The Twentieth Century American Part 3

Along the whole northern border of the country lies the Dominion of Canada, without, for a distance of some two thousand miles, any visible line of demarcation, so that the American may walk upon the prairie and not know at what moment his foot pa.s.ses from his own soil to the soil of Great Britain. One of the chief lines of railway from New York to Chicago pa.s.ses for half its length over Canadian ground; the effect being precisely as if the Englishman to go from London to Birmingham were to run for half the distance over a corner of France. A large proportion of the produce of the wheat-fields of the North-western States, of Minnesota and the two Dakotas, finds its way to New York over the Canadian Pacific Railway and from New York is s.h.i.+pped, probably in British bottoms, to Liverpool. When the American sails outward from New York or other eastern port, if he goes north he arrives only at Newfoundland or Nova Scotia; if he puts out to southward, the first land that he finds is the Bermudas. If he makes for Europe, it is generally at Liverpool or Southampton that he disembarks. On his very threshold in all directions, lies land over which floats the Union Jack and the same flag flies over half the vessels in the harbours of his own coasts.

It is difficult for the Englishman to understand how near Great Britain has always been to the citizen of the United States, for to the Englishman himself the United States is a distant region, which he does not visit unless of set purpose he makes up his mind to go there. He must undertake a special journey, and a long one, lying apart from his ordinary routes of travel. The American cannot, save with difficulty and by circuitous routes, escape from striking British soil whenever he leaves his home. It confronts him on all sides and bars his way to all the world. Is it to be wondered at that he thinks of Englishmen otherwise than as Englishmen think of him?

Yet this mere matter of geographical proximity is trivial compared to the nearness of Great Britain in other ways.

Commercially--and it must be remembered how large a part matters of commerce play in the life and thoughts of the people of the United States--until recently America traded with the world almost entirely through Great Britain. It is not the produce of the Western wheat-fields only that is carried abroad in British bottoms, but the great bulk of the commerce of the United States must even now find its way to the outer world in s.h.i.+ps which carry the Union Jack, and in doing so must pay the toll of its freight charges to Great Britain. If a New York manufacturer sells goods to South America itself, the chances are that those goods will be s.h.i.+pped to Liverpool and res.h.i.+pped to their destination--each time in British vessels--and the payment therefor will be made by exchange on London, whereby the British banker profits only in less degree than the British s.h.i.+p-owner. In financial matters, New York has had contact with the outer world practically only through London. Until recently, no great corporate enterprise could be floated in America without the a.s.sistance of English capital, so that for years the "British Bondholder," who, by the interest which he drew (or often did not draw) upon his bonds, was supposed to be sucking the life-blood out of the American people, has been, until the trusts arose, the favourite bogey with which the American demagogue has played upon the feelings of his audiences. Now, happily, with more wealth at home, animosity has been diverted to the native trusts.

It is true that of late years the United States has been striking out to win a world-commerce of her own; that by way of the Pacific she is building up a trade free, in part at least, from British domination; that she is making earnest efforts to develop her mercantile marine, so that her own commerce may in some fair measure be carried under her own flag; that New York is fast becoming a financial centre powerful enough to be able to disregard the dictation--and promising ere long to be a rival--of London; that during the last decade, America has been relieving England of vast quant.i.ties of her bonds and shares, heretofore held in London, and that the wealth of her people has increased so rapidly that she can find within herself the capital for her industries and (except in times like the recent panic) need no longer go abroad to beg. It is also true that of recent years England has become not a little uneasy at the growing volume of American trade, even within the borders of the British Isles themselves; but this newly developed uneasiness in British minds, however well grounded, can bear no comparison to the feeling of antagonism towards England--an antagonism compounded of mingled respect and resentment--which Americans of the older generation have had borne in upon them from youth up. To Englishmen, the growing commercial power of the United States is a new phenomenon, not yet altogether recognised and only half-understood; for they have been for so long accustomed to consider themselves the rulers of the sea-borne trade of the world that it is with difficulty that they comprehend that their supremacy can be seriously threatened. To the American, on the other hand, British commercial supremacy has, at least since 1862, been an incontrovertible and disheartening fact. The huge bulk of British commerce and British wealth has loomed so large as to shut out his view of all the world; it has hemmed him in on all sides, obstructed him, towered over him. And all the while, as he grew richer, he has seen that Great Britain only profited the more, by interest on his bonds, by her freight charges, by her profit on exchange. How is it possible that under such conditions the American can think about or feel towards England as the Englishman has thought about and felt towards him?

