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diff --git a/56484-0.txt b/56484-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ae5a51d --- /dev/null +++ b/56484-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6387 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56484 *** + + + + + + + + + + +[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK] + + + + + THE + FUTURE IN AMERICA + + A SEARCH AFTER REALITIES + + BY + H.G. WELLS + + AUTHOR OF + "ANTICIPATIONS" "THE WAR OF THE WORLDS" + "THIRTY STRANGE STORIES" ETC. + + ILLUSTRATED + + [Illustration] + + HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS + NEW YORK AND LONDON + 1906 + + + + + Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. + + _All rights reserved._ + + Published November, 1906. + + + + +CONTENTS + + + CHAP. PAGE + + I. The Prophetic Habit of Mind 1 + + II. Material Progress 21 + + III. New York 35 + + IV. Growth Invincible 49 + + V. The Economic Process 68 + + VI. Some Aspects of American Wealth 88 + + VII. Certain Workers 104 + + VIII. Corruption 116 + + IX. The Immigrant 133 + + X. State-Blindness 152 + + XI. Two Studies in Disappointment 167 + + XII. The Tragedy of Color 185 + + XIII. The Mind of a Modern State 203 + + XIV. Culture 223 + + XV. At Washington 236 + + The Envoy 254 + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + + + FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK _Frontispiece_ + + ENTRANCE TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE _Facing p._ 38 + + STATE STREET, CHICAGO " 62 + + WESTERN FARMERS STILL OWN THEIR FARMS " 82 + + PLUMP AND PRETTY PUPILS OF EXTRAVAGANCE " 90 + + NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE " 106 + + BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY " 112 + + INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING " 124 + + WHERE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE AMERICANIZED " 148 + + HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE " 214 + + A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY " 216 + + IN THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY " 238 + + + + +THE FUTURE IN AMERICA + + + + +THE FUTURE IN AMERICA + + + + +CHAPTER I + +THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND + +(_At a writing-desk in Sandgate_) + + +I + +The Question + +"Are you a Polygamist?" + +"Are you an Anarchist?" + +The questions seem impertinent. They are part of a long paper of +interrogations I must answer satisfactorily if I am to be regarded as +a desirable alien to enter the United States of America. I want very +much to pass that great statue of Liberty illuminating the World (from +a central position in New York Harbor), in order to see things in its +light, to talk to certain people, to appreciate certain atmospheres, +and so I resist the provocation to answer impertinently. I do not +even volunteer that I do not smoke and am a total abstainer; on which +points it would seem the States as a whole still keep an open mind. +I am full of curiosity about America, I am possessed by a problem I +feel I cannot adequately discuss even with myself except over there, +and I must go even at the price of coming to a decision upon the +theoretically open questions these two inquiries raise. + +My problem I know will seem ridiculous and monstrous when I give it in +all its stark disproportions--attacked by me with my equipment it will +call up an image of an elephant assailed by an ant who has not even +mastered Jiu-jitsu--but at any rate I've come to it in a natural sort +of way and it is one I must, for my own peace of mind, make some kind +of attempt upon, even if at last it means no more than the ant crawling +in an exploratory way hither and thither over that vast unconscious +carcass and finally getting down and going away. That may be rather +good for the ant, and the experience may be of interest to other ants, +however infinitesimal from the point of view of the elephant, the final +value of his investigation may be. And this tremendous problem in my +case and now in this--simply; What is going to happen to the United +States of America in the next thirty years or so? + +I do not know if the reader has ever happened upon any books or +writings of mine before, but if, what is highly probable, he has not, +he may be curious to know how it is that any human being should be +running about in so colossally an interrogative state of mind. (For +even the present inquiry is by no means my maximum limit). And the +explanation is to be found a little in a mental idiosyncrasy perhaps, +but much more in the development of a special way of thinking, of a +habit of mind. + +That habit of mind may be indicated by a proposition that, with a fine +air of discovery, I threw out some years ago, in a happy ignorance that +I had been anticipated by no less a person than Heraclitus. "There is +no Being but Becoming," that was what appeared to my unscholarly mind +to be almost triumphantly new. I have since then informed myself more +fully about Heraclitus, there are moments now when I more than half +suspect that all the thinking I shall ever do will simply serve to +illuminate my understanding of him, but at any rate that apothegm of +his does exactly convey the intellectual attitude into which I fall. I +am curiously not interested in things, and curiously interested in the +consequences of things. I wouldn't for the world go to see the United +States for what they are--if I had sound reason for supposing that the +entire western hemisphere was to be destroyed next Christmas, I should +not, I think, be among the multitude that would rush for one last look +at that great spectacle,--from which it follows naturally that I don't +propose to see Niagara. I should much more probably turn an inquiring +visage eastward, with the west so certainly provided for. I have come +to be, I am afraid, even a little insensitive to fine immediate things +through this anticipatory habit. + +This habit of mind confronts and perplexes my sense of things that +simply _are_, with my brooding preoccupation with how they will +shape presently, what they will lead to, what seed they will sow +and how they will wear. At times, I can assure the reader, this +quality approaches otherworldliness, in its constant reference to an +all-important here-after. There are times indeed when it makes life +seem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on +to an equally transitory series of consequences, that the enhanced +sense of instability becomes restlessness and distress; but on the +other hand nothing that exists, nothing whatever, remains altogether +vulgar or dull and dead or hopeless in its light. But the interest +is shifted. The pomp and splendor of established order, the braying +triumphs, ceremonies, consummations, one sees these glittering shows +for what they are--through their threadbare grandeur shine the little +significant things that will make the future.... + +And now that I am associating myself with great names, let me discover +that I find this characteristic turn of mind of mine, not only in +Heraclitus, the most fragmentary of philosophers, but for one fine +passage at any rate, in Mr. Henry James, the least fragmentary +of novelists. In his recent impressions of America I find him +apostrophizing the great mansions of Fifth Avenue, in words quite after +my heart;-- + +"It's all very well," he writes, "for you to look as if, since you've +had no past, you're going in, as the next best thing, for a magnificent +compensatory future. What are you going to make your future _of_, for +all your airs, we want to know? What elements of a future, as futures +have gone in the great world, are at all assured to you?" + +I had already when I read that, figured myself as addressing if not +these particular last triumphs of the fine Transatlantic art of +architecture, then at least America in general in some such words. It +is not unpleasant to be anticipated by the chief Master of one's craft, +it is indeed, when one reflects upon his peculiar intimacy with this +problem, enormously reassuring, and so I have very gladly annexed his +phrasing and put it here to honor and adorn and in a manner to explain +my own enterprise. I have already studied some of these fine buildings +through the mediation of an illustrated magazine--they appear solid, +they appear wonderful and well done to the highest pitch--and before +many days now I shall, I hope, reconstruct that particular moment, +stand--the latest admirer from England--regarding these portentous +magnificences, from the same sidewalk--will they call it?--as my +illustrious predecessor, and with his question ringing in my mind +all the louder for their proximity, and the universally acknowledged +invigoration of the American atmosphere. "What are you going to make +your future _of_, for all your airs?" + +And then I suppose I shall return to crane my neck at the Flat-Iron +Building or the _Times_ sky-scraper, and ask all that too, an identical +question. + + +II + +Philosophical + +Certain phases in the development of these prophetic exercises one may +perhaps be permitted to trace. + +To begin with, I remember that to me in my boyhood speculation about +the Future was a monstrous joke. Like most people of my generation I +was launched into life with millennial assumptions. This present sort +of thing, I believed, was going on for a time, interesting personally +perhaps but as a whole inconsecutive, and then--it might be in my +lifetime or a little after it--there would be trumpets and shoutings +and celestial phenomena, a battle of Armageddon and the Judgment. +As I saw it, it was to be a strictly protestant and individualistic +judgment, each soul upon its personal merits. To talk about the Man of +the Year Million was of course in the face of this great conviction, a +whimsical play of fancy. The Year Million was just as impossible, just +as gayly nonsensical as fairy-land.... + +I was a student of biology before I realized that this, my finite and +conclusive End, at least in the material and chronological form, had +somehow vanished from the scheme of things. In the place of it had come +a blackness and a vagueness about the endless vista of years ahead, +that was tremendous--that terrified. That is a phase in which lots of +educated people remain to this day. "All this scheme of things, life, +force, destiny which began not six thousand years, mark you, but an +infinity ago, that has developed out of such strange weird shapes and +incredible first intentions, out of gaseous nebulæ, carboniferous +swamps, saurian giantry and arboreal apes, is by the same tokens to +continue, developing--into what?" That was the overwhelming riddle that +came to me, with that realization of an End averted, that has come now +to most of our world. + +The phase that followed the first helpless stare of the mind was a wild +effort to express one's sudden apprehension of unlimited possibility. +One made fantastic exaggerations, fantastic inversions of all +recognized things. Anything of this sort might come, anything of any +sort. The books about the future that followed the first stimulus of +the world's realization of the implications of Darwinian science, have +all something of the monstrous experimental imaginings of children. I +myself, in my microcosmic way, duplicated the times. Almost the first +thing I ever wrote--it survives in an altered form as one of a bookful +of essays,--was of this type; "The Man of the Year Million," was +presented as a sort of pantomime head and a shrivelled body, and years +after that, the _Time Machine_, my first published book, ran in the +same vein. At that point, at a brief astonished stare down the vistas +of time-to-come, at something between wonder and amazed, incredulous, +defeated laughter, most people, I think, stop. But those who are doomed +to the prophetic habit of mind go on. + +The next phase, the third phase, is to shorten the range of the +outlook, to attempt something a little more proximate than the final +destiny of man. One becomes more systematic, one sets to work to trace +the great changes of the last century or so, and one produces these +in a straight line and according to the rule of three. If the maximum +velocity of land travel in 1800 was twelve miles an hour and in 1900 +(let us say) sixty miles an hour, then one concludes that in 2000 A.D. +it will be three hundred miles an hour. If the population of America in +1800--but I refrain from this second instance. In that fashion one got +out a sort of gigantesque caricature of the existing world, everything +swollen to vast proportions and massive beyond measure. In my case that +phase produced a book, _When the Sleeper Wakes_, in which, I am told, +by competent New-Yorkers, that I, starting with London, an unbiassed +mind, this rule-of-three method and my otherwise unaided imagination, +produced something more like Chicago than any other place wherein +righteous men are likely to be found. That I shall verify in due +course, but my present point is merely that to write such a book is to +discover how thoroughly wrong this all too obvious method of enlarging +the present is. + +One goes on therefore--if one is to succumb altogether to the +prophetic habit--to a really "scientific" attack upon the future. +The "scientific" phase is not final, but it is far more abundantly +fruitful than its predecessors. One attempts a rude wide analysis +of contemporary history, one seeks to clear and detach operating +causes and to work them out, and so, combining this necessary set of +consequences with that, to achieve a synthetic forecast in terms just +as broad and general and vague as the causes considered are few. I +made, it happens, an experiment in this scientific sort of prophecy +in a book called _Anticipations_, and I gave an altogether excessive +exposition and defence of it, I went altogether too far in this +direction, in a lecture to the Royal Institution, "The Discovery of +the Future," that survives in odd corners as a pamphlet, and is to be +found, like a scrap of old newspaper in the roof gutter of a museum, in +_Nature_ (vol. LXV., p. 326) and in the Smithsonian Report (for 1902). +Within certain limits, however, I still believe this scientific method +is sound. It gives sound results in many cases, results at any rate as +sound as those one gets from the "laws" of political economy; one can +claim it really does effect a sort of prophecy on the material side of +life. + +For example, it was quite obvious about 1899 that invention and +enterprise were very busy with the means of locomotion, and one could +deduce from that certain practically inevitable consequences in the +distribution of urban populations. With easier, quicker means of +getting about there were endless reasons, hygienic, social, economic, +why people should move from the town centres towards their peripheries, +and very few why they should not. The towns one inferred therefore, +would get slacker, more diffused, the countryside more urban. From +that, from the spatial widening of personal interests that ensued, +one could infer certain changes in the spirits of local politics, +and so one went on to a number of fairly valid adumbrations. Then +again starting from the practical supersession in the long run of +all unskilled labor by machinery one can work out with a pretty fair +certainty many coming social developments, and the broad trend of +one group of influences at least from the moral attitude of the mass +of common people. In industry, in domestic life again, one foresees +a steady development of complex appliances, demanding, and indeed +in an epoch of frequently changing methods _forcing_, a flexible +understanding, versatility of effort, a universal rising standard of +education. So too a study of military methods and apparatus convinces +one of the necessary transfer of power in the coming century from +the ignorant and enthusiastic masses who made the revolutions of +the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and won Napoleon his wars, +to any more deliberate, more intelligent and more disciplined class +that may possess an organized purpose. But where will one find that +class? There comes a question that goes outside science, that takes +one at once into a field beyond the range of the "scientific" method +altogether. + +So long as one adopts the assumptions of the old political economist +and assumes men without idiosyncrasy, without prejudices, without, as +people say, wills of their own, so long as one imagines a perfectly +acquiescent humanity that will always in the long run under pressure +liquefy and stream along the line of least resistance to its own +material advantage, the business of prophecy is easy. But from the +first I felt distrust for that facility in prophesying, I perceived +that always there lurked something, an incalculable opposition to these +mechanically conceived forces, in law, in usage and prejudice, in the +poiëtic power of exceptional individual men. I discovered for myself +over again, the inseparable nature of the two functions of the prophet. +In my _Anticipations_, for example, I had intended simply to work out +and foretell, and before I had finished I was in a fine full blast of +exhortation.... + +That by an easy transition brought me to the last stage in the life +history of the prophetic mind, as it is at present known to me. One +comes out on the other side of the "scientific" method, into the large +temperance, the valiant inconclusiveness, the released creativeness of +philosophy. Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible, +but the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts +and wills of unique incalculable men. With them we have to deal as +our ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to +be not "scientific" at all for all the greater issues, the humanly +important issues, but critical, literary, even if you will--artistic. +Here insight is of more account than induction and the perception of +fine tones than the counting of heads. Science deals with necessity and +necessity is here but the firm ground on which our freedom goes. One +passes from affairs of predestination to affairs of free will. + +This discovery spread at once beyond the field of prophesying. The +end, the aim, the test of science, as a model man understands the +word, is foretelling by means of "laws," and my error in attempting a +complete "scientific" forecast of human affairs arose in too careless +an assent to the ideas about me, and from accepting uncritically such +claims as that history should be "scientific," and that economics and +sociology (for example) are "sciences." Directly one gauges the fuller +implications of that uniqueness of individuals Darwin's work has so +permanently illuminated, one passes beyond that. The ripened prophet +realizes Schopenhauer--as indeed I find Professor Münsterberg saying. +"The deepest sense of human affairs is reached," he writes, "when we +consider them not as appearances but as decisions." There one has the +same thing coming to meet one from the psychological side.... + +But my present business isn't to go into this shadowy, metaphysical +foundation world on which our thinking rests, but to the brightly lit +overworld of America. This philosophical excursion is set here just to +prepare the reader quite frankly for speculations and to disabuse his +mind of the idea that in writing of the Future in America I'm going to +write of houses a hundred stories high and flying-machines in warfare +and things like that. I am not going to America to work a pretentious +horoscope, to discover a Destiny, but to find out what I can of what +must needs make that Destiny,--a great nation's Will. + + +III + +The Will of America + +The material factors in a nation's future are subordinate factors, +they present advantages, such as the easy access of the English to +coal and the sea, or disadvantages, such as the ice-bound seaboard of +the Russians, but these are the circumstances and not necessarily the +rulers of its fate. The essential factor in the destiny of a nation, +as of a man and of mankind, lies in the form of its will and in the +quality and quantity of its will. The drama of a nation's future, as +of a man's, lies in this conflict of its will with what would else be +"scientifically" predictable, materially inevitable. If the man, if the +nation was an automaton fitted with good average motives, so and so, +one could say exactly, would be done. It's just where the thing isn't +automatic that our present interest comes in. + +I might perhaps reverse the order of the three aspects of will I have +named, for manifestly where the quantity of will is small, it matters +nothing what the form or quality. The man or the people that wills +feebly is the sport of every circumstance, and there if anywhere the +scientific method holds truest or even altogether true. Do geographical +positions or mineral resources make for riches? Then such a people will +grow insecurely and disastrously rich. Is an abundant prolific life at +a low level indicated? They will pullulate and suffer. If circumstances +make for a choice between comfort and reproduction, your feeble people +will dwindle and pass; if war, if conquest tempt them then they will +turn from all preoccupations and follow the drums. Little things +provoke their unstable equilibrium, to hostility, to forgiveness.... + +And be it noted that the quantity of will in a nation is not +necessarily determined by adding up the wills of all its people. I am +told, and I am disposed to believe it, that the Americans of the United +States are a people of great individual force of will, the clear strong +faces of many young Americans, something almost Roman in the faces of +their statesmen and politicians, a distinctive quality I detect in such +Americans as I have met, a quality of sharply cut determination even +though it be only about details and secondary things, that one must +rouse one's self to meet, inclines me to give a provisional credit +to that, but how far does all this possible will-force aggregate to +a great national purpose?--what algebraically does it add up to when +this and that have cancelled each other? That may be a different thing +altogether. + +And next to this net quantity of will a nation or people may possess, +come the questions of its quality, its flexibility, its consciousness +and intellectuality. A nation may be full of will and yet inflexibly +and disastrously stupid in the expression of that will. There was +probably more will-power, mere haughty and determined self-assertion +in the young bull that charged the railway engine than in several +regiments of men, but it was after all a low quality of will with no +method but a violent and injudicious directness, and in the end it +was suicidal and futile. There again is the substance for ramifying +Enquiries. How subtle, how collected and patient, how far capable of a +long plan, is this American nation? Suppose it has a will so powerful +and with such resources that whatever simple end may be attained by +rushing upon it is America's for the asking, there still remains the +far more important question of the ends that are not obvious, that are +intricate and complex and not to be won by booms and cataclysms of +effort. + +An Englishman comes to think that most of the permanent and precious +things for which a nation's effort goes are like that, and here too I +have an open mind and unsatisfied curiosities. + +And lastly there is the form of the nation's purpose. I have been +reading what I can find about that in books for some time, and now +I want to cross over the Atlantic, more particularly for that, to +question more or less openly certain Americans, not only men and women, +but the mute expressive presences of house and appliance, of statue, +flag and public building, and the large collective visages of crowds, +what it is all up to, what it thinks it is all after, how far it means +to escape or improve upon its purely material destinies? I want over +there to find whatever consciousness or vague consciousness of a common +purpose there may be, what is their Vision, their American Utopia, +how much will there is shaping to attain it, how much capacity goes +with the will--what, in short, there is in America, over and above the +mere mechanical consequences of scattering multitudes of energetic +Europeans athwart a vast healthy, productive and practically empty +continent in the temperate zone. There you have the terms of reference +of an enquiry, that is I admit (as Mr. Morgan Richards the eminent +advertisement agent would say), "mammoth in character." + +The American reader may very reasonably inquire at this point why an +Englishman does not begin with the future of his own country. The +answer is that this particular one has done so, and that in many ways +he has found his intimacy and proximity a disadvantage. One knows too +much of the things that seem to matter and that ultimately don't, one +is full of misleading individual instances intensely seen, one can't +see the wood for the trees. One comes to America at last, not only with +the idea of seeing America, but with something more than an incidental +hope of getting one's own England there in the distance and as a whole, +for the first time in one's life. And the problem of America, from +this side anyhow, has an air of being simpler. For all the Philippine +adventure her future still seems to lie on the whole compactly in one +continent, and not as ours is, dispersed round and about the habitable +globe, strangely entangled with India, with Japan, with Africa and with +the great antagonism the Germans force upon us at our doors. Moreover +one cannot look ten years ahead in England, without glancing across the +Atlantic. "There they are," we say to one another, "those Americans! +They speak our language, read our books, give us books, share our mind. +What we think still goes into their heads in a measure, and their +thoughts run through our brains. What will they be up to?" + +Our future is extraordinarily bound up in America's and in a sense +dependent upon it. It is not that we dream very much of political +reunions of Anglo Saxondom and the like. So long as we British retain +our wide and accidental sprawl of empire about the earth we cannot +expect or desire the Americans to share our stresses and entanglements. +Our Empire has its own adventurous and perilous outlook. But our +civilization is a different thing from our Empire, a thing that +reaches out further into the future, that will be going on changed +beyond recognition. Because of our common language, of our common +traditions, Americans are a part of our community, are becoming indeed +the larger part of our community of thought and feeling and outlook--in +a sense far more intimate than any link we have with Hindoo or Copt or +Cingalese. A common Englishman has an almost pathetic pride and sense +of proprietorship in the States; he is fatally ready to fall in with +the idea that two nations that share their past, that still, a little +restively, share one language, may even contrive to share an infinitely +more interesting future. Even if he does not chance to be an American +now, his grandson may be. America is his inheritance, his reserved +accumulating investment. In that sense indeed America belongs to the +whole western world; all Europe owns her promise, but to the Englishman +the sense of participation is intense. "_We_ did it," he will tell of +the most American of achievements, of the settlement of the middle west +for example, and this is so far justifiable that numberless men, myself +included, are Englishmen, Australian, New-Zealanders, Canadians, +instead of being Americans, by the merest accidents of life. My father +still possesses the stout oak box he had had made to emigrate withal, +everything was arranged that would have got me and my brothers born +across the ocean, and only the coincidence of a business opportunity +and an illness of my mother's, arrested that. It was so near a thing +as that with me, which prevents my blood from boiling with patriotic +indignation instead of patriotic solicitude at the frequent sight +of red-coats as I see them from my study window going to and fro to +Shorncliffe camp. + +Well I learn from Professor Münsterberg how vain my sense of +proprietorship is, but still this much of it obstinately remains, that +I will at any rate _look_ at the American future. + +By the accidents that delayed that box it comes about that if I want +to see what America is up to, I have among other things to buy a +Baedeker and a steamer ticket and fill up the inquiring blanks in +this remarkable document before me, the long string of questions that +begins:-- + +"Are you a Polygamist?" + +"Are you an Anarchist?" + +Here I gather is one little indication of the great will I am going to +study. It would seem that the United States of America regard Anarchy +and Polygamy with aversion, regard indeed Anarchists and Polygamists as +creatures unfit to mingle with the already very various eighty million +of citizens who constitute their sovereign powers, and on the other +hand hold these creatures so inflexibly honorable as certainly to tell +these damning truths about themselves in this matter.... + +It's a little odd. One has a second or so of doubt about the quality of +that particular manifestation of will. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +MATERIAL PROGRESS + +(_On the "Carmania" going Americanward_) + + +I + +American Certitudes + +When one talks to an American of his national purpose he seems a little +at a loss; if one speaks of his national destiny, he responds with +alacrity. I make this generalization on the usual narrow foundations, +but so the impression comes to me. + +Until this present generation, indeed until within a couple of decades, +it is not very evident that Americans did envisage any national +purpose at all, except in so far as there was a certain solicitude +not to be cheated out of an assured destiny. A sort of optimistic +fatalism possessed them. They had, and mostly it seems they still +have, a tremendous sense of sustained and assured growth, and it is +not altogether untrue that one is told--I have been told--such things +as that "America is a great country, sir," that its future is gigantic +and that it is already (and going to be more and more so) the greatest +country on earth. + +I am not the sort of Englishman who questions that. I do so regard +that much as obvious and true that it seems to me even a little +undignified, as well as a little overbearing, for Americans to insist +upon it so; I try to go on as soon as possible to the question just +how my interlocutor _shapes_ that gigantic future and what that world +predominance is finally to do for us in England and all about the +world. So far, I must insist, I haven't found anything like an idea. I +have looked for it in books, in papers, in speeches and now I am going +to look for it in America. At the most I have found vague imaginings +that correspond to that first or monstrous stage in the scheme of +prophetic development I sketched in my opening. + +There is often no more than a volley of rhetorical blank-cartridge. So +empty is it of all but sound that I have usually been constrained by +civility from going on to a third enquiry;-- + +"And what are you, sir, doing in particular, to assist and enrich this +magnificent and quite indefinable Destiny of which you so evidently +feel yourself a part?"... + +That seems to be really no unjust rendering of the conscious +element of the American outlook as one finds it, for example, in +these nice-looking and pleasant-mannered fellow-passengers upon the +_Carmania_ upon whom I fasten with leading questions and experimental +remarks. One exception I discover--a pleasant New York clubman who +has doubts of this and that. The discipline and sense of purpose in +Germany has laid hold upon him. He seems to be, in contrast with his +fellow-countrymen, almost pessimistically aware that the American +ship of state is after all a mortal ship and liable to leakages. +There are certain problems and dangers he seems to think that may +delay, perhaps even prevent, an undamaged arrival in that predestined +port, that port too resplendent for the eye to rest upon; a Chinese +peril, he thinks has not been finally dealt with, "race suicide" is +not arrested for all that it is scolded in a most valiant and virile +manner, and there are adverse possibilities in the immigrant, in the +black, the socialist, against which he sees no guarantee. He sees huge +danger in the development and organization of the new finance and no +clear promise of a remedy. He finds the closest parallel between the +American Republic and Rome before the coming of Imperialism. But these +other Americans have no share in his pessimisms. They may confess to +as much as he does in the way of dangers, admit there are occasions +for calking, a need of stopping quite a number of possibilities if the +American Idea is to make its triumphant entry at last into that port +of blinding accomplishment, but, apart from a few necessary preventive +proposals, I do not perceive any extensive sense of anything whatever +to be done, anything to be shaped and thought out and made in the sense +of a national determination to a designed and specified end. + + +II + +A Symbol of Progress + +There are, one must admit, tremendous justifications for the belief +in a sort of automatic ascent of American things to unprecedented +magnificences, an ascent so automatic that indeed one needn't bother +in the slightest to keep the whole thing going. For example, consider +this, last year's last-word in ocean travel in which I am crossing, the +_Carmania_ with its unparalleled steadfastness, its racing, tireless +great turbines, its vast population of 3244 souls! It has on the whole +a tremendous effect of having come by fate and its own forces. One +forgets that any one planned it, much of it indeed has so much the +quality of moving, as the planets move, in the very nature of things. +You go aft and see the wake tailing away across the blue ridges, you +go forward and see the cleft water, lift protestingly, roll back in an +indignant crest, own itself beaten and go pouring by in great foaming +waves on either hand, you see nothing, you hear nothing of the toiling +engines, the reeking stokers, the effort and the stress below; you beat +west and west, as the sun does and it might seem with nearly the same +independence of any living man's help or opposition. Equally so does +it seem this great, gleaming, confident thing of power and metal came +inevitably out of the past and will lead on to still more shining, +still swifter and securer monsters in the future. + +One sees in the perspective of history, first the little cockle-shells +of Columbus, the comings and goings of the precarious Tudor +adventurers, the slow uncertain shipping of colonial days. Says Sir +George Trevelyan in the opening of his _American Revolution_, that +then--it is still not a century and a half ago!-- + + "a man bound for New York, as he sent his luggage on board at Bristol, + would willingly have compounded for a voyage lasting as many weeks as + it now lasts days.... Adams, during the height of the war, hurrying to + France in the finest frigate Congress could place at his disposal ... + could make not better speed than five and forty days between Boston + and Bordeaux. Lord Carlisle ... was six weeks between port and port; + tossed by gales which inflicted on his brother Commissioners agonies + such as he forbore to make a matter of joke even to George Selwyn.... + How humbler individuals fared.... They would be kept waiting weeks on + the wrong side of the water for a full complement of passengers and + weeks more for a fair wind, and then beating across in a badly found + tub with a cargo of millstones and old iron rolling about below, they + thought themselves lucky if they came into harbor a month after their + private store of provisions had run out and carrying a budget of news + as stale as the ship's provisions." + +Even in the time of Dickens things were by no measure more than +half-way better. I have with me to enhance my comfort by this aided +retrospect, his _American Notes_. His crossing lasted eighteen days and +his boat was that "far-famed American steamer," the _Britannia_ (the +first of the long succession of Cunarders, of which this _Carmania_ is +the latest); his return took fifty days, and was a jovial home-coming +under sail. It's the journey out gives us our contrast. He had the +"state-room" of the period and very unhappy he was in it, as he +testifies in a characteristically mounting passage. + + "That this state-room had been specially engaged for 'Charles Dickens, + Esquire, and Lady,' was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared + intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was + pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread + like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this + was the state-room, concerning which Charles Dickens, Esquire, and + Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences for at least four months + preceding; that this could by any possibility be that small snug + chamber of the imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the + spirit of prophecy strong upon him, had always foretold would contain + at least one little sofa, and which his Lady, with a modest and yet + most magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first + opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd + corner out of sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at + the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or + forced into a flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly + preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, + those chaste and pretty bowers, sketched in a masterly hand, in + the highly varnished, lithographic plan, hanging up in the agent's + counting-house in the City of London: that this room of state, in + short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of + the Captain's, invented and put in practice for the better relish and + enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed: these were + truths which I really could not bring my mind at all to bear upon or + comprehend." + +So he precludes his two weeks and a half of vile weather in this paddle +boat of the middle ages (she carried a "formidable" multitude of no +less than eighty-six saloon passengers) and goes on to describe such +experiences as this; + + "About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the + skylights, burst open the doors above, and came raging and roaring + down into the ladies' cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of + my wife and a little Scotch lady.... They, and the handmaid before + mentioned, being in such ecstacies of fear that I scarcely knew what + to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some restorative + or comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to me, at the + moment, than hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumblerful without + delay. It being impossible to stand or sit without holding on, they + were all heaped together in one corner of a long sofa--a fixture + extending entirely across the cabin--where they clung to each other in + momentary expectation of being drowned. When I approached this place + with my specific, and was about to administer it with many consolatory + expressions, to the nearest sufferer, what was my dismay to see + them all roll slowly down to the other end! and when I staggered to + that end, and held out the glass once more, how immensely baffled + were my good intentions by the ship giving another lurch, and their + rolling back again! I suppose I dodged them up and down this sofa, + for at least a quarter of an hour, without reaching them once; and + by the time I did catch them, the brandy-and-water was diminished, + by constant spilling, to a teaspoonful. To complete the group, it is + necessary to recognize in this disconcerted dodger, an individual + very pale from sea-sickness, who had shaved his beard and brushed his + hair last at Liverpool; and whose only articles of dress (linen not + included) were a pair of dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket, formerly + admired upon the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one slipper." + +It gives one a momentary sense of superiority to the great master to +read that. One surveys one's immediate surroundings and compares them +with _his_. One says almost patronizingly: "Poor old Dickens, you know, +really did have too awful a time!" The waves are high now, and getting +higher, dark-blue waves foam-crested; the waves haven't altered--except +relatively--but one isn't even sea-sick. At the most there are +squeamish moments for the weaker brethren. One looks down on these long +white-crested undulations thirty feet or so of rise and fall, as we +look down the side of a sky-scraper into a tumult in the street. + +We displace thirty thousand tons of water instead of twelve hundred, +we can carry 521 first and second class passengers, a crew of 463, and +2260 emigrants below.... + +We're a city rather than a ship, our funnels go up over the height of +any reasonable church spire, and you need walk the main-deck from end +to end and back only four times to do a mile. Any one who has been to +London and seen Trafalgar Square will get our dimensions perfectly, +when he realizes that we should only squeeze into that finest site in +Europe, diagonally, dwarfing the National Gallery, St. Martin's Church, +hotels and every other building there out of existence, our funnels +towering five feet higher than Nelson on his column. As one looks down +on it all from the boat-deck one has a social microcosm, we could set +up as a small modern country and renew civilization even if the rest +of the world was destroyed. We've the plutocracy up here, there is a +middle class on the second-class deck and forward a proletariat--the +_proles_ much in evidence--complete. It's possible to go slumming +aboard.... We have our daily paper, too, printed aboard, and all the +latest news by marconigram.... + +Never was anything of this sort before, never. Caligula's shipping it +is true (unless it was Constantine's) did, as Mr. Cecil Torr testifies, +hold a world record until the nineteenth century and he quotes Pliny +for thirteen hundred tons--outdoing the _Britannia_--and Moschion for +cabins and baths and covered vine-shaded walks and plants in pots. +But from 1840 onward, we have broken away into a new scale for life. +This _Carmania_ isn't the largest ship nor the finest, nor is it to be +the last. Greater ships are to follow and greater. The scale of size, +the scale of power, the speed and dimensions of things about us alter +remorselessly--to some limit we cannot at present descry. + + +III + +Is Progress Inevitable? + +It is the development of such things as this, it is this dramatically +abbreviated perspective from those pre-Reformation caravels to the +larger, larger, larger of the present vessels, one must blame for +one's illusions. One is led unawares to believe that this something +called Progress is a natural and necessary and secular process, +going on without the definite will of man, carrying us on quite +independently of us; one is led unawares to forget that it is after +all from the historical point of view only a sudden universal jolting +forward in history, an affair of two centuries at most, a process for +the continuance of which we have no sort of guarantee. Most western +Europeans have this delusion of automatic progress in things badly +enough, but with Americans it seems to be almost fundamental. It is +their theory of the Cosmos and they no more think of inquiring into +the sustaining causes of the progressive movement than they would into +the character of the stokers hidden away from us in this great thing +somewhere--the officers alone know where. + +I am happy to find this blind confidence very well expressed for +example in an illustrated magazine article by Mr. Edgar Saltus, +"New York from the Flat-iron," that a friend has put in my hand to +prepare me for the wonders to come. Mr. Saltus writes with an eloquent +joy of his vision of Broadway below, Broadway that is now "barring +trade-routes, the largest commercial stretch on this planet." So +late as Dickens's visit it was scavenged by roving untended herds of +gaunt, brown, black-blotched pigs. He writes of lower Fifth Avenue and +upper Fifth Avenue, of Madison Square and its tower, of sky-scrapers +and sky-scrapers and sky-scrapers round and about the horizon. (I am +to have a tremendous view of them to-morrow as we steam up from the +Narrows.) And thus Mr. Saltus proceeds,-- + + "As you lean and gaze from the toppest floors on houses below, which + from those floors seem huts, it may occur to you that precisely as + these huts were once regarded as supreme achievements, so, one of + these days, from other and higher floors, the Flat-iron may seem a hut + itself. Evolution has not halted. Undiscernibly but indefatigably, + always it is progressing. Its final term is not existing buildings, + nor in existing man. If humanity sprang from gorillas, from humanity + gods shall proceed." + +The rule of three in excelsis! + + "The story of Olympus is merely a tale of what might have been. That + which might have been may yet come to pass. Even now could the old + divinities, hushed forevermore, awake, they would be perplexed enough + to see how mortals have exceeded them.... In Fifth Avenue inns they + could get fairer fare than ambrosia, and behold women beside whom + Venus herself would look provincial and Juno a frump. The spectacle of + electricity tamed and domesticated would surprise them not a little, + the elevated quite as much, the Flat-iron still more. At sight of the + latter they would recall the Titans with whom once they warred, and + sink to their sun-red seas outfaced. + + "In this same measure we have succeeded in exceeding them, so will + posterity surpass what we have done. Evolution may be slow, it + achieved an unrecognized advance when it devised buildings such as + this. It is demonstrable that small rooms breed small thoughts. It + will be demonstrable that, as buildings ascend, so do ideas. It is + mental progress that sky-scrapers engender. From these parturitions + gods may really proceed--beings, that is, who, could we remain long + enough to see them, would regard us as we regard the apes...." + +Mr. Saltus writes, I think, with a very typical American accent. Most +Americans think like that and all of them I fancy feel like it. Just +in that spirit a later-empire Roman might have written apropos the +gigantic new basilica of Constantine the Great (who was also, one +recalls, a record-breaker in ship-building) and have compared it with +the straitened proportions of Cæsar's Forum and the meagre relics of +republican Rome. So too (_absit omen_) he might have swelled into +prophecy and sounded the true modern note. + +One hears that modern note everywhere nowadays where print spreads, +but from America with fewer undertones than anywhere. Even I find it, +ringing clear, as a thing beyond disputing, as a thing as self-evident +as sunrise again and again in the expressed thought of Mr. Henry James. + +But you know this progress isn't guaranteed. We have all indeed been +carried away completely by the up-rush of it all. To me now this +_Carmania_ seems to typify the whole thing. What matter it if there +are moments when one reflects on the mysterious smallness and it +would seem the ungrowing quality of the human content of it all? We +are, after all, astonishingly like flies on a machine that has got +loose. No matter. Those people on the main-deck are the oddest crowd, +strange Oriental-looking figures with Astrakhan caps, hook-noses, +shifty eyes, and indisputably dirty habits, bold-eyed, red-capped, +expectorating women, quaint and amazingly dirty children; Tartars +there are too, and Cossacks, queer wraps, queer head-dresses, a sort +of greasy picturesqueness over them all. They use the handkerchief +solely as a head covering. Their deck is disgusting with fragments of +food, with egg-shells they haven't had the decency to throw over-board. +Collectively they have--an atmosphere. They're going where we're going, +wherever that is. What matters it? What matters it, too, if these +people about me in the artistic apartment talk nothing but trivialities +derived from the _Daily Bulletin_, think nothing but trivialities, +are, except in the capacity of paying passengers, the most ineffectual +gathering of human beings conceivable? What matters it that there is +no connection, no understanding whatever between them and that large +and ominous crowd a plank or so and a yard or so under our feet? Or +between themselves for the matter of that? What matters it if nobody +seems to be struck by the fact that we are all, the three thousand two +hundred of us so extraordinarily got together into this tremendous +machine, and that not only does nobody inquire what it is has got us +together in this astonishing fashion and why, but that nobody seems to +feel that we are together in any sort of way at all? One looks up at +the smoke-pouring funnels and back at the foaming wake. It will be all +right. Aren't we driving ahead westward at a pace of four hundred and +fifty miles a day? + +And twenty or thirty thousand other souls, mixed and stratified, on +great steamers ahead of us, or behind, are driving westward too. That +there's no collective mind apparent in it at all, worth speaking about +is so much the better. That only shows its Destiny, its Progress as +inevitable as gravitation. I could almost believe it, as I sit quietly +writing here by a softly shaded light in this elegantly appointed +drawing-room, as steady as though I was in my native habitat on dry +land instead of hurrying almost fearfully, at twenty knots an hour, +over a tumbling empty desert of blue waves under a windy sky. But, +only a little while ago, I was out forward alone, looking at that. +Everything was still except for the remote throbbing of the engines and +the nearly effaced sound of a man, singing in a strange tongue, that +came from the third-class gangway far below. The sky was clear, save +for a few black streamers of clouds, Orion hung very light and large +above the waters, and a great new moon, still visibly holding its dead +predecessor in its crescent, sank near him. Between the sparse great +stars were deep blue spaces, unfathomed distances. + +Out there I had been reminded of space and time. Out there the ship was +just a hastening ephemeral fire-fly that had chanced to happen across +the eternal tumult of the winds and sea. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +NEW YORK + +(_In a room on the ninth floor in the sky-scraper hotel New York_) + + +I + +First Impressions + +My first impressions of New York are enormously to enhance the effect +of this Progress, this material progress, that is to say, as something +inevitable and inhuman, as a blindly furious energy of growth that +must go on. Against the broad and level gray contours of Liverpool one +found the ocean liner portentously tall, but here one steams into the +middle of a town that dwarfs the ocean liner. The sky-scrapers that +are the New-Yorker's perpetual boast and pride rise up to greet one +as one comes through the Narrows into the Upper Bay, stand out, in a +clustering group of tall irregular crenellations, the strangest crown +that ever a city wore. They have an effect of immense incompleteness; +each one seems to await some needed terminal,--to be, by virtue of its +woolly jets of steam, still as it were in process of eruption. One +thinks of St. Peter's great blue dome, finished and done as one saw it +from a vine-shaded wine-booth above the Milvian Bridge, one thinks of +the sudden ascendency of St. Paul's dark grace, as it soars out over +any one who comes up by the Thames towards it. These are efforts that +have accomplished their ends, and even Paris illuminated under the tall +stem of the Eiffel Tower looked completed and defined. But New York's +achievement is a threatening promise, growth going on under a pressure +that increases, and amidst a hungry uproar of effort. + +One gets a measure of the quality of this force of mechanical, of +inhuman, growth as one marks the great statue of Liberty on our +larboard, which is meant to dominate and fails absolutely to dominate +the scene. It gets to three hundred feet about, by standing on a +pedestal of a hundred and fifty; and the uplifted torch, seen against +the sky, suggests an arm straining upward, straining in hopeless +competition with the fierce commercial altitudes ahead. Poor liberating +Lady of the American ideal! One passes her and forgets. + +Happy returning natives greet the great pillars of business by name, +the St. Paul Building, the World, the Manhattan tower; the English +new-comer notes the clear emphasis of the detail, the freedom from +smoke and atmospheric mystery that New York gains from burning +anthracite, the jetting white steam clouds that emphasize that freedom. +Across the broad harbor plies an unfamiliar traffic of grotesque broad +ferry-boats, black with people, glutted to the lips with vans and +carts, each hooting and yelping its own distinctive note, and there is +a wild hurrying up and down and to and fro of piping and bellowing tugs +and barges; and a great floating platform, bearing a railway train, +gets athwart our course as we ascend and evokes megatherial bellowings. +Everything is moving at a great speed, and whistling and howling, it +seems, and presently far ahead we make out our own pier, black with +expectant people, and set up our own distinctive whoop, and with the +help of half a dozen furiously noisy tugs are finally lugged and butted +into dock. The tugs converse by yells and whistles, it is an affair of +short-tempered mechanical monsters, amidst which one watches for one's +opportunity to get ashore. + +Noise and human hurry and a vastness of means and collective result, +rather than any vastness of achievement, is the pervading quality of +New York. The great thing is the mechanical thing, the unintentional +thing which is speeding up all these people, driving them in headlong +hurry this way and that, exhorting them by the voice of every car +conductor to "step lively," aggregating them into shoving and elbowing +masses, making them stand clinging to straps, jerking them up elevator +shafts and pouring them on to the ferry-boats. But this accidental +great thing is at times a very great thing. Much more impressive than +the sky-scrapers to my mind is the large Brooklyn suspension-bridge. +I have never troubled to ask who built that; its greatness is not +in its design, but in the quality of necessity one perceives in its +inanimate immensity. It _tells_, as one goes under it up the East +River, but it is far more impressive to the stranger to come upon it +by glimpses, wandering down to it through the ill-paved van-infested +streets from Chatham Square. One sees parts of Cyclopean stone arches, +one gets suggestive glimpses through the jungle growth of business now +of the back, now of the flanks, of the monster; then, as one comes +out on the river, one discovers far up in one's sky the long sweep of +the bridge itself, foreshortened and with a maximum of perspective +effect; the streams of pedestrians and the long line of carts and +vans, quaintly microscopic against the blue, the creeping progress of +the little cars on the lower edge of the long chain of netting; all +these things dwindling indistinguishably before Brooklyn is reached. +Thence, if it is late afternoon, one may walk back to City Hall Park +and encounter and experience the convergent stream of clerks and +workers making for the bridge, mark it grow denser and denser, until +at last they come near choking even the broad approaches of the giant +duct, until the congested multitudes jostle and fight for a way. +They arrive marching afoot by every street in endless procession; +crammed trolley-cars disgorge them; the Subway pours them out.... The +individuals count for nothing, they are clerks and stenographers, +shop-men, shop-girls, workers of innumerable types, black-coated +men, hat-and-blouse girls, shabby and cheaply clad persons, such as one +sees in London, in Berlin, anywhere. Perhaps they hurry more, perhaps +they seem more eager. But the distinctive effect is the mass, the black +torrent, rippled with unmeaning faces, the great, the unprecedented +multitudinousness of the thing, the inhuman force of it all. + +[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE] + +I made no efforts to present any of my letters, or to find any one to +talk to on my first day in New York. I landed, got a casual lunch, and +wandered alone until New York's peculiar effect of inhuman noise and +pressure and growth became overwhelming, touched me with a sense of +solitude, and drove me into the hospitable companionship of the Century +Club. Oh, no doubt of New York's immensity! The sense of soulless +gigantic forces, that took no heed of men, became stronger and stronger +all that day. The pavements were often almost incredibly out of repair, +when I became footweary the street-cars would not wait for me, and I +had to learn their stopping-points as best I might. I wandered, just +at the right pitch of fatigue to get the full force of it into the +eastward region between Third and Fourth Avenue, came upon the Elevated +railway at its worst, the darkened streets of disordered paving below, +trolley-car-congested, the ugly clumsy lattice, sonorously busy +overhead, a clatter of vans and draught-horses, and great crowds of +cheap, base-looking people hurrying uncivilly by.... + + +II + +The Coming of White Marble + +I corrected that first crowded impression of New York with a clearer, +brighter vision of expansiveness when next day I began to realize the +social quality of New York's central backbone, between Fourth Avenue +and Sixth. The effect remained still that of an immeasurably powerful +forward movement of rapid eager advance, a process of enlargement and +increment in every material sense, but it may be because I was no +longer fatigued, was now a little initiated, the human being seemed +less of a fly upon the wheels. I visited immense and magnificent +clubs--London has no such splendors as the Union, the University, the +new hall of the Harvard--I witnessed the great torrent of spending +and glittering prosperity in carriage and motor-car pour along Fifth +Avenue. I became aware of effects that were not only vast and opulent +but fine. It grew upon me that the Twentieth Century, which found New +York brown-stone of the color of desiccated chocolate, meant to leave +it a city of white and colored marble. I found myself agape, admiring +a sky-scraper--the prow of the Flat-iron Building, to be particular, +ploughing up through the traffic of Broadway and Fifth Avenue in the +afternoon light. The New York sundown and twilight seemed to me quite +glorious things. Down the western streets one gets the sky hung in +long cloud-barred strips, like Japanese paintings, celestial tranquil +yellows and greens and pink luminosity toning down to the reeking +blue-brown edge of the distant New Jersey atmosphere, and the clear, +black, hard activity of crowd and trolley-car and Elevated railroad. +Against this deepening color came the innumerable little lights of the +house cliffs and the street tier above tier. New York is lavish of +light, it is lavish of everything, it is full of the sense of spending +from an inexhaustible supply. For a time one is drawn irresistibly into +the universal belief in that inexhaustible supply. + +At a bright table in Delmonico's to-day at lunch-time, my host told me +the first news of the destruction of the great part of San Francisco +by earthquake and fire. It had just come through to him, it wasn't +yet being shouted by the newsboys. He told me compactly of dislocated +water-mains, of the ill-luck of the unusual eastward wind that was +blowing the fire up-town, of a thousand reported dead, of the manifest +doom of the greater portion of the city, and presently the shouting +voices in the street outside arose to chorus him. He was a newspaper +man and a little preoccupied because his San Francisco offices were +burning, and that no further news was arriving after these first +intimations. Naturally the catastrophe was our topic. But this disaster +did not affect him, it does not seem to have affected any one with +a sense of final destruction, with any foreboding of irreparable +disaster. Every one is talking of it this afternoon, and no one is in +the least degree dismayed. I have talked and listened in two clubs, +watched people in cars and in the street, and one man is glad that +Chinatown will be cleared out for good; another's chief solicitude is +for Millet's "Man with the Hoe." "They'll cut it out of the frame," +he says, a little anxiously. "Sure." But there is no doubt anywhere +that San Francisco can be rebuilt, larger, better, and soon. Just as +there would be none at all if all this New York that has so obsessed +me with its limitless bigness was itself a blazing ruin. I believe +these people would more than half like the situation. It would give +them scope, it would facilitate that conversion into white marble in +progress everywhere, it would settle the difficulties of the Elevated +railroad and clear out the tangles of lower New York. There is no sense +of accomplishment and finality in any of these things, the largest, +the finest, the tallest, are so obviously no more than symptoms and +promises of Material Progress, of inhuman material progress that is so +in the nature of things that no one would regret their passing. That, I +say again, is at the first encounter the peculiar American effect that +began directly I stepped aboard the liner, and that rises here to a +towering, shining, clamorous climax. The sense of inexhaustible supply, +of an ultra-human force behind it all, is, for a time, invincible. + +One assumes, with Mr. Saltus, that all America is in this vein, and +that this is the way the future must inevitably go. One has a vision +of bright electrical subways, replacing the filth-diffusing railways of +to-day, of clean, clear pavements free altogether from the fly-prolific +filth of horses coming almost, as it were, of their own accord beneath +the feet of a population that no longer expectorates at all; of grimy +stone and peeling paint giving way everywhere to white marble and +spotless surfaces, and a shining order, of everything wider, taller, +cleaner, better.... + +So that, in the meanwhile, a certain amount of jostling and hurry and +untidiness, and even--to put it mildly--forcefulness may be forgiven. + + +III + +Ellis Island + +I visited Ellis Island yesterday. It chanced to be a good day for my +purpose. For the first time in its history this filter of immigrant +humanity has this week proved inadequate to the demand upon it. It was +choked, and half a score of gravid liners were lying uncomfortably up +the harbor, replete with twenty thousand or so of crude Americans from +Ireland and Poland and Italy and Syria and Finland and Albania; men, +women, children, dirt, and bags together. + +Of immigration I shall have to write later; what concerns me now is +chiefly the wholesale and multitudinous quality of that place and its +work. I made my way with my introduction along white passages and +through traps and a maze of metal lattices that did for a while succeed +in catching and imprisoning me, to Commissioner Wachorn, in his quiet, +green-toned office. There, for a time, I sat judicially and heard him +deal methodically, swiftly, sympathetically, with case after case, a +string of appeals against the sentences of deportation pronounced in +the busy little courts below. First would come one dingy and strangely +garbed group of wild-eyed aliens, and then another: Roumanian gypsies, +South Italians, Ruthenians, Swedes, each under the intelligent guidance +of a uniformed interpreter, and a case would be started, a report made +to Washington, and they would drop out again, hopeful or sullen or +fearful as the evidence might trend.... + +Down-stairs we find the courts, and these seen, we traverse long +refectories, long aisles of tables, and close-packed dormitories with +banks of steel mattresses, tier above tier, and galleries and passages +innumerable, perplexing intricacy that slowly grows systematic with the +Commissioner's explanations. + +Here is a huge, gray, untidy waiting-room, like a big railway-depot +room, full of a sinister crowd of miserable people, loafing about or +sitting dejectedly, whom America refuses, and here a second and a third +such chamber each with its tragic and evil-looking crowd that hates +us, and that even ventures to groan and hiss at us a little for our +glimpse of its large dirty spectacle of hopeless failure, and here, +squalid enough indeed, but still to some degree hopeful, are the +appeal cases as yet undecided. In one place, at a bank of ranges, works +an army of men cooks, in another spins the big machinery of the Ellis +Island laundry, washing blankets, drying blankets, day in and day out, +a big clean steamy space of hurry and rotation. Then, I recall a neat +apartment lined to the ceiling with little drawers, a card-index of the +names and nationalities and significant circumstances of upward of a +million and a half of people who have gone on and who are yet liable to +recall. + +The central hall is the key of this impression. All day long, through +an intricate series of metal pens, the long procession files, step by +step, bearing bundles and trunks and boxes, past this examiner and +that, past the quick, alert medical officers, the tallymen and the +clerks. At every point immigrants are being picked out and set aside +for further medical examination, for further questions, for the busy +little courts; but the main procession satisfies conditions, passes +on. It is a daily procession that, with a yard of space to each, +would stretch over three miles, that any week in the year would more +than equal in numbers that daily procession of the unemployed that is +becoming a regular feature of the London winter, that in a year could +put a cordon round London or New York of close-marching people, could +populate a new Boston, that in a century--What in a century will it all +amount to?... + +On they go, from this pen to that, pen by pen, towards a desk at a +little metal wicket--the gate of America. Through this metal wicket +drips the immigration stream--all day long, every two or three seconds +an immigrant, with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk and +goes on past the well-managed money-changing place, past the carefully +organized separating ways that go to this railway or that, past the +guiding, protecting officials--into a new world. The great majority +are young men and young women, between seventeen and thirty, good, +youthful, hopeful, peasant stock. They stand in a long string, waiting +to go through that wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with +cheap portmanteaus, with odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone, +women with children, men with strings of dependents, young couples. All +day that string of human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again; +all day and every day, constantly replenished, constantly dropping the +end beads through the wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and the +hundreds to thousands.... + +Yes, Ellis Island is quietly immense. It gives one a visible image of +one aspect at least of this world-large process of filling and growing +and synthesis, which is America. + +"Look there!" said the Commissioner, taking me by the arm and pointing, +and I saw a monster steamship far away, and already a big bulk +looming up the Narrows. "It's the _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_. She's +got--I forget the exact figures, but let us say--eight hundred and +fifty-three more for us. She'll have to keep them until Friday at the +earliest. And there's more behind her, and more strung out all across +the Atlantic." + +In one record day this month 21,000 immigrants came into the port of +New York alone; in one week over 50,000. This year the total will be +1,200,000 souls, pouring in, finding work at once, producing no fall in +wages. They start digging and building and making. Just think of the +dimensions of it! + + +IV + +To Fall River + +One must get away from New York to see the place in its proper +relations. I visited Staten Island and Jersey City, motored up to +Sleepy Hollow (where once the Headless Horseman rode), saw suburbs +and intimations of suburbs without end, and finished with the long +and crowded spectacle of the East River as one sees it from the Fall +River boat. It was Friday night, and the Fall River boat was in a +state of fine congestion with Jews, Italians, and week-enders, and one +stood crowded and surveyed the crowded shore, the sky-scrapers and +tenement-houses, the huge grain elevators, big warehouses, the great +Brooklyn Bridge, the still greater Williamsburgh Bridge, the great +promise of yet another monstrous bridge, overwhelmingly monstrous by +any European example I know, and so past long miles of city to the +left and to the right past the wide Brooklyn navy-yard (where three +clean white war-ships lay moored), past the clustering castellated +asylums, hospitals, almshouses and reformatories of Blackwell's long +shore and Ward's Island, and then through a long reluctant diminuendo +on each receding bank, until, indeed, New York, though it seemed +incredible, had done. + +And at one point a grave-voiced man in a peaked cap, with guide-books +to sell, pleased me greatly by ending all idle talk suddenly with the +stentorian announcement: "We are now in Hell Gate. We are now passing +through Hell Gate!" + +But they've blown Hell Gate open with dynamite, and it wasn't at +all the Hell Gate that I read about in my boyhood in the delightful +chronicle of Knickerbocker. + +So through an elbowing evening (to the tune of "Cavalleria Rusticana" +on an irrepressible string band) and a night of unmitigated fog-horn +to Boston, which I had been given to understand was a cultured and +uneventful city offering great opportunities for reflection and +intellectual digestion. And, indeed, the large quiet of Beacon Street, +in the early morning sunshine, seemed to more than justify that +expectation.... + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +GROWTH INVINCIBLE + + +I + +Boston's Way of Growing + +But Boston did not propose that its less-assertive key should be +misunderstood, and in a singularly short space of time I found myself +climbing into a tremulous impatient motor-car in company with three +enthusiastic exponents of the work of the Metropolitan Park Commission, +and provided with a neatly tinted map, large and framed and glazed, +to explore a fresh and more deliberate phase in this great American +symphony, this symphony of Growth. + +If possible it is more impressive, even, than the crowded largeness +of New York, to trace the serene preparation Boston has made through +this Commission to be widely and easily vast. New York's humanity +has a curious air of being carried along upon a wave of irresistible +prosperity, but Boston confesses design. I suppose no city in all the +world (unless it be Washington) has ever produced so complete and ample +a forecast of its own future as this Commission's plan of Boston. An +area with a radius of between fifteen and twenty miles from the State +House has been planned out and prepared for Growth. Great reservations +of woodland and hill have been made, the banks of nearly all the +streams and rivers and meres have been secured for public park and +garden, for boating and other water sports; big avenues of vigorous +young trees; a hundred and fifty yards or so wide, with drive-ways +and ridingways and a central grassy band for electric tramways, have +been prepared, and, indeed, the fair and ample and shady new Boston, +the Boston of 1950, grows visibly before one's eyes. I found myself +comparing the disciplined confidence of these proposals to the blind +enlargement of London; London, that like a bowl of viscid human fluid, +boils sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and slops messily +and uglily into the home counties. I could not but contrast their large +intelligence with the confused hesitations and waste and muddle of our +English suburban developments.... + +There were moments, indeed, when it seemed too good to be true, and Mr. +Sylvester Baxter, who was with me and whose faith has done so much to +secure this mapping out of a city's growth beyond all precedent, became +the victim of my doubts. "Will this enormous space of sunlit woodland +and marsh and meadow really be filled at any time?" I urged. "All +cities do not grow. Cities have shrunken." + +I recalled Bruges. I recalled the empty, goat-sustaining, flower-rich +meadows of Rome within the wall. What made him so sure of this +progressive magnificence of Boston's growth? My doubts fell on stony +soil. My companions seemed to think these scepticisms inopportune, a +forced eccentricity, like doubting the coming of to-morrow. Of course +Growth will go on.... + +The subject was changed by the sight of the fine marble buildings of +the Harvard medical school, a shining façade partially eclipsed by +several dingy and unsightly wooden houses. + +"These shanties will go, of course," says one of my companions. "It's +proposed to take the avenue right across this space straight to the +schools." + +"You'll have to fill the marsh, then, and buy the houses." + +"Sure."... + +I find myself comparing this huge growth process of America with +the things in my own land. After all, this growth is no distinctive +American thing; it is the same process anywhere--only in America there +are no disguises, no complications. Come to think of it, Birmingham and +Manchester are as new as Boston--newer; and London, south and east of +the Thames, is, save for a little nucleus, more recent than Chicago--is +in places, I am told, with its smoky disorder, its clattering ways, its +brutality of industrial conflict, very like Chicago. But nowhere now is +growth still so certainly and confidently _going on_ as here. Nowhere +is it upon so great a scale as here, and with so confident an outlook +towards the things to come. And nowhere is it passing more certainly +from the first phase of a mob-like rush of individualistic undertakings +into a planned and ordered progress. + + +II + +The End of Niagara + +Everywhere in the America I have seen the same note sounds, the note of +a fatal gigantic economic development, of large prevision and enormous +pressures. + +I heard it clear above the roar of Niagara--for, after all, I stopped +off at Niagara. + +As a water-fall, Niagara's claim to distinction is now mainly +quantitative; its spectacular effect, its magnificent and humbling size +and splendor, were long since destroyed beyond recovery by the hotels, +the factories, the power-houses, the bridges and tramways and hoardings +that arose about it. It must have been a fine thing to happen upon +suddenly after a day of solitary travel; the Indians, they say, gave it +worship; but it's no great wonder to reach it by trolley-car, through +a street hack-infested and full of adventurous refreshment-places and +souvenir-shops and the touting guides. There were great quantities of +young couples and other sightseers with the usual encumbrances of wrap +and bag and umbrella, trailing out across the bridges and along the +neat paths of the Reservation Parks, asking the way to this point and +that. Notice boards cut the eye, offering extra joys and memorable +objects for twenty-five and fifty cents, and it was proposed you should +keep off the grass. + +After all, the gorge of Niagara is very like any good gorge in the +Ardennes, except that it has more water; it's about as wide and about +as deep, and there is no effect at all that one has not seen a dozen +times in other cascades. One gets all the water one wants at Tivoli, +one has gone behind half a hundred downpours just as impressive in +Switzerland; a hundred tons of water is really just as stunning as ten +million. A hundred tons of water stuns one altogether, and what more +do you want? One recalls "Orridos" and "Schluchts" that are not only +magnificent but lonely. + +No doubt the Falls, seen from the Canadian side, have a peculiar long +majesty of effect; but the finest thing in it all, to my mind, was not +Niagara at all, but to look up-stream from Goat Island and see the +sea-wide crest of the flashing sunlit rapids against the gray-blue sky. +That was like a limitless ocean pouring down a sloping world towards +one, and I lingered, held by that, returning to it through an indolent +afternoon. It gripped the imagination as nothing else there seemed to +do. It was so broad an infinitude of splash and hurry. And, moreover, +all the enterprising hotels and expectant trippers were out of sight. + +That was the best of the display. The real interest of Niagara for me, +was not in the water-fall but in the human accumulations about it. They +stood for the future, threats and promises, and the water-fall was +just a vast reiteration of falling water. The note of growth in human +accomplishment rose clear and triumphant above the elemental thunder. + +For the most part these accumulations of human effort about Niagara +are extremely defiling and ugly. Nothing--not even the hotel signs and +advertisement boards--could be more offensive to the eye and mind than +the Schoellkopf Company's untidy confusion of sheds and buildings on +the American side, wastefully squirting out long, tail-race cascades +below the bridge, and nothing more disgusting than the sewer-pipes +and gas-work ooze that the town of Niagara Falls contributes to the +scenery. But, after all, these represent only the first slovenly +onslaught of mankind's expansion, the pioneers' camp of the +human-growth process that already changes its quality and manner. There +are finer things than these outrages to be found. + +The dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company, for +example, impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the +Winds; are, indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than that +accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made +visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are +clean, noiseless, and starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of +the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no +coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel-pit into which one descends has an +almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are +altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, +great sleeping tops that engender irresistible forces in their +sleep. They sprang, armed like Minerva, from serene and speculative, +foreseeing and endeavoring brains. First was the word and then these +powers. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the +dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket. Yet the outer rim of the big +generators is spinning at the pace of a hundred thousand miles an hour; +the dazzling clean switch-board, with its little handles and levers, +is the seat of empire over more power than the strength of a million +disciplined, unquestioning men. All these great things are as silent, +as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and +stronger than that.... + +When I thought that these two huge wheel-pits of this company are +themselves but a little intimation of what can be done in this way, +what will be done in this way, my imagination towered above me. I fell +into a day-dream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be +used by them.... + +For surely the greatness of life is still to come, it is not in such +accidents as mountains or the sea. I have seen the splendor of the +mountains, sunrise and sunset among them, and the waste immensity of +sky and sea. I am not blind because I can see beyond these glories. To +me no other thing is credible than that all the natural beauty in the +world is only so much material for the imagination and the mind, so +many hints and suggestions for art and creation. Whatever is, is but +the lure and symbol towards what can be willed and done. Man lives to +make--in the end he must make, for there will be nothing else left for +him to do. + +And the world he will make--after a thousand years or so! + +I, at least, can forgive the loss of all the accidental, unmeaning +beauty that is going for the sake of the beauty of fine order and +intention that will come. I believe--passionately, as a doubting lover +believes in his mistress--in the future of mankind. And so to me it +seems altogether well that all the froth and hurry of Niagara at last, +all of it, dying into hungry canals of intake, should rise again in +light and power, in ordered and equipped and proud and beautiful +humanity, in cities and palaces and the emancipated souls and hearts of +men.... + +I turned back to look at the power-house as I walked towards the Falls, +and halted and stared. Its architecture brought me out of my day-dream +to the quality of contemporary things again. It's a well-intentioned +building enough, extraordinarily well intentioned, and regardless of +expense. It's in granite and by Stanford White, and yet--It hasn't +caught the note. There's a touch of respectability in it, more than a +hint of the box of bricks. Odd, but I'd almost as soon have had one of +the Schoellkopf sheds. + +A community that can produce such things as those turbines and dynamos, +and then cover them over with this dull exterior, is capable, one +realizes, of feats of bathos. One feels that all the power that throbs +in the copper cables below may end at last in turning Great Wheels for +excursionists, stamping out aluminum "fancy" ware, and illuminating +night advertisements for drug shops and music halls. I had an afternoon +of busy doubts.... + +There is much discussion about Niagara at present. It may be some +queer compromise, based on the pretence that a voluminous water-fall +is necessarily a thing of incredible beauty, and a human use is +necessarily a degrading use, will "save" Niagara and the hack-drivers +and the souvenir-shops for series of years yet, "a magnificent monument +to the pride of the United States in a glory of nature," as one +journalistic savior puts it. It is, as public opinion stands, a quite +conceivable thing. This electric development may be stopped after +all, and the huge fall of water remain surrounded by gravel paths +and parapets and geranium-beds, a staring-point for dull wonder, a +crown for a day's excursion, a thunderous impressive accessory to +the vulgar love-making that fills the surrounding hotels, a Titanic +imbecility of wasted gifts. But I don't think so. I think somebody will +pay something, and the journalistic zeal for scenery abate. I think +the huge social and industrial process of America will win in this +conflict, and at last capture Niagara altogether. + +And then--what use will it make of its prey? + + +III + +The Tail of Chicago + +In smoky, vast, undisciplined Chicago Growth forced itself upon me +again as the dominant American fact, but this time a dark disorder of +growth. I went about Chicago seeing many things of which I may say +something later. I visited the top of the Masonic Building and viewed +a wilderness of sky-scrapers. I acquired a felt of memories of swing +bridges and viaducts and interlacing railways and jostling crowds and +extraordinarily dirty streets, I learnt something of the mystery of the +"floating foundations" upon which so much of Chicago rests. But I got +my best vision of Chicago as I left it. + +I sat in the open observation-car at the end of the Pennsylvania +Limited Express, and watched the long defile of industrialism from the +Union Station in the heart of things to out beyond South Chicago, +a dozen miles away. I had not gone to the bloody spectacle of the +stock-yards that "feed the world," because, to be frank, I have an +immense repugnance to the killing of fixed and helpless animals; I saw +nothing of those ill-managed, ill-inspected establishments, though I +smelt the unwholesome reek from them ever and again, and so it was +here I saw for the first time the enormous expanse and intricacy of +railroads that net this great industrial desolation, and something of +the going and coming of the myriads of polyglot workers. Chicago burns +bituminous coal, it has a reek that outdoes London, and right and +left of the line rise vast chimneys, huge blackened grain-elevators, +flame-crowned furnaces and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings, +monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots littered with rusty +cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are +groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses. + +We swept along the many-railed track, and the straws and scraps of +paper danced in our eddy as we passed. We overtook local trains and +they receded slowly in the great perspective, huge freight-trains met +us or were overtaken; long trains of doomed cattle passed northward; +solitary engines went by--every engine tolling a melancholy bell; open +trucks crowded with workmen went cityward. By the side of the track, +and over the level crossings, walked great numbers of people. So it +goes on mile after mile--Chicago. The sun was now bright, now pallid +through some streaming curtain of smoke; the spring afternoon was lit +here and again by the gallant struggle of some stunted tree with a rare +and startling note of new green.... + +It was like a prolonged, enlarged mingling of the south side of +London with all that is bleak and ugly in the Black Country. It is +the most perfect presentation of nineteenth-century individualistic +industrialism I have ever seen--in its vast, its magnificent squalor; +it is pure nineteenth century; it had no past at all before that; in +1800 it was empty prairie, and one marvels for its future. It is indeed +a nineteenth-century nightmare that culminates beyond South Chicago in +the monstrous fungoid shapes, the endless smoking chimneys, the squat +retorts, the black smoke pall of the Standard Oil Company. For a time +the sun is veiled altogether by that.... + +And then suddenly Chicago is a dark smear under the sky, and we are in +the large emptiness of America, the other America--America in between. + + +IV + +Intimations of Order + +"Undisciplined"--that is the word for Chicago. It is the word for +all the progress of the Victorian time, a scrambling, ill-mannered, +undignified, unintelligent development of material resources. +Packingtown, for example, is a place that feeds the world with meat, +that concentrates the produce of a splendid countryside at a position +of imperial advantage, and its owners have no more sense, no better +moral quality, than to make it stink in the nostrils of any one who +comes within two miles of it; to make it a centre of distribution for +disease and decay, an arena of shabby evasions and extra profits; a +scene of brutal economic conflict and squalid filthiness, offensive +to every sense. (I wish I could catch the soul of Herbert Spencer and +tether it in Chicago for awhile to gather fresh evidence upon the +superiority of unfettered individualistic enterprises to things managed +by the state.) + +Want of discipline! Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline! The +reek and scandal of the stock-yards is really only a gigantic form +of that same quality in American life that, in a minor aspect, makes +the sidewalk filthy. The key to the peculiar nasty ugliness of those +Schoellkopf works that defile the Niagara gorge is the same quality. +The detestableness of the Elevated railroads of Chicago and Boston +and New York have this in common. All that is ugly in America, in +Lancashire, in South and East London, in the Pas de Calais, is due +to this, to the shoving unintelligent proceedings of underbred and +morally obtuse men. Each man is for himself, each enterprise; there is +no order, no prevision, no common and universal plan. Modern economic +organization is still as yet only thinking of emerging from its +first chaotic stage, the stage of lawless enterprise and insanitary +aggregation, the stage of the prospector's camp.... + +But it does emerge. + +Men are makers--American men, I think, more than most men--and amidst +even the catastrophic jumble of Chicago one finds the same creative +forces at work that are struggling to replan a greater Boston, and that +turned a waste of dumps and swamps and cabbage-gardens into Central +Park, New York. Chicago also has its Parks Commission and its green +avenues, its bright flower-gardens, its lakes and playing-fields. Its +Midway Plaisance is in amazing contrast with the dirt, the congestion, +the moral disorder of its State Street; its Field Houses do visible +battle with slum and the frantic meanness of commercial folly. + +Field Houses are peculiar to Chicago, and Chicago has every reason +to be proud of them. I visited one that is positively within smell +of the stock-yards and wedged into a district of gaunt and dirty +slums. It stands in the midst of a little park, and close by it are +three playing-grounds with swings and parallel bars and all manner of +athletic appliances, one for little children, one for girls and women, +and one for boys and youths. In the children's place is a paddling-pond +of clear, clean, running water and a shaded area of frequently +changed sand, and in the park was a broad asphalted arena that can be +flooded for skating in winter. All this is free to all comers, and +free too is the Field House itself. This is a large, cool Italianate +place with two or three reading-rooms--one specially arranged for +children--a big discussion-hall, a big and well-equipped gymnasium, and +big, free baths for men and for women. There is also a clean, bright +refreshment-place where wholesome food is sold just above cost price. +It was early on Friday afternoon when I saw it all, but the place was +busy with children, reading, bathing, playing in a hundred different +ways. + +[Illustration: STATE STREET, CHICAGO] + +And this Field House is not an isolated philanthropic enterprise. It +is just one of a number that are dotted about Chicago, mitigating and +civilizing its squalor. It was not distilled by begging and charity +from the stench of the stock-yards or the reek of Standard Oil. It +is part of the normal work of a special taxing body created by the +legislature of the State of Illinois. It is just one of the fruits upon +one of the growths that spring from such persistent creative efforts +as that of the Chicago City Club. It is socialism--even as its enemies +declare.... + +Even amidst the sombre uncleanliness of Chicago one sees the light of +a new epoch, the coming of new conceptions, of foresight, of large +collective plans and discipline to achieve them, the fresh green +leaves, among all the festering manure, of the giant growths of a more +orderly and more beautiful age. + + +V + +The Pennsylvania Limited + +These growing towns, these giant towns that grow up and out, that grow +orderly and splendid out of their first chaotic beginnings, are only +little patches upon a vast expanse, upon what is still of all habitable +countries the emptiest country in the world. My long express journey +from Chicago to Washington lasted a day and a night and more, I could +get sooner from my home in Kent to Italy, and yet that was still well +under a third of the way across the continent. I spent most of my +daylight time in the fine and graceful open loggia at the end of the +observation-car or in looking out of the windows, looking at hills and +valleys, townships and quiet places, sudden busy industrial outbreaks +about coal-mine or metal, big undisciplined rivers that spread into +swamp and lake, new forest growths, very bright and green now, foaming +up above blackened stumps. There were many cypress-trees and trees with +white blossom and the Judas-tree, very abundant among the spring-time +green. I got still more clearly the enormous scale of this American +destiny I seek to discuss, through all that long and interesting day of +transit. I measured, as it seemed to me for the first time, the real +scale of the growth process that has put a four-track road nine hundred +miles across this exuberant land and scarred every available hill with +furnace and mine. + +Bigness--that's the word! The very fields and farm-buildings seem to me +to have four times the size of our English farms. + +Some casual suggestion of the wayside, I forget now what, set me +thinking of the former days, so recent that they are yet within the +lifetime of living men, when this was frontier land, when even the +middle west remained to be won. I thought of the slow diffusing +population of the forties, the pioneer wagon, the men armed with axe +and rifle, knife and revolver, the fear of the Indians, the weak and +casual incidence of law. Then the high-road was but a prairie track and +all these hills and hidden minerals unconquered fastnesses that might, +it seemed, hold out for centuries before they gave their treasure. How +quickly things had come! "Progress, progress," murmured the wheels, +and I began to make this steady, swift, and shiningly equipped train a +figure, just as I had made the _Carmania_ a figure of that big onward +sweep that is moving us all together. It was not a noisy train, after +the English fashion, nor did the cars sway and jump after the habit of +our lighter coaches, but the air was full of deep, triumphant rhythms. +"It goes on," I said, "invincibly," and even as the thought was in my +head, the brakes set up a droning, a vibration ran through the train +and we slowed and stopped. A minute passed, and then we rumbled softly +back to a little trestle-bridge and stood there. + +I got up, looked from the window, and then went to the platform at the +end of the train. I found two men, a passenger and a colored parlor-car +attendant. The former was on the bottom step of the car, the latter was +supplying him with information. + +"His head's still in the water," he remarked. + +"Whose head?" said I. + +"A man we've killed," said he. "We caught him in the trestle-bridge." + +I descended a step, craned over my fellow-passenger, and saw a little +group standing curiously about the derelict thing that had been a +living man three minutes before. It was now a crumpled, dark-stained +blue blouse, a limply broken arm with hand askew, trousered legs that +sprawled quaintly, and a pair of heavy boots, lying in the sunlit fresh +grass by the water below the trestle-bridge.... + +A man on the line gave inadequate explanations. "He'd have been all +right if he hadn't come over this side," he said. + +"Who was he?" said I. + +"One of these Eyetalians on the line," he said, and turned away. The +train bristled now with a bunch of curiosity at every car end, and even +windows were opened.... + +Presently it was intimated to us by a whistle and the hasty return of +men to the cars that the incident had closed. We began to move forward +again, crept up to speed.... + +But I could not go on with my conception of the train as a symbol of +human advancement. That crumpled blue blouse and queerly careless legs +would get into the picture and set up all sorts of alien speculations. +I thought of distant north Italian valleys and brown boys among the +vines and goats, of the immigrants who had sung remotely to me out of +the Carmania's steerage, of the hopeful bright-eyed procession of the +new-comers through Ellis Island wicket, of the regiments of workers the +line had shown me, and I told myself a tale of this Italian's journey +to the land of promise, this land of gigantic promises.... + +For a time the big spectacle of America about me took on a quality of +magnificent infidelity.... + +And by reason of this incident my last Image of Material Progress +thundered into Washington station five minutes behind its scheduled +time. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +THE ECONOMIC PROCESS + + +I + +A Bird's-Eye View + +Let me try now and make some sort of general picture of the American +nation as it impresses itself upon me. It is, you will understand, the +vision of a hurried bird of passage, defective and inaccurate at every +point of detail, but perhaps for my present purpose not so very much +the worse for that. The fact that I am transitory and bring a sort of +theorizing naïveté to this review is just what gives me the chance +to remark these obvious things the habituated have forgotten. I have +already tried to render something of the effect of huge unrestrained +growth and material progress that America first gives one, and I +have pointed out that so far America seems to me only to refresh an +old impression, to give starkly and startlingly what is going on +everywhere, what is indeed as much in evidence in Birkenhead or Milan +or London or Calcutta, a huge extension of human power and the scale +of human operations. This growth was elaborated in the physical and +chemical laboratories and the industrial experiments of the eighteenth +and early nineteenth century, and chiefly in Europe. The extension +itself is nothing typically American. Nevertheless America now shows +it best. America is most under the stress and urgency of it, resonates +most readily and loudly to its note. + +The long distances of travel, and the sense of isolation between place +and place, the remoteness verging upon inaudibility of Washington in +Chicago, of Chicago in Boston, the vision I have had of America from +observation cars and railroad windows brings home to me more and more +that this huge development of human appliances and resources is here +going on in a community that is still, for all the dense crowds of +New York, the teeming congestion of the East Side, extraordinarily +scattered. America, one recalls, is still an unoccupied country, across +which the latest developments of civilization are rushing. We are +dealing here with a continuous area of land which is, leaving Alaska +out of account altogether, equal to Great Britain, France, the German +Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Holland, +Spain and Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in Europe, Egypt and +the whole Empire of India, and the population spread out over this +vast space is still less than the joint population of the first two +countries named and not a quarter that of India. Moreover, it is not +spread at all evenly. Much of it is in undistributed clots. It is not +upon the soil, barely half of it is in holdings and homes and authentic +communities. It is a population of an extremely modern type. Urban +concentration has already gone far with it; fifteen millions of it are +crowded into and about twenty great cities, other eighteen millions +make up five hundred towns. Between these centres of population run +railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections, tracks of +various sorts, but to the European eye these are mere scratchings on +a virgin surface. An empty wilderness manifests itself through this +thin network of human conveniences, appears in the meshes even at the +railroad side. Essentially America is still an unsettled land, with +only a few incidental good roads in favored places, with no universal +police, with no wayside inns where a civilized man may rest, with +still only the crudest of rural postal deliveries, with long stretches +of swamp and forest and desert by the track side, still unassailed +by industry. This much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago. +Westward, I am told, it becomes more and more the fact. In Idaho at +last, comes the untouched and perhaps invincible desert, plain and +continuous through the long hours of travel. Huge areas do not contain +one human being to the square mile, still vaster portions fall short of +two.... + +And this community, to which material progress is bringing such +enormous powers, and that is knotted so densely here and there, and +is otherwise so attenuated a veil over the huge land surface, is, +as Professor Münsterberg points out, in spite of vast and increasing +masses of immigrants still a curiously homogeneous one, homogeneous +in the spirit of its activities and speaking a common tongue. It is +sustained by certain economic conventions, inspired throughout by +certain habits, certain trends of suggestion, certain phrases and +certain interpretations that collectively make up what one may call the +American Idea. To the process of enlargement and diffusion and increase +and multiplying resources, we must now bring the consideration of the +social and economic process that is going on. What is the form of that +process as one finds it in America? An English Tory will tell you +promptly, "a scramble for dollars." A good American will tell you it is +self realization under equality of opportunity. The English Tory will +probably allege that that amounts to the same thing. + +Let us look into that. + + +II + +Liberty of Property + +One contrast between America and the old world I had in mind before +ever I crossed the Atlantic, and now it comes before me very +vividly,--returns reinforced by a hundred little things observed and +felt. The contrast consists in the almost complete absence from the +normal American scheme, of certain immemorial factors in the social +structure of our European nations. + +In the first place, every European nation except the English is rooted +to the soil by a peasantry, and even in England one still finds +the peasant represented, in most of his features by those sons of +dispossessed serf-peasants, the agricultural laborers. Here in America, +except in the regions where the negro abounds, there is no lower +stratum, no "soil people," to this community at all; your bottom-most +man is a mobile free man who can read, and who has ideas above digging +and pigs and poultry keeping, except incidentally for his own ends. +No one owns to subordination. As a consequence, any position which +involves the acknowledgment of an innate inferiority is difficult to +fill; there is, from the European point of view, an extraordinary +dearth of servants, and this endures in spite of a great peasant +immigration. The servile tradition will not root here now, it dies in +this soil. An enormous importation of European serfs and peasants goes +on, but as they touch this soil their backs begin to stiffen with a new +assertion. + +And at the other end of the scale, also, one misses an element. There +is no territorial aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne, +no legitimate and acknowledged representative of that upper social +structure of leisure, power, State responsibility, which in the old +European theory of society was supposed to give significance to the +whole. The American community, one cannot too clearly insist, does not +correspond to an entire European community at all, but only to the +middle masses of it, to the trading and manufacturing class between the +dimensions of the magnate and the clerk and skilled artisan. It is the +central part of the European organism without either the dreaming head +or the subjugated feet. Even the highly feudal slave-holding "county +family" traditions of Virginia and the South pass now out of memory. +So that in a very real sense the past of this American community is in +Europe, and the settled order of the past is left behind there. This +community was, as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of its branches +and brought hither. It began neither serf nor lord, but burgher and +farmer, it followed the normal development of the middle class under +Progress everywhere and became capitalistic. Essentially America is +a middle-class become a community and so its essential problems are +the problems of a modern individualistic society, stark and clear, +unhampered and unilluminated by any feudal traditions either at its +crest or at its base. + +It would be interesting and at first only very slightly misleading to +pursue the rough contrast of American and English conditions upon these +lines. It is not difficult to show for example, that the two great +political parties in America represent only one English party, the +middle-class Liberal party, the party of industrialism and freedom. +There are no Tories to represent the feudal system, and no Labor party. +It is history, it is no mere ingenious gloss upon history, that the +Tories, the party of the crown, of the high gentry and control, of +mitigated property and an organic state, vanished from America at the +Revolution. They left the new world to the Whigs and Nonconformists and +to those less constructive, less logical, more popular and liberating +thinkers who became Radicals in England, and Jeffersonians and then +Democrats in America. All Americans are, from the English point of +view, Liberals of one sort or another. You will find a fac-simile +of the Declaration of Independence displayed conspicuously and +triumphantly beside Magna Charter in the London Reform Club, to carry +out this suggestion. + +But these fascinating parallelisms will lead away from the chief +argument in hand, which is that the Americans started almost clear +of the medieval heritage, and developed in the utmost--purity if you +like--or simplicity or crudeness, whichever you will, the modern type +of productive social organization. They took the economic conventions +that were modern and progressive at the end of the eighteenth century +and stamped them into the Constitution as if they meant to stamp +them there for all time. In England you can still find feudalism, +medievalism, the Renascence, at every turn. America is pure eighteenth +century--still crystallizing out from a turbid and troubled solution. + +To turn from any European state to America is, in these matters anyhow, +to turn from complication to a stark simplicity. The relationship +between employer and employed, between organizer and worker, between +capital and labor, which in England is qualified and mellowed and +disguised and entangled with a thousand traditional attitudes and +subordinations, stands out sharply in a bleak cold rationalism. There +is no feeling that property, privilege, honor, and a grave liability +to official public service ought to go together, none that uncritical +obedience is a virtue in a worker or that subordination carries with +it not only a sense of service but a claim for help. Coming across the +Atlantic has in these matters an effect of coming out of an iridescent +fog into a clear bright air. + +This homologization of the whole American social mass, not with the +whole English social mass, but with its "modern" classes, its great +middle portion, and of its political sides with the two ingredients of +English Liberalism, goes further than a rough parallel. An Englishman +who, like myself, has been bred and who has lived all his life either +in London, with its predominant West-End, or the southern counties with +their fair large estates and the great country houses, is constantly +being reminded, when he meets manufacturing and business men from +Birmingham or Lancashire, of Americans, and when he meets Americans, +of industrial North-country people. There is more push and less tacit +assumption, more definition, more displayed energy and less restraint, +more action and less subtlety, more enterprise and self-assertion than +there is in the typical Englishman of London and the home counties. +The American carries on the contrast further, it is true, and his +speech is not northernly, but marked by the accent of Hampshire or +East Anglia, and better and clearer than his English equivalent's; +but one feels the two are of the same stuff, nevertheless, and made +by parallel conditions. The liberalism of the eighteenth century, the +material progress of the nineteenth have made them both--out of the +undifferentiated Stuart Englishman. And they are the same in their +attitude towards property and social duty, individualists to the +marrow. But the one grew inside a frame of regal, aristocratic, and +feudal institutions, and has chafed against it, struggled with it, +modified it, strained it, and been modified by it, but has remained +within it; the other broke it and escaped to complete self-development. + +The liberalism of the eighteenth century was essentially the rebellion +of the modern industrial organization against the monarchial and +aristocratic State,--against hereditary privilege, against restrictions +upon bargains--whether they were hard bargains or not. Its spirit +was essentially Anarchistic,--the antithesis of Socialism. It was +the anti-State. It aimed not only to liberate men but property from +State control. Its most typical expressions, the Declaration of +Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, are +zealously emphatic for the latter interest--for the sacredness of +contracts and possessions. Post Reformation liberalism did to a large +extent let loose property upon mankind. The English Civil War of the +seventeenth century, like the American revolution of the eighteenth, +embodied essentially the triumphant refusal of private property to +submit to taxation without consent. In England the result was tempered +and qualified, security for private property was achieved, but not +cast-iron security; each man who had property became king of that +property, but only a constitutional and conditional king. In America +the victory of private property was complete. Let one instance suffice +to show how decisively it was established that individual property +and credit and money were sacred. Ten years ago the Supreme Court, +trying a case arising out of the General Revenue tax of 1894, decided +that a graduated income-tax, such as the English Parliament might pass +to-morrow, can never be levied upon the United States nation without +a change in the Constitution, which can be effected only by a vote of +two-thirds of both Houses of Congress as an initiative, and this must +be ratified either by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States, +or by special conventions representing three-fourths of the States. +The fundamental law of the States forbids any such invasion of the +individual's ownership. No national income-tax is legal, and there is +practically no power, short of revolution, to alter that.... + +Could anything be more emphatic? That tall Liberty with its spiky crown +that stands in New York Harbor and casts an electric flare upon the +world, is, indeed, the liberty of Property, and there she stands at the +Zenith.... + + +III + +Aggregation and Some Protests + +Now the middle-class of the English population and the whole population +of America that matters at all when we discuss ideas, is essentially +an emancipated class, a class that has rebelled against superimposed +privilege and honor, and achieved freedom for its individuals and +their property. Without property its freedom is a featureless and +unsubstantial theory, and so it relies for the reality of life upon +that, upon the possession and acquisition and development of property, +that is to say upon "business." That is the quality of its life. + +Everywhere in the modern industrial and commercial class this +deep-lying feeling that the State is something escaped from, has +worked out to the same mental habit of social irresponsibility, and in +America it has worked unimpeded. Patriotism has become a mere national +self-assertion, a sentimentality of flag cheering, with no constructive +duties. Law, social justice, the pride and preservation of the state +as a whole are taken as provided for before the game began, and one +devotes one-self to business. At business all men are held to be equal, +and none is his brother's keeper. + +All men are equal at the great game of business. You try for the best +of each bargain and so does your opponent; if you chance to have more +in your hand than he--well, that's your advantage, and you use it. +Presently he may have more than you. You take care he doesn't if you +can, but you play fair--except for the advantage in your hand; you play +fair--and hard. + +Now this middle-class equality ultimately destroys itself. Out of this +conflict of equals, and by virtue of the fact that property, like all +sorts of matter, does tend to gravitate towards itself whenever it is +free, there emerge the modern rich and the modern toiler. + +One can trace the process in two or three generations in Lancashire or +the Potteries, or any industrial region of England. One sees first the +early Lancashire industrialism, sees a district of cotton-spinners more +or less equal together, small men all; then come developments, comes +a state of ideally free competition with some men growing large, with +most men dropping into employment, but still with ample chances for an +industrious young man to end as a prosperous master; and so through a +steady growth in the size of the organization to the present opposition +of an employer class in possession of everything, almost inaccessibly +above, and an employed class below. The railways come, and the wealthy +class reaches out to master these new enterprises, capitalistic from +the outset.... + +America is simply repeating the history of the Lancashire industrialism +on a gigantic scale, and under an enormous variety of forms. + +But in England, as the modern Rich rise up, they come into a world of +gentry with a tradition of public service and authority; they learn +one by one and assimilate themselves to the legend of the "governing +class" with a sense of proprietorship which is also, in its humanly +limited way, a sense of duty to the state. They are pseudomorphs after +aristocrats. They receive honors, they inter-marry, they fall (and +their defeated competitors too fall) into the mellowed relationships +of an aristocratic system. That is not a permanent mutual attitude; +it does, however, mask and soften the British outline. Industrialism +becomes quasi-feudal. America, on the other hand, had no effectual +"governing class," there has been no such modification, no clouding +of the issue. Its Rich, to one's superficial inspection, do seem to +lop out, swell up into an immense consumption and power and inanity, +develop no sense of public duties, remain winners of a strange game +they do not criticise, concerned now only to hold and intensify their +winnings. The losers accept no subservience. That material progress, +that secular growth in scale of all modern enterprises, widens the gulf +between Owner and Worker daily. More and more do men realize that this +game of free competition and unrestricted property does not go on for +ever; it is a game that first in this industry and then in that, and +at last in all, can be played out and is being played out. Property +becomes organized, consolidated, concentrated, and secured. This is +the fact to which America is slowly awaking at the present time. The +American community is discovering a secular extinction of opportunity, +and the appearance of powers against which individual enterprise and +competition are hopeless. Enormous sections of the American public are +losing their faith in any personal chance of growing rich and truly +free, and are developing the consciousness of an expropriated class. + +This realization has come slowlier in America than in Europe, +because of the enormous undeveloped resources of America. So long as +there was an unlimited extent of unappropriated and unexplored land +westward, so long could tension be relieved by so simple an injunction +as Horace Greeley's, "Go West, young man; go West." And to-day, +albeit that is no longer true of the land, and there are already +far larger concentrations of individual possessions in the United +States of America than anywhere else in the world, yet so vast are +their continental resources that it still remains true that nowhere +in the world is property so widely diffused. Consider the one fact +that America can take in three-quarters of a million of workers in +one year without producing a perceptible fall in wages, and you will +appreciate the scale upon which things are measured here, the scale +by which even Mr. J.D. Rockefeller's billion dollars becomes no more +than a respectable but by no means overwhelming "pile." For all these +concentrations, the western farmers still own their farms, and it is +the rule rather than the exception for a family to possess the freehold +of the house it lives in. But the process of concentration goes on +nevertheless--is going on now perceptibly to the American mind. That +it has not gone so far as in the European instance it is a question of +size, just as the gestation of an elephant takes longer than that of a +mouse. If the process is larger and slower, it is, for the reasons I +have given, plainer, and it will be discussed and dealt with plainly. +That steady trend towards concentration under individualistic rules, +until individual competition becomes disheartened and hopeless, is the +essential form of the economic and social process in America as I see +it now, and it has become the cardinal topic of thought and discussion +in the American mind. + +[Illustration: WESTERN FARMERS STILL OWN THEIR FARMS] + +This realization has been reached after the most curious hesitation. +There is every reason for this; for it involves the contradiction +of much that seems fundamental in the American idea. It amounts to a +national change of attitude. It is a conscious change of attitude that +is being deliberately made. + +This slow reluctant process of disillusionment with individualism is +interestingly traceable through the main political innovations of the +last twenty years. There was the discovery in the east that the supply +of land was not limitless, and we had the Single Tax movement, and +the epoch of the first Mr. Henry George. He explained fervently of +course, how individualistic, how profoundly American he was--but land +was not to be monopolized. Then came the discovery in the west that +there were limits to borrowing and that gold appreciated against the +debtor, and so we have the Populist movement and extraordinary schemes +for destroying the monopolization of gold and credit. Mr. Bryan led +that and nearly captured the country, but only in last May's issue of +the _Century Magazine_ I found him explaining (expounding meanwhile a +largely socialistic programme) that he too is an Individualist of the +purest water. And then the attack shifted to the destruction of free +competition by the trusts. The small business went on sufferance, 'not +knowing from week to week when its hour to sell out or fight might +come. The Trusts have crushed competition, raised prices against the +consumer, and served him often quite abominably. The curious reader +may find in Mr. Upton Sinclair's essentially veracious _Jungle_ the +possibilities of individualistic enterprise in the matter of food and +decency. The States have been agitated by a big disorganized Anti-Trust +movement for some years, it becomes of the gravest political importance +at every election, and the sustained study of the affairs and methods +of that most typical and prominent of trust organizations, the Standard +Oil Company, by Miss Tarbell and a host of followers, is bringing to +light more and more clearly the defencelessness of the common person, +and his hopelessness, however enterprising, as a competitor against +those great business aggregations. His faith in all his reliances and +securities fades in the new light that grows about him, he sees his +little investments, his insurance policy, his once open and impartial +route to market by steamboat and rail, all passing into the grip of the +great property accumulators. The aggregation of property has created +powers that are stronger than state legislatures and more persistent +than any public opinion can be, that have no awe and no sentiment for +legislation, that are prepared to disregard it or evade it whenever +they can. + +And these aggregations are taking on immortality and declining to +disintegrate when their founders die. The Astor property, the Jay +Gould property, the Marshall Field property, for example, do not +break up, become undying centres for the concentration of wealth, and +it is doubtful if there is any power to hinder such a development of +perpetual fortunes. In England when Thelussen left his investments to +accumulate, a simple little act of Parliament set his will aside. But +Congress is not sovereign, there is no national sovereign power in +America, and Property in America, it would seem, is absolutely free to +do these things. So you have President Roosevelt in a recent oration +attacking the man with the Muck Rake (who gathered vile dross for the +love of it), and threatening the limitation of inheritance. But he too, +quite as much as Mr. Bryan, assures the public that he is a fervent +individualist. + +So in this American community, whose distinctive conception is its +emphatic assertion of the freedom of individual property, whose very +symbol is that spike-crowned Liberty gripping a torch in New York +Harbor, there has been and is going on a successive repudiation of that +freedom in almost every department of ownable things by considerable +masses of thinking people, a denial of the soundness of individual +property in land, an organized attempt against the accumulation of +gold and credit, by a systematic watering of the currency, a revolt +against the aggregatory outcome of untrammelled business competition, a +systematic interference with the freedom of railways and carriers to do +business as they please, and a protest from the most representative of +Americans against hereditary wealth.... + +That, in general terms, is the economic and social process as one sees +it in America now, a process of systematically concentrating wealth on +the part of an energetic minority, and of a great insurgence of alarm, +of waves of indignation and protest and threat on the part of that +vague indefinite public that Mr. Roosevelt calls the "nation." + +And this goes on side by side with a process of material progress +that partly masks its quality, that keeps the standard of life from +falling and prevents any sense of impoverishment among the mass of +the losers in the economic struggle. Through this material progress +there is a constant substitution of larger, cleaner, more efficient +possibilities, and more and more wholesale and far-sighted methods of +organization for the dark, confused, untidy individualistic expedients +of the Victorian time. An epoch which was coaly and mechanical, +commercial and adventurous after the earlier fashion is giving place, +almost automatically, to one that will be electrical and scientific, +artistic and creative. The material progress due to a secular increase +in knowledge, and the economic progress interfere and combine with and +complicate one another, the former constantly changes the forms and +appliances of the latter, changes the weapons and conditions, and may +ultimately change the spirit and conceptions of the struggle. The +latter now clogs and arrests the former. So in its broad features, as +a conflict between the birth strength of a splendid civilization and a +hampering commercialism, I see America. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH + + +I + +The Spenders + +It is obvious that in a community that has disavowed aristocracy or +rule and subordination or service, which has granted unparalleled +freedoms to property and despised and distrusted the state, the chief +business of life will consist in getting or attempting to get. But the +chief aspect of American life that impinges first upon the European +is not this, but the behavior of a certain overflow at the top, of +people who have largely and triumphantly got, and with hand, pockets, +safe-deposit vaults full of dollars, are proceeding to realize victory. +Before I came to America it was in his capacity of spender that I +chiefly knew the American; as a person who had demoralized Regent +Street and the Rue de Rivoli, who had taught the London cabman to +demand "arf a dollar" for a shilling fare, who bought old books and +old castles, and had driven the prices of old furniture to incredible +altitudes, and was slowly transferring our incubus of artistic +achievement to American soil. One of my friends in London is Mr. X, +who owns those two houses full of fine "pieces" near the British Museum +and keeps his honor unsullied in the most deleterious of trades. "They +come to me," he said, "and ask me to buy for them. It's just buying. +One of them wants to beat the silver of another, doesn't care what +he pays. Another clamors for tapestry. They trust me as they trust a +doctor. There's no understanding--no feeling. It's hard to treat them +well." + +And there is the story of Y, who is wise about pictures. "If you want +a Botticelli that size, Mr. Record, I can't find it," he said; "you'll +have to have it made for you." + +These American spenders have got the whole world "beat" at the foolish +game of collecting, and in all the peculiar delights of shopping they +excel. And they are the crown and glory of hotel managers throughout +the world. There is something naïve, something childishly expectant +and acquisitive, about this aspect of American riches. There appears +no aristocracy in their tradition, no sense of permanence and +great responsibility, there appears no sense of subordination and +service; from the individualistic business struggle they have emerged +triumphant, and what is there to do now but spend and have a good time? + +They swarm in the pleasant places of the Riviera, they pervade Paris +and Rome, they occupy Scotch castles and English estates, their +motor-cars are terrible and wonderful. And the London Savoy Hotel still +flaunts its memory of one splendid American night. The court-yard was +flooded with water tinted an artistic blue--to the great discomfort of +the practically inevitable gold-fish, and on this floated a dream of +a gondola. And in the gondola the table was spread and served by the +Savoy staff, mysteriously disguised in appropriate fancy costume. The +whole thing--there's only two words for it--was "perfectly lovely." +"The illusion"--whatever that was--we are assured, was complete. It +wasn't a nursery treat, you know. The guests, I am told, were important +grown-up people. + +This sort of childishness, of course, has nothing distinctively +American in it. Any people of sluggish and uneducated imagination who +find themselves profusely wealthy, and are too stupid to understand the +huge moral burden, the burden of splendid possibilities it carries, +may do things of this sort. It was not Americans but a party of +South-African millionaires who achieved the kindred triumph of the +shirt-and-belt dinner under a tent in a London hotel dining-room. The +glittering procession of carriages and motor-carriages which I watched +driving down Fifth Avenue, New York, apparently for the pleasure +of driving up again, is to be paralleled on the Pincio, in Naples, +in Paris, and anywhere where irresponsible pleasure-seekers gather +together. After the naïve joy of buying things comes the joy of +wearing them publicly, the simple pleasure of the promenade. These +things are universals. But nowhere has this spending struck me as +being so solid and substantial, so nearly twenty-two carats fine, as +here. The shops have an air of solid worth, are in the key of butlers, +bishops, opera-boxes, high-class florists, powdered footmen, Roman +beadles, motor-broughams, to an extent that altogether outshines either +Paris or London. + +[Illustration: PLUMP AND PRETTY PUPILS OF EXTRAVAGANCE] + +And in such great hotels as the Waldorf-Astoria, one finds the new +arrivals, the wives and daughters from the West and the South, in +new, bright hats, and splendors of costume, clubbed together, under +the discreetest management, for this and that, learning how to spend +collectively, reaching out to assemblies, to dinners. From an observant +tea-table beneath the fronds of a palm, I surveyed a fine array of +these plump and pretty pupils of extravagance. They were for the +most part quite brilliantly as well as newly dressed, and with an +artless and pleasing unconsciousness of the living from inside. Smart +innocents! I found all that gathering most contagiously interested and +happy and fresh. + +And I watched spending, too, as one sees it in the various incompatible +houses of upper Fifth Avenue and along the border of Central Park. +That, too, suggests a shop, a shop where country houses are sold and +stored; there is the Tiffany house, a most expensive-looking article, +on the shelf, and the Carnegie house. There had been no pretence on +the part of the architects that any house belonged in any sense to any +other, that any sort of community held them together. The link is just +spending. You come to New York and spend; you go away again. To some of +these palaces people came and went; others had their blinds down and +conveyed a curious effect of a sunlit child excursionist in a train who +falls asleep and droops against his neighbor. One of the Vanderbilt +houses was frankly and brutally boarded up. Newport, I am told, takes +up and carries on the same note of magnificent irresponsibility, and +there one admires the richest forms of simplicity, triumphs of villa +architecture in thatch, and bathing bungalows in marble.... + +There exists already, of these irresponsible American rich, a splendid +group of portraits, done without extenuation and without malice, in +the later work of that great master of English fiction, Mr. Henry +James. There one sees them at their best, their refinement, their large +wealthiness, their incredible unreality. I think of _The Ambassadors_ +and that mysterious source of the income of the Newcomes, a mystery +that, with infinite artistic tact, was never explained; but more I +think of _The Golden Bowl_, most spacious and serene of novels. + +In that splendid and luminous bubble, the Prince Amerigo and Maggie +Verver, Mr. Verver, that assiduous collector, and the adventurous +Charlotte Stant float far above a world of toil and anxiety, spending +with a large refinement, with a perfected assurance and precision. They +spend as flowers open. But this is the quintessence, the sublimation, +the idealization of the rich American. Few have the restraint for +this. For the rest, when one has shopped and shopped, and collected +and bought everything, and promenaded on foot, in motor-car and +motor-brougham and motor-boat, in yacht and special train; when one +has a fine house here and a fine house there, and photography and the +special article have exhausted admiration, there remains chiefly that +one broader and more presumptuous pleasure--spending to give. American +givers give most generously, and some of them, it must be admitted, +give well. But they give individually, incoherently, each pursuing a +personal ideal. There are unsuccessful givers.... + +American cities are being littered with a disorder of unsystematized +foundations and picturesque legacies, much as I find my nursery floor +littered with abandoned toys and battles and buildings when the +children are in bed after a long, wet day. Yet some of the gifts are +very splendid things. There is, for example, the Leland Stanford Junior +University in California, a vast monument of parental affection and +Richardsonian architecture, with professors, and teaching going on in +its interstices; and there is Mrs. Gardner's delightful Fenway Court, +a Venetian palace, brought almost bodily from Italy and full of finely +gathered treasures.... + +All this giving is, in its aggregate effect, as confused as industrial +Chicago. It presents no clear scheme of the future, promises no growth; +it is due to the impulsive generosity of a mob of wealthy persons, with +no broad common conceptions, with no collective dream, with little to +hold them together but imitation and the burning possession of money; +the gifts overlap, they lie at any angle, one with another. Some are +needless, some mischievous. There are great gaps of unfulfilled need +between. + +And through the multitude of lesser, though still mighty, givers, comes +that colossus of property, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the jubilee plunger of +beneficence, that rosy, gray-haired, nimble little figure, going to +and fro between two continents, scattering library buildings as if he +sowed wild oats, buildings that may or may not have some educational +value, if presently they are reorganized and properly stocked with +books. Anon he appals the thrifty burgesses of Dunfermline with vast +and uncongenial responsibilities of expenditure; anon he precipitates +the library of the late Lord Acton upon our embarrassed Mr. Morley; +anon he pauperizes the students of Scotland. He diffuses his monument +throughout the English-speaking lands, amid circumstances of the +most flagrant publicity; the receptive learned, the philanthropic +noble, bow in expectant swaths before him. He is the American fable +come true; nothing seems too wild to believe of him, and he fills the +European imagination with an altogether erroneous conception of the +self-dissipating quality in American wealth. + + +II + +The Astor Fortune + +Because, now, as a matter of fact, dissipation is by no means the +characteristic quality of American getting. The good American will +indeed tell you solemnly that in America it is three generations "from +shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves"; but this has about as much truth in +it as that remarkable absence of any pure-bred Londoners of the third +generation, dear to the British imagination. + +Amid the vast yeasty tumult of American business, of the getting and +losing which are the main life of this community, nothing could be +clearer than the steady accumulation of great masses of property that +show no signs of disintegrating again. The very rich people display +an indisposition to divide their estates; the Marshall Field estate +in Chicago, for example, accumulates; the Jay Gould inheritance +survives great strains. And when first I heard that "shirt-sleeves to +shirt-sleeves" proverb, Which is so fortifying a consolation to the +older school of Americans, my mind flew back to the Thames Embankment, +as one sees it from the steamboat on the river. There, just eastward of +the tall red Education offices of the London County Council, stands a +quite graceful and decorative little building of gray stone, that jars +not at all with the fine traditions of the adjacent Temple, but catches +the eye, nevertheless, with its very big, very gilded vane in the form +of a ship. This is the handsome strong-box to which New York pays +gigantic yearly tribute, the office in which Mr. W.W. Astor conducts +his affairs. They are not his private and individual affairs, but the +affairs of the estate of the late J.J. Astor--still undivided, and +still growing year by year. + +Mr. Astor seems to me to be a much more representative figure of +American wealth than any of the conspicuous spenders who strike so +vividly upon the European imagination. His is the most retiring of +personalities. In this picturesque stone casket he works; his staff +works under his cognizance, and administers, I know not to what ends +nor to what extent, revenues that exceed those of many sovereign +states. He himself is impressed by it, and, without arrogance, he makes +a visit to his offices, with a view of its storage vaults, its halls of +disciplined clerks, a novel and characteristic form of entertainment. +For the rest, Mr. Astor leads a life of modest affluence, and recreates +himself with the genealogy of his family, short stories about treasure +lost and found, and such like literary work. + +Now here you