of
alarum and armament 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 enlight
enment. 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 be
cause there is a Jewish problem. It is certainly not be
cause there is an Anti- Jewish prejudice. For if there
had been any amount of such racial and religious preju
dice, 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 inevi
table shipwreck; but remember that its very wildness
was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 137
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 can
not 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 prej
udiced 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
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 per
fectly entitled to hold; though as a matter of fact I do
not hold it. No extravagance of hatred merely follow
ing on experience of Jews can properly be called a prej
udice.
Now the point is that this new American Anti-Semit
ism 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
138 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
that democracy, and very creditable traditions too, are
in favour of toleration and a sort of idealistic indiffer
ence. The sympathies in which these nineteenth-century
people were reared were all against Front-de-Bceuf and
in favour of Rebecca. They inherited a prejudice
against Anti-Semitism ; a prejudice of Anti- Anti-Sem
itism. 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 ex
plain 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 Calif ornians 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 Calif ornians know more about the
Japanese than we do; and our own colonists when they
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 139
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 mili
tarism, may imitate European pacificism. I cannot hon
estly pretend to know what the Japanese mean by the one
any more than by the other. But when Englishmen, espe
cially English Liberals like myself, take a superior
and censorious attitude towards Americans and espe
cially Calif ornians, 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 con
sent to. stand for 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 Brit
ons 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 the universal empire.
140 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
We tell a continent crowded with Irishmen to thank God
that the Saxon can always rule the Celt. We tell a popu
lace whose very virtues are lawless that together we up
hold 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 anal
ogies with a non-existent 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 lan
guage, 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 im
plicit 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 legends revolved round polygamy and suicide, and
whose heroes wore two swords and worshipped the an
cestors of the Mikado.
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY
I WENT ta America with some notion of not discuss
ing 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 per
manently 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 every
body reads the Rubaiyat.
141
143 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 calam
ity. The old lady says, Tm sure this poor gentleman is
ill, and the cabman replies with fervour, 111! I wish I
ad alf is complaint.
We talk about unconscious humour; but there is such
a thing as unconscious seriousness. Flippancy is a
flower whose roots are often underground in the sub-
consciousness. Many a man talks sense when he thinks
he is talking nonsense; touches on a conflict of ideas as
if it were only a contradiction of language, or really
makes a parallel when he means only to make a pun.
Some of the Punch jokes of the best period are examples
of this; and that quoted above is a very strong example
of it. The cabman meant what he said; but he said a
great deal more than he meant. His utterance contained
fine philosophical doctrines and distinctions of which he
was not perhaps entirely conscious. The spirit of the
English language, the tragedy and comedy of the con
dition of the English people, spoke through him as the
god spoke through a teraph-head or brazen mask of
oracle. And the oracle is an omen; and in some sense
an omen of doom.
Observe, to begin with, the sobriety of the cabman.
Note his measure, his moderation ; or to use the yet truer
term, his temperance. He only wishes to have half the
old gentleman s complaint. The old gentleman is wel
come to the other half, along with all the other pomps and
luxuries of his superior social station. There is nothing
Bolshevist or even Communist about the temperance cab
man. He might almost be called Distributist, in the sense
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 143
that he wishes to distribute the old gentleman s complaint
more equally between the old gentleman and himself.
And, of course, the social relations there represented are
very much truer to life than it is fashionable to suggest.
By the realism of this picture Mr. Punch made amends
for some more snobbish pictures, with the opposite social
moral. It will remain eternally among his real glories
that he exhibited a picture in which a cabman was sober
and the gentleman was drunk. Despite many ideas to
the contrary, it was emphatically a picture of real life.
The truth is subject to the simplest of all possible tests.
If the cabman were really and truly drunk he would not
be a cabman, for he could not drive a cab. If he had
the whole of the old gentleman s complaint, he would be
sitting happily on the pavement beside the old gentleman ;
a symbol of social equality found at last, and the levelling
of all classes of mankind. I do not say that there has
never been such a monster known as a drunken cabman ;
I do not say that the driver may not sometimes have
approximated imprudently to three-quarters of the com
plaint, instead of adhering to his severe but wise concep
tion of half of it. But I do say that most men of the
world, if they spoke sincerely, oould testify to more ex
amples of helplessly drunken gentlemen put inside of cabs
than of helplessly drunken drivers on top of them. Phil
anthropists and officials, who never look at people but only
at papers, probably have a mass of social statistics to the
contrary ; founded on the simple fact that cabmen can be
cross-examined about their habits and gentlemen cannot.
Social workers probably have the whole thing worked
out in sections and compartments, showing how the ex
treme intoxication of cabmen compares with the parallel
intoxication of costermongers , or measuring the drunken-
144 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
ness of a dustman against the drunkenness of a crossing-
sweeper. But there is more practical experience embod
ied in the practical speech of the English; and in the pro
verb that says as drunk as a lord.
Now Prohibition, whether as a proposal in England
or a pretence in America, simply means that the man who
has drunk less shall have no drink, and the man who has
drunk more shall have all the drink. It means that the
old gentleman shall be carried home in a cab drunker than
ever; but that, in order to make it quite safe for him to
drink to excess, the man who drives him shall be for
bidden to drink even in moderation. That is what it
means; that is all it means; that is all it ever will mean.
It means that often in Islam; where the luxurious and
advanced drink champagne, while the poor and fanatical
drink water. It means that in modern America; where
the wealthy are all at this moment sipping their cocktails,
and discussing how much harder labourers can be made
to work if only they can be kept from festivity. This
is what it means and all it means; and men are divided
about it according to whether they believe in a certain
transcendental concept called justice/ expressed in a
more mystical paradox as the equality of men. So
long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as
you are rich and really confident of remaining so,
you can have Prohibition and be as drunk as you
choose.
I see that some remarks by the Rev. R. J. Campbell,
dealing with social conditions in America, are reported
in the press. They include some observations about Sinn
Fein in which, as in most of Mr. Campbell s allusions to
Ireland, it is not difficult to detect his dismal origin, or
the acrid smell of the smoke of Belfast. But the re-
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 145
marks about America are valuable in the objective sense,
over and above their philosophy. He believes that Pro
hibition will survive and be a success, nor does he seem
himself to regard the prospect with any special disfavour.
But he frankly and freely testifies to the truth I have
asserted; that Prohibition does not prohibit, so far as
the wealthy are concerned. He testifies to constantly see
ing wine on the table, as will any other grateful guest of
the generous hospitality of America; and he implies
humorously that he asked no questions about the story
told him of the old stocks in -the cellars. So there is no
dispute about the facts; and we come back as before to
the principles. Is Mr. Campbell content with a Prohibi
tion which is another name for Privilege? If so, he has
simply absorbed along with his new theology a new
morality which is different from mine. But he does state
both sides of the inequality with equal logic and clearness ;
and in these days of intellectual fog that alone is like a
ray of sunshine.
Now my primary objection to Prohibition is not based
on any arguments against it, but on the one argument for
it. I need nothing more for its condemnation than the
only thing that is said in its defence. It is said by cap
italists all over America; and it is very clearly and cor
rectly reported by Mr. Campbell himself. The argument
is that employees work harder, and therefore employers
get richer. That this idea should be taken calmly, by
itself, as the test or a problem of liberty, is in itself a
final testimony to the presence of slavery. It shows
that people have completely forgotten that there is any
other test except the servile test. Employers are willing
that workmen should have exercise, as it may help them
to do more work. They are even willing that workmen
146 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
should Have leisure; for the more intelligent capitalists
can see that this also really means that they can do more
work. But they are not in any way willing that workmen
should have fun; for fun only increases the happiness
and not the utility of the worker. Fun is freedom; and
in that sense is an end in itself. It concerns the man
not as a worker but as a citizen, or even as a soul ; and
the soul in that sense is an end in itself. That a man
shall have a reasonable amount of comedy and poetry and
even fantasy in his life is part of his spiritual health,
which is for the service of God; and not merely for his
mechanical health, which is now bound to the service of
man. The* very test adopted has all the servile implica
tion; the test of what we can get out of him, instead of
the test of what he can get out of life.
Mr. Campbell is reported to have suggested, doubt
less rather as a conjecture than a- prophecy, that England
may find it necessary to become teetotal in order to
compete commercially with the efficiency and economy
of teetotal America. Well, in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries there was in America one of the
most economical and* efficient of all forms of labour. It
did not happen to be feasible for the English to compete
with it by copying it. There were so many humanitarian
prejudices about in those days. But economically there
seems to be no reason why a man should not have proph
esied that England would be forced to adopt American
Slavery then, as she is urged to adopt American Pro
hibition now. Perhaps such a prophet would have proph
esied rightly. Certainly it is not impossible that uni
versal Slavery might have been the vision of Calhoun
as universal Prohibition seems to be the vision of Camp
bell. The old England of 1830 would have said that
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 147
such a plea for Slavery was monstrous; but what would
it have said of a plea for enforced water-drinking?
Nevertheless, the nobler Servile State of Calhoun col
lapsed before it could spread to Europe. And there is
always the hope that the same may happen to the far
more materialistic Utopia of Mr. Campbell and Soft
Drinks.
Abstract morality is very important; and it may well
clear the mind to consider what would be the effect of
Prohibition in America if it were introduced there. It
would, of course, be a decisive departure from the tradi
tion of the Declaration of Independence. Those who
deny that are hardly serious enough to demand attention.
It is enough to say that they are reduced to minimising
that document in defence of Prohibition, exactly as the
slave-owners were reduced to minimising it in defence
of Slavery. They are reduced to saying that the Fathers
of the Republic meant no more than that they would not
be ruled by a king. And they are obviously open to the
reply which Lincoln gave to Douglas on the slavery ques
tion; that if that great charter was limited to certain
events in the eighteenth century, it ,was hardly worth
making such a fuss about in the nineteenth or in the
twentieth. But they are also open to another reply which
is even more to the point, when they pretend that Jeffer
son s famous preamble only means to say that monarchy
is wrong. They are maintaining that Jefferson only
meant to say something that he does not say at all. The
great preamble does not say that all monarchical govern
ment must be wrong; on the contrary, it rather implies
that most government is right. It speaks of human
governments in general as justified by the necessity of de
fending certain personal rights. I see no reason what-
148 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
ever to suppose that it would not include any royal
government that does defend those rights. Still less do
I doubt what it would say of a republican government
that does destroy those rights.
But what are those rights? Sophists can always de
bate about their degree; but even sophists cannot debate
about their direction. Nobody in his five wits will deny
that Jeffersonian democracy wished to give the law a
general control in more public things, but the citizens a
more general liberty in private things. Wherever we
draw the line, liberty can only be personal liberty; and
the most personal liberties must at least be the last liber
ties we lose. But to-day they are the first liberties we
lose. It is not a question of drawing the line in the right
place, but of beginning at the wrong end. What are the
rights of man, if they do not include the normal right
to regulate his own health, in relation to the normal risks
of diet and daily life? Nobody can pretend that beer is
a poison as prussic acid is a poison; that all the millions
of civilized men who drank it all fell down dead when
they had touched it. Its use and abuse is obviously a
matter of judgment; and there can be no personal liberty,
if it is not a matter of private judgment. It is not in
the least a question of drawing the line between liberty
and licence. If this is licence, there is no such thing as
liberty. It is plainly impossible to find any right more
individual or intimate. To say that a man has a
right to a vote, but not a right to a voice about the choice
of his dinner, is like saying that he has a right to his
hat but not a right to his head.
Prohibition, therefore, plainly violates the rights of
man, if there are any rights of man. What its suppor
ters really mean is that there are none. And in sttg-
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 149
gesting this, they have all the advantages that every scep
tic has when he supports a negation. That sort of ulti
mate scepticism can only be retorted upon itself, and we
can point out to them that they can no more prove the
right of the city to be oppressive than we can prove the
right of the citizen to be free. In the primary meta
physics of such a claim, it would surely be easier to make
it out for a single conscious soul than for an artificial
social combination. If there are no rights of men, what
are the rights of nations? Perhaps a nation has no
claim to self-government. Perhaps it has no claim to
good government. Perhaps it has no claim to any sort
of government or any sort of independence. Perhaps
they will say that is not implied in the Declaration of
Independence. But without going deep into my reasons
for believing in natural rights, or rather in supernatural
rights (and Jefferson certainly states them as super
natural), I am content here to note that a man s treat
ment of his own body, in relation to tradition and or
dinary opportunities for bodily excess, is as near to his
self-respect as social coercion can possibly go; and that
when that is gone there is nothing left. If coercion
applies to that, it applies to everything ; and in the future
of this controversy it obviously will apply to everything.
When I was in America, people were already applying it
to tobacco. I never can see why they should not apply
it to talking. Talking often goes with tobacco as it goes
with beer; and what is more relevant, talking may often
lead both to beer and tobacco. Talking often drives a
man to drink, both negatively in the form of nagging
and positively in the form of bad company. If the
American Puritan is so anxious to be a censor morum, he
should obviously put a stop to the evil communications
150 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
that really corrupt good manners. He should reintro-
duce the Scold s Bridle among the other Blue Laws for
a land of blue devils. He should gag all gay deceivers
and plausible cynics; he should cut off all flattering lips
and the tongue that speaketh proud things. Nobody can
doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is done
simply by talking. Jefferson and the old democrats
allowed people to talk, not because they were unaware
of this fact, but because they were fettered by this old
fancy of theirs about freedom and the rights of man.
But since we have already abandoned that doctrine in a
final fashion, I cannot see why the new principle should
not be applied intelligently; and in that case it would be
applied to the control of conversation. The State would
provide us with forms already filled up with the subjects
suitable for us to discuss at breakfast; perhaps allowing
us a limited number of epigrams each. Perhaps we
should have to make a formal application in writing, to
be allowed to make a joke that had just occurred to us in
conversation. And the committee would consider it in
due course. Perhaps it would be effected in a more
practical fashion, and the private citizens would be shut
up as the public-houses were shut up. Perhaps they
would all wear gags, which the policeman would remove
at stated hours ; and their mouths would be opened from
one to three, as now in England even the public-houses
are from time to time accessible to the public. To some
this will sound fantastic ; but not so fantastic as Jefferson
would have thought Prohibition. But there is one sense
in which it is indeed fantastic, for by hypothesis it leaves
out the favouritism that is the fundamental of the whole
matter. The only sense in which we can say that logic
will never go so far as this is that logic will never go the
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 151
length of equality. It is perfectly possible that the same
forces that have forbidden beer may go on to forbid
tobacco. But they will in a special and limited sense
forbid tobacco but not cigars. Or at any rate not ex
pensive cigars. In America, where large numbers of
ordinary men smoke rather ordinary cigars, there would
be doubtless a good opportunity of penalising a very
ordinary pleasure. But the Havanas of the millionaire
will be all right. So it will be if ever the Puritans bring
back the Scold s Bridle and the statutory silence of the
populace. It will only be the populace that is silent.
The politicians will go on talking.
These I believe to be the broad facts of the problem
of Prohibition; but it would not be fair to leave it with
out mentioning two other causes which, if not defences,
are at least excuses. The first is that Prohibition was
largely passed in a sort of fervour or fever of self-sacri
fice, which was a part of the passionate patriotism of
America in the war. As I have remarked elsewhere,
those who have any notion of what that national una
nimity was like will smile when they see America made a
model of mere international idealism. Prohibition was
partly a sort of patriotic renunciation; for the popular
instinct, like every poetic instinct, always tends at great
crises to great gestures of renunciation. But this very
fact, while it makes the inhumanity far more human,
makes it far less final and convincing. Men cannot re
main standing stiffly in such symbolical attitudes ; nor can
a permanent policy be founded on something analogous
to flinging a gauntlet or uttering a battle-cry. We might
as well expect all the Yale students to remain through
life with their mouths open, exactly as they were when
they uttered the college yell. It would be as reasonable
i S2 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
as to expect them to remain through life with their
mouths shut, while the wine-cup which has been the sac
rament of all poets and lovers passed round among all the
youth of the world. This point appeared very plainly
in a discussion I had with a very thoughtful and sympa
thetic American critic, a clergyman writing in an Anglo-
Catholic magazine. He put the sentiment of these
healthier Prohibitionists, which had so much to do with
the passing of Prohibition, by asking, May not a man
who is asked to give up his blood for his country be
asked to give up his beer for his country? And this
phrase clearly illuminates all the limitations of the case.
I have never denied, in principle, that it might in some
abnormal crisis be lawful for a government to lock up the
beer, or to lock up the bread. In that sense I am quite
prepared to treat the sacrifice of beer in the same way as
the sacrifice of blood. But is my American critic really
ready to treat the sacrifice of blood in the same way as
the sacrifice of beer? Is bloodshed to be as prolonged
and protracted as Prohibition? Is the normal non-com
batant to shed his gore as often as he misses his drink?
I can imagine people submitting to a special regulation,
as I can imagine them serving in a particular war. I do
indeed despise the political knavery that deliberately
passes drink regulations as war measures and then pre
serves them as peace measures. But that is not a ques
tion of whether drink and drunkenness are wrong, but
of whether lying and swindling are wrong. But I never
denied that there might need to be exceptional sacrifices
for exceptional occasions ; and war is in its nature an ex
ception. Only, if war is the exception, why should Pro
hibition be the rule? If the surrender of beer is worthy
to be compared to the shedding of blood, why then blood
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 153
ought to be flowing for ever like a fountain in the public
squares of Philadelphia and New York. If my critic
wants to complete his parallel, he must draw up rather a
a remarkable programme for the daily life of the ordi
nary citizens. He must suppose that, through all their
lives, they are paraded every day at lunch time and prod
ded with bayonets to show that they will shed their blood
for their country. He must suppose that every evening,
after a light repast of poison gas and shrapnel, they are
made to go to sleep in a trench under a permanent drizzle
of shell-fire. It is surely obvious that if this were the
normal life of the citizen, the citizen would have no nor
mal life. The common sense of the thing is that sacri
fices of this sort are admirable but abnormal. It is not
normal for the State to be perpetually regulating our
days with the discipline of a fighting regiment; and it is
not normal for the State to be perpetually regulating our
diet with the discipline of a famine. To say that every
citizen must be subject to control in such bodily things is
like saying that every Christian ought to tear himself
with red-hot pincers because the Christian martyrs did
their duty in time of persecution. A man has a right to
control his body, though in a time of martyrdom he may
give his body to be burned; and a man has a right to
control his bodily health, though in a state of siege he
may give his body to be starved. Thus, though the pa
triotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that
comes back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it
proves only that Prohibition ought to be ephemeral, un
less war ought to be eternal.
The other excuse is much less romantic and much
more realistic. I have already said enough of the cause
which is really realistic. The real power behind Prohibi-
154 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
tion is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing em
ployers 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 busi
ness began with the problem of black labour. I have not
attempted in this book to deal adequately with the ques
tion 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, with
out 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 ca
tastrophe of American history. The only difference was
originally that one side thought that, the crime once com
mitted, 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,
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 155
that anything like a positive case for slavery became pos
sible. 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 Ameri
can 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 on so much of 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 thei negroes ; so they coerced every
body 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 sup
posing 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 disar
mament, Carnegie. But when some of the rich Ameri
cans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered
with, because they are only using up their existing stocks
156 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 every
body 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 prob
able 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 there
fore 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 commu
nity, and a certain plan was, rightly or wrongly, adopted
to meet his case. A law was made professedly for every
body 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 Phari
saic 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
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 157
element of hypocrisy. So we proceed, just as the Ameri
cans 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 ignor
ant ; so we pretend to drive everybody ; and then send in
spectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. We
apply the same ingenuous principle; and are quite as un
democratic 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 im
portant 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 ne
groes 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
FOREIGNER is a man who laughs at every
thing 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 foreign 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 dan
gerous 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 them
selves 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 fan-
158
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 159
tasy, 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 vul
garity 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, an 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 ex
traordinary 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
160 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
of honour swiftly resents. But the real cross-purposes
come from the contrary direction of the two exaggera
tions, 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 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 reconcilia
tion 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. Patri
otism is the most popular of all virtues. The drier
sort of democrats who despise it have the democracy a-
gainst 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 nation
alists.
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, Veil, Samivel, I hope you ll find your spirits
rose by this ere wisit. I have never looked up this pas
sage in the popular and successful French version of Pick
wick; 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
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 161
the right word but the right translation of the wrong
word. And in the same way I am quite prepared to sus
pect 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 English
men are generally only too prone to claim this fine percep
tion, 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 con
vention ; 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 conven
tion. 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 verg-
1 62 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
ing 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 fash
ion 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 respect
able 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 explana
tion.
Public opinion can be a prairie fire. It eats up every
thing 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 pa
triotism can be like. If they had been in America, after
America had entered the war, they would have seen some
thing which they would have always perhaps subcon
sciously dreaded, and would then have beyond all their
worse 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 eccen
trics 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 Eng-
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 163
land, 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 con
scientious 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 dur
ing the war a society called the Union of Democratic
Control, which would have been instantly destroyed any
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 fan
cies like the herd instinct are only figures of speech, and
cannot really cover anything human. For the Ameri
cans 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
164 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 pre
fer to wear a beard. These are of course fantastic exam
ples 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
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 165
be found in the nature of English eccentricity. Every
man in his humour is most interesting when he is uncon
scious of his humour ; or at least when he is in an inter
mediate 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 vir
tues; cheerfulness and courage and vim, otherwise zip,
also pep and similar things. But it is sometimes forgot
ten that negative morality is freer than positive morality.
Negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pat
tern, of which the lines or cords constrict at longer inter
vals. 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 posi
tive 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.; In
terviewers 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.
1 66 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 im
pulses ; 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 can
not be conveyed in their delicate proportion even in the
most large and allusive terms. 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
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 167
nonourably 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 eter
nity 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 possibly 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 refer-
i 68 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
ring solely or even specially to Prohibition, which I dis
cuss elsewhere. Prohibition is at least a superstition,
and therefore next door to a religion; it has some imag
inable connection with moral questions, as have slavery
or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to model our
selves 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 mod
ern 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
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 169
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 af a cart-wheel, and con
sulting 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 tem
perature. But what would be the good of imaginative
logic to prove the madness of such people, when they
themselves praise it for being mad ?
There is also the cult of the Infant Phenomenon, of
which Dickens made fun and of which educationalists
make fusses. When I was in America another news
paper produced a marvellous child o<f six who had the
intellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and
apparently one on which the experiment turned, was that
she could be made to understand and even to employ the
word annihilate/ When asked to say something prov
ing this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism,
When common sense comes in, superstition is annihi
lated. In reply to which, by way of showing that I
also am as intelligent as a child of twelve, and there is no
arrested development about me, I will say in the same
elegant diction, When psychological education comes in,
common sense is annihilated. Everybody seems to be
sitting round this child in an adoring fashion. It did not
seem to occur to anybody that we do not particularly
want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating
superstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk
like a child of twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a
man of fifty, or even a man of fifty to talk like a fool.
And on the principle of hoping that a little girl of six
170 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
will have a massive and mature brain there is every
reason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a
magnificent and bushy beard.
Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up
among American cranks. Anybody may propose to es
tablish coercive Eugenics ; or enforce psycho-analysis
that is, enforce confession without absolution. And I
confess I cannot connect this feature with the genuine
democratic spirit of the mass. I can only suggest, in
concluding this chapter, two possible causes rather
peculiar to America, which may have made this great
democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so
manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea.
The first historical cause is Puritanism; but not Pur
itanism merely in the sense of Prohibitionisrn. The
truth is that prohibitions might have done far less harm
as prohibitions, if a vague association had not arisen, on
some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition
and progress. And it was the progress that did the
harm, not the prohibition. Men can enjoy life under
considerable limitations, if they can be sure of their
limited enjoyments; but under Progressive Puritanism
we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not
limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in
the restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever re
strict the restriction. The prohibitions are bound to
progress point by point; more and more human rights
and pleasures must of necessity be taken away ; for it is
of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the
faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably
makes the pace. Thus the worst thing in the seventeenth-
century aberration was not so much Puritanism as secta
rianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but by
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 171
subdivision, It not only broke religion into small pieces,
but it was bound to choose the smallest piece* There is
in America, I believe, a large religious body that has felt
it right to separate itself from Christendom, because it
cannot believe in the morality of wearing buttons. I do
not know how the schism arose ; but it is easy to suppose,
for the sake of argument, that there had originally existed
some Puritan body which condemned the frivolity of
ribbons though not of buttons, I was going to say of
badges but not buttons; but on reflection I cannot bring
myself to believe that any American, however insane,
would object to wearing badges. But the point is that
as the holy spirit of progressive prophesy rested on the
first sect because it had invented a new objection to
ribbons, so that holy spirit would then pass from it to the
new sect who invented a further objection to buttons.
And from them it must inevitably pass to any rebel
among them who shall choose to rise and say that he dis
approves of trousers because of the existence of trouser-
buttons. Each secession in turn must be right because
it is recent, and progress must progress by growing
smaller and smaller. That is the progressive theory, the
legacy of seventeenth-century sectarianism, the dogma
implied in much modern politics, and the evident enemy
of democracy. Democracy is reproached with saying
that the majority is always right. But progress says that
the minority is always right. Progressives are prophets;
and fortunately not all the people are prophets. Thus in
the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianism anybody
who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over
the people. If he chooses to say that drinking is always
wrong, or that kissing is always wrong, or that wearing
buttons is always wrong, people are afraid to contradict
172 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
him for fear they should be contradicting their own
great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion
of the ancestor- worship of China; and instead of vainly
appealing to something that is dead, they appeal to some
thing that may never be born.
There is another cause of this strange servile disease
in American democracy. It is to be found in American
feminism, and feminist America is an entirely different
thing from feminine America. I should say that the
overwhelming majority of American girls laugh at their
female politicians at least as much as the majority of
American men despise their male politicians. But
though the aggressive feminists are a minority, they are
in this atmosphere which I have tried to analyse; the at
mosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about the
minority. And it is this superstition of seriousness that
constitutes the most solid obstacle and exception to the
general and almost conventional pressure of public opin
ion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as
was Abolitionism before the Civil War, or Pro-German
ism in the Great War, or the suggestion of radical ad
mixture in the South at all times, then the fad meets far
less mercy than anywhere else in the world ; it is snowed
under and swept away. But when it does not thus
directly challenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious
halo of hopeful solemnity surrounds it, merely because it
is a fad, but above all if it is a feminine fad. The
earnest lady-reformer who really utters a warning
against the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be
walking clothed in light, like a prophetess. Perhaps it is
something of the holy aureole which the East sees
shining around an idiot.
But I think there is another explanation, feminine
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 173
rather than feminist, and proceeding from normal
women and not from abnormal idiots. It is something
that involves an old controversy, but one upon which I
have not, like so many politicians, changed my opinion.
It concerns the particular fashion in which women tend
to regard, or rather to disregard, the formal and legal
rights of the citizen. In so far as this is a bias, it is a
bias in the directly opposite direction from that now
lightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history
going about, according to which women in the past have
always been in the position of slaves. It is much more
to the point to note that women have always been in the
position of despots. They have been despotic, because
they ruled in an area where they had too much common
sense to attempt to be constitutional. You cannot grant
a constitution to a nursery; nor can babies assemble like
barons and extort a Great Charter. Tommy cannot
plead a Habeas Corpus against going to bed; and an in
fant cannot be tried by twelve other infants before he is
put in the corner. And as there can be no laws or lib
erties in a nursery, the extension of feminism means that
there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state than
there are in a nursery. The woman does not really re
gard men as citizens but as children. She may, if she
is a humanitarian, love all mankind ; but she does not re
spect it. Still less does she respect its votes. Now a
man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is
a danger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science
being made the excuse for every trick of tyranny and
interference. Anybody who is not an anarchist agrees
with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but
the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half
way down the chimney or even under the bed. In other
174 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
words, it is a danger of turning the policeman into a sort
of benevolent burglar. Against this protests are already
being made, and will increasingly be made, if men retain
any instinct of independence or dignity at all. But to
complain of the woman interfering in the home will
always sound like the complaining of the oyster intruding
into the oyster-shell. To object that she has too much
power over education will seem like objecting to a hen
having too much to do with eggs. She has already been
given an almost irresponsible power over a limited region
in these things ; and if that power is made infinite it will
be even more irresponsible, If she adds to her own
power in the family all these alien fads external to the
family, her power will not only be irresponsible but
insane. She will be something which may well be called
a nightmare of the nursery; a mad mother. But the
point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as
well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The
results will be interesting; but at least it is certain that
under this softening influence government of the people,
by the people, for the people, will most assuredly perish
from the earth.
But there is always another possibility. Hints of it
may be noted here and there like muffled gongs of doom.
The other day some people preaching some low trick or
other, for running away from the glory of mother
hood, were suddenly silenced in New York ; by a voice of
deep and democratic volume. The prigs who potter
about the great plains are pygmies dancing round a sleep
ing giant. That which sleeps, so far as they are con
cerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intol
erance in the soul of America. At present the masses
in the Middle West are indifferent to such fancies or
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 175
faintly attracted by them, as fashions of culture from the
great cities. But any day it may not be so ; some lunatic
may cut across their economic rights or their strange and
buried religion ; and then he will see something. He will
find himself running like a nigger who has wronged a
white woman, or a man who has set the prairie on fire.
He will see something which the politicians fan in its
sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many
reactionaries have cursed with the name of the mob, but
which in any case has had under its feet the crowns of
many kings. It was said that the voice of the people is
the voice of God; and this at least is certain, that it can
be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics
of their arrogance shall stiffen before something enor
mous, such as towers in the last words that Job heard out
of the whirlwind ; and a voice they never knew shall tell
them that his name is Leviathan, and he is lord over all
the children of pride.
THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN
WHEN I was in America I had the feeling
that it was far more foreign than France
or even than Ireland. And by foreign I
mean fascinating rather than repulsive. I mean that ele
ment of strangeness which marks the frontier of any
fairyland, or gives to the traveller himself the almost
eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there more clearly
than in countries counted as more remote from us, in
race or religion, a paradox that is one of the great truths
of travel.
We have never even begun to understand a people until
we have found something that we do not understand.
So long as we find the character easy to read, we are read
ing into it our own character. If when we see an event
we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be
pretty certain that we had ourselves prepared the explan
ation before we saw the event. It follows from this
that the best picture of a foreign people can probably be
found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event of
which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably
throw some light on the truth. I will therefore take
from my American experiences one isolated incident,
which certainly could not have happened in any other
country I have ever clapped eyes on. I have really no
notion of what it meant. I have heard even from
Americans about five different conjectures about its
176
THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 177
meaning. But though I do not understand it, I do sin
cerely believe that if I did understand it, I should under
stand America.
It happened in the city of Oklahoma, which would re
quire a book to itself, even considered as a background.
The State of Oklahoma is a district in the south-west
recently reclaimed from the Red Indian territory. What
many, quite incorrectly, imagine about all America is
really true of Oklahoma. It is proud of having no his
tory. It is glowing with the sense of having a g*reat fu
ture and nothing else. People are just as likely to boast
of an old building in Nashville as in Norwich; people are
just as proud of old families in Boston as in Bath. But
in Oklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal struc
ture, arrogantly affirming that it wasn t there last week.
It was against the colours of this crude stage scenery, as
of a pantomime city of pasteboard, that the fantastic
figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note
of interrogation. I was strolling down the main street
of the city, and looking in at a paper-stall vivid with the
news of crime, when a stranger addressed me; and asked
me, quite politely but with a curious air of having author
ity to put the question, what I was doing in that city.
He was a lean brown man, having rather the look of a
shabby tropical traveller, with a grey moustache and a
lively and alert eye. But the most singular thing about
him was that the front of his coat was covered with a
multitude of shining metallic emblems made m the shape
of stars and crescents. I was well accustomed by this
time to Americans adorning the lapels of their coats with
little symbols of various societies; it is a part of the
American passion for the ritual of comradship. There
178 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
is nothing that an American likes so much as to have a
secret society and to make no secret of it. But in this
case, if I may put it so, the rash of symbolism seemed to
have broken out all over the man, in a fashion that indi
cated that the fever was far advanced. Of this minor
mystery, however, his first few sentences offered a pro
visional explanation. In answer to his question, touch
ing my business in Oklahoma, I replied with restraint
that I was lecturing. To which he replied without re
straint, but rather with an expansive and radiant pride,
I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy/
So far a certain wild rationality seemed to light up the
affair. I knew it was unusual, in my own country, for
the Astronomer Royal to walk down the Strand with
his coat plastered all over with the Solar System. In
deed, it was unusual for any English astronomical lec
turer to advertise the subject of his lectures in this fash
ion. But though it would be unusual, it would not nec
essarily be unreasonable. In fact, I think it might add
to the colour and variety of life, if specialists did adopt
this sort of scientific heraldry. I should like to be able
to recognise an entomologist at sight by the decorative
spiders and cockroaches crawling all over his coat and
waistcoat. I should like to see a conchologist in a simple
costume of shells. An osteopath, I suppose, would be
agreeably painted so as to resemble a skeleton, while a
botanist would enliven the street with the appearance of a
Jack-in-the-Green, So while I regarded the astronomi
cal lecturer in the astronomical coat as a figure dis
tinguishable, by a high degree of differentiation, from
the artless astronomers of my island home (enough
their simple loveliness for me) I saw in him nothing
illogical, but rather an imaginative extreme of logic.
THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 179
And then came another turn of the wheel of topsy-turvy-
dom, and all the logic was scattered to the wind.
Expanding his starry bosom and standing astraddle,
with the air of one who owned the street, the strange be
ing continued, Yes, I am lecturing on astronomy, anthro
pology, archaeology, palaeontology, embryology, escha-
tology, and so on in a thunderous roll of theoretical
sciences apparently beyond the scope of any single uni
versity, let alone any single professor, Having thus in
troduced himself, however, he got to business. He
apologised with true American courtesy for having ques
tioned me at all, and excused it on the ground of his own
exacting responsibilities. I imagined him to mean the
responsibility of simultaneously occupying the chairs
of all the faculties already mentioned, But these appar
ently were trifles to him, and something far more serious
was clouding his bfow.
I feel it to be my duty/ he said, to acquaint myself
with any stranger visiting this city; and it is an addi
tional pleasure to welcome here a member of the Upper
Ten/ I assured him earnestly that I knew nothing about
the Upper Ten, except that I did not belong to them; I
felt, not without alarm, that the Upper Ten might be an
other secret society. He waved my abnegation aside
and continued, I have a great responsibility in watching
over this city. My friend the mayor and I have a great
responsibility/ And then an extraordinary thing hap
pened. Suddenly diving his hand into his breast-pocket,
he flashed something before my eyes like a hand-mirror ;
something which disappeared again almost as soon as it
appeared. In that flash I could only see that it was some
sort of polished metal plate, with some letters engraved
on it like a monogram, But the reward of a studious
i8o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
and virtuous life, which has been spent chiefly in the
reading of American detective stories, shone forth for
me in that hour of trial; I received at last the prize of a
profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders
in tenth-rate magazines. I remembered who it was who
in the Yankee detective yarn flashes before the eyes of
Slim Jim or the Lone Hand Crook a badge of metal
sometimes called a shield. Assuming all the desperate
composure of Slim Jim himself, I replied, You mean
you are connected with the police authorities here, don t
you? Well, if I commit a murder here, I ll let you
know/ Whereupon that astonishing man waved a hand
in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a
dancing master; and said, Oh, those are not things we
expect from members of the Upper Ten.
Then that moving constellation moved away, disap
pearing in the dark tides of humanity, as the vision
passed away down the dark tides from Sir Galahad and,
starlike, mingled with the stars.
That is the problem I would put to all Americans, and
to all who claim to understand America. Who and what
was that man? Was he an astronomer? Was he a de
tective? Was he a wandering lunatic? If he was a
lunatic who thought he was an astronomer, why did he
have a badge to prove he was a detective? If he was a
detective pretending to be an astronomer, why did he tell
a total stranger that he was a detective two minutes after
saying he was an astronomer? If he wished to watch
over the city in a quiet and unobtrusive fashion, why did
he blazon himself all over with all the stars of the sky, and
profess to give public lectures on all the subjects of the
world? Every wise and well-conducted student of
murder stories is acquainted with the notion of a police-
THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 181
man in plain clothes. But nobody could possibly say
that this gentleman was in plain clothes. Why not wear
his uniform, if he was resolved to show every stranger
in the street his badge ? Perhaps after all he had no uni
form; for these lands were but recently a wild frontier
rudely ruled by vigilance committees. Some Americans
suggested to me that he was the Sheriff; the regular
hard-riding, free-shooting Sheriff of Bret Harte and my
boyhood s dreams. Others suggested that he was an
agent of the Ku Klux Klan, that great nameless revolu
tion of the revival of which there were rumours at the
time; and that the symbol he exhibited was theirs. But
whether he was a sheriff acting for the law, or a con
spirator against the law, or a lunatic entirely outside the
law, I agree with the former conjectures upon one point.
I am perfectly certain he had something else in his pocket
besides a badge. And I am perfectly certain that under
certain circumstances he would have handled it instantly,
and shot me dead between the gay bookstall and the
crowded trams, And that is the last touch to the com
plexity; for though in that country it often seems that the
law is made by a lunatic you never know when the lunatic
may not shoot you for keeping it. Only in the presence
of that citizen of Oklahoma I feel I am confronted with
the fullness and depth of the mystery of America. Be
cause I understand nothing, I recognise the thing that we
call a nation; and I salute the flag. \
But even in connection with this mysterious figure there
is a moral which affords another reason for mentioning
him. Whether he was a sheriff or an outlaw, there was
certainly something about him that suggested the adven
turous violence of the old border life of America; and
whether he was connected with the police or no, there
182 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
was certainly violence enough in his environment to sat
isfy the most ardent policeman. The posters in the
paper-shop were placarded with the verdict in the Hamon
trial ; a cause celebre which reached its crisis in Oklahoma
while I was there, Senator Hamon had been shot by a
girl whom he had wronged) and his widow demanded
justice, or what might fairly be called vengeance. There
was very great excitement culminating in the girl s ac
quittal. Nor did the Hamon case appear to be entirely
exceptional in that breezy borderland. The moment the
town had received the news that Clara Smith was free,
newsboys rushed down the street shouting, Double stab
bing outrage near Oklahoma/ or Banker s throat cut on
Main Street/ and otherwise resuming their regular mode
of life. It seemed as much as to say, Do not imagine that
pur local energies are exhausted in shooting a Senator/
or Come, now, the world is young, even if Clara Smith
is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of Oklahoma is not yet
cold/
But my particular reason for mentioning the matter
is this. Despite my friend s mystical remarks about
the Upper Ten, he lived in an atmosphere of something
that was at least the very reverse of a respect for persons.
Indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his
social compliment that smacked, strangely enough, of
that egalitarian Soil. In a vaguely aristocratic country
like England, people would never dream of telling a total
stranger that he was a member of the Upper Ten. For
one thing, they would be afraid that he might be. Real
Snobbishness is never vulgar ; for it is intended to please
the refined. Nobody licks the boots of a duke, if only
because the duke does not like his boots cleaned in that
way. Nobody embraces the knees of a marquis, because
THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 183
it would embarrass that nobleman. And nobody tells
him he is a member of the Upper Ten, because every
body is expected to know it ? But there is a much more
subtle kind of snobbishness pervading the atmosphere
of any society trial in England, And the first thing that
struck me was the total absence of that atmosphere in
the trial at Oklahoma. Mr. Hamon was presumably a
member of the Upper Ten, if there is such a thing. He
was a member of the Senate or Upper House in the
American Parliament; he was a millionaire and a pillar
of the Republican party, which might be called the re
spectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a
possible President. And the speeches of Clara Smith s
counsel, who was known by the delightfully Oklahomite
title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enough in all con
science; but they left very little of my friend s illusion that
members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of
crimes. Nero and Borgia were quite presentable people
compared with Sentor Hamon when Wild Bill McLean
had done with him. But the difference was deeper, and
even in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain
tone about English trials, which does at least begin with
a certain scepticism about people prominent in public
life being abominable in private life. People do vaguely
doubt the criminality of a man in that position ; that is,
the position of the Marquise de Brinvilliers or the Mar
quis de Sade. Prima facie, it would be an advantage
to the Marquis de Sade that he was a marquis. But it
was certainly against Hamon that he was a millionaire.
Wild Bill did not minimise him as a bankrupt or an ad
venturer; he insisted on the solidity and size of his for
tune, he made mountains out of the Hamon millions/
as if they made the matter much worse; as indeed I think
184 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
they do. But that is because I happen to share a certain
political philosophy with Wild Bill and other wild buffa
loes of the prairies. In other words, there is really pres
ent here a democratic instinct against the domination of
wealth. It does not prevent wealth from dominating;
but it does prevent the domination from being regarded
with any affection or loyalty. Despite the man in the
starry coat, the Americans have not really any illusions
about the Upper Ten. McLean was appealing to an
implicit public opinion when he pelted the Senator with
his gold.
But something more is involved. I became conscious,
as I have been conscious in reading the crime novels of
America, that the millionaire was taken as a type and
not an individual. This is the great difference; that
America recognises rich crooks as a class. Any English
man might recognise them as individuals. Any English
romance may turn on a crime in high life; in which the
baronet is found to have poisoned his wife, or the elusive
burglar turns out to be the bishop. But the English are
not always saying, either in romance or reality, What s
to be done, if our food is being poisoned by all these
baronets? They do not murmur in indignation, If bish
ops will go on burgling like this, something must be
done. The whole point of the English romance is the
exceptional character of a crime in high life. That is not
the tone of American novels or American newspapers or
American trials like the trial in Oklahoma. Americans
may be excited when a millionaire crook is caught, as
when any other crook is caught; but it is at his being
caught, not at his being discovered. To put the matter
shortly, England recognises a criminal class at the bottom
of the social scale. America also recognises a criminal
THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 185
class at the top of the social scale. In both, for various
reasons, it may be difficult for the criminals to be con
victed; but in America the upper class of criminals is
recognised. In both America and England, of course, it
exists.
This is an assumption at the back of the American
mind which makes a great difference in many ways;
and in my opinion a difference for the better. I wrote
merely fancifully just now about bishops being burglars;
but there is a story in New York, illustrating this, which
really does in a sense attribute a burglary to a bishop.