Yet even now not one half has been told. We have seen that the geographical proximity of Great Britain and the overshadowing bulk of British commerce could not fail--neither separately could fail--to create in American minds an att.i.tude towards England different from the natural att.i.tude of Englishmen towards the United States; but both these influences together, powerful though each may be, are almost unimportant compared to the factor which most of all colours, and must colour, the American's view of Great Britain,--and that is the influence of the history of his own country.

The history of the United States as an independent nation goes back no more than one hundred and thirty years, a s.p.a.ce to be spanned by two human lives; so that events of even her very earliest years are still recent history and the sentiments evoked by those events have not yet had time to die. In the days of the childhood of fathers of men still living (the thing is possible, so recent is it) the nation was born out of the throes of a desperate struggle with Great Britain--a struggle which left the name "British" a word of loathing and contempt to American ears. American history proper begins with hatred of England: nor has there been anything in the course of that history, until the present decade, calculated to tend to modify that hatred in any material degree.

During the nineteenth century, the United States, except for the war with Spain at its close, had little contact with foreign Powers. She lived isolated, concentrating all her energies on the developing of her own resources and the work of civilising a continent. Foreign complications scarcely came within the range of her vision. The Mexican War was hardly a foreign war. The only war with another nation in the whole course of the century was that with Great Britain in 1812.

Reference has already been made to the English ignorance of the War of 1812; but to the American it was the chief event in the foreign politics of his country during the first century and a quarter of its existence, and the Englishman's ignorance thereof moves him either to irritation or to amus.e.m.e.nt according to his temperament. In the American Civil War, British sympathy with the South was unhappily exaggerated in American eyes by the _Alabama_ incident. The North speedily forgave the South; but it has not yet entirely forgiven Great Britain.

The other chief events of American history have nearly all, directly or indirectly, tended to keep Great Britain before the minds of the people as the one foreign Power with whom armed conflict was an ever-present possibility. The cession of her North American territory on the part of France only served to accentuate England's position as the sole rival of the United States upon the continent. Alaska was purchased from Russia; but Russia has long ago been almost forgotten in the transaction while it was with Great Britain that the troublesome question of the Alaskan boundary arose. And through all the years there have been recurring at intervals, not too far apart, various minor causes of friction between the two peoples,--in the Newfoundland fisheries question on the east and the seal fisheries on the west, with innumerable difficulties arising out of the common frontier line on the north or out of British relations (as in the case of Venezuela) with South American peoples.

If an Englishman were asked what had been the chief events in the external affairs of England during the nineteenth century he would say: the Napoleonic wars, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the China, Ashanti, Afghan, Zulu, Soudan, Burmese, and Boer wars, the occupation of Egypt, the general expansion of the Empire in Africa--and what not else besides. He would not mention the United States. To the American the history of his country has chiefly to do with Great Britain.

Just as geographically British territory surrounds and abuts on the United States on almost every side; just as commercially Great Britain has always hemmed in, dominated, and overshadowed the United States, so, historically, Great Britain has been the one and constant enemy, actual or potential, and her power a continual menace. How is it possible that the American should think of England as the Englishman thinks of the United States?

There have, moreover, been constantly at work in America forces the chief object of which has been to keep alive hostility to Great Britain.

