{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_56484/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_56484","id":"gutenberg_56484","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56484","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: History - American","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Sociology","Category: Travel Writing","National characteristics, American","United States -- Civilization -- 1865-1918","United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918"],"text":"Produced by ellinora, Graeme Mackreth and the Online\nDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This\nfile was produced from images generously made available\nby The Internet Archive)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK]\n\n\n\n\n  THE\n  FUTURE IN AMERICA\n\n  A SEARCH AFTER REALITIES\n\n  BY\n  H.G. WELLS\n\n  AUTHOR OF\n  \"ANTICIPATIONS\" \"THE WAR OF THE WORLDS\"\n  \"THIRTY STRANGE STORIES\" ETC.\n\n  ILLUSTRATED\n\n  [Illustration]\n\n  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS\n  NEW YORK AND LONDON\n  1906\n\n\n\n\n  Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.\n\n  _All rights reserved._\n\n  Published November, 1906.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\n  CHAP.                                                       PAGE\n\n     I. The Prophetic Habit of Mind                              1\n\n    II. Material Progress                                       21\n\n   III. New York                                                35\n\n    IV. Growth Invincible                                       49\n\n     V. The Economic Process                                    68\n\n    VI. Some Aspects of American Wealth                         88\n\n   VII. Certain Workers                                        104\n\n  VIII. Corruption                                             116\n\n    IX. The Immigrant                                          133\n\n     X. State-Blindness                                        152\n\n    XI. Two Studies in Disappointment                          167\n\n   XII. The Tragedy of Color                                   185\n\n  XIII. The Mind of a Modern State                             203\n\n   XIV. Culture                                                223\n\n    XV. At Washington                                          236\n\n        The Envoy                                              254\n\n\n\n\nILLUSTRATIONS\n\n\n  FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK                                 _Frontispiece_\n\n  ENTRANCE TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE                            _Facing p._ 38\n\n  STATE STREET, CHICAGO                                     \"        62\n\n  WESTERN FARMERS STILL OWN THEIR FARMS                     \"        82\n\n  PLUMP AND PRETTY PUPILS OF EXTRAVAGANCE                   \"        90\n\n  NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE                    \"       106\n\n  BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY                   \"       112\n\n  INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING                    \"       124\n\n  WHERE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE AMERICANIZED                 \"       148\n\n  HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE              \"       214\n\n  A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY                             \"       216\n\n  IN THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY                              \"       238\n\n\n\n\nTHE FUTURE IN AMERICA\n\n\n\n\nTHE FUTURE IN AMERICA\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nTHE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND\n\n(_At a writing-desk in Sandgate_)\n\n\nI\n\nThe Question\n\n\"Are you a Polygamist?\"\n\n\"Are you an Anarchist?\"\n\nThe questions seem impertinent. They are part of a long paper of\ninterrogations I must answer satisfactorily if I am to be regarded as\na desirable alien to enter the United States of America. I want very\nmuch to pass that great statue of Liberty illuminating the World (from\na central position in New York Harbor), in order to see things in its\nlight, to talk to certain people, to appreciate certain atmospheres,\nand so I resist the provocation to answer impertinently. I do not\neven volunteer that I do not smoke and am a total abstainer; on which\npoints it would seem the States as a whole still keep an open mind.\nI am full of curiosity about America, I am possessed by a problem I\nfeel I cannot adequately discuss even with myself except over there,\nand I must go even at the price of coming to a decision upon the\ntheoretically open questions these two inquiries raise.\n\nMy problem I know will seem ridiculous and monstrous when I give it in\nall its stark disproportions--attacked by me with my equipment it will\ncall up an image of an elephant assailed by an ant who has not even\nmastered Jiu-jitsu--but at any rate I've come to it in a natural sort\nof way and it is one I must, for my own peace of mind, make some kind\nof attempt upon, even if at last it means no more than the ant crawling\nin an exploratory way hither and thither over that vast unconscious\ncarcass and finally getting down and going away. That may be rather\ngood for the ant, and the experience may be of interest to other ants,\nhowever infinitesimal from the point of view of the elephant, the final\nvalue of his investigation may be. And this tremendous problem in my\ncase and now in this--simply; What is going to happen to the United\nStates of America in the next thirty years or so?\n\nI do not know if the reader has ever happened upon any books or\nwritings of mine before, but if, what is highly probable, he has not,\nhe may be curious to know how it is that any human being should be\nrunning about in so colossally an interrogative state of mind. (For\neven the present inquiry is by no means my maximum limit). And the\nexplanation is to be found a little in a mental idiosyncrasy perhaps,\nbut much more in the development of a special way of thinking, of a\nhabit of mind.\n\nThat habit of mind may be indicated by a proposition that, with a fine\nair of discovery, I threw out some years ago, in a happy ignorance that\nI had been anticipated by no less a person than Heraclitus. \"There is\nno Being but Becoming,\" that was what appeared to my unscholarly mind\nto be almost triumphantly new. I have since then informed myself more\nfully about Heraclitus, there are moments now when I more than half\nsuspect that all the thinking I shall ever do will simply serve to\nilluminate my understanding of him, but at any rate that apothegm of\nhis does exactly convey the intellectual attitude into which I fall. I\nam curiously not interested in things, and curiously interested in the\nconsequences of things. I wouldn't for the world go to see the United\nStates for what they are--if I had sound reason for supposing that the\nentire western hemisphere was to be destroyed next Christmas, I should\nnot, I think, be among the multitude that would rush for one last look\nat that great spectacle,--from which it follows naturally that I don't\npropose to see Niagara. I should much more probably turn an inquiring\nvisage eastward, with the west so certainly provided for. I have come\nto be, I am afraid, even a little insensitive to fine immediate things\nthrough this anticipatory habit.\n\nThis habit of mind confronts and perplexes my sense of things that\nsimply _are_, with my brooding preoccupation with how they will\nshape presently, what they will lead to, what seed they will sow\nand how they will wear. At times, I can assure the reader, this\nquality approaches otherworldliness, in its constant reference to an\nall-important here-after. There are times indeed when it makes life\nseem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on\nto an equally transitory series of consequences, that the enhanced\nsense of instability becomes restlessness and distress; but on the\nother hand nothing that exists, nothing whatever, remains altogether\nvulgar or dull and dead or hopeless in its light. But the interest\nis shifted. The pomp and splendor of established order, the braying\ntriumphs, ceremonies, consummations, one sees these glittering shows\nfor what they are--through their threadbare grandeur shine the little\nsignificant things that will make the future....\n\nAnd now that I am associating myself with great names, let me discover\nthat I find this characteristic turn of mind of mine, not only in\nHeraclitus, the most fragmentary of philosophers, but for one fine\npassage at any rate, in Mr. Henry James, the least fragmentary\nof novelists. In his recent impressions of America I find him\napostrophizing the great mansions of Fifth Avenue, in words quite after\nmy heart;--\n\n\"It's all very well,\" he writes, \"for you to look as if, since you've\nhad no past, you're going in, as the next best thing, for a magnificent\ncompensatory future. What are you going to make your future _of_, for\nall your airs, we want to know? What elements of a future, as futures\nhave gone in the great world, are at all assured to you?\"\n\nI had already when I read that, figured myself as addressing if not\nthese particular last triumphs of the fine Transatlantic art of\narchitecture, then at least America in general in some such words. It\nis not unpleasant to be anticipated by the chief Master of one's craft,\nit is indeed, when one reflects upon his peculiar intimacy with this\nproblem, enormously reassuring, and so I have very gladly annexed his\nphrasing and put it here to honor and adorn and in a manner to explain\nmy own enterprise. I have already studied some of these fine buildings\nthrough the mediation of an illustrated magazine--they appear solid,\nthey appear wonderful and well done to the highest pitch--and before\nmany days now I shall, I hope, reconstruct that particular moment,\nstand--the latest admirer from England--regarding these portentous\nmagnificences, from the same sidewalk--will they call it?--as my\nillustrious predecessor, and with his question ringing in my mind\nall the louder for their proximity, and the universally acknowledged\ninvigoration of the American atmosphere. \"What are you going to make\nyour future _of_, for all your airs?\"\n\nAnd then I suppose I shall return to crane my neck at the Flat-Iron\nBuilding or the _Times_ sky-scraper, and ask all that too, an identical\nquestion.\n\n\nII\n\nPhilosophical\n\nCertain phases in the development of these prophetic exercises one may\nperhaps be permitted to trace.\n\nTo begin with, I remember that to me in my boyhood speculation about\nthe Future was a monstrous joke. Like most people of my generation I\nwas launched into life with millennial assumptions. This present sort\nof thing, I believed, was going on for a time, interesting personally\nperhaps but as a whole inconsecutive, and then--it might be in my\nlifetime or a little after it--there would be trumpets and shoutings\nand celestial phenomena, a battle of Armageddon and the Judgment.\nAs I saw it, it was to be a strictly protestant and individualistic\njudgment, each soul upon its personal merits. To talk about the Man of\nthe Year Million was of course in the face of this great conviction, a\nwhimsical play of fancy. The Year Million was just as impossible, just\nas gayly nonsensical as fairy-land....\n\nI was a student of biology before I realized that this, my finite and\nconclusive End, at least in the material and chronological form, had\nsomehow vanished from the scheme of things. In the place of it had come\na blackness and a vagueness about the endless vista of years ahead,\nthat was tremendous--that terrified. That is a phase in which lots of\neducated people remain to this day. \"All this scheme of things, life,\nforce, destiny which began not six thousand years, mark you, but an\ninfinity ago, that has developed out of such strange weird shapes and\nincredible first intentions, out of gaseous nebul\u00e6, carboniferous\nswamps, saurian giantry and arboreal apes, is by the same tokens to\ncontinue, developing--into what?\" That was the overwhelming riddle that\ncame to me, with that realization of an End averted, that has come now\nto most of our world.\n\nThe phase that followed the first helpless stare of the mind was a wild\neffort to express one's sudden apprehension of unlimited possibility.\nOne made fantastic exaggerations, fantastic inversions of all\nrecognized things. Anything of this sort might come, anything of any\nsort. The books about the future that followed the first stimulus of\nthe world's realization of the implications of Darwinian science, have\nall something of the monstrous experimental imaginings of children. I\nmyself, in my microcosmic way, duplicated the times. Almost the first\nthing I ever wrote--it survives in an altered form as one of a bookful\nof essays,--was of this type; \"The Man of the Year Million,\" was\npresented as a sort of pantomime head and a shrivelled body, and years\nafter that, the _Time Machine_, my first published book, ran in the\nsame vein. At that point, at a brief astonished stare down the vistas\nof time-to-come, at something between wonder and amazed, incredulous,\ndefeated laughter, most people, I think, stop. But those who are doomed\nto the prophetic habit of mind go on.\n\nThe next phase, the third phase, is to shorten the range of the\noutlook, to attempt something a little more proximate than the final\ndestiny of man. One becomes more systematic, one sets to work to trace\nthe great changes of the last century or so, and one produces these\nin a straight line and according to the rule of three. If the maximum\nvelocity of land travel in 1800 was twelve miles an hour and in 1900\n(let us say) sixty miles an hour, then one concludes that in 2000 A.D.\nit will be three hundred miles an hour. If the population of America in\n1800--but I refrain from this second instance. In that fashion one got\nout a sort of gigantesque caricature of the existing world, everything\nswollen to vast proportions and massive beyond measure. In my case that\nphase produced a book, _When the Sleeper Wakes_, in which, I am told,\nby competent New-Yorkers, that I, starting with London, an unbiassed\nmind, this rule-of-three method and my otherwise unaided imagination,\nproduced something more like Chicago than any other place wherein\nrighteous men are likely to be found. That I shall verify in due\ncourse, but my present point is merely that to write such a book is to\ndiscover how thoroughly wrong this all too obvious method of enlarging\nthe present is.\n\nOne goes on therefore--if one is to succumb altogether to the\nprophetic habit--to a really \"scientific\" attack upon the future.\nThe \"scientific\" phase is not final, but it is far more abundantly\nfruitful than its predecessors. One attempts a rude wide analysis\nof contemporary history, one seeks to clear and detach operating\ncauses and to work them out, and so, combining this necessary set of\nconsequences with that, to achieve a synthetic forecast in terms just\nas broad and general and vague as the causes considered are few. I\nmade, it happens, an experiment in this scientific sort of prophecy\nin a book called _Anticipations_, and I gave an altogether excessive\nexposition and defence of it, I went altogether too far in this\ndirection, in a lecture to the Royal Institution, \"The Discovery of\nthe Future,\" that survives in odd corners as a pamphlet, and is to be\nfound, like a scrap of old newspaper in the roof gutter of a museum, in\n_Nature_ (vol. LXV., p. 326) and in the Smithsonian Report (for 1902).\nWithin certain limits, however, I still believe this scientific method\nis sound. It gives sound results in many cases, results at any rate as\nsound as those one gets from the \"laws\" of political economy; one can\nclaim it really does effect a sort of prophecy on the material side of\nlife.\n\nFor example, it was quite obvious about 1899 that invention and\nenterprise were very busy with the means of locomotion, and one could\ndeduce from that certain practically inevitable consequences in the\ndistribution of urban populations. With easier, quicker means of\ngetting about there were endless reasons, hygienic, social, economic,\nwhy people should move from the town centres towards their peripheries,\nand very few why they should not. The towns one inferred therefore,\nwould get slacker, more diffused, the countryside more urban. From\nthat, from the spatial widening of personal interests that ensued,\none could infer certain changes in the spirits of local politics,\nand so one went on to a number of fairly valid adumbrations. Then\nagain starting from the practical supersession in the long run of\nall unskilled labor by machinery one can work out with a pretty fair\ncertainty many coming social developments, and the broad trend of\none group of influences at least from the moral attitude of the mass\nof common people. In industry, in domestic life again, one foresees\na steady development of complex appliances, demanding, and indeed\nin an epoch of frequently changing methods _forcing_, a flexible\nunderstanding, versatility of effort, a universal rising standard of\neducation. So too a study of military methods and apparatus convinces\none of the necessary transfer of power in the coming century from\nthe ignorant and enthusiastic masses who made the revolutions of\nthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and won Napoleon his wars,\nto any more deliberate, more intelligent and more disciplined class\nthat may possess an organized purpose. But where will one find that\nclass? There comes a question that goes outside science, that takes\none at once into a field beyond the range of the \"scientific\" method\naltogether.\n\nSo long as one adopts the assumptions of the old political economist\nand assumes men without idiosyncrasy, without prejudices, without, as\npeople say, wills of their own, so long as one imagines a perfectly\nacquiescent humanity that will always in the long run under pressure\nliquefy and stream along the line of least resistance to its own\nmaterial advantage, the business of prophecy is easy. But from the\nfirst I felt distrust for that facility in prophesying, I perceived\nthat always there lurked something, an incalculable opposition to these\nmechanically conceived forces, in law, in usage and prejudice, in the\npoi\u00ebtic power of exceptional individual men. I discovered for myself\nover again, the inseparable nature of the two functions of the prophet.\nIn my _Anticipations_, for example, I had intended simply to work out\nand foretell, and before I had finished I was in a fine full blast of\nexhortation....\n\nThat by an easy transition brought me to the last stage in the life\nhistory of the prophetic mind, as it is at present known to me. One\ncomes out on the other side of the \"scientific\" method, into the large\ntemperance, the valiant inconclusiveness, the released creativeness of\nphilosophy. Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible,\nbut the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts\nand wills of unique incalculable men. With them we have to deal as\nour ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to\nbe not \"scientific\" at all for all the greater issues, the humanly\nimportant issues, but critical, literary, even if you will--artistic.\nHere insight is of more account than induction and the perception of\nfine tones than the counting of heads. Science deals with necessity and\nnecessity is here but the firm ground on which our freedom goes. One\npasses from affairs of predestination to affairs of free will.\n\nThis discovery spread at once beyond the field of prophesying. The\nend, the aim, the test of science, as a model man understands the\nword, is foretelling by means of \"laws,\" and my error in attempting a\ncomplete \"scientific\" forecast of human affairs arose in too careless\nan assent to the ideas about me, and from accepting uncritically such\nclaims as that history should be \"scientific,\" and that economics and\nsociology (for example) are \"sciences.\" Directly one gauges the fuller\nimplications of that uniqueness of individuals Darwin's work has so\npermanently illuminated, one passes beyond that. The ripened prophet\nrealizes Schopenhauer--as indeed I find Professor M\u00fcnsterberg saying.\n\"The deepest sense of human affairs is reached,\" he writes, \"when we\nconsider them not as appearances but as decisions.\" There one has the\nsame thing coming to meet one from the psychological side....\n\nBut my present business isn't to go into this shadowy, metaphysical\nfoundation world on which our thinking rests, but to the brightly lit\noverworld of America. This philosophical excursion is set here just to\nprepare the reader quite frankly for speculations and to disabuse his\nmind of the idea that in writing of the Future in America I'm going to\nwrite of houses a hundred stories high and flying-machines in warfare\nand things like that. I am not going to America to work a pretentious\nhoroscope, to discover a Destiny, but to find out what I can of what\nmust needs make that Destiny,--a great nation's Will.\n\n\nIII\n\nThe Will of America\n\nThe material factors in a nation's future are subordinate factors,\nthey present advantages, such as the easy access of the English to\ncoal and the sea, or disadvantages, such as the ice-bound seaboard of\nthe Russians, but these are the circumstances and not necessarily the\nrulers of its fate. The essential factor in the destiny of a nation,\nas of a man and of mankind, lies in the form of its will and in the\nquality and quantity of its will. The drama of a nation's future, as\nof a man's, lies in this conflict of its will with what would else be\n\"scientifically\" predictable, materially inevitable. If the man, if the\nnation was an automaton fitted with good average motives, so and so,\none could say exactly, would be done. It's just where the thing isn't\nautomatic that our present interest comes in.\n\nI might perhaps reverse the order of the three aspects of will I have\nnamed, for manifestly where the quantity of will is small, it matters\nnothing what the form or quality. The man or the people that wills\nfeebly is the sport of every circumstance, and there if anywhere the\nscientific method holds truest or even altogether true. Do geographical\npositions or mineral resources make for riches? Then such a people will\ngrow insecurely and disastrously rich. Is an abundant prolific life at\na low level indicated? They will pullulate and suffer. If circumstances\nmake for a choice between comfort and reproduction, your feeble people\nwill dwindle and pass; if war, if conquest tempt them then they will\nturn from all preoccupations and follow the drums. Little things\nprovoke their unstable equilibrium, to hostility, to forgiveness....\n\nAnd be it noted that the quantity of will in a nation is not\nnecessarily determined by adding up the wills of all its people. I am\ntold, and I am disposed to believe it, that the Americans of the United\nStates are a people of great individual force of will, the clear strong\nfaces of many young Americans, something almost Roman in the faces of\ntheir statesmen and politicians, a distinctive quality I detect in such\nAmericans as I have met, a quality of sharply cut determination even\nthough it be only about details and secondary things, that one must\nrouse one's self to meet, inclines me to give a provisional credit\nto that, but how far does all this possible will-force aggregate to\na great national purpose?--what algebraically does it add up to when\nthis and that have cancelled each other? That may be a different thing\naltogether.\n\nAnd next to this net quantity of will a nation or people may possess,\ncome the questions of its quality, its flexibility, its consciousness\nand intellectuality. A nation may be full of will and yet inflexibly\nand disastrously stupid in the expression of that will. There was\nprobably more will-power, mere haughty and determined self-assertion\nin the young bull that charged the railway engine than in several\nregiments of men, but it was after all a low quality of will with no\nmethod but a violent and injudicious directness, and in the end it\nwas suicidal and futile. There again is the substance for ramifying\nEnquiries. How subtle, how collected and patient, how far capable of a\nlong plan, is this American nation? Suppose it has a will so powerful\nand with such resources that whatever simple end may be attained by\nrushing upon it is America's for the asking, there still remains the\nfar more important question of the ends that are not obvious, that are\nintricate and complex and not to be won by booms and cataclysms of\neffort.\n\nAn Englishman comes to think that most of the permanent and precious\nthings for which a nation's effort goes are like that, and here too I\nhave an open mind and unsatisfied curiosities.\n\nAnd lastly there is the form of the nation's purpose. I have been\nreading what I can find about that in books for some time, and now\nI want to cross over the Atlantic, more particularly for that, to\nquestion more or less openly certain Americans, not only men and women,\nbut the mute expressive presences of house and appliance, of statue,\nflag and public building, and the large collective visages of crowds,\nwhat it is all up to, what it thinks it is all after, how far it means\nto escape or improve upon its purely material destinies? I want over\nthere to find whatever consciousness or vague consciousness of a common\npurpose there may be, what is their Vision, their American Utopia,\nhow much will there is shaping to attain it, how much capacity goes\nwith the will--what, in short, there is in America, over and above the\nmere mechanical consequences of scattering multitudes of energetic\nEuropeans athwart a vast healthy, productive and practically empty\ncontinent in the temperate zone. There you have the terms of reference\nof an enquiry, that is I admit (as Mr. Morgan Richards the eminent\nadvertisement agent would say), \"mammoth in character.\"\n\nThe American reader may very reasonably inquire at this point why an\nEnglishman does not begin with the future of his own country. The\nanswer is that this particular one has done so, and that in many ways\nhe has found his intimacy and proximity a disadvantage. One knows too\nmuch of the things that seem to matter and that ultimately don't, one\nis full of misleading individual instances intensely seen, one can't\nsee the wood for the trees. One comes to America at last, not only with\nthe idea of seeing America, but with something more than an incidental\nhope of getting one's own England there in the distance and as a whole,\nfor the first time in one's life. And the problem of America, from\nthis side anyhow, has an air of being simpler. For all the Philippine\nadventure her future still seems to lie on the whole compactly in one\ncontinent, and not as ours is, dispersed round and about the habitable\nglobe, strangely entangled with India, with Japan, with Africa and with\nthe great antagonism the Germans force upon us at our doors. Moreover\none cannot look ten years ahead in England, without glancing across the\nAtlantic. \"There they are,\" we say to one another, \"those Americans!\nThey speak our language, read our books, give us books, share our mind.\nWhat we think still goes into their heads in a measure, and their\nthoughts run through our brains. What will they be up to?\"\n\nOur future is extraordinarily bound up in America's and in a sense\ndependent upon it. It is not that we dream very much of political\nreunions of Anglo Saxondom and the like. So long as we British retain\nour wide and accidental sprawl of empire about the earth we cannot\nexpect or desire the Americans to share our stresses and entanglements.\nOur Empire has its own adventurous and perilous outlook. But our\ncivilization is a different thing from our Empire, a thing that\nreaches out further into the future, that will be going on changed\nbeyond recognition. Because of our common language, of our common\ntraditions, Americans are a part of our community, are becoming indeed\nthe larger part of our community of thought and feeling and outlook--in\na sense far more intimate than any link we have with Hindoo or Copt or\nCingalese. A common Englishman has an almost pathetic pride and sense\nof proprietorship in the States; he is fatally ready to fall in with\nthe idea that two nations that share their past, that still, a little\nrestively, share one language, may even contrive to share an infinitely\nmore interesting future. Even if he does not chance to be an American\nnow, his grandson may be. America is his inheritance, his reserved\naccumulating investment. In that sense indeed America belongs to the\nwhole western world; all Europe owns her promise, but to the Englishman\nthe sense of participation is intense. \"_We_ did it,\" he will tell of\nthe most American of achievements, of the settlement of the middle west\nfor example, and this is so far justifiable that numberless men, myself\nincluded, are Englishmen, Australian, New-Zealanders, Canadians,\ninstead of being Americans, by the merest accidents of life. My father\nstill possesses the stout oak box he had had made to emigrate withal,\neverything was arranged that would have got me and my brothers born\nacross the ocean, and only the coincidence of a business opportunity\nand an illness of my mother's, arrested that. It was so near a thing\nas that with me, which prevents my blood from boiling with patriotic\nindignation instead of patriotic solicitude at the frequent sight\nof red-coats as I see them from my study window going to and fro to\nShorncliffe camp.\n\nWell I learn from Professor M\u00fcnsterberg how vain my sense of\nproprietorship is, but still this much of it obstinately remains, that\nI will at any rate _look_ at the American future.\n\nBy the accidents that delayed that box it comes about that if I want\nto see what America is up to, I have among other things to buy a\nBaedeker and a steamer ticket and fill up the inquiring blanks in\nthis remarkable document before me, the long string of questions that\nbegins:--\n\n\"Are you a Polygamist?\"\n\n\"Are you an Anarchist?\"\n\nHere I gather is one little indication of the great will I am going to\nstudy. It would seem that the United States of America regard Anarchy\nand Polygamy with aversion, regard indeed Anarchists and Polygamists as\ncreatures unfit to mingle with the already very various eighty million\nof citizens who constitute their sovereign powers, and on the other\nhand hold these creatures so inflexibly honorable as certainly to tell\nthese damning truths about themselves in this matter....\n\nIt's a little odd. One has a second or so of doubt about the quality of\nthat particular manifestation of will.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nMATERIAL PROGRESS\n\n(_On the \"Carmania\" going Americanward_)\n\n\nI\n\nAmerican Certitudes\n\nWhen one talks to an American of his national purpose he seems a little\nat a loss; if one speaks of his national destiny, he responds with\nalacrity. I make this generalization on the usual narrow foundations,\nbut so the impression comes to me.\n\nUntil this present generation, indeed until within a couple of decades,\nit is not very evident that Americans did envisage any national\npurpose at all, except in so far as there was a certain solicitude\nnot to be cheated out of an assured destiny. A sort of optimistic\nfatalism possessed them. They had, and mostly it seems they still\nhave, a tremendous sense of sustained and assured growth, and it is\nnot altogether untrue that one is told--I have been told--such things\nas that \"America is a great country, sir,\" that its future is gigantic\nand that it is already (and going to be more and more so) the greatest\ncountry on earth.\n\nI am not the sort of Englishman who questions that. I do so regard\nthat much as obvious and true that it seems to me even a little\nundignified, as well as a little overbearing, for Americans to insist\nupon it so; I try to go on as soon as possible to the question just\nhow my interlocutor _shapes_ that gigantic future and what that world\npredominance is finally to do for us in England and all about the\nworld. So far, I must insist, I haven't found anything like an idea. I\nhave looked for it in books, in papers, in speeches and now I am going\nto look for it in America. At the most I have found vague imaginings\nthat correspond to that first or monstrous stage in the scheme of\nprophetic development I sketched in my opening.\n\nThere is often no more than a volley of rhetorical blank-cartridge. So\nempty is it of all but sound that I have usually been constrained by\ncivility from going on to a third enquiry;--\n\n\"And what are you, sir, doing in particular, to assist and enrich this\nmagnificent and quite indefinable Destiny of which you so evidently\nfeel yourself a part?\"...\n\nThat seems to be really no unjust rendering of the conscious\nelement of the American outlook as one finds it, for example, in\nthese nice-looking and pleasant-mannered fellow-passengers upon the\n_Carmania_ upon whom I fasten with leading questions and experimental\nremarks. One exception I discover--a pleasant New York clubman who\nhas doubts of this and that. The discipline and sense of purpose in\nGermany has laid hold upon him. He seems to be, in contrast with his\nfellow-countrymen, almost pessimistically aware that the American\nship of state is after all a mortal ship and liable to leakages.\nThere are certain problems and dangers he seems to think that may\ndelay, perhaps even prevent, an undamaged arrival in that predestined\nport, that port too resplendent for the eye to rest upon; a Chinese\nperil, he thinks has not been finally dealt with, \"race suicide\" is\nnot arrested for all that it is scolded in a most valiant and virile\nmanner, and there are adverse possibilities in the immigrant, in the\nblack, the socialist, against which he sees no guarantee. He sees huge\ndanger in the development and organization of the new finance and no\nclear promise of a remedy. He finds the closest parallel between the\nAmerican Republic and Rome before the coming of Imperialism. But these\nother Americans have no share in his pessimisms. They may confess to\nas much as he does in the way of dangers, admit there are occasions\nfor calking, a need of stopping quite a number of possibilities if the\nAmerican Idea is to make its triumphant entry at last into that port\nof blinding accomplishment, but, apart from a few necessary preventive\nproposals, I do not perceive any extensive sense of anything whatever\nto be done, anything to be shaped and thought out and made in the sense\nof a national determination to a designed and specified end.\n\n\nII\n\nA Symbol of Progress\n\nThere are, one must admit, tremendous justifications for the belief\nin a sort of automatic ascent of American things to unprecedented\nmagnificences, an ascent so automatic that indeed one needn't bother\nin the slightest to keep the whole thing going. For example, consider\nthis, last year's last-word in ocean travel in which I am crossing, the\n_Carmania_ with its unparalleled steadfastness, its racing, tireless\ngreat turbines, its vast population of 3244 souls! It has on the whole\na tremendous effect of having come by fate and its own forces. One\nforgets that any one planned it, much of it indeed has so much the\nquality of moving, as the planets move, in the very nature of things.\nYou go aft and see the wake tailing away across the blue ridges, you\ngo forward and see the cleft water, lift protestingly, roll back in an\nindignant crest, own itself beaten and go pouring by in great foaming\nwaves on either hand, you see nothing, you hear nothing of the toiling\nengines, the reeking stokers, the effort and the stress below; you beat\nwest and west, as the sun does and it might seem with nearly the same\nindependence of any living man's help or opposition. Equally so does\nit seem this great, gleaming, confident thing of power and metal came\ninevitably out of the past and will lead on to still more shining,\nstill swifter and securer monsters in the future.\n\nOne sees in the perspective of history, first the little cockle-shells\nof Columbus, the comings and goings of the precarious Tudor\nadventurers, the slow uncertain shipping of colonial days. Says Sir\nGeorge Trevelyan in the opening of his _American Revolution_, that\nthen--it is still not a century and a half ago!--\n\n \"a man bound for New York, as he sent his luggage on board at Bristol,\n would willingly have compounded for a voyage lasting as many weeks as\n it now lasts days.... Adams, during the height of the war, hurrying to\n France in the finest frigate Congress could place at his disposal ...\n could make not better speed than five and forty days between Boston\n and Bordeaux. Lord Carlisle ... was six weeks between port and port;\n tossed by gales which inflicted on his brother Commissioners agonies\n such as he forbore to make a matter of joke even to George Selwyn....\n How humbler individuals fared.... They would be kept waiting weeks on\n the wrong side of the water for a full complement of passengers and\n weeks more for a fair wind, and then beating across in a badly found\n tub with a cargo of millstones and old iron rolling about below, they\n thought themselves lucky if they came into harbor a month after their\n private store of provisions had run out and carrying a budget of news\n as stale as the ship's provisions.\"\n\nEven in the time of Dickens things were by no measure more than\nhalf-way better. I have with me to enhance my comfort by this aided\nretrospect, his _American Notes_. His crossing lasted eighteen days and\nhis boat was that \"far-famed American steamer,\" the _Britannia_ (the\nfirst of the long succession of Cunarders, of which this _Carmania_ is\nthe latest); his return took fifty days, and was a jovial home-coming\nunder sail. It's the journey out gives us our contrast. He had the\n\"state-room\" of the period and very unhappy he was in it, as he\ntestifies in a characteristically mounting passage.\n\n \"That this state-room had been specially engaged for 'Charles Dickens,\n Esquire, and Lady,' was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared\n intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was\n pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread\n like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this\n was the state-room, concerning which Charles Dickens, Esquire, and\n Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences for at least four months\n preceding; that this could by any possibility be that small snug\n chamber of the imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the\n spirit of prophecy strong upon him, had always foretold would contain\n at least one little sofa, and which his Lady, with a modest and yet\n most magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first\n opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd\n corner out of sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at\n the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or\n forced into a flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly\n preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with,\n those chaste and pretty bowers, sketched in a masterly hand, in\n the highly varnished, lithographic plan, hanging up in the agent's\n counting-house in the City of London: that this room of state, in\n short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of\n the Captain's, invented and put in practice for the better relish and\n enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed: these were\n truths which I really could not bring my mind at all to bear upon or\n comprehend.\"\n\nSo he precludes his two weeks and a half of vile weather in this paddle\nboat of the middle ages (she carried a \"formidable\" multitude of no\nless than eighty-six saloon passengers) and goes on to describe such\nexperiences as this;\n\n \"About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the\n skylights, burst open the doors above, and came raging and roaring\n down into the ladies' cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of\n my wife and a little Scotch lady.... They, and the handmaid before\n mentioned, being in such ecstacies of fear that I scarcely knew what\n to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some restorative\n or comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to me, at the\n moment, than hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumblerful without\n delay. It being impossible to stand or sit without holding on, they\n were all heaped together in one corner of a long sofa--a fixture\n extending entirely across the cabin--where they clung to each other in\n momentary expectation of being drowned. When I approached this place\n with my specific, and was about to administer it with many consolatory\n expressions, to the nearest sufferer, what was my dismay to see\n them all roll slowly down to the other end! and when I staggered to\n that end, and held out the glass once more, how immensely baffled\n were my good intentions by the ship giving another lurch, and their\n rolling back again! I suppose I dodged them up and down this sofa,\n for at least a quarter of an hour, without reaching them once; and\n by the time I did catch them, the brandy-and-water was diminished,\n by constant spilling, to a teaspoonful. To complete the group, it is\n necessary to recognize in this disconcerted dodger, an individual\n very pale from sea-sickness, who had shaved his beard and brushed his\n hair last at Liverpool; and whose only articles of dress (linen not\n included) were a pair of dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket, formerly\n admired upon the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one slipper.\"\n\nIt gives one a momentary sense of superiority to the great master to\nread that. One surveys one's immediate surroundings and compares them\nwith _his_. One says almost patronizingly: \"Poor old Dickens, you know,\nreally did have too awful a time!\" The waves are high now, and getting\nhigher, dark-blue waves foam-crested; the waves haven't altered--except\nrelatively--but one isn't even sea-sick. At the most there are\nsqueamish moments for the weaker brethren. One looks down on these long\nwhite-crested undulations thirty feet or so of rise and fall, as we\nlook down the side of a sky-scraper into a tumult in the street.\n\nWe displace thirty thousand tons of water instead of twelve hundred,\nwe can carry 521 first and second class passengers, a crew of 463, and\n2260 emigrants below....\n\nWe're a city rather than a ship, our funnels go up over the height of\nany reasonable church spire, and you need walk the main-deck from end\nto end and back only four times to do a mile. Any one who has been to\nLondon and seen Trafalgar Square will get our dimensions perfectly,\nwhen he realizes that we should only squeeze into that finest site in\nEurope, diagonally, dwarfing the National Gallery, St. Martin's Church,\nhotels and every other building there out of existence, our funnels\ntowering five feet higher than Nelson on his column. As one looks down\non it all from the boat-deck one has a social microcosm, we could set\nup as a small modern country and renew civilization even if the rest\nof the world was destroyed. We've the plutocracy up here, there is a\nmiddle class on the second-class deck and forward a proletariat--the\n_proles_ much in evidence--complete. It's possible to go slumming\naboard.... We have our daily paper, too, printed aboard, and all the\nlatest news by marconigram....\n\nNever was anything of this sort before, never. Caligula's shipping it\nis true (unless it was Constantine's) did, as Mr. Cecil Torr testifies,\nhold a world record until the nineteenth century and he quotes Pliny\nfor thirteen hundred tons--outdoing the _Britannia_--and Moschion for\ncabins and baths and covered vine-shaded walks and plants in pots.\nBut from 1840 onward, we have broken away into a new scale for life.\nThis _Carmania_ isn't the largest ship nor the finest, nor is it to be\nthe last. Greater ships are to follow and greater. The scale of size,\nthe scale of power, the speed and dimensions of things about us alter\nremorselessly--to some limit we cannot at present descry.\n\n\nIII\n\nIs Progress Inevitable?\n\nIt is the development of such things as this, it is this dramatically\nabbreviated perspective from those pre-Reformation caravels to the\nlarger, larger, larger of the present vessels, one must blame for\none's illusions. One is led unawares to believe that this something\ncalled Progress is a natural and necessary and secular process,\ngoing on without the definite will of man, carrying us on quite\nindependently of us; one is led unawares to forget that it is after\nall from the historical point of view only a sudden universal jolting\nforward in history, an affair of two centuries at most, a process for\nthe continuance of which we have no sort of guarantee. Most western\nEuropeans have this delusion of automatic progress in things badly\nenough, but with Americans it seems to be almost fundamental. It is\ntheir theory of the Cosmos and they no more think of inquiring into\nthe sustaining causes of the progressive movement than they would into\nthe character of the stokers hidden away from us in this great thing\nsomewhere--the officers alone know where.