V 
 
THE FUTURE I N 
 AMERICA, 
 
 A SEARCH AFTER REALITIES 
 
 BY 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 THE TIME MACHINE," "ANTICIPATIONS," "KIPPS, 
 AND "A MODERN UTOPIA" 
 
 r ff 
 ^SITY 
 
 Mt/FOR^] 
 
 LONDON 
 CHAPMAN &r HALL, LTD. 
 
 1906 
 
\ 5 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 C N T h IN "TS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND . . . 1 
 
 II. EN ROUTE . . .27 
 
 1 III. GROWTH INVINCIBLE ^ . . . . .49 
 
 IV. THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 91 
 
 V. SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH . 117 
 
 VI. CERTAIN WORKERS ...**.. 141 
 
 VII. CORRUPTION . / . ...<.. 159 
 
 VIII. THE IMMIGRANT . ., . - . ^. . . 183 
 
 IK. STATE-BLINDNESS . /. . . ^ . . .209 
 
 X. TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT . . 231 
 
 XI. THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR ^\ . ~. .257 
 
 XII. THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE . . % . 283 
 
 XIII. CULTURE 309 
 
 XIV. AT WASHINGTON . 327 
 
 THE ENVOY . 351 
 
 vii 
 
 I 5 ~7 ^ -a 3 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PEOPHETIC HABIT OF MIND 
 
 *- 
 
 1 
 
 [At a Writing-desk in Sandgate in April, 190 6. ,] 
 
 " AKE you a Polygamist ? " 
 
 " Are you an Anarchist ? " 
 
 The questions seem impertinent. They are 
 part of a long paper of interrogations I must 
 answer satisfactorily if I am to be regarded 
 as a desirable alien to enter the United States 
 of America. I want very much to pass that 
 great statue of Liberty illuminating the world 
 (from a central position in New York Harbour) 
 in order to see things in its light, to talk to 
 certain people, to anpreciate certain atmo 
 spheres, an $ist the provocation to 
 answer imperti I do not even volunteer 
 that I do nc d am a total abstainer, 
 on which po. Id seem, the States as 
 a whole still pen mind. I am full 
 
4 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 of curiosity about America, I am possessed 
 by a problem I feel I cannot adequately dis 
 cuss even with myself except over there,/ 
 and I must go though it be at the price of 
 coming to a decision upon the (theoretically) 
 open questions these two inquiries raise. 
 
 My problem, I know, will seem ridiculous 
 and monstrous when I give it in all its stark 
 disproportions attacked by me with my equip 
 ment, it will call up an image of an elephant 
 assailed by an ant who has not even mastered 
 Jiu-jiteu but at any rate I ve come to it in 
 a natural sort of way, and it is one I must, 
 fo^Hpiy own peace of mind, make some kind 
 of attempt upon, even if at last it means no 
 more than the ant crawling in an exploratory 
 way hither and thither over that vast, un 
 conscious carcass, and finally getting down 
 and going away. That may be rather good 
 for the ant, and the experience may be of 
 interest to other a .ts; ho 1 jesimal, 
 
 from the point of nt, the 
 
 final value of his : ^iga b ). - N And 
 
 this tremendous pi nd now 
 
 is this simply: What is going ppen to 
 
 the United States le next 
 
 thirty years or so 1 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 2 
 
 I do not know if the reader has ever 
 chanced upon any books or writings of mine 
 before, but if, what is highly probable, he has 
 not, he may be curious to know how it is that 
 any human being should be running about in 
 a state of mind so colossally interrogative. 
 (For even the present inquiry is by no means 
 my maximum limit.) And the explanation is 
 to be found a little in a mental idiosyncrasy 
 perhaps, but much more in the development of 
 a special way of thinking, of a habit of mind. 
 
 That habit of mind may be indicated by a 
 proposition that, with a fine air of discovery, 
 I threw out some years ago, in a happy 
 ignorance that I had been anticipated by no 
 less a person than Heraclitus. " There is no 
 Being but Becoming," that was what appeared 
 to my unscholarly mind to be almost trium 
 phantly new. } I have since then informed 
 myself more fully about Heraclitus ; there are 
 moments now when I more than half suspect 
 that all the thinking I shall ever do will simply 
 serve to illuminate my understanding of him ; 
 
6 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 but at any rate that apothegm of his does 
 exactly convey the intellectual attitude into 
 which I fall. / I am curiously not interested in 
 things, and curiously interested in the conse 
 quences of things. I wouldn t for the world 
 go to see the United States for what they are 
 if I had sound reason for supposing that the 
 entire Western Hemisphere was to be destroyed 
 next Christmas, I should not, I think, be 
 among the multitude that would rush for one 
 last look at that great spectacle. (From which 
 it follows naturally that I don t propose to see 
 Niagara.) I should much more probably turn 
 an inquiring visage eastward, with the west 
 so certainly provided for. I have come to be, 
 I am afraid, even a little insensitive to fine 
 immediate things through this anticipatory 
 habit. 
 
 This habit of mind confronts and perplexes 
 my sense of things that simply are y with my 
 brooding preoccupation with how they will 
 shape presently, what they will lead to, what 
 seed they will sow, and how they will wear. 
 At times, I can assure the reader, this quality 
 approaches other-worldliness, in its constant 
 reference to an all-important hereafter. There 
 are days, indeed, when it makes life seem so 
 transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 7 
 
 passing on to an equally transitory series of 
 consequences, that the enhanced sense of 
 instability becomes restlessness and distress; 
 but on the other hand nothing that exists, 
 nothing whatever, remains altogether vulgar 
 or dull and dead or hopeless in its light. But 
 the interest is shifted. The pomp and splen 
 dour of established order, the braying triumphs, 
 ceremonies, consummations, one sees these 
 glittering shows for what they are through 
 their threadbare grandeur shine the little 
 significant things that will make the future. . . . 
 
 And now that I am associating myself with 
 great names, let me discover that I find this 
 characteristic turn of mind of mine, not only 
 in Heraclitus, the most fragmentary of philo 
 sophers, but for one fine passage at any rate 
 in Mr. Henry James, the least fragmentary 
 of novelists. In his recent impressions of 
 America I find him apostrophizing the great 
 mansions of Fifth-avenue, in words quite after 
 my heart : 
 
 "It s all very well," he writes, "for you 
 to look as if, since you ve had no past, you re 
 going in, as the next best thing, for a magni 
 ficent compensatory future. What are you 
 going to make your future of, for all your airs, 
 we want to know ? What elements of a future, 
 
8 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 as futures have gone in the great world, are at 
 all assured to you ? " 
 
 I had already, when I read that, figured 
 myself as addressing, if not these particular 
 last triumphs of the fine Transatlantic art of 
 architecture, then at least America in general 
 in some such words. It is not unpleasant to 
 be anticipated by the chief master of one s 
 craft ; it is, indeed, when one reflects upon his 
 peculiar intimacy with this problem, enormously 
 reassuring ; and so I have very gladly annexed 
 his phrasing and put it here to honour and 
 adorn and in a manner to explain my own 
 enterprise. I have already studied some of 
 these fine buildings through the mediation of 
 an illustrated magazine they appear solid, 
 they appear wonderful and well done to the 
 highest pitch and before many days now I 
 shall, I hope, reconstruct that particular mo 
 ment, stand the latest admirer from England 
 regarding these portentous magnificences 
 from the same sidewalk will they call it ? 
 as my illustrious predecessor, and with his 
 question ringing in my mind all the louder 
 for their proximity and the invigoration of the 
 American atmosphere : " What are you going 
 to make your future of, for all your airs ? " 
 
 And then, I suppose, I shall return down 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 9 
 
 town to crane my neck at the Flat-iron Build 
 ing or the Times skyscraper, and ask all that, 
 too, an identical question. 
 
 3 
 
 Certain phases in the development of these 
 prophetic exercises one may perhaps be per 
 mitted to trace. 
 
 To begin with, C I remember that to me in 
 my boyhood speculation about the Future was 
 a monstrous joke. > Like most people of my 
 generation, I was launched into life with mil 
 lennial assumptions. This present sort of 
 thing, I believed, was going on for a time, 
 interesting personally, perhaps, but as a whole 
 inconsecutive, and then it might be in my 
 lifetime or a little after it there would be 
 trumpets and shoutings and celestial pheno 
 mena, a battle of Armageddon, and the Judg 
 ment. As I saw it, it was to be a strictly 
 protestant and individualistic judgment, each 
 soul upon its personal merits. To talk about 
 the Man of the Year Million was, of course, in 
 the face of this great conviction, a whimsical 
 
io THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 play of fancy. The year Million was just as 
 impossible, just as gaily nonsensical as fairy 
 land. . . . 
 
 I was a student of biology before I realized 
 that this, my finite and conclusive End, at least 
 in the material and chronological form, had 
 somehow vanished from the scheme of things. 
 In the place of it had come a blackness and 
 a vagueness about the endless vista of years 
 ahead, that was tremendous that terrified. 
 That is a phase in which lots of educated 
 people remain to this day. " All this scheme 
 of things, life, force, destiny, which began 
 not six thousand years, mark you, but an in 
 finity ago, that has developed out of such 
 strange, weird shapes and incredible first in 
 tentions, out of gaseous nebulas, carboniferous 
 swamps, saurian giantry, and arboreal apes, is 
 by the same tokens to continue, developing 
 into what ? " That was the overwhelming 
 riddle that came to me, with that realization 
 of an End averted, that has come now to most 
 of our world. 
 
 The phase that followed one s first helpless 
 stare of the mind was a wild effort to express 
 one s sudden apprehension of unlimited pos 
 sibility. One made fantastic exaggerations, 
 fantastic inversions of all recognized things. 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT n 
 
 Anything of this sort might come, anything of 
 any sort. The books about the future that 
 followed the first stimulus of the world s reali 
 zation of the implications of Darwinian science, 
 have all something of the monstrous experi 
 mental imaginings of children. I myself, in 
 my microcosmic way, duplicated my times. 
 Almost the first thing I ever wrote it survives 
 in an altered form as one of a bookful of essays 
 was of this type. " The Man of the Year 
 Million," was presented as a sort of pantomime 
 head and a shrivelled body, and years after 
 that, the " Time Machine," my first published 
 book, ran in the same vein. At that point, 
 at a brief astonished stare down the vistas of 
 time-to-come, at something between wonder 
 and amazed, incredulous, defeated laughter, 
 most people, I think, stop. But those who are 
 doomed to the prophetic habit of mind go on. 
 j(, The next phase, the third phase, is to 
 -" shorten the range of the outlook, to attempt 
 something a little more proximate than the 
 final destiny of man. One becomes more sys 
 tematic, one sets to work to trace the great 
 changes of the last century or so, and one 
 produces these in a straight line and accord 
 ing to the rule of three. If the maximum 
 velocity of land travel in 1800 was twelve 
 
12 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 miles an hour and in 1900 (let us say) sixty 
 miles an hour, then one concludes that in 
 2000 A.D. it will be three hundred miles an 
 hour. If the population of America in 1800 
 but I refrain from this second instance. In 
 that fashion one got out a sort of gigantesque 
 caricature of the existing world, everything 
 swollen to vast proportions and massive beyond 
 measure. In my case that phase produced a 
 book, " When the Sleeper Wakes," in which, 
 I am told by competent New Yorkers, that I, 
 starting with London, an unbiassed mind, this 
 rule-of-three method, and my otherwise unaided 
 imagination, produced something more like 
 Chicago than any other place wherein righteous 
 men are likely to be found. That I shall verify 
 in due course, but my present point is merely 
 that to write such a book is to discover how 
 thoroughly wrong is this all too obvious 
 method of enlarging the present. 
 
 One goes on therefore if one is to suc 
 cumb altogether to the prophetic habit to 
 a really " scientific " attack upon the future. 
 The " scientific " phase is not final, but it is 
 far more abundantly fruitful than its prede 
 cessors. One attempts a rude, wide analysis 
 of contemporary history, one seeks to clear 
 and detach operating causes and to work them 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 13 
 
 out, and so, combining this necessary set of 
 consequences with that, to achieve a synthetic 
 forecast in terms just as broad and general 
 and vague as the causes considered are few. 
 I made, it happens, an experiment in this 
 scientific sort of prophecy in a book called 
 " Anticipations," and I gave an altogether 
 excessive exposition and defence of it. I went 
 altogether too far in this direction in a lecture 
 to the Eoyal Institution, " The Discovery of 
 the Future," that survives in odd corners as a 
 pamphlet, and is to be found, like a scrap of 
 old newspaper in the roof gutter of a museum 
 in " Nature" (vol. Ixv. p. 326), and in the 
 Smithsonian Report (for 1902). Within certain 
 limits, however, I still believe this scientific 
 method is sound. It gives sound results in 
 many cases, results at any rate as sound as 
 those one gets from the "laws" of political 
 economy ; one can claim it really does effect 
 a sort of prophecy on the material side of life. 
 
 For example, it was obvious about 1899 
 that invention and enterprise were very busy 
 with the means of locomotion, and one could 
 deduce from that certain practically inevit 
 able consequences in the distribution of urban 
 populations. With easier, quicker means of 
 getting about there were endless reasons, 
 
i 4 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 hygienic, social, economic, why people should 
 move from the town centres towards their 
 peripheries, and very few why they should 
 not. The towns, one inferred therefore, would 
 get slacker, more diffused; the countryside 
 more urban. From that, from the spatial 
 widening of personal interests that ensued, 
 one could infer certain changes in the spirit 
 of local politics, and so one went on to a 
 number of fairly valid adumbrations. Then 
 again, starting from the practical supersession 
 in the long run of all unskilled labour by 
 machinery, one can work out with a fair 
 certainty many coming social developments, 
 and the broad trend of one group of influences 
 at least upon the moral attitude of the mass 
 of common people. In industry, in domestic 
 life again, one foresees a steady development 
 of complex appliances, .demanding, and indeed 
 in an epoch of frequently changing methods 
 forcing, a flexible understanding, versatility of 
 effort, a universal rising standard of education. 
 So, too, a study of military methods and 
 apparatus convinces one of the necessary 
 transfer of power in the coming century from 
 the ignorant and enthusiastic masses who 
 made the revolutions of the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries and won Napoleon his 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 15 
 
 wars, to any more deliberate, more intelligent 
 and more disciplined class that may possess 
 an organized purpose. But where will one 
 find that class ? There comes a question 
 that goes outside science, that takes one at 
 once into a field beyond the range of the 
 " scientific " method altogether. 
 
 So long as one adopts the assumptions 
 of the old political economist and assumes 
 men without idiosyncrasy, without prejudices, 
 without, as people say, wills of their own, so 
 long as one imagines a perfectly acquiescent 
 humanity that will always in the long run 
 under pressure liquefy and stream along the 
 line of least resistance to its own material 
 advantage, the business of prophecy is easy. 
 But from the first I felt distrust for that 
 facility in prophesying, I perceived that always 
 there lurked something, an incalculable opposi 
 tion to these mechanically-conceived forces, 
 in law, in usage and prejudice, in the poietic 
 power of exceptional individual men. I dis 
 covered for myself over again, the inseparable 
 nature of the two functions of the prophet. 
 In my " Anticipations," for example, I had 
 intended simply to work out and foretell, and 
 before I had finished I was in a fine full blast 
 of exhortation. 
 
1 6 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 That, by an easy transition, brought me 
 to the last stage in the life history of the 
 prophetic mind, as it is at present known to 
 me. One comes out on the other side of the 
 " scientific " method, into the large temper 
 ance, the valiant inconclusiveness, the released 
 creativeness of philosophy. Much may be 
 foretold as certain, much more as possible, 
 but the last decisions and the greatest de 
 cisions, lie in the hearts and wills of unique 
 incalculable men. { With itliem we have to 
 deal as our ultimate reality in all these matters, 
 and our methods have to be not " scientific " 
 at all for all the greater issues, the humanly- 
 important issues, but critical, literary, even 
 if you will artistic. Here insight is of 
 more account than induction and the percep 
 tion of fine tones than the counting of heads, 
 ^jcieyace deals with necessity, and necessity is 
 here but the firm ground on which our freedom 
 goes. One passes from affairs of predestination 
 to affairs of free-will. 
 
 This discovery spread at once beyond the 
 field of prophesying. The end, the aim, the 
 test of science, as a modern man understands 
 the word, is foretelling by means of "laws," 
 and my error in attempting a complete " scien 
 tific " forecast of human affairs arose in too 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 17^ 
 
 careless an assent to the ideas about me, anqi 
 from accepting uncritically such claims as thafc 
 history could be "scientific," and that ecot 
 nomics and sociology (for example) ar3 
 " sciences." Directly one gauges the fulle/r 
 implications of that uniqueness of individual s 
 Darwin s work has so permanently illuminated, 
 one passes beyond that. The ripened prophet 
 realizes Schopenhauer as, indeed, I find Pro 
 fessor Miinsterberg saying. " The deepest sense 
 of human affairs is reached," he writes, " when 
 we consider them not as appearances but deci 
 sions." There one has the same thing coming 
 to meet one from the psychological side. . . . 
 
 But my present business isn t to go into 
 this shadowy, metaphysical foundation world 
 on which our thinking rests, but to the 
 brightly-lit over world of America. This philo 
 sophical excursion is set here just^to prepare 
 the reader quite frankly for speculations and 
 to disabuse his mind of the idea that in writ 
 ing of the Future in America I m going to 
 write of houses a hundred stories high and 
 flying machines in warfare and things like 
 that. I am not going to America to work a 
 pretentious horoscope, to discover a Destiny, 
 but to find out what I can of what must needs 
 make that Destiny a great nation s Will. 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 4 
 
 JThe material factors in a nation s future 
 re subordinate factors, they present advan 
 tages, such as the easy access of the English 
 to coal and the sea, or disadvantages, such as 
 the icebound seaboard of the Eussians, but 
 these are the circumstances and not neces- 
 parily the rulers of its fate. ( The essential 
 factor in the destiny of a nation, as of a man 
 
 and of mankind, lies in the form of its Will, 
 
 \ 
 
 and /in the quality and quantity of its Will. 
 The drama of a nation s future, as of a man s, 
 lies in this conflict of its Will with what would 
 else be " scientifically " predictable, materially 
 inevitable. If the man, if the nation was an 
 automaton fitted with good average motives, 
 so and so, one could say exactly, would be 
 done. It s just where the thing isn t automatic 
 that our present interest comes in. 
 
 I might perhaps reverse the order of the 
 three aspects of will I have named, for mani 
 festly where the quantity of will is small, it 
 matters nothing what the form or quality. The 
 man or the people that wills feebly is the sport 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 19 
 
 of every circumstance, and there if anywhere 
 the scientific method holds truest, or even 
 altogether true. Do geographical positions or 
 mineral resources make for riches, then such 
 a people will grow insecurely and disastrously 
 rich. v Is an abundant prolific life at a low level 
 indicated, they will pullulate and suffer.\ If 
 circumstances make for a choice between com 
 fort and reproduction, your feeble people will 
 dwindle and pass ; if war, if conquest tempt 
 them, then they will turn from all preoccupa 
 tions and follow the drums. Little things 
 provoke their unstable equilibrium, to hostility, 
 to forgiveness. , . . 
 
 And be it noted that the quantity of will 
 in a nation is not necessarily determined by 
 adding up the wills of all its people. I am 
 told, and I am disposed to believe it, that the 
 Americans of the United States are a people 
 of great individual force of will; the clear strong 
 faces of many young Americans, something 
 almost Eoman in the faces of their statesmen 
 and politicians, a distinctive quality I detect 
 in such Americans as I have met, a quality of 
 sharply-cut determination even though it be 
 only about details and secondary things, that 
 one must rouse one s self to meet, inclines me 
 to give a provisional credit to that ; but how far 
 
20 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 does all this possible will-force aggregate to a 
 great national purpose ? what algebraically 
 does it add up to when this and that have 
 cancelled each other ? That may be a different 
 thing altogether. 
 
 { And next to this net quantity of will a 
 nation or people may possess, come the ques 
 tions of its quality, its flexibility, its conscious 
 ness, and intellectuality. A nation may be 
 full of will and yet inflexibly and disastrously 
 stupid in the expression of that will. There 
 was probably more will-power, more haughty 
 and determined self-assertion in the young 
 bull that charged the railway engine than in 
 several regiments of men, but it was, after 
 all, a low quality of will, with no method but 
 a violent and injudicious directness, and in 
 the end it was suicidal and futile. There, 
 again, is the substance for ramifying inquiries. 
 How subtle, how collected and patient, how far 
 capable of a long plan, is this American nation ? 
 Suppose it has a will so powerful and with such 
 resources that whatever simple end may be 
 attained by rushing upon it is America s for the 
 asking, there still remains the far more impor 
 tant question of the ends that are not obvious, 
 that are intricate and complex, and not to be 
 won by booms and cataclysms of effort. 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 21 
 
 An Englishman comes to think that most 
 of the permanent and precious things for which 
 a nation s effort goes are like that, and here, 
 too, I have an open mind and unsatisfied 
 cipiosities. 
 
 And, lastly, there is the form of the nation s 
 purpose. I have been reading what I can 
 find about that in books for some time, and 
 now I cross over the Atlantic more particu 
 larly for that, to question more or less openly 
 certain Americans, not only men and women, 
 but the mute expressive presences of house 
 and appliance, of statue, flag, and public 
 building, and the large collective visages of 
 crowds, what it is all up to, what it thinks it 
 is all after, how far it means to escape or 
 improve upon its purely material destinies ? I 
 want over there to find whatever consciousness 
 or vague consciousness of a common purpose 
 there may be, what is their Vision, their 
 American Utopia, how much Will there is 
 shaping to attain it, how much capacity goes 
 with the will what, in short, there is in 
 America, over and above the mere mechanical 
 consequences of scattering multitudes of ener 
 getic Europeans athwart a vast, healthy, pro 
 ductive and practically empty continent in 
 the temperate zone. There you have the 
 
22 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 terms of reference of an inquiry, that is, I 
 admit (as Mr. Morgan Kichards, the eminent 
 advertisement agent, would say), " mammoth 
 in character/ 
 
 5 
 
 The American reader may very reasonably 
 inquire at this point why an Englishman does 
 not begin with the future of his own country. 
 The answer is that this particular one has 
 done so, and that in many ways he has 
 found his intimacy and proximity a disad 
 vantage. One knows too much of the things 
 that seem to matter, and that ultimately 
 don t, one is full of misleading individual 
 instances intensely seen, one can t see the 
 wood for the trees. : One comes to America 
 at last, not only with the idea of seeing 
 America, but with something more than an 
 incidental hope of getting one s own England 
 there in the distance, and as a whole, for the 
 first time in one s life. And the problem of 
 America, from this side anyhow, has an air 
 of being simpler. For all the Philippine 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 23 
 
 adventure her future still seems to lie on 
 the .whole compactly in one continent, and 
 not as ours is, dispersed round and about the 
 habitable globe, strangely entangled with India, 
 with Japan, with Africa, and with the great 
 antagonism the Germans force upon us at 
 our doors. Moreover, one cannot look ten 
 years ahead in England without glancing 
 across the Atlantic. " There they are," we 
 say to one another, " those Americans ! They 
 speak our language, read our books, give us 
 books, share our mind. What we think still 
 goes into their heads in a measure, and their 
 thoughts run through our brains. What will 
 they be up to?" 
 
 Our future is extraordinarily bound up in 
 America s, and, in a sense, dependent upon 
 it. It is not that we dream very much of 
 political reunions of Anglo- Saxondom and the 
 like. So long as we British retain our wide 
 and accidental sprawl of empire about the earth 
 we cannot expect or desire the Americans to 
 share our stresses and entanglements. Our 
 Empire has its own adventurous and perilous 
 outlook. But our civilization is a different 
 thing from our Empire, a thing that reaches 
 out further into the future, that will be going 
 on when the whole political map of the world 
 
24 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 has been changed beyond recognition. Because 
 of our common language, of our common tradi 
 tions, Americans are a part of our community, 
 are becoming, indeed, the larger part of our 
 community of thought and feeling and outlook 
 in a sense far more intimate than any link we 
 have with Hindoo or Copt or Cingalee. The 
 common Englishman has an almost pathetic 
 pride and sense of proprietorship in the States ; 
 he is fatally ready to fall in with the idea that 
 two nations that shared their past, that still, 
 a little restively, share one language, may even 
 contrive to share an infinitely more interesting 
 future. Even if he does not chance to be an 
 American now, his grandson may be. America 
 is his inheritance, his reserved accumulating 
 investment. In that sense, indeed, America 
 belongs to the whole western world, all Europe 
 owns her promise, but to the Englishman the 
 sense of participation is intense. " We did it," 
 he will tell of the most American of achieve 
 ments, of the settlement of the middle west 
 for example, and this is so far justifiable that 
 numberless men, myself included, are English 
 men, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, 
 instead of being Americans, by the merest acci 
 dents of life. My father still possesses the 
 stout oak box he had had made to emigrate 
 
THE PROPHETIC HABIT 25 
 
 withal, everything was arranged that would 
 have got me and my brothers born across the 
 ocean, and only the coincidence of a business 
 opportunity and an illness of my mother s, 
 arrested that. It was so near a thing as that 
 with me, which prevents my blood from boiling 
 with patriotic indignation instead of patriotic 
 solicitude at the frequent sight of red-coats as 
 I see them from my study window going to 
 and fro to Shorncliffe camp. . . . 
 
 By the accidents that delayed that box it 
 comes about that if I want to see what America 
 is up to, I have among other things to buy a 
 Baedeker and a steamer ticket and fill up the 
 inquiring blanks in this remarkable document 
 before me, the long string of questions that 
 begins : 
 
 " Are you a Polygamist ? " 
 
 "Are you an Anarchist ?" 
 
 Here I gather is one little indication of the 
 great Will I am going to study. It would 
 seem that the United States of America regard 
 Anarchy and Polygamy with aversion, regard, 
 indeed, Anarchists and Polygamists as creatures 
 unfit to mingle with the already very various 
 eighty million of citizens who constitute their 
 sovereign powers, and on the other hand hold 
 these creatures so inflexibly honourable as 
 
26 THE PROPHETIC HABIT 
 
 certainly to tell these damning truths about 
 themselves in this matter. . . . 
 
 It s a little odd. One has a second or so 
 of doubt about the quality of that particular 
 manifestation of will. 
 
EN ROUTE 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 EN EOUTE 
 1 
 
 WHEN one talks to an American of his national 
 purpose he seems a little at a loss; if one 
 speaks of his national destiny, he responds with 
 alacrity. I make this generalization on the 
 usual narrow foundations, but so the impression 
 comes to me. 
 
 Until this present generation, indeed until 
 within a couple of decades, it is not very 
 evident that Americans did envisage any 
 national purpose at all, except in so far as 
 there was a certain solicitude not to be cheated 
 out of an assured destiny. A sort of optimistic 
 fatalism possessed them. They had, and mostly 
 it seems they still have, a tremendous sense 
 of sustained and assured growth, and it is not 
 altogether untrue that one is told I have 
 been told such things as that " America 
 is a great country, sir," that its future is 
 
30 EN ROUTE 
 
 gigantic, and that it is already (and going to 
 be more and more so) the greatest country 
 on earth. 
 
 I am not the sort of Englishman who 
 questions that. I do regard that much as so 
 ohvious and true that it seems to me even a 
 little undignified, as well as a little over 
 bearing, for Americans to insist upon it so ; I 
 try to go on as soon as possible to the 
 question just how my interlocutor shapes that 
 gigantic future, and what that world pre 
 dominance is finally to do for us in England 
 and all about the world. I have sought this 
 in books, in papers and speeches and conver 
 sation, and now I am going to look for it in 
 America itself. So far, I must insist, I haven t 
 found anything like an idea. At the most, 
 one finds vague imaginings that correspond 
 to that first or monstrous stage in the scheme 
 of prophetic development I sketched in my 
 opening. 
 
 There is often no more than a volley of 
 rhetorical blank cartridge. So empty is it of 
 all but sound, that I have usually been con 
 strained by civility from going on to a third 
 inquiry : 
 
 " And what are you, sir, doing in particular, 
 to assist and enrich this magnificent and quite 
 
EN ROUTE 31 
 
 indefinable Destiny of which you so evidently 
 feel yourself a part? . . ." 
 
 That seems to be really no unjust render 
 ing of the conscious element of the American 
 outlook as one finds it, for example, in these 
 nice-looking and pleasant - mannered fellow- 
 passengers upon the Carmania, upon whom 
 I fasten with leading questions and experi 
 mental remarks. One exception I discover, a 
 New York clubman who has doubts. The 
 discipline and efficiency of Germany has 
 laid hold upon him. He seems to be, in 
 contrast with his fellow - countrymen as I 
 have seen them hitherto, almost pessimisti 
 cally aware that the American ship of 
 State is after all a mortal ship and liable to 
 leakages. There are certain problems and 
 dangers, he seems to think, may delay, per 
 haps even prevent, an undamaged arrival 
 in that predestined port, that port too re 
 splendent for the eye to rest upon ; a Chinese 
 peril, he thinks, has not been finally dealt 
 with, " race suicide " is not arrested for all 
 that it is scolded in a most valiant and virile 
 manner, and there are adverse possibilities in 
 the immigrant, the black, the Socialist, against 
 which he sees no guarantees. He sees huge 
 danger in the development and organization of 
 
32 EN ROUTE 
 
 the new finance, and no clear promise of a 
 remedy. He finds the closest parallel between 
 the American Kepublic and Kome before the 
 coming of Imperialism. 
 
 But these other Americans have no share 
 in his pessimism. They may confess to as 
 much as he does in the way of dangers, admit 
 there are occasions for caulking, a need of 
 stopping quite a number of possibilities if the 
 American Idea is to make its triumphant entry 
 at last into that port of blinding accomplish 
 ment, but, apart from a few necessary pre 
 ventive proposals, I do not perceive any 
 extensive sense of anything whatever to be 
 done, anything to be shaped and thought out 
 and made in the sense of a national determina 
 tion to a designed and specified end. 
 
 2 
 
 There are, one must admit, tremendous 
 justifications for the belief in a sort of auto 
 matic ascent of America to unprecedented 
 magnificences, an ascent so automatic that 
 indeed one needn t bother in the slightest to 
 keep the whole thing going. 
 
EN ROUTE 33 
 
 For example, consider this last year s last- 
 word in ocean travel in which I am crossing, 
 the Carmania, with its unparalleled steadfast 
 ness, its racing tireless great turbines, its vast 
 population of 3244 souls ! It has, on the 
 whole, a tremendous effect of having come 
 by fate and its own forces. One forgets that 
 any one planned it, much of it indeed has so 
 greatly the quality of moving, as the planets 
 move, in the very nature of things. You go 
 aft and sett -the wake tailing away across the 
 blue ridges ; you go forward and see the cleft 
 water lift protestingly, roll back in an indignant 
 crest, own itself beaten, and go pouring by 
 in great foaming waves on either hand ; you 
 see nothing, you hear nothing of the toiling 
 engines, the reeking stokers, the effort and the 
 stress below; you beat west and west, as 
 the sun does, and it might seem with nearly 
 the same independence of any living man s 
 help or opposition. Equally so does it seem 
 this great gleaming confident thing of power 
 and metal came inevitably out of the past, 
 and will lead on to still more shining, still 
 swifter and securer monsters in the future. 
 
 One sees in a perspective of history, first 
 the little cockleshells of Columbus, the comings 
 and goings of the precarious Tudor adventurers, 
 
 D 
 
34 EN ROUTE 
 
 the slow uncertain shipping of colonial days. 
 Says Sir George Trevelyan in the opening of 
 his "American Revolution/ that then it is 
 still not a century and a half ago ! 
 
 " A man bound for New York, as he sent 
 his luggage on board at Bristol, would willingly 
 have compounded for a voyage lasting as many 
 weeks as it now lasts days. . . . Adams, during 
 the height of the war, hurrying to France in 
 the finest frigate Congress could place at his 
 disposal . . . could make no better speed than 
 five and forty days between Boston and Bor 
 deaux. Lord Carlisle . . . was six weeks be 
 tween port and port; tossed by gales which 
 inflicted on his brother Commissioners agonies 
 such as he forebore to make a matter of joke 
 even to George Selwyn. . . . How humbler 
 individuals fared. . . . They would be kept 
 waiting weeks on the wrong side of the water 
 for a full complement of passengers, and weeks 
 more for a fair wind, and then beating across 
 in a badly-found tub with a cargo of millstones 
 and old iron rolling about below, they thought 
 themselves lucky if they came into harbour 
 a month after their private store of provisions 
 had run out, and carrying a budget of news 
 as stale as the ship s provisions." 
 
EN ROUTE 35 
 
 3 
 
 Even in the time of Dickens things were 
 by no measure more than halfway better. I 
 have with me to enhance my comfort by this 
 aided retrospect his " American Notes." His 
 crossing lasted eighteen days, and his boat 
 was that " far-famed American steamer, 7 the 
 Britannia (the first of the long succession of 
 Cunarders, of which this Carmania is the 
 latest) ; his return took fifty days, and was 
 a jovial home-coming under sail. It s the 
 journey out gives us our contrast. He had 
 the " state room 7 of the period, and very 
 unhappy he was in it, as he testifies in a 
 characteristically mounting passage : 
 
 " That this state room had been specially 
 engaged for Charles Dickens, Esquire, and 
 Lady, 7 was rendered sufficiently clear even 
 to my scared intellect by a very small 
 manuscript, announcing the fact, which was 
 pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very 
 thin mattress, spread like a surgical plaster 
 on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this 
 was the state room, concerning which Charles 
 
36 EN ROUTE 
 
 Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, had held daily 
 and nightly conferences for at least four 
 months preceding; that this could by any 
 possibility be that small snug chamber of 
 the imagination, which Charles Dickens, 
 Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy strong 
 upon him, had always foretold would contain 
 at least one little sofa, and which his lady, 
 with a modest, yet most magnificent sense 
 of its limited dimensions, had from the first 
 opined would not hold more than two 
 enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner 
 out of sight (portmanteaus which could now 
 no more be got in at the door, not to say 
 stowed away, than a giraffe could be per 
 suaded or forced into a flower-pot) ; that 
 this utterly impracticable, thoroughly pre 
 posterous box, had the remotest reference to, 
 or connection with, those chaste and pretty 
 bowers, sketched in a masterly hand, in the 
 highly varnished, lithographic plan, hanging 
 up in the agent s counting-house in the city 
 of London ; that this room of state, in short, 
 could be anything but a pleasant fiction and 
 cheerful jest of the captain s, invented and 
 put in practice for the better relish and 
 enjoyment of the real state room presently 
 to be disclosed; these were the truths which 
 
EN ROUTE 37 
 
 I really could not bring my mind at all to 
 bear upon or comprehend." 
 
 So he preludes his two weeks and a half 
 of vile weather in this paddle boat of the 
 Middle Ages (she carried a " formidable " 
 multitude of no less than eighty-six saloon 
 passengers), and goes on to describe such 
 experiences as this : 
 
 " About midnight we shipped a sea, which 
 forced its way through the skylights, burst 
 open the doors above, and came raging and 
 roaring down into the ladies cabin, to the 
 unspeakable consternation of my wife and a 
 little Scotch lady. . . . They, and the hand 
 maid before mentioned, being in such ecstasies 
 of fear that I scarcely knew what to do with 
 them, I naturally bethought myself of some 
 restorative or comfortable cordial ; and, nothing 
 better occurring to me, at the moment, than 
 hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumber- 
 full without delay. It being impossible to 
 stand or sit without holding on, they were 
 all heaped together in one corner of a long 
 sofa a fixture extending entirely across the 
 cabin where they clung to each other in 
 momentary expectation of being drowned. 
 When I approached this place with my specific, 
 and was about to administer it with many 
 
38 EN ROUTE 
 
 consolatory expressions, to the nearest sufferer, 
 what was my dismay to see them all roll 
 slowly down to the other end! and when I 
 staggered to that end, and held out the glass 
 once more, how immensely baffled were my 
 good intentions by the ship giving another 
 lurch, and their rolling back again ! I suppose 
 I dodged them up and down this sofa for at 
 least a quarter of an hour, without reaching 
 them once; and by the time I did catch 
 them the brandy-and-water was diminished, 
 by constant spilling, to a teaspoonful. To 
 complete the group, it is necessary to recognize 
 in this disconcerted dodger an individual very 
 pale from sea-sickness, who had shaved his 
 beard and brushed his hair last at Liverpool, 
 and whose only articles of dress (linen not 
 included) were a pair of dreadnought trousers, 
 a blue jacket, formerly admired upon the 
 Thames at Bibhmond, no stockings, and one 
 slipper. " 
 
EN ROUTE 39 
 
 4 
 
 It gives one a momentary sense of supe 
 riority to the great master to read that. One 
 surveys one s immediate surroundings and 
 compares them with his. One says almost 
 patronizingly : " Poor old Dickens, you know, 
 really did have too awful a time ! " The 
 waves are high now, and getting higher, dark 
 blue waves foam-crested; the waves haven t 
 altered except relatively hut one isn t even 
 sea-sick. At the most there are squeamish 
 moments for the weaker brethren. One looks 
 down on these long, white-crested undulations, 
 thirty feet or so of rise and fall, as one looks 
 down the side of a skyscraper into a tumult 
 in the street. 
 
 We displace thirty thousand tons of water 
 instead of twelve hundred, we can carry five 
 hundred and twenty-one first and second class 
 passengers^ a crew of four hundred and sixty- 
 three, and two thousand two hundred and 
 sixty emigrants below. . . , 
 
 We re a city rather than a ship, our funnels 
 go up over the height of any reasonable church 
 
40 EN ROUTE 
 
 spire, and you need walk the main deck from 
 end to end and back only four times to do a 
 mile. Any one who has been to London and 
 seen Trafalgar Square will get our dimensions 
 perfectly when he realizes that we should only 
 squeeze into that finest site in Europe, diago 
 nally, dwarfing the National Gallery, St. Mar 
 tin s Church, hotels, and every other building 
 there out of existence, our funnels towering 
 five feet higher than Nelson on his column. 
 As one looks down on it all from the boat 
 deck one has a social microcosm, we could set 
 up as a small modern country and renew civi 
 lization even if the rest of the world was 
 destroyed. We ve the plutocracy up here, 
 there s a middle-class on the second-class deck, 
 and forward a proletariat the proles much in 
 evidence complete. It s possible to go slum 
 ming aboard. . . . We have our daily paper, 
 too, printed aboard, with all the latest news 
 by marconigram. . . . 
 
 Never was anything of this sort before, 
 never. Caligula s shipping, it is true (unless 
 it was Constantine s), did, as Mr. Cecil Torr 
 testifies, hold a world record until the nine 
 teenth century, and he quotes Pliny for thirteen 
 hundred tons outdoing the Britannia and 
 Moschion for cabins and baths and covered 
 
EN ROUTE 41 
 
 vine-shaded walks and plants in pots. But 
 from 1840 onward we have broken away into 
 a new scale for life. This Carmania isn t the 
 largest ship nor the finest, nor is it to be the 
 last. Greater ships are to follow and greater. 
 The scale of size, the scale of power, the speed 
 and dimensions of things about us alter re 
 morselessly to some limit we cannot at pre 
 sent descry. 
 
 5 
 
 It is the development of such things as this, 
 it is this dramatically abbreviated perspective 
 from those pre-Eeformation caravels to the 
 larger, larger, larger of this present vessel, and 
 a thousand other -kindred and parallel perspec 
 tives one must blame for one s illusion. One 
 is led unawares to believe that this something 
 called Progress is a natural and necessary and 
 secular process, going on without the definite 
 will of man, carrying us on quite independently 
 of us ; one is led unawares to forget that it is 
 after all from the historical point of view only 
 a sudden universal jolting forward in history, 
 
42 EN ROUTE 
 
 an affair of two centuries at most, a process 
 for the continuance of which we have no sort 
 of guarantee. Most Western Europeans have 
 this delusion of automatic progress in things 
 badly enough, but, with Americans it seems to 
 be almost fundamental. It is their theory of 
 the Cosmos, and they no more think of inquir 
 ing into the sustaining causes of the progres 
 sive movement than they would into the 
 character of the stokers hidden away from us 
 in the great thing somewhere the officers 
 alone know where. 
 
 I ana happy to find this blind confidence 
 very well expressed, for example, in an illus 
 trated magazine article by Mr. Edgar Saltus, 
 " New York from the Flat-iron," that a friend 
 has put in my hand to prepare me for the 
 wonders to come. Mr. Saltus writes with an 
 eloquent joy of his vision of Broadway below, 
 Broadway that is now, " barring trade routes, 
 the largest commercial stretch on this planet 
 (so late as Dickens s visit it was scavenged 
 by roving untended herds of gaunt, brown, 
 black-blotched pigs), of lower Fifth Avenue and 
 upper Fifth Avenue, of Madison Square and 
 its tower, of skyscrapers and skyscrapers 
 and skyscrapers round and about the horizon. 
 (I am to have a tremendous view of them 
 
FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 
 
EN ROUTE 43 
 
 to-morrow as we steam up from the Narrows.) 
 And thus Mr. Saltus proceeds : 
 
 "As you lean and gaze from the toppest 
 floors on houses below, which, from those 
 floors, seem huts, it may occur to you that 
 precisely as these huts were once regarded as 
 supreme achievements, so, one of these days, 
 from other and higher floors, the Flat-iron may 
 seem a hut itself. Evolution has not halted. 
 Undiscernably, but indefatigably, always it is 
 progressing. Its final term is not existing 
 buildings, nor in existing man. If humanity 
 sprang from gorillas, from humanity gods shall 
 proceed. * 
 
 The rule of three in excelsis ! 
 
 " The story of Olympus is merely a tale of 
 what might have been. That which might 
 have been may yet come to pass. Even now, 
 could the old divinities, hushed for evermore, 
 awake, they would be perplexed enough to see 
 how mortals have exceeded them. ... In 
 Fifth-avenue inns they could get fairer fare 
 than ambrosia, and behold women beside whom 
 Venus herself would look provincial and Juno 
 a frump. The spectacle of electricity tamed 
 and domesticated would surprise them not a 
 little, the Elevated quite as much, the Flat-iron 
 still more. At sight of the latter they would 
 
44 EN ROUTE 
 
 recall the Titans with whom once they warred, 
 and sink to their sun-red seas outfaced. 
 
 "In this same measure we have succeeded 
 in exceeding them, so will posterity surpass 
 what we have done. Evolution may be slow; 
 it achieved an unrecognized advance when it 
 devised buildings such as this." 
 
 Mr. Saltus writes, I think, with a very 
 typical American accent. Most Americans 
 think like that, and all of them, I fancy, feel 
 like it. Just in that spirit a later empire 
 Eoman might have written apropos the gigantic 
 new basilica of Consfcantine the Great (who was 
 also, one recalls, a record breaker in shipbuild 
 ing), and have compared it with the straitened 
 proportions of Caasar s Forum and the meagre 
 relics of republican Eome. So, too (dbsit omen), 
 he might have swelled into prophecy and 
 sounded the true modern note. 
 
 One hears that modern note everywhere 
 nowadays where print spreads, but from 
 America with fewer undertones than anywhere. 
 Even I find it, ringing clear, as a thing 
 beyond disputing, as a thing as self-evident 
 as sunrise, again and again in the expressed 
 thought of Mr. Henry James. 
 