Of native Americans who trace their family back to colonial days, there are still some among the older generation in whom the old hatred of the Revolutionary War yet burns so strongly that they would not, when at work on the old family farm in, let us say, Vermont, be very seriously surprised on some fine morning to see a party of red-coated Hessians come round the angle of the hill. There are those living whose chief pastime as boys was to fight imaginary battles with the loathed British in and out among the old farm-buildings--buildings which yet bear upon them, perhaps, the marks of real British bullets fired in the real war.[57:1] And those boys, moving West as they came to manhood, carried the same spirit, the same inherited dislike of the name "British," into the cities of the Mississippi Valley, across the prairies and over the mountains to the Pacific slope. But it is not the real American--except one here and there on the old New England homestead--who talks much of his anti-British feeling. It is the imported American who has refused to allow the old hostility to die but has kept pouring contumely on the British name and insisted on the incorporation of an "anti-British"

plank in his party platform to catch the votes of the citizens of his own nationality at each succeeding election.

Englishmen are generally aware of the importance in American politics of the Irish vote. It is probable, indeed, that, particularly as far as the conditions of the last few years are concerned, the importance of that vote has been magnified to the English mind. In certain localities, and more particularly in a few of the larger cities, it is still, of course, an important factor by its mere numbers; but even in the cities in which the Irish vote is still most in evidence at elections, the influx during the past decade from all parts of Europe of immigrants who in the course of the five-years term become voters has, of necessity, lessened its relative importance.

In New York City, for instance, through which pa.s.s annually some nineteen twentieths of all the immigrants coming into the country, the foreign elements other than Irish--German, Italian (mainly from the less educated portions of the Peninsula), Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Roumanian, etc.,--now far outnumber the Irish. In New York, indeed, the Germans are alone more numerous; but the Irish have always shown a larger interest in, and a greater capacity for, political action, so that they still retain an influence out of all proportion to their voting number. On the other hand the Irish, or their leaders, have maintained so corrupt a standard of political action (so that a large proportion of the evils from which the affairs of certain of the larger American cities suffer to-day may be justly charged to their methods and influence) that it is uncertain whether their abuse of Great Britain does not, in the minds of certain, and those not the worst, cla.s.ses of the people react rather to create good-will towards England than to increase hostility.

The power of the Irish vote as an anti-British force, then, is undoubtedly overrated in England; but it must be borne in mind that some of the other foreign elements in the population which on many questions may act as a counterpoise to the Irish are not themselves conspicuously friendly to England. If we hear too much of the Irish in America, we hear perhaps too little of some of the other peoples. And the point which I would impress on the English reader is that he cannot expect the American to feel towards England as he himself feels towards the United States. The American people came in the first instance justly by its hatred of the name "British," and there have not since been at work any forces sufficiently powerful to obliterate that hatred, while there have been some operating to keep it alive.

FOOTNOTES:

[36:1] _The Americans_, by Hugo Munsterberg, 1905.

[38:1] _America To-day_, by William Archer (1900). Mr. Archer's study of the American people is in my opinion the most sympathetic and comprehending which has been written by an Englishman.

[41:1] The battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812, is not one of those incidents in English history which Englishmen generally insist on remembering, and it may be as well to explain to English readers that it was on that occasion that an inferior force of American riflemen (a "backwoods rabble" a British officer called them before the engagement) repulsed a British attack, from behind improvised earthworks, with a loss to the attacking force of 3300 killed and wounded, and at a cost to themselves of 13 wounded and 8 killed--or 21 casualties in all. Of the Forty-fourth (Ess.e.x) Regiment 816 men went into action, and after less than thirty minutes 134 were able to line up. The Ninety-third (Sutherland) Highlanders suffered even more severely. Of 1008 officers and men only 132 came out unhurt. The battle was fought after peace had been concluded, so that the lives were thrown away to no purpose. The British had to deliver a direct frontal attack over level ground, penned in by a lake on one side and a swamp on the other. It was the same lesson, in even bloodier characters, as was taught on several occasions in South Africa.

[44:1] _Presidential Problems_, by Grover Cleveland, p. 281 (New York, 1904).

[57:1] I had written this before reading Senator h.o.a.r's Reminiscences in which, in speaking of his own youth, he tells how "Every boy imagined himself a soldier and his highest conception of glory was to 'lick the British'" (_An Autobiography of Seventy Years_).

