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 PR 6013 
 A5 A65 
 1919 
 
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 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
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Class T^V < Go\? ^ 
 Book A .^A GS^ 
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 CDBOilGHX D£POSm 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 VILLA RUBEIK, and Other Stories 
 
 THE ISLAND PHARISBES 
 
 THE MAN OF PROPERTY 
 
 THE COUNTRY HOUSE 
 
 mATBRNITY 
 
 THE PATRICIAN 
 
 THE DARK FLOWBB 
 
 THE FRBELAND8 
 
 BEYOND 
 
 five tales 
 saint's progress 
 
 A COMMENTARY 
 
 A MOTLEY 
 
 THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY 
 
 THE LITTLE MAN, and Other Satiror 
 
 A SHEAF 
 
 ANOTHER SHEAF 
 
 ADDRESSES IN AMERICA: 1918 
 
 plays: first series 
 
 and SeparaUi^ 
 THE SILVER BOX 
 JOY 
 STRIFE 
 
 plays: second series 
 
 and SeparaMn 
 THE ELDEST SON 
 THE LITTLE DREAM 
 JUSTICE 
 
 PI/AYS : THIRD SERIES 
 
 cmd StparaUig 
 THE FUGITIVE 
 THE PIGEON 
 THE MOB 
 
 Jl BIT O' LOVE 
 
 MOODS, SONGS, AND DOOGBRXU 
 M£MORIES. Illustrated 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 1919 
 
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Front a photograph, copyritrht, igig, hy lui!;c7tc Hutch 
 
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ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 1919 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1919 
 
-^ 
 
 
 copteight, 1919, by 
 Charles Scribneh's Sons 
 
 Published August, 1919 
 
 JUL 26 1919 
 
 ©CI.A530646 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 vAcn 
 
 I. AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY .... 1 
 
 II. AMERICAN AND BRITON 11 
 
 III. FROM A SPEECH AT THE LOTUS CLUB, 
 
 NEW YORK 45 
 
 IV. FROM A SPEECH TO THE SOCIETY OF 
 
 ARTS AND SCIENCES, NEW YORK . 61 
 
 V. ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY . 64 
 
 VI. TO THE LEAGUE OF POLITICAL EDU- 
 CATION, NEW YORK 67 
 
 VIL TALKING AT LARGE 73 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 1919 
 
I 
 
 AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY 
 
 WE celebrate to-night the memory of a 
 great man of Letters. What strikes me 
 most about that glorious group of New England 
 writers — Emerson and Longfellow, Hawthorne, 
 Whittier, Thoreau, Motley, Holmes, and Lowell 
 — ^is a certain measure and magnanimity. They 
 were rare men and fine writers, of a temper 
 simple and unafraid. 
 
 I confess to thinking more of James Russell 
 Lowell as a critic and master of prose than as 
 a poet. His single-hearted enthusiasm for 
 Letters had a glowing quality which made it a 
 guiding star for the frail barque of culture. 
 His humour, breadth of view, sagacity, and the 
 all-round character of his activities has hardly 
 been equalled in your country. Not so great 
 a thinker or poet as Emerson, not so creative 
 as Hawthorne, so original in philosophy and 
 life as Thoreau, so racy and quaint as Hohnes, 
 
 1 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 he ran the gamut of those qualities as noae of 
 the others did; and as critic and analyst of 
 literature surpassed them all. 
 
 But I cannot hope to add anything of value 
 to American estimate and praise of Lowell — 
 critic, humorist, poet, editor, reformer, man of 
 Letters, man of State affairs. I may, perhaps, 
 be permitted however to remind you of two 
 sayings of his: "I am never Hfted up to any 
 peak of vision — but that when I look down in 
 hope to see some valley of the Beautiful Moun- 
 tains I behold nothing but blackened ruins, 
 and the moans of the down-trodden the world 
 over. . . . Then it seems as if my heart would 
 break in pouring out one glorious song that 
 should be the Gospel of Reform, full of con- 
 solation and strength to the oppressed — that 
 way my madness Hes." That was one side of 
 the youthful Lowell, the generous righter of 
 wrongs, the man. And this other sa3dng: "The 
 EngHsh-speaking nations should build a monu- 
 ment to the misguided enthusiasts of the plains 
 of Shinar, for as the mixture of many bloods 
 seems to have made them the most vigorous of 
 modem races, so has the mingling of divers 
 
 2 
 
AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY 
 
 speeches given them a language which is per- 
 haps the noblest vehicle of poetic thought that 
 ever existed." That was the other side of 
 Lowell, the enthusiast for Letters; and that 
 the feeling he had about our langjiage. 
 
 I am wondering, indeed, Mr. President, 
 what those men who in the fourteenth, fifteenth, 
 sixteenth centuries were welding the EngHsh 
 language would think if they could visit this 
 hall to-night, if suddenly we saw them sitting 
 here among us in their monkish dress, their 
 homespun, or their bright armour, having come 
 from a greater Land even than America — the 
 Land of the Far Shades. What expression 
 should we see on the dim faces of them, the 
 while they took in the marvellous fact that the 
 instrument of speech they forged in the cot- 
 tages, courts, cloisters, and castles of their Httle 
 misty island had become the hving speech of 
 half the world, and the second tongue for all 
 the nations of the other half ! For even so it 
 is now — this Enghsh language, which they 
 made, and Shakespeare crowned, which you 
 speak and we speak, and men speak imder the 
 Southern Cross, and unto the Arctic Seas ! 
 
 3 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 I do not think that you Americans and we 
 Enghsh are any longer strikingly alike in physi- 
 cal type or general characteristics, no more 
 than I think there is much resemblance be- 
 tween yourselves and the Australians. Our 
 link is now but community of language — and 
 the infinity which this connotes. 
 
 Perfected language — and ours and yours had 
 come to flower before white men began to seek 
 these shores — ^is so much more than a medium 
 through which to exchange material commodi- 
 ties; it is cement of the spirit, mortar linking 
 the bricks of our thoughts into a single struc- 
 ture of ideals and laws, painted and carved 
 with the rarities of oiu* fancy, the manifold 
 forms of Beauty and Truth. We who speak 
 American and you who speak English are con- 
 scious of a community which no differences can 
 take from us. Perhaps the very greatest re- 
 sult of the grim years we have just been pass- 
 ing through is the promotion of our common 
 tongue to the position of the universal language. 
 The importance of the EngHsh-speaking peo- 
 ples is now such that the educated man in every 
 country will perforce, as it were, acquire a 
 
 4 
 
AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY 
 
 knowledge of our speech. The second-language 
 problem, in my judgment, has been solved. 
 Numbers, and geographical and political acci- 
 dent have decided a question which I think 
 will never seriously be reopened, unless mad- 
 ness descends on us and we speakers of English 
 fight among ourselves. That fate I, at least, 
 cannot see haunting the future. 
 
 Lowell says in one of his earlier writings: 
 "We are the furthest from wishing to see what 
 many are so ardently praying for, namely, a 
 National Literature; for the same mighty lyre 
 of the human heart answers the touch of the 
 master in all ages and in every clime, and any 
 literature in so far as it is national is diseased 
 in so much as it appeals to some climatic pe- 
 culiarity rather than to universal nature." 
 That is very true, but good fortime has now 
 made of our English speech a medixma of inter- 
 nationality. 
 
 Henceforth you and we are the inhabitants 
 and guardians of a great Spirit-City, to which 
 the whole world will make pilgrimage. They 
 will make that pilgrimage primarily because 
 our City is a market-place. It will be for us 
 5 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 to see that they who come to trade remain to 
 worship. What is it we seek in this motley 
 of our Hves, to what end do we ply the multi- 
 farious traffic of civilisation? Is it that we 
 may become rich and satisfy a material car 
 price ever growing with the opportunity of 
 satisfaction? Is it that we may, of set and 
 conscious purpose, always be getting the better 
 of one another? Is it even, that of no sort of 
 conscious purpose we may pound the roads of 
 life at top speed, and blindly use up our Httle 
 energies? I cannot think so. Surely, in dim 
 sort we are trying to realise human happiness, 
 trying to reach a far-off goal of health and 
 kindliness and beauty; trying to live so that 
 those quaUties which make us human beings — 
 the sense of proportion, the feeling for beauty, 
 pity, and the sense of humour — should be ever 
 more exalted above the habits and passions 
 that we share with the tiger, the ostrich, and 
 the ape. 
 
 And so I would ask what will become of all 
 our reconstruction in these days if it be informed 
 and guided solely by the spirit of the market- 
 place ? Do Trade, material prosperity, and the 
 
 6 
 
AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY 
 
 abundance of creature comforts guarantee that 
 we advance towards our real goal? Material 
 comfort in abundance is no bad thing; I con- 
 fess to a considerable regard for it. But for 
 true progress it is but a flighty consort. I can 
 well see the wreckage from the world-storm 
 completely cleared away, the fields of life 
 ploughed and manured, and yet no wheat 
 grown there which can feed the spirit of man, 
 and help its stature. 
 
 Lest we suffer such a disillusion as that, what 
 powers and influence can we exert? There is 
 one at least: The proper and exalted use of 
 this great and splendid instrument, our com- 
 mon language. In a sophisticated world speech 
 is action, words are deeds; we cannot watch 
 our winged words too closely. Let us at least 
 make our language the instrument of Truth; 
 prune it of lies and extravagance, of perversions 
 and all the calculated battery of partizanship; 
 train ourselves to such sobriety of speech, and 
 penmanship, that we come to be trusted at 
 home and abroad; so making our language the 
 medium of honesty and fair-play, that mean- 
 ness, violence, sentimentality, and seK-seeking 
 
 7 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 become strangers in our Lands. Great and 
 evil is the power of the he, of the violent say- 
 ing, and the calculated appeal to base or danger- 
 ous motive; let us, then, make them fugitives 
 among us, outcast from our speech ' 
 
 I have often thought during these past years 
 what an ironical eye Providence must have 
 been turning on National Propaganda — on all 
 the disingenuous breath which has been issued 
 to order, and all those miles of patriotic writ- 
 ings dutifully produced in each country, to 
 prove to other countries that they are its in- 
 feriors! A very little wind will blow those 
 ephemeral sheets into the limbo of thin air. 
 Already they are decomposing, soon they will 
 be dust. To my thinking there are bat two 
 forms of National Propaganda, two sorts of 
 evidence of a country's worth, which defy the 
 cross-examination of Time : The first and most 
 important is the rectitude and magnanimity 
 of a Country's conduct; its determination not 
 to take advantage of the weakness of other 
 countries, nor to tolerate tyranny within its own 
 borders. And the other lasting form of Propa- 
 ganda is the work of the thinker and the artist, 
 
 8 
 
AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY 
 
 of men whose unbidden, unfettered hearts are 
 set on the expression of Truth and Beauty as 
 best they can perceive them. Such Propa- 
 ganda the old Greeks left behind them, to the 
 imperishable glory of their Land. By such 
 Propaganda Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch; Dante, 
 St. Francis; Cervantes, Spinoza; Montaigne, 
 Racine; Chaucer, Shakespeare; Goethe, Kant; 
 Turgenev, Tolstoi; Emerson, Lowell — a thou- 
 sand and one more, have exalted their coun- 
 tries in the sight of all, and advanced the 
 stature of mankind. 
 
 You may have noticed in life that when we 
 assure others of our virtue and the extreme 
 rectitude of our conduct, we make on them 
 but a sorry impression. If on the other hand 
 we chance to perform some just act or kind- 
 ness, of which they hear, or to produce a beau- 
 tiful work which they can see, we become 
 exalted in their estimation though we did not 
 seek to be. And so it is with Countries. 
 They may proclaim their powers from the 
 housetops — they will but convince the wind; 
 but let their acts be just, their temper humane, 
 the speech and writings of their peoples sober, 
 
 9 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 the work of their thinkers and their artists 
 true and beautiful — and those Countries shall 
 be sought after and esteemed. 
 
 We, who possess in common the English 
 language — "best result of the confusion of 
 tongues" Lowell called it — ^that most superb 
 instrument for the making of word-music, for 
 the telling of the truth, and the expression of 
 the imagination, may well remember this: 
 That, in the use we make of it, in the breadth, 
 justice, and humanity of our thoughts, the 
 vigour, restraint, clarity, and beauty of the 
 setting we give to them, we have our greatest 
 chance to make our Countries lovely and be- 
 loved, to further the happiness of mankind, 
 and to keep inmiortal the priceless comrade- 
 ship between us. 
 
 10 
 
n 
 
 AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 ON the mutual understanding of each other 
 by Americans and Britons, the future 
 happiness of nations depends more than on 
 any other world cause. Ignorance in Central 
 Europe of the nature of American and English- 
 man tipped the balance in favour of war; and 
 the course of the future will surely be improved 
 by right comprehension of their characters. 
 
 Well, I know something at least of the Eng- 
 Hshman, who represents four-fifths of the popu- 
 lation of the British Isles. 
 
 And, first, there exists no more unconsciously 
 deceptive person on the face of the globe. The 
 Enghshman does not know himself; outside 
 England he is only guessed at. 
 
 Racially the Englishman is so complex and 
 so old a blend that no one can say precisely 
 what he is. In character he is just as complex. 
 Physically, there are two main types; one in- 
 clining to length of limb, bony jaws, and nar- 
 11 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 rowness of face and head (you will nowhere see 
 such long and narrow heads as in our island); 
 the other approximating more to the legendary 
 John Bull. The first type is gaining on the 
 second. There is little or no difference in the 
 main mental character behind these two. 
 
 In attempting to understand the real nature 
 of the Enghshman, certain salient facts must 
 be borne in mind. 
 
 The Sea. To be surrounded generation 
 after generation by the sea has developed in 
 him a suppressed ideahsm, a peculiar imperme- 
 ability, a turn for adventure, a faculty for 
 wandering, and for being sufficient unto him- 
 self in far and awkward surroundings. 
 
 The Climate. Whoso weathers for cen- 
 turies a climate that, though healthy and never 
 extreme, is, perhaps, the least rehable and one 
 of the wettest in the world, must needs grow 
 in himself a counterbalance of dry philosophy, 
 a defiant humour, an enforced medium tem- 
 perature of soul. The Englishman is no more 
 given to extremes than his chmate ; and against 
 its damp and perpetual changes he has become 
 coated with a sort of protective bluntness. 
 
