The Twentieth Century American Part 4

"Shut your mouth," said Bill. "Maybe I don't know nothing now, but you bet I will by the time I get to 'Frisco."

The same spirit guides almost every young American who drifts West to tackle hopefully whatever job the G.o.ds may send. The cases wherein he has any destiny marked out for him or any especial preference as to the lines on which his future career shall run (except that he may hope ultimately to be President of the United States) are comparatively few.

In ten years, he may be a grocer or a banker or a dry-goods merchant or a real-estate man or a lawyer. Whatever he is, more likely than not ten years later he will be something else.

"What is your trade?" is the first question which an Englishman asks of an applicant for employment; and the answer will probably be truthful and certainly unimaginative.

"What can you do?" the American enquires under the same circ.u.mstances.

"'Most anything. What have you got to do?" is commonly the reply.

It is an extraordinarily impressive experience for an Englishman to go out from the old-established well-formulated ways of the club-life and street-life of London, to a.s.sist in--not merely to watch but to co-operate in--the organisation of society in the wilderness: to see a town grow up--indeed, so far as his clumsy ability in the handling of an ax will permit, to help to build it; to join the handful of men, bearded, roughly clad, and unlettered most of them, proceeding deliberately to the fas.h.i.+oning of the framework of government, the election of town officers, the appointment of a sheriff, and the necessary provisions, rough but not inadequate, for dealing with the grosser forms of crime. Quickly thereafter, in the case which I have especially in mind, came the formation of the county government and, simultaneously therewith, the opportunity (automatically and by mere right of the number of the population) to elect a representative to the Territorial Legislature. In the first year, however, this last privilege had to be pretermitted. The Territorial laws required that any member must have been resident in the district from which he came for not less than six months prior to his election and must be able to read and write; and, as cruel chance would have it, among the first prospectors to find their way into the new diggings in the preceding winter, who alone could comply with the required term of residence, not one could write his name. Had but one been able to do it ever so crudely--could one but have made a reasonable pretence of an ability to stumble through the opening paragraphs of the Const.i.tution of the United States,--that man would inevitably and unanimously have been elected a full-blown Legislator. As it was, the new district was perforce compelled to go without representation in the Territorial Capital.

"But," it will be objected, and by no one more quickly than by the American of the Eastern States, "All Americans do not go through these experiences. How many New Yorkers have helped to organise a new mining town?" Not many, certainly; and that is one of the reasons why New York is, perhaps, the least representative section of all the United States.

But though the American of to-day may not have had to do these things, his father and his grandfather had to. The necessity has long ago left New York, but Illinois was not far removed from the circ.u.mstances of frontier life when Abraham Lincoln was a youth; and the men who laid the foundations of Minneapolis, and Kansas City, and Omaha, and Duluth, are still alive. The frontiersman is latent in every American.

For the benefit of many Englishmen who think that they have been to the United States, when as a matter of fact they have only been to New York, it may be as well to explain why New York City is the least typically American of all parts of the country. There are some who go back as far as Revolutionary days for the explanation, and point out that even then New York was more loyalist than patriot; one might go even farther back and show that New York always had a conspicuously large non-Anglo-Saxon element. But there is no need to go back even to the Revolution. In the century that has pa.s.sed since then, the essential characteristics of the American character have been the products of the work which the people had to do in the subduing of the wilderness and of the isolation of the country--of its segregation from contact with the outside world. New York has been the one point in America farthest removed from the wilderness and most in touch with Europe, and it has been there that the chief forces which have moulded the American character have been least operative. The things in a New Yorker which are most characteristic of his New-Yorks.h.i.+p are least characteristically American, and among these is a much greater friendliness towards Great Britain than is to be found elsewhere except in one or two towns of specialised traits. This is not in any way to depreciate the position of New York as the greatest and most influential city in the United States, as well as (whatever may have been the relative standing of it and Boston up to twenty years ago) the literary and artistic centre of the country; and I do not know that any city of the world has a sight more impressive in its way than upper-middle New York--that is to say, than Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to the Park. But the English visitor who acquires his ideas of American sentiments from what he hears in New York dining-rooms or in Wall Street offices, is likely to go far astray. There is an instructive, if hackneyed, story of the little girl whose father boasted that she had travelled all over the United States. "Dear me!" said the recipient of the information, "she has travelled a great deal for one of her age!" "Yes, sir! all over the United States--all, except east of Chicago."