CHAPTER III

TWO SIDES OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER

Europe's Undervaluation of America's Fighting Power--The Americans as Sailors--The Nation's Greatest a.s.set--Self-reliance of the People--The Making of a Doctor--And of a Surveyor-- Society in the Rough--New York and the Country--An Anglo-Saxon Trait--America's Unpreparedness--American Consuls and Diplomats--A h.o.m.ogeneous People--The Value of a Common Speech--America more Anglo-Saxon than Britain--Mr. Wells and the Future in America.

One circ.u.mstance ought in itself to convince Americans that cowardice or fear has no share in the greater outspokenness of England's good-will during these later years, namely that when Great Britain showed her sympathy with the United States at the time of the Spanish War, Englishmen largely believed that they were giving that sympathy to the weaker Power,[60:1]--weaker, that is as far as organised fighting strength, immediately available, was concerned. It is a century or two since Englishmen did Spain the compliment of being afraid of her. How then, in 1895, could they have had any fear of the United States?

Few Europeans, indeed, have any conception of the fighting power of the United States, for it is not large on paper. Nor is an Englishman likely to make special allowance for the fighting efficiency of either the s.h.i.+ps or the men, for the reason that, in spite of experiences which might have bred misgivings (English memory for such matters is short), it remains to him unthinkable that, in the last resort, any men or still less any s.h.i.+ps will prove--man for man and gun for gun--better than his own. He might be glad to concede that 25,000 American troops are the equivalent of 50,000 Germans or 100,000 Cossacks, or that two American men of war should be counted as the equivalent of three Italian. He makes no such concession when it comes to a comparison with British troops or British s.h.i.+ps. What then can there be in the fighting strength of the United States, for all the figures that she has to show, to breed in him a suggestion of fear?

This is a statement which will irritate many a patriotic American, who will say that it is the same old British superciliousness. But it should not irritate; and if the American understood the Englishman better and the spirit which inspires him, he would like it. The Englishman prefers not to regard the American troops or s.h.i.+ps as potentially hostile, and Great Britain has sufficient to do in measuring the strength of her possible enemies. As for the people of the United States, he opines that they know their own business. They are best able to judge how many s.h.i.+ps and how many men under arms will serve their purpose. England would, indeed, be glad to see the United States with a few more s.h.i.+ps than she has, but--it is none of England's business. Englishmen can only wish her luck and hope that she is making no mistake in her calculations and go on about their own affairs, which are pressing enough. At the same time if the United States should prove to have miscalculated and should ever need . . .--well, England has a s.h.i.+p or two herself.

It would be a gain for the world if Americans would only understand!

The Englishman of the present generation knows practically nothing of the Americans as a maritime nation; and again let me say that this arises not from superciliousness or any intentional neglect, but merely from the fact that the matter is one beyond his horizon. He is so familiar with the fact that Britain rules the waves that he has no notion that whenever opportunity of comparison has offered the Americans have generally shown themselves (if there has been anything to choose) the better sailors of the two. Every English reader will probably read that sentence again to see if he has not misunderstood it. The truth is that Englishmen have forgotten the incidents of the Revolutionary War almost as completely as they have forgotten those of the War of 1812; Paul Jones is as meaningless a name to them as Andrew Jackson. While it is true that American historians have given the American people, up to the present generation, an unfortunately exaggerated idea of the heroism of the patriot forces and have held the British troops up to all manner of unmerited odium, it is also true that English historians, while the less partial of the two, have perhaps been over-careful not to err in the same direction. Not until the last twenty years--hardly until the last four or five--have there been accessible to the public of the two countries the materials for forming a just judgment on the incidents of the war. It must be confessed that there is at least nothing in the evidence to permit the Englishman to think that a hundred years ago the home-bred Briton could either sail or fight his s.h.i.+ps better than the Colonial. Nor has the Englishman as a rule any idea that in the middle of the nineteenth century the American commercial flag was rapidly ousting the British flag from the seas. Even with a knowledge of the facts, it is still hard for us to-day to comprehend.