 12 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 The Political Age of His Country. This 
 is by far the oldest settled Western power 
 politically speakiDg. For 850 years England 
 has known no serious military incursion from 
 without; for nearly 200 years she has known 
 no serious political turmoU within. This is 
 partly the outcome of her isolation, partly the 
 happy accident of her political constitution, 
 partly the result of the Englishman's habit of 
 looking before he leaps, which comes, no doubt, 
 from the climate and the mixture of his blood. 
 This pohtical stabiHty has been a tremendous 
 factor in the formation of EngHsh character, 
 has given the Englishman of all ranks a cer- 
 tain deep, quiet sense of form and order, an 
 ingrained culture which makes no show, being 
 in the bones of the man as it were. 
 
 The Great Preponderance for Several 
 Generations of Town Over Country Life. 
 Taken in conjunction with generations of politi- 
 cal stabihty, this is the main cause of a growing, 
 inarticulate humaneness, of which however the 
 EngHshman appears to be rather ashamed. 
 
 The other chief factors have been: 
 
 The English Public Schools. 
 13 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 The Essential Democracy of the Gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 The Freedom of Speech and the Press 
 (at present rather under a cloud). 
 
 The Old-Time Freedom from Compulsory 
 Military Service. 
 
 All these, the outcome of the quiet and stable 
 home Hfe of an island people, have helped to 
 make the EngHshman a deceptive personaHty 
 to the outside eye. He has for centuries been 
 licensed to grumble. There is no such con- 
 firmed grumbler — until he really has something 
 to grumble at; and then, no one perhaps who 
 grumbles less. An EngHsh soldier was sitting 
 in a trench, in the act of Hghting his pipe, when 
 a shell burst close by, and lifted him bodily 
 some yards away. He picked himself up, 
 bruised and shaken, and went on Hghting his 
 pipe, with the words: "These French matches 
 aren't 'alf rotten." 
 
 Confirmed carper though the Englishman 
 is at the condition of his country, no one per- 
 haps is so profoundly convinced that it is the 
 best in the world. A stranger might well 
 think from his utterances that he was spoiled 
 
 14 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 by the freedom of his life, unprepared to sacri- 
 fice anything for a land in such a condition. 
 If that country be threatened, and with it his 
 liberty, you find that his grumbles have meant 
 less than nothing. You find, too, that behind 
 the apparent slackness of every arrangement 
 and every individual, are powers of adaptabihty 
 to facts, elasticity, practical genius, a spirit of 
 competition amoimting almost to disease, and 
 great determination. Before this war began, 
 it was the fashion among a number of Enghsh 
 to lament the decadence of their race. Such 
 lamentations, which plentifully deceived the 
 outside ear, were just English grumbles. All 
 this democratic grumbling, and habit of "going 
 as you please," serve a deep purpose. Autoc- 
 racy, censorship, compulsion destroy the salt 
 in a nation's blood, and elasticity in its fibre; 
 they cut at the very mainsprings of a nation's 
 vitality. Only if reasonably free from control 
 can a man really arrive at what is or is not 
 national necessity and truly identify himself 
 with a national ideal, by simple conviction 
 from within. 
 Two words of caution to strangers trying to 
 15 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 form an estimate of the Englishman: He must 
 not be judged from his Press, which, manned 
 (with certain exceptions) by those who are not 
 typically EngHsl\,. is too hectic to illustrate the 
 true EngHsh spirit; nor can he be judged en- 
 tirely from his Hterature. The Englishman is 
 essentially inexpressive, unexpressed; and his 
 literary men have been for the most part sports 
 — Nature's attempt to redress the balance. 
 Further, he must not be judged by the evi- 
 dence of his wealth. England may be the 
 richest country in the world in proportion to 
 its population, but not ten per cent of that 
 population have any wealth to speak of, cer- 
 tainly not enough to have affected their hardi- 
 hood; and, with few exceptions, those who have 
 enough wealth are brought up to worship 
 hardihood. 
 
 I have never held a whole-hearted brief for 
 the British character. There is a lot of good 
 in it, but much which is repellent. It has a 
 kind of deliberate unattractiveness, setting out 
 on its journey with the words: "Take me or 
 leave me." One may respect a person of this 
 sort, but it's difficult either to know or to like 
 
 16 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 him. An American officer said recently to a 
 British Staff Officer in a friendly voice: "So 
 we're going to clean up Brother Boche to- 
 gether!" and the British Staff Officer replied: 
 "Really!" No wonder Americans sometimes 
 say: "I've got no use for those fellows !" 
 
 The world is consecrate to strangeness and 
 discovery, and the attitude of mind concreted 
 in that: "Really !" seems unforgivable till one 
 remembers that it is manner rather than matter 
 which divides the hearts of American and 
 Briton. 
 
 In your huge, still half-developed country, 
 where every kind of national type and habit 
 comes to run a new thread into the rich tapestry 
 of American life and thought, people must find 
 it almost impossible to conceive the life of a 
 little old island where traditions persist gen- 
 eration after generation without anything to 
 break them up; where blood remains undoc- 
 tored by new strains; demeanour becomes 
 crystallised for lack of contrasts; and manner 
 gets set Hke a plaster mask. Nevertheless the 
 EngHsh manner of to-day, of what are called 
 the classes, is the growth of only a century or 
 
 17 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 so. There was probably nothing at all like it 
 in the days of Elizabeth or even of Charles II. 
 The English manner was still racy not to say 
 rude when the inhabitants of Virginia, as we 
 are told, sent over to ask that there might be 
 despatched to them some hierarchical assist- 
 ance for the good of their souls, and were an- 
 swered: "D n your souls, grow tobacco!" 
 
 The Enghsh manner of to-day could not even 
 have come into its own when that epitaph of a 
 Lady, quoted somewhere by Gilbert Murray, 
 was written: "Bland, passionate, and deeply 
 religious, she was second cousin to the Earl of 
 Leitrim; of such are the Kingdom of Heaven." 
 About that gravestone motto you will admit 
 there was a certain lack of self -consciousness; 
 that element which is now the foremost char- 
 acteristic of the EngHsh manner. 
 
 But this English self-consciousness is no 
 mere fluffy gaucherie; it is our special form of 
 what Germans would call "Kultur." Behind 
 every manifestation of thought or emotion, 
 the Briton retains control of self, and is think- 
 ing : "That's all I'll let myself feel; at all events 
 all I'll let myself show." This stoicism is good 
 
 18 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON' 
 
 in its refusal to be foundered; bad in that it 
 fosters a narrow outlook; starves emotion, 
 spontaneity, and frank sympathy; destroys 
 grace and what one may describe roughly as 
 the lovable side of personality. The EngHsh 
 hardly ever say just what comes into their 
 heads. What we call "good form," the un- 
 written law which governs certain classes of the 
 Briton, savours of the dull and glacial; but 
 there lurks within it a core of virtue. It has 
 grown up Hke callous shell round two fine 
 ideals— suppression of the ego lest it trample 
 on the corns of other people; and exaltation of 
 the maxim: 'Deeds before words.' Good 
 form, hke any other rehgion, starts well with 
 some ethical truth, but in due time gets com- 
 monised, twisted, and petrified till at last we 
 can hardly trace its origin, and watch with 
 surprise its denial and contradiction of the 
 root idea. 
 
 Without doubt, before the war, good form 
 had become a kind of disease in England. A 
 French friend told me how he witnessed in a 
 Swiss Hotel the meeting between an Enghsh- 
 woman and her son, whom she had not seen 
 19 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 for two years; she was greatly affected — by the 
 fact that he had not brought a dinner-jacket. 
 The best manners are no "manners," or at all 
 events no mannerisms; but many Britons who 
 have even attained to this perfect purity are 
 yet not free from the paralytic effects of "good 
 form"; are still self-conscious in the depths of 
 their souls, and never do or say a thing without 
 trying not to show how much they are feeling. 
 AH this guarantees perhaps a certain decency 
 in life; but in intimate intercourse with peo- 
 ple of other nations who have not this par- 
 ticular cult of suppression, we English disap- 
 point, and jar, and often irritate. Nations 
 have their differing forms of snobbery. At one 
 time, if we are to believe Thackeray, the Eng- 
 lish all wanted to be second cousins to the 
 Earl of Leitrim, Hke that lady bland and 
 passionate. Now-a-days it is not so simple. 
 The Earl of Leitrim has become etherialised. 
 We no longer care how a fellow is born, so long 
 as he behaves as the Earl of Leitrim would 
 have; never makes himself conspicuous or 
 ridiculous, never shows too much what he's 
 really feehng, never talks of what he's going 
 
 20 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 to do, and always "plays the game." The cult 
 is centred in our Public Schools and Univer- 
 sities. 
 
 At a very typical and honoured old Public 
 School, he to whom you are Hstening passed 
 on the whole a happy time; but what an odd 
 life educationally speaking! We lived rather 
 Hke young Spartans; and were not encouraged 
 to think, imagine, or see anything we learned, 
 in relation to hfe at large. It's very difficult 
 to teach boys, because their chief object is not 
 to be taught anything; but I should say we 
 were crammed, not taught. Living as we did 
 the herd-Hfe of boys with little or no intrusion 
 from our elders, and they men who had been 
 brought up in the same way as ourselves, we 
 were debarred from any real interest in philoso- 
 phy, history, art, Hterature, and music, or any 
 advancing notions in social life or politics. We 
 were reactionaries almost to a boy. I remem- 
 ber one summer term Gladstone came down to 
 speak to us, and we repaired to the Speech 
 Room with white collars and dark hearts, mut- 
 tering what we would do to that Grand Old 
 Man if we could have our way. But, after all, 
 21 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 he contrived to charm us. Boys are not diffi- 
 cult to charm. In that queer Hfe we had aU 
 sorts of unwritten rules of suppression. You 
 must turn up your trousers; must not go out 
 with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be 
 worn tilted forward; you must not walk more 
 than two abreast till you reached a certain 
 form; nor be enthusiastic about anything, ex- 
 cept such a supreme matter as a drive over 
 the paviHon at cricket, or a run the whole 
 length of the ground at football. You must 
 not talk about yourself or your home people; 
 and for any punishment you must assume com- 
 plete indifference. 
 
 I dwell on these triviaHties, because every 
 year thousands of British boys enter these 
 mills which grind exceeding small; and be- 
 cause these boys constitute in after life the 
 great majority of the official, military, academic, 
 professional, and a considerable proportion of 
 the business classes of Great Britain. They 
 become the Englishmen who say: "Really!" 
 and they are for the most part the Englishmen 
 who travel and reach America. The great 
 defence I have always heard put up for our 
 
 22 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 Public Schools is that they form character. 
 As oatmeal is supposed to form bone in the 
 bodies of Scotsmen, so our PubUc Schools are 
 supposed to form good sound moral fibre in 
 British boys. And there is much in this plea. 
 The life does make boys enduring, self-reliant, 
 good-tempered, and honourable, but it most 
 carefully endeavours to destroy all original sin 
 of individuality, spontaneity, and engaging 
 freakishness. It implants, moreover, in the 
 great majority of those who have Hved it the 
 mental attitude of that swell, who when asked 
 where he went for his hats, repHed: "Blank's; 
 is there another fellow's?" 
 
 To know all is to excuse all — to know all 
 about the bringing-up of English PubHc School 
 boys makes one excuse much. The atmos- 
 phere and tradition of those places is extraor- 
 dinarily strong, and persists through aU modem 
 changes. Thirty-eight years have gone since I 
 was a new boy, but cross-examining a young 
 nephew who left not long ago, I found almost 
 precisely the same features and conditions. 
 The War, which has changed so much of our 
 social life, will have some, but no very great, 
 23 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 effect on this particular institution. The boys 
 still go there from the same kind of homes and 
 preparatory schools and come under the same 
 kind of masters. And the traditional unemo- 
 tionalism, the cult of a dry and narrow stoicism, 
 is rather fortified than diminished by the times 
 we live in. 
 
 Our Universities on, the other hand, have 
 lately been but the ghosts of their old selves. 
 At my old CoUege in Oxford last year they had 
 only two English students. In the Chapel 
 under the Joshua Reynolds window, through 
 which the sim was shining, hung a long "roll 
 of honour," a hundred names and more. In 
 the College garden an open-air hospital was 
 ranged under the old City waU, where we used 
 to climb and go wandering in the early summer 
 mornings after some aU-night spree. Down 
 on the river the empty College barges lay 
 stripped and stark. From the top of one of 
 them an aged custodian broke into words: 
 "Ah! Oxford'U never be the same again in 
 my time. Why, who's to teach 'em rowin'? 
 When we do get undergrads again, who's to 
 teach ^em? All the old ones gone, killed, 
 
 24 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 wounded and that. No! Rowin'll never be 
 the same again — ^not in my time." That was 
 the tragedy of the War for him. Our Univer- 
 sities will recover faster than he thinks, and 
 resume the care of our particular 'Kultur/ and 
 cap the products of our public schools with the 
 Oxford accent and the Oxford manner. 
 
 An acute critic tells me that Americans hear- 
 ing such deprecatory words as these from an 
 Englishman about his country's institutions 
 would say that this is precisely an instance of 
 what an American means by the Oxford manner. 
 Americans whose attitude towards their own 
 country seems to be that of a lover to his lady 
 or a child to its mother, cannot — ^he says — 
 understand how Englishmen can be critical of 
 their own country, and yet love her. Well, 
 the Englishman's attitude to his country is 
 that of a man to himself; and the way he runs 
 her down is rather a part of that special Eng- 
 hsh bone-deep self-consciousness of which I 
 have been speaking. Englishmen (the speaker 
 amongst them) love their Country as much as 
 the French love France, and the Americans 
 America; but she is so much a part of us that 
 25 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 to speak well of her is like speaking well of 
 ourselves, which we have been brought up to 
 regard as impossible. When Americans hear 
 EngHshmen speaking critically of their own 
 country I think they should note it for a sign 
 of complete identification with their country 
 rather than of detachment from it. But to 
 return to Enghsh Universities: They have, on 
 the whole, a broadening influence on the ma- 
 terial which comes to them so set and narrow. 
 They do a little to discover for their children 
 that there are many points of view, and much 
 which needs an open mind in this world. They 
 have not precisely a democratic influence, but 
 taken by themselves they would not be inimical 
 to democracy. And when the War is over they 
 will surely be still broader in philosophy and 
 teaching. Heaven forefend that we should see 
 vanish all that is old, all that has as it were the 
 virginia-creeper, the wistaria bloom of age 
 upon it; there is a beauty in age and a health 
 in tradition, ill dispensed with. But what is 
 hateful in age is its lack of understanding and 
 of sympathy; in a word — ^its intolerance. Let 
 us hope this wind of change may sweep out and 
 
 26 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 sweeten the old places of my country, sweep 
 away the cobwebs and the dust, our narrow 
 ways of thought, our mannikinisms. But those 
 who hate intolerance dare not be intolerant 
 with the foibles of age; they should rather see 
 them as comic, and gently laugh them out. 
 