have wealth with, as it were, the minimum of ownership, +as indeed owning its possessor. Nobody seems to be spending that huge +income the crowded enormity of New York squeezes out. The "Estate of +the late J.J. Astor" must be accumulating more wealth and still more; +under careful and systematic management must be rolling up like a +golden snowball under that golden weather-vane. In the most accidental +relation to its undistinguished, harmless, arithmetical proprietor! + +Your anarchist orator or your crude socialist is always talking of the +rich as blood-suckers, robbers, robber-barons, _grafters_ and so on. +It really is nonsense to talk like that. In the presence of Mr. W.W. +Astor these preposterous accusations answer themselves. The thing is +a logical outcome of the assumptions about private property on which +our contemporary civilization is based, and Mr. Astor, for all that +he draws gold from New York as effectually as a ferret draws blood +from a rabbit, is indeed the most innocent of men. He finds himself +in a certain position, and he sits down very congenially and adds and +adds and adds, and relieves the tedium of his leisure in literary +composition. Had he been born at the level of a dry-goods clerk he +would probably have done the same sort of thing on a smaller scale, +and it would have been the little Poddlecombe literary society, and +not the _Pall Mall Magazine_, that would have been the richer for his +compositions. It is just the scale of the circumstances that differs.... + + +III + +The Chief Getters + +The lavish spending of Fifth Avenue and Paris and Rome and Mayfair is +but the flower, the often brilliant, the sometimes gaudy flower of +the American economic process; and such slow and patient accumulators +as Mr. Astor the rounding and ripening fruit. One need be only a +little while in America to realize this, and to discern the branch and +leaf, and at last even the aggressive insatiable spreading root of +aggregating property, that was liberated so effectually when America +declared herself free. + +The group of people that attracts the largest amount of attention in +press and talk, that most obsesses the American imagination, and that +is indeed the most significant at the present time, is the little +group--a few score men perhaps altogether--who are emerging distinctly +as winners in that great struggle to get, into which this commercial +industrialism has naturally resolved itself. Central among them are +the men of the Standard Oil group, the "octopus" which spreads its +ramifying tentacles through the whole system of American business, +absorbing and absorbing, grasping and growing. The extraordinarily able +investigations of such writers as Miss Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker, +the rhetorical exposures of Mr. T.W. Lawson, have brought out the +methods and quality of this group of persons with a particularity that +has been reserved heretofore for great statesmen and crowned heads, and +with an unflattering lucidity altogether unprecedented. Not only is +every hair on their heads numbered, but the number is published. They +are known to their pettiest weaknesses and to their most accidental +associations. And in this astonishing blaze of illumination they +continue steadfastly to get. + +These men, who are creating the greatest system of correlated private +properties in the world, who are wealthy beyond all precedent, seem +for the most part to be men with no ulterior dream or aim. They are +not voluptuaries, they are neither artists nor any sort of creators, +and they betray no high political ambitions. Had they anything of the +sort they would not be what they are, they would be more than that and +less. They want and they get, they are inspired by the brute will in +their wealth to have more wealth and more, to a systematic ardor. They +are men of a competing, patient, enterprising, acquisitive enthusiasm. +They have found in America the perfectly favorable environment for +their temperaments. In no other country and in no other age could they +have risen to such eminence. America is still, by virtue of its great +Puritan tradition and in the older sense of the word, an intensely +moral land. Most lusts here are strongly curbed, by public opinion, by +training and tradition. But the lust of acquisition has not been curbed +but glorified.... + +These financial leaders are accused by the press of every sort of crime +in the development of their great organizations and their fight against +competitors, but I feel impelled myself to acquit them of anything so +heroic as a general scheme of criminality, as a systematic organization +of power. They are men with a good deal of contempt for legislation +and state interference, but that is no distinction, it has unhappily +been part of the training of the average American citizen, and they +have no doubt exceeded the letter if not the spirit of the laws of +business competition. They have played to win and not for style, and +if they personally had not done so somebody else would; they fill a +position which from the nature of things, somebody is bound to fill. +They have, no doubt, carried sharpness to the very edge of dishonesty, +but what else was to be expected from the American conditions? Only +by doing so and taking risks is pre-eminent success in getting to be +attained. They have developed an enormous system of espionage, but on +his smaller scale every retail grocer, every employer of servants does +something in that way. They have secret agents, false names, concealed +bargains,--what else could one expect? People have committed suicide +through their operations--but in a game which is bound to bring the +losers to despair it is childish to charge the winners with murder. +It's the game that is criminal. It is ridiculous, I say, to write of +these men as though they were unparalleled villains, intellectual +overmen, conscienceless conquerors of the world. Mr. J.D. Rockefeller's +mild, thin-lipped, pleasant face gives the lie to all such melodramatic +nonsense. + +I must confess to a sneaking liking for this much-reviled man. One +thinks of Miss Tarbell's description of him, displaying his first +boyish account-book, his ledger A, to a sympathetic gathering of the +Baptist young, telling how he earned fifty dollars in the first three +months of his clerking in a Chicago warehouse, and how savingly he +dealt with it. Hear his words: + +"You could not get that book from me for all the modern ledgers in New +York, nor for all that they would bring. It almost brings tears to my +eyes when I read over this little book, and it fills me with a sense of +gratitude I cannot express.... + +"I know some people, ... especially some young men, find it difficult +to keep a little money in their pocket-book. I learned to keep money, +and, as we have a way of saying, it did not burn a hole in my pocket. I +was taught that it was the thing to keep the money and take care of it. +Among the early experiences that were helpful to me that I recollect +with pleasure, was one of working a few days for a neighbor digging +potatoes--an enterprising and thrifty farmer who could dig a great many +potatoes. I was a boy perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age, and he +kept me busy from morning until night. It was a ten-hour day.... + +"And as I was saving these little sums, I soon learned I could get as +much interest for fifty dollars loaned at seven per cent.--the legal +rate in the State of New York at that time for a year--as I could earn +by digging potatoes ten days. The impression was gaining ground with me +that it was a good thing to let money be my slave and not make myself a +slave to money. I have tried to remember that in every sense." + +This is not the voice of any sort of contemptuous trampler of his +species. This is the voice of an industrious, acquisitive, commonplace, +pious man, as honestly and simply proud of his acquisitiveness as a +stamp-collector might be. At times, in his acquisitions, the strength +of his passion may have driven him to lengths beyond the severe moral +code, but the same has been true of stamp-collectors. He is a man who +has taken up with great natural aptitude an ignoble tradition which +links economy and earning with piety and honor. His teachers were +to blame, that Baptist community that is now so ashamed of its son +that it refuses his gifts. To a large extent he is the creature of +opportunity; he has been flung to the topmost pinnacle of human envy, +partly by accident, partly by that peculiarity of American conditions +that has subordinated, in the name of liberty, all the grave and +ennobling affairs of statecraft to a middle-class freedom of commercial +enterprise. Quarrel with that if you like. It is unfair and ridiculous +to quarrel with him. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +CERTAIN WORKERS + + +I + +Those Who Do Not Get + +Let us now look a little at another aspect of this process of +individualistic competition which is the economic process in America, +and which is giving us on its upper side the spenders of Fifth Avenue, +the slow accumulators of the Astor type, and the great getters of the +giant business organizations, the Trusts and acquisitive finance. +We have concluded that this process of free and open competition in +business which, clearly, the framers of the American Constitution +imagined to be immortal, does as a matter of fact tend to kill itself +through the advantage property gives in the acquisition of more +property. But before we can go on to estimate the further future +of this process we must experiment with another question. What is +happening to those who have not got and who are not getting wealth, who +are, in fact, falling back in the competition? + +Now there can be little doubt to any one who goes to and fro in +America that in spite of the huge accumulation of property in a few +hands that is now in progress, there is still no general effect of +impoverishment. To me, coming from London to New York, the effect +of the crowd in the trolley-cars and subways and streets was one of +exceptional prosperity. New York has no doubt its effects of noise, +disorder, discomfort, and a sort of brutality, but to begin with one +sees nothing of the underfed people, the numerous dingily clad and +grayly housed people who catch the eye in London. Even in the congested +arteries, the filthy back streets of the East Side I found myself +saying, as a thing remarkable, "These people have money to spend." In +London one travels long distances for two cents, and great regiments of +people walk; in New York the universal fare is five cents and everybody +rides. Common people are better gloved and better booted in America +than in any European country I know, in spite of the higher prices for +clothing here, the men wear ready-made suits, it is true, to a much +greater extent, but they are newer and brighter than the London clerk's +carefully brushed, tailor-made garments. Wages translated from dollars +into shillings seem enormous. + +And there is no perceptible fall in wages going on. On the whole wages +tend to rise. For almost all sorts of men, for working women who are +not "refined," there is a limitless field of employment. The fact that +a growing proportion of the wealth of the community is passing into +the hands of a small minority of successful getters, is masked to +superficial observation by the enormous increase of the total wealth. +The growth process overrides the economic process and may continue to +do so for many years. + +So that the great mass of the population is not consciously defeated +in the economic game. It is only failing to get a large share in +the increment of wealth. The European reader must dismiss from his +mind any conception of the general American population as a mass of +people undergoing impoverishment through the enrichment of the few. He +must substitute for that figure a mass of people, very busy, roughly +prosperous, generally self-satisfied, but ever and again stirred to +bouts of irascibility and suspicion, inundated by a constantly swelling +flood of prosperity that pours through it and over it and passes by it, +without changing or enriching it at all. Ever and again it is irritated +by some rise in price, an advance in coal, for example, or meat or +rent, that swallows up some anticipated gain, but that is an entirely +different thing from want or distress, from the fireless hungering +poverty of Europe. + +[Illustration: NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE] + +Nevertheless, the sense of losing develops and spreads in the mass of +the American people. Privations are not needed to create a sense of +economic disadvantage; thwarted hopes suffice. The speed and pressure +of work here is much greater than in Europe, the impatience for +realization intenser. The average American comes into life prepared +to "get on," and ready to subordinate most things in life to that. He +encounters a rising standard of living. He finds it more difficult to +get on than his father did before him. He is perplexed and irritated +by the spectacle of lavish spending and the report of gigantic +accumulations that outshine his utmost possibilities of enjoyment or +success. He is a busy and industrious man, greatly preoccupied by the +struggle, but when he stops to think and talk at all, there can be +little doubt that his outlook is a disillusioned one, more and more +tinged with a deepening discontent. + + +II + +The Little Messenger-boy + +But the state of mind of the average American we have to consider +later. That is the central problem of this horoscope we contemplate. +Before we come to that we have to sketch out all the broad aspects of +the situation with which that mind has to deal. + +Now in the preceding chapter I tried to convey my impression of the +spending and wealth-getting of this vast community; I tried to convey +how irresponsible it was, how unpremeditated. The American rich have, +as it were, floated up out of a confused struggle of equal individuals. +That individualistic commercial struggle has not only flung up these +rich to their own and the world's amazement, it is also, with an equal +blindness, crushing and maiming great multitudes of souls. But this +is a fact that does not smite upon one's attention at the outset. The +English visitor to the great towns sees the spending, sees the general +prosperity, the universal air of confident pride; he must go out of his +way to find the under side to these things. + +One little thing set me questioning. I had been one Sunday night +down-town, supping and talking with Mr. Abraham Cahan about the "East +Side," that strange city within a city which has a drama of its own +and a literature and a press, and about Russia and her problem, and I +was returning on the subway about two o'clock in the morning. I became +aware of a little lad sitting opposite me, a childish-faced delicate +little creature of eleven years old or so, wearing the uniform of a +messenger-boy. He drooped with fatigue, roused himself with a start, +edged off his seat with a sigh, stepped off the car, and was vanishing +up-stairs into the electric glare of Astor Place as the train ran out +of the station. + +"What on earth," said I, "is that baby doing abroad at this time of +night?" + +For me this weary little wretch became the irritant centre of a painful +region of inquiry. "How many hours a day may a child work in New York," +I began to ask people, "and when may a boy leave school?" + +I had blundered, I found, upon the weakest spot in America's fine front +of national well-being. My eyes were opened to the childish newsboys +who sold me papers, and the little bootblacks at the street corners. +Nocturnal child employment is a social abomination. I gathered stories +of juvenile vice, of lads of nine and ten suffering from terrible +diseases, of the contingent sent by these messengers to the hospitals +and jails. I began to realize another aspect of that great theory +of the liberty of property and the subordination of the state to +business, upon which American institutions are based. That theory has +no regard for children. Indeed, it is a theory that disregards women +and children, the cardinal facts of life altogether. They are private +things.... + +It is curious how little we, who live in the dawning light of a new +time, question the intellectual assumptions of the social order about +us. We find ourselves in a life of huge confusions and many cruelties, +we plan this and that to remedy and improve, but very few of us go down +to the ideas that begot these ugly conditions, the laws, the usages +and liberties that are now in their detailed expansion so perplexing, +intricate, and overwhelming. Yet the life of man is altogether made up +of will cast into the mould of ideas, and only by correcting ideas, +changing ideas and replacing ideas are any ameliorations and advances +to be achieved in human destiny. All other things are subordinate to +that. + +Now the theory of liberty upon which the liberalism of Great Britain, +the Constitution of the United States, and the bourgeois Republic of +France rests, assumes that all men are free and equal. They are all +tacitly supposed to be adult and immortal, they are sovereign over +their property and over their wives and children, and everything is +framed with a view to insuring them security in the enjoyment of +their rights. No doubt this was a better theory than that of the +divine right of kings, against which it did triumphant battle, but it +does, as one sees it to-day, fall most extraordinarily short of the +truth, and only a few logical fanatics have ever tried to carry it +out to its complete consequences. For example, it ignored the facts +that more than half of the adult people in a country are women, and +that all the men and women of a country taken together are hardly as +numerous and far less important to the welfare of that country than +the individuals under age. It regarded living as just living, a stupid +dead level of egotistical effort and enjoyment; it was blind to the +fact that living is part growing, part learning, part dying to make way +and altogether service and sacrifice. It asserted that the care and +education of children, and business bargains affecting the employment +and welfare of women and children, are private affairs. It resisted the +compulsory education of children and factory legislation, therefore, +with extraordinary persistence and bitterness. The commonsense of +the three great progressive nations concerned has been stronger +than their theory, but to this day enormous social evils are to be +traced to that passionate jealousy of state intervention between a +man and his wife, his children, and other property, which is the +distinctive unprecedented feature of the originally middle-class modern +organization of society upon commercial and industrial conceptions in +which we are all (and America most deeply) living. + +I began with a drowsy little messenger-boy in the New York Subway. +Before I had done with the question I had come upon amazing things. +Just think of it! This richest, greatest country the world has ever +seen has over 1,700,000 children under fifteen years of age toiling +in fields, factories, mines, and workshops. And Robert Hunter--whose +_Poverty_, if I were autocrat, should be compulsory reading for every +prosperous adult in the United States, tells me of "not less than +eighty thousand children, most of whom are little girls, at present +employed in the textile mills of this country. In the South there are +now six times as many children at work as there were twenty years ago. +Child labor is increasing yearly in that section of the country. Each +year more little ones are brought in from the fields and hills to live +in the degrading atmosphere of the mill towns."... + +Children are deliberately imported by the Italians. I gathered from +Commissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of little +nephews and nieces, friends' sons, and so forth, brought in by them is +peculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It +was a particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little +boy of no ascertainable relationship.... + +In the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions were +hardly worse than those now existing in the South. Children, the +tiniest and frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning +and, like old men and women, go to the mills to do their day's labor; +and when they return home, "wearily fling themselves on their beds, too +tired to take off their clothes." Many children work all night--"in +the maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere unsanitary and +clouded with humidity and lint." + +"It will be long," adds Mr. Hunter, in his description, "before I +forget the face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched +forward to rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form +already showing the physical effects of labor. This child, six years of +age, was working twelve hours a day." + +From Mr. Spargo's _Bitter Cry of the Children_ I learn this much of the +joys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania: + +[Illustration: BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY] + + "For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop + over the chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the + coal as it moves past them. The air is black with coal-dust, and + the roar of the crushers, screens, and rushing mill-race of coal is + deafening. Sometimes one of the children falls into the machinery + and is terribly mangled, or slips into the chute and is smothered to + death. Many children are killed in this way. Many others, after a + time, contract coal-miners' asthma and consumption, which gradually + undermine their health. Breathing continually day after day the clouds + of coal-dust, their lungs become black and choked with small particles + of anthracite."... + +In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J.F. Carey tells us how +little naked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York +millionaire, packing cloth into bleaching vats in a bath of chemicals +that bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of lepers.... + +Well, we English have no right to condemn the Americans for these +things. The history of our own industrial development is black with the +blood of tortured and murdered children. America still has the factory +serfs. New Jersey sends her pauper children south to-day into worse +than slavery, but, as Cottle tells in his reminiscences of Southey and +Coleridge, that is precisely the same wretched export Bristol packed +off to feed the mills of Manchester in late Georgian times. We got +ahead with factory legislation by no peculiar virtue in our statecraft, +it was just the revenge the landlords took upon the manufacturers for +reform and free trade in corn and food. In America the manufacturers +have had things to themselves. + +And America has difficulties to encounter of which we know nothing. In +the matter of labor legislation each State legislature is supreme; in +each separate State the forces of light and progress must fight the +battle of the children and the future over again against interests, +lies, prejudice and stupidity. Each State pleads the bad example +of another State, and there is always the threat that capital will +withdraw. No national minimum is possible under existing conditions. +And when the laws have passed there is still the universal contempt +for State control to reckon with, the impossibilities of enforcement. +Illinois, for instance, scandalized at the spectacle of children in +those filthy stock-yards, ankle-deep in blood, cleaning intestines +and trimming meat, recently passed a child-labor law that raised the +minimum age for such employment to sixteen, but evasion, they told +me in Chicago, was simple and easy. New York, too, can show by its +statute-books that my drowsy nocturnal messenger-boy was illegal and +impossible.... + +This is the bottomest end of the scale that at the top has all the +lavish spending of Fifth Avenue, the joyous wanton giving of Mr. Andrew +Carnegie. Equally with these things it is an unpremeditated consequence +of an inadequate theory of freedom. The foolish extravagances of the +rich, the architectural pathos of Newport, the dingy, noisy, economic +jumble of central and south Chicago, the Standard Oil offices in +Broadway, the darkened streets beneath New York's elevated railroad, +the littered ugliness of Niagara's banks, and the lower-most hell +of child suffering are all so many accordant aspects and inexorable +consequences of the same undisciplined way of living. Let each man push +for himself--it comes to these things.... + +So far as our purpose of casting a horoscope goes we have particularly +to note this as affecting the future; these working children +cannot be learning to read--though they will presently be having +votes--they cannot grow up fit to bear arms, to be in any sense but +a vile computing sweater's sense, men. So miserably they will avenge +themselves by supplying the stuff for vice, for crime, for yet more +criminal and political manipulations. One million seven hundred +children, practically uneducated, are toiling over here, and growing +up, darkened, marred, and dangerous, into the American future I am +seeking to forecast. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +CORRUPTION + + +I + +The Problem of the Nation + +So, it seems to me, in this new crude continental commonwealth, there +is going on the same economic process, on a grander scale, indeed, than +has gone so far in our own island. There is a great concentration of +wealth above, and below, deep and growing is the abyss, that sunken +multitude on the margin of subsistence which is a characteristic and +necessary feature of competitive industrialism, that teeming abyss +where children have no chance, where men and women dream neither of +leisure nor of self-respect. And between this efflorescence of wealth +above and spreading degradation below, comes the great mass of the +population, perhaps fifty millions and more of healthy and active men, +women and children (I leave out of count altogether the colored people +and the special trouble of the South until a later chapter) who are +neither irresponsibly free nor hopelessly bound, who are the living +determining substance of America. + +Collectively they constitute what Mr. Roosevelt calls the "Nation," +what an older school of Americans used to write of as the People. +The Nation is neither rich nor poor, neither capitalist nor laborer, +neither Republican nor Democrat; it is a great diversified multitude +including all these things. It is a comprehensive abstraction; it is +the ultimate reality. You may seek for it in America and you cannot +find it, as one seeks in vain for the forest among the trees. It has +no clear voice; the confused and local utterances of a dispersed +innumerable press, of thousands of public speakers, of books and +preachers, evoke fragmentary responses or drop rejected into oblivion. +I have been told by countless people where I shall find the typical +American; one says in Maine, one in the Alleghenies, one "farther +west," one in Kansas, one in Cleveland. He is indeed nowhere and +everywhere. He is an English-speaking person, with extraordinarily +English traits still, in spite of much good German and Scandinavian and +Irish blood he has assimilated. He has a distrust of lucid theories, +and logic, and he talks unwillingly of ideas. He is preoccupied, he +is busy with his individual affairs, but he is--I can feel it in the +air--thinking. + +How widely and practically he is thinking that curious product of +the last few years, the ten-cent magazine, will show. In England our +sixpenny magazines seem all written for boys and careless people; +they are nothing but stories and jests and pictures. The weekly +ones achieve an extraordinarily agreeable emptiness. Their American +equivalents are full of the studied and remarkably well-written +discussion of grave public questions. I pick up one magazine and find +a masterly exposition of the public aspect of railway rebates, another +and a trust is analyzed. Then here are some titles of books that +all across this continent are being multitudinously read: Parson's +_Heart of the Railway Problem_, Steffens's _Shame of the Cities_, +Lawson's _Frenzied Finance_, Miss Tarbell's _Story of Standard Oil_, +Abbott's _Industrial Problem_, Spargo's _Bitter Cry of the Children_, +Hunter's _Poverty_, and, pioneer of them all, Lloyd's _Wealth Against +Commonwealth_. These are titles quoted almost at hap-hazard. Within a +remarkably brief space of time the American nation has turned away from +all the heady self-satisfaction of the nineteenth century and commenced +a process of heart searching quite unparalleled in history. Its +egotistical interest in its own past is over and done. While Mr. Upton +Sinclair, the youngest, most distinctive of recent American novelists, +achieved but a secondary success with his admirably conceived romance +of the Civil War, _Manassas, The Jungle_, his book about the beef trust +and the soul of the immigrant, the most unflattering picture of America +that any one has yet dared to draw, has fired the country. + +The American nation, which a few years ago seemed invincibly wedded +to an extreme individualism, seemed resolved, as it were, to sit on +the safety valves of the economic process and go on to the ultimate +catastrophe, displays itself now alert and questioning. It has roused +itself to a grave and extensive consideration of the intricate economic +and political problems that close like a net about its future. The +essential question for America, as for Europe, is the rescue of her +land, her public service, and the whole of her great economic process +from the anarchic and irresponsible control of private owners--how +dangerous and horrible that control may become the Railway and Beef +Trust investigations have shown--and the organization of her social +life upon the broad, clean, humane conceptions of modern science. In +every country, however, this huge problem of reconstruction which is +the alternative to a plutocratic decadence, is enormously complicated +by irrelevant and special difficulties. In Great Britain, for example, +the ever-pressing problem of holding the empire, and the fact that one +legislative body is composed almost entirely of private land-owners, +hampers every step towards a better order. Upon every country in Europe +weighs the armor of war. In America the complications are distinctive +and peculiar. She is free, indeed, now to a large extent from the +possibility of any grave military stresses, her one overseas investment +in the Philippines she is evidently resolved to forget and be rid of at +as early a date as possible. But, on the other hand, she is confronted +by a system of legal entanglements of extraordinary difficulty and +perplexity, she has the most powerful tradition of individualism in the +world, and a degraded political system, and she has in the presence +of a vast and increasing proportion of unassimilable aliens in her +substance--negroes, south European peasants, Russian Jews and the +like--an ever-intensifying complication. + + +II + +Graft + +Now what is called corruption in America is a thing not confined to +politics; it is a defect of moral method found in every department of +American life. I find in big print in every paper I open, "GRAFT." All +through my journey in America I have been trying to gauge the quality +of this corruption, I have been talking to all kinds of people about +it, I have had long conversations about it with President Eliot of +Harvard, with District-Attorney Jerome, with one leading insurance +president, with a number of the City Club people in Chicago, with +several East-Siders in New York, with men engaged in public work in +every city I have visited, with Senators at Washington, with a Chicago +saloon-keeper and his friend, a shepherd of votes, and with a varied +and casual assortment of Americans upon trains and boats; I read +my Ostrogorsky, my Otünsterberg, and my Roosevelt before I came to +America, and I find myself going through any American newspaper that +comes to hand always with an eye to this. It is to me a most vital +issue in the horoscope I contemplate. All depends upon the answer to +this question: Is the average citizen fundamentally dishonest? Is he +a rascal and humbug in grain? If he is, the future can needs be no +more than a monstrous social disorganization in the face of divine +opportunities. Or is he fundamentally honest, but a little confused +ethically?... + +The latter, I think, is the truer alternative, but I will confess +I have ranged through all the scale between a buoyant optimism and +despair. It is extraordinarily difficult to move among the crowded +contrasts of this perplexing country and emerge with any satisfactory +generalization. But there is one word I find all too frequently in the +American papers, and that is "stealing." They come near calling any +profitable, rather unfair bargain with the public a "steal." It's the +common journalistic vice here always to overstate. Every land has its +criminals, no doubt, but the American, I am convinced, is the last +man in the world to steal. Nor does he tell you lies to your face, +except in the way of business. He's not that sort of man. Nor does he +sneak bad money into your confiding hand. Nor ask a higher price than +he means to accept. Nor cheat on exchange. For all the frequency of +"graft" and "stealing" in the press head-lines, I feel the American is +pretty distinctly less "mean" than many Europeans in these respects, +and much more disposed to be ashamed of meanness. + +But he certainly has an ethical system of a highly commercial type. If +he isn't dishonest he's commercialized. He lives to get, to come out of +every transaction with more than he gave. + +In the highly imaginative theory that underlies the realities of an +individualistic society there is such a thing as honest trading. In +practice I don't believe there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to +have a fixed quality called their value, and honest trading is, I am +told, the exchange of things of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by +honest trading, and therefore nobody can grow rich by it. And nobody +would do business except to subsist by a profit and attempt to grow +rich. The honest merchant in the individualist's dream is a worthy and +urbane person who intervenes between the seller here and the buyer +there, fetches from one to another, stores a surplus of goods, takes +risks, and indemnifies himself by charging the seller and the buyer +a small fee for his waiting and his carrying and his speculative +hawking about. He would be sick and ashamed to undervalue a purchase +or overcharge a customer, and it scarcely requires a competitor to +reduce his fee to a minimum. He draws a line between customers with +whom he deals and competitors with whom he wouldn't dream of dealing. +And though it seems a little incredible, he grows rich and beautiful +in these practices and endows Art, Science, and Literature. Such is +the commercial life in a world of economic angels, magic justice and +the Individualist's Utopia. In reality flesh and blood cannot resist +a bargain, and people trade to get. In reality value is a dream, and +the commercial ideal is to buy from the needy, sell to the urgent +need, and get all that can possibly be got out of every transaction. +To do anything else isn't business--it's some other sort of game. Let +us look squarely into the pretences of trading. The plain fact of the +case is that in trading for profit there is no natural line at which +legitimate bargaining ends and cheating begins. The seller wants to get +above the value and the buyer below it. The seller seeks to appreciate, +the buyer to depreciate; and where is there room for truth in that +contest? In bargaining, overvaluing and undervaluing are not only +permissible but inevitable, attempts to increase the desire to buy and +willingness to sell. Who can invent a rule to determine what expedients +are permissible and what not? You may draw an arbitrary boundary--the +law does here and there, a little discontinuously--but that is all. +For example, consider these questions that follow: Nothing is perfect +in this world; all goods are defective. Are you bound to inform your +customer of every defect? Suppose you are, then are you bound to +examine your goods minutely for defects? Grant that. Then if you +intrust that duty to an employee ought you to dismiss him for selling +defective goods for you? The customer will buy your goods anyhow. +Are you bound to spend more upon cleaning and packing them than he +demands?--to wrap them in gold-foil gratuitously, for example? How are +you going to answer these questions? Let me suppose that your one dream +in life is to grow rich. Suppose you want to grow very rich and found a +noble university, let us say? + +You answer them in the Roman spirit, with _caveat emptor_. Then can you +decently join in the outcry against the Chicago butchers? + +Then turn again to the group of problems the Standard Oil history +raises. You want the customer to buy your goods and not your +competitor's. Naturally you do everything to get your goods to him, +to make them seem best to him, to reduce the influx of the other +man's stuff. You don't lend your competitor your shop-window anyhow. +If there's a hoarding you don't restrict your advertisements because +otherwise there won't be room for him. And if you happen to have a +paramount interest in the carrying line that bears your goods and +his, why shouldn't you see that your own goods arrive first? And at a +cheaper rate?... + +[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING] + +You see one has to admit there is always this element of overreaching, +of outwitting, of fore-stalling, in all systematic trade. It may be +refined, it may be dignified, but it is there. It differs in degree +and not in quality from cheating. A very scrupulous man stops at one +point, a less scrupulous man at another, an eager, ambitious man may +find himself carried by his own impetus very far. Too often the least +scrupulous wins. In all ages, among all races, this taint in trade has +been felt. Modern western Europe, led by England, and America have +denied it stoutly, have glorified the trader, called him a "merchant +prince," wrapped him in the purple of the word "financier," bowed down +before him. The trader remains a trader, a hand that clutches, an +uncreative brain that lays snares. Occasionally, no doubt, he exceeds +his function and is better than his occupations. But it is not he but +the maker who must be the power and ruler of the great and luminous +social order that must surely come, that new order I have persuaded +myself I find in glimmering evasive promises amid the congestions of +New York, the sheds and defilements of Niagara, and the Chicago reek +and grime.... The American, I feel assured, can be a bold and splendid +maker. He is not, like the uncreative Parsee or Jew or Armenian, a +trader by blood and nature. The architecture I have seen, the finely +planned, internally beautiful, and admirably organized office buildings +(to step into them from the street is to step up fifty years in the +scale of civilization), the business organizations, the industrial +skill--I visited a trap and chain factory at Oneida, right in the +heart of New York State, that was like the interior of a well-made +clock--above all, the plans for reconstructing his cities show that. +Those others make nothing. But nevertheless, since he, more than any +man, has subserved the full development of eighteenth and nineteenth +century conceptions, he has acquired some of the very worst habits +of the trader. Too often he is a gambler. Ever and again I have had +glimpses of preoccupied groups of men at green tables in little +rooms, playing that dreary game poker, wherein there is no skill, no +variety except in the sum at hazard, no orderly development, only a +sort of expressionless lying called "bluffing." Indeed, poker isn't +so much a game as a bad habit. Yet the American sits for long hours +at it, dispersing and accumulating dollars, and he carries its great +conception of "bluff" and a certain experience of kinetic physiognomy +back with him to his office.... + +And Americans talk dollars to an astonishing extent.... + +Now this is the reality of American corruption, a huge exclusive +preoccupation with dollar-getting. What is called corruption by the +press is really no more than the acute expression in individual cases +of this general fault. + +Where everybody is getting it is idle to expect a romantic standard of +honesty between employers and employed. The official who buys rails for +the big railway company that is professedly squeezing every penny it +can out of the public for its shareholders as its highest aim, is not +likely to display any religious self-abnegation of a share for himself +in this great work. The director finds it hard to distinguish between +getting for himself and getting for his company, and the duty to +one-self of a discreet use of opportunity taints the whole staff from +manager to messenger-boy. The politicians who protect the interests of +the same railway in the House of Commons or the Senate, as the case may +be, are not going to do it for love either. Nobody will have any mercy +for their wives or children if they die poor. The policeman who stands +between the property of the company and the irregular enterprise of +robbers feels his vigilance merits a special recognition. A position +of trust is a position of advantage, and deserves a percentage. +Everywhere, as every one knows, in all the modern States, quite as +much as in China, there are commissions, there are tips, there are +extortions and secret profits, there is, in a word, "graft." It's no +American specialty. Things are very much the same in this matter in +Great Britain as in America, but Americans talk more and louder than +we do. And indeed all this is no more than an inevitable development +of the idea of trading in the mind, that every transaction must leave +something behind for the agent. It's not stealing, but nevertheless, +the automatic cash-register becomes more and more of a necessity in +this thickening atmosphere of private enterprise. + + +III + +Political Dishonesty + +It seems to me that the political corruption that still plays so large +a part in the American problem is a natural and necessary underside +to a purely middle-class organization of society for business. Nobody +is left over to watch the politician. And the evil is enormously +aggravated by the complexities of the political machinery, by the +methods of the presidential election that practically prescribes a +ticket method of voting, and by the absence of any second ballots. +Moreover, the passion of the simpler minded Americans for aggressive +legislation controlling private morality has made the control of +the police a main source of party revenue, and dragged the saloon +and brothel, essentially retiring though these institutions are, +into politics. The Constitution ties up political reform in the most +extraordinary way, it was planned by devout Republicans equally afraid +of a dictatorship and the people; it does not so much distribute +power as disperse it, the machinery falls readily into the hands of +professional politicians with no end to secure but their immediate +profit, and is almost inaccessible to poor men who cannot make their +incomes in its working. An increasing number of wealthy young men have +followed President Roosevelt into political life--one thinks of such +figures as Senator Colby of New Jersey, but they are but incidental +mitigations of a generally vicious scheme. Before the nation, so busy +with its diversified private affairs, lies the devious and difficult +problem of a great reconstruction of its political methods, as a +preliminary to any broad change of its social organization.... + +How vicious things are I have had some inkling in a dozen whispered +stories of votes, of ballot-boxes rifled, of votes destroyed, of the +violent personation of cowed and ill-treated men. And in Chicago I saw +a little of the physical aspect of the system. + +I made the acquaintance of Alderman Kenna, who is better known, I +found, throughout the States as "Hinky-Dink," saw his two saloons and +something of the Chinese quarter about him. He is a compact, upright +little man, with iron-gray hair, a clear blue eye, and a dry manner. He +wore a bowler hat through all our experiences in common, and kept his +hands in his jacket-pockets. He filled me with a ridiculous idea, for +which I apologize, that had it fallen to the lot of Mr. J.M. Barrie to +miss a university education, and keep a saloon in Chicago and organize +voters, he would have looked own brother to Mr. Kenna. We commenced +in the first saloon, a fine, handsome place, with mirrors and tables +and decorations and a consumption of mitigated mineral waters and +beer in bottles; then I was taken over to see the other saloon, the +one across the way. We went behind the counter, and while I professed +a comparative interest in English and American beer-engines, and the +Alderman exchanged commonplaces with two or three of the shirt-sleeved +barmen, I was able to survey the assembled customers. + +It struck me as a pretty tough gathering. + +The first thing that met the eye were the schooners of beer. There is +nothing quite like the American beer-schooner in England. It would +appeal strongly to an unstinted appetite for beer, and I should be +curious to try it upon a British agricultural laborer and see how many +he could hold. He would, I am convinced, have to be entirely hollowed +out to hold two. Those I saw impressed me as being about the size of +small fish-globes set upon stems, and each was filled with a very +substantial-looking beer indeed. They stood in a careless row all +along the length of the saloon counter. Below them, in attitudes of +negligent proprietorship, lounged the "crowd" in a haze of smoke and +conversation. For the most part I should think they were Americanized +immigrants. I looked across the counter at them, met their eyes, got +the quality of their faces--and it seemed to me I was a very flimsy and +unsubstantial intellectual thing indeed. It struck me that I would as +soon go to live in a pen in a stock-yard as into American politics. + +That was my momentary impression. But that line of base and coarse +faces seen through the reek was only one sample of the great saloon +stratum of the American population in which resides political power. +They have no ideas and they have votes; they are capable, if need be, +of meeting violence by violence, and that is the sort of thing American +methods demand.... + +Now Alderman Kenna is a straight man, the sort of man one likes and +trusts at sight, and he did not invent his profession. He follows his +own ideas of right and wrong, and compared with my ideas of right +and wrong, they seem tough, compact, decided things. He is very kind +to all his crowd. He helps them when they are in trouble, even if it +is trouble with the police; he helps them find employment when they +are down on their luck; he stands between them and the impacts of an +unsympathetic and altogether too-careless social structure in a sturdy +and almost parental way. I can quite believe what I was told, that in +the lives of many of these rough undesirables he's almost the only +decent influence. He gets wives well treated, and he has an open heart +for children. And he tells them how to vote, a duty of citizenship +they might otherwise neglect, and sees that they do it properly. And +whenever you want to do things in Chicago you must reckon carefully +with him.... + +There you have a chip, a hand specimen, from the basement structure +upon which American politics rest. That is the remarkable alternative +to private enterprise as things are at present. It is America's only +other way. If public services are to be taken out of the hands of such +associations of financiers as the Standard Oil group they have to be +put into the hands of politicians resting at last upon this sort of +basis. Therein resides the impossibility of socialism in America--as +the case for socialism is put at present. The third course is the far +more complex, difficult and heroic one of creating imaginatively and +bringing into being a new state--a feat no people in the world has yet +achieved, but a feat that any people which aspires to lead the future +is bound, I think, to attempt. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +THE IMMIGRANT + + +I + +The Flood + +My picture of America assumes now a certain definite form. I have +tried to convey the effect of a great and energetic English-speaking +population strewn across a continent so vast as to make it seem small +and thin; I have tried to show this population caught by the upward +sweep of that great increase in knowledge that is everywhere enlarging +the power and scope of human effort, exhilarated by it, and active and +hopeful beyond any population the world has ever seen, and I have tried +to show how the members of this population struggle and differentiate +among themselves in a universal commercial competition that must, in +the end, if it is not modified, divide them into two permanent classes +of rich and poor. I have ventured to hint at a certain emptiness in +the resulting wealthy, and to note some of the uglinesses and miseries +inseparable from this competition. I have tried to give my impressions +of the vague, yet widely diffused, will in the nation to resist this +differentiation, and of a dim, large movement of thought towards a +change of national method. I have glanced at the debasement of politics +that bars any immediate hope of such reconstruction. And now it is time +to introduce a new element of obstruction and difficulty into this +complicating problem--the immigrants. + +Into the lower levels of the American community there pours perpetually +a vast torrent of strangers, speaking alien tongues, inspired by alien +traditions, for the most part illiterate peasants and working-people. +They come in at the bottom: that must be insisted upon. An enormous and +ever-increasing proportion of the laboring classes, of all the lower +class in America, is of recent European origin, is either of foreign +birth or foreign parentage. The older American population is being +floated up on the top of this influx, a sterile aristocracy above a +racially different and astonishingly fecund proletariat. (For it grows +rankly in this new soil. One section of immigrants, the Hungarians, +have here a birth-rate of forty-six in the thousand, the highest of any +civilized people in the world.) + +Few people grasp the true dimensions of this invasion. Figures carry +so little. The influx has clambered from half a million to 700,000, +to 800,000; this year the swelling figures roll up as if they mean to +go far over the million mark. The flood swells to overtake the total +birth-rate; it has already over-topped the total of births of children +to native-American parents. + +I have already told something of the effect of Ellis Island. I have +told how I watched the long procession of simple-looking, hopeful, +sunburned country folk from Russia, from the Carpathians, from southern +Italy and Turkey and Syria, filing through the wickets, bringing their +young wives for the mills of Paterson and Fall River, their children +for the Pennsylvania coal-breakers and the cotton-mills of the South. + +Yet there are moments when I could have imagined there were no +immigrants at all. All the time, except for one distinctive evening, I +seem to have been talking to English-speaking men, now and then to the +Irishman, now and then, but less frequently, to an Americanized German. +In the clubs there are no immigrants. There are not even Jews, as there +are in London clubs. One goes about the wide streets of Boston, one +meets all sorts of Boston people, one visits the State-House; it's all +the authentic English-speaking America. Fifth Avenue, too, is America +without a touch of foreign-born; and Washington. You go a hundred yards +south of the pretty Boston Common and, behold! you are in a polyglot +slum! You go a block or so east of Fifth Avenue and you are in a +vaster, more Yiddish Whitechapel. You cross from New York to Staten +Island, attracted by its distant picturesque suggestion of scattered +homes among the trees, and you discover black-tressed, bold-eyed women +on those pleasant verandas, half-clad brats, and ambiguous washing, +where once the native American held his simple state. You ask the way +of a young man who has just emerged from a ramshackle factory, and you +are answered in some totally incomprehensible tongue. You come up again +after such a dive below, to dine with the original Americans again, +talk With them, go about with them and forget.... + +In Boston, one Sunday afternoon, this fact of immigration struck upon +Mr. Henry James: + +"There went forward across the cop of the hill a continuous passage of +men and women, in couples and talkative companies, who struck me as +laboring wage-earners of the simpler sort arrayed in their Sunday best +and decently enjoying their leisure ... no sound of English in a single +instance escaped their lips; the greater number spoke a rude form of +Italian, the others some outland dialect unknown to me--though I waited +and waited to catch an echo of antique refrains." + +That's one of a series of recurrent, uneasy observations of this great +replacement I find in Mr. James's book. + +The immigrant does not clamor for attention. He is, indeed, almost +entirely inaudible, inarticulate, and underneath. He is in origin a +peasant, inarticulate, and underneath by habit and tradition. Mr. James +has, as it were, to put his ear to earth, to catch the murmuring of +strange tongues. The incomer is of diverse nationality and diverse +tongues, and that "breaks him up" politically and socially. He drops +into American clothes, and then he does not catch the careless eye. +He goes into special regions and works there. Where Americans talk or +think or have leisure to observe, he does not intrude. The bulk of the +Americans don't get as yet any real sense of his portentous multitude +at all. He does not read very much, and so he produces no effect upon +the book trade or magazines. You can go through such a periodical as +_Harper's Magazine_, for example, from cover to cover, and unless +there is some article or story bearing specifically upon the subject +you might doubt if there was an immigrant in the country. On the liner +coming over, at Ellis Island, and sometimes on the railroads one saw +him--him and his womankind,--in some picturesque east-European garb, +very respectful, very polite, adventurous, and a little scared. Then he +became less visible. He had got into cheap American clothes, resorted +to what naturalists call "protective mimicry," even perhaps acquired +a collar. Also his bearing had changed, become charged with a certain +aggression. He had got a pocket-handkerchief, and had learned to move +fast and work fast, and to chew and spit with the proper meditative +expression. One detected him by his diminishing accent, and by a few +persistent traits--rings in his ears, perhaps, or the like adornment. +In the next stage these also had gone; he had become ashamed of the +music of his native tongue, and talked even to his wife, on the +trolley-car and other public places, at least, in brief remarkable +American. Before that he had become ripe for a vote. + +The next stage of Americanization, I suppose, is this dingy quick-eyed +citizen with his schooner of beer in my Chicago saloon--if it is not +that crumpled thing I saw lying so still in the sunlight under the +trestle bridge on my way to Washington.... + + +II + +In Defence of Immigration + +Every American above forty, and most of those below that limit, seem +to be enthusiastic advocates of unrestricted immigration. I could not +make them understand the apprehension with which this huge dilution of +the American people with profoundly ignorant foreign peasants filled +me. I rode out on an automobile into the pretty New York country beyond +Yonkers with that finely typical American, Mr. Z.--he wanted to show +me the pleasantness of the land,--and he sang the song of American +confidence, I think, more clearly and loudly than any. He told me how +everybody had hope, how everybody had incentive, how magnificently it +was all going on. He told me--what is, I am afraid, a widely spread +delusion--that elementary education stands on a higher level of +efficiency in the States than in England. He had no doubt whatever of +the national powers of assimilation. "Let them all come," he said, +cheerfully. + +"The Chinese?" said I. + +"We can do with them all."... + +He was exceptional in that extension. Most Americans stop at the +Ural Mountains, and refuse the "Asiatic." It was not a matter for +discussion with him, but a question of belief. He had ceased to reason +about immigration long ago. He was a man in the fine autumn of life, +abounding in honors, wrapped in furs, and we drove swiftly in his +automobile, through the spring sunshine. ("By Jove!" thought I, "you +talk like Pippa's rich uncle.") By some half-brother of a coincidence +we happened first upon this monument commemorating a memorable incident +of the War of Independence, and then upon that. He recalled details +of that great campaign as Washington was fought out of Manhattan +northward. I remember one stone among the shooting trees that indicated +where in the Hudson River near by a British sloop had fired the first +salute in honor of the American flag. That salute was vividly present +still to him; it echoed among the woods, it filled him with a sense +of personal triumph; it seemed half-way back to Agincourt to me. All +that bright morning the stars and stripes made an almost luminous +visible presence about us. Open-handed hospitality and confidence +in God so swayed me that it is indeed only now, as I put this book +together, I see this shining buoyancy, this bunting patriotism, in +its direct relation to the Italian babies in the cotton-mills, to the +sinister crowd that stands in the saloon smoking and drinking beer, an +accumulating reserve of unintelligent force behind the manoeuvres of +the professional politicians.... + +I tried my views upon Commissioner Watchorn as we leaned together over +the gallery railing and surveyed that bundle-carrying crowd creeping +step by step through the wire filter of the central hall of Ellis +Island--into America. + +"You don't think they'll swamp you?" I said. + +"Now look here," said the Commissioner, "I'm English born--Derbyshire. +I came into America when I was a lad. I had fifteen dollars. And here I +am! Well, do you expect me, now I'm here, to shut the door on any other +poor chaps who want a start--a start with hope in it, in the New World?" + +A pleasant-mannered, a fair-haired young man, speaking excellent +English, had joined us as we went round, and nodded approval. + +I asked him for his opinion, and gathered he was from Milwaukee, and +the son of a Scandinavian immigrant. He, too, was for "fair-play" and +an open door for every one. "Except," he added, "Asiatics." So also, I +remember, was a very New England lady I met at Hull House, who wasn't, +as a matter of fact, a New-Englander at all, but the daughter of a +German settler in the Middle West. They all seemed to think that I was +inspired by hostility to the immigrant in breathing any doubt about +the desirability of this immense process.... + +I tried in each case to point out that this idea of not being +churlishly exclusive did not exhaust the subject, that the present +immigration is a different thing entirely from the immigration of +half a century ago, that in the interest of the immigrant and his +offspring more than any one, is the protest to be made. Fifty years +ago more than half of the torrent was English speaking, and the rest +mostly from the Teutonic and Scandinavian northwest of Europe, an +influx of people closely akin to the native Americans in temperament +and social tradition. They were able to hold their own and mix +perfectly. Even then the quantity of illiterate Irish produced a marked +degradation of political life. The earlier immigration was an influx +of energetic people who wanted to come, and who had to put themselves +to considerable exertion to get here; it was higher in character and +in social quality than the present flood. The immigration of to-day is +largely the result of energetic canvassing by the steamship companies; +it is, in the main, an importation of laborers and not of economically +independent settlers, and it is increasingly alien to the native +tradition. The bulk of it is now Italian, Russian Jewish, Russian, +Hungarian, Croatian, Roumanian, and eastern European generally. + +"The children learn English, and become more American and better +patriots than the Americans," Commissioner Watchorn--echoing everybody +in that--told me.... + +(In Boston one optimistic lady looked to the Calabrian and Sicilian +peasants to introduce an artistic element into the population--no +doubt because they come from the same peninsula that produced the +Florentines.) + + +III + +Assimilation + +Will the reader please remember that I've been just a few weeks in +the States altogether, and value my impressions at that! And will he, +nevertheless, read of doubts that won't diminish. I doubt very much +if America is going to assimilate all that she is taking in now; much +more do I doubt that she will assimilate the still greater inflow of +the coming years. I believe she is going to find infinite difficulties +in that task. By "assimilate" I mean make intelligently co-operative +citizens of these people. She will, I have no doubt whatever, impose +upon them a bare use of the English language, and give them votes and +certain patriotic persuasions, but I believe that if things go on as +they are going the great mass of them will remain a very low lower +class--will remain largely illiterate industrialized peasants. They +are decent-minded peasant people, orderly, industrious people, rather +dirty in their habits, and with a low standard of life. Wherever they +accumulate in numbers they present to my eye a social phase far below +the level of either England, France, north Italy, or Switzerland. +And, frankly, I do not find the American nation has either in its +schools--which are as backward in some States as they are forward in +others--in its press, in its religious bodies or its general tone, any +organized means or effectual influences for raising these huge masses +of humanity to the requirements of an ideal modern civilization. They +are, to my mind, "biting off more than they can chaw" in this matter. + +I got some very interesting figures from Dr. Hart, of the Children's +Home and Aid Society, Chicago, in this matter. He was pleading for +the immigrant against my scepticisms. He pointed out to me that +the generally received opinion that the European immigrants are +exceptionally criminal is quite wrong. + +The 1900 census report collapsed after a magnificent beginning, and its +figures are not available, but from the earlier records there can be +no doubt that the percentage of criminals among the "foreign-born" is +higher than that among the native-born. This, however, is entirely due +to the high criminal record of the French Canadians in the Northeast, +and the Mexicans in Arizona, who are not overseas immigrants at +all. The criminal statistics of the French Canadians in the States +should furnish useful matter for the educational controversy in Great +Britain. Allowing for their activities--which appear to be based on an +education of peculiar religious virtue--the figures bring the criminal +percentage among the foreigners far below that of the native-born. +But Dr. Hart's figures also showed very clearly something further: as +between the offspring of native and foreign parents the preponderance +of crime is enormously on the side of the latter. + +That, at any rate, falls in with my own preconceptions and roving +observations. Bear in mind always that this is just one questioning +individual's impression. It seems to me that the immigrant arrives +an artless, rather uncivilized, pious, good-hearted peasant, with +a disposition towards submissive industry and rude effectual moral +habits. America, it is alleged, makes a man of him. It seems to me +that all too often she makes an infuriated toiler of him, tempts him +with dollars and speeds him up with competition, hardens him, coarsens +his manners, and, worst crime of all, lures and forces him to sell his +children into toil. The home of the immigrant in America looks to me +worse than the home he came from in Italy. It is just as dirty, it is +far less simple and beautiful, the food is no more wholesome, the moral +atmosphere far less wholesome; and, as a consequence, the child of the +immigrant is a worse man than his father. + +I am fully aware of the generosity, the nobility of sentiment which +underlies the American objection to any hindrance to immigration. But +either that general sentiment should be carried out to a logical +completeness and a gigantic and costly machinery organized to educate +and civilize these people as they come in, or it should be chastened to +restrict the inflow to numbers assimilable under existing conditions. +At present, if we disregard sentiment, if we deny the alleged need +of gross flattery whenever one writes of America for Americans, and +state the bare facts of the case, they amount to this: that America, +in the urgent process of individualistic industrial development, in +its feverish haste to get through with its material possibilities, +is importing a large portion of the peasantry of central and eastern +Europe, and converting it into a practically illiterate industrial +proletariat. In doing this it is doing a something that, however +different in spirit, differs from the slave trade of its early +history only in the narrower gap between employer and laborer. In the +"colored" population America has already ten million descendants of +unassimilated and perhaps unassimilable labor immigrants. These people +are not only half civilized and ignorant, but they have infected +the white population about them with a kindred ignorance. For there +can be no doubt that if an Englishman or Scotchman of the year 1500 +were to return to earth and seek his most retrograde and decivilized +descendants, he would find them at last among the white and colored +population south of Washington. And I have a foreboding that in this +mixed flood of workers that pours into America by the million to-day, +in this torrent of ignorance, against which that heroic being, the +schoolmarm, battles at present all unaided by men, there is to be found +the possibility of another dreadful separation of class and kind, a +separation perhaps not so profound but far more universal. One sees the +possibility of a rich industrial and mercantile aristocracy of western +European origin, dominating a darker-haired, darker-eyed, uneducated +proletariat from central and eastern Europe. The immigrants are being +given votes, I know, but that does not free them, it only enslaves the +country. The negroes were given votes. + +That is the quality of the danger as I see it. But before this +indigestion of immigrants becomes an incurable sickness of the States +many things may happen. There is every sign, as I have said, that a +great awakening, a great disillusionment, is going on in the American +mind. The Americans have become suddenly self-critical, are hot with +an unwonted fever for reform and constructive effort. This swamping of +the country may yet be checked. They may make a strenuous effort to +emancipate children below fifteen from labor, and so destroy one of the +chief inducements of immigration. Once convince them that their belief +in the superiority of their public schools to those of England and +Germany is an illusion, or at least that their schools are inadequate +to the task before them, and it may be they will perform some swift +American miracle of educational organization and finance. For all +the very heavy special educational charges that are needed if the +immigrant is really to be assimilated, it seems a reasonable proposal +that immigration should pay. Suppose the new-comer were presently to +be taxed on arrival for his own training and that of any children he +had with him, that again would check the inrush very greatly. Or the +steamship company might be taxed, and left to settle the trouble with +the immigrant by raising his fare. And finally, it may be that if the +line is drawn, as it seems highly probable it will be, at "Asiatics," +then there may even be a drying up of the torrent at its source. The +European countries are not unlimited reservoirs of offspring. As they +pass from their old conditions into more and more completely organized +modern industrial states, they develop a new internal equilibrium and +cease to secrete an excess of population. England no longer supplies +any great quantity of Americans; Scotland barely any; France is +exhausted; Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia have, it seems, disgorged +nearly all their surplus load, and now run dry.... + +These are all mitigations of the outlook, but still the dark shadow of +disastrous possibility remains. The immigrant comes in to weaken and +confuse the counsels of labor, to serve the purposes of corruption, to +complicate any economic and social development, above all to retard +enormously the development of that national consciousness and will on +which the hope of the future depends. + + +IV + +The Educational Alliance + +I told these doubts of mine to a pleasant young lady of New York, who +seems to find much health and a sustaining happiness in settlement work +on the East Side. She scorned my doubts. "Children make better citizens +than the old Americans," she said, like one who quotes a classic, and +took me with her forthwith to see the central school of the Educational +Alliance, that fine imposing building in East Broadway. + +It's a thing I'm glad not to have missed. I recall a large cool room +with a sloping floor, tier rising above tier of seats and desks, and a +big class of bright-eyed Jewish children, boys and girls, each waving +two little American flags to the measure of the song they sang, singing +to the accompaniment of the piano on the platform beside us. + +"God bless our native land," they sang--with a considerable variety of +accent and distinctness, but with a very real emotion. + +Some of them had been in America a month, some much longer, but here +they were--under the auspices of the wealthy Hebrews of New York and +Mr. Blaustein's enthusiastic direction--being Americanized. They sang +of America--"sweet land of liberty"; they stood up and drilled with +the little bright pretty flags; swish they crossed and swish they +waved back, a waving froth of flags and flushed children's faces; +and they stood up and repeated the oath of allegiance, and at the end +filed tramping by me and out of the hall. The oath they take is finely +worded. It runs: + +[Illustration: WHERE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE AMERICANIZED] + +"Flag our great Republic, inspirer in battle, guardian of our homes, +whose stars and stripes stand for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we +salute thee! We, the natives of distant lands, who find rest under thy +folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and our sacred honor to love +and protect thee, our country, and the liberty of the American people +forever." + +I may have been fanciful, but as I stood aside and watched them going +proudly past, it seemed to me that eyes met mine, triumphant and +victorious eyes--for was I not one of these British from whom freedom +was won? But that was an ignoble suspicion. They had been but a few +weeks in America, and that light in their eyes was just a brotherly +challenge to one they supposed a fellow-citizen who stood unduly +thoughtful amid their rhythmic exaltation. They tramped out and past +with their flags and guidons. + +"It is touching!" whispered my guide, and I saw she had caught a faint +reflection of that glow that lit the children. + +I told her it was the most touching thing I had seen in America. + +And so it remains. + +Think of the immense promise in it! Think of the flower of belief and +effort that may spring from this warm sowing! We passed out of this +fluttering multiplication of the most beautiful flag in the world, into +streets abominable with offal and indescribable filth, and dark and +horrible under the thunderous girders of the Elevated railroad, to our +other quest for that morning, a typical New York tenement. For I wanted +to see one, with practically windowless bedrooms.... + +The Educational Alliance is of course not a public institution; it +was organized by Hebrews, and conducted for Hebrews, chiefly for the +benefit of the Hebrew immigrant. It is practically the only organized +attempt to Americanize the immigrant child. After the children have +mastered sufficient English and acquired the simpler elements of +patriotism--which is practically no more than an emotional attitude +towards the flag--they pass on into the ordinary public schools. + +"Yes," I told my friend, "I know how these children feel. That, less +articulate perhaps, but no less sincere, is the thing--something +between pride and a passionate desire--that fills three-quarters of the +people at Ellis Island now. They come ready to love and worship, ready +to bow down and kiss the folds of your flag. They give themselves--they +want to give. Do you know I, too, have come near feeling that at times +for America."... + +We were separated for a while by a long hole in the middle of the +street and a heap of builder's refuse. Before we came within talking +distance again I was in reaction against the gleam of satisfaction my +last confession had evoked. + +"In the end," I said, "you Americans won't be able to resist it." + +"Resist what?" + +"You'll respect your country," I said. + +"What do you mean?" + +In those crowded noisy East Side streets one has to shout, and shout +compact things. "_This!_" I said to the barbaric disorder about us. +"Lynching! Child Labor! Graft!" + +Then we were separated by a heap of decaying fish that some hawker had +dumped in the gutter. + +My companion shouted something I did not catch. + +"_We'll_ tackle it!" she repeated. + +I looked at her, bright and courageous and youthful, a little +overconfident, I thought, but extremely reassuring, going valiantly +through a disorderly world of obstacles, and for the moment--I suppose +that waving bunting and the children's voices had got into my head a +little--I forgot all sorts of things.... + +I could have imagined her the spirit of America incarnate rather than a +philanthropic young lady of New York. + + + + +CHAPTER X + +STATE-BLINDNESS + + +I + +Sense of the State + +In what I have written so far, I have tried to get the effect of the +American outlook, the American task, the American problem as a whole, +as it has presented itself to me. Clearly, as I see it, it is a mental +and moral issue. There seems to me an economic process going on that +tends to concentrate first wealth and then power in the hands of a +small number of adventurous individuals of no very high intellectual +type, a huge importation of alien and unassimilable workers, and a +sustained disorder of local and political administration. Correlated +with this is a great increase in personal luxury and need. In all these +respects there is a strong parallelism between the present condition +of the United States and the Roman Republic in the time of the early +Cæsars; and arguing from these alone one might venture to forecast +the steady development of an exploiting and devastating plutocracy, +leading perhaps to Cæsarism, and a progressive decline in civilization +and social solidarity. But there are forces of recuperation and +construction in America such as the earlier instance did not display. +There is infinitely more original and originating thought in the +state, there are the organized forces of science, a habit of progress, +clearer and wider knowledge among the general mass of the people. These +promise, and must, indeed, inevitably make, some synthetic effort of +greater or less homogeneity and force. It is upon that synthetic effort +that the distinctive destiny of America depends. + +I propose to go on now to discuss the mental quality of America as I +have been able to focus it. (Remember always that I am an undiplomatic +tourist of no special knowledge or authority, who came, moreover, to +America with certain prepossessions.) And first, and chiefly, I have +to convey what seems to me the most significant and pregnant thing of +all. It is a matter of something wanting, that the American shares +with the great mass of prosperous middle-class people in England. I +think it is best indicated by saying that the typical American has no +"sense of the state." I do not mean that he is not passionately and +vigorously patriotic. But I mean that he has no perception that his +business activities, his private employments, are constituents in a +large collective process; that they affect other people and the world +forever, and cannot, as he imagines, begin and end with him. He sees +the world in fragments; it is to him a multitudinous collection of +individual "stories"--as the newspapers put it. If one studies an +American newspaper, one discovers it is all individuality, all a matter +of personal doings, of what so and so said and how so and so felt. And +all these individualities are unfused. Not a touch of abstraction or +generalization, no thinnest atmosphere of reflection, mitigates these +harsh, emphatic, isolated happenings. The American, it seems to me, +has yet to achieve what is, after all, the product of education and +thought, the conception of a whole to which all individual acts and +happenings are subordinate and contributory. + +When I say this much, I do not mean to insinuate that any other nation +in the world has any superiority in this matter. But I do want to urge +that the American problem is pre-eminently one that must be met by +broad ways of thinking, by creative, synthetic, and merging ideas, and +that a great number of Americans seem to lack these altogether. + + +II + +A Sample American + +Let me by way of illustration give a specimen American mind. It is not +the mind of a writer or philosopher, it is just a plain successful +business-man who exposes himself, and makes it clear that this want of +any sense of the state of any large duty of constructive loyalty, is +not an idiosyncrasy, but the quality of all his circle, his friends, +his religious teacher.... + +I found my specimen in a book called _With John Bull and Jonathan_. +It contains the rather rambling reminiscences of Mr. J. Morgan +Richards, the wealthy and successful London agent of a great number of +well-advertised American proprietary articles, and I read it first, I +will confess, chiefly in search of such delightful phrases as the one +"mammoth in character" I have already quoted. But there were few to +equal that first moment's bright discovery. What I got from it finally +wasn't so much that sort of thing as this realization of Mr. Richards's +peculiar quality, this acute sense of all that he hadn't got. Mr. +Richards told of advertising enterprises, of contracts and journeyings, +of his great friendship with the late Dr. Parker, of his domestic +affairs, and all the changes in the world that had struck him, and of a +remarkable dining club, called (paradoxically) the _Sphinx_, in which +the giants (or are they the mammoths?) of the world of advertisement +foregather. He gave his portrait, and the end-paper presented him +playfully as the jolly president of the Sphinx Club, champagne-bottle +crowned, but else an Egyptian monarch; and on the cover are two gilt +hands clasped across a gilt ripple of sea ("hands across the sea"), +under intertwining English and American flags. From the book one got +an effect, garrulous perhaps, but on the whole not unpleasing, of an +elderly but still active business personality quite satisfied by his +achievements, and representative of I know not what proportion, but at +any rate a considerable proportion, of his fellow-countrymen. And one +got an effect of a being not simply indifferent to the health and vigor +and growth of the community of which he was a part, but unaware of its +existence. + +He displays this irresponsibility of the commercial mind so +illuminatingly because he does in a way attempt to tell something +more than his personal story. He notes the changes in the world about +him, how this has improved and that progressed, which contrasts +between England and America struck upon his mind. That he himself +is responsible amid these changes never seems to dawn upon him. +His freedom from any sense of duty to the world as a whole, of any +subordination of trading to great ideas, is naïve and fundamental. +He tells of how he arranged with the authorities in charge of the +Independence Day celebrations on Boston Common to display "three large +pieces" containing the name of a certain "bitters," which they did, and +how this no doubt very desirable commodity was first largely advertised +throughout the United States in the fall of 1861, and rapidly became +the success of the day, because of the enormous amount of placarding +given to the cabalistic characters 'S-T-1860-X.' Those strange letters +and figures stared upon people from wall and fence and tree, in every +leading town throughout the United States. They were painted on the +rocks of the Hudson River to such an extent that the attention of the +Legislature was drawn to the fact, and a law was passed to prevent the +further disfigurement of river scenery. + +He calls this "cute." He tells, too, of his educational work upon +the English press, how he won it over to "display" advertisements, +and devised "the first sixteen-sheet double-demy poster ever seen +in England in connection with a proprietary article." He introduced +the smoking of cigarettes into England against great opposition. +Mr. Richards finds no incongruity, but apparently a very delightful +association, in the fact that this great victory for the adolescent's +cigarette was won on the site of Strudwick's house, wherein John Bunyan +died, and hard by the path of the Smithfield martyrs to their fiery +sacrifice. Both they and Mr. Richards "lit such a candle in England--" + +Well, my business is not to tell of the feats by which Mr. Richards +grew wealthy and important as a tree may grow and flourish amid the +masonry it helps to disintegrate. My business is purely with his +insensibility to the state as an aspect of his personal life. It is +insensibility--not disregard or hostility. One gets an impression from +this book that if Mr. Richards had lived in a different culture, he +would have been a generous giver of himself. In spite of his curious +incapacity to appreciate any issues larger than large enterprises in +selling, he is very evidently a religious man. He sat under the late +Dr. Parker of the rich and prosperous City Temple, and that reverend +gentleman's leonine visage adorns the book. Its really the light one +gets on Dr. Parker and his teaching that appeals to me most in this +volume. For this gentleman Mr. Richards seems to have entertained a +feeling approaching reverence. He notes such details as: + +"At the conclusion of an invocation or prayer, his habit always was to +make a pause of a few seconds before pronouncing 'Amen.' This was most +impressive.... + +"He spoke such words as 'God,' 'Jesus Christ,' 'No,' 'Yes,' 'Nothing,' +in a way to give more value to each word than any speaker I have ever +heard." + +They became great friends, rarely a week passed without their meeting, +and, says Mr. Richards, he "was pleased, in the course of time, +to honor me with his confidence in a marked degree, as though he +recognized in me some quality which satisfied his judgment, that I +could be trusted in business questions quite apart from those relating +to his church. He was not only a born preacher, but possessed a +marvellous grasp of sound, practical knowledge upon the affairs of +the day. I often consulted with him regarding my own affairs, always +getting the most practical help." + +When Dr. Parker came to America, the two friends corresponded warmly, +and several of the letters are quoted. Even "£5000 a year easily made" +could not tempt him from London and the modest opulence of the City +Temple.... + +But my business now is not to dwell on these characteristic details, +but to point out that Mr. Richards does not stand alone in the entire +detachment, not only of his worldly achievements, but of his spiritual +life, from any creative solicitude for the state. If he was merely an +isolated "character" I should have no concern with him. His association +with Dr. Parker shows most luminously that he presents a whole cult +of English and American rich traders, who in America "sat under" such +men as the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, for example, who evidently stand +for much more in America than in England, and who, so far as the +state and political and social work go, are scarcely of more use, are +probably more hindrance, than any organization of selfish voluptuaries +of equal wealth and numbers. It is a cult, it has its teachers and its +books. I have had a glimpse of one of its manuals. I find Mr. Richards +quoting with approval Dr. Parker's "Ten General Commandments for Men of +Business," commandments which strike me as not only State-blind, but +utterly God-blind, which are, indeed, no more than shrewd counsels for +"getting on." It is really quite horrible stuff morally. "Thou shalt +not hobnob with idle persons," parodies Dr. Parker in commandment V., +so glossing richly upon the teachings of Him who ate with publicans +and sinners, and (no doubt to instil the advisability of keeping one's +more delicate business procedure in one's own hands), "Thou shalt not +forget that a servant who can tell lies _for_ thee, may one day tell +lies _to_ thee."... + +I am not throwing any doubt upon the sincerity of Dr. Parker and Mr. +Richards. I believe that nothing could exceed the transparent honesty +that ends this record which tells of a certain bitters pushed at +the sacrifice of beautiful scenery, of a successful propaganda of +cigarette-smoking, and of all sorts of proprietary articles landed +well home in their gastric target of a whole life lost, indeed, in +commercial self-seeking, with "What shall I render unto the Lord for +all his benefits?" + + "The Now is an atom of Sand, + And the Near is a perishing Clod, + But Afar is a fairyland, + And Beyond is the Bosom of God." + +What I have to insist upon now is that this is a sample, and, so +far as I can tell, a fair sample, of the quality and trend of the +mind-stuff and the breadth and height of the tradition of a large and +I know not how influential mass of prosperous middle-class English, +and of a much more prosperous and influential and important section of +Americans. They represent much energy, they represent much property, +they are a factor to reckon with. They present a powerful opposing +force to anything that will suppress their disgusting notice-boards +or analyze their ambiguous "proprietary articles," or tax their +gettings for any decent public purpose. And here I find them selling +poisons as pain-killers, and alcohol as tonics, and fighting ably and +boldly to silence adverse discussion. In the face of the great needs +that lie before America their active trivality of soul, their energy +and often unscrupulous activity, and their quantitative importance +become, to my mind, adverse and threatening, a stumbling-block for +hope. For the impression I have got by going to and fro in America +is that Mr. Richards is a fair sample of at least the older type of +American. So far as I can learn, Mr. J.D. Rockefeller is just another +product of the same cult. You meet these older types everywhere, +they range from fervent piety and temperance to a hearty drinking, +"story"-telling, poker-playing type, but they have in common a sharp, +shrewd, narrow, business habit of mind that ignores the future and +the state altogether. But I do not find the younger men are following +in their lines. Some are. But just how many and to what extent, I do +not know. It is very hard for a literary man to estimate the quantity +and importance of ideas in a community. The people he meets naturally +all entertain ideas, or they would not come in his way. The people +who have new ideas talk; those who have not, go about their business. +But I hazard an opinion that Young America now presents an altogether +different type from the young men of enterprise and sound Baptist +and business principles who were the backbone of the irresponsible +commercial America of yesterday, the America that rebuilt Chicago on +"floating foundations," covered the world with advertisement boards, +gave the great cities the elevated railroads, and organized the trusts. + + +III + +Oneida + +I spent a curious day amid the memories of that strangely interesting +social experiment, the Oneida Community, and met a most significant +contemporary, "live American" of the newer school, in the son of the +founder and the present head of "Oneida Limited." + +There are moments when that visit I paid to Oneida seems to me to +stand for all America. The place, you know, was once the seat of a +perfectionist community; the large red community buildings stand now +among green lawns and ripening trees, and I dined in the communal +dining-room, and visited the library, and saw the chain and trap +factory, and the silk-spinning factory and something of all its +industries. I talked to old and middle-aged people who told me all +sorts of interesting things of "community days," looked through curious +old-fashioned albums of photographs, showing the women in their +bloomers and cropped hair, and the men in the ill-fitting frock-coats +of the respectable mediocre person in early Victorian times. I think +that some of the reminiscences I awakened had been voiceless for some +time. At moments it was like hearing the story of a flattened, dry, +and colorless flower between the pages of a book, of a verse written +in faded ink, or of some daguerreotype spotted and faint beyond +recognition. It was extraordinarily New England in its quality as I +looked back at it all. They claimed a quiet perfection of soul, they +searched one another marvellously for spiritual chastening, they defied +custom and opinion, they followed their reasoning and their theology +to the inmost amazing abnegations--and they kept themselves solvent by +the manufacture of steel traps that catch the legs of beasts in their +strong and pitiless jaws.... + +But this book is not about the things that concerned Oneida in +community days, and I mention them here only because of the curious +developments of the present time. Years ago, when the founder, John +Humphrey Noyes, grew old and unable to control the new dissensions +that arose out of the sceptical attitude of the younger generation +towards his ingenious theology, and such-like stresses, communism was +abandoned, the religious life and services discontinued, the concern +turned into a joint-stock company, and the members made shareholders on +strictly commercial lines. For some years its prosperity declined. Many +of the members went away. But a nucleus remained as residents in the +old buildings, and after a time there were returns. I was told that in +the early days of the new period there was a violent reaction against +communistic methods, a jealous inexperienced insistence upon property. +"It was difficult to borrow a hammer," said one of my informants. + +Then, as the new generation began to feel its feet, came a fresh +development of vitality. The Oneida company began to set up new +machinery, to seek wider markets, to advertise and fight competitors. + +This Mr. P.B. Noyes was the leader into the new paths. He possesses all +the force of character, the constructive passion, the imaginative power +of his progenitor, and it has all gone into business competition. I +have heard much talk of the romance of business, chiefly from people I +heartily despised, but in Mr. Noyes I found business indeed romantic. +It had get hold of him, it possessed him like a passion. He has +inspired all his half-brothers and cousins and younger fellow-members +of the community with his own imaginative motive. They, too, are +enthusiasts for business. + +Mr. Noyes is a tall man, who looks down when he talks to one. He showed +me over the associated factories, told me how the trap trade of all +North America is in Oneida's hands, told me of how they fight and win +against the British traps in South America and Burmah. He showed me +photographs of panthers in traps, tigers in traps, bears snarling at +death, unfortunate deer, foxes caught by the paws.... + +I did my best to forget those photographs at once in the interest of +his admirable machinery, which busied itself with chain-making as +though it had eyes and hands. I went beside him, full of that respect +that a literary man must needs feel when a creative business controller +displays his quality. + +"But the old religion of Oneida?" I would interpolate. + +"Each one of us is free to follow his own religion. Here is a new sort +of chain we are making for hanging-lamps. Hitherto--" + +Presently I would try again. "Are the workers here in any way members +of the community?" + +"Oh no! Many of them are Italian immigrants. We think of building a +school for them.... No, we get no labor troubles. We pay always above +the trade-union rates, and so we get the pick of the workmen. Our class +of work can't be sweated."