The story was that an Anglican Lord Spiritual, of the
pompous and now rather antiquated school, was pushing
open the door of a poor American tenement with all the
placid patronage of the squire and rector visiting the cot
tagers, when a gigantic Irish policeman came round the
corner and hit him a crack over the head with a trun
cheon on the assumption that he was a house-breaker. I
hope that those who laugh at the story see that the laugh
is not altogether against the policeman ; and that it is not
only the policeman, but rather the bishop, who had failed
to recognise some final logical distinctions. The bishop,
being a learned man, might well be called upon (when he
had sufficiently recovered from the knock on the head) to
define what is the exact difference between a house
breaker and a home-visitor; and why the home- visitor
should not be regarded as a house-breaker when he will
not behave as a guest. An impartial intelligence will be
much less shocked at the policeman s disrespect for the
home-visitor than by the home-visitor s disrespect for the
home.
But that story smacks of the western soil, precisely
because of the element of brutality there is in it. In Eng-
186 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
land snobbishness and social oppression are much subtler
and softer; the manifestations of them at least are more
mellow and humane. In Comparison there is indeed
Something which people call ruthless about the air of
America, especially the American cities. The bishop may
push open the door without an apology, but he would
not break open the door with a truncheon; but the Irish
policeman s truncheon hits both ways, It may be brutal
to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop ; but the
difference and distinction is that it might really be brutal
to the bishop. It is because there is after all, at the back
of all that barbarism, a sort of a negative belief in the
brotherhood of men, a dark democratic sense that men
are really men and nothing more, that the coarse and
even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly as oligar
chic bureaucracies are resented. There is a sense in
which corruption is not so narrow as nepotism. It is
upon this queer cynical charity, and even humility, that
it has been possible to rear so high and uphold so long
that tower of brass, Tammany Hall. The modern police
system is in spirit the most inhuman in history, and its
evil belongs to an age and not to a nation. But some
American police methods are evil past all parallel ; and the
detective can be more crooked than a hundred crooks.
But in the States it is not only possible that the policeman
is worse than the convict, it is by no means certain that
he thinks that he is any better. In the popular stories of
O. Henry there are light allusions to tramps being thrown
out of hotels which will make any Christian seek relief
in strong language and a trust in heaven not to say in
hell And yet books even more popular than O. Henry s
are those of the sob-sisterhood who swim in lachrymose
lakes after love-lorn spinsters, who pass their lives in re-
THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 187
claiming and consoling such tramps. There are in this
people two strains of brutality and sentimentalism which
I do not understand, especially where they mingle; but
I am fairly sure they both work back to the dim demo
cratic origin. The Irish policeman does not confine him
self fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops; his truncheon
finds plenty of poor people s heads to hit ; and yet I believe
on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with poor people
not to be found in the police of more aristocratic states.
I believe he also reads and weeps over the stories of the
spinsters and the reclaimed tramps ; in fact, there is much
of such pathos in an American magazine (my sole com
panion on many happy railway journeys) which is not
only devoted to detective stories, but apparently edited by
detectives. In these stories also there is the honest pop
ular astonishment at the Upper Ten expressed by the as
tronomical detective, if indeed he was a detective and not a
demon from the dark Red-Indian forests that faded to the
horizon behind him. But I have set him as the head and
text of this chapter because with these elements of the
Third Degree of devilry and the Seventh Heaven of
sentimentalism I touch on elements that I do not under
stand ; and when I do not Understand, I say so.
THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS
THE heathen in his blindness bows down to wood
and stone; especially to a wood-cut or a litho
graphic stone. Modern people put their trust
in pictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the
most superstitious ever put it in religious pictures. They
publish a portrait of the Missing Link as if he were the
Missing Man, for whom the police are always advertis
ing; for all the world as if the anthropoid had been
photographed before he absconded. The scientific dia
gram may be a hypothesis ; it may be a fancy ; it may be a
forgery. But it is always an idol in the true sense of an
image ; and an image in the true sense of a thing master
ing the imagination and not the reason. The power of
these talismanic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern
humanity. We can never forget that we have seen a por
trait of the Missing Link; though we should instantly
detect the lapse of logic into superstition, if we were told
that the old Greek agnostics had made a statue of the
Unknown God. But there is a still stranger fashion in
which we fall victims to the same trick of fancy. We
accept in a blind and literal spirit, not only images of
speculation, but even figures of speech. The nineteenth
century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths,
and proceeded to put all its faith in metaphors. It dis
missed the old doctrines about the way of life and the
light of the world; and then it proceeded to talk as if the
light of truth were really and literally a light, that could
be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path
188
THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 189
of progress were really and truly a path, to be found by
merely following our noses. Thus the purpose of God
is an idea, true or false; but the purpose of Nature is
merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no God there
is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative in
stinct, spoke of the purpose of God with a grand agnosti
cism, as something too large to be seen, something reach
ing out to worlds and to eternities, they talk of the pur
pose of Nature in particular and practical problems of
curing babies or cutting up rabbits. The power of the
modern metaphor must be understood, by way of an in
troduction, if we are to understand one of the chief errors,
at once evasive and pervasive, which perplex the problem
of America.
America is always spoken of as a young nation; and
whether or no this be a valuable and suggestive metaphor,
very few people notice that it is a metaphor at all. If
somebody said that a certain deserving charity had just
gone into trousers, we should recognise that it was a
figure of speech, and perhaps a rather surprising figure of
speech. If somebody said that a daily paper had recently
put its hair up, we should know it could only be a meta
phor, and possibly a rather strained metaphor. Yet these
phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly be
meant by calling a corporate association of all sorts of
people young ; that is, that a certain institution has only
existed for a certain time. I am not now denying that
such a corporate nationality may happen to have a psy
chology comparatively analogous to the psychology of
youth. I am not even denying that America has it. I am
only pointing out, to begin with, that we must free our
selves from the talismanic tyranny of a metaphor which
we do recognise as a metaphor. Men realised that the old
i 9 o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
mystical doctrines were mystical; they do not realise
that the new metaphors are metaphorical. They have
some, sort of hazy notion that American society must be
growing, must be promising, must have the virtues of
hope or the faults of ignorance, merely because it has only
had a separate existence since the eighteenth century.
And that is exactly like saying that a new chapel must be
growing taller, or that a limited liability company will
soon have its second teeth.
Now in truth this particular conception of American
hopefulness would be anything but hopeful for America.
If the argument really were, as it is still vaguely supposed
to be, that America must have a long life before it, be
cause it only started in the eighteenth century, we should
find a very fatal answer by looking at the other political
systems that did start in the eighteenth century. The
eighteenth century was called the Age of Reason; and
there is a very real sense in which the other systems were
indeed started in a spirit of reason. But starting
from reason has not saved them from ruin. If we survey
the Europe of to-day with real clarity and historic com
prehension, we shall see that it is precisely the most re
cent and the most rationalistic creations that have been
ruined. The two great states which did most definitely
and emphatically deserve to be called modern states were
Prussia and Russia. There was no real Prussia before
Frederick the Great; no real Russian Empire before
Peter the Great. Both those innovators recognised
themselves as rationalists bringing a new reason and
order into an indeterminate barbarism; and doing for
the barbarians what the barbarians could not do for
themselves. They did not, like the kings of England
or France or Spain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that
THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 191
was the symbol of a historic and patriotic people. In
this sense there was no Russia but only an Emperor
of Russia. In this sense Prussia was a kingdom before
it was a nation; if it ever was a nation. But anyhow
both men were particularly modern in their whole mood
and mind. They were modern to the extent of being
not only anti-traditional, but almost anti-patriotic.
Peter forced the science of the West on Russia to the re
gret of many Russians. Frederick talked the French of
Voltaire and not the German of Luther. The two experi
ments were entirely in the spirit of Voltairean rationalism ;
they were built in broad daylight by men who believed in
nothing but the light of common day; and already their
day is done.
If then the promise of America were in the fact that
she is one of the latest births of progress, we should
point out that it is exactly the latest born that were the
first to die. If in this sense she is praised as young, it
may be answered that the young have died young, and
have not lived to be old. And if this be confused with
the argument that she came in an age of clarity and
scepticism, uncontaminated by old superstitions, it could
still be retorted that the works of superstition have sur
vived the works of scepticism. But the truth is, of
course, that the real quality of America is much more
subtle and complex than this; and is mixed not only of
good and bad, and rational and mystical, but also of old
and new. That is what makes the task of tracing the
true proportions of American life so interesting and so
impossible.
To begin with, such a metaphor is always as distract
ing as a mixed metaphor. It is a double-edged tool that
cuts both ways; and consequently opposite ways. We
192 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
use the same word young to mean two opposite ex
tremes. We mean something at an early stage of
growth, and also something having the latest fruits of
growth. We might call a commonwealth young if it
conducted all its daily conversation by wireless telegra
phy; meaning that it was progressive. But we might
also call it young if it conducted all its industry with
chipped flints; meaning that it was primitive. These
two meanings of youth are hopelessly mixed up when
the word is applied to America. But what is more curi
ous, the two elements really are wildly .entangled in
America. America is in some ways what is called in
advance of the times, and in some ways what is called
behind the times ; but it seems a little confusing to con
vey both notions by the same word.
On the one hand, Americans often are successful in
the last inventions. And for that very reason they are
often neglectful of the last but one. It is true of men
in general, dealing with things in general, that while
they are progressing in one thing, such as science, they
are going back in another thing, such as art. What is
less fully realized is that this is true even as between dif
ferent methods of science. The perfection of wireless
telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imper
fection of wires. The very enthusiasm of American
science brings this out very vividly. The telephone in
New York works miracles all day long. Replies from
remote places come as promptly as in a private talk; no
body cuts anybody off; nobody says, Sorry you ve
been troubled. But then the postal service of New
York does not work at all. At least I could never
discover it working. Letters lingered in it for days
and days, as in some wild Village of the Pyrenees.
THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 193
When I asked a taxi-driver to drive me to a post-office,
a look of far-off vision and adventure came into his
eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post-office
somewhere near West Ninety-Seventh Street. Men
are not efficient in everything, but only in the fashion
able thing. This may be a mark of the march of
science; it does certainly in one sense deserve the de
scription of youth. We can imagine a very young
person forgetting the old toy in the excitement of a
new one.
But on the other hand, American manners contain
much that is called young in the contrary sense; in the
sense of an earlier stage of history. There are whole
patches and particular aspects that seem to me quite
Early Victorian. I cannot help having this sensation,
for instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the
railway carriages. There are no smoking carriages, as
a rule ; but a corner of each of the great cars is curtained
off mysteriously, that a man may go behind the curtain
and smoke. Nobody thinks of a woman doing so. It
is regarded as a dark, bohemian, and almost brutally
masculine indulgence; exactly as it was regarded by the
dowagers in Thackeray s novels. Indeed, this is one of
the many such cases in which extremes meet; the ex
tremes of stuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. The
American dowager is sorry that tobacco was ever intro
duced; and the American suffragette and social re
former is considering whether tobacco ought not to be
abolished. The tone of American society suggests
some sort of compromise, by which women will be
allowed to smoke, but men forbidden to do so.
In one respect, however, America is very old indeed.
In one respect America is more historic than England;
194 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
I might almost say more archaeological than England.
The record of one period of the past, morally remote
and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a more
perfect form as a pagan city is preserved at Pompeii.
In a more general sense, of course, it is easy to exag
gerate the contrast as a mere contrast between the old
world and the new. There is a superficial satire about
the millionaire s daughter who has recently become the
wife of an aristocrat; but there is a rather more subtle
satire in the question of how long the aristocrat has
been aristocratic. There is often much misplaced
mockery of a marriage between an upstart s daughter
and a decayed relic of feudalism; when it is really a
marriage between an upstart s daughter and an upstart s
grandson. The sentimental socialist often seems to
admit the blue blood of the nobleman, even when he
wants to shed it; just as he seems to admit the mar
vellous brains of the millionaire, even when he wants to
blow them out. Unfortunately (in the interests of
social science, of course) the sentimental socialist never
does go so far as bloodshed or blowing out brains ; other
wise the colour and quality of both blood and brains
would probably be a disappointment to him. There are
certainly more American families that really came over
in the Mayflower than English families that really came
over with the Conqueror; and an English county family
clearly dating from the time of the Mayflower would be
considered a very traditional and historic house. Never
theless, there are ancient things in England, though the
aristocracy is hardly one of them. There are buildings,
there are institutions, there are even ideas in England
which do preserve, as in a perfect pattern, some particular
epoch of the past, and even of the remote past. A man
THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 195
could study the Middle Ages in Lincoln as well as in
Rouen; in Canterbury as well as in Cologne. Even of
the Renaissance the same is true, at least on the literary
side; if Shakespeare was later he was also greater than
Ronsard. But the point is that the spirit and philosophy
of the periods were present in fullness and in freedom.
The guildsmen were as Christian in England as they
were anywhere; the poets were as pagan in England as
they were anywhere. Personally I do not admit that
the men who served patrons were freer than those who
served patron saints. But each fashion had its own kind
of freedom ; and the point is that the English, in each case,
had the fullness of that kind of freedom. But there was
another ideal of freedom which the English never had at
all; or, anyhow, never expressed at all. There was an
other ideal, the soul of another epoch, round which we
built no monuments and wrote no masterpieces. You
will find no traces of it in England; but you will find
them in America.
The thing I mean was the real religion of the eight
eenth century. Its religion, in the more defined sense,
was generally Deism, as in Robespierre or Jefferson.
In the more general way of morals and atmosphere it
was rather Stoicism, as in the suicide of Wolfe Tone.
It had certain very noble and, as some would say, im
possible ideals; as that a politician should be poor, and
should be proud of being poor. It knew Latin; and
therefore insisted on the strange fancy that the Republic
should be a public thing. Its Republican simplicity was
anything but a silly pose; unless all martyrdom is a silly
pose. Even of the prigs and fanatics of the American
and French Revolutions we can often say, as Stevenson
said of an American, that thrift and courage glowed in
196 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
him. And its virtue and value for us is that it did
remember the things we now most tend to forget; from
the dignity of liberty to the danger of luxury. It did
really believe in self-determination, in the self-determina
tion of the self, as well as of the state. And its deter
mination was really determined. In short, it believed in
self-respect; and it is strictly true even of its rebels and
regicides that they desired chiefly to be respectable. But
there were in it the marks of religion as well as respect
ability; it had a creed; it had a crusade. Men died
singing its songs ; men starved rather than write against
its principles. And its principles were liberty, equality,
and fraternity, or the dogmas of the Declaration of Inde
pendence. This was the idea that redeemed the dreary
negations of the eighteenth century; and there are still
corners of Philadelphia or Boston or Baltimore where
we can feel so suddenly in the silence its plain garb and
formal manners, that the walking ghost of Jefferson
would hardly surprise us.
There is not the ghost of such a thing in England.
In England the real religion of the eighteenth century
never found freedom or scope. It never cleared a space
in which to build that cold and classic building called
the Capitol. It never made elbow-room for that free if
sometimes frigid figure called the Citizen.
In eighteenth-century England he was crowded out,
partly perhaps by the relics of better things of the past,
but largely at least by the presence of much worse things
in the present. The worst things kept out the best
things of the eighteenth century. The ground was
occupied by legal fictions; by a godless Erastian church
and a powerless Hanoverian king. Its realties were an
aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumes made to
THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 197
match Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but
florid. It was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox
that prevented that great man from being a glorious
exception. It is therefore well for us to realise that
there is something in history which we did not expe
rience; and therefore probably something in Americans
that we do not understand. There was this idealism at
the very beginning of their individualism. There was
a note of heroic publicity and honourable poverty which
lingers in the very name of Cincinnati.
But I have another and special reason for noting this
historical fact ; the fact that we English never made any
thing upon the model of a capitol, while we can match
anybody with the model of a cathedral. It is far from
improbable that the latter model may again be a working
model. For I have myself felt, naturally and for a long
time, a warm sympathy with both those past ideals, which
seem to some so incompatible. I have felt the attraction
of the red cap as well as the red cross, of the Marseillaise
as well as the Magnificat. And even when they were in
furious conflict I have never altogether lost my sympathy
for either. But in the conflict between the Republic and
the Church, the point often made against the Church
seems to me much more of a point against the Republic. *
It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that I
venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the
past. In fact I feel exactly the same sort of sad respect
for the republican ideal that many mid-Victorian free
thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The most sincere
poets of that period were largely divided between those
who insisted, like Arnold and Clough, that Christianity
* Throughout the conclusion of this chapter I mean by the Re
public not merely the American system, but the whole modern
elective system, as in France or even in England.
198 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
might be a ruin, but after all it must be treated as a
picturesque ruin; and those, like Swinburne, who in
sisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after all it
must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan
temple of political liberty is now much more of a ruin
than the other; and I fancy I am one of the few who
still take off their hats in that ruined temple. That is
why I went about looking for the fading traces of that
lost cause, in the old-world atmosphere of the new
world.
But I do not, as a fact, feel that the cathedral is a ruin ;
I doubt if I should feel it even if I wished to lay it in
ruins. I doubt if Mr. McCabe really thinks that Catholi
cism is dying, though he might deceive himself into saying
so. Nobody could be naturally moved to say that the
crowded cathedral of St. Patrick in New York was a
ruin, or even that the unfinished Anglo-Catholic cathe
dral at Washington was a ruin, though it is not yet a
church; or that there is anything lost or lingering about
the splendid and spirited Gothic churches springing up
under the inspiration of Mr. Cram of Boston. As a
matter of feeling, as a matter of fact, as a matter quite
apart from theory or opinion, it is not in the religious
centres that we now have the feeling of something beau
tiful but receding, of something loved but lost. It is
exactly in the spaces cleared and levelled by America for
the large and sober religion of the eighteenth century;
it is where an old house in Philadelphia contains an old
picture of Franklin, or where the men of Maryland
raised above their city the first monument of Washing
ton. It is there that I feel like one who treads alone
some banquet hall deserted, whose lights are fled, whose
THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 199
garlands dead, and all save he departed. It 13 then
that I feel as if I were the last Republican.
But when I say that the Republic of the Age of Reason
is now a ruin, I should rather say that at its best it is a
ruin. At its worst it has collapsed into a death-trap or
is rotting like a dunghill. What is the real Republic of
our day, as distinct from the ideal Republic of our fa
thers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with
worms; with those parasites, the professional politicians?
I was re-reading Swinburne s bitter but not ignoble
poem, Before a Crucifix, in which he bids Chri-st, or the
ecclesiastical image of Christ, stand out of the way of
the onward march of political idealism represented by
United Italy or the French Republic. I was struck by
the strange and ironic exactitude with which every taunt
he flings at the degradation of the old divine ideal would
now fit the degradation of his own human ideal. The
time has already come when we can ask his Goddess of
Liberty, as represented by the actual Liberals, Have
you filled full men s starved-out souls ; have you brought
freedom on the earth ? For every engine in which these
old free-thinkers firmly and confidently trusted has itself
become an engine of oppression and even of class oppres
sion. Its free Parliament has become an oligarchy. Its
free press has become a monopoly. If the pure Church
has been corrupted in the course of two thousand years,
what about the pure Republic that has rotted into a filthy
plutocracy in less than a hundred?
O hidden face of man, whereover
The years have woven a viewless veil,
If thou wert verily man s lover
200 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
What did thy love or blood avail?
Thy blood the priests make poison of;
And in gold shekels coin thy love.
Which has most to do with shekels to-day, the
priests or the politicians? Can we say in any special
sense nowadays that clergymen, as such, make a poison
out of the blood of the martyrs ? Can we say it in any
thing like the real sense, in which we do say that yellow
journalists make a poison out of the blood of the soldiers ?
But I understand how Swinburne felt when con
fronted by the image of the carven Christ, and, per
plexed by the contrast between its claims and its con
sequences, he said his strange farewell to it, hastily in
deed, but not without regret, not even really without re
spect. I felt the same myself when I looked for the
last time on thei Statue of Liberty.
IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING?
A CERTAIN ^ind of question is asked very earn
estly in our time. Because of a certain logical
quality in it, connected with premises and data,
it is very difficult to answer. Thus people will ask what
is the hidden weakness in the Celtic race that makes it
everywhere fail or fade away; or how the Germans con
trived to bring all their organisation into a state of such
perfect efficiency; and what was the significance of the re
cent victory of Prussia. Ojr they will ask by what stages
the modern world has abandoned all belief in miracles;
and the modern newspapers ceased to print any news of
murders. They will as^k why English politics are free
from corruption; or by what mental and moral training
certain millionaires were enabled to succeed by sheer
force of character; in short, they will ask why plutocrats
govern* well and "how it is that pigs fly, spreading their
pink pinions to the breeze or delighting us as they twitter
and flutter from tree to tree. The logical difficulty of
answering these questions is connected with an old story
about Charles the Second and a bowl of goldfish, and
with another anecdote about a gentleman who was asked,
When did you leave off beating your wife? But there
is something analogous to it in the present discussions
about the forces drawing England and America together.