 The educated Briton may be self-sufficient, 
 but he has grit ; and at bottom grit is, I fancy, 
 what Americans at any rate appreciate more 
 than anything. If the motto of my old Oxford 
 College: "Manners makyth man," were true, 
 I should often be sorry for the Briton. But 
 his manners don't make him, they mar him. 
 His goods are all absent from the shop window; 
 he is not a man of the world in the wider mean- 
 ing of that expression. And there is, of course, 
 a particularly noxious type of travelling Briton, 
 who does his best, unconsciously, to take the 
 bloom off his country wherever he goes. Sel- 
 fish, coarse-fibred, loud-voiced — ^the sort which 
 thanks God he is a Briton — I suppose because 
 nobody else will do it for him ! 
 
 We live in times when patriotism is exalted 
 above all other virtues, because there have 
 happened to lie before the patriotic tremendous 
 27 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 chances for the display of courage and self- 
 sacrifice. Patriotism ever has that advantage 
 as the world is now constituted; but patri- 
 otism and provincialism of course are pretty- 
 close relations, and they who can only see 
 beauty in the plumage of their own kind, who 
 prefer the bad points of their countrymen to 
 the good points of foreigners, merely write 
 themselves down blind of an eye, and pan- 
 derers to herd feeling. America is advantaged 
 in this matter. She hves so far away from 
 other nations that she might well be excused 
 for thinking herself the only country in the 
 world; but in the many strains of blood which 
 go to make up America, there is as yet a natural 
 corrective to the narrower kind of patriotism. 
 America has vast spaces and many varieties 
 of t3rpe and climate, and life to her is still a 
 great adventure. 
 
 I pretend to no proper knowledge of the 
 American people. It takes more than two 
 visits of two months each to know the Ameri- 
 can people; there is just one thing, however, I 
 can tell you: You seem easy, but are difficult 
 to know. Americans have their own form of 
 
 28 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 self-absorption; but they appear to be free as 
 yet from the special competitive self-centre- 
 ment which has been forced on Britons through 
 long centuries by countless continental rival- 
 ries and wars. Insularity was driven into the 
 very bones of our people by the generation- 
 long wars of Napoleon. A Frenchman, Andre 
 ChevriUon, whose book: "England and the 
 War" I commend to anyone who wishes to 
 understand British peculiarities, justly, subtly 
 studied by a Frenchman, used these words in 
 a recent letter to me: "You English are so 
 strange to us French; you are so utterly differ- 
 ent from any other people in the world." It is 
 true; we are a lonely race. Deep in our hearts, 
 I think, we feel that only the American people 
 could ever really understand us. And being 
 extraordinarily self-conscious, perverse, and 
 proud, we do our best to hide from Americans 
 that we have any such feeHng. It would dis- 
 tress the average Briton to confess that he 
 wanted to be imderstood, had anything so 
 natural as a craving for fellowship or for being 
 liked. We are a weird people, though we look 
 so commonplace. In looking at photographs 
 29 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 of British tj^es among photographs of other 
 European nationahties, one is struck at once 
 by something which is in no other of those 
 races — exactly as if we had an extra skin; as 
 if the British animal had been tamed longer 
 than the rest. And so he has. HispoHtical, 
 social, legal life was fixed long before that of 
 any other Western country. He was old be- 
 fore the Mayflower touched American shores 
 and brought there avatars, grave and civihsed 
 as ever foimded nation. There is something 
 touching and terrifying about our character, 
 about the depth at which it keeps its real 
 yearnings, about the perversity with which it 
 disguises them, and its inabihty to show its 
 feelings. We are, deep down, under all our 
 lazy mentaUty, the most combative and com- 
 petitive race in the world, with the exception 
 perhaps of the American. This is at once a 
 spiritual link with America, and yet one of the 
 great barriers to friendship between the two 
 peoples. Whether we are better than French- 
 men, Germans, Russians, Itahans, Chinese, or 
 any other race, is of course more than a ques- 
 tion; but those peoples are all so different 
 
 30 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 from us that we are bound, I suppose, secretly 
 to consider ourselves superior. But between 
 Americans and ourselves under all differences 
 there is some mysterious deep kinship which 
 causes us to doubt, and makes us irritable, as 
 if we were continually being tickled by that 
 question: Now am I really a better man than 
 he? Exactly what proportion of American 
 blood at this time of day is British, I know not; 
 but enough to make us definitely cousins — 
 always an awkward relationship. We see in 
 Americans a sort of image of ourselves; feel 
 near enough, yet far enough, to criticise and 
 carp at the points of difference. It is as though 
 a man went out and encountered, in the street, 
 what he thought for the moment was himself; 
 and, decidedly disturbed in his self-love, in- 
 stantly began to disparage the appearance of 
 that fellow. Probably community of language 
 rather than of blood accounts for our sense of 
 kinship, for a comanon means of expression 
 cannot but mould thought and feeling into some 
 kind of imity. Certainly one can hardly over- 
 rate the intimacy which a common hterature 
 brings. The lives of great Americans, Wash- 
 
 31 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 ington and Franklin, Lincoln and Lee and 
 Grant are unsealed for us, just as to Americans 
 are the lives of Marlborough and Nelson, Pitt 
 and Gladstone, and Gordon. Longfellow and 
 Whittier and Whitman can be read by the 
 British child as simply as Bums and Shelley 
 and Keats. Emerson and WiUiam James are 
 no more difficult to us than Darwin and Spencer 
 to Americans. Without an effort we rejoice 
 in Hawthorne and Mark Twain, Henry James 
 and Howells, as Americans can in Dickens and 
 Thackeray, Meredith and Thomas Hardy. 
 And, more than all, Americans own with our- 
 selves all literature in the English tongue before 
 the Mayflower sailed; Chaucer and Spenser 
 and Shakespeare, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and the 
 authors of the English Bible Version are their 
 spiritual ancestors as much as ever they are 
 ours. The tie of language is all-powerful — 
 for language is the food formative of minds. 
 Why ! a volume could be written on the forma- 
 tion of character by literary humour alone. 
 It has, I am sure, had a say in planting in 
 American and Briton, especially the British 
 townsman, a kind of bone-deep defiance of 
 
 32 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 Fate, a readiness for anything which may turn 
 up, a dry, wry smile under the blackest sky, 
 an individual way of looking at things, which 
 nothing can shake. Americans and Britons 
 both, we must and will think for ourselves, and 
 know why we do a thing before we do it. We 
 have that ingrained respect for the individual 
 conscience, which is at the bottom of all free 
 institutions. Some years before the War, an 
 intelHgent and cultivated Austrian who had 
 Hved long in England, was asked for his opin- 
 ion of the British. "In many ways," he said, 
 "I think you are inferior to us; but one great 
 thing I have noticed about you which we have 
 not. You think and act and speak for your- 
 selves." If he had passed those years in 
 America instead of in England he must needs 
 have pronoimced the very same judgment of 
 Americans. Free speech, of course, Hke every 
 form of freedom, goes in danger of its life in 
 war time. In 1917 an Englishman in Russia 
 came on a street meeting shortly after the first 
 revolution had begun. An Extremist was ad- 
 dressing the gathering and telling them that 
 they were fools to go on fighting, that they 
 33 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 ought to refuse and go home, and so forth. 
 The crowd grew angry, and some soldiers were 
 for making a rush at him; but the Chairman, a 
 big burly peasant, stopped them with these 
 words: "Brothers, you know that our country 
 is now a country of free speech. We must 
 listen to this man, we must let him say any- 
 thing he will. But, brothers, when he's fin- 
 ished, we'll bash his head in !" 
 
 I cannot assert that either Britons or Ameri- 
 cans are incapable in times like these of a sim- 
 ilar interpretation of "free speech." Things 
 have been done in my country, and perhaps in 
 America, which should make us blush. But 
 so strong is the free instinct in both countries, 
 that it win survive even this War. Democracy, 
 in fact, is a sham unless it means the preserva- 
 tion and development of this instinct of think- 
 ing for oneself throughout a people. " Govern- 
 ment of the people by the people for the people " 
 means nothing unless the individuals of a 
 people keep their consciences unfettered, and 
 think freely. Accustom the individual to be 
 nose-led and spoon-fed, and democracy is a 
 mere pretence. The measure of democracy i? 
 
 34 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 the measure of the freedom and sense of indi- 
 vidual responsibihty in its humblest citizens. 
 And democracy is still in the evolutionary stage. 
 An English scientist, Dr. Spurrell, in a recent 
 book, "Man and his Forerunners," thus diag- 
 noses the growth of civilisations: A civiHsation 
 begins with the enslavement by some hardy 
 race of a tame race Hving a tame life in more 
 congenial natural surroundings. It is built 
 up on slavery, and attains its maximum vitality 
 in conditions Httle removed therefrom. Then, 
 as individual freedom gradually grows, disor- 
 ganisation sets in and the civilisation slowly 
 dissolves away in anarchy. Dr. Spurrell does 
 not dogmatise about our present civiHsation, 
 but suggests that it will probably follow the 
 civilisations of the past into dissolution. I am 
 not convinced of that, because of certain fac- 
 tors new to the history of man. Recent dis- 
 coveries have so unified the world, that such 
 old isolated successful swoops of race on race 
 are not now possible. In our great Industrial 
 States, it is true, a new form of slavery has 
 arisen (the enslavement of men by their ma- 
 chines), but it is hardly of the nature on which 
 35 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 the civilisations of the past were reared. More- 
 over, all past civilisations have been more or 
 less Southern, and subject to the sapping in- 
 fluence of the sun. Modern civilisation is 
 essentially Northern. The individuaHsm, how- 
 ever, which according to Dr. Spurrell, dissolved 
 the Empires of the past, exists already, in a 
 marked degree, in every modern State; and the 
 problem before us is to discover how democracy 
 and Hberty of the subject can be made into 
 enduring props rather than dissolvents. It is, 
 in fact, the problem of making democracy gen- 
 uine. If that cannot be achieved and per- 
 petuated, then I agree there is nothing to pre- 
 vent democracy drifting into an anarchism 
 which will dissolve modern States, till they are 
 the prey of pouncing Dictators, or of other 
 States not so far gone in dissolution — ^the same 
 process in kind though different in degree from 
 the old descents of savage races on their tamer 
 neighbours. 
 
 Ever since the substantial introduction of 
 democracy, nearly a century and a half ago 
 with the American War of Independence, I 
 would point out that Western Civilisation has 
 
 36 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 been living on two planes or levels — ^the auto- 
 cratic plane with which is bound up the idea 
 of nationahsm, and the democratic, to which 
 has become conjoined in some sort the idea of 
 internationalism. Not only Httle wars, but 
 great wars such as this, come because of in- 
 equality in growth, dissimilarity of political in- 
 stitutions between States; because this State 
 or that is basing its life on different principles 
 from its neighbours. 
 
 We fall into glib usage of words like democ- 
 racy, and make fetiches of them without due 
 understanding. Democracy is certainly in- 
 ferior to autocracy from the aggressively na- 
 tional point of view; it is not necessarily su- 
 perior to autocracy as a guarantee of general 
 well-being; it might even tm^n out to be in- 
 ferior unless we can improve it. But democ- 
 racy is the rising tide; it may be dammed or 
 delayed but cannot be stopped. It seems to 
 be a law in human nature that where, in any 
 corporate society, the idea of self-government 
 sets foot it refuses ever to take that foot up 
 again. State after State, copying the Ameri- 
 can example, has adopted the democratic 
 37 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 principle; and the world's face is that way set. 
 Autocracy has, practically speaking, vanished 
 from the western world. It is my belief that 
 only in a world thus uniform in its principles 
 of government, and freed from the danger of 
 pounce by autocracies, have States any chance 
 to develop the individual conscience to a point 
 which shall make democracy proof against 
 anarchy, and themselves proof against dissolu- 
 tion; and only in such a world can a League of 
 Nations to enforce peace succeed. 
 
 But though we have now secured a single 
 plane for Western civilisation and ultimately, 
 I hope, for the world, there will be but slow 
 and difficult progress in the lot of mankind. 
 And for this progress the soHdarity of the 
 English-speaking races is vital; for without 
 that there is but sand on which to build. 
 
 The ancestors of the American people sought 
 a new country, because they had in them a 
 reverence for the individual conscience; they 
 came from Britain, the first large State in the 
 Christian era to build up the idea of political 
 freedom. The instincts and ideals of our two 
 races have ever been the same. That great 
 
 38 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 and lovable people the French, with their clear 
 thought and expression, and their quick blood, 
 have expressed those ideals more vividly than 
 either of us. But the phlegmatic tenacity of 
 the EngHsh and the dry tenacity of the American 
 temperament have ever made our countries 
 the most settled and safe homes of the indi- 
 vidual conscience. And we must look to our 
 two countries to guarantee its strength and 
 activity. If we English-speaking races quarrel 
 and become disunited, civilisation will spHt up 
 again and go its way to ruin. The individual 
 conscience is the heart of democracy. Democ- 
 racy is the new order; of the new order the 
 EngHsh-speaking nations are the ballast. 
 
