(IFT2EI cAVENjJE, NEW YORK
THE
FUTURE IN AMERICA
A SEARCH AFTER REALITIES
BY
H. G. WELLS
AUTHOR OP
'ANTICIPATIONS" "THE WAR OP THE WORLDS
"THIRTY STRANGE STORIES" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
-
BOOKS BY
H. G. WELLS
SOCIAL FORCES IX ENGLAND AND AMERICA
Crown Svo
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS. Illustrated. Svo
ANN VERONICA. Illustrated Post Svo
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. Post Svo
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA. Illustrated. Svo
THE INVISIBLE MAN. Post Svo
THIRTY STRANGE STORIES Post Svo
WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES
Illustrated. Post Svo
ANTICIPATIONS. Post Svo
SOCIALISM AND THE GREAT STATE (Wells
and others). Svo
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
Copyright, 1906, by HARPHR & BROTHERS.
Published November, 1906.
Printed, in the United States of America
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE PROPHETIC HABIT OP MIND i
II. MATERIAL PROGRESS 21
III. NEW YORK 35
IV. GROWTH INVINCIBLE 49
V. THE ECONOMIC PROCESS 68
VI. SOME ASPECTS OP AMERICAN WEALTH .... 88
VII. CERTAIN WORKERS 104
VIII. CORRUPTION 116
IX. THE IMMIGRANT 133
X. STATE-BLINDNESS 152
XI. Two STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT 167
XII. THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR 185
XIII. THE MIND OP A MODERN STATE 203
XIV. CULTURE 223
XV. AT WASHINGTON 236
THE ENVOY 254
423890
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK Frontispiece
ENTRANCE TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE Facing p. 38
STATE STREET, CHICAGO " 62
WESTERN FARMERS STILL OWN THEIR FARMS ... " 82
PLUMP AND PRETTY PUPILS OF EXTRAVAGANCE . . " 90
NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE ... " 106
BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY . . 112
INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING ... " 124
WHERE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE AMERICANIZED . " 148
HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE " 214
A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY " 2l6
IN THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY " 238
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
CHAPTER I
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
(At a writing-desk in Sandgate)
"ARE you a Polygamist ?"
The Question "Are you an Anarchist?'*
The questions seem impertinent.
They are part of a long paper of interrogations I
must answer satisfactorily if I am to be regarded
as a desirable alien to enter the United States of
America. I want very much to pass that great
statue of Liberty illuminating the World (from a
central position in New York Harbor), in order to
see things in its light, to talk to certain people, to
appreciate certain atmospheres, and so I resist the
provocation to answer impertinently. I do not
even volunteer that I do not smoke and am a total
abstainer; on which points it would seem the States
as a whole still keep an open mind. I am full of
curiosity about America, I am possessed by a prob-
^ THE1 FUTURE IN AMERICA
lem I feel I cannot adequately discuss even with
myself except over there, and I must go even at
the price of coming to a decision upon the theoreti
cally open questions these two inquiries raise.
My problem I know will seem ridiculous and
monstrous when I give it in all its stark dispropor
tions — attacked by me with my equipment it will
call up an image of an elephant assailed by an
ant who has not even mastered Jiu-jitsu — but at
any rate I've come to it in a natural sort of way
and it is one I must, for my own peace of mind,
make some kind of attempt upon, even if at last it
means no more than the ant crawling in an explora
tory way hither and thither over that vast uncon
scious carcass and finally getting down and going
away. That may be rather good for the ant, and
the experience may be of interest to other ants,
however infinitesimal from the point of view of the
elephant, the final value of his investigation may
be. And this tremendous problem in my case and
now in this — simply; What is going to happen to
the United States of America in the next thirty
years or so?
I do not know if the reader has ever happened
upon any books or writings of mine before, but if,
what is highly probable, he has not, he may be curi
ous to know how it is that any human being should
be running about in so colossally an interrogative
state of mind. (For even the present inquiry is
by no means my maximum limit). And the ex-
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
planation is to be found a little in a mental idiosyn
crasy perhaps, but much more in the development
of a special way of thinking, of a habit of mind.
That habit of mind may be indicated by a prop
osition that, with a fine air of discovery, I threw
out some years ago, in a happy ignorance that I
had been anticipated by no less a person than
Heraclitus. "There is no Being but Becoming,"
that was what appeared to my unscholarly mind to
be almost triumphantly new. I have since then
informed myself more fully about Heraclitus, there
are moments now when I more than half suspect
that all the thinking I shall ever do will simply
serve to illuminate my understanding of him, but
at any rate that apothegm of his does exactly con
vey the intellectual attitude into which I fall. I
am curiously not interested in things, and curiously
interested in the consequences of things. I wouldn't
for the world go to see the United States for what
they are — if I had sound reason for supposing that
the entire western hemisphere was to be destroyed
next Christmas, I should not, I think, be among the
4multitude that would rush for one last look at that
great spectacle, — from which it follows naturally
that I don't propose to see Niagara. I should much
more probably turn an inquiring visage eastward,
with the west so certainly provided for. I have
come to be, I am afraid, even a little insensitive
to fine immediate things through this anticipatory
habit.
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
This habit of mind confronts and perplexes my
sense of things that simply are, with my brooding
preoccupation with how they will shape presently,
what they will lead to, what seed they will sow and
how they will wear. At times, I can assure the
reader, this quality approaches otherworldliness, in
its constant reference to an all-important here
after. There are times indeed when it makes life
seem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving,
so passing on to an equally transitory series of con
sequences, that the enhanced sense of instability
becomes restlessness and distress; but on the other
hand nothing that exists, nothing whatever, re
mains altogether vulgar or dull and dead or hopeless
in its light. But the interest is shifted. The pomp
and splendor of established order, the braying tri
umphs, ceremonies, consummations, one sees these
glittering shows for what they are — through their
threadbare grandeur shine the little significant things
that will make the future. . . .
And now that I am associating myself with great
names, let me discover that I find this characteristic
turn of mind of mine, not only in Heraclitus, the
most fragmentary of philosophers, but for one fine
passage at any rate, in Mr. Henry James, the least
fragmentary of novelists. In his recent impressions
of America I find him apostrophizing the great
mansions of Fifth Avenue, in words quite after my
heart ; —
"It's all very well," he writes, "for you to look
4
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
as if, since you've had no past, you're going in, as
the next best thing, for a magnificent compensatory
future. What are you going to make your future
of, for all your airs, we want to know? What ele
ments of a future, as futures have gone in the great
world, are at all assured to you?"
I had already when I read that, figured myself
as addressing if not these particular last triumphs
of the fine Transatlantic art of architecture, then
at least America in general in some such words. It
is not unpleasant to be anticipated by the chief
Master of one's craft, it is indeed, when one reflects
upon his peculiar intimacy with this problem, enor
mously reassuring, and so I have very gladly an
nexed his phrasing and put it here to honor and
adorn and in a manner to explain my own enter
prise. I have already studied some of these fine
buildings through the mediation of an illustrated
magazine — they appear solid, they appear wonder
ful and well done to the highest pitch — and before
many days now I shall, I hope, reconstruct that
particular moment, stand — the latest admirer from
England — regarding these portentous magnificences,
from the same sidewalk — will they call it? — as my
illustrious predecessor, and with his question ring
ing in my mind all the louder for their proximity,
and the universally acknowledged invigoration of
the American atmosphere. "What are you going
to make your future of, for all your airs?"
And then I suppose I shall return to crane my
5
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
neck at the Flat-Iron Building or the Times sky
scraper, and ask all that too, an identical question.
ii
CERTAIN phases in the development
Philosophical of these prophetic exercises one may
perhaps be permitted to trace.
To begin with, I remember that to me in my boy
hood speculation about the Future was a monstrous
joke. Like most people of my generation I was
launched into life with millennial assumptions. This
present sort of thing, I believed, was going on for
a time, interesting personally perhaps but as a
whole inconsecutive, and then — it might be in my
lifetime or a little after it — there would be trumpets
and shoutings and celestial phenomena, a battle of
Armageddon and the Judgment. As I saw it, it
was to be a strictly protestant and individualistic
judgment, each soul upon its personal merits. To
talk about the Man of the Year Million was of course
in the face of this great conviction, a whimsical
play of fancy. The Year Million was just as im
possible, just as gayly nonsensical as fairy-land. . . .
I was a student of biology before I realized that
this, my finite and conclusive End, at least in the
material and chronological form, had somehow
vanished from the scheme of things. In the place
of it had come a blackness and a vagueness about
6
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
the endless vista of years ahead, that was tremen
dous — that terrified. That is a phase in which lots
of educated people remain to this day. "All this
scheme of things, life, force, destiny which began not
six thousand years, mark you, but an infinity ago,
that has developed out of such strange weird shapes
and incredible first intentions, out of gaseous nebulas,
carboniferous swamps, saurian giantry and arboreal
apes, is by the same tokens to continue, developing
— into what?" That was the overwhelming riddle
that came to me, with that realization of an End
averted, that has come now to most of our world.
The phase that followed the first helpless stare of
the mind was a wild effort to express one's sudden
apprehension of unlimited possibility. One made
fantastic exaggerations, fantastic inversions of all
recognized things. Anything of this sort might
come, anything of any sort. The books about the
future that followed the first stimulus of the world's
realization of the implications of Darwinian science,
have all something of the monstrous experimental
imaginings of children. I myself, in my microcos-
mic way, duplicated the times. Almost the first
thing I ever wrote — it survives in an altered form
as one of a bookful of essays, — was of this type;
"The Man of the Year Million," was presented as a
sort of pantomime head and a shrivelled body, and
years after that, the Time Machine, my first pub
lished book, ran in the same vein. At that point,
at a brief astonished stare down the vistas of time-
7
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
to-come, at something between wonder and amazed,
incredulous, defeated laughter, most people, I think,
stop. But those who are doomed to the prophetic
habit of mind go on.
The next phase, the third phase, is to shorten the
range of the outlook, to attempt something a little
more proximate than the final destiny of man. One
becomes more systematic, one sets to work to trace
the great changes of the last century or so, and one
produces these in a straight line and according to
the rule of three. If the maximum velocity of land
travel in 1800 was twelve miles an hour and in
1900 (let us say) sixty miles an hour, then one con
cludes that in 2000 A.D. it will be three hundred miles
an hour. If the population of America in 1800 —
but I refrain from this second instance. In that
fashion one got out a sort of gigantesque caricature
of the existing world, everything swollen to vast
proportions and massive beyond measure. In my
case that phase produced a book, When the Sleeper
Wakes, in which, I am told, by competent New-
Yorkers, that I, starting with London, an unbiassed
mind, this rule-of -three method and my otherwise
unaided imagination, produced something more
like Chicago than any other place wherein righteous
men are likely to be found. That I shall verify in
due course, but my present point is merely that to
write such a book is to discover how thoroughly
wrong this all too obvious method of enlarging the
present is.
8
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
One goes on therefore — if one is to succumb alto
gether to the prophetic habit — to a really "scien
tific" attack upon the future. The " scientific"
phase is not final, but it is far more abundantly
fruitful than its predecessors. One attempts a rude
wide analysis of contemporary history, one seeks
to clear and detach operating causes and to work
them out, and so, combining this necessary set of
consequences with that, to achieve a synthetic fore
cast in terms just as broad and general and vague
as the causes considered are few. I made, it hap
pens, an experiment in this scientific sort of proph
ecy in a book called Anticipations, and I gave
an altogether excessive exposition and defence of
it, I went altogether too far in this direction, in a
lecture to the Royal Institution, "The Discovery of
the Future," that survives in odd corners as a pam
phlet, and is to be found, like a scrap of old news
paper in the roof gutter of a museum, in Nature
(vol. LXV., p. 326) and in the Smithsonian Report
(for 1902). Within certain limits, however, I still
believe this scientific method is sound. It gives
sound results in many cases, results at any rate as
sound as those one gets from the "laws" of political
economy; one can claim it really does effect a sort
of prophecy on the material side of life.
For example, it was quite obvious about 1899
that invention and enterprise were very busy with
the means of locomotion, and one could deduce
from that certain practically inevitable consequences
9
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
in the distribution of urban populations. With
easier, quicker means of getting about there were
endless reasons, hygienic, social, economic, why peo
ple should move from the town centres towards
their peripheries, and very few why they should
not. The towns one inferred therefore, would get
slacker, more diffused, the country-side more urban.
From that, from the spatial widening of personal
interests that ensued, one could infer certain changes
in the spirits of local politics, and so one went on to
a number of fairly valid adumbrations. Then again
starting from the practical supersession in the long
run of all unskilled labor by machinery one can work
out with a pretty fair certainty many coming social
developments, and the broad trend of one group of
influences at least from the moral attitude of the
mass of common people. In industry, in domestic
life again, one foresees a steady development of
complex appliances, demanding, and indeed in an
epoch of frequently changing methods forcing, a
flexible understanding, versatility of effort, a uni
versal rising standard of education. So too a study
of military methods and apparatus convinces one
of the necessary transfer of power in the coming
century from the ignorant and enthusiastic masses
who made the revolutions of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and won Napoleon his wars,
to any more deliberate, more intelligent and more
disciplined class that may possess an organized pur
pose. But where will one find that class? There
10
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
comes a question that goes outside science, that
takes one at once into a field beyond the range of
the "scientific" method altogether.
So long as one adopts the assumptions of the
old political economist and assumes men without
idiosyncrasy, without prejudices, without, as peo
ple say, wills of their own, so long as one imagines
a perfectly acquiescent humanity that will always
in the long run under pressure liquefy and stream
along the line of least resistance to its own material
advantage, the business of prophecy is easy. But
from the first I felt distrust for that facility in
prophesying, I perceived that always there lurked
something, an incalculable opposition to these
mechanically conceived forces, in law, in usage and
prejudice, in the poietic power of exceptional in
dividual men. I discovered for myself over again,
the inseparable nature of the two functions of the
prophet. In my Anticipations, for example, I had
intended simply to work out and foretell, and be
fore I had finished I was in a fine full blast of
exhortation. . . .
That by an easy transition brought me to the
last stage in the life history of the prophetic mind,
as it is at present known to me. One comes out on
the other side of the " scientific" method, into the
large temperance, the valiant inconclusiveness, the
released creativeness of philosophy. Much may be
foretold as certain, much more as possible, but the
last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
hearts and wills of unique incalculable men. With
them we have to deal as our ultimate reality in all
these matters, and our methods have to be not
"scientific" at all for all the greater issues, the
humanly important issues, but critical, literary,
even if you will — artistic. Here insight is of more
account than induction and the perception of fine
tones than the counting of heads. vScience deals
with necessity and necessity is here but the firm
ground on which our freedom goes. One passes
from affairs of predestination to affairs of free will.
This discovery spread at once beyond the field
of prophesying. The end, the aim, the test of
science, as a model man understands the word, is
foretelling by means of "laws," and my error in
attempting a complete "scientific" forecast of
human affairs arose in too careless an assent to the
ideas about me, and from accepting uncritically
such claims as that history should be "scientific,"
and that economics and sociology (for example)
are "sciences." Directly one gauges the fuller im
plications of that uniqueness of individuals Darwin's
work has so permanently illuminated, one passes
beyond that. The ripened prophet realizes Scho
penhauer — as indeed I find Professor Munsterberg
saying. "The deepest sense of human affairs is
reached," he writes, "when we consider them not
as appearances but as decisions." There one has
the same thing coming to meet one from the psy
chological side. . . .
12
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
But my present business isn't to go into this
shadowy, metaphysical foundation world on which
our thinking rests, but to the brightly lit overworld
of America. This philosophical excursion is set
here just to prepare the reader quite frankly for
speculations and to disabuse his mind of the idea
that in writing of the Future in America I'm going
to write of houses a hundred stories high and flying-
machines in warfare and things like that. I am
not going to America to work a pretentious horo
scope, to discover a Destiny, but to find out what
I can of what must needs make that Destiny, — a
great nation's Will.
in
THE material factors in a nation's
TAenSa°f future are subordinate factors, they
present advantages, such as the easy
access of the English to coal and the sea, or dis
advantages, such as the ice-bound seaboard of the
Russians, but these are the circumstances and not
necessarily the rulers of its fate. The essential
factor in the destiny of a nation, as of a man and
of mankind, lies in the form of its will and in the
quality and quantity of its will. The drama of a
nation's future, as of a man's, lies in this conflict of
its will with what would else be "scientifically"
predictable, materially inevitable. If the man, if
the nation was an automaton fitted with good
T3
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
average motives, so and so, one could say exactly,
would be done. It's just where the thing isn't
automatic that our present interest comes in.