\n\nI am happy to find this blind confidence very well expressed for\nexample in an illustrated magazine article by Mr. Edgar Saltus,\n\"New York from the Flat-iron,\" that a friend has put in my hand to\nprepare me for the wonders to come. Mr. Saltus writes with an eloquent\njoy of his vision of Broadway below, Broadway that is now \"barring\ntrade-routes, the largest commercial stretch on this planet.\" So\nlate as Dickens's visit it was scavenged by roving untended herds of\ngaunt, brown, black-blotched pigs. He writes of lower Fifth Avenue and\nupper Fifth Avenue, of Madison Square and its tower, of sky-scrapers\nand sky-scrapers and sky-scrapers round and about the horizon. (I am\nto have a tremendous view of them to-morrow as we steam up from the\nNarrows.) And thus Mr. Saltus proceeds,--\n\n \"As you lean and gaze from the toppest floors on houses below, which\n from those floors seem huts, it may occur to you that precisely as\n these huts were once regarded as supreme achievements, so, one of\n these days, from other and higher floors, the Flat-iron may seem a hut\n itself. Evolution has not halted. Undiscernibly but indefatigably,\n always it is progressing. Its final term is not existing buildings,\n nor in existing man. If humanity sprang from gorillas, from humanity\n gods shall proceed.\"\n\nThe rule of three in excelsis!\n\n \"The story of Olympus is merely a tale of what might have been. That\n which might have been may yet come to pass. Even now could the old\n divinities, hushed forevermore, awake, they would be perplexed enough\n to see how mortals have exceeded them.... In Fifth Avenue inns they\n could get fairer fare than ambrosia, and behold women beside whom\n Venus herself would look provincial and Juno a frump. The spectacle of\n electricity tamed and domesticated would surprise them not a little,\n the elevated quite as much, the Flat-iron still more. At sight of the\n latter they would recall the Titans with whom once they warred, and\n sink to their sun-red seas outfaced.\n\n \"In this same measure we have succeeded in exceeding them, so will\n posterity surpass what we have done. Evolution may be slow, it\n achieved an unrecognized advance when it devised buildings such as\n this. It is demonstrable that small rooms breed small thoughts. It\n will be demonstrable that, as buildings ascend, so do ideas. It is\n mental progress that sky-scrapers engender. From these parturitions\n gods may really proceed--beings, that is, who, could we remain long\n enough to see them, would regard us as we regard the apes....\"\n\nMr. Saltus writes, I think, with a very typical American accent. Most\nAmericans think like that and all of them I fancy feel like it. Just\nin that spirit a later-empire Roman might have written apropos the\ngigantic new basilica of Constantine the Great (who was also, one\nrecalls, a record-breaker in ship-building) and have compared it with\nthe straitened proportions of C\u00e6sar's Forum and the meagre relics of\nrepublican Rome. So too (_absit omen_) he might have swelled into\nprophecy and sounded the true modern note.\n\nOne hears that modern note everywhere nowadays where print spreads,\nbut from America with fewer undertones than anywhere. Even I find it,\nringing clear, as a thing beyond disputing, as a thing as self-evident\nas sunrise again and again in the expressed thought of Mr. Henry James.\n\nBut you know this progress isn't guaranteed. We have all indeed been\ncarried away completely by the up-rush of it all. To me now this\n_Carmania_ seems to typify the whole thing. What matter it if there\nare moments when one reflects on the mysterious smallness and it\nwould seem the ungrowing quality of the human content of it all? We\nare, after all, astonishingly like flies on a machine that has got\nloose. No matter. Those people on the main-deck are the oddest crowd,\nstrange Oriental-looking figures with Astrakhan caps, hook-noses,\nshifty eyes, and indisputably dirty habits, bold-eyed, red-capped,\nexpectorating women, quaint and amazingly dirty children; Tartars\nthere are too, and Cossacks, queer wraps, queer head-dresses, a sort\nof greasy picturesqueness over them all. They use the handkerchief\nsolely as a head covering. Their deck is disgusting with fragments of\nfood, with egg-shells they haven't had the decency to throw over-board.\nCollectively they have--an atmosphere. They're going where we're going,\nwherever that is. What matters it? What matters it, too, if these\npeople about me in the artistic apartment talk nothing but trivialities\nderived from the _Daily Bulletin_, think nothing but trivialities,\nare, except in the capacity of paying passengers, the most ineffectual\ngathering of human beings conceivable? What matters it that there is\nno connection, no understanding whatever between them and that large\nand ominous crowd a plank or so and a yard or so under our feet? Or\nbetween themselves for the matter of that? What matters it if nobody\nseems to be struck by the fact that we are all, the three thousand two\nhundred of us so extraordinarily got together into this tremendous\nmachine, and that not only does nobody inquire what it is has got us\ntogether in this astonishing fashion and why, but that nobody seems to\nfeel that we are together in any sort of way at all? One looks up at\nthe smoke-pouring funnels and back at the foaming wake. It will be all\nright. Aren't we driving ahead westward at a pace of four hundred and\nfifty miles a day?\n\nAnd twenty or thirty thousand other souls, mixed and stratified, on\ngreat steamers ahead of us, or behind, are driving westward too. That\nthere's no collective mind apparent in it at all, worth speaking about\nis so much the better. That only shows its Destiny, its Progress as\ninevitable as gravitation. I could almost believe it, as I sit quietly\nwriting here by a softly shaded light in this elegantly appointed\ndrawing-room, as steady as though I was in my native habitat on dry\nland instead of hurrying almost fearfully, at twenty knots an hour,\nover a tumbling empty desert of blue waves under a windy sky. But,\nonly a little while ago, I was out forward alone, looking at that.\nEverything was still except for the remote throbbing of the engines and\nthe nearly effaced sound of a man, singing in a strange tongue, that\ncame from the third-class gangway far below. The sky was clear, save\nfor a few black streamers of clouds, Orion hung very light and large\nabove the waters, and a great new moon, still visibly holding its dead\npredecessor in its crescent, sank near him. Between the sparse great\nstars were deep blue spaces, unfathomed distances.\n\nOut there I had been reminded of space and time. Out there the ship was\njust a hastening ephemeral fire-fly that had chanced to happen across\nthe eternal tumult of the winds and sea.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nNEW YORK\n\n(_In a room on the ninth floor in the sky-scraper hotel New York_)\n\n\nI\n\nFirst Impressions\n\nMy first impressions of New York are enormously to enhance the effect\nof this Progress, this material progress, that is to say, as something\ninevitable and inhuman, as a blindly furious energy of growth that\nmust go on. Against the broad and level gray contours of Liverpool one\nfound the ocean liner portentously tall, but here one steams into the\nmiddle of a town that dwarfs the ocean liner. The sky-scrapers that\nare the New-Yorker's perpetual boast and pride rise up to greet one\nas one comes through the Narrows into the Upper Bay, stand out, in a\nclustering group of tall irregular crenellations, the strangest crown\nthat ever a city wore. They have an effect of immense incompleteness;\neach one seems to await some needed terminal,--to be, by virtue of its\nwoolly jets of steam, still as it were in process of eruption. One\nthinks of St. Peter's great blue dome, finished and done as one saw it\nfrom a vine-shaded wine-booth above the Milvian Bridge, one thinks of\nthe sudden ascendency of St. Paul's dark grace, as it soars out over\nany one who comes up by the Thames towards it. These are efforts that\nhave accomplished their ends, and even Paris illuminated under the tall\nstem of the Eiffel Tower looked completed and defined. But New York's\nachievement is a threatening promise, growth going on under a pressure\nthat increases, and amidst a hungry uproar of effort.\n\nOne gets a measure of the quality of this force of mechanical, of\ninhuman, growth as one marks the great statue of Liberty on our\nlarboard, which is meant to dominate and fails absolutely to dominate\nthe scene. It gets to three hundred feet about, by standing on a\npedestal of a hundred and fifty; and the uplifted torch, seen against\nthe sky, suggests an arm straining upward, straining in hopeless\ncompetition with the fierce commercial altitudes ahead. Poor liberating\nLady of the American ideal! One passes her and forgets.\n\nHappy returning natives greet the great pillars of business by name,\nthe St. Paul Building, the World, the Manhattan tower; the English\nnew-comer notes the clear emphasis of the detail, the freedom from\nsmoke and atmospheric mystery that New York gains from burning\nanthracite, the jetting white steam clouds that emphasize that freedom.\nAcross the broad harbor plies an unfamiliar traffic of grotesque broad\nferry-boats, black with people, glutted to the lips with vans and\ncarts, each hooting and yelping its own distinctive note, and there is\na wild hurrying up and down and to and fro of piping and bellowing tugs\nand barges; and a great floating platform, bearing a railway train,\ngets athwart our course as we ascend and evokes megatherial bellowings.\nEverything is moving at a great speed, and whistling and howling, it\nseems, and presently far ahead we make out our own pier, black with\nexpectant people, and set up our own distinctive whoop, and with the\nhelp of half a dozen furiously noisy tugs are finally lugged and butted\ninto dock. The tugs converse by yells and whistles, it is an affair of\nshort-tempered mechanical monsters, amidst which one watches for one's\nopportunity to get ashore.\n\nNoise and human hurry and a vastness of means and collective result,\nrather than any vastness of achievement, is the pervading quality of\nNew York. The great thing is the mechanical thing, the unintentional\nthing which is speeding up all these people, driving them in headlong\nhurry this way and that, exhorting them by the voice of every car\nconductor to \"step lively,\" aggregating them into shoving and elbowing\nmasses, making them stand clinging to straps, jerking them up elevator\nshafts and pouring them on to the ferry-boats. But this accidental\ngreat thing is at times a very great thing. Much more impressive than\nthe sky-scrapers to my mind is the large Brooklyn suspension-bridge.\nI have never troubled to ask who built that; its greatness is not\nin its design, but in the quality of necessity one perceives in its\ninanimate immensity. It _tells_, as one goes under it up the East\nRiver, but it is far more impressive to the stranger to come upon it\nby glimpses, wandering down to it through the ill-paved van-infested\nstreets from Chatham Square. One sees parts of Cyclopean stone arches,\none gets suggestive glimpses through the jungle growth of business now\nof the back, now of the flanks, of the monster; then, as one comes\nout on the river, one discovers far up in one's sky the long sweep of\nthe bridge itself, foreshortened and with a maximum of perspective\neffect; the streams of pedestrians and the long line of carts and\nvans, quaintly microscopic against the blue, the creeping progress of\nthe little cars on the lower edge of the long chain of netting; all\nthese things dwindling indistinguishably before Brooklyn is reached.\nThence, if it is late afternoon, one may walk back to City Hall Park\nand encounter and experience the convergent stream of clerks and\nworkers making for the bridge, mark it grow denser and denser, until\nat last they come near choking even the broad approaches of the giant\nduct, until the congested multitudes jostle and fight for a way.\nThey arrive marching afoot by every street in endless procession;\ncrammed trolley-cars disgorge them; the Subway pours them out.... The\nindividuals count for nothing, they are clerks and stenographers,\nshop-men, shop-girls, workers of innumerable types, black-coated\nmen, hat-and-blouse girls, shabby and cheaply clad persons, such as one\nsees in London, in Berlin, anywhere. Perhaps they hurry more, perhaps\nthey seem more eager. But the distinctive effect is the mass, the black\ntorrent, rippled with unmeaning faces, the great, the unprecedented\nmultitudinousness of the thing, the inhuman force of it all.\n\n[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE]\n\nI made no efforts to present any of my letters, or to find any one to\ntalk to on my first day in New York. I landed, got a casual lunch, and\nwandered alone until New York's peculiar effect of inhuman noise and\npressure and growth became overwhelming, touched me with a sense of\nsolitude, and drove me into the hospitable companionship of the Century\nClub. Oh, no doubt of New York's immensity! The sense of soulless\ngigantic forces, that took no heed of men, became stronger and stronger\nall that day. The pavements were often almost incredibly out of repair,\nwhen I became footweary the street-cars would not wait for me, and I\nhad to learn their stopping-points as best I might. I wandered, just\nat the right pitch of fatigue to get the full force of it into the\neastward region between Third and Fourth Avenue, came upon the Elevated\nrailway at its worst, the darkened streets of disordered paving below,\ntrolley-car-congested, the ugly clumsy lattice, sonorously busy\noverhead, a clatter of vans and draught-horses, and great crowds of\ncheap, base-looking people hurrying uncivilly by....\n\n\nII\n\nThe Coming of White Marble\n\nI corrected that first crowded impression of New York with a clearer,\nbrighter vision of expansiveness when next day I began to realize the\nsocial quality of New York's central backbone, between Fourth Avenue\nand Sixth. The effect remained still that of an immeasurably powerful\nforward movement of rapid eager advance, a process of enlargement and\nincrement in every material sense, but it may be because I was no\nlonger fatigued, was now a little initiated, the human being seemed\nless of a fly upon the wheels. I visited immense and magnificent\nclubs--London has no such splendors as the Union, the University, the\nnew hall of the Harvard--I witnessed the great torrent of spending\nand glittering prosperity in carriage and motor-car pour along Fifth\nAvenue. I became aware of effects that were not only vast and opulent\nbut fine. It grew upon me that the Twentieth Century, which found New\nYork brown-stone of the color of desiccated chocolate, meant to leave\nit a city of white and colored marble. I found myself agape, admiring\na sky-scraper--the prow of the Flat-iron Building, to be particular,\nploughing up through the traffic of Broadway and Fifth Avenue in the\nafternoon light. The New York sundown and twilight seemed to me quite\nglorious things. Down the western streets one gets the sky hung in\nlong cloud-barred strips, like Japanese paintings, celestial tranquil\nyellows and greens and pink luminosity toning down to the reeking\nblue-brown edge of the distant New Jersey atmosphere, and the clear,\nblack, hard activity of crowd and trolley-car and Elevated railroad.\nAgainst this deepening color came the innumerable little lights of the\nhouse cliffs and the street tier above tier. New York is lavish of\nlight, it is lavish of everything, it is full of the sense of spending\nfrom an inexhaustible supply. For a time one is drawn irresistibly into\nthe universal belief in that inexhaustible supply.\n\nAt a bright table in Delmonico's to-day at lunch-time, my host told me\nthe first news of the destruction of the great part of San Francisco\nby earthquake and fire. It had just come through to him, it wasn't\nyet being shouted by the newsboys. He told me compactly of dislocated\nwater-mains, of the ill-luck of the unusual eastward wind that was\nblowing the fire up-town, of a thousand reported dead, of the manifest\ndoom of the greater portion of the city, and presently the shouting\nvoices in the street outside arose to chorus him. He was a newspaper\nman and a little preoccupied because his San Francisco offices were\nburning, and that no further news was arriving after these first\nintimations. Naturally the catastrophe was our topic. But this disaster\ndid not affect him, it does not seem to have affected any one with\na sense of final destruction, with any foreboding of irreparable\ndisaster. Every one is talking of it this afternoon, and no one is in\nthe least degree dismayed. I have talked and listened in two clubs,\nwatched people in cars and in the street, and one man is glad that\nChinatown will be cleared out for good; another's chief solicitude is\nfor Millet's \"Man with the Hoe.\" \"They'll cut it out of the frame,\"\nhe says, a little anxiously. \"Sure.\" But there is no doubt anywhere\nthat San Francisco can be rebuilt, larger, better, and soon. Just as\nthere would be none at all if all this New York that has so obsessed\nme with its limitless bigness was itself a blazing ruin. I believe\nthese people would more than half like the situation. It would give\nthem scope, it would facilitate that conversion into white marble in\nprogress everywhere, it would settle the difficulties of the Elevated\nrailroad and clear out the tangles of lower New York. There is no sense\nof accomplishment and finality in any of these things, the largest,\nthe finest, the tallest, are so obviously no more than symptoms and\npromises of Material Progress, of inhuman material progress that is so\nin the nature of things that no one would regret their passing. That, I\nsay again, is at the first encounter the peculiar American effect that\nbegan directly I stepped aboard the liner, and that rises here to a\ntowering, shining, clamorous climax. The sense of inexhaustible supply,\nof an ultra-human force behind it all, is, for a time, invincible.\n\nOne assumes, with Mr. Saltus, that all America is in this vein, and\nthat this is the way the future must inevitably go. One has a vision\nof bright electrical subways, replacing the filth-diffusing railways of\nto-day, of clean, clear pavements free altogether from the fly-prolific\nfilth of horses coming almost, as it were, of their own accord beneath\nthe feet of a population that no longer expectorates at all; of grimy\nstone and peeling paint giving way everywhere to white marble and\nspotless surfaces, and a shining order, of everything wider, taller,\ncleaner, better....\n\nSo that, in the meanwhile, a certain amount of jostling and hurry and\nuntidiness, and even--to put it mildly--forcefulness may be forgiven.\n\n\nIII\n\nEllis Island\n\nI visited Ellis Island yesterday. It chanced to be a good day for my\npurpose. For the first time in its history this filter of immigrant\nhumanity has this week proved inadequate to the demand upon it. It was\nchoked, and half a score of gravid liners were lying uncomfortably up\nthe harbor, replete with twenty thousand or so of crude Americans from\nIreland and Poland and Italy and Syria and Finland and Albania; men,\nwomen, children, dirt, and bags together.\n\nOf immigration I shall have to write later; what concerns me now is\nchiefly the wholesale and multitudinous quality of that place and its\nwork. I made my way with my introduction along white passages and\nthrough traps and a maze of metal lattices that did for a while succeed\nin catching and imprisoning me, to Commissioner Wachorn, in his quiet,\ngreen-toned office. There, for a time, I sat judicially and heard him\ndeal methodically, swiftly, sympathetically, with case after case, a\nstring of appeals against the sentences of deportation pronounced in\nthe busy little courts below. First would come one dingy and strangely\ngarbed group of wild-eyed aliens, and then another: Roumanian gypsies,\nSouth Italians, Ruthenians, Swedes, each under the intelligent guidance\nof a uniformed interpreter, and a case would be started, a report made\nto Washington, and they would drop out again, hopeful or sullen or\nfearful as the evidence might trend....\n\nDown-stairs we find the courts, and these seen, we traverse long\nrefectories, long aisles of tables, and close-packed dormitories with\nbanks of steel mattresses, tier above tier, and galleries and passages\ninnumerable, perplexing intricacy that slowly grows systematic with the\nCommissioner's explanations.\n\nHere is a huge, gray, untidy waiting-room, like a big railway-depot\nroom, full of a sinister crowd of miserable people, loafing about or\nsitting dejectedly, whom America refuses, and here a second and a third\nsuch chamber each with its tragic and evil-looking crowd that hates\nus, and that even ventures to groan and hiss at us a little for our\nglimpse of its large dirty spectacle of hopeless failure, and here,\nsqualid enough indeed, but still to some degree hopeful, are the\nappeal cases as yet undecided. In one place, at a bank of ranges, works\nan army of men cooks, in another spins the big machinery of the Ellis\nIsland laundry, washing blankets, drying blankets, day in and day out,\na big clean steamy space of hurry and rotation. Then, I recall a neat\napartment lined to the ceiling with little drawers, a card-index of the\nnames and nationalities and significant circumstances of upward of a\nmillion and a half of people who have gone on and who are yet liable to\nrecall.\n\nThe central hall is the key of this impression. All day long, through\nan intricate series of metal pens, the long procession files, step by\nstep, bearing bundles and trunks and boxes, past this examiner and\nthat, past the quick, alert medical officers, the tallymen and the\nclerks. At every point immigrants are being picked out and set aside\nfor further medical examination, for further questions, for the busy\nlittle courts; but the main procession satisfies conditions, passes\non. It is a daily procession that, with a yard of space to each,\nwould stretch over three miles, that any week in the year would more\nthan equal in numbers that daily procession of the unemployed that is\nbecoming a regular feature of the London winter, that in a year could\nput a cordon round London or New York of close-marching people, could\npopulate a new Boston, that in a century--What in a century will it all\namount to?...\n\nOn they go, from this pen to that, pen by pen, towards a desk at a\nlittle metal wicket--the gate of America. Through this metal wicket\ndrips the immigration stream--all day long, every two or three seconds\nan immigrant, with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk and\ngoes on past the well-managed money-changing place, past the carefully\norganized separating ways that go to this railway or that, past the\nguiding, protecting officials--into a new world. The great majority\nare young men and young women, between seventeen and thirty, good,\nyouthful, hopeful, peasant stock. They stand in a long string, waiting\nto go through that wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with\ncheap portmanteaus, with odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone,\nwomen with children, men with strings of dependents, young couples. All\nday that string of human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again;\nall day and every day, constantly replenished, constantly dropping the\nend beads through the wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and the\nhundreds to thousands....\n\nYes, Ellis Island is quietly immense. It gives one a visible image of\none aspect at least of this world-large process of filling and growing\nand synthesis, which is America.\n\n\"Look there!\" said the Commissioner, taking me by the arm and pointing,\nand I saw a monster steamship far away, and already a big bulk\nlooming up the Narrows. \"It's the _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_. She's\ngot--I forget the exact figures, but let us say--eight hundred and\nfifty-three more for us. She'll have to keep them until Friday at the\nearliest. And there's more behind her, and more strung out all across\nthe Atlantic.\"\n\nIn one record day this month 21,000 immigrants came into the port of\nNew York alone; in one week over 50,000. This year the total will be\n1,200,000 souls, pouring in, finding work at once, producing no fall in\nwages. They start digging and building and making. Just think of the\ndimensions of it!\n\n\nIV\n\nTo Fall River\n\nOne must get away from New York to see the place in its proper\nrelations. I visited Staten Island and Jersey City, motored up to\nSleepy Hollow (where once the Headless Horseman rode), saw suburbs\nand intimations of suburbs without end, and finished with the long\nand crowded spectacle of the East River as one sees it from the Fall\nRiver boat. It was Friday night, and the Fall River boat was in a\nstate of fine congestion with Jews, Italians, and week-enders, and one\nstood crowded and surveyed the crowded shore, the sky-scrapers and\ntenement-houses, the huge grain elevators, big warehouses, the great\nBrooklyn Bridge, the still greater Williamsburgh Bridge, the great\npromise of yet another monstrous bridge, overwhelmingly monstrous by\nany European example I know, and so past long miles of city to the\nleft and to the right past the wide Brooklyn navy-yard (where three\nclean white war-ships lay moored), past the clustering castellated\nasylums, hospitals, almshouses and reformatories of Blackwell's long\nshore and Ward's Island, and then through a long reluctant diminuendo\non each receding bank, until, indeed, New York, though it seemed\nincredible, had done.\n\nAnd at one point a grave-voiced man in a peaked cap, with guide-books\nto sell, pleased me greatly by ending all idle talk suddenly with the\nstentorian announcement: \"We are now in Hell Gate. We are now passing\nthrough Hell Gate!\"\n\nBut they've blown Hell Gate open with dynamite, and it wasn't at\nall the Hell Gate that I read about in my boyhood in the delightful\nchronicle of Knickerbocker.\n\nSo through an elbowing evening (to the tune of \"Cavalleria Rusticana\"\non an irrepressible string band) and a night of unmitigated fog-horn\nto Boston, which I had been given to understand was a cultured and\nuneventful city offering great opportunities for reflection and\nintellectual digestion. And, indeed, the large quiet of Beacon Street,\nin the early morning sunshine, seemed to more than justify that\nexpectation....\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nGROWTH INVINCIBLE\n\n\nI\n\nBoston's Way of Growing\n\nBut Boston did not propose that its less-assertive key should be\nmisunderstood, and in a singularly short space of time I found myself\nclimbing into a tremulous impatient motor-car in company with three\nenthusiastic exponents of the work of the Metropolitan Park Commission,\nand provided with a neatly tinted map, large and framed and glazed,\nto explore a fresh and more deliberate phase in this great American\nsymphony, this symphony of Growth.\n\nIf possible it is more impressive, even, than the crowded largeness\nof New York, to trace the serene preparation Boston has made through\nthis Commission to be widely and easily vast. New York's humanity\nhas a curious air of being carried along upon a wave of irresistible\nprosperity, but Boston confesses design. I suppose no city in all the\nworld (unless it be Washington) has ever produced so complete and ample\na forecast of its own future as this Commission's plan of Boston. An\narea with a radius of between fifteen and twenty miles from the State\nHouse has been planned out and prepared for Growth. Great reservations\nof woodland and hill have been made, the banks of nearly all the\nstreams and rivers and meres have been secured for public park and\ngarden, for boating and other water sports; big avenues of vigorous\nyoung trees; a hundred and fifty yards or so wide, with drive-ways\nand ridingways and a central grassy band for electric tramways, have\nbeen prepared, and, indeed, the fair and ample and shady new Boston,\nthe Boston of 1950, grows visibly before one's eyes. I found myself\ncomparing the disciplined confidence of these proposals to the blind\nenlargement of London; London, that like a bowl of viscid human fluid,\nboils sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and slops messily\nand uglily into the home counties. I could not but contrast their large\nintelligence with the confused hesitations and waste and muddle of our\nEnglish suburban developments....\n\nThere were moments, indeed, when it seemed too good to be true, and Mr.\nSylvester Baxter, who was with me and whose faith has done so much to\nsecure this mapping out of a city's growth beyond all precedent, became\nthe victim of my doubts. \"Will this enormous space of sunlit woodland\nand marsh and meadow really be filled at any time?\" I urged. \"All\ncities do not grow. Cities have shrunken.\"\n\nI recalled Bruges. I recalled the empty, goat-sustaining, flower-rich\nmeadows of Rome within the wall. What made him so sure of this\nprogressive magnificence of Boston's growth? My doubts fell on stony\nsoil. My companions seemed to think these scepticisms inopportune, a\nforced eccentricity, like doubting the coming of to-morrow. Of course\nGrowth will go on....\n\nThe subject was changed by the sight of the fine marble buildings of\nthe Harvard medical school, a shining fa\u00e7ade partially eclipsed by\nseveral dingy and unsightly wooden houses.\n\n\"These shanties will go, of course,\" says one of my companions. \"It's\nproposed to take the avenue right across this space straight to the\nschools.\"\n\n\"You'll have to fill the marsh, then, and buy the houses.\"\n\n\"Sure.\"...\n\nI find myself comparing this huge growth process of America with\nthe things in my own land. After all, this growth is no distinctive\nAmerican thing; it is the same process anywhere--only in America there\nare no disguises, no complications. Come to think of it, Birmingham and\nManchester are as new as Boston--newer; and London, south and east of\nthe Thames, is, save for a little nucleus, more recent than Chicago--is\nin places, I am told, with its smoky disorder, its clattering ways, its\nbrutality of industrial conflict, very like Chicago. But nowhere now is\ngrowth still so certainly and confidently _going on_ as here. Nowhere\nis it upon so great a scale as here, and with so confident an outlook\ntowards the things to come. And nowhere is it passing more certainly\nfrom the first phase of a mob-like rush of individualistic undertakings\ninto a planned and ordered progress.\n\n\nII\n\nThe End of Niagara\n\nEverywhere in the America I have seen the same note sounds, the note of\na fatal gigantic economic development, of large prevision and enormous\npressures.\n\nI heard it clear above the roar of Niagara--for, after all, I stopped\noff at Niagara.\n\nAs a water-fall, Niagara's claim to distinction is now mainly\nquantitative; its spectacular effect, its magnificent and humbling size\nand splendor, were long since destroyed beyond recovery by the hotels,\nthe factories, the power-houses, the bridges and tramways and hoardings\nthat arose about it. It must have been a fine thing to happen upon\nsuddenly after a day of solitary travel; the Indians, they say, gave it\nworship; but it's no great wonder to reach it by trolley-car, through\na street hack-infested and full of adventurous refreshment-places and\nsouvenir-shops and the touting guides. There were great quantities of\nyoung couples and other sightseers with the usual encumbrances of wrap\nand bag and umbrella, trailing out across the bridges and along the\nneat paths of the Reservation Parks, asking the way to this point and\nthat. Notice boards cut the eye, offering extra joys and memorable\nobjects for twenty-five and fifty cents, and it was proposed you should\nkeep off the grass.\n\nAfter all, the gorge of Niagara is very like any good gorge in the\nArdennes, except that it has more water; it's about as wide and about\nas deep, and there is no effect at all that one has not seen a dozen\ntimes in other cascades. One gets all the water one wants at Tivoli,\none has gone behind half a hundred downpours just as impressive in\nSwitzerland; a hundred tons of water is really just as stunning as ten\nmillion. A hundred tons of water stuns one altogether, and what more\ndo you want? One recalls \"Orridos\" and \"Schluchts\" that are not only\nmagnificent but lonely.\n\nNo doubt the Falls, seen from the Canadian side, have a peculiar long\nmajesty of effect; but the finest thing in it all, to my mind, was not\nNiagara at all, but to look up-stream from Goat Island and see the\nsea-wide crest of the flashing sunlit rapids against the gray-blue sky.\nThat was like a limitless ocean pouring down a sloping world towards\none, and I lingered, held by that, returning to it through an indolent\nafternoon. It gripped the imagination as nothing else there seemed to\ndo. It was so broad an infinitude of splash and hurry. And, moreover,\nall the enterprising hotels and expectant trippers were out of sight.\n\nThat was the best of the display. The real interest of Niagara for me,\nwas not in the water-fall but in the human accumulations about it. They\nstood for the future, threats and promises, and the water-fall was\njust a vast reiteration of falling water. The note of growth in human\naccomplishment rose clear and triumphant above the elemental thunder.\n\nFor the most part these accumulations of human effort about Niagara\nare extremely defiling and ugly. Nothing--not even the hotel signs and\nadvertisement boards--could be more offensive to the eye and mind than\nthe Schoellkopf Company's untidy confusion of sheds and buildings on\nthe American side, wastefully squirting out long, tail-race cascades\nbelow the bridge, and nothing more disgusting than the sewer-pipes\nand gas-work ooze that the town of Niagara Falls contributes to the\nscenery. But, after all, these represent only the first slovenly\nonslaught of mankind's expansion, the pioneers' camp of the\nhuman-growth process that already changes its quality and manner. There\nare finer things than these outrages to be found.\n\nThe dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company, for\nexample, impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the\nWinds; are, indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than that\naccidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made\nvisible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are\nclean, noiseless, and starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of\nthe early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no\ncoal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel-pit into which one descends has an\nalmost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are\naltogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters,\ngreat sleeping tops that engender irresistible forces in their\nsleep. They sprang, armed like Minerva, from serene and speculative,\nforeseeing and endeavoring brains. First was the word and then these\npowers. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the\ndynamos. There is no clangor, no racket. Yet the outer rim of the big\ngenerators is spinning at the pace of a hundred thousand miles an hour;\nthe dazzling clean switch-board, with its little handles and levers,\nis the seat of empire over more power than the strength of a million\ndisciplined, unquestioning men. All these great things are as silent,\nas wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and\nstronger than that....\n\nWhen I thought that these two huge wheel-pits of this company are\nthemselves but a little intimation of what can be done in this way,\nwhat will be done in this way, my imagination towered above me. I fell\ninto a day-dream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be\nused by them....\n\nFor surely the greatness of life is still to come, it is not in such\naccidents as mountains or the sea. I have seen the splendor of the\nmountains, sunrise and sunset among them, and the waste immensity of\nsky and sea. I am not blind because I can see beyond these glories. To\nme no other thing is credible than that all the natural beauty in the\nworld is only so much material for the imagination and the mind, so\nmany hints and suggestions for art and creation. Whatever is, is but\nthe lure and symbol towards what can be willed and done. Man lives to\nmake--in the end he must make, for there will be nothing else left for\nhim to do.\n\nAnd the world he will make--after a thousand years or so!\n\nI, at least, can forgive the loss of all the accidental, unmeaning\nbeauty that is going for the sake of the beauty of fine order and\nintention that will come. I believe--passionately, as a doubting lover\nbelieves in his mistress--in the future of mankind. And so to me it\nseems altogether well that all the froth and hurry of Niagara at last,\nall of it, dying into hungry canals of intake, should rise again in\nlight and power, in ordered and equipped and proud and beautiful\nhumanity, in cities and palaces and the emancipated souls and hearts of\nmen....\n\nI turned back to look at the power-house as I walked towards the Falls,\nand halted and stared. Its architecture brought me out of my day-dream\nto the quality of contemporary things again. It's a well-intentioned\nbuilding enough, extraordinarily well intentioned, and regardless of\nexpense. It's in granite and by Stanford White, and yet--It hasn't\ncaught the note. There's a touch of respectability in it, more than a\nhint of the box of bricks. Odd, but I'd almost as soon have had one of\nthe Schoellkopf sheds.\n\nA community that can produce such things as those turbines and dynamos,\nand then cover them over with this dull exterior, is capable, one\nrealizes, of feats of bathos. One feels that all the power that throbs\nin the copper cables below may end at last in turning Great Wheels for\nexcursionists, stamping out aluminum \"fancy\" ware, and illuminating\nnight advertisements for drug shops and music halls. I had an afternoon\nof busy doubts....\n\nThere is much discussion about Niagara at present. It may be some\nqueer compromise, based on the pretence that a voluminous water-fall\nis necessarily a thing of incredible beauty, and a human use is\nnecessarily a degrading use, will \"save\" Niagara and the hack-drivers\nand the souvenir-shops for series of years yet, \"a magnificent monument\nto the pride of the United States in a glory of nature,\" as one\njournalistic savior puts it. It is, as public opinion stands, a quite\nconceivable thing. This electric development may be stopped after\nall, and the huge fall of water remain surrounded by gravel paths\nand parapets and geranium-beds, a staring-point for dull wonder, a\ncrown for a day's excursion, a thunderous impressive accessory to\nthe vulgar love-making that fills the surrounding hotels, a Titanic\nimbecility of wasted gifts. But I don't think so. I think somebody will\npay something, and the journalistic zeal for scenery abate. I think\nthe huge social and industrial process of America will win in this\nconflict, and at last capture Niagara altogether.\n\nAnd then--what use will it make of its prey?\n\n\nIII\n\nThe Tail of Chicago\n\nIn smoky, vast, undisciplined Chicago Growth forced itself upon me\nagain as the dominant American fact, but this time a dark disorder of\ngrowth. I went about Chicago seeing many things of which I may say\nsomething later. I visited the top of the Masonic Building and viewed\na wilderness of sky-scrapers. I acquired a felt of memories of swing\nbridges and viaducts and interlacing railways and jostling crowds and\nextraordinarily dirty streets, I learnt something of the mystery of the\n\"floating foundations\" upon which so much of Chicago rests. But I got\nmy best vision of Chicago as I left it.\n\nI sat in the open observation-car at the end of the Pennsylvania\nLimited Express, and watched the long defile of industrialism from the\nUnion Station in the heart of things to out beyond South Chicago,\na dozen miles away. I had not gone to the bloody spectacle of the\nstock-yards that \"feed the world,\" because, to be frank, I have an\nimmense repugnance to the killing of fixed and helpless animals; I saw\nnothing of those ill-managed, ill-inspected establishments, though I\nsmelt the unwholesome reek from them ever and again, and so it was\nhere I saw for the first time the enormous expanse and intricacy of\nrailroads that net this great industrial desolation, and something of\nthe going and coming of the myriads of polyglot workers. Chicago burns\nbituminous coal, it has a reek that outdoes London, and right and\nleft of the line rise vast chimneys, huge blackened grain-elevators,\nflame-crowned furnaces and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings,\nmonstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots littered with rusty\ncans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are\ngroups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses.\n\nWe swept along the many-railed track, and the straws and scraps of\npaper danced in our eddy as we passed. We overtook local trains and\nthey receded slowly in the great perspective, huge freight-trains met\nus or were overtaken; long trains of doomed cattle passed northward;\nsolitary engines went by--every engine tolling a melancholy bell; open\ntrucks crowded with workmen went cityward. By the side of the track,\nand over the level crossings, walked great numbers of people. So it\ngoes on mile after mile--Chicago. The sun was now bright, now pallid\nthrough some streaming curtain of smoke; the spring afternoon was lit\nhere and again by the gallant struggle of some stunted tree with a rare\nand startling note of new green....\n\nIt was like a prolonged, enlarged mingling of the south side of\nLondon with all that is bleak and ugly in the Black Country. It is\nthe most perfect presentation of nineteenth-century individualistic\nindustrialism I have ever seen--in its vast, its magnificent squalor;\nit is pure nineteenth century; it had no past at all before that; in\n1800 it was empty prairie, and one marvels for its future. It is indeed\na nineteenth-century nightmare that culminates beyond South Chicago in\nthe monstrous fungoid shapes, the endless smoking chimneys, the squat\nretorts, the black smoke pall of the Standard Oil Company. For a time\nthe sun is veiled altogether by that....\n\nAnd then suddenly Chicago is a dark smear under the sky, and we are in\nthe large emptiness of America, the other America--America in between.\n\n\nIV\n\nIntimations of Order\n\n\"Undisciplined\"--that is the word for Chicago. It is the word for\nall the progress of the Victorian time, a scrambling, ill-mannered,\nundignified, unintelligent development of material resources.\nPackingtown, for example, is a place that feeds the world with meat,\nthat concentrates the produce of a splendid countryside at a position\nof imperial advantage, and its owners have no more sense, no better\nmoral quality, than to make it stink in the nostrils of any one who\ncomes within two miles of it; to make it a centre of distribution for\ndisease and decay, an arena of shabby evasions and extra profits; a\nscene of brutal economic conflict and squalid filthiness, offensive\nto every sense. (I wish I could catch the soul of Herbert Spencer and\ntether it in Chicago for awhile to gather fresh evidence upon the\nsuperiority of unfettered individualistic enterprises to things managed\nby the state.)\n\nWant of discipline! Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline! The\nreek and scandal of the stock-yards is really only a gigantic form\nof that same quality in American life that, in a minor aspect, makes\nthe sidewalk filthy. The key to the peculiar nasty ugliness of those\nSchoellkopf works that defile the Niagara gorge is the same quality.\nThe detestableness of the Elevated railroads of Chicago and Boston\nand New York have this in common. All that is ugly in America, in\nLancashire, in South and East London, in the Pas de Calais, is due\nto this, to the shoving unintelligent proceedings of underbred and\nmorally obtuse men. Each man is for himself, each enterprise; there is\nno order, no prevision, no common and universal plan. Modern economic\norganization is still as yet only thinking of emerging from its\nfirst chaotic stage, the stage of lawless enterprise and insanitary\naggregation, the stage of the prospector's camp....\n\nBut it does emerge.\n\nMen are makers--American men, I think, more than most men--and amidst\neven the catastrophic jumble of Chicago one finds the same creative\nforces at work that are struggling to replan a greater Boston, and that\nturned a waste of dumps and swamps and cabbage-gardens into Central\nPark, New York. Chicago also has its Parks Commission and its green\navenues, its bright flower-gardens, its lakes and playing-fields. Its\nMidway Plaisance is in amazing contrast with the dirt, the congestion,\nthe moral disorder of its State Street; its Field Houses do visible\nbattle with slum and the frantic meanness of commercial folly.