 I don't beHeve in formal alliances, or in 
 grouping nations to exclude and keep down 
 other nations. Friendships between countries 
 should have the only true reaHty of common 
 sentiment, and he animated hy desire for the geri- 
 eral welfare of mankind. We need no formal 
 bonds, but we have a sacred charge in common, 
 to let no petty matters, differences of manner, 
 divergencies of material interest, destroy our 
 spiritual agreement. Our pasts, our geo- 
 
 39 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 graphical positions, our temperaments make us 
 beyond all other races, the hope and trustees 
 of mankind's advance along the only line now 
 open — democratic internationalism. It is child- 
 ish to claim for Americans or Britons virtues 
 beyond those of other nations, or to believe in 
 the superiority of one national culture to an- 
 other; they are different, that is aU. It is by 
 accident that we find ourselves in this position 
 of guardianship to the main Hue of human de- 
 velopment; no need to pat ourselves on the 
 back about it. But we are at a great and criti- 
 cal moment in the world's history — ^how critical, 
 none of us aHve will ever realise to the full. 
 The civiHsation slowly built since the fall of 
 Rome has either to break up and dissolve into 
 jagged and isolated fragments through a cen- 
 tury of revolutions and wars; or, unified and 
 reanimated by a single idea, to move forward 
 on one plane and attain greater height and 
 breadth. 
 
 Under the pressiu-e of this War there has 
 often been, beneath the lip-service we pay to 
 democracy, a disposition to lose faith in it, 
 because of its undoubted weakness and incon- 
 
 40 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 venience in a struggle with States autocrati- 
 cally governed; there has even been a sort of 
 secret reaction towards autocracy. On those 
 lines there is no way out of a future of bitter 
 rivalries, chicanery, and wars, and the probable 
 total failure of our civilisation. The only cure 
 which I can see, Hes in democratising the whole 
 world, and removing the present weaknesses 
 and shams of democracy by education of the 
 individual conscience in eveiy country. Good- 
 bye to that chance, if Americans and Britons 
 fall foul of each other, refuse to make common 
 cause of their thoughts and hopes, and to keep 
 the general welfare of mankind in view. They 
 have got to stand together, not in aggressive 
 and jealous policies, but in defence and cham- 
 pionship of the self -helpful, self-governing, 'hve 
 and let live' philosophy of life. 
 
 Who would not desire, rushing through the 
 thick dark of the future, to stand on the cliffs 
 of vision — ^two hundred years, say — hence — 
 and view this world? 
 
 Will there then be this League for War, this 
 caldron where, beneath the thin crust, a boil- 
 ing lava bubbles, and at any minute may break 
 41 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 through and leap up, as of late, jet high ? Will 
 there still be reek and desolation, and man at 
 the mercy of the machines he has made; still 
 be narrow national poHcies and rancours, and 
 such mutual fear, that no coimtry dare be 
 generous? Or will there be over the whole 
 world something of the glamour that each one 
 of us now sees hovering over his own country; 
 and men and women — all — ^feel they are natives 
 of one land? Who dare say? 
 
 The guns have ceased fire and all is still; 
 from the woods and fields and seas, from the 
 skeleton towns of ravaged countries the wist- 
 ful dead rise, and with their eyes question us. 
 In this hour we have for answer only this: We 
 fought for a better Future for Mankind I 
 
 Did we? Do we? That is the great ques- 
 tion. Is our gaze really fixed on the far hori- 
 zon? Or do we only dream it; and have the 
 slain no comfort in their untimely darkness; 
 the maimed, the ruined, the bereaved, no shred 
 of consolation? Is it all to be for nothing but 
 the salving of national prides? And shall the 
 Ironic Spirit fill the whole world with his 
 laughter? 
 
 42 
 
AMERICAN AND BRITON 
 
 The House of the Future is always dark. 
 There are few cornerstones to be discerned in 
 the Temple of our Fate. But, of these few, 
 one is the brotherhood and bond of the Enghsh- 
 speaking races; not for narrow purposes, but 
 that mankind may yet see Faith and Good 
 Will enshrined, yet breathe a sweeter air, and 
 know a life where Beauty passes, with the sun 
 on her wings. 
 
 We want in the lives of men a "Song of 
 Honour," as in Ralph Hodgson's poem: 
 
 "The song of men aU sorts and kinds 
 As many tempers, moods and minds 
 As leaves are on a tree. 
 As many faiths and castes and creeds 
 As many human bloods and breeds 
 As in the world may be." 
 
 In the making of that song the Englisti- 
 speaking races will assuredly unite. What set 
 this world in motion we know not; the Prin- 
 ciple of Life is inscrutable and will for ever be; 
 but we do know, that Earth is yet on the up- 
 grade of existence, the mountain top of man's 
 life not reached, that many centuries of growth 
 43 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA / 
 
 are yet in front of us before Time begins to 
 chill this planet, till it swims, at last, another 
 moon, in space. In the climb to that moun- 
 tain top, of a happy life for mankind, our two 
 great nations are as guides who go before, 
 roped together in perilous ascent. On their 
 nerve, loyalty, and w sdom, the adventure now 
 hangs. What American or British knife would 
 sever the rope? 
 
 He who ever gives a thought to the life of 
 man at large, to his miseries, and disappoint- 
 ments, to the waste and cruelty of existence, 
 will remember that if American or Briton fail 
 in this climb, there can but be for us both, and 
 for all other peoples, a hideous slip, a swift 
 and fearful fall into an abyss, whence all shall 
 be to begin over again. 
 
 We shall not fail — neither ourselves, nor each 
 other. Our comradeship will endure. 
 
 44 
 
Ill 
 
 FROM A SPEECH AT THE LOTUS 
 CLUB, NEW YORK 
 
 I WONDER whether you in America can 
 realise what an entrancing voyage of dis- 
 covery you represent to us primeval Anglo- 
 Britons. I prefer that term to Anglo-Saxon, 
 for even if we Enghsh glory in the thought that 
 our seaborne ancestors were extremely blood- 
 thirsty, we have no evidence that they brought 
 their own women to Britain in any quantities, 
 or had the power of reproducing themselves 
 without aid from the other sex ! 
 
 Can you, I say, reahse how much more en- 
 ticing to my Enghsh mind America is, than the 
 Arabian Nights were to your fascinating fab- 
 ulist, 0. Henry? One longs to unriddle to 
 oneself the significance and sense of America. 
 In the EngHsh-speaking world to-day we need 
 understanding of each others' natures, aims, 
 sympathies, and dislikes. For without under- 
 45 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 standing we become doctrinaire and partizan, 
 building our ship in compartments very water- 
 tight; and getting into them and shutting the 
 doors when the ship threatens to go down. 
 
 We English have a reputation for self- 
 sufficiency. But speaking for myself, who 
 find no name that is not Enghsh in my gene- 
 alogy, I never can get up quite the interest in 
 my own race that I can in others. We Eng- 
 lish are so set and made, you Americans are 
 yet in the making. We at most experience 
 modification of type; you are in process of 
 creating one. I have often asked Americans: 
 What is now the American type? and have 
 been answered by — a smile. When I go back 
 home my countrymen will ask me the same 
 question. I would I could sit down and listen 
 to you telling me what it is. 
 
 It will not have escaped you, at all events, 
 that for four years the various branches of the 
 EngHsh-speaking peoples have been credited 
 with all the virtues — a love of Hberty, human- 
 ity, and justice has, as it were, been patented 
 for them on both sides of the Atlantic, and 
 under the Southern Cross, till one has come to 
 
 46 
 
AT THE LOTUS CLUB 
 
 listen with a sort of fascinated terror for those 
 three words to tinkle from the tongue. I am 
 prepared to sacrifice a measure of the truth 
 sooner than pronounce them to-night. Let 
 me rather speak of those lower qualities which 
 I think we English-speaking peoples possess 
 in a conspicuous degree: Commonsense and 
 Energy. From those vulgar attributes, I am 
 sure, the historian of the far futm-e will say- 
 that the Enghsh-speaking era has germinated; 
 and that by those vulgar attributes it will 
 flourish. Deep in the American spirit and in 
 the Enghsh spirit is a curious intense reahsm — 
 sometimes very highly camouflaged by hot air 
 — an instinct for putting the finger on the but- 
 ton of life, and pressing it there till the bell 
 rings. We are so extraordinarily successful 
 that we may expect the historian of the far 
 future to write: 'The Enghsh-speaking races 
 were so rapid in their subjugation of the forces 
 of Nature, so prodigal of inventions, so eager 
 in their use of them, so extremely practical, 
 and altogether so successful, that the only 
 thing they missed was — ^happiness.' 
 When I read of some great new American 
 47 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 invention, or of a Lord Leverhulme converting 
 an island of Lewis into a commercial Paradise, 
 I confess to trembling. Gentlemen, it is a 
 melancholy fact that the complete man does 
 not Hve by invention and trade alone. At the 
 risk of being laughed out of Paradise, I dare 
 put in a plea for Beauty. Both our peoples, 
 indeed, are so severely practical that I do feel 
 we run the risk of getting machine-made, and 
 coming actually to look down on those who give 
 themselves to anything so unpractical as the 
 love of Beauty. Now, I venture to think that 
 the spirit of the old builders of Seville cathedral: 
 'Let us make us a church such as the world 
 has never seen before ! ' ought to inspire us in 
 these days too. 'But it does, my dear Sir.' I 
 shall be answered: 'We make flying machines, 
 and iron foimdries. Palace hotels, stock-yards, 
 self-playing pianos, fihn pictures, cocktails, and 
 ladies' hats, such as the world has never seen 
 before. A fig for the Giralda, the Sphynx, 
 Shakespeare, and Michael Angelo! They did 
 not elevate the lot of man. We are for inven- 
 tion, industry, and trade.' Far be it from me 
 to run down any of those things, so excellent in 
 
 48 
 
AT THE LOTUS CLUB 
 
 moderation; but since I solemnly aver that 
 man's greatest quality is the sense of proportion, 
 I feel that if he neglects Beauty (which is but 
 proportion elegantly cooked) — the 'result of 
 perfect economy' Emerson had it — ^he sags 
 backwards, no matter how inventive and com- 
 mercially successful he may be. 
 
 But this is to become grave, which is de- 
 testable, even in a country which has just 
 been taking its ticket for the Garden of Eden. 
 
 I beheve I shall yet see (unless I perish of 
 public speaking) America taking the long cut 
 to Beauty — ^for there are no short cuts to Her, 
 no cheap nostrums by which she can be con- 
 jured from the blue. Beauty and Simplicity 
 are the natural antidotes to the feverish in- 
 dustriaHsm of our age. If only America will 
 begin to take them freely she has it in her 
 power to re-inspire in us older peoples, just now 
 rather breathless and exhausted, the belief in 
 Beauty, and a new fervour for the creation of 
 fine and rare things. If on the other hand 
 America turns Beauty down as a dangerous 
 'bit of fluff' and SimpHcity as an impecunious 
 aHen, we over there, one behind the other, will 
 
 49 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 smk into a soup of utilitarianism so thick that 
 we may never get out. 
 
 Gentlemen, I long to see established between 
 the English-speaking peoples a fellowship, not 
 only in matters political and commercial, im- 
 portant as these are, but in philosophy and art. 
 For after all those laughing-stocks, philosophy 
 and art — the beautiful expression of our highest 
 thoughts and fancies — are the lanterns of a 
 nation's life, and we ought to hang them in 
 each others' houses. 
 
 50 
 
IV 
 
 FROM A SPEECH TO THE SOCIETY 
 
 OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 I DO not know what your chief thought is 
 now; for me the overmastering thought 
 is that of Creation — Re-creation. You know 
 when we look at a bit of moorland where the 
 gorse and heather have been burned — swaled 
 we call it in Devon — ^how we delight in the 
 green, pushing up among the black shrivelled 
 roots. I long to see the green pushing up, the 
 creative impulse at work in its thousand ways 
 all over the world again; each of us on both 
 continents in his own line doing creative work; 
 and not so much that wealth and comfort, as 
 that health and beauty may be born again. 
 
 But, confronting as I do to-night, the Arts 
 
 and Sciences, let me divide my words. You 
 
 sciences have no need to Hsten. You have 
 
 never had such a heyday as this; in engineer- 
 
 51 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 ing, in chemistry, in surgery, in every branch 
 except perhaps 'star-gazing/ you have been 
 shooting ahead, earning fresh laurels, putting 
 new discoveries at the service of bewildered 
 Man. Science drags no lame foot, it dances 
 along like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I had 
 better not pursue the simile. But the Arts, 
 with faces muffled to the eyes, stand against the 
 walls of life, and gaze a little enviously, a httle 
 mournfully at the passing rout. This is not 
 their time for carnival; their lovers sleep, heavy 
 with war and toil. It is to those poor wall- 
 flowers the Arts, that I would speak : Drop your 
 veils, have the courage of your charms; you 
 shall break many a heart yet, make many a 
 lover happy. 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, you have all noticed 
 as I have the difference between a town by 
 daylight and a town by night; well, the day- 
 light town belongs to the Sciences, the night- 
 lit town to the Arts. I don't mean that artists 
 are night-birds, though I have heard of such a 
 case; I mean that the Arts Kve on Mystery and 
 Imagination. Have you ever thought how we 
 should get through if we had to live in a town 
 
 52 
 
SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 
 
 which never put on the fihny dark robe of night, 
 so that hour-in, hour-out we had to stare at 
 things garbed in the efficient overalls of Science, 
 with their prices properly pinned on? How 
 long would it be before we found ourselves in 
 Coney Hatch? Well, we are in a fair way to 
 abolish Night — Mystery and Imagination are 
 'off,' as they say, and that way sooner or later 
 madness lies. 
 
 It is time the Arts left off leaning against the 
 wall, and took their share of the dance again. 
 We want them to be as creative, nay, as seduc- 
 tive as the Sciences. We have seen Science 
 work miracles of late; now let Art work her 
 miracles in turn. 
 
 People are inclined to smile at me when I 
 suggest that you in America are at the com- 
 mencement of a period of fine and vigorous 
 Art. The signs, they say, are all the other 
 way. Of course you ought to know best; all 
 the same, I stick to my opinion with British 
 obstinacy, and I behave I shall see it justified. 
 
 53 
 
V 
 ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 A DOUBTER of the general divinity of our 
 civilisation is labelled 'pedant/ Anyone 
 who questions modern progress is tabooed. 
 And yet there is no doubt, I think, that we are 
 getting feverish, rushed, complicated, and have 
 multiplied conveniences to such an extent that 
 we do Httle with them but scrape the surface of 
 hfe. 
 