I might perhaps reverse the order of the three
aspects of will I have named, for manifestly where
the quantity of will is small, it matters nothing what
the form or quality. The man or the people that
wills feebly is the sport of every circumstance, and
there if anywhere the scientific method holds truest
or even altogether true. Do geographical positions
or mineral resources make for riches? Then such
a people will grow insecurely and disastrously
rich. Is an abundant prolific life at a low level in
dicated? They will pullulate and suffer. If cir
cumstances make for a choice between comfort and
reproduction, your feeble people will dwindle and
pass ; if war, if conquest tempt them then they will
turn from all preoccupations and follow the drums.
Little things provoke their unstable equilibrium,
to hostility, to forgiveness. . . .
And be it noted that the quantity of will in a
nation is not necessarily determined by adding up
the wills of all its people. I am told, and I am dis
posed to believe it, that the Americans of the United
States are a people of great individual force of will,
the clear strong faces of many young Americans,
something almost Roman in the faces of their states
men and politicians, a distinctive quality I detect
in such Americans as I have met, a quality of sharp
ly cut determination even though it be only about
14
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
details and secondary things, that one must rouse
one's self to meet, inclines me to give a provisional
credit to that, but how far does all this possible will-
force aggregate to a great national purpose? — what
algebraically does it add up to when this and that
have cancelled each other? That may be a differ
ent thing altogether.
And next to this net quantity of will a nation or
people may possess, come the questions of its qual
ity, its flexibility, its consciousness and intellectual
ity. A nation may be full of will and yet inflexibly
and disastrously stupid in the expression of that
will. There was probably more will-power, more
haughty and determined self-assertion in the young
bull that charged the railway engine than in several
regiments of men, but it was after all a low quality
of will with no method but a violent and injudicious
directness, and in the end it was suicidal and futile.
There again is the substance for ramifying Enquiries.
How subtle, how collected and patient, how far
capable of a long plan, is this American nation?
Suppose it has a will so powerful and with such re
sources that whatever simple end may be attained
by rushing upon it is America's for the asking, there
still remains the far more important question of the
ends that are not obvious, that are intricate and
complex and not to be won by booms and cata
clysms of effort.
An Englishman comes to think that most of the
permanent and precious things for which a nation's
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
effort goes are like that, and here too I have an open
mind and unsatisfied curiosities.
And lastly there is the form of the nation's pur
pose. I have been reading what I can find about
that in books for some time, and now I want to
cross over the Atlantic, more particularly for that,
to question more or less openly certain Americans,
not only men and women, but the mute expressive
presences of house and appliance, of statue, flag
and public building, and the large collective visages
of crowds, what it is all up to, what it thinks it is
all after, how far it means to escape or improve
upon its purely material destinies? I want over
there to find whatever consciousness or vague con
sciousness of a common purpose there may be,
what is their Vision, their American Utopia, how
much will there is shaping to attain it, how much
capacity goes with the will — what, in short, there is
in America, over and above the mere mechanical
consequences of scattering multitudes of energetic
Europeans athwart a vast healthy, productive and
practically empty continent in the temperate zone.
There you have the terms of reference of an enquiry,
that is I admit (as Mr. Morgan Richards the emi
nent advertisement agent would say), "mammoth
in character."
The American reader may very reasonably in
quire at this point why an Englishman does not
begin with the future of his own country. The
answer is that this particular one has done so, and
16
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
that in many ways he has found his intimacy and
proximity a disadvantage. One knows too much
of the things that seem to matter and that ulti
mately don't, one is full of misleading individual
instances intensely seen, one can't see the wood for
the trees. One comes to America at last, not only
with the idea of seeing America, but with some
thing more than an incidental hope of getting one's
own England there in the distance and as a whole,
for the first time in one's life. And the problem of
America, from this side anyhow, has an air of being
simpler. For all the Philippine adventure her
future still seems to lie on the whole compactly in
one continent, and not as ours is, dispersed round
and about the habitable globe, strangely entangled
with India, with Japan, with Africa and with the
great antagonism the Germans force upon us at
our doors. Moreover one cannot look ten years
ahead in England, without glancing across the
Atlantic. "There they are," we say to one an
other, "those Americans! They speak our lan
guage, read our books, give us books, share our
mind. What we think still goes into their heads
in a measure, and their thoughts run through our
brains. What will they be up to?"
Our future is extraordinarily bound up in Ameri
ca's and in a sense dependent upon it. It is not
that we dream very much of political reunions of
Anglo Saxondom and the like. So long as we
British retain our wide and accidental sprawl of
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
empire about the earth we cannot expect or desire
the Americans to share our stresses and entangle
ments. Our Empire has its own adventurous and
perilous outlook. But our civilization is a differ
ent thing from our Empire, a thing that reaches
out further into the future, that will be going on
changed beyond recognition. Because of our com
mon language, of our common traditions, Americans
are a part of our community, are becoming indeed
the larger part of our community of thought and
feeling and outlook — in a sense far more intimate
than any link we have with Hindoo or Copt or
Cingalese. A common Englishman has an almost
pathetic pride and sense of proprietorship in the
States; he is fatally ready to fall in with the idea
that two nations that share their past, that still,
a little restively, share one language, may even
contrive to share an infinitely more interesting
future. Even if he does not chance to be an
American now, his grandson may be. America is
his inheritance, his reserved accumulating invest
ment. In that sense indeed America belongs to
the whole western world; all Europe owns her
promise, but to the Englishman the sense of par
ticipation is intense. "We did it," he will tell of
the most American of achievements, of the settle
ment of the middle west for example, and this is
so far justifiable that numberless men, myself in
cluded, are Englishmen, Australian, New-Zealand-
18
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
ers, Canadians, instead of being Americans, by the
merest accidents of life. My father still possesses
the stout oak box he had had made to emigrate
withal, everything was arranged that would have
got me and my brothers born across the ocean, and
only the coincidence of a business opportunity and
an illness of my mother's, arrested that. It was so
near a thing as that with me, which prevents my
blood from boiling with patriotic indignation in
stead of patriotic solicitude at the frequent sight of
red- coats as I see them from my study window go
ing to and fro to Shorncliffe camp.
Well I learn from Professor Miinsterberg how
vain my sense of proprietorship is, but still this
much of it obstinately remains, that I will at any
rate look at the American future.
By the accidents that delayed that box it comes
about that if I want to see what America is up to,
I have among other things to buy a Baedeker and
a steamer ticket and fill up the inquiring blanks
in this remarkable document before me, the long
string of questions that begins :—
"Are you a Polygamist ?"
"Are you an Anarchist?"
Here I gather is one little indication of the great
will I am going to study. It would seem that the
United States of America regard Anarchy and
Polygamy with aversion, regard indeed Anarchists
and Polygamists as creatures unfit to mingle with
the already very various eighty million of citizens
19
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
who constitute their sovereign powers, and on the
other hand hold these creatures so inflexibly hon
orable as certainly to tell these damning truths
about themselves in this matter. . . .
It's a little odd. One has a second or so of doubt
about the quality of that particular manifestation
of will.
CHAPTER II
MATERIAL PROGRESS
(On the " Carmania " going Americanward)
WHEN one talks to an American of
Ameceratitudes n^s national purpose he seems a little
at a loss; if one speaks of his national
destiny, he responds with alacrity. I make this
generalization on the usual narrow foundations, but
so the impression comes to me.
Until this present generation, indeed until within
a couple of decades, it is not very evident that
Americans did envisage any national purpose at
all, except in so far as there was a certain solicitude
not to be cheated out of an assured destiny. A sort
of optimistic fatalism possessed them. They had,
and mostly it seems they still have, a tremendous
sense of sustained and assured growth, and it is
not altogether untrue that one is told — I have been
told — such things as that "America is a great
country, sir," that its future is gigantic and that
it is already (and going to be more and more so) the
greatest country on earth.
21
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
I am not the sort of Englishman who questions
that. I do so regard that much as obvious and
true that it seems to me even a little undignified,
as well as a little overbearing, for Americans to in
sist upon it so ; I try to go on as soon as possible to
the question just how my interlocutor shapes that
gigantic future and what that world predominance
is finally to do for us in England and all about the
world. So far, I must insist, I haven't found any
thing like an idea. I have looked for it in books,
in papers, in speeches and now I am going to look
for it in America. At the most I have found vague
imaginings that correspond to that first or mon
strous stage in the scheme of prophetic development
I sketched in my opening.
There is often no more than a volley of rhetorical
blank- cartridge. So empty is it of all but sound
that I have usually been constrained by civility
from going on to a third enquiry;—
"And what are you, sir, doing in particular, to
assist and enrich this magnificent and quite in
definable Destiny of which you so evidently feel
yourself a part?" . . .
That seems to be really no unjust rendering of
the conscious element of the American outlook as
one finds it, for example, in these nice-looking and
pleasant - mannered fellow - passengers upon the
Carmania upon whom I fasten with leading ques
tions and experimental remarks. One exception
I discover — a pleasant New York clubman who has
22
MATERIAL PROGRESS
doubts of this and that. The discipline and sense
of purpose in Germany has laid hold upon him. He
seems to be, in contrast with his fellow-countrymen,
almost pessimistically aware that the American
ship of state is after all a mortal ship and liable to
leakages. There are certain problems and dangers
he seems to think that may delay, perhaps even
prevent, an undamaged arrival in that predestined
port, that port too resplendent for the eye to rest
upon ; a Chinese peril, he thinks has not been finally
dealt with, "race suicide" is not arrested for all that
it is scolded in a most valiant and virile manner,
and there are adverse possibilities in the immigrant,
in the black, the socialist, against which he sees no
guarantee. He sees huge danger in the develop
ment and organization of the new finance and no
clear promise of a remedy. He finds the closest
parallel between the American Republic and Rome
before the coming of Imperialism. But these other
Americans have no share in his pessimisms. They
may confess to as much as he does in the way of
dangers, admit there are occasions for calking, a
need of stopping quite a number of possibilities if
the American Idea is to make its triumphant entry
at last into that port of blinding accomplishment,
but, apart from a few necessary preventive pro
posals, I do not perceive any extensive sense of any
thing whatever to be done, anything to be shaped
and thought out and made in the sense of a national
determination to a designed and specified end.
3 23
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
II
THERE are, one must admit, tremen-
Apryo™?e0ssof dous justifications for the belief in a
sort of automatic ascent of American
things to unprecedented magnificences, an ascent
so automatic that indeed one needn't bother in the
slightest to keep the whole thing going. For ex
ample, consider this, last year's last- word in ocean
travel in which I am crossing, the Carmania with
its unparalleled steadfastness, its racing, tireless
great turbines, its vast population of 3244 souls!
It has on the whole a tremendous effect of having
come by fate and its own forces. One forgets that
any one planned it, much of it indeed has so much
the quality of moving, as the planets move, in the
very nature of things. You go aft and see the
wake tailing away across the blue ridges, you go for
ward and see the cleft water, lift protestingly, roll
back in an indignant crest, own itself beaten and go
pouring by in great foaming waves on either hand,
you see nothing, you hear nothing of the toiling
engines, the reeking stokers, the effort and the
stress below; you beat west and west, as the sun
does and it might seem with nearly the same in
dependence of any living man's help or opposition.
Equally so does it seem this great, gleaming, con
fident thing of power and metal came inevitably
out of the past and will lead on to still more shining,
still swifter and securer monsters in the future.
24
MATERIAL PROGRESS
One sees in the perspective of history, first the
little cockle-shells of Columbus, the comings and
goings of the precarious Tudor adventurers, the
slow uncertain shipping of colonial days. Says Sir
George Trevelyan in the opening of his American
Revolution, that then — it is still not a century
and a half ago! —
"a man bound for New York, as he sent his luggage on
board at Bristol, would willingly have compounded for
a voyage lasting as many weeks as it now lasts days. . . .
Adams, during the height of the war, hurrying to France
in the finest frigate Congress could place at his disposal
. . . could make not better speed than five and forty days
between Boston and Bordeaux. Lord Carlisle . . . was six
weeks between port and port; tossed by gales which in
flicted on his brother Commissioners agonies such as he for
bore to make a matter of joke even to George Selwyn. . . .
How humbler individuals fared. . . . They would be kept
waiting weeks on the wrong side of the water for a full
complement of passengers and weeks more for a fair wind,
and then beating across in a badly found tub with a cargo
of millstones and old iron rolling about below, they thought
themselves lucky if they came into harbor a month after
their private store of provisions had run out and carrying
a budget of news as stale as the ship's provisions."
Even in the time of Dickens things were by no
measure more than half - way better. I have with
me to enhance my comfort by this aided retro
spect, his American Notes. His crossing lasted
eighteen days and his boat was that "far-famed
American steamer," the Britannia (the first of the
long succession of Cunarders, of which this Carmania
25
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
is the latest) ; his return took fifty days, and was a
jovial home-coming under sail. It's the journey
out gives us our contrast. He had the "state-room "
of the period and very unhappy he was in it, as he
testifies in a characteristically mounting passage.
"That this state-room had been specially engaged for
'Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady,' was rendered suf
ficiently clear even to my scared intellect by a very small
manuscript, announcing the fact, which was pinned on a
very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread like
a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that
this was the state-room, concerning which Charles Dickens,
Esquire, and Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences
for at least four months preceding; that this could by any
possibility be that small snug chamber of the imagination,
which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy
strong upon him, had always foretold would contain at
least one little sofa, and which his Lady, with a modest and
yet most magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had
from the first opined would not hold more than two enor
mous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight (port
manteaus which could now no more be got in at the door,
not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded
or forced into a flower-pot) : that this utterly impracticable,
thoroughly preposterous box, had the remotest reference
to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty bowers,
sketched in a masterly hand, in the highly varnished,
lithographic plan, hanging up in the agent's counting-
house in the City of London: that this room of state, in
short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheer
ful jest of the Captain's, invented and put in practice for
the better relish and enjoyment of the real state-room
presently to be disclosed : these were truths which I really
could not bring my mind at all to bear upon or compre
hend."
26
MATERIAL PROGRESS
So he precludes his two weeks and a half of vile
weather in this paddle boat of the middle ages (she
carried a " formidable " multitude of no less than
eighty-six saloon passengers) and goes on to de
scribe such experiences as this;
"About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way
through the skylights, burst open the doors above, and
came raging and roaring down into the ladies' cabin, to
the unspeakable consternation of my wife and a little
Scotch lady. . . . They, and the handmaid before men
tioned, being in such ecstacies of fear that I scarcely knew
what to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of
some restorative or comfortable cordial; and nothing bet
ter occurring to me, at the moment, than hot brandy-and-
water, I procured a tumblerful without delay. It being
impossible to stand or sit without holding on, they were
all heaped together in one corner of a long sofa — a fixture
extending entirely across the cabin — where they clung to
each other in momentary expectation of being drowned.
When I approached this place with my specific, and was
about to administer it with many consolatory expressions,
to the nearest sufferer, what was my dismay to see them
all roll slowly down to the other end ! and when I staggered
to that end, and held out the glass once more, how im
mensely baffled were my good intentions by the ship giving
another lurch, and their rolling back again! I suppose I
dodged them up and down this sofa, for at least a quarter
of an hour, without reaching them once; and by the time
I did catch them, the brandy-and-water was diminished,
by constant spilling, to a teaspoonful. To complete the
group, it is necessary to recognize in this disconcerted
dodger, an individual very pale from sea-sickness, who had
shaved his beard and brushed his hair last at Liverpool ; and
whose only articles of dress (linen not included) were a pair of
dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket, formerly admired upon
the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one slipper."