EN ROUTE 45 
 
 6 
 
 But you know this progress isn t guaran 
 teed. We have, indeed, been carried away 
 completely by the up-rush of it all. To me 
 now this Carmania seems to typify the whole 
 thing. What matters it if there are moments 
 when one reflects on the mysterious smallness, 
 and it would seem, the ungrowing quality of 
 the human content of it ? We are, after all, 
 astonishingly like flies on a machine that has 
 got loose. No matter! Those people on the 
 main deck are the oddest crowd, strange 
 Oriental-looking figures with Astrakhan caps, 
 hook-noses, shifty eyes, and indisputably dirty 
 habits, bold-eyed, red-capped, expectorating 
 women, quaint and amazingly dirty children; 
 Tartars there are, too, and Cossacks, queer 
 wraps, queer head-dresses, a sort of greasy 
 picturesqueness over them all. Their deck is 
 disgusting with fragments of food, with egg 
 shells they haven t had the decency to throw 
 overboard. They use a handkerchief as a 
 head - covering. Collectively they have an 
 atmosphere. They re going where we re going, 
 wherever that is. What matters it? What 
 
46 EN ROUTE 
 
 matters it, too, if these people about me in 
 this artistic apartment, talking nothing but 
 trivialities derived from the Daily Bulletin, 
 thinking nothing but trivialities, are, except 
 in their capacity of paying passengers, the 
 most ineffectual gathering of human beings 
 conceivable ? What matters it that there is 
 no connexion, no understanding whatever 
 between them and that large and ominous 
 crowd a yard or so under our feet ? Or 
 between themselves for the matter of that. 
 What matters it if nobody seems to be struck 
 by the fact that we are all, the three thousand 
 two hundred of us, so extraordinarily got 
 together into this tremendous machine, and 
 that not only does nobody seem to inquire 
 what it is has got us together in this 
 astonishing fashion and why, but that nobody 
 seems to feel that we are together in any sort 
 of way at all? One looks up at the smoke- 
 pouring funnels and back at the foaming wake. 
 It will be all right. Aren t we driving ahead 
 westward at a pace of 450 miles a day? 
 
 And twenty or thirty thousand other souls 
 similarly mixed and stratified, on great 
 steamers ahead of us, or behind, are driving 
 westward too. That there s no collective mind 
 apparent in it at all, worth speaking about, 
 
EN ROUTE 47 
 
 is so much the better. That only shows 
 it s Destiny, it s Progress, as inevitable as 
 gravitation. 
 
 I could almost believe it, as I sit quietly 
 writing here by a softly-shaded light in this 
 elegantly appointed drawing-room, as steady 
 as though I was in my native habitat on dry 
 land instead of hurrying almost fearfully, at 
 twenty knots an hour, over a tumbling empty 
 desert of blue waves under a windy sky. But, 
 only a little while ago, I was out forward 
 alone, looking at that. Everything was still 
 except for the remote throbbing of the engines 
 and the nearly effaced sound of a man sing 
 ing in a strange tongue, that came from the 
 third-class gangway far below. The sky was 
 clear, save for a few black streamers of clouds, 
 Orion hung very bright and large above the 
 waters, and a very large new moon, still 
 visibly holding its dead predecessor in its 
 crescent, sank near him. Between the sparse 
 great stars were deep blue spaces, unfathomed 
 distances. 
 
 Out there I had been reminded of space 
 and time. Out there this ship was just a 
 hastening ephemeral firefly that had chanced 
 to happen across the eternal tumult of the 
 winds and sea. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 GBOWTH INVINCIBLE 
 1 
 
 MY first impressions of New York are enor 
 mously to enhance the effect of this Progress, 
 this material progress that is to say, as some 
 thing inevitable and inhuman, as a blindly 
 furious energy of growth that must go on. 
 Against the broad and level grey contours of 
 Liverpool one found the ocean liner portent 
 ously tall, but here one steams into the middle 
 of a town that dwarfs the ocean liner. The 
 skyscrapers that are the New Yorkers perpetual 
 boast and pride, rise up to greet one as one 
 comes through the Narrows into the Upper 
 Bay, stand out in a clustering group of tall, 
 irregular crenellations, the strangest crown 
 that ever a city wore. They have a n effect 
 of immense incompleteness, each one seems to 
 await some needed terminal, to be, by virtue 
 of its woolly jets of steam, still as it were in 
 
 ^ o 
 
 I 
 
52 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 process of eruption. One thinks of Saint 
 Peter s great blue dome, finished and done, 
 as one saw it from a vine-shaded wine booth 
 above the Milvian Bridge ; one thinks of the 
 sudden ascendency of St. Paul s dark grace, as 
 it soars out over any one who comes up by 
 the Thames towards it. These are efforts that 
 have accomplished their ends, and even Paris 
 illuminated under the tall stem of the Eiffel 
 Tower looked completed and defined. But 
 New York s achievement is a threatening 
 promise, growth going on under a pressure 
 that increases, and amidst a hungry uproar of 
 effort. 
 
 One gets a measure of the quality of this 
 force of mechanical, of inhuman growth, as 
 one marks the great statue of Liberty on our 
 larboard, which is meant to dominate and fails 
 absolutely to dominate the scene. It gets to 
 about three hundred feet, by standing on a 
 pedestal of a hundred and fifty, and the uplifted 
 torch, seen against the sky, suggests an arm 
 straining upward, straining in hopeless com 
 petition with the fierce commercial altitudes 
 ahead. Poor liberating Lady of the American 
 ideal! One passes her and forgets. 
 
 Happy returning natives greet the great 
 pillars of business by name, the Saint Paul 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 53 
 
 building, the World, the Manhattan tower;/ the 
 English new-comer notes the clear emphasis of 
 the detail, the freedom from smoke and atmo 
 spheric mystery that New York gains from 
 burning anthracite, the jetting white steam 
 clouds that emphasize that freedom. Across 
 the broad harbour plies an unfamiliar traffic of 
 grotesque wide ferry-boats, black with people, 
 glutted to the lips with vans and carts, each 
 hooting and yelping its own distinctive note, 
 and there is a wild hurrying up and down and 
 to and fro of tugs and barges, piping and bellow 
 ing. A floating platform bearing a railway 
 train gets athwart our course as we ascend, and 
 evokes megatherial bellowings. Everything is 
 moving at a great speed and whistling and 
 howling it seems, and presently far ahead we 
 make out our own pier, black with expectant 
 people, and set up our own distinctive whoop, 
 and with the help of half a dozen furiously 
 noisy tugs are finally lugged and butted into 
 dock. The tugs converse by yells and whistles, 
 it is an affair of short-tempered mechanical 
 monsters, amidst which one watches for one s 
 opportunity to get ashore. 
 
 Noise and human hurry and a vastness of 
 means and collective result, rather than any 
 vastness of achievement, is the pervading 
 
54 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 quality of New York. The great thing is 
 the mechanical thing, the unintentional thing 
 which is speeding up all these people, driving 
 them in headlong hurry this way and that, 
 exhorting them by the voice of every car con 
 ductor to "step lively," aggregating them 
 into shoving and elbowing masses, making 
 them stand clinging to straps, jerking them 
 up elevator shafts, and pouring them on to 
 ferry-boats. But this accidental great thing 
 is at times a very great thing. Much more 
 impressive than the skyscrapers, to my mind, 
 is the large Brooklyn Suspension Bridge. I 
 have never troubled to ask who built that, 
 its greatness is not in its design, but in the 
 quality of necessity one perceives in its in 
 animate immensity. It tells, as one goes 
 under it up the East Eiver, but it is far more 
 impressive to the stranger to come upon it 
 by glimpses, wandering down to it through 
 the ill-paved, van-infested little streets from 
 Chatham Square. One sees parts of Cyclopean 
 stone arches, one gets suggestive glimpses 
 through the jungle growth of business, now 
 of the back, now of the flanks of the monster, 
 then as one comes out on the river one dis 
 covers, far up in one s sky, the long sweep 
 of the bridge itself, foreshortened and with 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 55 
 
 a maximum of perspective effect ; the streams 
 of pedestrians and the long line of carts and 
 vans quaintly microscopic against the blue, 
 the creeping progress of the little cars in the 
 lower edge of the long chain of netting; all 
 these things dwindling indistinguishably be 
 fore Brooklyn is reached. Thence, if it is 
 late afternoon, one may walk back to City 
 Hall Park and encounter and experience the 
 convergent stream of clerks and workers 
 making for the bridge, mark it grow denser 
 and denser until at last they come near chok 
 ing even the broad approaches of the giant 
 duct, until the congested multitudes jostle and 
 fight for a way. They arrive marching afoot 
 by every street in endless processions; crammed 
 trolley-cars disgorge them, the subway pours 
 them out. . , . The individuals count for 
 nothing, they are clerks and stenographers, 
 shopmen, shop-girls, workers of innumerable 
 types, black-coated men, hat and blouse girls, 
 shabby and cheaply-clad persons, such as one 
 sees in London, in Berlin, anywhere. Perhaps 
 they hurry more, perhaps they seem more 
 eager. But the distinctive effect is the mass, 
 the black torrent, rippled with unmeaning faces, 
 the great, the unprecedented multitudinousness 
 of the thing, the inhuman force of it all. 
 
56 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 I made no effort to present any of my 
 letters, or to find any one to talk to on my 
 first day in New York. I landed, got a 
 casual lunch, and wandered alone until New 
 York s peculiar effect of inhuman noise and 
 pressure and growth became overwhelming, 
 touched me with a sense of solitude, and 
 drove me into the hospitable companionship 
 of the Century Club. Oh, no doubt of New 
 York s immensity ! The sense of soulless, 
 gigantic forces, that took no heed of men, 
 became stronger and stronger/ all that day. 
 The pavements were often almost incredibly 
 out of repair; when I became foot weary, the 
 street cars would not wait for me, and I 
 had to learn their stopping points as best I 
 might. I wandered, just at the right pitch 
 of fatigue to get the full force of it, into the 
 eastward region between Bast Broadway and 
 Fourth Avenue, came upon the Elevated 
 Eailway at its worst, the darkened streets of 
 disordered paving below, trolley-car congested, 
 the ugly clumsy lattice, sonorously busy over 
 head, a clatter of vans and draught horses 
 and great crowds of cheap base-looking people 
 hurrying uncivilly by. ... 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 57 
 
 2 
 
 I corrected that first crowded impression 
 of New York with a clearer brighter vision 
 of expansiveness when next day I began to 
 realize the quality of New York s central 
 backbone, between Fourth Avenue and Sixth. 
 The effect remained still that of an immeasur 
 ably powerful forward movement of rapid 
 eager advance, a process of enlargement and 
 increment in every material sense, but, it 
 may be because I was no longer fatigued, 
 was now a little initiated, the human being 
 seemed less of a fly upon the wheels. I 
 visited immense and magnificent clubs 
 London has no such splendours as the Union, 
 the University, the new hall of the Harvard 
 I witnessed the great torrent of spending and 
 glittering prosperity in carriage and motor 
 car pour along Fifth Avenue. I became aware 
 of effects that were not only vast and opulent, 
 but fine. It grew upon me that the twentieth 
 century which found New York brown stone 
 of the colour of desiccated chocolate, meant 
 to leave it a city of white and coloured 
 
58 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 marble. I found myself agape, admiring a 
 skyscraper the prow of the Hat-iron build 
 ing, to be particular, ploughing up through 
 the traffic of Broadway and Fifth Avenue in 
 the afternoon light. The New York sundown 
 and twilight seemed to me quite glorious 
 things. Down the western streets one gets 
 the sky hung in long cloud-barred strips, like 
 Japanese paintings, celestial tranquil yellows 
 and greens and pink luminosity toning down 
 to the reeking blue brown edge of the distant 
 New Jersey atmosphere, and the clear black 
 hard activity of crowd and trolley-car and 
 elevated railroad. Against this deepening 
 colour come the innumerable little lights of 
 the house cliffs and the streets, tier above 
 tier. New York is lavish of light, it is lavish 
 of everything, it is full of the sense of spend 
 ing from an inexhaustible supply. For a time 
 one is drawn irresistibly into the universal 
 belief in that inexhaustible supply. 
 
 At a bright table in Delmonico s to-day 
 at lunch-time, my host told me the first 
 news of the destruction of the greater part 
 of San Francisco by earthquake and fire. It 
 had just come through to him, it wasn t yet 
 being shouted by the newsboys. He told me 
 compactly of dislocated water-mains, of the 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 59 
 
 ill-luck of the unusual eastward wind that 
 was blowing the fire up-town, of a thousand 
 reported dead, of the manifest doom of the 
 greater portion of the city, and presently the 
 shouting voices in the street outside arose to 
 chorus him. He was a newspaper man, and 
 a little preoccupied because his San Francisco 
 offices were burning and that no further news 
 was arriving after these first intimations. 
 Naturally the catastrophe was our topic. But 
 this disaster did not affect him, it does not 
 seem to have affected any one with a sense 
 of final destruction, with any foreboding of 
 irreparable damage. Every one is talking of 
 it this afternoon, and no one is in the least 
 degree dismayed. I have talked and listened 
 in two clubs, watched people in cars and in 
 the street, and one man is glad that China 
 town will be cleared out for good, another s 
 chief solicitude is for Millet s " Man with the 
 Hoe." " They ll cut it out of the frame," 
 he says, a little anxiously, " sure." But there 
 is no doubt anywhere that San Francisco can 
 be rebuilt, larger, better, and soon. Just as 
 there would be none at all if all this New 
 York that has so obsessed me with its big 
 ness was itself a blazing ruin. I believe these 
 people would more than half like the situation. 
 
60 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 It would give them scope, it would facilitate 
 that conversion into white marble in progress 
 everywhere, it would settle the difficulties of 
 the elevated railroad, and clear out the tangles 
 of lower New York. There is no sense of 
 accomplishment and finality in any of these; 
 the largest, the finest, the tallest, are so 
 obviously no more than symptoms and promises 
 of Material Progress, of inhuman material 
 progress that is so in the nature of things 
 that no one would regret their passing. That, 
 I say again, is at the first encounter the 
 peculiar American effect that began directly 
 I stepped aboard the liner, and that rises 
 here to a towering, shining, clamorous climax. 
 The sense of inexhaustible supply, of an ultra- 
 human force behind it all, is, for a time, in 
 vincible. 
 
 One assumes, with Mr. Saltus, that all 
 America is in this vein, and that this is the 
 way the future must inevitably go. One has 
 a vision of bright electrical subways, replacing 
 the filth-diffusing railways of to-day, of clean 
 clear pavements free altogether from the fly 
 prolific filth of horses coming almost as it were 
 of their own accord beneath the feet of a 
 population that no longer expectorates at all; 
 of grimy stone and peeling paint giving way 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 61 
 
 everywhere to white marble and spotless 
 surfaces and a shining order, of everything 
 wider, taller, cleaner, better, v . . 
 
 So that, in the meanwhile, a certain amount 
 of jostling and hurry and untidiness, and even 
 to put it mildly forcefulness, may be for 
 given. 
 
 3 
 
 I visited Ellis Island yesterday. It chanced 
 to be a good day for my purpose. For the first 
 time in its history, this filter of immigrant 
 humanity has this week proved inadequate to 
 the demand upon it. It was choked, and half 
 a score of gravid liners were lying uncomfort 
 ably up the harbour, replete with twenty 
 thousand or so of crude Americans from Ireland 
 and Poland, and Italy and Syria, and Finland 
 and Albania; men, women, children, dirt, and 
 bags together. 
 
 Of immigration I shall have to write later ; 
 what concerns me now is chiefly the wholesale 
 and multitudinous quality of that place and its 
 worl my way with my introduction 
 
62 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 along white passages and through traps and 
 a maze of metal lattices that did for a while 
 succeed in catching and imprisoning me, to 
 Commissioner Watchorn, in his quiet, green- 
 toned office. There, for a time, I sat judicially 
 and heard him deal methodically, swiftly, sym 
 pathetically, with case after case, a string of 
 appeals against the sentences of deportation 
 pronounced in the busy little courts below. 
 First would come one dingy and strangely 
 garbed group of wild-eyed aliens, and then 
 another: Eoumanian gypsies, South Italians, 
 Euthenians, Swedes, each under the intelligent 
 guidance of a uniformed interpreter, and a case 
 would be stated, a report made to Washington, 
 and they would drop out again, hopeful or 
 sullen or fearful as the evidence might trend. . . . 
 
 Downstairs we find the courts, and these 
 seen, we traverse long xefectories, long aisles 
 of tables and close-packed dormitories with 
 banks of steel mattresses, tier above tier, and 
 galleries and passages innumerable, a perplexing 
 intricacy that slowly grows systematic with 
 the Commissioner s explanations. 
 
 Here is a huge gray untidy waiting-room, 
 like a big railway depot-room, full of a sinister 
 crowd of miserable people, loafing about or sit 
 ting dejectedly, whom America refuses, i^d here 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 63 
 
 a second and a third such chamber, each with 
 its tragic and evil-looking crowd that hates us, 
 and that even ventures to groan and hiss at 
 us a little for our glimpse of its large dirty 
 spectacle of hopeless failure, and here, squalid 
 enough, indeed, but still to some degree hope 
 ful, are the appeal cases as yet undecided. In 
 one place, at a bank of ranges, works an army of 
 men cooks, in another spins the big machinery 
 of the Ellis Island laundry, washing blankets, 
 drying blankets, day in and day out, a big, 
 clean, steamy place of hurry and rotation. 
 Then I recall a neat apartment lined to the 
 ceiling with little drawers, a card index of the 
 names and nationalities and significant circum 
 stances of upwards of a million and a half of 
 people who have gone on and w r ho are yet 
 liable to recall. 
 
 The central Hall is the key of this impres 
 sion. All day long, through an intricate series 
 of metal pens, the long procession files, step by 
 step, bearing bundles and trunks and boxes, 
 past this examiner and that, past the quick, 
 alert medical officers, the tallymen, and the 
 clerks ; at every point immigrants are being 
 picked out and set aside for further medical 
 examination, for further questions, for the busy 
 little courts ; but the main procession satisfies 
 
64 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 conditions, passes on. It is a daily procession 
 that, with a yard of space to each, would 
 stretch over three miles, that any week in the 
 year would more than equal in numbers that 
 daily procession of the unemployed that is be 
 coming a regular feature of the London winter, 
 that in a year could put a cordon round London 
 or New York of close-marching people, could 
 populate a new Boston, that in a century 
 What in a century will it all amount to? . . . 
 On they go, from this pen to that, pen by 
 pen, towards a desk at a little metal wicket 
 the gate of America. Through this metal 
 wicket drips the immigration stream all day 
 long, every two or three seconds an immigrant, 
 with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk 
 and goes on past the well-managed money- 
 changing place, past the carefully organized 
 separating ways that go to this railway or that, 
 past the guiding, protecting officials into a 
 new world. The great majority are young men 
 and young women, between seventeen and 
 thirty, good, youthful, hopeful peasant stock. 
 They stand in a long string, waiting to go 
 through that wicket, with bundles, with little 
 tin-boxes, with cheap portmanteaus, with odd 
 packages, in pairs, in families, alone, women 
 with children, men with strings of dependents. 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 65 
 
 young couples. All day that string of human 
 beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again; 
 all day and every day, constantly replenished, 
 constantly dropping the end beads through the 
 wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and 
 the hundreds to thousands. . . . 
 
 Yes,( Ellis Island is quietly immense. It 
 gives one a visible image of one aspect at least 
 of this world-large process of filling and growing 
 and synthesis, which is America. ) 
 
 " Look there ! said the Commissioner, 
 taking me by the arm and pointing, and I saw 
 a monster steamship far away and already a 
 big bulk looming up the Narrows. " It s the 
 Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse. She s got" I 
 forget the exact figures, but let us say "853 
 more for us. She ll have to keep them until 
 Friday at the earliest. And there s more 
 behind her and more strung out all across the 
 Atlantic." 
 
 In one record day this month 21,000 immi 
 grants came into the port of New York alone ; 
 in one week over 50,000.- This year the total 
 will be 1,200,000 souls, pouring in, finding work 
 at once, producing no fall in wages. They 
 start digging and building and making. Just 
 think of the dimensions of it ! 
 
66 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 4 
 
 One must get away from New York to see 
 the place in its proper relations. I visited 
 Staten Island and Jersey City, motored up to 
 Irving s home near Sleepy Hollow (where once 
 the Headless Horseman rode) saw suburbs 
 and intimations of suburbs without end, and 
 finished with the long and crowded spectacle 
 of the East River as one sees it from the 
 Fall River boat. It was Friday night, and 
 the Fall River boat was in a state of fine 
 congestion with Jews, Italians, and week 
 enders, and one stood crowded and surveyed 
 the crowded shore, the skyscrapers and 
 tenement houses, the huge grain elevators, 
 big warehouses, the great Brooklyn bridge, 
 the still greater Williamsburgh bridge, the 
 promise of yet another monstrous bridge, 
 overwhelmingly monstrous by any European 
 example I know, and so past long miles of 
 city to the left, and to the right, past the 
 wide Brooklyn navy yards (where three clean 
 white warships lay moored), past the cluster 
 ing castellated asylums, hospitals, almshouses, 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 67 
 
 and reformatories of Blackwells s long shore 
 and Ward Island, and then through a long 
 reluctant diminuendo on each receding bank, 
 until, indeed, New York, though it seemed 
 incredible, had done. 
 
 And at one point a grave-voiced man in a 
 peaked cap, with guide-books to sell, pleased 
 me greatly by ending all idle talk suddenly 
 with the stentorian announcement, " We are 
 now in Hell Gate. We are now passing 
 through Hell Gate !" 
 
 But they ve blown Hell Gate open with 
 dynamite, and it wasn t at all the Hell Gate 
 that I read about in my boyhood in the 
 delightful chronicle of Knickerbocker. 
 
 So through an elbowing evening (to the 
 tune of u Cavalleria Rustican&" on an irre 
 pressible string band) and a night of unmiti 
 gated foghorn to Boston, which I had been 
 given to understand was a cultured and 
 uneventful city offering great opportunities for 
 reflection and intellectual digestion. And in 
 deed the large quiet of Beacon Street, in the 
 early morning sunshine, seemed to more than 
 justify that expectation. . . . 
 
 But Boston did not propose that its less 
 assertive key should be misunderstood, and in 
 a singularly short space of time I found 
 
68 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 myself climbing into a tremulous impatient 
 motor-car in company with three enthusiastic 
 exponents of the work of the Metropolitan 
 Parks Commission, and provided with a neatly 
 tinted map, large and framed and glazed, to 
 explore a fresh and more deliberate phase in 
 this great America symphony, this symphony 
 of Growth. 
 
 If possible, it is more impressive even than 
 the crowded largeness of New York to trace 
 the serene preparation Boston has made 
 through this Commission to be widely and 
 easily vast. ( New York s humanity has a 
 curious air of being carried along upon a wave 
 of irresistible prosperity, but Boston confesses 
 design. /I I suppose no city in all the world 
 (unless it be Washington) has ever produced 
 so complete and ample a forecast of its own 
 future as this Commission s plan of Boston. v 
 An area with a radius of between fifteen and 
 twenty miles from the State House has been 
 planned out and prepared for Growth. Great 
 reservations of woodland and hill have been 
 made ; the banks of nearly all the streams and 
 rivers and meres have been secured for public 
 park and garden, for boating and other water 
 sports;! big avenues of vigorous young trees, a 
 hundred and fifty yards or so wide, with drive 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 69 
 
 ways and riding ways and a central grassy 
 band for electric tramways, have been prepared, 
 and indeed the fair and ample and shady new 
 Boston, the Boston of 1950, grows visibly 
 before one s eyes. I found myself comparing 
 the disciplined confidence of these proposals 
 to the blind enlargement of London; London, 
 that, like a bowl of viscid human fluid, boils 
 sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills 
 and slops messily and uglily into the home 
 counties. 
 
 There were moments, indeed, when it 
 seemed too good to be true, and Mr. Sylvester 
 Baxter, who was with me, and whose faith has 
 done so much to secure this mapping out of 
 a city s growth beyond all precedent, became 
 the victim of my doubts. " Will this enormous 
 space of sunlit woodland and marsh and 
 meadow really be filled at any time?" I 
 urged. " All cities do not grow. Cities have 
 shrunken." 
 
 I recalled Bruges. I recalled the empty, 
 goat-sustaining, flower-rich meadows of Eome 
 within the wall. What made him so sure 
 of this progressive magnificence of Boston s 
 growth? My doubts fell on stony soil. My 
 companions seemed to think these scepticisms 
 inopportune, a forced eccentricity like doubting 
 
70 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 the corning of to-morrow. Of course Growth 
 will go on. . . . 
 
 The subject was changed by the sight of 
 the fine marble buildings of the Harvard 
 medical school, a shining fa9ade partially 
 eclipsed by several dingy and unsightly wooden 
 houses. 
 
 " Those shanties will go, of course," said 
 one of my companions. u It s proposed to take 
 the avenue right across this space straight to 
 the schools." 
 
 " You ll have to fill the marsh, then, and 
 buy the houses." 
 
 " Sure. ..." 
 
 I find myself comparing this huge growth 
 process of America with the things in my own 
 land. After all, it is no distinctive American 
 thing ; it is the same process anywhere 
 only in America there are no disguises, no 
 complications. Come to think of it, Birming 
 ham and Manchester are as new as Boston 
 newer, and London, south and east of the 
 Thames, is, save for a little nucleus, more 
 recent than Chicago, is in places, I am told, 
 with its smoky disorder, its clattering ways, 
 its brutality of industrial conflict, very like 
 Chicago. But nowhere now is growth still so 
 certainly and confidently going on as here. 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 7 1 
 
 Nowhere is it upon so great a scale as here, 
 and with so confident an outlook towards the 
 things to corne. And nowhere is it passing 
 more certainly from the first phase of a mob- 
 like rush of individualistic undertakings into 
 a planned and ordered progress. 
 
 5 
 
 Everywhere in the America I have seen, 
 the same note sounds, the note of a fatal 
 gigantic economic development, of large pre 
 vision and enormous pressures. 
 
 I heard it clear above the roar of Niagara 
 for, after all, I " stopped off " at Niagara. 
 
 As a waterfall, Niagara s claim to distinc 
 tion is now mainly quantitative ; its spectacular 
 effect, its magnificent and humbling size and 
 splendour, were long since destroyed beyond 
 recovery by the hotels, the factories, the power 
 houses, the bridges and tramways and hoard 
 ings that arose about it. It must have been 
 a fine thing to happen upon suddenly after a 
 day of solitary travel ; the Indians, they say, 
 Rave it worship ; but it s no great wonder to 
 
72 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 reach it by trolley - car, through, a street 
 hack-infested and full of adventurous refresh 
 ment places and souvenir shops and touting 
 guides. There were great quantities of young 
 couples and other sight-seers, with the usual 
 encumbrances of wrap and bag and umbrella, 
 trailing out across the bridges and along the 
 neat paths of the reservation parks, asking 
 the way to this point and that. Notice-boards 
 cut the eye, offering extra joys and memorable 
 objects for twenty-five and fifty cents, and it 
 was proposed you should keep off the grass. 
 
 After all, the gorge of Niagara is very like 
 any good gorge in the Ardennes, except that 
 it has more water ; it s about as wide and about 
 as deep, and there is no effect at all that one 
 has not seen a dozen times in other cascades. 
 One gets all the water one wants at Tivoli, 
 one has gone behind half a hundred downpours 
 just as impressive in Switzerland; a hundred 
 tons of water is really just as stunning as ten 
 million. A hundred tons of water stuns one 
 altogether, and what more do you want ? One 
 recalls "Orridos" and " Schluchts," that are 
 not only magnificent but lonely. 
 
 No doubt the falls seen from the Canadian 
 side have a peculiar long majesty of effect, but 
 the finest thing in it all, to my mind, was not 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 73 
 
 Niagara at all, but to look up-stream from Goat 
 Island and see the sea-wide crest of the flashing 
 sunlit rapids against the grey-blue sky. 1 That 
 was like a limitless ocean pouring down a 
 sloping world towards one, and I lingered, 
 held by that, returning to it through an indo 
 lent afternoon. It gripped the imagination as 
 nothing else there seemed to do. It was so 
 broad an infinitude of splash and hurry. And, 
 moreover, all the enterprising hotels and ex- 
 peptant trippers were out of sight. 
 
 ( That was the best of the display. The 
 real interest of Niagara for me was not in 
 the waterfall, but in the human accumulations 
 about it. They stood for the future, threats 
 and promises, and the waterfall was just a 
 vast reiteration of falling water. The note of 
 growth in human accomplishment rose clear 
 and triumphant above the elemental thunder. 
 For the most part these accumulations of 
 human effort about Niagara are extremely 
 defiling and ugly. Nothing nofc even the 
 hotel signs and advertisement boards could 
 be more offensive to the eye and mind than 
 the Schoellkopf companies untidy confusion 
 of sheds and buildings on the American side, 
 wastefully squirting out long tailrace cascades 
 below the bridge, and nothing more disgusting 
 
74 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 than the sewer pipes and gas-work ooze that 
 the town of Niagara Falls contributes to the 
 scenery. But, after all, these represent only 
 the first slovenly onslaught of mankind s expan 
 sion, the pioneers camp of the human growth 
 process that already changes its quality and 
 manner. There are finer things than these 
 outrages to be found. 
 
 The dynamos and galleries of the Niagara 
 Falls Power Company, for example, impressed 
 me far more profoundly than the Cave of the 
 Winds ; are, indeed, to my mind, greater and 
 more beautiful than that accidental eddying of 
 air beside a downpour. They are will made 
 visible, thought translated into easy and com 
 manding things. ( They are clean, noiseless, and 
 starkly powerful. N All the clatter and tumult 
 of the early age of machinery is past and 
 gone here ; there is no smoke, ( no coal-grit, 
 no dirt at all. The wheel-pit into which one 
 descends has an almost cloistered quiet about 
 its softly-humming turbines. These are alto 
 gether noble masses of machinery, huge black 
 slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that 
 engender irresistible forces in their sleep. 
 They sprang, armed like Minerva, from serene 
 and speculative, foreseeing and endeavouring 
 brains. First was the word, and then these 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 75 
 
 powers. A man goes to and fro quietly in 
 the long, clean hall of the dynamos. There 
 is no clangor, no racket. Yet the outer rim 
 of the big generators is spinning at the pace 
 of a hundred thousand miles an hour; the 
 dazzling, clean switchboard, with its little 
 handles and levers, is the seat of empire over 
 more power than the strength of a million 
 disciplined, unquestioning men. All these great 
 things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as 
 the heart in a living body, and stouter and 
 stronger than that. . . . 
 
 When I thought that these two huge wheel- 
 pits of this company are themselves but a 
 little intimation of what can be done in this 
 way, what will be done in this way, my imagi 
 nation towered above me. I fell into a day 
 dream of the coming power of men, and how 
 that power may be used by them. . . . 
 
 For surely the greatness of life is still to 
 come, it is not in such accidents as mountains 
 or the sea. I have seen the splendour of the 
 mountains, sunrise and sunset among them, 
 and the waste immensity of sky and sea. I 
 am not blind because I can see beyond these 
 glories. To me no other thing is credible 
 than that all the natural beauty in the world 
 is only so much material for the imagination 
 
76 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 and the mind, so many hints and suggestions 
 for art and creation. Whatever is, is but 
 the lure and symbol towards what can be 
 willed and done. Man lives to make in the 
 end he must make, for there will be nothing 
 else left for him to do. 
 
 And the world he will make after a 
 thousand years or so ! 
 
 I, at least, can forgive the loss of all the 
 accidental unmeaning beauty that is going 
 for the sake of the beauty of fine order and 
 intention that will come. I believe passion 
 ately, as a doubting lover believes in his 
 mistress in the future of mankind. And so 
 to me it seems altogether well that all the 
 froth and hurry of Niagara at last, all of it, 
 dying into hungry canals of intake, should 
 rise again in light and power, in ordered and 
 equipped and proud and beautiful humanity, 
 in cities and palaces and the emancipated 
 souls and hearts of men. . . . 
 
 I turned back to look at the power house 
 as I walked towards the Falls, and halted 
 and stared. Its architecture brought me out 
 of my daydream to the quality of contem 
 porary things again. It is a well-intentioned 
 building enough, extraordinarily well - inten- 
 tioned, and regardless of expense. It s in 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 77 
 
 granite and by Stanford White, and yet 
 
 It hasn t caught the note. There s a touch 
 of respectability in it, more than a hint of 
 the box of bricks. Odd, but I d almost as 
 soon have had one of the Schoellkopf 
 sheds. 
 
 A community that can produce such things 
 as those turbines and dynamos, and then 
 cover them over with this dull exterior, is 
 capable, one realizes, of feats of bathos. One 
 feels that all the power that throbs in the 
 copper cables below may end at last in turn 
 ing Great Wheels for excursionists, stamping 
 out aluminium "fancy" ware, and illuminating 
 night advertisements for drug-shops and 
 music-halls. I had an afternoon of busy 
 doubts. . . . 
 
 There is much discussion about Niagara at 
 present. It may be some queer compromise, 
 based on the pretence that a voluminous water 
 fall is necessarily a, thing of incredible beauty, 
 and a human use is necessarily a degrading 
 use, will " save " Niagara and the hack-drivers 
 and the souvenir shops for series of years yet 
 " a magnificent monument to the pride of 
 the United States in a glory of nature," 
 as one journalistic saviour puts it. It is, as 
 public opinion stands, a quite conceivable 
 
78 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 thing. This electric development may be 
 stopped after all, and the huge fall of water 
 remain surrounded by gravel paths and para 
 pets and geranium beds, a staring point for 
 dull wonder, a crown for a day s excursion, a 
 thunderous impressive accessory to the artless 
 love-making that fills the surrounding hotels, 
 a Titanic imbecility of wasted gifts. But I 
 don t think so. I think somebody will pay 
 something, and the journalistic zeal for scenery 
 abate. I think the huge social and industrial 
 process of America will win in this conflict, 
 and at last capture Niagara altogether. 
 
 And then what use will it make of its 
 prey? 
 
 6 
 
 In smoky, vast, undisciplined Chicago growth 
 forced itself upon me again as the dominant 
 American fact, but this time a dark disorder 
 of growth. I went about Chicago seeing many 
 things of which I may say something later. 
 I visited the top of the Masonic Building 
 and viewed a wilderness of skyscrapers; I 
 acquired a felt of memories of swing-bridges 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 79 
 
 and viaducts and interlacing railways and jost 
 ling crowds and extraordinarily dirty streets ; 
 I learnt something of the mystery of the 
 " floating foundations " upon which so much 
 of Chicago rests. But I got my best vision 
 of Chicago as I left it. ; 
 
 I sat in the open observation car at the 
 end of the Pennsylvania Limited Express, 
 and watched the long defile of industrialism 
 from the Union Station in the heart of things 
 to out beyond South Chicago a dozen miles 
 away. I had not gone to the bloody spectacle 
 of the Stockyards that " feed the world/ 
 because, to be frank, I hate stenches, and 
 I have an immense repugnance to the killing 
 of fixed and helpless animals ; I saw nothing 
 of those ill-managed, ill-inspected establish 
 ments, though I smelt their unwholesome 
 reek ever and again ; and so it was here, as 
 I left Chicago, that I measured for the first 
 time the enormous expanse and intricacy of 
 railroads that nets this great industrial desola 
 tion, and something of the scale of the going 
 and coming of her myriads of polyglot 
 
 workers. 
 f 
 
 Chicago burns bituminous coal, it has a 
 reek that outdoes London} and right and left 
 of the line rise vast chimneys, huge, blackened 
 
8o GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 grain elevators, flame-crowned furnaces and 
 gauntlv ugly and filthy factory buildings, 
 monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate empty 
 lots littered with rusty cans, old iron, and 
 indescribable rubbish. And interspersed with 
 these are groups of dirty, disreputable, in 
 sanitary-looking wooden houses the homes of 
 the people. . . . 
 
 "We swept along the many-railed track, 
 and the straws and scraps of paper danced 
 in our eddy as we passed. We overtook 
 local trains, and they receded slowly in the 
 great perspective, Ihuge freight trains met us 
 or were overtaken, long trains of doomed 
 cattle passed northward,! solitary engines went 
 by every engine, tolling a melancholy bell, 
 contributed to a clanging that approached or 
 receded but never ceased open trucks crowded 
 with workmen went cityward. By the side of 
 the track, and over the level crossings, walked 
 great swarms of common-looking people. So 
 it goes on, mile after mile Chicago. The sun 
 was now bright, now pallid through some 
 streaming curtain of smoke ; the gallant 
 struggle of some stunted tree lit the spring 
 afternoon here and there with a rare and 
 startling note of fresh verdure ; all else was 
 dingy and unclean. . . . 
 
STATE STREET, CHICAGO 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 81 
 
 It was like a prolonged, enlarged mingling 
 of the south side of London, with all that is 
 bleak and ugly in the Black Country. It is 
 the most perfect presentation of nineteenth- 
 century individualistic industrialism I have 
 ever seen in its vast, its magnificent squalor. 
 It is pure nineteenth century. It had no 
 past at all before that, ( in 1800 it was 
 empty prairie ; and one marvels for its future. 
 It is indeed a Victorian nightmare that 
 culminates beyond South Chicago in the 
 monstrous fungoid shapes, the endless smok 
 ing chimneys, the squat retorts, the black 
 smoke pall of the Standard Oil Company. 
 For a time the sun is veiled altogether by 
 that. One s heart falls as if before a sinister 
 threat. . . . 
 
 And then suddenly Chicago is a dark 
 smear under the sky, and we are in the large 
 emptiness of America, the other America 
 America in between. 
 
82 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 7 
 
 " Undisciplined " ; that is the word for 
 Chicago. It is the word for all the progress 
 of the Victorian time, a scrambling, ill- 
 mannered, undignified, unintelligent develop 
 ment of material resources. Packingtown, for 
 example, is a place that feeds the world with 
 meat, that concentrates the produce of a 
 splendid countryside at a position of imperial 
 advantage; and its owners have no more 
 sense, no better moral quality, than to make 
 it stink in the nostrils of any one who comes 
 within two miles of it, to make it a centre 
 of distribution for disease and decay, an arena 
 of shabby evasions and extra profits, a scene 
 of brutal economic conflict and squalid filthi- 
 ness, offensive to every sense. (I wish I could 
 catch the soul of Herbert Spencer and tether 
 it in Chicago for awhile to gather fresh 
 evidence upon the superiority of unfettered 
 individualist enterprise to things managed by 
 the State.) 
 
 Want of discipline ! Chicago is one hoarse 
 cry for discipline 1 Th^reek and scandal of 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 83 
 
 the stockyards is really only a gigantic form 
 of that same quality in American life that, 
 in a minor aspect, makes the sidewalk filthy. 
 The key to the peculiar nasty ugliness of those 
 Schoellkopf works that defile the Niagara gorge 
 is the same quality. The detestableness of 
 the elevated railroads of Chicago and Boston 
 and New York have this in common. All that 
 is ugly in America, in Lancashire, in South 
 and East London, in the Pas de Calais, in 
 Western Prussia, is due to this, to the shoving 
 unintelligent proceedings of underbred and 
 morally obtuse men. Each man is for himself, 
 each enterprise ; there is no order, no pre 
 vision, no common and universal plan. Modern 
 economic organization is still as yet only think 
 ing of emerging from its first chaotic stage, 
 the stage of lawless enterprise and insanitary 
 aggregation, the stage of the prospector s 
 camp. . . . 
 
 But it does emerge. 
 
 Men are makers, American men I think 
 more than most men, and amidst even the 
 catastrophic jumble of Chicago one finds the 
 same creative forces at work that are struggling 
 to replan a greater Boston, that turned a waste 
 of rubbish dump and swamp and cabbage gar 
 den into Central Park, New York. Chicago 
 
84 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 also has its Parks 7 Commission and its green 
 avenues, its bright flower gardens, its lakes 
 and playing fields. Its Midway Plaisance is 
 in amazing contrast with the dirt, the conges 
 tion, the moral disorder of lower State Street, 
 with its dime shows and ambiguous resorts ; 
 its field houses do visible battle with slum and 
 the frantic meanness of commercial folly. 
 
 Field houses are peculiar to Chicago, and 
 Chicago has every reason to be proud of them. 
 I visited one that is positively within smell 
 of the stockyards, wedged into a district of 
 gaunt and dirty slums. It stands in the midst 
 of a little park, and close by it are three play 
 ing grounds with swings and parallel bars and 
 all manner of athletic appliances, one for little 
 children, one for girls and women, and one 
 for boys and youths. In the children s place 
 is a paddling pond of clear, clean, running 
 water and a shaded area of frequently changed 
 sand, and in the park is a broad asphalte arena 
 that can be flooded for skating in winter. All 
 this is free to all comers, and free, too, is the 
 field-house itself. This is a large, cool, Italian- 
 ate place with two or three reading-rooms 
 one specially arranged for children a big dis 
 cussion hall, a big and well-equipped gym 
 nasium, and fine, large free baths for men 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 85 
 
 and for women. There is also a clean, bright 
 refreshment place, where wholesome food is 
 sold at a mere trifle above cost price. It 
 was early on Friday afternoon when I saw it 
 all, but the place was busy with children, 
 reading, bathing, playing in a hundred different 
 ways. 
 
 And this field house is not an isolated 
 philanthropic enterprise. It is just one of a 
 number that are dotted about Chicago, miti 
 gating and civilizing its squalor. It was not 
 distilled by begging and charity from the stench 
 of the stockyards or the reek of Standard Oil. 
 It is part of the normal work of a special 
 taxing body created by the legislature of the 
 State of Illinois. It is just one of the fruits 
 upon one of the growths that spring from 
 such persistent creative effort as that of the 
 Chicago City Club. It is Socialism let us 
 joyfully admit as much. And soon Chicago s 
 municipal powers will grapple with the net of 
 foul railroads and old worn-out cable-car lines 
 and the rest of her muddle of inter-urban com 
 munications, and try to make a job of that. 
 That will be more Socialism. And then, 
 perhaps, these world-poisoning abattoirs will 
 come under public control, and clean marble 
 and pure water and well-washed hands replace 
 
86 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 the rotten, blood-soaked wood and mud and 
 squalid rush of the present regime. . . . 
 
 Even amidst the sombre uncleanliness of 
 Chicago, the hopeful eye may see the light 
 of a new epoch, the coming of new concep 
 tions, of foresight, of large collective plans and 
 discipline to achieve them; the fresh green 
 leaves, among all the festering manure, of the 
 giant growths of a more orderly and more 
 beautiful age. 
 
 8 
 
 These growing towns, these giant towns 
 that grow up and out, that grow orderly and 
 splendid out of their first chaotic beginnings, 
 are only little patches upon a vast expanse, 
 upon what is still of all habitable countries 
 the emptiest country in the world. My long 
 express journey from Chicago to Washington 
 lasted a day and a night and more, I could 
 get sooner from my home in Kent to Italy, 
 and yet that was still well under a third of 
 the way across the Continent. I spent most 
 of my daylight time in the fine and graceful 
 open loggia at the end of the observation car, 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 87 
 
 or in looking out of the windows, looking at 
 hills and valleys, townships and quiet places, 
 sudden busy industrial outbreaks about coal 
 mine or metal, big undisciplined rivers that 
 spread into swamp and lake, new forest 
 growths, very bright and green now, foaming 
 up above blackened stumps. There were many 
 cypress trees and trees with white blossom, 
 and the Judas tree, very conspicuous among the 
 springtime green. I got still more clearly the 
 enormous scale of this American destiny I seek 
 to discuss through all that long and interesting 
 day of transit. I measured, as it seemed to 
 me for the first time, the real scale of the 
 growth process that has put a four-track road 
 nine hundred miles across this exuberant land 
 and scarred every available hill with furnace 
 and mine. 
 