 We were rattHng into a species of barbarism 
 when the war came, and unless we check our- 
 selves shall continue to rattle now that it is 
 over. The underlying cause in every country 
 is the increase of herd-life, based on machines, 
 money-getting, and the dread of being dull. 
 Everyone knows how fearfully strong that dread 
 is. But to be capable of being dull is in itself 
 a disease. 
 
 And most of modern life seems to be a proc- 
 ess of creating disease, then finding a remedy, 
 
 54 
 
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 which in its turn creates another disease, de- 
 manding fresh remedy, and so on. We pride 
 ourselves, for example, on scientific sanitation; 
 but what is scientific sanitation if not one huge 
 palKative of evils which have arisen from herd- 
 life enabling herd-life to be intensified, so that 
 we shall presently need even more scientific 
 sanitation? The true elixirs vitse — ^for there 
 be two, I think — are open-air life, and a proud 
 pleasure in one's work, but we have evolved a 
 mode of existence in which it is comparatively 
 rare to find these two conjoined. In old coun- 
 tries such as mine, the evils of herd-life are at 
 present vastly more acute than in a new coun- 
 try such as yours. On the other hand, the 
 further one is from hades, the faster one drives 
 towards it, and machines are beginning to run 
 along with America even more violently than 
 with Europe. 
 
 When our Tanks first appeared, they were 
 described as snouting monsters creeping at their 
 own sweet will. I confess that this is how my 
 inflamed eye sees all our modem machines — 
 monsters running on their own, dragging us 
 along, and very often squashing us. 
 55 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 We are, I believe, awakening to the dangers 
 of this ' Gadarening,' of rushing down the high 
 cliff into the sea, possessed and pursued by the 
 devils of — ^machinery. But if any would see 
 how little alarmed he really is — let him ask 
 himself how much of his present mode of exist- 
 ence he is prepared to alter. Altering the 
 modes of other people is delightful; one would 
 have great hope of the future if we had nothing 
 before us but that. The mediaeval Irishman, 
 indicted for burning down the cathedral at 
 Armagh, together with the Archbishop, de- 
 fended himself thus: "As for the cathedral, 
 *tis true I burned it; but indeed an' I wouldn't 
 have, only they told me himself was inside." 
 We are all ready to alter our opponents, if not 
 to bum them. But even if we were as ardent 
 reformers as that Irishman, we could hardly 
 force men to live in the open, or take a proud 
 pleasure in their work, or enjoy beauty, or not 
 concentrate themselves on making money. 
 No amount of legislation will make us "lihes 
 of the field" or "birds of the air," or prevent 
 us from worshipping false gods, or neglecting 
 to reform ourselves. 
 
 56 
 
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 I once wrote the unpopular sentence: "De- 
 mocracy at present offers the spectacle of a 
 man running down a road followed at a more 
 and more respectful distance by his own soul." 
 For democracy read rather the words modem 
 civilisation which prides itself on redress after 
 the event, foresees nothing and avoids less; is 
 purely empirical if one may use so high brow a 
 word. 
 
 I look very eagerly and watchfully to America 
 in many ways. After the war she will be more 
 emphatically than ever, in material things, the 
 most important and powerful nation of the 
 earth. We British have a legitimate and some- 
 what breathless interest m the use she will 
 make of her strength, and in the course of her 
 national life, for this will greatly influence the 
 course of our own. But power for real Hght 
 and leading in America will depend, not so 
 much on her material wealth, or her armed 
 force, as on what her attitude towards life, and 
 what the ideals of her citizens are going to be. 
 Americans have a certain eagerness for knowl- 
 edge; they have also, for all their absorption 
 in success, the aspiring eye. They do want the 
 
 67 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 good thing. They don't always know when 
 they see it, but they want it. These quahties, 
 in combination with material strength, give 
 America her chance. Yet, if she does not set 
 her face against " Gadarening," we are all bound 
 for downhill. If she goes in for spreadeagleism, 
 if her aspirations are towards quantity, not 
 quality, we shall all go on being commonised. 
 If she should get that purse-and-power-proud 
 fever which comes from national success, we 
 are all bound for another world flare-up. The 
 burden of proving that democracy can be real 
 and yet Hve up to an ideal of health and beauty 
 will be on America's shoulders, and on ours. 
 What are we and Americans going to make of 
 our inner life, of our individual habits of 
 thought ? What are we going to reverence, and 
 what despise? Do we mean to lead, in spirit 
 and in truth, not in mere money and guns? 
 Britain is an old country, though still in her 
 prime, I hope; America is yet on the threshold. 
 Is she to step out into the sight of the world as 
 a great leader? That is for America the long 
 decision, to be worked out, not so much in 
 her Senate and her Congress, as in her homes 
 
 58 
 
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 and schools. On America, now that the war 
 is over, the destiny of civilisation may hang for 
 the next century. If she mislays, indeed if she 
 does not improve the power of self-criticism — 
 that special dry American humour which the 
 great Lincoln had — she might soon develop the 
 intolerant provincialism which has so often 
 been the bane of the earth and the undoing of 
 nations. Above all, if she does not solve the 
 problems of town life, of Capital and Labour, 
 of the distribution of wealth, of national health, 
 and attain to a mastery over inventions and 
 machinery — she is in for a cycle of mere anarchy, 
 disruption, and dictatorships, into which we 
 shall all follow. The motto "noblesse oblige" 
 appHes as much to democracy as ever it did 
 to the old-time aristocrat. It applies with 
 terrific vividness to America. Ancestry and 
 Nature have bestowed on her great gifts. Be- 
 hind her stand Conscience, Enterprise, Inde- 
 pendence, and AbiHty — such were the com- 
 panions of the first Americans, and are the 
 comrades of American citizens to this day. 
 She has abounding energy, an unequalled spirit 
 of discovery, a vast territory not haK devel- 
 59 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 oped, and great natural beauty. I remember 
 sitting on a bench overlooking the Grand 
 Canyon of Arizona; the sun was shining into 
 it, and a snow storm was whirling down there. 
 All that most marvellous work of Nature was 
 flooded to the brim with rose and tawny-gold, 
 with white, and wine-dark shadows; the co- 
 lossal carvings as of huge rock-gods and sacri- 
 ficial altars, and great beasts along its sides, 
 were made hving by the very mystery of light 
 and darkness, on that violent day of Spring; 
 I remember sitting there, and an old gentle- 
 man passing close behind, leaning towards me 
 and saying in a sly, gentle voice : " How are you 
 going to tell it to the folks at home ? " America 
 has so much, that one despairs of telHng to the 
 folks at home, so much grand beauty to be to 
 her an inspiration and uplift towards high and 
 free thought and vision. Great poems of 
 Nature she has, wrought in the large, to make 
 of her and keep her a noble people. In my be- 
 loved Britain — all told, not half the size of 
 Texas — there is a quiet beauty of a sort which 
 America has not. I walked not long ago from 
 Worthing to the little village of Steyning, in 
 
 60 
 
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 the South Downs. It was such a day as one 
 seldom gets in England; when the sun was 
 dipping and there came on the cool chalky hills 
 the smile of late afternoon, and across a smooth 
 valley on the rim of the Downs one saw a tiny 
 group of trees, one little building, and a stack, 
 against the clear-blue, pale sky — it was like a 
 glimpse of heaven, so utterly pure in line and 
 colour so removed, and touching. The tale of 
 loveliness in our land is varied and imending, 
 but it is not in the grand manner. America 
 has the grand manner in her scenery and in her 
 blood, for in America all are the children of 
 adventure, every single man an emigrant him- 
 self or a descendant of one who had the pluck 
 to emigrate. She has already had past-masters 
 in dignity, but she has still to reach as a nation 
 the grand manner in achievement. She knows 
 her own dangers and faihngs; her qualities and 
 powers; but she cannot reahse the intense con- 
 cern and interest, deep down behind our pro- 
 voking stohdities, with which we of the old 
 country watch her, feeHng that what she does 
 reacts on us above aU nations, and will ever 
 react more and more. Underneath surface 
 
 61 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 differences and irritations we English-speaking 
 peoples are fast bound together. May it not 
 be in misery and iron ! If America walks up- 
 right, so shall we; if she goes bowed under the 
 weight of machines, money, and materiahsm, 
 we too shall creep our ways. We run a long 
 race, we nations; a generation is but a day. 
 But in a day a man may leave the track, and 
 never again recover it ! Nations depend for 
 their health and safety on the behaviour of the 
 individuals who compose them. 
 
 Modem man is a very new and marvellous 
 creature. Without quite reaMsing it, we have 
 evolved a fresh species of stoic — even more 
 stoical, I suspect, than were the old Stoics. 
 Modem man stands on his own feet. His re- 
 ligion is to take what comes without flinching 
 or complaint, as part of the day's work, which 
 an unknowable God, Providence, Creative Prin- 
 ciple, has appointed. By courage and kindness 
 modern man exists, warmed by the glow of the 
 great human fellowship. He has re-discovered 
 the old Greek saying: "God is the helping of 
 man by man"; has found out in his unself con- 
 scious way that if he does not help himself, 
 
 62 
 
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 and help his fellows, he cannot reach that inner 
 peace which satisfies. To do his bit; and to 
 be kind ! It is by that creed, rather than by 
 any mysticism, that he finds the salvation of 
 his soul, for, of a truth, the reHgion of this age 
 is conduct. 
 
 After all, does not the only real spiritual 
 warmth, not tinged by Pharisaism, egotism, or 
 cowardice, come from the feeling of doing your 
 work well and helping others; is not all the 
 rest embroidery, luxury, pastime, pleasant 
 sound and incense? Modern man is a reahst 
 with too romantic a sense, perhaps, of the mys- 
 tery which surrounds existence, to pry into it. 
 And, Uke modem civilisation itself, he is the 
 creature of West and North, of those atmos- 
 pheres, climates, manners, of life, which foster 
 neither inertia, reverence, nor mystic medita- 
 tion. Essentially man of action, in ideal ac- 
 tion he finds his only true comfort. I am sure 
 that padres at the front have seen that the 
 men whose souls they have gone out to tend, 
 are living the highest form of religion; that in 
 their comic courage, unselfish humanity, their 
 endurance without whimper of things worse 
 63 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 than death, they have gone beyond all pulpit- 
 and-deathbed teaching. And who are these 
 men ? Just the early manhood of the race, just 
 modem man as he was before the war began, 
 and will be now that the war is over. 
 
 This modem world, of which we EngHsh and 
 Americans are perhaps the truest types, stands 
 revealed from beneath its froth, frippery, and 
 vulgar excrescences, sound at core — a world 
 whose impHcit motto is: "The good of all hu- 
 manity." But the herd-life which is its char- 
 acteristic, brings many evils, has many dangers; 
 and to preserve a sane mind in a healthy body 
 is the riddle before us. Somehow we must free 
 ourselves from the driving domination of ma- 
 chines and money-getting, not only for our own 
 sakes but for that of all mankind. 
 
 And there is another thing of the most 
 solemn importance: We English-speaking na- 
 tions are by chance as it were, the ballast of the 
 future. It is absolutely necessary for the hap- 
 piness of the world that we should remain 
 united. The comradeship that we now feel 
 must and surely shall abide. For imless we 
 work together, and in no selfish or exclusive 
 spirit — Goodbye to Civilisation ! It will van- 
 
 64 
 
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 ish like the dew off grass. The betteraient not 
 only of the British nations and America, but 
 of all mankind is and must be our object. 
 
 From all our hearts a great weight has been 
 lifted; in those fields death no longer sweeps 
 his scythe, and our ears at last are free from 
 the rustling thereof — ^now comes the test of 
 magnanimity, in all countries. Will modem 
 man rise to the ordering of a sane, a free, a 
 generous life? Each of us loves his own coun- 
 try best, be it a Httle land or the greatest on 
 earth; but jealousy is the dark thing, the creep- 
 ing poison. Where there is true greatness, let 
 us acclaim it; where there is true worth, let 
 us prize it — as if it were our own. 
 
 This earth is made too subtly, of too multiple 
 warp and woof, for prophecy. When he sur- 
 veys the world around — "the wondrous things 
 which there abound," the prophet closes foolish 
 hps. Besides, as the historian tells us : " Writers 
 have that undeterminateness of spirit which 
 commonly makes Hterary men of no use in the 
 world." So I, for one, prophesy not. Still, 
 we do know this: All English-speaking peoples 
 will go to this adventure of Peace with some- 
 thing of big purpose and spirit in their hearts, 
 
 65 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 with something of free outlook. The world is 
 wide and Nature bountiful enough for all, if 
 we keep sane minds. The earth is fair and 
 meant to be enjoyed, if we keep sane bodies. 
 Who dare affront this world of beauty with 
 mean views? There is no darkness but what 
 the ape in us still makes, and in spite of all his 
 monkey-tricks modem man is at heart further 
 from the ape than man has yet been. 
 
 To do our jobs really well and to be brotherly ! 
 To seek health and ensue Beauty! If, in 
 Britain and America, in all the English-speak- 
 ing nations, we can put that simple faith into 
 real and thorough practice, what may not this 
 century yet bring forth ? Shall man, the high- 
 est product of creation, be content to pass his 
 little day in a house Hke unto Bedlam? 
 
 When the present great task in which we 
 have joined hands is really ended; when once 
 more from the shuttered mad-house the figure 
 of Peace steps forth and stands in the risen sun, 
 and we may go our ways again in the wonder 
 of a new morning — ^let it be with this vow in 
 our hearts: "No more of Madness — ^in War, or 
 in Peace!" 
 
 66 
 
VI 
 
 TO THE LEAGUE OF POLITICAL 
 EDUCATION, NEW YORK 
 
 STANDING here, privileged to address my 
 betters — I, the least politically educated 
 person in the world, have two thoughts to 
 leave on the air. They arise from the title of 
 your League. 
 