27
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
It gives one a momentary sense of superiority to
the great master to read that. One surveys one's
immediate surroundings and compares them with
his. One says almost patronizingly: "Poor old
Dickens, you know, really did have too awful a
time!" The waves are high now, and getting
higher, dark -blue waves foam-crested; the waves
haven't altered — except relatively — but one isn't
even sea-sick. At the most there are squeamish
moments for the weaker brethren. One looks down
on these long white-crested undulations thirty feet
or so of rise and fall, as we look down the side of a
sky-scraper into a tumult in the street.
We displace thirty thousand tons of water in
stead of twelve hundred, we can carry 521 first and
second class passengers, a crew of 463, and 2260
emigrants below. . . .
We're a city rather than a ship, our funnels go
up over the height of any reasonable church spire,
and you need walk the main-deck from end to end
and back only four times to do a mile. Any one
who has been to London and seen Trafalgar Square
will get our dimensions perfectly, when he realizes
that we should only squeeze into that finest site in
Europe, diagonally, dwarfing the National Gallery,
St. Martin's Church, hotels and every other build
ing there out of existence, our funnels towering five
feet higher than Nelson on his column. As one
looks down on it all from the boat-deck one has a
social microcosm, we could set up as a small modern
28
MATERIAL PROGRESS
country and renew civilization even if the rest of
the world was destroyed. We've the plutocracy
up here, there is a middle class on the second-
class deck and forward a proletariat — the proles
much in evidence — complete. It's possible to go
slumming aboard. . . . We have our daily paper,
too, printed aboard, and all the latest news by
marconigram. . . .
Never was anything of this sort before, never.
Caligula's shipping it is true (unless it was Con-
stantine's) did, as Mr. Cecil Torr testifies, hold a
world record until the nineteenth century and he
quotes Pliny for thirteen hundred tons — outdoing
the Britannia — and Moschion for cabins and baths
and covered vine-shaded walks and plants in pots.
But from 1840 onward, we have broken away into
a new scale for life. This Carmania isn't the largest
ship nor the finest, nor is it to be the last. Greater
ships are to follow and greater. The scale of size,
the scale of power, the speed and dimensions of things
about us alter remorselessly — to some limit we cannot
at present descry.
in
IT is the development of such things
Is ¥n°e8vfisbie ? as this, it is this dramatically abbre
viated perspective from those pre-Ref-
ormation caravels to the larger, larger, larger of the
present vessels, one must blame for one's illusions.
29
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
One is led unawares to believe that this something
called Progress is a natural and necessary and
secular process, going on without the definite will
of man, carrying us on quite independently of us;
one is led unawares to forget that it is after all from
the historical point of view only a sudden universal
jolting forward in history, an affair of two centuries
at most, a process for the continuance of which we
have no sort of guarantee. Most western Euro
peans have this delusion of automatic progress in
things badly enough, but with Americans it seems
to be almost fundamental. It is their theory of
the Cosmos and they no more think of inquir
ing into the sustaining causes of the progressive
movement than they would into the character
of the stokers hidden away from us in this
great thing somewhere — the officers alone know
where.
I am happy to find this blind confidence very well
expressed for example in an illustrated magazine
article by Mr. Edgar Saltus, "New York from the
Flat-iron," that a friend has put in my hand to pre
pare me for the wonders to come. Mr. Saltus writes
with an eloquent joy of his vision of Broadway be
low, Broadway that is now "barring trade-routes,
the largest commercial stretch on this planet."
So late as Dickens 's visit it was scavenged by rov
ing untended herds of gaunt, brown, black-blotched
pigs. He writes of lower Fifth Avenue and upper
Fifth Avenue, of Madison Square and its tower, of
30
MATERIAL PROGRESS
sky-scrapers and sky-scrapers and sky-scrapers round
and about the horizon. (I am to have a tremendous
view of them to-morrow as we steam up from the
Narrows.) And thus Mr. Saltus proceeds, —
1 ' As you lean and gaze from the toppest floors on houses
below, which from those floors seem huts, it may occur
to you that precisely as these huts were once regarded as
supreme achievements, so, one of these days, from other
and higher floors, the Flat-iron may seem a hut itself.
Evolution has not halted. Undiscernibly but indefatiga-
bly, always it is progressing. Its final term is not exist
ing buildings, nor in existing man. If humanity sprang
from gorillas, from humanity gods shall proceed."
The rule of three in excelsis !
"The story of Olympus is merely a tale of what might
have been. That which might have been may yet come
to pass. Even now could the old divinities, hushed for-
evermore, awake, they would be perplexed enough to see
how mortals have exceeded them. ... In Fifth Avenue
inns they could get fairer fare than ambrosia, and behold
women beside whom Venus herself would look provincial
and Juno a frump. The spectacle of electricity tamed and
domesticated would surprise them not a little, the elevated
quite as much, the Flat-iron still more. At sight of the
latter they would recall the Titans with whom once they
warred, and sink to their sun-red seas outfaced.
"In this same measure we have succeeded in exceeding
them, so will posterity surpass what we have done. Evo
lution may be slow, it achieved an unrecognized advance
when it devised buildings such as this. It is demonstrable
that small rooms breed small thoughts. It will be demon
strable that, as buildings ascend, so do ideas. It is mental
progress that sky-scrapers engender. From these parturi-
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
tions gods may really proceed — beings, that is, who, could
we remain long enough to see them, would regard us as
we regard the apes. ..."
Mr. Saltus writes, I think, with a very typical
American accent. Most Americans think like that
and all of them I fancy feel like it. Just in that
spirit a later -empire Roman might have written
apropos the gigantic new basilica of Constantine
the Great (who was also, one recalls, a record-breaker
in ship - building) and have compared it with the
straitened proportions of Caesar's Forum and the
meagre relics of republican Rome. So too (dbsit
omen) he might have swelled into prophecy and
sounded the true modern note.
One hears that modern note everywhere nowa
days where print spreads, but from America with
fewer undertones than anywhere. Even I find it,
ringing clear, as a thing beyond disputing, as a
thing as self-evident as sunrise again and again in
the expressed thought of Mr. Henry James.
But you know this progress isn't guaranteed.
We have all indeed been carried away completely
by the up-rush of it all. To me now this Carmania
seems to typify the whole thing. What matter it
if there are moments when one reflects on the mys
terious smallness and it would seem the ungrowing
quality of the human content of it all? We are,
after all, astonishingly like flies on a machine that
has got loose. No matter. Those people on the
main-deck are the oddest crowd, strange Oriental-
32
MATERIAL PROGRESS
looking figures with Astrakhan caps, hook -noses,
shifty eyes, and indisputably dirty habits, bold-
eyed, red-capped, expectorating women, quaint and
amazingly dirty children ; Tartars there are too, and
Cossacks, queer wraps, queer head-dresses, a sort
of greasy picturesqueness over them all. They use
the handkerchief solely as a head covering. Their
deck is disgusting with fragments of food, with egg
shells they haven't had the decency to throw over
board. Collectively they have — an atmosphere.
They're going where we're going, wherever that is.
What matters it? What matters it, too, if these
people about me in the artistic apartment talk noth
ing but trivialities derived from the Daily Bulletin,
think nothing but trivialities, are, except in the
capacity of paying passengers, the most ineffectual
gathering of human beings conceivable? What
matters it that there is no connection, no under
standing whatever between them and that large and
ominous crowd a plank or so and a yard or so under
our feet? Or between themselves for the matter
of that? What matters it if nobody seems to be
struck by the fact that we are all, the three thousand
two hundred of us so extraordinarily got together
into this tremendous machine, and that not only
does nobody inquire what it is has got us together
in this astonishing fashion and why, but that no
body seems to feel that we are together in any sort
of way at all ? One looks up at the smoke-pouring
funnels and back at the foaming wake. It will be
33
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
all right. Aren't we driving ahead westward at a
pace of four hundred and fifty miles a day ?
And twenty or thirty thousand other souls,
mixed and stratified, on great steamers ahead of us,
or behind, are driving westward too. That there's
no collective mind apparent in it at all, worth speak
ing about is so much the better. That only shows
its Destiny, its Progress as inevitable as gravitation.
I could almost believe it, as I sit quietly writing here
by a softly shaded light in this elegantly appointed
drawing-room, as steady as though I was in my
native habitat on dry land instead of hurrying al
most fearfully, at twenty knots an hour, over a
tumbling empty desert of blue waves under a windy
sky. But, only a little while ago, I was out forward
alone, looking at that. Everything was still ex
cept for the remote throbbing of the engines and
the nearly effaced sound of a man, singing in a
strange tongue, that came from the third-class gang
way far below. The sky was clear, save for a few
black streamers of clouds, Orion hung very light and
large above the waters, and a great new moon, still
visibly holding its dead predecessor in its crescent,
sank near him. Between the sparse great stars
were deep blue spaces, unfathomed distances.
Out there I had been reminded of space and
time. Out there the ship was just a hastening
ephemeral fire-fly that had chanced to happen across
the eternal tumult of the winds and sea.
CHAPTER III
NEW YORK
(In a room on the ninth floor in the sky -scraper hotel
New York)
MY first impressions of New York are
impressions enormously to enhance the effect of
this Progress, this material progress,
that is to say, as something inevitable and inhuman,
as a blindly furious energy of growth that must go
on. Against the broad and level gray contours of
Liverpool one found the ocean liner portentously
tall, but here one steams into the middle of a town
that dwarfs the ocean liner. The sky-scrapers that
are the New-Yorker's perpetual boast and pride
rise up to greet one as one comes through the Nar
rows into the Upper Bay, stand out, in a clustering
group of tall irregular crcnellations, the strangest
crown that ever a city wore. They have an effect
of immense incompleteness ; each one seems to await
some needed terminal, — to be, by virtue of its woolly
jets of steam, still as it were in process of eruption.
One thinks of St. Peter's great blue dome, finished
35
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
and done as one saw it from a vine-shaded wine-
booth above the Milvian Bridge, one thinks of the
sudden ascendency of St. Paul's dark grace, as
it soars out over any one who comes up by the
Thames towards it. These are efforts that have
accomplished their ends, and even Paris illuminated
under the tall stem of the Eiffel Tower looked com
pleted and defined. But New York's achievement
is a threatening promise, growth going on under a
pressure that increases, and amidst a hungry uproar
of effort.
One gets a measure of the quality of this force of
mechanical, of inhuman, growth as one marks the
great statue of Liberty on our larboard, which is
meant to dominate and fails absolutely to dominate
the scene. It gets to three hundred feet about, by
standing on a pedestal of a hundred and fifty ; and
the uplifted torch, seen against the sky, suggests an
arm straining upward, straining in hopeless com
petition with the fierce commercial altitudes ahead.
Poor liberating Lady of the American ideal! One
passes her and forgets.
Happy returning natives greet the great pillars
of business by name, the St. Paul Building, the
World, the Manhattan tower ; the English new-comer
notes the clear emphasis of the detail, the freedom
from smoke and atmospheric mystery that New
York gains from burning anthracite, the jetting
white steam clouds that emphasize that freedom.
Across the broad harbor plies an unfamiliar traffic
36
NEW YORK
of grotesque broad ferry-boats, black with people,
glutted to the lips with vans and carts, each hooting
and yelping its own distinctive note, and there is a
wild hurrying up and down and to and fro of piping
and bellowing tugs and barges ; and a great floating
platform, bearing a railway train, gets athwart our
course as we ascend and evokes megatherial bel-
lowings. Everything is moving at a great speed,
and whistling and howling, it seems, and presently
far ahead we make out our own pier, black with ex
pectant people, and set up our own distinctive whoop,
and with the help of half a dozefi furiously noisy
tugs are finally lugged and butted into dock. The
tugs converse by yells and whistles, it is an affair of
short-tempered mechanical monsters, amidst which
one watches for one's opportunity to get ashore.
Noise and human hurry and a vastness of means
and collective result, rather than any vastness of
achievement, is the pervading quality of New York.
The great thing is the mechanical thing, the unin
tentional thing which is speeding up all these people,
driving them in headlong hurry this way and that,
exhorting them by the voice of every car conductor
to "step lively," aggregating them into shoving and
elbowing masses, making them stand clinging to
straps, jerking them up elevator shafts and pouring
them on to the ferry-boats. But this accidental great
thing is at times a very great thing. Much more
impressive than the sky-scrapers to my mind is the
large Brooklyn suspension-bridge. I have never
37
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
troubled to ask who built that ; its greatness is not
in its design, but in the quality of necessity one per
ceives in its inanimate immensity. It tells, as one
goes under it up the East River, but it is far more
impressive to the stranger to come upon it by
glimpses, wandering down to it through the ill-paved
van-infested streets from Chatham Square. One sees
parts of Cyclopean stone arches, one gets suggestive
glimpses through the jungle growth of business now
of the back, now of the flanks, of the monster; then,
as one comes out on the river, one discovers far up
in one's sky the long sweep of the bridge itself,
foreshortened and with a maximum of perspective
effect; the streams of pedestrians and the long line
of carts and vans, quaintly microscopic against the
blue, the creeping progress of the little cars on the
lower edge of the long chain of netting; all these
things dwindling indistinguishably before Brooklyn
is reached. Thence, if it is late afternoon, one may
walk back to City Hall Park and encounter and ex
perience the convergent stream of clerks and work
ers making for the bridge, mark it grow denser and
denser, until at last they come near choking even the
broad approaches of the giant duct, until the con
gested multitudes jostle and fight for a way. They
arrive marching afoot by every street in endless pro
cession; crammed trolley-cars disgorge them; the
Subway pours them out. . . . The individuals count
for nothing, they are clerks and stenographers, shop
men, shop-girls, workers of innumerable types, black-
38
NEW YORK
coated men, hat-and-blouse girls, shabby and cheap
ly clad persons, such as one sees in London, in Ber
lin, anywhere. Perhaps they hurry more, perhaps
they seem more eager. But the distinctive effect
is the mass, the black torrent, rippled with un
meaning faces, the great, the unprecedented mul-
titudinousness of the thing, the inhuman force of
it all.
I made no efforts to present any of my letters, or
to find any one to talk to on my first day in New
York. I landed, got a casual lunch, and wandered
alone until New York's peculiar effect of inhuman
noise and pressure and growth became overwhelm
ing, touched me with a sense of solitude, and drove
me into the hospitable companionship of the Cent
ury Club. Oh, no doubt of New York's immensity!
The sense of soulless gigantic forces, that took no
heed of men, became stronger and stronger all that
day. The pavements were often almost incredibly
out of repair, when I became footweary the street
cars would not wait for me, and I had to learn their
stopping - points as best I might. I wandered,
just at the right pitch of fatigue to get the full
force of it into the eastward region between Third
and Fourth Avenue, came upon the Elevated rail
way at its worst, the darkened streets of disordered
paving below, trolley-car-congested, the ugly clumsy
lattice, sonorously busy overhead, a clatter of vans
and draught-horses, and great crowds of cheap, base-
looking people hurrying uncivilly by. . . .
4 39
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
II
I CORRECTED that first crowded im-
Thwh°t™Mfrbie pression of New York with a clearer,
brighter vision of expansiveness when
next day I began to realize the social quality of
New York's central backbone, between Fourth
Avenue and Sixth. The effect remained still that
of an immeasurably powerful forward movement
of rapid eager advance, a process of enlargement
and increment in every material sense, but it may
be because I was no longer fatigued, was now a lit
tle initiated, the human being seemed less of a fly
upon the wheels. I visited immense and magnifi
cent clubs — London has no such splendors as the
Union, the University, the new hall of the Har
vard — I witnessed the great torrent of spending and
glittering prosperity in carriage and motor-car pour
along Fifth Avenue. I became aware of effects that
were not only vast and opulent but fine. It grew
upon me that the Twentieth Century, which found
New York brown-stone of the color of desiccated
chocolate, meant to leave it a city of white and
colored marble. I found myself agape, admiring a
sky-scraper — the prow of the Flat-iron Building, to
be particular, ploughing up through the traffic of
Broadway and Fifth Avenue in the afternoon light.
