973 
 
 C883a E SHILLING NET 
 
 THE 
 
 ABOUNDING 
 
 AMERICAN 
 
 BY 
 
 T. W. H. CROSLAND 
 
 Author of 
 
 Lovely Woman ” and “ The Unspeakable Scot ” 
 
 London : 
 
 A. F. THOMPSON & CO. 
 92 Fleet Street, £.C. 
 1907 
 
Trorn the Cihrary of O.T,. and 
 Mary MapCe Jones 
 
 Ji gift from <EstHer (Doughtie Trench, 
 
 Jane (Doughtie TayCor (Richard T. (Doughtie III 
 
 o 
 
 University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign J 
 
 « J 
 
Cuio^ I5^l^\v 
 
 
 
THE 
 
 ABOUNDING 
 
 AMERICAN 
 
 BY 
 
 T. W. H. CROSLAND 
 
 Author of 
 
 ** Lovely Woman ’* and “ The Unspeakable Scot *’ 
 
 London : 
 
 A. F. THOMPSON & CO. 
 
 92 Fleet Street, E.C. 
 1907 
 
'• vji’- 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Proposition 7 
 
 Millionaires • 19 
 
 Humourists 29 
 
 The American Woman .... 37 
 
 Literature 45 
 
 The President 55 
 
 Advertisement 61 
 
 The Pea-nut Mind 71 
 
 The Drama 81 
 
 Sport 91 
 
 Hogs loi 
 
 Verdict 109 
 
 
COPYRIGHT 1907 
 BY 
 
 A. F. THOMPSON 
 IN 
 
 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 AND IN 
 
 GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 The Proposition 
 ND what, prithee, hath overtaken 
 
 drabbed and ruffled away his inheritance, 
 and to save his neck took shipping for 
 the tobacco plantations where, they say, 
 he married a daughter of Lo, the poor 
 Indian, and none hath since heard of him.” 
 
 This is the kind of talk that one could 
 hear in the clubs of London a matter 
 of, say, two hundred and fifty years 
 ago. In plain terms, Guy, poor devil, 
 being a wastrel, — and a broken wastrel 
 at that — had betaken himself to America, 
 there probably to found one of the “ fine 
 old Virginia families ” of which American 
 writers, and particularly American fic- 
 tional writers, are so prone to babble. 
 
 America, of course, was really started 
 not by the Indians or Columbus, but by 
 the Pilgrim Fathers, assisted and backed 
 up by several cargoes of blue-brained 
 and cleverblooded spirits from the 
 British Isles, whose minds were full of 
 theology and whose souls were full of 
 tea. I shall be told that it is unkind of 
 me to make such remarks. 
 
 But, quite apart from all questions of 
 
 Guy?” 
 
 Guy — why Guy diced and 
 
S THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 kindness, it is desirable that you know 
 something of the antecedents of a man 
 before you set about a proper estimate 
 of him. If you wish to understand him 
 thoroughly, you must never let sleeping 
 dogs lie nor allow bygones to be bygones. 
 It is notorious that the average frantic 
 Fourth of July American is an adept at 
 showing the best side of himself and 
 his institutions to an admiring world. 
 If you are to believe him the first Ameri- 
 can was Christopher Columbus, whose 
 name in this connection I had hoped not 
 to mention. But Don Columbus made 
 the mistake of ^^discovering America.” 
 For the accomplishment of this feat the 
 Americans bestow upon his memory 
 unqualified paeans. Really, of course, 
 the fact that Columbus steered his leaky 
 lugger desperately for Coney Island and 
 Long Branch, when he had the rest of 
 the world — including China and Gozo — 
 before him where to choose, proves that 
 so far from being a hero and a man of 
 genius, he was a dull and evilly disposed 
 person. 
 
 According to the bumptious, khaki- 
 tinted gentleman from Indiana too, 
 the Pilgrim Fathers already referred to 
 were high-minded, blameless, and en- 
 tirely disinterested saints, incapable of 
 hurting a fly or causing butter to melt 
 north of the colour line. They “ inau- 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 9 
 
 gurated America for conscience sake, 
 sir, and you can bet your pile that I am 
 proud to have them for ancestors.” In 
 which connection I shall pass no rude 
 observation, contenting myself rather 
 with the hint that the reader who wishes 
 to acquaint himself with the true in- 
 wardness of the Pilgrim Fathers and 
 their doings in America should look up 
 some of the serious literature on the 
 subject. The Americans, be it noted, 
 read that literature very privately, and 
 neither in the basket nor in the store. 
 
 I might proceed indefinitely on these 
 lines of disillusion for Master Phineas B. 
 Flubdub ; but as it is not my particular 
 business to amuse him inordinately, I 
 shall desist. 
 
 In Europe, or at any rate in England, 
 there is a disposition on the part of the 
 sandblind to look upon the United States 
 and the people who dwell in them with 
 an eye of amused wonderment, as well 
 as admiration. For reasons that are 
 not difficult to appreciate America 
 has never been taken quite seriously 
 by the superior European. In spite of 
 all her boasting and shouting, in spite 
 of her e-normous population and her 
 equally e-normous wealth, in spite of 
 the fact that there is a U.S. Army and 
 a U.S. Navy that can lick creation, 
 and that the U.S. also boasts of a reeking, 
 
10 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 shrieking press, together with the most 
 gaudy and scintillating Courts of Jus- 
 tice that ever delighted civilisation, no 
 person in Europe believes in the back of 
 his mind that the land of hustle and 
 bluff is a nation of any weight where 
 nations count, or that she is capable of 
 exercising the smallest direct or indirect 
 influence upon the manners, customs, 
 tendencies, or destiny of haughty feudal 
 Europe. 
 
 The Americans are hot stuff. They 
 go in for cut-throat finance and lime- 
 light lynchings, their swindles are beauti- 
 ful, their fortunes colossal, and their 
 corruption is picturesque. They have 
 a wonderful country. It is theirs and 
 not ours, and they are welcome to do 
 as they like in it. They can never 
 hurt us. Knowing this, the Englishman 
 sleeps snugly of nights, and when he 
 meets a " Yank ” in London or on the 
 Riviera or in Paris, he smiles to himself, 
 professes to be tickled, tolerates him 
 if there be occasion for it, grapples him 
 to his bosom with hooks of steel if there 
 is money in it, and parts from him pretty 
 much in the mood of a man who has been 
 inspecting a new motor car. 
 
 And, truth to tell, in the guileless, 
 sight-seeing, rush-about American whom 
 the Englishman encounters on his own 
 midden, there does not appear to be any- 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 11 
 
 thing which is either very outrageous or 
 very formidable. All you see of him is 
 a somewhat undersized, loosely built 
 human biped, with a fat jowl, straight 
 hair, a nobby suit, a little round white 
 or brown felt hat — and a guide-book. 
 Of course, there is also the smart swagger 
 American, accompanied by a feminine 
 entourage of peaches and dreams. But 
 usually your man from Yankeeland has 
 with him a plain, up-and-down, sad sort 
 of woman who might have stepped out 
 of Noah’s ark — and that is the end of it. 
 When he engages you in conversation, 
 which he commonly insists upon doing, 
 he blows foolishly about his own Country, 
 admits that yours '' hez the bulge in 
 antiques,” says that he is glad that he 
 came over, and sticking out his finger 
 in the direction of the woman, remarks : 
 This is Mrs. Sarah B. Gazabo, my 
 wife.” The real insides ” of the man 
 never strike you, partly because you are 
 busy loathing his accent and admiring his 
 ginger, and partly because he has left his 
 vital concerns, his private essence and 
 sheer Americanisms '' way back to hum.” 
 All Americans imported for us by Thos. 
 Cook & Son and his imitators are of this 
 order. For them England is a place in 
 which to tread softly and speak low, or 
 at any rate as low as possible. They 
 visit us in the same spirit that a prize- 
 
12 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 fighter might visit a cemetery, and 
 though the casual observer would scarcely 
 suspect it, their intention is to be sub- 
 dued, sober, decorous, and civil. 
 
 Eight times out of nine the American 
 IS a fine specimen of a manly man, but 
 it is the ninth that is such a wonder. 
 We, the obtuse and effete people of 
 Great Britain, now and again wake 
 up suddenly to the circumstance that 
 we have been the victims of an American 
 invasion. Such a ghastly conviction 
 may at any moment overtake the best 
 of us, for no class of society knows 
 whose turn is likely to be next. There 
 was an American invasion of the turf 
 a year or two back, and English sport 
 is sore and poor about it to this day. 
 There have been sundry social invasions 
 which those most directly concerned 
 find it difficult to forget, and at the 
 present moment we are in the thick 
 of a theatrical invasion which is not 
 doing us an appreciable amount of 
 good. The fact of these invasions and 
 of their always unpleasant consequences 
 so far as the invaded are involved is, in 
 my judgment, a fact of the ost serious 
 import to Englishmen. 
 
 I shall for a moment drop the American 
 as he seems to be, and regard him as he 
 actually is. What can one record of him 
 that is to his credit ? Imprimus : He 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 13 
 
 has devoted three hundred years more 
 or less to the frantic and bloodthirsty 
 pursuit of the Almighty Dollar. Item : 
 During those three hundred years more 
 or less he has done absolutely nothing 
 but pursue dollars. Item : He is still 
 pursuing them. Item : But he makes 
 the best husband in the world, and 
 places woman in the high place to which 
 she is so amply entitled. I will put so 
 much to the credit side, though I make 
 no doubt that there are people in the 
 world who will find themselves unable to 
 commend me for doing it. 
 
 Now for the obverse or discredit side. 
 I shall ask you to note : 
 
 (1) That the Americans are the only 
 nation who are ruled by a bureaucracy 
 of millionaires and at the same time 
 croon themselves into a state of vacuous 
 coma to the touching strains of “ vox 
 populi, vox dei ! ” 
 
 (2) That they are the originators of the 
 yelling yellow press, the pioneers of the 
 New Humour and the apostles of the 
 New Pathos. 
 
 ^v. . 
 
 (3) That they are the only civilised 
 people who make a point of ex- 
 porting the finest specimens of their 
 womankind to foreign countries, in- 
 
14 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 eluded in a consignment of cold dollars 
 calculated pro rata with the antiquity, 
 decay and general worthlessness of the 
 name which the former take in exchange. 
 
 (4) That having inherited, borrowed 
 or stolen a beautiful language, they 
 wilfully and of set purpose degrade, 
 distort and misspell it apparently for 
 the sole purpose of saving money in 
 type-setting. 
 
 (5) That out of twenty-six Presidents 
 of the United States, three have met 
 death at the hands of the assassin.* 
 
 (6) That having by sheer accident or 
 because of the care and forethought, 
 which Providence has for fools, become 
 possessed of a President who is a man 
 among men and a ninety horse-power 
 statesman with direct drive on all 
 speeds, they allow him to be handicapped 
 by a spectacular gang of undesirable 
 citizens. 
 
 (7) That they consider no function, 
 public or private, sacred or profane, to be 
 complete without a newspaper corre- 
 spondent, a lime-light photographer, and 
 a sky-sign contractor. 
 
 * This is a greater percentage than has obtained in the case 
 of the Czars of Russia, and in America there are no Nihilists 
 or at any rate none who are actively opposed to the American 
 Presidency. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 15 
 
 (8) That willingly and of their own 
 unfettered volition they have thrown 
 back to the customs of their aboriginal 
 ancestors in the matter of diet, which 
 diet is rapidly reducing them morally, 
 physically and intellectually to the level 
 of primordial protoplasms. 
 
 (9) That they are the only nation who 
 in civilised times rate noise above all 
 else, save dollars, and who in their 
 theatres acclaim as the greatest actor or 
 play the one that in the shortest time 
 makes the greatest uproar for the 
 smallest reason. 
 
 (10) That they have resolved their 
 sports and pastimes into business pro- 
 positions in which the avowed aim and 
 object of every competitor is the utter 
 destruction of his opponent by any 
 means that can be found, devised or 
 conceived. 
 
 (11) That they are the only nation 
 who in civilised times have been happy 
 and content to sink their individuality 
 in an all pervading and evil smelling 
 atmosphere of hog and by-products. 
 
 The foregoing are merely a few of the 
 main counts in the indictment. Behind 
 every one of them lies a history of 
 gaiety, graft, dyspepsia, bossism, faWy, 
 
16 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 flamboyancy, hysteria, vociferation 
 brain storms and dementia Americana 
 of the most disconcerting and enter- 
 taining kind. The details are on 
 record, and I do not propose to 
 harrow the reader’s feelings with ex- 
 amples of them. I shall suggest simply 
 that it is questionable whether any 
 other known race of men, white or 
 black, has managed to pack into three 
 centuries such a volume of unthinkable 
 excitement and picturesque iniquity as 
 can be rightfully and without exaggera- 
 tion laid at the door of these abounding 
 Americans. 
 
 A certain Western city has been 
 described by a friendly visitor as “ hell 
 with the lid off.” For the greater part 
 of her existence as a nation that de- 
 scription might with justice have been 
 applied to all America, and I am byfno 
 means sure that it is not still applicable. 
 It would seem that under the inspiring 
 aegis of the much-vaunted American 
 constitution the whole of the vices of 
 civilised man have become grossly and 
 incredibly intensified. For unscrupu- 
 lousness, insincerity, cynicism, and the 
 pure worship of mammon the United 
 States stands without rival among the 
 nations to-day 
 
 I believe the man lied who said^there 
 is not an institution in the country — 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 17 
 
 political, social, economic or even re- 
 ligious — that is not based on a species 
 of ingrained rottenness and not infested 
 with the worm of corruption and the 
 scrawl of scandal. But there is no 
 national aspiration that does not have 
 at the back of it the root idea that the 
 sole duty of an American man is to get 
 rich and to get rich quick. There are 
 few standards of American life that are 
 not gold standards and few kinds of 
 American effort that are not directed 
 towards the rapid acquisition of other 
 people’s money. 
 
 It can be proved out of the history 
 books that, broadly speaking, j^our aver- 
 age American is a nondescript and 
 nefarious hybrid composed of three 
 parts promoter, three parts missionary, 
 three parts slave-driver, and one 
 part Indian. On this unsavoury soil 
 the worst passions of the soaring human 
 animal have grown and run hoggishly 
 to seed. Out of such blood nothing that 
 is honest or of good report could be 
 expected to rise. And when we in 
 England, as has been the tendency in 
 the past few years, condescend to the 
 adoption of American methods and 
 American notions, and applaud rather 
 than rebuke American smartness and 
 American impudence, there can be no 
 question whatever that we are on the 
 
 B 
 
18 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 toboggan. The gradual Americanisation 
 of this grand old country is not only 
 flattering to American vanity, but grati- 
 fying to American greed. As I shall 
 presently show, America has no more 
 love for England than would easily cover 
 a threepenny-bit, and her insatiable cry 
 is for markets, markets, markets — a 
 howl in which she is dulcetly supported 
 by her dear friend Germany. The 
 causes for alarm in so far as they affect 
 the larger concrete issues are as yet 
 comparatively slight. But it behoves 
 every Englishman to meditate on the 
 possibility that Macaulay’s New Zea- 
 lander may in the long run turn out to 
 be an American. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 19 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 Millionaires 
 
 The population of the United States, 
 according to the last census returns, is 
 about a hundred millions. Names in 
 American directories invariably begin 
 with Aarons and end with Zaccharia, 
 and millionaires are marked with a 
 star — thus *. In a town, or — as the 
 puffed up merchant in stars and stripes 
 would call it a city — of fifty thousand 
 inhabitants you will find that the local 
 directory stars quite twenty-five thou- 
 sand as millionaires. 
 