 I wish I did not feel, speaking in the large, 
 that poHtics and education have but a bowing 
 acquaintanceship in the modern State; and I 
 wish I did feel that either education or pohtics 
 had any definite idea of what they were out to 
 attain; in other words, had a clear image of 
 the ideal State. It seems to me that their 
 object at present is just to keep the heads of 
 the citizens of the modern State above water; 
 to keep them alive, without real concern as to 
 what kind of hfe they are being preserved for. 
 We seem, in fact, to be letting our civihsation 
 67 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 run us, instead of running our civilisation. If 
 a man does not know where he wants to go, he 
 goes where circumstances and the telephone 
 take him. Where do we want to go? Can 
 you answer me? Have you any definite idea? 
 What is the Ultima Thule of our longings ? I 
 suppose one ought to say, roughly, that the 
 modern ideal is: Maximum production of 
 wealth to the square mile of a country — an 
 ideal which, seeing that a man normally pro- 
 duces wealth in surplus to his own requirements, 
 signifies logically a maximima head of popula- 
 tion to the square mile. And it seems to me 
 that the great modem fallacy is the identifica- 
 tion of the word wealth with the word welfare. 
 Granted that demand creates supply, and that 
 it is impossible to stop human nature from de- 
 manding, the problem is surely to direct de- 
 mand into the best channels for seeming health 
 and happiness. And I venture to say that the 
 mere blind production of wealth and popula- 
 tion by no means fills that bill. We ought to 
 produce wealth only in such ways and to such 
 an extent as shall make us all good, clean, 
 healthy, intelligent, and beautiful to look at. 
 
 68 
 
LEAGUE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION 
 
 That is the end, and production whether of 
 wealth or population only the means to that 
 end, to be regulated accordingly. As things 
 are, we confuse the means with the end, and 
 make of production a fetich. 
 
 Let me take a parallel from the fields of Art. 
 What kind of good in the world is an artist who 
 sets to work to cover the utmost possible acre- 
 age of canvas, or to spoil the greatest possible 
 number of reams of paper, in deference to the 
 call from a vulgar and undiscriminating market 
 for all he can produce? Do we admire him — 
 a man whose ideal is blind supply to meet blind 
 demand ? 
 
 The most urgent need of the world to-day is 
 to learn — or is it to re-learn? — the love of 
 quality. And how are we to learn that in a 
 democratic age, unless we so perfect our elec- 
 toral machineries as to be sure that we secure 
 for our leaders, and especially for our leaders 
 of education, men and women who, themselves 
 worshipping quality, will see that the love of 
 quaHty is instilled into the boys and girls of 
 the nation. 
 
 After all, we have some common sense, and 
 69 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 we really cannot contemplate much longer the 
 grimy, grinding monster of modem industrial- 
 ism without feeling that we are becoming dis- 
 inherited, instead of — as we are brought up to 
 think — heirs to an ever-increasing fortune. 
 
 It seems to me that no amount of political 
 evolution or revolution is going to do us any 
 good unless it is accompanied by evolution or 
 revolution in ideals. What does it matter 
 whether one class holds the reins, or another 
 class holds the reins, if the dominant impulse 
 in the population remains the craving for wealth 
 without the power of discriminating whether 
 or not that wealth is taking forms which pro- 
 mote health and happiness. 
 
 A new educational charter — a charter of taste, 
 affirming the rule of dignity, beauty, and sim- 
 pKcity, is wanted before political change can 
 turn out to be an3rthing but cheap-jack nos- 
 trums, and a mere shuffing around. 
 
 I would just cite three of the many changes 
 necessary for any advance: 
 
 (1) The reduction of working hours to a 
 point that would enable men and 
 women to live lives of wider interest. 
 70 
 
LEAGUE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION 
 
 (2) The abolition of smoke — ^which surely 
 
 should not be beyond attainment in 
 this scientific age. 
 
 (3) The rescue of educational forces from 
 
 the grip of vested interests. 
 I would have all educational institutions fi- 
 nanced by the State, but give all the directing 
 power to heads of education elected by the 
 main body of teachers themselves. I would 
 not have education dependent on advertise- 
 ment or on charity. I would not even have 
 newspapers, which are an educational force — 
 though you might not always think so — de- 
 pendent on advertisements. A newspaper man 
 told me the other day that his paper had 
 printed an article drawing attention to the dele- 
 teriousness of a certain product. The manu- 
 facturers of that product sent an ultimatum 
 drawing the editor's attention to the deleterious- 
 ness of their advertising in a journal which 
 printed such articles. The result was perfect 
 peace. What chance is there of rescuing news- 
 papers, for instance, until education has im- 
 planted in the rising generation the feeling that 
 to accept money for what you know is doing 
 
 71 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 harm to your neighbours, is not playing the 
 game. Or take another instance: Not long ago 
 in England a College for the training of school- 
 teachers desired to make certain excellent ad- 
 vances in their curriculimi, which did not meet 
 with the approval of the municipal powers con- 
 trolling the College. A short, sharp fight, and 
 again perfect peace. 
 
 I suppose it would be too sweeping to say 
 that a vested interest never yet held an en- 
 lightened view, but I think one may fairly say 
 that their enlightened views are rare birds. 
 
 How, then, is any emancipation to come? I 
 know not, imless we take to looking on Educa- 
 tion as the hub of the wheel — the Schools, the 
 Arts, the Press; and concentrate our thoughts 
 on the best means of manning these agencies 
 with men and women of real honesty and vision, 
 and giving them real power to effect in the rising 
 generation the evolution of ethics and taste, in 
 accordance with the rules of dignity, beauty, and 
 simplicity. 
 
 72 
 
VII 
 TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 IT is of the main new factors which have 
 come into the life of the civilised world 
 that I would speak. 
 
 The division deep and subtle between those 
 who have fought and those who have not — 
 concerns us in Europe far more than you in 
 America; for in proportion to your population 
 the number of your soldiers who actually 
 fought has been small, compared with the num- 
 ber in any beUigerent European country. And 
 I think that so far as you are concerned the di- 
 vision will soon disappear, for the iron had not 
 time to enter into the souls of your soldiers. 
 For us in Europe, however, this factor is very 
 tremendous, and will take a long time to wear 
 away. In my country the, as it were, profes- 
 sional EngHsh dislike to the expression of feel- 
 ing, which strikes every American so forcibly, 
 covers very deep hearts and highly sensitive 
 73 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 nerves. The average Briton is now not at all 
 stolid underneath; I think he has changed a 
 great deal in this last century, owing to the 
 town life which seven-tenths of our population 
 lead. Perhaps only of the Briton may one 
 still invent the picture which appeared in 
 Punch in the autumn of 1914 — of the steward 
 on a battleship asking the naval lieutenant: 
 "Will you take your bath before or after the 
 engagement; sir?" and only among Britons 
 overhear one stoker say to another in the heat 
 of a sea-fight: "Well, wot I say is — 'E ought 
 to 'ave married 'er." For all that, the Briton 
 feels deeply; and on those who have fought the 
 experiences of the battlefield have had an ef- 
 fect which almost amounts to metamorphosis. 
 There are now two breeds of British people — 
 such as have been long iu the danger zones, 
 and such as have not; shading, of course, into 
 each other through the many who have just 
 smelled powder and peril, and the very few 
 whose imaginations are vibrant enough to have 
 Hved the two lives, while only living one. 
 
 In a certain cool paper called: "The Balance- 
 sheet of the Soldier Workman" I tried to come 
 
 74 
 
TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 at the effect of the war; but purposely pitched 
 it in a low and sober key; and there is a much 
 more poignant tale of change to tell of each 
 individual human being. 
 
 Take a man who, when the war broke out 
 (or had been raging perhaps a year), was Hving 
 the ordinary Briton's life, in factory, shop, and 
 home. Suppose that he went through that 
 deep, sharp struggle between the pull of home 
 love and interests, and the pull of country (for 
 I hope it will never be forgotten that five mil- 
 lion Britons were volunteers) and came out 
 committed to his country. That then he had 
 to submit to beiug rattled at great speed into 
 the soldier-shape which we Britons and you 
 Americans have been brought up to regard as 
 but the haK of a free man; that then he was 
 plunged into such a hideous hell of horrible 
 danger and discomfort as this planet has never 
 seen; came out of it time and again, went back 
 into it time and again; and finally emerged, 
 shattered or unscathed, with a spirit at once 
 uplifted and enlarged, yet bruised and un- 
 geared for the old life of peace. Imagine such 
 a man set back among those who have not 
 75 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 been driven and grilled and crucified. What 
 would he feel, and how bear himself? On the 
 surface he would no doubt disguise the fact 
 that he felt different from his neighbours — ^he 
 would conform; but something within him 
 would ever be stirring, a sort of superiority, an 
 impatient sense that he had been through it 
 and they had not; the feeling, too, that he had 
 seen the bottom of things, that nothing he 
 could ever experience again would give him the 
 sensations he had had out there; that he had 
 lived, and there could be nothing more to it. 
 I don't think that we others quite realise what 
 it must mean to those men, most of them under 
 thirty, to have been stretched to the uttermost, 
 to have no illusions left, and yet have, perhaps, 
 forty years still to Hve. There is something 
 gained in them, but there's something gone 
 from them. The old sanctions, the old values 
 won't hold; are there any sanctions and values 
 which can be made to hold? A kind of im- 
 reahty must needs cling about their hves 
 henceforth. This is a finespun way of putting 
 it, but I think, at bottom, true. 
 The old professional soldier lived for his sol- 
 76 
 
TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 diering. At the end of a war (however ter- 
 rible) there was left to him a vista of more 
 warS; more of what had become to him the 
 ultimate reaKty — ^his business in life. For these 
 temporary soldiers of what has been not so 
 much a war as a prolonged piece of very hor- 
 rible carnage, there succeeds something so mild 
 in sensation that it simply will not fill the void. 
 When the dish of life has lost its savour, by 
 reason of violent and uttermost experience, 
 wherewith shall it be salted? 
 
 The American Civil War was very long and 
 very dreadful, but it was a human and humane 
 business compared to what Europe has just 
 come through. There is no analogy in history 
 for the present moment. An old soldier of that 
 Civil War, after hearing these words, wrote me 
 an account of his after-career which shows that 
 in exceptional cases a life so stirring, full, and 
 even dangerful may be lived that no void is 
 felt. But one swallow does not make a sum- 
 mer, nor will a few hundreds or even thousands 
 of such lives leaven to any extent the vast 
 lump of human material used in this war. The 
 spiritual point is this: In front of a man in 
 77 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 ordinary civilised existence there hovers ever 
 that moment in the futm-e when he expects to 
 prove himself more of a man than he has yet 
 proved himself. For these soldiers of the 
 Great Carnage the moment of probation is al- 
 ready in the past. They have proved them- 
 selves as they will never have the chance to 
 do again, and secretly they know it. One talks 
 of their powers of heroism and sacrifice being 
 wanted just as much in time of Peace; but that 
 cannot really be so, because Peace times do not 
 demand men's Hves — ^which is the ultimate 
 test — ^with every minute that passes. No, the 
 great moment of their existence lies behind 
 them, young though so many of them are. 
 This makes them at once greater than us, yet 
 in a way smaller, because they have lost the 
 power and hope of expansion. They have lived 
 their masterpiece already. Human nature is 
 elastic, and hope springs eternal; but a climax 
 of experience and sensation cannot be repeated; 
 I think these have reached and passed the 
 uttermost climax; and in Europe they number 
 milHons. 
 This is a veritable portent, and I am. glad 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 that in America you will not have it to any 
 great extent. 
 
 Now how does this affect the future? 
 Roughly speaking it must, I think, have a 
 diminishing effect on what I may call loosely 
 — Creative abiUty. People have often said to 
 me: "We shall have great writings and paint- 
 ings from these young men when they come 
 back." We shall certainly have poignant ex- 
 pression of their experiences and sufferings; 
 and the best books and paintings of the war 
 itself are probably yet to come. But, taking 
 the long view, I do not believe we shall have 
 from them, in the end, as much creative art 
 and literature as we should have had if they 
 had not been through the war. Illusion about 
 life, and interest in ordinary daily experience 
 and emotion, which after all, are to be the stuff 
 of their future as of ours, has in a way been 
 blunted or destroyed for them. And in the 
 other provinces of life, in industry, in trade, in 
 affairs, how can we expect from men who have 
 seen the utter uselessness of money or comfort 
 or power in the last resort, the same naive faith 
 in these things, or the same driving energy 
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ADDRESSES. IN AMERICA 
 
 towards the attaining of them that we others 
 exhibit? 
 
 It may be cheering to assume that those who 
 have been ahnost superhuman these last four 
 years in one environment will continue to be 
 almost superhuman under conditions the very 
 opposite. But alack! it is not logical. 
 
 On the other hand I think that those who 
 have had this great and racking experience 
 will be left, for the most part, with a real pas- 
 sion for Justice; and that this will have a 
 profoundly modifying effect on social conditions. 
 I think, too, that many of them will have a 
 sort of passion for humaneness, which will, if 
 you will suffer me to say so, come in very 
 handy; for I have observed that the rest of us, 
 through reading about horrors, have lost the 
 edge of our gentleness, and have got into the 
 habit of thinking that it is the business of 
 women and children to starve, if they happen 
 to be German; of creatures to be underfed and 
 overworked if they happen to be horses; of 
 families to be broken up if they happen to be 
 aliens; and that a general carelessness as to 
 what suffering is necessary and what is not, 
 
 80 
 
TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 has set in. And, queer as it may seem, I look 
 to those who have been in the thick of the worst 
 suffering the world has ever seen, to set us in 
 the right path again, and to correct the vitri- 
 olic sentiments engendered by the armchair and 
 the inkpot, in times such as we have been and 
 are still passing through. A cloistered life in 
 times Hke these engenders bile; in fact, I think 
 it always does. For sheer ferocity there is no 
 place, you will have noticed, like a club full of 
 old gentlemen. I expect the men who have 
 come home from killing each other to show us 
 the way back to brotherliness ! And not be- 
 fore it's wanted. Here is a little true story 
 of war-time, when all men were supposed to 
 be brothers if they belonged to the same na- 
 tion. Li the fifth year of the war two men sat 
 alone in a railway carriage. One, pale, young, 
 and rather worn, had an unhghted cigarette in 
 his mouth. The other, elderly, prosperous, and 
 of a ruddy countenance, was smoking a large 
 cigar. 
 
 The young man, who looked as if his days 
 were strenuous, took his imlighted cigarette 
 from his mouth, gazed at it, searched his 
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ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 pockets, and looked at the elderly man. His 
 nose twitched, vibrated by the scent of the 
 cigar, and he said suddenly: 
 
 "Could you give me a light, sir?" 
 
 The elderly man regarded him for a moment, 
 drooped his eyelids, and murmured: 
 
 "I've no matches." 
 