The New York sundown and twilight seemed to me
quite glorious things. Down the western streets
one gets the sky hung in long cloud-barred strips,
40
NEW YORK
like Japanese paintings, celestial tranquil yellows
and greens and pink luminosity toning down to the
reeking blue-brown edge of the distant New Jersey
atmosphere, and the clear, black, hard activity of
crowd and trolley-car and Elevated railroad.
Against this deepening color came the innumerable
little lights of the house cliffs and the street tier
above tier. New York is lavish of light, it is lavish
of everything, it is full of the sense of spending from
an inexhaustible supply. For a time one is drawn
irresistibly into the universal belief in that inex
haustible supply.
At a bright table in Delmonico's to-day at lunch-
time, my host told me the first news of the de
struction of the great part of San Francisco by earth
quake and fire. It had just come through to him,
it wasn't yet being shouted by the newsboys. He
told me compactly of dislocated water-mains, of the
ill-luck of the unusual eastward wind that was blow
ing the fire up- town, of a thousand reported dead,
of the manifest doom of the greater portion of the
city, and presently the shouting voices in the street
outside arose to chorus him. He was a newspaper
man and a little preoccupied because his San Fran
cisco offices were burning, and that no further news
was arriving after these first intimations. Natural
ly the catastrophe was our topic. But this disaster
did not affect him, it does not seem to have affected
any one with a sense of final destruction, with any
foreboding of irreparable disaster. Every one is
41
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
talking of it this afternoon, and no one is in the least
degree dismayed. I have talked and listened in
two clubs, watched people in cars and in the street,
and one man is glad that Chinatown will be cleared
out for good ; another's chief solicitude is for Millet's
"Man with the Hoe." " They'll cut it out of the
frame," he says, a little anxiously. "Sure." But
there is no doubt anywhere that San Francisco can
be rebuilt, larger, better, and soon. Just as there
would be none at all if all this New York that has
so obsessed me with its limitless bigness was itself
a blazing ruin. I believe these people would more
than half like the situation. It would give them
scope, it would facilitate that conversion into white
marble in progress everywhere, it would settle the
difficulties of the Elevated railroad and clear out the
tangles of lower New York. There is no sense of
accomplishment and finality in any of these things,
the largest, the finest, the tallest, are so obviously
no more than symptoms and promises of Material
Progress, of inhuman material progress that is so
in the nature of things that no one would regret
their passing. That, I say again, is at the first
encounter the peculiar American effect that began
directly I stepped aboard the liner, and that rises
here to a towering, shining, clamorous climax. The
sense of inexhaustible supply, of an ultra -human
force behind it all, is, for a time, invincible.
One assumes, with Mr. Saltus, that all America is
in this vein, and that this is the way the future must
42
NEW YORK
inevitably go. One has a vision of bright electrical
subways, replacing the filth-diffusing railways of
to-day, of clean, clear pavements free altogether from
the fly-prolific filth of horses coming almost, as it
were, of their own accord beneath the feet of a popu
lation that no longer expectorates at all; of grimy
stone and peeling paint giving way everywhere to
white marble and spotless surfaces, and a shining
order, of everything wider, taller, cleaner, better. . . .
So that, in the meanwhile, a certain amount of
jostling and -hurry and untidiness, and even — to put
it mildly — forcefulness may be forgiven.
in
I VISITED Ellis Island yesterday. It
us island chanced to be a good day for my pur
pose. For the first time in its history
this filter of immigrant humanity has this week
proved inadequate to the demand upon it. It was
choked, and half a score of gravid liners were lying
uncomfortably up the harbor, replete with twenty
thousand or so of crude Americans from Ireland and
Poland and Italy and Syria and Finland and Al
bania ; men, women, children, dirt, and bags together.
Of immigration I shall have to write later ; what
concerns me now is chiefly the wholesale and multi
tudinous quality of that place and its work. I
made my way with my introduction along white
43
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
passages and through traps and a maze of metal
lattices that did for a while succeed in catching and
imprisoning me, to Commissioner Wachorn, in his
quiet, green-toned office. There, for a time, I sat
judicially and heard him deal methodically, swiftly,
sympathetically, with case after case, a string of
appeals against the sentences of deportation pro
nounced in the busy little courts below. First would
come one dingy and strangely garbed group of wild-
eyed aliens, and then another: Roumanian gypsies,
South Italians, Ruthenians, Swedes, each under the
intelligent guidance of a uniformed interpreter, and
a case would be started, a report made to Washing
ton, and they would drop out again, hopeful or
sullen or fearful as the evidence might trend. . . .
Down-stairs we find the courts, and these seen, we
traverse long refectories, long aisles of tables, and
close - packed dormitories with banks of steel mat
tresses, tier above tier, and galleries and passages
innumerable, perplexing intricacy that slowly grows
systematic with the Commissioner's explanations.
Here is a huge, gray, untidy waiting-room, like a
big railway-depot room, full of a sinister crowd of
miserable people, loafing about or sitting dejectedly,
whom America refuses, and here a second and a
third such chamber each with its tragic and evil-
looking crowd that hates us, and that even ventures
to groan and hiss at us a little for our glimpse of its
large dirty spectacle of hopeless failure, and here,
squalid enough indeed, but still to some degree
44
NEW YORK
hopeful, are the appeal cases as yet undecided. In
one place, at a bank of ranges, works an army of
men cooks, in another spins the big machinery of
the Ellis Island laundry, washing blankets, drying
blankets, day in and day out, a big clean steamy
space of hurry and rotation. Then, I recall a neat
apartment lined to the ceiling with little drawers,
a card-index of the names and nationalities and sig
nificant circumstances of upward of a million and a
half of people who have gone on and who are yet
liable to recall.
The central hall is the key of this impression.
All day long, through an intricate series of metal
pens, the long procession files, step by step, bear
ing bundles and trunks and boxes, past this examiner
and that, past the quick, alert medical officers, the
tallymen and the clerks. At every point immigrants
are being picked out and set aside for further medical
examination, for further questions, for the busy lit
tle courts; but the main procession satisfies condi
tions, passes on. It is a daily procession that, with
a yard of space to each, would stretch over three
miles, that any week in the year would more than
equal in numbers that daily procession of the un
employed that is becoming a regular feature of the
London winter, that in a year could put a cordon
round London or New York of close-marching peo
ple, could populate a new Boston, that in a century —
What in a century will it all amount to ? ...
On they go, from this pen to that, pen by pen,
45
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
towards a desk at a little metal wicket — the gate
of America. Through this metal wicket drips the
immigration stream — all day long, every two or
three seconds an immigrant, with a valise or a
bundle, passes the little desk and goes on past the
well-managed money-changing place, past the care
fully organized separating ways that go to this rail
way or that, past the guiding, protecting officials —
into a new world. The great majority are young
men and young women, between seventeen and
thirty, good, youthful, hopeful, peasant stock. They
stand in a long string, waiting to go through that
wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with
cheap portmanteaus, with odd packages, in pairs,
in families, alone, women with children, men with
strings of dependents, young couples. All day that
string of human beads waits there, jerks forward,
waits again; all day and every day, constantly re
plenished, constantly dropping the end beads
through the wicket, till the units mount to hundreds
and the hundreds to thousands. . . .
Yes, Ellis Island is quietly immense. It gives one
a visible image of one aspect at least of this world-
large process of filling and growing and synthesis,
which is America.
"Look there!" said the Commissioner, taking me
by the arm and pointing, and I saw a monster
steamship far away, and already a big bulk looming
up the Narrows. "It's the Kaiser Wilhelm der
Grosse. She's got — I forget the exact figures, but
46
NEW YORK
let us say — eight hundred and fifty-three more for
us. She'll have to keep them until Friday at the
earliest. And there's more behind her, and more
strung out all across the Atlantic."
In one record day this month 21,000 immigrants
came into the port of New York alone ; in one week
over 50,000. This year the total will be 1,200,000
souls, pouring in, finding work at once, producing no
fall in wages. They start digging and building and
making. Just think of the dimensions of it!
IV
ONE must get away from New York
TO Fan River to see the place in its proper relations.
I visited Staten Island and Jersey City,
motored up to Sleepy Hollow (where once the Head
less Horseman rode), saw suburbs and intimations
of suburbs without end, and finished with the long
and crowded spectacle of the East River as one sees
it from the Fall River boat. It was Friday night,
and the Fall River boat was in a state of fine con
gestion with Jews, Italians, and week-enders, and
one stood crowded and surveyed the crowded shore,
the sky - scrapers and tenement - houses, the huge
grain elevators, big warehouses, the great Brooklyn
Bridge, the still greater Williamsburgh Bridge, the
great promise of yet another monstrous bridge,
overwhelmingly monstrous by any European ex-
47
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
ample I know, and so past long miles of city to
the left and to the right past the wide Brooklyn
navy-yard (where three clean white war-ships lay
moored), past the clustering castellated asylums,
hospitals, almshouses and reformatories of Black-
well's long shore and Ward's Island, and then
through a long reluctant diminuendo on each re
ceding bank, until, indeed, New York, though it
seemed incredible, had done.
And at one point a grave- voiced man in a peaked
cap, with guide-books to sell, pleased me greatly by
ending all idle talk suddenly with the stentorian
announcement: "We are now in Hell Gate. We
are now passing through Hell Gate!"
But they've blown Hell Gate open with dynamite,
and it wasn't at all the Hell Gate that I read about
in my boyhood in the delightful chronicle of Knick
erbocker.
So through an elbowing evening (to the tune of
"Cavalleria Rusticana " on an irrepressible string
band) and a night of unmitigated fog-horn to Bos
ton, which I had been given to understand was a
cultured and uneventful city offering great oppor
tunities for reflection and intellectual digestion.
And, indeed, the large quiet of Beacon Street, in the
early morning sunshine, seemed to more than jus
tify that expectation. . . .
CHAPTER IV
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
BUT Boston did not propose that its
less-assertive key should be misunder
stood, and in a singularly short space
of time I found myself climbing into a tremulous
impatient motor-car in company with three enthu
siastic exponents of the work of the Metropolitan
Park Commission, and provided with a neatly
tinted map, large and framed and glazed, to ex
plore a fresh and more deliberate phase in this great
American symphony, this symphony of Growth.
If possible it is more impressive, even, than the
crowded largeness of New York, to trace the serene
preparation Boston has made through this Com
mission to be widely and easily vast. New York's
humanity has a curious air of being carried along
upon a wave of irresistible prosperity, but Boston
confesses design. I suppose no city in all the
world (unless it be Washington) has ever produced
so complete and ample a forecast of its own future
as this Commission's plan of Boston. An area with
40
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
a radius of between fifteen and twenty miles from
the State House has been planned out and prepared
for Growth. Great reservations of woodland and
hill have been made, the banks of nearly all the
streams and rivers and meres have been secured for
public park and garden, for boating and other
water sports big avenues of vigorous young trees;
a hundred and fifty yards or so wide, with drive
ways and ridingways and a central grassy band for
electric tramways, have been prepared, and, indeed,
the fair and ample and shady new Boston, the
Boston of 1950, grows visibly before one's eyes. I
found myself comparing the disciplined confidence
of these proposals to the blind enlargement of Lon
don; London, that like a bowl of viscid human fluid,
boils sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and
slops messily and uglily into the home counties. I
could not but contrast their large intelligence with
the confused hesitations and waste and muddle of
our English suburban developments. . . .
There were moments, indeed, when it seemed too
good to be true, and Mr. Sylvester Baxter, who was
with me and whose faith has done so much to se
cure this mapping out of a city's growth beyond all
precedent, became the victim of my doubts. "Will
this enormous space of sunlit woodland and marsh
and meadow really be filled at any time?" I urged.
"All cities do not grow. Cities have shrunken."
I recalled Bruges. I recalled the empty, goat-
sustaining, flower - rich meadows of Rome within
50
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
the wall. What made him so sure of this pro
gressive magnificence of Boston's growth? My
doubts fell on stony soil. My companions seemed
to think these scepticisms inopportune, a forced
eccentricity, like doubting the coming of to-morrow.
Of course Growth will go on. . . .
The subject was changed by the sight of the fine
marble buildings of the Harvard medical school, a
shining facade partially eclipsed by several dingy
and unsightly wooden houses.
"These shanties will go, of course," says one of
my companions. "It's proposed to take the
avenue right across this space straight to the
schools."
"You'll have to fill the marsh, then, and buy the
houses."
"Sure.". . .
I find myself comparing this huge growth process
of America with the things in my own land. After
all, this growth is no distinctive American thing; it
is the same process anywhere — only in America
there are no disguises, no complications. Come to
think of it, Birmingham and Manchester are as new
as Boston — newer; and London, south and east of
the Thames, is, save for a little nucleus, more re
cent than Chicago — is in places, I am told, with its
smoky disorder, its clattering ways, its brutality of
industrial conflict, very like Chicago. But nowhere
now is growth still so certainly and confidently
going on as here. Nowhere is it upon so great a
S1
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
scale as here, and with so confident an outlook tow
ards the things to come. And nowhere is it pass
ing more certainly from the first phase of a mob-
like rush of individualistic undertakings into a
planned and ordered progress.
ii
EVERYWHERE in the America I have
The Ba*/*^ seen the same note sounds, the note
of a fatal gigantic economic develop
ment, of large prevision and enormous pressures.
I heard it clear above the roar of Niagara — for,
after all, I stopped off at Niagara.
As a water-fall, Niagara's claim to distinction is
now mainly quantitative; its spectacular effect, its
magnificent and humbling size and splendor, were
long since destroyed beyond recovery by the hotels,
the factories, the power-houses, the bridges and
tramways and hoardings that arose about it. It
must have been a fine thing to happen upon sud
denly after a day of solitary travel; the Indians,
they say, gave it worship; but it's no great wonder
to reach it by trolley-car, through a street hack-
infested and full of adventurous refreshment-places
and souvenir-shops and the touting guides. There
were great quantities of young couples and other
sight-seers with the usual encumbrances of wrap
and bag and umbrella, trailing out across the
52
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
bridges and along the neat paths of the Reservation
Parks, asking the way to this point and that. No
tice boards cut the eye, offering extra joys and
memorable objects for twenty-five and fifty cents,
and it was proposed you should keep off the grass.
After all, the gorge of Niagara is very like any
good gorge in the Ardennes, except that it has
more water; it's about as wide and about as deep,
and there is no effect at all that one has not seen
a dozen times in other cascades. One gets all the
water one wants at Tivoli, one has gone behind half
a hundred downpours just as impressive in Switzer
land; a hundred tons of water is really just as
stunning as ten million. A hundred tons of water
stuns one altogether, and what more do you want?
One recalls "Orridos" and "Schluchts" that are
not only magnificent but lonely.
No doubt the Falls, seen from the Canadian side,
have a peculiar long majesty of effect; but the finest
thing in it all, to my mind, was not Niagara at all,
but to look up-stream from Goat Island and see
the sea-wide crest of the flashing sunlit rapids
against the gray-blue sky. That was like a limit
less ocean pouring down a sloping world towards
one, and I lingered, held by that, returning to it
through an indolent afternoon. It gripped the
imagination as nothing else there seemed to do. It
was so broad an infinitude of splash and hurry.
And, moreover, all the enterprising hotels and ex
pectant trippers were out of sight.
53
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
That was the best of the display. The real in
terest of Niagara for me, was not in the water-fall
but in the human accumulations about it. They
stood for the future, threats and promises, and the
water- fall was just a vast reiteration of falling water.
The note of growth in human accomplishment rose
clear and triumphant above the elemental thunder.
For the most part these accumulations of human
effort about Niagara are extremely defiling and
ugly. Nothing — not even the hotel signs and ad
vertisement boards — could be more offensive to
the eye and mind than the Schoellkopf Company's
untidy confusion of sheds and buildings on the
American side, wastefully squirting out long, tail-
race cascades below the bridge, and nothing more
disgusting than the sewer-pipes and gas-work ooze
that the town of Niagara Falls contributes to the
scenery. But, after all, these represent only the
first slovenly onslaught of mankind's expansion, the
pioneers' camp of the human-growth process that
already changes its quality and manner. There
are finer things than these outrages to be found.
The dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls
Power Company, for example, impressed me far
more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds; are,
indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than
that accidental eddying of air beside a downpour.