 It is pretty certain that fully ninety- 
 nine per cent, of these bloated plutocrats 
 do not know where the next dollar is 
 coming from. I have it on the authority 
 of an American that ' ‘ in introducing 
 a man in high American society the 
 introducer thinks it proper to say, 
 " This is Obadiah S. Bluggs of Squedunk, 
 Wis. — one of the richest men in 
 the city. He’s worth his million dollars 
 — ain’t you, Obadiah ? And he’s presi- 
 dent of a National Bank and owns a 
 block of buildings on the main street. 
 His wife has the largest diamonds in the 
 northern part of the State, and his 
 daughter, Miss Mamie Bluggs, gets her 
 
20 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 gowns in Paris, and uses lorgnettes.’ 
 Such words of recommendation, I am 
 told, move Mr. Bluggs to a profound 
 delight. Within five minutes half the 
 men present — this is true even of the 
 most exclusive circles — will cluster 
 
 around Mr. Bluggs to sell things to him ; 
 champagne, a horse, shares in a bogus 
 mining company, or to ask him if Miss 
 Bluggs is engaged, whether she is a 
 blonde or a brunette, and whether he, 
 Bluggs, thinks it is worth the questioner’s 
 while to run up to Squedunk, Wis., take 
 Miss Bluggs out buggy riding and size 
 her up one afternoon.” 
 
 It is highly probable that Mr. Million- 
 aire Bluggs possesses no ready cash 
 whatever, though he is prepared to 
 discuss five-million dollar propositions 
 in the loudest tones and in any quantity, 
 and it is probable, too, that Miss Bluggs 
 is neither a blonde nor a brunette that 
 matters, but an ordinary good strong 
 country girl whose principal diet is 
 pumplan pie and chewing gum, and 
 whose single go-to-party gown was 
 bought in Paris truly but fell to the 
 lot of Miss Mamie Bluggs at third hand 
 and at bed-rock bargain-day price, at 
 the corner store in Squedunk, Wis. 
 
 I have no desire to suggest that ^ the 
 millionaires of America as a body are in 
 straitened or difficult circumstances. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 21 
 
 or that an American here and there 
 has not succeeded in amassing vast 
 sums of money. But I assert flatly 
 that the great majority of them are not 
 within a mile of being anything like so 
 rich as they pretend to be, and that, 
 taking millionaire for millionaire, they 
 are an entirely Brummagem and specious 
 company. They maintain all the 
 appearances of riches, not on solid 
 bullion or property, but on a little paper. 
 They come like water and like wind 
 they go. Since millionairedom became 
 fashionable. New York State alone 
 must have produced, literally, thousands 
 of them. 
 
 Of the real authentic untraversable 
 American millionaire, one is inclined to 
 speak with bated breath and whispered 
 humbleness. There are three men of 
 means in America at the time of writing 
 who will probably be remembered for 
 the wealth they possess as long as this 
 weary world holds together. The 
 virginal chaste names of them, need one 
 say, are John D. Rockefeller, J. Pier- 
 pont Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie. 
 No doubt there are others, such as the 
 Vanderbilts and the Goulds, and Mr. 
 Astor and Mr. Harriman, and that great 
 patron of the drama, Mr. John Cory, 
 whose wealth transcends the wealth of 
 Ormuz^and of Ind coming in together. 
 
22 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 But it is on Messrs. Rockefeller, Morgan 
 and Carnegie that the brunt and burden 
 and glitter and glory of real unlimited 
 and omnipotent millionairedbm has 
 fallen. Mr. Rockefeller, indeed, is com- 
 monly credited with being the richest 
 and most powerful capitalist in the world. 
 So rich is he, and so enormous are his 
 accumulations of earned and unearned 
 increment, that he is rapidly becoming 
 the overlord of all the other millionaires, 
 who even now are, to a great extent, 
 playing with his money and must, to a 
 corresponding extent, do his bidding. 
 
 Of Mr. Rockefeller the world knows 
 next to nothing, excepting that he is 
 fabulously and pitifully rich, that he 
 has absolutely no hirsute covering for 
 his stupendous brains, that he suffers 
 from indigestion, and that he plays 
 golf and teaches a Sunday school 
 in a Nonconformist place of worship. 
 Every other morning he appears to 
 present to this or that American city a 
 few odd millions ' ‘ for educational pur- 
 poses,’' the which millions are promptly 
 spurned by the local authority as 
 “tainted money,” but ultimately 
 accepted ‘ ‘ in the interests of the in- 
 dustrial class.” 
 
 Probably Mr. Rockefeller is the best 
 abused man on this footstool. He has 
 been variously described as a thief, 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 23 
 
 a ghoul, a bloodsucker, a murderer, a 
 miser, a cannibal, a wrecker, a tiger, a 
 devastator, a jackal, and a wolf. All 
 the notice he takes is blandly to play 
 golf and unobtrusively to dodge the 
 lawyers and officers of the law who 
 desire to bring him to book for the 
 alleged malpractices of the Standard 
 Oil Trust. Yet you have to remember 
 that this placid, smiling, hairless old 
 gentleman of sixty-five, ‘ ' with a glad 
 hand for everyone,"' takes out of the 
 United States an income greater than 
 the incomes of all the Royal Families 
 of all Europe, and that, in addition to 
 his controlling interest in the Standard 
 Oil Trust, which last year paid dividends 
 to the tune of fifty million dollars, he 
 owns the entire Electric Light and Gas 
 Plants of New York City, controls the 
 American iron industry, has almost 
 complete control of the railways and 
 copper mines, and of the largest banks 
 in New York and throughout the country. 
 The which sad data go to show that he 
 is at once a wicked man and a foolish, 
 and that the American people are even 
 wickeder and more foolish. You can 
 never bring an American to see that there 
 is no conceivable advantage in possess- 
 ing too much money ; and in spite of 
 his ‘ ' shattered nerves, " ' ‘ enfeebled 
 mind," and "unenviable reputation," 
 
24 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 there is not a man in America who 
 would not jump at the chance of 
 standing in the shoes of J awn D. 
 
 As for Mr. Pierpont Morgan, he is 
 chiefly noted as the head and front of a 
 Steel Trust that is making money at 
 the rate of one hundred and forty million 
 dollars per year, and as a gentleman who 
 has a pretty taste in pictures and objects 
 of art. Mr. Morgan is a man with a 
 large and poetic imagination. It was he 
 who conceived the noble idea of Ameri- 
 canising the British Transatlantic carry- 
 ing trade by buying up the principal 
 fleets engaged in it. In this deal, as in 
 most other American-English deals, the 
 American came forth to shear and got 
 shorn. The woolly, bleating, unsus- 
 picious Britisher sold his vessels at in- 
 flated figures, snickered in his sleeve, 
 and built new ones with some of the 
 money. Mr. Morgan is a frequent and 
 welcome visitor to these shores, and the 
 London picture dealers and their touts 
 no doubt do very well out of him. But 
 if you say “ Liverpool ” to him he goes 
 hot all over. 
 
 For a bonne-bo uche I have kept Mr. 
 Andrew Carnegie, of Skibo Castle and 
 sundry other addresses. Mr. Carnegie 
 has the misfortune to be a Scotch Ameri- 
 can — surely the least admirable of the 
 less admirable types of humanity. He 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 25 
 
 will live in men's memories as the sturdy, 
 forthright Scot who managed one of 
 the most desperate strikes that ever took 
 place in America from the safe vantage 
 ground of his native heath. It must be 
 remembered that in spite of his ridicu- 
 lous possessions Mr. Carnegie is an 
 avowed democrat, and the author of a 
 book that makes him out to be quite a 
 benevolently minded philosopher. But 
 during all the terrors of the Homestead 
 lock-out, he lay snug at his shooting 
 box of Rannoch, N.B., and refused 
 to say a word that would tend to 
 still the storm, although he knew that 
 blood was being shed at Homestead, and 
 that his own partner, Mr. Frick, had 
 been seriously wounded. 
 
 Being a Scotchman it is impossible 
 that Mr. Carnegie should have been 
 a coward. Let me say rather that he 
 was cautious and canny, and indisposed 
 to take unnecessary risks. When the 
 row was more or less over he told 
 a representative of the Associated 
 Press that “ the deplorable events at 
 Homestead had burst upon him like a 
 thunderbolt from a clear sky. They had 
 such a depressing effect upon him that 
 he had to lay his book aside and resort 
 to the lochs and moors, fishing from 
 morning to night." Which, on the face 
 of it, is pawky Scots, and as who should 
 
26 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 say “ the deplorable news of the death of 
 my wife had such a depressing effect 
 upon me that I had to go to a fancy dress 
 ball and dance and dance till cock-crow.” 
 
 It will be seen, therefore, that in the 
 main the American millionaires do not 
 shine with any startling or blinding 
 effulgence. With here and there an ex- 
 ception, they are common, vulgar, snob- 
 bish, undistinguished men who happen 
 to have come out top-dog in a series of 
 financial bruising matches in which few 
 persons above the quality of a savage 
 would have cared to engage. For the 
 possession and administration of even 
 reasonable wealth their qualification 
 would seem to be of the meagrest. Out- 
 side the dull mechanical reduplication of 
 their mammoth fortunes, their stunted 
 intellects permit them only two very 
 doubtful joys, namely, sensational house 
 building and sensational charity. Mr. 
 Morgan may be taken as the type of the 
 house-proud money-snatcher. Mr. Rocke- 
 feller and Mr. Carnegie are the charity- 
 proud ; and they have reaped the reward 
 of the charity-proud— the colleges of the 
 one being a by-word and a mockery in 
 America, just as the “ Free Libraries ” 
 of the other are a by-word and a nuis- 
 ance in England. 
 
 I do not believe that in their heart of 
 hearts the Americans themselves — that 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 27 
 
 is, the great mass of the people — 
 have any feeling of admiration for the 
 gigantic money -grabbers who rule them. 
 The American has just perception enough 
 to discern that millionaires are not alto- 
 gether the best possible kind of man. 
 On the other hand, if you take away 
 the country’s millionaires you have 
 robbed her male population of one of its 
 chief objects of envy and its chief subject 
 of bluffing conversation. 
 
 The shadow of each of the fascinating 
 trinity that I have mentioned is as the 
 shadow of a Colossus, and is so enormous 
 that it is almost impossible to pick 
 up an American newspaper or other 
 publication in which they do not figure 
 and figure prominently. Especially 
 is this the case with respect to Mr. 
 Rockefeller, upon whose doings or 
 misdoings every scribbler in America 
 has some comment to offer or some 
 theory to base. The other day I came 
 across a book of essays published in 
 Boston, which contained a review of 
 Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace’s '' Man’s 
 Place in the Universe.” And right in the 
 middle of it I found this passage : 
 ‘‘ When a little child looks out on the Earth 
 he at first thinks it infinite. He looks 
 upon it as unorganised and unrelated. 
 Only with increasing age and under- 
 standing can he realise that it is finite 
 
28 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 and organised. So when Rockefeller as 
 a lad went into the oil businessdt seemed 
 to him that there was infinite|scope for 
 the extension of the oil business/' and so 
 on and so forth. Clearly it is a mighty 
 business to be Rockefeller ! 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 29 
 
 CHAPTER in 
 Humourists 
 
 American humour has come to be 
 a bugbear in England, pretty much 
 like American canned meats. 
 
 Twenty years ago, when anybody on 
 this side of the Atlantic wished to be 
 rather crudely and shockingly amused, 
 he sent to the libraries for some- 
 thing American. In that day and 
 generation Mark Twain was at the 
 zenith of his fame and powers, and 
 the names of Artemus Ward and 
 Josh Billings were names to conjure 
 with. Autres temps autres moeurs. 
 The popularity of Mark Twain has suf- 
 fered woeful eclipse, and Artemus Ward 
 and Mr. Billings have gone clean out of 
 vogue, and are rememfcred only as the 
 originators of a very tiresome kind of 
 humour which depends on phonetic 
 spelling for its more excruciating effects. 
 
 The fact is that America and England 
 alike have been dosed to death with the 
 lucubrations of handy scribblers who 
 caught something of Mark Twain's trick 
 and pretended to something of his gift, 
 and the label American humourist ” 
 nowadays repels with an even greater 
 insistence than it formerly attracted. 
 
30 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 Mr. Twain made desperate and valiant 
 efforts to retrieve his waning popularity 
 with a book called A Yankee at the 
 Court of King Arthur.” If ever there 
 was a piece of writing nicely calculated 
 to tickle and make purr the fat-necked 
 American here was the article. But it 
 fizzled in the pan, failed in short to bring 
 ’em on again. And it now belongs to the 
 category of books that people have for- 
 gotten. So much for Mr. Twain, whom 
 I admire, but of whom, nevertheless, 
 I have taken leave to speak the truth. 
 
 Artemus Ward and Josh Billings are 
 dead, and their souls, I trust, are with 
 the saints ; so that they will pardon me 
 when I venture on the opinion that the 
 humour they gave us was of the thinnest 
 sort, and, taking into account the furore 
 it created, extraordinarily ephemeral. 
 However any person of sense came to 
 accept the following for humour passes 
 my comprehension : — 
 
 Experiences as an Editor 
 
 In the Ortum of i8 — my friend, the 
 editor of the Baldissville Bugle, was 
 obleged to leave perfeshernal dooties 
 & go & dig his taters, & he axed me to 
 edit for him doorin his absence. Accord- 
 inly I ground up his Shears and com- 
 menced. It didn’t take me a grate 
 while to slash out copy enuff from the 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 31 
 
 xchanges for one issoo, and I thawt 
 I’d ride up to the next town on a little 
 Jaunt, to rest my Branes which had bin 
 severely rackt by my mental efforts 
 (This is sorter Ironical) So I went over 
 to the Rale Rood offiss and axed the 
 Sooprintendent for a pars. 
 
 ^ You a editer,’ he axed, evinebtly 
 on the point of snicker in. 
 
 ‘ Yes, Sir,’ sez I, ‘ Don’t I look poor 
 enuff ? ’ 
 
 ^ Just about,’ sed he, ^ but our Road 
 can’t pars you.’ 
 
 ‘ Can’t hay.’ 
 
 ^ No Sir — it can’t.’ 
 
 ^ Becauz,’ sez I, looking him full in 
 the face with a Eagle eye, ‘ it goes so 
 darned slow it can’t pars anybody ! ’ 
 Methink I had him thar. It is the 
 slowest Rale Road in the West. With 
 a mortified air, he tole me to get out of 
 his offiss. I pittid him and went.” 
 
 The essence of this excursion into 
 the realms of the Comic Spirit is about 
 as cheap and small a thing in essences 
 as one is likely to come across. Mr. 
 Ward had made or heard somebody 
 make a punning retort of an ultra- 
 feeble quality, and straightway he 
 rushes off to turn it into humourous 
 lucubration. The Americans believed 
 it was darned funny,” it raised “ gales 
 of laughter ” among them, and they 
 
32 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 shouted about its excellences till the 
 English also began to recognise them. 
 At best Artemus Ward is humour of 
 the “ Wot-the-orfis-boy-finks ” order, 
 and as such it has always been 
 eschewed by persons blessed with a trifle 
 more than the milk-maid order of in- 
 tellect. 
 