 Bigness that s the word ! The very fields 
 and farm buildings seem to me to have four 
 times the size of our English farms. 
 
 Some casual suggestion of the wayside, I 
 forget now what, set me thinking of the former 
 days, so recent that they are yet within the 
 lifetime of living men, when this was frontier 
 land, when even the middle west remained to 
 be won. I thought of the slow diffusing popu 
 lation of the forties, the pioneer waggon, the 
 
88 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 men armed with axe and rifle, knife and re 
 volver, the fear of the Indians, the weak and 
 casual incidence of law. Then the high-road 
 was but a prairie track, and all these hills and 
 hidden minerals unconquered fastnesses that 
 might, it seemed, hold out for centuries before 
 they gave their treasure. How quickly things 
 had come I " Progress, progress," murmured 
 the wheels, and I began to make this steady, 
 swift and shiningly equipped train a figure, 
 just as I had made the Carmania a figure of 
 that big onward sweep that is moving us all 
 together. It was not a noisy train after the 
 English fashion, nor did the car sway and 
 jump after the habit of our lighter coaches, but 
 the air was full of deep triumphant rhythms. 
 " It goes on," I said, " invincibly," and even 
 as the thought was in my head, the brakes 
 set up a droning, a vibration ran through the 
 train, and we slowed and stopped. A minute 
 passed and then we rumbled softly back to a 
 little trestle bridge and stood there. 
 
 I got up, looked from the window, and then 
 went to the platform at the end of the train. 
 I found two men, a passenger and a coloured 
 parlour car attendant. The former was on the 
 bottom step of the car, the latter was supplying 
 him with information. 
 
GROWTH INVINCIBLE 89 
 
 " His head s still in the water," he re 
 marked. 
 
 " Whose head?" said I. 
 
 "A man we ve killed," said he. "We 
 caught him in the trestle-bridge." 
 
 I descended a step, craned over my fellow- 
 passenger, and saw a little group standing 
 curiously about the derelict thing that had 
 been a living man three minutes before. It 
 was now a crumpled dark-stained blue blouse, 
 a limply broken arm with hand askew, trou 
 sered legs that sprawled quaintly and ended 
 in a pair of heavy boots, lying in the sunlit 
 fresh grass by the water below the trestle- 
 bridge. . . . 
 
 A man on the line gave inadequate ex 
 planations. " He d have been all right if he 
 hadn t come over this side," he said. 
 
 "Who was he?" said I. 
 
 " One of these Eyetalians on the line," he 
 said, and turned away. The train bristled now 
 with a bunch of curiosity at every car end, and 
 even windows were opened. . . . 
 
 Presently it was intimated to us by a whistle 
 and the hasty return of men to the cars that 
 the incident had closed. We began to move 
 forward again, crept up to speed. . . . 
 
 But I could not go on with my conception 
 
90 GROWTH INVINCIBLE 
 
 of the train as a symbol of human advance 
 ment. That crumpled blue blouse and queerly 
 careless legs would get into the picture and 
 set up all sorts of alien speculations. I thought 
 of distant north Italian valleys and brown boys 
 among the vines and goats, of the immigrants 
 who had sung remotely to me out of the 
 Carmanias steerage, of the hopeful bright-eyed 
 procession of the new-comers through the Ellis 
 Island wicket, of the regiments of workers the 
 line had shown me, and I told myself a tale 
 of this Italian s journey to the land of promise, 
 this land of gigantic promises. . . . 
 
 For a time the big spectacle of America 
 about me took on a quality of magnificent 
 infidelity. . . . 
 
 And by reason of this incident my last 
 Image of Material Progress thundered into 
 Washington Station five minutes behind its 
 scheduled time. 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 1 
 
 LET me try now and make some sort of general 
 picture of the American nation as it impresses 
 itself upon me. It is, you will understand, 
 the vision of a hurried bird of passage, defective 
 and inaccurate at every point of detail, but 
 perhaps for my present purpose not so very 
 much the worse for that. The fact that I 
 am transitory and bring a sort of theorizing 
 naivete to this review is just what gives me 
 the chance to remark these obvious things the 
 habituated have forgotten. I have already tried 
 to render something of the effect of huge un 
 restrained growth and material progress that 
 America first gives one, and I have pointed 
 out that so far America seems to me only to 
 refresh an old impression, to give starkly and 
 startlingly what is going on everywhere, what 
 is indeed as much in evidence in Birken- 
 i;i Milan or London or Calcutta, a huge 
 
94 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 extension of human power and the scale of 
 human operations. This growth was elaborated 
 in the physical and chemical laboratories and 
 the industrial experiments of the eighteenth 
 and early nineteenth century, and chiefly in 
 Europe. The extension itself is nothing typi 
 cally American. Nevertheless, America now 
 shows it best. America is most under the 
 stress and urgency of it, resonates most readily 
 and loudly to its note. 
 
 The long distances of travel and the sense 
 of isolation between place and place, the re 
 moteness verging upon inaudibility of Washing 
 ton in Chicago, of Chicago in Boston, the 
 vision I have had of America from observation 
 cars and railroad windows, brings home to me 
 more and more that this huge development of 
 human appliances and resources is here going 
 on in a community that is still, for all the 
 dense crowds of New York, the teeming con 
 gestion of East Side, extraordinarily scattered. 
 America, one recalls, is still an unoccupied 
 country, across which the latest developments 
 of civilization are rushing. We are dealing 
 here with a continuous area of land which is, 
 leaving Alaska out of account altogether, equal 
 to Great Britain, France, the German Empire, 
 the Austro-Hungariau Empire, Italy, Belgium, 
 
!r ^sz 
 
 NEW YORK S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE 
 

THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 95 
 
 Japan, Holland, Spain and Portugal, Sweden 
 and Norway, Turkey in Europe, Egypt and the 
 whole Empire of India, and the population 
 spread out over this vast space is still less 
 than the joint population of the first two 
 countries named and not a quarter that of 
 India. Moreover, it is not spread at all evenly. 
 Much of it is in undistributed clots. It is not 
 upon the soil ; barely half of it is in holdings 
 and homes and authentic communities. It is 
 a population of an extremely modern type. 
 Urban concentration has already gone far with 
 it ; fifteen millions of it are crowded into and 
 about twenty great cities, other eighteen mil 
 lions make up five hundred towns. Between 
 these centres of population run railways indeed, 
 telegraph wires, telephone connections, tracks 
 of various sorts, but to the European eye these 
 are mere scratchings on a virgin surface. An 
 empty wilderness manifests itself through this 
 thin network of human conveniences, appears 
 in the meshes even at the railroad side. Essen 
 tially America is still an unsettled land, with 
 only a few incidental good roads in favoured 
 places, with no universal police, with no way 
 side inns where a civilized man may rest, with 
 still only the crudest of rural postal deliveries, 
 with long stretches of swamp and forest and 
 
96 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 desert by the track side, still unassailed by 
 industry. This much one sees clearly enough 
 eastward of Chicago. Westward, I am told, it 
 becomes more and more the fact. In Idaho, 
 at last, comes the untouched and perhaps in 
 vincible desert, plain and continuous through 
 the long hours of travel. Huge areas do not 
 contain one human being to the square mile, 
 still vaster portions fall short of two. . . . 
 
 And this community, to which material 
 progress is bringing such enormous powers, and 
 that is knotted so densely here and there and 
 is otherwise so attenuated a veil over the huge 
 land surface, is, as Professor Miinsterberg points 
 out, in spite of vast and increasing masses of 
 immigrants, still a curiously homogeneous one 
 homogeneous in the spirit of its activities 
 and speaking a common tongue. It is sus 
 tained by certain economic conventions, in 
 spired throughout by certain habits, certain 
 trends of suggestion, certain phrases and certain 
 interpretations that collectively make up what 
 one may call the American Idea. To this 
 process of enlargement and diffusion and in 
 crease and multiplying resources, we must now 
 bring the consideration of the social and eco 
 nomic process that is going on. What is the 
 form of that process as one finds it in America ? 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 97 
 
 An English Tory will tell you promptly, " a 
 scramble for dollars. * A good American will 
 tell you it is self-realization under equality of 
 opportunity. The English Tory will probably 
 allege that that amounts to the same thing. 
 Let us look into that. 
 
 2 
 
 One contrast between America and the old 
 world I had in mind before ever I crossed the 
 Atlantic, and now it comes before me very 
 vividly returns reinforced by a hundred little 
 things observed and felt. The [contrast con 
 sists in the almost complete absence from 
 the normal American scheme, of certain im 
 memorial factors in the social structure of our 
 European nations. 
 
 In the first place, every European nation 
 except the English is rooted to the soil by 
 a peasantry, and even in England one still 
 finds t*i n -nopacmt represented, in most of his 
 featu: by those sons of dispossessed serf- 
 peasant , the agricultural labourers. Here in 
 Amer. except in the regions where the 
 negro abounds, there is no lower stratum, no 
 
 H 
 
98 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 "soil people," to this community at all; your 
 bottommost man is a mobile free man who 
 can read, and who has ideas above digging 
 and pigs and poultry-keeping, except inci 
 dentally for his own ends. No one owns to 
 subordination. As a consequence, any position 
 which involves the acknowledgment of an 
 innate inferiority is difficult to fill; there is, 
 from the European point of view, an extra 
 ordinary dearth of servants, and this endures 
 in spite of a great peasant immigration. The 
 servile tradition will not root here now, it 
 dies in this soil. An enormous importation of 
 European serfs and peasants goes on, but as 
 they touch this soil their backs begin to stiffen 
 with a new assertion. 
 
 And at the other end of the scale also, 
 one misses an element. / There is no territorial 
 aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne, 
 no legitimate and acknowledged representative 
 of that upper social structure of leisure, power, 
 State responsibility, which in the old European 
 theory of society was supposed to give signifi 
 cance to the whole. The \rnej < commu 
 nity, one cannot too clear st, does not 
 correspond to an entire Eu pean community 
 at all, but only to the midcfjt f it, to 
 the trading and manufactui >etween 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 99 
 
 the dimensions of the magnate and the clerk 
 and skilled artisan. It is the central part 
 of the European organism without either the 
 dreaming head or the subjugated feet. Even 
 the highly feudal slave - holding " county 
 family" traditions of Virginia and the South 
 pass now out of memory. So that in a very 
 real sense the past of this American community 
 is in Europe, and the settled order of the past 
 is left behind there. This community was, 
 as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of its 
 branches, and brought hither. It began 
 neither serf nor lord, but burgher and farmer ; 
 it followed the normal development of the 
 middle class under Progress everywhere, and 
 became capitalistic. Essentially America is a 
 middle class become a community, and so its 
 essential problems are the problems of a 
 modern individualistic society, stark and clear, 
 unhampered and unilluminated by any feudal 
 traditions either at its crest or at its base. 
 
 It would be interesting and at first only 
 very slightly misleading to pursue the rough 
 contrast of American and English conditions 
 upon these lines. It is not difficult to show, 
 for example, that the two great political 
 parties in America represent only one English 
 party, the middle-class Liberal Party, the 
 
ioo THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 party of industrialism and freedom. There 
 are no Tories to represent the feudal system, 
 and no Labour Party. It is history, it is no 
 mere ingenious gloss upon history, that the 
 Tories, the party of the Crown, of the high 
 gentry and control, of mitigated property and 
 an organic state, vanished from America at 
 the Eevolution. They left the new world to 
 the Whigs and Nonconformists, and to those 
 less constructive, less logical, more popular 
 and liberating thinkers who became Radicals 
 in England, and Jeffersonians and then Demo 
 crats in America. All Americans are, from 
 the English point of view, Liberals of one sort 
 or another. You will find a facsimile of the 
 Declaration of Independence displayed con 
 spicuously and triumphantly beside Magna 
 Charta in the London Eeform Club, to carry 
 out this suggestion. . . . 
 
 But these fascinating parallelisms will lead 
 away from the chief argument in hand, which 
 is that the Americans started almost clear of 
 the mediaeval heritage, and developed in the 
 utmost purity if you like or simplicity or 
 crudeness, whichever you will, the modern 
 type of productive social organization. They 
 took the economic conventions that were 
 modern and progressive at the end of the 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 101 
 
 eighteenth century, and stamped them into 
 the Constitution as if they meant to stamp 
 them there for all time. In England you 
 can still find feudalism, medievalism, the 
 Eenascence, at every turn. America is pure 
 eighteenth century still crystallizing out from 
 a turbid and troubled solution. 
 
 To turn from any European state to America 
 is, in these matters anyhow, to turn from com 
 plication to a stark simplicity. The relation 
 ship between employer and employed, between 
 organizer and worker, between capital and 
 labour, which in England is qualified and mel 
 lowed and disguised and entangled with a 
 thousand traditional attitudes and subordina 
 tions, stands out sharply in a bleak cold ration 
 alism. There is no feeling that property, 
 privilege, honour, and a grave liability to official 
 public service ought to go together, none that 
 uncritical obedience is a virtue in a worker or 
 that subordination carries with it not only a 
 sense of service but a claim for help. Coming 
 across the Atlantic has in these matters an 
 effect of coming out of an iridescent fog into 
 a clear bright air. 
 
 This homologization of the whole American 
 social mass, not with the whole English social 
 mass, but with its "modern" classes, its great 
 
102 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 middle portion, and of its political sides with 
 the two ingredients of English Liberalism, goes 
 further than a rough parallel. An Englishman 
 who, like myself, has been bred and who has 
 lived all his life either in London with its pre 
 dominant West End, or the southern counties 
 with their fair large estates and the great 
 country houses, is constantly being reminded, 
 when he meets manufacturing and business 
 men from Birmingham or Lancashire, of Ameri 
 cans, and when he meets Americans, of indus 
 trial North-country people. There is more 
 push and less tacit assumption, more definition, 
 more displayed energy and less restraint, more 
 action and less subtlety, more enterprise and 
 self-assertion than there is in the typical Eng 
 lishman of London and the home counties. 
 The American carries on the contrast further, 
 it is true, and his speech is not northernly, but 
 marked by the accent of Hampshire or East 
 Anglia, and better and clearer than his English 
 equivalent s ; but one feels the two are of the 
 same stuff, nevertheless, and made by parallel 
 conditions. The liberalism of the eighteenth 
 century, the material progress of the nineteenth, 
 have made them both out of the undifferen- 
 tiated Stuart Englishman. And they are the 
 same in their attitude towards property and 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 103 
 
 social duty, individualists to the marrow. But 
 the one grew inside a frame of regal, aristo 
 cratic, and feudal institutions, and has chafed 
 against it, struggled with it, modified it, 
 strained it, and been modified by it, but has 
 remained within it ; the other broke it and 
 escaped to complete self-development. 
 
 The liberalism of the eighteenth century 
 was essentially the rebellion of the modern 
 industrial organization against the monarchial 
 and aristocratic State against hereditary pri 
 vilege, against restrictions upon bargains 
 whether they were hard bargains or not. Its 
 spirit was essentially Anarchistic the antithesis 
 of Socialism. It was the anti-State. It aimed 
 not only to liberate men but property from 
 State control. Its most typical expressions, 
 the Declaration of Independence, and the 
 French Declaration of the Eights of Man, are 
 zealously emphatic for the latter interest for 
 the sacredness of contracts and possessions. 
 Post - Eeformation liberalism did to a large 
 extent let loose property upon mankind. The 
 English Civil War of the sixteenth century, 
 like the American Eevolution of the seventeenth, 
 embodied essentially the triumphant refusal of 
 private property to submit to taxation without 
 consent. In England the result was tempered 
 
104 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 and qualified, security for private property was 
 achieved, but not cast-iron security ; each man 
 who had property became king of that property, 
 but only a constitutional and conditional king. 
 In America the victory of private property was 
 complete. Let one instance suffice to show 
 how decisively it was established that individual 
 property and credit and money were sacred. 
 Ten years ago the Supreme Court, trying a case 
 arising out of the General Eevenue tax of 1894, 
 decided that a graduated income-tax, such as 
 the English Parliament might pass to-morrow, 
 can never be levied upon the United States 
 nation without either a revolutionary change 
 in the Constitution or the unanimous legislation 
 of all the State legislatures to that effect. The 
 fundamental law of the States forbids any such 
 invasion of the individual s ownership. No 
 national income-tax is legal, and there is prac 
 tically no power, short of revolution, to alter 
 that. . . . 
 
 Could anything be more emphatic? That 
 tall Liberty with its spiky crown that stands 
 in New York harbour and casts an electric 
 flare upon the world, is, indeed, the liberty 
 of Property, and there she stands at the 
 Zenith. 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 105 
 
 3 
 
 Now the middle-class of the English popu 
 lation and the whole population of America 
 that matters at all when we discuss ideas, is 
 essentially an emancipated class, a class that 
 has rebelled against superimposed privilege and 
 honour, and achieved freedom for its indi 
 viduals and their property. Without property 
 its freedom is a featureless and unsubstantial 
 theory, and so it relies for the reality of life 
 upon that, upon the possession and acquisition 
 and development of property, that is to say 
 upon] " business." This is the quality of its 
 life. 
 
 Everywhere in the modern industrial and 
 commercial class this deep-lying feeling that 
 the State is something escaped from, has 
 worked out to the same mental habit of 
 social irresponsibility, and in America it has 
 worked unimpeded. / Patriotism has become a 
 mere national self-assertion, a sentimentality 
 of flag-cheering, with no constructive duties. 
 Law, social justice, the pride and preserva 
 tion of the State as a whole, are taken as 
 
io6 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 provided for before the game began, and one 
 devotes one s self to business. < v At business all 
 men are held ta be equal, and none is his 
 brother s keeper. j 
 
 All men are equal at the great game of 
 business, you try for the best of each bar 
 gain, and so does your opponent ; if you 
 chance to have more in your hand than he 
 well, that s your advantage, and you use it. 
 Presently he may have more than you. You 
 take care he doesn t if you can, but you play 
 fair except for the advantage in your hand ; 
 you play fair and hard. 
 
 Now this middle-class equality ultimately 
 destroys itself. Out of this conflict of equals, 
 and by virtue of the fact that property, like 
 all sorts of matter, does tend to gravitate to 
 wards itself whenever it is free, there emerge 
 the modern rich and the modern toiler. 
 
 One can trace the process in two or three 
 generations in Lancashire or the Potteries, or 
 any industrial region of England. One sees 
 first the early Lancashire industrialism, sees 
 a district of cotton -spinners more or less 
 equal together, small men all ; then come 
 developments, comes a state of ideally free 
 competition with some men growing large, 
 with most men dropping into employment, 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 107 
 
 but still with ample chances for an indus 
 trious young man to end as a prosperous 
 master ; and so through a steady growth in 
 the size of the organization to the present 
 opposition of an employer class in possession 
 of everything, almost inaccessibly above, and 
 an employed class below. The railways come, 
 and the wealthy class reaches out to master 
 these new enterprises, capitalistic from the 
 outset. . . . 
 
 America is simply repeating the history ot 
 the Lancashire industrialism on a gigantic 
 scale, and under an enormous variety of 
 forms. 
 
 But in England, as the modern Eich rise 
 up/ they come into a world of gentry with a 
 tradition of public service and authority ; they 
 learn one by one and assimilate themselves 
 to the legend of the " governing class " with 
 a sense of proprietorship which is also, in its 
 humanly limited way, a sense of duty to the 
 State. They are pseudomorphs after aristo 
 crats. They receive honours, they inter-marry, 
 they fall (and their defeated competitors too 
 fall) into the mellowed relationships of an 
 aristocratic system. That is not a perma 
 nent mutual attitude ; it does, however, mask 
 and,, soften the British outline. Industrialism 
 
io8 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 becomes quasi-feudal. \America, on the other 
 hand, had no effectual " governing class, ] there 
 has been no such modification, no clouding 
 of the issue. < Its Bich, to one s superficial 
 inspection, do seem to lop out, swell up into 
 an immense consumption and power and in 
 anity, develop no sense of public duties, re 
 main winners of a strange game they do not 
 criticize, concerned now only to hold and 
 intensify their winnings. / The losers accept 
 no subservience. That material progress, that 
 secular growth in scale of all modern enter 
 prises, widens the gulf between Owner and 
 Worker daily. More and more do men realize 
 that this game of free competition and un 
 restricted property does not go on for ever ; 
 it is a game that, first in this industry and 
 then in that, and at last in all, can be played 
 out and is being played out. Property be 
 comes organized, consolidated, concentrated, 
 and secured. This is the fact to which America 
 is slowly awaking at the present time. The 
 American community is discovering a secular 
 extinction of opportunity, and the appearance 
 of powers against which individual enterprise 
 and competition are hopeless. Enormous sec 
 tions of the American public are losing their 
 faith in any personal chance of growing rich 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 109 
 
 and truly free, and are developing the con 
 sciousness of an expropriated class. 
 
 This realization has come slowlier in 
 America than in Europe, because of the 
 enormous undeveloped resources of America. 
 So long as there was an unlimited extent of 
 unappropriated and unexplored land westward, 
 so long could tension be relieved by so simple 
 an injunction as Horace Greeley s " Go West, 
 young man; go West." And to-day, albeit 
 that is no longer true of the land, and there 
 are already far larger concentrations of in 
 dividual possessions in the United States of 
 America than anywhere else in the world, yet 
 so vast are their continental resources that it 
 still remains true that nowhere in the world 
 is property so widely diffused. Consider the 
 one fact that America can take in three- 
 quarters of a million of workers in one year 
 without producing a perceptible fall in wages, 
 and you will appreciate the scale upon which 
 things are measured here, the scale by which 
 even Mr. J. D. Eockefeller s billion dollars 
 becomes no morejthan a respectable but by 
 no means overwhelming "pile." For all these 
 concentrations, the western farmers still own 
 their farms, and it is the rule rather than the 
 exception for a family to possess the freehold 
 
no THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 of the house it lives in. But the process of 
 concentration goes on nevertheless is going 
 on now perceptibly to the American mind. 
 That it has not gone so far as in the European 
 instance is a question of size, just as the 
 gestation of an elephant takes longer than 
 that of a mouse. If the process is larger and 
 slower, it is, for the reasons I have given, 
 plainer, and it will be discussed and dealt with 
 plainly. That steady trend towards concentra 
 tion under individualistic rules, until individual 
 competition becomes disheartened and hopeless, 
 is the essential form of the economic and social 
 process in America as I see it now, and it has 
 become the cardinal topic of thought and dis 
 cussion in the American mind. 
 
 This realization has been reached after the 
 most curious hesitation. There is every reason 
 for this ; for it involves the contradiction of 
 much that seems fundamental in the American 
 idea. It amounts to a national change of 
 attitude. It is a conscious change of attitude 
 that is being deliberately made. 
 
 This slow reluctant process of disillusion 
 ment with individualism is interestingly trace 
 able through the main political innovations of 
 the last twenty years. There was the dis 
 covery in the east that the supply of land 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS in 
 
 was not limitless, and we had the Single Tax 
 movement, and the epoch of the first Mr. 
 Henry George. He explained fervently, of 
 course, how individualistic, how profoundly 
 American he was but land was not to be 
 monopolized. Then came the discovery in the 
 west that there were limits to borrowing, and 
 that gold appreciated against the debtor, and 
 so we have the Populist movement and extra 
 ordinary schemes for destroying the monopoli 
 zation of gold and credit. Mr. Bryan led 
 that, and nearly captured the country, but 
 only in last May s issue of the Century 
 Magazine I found him explaining (expound 
 ing meanwhile a largely socialistic programme) 
 that he too is an individualist of the purest 
 water. And then the attack shifted to the 
 destruction of free competition by the trusts. 
 The small business went on sufferance, not 
 knowing from week to week when its hour to 
 sell out or fight might come. The trusts have 
 crushed competition, raised prices against the 
 consumer, and served him often quite abomin 
 ably. The curious reader may find in Mr. 
 Upton Sinclair s essentially veracious "The 
 Jungle" the possibilities of individualistic enter 
 prise in the matter of food and decency. The 
 States have been agitated by a big disorganized 
 
ii2 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 anti-trust movement for some years, it becomes 
 of the gravest political importance at every 
 election, and the sustained study of the affairs 
 and methods of that most typical and prominent 
 of trust organizations, the Standard Oil Com 
 pany, by Miss Tarbell and a host of followers, 
 is bringing to light more and more clearly 
 the defencelessness of the common person, 
 and his hopelessness, however enterprising, as 
 a competitor against those great business 
 aggregations. His faith in all his reliances 
 and securities fades in the new light that 
 grows about him, he sees his little invest 
 ments, his insurance policy, his once open and 
 impartial route to market by steamboat and 
 rail, passing into the grip of the great property 
 accumulators. The aggregation of property has 
 created powers that are stronger than State 
 legislatures and more persistent than any public 
 opinion can be, that have no awe and no 
 sentiment for legislation, that are prepared to 
 disregard it or evade it whenever they can. 
 
 And these aggregations are taking on im 
 mortality and declining to disintegrate when 
 their founders die. The Astor property, the 
 Jay Gould property, the Marshall Field pro 
 perty, for example, do not break up, become 
 undying centres for the concentration of wealth, 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 113 
 
 and it is doubtful if there is any power to 
 hinder such a development of perpetual 
 fortunes. In England, when Thelussen left his 
 investments to accumulate, a simple little Act 
 of Parliament set his will aside. But Congress 
 is not sovereign, there is no national sovereign 
 power in America, and property in America, 
 it would seem, is absolutely free to do these 
 things. So you have President Eoosevelt in 
 a recent oration attacking the man with the 
 muck-rake (who gathered vile dross for the 
 love of it), and threatening the limitation of 
 inheritance. (But he, too, quite as much as 
 Mr. Bryan, assures the public that he is a 
 fervent individualist.) 
 
 Thus in this American community, whose 
 distinctive conception is its emphatic assertion 
 of the freedom of individual property, whose 
 very symbol is that spike-crowned Liberty grip 
 ping a torch in New York Harbour, there has 
 been and is going on, a successive repudiation 
 of that freedom in almost every department of 
 ownable things by considerable masses of think 
 ing people, a denial of the soundness of indi 
 vidual property in land, an organized attempt 
 against the accumulation of gold and credit 
 by a systematic watering of the currency, a 
 revolt agra.inst the aggregatory outcome of 
 
ii4 THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 
 
 untrammelled business competition, a systematic 
 interference with the freedom of railways and 
 carriers to do business as they please, and a 
 protest from the most representative of Ameri 
 cans against hereditary wealth. . . . 
 
 That, in general terms, is the economic 
 and social process, as one sees it in America 
 now, a process of systematically concentrating 
 wealth on the part of an energetic minority, 
 and of a great insurgence of alarm, of waves 
 of indignation and protest and threat on the 
 part of that vague indefinite public that Mr. 
 Koosevelt calls the "nation.j" 
 
 And this goes on side by side with a pro 
 cess of material progress that partly masks its 
 quality, that keeps the standard of life from 
 falling, and prevents any sense of impoverish 
 ment among the mass of the losers in the 
 economic struggle. Through this material 
 progress there is a constant substitution of 
 larger, cleaner, more efficient possibilities, and 
 more and more wholesale and far-sighted 
 methods of organization, for the dark, con 
 fused, untidy individualistic expedients of the 
 Victorian time. An epoch which was coaly 
 and mechanical, commercial and adventurous 
 after the earlier fashion is giving place, almost 
 automatically, to one that will be electrical 
 
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 115 
 
 and scientific, artistic and creative. The 
 material progress due to a secular increase 
 in knowledge, and the economic progress, 
 interfere and combine with and complicate 
 one another ; the former constantly changes 
 the shapes and appliances of the latter, changes 
 the weapons and conditions, and may ulti 
 mately change the spirit and conceptions of 
 the struggle. ; The latter now clogs and arrests 
 the former. So in its broad features, as a con 
 flict between the birth strength of a splendid 
 civilization and a hampering commercialism, I 
 see America. 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF 
 AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OP AMERICAN WEALTH 
 1 
 
 IT is obvious that in a community that has 
 disavowed aristocracy or rule and subordination 
 or service, which has granted unparalleled 
 freedoms to property and despised and dis 
 trusted the state, the chief business of life 
 will consist in getting or attempting to get. 
 But the chief aspect of American life that 
 impinges first upon the European is not this, 
 but the behaviour of a certain overflow at 
 the top of people who have largely and tri 
 umphantly got, and with hands, pockets, safe- 
 deposit vaults full of dollars, are proceeding 
 to realize victory. Before I came to America 
 it was in his capacity of spender that I 
 chiefly knew the American, as a person who 
 had demoralized Regent Street and the Rue 
 de Rivoli, who had taught the London cab 
 man to demand " arf a dollar" for a shilling 
 
120 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 fare, who bought old books and old castles, 
 and had driven the prices of old furniture 
 to incredible altitudes, and was slowly trans 
 ferring our incubus of artistic achievement 
 to American soil. One of my friends in 
 London is Mr. X, who owns those two 
 houses full of fine " pieces" near the British 
 Museum, and keeps his honour unsullied in 
 the most deleterious of trades. " They come 
 to me," he said, " and ask me to buy for 
 them. It s just buying. One of them wants 
 to beat the silver of another; doesn t care 
 what he pays. Another clamours for tapestry. 
 They trust me as they trust a doctor. 
 There s no understanding no feeling. It s 
 hard to treat them well." 
 
 And there is the story of Y, who is wise 
 about pictures. " If you want a Botticelli 
 that size, Mr. Eecord, I can t find it," he 
 said; "you ll have to have it made for you." 
 
 These American spenders have got the 
 whole world u beat" at the foolish game of 
 collecting, and in all the peculiar delights 
 of shopping they excel. And they are the 
 crown and glory of hotel managers through 
 out the world. There is something na ive, 
 something childishly expectant and acquisi 
 tive about this aspect of American riches. 
 

 ^---jfc.. 
 
 , 
 
 I ; 
 
 -s, - 
 
 INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 12: 
 
 There appears no aristocracy in their tra 
 dition, no sense of permanence and greafr 
 responsibility; there appears no sense of sub 
 ordination and service; from the individual 
 istic business struggle they have emerged 
 triumphant, and what is there to do now 
 but spend and have a good time ? 
 
 They swarm in the pleasant places of the 
 Riviera, they pervade Paris and Eome, they 
 occupy Scotch castles and English estates, 
 their motor-cars are terrible and wonderful. 
 And the London Savoy Hotel still flaunts 
 its memory of one splendid American night. 
 The courtyard was flooded with water tinted 
 an artistic blue to the great discomfort of 
 the practically inevitable goldfish, and on 
 this floated a dream of a gondola. And in 
 the gondola the table was spread, and served 
 by the Savoy staff mysteriously disguised in 
 appropriate fancy costume. The whole thing 
 there s only two words for it was "pur- 
 fectly lovely." " The illusion" whatever 
 that was we are assured was complete. It 
 wasn t a nursery treat, you know. The 
 guests, I am told, were important grown 
 up people. 
 
 This sort of childishness, of course, has 
 nothing distinctively American in it. Any 
 
122 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 people of sluggish and uneducated imagina 
 tion, who find themselves profusely wealthy, 
 and are too stupid to understand the huge 
 moral burthen, the burthen of splendid possi 
 bilities it carries, may do things of this sort. 
 It was not Americans, but a party of South 
 African millionaires, who achieved the kindred 
 triumph of the shirt and belt dinner under 
 a tent in a London hotel dining-room. The 
 glittering procession of carriages and motor- 
 carriages which I watched driving down Fifth 
 Avenue, New York, apparently for the pleasure 
 of driving up again, is to be paralleled on 
 the Pincio, in Naples, in Paris, and anywhere 
 where irresponsible pleasure-seekers gather 
 together. After the naive joy of buying 
 things, comes the joy of wearing them 
 publicly, the simple pleasure of the prome 
 nade. These things are universal. But no 
 where has this spending struck me as being 
 so solid and substantial, so nearly twenty- 
 two carats fine, as here. The shops have 
 an air of solid worth, are in the key of 
 butlers, bishops, opera boxes, high class 
 florists, powdered footmen, Eoman beadles, 
 motor -broughams, to an extent that alto 
 gether outshines either Paris or London. 
 
 And in such great hotels as the Waldorf 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 123 
 
 Astoria one finds the new arrivals, the wives 
 and daughters from the west and the south, in 
 new bright hats and splendours of costume, 
 clubbed together, under the discreetest 
 management, for this and that, learning how 
 to spend collectively, reaching out to assem 
 blies, to dinners. From an observant tea- 
 table beneath the fronds of a palm, I 
 surveyed a fine array of these plump and 
 pretty pupils of extravagance. They were, for 
 the most part, quite brilliantly, as well as 
 newly dressed, and with an artless and 
 pleasing unconsciousness of the living form 
 inside. Smart innocents ! I found all that 
 gathering most contagiously interested and 
 happy and fresh. 
 
 And I watched Spending, too, as one 
 sees it in the various incompatible houses 
 of Upper Fifth Avenue, and along the border 
 of Central Park. That, too, suggests a shop, 
 a shop where country houses are sold and 
 stored; there is the Tiffany House, a most 
 expensive looking article, on the shelf, and 
 the Carnegie house. There had been no 
 pretence on the part of the architects that 
 any house belonged in any sense to any 
 other, that any sort of community held them 
 together. The link is just spending. You 
 
i2 4 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 come to New York and spend ; you go 
 away again. To some of these palaces people 
 came and went, others had their blinds down, 
 and conveyed a curious effect of a sunlit 
 child excursionist in a train, who falls asleep 
 and droops against his neighbour; one of 
 the Vanderbilt houses was frankly and 
 brutally boarded up. Newport, I am told, 
 takes up and carries on the same note of 
 magnificent irresponsibility, and there one 
 admires the richest forms of simplicity, tri 
 umphs of villa architecture in thatch, and 
 bathing bungalows in marble . . . 
 
 There exists already, of these irresponsible 
 American rich, a splendid group of portraits, 
 done without extenuation and without malice, 
 in the later work of that great master of 
 English fiction, Mr. Henry James. There 
 one sees them at their best, their refine 
 ment, their large wealthiness, their incredible 
 unreality. I think of " The Ambassadors " and 
 that mysterious source of the income of the 
 Newsomes, a mystery that, with infinite 
 artistic tact, was never explained; but more 
 I think of the " The Golden Bowl," most 
 spacious and serene of novels. 
 
 In that splendid and luminous bubble, 
 the Prince Amerigo and Maggie Verver, Mr. 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 125 
 
 Verver, that assiduous collector, and the 
 adventurous Charlotte Stant, float far above 
 a world of toil and anxiety, spending with 
 a large refinement, with a perfected assur 
 ance and precision. They spend as flowers 
 open. But this is the quintessence, the 
 sublimation, the idealization of the rich 
 American. Few have the restraint for this. 
 For the rest, when one has shopped and 
 shopped, and collected and bought every 
 thing, and promenaded on foot, in motor 
 car and motor - brougham and motor -boat, 
 in yacht and special train, when one has a 
 fine house here, and a fine house there, 
 and photography and the special article have 
 exhausted admiration, there remains chiefly 
 that one broader and more presumptuous 
 pleasure, spending to give. American givers 
 give most generously, and some of them, it 
 must be admitted, give well. But they give 
 individually, incoherently, each pursuing a 
 personal ideal. There are unsuccessful 
 givers. . . . 
 
 American cities are being littered with 
 a disorder of unsystematized foundations and 
 picturesque legacies, much as I find my 
 nursery floor littered with abandoned toys 
 and battles and buildings when the children 
 
126 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 are in bed after a long wet day. Yet some 
 of the gifts are very splendid things. There 
 is, for example, the Leland Stanford Junior 
 University in California, a vast monument 
 of parental affection and Bichardsonian archi 
 tecture, with professors and teaching going 
 on in its interstices ; and there is Mrs. 
 Gardner s delightful Fenway Court, a Ven 
 etian palace brought almost bodily from 
 Italy, and full of finely gathered treasures. . . . 
 
 All this giving is, in its aggregate effect, 
 as confused as industrial Chicago. It pre 
 sents no clear scheme of the future, promises 
 no growth, it is due to the impulsive 
 generosity of a mob of wealthy persons 
 with no broad common conceptions, with 
 no collective dream, with little to hold them 
 together but imitation, and the burning pos 
 session of money; the gifts overlap, they lie 
 at any angle one with another. Some are 
 needless, some mischievous. There are great 
 gaps of unfulfilled need between. 
 
 And through the multitude of lesser though 
 still mighty givers, comes that Colossus of 
 property, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the Jubilee 
 Plunger of Beneficence, that rosy grey-haired 
 nimble little figure, going to and fro between 
 two continents, scattering library buildings as 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 127 
 
 if he sowed wild oats, buildings that may or 
 may not have some educational value, if 
 presently they are reorganized and properly 
 stocked with books. Anon, he appals the 
 thrifty burgesses of Dunfermline with vast and 
 uncongenial responsibilities of expenditure ; 
 anon, he precipitates the library of the late 
 Lord Acton upon our embarrassed Mr. 
 Morley; anon, he pauperizes the students of 
 Scotland. He diffuses his monument through 
 out the English-speaking lands, amidst circum 
 stances of the most flagrant publicity; the 
 receptive learned, the philanthropic noble, 
 bow in expectant swathes before him ; he is 
 the American fable come true ; nothing seems 
 too wild to believe of him, and he fills the 
 European imagination with an altogether 
 erroneous conception of the self-dissipating 
 quality in American wealth. 
 
 2 
 
 Because now, as a matter of fact, dissipa 
 tion is by no means the characteristic quality 
 of* American getting. The good American 
 
128 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 will indeed tell you solemnly that in 
 America it is three generations "from shirt 
 sleeves to shirt sleeves," hut this has about 
 as much truth in it as that remarkable 
 absence of any pure-bred Londoners of the 
 third generation, dear to the British imagina 
 tion. 
 
 Amidst the vast yeasty tumult of American 
 business, of the getting and losing which is 
 the main life of this community, nothing could 
 be clearer than the steady accumulation of 
 great masses of property that show no signs 
 of disintegrating again. The very rich people 
 display an indisposition to divide their estates, 
 the Marshall Field estate in Chicago, for ex 
 ample, accumulates ; the Jay Gould inherit 
 ance survives great strains. And when first 
 I heard that " shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves" 
 proverb, which is so fortifying a consolation 
 to the older school of American, my mind 
 flew back to the Thames Embankment, as 
 one sees it from the steamboat on the river. 
 There, just eastward of the tall red education 
 offices of the London County Council, stands 
 a quite graceful and decorative little building 
 of grey stone, that jars not at all with the 
 fine traditions of the adjacent Temple, but 
 catches the eye, nevertheless, with its very 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 129 
 
 big, very gilded vane in the form of a ship. 
 This is the handsome strong box to which 
 New York pays gigantic yearly tribute, the 
 office in which Mr. W. W. Astor conducts 
 his affairs. They are not his private and indi 
 vidual affairs, but the affairs of the estate of 
 the late J. J. Astor still undivided, and still 
 growing year by year. 
 
 Mr. Astor seems to me to be a much 
 more representative figure of American wealth 
 than any of the conspicuous spenders who 
 strike so vividly upon the European imagina 
 tion. He is the most retiring of personalities. 
 In this picturesque stone casket he works, his 
 staff works under his cognizance, and admi 
 nisters, I know not to what ends, nor to 
 what extent, revenues that exceed those of 
 many sovereign states. He himself is im 
 pressed by it, and, without arrogance, he 
 makes a visit to his offices, with a view of 
 its storage vaults, its halls of disciplined 
 clerks, a novel and characteristic form of 
 entertainment. For the rest, Mr. Astor leads 
 a life of modest affluence, and recreates him 
 self with the genealogy of his family, or in 
 writing short stories about treasure lost and 
 found, and such-like literary work. 
 
 Now, here you have wealth with, as it 
 
 K 
 
130 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 were, the minimum of ownership, as indeed 
 owning its possessor. Nobody seems to be 
 spending that huge income the crowded 
 enormity of New York squeezes out. The 
 "Estate of the late J. J. Astor" must 
 be accumulating more wealth, and still more ; 
 under careful and systematic management 
 must be rolling up like a golden snowball 
 under that golden weather vane. In the 
 most accidental relation to its undistinguished, 
 harmless, arithmetical proprietor ! 
 
 Your anarchist orator or your crude socialist 
 is always talking of the rich as blood-suckers, 
 robbers, robber-barons, "grafters," and so on. 
 It really is nonsense to talk like that. In 
 the presence of Mr. W. W. Astor these pre 
 posterous accusations answer themselves. The 
 thing is a logical outcome of the assumptions 
 about private property on which our con 
 temporary civilization is based, and Mr. 
 Astor, for all that he draws gold from New 
 York as effectually as a ferret draws blood 
 from a rabbit, is indeed the most innocent 
 of men. He finds himself in a certain position, 
 and he sits down very congenially and adds 
 and adds and adds, and relieves the tedium 
 of his leisure in literary composition. Had 
 he been born at the level of a dry-good^ 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 131 
 
 clerk, he would probably have done the same 
 sort of thing on a smaller scale, and it would 
 have been the little Poddlecombe literary 
 society, and not the Pall Mall Magazine, that 
 would have been the richer for his composi 
 tions. It is just the scale of the circumstances 
 that differs. . . 
 
 3 
 
 The lavish spending of Fifth Avenue, and 
 Paris, and Eome, and Mayfair, is but the 
 flower, the often brilliant, the sometimes 
 gaudy flower of the American economic pro 
 cess ; and such slow and patient accumu 
 lators as Mr. Astor, the rounding and ripening 
 fruit. One need be only a little while in 
 America to realize this, and to discern the 
 branch and leaf, and at last even the aggres 
 sive, insatiable spreading root of aggregating 
 property, that was liberated so effectually 
 when America declared herself free. 
 
 The group of people that attracts the 
 largest amount of attention in press and talk, 
 that most obsesses the American imagination, 
 
1 32 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 and that is indeed the most significant at 
 the present time, is the little group a few 
 score men perhaps altogether who are emerg 
 ing distinctly as winners in that great struggle 
 to get, into which this commercial industrial 
 ism has naturally resolved itself. Central 
 among them are the men of the Standard 
 Oil group, the " octopus " which spreads its 
 ramifying tentacles through the whole system 
 of American business, absorbing and absorb 
 ing, grasping and growing. The extraordinarily 
 able investigations of such writers as Miss 
 Tarbell and Bay Stannard Baker, the rhe 
 torical exposures of Mr. T. W. Lawson, have 
 brought out the methods and quality of this 
 group of persons with a particularity that 
 has been reserved heretofore for great states 
 men and crowned heads, and with an un 
 flattering lucidity altogether unprecedented. 
 Not only is every hair on their heads numbered, 
 but the number is published. They are 
 known to their pettiest weaknesses and to 
 their most accidental associations. And in 
 this astonishing blaze of illumination they 
 continue steadfastly to get. 
 