So amazing was the growth of the mercantile marine of the young republic--such qualities did the Americans show as s.h.i.+pbuilders, as sailors, and as merchants--that in 1860, the American mercantile marine was greater in tonnage and number of vessels than that of all other nations of the world combined, except Great Britain, and almost equal to that of Great Britain herself. These were of course the days of glory of the American clipper. It appeared then inevitable that in a few years the Stars and Stripes--a flag but little more than half a century old--would be the first commercial flag of the world; and but for the outbreak of the Civil War, it is at least probable that by now Englishmen would have grown accustomed to recognising that not they but another people were the real lords of the ocean's commerce. When the Civil War broke out, the tonnage of American registered vessels was something over five and one-half millions; and when the war closed it was practically non-existent. The North was able to draw from its merchant service for the purposes of war no fewer than six hundred vessels of an aggregate tonnage of over a million and carrying seventy thousand men. Those s.h.i.+ps and men went a long way towards turning the tide of victory to the North; but when peace was made the American commercial flag had disappeared from the seas.

It would be out of place here to go into a statement of the causes which co-operated with the subst.i.tution of iron for wood in s.h.i.+pbuilding to make it hard at first for America to regain her lost position, or into a discussion of the incomprehensible apathy (incomprehensible if one did not know the ways of American legislation) which successive Congresses have shown in the matter.

A year or so back, the nation seemed to have made up its mind in earnest to take hold of the problem of the restoration of its commercial marine; but the defeat in the early part of 1907 of the s.h.i.+p Subsidies Bill left the situation much where it was when President Grant, President Harrison, and President McKinley, in turn, attempted to arouse Congress to the necessity of action; except that with the pa.s.sage of time conditions only become worse and reform necessarily more difficult. The s.h.i.+p Subsidies Bill was defeated largely by the votes of the representatives of the Mississippi Valley and the Middle Western States, and to an outsider the opposition of those regions looked very much like a manifestation of selfishness and lack of patriotism, on the part of the inland population jealous of the seaboard States. In the East, various reasons were given at the time for the failure of the measure. I happened myself to be travelling then through the States of the Mississippi Valley, and I discussed the situation with people whom I met, and particularly with politicians. The explanations which I received fell into one of two categories. Some said: "It is true that the Mississippi Valley and the West have little direct interest in our s.h.i.+pbuilding industry, but none the less we should like to see our merchant marine encouraged and built up. The trouble is that we have from experience acquired a profound distrust of a certain 'gang' in the Senate [and here would often follow the names of certain four or five well-known Senators, chiefly from the East], and the mere fact that these Senators were backing this particular bill was enough to convince us Westerners that it included a 'steal.'"

Others took this ground: "The Mississippi Valley and the West believe in the general principle of Protection, but we think that our legislation has carried this principle far enough. We should now prefer to see a little easing off. We do not believe that the right way to develop our commercial marine is, first by our tariff laws to make it impossible for us to build or operate s.h.i.+ps in compet.i.tion with other countries and then to be obliged, in order to equalise things, to have recourse to bounties. What we want is a modification of our law which will help us, in the first instance, to build and to run the s.h.i.+ps at a reasonable price. When a bill to that effect comes along, the Mississippi Valley will be found all right."

Not a few of the voters in the East, also cordially interested in any plan that seemed to them promising and equitable for building up the American commercial marine, took the ground that it was an absurdity to build up barriers against foreign trade by enacting a tariff bill, such as the Dingley measure, with higher duties than the country had ever known, and then to attempt to overcome that barrier by means of bounty measures, which must themselves const.i.tute a fresh form of taxation on the general public.

The ma.s.s of the people, in fact, are in sympathy with the movement to encourage American s.h.i.+pping, but, for sectional or other reasons, a large proportion of them objected to the particular form in which the end was sought to be reached in the last Congress. So long as the voice and opinion of Mr. Roosevelt have any weight, it is not to be expected that the subject is going to be allowed to drop; and with his strength of will and determination of character it is at least not improbable that, where successive Presidents before him have failed, he will, whether still in the Presidential chair or not, ultimately succeed, and that not the smallest of the reasons for grat.i.tude to him which future generations of Americans will recognise will be that he helped to recreate the nation's merchant marine. At present, less than nine percent of the American foreign commerce is carried in American bottoms, a situation which is not only sufficiently humiliating to a people who but a short while ago hoped to dominate the carrying trade of all countries but also, what perhaps hurts the Americans almost as much as the injury to their pride, absurdly wasteful and unbusinesslike.