 And lest I be accused of raking up 
 what the Americans themselves choicely 
 term '' dead dog ” I will ask your atten- 
 tion for the space of a paragraph or two 
 to the brand of the New Humour gener- 
 ally consumed by the inhabitants of the 
 United States in the present era of grace. 
 In this connection it would be easy for 
 one to take a distinctly bitter line ; 
 inasmuch as the books of humour as 
 distinguished from the humourous 
 periodicals, nowadays published in 
 America are not really books of humour 
 at all, but aggregations of acrid and 
 wicked cynicism. The authors of them 
 either do not intend to be funny or 
 have no conception of the meaning of 
 fun. Sourness of spirit, meanness of 
 thought, and savageness of expression 
 are their principal standby. In the 
 humourous periodicals, however, you 
 discover a well-defined intention to be 
 funny — though the cynicism and the 
 vitriol are not of course forgotten. 
 
 I believe that these periodicals are 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 33 
 
 nicely adjusted to the public require- 
 ments, for the American is not out to 
 produce even comic papers “ for his 
 health,” and being nothing if not prac- 
 tical, he gives his public exactly “ what 
 they want.” Here are some samples 
 of '' exactly what they want,” pub- 
 lished so recently as May of the pre- 
 sent year. First as to verse : 
 
 If 
 
 If all the trips Fve had at sea 
 
 Should take effect at once on me, 
 
 In one huge, nauseated spell 
 
 Gee ! wouldn’t I be sick ! Well, well ! 
 
 But possibly the fault is mine. You 
 see Fm English. Perhaps the above 
 example of the New Humour is really a 
 choice sample of the New Pathos. 
 
 Again ; and this smacks of genius : 
 
 Now Birdie Gets His 
 
 Of all the things that swim or run, 
 
 Man beats in easy pace ; 
 
 He gives big odds to fin and fur. 
 
 And wins in every race. 
 
 He hops into his auto-car 
 And handicaps the horse ; 
 
 Or takes the greyhound for a try 
 And licks him even worse. 
 
 Perhaps the whale or shark get gay 
 And want a little go. 
 
 Man dives into his submarine 
 And does them down below. 
 
 C 
 
34 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 And now the chesty feathered chap 
 Must close his gay bazoo, 
 
 For man puts on his flying gear 
 And wallops birdie, too. 
 
 As to prose, here you are : 
 
 Want Too Much 
 
 ‘ ' Some time ago two surgeons took a 
 ten-pound tumor out of Dave Saunders, 
 an* to-day he got a terrible big bill for 
 the operation.** 
 
 ‘ ‘ Is Dave goin* to pay it ? * * 
 
 ‘ ' No ; he sez, ‘ they*ve got enough 
 out of him already. * * * 
 
 Monkish 
 
 Behold the tippler and mark how he 
 tippeth in the streets. Whoso hath dis- 
 colouration of the optic ? Is it not the 
 meddler ? Yea. He that is a lunkhead 
 condemneth that which he compre- 
 hendeth not. 
 
 Be thou not envious of them that have 
 vacation in time of influenza. 
 
 I have not gone out of my way to 
 search for these excerpts in the cheaper 
 class of American comic publication. 
 Nor have I been at special pains to search 
 for blemishes through the files of the 
 ten cent “ high class journal ” which 
 is laid under contribution. In point 
 of fact, I find them in the first num- 
 ber of that journal which came to my 
 hands, namely, its latest issue obtainable 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 35 
 
 in London. How really foolish and 
 vulgar these samples are ! The first set of 
 verses is about being sick ; the second 
 set is slangy, ill-expressed and con- 
 tains a childish mistake in grammar ; 
 the first piece of prose is objectionable 
 because of its reference to a ten-pound 
 tumor,” and the second piece is sheer 
 banality, meaning nothing that is worth 
 a smile. 
 
 The plain fact is that humour in 
 America is the humour of fatty 
 degeneration of the intellect. America's 
 funny man was at one time a 
 
 fairly clean, healthy creature, with a 
 droll outlook on the facts of life. 
 That he was a trifle over-devoted to 
 rye whiskey and effusive practical 
 jokes, and had a tendency to rank 
 irreverence, were among the defects of 
 his qualities. The great American people 
 speedily learnt to vote him slow, and into 
 his shoes they hurried the hard-faced, 
 terrier-toothed, cigarette-smoking, anae- 
 mic, fleering decadent. And at long and 
 last they have set up for their humourous 
 god the sheer hoodlum or larrikin, 
 whose sense of what is comic is even 
 more degraded than that of a Chinaman, 
 and whose view of morality is the view 
 of a naughty parrot. There can be 
 no possible hope for a country whose 
 risible faculties are exercised only at 
 
36 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 squalid moments or excited only by 
 squalid writing. 
 
 No matter how wealthy and hard- 
 headed your man, and no matter how 
 beautiful or accomplished your woman, 
 they are spiritually and morally topsy- 
 turvy if they laugh at the wrong things, 
 and I maintain that the twentieth-cen- 
 tury American is consistently laughing 
 at the wrong things, and quite incapable 
 of appreciating the right and proper 
 humour even when you have explained 
 it to him. The Scotch cannot see a joke, 
 the Americans can see only bad jokes. 
 
 Nearly all the vilest and most offen- 
 sive jokes that creep into the third-rate 
 English comics are of American origin. 
 The Weary Willie and Tired Tim business 
 is purely American, so are the Buster 
 Brown and grinning Pup futilities, so 
 are the idiotcies associated with the 
 patronymic Newlywed ; so are the dis- 
 gusting buffooneries about whiskers. 
 The English have learnt that American 
 canned meat is a dubious viand. The 
 sooner they learn that the current 
 American humour is even more noxious 
 the better it will be for the English. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 37 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The American Woman 
 
 The abounding gentleman from Idaho, 
 or Cincinnati, or Nahant, will tell you 
 that the American woman is a dream 
 of beauty and goodness. If I am to 
 credit the American he would not take 
 eighty thousand dollars for her — no, 
 sir ! At least, he doesn't calculate that 
 he would. The American woman, sir, 
 is a peach. The American man believes 
 in her down to the soles of his store 
 boots, and has been educated to regard 
 her as a being of angelic antecedents and 
 destiny. Far be it from a simple 
 scribbler to pluck from her, unless it 
 were by way of a memento, one single 
 angel feather. But at time and time 
 I have seen a considerable deal of her, and 
 I shall venture to put her down here as 
 she seems to me, who am no judge and 
 do not matter anyway. 
 
 In the first place I shall assert, 
 though it were at the risk of my life, 
 that the American woman is not always 
 beautiful, and that even the beautiful 
 American woman is not always beautiful. 
 I shall go further and say that for one 
 beautiful woman per thousand head of 
 the population in America we can pro- 
 
38 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 duce at least three in England and four 
 or five in Ireland. Furthermore, the 
 English or the Irish beauty will last 
 you three times as long as the American 
 variety, and in point of fact it seldom 
 really wanes, whereas, in America, 
 feminine beauty nearly always passes, 
 and passes quickly. 
 
 It should be clearly understood — and 
 I say it with my hand on my heart — 
 that this is not the fault of the American 
 woman, with whom I have no quarrel, 
 and upon whom I desire to pass no asper- 
 sion. The vulgar commentators on the 
 American woman's physical blemishes 
 and shortcomings have assured us that 
 they are the direct result of her diet, 
 which is said to consist of pea-nuts, 
 griddle cakes, oysters, pie, turkey, 
 stewed terrapin, tinned mushrooms, 
 fat ham, cheese, chocolates, and ice 
 cream. As is usually the case, however, 
 the vulgar commentators are entirely 
 wrong. The real enemy of the American 
 woman's beauty is the American climate. 
 In the process of time it is climate that 
 makes and mars everything. It is 
 climate that has made the African black 
 and the European white. It is climate 
 that is rapidly transforming the Ameri- 
 can man into a sort of ignoble red man 
 or Kickapoo Indian, and it is climate 
 that may eventually make the American 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 39 
 
 woman resemble a squaw. The Ameri- 
 can climate produced the American 
 Indian. The American climate is modi- 
 fying the physique of the American 
 man and marring and obliterating the 
 great and undeniable beauty of the 
 American woman. 
 
 Most male Americans that one meets 
 nowadays have a curiously Indianised 
 cast of figure and countenance. Their 
 blood as we know is hybrid blood, but 
 somehow you never find an American 
 that looks like an Italian or a Spaniard 
 or an Englishman. Always and inevit- 
 ably there is that about him which 
 reminds you of the Indian. Climate 
 is stronger than blood, or at any rate, 
 the American climate has proved 
 stronger so far. Roughly speaking, it 
 may be said to induce in the human 
 male black straight hair, horse features, 
 a swarthy complexion, inclining to a 
 coppery redness, a thick neck, large 
 hands and flat feet. Its effects upon 
 women I shall refrain from rehearsing, 
 but you will not fail to discern them if 
 you look carefully at the next American 
 woman you happen to come across, 
 that is if she happens to be anything 
 other than one of those splendid and 
 alluring peaches for the production of 
 which in such charming numbers all 
 men should be eternally grateful. 
 
40 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 I have further to reflect that the 
 American woman's beauty and charm 
 are, as a rule, very seriously discounted 
 by the circumstance that she talks 
 through her nose, with that atrocious 
 intonation that is commonly called 
 the American accent. I should defy 
 Venus herself to impress with her 
 beauty anybody above the quality of a 
 dollar hunter or a pork-packer if she 
 could be imagined to speak in the average 
 American way. 
 
 Coming now to the question of good- 
 ness, which is a delicate question, it 
 seems to me more than probable that the 
 American woman is just as good, and 
 no better, than the rest of womankind. 
 She has been accused of all sorts of 
 frightfulness — ^mainly on account of her 
 unfortunate accent and her free and 
 easy methods of talk. It is certain 
 that she is capable of the higher forms 
 of devotion and self-sacrifice, even if 
 her views on divorce are entirely airy 
 and liberal. 
 
 But I do not believe that her heart 
 is wicked, and as women go in the virtue 
 way, she is unsurpassed. In some 
 other respects I must confess she is to 
 be forgiven, although she is, so far as 
 mind, disposition, and outlook are con- 
 cerned, a great deal too much like her 
 half-civilised Poppa, and affects a great 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 41 
 
 deal too much of the cheap smartness 
 and abounding audacity that are the 
 stock-in-trade of her still less civilised 
 brother. 
 
 If you talk with an American girl 
 for any length of time you will discover 
 that among other defects she is troubled 
 with what one may term a statistical, 
 or, perhaps, more correctly, an arithmeti- 
 cal mind. Her male folk talk dollars 
 and put everything into the terms of 
 dollars. She, cute little bon-bon head, 
 talks figures. She is as full of dates as a 
 Scotchman, and as full of heights, depths, 
 widths, dimensions, aggregations, and 
 general computations as a guide-book. 
 She will pour into your willing ear parti- 
 culars as to the population of the city 
 in which she was “ raised,'' and the next 
 city to that, and the next. She is sure 
 to tell you that she came over on such 
 and such a liner, that they had exactly 
 one thousand three hundred and forty- 
 nine persons aboard, including three 
 hundred officers and crew, two hundred 
 and seventeen saloon passengers, and 
 a precise number of second class and 
 steerage people. '' That ship has got 
 eight thousand electric lights, five hun- 
 dred portholes, eight thousand seven 
 hundred and twenty-five tons of coal 
 in her bunkers, when she leaves port ; 
 her stores include four thousand knives, 
 
42 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 forks, and spoons, and ten thousand 
 bottles of old rye whiskey ; she is an 
 American boat, and there are twenty 
 performers in the band, and her captain 
 has made the return trip two hundred 
 and seventy-three times,” and so on, 
 until you begin to feel as if you had 
 fallen into a ready reckoner, and to 
 wonder whether in some occult way the 
 young lady receives a commission from 
 the steamship company. Like every 
 other American man, woman or child, 
 Mark Twain included, she is plagued 
 also with the “ pass-a-given-point ” 
 mania. The Americans are literally 
 eaten up with processions, and the 
 glory of every one of them is determined 
 by the circumstance that it took so 
 many minutes to pass a given point. 
 Of the latest records in this connection, 
 the American girl is sure to prattle to 
 you with amazing zest. In brief, her 
 mind, besides containing much that is 
 really valuable and certainly interesting, 
 is a storehouse of unimportant and 
 altogether gratuitous and unnecessary 
 facts. Summed up, she is pert, pro- 
 voking, chock full of information, moder- 
 ately pretty, a good deal of a bore, and — 
 an obvious peach. 
 
 Then there is the American married 
 woman, who may or who may not have 
 been married in several different places. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 43 
 
 If you meet this lady casually in London 
 or on the Continent, it will take you quite 
 a week to discover which of the numerous 
 men by whom she is always squired, 
 happens to be her husband. 
 
 Of course, the Americans consider their 
 women the pink of propriety. '' The 
 ladies of this State, sir, — and I am proud 
 to say of every other State in the Union — 
 are h — 1 upon propriety ! ” I do not 
 doubt it, and I should not say so if I 
 did. The American woman has her good 
 points and her good qualities, other- 
 wise American man, dazzler as he 
 is, could not be so idiotically contented 
 with her, or, as he himself phrases it, 
 '' sot on her.” At the same time she has, 
 on the average, omelettes souffl^es for 
 brains and tenderloin steaks for hearts — 
 and in spite of her charming curves she 
 exhibits defects of mind, emotions, 
 person, and breeding alike which, in 
 my opinion, condemn her to obscure, 
 or exalt her to take the highest, rank in 
 the table of civilised feminine precedence 
 according to the way you look at her. 
 Always excepting, of course, the obvious 
 peaches. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 45 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Literature 
 
 Mr. William Dean Howells, who 
 is one of the leaders of that small band 
 of American authors who have a right 
 to literary consideration in England, 
 has lately published an entertaining 
 romance which he calls Through the 
 Eye of the Needle.'' With Mr. Howells's 
 story as a story I have nothing to do. 
 In the process of relating it Mr. Howells 
 offers us some candid criticisms of his 
 countrymen which will serve to illustrate 
 the real opinion of the cultivated Ameri- 
 can as to himself, and all that to him 
 appertains. 
 
 “ My hero," writes Mr. Howells, 
 “ visited this country when it was on the 
 verge of great economic depression 
 extending from 1894 to 1898, but, after 
 the Spanish War, Providence marked 
 the Divine approval of our victory in 
 that contest by renewing in unexampled 
 measure the prosperity of the Republic. 
 With the downfall of the Trusts, and 
 the release of our industrial and com- 
 mercial forces to unrestricted activity, 
 the condition of every form of Labour 
 has been immeasurably improved, and 
 
46 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 it is now united with Capital in bonds of 
 the closest affection.” 
 
 Mr. Howells does not mean this 
 passage satirically. He is really of 
 opinion that Providence marked the 
 Divine approval of America’s victory 
 over Spain '' by renewing in unex- 
 ampled measure the prosperity of the 
 Republic.” He believes, good easy man, 
 that the Trusts have been humbled, 
 and that “ Labour is now united with 
 Capital in bonds of the closest affection.” 
 Isn’t it delicious ? Mr. Howells further 
 informs us that the servant problem in 
 America has been “ solved once for all 
 by humanity,” and that New York is 
 no longer a city of violent and un- 
 thinkable noises. 
 