 These men who are creating the greatest 
 system of correlated private properties in the 
 world, who are wealthy beyond all precedent, 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 133 
 
 seem for the most part to be men with no 
 ulterior dream or aim. They are not volup 
 tuaries, they are neither artists nor any sort 
 of creators, and they betray no high political 
 ambitions. Had they anything of the sort, 
 they would not be what they are, they would 
 bo more than that and less. They want and 
 they get, they are inspired by the brute will 
 in their wealth to have more wealth and more, 
 to a sympathetic ardour. They are men of U 
 a competing, patient, enterprising, acquisitive 
 enthusiasm. They have found in America 
 the perfectly favourable environment for their 
 temperaments. In no other country and in 
 no other age could they have risen to such 
 eminence. America is still, by virtue of its 
 great Puritan tradition, and in the older 
 sense of the word, an intensely moral land. 
 Most lusts here are strongly curbed, by public L. 
 opinion, by training and tradition. But the / 
 lust of acquisition has not been curbed, but 
 glorified. . . . 
 
 These financial leaders are accused by the 
 press of every sort of crime in the develop 
 ment of their great organizations and their 
 fight against competitors ; but I feel impelled 
 myself to acquit them of anything so heroic 
 as a general scheme of criminality, as a 
 
I 3 4 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 systematic organization of power. They are 
 men with a good deal of contempt for legis 
 lation and state interference, but that is no 
 distinction, it has unhappily been part of the 
 training of the average American citizen, and 
 they have no doubt exceeded the letter, if 
 not the spirit, of the law of business com 
 petition. They have played to win and not 
 for style, and if they personally had not 
 done so somebody else would ; they fill a 
 position which, from the nature of things, 
 somebody is bound to fill. They have, no 
 doubt, carried sharpness to the very edge of 
 dishonesty; but what else was to be expected 
 from the American conditions ? Only by doing 
 so and taking risks is pre-eminent success in 
 getting to be attained. They have developed 
 an enormous system of espionage, but on 
 his smaller scale every retail grocer, every 
 employer of servants, does something in that 
 way. They have secret agents, false names, 
 concealed bargains, what else could one ex 
 pect ? People have committed suicide through 
 their operations ; but in a game which is bound 
 to bring the losers to despair it is childish 
 to charge the winners with murder. It s the 
 game that is criminal. It is ridiculous, I 
 say, to write of these men as though they 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 135 
 
 were unparalleled villains, intellectual overmen, 
 conscienceless conquerors of the world. Mr. 
 J. D. Kockefeller s mild, thin-lipped, pleasant 
 face gives the lie to all such melodramatic 
 nonsense. 
 
 I must confess to a sneaking liking for 
 this much reviled man. One thinks of Miss 
 Tarbell s description of him displaying his 
 first boyish account-book, his ledger A, to a 
 sympathetic gathering of the Baptist young, 
 telling how he earned fifty dollars in the first 
 three months of his clerking in a Chicago 
 warehouse, and how savingly he dealt with 
 it. Hear his words : 
 
 "You could not get that book from me for 
 all the modern ledgers in New York, nor for 
 all that they would bring. It almost brings 
 tears to my eyes when I read over this little 
 book, and it fills me with a sense of gratitude 
 I cannot express. . . . 
 
 " I know some people . . . especially some 
 young men, find it difficult to keep a little 
 money in their pocket-book. I learned to 
 keep money, and, as we have a way of 
 saying, it did not burn a hole in rny pocket. 
 I was taught that it was the thing to keep 
 the money and take care of it. Among the 
 early experiences that were helpful to me that 
 
136 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 I recollect with pleasure, was one of working 
 a few days for a neighbour digging potatoes 
 an enterprising and thrifty farmer, who could 
 dig a great many potatoes. I was a boy 
 perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age, and 
 he kept me busy from morning until night. 
 It was a ten-hour day. . . . 
 
 "And as I was saving these little sums, I 
 soon learned I could get as much interest for 
 fifty dollars, loaned at seven per cent. the 
 legal rate in the state of New York at that 
 time for a year as I could earn by digging 
 potatoes ten days. The impression was gain 
 ing ground with me that it was a good thing 
 to let money be my slave and not make myself 
 a slave to money. I have tried to remember 
 that in every sense." 
 
 This is not the voice of any sort of con 
 temptuous trampler of his species. This is 
 the voice of an industrious, acquisitive, com 
 monplace, pious man, as honestly and simply 
 proud of his acquisitiveness as a stamp col 
 lector might be. At times in his acquisitions, 
 the strength of his passion may have driven 
 him to lengths beyond the severe moral code, 
 but the same has been true of stamp collectors. 
 He is a man who has taken up with great 
 natural aptitude an ignoble tradition which 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 137 
 
 links economy and earning with piety and 
 honour. His teachers were to blame, that 
 Baptist community that is now so ashamed of 
 its son that it refuses his gifts. To a large 
 extent he is the creature of opportunity; he 
 has been flung to the topmost pinnacle of 
 human envy, partly by accident, partly by 
 that peculiarity of American conditions that 
 has subordinated, in the name of Liberty, all 
 the grave and ennobling affairs of statescraft 
 to a middle-class freedom of commercial enter 
 prise. Quarrel with that if you will. It is 
 unfair and ridiculous to quarrel with him. 
 
 There are, of course, personalities of a very 
 different type in this American central group ; 
 it is, by its nature, a quite promiscuously 
 gathered group of acquisitive men ; and in 
 some the attainment of fabulous wealth has 
 produced, not pious gratitude, but a lumpish 
 arrogance. I have very vivid in my mind a 
 picture, by a keen-minded artist, of perhaps 
 the most impressive of those very rich 
 Americans. My friend beheld him, gross and 
 heavy, seated in an easy-chair in the centre 
 of his private car, among men who stood and 
 came and went. " He clutched a long cigar 
 with a great clumsy hand. He turned on you 
 a queer, coarse, disconcerting bottle-nose with 
 
138 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 
 
 a little hard, blue, wary, hostile eye that 
 watched out from the roots of it. He said 
 nothing. He attempted no civility, he looked 
 pride and insults you ceased to respect your 
 self. . . . 
 
 "It was Boman," my friend said. "There 
 has been nothing like it since the days of that 
 republic. No living king would dare to do it. 
 And those other Americans ! These people 
 walked up to him and talked to him they tried 
 to flatter him and get him to listen to projects. 
 Abjectly. And, you know, he grunted. He 
 didn t talk back. It was beneath him. He 
 just grunted at them ! . . ." 
 
 If you Want to master the absolute " com 
 monness " of quality in all this concentration 
 of American wealth, if you want to understand 
 the entirely unheroic clutching and overreach 
 ing that constitutes the process, you must read 
 the convincing story of Standard Oil methods 
 Mr. T. W. Lawson has to tell in " Frenzied 
 Finance." He writes, very properly, like a 
 sporting tipster, in a peculiarly tawdry slang, 
 of "yegg men" and the "double cross," of 
 " bunco steering" and the "cinch"; he calls 
 the world " God s footstool " and money 
 " shekels " ; he is particularly insistent that Mr. 
 William Eockefeller is " God s image," and in 
 
ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH 139 
 
 terms such as these he achieves his picture 
 triumphantly. The figure of his favourite 
 hero, H. H. Eogers, stands out, a wonderful 
 piece of modelling, "with eyes like X rays," 
 and he inspires the reader at last with an 
 almost fearsome sense of " John D.," waiting, 
 waiting, in the room "upstairs," constantly 
 consulted, constantly correcting and endorsing 
 never once throughout the whole story 
 appearing in his own person. In the near 
 background loom Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan and 
 other portentous bulks of the Steel Trust. The 
 true spirit and texture of the process that is 
 gathering together more of the wealth and 
 control of America, and, still mo re, into one 
 little group of prehensile hands, is displayed 
 beyond dispute or palliation. It is in many 
 ways the best novel I have read for years, 
 done by a man of real literary genius. You 
 have the kinetic aspect of American getting, 
 plainly and vulgarly set forth, the truth about 
 that American wealth accumulation which, at 
 the other end of the scale, and in its children 
 and grandchildren, gives one the retiring 
 refinement of Mr. W. W. Astor, the dainty 
 princesses of "The Golden Bowl," and our 
 duchesses in fine porcelain. 
 
CERTAIN WORKERS 
 

 CHAPTER VI 
 
 CEBTAIN WORKEES 
 1 
 
 LET us now look a little at another aspect 
 of this process of individualistic competition 
 which is the economic process in America, 
 and which is giving us on its upper side the 
 spenders of Fifth Avenue, the slow accumu 
 lators of the Astor type, and the great getters 
 of the giant business organizations, the Trusts 
 and acquisitive finance. We have concluded 
 that this process of free and open competi 
 tion in business which, clearly, the framers 
 of the American Constitution imagined to be 
 immortal, does, as a matter of fact, tend to 
 kill itself through the advantage property 
 gives in the acquisition of more property. 
 But before we can go on to estimate the 
 further future of this process, we must ex 
 periment with another question. What is 
 happening to those who have not got and 
 
144 CERTAIN WORKERS 
 
 who are not getting wealth, who are, in fact, 
 falling back in the competition? 
 
 Now, there can be little doubt to any one< 
 who goes to and fro in America that, in spite 
 of the huge accumulation of property in a 
 few hands that is now in progress, there is 
 still no general effect of impoverishment. To 
 me, coming from London to New York, the 
 crowd in the trolley-cars and subways and 
 streets seemed one of exceptional prosperity. 
 New York has, no doubt, its effects of noise, 
 disorder, discomfort, and a sort of brutality; 
 but to begin with, one sees nothing of the 
 underfed people, the numerous dingily clad 
 and greyly housed people who catch the eye 
 in London. Even in the congested arteries, 
 the filthy back streets of the East side, I 
 found myself saying, as a thing remarkable, 
 " These people have money to spend. " In 
 London one travels long distances for a penny, 
 and great regiments of people walk; in New 
 York the universal fare is twopence halfpenny, 
 and everybody rides. Common people are 
 better gloved and better booted in America 
 than in any European country I know, in 
 spite of the higher prices for clothing ; the 
 men wear ready-made suits, it is true, to a 
 much greater extent, but they are newer 
 
CERTAIN WORKERS 145 
 
 and brighter than the London clerk s care 
 fully brushed, tailor-made garments. Wages 
 translated from dollars into shillings seem 
 enormous. 
 
 And there is no perceptible fall in wages 
 going on. On the whole wages tend to rise. 
 For almost all sorts of men, for working 
 women who are not " refined," there is a 
 limitless field of employment. The fact that 
 a growing proportion of the wealth of the 
 community is passing into the hands of a 
 small minority of successful getters, is masked 
 to superficial observation by the steady in 
 crease of the total wealth. The growth 
 process overrides the economic process, and 
 may continue to do so for many years. 
 
 So that the great mass of the population 
 is not consciously defeated in the economic 
 game. It is only failing to get a large share 
 in the increment of wealth. The European 
 reader must dismiss from his mind any con 
 ception of the general American population 
 as a mass of people undergoing impoverish 
 ment through the enrichment of the few. 
 He must substitute for that figure a mass 
 of people, very busy, roughly prosperous, 
 generally self-satisfied, but ever and again 
 stirred to bouts of irascibility and suspicion, 
 
146 CERTAIN WORKERS 
 
 inundated by a constantly swelling flood of 
 prosperity that pours through it and over 
 it and passes by it, without changing or 
 enriching it at all. Ever and again it is 
 irritated by some rise in price; an advance 
 in coal, for example, or meat or rent, that 
 swallows up some anticipated gain ; but that 
 is an entirely different thing from the distress, 
 from the fireless, hungering poverty of Europe. 
 Nevertheless, the sense of losing develops 
 and spreads in the mass of the American 
 people. Privations are not needed to create 
 a sense of economic disadvantage; thwarted 
 hopes suffice. The speed and pressure of 
 work here is much greater than in Europe, 
 the impatience for realization intenser. The 
 average American comes into life prepared to 
 "get on," and ready to subordinate most 
 things in life to that. He encounters a 
 rising standard of living. He finds it more 
 difficult to get on than his father did before 
 him. He is perplexed and irritated by the 
 spectacle of lavish spending and the report 
 of gigantic accumulations that outshine his 
 utmost possibilities of enjoyment or success. 
 He is a busy and industrious man, greatly 
 preoccupied by the struggle ; but when he 
 stops to think and talk at all, there can be 
 
CERTAIN WORKERS 147 
 
 little doubt that his outlook is a disillusioned 
 one, more and more tinged with a deepening 
 discontent. 
 
 2 
 
 But the state of mind of the average 
 American we have to consider later. That is 
 the central problem of this horoscope we con 
 template. Before we come to that we have 
 to sketch out all the broad aspects of the 
 situation with which that mind has to deal. 
 
 Now, in the preceding chapter I tried to 
 convey my impression of the spending and 
 wealth-getting of this vast community ; I 
 tried to convey how irresponsible it was, how 
 unpremeditated. The American rich have, as it 
 were, floated up out of a confused struggle of 
 equal individuals. That individualistic com 
 mercial struggle has not only flung up these 
 rich to their own and the world s amazement ; 
 it is also, with an equal blindness, crushing 
 and maiming great multitudes of souls. But 
 this is a fact that does not smite upon one s 
 attention at the outset. The English visitor 
 
i 4 8 CERTAIN WORKERS 
 
 to the great towns sees the spending, sees 
 the general prosperity, the universal air of 
 confident pride ; he must go out of his way 
 to find the underside to these things. 
 
 One little thing set me questioning. I 
 had been one Sunday night down town, sup 
 ping and talking with Mr. Abraham Cahan 
 about " Bast Side," that strange city within 
 a city, which has a drama of its own and a 
 literature and a press, and about Eussia and 
 her problem, and I was returning on the sub 
 way about two o clock in the morning. I 
 became aware of a little lad sitting opposite 
 me, a childish-faced, delicate little creature 
 of eleven years old or thereabouts, wearing 
 the uniform of a boy messenger. He drooped 
 with fatigue, roused himself with a start, 
 edged from his seat with a sigh, stepped off 
 the car, and was vanishing upstairs into the 
 electric glare of Astor Place as the train ran 
 out of the station. 
 
 " What on earth," said I, "is that baby 
 doing abroad at this time of night ? " 
 
 For me this weary little wretch became the 
 irritant centre of a painful region of inquiry. 
 " How many hours a day may a child 
 work in New York?" I began to ask people, 
 " and when may a boy leave school? " 
 
CERTAIN WORKERS 149 
 
 I had blundered, I found, upon the 
 weakest spot in America s fine front of 
 national well-being. My eyes were opened 
 to the childish! newsboys who sold me papers, 
 and the little bootblacks at the street 
 corners. Nocturnal child employment is a 
 social abomination. I gathered stories of 
 juvenile vice, of lads of nine and ten suffer 
 ing from terrible diseases, of the contingent 
 sent out of the ranks of these messengers 
 to the hospitals and jails. I began to realize 
 another aspect of that great theory of the 
 liberty of property and the subordination of 
 the state to business, upon which American 
 institutions are based. That theory has no 
 regard for children. Indeed, it is a theory 
 that disregards women and children, the car 
 dinal facts of life, altogether. They are in 
 America private things . . . 
 
 It is curious how little we, who live in 
 the dawning light of a new time, question 
 the intellectual assumptions of the social 
 order about us. We find ourselves in a life 
 of huge confusions and many cruelties, we 
 plan this and that to remedy and improve, 
 but very few of us go down to the ideas 
 that begot these ugly conditions, the laws, 
 the usages and liberties that are now in 
 
150 CERTAIN WORKERS 
 
 their detailed expansion so perplexing, intri 
 cate, and overwhelming. Yet the life of 
 man is altogether made up of will cast into 
 the mould of ideas, and only by correcting 
 ideas, changing ideas and replacing ideas, are 
 any ameliorations and advances to be achieved 
 in human destiny. All other things are 
 subordinate to that. 
 
 Now, the theory of liberty upon which the 
 liberalism of Great Britain, the Constitution 
 of the United States, and the bourgeois 
 republic of France rests, assumes that all 
 men are free and equal. They are all 
 tacitly supposed to be adult and immortal, 
 they are sovereign over their property and 
 over their wives and children, and every 
 thing is framed with a view to ensuring 
 them security in the enjoyment of their 
 rights. No doubt this was a better theory 
 than that of the divine right of kings, 
 against which it did triumphant battle ; but 
 it does, as one sees it to-day, fall most ex 
 traordinarily short of the truth, and only a 
 few logical fanatics have ever tried to carry 
 it out to its complete consequences. For 
 example, it ignored the facts that more than 
 half of the adult people in a country are 
 women, and that all the men and women of 
 
CERTAIN WORKERS 151 
 
 a country taken together are hardly as 
 numerous, and far less important to the wel 
 fare of that country, than the individuals 
 under age. It regarded living as just living, 
 a stupid dead-level of egotistical effort and 
 enjoyment ; it was blind to the fact that 
 living is part growing, part learning, part 
 dying to make way, and altogether service 
 and sacrifice. It asserted that the care 
 and education of children, and business bar 
 gains affecting the employment and wel 
 fare of women and children, are private 
 affairs. It resisted the compulsory education 
 of children, and factory legislation, therefore, 
 with extraordinary persistence and bitterness. 
 The common sense of the three great pro 
 gressive nations concerned has been stronger 
 than their theory, but to this day enormous 
 social evils are to be traced to that pas 
 sionate jealousy of state intervention between 
 a man and his wife, his children, and other 
 property, which is the distinctive unpre 
 cedented feature of the originally middle- 
 class modern organization of society upon 
 commercial and industrial conceptions in 
 which we are all (and America most deeply) 
 living. 
 
 I began with a drowsy little messenger 
 
152 CERTAIN WORKERS 
 
 boy in the New York subway. Before I had 
 done with the question I had come upon 
 amazing things. Just think of it ! This 
 richest, greatest country the world has ever 
 seen has over 1,700,000 children under fifteen 
 years of age toiling in fields, factories, mines, 
 and workshops. And Eobert Hunter, whose 
 " Poverty, * if I were autocrat, should be 
 compulsory reading for every prosperous adult 
 in the United States, tells me of " not less 
 than eighty thousand children, most of whom 
 are little girls, at present employed in the 
 textile mills of this country. In the South 
 there are now six times as many children 
 at work as there were twenty years ago. 
 Child labour is increasing yearly in that 
 section of the country. Each year more 
 little ones are brought in from the fields 
 and hills to live in the degrading and de 
 moralizing atmosphere of the mill towns ..." 
 Children are deliberately imported by the 
 Italians. I gathered from Commissioner 
 Watchorn at Ellis Island that the propor 
 tion of little nephews and nieces, friends 7 
 sons, and so forth, brought in by them is 
 peculiarly high, and I heard him try and 
 condemn a doubtful case. It was a particu 
 larly unattractive Italian in charge of a 
 
CERTAIN WORKERS 153 
 
 dull-eyed little boy of no ascertainable relation 
 ship. . . . 
 
 In the worst days of cotton-milling in 
 England the conditions were hardly worse 
 than those now existing in the South. 
 Children, the tiniest and frailest, of five and 
 six years of age, rise in the morning and, 
 like old men and women, go to the mills 
 to do their day s labour; and, when they 
 return home, " wearily fling themselves on 
 their beds, too tired to take off their clothes." 
 Many children work all night "in the mad 
 dening racket of the machinery, in an at 
 mosphere insanitary and clouded with humidity 
 and lint." 
 
 " It will be long," adds Mr. Hunter, in 
 his description, "before I forget the face oi 
 a little boy of six years, with his hands 
 stretched forward to rearrange a bit of 
 machinery, his pallid face and spare form 
 already showing the physical effects of 
 labour. This child, six years of age, was 
 working twelve hours a day/ 
 
 From Mr. Spargo s "Bitter Cry of the 
 Children " I learn this much of the joys of 
 certain among the youth of Pennsylvania : 
 
 "For ten or eleven hours a day children 
 of ten and eleven stoop over the chute and 
 
r 5 4 CERTAIN WORKERS 
 
 pick out the slate and other impurities from 
 the coal as it moves past them. The air 
 is black with coal-dust, and the roar of the 
 crushers, screens, and rushing mill-race of 
 coal is deafening. Sometimes one of the 
 children falls into the machinery and is 
 terribly mangled, or slips into the chute and 
 is smothered to death. Many children are 
 killed in this way. Many others, after a 
 time, contract coal-miners asthma and con 
 sumption, which gradually undermine their 
 health. Breathing continually, day after day, 
 the clouds of coal-dust, their lungs become 
 black and choked with small particles of 
 anthracite . . ." 
 
 In Massachusetts, at Fall Eiver, the Hon. 
 J. F. Carey tells us how little naked boys, 
 free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the 
 New York millionaire, packing cloth into 
 bleaching vats, in a bath of chemicals that 
 bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of 
 lepers. . . . 
 
 Well, we English have no right to con 
 demn the Americans for these things. The 
 history of our own industrial development is 
 black with the blood of tortured and mur 
 dered children. New Jersey sends her pauper 
 children south to-day into worse than slavery, 
 

 BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY 
 
CERTAIN WORKERS 155 
 
 but, as Cottle tells in his reminiscences of 
 Southey and Coleridge, that is precisely the 
 same wretched export that Bristol packed off to 
 feed the mills of Manchester in late Georgian 
 times. We got ahead with factory legislation 
 by no peculiar virtue in our statecraft, it was 
 just the revenge the landlords took upon the 
 manufacturers for reform and free trade in 
 corn and food. In America the manufacturers 
 have had things to themselves. 
 
 And America has difficulties to encounter 
 of which we know nothing. In the matter 
 of labour legislation, each state legislature is 
 supreme; in each separate state the forces of 
 light and progress must fight the battle of 
 the children and the future over again 
 against interests, lies, prejudice, and stupidity. 
 Each state pleads the bad example of another 
 state, and there is always the threat that 
 capital will withdraw. No national minimum 
 is possible under existing conditions. And 
 when the laws have passed, there is still the 
 universal contempt for state control to reckon 
 with, the impossibilities of enforcement. Illi 
 nois, for instance, scandalized at the spectacle 
 of children in those filthy stockyards, ankle- 
 deep in blood, cleaning intestines and trim 
 ming meat, recently passed a Child Labour 
 
156 CERTAIN WORKERS 
 
 Law that raised the minimum age for such 
 employment to sixteen, but evasion, they told 
 me in Chicago, was simple and easy. New 
 York, too, can show by its statute books that 
 my drowsy, nocturnal messenger boy was illegal 
 and impossible. . . . 
 
 This is the bottommost end of the scale 
 that at the top has all the lavish spending 
 of Fifth Avenue, the joyous, wanton giving 
 of Mr. Andrew Carnegie. Equally with these 
 things, it is an unpremeditated consequence 
 of an inadequate theory of freedom. The 
 foolish extravagances of the rich, the archi 
 tectural bathos of Newport, the dingy, noisy, 
 economic jumble of central and south Chicago, 
 the Standard Oil offices in Broadway, the 
 darkened streets beneath New York s elevated 
 railroad, the littered ugliness of Niagara s 
 banks, and the lowermost hell of child-suffer 
 ing, are all so many accordant aspects and 
 inexorable consequences of the same undis 
 ciplined way of living. Let each man push 
 for himself it comes to these things. . . . 
 
 So far as our purpose of casting a horo 
 scope goes, we have particularly to note this 
 as affecting the future ; these working children 
 cannot be learning to read though they will 
 presently be having votes; they cannot grow 
 
CERTAIN WORKERS 157 
 
 up fit to bear arms, to be in any sense but 
 a vile, corrupting sweater s sense men. So 
 miserably they will avenge themselves by 
 supplying the stuff for vice, for crime, for 
 yet more criminal political manipulations. One 
 million seven hundred children, practically 
 uneducated, are toiling over here, and grow 
 ing up, darkened, marred, and dangerous, into 
 the American Future I am seeking to 
 forecast. 
 
CORRUPTION 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 COKBUPTION 
 1 
 
 So, it seems to me, in this new crude conti 
 nental commonwealth, there is going on the 
 same economic process, on a grander scale 
 indeed, that has gone so far in our own 
 island. There is a great concentration of 
 wealth above, and below, deep and growing, 
 is the Abyss, that sunken multitude on the 
 margin of subsistence which is a characteristic 
 and necessary feature of competitive indus 
 trialism, that teeming Abyss whose children 
 have no chance, whose men and women 
 dream neither of leisure nor self-respect. And 
 between this efflorescence of wealth above 
 and spreading degradation below, comes the 
 great mass of the population, perhaps fifty 
 millions and more of healthy and active men, 
 women, and children (I leave out of count 
 altogether the coloured people and the special 
 
 M 
 
1 62 CORRUPTION 
 
 trouble of the South until a later paper) 
 who are neither irresponsibly free nor hope 
 lessly bound, who are the living determining 
 substance of America. 
 
 Collectively they constitute what Mr. Boose- 
 velt calls the "Nation," what an older school 
 of Americans used to write of as the People. 
 The Nation is neither rich nor poor, neither 
 capitalist nor labourer, neither Kepublican nor 
 Democrat; it is a great diversified multitude 
 including all these things. It is a compre 
 hensive abstraction; it is the ultimate reality. 
 You may seek for it in America and you 
 cannot find it, as one seeks in vain for the 
 forest among the trees. It has no clear 
 voice; the confused and local utterances of a 
 dispersed innumerable press, of thousands of 
 public speakers, of books and preachers, evoke 
 fragmentary responses or drop rejected into 
 oblivion. I have been told by countless people 
 where I shall find the typical American; one 
 says in Maine, one in the Alleghenies, one 
 "further west," one in Kansas, one in Cleve 
 land. He is indeed nowhere and everywhere. 
 He is an English-speaking person, with ex 
 traordinarily English traits still, in spite of 
 much good German and Scandinavian and 
 Irish blood he has assimilated. He has a 
 
CORRUPTION 163 
 
 distrust of lucid theories and logic, and lie 
 talks unwillingly of ideas. He is preoccupied, 
 he is busy with his individual affairs, but he 
 is I can feel it in the air thinking. 
 
 How widely and practically he is think 
 ing, that curious product of the last few 
 years, the ten-cent magazine, will show. In 
 England our sixpenny magazines seem all 
 written for boys and careless people; they 
 are nothing but stories and jests and pictures. 
 The weekly ones achieve an extraordinarily 
 agreeable emptiness. Their American equiva 
 lents are full of the studied and remarkably 
 well-written discussion of grave public ques 
 tions. I pick up one magazine and find a 
 masterly exposition of the public aspect of 
 railway rebates ; another, and a trust is 
 analyzed. Then here are some titles of the 
 books that all across this continent are being 
 multitudinously read : Parsons Heart of the 
 Railway Problem, Steffens* Shame of the Cities, 
 Lawson s Frenzied Finance, Miss Tarbell s 
 Story of Standard Oil, Abbott s Industrial 
 Problem, Spargo s Bitter Cry of the Children, 
 Hunter s Poverty, and, pioneer of them all, 
 Lloyd s Wealth against Commonwealth. These 
 are titles quoted almost at haphazard. Within 
 a remarkably brief space of time, the American 
 
164 CORRUPTION 
 
 nation has turned away from all the heady 
 self-satisfaction of the nineteenth century and 
 commenced a process of heart-searching quite 
 unparalleled in history. Its egotistical in 
 terest in its own past is over and done. 
 While Mr. Upton Sinclair, the youngest, 
 most distinctive of recent American novelists, 
 achieved but a secondary success with his 
 admirably conceived romance of the civil 
 war, Manassas ; . The Jungle, his book about 
 the beef trust and the soul of the immigrant, 
 the most unflattering picture of America 
 that any one has yet dared to draw, LAS 
 fired the country. 
 
 The American nation, which a few years 
 ago seemed invincibly wedded to an extreme 
 individualism, resolved, as it were, to sit on 
 the safety valves of the economic process 
 and go on to the ultimate catastrophe, dis 
 plays itself now alert and questioning, It 
 has roused itself to a grave and extensive 
 consideration of the intricate economic and 
 political problems that close like a net about 
 its future. The essential question for America, 
 as for Europe, is the rescue of her land, her 
 public services, and the whole of her great 
 economic process from the anarchic and 
 irresponsible control of private owners how 
 
CORRUPTION 165 
 
 dangerous and horrible that control may be 
 come the Kailway and Beef Trust investiga 
 tions have shown and the organization of her 
 social life upon the broad, clean, humane con 
 ceptions of modern science. In every country, 
 however, this huge problem of reconstruction, 
 which is the alternative to a plutocratic de 
 cadence, is enormously complicated by irrele 
 vant and special difficulties. In Great Britain, 
 for example, the ever-pressing problem of 
 holding the Empire, and the fact that one 
 legislative body is composed almost entirely 
 of private landowners, hampers every step 
 towards a better order. Upon every country 
 in Europe weighs the armour of war. In 
 America the complications are distinctive 
 and peculiar. She is free, indeed, now to a 
 large extent from the possibility of any grave 
 military stresses ; her one overseas investment 
 in the Philippines she is evidently resolved 
 to forget and be rid of at as early a date 
 as possible. But, on the other hand, she is 
 confronted by a system of legal entangle 
 ments of extraordinary difficulty and per 
 plexity, she has the most powerful tradition 
 of individualism in the world, and a degraded 
 political system, and she has, in the pre 
 sence of a vast and increasing proportion of 
 
1 66 CORRUPTION 
 
 unassirnilable aliens in her substance, negroes, 
 South European peasants, Russian Jews, and 
 the like, an ever-intensifying complication. 
 
 I 
 i. 
 
 Now what is called corruption in America 
 is a thing not confined to politics ; it is a 
 defect of moral method found in every depart 
 ment of American life. I find in big print 
 in every paper I open, " GRAFT." All through 
 my journey in America I have been trying 
 to gauge the quality of this corruption. I 
 have been talking to all kinds of people 
 about it; I have had long conversations 
 about it with President Eliot of Harvard, 
 with District Attorney Jerome, with one 
 leading insurance president, with a number 
 of the City Club people in Chicago, with 
 several East-siders in New York, with men 
 engaged in public work in every city I have 
 visited, with senators at Washington, with a 
 Chicago saloon-keeper and his friend, a shep 
 herd of votes, and with a varied and casual 
 assortment of Americans upon trains and 
 
CORRUPTION 167 
 
 boats ; I read my Ostrogorsky, my Miinster- 
 berg, and my Koosevelt before I came to 
 America, and I find myself going through 
 any American newspaper that comes to hand 
 always with an eye to this. It is to me a 
 most vital issue in the horoscope I contem 
 plate. All depends upon the answer to this 
 question: is the average citizen fundamen 
 tally dishonest? Is he a rascal and humbug 
 in grain ? If he is, the future can needs 
 be no more than a monstrous social dis 
 organization in the face of Divine oppor 
 tunities. Or is he fundamentally honest, but 
 a little confused ethically ? . . . 
 
 The latter, I think, is the truer alterna 
 tive, but I will confess I have ranged through 
 all the scale between a buoyant optimism 
 and despair. It is extraordinarily difficult 
 to move among the crowded contrasts of this 
 perplexing country and emerge with any satis 
 factory generalization. But there is one word 
 I find all too frequently in the American 
 papers, and that is " stealing." They come 
 near calling any profitable, rather unfair bar 
 gain with the public, a "steal." It s the 
 common journalistic vice here always to over 
 state. Every land has its criminals no doubt, 
 but the American, I am convinced, is the last 
 
i68 CORRUPTION 
 
 man in the world to steal. Nor does he tell 
 you lies to your face, except in the way of 
 business. He s not that sort of man. Nor 
 does he sneak bad money into your confiding 
 hand. Nor ask a higher price than he means 
 to accept* Nor cheat on exchange. For all 
 the frequency of "graft" and " stealing" in 
 the press headlines, I feel the American is 
 pretty distinctly less "mean" than many 
 Europeans in these respects, and much more 
 disposed to be ashamed of meanness. 
 
 But he certainly has an ethical system of 
 a highly commercial type. If he isn t dis 
 honest, he s commercialized. He lives to 
 get, to come out of every transaction with 
 more than he gave. / 
 
 In the highly imaginative theory that 
 underlies the realities of an individualistic 
 society there is such a thing as honest trad 
 ing. In practice I don t believe there is. 
 Exchangeable things are supposed to have a 
 fixed quality called their value, and honest 
 trading is, I am told, the exchange of things 
 of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by 
 honest trading, and therefore nobody can grow 
 rich by it. And nobody would do business 
 except to subsist by a profit and attempt 
 to grow rich. The honest merchant in the 
 
CORRUPTION 169 
 
 individualist s dream is a worthy and urbane 
 person who intervenes between the seller 
 here and the buyer there, fetches from one 
 to another, stores a surplus of goods, takes 
 risks, and indemnifies himself by charging 
 the seller and the buyer a small fee for his 
 waiting and his carrying and his speculative 
 hawking about. He would be sick and 
 ashamed to undervalue a purchase or over 
 charge a customer, and it scarcely requires 
 a competitor to reduce his fee to a minimum. 
 He draws a line between customers with whom 
 he deals and competitors with whom he 
 wouldn t dream of dealing. And though it 
 seems a little incredible, he grows rich and 
 bountiful in these practices, and endows Art, 
 Science, and Literature. Such is the com 
 mercial life in a world of economic angels, 
 magic justice, and the individualist s Utopia. 
 In reality, flesh and blood cannot resist a 
 bargain, and people trade to get. In reality, 
 value is a dream, and the commercial ideal 
 is to buy from the needy, sell to the urgent 
 need, and get all that can possibly be got out 
 of every transaction. To do anything else 
 isn t business it s some other sort of game. 
 
 Let us look squarely into the pretences 
 of trading. The plain fact of the case is that 
 
1 70 CORRUPTION 
 
 in trading for profit there is no natural line 
 at which legitimate bargaining ends and cheat 
 ing begins. The seller wants to get above 
 the value and the buyer below it. The seller 
 seeks to appreciate, the buyer to depreciate ; 
 and where is there room for truth in that 
 contest ? In bargaining, overvaluing and 
 undervaluing are not only permissible but 
 inevitable, attempts to increase the desire to 
 buy and willingness to sell. Who can invent 
 a rule to determine what expedients are per 
 missible and what not ? You may draw an 
 arbitrary boundary the law does here and 
 there, a little discontinuously but that is all. 
 For example, consider these questions that 
 follow : Nothing is perfect in this world, all 
 goods are defective ; are you bound to inform 
 your customer of every defect ? Suppose 
 you are, then are you bound to examine 
 your goods minutely for defects ? Grant that ; 
 then if you entrust that duty to an employee, 
 ought you to dismiss him for selling defective 
 goods for you ? The customer will buy your 
 goods anyhow ; are you bound to spend more 
 upon cleaning and packing them than he 
 demands? to wrap them in gold-foil gratuit 
 ously, for example ? How are you going to 
 answer these questions ? Let me suppose that 
 
CORRUPTION 171 
 
 your one dream in life is to grow rich. Sup 
 pose you want to grow very rich and found 
 a noble university, let us say ? 
 
 You answer them in the Roman spirit, with 
 caveat emptor. 
 
 Then can you decently join in the outcry 
 against the Chicago butchers ? 
 
 Then turn again to the group of problems 
 the Standard Oil history raises. You want 
 the customer to buy your goods and not your 
 competitor s. Naturally you do everything to 
 get your goods to him, to make them seem 
 best to him, to reduce the influx of the other 
 man s stuff. You don t lend your competitor 
 your shop window anyhow. If there s a 
 hoarding you don t restrict your advertise 
 ments, because otherwise there won t be room 
 for him. And if you happen to have a para 
 mount interest in the carrying line that bears 
 your goods and his, why shouldn t you see 
 that your own goods arrive first? And at a 
 cheaper rate ? . . . 
 
 You see, one has to admit there is always 
 this element of over-reaching, of outwitting, 
 of forestalling, in all systematic trade. It 
 may be refined, it may be dignified, but it 
 is there. It differs in degree and not in 
 quality from cheating. A very scrupulous 
 
172 CORRUPTION 
 
 man stops at one point, a less scrupulous 
 man at another, an eager ambitious man may 
 find himself carried by his own impetus very 
 far. Too often the least scrupulous wins. In 
 all ages, among all races, this taint in trade 
 has been felt. Modern Western Europe, led 
 by England, and America have denied it 
 stoutly, have glorified the trader, called him 
 a " merchant prince," wrapped him in the 
 purple of the word "financier," bowed down 
 before him. The trader remains a trader, a 
 hand that clutches, an uncreative brain that 
 lays snares. Occasionally, no doubt, he 
 exceeds his function and is better than his 
 occupations. But it is not he but the maker 
 who must be the power and ruler of the 
 great and luminous social order that must 
 surely come, that new order I have persuaded 
 myself I find in glimmering evasive promise 
 amidst the congestions of New York, the 
 sheds and defilements of Niagara, and the 
 Chicago reek and grime. . . . 
 
 The American, I feel assured, can be a 
 bold and splendid maker* He is not, like 
 the uncreative Parsee, or Jew, or Armenian, 
 a trader by blood and nature. The archi 
 tecture I have seen, the finely planned, 
 internally beautiful, and admirably organized 
 
CORRUPTION 173 
 
 office buildings (to step into them from the 
 street is to step up fifty years in the scale 
 of civilization), the business organizations, 
 the industrial skill I visited a trap and 
 chain factory at Oneida, right in the heart 
 of New York State, that was like the interior 
 of a well-made clock above all, the plans 
 for reconstructing his cities, show that. Those 
 others make nothing. But, nevertheless, since 
 he more than any man has subserved the full 
 development of eighteenth and nineteenth 
 century conceptions, he has acquired some 
 of the very worst habits of the trader. Too 
 often he is a gambler. Ever and again I 
 have had glimpses of preoccupied groups 
 of men at green tables in little rooms, play 
 ing that dreary gam$ poker, wherein there 
 is no skill, no variety except in the sum at 
 hazard, no orderly development, only a sort 
 of expressionless lying called " bluffing." 
 Indeed, poker isn t so much a game as a bad 
 habit. Yet the American sits for long hours 
 at it, dispersing and accumulating dollars, 
 and he carries its great conception of " bluff" 
 and a certain experience of kinetic physiognomy 
 back with him to his office. . . . 
 
 And Americans talk dollars to an astonish 
 ing extent. . . . 
 
174 CORRUPTION 
 
 Now this is the reality of American cor 
 ruption, a huge exclusive preoccupation with 
 dollar-getting. What is called corruption by 
 the press is really no more than the acute 
 expression in individual cases of this general 
 fault. 
 
 Where everybody is getting, it is idle to 
 expect a romantic standard of honesty between 
 employers and employed. The official who 
 buys rails for the big railway company that 
 is professedly squeezing every penny it can 
 out of the public for its shareholders as its 
 highest aim, is not likely to display any 
 religious self-abnegation of a share for himself 
 in this great work. The director finds it hard 
 to distinguish between getting for himself 
 and getting for his company, and the duty 
 to one s self of a discreet use of opportunity 
 taints the whole staff from manager to mes 
 senger boy. The politicians who protect the 
 interests of the same railway in the House 
 of Commons or the Senate, as the case may 
 be, are not going to do it for love either. 
 Nobody will have any mercy for their wives 
 or children if they die poor. The policeman 
 who stands between the property of the com 
 pany and the irregular enterprise of robbers 
 feels his vigilance merits a special recognition. 
 
CORRUPTION 175 
 
 A position of trust is a position of advantage, 
 and deserves a percentage. Everywhere, as 
 every one knows, in all the modern states, 
 quite as much as in China, there are com 
 missions, there are tips, there are extortions 
 and secret profits ; there is, in a word, 
 " graft." It s no American speciality. Things 
 are very much the same in this matter in 
 Great Britain as in America, but Americans 
 talk more and louder of these things than we 
 do. And indeed all this is no more than 
 an inevitable development of the idea of 
 trading in the mind, that every transaction 
 must leave something behind for the agent. 
 It s not stealing, but nevertheless the auto 
 matic cash register becomes more and more 
 of a necessity in this thickening atmosphere 
 of private enterprise. 
 
 3 
 
 It seems to me that the political corrup 
 tion that still plays so large a part in the 
 American problem is a natural and necessary 
 underside to a purely middle-class organization 
 
176 CORRUPTION 
 
 of society for business. Nobody is left over 
 to watch the politician. And the evil is 
 enormously aggravated by the complexities 
 of the political machinery, by the methods 
 of the presidential election that practically 
 prescribes a ticket method of voting, and by 
 the absence of any second ballots. Moreover, 
 the passion of the simpler-minded Americans 
 for aggressive legislation controlling private 
 morality, has made the control of the police 
 a main source of party revenue, and dragged 
 the saloon and brothel, essentially retiring 
 though these institutions are, into politics. 
 The Constitution ties up political reform in 
 the most extraordinary way; it was planned 
 by devout republicans equally afraid of a 
 dictatorship and the people; it does not so 
 much distribute power as disperse it, the 
 machinery falls readily into the hands of 
 professional politicians with no end to serve 
 but their immediate profit, and is almost 
 inaccessible to poor men who cannot make 
 their incomes in its working. An increasing 
 number of wealthy young men have followed 
 President Roosevelt into political life one 
 thinks of such figures as Senator Colby of 
 New Jersey but they are but incidental 
 mitigations of a generally vicious scheme. 
 
CORRUPTION 177 
 
 Before the nation, so busy with its diversified 
 private affairs, lies the devious and difficult 
 problem of a great reconstruction of its 
 political methods, as a preliminary to any broad 
 change of its social organization. . . . 
 
 How vicious things are I have had some 
 inkling in a dozen whispered stories of 
 forged votes, of ballot-boxes rifled, of papers 
 destroyed, of the violent personation of cowed 
 and ill-treated men. And in Chicago I 
 saw a little of the physical aspect of the 
 system. 
 
 I made the acquaintance of Alderman 
 Kenna, who is better known, I found, through 
 out the States, as " Hinky-Dink," saw his 
 two saloons and something of the Chinese 
 quarter about him. He is a compact, upright 
 little man, with iron-grey hair, a clear blue 
 eye, and a dry manner. He wore a bowler 
 hat through all our experiences, and kept his 
 hands in his jacket pockets. He filled me with 
 a ridiculous idea, for which I apologize, that, 
 had it fallen to the lot of Mr. J. M. Barrie 
 to miss a university education, and keep a 
 saloon in Chicago and organize voters, he 
 would have looked own brother to Mr. Kenna. 
 We conversed in the first saloon, a fine, 
 handsome place, with mirrors and tables and 
 
 N 
 
178 CORRUPTION 
 
 decorations, and a consumption of mitigated 
 mineral waters and beer in bottles ; then I 
 was taken over to see the other saloon, the 
 one across the way. We went behind the 
 counter, and while I professed a compara 
 tive interest in English and American beer- 
 engines, and the Alderman exchanged com 
 monplaces with two or three of the shirt- 
 sleeved barmen, I was able to survey the 
 assembled customers. 
 
 It struck me as a pretty tough gathering. 
 