English s.h.i.+pping circles may take the prospect of efforts being made by the United States to recover some measure of its lost prestige seriously or not: but it would be inadvisable to admit as a factor in their calculations any theory as to the inability of the Americans either to build s.h.i.+ps or sail them as well as the best. With the growth of an American merchant marine--if a growth comes--will come also the obvious need of a larger navy; and other nations might do well to remember that Americans have never yet shown any inability to fight their s.h.i.+ps, any more than they have to build or sail them.

In basing any estimate of the fighting strength of the United States on the figures of her army or navy as they look on paper, the people of other nations--Englishmen no less than any--leave out of sight, because they have no standard for measuring, that remarkable attribute of the American character, which is the greatest of the national a.s.sets, the combination of self-reliance and resourceful ingenuity which seems to make the individual American equal to almost any fortune. It is remarkable, but not beyond explanation. It is an essentially Anglo-Saxon trait. The British have always possessed it in a degree, if inferior to the present day American, at least in excess of other peoples. The history of the Empire bears witness to it on every page and it is in truth one of the most fundamentally English things in the American character. But the conditions of their life have developed it in Americans beyond any need which the Englishman has felt. The latter, living at home amid the established inst.i.tutions of a society which moves on its way evenly and without friction regardless of any effort or action on his part, has had no occasion for those qualities on which the American's success, his life, have commonly depended from day to day amid the changing emergencies of a frontier life. The American of any generation previous to that which is now growing up has seldom known what it meant to choose a profession or a vocation in life; but must needs do the work that came to him, and, without apprentices.h.i.+p or training, turn to whatever craft has offered.

The notion that every American is, without any special training, by mere gift of birthright, competent to any task that may be set him, is commonly said to have come in with Andrew Jackson; and President Eliot, of Harvard, has dubbed it a "vulgar conceit."[68:1] It is undoubtedly a dangerous doctrine to become established as a tenet of national belief and least of all men can the head of a great inst.i.tution for the training of the nation's youth afford to encourage it. None the less, when the American character is compared with that of any European people, it has, if not justification, at least considerable excuse.

Once into a new mining camp in the West there drove in the same "stage-coach" two young men who became friends on the journey. Each was out to seek his fortune and each hoped to find it in the new community.

Each had his belongings in a "valise" and in each "valise" among those belongings was a "s.h.i.+ngle," or name-plate, bearing each the name of its respective owner followed by the words "Attorney at Law." The young men compared their s.h.i.+ngles and considered. The small camp would not need two lawyers, even if it would provide a living for one. So they "matched" coins (the American equivalent of tossing up) to see which of the two should erase "Attorney at Law" from his sign and subst.i.tute "Doctor of Medicine." Which is history; as also is the following:

In another mining camp, some twenty-three years ago, there was at first no surveyor. Men paced off the boundaries of their claims and went to work as fancy inclined them, and in the town which began to grow up houses were built at random regardless of any street-line and with no finnicking considerations of a building frontage. So a young fellow whose claim was unpromising sent out to civilisation for a set of instruments (he had never seen a transit or a level before) and began business as a surveyor. He used to come to me secretly that I might figure out for him the cubic contents of a ditch or the superficial area of a wall. He could barely write and knew no arithmetic at all; but he worked most of the night as well as all the day, and when the town took to itself a form of organised government he was appointed official surveyor and within a few weeks thereafter was made surveyor to the county. I doubt not that G---- T---- is rich and prosperous to-day.

On a certain wharf, no matter where, lounged half a dozen seamen when to them came the owner of a vessel. It was in the days of '49 when anything that could be made to float was being put into commission in the California trade, and men who could navigate were scarce.

"Can any of you men" said the newcomer "take a boat out for me to San Francisco?"

"I'll do it, sir" said one stepping forward.

"Thunder, Bill!" exclaimed a comrade in an undertone, "you don't know nothing about navigating."