In the course of a long term of residence in the United States, this adaptability, this readiness to turn to whatever seems at the time to offer the best "opening" (which is so conspicuously a national trait but is not especially noticeable in the typical New Yorker) becomes so familiar that it ceases to be worth comment. I have seen among my own friends journalists become hotel managers, advertising solicitors turn to "real estate agents," merchants translated straight into responsible positions in the executive departments of railway companies, and railway men become merchants and bankers, editors change into engineers and engineers into editors, and lawyers into anything from amba.s.sadors to hotel clerks. I am not now speaking in praise of these conditions or of the results in individual cases. The point to be noticed is that the people among whom these conditions prevail must in the long run develop into a people of extraordinary resourcefulness and versatility. And in the individual cases, the results are not nearly as deplorable as an Englishman might suppose or as they would be if the raw material consisted of home-staying Englishmen.

The trait however is, as has been said, essentially an Anglo-Saxon trait--an English trait--and the colonial Englishman develops the same qualities in a not incomparable degree. The Canadian and the New Zealander acquire a like unconquerable soul, but the Englishman at home is not much impressed thereby, chiefly for the reason that he is almost as ignorant of the Canadian and the New Zealander as he is of the American, and with the same benevolent ignorance.

In the individual citizen of the United States, he recognises the quality in a vague way. "Yankee ingenuity" is familiar to him and he is interested in, and amused at, the imperturbability with which the individual American--and especially the individual American woman--confronts and rises at least equal to whatever new and unheard of conditions he (or she) may find himself (or herself) placed among in England. But just as the American will not from the likability and kindliness of individual Englishmen draw any general inference as to the likability and kindliness of the nation, so the Englishman or other European rarely gives to these occasional attributes, which he sees reproduced again and again in particular Americans, their proper value as the manifestations of a national trait of the first importance, a trait which makes the people unquestionably formidable as compet.i.tors in peace and would make them correspondingly formidable as antagonists in war. The trait is, as I have said, perhaps the most precious of all the American national a.s.sets.

Great Britain has recently had abundant evidence of the difficulty of turning out all the paraphernalia of victory ready made and is now making earnest effort to guard against the necessity of attempting it again. But the rules which apply to European peoples do not apply, with anything like equal force, to America. England in the South African war found by no means despicable fighting material almost ready made in her colonial troops; and that same material, certainly not inferior, America can supply in almost unlimited quant.i.ties. From the West and portions of the South, the United States can at any time draw immense numbers of men who, in the training of their frontier life, their ability to ride and shoot, their habituation to privations of every kind, possess all those qualities which made the Boers formidable, with the better moral fibre of the Anglo-Saxon to back them.

But this quality of resourcefulness and self-reliance is not a mere matter of the moral or physical qualities of the individual. Its spirit permeates the nation as a unit. The machinery of the government will always move in emergencies more quickly than that of any European country; and unpreparedness becomes a vastly less serious matter. The standing army of the United States, in spite of the events of the last few years, remains little more than a Federal police force; and with no mercantile marine to protect and no colonies, there has been till lately no need of an American navy. But the European who measures the unpreparedness of the nation in the terms of the unpreparedness of his own, or any other European, country, not taking into account the colonial character of the population, the alertness and audacity of the national mind, the resourcefulness and confident self-reliance of the people, is likely to fall into error.

The reverse of the medal is, perhaps, more familiar to Europeans, under the form of what has generally been called the characteristic American lack of the sentiment of reverence. The lack is indubitably there--is necessarily there; for what the Englishman does not commonly understand is that that lack is not a positive quality in itself. It is but the reflection, as it were, or complement, of the national self-reliance.

How should the American in his new country, with his "Particularist"

spirit, his insistence on the independence and sovereignty of the individual, seem to Europeans other than lacking in reverence?