They are will made visible, thought translated into
easy and commanding things. They are clean,
noiseless, and starkly powerful. All the clatter and
54
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
tumult of the early age of machinery is past and
gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt
at all. The wheel-pit into which one descends has
an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming
turbines. These are altogether noble masses of
machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, great
sleeping tops that engender irresistible forces in
their sleep. They sprang, armed like Minerva,
from serene and speculative, foreseeing and en
deavoring brains. First was the word and then
these po\vers. A man goes to and fro quietly in
the long, clean hall of the dynamos. There is no
clangor, no racket. Yet the outer rim of the big
generators is spinning at the pace of a hundred
thousand miles an hour; the dazzling clean switch
board, with its little handles and levers, is the seat
of empire over more power than the strength of a
million disciplined, unquestioning men. All these
great things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as
the heart in a living body, and stouter and stronger
than that. . . .
When I thought that these two huge wheel-pits
of this company are themselves but a little intima
tion of what can be done in this way, what will be
done in this way, my imagination towered above
me. I fell into a day-dream of the coming power
of men, and how that power may be used by
them. . . .
For surely the greatness of life is still to come, it
is not in such accidents as mountains or the sea. I
5 55
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
have seen the splendor of the mountains, sunrise
and sunset among them, and the waste immensity
of sky and sea. I am not blind because I can see
beyond these glories. To me no other thing is
credible than that all the natural beauty in the
world is only so much material for the imagination
and the mind, so many hints and suggestions for
art and creation. Whatever is, is but the lure and
symbol towards what can be willed and done. Man
lives to make — in the end he must make, for there
will be nothing else left for him to do.
And the world he will make — after a thousand
years or so!
I, at least, can forgive the loss of all the acci
dental, unmeaning beauty that is going for the sake
of the beauty of fine order and intention that will
come. I believe — passionately, as a doubting lover
believes in his mistress — in the future of man
kind. And so to me it seems altogether well that
all the froth and hurry of Niagara at last, all of
it, dying into hungry canals of intake, should
rise again in light and power, in ordered and equip
ped and proud and beautiful humanity, in cities
and palaces and the emancipated souls and hearts
of men. . . .
I turned back to look at the power-house as I
walked towards the Falls, and halted and stared.
Its architecture brought me out of my day-dream
to the quality of contemporary things again. It's
a well-intentioned building enough, extraordinarily
56
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
well intentioned, and regardless of expense. It's
in granite and by Stanford White, and yet — It
hasn't caught the note. There's a touch of respect
ability in it, more than a hint of the box of bricks.
Odd, but I'd almost as soon have had one of the
Schoellkopf sheds.
A community that can produce such things as
those turbines and dynamos, and then cover them
over with this dull exterior, is capable, one real
izes, of feats of bathos. One feels that all the
power that throbs in the copper cables below may
end at last in turning Great Wheels for excur
sionists, stamping out aluminum "fancy" ware,
and illuminating night advertisements for drug
shops and music halls. I had an afternoon of busy
doubts. . . .
There is much discussion about Niagara at
present. It may be some queer compromise, based
on the pretence that a voluminous water - fall
is necessarily a thing of incredible beauty, and
a human use is necessarily a degrading use, will
"save" Niagara and the hack -drivers and the
souvenir-shops for series of years yet, "a magnifi
cent monument to the pride of the United States
in a glory of nature," as one journalistic savior
puts it. It is, as public opinion stands, a quite
conceivable thing. This electric development may
be stopped after all, and the huge fall of water
remain surrounded by gravel paths and parapets
and geranium-beds, a staring-point for dull won-
57
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
der, a crown for a day's excursion, a thunderous
impressive accessory to the vulgar love - making
that fills the surrounding hotels, a Titanic im
becility of wasted gifts. But I don't think so.
I think somebody will pay something, and the
journalistic zeal for scenery abate. I think the
huge social and industrial process of America will
win in this conflict, and at last capture Niagara
altogether.
And then — what use will it make of its prey ?
in
IN smoky, vast, undisciplined Chicago
Tcehkago°f Growth forced itself upon me again as
the dominant American fact, but this
time a dark disorder of growth. I went about
Chicago seeing many things of which I may say
something later. I visited the top of the Masonic
Building and viewed a wilderness of sky-scrapers.
I acquired a felt of memories of swing bridges and
viaducts and interlacing railways and jostling
crowds and extraordinarily dirty streets, I learnt
something of the mystery of the "floating founda
tions" upon which so much of Chicago rests. But
I got my best vision of Chicago as I left it.
I sat in the open observation- car at the end of
the Pennsylvania Limited Express, and watched
the long defile of industrialism from the Union
Station in the heart of things to out beyond South
58
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
Chicago, a dozen miles away. I had not gone to the
bloody spectacle of the stock-yards that "feed the
world," because, to be frank, I have an immense re
pugnance to the killing of fixed and helpless ani
mals ; I saw nothing of those ill-managed, ill-inspected
establishments, though I smelt the unwholesome
reek from them ever and again, and so it was here
I saw for the first time the enormous expanse and
intricacy of railroads that net this great industrial
desolation, and something of the going and coming
of the -myriads of polyglot workers. Chicago burns
bituminous coal, it has a reek that outdoes London,
and right and left of the line rise vast chimneys,
huge blackened grain-elevators, flame-crowned fur
naces and gauntly ugly and filthy factory build
ings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty
lots littered with rusty cans, old iron, and indescrib
able rubbish. Interspersed with these are groups
of dirty, disreputable, insanitary - looking wooden
houses.
We swept along the many-railed track, and the
straws and scraps of paper danced in our eddy as
we passed. We overtook local trains and they re
ceded slowly in the great perspective, huge freight-
trains met us or were overtaken; long trains of
doomed cattle passed northward; solitary engines
went by — every engine tolling a melancholy bell;
open trucks crowded with workmen went cityward.
By the side of the track, and over the level crossings,
walked great numbers of people. So it goes on
59
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
mile after mile — Chicago. The sun was now bright,
now pallid through some streaming curtain of smoke ;
the spring afternoon was lit here and again by the
gallant struggle of some stunted tree with a rare
and startling note of new green. . . .
It was like a prolonged, enlarged mingling of the
south side of London with all that is bleak and ugly
in the Black Country. It is the most perfect pres
entation of nineteenth - century individualistic in
dustrialism I have ever seen — in its vast, its magnifi
cent squalor; it is pure nineteenth century; it had
no past at all before that; in 1800 it was empty
prairie, and one marvels for its future. It is indeed
a nineteenth-century nightmare that culminates be
yond South Chicago in the monstrous fungoid shapes,
the endless smoking chimneys, the squat retorts,
the black smoke pall of the Standard Oil Com
pany. For a time the sun is veiled altogether by
that. . . .
And then suddenly Chicago is a dark smear under
the sky, and we are in the large emptiness of Ameri
ca, the other America — America in between.
IV
" UNDISCIPLINED" — that is the word
£or Chicago. It is the word for all the
progress of the Victorian time, a scram
bling, ill-mannered, undignified, unintelligent de-
60
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
velopment of material resources. Packing- town,
for example, is a place that feeds the world with
meat, that concentrates the produce of a splendid
countryside at a position of imperial advantage,
and its owners have no more sense, no better moral
quality, than to make it stink in the nostrils of any
one who comes within two miles of it; to make it
a centre of distribution for disease and decay, an
arena of shabby evasions and extra profits; a scene
of brutal economic conflict and squalid filthiness,
offensive to every sense. (I wish I could catch the
soul of Herbert Spencer and tether it in Chicago for
awhile to gather fresh evidence upon the superiority
of unfettered individualistic enterprises to things
managed by the state.)
Want of discipline ! Chicago is one hoarse cry for
discipline ! The reek and scandal of the stock-yards
is really only a gigantic form of that same quality
in American life that, in a minor aspect, makes the
sidewalk filthy. The key to the peculiar nasty ug
liness of those Schoellkopf works that defile the
Niagara gorge is the same quality. The detestable-
ness of the Elevated railroads of Chicago and Boston
and New York have this in common. All that is
ugly in America, in Lancashire, in South and East
London, in the Pas de Calais, is due to this, to the
shoving unintelligent proceedings of underbred and
morally obtuse men. Each man is for himself, each
enterprise; there is no order, no prevision, no com
mon and universal plan. Modern economic organi-
61
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
zation is still as yet only thinking of emerging from
its first chaotic stage, the stage of lawless enterprise
and insanitary aggregation, the stage of the pros
pector's camp. . . .
But it does emerge.
Men are makers — American men, I think, more
than most men — and amidst even the catastrophic
jumble of Chicago one finds the same creative forces
at work that are struggling to replan a greater Bos
ton, and that turned a waste of dumps and swamps
and cabbage-gardens into Central Park, New York.
Chicago also has its Parks Commission and its green
avenues, its bright flower-gardens, its lakes and
playing-fields. Its Midway Plaisance is in amazing
contrast with the dirt, the congestion, the moral
disorder of its State Street; its Field Houses do
visible battle with slum and the frantic meanness of
commercial folly.
Field Houses are peculiar to Chicago, and Chicago
has every reason to be proud of them. I visited one
that is positively within smell of the stock- yards and
wedged into a district of gaunt and dirty slums. It
stands in the midst of a little park, and close by it
are three playing-grounds with swings and parallel
bars and all manner of athletic appliances, one for
little children, one for girls and women, and one
for boys and youths. In the children's place is a
paddling-pond of clear, clean, running water and a
shaded area of frequently changed sand, and in the
park was a broad asphalted arena that can be flooded
62
STATE STREET. CHICAGO
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
for skating in winter. All this is free to all comers,
and free too is the Field House itself. This is a
large, cool Italianate place with two or three reading-
rooms — one specially arranged for children — a big
discussion-hall, a big and well-equipped gymnasium,
and big, free baths for men and for women. There
is also a clean, bright refreshment-place where whole
some food is sold just above cost price. It was early
on Friday afternoon when I saw it all, but the place
was busy with children, reading, bathing, playing in
a hundred different ways.
And this Field House is not an isolated philan
thropic enterprise. It is just one of a number that
are dotted about Chicago, mitigating and civilizing
its squalor. It was not distilled by begging and
charity from the stench of the stock-yards or the
reek of Standard Oil. It is part of the normal work
of a special taxing body created by the legislature
of the State of Illinois. It is just one of the fruits
upon one of the growths that spring from such per
sistent creative efforts as that of the Chicago City
Club. It is socialism — even as its enemies de
clare. . . .
Even amidst the sombre uncleanliness of Chicago
one sees the light of a new epoch, the coming of new
conceptions, of foresight, of large collective plans
and discipline to achieve them, the fresh green
leaves, among all the festering manure, of the
giant growths of a more orderly and more beautiful
age.
63
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
THESE growing towns, these giant
Pennsylvania towns that grow up and out, that
grow orderly and splendid out of their
first chaotic beginnings, are only little patches upon
a vast expanse, upon what is still of all habit
able countries the emptiest country in the world.
My long express journey from Chicago to Washing
ton lasted a day and a night and more, I could get
sooner from my home in Kent to Italy, and yet that
was still well under a third of the way across the
continent. I spent most of my daylight time in
the fine and graceful open loggia at the end of the
observation-car or in looking out of the windows,
looking at hills and valleys, townships and quiet
places, sudden busy industrial outbreaks about coal
mine or metal, big undisciplined rivers that spread
into swamp and lake, new forest growths, very
bright and green now, foaming up above blackened
stumps. There were many cypress-trees and trees
with white blossom and the Judas-tree, very abun
dant among the spring-time green. I got still more
clearly the enormous scale of this American destiny
I seek to discuss, through all that long and interest
ing day of transit. I measured, as it seemed to me
for the first time, the real scale of the growth proc
ess that has put a four - track road nine hundred
miles across this exuberant land and scarred every
available hill with furnace and mine.
64
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
Bigness — that's the word! The very fields and
farm-buildings seem to me to have four times the
size of our English farms.
Some casual suggestion of the wayside, I forget
now what, set me thinking of the former days, so
recent that they are yet within the lifetime of living
men, when this was frontier land, when even the
middle west remained to be won. I thought of the
slow diffusing population of the forties, the pioneer
wagon, the men armed with axe and rifle, knife and
revolver, the fear of the Indians, the weak and
casual incidence of law. Then the high-road was
but a prairie track and all these hills and hidden
minerals unconquered fastnesses that might, it
seemed, hold out for centuries before they gave
their treasure. How quickly things had come!
"Progress, progress," murmured the wheels, and I
began to make this steady, swift, and shiningly
equipped train a figure, just as I had made the
Carmania a figure of that big onward sweep that
is moving us all together. It was not a noisy train,
after the English fashion, nor did the cars sway
and jump after the habit of our lighter coaches, but
the air was full of deep, triumphant rhythms. " It
goes on," I said, "invincibly," and even as the
thought was in my head, the brakes set up a dron
ing, a vibration ran through the train and we slowed
and stopped. A minute passed, and then we rum
bled softly back to a little trestle-bridge and stood
there.
65
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
I got up, looked from the window, and then went
to the platform at the end of the train. I found
two men, a passenger and a colored parlor-car at
tendant. The former was on the bottom step of
the car, the latter was supplying him with infor
mation.
"His head's still in the water," he remarked.
"Whose head?" said I.
" A man we've killed," said he. " We caught him
in the trestle-bridge."
I descended a step, craned over my fellow-pas
senger, and saw a little group standing curiously
about the derelict thing that had been a living man
three minutes before. It was now a crumpled,
dark-stained blue blouse, a limply broken arm with
hand askew, trousered legs that sprawled quaintly,
and a pair of heavy boots, lying in the sunlit fresh
grass by the water below the trestle-bridge. . . .
A man on the line gave inadequate explanations.
"He'd have been all right if he hadn't come over
this side," he said.
"Who was he?" said I.
"One of these Eyetalians on the line," he said,
and turned away. The train bristled now with a
bunch of curiosity at every car end, and even win
dows were opened. . . .
Presently it was intimated to us by a whistle and
the hasty return of men to the cars that the inci
dent had closed. We began to move forward again,
crept up to speed. . . .
66
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
But I could not go on with my conception of the
train as a symbol of human advancement. That
crumpled blue blouse and queerly careless legs
would get into the picture and set up all sorts of
alien speculations. I thought of distant north
Italian valleys and brown boys among the vines
and goats, of the immigrants who had sung remotely
to me out of the Carmania's steerage, of the hope
ful bright-eyed procession of the new-comers through
Ellis Island wicket, of the regiments of workers the
line had shown me, and I told myself a tale of this
Italian's journey to the land of promise, this land
of gigantic promises. . . .
For a time the big spectacle of America about me
took on a quality of magnificent infidelity. . . .
And by reason of this incident my last Image of
Material Progress thundered into Washington sta
tion five minutes behind its scheduled time.
CHAPTER V
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
LET me try now and make some sort
A Bview~Eve of general picture of the American
nation as it impresses itself upon me.
It is, you will understand, the vision of a hurried
bird of passage, defective and inaccurate at every
point of detail, but perhaps for my present purpose
not so very much the worse for that. The fact that I
am transitory and bring a sort of theorizing naivete
to this review is just what gives me the chance to re
mark these obvious things the habituated have for
gotten. I have already tried to render something
of the effect of huge unrestrained growth and ma
terial progress that America first gives one, and I
have pointed out that so far America seems to me
only to refresh an old impression, to give starkly
and startlingly what is going on everywhere, what
is indeed as much in evidence in Birkenhead or
Milan or London or Calcutta, a huge extension
of human power and the scale of human opera
tions. This growth was elaborated in the physical
68
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
and chemical laboratories and the industrial ex
periments of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
century, and chiefly in Europe. The extension it
self is nothing typically American. Nevertheless
America now shows it best. America is most un
der the stress and urgency of it, resonates most
readily and loudly to its note.