\n\nField Houses are peculiar to Chicago, and Chicago has every reason\nto be proud of them. I visited one that is positively within smell\nof the stock-yards and wedged into a district of gaunt and dirty\nslums. It stands in the midst of a little park, and close by it are\nthree playing-grounds with swings and parallel bars and all manner of\nathletic appliances, one for little children, one for girls and women,\nand one for boys and youths. In the children's place is a paddling-pond\nof clear, clean, running water and a shaded area of frequently\nchanged sand, and in the park was a broad asphalted arena that can be\nflooded for skating in winter. All this is free to all comers, and\nfree too is the Field House itself. This is a large, cool Italianate\nplace with two or three reading-rooms--one specially arranged for\nchildren--a big discussion-hall, a big and well-equipped gymnasium, and\nbig, free baths for men and for women. There is also a clean, bright\nrefreshment-place where wholesome food is sold just above cost price.\nIt was early on Friday afternoon when I saw it all, but the place was\nbusy with children, reading, bathing, playing in a hundred different\nways.\n\n[Illustration: STATE STREET, CHICAGO]\n\nAnd this Field House is not an isolated philanthropic enterprise. It\nis just one of a number that are dotted about Chicago, mitigating and\ncivilizing its squalor. It was not distilled by begging and charity\nfrom the stench of the stock-yards or the reek of Standard Oil. It\nis part of the normal work of a special taxing body created by the\nlegislature of the State of Illinois. It is just one of the fruits upon\none of the growths that spring from such persistent creative efforts\nas that of the Chicago City Club. It is socialism--even as its enemies\ndeclare....\n\nEven amidst the sombre uncleanliness of Chicago one sees the light of\na new epoch, the coming of new conceptions, of foresight, of large\ncollective plans and discipline to achieve them, the fresh green\nleaves, among all the festering manure, of the giant growths of a more\norderly and more beautiful age.\n\n\nV\n\nThe Pennsylvania Limited\n\nThese growing towns, these giant towns that grow up and out, that grow\norderly and splendid out of their first chaotic beginnings, are only\nlittle patches upon a vast expanse, upon what is still of all habitable\ncountries the emptiest country in the world. My long express journey\nfrom Chicago to Washington lasted a day and a night and more, I could\nget sooner from my home in Kent to Italy, and yet that was still well\nunder a third of the way across the continent. I spent most of my\ndaylight time in the fine and graceful open loggia at the end of the\nobservation-car or in looking out of the windows, looking at hills and\nvalleys, townships and quiet places, sudden busy industrial outbreaks\nabout coal-mine or metal, big undisciplined rivers that spread into\nswamp and lake, new forest growths, very bright and green now, foaming\nup above blackened stumps. There were many cypress-trees and trees with\nwhite blossom and the Judas-tree, very abundant among the spring-time\ngreen. I got still more clearly the enormous scale of this American\ndestiny I seek to discuss, through all that long and interesting day of\ntransit. I measured, as it seemed to me for the first time, the real\nscale of the growth process that has put a four-track road nine hundred\nmiles across this exuberant land and scarred every available hill with\nfurnace and mine.\n\nBigness--that's the word! The very fields and farm-buildings seem to me\nto have four times the size of our English farms.\n\nSome casual suggestion of the wayside, I forget now what, set me\nthinking of the former days, so recent that they are yet within the\nlifetime of living men, when this was frontier land, when even the\nmiddle west remained to be won. I thought of the slow diffusing\npopulation of the forties, the pioneer wagon, the men armed with axe\nand rifle, knife and revolver, the fear of the Indians, the weak and\ncasual incidence of law. Then the high-road was but a prairie track and\nall these hills and hidden minerals unconquered fastnesses that might,\nit seemed, hold out for centuries before they gave their treasure. How\nquickly things had come! \"Progress, progress,\" murmured the wheels,\nand I began to make this steady, swift, and shiningly equipped train a\nfigure, just as I had made the _Carmania_ a figure of that big onward\nsweep that is moving us all together. It was not a noisy train, after\nthe English fashion, nor did the cars sway and jump after the habit of\nour lighter coaches, but the air was full of deep, triumphant rhythms.\n\"It goes on,\" I said, \"invincibly,\" and even as the thought was in my\nhead, the brakes set up a droning, a vibration ran through the train\nand we slowed and stopped. A minute passed, and then we rumbled softly\nback to a little trestle-bridge and stood there.\n\nI got up, looked from the window, and then went to the platform at the\nend of the train. I found two men, a passenger and a colored parlor-car\nattendant. The former was on the bottom step of the car, the latter was\nsupplying him with information.\n\n\"His head's still in the water,\" he remarked.\n\n\"Whose head?\" said I.\n\n\"A man we've killed,\" said he. \"We caught him in the trestle-bridge.\"\n\nI descended a step, craned over my fellow-passenger, and saw a little\ngroup standing curiously about the derelict thing that had been a\nliving man three minutes before. It was now a crumpled, dark-stained\nblue blouse, a limply broken arm with hand askew, trousered legs that\nsprawled quaintly, and a pair of heavy boots, lying in the sunlit fresh\ngrass by the water below the trestle-bridge....\n\nA man on the line gave inadequate explanations. \"He'd have been all\nright if he hadn't come over this side,\" he said.\n\n\"Who was he?\" said I.\n\n\"One of these Eyetalians on the line,\" he said, and turned away. The\ntrain bristled now with a bunch of curiosity at every car end, and even\nwindows were opened....\n\nPresently it was intimated to us by a whistle and the hasty return of\nmen to the cars that the incident had closed. We began to move forward\nagain, crept up to speed....\n\nBut I could not go on with my conception of the train as a symbol of\nhuman advancement. That crumpled blue blouse and queerly careless legs\nwould get into the picture and set up all sorts of alien speculations.\nI thought of distant north Italian valleys and brown boys among the\nvines and goats, of the immigrants who had sung remotely to me out of\nthe Carmania's steerage, of the hopeful bright-eyed procession of the\nnew-comers through Ellis Island wicket, of the regiments of workers the\nline had shown me, and I told myself a tale of this Italian's journey\nto the land of promise, this land of gigantic promises....\n\nFor a time the big spectacle of America about me took on a quality of\nmagnificent infidelity....\n\nAnd by reason of this incident my last Image of Material Progress\nthundered into Washington station five minutes behind its scheduled\ntime.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nTHE ECONOMIC PROCESS\n\n\nI\n\nA Bird's-Eye View\n\nLet me try now and make some sort of general picture of the American\nnation as it impresses itself upon me. It is, you will understand, the\nvision of a hurried bird of passage, defective and inaccurate at every\npoint of detail, but perhaps for my present purpose not so very much\nthe worse for that. The fact that I am transitory and bring a sort of\ntheorizing na\u00efvet\u00e9 to this review is just what gives me the chance\nto remark these obvious things the habituated have forgotten. I have\nalready tried to render something of the effect of huge unrestrained\ngrowth and material progress that America first gives one, and I\nhave pointed out that so far America seems to me only to refresh an\nold impression, to give starkly and startlingly what is going on\neverywhere, what is indeed as much in evidence in Birkenhead or Milan\nor London or Calcutta, a huge extension of human power and the scale\nof human operations. This growth was elaborated in the physical and\nchemical laboratories and the industrial experiments of the eighteenth\nand early nineteenth century, and chiefly in Europe. The extension\nitself is nothing typically American. Nevertheless America now shows\nit best. America is most under the stress and urgency of it, resonates\nmost readily and loudly to its note.\n\nThe long distances of travel, and the sense of isolation between place\nand place, the remoteness verging upon inaudibility of Washington in\nChicago, of Chicago in Boston, the vision I have had of America from\nobservation cars and railroad windows brings home to me more and more\nthat this huge development of human appliances and resources is here\ngoing on in a community that is still, for all the dense crowds of\nNew York, the teeming congestion of the East Side, extraordinarily\nscattered. America, one recalls, is still an unoccupied country, across\nwhich the latest developments of civilization are rushing. We are\ndealing here with a continuous area of land which is, leaving Alaska\nout of account altogether, equal to Great Britain, France, the German\nEmpire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Holland,\nSpain and Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in Europe, Egypt and\nthe whole Empire of India, and the population spread out over this\nvast space is still less than the joint population of the first two\ncountries named and not a quarter that of India. Moreover, it is not\nspread at all evenly. Much of it is in undistributed clots. It is not\nupon the soil, barely half of it is in holdings and homes and authentic\ncommunities. It is a population of an extremely modern type. Urban\nconcentration has already gone far with it; fifteen millions of it are\ncrowded into and about twenty great cities, other eighteen millions\nmake up five hundred towns. Between these centres of population run\nrailways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections, tracks of\nvarious sorts, but to the European eye these are mere scratchings on\na virgin surface. An empty wilderness manifests itself through this\nthin network of human conveniences, appears in the meshes even at the\nrailroad side. Essentially America is still an unsettled land, with\nonly a few incidental good roads in favored places, with no universal\npolice, with no wayside inns where a civilized man may rest, with\nstill only the crudest of rural postal deliveries, with long stretches\nof swamp and forest and desert by the track side, still unassailed\nby industry. This much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago.\nWestward, I am told, it becomes more and more the fact. In Idaho at\nlast, comes the untouched and perhaps invincible desert, plain and\ncontinuous through the long hours of travel. Huge areas do not contain\none human being to the square mile, still vaster portions fall short of\ntwo....\n\nAnd this community, to which material progress is bringing such\nenormous powers, and that is knotted so densely here and there, and\nis otherwise so attenuated a veil over the huge land surface, is,\nas Professor M\u00fcnsterberg points out, in spite of vast and increasing\nmasses of immigrants still a curiously homogeneous one, homogeneous\nin the spirit of its activities and speaking a common tongue. It is\nsustained by certain economic conventions, inspired throughout by\ncertain habits, certain trends of suggestion, certain phrases and\ncertain interpretations that collectively make up what one may call the\nAmerican Idea. To the process of enlargement and diffusion and increase\nand multiplying resources, we must now bring the consideration of the\nsocial and economic process that is going on. What is the form of that\nprocess as one finds it in America? An English Tory will tell you\npromptly, \"a scramble for dollars.\" A good American will tell you it is\nself realization under equality of opportunity. The English Tory will\nprobably allege that that amounts to the same thing.\n\nLet us look into that.\n\n\nII\n\nLiberty of Property\n\nOne contrast between America and the old world I had in mind before\never I crossed the Atlantic, and now it comes before me very\nvividly,--returns reinforced by a hundred little things observed and\nfelt. The contrast consists in the almost complete absence from the\nnormal American scheme, of certain immemorial factors in the social\nstructure of our European nations.\n\nIn the first place, every European nation except the English is rooted\nto the soil by a peasantry, and even in England one still finds\nthe peasant represented, in most of his features by those sons of\ndispossessed serf-peasants, the agricultural laborers. Here in America,\nexcept in the regions where the negro abounds, there is no lower\nstratum, no \"soil people,\" to this community at all; your bottom-most\nman is a mobile free man who can read, and who has ideas above digging\nand pigs and poultry keeping, except incidentally for his own ends.\nNo one owns to subordination. As a consequence, any position which\ninvolves the acknowledgment of an innate inferiority is difficult to\nfill; there is, from the European point of view, an extraordinary\ndearth of servants, and this endures in spite of a great peasant\nimmigration. The servile tradition will not root here now, it dies in\nthis soil. An enormous importation of European serfs and peasants goes\non, but as they touch this soil their backs begin to stiffen with a new\nassertion.\n\nAnd at the other end of the scale, also, one misses an element. There\nis no territorial aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne,\nno legitimate and acknowledged representative of that upper social\nstructure of leisure, power, State responsibility, which in the old\nEuropean theory of society was supposed to give significance to the\nwhole. The American community, one cannot too clearly insist, does not\ncorrespond to an entire European community at all, but only to the\nmiddle masses of it, to the trading and manufacturing class between the\ndimensions of the magnate and the clerk and skilled artisan. It is the\ncentral part of the European organism without either the dreaming head\nor the subjugated feet. Even the highly feudal slave-holding \"county\nfamily\" traditions of Virginia and the South pass now out of memory.\nSo that in a very real sense the past of this American community is in\nEurope, and the settled order of the past is left behind there. This\ncommunity was, as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of its branches\nand brought hither. It began neither serf nor lord, but burgher and\nfarmer, it followed the normal development of the middle class under\nProgress everywhere and became capitalistic. Essentially America is\na middle-class become a community and so its essential problems are\nthe problems of a modern individualistic society, stark and clear,\nunhampered and unilluminated by any feudal traditions either at its\ncrest or at its base.\n\nIt would be interesting and at first only very slightly misleading to\npursue the rough contrast of American and English conditions upon these\nlines. It is not difficult to show for example, that the two great\npolitical parties in America represent only one English party, the\nmiddle-class Liberal party, the party of industrialism and freedom.\nThere are no Tories to represent the feudal system, and no Labor party.\nIt is history, it is no mere ingenious gloss upon history, that the\nTories, the party of the crown, of the high gentry and control, of\nmitigated property and an organic state, vanished from America at the\nRevolution. They left the new world to the Whigs and Nonconformists and\nto those less constructive, less logical, more popular and liberating\nthinkers who became Radicals in England, and Jeffersonians and then\nDemocrats in America. All Americans are, from the English point of\nview, Liberals of one sort or another. You will find a fac-simile\nof the Declaration of Independence displayed conspicuously and\ntriumphantly beside Magna Charter in the London Reform Club, to carry\nout this suggestion.\n\nBut these fascinating parallelisms will lead away from the chief\nargument in hand, which is that the Americans started almost clear\nof the medieval heritage, and developed in the utmost--purity if you\nlike--or simplicity or crudeness, whichever you will, the modern type\nof productive social organization. They took the economic conventions\nthat were modern and progressive at the end of the eighteenth century\nand stamped them into the Constitution as if they meant to stamp\nthem there for all time. In England you can still find feudalism,\nmedievalism, the Renascence, at every turn. America is pure eighteenth\ncentury--still crystallizing out from a turbid and troubled solution.\n\nTo turn from any European state to America is, in these matters anyhow,\nto turn from complication to a stark simplicity. The relationship\nbetween employer and employed, between organizer and worker, between\ncapital and labor, which in England is qualified and mellowed and\ndisguised and entangled with a thousand traditional attitudes and\nsubordinations, stands out sharply in a bleak cold rationalism. There\nis no feeling that property, privilege, honor, and a grave liability\nto official public service ought to go together, none that uncritical\nobedience is a virtue in a worker or that subordination carries with\nit not only a sense of service but a claim for help. Coming across the\nAtlantic has in these matters an effect of coming out of an iridescent\nfog into a clear bright air.\n\nThis homologization of the whole American social mass, not with the\nwhole English social mass, but with its \"modern\" classes, its great\nmiddle portion, and of its political sides with the two ingredients of\nEnglish Liberalism, goes further than a rough parallel. An Englishman\nwho, like myself, has been bred and who has lived all his life either\nin London, with its predominant West-End, or the southern counties with\ntheir fair large estates and the great country houses, is constantly\nbeing reminded, when he meets manufacturing and business men from\nBirmingham or Lancashire, of Americans, and when he meets Americans,\nof industrial North-country people. There is more push and less tacit\nassumption, more definition, more displayed energy and less restraint,\nmore action and less subtlety, more enterprise and self-assertion than\nthere is in the typical Englishman of London and the home counties.\nThe American carries on the contrast further, it is true, and his\nspeech is not northernly, but marked by the accent of Hampshire or\nEast Anglia, and better and clearer than his English equivalent's;\nbut one feels the two are of the same stuff, nevertheless, and made\nby parallel conditions. The liberalism of the eighteenth century, the\nmaterial progress of the nineteenth have made them both--out of the\nundifferentiated Stuart Englishman. And they are the same in their\nattitude towards property and social duty, individualists to the\nmarrow. But the one grew inside a frame of regal, aristocratic, and\nfeudal institutions, and has chafed against it, struggled with it,\nmodified it, strained it, and been modified by it, but has remained\nwithin it; the other broke it and escaped to complete self-development.\n\nThe liberalism of the eighteenth century was essentially the rebellion\nof the modern industrial organization against the monarchial and\naristocratic State,--against hereditary privilege, against restrictions\nupon bargains--whether they were hard bargains or not. Its spirit\nwas essentially Anarchistic,--the antithesis of Socialism. It was\nthe anti-State. It aimed not only to liberate men but property from\nState control. Its most typical expressions, the Declaration of\nIndependence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, are\nzealously emphatic for the latter interest--for the sacredness of\ncontracts and possessions. Post Reformation liberalism did to a large\nextent let loose property upon mankind. The English Civil War of the\nseventeenth century, like the American revolution of the eighteenth,\nembodied essentially the triumphant refusal of private property to\nsubmit to taxation without consent. In England the result was tempered\nand qualified, security for private property was achieved, but not\ncast-iron security; each man who had property became king of that\nproperty, but only a constitutional and conditional king. In America\nthe victory of private property was complete. Let one instance suffice\nto show how decisively it was established that individual property\nand credit and money were sacred. Ten years ago the Supreme Court,\ntrying a case arising out of the General Revenue tax of 1894, decided\nthat a graduated income-tax, such as the English Parliament might pass\nto-morrow, can never be levied upon the United States nation without\na change in the Constitution, which can be effected only by a vote of\ntwo-thirds of both Houses of Congress as an initiative, and this must\nbe ratified either by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States,\nor by special conventions representing three-fourths of the States.\nThe fundamental law of the States forbids any such invasion of the\nindividual's ownership. No national income-tax is legal, and there is\npractically no power, short of revolution, to alter that....\n\nCould anything be more emphatic? That tall Liberty with its spiky crown\nthat stands in New York Harbor and casts an electric flare upon the\nworld, is, indeed, the liberty of Property, and there she stands at the\nZenith....\n\n\nIII\n\nAggregation and Some Protests\n\nNow the middle-class of the English population and the whole population\nof America that matters at all when we discuss ideas, is essentially\nan emancipated class, a class that has rebelled against superimposed\nprivilege and honor, and achieved freedom for its individuals and\ntheir property. Without property its freedom is a featureless and\nunsubstantial theory, and so it relies for the reality of life upon\nthat, upon the possession and acquisition and development of property,\nthat is to say upon \"business.\" That is the quality of its life.\n\nEverywhere in the modern industrial and commercial class this\ndeep-lying feeling that the State is something escaped from, has\nworked out to the same mental habit of social irresponsibility, and in\nAmerica it has worked unimpeded. Patriotism has become a mere national\nself-assertion, a sentimentality of flag cheering, with no constructive\nduties. Law, social justice, the pride and preservation of the state\nas a whole are taken as provided for before the game began, and one\ndevotes one-self to business. At business all men are held to be equal,\nand none is his brother's keeper.\n\nAll men are equal at the great game of business. You try for the best\nof each bargain and so does your opponent; if you chance to have more\nin your hand than he--well, that's your advantage, and you use it.\nPresently he may have more than you. You take care he doesn't if you\ncan, but you play fair--except for the advantage in your hand; you play\nfair--and hard.\n\nNow this middle-class equality ultimately destroys itself. Out of this\nconflict of equals, and by virtue of the fact that property, like all\nsorts of matter, does tend to gravitate towards itself whenever it is\nfree, there emerge the modern rich and the modern toiler.\n\nOne can trace the process in two or three generations in Lancashire or\nthe Potteries, or any industrial region of England. One sees first the\nearly Lancashire industrialism, sees a district of cotton-spinners more\nor less equal together, small men all; then come developments, comes\na state of ideally free competition with some men growing large, with\nmost men dropping into employment, but still with ample chances for an\nindustrious young man to end as a prosperous master; and so through a\nsteady growth in the size of the organization to the present opposition\nof an employer class in possession of everything, almost inaccessibly\nabove, and an employed class below. The railways come, and the wealthy\nclass reaches out to master these new enterprises, capitalistic from\nthe outset....\n\nAmerica is simply repeating the history of the Lancashire industrialism\non a gigantic scale, and under an enormous variety of forms.\n\nBut in England, as the modern Rich rise up, they come into a world of\ngentry with a tradition of public service and authority; they learn\none by one and assimilate themselves to the legend of the \"governing\nclass\" with a sense of proprietorship which is also, in its humanly\nlimited way, a sense of duty to the state. They are pseudomorphs after\naristocrats. They receive honors, they inter-marry, they fall (and\ntheir defeated competitors too fall) into the mellowed relationships\nof an aristocratic system. That is not a permanent mutual attitude;\nit does, however, mask and soften the British outline. Industrialism\nbecomes quasi-feudal. America, on the other hand, had no effectual\n\"governing class,\" there has been no such modification, no clouding\nof the issue. Its Rich, to one's superficial inspection, do seem to\nlop out, swell up into an immense consumption and power and inanity,\ndevelop no sense of public duties, remain winners of a strange game\nthey do not criticise, concerned now only to hold and intensify their\nwinnings. The losers accept no subservience. That material progress,\nthat secular growth in scale of all modern enterprises, widens the gulf\nbetween Owner and Worker daily. More and more do men realize that this\ngame of free competition and unrestricted property does not go on for\never; it is a game that first in this industry and then in that, and\nat last in all, can be played out and is being played out. Property\nbecomes organized, consolidated, concentrated, and secured. This is\nthe fact to which America is slowly awaking at the present time. The\nAmerican community is discovering a secular extinction of opportunity,\nand the appearance of powers against which individual enterprise and\ncompetition are hopeless. Enormous sections of the American public are\nlosing their faith in any personal chance of growing rich and truly\nfree, and are developing the consciousness of an expropriated class.\n\nThis realization has come slowlier in America than in Europe,\nbecause of the enormous undeveloped resources of America. So long as\nthere was an unlimited extent of unappropriated and unexplored land\nwestward, so long could tension be relieved by so simple an injunction\nas Horace Greeley's, \"Go West, young man; go West.\" And to-day,\nalbeit that is no longer true of the land, and there are already\nfar larger concentrations of individual possessions in the United\nStates of America than anywhere else in the world, yet so vast are\ntheir continental resources that it still remains true that nowhere\nin the world is property so widely diffused. Consider the one fact\nthat America can take in three-quarters of a million of workers in\none year without producing a perceptible fall in wages, and you will\nappreciate the scale upon which things are measured here, the scale\nby which even Mr. J.D. Rockefeller's billion dollars becomes no more\nthan a respectable but by no means overwhelming \"pile.\" For all these\nconcentrations, the western farmers still own their farms, and it is\nthe rule rather than the exception for a family to possess the freehold\nof the house it lives in. But the process of concentration goes on\nnevertheless--is going on now perceptibly to the American mind. That\nit has not gone so far as in the European instance it is a question of\nsize, just as the gestation of an elephant takes longer than that of a\nmouse. If the process is larger and slower, it is, for the reasons I\nhave given, plainer, and it will be discussed and dealt with plainly.\nThat steady trend towards concentration under individualistic rules,\nuntil individual competition becomes disheartened and hopeless, is the\nessential form of the economic and social process in America as I see\nit now, and it has become the cardinal topic of thought and discussion\nin the American mind.\n\n[Illustration: WESTERN FARMERS STILL OWN THEIR FARMS]\n\nThis realization has been reached after the most curious hesitation.\nThere is every reason for this; for it involves the contradiction\nof much that seems fundamental in the American idea. It amounts to a\nnational change of attitude. It is a conscious change of attitude that\nis being deliberately made.\n\nThis slow reluctant process of disillusionment with individualism is\ninterestingly traceable through the main political innovations of the\nlast twenty years. There was the discovery in the east that the supply\nof land was not limitless, and we had the Single Tax movement, and\nthe epoch of the first Mr. Henry George. He explained fervently of\ncourse, how individualistic, how profoundly American he was--but land\nwas not to be monopolized. Then came the discovery in the west that\nthere were limits to borrowing and that gold appreciated against the\ndebtor, and so we have the Populist movement and extraordinary schemes\nfor destroying the monopolization of gold and credit. Mr. Bryan led\nthat and nearly captured the country, but only in last May's issue of\nthe _Century Magazine_ I found him explaining (expounding meanwhile a\nlargely socialistic programme) that he too is an Individualist of the\npurest water. And then the attack shifted to the destruction of free\ncompetition by the trusts. The small business went on sufferance, 'not\nknowing from week to week when its hour to sell out or fight might\ncome. The Trusts have crushed competition, raised prices against the\nconsumer, and served him often quite abominably. The curious reader\nmay find in Mr. Upton Sinclair's essentially veracious _Jungle_ the\npossibilities of individualistic enterprise in the matter of food and\ndecency. The States have been agitated by a big disorganized Anti-Trust\nmovement for some years, it becomes of the gravest political importance\nat every election, and the sustained study of the affairs and methods\nof that most typical and prominent of trust organizations, the Standard\nOil Company, by Miss Tarbell and a host of followers, is bringing to\nlight more and more clearly the defencelessness of the common person,\nand his hopelessness, however enterprising, as a competitor against\nthose great business aggregations. His faith in all his reliances and\nsecurities fades in the new light that grows about him, he sees his\nlittle investments, his insurance policy, his once open and impartial\nroute to market by steamboat and rail, all passing into the grip of the\ngreat property accumulators. The aggregation of property has created\npowers that are stronger than state legislatures and more persistent\nthan any public opinion can be, that have no awe and no sentiment for\nlegislation, that are prepared to disregard it or evade it whenever\nthey can.\n\nAnd these aggregations are taking on immortality and declining to\ndisintegrate when their founders die. The Astor property, the Jay\nGould property, the Marshall Field property, for example, do not\nbreak up, become undying centres for the concentration of wealth, and\nit is doubtful if there is any power to hinder such a development of\nperpetual fortunes. In England when Thelussen left his investments to\naccumulate, a simple little act of Parliament set his will aside. But\nCongress is not sovereign, there is no national sovereign power in\nAmerica, and Property in America, it would seem, is absolutely free to\ndo these things. So you have President Roosevelt in a recent oration\nattacking the man with the Muck Rake (who gathered vile dross for the\nlove of it), and threatening the limitation of inheritance. But he too,\nquite as much as Mr. Bryan, assures the public that he is a fervent\nindividualist.\n\nSo in this American community, whose distinctive conception is its\nemphatic assertion of the freedom of individual property, whose very\nsymbol is that spike-crowned Liberty gripping a torch in New York\nHarbor, there has been and is going on a successive repudiation of that\nfreedom in almost every department of ownable things by considerable\nmasses of thinking people, a denial of the soundness of individual\nproperty in land, an organized attempt against the accumulation of\ngold and credit, by a systematic watering of the currency, a revolt\nagainst the aggregatory outcome of untrammelled business competition, a\nsystematic interference with the freedom of railways and carriers to do\nbusiness as they please, and a protest from the most representative of\nAmericans against hereditary wealth....\n\nThat, in general terms, is the economic and social process as one sees\nit in America now, a process of systematically concentrating wealth on\nthe part of an energetic minority, and of a great insurgence of alarm,\nof waves of indignation and protest and threat on the part of that\nvague indefinite public that Mr. Roosevelt calls the \"nation.\"\n\nAnd this goes on side by side with a process of material progress\nthat partly masks its quality, that keeps the standard of life from\nfalling and prevents any sense of impoverishment among the mass of\nthe losers in the economic struggle. Through this material progress\nthere is a constant substitution of larger, cleaner, more efficient\npossibilities, and more and more wholesale and far-sighted methods of\norganization for the dark, confused, untidy individualistic expedients\nof the Victorian time. An epoch which was coaly and mechanical,\ncommercial and adventurous after the earlier fashion is giving place,\nalmost automatically, to one that will be electrical and scientific,\nartistic and creative. The material progress due to a secular increase\nin knowledge, and the economic progress interfere and combine with and\ncomplicate one another, the former constantly changes the forms and\nappliances of the latter, changes the weapons and conditions, and may\nultimately change the spirit and conceptions of the struggle. The\nlatter now clogs and arrests the former. So in its broad features, as\na conflict between the birth strength of a splendid civilization and a\nhampering commercialism, I see America.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nSOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH\n\n\nI\n\nThe Spenders\n\nIt is obvious that in a community that has disavowed aristocracy or\nrule and subordination or service, which has granted unparalleled\nfreedoms to property and despised and distrusted the state, the chief\nbusiness of life will consist in getting or attempting to get. But the\nchief aspect of American life that impinges first upon the European\nis not this, but the behavior of a certain overflow at the top, of\npeople who have largely and triumphantly got, and with hand, pockets,\nsafe-deposit vaults full of dollars, are proceeding to realize victory.\nBefore I came to America it was in his capacity of spender that I\nchiefly knew the American; as a person who had demoralized Regent\nStreet and the Rue de Rivoli, who had taught the London cabman to\ndemand \"arf a dollar\" for a shilling fare, who bought old books and\nold castles, and had driven the prices of old furniture to incredible\naltitudes, and was slowly transferring our incubus of artistic\nachievement to American soil. One of my friends in London is Mr. X,\nwho owns those two houses full of fine \"pieces\" near the British Museum\nand keeps his honor unsullied in the most deleterious of trades. \"They\ncome to me,\" he said, \"and ask me to buy for them. It's just buying.\nOne of them wants to beat the silver of another, doesn't care what\nhe pays. Another clamors for tapestry. They trust me as they trust a\ndoctor. There's no understanding--no feeling. It's hard to treat them\nwell.\"\n\nAnd there is the story of Y, who is wise about pictures. \"If you want\na Botticelli that size, Mr. Record, I can't find it,\" he said; \"you'll\nhave to have it made for you.\"\n\nThese American spenders have got the whole world \"beat\" at the foolish\ngame of collecting, and in all the peculiar delights of shopping they\nexcel. And they are the crown and glory of hotel managers throughout\nthe world. There is something na\u00efve, something childishly expectant\nand acquisitive, about this aspect of American riches. There appears\nno aristocracy in their tradition, no sense of permanence and\ngreat responsibility, there appears no sense of subordination and\nservice; from the individualistic business struggle they have emerged\ntriumphant, and what is there to do now but spend and have a good time?\n\nThey swarm in the pleasant places of the Riviera, they pervade Paris\nand Rome, they occupy Scotch castles and English estates, their\nmotor-cars are terrible and wonderful. And the London Savoy Hotel still\nflaunts its memory of one splendid American night. The court-yard was\nflooded with water tinted an artistic blue--to the great discomfort of\nthe practically inevitable gold-fish, and on this floated a dream of\na gondola. And in the gondola the table was spread and served by the\nSavoy staff, mysteriously disguised in appropriate fancy costume. The\nwhole thing--there's only two words for it--was \"perfectly lovely.\"\n\"The illusion\"--whatever that was--we are assured, was complete. It\nwasn't a nursery treat, you know. The guests, I am told, were important\ngrown-up people.\n\nThis sort of childishness, of course, has nothing distinctively\nAmerican in it. Any people of sluggish and uneducated imagination who\nfind themselves profusely wealthy, and are too stupid to understand the\nhuge moral burden, the burden of splendid possibilities it carries,\nmay do things of this sort. It was not Americans but a party of\nSouth-African millionaires who achieved the kindred triumph of the\nshirt-and-belt dinner under a tent in a London hotel dining-room. The\nglittering procession of carriages and motor-carriages which I watched\ndriving down Fifth Avenue, New York, apparently for the pleasure\nof driving up again, is to be paralleled on the Pincio, in Naples,\nin Paris, and anywhere where irresponsible pleasure-seekers gather\ntogether. After the na\u00efve joy of buying things comes the joy of\nwearing them publicly, the simple pleasure of the promenade. These\nthings are universals. But nowhere has this spending struck me as\nbeing so solid and substantial, so nearly twenty-two carats fine, as\nhere. The shops have an air of solid worth, are in the key of butlers,\nbishops, opera-boxes, high-class florists, powdered footmen, Roman\nbeadles, motor-broughams, to an extent that altogether outshines either\nParis or London.\n\n[Illustration: PLUMP AND PRETTY PUPILS OF EXTRAVAGANCE]\n\nAnd in such great hotels as the Waldorf-Astoria, one finds the new\narrivals, the wives and daughters from the West and the South, in\nnew, bright hats, and splendors of costume, clubbed together, under\nthe discreetest management, for this and that, learning how to spend\ncollectively, reaching out to assemblies, to dinners. From an observant\ntea-table beneath the fronds of a palm, I surveyed a fine array of\nthese plump and pretty pupils of extravagance. They were for the\nmost part quite brilliantly as well as newly dressed, and with an\nartless and pleasing unconsciousness of the living from inside. Smart\ninnocents! I found all that gathering most contagiously interested and\nhappy and fresh.\n\nAnd I watched spending, too, as one sees it in the various incompatible\nhouses of upper Fifth Avenue and along the border of Central Park.\nThat, too, suggests a shop, a shop where country houses are sold and\nstored; there is the Tiffany house, a most expensive-looking article,\non the shelf, and the Carnegie house. There had been no pretence on\nthe part of the architects that any house belonged in any sense to any\nother, that any sort of community held them together. The link is just\nspending. You come to New York and spend; you go away again. To some of\nthese palaces people came and went; others had their blinds down and\nconveyed a curious effect of a sunlit child excursionist in a train who\nfalls asleep and droops against his neighbor. One of the Vanderbilt\nhouses was frankly and brutally boarded up. Newport, I am told, takes\nup and carries on the same note of magnificent irresponsibility, and\nthere one admires the richest forms of simplicity, triumphs of villa\narchitecture in thatch, and bathing bungalows in marble....\n\nThere exists already, of these irresponsible American rich, a splendid\ngroup of portraits, done without extenuation and without malice, in\nthe later work of that great master of English fiction, Mr. Henry\nJames. There one sees them at their best, their refinement, their large\nwealthiness, their incredible unreality. I think of _The Ambassadors_\nand that mysterious source of the income of the Newcomes, a mystery\nthat, with infinite artistic tact, was never explained; but more I\nthink of _The Golden Bowl_, most spacious and serene of novels.\n\nIn that splendid and luminous bubble, the Prince Amerigo and Maggie\nVerver, Mr. Verver, that assiduous collector, and the adventurous\nCharlotte Stant float far above a world of toil and anxiety, spending\nwith a large refinement, with a perfected assurance and precision. They\nspend as flowers open. But this is the quintessence, the sublimation,\nthe idealization of the rich American. Few have the restraint for\nthis. For the rest, when one has shopped and shopped, and collected\nand bought everything, and promenaded on foot, in motor-car and\nmotor-brougham and motor-boat, in yacht and special train; when one\nhas a fine house here and a fine house there, and photography and the\nspecial article have exhausted admiration, there remains chiefly that\none broader and more presumptuous pleasure--spending to give. American\ngivers give most generously, and some of them, it must be admitted,\ngive well. But they give individually, incoherently, each pursuing a\npersonal ideal. There are unsuccessful givers....\n\nAmerican cities are being littered with a disorder of unsystematized\nfoundations and picturesque legacies, much as I find my nursery floor\nlittered with abandoned toys and battles and buildings when the\nchildren are in bed after a long, wet day. Yet some of the gifts are\nvery splendid things. There is, for example, the Leland Stanford Junior\nUniversity in California, a vast monument of parental affection and\nRichardsonian architecture, with professors, and teaching going on in\nits interstices; and there is Mrs. Gardner's delightful Fenway Court,\na Venetian palace, brought almost bodily from Italy and full of finely\ngathered treasures....\n\nAll this giving is, in its aggregate effect, as confused as industrial\nChicago. It presents no clear scheme of the future, promises no growth;\nit is due to the impulsive generosity of a mob of wealthy persons, with\nno broad common conceptions, with no collective dream, with little to\nhold them together but imitation and the burning possession of money;\nthe gifts overlap, they lie at any angle, one with another. Some are\nneedless, some mischievous. There are great gaps of unfulfilled need\nbetween.\n\nAnd through the multitude of lesser, though still mighty, givers, comes\nthat colossus of property, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the jubilee plunger of\nbeneficence, that rosy, gray-haired, nimble little figure, going to\nand fro between two continents, scattering library buildings as if he\nsowed wild oats, buildings that may or may not have some educational\nvalue, if presently they are reorganized and properly stocked with\nbooks. Anon he appals the thrifty burgesses of Dunfermline with vast\nand uncongenial responsibilities of expenditure; anon he precipitates\nthe library of the late Lord Acton upon our embarrassed Mr. Morley;\nanon he pauperizes the students of Scotland. He diffuses his monument\nthroughout the English-speaking lands, amid circumstances of the\nmost flagrant publicity; the receptive learned, the philanthropic\nnoble, bow in expectant swaths before him. He is the American fable\ncome true; nothing seems too wild to believe of him, and he fills the\nEuropean imagination with an altogether erroneous conception of the\nself-dissipating quality in American wealth.\n\n\nII\n\nThe Astor Fortune\n\nBecause, now, as a matter of fact, dissipation is by no means the\ncharacteristic quality of American getting. The good American will\nindeed tell you solemnly that in America it is three generations \"from\nshirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves\"; but this has about as much truth in\nit as that remarkable absence of any pure-bred Londoners of the third\ngeneration, dear to the British imagination.\n\nAmid the vast yeasty tumult of American business, of the getting and\nlosing which are the main life of this community, nothing could be\nclearer than the steady accumulation of great masses of property that\nshow no signs of disintegrating again. The very rich people display\nan indisposition to divide their estates; the Marshall Field estate\nin Chicago, for example, accumulates; the Jay Gould inheritance\nsurvives great strains. And when first I heard that \"shirt-sleeves to\nshirt-sleeves\" proverb, Which is so fortifying a consolation to the\nolder school of Americans, my mind flew back to the Thames Embankment,\nas one sees it from the steamboat on the river. There, just eastward of\nthe tall red Education offices of the London County Council, stands a\nquite graceful and decorative little building of gray stone, that jars\nnot at all with the fine traditions of the adjacent Temple, but catches\nthe eye, nevertheless, with its very big, very gilded vane in the form\nof a ship. This is the handsome strong-box to which New York pays\ngigantic yearly tribute, the office in which Mr. W.W. Astor conducts\nhis affairs. They are not his private and individual affairs, but the\naffairs of the estate of the late J.J. Astor--still undivided, and\nstill growing year by year.