 The flattened wheel of the trolley,” 
 he says, “ banging the track day and 
 night, and tormenting the waking and 
 sleeping ear, was, oddly enough, the 
 inspiration of Reforms which have made 
 our city the quietest in the world. The 
 trolleys now pass unheard ; the elevated 
 train glides by overhead with only a 
 modulated murmur, the subway is a 
 retreat fit for meditation and prayer, 
 where the passenger can possess his soul 
 in a peace to be found nowhere else ; 
 the automobile whirrs softly through 
 the most crowded thoroughfare, far 
 below the speed limit, with a sigh of 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 47 
 
 gentle satisfaction in its own harmless- 
 ness, and, ' like the sweet South, taking 
 and giving odor/ ” It is beside the 
 mark to note that Shakespeare did not 
 write '' taking ” but '' stealing,” and he 
 certainly did not spell odour Mr. 
 Howells's way. 
 
 Our author proceeds to assure us that 
 American men are not now the in- 
 tellectual inferiors of American women, 
 “ or at least not so much the inferiors ” ; 
 that American men have made '' a vast 
 advance in the knowledge and love of 
 literature,” and that “ with the multitude 
 of our periodicals, and the swarm of our 
 fictions selling from a hundred thousand 
 to half a million each, even our business 
 men cannot wholly escape culture, and 
 they have become more and more cul- 
 tured, so that now you frequently hear 
 them asking what this or that book is 
 all about.” 
 
 Later he says of the New Yorkers : 
 “ They are purely commercial, and the 
 thing that cannot be bought and sold 
 has logically no place in their life. They 
 applaud one another for their charities, 
 which they measure by the amount 
 given, rather than by the love which 
 goes with the giving. The widow's 
 mite has little credit with them, but 
 the rich man's million has an acclaim 
 that reverberates through their news- 
 
48 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 papers long after his gift is made. It is 
 only the poor in America who do charity 
 — by giving help where it is needed ; 
 the Americans are mostly too busy, 
 if they are at all prosperous, to give 
 anything but money ; and the more 
 money they give, the more charitable 
 they esteem themselves. From time to 
 time some man with twenty or thirty 
 millions gives one of them away, usually 
 to a public institution of some sort, 
 where it will have no effect with the 
 people who are under-paid for their work, 
 or cannot get work ; and then his deed is 
 famed throughout the Country as a 
 thing really beyond praise. Yet anyone 
 who thinks about it must know that he 
 never earned the millions he kept, or the 
 millions he gave, but somehow made 
 them from the labours of others ; that 
 with all the wealth left him he cannot 
 miss the fortune that he lavishes, any 
 more than if the check (English, cheque) 
 which conveyed it were a withered leaf, 
 and not in any wise so much as an 
 ordinary working man might feel the 
 bestowal of a postage stamp.” 
 
 We have here, as I have said, views 
 on America not by a shouting American 
 bluffer or dealer in hyperbole, but by 
 a man of recognised literary parts and 
 judgment. Furthermore, Mr. Howells is 
 plainly not one of those Americans who 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 49 
 
 affect a contempt for their country. 
 When he speaks of American success he 
 attributes it to the favour of Providence ; 
 he can perceive a '' vast advance ” in the 
 American's knowledge and love of litera- 
 ture, and while he reproves the American 
 millionaire, he does so more in sorrow 
 than in anger. So that on the whole 
 his testimony cannot fairly be traversed. 
 
 And reading between the lines of it, 
 the intelligent observer will not be slow 
 to discern that it amounts practically 
 to a pretty severe indictment of the 
 Americans. A man who has no place 
 in his life for a thing that cannot be 
 bought and sold, is not, after all, the 
 kind of man one can be expected to 
 admire, even though Providence may 
 appear to smile upon him. Neither 
 can I express myself violently taken 
 with the man who is '' not so much 
 the intellectual inferior of our women ” — 
 and such women— even if you do fre- 
 quently hear him asking what this or 
 that book is all about. And Mr. 
 Howells's opinion of millionaires and 
 their charity coincides pretty well with 
 the opinion of Europe. 
 
 Mr. Howells, of course, is a well bred, 
 well mannered and entirely discreet 
 author ; he sets down naught in malice, 
 his tendency being rather in the direction 
 of a little gentle extenuation. Irony, 
 
 D 
 
50 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 sarcasm, reproach, and, least of all, 
 flouts and jeers are not among his 
 literary weapons. 
 
 It goes without saying, however, that 
 America has been written about in 
 much harsher tones than those of Mr. 
 Howells. From an American book pub- 
 lished pseudonymously two or three 
 years back, a book that does not appear 
 to have received anything like its due 
 share of recognition either in England 
 or America, I cull the following pic- 
 turesque details : — 
 
 ‘ ' From the moment he takes his seat 
 in his office, until he goes home, an Ameri- 
 can’s business consists of a succession of 
 swindles. He either picks the pocket of 
 each man he interviews, or the men pick 
 his.” 
 
 ' * The American gloats over his ability 
 as a liar. He prides himself upon the fact 
 that his lie is a plausible one and likely 
 to deceive. If it does not come up to the 
 specifications he regards it and himself as 
 failures, and a shadow is cast upon his life.’ ’ 
 
 ‘ ' The American who has just borrowed 
 a dollar immediately rushes into the 
 nearest bar room and announces that he 
 has raised 500,000 dollars from a prominent 
 millionaire who has become his partner, 
 and will back him to any amount in any 
 enterprise, sane or insane, in which he may 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 51 
 
 agree to embark. Then for the succeeding 
 three hours he talks about himself so 
 loudly that the entire neighbourhood 
 throngs around him to join in the debate.' * 
 
 The American trader in Europe has 
 created the same feeling that prevails 
 among a party of honest cardplayers when 
 the card-sharper appears at the table." 
 
 " The American politician never speaks 
 but always ' orates.' If the matter under 
 discussion in the legislative body is a 
 question whether five cents shall be 
 expended on pencils, or whether Mrs. 
 Bridget O'Neill, or Mrs. Patrick O'Reilly 
 shall be appointed scrubwoman of the 
 Senate House, he considers it beneath 
 his dignity to say anything that will not 
 recall the diction of Cicero or Demosthenes. 
 If the ceiling is to be cleaned and a three- 
 and-elevenpenny contract is to be given 
 out, he takes the floor and with a loud 
 preliminary bellow announces that he is 
 an American citizen, and anyone who says 
 that he is not is a confirmed and hereditary 
 liar." 
 
 " If an American learns that a man has 
 been bribed he does not hate him — he 
 envies him." 
 
 " In New York society no man is ever 
 referred to as ' Mr. Jones ' or ‘ Mr. Smith.' 
 He is always referred to as * Mr. Jones, 
 who is worth two million dollars,' or ‘ Mr. 
 Smith, who is worth four million dollars 
 and stole every cent of it. ' " 
 
52 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 The average Chicagoan has not the 
 faintest conception of the true meaning of 
 right and wrong. Right is the method that 
 succeeds in getting money. Wrong is the 
 method that does not. * * 
 
 I shall beg the reader to observe 
 particularly that I do not myself make 
 these stinging assertions. In the words 
 of the late Sir William Harcourt, “ I 
 merely quote them.’' In a sense, per- 
 haps, they may be most correctly 
 described as exaggerations. But they 
 are exaggerations of a kind which have 
 more than a substratum of truth in 
 them. I commend them to the swagger- 
 ing rubber-jawed American for what 
 they are worth. 
 
 Did the scope of this book allow, 
 it would be possible to cite numerous 
 other animadversions upon American 
 manners and customs by other pens. 
 
 No British author of standing has 
 visited the United States and come 
 back in love with the American people. 
 Dickens loathed them, Thackeray could 
 not put up with them, Mathew Arnold 
 despised them, and Browning laughed 
 at them, while as for Tennyson he 
 absolutely refused to go near them. 
 Even the sensational litterateurs of 
 our own generation, such as Hall Caine 
 or Bernard Shaw, have failed to find 
 much or anything to shriek about. The 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 53 
 
 Bishop of London and Father Vaughan 
 are not authors but diplomats. Rud- 
 yard Kipling has been in America 
 more than once, and remains dumb as 
 to the whole concern. Mr. Zangwill 
 is equally travelled and equally silent. 
 Mr. Wells, who went out for the purpose, 
 has written his book and said practically 
 nothing. All of them, and others who 
 might be named, recognise that what 
 ought to be said would be better unsaid — 
 unpleasant for the Americans, and conse- 
 quently likely to provoke bad feeling. 
 It is gentlest to the Americans to write 
 of them without paying a preliminary 
 visit to their native air. What would 
 happen if a person who wields a plain 
 blunt pen were to make a call upon them 
 and set forth his impressions in good 
 cold type and without fear or pity, no 
 man may tell. Probably the Americans 
 would shoot him. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 55 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 The President 
 
 It is said that killing a man will not 
 prevent him from going to Chicago, 
 and you may be certain that nothing 
 will prevent an American from getting 
 himself elected President of the United 
 States if he can possibly manage it. 
 
 The United States Presidency is 
 believed by the patriotic American to 
 be the very finest position that mortal 
 man could possibly desire to occupy, 
 outshining in glory and honour, if not 
 exactly in importance, all “ the effete 
 thrones of Yurrup ” rolled into one 
 paroxysm of purple. Tremendous and 
 almighty as the United States Presi- 
 dency may be, however, its real lustre 
 and attraction for the American imagina- 
 tion lies in the fact that it is within the 
 possible attainment of any and every 
 United States citizen who does not 
 happen to be a nigger. Of course, your 
 United States President has sometimes 
 been a very different affair from the 
 United States Presidency. But that 
 is neither here nor there ; because a 
 man who can write '' President U.S. "after 
 his name is, on the face of it, clearly 
 
56 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 entitled to think that he casts a large 
 shadow. And he does. 
 
 Though the history books will tell you 
 otherwise, astute people — ^which phrase 
 includes a fair handful of Americans — 
 are of opinion that the Republic of 
 the United States has had only a matter 
 of three Presidents. The first of them 
 was George Washington, who, let it 
 be said, set the fashion of not relishing 
 the job ; the second of them was Abra- 
 ham Lincoln, rail splitter, lawyer, states- 
 man and martyr ; and the third 
 American President — one blushes with 
 pride to name him — is none other than 
 Theodore Roosevelt, now more or less 
 happily reigning. 
 
 I am no great hand at either history 
 or biography, so that the reader of these 
 pages will be spared the usual enter- 
 taining biographical details. I am not 
 even aware if Mr. Roosevelt arrived 
 at the White House by way of the 
 traditional Log Cabin, or whether he 
 took a pleasanter, less stony and less 
 circuitous route. It is sufficient for me 
 to have reasonable hearsay evidence 
 that he is there, and that he has filled 
 up frantically every hour of his time 
 since he got there. 
 
 For the ruler of a great state Mr. 
 Roosevelt is, to say the least, an appeal- 
 ing and exciting figure. He may be 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 57 
 
 said fairly to out-rival anything of the 
 kind that has hitherto been offered us 
 this side of the Atlantic — with one di- 
 verting and rhetorical Teutonic exception. 
 
 In Mr. Roosevelt you have the follow- 
 ing popular and captivating elements : 
 
 He is : — 
 
 A Dutchman. 
 
 An American. 
 
 A Diplomat. 
 
 A Soldier. 
 
 A Lawn-Tennis Champion. 
 
 A Cow-boy. 
 
 A Big Game Shooter. 
 
 A Strong Man. 
 
 An Anti-Malthusian. 
 
 A Hand-Shaker-of-All-Comers. 
 
 A Stump Orator. 
 
 A Spelling Reformer. 
 
 An Apostle of the Strenuous Life. 
 A Husband. 
 
 A Father. 
 
 A Family Man. 
 
 A Deacon. 
 
 A Humourist. 
 
 A Pugilist. 
 
 A Harriman-hunter. 
 
 A Hardy Horseman. 
 
 A Dog Fancier. 
 
 An Author. 
 
 A Judge of White Mice. 
 
 A San Juan Hero. 
 
58 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 A Nobel Prize Winner. 
 
 A Statesman of the First Order. 
 
 A Hustler ; 
 and 
 
 President of the United States of 
 America. 
 
 Probably it has never been possible 
 to compile such an inventory in favour 
 of any other example of the human 
 species, and when one looks down its 
 massive proportions one is at no loss to 
 understand why the American people 
 consider themselves to be the very finest 
 people on earth and entirely denuded of 
 flies. 
 
 In a comparatively short if variegated 
 career President Roosevelt has accom- 
 plished so much that is extraordinary 
 that one never knows where he is likely 
 to break out afresh. Before his term 
 of office is out he may conceivably 
 become many other things besides those 
 I have listed. It would not surprise 
 me if he turned Vegetarian or King. 
 Nothing is too high for him, nothing 
 too humble, nothing too exceptional 
 or unconventional, nothing too imperial. 
 And withal there is a rugged and stern 
 and solid dignity about him. He wields 
 the big stick throughout his vast domin- 
 ions, and spanks down evildoers as a 
 housewife spanks down wasps. At home 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 59 
 
 he stands no nonsense ; abroad he wants 
 peace, perfect peace, but equally stands 
 no foolery. People of all nations admire 
 him and wave banners over his head 
 and cheer him to the echo. He is a 
 sort of quick-firer, strong in the arm 
 and lively in the head, and built by 
 heaven to rule over the people of the 
 United States. 
 
 In many respects President Roosevelt 
 appears to be a sort of republican 
 replica of no less a personage than 
 Wilhelm II. of Germany. The parallel 
 between the two potentates is interest- 
 ing and diverting and to some extent 
 disconcerting. That they are friends, 
 that they think together on certain big 
 subjects, that they have exchanged 
 telegrams, that they love each other, 
 and that they have both been a trifle 
 flighty at times cannot be doubted. 
 
 The really interesting point about 
 Mr. Roosevelt is that he may be reckoned 
 to stand for the finest expression and 
 exemplar of the American people. A 
 nation that can manufacture such a 
 President must be possessed of national 
 characteristics altogether out of the 
 common. He is the absolute personi- 
 fication of the United States. He is 
 absolutely fearless, he is absolutely 
 honest, he is absolutely magnificent. 
 Someday he may be absolutely absolute. 
 
60 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 You may be sure that President 
 Roosevelt will go down to posterity 
 as the beau ideal of American Presidents. 
 In the eye of the Americans he has made 
 few if any mistakes, and though there 
 is a party in the States that can be very 
 bitter about him and very rude to him, 
 their bark is considerably worse than 
 their bite, and secretly they glory in 
 him. By dint of a good deal of adroit- 
 ness he has succeeded in keeping his 
 diplomatic end up in Europe and par- 
 ticularly in England, and nobody 
 between Tipperary and the Great Wall 
 of China has hard words for him. The 
 world recognises in him a great genius- 
 unparalleled in modern times. 
 
 If ever an American had sound reason 
 to look back with satisfaction on a well- 
 spent life, Mr. Roosevelt is the man. 
 And if ever republic had just cause 
 to thank Providence for its luck in the 
 matter of a President, the United States 
 is that Republic. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 61 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Advertisement 
 
 The man who would in business rise 
 must either bust or advertise '' is the 
 American's article of faith. In civil- 
 ised countries advertising is confined to 
 its proper limits, that is to say, it is 
 part of the business of a tradesman. 
 In America everybody advertises, and 
 advertises through a megaphone. 
 