The long distances of travel, and the sense of
isolation between place and place, the remoteness
verging upon inaudibility of Washington in Chicago,
of Chicago in Boston, the vision I have had of
America from observation cars and railroad win
dows brings home to me more and more that this
huge development of human appliances and re
sources is here going on in a community that is
still, for all the dense crowds of New York, the
teeming congestion of the East Side, extraordinarily
scattered. America, one recalls, is still an unoccu
pied country, across which the latest developments of
civilization are rushing. We are dealing here with
a continuous area of land which is, leaving Alaska
out of account altogether, equal to Great Britain,
France, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Holland, Spain and
Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in Europe,
Egypt and the whole Empire of India, and the popu
lation spread out over this vast space is still less
than the joint population of the first two countries
named and not a quarter that of India. Moreover,
it is not spread at all evenly. Much of it is in un-
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
distributed clots. It is not upon the soil, barely half
of it is in holdings and homes and authentic commu
nities. It is a population of an extremely modern
type. Urban concentration has already gone far with
it ; fifteen millions of it are crowded into and about
twenty great cities, other eighteen millions make up
five hundred towns. Between these centres of popu
lation run railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone
connections, tracks of various sorts, but to the
European eye these are mere scratchings on a
virgin surface. An empty wilderness manifests it
self through this thin network of human con
veniences, appears in the meshes even at the rail
road side. Essentially America is still an unsettled
land, with only a few incidental good roads in
favored places, with no universal police, with no
wayside inns where a civilized man may rest, with
still only the crudest of rural postal deliveries, with
long stretches of swamp and forest and desert by
the track side, still unassailed by industry. This
much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago.
Westward, I am told, it becomes more and more
the fact. In Idaho at last, comes the untouched
and perhaps invincible desert, plain and continu
ous through the long hours of travel. Huge areas
do not contain one human being to the square
mile, still vaster portions fall short of two. . . .
And this community, to which material progress
is bringing such enormous powers, and that is
knotted so densely here and there, and is otherwise
70
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
so attenuated a veil over the huge land surface, is, as
Professor Miinsterberg points out, in spite of vast
and increasing masses of immigrants still a curiously
homogeneous one, homogeneous in the spirit of its
activities and speaking a common tongue. It is sus
tained by certain economic conventions, inspired
throughout by certain habits, certain trends of sug
gestion, certain phrases and certain interpretations
that collectively make up what one may call the
American Idea. To the process of enlargement and
diffusion and increase and multiplying resources, we
must now bring the consideration of the social and
economic process that is going on. What is the
form of that process as one finds it in America?
An English Tory will tell you promptly, "a scramble
for dollars." A good American will tell you it is
self realization under equality of opportunity. The
English Tory will probably allege that that amounts
to the same thing.
Let us look into that.
II
ONE contrast between America and
the old world I had in mind before
ever I crossed the Atlantic, and now it
comes before me very vividly, — returns reinforced
by a hundred little things observed and felt. The
contrast consists in the almost complete absence
6 7I
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
from the normal American scheme, of certain im
memorial factors in the social structure of our
European nations.
In the first place, every European nation except
the English is rooted to the soil by a peasantry, and
even in England one still finds the peasant repre
sented, in most of his features by those sons of dis
possessed serf - peasants, the agricultural laborers.
Here in America, except in the regions where the
negro abounds, there is no lower stratum, no "soil
people," to this community at all; your bottom
most man is a mobile free man who can read, and
who has ideas above digging and pigs and poultry
keeping, except incidentally for his own ends. No
one owns to subordination. As a consequence, any
position which involves the acknowledgment of an
innate inferiority is difficult to fill; there is, from
the European point of view, an extraordinary
dearth of servants, and this endures in spite of a
great peasant immigration. The servile tradition
will not root here now, it dies in this soil. An
enormous importation of European serfs and peas
ants goes on, but as they touch this soil their backs
begin to stiffen with a new assertion.
And at the other end of the scale, also, one misses
an element. There is no territorial aristocracy, no
aristocracy at all, no throne, no legitimate and ac
knowledged representative of that upper social
structure of leisure, power, State responsibility,
which in the old European theory of society was
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
supposed to give significance to the whole. The
American community, one cannot too clearly in
sist, does not correspond to an entire European
community at all, but only to the middle masses of
it, to the trading and manufacturing class between
the dimensions of the magnate and the clerk and
skilled artisan. It is the central part of the Euro
pean organism without either the dreaming head or
the subjugated feet. Even the highly feudal
slave-holding "county family" traditions of Vir
ginia and the South pass now out of memory. So
that in a very real sense the past of this American
community is in Europe, and the settled order of
the past is left behind there. This community was,
as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of its branches
and brought hither. It began neither serf nor lord,
but burgher and farmer, it followed the normal de
velopment of the middle class under Progress every
where and became capitalistic. Essentially America
is a middle-class become a community and so its
essential problems are the problems of a modern
individualistic society, stark and clear, unhampered
and unilluminated by any feudal traditions either
at its crest or at its base.
It would be interesting and at first o,r^ly very
slightly misleading to pursue the rough contrast of
American and English conditions upon these lines.
It is not difficult to show for example, that the two
great political parties in America represent only
one English party, the middle-class Liberal party,
73
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
the party of industrialism and freedom. There are
no Tories to represent the feudal system, and no
Labor party. It is history, it is no mere ingenious
gloss upon history, that the Tories, the party of the
crown, of the high gentry and control, of mitigated
property and an organic state, vanished from
America at the Revolution. They left the new
world to the Whigs and Nonconformists and to
those less constructive, less logical, more popular
and liberating thinkers who became Radicals in
England, and Jeffersonians and then Democrats in
America. All Americans are, from the English
point of view, Liberals of one sort or another. You
will find a fac-simile of the Declaration of Inde
pendence displayed conspicuously and trium
phantly beside Magna Charter in the London Re
form Club, to carry out this suggestion.
But these fascinating parallelisms will lead away
from the chief argument in hand, which is that the
Americans started almost clear of the medieval
heritage, and developed in the utmost — purity if
you like — or simplicity or crudeness, whichever
you will, the modern type of productive social
organization. They took the economic conven
tions that were modern and progressive at the
end of the eighteenth century and stamped them
into the Constitution as if they meant to stamp
them there for all time. In England you can still
find feudalism, medievalism, the Renascence, at
every turn. America is pure eighteenth century
74
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
— still crystallizing out from a turbid and troubled
solution.
To turn from any European state to America is,
in these matters anyhow, to turn from complica
tion to a stark simplicity. The relationship be
tween employer and employed, between organizer
and worker, between capital and labor, which in
England is qualified and mellowed and disguised
and entangled with a thousand traditional attitudes
and subordinations, stands out sharply in a bleak
cold rationalism. There is no feeling that property,
privilege, honor, and a grave liability to official pub
lic service ought to go together, none that uncriti
cal obedience is a virtue in a worker or that sub
ordination carries with it not only a sense of service
but a claim for help. Coming across the Atlantic
has in these matters an effect of coming out of an
iridescent fog into a clear bright air.
This homologization of the whole American social
mass, not with the whole English social mass, but
with its "modern" classes, its great middle portion,
and of its political sides with the two ingredients of
English Liberalism, goes further than a rough par
allel. An Englishman who, like myself, has been
bred and who has lived all his life either in London,
with its predominant West -End, or the southern
counties with their fair large estates and the great
country houses, is constantly being reminded, when
he meets manufacturing and business men from
Birmingham or Lancashire, of Americans, and when
75
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
he meets Americans, of industrial North - country
people. There is more push and less tacit assump
tion, more definition, more displayed energy and
less restraint, more action and less subtlety, more
enterprise and self-assertion than there is in the
typical Englishman of London and the home coun
ties. The American carries on the contrast fur
ther, it is true, and his speech is not northernly,
but marked by the accent of Hampshire or East
Anglia, and better and clearer than his English
equivalent's; but one feels the two are of the same
stuff, nevertheless, and made by parallel conditions.
The liberalism of the eighteenth century, the ma
terial progress of the nineteenth have made them
both — out of the undifferentiated Stuart English*
man. And they are the same in their attitude
towards property and social duty, individualists to
the marrow. But the one grew inside a frame of
regal, aristocratic, and feudal institutions, and has
chafed against it, struggled with it, modified it,
strained it, and been modified by it, but has re
mained within it ; the other broke it and escaped to
complete self-development.
The liberalism of the eighteenth century was es
sentially the rebellion of the modern industrial or
ganization against the monarchial and aristocratic
State, — against hereditary privilege, against restric
tions upon bargains — whether they were hard bar
gains or not. Its spirit was essentially Anarchistic,
— the antithesis of Socialism. It was the anti-State.
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
It aimed not only to liberate men but property
from State control. Its most typical expressions,
the Declaration of Independence, and the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man, are zealously em
phatic for the latter interest — for the sacredness of
contracts and possessions. Post Reformation lib
eralism did to a large extent let loose property up
on mankind. The English Civil War of the seven
teenth century, like the American revolution of the
eighteenth, embodied essentially the triumphant
refusal of private property to submit to taxation
without consent. In England the result was tem
pered and qualified, security for private property
was achieved, but not cast-iron security; each man
who had property became king of that property,
but only a constitutional and conditional king. In
America the victory of private property was com
plete. Let one instance suffice to show how de
cisively it was established that individual property
and credit and money were sacred. Ten years ago
the Supreme Court, trying a case arising out of the
General Revenue tax of 1894, decided that a gradu
ated income-tax, such as the English Parliament
might pass to-morrow, can never be levied upon
the United States nation without a change in the
Constitution, which can be effected only by a vote
of two-thirds of both Houses of Congress as an in
itiative, and this must be ratified either by the leg
islatures of three-fourths of the States, or by special
conventions representing three-fourths of the States
77
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
The fundamental law of the States forbids any such
invasion of the individual's ownership. No national
income-tax is legal, and there is practically no power,
short of revolution, to alter that. . . .
Could anything be more emphatic? That tall
Liberty with its spiky crown that stands in New
York Harbor and casts an electric flare upon the
world, is, indeed, the liberty of Property, and there
she stands at the Zenith. ,
in
Now the middle-class of the English
li?d Some population and the whole population
Protests f M
of America that matters at all when we
discuss ideas, is essentially an emancipated class, a
class that has rebelled against superimposed privi
lege and honor, and achieved freedom for its indi
viduals and their property. Without property its
freedom is a featureless and unsubstantial theory,
and so it relies for the reality of life upon that, upon
the possession and acquisition and development of
property, that is to say upon "business." That
is the quality of its life.
Everywhere in the modern industrial and com
mercial class this deep-lying feeling that the State
is something escaped from, has worked out to the
same mental habit of social irresponsibility, and
in America it has worked unimpeded. Patriotism
78
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
has become a mere national self-assertion, a sen
timentality of flag cheering, with no constructive
duties. Law, social justice, the pride and preserva
tion of the state as a whole are taken as provided
for before the game began, and one devotes one
self to business. At business all men are held to
be equal, and none is his brother's keeper.
All men are equal at the great game of business.
You try for the best of each bargain and so does
your opponent ; if you chance to have more in your
hand than he — well, that's your advantage, and you
use it. Presently he may have more than you.
You take care he doesn't if you can, but you play
fair — except for the advantage in your hand; you
play fair — and hard.
Now this middle -class equality ultimately de
stroys itself. Out of this conflict of equals, and by
virtue of the fact that property, like all sorts of
matter, does tend to gravitate towards itself when
ever it is free, there emerge the modern rich and
the modern toiler.
One can trace the process in two or three gen
erations in Lancashire or the Potteries, or any in
dustrial region of England. One sees first the early
Lancashire industrialism, sees a district of cotton-
spinners more or less equal together, small men all;
then come developments, comes a state of ideally
free competition with some men growing large, with
most men dropping into employment, but still with
ample chances for an industrious young man to
79
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
end as a prosperous master; and so through a
steady growth in the size of the organization to the
present opposition of an employer class in posses
sion of everything, almost inaccessibly above, and
an employed class below. The railways come, and
the wealthy class reaches out to master these new
enterprises, capitalistic from the outset. . . .
America is simply repeating the history of the
Lancashire industrialism on a gigantic scale, and
under an enormous variety of forms.
But in England, as the modern Rich rise up, they
come into a world of gentry with a tradition of
public service and authority ; they learn one by one
and assimilate themselves to the legend of the
" governing class" with a sense of proprietorship
which is also, in its humanly limited way, a sense
of duty to the state. They are pseudomorphs after
aristocrats. They receive honors, they inter-marry,
they fall (and their defeated competitors too fall)
into the mellowed relationships of an aristocratic
system. That is not a permanent mutual attitude ;
it does, however, mask and soften the British out
line. Industrialism becomes quasi-feudal. America,
on the other hand, had no effectual "governing
class," there has been no such modification, no
clouding of the issue. Its Rich, to one's superficial
inspection, do seem to lop out, swell up into an im
mense consumption and power and inanity, de
velop no sense of public duties, remain winners of a
strange game they do not criticise, concerned now
80
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
only to hold and intensify their winnings. The
losers accept no subservience. That material prog
ress, that secular growth in scale of all modern
enterprises, widens the gulf between Owner and
Worker daily. More and more do men realize that
this game of free competition and unrestricted
property does not go on for ever ; it is a game that
first in this industry and then in that, and at last
in all, can be played out and is being played out.
Property becomes organized, consolidated, con
centrated, and secured. This is the fact to which
America is slowly awaking at the present time.
The American community is discovering a secular
extinction of opportunity, and the appearance of
powers against which individual enterprise and
competition are hopeless. Enormous sections of
the American public are losing their faith in any
personal chance of growing rich and truly free, and
are developing the consciousness of an expropriated
class.
This realization has come slowlier in America
than in Europe, because of the enormous unde
veloped resources of America. So long as there
was an unlimited extent of unappropriated and
unexplored land westward, so long could tension be
relieved by so simple an injunction as Horace
Greeley's, "Go West, young man; go West." And
to-day, albeit that is no longer true of the land,
and there are already far larger concentrations of
individual possessions in the United States of
81
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
America than anywhere else in the world, yet so
vast are their continental resources that it still re
mains true that nowhere in the world is proper
ty so widely diffused. Consider the one fact that
America can take in three-quarters of a million of
workers in one year without producing a perceptible
fall in wages, and you will appreciate the scale
upon which things are measured here, the scale by
which even Mr. J. D. Rockefeller's billion dollars
becomes no more than a respectable but by no
means overwhelming "pile." For all these con
centrations, the western farmers still own their
farms, and it is the rule rather than the exception
for a family to possess the freehold of the house it
lives in. But the process of concentration goes on
nevertheless — is going on now perceptibly to the
American mind. That it has not gone so far as in
the European instance it is a question of size, just
as the gestation of an elephant takes longer than
that of a mouse. If the process is larger and
slower, it is, for the reasons I have given, plainer,
and it will be discussed and dealt with plainly.
That steady trend towards concentration under in
dividualistic rules, until individual competition be
comes disheartened and hopeless, is the essential
form of the economic and social process in America
as I see it now, and it has become the cardinal topic
of thought and discussion in the American mind.
This realization has been reached after the most
curious hesitation. There is every reason for this;
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
for it involves the contradiction of much that seems
fundamental in the American idea. It amounts
to a national change of attitude. It is a con
scious change of attitude that is being deliberately
made.
This slow reluctant process of disillusionment
with individualism is interestingly traceable through
the main political innovations of the last twenty
years. There was the discovery in the east that
the supply of land was not limitless, and we had
the Single Tax movement, and the epoch of the
first Mr. Henry George. He explained fervently
of course, how individualistic, how profoundly
American he was — but land was not to be monopo
lized. Then came the discovery in the west that
there were limits to borrowing and that gold ap
preciated against the debtor, and so we have the
Populist movement and extraordinary schemes for
destroying the monopolization of gold and credit.
Mr. Bryan led that and nearly captured the coun
try, but only in last May's issue of the Century
Magazine I found him explaining (expounding
meanwhile a largely socialistic programme) that he
too is an Individualist of the purest water. And
then the attack shifted to the destruction of free
competition by the trusts. The small business
went on sufferance, not knowing from week to
week when its hour to sell out or fight might come.
The Trusts have crushed competition, raised prices
against the consumer, and served him often quite
83
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
abominably. The curious reader may find in Mr.