It seems as if the reasoners hardly went far enough back
in their argument, or took trouble enough to disentangle
their assumptions. They are still moving with the mo
mentum of the peculiar nineteenth-century notion of prog-
201
202 WHAT i SAW IN AMERICA
ress; of certain very simple tendencies perpetually in
creasing and needing no special analysis. It is so with
the international rapprochement I have to consider here.
In other places I have ventured to express a doubt about
whether nations can be drawn together by an ancient ru
mour about races ; by a sort of prehistoric chit-chat or the
gossip of the Stone Age. I have ventured farther; and
even expressed a doubt about whether they ought to be
drawn together, or rather dragged together, by the brute
violence of the engines of science and speed. But there
is yet another horrible doubt haunting my morbid mind,
which it will be better for my constitution to confess
frankly. And that is the doubt about whether they are
being drawn together at all.
It has long been a conversational commonplace among
the enlightened that all countries are coming closer and
closer to each other. It was a conversational common
place among the enlightened, somewhere about the year
1913, that all wars were receding farther and farther into
a barbaric past. There is something about these sayings
that seems simple and familiar and entirely satisfactory
when we say them; they are of that consoling sort which
we can say without any of the mental pain of thinking
what we are saying. But if we turn our attention from
the phrases we use to the facts that we talk about, we
shall realise at least that there are a good many facts on
the other side and examples pointing the other way. For
instance, it does happen occasionally, from time to time,
that people talk about Ireland. He would be a very hi
larious humanitarian who should maintain that Ireland
and England have been more and more assimilated during
the last hundred years. The very name of Sinn Fein is
an answer to it, and the very language in which that
IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 203
phrase is spoken. Curran and Shell would no more have
dreamed of uttering the watchword of Repeal in Gaelic
than of uttering it in Zulu. Grattan coulcl hardly have
brought himself to believe that the real repeal of the
Union would actually be signed in London in the strange
script as remote as the* snaky ornament of the Celtic
crosses. It would have seemed like Washington signing
the Declaration of Independence in the picture-writing
of the Red Indians. Ireland has clearly grown away
from England; and her language, literature, and type of
patriotism are far less English than they were. On the
other hand, no one will pretend that the mass of mod
ern Englishmen are much nearer to talking Gaelic or
decorating Celtic crosses. A hundred years ago it was
perfectly natural that Byron and Moore should walk
down the street arm in arm. Even the sight of Mr.
Rudyard Kipling and Mr. W. B. Yeats walking down the
street arm in arm would now arouse some remark.
I could give any number of other examples of the same
new estrangement of nations. I could cite the obvi
ous facts that Norway and Sweden parted company not
very long ago, that Austria and Hungary have again be
come separate States. I could point to the mob of new
nations that have started up after the war; to the fact
that the great empires are now nearly all broken up ; that
the Russian Empire no longer directs Poland, that the
Austrian Empire no longer directs Bohemia, that the
Turkish Empire no longer directs Palestine. Sinn Fein
is the separatism of the Irish. Zionism is the separatism
of the Jews. But there is one simple and sufficing ex
ample, which is here more to my purpose, and is at least
equally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening na
tional difference between the Americans and the English.
204 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
Let me test it first by my individual experience in the
matter of literature. When I was a boy I read a book
like The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table exactly as I read
another book like The Book of Snobs. I did not think
of it as an American book, but simply as a book. Its wit
and idiom were like those of the English literary tra
dition ; and its few touches of local colour seemed merely
accidental, like those of an Englishman who happened to
be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My father and my
father s friends were rightly enthusiastic for the
book; so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance
like Gulliver s Travels or Tristram Shandy. Its language
was as English as Ruskin, and a great deal more English
than Carlyle. Well, I have seen in later years an almost
equally wide and well-merited popularity of the stories of
O. Henry. But never for one moment could I or any
one else reading them forget that they were stories by an
American about America. The very first fact about
them is that they are told with an American accent, that
is, in the unmistakable tones of a brilliant and fascinating
foreigner. And the same is true of every other recent
work of which the fame has managed to cross the Atlan
tic. We did not say that The Spoon River Anthology
was a new book, but that it was a new book from Amer
ica. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel
was reported from Russia or Italy. We were in no
danger of confusing it with the Elegy in a Country
Churchyard/ People in England who heard of Main
Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street;
with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berk
shire or Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I prac
tically identified the boarding-house of the Autocrat with
any boarding-house I happened to know in Brompton or
IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 205
Brighton. No doubt there were differences; but the
point is that the differences did not pierce the conscious
ness or prick the illusion. I said to myself, People are
like this in boarding-houses, not People are like this in
Boston/
This can be seen even in the simple matter of language,
especially in the sense of slang. Take, for instance, the
delightful sketch in- the causerie of Oliver Wendell
Holmes; the character of the young man called John.
He is a very modern type in every modern country who
does specialise in slang. He is the young fellow who is
something in the City; the* everyday young man of the
Gilbertian song, with a stick and a pipe and a half-bred
black-and-tan. In every country he is at once witty and
commonplace. In every country, therefore, he tends
both to the vivacity and the vulgarity of slang. But
when he appeared in Holmes s book, his language was not
very different from what it would have been in a Brighton
instead of a Boston boarding-house; or, in short, if the
young man called John had more commonly been called
*Arry. If he had appeared in a modern American book,
his language would have been almost literally unintelli
gible. At the least an Englishman would have to read
some of the best sentences twice, as he sometimes has to
read the dizzy and involved metaphors of O. Henry.
Nor is it an answer that this depended on the personali
ties of the particular writers. A comparison between
the real journalism of the time of Holmes and the real
journalism of the time of Henry reveals the same thing.
It is the expansion of a slight difference of style into a
luxuriant difference of idiom; and the process continued
indefinitely would certainly produce a totally different
language. After a few centuries .the signatures of
206 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
American ambassadors would look as fantastic as Gaelic,
and the very name of the Republic be as strange as Sinn
Fein.
It is true that there has been on the surface a certain
amount of give and take; or at least, as far as the Eng
lish are concerned, of take rather than give. But it is
true that it was once all the other way ; and indeed the one
thing is something like a ju.st nemesis of the other. In
deed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular,
when we come to think of it. It began in a certain at
mosphere and spirit of certain well-meaning people who
talked about the English-speaking race; and were ap
parently indifferent to how the English was spoken,
whether in the accent of a Jamaican negro or a convict
from Botany Bay. It was their logical tendency to say
that Dante was a Dago. It was their logical punishment
to say that Disraeli was an Englishman. Now there
may have been a period when this Anglo-American
amalgamation included more or less equal elements from
England and America. It never included the larger ele
ments, or the more valuable elements of either. But, on
the whole, I think it true to say that it was not an allot
ment but an interchange of parts; and that things first
went all one way and then all the other. People began
by telling the Americans that they owed all their past
triumphs to England; which was false. They ended up
by telling the English that they would owe all their future
triumphs to America; which is if possible still more false.
Because we chose to forget that New York had been
New Amsterdam, we are now in danger of forgetting
that London is not New York. Because we insisted that
Chicago was only a pious imitation of Chiswick, we may
yet see Chiswick an inferior imitation of Chicago. Our
IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 207
Anglo-Saxon historians attempted that conquest in which
Howe and Burgoyne had failed, and with infinitely less
justification on their side. They attempted the great
crime of the Anglicisation of America. They have
called down the punishment of the Americanisation of
England. We must not murmur; but it is a heavy pun
ishment.
It may lift a little of its load, however, if we look at
it more closely; we shall then find that though it is very
much on top of us, it is only on top. In that sense such
Americanisation as there is is very superficial. For in
stance, there is a certain amount of American slang
picked up at random ; it appears in certain pushing types
of journalism and drama. But we may easily dwell too
much on this tragedy; of people who have never spoken
English beginning to speak American. I am far from
suggesting that American, like any other foreign lan
guage, may not frequently contribute to the common cul
ture of the world phrases for which there is no sub
stitute ; there are French phrases so used in England and
English phrases in France. The word high-brow, for
instance, is a real discovery and revelation, a new and
necessary name for something that walked nameless but
enormous in the modern world, a shaft of light and a
stroke of lightning. That comes from America and be
longs to the world, as much as The Raven or The Scar
let Letter or the novels of Henry James belong to the
world. In fact, I can imagine Henry James originating
it in the throes of self-expression, and bringing out a
word like high-browed, with a sort of gentle jerk, at
the end of searching sentences which groped sensitively
until they found the phrase. But most of the American
slang that is borrowed seems to be borrowed for no partic-
208 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
<ular reason. It either has no point or the point is lost by
translation into another context and culture. It is either
something which does not need any grotesque and exag
gerative description, or of which there already exists a
grotesque and exaggerative description more native to
our tongue and soil. For instance, I cannot see that the
strong and simple expression Now it is for you to pull
the police magistrate s nose is in any way strengthened
by saying, Now it is up to you to pull the police magis
trate s nose/ When Tennyson says of the men of the
Light Brigade Theirs but to do arid die, the expression
seems to me perfectly lucid. Up to them to do and die
would alter the metre without especially clarifying the
meaning. This is an example of ordinary language being
quite adequate; but there is a further difficulty that even
wild slang comes to sound like ordinary language. Very
often the English have already as humorous and fanciful
idiom of their own, only that through habit it has lost
its humour. When Keats wrote the line, What pipes
and timbrels, what wild ecstasy! I am willing to believe
that the American humorist would have expressed the
same sentiment by beginning the sentence with Some
pipe ! When that was first said, somewhere in the wilds
of Colorado, it was really funny; involving a powerful
understatement and the suggestion of a mere sample. If
a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird, and we
find it is an ostrich, there will be considerable point in the
Colorado satirist saying inquiringly, Some bird? as if he
were offering us a small slice of a small plover. But if
we go back to this root and rationale of a joke, the Eng
lish language already contains quite as good a joke. It
is not necessary to say, Some bird ; there is a far finer
irony in the old expression, Something like a bird. It
IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 209
suggests that the speaker sees something faintly and
strangely birdlike about a bird; that it remotely and al
most irrationally reminds him of a bird; and that there is
about ostrich plumes a yard long something like the faint
and delicate traces of a feather. It has every quality of
imaginative irony, except that nobody even imagines it
to be ironical. All that happens is that people get tired
of that turn of phrase, take up a foreign phrase and get
tired of that, without realising the point of either. All
that happens is that a number of weary people who used
to say Something like a bird, now say, Some bird/ with
undiminished weariness. But they might just as well
use dull and decent English; for in both cases they are
only using jocular language without seeing the joke.
There is indeed a considerable trade in the transplanta
tion of these American jokes to England just now. They
generally pine and die in our climate, or they are dead
before their arrival; but we cannot be certain that they
were never alive. There is a sort of unending frieze or
scroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before
the British public, about a hen-pecked husband, which is
indistinguishable to the eye from an actual self-repeat
ing pattern like that of the Greek key, but which is im
ported as if it were as precious and irreplaceable as the
Elgin Marbles. Advertisement and syndication make
mountains out of the most funny little mole-hills; but
no doubt the mole-hills are picturesque enough in their
own landscape. In any case there is nothing so national
as humour; and many things, like many people, can be
humorous enough when they are at home. But these
American jokes are boomed as solemnly as American
religions ; and their supporters gravely testify that they are
funny, without seeing the fun of it for a moment. This
210 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
is partly perhaps the spirit of spontaneous intitutional-
ism in American democracy, breaking out in the wrong
place. They make humour an institution; and a man
will be set to tell an anecdote as if to play the violin. But
when the story is told in America it really is amusing;
and when these jokes are reprinted in England they are
often not even intelligible. With all the stupidity of the
millionaire and the monopolist, the enterprising proprietor
prints jokes in England which are necessarily unintellig
ible to nearly every English person; jokes referring to
domestic and local conditions quite peculiar to America.
I saw one of these narrative caricatures the other day in
which the whole of the joke (what there was of it) turned
on the astonishment of a housewife at the absurd notion
of not having an ice-box. It is perfectly true that nearly
every ordinary American housewife possesses an ice-box.
An ordinary English housewife would no more expect
to possess an ice-box than to possess an iceberg. And
it would be about as sensible to tow an iceberg to an
English port all the way from the North Pole, as to trail
that one pale and frigid joke to Fleet Street all the way
from the New York papers. It is the same with a hun
dred other advertisements and adaptions. I have
already confessed that I took a considerable delight in
the dancing illuminations of Broadway in Broadway,
Everything there is suitable to them, the vast intermin
able thoroughfare, the toppling houses, the dizzy and rest
less spirit of the whole city. It is a city of dissolving
views, and one may almost say a city in everlasting dis
solution. But I do not especially admire a burning frag
ment of Broadway stuck up opposite the old Georgian
curve of Regent Street. I would as soon express sym
pathy with the Republic of Switzerland by erecting a small
IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 211
Alp, with imitation snow, in the middle of St. James s
Park.
But all this commercial copying is very superficial;
and above all, it 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 Amer
ica; 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,
wahear 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 Sel fridge 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 grav
ity 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
212 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 are really re
sponsible for their shops. 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 deli
cate operation; and then pass on to the advocacy depart
ment 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
IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 213
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
Besit. It may be that commercial enterprise will eventu
ally cover these fields also, and advertisement-agents will
provide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons
of the soldier. When that happns, the armies will be de
feated 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
I
T has already been remarked here that the English
know a great deal about past American literature,
M 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 import
ant 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 An
drew 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 Ply
mouth 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 stee
ple-crowned hats struggling with sea-waves or Red In-
214
LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 215
dians. 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 some
body known as Sir Walter Raleigh ; and though his prin
cipal possession was a cloak, it is also true that he had a
potato, not to mention a pipe of tobacco. Can it be pos
sible that he brought it from Virginia, where the cigar
ettes 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 be
come correct. It is not strictly true to say that the Pil
grim 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 re
ligious 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.
216 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
But there is no doubt that the note of their whole experi
ment in New England was intolerance, and even inquisi
tion. And there is no doubt that New England was then
only the newest and not the oldest of these colonial ex
periments. 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 Eng
land in the South. Relatively speaking, there is still.
Whenever the anniversary of the Mayflower comes
round, there is a chorus of Anglo- American congratula
tion 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 English
men 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
was what made it a great w r ar, 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
LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 217
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 French
man, 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 ab
stractions, that he reviewed and revelled in academic
abstractions, even while he could not apply them to prac
tical life. He loved to repeat that slavery was intoler
able while he tolerated it, and to prove ftiat 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 de
stroy. But for all that this inconsistency beat the politi
cians 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 com
mon missile in the market-place. The matter is worth
mentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger mod
ern question. A wise man s attiude towards industrial
218 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 abolition
ism. He will not call all business men brutes, any more
thari 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 Com
bines 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 refer
ence 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 Ire
land. And if we study the matter, we shall hardly ad
mire the tact and sagacity of those journalists and politi
cians.
History is an eternal tangle of cross-purposes ; and we
could not take a clearer case, or rather a more compli
cated 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 inde
pendence and the attempted secession of the Southern
LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 219
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 com
plete 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 Americans know 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 anal
ogy, 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. In another chapter, 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 foreign-
220 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
ers 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 human
ities, 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 tradi
tions really hold them to us, not by alliance but by affec
tion. Indeed, they have the affection in spite of the alli
ance. 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 foreign
ers 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 fidel
ity; but it does not follow 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
LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 221
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 ex
pense of her only defenders. But however this may be,
it is as well to bear witness to some of the elements of
my o^wn 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 con
quest 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 slav
ery, industrial slavery, or what is called wage slavery,
222 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
is not decaying but increasing; and the end o-f 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 recon
struction, 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 oppo
nents being conquered, but by their being converted.
Now, if the English politicians must insist on this paral
lel, they ought to see that the parallel is fatal to them-
LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 223
selves. 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 occasionally heard
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 re
vival 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 ex
hibit, not the things in which England is wrong but the
things in which England 19 right. And England is
right in England, just as she is wrong in Ireland; and
it is exactly that Tightness 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
224 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
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 them
selves. 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 prais
ing 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 English
man 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 con
versation 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
LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 225
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 import
ing the daughters of American millionaires that England
can get any glimpse of the democratic dignity of Ameri
can 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 trav
eller 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 gather
ing 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 dis
cussed the new science. Among their graceful felici
tations 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 im
pulse 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.
I resent the suggestion that a machine can make me
bad. But I resent quite equally the suggestion that a
machine can make me good. It might be the unfortunate
fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and Mr.
226
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 227
Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa
and garden next to mine ; and I might even be largely to
blame for it. But if somebody told me that a new kind
of lawn-mower had just been invented, of so cunning a
structure that I should be forced to become a bosom-
friend of Mr. Blenkinsop whether I liked it or not, I
should be very much annoyed, I should be moved to say
that if that was the only way of cutting my grass I
would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my neighbour.
Or suppose the difference were even less defensible;
suppose a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with
his wife. And suppose somebody told him that the
introduction of an entirely new vacuum-cleaner would
compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his wife.
It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors
that vacuum. Reasonably spirited human beings will
not be ordered about by bicycles and sewing-machines;
and a healthy man will not be made good, let alone bad,
by the things he has himself made. I have occasionally
dictated to a typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a
typewriter, even of the newest and most complicated
mechanism; nor have I ever met a typewriter, however
complex, which attempted such a tyranny.
Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such
talk of the aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as
distances ; and an international aviation abolishing nation
alities. This and nothing else was really implied in one
speaker s prediction that such aviation will almost neces
sitate an Anglo-American friendship. Incidentally, I
may remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the prac
tical and materialistic sense ; and the speaker s phrase re
futed the speaker s argument. He said that international
relations must be more friendly when men can get from
228 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
England to America in a day. Well, men can already
get from England to Germany in a day; and the result
was a mutual invitation of which the formalities lasted
for five years. Men could get from the coast of England
to the coast of France very quickly, through nearly all the
ages during which those two coasts were bristling with
arms against each other. They could get there very
quickly when Nelson went down by that Burford Inn to
embark for Trafalgar; they could get there very quickly
when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at Boulogne
that filled England w r ith alarums of invasion. Are these
the amiable and pacific relations which will unite England
and America, when Englishmen can get to America in a
day? The shortening of the distance seems quite as
likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that end
less guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas
in the Middle Ages; when French invaders carried away
the bells of Rye, and the men of those flats of East Sus
sex gloriously pursued and recovered them. I do not
know whether American privateers, landing at Liverpool,
would carry away a few of the more elegant factory-
chimneys as a substitute for the superstitious symbols of
the past. I know not if the English, on ripe reflection,
would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back. But
anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot
fight each other because they are near to each other; and
if it were true, there would never have been any such
thing as border warfare in the world. As a fact, border
warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it
was most difficult to bring under control. And our own
traditional position in face of this new logic is somewhat
disconcerting. We have always supposed ourselves safer
because we were insular and therefore isolated. We
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 229
have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on hav
ing enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our
neighbours. And now they are telling us that we shall
only enjoy peace when we are joined up with our neigh
bours. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers,
because a frontier only produces fighting; and now we
are trusting to a frontier as the only thing that will pro
duce friendship. But, as a matter of fact, and for a far
deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier will not pro
duce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship.
And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the
thing that produces friendliness.
But apart from this fallacy about the facts, I feel, as
I say, a strong abstract anger against the idea, or what
some would call the ideal. If it were true that men could
be taught and tamed by machines, even if they were
taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think it
the most tragic truth in the world. A man so improved
would be, in an exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to
save it. But in truth he cannot be so completely coerced
into good ; and in so far as he is incompletely coerced, he
is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. Of the financial
characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers
in such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is
evil. The light in their bodies is darkness, and the high
est objects of such men are the lowest objects of ordinary
men. Their peace is mere safety, their friendship is mere
trade; their international friendship is mere international
trade. The best we can say of that school of capitalism
is that it will be unsuccessful. It has every other vice,
but it is not practical. It has at least the impossibility of
idealism ; and so far as remoteness can carry it, that In
ferno is indeed a Utopia. All the visible manifestations
2 3 o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
of these men are materialistic; but at least their visions
will not materialise. The worse we suffer; but the best
we shall at any rate escape. We may continue to endure
the realities of cosmopolitan capitalism; but we shall be
spared its ideals.
But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats
whose vision takes so vulgar a form. I am interested
in the same thing when it takes a far more subtle form,
in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like Mr.
H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr.
Wells to suggest that in his vision the Englishman and
the American are to embrace only in the sense of clinging
to each other in terror. He is a man who understands
what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the mot
ley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruc
tion which he proposes is too much determined by this old
nightmare of necessitarianism. He tells us that our
national dignities and differences must be melted into the
huge mould of a World State, or else (and I think these
are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by the
instruments and machinery we have ourselves made.
In effect, men must abandon patriotism or they
will be murdered by science. After this, surely no one
can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific
over other types of training. Greek may be a good thing
or no; but nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried
past a certain point, everybody will be torn in pieces like
Orpheus, or burned up like Semele, or poisoned like Soc
rates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not
be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the
study of philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately
forces its students to manufacture racks and thumb
screws against their will; or that even logicians need be
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 231
so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be
the only branch of study in which people have to be
waved back from perfection as from a pestilence. But
my business is not with the scientific dangers which alarm
Mr. Wells, but with the remedy he proposes for them ; or
rather with the relation of that remedy to the foundation
and the future of America. Now it is not too much to
say that Mr. Wells finds his model in America. The
World State is to be the United States of the World.