 The young man sighed, mumbhng the ciga- 
 rette in his watering lips, then said very sud- 
 denly: 
 
 "Perhaps you'll kindly give me a Hght from 
 your cigar, sir." 
 
 The elderly man moved throughout his body 
 as if something very sacred had been touched 
 within him. 
 
 "I'd rather not," he said; "if you don't 
 mind." 
 
 A quarter of an hour passed, while the young 
 man's cigarette grew moister, and the elder 
 man's cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, 
 took it from under his grey moustache, looked 
 critically at it, held it out a little way towards 
 the other with the side which was least burned- 
 down foremost, and said: 
 
 "Unless you'd like to take it from the edge." 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 On the other hand one has often travelled 
 in these last years with extreme embarrassment 
 because our soldiers were so extraordinarily 
 anxious that one should smoke their cigarettes, 
 eat their apples, and their sausages. The 
 marvels of comradeship they have performed 
 would fill the libraries of the world. 
 
 The second main new factor in the world's 
 life is the disappearance of the old autocracies. 
 
 In 1910, walking in Hyde Park with a writer 
 friend, I remember saying: "It's the hereditary 
 autocracies in Germany, Austria, and Russia 
 which make the danger of war." He did not 
 agree — ^but no two writers agree with each 
 other at any given moment. "If only autoc- 
 racies go down in the wreckage of this war!" 
 was almost the first thought I put down in 
 writing when the war broke out. Well, they 
 are gone! They were an anachronism, and 
 without them and the bureaucracies and secrecy 
 which buttressed them we should not, I think, 
 have had this world catastrophe. But let us 
 not too glibly assume that the forms of govern- 
 ment which take their place can steer the bat- 
 tered ships of the nations in the very troubled 
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ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 waters of to-day, or that they will be truly 
 democratic. Even highly democratic states- 
 men have been known to resort to the way of 
 the headmaster at my old school, who put a 
 motion to the masters' meeting and asked for 
 a show of hands in its favour. Not one hand 
 was held up. "Then," he said, "I shall adopt 
 it with the greater regret." Nevertheless, the 
 essential new factor is, that, whereas in 1914 
 civilisation was on two planes, it is now, the- 
 oretically, at least, on the one democratic plane 
 or level. That is a great easing of the world- 
 situation, and removes a chief cause of inter- 
 national misunderstanding. The rest depends 
 on what we can now make of democracy. 
 Surely no word can so easily be taken in vain; 
 to have got rid of the hereditary principle in 
 government is by no means to have made de- 
 mocracy a real thing. Democracy is neither 
 government by rabble, nor government by 
 caucus. Its measure as a beneficent principle 
 is the measure of the intelligence, honesty, 
 public spirit, and independence of the average 
 voter. The voter who goes to the poll blind 
 of an eye and with a cast in the other, so that 
 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 he sees no issue clear, and every issue only in 
 so far as it affects him personally, is not pre- 
 cisely the sort of ultimate administrative power 
 we want. Intelligent, honest, pubHc-spirited, 
 and independent voters guarantee an honest 
 and intelligent governing body. The best 
 men the best government is a truism which 
 cannot be refuted. Democracy to be real and 
 effective must succeed in throwing up into the 
 positions of administrative power the most 
 trustworthy of its able citizens. In other 
 words it must incorporate and make use of the 
 principle of aristocracy; government by the 
 best — best in spirit, not best-born. Rightly 
 seen, there is no tug between democracy and 
 aristocracy; aristocracy should be the means 
 and machinery by which democracy works it- 
 self out. What then can be done to increase 
 in the average voter intelligence and honesty, 
 public spirit and independence ? Nothing save 
 by education. The Arts, the Schools, the Press. 
 It is impossible to overestimate the need for 
 vigour, breadth, restraint, good taste, enHght- 
 enment, and honesty in these three agencies. 
 The artist, the teacher (and among teachers 
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ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 one includes, of course, religious teachers in so 
 far as they concern themselves with the affairs 
 of this world), and the journalist have the 
 future in their hands. As they are fine the 
 future wiU be fine; as they are mean the future 
 will be mean. The burden is very specially 
 on the shoulders of PubHc Men, and that most 
 powerful agency the Press, which reports them. 
 Do we reahse the extent to which the modem 
 world reHes for its opinions on public utter- 
 ances and the Press ? Do we realise how com- 
 pletely we are all in the power of report? Any 
 little He or exaggerated sentiment uttered by 
 one with a bee in his bonnet, with a principle, 
 or an end to serve, can, if cleverly expressed 
 and distributed, distort the views of thousands, 
 sometimes of miUions. Any wilful suppression 
 of truth for Party or personal ends can so falsify 
 our vision of things as to plunge us into endless 
 cruelties and follies. Honesty of thought and 
 speech and written word is a jewel, and they 
 who cm-b prejudice and seek honourably to 
 know and speak the truth are the only true 
 builders of a better life. But what a dull world 
 if we can't chatter and write irresponsibly, can't 
 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 slop over with hatred, or pursue our own ends 
 without scruple! To be tied to the apron- 
 strings of truth, or coiffed with the nightcap of 
 silence; who in this age of cheap ink and ora- 
 tory will submit to such a fate? And yet, if 
 we do not want another seven million violent 
 deaths, another eight milHon maimed and halt 
 and blind, and if we do not want anarchy, our 
 tongues must be sober, and we must tell the 
 truth. Report, I would almost say, now rules 
 the world and holds the fate of man on the say- 
 ings of its many tongues. If the good sense of 
 mankind cannot somehow restrain utterance 
 and cleanse report, Democracy, so highly 
 vaunted, will not save us; and all the gHb 
 words of promise spoken might as well have lain 
 unuttered in the throats of orators. We are 
 always in peril under Democracy of taking the 
 line of least resistance and immediate material 
 profit. The gentleman, for instance, whoever 
 he was, who first discovered that he could sell 
 his papers better by undercutting the standard 
 of his rivals, and, appealing to the lower tastes 
 of the Public under the flag of that convenient 
 expression "what the Pubhc wants," made a 
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ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 most evil discovery. The Press is for the most 
 part in the hands of men who know what is 
 good and right. It can be a great agency for 
 levelling up. But whether on the whole it is 
 so or not; one continually hears doubted. 
 There ought to be no room for doubt in any of 
 our minds that the Press is on the side of the 
 angels. It can do as much as any other single 
 agency to raise the level of honesty, intelligence, 
 pubHc spirit, and taste in the average voter, in 
 other words, to build Democracy on a sure 
 foimdation. This is a truly tremendous trust; 
 for the safety of civilisation and the happiness 
 of mankind hangs thereby. The saying about 
 little children and the kingdom of heaven was 
 meant for the ears of all those who have it in 
 their power to influence simple folk. To be a 
 good and honest editor, a good and honest 
 journalist is in these days to be a veritable 
 benefactor of mankind. 
 
 Now take the function of the artist, of the 
 man who in stone, or music, marble, bronze, 
 paint, or words, can express himself, and his 
 vision of life, truly and beautifully. Can we 
 set limit to his value? The answer is in the 
 
TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 aflfinnative. We set such limitation to his 
 value that he has been known to die of it. 
 And I would only venture to say here that if 
 we don't increase the store we set by him, we 
 shall, in this reach-me-down age of machines 
 and wholesale standardisations, emulate the 
 Goths who did their best to destroy the art of 
 Rome, and all these centuries later, by way of 
 atonement, have filled the Thiergarten at Ber- 
 lin and the City of London with peculiar 
 brands of statuary, and are always writing their 
 names on the Sphynx. 
 
 I suppose the hardest lesson we all have to 
 learn in life is that we can't have things both 
 ways. If we want to have beauty, that which 
 appeals not merely to the stomach and the epi- 
 dermis (which is the function of the greater 
 part of industrialism), but to what lies deeper 
 within the human organism, the heart and the 
 brain, we must have conditions wliich permit 
 and even foster the production of beauty. The 
 artist, unfortunately, no less than the rest of 
 mankind, must eat to Hve. Now, if we insist 
 that we will pay the artist only for what fas- 
 cinates the popular imeducated instincts, he 
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ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 will either produce beauty, remain unpaid and 
 starve; or he will give us shoddy, and fare 
 sumptuously every day. My experience tells 
 me this: An artist who is by accident of inde- 
 pendent means can, if he has talent, give the 
 PubHc what he, the artist, wants, and sooner 
 or later the public will take whatever he gives 
 it, at his own valuation. But very few artists, 
 who have no independent means, have enough 
 character to hold out until they can sit on the 
 PubHc's head and pull the Public's beard, to 
 use the old Sikh sajdng. How many times 
 have I not heard over here — and it's very much 
 the same over there — that a man must pro- 
 duce this or that kind of work or else of course 
 he can't hve. My advice — at all events to 
 yoimg artists and writers — is: 'Sooner than 
 do that and have someone sitting on your head 
 and pulling your beard aU the time, go out of 
 business — there are other means of making a 
 Hving, besides faked or degraded art. Become 
 a dentist and revenge yourself on the PubUc's 
 teeth — even editors and picture dealers go to 
 the dentist!' The artist has got to make a 
 stand against beiug exploited, and he has got, 
 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 also, to live the kind of life which will give him 
 a chance to see clearly, to feel truly, and to 
 express beautifully. He, too, is a trustee for 
 the future of mankind. Money has one in- 
 estimable value — ^it guarantees independence, 
 the power of going your own way and giving 
 out the best that's in you. But, generally 
 speaking, we don't stop there in our desire for 
 money; and I would say that any artist who 
 doesn't stop there is not 'playing the game,' 
 neither towards himself nor towards mankind; 
 he is not standing up for the faith that is in 
 him, and the future of civiHsation. 
 
 And now what of the teacher? One of the 
 discouraging truths of life is the fact that a 
 man cannot raise himself from the ground by 
 the hair of his own head. And if one took 
 Democracy logically, one would have to give 
 up the idea of improvement. But things are 
 not always what they seem, as somebody once 
 said; and fortunately, government 'of the 
 people by the people for the people' does not 
 in practice prevent the people from using those 
 saving graces — Commonsense and Selection. 
 In fact, only by the use of those graces will de- 
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ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 mocracy work at all. When twelve men get 
 together to serve on a jury, their conunonsense 
 makes them select the least stupid among them 
 to be their foreman. Each of them, of course, 
 feels that he is that least stupid man, but since 
 a man cannot vote for himself, he votes for the 
 least dense among his neighbours, and the fore- 
 man comes to life. The same principle appHed 
 thoroughly enough throughout the social system 
 produces government by the best. And it is 
 more vital to apply it thoroughly in matters of 
 education than in other branches of human 
 activity. But when we have secured our best 
 heads of education, we must trust them and 
 give them real power, for they are the hope — 
 well nigh the only hope — of our future. They 
 alone, by the selection and instruction of their 
 subordinates and the curricula which they lay 
 down, can do anything substantial in the way 
 of raising the standard of general taste, con- 
 duct, and learning. They alone can give the 
 starting push towards greater dignity and sim- 
 pHcity; promote the love of proportion, and 
 the feeling for beauty. They alone can grad- 
 ually instil into the body politic the under- 
 
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 standing that education is not a means towards 
 wealth as such, or learning as such, but towards 
 the broader ends of health and happiness. The 
 first necessity for improvement in modem life 
 is that our teachers should have the wide view, 
 and be provided with the means and the cur- 
 ricula which make it possible to apply this en- 
 Hghtenment to their pupils. Can we take too 
 much trouble to secure the best men as heads 
 of education — ^that most responsible of all 
 positions in the modern State? The child is 
 father to the man. We think too much of 
 politics and too little of education. We treat 
 it almost as cavaherly as the undergraduate 
 treated the Master of BaUiol. "Yes," he said, 
 showing his people roimd the quadrangle, 
 "that's the Master's window;" then, picking 
 up a pebble, he threw it against the window 
 pane. "And that," he said, as a face ap- 
 peared, "is the Master!" Democracy has 
 come, and on education Democracy hangs; the 
 thread as yet is slender. 
 
 It is a far cry to the third new factor: Ex- 
 ploitation of the air. We were warned, by 
 Sir Hiram Maxim about 1910 that a year or 
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ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 so of war would do more for the conquest of 
 the air than many years of peace. It has. 
 We hear of a man flying 260 miles in 90 min- 
 utes; of the Atlantic being flown in 24 hours; 
 of airships which will have a lifting capacity 
 of 300 tons; of air mail-routes all over the 
 world. The time will perhaps come when we 
 shall live in the air, and come down to earth 
 on Sundays. 
 
 I confess that, mechanically marvellous as 
 all this is, it interests me chiefly as a prime in- 
 stance of the way human beings prefer the 
 shadow of existence to its substance. Granted 
 that we speed up everything, that we annihi- 
 late space, that we increase the powers of trade, 
 leave no point of the earth unsurveyed, and 
 are able to perform air-stunts which people will 
 pay five doUars apiece to see — how shall we 
 have furthered human health, happiness, and 
 virtue, speaking in the big sense of these words ? 
 It is an advantage, of course, to be able to 
 carry food to a starving community in some 
 desert; to rescue shipwrecked mariners; to 
 have a letter from one's wife four days sooner 
 than one could otherwise; and generally to 
 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 save time in the swopping of our commodities 
 and the journeys we make. But how does all 
 this help human beings to inner contentment 
 of spirit, and health of body ? Did the arrival 
 of motor-cars, bicycles, telephones, trains, and 
 steamships do much for them in that line? 
 Anything which serves to stretch human ca- 
 pabiHties to the utmost, would help human 
 happiness, if each new mechanical activity, 
 each new human toy as it were, did not so run 
 away with our sense of proportion as to de- 
 bauch our energies. A man, for instance, 
 takes to motoring, who used to ride or walk; 
 it becomes a passion with him, so that he now 
 never rides or walks — and his calves become 
 flabby and his Hver enlarged. A man puts a 
 telephone into his house to save time and 
 trouble, and is straightway a slave to the tinkle 
 of its bell. The few hinnan activities in them- 
 selves and of themselves pure good are just 
 eating, drinking, sleeping, and the affections — 
 in moderation; the inhaling of pure air, exer- 
 cise in most of its forms, and interesting crea- 
 tive work — ^in moderation; the study and con- 
 templation of the arts and Nature — ^in modera- 
 
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 tion; thinking of others and not thinking of 
 yourself — ^in moderation; doing kind acts and 
 thinking kind thoughts. All the rest seems to 
 be what the prophet had in mind when he said: 
 'Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!' Ah! but the 
 one great activity — adventure and the craving 
 for sensation ! It is that for which the human 
 being really lives, and all his restless activity 
 is caused by the desire for it. True; yet ad- 
 venture and sensation without rhyme or reason 
 lead to disharmony and disproportion. We 
 may take civilisation to the South Sea Islands, 
 but it would be better to leave the islanders 
 naked and healthy than to improve them with 
 trousers and civiHsation off the face of the 
 earth. We may invent new cocktails, but it 
 would be better to stay dry. In mechanical 
 matters I am reactionary, for I cannot believe 
 in inventions and machinery unless they can 
 be so controlled as to minister definitely to 
 health and happiness — and how difficult that 
 is! In my own country the townsman has 
 become physically inferior to the countryman 
 (speaking in the large), and I infer from this 
 that we British — at all events — ^are not so in 
 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 command of ourselves and our wonderful in- 
 ventions and machines that we are putting 
 them to uses which are really beneficent. If 
 we had proper command of ourselves no doubt 
 we could do this, but we haven't; and if you 
 look about you in America, the same doubt 
 may possibly attack you. 
 