... + +Yes, he was an astonishing personality, so immensely concentrated on +these efficient manufacturing and trading developments, so evidently +careless of theology, philosophy, social speculation, beauty. + +"Your father was a philosopher," I said. + +"I think in ten years' time I may give up the control here," he threw +out, "and write something." + +"I've thought of the publishing trade myself," I said, "when my wits +are old and stiff."... + +I never met a man before so firmly gripped by the romantic constructive +and adventurous element of business, so little concerned about +personal riches or the accumulation of wealth. He illuminated much +that had been dark to me in the American character. I think better +of business by reason of him. And time after time I tried him upon +politics. It came to nothing. Making a new world was, he thought, +a rhetorical flourish about futile and troublesome activities, and +politicians merely a disreputable sort of parasite upon honorable +people who made chains and plated spoons. All his constructive +instincts, all his devotion, were for Oneida and its enterprises. +America was just the impartial space, the large liberty, in which +Oneida grew, the Stars and Stripes a wide sanction akin to the +impartial irresponsible harboring sky overhead. Sense of the State had +never grown in him--can now, I felt convinced, never grow.... + +But some day, I like to imagine, the World State, and not Oneida +corporations, and a nobler trade than traps, will command such services +as his. + + + + +CHAPTER XI + +TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT + + +I + +The Riddle of Intolerance + +In considering the quality of the American mind (upon which, as +I believe, the ultimate destiny of America entirely depends), it +has been necessary to point out that, considered as one whole, it +still seems lacking in any of that living sense of the state out +of which constructive effort must arise, and that, consequently, +enormous amounts of energy go to waste in anarchistic and chaotically +competitive private enterprise. I believe there are powerful forces +at work in the trend of modern thought, science, and method, in the +direction of bringing order, control, and design into this confused +gigantic conflict, and the discussion of these constructive forces must +necessarily form the crown of my forecast of America's future. But +before I come to that I must deal with certain American traits that +puzzle me, that I cannot completely explain to myself, that dash my +large expectations with an obstinate shadow of foreboding. Essentially +these are disintegrating influences, in the nature of a fierce +intolerance, that lead to conflicts and destroy co-operation. One makes +one's criticism with compunction. One moves through the American world, +meeting constantly with kindness and hospitality, with a familiar +helpfulness that is delightful, with sympathetic enterprise and +energetic imagination, and then suddenly there flashes out a quality of +harshness.... + +I will explain in a few minutes what I mean by this flash of harshness. +Let me confess here that I cannot determine whether it is a necessary +consequence of American conditions, the scar upon the soul of too +strenuous business competition, or whether it is something deeper, +some subtle, unavoidable infection perhaps in this soil that was once +the Red Indian's battle-ground, some poison, it may be, mingled with +this clear exhilarating air. And going with this harshness there seems +also something else, a contempt for abstract justice that one does not +find in any European intelligence--not even among the English. This +contempt may be a correlative of the intense practicality begotten by +a scruple-destroying commercial training. That, at any rate, is my own +prepossession. Conceivably I am over-disposed to make that tall lady in +New York Harbor stand as a symbol for the liberty of property, and to +trace the indisputable hastiness of life here--it is haste sometimes +rather than speed,--its scorn of æsthetic and abstract issues, this +frequent quality of harshness, and a certain public disorder, whatever +indeed mars the splendid promise and youth of America, to that. I +think it is an accident of the commercial phase that presses men +beyond dignity, patience, and magnanimity. I am loath to believe it is +something fundamentally American. + +I have very clearly in my memory the figure of young MacQueen, in his +gray prison clothes in Trenton jail, and how I talked with him. He and +Mr. Booker T. Washington and Maxim Gorky stand for me as figures in +the shadow--symbolical men. I think of America as pride and promise, +as large growth and large courage, all set with beautiful fluttering +bunting, and then my vision of these three men comes back to me; +they return presences inseparable from my American effect, unlit +and uncomplaining on the sunless side of her, implying rather than +voicing certain accusations. America can be hasty, can be obstinately +thoughtless and unjust.... + +Well, let me set down as shortly as I can how I saw them, and then go +on again with my main thesis. + + +II + +MacQueen + +MacQueen is one of those young men England is now making by the +thousand in her elementary schools--a man of that active, intelligent, +mentally hungry, self-educating sort that is giving us our elementary +teachers, our labor members, able journalists, authors, civil +servants, and some of the most public-spirited and efficient of our +municipal administrators. He is the sort of man an Englishman grows +prouder of as he sees America and something of her politicians and +labor leaders. After his board-school days MacQueen went to work as +a painter and grainer, and gave his spare energy to self-education. +He mastered German, and read widely and freely. He corresponded with +William Morris, devoured Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, followed the +_Clarion_ week by week, discussed social questions, wrote to the +newspapers, debated, made speeches. The English reader will begin to +recognize the type. Jail had worn him when I saw him, but I should +think he was always physically delicate; he wears spectacles, he warms +emotionally as he talks. And he decided, after much excogitation, that +the ideal state is one of so fine a quality of moral training that +people will not need coercion and repressive laws. He calls himself an +anarchist--of the early Christian, Tolstoyan, non-resisting school. +Such an anarchist was Emerson, among other dead Americans whose names +are better treasured than their thoughts. That sort of anarchist has +as much connection with embittered bomb-throwers and assassins as Miss +Florence Nightingale has with the woman Hartmann, who put on a nurse's +uniform to poison and rob.... + +Well, MacQueen led an active life in England, married, made a decent +living, and took an honorable part in the local affairs of Leeds until +he was twenty-six. Then he conceived a desire for wider opportunity +than England offers men of his class. + +In January, 1902, he crossed the Atlantic, and, no doubt, he came very +much aglow with the American idea. He felt that he was exchanging a +decadent country of dwarfing social and political traditions for a land +of limitless outlook. He became a proof-reader in New York, and began +to seek around him for opportunities of speaking and forwarding social +progress. He tried to float a newspaper. The New York labor-unions +found him a useful speaker, and, among others, the German silk-workers +of New York became aware of him. In June they asked him to go to +Paterson to speak in German to the weavers in that place. + +The silk-dyers were on strike in Paterson, but the weavers were weaving +"scab-silk," dyed by dyers elsewhere, and it was believed that the +dyers' strike would fail unless they struck also. They had to be called +out. They were chiefly Italians, some Hungarians. It was felt by the +New York German silk-workers that perhaps MacQueen's German learned in +England might meet the linguistic difficulties of the case. + +He went. I hope he will forgive me if I say that his was an extremely +futile expedition. He did very little. He wrote an entirely harmless +article or so in English for _La Questione Sociale_, and he declined +with horror and publicity to appear upon the same platform with a +mischievous and violent lady anarchist called Emma Goldman. On June +17, 1902, he went to Paterson again, and spoke to his own undoing. +There is no evidence that he said anything illegal or inflammatory, +there is clear evidence that he bored his audience. They shouted him +down, and called for a prominent local speaker named Galiano. MacQueen +subsided into the background, and Galiano spoke for an hour in Italian. +He aroused great enthusiasm, and the proceedings terminated with a +destructive riot. + +Eight witnesses testify to the ineffectual efforts on the part of +MacQueen to combat the violence in progress.... + +That finishes the story of MacQueen's activities in America, for +which he is now in durance at Trenton. He, in common with a large +crowd and in common, too, with nearly all the witnesses against him, +did commit one offence against the law--he did not go home when +destruction began. He was arrested next day. From that time forth +his fate was out of his hands, and in the control of a number of +people who wanted to "make an example" of the Paterson strikers. The +press took up MacQueen. They began to clothe the bare bones of this +simple little history I have told in fluent, unmitigated lying. They +blackened him, one might think, out of sheer artistic pleasure in the +operation. They called this rather nervous, educated, nobly meaning if +ill-advised young man a "notorious anarchist"; his head-line title +became "Anarchistic MacQueen"; they wrote his "story" in a vein of +imaginative fervor; they invented "an unsavory police record" for +him in England; and enlarged upon the marvellous secret organization +for crime of which he was representative and leader. In a little +while MacQueen had ceased to be a credible human being; he might have +been invented by Mr. William le Queux. He was arrested--Galiano went +scot-free--and released on bail. It was discovered that his pleasant, +decent Yorkshire wife and three children were coming out to America to +him, and she became "the woman Nellie Barton"--her maiden name--and +"a socialist of the Emma Goldman stripe." This, one gathers, is the +most horrible stripe known to American journalism. Had there been a +worse one, Mrs. MacQueen would have been the _ex officio_. And now +here is an extraordinary thing--public officials began to join in +the process. This is what perplexes me most in this affair. I am +told that Assistant-Secretary-of-the-Treasury H.A. Taylor, without +a fact to go upon, subscribed to the "unsavory record" legend and +Assistant-Secretary C.H. Keep fell in with it. They must have seen +what it was they were indorsing. In a letter from Mr. Keep to the +Reverend A.W. Wishart, of Trenton (who throughout has fought most +gallantly for justice in this case), I find Mr. Keep distinguishes +himself by the artistic device of putting "William MacQueen's" name +in inverted commas. So, very delicately, he conveys out of the void +the insinuation that the name is an alias. Meanwhile the Commissioner +of Immigration prepared to take a hand in the game of breaking up +MacQueen. He stopped Mrs. MacQueen at the threshold of liberty, +imprisoned her in Ellis Island, and sent her back to Europe. MacQueen, +still on bail, was not informed of this action, and waited on the pier +for some hours before he understood. His wife had come second class to +America, but she was returned first class, and the steamship company +seized her goods for the return fare.... + +That was more than MacQueen could stand. He had been tried, convicted, +sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and he was now out on bail +pending an appeal. Anxiety about his wife and children was too much for +him. He slipped off to England after them ("Escape of the Anarchist +MacQueen"), made what provision and arrangements he could for them, +and returned in time to save his bondsman's money ("Capture of the +Escaped Anarchist MacQueen"). Several members of the Leeds City Council +("Criminal Associates in Europe") saw him off. That was in 1903. His +appeal had been refused on a technical point. He went into Trenton +jail, and there he is to this day. There I saw him. Trenton Jail did +not impress me as an agreeable place. The building is fairly old, and +there is no nonsense about the food. The cells hold, some of them, +four criminals, some of them two, but latterly MacQueen has had spells +in the infirmary, and has managed to get a cell to himself. Many of +the criminals are negroes and half-breeds, imprisoned for unspeakable +offences. In the exercising-yard MacQueen likes to keep apart. "When I +first came I used to get in a corner," he said.... + +Now this case of MacQueen has exercised my mind enormously. It was +painful to go out of the gray jail again after I had talked to +him--of Shaw and Morris, of the Fabian Society and the British labor +members--into sunlight and freedom, and ever and again, as I went about +New York having the best of times among the most agreeable people, +the figure of him would come back to me quite vividly, in his gray +dress, sitting on the edge of an unaccustomed chair, hands on his +knees, speaking a little nervously and jerkily, and very glad indeed +to see me. He is younger than myself, but much my sort of man, and we +talked of books and education and his case like brothers. There can be +no doubt to any sensible person who will look into the story of his +conviction, who will even go and see him, that there has been a serious +miscarriage of justice. + +There has been a serious miscarriage of justice, such as (unhappily) +might happen in any country. That is nothing distinctive of America. +But what does impress me as remarkable and perplexing is the immense +difficulty--the perhaps unsurmountable difficulty--of getting this man +released. The Governor of the State of New Jersey knows he is innocent, +the judges of the Court of Pardons know he is innocent. Three of them +I was able to button-hole at Trenton, and hear their point of View. +Two are of the minority and for release, one was doubtful in attitude +but hostile in spirit. They hold, the man, he thinks, on the score of +public policy. They put it that Paterson is a "hotbed" of crime and +violence; that once MacQueen is released every anarchist in the country +will be emboldened to crime, and so on and so on. I admit Paterson +festers, but if we are to punish anybody instead of reforming the +system, it's the masters who ought to be in jail for that. + +"What will the property-owners in Paterson say to us if this man is +released?" one of the judges admitted frankly. + +"But he hadn't anything to do with the violence," I said, and argued +the case over again--quite missing the point of that objection. + +Whenever I had a chance in New York, in Boston, in Washington, even +amid the conversation of a Washington dinner-table, I dragged up the +case of MacQueen. Nobody seemed indignant. One lady admitted the +sentence was heavy, "he might have been given six months to cool off +in," she said. I protested he ought not to have been given a day. "Why +did he go there?" said a Supreme Court judge in Washington, a lawyer in +New York, and several other people. "Wasn't he making trouble?" I was +asked. + +At last that reached my sluggish intelligence. + +Yet I still hesitate to accept the new interpretations. Galiano, who +preached blind violence and made the riot, got off scot-free; MacQueen, +who wanted a legitimate strike on British lines, went to jail. So +long as the social injustice, the sweated disorder of Paterson's +industrialism, vents its cries in Italian in _La Questione Sociale_, +so long as it remains an inaudible misery so far as the great public +is concerned, making vehement yet impotent appeals to mere force, and +so losing its last chances of popular sympathy, American property, I +gather, is content. The masters and the immigrants can deal with one +another on those lines. But to have outsiders coming in! + +There is an active press campaign against the release of "the Anarchist +MacQueen," and I do not believe that Mr. Wishart will succeed in his +endeavors. I think MacQueen will serve out his five years. + +The plain truth is that no one pretends he is in jail on his merits; +he is in jail as an example and lesson to any one who proposes to +come between master and immigrant worker in Paterson. He has attacked +the system. The people who profit by the system, the people who think +things are "all right as they are," have hit back in the most effectual +way they can, according to their lights. + +That, I think, accounts for the sustained quality of the lying in +this case, and, indeed, for the whole situation. He is in jail on +principle and without personal animus, just as they used to tar and +feather the stray abolitionist on principle in Carolina. The policy +of stringent discouragement is a reasonable one--scoundrelly, no +doubt, but understandable. And I think I can put myself sufficiently +into the place of the Paterson masters, of the Trenton judges, of +those journalists, of those subordinate officials at Washington +even, to understand their motives and inducements. I indulge in no +self-righteous pride. Simply, I thank Heaven I have not had their +peculiar temptations. + +But my riddle lies in the attitude of the public--of the American +nation, which hasn't, it seems, a spark of moral indignation for this +sort of thing, which indeed joins in quite cheerfully against the +victim. + +It is ill served by its press, no doubt, but surely it understands.... + + +III + +Maxim Gorky + +Then I assisted at the coming of Maxim Gorky, and witnessed many +intimate details of what Professor Giddings, that courageous publicist, +has called his "lynching." + +Here, again, is a case I fail altogether to understand. The surface +values of that affair have a touch of the preposterous. I set them down +in infinite perplexity. + +My first week in New York was in the period of Gorky's advent. +Expectation was at a high pitch, and one might have foretold a +stupendous, a history-making campaign. The American nation seemed +concentrated upon one great and ennobling idea, the freedom of Russia, +and upon Gorky as the embodiment of that idea. A protest was to be made +against cruelty and violence and massacre. That great figure of Liberty +with the torch was to make it flare visibly half-way round the world, +reproving tyranny. + +Gorky arrived, and the _éclat_ was immense. We dined him, we lunched +him, we were photographed in his company by flash-light. I very gladly +shared that honor, for Gorky is not only a great master of the art I +practise, but a splendid personality. He is one of those people to whom +the camera does no justice, whose work, as I know it in an English +translation, forceful as it is, fails very largely to convey his +peculiar quality. His is a big, quiet figure; there is a curious power +of appeal in his face, a large simplicity in his voice and gesture. +He was dressed, when I met him, in peasant clothing, in a belted blue +shirt, trousers of some shiny black material, and boots; and save for +a few common greetings he has no other language than Russian. So it +was necessary that he should bring with him some one he could trust +to interpret him to the world. And having, too, much of the practical +helplessness of his type of genius, he could not come without his right +hand, that brave and honorable lady, Madame Andreieva, who has been now +for years in everything but the severest legal sense his wife. Russia +has no Dakota; and although his legal wife has long since found another +companion, the Orthodox Church in Russia has no divorce facilities for +men in the revolutionary camp. So Madame Andreieva stands to him as +George Eliot stood to George Lewes, and I suppose the two of them had +almost forgotten the technical illegality of their tie, until it burst +upon them and the American public in a monstrous storm of exposure. + +It was like a summer thunder-storm. At one moment Gorky was in an +immense sunshine, a plenipotentiary from oppression to liberty, at the +next he was being almost literally pelted through the streets. + +I do not know what motive actuated a certain section of the American +press to initiate this pelting of Maxim Gorky. A passion for moral +purity may perhaps have prompted it, but certainly no passion for +purity ever before begot so brazen and abundant a torrent of lies. +It was precisely the sort of campaign that damned poor MacQueen, but +this time on an altogether imperial scale. The irregularity of Madame +Andreieva's position was a mere point of departure. The journalists +went on to invent a deserted wife and children, they declared Madame +Andreieva was an "actress," and loaded her with all the unpleasant +implications of that unfortunate word; they spoke of her generally as +"the woman Andreieva"; they called upon the Commissioner of Immigration +to deport her as a "female of bad character"; quite influential people +wrote to him to that effect; they published the name of the hotel that +sheltered her, and organized a boycott. Whoever dared to countenance +the victims was denounced. Professor Dewar of Columbia had given them +a reception; "Dewar must go," said the head-lines. Mark Twain, who had +assisted in the great welcome, was invited to recant and contribute +unfriendly comments. The Gorkys were pursued with insult from hotel +to hotel. Hotel after hotel turned them out. They found themselves at +last, after midnight, in the streets of New York city with every door +closed against them. Infected persons could not have been treated more +abominably in a town smitten with a panic of plague. + +This change happened in the course of twenty-four hours. On one day +Gorky was at the zenith, on the next he had been swept from the world. +To me it was astounding--it was terrifying. I wanted to talk to Gorky +about it, to find out the hidden springs of this amazing change. I +spent a Sunday evening looking for him with an ever-deepening respect +for the power of the American press. I had a quaint conversation with +the clerk of the hotel in Fifth Avenue from which he had first been +driven. Europeans can scarcely hope to imagine the moral altitudes +at which American hotels are conducted.... I went thence to seek Mr. +Abraham Cahan in the East Side, and thence to other people I knew, but +in vain. Gorky was obliterated. + +I thought this affair was a whirlwind of foolish misunderstanding, +such as may happen in any capital, and that presently his entirely +tolerable relationship would be explained. But for all the rest of my +time in New York this insensate campaign went on. There was no attempt +of any importance to stem the tide, and to this day large sections +of the American public must be under the impression that this great +writer is a depraved man of pleasure accompanied by a favorite cocotte. +The writers of paragraphs racked their brains to invent new and smart +ways of insulting Madame Andreieva. The chaste entertainers of the +music-halls of the Tenderloin district introduced allusions. And amid +this riot of personalities Russia was forgotten. The massacres, the +chaos of cruelty and blundering, the tyranny, the women outraged, the +children tortured and slain--all that was forgotten. In Boston, in +Chicago, it was the same. At the bare suggestion of Gorky's coming the +same outbreak occurred, the same display of imbecile gross lying, the +same absolute disregard of the tragic cause he had come to plead. + +One gleam of comedy in this remarkable outbreak I recall. Some one +in ineffectual protest had asked what Americans would have said if +Benjamin Franklin had encountered such ignominies on his similar +mission of appeal to Paris before the War of Independence. "Benjamin +Franklin," retorted one bright young Chicago journalist, "was a man of +very different moral character from Gorky," and proceeded to explain +how Chicago was prepared to defend the purity of her homes against +the invader. Benjamin Franklin, it is true, _was_ a person of very +different morals from Gorky--but I don't think that bright young man in +Chicago had a very sound idea of where the difference lay. + +I spent my last evening on American soil in the hospitable home +in Staten Island that sheltered Gorky and Madame Andreieva. After +dinner we sat together in the deepening twilight upon a broad veranda +that looks out upon one of the most beautiful views in the world, +upon serene large spaces of land and sea, upon slopes of pleasant, +window-lit, tree-set wooden houses, upon the glittering clusters +of lights, and the black and luminous shipping that comes and goes +about the Narrows and the Upper Bay. Half masked by a hill contour +to the left was the light of the torch of Liberty.... Gorky's big +form fell into shadow, Madame Andreieva sat at his feet, translating +methodically, sentence by sentence, into clear French whatever he +said, translating our speeches into Russian. He told us stories--of +the soul of the Russian, of Russian religious sects, of kindnesses and +cruelties, of his great despair. + +Ever and again, in the pauses, my eyes would go to where New York far +away glittered like a brighter and more numerous Pleiades. + +I gauged something of the real magnitude of this one man's +disappointment, the immense expectation of his arrival, the impossible +dream of his mission. He had come--the Russian peasant in person, +out of a terrific confusion of bloodshed, squalor, injustice--to tell +America, the land of light and achieved freedom, of all these evil +things. She would receive him, help him, understand truly what he +meant with his "Rossia." I could imagine how he had felt as he came in +the big steamer to her, up that large converging display of space and +teeming energy. There she glowed to-night across the water, a queen +among cities, as if indeed she was the light of the world. Nothing, I +think, can ever rob that splendid harbor approach of its invincible +quality of promise.... And to him she had shown herself no more than +the luminous hive of multitudes of base and busy, greedy and childish +little men. + +MacQueen in jail, Gorky with his reputation wantonly bludgeoned and +flung aside; they are just two chance specimens of the myriads who have +come up this great waterway bearing hope and gifts. + + + + +CHAPTER XII + +THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR + + +I + +Harsh Judgments + +I seem to find the same hastiness and something of the same note +of harshness that strike me in the cases of MacQueen and Gorky +in America's treatment of her colored population. I am aware how +intricate, how multitudinous, the aspects of this enormous question +have become, but looking at it in the broad and transitory manner I +have proposed for myself in these papers, it does seem to present +many parallel elements. There is the same disposition towards an +indiscriminating verdict, the same disregard of proportion as between +small evils and great ones, the same indifference to the fact that the +question does not stand alone, but is a part, and this time a by no +means small part, in the working out of America's destinies. + +In regard to the colored population, just as in regard to the great +and growing accumulations of unassimilated and increasingly unpopular +Jews, and to the great and growing multitudes of Roman Catholics whose +special education contradicts at so many points those conceptions of +individual judgment and responsibility upon which America relies, I +have attempted time after time to get some answer from the Americans +I have met to what is to me the most obvious of questions. "Your +grandchildren and the grandchildren of these people will have to +live in this country side by side; do you propose, do you believe +it possible, that under the increasing pressure of population and +competition they should be living then in just the same relations that +you and these people are living now; if you do not, then what relations +do you propose shall exist between them?" + +It is not too much to say that I have never once had the beginnings +of an answer to this question. Usually one is told with great gravity +that the problem of color is one of the most difficult that we have +to consider, and the conversation then breaks up into discursive +anecdotes and statements about black people. One man will dwell upon +the uncontrollable violence of a black man's evil passions (in Jamaica +and Barbadoes colored people form an overwhelming proportion of the +population, and they have behaved in an exemplary fashion for the last +thirty years); another will dilate upon the incredible stupidity of the +full-blooded negro (during my stay in New York the prize for oratory +at Columbia University, oratory which was the one redeeming charm of +Daniel Webster, was awarded to a Zulu of unmitigated blackness); a +third will speak of his physical offensiveness, his peculiar smell +which necessitates his social isolation (most well-to-do Southerners +are brought up by negro "mammies"); others, again, will enter upon the +painful history of the years that followed the war, though it seems a +foolish thing to let those wrongs of the past dominate the outlook for +the future. And one charming Southern lady expressed the attitude of +mind of a whole class very completely, I think, when she said, "You +have to be one of us to feel this question at all as it ought to be +felt." + +There, I think, I got something tangible. These emotions are a cult. + +My globe-trotting impudence will seem, no doubt, to mount to its +zenith when I declare that hardly any Americans at all seem to be in +possession of the elementary facts in relation to this question. These +broad facts are not taught, as of course they ought to be taught, +in school; and what each man knows is picked up by the accidents of +his own untrained observation, by conversation always tinctured by +personal prejudice, by hastily read newspapers and magazine articles +and the like. The quality of this discussion is very variable, but +on the whole pretty low. While I was in New York opinion was greatly +swayed by an article in, if I remember rightly, the _Century Magazine_, +by a gentleman who had deduced from a few weeks' observation in the +slums of Khartoum the entire incapacity of the negro to establish a +civilization of his own. He never had, therefore he never could; a +discouraging ratiocination. We English, a century or so ago, said all +these things of the native Irish. If there is any trend of opinion at +all in this matter at present, it lies in the direction of a generous +decision on the part of the North and West to leave the black more and +more to the judgment and mercy of the white people with whom he is +locally associated. This judgment and mercy points, on the whole, to an +accentuation of the colored man's natural inferiority, to the cessation +of any other educational attempts than those that increase his +industrial usefulness (it is already illegal in Louisiana to educate +him above a contemptible level), to his industrial exploitation through +usury and legal chicanery, and to a systematic strengthening of the +social barriers between colored people of whatever shade and the whites. + +Meanwhile, in this state of general confusion, in the absence +of any determining rules or assumptions, all sorts of things +are happening--according to the accidents of local feeling. In +Massachusetts you have people with, I am afraid, an increasing sense of +sacrifice to principle, lunching and dining with people of color. They +do it less than they did, I was told. Massachusetts stands, I believe, +at the top of the scale of tolerant humanity. One seems to reach the +bottom at Springfield, Missouri, which is a county seat with a college, +an academy, a high school, and a zoological garden. There the exemplary +method reaches the nadir. Last April three unfortunate negroes were +burned to death, apparently because they were negroes, and as a general +corrective of impertinence. They seem to have been innocent of any +particular offence. It was a sort of racial sacrament. The edified +Sunday-school children hurried from their gospel-teaching to search +for souvenirs among the ashes, and competed with great spirit for a +fragment of charred skull. + +It is true that in this latter case Governor Folk acted with vigor +and justice, and that the better element of Springfield society was +evidently shocked when it was found that quite innocent negroes had +been used in these instructive pyrotechnics; but the fact remains +that a large and numerically important section of the American public +does think that fierce and cruel reprisals are a necessary part of +the system of relationships between white and colored man. In our +dispersed British community we have almost exactly the same range +between our better attitudes and our worse--I'm making no claim of +national superiority. In London, perhaps, we out-do Massachusetts in +liberality; in the National Liberal Club or the Reform a black man +meets all the courtesies of humanity--as though there was no such thing +as color. But, on the other hand, the Cape won't bear looking into for +a moment. The same conditions give the same results; a half-educated +white population of British or Dutch or German ingredients greedy +for gain, ill controlled and feebly influenced, in contact with a +black population, is bound to reproduce the same brutal and stupid +aggressions, the same half-honest prejudices to justify those +aggressions, the same ugly, mean excuses. "Things are better in Jamaica +and Barbadoes," said I, in a moment of patriotic weakness, to Mr. +Booker T. Washington. + +"Eh!" said he, and thought in that long silent way he has.... "They're +worse in South Africa--much. Here we've got a sort of light. We know +generally what we've got to stand. _There_--" + +His words sent my memory back to some conversations I had quite +recently with a man from a dry-goods store in Johannesburg. He gave me +clearly enough the attitude of the common white out there; the dull +prejudice; the readiness to take advantage of the "boy"; the utter +disrespect for colored womankind; the savage, intolerant resentment, +dashed dangerously with fear, which the native arouses in him. (Think +of all that must have happened in wrongful practice and wrongful law +and neglected educational possibilities before our Zulus in Natal were +goaded to face massacre, spear against rifle!) The rare and culminating +result of education and experience is to enable men to grasp facts, to +balance justly among their fluctuating and innumerable aspects, and +only a small minority in our world is educated to that pitch. Ignorant +people can think only in types and abstractions, can achieve only +emphatic absolute decisions, and when the commonplace American or the +commonplace colonial Briton sets to work to "think over" the negro +problem, he instantly banishes most of the material evidence from his +mind--clears for action, as it were. He forgets the genial carriage +of the ordinary colored man, his beaming face, his kindly eye, his +rich, jolly voice, his touching and trusted friendliness, his amiable, +unprejudiced readiness to serve and follow a white man who seems to +know what he is doing. He forgets--perhaps he has never seen--the dear +humanity of these people, their slightly exaggerated vanity, their +innocent and delightful love of color and song, their immense capacity +for affection, the warm romantic touch in their imaginations. He +ignores the real fineness of the indolence that despises servile toil, +of the carelessness that disdains the watchful aggressive economies, +day by day, now a wretched little gain here and now a wretched little +gain there, that make the dirty fortune of the Russian Jews who prey +upon color in the Carolinas. No; in the place of all these tolerable +every-day experiences he lets his imagination go to work upon a +monster, the "real nigger." + +"Ah! You don't know the _real_ nigger," said one American to me when I +praised the colored people I had seen. "You should see the buck nigger +down South, Congo brand. Then you'd understand, sir." + +His voice, his face had a gleam of passionate animosity. + +One could see he had been brooding himself out of all relations to +reality in this matter. He was a man beyond reason or pity. He was +obsessed. Hatred of that imaginary diabolical "buck nigger" blackened +his soul. It was no good to talk to him of the "buck American, +Packingtown brand," or the "buck Englishman, suburban race-meeting +type," and to ask him if these intensely disagreeable persons justified +outrages on Senator Lodge, let us say, or Mrs. Longworth. No reply +would have come from him. "You don't understand the question," he would +have answered. "You don't know how we Southerners feel." + +Well, one can make a tolerable guess. + + +II + +The White Strain + +I certainly did not begin to realize one most important aspect of this +question until I reached America. I thought of those eight millions +as of men, black as ink. But when I met Mr. Booker T. Washington, +for example, I met a man certainly as white in appearance as our +Admiral Fisher, who is, as a matter of fact, quite white. A very large +proportion of these colored people, indeed, is more than half white. +One hears a good deal about the high social origins of the Southern +planters, very many derive indisputably from the first families of +England. It is the same blood flows in these mixed colored people's +veins. Just think of the sublime absurdity, therefore, of the ban. +There are gentlemen of education and refinement, qualified lawyers +and doctors, whose ancestors assisted in the Norman Conquest, and they +dare not enter a car marked "white" and intrude upon the dignity of the +rising loan-monger from Esthonia. For them the "Jim Crow" car.... + +One tries to put that aspect to the American in vain. "These people," +you say, "are nearer your blood, nearer your temper, than any of those +bright-eyed, ringleted immigrants on the East Side. Are you ashamed of +your poor relations? Even if you don't like the half, or the quarter +of negro blood, you might deal civilly with the three-quarters white. +It doesn't say much for your faith in your own racial prepotency, +anyhow."