He answers almost all objections to the practicability
of such a peace among states, by pointing out that the
American States have such a peace, and by adding, truly
enough, that another turn of history might easily have
seen them broken up by war. The pattern of the World
State is to be found in the New World.
Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost
cosmic conquests for the American Constitution, while
leaving out the most successful thing in that Constitution.
The point appeared in answer to a question which many,
like myself, must have put in this matter; the question
of despotism and democracy. I cannot understand any
democrat not seeing the danger of so distant and indirect
a system of government. It is hard enough anywhere
to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough to
get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little
town, even when the townsmen meet the town councillors
every day in the street, and could kick them down the
street if they liked. What the same town councillors
would be like if they were ruling all their fellow-creatures
from the North Pole or the New Jerusalem, is a vision of
Oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Tam-
berlane. This difficulty in all representative government
is felt everywhere, and not least in America. But I think
232 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
that if there is one truth apparent in such a choice of evils,
it is that monarchy is at least better than oligarchy ; and
that where we have to act on a large scale, the most genu
ine popularity can gather round a particular person like
a Pope or a President of the United States, or even a
dictator like Caesar or Napoleon, rather than round a
more or less corrupt committee which can only be defined
as an obscure oligarchy. And in that sense any oli
garchy is obscure. For people to continue to trust
twenty-seven men it is necessary, as a preliminary for
mality, that people should have heard of them. And
there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has
heard as everybody in France had heard of Napoleon, as
all Catholics have heard of the Pope or all Americans
have heard of the President. I think the mass of ordi
nary Americans do really elect their President ; and even
where they cannot control him at least they watch him,
and in the long run they judge him, I think, therefore,
that the American Constitution has a teal popular in
stitution in the Presidency. But Mr. Wells would appear
to want the American Constitution without the Pres
idency. If I understand his words rightly, he seems to
want the great democracy without its popular institution.
Alluding to this danger, that the World State might be
a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely in the
sense of autocracy. He asks whether the President of
the World State would not be rather too tremendous a
person and seems to suggest in answer that there need not
even be any such a person. He seems to imply that the
committee controlling the planet could meet almost with
out any one in the chair, certainly without any one on the
throne. I cannot imagine anything more manifestly
made to be a tyranny than such an acephalous aristoc-
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 233
racy. But while Mr. Well s decision seems to me strange,
his reason for it seems to me still more extraor
dinary.
He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in
his World State because there will be no wars and no
diplomacy. A World State ought doubtless to go round
the world ; and going round the world seems to be a good
training for arguing in a circle. Obviously there will
be no wars and no war-diplomacy if something has the
power to prevent them; and we cannot deduce that the
something will not want any power. It is rather as if
somebody, urging that the Germans could only be de
feated by uniting the Allied commands under Marshal
Foch, had said that after all it need not offend the British
Generals because the French supremacy need only be a
fiction, the Germans being defeated. We should natur
ally say that the German defeat would only be a reality
because the Allied command was not a fiction. So the
universal peace would only be a reality if the World State
were not a fiction. And it could not be even a state if it
were not a government. This argument amounts to say
ing, first that the World State will be needed because it
is strong, and then it may safely be weak because it will
not be needed.
Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy.
I do not say it is incompatible with it ; but any combina
tion of the two will be a compromise between the two.
The only purely popular government is local, and founded
on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city be
cause they know the city; but it will always be an ex
ceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to
rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien
cities. All Irishmen may know roughly the same sort
234 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
of things about Ireland; but it is absurd to say they all
know the same things about Iceland, when they may in
clude a scholar steeped in Icelandic sagas or a sailor who
has been to Iceland. To make all politics cosmopolitan
is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your
political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you
depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority
of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or
rather" of the still smaller and more select minority who
have come back.
Given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over
large areas, I think the nearest thing to democracy is des
potism. At any rate I think it is some sort of more or
less independent monarchy, such as Andrew Jackson
created in America. And I believe it is true to say that
the two men whom the modern world really and almost
reluctantly regards with impersonal respect, as clothed
by their office with something historic and honourable,
are the Pope and the President of the United States.
But to admire the United States as the United States
is one thing. To admire them as the World State is
quite another. The attempt of Mr. Wells to make
America a sort of model for the federation of all the free
nations of the earth, though it is international in in
tention, is really as narrowly national, in the bad sense,
as the desire of Mr. Kipling to cover the world with
British Imperialism, or of Professor Treitschke to cover
it with Prussian Pan-Germanism. Not being schoolboys,
we no longer believe that everything can be settled by
painting the map red. Nor do I believe it can be done
by painting it blue with white spots, even if they are
called stars. The insufficiency of British Imperialism
does not lie in the fact that it has always been applied by
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 235
force of arms. As a matter of fact, it has not. It has
been effected largely by commerce, by colonisation of
comparatively empty places, by geographical discovery
and diplomatic bargain. Whether it be regarded as
praise or blame, it is certainly the truth that among all the
things that have called themselves empires, the British
has been perhaps the least purely military, and has least
both of the special guilt and the special glory that goes
with militarism. The insufficiency of British Imperial
ism is not that it is imperial, let alone military. The in
sufficiency of British Imperialism is that it is British;
when it is not merely Jewish. It is that just as a man is
no more than a man, so a nation is no more than a na
tion; and any nation is adequate as an international
model. Any state looks small when it occupies the whole
earth. Any polity is narrow as soon as it is as wide as
the world. It would be just the same if Ireland began
to paint the map green or Montenegro were to paint it
black. The objection to spreading anything all over
the world is that, among other things, you have to spread
it very thin.
But America, which Mn Wells takes as a model, is in
another sense rather a warning. Mr. Wells says very
truly that there was a moment in history when America
might well have broken up into independent states like
those of Europe. He seems to take it for granted that
it was in all respects an advantage that this was avoided.
Yet there is surely a case, however mildly we put it, for
a certain importance in the world still attaching to Europe.
There are some who find France as interesting as Florida ;
and who think they can learn as much about history and
humanity in the marble cities of the Mediterranean as in
the wooden towns of the Middle West. Europe may
236 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
have been divided, but it was certainly not destroyed;
nor has its peculiar position in the culture of the world
been destroyed. Nothing has yet appeared capable of
completely eclipsing it, either in its extension in America
or its imitation in Japan. But the immediate point here
is perhaps a more important one* There is now no
creed accepted as embodying the common sense of all
Europe, as the Catholic creed was accepted as embodying
it in mediaeval times. There is no culture broadly su
perior to all others, as the Mediterranean culture was su
perior to that of the barbarians in Roman times. If
Europe were united in modern times, it would probably
be by the victory of one of its types over others, pos
sibly over all the others. And when America was uni
ted finally in the nineteenth century, it was by the vic
tory of one of its types over others. It is not yet cer
tain that this victory was a good thing. It is not yet
certain that the world will be better for the triumph of the
North over the Southern traditions of America. It
may yet turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of
the North Germans over the Southern traditions of
Germany and of Europe.
The men who will not face this fact are men whose
minds are not free. They are more crushed by Progress
than any pietists by Providence. They are not allowed
to question that whatever has recently happened was all
for the best. Now Progress is Providence without God.
That is, it is a theory that everything has always per
petually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheis
tic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far
more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no pur
pose, or if the purpose permits of human free will, then
in either case it is almost insanely unlikely that there
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 237
should be in history a period of steady and uninterrupted
progress ; or in other words a period in which poor be
wildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications,
without making a single mistake. What has to be ham
mered into the heads of most normal newspaper-readers
to-day is that Man has made a great many mistakes.
Modern Man has made a great many mistakes. Indeed,
in the case of that progressive and pioneering character,
one is sometimes tempted to say that he has made noth
ing but mistakes. Calvinism was a mistake, and Capi
talism was a mistake, and Teutonism and the flattery
of the Northern tribes were mistakes. In the French
the persecution of Catholicism by the politicians was a
mistake, as they found out in the Great War; when the
memory gave Irish or Italian Catholics an excuse for
hanging back. In England the loss of agriculture and
therefore of food-supply in war, and the power to stand
a siege, was a mistake. And in America the introduction
of the negroes was a mistake; but it may yet be found
that the sacrifice of the Southern white man to them
was even more of a mistake.
The reason of this doubt is in one word. We have
not yet seen the end of the whole industrial experiment;
and there are already signs of it coming to a bad end. It
may end in Bolshevism. It is more likely to end in the
Servile State. Indeed, the two things are not so differ
ent as some suppose, and they grow less different every
day. The Bolshevists have already called in Capitalists
to help them to crush the free peasants. The Capitalists
are quite likely to call in Labour leaders to whitewash
their compromise as social reform or even Socialism.
The cosmopolitan Jews who are the Communists in the
East will not find it so very hard to make a bargain with
238 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
the cosmopolitan Jews who are Capitalists in the West.
The Western Jews would be willing to admit a nominal
Socialism. The Eastern Jews have already admitted
that their Socialism is nominal. It was the Bolshevist
ileader himself who said, Russia is again a Capitalist
country. But whoever makes the bargain, and what
ever is its precise character, the substance of it will be
servile. It will be servile in the only rational and reliable
sense ; that is an arrangement by which a mass of men are
ensured shelter and livelihood, in return for being sub
jected to a law which obliges them to continue to labour.
Of course it will not be called the Servile State; it is very
probable that it will be called the Socialist State. But
nobody seems to realise how very near all the industrial
countries are to it. At any moment it may appear in
the simple form of compulsory arbitration; for compul
sory arbitration dealing with private employers is by
definition slavery. When workmen receive unemploy
ment pay, and at the same time arouse more and more
irritation by going on strike, it may seem very natural
to give them the unemployment pay for good and forbid
them the strike for good; and the combination of those
two things is by definition slavery. And Trotsky can
beat any Trust magnate as a strike-breaker; for he does
not even pretend that his compulsory labour is a free
bargain. If Trotsky and the Trust magnate come to
a working compromise, that compromise will be a Ser
vile State. But it will also be the supreme and by far
the most constructive and conclusive result of the in
dustrial movement in history; of the power of machinery
or money; of the huge populations of the modern cities;
of scientific inventions and resources; of all the things
before which the agricultural society of the Southern
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 239
Confederacy went down. But even those who cannot
see that commercialism may end in the triumph of slav
ery can see that the Northern victory has to a great ex
tent ended in the triumph of commercialism. And the
point at the moment is that this did definitely mean,
even at the time, the triumph of one American type over
another American type; just as much as any European
war might mean the triumph of one European type over
another, A victory of England over France would be
a victory of merchants over peasants; and the victory
of Northerners over Southerners was a victory of mer
chants over squires. So that that very unity, which Mr.
Wells contrasts so favourably with war, was not only it
self due to a war, but to a war which had one of the most
questionable and even perilous of the results of war.
That result was a change in the balance of power, the pre
dominance of a particular partner, the exaltation of a
particular example, the eclipse of excellent traditions
when the defeated lost their international influence. In
short, it made exactly the same sort of difference of which
we speak when we say that 1870 was a disaster to Europe,
or that it was necessary to fight Prussia lest she should
Prussianise the whole world. America would have
been very different if the leadership had remained with
Virginia. The world would have been very different
if America had been very different. It is quite reason
able to rejoice that the issue went as it did; indeed, as
I have explained elsewhere, for other reasons I do on
the whole rejoice in it. But it is certainly not self-evi
dent that it is a matter for rejoicing. One type of
American state conquered and subjugated another type
of American state ; and the virtues and value of the latter
were very largely lost to the world. So if Mr. Wells in-
240 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
sists on the parallel of a United States of Europe, he
must accept the parallel of a Civil War of Europe. He
must suppose that the peasant countries crush the indus
trial countries or vice versa; and that one or other of
them becomes the European tradition to the neglect of
the other. The situation which seems to satisfy him so
completely in America is, after all, the situation which
would result in Europe if the German Empire, let us
say, had entirely arrested the special development of the
Slavs; or if the influence of France had really broken off
short under the blow from Britain^ The Old South had
qualities of humane civilisation which have not sufficiently
survived ; or at any rate have not sufficiently spread. It
is true that the decline of the agricultural South has been
considerably balanced by the growth of the agricultural
West. It is true, as I have occasion to emphasise in
another place, that the West does give the New America
something that is nearly a normal peasantry, as a pen
dant to the industrial towns. But this is not an answer ;
it is rather an augmentation of the argument. In so far
as America is saved it is saved by being patchy; and
would be ruined if the Western patch had the same fate
as the Southern patch. When all is said, therefore, the
advantages of American unification are not so certain
that we can apply them to a world unification. The
doubt could be expressed in a great many ways and by
a great many examples. !For that matter, it is already
being felt that supremacy of the Middle West in politics
is inflicting upon other localities exactly the sort of local
injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling to
be free. It has already inflicted what amounts to re
ligious persecution, or the imposition of an alien moral
ity, on the wine-growing civilisation of California. In
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 241
a word, the American system is a good one as govern
ments go ; but it is too large, and the world will not be im
proved by making it larger. And for this reason alone
I should reject this second method of uniting England
and America; which is not only Americanising England,
but Americanising everything else.
But the essential reason is that a type of culture came
out on top in America and England in the nineteenth cen
tury, which cannot and would not be tolerated on top of
the world. To unite all the systems at the top, without
improving and simplifying their social organisation be
low, would be to tie all the tops of the trees together
where they rise above a dense and poisonous jungle, and
make the jungle darker than before. To create such a
cosmopolitan political platform would be to build a roof
above our own heads to shut out the sunlight, on which
only usurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk
about in the sun. This is no moment when industrial
intellectualism can inflict such an artificial oppression
upon the world. Industrialism itself is coming to see
dark days, and its future is very doubtful. It is split
from end to end with strikes and struggles for economic
life, in which the poor not only plead that they are starv
ing, but even the rich can only plead that they are bank
rupt. The peasantries are growing not only more pros
perous but more politically effective; the Russian moujik
has held up the Bolshevist Government of Moscow and
Petersburg; a huge concession has been made by Eng
land to Ireland; the League of Nations has decided for
Poland against Prussia. It is not certain that indus
trialism will not wither even in its own field ; it is certain
that its intellectual ideas will not be allowed to cover
every field; and this sort of cosmopolitan culture is one
242 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
of its ideas. Industrialism itself may perish; or on the
other hand industrialism itself may survive, by some
searching and scientific reform that will really guarantee
economic security to all. It may really purge itself of
the accidental maladies of anarchy and famine; and con
tinue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively clean
and humanely shielded machine; at any rate no longer
as a man-eating machine. Capitalism may clear itself
of its worst corruptions by such reform as is open to it ;
by creating humane and healthy conditions for labour,
and setting the labouring classes to work under a lucid
and recognised law. It may make Pittsburg one vast
model factory for all who will model themselves upon fac
tories; and may give to all men and women in its em
ployment a clear social status in which they can be con
tented and secure. And on the day when that social se
curity is established for the masses, when industrial cap
italism has achieved this larger and more logical organ
isation and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy
and ironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely
hover over all those graves in the Wilderness where lay
the bones of so many gallant gentlemen; men who had
also from their youth known and upheld such a social
stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade
and a slave a slave.
A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT
THE aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest
this thesis; that the very worst way of helping
Anglo-American friendship is to be an Anglo-
American. There is only one thing lower, of course,
which is being an Anglo-Saxon. It is lower, because
at least Englishmen do exist and Americans do exist;
and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imagine an
American and an Englishman in some way blended to
gether. But if Angles and Saxons ever did exist, they
are all fortunately dead now ; and the wildest imagination
cannot form the weakest idea of what sort of monster
would be made of mixing one with the other. But my
thesis is that the whole hope, and the only hope, lies not
in mixing two things together, but rather in cutting them
very sharply asunder. That is the only way in which
two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outside each
other to appreciate and admire each other. So long as
they are different and yet supposed to be the same,
there can be nothing but a divided mind and a staggering
balance. It may be that in the first twilight of time man
and woman walked about as one quadruped. But if they
did, I am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked
and kicked up its heels. Then the flaming sword of
some angel divided them, and they fell in love with each
other.
Should the reader require an example a little more
within historical range, or a little more subject to critical
tests, than the above prehistoric anecdote (which I need
243
244 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
not say was revealed to me in a vision) it would be easy
enough to supply them both in a hypothetical and a his
torical form. It is obvious enough in a general way
that if we begin to subject diverse countries to an identi
cal test, there will not only be rivalry, but what is far
more deadly and disastrous, superiority. If we institute
a competition between Holland and Switzerland as to the
relative grace and agility of their mountain guides, it will
be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy; it
will also be clear that certain facts about the configura
tion of Holland have escaped our international eye. If
we establish a comparison between them in skill and
industry in the art of building dykes against the sea, it
will be equally clear that the injustice falls the other way;
it will also be clear that the situation of Switzerland on
the map has received insufficient study. In both cases
there will not only be rivalry but very unbalanced and
unjust rivalry; in both cases, therefore, there will not
only be enmity but very bitter or insolent enmity. But
so long as the two are sharply divided there can be no
enmity because there can be no rivalry. Nobody can ar
gue about whether the Swiss climb mountains better than
the Dutch build dykes; just as nobody can argue about
whether a triangle is more triangular than a circle is
round.
This fancy example is alphabetically and indeed arti
ficially simple; but, having used it for convenience, I
could easily give similar examples not of fancy but of
fact. I had occasion recently to attend the Christmas
festivity of a club in London for the exiles of one of the
Scandinavian nations. When I entered the room the
first thing that struck my eye, and greatly raised my
spirits, was that the room was dotted with the colours of
A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 245
peasant costumes and the specimens of peasant crafts
manship. There were, of course, other costumes and
other crafts in evidence; there were men dressed like
myself (only better) in the garb of the modern middle
classes; there was furniture like the furniture of any
other room in London. Now, according to the ideal
formula of the ordinary internationalist, these things
that we had in common ought to have moved me to a
sense of the kinship of all civilisation. I ought to have
felt that as the Scandinavian gentleman wore a collar
and tie, and I also wore a collar and tie, we were brothers
and nothing could come between us. I ought to have
felt that we were standing for the same principles of
truth because we were wearing the same pair of trousers ;
or rather, to speak with more precision, similar pairs
of trousers. Anyhow, the pair of trousers, that cloven
pennon, ought to have floated in fancy over my head as
the banner of Europe or the League of Nations. I am
constrained to confess that no such rush of emotions
overcame me; and the topic of trousers did not float
across my mind at all. So far as those things were
concerned, I might have remained in a mood of mortal
enmity, and cheerfully shot or stabbed the best-dressed
gentleman in the room. Precisely what did warm my
heart with an abrupt affection for that northern nation
was the very thing that is utterly and indeed lamentably
lacking in my own nation. It was something corre
sponding to the one great gap in English history, corre
sponding to the one great blot on English civilisation. It
was the spiritual presence of a peasantry, dressed accord
ing to its own dignity, and expressing itself by its own
creations.
The sketch of America left by Charles Dickens is gen-
246 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
erally regarded as something which is either to be used
as a taunt or covered with an apology. Doubtless it was
unduly critical, even of the America of that day; yet
curiously enough it may well be the text for a true rec
onciliation at the present day. It is true that in this,
as in other things, the Dickensian exaggeration is itself
exaggerated. It is also true that, while it is over-em
phasised, it is not allowed for. Dickens tended too much
to describe the United States as a vast lunatic asylum;
but partly because he had a natural inspiration and imag
ination suited to the description of lunatic asylums. As
it was his finest poetic fancy that created a lunatic over
the garden wall, so it was his fancy that created a lunatic
over the western sea. To read some of the complaints,
one would fancy that Dickens had deliberately invented
a low and farcical America to be a contrast to his high
and exalted England. It is suggested that he showed
America as full of rowdy bullies like Hannibal Chollop,
or as ridiculous wind-bags like Elijah Pogram, while
England was full of refined and sincere spirits like Jonas
Chuzzlewit, Chevy Slime, Montague Tigg, and Mr. Peck
sniff. If Martin Chuzzlewit makes America a lunatic
asylum, what in the world does it make England? We
can only say a criminal lunatic asylum. The truth is, of
course, that Dickens so described them because he had a
genius for that sort of description; for the making of
almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as Quilp
or Fagin. He made these Americans absurd because he
was an artist in absurdity ; and no artist can help finding
hints everywhere for his own peculiar art. In a word,
he created a laughable Pogram for the same reason
that he created a laughable Pecksniff; and that was
only because no other creature could have created them.
A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 247
It is often said that we learn to love the characters in
romances as if they were characters in real life. I wish
we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we
love the characters in romances. There are a great many
human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and
even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them
as people in a story. Martin Chuzzlewit is itself indeed an
unsatisfactory and even unfortunate example; for it is,
among its author s other works, a rather unusually harsh
and hostile story. I do not suggest that we should feel
towards an American friend that exact shade or tint of
tenderness that we feel towards Mr. Hannibal Chollop.
Our enjoyment of the foreigner should rather resemble
our enjoyment of Pickwick than our enjoyment of Peck
sniff. But there is" this amount of appropriateness even
in the particular example ; that Dickens did show in both
countries how men can be made amusing to each other.