It is true that now, by mere pa.s.sage of years, there are monuments in the United States which are beginning to gather the dignity and respect which naturally attach to age. The American of the present day has great veneration for the wisdom of the Fathers of the Republic, much love for the old buildings which are a.s.sociated with the birth of the nation.

Even the events of the Civil War are beginning to put on something of the majesty of antiquity, but there are still alive too many of the combatants in that war--who are obviously but commonplace men--for the figures of any but some three or four of the greatest of the actors to have yet a.s.sumed anything like heroic proportions. For the rest, what is there in the country which the living American has not made himself, or which his fathers did not make? The fabric of society is of too new a weaving, he knows too well the trick of it, for it to be wonderful in his eyes.

Lack of reverence is only a symptom of the American's strength--not admirable in itself, yet, as the index to something admirable, not, perhaps, altogether to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful.

The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman.

The American national character is, indeed, a finer thing than the European generally supposes. The latter sees only occasional facets and angles, offshoots and outgrowths, some of them not desirable but even grotesque in themselves, while those elements which unify and harmonise the whole are likely to escape him. The blunders of American diplomats--the _gaucheries_ and ignorances of American consular representatives--these are familiar subjects to Europeans; on them many a travelling Englishman has based his rather contemptuous opinion of the culture of the American people as a whole. But it is unsafe to argue from the inferiority of the representative to the inferiority of the thing represented.

If two fruit-growers have adjoining orchards and, for the purpose of making a display at an agricultural show, one spends months of careful nouris.h.i.+ng, training, and pruning of certain trees wherefrom he selects with care the finest of his fruit, while the other without preparation goes out haphazard to his orchard and reaches for the first fruit that he sees, it is probable that, judging by their exhibits, the public will get an erroneous idea of the characters of the orchards as a whole. And this is precisely the difference between the representatives whom the United States sends abroad and those sent to be displayed beside them by other nations.

There is no recognised diplomatic service in the United States, no school for the training of consular representatives, no training or nurturing or pruning of any sort. The fundamental objection of the American people to the creation of any permanent privileged cla.s.s, has made the thing impossible in the past, while, under the system of party patronage, practically the entire representation of the country abroad--commercial as well as diplomatic--is changed with each change of government. The American cannot count on holding an appointment abroad for more than four years; and while four years is altogether too short a term to be considered a career, it is over-long for a holiday. So in addition to the lack of any trained cla.s.s from which to draw, even among the untrained the choice is much restricted by the undesirability of the conditions of the service itself.

Though the conditions have improved immensely of late years, the fact remains that the consular service as a whole is not fairly to be compared on equal terms with that of other countries; and the majority of appointments are still made as the reward for minor services to the party in power. Nor are the conditions which govern the appointments to the less important diplomatic posts much different; but Great Britain has abundant cause to be aware that when the place is one which appeals to the ambition of first-cla.s.s men, first-cla.s.s men enough are forthcoming; though even Amba.s.sadors to London are generally lacking in any special training or experience up to the time of their appointment.

Sydney Smith's phrase has been often enough quoted--that when a woman makes a public speech, we admire her as we admire a dog that stands upon its hind legs, not because she does it well, but because she does it at all. Congress includes among its members many curious individuals and, as a unit, it does queer things at times. State legislatures are sometimes strange looking bodies of men and on occasions they achieve legislation which moves the country to mirth. The representatives of the nation abroad make blunders which contribute not a little to the gaiety of the world. But the thing to admire is that they do these things at all--that the legislators, whether Federal or State, and the members of the consular service, appointed or elected as they are, and from the cla.s.ses which they represent, do somehow manage to form legislative bodies which, year in and year out, will bear comparison well enough with other Parliaments, and do in one way and another succeed in giving their country a service abroad which is far from despicable as compared with that of other peoples, nor all devoid of dignity. The fact that results are not immeasurably worse than they are is no small tribute to the adaptability of the American character. There is no other national character which could stand the same test.