 But there is another side to the exploitation 
 of the air which does not as yet affect you in 
 America as it does us in Europe — ^the destruc- 
 tive side. Britain, for instance, is no longer 
 an island. In five or ten years it will, I think, 
 be impossible to guarantee the safety of Britain 
 and Britain's commerce, by sea-power; and 
 those who continue to pin faith to that formula 
 will find themselves nearly as much back- 
 numbered as people who continued to prefer 
 wooden ships to iron, when the iron age came 
 in. Armaments on land and sea will be lim- 
 ited; not, I think, so much by a League of 
 Nations, if it comes, as by the commonsense of 
 people who begin to observe that with the de- 
 velopment of the powers of destruction and of 
 transport from the air, land and sea arma- 
 ments are becoming of little use. We may all 
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 disann completely, and yet — so long as there 
 are flying-machines and high explosives — re- 
 main almost as fonnidably destructive as ever. 
 So difficult to control, so infinite in its possi- 
 bilities for evil and so limited in its possibili- 
 ties for good do I consider this exploitation of 
 the air that, personally, I would rejoice to see 
 the nations in solemn conclave agree this very- 
 minute to ban the use of the air altogether, 
 whether for trade, travel, or war; destroy every 
 flying-machine and every airship, and forbid 
 their construction. That, of course, is a con- 
 sunamation which will remain devoutly to be 
 wished. Every day one reads in one's paper 
 that some country or other is to take the lead 
 in the air. What a wild-goose chase we are in 
 for! I verily beheve mankind will come one 
 day in their underground dwellings to the an- 
 nual practice of burning in effigy the Guy 
 (whoever he was) who first rose off the earth. 
 After I had talked in this strain once before, a 
 young airman came up to me and said: "Have 
 you been up?" I shook my head. "You 
 wait !" he said. When I do go up I shall take 
 great pains not to go up with that one. 
 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 We come now to the fourth great new factor 
 — ^Bolshevism, and the social unrest. But I 
 am shy of saying anything about it, for my 
 knowledge and experience are insufficient. I 
 will only offer one observation. Whatever 
 philosophic cloak may be thrown over the 
 shoulders of Bolshevism, it is obviously — ^Hke 
 every revolutionary movement of the past — 
 an aggregation of individual discontents, the 
 simi of milKons of human moods of dissatisfac- 
 tion with the existing state of things; and what- 
 ever philosophic cloak we drape on the body of 
 hberalism, if by that name we may designate 
 our present social and poHtical system — that 
 system has clearly not yet justified its claim to 
 the word evolutionary, so long as the dispro- 
 portion between the very rich and the very 
 poor continues (as hitherto it has) to grow. 
 No system can properly be called evolutionary 
 which provokes against it the rising of so for- 
 midable a revolutionary wave of discontent. 
 One hears that co-operation is now regarded 
 as vieux jeu. If that be so, it is because co- 
 operation in its true sense of spontaneous friend- 
 liness between man and man, has never been 
 
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 tried. Perhaps human nature in the large can 
 never rise to that ideal. But if it cannot, if 
 industrialism cannot achieve a change of heart, 
 so that in effect employers would rather their 
 profits (beyond a quite moderate scale) were 
 used for the amelioration of the lot of those 
 they employ, it looks to me uncommonly like 
 being the end of the present order of things, 
 after an era of class-struggle which will shake 
 civiHsation to its foundations. Being myself 
 an evolutionist, who fundamentally distrusts 
 violence, and admires the old Greek saying: 
 "God is the helping of man by man," I yet 
 hope it will not come to that; I yet believe we 
 may succeed in striking the balance, without 
 civil wars. But I feel that (speaking of Europe) 
 it is touch and go. In America, in Canada, in 
 Austraha, the conditions are different, the 
 powers of expansion still large, the individual 
 hopefulness much greater. There is little an- 
 alogy with the state of things in Europe; but, 
 whatever happens in Europe must have its 
 infectious influence in America. The wise man 
 takes Time by the forelock — and goes in front 
 of events. 
 
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 Let me turn away to the fifth great new fac- 
 tor: The impetus towards a League of Nations. 
 
 This, to my thinking, so wholly advisable, 
 would inspire more hopefulness; if the condi- 
 tion of Europe was not so terribly confused, 
 and if the most salient characteristics of human 
 nature were not elasticity, bluntness of imagi- 
 nation, and shortness of memory. Those of us 
 who, while affirming the principle of the League, 
 are afraid of committing ourselves to what 
 obviously cannot at the start be a perfect piece 
 of machinery, seem inclined to forget that if 
 the assembled Statesmen fail to place in run- 
 ning order, now, some definite machinery for 
 the consideration of international disputes, the 
 chance will certainly slip. We cannot reckon 
 on more than a very short time during which 
 the horror of war will rule our thoughts and 
 actions. And during that short time it is es- 
 sential that the League should have had some 
 tangible success in preventing war. Mankind 
 puts its faith in facts, not theories; in proven, 
 and not in problematic, success. One can 
 imagine with what profound suspicion and con- 
 tempt the armed individuaHsts of the Neolithic 
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 Age regarded the first organised tribunal; with 
 what surprise they found that it actually 
 worked so well that they felt justified in drop- 
 ping their habit of taking the lives and prop- 
 erty of their neighbours first and thinking over 
 it afterwards. Not till the Tribunal of the 
 League of Nations has had successes of con- 
 ciliation, visible to all, will the armed indi- 
 vidualist nations of to-day begin to rub their 
 cynical and suspicious eyes, and to sprinkle 
 their armour with moth-powder. No one who, 
 like myself, has recently experienced the sen- 
 sation of landing in America after having lived 
 in Europe throughout the war, can fail to re- 
 alise the reluctance of Americans to commit 
 themselves, and the difficulty Americans have 
 in reaHsing the need for doing so. But may I 
 remind Americans that during the first years 
 of the war there was practically the same gen- 
 eral American reluctance to interfere in an old- 
 world struggle; and that in the end America 
 found that it was not an old-world but a world- 
 struggle. It is entirely reasonable to dislike 
 snatching chestnuts out of the fire for other 
 people, and to shun departure from the letter 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 of cherished tradition; but things do not stand 
 stillin this world; storm centres shift; and live 
 doctrine often becomes dead dogma. 
 
 The League of Nations is but an incorpora- 
 tion of the co-operative principle in world 
 affairs. We have seen to what the lack of that 
 principle leads both in international and national 
 life. Americans seem almost unanimously in 
 favour of a League of Nations, so long as it is 
 sufficiently airy — ^perhaps one might say 'hot- 
 airy*; but when it comes to earth, many of 
 them fear the risk. I would only say that no 
 great change ever comes about in the Hves of 
 men unless they take risks; no progress can 
 be made. As to the other objection taken to 
 the League, not only by Americans — ^that it 
 won't work, well we shall never know the rights 
 of that unless we try it. The two chief fac- 
 tors in avoiding war are PubHcity and Delay. 
 If there is some better plan for bringing these 
 two factors into play than the machinery of a 
 League of Nations, I have yet to learn of it. 
 The League which, I think, will come in spite 
 of all our hesitations, may very likely make 
 claims larger than its real powers; and there is, 
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 of course, danger in that; but there is also 
 wisdom and advantage, for the success of the 
 League must depend enormously on how far 
 it succeeds in riveting the imaginations of man- 
 kind in its first years. The League should there- 
 fore make bold claims. After all, there is 
 solidity and truth in this notion of a Society of 
 Nations. The world is really growing towards 
 it beneath all surface rivalries. We must ad- 
 mit it to be in the line of natural development, 
 unless we turn our back on all analogy. Don't 
 then let us be ashamed of it, as if it were a 
 piece of unpractical ideaHsm. It is much more 
 truly real than the state of things which has 
 led to the misery of these last four years. The 
 soldiers who have fought and suffered and 
 known the horrors of war, desire it. The ob- 
 jections come from those who have but watched 
 them fight and suffer. Like every other change 
 in the life of mankind, and like every new de- 
 velopment in industry or art, the League needs 
 faith. Let us have faith and give it a good 
 'send-off.' 
 
 I have left what I deem the greatest new 
 factor till the last — ^Anglo-American unity. 
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TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 Greater it is even than the impetus towards a 
 League of Nations, because without it the 
 League of Nations has surely not the chance 
 of a lost dog. 
 
 I have been reading a Life of George Wash- 
 ington, which has filled me with admiration of 
 your stand against our Junkers of those days. 
 And I am familiar with the way we outraged 
 the sentiment of both the North and the South, 
 in the days of your Civil War. No wonder 
 your history books were not precisely Anglo- 
 phile, and that Americans grew up in a tradi- 
 tional dislike of Great Britain! I am reaUst 
 enough to know that the past will not vanish 
 like a ghost — ^just because we have fought side 
 by side in this war; and realist enough to recog- 
 nise the other elements which make for patches 
 of hearty dislike between our peoples. But, 
 surveying the whole field, I beHeve there are 
 Hnks and influences too strong for the disrup- 
 tive forces; and I am sure that the first duty 
 of English and American citizens to-day is to 
 be fair and open to understanding about each 
 other. If anyone will take down the map of 
 the world and study it, he will see at once how 
 105 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 that world is ballasted by the EngHsh-speaking 
 countries; how, so long as they remain friends, 
 holding as they do the trade routes and the 
 main material resources of the world under 
 their control, the world must needs sail on an 
 even keel. And if he will turn to the less visi- 
 ble chart of the world's mental quahties, he 
 will find a certain reassuring identity of ideals 
 between the various EngHsh-speaking races, 
 which form a sort of guarantee of stable unity. 
 Thirdly, in community of language we have a 
 factor promoting unity of ethics, potent as 
 blood itself; for community of language is ever 
 unconsciously producing unity of traditions and 
 ideas. Americans and Britons, we are both, of 
 course, very competitive peoples, and I sup- 
 pose consider our respective nations the chosen 
 people of the earth. That is a weakness which, 
 though natural, is extremely silly, and merely 
 proves that we have not yet outgrown pro- 
 vincialism. But competition is possible with- 
 out reckless rivalry. There was once a boot- 
 maker who put over his shop: 'Mens conscia 
 recti' ('A mind conscious of right'). He did 
 quite well, till a rival bootmaker came along, 
 106 
 
TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 established himself opposite, and put over his 
 shop the words: 'Men's, Women's, and Chil- 
 dren's conscia recti,' and did even better. The 
 way nations try to cut each other's commercial 
 throats is what makes the stars twinkle — ^that 
 smile on the face of the heavens. It has the 
 even more ruinous effect of making bad blood 
 in the veins of the nations. Let us try playing 
 the game of commerce like sportsmen, and re- 
 spect each other's quaHties and efforts. Sports- 
 manship has been rather ridiculed of late, yet 
 I dare make the assertion that she will yet hold 
 the field, both in your country and in mine; 
 and if in our countries — ^then in the world. 
 
 It is ignorance of each other, not knowledge, 
 which has always made us push each other off 
 — the habit, you know, is almost endemic in 
 strangers, so that they do it even in their sleep. 
 There were once two travellers, a very large 
 man and a very Httle man, strangers to each 
 other, whom fate condemned to share a bed at 
 an inn. In his sleep the big man stirred, and 
 pushed the Httle man out on to the floor. The 
 httle man got up in silence, climbed carefully 
 over the big man who was still asleep, got his 
 107 
 
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA 
 
 back against the wall and his feet firmly planted 
 against the small of the big man's back, gave a 
 tremendous revengeful push and — ^pushed the 
 bed away from the wall and fell down in be- 
 tween. Such is the imevenness of fate, and the 
 result of taking things too seriously. America 
 and England must not push each other out, even 
 in their sleep, nor resent the unconscious shoves 
 they give each other, too violently. Since we 
 have been comrades in this war we have taken 
 to speaking well of each other, even in public 
 print. To cease doing that now will show that 
 we spoke nicely of each other only because we 
 were afraid of the consequences if we did not. 
 Well, we both have a sense of humour. 
 
 But not only self-preservation and the fear 
 of ridicule guard our friendship. We have, I 
 hope, also the feeling that we stand, by geo- 
 graphical and poUtical accident, trustees for 
 the health and happiness of all mankind. The 
 magnitude of this trust cannot be exaggerated, 
 and I would wish that every American and 
 British boy and girl could be brought up to 
 reverence it — not to beHeve that they are there 
 to whip creation. We are here to serve crea- 
 108 
 
TALKING AT LARGE 
 
 tion, that creation may be ever better all over 
 the earth, and life more humane, more just, 
 more free. The habit of being charitable to 
 each other will grow if we give it a little chance. 
 If we EngHsh-speaking peoples bear with each 
 other's foibles, help each other over the stiles 
 we come on, and keep the peace of the world, 
 there is still hope that some day that world 
 may come to be God's own. 
 
 Let us be just and tolerant; let us stand fast 
 and stand together — for Hght and liberty, for 
 humanity and Peace ! 
 
 109 
 
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