So far the point is not that he made fun of America, but
that he got fun out of America. And, as I have already
pointed out, he applied exactly the same method of
selection and exaggeration to England. In the other
English stories, written in E more amiable mood, he
applied it in a more amiable manner; but he could apply
it to an American too, when he was writing in that mood
and manner. We can see it in the witty and withering
criticism delivered by the Yankee traveller in the musty
refreshment room of Mugby Junction ; a genuine example
of a genuinely American fun and freedom satirising a
genuinely British stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody ex
pects the American traveller to admire the refreshments at
Mugby Junction ; but he might admire the refreshment at
one of the Pickwickian inns, especially if it contained
Pickwick. Nobody expects Pickwick to like Pogram;
248 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
but he might like the American who made fun of Mugby
Junction. But the point is that, while he supported him
in making fun, he would also think him funny. The two
comic characters could admire each other, but they would
also be amused at each other. And the American would
think the Englishman funny because he was English;
and a very good reason too. The Englishman would
think the American amusing because he was American;
nor can I imagine a better ground for his amusement.
Now many will debate on the psychological possibility
of such a friendship founded on reciprocal ridicule, or
rather on a comedy of comparisons. But I will say of
this harmony of humours what Mr. H. G. Wells says
of his harmony of states in the unity of his World State.
If it can be truly impossible to have such a peace, then
there is nothing possible except war. If we cannot have
friends in this fashion, then we shall sooner or later
have enemies in some other fashion. There is no hope
in the pompous impersonalities of internationalism.
And this brings us to the real and relevant mistake of
Dickens. It was not in thinking his Americans funny,
but in thinking them foolish because they were funny.
In this sense it will be noticed that Dickens s American
sketches are almost avowedly superficial; they are de
scriptions of public life and riot private life. Mr. Jeffer
son Brick had no private life. But Mr. Jonas Chuzzle-
wit undoubtedly had a private life; and even kept some
parts of it exceeding private. Mr. Pecksniff was also a
domestic character; so was Mr. Quilp. Mr. Pecksniff
and Mr. Quilp had slightly different ways of surprising
their families ; Mr. Pecksniff by playfully observing
Boh! when he came home; Mr. Quilp by coming
home at all. But we can form no picture of how Mr.
A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 249
Hannibal Chollop playfully surprised his family; possi
bly by shooting at them ; possibly by not shooting at them.
We can only say that he would rather surprise us by
having a family at all. We do not know how the
Mother of the Modern Gracchi managed the Modern
Gracchi; for her maternity was rather a public than
private office. We have no romantic moonlit scenes of
the love-making of Elijah Pogram, to balance against
the love story of Seth Pecksniff. These figures are all
in a special sense theatrical; all facing one way and lit
up by a public limelight. Their ridiculous characters are
detachable from their real characters, if they have any
real characters. And the author might perfectly well
be right about what is ridiculous, and wrong about what
is real. He might be as right in smiling at the Pograms
and the Bricks as in smiling at the Pickwicks and the
Boffins. And he might still be as wrong in seeing Mr.
Pogram as a hypocrite as the great Buzfuz was wrong
in seeing Mr. Pickwick as a monster of revolting heart-
lessness and systematic villainy. He might still be as
wrong in thinking Jefferson Brick a charlatan and a
cheat as was that great disciple of Lavater, Mrs. Wilfer,
in tracing every wrinkle of evil cunning in the face of
Mrs. Boffin. For Mr. Pickwick s spectacles and gaiters
and Mrs. Boffin s bonnets and boudoir are after all super
ficial jokes; and might be equally well seen whatever
we saw beneath them. A man may smile and smile and
be a villain; but a man may also make us smile and
not be a villain. He may make us smile and not even be a
fool. He may make us roar with laughter and be an
exceedingly wise man.
Now that is the paradox of America which Dickens
never discovered. Elijah Pogram was far more fantas-
250 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
tic than his satirist thought; and the most grotesque
feature of Brick and Chollop was hidden from him.
The really strange thing was that Pogram probably did
say, Rough he may be. So air our bars. Wild he may
be. So air our buffalers, and yet was a perfectly intelli
gent and public-spirited citizen while he said it. The
extraordinary thing is that Jefferson Brick may really
have said, The libation of freedom must sometimes be
quaffed in blood/ and yet Jefferson Brick may have
served freedom, resisting unto blood. There really has
been a florid school of rhetoric in the United States
which has made it quite possible for serious and sensible
men to say such things. It is amusing simply as a differ
ence of idiom or costume is always amusing; just as Eng
lish idiom and English costume are amusing to Ameri
cans. But about this kind of difference there can be no
kind of doubt. So sturdy not to say stuffy a materialist
as Ingersoll could say of so shoddy not to say shady a
financial politician as Blaine, Like an armed warrior,
like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine strode down the
hall of Congress, and flung his spear full and true at the
shield of every enemy of his country and every traducer
of his fair name. Compared with that, the passage
about bears and buffaloes, which Mr. Pogram delivered
in defense of the defaulting post-master, is really a very
reasonably and appropriate statement. For bears and
buffaloes are wild and rough and in that sense free ; while
plumed knights do not throw their lances about like the
assegais of Zulus. And the defaulting post-master was
at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion as
James G. Blaine of the Little Rock Railway. But any
body who treated Ingersoll or Blaine merely as a fool
A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 251
and a figure of fun would have very rapidly found out
his mistake. But Dickens did not know Brick or Chollop
long enough to find out his mistake. It need not be
denied that, even after a full understanding, he might
still have found things to smile at or to criticise. I do
not insist on his admitting that Hannibal Chollop was
as great a hero as Hannibal, or that Elijah Pogram was as
true a prophet as Elijah. But I do say very seriously
that they had something about their atmosphere and
situation that made possible a sort of heroism and
even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural at
that period in that Merry England whose comedy and
common sense we sum up under the name of Dickens.
When we joke about the name of Hannibal Chollop, we
might remember of what nation was the general who
dismissed his defeated soldiers at Appomatox with
words which the historian has justly declared to be
worthy of Hannibal : We have fought through this war
together. I have done my best for you. It is not fair to
forget Jefferson, or even Jefferson Davis, entirely in
favour of Jefferson Brick.
For all these three things, good, bad, and indifferent,
go together to form something that Dickens missed,
merely because the England of his time most disastrously
missed it. In this case, as in every- case, the only way
to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to
measure the defect of our own country. For in this
matter the human mind is the victim of a curious little
unconscious trick, the cause of nearly all international
dislikes. A man treats his own faults as original sin
and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of
Adam. He supposes that men have then added their
252 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of
his own private vices. It would astound him to realise
that they have actually, by their strange erratic path,
avoided his vices as well as his virtues. His own faults
are things with which he is so much at home that he at
once forgets and assumes them abroad. He is so faintly
conscious of them in himself that he is not even conscious
of the absence of them in other people. He assumes
that they are there so that he does not see that they are
not there. The Englishman takes it for granted that a
Frenchman will have all the English faults. Then he
goes on to be seriously angry with the Frenchman for
having dared to complicate them by the French faults.
The notion that the Frenchman has the French faults
and not the English faults is a paradox too wild to cross
his mind.
He is like an old Chinaman who should laugh at Euro
peans for wearing ludicrous top-hats and curling up their
pig-tails inside them ; because obviously all men have pig
tails, as all monkeys have tails. Or he is like an old
Chinese lady who should justly deride the high-heeled
shoes of the West, considering them a needless addition
to the sufficiently tight and secure bandaging of the foot;
for, of course, all women bind up their feet, as all women
bind up their hair. What these Celestial thinkers would
not think of, or allow for, is the -wild possibility that we
do not have pig-tails although we do have top-hats, or
that our ladies are not silly enough to have Chinese feet,
though they are silly enough to have high-heeled shoes.
Nor should we necessarily have come an inch nearer to
the Chinese extravagances even if the chimney-pot hat
rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had
A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 253
evolved into a sort of stilts. By the same fallacy the
Englishman will not only curse the French peasant as a
miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar. That is,
he will first complain of the man having the surliness of
an independent man, and then accuse him of having the
servility of a dependent one. Just as the hypothetical
Chinaman cannot believe that we have top-hats but not
pig-tails, so the Englishman cannot believe that peasants
are not snobs even when they are savages. Or he sees
that a Paris paper is violent and sensational; and then
supposes that some millionaire owns twenty such papers
and runs them as a newspaper trust. Surely the Yellow
Press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow, as
the British Empire to paint it red. It never occurs to
such a critic that the French paper is violent because it is
personal, and personal because it belongs to a real and
responsible person, and not to a ring of nameless million
aires. It is a pamphlet, and not an anonymous pamphlet.
In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illus
trated ; the situation in which the black man first assumes
that all mankind is black, and then accuses the rest of
the artificial vice of painting their faces red and yellow,
or the hypocrisy of white-washing themselves after the
fashion of whited sepulchers. The particular case of
it now before us is that of the English misunderstanding
of America; and it is based, as in all these cases, on the
English misunderstanding of England.
For the truth is that England has suffered of late from
not having enough of the free shooting of Hannibal
Chollop ; from not understanding enough that the libation
of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood. The
prosperous Englishman will not admit this; but then
254 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
the prosperous Englishman will not admit that he has suf
fered from anything. That is what he is suffering from.
Until lately at least he refused to realise that many of his
modern habits had been bad habits, the worst of them
being contentment. For all the real virtue in content
ment evaporates, when the contentment is only satisfac
tion and the satisfaction is only self-satisfaction. Now
it is perfectly true that America and not England has seen
the most obvious and outrageous official denials of liberty.
But it is equally true that it has seen the most obvious
flouting of such official nonsense, far more obvious than
any similar evasions in England. And nobody who
knows the subconscious violence of the American charac
ter would ever be surprised if the weapons of Chollop
began to be used in that most lawful lawlessness. It is
perfectly true that the libation of freedom must some
times be drunk in blood, and never more (one would
think) than when mad millionaires forbid it to be drunk
in beer. But America, as compared with England, is the
country where one can still fancy men obtaining the liba
tion of beer by the libation of blood. Vulgar plutocracy
is almost omnipotent in both countries ; but I think there
is now more kick of reaction against it in America than
in England. The Americans may go mad when they
make laws ; but they recover their reason when they dis
obey them. I wish I could believe that there was as
much of that destructive repentance in England; as indeed
there certainly was when Cobbett wrote. It faded gradu
ally like a dying fire through the Victorian era; and it
was one of the very few realities that Dickens did not
understand. But any one who does understand it will
know that the days of Cobbett saw the last lost fight for
English democracy; and that if he had stood at that turn-
A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 255
ing of the historic road, he would have wished a better
fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against the first
machinery, and luck to the Luddite fires.
Anyhow, what is wanted is a new Martin Chuzzelwit,
told by a wiser Mark Tapley. It is typical of something
sombre and occasionally stale in the mood of Dickens
when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is not
really very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow
of Sam Weller. But if Dickens had written it in a hap
pier mood, there might have been a truer meaning in
Mark Tapley s happiness. For it is true that this illogi
cal good humour amid unreason and disorder is one of
the real virtues of the English people. It is the real
advantage they have in that adventure all over the world,
which they were recently and reluctantly induced to call
an Empire. That receptive ridicule remains with them
as a secret pleasure when they are colonists or convicts.
Dickens might have written another version of the great
romance, and one in which America was really seen gaily
by Mark instead of gloomily by Martin. Mark Tapley
might really have made the best of America. Then
America would have lived and danced before us like Pick
wick s England, a fairyland of happy lunatics and lovable
monsters, and we might still have sympathised as much
with the rhetoric of Lafayette Kettle as with the rhetoric
of Wilkins Micawber, or with the violence of Chollop as
with the violence of Boythorn. That new Martin Chuz-
zlewit will never be written; and the loss of it is more
tragic than the loss of Edwin Drood. But every man
who has travelled in America has seen glimpses and epi
sodes in that untold tale; and far away on the Red-
Indian- frontiers or in the hamlets in the hills of Pennsyl
vania, there are people whom I met for a few hours or a
256 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
few moments, whom I none the less sincerely admire and
honour because I cannot but smile as I think of them. But
the converse is also true ; they have probably forgotten me ;
but if they remember they laugh.
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA
**-" " "***
I SUGGEST that diplomatists of the internationalist
school should spend some of their money on staging
farces and comedies of cross-purposes, founded on
the curious and prevalent idea that England and Amer
ica have the same language. I know, of course, that we
both inherit the glorious tongue of Shakespeare, not to
mention the tune of the musical glasses; but there have
been moments when I thought that if we spoke Greek
and they spoke Latin we might understand each other
better. For Greek and Latin are at least fixed, while
American at least is still very fluid. I do not know the
American language, and therefore I do not claim to dis
tinguish between the American language and the Ameri
can slang. But I know that highly theatrical develop
ments might follow on taking the words as part of the
English slang or the English language. I have already
given the example of calling a person a regular guy,
which in the States is a graceful expression of respect
and esteem, but which on the stage, properly handled,
might surely lead the way towards a divorce or duel or
something lively. Sometimes coincidence merely clinches
a mistake, as it often clinches* a misprint. Every proof
reader knows that the worst misprint is not that which
makes nonsense but that which makes sense; not
that which is obviously wrong but that which is hid
eously right. He who has essayed to write he got the
book/ and has found it rendered mysteriously as he got
the boob is pensively resigned. It is when it is rendered
257
258 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
quite lucidly as he got the boot that he is moved to a
more passionate mood of regret. I have had conver
sations in which this sort of accident would have wholly
misled me, if another accident had not come to the res
cue. An American friend of mine was telling me of his
adventures as a cinema-producer down in the south-west
where real Red Indians were procurable. He said that
certain Indians were Very bad actors. It passed for me
as a very ordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural
deficiency. It would hardly seem a crushing criticism to
say that some wild Arab chieftain was not very good at
imitating a farmyard ; or that the Grand Llama of Thibet
was rather clumsy at making paper boats. But the re
mark might be natural in a man travelling in paper
boats, or touring with an invisible farmyard- for his
menagerie. As my friend was a cinema-producer, I
supposed he meant that the Indians were bad cinema ac
tors. But the phrase has really a high and austere moral
meaning, which my levity had wholly missed. A bad
actor means a man whose actions are bad or morally rep
rehensible. So that I might have embraced a Red
Indian who was dripping with gore, or covered with
atrocious crimes, imagining there was nothing the matter
with him beyond a mistaken choice of the theatrical pro
fession. Surely there are here the elements of a play,
not to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England
village maiden might find herself among the wigwams
in the power of the formidable and fiendish Little Blue
Bison, merely through her mistaken sympathy with his
financial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me
glimpses of all sorts of dissolving views of primeval
forests and flamboyant theatres; but this impulse of ir
relevant theatrical production must be curbed. There is
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 259
one example, however, of this complication of language
actually used in contrary senses, about which the same
figure can be used to illustrate a more serious fact.
Suppose that, in such an international interlude, an
English girl and an American girl are talking about the
fiance of the former, who is coming to call. The English
girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on the stage), the
American girl will of course have short hair and skirts
and will be cynical; Americans being more completely
free from cynicism than any people in the world. It is
the great glory of Americans that they are not cynical ;
for that matter, English aristocrats are hardly ever
haughty ; they understand the game much better than that.
But on the stage, anyhow, the American girl may say, re
ferring to her friend s fiance, with a cynical wave of the
cigarette, I suppose he s bound to come and see you/
And at this the blue blood of the Vere de Veres will boil
over; the English lady will be deeply wounded and in
sulted at the suggestion that her lover only comes to see
her because he is forced to do so. A staggering stage
quarrel will then ensue, and things will gof from bad to
worse ; until the arrival of an Interpreter who can talk both
English and American. He stands between the two
ladies waving two pocket dictionaries, and explains the
error on which the quarrel turns. It is very simple ; like
the seed of all tragedies. In English he is bound to
come and see you means that he is obliged or constrained
to come and see you. In American it does; not. In
American it means that he is bent on coming to see you,
that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and will sur
mount any obstacle to do it. The two young ladies will
then embrace as the curtain falls.
Now when I was lecturing in America I was often
2<5o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
told, in a radiant and congratulatory manner, that such
and such a person was bound to come and hear me
lecture. It seemed a very cruel form of conscription,
and I could not understand what authority could have
made it compulsory. In the course of discovering my
error, however, I thought I began to understand certain
American ideas and instincts that lie behind this Amer
ican idiom. For as I have urged before, and shall often
urge again, the road to international friendship is
through really understanding jokes. It is in a sense
through taking jokes seriously. It is quite legitimate to
laugh at a man who walks down the street in three white
hats and a green dressing gown, because it is unfamiliar;
but after all the man has some reason for what he does ;
and until we know the reason we do not understand the
story, or even understand the joke. So the outlander
will always seem outlandish in custom or costume; but
serious relations depend on our getting beyond the fact
of difference to the things wherein it differs. A good
symbolical figure for all this may be found among the
people who say, perhaps with a self -revealing simplicity,
that they are bound to go to a lecture.
If I were asked for a single symbolic figure summing
up the whole of what seems eccentric and interesting
about America to an Englishman, I should be satisfied
to select that one lady who complained of Mrs. Asquith s
lecture and wanted her money back. I do not mean
that she was typically American in complaining ; far from
it. I, for one, have a great and guilty knowledge of all
that amiable American audiences will endure without
complaint. I do not mean that she was typically Amer
ican in wanting her money; quite the contrary. That
sort of American spends money rather than hoards it;
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 261
and when we convict them of vulgarity we acquit them of
avarice. Where she was typically American, summing
up a truth individual and indescribable in any other way,
is that she used these words : Tve risen from a sick-bed
to come and hear her, and I want my money back.
The element in that which really amuses an English
man is precisely the element which, properly analysed,
ought to make him admire an American. But my point
is that only by going through the amusement can he
reach the admiration. The amusement is in the vision
of a tragic sacrifice for what is avowedly a rather trivial
object. Mrs. Asquith is a candid lady of considerable
humour; and I feel sure she does not regard the experi
ence of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for
which the sick should thus suffer martyrdom. She also
is English; and had no other claim but to amuse Amer
icans and possibly to be amused by them. This being
so, it is rather as if somebody said, I have risked my
life in fire and pestilence to find my way to the music
hall, or, I have fasted forty days in the wilderness sus-/
tained by the hope of seeing Totty Toddles do her new
dance. And there is something rather more subtle in
volved here. There is something in an Englishman
which would make him feel faintly ashamed of saying
that he had fasted to hear Totty Toddles, or risen from
a sick-bed to hear Mrs. Asquith. He would feel it was
undignified to confess that he had wanted mere amuse
ment so much ; and perhaps that he had wanted anything
so much. He would not like, so to speak, to be seen
rushing down the street after Totty Toddles, or after
Mrs. Asquith, or perhaps after anybody. But there is
something in it distinct from a mere embarrassment at
admitting enthusiasm. He might admit the enthusiasm
262 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
if the object seemed to justify it; he might perfectly well
be serious about a serious thing. But he cannot under
stand a person being proud of serious sacrifices for what
is not a serious thing. He does not like to admit that
a little thing can excite him; that he can lose his breath
in running, or lose his balance in reaching, after some
thing that might be called silly.
Now that is where the American is fundamentally
different. To him the enthusiasm itself is meritorious.
To him the excitement itself is dignified. He counts it
a part of his manhood to fast or fight or rise from a bed
of sickness for something, or possibly for anything. His
ideal is not to be a lock that only a worthy key can open,
but a live wire that anything can touch or anybody can
use. In a word, there is a difference in the very defi
nition of virility and therefore of virtue. A live wire is
not only active, it is also sensitive. Thus sensibility be
comes actually a part of virility. Something more is
involved than the vulgar simplification of the American
as the irresistible force and the Englishman as the im
movable post. As a fact, those who speak of such things
nowadays generally mean by something irresistible some
thing simply immovable, or at least something unalter
able, motionless even in motion, like a cannon ball ; for
a cannon ball is as dead as a cannon. Prussian mili
tarism was praised in that way until it met a French
force of about half its size on the banks of the Marne.
But that is not what an American means by energy;
that sort of Prussian energy is only monotony without
repose. American energy is not a soulless machine; for
it is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. It is
a very small box for so big a thing; but it is not an
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 263
empty box. But the point is that he is not only proud
of his energy, he is proud of his excitement. He is not
ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in
him manly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel
of his machine breaks four billion butterflies an hour.
That is the point about American sport; that it is not
in the least sportive. It is because it is not very sportive
that we sometimes say it is not very sporting. It has the
vices of a religion. It has all the paradox of original
sin in the service of aboriginal faith. It is sometimes
untruthful because it is sincere. It is sometimes treach
erous because it is loyal. Men lie and cheat for it as they
lied for their lords in a feudal conspiracy, or cheated for
their chieftains in a Highland feud. We may say that
the vassal readily committed treason; but it is equally
true that he readily endured torture. So does the
American athlete endure torture. Not only the self-sacri
fice but/the solemnity of the American athlete is like that
of the American Indian. The athletes in the States have
the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, the great
historical nation without a sense of humour. They suffer
an ascetic regime not to be matched in any monasticism
and hardly in any militarism. If any tradition of these
things remains in a saner age, they will probably be re
membered as a mysterious religious order of fakirs or
dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted
in honour of Hercules or Caster and Pollux. And that
is really the spiritual atmosphere though the Gods have
vanished; and the religion is subconscious and therefore
irrational. For the problem of the modern world is that
is has continued to be religious when it has ceased to be
rational. Americans really would starve to win a cocoa-
264 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
nut shy. They would fast or bleed to win a race of
paper boats on a pond. They would rise from a sick-bed
to listen to Mrs. Asquith.