 The first thing that met the eye were 
 the schooners of beer. There is nothing quite 
 like the American beer schooner in England. 
 It would appeal strongly to an unstinted 
 appetite for beer, and I should be curious to 
 try it upon a British agricultural labourer 
 and see how many he could hold. He would, 
 I am convinced, have to be entirely hollowed 
 out to hold two. Those I saw impressed 
 me as being about the size of small fish- 
 globes set upon stems, and each was filled 
 with a very substantial-looking beer indeed 
 a sticky-looking beer. They stood in a careless 
 row all the long length of the saloon counter. 
 Below them, in attitudes of negligent pro 
 prietorship, lounged the " crowd" in a haze 
 of smoke and conversation. For the most 
 
CORRUPTION 179 
 
 part I should think they were Americanized 
 immigrants. I looked across the counter at 
 them, met their eyes, got the quality of their 
 faces, and it struck me I was a very flimsy 
 and unsubstantial, intellectual thing indeed. 
 It seemed to me that I would as soon go to 
 live in a pen in a stockyard as into American 
 politics. 
 
 That was nay momentary impression. But 
 that line of base and coarse faces, seen through 
 the reek, was only one sample of the great 
 saloon stratum of the American population, in 
 which resides political power. They have no 
 ideas and they have votes; they are capable, 
 if need be, of meeting violence by violence, 
 and that is the sort of thing American methods 
 demand. . . . 
 
 Now, Alderman Kenna is a straight man, 
 the sort of man one likes and trusts at sight, 
 and he did not invent his profession. He 
 follows his own ideas of right and wrong, 
 and, compared with my ideas of right and 
 wrong, they seem tough, compact, decided 
 things. He is very kind to all his crowd. 
 He helps them when they are in trouble, 
 even if it is trouble with the police; he 
 helps them find employment when they are 
 down on their luck ; he stands between them 
 
180 CORRUPTION 
 
 and the impacts of an unsympathetic and 
 altogether too careless social structure in a 
 sturdy and almost parental way. I can quite 
 believe what I was told, that in the lives 
 of many of these rough undesirables, he s 
 almost the only decent influence. He gets 
 wives well treated, and has an open heart 
 for children. And he tells them how to vote, 
 a duty of citizenship they might otherwise 
 neglect, and sees that they do it properly. 
 And whenever you want to do things in 
 Chicago, you must reckon carefully with 
 him. . . . 
 
 There you have a chip, a hand specimen, 
 from the basement structure upon which 
 American politics rest 1 That is the remark 
 able alternative to private enterprise as 
 things are at present. It is America s only 
 other way. If quasi-public services are to be 
 taken out of the hands of such associations 
 of financiers as the Standard Oil group and 
 made altogether public, they have to be put 
 into the hands of politicians, resting at last 
 upon this sort of basis. Therein resides the 
 impossibility of socialism in America as the 
 case for socialism is put at present. The third 
 course is the far more complex, difficult, and 
 heroic one of creating imaginatively and 
 
CORRUPTION 181 
 
 bringing into being a new state a feat no 
 people in the world has yet achieved, but 
 a feat that any people which aspires to lead 
 the future is bound, I think, to attempt. 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE IMMIGRANT 
 1 
 
 MY picture of America assumes now a certain 
 definite form. I have tried to convey the 
 effect of a great and energetic English- 
 speaking population strewn across a continent 
 so vast as to make it seem small and thin ; 
 I have tried to show this population caught 
 by the upward sweep of that great increase 
 in knowledge that is everywhere enlarging 
 the power and scope of human effort, exhi 
 larated by it, and active and hopeful beyond 
 any population the world has ever seen; and 
 I have tried to show how the members of 
 this population struggle and differentiate 
 among themselves in a universal commercial 
 competition that must, in the end, if it is 
 not modified, divide them into two perma 
 nent classes of rich and poor. I have ven 
 tured to hint at a certain emptiness in the 
 
1 86 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 resulting wealthy, and to note some of the 
 uglinesses and miseries inseparable from this 
 competition. I have tried to give my im 
 pressions of the vague yet widely diffused 
 will in the nation to resist this differentiation, 
 and of a dim large movement of thought 
 towards a change of national method. I 
 have glanced at the debasement of politics 
 that bars any immediate hope of such recon 
 struction. And now it is time to introduce 
 a new element of difficulty into this compli 
 cating problem the immigrants. 
 
 Into the lower levels of the American 
 community there pours perpetually a vast 
 torrent of strangers, speaking alien tongues, 
 inspired by alien traditions, for the most 
 part illiterate peasants and working people. 
 They come in at the bottom that must be 
 insisted upon. An enormous and ever-in 
 creasing proportion of the labouring classes, 
 of all the lower class in America, is of 
 recent European origin, is either of foreign 
 birth or foreign parentage. The older Ameri 
 can population is being floated up on the 
 top of this influx, a sterile aristocracy above 
 a racially different and astonishingly fecund 
 proletariat. (For it grows rankly in this 
 new soil. One section of immigrants, the 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 187 
 
 Hungarians, have here a birth-rate of forty- 
 six in the thousand, the highest of any 
 civilized people in the world.) 
 
 Few people grasp the true dimensions of 
 this invasion. Figures carry so little. The 
 influx has clambered from half a million to 
 700,000 or 800,000; this year the swelling 
 figures roll up as if they mean to go far 
 over the million mark. The flood rolls in 
 to overtake the total birth-rate ; it has 
 already overtopped the total of births of 
 children to native American parents. 
 
 For my own part, I find these figures 
 extremely hard to realize. I have already 
 told something of the effect of Ellis Island. 
 I have told how I watched the long 
 procession of simple -looking, hopeful, sun 
 burnt country folk from Eussia, from the 
 Carpathians, from Southern Italy and Turkey 
 and Syria, filing through the wickets, bring 
 ing their young wives for the mills of 
 Paterson and Fall Eiver, their children for 
 the Pennsylvania coal-breakers and the cotton- 
 mills of the south. And always I have 
 been saying to myself, " Kemember the 
 immigrants; don t leave them out of your 
 reckoning." 
 
 Yet there are moments when I could 
 
1 88 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 have imagined there were no immigrants at 
 all. All this time, except for one distinctive 
 evening, I seem to have been talking to 
 English-speaking men, now and then to an 
 Irishman, now and then, but less frequently, 
 to an Americanized German. In the clubs 
 there are no immigrants. There are not 
 even Jews, as there are in London clubs. 
 One goes about the wide streets of Boston, 
 one meets all sorts of Boston people, one 
 visits the State House; it s all the authentic 
 English-speaking America. Fifth Avenue, 
 too, is America without a touch of foreign 
 born, and Washington. But go a hundred 
 yards south of the pretty Boston Common, 
 and behold ! you are in a polyglot slum ! 
 Go a block or so east ol Fifth Avenue, and 
 you are in a vaster, more Yiddish White- 
 chapel. You cross from New York to 
 Staten Island, attracted by its distant pic 
 turesque suggestion of scattered homes 
 among the trees, and you discover black- 
 tressed sloe-eyed women on those pleasant 
 verandas, half-clad brats and ambiguous 
 washing, where once the native American 
 held his simple state. You ask the way of 
 a young man who has just emerged from a 
 ramshackle factory, and you are answered 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 189 
 
 in some totally incomprehensible tongue. 
 You come up again after such a dive 
 below, to dine with the original Americans, 
 talk with them, go about with them and 
 forget .... 
 
 In Boston one Sunday afternoon this fact 
 of immigration struck upon Mr. Henry 
 James : 
 
 " There went forward across the top of 
 the hill a continuous passage of men and 
 women, in couples and talkative companies, 
 who struck me as labouring wage-earners of 
 the simpler sort arrayed in their Sunday 
 best and decently enjoying their leisure . . . 
 no sound of English in a single instance 
 escaped their lips; the greater number 
 spoke a rude form of Italian, the others 
 some outland dialect unknown to me though 
 I waited and waited to catch an echo of 
 antique refrains. 7 * 
 
 That s one of a series of recurrent, uneasy 
 observations of this great replacement I 
 find in Mr. James book. 
 
 The immigrant does not clamour for 
 attention. He is, indeed, almost entirely 
 inaudible, inarticulate, and underneath. He 
 is in origin a peasant, inarticulate and 
 underneath by habit and tradition. Mr. 
 
190 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 James has, as it were, to put his ear to 
 earth to catch the murmuring of strange 
 tongues. The incomer is of diverse nation 
 ality and diverse tongues, and that " breaks 
 him up " politically and socially. He drops 
 into American clothes, and then he does not 
 catch the careless eye. He goes into special 
 regions and works there. Where Americans 
 talk or think or have leisure to observe, 
 he does not intrude. The bulk of the 
 Americans don t get as yet any real sense 
 of his portentous multitude at all. He does 
 not read very much, and so he produces 
 no effect upon the book trade or magazines. 
 You can go through such a periodical as 
 Harper s Magazine, for example, from cover 
 to cover, and unless there is some article 
 or story bearing specifically upon the subject, 
 you might doubt if there was an immigrant 
 in the country. On the liner coming over, 
 at Ellis Island, and sometimes on the rail 
 roads, one saw him, him and his womankind, 
 in some picturesque East European garb, 
 very respectful, very polite, adventurous, and 
 a little scared. Then he became less visible. 
 He had got into cheap American clothes, 
 resorted to what naturalists call " protective 
 mimicry;" even perhaps acquired a collar. 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 191 
 
 Also his bearing had changed, become 
 charged with a certain aggression. He had 
 got a pocket-handkerchief, and learnt to 
 move fast and work fast, and to chew 
 and spit with the proper meditative expres 
 sion. One detected him by his diminishing 
 accent, and by a few persistent traits rings 
 in his ears perhaps, or the like adornment. 
 In the next stage these also had gone; he 
 had become ashamed of the music of his 
 native tongue, and talked even to his wife, 
 on the trolley-car and other public places 
 at least, in brief remarkable American. Before 
 that he had become ripe for a vote. 
 
 The next stage of Americanization, I 
 suppose, is this dingy, quick-eyed citizen 
 with his schooner of beer in my Chicago 
 saloon if it is not that crumpled thing I 
 saw lying so still in the sunlight under the 
 trestle bridge on my way to Washington. . . . 
 
 2 
 
 Every American above forty, and most of 
 those below that limit, seem to be enthusi 
 astic advocates of unrestricted immigration. 
 
1 92 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 I could not make them understand the appre 
 hension with which this huge dilution of the 
 American people with profoundly ignorant 
 foreign peasants filled me. I rode out on an 
 automobile into the pretty New York country 
 beyond Yonkers with that finely typical 
 American, Mr. Z. he wanted to show me 
 the pleasantness of the land and he sang 
 the song of American confidence, I think, 
 more clearly and loudly than any one else. 
 He told me how everybody had hope, how 
 everybody had incentive, how magnificently it 
 was all going on. He told me what is, I 
 am afraid, a widely-spread delusion that ele 
 mentary education stands on a higher level 
 of efficiency in the States than in England. 
 He had no doubt whatever of the national 
 powers of assimilation. 
 
 "Let them all come," he said cheerfully. 
 
 "The Chinese ?" said I. 
 
 "We can do with them all. . . ." 
 
 He was exceptional in that extension. 
 Most Americans stop at the Ural mountains 
 and refuse the " Asiatic." It was not a 
 matter for discussion with him, but a ques 
 tion of belief. He had ceased to reason 
 about immigration long ago. He was a man 
 in the fine autumn of life, abounding in 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 193 
 
 honours, wrapped in furs, and we drove swiftly 
 in his automobile through the spring sunshine. 
 (" By Jove," thought I, " you talk like 
 Pippa s rich uncle ! ") By some half-brother 
 of a coincidence we happened first upon this 
 monument commemorating a memorable inci 
 dent of the War of Independence, and then 
 upon that. He recalled details of that great 
 campaign as Washington was fought out of 
 Manhattan northward. I remember one 
 stone among the shooting trees that indi 
 cated where, in the Hudson River near by, 
 a British sloop had fired the first salute in 
 honour of the American flag. That salute 
 was vividly present still to him; it echoed 
 among the woods, it filled him with a sense 
 of personal triumph, it seemed halfway back 
 to Agincourt to me. All that bright morn 
 ing the stars and stripes made an almost 
 luminous, visible presence about us. Open- 
 handed hospitality and confidence in God so 
 swayed me, that it is indeed only now, as I 
 put this book together, I see this shining 
 buoyancy, this bunting patriotism in its direct 
 relation to the Italian babies in the cotton- 
 mills, to the sinister crowd that stands in 
 the saloon, smoking and drinking beer, an 
 accumulating reserve of unintelligent force 
 
i 9 4 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 behind the manoeuvres of the professional 
 politicians. . . . 
 
 I tried my views upon Commissioner 
 Watchorn as we leant together over the 
 gallery railing and surveyed that bundle-carry 
 ing crowd creeping step by step through the 
 wire filter of the central hall of Ellis Island 
 into America. 
 
 "You don t think they ll swamp you?" I 
 said. 
 
 "Now, look here," said the Commissioner, 
 "I m English-born Derbyshire. I came into 
 America when I was a lad. I had fifteen 
 dollars. And here I am ! Well, do you ex 
 pect me, now I m here, to shut the door on 
 any other poor chaps who want a start a 
 start with hope in it in the new world ? " 
 
 A pleasant - mannered, fair -haired young 
 man, speaking excellent English, had joined 
 us as we went round, and nodded approval. 
 
 I asked him for his opinion, and gathered 
 he was from Milwaukee, and the son of a 
 Scandinavian immigrant. He too was for 
 "fair play" and an open door for every one. 
 "Except," he added, "Asiatics." So also, I 
 remember, was a very New England lady I 
 met at Hull House, who wasn t, as a matter 
 of fact, a New Englander at all, but the 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 195 
 
 daughter of a German settler in the middle 
 west. They all seemed to think that I was 
 inspired by hostility to the immigrant and 
 Anglomania in "breathing any doubt about 
 the desirability of this immense process. . . . 
 I tried in each case to point out that 
 this idea of not being churlishly exclusive 
 did not exhaust the subject, that the present 
 immigration is a different thing entirely from 
 the immigration of half a century ago, that 
 in the interest of the immigrant and his off 
 spring, more than any one, is the protest to 
 be made. Fifty years ago more than half of 
 the torrent was English - speaking, and the 
 rest mostly from the Teutonic and Scandi 
 navian north - west of Europe, an influx of 
 people closely akin to the native Americans 
 in temperament and social tradition. They 
 were able to hold their own and mix per 
 fectly. Even then the quantity of illiterate 
 Irish produced a marked degradation of poli 
 tical life. The earlier immigration was an 
 influx of energetic people who wanted to 
 come, and who had put themselves to con 
 siderable exertion to get here; it was higher 
 in character and in social quality than the 
 present flood. The immigration of to-day is 
 largely the result of energetic canvassing by 
 
196 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 the steamship companies ; it is, in the main, 
 an importation of labourers, and not of eco 
 nomically independent settlers, and it is in 
 creasingly alien to the native tradition. The 
 bulk of it now is Italian, Kussian Jewish, 
 Eussian, Hungarian, Croatian, Eoumanian, and 
 Eastern European generally. 
 
 " The children learn English, and become 
 more American and better patriots than the 
 Americans," Commissioner Watchorn echoing 
 everybody in that told me. . . . 
 
 (In Boston one optimistic lady looked to 
 the Calabrian and Sicilian peasants to intro 
 duce an artistic element into the population 
 no doubt because they come from the same 
 peninsula that produced the Florentines.) 
 
 Will the reader please remember that I ve 
 been just a few weeks in the States altogether, 
 and value my impressions at that! And will 
 he, nevertheless, read of doubts that won t 
 diminish. I doubt very much if America is 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 197 
 
 going to assimilate all that she is taking in 
 now, much more do I doubt that she will 
 assimilate the still greater inflow of the coming 
 years. I believe she is going to find infinite 
 difficulties in that task. By " assimilate " I 
 mean make intelligently co-operative citizens 
 of these people. She will, I have no doubt 
 whatever, impose upon them a bare use of 
 the English language, and give them votes 
 and certain patriotic persuasions ; but I believe 
 that if things go on as they are going the 
 great mass of them will remain a very low 
 lower class will remain largely illiterate, in 
 dustrialized peasants. They are decent-minded 
 peasant people, orderly industrious people, 
 rather dirty in their habits, and with a low 
 standard of life. Wherever they accumulate 
 in numbers, they present to my eye a social 
 phase far below the level of either England, 
 France, North Italy, or Switzerland. And, 
 frankly, I do not find the American nation 
 has, either in its schools which are as back 
 ward in some states as they are forward in 
 others in its press, in its religious bodies, 
 or its general tone, any organized means or 
 effectual influences for raising these huge 
 masses of humanity to the requirements of 
 an ideal modern civilization. America is, to 
 
198 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 my mind, " biting off more than she can 
 chaw " in this matter. 
 
 I got some very interesting figures from 
 Dr. Hart, of the Children s Home and Aid 
 Society, Chicago. He was pleading for the 
 immigrant, against my scepticisms. He 
 pointed out to me that the generally received 
 opinion that the European immigrants are 
 exceptionally criminal is quite wrong. The 
 1900 Census report collapsed after a magni 
 ficent beginning, and its figures are not avail 
 able ; but from the earlier records there can 
 be no doubt that the percentage of criminals 
 among the " foreign-born " is higher than 
 that among the native-born. This, however, 
 is entirely due to the high criminal record 
 of the French-Canadians in the north-east, 
 and the Mexicans in Arizona, who are not 
 overseas immigrants at all. The criminal 
 statistics of the French- Canadians in the 
 States should furnish useful matter for the 
 educational controversy in Great Britain. 
 Allowing for their activities, which appear 
 to be based on an education of peculiar re 
 ligious virulence, the figures bring the crimi 
 nal percentage among the foreigners far below 
 that of the native-born. But Dr. Hart s 
 figures also showed very clearly something 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 199 
 
 further; as between the offspring of native 
 and foreign parents the preponderance of crime 
 is enormously on the side of the latter. 
 
 That, at any rate, falls in with my own 
 preconceptions and roving observations. Bear 
 in mind always that this is just one question 
 ing individual s impression. It seems to me 
 that the immigrant arrives an artless, rather 
 uncivilized, pious, good-hearted peasant, with 
 a disposition towards submissive industry and 
 rude, effectual, moral habits. America, it is 
 alleged, makes a man of him. It seems to 
 me that all too often she makes an infuriated 
 toiler of him, tempts him with dollars and 
 speeds him up with competition, hardens him, 
 coarsens his manners, and, worst crime of all, 
 lures and forces him to sell his children into 
 toil. The home of the immigrant in America 
 looks to me worse than the home he came 
 from in Italy. It is just as dirty, it is far 
 less simple and beautiful, the food is no more 
 wholesome, the moral atmosphere far less 
 wholesome, and, as a consequence, the child 
 of the immigrant is a worse man than his 
 father. 
 
 I am fully aware of the generosity, the 
 nobility of sentiment which underlies the 
 American objection to any hindrance to 
 
200 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 immigration. But either that general sentiment 
 should be carried out to a logical complete 
 ness and a gigantic and costly machinery 
 organized to protect, educate, and civilize 
 these people as they come in, or it should 
 be chastened to restrict the inflow to numbers 
 assimilable under existing conditions. At 
 present, if we disregard sentiment, if we deny 
 the alleged need of gross flattery whenever 
 one writes of America for Americans, and 
 state the bare facts of the case, they amount 
 to this, that America, in the urgent process 
 of individualistic industrial development, in 
 its feverish haste to get through with its 
 material possibilities, is importing a large 
 portion of the peasantry of Central and Eastern 
 Europe and converting it into a practically 
 illiterate industrial proletariat. In doing this 
 it is doing something that, however different 
 in spirit, differs from the slave-trade of its 
 early history only in the narrower gap between 
 employer and labourer. In the " coloured " 
 population America has already ten million 
 descendants of unassimilated and, perhaps, 
 unassimilable labour immigrants. These people 
 are not only half civilized and ignorant, but 
 they have infected the white population about 
 them with a kindred ignorance. For there 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 201 
 
 can be no doubt that if an Englishman or 
 Scotchman of the year 1500 were to return to 
 earth and seek his most retrograde and de- 
 civilized descendants, he would find them at 
 last among the white and coloured population 
 south of Washington. And I have a forebod 
 ing that in this mixed flood of workers that 
 pours into America by the million to-day, in 
 this torrent of ignorance, against which . that 
 heroic being, the school-marm, battles at pre 
 sent all unaided by men, there is to be found 
 the possibility of another dreadful separation 
 of class and kind, a separation perhaps not so 
 profound but far more universal. One sees 
 the possibility of a rich industrial and mer 
 cantile aristocracy of Western European origin, 
 dominating a darker-haired, darker-eyed, un 
 educated proletariat from Central and Eastern 
 Europe. The immigrants are being given 
 votes, I know ; but that does not free them, it 
 only enslaves the country. The negroes were ? 
 given votes. 
 
 That is the quality of the danger as I see 
 it. But before this indigestion of immigrants 
 becomes -an incurable sickness of the State, 
 many things may happen. There is every sign, 
 as I have said, that a great awakening, a 
 great disillusionment, is going on in the 
 
 f 
 
202 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 American mind. The Americans have become 
 suddenly self-critical, are hot with an unwonted 
 fever for reform and constructive effort. This 
 swamping of the country may yet be checked. 
 They may make a strenuous effort to emanci 
 pate children below fifteen from labour, and 
 so destroy one of the chief inducements of 
 immigration. Once convince them that their 
 belief in the superiority of their public schools 
 to those of England and Germany is an illusion, 
 or at least that their schools are inadequate 
 to the task before them, and, it may be, they 
 will perform some swift American miracle of 
 educational organization and finance. For all 
 the very heavy special educational charges that 
 are needed if the immigrant is really to be 
 assimilated, it seems a reasonable proposal that 
 immigration should pay. Suppose the new 
 comer was presently to be taxed on arrival for 
 his own training and that of any children he 
 had with him ; that, again, would check the 
 inrush very greatly. Or the steamship company^ 
 might be taxed and left to settle the trouble 
 with the immigrant by raising his fare. And, 
 finally, it may be, that if the line is drawn, as it 
 seems highly probable it will be, at " Asiatics/ 
 then there may even be a drying-up of the 
 torrent at its source. The European countries 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 203 
 
 are not unlimited reservoirs of offspring. As 
 they pass from their old conditions into more 
 and more completely organized modern indus 
 trial states, they develop a new internal equi 
 librium, and cease to secrete an excess of 
 population. England no longer supplies any 
 great quantity of Americans, Scotland barely 
 any, France is exhausted ; Ireland, Germany, 
 Scandinavia have, it seems, disgorged nearly 
 all their surplus load and now run dry. . . . 
 
 These are all mitigations of the outlook, 
 but still the dark shadow of disastrous possi 
 bility remains. The immigrant comes in to 
 weaken and confuse the counsels of labour, 
 to serve the purposes of corruption, to compli 
 cate any economic and social development ; 
 above all, to retard enormously the develop 
 ment of that national consciousness and will 
 on which the hope of the future depends. 
 
 4 
 
 I told these doubts of mine to a pleasant 
 young lady of New York, who seems to find 
 much health and a sustaining happiness in 
 settlement work on the East Side. She 
 
204 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 scorned my doubts. " Children make better 
 citizens than the old Americans/ she said, 
 like one who quotes a classic, and took me 
 with her forthwith to see the central school 
 of the Educational Alliance, that fine imposing 
 building in East Broadway. 
 
 It s a thing I m glad not to have missed. 
 I recall a large cool room with a sloping 
 floor, tier rising above tier of seats and 
 desks, and a big class of bright-eyed Jewish 
 children, boys and girls, each waving two 
 little American flags to the measure of the 
 song they sang, singing to the accompani 
 ment of the piano on the platform beside us. 
 
 " God bless our native land/ they sang 
 with a considerable variety of accent and 
 distinctness, but with a very real emotion. 
 
 Some of them had been in America a 
 month, some much longer, and here they 
 were under the auspices of the wealthy 
 Hebrews of New York and Mr. Blaustein s 
 enthusiastic direction being Americanized. 
 They sang of America " sweet land of 
 Liberty," they drilled with the little bright 
 pretty flags, swish they crossed and swish 
 they waved back, a waving froth it was of 
 flags and flushed children s faces ; and then 
 they stood up and repeated the oath of 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 205 
 
 allegiance, and at the end filed tramping by 
 me and out of the hall. The oath they 
 take is finely worded. It runs : 
 
 "Flag of our great Eepublic, inspirer in 
 battle, guardian of our homes, whose stars 
 and stripes stand for Bravery, Purity, Truth, 
 and Union, we salute Thee ! We, the natives 
 of distant lands, who find rest under thy 
 folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and 
 our sacred honour, to love and protect thee, 
 our COUNTRY, and the LIBERTY of the American 
 people FOREVER." 
 
 I may have been fanciful, but as I stepped 
 aside and watched them going proudly past, it 
 seemed to me that eyes met mine triumphant 
 and victorious eyes for was I not one of 
 these British from whom freedom was won? 
 But that was an ignoble suspicion. They 
 had been but a few weeks in America, and 
 that light in their eyes was just a brotherly 
 challenge to one they supposed a fellow- 
 citizen who remained unduly thoughtful amidst 
 their rhythmic exaltation. They tramped out 
 and past with their flags and guidons. 
 
 "It is touching!" whispered my guide, 
 and I saw she had caught a faint reflection 
 of the glow that lit the children. 
 
206 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 I told her it was the most touching thing 
 I had seen in America. 
 
 And so it remains. 
 
 Think of the immense promise in it ! 
 Think of the flowers of belief and effort that 
 may spring from this warm sowing! We 
 passed out of this fluttering multiplication 
 of the most beautiful flag in the world into 
 streets abominable with offal and indescribable 
 filth, and dark and horrible under the thun 
 derous girders of the Elevated Eailroad to 
 our other quest for that morning, a typical 
 New York tenement for I wanted to see one 
 with practically windowless bedrooms. . . . 
 
 The Educational Alliance is, of course, not 
 a public institution ; it was organized by 
 Hebrews and conducted by Hebrews, chiefly 
 for the benefit of the Hebrew immigrant. It 
 is practically the only organized attempt to 
 Americanize the immigrant child. After the 
 children have mastered sufficient English and 
 acquired the simpler elements of patriotism 
 which is practically no more than an emotional 
 attitude towards the flag they pass on into 
 the ordinary public schools. 
 
 "Yes," -I told my friend, "I know how 
 these children feel. That, less articulate 
 perhaps, but no less sincere, is the thing 
 
THE IMMIGRANT 207 
 
 something between pride and a passionate 
 desire that fills three-quarters of the people 
 at Ellis Island now. They come ready to 
 love and worship, ready to bow down and 
 kiss the folds of your flag. They give them 
 selves they want to give. Do you know I 
 too have come near feeling that at times for 
 America. . . ." 
 
 We were separated for a while by a long 
 hole in the middle of the street and a heap 
 of builder s refuse. Before we came within 
 talking distance again I was in reaction 
 against the gleam of gratification my last 
 confession had evoked. 
 
 " In the end," I said, " you Americans 
 won t be able to resist it." 
 "Kesist what?" 
 
 " You ll respect your country," I said. 
 "What do you mean?" 
 In those crowded noisy East Side streets 
 one has to shout and shout compact things. 
 " This I" I said to the barbaric disorder about 
 us. "Lynching! Child labour! Graft!" 
 
 Then we were separated by a heap of 
 decaying fish that some hawker had dumped 
 in the gutter. 
 
 My companion shouted something I did 
 not catch. 
 
208 THE IMMIGRANT 
 
 " We ll tackle it!" she repeated. 
 
 I looked at her, bright and courageous 
 and youthful, a little over confident, I 
 thought, but extremely reassuring, going 
 valiantly through a disorderly world of 
 obstacles, and for the moment I suppose 
 that waving bunting and the children s voices 
 had got into my head a little I forgot all 
 sorts of things. . . . 
 
 I could have imagined her the spirit of 
 America incarnate rather than a philanthropic 
 young lady of New York. 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 1 
 
 IN what I have written so far I have tried 
 to get the effect of the American outlook, 
 the American task, the American problem as 
 a whole, as it has presented itself to me. 
 Clearly, as I see it, it is a mental and moral 
 issue. There seems to me an economic pro 
 cess going on that tends to concentrate first 
 wealth and then power in the hands of a 
 small number of adventurous individuals of no 
 very high intellectual type, a huge importa 
 tion of alien and unassimilable workers, and 
 a sustained disorder of local and political 
 administration. Correlated with this is a 
 great increase in personal luxury and need. 
 In all these respects there is a strong 
 parallelism between the present condition of 
 the United States and the Eoman republic 
 in the time of the early Csesars, and, arguing 
 
 p 2 
 
2 1 2 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 from these alone, one might venture to fore 
 cast the steady development of an exploiting 
 and devastating plutocracy, leading perhaps to 
 Caesarism, and a progressive decline in civili 
 zation and social solidarity. But there are 
 forces of recuperation and construction in 
 America such as the earlier instance did not 
 display. There is infinitely more original and 
 originating thought in the state, there are 
 the organized forces of science, a habit of 
 progress, clearer and wider knowledge among 
 the general mass of the people. These pro 
 mise, and must indeed inevitably make, some 
 synthetic effort of greater or less homogeneity 
 and force. It is upon that synthetic effort 
 that the distinctive destiny of America 
 depends. 
 
 I propose to go on now to discuss the 
 mental quality of America as I have been 
 able to focus it. (Remember always that I 
 am an undiplomatic tourist of no special 
 knowledge or authority, who came, more 
 over, to America with certain prepossessions.) 
 And first, and chiefly, I have to convey what 
 seems to me the most significant and preg 
 nant thing of all. It is a matter of something 
 wanting, that the American shares with the 
 great mass of prosperous middle-class people 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 2 1 3 
 
 in England. I think it is best indicated by 
 saying that the typical American has no" 
 " sense of the state. " I do not mean that 
 he is not passionately and vigorously patriotic. 
 But I mean that he has no perception that 
 his business activities, his private employ 
 ments, are constituents in a larger collective 
 process ; that they affect other people and the 
 world for ever, and cannot, as he imagines, 
 begin and end with him. He sees the world 
 in fragments; it is to him a multitudinous 
 collection of individual " stories," as the news 
 papers put it. If one studies an American 
 newspaper, one discovers it is all individuality, 
 all a matter of personal doings, of what so 
 and-so said and how so-and-so felt. And these 
 individualities are unfused. Not a touch of 
 abstraction or generalization, no thinnest at 
 mosphere of reflection, mitigates these harsh, 
 emphatic, isolated happenings. The American, 
 it seems to me, has yet to achieve what is 
 after all the product of education and thought, 
 the conception of a whole to which individual 
 acts and happenings are subordinate and 
 contributory. 
 
 When I say this much, I do not mean to 
 insinuate that any other nation in the world 
 has a superiority in this matter. But I do 
 
2 1 4 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 want to urge that the American problem is 
 pre-eminently one that must be met by broad 
 ways of thinking, by creative, synthetic, and 
 merging ideas, and that a great number of 
 Americans lack these altogether. 
 
 Let me by way of illustration give a speci 
 men American mind. It is not the mind of 
 a writer or philosopher, it is just a plain suc 
 cessful business man who exposes himself and 
 makes it clear that this want of any sense of 
 the state, of any large duty of constructive 
 loyalty, is not an idiosyncrasy but the quality 
 of all his circle, his friends, his religious 
 teacher. . . . 
 
 I found my specimen in a book called 
 With John Bull and JonatJuin. It contains 
 the rather rambling reminiscences of Mr. J. 
 Morgan Richards, the wealthy and successful 
 London agent of a great number of well- 
 advertised American proprietary articles, and 
 I read it first, I will confess, chiefly in 
 search of such delightful phrases as the one 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 2 1 5 
 
 " mammoth in character " I have already quoted. 
 But there were few to equal that first moment s 
 bright discovery. What I got from it finally 
 wasn t so much that sort of thing as this 
 realization of Mr. Biohards peculiar quality, 
 this acute sense of all that he hadn t got. 
 Mr. Eichards told of advertising enterprise, of 
 contracts and journeyings, of his great friend 
 ship with the late Dr. Parker, of his domestic 
 affairs, and all the changes in the world that 
 had struck him, and of a remarkable dining 
 club called (paradoxically) the Sphinx, in 
 which the giants (or are they the mammoths ?) 
 of the world of Advertisement foregather, of 
 everything under the sun in a small way 
 except of his connection with Carter s Little 
 Liver Pills, so well known now as an adjunct 
 to our pleasant domesticated English scenery. 
 He gave his portrait, and the end-paper pre 
 sented him playfully as the jolly president of 
 the Sphinx club, champagne-bottle crowned, 
 but else an Egyptian monarch ; and on the 
 cover are two gilt hands clasped across a gilt 
 ripple of sea (" hands across the sea"), under 
 intertwining English and American flags. From 
 the book one got an effect, garrulous perhaps, 
 but on the whole not unpleasing, of an elderly 
 but still active business personality quite 
 
216 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 satisfied by his achievements, and representa 
 tive of I know not what proportion, but at 
 any rate a considerable proportion, of his 
 fellow-countrymen. And one got an effect of 
 a being not simply indifferent to the health 
 and vigour and growth of the community of 
 which he was a part, but unaware of its 
 existence. 
 
 He displays this irresponsibility of the 
 commercial mind so illuminatingly because he 
 does in a way attempt to tell something more 
 than his personal story. He notes the changes 
 in the world about him, how this has improved 
 and that progressed, what contrasts between 
 England and America struck upon his mind. 
 That he himself is responsible amidst these 
 changes never seems to dawn upon him. His 
 freedom from any sense of duty to the world 
 as a whole, of any subordination of trading to 
 great ideas, is naive and fundamental. He 
 tells of how he arranged with the authorities 
 in charge of the Independence Day celebra 
 tions on Boston Common to display " three 
 large pieces " containing the name of " Plan 
 tation Bitters," which they did, and how this 
 no doubt very desirable commodity " was first 
 largely advertised throughout the United States 
 in the fall of 1861, and rapidly became the 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 2 1 7 
 
 success of the day, because of the enormous 
 amount of placarding given to the cabalistic 
 characters f S-T-1860-X, which was a descrip 
 tion of the medicine. Those strange letters 
 and figures stared upon people from wall and 
 fence and tree, in every leading town through 
 out the United States. They were painted 
 on the rocks of the Hudson Eiver to such an 
 extent that the attention of the Legislature 
 was drawn to the fact, and a law was passed 
 to prevent the further disfigurement of river 
 scenery." 
 
 He calls this "cute." He tells, too, of 
 his educational work upon the English press, 
 how he won it over to "display" advertise 
 ments, and devised "the first sixteen-sheet 
 double demy poster ever seen in England in 
 connection with a proprietary article." He 
 introduced the smoking of cigarettes into 
 England against great opposition the cele 
 brated Allen and Ginter Quaker poster did 
 much to turn the scale, and he was treated 
 with some ingratitude, one gathers, by the 
 American Tobacco Co. Mr. Kichards finds 
 no incongruity, but apparently a very delight 
 ful association in the fact that this great 
 victory for the adolescent s cigarette was 
 won on the site of Strudwick s house wherein 
 
2 1 8 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 John Bunyan died, and hard by the path of 
 the Smithfield martyrs to their fiery sacrifice. 
 Both they and Mr. Richards "lit such a 
 
 candle in England "... 
 
 Well, my business is not to tell of the 
 feats by which Mr. Eichards grew wealthy 
 and important as a tree may grow and 
 flourish amidst the masonry it helps to dis 
 integrate. My business is purely with his 
 insensibility to the state as an aspect of his 
 personal life. It is insensibility not disre 
 gard nor hostility. One gets an impression 
 from this book that if Mr. Eichards had lived 
 in a different culture, he would have been a 
 generous giver of himself. In spite of his 
 curious incapacity to appreciate any issues 
 larger than large enterprises in selling, he is 
 very evidently a religious man. He sat under 
 the late Dr. Parker, of the rich and prosperous 
 City Temple, and that reverend gentleman s 
 leonine visage adorns the book. It s really 
 the light one gets on Dr. Parker and his 
 teaching that appeals to me most in this 
 volume. For this gentleman Mr. Eichards 
 seems to have entertained a feeling approach 
 ing reverence. He notes such details as, "At 
 the conclusion of an invocation or prayer, his 
 habit always was to make a pause for a few 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 2 1 9 
 
 seconds before pronouncing Amen. 1 This was 
 most impressive. . . . 
 
 " He spoke such words as God Jesus 
 Christ No Yes Nothing in a way 
 to give more value to each word than any 
 speaker I have ever heard. 7 
 
 They became great friends ; rarely a week 
 passed without their meeting, and, says Mr. 
 Richards, he "was pleased, in the course of 
 time, to honour me with his confidence in a 
 marked degree, as though he recognized in 
 me some quality which satisfied his judg 
 ment, that I could be trusted in business 
 questions quite apart from those relating to 
 the church. He was not only a born preacher, 
 but possessed a marvellous grasp of sound 
 practical knowledge upon the affairs of the 
 day. I often consulted with him regarding 
 my own affairs, often getting the most practical 
 help." 
 
 When Dr. Parker came to America (under 
 the auspices of Major Pond) on that lectur 
 ing campaign ("upon secular subjects") which 
 led to so unhappy a dispute over the profits 
 (see also the Eccentricities of Genius, by 
 Major Pond), the two friends corresponded 
 warmly, and several of the letters are quoted. 
 Even "5000 (pounds) a year easily made " 
 
220 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 could not tempt him from London and the 
 modest opulence of the City Temple. . . . 
 
 But my business now is not to dwell on 
 these characteristic details, but to point out 
 that Mr. Richards does not stand alone in 
 the entire detachment, not only of his worldly 
 achievements, but of his spiritual life, from 
 any creative solicitude for the state. If he 
 was merely an isolated "character," I should 
 have no concern with him. His association 
 with Dr. Parker shows most luminously that 
 he presents a whole cult of English and 
 American rich traders, who in America " sat 
 under" such men as the Eev. Ward Beecher, 
 for example, who evidently stand for much 
 more in America than in England, and who 
 so far as the state and political and social 
 work go, are scarcely of more use, are pro 
 bably more hindrance, than any organization 
 of selfish voluptuaries of equal wealth and 
 numbers. It is a cult, it has its teachers 
 and its books. I have had a glimpse of one 
 of its manuals. I find Mr. Richards quot 
 ing with approval Dr. Parker s Ten General 
 Commandments for Men of Business, com 
 mandments which strike me as not only 
 State-blind, but utterly God-blind, which are 
 indeed no more than shrewd counsels for 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 221 
 
 "getting on." It is really quite horrible 
 stuff morally. " Thou shalt not hobnob with 
 idle persons," parodies Dr. Parker in Com 
 mandment V., so glossing richly upon the 
 teachings of Him who ate with publicans and 
 sinners, and (no doubt to instil the advisa 
 bility of keeping one s more delicate business 
 procedure in one s own hands) " Thou shalt 
 not forget that a servant who can tell lies 
 for thee, may one day tell lies to thee." . . . 
 I am not throwing any doubt upon the 
 sincerity of Dr. Parker and Mr. Eichards. I 
 believe that nothing could exceed the trans 
 parent honesty that ends this record which 
 tells of " Plantation Bitters" pushed at the 
 sacrifice of beautiful scenery, of a successful 
 propaganda of cigarette - smoking, and of all 
 sorts of proprietary articles landed well home 
 in their gastric target, of a whole life lost 
 indeed in commercial self-seeking, with 
 "What shall I render unto the Lord for all 
 his benefits?" 
 
 " The Now is an atom of Sand, 
 
 And the Near is a perishing Clod, 
 But Afar is as fairyland, 
 And BEYOND is the Bosom of God." 
 
 What I have to insist upon now is that 
 this is a sample, and, so far as I can tell, a 
 fair sample, of the quality and trend of the 
 
222 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 mind-stuff, and the breadth and height of 
 the tradition of a large and I know not how 
 influential mass of prosperous middle-class 
 English, and of a much more prosperous and 
 influential and important section of Americans. 
 They represent much energy, they represent 
 much property, they are a factor to reckon 
 with. They present a powerful opposing force 
 to anything that will suppress their offensive 
 notice - boards, or analyze their ambiguous 
 " proprietary articles/ or tax their gettings 
 for any decent public purpose. And here I 
 find them selling poisons as pain-killers, and 
 alcohol as tonics, and fighting ably and 
 boldly to silence adverse discussion one 
 valiant magazine at war with them. As help 
 or opposition or obstacle, these thousands or 
 tens of thousands of powerful state - blind 
 traders have to be computed in our horo 
 scope. In the face of the great needs that 
 lie before America, their active triviality of 
 soul, their energy, and often unscrupulous 
 activity, and their quantitative importance 
 become, to my mind, adverse and threaten 
 ing, a stumbling - block for hope. For the 
 impression I have got by going to and fro 
 in America is that Mr. Richards is a fair 
 sample of, at least, the older type of American. 
 
LTE-BLINDNESS 223 
 
 So far as I can learn, Mr. J. D. Eockefeller 
 is just another product of the same cult. 
 You meet these older types everywhere, they 
 range from fervent piety and temperance to 
 a hearty drinking, " story " telling, poker- 
 playing type, but they have in common a 
 sharp, shrewd, narrow, business habit of mind, 
 that ignores the future and the state alto 
 gether. But I do not find the younger men 
 are following in their lines. Some are. But 
 just how many, and to what extent, I do 
 not know. It is very hard for a literary 
 man to estimate the quantity and impor 
 tance of ideas in a community. The people 
 he meets naturally all entertain ideas, or they 
 would not come in his way. The people who 
 have new ideas talk; those who have not, 
 go about their business. But I hazard an 
 opinion that young America now presents an 
 altogether different type from the young men 
 of enterprise and sound Baptist and business 
 principles who were the backbone of the 
 irresponsible commercial America of yesterday, 
 the America that rebuilt Chicago on " float 
 ing foundations/ 1 covered the world with ad 
 vertisement boards, gave the great cities the 
 elevated railroads, and organized the trusts. 
 
224 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 3 
 
 I spent a curious day amidst the memories 
 of that strangely interesting social experi 
 ment, the Oneida community, and met a most 
 significant contemporary, a " live American " 
 of the newer school, in the son of the founder 
 and the present head of " Oneida Limited." 
 
 There are moments when that visit I paid 
 to Oneida seems to me to stand for all 
 America. The place, you know, was once 
 the seat of a perfectionist community; the 
 large red community buildings stand now 
 among green lawns and ripening trees, and 
 I dined in the communal dining-room, and 
 visited the library, and saw the chain and trap 
 factory, and the silk-spinning factory, and 
 something of all its industries. I talked to 
 old and middle-aged people, who told me all 
 sorts of interesting things of " community 
 days," looked through curious old-fashioned 
 albums of photographs showing the women 
 in their bloomers and cropped hair, and the 
 men in the ill-fitting frock-coats of the re 
 spectable mediocre person in early Victorian 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 225 
 
 times. I think that some of the reminis 
 cences I awakened had been voiceless for 
 some time. At moments it was like hearing 
 the story of a flattened, dry, and colourless 
 flower between the pages of a book, of a 
 verse written in faded ink, or some daguer 
 reotype spotted and faint beyond recognition. 
 It was extraordinarily New England in its 
 quality as I looked back at it all. They 
 claimed a quiet perfection of soul, they 
 searched each other marvellously for spiritual 
 chastening, they defied custom and opinion, 
 they followed their reasoning and their theo 
 logy to the most amazing abnegations, and 
 they kept themselves solvent by the manu 
 facture of steel traps that catch the legs of 
 beasts in their strong and pitiless jaws . . . 
 