 The United States appears to have 
 been created for the pure purpose of 
 advertising itself and everything that 
 occurs in it. In England of late we 
 have been a little overtroubled with the 
 persistent and flamboyant advertiser. 
 His flaring posters, his disconcerting 
 circulars, and particularly his promises 
 of fabulous prizes if one will but buy his 
 soap or his half-penny paper or his gaspipe 
 bicycles have jarred upon most of us. 
 The Ixindon hoardings blaze with all 
 sorts of invitations to drink cocoa, 
 swallow pills, go to the theatre, and 
 demand bottled trouble of one label or 
 another. 
 
 The plague is upon England, and prob- 
 ably we shall not get rid of it for a couple 
 of generations or so. In the meantime, 
 however, we may console ourselves with 
 
62 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 the knowledge that gaudy and excru- 
 ciating as London advertising may be, 
 it is a mere tea-party compared to the 
 orgie of announcement that is always in 
 progress in every bright American city. 
 Furthermore, while the English adver- 
 tiser has admittedly done his best to 
 destroy for us the mild delights of a rail- 
 way journey by erecting in every second 
 meadow funereal signs with the names of 
 liver piUs and cattle foods upon them 
 he has not yet attained to the au- 
 dacities of his American confrere who, 
 in his delirium of publicity, paints the 
 names of nostrums on the sides of innocu- 
 ous cows and adorns the scenery with 
 purple and yellow posters that are posi- 
 tively zoo-like in their noise. 
 
 The rocks and hills of America are 
 daubed over with wild entreaties to the 
 passer-by to fix up his liver with some 
 newly invented mixture, or to sow some- 
 one's invaluable hair seed on his bald 
 head. Each country barn is decorated 
 with huge signs bearing disinterested 
 advice as to what sort of medicine a 
 wayfarer should use in the spring. In 
 no part of any State can one escape the 
 huge advertisement. If you penetrate 
 into the recesses of the highest mountain 
 and find there the hut of a bewhiskered 
 hermit, the chances are that when you 
 approach him he will give you some 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 63 
 
 handbills containing details of the mar- 
 vellous cures effected by So-and-So’s 
 sarsaparilla. The sails of yachts are 
 adorned with statements as to medicines. 
 Landscapes serve but to promulgate the 
 claims of the quack. If a man plants a 
 bed of geraniums the chances are that 
 the flowers are arranged in such a way 
 that they immortalise the fame of 
 somebody's ipecachuana. The gardener 
 is induced to do this by a present of free 
 seeds. 
 
 In the tiolley cars of New York one is 
 always in danger of finding a seat under 
 some such notice as, “ The gentleman 
 sitting beneath this sign is wearing a 
 pair of our inimitable three dollar 
 pants. They fit him beautifully. 
 Don't you think they do ? " Or, ‘‘ The 
 gentleman sitting below has a very yel- 
 low complexion this morning. He looks 
 as if he had drunk too much last night. 
 If he had had proper advice he would 
 have taken a dose of Green Jackdaw 
 Effervescent before breakfast, then he 
 would feel very much better than he 
 does now." 
 
 Pills, potions, pick-me-ups, blood puri- 
 fiers, liver mixtures, lung tonics, corn 
 cures, and preparations for tender feet 
 appear to be the only articles of commerce 
 that half the population of the United 
 States trade in and manufacture. You 
 
64 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 cannot move in America without having 
 these nostrums cast violently into your 
 teeth and shoved down your throat by 
 every species of reminder that printers* 
 ink and the ingenuity of the devil are 
 capable of compassing. 
 
 With a view to the maintenance and 
 upkeep of this extraordinary jumble of 
 publicity the country is patrolled year 
 in and year out by thousands of adver- 
 tising vans, each accompanied by a con- 
 siderable staff of '' old hands.** Ameri- 
 can papers commonly contain para- 
 graphs like the following : '' Advertising 
 car No 2 of Pawnee BilFs Wild West has 
 the following people : A1 Osborn, mana- 
 ger ; Doc Ingram, boss billposter ; A. 
 Clarkson, lithographer ; J. Dees, ban- 
 ners ; N. C. Murray, J. Judge and 
 twelve other billposters ; B. Balke, paste- 
 maker ; and R. Richardson, chef.** That 
 the boss billposter should rank after the 
 manager and the chef after the paste- 
 maker is a choice American touch. 
 
 WTien you turn to the question of news- 
 paper advertising you encounter pretty 
 much the same characteristics, supple- 
 mented by a great deal of top-speed bel- 
 lowing. In a high-class paper that lies 
 before me as I wiite, a gentleman in the 
 wholesale way announces in indecently 
 tall black type that he is the only live 
 hardware man on earth,** and that he 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 65 
 
 has '' figured out a way to boost the busi- 
 ness of his customers as well as build a 
 good foundation/' Another dweller in 
 the land of brotherly love — an artiste 
 this time, if you please — announces him- 
 self as “ The Death Defying Daredevil 
 King of the High Wire ” and assures us 
 not only that he has been '' the Feature 
 Attraction for Three Seasons in vSucces- 
 sion at Luna Park, Coney Island," but 
 that his “ Reputation Talks for Itself." 
 
 The tone of these announcements is 
 typical. Every American advertiser 
 insists that he is the greatest man of 
 business alive, and that the article he is 
 so anxious to get rid of is the only fine 
 thing in the world. You note, too, with 
 a certain restrained joy, that every 
 second advertisement appearing in an 
 American paper or magazine starts off 
 with the magical words : It Will Pay 
 
 You." Thus if we are to believe the 
 veracious publicity-monger it will pay 
 you to wear So and So's Collegian 
 clothes which “ are the only garments 
 made in this entire country with real 
 dash to them " ; it will pay you to buy 
 Thingamy vSuspenders because they will 
 make your boy “ comfortable and good- 
 natured " ; it will pay you to go about 
 in Thingamy Shoes because when you 
 pay three dollars for the Thingamy 
 Shoe “ you can know that all of your 
 
 E 
 
66 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 money goes to the purchase of protection 
 for your feet ; and it will pay you to 
 keep step with nature and tempt the 
 fussy appetite with ‘ Ten Liberal Break- 
 fasts for Ten Cents/ '' The authors of 
 these touching suggestions evidently 
 understand the public with whom they 
 have to deal. They have learnt the 
 sublime lesson that the American has 
 but a single inducement in his nightmare 
 of a life, namely — the inducement of 
 money or noise. 
 
 I shall now consider the advertising 
 feats of that class of American persons 
 wLo advertise not for financial gain, but 
 for the sweet sake of notoriety. A great 
 lady of American birth is said to have 
 advised her sons that if they were to 
 succeed in life they must make a point 
 of getting their names into the papers 
 at least once a day. The sons of the lady 
 appear to have taken the hint, with the 
 result that they have made themselves 
 fairly snug out of very small beginnings. 
 
 In the United States the bare getting of 
 one's name into the papers is a compara- 
 tively easy matter. Pretty well any 
 American reporter will arrange that much 
 for you in return for a ten cent drink, 
 while for two such drinks he will run to a 
 photo-block and a description of your- 
 self as “ a prominent society and club 
 man who made his pile in Wall Street." 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 67 
 
 You must always remember, however, 
 that the accomplished American private 
 advertiser has a soul vastly above the 
 mere elements of the game. Usually he 
 is rich and often his life has contained 
 episodes which an ingenious press can 
 work up into scandals with half a column 
 of sensational headlines — pin new and 
 piping hot — on the shortest notice. 
 Most wealthy advertising Americans, 
 and indeed many of those who do not 
 advertise, have been treated to this beau- 
 tiful brand of publicity. 
 
 As a matter of fact it is an ancient 
 and over-worn fetich, and as the news- 
 paper-reading American is no longer to 
 be excited by it, there is little or nothing 
 in it for anybody. Consequently the 
 American who is thirsty for advertise- 
 ment is compelled to have resource to 
 what are called “ stunts.” So far as one 
 is able to make out you are considered 
 by American society to achieve a '' stunt ” 
 when you do something that nobody but 
 a lunatic could possibly have thought of 
 doing. For example, if you give a dinner 
 party at a big New York hotel and let it 
 be known that the guests were all of 
 them chimpanzees you have done a 
 “ stunt.” And the reporters of every 
 paper in the city will rush to you as one 
 man to find out the facts. They will 
 describe you as a multi-millionaire and a 
 
68 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 high-life club man whose existence is a 
 sort of perennial grand slam. They will 
 assert that your notion of bringing 
 together a company of chimpanzees for 
 dinner is wildly and unprecedentedly 
 clever. They will go on to explain that the 
 number of chimpanzees present was 47, 
 that they turned up in the very smartest 
 evening dress, that they ate and drank 
 off plate of solid gold and that the cham- 
 pagne bottles were studded with rubies. 
 And they will wind up by announcing 
 that one of the most distinguished of the 
 chimpanzees, who made his entrance to 
 the dinner party out of a balloon made 
 of fifty dollar bills, has just found a 
 $500,000,000 gold -brick mine in a remote 
 district of Omaha, where he was ‘'raised,'' 
 and is as a consequence about to be 
 elected President of the National Bank. 
 
 Result : your dinner becomes the talk 
 of America for at least a few hours, and 
 you consider yourself a fortunate and 
 public man. That is, if you are an 
 ambitious American. Of course, this 
 sort of advertising requires a good deal 
 of coin to keep up the pace. And while 
 there is not an hotel keeper in the Union 
 who cannot supply you with a steady 
 succession of idiotic freak ideas, the cost 
 is a trifle heavy, and you soon find your- 
 self growing rather tired. 
 
 But the American is nothing if not 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 69 
 
 clever. For a change, perhaps, he 
 acquires an affinity or elopes with another 
 man’s wife in a series of gorgeous motor 
 cars and specially reserved steamships. 
 He writes letters to his own wife explain- 
 ing in ecstatic language what he has 
 done ; and she, good soul, serves them 
 out to the reporters like so many dough- 
 nuts. Again, he gets his boosting — his 
 roaring, rolling advertisement. Two 
 months later the whole affair may turn 
 out to have been a merry little ‘‘ plant ” ; 
 but your bright American has had his 
 glad columns in the papers, and nothing 
 in the world can take them from him. 
 
 Of course, the “stunts” I have here 
 indicated are really of a rather out-of-the- 
 way sort. The common or garden 
 “ stunt ” usually takes the shape of an 
 appendicitis dinner, pies with girls in 
 them, fountains running champagne, or 
 Adam and Eve suppers. r '| 
 
 American women’s “ stunts ” are gen- 
 erally giddier still. One lady compassed 
 social distinction by having her sunshade 
 heavily embroidered with diamonds, 
 another has tiny musical boxes fitted into 
 the heels of her shoes that play when 
 ever she puts her feet up — which is 
 often — and a third wears a live newt in 
 her hair, and has a boudoir full of shakes 
 and lucky bears. 
 
 But the soul and essence of it all is 
 
70 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 advertisement. '‘Be singular and you 
 will get talked about ; get talked about 
 and you will be happy ” is America’s 
 golden rule. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 71 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Pea-nut Mind 
 
 I AM in the happy position of never 
 having gazed upon a pea-nut in my 
 life. Therefore my notions of what the 
 pea-nut may be are of the haziest. 
 
 But I gather as the result of some re- 
 search that it is a species of provender, 
 and that it is purchased and consumed by 
 the American masses in pretty much the 
 same spirit and on pretty well the same 
 occasions that the common Cockney of 
 our own happy British Islands purchases 
 and devours barcelonas and whelks. In 
 other words, a pea-nut is an inevitable 
 concomitant of a lower-class American 
 hohday. It is always with them. It is 
 the one article that you may depend 
 upon obtaining not only at every 
 American dry goods store, but at every 
 street-fair, park, beach, and entertain- 
 ment ground throughout the country. 
 It is a . comestible beloved of old and 
 young alike, and when the American 
 boy or girl’s mouth is not at work on 
 chewing gum it is working overtime on 
 pea-nuts. 
 
 When a working-class American wants 
 a holiday — and sometimes when he 
 would rather stay at home — he sets out 
 
72 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 with his wife and family for the nearest 
 park. In England, of course, a park 
 means, for the working classes at any 
 rate, a somewhat decorous and over- 
 laid-out open space where there is a 
 band-stand, a range of concrete promen- 
 ades, a Swiss chalet where bad tea is 
 provided, a policeman, and a number of 
 hard seats. In America, however, the 
 park is an entirely different affair. It 
 is always a place in which you can buy 
 pea-nuts. Not only so ; it is a place in 
 which the benevolent American entre- 
 preneurs throw together aggregations of 
 “ attractions ” such as are to be seen 
 nowhere else on sea or land. I find, for 
 example, that for Cream City Park, 
 Lyons, 111., the following amusement 
 devices are to be provided during this 
 present summer : — 
 
 ''Old Mill, Merry-Go-Rounds, Penny 
 Arcade, Circular Swing, Cave of the 
 Winds, Billiard and Pool Parlours, Jap 
 Ping-Pong Parlour, Cane Rack, Baby 
 Rack, Illusion Shows, Baby Incubator, 
 Pony Track, Razzle-Dazzle, and ' other 
 novelties.^ There are also to be Japan- 
 ese Tea Gardens, Ice Cream Stands, Soft 
 Drink Stands, Candy and Pop Corn 
 Stands, and facilities for the sale of 
 pea-nuts.'' 
 
 Another of these parks at Aldoc 
 Beach, near Buffalo, is described as 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 73 
 
 " running seven days a week ” and as 
 possessing “ the most magnificent Pine 
 Grove and Great Lake,” together with 
 '' a $100,000 Summer Hotel, a $15,000 
 Figure Eight, a $5,000 Rustic Vaude- 
 ville Theatre, and a $5,000 Dance 
 Pavilion,” in addition to a Blinding 
 Array of Restaurants, Chubbuck Wheels, 
 Houses of Mirth, Box-Ball Alleys, 
 Shooting Galleries, Circle Swings, and 
 Stands for the sale of Soft Drinks, 
 Tobaccos, Sandwiches, Ice Creams, 
 Frankfurters — and pea-nuts. 
 
 There are literally thousands of these 
 parks scattered throughout the United 
 States, and at all and each of them 
 roaring provision is made for the 
 people's enj oyment. Compared with our 
 English parks, with their sad, uncertain 
 County Council bands, they fire the 
 imagination. Practically they represent 
 the old English fair — which the drab 
 English authorities have so ruthlessly 
 stamped out — very much modernised, 
 Americanised, and '' notionised.” Here 
 the pea-nut reigns supreme. You chew 
 it on the Razzle-Dazzle and in the Baby 
 Rack and the Old Mill and the House of 
 Mirth and the Chubbuck Wheel, and 
 even in the $15,000 Figure Eight and 
 the $5,000 Rustic Vaudeville. It is 
 pea-nuts, pea-nuts, pea-nuts all the 
 time, and nobody hopes, and nobody 
 
74 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 has the least desire to get away from 
 them — from pea-nuts. 
 
 Now, as the parks are open throughout 
 the year and run seven days a week, and 
 are all situated within easy distance of 
 large centres of population, it follows 
 that the consumption of pea-nuts in 
 America is something enormous. If the 
 yearly supply were to be put into trucks 
 and looped up into a procession, it 
 would probably take that procession 368 
 days to pass a given point. 
 
 The big fact that I wish to bring out 
 is that the Americans are a pea-nut-fed 
 nation. With this simple statement it 
 is possible to account for a great deal 
 that is otherwise inexplicable in the 
 American genius and character. 
 