... + +The answer to that is usually in terms of mania. + +"Let me tell you a little story just to illustrate," said one deponent +to me in an impressive undertone--"just to illustrate, you know.... A +few years ago a young fellow came to Boston from New Orleans. Looked +all right. Dark--but he explained that by an Italian grandmother. Touch +of French in him, too. Popular. Well, he made advances to a Boston +girl--good family. Gave a fairly straight account of himself. Married." + +He paused. "Course of time--offspring. Little son." + +His eye made me feel what was coming. + +"Was it by any chance very, very black?" I whispered. + +"Yes, _sir_. Black! Black as your hat. Absolutely negroid. Projecting +jaw, thick lips, frizzy hair, flat nose--everything.... + +"But consider the mother's feelings, sir, consider that! A pure-minded, +pure white woman!" + +What can one say to a story of this sort, when the taint in the blood +surges up so powerfully as to blacken the child at birth beyond even +the habit of the pure-blooded negro? What can you do with a public +opinion made of this class of ingredient? And this story of the +lamentable results of intermarriage was used, not as an argument +against intermarriage, but as an argument against the extension +of quite rudimentary civilities to the men of color. "If you eat +with them, you've got to marry them," he said, an entirely fabulous +post-prandial responsibility. + +It is to the tainted whites my sympathies go out. The black or mainly +black people seem to be fairly content with their inferiority; one sees +them all about the States as waiters, cab-drivers, railway porters, car +attendants, laborers of various sorts, a pleasant, smiling, acquiescent +folk. But consider the case of a man with a broader brain than such +small uses need, conscious, perhaps, of exceptional gifts, capable +of wide interests and sustained attempts, who is perhaps as English +as you or I, with just a touch of color in his eyes, in his lips, in +his fingernails, and in his imagination. Think of the accumulating +sense of injustice he must bear with him through life, the perpetual +slight and insult he must undergo from all that is vulgar and brutal +among the whites! Something of that one may read in the sorrowful +pages of Du Bois's _The Souls of Black Folk_. They would have made +Alexandre Dumas travel in the Jim Crow car if he had come to Virginia. +But I can imagine some sort of protest on the part of that admirable +but extravagant man.... They even talk of "Jim Crow elevators" now in +Southern hotels. + +At Hull House, in Chicago, I was present at a conference of colored +people--Miss Jane Addams efficiently in control--to consider the +coming of a vexatious play, "The Clansman," which seems to have been +written and produced entirely to exacerbate racial feeling. Both men +and women were present, business people, professional men, and their +wives; the speaking was clear, temperate, and wonderfully to the point, +high above the level of any British town council I have ever attended. +One lady would have stood out as capable and charming in any sort of +public discussion in England--though we are not wanting in good women +speakers--and she was at least three-quarters black.... + +And while I was in Chicago, too, I went to the Peking Theatre--a +"coon" music-hall--and saw something of a lower level of colored life. +The common white, I must explain, delights in calling colored people +"coons," and the negro, so far as I could learn, uses no retaliatory +word. It was a "variety" entertainment, with one turn, at least, of +quite distinguished merit, good-humored and brisk throughout. I watched +keenly, and I could detect nothing of that trail of base suggestion +one would find as a matter of course in a music-hall in such English +towns as Brighton and Portsmouth. What one heard of kissing and +love-making was quite artless and simple indeed. The negro, it seemed +to me, did this sort of thing with a better grace and a better temper +than a Londoner, and shows, I think, a finer self-respect. He thinks +more of deportment, he bears himself more elegantly by far than the +white at the same social level. The audience reminded me of the sort of +gathering one would find in a theatre in Camden Town or Hoxton. There +were a number of family groups, the girls brightly dressed, and young +couples quite of the London music-hall type. Clothing ran "smart," +but not smarter than it would be among fairly prosperous north London +Jews. There was no gallery--socially--no collection of orange-eating, +interrupting hooligans at all. Nobody seemed cross, nobody seemed +present for vicious purposes, and everybody was sober. Indeed, there +and elsewhere I took and confirmed a mighty liking to these gentle, +human, dark-skinned people. + + +III + +Mr. Booker T. Washington + +But whatever aspect I recall of this great taboo that shows no signs +of lifting, of this great problem of the future that America in her +haste, her indiscriminating prejudice, her lack of any sustained study +and teaching of the broad issues she must decide, complicates and +intensifies, and makes threatening, there presently comes back to mind +the browned face of Mr. Booker T. Washington, as he talked to me over +our lunch in Boston. + +He has a face rather Irish in type, and the soft slow negro voice. He +met my regard with the brown sorrowful eyes of his race. He wanted +very much that I should hear him make a speech, because then his words +came better; he talked, he implied, with a certain difficulty. But I +preferred to have his talking, and get not the orator--every one tells +me he is an altogether great orator in this country where oratory is +still esteemed--but the man. + +He answered my questions meditatively. I wanted to know with an active +pertinacity. What struck me most was the way in which his sense of the +overpowering forces of race prejudice weighs upon him. It is a thing he +accepts; in our time and conditions it is not to be fought about. He +makes one feel with an exaggerated intensity (though I could not even +draw him to admit) its monstrous injustice. He makes no accusations. He +is for taking it as a part of the present fate of his "people," and for +doing all that can be done for them within the limit it sets. + +Therein he differs from Du Bois, the other great spokesman color +has found in our time. Du Bois, is more of the artist, less of the +statesman; he conceals his passionate resentment all too thinly. +He batters himself into rhetoric against these walls. He will not +repudiate the clear right of the black man to every educational +facility, to equal citizenship, and equal respect. But Mr. Washington +has statecraft. He looks before and after, and plans and keeps his +counsel with the scope and range of a statesman. I use "statesman" +in its highest sense; his is a mind that can grasp the situation and +destinies of a people. After I had talked to him I went back to my +club, and found there an English newspaper with a report of the opening +debate upon Mr. Birrell's Education Bill. It was like turning from the +discussion of life and death to a dispute about the dregs in the bottom +of a tea-cup somebody had neglected to wash up in Victorian times. + +I argued strongly against the view he seems to hold that black and +white might live without mingling and without injustice, side by +side. That I do not believe. Racial differences seem to me always to +exasperate intercourse unless people have been elaborately trained to +ignore them. Uneducated men are as bad as cattle in persecuting all +that is different among themselves. The most miserable and disorderly +countries of the world are the countries where two races, two +inadequate cultures, keep a jarring, continuous separation. "You must +repudiate separation," I said. "No peoples have ever yet endured the +tension of intermingled distinctness." + +"May we not become a peculiar people--like the Jews?" he suggested. +"Isn't that possible?" + +But there I could not agree with him. I thought of the dreadful +history of the Jews and Armenians. And the negro cannot do what the +Jews and Armenians have done. The colored people of America are of a +different quality from the Jew altogether, more genial, more careless, +more sympathetic, franker, less intellectual, less acquisitive, less +wary and restrained--in a word, more Occidental. They have no common +religion and culture, no conceit of race to hold them together. The +Jews make a ghetto for themselves wherever they go; no law but their +own solidarity has given America the East Side. The colored people are +ready to disperse and inter-breed, are not a community at all in the +Jewish sense, but outcasts from a community. They are the victims of a +prejudice that has to be destroyed. These things I urged, but it was, +I think, empty speech to my hearer. I could talk lightly of destroying +that prejudice, but he knew better. It is the central fact of his life, +a law of his being. He has shaped all his projects and policy upon +that. Exclusion is inevitable. So he dreams of a colored race of decent +and inaggressive men silently giving the lie to all the legend of their +degradation. They will have their own doctors, their own lawyers, their +own capitalists, their own banks--because the whites desire it so. But +will the uneducated whites endure even so submissive a vindication as +that? Will they suffer the horrid spectacle of free and self-satisfied +negroes in decent clothing on any terms without resentment? + +He explained how at the Tuskegee Institute they make useful men, +skilled engineers, skilled agriculturalists, men to live down the +charge of practical incompetence, of ignorant and slovenly farming and +house management.... + +"I wish you would tell me," I said, abruptly, "just what you think of +the attitude of white America towards you. Do you think it is generous?" + +He regarded me for a moment. "No end of people help us," he said. + +"Yes," I said; "but the ordinary man. Is he fair?" + +"Some things are not fair," he said, leaving the general question +alone. "It isn't fair to refuse a colored man a berth on a +sleeping-car. I?--I happen to be a privileged person, they make an +exception for me; but the ordinary educated colored man isn't admitted +to a sleeping-car at all. If he has to go a long journey, he has to sit +up all night. His white competitor sleeps. Then in some places, in the +hotels and restaurants--It's all right here in Boston--but southwardly +he can't get proper refreshments. All that's a handicap.... + +"The remedy lies in education," he said; "ours--_and theirs_. + +"The real thing," he told me, "isn't to be done by talking and +agitation. It's a matter of lives. The only answer to it all is for +colored men to be patient, to make themselves competent, to do good +work, to live well, to give no occasion against us. We feel that. In a +way it's an inspiration.... + +"There is a man here in Boston, a negro, who owns and runs some big +stores, employs all sorts of people, deals justly. That man has done +more good for our people than all the eloquence or argument in the +world.... That is what we have to do--it is all we _can_ do."... + +Whatever America has to show in heroic living to-day, I doubt if she +can show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast +effort hundreds of black and colored men are making to-day to live +blamelessly, honorably, and patiently, getting for themselves what +scraps of refinement, learning, and beauty they may, keeping their +hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied. They do it not +for themselves only, but for all their race. Each educated colored +man is an ambassador to civilization. They know they have a handicap, +that they are not exceptionally brilliant nor clever people. Yet every +such man stands, one likes to think, aware of his representative +and vicarious character, fighting against foul imaginations, +misrepresentations, injustice, insult, and the naïve unspeakable +meannesses of base antagonists. Every one of them who keeps decent and +honorable does a little to beat that opposition down. + +But the patience the negro needs! He may not even look contempt. He +must admit superiority in those whose daily conduct to him is the +clearest evidence of moral inferiority. We sympathetic whites, indeed, +may claim honor for him; if he is wise he will be silent under our +advocacy. He must go to and fro self-controlled, bereft of all the +equalities that the great flag of America proclaims--that flag for +whose united empire his people fought and died, giving place and +precedence to the strangers who pour in to share its beneficence, +strangers ignorant even of its tongue. That he must do--and wait. The +Welsh, the Irish, the Poles, the white South, the indefatigable Jews +may cherish grievances and rail aloud. He must keep still. They may +be hysterical, revengeful, threatening, and perverse; their wrongs +excuse them. For him there is no excuse. And of all the races upon +earth, which has suffered such wrongs as this negro blood that is still +imputed to him as a sin? These people who disdain him, who have no +sense of reparation towards him, have sinned against him beyond all +measure.... + +No, I can't help idealizing the dark submissive figure of the negro in +this spectacle of America. He, too, seems to me to sit waiting--and +waiting with a marvellous and simple-minded patience--for finer +understandings and a nobler time. + + + + +CHAPTER XIII + +THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE + + +I + +Recapitulatory + +I do not know if I am conveying to any extent the picture of America +as I see it, the vast rich various continent, the gigantic energetic +process of development, the acquisitive successes, the striving +failures, the multitudes of those rising and falling who come between, +all set in a texture of spacious countryside, animate with pleasant +timber homes, of clangorous towns that bristle to the skies, of great +exploitation districts and crowded factories, of wide deserts and +mine-torn mountains, and huge half-tamed rivers. I have tried to make +the note of immigration grow slowly to a dominating significance in +this panorama, and with that, to make more and more evident my sense +of the need of a creative assimilation, the cry for synthetic effort, +lest all this great being, this splendid promise of a new world, +should decay into a vast unprogressive stagnation of unhappiness and +disorder. I have hinted at failures and cruelties, I have put into the +accumulating details of my vision, children America blights, men she +crushes, fine hopes she disappoints and destroys. I have found a place +for the questioning figure of the South, the sorrowful interrogation +of the outcast colored people. These are but the marginal shadows of +a process in its totality magnificent, but they exist, they go on to +mingle in her destinies. + +Then I have tried to show, too, the conception I have formed of the +great skein of industrial competition that has been tightening and +becoming more and more involved through all this century-long age, +the age of blind growth, that draws now towards its end; until the +process threatens to throttle individual freedom and individual +enterprise altogether. And of a great mental uneasiness and discontent, +unprecedented in the history of the American mind, that promises +in the near future some general and conscious endeavor to arrest +this unanticipated strangulation of freedom and free living, some +widespread struggle, of I know not what constructive power, with the +stains and disorders and indignities that oppress and grow larger in +the national consciousness. I perceive more and more that in coming +to America I have chanced upon a time of peculiar significance. The +note of disillusionment sounds everywhere. America, for the first time +in her history, is taking thought about herself, and ridding herself +of long-cherished illusions. I have already mentioned (in Chapter +VIII.) the memorable literature of self-examination that has come +into being during the last decade. Hitherto American thought has been +extraordinarily localized; there has been no national press, in the +sense that the press of London or Paris is national. Americans knew of +America as a whole, mainly as the flag. Beneath the flag America is +lost among constituent States and cities. All her newspapers have been, +by English standards, "local" papers, preoccupied by local affairs, +and taking an intensely localized point of view. A national newspaper +for America would be altogether too immense an enterprise. Only since +1896, and in the form of weekly and monthly ten-cent magazines, have +the rudiments of a national medium of expression appeared, and appeared +to voice strange pregnant doubts. I had an interesting talk with Mr. +Brisben Walker upon this new development. To him the first ten-cent +magazine, _The Cosmopolitan_, was due, and he was naturally glad to +tell me of the growth of this vehicle. To-day there is an aggregate +circulation of ten millions of these magazines; they supply fiction, no +doubt, and much of light interesting ephemeral matter, but not one of +them is without its element of grave public discussion. I do not wish +to make too much of this particular development, but regard it as a +sign of new interests, of keen curiosities. + +Now I must confess when I consider this ocean of readers I find the +fears I have expressed of some analogical development of American +affairs towards the stagnant commercialism of China, or towards +a plutocratic imperialism and decadence of the Roman type, look +singularly flimsy. Upon its present lines, and supposing there were +no new sources of mental supply and energy, I do firmly believe that +America might conceivably come more and more under the control of a +tacitly organized and exhausting plutocracy, be swamped by a swelling +tide of ignorant and unassimilable labor immigrants, decline towards +violence and social misery, fall behind Europe in education and +intelligence, and cease to lead civilization. In such a decay Cæsarism +would be a most probable and natural phase, Cæsarism and a splitting +into contending Cæsarisms. Come but a little sinking from intelligence +towards coarseness and passion, and the South will yet endeavor to +impose servitude anew upon its colored people, or secede--that trouble +is not yet over. A little darkening and impoverishment of outlook and +New York would split from New England, and Colorado from the East. An +illiterate, short-sighted America would be America doomed. But America +is not illiterate; there are these great unprecedented reservoirs of +intelligence and understanding, these millions of people who follow +the process with an increasing comprehension. It is these millions of +readers who make the American problem, and the problem of Europe and +the world to-day, unique and incalculable, who provide a cohesive and +reasonable and pacifying medium the Old World did not know. + + +II + +Birth Struggles of a Common Mind + +You see, my hero in the confused drama of human life is intelligence; +intelligence inspired by constructive passion. There is a demi-god +imprisoned in mankind. All human history presents itself to me as +the unconscious or half-unconscious struggle of human thought to +emerge from the sightless interplay of instinct, individual passion, +prejudice, and ignorance. One sees this diviner element groping after +law and order and fine arrangement, like a thing blind and half-buried, +in ancient Egypt, in ancient Judæa, in ancient Greece. It embodies +its purpose in religions, invents the disciplines of morality, the +reminders of ritual. It loses itself and becomes confused. It wearies +and rests. In Plato, for the first time, one discovers it conscious and +open-eyed, trying, indeed, to take hold of life and control it. Then it +goes under, and becomes again a convulsive struggle, an inco-ordinated +gripping and leaving, a muttering of literature and art, until the +coming of our own times. Most painful and blundering of demi-gods it +seems through all that space of years, with closed eyes and feverish +effort. And now again it is clear to the minds of many men that they +may lay hold upon and control the destiny of their kind.... + +It is strange, it is often grotesque to mark how the reviving racial +consciousness finds expression to-day. Now it startles itself into a +new phase of self-knowledge by striking a note from this art, and now +by striking one from that. It breaks out in fiction that is ostensibly +written only to amuse, it creeps into after-dinner discussions, +and invades a press which is economically no more than a system of +advertisement sheets proclaiming the price of the thing that is. +Presently it is on the stage; the music-hall even is not safe from it. +Youths walk in the streets to-day, talking together of things that were +once the ultimate speculation of philosophy. I am no contemner of the +present. To me it appears a time of immense and wonderful beginnings. +New ideas are organizing themselves out of the little limited efforts +of innumerable men. Never was there an age so intellectually prolific +and abundant as this in the aggregate is. It is true, indeed, that +we who write and think and investigate to-day, present nothing to +compare with the magnificent reputations and intensely individualized +achievements of the impressive personalities of the past. None the +less is it true that taken all together we signify infinitely more. +We no longer pose ourselves for admiration, high priests and princes +of letters in a world of finite achievement; we admit ourselves no +more than pages bearing the train of a Queen--but a Queen of limitless +power. The knowledge we co-ordinate, the ideas we build together, the +growing blaze in which we are willingly consumed, are wider and higher +and richer in promise than anything the world has had before.... + +When one takes count of the forces of intelligence upon which we +may rely in the great conflict against matter, brute instinct, and +individualistic disorder, to make the new social state, when we +consider the organizing forms that emerge already from the general +vague confusion, we find apparent in every modern state three chief +series of developments. There is first the thinking and investigatory +elements that grow constantly more important in our university +life, the enlarging recognition of the need of a systematic issue +of university publications, books, periodicals, and of sustained +and fertilizing discussion. Then there is the greater, cruder, +and bolder sea of mental activities outside academic limits, the +amateurs, the free lances of thought and inquiry, the writers and +artists, the innumerable ill-disciplined, untrained, but interested +and well-meaning people who write and talk. They find their medium +in contemporary literature, in journalism, in organizations for the +propaganda of opinion. And, thirdly, there is the immense, nearly +universally diffused system of education which, inadequately enough, +serves to spread the new ideas as they are elaborated, which does, at +any rate by its preparatory work, render them accessible. All these +new manifestations of mind embody themselves in material forms, in +class-rooms and laboratories, in libraries, and a vast machinery of +book and newspaper production and distribution. + +Consider the new universities that spring up all over America. +Almost imperceptibly throughout the past century, little by little, +the conception of a university has changed, until now it is nearly +altogether changed. The old-time university was a collection of learned +men; it believed that all the generalizations had been made, all the +fundamental things said; it had no vistas towards the future; it +existed for teaching and exercises, and more than half implied what +Dr. Johnson, for example, believed, that secular degeneration was the +rule of human life. All that, you know, has gone; every university, +even Oxford (though, poor pretentious dear, she still professes to read +and think metaphysics in "the original" Greek) admits the conception +of a philosophy that progresses, that broadens and intensifies, age +by age. But to come to America is to come to a country far more alive +to the thinking and knowledge-making function of universities than +Great Britain. One splendidly endowed foundation, the Johns Hopkins +University, Baltimore, exists only for research, and that was the first +intention of Chicago University also. In sociology, in pedagogics, in +social psychology, these vital sciences for the modern state, America +is producing an amount of work which, however trivial in proportion to +the task before her, is at any rate immense in comparison with our own +British output.... + + +III + +Columbia University + +I did my amateurish and transitory best to see something of the +American universities. There was Columbia. Thither I went with a +letter to Professor Giddings, whose sociological writings are world +famous. I found him busy with a secretary in a businesslike little +room, stowed away somewhere under the dome of the magnificent building +of the university library. He took me round the opulent spaces, the +fine buildings of Columbia.... I suppose it is inevitable that a +visitor should see the constituents of a university out of proportion, +but I came away with an impression overwhelmingly architectural. The +library dome, I confess, was fine, and the desks below well filled with +students, the books were abundant, well arranged, and well tended. But +I recall marble staircases, I recall great wastes of marble steps, I +recall, in particular, students' baths of extraordinary splendor, and +I do not recall anything like an equivalent effect of large leisure +and dignity for intellectual men. Professor Giddings seemed driven and +busy, the few men I met there appeared all to have a lot of immediate +work to do. It occurred to me in Columbia, as it occurred to me later +in the University of Chicago, that the disposition of the university +founder is altogether too much towards buildings and memorial +inscriptions, and all too little towards the more difficult and far +more valuable end of putting men of pre-eminent ability into positions +of stimulated leisure. This is not a distinctly American effect. In +Oxford, just as much as in Columbia, nay, far more! you find stone and +student lording it over the creative mental thing; the dons go about +like some sort of little short-coated parasite, pointing respectfully +to tower and façade, which have, in truth, no reason for existing +except to shelter them. Columbia is almost as badly off for means +of publication as Oxford, and quite as poor in inducements towards +creative work. Professors talk in an altogether British way of getting +work done in the vacation. + +Moreover, there was an effect of remoteness about Columbia. It may +have been the quality of a blue still morning of sunshine that invaded +my impression. I came up out of the crowded tumult of New York to it, +with a sense of the hooting, hurrying traffics of the wide harbor, the +teeming East Side, the glitter of spending, the rush of finance, the +whole headlong process of America, behind me. I came out of the subway +station into wide still streets. It was very spacious, very dignified, +very quiet. Well, I want the universities of the modern state to be +more aggressive. I want to think of a Columbia University of a less +detached appearance, even if she is less splendidly clad. I want to +think of her as sitting up there, cheek on hand, with knitted brows, +brooding upon the millions below. I want to think of all the best minds +conceivable going to and fro--thoughts and purposes in her organized +mind. And when she speaks that busy world should listen.... + +As a matter of fact, much of that busy world still regards a professor +as something between a dealer in scientific magic and a crank, and a +university as an institution every good American should be honestly +proud of and avoid. + + +IV + +Harvard + +Harvard, too, is detached, though not quite with the same immediacy +of contrast. Harvard reminded me very much of my first impressions of +Oxford. One was taken about in the same way to see this or that point +of view. Much of Harvard is Georgian red brick, that must have seemed +very ripe and venerable until a year or so ago one bitter winter killed +all the English ivy. There are students' clubs, after the fashion of +the Oxford Union, but finer and better equipped; there is an amazing +Germanic museum, the gift of the present Emperor, that does, in a +concentrated form, present all that is flamboyant of Germany; there are +noble museums and libraries, and very many fine and dignified aspects +and spaces, and an abundant intellectual life. Harvard is happily free +from the collegiate politics that absorb most of the surplus mental +energy of Oxford and Cambridge, and the professors can and do meet and +talk. At Harvard men count. I was condoled with on all hands in my +disappointment that I could not meet Professor William James--he was +still in California--and I had the good fortune to meet and talk to +President Eliot, who is, indeed, a very considerable voice in American +affairs. To me he talked quite readily and frankly of a very living +subject, the integrity of the press in relation to the systematic and +successful efforts of the advertising chemists and druggists to stifle +exposures of noxious proprietary articles. He saw the problem as the +subtle play of group psychology it is; there was none of that feeble +horror of these troubles as "modern and vulgar" that one would expect +in an English university leader. I fell into a great respect for his +lean fine face and figure, his deliberate voice, his open, balanced, +and constructive mind. He was the first man I had met who had any +suggestion of a force and quality that might stand up to and prevail +against the forces of acquisition and brute trading. He bore himself +as though some sure power were behind him, unlike many other men I met +who criticised abuses abusively, or in the key of facetious despair. He +had very much of that fine aristocratic quality one finds cropping up +so frequently among Americans of old tradition, an aristocratic quality +that is free from either privilege or pretension.... + +[Illustrations: HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE] + +At Harvard, too, I met Professor Münsterberg, one of the few writers +of standing who have attempted a general review of the American +situation. He is a tall fair German, but newly annexed to America, +with a certain diplomatic quality in his personality, standing almost +consciously, as it were, for Germany in America, and for America in +Germany. He has written a book for either people, because hitherto they +have seen each other too much through English media ("von Englischen +linseln retouchiert"), and he has done much to spread the conception +of a common quality and sympathy between Germany and America. "Blood," +he says in this connection, "is thicker than water, but ... printer's +ink is thicker than blood." England is too aristocratic, France too +shockingly immoral, Russia too absolutist to be the sympathetic and +similar friend of America, and so, by a process of exhaustion, Germany +remains the one power on earth capable of an "inner understanding." +(Also he has drawn an alluring parallel between President Roosevelt +and the Emperor William to complete the approximation of "die beiden +Edelnationen"). I had read all this, and was interested to encounter +him therefore at a Harvard table in a circle of his colleagues, +agreeable and courteous, and still scarcely more assimilated than the +brightly new white Germanic museum among the red brick traditions of +Kirkland and Cambridge streets.... + +Harvard impresses me altogether as a very living factor in the present +American outlook, not only when I was in Cambridge, but in the way the +place _tells_ in New York, in Chicago, in Washington. It has a living +and contemporary attitude, and it is becoming more and more audible. +Harvard opinion influences the magazines and affects the press, at +least in the East, to an increasing extent. It may, in the near future, +become still more rapidly audible. Professor Eliot is now full of +years and honor, and I found in New York, in Boston, in Washington, +that his successor was being discussed. In all these cities I met +people disposed to believe that if President Roosevelt does not become +President of the United States for a further term, he may succeed +President Eliot. Now that I have seen President Roosevelt it seems to +me that this might have a most extraordinary effect in accelerating the +reaction upon the people of America of the best and least mercenary of +their national thought. Already he is exerting an immense influence in +the advertisement of new ideas and ideals. But of President Roosevelt I +shall write more fully later.... + + +V + +Chicago University + +Chicago University, too, is a splendid place of fine buildings and +green spaces and trees, with a great going to and fro of students, a +wonderful contrast to the dark congestions of the mercantile city to +the north. To all the disorganization of that it is even physically +antagonistic, and I could think as I went about it that already this +new organization has produced such writing as Veblen's admirable +ironies (_The Theory of Business Enterprise_, for example), and such +sociological work as that of Zueblin and Albion Small. I went through +the vigorous and admirably equipped pedagogic department, which is +evidently a centre of thought and stimulus for the whole teaching +profession of Illinois; I saw a library of sociology and economics +beyond anything that London can boast; I came upon little groups of +students working amid piles of books in a businesslike manner, and +if at times in other sections this suggestion was still insistent +that thought was as yet only "moving in" and, as it were, getting the +carpets down, it was equally clear that thought was going to live +freely and spaciously, to an unprecedented extent, so soon as things +were in order. + +[Illustration: A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY] + +I visited only these three great foundations, each in its materially +embodiment already larger, wealthier, and more hopeful than any +contemporary British institution, and it required an effort to realize +that they were but a portion of the embattled universities of America, +that I had not seen Yale nor Princeton nor Cornell nor Leland Stanford +nor any Western State university, not a tithe, indeed, of America's +drilling levies in the coming war of thought against chaos. I am in no +way equipped to estimate the value of the drilling; I have been unable +to get any conception how far these tens of thousands of students +in these institutions are really _alive_ intellectually, are really +inquiring, discussing, reading, and criticising; I have no doubt the +great numbers of them spend many hours after the fashion of one roomful +I saw intent upon a blackboard covered with Greek; but allowing the +utmost for indolence, games, distractions, and waste of time and energy +upon unfruitful and obsolete studies, the fact of this great increasing +proportion of minds at least a little trained in things immaterial, +a little exercised in the critical habit, remains a fact to put over +against that million and a half child workers who can barely have +learned to read--the other side, the redeeming side of the American +prospect. + + +VI + +A Voice from Cornell + +I am impressed by the evident consciousness of the American +universities of the rôle they have to play in America's future. They +seem to me pervaded by the constructive spirit. They are intelligently +antagonistic to lethargic and self-indulgent traditions, to disorder, +and disorderly institutions. It is from the universities that the +deliberate invasion of the political machine by independent men +of honor and position--of whom President Roosevelt is the type +and chief--proceeds. Mr. George Iles has called my attention to a +remarkable address made so long ago as the year 1883 before the Yale +Alumni, by President Andrew D. White (the first president), of +Cornell, who was afterwards American Ambassador at St. Petersburg +and Berlin. President White was a member of the class of '53, and he +addressed himself particularly to the men of that year. His title was +"The Message of the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth," and it is +full of a spirit that grows and spreads throughout American life, that +may ultimately spread throughout the life of the whole nation, a spirit +of criticism and constructive effort, of a scope and quality the world +has never seen before. The new class of '83 are the messengers. + +"To a few tottering old men of our dear class of '53 it will be granted +to look with straining eyes over the boundary into the twentieth +century; but even these can do little to make themselves heard then. +Most of us shall not see it. But before us and around us; nay, in our +own families are the men who shall see it. The men who go forth from +these dear shades to-morrow are girding themselves for it. Often as I +have stood in the presence of such bands of youthful messengers I have +never been able to resist a feeling of awe, as in my boyhood when I +stood before men who were soon to see Palestine and the Far East, or +the Golden Gates of the West, and the islands of the Pacific. The old +story of St. Fillipo Neri at Rome comes back to me, who, in the days +of the Elizabethan persecutions, made men bring him out into the open +air and set him opposite the door of the Papal College of Rome, that +he might look into the faces of the English students, destined to go +forth to triumph or to martyrdom for the faith in far-off, heretic +England." + +I cannot forbear from quoting further from this address; it is all so +congenial to my own beliefs. Indeed, I like to think of that gathering +of young men and old as if it were still existing, as though the old +fellows of '53 were still sitting, listening and looking up responsive +to this appeal that comes down to us. I fancy President White on the +platform before them, a little figure in the perspective of a quarter +of a century, but still quite clearly audible, delivering his periods +to that now indistinguishable audience: + +"What, then, is to be done? Mercantilism, necessitated at first by our +circumstances and position, has been in the main a great blessing. It +has been so under a simple law of history. How shall it be prevented +from becoming in obedience to a similar inexorable law, a curse? + +"Here, in the answer to this question, it seems to me, is the most +important message from this century to the next. + +"For the great thing to be done is neither more nor less than to +develop _other_ great elements of civilization now held in check, which +shall take their rightful place in the United States, which shall +modify the mercantile spirit, ... which shall make the history of our +country something greater and broader than anything we have reached, or +ever can reach, under the sway of mercantilism alone. + +"What shall be those counter elements of civilization? Monarchy, +aristocracy, militarism we could not have if we would, we would not +have if we could. What shall we have? + +"I answer simply that we must do all that we can to rear greater +fabrics of religious, philosophic thought, literary thought, +scientific, artistic, political thought to summon young men more and +more into these fields, not as a matter of taste or social opportunity, +but as a patriotic duty; to hold before them not the incentive of +mere gain or of mere pleasure or of mere reputation, but the ideal +of a new and higher civilization. The greatest work which the coming +century has to do in this country is to build up an aristocracy of +thought and feeling which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of +mercantilism. I would have more and more the appeal made to every young +man who feels within him the ability to do good or great things in any +of these higher fields, to devote his powers to them as a sacred duty, +no matter how strongly the mercantile or business spirit may draw him. +I would have the idea preached early and late.... + +"And as the guardian of such a movement, ... I would strengthen at +every point this venerable university, and others like it throughout +the country. Remiss, indeed, have the graduates and friends of our own +honored Yale been in their treatment of her. She has never had the +means to do a tithe of what she might do. She ought to be made strong +enough, with more departments, more professors, more fellowships, to +become one of a series of great rallying points or fortresses, and +to hold always concentrated here a strong army, ever active against +mercantilism, materialism, and Philistinism.... + +"But, after all, the effort to create these new counterpoising, +modifying elements of a greater civilization must be begun in the +individual man, and especially in the youth who feels within himself +the power to think, the power to write, the power to carve the +marble, to paint, to leave something behind him better than dollars. +In the individual minds and hearts and souls of the messengers who +are preparing for the next century is a source of regeneration. They +must form an ideal of religion higher than that of a life devoted to +grasping and grinding and griping, with a whine for mercy at the end of +it. They must form an ideal of science higher than that of increasing +the production of iron or cotton. They must form an ideal of literature +and of art higher than that of pandering to the latest prejudice or +whimsey. And they must form an ideal of man himself worthy of that +century into which are to be poured the accumulations of this. So shall +material elements be brought to their proper place, made stronger for +good, made harmless for evil. So shall we have that development of new +and greater elements, that balance of principles which shall make this +republic greater than anything of which we now can dream." + + + + +CHAPTER XIV + +CULTURE + + +I + +The Boston Enchantment + +Yet even as I write of the universities as the central intellectual +organ of a modern state, as I sit implying salvation by schools, there +comes into my mind a mass of qualification. The devil in the American +world drama may be mercantilism, ensnaring, tempting, battling against +my hero, the creative mind of man, but mercantilism is not the only +antagonist. In Fifth Avenue or Paterson one may find nothing but +the zenith and nadir of the dollar hunt, at a Harvard table one may +encounter nothing but living minds, but in Boston--I mean not only +Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, but that Boston of the mind and +heart that pervades American refinement and goes about the world--one +finds the human mind not base, nor brutal, nor stupid, nor ignorant, +but mysteriously enchanting and ineffectual, so that having eyes it yet +does not see, having powers it achieves nothing.... + +I remember Boston as a quiet effect, as something a little withdrawn, +as a place standing aside from the throbbing interchange of East and +West. When I hear the word Boston now it is that quality returns. I do +not think of the spreading parkways of Mr. Woodbury and Mr. Olmstead +nor of the crowded harbor; the congested tenement-house regions, full +of those aliens whose tongues struck so strangely on the ears of Mr. +Henry James, come not to mind. But I think of rows of well-built, brown +and ruddy homes, each with a certain sound architectural distinction, +each with its two squares of neatly trimmed grass between itself and +the broad, quiet street, and each with its family of cultured people +within. I am reminded of deferential but unostentatious servants, +and of being ushered into large, dignified entrance-halls. I think +of spacious stairways, curtained archways, and rooms of agreeable, +receptive persons. I recall the finished informality of the high tea. +All the people of my impression have been taught to speak English with +a quite admirable intonation; some of the men and most of the women are +proficient in two or three languages; they have travelled in Italy, +they have all the recognized classics of European literature in their +minds, and apt quotations at command. And I think of the constant +presence of treasured associations with the titanic and now mellowing +literary reputations of Victorian times, with Emerson (who called Poe +"that jingle man"), and with Longfellow, whose house is now sacred, its +view towards the Charles River and the stadium--it is a real, correct +stadium--secured by the purchase of the sward before it forever.... + +At the mention of Boston I think, too, of autotypes and then of plaster +casts. I do not think I shall ever see an autotype again without +thinking of Boston. I think of autotypes of the supreme masterpieces +of sculpture and painting, and particularly of the fluttering garments +of the "Nike of Samothrace." (That I saw, also, in little casts and +big, and photographed from every conceivable point of view.) It is +incredible how many people in Boston have selected her for their +æsthetic symbol and expression. Always that lady was in evidence about +me, unobtrusively persistent, until at last her frozen stride pursued +me into my dreams. That frozen stride became the visible spirit of +Boston in my imagination, a sort of blind, headless, and unprogressive +fine resolution that took no heed of any contemporary thing. Next +to that I recall, as inseparably Bostonian, the dreaming grace of +Botticelli's "Prima vera." All Bostonians admire Botticelli, and +have a feeling for the roof of the Sistine chapel--to so casual and +adventurous a person as myself, indeed, Boston presents a terrible, +a terrifying unanimity of æsthetic discriminations. I was nearly +brought back to my childhood's persuasion that, after all, there is +a right and wrong in these things. And Boston clearly thought the +less of Mr. Bernard Shaw when I told her he had induced me to buy a +pianola, not that Boston ever did set much store by so contemporary a +person as Mr. Bernard Shaw. The books she reads are toned and seasoned +books--preferably in the old or else in limited editions, and by +authors who may be lectured upon without decorum.... + +Boston has in her symphony concerts the best music in America, and +here her tastes are severely orthodox and classic. I heard Beethoven's +Fifth Symphony extraordinarily well done, the familiar pinnacled Fifth +Symphony, and now, whenever I grind that out upon the convenient +mechanism beside my desk at home, mentally I shall be transferred +to Boston again, shall hear its magnificent aggressive thumpings +transfigured into exquisite orchestration, and sit again among that +audience of pleased and pleasant ladies in chaste, high-necked, +expensive dresses, and refined, attentive, appreciative, bald, or +iron-gray men.... + + +II + +Boston's Antiquity + +Then Boston has historical associations that impressed me like +iron-moulded, leather-bound, eighteenth-century books. The War of +Independence, that to us in England seems half-way back to the days of +Elizabeth, is a thing of yesterday in Boston. "Here," your host will +say and pause, "came marching" so-and-so, "with his troops to relieve" +so-and-so. And you will find he is the great-grandson of so-and-so, and +still keeps that ancient colonial's sword. And these things happened +before they dug the Hythe military canal, before Sandgate, except for +a decrepit castle, existed; before the days when Bonaparte gathered +his army at Boulogne--in the days of muskets and pigtails--and erected +that column my telescope at home can reach for me on a clear day. All +that is ancient history in England and in Boston the decade before +those distant alarums and excursions is yesterday. A year or so ago +they restored the British arms to the old State-House. "Feeling," +my informant witnessed, "was dying down." But there were protests, +nevertheless.... + +If there is one note of incongruity in Boston, it is in the gilt dome +of the Massachusetts State-House at night. They illuminate it with +electric light. That shocked me as an anachronism. It shocked me--much +as it would have shocked me to see one of the colonial portraits, or +even one of the endless autotypes of the Belvidere Apollo replaced, let +us say, by one of Mr. Alvin Coburn's wonderfully beautiful photographs +of modern New York. That electric glitter breaks the spell; it is +the admission