In the absence of any especially trained or officially dedicated cla.s.s, the American people in the ma.s.s provides an amazing quant.i.ty of not impossible material out of which legislators and consuls may be made--just as it might equally well be made into whatever should happen to be required.

And this fact strikes at the root of a common misapprehension in the minds of foreigners as to the const.i.tution of the American people, a misapprehension which is fostered by what is written by other foreigners after inadequate observation.

Much is thus written of the so-called heterogeneousness of the people of America. The Englishman who visits the United States for a few weeks only, commonly comes away with an idea that the New Yorker is the American people; whereas we have seen why it is that good American authorities maintain that in all the width and depth of the continent there is no aggregation of persons so little representative of the American people as a whole as the inhabitants of New York. After the Englishman has been in the United States for some months or a year or two, he grows bewildered and reaches the conclusion that there is no common American type--nothing but a patchwork of una.s.similated units. In which conclusion he is just as mistaken as he was at first. There does exist a clearly defined and h.o.m.ogeneous American type.

Let us suppose that all the negroes had been swept as with some vast net down and away into the Gulf of Mexico; that the Irishmen had been gathered out of the cities and deposited back into the Atlantic; that the Germans had been rounded up towards their fellows in Chicago and Milwaukee and then tipped gently into Lake Michigan, while the Scandinavians, having been a.s.sembled in Minnesota, had been edged courteously over the Canadian border;--when all this had been done, there would still remain the great American People. Of this great People there would remain certain local variations--in parts of the South, in New England, on the plains--but each clearly recognisable as a variety only, differing but superficially and in substance possessing well-defined all the generic and specific attributes of the race.

If the entire members.h.i.+p of the Chicago Club were to be transferred bodily to the Manhattan Club-house in New York, and all the members of the Manhattan were simultaneously made to migrate from Fifth Avenue to Michigan Avenue, the club servants, beyond missing some familiar faces, would not find much difference. Could any man, waking from a trance, tell by the men surrounding him whether he was in the Duquesne Club at Pittsburgh or the Minnesota Club in St. Paul? And, if it be urged that the select club-members.h.i.+p represents a small circle of the population only, would the disturbance be much greater if the entire populations of Erie and Minneapolis and Kansas City were to execute a three-cornered "general post" or if Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine, swapped inhabitants? How long would it take the inhabitants of any one town to settle down in their new environment and go to work on precisely the same lines as their predecessors whom they dislodged? The novelty would, I think, be even less than if Manchester and Birmingham were miraculously made to execute a similar change in a night.

I do not underrate the magnitude of the problem presented to the people of America by the immense volume of immigration from alien races, and chiefly from the most undesirable strata in those races, of the last few years. On the other hand, I have no shadow of doubt of the ability of the people to cope with the problem and to succeed in a.s.similating to itself all the elements in this great influx while itself remaining unchanged.

It seems to me that the American himself constantly overestimates the influence on his national character of the immigration of the past. To persons living in New York, especially if, from philanthropic motives or otherwise, they are brought at all into immediate contact with the incoming hordes as they arrive, this stream of immigration may well be a terrifying thing. Those who are in daily touch with it can hardly fail to be oppressed by it, till it gets upon their nerves and breeds nightmares; and to such I have more than once recommended that they would do well to take a holiday of six months; journey through the West, and so come to a realisation of the magnitude of their country and correct their point of view. With every mile that one recedes from Castle Garden, the phenomenon grows less appalling: the cloud which was dense enough to blacken New York harbour makes not a veil to stop one ray of sunlight when shredded out over the Mississippi Valley and the Western plains.

A bucket of sewage (or of Eau de Cologne), however formidable in itself, makes very little difference when tipped into the St. Lawrence River. It is, of course, a portentous fact that some twenty millions of foreigners should have come into the country to settle in the course of half a century; but, after all, the process of a.s.similation has been constantly and successfully at work throughout those fifty years, and I think the figures will show that in no one year (not even in 1906, when the volume of immigration was the largest and contained the greatest proportion of the distinctly "undesirable" elements), if we set against the totals the number of those aliens returning to their own countries and deduct those who have come from the English-speaking countries, has the influx amounted to three quarters of one per cent of the entire population of the country.