 Nut-chewing is a habit which has been 
 in vogue on the earth for an incredible 
 period. Originally developed by the 
 Simian races, it was at one time the 
 only known dietetic habit that did not 
 involve bloodshed. It fell into neglect 
 in Europe with the coming of the white 
 man, and throughout the dark ages 
 which ensued nobody appears to have 
 given it a thought. It remained for the 
 genius of America to revive it, and there 
 can be no doubt that the renascence 
 has been brought about in a thoroughly 
 adequate and successful manner. 
 
 For, as I have shown, all America 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 75 
 
 now chews pea-nuts. As the result, 
 they are a square- jawed, massy -faced 
 race, martyrs to dyspepsia, fussy in the 
 matter of appetite, and indiscriminate 
 in the general selection of viands, their 
 staples under this head consisting of fat 
 pork and beans, corn mush and jungle - 
 canned beef. Moreover, by dint of the 
 assiduous and long-continued absorption 
 of pea-nuts, they have acquired what 
 may be reasonably termed a pea-nut mind. 
 
 If you can imagine the vast hordes of 
 the original nut-chewers of antiquity 
 suddenly set down in the midst of the 
 machinery and advantages of twentieth- 
 century civilisation, and imagine what 
 they would proceed to do in the circum- 
 stances, you have gone a great way 
 towards a true conception of the 
 American people as they really are. 
 Their habits and manners and aspira- 
 tions and desires appear in effect to be 
 based entirely on nut-chewing, which, as 
 every naturalist is aware, tends to 
 render the chewer acquisitive, cute, 
 tricksomfe, not given to reflection, tough 
 and nimble of body, and reasonably 
 devoid of soul. The habit carries with 
 it, also, an innate love of what is noisy 
 and showy, and a vanity which passes 
 ordinary human understanding. It is 
 all based on the desire to dazzle. 
 
 So long as America has parks, so long 
 
76 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 will she chew pea-nuts, and so long as 
 she chews pea-nuts, so long will she 
 continue to remain as artlessly, 
 amazingly and convincingly American 
 as she is at the present moment. To 
 take a few pertinent instances, you will 
 find that all American oratory is simply 
 and solely pea-nut oratory. I append 
 an extract from a speech delivered at the 
 New York Board of Aldermen by a 
 representative from the Borough of 
 Brooklyn, as reported in an American 
 paper : — 
 
 ‘ * I demand this ordinance to your 
 attention fer the sake of humanity and fer 
 the cause of freedom. Has introduced two 
 ordinances on this subject before, and now 
 I am submittin' this Bill instead of them 
 two. Maybe I don't know nuthin' about 
 how things is over here on this side of the 
 bridge, but I know just how it is in Brook- 
 lyn. An' I wanter tell you that them 
 motormen over in Brooklyn is grinded 
 under the heels of their masters just as the 
 slaves was drove in the olden times by his 
 masters, an' it's time fer us to interfere in 
 this here matter now. 
 
 Now you may want to know why them 
 motormen don't come over here and speak 
 up to you for their rights. If the is 
 suffering such outrages as this, you asks, 
 why don't they come here and tell us that 
 they is sufferin' and ast us to life the yoke 
 from offen them ? 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 77 
 
 1^11 tell yer why they don’t come* 
 They dasn’t. That’s why. 
 
 ‘‘They’re afraid, because they’re slaves 
 and dasn’t speak up fer themselves. If 
 they was to come over here and say to 
 this committee, ‘ We want you to protect 
 us in our rights for the reason that we’re 
 sufferin’ and frozing in the winter,’ what 
 would happen ? 
 
 ** Why, before them men got through 
 speakin’ their names would be taken and 
 telegraphed to their masters, and when 
 they got back to their cars them masters 
 would tell them they hadn’t no more use 
 for ’em no more furever.” 
 
 Herein surely one may trace the effects 
 of pea-nuts as easily as white paint can 
 be seen on a negro. 
 
 Now let us turn to a sample of English 
 as she is wrote ” and apparently 
 spoken by the American who can 
 read : — 
 
 The story about that fisherman wasn’t 
 so bad. He was an old guy, and so poor 
 he had a hard time getting three squares 
 a day, and he had a wife and three kids to 
 support. For some reason too deep for 
 your uncle, he had a rule to pitch his nets 
 in the sea only four times a day. One 
 morning he '“went out fishing before day- 
 light, and the first drag he made, he copped 
 out a dead donkey. That made him 
 pretty sore. Dead donks were a frost, and 
 he was out one throw. He win out a lot 
 of mud, the next throw, and he was sick, 
 and he makes a howl about fortune. 
 
78 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 Here I am,*' says he, ‘'hustling all day 
 long and every day in the week ; I got no 
 other graft but this ; and yet as hard as I 
 wrestle I can’t pay rent. A poor man has 
 no chance. The smooth guys get all the 
 tapioca, and the honest citizen nit.” 
 
 Then he throws again, and finds 
 another gold brick — stones, shells, and 
 stuff. I guess he was pretty wild when 
 he sees that. Three throws to the bad 
 and nairy fish. 
 
 When the sun came over the hill, he 
 flopped down on his knees and prayed like 
 all good Mussulmens, and after that gave 
 the Lord another song. 
 
 English of this description runs very 
 badly to pea-nut. It is distorted and 
 degraded and entirely ungrammatical. 
 Yet no one will deny that, if it is not 
 commonly written, it is at least com- 
 monly spoken, even in such centres as 
 New York and Boston. To American 
 ears and eyes there is nothing about it 
 that can be quarrelled with. Every 
 American knows what is meant by 
 ‘ ‘ guys, * ’ ^ ‘ tapioca,’ * ‘ ‘ nit,” “ goldbrick, ’ ^ 
 
 nairy,” squares,” ‘‘ hot-air,” and so 
 forth ; and he uses these and similarly 
 squalid words and phrases in his daily 
 speech and conversation. If you were 
 to tell him that such a sentence as “he 
 win out a lot of mud, the next throw ” 
 was grammatically unsound and im- 
 possible, he would ask you please to be 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 79 
 
 so kind ‘ ' as not to pull his leg.” He is 
 mentally incapable of distinguishing the 
 kind of muss I have quoted from 
 writing of a correct order, and when it 
 creeps into his newspapers, and fictional 
 publications, as it is continually doing, 
 he never as much as suspects that there 
 is anything wrong. 
 
 Such a pea-nutty view of language 
 points its own moral. It is a view that 
 is universal among Americans, and it 
 can be proved to obtain even among the 
 best of American authors, who habitually 
 use some of the crudest Americanisms 
 without knowing it. 
 
 I need scarcely add that the pea-nut 
 flavour predominates in most American 
 affairs. The advertising of the country 
 is done wholly on pea-nut principles, its 
 politics are run on pea-nut lines, and its 
 professional men and financiers indulge 
 in every species of pea-nut methods. No 
 doubt one should be charitable enough 
 to refrain from blaming them for it. 
 They are to the manner born, and the 
 pea-nut idiosyncracy is so firmly im- 
 planted in their natures that it would be 
 impossible for them to shake it out, 
 even if they tried. So that they go on 
 pea-nutting and pea-nutting from genera- 
 tion to generation, and in spite of the 
 extraordinary number of colleges, free 
 schools, reading clubs, and general 
 
80 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 facilities for culture, they remain clear 
 pea-nut right through. 
 
 As I do not happen to wish them any 
 particular harm, I shall express the 
 pious hope that they will long continue 
 to pea-nut. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 81 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 The Drama 
 
 The Americans are nothing if not 
 fiercely and incorrigibly theatrical. It 
 is true that they have only one pose, 
 namely, the pose of being gloriously and 
 unaffectedly American. Yet in all the 
 large issues of life they display a strong 
 sense of the stage, they revel in the more 
 obvious situations, and they have an 
 innate love of a good curtain. 
 
 These facts are strikingly illustrated 
 in the American law courts, where all 
 small matters are managed on the lines 
 of comedy, and all large matters on the 
 lines of hot and lurid melodrama. The 
 recent Thaw trial may be taken as a 
 typical case in point, so far as melo- 
 (hrama is concerned. The speeches of 
 counsel on both sides might have been 
 written specially for the Adelphi Theatre, 
 and every gesture of the rival declaimers 
 would seem to have been modelled on 
 the style of the adipose itinerant actor 
 who plays ‘‘ Othello ” in penny gaffs. 
 
 So far as the real stage is concerned, 
 the Americans are to be credited with 
 quite a number of startling innovations. 
 They were the sole inventors of the 
 Deadwood Dick kind of play, which 
 
 F 
 
82 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 involves the tooling on|to the stage of an 
 ancient and battered mail coach, accom- 
 panied by feats of unthinkable skill 
 with the shooting irons. I believe, too, 
 that they were the only begetters of the 
 drama that has for its central attraction 
 a real set-to between bona-fide bruisers, 
 who fight with the gloves off and punish 
 one another for all they are worth 
 under American rules. 
 
 Then, of course, I must not forget to 
 mention the world-renowned “ Tank 
 Drama.” It appears than an American 
 manager happened once upon a time to 
 find himself in a second-hand galvanised 
 iron store. Here he discovered an enor- 
 mous iron tank which he found could 
 be purchased for a song. In a fit of ab- 
 straction, and in pursuance of the Ameri- 
 can tendency to buy anything and 
 everything that can be had dirt cheap, 
 he purchased the tank. And having it on 
 hi hands and no particular use for it, he 
 hired a dramatist to write a play around 
 it. To this woolly genius a tank of course 
 suggested water and high dives and 
 swimmers, and before you could say hey, 
 presto ! Mr. Manager found himself in 
 possession of a sensational, if somewhat 
 humid, melodrama, the like of which had 
 never before been seen on any road. 
 
 The Tank Drama toured the States for 
 years on end, to the approval and delight 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 83 
 
 of American audiences, and for anything 
 I know to the contrary, it is still running, 
 the tank itself having by this time, 
 no doubt, grown a little leaky. 
 
 In England the public is familiar with 
 melodramas in which the principal part is 
 taken by steam-rollers, circular saws, 
 fire-engines, and other pieces of mechan- 
 ism. The Tank Drama, however, was 
 the progenitor of them all. It was from 
 the Americans, also, that we learnt to 
 grace our melodramas with the presence 
 on the stage of real live cows, race- 
 horses, ducks and geese, faithful dogs, 
 dancing bears, blue monkeys, and 
 educated asses. 
 
 The American public prides itself 
 upon the rapidity with which the national 
 dramatists, from Clyde Fitch or Augustus 
 Thomas to David Belasco or Theodore 
 Kremer, can turn out almost any species 
 of dramatic work to order. On the 
 production of a five-act tragedy recently 
 in New York, it was announced that 
 the author had written “ the whole 
 contraption” in under the twenty-four 
 hours. I can well believe it. The 
 majority of American plays that come 
 to us on this side bear unmistakable 
 indications of having been written 
 in haste, and with a single eye to getting 
 through with the labour. This is no 
 doubt due to the circumstance that 
 
84 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 American managers have a mania for 
 producing new pieces, and that the 
 average run of such pieces is exceedingly 
 short. Authors do not feel it to be 
 worth their while to take pains, parti- 
 cularly as the majority of them have to 
 subsist by dressing up in dramatic 
 guise some new and big mechanical 
 invention or some cause celebre or 
 tragedy in real life or some stupid story, 
 which happens to have caught on, but 
 which they know cannot in the nature 
 of things keep the stage for more than 
 a few weeks. 
 
 Although one is continually hearing of 
 the triumphs of this or that American 
 actor or actress in Shakespearean parts, 
 it is a solemn fact that the average of 
 Shakespearean acting in America is very 
 much below that of any other country 
 in which Shakespeare is consistently 
 played. I cannot, of course, forget 
 that America produced the late Mr. 
 Phelps and gave us Miss Mary Anderson, 
 whom all the world admired. But these 
 are the exceptions. The rule is that the 
 American actor who plays Shakespeare is 
 a bull-necked, unlettered mummer who 
 has served his apprenticeship to the 
 circus business or to the plumbing, and 
 roars out Shakespeare’s lines with a 
 nasal intonation and an absolute lack 
 of understanding. Nine out of ten 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 85 
 
 American actors ought to carry a net 
 with them. 
 
 I am aware that it may be contended 
 that the foregoing aspects of the 
 American drama are things of the past, 
 and that in all essential respects the 
 theatre in America is nowadays on 
 an equal footing with the theatre in 
 England. In a considerable measure, 
 this may be so, due, no doubt, to the 
 mixed beneficence of the blessed brother- 
 hood : Frohman, Klaw and Erlanger. 
 
 Yet there can be no getting away 
 from the fact that the American plays 
 and American companies that are from 
 time to time brought to London for our 
 edification fail woefully to interest us. 
 
 In London, quite lately we have been 
 presented with two plays of American 
 extraction and rendered by American 
 companies. One of them " Mrs. Wiggs of 
 the Cabbage Patch '' to wit, at Terry's 
 Theatre, appears to have been a suc- 
 cess, from a monetary point of view, 
 and nobody can witness it without 
 entertainment. On the other hand, it 
 suffers from that pea-nutty exuberance 
 and thinness of interest which are so 
 characteristically American. The senti- 
 ment in it is of the floweriest and slobber- 
 iest sort, the comedy forced and jerky, 
 and the setting squalid and depressing to 
 a degree. It is said to be a transcript 
 
86 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 of life among the American poorer 
 classes, and herein conceivably it is 
 instructive if not altogether uplifting ; 
 for it indicates only too plainly that the 
 hackneyed American talk about '' the 
 full dinner-pail ” and the general snugness 
 and decency of the existence of the 
 American poor has precious little founda- 
 tion in fact. Of course, Mrs. Wiggs 
 herself is made to exhibit singularly 
 good qualities of heart, and a certain 
 shrewd and humorous wisdom. But 
 the rest of the characters — not even 
 excluding the weepily-named Lovey- 
 Mary and Mrs. Wiggs's troops of wild-cat 
 children — are the kind of people whom 
 it sets one’s teeth on edge to meet. 
 If, as I am told, America is full of 
 Cabbage Patches, I can only say that 
 America should hasten to the penitent 
 form. 
 
 The other play of which London 
 was adjured to expect great things was 
 called Strongheart.” It ran for a 
 couple of weeks or more at the Aldwych 
 Theatre, and was then taken off. 
 “ Strongheart ” purported to give us 
 some highly realistic glimpses of Ameri- 
 can college life. There was a great 
 deal of American football in it, and a 
 great deal of ra, ra, ra-ing about it. 
 There were also unlimited quantities of ra, 
 ra rant. But the plot exhibited the usual 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 87 
 
 thinness, the construction was slack and 
 loose, and the characterisation feeble 
 and colourless. If the company which 
 supported the handsome Robert Edeson 
 in this particular piece is to be taken 
 as a fair sample, I feel free to conclude 
 that in the lump American actors and 
 actresses are a reasonably poor crowd. 
 Play as they would, the men failed to 
 convince us that they were persons 
 of any particular breeding, and the 
 women said their lines as if they were 
 in pain, and walked through their 
 parts like so many uninspired clothes 
 horses. Of course I know America has 
 many gifted actors and actresses such as 
 William Faversham, James K. Hackett, 
 E. H. Sothern, Julia Merlowe, Olga 
 Nethersole and Mery Mannering — but, 
 as luck will have it, with the exception 
 of the second-named, who is a Canadian, 
 they’re all English. And so is even the 
 inimitable Hap Ward. On the whole, I 
 think America will have to make some 
 very serious strides in the dramatic art 
 before she can fairly hope to show 
 England anything that is worth looking 
 at. 
 