 But this book is not about the things 
 that concerned Oneida in community days, 
 and I mention them here only because of 
 the curious developments of the present 
 time. Years ago, when the founder, John 
 Humphrey Noyes, grew old and unable to 
 control the new dissensions that arose out 
 of the sceptical attitude of the younger gene 
 ration towards his ingenious theology, and 
 such-like stresses, communism was abandoned, 
 the religious life and services discontinued, 
 
 Q 
 
226 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 the concern turned into a joint-stock com 
 pany, and the members made shareholders on 
 strictly commercial lines. For some years its 
 prosperity declined. Many of the members 
 went away; but a nucleus remained as resi 
 dents in the old buildings, and after a time 
 there were returns. I was told that in the 
 early days of the new period there was a 
 violent reaction against communistic methods, 
 a jealous, inexperienced insistence upon pro 
 perty. " It was difficult to borrow a ham 
 mer," said one of my informants. 
 
 Then, as the new generation began to feel 
 its feet, came a fresh development of vitality. 
 The Oneida company began to set up new 
 machinery, to seek wider markets, to advertise, 
 and fight competitors. 
 
 This Mr. P. B. Noyes was the leader into 
 the new paths. He possesses all the forc6 of 
 character, the constructive passion, the imagi 
 native power of his progenitor, and it has 
 all gone into business competition. I have 
 heard much talk of the romance of business, 
 chiefly from people I heartily despised, but in 
 Mr. Noyes I found business indeed romantic. 
 It had got hold of him, it possessed him 
 like a passion. He has inspired all his 
 half-brothers and cousins and younger fellow- 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 227 
 
 members of the community with his own 
 imaginative motive. They, too, are enthu 
 siasts for business. Before the old per 
 fectionists of the former generation realized 
 what had happened, the Oneida corporation 
 had started out upon the road of commercial 
 adventure, to fight and capture, to form and 
 control " combines," to be in traps and chains 
 what Standard Oil is in petroleum, to lead 
 the market in plated knives and forks through 
 out the world. Some of the poor dears, I 
 perceive, are growing rich in the profoundest 
 dismay of soul; and there are no weekly 
 criticisms, no prayers, no fires upon the 
 deserted altars of Oneida any more for 
 ever. . . . 
 
 Mr. Noyes is a tall man, who looks down 
 when he talks to one. He showed me over 
 the associated factories, told me how the 
 trap trade of all North America is in Oneida s 
 hands, told me of how they fight and win 
 against the British traps in South America 
 and Burmah. He showed me photographs of 
 panthers in traps, tigers in traps, bears snarl 
 ing at the approaching death, unfortunate deer, 
 foxes caught by the paws. . . . 
 
 I did my best, to forget those photograp 1 
 at once in the interest of his admr 
 
228 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 machinery, which busied itself with chain- 
 making as though it had eyes and hands. I 
 went beside him, full of that respect that a 
 literary man must needs feel when a creative 
 business controller displays his quality. 
 
 "But the old religion of Oneida?" I would 
 interpolate. 
 
 "Each one of us is free to follow his own 
 religion. Here is a new sort of chain we are 
 making for hanging lamps. Hitherto " 
 
 Presently I would try again. " Are the 
 workers here in any way members of the 
 community? " 
 
 "Oh no ! Many of them are Italian im 
 migrants. We think of building a school for 
 them. . . . No, we get no labour troubles. 
 We pay always above the trade-union rates, 
 and so we get the pick of the workmen. Our 
 class of work can t be sweated. . . ." 
 
 Yes, he was an astonishing personality, 
 so immensely concentrated in these efficient 
 manufacturing and trading developments, so 
 evidently careless of theology, philosophy, 
 social speculation, beauty. 
 
 "Your father was a philosopher," I said. 
 
 " I think in ten years time I may give 
 up control here," he threw out, "and write 
 something." 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 229 
 
 "I ve thought of the publishing trade my 
 self," I had to retort, " when my wits are 
 old and stiff. . . ." 
 
 I never met a man before so firmly gripped 
 by the romantic, constructive, and adventurous 
 element of business, so little concerned about 
 personal riches or the accumulation of wealth. 
 He illuminated much that had been dark to 
 me in the American character. I think better 
 of business by reason of him. And time after 
 time I tried him upon politics. It came to 
 nothing. Making a new world was, he thought, 
 a rhetorical flourish about futile and trouble 
 some activities, and politicians merely a dis 
 reputable sort of parasite upon honourable 
 people who made chains and plated spoons. 
 All his constructive instincts, all his devotion, 
 were for Oneida and its enterprises. America 
 was just the impartial space, the large liberty, 
 in which Oneida grew, the stars and stripes 
 a wide sanction akin to the impartial, irre 
 sponsible harbouring sky overhead. Sense of 
 the state had never grown in him ; can now, 
 I feel convinced, never grow. . . . 
 
 But some day, I like to imagine, it will 
 be the World State, and not Oneida corpora 
 tions, and a nobler trade than traps, that 
 will command such services as his. 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 1 
 
 IN considering the quality of the American 
 mind (upon which, as I believe, the ultimate 
 destiny of America entirely depends), it has 
 been necessary to point out that, considered 
 as one whole, it still seems lacking in any 
 of that living sense of the state out of which 
 constructive effort must arise, and that conse 
 quently enormous amounts of energy go to 
 waste in anarchistic and chaotically competi 
 tive private enterprise. I believe there are 
 powerful forces at work in the trend of modern 
 thought, science, and method, in the direction 
 of bringing order, control, and design into this 
 confused gigantic conflict, and the discussion 
 of these constructive forces must necessarily 
 form the crown of my forecast of America s 
 future. But before I come to that, I must 
 deal with certain American traits that puzzle 
 
234 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 me, that I cannot completely explain to my 
 self, that dash my large expectations with an 
 obstinate shadow of foreboding. Essentially 
 these are disintegrating influences, in the 
 nature of a fierce intolerance that leads to 
 conflicts and destroys co-operation. One 
 makes one s criticism with compunction. One 
 moves through the American world, meeting 
 constantly with kindness and hospitality, with 
 a familiar helpfulness that is delightful, with 
 sympathetic enterprise and energetic imagina 
 tion, and then suddenly there flashes out a 
 quality of harshness. ... 
 
 I will explain in a few minutes what I 
 mean by this flash of harshness. Let me 
 confess here that I cannot determine whether 
 it is a necessary consequence of American 
 conditions, the scar upon the soul of too 
 strenuous business competition, or whether 
 it is something deeper, some subtle unavoid 
 able infection perhaps in this soil that was 
 once the Bed Indian s battle-ground, some 
 poison it may be mingled with this clear 
 exhilarating air. And going with this harsh 
 ness there seems also something else, a con 
 tempt for abstract justice, that one does not 
 find in any European intelligences not even 
 among the English. This contempt may be 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 235 
 
 a correlative of the intense practicality begotten 
 by a scruple-destroying commercial training. 
 That, at any rate, is my own prepossession. 
 Conceivably I am over disposed to make that 
 tall lady in New York Harbour stand as a 
 symbol for the liberty of property, and to 
 trace the indisputable hastiness of life here 
 it is haste sometimes rather than speed 
 its scorn of aesthetic and abstract issues, this 
 frequent quality of harshness, and a certain 
 public disorder, whatever indeed mars the 
 splendid promise and youth of America, to 
 that. I think it is an accident of the com 
 mercial phase that presses men beyond dignity, 
 patience, and magnanimity. I am loth to be 
 lieve it is something fundamentally American. 
 
 I have very clearly in my memory the 
 figure of young MacQueen, in his grey prison 
 clothes in Trenton jail, and how I talked with 
 him. He and Mr. Booker T. Washington and 
 Maxim Gorky stand for me as figures in the 
 shadow symbolical men. I think of America 
 as pride and promise, as large growth and 
 large courage, all set with beautiful fluttering 
 bunting, and then my vision of these three 
 men comes back to me, they return, presences 
 inseparable from my American effect, unlit 
 and uncomplaining on the sunless side of her, 
 
236 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 implying rather than voicing certain accusa 
 tions. America can be hasty, can be obsti 
 nately thoughtless and unjust. . . . 
 
 Well, let me set down, as shortly as I 
 can, how I saw them, and then go on again 
 with my main thesis. 
 
 2 
 
 MacQueen is one of those young men 
 England is now making by the thousand in 
 her elementary schools, a man of that active, 
 intelligent, mentally hungry, self-educating 
 sort that is giving us our elementary teachers, 
 our labour members, able journalists, authors, 
 civil servants, and some of the most public- 
 spirited and efficient of our municipal adminis 
 trators. He is the sort of man an Englishman 
 grows prouder of as he sees America and 
 something of her politicians and labour leaders. 
 After his board-school days, MacQueen went 
 to work as a painter and grainer, and gave 
 his spare energy to self-education. He 
 mastered German, and read widely and 
 freely. He corresponded with William Morris, 
 devoured Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, followed 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 237 
 
 the Clarion week by week, discussed social 
 questions, wrote to the newspapers, debated, 
 made speeches. The English reader will begin 
 to recognize the type. Jail had worn him 
 when I saw him, but I should think he was 
 always physically delicate ; he wears spectacles, 
 he warms emotionally as he talks. And he 
 decided, after much excogitation, that the 
 ideal state is one of so fine a quality of moral 
 training, that people will not need coercion 
 and repressive laws. He calls himself an an 
 archist of the early Christian, Tolstoyan, 
 non-resisting school. Such an anarchist was 
 Emerson among other dead Americans whose 
 names are better treasured than their thoughts. 
 That sort of anarchist has as much connec 
 tion with embittered bomb-throwers and assas 
 sins, as Miss Florence Nightingale has with 
 the woman Hartmann, who put on a nurse s 
 uniform to poison and rob. . . . 
 
 Well, MacQueen led an active life in 
 England, married, made a decent living, and 
 took an honourable part in the local affairs 
 of Leeds until he was twenty-six. Then he 
 conceived a desire for wider opportunity than 
 England offers men of his class. 
 
 In January, 1902, he crossed the Atlantic, 
 and no doubt he came very much aglow 
 
238 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 with the American idea. He felt that he 
 was exchanging a decadent country of 
 dwarfing social and political traditions for 
 a land of limitless outlook. He became a 
 proof-reader in New York, and began to 
 seek around him for opportunities of speaking 
 and forwarding social progress. He tried to 
 float a newspaper. The New York labour 
 unions found him a useful speaker, and among 
 others the German silk-workers of New York 
 became aware of him. In June they asked 
 him to go to Paterson to speak in German 
 to the weavers in that place. 
 
 To my mind Paterson isn t so much a town 
 as a festering industrial sore. No country 
 could possibly be proud of Paterson. Beside 
 it Preston is well governed and well educated, 
 and West Ham a focus of light. New Jersey, 
 in its company law, its education, its indus 
 trial legislation, is half a century behind 
 England or New York State, and Paterson 
 is one of the predestined receptacles for 
 these imported Italian children about whom 
 I have already written ; it is a place which 
 receives and uses up immigrants. It is a 
 place of ugliness and weariness and injustice, 
 of vice and retaliatory violence, more slovenly 
 than any European town west of Russia, and 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 239 
 
 as hopeless. The workers seethe in polyglot 
 discontent, and they even sustain a wretched 
 little paper in Italian, called La Questione 
 Socialej whose dominant note is anger, which 
 constantly advocates violence. I must con 
 fess I don t blame it or them. If I was 
 caught in the Paterson mill I should certainly 
 want to kill somebody. Well, the silk-dyers 
 were on strike in Paterson, but the weavers 
 were weaving " scab silk," dyed by dyers 
 elsewhere, and it was believed that the 
 dyers strike would fail unless they struck 
 also. They had to be called out. They 
 were chiefly Italians, some Hungarians. It 
 was felt by the New York German silk- 
 workers that perhaps MacQueen s German 
 learnt in England might meet the linguistic 
 difficulties of the case. 
 
 He went. I hope he will forgive me if 
 I say that his was an extremely futile 
 expedition. I think it was an altogether 
 honourable thing for him to have gone 
 but as a matter of fact the salvation of Pater 
 son is to be achieved, if it ever is achieved, 
 at Washington, at Harvard, and through a 
 long conflict of years. Industrial sores are 
 not cured by local irritation. However, that 
 was not his idea, and he went to Paterson. 
 
2 4 o TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 He did very little. He wrote an entirely 
 harmless article or so in English for La 
 Questione Sociale, and he declined with horror 
 and publicity to appear upon the same plat 
 form with a mischievous and violent lady 
 anarchist called Emma Goldman. On June 17, 
 1902, he went to Paterson again, and spoke 
 to his own undoing. There is no evidence 
 that he said anything illegal or inflammatory, 
 there is clear evidence that he bored his 
 audience. They shouted him down, and called 
 for a prominent local speaker named Galiano. 
 MacQueen subsided into the background, and 
 Galiano spoke for an hour in Italian. He 
 aroused great enthusiasm, and the proceedings 
 terminated with a destructive riot. 
 
 Eight witnesses testify to ineffectual efforts 
 on the part of MacQueen to combat the 
 violence in progress. . . . 
 
 That finishes the story of MacQueen s 
 activities in America for which he is now 
 in durance at Trenton. He, in common with 
 a large crowd, and in common too with 
 nearly all the witnesses against him, did 
 commit one offence against the law he did 
 not go home when destruction began. He 
 was arrested next day. From that time forth 
 his fate was out of his hands, and in the 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 241 
 
 control of a number of people who wanted 
 " to make an example " of the Paterson 
 strikers. The press took up MacQueen. 
 They began to clothe the bare bones of this 
 simple little history I have told, in fluent, 
 unmitigated lying. They blackened him, one 
 might think, out of sheer artistic pleasure 
 in the operation. They called this rather 
 nervous, educated, nobly meaning, if ill- 
 advised young man, a "notorious anarchist," 
 his headline title became " Anarchist Mac- 
 Queen," they wrote his " story " in a vein 
 of imaginative fervour, they invented " an 
 unsavoury police record" for him in England, 
 and enlarged upon the marvellous secret 
 organization for crime, of which he was 
 representative and leader. In a little while 
 MacQueen had ceased to be a credible 
 human being ; he might have been invented 
 by Mr. William le Queux. He was arrested 
 Galiano went scot-free and released on 
 bail. It was discovered that his pleasant, 
 decent Yorkshire wife and three children 
 were coming out to America to him, and 
 she became "the woman Nellie Barton" 
 her maiden name, and " a socialist of the 
 Emma Goldman stripe." This, one gathers, 
 is the most horrible stripe known to 
 
 R 
 
242 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 American journalism. Had there been a 
 worse one, Mrs. MacQueen would have been 
 that ex officlo. And now here is an extra 
 ordinary thing public officials began to join 
 in the process. This is what perplexes me 
 most in this affair. Assistant-Secretary of 
 the Treasury, H. A. Taylor, without a fact 
 to go upon, subscribed to the "unsavoury 
 record" legend, Assistant- Secretary C. H. 
 Keep fell in with it. They must have 
 seen what it was they were endorsing. 
 In a letter from Mr. Keep to the Rev. 
 A. W. Wishart, of Trenton (who through 
 out has fought most gallantly for justice 
 in this case), I find Mr. Keep distinguishes 
 himself by the artistic device of putting 
 "William MacQueen " J s name in inverted 
 commas. So, very delicately, he conveys 
 out of the void the insinuation that the 
 name is an alias. Meanwhile the Com 
 missioner of Immigration prepared to take a 
 hand in the game of breaking up Mac- 
 Queen; he stopped Mrs. MacQueen at the 
 threshold of liberty, imprisoned her in Ellis 
 Island, and sent her back to Europe. Mac- 
 Queen, still on bail, was not informed of 
 this action, and waited on the pier for some 
 hours before he understood. His wife had 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 243 
 
 come second-class to America, but she was 
 returned first-class, and the steamship com 
 pany seized her goods for the return fare. . . . 
 That was more than MacQueen could 
 stand. He had been tried, convicted, sen 
 tenced to five years imprisonment, and he 
 was now out on bail pending an appeal. 
 Anxiety about his wife and children was too 
 much for him. He slipped off to England 
 after them (" Escape of the Anarchist Mac- 
 Queen"), made what provision and arrange 
 ments he could for them, and returned in 
 time to save his bondsman s money (" Capture 
 of the Escaped Anarchist MacQueen "). 
 Several members of the Leeds city council 
 (" Criminal Associates in Europe") saw him 
 off. That was in 1903. His appeal had 
 been refused on a technical point. He 
 went into Trenton jail, and there he is to 
 this day. There I saw him. Trenton jail 
 did not impress me as an agreeable place. 
 The building is fairly old, and there is no 
 nonsense about the food. The cells hold, 
 some of them, four criminals, some of them 
 two, but latterly MacQueen has had spells 
 in the infirmary, and has managed to get 
 a cell to himself. Many of the criminals 
 are negroes and half-breeds, imprisoned for 
 
244 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 unspeakable offences. In the exercising yard 
 MacQueen likes to keep apart. " When I 
 first came I used to get in a corner," he 
 said. . . . 
 
 Now, this case of MacQueen has exercised 
 my mind enormously. It was painful to go 
 out of the grey jail again after I had talked 
 to him of Shaw and Morris, of the Fabian 
 Society and the British labour members 
 into sunlight and freedom; and ever and 
 again as I went about New York, having 
 the best of times among the most agreeable 
 people, the figure of him would come back 
 to me quite vividly, in his grey dress, 
 sitting on the edge of an unaccustomed 
 chair, hands on his knees, speaking a little 
 nervously and jerkily, and very glad indeed 
 to see me. He is younger than myself, but 
 much my sort of man, and we talked of 
 books and education and his case like 
 brothers. There can be no doubt, to any 
 sensible person who will look into the story 
 of his conviction, who will even go and see 
 him, that there has been a serious mis 
 carriage of justice. 
 
 There has been a serious miscarriage of 
 justice, such as (unhappily) might happen 
 in any country. That is nothing distinctive 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 245 
 
 of America. But what does impress me as 
 remarkable and perplexing is the immense 
 difficulty the perhaps unsurmountable diffi 
 culty of getting this man released. The 
 Governor of the State of New Jersey knows 
 he is innocent, the judges of the Court of 
 Pardons know he is innocent. Three of 
 them I was able to buttonhole at Trenton 
 and hear their point of view. Two were of 
 the minority and for release, one was 
 doubtful in attitude but hostile in spirit. 
 They hold the man, he thinks, on the score 
 of public policy. They put it that Paterson 
 is a "hot-bed" of crime and violence; that, 
 once MacQueen is released, every anarchist 
 in the country will be emboldened to crime, 
 and so on and so on. I admit Paterson 
 festers, but if we are to punish anybody 
 instead of reforming the system, it s the 
 masters who ought to be in jail for that. 
 
 "What will the property owners in 
 Paterson say to us if this man is released ? " 
 one of the judges admitted frankly. 
 
 "But he hadn t anything to do with the 
 violence," I said, and argued the case over 
 again quite missing the point of that 
 objection. 
 
 Whenever I had a chance in New York, 
 
246 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 in Boston, in Washington, even amidst the 
 conversation of a Washington dinner-table, I 
 dragged up the case of MacQueen. Nobody 
 seemed indignant. One lady admitted the 
 sentence was heavy; "he might have been 
 given six months to cool off," she said. 
 I protested he ought not to have been 
 given a day. " Why did he go there ? " 
 said a supreme court judge in Washington, 
 a lawyer in New York, and several other 
 people. " Wasn t he making trouble ? " I 
 was asked. 
 
 At last that reached my sluggish intelli 
 gence. 
 
 Yet I still hesitate to accept the new 
 interpretations. Galiano, who preached blind 
 violence and made the riot, got off scot- 
 free ; MacQueen, who wanted a legitimate 
 strike on British lines, went to jail. So 
 long as the social injustice, the sweated 
 disorder of Paterson s industrialism vents its 
 cries in Italian in La Questione Sociale, so long 
 as it remains an inaudible misery so far as 
 the great public is concerned, making vehe 
 ment yet impotent appeals to mere force 
 and so losing its last chance of popular 
 sympathy, American property, I gather, is 
 content. The masters and the immigrants 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 247 
 
 can deal with one another on those lines. 
 But to have outsiders coming in! 
 
 There is an active press campaign against 
 the release of "the Anarchist MacQueen," 
 and I do not believe that Mr. Wishart will 
 succeed in his endeavours. I think Mac- 
 Queen will serve out his five years. 
 
 The plain truth is that no one pretends 
 he is in jail on his merits ; he is in jail as an 
 example and lesson to any one who proposes 
 to come between master and immigrant 
 worker in Paterson. He has attacked the 
 system. The people who profit by the 
 system, the people who think things are 
 " all right as they are," have hit back in 
 the most effectual way they can, according 
 to their lights. 
 
 That, I think, accounts for the sustained 
 quality of the lying in this case, and indeed 
 for the whole situation. He is in jail on 
 principle and without personal animus, just 
 as they used to tar and feather the stray 
 abolitionist on principle in Carolina. The 
 policy of stringent discouragement is a 
 reasonable one, scoundrelly, no doubt, but 
 understandable. And I think I can put 
 myself sufficiently into the place of the 
 Paterson masters, of the Trenton judges, 
 
248 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 of those journalists, of those subordinate 
 officials at Washington even, to understand 
 their motives and inducements. I indulge in no 
 self-righteous pride. Simply I thank Heaven 
 I have not had their peculiar temptations. 
 
 But my riddle lies in the attitude of 
 the public of the American nation, which 
 hasn t, it seems, a spark of moral indigna 
 tion for this sort of thing, which indeed 
 joins in quite cheerfully against the victim. 
 
 It is ill-served by its press no doubt, 
 but surely it understands. . . . 
 
 3 
 
 Then I assisted at the coming of Maxirn 
 Gorky, and witnessed many intimate details 
 of what Professor Giddings, that courageous 
 publicist, has called his " lynching." 
 
 Here again is a case I fail altogether to 
 understand. The surface values of that affair 
 have a touch of the preposterous. I set them 
 down in infinite perplexity. 
 
 My first week in New York was in the 
 period of Gorky s advent. Expectation was at 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 249 
 
 a high pitch, and one might have foretold a 
 stupendous, a history-making campaign. The 
 American nation seemed concentrated upon 
 one great and ennobling idea, the freedom of 
 Russia, and upon Gorky as the embodiment 
 of that idea. A protest was to be made 
 against cruelty and violence and massacre. 
 That great figure of Liberty with the torch 
 was to make it flare visibly halfway round the 
 world, reproving tyranny. 
 
 Gorky arrived, and the eclat was immense. 
 We dined him, we lunched him, we were 
 photographed in his company by flashlight. 
 I very gladly shared that honour, for Gorky 
 is not only a great master of the art I prac 
 tise, but a splendid personality. He is one of 
 those people to whom the camera does no 
 justice, whose work as I know it in an English 
 translation, forceful as it is, fails very largely 
 to convey his peculiar quality. His is a big, 
 quiet figure ; there is a curious power of appeal 
 in his face, a large simplicity in his voice and 
 gesture. He was dressed, when I met him, 
 in peasant clothing, in a belted blue shirt, 
 trousers of some shiny black material, and 
 boots, and, save for a few common greetings, 
 he has no other language than Russian. So 
 it was necessary that he should bring with 
 
250 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 him some one he could trust to interpret him 
 to the world. And having, too, much of the 
 practical helplessness of his type of genius, 
 he could not come without his right hand, 
 that brave and honourable lady, Madame 
 Andreieva, who has been now for years, in 
 everything but the severest legal sense, his 
 wife. Russia has no Dakota, and although 
 his legal wife has long since found another 
 companion, the Orthodox Church in Eussia 
 has no divorce facilities for men in the revolu 
 tionary camp. So Madame Andreieva stands 
 to him as George Eliot stood to George Lewis ; 
 and I suppose the two of them had almost 
 forgotten the technical illegality of their tie, 
 until it burst upon them and the American 
 public in a monstrous storm of exposure. 
 
 It was like a summer thunderstorm. At 
 one moment Gorky was in an immense sun 
 shine, a plenipotentiary from oppression to 
 liberty, at the next he was being almost 
 literally pelted through the streets. 
 
 I do not know what motive actuated a 
 certain section of the American press to initiate 
 this pelting of Maxim Gorky. A passion for 
 moral purity may perhaps have prompted it, 
 but certainly no passion for purity ever before 
 begot so brazen and abundant a torrent of 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 251 
 
 lies. It was precisely the sort of campaign 
 that damned poor MacQueen, but this time 
 on an altogether imperial scale. The irregu 
 larity of Madame Andreieva s position was a 
 mere point of departure. The journalists went 
 on to invent a deserted wife and children; 
 they declared Madame Andreieva was an 
 " actress," and loaded her with all the un 
 pleasant implications of that unfortunate word ; 
 they spoke of her generally as "the woman 
 Andreieva;" they called upon the Commis 
 sioner of Immigration to deport her as a 
 " female of bad character," quite influential 
 people wrote to him to that effect ; they 
 published the name of the hotel that 
 sheltered her, and organized a boycott. Who 
 ever dared to countenance the victims was 
 denounced. Professor Dewar of Columbia had 
 given them a reception; " Dewar must go," 
 said the headlines. Mark Twain, who had 
 assisted in the great welcome, was invited to 
 recant and contribute unfriendly comments. 
 The Gorkys were pursued with insult from 
 hotel to hotel. Hotel after hotel turned them 
 out. They found themselves at last after 
 midnight in the streets of New York city 
 with every door closed against them. Infected 
 persons could not have been treated more 
 
252 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 abominably in a town smitten with a panic 
 of plague. 
 
 This change happened in the course of 
 twenty-four hours. On one day Gorky was 
 at the zenith, on the next he had been swept 
 from the world. To me it was astounding it 
 was terrifying. I wanted to talk to Gorky 
 about it, to find out the hidden springs of 
 this amazing change. I spent a Sunday even 
 ing looking for him with an ever-deepening 
 respect for the power of the American press. 
 I had a quaint conversation with the clerk of 
 the hotel in Fifth Avenue from which he 
 had first been driven. Europeans can scarcely 
 hope to imagine the moral altitudes at which 
 American hotels are conducted. ... I went 
 thence to seek Mr. Abraham Cahan in East 
 Side, and thence to other people I knew, but 
 in vain. Gorky was obliterated. 
 
 I thought this affair was a whirlwind of 
 foolish misunderstanding, such as may happen 
 in any capital, and that presently his entirely 
 tolerable relationship would be explained. But 
 for all the rest of my time in New York this 
 insensate campaign went on. There was no 
 attempt of any importance to stem the tide, 
 and to this day large sections of the American 
 public must be under the impression that this 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 253 
 
 great writer is a depraved man of pleasure 
 accompanied by a favourite cocotte. The 
 writers of paragraphs racked their brains to 
 invent new and smart ways of insulting 
 Madame Andreieva. The chaste entertainers 
 of the music-halls of the Tenderloin district 
 introduced allusions. And amidst this riot of 
 personalities Kussia was forgotten. The mas 
 sacres, the chaos of cruelty and blundering, 
 the tyranny, the women outraged, the children 
 tortured and slain; all that was forgotten. 
 In Boston, in Chicago, it was the same. At 
 the bare suggestion of Gorky s coming, the 
 same outbreak occurred, the same display of 
 imbecile, gross lying, the same absolute dis 
 regard of the tragic cause he had come to 
 plead. 
 
 One gleam of comedy in this remarkable 
 outbreak I recall. Some one in ineffectual 
 protest had asked what Americans would 
 have said if Benjamin Franklin had en 
 countered such ignominies on his similar mis 
 sion of appeal to Paris before the War of 
 Independence. " Benjamin Franklin," retorted 
 one bright young Chicago journalist, "was a 
 man of very different moral character from 
 Gorky " and proceeded to explain how Chicago 
 was prepared to defend the purity of her 
 
254 TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 homes against the invader. Benjamin Frank 
 lin, it is true, was a person of very different 
 morals from Gorky but I don t think that 
 bright young man in Chicago had a very 
 sound idea of where the difference lay. . . . 
 
 I spent my last evening on American soil 
 in the hospitable home in Staten Island that 
 sheltered Gorky and Madame Andreieva. After 
 dinner we sat together in the deepening twi 
 light upon a broad veranda that looks out 
 npon one of the most beautiful views in the 
 world, upon serene large spaces of land and 
 sea, upon slopes of pleasant window-lit, tree- 
 set wooden houses, upon the glittering clusters 
 of lights and the black and luminous ship 
 ping that comes and goes about the Narrows 
 and the Upper Bay. Half masked by a hill 
 contour to the left was the light of the 
 torch of Liberty. . . . Gorky s big form 
 fell into shadow, Madame Andreieva sat at 
 his feet, translating methodically, sentence 
 by sentence, into clear French, whatever he 
 said translating our speeches into Eussian. 
 He told us stories of the soul of the 
 Eussian, of Eussian religious sects, of kind 
 nesses and cruelties, of his great despair. 
 
 Ever and again, in the pauses, my eyes 
 would go to where New York, far away, 
 
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 255 
 
 glittered like a brighter and more numerous 
 Pleiades. 
 
 I gauged something of the real magnitude 
 of this one man s disappointment, the im 
 mense expectation of his arrival, the impossible 
 dream of his mission. He had come, the 
 Kussian peasant in person, out of a terrific 
 confusion of bloodshed, squalor, injustice to 
 tell America, the land of light and achieved 
 freedom, of all these evil things. She would 
 receive him, help him, understand truly what 
 he meant with his "Rossia." I could imagine 
 how he had felt as he came in the big 
 steamer to her, up that large converging dis 
 play of space and teeming energy. There 
 she glowed to-night across the water, a queen 
 among cities, as if indeed she was the light 
 of the world. Nothing, I think, can ever 
 rob that splendid harbour approach of its in 
 vincible quality of promise. . . . And to him 
 she had shown herself no more than the 
 luminous hive of multitudes of base and 
 busy, greedy and childish little men. 
 
 McQueen in jail, Gorky with his reputa 
 tion wantonly bludgeoned and flung aside ; 
 they are just two chance specimens of the 
 myriads who have come up this great water 
 way bearing hope and gifts. 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE TBAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 1 
 
 I SEEM to find the same hastiness and some 
 thing of the same note of harshness that 
 strikes me in the cases of MacQueen and 
 Gorky, in America s treatment of her coloured 
 population. I am aware how intricate, how 
 multitudinous, the aspects of this enormous 
 question have become, but looking at it in 
 the broad and transitory manner I have pro 
 posed for myself in these papers, it does 
 seem to present many parallel elements. 
 There is the same disposition towards an 
 indiscriminating verdict, the same disregard 
 of proportion as between small evils and 
 great ones, the same indifference to the 
 fact that the question does not stand alone, 
 but is a part, and this time a by no means 
 small part, in the working out of America s 
 destinies. 
 
 s 2 
 
260 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 In regard to the coloured population, just 
 as in regard to the great and growing ac 
 cumulations of unassimilated and increasingly 
 unpopular Jews, and to the great and grow 
 ing multitudes of Eoman Catholics, whose 
 special education contradicts at so many 
 points those conceptions of individual judg 
 ment and responsibility upon which America 
 relies, I have attempted, time after time, to 
 get some answer from the Americans I have 
 met to what is to me the most obvious of 
 questions. " Your grandchildren and the 
 grandchildren of these people will have to 
 live in this country side by side ; do you 
 propose, do you believe it possible, that, under 
 the increasing pressure of population and 
 competition, they should be living then in 
 just the same relations that you and these 
 people are living now ? If you do not, then 
 what relations do you propose shall exist 
 between them? " 
 
 It is not too much to say that I have 
 never once had the beginnings of an answer 
 to this question. Usually one is told with 
 great gravity that the problem of colour is 
 one of the most difficult that we have to 
 consider, and the conversation then breaks 
 up into discursive anecdotes and statements 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 261 
 
 about black people. One man will dwell 
 upon the uncontrollable violence of a black 
 man s evil passions (in Jamaica and Bar- 
 badoes coloured people form an overwhelming 
 proportion of the population, and they have 
 behaved in an exemplary fashion for the last 
 thirty years) ; another will dilate upon the 
 incredible stupidity of the full-blooded negro 
 (during my stay in New York the prize for 
 oratory at Columbia University, oratory which 
 was the one redeeming charm of Daniel 
 Webster, was awarded to a Zulu of unmiti 
 gated blackness); a third will speak of his 
 physical offensiveness, his peculiar smell, which 
 necessitates his social isolation (most well- 
 to-do southerners are brought up by negro 
 " mammies "); others, again, will enter upon 
 the painful history of the years that followed 
 the war, though it seems a foolish thing to 
 let those wrongs of the past dominate the 
 outlook for the future. And one charming 
 southern lady expressed the attitude of mind 
 of a whole class very completely, I think, 
 when she said, "You have to be one of us 
 to feel this question at all as it ought to 
 be felt." 
 
 There, I think, I got something tangible. 
 These emotions are a cult. 
 
262 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 My globe-trotting impudence will seem, 
 no doubt, to mount to its zenith when I 
 declare that hardly any Americans at all 
 seem to be in possession of the elementary 
 facts in relation to this question. These 
 broad facts are not taught, as, of course, they 
 ought to be taught, in school, and what each 
 man knows is picked up by the accidents 
 of his own untrained observation, by conver 
 sation always tinctured by personal prejudice, 
 by hastily read newspapers and magazine 
 articles and the like. The quality of this 
 discussion is very variable, but on the whole 
 pretty low. While I was in New York 
 opinion was greatly swayed by an article 
 in, if I remember rightly, the Century Maga 
 zine, by a gentleman who had deduced from 
 a few weeks observation in the slums of 
 Khartoum the entire incapacity of the negro 
 to establish a civilization of his own. He 
 never had, therefore he never could ; a dis 
 couraging ratiocination. We English, a cen 
 tury ago, said all these things of the native 
 Irish. If there is any trend of opinion at all in 
 this matter at present, it lies in the direction 
 of a generous decision on the part of the 
 north and west to leave the black more and 
 more to the judgment and mercy of the white 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 263 
 
 people with whom he is locally associated. 
 This judgment and mercy points on the whole 
 to an accentuation of the coloured man s 
 natural inferiority, to the cessation of any 
 other educational attempts than those that 
 increase his industrial usefulness (it is already 
 illegal in Louisiana to educate him above a 
 contemptible level), to his industrial exploita 
 tion through usury and legal chicanery, and 
 to a systematic strengthening of the social 
 barriers between coloured people, of whatever 
 shade, and the whites. 
 
 ^ Meanwhile, in this state of general con 
 fusion, in the absence of any determining 
 rules or assumptions, all sorts of things are 
 happening according to the accidents of local 
 feeling. In Massachusetts you have people 
 with, I am afraid, an increasing sense of 
 sacrifice to principle, lunching and dining 
 with people of colour. They do it less than 
 they did, I was told. Massachusetts stands, 
 I believe, at the top of the scale of tolerant 
 humanity. One seems to reach the bottom 
 at Springfield, Missouri, which is a county 
 seat with a college, an academy, a high school, 
 and a zoological garden. There the exem 
 plary method reaches the nadir. Last April 
 three unfortunate negroes were burnt to 
 
264 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 death apparently because they were negroes, 
 and as a general corrective of impertinence. 
 They seem to have been innocent of any 
 particular offence. It was a sort of racial 
 sacrament. The edified Sunday-school chil 
 dren hurried from their gospel teaching to 
 search for souvenirs among the ashes, and 
 competed with great spirit for a fragment 
 of charred skull. 
 
 It is true that in this latter case Governor 
 Folk acted with vigour and justice, and that 
 the better element of Springfield society was 
 evidently shocked when it was found that 
 quite innocent negroes had been used in these 
 instructive pyrotechnics, but the fact remains 
 that a large and numerically important sec- 
 ; tion of the American public does think that 
 fierce and cruel reprisals are a necessary part 
 of the system of relationships between white 
 and coloured man. In our dispersed British 
 community we have almost exactly the same 
 range between our better attitudes and our 
 worse I m making no claim of national 
 superiority. In London, perhaps, we outdo 
 Massachusetts in liberality; in the National 
 Liberal Club or the Eeform, a black man 
 meets all the courtesies of humanity as though 
 there was no such thing as colour. But on 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 265 
 
 the other hand, the Cape won t bear looking 
 into for a moment. The same conditions give 
 the same results ; a half-educated white popu 
 lation of British or Dutch or German ingredi 
 ents greedy for gain, ill-controlled and feebly 
 influenced, in contact with a black popula 
 tion, is bound to reproduce the same brutal 
 and stupid aggressions, the same half-honest 
 prejudices to justify those aggressions, the 
 same ugly mean excuses. " Things are better 
 in Jamaica and Barbadoes," said I, in a 
 moment of patriotic weakness, to Mr. Booker 
 T. Washington. 
 
 "Eh!" said he, and thought in that long 
 silent way he has. . . . "They re worse in 
 South Africa much. Here we ve got a sort 
 of light. We know generally what we ve got 
 to stand. There " 
 
 His words sent my memory back to some 
 conversations I had quite recently with a 
 man from a dry goods store in Johannesburg. 
 He gave me clearly enough the attitude of 
 the common white out there, the dull pre 
 judice, the readiness to take advantage of the 
 "boy," the utter disrespect for coloured 
 womankind, the savage intolerant resentment, 
 dashed dangerously with fear, which the 
 native arouses in him. (Think of all that 
 
266 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 must have happened in wrongful practice and 
 wrongful law and neglected educational possi 
 bilities before our Zulus in Natal were goaded 
 to face massacre, spear against rifle !) The 
 rare and culminating result of education and 
 experience is to enable men to grasp facts, 
 to balance justly among their fluctuating and 
 innumerable aspects, and only a small minority 
 in our world is educated to that pitch. 
 Ignorant people can only think in types and 
 abstractions, can achieve only emphatic abso 
 lute decisions, and j when the commonplace 
 American or the commonplace colonial Briton 
 sets to work to " think over " the negro 
 problem, he instantly banishes most of the 
 material evidence from his mind clears for 
 action, as it were. He forgets the genial 
 carriage of the ordinary coloured man, his 
 beaming face, his kindly eye, his rich, jolly 
 voice, his touching and trustful friendliness, 
 his amiable, unprejudiced readiness to serve 
 and follow a white man who seems to know 
 what he is doing. He forgets perhaps he 
 has never seen the dear humanity of these 
 people, their slightly exaggerated vanity, their 
 innocent and delightful love of colour and 
 song, their immense capacity for affection, the 
 warm romantic touch in their imaginations. 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 267 
 
 He ignores the real fineness of the indolence 
 that despises servile toil, of the carelessness 
 that disdains the watchful, aggressive eco 
 nomies, day by day, now a wretched little gain 
 here, and now a wretched little gain there, 
 that makes the dirty fortune of the Eussian 
 Jews who prey upon colour in the Carolinas. 
 No, in the place of all these tolerable every 
 day experiences, he lets his imagination go 
 to work upon a monster, the "real nigger." 
 
 "Ah! You don t know the real nigger/ 1 
 said one American to me when I praised the 
 coloured people I had seen. "You should 
 see the buck nigger down south, Congo brand. 
 Then you d understand, sir ! " 
 
 His voice, his face had a gleam of pas 
 sionate animosity. One could see he had 
 been brooding himself out of all relations to 
 reality in this matter. He was a man beyond 
 reason or pity. He was obsessed. Hatred of 
 that imaginary diabolical " buck nigger " 
 blackened his soul. It was no good to talk 
 to him of the "buck American, Packingtown 
 brand," or the "buck Englishman, suburban 
 race-meeting type," and to ask him if these 
 intensely disagreeable persons justified out 
 rages on Senator Lodge, let us say, or Mrs. 
 Longworth. No reply would have come from 
 
268 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 him. "You don t understand the question," 
 he would have answered. "You don t know 
 how we southerners feel." 
 
 Well one can make a tolerable guess. 
 
 2 
 
 I certainly did not begin to realize one 
 most important aspect of this question until 
 I reached America. I thought of those eight 
 millions as of men, black as ink. But when 
 I met Mr. Booker T. Washington, for ex 
 ample, I met a man certainly as white in 
 appearance as our Admiral Fisher, who is, as 
 a matter of fact, quite white. A very large 
 proportion of these coloured people, indeed, is 
 more than half white. One hears a good deal 
 about the high social origins of the southern 
 planters, very many derive indisputably from 
 the first families of England. It is the same 
 blood flows in these mixed coloured people s 
 veins. Just think of the sublime absurdity, 
 therefore, of the ban. There are gentlemen 
 of education and refinement, qualified lawyers 
 and doctors whose ancestors assisted in the 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 269 
 
 Norman Conquest, and they dare not enter 
 a car marked "WHITE" and intrude upon the 
 dignity of the rising loan-monger from Esthonia. 
 For them the " Jim Crow " car. . . . 
 
 One tries to put that aspect to the American 
 in vain. " These people," you say, " are nearer 
 your blood, nearer your temper than any of 
 those bright -eyed, ringletted immigrants on 
 the East Side. Are you ashamed of your poor 
 relations ? Even if you don t like the half, 
 or the quarter of negro blood, you might deal 
 civilly with the three - quarters white. It 
 doesn t say much for your faith in your own 
 racial prepotency, anyhow. ..." 
 
 The answer to that is usually in terms of 
 mania. 
 
 "Let me tell you a little story just to 
 illustrate," said one deponent to me in an 
 impressive undertone "just to illustrate, you 
 know. ... A few years ago a young fellow 
 came to Boston from New Orleans. Looked 
 all right. Dark but he explained that by 
 an Italian grandmother. Touch of French in 
 him too. Popular. Well, he made advances 
 to a Boston girl good family. Gave a fairly 
 straight account of himself. Married." 
 
 He paused. " Course of time offspring. 
 Little son." 
 
270 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 His eye made ine feel what was coming. 
 
 " Was it by any chance very, very black ? " 
 I whispered. 
 
 "Yes, SIK. Black! Black as your hat. 
 Absolutely negroid. Projecting jaw, thick lips, 
 frizzy hair, fiat nose everything. . . . 
 
 "But consider the mother s feelings, sir 
 consider that! A pure-minded, pure white 
 woman ! " 
 
 What can one say to a story of this sort, 
 when the taint in the blood surges up so 
 powerfully as to blacken the child at birth 
 beyond even the habit of the pure-blooded 
 negro? What can you do with a public 
 opinion made of this class of ingredient? 
 And this story of the lamentable results of 
 intermarriage was used, not as an argument 
 against intermarriage, but as an argument 
 against the extension of quite rudimentary 
 civilities to the men of colour. "If you eat 
 with them, you ve got to marry them," he 
 said, an entirely fabulous post-prandial re 
 sponsibility. 
 
 It is to the tainted whites my sympathies 
 go out. The black or mainly black people 
 seem to be fairly content with their in 
 feriority; one sees them all about the States 
 as waiters, cab-drivers, railway porters, car 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 271 
 
 attendants, labourers of various sorts, a 
 pleasant, smiling, acquiescent folk. But con 
 sider the case of a man with a broader brain 
 than such small uses need, conscious perhaps 
 of exceptional gifts, capable of wide interests 
 and sustained attempts, who is perhaps as 
 English as you or I, with just a touch of 
 colour in his eyes, in his lips, in his finger 
 nails, and in his imagination. Think of the 
 accumulating sense of injustice he must bear 
 with him through life, the perpetual slight 
 and insult he must undergo from all that is 
 vulgar and brutal among the whites. Some 
 thing of that one may read in the sorrowful 
 pages of Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk. 
 They would have made Alexandre Dumas 
 travel in the Jim Crow car if he had come 
 to Virginia. But I can imagine some sort of 
 protest on the part of that admirable but 
 extravagant man. . . . They even talk of 
 " Jim Crow elevators " now in southern 
 hotels. 
 