So far, the dilution of the original character of the people by the injection of the foreign elements has been curiously slight, and while recognising that the inflow of the last few years has been more serious, both in quant.i.ty and character, than at any previous period, there does not seem to me any reason for questioning the ability of the country to absorb and a.s.similate it without any impairment of the fundamental qualities of the people. That at certain points near the seaboard, or in places where the newly introduced aliens become congested in ma.s.ses of industrial workers, they present a local problem of extreme difficulty may be granted, but I think that those who are in contact with these local problems are inclined to exaggerate the general or national danger. The dominating American type will persist, as it persists to-day; the people will remain, in all that is essential, an Anglo-Saxon and a h.o.m.ogeneous people.

In one sense--and that the essential one--the American people is more h.o.m.ogeneous than the English. What individuals among them may have been in the last generation does not matter. The point is here:--When one speaks of the "average Englishman" (as, without regard to grammar, we persist in doing) what he really means is the typical representative of a comparatively small section of the population, from the middle, or upper middle, cla.s.ses upward. It is the same when one speaks of Frenchmen. When he says "the average Frenchman dresses," or "thinks," or "talks" in such and such a way, he merely means that so does the normal specimen of a cla.s.s including only a few hundred thousand men, and those city dwellers, dress or think or speak. The figure is excusable because (apart from the fact that an "average" of the entire population would be quite unfindable) the comparatively small cla.s.s does indeed guide, rule, and, practically, think for, the whole population. So far as foreign countries are concerned, they represent the policy and mode of thought of the nation. The great numerical majority is practically negligible.

The same is true of the people of the United States, but with this difference, that the cla.s.s represented by the "average"--the cla.s.s of which, when grouped together, it is possible to find a reasonably typical representative--includes in the United States a vastly larger proportion of the whole people than is the case in other countries. It would not be possible to find a common mental or moral divisor for the members of Parliament in the aggregate, and an equal number of Norfolk fishermen or Cornish miners. They are not to be stated in common terms.

But no such incongruity exists between the members of Congress, Michigan lumbermen, and the men of the Texas plains.

It may be that within the smaller circle in England, the individuals--thanks to the public schools and the universities--are more nearly identical and the type specimen would more closely represent the whole. But as soon as we get outside the circle, much greater divergences appear. The English are _h.o.m.ogeneous_ over a small area: the Americans _h.o.m.ogeneous_ over a much larger.

"You may go all over the States," said Robert Louis Stevenson (and Americans will, for love of the man, pardon his calling their country "the States") "and--setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese--you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in forty miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen." And Stevenson understates the case. There are differences of speech in America, but at the most they remain so slight that, after all, the resident in one section will rather pride himself on his acuteness in recognising the intonation of the stranger as being that of some other--of the South, it may be, or of New England. An educated Londoner has difficulty in understanding even the London c.o.c.kney.

Suffolk, Cornish, or Lancas.h.i.+re--these are almost foreign tongues to him. The American of the South has at least no difficulty in understanding the New Englander: the New Yorker does not have to make the Californian repeat each sentence that he utters.

And this similarity of tongue--this universal mutual comprehensibility--is a fact of great importance to the nation. It must tend to rapidity of communication--to greater uniformity of thought--to much greater readiness in the people to concentrate as a nation on one idea or one object. How much does England not lose--there is no way of measuring, but the amount must be very great--by the fact that communication of thought is practically impossible between people who are neighbours? How much would it not contribute to the national alertness, to national efficiency, if the local dialects could be swept away and the peasantry and gentry of all England--nay of the British Isles--talk together easily in one tongue? It is impossible not to believe that this ease in the interchange of ideas must in itself contribute greatly to uniformity of thought and character in a people.

Possessing it, it is not easy to see how the American people could have failed to become more h.o.m.ogeneous than the English.