 When you turn to the music halls you 
 find the American in equally sad case. 
 There is no performer of note on the 
 English music-hall stage whose training 
 and exper ence have been American. 
 
88 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 From the other side we get a few trick 
 bicyclists, wire-walkers, high divers, 
 and comic speech makers whose pea- 
 nutty witticisms are obviously culled 
 from the comic papers. They help to fill 
 up the programme, without in any sense 
 helping to fill up the house. 
 
 It is in this connection that the 
 Americans have made a practical avowal 
 of their pathetic inferiority ; for they 
 are said to have made contracts with 
 some of the leading English stars for 
 appearances in America, on terms which 
 plainly indicate that the American 
 managers must be singularly hard up 
 for talent and quite incapable of finding 
 it in their own country. 
 
 The fact is, that in this as in a variety 
 of other matters, the American’s cock- 
 sureness and unblushing faith in his 
 personal beauty and powers have led 
 him considerably astray. The American 
 really possesses scarcely any talent. 
 All he can do is to boast and shout and 
 advertise. And having little or nothing 
 behind him to boast and shout and 
 advertise about, he is bound in the long 
 run to find himself at a disadvantage. 
 Half the actresses and female music-hall 
 artists of America are successful not 
 because they can do anything, but 
 because they have been “ boosted ” 
 into fame by the pushful, blatant 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 89 
 
 manager. The sole accomplishment of 
 many of them is that they can 
 undress prettily in full view of their 
 audiences. 
 
 For the rest they bolster up their 
 position by extraneous escapades rather 
 than by art. They are harum-scarum, 
 feather-brained young women who for 
 the most part would find it exceedingly 
 difficult to get a living by the exercise 
 of their alleged smartness before an 
 English public. And as for American 
 actors and music-hall men, the best that 
 can be said of them is that when thej^ 
 are not vulgar they are deadly dull, 
 and the worst that their real sphere of 
 life is the American circus. I wish they 
 would all take to the Tank. 
 
 The average American theatrical man, 
 invariably strikes me as being a born 
 circus-man, intended by nature to go 
 around in a gaudy procession by day and 
 to fill up his nights showing oft 
 wild beasts and freaks and Deadwood 
 coaches. Unconsciously he does all 
 his business and manages all his affairs 
 on circus principles. He is for ever 
 beating the drum and inviting the crowd 
 to walk up and see the finest show on 
 earth. The ideal man of his private 
 bosom is the late P. T. Barnum, who was 
 the father of advertisement and the 
 originator of the fine art of “ boosting.” 
 
90 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 It was P. T. Barnum who said, or who 
 got somebody to say for him, “ When 
 you have anything good, keep on letting 
 on about it, and you will get rich.” 
 
 The American business man has always 
 considered that saying to be the extreme 
 height of philosophy. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMEBICAN 91 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 Sport 
 
 The Americans are all "sports.” But 
 to their credit, they are one and all 
 “ dead games.” They have a sporting 
 tradition which extends back to the 
 time when their great-grandfathers 
 gambled for negresses and went trailing 
 for Indians in pretty much the same 
 way that an Englishman goes shooting 
 wild duck. 
 
 It is said, with what truth I know 
 not, that the Americans hunt the fox 
 in red coats and top-hats, and that they 
 are yachtsmen and fishermen and big 
 game killers. I have met a considerable 
 number of Americans — well-to-do and 
 otherwise — but I never yet came across 
 one whom I could conscientiously figure 
 in any of the latter connections. Of 
 course, there is the America Cup Race 
 to confound me, and there are the 
 redoubtable doings of President Roose- 
 velt on the rolling prairie and in the 
 Rockies, and there is young Mr. Jay 
 Gould's defeat of our Mr. Eustace Miles 
 at Rackets or Ping Pong or some such 
 game. All the same, I will never believe 
 that the modem American is leisurely 
 
92 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 enough or uncommercial enough to 
 know much about real sport. 
 
 That they play games in America 
 even as we play games in England 
 appears to be fairly evident. The game 
 of white man's games, namely, cricket, 
 is, however, a game they do not under- 
 stand. Baseball and football on the 
 other hand are exercises which they are 
 alleged to have cultivated out of all 
 recognition. Baseball I know nothing 
 about. And when I come to consider 
 it closely, I could wish that I knew 
 nothing about American football. 
 
 Pugilism without the gloves having 
 been forbidden by law in America, the 
 free and equal inhabitants thereof must 
 e'en look round for a form of sport which 
 would allow of their ‘‘ lamming the hides 
 off one another " without being pulled 
 up short by the police ; and they settled 
 on football. The essence of American 
 football is not to kick or punch the 
 ball, but to kick, punch, break up, de- 
 face and destroy the next man. On all 
 American football fields a squad of 
 surgeons, bonesetters, and nurses have 
 to be in continual attendance. The 
 crushing of a player's ribs, the gouging 
 out of his eye, or the splitting open of 
 his head are regarded as trifling matters 
 among American sportsmen, and when 
 the football player goes forth to the 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 93 
 
 fray, he makes a point of taking a fond 
 farewell of his relations and friends in 
 case of even more serious accident. 
 Here, again, you have a distinct instance 
 of the American tendency to outrage 
 and excess. They have overdone foot- 
 ball to such an extent that they them- 
 selves consider it in the light of some- 
 thing which approximates closely to 
 a murderous affray. So much for games. 
 
 As Indians are no longer shootable, 
 and negroes can no longer be hunted 
 with dogs, and the buffalo is extinct, 
 and the grizzly a ‘‘rare proposition” and 
 difficult of access, the modern American 
 sport has to be content with smaller 
 deer, such as possum and bobolink and 
 wild turkey. And when he goes gunning 
 for these trophies he is a sight to see. 
 Nobody can rival him in the magnificence 
 of his outfit. He insists upon donning 
 cow-boy attire and proceeding to the 
 field of action on a fiery mustang, with 
 a magazine of guns slung all over him, 
 and enough ammunition to take Port 
 Arthur. The whole of this equipment 
 has been purchased at store prices, 
 and he acquires it not because it is likely 
 to be useful to him but because he thinks 
 that it makes him look smart. When 
 it comes to yachting or fishing or racing 
 you can depend upon him to display 
 an equal gaiety of demeanour and to 
 
94 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 dress ” and “ swank ” the part to per- 
 fection. 
 
 For the fox-hunting I shall say 
 nothing. The indigenous American fox 
 does not run straight, the imported fox 
 has lost some of the best qualities of 
 his English forbears, and the American 
 variety of foxhound is a romping, ill- 
 mannered, and indiscreet quadruped. 
 
 The national sport of America is horse 
 racing, qualified with a considerable 
 dash of trotting. And here, of course, 
 the American temperament in all its 
 aspects is made to shine. The head 
 quarters of American horse racing — 
 the Epsom, Ascot and Sandown of 
 the United States — is a place called 
 Saratoga, where the trunks come from. 
 Here you find the American horse, 
 the American racing man, and the 
 American sport in their highest and 
 lowest and most perfect expression. 
 It is said that a Saratoga horse is 
 poison-proof ; being so accustomed to 
 profound potations of laudanum, bro- 
 mide, and other sedatives that he can 
 quaff any quantity of them without 
 turning a hair. The people who live 
 at Saratoga are all horsey and dis- 
 honest. They speak the most degraded 
 form of Anglo-Saxon — a sort of Americo- 
 Negroid flash talk^ — and what they do 
 not know in the way of knavery and 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 95 
 
 brutality has yet to be invented. It 
 goes without saying that all American 
 racing men no not necessarily dwell 
 in this sublime spot. But a quite con- 
 siderable contingent of them have learnt 
 lessons out of the Saratoga book, and 
 are consequently as dangerous to deal 
 with as it is possible to conceive that 
 white men could be. 
 
 The American sportsmen we are 
 privileged to see in England have, with 
 some notable exceptions, failed signally 
 to secure our confidence. There are 
 honest men among them — though never 
 by any chance a ‘'jay ” — and there are 
 sheep of a blackness which would do no 
 discredit to the nether pit. On the whole 
 their connection with the English turf has 
 been unfortunate for the English turf. 
 We are most of us quite old enough to 
 remember the unpleasant things that 
 happened when an oganised gang of these 
 gentry descended upon our innocent 
 English rings and racecourses some three 
 years ago. They got their hands well 
 into the English pockets, depleted us of 
 much glittering money, raised what 
 they were pleased to consider “ general 
 h — 1 ” in the scandal way, and left us 
 outraged and aghast. Up to this period 
 in our history the astute English racing- 
 man had regarded himself as the last 
 word in craft and wariness ; but the 
 
96 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 Americans despoiled him as easily as if 
 he had been a “ tenderfoot,” and when 
 he discovered it, Mr. Englishman was 
 very shocked. The racing interests of 
 these realms is still suffering from the 
 shaking it received during the exciting 
 period to which I refer. The only profit 
 the poor Britishers got out of the deal 
 was a new-fashioned way of riding, which 
 still remains in vogue, and a lesson in 
 caution which will last us a good century. 
 
 What the American jockey really 
 means was forcibly borne in upon us 
 by the vagaries of a Mr. Tod Sloan. 
 By dint of the usual advertising and 
 bluff, coupled indeed with no ordinary 
 gifts as a horseman, Mr. Sloan made 
 his early career in England a success 
 at the first blush. He was soon in 
 receipt of an income of ridiculous dimen- 
 sions, and hob-nobbing with the best 
 blood of the country. He got found 
 out, as Americans will, and ended up 
 feebly by smacking a waiter across 
 the head with a champagne bottle. 
 Luck does not appear to have looked 
 his way since. He went back to America 
 a disgraced man, even for America ; 
 and took to giving tips for a New York 
 paper. At the present moment he is 
 said to be engaged in the gentle art of 
 billiard-marking at a salary running to 
 at least ten dollars a week. I recite 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 97 
 
 the history of Mr. Sloan to encourage 
 the others. Our experiences with the 
 American racing-man in this country 
 justify us in assuming that he is an 
 exceptionally sad dog at home. America 
 is overrun with him, and while she has 
 done everything that lay in her power 
 to corral and exterminate him he still 
 continues merrily on his wicked way. 
 
 It only remains to point out that the 
 Americans as a people are frantic 
 gamblers, and that they are infatuated 
 enough to regard gambling as a form of 
 sport. Probably more gambling at cards 
 goes on in the United States than in the * 
 whole of the countries of Europe put 
 together. The proper American is ever- 
 lastingly playing at poker, which is a 
 bluffing game, and which he will assure 
 you trains him for his business. The 
 American card-sharper has been famous 
 in song and story time out of mind. 
 For sheer coolness, audacity, and skill 
 at the job, he has never had an equal. 
 Occasionally he lands on these shores, 
 with a picturesque entourage, takes a 
 flat in the West End of London, and 
 relieves the adolescent gentry of the 
 neighbourhood of their little alls. Then 
 he is up and off, on the wings of the 
 morning. 
 
 Among themselves, too, the Americans 
 play a great deal of roulette, petit che- 
 
 G 
 
98 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 vaux, and kindred fascinations. They 
 count also amongst the most enthusi- 
 astic patrons of Monte Carlo, where 
 season after season many of them turn 
 up with very little money and make a 
 fat thing of it. Last season a long- 
 haired gentleman from Kansas City 
 scooped up between two and three 
 hundred louis a night for twenty nights 
 running by the simple process of walking 
 from table to table and backing 17. 
 He told me that he and his wife were 
 there for a little trip, and that he had 
 hit on the 17 idea because 17 was the 
 number of their cabin on the liner which 
 brought them over. Of course 17 can 
 refuse to come up at Monte Carlo for 
 hours at a time. But whenever this 
 raw-boned large-handed citizen of Kan- 
 sas chose to put money on it, up it 
 came inside two or three spins. 
 
 There are American gamblers at 
 Monte Carlo, however, who are not by 
 any means so consistently lucky as my 
 friend. The money some of them get 
 through when they are having a bad 
 time would probably astonish the old 
 folks at home. But it is only fair to 
 them to say that they take their losses 
 with an unruffled, if rather moist, brow 
 and go off solemnly to cable for further 
 supplies. 
 
 \^en a certain sort of American 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 99 
 
 millionaire turns up in the Mediterranean 
 paradise there are sure to be merry 
 doings. I have seen such a one mop his 
 wet face after handing the bank a bundle 
 of notes that would have made a tidy 
 year’s income for a man with a large 
 family, and remark, a little feebly, " Gee 
 whizz ! Then he was led gently away 
 by a number of pretty ladies. 
 
 It is in what one may term hard 
 gambles such as he gets at Monte Carlo 
 that the American shows his most 
 sportsmanlike qualities. At roulette, 
 or trente et quarente, it is almost im- 
 possible for him to cheat, and con- 
 sequently he wins or loses more or less 
 calmly and with perfect honour. But 
 at poker — ^tut — tut ! 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 101 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 Hogs 
 
 The national peril of the United States 
 is hogs. Of the peculiar and subtle 
 influences which have driven most 
 Americans into the pig business I find 
 it impossible to formulate any reasonable 
 account. Of course, there is the fact 
 that the pig business has large monies 
 in it, and that America is a country 
 in which it would seem you have only to 
 tickle a little pig with a hoe to turn him 
 into a fine fat porker. 
 
 There can be no doubt whatever that 
 a very large percentage of Americans 
 think, talk, and raise pig throughout the 
 whole of their natural lives. This in- 
 dustry appears to be of such a fascinating 
 character that when once you have 
 got into it you cannot possibly get out 
 of it. Even if you wax unrighteously 
 rich and get elected to Congress and 
 move your family to New York, you 
 still stick to pork and lard as if they were 
 your brother. I understand that many 
 of the ball-rooms in the big brown stone 
 mansions in Fifth Avenue are waxed 
 with lard. 
 
 I do not know whether there were any 
 pigs in America before the Pilgrim 
 
102 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 Fathers landed. But it is certain that 
 there are millions of them there now, and 
 that they eat apples and grow wondrous 
 frisky and have a good time of it — till 
 killing day comes around. And it is 
 precisely here that the frightful Ameri- 
 canism of the hog begins. For the 
 wicked pig, like the wicked man, has 
 a knack of finding his way to Chicago — 
 which, as aU the world now knows, is the 
 most bloodthirsty, sultry, and unregen- 
 erate city on the face of the earth. In 
 this place they kill pigs by the thousand 
 daily. Hoggish shrieks rend all the air, 
 the stores and warehouses groan with 
 the pig's dismembered parts, and the 
 odour of his frizzling adipose tissue 
 is in every nostril. 
 
 It seems to me more than likely that 
 the pig owes the beginnings of his present 
 supremacy in the United States to 
 the Irish, who are pretty thick upon the 
 ground there. An Irishman without a 
 pig in one form or another would in all 
 likelihood take cold, or die of heart-ache. 
 In his own distressful Island, the Irish- 
 man and his pig live on terms of freedom 
 and fraternity that put the American 
 Constitution to the distinct blush. Not 
 only does the pig pay the greater pro- 
 portion of rent that gets paid in Ireland, 
 but he is the friend and playmate of the 
 family, and is invariably accorded a cosy 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 103 
 
 corner for himself on the domestic 
 hearth. 
 