Upton Sinclair's essentially veracious Jungle the
possibilities of individualistic enterprise in the mat
ter of food and decency. The States have been
agitated by a big disorganized Anti-Trust movement
for some years, it becomes of the gravest political
importance at every election, and the sustained
study of the affairs and methods of that most
typical and prominent of trust organizations, the
Standard Oil Company, by Miss Tarbell and a host
of followers, is bringing to light more and more
clearly the defencelessness of the common person,
and his hopelessness, however enterprising, as a
competitor against those great business aggrega
tions. His faith in all his reliances and securities
fades in the new light that grows about him, he
sees his little investments, his insurance policy, his
once open and impartial route to market by steam
boat and rail, all passing into the grip of the
great property accumulators. The aggregation of
property has created powers that are stronger
than state legislatures and more persistent than
any public opinion can be, that have no awe
and no sentiment for legislation, that are pre
pared to disregard it or evade it whenever they
can.
And these aggregations are taking on immor
tality and declining to disintegrate when their
founders die. The Astor property, the Jay Gould
property, the Marshall Field property, for example,
84
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
do not break up, become undying centres for the
concentration of wealth, and it is doubtful if there
is any power to hinder such a development of per
petual fortunes. In England when Thelussen left
his investments to accumulate, a simple little act of
Parliament set his will aside. But Congress is not
sovereign, there is no national sovereign power in
America, and Property in America, it would seem,
is absolutely free to do these things. So you have
President Roosevelt in a recent oration attacking
the man with the Muck Rake (who gathered vile
dross for the love of it), and threatening the limita
tion of inheritance. But he too, quite as much as
Mr. Bryan, assures the public that he is a fervent
individualist.
So in this American community, whose distinc
tive conception is its emphatic assertion of the free
dom of individual property, whose very symbol is
that spike-crowned Liberty gripping a torch in
New York Harbor, there has been and is going on
a successive repudiation of that freedom in almost
every department of ownable things by consider
able masses of thinking people, a denial of the
soundness of individual property in land, an or
ganized attempt against the accumulation of gold
and credit, by a systematic watering of the cur
rency, a revolt against the aggregatory outcome of
untrammelled business competition, a systematic
interference with the freedom of railways and car
riers to do business as they please, and a protest
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
from the most representative of Americans against
hereditary wealth. . . .
That, in general terms, is the economic and
social process as one sees it in America now, a proc
ess of systematically concentrating wealth on the
part of an energetic minority, and of a great in-
surgence of alarm, of waves of indignation and
protest and threat on the part of that vague in
definite public that Mr. Roosevelt calls the ''na
tion."
And this goes on side by side with a process of
material progress that partly masks its quality,
that keeps the standard of life from falling and
prevents any sense of impoverishment among the
mass of the losers in the economic struggle. Through
this material progress there is a constant substitu
tion of larger, cleaner, more efficient possibilities,
and more and more wholesale and far-sighted
methods of organization for the dark, confused, un
tidy individualistic expedients of the Victorian
time. An epoch which was coaly and mechanical,
commercial and adventurous after the earlier
fashion is giving place, almost automatically, to
one that will be electrical and scientific, artistic and
creative. The material progress due to a secular
increase in knowledge, and the economic progress
interfere and combine with and complicate one an
other, the former constantly changes the forms and
appliances of the latter, changes the weapons and
conditions, and may ultimately change the spirit
86
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
and conceptions of the struggle. The latter now
clogs and arrests the former. So in its broad feat
ures, as a conflict between the birth strength of a
splendid civilization and a hampering commercial
ism, I see America.
7
CHAPTER VI
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
IT is obvious that in a community
The Spenders that has disavowed aristocracy or rule
and subordination or service, which
has granted unparalleled freedoms to property and
despised and distrusted the state, the chief business
of life will consist in getting or attempting to get.
But the chief aspect of American life that impinges
first upon the European is not this, but the be
havior of a certain overflow at the top, of people
who have largely and triumphantly got, and with
hand, pockets, safe-deposit vaults full of dollars,
are proceeding to realize victory. Before I came to
America it was in his capacity of spender that I
chiefly knew the American; as a person who had
demoralized Regent Street and the Rue de Rivoli,
who had taught the London cabman to demand
"arf a dollar " for a shilling fare, who bought old
books and old castles, and had driven the prices
of old furniture to incredible altitudes, and was
slowly transferring our incubus of artistic achieve-
88
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
ment to American soil. One of my friends in Lon
don is Mr. X, who owns those two houses full of
fine "pieces" near the British Museum and keeps
his honor unsullied in the most deleterious of
trades. "They come to me," he said, "and ask
me to buy for them. It's just buying. One of
them wants to beat the silver of another, doesn't
care what he pays. Another clamors for tapestry.
They trust me as they trust a doctor. There's no
understanding — no feeling. It's hard to treat them
well."
And there is the story of Y, who is wise about
pictures. "If you want a Botticelli that size, Mr.
Record, I can't find it," he said; "you'll have to
have it made for you."
These American spenders have got the whole
world "beat" at the foolish game of collecting, and
in all the peculiar delights of shopping they excel.
And they are the crown and glory of hotel managers
throughout the world. There is something naive,
something childishly expectant and acquisitive,
about this aspect of American riches. There ap
pears no aristocracy in their tradition, no sense of
permanence and great responsibility, there appears
no sense of subordination and service; from the in
dividualistic business struggle they have emerged
triumphant, and what is there to do now but spend
and have a good time ?
They swarm in the pleasant places of the Riviera,
they pervade Paris and Rome, they occupy Scotch
89
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
castles and English estates, their motor-cars are
terrible and wonderful. And the London Savoy
Hotel still flaunts its memory of one splendid
American night. The court-yard was flooded with
water tinted an artistic blue — to the great discom
fort of the practically inevitable gold-fish, and on
this floated a dream of a gondola. And in the gon
dola the table was spread and served by the Savoy
staff, mysteriously disguised in appropriate fancy
costume. The whole thing — there's only two words
for it — was " perfectly lovely." "The illusion" —
whatever that was — we are assured, was complete.
It wasn't a nursery treat, you know. The guests,
I am told, were important grown-up people.
This sort of childishness, of course, has nothing
distinctively American in it. Any people of slug
gish and uneducated imagination who find them
selves profusely wealthy, and are too stupid to un
derstand the huge moral burden, the burden of
splendid possibilities it carries, may do things of
this sort. It was not Americans but a party of
South-African millionaires who achieved the kindred
triumph of the shirt-and-belt dinner under a tent
in a London hotel dining-room. The glittering pro
cession of carriages and motor-carriages which I
watched driving down Fifth Avenue, New York,
apparently for the pleasure of driving up again, is
to be paralleled on the Pincio, in Naples, in Paris,
and anywhere where irresponsible pleasure-seekers
gather together. After the naive joy of buying
90
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
things comes the joy of wearing them publicly, the
simple pleasure of the promenade. These things
are universals. But nowhere has this spending
struck me as being so solid and substantial, so
nearly twenty-two carats fine, as here. The shops
have an air of solid worth, are in the key of butlers,
bishops, opera-boxes, high-class florists, powdered
footmen, Roman beadles, motor-broughams, to an
extent that altogether outshines either Paris or
London.
And in such great hotels as the Waldorf-Astoria,
one finds the new arrivals, the wives and daugh
ters from the West and the South, in new, bright
hats, and splendors of costume, clubbed together,
under the discreetest management, for this and
that, learning how to spend collectively, reaching
out to assemblies, to dinners. From an observant
tea-table beneath the fronds of a palm, I surveyed
a fine array of these plump and pretty pupils of
extravagance. They were for the most part quite
brilliantly as well as newly dressed, and with an
artless and pleasing unconsciousness of the living
from inside. Smart innocents! I found all that
gathering most contagiously interested and happy
and fresh.
And I watched spending, too, as one sees it in
the various incompatible houses of upper Fifth
Avenue and along the border of Central Park.
That, too, suggests a shop, a shop where country
houses are sold and stored; there is the Tiffany
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
house, a most expensive - looking article, on the
shelf, and the Carnegie house. There had been
no pretence on the part of the architects that any
house belonged in any sense to any other, that any
sort of community held them together. The link
is just spending. You come to New York and
spend; you go away again. To some of these pal
aces people came and went ; others had their blinds
down and conveyed a curious effect of a sunlit
child excursionist in a train who falls asleep and
droops against his neighbor. One of the Vander-
bilt houses was frankly and brutally boarded up.
Newport, I am told, takes up and carries on the
same note of magnificent irresponsibility, and there
one admires the richest forms of simplicity, tri
umphs of villa architecture in thatch, and bathing
bungalows in marble. . . .
There exists already, of these irresponsible Amer
ican rich, a splendid group of portraits, done with
out extenuation and without malice, in the later
work of that great master of English fiction, Mr.
Henry James. There one sees them at their best,
their refinement, their large wealthiness, their in
credible unreality. I think of The Ambassadors
and that mysterious source of the income of the
Newcomes, a mystery that, with infinite artistic
tact, was never explained ; but more I think of The
Golden Bowl, most spacious and serene of novels.
In that splendid and luminous bubble, the Prince
Amerigo and Maggie Verver, Mr. Verver, that as-
92
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
siduous collector, and the adventurous Charlotte
Stant float far above a world of toil and anxiety,
spending with a large refinement, with a perfected
assurance and precision. They spend as flowers
open. But this is the quintessence, the sublima
tion, the idealization of the rich American. Few
have the restraint for this. For the rest, when one
has shopped and shopped, and collected and bought
everything, and promenaded on foot, in motor-car
and motor-brougham and motor-boat, in yacht and
special train ; when one has a fine house here and a
fine house there, and photography and the special
article have exhausted admiration, there remains
chiefly that one broader and more presumptuous
pleasure — spending to give. American givers give
most generously, and some of them, it must be ad
mitted, give well. But they give individually, in
coherently, each pursuing a personal ideal. There
are unsuccessful givers. . . .
American cities are being littered with a disorder
of unsystematized foundations and picturesque
legacies, much as I find my nursery floor littered
with abandoned toys and battles and buildings
when the children are in bed after a long, wet day.
Yet some of the gifts are very splendid things.
There is, for example, the Leland Stanford Junior
University in California, a vast monument of pa
rental affection and Richardsonian architecture,
with professors, and teaching going on in its in
terstices; and there is Mrs. Gardner's delightful
93
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
Fenway Court, a Venetian palace, brought almost
bodily from Italy and full of finely gathered treas
ures. . . .
All this giving is, in its aggregate effect, as con
fused as industrial Chicago. It presents no clear
scheme of the future, promises no growth ; it is due
to the impulsive generosity of a mob of wealthy
persons, with no broad common conceptions, with
no collective dream, with little to hold them to
gether but imitation and the burning possession of
money; the gifts overlap, they lie at any angle, one
with another. Some are needless, some mischiev
ous. There are great gaps of unfulfilled need be
tween.
And through the multitude of lesser, though still
mighty, givers, comes that colossus of property,
Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the jubilee plunger of benefi
cence, that rosy, gray-haired, nimble little figure,
going to and fro between two continents, scatter
ing library buildings as if he sowed wild oats, build
ings that may or may not have some educational
value, if presently they are reorganized and proper
ly stocked with books. Anon he appals the thrifty
burgesses of Dunfermline with vast and uncongenial
responsibilities of expenditure; anon he precipitates
the library of the late Lord Acton upon our em
barrassed Mr. Morley; anon he pauperizes the
students of Scotland. He diffuses his monument
throughout the English-speaking lands, amid cir
cumstances of the most flagrant publicity; the re-
94
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
ceptive learned, the philanthropic noble, bow in
expectant swaths before him. He is the American
fable come true; nothing seems too wild to believe
of him, and he fills the European imagination with
an altogether erroneous conception of the self-dissi
pating quality in American wealth.
ii
BECAUSE, now, as a matter of fact,
dissipation is by no means the charac
teristic quality of American getting.
The good American will indeed tell you solemnly
that in America it is three generations ' ' from shirt
sleeves to shirt -sleeves"; but this has about as
much truth in it as that remarkable absence of any
pure-bred Londoners of the third generation, dear
to the British imagination.
Amid the vast yeasty tumult of American busi
ness, of the getting and losing which are the main
life of this community, nothing could be clearer
than the steady accumulation of great masses of
property that show no signs of disintegrating again.
The very rich people display an indisposition to
divide their estates; the Marshall Field estate in
Chicago, for example, accumulates; the Jay Gould
inheritance survives great strains. And when first
I heard that " shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves" proverb,
which is so fortifying a consolation to the older
95
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
school of Americans, my mind flew back to the
Thames Embankment, as one sees it from the
steamboat on the river. There, just eastward of
the tall red Education offices of the London County
Council, stands a quite graceful and decorative
little building of gray stone, that jars not at all with
the fine traditions of the adjacent Temple, but
catches the eye, nevertheless, with its very big, very
gilded vane in the form of a ship. This is the
handsome strong-box to which New York pays gi
gantic yearly tribute, the office in which Mr. W. W.
Astor conducts his affairs. They are not his pri
vate and individual affairs, but the affairs of the
estate of the late J. J. Astor — still undivided, and
still growing year by year.
Mr. Astor seems to me to be a much more repre
sentative figure of American wealth than any of
the conspicuous spenders who strike so vividly upon
the European imagination. His is the most retir
ing of personalities. In this picturesque stone
casket he works; his staff works under his cog
nizance, and administers, I know not to what ends
nor to what extent, revenues that exceed those of
many sovereign states. He himself is impressed by
it, and, without arrogance, he makes a visit to his
offices, with a view of its storage vaults, its halls of
disciplined clerks, a novel and characteristic form
of entertainment. For the rest, Mr. Astor leads a
life of modest affluence, and recreates himself with
the genealogy of his family, short stories about
96 "
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
treasure lost and found, and such like literary
work.
Now here you have wealth with, as it were, the
minimum of ownership, as indeed owning its pos
sessor. Nobody seems to be spending that huge
income the crowded enormity of New York squeezes
out. The "Estate of the late J. J. Astor" must
be accumulating more wealth and still more; un
der careful and systematic management must be
rolling up like a golden snowball under that gold
en weather-vane. In the most accidental relation
to its undistinguished, harmless, arithmetical pro
prietor !
Your anarchist orator or your crude socialist is
always talking of the rich as blood-suckers, rob
bers, robber-barons, grafters and so on. It really is
nonsense to talk like that. In the presence of Mr.
W. W. Astor these preposterous accusations answer
themselves. The thing is a logical outcome of the
assumptions about private property on which our
contemporary civilization is based, and Mr. Astor,
for all that he draws gold from New York as effect
ually as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit, is in
deed the most innocent of men. He finds himself in
a certain position, and he sits down very con
genially and adds and adds and adds, and relieves
the tedium of his leisure in literary composition.
Had he been born at the level of a dry-goods clerk
he would probably have done the same sort of
thing on a smaller scale, and it would have been
97
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
the little Poddlecombe literary society, and not the
Pall Mall Magazine, that would have been the
richer for his compositions. It is just the scale of
the circumstances that differs. .
in
THE lavish spending of Fifth Avenue
and Paris and Rome and Mayfair is
but the flower, the often brilliant, the
sometimes gaudy flower of the American economic
process ; and such slow and patient accumulators as
Mr. Astor the rounding and ripening fruit. One
need be only a little while in America to realize
this, and to discern the branch and leaf, and at last
even the aggressive insatiable spreading root of ag
gregating property, that was liberated so effectually
when America declared herself free.
The group of people that attracts the largest
amount of attention in press and talk, that most
obsesses the American imagination, and that is in
deed the most significant at the present time, is the
little group — a few score men perhaps altogether
—who are emerging distinctly as winners in that
great struggle to get, into which this commercial in
dustrialism has naturally resolved itself. Central
among them are the men of the Standard Oil
group, the "octopus" which spreads its ramifying
tentacles through the whole system of American
98
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
business, absorbing and absorbing, grasping and
growing. The extraordinarily able investigations
of such writers as Miss Tarbell and Ray Stannard
Baker, the rhetorical exposures of Mr. T. W. Law-
son, have brought out the methods and quality of
this group of persons with a particularity that has
been reserved heretofore for great statesmen and
crowned heads, and with an unflattering lucidity
altogether unprecedented. Not only is every hair
on their heads numbered, but the number is pub
lished. They are known to their pettiest weak
nesses and to their most accidental associations.