But there is a deeper reason for their h.o.m.ogeneousness. The American people is not only an English people; it is much more Anglo-Saxon than the English themselves. We have already seen how the essential quality of both peoples is an Anglo-Saxon quality--what has been called (and the phrase will do as well as any other) their "Particularist" instinct. The Angles and Saxons (with some modification in the former) were tribes of individual workers, sprung from the soil, rooted in it, accustomed always to rely on individual labour and individual impulse rather than on the initiative, the protection, or the a.s.sistance of the State or the community. The const.i.tutional history of England is little more than the story of the steps by which the Anglo-Saxon, by the strength which this quality gave him, came to dominate the other races which invaded or settled in Britain and finally worked his way up to and through the Norman crust which, as it were, overlay the country.

In England many inst.i.tutions are of course Norman. An hereditary aristocracy, the laws of primogeniture and entail--these are Norman. By the help of them the Norman hoped to perpetuate his authority over the Saxon herd; and failed. Magna Charta, Cromwell, the Roundheads, the Puritans, the spirit of nonconformity, most of the limitations of the power of the Throne, the industrial and commercial greatness of Britain--these things are Anglo-Saxon. The American colonists (however many individuals of Norman blood were among them) were Anglo-Saxon; they came from the Anglo-Saxon body of the people and carried with them the Anglo-Saxon spirit. They did not reproduce in their new environment an hereditary aristocracy, a law of primogeniture or of entail. It is probable that no single English colony to-day, if suddenly cut loose from the Empire and left to fas.h.i.+on its form of society anew, would reproduce any one of these things. In the United States the Anglo-Saxon spirit went to work without Norman a.s.sistance or (as we choose to view it) Norman enc.u.mbrances. The Anglo-Saxon spirit is still working in England--never perhaps has its operation been more powerfully visible than in the trend of thought of the last few years. It is working also in the United States; but, because it there works independently of Norman traditions, it works faster.

In many things--in almost everything, as we shall see--the two peoples are progressing along precisely the same path, a path other than that which other nations are treading. In many things--in almost everything--the United States moves the more rapidly. It seems at first a contradiction in terms to say that the Americans are an English people and then to show that in many individual matters the English people is approximating to American models. It is in truth no contradiction; and the explanation is obvious. Both are impelled by the same spirit, the same motives, the same ambitions; but in England that spirit, those motives and ambitions work against greater resistance.

What looks at first like a peculiar departure on the part of the American people will again and again, on investigation, be found to be only the English spirit shooting ahead faster than it can advance in England. When, in a particular matter, it appears as if England was coming to conform to American precedent, it is, in truth only that, having given the impulse to America, she herself is following with less speed than the younger runner, but with such speed as she can.

If we bear this fact in mind we shall see how it is ill.u.s.trated, borne out, supported by a score of things that it falls in our way to notice; as it is by many hundred things that lie outside our present province.

We shall have occasion to notice hereafter how in the past the American disposition to dislike England has been fed by the headlong and superficial criticism of American affairs by English "literary"

visitors; and it is unfortunate that the latest[88:1] English visitor to write on the United States has hurt American susceptibilities almost as keenly as any of his predecessors. With all its brilliant qualities, few more superficial "studies" of American affairs have been given to the world than that of Mr. H. G. Wells.

Mr. Wells, by his own account, went about the country confronting all comers with the questions, "What are you going to make of your future?"

. . . "What is the American Utopia, how much Will is there shaping to attain it?" This, he says, was the conundrum to find an answer to which he crossed the Atlantic, and he is much depressed because he failed in his search. "When one talks to an American of his national purpose he seems a little at a loss"; and when he comes to sum up his conclusions: "What seems to me the most significant and pregnant thing of all is . . . best indicated by saying that the typical American has no 'sense of the State.'"[89:1]

Has Mr. Wells ever gone about England asking Englishmen the same question: "What are you going to make of your future?" How much less "at a loss" does he antic.i.p.ate that he would find them? Mr. Wells apparently expected to find every American with a card in his vest pocket containing a complete scheme of an American Utopia. He was disappointed because the government at Was.h.i.+ngton was not inviting bids for roofing in the country and laying the portion north of Mason and Dixon's Line with hot-water pipes.