 At Hull House in Chicago I was present 
 at a conference of coloured people Miss 
 Jane Addams efficiently in control to con 
 sider the coming of a vexatious play, TJie 
 Clansman, which seems to have been written 
 and produced entirely to exacerbate racial 
 
272 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 feeling. Both men and women were present, 
 business people, professional men and their 
 wives, the speaking was clear, temperate, 
 and wonderfully to the point, high above 
 the level of any British town council I 
 have ever attended. One lady would have 
 stood out as capable and charming in any 
 sort of public discussion in England though 
 we are not wanting in good women speakers 
 and she was, at least, three quarters 
 black. . . . 
 
 And while I was in Chicago, too, I went 
 to the Pekin Theatre a " coon " music- 
 hall and saw something of a lower level 
 of coloured life. The common white, I 
 must explain, delights in calling coloured 
 people " coons, " and the negro, so far as 
 I could learn, uses no retaliatory word. 
 It was a " variety " entertainment with one 
 turn, at least, of quite distinguished merit, 
 good - humoured and brisk throughout. I 
 watched keenly, and I could detect nothing 
 of that trail of base suggestion one would 
 find as a matter of course in a music-hall 
 in such English towns as Brighton or Ports 
 mouth. What one heard of kissing and 
 love-making was quite artless and simple- 
 minded. The negro, it seemed to me, did 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 273 
 
 this sort of thing with a better grace and 
 a better temper than a Londoner, and 
 shows, I think, a finer self-respect. He 
 thinks more of deportment, he bears him 
 self more elegantly by far than the white 
 at the same social level. The audience 
 reminded me of the sort of gathering one 
 would find in a theatre in Oamden Town 
 or Hoxton. There were a number of family 
 groups, the girls brightly dressed, and young 
 couples quite of the London music-hall 
 type. Clothing ran " smart, " but not 
 smarter than it would be among fairly 
 prosperous North London Jews. There was 
 no gallery socially no collection of orange- 
 eating, interrupting hooligans at all. No 
 body seemed cross, nobody seemed present 
 for vicious purposes, and everybody was sober. 
 Indeed, there and elsewhere, I took and 
 confirmed a mighty liking to these gentle, 
 human, dark-skinned people. 
 
 3 
 
 But whatever aspect I recall of this 
 great Taboo that shows no signs of lifting, 
 of this great problem of the future that 
 
 T 
 
274 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 America, in her haste, her indiscriminating 
 prejudice, her lack of any sustained study 
 and teaching of the broad issues she must 
 decide, complicates and intensifies, and 
 makes threatening, there presently conies 
 back to mind the browned face of Mr. 
 Booker T. Washington, as he talked to me 
 over our lunch in Boston. 
 
 He has a face rather Irish in type, and 
 the soft, slow negro voice. He met my 
 regard with the brown sorrowful eyes of his 
 race. He wanted very much that I should 
 hear him make a speech, because then his 
 words came better; he talked, he implied, 
 with a certain difficulty. But I preferred to 
 have his talking, and get, not the orator 
 every one tells me he is an altogether great 
 orator in this country, where oratory is still 
 esteemed but the man. 
 
 He answered my questions meditatively. 
 I wanted to know with an active pertinacity. 
 What struck me most was the way in which 
 his sense of the overpowering forces of race 
 prejudice weighs upon him. It is a thing 
 he accepts ; in our time and conditions it 
 is not to be fought about. He makes one 
 feel, with an exaggerated intensity (though 
 I could not even draw him to admit), its 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 275 
 
 monstrous injustice. He makes no accusa 
 tions. He is for taking it as a part of the 
 present fate of his "people," and for doing 
 all that can be done for them within the 
 limit it sets. 
 
 Therein he differs from Du Bois, the 
 other great spokesman colour has found in 
 our time. Du Bois is more of the artist, 
 less of the statesman ; he conceals his pas 
 sionate resentment all too thinly. He 
 batters himself into rhetoric against these 
 walls. He will not repudiate the clear right 
 of the black man to every educational 
 facility, to equal citizenship and equal 
 respect. But Mr. Washington has statecraft, 
 He looks before and after, and plans and 
 keeps his counsel with the scope and range 
 of a statesman. I use statesman in its 
 highest sense; his is a mind that can grasp 
 the situation and destinies of a people. 
 After I had talked to him I went back to 
 my club, and found there an English news 
 paper with a report of the opening debate 
 upon Mr. Birrell s Education Bill. It was 
 like turning from the discussion of life and 
 death to a dispute about the dregs in the 
 bottom of a tea-cup somebody had neglected 
 to wash up in Victorian times. 
 
276 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 I argued strongly against the view he 
 seems to hold that black and white might 
 live without mingling and without injustice, 
 side by side. That I do not believe. Eacial 
 differences seem to me always to exasperate 
 intercourse unless people have been elabo 
 rately trained to ignore them. Uneducated 
 men are as bad as cattle in persecuting all 
 that is different among themselves. The 
 mosr. miserable and disorderly countries of 
 the world are the countries where two 
 races, two inadequate cultures, keep a jarring, 
 continuous separation. " You must repudiate 
 separation?* I said. " No peoples have ever 
 yet endured the tension of intermingled 
 distinctness." 
 
 "May we not become a peculiar people 
 like the Jews ? " he suggested. " Isn t 
 that possible ?" 
 
 But there I could not agree with him. 
 I thought of the dreadful history of the 
 Jews and Armenians. And the negro cannot 
 do what the Jews and Armenians have done. 
 The coloured people of America are of a 
 different quality from the Jew altogether, 
 more genial, more careless, more sympathetic, 
 franker, less intellectual, less acquisitive, less 
 wary and restrained in a word, more 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 277 
 
 Occidental. They have no common religion 
 and culture, no conceit of race to hold them 
 together. The Jews make a ghetto for 
 themselves wherever they go ; no law but 
 their own solidarity has given America East 
 Side. The coloured people are ready to dis 
 perse and interbreed, are not a community 
 at all in the Jewish sense, but outcasts from 
 a community. They are the victims of a 
 prejudice that has to be destroyed. These 
 things I urged, but it was, I think, empty 
 speech to my hearer. I could talk lightly 
 of destroying that prejudice, but he knew 
 better. It is the central fact of his life, 
 a law of his being. He has shaped all his 
 projects and policy upon that. Exclusion is 
 inevitable. So he dreams of a coloured race 
 of decent and inaggressive men, silently 
 giving the lie to all the legends of their 
 degradation. They will have their own 
 doctors, their own lawyers, their own capi 
 talists, their own banks because the whites 
 desire it so. But will the uneducated whites 
 endure even so submissive a vindication as 
 that ? Will they suffer the horrid spectacle 
 of free and self-satisfied negroes in decent 
 clothing on any terms without resentment ? 
 He explained how at the Tuskegee Institute 
 
278 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 they make useful men, skilled engineers, 
 skilled agriculturalists, men to live down the 
 charge of practical incompetence, of ignorant 
 and slovenly farming and house manage 
 ment. . . . 
 
 "I wish you would tell me," I said 
 abruptly, "just what you think of the atti 
 tude of white America towards you. Do you 
 think it is generous ? " 
 
 He regarded me for a moment. " No end 
 of people help us," he said. 
 
 "Yes," I said, "but the ordinary man. 
 Is he fair?" 
 
 " Some things are not fair," he said, 
 leaving the general question alone. "It isn t 
 fair to refuse a coloured man a berth on a 
 sleeping-car. I ? I happen to be a privi 
 leged person, they make an exception of me, 
 but the ordinary educated coloured man isn t 
 admitted to a sleeping-car at aril. If he has 
 to go a long journey, he has to sit up all 
 night. His white competitor sleeps. Then 
 in some places, in the hotels and restaurants 
 it s all right here in Boston but south 
 wardly, he can t get proper refreshments. All 
 that s a handicap. . . , 
 
 "The remedy lies in education," he said; 
 " ours and theirs. 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 279 
 
 "The real thing," he told me, "isn t to 
 be done by talking and agitation. It s a 
 matter of lives. The only answer to it all 
 is for coloured men to be patient, to make 
 themselves competent, to do good work, to 
 live well, to give no occasion against us. We 
 feel that. In a way it s an inspiration. . . . 
 
 " There is a man here in Boston, a negro, 
 who owns and runs some big stores, employs 
 all sorts of people, deals justly. That man 
 has done more good for our people than all 
 the eloquence or argument in the world. . . . 
 That is what we have to do it is all we 
 can do. ... " 
 
 Whatever America has to show in heroic 
 living to-day, I doubt if she can show any 
 thing finer than the quality of the resolve, 
 the steadfast effort hundreds of black and 
 coloured men are making to-day to live blame 
 lessly, honourably, and patiently, getting for 
 themselves what scraps of refinement, learn 
 ing, and beauty they may, keeping their hold 
 on a civilization they are grudged and denied. 
 They do it not for themselves only, but for 
 all their race. Each educated coloured man 
 is an ambassador to civilization. They know 
 they have a handicap, that they are not 
 exceptionally brilliant nor clever people. Yet 
 
280 THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 
 
 every such man stands, one likes to think, 
 aware of his representative and vicarious cha 
 racter, fighting against foul imaginations, mis 
 representations, injustice, insult, and the nai ve 
 unspeakable meannesses of base antagonists. 
 Every one of them who keeps decent and 
 honourable does a little to beat that opposition 
 down. 
 
 But the patience the negro needs ! He 
 may not even look contempt. He must admit 
 superiority in those whose daily conduct to 
 him is the clearest evidence of moral in 
 feriority. We sympathetic whites, indeed, 
 may claim honour for him ; if he is wise, he 
 will be silent under our advocacy. He must 
 go to and fro self-controlled, bereft of all the 
 equalities that the great flag of America 
 proclaims, that flag for whose united empire 
 his people fought and died, giving place and 
 precedence to the strangers who pour in to 
 Bhare its beneficence, strangers ignorant even 
 of its tongue. That he must do and wait. 
 The Welsh, the Irish, the Poles, the white 
 South, the indefatigable Jews, may cherish 
 grievances and rail aloud. He must keep 
 still. They may be hysterical, revengeful, 
 threatening, and perverse ; their wrongs excuse 
 them. For him there is no excuse. And of 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOUR 281 
 
 all the races upon earth, which has suffered 
 such wrongs as this negro blood that is still 
 imputed to him as a sin? These people 
 who disdain him, who have no sense of repara 
 tion towards him, have sinned against him 
 beyond all measure. . . . 
 
 No, I can t help idealizing the dark sub 
 missive figure of the negro in this spectacle 
 of America. He too seems to me to sit 
 waiting and waiting with a marvellous and 
 simple-minded patience for finer understand 
 ings and a nobler time. 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE MIND OF A MODEEN STATE 
 1 
 
 I DO not know if I ain conveying to any 
 extent the picture of America as I see it, 
 the vast, rich, various continent, the gigantic, 
 energetic process of development, the acquisi 
 tive successes, the striving failures, the multi 
 tudes of those rising and falling who come 
 between, all set in a texture of spacious 
 countryside, animate with pleasant timber 
 homes, of clangorous towns that bristle to 
 the skies, of great exploitation districts and 
 crowded factories, of wide deserts and mine- 
 torn mountains, and huge half-tamed rivers. 
 I have tried to make the note of immigration 
 grow slowly to a dominating significance 
 in this panorama, and with that, to make 
 more and more evident my sense of the 
 need of a creative assimilation, the cry for 
 synthetic effort, lest all this great being, 
 
286 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 this splendid promise of a new world, should 
 decay into a vast, unprogressive stagnation 
 of nnhappiness and disorder. I have hinted 
 at failures and cruelties; I have put into 
 the accumulating details of my vision children 
 America blights, men she crushes, fine hopes 
 she disappoints and destroys. I have found 
 a place for the questioning figure of the 
 south, the sorrowful interrogation of the outcast 
 coloured people. These are but the marginal 
 shadows of a process in its totality magnifi 
 cent; but they exist, they go on to mingle 
 in her destinies. 
 
 Then I have tried to show, too, the con 
 ception I have formed of the great skein of 
 industrial competition that has been tightening 
 and becoming more and more involved through 
 all this century-long age, the Age of Blind 
 Growth, that draws now towards its end, until 
 the process threatens to throttle individual 
 freedom and individual enterprise altogether; 
 and of a great mental uneasiness and dis 
 content, unprecedented in the history of the 
 American mind, that promises in the near 
 future some general and conscious endeavour 
 to arrest this unanticipated strangulation of 
 freedom and free living, some widespread 
 struggle, of I know not what constructive 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 287 
 
 power, with the stains and disorders and 
 indignities that oppress and grow larger in 
 the national consciousness. I perceive more 
 and more that in coming to America I have 
 chanced upon a time of peculiar significance. 
 The note of disillusionment sounds everywhere. 
 America, for the first time in her history, is 
 taking thought about herself, and ridding her 
 self of long-cherished illusions. I have already 
 mentioned (in Chapter VIII.) the memorable 
 literature of self-examination that has come 
 into being during the last decade. Hitherto 
 American thought has been extraordinarily 
 localized; there has been no national press in 
 the sense that the press of London or Paris 
 is national. Americans knew of America as 
 a whole, mainly as the flag. Beneath the flag 
 America is lost among constituent states and 
 cities. All her newspapers have been, by 
 English standards, "local" papers, preoccu 
 pied by local affairs, and taking an intensely 
 localized point of view. A national newspaper 
 for America would be altogether too immense 
 an enterprise. Only since 1896, and in the 
 form of weekly and monthly ten-cent maga 
 zines, have the rudiments of a national medium 
 of expression appeared, and appeared to voice 
 strange, pregnant doubts. I had an interesting 
 
288 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 talk with Mr. Brisbane Walker upon this 
 new development. To him the first ten-cent 
 magazine, The Cosmopolitan, was due, and he 
 was naturally glad to tell me of the growth 
 of this vehicle. To-day there is an aggregate 
 circulation of ten million of these magazines ; 
 they supply fiction, no doubt, and much of 
 light interesting ephemeral matter, but not one 
 of them is without its element of grave public 
 discussion. I do not wish to make too much 
 of this particular development, but regard it as 
 a sign of new interests, of keen curiosities ! 
 
 Now, I must confess, when I consider this 
 ocean of readers, I find the fears I have 
 expressed of some analogical development of 
 American affairs towards the stagnant com 
 mercialism of China, or towards a plutocratic 
 imperialism and decadence of the Eoman type, 
 look singularly flimsy. Upon its present lines, 
 and supposing there were no new sources of 
 mental supply and energy, I do firmly believe 
 that America might conceivably come more 
 and more under the control of a tacitly 
 organized and exhausting plutocracy, be 
 swamped by a swelling tide of ignorant and 
 unassimilable labour immigrants, decline to 
 wards violence and social misery, fall behind 
 Europe in education and intelligence, and 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 289 
 
 cease to lead civilization. In such a decay 
 Caesarism would be a most probable and 
 natural phase, Caesarism and a splitting into 
 contending Caesarisms. Come but a little 
 sinking from intelligence towards coarseness 
 and passion, and the south will yet endea 
 vour to impose servitude upon its coloured 
 people, or secede that trouble is not yet 
 over. A little darkening and impoverishment 
 of outlook, and New York would split from 
 New England, and Colorado from the Bast. 
 An illiterate, short-sighted America would be 
 America doomed. But America is not 
 illiterate ; there are these great unprecedented 
 reservoirs of intelligence and understanding, 
 these millions of people who follow the pro 
 cess with an unceasing comprehension. It is 
 these millions of readers who make the 
 American problem, and the problems of 
 Europe and the world to-day, unique and in 
 calculable, who provide a cohesive and reason 
 able and pacifying medium the old world did 
 not know. 
 
 You see, my hero in the confused drama 
 of human life is intelligence ; intelligence in 
 spired by constructive passion. There is a 
 demi-god imprisoned in mankind. All human 
 history presents itself to me as the unconscious 
 
 u 
 
290 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 or half-conscious struggle of human thought 
 to emerge from the sightless interplay of 
 instinct, individual passion, prejudice, and 
 ignorance. One sees this diviner element 
 groping after law and order and fine arrange 
 ment, like a thing blind and half buried, in 
 ancient Egypt, in ancient Judsea, in ancient 
 Greece. It embodies its purpose in religions, 
 invents the disciplines of morality, the re 
 minders of ritual. It loses itself and becomes 
 confused. It wearies and rests. In Plato, for 
 the first time, one discovers it conscious and 
 open-eyed; trying, indeed, to take hold of 
 life and control it. Then it goes under, and 
 becomes again a convulsive struggle, an inco- 
 ordinated gripping and leaving, a muttering of 
 literature and art, until the coming of our 
 own times. Most painful and blundering of 
 demi-gods it seems through all that space of 
 years, with closed eyes and feverish efforts. 
 And now again it is clear to the minds of 
 many men that they may lay hold upon and 
 control the destiny of their kind. . . . 
 
 It is strange, it is -often grotesque to mark 
 how the reviving racial consciousness finds 
 expression to-day. Now it startles itself into 
 a new phase of self-knowledge by striking a 
 note from this art, and now by striking one 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 291 
 
 from that. It breaks out in fiction that is 
 ostensibly written only to amuse, it creeps 
 into after-dinner discussions, and invades a 
 press which is economically no more than a 
 system of advertisement sheets proclaiming 
 the price of the thing that is. Presently it is 
 on the stage; the music-hall even is not safe 
 from it. Youths walk in the streets to-day, 
 talking together of things that were once the 
 ultimate speculation of philosophy. I am no 
 contemner of the present. To me it appears 
 a time of immense and wonderful beginnings. 
 New ideas are organizing themselves out of 
 the little limited efforts of innumerable men. 
 Never was there an age so intellectually 
 prolific and abundant as this in the aggregate 
 is. It is true, indeed, that we who write 
 and think and investigate to-day, present no 
 thing to compare with the magnificent reputa 
 tions and intensely individualized achievements, 
 of the impressive personalities of the past. 
 None the less is it true that, taken all to 
 gether, we signify infinitely more. We no 
 longer pose ourselves for admiration, high 
 priests and princes of letters in a world of 
 finite achievement; we admit ourselves no 
 more than pages bearing the train of a 
 queen but a queen of limitless power. The 
 
292 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 knowledge we co-ordinate, the ideas we build 
 together, the growing blaze in which we are 
 willingly consumed, are wider and higher and 
 richer in promise than anything the world 
 has had before. 
 
 2 
 
 When one takes count of the forces of 
 intelligence upon which we may rely in the 
 great conflict against matter, brute instinct, 
 and individualistic disorder, to make the new 
 social state, when we consider the organizing 
 forms that emerge already from the general 
 vague confusion, we find apparent in every 
 modern state three chief series of develop 
 ments. There is, first, the thinking and in 
 vestigatory elements, that grow constantly 
 more important in our university life, the 
 enlarging recognition of the need of a syste 
 matic issue of university publications, books, 
 periodicals, and of sustained and fertilizing 
 discussion. Then there is the greater, cruder, 
 and bolder sea of mental activities outside 
 academic limits, the amateurs, the free-lances 
 of thought and inquiry, the writers and artists, 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 293 
 
 the innumerable ill-disciplined, untrained, but 
 interested and well-meaning people who write 
 and talk. They find their medium in con 
 temporary literature, in journalism, in organiza 
 tions for the propaganda of opinion. And, 
 thirdly, there is the immense, nearly uni 
 versally diffused system of education which, 
 inadequately enough, serves to spread the new 
 ideas as they are elaborated, which does, at 
 any rate, by its preparatory work, render them 
 accessible. All these new manifestations of 
 mind embody themselves in material forms, 
 in class-rooms and laboratories, in libraries 
 and a vast machinery of book and newspaper 
 production and distribution. 
 
 Consider the new universities that spring 
 up all over America. Almost imperceptibly 
 throughout the past century, little by little, 
 the conception of a university has changed, 
 until now it is nearly altogether changed. 
 The old-time university was a collection of 
 learned men; it believed that all the genera 
 lizations had been made, all the fundamental 
 things said ; it had no vistas towards the 
 future ; it existed for teaching and exercises, 
 and more than half implied, what Dr. Johnson, 
 for example, believed, that secular degenera 
 tion was the rule of human life. All that, 
 
294 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 you know, has gone ; every university, even 
 Oxford (though, poor pretentious dear, she 
 still professes to read and think metaphysics 
 in "the original" Greek), admits the concep 
 tion of a philosophy that progresses, that 
 broadens and intensifies, age by age. But to 
 come to America is to come to a country far 
 more alive to the thinking and knowledge- 
 making function of universities than Great 
 Britain. One splendidly endowed foundation, 
 the John Hopkins University, Baltimore, exists 
 only for research, and that was the first in 
 tention of Chicago University also. In socio 
 logy, in pedagogics, in social psychology, those 
 vital sciences for the modern state, America 
 is producing an amount of work which, how 
 ever trivial in proportion to the task before 
 her, is at any rate immense in comparison 
 with our own British output. . . . 
 
 I did my amateurish and transitory best to 
 see something of the American universities. 
 There iwas Columbia. Thither I went with a 
 letter to Professor Giddings, whose sociological 
 writings are world-famous. I found him busy 
 with a secretary in a business-like little room, 
 stowed away somewhere under the dome of 
 the magnificent building of the university 
 library. He took me round the opulent spaces, 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 295 
 
 the fine buildings of Columbia. ... I suppose 
 it is inevitable that a visitor should see the 
 constituents of a university out of proportion, 
 but I came away with an impression over 
 whelmingly architectural. The library dome, 
 I confess, was fine, and the desks below well 
 filled with students; the books were abundant, 
 well arranged, and well tended. But I recall 
 marble staircases, I recall great wastes of 
 marble steps, I recall, in particular, students 
 baths of extraordinary splendour, and I do not 
 recall anything like an equivalent effect of 
 large leisure and dignity for intellectual men. 
 Professor Giddings seemed driven and busy, 
 the few men I met there appeared all to have 
 a lot of. immediate work to do. It occurred to 
 me in Columbia, as it occurred to me later 
 in the University of Chicago, that the dis 
 position of the university founder is altogether 
 too much towards buildings and memorial in 
 scriptions, and all too little towards the more 
 difficult and far more valuable end of putting 
 men of pre-eminent ability into positions of 
 stimulated leisure. This is not, a distinctively 
 American effect. In Oxford, just as much as 
 in Columbia, nay, far more ! you find stone 
 and student lording it over the creative mental 
 thing; the dons go about like some sort of 
 
296 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 little short-coated parasite, pointing respect 
 fully to tower and facade, which have, in 
 truth, no reason for existing except to shelter 
 them. Columbia is almost as badly off for 
 means of publication as Oxford, and quite as 
 poor in inducements towards creative work, 
 Professors talk in an altogether British way of 
 getting work done in the vacation. 
 
 Moreover, there was an effect of remote 
 ness about Columbia. It may have been the 
 quality of a blue still morning of sunshine 
 that invaded my impression. I came up out 
 of the crowded tumult of New York to it, with 
 a sense of the hooting, hurrying traffics of 
 the wide harbour, the teeming East Side, the 
 glitter of spending, the rush of finance, the 
 whole headlong process of America, behind 
 me. I came out of the subway station into 
 wide, still streets. It was very spacious, very 
 dignified, very quiet. Well, I want the uni 
 versities of the modern state to be more 
 aggressive. I want to think of a Columbia 
 University of a less detached appearance, even 
 if she is less splendidly clad. I want to think 
 of her as sitting up there, cheek on hand, 
 with knitted brows, brooding upon the millions 
 below. I want to think of all the best minds 
 conceivable, going to and fro thoughts and 
 
HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 297 
 
 purposes in her organized mind. And when 
 she speaks, that busy world should listen. . . . 
 
 As a matter of fact, much of that busy 
 world still regards a professor as something 
 between a dealer in scientific magic and a 
 crank, and a university as an institution every 
 good American should be honestly proud of 
 and avoid. 
 
 Harvard, too, is detached, though not quite 
 with the same immediacy of contrast. Har 
 vard reminded me very much of my first 
 impressions of Oxford. One was taken about 
 in the same way to see this or that point of 
 view. Much of Harvard is Georgian red 
 brick, that must have seemed very ripe and 
 venerable until a year or so ago one bitter 
 winter killed all the English ivy. There are 
 students clubs, after the fashion of the 
 Oxford Union, but finer and better equipped; 
 there is an amazing Germanic museum, the 
 gift of the present Emperor, that does, in a 
 concentrated form, present all that is flam 
 boyant of Germany ; there are noble museums 
 and libraries, and very many fine and dignified 
 aspects and spaces, and an abundant intel 
 lectual life. Harvard is happily free from 
 the collegiate politics that absorb most of 
 the surplus mental energy of Oxford and 
 
298 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 Cambridge, and the professors can, and do, 
 meet and talk. At Harvard men count. I was 
 condoled with on all hands in my disappoint 
 ment that I could not meet Professor William 
 James he was still in California and I had 
 the good fortune to meet and talk to President 
 Eliot, who is, indeed, a very considerable 
 voice in American affairs. To me he talked 
 quite readily and frankly of a very living 
 subject, the integrity of the press in relation 
 to the systematic and successful efforts of the 
 advertising chemists and druggists to stifle 
 exposures of noxious proprietary articles. He 
 saw the problem as the subtle play of group 
 physiology it is ; there was none of that 
 feeble horror of these troubles as " modern 
 and vulgar " that one would expect in an 
 English university leader. I fell into a great 
 respect for his lean, fine face and figure, his 
 deliberate voice, his open, balanced, and con 
 structive mind. He was the first man I had 
 met who had any suggestion of a force and 
 quality that might stand up to and prevail 
 against the forces of acquisition and brute 
 trading. He bore himself as though some 
 sure power were behind him, unlike many 
 other men I met who criticized abuses abu 
 sively, or in the key of facetious despair. 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 299 
 
 He had very much of that fine aristocratic 
 quality one finds cropping up so frequently 
 among Americans of old tradition, an aristo 
 cratic quality that is free from either privilege 
 or pretension. . . . 
 
 At Harvard, too, I met Professor Mttn- 
 sterberg, one of the few writers of standing 
 who have attempted a general review of the 
 American situation. He is a tall fair German, 
 but newly annexed to America, with a certain 
 diplomatic quality in his personality, standing 
 almost consciously, as it were, for Germany 
 in America, and for America in Germany. He 
 has written a book for either people, because 
 hitherto they have seen each other too 
 much through English media f"von En- 
 glischen pinseln retouchiert "), and he has 
 done much to spread the conception of a 
 common quality and sympathy between Ger 
 many and America. "Blood," he says in this 
 connection, "is thicker than water, but . . . 
 printer s ink is thicker than blood. * England 
 is too aristocratic, France too shockingly 
 immoral, Eussia too absolutist to be the 
 sympathetic and similar friend of America, 
 and so, by a process of exhaustion, Germany 
 remains the one power on earth capable of 
 an "inner understanding." (Also he has 
 
300 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 drawn an alluring parallel between President 
 Eoosevelt and the Emperor William to com 
 plete the approximation of "die beiden Edel- 
 nationen.") I had read all this, and was 
 interested to encounter him, therefore, at a 
 Harvard table in a circle of his colleagues, 
 agreeable and courteous, and still scarcely 
 more assimilated than the brightly-new white 
 Germanic museum among the red-brick tradi 
 tions of Kirkland and Cambridge streets. . . . 
 Harvard impresses me altogether as a very 
 living factor in the present American outlook, 
 not only when I was in Cambridge, but in 
 the way the place tells in New York, in 
 Chicago, in Washington. It has a living and 
 contemporary attitude, and it is becoming more 
 and more audible. Harvard opinion influences 
 the magazines and affects the press, at least 
 in the east, to an increasing extent. It may, 
 in the near future, become still more rapidly 
 audible. Professor Eliot is now full of years 
 and honour, and I found in New York, in 
 Boston, in Washington, that his successor was 
 being discussed. In all these cities I met 
 people disposed to believe that if President 
 Eoosevelt does not become President of the 
 United States for a further term, he may 
 succeed President Eliot. Now that I have 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 301 
 
 seen President Roosevelt, ib seems to me that 
 this might have a most extraordinary effect 
 in accelerating the reaction upon the people 
 of America of t^ best and least mercenary 
 of their national thought. Already he is 
 exerting an immense influence in the ad 
 vertisement of new ideas and ideals. But of 
 President Roosevelt I shall write more fully 
 later. . . . 
 
 Chicago University, too, is a splendid place 
 of fine buildings and green spaces and trees, 
 with a great going to and fro of students, a 
 wonderful contrast to the dark congestions of 
 the mercantile city to the north. To all the 
 disorganization of that it is even physically an 
 tagonistic, and I could think as I went about 
 it that already this new organization has 
 produced such writing as Veblen s admirable 
 ironies (The Theory of Business Enterprise, for 
 example) and such sociological work as that 
 of Zueblin and Albion Small. I went through 
 the vigorous and admirably equipped pedagogic 
 department, which is evidently a centre of 
 thought and stimulus for the whole teaching 
 profession of Illinois ; I saw a library of socio 
 logy and economics beyond anything that 
 London can boast. I came upon little groups 
 of students working amidst piles of books in a 
 
302 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 business-like manner, and if at times in other 
 sections this suggestion was still insistent that 
 thought was as yet only "moving in" and, 
 as it were, getting the carjgts down, it was 
 equally clear that thought was going to live 
 freely and spaciously, to an unprecedented 
 extent, so soon as things were in order. 
 
 I visited only these three great founda 
 tions, each in its material embodiment already 
 larger, wealthier, and more hopeful than any 
 contemporary British institution, and it re 
 quired an effort to realize that they were but 
 a portion of the embattled universities of 
 America ; that I had not seen Yale, nor 
 Princetojtfh, nor Cornell, nor Leland Stanford, 
 nor any western state university not a tithe, 
 indeed, of America s drilling levies in the 
 coming war of thought against chaos. I am 
 in no way equipped to estimate the value of 
 the drilling; I have been unable to get any 
 conception how far the tens of thousands of 
 students in these institutions are really alive 
 intellectually, are really inquiring, discussing, 
 reading, and criticizing ; I have no doubt that 
 great numbers of them spend many hours 
 after the fashion of one roomful I saw intent 
 upon a blackboard covered with Greek; but 
 allowing the utmost for indolence, games, 
 
A BIT OF PRINCETOWN UNIVERSITY 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 303 
 
 distractions, and waste of time and energy 
 upon unfruitful and obsolete studies, the fact 
 of this great, increasing proportion of minds, 
 at least a little trained in things immaterial, 
 a little exercised in the critical habit, remains 
 a fact to put over against that million and a 
 half child-workers who can barely have learnt 
 to read the other side, the redeeming side 
 of the American prospect. 
 
 3 
 
 I am impressed by the evident conscious 
 ness of the American universities of the role 
 they have to play in America s future. They 
 seem to me pervaded by the constructive spirit. 
 They are intelligently antagonistic to lethargic 
 and self-indulgent traditions, to disorder and 
 disorderly institutions. It is from the universi 
 ties that the deliberate invasion of the political 
 machine by independent men of honour and 
 position of whom President Koosevelt is the 
 type and chief proceeds. Mr. George lies has 
 called my attention to a remarkable address 
 made so long ago as the year 1883 before the 
 Yale Alumni by President Dickson White (the 
 
304 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 first president), of Cornell, who was afterwards 
 American Ambassador at St. Petersburg and 
 Berlin. President White was a member of 
 the class of 53, and he addressed himself par 
 ticularly to the men of that year. His title 
 was " The Message of the Nineteenth Century 
 to the Twentieth/ and it is full of a spirit that 
 grows and spreads throughout American life, 
 that may ultimately spread throughout the life 
 of the whole nation, a spirit of criticism and 
 constructive effort, of a scope and quality the 
 world has never seen before. The new class 
 of 83 are the messengers : 
 
 "To a few tottering old men of our dear 
 class of 53 it will be granted to look with 
 straining eyes over the boundary into the 
 twentieth century ; but even these can do 
 little to make themselves heard then. Most 
 of us will not see it. But before us and 
 around us, nay, in our own families, are the 
 men who will see it. The men who go forth 
 from these dear shades to-morrow are girding 
 themselves for it. Often as I have stood in 
 the presence of such bands of youthful mes 
 sengers I have never been able to resist a 
 feeling of awe, as in my boyhood when I stood 
 before men who were soon to see Palestine 
 and the Far East, or the Golden Gates of the 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 305 
 
 West and the islands of the Pacific. The old 
 story of St. Fillipo Neri at Eome comes back 
 to me, who, in the days of the Elizabethan 
 persecutions, made men bring him out into 
 the open air and set him opposite the door 
 of the Papal College of Eome, that he might 
 look into the faces of the English students, 
 destined to go forth to triumph or to martyr 
 dom for the faith in far-off, heretic England." 
 
 I cannot forbear from quoting further from 
 this address ; it is all so congenial to my 
 own beliefs. Indeed, I like to think of that 
 gathering of young men and old as if it were 
 still existing, as though the old fellows of 53 
 were still sitting, listening, and looking up 
 responsive to this appeal that comes down 
 to us. I fancy President White on the plat 
 form before them, a little figure in the per 
 spective of a quarter of a century, but still 
 quite clearly audible, delivering his periods 
 to that now indistinguishable audience : 
 
 " What, then, is to be done ? Mercantilism, 
 necessitated at first by our circumstances and 
 position, has been in the main a great bless 
 ing. It has been so under a simple law of 
 history. How shall it be prevented from 
 becoming, in obedience to a similar inexorable 
 law, a curse? 
 
306 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 "Here, in the "answer to this question, it 
 seems to me, is the most important message 
 from this century to the next. 
 
 "For the great thing to he done is neither 
 more nor less than to develop other great 
 elements of civilization, now held in check, 
 which shall take their rightful place in the 
 United States, which shall modify the mer 
 cantile spirit, . . . which shall make the 
 history of our country something greater and 
 broader than anything we have reached, or 
 ever can reach, under the sway of mercantilism 
 alone. 
 
 "What shall be those counter-elements of 
 civilization ? Monarchy, aristocracy, militarism 
 we could not have if we would, and would not 
 have if we could. What shall we have ? 
 
 "I answer simply that we must do all 
 that we can to rear greater fabrics of re 
 ligious, philosophic thought, literary thought, 
 1 scientific, artistic, political thought, to sum 
 mon young men more and more into these 
 fields, not as a matter of taste, or social 
 opportunity, but as a patriotic duty ; to hold 
 before them not the incentive of mere gain 
 or of mere pleasure or of mere reputation, 
 but the ideal of a new and higher civilization. 
 The] greatest work which the coming century 
 
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 307 
 
 has to do in this country is to build up an 
 aristocracy of thought and feeling which shall 
 hold its own against the aristocracy of mer 
 cantilism. I would have more and more the 
 appeal made to every young man who feels 
 within him the ability to do good or great 
 things in any of these higher fields, to 
 devote his powers to them as a sacred duty, 
 no matter how strongly the mercantile or 
 business spirit may draw him. 
 
 " I would have the idea preached early 
 and late. . . . 
 
 "And, as the guardian of such a move 
 ment, ... I would strengthen at every point 
 this venerable university, and others like it 
 throughout the country. Eemiss, indeed, 
 have the graduates and friends of our own 
 honoured Yale been in their treatment of 
 her. She has never had the means to do 
 a tithe of what she might do. She ought 
 to be made strong enough, with more de 
 partments, more professors, more fellowships, 
 to become one of a series of great rallying- 
 points or fortresses, and to hold always 
 concentrated here a strong army, ever 
 active against mercantilism, materialism, and 
 Philistinism. . . . 
 
 "But, above all, the effort to create these 
 
3o8 THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE 
 
 new counter-poising, modifying elements of 
 a greater civilization must be begun in the 
 individual man, and especially in the youth 
 who feels within himself the power to think, 
 the power to write, the power to carve the 
 marble, to paint, to leave something behind 
 him better than dollars. In the individual 
 minds and hearts and souls of the messengers 
 who are preparing for the next century is 
 the source of regeneration. They must form 
 an ideal of religion higher than that of a 
 life devoted to grasping and grinding and 
 griping, with a whine for mercy at the end 
 of it. They must form an ideal of science 
 higher than that of increasing the production 
 of iron or cotton. They must form an ideal 
 of literature and of art higher than that of 
 pandering to the latest prejudice or whimsey. 
 And they must form an ideal of man him 
 self worthy of that century into which are 
 to be poured the accumulations of .this. So 
 shall material elements be brought to their 
 proper place, made stronger for good, made 
 harmless for evil. So shall we have that 
 development of new and greater elements, 
 that balance of principles which shall make 
 this republic greater than anything of which 
 we now can dream." 
 
CULTURE 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 CULTURE 
 1 
 
 YET even as I write of the universities as 
 the central intellectual organ of a modern state, 
 as I sit implying salvation by schools, there 
 comes into my mind a mass of qualification. 
 The devil in the American world-drama may 
 be mercantilism, ensnaring, tempting, battling 
 against my hero, the creative mind of man; 
 but mercantilism is not the only antagonist. 
 In Fifth Avenue or Paterson one may find 
 nothing but the zenith and nadir of the dollar- 
 hunt ; at a Harvard table one may encounter 
 nothing but living minds; but in Boston I 
 mean not only Beacon Street and Common 
 wealth Avenue, but that Boston of the mind 
 and heart that pervades American refinement 
 and goes about the world one finds the 
 human mind not base, nor brutal, nor stupid, 
 nor ignorant, but mysteriously enchanted and 
 
312 CULTURE 
 
 ineffectual, so that having eyes it yet does 
 not see, having powers it achieves nothing. . . . 
 I remember Boston as a quiet effect, as 
 something a little withdrawn, as a place 
 standing aside from the throbbing interchange 
 of east and west. When I hear the word 
 Boston now it is that quality returns. I do 
 not think of the spreading park-ways of Mr. 
 Woodbury and Mr. Olmstead, nor of the 
 crowded harbour; the congested tenement 
 house regions, full of those aliens whose 
 tongues struck so strangely on the ears of 
 Mr. Henry James, come not to mind. But 
 I think of rows of well-built, brown, and 
 ruddy homes, each with a certain sound 
 architectural distinction, each with its two 
 squares of neatly trimmed grass between 
 itself and the broad, quiet street, and each 
 with its family of cultured people within. 
 I am reminded of deferential but unosten 
 tatious servants, and of being ushered into 
 large, dignified entrance-halls. I think of 
 spacious stairways, curtained archways, and 
 rooms of agreeable receptive persons. I recall 
 the finished informality of the High Tea. 
 All the people of my impression have been 
 taught to speak English with a quite admir 
 able intonation ; some of the men, and most 
 
CULTURE 313 
 
 of the women, are proficient in two or three 
 languages ; they have travelled in Italy, they 
 have all the recognized classics of European 
 literature in their minds, and apt quotations 
 at command. And I think of the constant 
 presence of treasured associations with the 
 titanic and now mellowing literary reputa 
 tions of Victorian times, with Emerson (who 
 called Poe "that jingle man "), and with 
 Longfellow, whose house is now sacred, its 
 view towards the Charles River and the 
 stadium it is a real correct stadium secured 
 by the purchase of the sward before it for 
 ever. . . . 
 
 At the mention of Boston I think, too, 
 of autotypes, and then of plaster casts. I 
 do not think I shall ever see an autotype 
 again without thinking of Boston. I think of 
 autotypes of the supreme masterpieces of 
 sculpture and painting, and particularly of the 
 fluttering garments of the Nike of Samothrace. 
 (That I saw also in little casts and big, 
 and photographed from every conceivable 
 point of view.) It is incredible how many 
 people in Boston have selected her for their 
 aesthetic symbol and expression. Always 
 that lady was in evidence about me, obtru 
 sively persistent, until at last her frozen 
 
3H CULTURE 
 
 stride pursued me into my dreams. That 
 frozen stride became the visible spirit of 
 Boston in my imagination, a sort of blind, 
 headless, and unprogressive fine resolution 
 that took no heed of any contemporary 
 thing. Next to that I recall, as inseparably 
 Bostonian, the dreaming grace of Botticelli s 
 Primavera. All Bostonians admire Botticelli, 
 and have a feeling for the roof of the 
 Sistine chapel ; to so casual and adventurous 
 a person as myself, indeed, Boston presents 
 a terrible, a terrifpng_jiinanimity of aesthetic 
 i discriminations. I was nearly brought back 
 to my childhood s persuasion that, after all, 
 there is a right and wrong in these things. 
 And Boston clearly thought the less of Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw when I told her he had in 
 duced me to buy a pianola. Not that 
 Boston ever did set much store by so con 
 temporary a person as Mr. Bernard Shaw. 
 The books she reads are toned and seasoned 
 books preferably in the old or else in 
 , limited editions, and by authors who may be 
 I lectured upon without indecorum. . . . 
 
 Boston has in her symphony concerts the 
 best music in America, and here her tastes 
 are severely orthodox and classic. I heard 
 Beethoven s Fifth Symphony extraordinarily 
 
CULTURE 315 
 
 well done, the familiar pinnacled Fifth Sym 
 phony, and now, whenever I grind that out 
 upon the convenient mechanism beside my 
 desk at home, mentally I shall be trans 
 ferred to Boston again, shall hear its 
 magnificent, aggressive thumpings transfigured 
 into exquisite orchestration, and sit again 
 among that audience of pleased and pleasant 
 ladies in chaste, high-necked, expensive 
 dresses, and refined, attentive, appreciative, 
 bald or iron-grey men. . . . 
 
 Then Boston has historical associations 
 that impressed me like iron-moulded, leather- 
 bound, eighteenth-century books. The War 
 of Independence, that to us in England seems 
 halfway back to the days of Elizabeth, is a 
 thing of yesterday in Boston. "Here," your 
 host will say, and pause, " came marching" 
 so-and-so, "with his troops to relieve " so- 
 and-so. And you will find he is a great- 
 grandson of so-and-so, and still keeps that 
 ancient colonial s sword. And these things 
 happened before they dug the Hythe military 
 canal; before Sandgate, except for a decrepit 
 castle, existed ; before the days when Buona 
 parte gathered his army at Boulogne in the 
 days of muskets and pigtails and erected 
 that column my telescope at home can reach 
 
316 CULTURE 
 
 for me on a clear day. All that is ancient 
 history in England, and in Boston the decade 
 before those distant alarums and excursions 
 is yesterday. A year or so ago they restored 
 the British arms to the old State House. 
 "Feeling," my informant witnessed, "was 
 dying down." But there were protests 
 nevertheless. . . . 
 
 If there is one note of incongruity in 
 Boston, it is in the gilt dome of the Massa 
 chusetts State House at night. They illu 
 minate it with electric light. That shocked 
 me as an anachronism. It shocked me 
 much as it would have shocked me to see 
 one of the colonial portraits, or even one of 
 the endless autotypes of the Belvidere Apollo 
 replaced let us say by one of Mr. Alvim 
 Coburn s wonderfully beautiful photographs of 
 modern New York. That electric glitter 
 breaks the spell; it is the admission of the 
 present, of the twentieth century. It is just 
 as if the Quirinal and Vatican took to an 
 exchange of badinage with searchlights, or 
 the King mounted an illuminated B.E. on 
 the Bound Tower at Windsor. 
 