\n\nMr. Astor seems to me to be a much more representative figure of\nAmerican wealth than any of the conspicuous spenders who strike so\nvividly upon the European imagination. His is the most retiring of\npersonalities. In this picturesque stone casket he works; his staff\nworks under his cognizance, and administers, I know not to what ends\nnor to what extent, revenues that exceed those of many sovereign\nstates. He himself is impressed by it, and, without arrogance, he makes\na visit to his offices, with a view of its storage vaults, its halls of\ndisciplined clerks, a novel and characteristic form of entertainment.\nFor the rest, Mr. Astor leads a life of modest affluence, and recreates\nhimself with the genealogy of his family, short stories about treasure\nlost and found, and such like literary work.\n\nNow here you have wealth with, as it were, the minimum of ownership,\nas indeed owning its possessor. Nobody seems to be spending that huge\nincome the crowded enormity of New York squeezes out. The \"Estate of\nthe late J.J. Astor\" must be accumulating more wealth and still more;\nunder careful and systematic management must be rolling up like a\ngolden snowball under that golden weather-vane. In the most accidental\nrelation to its undistinguished, harmless, arithmetical proprietor!\n\nYour anarchist orator or your crude socialist is always talking of the\nrich as blood-suckers, robbers, robber-barons, _grafters_ and so on.\nIt really is nonsense to talk like that. In the presence of Mr. W.W.\nAstor these preposterous accusations answer themselves. The thing is\na logical outcome of the assumptions about private property on which\nour contemporary civilization is based, and Mr. Astor, for all that\nhe draws gold from New York as effectually as a ferret draws blood\nfrom a rabbit, is indeed the most innocent of men. He finds himself\nin a certain position, and he sits down very congenially and adds and\nadds and adds, and relieves the tedium of his leisure in literary\ncomposition. Had he been born at the level of a dry-goods clerk he\nwould probably have done the same sort of thing on a smaller scale,\nand it would have been the little Poddlecombe literary society, and\nnot the _Pall Mall Magazine_, that would have been the richer for his\ncompositions. It is just the scale of the circumstances that differs....\n\n\nIII\n\nThe Chief Getters\n\nThe lavish spending of Fifth Avenue and Paris and Rome and Mayfair is\nbut the flower, the often brilliant, the sometimes gaudy flower of\nthe American economic process; and such slow and patient accumulators\nas Mr. Astor the rounding and ripening fruit. One need be only a\nlittle while in America to realize this, and to discern the branch and\nleaf, and at last even the aggressive insatiable spreading root of\naggregating property, that was liberated so effectually when America\ndeclared herself free.\n\nThe group of people that attracts the largest amount of attention in\npress and talk, that most obsesses the American imagination, and that\nis indeed the most significant at the present time, is the little\ngroup--a few score men perhaps altogether--who are emerging distinctly\nas winners in that great struggle to get, into which this commercial\nindustrialism has naturally resolved itself. Central among them are\nthe men of the Standard Oil group, the \"octopus\" which spreads its\nramifying tentacles through the whole system of American business,\nabsorbing and absorbing, grasping and growing. The extraordinarily able\ninvestigations of such writers as Miss Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker,\nthe rhetorical exposures of Mr. T.W. Lawson, have brought out the\nmethods and quality of this group of persons with a particularity that\nhas been reserved heretofore for great statesmen and crowned heads, and\nwith an unflattering lucidity altogether unprecedented. Not only is\nevery hair on their heads numbered, but the number is published. They\nare known to their pettiest weaknesses and to their most accidental\nassociations. And in this astonishing blaze of illumination they\ncontinue steadfastly to get.\n\nThese men, who are creating the greatest system of correlated private\nproperties in the world, who are wealthy beyond all precedent, seem\nfor the most part to be men with no ulterior dream or aim. They are\nnot voluptuaries, they are neither artists nor any sort of creators,\nand they betray no high political ambitions. Had they anything of the\nsort they would not be what they are, they would be more than that and\nless. They want and they get, they are inspired by the brute will in\ntheir wealth to have more wealth and more, to a systematic ardor. They\nare men of a competing, patient, enterprising, acquisitive enthusiasm.\nThey have found in America the perfectly favorable environment for\ntheir temperaments. In no other country and in no other age could they\nhave risen to such eminence. America is still, by virtue of its great\nPuritan tradition and in the older sense of the word, an intensely\nmoral land. Most lusts here are strongly curbed, by public opinion, by\ntraining and tradition. But the lust of acquisition has not been curbed\nbut glorified....\n\nThese financial leaders are accused by the press of every sort of crime\nin the development of their great organizations and their fight against\ncompetitors, but I feel impelled myself to acquit them of anything so\nheroic as a general scheme of criminality, as a systematic organization\nof power. They are men with a good deal of contempt for legislation\nand state interference, but that is no distinction, it has unhappily\nbeen part of the training of the average American citizen, and they\nhave no doubt exceeded the letter if not the spirit of the laws of\nbusiness competition. They have played to win and not for style, and\nif they personally had not done so somebody else would; they fill a\nposition which from the nature of things, somebody is bound to fill.\nThey have, no doubt, carried sharpness to the very edge of dishonesty,\nbut what else was to be expected from the American conditions? Only\nby doing so and taking risks is pre-eminent success in getting to be\nattained. They have developed an enormous system of espionage, but on\nhis smaller scale every retail grocer, every employer of servants does\nsomething in that way. They have secret agents, false names, concealed\nbargains,--what else could one expect? People have committed suicide\nthrough their operations--but in a game which is bound to bring the\nlosers to despair it is childish to charge the winners with murder.\nIt's the game that is criminal. It is ridiculous, I say, to write of\nthese men as though they were unparalleled villains, intellectual\novermen, conscienceless conquerors of the world. Mr. J.D. Rockefeller's\nmild, thin-lipped, pleasant face gives the lie to all such melodramatic\nnonsense.\n\nI must confess to a sneaking liking for this much-reviled man. One\nthinks of Miss Tarbell's description of him, displaying his first\nboyish account-book, his ledger A, to a sympathetic gathering of the\nBaptist young, telling how he earned fifty dollars in the first three\nmonths of his clerking in a Chicago warehouse, and how savingly he\ndealt with it. Hear his words:\n\n\"You could not get that book from me for all the modern ledgers in New\nYork, nor for all that they would bring. It almost brings tears to my\neyes when I read over this little book, and it fills me with a sense of\ngratitude I cannot express....\n\n\"I know some people, ... especially some young men, find it difficult\nto keep a little money in their pocket-book. I learned to keep money,\nand, as we have a way of saying, it did not burn a hole in my pocket. I\nwas taught that it was the thing to keep the money and take care of it.\nAmong the early experiences that were helpful to me that I recollect\nwith pleasure, was one of working a few days for a neighbor digging\npotatoes--an enterprising and thrifty farmer who could dig a great many\npotatoes. I was a boy perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age, and he\nkept me busy from morning until night. It was a ten-hour day....\n\n\"And as I was saving these little sums, I soon learned I could get as\nmuch interest for fifty dollars loaned at seven per cent.--the legal\nrate in the State of New York at that time for a year--as I could earn\nby digging potatoes ten days. The impression was gaining ground with me\nthat it was a good thing to let money be my slave and not make myself a\nslave to money. I have tried to remember that in every sense.\"\n\nThis is not the voice of any sort of contemptuous trampler of his\nspecies. This is the voice of an industrious, acquisitive, commonplace,\npious man, as honestly and simply proud of his acquisitiveness as a\nstamp-collector might be. At times, in his acquisitions, the strength\nof his passion may have driven him to lengths beyond the severe moral\ncode, but the same has been true of stamp-collectors. He is a man who\nhas taken up with great natural aptitude an ignoble tradition which\nlinks economy and earning with piety and honor. His teachers were\nto blame, that Baptist community that is now so ashamed of its son\nthat it refuses his gifts. To a large extent he is the creature of\nopportunity; he has been flung to the topmost pinnacle of human envy,\npartly by accident, partly by that peculiarity of American conditions\nthat has subordinated, in the name of liberty, all the grave and\nennobling affairs of statecraft to a middle-class freedom of commercial\nenterprise. Quarrel with that if you like. It is unfair and ridiculous\nto quarrel with him.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nCERTAIN WORKERS\n\n\nI\n\nThose Who Do Not Get\n\nLet us now look a little at another aspect of this process of\nindividualistic competition which is the economic process in America,\nand which is giving us on its upper side the spenders of Fifth Avenue,\nthe slow accumulators of the Astor type, and the great getters of the\ngiant business organizations, the Trusts and acquisitive finance.\nWe have concluded that this process of free and open competition in\nbusiness which, clearly, the framers of the American Constitution\nimagined to be immortal, does as a matter of fact tend to kill itself\nthrough the advantage property gives in the acquisition of more\nproperty. But before we can go on to estimate the further future\nof this process we must experiment with another question. What is\nhappening to those who have not got and who are not getting wealth, who\nare, in fact, falling back in the competition?\n\nNow there can be little doubt to any one who goes to and fro in\nAmerica that in spite of the huge accumulation of property in a few\nhands that is now in progress, there is still no general effect of\nimpoverishment. To me, coming from London to New York, the effect\nof the crowd in the trolley-cars and subways and streets was one of\nexceptional prosperity. New York has no doubt its effects of noise,\ndisorder, discomfort, and a sort of brutality, but to begin with one\nsees nothing of the underfed people, the numerous dingily clad and\ngrayly housed people who catch the eye in London. Even in the congested\narteries, the filthy back streets of the East Side I found myself\nsaying, as a thing remarkable, \"These people have money to spend.\" In\nLondon one travels long distances for two cents, and great regiments of\npeople walk; in New York the universal fare is five cents and everybody\nrides. Common people are better gloved and better booted in America\nthan in any European country I know, in spite of the higher prices for\nclothing here, the men wear ready-made suits, it is true, to a much\ngreater extent, but they are newer and brighter than the London clerk's\ncarefully brushed, tailor-made garments. Wages translated from dollars\ninto shillings seem enormous.\n\nAnd there is no perceptible fall in wages going on. On the whole wages\ntend to rise. For almost all sorts of men, for working women who are\nnot \"refined,\" there is a limitless field of employment. The fact that\na growing proportion of the wealth of the community is passing into\nthe hands of a small minority of successful getters, is masked to\nsuperficial observation by the enormous increase of the total wealth.\nThe growth process overrides the economic process and may continue to\ndo so for many years.\n\nSo that the great mass of the population is not consciously defeated\nin the economic game. It is only failing to get a large share in\nthe increment of wealth. The European reader must dismiss from his\nmind any conception of the general American population as a mass of\npeople undergoing impoverishment through the enrichment of the few. He\nmust substitute for that figure a mass of people, very busy, roughly\nprosperous, generally self-satisfied, but ever and again stirred to\nbouts of irascibility and suspicion, inundated by a constantly swelling\nflood of prosperity that pours through it and over it and passes by it,\nwithout changing or enriching it at all. Ever and again it is irritated\nby some rise in price, an advance in coal, for example, or meat or\nrent, that swallows up some anticipated gain, but that is an entirely\ndifferent thing from want or distress, from the fireless hungering\npoverty of Europe.\n\n[Illustration: NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE]\n\nNevertheless, the sense of losing develops and spreads in the mass of\nthe American people. Privations are not needed to create a sense of\neconomic disadvantage; thwarted hopes suffice. The speed and pressure\nof work here is much greater than in Europe, the impatience for\nrealization intenser. The average American comes into life prepared\nto \"get on,\" and ready to subordinate most things in life to that. He\nencounters a rising standard of living. He finds it more difficult to\nget on than his father did before him. He is perplexed and irritated\nby the spectacle of lavish spending and the report of gigantic\naccumulations that outshine his utmost possibilities of enjoyment or\nsuccess. He is a busy and industrious man, greatly preoccupied by the\nstruggle, but when he stops to think and talk at all, there can be\nlittle doubt that his outlook is a disillusioned one, more and more\ntinged with a deepening discontent.\n\n\nII\n\nThe Little Messenger-boy\n\nBut the state of mind of the average American we have to consider\nlater. That is the central problem of this horoscope we contemplate.\nBefore we come to that we have to sketch out all the broad aspects of\nthe situation with which that mind has to deal.\n\nNow in the preceding chapter I tried to convey my impression of the\nspending and wealth-getting of this vast community; I tried to convey\nhow irresponsible it was, how unpremeditated. The American rich have,\nas it were, floated up out of a confused struggle of equal individuals.\nThat individualistic commercial struggle has not only flung up these\nrich to their own and the world's amazement, it is also, with an equal\nblindness, crushing and maiming great multitudes of souls. But this\nis a fact that does not smite upon one's attention at the outset. The\nEnglish visitor to the great towns sees the spending, sees the general\nprosperity, the universal air of confident pride; he must go out of his\nway to find the under side to these things.\n\nOne little thing set me questioning. I had been one Sunday night\ndown-town, supping and talking with Mr. Abraham Cahan about the \"East\nSide,\" that strange city within a city which has a drama of its own\nand a literature and a press, and about Russia and her problem, and I\nwas returning on the subway about two o'clock in the morning. I became\naware of a little lad sitting opposite me, a childish-faced delicate\nlittle creature of eleven years old or so, wearing the uniform of a\nmessenger-boy. He drooped with fatigue, roused himself with a start,\nedged off his seat with a sigh, stepped off the car, and was vanishing\nup-stairs into the electric glare of Astor Place as the train ran out\nof the station.\n\n\"What on earth,\" said I, \"is that baby doing abroad at this time of\nnight?\"\n\nFor me this weary little wretch became the irritant centre of a painful\nregion of inquiry. \"How many hours a day may a child work in New York,\"\nI began to ask people, \"and when may a boy leave school?\"\n\nI had blundered, I found, upon the weakest spot in America's fine front\nof national well-being. My eyes were opened to the childish newsboys\nwho sold me papers, and the little bootblacks at the street corners.\nNocturnal child employment is a social abomination. I gathered stories\nof juvenile vice, of lads of nine and ten suffering from terrible\ndiseases, of the contingent sent by these messengers to the hospitals\nand jails. I began to realize another aspect of that great theory\nof the liberty of property and the subordination of the state to\nbusiness, upon which American institutions are based. That theory has\nno regard for children. Indeed, it is a theory that disregards women\nand children, the cardinal facts of life altogether. They are private\nthings....\n\nIt is curious how little we, who live in the dawning light of a new\ntime, question the intellectual assumptions of the social order about\nus. We find ourselves in a life of huge confusions and many cruelties,\nwe plan this and that to remedy and improve, but very few of us go down\nto the ideas that begot these ugly conditions, the laws, the usages\nand liberties that are now in their detailed expansion so perplexing,\nintricate, and overwhelming. Yet the life of man is altogether made up\nof will cast into the mould of ideas, and only by correcting ideas,\nchanging ideas and replacing ideas are any ameliorations and advances\nto be achieved in human destiny. All other things are subordinate to\nthat.\n\nNow the theory of liberty upon which the liberalism of Great Britain,\nthe Constitution of the United States, and the bourgeois Republic of\nFrance rests, assumes that all men are free and equal. They are all\ntacitly supposed to be adult and immortal, they are sovereign over\ntheir property and over their wives and children, and everything is\nframed with a view to insuring them security in the enjoyment of\ntheir rights. No doubt this was a better theory than that of the\ndivine right of kings, against which it did triumphant battle, but it\ndoes, as one sees it to-day, fall most extraordinarily short of the\ntruth, and only a few logical fanatics have ever tried to carry it\nout to its complete consequences. For example, it ignored the facts\nthat more than half of the adult people in a country are women, and\nthat all the men and women of a country taken together are hardly as\nnumerous and far less important to the welfare of that country than\nthe individuals under age. It regarded living as just living, a stupid\ndead level of egotistical effort and enjoyment; it was blind to the\nfact that living is part growing, part learning, part dying to make way\nand altogether service and sacrifice. It asserted that the care and\neducation of children, and business bargains affecting the employment\nand welfare of women and children, are private affairs. It resisted the\ncompulsory education of children and factory legislation, therefore,\nwith extraordinary persistence and bitterness. The commonsense of\nthe three great progressive nations concerned has been stronger\nthan their theory, but to this day enormous social evils are to be\ntraced to that passionate jealousy of state intervention between a\nman and his wife, his children, and other property, which is the\ndistinctive unprecedented feature of the originally middle-class modern\norganization of society upon commercial and industrial conceptions in\nwhich we are all (and America most deeply) living.\n\nI began with a drowsy little messenger-boy in the New York Subway.\nBefore I had done with the question I had come upon amazing things.\nJust think of it! This richest, greatest country the world has ever\nseen has over 1,700,000 children under fifteen years of age toiling\nin fields, factories, mines, and workshops. And Robert Hunter--whose\n_Poverty_, if I were autocrat, should be compulsory reading for every\nprosperous adult in the United States, tells me of \"not less than\neighty thousand children, most of whom are little girls, at present\nemployed in the textile mills of this country. In the South there are\nnow six times as many children at work as there were twenty years ago.\nChild labor is increasing yearly in that section of the country. Each\nyear more little ones are brought in from the fields and hills to live\nin the degrading atmosphere of the mill towns.\"...\n\nChildren are deliberately imported by the Italians. I gathered from\nCommissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of little\nnephews and nieces, friends' sons, and so forth, brought in by them is\npeculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It\nwas a particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little\nboy of no ascertainable relationship....\n\nIn the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions were\nhardly worse than those now existing in the South. Children, the\ntiniest and frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning\nand, like old men and women, go to the mills to do their day's labor;\nand when they return home, \"wearily fling themselves on their beds, too\ntired to take off their clothes.\" Many children work all night--\"in\nthe maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere unsanitary and\nclouded with humidity and lint.\"\n\n\"It will be long,\" adds Mr. Hunter, in his description, \"before I\nforget the face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched\nforward to rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form\nalready showing the physical effects of labor. This child, six years of\nage, was working twelve hours a day.\"\n\nFrom Mr. Spargo's _Bitter Cry of the Children_ I learn this much of the\njoys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania:\n\n[Illustration: BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY]\n\n \"For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop\n over the chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the\n coal as it moves past them. The air is black with coal-dust, and\n the roar of the crushers, screens, and rushing mill-race of coal is\n deafening. Sometimes one of the children falls into the machinery\n and is terribly mangled, or slips into the chute and is smothered to\n death. Many children are killed in this way. Many others, after a\n time, contract coal-miners' asthma and consumption, which gradually\n undermine their health. Breathing continually day after day the clouds\n of coal-dust, their lungs become black and choked with small particles\n of anthracite.\"...\n\nIn Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J.F. Carey tells us how\nlittle naked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York\nmillionaire, packing cloth into bleaching vats in a bath of chemicals\nthat bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of lepers....\n\nWell, we English have no right to condemn the Americans for these\nthings. The history of our own industrial development is black with the\nblood of tortured and murdered children. America still has the factory\nserfs. New Jersey sends her pauper children south to-day into worse\nthan slavery, but, as Cottle tells in his reminiscences of Southey and\nColeridge, that is precisely the same wretched export Bristol packed\noff to feed the mills of Manchester in late Georgian times. We got\nahead with factory legislation by no peculiar virtue in our statecraft,\nit was just the revenge the landlords took upon the manufacturers for\nreform and free trade in corn and food. In America the manufacturers\nhave had things to themselves.\n\nAnd America has difficulties to encounter of which we know nothing. In\nthe matter of labor legislation each State legislature is supreme; in\neach separate State the forces of light and progress must fight the\nbattle of the children and the future over again against interests,\nlies, prejudice and stupidity. Each State pleads the bad example\nof another State, and there is always the threat that capital will\nwithdraw. No national minimum is possible under existing conditions.\nAnd when the laws have passed there is still the universal contempt\nfor State control to reckon with, the impossibilities of enforcement.\nIllinois, for instance, scandalized at the spectacle of children in\nthose filthy stock-yards, ankle-deep in blood, cleaning intestines\nand trimming meat, recently passed a child-labor law that raised the\nminimum age for such employment to sixteen, but evasion, they told\nme in Chicago, was simple and easy. New York, too, can show by its\nstatute-books that my drowsy nocturnal messenger-boy was illegal and\nimpossible....\n\nThis is the bottomest end of the scale that at the top has all the\nlavish spending of Fifth Avenue, the joyous wanton giving of Mr. Andrew\nCarnegie. Equally with these things it is an unpremeditated consequence\nof an inadequate theory of freedom. The foolish extravagances of the\nrich, the architectural pathos of Newport, the dingy, noisy, economic\njumble of central and south Chicago, the Standard Oil offices in\nBroadway, the darkened streets beneath New York's elevated railroad,\nthe littered ugliness of Niagara's banks, and the lower-most hell\nof child suffering are all so many accordant aspects and inexorable\nconsequences of the same undisciplined way of living. Let each man push\nfor himself--it comes to these things....\n\nSo far as our purpose of casting a horoscope goes we have particularly\nto note this as affecting the future; these working children\ncannot be learning to read--though they will presently be having\nvotes--they cannot grow up fit to bear arms, to be in any sense but\na vile computing sweater's sense, men. So miserably they will avenge\nthemselves by supplying the stuff for vice, for crime, for yet more\ncriminal and political manipulations. One million seven hundred\nchildren, practically uneducated, are toiling over here, and growing\nup, darkened, marred, and dangerous, into the American future I am\nseeking to forecast.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nCORRUPTION\n\n\nI\n\nThe Problem of the Nation\n\nSo, it seems to me, in this new crude continental commonwealth, there\nis going on the same economic process, on a grander scale, indeed, than\nhas gone so far in our own island. There is a great concentration of\nwealth above, and below, deep and growing is the abyss, that sunken\nmultitude on the margin of subsistence which is a characteristic and\nnecessary feature of competitive industrialism, that teeming abyss\nwhere children have no chance, where men and women dream neither of\nleisure nor of self-respect. And between this efflorescence of wealth\nabove and spreading degradation below, comes the great mass of the\npopulation, perhaps fifty millions and more of healthy and active men,\nwomen and children (I leave out of count altogether the colored people\nand the special trouble of the South until a later chapter) who are\nneither irresponsibly free nor hopelessly bound, who are the living\ndetermining substance of America.\n\nCollectively they constitute what Mr. Roosevelt calls the \"Nation,\"\nwhat an older school of Americans used to write of as the People.\nThe Nation is neither rich nor poor, neither capitalist nor laborer,\nneither Republican nor Democrat; it is a great diversified multitude\nincluding all these things. It is a comprehensive abstraction; it is\nthe ultimate reality. You may seek for it in America and you cannot\nfind it, as one seeks in vain for the forest among the trees. It has\nno clear voice; the confused and local utterances of a dispersed\ninnumerable press, of thousands of public speakers, of books and\npreachers, evoke fragmentary responses or drop rejected into oblivion.\nI have been told by countless people where I shall find the typical\nAmerican; one says in Maine, one in the Alleghenies, one \"farther\nwest,\" one in Kansas, one in Cleveland. He is indeed nowhere and\neverywhere. He is an English-speaking person, with extraordinarily\nEnglish traits still, in spite of much good German and Scandinavian and\nIrish blood he has assimilated. He has a distrust of lucid theories,\nand logic, and he talks unwillingly of ideas. He is preoccupied, he\nis busy with his individual affairs, but he is--I can feel it in the\nair--thinking.\n\nHow widely and practically he is thinking that curious product of\nthe last few years, the ten-cent magazine, will show. In England our\nsixpenny magazines seem all written for boys and careless people;\nthey are nothing but stories and jests and pictures. The weekly\nones achieve an extraordinarily agreeable emptiness. Their American\nequivalents are full of the studied and remarkably well-written\ndiscussion of grave public questions. I pick up one magazine and find\na masterly exposition of the public aspect of railway rebates, another\nand a trust is analyzed. Then here are some titles of books that\nall across this continent are being multitudinously read: Parson's\n_Heart of the Railway Problem_, Steffens's _Shame of the Cities_,\nLawson's _Frenzied Finance_, Miss Tarbell's _Story of Standard Oil_,\nAbbott's _Industrial Problem_, Spargo's _Bitter Cry of the Children_,\nHunter's _Poverty_, and, pioneer of them all, Lloyd's _Wealth Against\nCommonwealth_. These are titles quoted almost at hap-hazard. Within a\nremarkably brief space of time the American nation has turned away from\nall the heady self-satisfaction of the nineteenth century and commenced\na process of heart searching quite unparalleled in history. Its\negotistical interest in its own past is over and done. While Mr. Upton\nSinclair, the youngest, most distinctive of recent American novelists,\nachieved but a secondary success with his admirably conceived romance\nof the Civil War, _Manassas, The Jungle_, his book about the beef trust\nand the soul of the immigrant, the most unflattering picture of America\nthat any one has yet dared to draw, has fired the country.\n\nThe American nation, which a few years ago seemed invincibly wedded\nto an extreme individualism, seemed resolved, as it were, to sit on\nthe safety valves of the economic process and go on to the ultimate\ncatastrophe, displays itself now alert and questioning. It has roused\nitself to a grave and extensive consideration of the intricate economic\nand political problems that close like a net about its future. The\nessential question for America, as for Europe, is the rescue of her\nland, her public service, and the whole of her great economic process\nfrom the anarchic and irresponsible control of private owners--how\ndangerous and horrible that control may become the Railway and Beef\nTrust investigations have shown--and the organization of her social\nlife upon the broad, clean, humane conceptions of modern science. In\nevery country, however, this huge problem of reconstruction which is\nthe alternative to a plutocratic decadence, is enormously complicated\nby irrelevant and special difficulties. In Great Britain, for example,\nthe ever-pressing problem of holding the empire, and the fact that one\nlegislative body is composed almost entirely of private land-owners,\nhampers every step towards a better order. Upon every country in Europe\nweighs the armor of war. In America the complications are distinctive\nand peculiar. She is free, indeed, now to a large extent from the\npossibility of any grave military stresses, her one overseas investment\nin the Philippines she is evidently resolved to forget and be rid of at\nas early a date as possible. But, on the other hand, she is confronted\nby a system of legal entanglements of extraordinary difficulty and\nperplexity, she has the most powerful tradition of individualism in the\nworld, and a degraded political system, and she has in the presence\nof a vast and increasing proportion of unassimilable aliens in her\nsubstance--negroes, south European peasants, Russian Jews and the\nlike--an ever-intensifying complication.\n\n\nII\n\nGraft\n\nNow what is called corruption in America is a thing not confined to\npolitics; it is a defect of moral method found in every department of\nAmerican life. I find in big print in every paper I open, \"GRAFT.\" All\nthrough my journey in America I have been trying to gauge the quality\nof this corruption, I have been talking to all kinds of people about\nit, I have had long conversations about it with President Eliot of\nHarvard, with District-Attorney Jerome, with one leading insurance\npresident, with a number of the City Club people in Chicago, with\nseveral East-Siders in New York, with men engaged in public work in\nevery city I have visited, with Senators at Washington, with a Chicago\nsaloon-keeper and his friend, a shepherd of votes, and with a varied\nand casual assortment of Americans upon trains and boats; I read\nmy Ostrogorsky, my Ot\u00fcnsterberg, and my Roosevelt before I came to\nAmerica, and I find myself going through any American newspaper that\ncomes to hand always with an eye to this. It is to me a most vital\nissue in the horoscope I contemplate. All depends upon the answer to\nthis question: Is the average citizen fundamentally dishonest? Is he\na rascal and humbug in grain? If he is, the future can needs be no\nmore than a monstrous social disorganization in the face of divine\nopportunities. Or is he fundamentally honest, but a little confused\nethically?...\n\nThe latter, I think, is the truer alternative, but I will confess\nI have ranged through all the scale between a buoyant optimism and\ndespair. It is extraordinarily difficult to move among the crowded\ncontrasts of this perplexing country and emerge with any satisfactory\ngeneralization. But there is one word I find all too frequently in the\nAmerican papers, and that is \"stealing.\" They come near calling any\nprofitable, rather unfair bargain with the public a \"steal.\" It's the\ncommon journalistic vice here always to overstate. Every land has its\ncriminals, no doubt, but the American, I am convinced, is the last\nman in the world to steal. Nor does he tell you lies to your face,\nexcept in the way of business. He's not that sort of man. Nor does he\nsneak bad money into your confiding hand. Nor ask a higher price than\nhe means to accept. Nor cheat on exchange. For all the frequency of\n\"graft\" and \"stealing\" in the press head-lines, I feel the American is\npretty distinctly less \"mean\" than many Europeans in these respects,\nand much more disposed to be ashamed of meanness.\n\nBut he certainly has an ethical system of a highly commercial type. If\nhe isn't dishonest he's commercialized. He lives to get, to come out of\nevery transaction with more than he gave.\n\nIn the highly imaginative theory that underlies the realities of an\nindividualistic society there is such a thing as honest trading. In\npractice I don't believe there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to\nhave a fixed quality called their value, and honest trading is, I am\ntold, the exchange of things of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by\nhonest trading, and therefore nobody can grow rich by it. And nobody\nwould do business except to subsist by a profit and attempt to grow\nrich. The honest merchant in the individualist's dream is a worthy and\nurbane person who intervenes between the seller here and the buyer\nthere, fetches from one to another, stores a surplus of goods, takes\nrisks, and indemnifies himself by charging the seller and the buyer\na small fee for his waiting and his carrying and his speculative\nhawking about. He would be sick and ashamed to undervalue a purchase\nor overcharge a customer, and it scarcely requires a competitor to\nreduce his fee to a minimum. He draws a line between customers with\nwhom he deals and competitors with whom he wouldn't dream of dealing.\nAnd though it seems a little incredible, he grows rich and beautiful\nin these practices and endows Art, Science, and Literature. Such is\nthe commercial life in a world of economic angels, magic justice and\nthe Individualist's Utopia. In reality flesh and blood cannot resist\na bargain, and people trade to get. In reality value is a dream, and\nthe commercial ideal is to buy from the needy, sell to the urgent\nneed, and get all that can possibly be got out of every transaction.\nTo do anything else isn't business--it's some other sort of game. Let\nus look squarely into the pretences of trading. The plain fact of the\ncase is that in trading for profit there is no natural line at which\nlegitimate bargaining ends and cheating begins. The seller wants to get\nabove the value and the buyer below it. The seller seeks to appreciate,\nthe buyer to depreciate; and where is there room for truth in that\ncontest? In bargaining, overvaluing and undervaluing are not only\npermissible but inevitable, attempts to increase the desire to buy and\nwillingness to sell. Who can invent a rule to determine what expedients\nare permissible and what not? You may draw an arbitrary boundary--the\nlaw does here and there, a little discontinuously--but that is all.\nFor example, consider these questions that follow: Nothing is perfect\nin this world; all goods are defective. Are you bound to inform your\ncustomer of every defect? Suppose you are, then are you bound to\nexamine your goods minutely for defects? Grant that. Then if you\nintrust that duty to an employee ought you to dismiss him for selling\ndefective goods for you? The customer will buy your goods anyhow.\nAre you bound to spend more upon cleaning and packing them than he\ndemands?--to wrap them in gold-foil gratuitously, for example? How are\nyou going to answer these questions? Let me suppose that your one dream\nin life is to grow rich. Suppose you want to grow very rich and found a\nnoble university, let us say?\n\nYou answer them in the Roman spirit, with _caveat emptor_. Then can you\ndecently join in the outcry against the Chicago butchers?\n\nThen turn again to the group of problems the Standard Oil history\nraises. You want the customer to buy your goods and not your\ncompetitor's. Naturally you do everything to get your goods to him,\nto make them seem best to him, to reduce the influx of the other\nman's stuff. You don't lend your competitor your shop-window anyhow.\nIf there's a hoarding you don't restrict your advertisements because\notherwise there won't be room for him. And if you happen to have a\nparamount interest in the carrying line that bears your goods and\nhis, why shouldn't you see that your own goods arrive first? And at a\ncheaper rate?...\n\n[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING]\n\nYou see one has to admit there is always this element of overreaching,\nof outwitting, of fore-stalling, in all systematic trade. It may be\nrefined, it may be dignified, but it is there. It differs in degree\nand not in quality from cheating. A very scrupulous man stops at one\npoint, a less scrupulous man at another, an eager, ambitious man may\nfind himself carried by his own impetus very far. Too often the least\nscrupulous wins. In all ages, among all races, this taint in trade has\nbeen felt. Modern western Europe, led by England, and America have\ndenied it stoutly, have glorified the trader, called him a \"merchant\nprince,\" wrapped him in the purple of the word \"financier,\" bowed down\nbefore him. The trader remains a trader, a hand that clutches, an\nuncreative brain that lays snares. Occasionally, no doubt, he exceeds\nhis function and is better than his occupations. But it is not he but\nthe maker who must be the power and ruler of the great and luminous\nsocial order that must surely come, that new order I have persuaded\nmyself I find in glimmering evasive promises amid the congestions of\nNew York, the sheds and defilements of Niagara, and the Chicago reek\nand grime.... The American, I feel assured, can be a bold and splendid\nmaker. He is not, like the uncreative Parsee or Jew or Armenian, a\ntrader by blood and nature. The architecture I have seen, the finely\nplanned, internally beautiful, and admirably organized office buildings\n(to step into them from the street is to step up fifty years in the\nscale of civilization), the business organizations, the industrial\nskill--I visited a trap and chain factory at Oneida, right in the\nheart of New York State, that was like the interior of a well-made\nclock--above all, the plans for reconstructing his cities show that.\nThose others make nothing. But nevertheless, since he, more than any\nman, has subserved the full development of eighteenth and nineteenth\ncentury conceptions, he has acquired some of the very worst habits\nof the trader. Too often he is a gambler. Ever and again I have had\nglimpses of preoccupied groups of men at green tables in little\nrooms, playing that dreary game poker, wherein there is no skill, no\nvariety except in the sum at hazard, no orderly development, only a\nsort of expressionless lying called \"bluffing.\" Indeed, poker isn't\nso much a game as a bad habit. Yet the American sits for long hours\nat it, dispersing and accumulating dollars, and he carries its great\nconception of \"bluff\" and a certain experience of kinetic physiognomy\nback with him to his office....\n\nAnd Americans talk dollars to an astonishing extent....\n\nNow this is the reality of American corruption, a huge exclusive\npreoccupation with dollar-getting. What is called corruption by the\npress is really no more than the acute expression in individual cases\nof this general fault.\n\nWhere everybody is getting it is idle to expect a romantic standard of\nhonesty between employers and employed. The official who buys rails for\nthe big railway company that is professedly squeezing every penny it\ncan out of the public for its shareholders as its highest aim, is not\nlikely to display any religious self-abnegation of a share for himself\nin this great work. The director finds it hard to distinguish between\ngetting for himself and getting for his company, and the duty to\none-self of a discreet use of opportunity taints the whole staff from\nmanager to messenger-boy. The politicians who protect the interests of\nthe same railway in the House of Commons or the Senate, as the case may\nbe, are not going to do it for love either. Nobody will have any mercy\nfor their wives or children if they die poor. The policeman who stands\nbetween the property of the company and the irregular enterprise of\nrobbers feels his vigilance merits a special recognition. A position\nof trust is a position of advantage, and deserves a percentage.\nEverywhere, as every one knows, in all the modern States, quite as\nmuch as in China, there are commissions, there are tips, there are\nextortions and secret profits, there is, in a word, \"graft.\" It's no\nAmerican specialty. Things are very much the same in this matter in\nGreat Britain as in America, but Americans talk more and louder than\nwe do. And indeed all this is no more than an inevitable development\nof the idea of trading in the mind, that every transaction must leave\nsomething behind for the agent. It's not stealing, but nevertheless,\nthe automatic cash-register becomes more and more of a necessity in\nthis thickening atmosphere of private enterprise.\n\n\nIII\n\nPolitical Dishonesty\n\nIt seems to me that the political corruption that still plays so large\na part in the American problem is a natural and necessary underside\nto a purely middle-class organization of society for business. Nobody\nis left over to watch the politician. And the evil is enormously\naggravated by the complexities of the political machinery, by the\nmethods of the presidential election that practically prescribes a\nticket method of voting, and by the absence of any second ballots.\nMoreover, the passion of the simpler minded Americans for aggressive\nlegislation controlling private morality has made the control of\nthe police a main source of party revenue, and dragged the saloon\nand brothel, essentially retiring though these institutions are,\ninto politics. The Constitution ties up political reform in the most\nextraordinary way, it was planned by devout Republicans equally afraid\nof a dictatorship and the people; it does not so much distribute\npower as disperse it, the machinery falls readily into the hands of\nprofessional politicians with no end to secure but their immediate\nprofit, and is almost inaccessible to poor men who cannot make their\nincomes in its working. An increasing number of wealthy young men have\nfollowed President Roosevelt into political life--one thinks of such\nfigures as Senator Colby of New Jersey, but they are but incidental\nmitigations of a generally vicious scheme. Before the nation, so busy\nwith its diversified private affairs, lies the devious and difficult\nproblem of a great reconstruction of its political methods, as a\npreliminary to any broad change of its social organization....\n\nHow vicious things are I have had some inkling in a dozen whispered\nstories of votes, of ballot-boxes rifled, of votes destroyed, of the\nviolent personation of cowed and ill-treated men. And in Chicago I saw\na little of the physical aspect of the system.