But it is the real reason that interests me here. It
is certainly not that Americans are so stupid as not to
know that cocoa-nuts are only cocoa-nuts and paper boats
only made of paper. Americans are, on an average,
rather more intelligent than Englishmen; and they are
well aware that Hercules is a myth and that Mrs. Asquith
is something of a mythologist. It is not that they do not
know that the object is small in itself; it is that they do
really believe that the enthusiasm is great in itself. They
admire people for being impressionable. They admire
people for being excited. An American so struggling
for some disproportionate trifle (like one of my lectures)
really feels in a mystical way that he is right, because
it is his whole morality to be keen. So long as he wants
something very much, whatever it is, he feels he has
his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of
society behind him, and God and the whole universe be
hind him. Wedged on one leg in a hot crowd at a
trivial lecture, he has self-respect; his dignity is at rest.
That is what he means when he says he is bound to
come to the lecture.
Now the Englishman is fond of occasional larks.
But these things are not larks; nor are they occasional.
It is the essential of the Englishman s lark that he should
think it a lark; that he should laugh at it even when he
does it. Being English myself, I like it ; but being Eng
lish myself, I know it is connected with weaknesses as
well as merits. In its irony there is condescension and
therefore embarrassment. This patronage is allied to the
patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratic tradi-
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 265
tion of society. The larks are a variant of laziness be
cause of leisure; and the leisure is a variant of the secur
ity and even supremacy of the gentleman. When an
undergraduate at Oxford smashes half a hundred win
dows, he is well aware that the incident is merely a
trifle. He can be trusted to explain to his parents and
guardians that it was merely a trifle. He does not say,
even in the American sense, that he was bound to smash
the windows. He does not say that he had risen from a
sick-bed to smash the windows. He does not especially
think he has risen at all; he knows he has descended
(though with delight, like one diving or sliding down the
banisters) to something flat and farcical and full of the
English taste for the bathos. He has collapsed into
something entirely commonplace; though the owners of
the windows may possibly not think so. This rather in
describable element runs through a hundred English
things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound
of proper names; so that even the yearning lover in a
lyric yearns for somebody named Sally rather than
Salome, and for a place called Wapping rather than a
place called Westermain. Even in the relapse into
rowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There
is also what is so large a part of comfort; carelessness.
The undergraduate breaks windows because he does not
care about windows, not because .he does care about more
fresh air like a hygienist, or about more light like a Ger
man poet. Still less does he heroically smash a hundred
windows because they come between him and the voice
of Mrs. Asquith. But least of all does he do it because
he seriously prides himself on the energy apart from its
aim, and on the will-power that carries it through. He
is not bound to smash the windows, even in the sense
266 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
of being bent upon it. He is not bound at all but rather
relaxed; and his violence is not only a relaxation but a
laxity. Finally, this is shown in the fact that he only
smashes windows when he is in the mood to smash
windows; when some fortunate conjunction of stars
and all the tints and nuances of nature whisper to
him that it would be well to smash windows. But the
American is always ready, at any moment, to waste his
energies on the wilder and more suicidal course of going
to lectures. And this is because to him such excitement
is not a mood but a moral ideal. As I note in another
connection, much of the English mystery would be clear
to Americans if they understood the word mood.
Englishmen are very moody, especially when they smash
windows. But I doubt if many Americans understand
exactly what we mean by the mood ; especially the passive
mood.
It is only by trying to get some notion of all this that
an Englishman can enjoy the final crown and fruit of all
international friendship ; which is really liking an Ameri
can to be American. If we only think that parts of him
are excellent because parts of him are English, it would
be far more sensible to stop at. home and possibly enjoy
the society of a whole complete Englishman. But any
body who does understand this can take the same pleasure
in an American being American that he does in a
thunderbolt being swift and a barometer being sensitive.
He can see that a vivid sensibility and vigilance really
radiate outwards through all the ramifications of
machinery and even of materialism. He can see
that the American uses his great practical, powers
upon very small provocation; but he can also
see that there is a kind of sense of honour, like that of a
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 267
duellist, in his readiness to be provoked. Indeed, there
is some parallel between the American man of action,
however vulgar his aims, and the old feudal, idea of the
gentleman with a sword at his side. The gentleman may
have been proud of being strong or sturdy; he may too
often have been proud of being thick-headed ; but he was
not proud of being thick-skinned. On the contrary, he
was proud of being thin-skinned. He also seriously
thought that sensitiveness was a part of masculinity. It
may be very absurd to read of two Irish gentlemen try
ing to kill each other for trifles, or of two Irish- Ameri
can millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash. But
the very pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose
illustrates the same conception; which may be called the
virtue of excitability. And it is really this, and not any
rubbish about iron will-power and masterful mentality,
that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos and
its industrial ideals. Being a live wire does not mean that
the nerves should be like wires; but rather that the very
wires should be like nerves.
Another approximation to the truth would be to say that
an American is really not ashamed of curiosity. It is not
so simple as it looks. Men will carry off curiosity with
various kinds of laughter and bravado, just as they will
carry off drunkenness or bankruptcy. But very few peo
ple are really proud of lying on a door-step, and very few
people are really proud of longing to look through a key
hole. I do not speak of looking through it, which
involves questions of honour and self-control; but few
people feel that even the desire is dignified. Now
I fancy the American, at least by comparison with
the Englishman, does feel that his curiosity is consistent
with his dignity, because dignity is consistent with
268 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
vivacity. He feels it is not merely the curiosity
of Paul Pry, but the curiosity of Christopher Columbus.
He is not a spy but an explorer; and he feels
his greatness rather grow with his refusal to turn back,
as a traveller might feel taller and taller as he neared the
source of the Nile or the North-West passage. Many
an Englishman has had that feeling about discoveries in
dark continents; but he does not often have it about dis
coveries in daily life. The one type does believe in the
indignity and the other in the dignity of the detective.
It has nothing to do with ethics in the merely external
sense. It involves no particular comparison in practical
morals and manners. It is something in the whole poise
and posture of the self ; of the way a man carries himself.
For men are not only affected by what they are ; but still
more, when they are fools, by what they think they are ;
and when they are wise, by what they wish to be.
There are truths that have almost become untrue by
becoming untruthful. There are statements so often stale
and insincere that one hesitates to use them, even when
they stand for something more subtle. This point about
curiosity is not the conventional complaint against the
American interviewer. It is not the ordinary joke against
the American child. And in the same way I feel the dan
ger of it being identified with the cant about a young
nation if I say that it has some of the attractions, not of.
American childhood, but of real childhood. There is
some truth in the tradition that the children of wealthy
Americans tend to be too precocious and luxurious. But
there is a sense in which we can really say that if the chil
dren are like adults, the adults are like children. And that
sense is in the very best sense of childhood. It is some
thing which the modern world does not understand.
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 269
It is something that modern Americans do not under
stand, even when they possess it; but I think they do
possess it.
The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose ; and the
text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes
is, The kingdom of heaven is within you. That text
has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs
and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas
in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction
with the peace that passes all understanding. And the
text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares
that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little
child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit ;
but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about
what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that
one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike
thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and
his power of wonder at the world. We might almost
say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom
within is that we look for it somewhere else.
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND
NINE times out of ten a man s broad-mindedness
is necessarily the narrowest thing about him.
This is not particularly paradoxical ; it is, when
we come to think of it, quite inevitable. His vision of
his own village may really be full of varieties ; and even
his vision of his own nation may have a rough resem
blance to the reality. But his vision of the world is
probably smaller than the world. His vision of the
universe is certainly much smaller than the universe.
Hence he is never so inadequate as when he is universal ;
he is never so limited as when he generalises. This
is the fallacy in many modern attempts at a creedless
creed, at something variously described as essential
Christianity or undenominational religion or a world
faith to embrace all the faiths in the world. It is that
every sectarian is more sectarian in his unsectarianism
than he is in his sect. The emancipation of a Baptist
is a very Baptist emancipation. The charity of a
Buddhist is a very Buddhist charity, and very different
from Christian charity. When a philosophy embraces
everything it generally squeezes everything, and squeezes
it out of shape; when it digests it necessarily assimilates.
When a theosophist absorbs Christianity it is rather as a
cannibal absorbs Christian missionaries. In this
sense it is even possible for the larger thing to be
swallowed by the smaller; and for men to move about
not only in a Clapham sect but in a Clapham cosmos under
Clapham moon and stars.
But if this danger exists for all men, it exists espe-
270
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 271
daily for the Englishman. The Englishman is never so
insular as when he is imperial ; except indeed when he is
international. In private life he is a good friend and in
practical politics often a very good ally. But theoretical
politics are more practical than practical politics. And in
theoretical politics the Englishman is the worst ally the
world ever saw. This is all the more curious because he
has passed so much of his historical life in the character
of an ally. He has been in twenty great alliances and
never understood one of them. He has never been far
ther away from European politics than when he was fight
ing heroically in the thick of them. I myself think that
this splendid isolation is sometimes really splendid; so
long as it is isolation and does not imagine itself -to be
imperialism or internationalism. With the idea of being
international, with the idea of being imperial, comes the
frantic and farcical idea of being impartial. Generally
speaking, men are never so mean and false and hypocriti
cal as when they are occupied in being impartial. They
are performing the first and most typical of all the actions
of the devil ; they are claiming the throne of God. Even
when it is not hypotrisy but only mental confusion, it is
always a confusion worse and worse confounded. We
see it in the impartial historians of the Victorian Age,
who now seem far more Victorian than the partial
historians. Hallam wrote about the Middle Ages; but
Hallam was far less mediaeval than Macaulay; for
Macaulay was at least a fighter. Huxley had more
mediaeval sympathies than Herbert Spencer for the
same reason; that Huxley was a fighter. They both
fought in many ways for the limitations of their
own rationalistic epoch; but they were nearer the truth
than the men who simply assumed those limitations
272 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
as rational. The war of the controversionalists was
a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters. And
in the same way the Englishman never cuts a less con
vincing figure before other nations than when he tries to
arbitrate between them.
I have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity
of saving Anglo-American friendship, a necessity which
I myself feel rather too strongly to be satisfied with the
ambassadorial and editorial style of achieving it. I repeat
that the worst road to Anglo-American friendship is to
be Anglo-American; or, as the more illiterate would ex
press, to be Anglo-Saxon. I am more and more con
vinced that the way for the Englishman to do it is to be
English; but to know that he is English and not every
thing else as well. Thus the only sincere answer to Irish
nationalism is English nationalism, which is a reality;
and not English imperialism, which is a reactionary fic
tion, or English internationalism, which is a revolutionary
one.
For the English are reviled for their imperialism be
cause they are not imperialistic. They dislike it, which
is the real reason why they do it badly; and they do it
badly, which is the real reason why they are disliked when
they do it. Nobody calls France imperialistic because
she has absorbed Brittany. But everybody calls England
imperialistic because she has not absorbed Ireland. The
Englishman is fixed and frozen for ever in the attitude of
a ruthless conqueror; not because he has conquered such
people but because he has not conquered them ; but he is
always trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy
of a better cause. For the really native and vigorous
part of what is unfortunately called the British Empire
is not an empire at all, and does not consist of these
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 273
conquered provinces at all. It is not an empire but an
adventure; which is probably a much finer thing. It
was not the power of making strange countries similar
to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeing
strange countries because they were different from our
own. The adventurer did indeed, like the third son, set
out to seek his fortune, but not primarily to alter other
people s fortunes; he wished to trade with people rather
than to rule them. But as the other people remained
different from him, so did he remain different from them.
The adventurer saw a thousand strange things and re
mained a stranger. He was the Robinson Crusoe
on a hundred desert islands; and on each he remained
as insular as on his* own island.
What is wanted for the cause of England to-day is an
Englishman with enough imagination to love his country
from the outside as well as the inside. That is, we need
somebody who will do for the English what has never
been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish
peasantry or even any savage tribe. We want people who
can make England attractive; quite apart from disputes
about whether England is strong or weak. We want
somebody to explain, not that England is everywhere,
but what England is anywhere ; not that England is or is
not really dying, but why we do not want her to die. For
this purpose the official and conventional compliments or
claims can never get any farther than pompous abstrac
tions about Law and Justice and Truth ; the ideals which
England accepts as every civilised state accepts them,
and violates as every civilised state violates them. That
is not the way in which the picture of any people has ever
been painted on the sympathetic imagination of the world.
Enthusiasts for old Japan did not tell us that the Japs
274 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
recognised the existence of abstract morality; but that
they lived in paper houses or wrote letters with paint
brushes. Men who wished to interest us in Arabs did not
confine themselves to saying that they are monotheists or
moralists; they filled our romances with the rush of Arab
steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. What
we want is somebody who will do for the Englishman
with his front garden what was done for the Jap and his
paper house; who shall understand the Englishman with
his dog as well as the Arab with his horse. In a word,
what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that
really wants doing. It is to make England attractive as
a nationality, and even as a small nationality.
For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love
each other because they are alike. They will never
really do that unless they are really alike; and then they
will not be nations. Nations can love each other as men
and women love each other, not because they are alike but
because they are different. It can easily be shown, I
fancy, that in every case where a real public sympathy
was aroused for some unfortunate foreign people, it has
always been accompanied with a particular and positive
interest in their most foreign customs and their most
foreign externals. The man who made a romance of the
Scotch Highlander made a romance of his kilt and even
of his dirk ; the friend of the Red Indians was interested
in picture writing and had some tendency to be interested
in scalping. To take a more serious example, such na
tions as Serbia had been largely commended to inter
national consideration by the study of Serbian epics or
Serbian songs. The epoch of negro emancipation was
also the epoch of negro melodies. Those who wept over
Uncle Tom also laughed over Uncle Remus. And just
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 275
as the admiration for the Redskin almost became an apol
ogy for scalping, the mysterious fascination of the Afri
can has sometimes almost led us into the fringes of the
black forest of Voodoo. But the sort of interest that is
felt even in the scalp-hunter and the cannibal, the torturer
and the devil-worshipper, that sort of interest has never
been felt in the Englishman.
And this is 1 the more extraordinary because the English
man is really very interesting. He is interesting in a
special degree in this special manner; he is interesting
because he is individual. No man in the world is more
misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordi
nary sense national. A description of English life must
be a description of private life. In that sense there is no
public life. In that sense there is no public opinion.
There have never been those prairie fires of public opinion
in England which often sweep over America. At any
rate, there have never been any such popular revolutions
since the popular revolutions of the Middle Ages. The
English are a nation of amateurs; they are even a nation
of eccentrics. An Englishman is never more English
than when he is considered a lunatic by the other English
men. This can be clearly seen in a figure like Dr. John
son, who has become national not by being normal but
by being extraordinary. To express this mysterious
people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges
and heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gar
dens with large fences, and why they alone among Chris
tians have kept quite consistently the great Christian
glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and
stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words,
who study the souls of strange peoples. That would
be the true way to create a friendship between England
276 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
and America, or between England and anything else ; yes,
even between England and Ireland. For this justice at
least has already been done to Ireland; and as an in
dignant patriot I demand a more equal treatment for the
tiwo nations. :
I have already noted the commonplace that in order
to teach internationalism we must talk nationalism. We
must make the nations as nations less odious or mysterious
to each other. We do not make men love each other by
describing a monster with a million arms and legs but by
describing the men as men, with their separate and even
solitary emotions. As this has a particular application
to the emotions of the Englishman, I will expand the
topic yet further. Now Americans have a power that is
the soul and success of democracy, the power of spontane
ous social organisation. Their high spirits, their humane
ideals, are really creative, they abound in unofficial institu
tions ; we might almost say in unofficial officialism-. No
body who has felt the presence of all the leagues and guilds
and college clubs will deny that Whitman was national
when he said he would build states and cities out of the
love of comrades. When all this communal enthusiasm
collides with the Englishman, it too often seems literally
to leave him cold. They say he is reserved ; they possibly
think he is rude. And jthe Englishman, having been
taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take
the criticism as a compliment. He admits that he is re
served because he is stern and strong; or even that he is
rude because he is shrewd and candid. But as a fact he
is not rude and not especially reserved; at least reserve
is not the meaning of his reluctance. The real difference
lies, I think, in the fact that American high spirits are not
only high but level; that the hilarious American spirit is
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 277
like a plateau, and the humorous English spirit like a
ragged mountain range.
The Englishman is m6ody; which does not in the least
mean that the Englishman is morose. Dickens, as we all
feel in reading his books, was boisterously English.
Dickens was moody when he wrote Oliver Tzuist; but he
was also moody when he wrote Pickwick. That is, he
was in another and much healthier mood. The mood
was normal to him in the sense that nine times out of ten
he felt and wrote in that humorous and hilarious mood.
But he was, if ever there was one, a man of moods; and
all the more of a typical Englishman for being a man of
moods. But it was because of this, almost entirely, that
he had a misunderstanding with America.
In America there are no moods, or there is only one
mood. It is the same whether it is called hustle or uplift;
whether we regard it as the heroic love of comrades or
the last hysteria of the herd instinct. It has been said
of the typical English aristocrats of the Government offi
ces that they resemble certain ornamental fountains and
play from ten till four ; and it is true that an Englishman,
even an English aristocrat, is not always inclined to play
any more than to work. But American sociability is
not like the Trafalgar fountains. It is like Niagara. It
never stops, under the silent stars or the rolling storms.
There seems always to be the same human heat and
pressure behind it; it is like the central heating of hotels
as explained in the advertisements and announcements.
The temperature can be regulated ; but it is not. And it
is always rather overpowering for an Englishman, whose
mood changes like his own mutable and shifting sky.
The English mood is very like the English weather; it is
a nuisance and a national necessity. \
278 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
If any one wishes to understand the quarrel between
Dickens and the Americans, let him turn to that chapter
in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which young Martin has to re
ceive endless defiles and deputations of total strangers
each announced by name and demanding formal caluta-
tion. There are several things to be noticed about this
incident. To begin with, it did not happen to Martin
Chuzzlewit ; but it did happen to Charles Dickens. Dick
ens is incorporating almost without alteration a passage
from a diary in the middle of a story ; as he did when he
included the admirable account of the prison petition of
John Dickens as the prison petition of Wilkins Micawber.
There is no particular reason why even the gregarious
Americans should so throng the portals of a perfectly
obscure steerage passenger like young Chuzzlewit.
There was every reason why they should throng the
portals of the author of Pickwick and Oliver Twist.
And no doubt they did. If I may be permitted the alea
tory image, you bet they did. Similar troops of
sociable human beings have visited much more insignif
icant English travellers in America, with some of whom
I am myself acquainted. I myself have the luck to be a
little more stodgy and less sensitive than many of my
countrymen; and certainly less sensitive than Dickens.
But I know what it was that annoyed him about that
unending and unchanging stream of American visitors;
it was the unending and unchanging stream of American
sociability and high spirits. A people living on such a
lofty but level tableland do not understand the ups and
downs of the English temperament; the temper of a
nation of eccentrics or (as they used to be called) of
humorists. There is something very national in the very
name of the old play of Every Man in His Humour.
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 279
But the play more often acted in real life is Every Man
Out of His Humour/ It is true, as Matthew Arnold
said, that an Englishman wants to do as he likes ; but it is
not always true even that he likes what he likes. An
Englishman can be friendly and yet not feel friendly.
Or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. Or
he can feel hospitable and yet not welcome those whom
he really loves. He can think, almost with tears of
tenderness, about people at a distance who would be
bares if they came in at the door.
American sociability sweeps away any such subtlety.
It cannot be expected to understand the paradox or
perversity of the Englishman, who thus can feel friendly
and avoid friends. That is the truth in the suggestion
that Dickens was sentimental. It means that he prob
ably felt most sociable when he was solitary. In all
these attempts to describe the indescribable, to indicate
the real but unconscious differences between the two
peoples, I have tried to balance my words without the
irrelevant bias of praise and blame. Both characteristics
always cut both ways. On one side this comradeship
makes possible a certain communal courage, a demo
cratic derision of rich men in high places, that is not
easy in our smaller and more stratified society. On
the other hand the Englishman has certainly more liberty,
if less equality and fraternity. But the richest compen
sation of the Englishman is not even in the word liberty/
but rather in the word poetry. That humour of escape
or seclusion, that genial isolation, that healing of wounded
friendship by what Christian Science would call
absent treatment, that is the best atmosphere of all for
the creation of great poetry ; and out of that came bare
ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang and thou
280 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
wast not made for death, immortal bird. In this sense
it is indeed true that poetry is emotion remembered in
tranquillity; which may be extended to mean affection
remembered in loneliness. There is in it a spirit not
only of detachment but even of distance; a spirit which
does desire, as in the old English rhyme, to be not only
over the hills but also far away. In other words, in so
far as it is true that the Englishman is an exception to the
great truth of Aristotle, it is because he is not so near to
Aristotle as he is to Homer. In so far as he is not by
nature a political animal, it is because he is a poetical
animal. We see it in his relations to the other animals ;
his quaint and almost illogical love of dogs and horses
and dependants whose political rights cannot possibly be
defined in logic. Many forms of hunting or fishing are
but an excuse for the same thing which the shameless
literary man does without any excuse. Sport is speech
less poetry. It would be easy for a foreigner, by taking
a few liberties with the facts, to make a satire about the
sort of silent Shelley who decides ultimately to shoot the
skylark. It would be easy to answer these poetic sug
gestions, by saying that he himself might be responsible
for ruining the choirs where late sweet birds sang,
or that the immortal bird was likely to be mortal when
he was out with his gun. But these international satires
are never just; and the real relations of an Englishman
and an English bird are far more delicate. It would be
equally easy and equally unjust to suggest a similar satire
against American democracy; and represent Americans
merely as birds of a feather who can do nothing but flock
together. But this again leaves out the fact that at least
it is not the white feather; that democracy is capable of
defiance and of death for an idea. Touching the souls
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 281
of great nations, these criticisms are generally false be
cause they are critical.