 Save for that one discord, there broods over 
 the real Boston an immense effect of finality. 
 One feels in Boston, as one feels in no other 
 
CULTURE 317 
 
 part of the States, that the intellectual move 
 ment has ceased. Boston is now producing 
 no literature except a little criticism. The 
 publishers have long since left her, save for 
 one firm (which busies itself chiefly with 
 beautiful reprints of the minor classics). Con 
 temporary Boston art is imitative art, its 
 writers are correct and imitative writers, the 
 central figure of its literary world is that 
 charming old lady of eighty-eight, Mrs. Julia 
 Ward Howe. One meets her and Colonel 
 Higginson in the midst of an Authors 
 Society that is not so much composed of 
 minor stars as a chorus of indistinguishable 
 culture. There are an admirable library and 
 a museum in Boston, and the library is 
 Italianate and decorated within like an 
 ancient missal. In the less ornamental spaces 
 of this place there are books and readers. 
 There is particularly a charming large room 
 for children, full of pigmy chairs and tables, 
 in which quite little tots sit reading. I regret 
 now I did not ascertain precisely what they 
 were reading, but I have no doubt it was 
 classical matter. 
 
 I do not know why the full sensing of 
 what is ripe and good in the past should 
 carrv with it this quality of discriminating 
 
318 CULTURE 
 
 against the present and the future. The fact 
 remains that it does. It does so almost 
 oppressively. I found myself by some acci 
 dent of hospitality one evening in the 
 company of a number of Boston gentlemen 
 who constituted a book-collecting club. They 
 had dined, and they were listening to a paper 
 on Bibles printed in America. It was a 
 scholarly, valuable, and exhaustive piece of 
 research. The surviving copies of each 
 edition were traced, and when some rare 
 specimen was mentioned as the property of 
 any member of the club, there was decorously 
 warm applause. I had been seeing Boston, 
 drinking in the Boston atmosphere all 
 day. ... I know it will seem an ungracious 
 and ungrateful thing to confess (yet the 
 necessities of my picture of America compel 
 me), but as I sat at the large and beautifully 
 ordered table, with these fine rich men about 
 me, and listened to the steady progress of 
 the reader s even unrhetorical sentences, and 
 the little bursts of approval, it came to mo 
 with a horrible quality of conviction that 
 the Mind of the World was dead, and that 
 this was a distribution of souvenirs. 
 
 Indeed, so strongly did this grip me, that 
 presently upon some slight occasion I excused 
 
CULTURE 319 
 
 myself, and went out into the night. I 
 wandered about Boston for some hours try 
 ing to shake off this unfortunate idea. I 
 felt that all the books had been written, 
 all the pictures painted, all the thoughts 
 said or at least that nobody would ever 
 believe this wasn t so. I felt it was dread 
 ful nonsense to go on writing books. Nothing ) 
 remained but to collect them in the richest, 
 finest manner one could. Somewhen about 
 midnight I came to Messrs. Houghton and 
 Miffiin s window and stood in the dim moon 
 light peering enviously at piled copies of 
 Isaac Walton and Omar Khayyam, and all 
 the happy immortals who got in before the 
 gates were shut. And then in the corner 
 I discovered a thin, small book. For a time 
 I could scarcely believe my eyes. I lit a 
 match to be the surer. And it was A 
 Modern Symposium by Lowes Dickinson 
 beyond all disputing ! It was strangely com 
 forting to see it there a leaf of olive from 
 the world of thought I had imagined drowned 
 for ever. 
 
 That was just one night s mood. I do 
 not wish to accuse Boston of any wilful, 
 deliberate repudiation of the present and the 
 future. But I think that Boston when I 
 
320 CULTURE 
 
 say Boston let the reader always understand 
 I mean that intellectual and spiritual Boston 
 that goes about the world, that traffics in 
 book-shops in Rome and Piccadilly, that I 
 have dined with and wrangled with in my 
 friend W. s house in Blackheath, dear W., 
 who, I believe, has never seen America I 
 think, I say, that Boston commits the 
 scholastic error and tries to remember too 
 much, to treasure too much, and has refined 
 and studied and collected herself into a state 
 of hopeless intellectual and aesthetic repletion 
 in consequence. In these matters there are 
 limits. The finality of Boston is a quantita- 
 r tive consequence. The capacity of Boston, 
 it would seem, was just sufficient, but no 
 more than sufficient, to comprehend the 
 whole achievement of the human intellect 
 up, let us say, to the year 1875 A.D. Then 
 an equilibrium was established. At or about 
 that year Boston filled up. 
 
 It is the peculiarity of Boston s intellectual 
 quality that she cannot unload again. She 
 treasures Longfellow in quantity. She treasures 
 his works, she treasures associations, she 
 treasures his Cambridge home. Now really, 
 to be perfectly frank about him, Longfellow 
 is not good enough for that amount of 
 
CULTURE 321 
 
 intellectual house-room. He cumbers Boston. 
 And when I went out to Wellesley to see 
 that delightful girls college, everybody told 
 me I should be reminded of the " Princess." 
 For the life of me I could not remember 
 what " Princess." Much of my time in 
 Boston was darkened by the constant strain 
 of concealing the frightful gaps in my intel 
 lectual baggage; this absence of things I 
 might reasonably be supposed, as a culti 
 vated person, to have, but which, as a 
 matter of fact, I d either left behind, never 
 possessed, or deliberately thrown away. I 
 felt instinctively that Boston could never 
 possibly understand the light travelling of a 
 philosophical carpet bagger. But I did in 
 full view of the tree-set Wellesley lake, gay 
 with the skiffs of " sweet girl graduates " own 
 up. "I say," I said. "I wish you wouldn t 
 all be so allusive. What Princess ?" 
 
 It was, of course, that thing of Tennyson s. 
 
 It is a long, frequently happy and elegant, 
 
 nd always meritorious narrative poem in 
 
 lich a chaste Victorian amorousness 
 
 ruggles with the early formulae of the 
 
 ninist movement. I had read it when 
 
 was a boy, I was delighted to be able 
 
 claim, and had honourably forgotten the 
 
322 CULTURE 
 
 incident. But in Boston they treat it as 
 a living classic, and expect you to remember 
 constantly and with appreciation this passage 
 and that. I think that quite typical of the 
 Bostonian weakness. It is the error of the 
 clever high-school girl, it is the mistake of 
 the scholastic mind all the world over, to 
 learn too thoroughly and to carry too much. 
 They want to know and remember Lang- 
 fellow and Tennyson just as in art they 
 want to know and remember Eaphael and 
 all the elegant inanity of the Sacrifice at 
 Lystra, or the Miraculous Draught of 
 Fishes; just as in history they keep all 
 the picturesque legend of the War of In 
 dependence looking up the dates and minor 
 names, one imagines, ever and again. Some 
 years ago I met two Boston ladies in Eome. 
 Each day they sallied forth from our hotel 
 to see and appreciate ; each evening after 
 dinner they revised and underlined in 
 Baedeker what they had seen. They meant 
 to miss nothing in Rome. It s fine in its 
 this receptive eagerness, this learnei 
 avidity. Only people who can go about : 
 this spirit need, if their minds are to r 
 main mobile, not so much heads as cephal 
 pantechnicon vans. . . . 
 
CULTURE 323 
 
 I find this appetite to have all the mellow 
 and refined and beautiful things in life to 
 the exclusion of all thought for the present 
 and the future even in the sweet free air 
 of Wellesley s broad park, that most de 
 lightful, that almost incredible girls uni 
 versity, with its class-rooms, its halls of 
 residence, its club-houses and gathering-places 
 among the glades and trees. I have very 
 vivid in my mind a sunlit room in which 
 girls were copying the detail in the photo 
 graphs of masterpieces, and all around this 
 room were cabinets of drawers, and in each 
 drawer photographs. There must be in that 
 room photographs of every picture of the 
 slightest importance in Italy, and detailed 
 studies of many. I suppose, too, there are 
 photographs of all the sculpture and build 
 ings in Italy that are by any standard 
 considerable. There is, indeed, a great 
 civilization, stretching over centuries and 
 embodying the thought and devotion, the 
 scepticism and levities, the ambition, the 
 pretensions, the passions and desires of in 
 numerable sinful and world-used men canned, 
 as it were, in this one room, and freed from 
 any deleterious ingredients. The young ladies, 
 under the direction of competent instructors, 
 
324 CULTURE 
 
 go through it, no doubt, industriously, and 
 emerge capable of Browning. 
 
 I was taken into two or three charming 
 club-houses that dot this beautiful domain. 
 There was a Shakespeare club-house, with a 
 delightful theatre, Elizabethan in style, and 
 all set about with Shakespearean things ; 
 there was the club-house of the girls who 
 are fitting themselves for their share in the 
 great American problem by the study of 
 Greek. Groups of pleasant girls in each, 
 grave with the fine gravity of youth, enter 
 tained the reluctantly critical visitor, and 
 were unmistakably delighted and relaxed 
 when one made it clear that one was not 
 in the Great Teacher line of business, when 
 one confided that one was there on false 
 pretences, and insisted on seeing the pantry. 
 They have jolly little pantries, and they 
 make excellent tea. 
 
 I returned to Boston at last in a state 
 of mighty doubting, provided with a Wellesley 
 College calendar to study at my leisure. 
 
 I cannot, for the life of me, determine 
 how far Wellesley is an aspect of what I 
 have called Boston ; how far it is a part of 
 that wide forward movement of the univer 
 sities upon which I lavish hope and blessings. 
 
CULTURE 325 
 
 Those drawings of photographed Madonnas 
 and Holy Families and Annunciations, the 
 sustained study of Greek, the class in the 
 French Drama of the seventeenth century, 
 the study of the Topography of Eome, fill 
 me with misgivings, seeing that the world is in 
 torment for the want of living thought about 
 its present affairs. But, on the other hand, 
 there are courses upon Socialism though 
 the text-book is still Das Kapital of Marx 
 and upon the Industrial History of England 
 and America. I didn t discover a debating 
 society, but there is a large accessible library. 
 
 How far, I wonder still, are these girls 
 thinking and feeding mentally for themselves? 
 What do they discuss one with another ? 
 How far do they suffer under that blight 
 of feminine education, note-taking from 
 lectures? . . . 
 
 But, after all, this about Wellesley is a 
 digression into which I fell by way of 
 Boston s autotypes. My main thesis was 
 that culture, as it is conceived in Boston, 
 is no contribution to the future of America, 
 that cultivated people may be in effect as 
 state-blind as Mr. Morgan Eichards. It 
 matters little in the Mind of the World 
 whether any one is concentrated upon mediaeval 
 
326 CULTURE 
 
 poetry, Florentine pictures, or the propagation 
 of pills. The common significant fact in all 
 these cases is this, a blindness to the crude 
 splendour of the possibilities of America 
 now, to the tragic greatness of the unheeded 
 issues that blunder towards solution. Frankly, 
 I grieve over Boston Boston throughout the 
 world as a great waste of leisure and energy, 
 as a frittering away of moral and intellectual 
 possibilities. We give too much to the past. 
 New York is not simply more interesting 
 than Koine, but more significant, more 
 stimulating, and far more beautiful, and the 
 idea that to be concerned about the latter 
 in preference to the former is a mark of a 
 finer mental quality, is one of the most 
 mischievous and foolish ideas that ever 
 invaded the mind of man. We are obsessed 
 by the scholastic prestige of mere knowledge 
 and genteel remoteness. Over against un 
 thinking ignorance is scholarly refinement, 
 the Spirit of Boston; between that Scylla 
 and this Charybdis, the creative mind of 
 man steers its precarious way. 
 
AT WASHINGTON 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 1 
 
 I CAME to Washington full of expectations 
 and curiosities. Here, I felt, so far as it 
 could exist visibly and palpably anywhere, 
 was the head and mind of this colossal 
 America over which my observant curiosities 
 had wandered. In this place I should find, 
 among other things, perhaps as many as ten 
 thousand men who would not be concerned 
 in trade. There would be all the senators 
 and representatives, their secretaries and 
 officials, the four thousand and more scientific 
 and literary men of Washington s institutions 
 and libraries, the diplomatic corps, the educa 
 tional centres, the civil service, the writers 
 and thinking men who must inevitably be 
 drawn to this predestined centre. I promised 
 myself arduous intercourse with a teeming 
 intellectual life. Here I should find questions 
 
330 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 answered, discover missing clues, get hold of 
 the last connexions in my inquiry. I should 
 complete at Washington my vision of America; 
 my forecast would follow. 
 
 I don t precisely remember how this vision 
 departed. I know only that after a day or 
 so in Washington an entirely different con 
 ception was established, a conception of 
 Washington as architecture and avenues, as 
 a place of picture post-cards and excursions, 
 . I with sightsej3is instead of thoughts going to 
 and fro. I had imagined that in Washington 
 I should find such mentally vigorous discussion 
 centres as the New York X Club on a quite 
 magnificent scale. Instead, I found the chief 
 scientific gathering-place has, like so many 
 messes in the British Army before th,e Boer 
 war, a rule against talking "shop." In all 
 Washington there is no clearing-house of 
 thought at all; Washington has no literary 
 journals, no magazines, no publications other 
 than those of the official specialist there 
 does not seem to be a living for a single firm 
 of publishers in this magnificent empty city. 
 
 I went about the place in a state of 
 ridiculous and deepening concern. I went 
 through the splendid Botanical Gardens, 
 through the spacious and beautiful Capitol, 
 
IX THE COXGRESSIOXAL LIBRARY 
 
AT WASHINGTON 33 l 
 
 and so to the magnificently equipped Library 
 of Congress. There in an upper chamber, 
 that commands an altogether beautiful view 
 of long vistas of avenue and garden to that 
 stupendous, unmeaning obelisk (the work of 
 the women of America) that dominates all 
 Washington, I found at last a little group 
 of men who could talk. It was like a small 
 raft upon a limitless empty sea. I lunched 
 with them at their Bound Table, and after 
 wards Mr. Putnam showed me the Eotunda, 
 quite the most gracious reading-room dome 
 the world possesses, and explained the 
 wonderful mechanical organization that brings 
 almost every volume in that immense col 
 lection within a minute of one s hasd. 
 "With all this, 7 I asked him, " why 
 doesn t the place think?" He seemed, dis 
 creetly, to consider it did. 
 
 It was in the vein of Washington s 
 detached deadness that I should find Pro 
 fessor Langley (whose flying experiments I 
 have followed for some years with close 
 interest) was dead, and I went through the 
 long galleries of archaeological specimens and 
 stuffed animals in the Smithsonian Institution 
 to inflict my questions upon his temporary 
 successor, Dr. Cyrus Adler. He had no 
 
332 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 adequate excuses. He found a kind of 
 explanation in the want of enterprise of 
 American publishers, so that none of them 
 come to Washington to tap its latent re 
 sources of knowledge and intellectual capacity; 
 but that does not account for the absence of 
 any traffic in ideas. It is perhaps near the 
 truth to say that this dearth of any general 
 and comprehensive intellectual activity is 
 due to intellectual specialization. The four 
 thousand scientific men in Washington are 
 all too energetically busy with ethnographic 
 details, electrical computations or herbaria, to 
 talk about common and universal things. 
 They ought not to be so busy, and a science 
 so specialized sinks halfway down the scale 
 of sciences. Science is one of those things 
 that cannot hustle ; if it does, it loses its 
 connexions. In Washington some men, I 
 gathered, hustle, others play bridge, and 
 general questions are left a little contemptu 
 ously, as being of the nature of "gas," to 
 the newspapers and magazines. Philosophy, 
 which correlates the sciences and keeps 
 them subservient to the universals of life, has 
 no seat there. My anticipated synthesis of 
 ten thousand minds refused, under exami 
 nation, to synthesize at all; it remained 
 
WASHINGTON 333 
 
 dir mob, individually active and 
 
 collect ile, of specialists and poli 
 
 tic 
 
 only one side of Washington 
 lift iast and south of the White 
 
 He -westward I found, I confess, 
 
 th< 3eable social atmosphere in 
 
 An 3iic; a region of large, fine houses, 
 
 of : anil ample-minded people, people 
 
 nou given uvor to " smartness " nor redolent 
 of dollars, unhurried and reflective, not alto 
 gether lost to the wider aspects of life. In 
 Washington I met again that peculiarly aristo 
 cratic quality I had found in Harvard in the 
 person of President Eliot, for example an 
 aristocratic quality that is all the finer for 
 the absence of rank, that has integral in it, 
 books, thought, and responsibility. And yet 
 I could have wished these fine people more 
 alive to present and future things, a little 
 less established upon completed and mellow 
 ing foundations, a little less final in their 
 admirable finish. . . . 
 
 There was, I found, a little breeze of 
 satisfaction fluttering the Washington atmo 
 sphere in this region. Mr. Henry James 
 came through the States last year dis 
 tributing epithets among their cities with 
 
334 AT WASHINGTO 
 
 the justest aptitude. Washington the 
 
 " City of Conversation ; a was 
 
 pleasantly conscious that she this 
 
 friendly coronation. 
 
 Washington, indeed, converi ith- 
 
 out awkwardness, without chafr ring Ily, 
 
 watchful, agreeably witty. She and 
 
 tamed my purpose to ask primary 
 
 things, to discuss large questioi ice, 
 
 and that was in an after-dinnei did 
 
 I get at all into a question in Wi lingfcon. 
 For the rest Washington remark ad alluded 
 and made her point and got away. 
 
 And Washington, with a remarkable un 
 animity and in the most charming manner, 
 assured me that if I came to see and under 
 stand America I must on no account miss 
 Mount Vernon. To have passed indifferently 
 by Concord was bad enough, I was told, but 
 to ignore the home of the first president, to 
 turn my back upon that ripe monument of 
 colonial simplicity, would be quite criminal 
 neglect. To me it was a revelation how 
 sincerely insistent they were upon this. It 
 reminded me of an effect I had already 
 appreciated very keenly in Boston and even 
 before Boston, when Mr. Z. took me across 
 Spuyten Duyvil into the country of Sleepy 
 
AT WASHINGTON 335 
 
 Hollow, and spoke of Cornwallis as though 
 he had died yesterday and that is the 
 longer historical perspectives of America. 
 America is an older country than any Euro 
 pean one, for she has not rejuvenesced for a 
 hundred and thirty years. In endless ways 
 America fails to be contemporary. In many 
 respects, no doubt, she is decades in front of 
 Europe, in mechanism, for example, and pro 
 ductive organization, but in very many other 
 and more fundamental ones she is decades 
 behind. Go but a little way back, and you 
 will find the European s perspectives close 
 up; they close at 71, at 48, down a vista of 
 Eeform Bills, at Waterloo and the Treaty of 
 Paris, at the Irish Union, at the coming 
 of Victor Emmanuel ; Great Britain, for 
 example, in the last hundred years has recon 
 structed politically and socially, created half 
 her present peerage, evolved the Empire of 
 India, developed Australia, New Zealand, 
 South Africa, fought fifty considerable wars. 
 Mount Vernon, on the other hand, goes back 
 with unbroken continuity, a broad band of 
 mellow tradition, to the War of Independence. 
 Well, I got all that in conversation at 
 Washington, and so I didn t need to go to 
 Mount Vernon after all. I got all that about 
 
336 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 1777, and I failed altogether to get anything 
 of any value whatever about 1977, which is 
 the year of greater interest to me. About the 
 direction and destinies of that great American 
 process that echoes so remotely through Wash 
 ington s cool gracefulness of architecture and 
 her umbrageous parks this cultivated society 
 seemed to me to be terribly incurious and 
 indifferent. It was alive to political person 
 alities no doubt ; its sons and husbands were 
 senators, judges, ambassadors, and the like ; 
 it was concerned with their speeches and 
 prospects; but as to the trend of the whole 
 thing, Washington does not picture it, does 
 not want to picture it. I found myself pre 
 sently excusing myself for Mount Vernon on 
 the ground that I was not a retrospective 
 American, but a go-ahead Englishman, and 
 so apologizing for my want of reverence for 
 venerable things. "We are young people," 
 I maintained. "We are a new generation." 
 
 I went to see the senate debating the 
 Railway Eates Bill, and from the senatorial 
 gallery I had pointed out to me Tillman and 
 Platt, Foraker and Lodge, and all the varied 
 personalities of the assembly. The chamber 
 is a circular one with enormously capacious 
 galleries. The members speak from their 
 
AT WASHINGTON 337 
 
 desks, other members write letters, read (and 
 rustle) newspapers, sit among accumulations 
 of torn paper, or stand round the apartment 
 in audibly conversational groups. A number 
 of messenger boys they wear no uniform 
 share the floor of the house with the repre 
 sentatives, and are called by clapping the 
 hands. They go to and fro, or sit at the 
 feet of the vice-president. Behind and above 
 the vice-president the newspaper men sit 
 in a state of partial attention, occasionally 
 making notes for the vivid descriptions that 
 have long since superseded verbatim reports 
 in America. The public galleries contain 
 hundreds of intermittently talkative spectators. 
 For the most part these did not seem to me 
 to represent, as the little strangers gallery 
 in the House of Commons represents, interests 
 affected. They were rather spectators seeing 
 Washington, taking the senate en route for the 
 obelisk top and Mount Vernon. They made 
 little attempt to hear the speeches. 
 
 In a large distinguished emptiness among 
 these galleries is the space devoted to diplo 
 matic representatives, and there I saw, sitting 
 in a meritorious solitude, the British charge 
 d affaires and his wife following the debate 
 below. I found it altogether too submerged 
 
338 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 for me to follow. The countless spectators, 
 the senators, the boy messengers, the comings 
 and goings kept up a perpetual confusing 
 babblement. One saw men walking carelessly 
 between the speaker and the vice-president, 
 and at one time two gentlemen with their 
 backs to the member in possession of the 
 house engaged the vice-president in an earnest 
 conversation. The messengers circulated at a 
 brisk trot, or sat on the edge of the dais 
 exchanging subdued badinage. I have never 
 seen a more distracted legislature. 
 
 The whole effect of Washington is a want 
 of concentration, of something unprehensile 
 , and apart. It is on, not in, the American 
 process. The place seems to me to reflect, 
 even in its sounds and physical forms, that 
 dispersal of power, that evasion of a simple 
 conclusiveness, which is the peculiar effect 
 of that ancient compromise, the American 
 Constitution. The framers of that treaty were 
 haunted by two terrible bogies, a military 
 dictatorship and what they called "mob 
 rule ; " they were obsessed by the need of 
 safeguards against these dangers, they were 
 controlled by the mutual distrust of con 
 stituent states far more alien to one another 
 than they are now, and they failed to foresee 
 
AT WASHINGTON 339 
 
 both the enormous assimilation of interests 
 and character presently to be wrought by 
 the railways and telegraphs, and the huge 
 possibilities of corruption, elaborate electorial 
 arrangements offer to clever, unscrupulous 
 men. And here in Washington is the result 
 a legislature that fails to legislate, a govern 
 ment that cannot govern, a pseudo-responsible 
 administration that offers enormous scope for 
 corruption, and that is perhaps invincibly 
 intrenched behind the two-party system from 
 any insurgence of the popular will. The plain 
 fact of the case is that Congress, as it is 
 constituted at present, is the feeblest, least 
 accessible, and most inefficient central govern 
 ment of any civilized nation in the world 
 west of Eussia. Congress is entirely in 
 adequate to the tasks of the present time. 
 
 I came away from Washington with my 
 preconception enormously reinforced that the 
 supreme need of America, the preliminary 
 thing to any social or economic reconstruc 
 tion, is political reform. It seems to me to 
 lie upon the surface that America has to 
 be democratized. It is necessary to make 
 the Senate and the House of Representatives 
 more interdependent, and to abolish the possi 
 bilities of deadlocks between them, to make 
 
340 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 election to the Senate direct from the people, 
 and to qualify and weaken the power of the 
 two-party system by the introduction of 
 " second ballots " and the referendum. . . . 
 
 But how such drastic changes are to be 
 achieved constitutionally in America I cannot 
 imagine. Only a great educated, trained, and 
 sustained agitation can bring about so funda 
 mental a political revolution, and at present 
 I can find nowhere even the beginnings of a 
 realization of this need. 
 
 2 
 
 In the White House, set midway between 
 the Washington of the sightseers and the 
 Washington of brilliant conversation, I met 
 President Koosevelt. I was mightily pleased 
 by the White House ; it is dignified and 
 simple once again am I tempted to use the 
 phrase " aristocratic in the best sense " of 
 things American and an entire absence of 
 uniforms or liveries creates an atmosphere 
 of republican equality that is reinforced by 
 "Mr. President s" friendly grasp of one s 
 
AT WASHINGTON 341 
 
 undistinguished hand. And after lunch I 
 walked about the grounds with him, and so 
 achieved my ambition to get him " placed," 
 as it were, in my vision of America. 
 
 In the rare chances I have had of meeting 
 statesmen, there has always been one common 
 effect, an effect of their being smaller, less 
 audible, and less saliently featured than one 
 had expected. A common man builds up his 
 picture of the men prominent in the great 
 game of life very largely out of caricature, out 
 of headlines, out of posed and " characteristic " 
 portraits. One associates them with actresses 
 and actors, literary poseurs and suchlike public 
 performers, anticipates the same vivid self- 
 consciousness as these display in common 
 intercourse, keys one s self up for the paint 
 on their faces, and for voices and manners 
 altogether too accentuated for the grey-toned 
 lives of common men. I ve met politicians 
 who remained at that. But so soon as Mr. 
 Roosevelt entered the room, " Teddy," the 
 Teddy of the slouch hat, the glasses, the 
 teeth, and the sword, that strenuous vehement 
 Teddy (who had, let me admit, survived a 
 fall course of reading in the President s earlier 
 writings) vanished, and gave place to an 
 entirely negotiable individuality. To-day, at 
 
342 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 any rate, the " Teddy " legend is untrue. 
 Perhaps it wasn t always quite untrue. There 
 was a time during the world predominance of 
 Mr. Kipling, when I think the caricature 
 must have come close to certain of Mr. 
 Roosevelt s acceptances and attitudes. But 
 that was ten years and more ago, and Mr. 
 Roosevelt to this day goes on thinking and 
 changing and growing. . . . 
 
 For me, anyhow, that strenuousness has 
 vanished beyond recalling, and there has 
 emerged a figure in grey of a quite reasonable 
 size, with a face far more thoughtful and 
 perplexed than strenuous, with a clenched 
 hand that does indeed gesticulate though it 
 is by no means a gigantic fist and with quick 
 movements, a voice strained indeed, a little 
 forced for oratory, but not raised or aggressive 
 in any fashion, and" friendly screwed up eyes 
 behind the glasses. 
 
 It isn t my purpose at all to report a 
 conversation that went from point to point. I 
 wasn t interviewing the President, and I made 
 no note at the time of the things said. My 
 impression was of a mind for the situation 
 quite extraordinarily open. That is the value 
 of President Roosevelt for me, and why I 
 can t for the life of my book leave him out. 
 
AT WASHINGTON 343 
 
 He is the seeking mind of America displayed. 
 The ordinary politician goes through his 
 career like a charging bull, with his eyes 
 shut to any changes in the premises. He 
 locks up his mind like a powder magazine. 
 But any spark may fire the mind of President 
 Eoosevelt. His range of reading is amazing ; 
 he seems to be echoing with all the thought 
 of the time, he has receptivity to the pitch 
 of genius. And he does not merely receive, 
 he digestMmc[ reconstructs ; he thinks. It is 
 his politicial misfortune that at times he 
 thinks aloud. His mind is active with pro 
 jects of solution for the teeming problems 
 around him. Traditions have no hold upon 
 him nor, his enemies say, have any but 
 quite formal pledges. It is hard to tie him. 
 In all these things he is, to a singular com 
 pleteness, the mind and will of contemporary 
 America. And by an unparalleled conspiracy 
 of political accidents, as all the world knows, 
 he has got to the White House. He is not 
 a part of the regular American political 
 system at all he has, it happens, stuck 
 through. 
 
 Now, my picture of America is, as I have 
 tried to make clear, one of a gigantic process 
 of growth, of economic coming and going, 
 
344 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 spaced out over vast distances and involving 
 millions of hastening men ; I see America 
 as towns and urgency and greatnesses beyond, 
 I suppose, any precedent that has ever been 
 in the world. And like a little island of 
 order amidst that ocean of enormous oppor 
 tunity and business turmoil and striving 
 individualities, is this district of Columbia, 
 with Washington and its Capitol and obelisk. 
 It is a mere pin-point on the unlimited, on 
 which, in peace times, the national govern 
 ment lies marooned, twisted up into knots, 
 bound with safeguards, and altogether im- 
 potently stranded. And peering closely and 
 looking from the Capitol down the vista of 
 Pennsylvania Avenue, I see the White House, 
 minute and clear, with a fountain playing 
 before it, and behind it a railed garden set 
 with fine trees. The trees are not so thick, 
 nor the railings so high, but that the people 
 on the big " seeing Washington" cars cannot 
 crane to look into it and watch whoever walk 
 about it. And in this garden goes a living 
 speck, as it were, in grey, talking, swinging a 
 white clenched hand, and trying vigorously 
 and resolutely to get a hold upon the signifi 
 cance of the whole vast process in which he 
 and his island of government are set. 
 
AT WASHINGTON 345 
 
 Always before him there have been 
 political resultants, irrelevancies and futilities 
 of the White House; and after him, it would 
 seem, they may come again. I do not know 
 anything of the quality of Mr. Bryan, who 
 may perhaps succeed him. He, too, is some 
 thing of an exception, it seems, and keeps 
 a still developing and inquiring mind. Be 
 yond is a vista of figures of questionable 
 value, so far as I am concerned. They have 
 this in common that they don t stand for 
 thought. For the present, at any rate, 
 a personality, extraordinarily representative, 
 occupies the White House. And what he 
 chooses to say publicly (and some things he 
 says privately) are, by an exceptional law of 
 acoustics, heard in San Francisco, in Chicago, 
 in New Orleans, in New York and Boston, 
 in Kansas and Maine, throughout the whole 
 breadth of the United States of America. He 
 assimilates contemporary thought, delocalizes 
 and reverberates it. He is America for the 
 first time vocal to itself. 
 
346 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 3 
 
 What is America saying to itself? 
 
 I ve read most of the President s recent 
 speeches, and they fall in oddly with that 
 quality in his face that so many photographs 
 even convey a complex mingling of will and 
 a critical perplexity. Taken altogether, they 
 amount to a mass of not always consistent 
 suggestions that conflict and overlap. Things 
 crowd upon him, rebate scandals, insurance 
 scandals, the meat scandals, this insecurity 
 and that. The conditions of his position 
 press upon him. It is no wonder he gives 
 out no single, simple note. . . . 
 
 The plain fact is that in the face of the 
 teeming situations of to-day America does not 
 know what to do. Nobody, except those 
 happily gifted individuals who can see but 
 one aspect of an intricate infinitude, imagines 
 any simple solution. For the rest the time 
 is one of ample, vigorous, and at times im 
 patient inquiry, and of intense disillusionment 
 with old assumptions and methods. And 
 never did a president before so reflect the 
 
A" 
 
 AT WASHINGTON 347 
 
 quality of his time. The trend is altogether 
 away from the anarchistic individualism of 
 the nineteenth century, that much is sure, 
 and towards some constructive scheme 
 which, if not exactly socialism, as socialism 
 is defined, will be, at any rate, closely 
 analogous to socialism. This is the immense 
 change of thought and attitude in which 
 President Eoosevelt participates, and to which 
 he gives a unique expression. Day by day\ 
 
 I he changes with the big world about him / 
 
 \ontradicts himself. . . . 
 
 I came away with the clear impression 
 that neither President Eoosevelt nor America 
 will ever, as some people prophesy, " declare 
 for socialism ;" but my impression is equally 
 clear that he, and all the world of men he 
 stands for, have done forever with the thread 
 bare formulae that have served America such 
 an unconscionable time. We talked of the 
 press and books and of the question of colour, 
 and then for a while about the rdle of the 
 universities in the life of the coming time. 
 
 Now, it is a curious thing that as I talked 
 with President Eoosevelt in the garden of 
 the W T hite House there came back to me 
 quite forcibly that undertone of doubt that 
 has haunted me throughout this journey. 
 
348 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 After all, does this magnificent appearance of 
 beginnings, which is America , convey any clear 
 and certain promise of permanence and ful 
 filment whatever? Much makes for construc 
 tion, a great wave of reform is going on, but 
 will it drive on to anything more than a 
 breaking impact upon even more gigantic un 
 certainties and dangers ? Is America a giant 
 childhood or a gigantic futility, a mere latest 
 phase of that long succession of experiments 
 which has been and may be for interminable 
 years may be, indeed, altogether until the 
 end man s social history? I can t now re 
 call how our discursive talk settled towards 
 that, but it is clear to me that I struck upon 
 a familiar vein of thought in the President s 
 mind. He hadn t, he said, an effectual dis 
 proof of any pessimistic interpretation of the 
 future. If one chose to say America must 
 presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that 
 she and all mankind must culminate and pass, 
 he could not conclusively deny that possibility. 
 Only he chose to live as if this were not so. 
 That remained in his mind. Presently he 
 reverted to it. He made a sort of apology 
 for his life against the doubts and scepticisms 
 that, I fear, must be in the background of 
 the thoughts of every modern man who is 
 
AT WASHINGTON 349 
 
 intellectually alive. He mentioned a little 
 book of mine, an early book full of the 
 deliberate pessimism of youth, in which I 
 drew a picture of a future of decadence, of 
 a time when constructive effort had fought 
 its fight and failed, when the inevitable 
 segregations of an individualistic system had 
 worked themselves out and all the hope and 
 vigour of humanity had gone for ever. The 
 descendants of the workers had become 
 etiolated, sinister, and subterranean monsters, 
 the property owners had degenerated into a 
 hectic and feebly self-indulgent race, living 
 fitfully amidst the ruins of the present time. 
 He became gesticulatory, and his straining 
 voice a note higher in denying this as a 
 credible interpretation of destiny. With one 
 of those sudden movements of his he knelt 
 forward in a garden-chair we were standing, 
 before our parting, beneath the colonnade 
 and addressed me very earnestly over the 
 back, clutching it and then thrusting out 
 his familiar gesture, a hand first partly open 
 and then closed. 
 
 " Suppose, after all," he said slowly, "that 
 should prove to be right, and it all ends in 
 your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn t 
 matter now. The effort s real. It s worth 
 
350 AT WASHINGTON 
 
 going on with. It s worth it. It s worth it 
 even then/ . . . 
 
 I can see him now and hear his unmusical 
 voice saying, " The effort the effort s worth 
 it," and see the gesture of his clenched hand 
 and the how can I describe it? the friendly 
 peering snarl of his face, like a man with the 
 sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind at 
 that, as a very symbol of the creative will 
 in man, in its limitations, its doubtful adequacy, 
 its valiant persistence amidst perplexities and 
 confusions. He kneels out, assertive against 
 his setting and his setting is the White 
 House with a background of all America. 
 
 I could almost write, with a background 
 of all the world; for I know of no other a 
 tithe so representative of the creative purpose, 
 the goodwill in men as he. In his undis 
 ciplined hastiness, his limitations, his preju 
 dices, his unfairness, his frequent errors, 
 just as much as in his force, his sustained 
 courage, his integrity, his open intelligence, 
 he stands for his people and his kind. 
 
THE ENVOY 
 
THE ENVOY 
 
 AND at last I am back in my study by 
 the sea. It is high June. When I said 
 good-bye to things it was March, a March 
 warm and eager to begin with, and then 
 dashed with sleet and wind; but the daffodils 
 were out, and the primulas and primroses 
 shone brown and yellow in the unseasonable 
 snow. The spring display that was just 
 beginning is over. The iris rules. Outside 
 the window is a long level line of black 
 fleur-de-lys rising from a serried rank of leaf- 
 blades. Their silhouettes stand out against 
 the brightness of the twilight sea. They 
 mark, so opened, two months of absence. 
 And in the interval I have seen a world. 
 
 I have tried to render it as I saw it. I 
 have tried to present the first exhilaration pro 
 duced by the sheer growth of it, the morning- 
 time hopefulness of spacious and magnificent 
 opportunity, the optimism of successful, swift, 
 progressive effort in material things. And 
 
 2 A 
 
354 THE ENVOY 
 
 from that I have passed to rny sense of the 
 chaotic condition of the American will, and 
 that first confidence has darkened more and 
 more towards doubt again. I came to America 
 questioning the certitudes of progress. For a 
 time I forgot my questionings ; I sincerely 
 believed, " These people can do anything, " 
 and, now I have it all in perspective, I 
 have to confess that doubt has taken me 
 again. " These people," I say, " might do 
 anything. They are the finest people upon 
 earth the most hopeful. But they are vain 
 and hasty; they are thoughtless, harsh, and 
 undisciplined. In the end, it may be, they 
 will accomplish nothing." I see, I have noted 
 in its place, the great forces of construction, 
 the buoyant, creative spirit of America. But 
 I have marked, too, the intricacy of snares 
 and obstacles in its path. The problem of 
 America, save in its scale and freedom, is 
 no different from the problem of Great Britain, 
 of Europe, of all humanity ; it is one chiefly 
 moral and intellectual ; it is to resolve a con 
 fusion of purposes, traditions, habits, into a 
 common ordered intention. Everywhere one 
 finds what seem to me the beginnings of that 
 and, for this epoch it is all too possible, 
 they may get no further than beginnings. 
 
THE ENVOY 355 
 
 Yet another Decline and Fall may remain to 
 be written, another and another, and it may 
 be another, before the World State comes and 
 Peace. 
 
 Yet against this prospect of a dispersal of 
 will, of a secular decline in honour, education, 
 public spirit, and confidence, of a secular in 
 tensification of corruption, lawlessness, and 
 disorder, I do, with a confidence that waxes 
 and wanes, balance the creative spirit in 
 America, and that kindred spirit that for me 
 finds its best symbol in the President s 
 kneeling, gesticulating figure, and his urgent 
 " The effort s worth it! " Who can gauge the 
 far-reaching influence of even the science 
 we have, in ordering and quickening the 
 imagination of man, in enhancing and assur 
 ing their powers ? Common men feel secure 
 to-day in enterprises it needed men of genius 
 to conceive in former times. And there is a 
 literature for all our faults we do write more 
 widely, deeply, disinterestedly, more freely 
 and frankly than any set of writers ever did 
 before reaching incalculable masses of readers, 
 and embodying an amount of common con 
 sciousness and purpose beyond all precedent. 
 Consider only how nowadays the problems 
 that were once the inaccessible thoughts of 
 
356 THE ENVOY 
 
 statesmen may be envisaged by common men ! 
 Here am I really able, in a few weeks of 
 observant work, to get a picture of America. 
 I publish it. If it bears a likeness, it will live 
 and be of use; if not, it will die, and be no 
 irreparable loss. Some fragment, some sug 
 gestion may survive. My friend Mr. F. 
 Madox Hueffer was here a day or so ago 
 to say good-bye; he starts for America as I 
 write here, to get his vision. As I have been 
 writing these papers I have also been read 
 ing, instalment by instalment, the subtle, fine 
 renderings of America revisited by Mr. Henry 
 James. We work in shoals, great and small 
 together, one trial thought following another. 
 We are getting the world presented. It is not 
 simply America that we swarm over and build 
 up into a conceivable process, into something 
 understandable and negotiable by the mind. 
 I find on my desk here waiting for me a 
 most illuminating "Vision of India," in which 
 Mr. Sidney Low, with a marvellous aptitude, 
 has interpreted east to west. Beside my poor 
 superficialities in The Tribune appears Sir 
 William Butler, with a livid frankness ex 
 pounding the most intimate aspects of the 
 South African situation. A friend who called 
 to-day spoke of Nevinson s raid upon the slave 
 
THE ENVOY 357 
 
 trade of Portuguese East Africa, and of two 
 irrepressible writers upon the Congo crimes. 
 I have already mentioned the economic and 
 social literature, the so-called literature of 
 exposure in America. This altogether repre 
 sents collectively a tremendous illumination. 
 No social development was ever so lit and 
 seen before. Collectively, this literature of 
 facts and theories and impressions is of im 
 mense importance. Things are done in the 
 light, more and more are they done in the 
 light. The world perceives and thinks. . . . 
 
 After all is said and done, I do find the 
 balance of my mind tilts steadily to a belief 
 in a continuing and accelerated progress now 
 in human affairs. And in spite of my 
 patriotic inclinations, in spite, too, of the 
 present high intelligence and efficiency of 
 Germany, it seems to me that in America, 
 by sheer virtue of its size, its free traditions, 
 and the habit of initiative in its people, the 
 leadership of progress must ultimately rest. 
 Things like the Chicago scandals, the insur 
 ance scandals, and all the manifest crudities 
 of the American spectacle, don t seem to 
 me to be more than relatively trivial after 
 all. There are the universities, the turbines 
 of Niagara, the New York architecture, and 
 
358 THE ENVOY 
 
 the quality of the mediocre people to set 
 against these. . . . 
 
 Within a week after I saw the President 
 I was on the Umbria and steaming slowly 
 through the long spectacle of that harbour 
 which was my first impression of America, 
 which still, to my imagination, stands so 
 largely for America. The crowded ferry-boats 
 hooted past; athwart the shining water, tugs 
 clamoured to and fro. The skyscrapers raised 
 their slender masses heavenward America s 
 gay bunting lit the scene. As we dropped 
 down I had a last glimpse of the Brooklyn 
 Bridge. There to the right was Ellis Island, 
 where the immigrants, minute by minute, drip 
 and drip into America; and beyond, that 
 tall spike-headed Liberty with her reluctant 
 torch, which I have sought to make the centre 
 of all this writing. And suddenly as I looked 
 back at the skyscrapers of lower New York 
 a queer fancy sprang into my head. They 
 reminded me quite irresistibly of piled-up 
 packing cases outside a warehouse. I was 
 amazed I had not seen the resemblance 
 before. I could have believed for a moment 
 that that was what they were, could have 
 accepted the omen in perfect good faith, that 
 presently out of these would come the real 
 
THE ENVOY 359 
 
 right thing, palaces and noble places, free, 
 high circumstances, and space and leisure, 
 light and fine living for the sons of men. . . . 
 Ocean, cities, multitudes, long journeys, 
 mountains, lakes as large as seas, and the 
 riddle of a nation s destiny; I ve done my 
 impertinent best now with this monstrous 
 insoluble problem. The air is very warm and 
 pleasant in my garden to-night, the sunset 
 has left a rim of greenish gold about the 
 northward sky, shading up a blue that is 
 as yet scarce pierced by any star. I write 
 down these last words here, and then I shall 
 step through the window and sit out there 
 in the kindly twilight, now quiet, now gossip 
 ing idly of what so-and-so has said and of 
 what so-and-so has done while I have been 
 away, of personal motives and of little inci 
 dents and entertaining intimate things. . . . 
 
 THE END 
 
PRINTED BY 
 
 WILLIAM CLOWES AND SOXS, LIMITED, 
 LONDON AND BECCLES. 
 
MAIN LIBRARY 
 
 B*rtlk loans M*^ j.*^ davs ^ 
 Renewals and rech^m^ be 
 
 r ED 
 

 C003 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 * i;