\n\nI made the acquaintance of Alderman Kenna, who is better known, I\nfound, throughout the States as \"Hinky-Dink,\" saw his two saloons and\nsomething of the Chinese quarter about him. He is a compact, upright\nlittle man, with iron-gray hair, a clear blue eye, and a dry manner. He\nwore a bowler hat through all our experiences in common, and kept his\nhands in his jacket-pockets. He filled me with a ridiculous idea, for\nwhich I apologize, that had it fallen to the lot of Mr. J.M. Barrie to\nmiss a university education, and keep a saloon in Chicago and organize\nvoters, he would have looked own brother to Mr. Kenna. We commenced\nin the first saloon, a fine, handsome place, with mirrors and tables\nand decorations and a consumption of mitigated mineral waters and\nbeer in bottles; then I was taken over to see the other saloon, the\none across the way. We went behind the counter, and while I professed\na comparative interest in English and American beer-engines, and the\nAlderman exchanged commonplaces with two or three of the shirt-sleeved\nbarmen, I was able to survey the assembled customers.\n\nIt struck me as a pretty tough gathering.\n\nThe first thing that met the eye were the schooners of beer. There is\nnothing quite like the American beer-schooner in England. It would\nappeal strongly to an unstinted appetite for beer, and I should be\ncurious to try it upon a British agricultural laborer and see how many\nhe could hold. He would, I am convinced, have to be entirely hollowed\nout to hold two. Those I saw impressed me as being about the size of\nsmall fish-globes set upon stems, and each was filled with a very\nsubstantial-looking beer indeed. They stood in a careless row all\nalong the length of the saloon counter. Below them, in attitudes of\nnegligent proprietorship, lounged the \"crowd\" in a haze of smoke and\nconversation. For the most part I should think they were Americanized\nimmigrants. I looked across the counter at them, met their eyes, got\nthe quality of their faces--and it seemed to me I was a very flimsy and\nunsubstantial intellectual thing indeed. It struck me that I would as\nsoon go to live in a pen in a stock-yard as into American politics.\n\nThat was my momentary impression. But that line of base and coarse\nfaces seen through the reek was only one sample of the great saloon\nstratum of the American population in which resides political power.\nThey have no ideas and they have votes; they are capable, if need be,\nof meeting violence by violence, and that is the sort of thing American\nmethods demand....\n\nNow Alderman Kenna is a straight man, the sort of man one likes and\ntrusts at sight, and he did not invent his profession. He follows his\nown ideas of right and wrong, and compared with my ideas of right\nand wrong, they seem tough, compact, decided things. He is very kind\nto all his crowd. He helps them when they are in trouble, even if it\nis trouble with the police; he helps them find employment when they\nare down on their luck; he stands between them and the impacts of an\nunsympathetic and altogether too-careless social structure in a sturdy\nand almost parental way. I can quite believe what I was told, that in\nthe lives of many of these rough undesirables he's almost the only\ndecent influence. He gets wives well treated, and he has an open heart\nfor children. And he tells them how to vote, a duty of citizenship\nthey might otherwise neglect, and sees that they do it properly. And\nwhenever you want to do things in Chicago you must reckon carefully\nwith him....\n\nThere you have a chip, a hand specimen, from the basement structure\nupon which American politics rest. That is the remarkable alternative\nto private enterprise as things are at present. It is America's only\nother way. If public services are to be taken out of the hands of such\nassociations of financiers as the Standard Oil group they have to be\nput into the hands of politicians resting at last upon this sort of\nbasis. Therein resides the impossibility of socialism in America--as\nthe case for socialism is put at present. The third course is the far\nmore complex, difficult and heroic one of creating imaginatively and\nbringing into being a new state--a feat no people in the world has yet\nachieved, but a feat that any people which aspires to lead the future\nis bound, I think, to attempt.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nTHE IMMIGRANT\n\n\nI\n\nThe Flood\n\nMy picture of America assumes now a certain definite form. I have\ntried to convey the effect of a great and energetic English-speaking\npopulation strewn across a continent so vast as to make it seem small\nand thin; I have tried to show this population caught by the upward\nsweep of that great increase in knowledge that is everywhere enlarging\nthe power and scope of human effort, exhilarated by it, and active and\nhopeful beyond any population the world has ever seen, and I have tried\nto show how the members of this population struggle and differentiate\namong themselves in a universal commercial competition that must, in\nthe end, if it is not modified, divide them into two permanent classes\nof rich and poor. I have ventured to hint at a certain emptiness in\nthe resulting wealthy, and to note some of the uglinesses and miseries\ninseparable from this competition. I have tried to give my impressions\nof the vague, yet widely diffused, will in the nation to resist this\ndifferentiation, and of a dim, large movement of thought towards a\nchange of national method. I have glanced at the debasement of politics\nthat bars any immediate hope of such reconstruction. And now it is time\nto introduce a new element of obstruction and difficulty into this\ncomplicating problem--the immigrants.\n\nInto the lower levels of the American community there pours perpetually\na vast torrent of strangers, speaking alien tongues, inspired by alien\ntraditions, for the most part illiterate peasants and working-people.\nThey come in at the bottom: that must be insisted upon. An enormous and\never-increasing proportion of the laboring classes, of all the lower\nclass in America, is of recent European origin, is either of foreign\nbirth or foreign parentage. The older American population is being\nfloated up on the top of this influx, a sterile aristocracy above a\nracially different and astonishingly fecund proletariat. (For it grows\nrankly in this new soil. One section of immigrants, the Hungarians,\nhave here a birth-rate of forty-six in the thousand, the highest of any\ncivilized people in the world.)\n\nFew people grasp the true dimensions of this invasion. Figures carry\nso little. The influx has clambered from half a million to 700,000,\nto 800,000; this year the swelling figures roll up as if they mean to\ngo far over the million mark. The flood swells to overtake the total\nbirth-rate; it has already over-topped the total of births of children\nto native-American parents.\n\nI have already told something of the effect of Ellis Island. I have\ntold how I watched the long procession of simple-looking, hopeful,\nsunburned country folk from Russia, from the Carpathians, from southern\nItaly and Turkey and Syria, filing through the wickets, bringing their\nyoung wives for the mills of Paterson and Fall River, their children\nfor the Pennsylvania coal-breakers and the cotton-mills of the South.\n\nYet there are moments when I could have imagined there were no\nimmigrants at all. All the time, except for one distinctive evening, I\nseem to have been talking to English-speaking men, now and then to the\nIrishman, now and then, but less frequently, to an Americanized German.\nIn the clubs there are no immigrants. There are not even Jews, as there\nare in London clubs. One goes about the wide streets of Boston, one\nmeets all sorts of Boston people, one visits the State-House; it's all\nthe authentic English-speaking America. Fifth Avenue, too, is America\nwithout a touch of foreign-born; and Washington. You go a hundred yards\nsouth of the pretty Boston Common and, behold! you are in a polyglot\nslum! You go a block or so east of Fifth Avenue and you are in a\nvaster, more Yiddish Whitechapel. You cross from New York to Staten\nIsland, attracted by its distant picturesque suggestion of scattered\nhomes among the trees, and you discover black-tressed, bold-eyed women\non those pleasant verandas, half-clad brats, and ambiguous washing,\nwhere once the native American held his simple state. You ask the way\nof a young man who has just emerged from a ramshackle factory, and you\nare answered in some totally incomprehensible tongue. You come up again\nafter such a dive below, to dine with the original Americans again,\ntalk With them, go about with them and forget....\n\nIn Boston, one Sunday afternoon, this fact of immigration struck upon\nMr. Henry James:\n\n\"There went forward across the cop of the hill a continuous passage of\nmen and women, in couples and talkative companies, who struck me as\nlaboring wage-earners of the simpler sort arrayed in their Sunday best\nand decently enjoying their leisure ... no sound of English in a single\ninstance escaped their lips; the greater number spoke a rude form of\nItalian, the others some outland dialect unknown to me--though I waited\nand waited to catch an echo of antique refrains.\"\n\nThat's one of a series of recurrent, uneasy observations of this great\nreplacement I find in Mr. James's book.\n\nThe immigrant does not clamor for attention. He is, indeed, almost\nentirely inaudible, inarticulate, and underneath. He is in origin a\npeasant, inarticulate, and underneath by habit and tradition. Mr. James\nhas, as it were, to put his ear to earth, to catch the murmuring of\nstrange tongues. The incomer is of diverse nationality and diverse\ntongues, and that \"breaks him up\" politically and socially. He drops\ninto American clothes, and then he does not catch the careless eye.\nHe goes into special regions and works there. Where Americans talk or\nthink or have leisure to observe, he does not intrude. The bulk of the\nAmericans don't get as yet any real sense of his portentous multitude\nat all. He does not read very much, and so he produces no effect upon\nthe book trade or magazines. You can go through such a periodical as\n_Harper's Magazine_, for example, from cover to cover, and unless\nthere is some article or story bearing specifically upon the subject\nyou might doubt if there was an immigrant in the country. On the liner\ncoming over, at Ellis Island, and sometimes on the railroads one saw\nhim--him and his womankind,--in some picturesque east-European garb,\nvery respectful, very polite, adventurous, and a little scared. Then he\nbecame less visible. He had got into cheap American clothes, resorted\nto what naturalists call \"protective mimicry,\" even perhaps acquired\na collar. Also his bearing had changed, become charged with a certain\naggression. He had got a pocket-handkerchief, and had learned to move\nfast and work fast, and to chew and spit with the proper meditative\nexpression. One detected him by his diminishing accent, and by a few\npersistent traits--rings in his ears, perhaps, or the like adornment.\nIn the next stage these also had gone; he had become ashamed of the\nmusic of his native tongue, and talked even to his wife, on the\ntrolley-car and other public places, at least, in brief remarkable\nAmerican. Before that he had become ripe for a vote.\n\nThe next stage of Americanization, I suppose, is this dingy quick-eyed\ncitizen with his schooner of beer in my Chicago saloon--if it is not\nthat crumpled thing I saw lying so still in the sunlight under the\ntrestle bridge on my way to Washington....\n\n\nII\n\nIn Defence of Immigration\n\nEvery American above forty, and most of those below that limit, seem\nto be enthusiastic advocates of unrestricted immigration. I could not\nmake them understand the apprehension with which this huge dilution of\nthe American people with profoundly ignorant foreign peasants filled\nme. I rode out on an automobile into the pretty New York country beyond\nYonkers with that finely typical American, Mr. Z.--he wanted to show\nme the pleasantness of the land,--and he sang the song of American\nconfidence, I think, more clearly and loudly than any. He told me how\neverybody had hope, how everybody had incentive, how magnificently it\nwas all going on. He told me--what is, I am afraid, a widely spread\ndelusion--that elementary education stands on a higher level of\nefficiency in the States than in England. He had no doubt whatever of\nthe national powers of assimilation. \"Let them all come,\" he said,\ncheerfully.\n\n\"The Chinese?\" said I.\n\n\"We can do with them all.\"...\n\nHe was exceptional in that extension. Most Americans stop at the\nUral Mountains, and refuse the \"Asiatic.\" It was not a matter for\ndiscussion with him, but a question of belief. He had ceased to reason\nabout immigration long ago. He was a man in the fine autumn of life,\nabounding in honors, wrapped in furs, and we drove swiftly in his\nautomobile, through the spring sunshine. (\"By Jove!\" thought I, \"you\ntalk like Pippa's rich uncle.\") By some half-brother of a coincidence\nwe happened first upon this monument commemorating a memorable incident\nof the War of Independence, and then upon that. He recalled details\nof that great campaign as Washington was fought out of Manhattan\nnorthward. I remember one stone among the shooting trees that indicated\nwhere in the Hudson River near by a British sloop had fired the first\nsalute in honor of the American flag. That salute was vividly present\nstill to him; it echoed among the woods, it filled him with a sense\nof personal triumph; it seemed half-way back to Agincourt to me. All\nthat bright morning the stars and stripes made an almost luminous\nvisible presence about us. Open-handed hospitality and confidence\nin God so swayed me that it is indeed only now, as I put this book\ntogether, I see this shining buoyancy, this bunting patriotism, in\nits direct relation to the Italian babies in the cotton-mills, to the\nsinister crowd that stands in the saloon smoking and drinking beer, an\naccumulating reserve of unintelligent force behind the manoeuvres of\nthe professional politicians....\n\nI tried my views upon Commissioner Watchorn as we leaned together over\nthe gallery railing and surveyed that bundle-carrying crowd creeping\nstep by step through the wire filter of the central hall of Ellis\nIsland--into America.\n\n\"You don't think they'll swamp you?\" I said.\n\n\"Now look here,\" said the Commissioner, \"I'm English born--Derbyshire.\nI came into America when I was a lad. I had fifteen dollars. And here I\nam! Well, do you expect me, now I'm here, to shut the door on any other\npoor chaps who want a start--a start with hope in it, in the New World?\"\n\nA pleasant-mannered, a fair-haired young man, speaking excellent\nEnglish, had joined us as we went round, and nodded approval.\n\nI asked him for his opinion, and gathered he was from Milwaukee, and\nthe son of a Scandinavian immigrant. He, too, was for \"fair-play\" and\nan open door for every one. \"Except,\" he added, \"Asiatics.\" So also, I\nremember, was a very New England lady I met at Hull House, who wasn't,\nas a matter of fact, a New-Englander at all, but the daughter of a\nGerman settler in the Middle West. They all seemed to think that I was\ninspired by hostility to the immigrant in breathing any doubt about\nthe desirability of this immense process....\n\nI tried in each case to point out that this idea of not being\nchurlishly exclusive did not exhaust the subject, that the present\nimmigration is a different thing entirely from the immigration of\nhalf a century ago, that in the interest of the immigrant and his\noffspring more than any one, is the protest to be made. Fifty years\nago more than half of the torrent was English speaking, and the rest\nmostly from the Teutonic and Scandinavian northwest of Europe, an\ninflux of people closely akin to the native Americans in temperament\nand social tradition. They were able to hold their own and mix\nperfectly. Even then the quantity of illiterate Irish produced a marked\ndegradation of political life. The earlier immigration was an influx\nof energetic people who wanted to come, and who had to put themselves\nto considerable exertion to get here; it was higher in character and\nin social quality than the present flood. The immigration of to-day is\nlargely the result of energetic canvassing by the steamship companies;\nit is, in the main, an importation of laborers and not of economically\nindependent settlers, and it is increasingly alien to the native\ntradition. The bulk of it is now Italian, Russian Jewish, Russian,\nHungarian, Croatian, Roumanian, and eastern European generally.\n\n\"The children learn English, and become more American and better\npatriots than the Americans,\" Commissioner Watchorn--echoing everybody\nin that--told me....\n\n(In Boston one optimistic lady looked to the Calabrian and Sicilian\npeasants to introduce an artistic element into the population--no\ndoubt because they come from the same peninsula that produced the\nFlorentines.)\n\n\nIII\n\nAssimilation\n\nWill the reader please remember that I've been just a few weeks in\nthe States altogether, and value my impressions at that! And will he,\nnevertheless, read of doubts that won't diminish. I doubt very much\nif America is going to assimilate all that she is taking in now; much\nmore do I doubt that she will assimilate the still greater inflow of\nthe coming years. I believe she is going to find infinite difficulties\nin that task. By \"assimilate\" I mean make intelligently co-operative\ncitizens of these people. She will, I have no doubt whatever, impose\nupon them a bare use of the English language, and give them votes and\ncertain patriotic persuasions, but I believe that if things go on as\nthey are going the great mass of them will remain a very low lower\nclass--will remain largely illiterate industrialized peasants. They\nare decent-minded peasant people, orderly, industrious people, rather\ndirty in their habits, and with a low standard of life. Wherever they\naccumulate in numbers they present to my eye a social phase far below\nthe level of either England, France, north Italy, or Switzerland.\nAnd, frankly, I do not find the American nation has either in its\nschools--which are as backward in some States as they are forward in\nothers--in its press, in its religious bodies or its general tone, any\norganized means or effectual influences for raising these huge masses\nof humanity to the requirements of an ideal modern civilization. They\nare, to my mind, \"biting off more than they can chaw\" in this matter.\n\nI got some very interesting figures from Dr. Hart, of the Children's\nHome and Aid Society, Chicago, in this matter. He was pleading for\nthe immigrant against my scepticisms. He pointed out to me that\nthe generally received opinion that the European immigrants are\nexceptionally criminal is quite wrong.\n\nThe 1900 census report collapsed after a magnificent beginning, and its\nfigures are not available, but from the earlier records there can be\nno doubt that the percentage of criminals among the \"foreign-born\" is\nhigher than that among the native-born. This, however, is entirely due\nto the high criminal record of the French Canadians in the Northeast,\nand the Mexicans in Arizona, who are not overseas immigrants at\nall. The criminal statistics of the French Canadians in the States\nshould furnish useful matter for the educational controversy in Great\nBritain. Allowing for their activities--which appear to be based on an\neducation of peculiar religious virtue--the figures bring the criminal\npercentage among the foreigners far below that of the native-born.\nBut Dr. Hart's figures also showed very clearly something further: as\nbetween the offspring of native and foreign parents the preponderance\nof crime is enormously on the side of the latter.\n\nThat, at any rate, falls in with my own preconceptions and roving\nobservations. Bear in mind always that this is just one questioning\nindividual's impression. It seems to me that the immigrant arrives\nan artless, rather uncivilized, pious, good-hearted peasant, with\na disposition towards submissive industry and rude effectual moral\nhabits. America, it is alleged, makes a man of him. It seems to me\nthat all too often she makes an infuriated toiler of him, tempts him\nwith dollars and speeds him up with competition, hardens him, coarsens\nhis manners, and, worst crime of all, lures and forces him to sell his\nchildren into toil. The home of the immigrant in America looks to me\nworse than the home he came from in Italy. It is just as dirty, it is\nfar less simple and beautiful, the food is no more wholesome, the moral\natmosphere far less wholesome; and, as a consequence, the child of the\nimmigrant is a worse man than his father.\n\nI am fully aware of the generosity, the nobility of sentiment which\nunderlies the American objection to any hindrance to immigration. But\neither that general sentiment should be carried out to a logical\ncompleteness and a gigantic and costly machinery organized to educate\nand civilize these people as they come in, or it should be chastened to\nrestrict the inflow to numbers assimilable under existing conditions.\nAt present, if we disregard sentiment, if we deny the alleged need\nof gross flattery whenever one writes of America for Americans, and\nstate the bare facts of the case, they amount to this: that America,\nin the urgent process of individualistic industrial development, in\nits feverish haste to get through with its material possibilities,\nis importing a large portion of the peasantry of central and eastern\nEurope, and converting it into a practically illiterate industrial\nproletariat. In doing this it is doing a something that, however\ndifferent in spirit, differs from the slave trade of its early\nhistory only in the narrower gap between employer and laborer. In the\n\"colored\" population America has already ten million descendants of\nunassimilated and perhaps unassimilable labor immigrants. These people\nare not only half civilized and ignorant, but they have infected\nthe white population about them with a kindred ignorance. For there\ncan be no doubt that if an Englishman or Scotchman of the year 1500\nwere to return to earth and seek his most retrograde and decivilized\ndescendants, he would find them at last among the white and colored\npopulation south of Washington. And I have a foreboding that in this\nmixed flood of workers that pours into America by the million to-day,\nin this torrent of ignorance, against which that heroic being, the\nschoolmarm, battles at present all unaided by men, there is to be found\nthe possibility of another dreadful separation of class and kind, a\nseparation perhaps not so profound but far more universal. One sees the\npossibility of a rich industrial and mercantile aristocracy of western\nEuropean origin, dominating a darker-haired, darker-eyed, uneducated\nproletariat from central and eastern Europe. The immigrants are being\ngiven votes, I know, but that does not free them, it only enslaves the\ncountry. The negroes were given votes.\n\nThat is the quality of the danger as I see it. But before this\nindigestion of immigrants becomes an incurable sickness of the States\nmany things may happen. There is every sign, as I have said, that a\ngreat awakening, a great disillusionment, is going on in the American\nmind. The Americans have become suddenly self-critical, are hot with\nan unwonted fever for reform and constructive effort. This swamping of\nthe country may yet be checked. They may make a strenuous effort to\nemancipate children below fifteen from labor, and so destroy one of the\nchief inducements of immigration. Once convince them that their belief\nin the superiority of their public schools to those of England and\nGermany is an illusion, or at least that their schools are inadequate\nto the task before them, and it may be they will perform some swift\nAmerican miracle of educational organization and finance. For all\nthe very heavy special educational charges that are needed if the\nimmigrant is really to be assimilated, it seems a reasonable proposal\nthat immigration should pay. Suppose the new-comer were presently to\nbe taxed on arrival for his own training and that of any children he\nhad with him, that again would check the inrush very greatly. Or the\nsteamship company might be taxed, and left to settle the trouble with\nthe immigrant by raising his fare. And finally, it may be that if the\nline is drawn, as it seems highly probable it will be, at \"Asiatics,\"\nthen there may even be a drying up of the torrent at its source. The\nEuropean countries are not unlimited reservoirs of offspring. As they\npass from their old conditions into more and more completely organized\nmodern industrial states, they develop a new internal equilibrium and\ncease to secrete an excess of population. England no longer supplies\nany great quantity of Americans; Scotland barely any; France is\nexhausted; Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia have, it seems, disgorged\nnearly all their surplus load, and now run dry....\n\nThese are all mitigations of the outlook, but still the dark shadow of\ndisastrous possibility remains. The immigrant comes in to weaken and\nconfuse the counsels of labor, to serve the purposes of corruption, to\ncomplicate any economic and social development, above all to retard\nenormously the development of that national consciousness and will on\nwhich the hope of the future depends.\n\n\nIV\n\nThe Educational Alliance\n\nI told these doubts of mine to a pleasant young lady of New York, who\nseems to find much health and a sustaining happiness in settlement work\non the East Side. She scorned my doubts. \"Children make better citizens\nthan the old Americans,\" she said, like one who quotes a classic, and\ntook me with her forthwith to see the central school of the Educational\nAlliance, that fine imposing building in East Broadway.\n\nIt's a thing I'm glad not to have missed. I recall a large cool room\nwith a sloping floor, tier rising above tier of seats and desks, and a\nbig class of bright-eyed Jewish children, boys and girls, each waving\ntwo little American flags to the measure of the song they sang, singing\nto the accompaniment of the piano on the platform beside us.\n\n\"God bless our native land,\" they sang--with a considerable variety of\naccent and distinctness, but with a very real emotion.\n\nSome of them had been in America a month, some much longer, but here\nthey were--under the auspices of the wealthy Hebrews of New York and\nMr. Blaustein's enthusiastic direction--being Americanized. They sang\nof America--\"sweet land of liberty\"; they stood up and drilled with\nthe little bright pretty flags; swish they crossed and swish they\nwaved back, a waving froth of flags and flushed children's faces;\nand they stood up and repeated the oath of allegiance, and at the end\nfiled tramping by me and out of the hall. The oath they take is finely\nworded. It runs:\n\n[Illustration: WHERE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE AMERICANIZED]\n\n\"Flag our great Republic, inspirer in battle, guardian of our homes,\nwhose stars and stripes stand for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we\nsalute thee! We, the natives of distant lands, who find rest under thy\nfolds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and our sacred honor to love\nand protect thee, our country, and the liberty of the American people\nforever.\"\n\nI may have been fanciful, but as I stood aside and watched them going\nproudly past, it seemed to me that eyes met mine, triumphant and\nvictorious eyes--for was I not one of these British from whom freedom\nwas won? But that was an ignoble suspicion. They had been but a few\nweeks in America, and that light in their eyes was just a brotherly\nchallenge to one they supposed a fellow-citizen who stood unduly\nthoughtful amid their rhythmic exaltation. They tramped out and past\nwith their flags and guidons.\n\n\"It is touching!\" whispered my guide, and I saw she had caught a faint\nreflection of that glow that lit the children.\n\nI told her it was the most touching thing I had seen in America.\n\nAnd so it remains.\n\nThink of the immense promise in it! Think of the flower of belief and\neffort that may spring from this warm sowing! We passed out of this\nfluttering multiplication of the most beautiful flag in the world, into\nstreets abominable with offal and indescribable filth, and dark and\nhorrible under the thunderous girders of the Elevated railroad, to our\nother quest for that morning, a typical New York tenement. For I wanted\nto see one, with practically windowless bedrooms....\n\nThe Educational Alliance is of course not a public institution; it\nwas organized by Hebrews, and conducted for Hebrews, chiefly for the\nbenefit of the Hebrew immigrant. It is practically the only organized\nattempt to Americanize the immigrant child. After the children have\nmastered sufficient English and acquired the simpler elements of\npatriotism--which is practically no more than an emotional attitude\ntowards the flag--they pass on into the ordinary public schools.\n\n\"Yes,\" I told my friend, \"I know how these children feel. That, less\narticulate perhaps, but no less sincere, is the thing--something\nbetween pride and a passionate desire--that fills three-quarters of the\npeople at Ellis Island now. They come ready to love and worship, ready\nto bow down and kiss the folds of your flag. They give themselves--they\nwant to give. Do you know I, too, have come near feeling that at times\nfor America.\"...\n\nWe were separated for a while by a long hole in the middle of the\nstreet and a heap of builder's refuse. Before we came within talking\ndistance again I was in reaction against the gleam of satisfaction my\nlast confession had evoked.\n\n\"In the end,\" I said, \"you Americans won't be able to resist it.\"\n\n\"Resist what?\"\n\n\"You'll respect your country,\" I said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nIn those crowded noisy East Side streets one has to shout, and shout\ncompact things. \"_This!_\" I said to the barbaric disorder about us.\n\"Lynching! Child Labor! Graft!\"\n\nThen we were separated by a heap of decaying fish that some hawker had\ndumped in the gutter.\n\nMy companion shouted something I did not catch.\n\n\"_We'll_ tackle it!\" she repeated.\n\nI looked at her, bright and courageous and youthful, a little\noverconfident, I thought, but extremely reassuring, going valiantly\nthrough a disorderly world of obstacles, and for the moment--I suppose\nthat waving bunting and the children's voices had got into my head a\nlittle--I forgot all sorts of things....\n\nI could have imagined her the spirit of America incarnate rather than a\nphilanthropic young lady of New York.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nSTATE-BLINDNESS\n\n\nI\n\nSense of the State\n\nIn what I have written so far, I have tried to get the effect of the\nAmerican outlook, the American task, the American problem as a whole,\nas it has presented itself to me. Clearly, as I see it, it is a mental\nand moral issue. There seems to me an economic process going on that\ntends to concentrate first wealth and then power in the hands of a\nsmall number of adventurous individuals of no very high intellectual\ntype, a huge importation of alien and unassimilable workers, and a\nsustained disorder of local and political administration. Correlated\nwith this is a great increase in personal luxury and need. In all these\nrespects there is a strong parallelism between the present condition\nof the United States and the Roman Republic in the time of the early\nC\u00e6sars; and arguing from these alone one might venture to forecast\nthe steady development of an exploiting and devastating plutocracy,\nleading perhaps to C\u00e6sarism, and a progressive decline in civilization\nand social solidarity. But there are forces of recuperation and\nconstruction in America such as the earlier instance did not display.\nThere is infinitely more original and originating thought in the\nstate, there are the organized forces of science, a habit of progress,\nclearer and wider knowledge among the general mass of the people. These\npromise, and must, indeed, inevitably make, some synthetic effort of\ngreater or less homogeneity and force. It is upon that synthetic effort\nthat the distinctive destiny of America depends.\n\nI propose to go on now to discuss the mental quality of America as I\nhave been able to focus it. (Remember always that I am an undiplomatic\ntourist of no special knowledge or authority, who came, moreover, to\nAmerica with certain prepossessions.) And first, and chiefly, I have\nto convey what seems to me the most significant and pregnant thing of\nall. It is a matter of something wanting, that the American shares\nwith the great mass of prosperous middle-class people in England. I\nthink it is best indicated by saying that the typical American has no\n\"sense of the state.\" I do not mean that he is not passionately and\nvigorously patriotic. But I mean that he has no perception that his\nbusiness activities, his private employments, are constituents in a\nlarge collective process; that they affect other people and the world\nforever, and cannot, as he imagines, begin and end with him. He sees\nthe world in fragments; it is to him a multitudinous collection of\nindividual \"stories\"--as the newspapers put it. If one studies an\nAmerican newspaper, one discovers it is all individuality, all a matter\nof personal doings, of what so and so said and how so and so felt. And\nall these individualities are unfused. Not a touch of abstraction or\ngeneralization, no thinnest atmosphere of reflection, mitigates these\nharsh, emphatic, isolated happenings. The American, it seems to me,\nhas yet to achieve what is, after all, the product of education and\nthought, the conception of a whole to which all individual acts and\nhappenings are subordinate and contributory.\n\nWhen I say this much, I do not mean to insinuate that any other nation\nin the world has any superiority in this matter. But I do want to urge\nthat the American problem is pre-eminently one that must be met by\nbroad ways of thinking, by creative, synthetic, and merging ideas, and\nthat a great number of Americans seem to lack these altogether.\n\n\nII\n\nA Sample American\n\nLet me by way of illustration give a specimen American mind. It is not\nthe mind of a writer or philosopher, it is just a plain successful\nbusiness-man who exposes himself, and makes it clear that this want of\nany sense of the state of any large duty of constructive loyalty, is\nnot an idiosyncrasy, but the quality of all his circle, his friends,\nhis religious teacher....\n\nI found my specimen in a book called _With John Bull and Jonathan_.\nIt contains the rather rambling reminiscences of Mr. J. Morgan\nRichards, the wealthy and successful London agent of a great number of\nwell-advertised American proprietary articles, and I read it first, I\nwill confess, chiefly in search of such delightful phrases as the one\n\"mammoth in character\" I have already quoted. But there were few to\nequal that first moment's bright discovery. What I got from it finally\nwasn't so much that sort of thing as this realization of Mr. Richards's\npeculiar quality, this acute sense of all that he hadn't got. Mr.\nRichards told of advertising enterprises, of contracts and journeyings,\nof his great friendship with the late Dr. Parker, of his domestic\naffairs, and all the changes in the world that had struck him, and of a\nremarkable dining club, called (paradoxically) the _Sphinx_, in which\nthe giants (or are they the mammoths?) of the world of advertisement\nforegather. He gave his portrait, and the end-paper presented him\nplayfully as the jolly president of the Sphinx Club, champagne-bottle\ncrowned, but else an Egyptian monarch; and on the cover are two gilt\nhands clasped across a gilt ripple of sea (\"hands across the sea\"),\nunder intertwining English and American flags. From the book one got\nan effect, garrulous perhaps, but on the whole not unpleasing, of an\nelderly but still active business personality quite satisfied by his\nachievements, and representative of I know not what proportion, but at\nany rate a considerable proportion, of his fellow-countrymen. And one\ngot an effect of a being not simply indifferent to the health and vigor\nand growth of the community of which he was a part, but unaware of its\nexistence.\n\nHe displays this irresponsibility of the commercial mind so\nilluminatingly because he does in a way attempt to tell something\nmore than his personal story. He notes the changes in the world about\nhim, how this has improved and that progressed, which contrasts\nbetween England and America struck upon his mind. That he himself\nis responsible amid these changes never seems to dawn upon him.\nHis freedom from any sense of duty to the world as a whole, of any\nsubordination of trading to great ideas, is na\u00efve and fundamental.\nHe tells of how he arranged with the authorities in charge of the\nIndependence Day celebrations on Boston Common to display \"three large\npieces\" containing the name of a certain \"bitters,\" which they did, and\nhow this no doubt very desirable commodity was first largely advertised\nthroughout the United States in the fall of 1861, and rapidly became\nthe success of the day, because of the enormous amount of placarding\ngiven to the cabalistic characters 'S-T-1860-X.' Those strange letters\nand figures stared upon people from wall and fence and tree, in every\nleading town throughout the United States. They were painted on the\nrocks of the Hudson River to such an extent that the attention of the\nLegislature was drawn to the fact, and a law was passed to prevent the\nfurther disfigurement of river scenery.\n\nHe calls this \"cute.\" He tells, too, of his educational work upon\nthe English press, how he won it over to \"display\" advertisements,\nand devised \"the first sixteen-sheet double-demy poster ever seen\nin England in connection with a proprietary article.\" He introduced\nthe smoking of cigarettes into England against great opposition.\nMr. Richards finds no incongruity, but apparently a very delightful\nassociation, in the fact that this great victory for the adolescent's\ncigarette was won on the site of Strudwick's house, wherein John Bunyan\ndied, and hard by the path of the Smithfield martyrs to their fiery\nsacrifice. Both they and Mr. Richards \"lit such a candle in England--\"\n\nWell, my business is not to tell of the feats by which Mr. Richards\ngrew wealthy and important as a tree may grow and flourish amid the\nmasonry it helps to disintegrate. My business is purely with his\ninsensibility to the state as an aspect of his personal life. It is\ninsensibility--not disregard or hostility. One gets an impression from\nthis book that if Mr. Richards had lived in a different culture, he\nwould have been a generous giver of himself. In spite of his curious\nincapacity to appreciate any issues larger than large enterprises in\nselling, he is very evidently a religious man. He sat under the late\nDr. Parker of the rich and prosperous City Temple, and that reverend\ngentleman's leonine visage adorns the book. Its really the light one\ngets on Dr. Parker and his teaching that appeals to me most in this\nvolume. For this gentleman Mr. Richards seems to have entertained a\nfeeling approaching reverence. He notes such details as:\n\n\"At the conclusion of an invocation or prayer, his habit always was to\nmake a pause of a few seconds before pronouncing 'Amen.' This was most\nimpressive....\n\n\"He spoke such words as 'God,' 'Jesus Christ,' 'No,' 'Yes,' 'Nothing,'\nin a way to give more value to each word than any speaker I have ever\nheard.\"\n\nThey became great friends, rarely a week passed without their meeting,\nand, says Mr. Richards, he \"was pleased, in the course of time,\nto honor me with his confidence in a marked degree, as though he\nrecognized in me some quality which satisfied his judgment, that I\ncould be trusted in business questions quite apart from those relating\nto his church. He was not only a born preacher, but possessed a\nmarvellous grasp of sound, practical knowledge upon the affairs of\nthe day. I often consulted with him regarding my own affairs, always\ngetting the most practical help.\"\n\nWhen Dr. Parker came to America, the two friends corresponded warmly,\nand several of the letters are quoted. Even \"\u00a35000 a year easily made\"\ncould not tempt him from London and the modest opulence of the City\nTemple....\n\nBut my business now is not to dwell on these characteristic details,\nbut to point out that Mr. Richards does not stand alone in the entire\ndetachment, not only of his worldly achievements, but of his spiritual\nlife, from any creative solicitude for the state. If he was merely an\nisolated \"character\" I should have no concern with him. His association\nwith Dr. Parker shows most luminously that he presents a whole cult\nof English and American rich traders, who in America \"sat under\" such\nmen as the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, for example, who evidently stand\nfor much more in America than in England, and who, so far as the\nstate and political and social work go, are scarcely of more use, are\nprobably more hindrance, than any organization of selfish voluptuaries\nof equal wealth and numbers. It is a cult, it has its teachers and its\nbooks. I have had a glimpse of one of its manuals. I find Mr. Richards\nquoting with approval Dr. Parker's \"Ten General Commandments for Men of\nBusiness,\" commandments which strike me as not only State-blind, but\nutterly God-blind, which are, indeed, no more than shrewd counsels for\n\"getting on.\" It is really quite horrible stuff morally. \"Thou shalt\nnot hobnob with idle persons,\" parodies Dr. Parker in commandment V.,\nso glossing richly upon the teachings of Him who ate with publicans\nand sinners, and (no doubt to instil the advisability of keeping one's\nmore delicate business procedure in one's own hands), \"Thou shalt not\nforget that a servant who can tell lies _for_ thee, may one day tell\nlies _to_ thee.\"...\n\nI am not throwing any doubt upon the sincerity of Dr. Parker and Mr.\nRichards. I believe that nothing could exceed the transparent honesty\nthat ends this record which tells of a certain bitters pushed at\nthe sacrifice of beautiful scenery, of a successful propaganda of\ncigarette-smoking, and of all sorts of proprietary articles landed\nwell home in their gastric target of a whole life lost, indeed, in\ncommercial self-seeking, with \"What shall I render unto the Lord for\nall his benefits?\"\n\n  \"The Now is an atom of Sand,\n    And the Near is a perishing Clod,\n  But Afar is a fairyland,\n    And Beyond is the Bosom of God.\"\n\nWhat I have to insist upon now is that this is a sample, and, so\nfar as I can tell, a fair sample, of the quality and trend of the\nmind-stuff and the breadth and height of the tradition of a large and\nI know not how influential mass of prosperous middle-class English,\nand of a much more prosperous and influential and important section of\nAmericans. They represent much energy, they represent much property,\nthey are a factor to reckon with. They present a powerful opposing\nforce to anything that will suppress their disgusting notice-boards\nor analyze their ambiguous \"proprietary articles,\" or tax their\ngettings for any decent public purpose. And here I find them selling\npoisons as pain-killers, and alcohol as tonics, and fighting ably and\nboldly to silence adverse discussion. In the face of the great needs\nthat lie before America their active trivality of soul, their energy\nand often unscrupulous activity, and their quantitative importance\nbecome, to my mind, adverse and threatening, a stumbling-block for\nhope. For the impression I have got by going to and fro in America\nis that Mr. Richards is a fair sample of at least the older type of\nAmerican. So far as I can learn, Mr. J.D. Rockefeller is just another\nproduct of the same cult. You meet these older types everywhere,\nthey range from fervent piety and temperance to a hearty drinking,\n\"story\"-telling, poker-playing type, but they have in common a sharp,\nshrewd, narrow, business habit of mind that ignores the future and\nthe state altogether. But I do not find the younger men are following\nin their lines. Some are. But just how many and to what extent, I do\nnot know. It is very hard for a literary man to estimate the quantity\nand importance of ideas in a community. The people he meets naturally\nall entertain ideas, or they would not come in his way. The people\nwho have new ideas talk; those who have not, go about their business.\nBut I hazard an opinion that Young America now presents an altogether\ndifferent type from the young men of enterprise and sound Baptist\nand business principles who were the backbone of the irresponsible\ncommercial America of yesterday, the America that rebuilt Chicago on\n\"floating foundations,\" covered the world with advertisement boards,\ngave the great cities the elevated railroads, and organized the trusts.\n\n\nIII\n\nOneida\n\nI spent a curious day amid the memories of that strangely interesting\nsocial experiment, the Oneida Community, and met a most significant\ncontemporary, \"live American\" of the newer school, in the son of the\nfounder and the present head of \"Oneida Limited.