of the present, of the twentieth century. It is just +as if the Quirinal and Vatican took to an exchange of badinage with +search-lights, or the King mounted an illuminated E.R. on the Round +Tower at Windsor. + +Save for that one discord there broods over the real Boston an immense +effect of finality. One feels in Boston, as one feels in no other part +of the States, that the intellectual movement has ceased. Boston is +now producing no literature except a little criticism. Contemporary +Boston art is imitative art, its writers are correct and imitative +writers the central figure of its literary world is that charming old +lady of eighty-eight, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. One meets her and Colonel +Higginson in the midst of an authors' society that is not so much +composed of minor stars as a chorus of indistinguishable culture. There +are an admirable library and a museum in Boston, and the library is +Italianate, and decorated within like an ancient missal. In the less +ornamental spaces of this place there are books and readers. There is +particularly a charming large room for children, full of pigmy chairs +and tables, in which quite little tots sit reading. I regret now I did +not ascertain precisely what they were reading, but I have no doubt it +was classical matter. + +I do not know why the full sensing of what is ripe and good in the past +should carry with it this quality of discriminating against the present +and the future. The fact remains that it does so almost oppressively. I +found myself by some accident of hospitality one evening in the company +of a number of Boston gentlemen who constituted a book-collecting club. +They had dined, and they were listening to a paper on Bibles printed +in America. It was a scholarly, valuable, and exhaustive piece of +research. The surviving copies of each edition were traced, and when +some rare specimen was mentioned as the property of any member of the +club there was decorously warm applause. I had been seeing Boston, +drinking in the Boston atmosphere all day.... I know it will seem +an ungracious and ungrateful thing to confess (yet the necessities +of my picture of America compel me), but as I sat at the large and +beautifully ordered table, with these fine, rich men about me, and +listened to the steady progress of the reader's ever unrhetorical +sentences, and the little bursts of approval, it came to me with a +horrible quality of conviction that the mind of the world was dead, and +that this was a distribution of souvenirs. + +Indeed, so strongly did this grip me that presently, upon some slight +occasion, I excused myself and went out into the night. I wandered +about Boston for some hours, trying to shake off this unfortunate idea. +I felt that all the books had been written, all the pictures painted, +all the thoughts said--or at least that nobody would ever believe this +wasn't so. I felt it was dreadful nonsense to go on writing books. +Nothing remained but to collect them in the richest, finest manner one +could. Somewhere about midnight I came to a publisher's window, and +stood in the dim moonlight peering enviously at piled copies of Izaak +Walton and Omar Khayyam, and all the happy immortals who got in before +the gates were shut. And then in the corner I discovered a thin, small +book. For a time I could scarcely believe my eyes. I lit a match to be +the surer. And it was _A Modern Symposium_, by Lowes Dickinson, beyond +all disputing. It was strangely comforting to see it there--a leaf of +olive from the world of thought I had imagined drowned forever. + +That was just one night's mood. I do not wish to accuse Boston of any +wilful, deliberate repudiation of the present and the future. But I +think that Boston--when I say Boston let the reader always understand +I mean that intellectual and spiritual Boston that goes about the +world, that traffics in book-shops in Rome and Piccadilly, that I have +dined with and wrangled with in my friend W.'s house in Blackheath, +dear W., who, I believe, has never seen America--I think, I say, that +Boston commits the scholastic error and tries to remember too much, to +treasure too much, and has refined and studied and collected herself +into a state of hopeless intellectual and æsthetic repletion in +consequence. In these matters there are limits. The finality of Boston +is a quantitive consequence. The capacity of Boston, it would seem, was +just sufficient but no more than sufficient, to comprehend the whole +achievement of the human intellect up, let us say, to the year 1875 +A.D. Then an equilibrium was established. At or about that year Boston +filled up. + + +III + +About Wellesley + +It is the peculiarity of Boston's intellectual quality that she cannot +unload again. She treasures Longfellow in quantity. She treasures his +works, she treasures associations, she treasures his Cambridge home. +Now, really, to be perfectly frank about him, Longfellow is not good +enough for that amount of intellectual house room. He cumbers Boston. +And when I went out to Wellesley to see that delightful girls' college +everybody told me I should be reminded of the "Princess." For the life +of me I could not remember what "Princess." Much of my time in Boston +was darkened by the constant strain of concealing the frightful gaps in +my intellectual baggage, this absence of things I might reasonably be +supposed, as a cultivated person, to have, but which, as a matter of +fact, I'd either left behind, never possessed, or deliberately thrown +away. I felt instinctively that Boston could never possibly understand +the light travelling of a philosophical carpet-bagger. But I hid--in +full view of the tree-set Wellesley lake, ay, with the skiffs of "sweet +girl graduates"--own up. "I say," I said, "I wish you wouldn't all be +so allusive. _What_ Princess?" + +It was, of course, that thing of Tennyson's. It is a long, frequently +happy and elegant, and always meritorious narrative poem, in which a +chaste Victorian amorousness struggles with the early formulæ of the +feminist movement. I had read it when I was a boy, I was delighted to +be able to claim, and had honorably forgotten the incident. But in +Boston they treat it as a living classic, and expect you to remember +constantly and with appreciation this passage and that. I think that +quite typical of the Bostonian weakness. It is the error of the clever +high-school girl, it is the mistake of the scholastic mind all the +world over, to learn too thoroughly and to carry too much. They want to +know and remember Longfellow and Tennyson--just as in art they want to +know and remember Raphael and all the elegant inanity of the sacrifice +at Lystra, or the miraculous draught of Fishes; just as in history they +keep all the picturesque legends of the War of Independence--looking up +the dates and minor names, one imagines, ever and again. Some years ago +I met two Boston ladies in Rome. Each day they sallied forth from our +hotel to see and appreciate; each evening, after dinner, they revised +and underlined in Baedeker what they had seen. _They meant to miss +nothing in Rome._ It's fine in its way--this receptive eagerness, this +learners' avidity. Only people who can go about in this spirit need, +if their minds are to remain mobile, not so much heads as _cephalic +pantechnicon vans_.... + + +IV + +The Wellesley Cabinets + +I find this appetite to have all the mellow and refined and beautiful +things in life to the exclusion of all thought for the present and +the future even in the sweet, free air of Wellesley's broad park, +that most delightful, that almost incredible girls' university, +with its class-rooms, its halls of residence, its club-houses and +gathering-places among the glades and trees. I have very vivid in +my mind a sunlit room in which girls were copying the detail in the +photographs of masterpieces, and all around this room were cabinets of +drawers, and in each drawer photographs. There must be in that room +photographs of every picture of the slightest importance in Italy, +and detailed studies of many. I suppose, too, there are photographs +of all the sculpture and buildings in Italy that are by any standard +considerable. There is, indeed, a great civilization, stretching over +centuries and embodying the thought and devotion, the scepticism and +levities, the ambition, the pretensions, the passions, and desires of +innumerable sinful and world-used men--_canned_, as it were, in this +one room, and freed from any deleterious ingredients. The young ladies, +under the direction of competent instructors, go through it, no doubt, +industriously, and emerge--capable of Browning. + +I was taken into two or three charming club-houses that dot this +beautiful domain. There was a Shakespeare club-house, with a delightful +theatre, Elizabethan in style, and all set about with Shakespearean +things; there was the club-house of the girls who are fitting +themselves for their share in the great American problem by the study +of Greek. Groups of pleasant girls in each, grave with the fine gravity +of youth, entertained the reluctantly critical visitor, and were +unmistakably delighted and relaxed when one made it clear that one was +not in the Great Teacher line of business, when one confided that one +was there on false pretences, and insisting on seeing the pantry. They +have jolly little pantries, and they make excellent tea. + +I returned to Boston at last in a state of mighty doubting, provided +with a Wellesley College calendar to study at my leisure. + +I cannot, for the life of me, determine how far Wellesley is an aspect +of what I have called Boston; how far it is a part of that wide forward +movement of the universities upon which I lavish hope and blessings. +Those drawings of photographed Madonnas and Holy Families and +Annunciations, the sustained study of Greek, the class in the French +drama of the seventeenth century, the study of the topography of Rome +fill me with misgivings, seeing the world is in torment for the want of +living thought about its present affairs. But, on the other hand, there +are courses upon socialism--though the text-book is still _Das Kapital_ +of Marx--and upon the industrial history of England and America. I +didn't discover a debating society, but there is a large accessible +library. + +How far, I wonder still, are these girls thinking and feeding mentally +for themselves? What do they discuss one with another? How far do +they suffer under that plight of feminine education--notetaking from +lectures?... + +But, after all, this about Wellesley is a digression into which I fell +by way of Boston's autotypes. My main thesis was that culture, as it +is conceived in Boston, is no contribution to the future of America, +that cultivated people may be, in effect, as state-blind as--Mr. +Morgan Richards. It matters little in the mind of the world whether +any one is concentrated upon mediæval poetry, Florentine pictures, or +the propagation of pills. The common, significant fact in all these +cases is this, a blindness to the crude splendor of the possibilities +of America now, to the tragic greatness of the unheeded issues that +blunder towards solution. Frankly, I grieve over Boston--Boston +throughout the world--as a great waste of leisure and energy, as a +frittering away of moral and intellectual possibilities. We give too +much to the past. New York is not simply more interesting than Rome, +but more significant, more stimulating, and far more beautiful, and the +idea that to be concerned about the latter in preference to the former +is a mark of a finer mental quality is one of the most mischievous and +foolish ideas that ever invaded the mind of man. We are obsessed by +the scholastic prestige of mere knowledge and genteel remoteness. Over +against unthinking ignorance is scholarly refinement, the spirit of +Boston; between that Scylla and this Charybdis the creative mind of man +steers its precarious way. + + + + +CHAPTER XV + +AT WASHINGTON + + +I + +Washington as Anti-climax + +I came to Washington full of expectations and curiosities. Here, I +felt, so far as it could exist visibly and palpably anywhere, was +the head and mind of this colossal America over which my observant +curiosities had wandered. In this place I should find, among other +things, perhaps as many as ten thousand men who would not be concerned +in trade. There would be all the Senators and representatives, their +secretaries and officials, and four thousand and more scientific and +literary men of Washington's institutions and libraries, the diplomatic +corps, the educational centres, the civil service, the writers and +thinking men who must inevitably be drawn to this predestined centre. I +promised myself arduous intercourse with a teeming intellectual life. +Here I should find questions answered, discover missing clues, get hold +of the last connections in my inquiry. I should complete at Washington +my vision of America; my forecast would follow. + +I don't precisely remember how this vision departed. I know only that +after a day or so in Washington an entirely different conception was +established, a conception of Washington as architecture and avenues, +as a place of picture post-cards and excursions, with sightseers +instead of thoughts going to and fro. I had imagined that in Washington +I should find such mentally vigorous discussion-centres as the New +York X Club on a quite magnificent scale. Instead, I found the chief +scientific gathering-place has, like so many messes in the British +army before the Boer war, a rule against talking "shop." In all +Washington there is no clearing-house of thought at all; Washington has +no literary journals, no magazines, no publications other than those +of the official specialist--there does not seem to be a living for a +single firm of publishers in this magnificent empty city. + +I went about the place in a state of ridiculous and deepening concern. +I went through the splendid Botanical Gardens, through the spacious +and beautiful Capitol, and so to the magnificently equipped Library +of Congress. There in an upper chamber that commands an altogether +beautiful view of long vistas of avenue and garden to that stupendous +unmeaning obelisk (the work of the women of America) that dominates +all Washington, I found at last a little group of men who could talk. +It was like a small raft upon a limitless empty sea. I lunched with +them at their Round Table, and afterwards Mr. Putnam showed me the +Rotunda, quite the most gracious reading-room dome the world possesses, +and explained the wonderful mechanical organization that brings almost +every volume in that immense collection within a minute of one's hand. +"With all this," I asked him, "why doesn't the place _think_?" He +seemed, discreetly, to consider it did. + +[Illustration: IN THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY] + +It was in the vein of Washington's detached deadness that I should +find Professor Langley (whose flying experiments I have followed for +some years with close interest) was dead, and I went through the +long galleries of archæological specimens and stuffed animals in the +Smithsonian Institution to inflict my questions upon his temporary +successor, Dr. Cyrus Adler. He had no adequate excuses. He found a +kind of explanation in the want of enterprise of American publishers, +so that none of them come to Washington to tap its latent resources of +knowledge and intellectual capacity; but that does not account for the +absence of any traffic in ideas. It is perhaps near the truth to say +that this dearth of any general and comprehensive intellectual activity +is due to intellectual specialization. The four thousand scientific men +in Washington are all too energetically busy with ethnographic details, +electrical computations, or herbaria to talk about common and universal +things. They ought not to be so busy, and a science so specialized +sinks half-way down the scale of sciences. Science is one of those +things that cannot hustle; if it does, it loses its connections. +In Washington some men, I gathered, hustle, others play bridge, and +general questions are left, a little contemptuously, as being of the +nature of "gas," to the newspapers and magazines. Philosophy, which +correlates the sciences and keeps them subservient to the universals +of life, has no seat there. My anticipated synthesis of ten thousand +minds refused, under examination, to synthesize at all; it remained +disintegrated, a mob, individually active and collectively futile, of +specialists and politicians. + + +II + +The City of Conversation + +But that is only one side of Washington life, the side east and +south of the White House. Northwestward I found, I confess, the most +agreeable social atmosphere in America. It is a region of large fine +houses, of dignified and ample-minded people, people not given over +to "smartness" nor redolent of dollars, unhurried and reflective, not +altogether lost to the wider aspects of life. In Washington I met +again that peculiarly aristocratic quality I had found in Harvard--in +the person of President Eliot, for example--an aristocratic quality +that is all the finer for the absence of rank, that has integral in +it--books, thought, and responsibility. And yet I could have wished +these fine people more alive to present and future things, a little +less established upon completed and mellowing foundations, a little +less final in their admirable finish.... + +There was, I found, a little breeze of satisfaction fluttering the +Washington atmosphere in this region. Mr. Henry James came through the +States last year distributing epithets among their cities with the +justest aptitude. Washington was the "City of Conversation"; and she +was pleasantly conscious that she merited this friendly coronation. + +Washington, indeed, converses well, without awkwardness, without +chatterings, kindly, watchful, agreeably witty. She lulled and tamed my +purpose to ask about primary things, to discuss large questions. Only +once, and that was in an after-dinner duologue, did I get at all into a +question in Washington. For the rest, Washington remarked and alluded +and made her point and got away. + + +III + +Mount Vernon + +And Washington, with a remarkable unanimity and in the most charming +manner, assured me that if I came to see and understand America I +must on no account miss Mount Vernon. To have passed indifferently +by Concord was bad enough, I was told, but to ignore the home of +the first president, to turn my back upon that ripe monument of +colonial simplicity, would be quite criminal neglect. To me it was a +revelation how sincerely insistent they were upon this. It reminded +me of an effect I had already appreciated very keenly in Boston--and +even before Boston, when Mr. Z took me across Spuyten Duyvil into +the country of Sleepy Hollow, and spoke of Cornwallis as though he +had died yesterday--and that is the longer historical perspectives +of America. America is an older country than any European one, for +she has not rejuvenesced for a hundred and thirty years. In endless +ways America fails to be contemporary. In many respects, no doubt, +she is decades in front of Europe, in mechanism, for example, and +productive organization, but in very many other and more fundamental +ones she is decades behind. Go but a little way back and you will +find the European's perspectives close up; they close at '71, at '48, +down a vista of reform bills, at Waterloo and the treaty of Paris, +at the Irish Union, at the coming of Victor Emanuel; Great Britain, +for example, in the last hundred years has reconstructed politically +and socially, created half her present peerage, evolved the Empire of +India, developed Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, fought fifty +considerable wars. Mount Vernon, on the other hand, goes back with +unbroken continuity, a broad band of mellow tradition, to the War of +Independence. + +Well, I got all that in conversation at Washington, and so I didn't +need to go to Mount Vernon, after all. I got all that about 1777, +and I failed altogether to get anything of any value whatever about +1977--which is the year of greater interest to me. About the direction +and destinies of that great American process that echoes so remotely +through Washington's cool gracefulness of architecture and her +umbrageous parks, this cultivated society seemed to me to be terribly +incurious and indifferent. It was alive to political personalities, no +doubt, its sons and husbands were Senators, judges, ambassadors, and +the like; it was concerned with their speeches and prospects, but as +to the trend of the whole thing Washington does not picture it, does +not want to picture it. I found myself presently excusing myself for +Mount Vernon on the ground that I was not a retrospective American, but +a go-ahead Englishman, and so apologizing for my want of reverence for +venerable things. "We are a young people," I maintained. "We are a new +generation." + + +IV + +In the Senate-House + +I went to see the Senate debating the railway-rate bill, and from +the Senatorial gallery I had pointed out to me Tillman and Platt, +Foraker and Lodge, and all the varied personalities of the assembly. +The chamber is a circular one, with enormously capacious galleries. +The members speak from their desks, other members write letters, read +(and rustle) newspapers, sit among accumulations of torn paper, or +stand round the apartment in audibly conversational groups. A number of +messenger-boys--they wear no uniform--share the floor of the House with +the representatives, and are called by clapping the hands. They go to +and fro, or sit at the feet of the Vice-President. Behind and above the +Vice-President the newspaper men sit in a state of partial attention, +occasionally making notes for the vivid descriptions that have long +since superseded verbatim reports in America. The public galleries +contain hundreds of intermittently talkative spectators. For the most +part these did not seem to me to represent, as the little strangers' +gallery in the House of Commons represents, interests affected. They +were rather spectators seeing Washington, taking the Senate _en route_ +for the obelisk top and Mount Vernon. They made little attempt to hear +the speeches. + +In a large distinguished emptiness among these galleries is the space +devoted to diplomatic representatives, and there I saw, sitting in a +meritorious solitude, the British _charge d'affaires_ and his wife +following the debate below. I found it altogether too submerged for me +to follow. The countless spectators, the Senators, the boy messengers, +the comings and goings kept up a perpetual confusing babblement. One +saw men walking carelessly between the Speaker and the Vice-President, +and at one time two gentlemen with their backs to the member in +possession of the House engaged the Vice-President in an earnest +conversation. The messengers circulated at a brisk trot, or sat on the +edge of the dais exchanging subdued badinage. I have never seen a more +distracted Legislature. + +The whole effect of Washington is a want of concentration, of something +unprehensile and apart. It is on, not in, the American process. The +place seems to me to reflect, even in its sounds and physical forms, +that dispersal of power, that evasion of a simple conclusiveness, +which is the peculiar effect of that ancient compromise, the American +Constitution. The framers of that treaty were haunted by two terrible +bogies, a military dictatorship and what they called "mob rule," +they were obsessed by the need of safeguards against these dangers, +they were controlled by the mutual distrust of constituent States +far more alien to one another than they are now, and they failed to +foresee both the enormous assimilation of interests and character +presently to be wrought by the railways and telegraphs, and the huge +possibilities of corruption, elaborate electrical arrangements offer +to clever unscrupulous men. And here in Washington is the result, a +Legislature that fails to legislate, a government that cannot govern, +a pseudo-responsible administration that offers enormous scope for +corruption, and that is perhaps invincibly intrenched behind the +two-party system from any insurgence of the popular will. The plain +fact of the case is that Congress, as it is constituted at present, +is the feeblest, least accessible, and most inefficient central +government of any civilized nation in the worst west of Russia. +Congress is entirely inadequate to the tasks of the present time. + +I came away from Washington with my pre-conception enormously +reinforced that the supreme need of America, the preliminary thing to +any social or economic reconstruction, is political reform. It seems +to me to lie upon the surface that America has to be democratized. +It is necessary to make the Senate and the House of Representatives +more interdependent, and to abolish the possibilities of deadlocks +between them, to make election to the Senate direct from the people, +and to qualify and weaken the power of the two-party system by the +introduction of "second ballots" and the referendum.... + +But how such drastic changes are to be achieved constitutionally in +America I cannot imagine. Only a great educated, trained, and sustained +agitation can bring about so fundamental a political revolution, and at +present I can find nowhere even the beginnings of a realization of this +need. + + +V + +President Roosevelt + +In the White House, set midway between the Washington of the sightseers +and the Washington of brilliant conversation, I met President +Roosevelt. I was mightily pleased by the White House; it is dignified +and simple--once again am I tempted to use the phrase "aristocratic +in the best sense" of things American; and an entire absence of +uniforms or liveries creates an atmosphere of Republican equality +that is reinforced by "Mr. President's" friendly grasp of one's +undistinguishable hand. And after lunch I walked about the grounds with +him, and so achieved my ambition to get him "placed," as it were, in my +vision of America. + +In the rare chances I have had of meeting statesmen, there has always +been one common effect, an effect of their being smaller, less audible, +and less saliently featured than one had expected. A common man +builds up his picture of the men prominent in the great game of life +very largely out of caricature, out of head-lines, out of posed and +"characteristic" portraits. One associates them with actresses and +actors, literary poseurs and such-like public performers, anticipates +the same vivid self-consciousness as these display in common +intercourse, keys one's self up for the paint on their faces, and for +voices and manners altogether too accentuated for the gray-toned lives +of common men. I've met politicians who remained at that. But so soon +as Mr. Roosevelt entered the room, "Teddy," the Teddy of the slouch +hat, the glasses, the teeth, and the sword, that strenuous vehement +Teddy (who had, let me admit, survived a full course of reading in the +President's earlier writings) vanished, and gave place to an entirely +negotiable individuality. To-day, at any rate, the "Teddy" legend is +untrue. Perhaps it wasn't always quite untrue. There was a time during +the world predominance of Mr. Kipling, when I think the caricature +must have come close to certain of Mr. Roosevelt's acceptances and +attitudes. But that was ten years and more ago, and Mr. Roosevelt to +this day goes on thinking and changing and growing.... + +For me, anyhow, that strenuousness has vanished beyond recalling, and +there has emerged a figure in gray of a quite reasonable size, with a +face far more thoughtful and perplexed than strenuous, with a clinched +hand that does indeed gesticulate, though it is by no means a gigantic +fist--and with quick movements, a voice strained indeed, a little +forced for oratory, but not raised or aggressive in any fashion, and +friendly screwed-up eyes behind the glasses. + +It isn't my purpose at all to report a conversation that went from +point to point. I wasn't interviewing the President, and I made no note +at the time of the things said. My impression was of a mind--for the +situation--quite extraordinarily open. That is the value of President +Roosevelt for me, and why I can't for the life of my book leave +him out. He is the seeking mind of America displayed. The ordinary +politician goes through his career like a charging bull, with his eyes +shut to any changes in the premises. He locks up his mind like a powder +magazine. But any spark may fire the mind of President Roosevelt. +His range of reading is amazing; he seems to be echoing with all the +thought of the time, he has receptivity to the pitch of genius. And he +does not merely receive, he digests and reconstructs; he thinks. It is +his political misfortune that at times he thinks aloud. His mind is +active with projects of solution for the teeming problems around him. +Traditions have no hold upon him--nor, his enemies say, have any but +quite formal pledges. It is hard to tie him. In all these things he is +to a single completeness, to mind and will of contemporary America. And +by an unparalleled conspiracy of political accidents, as all the world +knows, he has got to the White House. He is not a part of the regular +American political system at all--he has, it happens, stuck through. + +Now my picture of America is, as I have tried to make clear, one of a +gigantic process of growth, of economic coming and going, spaced out +over vast distances and involving millions of hastening men; I see +America as towns and urgency and greatnesses beyond, I suppose, any +precedent that has ever been in the world. And like a little island of +order amid that ocean of enormous opportunity and business turmoil and +striving individualities, is this District of Columbia, with Washington +and its Capitol and obelisk. It is a mere pin-point in the unlimited, +on which, in peace times, the national government lies marooned, +twisted up into knots, bound with safeguards, and altogether impotently +stranded. And peering closely, and looking from the Capitol down the +vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, I see the White House, minute and clear, +with a fountain playing before it, and behind it a railed garden set +with fine trees. The trees are not so thick, nor the railings so high +but that the people on the big "seeing Washington" cannot crane to look +into it and watch whoever walk about it. And in this garden goes a +living speck, as it were, in gray, talking, swinging a white clinched +hand, and trying vigorously and resolutely to get a hold upon the +significance of the whole vast process in which he and his island of +government are set. + +Always before him there have been political resultants, irrelevancies +and futilities of the White House; and after him, it would seem, they +may come again. I do not know anything of the quality of Mr. Bryan, +who may perhaps succeed him. He, too, is something of an exception, it +seems, and keeps a still developing and inquiring mind. Beyond is a +vista of figures of questionable value so far as I am concerned. They +have this in common that they don't stand for thought. For the present, +at any rate, a personality, extraordinarily representative, occupies +the White House. And what he chooses to say publicly (and some things +he says privately) are, by an exceptional law of acoustics, heard in +San Francisco, in Chicago, in New Orleans, in New York and Boston, in +Kansas, and Maine, throughout the whole breadth of the United States +of America. He assimilates contemporary thought, delocalizes and +reverberates it. He is America for the first time vocal to itself. + +What is America saying to itself? + +I've read most of the President's recent speeches, and they fall in +oddly with that quality in his face that so many photographs even +convey, a complex mingling of will and a critical perplexity. Taken all +together they amount to a mass of not always consistent suggestions, +that and conflict overlap. Things crowd upon him, rebate scandals, +insurance scandals, the meat scandals, this insecurity and that. The +conditions of his position press upon him. It is no wonder he gives out +no single, simple note.... + +The plain fact is that in the face of the teeming situations of to-day +America does not know what to do. Nobody, except those happily gifted +individuals who can see but one aspect of an intricate infinitude, +imagines any simple solution. For the rest the time is one of +ample, vigorous, and at times impatient inquiry, and of intense +disillusionment with old assumptions and methods. And never did a +President before so reflect the quality of his time. The trend is +altogether away from the anarchistic individualism of the nineteenth +century, that much is sure, and towards some constructive scheme which, +if not exactly socialism, as socialism is defined, will be, at any +rate, closely analogous to socialism. This is the immense change of +thought and attitude in which President Roosevelt participates, and to +which he gives a unique expression. Day by day he changes with the big +world about him--contradicts himself.... + +I came away with the clear impression that neither President +Roosevelt nor America will ever, as some people prophesy, "declare +for socialism," but my impression is equally clear, that he and all +the world of men he stands for, have done forever with the threadbare +formulæ that have served America such an unconscionable time. We talked +of the press and books and of the question of color, and then for a +while about the rôle of the universities in the life of the coming time. + +Now it is a curious thing that as I talked with President Roosevelt in +the garden of the White House there came back to me quite forcibly that +undertone of doubt that has haunted me throughout this journey. After +all, does this magnificent appearance of beginnings which is America, +convey any clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfilment +whatever? Much makes for construction, a great wave of reform is going +on, but will it drive on to anything more than a breaking impact upon +even more gigantic uncertainties and dangers. Is America a giant +childhood or a gigantic futility, a mere latest phase of that long +succession of experiments which has been and may be for interminable +years--may be indeed altogether until the end--man's social history? +I can't now recall how our discursive talk settled towards that, but +it is clear to me that I struck upon a familiar vein of thought in +the President's mind. He hadn't, he said, an effectual disproof of +any pessimistic interpretation of the future. If one chose to say +America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all +mankind must culminate and pass, he could not conclusively deny that +possibility. Only he chose to live as if this were not so. + +That remained in his mind. Presently he reverted to it. He made a sort +of apology for his life against the doubts and scepticisms that, I +fear, must be in the background of the thoughts of every modern man +who is intellectually alive. He mentioned a little book of mine, an +early book full of the deliberate pessimism of youth, in which I drew +a picture of a future of decadence, of a time when constructive effort +had fought its fight and failed, when the inevitable segregations +of an individualistic system had worked themselves out and all the +hope and vigor of humanity had gone forever. The descendants of the +workers had become etiolated, sinister, and subterranean monsters, the +property-owners had degenerated into a hectic and feebly self-indulgent +race, living fitfully amid the ruins of the present time. He became +gesticulatory, and his straining voice a note higher in denying this +as a credible interpretation of destiny. With one of those sudden +movements of his, he knelt forward in a garden chair--we were standing +before our parting beneath the colonnade--and addressed me very +earnestly over the back, clutching it, and then thrusting out his +familiar gesture, a hand first partly open and then closed. + +"Suppose after all," he said, slowly, "that should prove to be right, +and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. _That doesn't matter +now._ The effort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it. It's +worth it--even then."... + +I can see him now and hear his unmusical voice saying "The effort--the +effort's worth it," and see the gesture of his clinched hand and +the--how can I describe it? the friendly peering snarl of his face, +like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind as that, +as a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations, +its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence amid perplexities and +confusions. He kneels out, assertive against his setting--and his +setting is the White House with a background of all America. + +I could almost write, with a background of all the world--for I +know of no other a tithe so representative of the creative purpose, +the _good-will_ in men as he. In his undisciplined hastiness, his +limitations, his prejudices, his unfairness, his frequent errors, just +as much as in his force, his sustained courage, his integrity, his open +intelligence, he stands for his people and his kind. + + + + +THE ENVOY + + +And at last I am back in my study by the sea. It is high June. When +I said good-bye to things it was March, a March warm and eager to +begin with, and then dashed with sleet and wind; but the daffodils +were out, and the primulas and primroses shone brown and yellow in +the unseasonable snow. The spring display that was just beginning +is over. The iris rules. Outside the window is a long level line of +black fleur-de-lys rising from a serried rank of leaf-blades. Their +silhouettes stand out against the brightness of the twilight sea. They +mark, so opened, two months of absence. And in the interval I have seen +a great world. + +I have tried to render it as I saw it. I have tried to present the +first exhilaration produced by the sheer growth of it, the morning-time +hopefulness of spacious and magnificent opportunity, the optimism of +successful, swift, progressive effort in material things. And from that +I have passed to my sense of the chaotic condition of the American +will, and that first confidence has darkened more and more towards +doubt again. I came to America questioning the certitudes of progress. +For a time I forgot my questionings; I sincerely believed, "These +people can do anything," and, now I have it all in perspective, I +have to confess that doubt has taken me again. "These people," I say, +"might do anything. They are the finest people upon earth--the most +hopeful. But they are vain and hasty; they are thoughtless, harsh, and +undisciplined. In the end, it may be, they will accomplish nothing." +I see, I have noted in its place, the great forces of construction, +the buoyant, creative spirit of America. But I have marked, too, the +intricacy of snares and obstacles in its path. The problem of America, +save in its scale and freedom, is no different from the problem of +Great Britain, of Europe, of all humanity; it is one chiefly moral and +intellectual; it is to resolve a confusion of purposes, traditions, +habits, into a common ordered intention. Everywhere one finds what +seem to me the beginnings of that--and, for this epoch it is all too +possible, they may get no further than beginnings. Yet another Decline +and Fall may remain to be written, another and another, and it may be +another, before the World State comes and Peace. + +Yet against this prospect of a dispersal of will, of a secular decline +in honor, education, public spirit, and confidence, of a secular +intensification of corruption, lawlessness, and disorder, I do, with +a confidence that waxes and wanes, balance the creative spirit in +America, and that kindred spirit that for me finds its best symbol in +the President's kneeling, gesticulating figure, and his urgent "The +effort's worth it!" Who can gauge the far-reaching influence of even +the science we have, in ordering and quickening the imagination of +man, in enhancing and assuring their powers? Common men feel secure +to-day in enterprises it needed men of genius to conceive in former +times. And there is a literature--for all our faults we do write more +widely, deeply, disinterestedly, more freely and frankly than any set +of writers ever did before--reaching incalculable masses of readers, +and embodying an amount of common consciousness and purpose beyond +all precedent. Consider only how nowadays the problems that were once +the inaccessible thoughts of statesmen may be envisaged by common +men! Here am I really able, in a few weeks of observant work, to get +a picture of America. I publish it. If it bears a likeness, it will +live and be of use; if not it will die, and be no irreparable loss. +Some fragment, some suggestion may survive. My friend Mr. F. Madox +Hueffer was here a day or so ago to say good-bye; he starts for America +as I write here, to get _his_ vision. As I have been writing these +papers I have also been reading, instalment by instalment, the subtle, +fine renderings of America revisited by Mr. Henry James. We work in +shoals, great and small together, one trial thought following another. +We are getting the world presented. It is not simply America that we +swarm over and build up into a conceivable process, into something +understandable and negotiable by the mind. I find on my desk here +waiting for me a most illuminating _Vision of India_, in which Mr. +Sidney Low, with a marvellous aptitude, has interpreted east to west. +Besides my poor superficialities in _The Tribune_ appears Sir William +Butler, with a livid frankness expounding the most intimate aspects +of the South African situation. A friend who called to-day spoke of +Nevinson's raid upon the slave trade of Portuguese East Africa, and +of two irrepressible writers upon the Congo crimes. I have already +mentioned the economic and social literature, the so-called literature +of exposure in America. This altogether represents collectively a +tremendous illumination. No social development was ever so lit and +seen before. Collectively, this literature of facts and theories and +impressions is of immense importance. Things are done in the light, +more and more are they done in the light. The world perceives and +thinks.... + +After all is said and done, I do find the balance of my mind tilts +steadily to a belief in a continuing and accelerated progress now in +human affairs. And in spite of my patriotic inclinations, in spite, +too, of the present high intelligence and efficiency of Germany, it +seems to me that in America, by sheer virtue of its size, its free +traditions, and the habit of initiative in its people, the leadership +of progress must ultimately rest. Things like the Chicago scandals, +the insurance scandals, and all the manifest crudities of the American +spectacle, don't seem to me to be more than relatively trivial after +all. There are the universities, the turbines of Niagara, the New York +architecture, and the quality of the mediocre people to set against +these.... + +Within a week after I saw the President I was on the _Umbria_ and +steaming slowly through the long spectacle of that harbor which was my +first impression of America, which still, to my imagination, stands so +largely for America. The crowded ferry-boats hooted past; athwart the +shining water, tugs clamored to and fro. The sky-scrapers raised their +slender masses heavenward--America's gay bunting lit the scene. As we +dropped down I had a last glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge. There to the +right was Ellis Island, where the immigrants, minute by minute, drip +and drip into America, and beyond that the tall spike-headed Liberty +with the reluctant torch, which I have sought to make the centre of +all this writing. And suddenly as I looked back at the sky-scrapers +of lower New York a queer fancy sprang into my head. They reminded me +quite irresistibly of piled-up packing cases outside a warehouse. I +was amazed I had not seen the resemblance before. I could really have +believed for a moment that that was what they were, and that presently +out of these would come the real thing, palaces and noble places, free, +high circumstances, and space and leisure, light and fine living for +the sons of men.... + +Ocean, cities, multitudes, long journeys, mountains, lakes as large as +seas, and the riddle of a nation's destiny; I've done my impertinent +best now with this monstrous insoluble problem. I finish. + +The air is very warm and pleasant in my garden to-night, the sunset has +left a rim of greenish-gold about the northward sky, shading up a blue +that is, as yet, scarce pierced by any star. I write down these last +words here, and then I shall step through the window and sit out there +in the kindly twilight, now quiet, now gossiping idly of what so-and-so +has done while I have been away, of personal motives and of little +incidents and entertaining intimate things. + + +THE END + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's The Future in America, by Herbert George Wells + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56484 *** |