 It seems only natural, therefore, that 
 in emigrating to the States, the Irishman 
 who could manage it would insist on 
 taking with him one or more pigs, proba- 
 bly as much for company's sake as for 
 any other reason. And behold the 
 result ! What was a simple and very 
 human foible on the part of the Irishman, 
 has become, with the American, a raging 
 and soul-consuming obsession. Pork, 
 pork, pork, pork, pork ! That is the 
 cry that rises daily and hourly to heaven 
 from the greater part of the United- 
 States-half of North America. Every- 
 body is concerned in it ; everybody has 
 money in it ; everybody wants to 
 get more money out of it. The pig is 
 rushed through his feeds, weighed every 
 morning till he has assumed the right 
 specific gravity, hurried off by car to his 
 doom, killed and slain on the no-waiting- 
 here principle, and turned into hams, 
 sides, lard, brawn, and sausages for the 
 delectation of a hungry world before he 
 has a chance to say George Washington. 
 
 America as a country, and the Ameri- 
 cans as a people, depend upon hogs for 
 their prosperity to an extent that is 
 appalling. Upon the dead weight of him 
 in the warehouses, and upon his firmness, 
 or want of it, in the markets, hangs the 
 
104 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 stability of all sorts of stocks, shares, 
 bonds, debentures, and general securi- 
 ties. If pig is “ up,” America is a land 
 of contented households and smiling 
 faces. If pig is " down,” she is plunged 
 forthwith into the deepest woe and the 
 meanest irritability. 
 
 All of which affords one further strik- 
 ing evidence that the Americans are 
 really a wonderful people, and that they 
 deserve the generous tributes of praise 
 that they so consistently and lavishly 
 draw upon themselves. 
 
 A nation whose principal diet is pea- 
 nuts, and whose principal profit is 
 derived from the sale of pigs, is obviously 
 pretty low down in the scale of civilisation. 
 A hog tender cannot by any chance be 
 the finest kind of man, neither can a pork 
 butcher or a wholesale ham merchant. 
 And every American who is not a 
 member of a trust, or a pastor of a 
 church, or a boss billposter, or a mis- 
 sionary, or a comic singer, is either a 
 hog tender, a pork butcher, or a whole- 
 sale ham merchant. At any rate, so one 
 gathers from the authorised reports. 
 
 And just as nut- chewing is responsible 
 for certain grave weaknesses in the 
 American character, so is pig-dealing. 
 The pig and the potato have made the 
 Irishman the idlest man in the world. 
 The pig takes no rearing, and the potato 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 105 
 
 is such a lively and prolific tuber that it 
 will grow almost without planting. The 
 Irishman has reaped the full disadvan- 
 tages incident to these merits in the pig 
 and the potato. And one feels sure that 
 the American is suffering equally from 
 the effects of the pig. I have no wish 
 to reopen the box of horrors which was 
 introduced to our notice some time back 
 by the author of "The Jungle.” That 
 gentleman did his work thoroughly, and 
 the atmosphere is even yet redolent in 
 consequence. It does not concern me 
 that Chicago meats, tinned or cured, are 
 not always entirely fitted for human 
 consumption, or that the Chicago method 
 of treating such meats are uncleanly, or 
 that the Chicago idea of industrial effi- 
 ciency is a perverted one. What does 
 concern me is that Chicago is an Ameri- 
 can city, built by Americans, run by 
 Americans, and made lurid by Americans 
 —on pig. 
 
 To suggest to the American reformer 
 that he should take steps for the imme- 
 diate extermination of the pigs in 
 America, steps, in fact, such as have been 
 taken with a view to the extinction of 
 the rabbit in Australia, would be to fill 
 him with horror and amazement. He is 
 all for the amelioration and improve- 
 ment and cleaning up of Chicago ; he 
 does not see that it is the pig and the 
 
106 THE ABOUNDING AMEEICAN 
 
 great American people who are the root 
 trouble. Prohibit the breeding and 
 rearing of pigs throughout the United 
 States, and you will have gone much 
 further towards the cleaning up of 
 Chicago, and, for that matter, the clean- 
 ing up of America, than you are ever 
 likely to get by dealing simply with 
 Chicago itself. So long as there are pigs, 
 so long will Chicago reek. Abolish pigs, 
 and you have abolished the worst 
 features of the world's foulest city. 
 
 The reformer will find that my sugges- 
 tion is an impracticable one. He may 
 even go the length of calling it frivol- 
 ous and ridiculous. But we shall see 
 what we shall see. America will one day 
 either have to forsake pig or come to 
 very bitter grief. She is already in 
 considerable straits as to the marketing 
 of her porcine staples. She has shoved 
 them down the necks of her own people 
 till they can no more. She is pushing 
 them down English throats with all the 
 force that in her lies, and the limit is 
 within a very little way of being reached. 
 Do as one will, one cannot consume 
 more than a certain amount of American 
 pig in the course of the day's deglutition. 
 Europe is taking far more than is good 
 for her even now, and yet the American 
 demand is for bigger s^es and extended 
 markets, to prevent the stuff from rotting 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 107 
 
 at home. The position is unfortunate 
 in quite a number of senses ; but it is 
 precisely what any prescient American 
 ought to have expected. America is 
 overdoing it in the matter of pig, just 
 as she is overdoing it in most other 
 matters. When you have got the 
 measure of people's hunger and purchas- 
 ing capacity you cannot appreciably 
 increase them by any amount of 
 advertising or bluff. 
 
 The Americans boast that they can 
 sell everything appertaining to a pig 
 save and except the squei. I don't 
 wish to frighten them, but it would 
 not surprise me in the least if within 
 the space of a few years the large 
 accumulation of squeals which they 
 must, by this time, have on hand were 
 to arise up as it were, and din their 
 ears in a manner which they will not 
 relish. 
 
 I may remark finally that in spite of 
 everything that Chicago may say and 
 publish in their praise, there can be no 
 question that American pig products 
 are of a most inferior and unappetising 
 quality as compared with the red article. 
 American hog meat exhibits a coarseness 
 of grain and a crudeness of flavour which 
 will incline any person of gustatory dis- 
 crimination to the abstention of the 
 Hebrew. Eggs and bacon constitute 
 
108 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 the English national breakfast dish ; 
 ham and eggs are the sure rock and sup- 
 port of our country inns and cheap 
 restaurants. Both these dishes have, 
 however, fallen into sad disrepute during 
 late years, and I have no hesitation in 
 attributing this grave and heartrending 
 circumstance to the fact that the bacon 
 and ham nowadays served are almost 
 exclusively American. 
 
 The gentlemen from the other side 
 must excuse me if I appear as he would 
 phrase it, “ to tread somewhat too 
 severely on his face ” ; but I really mean 
 him no evil. Rather do I wish him all 
 manner of good. 
 
 Besides which it is one’s duty to be 
 patriotic ; and charity — even in the 
 article of pig — should begin at home. 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 109 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 Verdict 
 
 Before I leave the jury of potent, 
 grave and reverend Britishers to their 
 own reflections on the subject before 
 them, it may be well to indulge in a little 
 summing-up. 
 
 I have shown that the fiery, untame- 
 able American is a creature of more than 
 doubtful antecedents, and that he con- 
 ceals beneath a veneer of smartness and 
 originality several qualities of mind and 
 heart that are not greatly to his credit. I 
 have shown that his destiny would seem 
 to lie in the direction of a reversion to 
 a condition of pseudo-barbarism which 
 will in many respects identify him with 
 the aboriginal possessors of his country. 
 Already the face, features and body of 
 him are becoming plainly Red-Indianised. 
 Already his talk contains hints and 
 suggestions of “ war-paint,'' the war- 
 path," the “ tomahawk " and the getting 
 of “ scalps." If I mistake not the rest is 
 bound soon to follow. 
 
 I have shown also that the American 
 woman, in so far as she is exhibited to us 
 in London,!' and on the Continent of 
 Europe, is a somewhat frivolous female, 
 and not always comely ; smart, possibly. 
 
no THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 and lively, possibly, but on the whole 
 disposed to be too smart and too lively. 
 I have given you a peep at the American 
 millionaire, and found him wanting in 
 everything but money, and not in- 
 variably too well provided with that. I 
 have pointed out that American adver- 
 tising, whether for the sake of gain 
 or of notoriety, is a shameless, blatant 
 and undesirable affair. For the first 
 time in history I have set it on record 
 that the Americans eat too many pea- 
 nuts. I have run the rule over their 
 painful attempts at the dramatic art, and 
 proved that in this important connec- 
 tion they have been responsible for 
 many banahties and futilities, and that 
 their average of performance is far 
 below that of the rest of the theatre- 
 using world. I have demonstrated, also, 
 that their real metier is the giddy tenth- 
 rate circus, ablast with drums and the roar- 
 ing of wild beasts, the snuffling of freaks, 
 and the shrieking mirth of the vulgar. I 
 have paid a passing tribute to the integ- 
 rity and blamelessness of their sportsmen. 
 And I have warned them solemnly 
 about pork. What more can be expected 
 of me ? 
 
 It is more than likely that I shall be 
 told that I have chosen for the subject of 
 my remarks a rather stodgy type of 
 American, which is rapidly giving place 
 
THE ABO UNDING AMERICAN 1 1 1 
 
 to a saner, wholesomer, and pleasanter 
 type, resulting from the spread of culture 
 and a modification of manners on the 
 best European plans. To this I reply 
 that I have spoken of the American 
 exactly as he seems to me to be, and 
 judged him on the numerous samples 
 which have hitherto come my way. 
 That there must be some residuum of 
 sound and serious people in the United 
 States seems pirobable, but I have never 
 been to the United States. 
 
 Can anyone point to anything in the 
 world that America is accomplishing 
 which is purely and simply calculated 
 to serve the highest interests of the human 
 race ? Can you look upon her trusts, 
 her general methods of finance, her 
 social and industrial system, her bosses, 
 her political parties, the administration 
 of her law, her press, her religious 
 mountebanks, her quacks and charlatans 
 of all conditions, and pronounce them 
 to be good ? Is it not the fact that these, 
 in common with pretty well the whole of 
 the remainder of her institutions, are 
 not only defective, but a great deal 
 more defective than one's right to expect 
 in view of the exceptional natural re- 
 sources of the country and her great 
 energy and wealth ? 
 
 You are at liberty to answer these 
 questions in any way you please ; but 
 
112 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 the conviction of myself and a by no 
 means inconsiderable number of other 
 persons will remain the same. 
 
 It is clear that if the Americans are 
 going to take that exalted position among 
 the nations to which they are for ever 
 laying claim, they will be compelled to 
 get rid of a great many excrescences of 
 temperament which they seem now only 
 too busy developing and emphasising 
 by every means in their power. 
 
 Is it possible for them, in the nature 
 of things, so to disencumber them- 
 selves ? 
 
 Will they ever become a really free 
 country, dethrone the millionaire and 
 the boss and acknowledge honesty as a 
 political virtue ? 
 
 Will they ever put silencers on the 
 yellow press and elect a congressional 
 committee to examine the gangrenous 
 decay of their wit and the dropsical 
 growth of their emotions ? 
 
 Will they ever make a point of keeping 
 their women at home and give practical 
 proof of their pride in the peaches by 
 marrying them themselves ? 
 
 Will they ever learn the English lan- 
 guage which was the best thing im- 
 ported in the “ Mayflower '' ? 
 
 Will they ever get rid of the climatic 
 influences that compel them to speak and 
 sing through their noses ? 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 113 
 
 Will they ever quote their astounding 
 President at anything but a discount or 
 realise that he is their greatest national 
 asset ? 
 
 Will they ever place a prohibitive tariff 
 on noise and lynch sensation-mongers 
 as they do niggers ? 
 
 Will their playwrights ever learn the 
 difference between a phonograph record 
 and a play and will their audiences ever 
 learn to appreciate acting when they see 
 it ? 
 
 Will they ever discover that sport is not 
 merely a business of record breaking and 
 that business and football, I class the 
 two together, are not the sports of the 
 stone age in which the vanquished was 
 not only overthrown but subsequently 
 utterly consumed ? 
 
 Will they ever give up pea-nuts ? 
 
 Will they ever cease from the blind 
 cultivation of pork ? 
 
 I trow not. 
 
 And as these chapters are intended a 
 great deal more for the English than for 
 the Americans, I may say here and now 
 that it is the Englishman’s plain duty to 
 himself and to the race to refrain as far" as 
 in him lies from the easy sin of imitation. 
 In his admiration and envy for the 
 magical and almost uncanny successes of 
 his American brother, let him not be 
 
 H 
 
114 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 carried away with the stupid notion that 
 it is possible for him to go forth and do 
 likewise. For one thing, he hasn’t got 
 the climate ; and for another he hasn’t 
 got either the pea-nuts or the pork. 
 
 Let the Englishman, therefore, be con- 
 tent to remain unreservedly and unsophis- 
 ticatedly English. When he sees an Ameri- 
 can adaptation or invasion — whether 
 commercial, social, religious, or other- 
 wise — coming his way, let him frown it 
 down, pass by it and flee from it. Such 
 things may seem simple and in- 
 nocuous and desirable enough in them- 
 selves, they may tickle the imagination, 
 and they may even appear to be for the 
 distinct betterment of mankind. But 
 in the aggregate they must of necessity 
 tend to the Americanisation of this 
 Country — and that is an evil which 
 every Britisher ought to be prepared to 
 make any sacrifice to avoid. 
 
 If any profit worth having is to come 
 out of the present welter it will come by 
 the Anglicisation of America, and not by 
 the Americanisation of England. The 
 Americans themselves recognise the 
 weight and importance of this fact. Some 
 of them are already wearing eye-glasses. 
 They smile in their sleeves at our readiness 
 to adopt the least admirable of their 
 multifarious foolish ways. When an 
 American meets an Englishman who is 
 
THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 115 
 
 trying to run his business or his house- 
 hold or other of his affairs after American 
 models, and particularly when he meets 
 an Englishman who looks upon the 
 Americans as his superiors and masters 
 at the game of life, he is sheerly, if 
 unavowedly, amazed. He knows what 
 America is, he knows in his heart what 
 America means, and if it lay in his power 
 to choose the place to which he will go 
 when he dies, that place would not be 
 Chicago, nor would it be even Paris, 
 but a clean, free, un-Americanised 
 England. 
 
 But with all their usually enormous 
 and often brilliant faults — that amaze, 
 even if they do not stagger humanity — 
 the Americans are a nation of Caesars. 
 In every field of activity they have 
 scored many triumphs. But they are 
 not satisfied with acquisition and con- 
 quest on a colossal scale, they want to 
 surpass all previous records in ancient 
 or modern times. They are endowed 
 with an inherent genius for arriving 
 at their destination, and the destina- 
 tion they have set down for themselves 
 in the national time-table is one in 
 keeping with their vast and great 
 country, whose mission it seems to be 
 to make Europe and the world sit-up. 
 Therefore, within the next decade or 
 two, I should not be surprised to see 
 
116 THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN 
 
 a very much larger splash of purple on 
 the map of the earth — and to see it 
 called the American Empire. 
 
 UNWIN BROS , LTD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND WOKING. 
 
'I 
 

 
OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 
 
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 ABOUNDING 
 
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 BY 
 
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 Author of 
 
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 92 Fleet Street, E.C. 
 1907 
 
 
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