\"\n\nThere are moments when that visit I paid to Oneida seems to me to\nstand for all America. The place, you know, was once the seat of a\nperfectionist community; the large red community buildings stand now\namong green lawns and ripening trees, and I dined in the communal\ndining-room, and visited the library, and saw the chain and trap\nfactory, and the silk-spinning factory and something of all its\nindustries. I talked to old and middle-aged people who told me all\nsorts of interesting things of \"community days,\" looked through curious\nold-fashioned albums of photographs, showing the women in their\nbloomers and cropped hair, and the men in the ill-fitting frock-coats\nof the respectable mediocre person in early Victorian times. I think\nthat some of the reminiscences I awakened had been voiceless for some\ntime. At moments it was like hearing the story of a flattened, dry,\nand colorless flower between the pages of a book, of a verse written\nin faded ink, or of some daguerreotype spotted and faint beyond\nrecognition. It was extraordinarily New England in its quality as I\nlooked back at it all. They claimed a quiet perfection of soul, they\nsearched one another marvellously for spiritual chastening, they defied\ncustom and opinion, they followed their reasoning and their theology\nto the inmost amazing abnegations--and they kept themselves solvent by\nthe manufacture of steel traps that catch the legs of beasts in their\nstrong and pitiless jaws....\n\nBut this book is not about the things that concerned Oneida in\ncommunity days, and I mention them here only because of the curious\ndevelopments of the present time. Years ago, when the founder, John\nHumphrey Noyes, grew old and unable to control the new dissensions\nthat arose out of the sceptical attitude of the younger generation\ntowards his ingenious theology, and such-like stresses, communism was\nabandoned, the religious life and services discontinued, the concern\nturned into a joint-stock company, and the members made shareholders on\nstrictly commercial lines. For some years its prosperity declined. Many\nof the members went away. But a nucleus remained as residents in the\nold buildings, and after a time there were returns. I was told that in\nthe early days of the new period there was a violent reaction against\ncommunistic methods, a jealous inexperienced insistence upon property.\n\"It was difficult to borrow a hammer,\" said one of my informants.\n\nThen, as the new generation began to feel its feet, came a fresh\ndevelopment of vitality. The Oneida company began to set up new\nmachinery, to seek wider markets, to advertise and fight competitors.\n\nThis Mr. P.B. Noyes was the leader into the new paths. He possesses all\nthe force of character, the constructive passion, the imaginative power\nof his progenitor, and it has all gone into business competition. I\nhave heard much talk of the romance of business, chiefly from people I\nheartily despised, but in Mr. Noyes I found business indeed romantic.\nIt had get hold of him, it possessed him like a passion. He has\ninspired all his half-brothers and cousins and younger fellow-members\nof the community with his own imaginative motive. They, too, are\nenthusiasts for business.\n\nMr. Noyes is a tall man, who looks down when he talks to one. He showed\nme over the associated factories, told me how the trap trade of all\nNorth America is in Oneida's hands, told me of how they fight and win\nagainst the British traps in South America and Burmah. He showed me\nphotographs of panthers in traps, tigers in traps, bears snarling at\ndeath, unfortunate deer, foxes caught by the paws....\n\nI did my best to forget those photographs at once in the interest of\nhis admirable machinery, which busied itself with chain-making as\nthough it had eyes and hands. I went beside him, full of that respect\nthat a literary man must needs feel when a creative business controller\ndisplays his quality.\n\n\"But the old religion of Oneida?\" I would interpolate.\n\n\"Each one of us is free to follow his own religion. Here is a new sort\nof chain we are making for hanging-lamps. Hitherto--\"\n\nPresently I would try again. \"Are the workers here in any way members\nof the community?\"\n\n\"Oh no! Many of them are Italian immigrants. We think of building a\nschool for them.... No, we get no labor troubles. We pay always above\nthe trade-union rates, and so we get the pick of the workmen. Our class\nof work can't be sweated.\"...\n\nYes, he was an astonishing personality, so immensely concentrated on\nthese efficient manufacturing and trading developments, so evidently\ncareless of theology, philosophy, social speculation, beauty.\n\n\"Your father was a philosopher,\" I said.\n\n\"I think in ten years' time I may give up the control here,\" he threw\nout, \"and write something.\"\n\n\"I've thought of the publishing trade myself,\" I said, \"when my wits\nare old and stiff.\"...\n\nI never met a man before so firmly gripped by the romantic constructive\nand adventurous element of business, so little concerned about\npersonal riches or the accumulation of wealth. He illuminated much\nthat had been dark to me in the American character. I think better\nof business by reason of him. And time after time I tried him upon\npolitics. It came to nothing. Making a new world was, he thought,\na rhetorical flourish about futile and troublesome activities, and\npoliticians merely a disreputable sort of parasite upon honorable\npeople who made chains and plated spoons. All his constructive\ninstincts, all his devotion, were for Oneida and its enterprises.\nAmerica was just the impartial space, the large liberty, in which\nOneida grew, the Stars and Stripes a wide sanction akin to the\nimpartial irresponsible harboring sky overhead. Sense of the State had\nnever grown in him--can now, I felt convinced, never grow....\n\nBut some day, I like to imagine, the World State, and not Oneida\ncorporations, and a nobler trade than traps, will command such services\nas his.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nTWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT\n\n\nI\n\nThe Riddle of Intolerance\n\nIn considering the quality of the American mind (upon which, as\nI believe, the ultimate destiny of America entirely depends), it\nhas been necessary to point out that, considered as one whole, it\nstill seems lacking in any of that living sense of the state out\nof which constructive effort must arise, and that, consequently,\nenormous amounts of energy go to waste in anarchistic and chaotically\ncompetitive private enterprise. I believe there are powerful forces\nat work in the trend of modern thought, science, and method, in the\ndirection of bringing order, control, and design into this confused\ngigantic conflict, and the discussion of these constructive forces must\nnecessarily form the crown of my forecast of America's future. But\nbefore I come to that I must deal with certain American traits that\npuzzle me, that I cannot completely explain to myself, that dash my\nlarge expectations with an obstinate shadow of foreboding. Essentially\nthese are disintegrating influences, in the nature of a fierce\nintolerance, that lead to conflicts and destroy co-operation. One makes\none's criticism with compunction. One moves through the American world,\nmeeting constantly with kindness and hospitality, with a familiar\nhelpfulness that is delightful, with sympathetic enterprise and\nenergetic imagination, and then suddenly there flashes out a quality of\nharshness....\n\nI will explain in a few minutes what I mean by this flash of harshness.\nLet me confess here that I cannot determine whether it is a necessary\nconsequence of American conditions, the scar upon the soul of too\nstrenuous business competition, or whether it is something deeper,\nsome subtle, unavoidable infection perhaps in this soil that was once\nthe Red Indian's battle-ground, some poison, it may be, mingled with\nthis clear exhilarating air. And going with this harshness there seems\nalso something else, a contempt for abstract justice that one does not\nfind in any European intelligence--not even among the English. This\ncontempt may be a correlative of the intense practicality begotten by\na scruple-destroying commercial training. That, at any rate, is my own\nprepossession. Conceivably I am over-disposed to make that tall lady in\nNew York Harbor stand as a symbol for the liberty of property, and to\ntrace the indisputable hastiness of life here--it is haste sometimes\nrather than speed,--its scorn of \u00e6sthetic and abstract issues, this\nfrequent quality of harshness, and a certain public disorder, whatever\nindeed mars the splendid promise and youth of America, to that. I\nthink it is an accident of the commercial phase that presses men\nbeyond dignity, patience, and magnanimity. I am loath to believe it is\nsomething fundamentally American.\n\nI have very clearly in my memory the figure of young MacQueen, in his\ngray prison clothes in Trenton jail, and how I talked with him. He and\nMr. Booker T. Washington and Maxim Gorky stand for me as figures in\nthe shadow--symbolical men. I think of America as pride and promise,\nas large growth and large courage, all set with beautiful fluttering\nbunting, and then my vision of these three men comes back to me;\nthey return presences inseparable from my American effect, unlit\nand uncomplaining on the sunless side of her, implying rather than\nvoicing certain accusations. America can be hasty, can be obstinately\nthoughtless and unjust....\n\nWell, let me set down as shortly as I can how I saw them, and then go\non again with my main thesis.\n\n\nII\n\nMacQueen\n\nMacQueen is one of those young men England is now making by the\nthousand in her elementary schools--a man of that active, intelligent,\nmentally hungry, self-educating sort that is giving us our elementary\nteachers, our labor members, able journalists, authors, civil\nservants, and some of the most public-spirited and efficient of our\nmunicipal administrators. He is the sort of man an Englishman grows\nprouder of as he sees America and something of her politicians and\nlabor leaders. After his board-school days MacQueen went to work as\na painter and grainer, and gave his spare energy to self-education.\nHe mastered German, and read widely and freely. He corresponded with\nWilliam Morris, devoured Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, followed the\n_Clarion_ week by week, discussed social questions, wrote to the\nnewspapers, debated, made speeches. The English reader will begin to\nrecognize the type. Jail had worn him when I saw him, but I should\nthink he was always physically delicate; he wears spectacles, he warms\nemotionally as he talks. And he decided, after much excogitation, that\nthe ideal state is one of so fine a quality of moral training that\npeople will not need coercion and repressive laws. He calls himself an\nanarchist--of the early Christian, Tolstoyan, non-resisting school.\nSuch an anarchist was Emerson, among other dead Americans whose names\nare better treasured than their thoughts. That sort of anarchist has\nas much connection with embittered bomb-throwers and assassins as Miss\nFlorence Nightingale has with the woman Hartmann, who put on a nurse's\nuniform to poison and rob....\n\nWell, MacQueen led an active life in England, married, made a decent\nliving, and took an honorable part in the local affairs of Leeds until\nhe was twenty-six. Then he conceived a desire for wider opportunity\nthan England offers men of his class.\n\nIn January, 1902, he crossed the Atlantic, and, no doubt, he came very\nmuch aglow with the American idea. He felt that he was exchanging a\ndecadent country of dwarfing social and political traditions for a land\nof limitless outlook. He became a proof-reader in New York, and began\nto seek around him for opportunities of speaking and forwarding social\nprogress. He tried to float a newspaper. The New York labor-unions\nfound him a useful speaker, and, among others, the German silk-workers\nof New York became aware of him. In June they asked him to go to\nPaterson to speak in German to the weavers in that place.\n\nThe silk-dyers were on strike in Paterson, but the weavers were weaving\n\"scab-silk,\" dyed by dyers elsewhere, and it was believed that the\ndyers' strike would fail unless they struck also. They had to be called\nout. They were chiefly Italians, some Hungarians. It was felt by the\nNew York German silk-workers that perhaps MacQueen's German learned in\nEngland might meet the linguistic difficulties of the case.\n\nHe went. I hope he will forgive me if I say that his was an extremely\nfutile expedition. He did very little. He wrote an entirely harmless\narticle or so in English for _La Questione Sociale_, and he declined\nwith horror and publicity to appear upon the same platform with a\nmischievous and violent lady anarchist called Emma Goldman. On June\n17, 1902, he went to Paterson again, and spoke to his own undoing.\nThere is no evidence that he said anything illegal or inflammatory,\nthere is clear evidence that he bored his audience. They shouted him\ndown, and called for a prominent local speaker named Galiano. MacQueen\nsubsided into the background, and Galiano spoke for an hour in Italian.\nHe aroused great enthusiasm, and the proceedings terminated with a\ndestructive riot.\n\nEight witnesses testify to the ineffectual efforts on the part of\nMacQueen to combat the violence in progress....\n\nThat finishes the story of MacQueen's activities in America, for\nwhich he is now in durance at Trenton. He, in common with a large\ncrowd and in common, too, with nearly all the witnesses against him,\ndid commit one offence against the law--he did not go home when\ndestruction began. He was arrested next day. From that time forth\nhis fate was out of his hands, and in the control of a number of\npeople who wanted to \"make an example\" of the Paterson strikers. The\npress took up MacQueen. They began to clothe the bare bones of this\nsimple little history I have told in fluent, unmitigated lying. They\nblackened him, one might think, out of sheer artistic pleasure in the\noperation. They called this rather nervous, educated, nobly meaning if\nill-advised young man a \"notorious anarchist\"; his head-line title\nbecame \"Anarchistic MacQueen\"; they wrote his \"story\" in a vein of\nimaginative fervor; they invented \"an unsavory police record\" for\nhim in England; and enlarged upon the marvellous secret organization\nfor crime of which he was representative and leader. In a little\nwhile MacQueen had ceased to be a credible human being; he might have\nbeen invented by Mr. William le Queux. He was arrested--Galiano went\nscot-free--and released on bail. It was discovered that his pleasant,\ndecent Yorkshire wife and three children were coming out to America to\nhim, and she became \"the woman Nellie Barton\"--her maiden name--and\n\"a socialist of the Emma Goldman stripe.\" This, one gathers, is the\nmost horrible stripe known to American journalism. Had there been a\nworse one, Mrs. MacQueen would have been the _ex officio_. And now\nhere is an extraordinary thing--public officials began to join in\nthe process. This is what perplexes me most in this affair. I am\ntold that Assistant-Secretary-of-the-Treasury H.A. Taylor, without\na fact to go upon, subscribed to the \"unsavory record\" legend and\nAssistant-Secretary C.H. Keep fell in with it. They must have seen\nwhat it was they were indorsing. In a letter from Mr. Keep to the\nReverend A.W. Wishart, of Trenton (who throughout has fought most\ngallantly for justice in this case), I find Mr. Keep distinguishes\nhimself by the artistic device of putting \"William MacQueen's\" name\nin inverted commas. So, very delicately, he conveys out of the void\nthe insinuation that the name is an alias. Meanwhile the Commissioner\nof Immigration prepared to take a hand in the game of breaking up\nMacQueen. He stopped Mrs. MacQueen at the threshold of liberty,\nimprisoned her in Ellis Island, and sent her back to Europe. MacQueen,\nstill on bail, was not informed of this action, and waited on the pier\nfor some hours before he understood. His wife had come second class to\nAmerica, but she was returned first class, and the steamship company\nseized her goods for the return fare....\n\nThat was more than MacQueen could stand. He had been tried, convicted,\nsentenced to five years' imprisonment, and he was now out on bail\npending an appeal. Anxiety about his wife and children was too much for\nhim. He slipped off to England after them (\"Escape of the Anarchist\nMacQueen\"), made what provision and arrangements he could for them,\nand returned in time to save his bondsman's money (\"Capture of the\nEscaped Anarchist MacQueen\"). Several members of the Leeds City Council\n(\"Criminal Associates in Europe\") saw him off. That was in 1903. His\nappeal had been refused on a technical point. He went into Trenton\njail, and there he is to this day. There I saw him. Trenton Jail did\nnot impress me as an agreeable place. The building is fairly old, and\nthere is no nonsense about the food. The cells hold, some of them,\nfour criminals, some of them two, but latterly MacQueen has had spells\nin the infirmary, and has managed to get a cell to himself. Many of\nthe criminals are negroes and half-breeds, imprisoned for unspeakable\noffences. In the exercising-yard MacQueen likes to keep apart. \"When I\nfirst came I used to get in a corner,\" he said....\n\nNow this case of MacQueen has exercised my mind enormously. It was\npainful to go out of the gray jail again after I had talked to\nhim--of Shaw and Morris, of the Fabian Society and the British labor\nmembers--into sunlight and freedom, and ever and again, as I went about\nNew York having the best of times among the most agreeable people,\nthe figure of him would come back to me quite vividly, in his gray\ndress, sitting on the edge of an unaccustomed chair, hands on his\nknees, speaking a little nervously and jerkily, and very glad indeed\nto see me. He is younger than myself, but much my sort of man, and we\ntalked of books and education and his case like brothers. There can be\nno doubt to any sensible person who will look into the story of his\nconviction, who will even go and see him, that there has been a serious\nmiscarriage of justice.\n\nThere has been a serious miscarriage of justice, such as (unhappily)\nmight happen in any country. That is nothing distinctive of America.\nBut what does impress me as remarkable and perplexing is the immense\ndifficulty--the perhaps unsurmountable difficulty--of getting this man\nreleased. The Governor of the State of New Jersey knows he is innocent,\nthe judges of the Court of Pardons know he is innocent. Three of them\nI was able to button-hole at Trenton, and hear their point of View.\nTwo are of the minority and for release, one was doubtful in attitude\nbut hostile in spirit. They hold, the man, he thinks, on the score of\npublic policy. They put it that Paterson is a \"hotbed\" of crime and\nviolence; that once MacQueen is released every anarchist in the country\nwill be emboldened to crime, and so on and so on. I admit Paterson\nfesters, but if we are to punish anybody instead of reforming the\nsystem, it's the masters who ought to be in jail for that.\n\n\"What will the property-owners in Paterson say to us if this man is\nreleased?\" one of the judges admitted frankly.\n\n\"But he hadn't anything to do with the violence,\" I said, and argued\nthe case over again--quite missing the point of that objection.\n\nWhenever I had a chance in New York, in Boston, in Washington, even\namid the conversation of a Washington dinner-table, I dragged up the\ncase of MacQueen. Nobody seemed indignant. One lady admitted the\nsentence was heavy, \"he might have been given six months to cool off\nin,\" she said. I protested he ought not to have been given a day. \"Why\ndid he go there?\" said a Supreme Court judge in Washington, a lawyer in\nNew York, and several other people. \"Wasn't he making trouble?\" I was\nasked.\n\nAt last that reached my sluggish intelligence.\n\nYet I still hesitate to accept the new interpretations. Galiano, who\npreached blind violence and made the riot, got off scot-free; MacQueen,\nwho wanted a legitimate strike on British lines, went to jail. So\nlong as the social injustice, the sweated disorder of Paterson's\nindustrialism, vents its cries in Italian in _La Questione Sociale_,\nso long as it remains an inaudible misery so far as the great public\nis concerned, making vehement yet impotent appeals to mere force, and\nso losing its last chances of popular sympathy, American property, I\ngather, is content. The masters and the immigrants can deal with one\nanother on those lines. But to have outsiders coming in!\n\nThere is an active press campaign against the release of \"the Anarchist\nMacQueen,\" and I do not believe that Mr. Wishart will succeed in his\nendeavors. I think MacQueen will serve out his five years.\n\nThe plain truth is that no one pretends he is in jail on his merits;\nhe is in jail as an example and lesson to any one who proposes to\ncome between master and immigrant worker in Paterson. He has attacked\nthe system. The people who profit by the system, the people who think\nthings are \"all right as they are,\" have hit back in the most effectual\nway they can, according to their lights.\n\nThat, I think, accounts for the sustained quality of the lying in\nthis case, and, indeed, for the whole situation. He is in jail on\nprinciple and without personal animus, just as they used to tar and\nfeather the stray abolitionist on principle in Carolina. The policy\nof stringent discouragement is a reasonable one--scoundrelly, no\ndoubt, but understandable. And I think I can put myself sufficiently\ninto the place of the Paterson masters, of the Trenton judges, of\nthose journalists, of those subordinate officials at Washington\neven, to understand their motives and inducements. I indulge in no\nself-righteous pride. Simply, I thank Heaven I have not had their\npeculiar temptations.\n\nBut my riddle lies in the attitude of the public--of the American\nnation, which hasn't, it seems, a spark of moral indignation for this\nsort of thing, which indeed joins in quite cheerfully against the\nvictim.\n\nIt is ill served by its press, no doubt, but surely it understands....\n\n\nIII\n\nMaxim Gorky\n\nThen I assisted at the coming of Maxim Gorky, and witnessed many\nintimate details of what Professor Giddings, that courageous publicist,\nhas called his \"lynching.\"\n\nHere, again, is a case I fail altogether to understand. The surface\nvalues of that affair have a touch of the preposterous. I set them down\nin infinite perplexity.\n\nMy first week in New York was in the period of Gorky's advent.\nExpectation was at a high pitch, and one might have foretold a\nstupendous, a history-making campaign. The American nation seemed\nconcentrated upon one great and ennobling idea, the freedom of Russia,\nand upon Gorky as the embodiment of that idea. A protest was to be made\nagainst cruelty and violence and massacre. That great figure of Liberty\nwith the torch was to make it flare visibly half-way round the world,\nreproving tyranny.\n\nGorky arrived, and the _\u00e9clat_ was immense. We dined him, we lunched\nhim, we were photographed in his company by flash-light. I very gladly\nshared that honor, for Gorky is not only a great master of the art I\npractise, but a splendid personality. He is one of those people to whom\nthe camera does no justice, whose work, as I know it in an English\ntranslation, forceful as it is, fails very largely to convey his\npeculiar quality. His is a big, quiet figure; there is a curious power\nof appeal in his face, a large simplicity in his voice and gesture.\nHe was dressed, when I met him, in peasant clothing, in a belted blue\nshirt, trousers of some shiny black material, and boots; and save for\na few common greetings he has no other language than Russian. So it\nwas necessary that he should bring with him some one he could trust\nto interpret him to the world. And having, too, much of the practical\nhelplessness of his type of genius, he could not come without his right\nhand, that brave and honorable lady, Madame Andreieva, who has been now\nfor years in everything but the severest legal sense his wife. Russia\nhas no Dakota; and although his legal wife has long since found another\ncompanion, the Orthodox Church in Russia has no divorce facilities for\nmen in the revolutionary camp. So Madame Andreieva stands to him as\nGeorge Eliot stood to George Lewes, and I suppose the two of them had\nalmost forgotten the technical illegality of their tie, until it burst\nupon them and the American public in a monstrous storm of exposure.\n\nIt was like a summer thunder-storm. At one moment Gorky was in an\nimmense sunshine, a plenipotentiary from oppression to liberty, at the\nnext he was being almost literally pelted through the streets.\n\nI do not know what motive actuated a certain section of the American\npress to initiate this pelting of Maxim Gorky. A passion for moral\npurity may perhaps have prompted it, but certainly no passion for\npurity ever before begot so brazen and abundant a torrent of lies.\nIt was precisely the sort of campaign that damned poor MacQueen, but\nthis time on an altogether imperial scale. The irregularity of Madame\nAndreieva's position was a mere point of departure. The journalists\nwent on to invent a deserted wife and children, they declared Madame\nAndreieva was an \"actress,\" and loaded her with all the unpleasant\nimplications of that unfortunate word; they spoke of her generally as\n\"the woman Andreieva\"; they called upon the Commissioner of Immigration\nto deport her as a \"female of bad character\"; quite influential people\nwrote to him to that effect; they published the name of the hotel that\nsheltered her, and organized a boycott. Whoever dared to countenance\nthe victims was denounced. Professor Dewar of Columbia had given them\na reception; \"Dewar must go,\" said the head-lines. Mark Twain, who had\nassisted in the great welcome, was invited to recant and contribute\nunfriendly comments. The Gorkys were pursued with insult from hotel\nto hotel. Hotel after hotel turned them out. They found themselves at\nlast, after midnight, in the streets of New York city with every door\nclosed against them. Infected persons could not have been treated more\nabominably in a town smitten with a panic of plague.\n\nThis change happened in the course of twenty-four hours. On one day\nGorky was at the zenith, on the next he had been swept from the world.\nTo me it was astounding--it was terrifying. I wanted to talk to Gorky\nabout it, to find out the hidden springs of this amazing change. I\nspent a Sunday evening looking for him with an ever-deepening respect\nfor the power of the American press. I had a quaint conversation with\nthe clerk of the hotel in Fifth Avenue from which he had first been\ndriven. Europeans can scarcely hope to imagine the moral altitudes\nat which American hotels are conducted.... I went thence to seek Mr.\nAbraham Cahan in the East Side, and thence to other people I knew, but\nin vain. Gorky was obliterated.\n\nI thought this affair was a whirlwind of foolish misunderstanding,\nsuch as may happen in any capital, and that presently his entirely\ntolerable relationship would be explained. But for all the rest of my\ntime in New York this insensate campaign went on. There was no attempt\nof any importance to stem the tide, and to this day large sections\nof the American public must be under the impression that this great\nwriter is a depraved man of pleasure accompanied by a favorite cocotte.\nThe writers of paragraphs racked their brains to invent new and smart\nways of insulting Madame Andreieva. The chaste entertainers of the\nmusic-halls of the Tenderloin district introduced allusions. And amid\nthis riot of personalities Russia was forgotten. The massacres, the\nchaos of cruelty and blundering, the tyranny, the women outraged, the\nchildren tortured and slain--all that was forgotten. In Boston, in\nChicago, it was the same. At the bare suggestion of Gorky's coming the\nsame outbreak occurred, the same display of imbecile gross lying, the\nsame absolute disregard of the tragic cause he had come to plead.\n\nOne gleam of comedy in this remarkable outbreak I recall. Some one\nin ineffectual protest had asked what Americans would have said if\nBenjamin Franklin had encountered such ignominies on his similar\nmission of appeal to Paris before the War of Independence. \"Benjamin\nFranklin,\" retorted one bright young Chicago journalist, \"was a man of\nvery different moral character from Gorky,\" and proceeded to explain\nhow Chicago was prepared to defend the purity of her homes against\nthe invader. Benjamin Franklin, it is true, _was_ a person of very\ndifferent morals from Gorky--but I don't think that bright young man in\nChicago had a very sound idea of where the difference lay.\n\nI spent my last evening on American soil in the hospitable home\nin Staten Island that sheltered Gorky and Madame Andreieva. After\ndinner we sat together in the deepening twilight upon a broad veranda\nthat looks out upon one of the most beautiful views in the world,\nupon serene large spaces of land and sea, upon slopes of pleasant,\nwindow-lit, tree-set wooden houses, upon the glittering clusters\nof lights, and the black and luminous shipping that comes and goes\nabout the Narrows and the Upper Bay. Half masked by a hill contour\nto the left was the light of the torch of Liberty.... Gorky's big\nform fell into shadow, Madame Andreieva sat at his feet, translating\nmethodically, sentence by sentence, into clear French whatever he\nsaid, translating our speeches into Russian. He told us stories--of\nthe soul of the Russian, of Russian religious sects, of kindnesses and\ncruelties, of his great despair.\n\nEver and again, in the pauses, my eyes would go to where New York far\naway glittered like a brighter and more numerous Pleiades.\n\nI gauged something of the real magnitude of this one man's\ndisappointment, the immense expectation of his arrival, the impossible\ndream of his mission. He had come--the Russian peasant in person,\nout of a terrific confusion of bloodshed, squalor, injustice--to tell\nAmerica, the land of light and achieved freedom, of all these evil\nthings. She would receive him, help him, understand truly what he\nmeant with his \"Rossia.\" I could imagine how he had felt as he came in\nthe big steamer to her, up that large converging display of space and\nteeming energy. There she glowed to-night across the water, a queen\namong cities, as if indeed she was the light of the world. Nothing, I\nthink, can ever rob that splendid harbor approach of its invincible\nquality of promise.... And to him she had shown herself no more than\nthe luminous hive of multitudes of base and busy, greedy and childish\nlittle men.\n\nMacQueen in jail, Gorky with his reputation wantonly bludgeoned and\nflung aside; they are just two chance specimens of the myriads who have\ncome up this great waterway bearing hope and gifts.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XII\n\nTHE TRAGEDY OF COLOR\n\n\nI\n\nHarsh Judgments\n\nI seem to find the same hastiness and something of the same note\nof harshness that strike me in the cases of MacQueen and Gorky\nin America's treatment of her colored population. I am aware how\nintricate, how multitudinous, the aspects of this enormous question\nhave become, but looking at it in the broad and transitory manner I\nhave proposed for myself in these papers, it does seem to present\nmany parallel elements. There is the same disposition towards an\nindiscriminating verdict, the same disregard of proportion as between\nsmall evils and great ones, the same indifference to the fact that the\nquestion does not stand alone, but is a part, and this time a by no\nmeans small part, in the working out of America's destinies.\n\nIn regard to the colored population, just as in regard to the great\nand growing accumulations of unassimilated and increasingly unpopular\nJews, and to the great and growing multitudes of Roman Catholics whose\nspecial education contradicts at so many points those conceptions of\nindividual judgment and responsibility upon which America relies, I\nhave attempted time after time to get some answer from the Americans\nI have met to what is to me the most obvious of questions. \"Your\ngrandchildren and the grandchildren of these people will have to\nlive in this country side by side; do you propose, do you believe\nit possible, that under the increasing pressure of population and\ncompetition they should be living then in just the same relations that\nyou and these people are living now; if you do not, then what relations\ndo you propose shall exist between them?\"\n\nIt is not too much to say that I have never once had the beginnings\nof an answer to this question. Usually one is told with great gravity\nthat the problem of color is one of the most difficult that we have\nto consider, and the conversation then breaks up into discursive\nanecdotes and statements about black people. One man will dwell upon\nthe uncontrollable violence of a black man's evil passions (in Jamaica\nand Barbadoes colored people form an overwhelming proportion of the\npopulation, and they have behaved in an exemplary fashion for the last\nthirty years); another will dilate upon the incredible stupidity of the\nfull-blooded negro (during my stay in New York the prize for oratory\nat Columbia University, oratory which was the one redeeming charm of\nDaniel Webster, was awarded to a Zulu of unmitigated blackness); a\nthird will speak of his physical offensiveness, his peculiar smell\nwhich necessitates his social isolation (most well-to-do Southerners\nare brought up by negro \"mammies\"); others, again, will enter upon the\npainful history of the years that followed the war, though it seems a\nfoolish thing to let those wrongs of the past dominate the outlook for\nthe future. And one charming Southern lady expressed the attitude of\nmind of a whole class very completely, I think, when she said, \"You\nhave to be one of us to feel this question at all as it ought to be\nfelt.\"\n\nThere, I think, I got something tangible. These emotions are a cult.\n\nMy globe-trotting impudence will seem, no doubt, to mount to its\nzenith when I declare that hardly any Americans at all seem to be in\npossession of the elementary facts in relation to this question. These\nbroad facts are not taught, as of course they ought to be taught,\nin school; and what each man knows is picked up by the accidents of\nhis own untrained observation, by conversation always tinctured by\npersonal prejudice, by hastily read newspapers and magazine articles\nand the like. The quality of this discussion is very variable, but\non the whole pretty low. While I was in New York opinion was greatly\nswayed by an article in, if I remember rightly, the _Century Magazine_,\nby a gentleman who had deduced from a few weeks' observation in the\nslums of Khartoum the entire incapacity of the negro to establish a\ncivilization of his own. He never had, therefore he never could; a\ndiscouraging ratiocination. We English, a century or so ago, said all\nthese things of the native Irish. If there is any trend of opinion at\nall in this matter at present, it lies in the direction of a generous\ndecision on the part of the North and West to leave the black more and\nmore to the judgment and mercy of the white people with whom he is\nlocally associated. This judgment and mercy points, on the whole, to an\naccentuation of the colored man's natural inferiority, to the cessation\nof any other educational attempts than those that increase his\nindustrial usefulness (it is already illegal in Louisiana to educate\nhim above a contemptible level), to his industrial exploitation through\nusury and legal chicanery, and to a systematic strengthening of the\nsocial barriers between colored people of whatever shade and the whites.\n\nMeanwhile, in this state of general confusion, in the absence\nof any determining rules or assumptions, all sorts of things\nare happening--according to the accidents of local feeling. In\nMassachusetts you have people with, I am afraid, an increasing sense of\nsacrifice to principle, lunching and dining with people of color. They\ndo it less than they did, I was told. Massachusetts stands, I believe,\nat the top of the scale of tolerant humanity. One seems to reach the\nbottom at Springfield, Missouri, which is a county seat with a college,\nan academy, a high school, and a zoological garden. There the exemplary\nmethod reaches the nadir. Last April three unfortunate negroes were\nburned to death, apparently because they were negroes, and as a general\ncorrective of impertinence. They seem to have been innocent of any\nparticular offence. It was a sort of racial sacrament. The edified\nSunday-school children hurried from their gospel-teaching to search\nfor souvenirs among the ashes, and competed with great spirit for a\nfragment of charred skull.\n\nIt is true that in this latter case Governor Folk acted with vigor\nand justice, and that the better element of Springfield society was\nevidently shocked when it was found that quite innocent negroes had\nbeen used in these instructive pyrotechnics; but the fact remains\nthat a large and numerically important section of the American public\ndoes think that fierce and cruel reprisals are a necessary part of\nthe system of relationships between white and colored man. In our\ndispersed British community we have almost exactly the same range\nbetween our better attitudes and our worse--I'm making no claim of\nnational superiority. In London, perhaps, we out-do Massachusetts in\nliberality; in the National Liberal Club or the Reform a black man\nmeets all the courtesies of humanity--as though there was no such thing\nas color. But, on the other hand, the Cape won't bear looking into for\na moment. The same conditions give the same results; a half-educated\nwhite population of British or Dutch or German ingredients greedy\nfor gain, ill controlled and feebly influenced, in contact with a\nblack population, is bound to reproduce the same brutal and stupid\naggressions, the same half-honest prejudices to justify those\naggressions, the same ugly, mean excuses. \"Things are better in Jamaica\nand Barbadoes,\" said I, in a moment of patriotic weakness, to Mr.\nBooker T. Washington.\n\n\"Eh!\" said he, and thought in that long silent way he has.... \"They're\nworse in South Africa--much. Here we've got a sort of light. We know\ngenerally what we've got to stand. _There_--\"\n\nHis words sent my memory back to some conversations I had quite\nrecently with a man from a dry-goods store in Johannesburg. He gave me\nclearly enough the attitude of the common white out there; the dull\nprejudice; the readiness to take advantage of the \"boy\"; the utter\ndisrespect for colored womankind; the savage, intolerant resentment,\ndashed dangerously with fear, which the native arouses in him. (Think\nof all that must have happened in wrongful practice and wrongful law\nand neglected educational possibilities before our Zulus in Natal were\ngoaded to face massacre, spear against rifle!) The rare and culminating\nresult of education and experience is to enable men to grasp facts, to\nbalance justly among their fluctuating and innumerable aspects, and\nonly a small minority in our world is educated to that pitch. Ignorant\npeople can think only in types and abstractions, can achieve only\nemphatic absolute decisions, and when the commonplace American or the\ncommonplace colonial Briton sets to work to \"think over\" the negro\nproblem, he instantly banishes most of the material evidence from his\nmind--clears for action, as it were. He forgets the genial carriage\nof the ordinary colored man, his beaming face, his kindly eye, his\nrich, jolly voice, his touching and trusted friendliness, his amiable,\nunprejudiced readiness to serve and follow a white man who seems to\nknow what he is doing. He forgets--perhaps he has never seen--the dear\nhumanity of these people, their slightly exaggerated vanity, their\ninnocent and delightful love of color and song, their immense capacity\nfor affection, the warm romantic touch in their imaginations. He\nignores the real fineness of the indolence that despises servile toil,\nof the carelessness that disdains the watchful aggressive economies,\nday by day, now a wretched little gain here and now a wretched little\ngain there, that make the dirty fortune of the Russian Jews who prey\nupon color in the Carolinas. No; in the place of all these tolerable\nevery-day experiences he lets his imagination go to work upon a\nmonster, the \"real nigger.\"\n\n\"Ah! You don't know the _real_ nigger,\" said one American to me when I\npraised the colored people I had seen. \"You should see the buck nigger\ndown South, Congo brand. Then you'd understand, sir.\"\n\nHis voice, his face had a gleam of passionate animosity.\n\nOne could see he had been brooding himself out of all relations to\nreality in this matter. He was a man beyond reason or pity. He was\nobsessed. Hatred of that imaginary diabolical \"buck nigger\" blackened\nhis soul. It was no good to talk to him of the \"buck American,\nPackingtown brand,\" or the \"buck Englishman, suburban race-meeting\ntype,\" and to ask him if these intensely disagreeable persons justified\noutrages on Senator Lodge, let us say, or Mrs. Longworth. No reply\nwould have come from him. \"You don't understand the question,\" he would\nhave answered. \"You don't know how we Southerners feel.\"\n\nWell, one can make a tolerable guess.\n\n\nII\n\nThe White Strain\n\nI certainly did not begin to realize one most important aspect of this\nquestion until I reached America. I thought of those eight millions\nas of men, black as ink. But when I met Mr. Booker T. Washington,\nfor example, I met a man certainly as white in appearance as our\nAdmiral Fisher, who is, as a matter of fact, quite white. A very large\nproportion of these colored people, indeed, is more than half white.\nOne hears a good deal about the high social origins of the Southern\nplanters, very many derive indisputably from the first families of\nEngland. It is the same blood flows in these mixed colored people's\nveins. Just think of the sublime absurdity, therefore, of the ban.\nThere are gentlemen of education and refinement, qualified lawyers\nand doctors, whose ancestors assisted in the Norman Conquest, and they\ndare not enter a car marked \"white\" and intrude upon the dignity of the\nrising loan-monger from Esthonia. For them the \"Jim Crow\" car....\n\nOne tries to put that aspect to the American in vain. \"These people,\"\nyou say, \"are nearer your blood, nearer your temper, than any of those\nbright-eyed, ringleted immigrants on the East Side. Are you ashamed of\nyour poor relations? Even if you don't like the half, or the quarter\nof negro blood, you might deal civilly with the three-quarters white.\nIt doesn't say much for your faith in your own racial prepotency,\nanyhow.\"...\n\nThe answer to that is usually in terms of mania.\n\n\"Let me tell you a little story just to illustrate,\" said one deponent\nto me in an impressive undertone--\"just to illustrate, you know.... A\nfew years ago a young fellow came to Boston from New Orleans. Looked\nall right. Dark--but he explained that by an Italian grandmother. Touch\nof French in him, too. Popular. Well, he made advances to a Boston\ngirl--good family. Gave a fairly straight account of himself. Married.\"\n\nHe paused. \"Course of time--offspring. Little son.\"\n\nHis eye made me feel what was coming.\n\n\"Was it by any chance very, very black?\" I whispered.\n\n\"Yes, _sir_. Black! Black as your hat. Absolutely negroid. Projecting\njaw, thick lips, frizzy hair, flat nose--everything....\n\n\"But consider the mother's feelings, sir, consider that! A pure-minded,\npure white woman!\"\n\nWhat can one say to a story of this sort, when the taint in the blood\nsurges up so powerfully as to blacken the child at birth beyond even\nthe habit of the pure-blooded negro? What can you do with a public\nopinion made of this class of ingredient? And this story of the\nlamentable results of intermarriage was used, not as an argument\nagainst intermarriage, but as an argument against the extension\nof quite rudimentary civilities to the men of color. \"If you eat\nwith them, you've got to marry them,\" he said, an entirely fabulous\npost-prandial responsibility.\n\nIt is to the tainted whites my sympathies go out. The black or mainly\nblack people seem to be fairly content with their inferiority; one sees\nthem all about the States as waiters, cab-drivers, railway porters, car\nattendants, laborers of various sorts, a pleasant, smiling, acquiescent\nfolk. But consider the case of a man with a broader brain than such\nsmall uses need, conscious, perhaps, of exceptional gifts, capable\nof wide interests and sustained attempts, who is perhaps as English\nas you or I, with just a touch of color in his eyes, in his lips, in\nhis fingernails, and in his imagination. Think of the accumulating\nsense of injustice he must bear with him through life, the perpetual\nslight and insult he must undergo from all that is vulgar and brutal\namong the whites! Something of that one may read in the sorrowful\npages of Du Bois's _The Souls of Black Folk_. They would have made\nAlexandre Dumas travel in the Jim Crow car if he had come to Virginia.\nBut I can imagine some sort of protest on the part of that admirable\nbut extravagant man.... They even talk of \"Jim Crow elevators\" now in\nSouthern hotels.\n\nAt Hull House, in Chicago, I was present at a conference of colored\npeople--Miss Jane Addams efficiently in control--to consider the\ncoming of a vexatious play, \"The Clansman,\" which seems to have been\nwritten and produced entirely to exacerbate racial feeling. Both men\nand women were present, business people, professional men, and their\nwives; the speaking was clear, temperate, and wonderfully to the point,\nhigh above the level of any British town council I have ever attended.