But when we are quite sure that we rejoice in a na
tion s strength, then and not before we are justified in
judging its weakness. I am quite sure that I rejoice
in any democratic success without arriere pensee ; and no
body who knows me will credit me with a covert sneer
at civic equality. And this being granted, I do think
there is a danger in the gregariousness of American so
ciety. The danger of democracy is not anarchy; as
I have said, it is convention. And it is touching this that
all my experience has increased my conviction that a great
deal that is called female emancipation has merely been
the increase of female convention. Now the males of
every community are far too conventional; it was the
females who were individual and criticised the conven
tions of the tribe. If the females become conventional
also, there is a danger of individuality being lost. This
indeed is not peculiar to America; it is common to the
whole modern industrial world, and to everything which
substitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the state for
the personal atmosphere of the home. But it is empha
sised in America by the curious contradiction that Ameri
cans do in theory value and even venerate the individual.
But individualism is the reverse of individuality. Where
men are trying to compete with each other they are try
ing to copy each other. They become standardised by
the very standard of self. Personality, in becoming a
conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal. In this respect
perhaps there is really something to be learnt from the
Englishman with his turn or twist in the direction of
private life. Those who have travelled in such a fash
ion as to see all the American hotels and none of the
282 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
American houses are sometimes driven to the excess of
saying that the Americans have no private life. But
even if the exaggeration has a hint of truth, we must bal
ance it with the corresponding truth; that the English
have no public life. They on their side have still to
learn the meaning of the public thing, the republic; and
how great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption
when the very state itself has become a state secret.
The English are patriotic; but patriotism is the un
conscious form of nationalism. It is being national with
out understanding the meaning of a nation. The Ameri
cans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept moving too
much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations
to superficiality and fashion; too much aware of outside
opinion and with too much appetite for outside criticism.
But the English are much too unconscious; and would
be the better for an increase in many forms of conscious
ness, including consciousness of sin. But even their"
sin is ignorance of their real virtue. The most admirable
English things are not the things that are most admired
by the English, or for which the English admire them
selves. They are things now blindly neglected and in
daily danger of being destroyed. It is all the worse that
they should be destroyed, because there is really nothing
like them in the world. That is why I have suggested a
note of nationalism rather than patriotism for the Eng
lish ; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not
as the nature of things. We say of some ballad from
the Balkans or some peasant costume in the Netherlands
that it is unique; but the good things of England really
are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars
and revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique.
The particular kind of beauty there is in an English
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 283
village, the particular kind of humour there is in an Eng
lish public-house, are things that cannot be found in
lands where the village is far more simply and equally
governed, or where the vine is far more honourably
served and praised. Yet we shall not save them by
merely sinking into them with the conservative sort of
contentment, even if the commercial capacity of our
plutocratic reforms would allow us to do so. We must
in a sense get far away from England in order to behold
her ; we must rise above patriotism in order to be practi
cally patriotic; we must have some sense of more varied
and remote things before these vanishing virtues can be
seen suddenly for what they are; almost as one might
fancy that a man would have to rise to the dizziest heights
of the divine understanding before he saw, as from a
peak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing
soul.
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
THE title of this final chapter requires an apology.
I do not need be reminded, alas, that the whole
book requires an apology. It is written in ac
cordance with a ritual or custom in which I could see no
particular harm, and which gives me a very interesting
subject, but a custom which it would be not altogether
easy to justify in logic. Everybody who goes to America
for a short time is expected to write a book; and nearly
everybody does. A man who takes a holiday at Trou-
ville or Dieppe is not confronted on his return with the
question, When is your book on France going to appear ?
A man who betakes himself to Switzerland for the
winter sports is not instantly pinned by the statement,
I suppose your History of the Helvetian Republic is
coming out this spring? Lecturing, at least my kind of
lecturing, is not much more serious or meritorious than
ski-ing or sea-bathing; and it happens to afford the holi
day-maker far less opportunity of seeing the daily life
of the people. Of all this I am only too well aware; and
my only defence is that I am at least sincere in my enjoy
ment and appreciation of America, and equally sincere
in my interest in its most serious problem, which I think
a very serious problem indeed; the problem of democracy
in the modern world. Democracy may be a very obvious
and facile affair for "plutocrats and politicians who only-
have to use it as a rhetorical term. But democracy is a
very serious problem for democrats. I certainly do not
apologise for the word democracy ; but I do apologise for
284
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 285
the word future. I am no Futurist; and any conjectures
I make must be taken with a grain of salt which is indeed
the salt of the earth; the descent and moderate humility
which comes from a belief in free will. That faith is in
itself a divine doubt. I do not believe in any of the
scientific predictions about mankind; I notice that they
always fail to predict any of the purely human develop
ments of men; I also notice that even their successes
prove the same truth as their failures; for their success
ful predictions are not about men but about machines.
But there are two things which a man may reasonably
do, in stating the probabilities of a problem, which do
not involve any claim to be a prophet. The first is to
tell the truth, and especially the neglected truth, about
the tendencies that have already accumulated in human
history; any miscalculation about which must at least
mislead us in any case. We cannot be certain of being
right about the future; but we can be almost certain of
being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the
past. The other thing that he can da is to note what
ideas necessarily go together by their own nature; what
ideas will triumph together or fall together. Hence it
foilows that this chapter must consist of two things.
The first is a summary of what has really happened to
the idea of democracy in recent times ; the second a sug
gestion of the fundamental doctrine which is necessary
for its triumph at any time.
The last hundred years have seen a general decline
in the democratic idea. If there be anybody left to
whom this historical truth appears a paradox, it is only
because during that period nobody has been taught his
tory, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of in
tellectual inquisition had been established, for the defini-
286 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
tion and differentiation of heresies, it would have been
found that the original republican orthodoxy had suffered
more and more from secessions, schisms and backslid-
ings. The highest point of democratic idealism and
conviction was towards the end of the eighteenth cent
ury, when the American .Republic was dedicated to the
proposition that all men are equal/ It was then that
the largest number of men had the most serious sort of
conviction that the political problem could be solved by
the vote of peoples instead of the arbitrary power of
princes and privileged orders. These men encountered
various difficulties and made various compromises in
relation to the practical politics of their time ; in England
they preserved aristocracy; in America they preserved
slavery. But though they had more difficulties, they had
less doubt. Since their time democracy has been steadily
disintegrated by doubts; and these political doubts have
been contemporary with and often identical with re
ligious doubts. This fact could be followed over almost
the whole field of the modern world; in this place it will
be more appropriate to take the great American ex
ample of slavery. I have found traces in all sorts of
intelligent quarters of an extraordinary idea that all
the Fathers of the Republic owned black men like beasts
of burden because they knew no better, until the light
of liberty was revealed to them by John Brown and Mrs.
Beecher Stowe. One of the best weekly papers in Eng
land said recently that even those who drew up the Dec
laration of Independence did not include negroes in its
generalisation about humanity. This is quite consistent
with the current convention, in which we were all brought
up; the theory that the heart of humanity broadens
in ever larger circles of brotherhood, till we pass from
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 287
embracing a black man to adoring a black beetle. Un
fortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts of
American history. The facts show that, in this problem
of the Old South, the eighteenth century was more lib
eral than the nineteenth century. There was more sym
pathy for the negro in the school of Jefferson than in
the school of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson, in the dark
estate of his simple Deism, said the sight of slavery in
hi*s country made him tremble, remembering that God
is just. His fellow Southerners, after a century of the
world s advance, said that slavery in itself was good,
when they did not go farther and say that negroes in
themselves were bad. And they were supported in this
by the great and growing modern suspicion that nature
is unjust. Difficulties seemed inevitably to delay justice,
to the mind of Jefferson ; but so they did to the mind of
Lincoln. But that the slave was human and the servitude
inhuman that was, if anything, clearer to Jefferson than
to Lincoln. The fact is that the utter separation and sub
ordination of the black like a beast was a progress; it was
a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and ex
periment; a triumph of science over superstition. It
was the way the world was going, as Mathew Arnold
reverentially remarked in some connection; perhaps as
part of a definition of God. Anyhow, it was not Jeffer
son s definition of God. He fancied, in his far-off pa-
triarchial way, a Father who had made all men brothers ;
and brutally unbrotherly as was the practice, such demo-
cratical Deists never dreamed of denying the theory.
It was not until the scientific sophistries began that
brotherhood was really disputed. Gobineau, who began
most of the modern talk about the superiority and in
feriority of racial stocks, was seized upon eagerly by the
288 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
less generous of the slave-owners and trumpeted as a
new truth of science and a new defence of slavery. It
was not really until the dawn of Darwinism, when all
our social relations began to smell of the* monkey-house,
that men thought of the barbarian as only a first and the
baboon as a second cousin. The full servile philosophy
has been a modern and even a recent thing; made in an
age whose inevitable deity was the Missing Link. The
Missing Link was a true metaphor in more ways than
one; and most of all in its suggestion of a chain.
By a symbolic coincidence, indeed, slavery grew more
brazen and brutal under the encouragement of more than
one movement of the progressive sort. Its youth was re
newed for it by the industrial prosperity of Lancashire;
and under that influence it became a commercial and
competitive instead of a patriarchal and customary thing,
We may say with no exaggerative irony that the uncon
scious patrons of slavery were Huxley and Cobden. The
machines of Manchester were manufacturing a great
many more things than the manufacturers knew en-
wanted to know; but they were certainly manufacturing
the fetters of the slave, doubtless out of the best quality
of steel and iron. But this is a minor illustration of
the modern tendency, as compared with the main stream
of scepticism which was destroying democracy. Evo
lution became more and more a vision of the break-up
of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth
century the genius of its greatest scientific romancer
saw it end in the anthropophagous antics of the Time
Machine. So far from evolution lifting us above the
idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least with
a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the
case of the American negroes, it may be remarked, it
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 289
does at any rate permit the preliminary course of roast
ing them. All this materialistic hardening, which re
placed the remorse of Jefferson, was part of the growing
evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of
the human race, or rather that there was really no such
thing as the human race. The South had begun by
agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. The
South ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the
emancipation of monkeys.
That is what had happened to the democratic ideal
in a hundred years. Anybody can test it by comparing
the final phase, I will not say with the ideal of Jefferson,
but with the ideal of Johnson. There was far more
horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century Tory like
Dr. Johnson than in a nineteenth-century democrat like
Stephen Douglas. Stephen Douglas may be mentioned
because he is a very representative type of the age of
evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents,
like Cecil Rhodes, human and hopeful in a truly
American fashion, and as a consequence cold and
careless rather than hostile in the matter of the old
mystical doctrines of equality. He did not care
whether slavery was voted up or voted down/ His
great opponent Lincoln did indeed care very much.
But it was an intense individual conviction with Lin
coln exactly as it was with Johnson. I doubt if the
spirit of the age was not much more behind Douglas
and his westward expansion of the white race. I am
sure that more and more men were coming to be in the
particular mental condition of Douglas ; men in whom
the old moral and mystical ideals had been undermined
by doubt, but only with a negative effect of indifference.
Their positive convictions were all concerned with what
290 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
some called progress and some imperialism. It is true
that there was a sincere sectional enthusiasm against
slavery in the North; and that the slaves were actually
emancipated in the nineteenth century. But I doubt
whether the Aboliti onists would ever have secured Aboli
tion. Abolition was a by-product of the Civil War;
which was fought for quite other reasons. Anyhow, if
slavery had somehow survived to the age of Rhodes and
Roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, I doubt if the
slaves would ever have been emancipated at all. Cer
tainly if it had survived till the modern movement for
the Servile State, they would never have been emanci
pated at all. Why should the world take the chains off
the black man when it was just putting them on the white ?
And in so far as we owe the change to Lincoln, we owe
it to Jefferson. Exactly what gives its real dignity to
the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a primi
tive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up
the tables of an ancient law, against the trend of the
nineteenth century; repeating, We hold these truths to
be self-evident; that all men were created equal, being en
dowed by their Creator, etc./ to a generation that was
more and more disposed to say something like this : We
hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists ;
that all things looking like men were evolved somehow,
being endowed by heredity and environment with no
equal rights, but very unequal wrongs/ and so on. I do
not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have
founded a state ; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself,
it would never have overthrown a slave state. What
it did do, as I have said, was to produce some very won
derful literary and artistic flights of sceptical imagination.
The world did have new visions, if they were visions of
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 291
monsters in the moon and Martians striding about like
spiders as tall as the sky, and the workmen and capitalists
becoming two separate species, so that one could devour
the other as gaily and greedily as a cat devours a bird.
No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells
and his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these
nightmares that were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth
century. They meant that the bottom had fallen out
of the mind at last, that the bridge of brotherhood had
broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the
chasms this infernal light like a dawn. All had grown
dizzy with degree and relativity; so that there would not
be so very much difference between eating dog and eating
darkie, or between eating darkie and eating dago. There
were different sorts of apes ; but there was no doubt that
we were the superior sort.
Against all this irresistible force stood one immovable
post. Against all this dance of doubt and degree stood
something that can best be symbolished by a simple exam
ple. An ape cannot be a priest, but a negro can be a
priest. The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially
the Catholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irre
vocably to the manhood of all men. Where its faith was
fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even
by surrender. It could not gradually dilute democracy,
as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. There
stood, in fact or in* possibility, the solid and smiling figure
of a black bishop. And he was either a man claiming the
most towering spiritual privileges of a man, or he was
the mere buffoonery and blasphemy of a monkey in a
mitre. That is the point about Christian and Catholic
democracy; it is not that it is necessarily at any moment
more democratic, it is that its indestructible minimum
292 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
of democracy really is indestructible. And by the nature
of things that mystical democracy was destined to survive,
when every other sort of democracy was free to destroy
itself. And whenever democacy destroying itself is sud
denly moved to save itself, it always grasps at a rag or
tag of that old tradition that alone is sure of itself. Hun
dreds have heard the story about the mediaeval dema
gogue who went about repeating the rhyme
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
Many have doubtless offered the obvious answer to the
question, The Serpent. But few seem to have
noticed what would be the more modern answer
to the question, if that innocent agitator went about pro
pounding it. Adam never delved and Eve never span,
for the simple reason that they never existed. They are
fragments of a Chaldeo-Babylonian mythos, and Adam
is only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pronounced Uttu.
For the real beginning of humanity we refer you to Dar
win s Origin of Species/ And then the modern man
would go on to justify plutocracy to the mediaeval man
by talking about the Struggle for Life and the Survival
of the Fittest; and how the strongest man seized authority
by means of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman
by behaving like a cad. Now I do not base my beliefs
on the theology of John Ball, or on the literal and mate
rialistic reading of the text of Genesis; though I think
the story of Adam and Eve infinitely less absurd and un
likely than that of the prehistoric strongest man who
could fight a hundred men. But I do note the fact that
the idealism of the leveller could be put in the form of
an appeal to Scripture, and could not be put in the form
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 293
of an appeal to Science. And I do note also that demo
crats were still driven to make the same appeal even in the
very century of Science. Tennyson was, if ever there
was one, an evolutionist in his vision and an aristocrat
in his sympathies. He was always boasting that John
Bull was evolutionary and not revolutionary, even as
these Frenchmen. He did not pretend to have any creed
beyond faintly trusting the larger hope. But when hu
man dignity is really in danger, John Bull has to use the
same old argument as John Ball. He tells Lady Clara
Vere de Vere that the gardener Adam and his wife smile
at the claim of long descent ; their own descent being by
no means long. Lady Clara might surely have scored off
him pretty smartly by quoting from Maud and In Mem-
oriam about evolution and the eft that was lord of valley
and hill. But Tennyson has evidently forgotten all about
Darwin-and the long descent of man. If this was true of
an evolutionist like Tennyson, it was naturally ten times
truer of a revolutionist like Jefferson. The Declaration
of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact
that God created* all men equal; and it is right; for if they
were not created equal, they were certainly evolved un
equal.
There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma
about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly sim
ple fact which the modern world will find out more and
more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of senti
mental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older
creeds. Those verbal associations are always, vain for
the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant. An idealist
may say to a capitalist, Don t you sometimes feel in the
rich twilight, when the lights twinkle from the distant
hamlet in the hills, that all humanity is a holy family?
294 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
But it is equally possible for the capitalist to reply with
brevity and decision, No, I don t/ and there is no more
disputing about it further than about the beauty of a fad
ing cloud. And the modern world of moods is a world
of clouds, even if some of them are thunderclouds.
For I have only taken here, as a convenient working
model, the case of negro slavery; because it was long
peculiar to America and is popularly associated with it.
It is more and more obvious that the line is no longer
running between black and white but between rich- and
poor. As I have already noted in the case of Prohibi
tion, the very same arguments, of the inevitable suicide
of the ignorant, of the impossibility of freedom for the
unfit, which were once applied to barbarians brought
from Africa are now applied to citizens born in America.
It is argued even by industrialists that industrialism has
produced a class submerged below the status of emanci
pated mankind. They imply that the Missing Link is
no longer missing, even from England or the Northern
States, and that the factories have manufactured their
own monkeys. Scientific hypotheses about the feeble
minded and the criminal type will supply the masters of
the modern world with more and more excuses for de
nying the dogma of equality in the case of white labour
as well as black. And any man who knows the world
knows perfectly well that to tell the millionaires, or their
servants, that they are disappointing the sentiments of
Thomas Jefferson, or disregarding a creed composed in
the eighteenth century, will be about as effective as
telling them that they are not observing the creed of
St. Athanasius or keeping the rule of St. Benedict.
The world cannot keep its own ideals. The secular
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 295
order cannot make secure any one of its own noble and
natural conceptions of secular perfection. That will be
found, as time goes on, the ultimate argument for a
Church independent of the world and the secular order:
What has become of all those ideal figures from the Wise
Man of the Stoics to the democratic Deist of the eight
eenth century? What has become of all that purely hu
man hierarchy or chivalry, with its punctilious pattern
of the good knight, its ardent ambition in the young
squire ? The very name of knight has come to represent
the petty triumph of a profiteer, and the very word squire
the petty tyranny of a landlord. What has become of
all that golden liberality of the Humanists, who found on
the high tablelands of the culture of Hellas the very bal
ance of repose in beauty that is most lacking in the mod
ern world? The very Greek language that they loved
has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons,
and a mere cock-shy for cheap and half -educated utilita
rians, who make it a symbol of superstition and reaction.
We have lived to see a time when the heroic legend of
the Republic and the Citizen, which seemed to Jefferson
the eternal youth of the world, has begun to grow old in
its turn. We cannot recover the earthly estate of knight
hood, to which all the colours and complications of her
aldry seemed as fresh and natural as flowers. We can
not re-enact the intellectual experiences of the Humanists,
for whom the Greek grammar was like the song of a bird
in spring. The more the matter is considered the clearer
it will seem that these old experiences are now only alive,
where they have found a lodgment in the Catholic tradi
tion of Christendom, and made themselves friends for
ever. St. Francis is the only surviving troubadour. St.
296 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
Thomas More is the only surviving Humanist. St. Louis
is the only surviving knight.
It would be the worse sort of insincerity, therefore,
to conclude even so hazy an outline of so great and majes
tic a matter as the American democratic experiment, with
out testifying my belief that to this also the same ultimate
test will come. So far as that democracy becomes or
remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will re
main democratic. In so far it does not, it will become
wildly and wickedly undemocratic. Its rich will riot with
a brutal indifference far beyound the feeble feudalism
which retains some shadow of responsibility or at least
of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into hea
then slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive
not merely in method but in aim; since they are but the
negations of the human appetites oi property and per
sonality. Eighteenth-century ideals, formulated in eight
eenth-century language, have no longer in themselves the
power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those
documents depended upon Deism ; their real strength will
survive in men who are still Deists. And the men who
are still Deists are more than Deists. Men will more and
more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if
there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no
meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of
significance and an authority that is the author of our
rights. There is truth in every ancient fable, and
there is here even something of it in the fancy that
finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore
the bolts of Jove. Owls and bats may wander where
they will in darkness, and for them as for the sceptics
the universe may have no centre ; kites and vultures may
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 297
linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the
plutocrats existence may have no origin and no end ; but it
was far back in the land of legends, where instincts find
their true images, that the cry went forth tha,t freedom is
an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.
THE END
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