\nOne lady would have stood out as capable and charming in any sort of\npublic discussion in England--though we are not wanting in good women\nspeakers--and she was at least three-quarters black....\n\nAnd while I was in Chicago, too, I went to the Peking Theatre--a\n\"coon\" music-hall--and saw something of a lower level of colored life.\nThe common white, I must explain, delights in calling colored people\n\"coons,\" and the negro, so far as I could learn, uses no retaliatory\nword. It was a \"variety\" entertainment, with one turn, at least, of\nquite distinguished merit, good-humored and brisk throughout. I watched\nkeenly, and I could detect nothing of that trail of base suggestion\none would find as a matter of course in a music-hall in such English\ntowns as Brighton and Portsmouth. What one heard of kissing and\nlove-making was quite artless and simple indeed. The negro, it seemed\nto me, did this sort of thing with a better grace and a better temper\nthan a Londoner, and shows, I think, a finer self-respect. He thinks\nmore of deportment, he bears himself more elegantly by far than the\nwhite at the same social level. The audience reminded me of the sort of\ngathering one would find in a theatre in Camden Town or Hoxton. There\nwere a number of family groups, the girls brightly dressed, and young\ncouples quite of the London music-hall type. Clothing ran \"smart,\"\nbut not smarter than it would be among fairly prosperous north London\nJews. There was no gallery--socially--no collection of orange-eating,\ninterrupting hooligans at all. Nobody seemed cross, nobody seemed\npresent for vicious purposes, and everybody was sober. Indeed, there\nand elsewhere I took and confirmed a mighty liking to these gentle,\nhuman, dark-skinned people.\n\n\nIII\n\nMr. Booker T. Washington\n\nBut whatever aspect I recall of this great taboo that shows no signs\nof lifting, of this great problem of the future that America in her\nhaste, her indiscriminating prejudice, her lack of any sustained study\nand teaching of the broad issues she must decide, complicates and\nintensifies, and makes threatening, there presently comes back to mind\nthe browned face of Mr. Booker T. Washington, as he talked to me over\nour lunch in Boston.\n\nHe has a face rather Irish in type, and the soft slow negro voice. He\nmet my regard with the brown sorrowful eyes of his race. He wanted\nvery much that I should hear him make a speech, because then his words\ncame better; he talked, he implied, with a certain difficulty. But I\npreferred to have his talking, and get not the orator--every one tells\nme he is an altogether great orator in this country where oratory is\nstill esteemed--but the man.\n\nHe answered my questions meditatively. I wanted to know with an active\npertinacity. What struck me most was the way in which his sense of the\noverpowering forces of race prejudice weighs upon him. It is a thing he\naccepts; in our time and conditions it is not to be fought about. He\nmakes one feel with an exaggerated intensity (though I could not even\ndraw him to admit) its monstrous injustice. He makes no accusations. He\nis for taking it as a part of the present fate of his \"people,\" and for\ndoing all that can be done for them within the limit it sets.\n\nTherein he differs from Du Bois, the other great spokesman color\nhas found in our time. Du Bois, is more of the artist, less of the\nstatesman; he conceals his passionate resentment all too thinly.\nHe batters himself into rhetoric against these walls. He will not\nrepudiate the clear right of the black man to every educational\nfacility, to equal citizenship, and equal respect. But Mr. Washington\nhas statecraft. He looks before and after, and plans and keeps his\ncounsel with the scope and range of a statesman. I use \"statesman\"\nin its highest sense; his is a mind that can grasp the situation and\ndestinies of a people. After I had talked to him I went back to my\nclub, and found there an English newspaper with a report of the opening\ndebate upon Mr. Birrell's Education Bill. It was like turning from the\ndiscussion of life and death to a dispute about the dregs in the bottom\nof a tea-cup somebody had neglected to wash up in Victorian times.\n\nI argued strongly against the view he seems to hold that black and\nwhite might live without mingling and without injustice, side by\nside. That I do not believe. Racial differences seem to me always to\nexasperate intercourse unless people have been elaborately trained to\nignore them. Uneducated men are as bad as cattle in persecuting all\nthat is different among themselves. The most miserable and disorderly\ncountries of the world are the countries where two races, two\ninadequate cultures, keep a jarring, continuous separation. \"You must\nrepudiate separation,\" I said. \"No peoples have ever yet endured the\ntension of intermingled distinctness.\"\n\n\"May we not become a peculiar people--like the Jews?\" he suggested.\n\"Isn't that possible?\"\n\nBut there I could not agree with him. I thought of the dreadful\nhistory of the Jews and Armenians. And the negro cannot do what the\nJews and Armenians have done. The colored people of America are of a\ndifferent quality from the Jew altogether, more genial, more careless,\nmore sympathetic, franker, less intellectual, less acquisitive, less\nwary and restrained--in a word, more Occidental. They have no common\nreligion and culture, no conceit of race to hold them together. The\nJews make a ghetto for themselves wherever they go; no law but their\nown solidarity has given America the East Side. The colored people are\nready to disperse and inter-breed, are not a community at all in the\nJewish sense, but outcasts from a community. They are the victims of a\nprejudice that has to be destroyed. These things I urged, but it was,\nI think, empty speech to my hearer. I could talk lightly of destroying\nthat prejudice, but he knew better. It is the central fact of his life,\na law of his being. He has shaped all his projects and policy upon\nthat. Exclusion is inevitable. So he dreams of a colored race of decent\nand inaggressive men silently giving the lie to all the legend of their\ndegradation. They will have their own doctors, their own lawyers, their\nown capitalists, their own banks--because the whites desire it so. But\nwill the uneducated whites endure even so submissive a vindication as\nthat? Will they suffer the horrid spectacle of free and self-satisfied\nnegroes in decent clothing on any terms without resentment?\n\nHe explained how at the Tuskegee Institute they make useful men,\nskilled engineers, skilled agriculturalists, men to live down the\ncharge of practical incompetence, of ignorant and slovenly farming and\nhouse management....\n\n\"I wish you would tell me,\" I said, abruptly, \"just what you think of\nthe attitude of white America towards you. Do you think it is generous?\"\n\nHe regarded me for a moment. \"No end of people help us,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said; \"but the ordinary man. Is he fair?\"\n\n\"Some things are not fair,\" he said, leaving the general question\nalone. \"It isn't fair to refuse a colored man a berth on a\nsleeping-car. I?--I happen to be a privileged person, they make an\nexception for me; but the ordinary educated colored man isn't admitted\nto a sleeping-car at all. If he has to go a long journey, he has to sit\nup all night. His white competitor sleeps. Then in some places, in the\nhotels and restaurants--It's all right here in Boston--but southwardly\nhe can't get proper refreshments. All that's a handicap....\n\n\"The remedy lies in education,\" he said; \"ours--_and theirs_.\n\n\"The real thing,\" he told me, \"isn't to be done by talking and\nagitation. It's a matter of lives. The only answer to it all is for\ncolored men to be patient, to make themselves competent, to do good\nwork, to live well, to give no occasion against us. We feel that. In a\nway it's an inspiration....\n\n\"There is a man here in Boston, a negro, who owns and runs some big\nstores, employs all sorts of people, deals justly. That man has done\nmore good for our people than all the eloquence or argument in the\nworld.... That is what we have to do--it is all we _can_ do.\"...\n\nWhatever America has to show in heroic living to-day, I doubt if she\ncan show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast\neffort hundreds of black and colored men are making to-day to live\nblamelessly, honorably, and patiently, getting for themselves what\nscraps of refinement, learning, and beauty they may, keeping their\nhold on a civilization they are grudged and denied. They do it not\nfor themselves only, but for all their race. Each educated colored\nman is an ambassador to civilization. They know they have a handicap,\nthat they are not exceptionally brilliant nor clever people. Yet every\nsuch man stands, one likes to think, aware of his representative\nand vicarious character, fighting against foul imaginations,\nmisrepresentations, injustice, insult, and the na\u00efve unspeakable\nmeannesses of base antagonists. Every one of them who keeps decent and\nhonorable does a little to beat that opposition down.\n\nBut the patience the negro needs! He may not even look contempt. He\nmust admit superiority in those whose daily conduct to him is the\nclearest evidence of moral inferiority. We sympathetic whites, indeed,\nmay claim honor for him; if he is wise he will be silent under our\nadvocacy. He must go to and fro self-controlled, bereft of all the\nequalities that the great flag of America proclaims--that flag for\nwhose united empire his people fought and died, giving place and\nprecedence to the strangers who pour in to share its beneficence,\nstrangers ignorant even of its tongue. That he must do--and wait. The\nWelsh, the Irish, the Poles, the white South, the indefatigable Jews\nmay cherish grievances and rail aloud. He must keep still. They may\nbe hysterical, revengeful, threatening, and perverse; their wrongs\nexcuse them. For him there is no excuse. And of all the races upon\nearth, which has suffered such wrongs as this negro blood that is still\nimputed to him as a sin? These people who disdain him, who have no\nsense of reparation towards him, have sinned against him beyond all\nmeasure....\n\nNo, I can't help idealizing the dark submissive figure of the negro in\nthis spectacle of America. He, too, seems to me to sit waiting--and\nwaiting with a marvellous and simple-minded patience--for finer\nunderstandings and a nobler time.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIII\n\nTHE MIND OF A MODERN STATE\n\n\nI\n\nRecapitulatory\n\nI do not know if I am conveying to any extent the picture of America\nas I see it, the vast rich various continent, the gigantic energetic\nprocess of development, the acquisitive successes, the striving\nfailures, the multitudes of those rising and falling who come between,\nall set in a texture of spacious countryside, animate with pleasant\ntimber homes, of clangorous towns that bristle to the skies, of great\nexploitation districts and crowded factories, of wide deserts and\nmine-torn mountains, and huge half-tamed rivers. I have tried to make\nthe note of immigration grow slowly to a dominating significance in\nthis panorama, and with that, to make more and more evident my sense\nof the need of a creative assimilation, the cry for synthetic effort,\nlest all this great being, this splendid promise of a new world,\nshould decay into a vast unprogressive stagnation of unhappiness and\ndisorder. I have hinted at failures and cruelties, I have put into the\naccumulating details of my vision, children America blights, men she\ncrushes, fine hopes she disappoints and destroys. I have found a place\nfor the questioning figure of the South, the sorrowful interrogation\nof the outcast colored people. These are but the marginal shadows of\na process in its totality magnificent, but they exist, they go on to\nmingle in her destinies.\n\nThen I have tried to show, too, the conception I have formed of the\ngreat skein of industrial competition that has been tightening and\nbecoming more and more involved through all this century-long age,\nthe age of blind growth, that draws now towards its end; until the\nprocess threatens to throttle individual freedom and individual\nenterprise altogether. And of a great mental uneasiness and discontent,\nunprecedented in the history of the American mind, that promises\nin the near future some general and conscious endeavor to arrest\nthis unanticipated strangulation of freedom and free living, some\nwidespread struggle, of I know not what constructive power, with the\nstains and disorders and indignities that oppress and grow larger in\nthe national consciousness. I perceive more and more that in coming\nto America I have chanced upon a time of peculiar significance. The\nnote of disillusionment sounds everywhere. America, for the first time\nin her history, is taking thought about herself, and ridding herself\nof long-cherished illusions. I have already mentioned (in Chapter\nVIII.) the memorable literature of self-examination that has come\ninto being during the last decade. Hitherto American thought has been\nextraordinarily localized; there has been no national press, in the\nsense that the press of London or Paris is national. Americans knew of\nAmerica as a whole, mainly as the flag. Beneath the flag America is\nlost among constituent States and cities. All her newspapers have been,\nby English standards, \"local\" papers, preoccupied by local affairs,\nand taking an intensely localized point of view. A national newspaper\nfor America would be altogether too immense an enterprise. Only since\n1896, and in the form of weekly and monthly ten-cent magazines, have\nthe rudiments of a national medium of expression appeared, and appeared\nto voice strange pregnant doubts. I had an interesting talk with Mr.\nBrisben Walker upon this new development. To him the first ten-cent\nmagazine, _The Cosmopolitan_, was due, and he was naturally glad to\ntell me of the growth of this vehicle. To-day there is an aggregate\ncirculation of ten millions of these magazines; they supply fiction, no\ndoubt, and much of light interesting ephemeral matter, but not one of\nthem is without its element of grave public discussion. I do not wish\nto make too much of this particular development, but regard it as a\nsign of new interests, of keen curiosities.\n\nNow I must confess when I consider this ocean of readers I find the\nfears I have expressed of some analogical development of American\naffairs towards the stagnant commercialism of China, or towards\na plutocratic imperialism and decadence of the Roman type, look\nsingularly flimsy. Upon its present lines, and supposing there were\nno new sources of mental supply and energy, I do firmly believe that\nAmerica might conceivably come more and more under the control of a\ntacitly organized and exhausting plutocracy, be swamped by a swelling\ntide of ignorant and unassimilable labor immigrants, decline towards\nviolence and social misery, fall behind Europe in education and\nintelligence, and cease to lead civilization. In such a decay C\u00e6sarism\nwould be a most probable and natural phase, C\u00e6sarism and a splitting\ninto contending C\u00e6sarisms. Come but a little sinking from intelligence\ntowards coarseness and passion, and the South will yet endeavor to\nimpose servitude anew upon its colored people, or secede--that trouble\nis not yet over. A little darkening and impoverishment of outlook and\nNew York would split from New England, and Colorado from the East. An\nilliterate, short-sighted America would be America doomed. But America\nis not illiterate; there are these great unprecedented reservoirs of\nintelligence and understanding, these millions of people who follow\nthe process with an increasing comprehension. It is these millions of\nreaders who make the American problem, and the problem of Europe and\nthe world to-day, unique and incalculable, who provide a cohesive and\nreasonable and pacifying medium the Old World did not know.\n\n\nII\n\nBirth Struggles of a Common Mind\n\nYou see, my hero in the confused drama of human life is intelligence;\nintelligence inspired by constructive passion. There is a demi-god\nimprisoned in mankind. All human history presents itself to me as\nthe unconscious or half-unconscious struggle of human thought to\nemerge from the sightless interplay of instinct, individual passion,\nprejudice, and ignorance. One sees this diviner element groping after\nlaw and order and fine arrangement, like a thing blind and half-buried,\nin ancient Egypt, in ancient Jud\u00e6a, in ancient Greece. It embodies\nits purpose in religions, invents the disciplines of morality, the\nreminders of ritual. It loses itself and becomes confused. It wearies\nand rests. In Plato, for the first time, one discovers it conscious and\nopen-eyed, trying, indeed, to take hold of life and control it. Then it\ngoes under, and becomes again a convulsive struggle, an inco-ordinated\ngripping and leaving, a muttering of literature and art, until the\ncoming of our own times. Most painful and blundering of demi-gods it\nseems through all that space of years, with closed eyes and feverish\neffort. And now again it is clear to the minds of many men that they\nmay lay hold upon and control the destiny of their kind....\n\nIt is strange, it is often grotesque to mark how the reviving racial\nconsciousness finds expression to-day. Now it startles itself into a\nnew phase of self-knowledge by striking a note from this art, and now\nby striking one from that. It breaks out in fiction that is ostensibly\nwritten only to amuse, it creeps into after-dinner discussions,\nand invades a press which is economically no more than a system of\nadvertisement sheets proclaiming the price of the thing that is.\nPresently it is on the stage; the music-hall even is not safe from it.\nYouths walk in the streets to-day, talking together of things that were\nonce the ultimate speculation of philosophy. I am no contemner of the\npresent. To me it appears a time of immense and wonderful beginnings.\nNew ideas are organizing themselves out of the little limited efforts\nof innumerable men. Never was there an age so intellectually prolific\nand abundant as this in the aggregate is. It is true, indeed, that\nwe who write and think and investigate to-day, present nothing to\ncompare with the magnificent reputations and intensely individualized\nachievements of the impressive personalities of the past. None the\nless is it true that taken all together we signify infinitely more.\nWe no longer pose ourselves for admiration, high priests and princes\nof letters in a world of finite achievement; we admit ourselves no\nmore than pages bearing the train of a Queen--but a Queen of limitless\npower. The knowledge we co-ordinate, the ideas we build together, the\ngrowing blaze in which we are willingly consumed, are wider and higher\nand richer in promise than anything the world has had before....\n\nWhen one takes count of the forces of intelligence upon which we\nmay rely in the great conflict against matter, brute instinct, and\nindividualistic disorder, to make the new social state, when we\nconsider the organizing forms that emerge already from the general\nvague confusion, we find apparent in every modern state three chief\nseries of developments. There is first the thinking and investigatory\nelements that grow constantly more important in our university\nlife, the enlarging recognition of the need of a systematic issue\nof university publications, books, periodicals, and of sustained\nand fertilizing discussion. Then there is the greater, cruder,\nand bolder sea of mental activities outside academic limits, the\namateurs, the free lances of thought and inquiry, the writers and\nartists, the innumerable ill-disciplined, untrained, but interested\nand well-meaning people who write and talk. They find their medium\nin contemporary literature, in journalism, in organizations for the\npropaganda of opinion. And, thirdly, there is the immense, nearly\nuniversally diffused system of education which, inadequately enough,\nserves to spread the new ideas as they are elaborated, which does, at\nany rate by its preparatory work, render them accessible. All these\nnew manifestations of mind embody themselves in material forms, in\nclass-rooms and laboratories, in libraries, and a vast machinery of\nbook and newspaper production and distribution.\n\nConsider the new universities that spring up all over America.\nAlmost imperceptibly throughout the past century, little by little,\nthe conception of a university has changed, until now it is nearly\naltogether changed. The old-time university was a collection of learned\nmen; it believed that all the generalizations had been made, all the\nfundamental things said; it had no vistas towards the future; it\nexisted for teaching and exercises, and more than half implied what\nDr. Johnson, for example, believed, that secular degeneration was the\nrule of human life. All that, you know, has gone; every university,\neven Oxford (though, poor pretentious dear, she still professes to read\nand think metaphysics in \"the original\" Greek) admits the conception\nof a philosophy that progresses, that broadens and intensifies, age\nby age. But to come to America is to come to a country far more alive\nto the thinking and knowledge-making function of universities than\nGreat Britain. One splendidly endowed foundation, the Johns Hopkins\nUniversity, Baltimore, exists only for research, and that was the first\nintention of Chicago University also. In sociology, in pedagogics, in\nsocial psychology, these vital sciences for the modern state, America\nis producing an amount of work which, however trivial in proportion to\nthe task before her, is at any rate immense in comparison with our own\nBritish output....\n\n\nIII\n\nColumbia University\n\nI did my amateurish and transitory best to see something of the\nAmerican universities. There was Columbia. Thither I went with a\nletter to Professor Giddings, whose sociological writings are world\nfamous. I found him busy with a secretary in a businesslike little\nroom, stowed away somewhere under the dome of the magnificent building\nof the university library. He took me round the opulent spaces, the\nfine buildings of Columbia.... I suppose it is inevitable that a\nvisitor should see the constituents of a university out of proportion,\nbut I came away with an impression overwhelmingly architectural. The\nlibrary dome, I confess, was fine, and the desks below well filled with\nstudents, the books were abundant, well arranged, and well tended. But\nI recall marble staircases, I recall great wastes of marble steps, I\nrecall, in particular, students' baths of extraordinary splendor, and\nI do not recall anything like an equivalent effect of large leisure\nand dignity for intellectual men. Professor Giddings seemed driven and\nbusy, the few men I met there appeared all to have a lot of immediate\nwork to do. It occurred to me in Columbia, as it occurred to me later\nin the University of Chicago, that the disposition of the university\nfounder is altogether too much towards buildings and memorial\ninscriptions, and all too little towards the more difficult and far\nmore valuable end of putting men of pre-eminent ability into positions\nof stimulated leisure. This is not a distinctly American effect. In\nOxford, just as much as in Columbia, nay, far more! you find stone and\nstudent lording it over the creative mental thing; the dons go about\nlike some sort of little short-coated parasite, pointing respectfully\nto tower and fa\u00e7ade, which have, in truth, no reason for existing\nexcept to shelter them. Columbia is almost as badly off for means\nof publication as Oxford, and quite as poor in inducements towards\ncreative work. Professors talk in an altogether British way of getting\nwork done in the vacation.\n\nMoreover, there was an effect of remoteness about Columbia. It may\nhave been the quality of a blue still morning of sunshine that invaded\nmy impression. I came up out of the crowded tumult of New York to it,\nwith a sense of the hooting, hurrying traffics of the wide harbor, the\nteeming East Side, the glitter of spending, the rush of finance, the\nwhole headlong process of America, behind me. I came out of the subway\nstation into wide still streets. It was very spacious, very dignified,\nvery quiet. Well, I want the universities of the modern state to be\nmore aggressive. I want to think of a Columbia University of a less\ndetached appearance, even if she is less splendidly clad. I want to\nthink of her as sitting up there, cheek on hand, with knitted brows,\nbrooding upon the millions below. I want to think of all the best minds\nconceivable going to and fro--thoughts and purposes in her organized\nmind. And when she speaks that busy world should listen....\n\nAs a matter of fact, much of that busy world still regards a professor\nas something between a dealer in scientific magic and a crank, and a\nuniversity as an institution every good American should be honestly\nproud of and avoid.\n\n\nIV\n\nHarvard\n\nHarvard, too, is detached, though not quite with the same immediacy\nof contrast. Harvard reminded me very much of my first impressions of\nOxford. One was taken about in the same way to see this or that point\nof view. Much of Harvard is Georgian red brick, that must have seemed\nvery ripe and venerable until a year or so ago one bitter winter killed\nall the English ivy. There are students' clubs, after the fashion of\nthe Oxford Union, but finer and better equipped; there is an amazing\nGermanic museum, the gift of the present Emperor, that does, in a\nconcentrated form, present all that is flamboyant of Germany; there are\nnoble museums and libraries, and very many fine and dignified aspects\nand spaces, and an abundant intellectual life. Harvard is happily free\nfrom the collegiate politics that absorb most of the surplus mental\nenergy of Oxford and Cambridge, and the professors can and do meet and\ntalk. At Harvard men count. I was condoled with on all hands in my\ndisappointment that I could not meet Professor William James--he was\nstill in California--and I had the good fortune to meet and talk to\nPresident Eliot, who is, indeed, a very considerable voice in American\naffairs. To me he talked quite readily and frankly of a very living\nsubject, the integrity of the press in relation to the systematic and\nsuccessful efforts of the advertising chemists and druggists to stifle\nexposures of noxious proprietary articles. He saw the problem as the\nsubtle play of group psychology it is; there was none of that feeble\nhorror of these troubles as \"modern and vulgar\" that one would expect\nin an English university leader. I fell into a great respect for his\nlean fine face and figure, his deliberate voice, his open, balanced,\nand constructive mind. He was the first man I had met who had any\nsuggestion of a force and quality that might stand up to and prevail\nagainst the forces of acquisition and brute trading. He bore himself\nas though some sure power were behind him, unlike many other men I met\nwho criticised abuses abusively, or in the key of facetious despair. He\nhad very much of that fine aristocratic quality one finds cropping up\nso frequently among Americans of old tradition, an aristocratic quality\nthat is free from either privilege or pretension....\n\n[Illustrations: HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE]\n\nAt Harvard, too, I met Professor M\u00fcnsterberg, one of the few writers\nof standing who have attempted a general review of the American\nsituation. He is a tall fair German, but newly annexed to America,\nwith a certain diplomatic quality in his personality, standing almost\nconsciously, as it were, for Germany in America, and for America in\nGermany. He has written a book for either people, because hitherto they\nhave seen each other too much through English media (\"von Englischen\nlinseln retouchiert\"), and he has done much to spread the conception\nof a common quality and sympathy between Germany and America. \"Blood,\"\nhe says in this connection, \"is thicker than water, but ... printer's\nink is thicker than blood.\" England is too aristocratic, France too\nshockingly immoral, Russia too absolutist to be the sympathetic and\nsimilar friend of America, and so, by a process of exhaustion, Germany\nremains the one power on earth capable of an \"inner understanding.\"\n(Also he has drawn an alluring parallel between President Roosevelt\nand the Emperor William to complete the approximation of \"die beiden\nEdelnationen\"). I had read all this, and was interested to encounter\nhim therefore at a Harvard table in a circle of his colleagues,\nagreeable and courteous, and still scarcely more assimilated than the\nbrightly new white Germanic museum among the red brick traditions of\nKirkland and Cambridge streets....\n\nHarvard impresses me altogether as a very living factor in the present\nAmerican outlook, not only when I was in Cambridge, but in the way the\nplace _tells_ in New York, in Chicago, in Washington. It has a living\nand contemporary attitude, and it is becoming more and more audible.\nHarvard opinion influences the magazines and affects the press, at\nleast in the East, to an increasing extent. It may, in the near future,\nbecome still more rapidly audible. Professor Eliot is now full of\nyears and honor, and I found in New York, in Boston, in Washington,\nthat his successor was being discussed. In all these cities I met\npeople disposed to believe that if President Roosevelt does not become\nPresident of the United States for a further term, he may succeed\nPresident Eliot. Now that I have seen President Roosevelt it seems to\nme that this might have a most extraordinary effect in accelerating the\nreaction upon the people of America of the best and least mercenary of\ntheir national thought. Already he is exerting an immense influence in\nthe advertisement of new ideas and ideals. But of President Roosevelt I\nshall write more fully later....\n\n\nV\n\nChicago University\n\nChicago University, too, is a splendid place of fine buildings and\ngreen spaces and trees, with a great going to and fro of students, a\nwonderful contrast to the dark congestions of the mercantile city to\nthe north. To all the disorganization of that it is even physically\nantagonistic, and I could think as I went about it that already this\nnew organization has produced such writing as Veblen's admirable\nironies (_The Theory of Business Enterprise_, for example), and such\nsociological work as that of Zueblin and Albion Small. I went through\nthe vigorous and admirably equipped pedagogic department, which is\nevidently a centre of thought and stimulus for the whole teaching\nprofession of Illinois; I saw a library of sociology and economics\nbeyond anything that London can boast; I came upon little groups of\nstudents working amid piles of books in a businesslike manner, and\nif at times in other sections this suggestion was still insistent\nthat thought was as yet only \"moving in\" and, as it were, getting the\ncarpets down, it was equally clear that thought was going to live\nfreely and spaciously, to an unprecedented extent, so soon as things\nwere in order.\n\n[Illustration: A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY]\n\nI visited only these three great foundations, each in its materially\nembodiment already larger, wealthier, and more hopeful than any\ncontemporary British institution, and it required an effort to realize\nthat they were but a portion of the embattled universities of America,\nthat I had not seen Yale nor Princeton nor Cornell nor Leland Stanford\nnor any Western State university, not a tithe, indeed, of America's\ndrilling levies in the coming war of thought against chaos. I am in no\nway equipped to estimate the value of the drilling; I have been unable\nto get any conception how far these tens of thousands of students\nin these institutions are really _alive_ intellectually, are really\ninquiring, discussing, reading, and criticising; I have no doubt the\ngreat numbers of them spend many hours after the fashion of one roomful\nI saw intent upon a blackboard covered with Greek; but allowing the\nutmost for indolence, games, distractions, and waste of time and energy\nupon unfruitful and obsolete studies, the fact of this great increasing\nproportion of minds at least a little trained in things immaterial,\na little exercised in the critical habit, remains a fact to put over\nagainst that million and a half child workers who can barely have\nlearned to read--the other side, the redeeming side of the American\nprospect.\n\n\nVI\n\nA Voice from Cornell\n\nI am impressed by the evident consciousness of the American\nuniversities of the r\u00f4le they have to play in America's future. They\nseem to me pervaded by the constructive spirit. They are intelligently\nantagonistic to lethargic and self-indulgent traditions, to disorder,\nand disorderly institutions. It is from the universities that the\ndeliberate invasion of the political machine by independent men\nof honor and position--of whom President Roosevelt is the type\nand chief--proceeds. Mr. George Iles has called my attention to a\nremarkable address made so long ago as the year 1883 before the Yale\nAlumni, by President Andrew D. White (the first president), of\nCornell, who was afterwards American Ambassador at St. Petersburg\nand Berlin. President White was a member of the class of '53, and he\naddressed himself particularly to the men of that year. His title was\n\"The Message of the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth,\" and it is\nfull of a spirit that grows and spreads throughout American life, that\nmay ultimately spread throughout the life of the whole nation, a spirit\nof criticism and constructive effort, of a scope and quality the world\nhas never seen before. The new class of '83 are the messengers.\n\n\"To a few tottering old men of our dear class of '53 it will be granted\nto look with straining eyes over the boundary into the twentieth\ncentury; but even these can do little to make themselves heard then.\nMost of us shall not see it. But before us and around us; nay, in our\nown families are the men who shall see it. The men who go forth from\nthese dear shades to-morrow are girding themselves for it. Often as I\nhave stood in the presence of such bands of youthful messengers I have\nnever been able to resist a feeling of awe, as in my boyhood when I\nstood before men who were soon to see Palestine and the Far East, or\nthe Golden Gates of the West, and the islands of the Pacific. The old\nstory of St. Fillipo Neri at Rome comes back to me, who, in the days\nof the Elizabethan persecutions, made men bring him out into the open\nair and set him opposite the door of the Papal College of Rome, that\nhe might look into the faces of the English students, destined to go\nforth to triumph or to martyrdom for the faith in far-off, heretic\nEngland.\"\n\nI cannot forbear from quoting further from this address; it is all so\ncongenial to my own beliefs. Indeed, I like to think of that gathering\nof young men and old as if it were still existing, as though the old\nfellows of '53 were still sitting, listening and looking up responsive\nto this appeal that comes down to us. I fancy President White on the\nplatform before them, a little figure in the perspective of a quarter\nof a century, but still quite clearly audible, delivering his periods\nto that now indistinguishable audience:\n\n\"What, then, is to be done? Mercantilism, necessitated at first by our\ncircumstances and position, has been in the main a great blessing. It\nhas been so under a simple law of history. How shall it be prevented\nfrom becoming in obedience to a similar inexorable law, a curse?\n\n\"Here, in the answer to this question, it seems to me, is the most\nimportant message from this century to the next.\n\n\"For the great thing to be done is neither more nor less than to\ndevelop _other_ great elements of civilization now held in check, which\nshall take their rightful place in the United States, which shall\nmodify the mercantile spirit, ... which shall make the history of our\ncountry something greater and broader than anything we have reached, or\never can reach, under the sway of mercantilism alone.\n\n\"What shall be those counter elements of civilization? Monarchy,\naristocracy, militarism we could not have if we would, we would not\nhave if we could. What shall we have?\n\n\"I answer simply that we must do all that we can to rear greater\nfabrics of religious, philosophic thought, literary thought,\nscientific, artistic, political thought to summon young men more and\nmore into these fields, not as a matter of taste or social opportunity,\nbut as a patriotic duty; to hold before them not the incentive of\nmere gain or of mere pleasure or of mere reputation, but the ideal\nof a new and higher civilization. The greatest work which the coming\ncentury has to do in this country is to build up an aristocracy of\nthought and feeling which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of\nmercantilism. I would have more and more the appeal made to every young\nman who feels within him the ability to do good or great things in any\nof these higher fields, to devote his powers to them as a sacred duty,\nno matter how strongly the mercantile or business spirit may draw him.\nI would have the idea preached early and late....\n\n\"And as the guardian of such a movement, ... I would strengthen at\nevery point this venerable university, and others like it throughout\nthe country. Remiss, indeed, have the graduates and friends of our own\nhonored Yale been in their treatment of her. She has never had the\nmeans to do a tithe of what she might do. She ought to be made strong\nenough, with more departments, more professors, more fellowships, to\nbecome one of a series of great rallying points or fortresses, and\nto hold always concentrated here a strong army, ever active against\nmercantilism, materialism, and Philistinism....\n\n\"But, after all, the effort to create these new counterpoising,\nmodifying elements of a greater civilization must be begun in the\nindividual man, and especially in the youth who feels within himself\nthe power to think, the power to write, the power to carve the\nmarble, to paint, to leave something behind him better than dollars.\nIn the individual minds and hearts and souls of the messengers who\nare preparing for the next century is a source of regeneration. They\nmust form an ideal of religion higher than that of a life devoted to\ngrasping and grinding and griping, with a whine for mercy at the end of\nit. They must form an ideal of science higher than that of increasing\nthe production of iron or cotton. They must form an ideal of literature\nand of art higher than that of pandering to the latest prejudice or\nwhimsey. And they must form an ideal of man himself worthy of that\ncentury into which are to be poured the accumulations of this. So shall\nmaterial elements be brought to their proper place, made stronger for\ngood, made harmless for evil. So shall we have that development of new\nand greater elements, that balance of principles which shall make this\nrepublic greater than anything of which we now can dream.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIV\n\nCULTURE\n\n\nI\n\nThe Boston Enchantment\n\nYet even as I write of the universities as the central intellectual\norgan of a modern state, as I sit implying salvation by schools, there\ncomes into my mind a mass of qualification. The devil in the American\nworld drama may be mercantilism, ensnaring, tempting, battling against\nmy hero, the creative mind of man, but mercantilism is not the only\nantagonist. In Fifth Avenue or Paterson one may find nothing but\nthe zenith and nadir of the dollar hunt, at a Harvard table one may\nencounter nothing but living minds, but in Boston--I mean not only\nBeacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, but that Boston of the mind and\nheart that pervades American refinement and goes about the world--one\nfinds the human mind not base, nor brutal, nor stupid, nor ignorant,\nbut mysteriously enchanting and ineffectual, so that having eyes it yet\ndoes not see, having powers it achieves nothing....\n\nI remember Boston as a quiet effect, as something a little withdrawn,\nas a place standing aside from the throbbing interchange of East and\nWest. When I hear the word Boston now it is that quality returns. I do\nnot think of the spreading parkways of Mr. Woodbury and Mr. Olmstead\nnor of the crowded harbor; the congested tenement-house regions, full\nof those aliens whose tongues struck so strangely on the ears of Mr.\nHenry James, come not to mind. But I think of rows of well-built, brown\nand ruddy homes, each with a certain sound architectural distinction,\neach with its two squares of neatly trimmed grass between itself and\nthe broad, quiet street, and each with its family of cultured people\nwithin. I am reminded of deferential but unostentatious servants,\nand of being ushered into large, dignified entrance-halls. I think\nof spacious stairways, curtained archways, and rooms of agreeable,\nreceptive persons. I recall the finished informality of the high tea.\nAll the people of my impression have been taught to speak English with\na quite admirable intonation; some of the men and most of the women are\nproficient in two or three languages; they have travelled in Italy,\nthey have all the recognized classics of European literature in their\nminds, and apt quotations at command. And I think of the constant\npresence of treasured associations with the titanic and now mellowing\nliterary reputations of Victorian times, with Emerson (who called Poe\n\"that jingle man\"), and with Longfellow, whose house is now sacred, its\nview towards the Charles River and the stadium--it is a real, correct\nstadium--secured by the purchase of the sward before it forever....\n\nAt the mention of Boston I think, too, of autotypes and then of plaster\ncasts. I do not think I shall ever see an autotype again without\nthinking of Boston. I think of autotypes of the supreme masterpieces\nof sculpture and painting, and particularly of the fluttering garments\nof the \"Nike of Samothrace.\" (That I saw, also, in little casts and\nbig, and photographed from every conceivable point of view.) It is\nincredible how many people in Boston have selected her for their\n\u00e6sthetic symbol and expression. Always that lady was in evidence about\nme, unobtrusively persistent, until at last her frozen stride pursued\nme into my dreams. That frozen stride became the visible spirit of\nBoston in my imagination, a sort of blind, headless, and unprogressive\nfine resolution that took no heed of any contemporary thing. Next\nto that I recall, as inseparably Bostonian, the dreaming grace of\nBotticelli's \"Prima vera.\" All Bostonians admire Botticelli, and\nhave a feeling for the roof of the Sistine chapel--to so casual and\nadventurous a person as myself, indeed, Boston presents a terrible,\na terrifying unanimity of \u00e6sthetic discriminations. I was nearly\nbrought back to my childhood's persuasion that, after all, there is\na right and wrong in these things. And Boston clearly thought the\nless of Mr. Bernard Shaw when I told her he had induced me to buy a\npianola, not that Boston ever did set much store by so contemporary a\nperson as Mr. Bernard Shaw. The books she reads are toned and seasoned\nbooks--preferably in the old or else in limited editions, and by\nauthors who may be lectured upon without decorum....\n\nBoston has in her symphony concerts the best music in America, and\nhere her tastes are severely orthodox and classic. I heard Beethoven's\nFifth Symphony extraordinarily well done, the familiar pinnacled Fifth\nSymphony, and now, whenever I grind that out upon the convenient\nmechanism beside my desk at home, mentally I shall be transferred\nto Boston again, shall hear its magnificent aggressive thumpings\ntransfigured into exquisite orchestration, and sit again among that\naudience of pleased and pleasant ladies in chaste, high-necked,\nexpensive dresses, and refined, attentive, appreciative, bald, or\niron-gray men....\n\n\nII\n\nBoston's Antiquity\n\nThen Boston has historical associations that impressed me like\niron-moulded, leather-bound, eighteenth-century books. The War of\nIndependence, that to us in England seems half-way back to the days of\nElizabeth, is a thing of yesterday in Boston. \"Here,\" your host will\nsay and pause, \"came marching\" so-and-so, \"with his troops to relieve\"\nso-and-so. And you will find he is the great-grandson of so-and-so, and\nstill keeps that ancient colonial's sword. And these things happened\nbefore they dug the Hythe military canal, before Sandgate, except for\na decrepit castle, existed; before the days when Bonaparte gathered\nhis army at Boulogne--in the days of muskets and pigtails--and erected\nthat column my telescope at home can reach for me on a clear day. All\nthat is ancient history in England and in Boston the decade before\nthose distant alarums and excursions is yesterday. A year or so ago\nthey restored the British arms to the old State-House. \"Feeling,\"\nmy informant witnessed, \"was dying down.\" But there were protests,\nnevertheless....\n\nIf there is one note of incongruity in Boston, it is in the gilt dome\nof the Massachusetts State-House at night. They illuminate it with\nelectric light. That shocked me as an anachronism. It shocked me--much\nas it would have shocked me to see one of the colonial portraits, or\neven one of the endless autotypes of the Belvidere Apollo replaced, let\nus say, by one of Mr. Alvin Coburn's wonderfully beautiful photographs\nof modern New York. That electric glitter breaks the spell; it is\nthe admission of the present, of the twentieth century. It is just\nas if the Quirinal and Vatican took to an exchange of badinage with\nsearch-lights, or the King mounted an illuminated E.R. on the Round\nTower at Windsor.\n\nSave for that one discord there broods over the real Boston an immense\neffect of finality. One feels in Boston, as one feels in no other part\nof the States, that the intellectual movement has ceased. Boston is\nnow producing no literature except a little criticism. Contemporary\nBoston art is imitative art, its writers are correct and imitative\nwriters the central figure of its literary world is that charming old\nlady of eighty-eight, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. One meets her and Colonel\nHigginson in the midst of an authors' society that is not so much\ncomposed of minor stars as a chorus of indistinguishable culture. There\nare an admirable library and a museum in Boston, and the library is\nItalianate, and decorated within like an ancient missal. In the less\nornamental spaces of this place there are books and readers. There is\nparticularly a charming large room for children, full of pigmy chairs\nand tables, in which quite little tots sit reading. I regret now I did\nnot ascertain precisely what they were reading, but I have no doubt it\nwas classical matter.\n\nI do not know why the full sensing of what is ripe and good in the past\nshould carry with it this quality of discriminating against the present\nand the future. The fact remains that it does so almost oppressively. I\nfound myself by some accident of hospitality one evening in the company\nof a number of Boston gentlemen who constituted a book-collecting club.\nThey had dined, and they were listening to a paper on Bibles printed\nin America. It was a scholarly, valuable, and exhaustive piece of\nresearch. The surviving copies of each edition were traced, and when\nsome rare specimen was mentioned as the property of any member of the\nclub there was decorously warm applause. I had been seeing Boston,\ndrinking in the Boston atmosphere all day.... I know it will seem\nan ungracious and ungrateful thing to confess (yet the necessities\nof my picture of America compel me), but as I sat at the large and\nbeautifully ordered table, with these fine, rich men about me, and\nlistened to the steady progress of the reader's ever unrhetorical\nsentences, and the little bursts of approval, it came to me with a\nhorrible quality of conviction that the mind of the world was dead, and\nthat this was a distribution of souvenirs.\n\nIndeed, so strongly did this grip me that presently, upon some slight\noccasion, I excused myself and went out into the night. I wandered\nabout Boston for some hours, trying to shake off this unfortunate idea.\nI felt that all the books had been written, all the pictures painted,\nall the thoughts said--or at least that nobody would ever believe this\nwasn't so. I felt it was dreadful nonsense to go on writing books.\nNothing remained but to collect them in the richest, finest manner one\ncould. Somewhere about midnight I came to a publisher's window, and\nstood in the dim moonlight peering enviously at piled copies of Izaak\nWalton and Omar Khayyam, and all the happy immortals who got in before\nthe gates were shut. And then in the corner I discovered a thin, small\nbook. For a time I could scarcely believe my eyes. I lit a match to be\nthe surer. And it was _A Modern Symposium_, by Lowes Dickinson, beyond\nall disputing. It was strangely comforting to see it there--a leaf of\nolive from the world of thought I had imagined drowned forever.\n\nThat was just one night's mood. I do not wish to accuse Boston of any\nwilful, deliberate repudiation of the present and the future. But I\nthink that Boston--when I say Boston let the reader always understand\nI mean that intellectual and spiritual Boston that goes about the\nworld, that traffics in book-shops in Rome and Piccadilly, that I have\ndined with and wrangled with in my friend W.'s house in Blackheath,\ndear W., who, I believe, has never seen America--I think, I say, that\nBoston commits the scholastic error and tries to remember too much, to\ntreasure too much, and has refined and studied and collected herself\ninto a state of hopeless intellectual and \u00e6sthetic repletion in\nconsequence. In these matters there are limits. The finality of Boston\nis a quantitive consequence. The capacity of Boston, it would seem, was\njust sufficient but no more than sufficient, to comprehend the whole\nachievement of the human intellect up, let us say, to the year 1875\nA.D. Then an equilibrium was established. At or about that year Boston\nfilled up.\n\n\nIII\n\nAbout Wellesley\n\nIt is the peculiarity of Boston's intellectual quality that she cannot\nunload again. She treasures Longfellow in quantity. She treasures his\nworks, she treasures associations, she treasures his Cambridge home.\nNow, really, to be perfectly frank about him, Longfellow is not good\nenough for that amount of intellectual house room. He cumbers Boston.\nAnd when I went out to Wellesley to see that delightful girls' college\neverybody told me I should be reminded of the \"Princess.\" For the life\nof me I could not remember what \"Princess.\" Much of my time in Boston\nwas darkened by the constant strain of concealing the frightful gaps in\nmy intellectual baggage, this absence of things I might reasonably be\nsupposed, as a cultivated person, to have, but which, as a matter of\nfact, I'd either left behind, never possessed, or deliberately thrown\naway. I felt instinctively that Boston could never possibly understand\nthe light travelling of a philosophical carpet-bagger. But I hid--in\nfull view of the tree-set Wellesley lake, ay, with the skiffs of \"sweet\ngirl graduates\"--own up. \"I say,\" I said, \"I wish you wouldn't all be\nso allusive. _What_ Princess?\"\n\nIt was, of course, that thing of Tennyson's. It is a long, frequently\nhappy and elegant, and always meritorious narrative poem, in which a\nchaste Victorian amorousness struggles with the early formul\u00e6 of the\nfeminist movement. I had read it when I was a boy, I was delighted to\nbe able to claim, and had honorably forgotten the incident. But in\nBoston they treat it as a living classic, and expect you to remember\nconstantly and with appreciation this passage and that. I think that\nquite typical of the Bostonian weakness. It is the error of the clever\nhigh-school girl, it is the mistake of the scholastic mind all the\nworld over, to learn too thoroughly and to carry too much. They want to\nknow and remember Longfellow and Tennyson--just as in art they want to\nknow and remember Raphael and all the elegant inanity of the sacrifice\nat Lystra, or the miraculous draught of Fishes; just as in history they\nkeep all the picturesque legends of the War of Independence--looking up\nthe dates and minor names, one imagines, ever and again. Some years ago\nI met two Boston ladies in Rome. Each day they sallied forth from our\nhotel to see and appreciate; each evening, after dinner, they revised\nand underlined in Baedeker what they had seen. _They meant to miss\nnothing in Rome._ It's fine in its way--this receptive eagerness, this\nlearners' avidity. Only people who can go about in this spirit need,\nif their minds are to remain mobile, not so much heads as _cephalic\npantechnicon vans_....\n\n\nIV\n\nThe Wellesley Cabinets\n\nI find this appetite to have all the mellow and refined and beautiful\nthings in life to the exclusion of all thought for the present and\nthe future even in the sweet, free air of Wellesley's broad park,\nthat most delightful, that almost incredible girls' university,\nwith its class-rooms, its halls of residence, its club-houses and\ngathering-places among the glades and trees. I have very vivid in\nmy mind a sunlit room in which girls were copying the detail in the\nphotographs of masterpieces, and all around this room were cabinets of\ndrawers, and in each drawer photographs. There must be in that room\nphotographs of every picture of the slightest importance in Italy,\nand detailed studies of many. I suppose, too, there are photographs\nof all the sculpture and buildings in Italy that are by any standard\nconsiderable. There is, indeed, a great civilization, stretching over\ncenturies and embodying the thought and devotion, the scepticism and\nlevities, the ambition, the pretensions, the passions, and desires of\ninnumerable sinful and world-used men--_canned_, as it were, in this\none room, and freed from any deleterious ingredients. The young ladies,\nunder the direction of competent instructors, go through it, no doubt,\nindustriously, and emerge--capable of Browning.\n\nI was taken into two or three charming club-houses that dot this\nbeautiful domain. There was a Shakespeare club-house, with a delightful\ntheatre, Elizabethan in style, and all set about with Shakespearean\nthings; there was the club-house of the girls who are fitting\nthemselves for their share in the great American problem by the study\nof Greek. Groups of pleasant girls in each, grave with the fine gravity\nof youth, entertained the reluctantly critical visitor, and were\nunmistakably delighted and relaxed when one made it clear that one was\nnot in the Great Teacher line of business, when one confided that one\nwas there on false pretences, and insisting on seeing the pantry. They\nhave jolly little pantries, and they make excellent tea.\n\nI returned to Boston at last in a state of mighty doubting, provided\nwith a Wellesley College calendar to study at my leisure.\n\nI cannot, for the life of me, determine how far Wellesley is an aspect\nof what I have called Boston; how far it is a part of that wide forward\nmovement of the universities upon which I lavish hope and blessings.\nThose drawings of photographed Madonnas and Holy Families and\nAnnunciations, the sustained study of Greek, the class in the French\ndrama of the seventeenth century, the study of the topography of Rome\nfill me with misgivings, seeing the world is in torment for the want of\nliving thought about its present affairs. But, on the other hand, there\nare courses upon socialism--though the text-book is still _Das Kapital_\nof Marx--and upon the industrial history of England and America. I\ndidn't discover a debating society, but there is a large accessible\nlibrary.\n\nHow far, I wonder still, are these girls thinking and feeding mentally\nfor themselves? What do they discuss one with another? How far do\nthey suffer under that plight of feminine education--notetaking from\nlectures?...\n\nBut, after all, this about Wellesley is a digression into which I fell\nby way of Boston's autotypes. My main thesis was that culture, as it\nis conceived in Boston, is no contribution to the future of America,\nthat cultivated people may be, in effect, as state-blind as--Mr.\nMorgan Richards. It matters little in the mind of the world whether\nany one is concentrated upon medi\u00e6val poetry, Florentine pictures, or\nthe propagation of pills. The common, significant fact in all these\ncases is this, a blindness to the crude splendor of the possibilities\nof America now, to the tragic greatness of the unheeded issues that\nblunder towards solution. Frankly, I grieve over Boston--Boston\nthroughout the world--as a great waste of leisure and energy, as a\nfrittering away of moral and intellectual possibilities. We give too\nmuch to the past. New York is not simply more interesting than Rome,\nbut more significant, more stimulating, and far more beautiful, and the\nidea that to be concerned about the latter in preference to the former\nis a mark of a finer mental quality is one of the most mischievous and\nfoolish ideas that ever invaded the mind of man. We are obsessed by\nthe scholastic prestige of mere knowledge and genteel remoteness. Over\nagainst unthinking ignorance is scholarly refinement, the spirit of\nBoston; between that Scylla and this Charybdis the creative mind of man\nsteers its precarious way.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XV\n\nAT WASHINGTON\n\n\nI\n\nWashington as Anti-climax\n\nI came to Washington full of expectations and curiosities. Here, I\nfelt, so far as it could exist visibly and palpably anywhere, was\nthe head and mind of this colossal America over which my observant\ncuriosities had wandered. In this place I should find, among other\nthings, perhaps as many as ten thousand men who would not be concerned\nin trade. There would be all the Senators and representatives, their\nsecretaries and officials, and four thousand and more scientific and\nliterary men of Washington's institutions and libraries, the diplomatic\ncorps, the educational centres, the civil service, the writers and\nthinking men who must inevitably be drawn to this predestined centre. I\npromised myself arduous intercourse with a teeming intellectual life.\nHere I should find questions answered, discover missing clues, get hold\nof the last connections in my inquiry. I should complete at Washington\nmy vision of America; my forecast would follow.\n\nI don't precisely remember how this vision departed. I know only that\nafter a day or so in Washington an entirely different conception was\nestablished, a conception of Washington as architecture and avenues,\nas a place of picture post-cards and excursions, with sightseers\ninstead of thoughts going to and fro. I had imagined that in Washington\nI should find such mentally vigorous discussion-centres as the New\nYork X Club on a quite magnificent scale. Instead, I found the chief\nscientific gathering-place has, like so many messes in the British\narmy before the Boer war, a rule against talking \"shop.\" In all\nWashington there is no clearing-house of thought at all; Washington has\nno literary journals, no magazines, no publications other than those\nof the official specialist--there does not seem to be a living for a\nsingle firm of publishers in this magnificent empty city.\n\nI went about the place in a state of ridiculous and deepening concern.\nI went through the splendid Botanical Gardens, through the spacious\nand beautiful Capitol, and so to the magnificently equipped Library\nof Congress. There in an upper chamber that commands an altogether\nbeautiful view of long vistas of avenue and garden to that stupendous\nunmeaning obelisk (the work of the women of America) that dominates\nall Washington, I found at last a little group of men who could talk.\nIt was like a small raft upon a limitless empty sea. I lunched with\nthem at their Round Table, and afterwards Mr. Putnam showed me the\nRotunda, quite the most gracious reading-room dome the world possesses,\nand explained the wonderful mechanical organization that brings almost\nevery volume in that immense collection within a minute of one's hand.\n\"With all this,\" I asked him, \"why doesn't the place _think_?\" He\nseemed, discreetly, to consider it did.\n\n[Illustration: IN THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY]\n\nIt was in the vein of Washington's detached deadness that I should\nfind Professor Langley (whose flying experiments I have followed for\nsome years with close interest) was dead, and I went through the\nlong galleries of arch\u00e6ological specimens and stuffed animals in the\nSmithsonian Institution to inflict my questions upon his temporary\nsuccessor, Dr. Cyrus Adler. He had no adequate excuses. He found a\nkind of explanation in the want of enterprise of American publishers,\nso that none of them come to Washington to tap its latent resources of\nknowledge and intellectual capacity; but that does not account for the\nabsence of any traffic in ideas. It is perhaps near the truth to say\nthat this dearth of any general and comprehensive intellectual activity\nis due to intellectual specialization. The four thousand scientific men\nin Washington are all too energetically busy with ethnographic details,\nelectrical computations, or herbaria to talk about common and universal\nthings. They ought not to be so busy, and a science so specialized\nsinks half-way down the scale of sciences. Science is one of those\nthings that cannot hustle; if it does, it loses its connections.\nIn Washington some men, I gathered, hustle, others play bridge, and\ngeneral questions are left, a little contemptuously, as being of the\nnature of \"gas,\" to the newspapers and magazines. Philosophy, which\ncorrelates the sciences and keeps them subservient to the universals\nof life, has no seat there. My anticipated synthesis of ten thousand\nminds refused, under examination, to synthesize at all; it remained\ndisintegrated, a mob, individually active and collectively futile, of\nspecialists and politicians.\n\n\nII\n\nThe City of Conversation\n\nBut that is only one side of Washington life, the side east and\nsouth of the White House. Northwestward I found, I confess, the most\nagreeable social atmosphere in America. It is a region of large fine\nhouses, of dignified and ample-minded people, people not given over\nto \"smartness\" nor redolent of dollars, unhurried and reflective, not\naltogether lost to the wider aspects of life. In Washington I met\nagain that peculiarly aristocratic quality I had found in Harvard--in\nthe person of President Eliot, for example--an aristocratic quality\nthat is all the finer for the absence of rank, that has integral in\nit--books, thought, and responsibility. And yet I could have wished\nthese fine people more alive to present and future things, a little\nless established upon completed and mellowing foundations, a little\nless final in their admirable finish....\n\nThere was, I found, a little breeze of satisfaction fluttering the\nWashington atmosphere in this region. Mr. Henry James came through the\nStates last year distributing epithets among their cities with the\njustest aptitude. Washington was the \"City of Conversation\"; and she\nwas pleasantly conscious that she merited this friendly coronation.\n\nWashington, indeed, converses well, without awkwardness, without\nchatterings, kindly, watchful, agreeably witty. She lulled and tamed my\npurpose to ask about primary things, to discuss large questions. Only\nonce, and that was in an after-dinner duologue, did I get at all into a\nquestion in Washington. For the rest, Washington remarked and alluded\nand made her point and got away.\n\n\nIII\n\nMount Vernon\n\nAnd Washington, with a remarkable unanimity and in the most charming\nmanner, assured me that if I came to see and understand America I\nmust on no account miss Mount Vernon. To have passed indifferently\nby Concord was bad enough, I was told, but to ignore the home of\nthe first president, to turn my back upon that ripe monument of\ncolonial simplicity, would be quite criminal neglect. To me it was a\nrevelation how sincerely insistent they were upon this. It reminded\nme of an effect I had already appreciated very keenly in Boston--and\neven before Boston, when Mr. Z took me across Spuyten Duyvil into\nthe country of Sleepy Hollow, and spoke of Cornwallis as though he\nhad died yesterday--and that is the longer historical perspectives\nof America. America is an older country than any European one, for\nshe has not rejuvenesced for a hundred and thirty years. In endless\nways America fails to be contemporary. In many respects, no doubt,\nshe is decades in front of Europe, in mechanism, for example, and\nproductive organization, but in very many other and more fundamental\nones she is decades behind. Go but a little way back and you will\nfind the European's perspectives close up; they close at '71, at '48,\ndown a vista of reform bills, at Waterloo and the treaty of Paris,\nat the Irish Union, at the coming of Victor Emanuel; Great Britain,\nfor example, in the last hundred years has reconstructed politically\nand socially, created half her present peerage, evolved the Empire of\nIndia, developed Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, fought fifty\nconsiderable wars. Mount Vernon, on the other hand, goes back with\nunbroken continuity, a broad band of mellow tradition, to the War of\nIndependence.\n\nWell, I got all that in conversation at Washington, and so I didn't\nneed to go to Mount Vernon, after all. I got all that about 1777,\nand I failed altogether to get anything of any value whatever about\n1977--which is the year of greater interest to me. About the direction\nand destinies of that great American process that echoes so remotely\nthrough Washington's cool gracefulness of architecture and her\numbrageous parks, this cultivated society seemed to me to be terribly\nincurious and indifferent. It was alive to political personalities, no\ndoubt, its sons and husbands were Senators, judges, ambassadors, and\nthe like; it was concerned with their speeches and prospects, but as\nto the trend of the whole thing Washington does not picture it, does\nnot want to picture it. I found myself presently excusing myself for\nMount Vernon on the ground that I was not a retrospective American, but\na go-ahead Englishman, and so apologizing for my want of reverence for\nvenerable things. \"We are a young people,\" I maintained. \"We are a new\ngeneration.\"\n\n\nIV\n\nIn the Senate-House\n\nI went to see the Senate debating the railway-rate bill, and from\nthe Senatorial gallery I had pointed out to me Tillman and Platt,\nForaker and Lodge, and all the varied personalities of the assembly.\nThe chamber is a circular one, with enormously capacious galleries.\nThe members speak from their desks, other members write letters, read\n(and rustle) newspapers, sit among accumulations of torn paper, or\nstand round the apartment in audibly conversational groups. A number of\nmessenger-boys--they wear no uniform--share the floor of the House with\nthe representatives, and are called by clapping the hands. They go to\nand fro, or sit at the feet of the Vice-President. Behind and above the\nVice-President the newspaper men sit in a state of partial attention,\noccasionally making notes for the vivid descriptions that have long\nsince superseded verbatim reports in America. The public galleries\ncontain hundreds of intermittently talkative spectators. For the most\npart these did not seem to me to represent, as the little strangers'\ngallery in the House of Commons represents, interests affected. They\nwere rather spectators seeing Washington, taking the Senate _en route_\nfor the obelisk top and Mount Vernon. They made little attempt to hear\nthe speeches.\n\nIn a large distinguished emptiness among these galleries is the space\ndevoted to diplomatic representatives, and there I saw, sitting in a\nmeritorious solitude, the British _charge d'affaires_ and his wife\nfollowing the debate below. I found it altogether too submerged for me\nto follow. The countless spectators, the Senators, the boy messengers,\nthe comings and goings kept up a perpetual confusing babblement. One\nsaw men walking carelessly between the Speaker and the Vice-President,\nand at one time two gentlemen with their backs to the member in\npossession of the House engaged the Vice-President in an earnest\nconversation. The messengers circulated at a brisk trot, or sat on the\nedge of the dais exchanging subdued badinage. I have never seen a more\ndistracted Legislature.\n\nThe whole effect of Washington is a want of concentration, of something\nunprehensile and apart. It is on, not in, the American process. The\nplace seems to me to reflect, even in its sounds and physical forms,\nthat dispersal of power, that evasion of a simple conclusiveness,\nwhich is the peculiar effect of that ancient compromise, the American\nConstitution. The framers of that treaty were haunted by two terrible\nbogies, a military dictatorship and what they called \"mob rule,\"\nthey were obsessed by the need of safeguards against these dangers,\nthey were controlled by the mutual distrust of constituent States\nfar more alien to one another than they are now, and they failed to\nforesee both the enormous assimilation of interests and character\npresently to be wrought by the railways and telegraphs, and the huge\npossibilities of corruption, elaborate electrical arrangements offer\nto clever unscrupulous men. And here in Washington is the result, a\nLegislature that fails to legislate, a government that cannot govern,\na pseudo-responsible administration that offers enormous scope for\ncorruption, and that is perhaps invincibly intrenched behind the\ntwo-party system from any insurgence of the popular will. The plain\nfact of the case is that Congress, as it is constituted at present,\nis the feeblest, least accessible, and most inefficient central\ngovernment of any civilized nation in the worst west of Russia.\nCongress is entirely inadequate to the tasks of the present time.\n\nI came away from Washington with my pre-conception enormously\nreinforced that the supreme need of America, the preliminary thing to\nany social or economic reconstruction, is political reform. It seems\nto me to lie upon the surface that America has to be democratized.\nIt is necessary to make the Senate and the House of Representatives\nmore interdependent, and to abolish the possibilities of deadlocks\nbetween them, to make election to the Senate direct from the people,\nand to qualify and weaken the power of the two-party system by the\nintroduction of \"second ballots\" and the referendum....\n\nBut how such drastic changes are to be achieved constitutionally in\nAmerica I cannot imagine. Only a great educated, trained, and sustained\nagitation can bring about so fundamental a political revolution, and at\npresent I can find nowhere even the beginnings of a realization of this\nneed.\n\n\nV\n\nPresident Roosevelt\n\nIn the White House, set midway between the Washington of the sightseers\nand the Washington of brilliant conversation, I met President\nRoosevelt. I was mightily pleased by the White House; it is dignified\nand simple--once again am I tempted to use the phrase \"aristocratic\nin the best sense\" of things American; and an entire absence of\nuniforms or liveries creates an atmosphere of Republican equality\nthat is reinforced by \"Mr. President's\" friendly grasp of one's\nundistinguishable hand. And after lunch I walked about the grounds with\nhim, and so achieved my ambition to get him \"placed,\" as it were, in my\nvision of America.\n\nIn the rare chances I have had of meeting statesmen, there has always\nbeen one common effect, an effect of their being smaller, less audible,\nand less saliently featured than one had expected. A common man\nbuilds up his picture of the men prominent in the great game of life\nvery largely out of caricature, out of head-lines, out of posed and\n\"characteristic\" portraits. One associates them with actresses and\nactors, literary poseurs and such-like public performers, anticipates\nthe same vivid self-consciousness as these display in common\nintercourse, keys one's self up for the paint on their faces, and for\nvoices and manners altogether too accentuated for the gray-toned lives\nof common men. I've met politicians who remained at that. But so soon\nas Mr. Roosevelt entered the room, \"Teddy,\" the Teddy of the slouch\nhat, the glasses, the teeth, and the sword, that strenuous vehement\nTeddy (who had, let me admit, survived a full course of reading in the\nPresident's earlier writings) vanished, and gave place to an entirely\nnegotiable individuality. To-day, at any rate, the \"Teddy\" legend is\nuntrue. Perhaps it wasn't always quite untrue. There was a time during\nthe world predominance of Mr. Kipling, when I think the caricature\nmust have come close to certain of Mr. Roosevelt's acceptances and\nattitudes. But that was ten years and more ago, and Mr. Roosevelt to\nthis day goes on thinking and changing and growing....\n\nFor me, anyhow, that strenuousness has vanished beyond recalling, and\nthere has emerged a figure in gray of a quite reasonable size, with a\nface far more thoughtful and perplexed than strenuous, with a clinched\nhand that does indeed gesticulate, though it is by no means a gigantic\nfist--and with quick movements, a voice strained indeed, a little\nforced for oratory, but not raised or aggressive in any fashion, and\nfriendly screwed-up eyes behind the glasses.\n\nIt isn't my purpose at all to report a conversation that went from\npoint to point. I wasn't interviewing the President, and I made no note\nat the time of the things said. My impression was of a mind--for the\nsituation--quite extraordinarily open. That is the value of President\nRoosevelt for me, and why I can't for the life of my book leave\nhim out. He is the seeking mind of America displayed. The ordinary\npolitician goes through his career like a charging bull, with his eyes\nshut to any changes in the premises. He locks up his mind like a powder\nmagazine. But any spark may fire the mind of President Roosevelt.\nHis range of reading is amazing; he seems to be echoing with all the\nthought of the time, he has receptivity to the pitch of genius. And he\ndoes not merely receive, he digests and reconstructs; he thinks. It is\nhis political misfortune that at times he thinks aloud. His mind is\nactive with projects of solution for the teeming problems around him.\nTraditions have no hold upon him--nor, his enemies say, have any but\nquite formal pledges. It is hard to tie him. In all these things he is\nto a single completeness, to mind and will of contemporary America. And\nby an unparalleled conspiracy of political accidents, as all the world\nknows, he has got to the White House. He is not a part of the regular\nAmerican political system at all--he has, it happens, stuck through.\n\nNow my picture of America is, as I have tried to make clear, one of a\ngigantic process of growth, of economic coming and going, spaced out\nover vast distances and involving millions of hastening men; I see\nAmerica as towns and urgency and greatnesses beyond, I suppose, any\nprecedent that has ever been in the world. And like a little island of\norder amid that ocean of enormous opportunity and business turmoil and\nstriving individualities, is this District of Columbia, with Washington\nand its Capitol and obelisk. It is a mere pin-point in the unlimited,\non which, in peace times, the national government lies marooned,\ntwisted up into knots, bound with safeguards, and altogether impotently\nstranded. And peering closely, and looking from the Capitol down the\nvista of Pennsylvania Avenue, I see the White House, minute and clear,\nwith a fountain playing before it, and behind it a railed garden set\nwith fine trees. The trees are not so thick, nor the railings so high\nbut that the people on the big \"seeing Washington\" cannot crane to look\ninto it and watch whoever walk about it. And in this garden goes a\nliving speck, as it were, in gray, talking, swinging a white clinched\nhand, and trying vigorously and resolutely to get a hold upon the\nsignificance of the whole vast process in which he and his island of\ngovernment are set.\n\nAlways before him there have been political resultants, irrelevancies\nand futilities of the White House; and after him, it would seem, they\nmay come again. I do not know anything of the quality of Mr. Bryan,\nwho may perhaps succeed him. He, too, is something of an exception, it\nseems, and keeps a still developing and inquiring mind. Beyond is a\nvista of figures of questionable value so far as I am concerned. They\nhave this in common that they don't stand for thought. For the present,\nat any rate, a personality, extraordinarily representative, occupies\nthe White House. And what he chooses to say publicly (and some things\nhe says privately) are, by an exceptional law of acoustics, heard in\nSan Francisco, in Chicago, in New Orleans, in New York and Boston, in\nKansas, and Maine, throughout the whole breadth of the United States\nof America. He assimilates contemporary thought, delocalizes and\nreverberates it. He is America for the first time vocal to itself.\n\nWhat is America saying to itself?\n\nI've read most of the President's recent speeches, and they fall in\noddly with that quality in his face that so many photographs even\nconvey, a complex mingling of will and a critical perplexity. Taken all\ntogether they amount to a mass of not always consistent suggestions,\nthat and conflict overlap. Things crowd upon him, rebate scandals,\ninsurance scandals, the meat scandals, this insecurity and that. The\nconditions of his position press upon him. It is no wonder he gives out\nno single, simple note....\n\nThe plain fact is that in the face of the teeming situations of to-day\nAmerica does not know what to do. Nobody, except those happily gifted\nindividuals who can see but one aspect of an intricate infinitude,\nimagines any simple solution. For the rest the time is one of\nample, vigorous, and at times impatient inquiry, and of intense\ndisillusionment with old assumptions and methods. And never did a\nPresident before so reflect the quality of his time. The trend is\naltogether away from the anarchistic individualism of the nineteenth\ncentury, that much is sure, and towards some constructive scheme which,\nif not exactly socialism, as socialism is defined, will be, at any\nrate, closely analogous to socialism. This is the immense change of\nthought and attitude in which President Roosevelt participates, and to\nwhich he gives a unique expression. Day by day he changes with the big\nworld about him--contradicts himself....\n\nI came away with the clear impression that neither President\nRoosevelt nor America will ever, as some people prophesy, \"declare\nfor socialism,\" but my impression is equally clear, that he and all\nthe world of men he stands for, have done forever with the threadbare\nformul\u00e6 that have served America such an unconscionable time. We talked\nof the press and books and of the question of color, and then for a\nwhile about the r\u00f4le of the universities in the life of the coming time.\n\nNow it is a curious thing that as I talked with President Roosevelt in\nthe garden of the White House there came back to me quite forcibly that\nundertone of doubt that has haunted me throughout this journey. After\nall, does this magnificent appearance of beginnings which is America,\nconvey any clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfilment\nwhatever? Much makes for construction, a great wave of reform is going\non, but will it drive on to anything more than a breaking impact upon\neven more gigantic uncertainties and dangers. Is America a giant\nchildhood or a gigantic futility, a mere latest phase of that long\nsuccession of experiments which has been and may be for interminable\nyears--may be indeed altogether until the end--man's social history?\nI can't now recall how our discursive talk settled towards that, but\nit is clear to me that I struck upon a familiar vein of thought in\nthe President's mind. He hadn't, he said, an effectual disproof of\nany pessimistic interpretation of the future. If one chose to say\nAmerica must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all\nmankind must culminate and pass, he could not conclusively deny that\npossibility. Only he chose to live as if this were not so.\n\nThat remained in his mind. Presently he reverted to it. He made a sort\nof apology for his life against the doubts and scepticisms that, I\nfear, must be in the background of the thoughts of every modern man\nwho is intellectually alive. He mentioned a little book of mine, an\nearly book full of the deliberate pessimism of youth, in which I drew\na picture of a future of decadence, of a time when constructive effort\nhad fought its fight and failed, when the inevitable segregations\nof an individualistic system had worked themselves out and all the\nhope and vigor of humanity had gone forever. The descendants of the\nworkers had become etiolated, sinister, and subterranean monsters, the\nproperty-owners had degenerated into a hectic and feebly self-indulgent\nrace, living fitfully amid the ruins of the present time. He became\ngesticulatory, and his straining voice a note higher in denying this\nas a credible interpretation of destiny. With one of those sudden\nmovements of his, he knelt forward in a garden chair--we were standing\nbefore our parting beneath the colonnade--and addressed me very\nearnestly over the back, clutching it, and then thrusting out his\nfamiliar gesture, a hand first partly open and then closed.\n\n\"Suppose after all,\" he said, slowly, \"that should prove to be right,\nand it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. _That doesn't matter\nnow._ The effort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it. It's\nworth it--even then.\"...\n\nI can see him now and hear his unmusical voice saying \"The effort--the\neffort's worth it,\" and see the gesture of his clinched hand and\nthe--how can I describe it? the friendly peering snarl of his face,\nlike a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind as that,\nas a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations,\nits doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence amid perplexities and\nconfusions. He kneels out, assertive against his setting--and his\nsetting is the White House with a background of all America.\n\nI could almost write, with a background of all the world--for I\nknow of no other a tithe so representative of the creative purpose,\nthe _good-will_ in men as he. In his undisciplined hastiness, his\nlimitations, his prejudices, his unfairness, his frequent errors, just\nas much as in his force, his sustained courage, his integrity, his open\nintelligence, he stands for his people and his kind.\n\n\n\n\nTHE ENVOY\n\n\nAnd at last I am back in my study by the sea. It is high June. When\nI said good-bye to things it was March, a March warm and eager to\nbegin with, and then dashed with sleet and wind; but the daffodils\nwere out, and the primulas and primroses shone brown and yellow in\nthe unseasonable snow. The spring display that was just beginning\nis over. The iris rules. Outside the window is a long level line of\nblack fleur-de-lys rising from a serried rank of leaf-blades. Their\nsilhouettes stand out against the brightness of the twilight sea. They\nmark, so opened, two months of absence. And in the interval I have seen\na great world.\n\nI have tried to render it as I saw it. I have tried to present the\nfirst exhilaration produced by the sheer growth of it, the morning-time\nhopefulness of spacious and magnificent opportunity, the optimism of\nsuccessful, swift, progressive effort in material things. And from that\nI have passed to my sense of the chaotic condition of the American\nwill, and that first confidence has darkened more and more towards\ndoubt again. I came to America questioning the certitudes of progress.\nFor a time I forgot my questionings; I sincerely believed, \"These\npeople can do anything,\" and, now I have it all in perspective, I\nhave to confess that doubt has taken me again. \"These people,\" I say,\n\"might do anything. They are the finest people upon earth--the most\nhopeful. But they are vain and hasty; they are thoughtless, harsh, and\nundisciplined. In the end, it may be, they will accomplish nothing.\"\nI see, I have noted in its place, the great forces of construction,\nthe buoyant, creative spirit of America. But I have marked, too, the\nintricacy of snares and obstacles in its path. The problem of America,\nsave in its scale and freedom, is no different from the problem of\nGreat Britain, of Europe, of all humanity; it is one chiefly moral and\nintellectual; it is to resolve a confusion of purposes, traditions,\nhabits, into a common ordered intention. Everywhere one finds what\nseem to me the beginnings of that--and, for this epoch it is all too\npossible, they may get no further than beginnings. Yet another Decline\nand Fall may remain to be written, another and another, and it may be\nanother, before the World State comes and Peace.\n\nYet against this prospect of a dispersal of will, of a secular decline\nin honor, education, public spirit, and confidence, of a secular\nintensification of corruption, lawlessness, and disorder, I do, with\na confidence that waxes and wanes, balance the creative spirit in\nAmerica, and that kindred spirit that for me finds its best symbol in\nthe President's kneeling, gesticulating figure, and his urgent \"The\neffort's worth it!\" Who can gauge the far-reaching influence of even\nthe science we have, in ordering and quickening the imagination of\nman, in enhancing and assuring their powers? Common men feel secure\nto-day in enterprises it needed men of genius to conceive in former\ntimes. And there is a literature--for all our faults we do write more\nwidely, deeply, disinterestedly, more freely and frankly than any set\nof writers ever did before--reaching incalculable masses of readers,\nand embodying an amount of common consciousness and purpose beyond\nall precedent. Consider only how nowadays the problems that were once\nthe inaccessible thoughts of statesmen may be envisaged by common\nmen! Here am I really able, in a few weeks of observant work, to get\na picture of America. I publish it. If it bears a likeness, it will\nlive and be of use; if not it will die, and be no irreparable loss.\nSome fragment, some suggestion may survive. My friend Mr. F. Madox\nHueffer was here a day or so ago to say good-bye; he starts for America\nas I write here, to get _his_ vision. As I have been writing these\npapers I have also been reading, instalment by instalment, the subtle,\nfine renderings of America revisited by Mr. Henry James. We work in\nshoals, great and small together, one trial thought following another.\nWe are getting the world presented. It is not simply America that we\nswarm over and build up into a conceivable process, into something\nunderstandable and negotiable by the mind. I find on my desk here\nwaiting for me a most illuminating _Vision of India_, in which Mr.\nSidney Low, with a marvellous aptitude, has interpreted east to west.\nBesides my poor superficialities in _The Tribune_ appears Sir William\nButler, with a livid frankness expounding the most intimate aspects\nof the South African situation. A friend who called to-day spoke of\nNevinson's raid upon the slave trade of Portuguese East Africa, and\nof two irrepressible writers upon the Congo crimes. I have already\nmentioned the economic and social literature, the so-called literature\nof exposure in America. This altogether represents collectively a\ntremendous illumination. No social development was ever so lit and\nseen before. Collectively, this literature of facts and theories and\nimpressions is of immense importance. Things are done in the light,\nmore and more are they done in the light. The world perceives and\nthinks....\n\nAfter all is said and done, I do find the balance of my mind tilts\nsteadily to a belief in a continuing and accelerated progress now in\nhuman affairs. And in spite of my patriotic inclinations, in spite,\ntoo, of the present high intelligence and efficiency of Germany, it\nseems to me that in America, by sheer virtue of its size, its free\ntraditions, and the habit of initiative in its people, the leadership\nof progress must ultimately rest. Things like the Chicago scandals,\nthe insurance scandals, and all the manifest crudities of the American\nspectacle, don't seem to me to be more than relatively trivial after\nall. There are the universities, the turbines of Niagara, the New York\narchitecture, and the quality of the mediocre people to set against\nthese....\n\nWithin a week after I saw the President I was on the _Umbria_ and\nsteaming slowly through the long spectacle of that harbor which was my\nfirst impression of America, which still, to my imagination, stands so\nlargely for America. The crowded ferry-boats hooted past; athwart the\nshining water, tugs clamored to and fro. The sky-scrapers raised their\nslender masses heavenward--America's gay bunting lit the scene. As we\ndropped down I had a last glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge. There to the\nright was Ellis Island, where the immigrants, minute by minute, drip\nand drip into America, and beyond that the tall spike-headed Liberty\nwith the reluctant torch, which I have sought to make the centre of\nall this writing. And suddenly as I looked back at the sky-scrapers\nof lower New York a queer fancy sprang into my head. They reminded me\nquite irresistibly of piled-up packing cases outside a warehouse. I\nwas amazed I had not seen the resemblance before. I could really have\nbelieved for a moment that that was what they were, and that presently\nout of these would come the real thing, palaces and noble places, free,\nhigh circumstances, and space and leisure, light and fine living for\nthe sons of men....\n\nOcean, cities, multitudes, long journeys, mountains, lakes as large as\nseas, and the riddle of a nation's destiny; I've done my impertinent\nbest now with this monstrous insoluble problem. I finish.\n\nThe air is very warm and pleasant in my garden to-night, the sunset has\nleft a rim of greenish-gold about the northward sky, shading up a blue\nthat is, as yet, scarce pierced by any star. I write down these last\nwords here, and then I shall step through the window and sit out there\nin the kindly twilight, now quiet, now gossiping idly of what so-and-so\nhas done while I have been away, of personal motives and of little\nincidents and entertaining intimate things.\n\n\nTHE END","title":"The Future in America: A Search After Realities","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":60475}