And in this astonishing blaze of illumination they
continue steadfastly to get.
These men, who are creating the greatest system
of correlated private properties in the world, who
are wealthy beyond all precedent, seem for the
most part to be men with no ulterior dream or aim.
They are not voluptuaries, they are neither artists
nor any sort of creators, and they betray no high
political ambitions. Had they anything of the sort
they would not be what, they are, they would be
more than that and less. They want and they get,
they are inspired by the brute will in their wealth
to have more wealth and move, to a systematic
ardor. They are men of a competing, patient,
enterprising, acquisitive enthusiasm. They have
found in America the perfectly favorable environ
ment for their temperaments. In no other country
and in no other age could they have risen to such
99
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
eminence. America is still, by virtue of its great
Puritan tradition and in the older sense of the word,
an intensely moral land. Most lusts here are
strongly curbed, by public opinion, by training and
tradition. But the lust of acquisition has not been
curbed but glorified. . . .
These financial leaders are accused by the press
of every sort of crime in the development of their
great organizations and their fight against com
petitors, but I feel impelled myself to acquit them
of anything so heroic as a general scheme of crimi
nality, as a systematic organization of power.
They are men with a good deal of contempt for
legislation and state interference, but that is no
distinction, it has unhappily been part of the
training of the average American citizen, and they
have no doubt exceeded the letter if not the
spirit of the laws of business competition. They
have played to win and not for style, and if they
personally had not done so somebody else would;
they fill a position which from the nature of things,
somebody is bound to fill. They have, no doubt,
carried sharpness to the very edge of dishonesty,
but what else was to be expected from the Ameri
can conditions ? Only by doing so and taking risks
is pre-eminent success in getting to be attained.
They have developed an enormous system of espio
nage, but on his smaller scale every retail grocer,
every employer of servants does something in that
way. They have secret agents, false names, con-
100
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN/
cealed bargains, — what else could one expect?
People have committed suicide through their
operations — but in a game which is bound to
bring the losers to despair it is childish to charge
the winners with murder. It's the game that is
criminal. It is ridiculous, I say, to write of these
men as though they were unparalleled villains, in
tellectual overmen, conscienceless conquerors of the
world. Mr. J. D. Rockefeller's mild, thin - lipped,
pleasant face gives the lie to all such melo
dramatic nonsense.
I must confess to a sneaking liking for this much-
reviled man. One thinks of Miss Tarbell's descrip
tion of him, displaying his first boyish account-
book, his ledger A, to a sympathetic gathering of
the Baptist young, telling how he earned fifty dol
lars in the first three months of his clerking in a
Chicago warehouse, and how savingly he dealt with
it. Hear his words:
" You could not get that book from me for all the
modern ledgers in New York, nor for all that they
would bring. It almost brings tears to my eyes
when I read over this little book, and it fills me
with a sense of gratitude I cannot express. . . .
"I know some people, . . . especially some young
men, find it difficult to keep a little money in their
pocket-book. I learned to keep money, and, as we
have a way of saying, it did not burn a hole in my
pocket. I was taught that it was the thing to keep
the money and take care of it. Among the early
101
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
experiences that were helpful to me that I recollect
with pleasure, was one of working a few days for
a neighbor digging potatoes — an enterprising and
thrifty farmer who could dig a great many pota
toes. I was a boy perhaps thirteen or fourteen
years of age, and he kept me busy from morning
until night. It was a ten-hour day. . . .
"And as I was saving these little sums, I soon
learned I could get as much interest for fifty dollars
loaned at seven per cent. — the legal rate in the
State of New York at that time for a year — as I
could earn by digging potatoes ten days. The im
pression was gaining ground with me that it was a
good thing to let money be my slave and not make
myself a slave to money. I have tried to remember
that in every sense."
This is not the voice of any sort of contemptuous
trampler of his species. This is the voice of an in
dustrious, acquisitive, commonplace, pious man, as
honestly and simply proud of his acquisitiveness as
a stamp-collector might be. At times, in his ac
quisitions, the strength of his passion may have
driven him to lengths beyond the severe moral code,
but the same has been true of stamp-collectors.
He is a man who has taken up with great natural
aptitude an ignoble tradition which links economy
and earning with piety and honor. His teachers
were to blame, that Baptist community that is
now so ashamed of its son that it refuses his gifts.
To a large extent he is the creature of opportunity;
102
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
he has been *flung to the topmost pinnacle of human
envy, partly by accident, partly by that peculiarity
of American conditions that has subordinated, in
the name of liberty, all the grave and ennobling
affairs of statecraft to a middle-class freedom of
commercial enterprise. Quarrel with that if you
like. It is unfair and ridiculous to quarrel with
him.
CHAPTER VII
CERTAIN WORKERS
LET us now look a little at another
Th0Not^Ge°t D° asPect °f this process of individualis
tic competition which is the economic
process in America, and which is giving us on its
upper side the spenders of Fifth Avenue, the slow
accumulators of the Astor type, and the great get
ters of the giant business organizations, the Trusts
and acquisitive finance. We have concluded that
this process of free and open competition in busi
ness which, clearly, the framers of the American
Constitution imagined to be immortal, does as a
matter of fact tend to kill itself through the ad
vantage property gives in the acquisition of more
property. But before we can go on to estimate the
further future of this process we must experiment
with another question. What is happening to
those who have not got and who are not getting
wealth, who are, in fact, falling back in the com
petition ?
Now there can be little doubt to any one who
104
CERTAIN WORKERS
goes to and fro in America that in spite of the
huge accumulation of property in a few hands that
is now in progress, there is still no general effect of
impoverishment. To me, coming from London to
New York, the effect of the crowd in the trolley-
cars and subways and streets was one of exceptional
prosperity. New York has no doubt its effects of
noise, disorder, discomfort, and a sort of brutality,
but to begin with one sees nothing of the underfed
people, the numerous dingily clad and grayly
housed people who catch the eye in London. Even
in the congested arteries, the filthy back streets of
the East Side I found myself saying, as a thing re
markable, "These people have money to spend."
In London one travels long distances for two cents,
and great regiments of people walk; in New York
the universal fare is five cents and everybody rides.
Common people are better gloved and better booted
in America than in any European country I know,
in spite of the higher prices for clothing here, the
men wear ready-made suits, it is true, to a much
greater extent, but they are newer and brighter
than the London clerk's carefully brushed, tailor-
made garments. Wages translated from dollars
into shillings seem enormous.
And there is no perceptible fall in wages going
on. On the whole wages tend to rise. For almost
all sorts of men, for working women who are not
"refined," there is a limitless field of employment.
The fact that a growing proportion of the wealth of
105
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
the community is passing into the hands of a small
minority of successful getters, is masked to super
ficial observation by the enormous increase of the
total wealth. The growth process overrides the
economic process and may continue to do so for
many years.
So that the great mass of the population is not
consciously defeated in the economic game. It is
only failing to get a large share in the increment
of wrealth. The European reader must dismiss
from his mind any conception of the general Ameri
can population as a mass of people undergoing im
poverishment through the enrichment of the few.
He must substitute for that figure a mass of people,
very busy, roughly prosperous, generally self-sat
isfied, but ever and again stirred to bouts of iras
cibility and suspicion, inundated by a constantly
swelling flood of prosperity that pours through it
and over it and passes by it, without changing or
enriching it at all. Ever and again it is irritated
by some rise in price, an advance in coal, for ex
ample, or meat or rent, that swallows up some
anticipated gain, but that is an entirely different
thing from want or distress, from the fireless hun
gering poverty of Europe.
Nevertheless, the sense of losing develops and
spreads in the mass of the American people. Priva
tions are not needed to create a sense of economic
disadvantage; thwarted hopes suffice. The speed
and pressure of work here is much greater than in
106
NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE
CERTAIN WORKERS
Europe, the impatience for realization intenser.
The average American comes into life prepared to
"get on," and ready to subordinate most things in
life to that. He encounters a rising standard of
living. He finds it more difficult to get on than
his father did before him. He is perplexed and
irritated by the spectacle of lavish spending and
the report of gigantic accumulations that outshine
his utmost possibilities of enjoyment or success.
He is a busy and industrious man, greatly preoccu
pied by the struggle, but when he stops to think
and talk at all, there can be little doubt that his
outlook is a disillusioned one, more and more
tinged with a deepening discontent.
ii
BUT the state of mind of the average
American we have to consider later.
That is the central problem of this
horoscope we contemplate. Before we come to
that we have to sketch out all the broad aspects of
the situation with which that mind has to deal.
Now in the preceding chapter I tried to convey
my impression of the spending and wealth-getting
of this vast community ; I tried to convey how irre
sponsible it was, how unpremeditated. The Amer
ican rich have, as it were, floated up out of a
confused struggle of equal individuals. That indi-
107
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
vidualistic commercial struggle has not only flung
up these rich to their own and the world's amaze
ment, it is also, with an equal blindness, crushing
and maiming great multitudes of souls. But this is
a fact that does not smite upon one's attention
at the outset. The English visitor to the great
towns sees the spending, sees the general prosperity,
the universal air of confident pride ; he must go out
of his way to find the under side to these things.
One little thing set me questioning. I had been
one Sunday night down- town, supping and talking
with Mr. Abraham Cahan about the " East Side," that
strange city within a city which has a drama of its
own and a literature and a press, and about Russia
and her problem, and I was returning on the sub
way about two o'clock in the morning. I became
aware of a little lad sitting opposite me, a childish-
faced delicate little creature of eleven years old or
so, wearing the uniform of a messenger-boy. He
drooped with fatigue, roused himself with a start,
edged off his seat with a sigh, stepped off the car,
and was vanishing up-stairs into the electric glare
of Astor Place as the train ran out of the station.
"What on earth," said I, "is that baby doing
abroad at this time of night?"
For me this weary little wretch became the irri
tant centre of a painful region of inquiry. "How
many hours a day may a child work in New York,"
I began to ask people, "and when may a boy
leave school?"
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CERTAIN WORKERS
I had blundered, I found, upon the weakest spot
in America's fine front of national well-being. My
eyes were opened to the childish newsboys who sold
me papers, and the little bootblacks at the street
corners. Nocturnal child employment is a social
abomination. I gathered stories of juvenile vice,
of lads of nine and ten suffering from terrible dis
eases, of the contingent sent by these messengers to
the hospitals and jails. I began to realize another
aspect of that great theory of the liberty of prop
erty and the subordination of the state to business,
upon which American institutions are based. That
theory has no regard for children. Indeed, it is a the
ory that disregards wromen and children, the cardinal
facts of life altogether. They are private things. . . .
It is curious how little we, who live in the dawn
ing light of a new time, question the intellectual
assumptions of the social order about us. We find
ourselves in a life of huge confusions and many
cruelties, we plan this and that to remedy and im
prove, but very few of us go down to the ideas that
begot these ugly conditions, the laws, the usages
and liberties that are nowT in their detailed ex
pansion so perplexing, intricate, and overwhelm
ing. Yet the life of man is altogether made up of
will cast into the mould of ideas, and only by cor
recting ideas, changing ideas and replacing ideas
are any ameliorations and advances to be achieved
in human destiny. All other things are subordi
nate to that.
109
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
Now the theory of liberty upon which the liberal
ism of Great Britain, the Constitution of the United
States, and the bourgeois Republic of France rests,
assumes that all men are free and equal. They are
all tacitly supposed to be adult and immortal, they
are sovereign over their property and over their
wives and children, and everything is framed with
a view to insuring them security in the enjoyment
of their rights. No doubt this was a better theory
than that of the divine right of kings, against
which it did triumphant battle, but it does, as one
sees it to-day, fall most extraordinarily short of the
truth, and only a few logical fanatics have ever
tried to carry it out to its complete consequences.
For example, it ignored the facts that more than
half of the adult people in a country are women,
and that all the men and women of a country
taken together are hardly as numerous and far less
important to the welfare of that country than the
individuals under age. It regarded living as just
living, a stupid dead level of egotistical effort and
enjoyment; it was blind to the fact that living is
part growing, part learning, part dying to make
way and altogether service and sacrifice. It as
serted that the care and education of children, and
business bargains affecting the employment and
welfare of women and children, are private affairs.
It resisted the compulsory education of children
and factory legislation, therefore, with extraordi
nary persistence and bitterness. The common-
CERTAIN WORKERS
sense of the three great progressive nations con
cerned has been stronger than their theory, but to
this day enormous social evils are to be traced to
that passionate jealousy of state intervention be
tween a man and his wife, his children, and other
property, which is the distinctive unprecedented
feature of the originally middle-class modern or
ganization of society upon commercial and in
dustrial conceptions in which we are all (and
America most deeply) living.
.1 began with a drowsy little messenger-boy in the
New York Subway. Before I had done with the
question I had come upon amazing things. Just
think of it! This richest, greatest country the
world has ever seen has over 1,700,000 children un
der fifteen years of age toiling in fields, factories,
mines, and workshops. And Robert Hunter — whose
Poverty, if I were autocrat, should be compulsory
reading for every prosperous adult in the United
States, tells me of "not less than eighty thousand
children, most of whom are little girls, at present
employed in the textile mills of this country. In
the South there are now six times as many children
at work as there were twenty years ago. Child
labor is increasing yearly in that section of the
country. Each year more little ones are brought
in from the fields and hills to live in the degrading
atmosphere of the mill towns." . . .
Children are deliberately imported by the Ital
ians. I gathered from Commissioner Watchorn at
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
Ellis Island that the proportion of little nephews
and nieces, friends' sons, and so forth, brought in
by them is peculiarly high, and I heard him try
and condemn a doubtful case. It was a particu
larly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed
little boy of no ascertainable relationship. . . .
In the worst days of cotton-milling in England
the conditions were hardly worse than those now
existing in the South. Children, the tiniest and
frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the
morning and, like old men and women, go to the
mills to do their day's labor; and when they return
home, "wearily fling themselves on their beds, too
tired to take off their clothes." Many children
work all night — "in the maddening racket of the
machinery, in an atmosphere unsanitary and cloud
ed with humidity and lint."
" It will be long," adds Mr. Hunter, in his descrip
tion, "before I forget the face of a little boy of six
years, with his hands stretched forward to rearrange
a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form
already showing the physical effects of labor. This
child, six years of age, was working twelve hours a
day."
From Mr. Spargo's Bitter Cry of the Children I
learn this much of the joys of certain among the
youth of Pennsylvania:
"For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and
eleven stoop over the chute and pick out the slate and
other impurities from the coal as it moves past them.
112
BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY
CERTAIN WORKERS
The air is black with coal-dust, and the roar of the crushers,
screens, and rushing mill-race of coal is deafening. Some
times one of the children falls into the machinery and is
terribly mangled, or slips into the chute and is smothered
to death. Many children are killed in this way. Many
others, after a time, contract coal - miners' asthma and
consumption, which gradually undermine their health.
Breathing continually day after day the clouds of coal-
dust, their lungs become black and choked with small
particles of anthracite." . . .
In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J. F.
Carey tells us how little naked boys, free Ameri
cans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York million
aire, packing cloth into bleaching vats in a bath of
chemicals that bleaches their little bodies like the
bodies of lepers. . . .
Well, we English have no right to condemn the
Americans for these things. The history of our
own industrial development is black with the blood
of tortured and murdered children. America still
has the factory serfs. New Jersey sends her
pauper children south to-day into worse than
slavery, but, as Cottle tells in his reminiscences of
Southey and Coleridge, that is precisely the same
wretched export Bristol packed off to feed the mills
of Manchester in late Georgian times. We got
ahead with factory legislation by no peculiar virtue
in our statecraft, it was just the revenge the land-
lords took upon the manufacturers for reform and
free trade in corn and food. In America the manu
facturers have had things to themselves.
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
And America has difficulties to encounter of
which we know nothing. In the matter of labor
legislation each State legislature is supreme; in
each separate State the forces of light and progress
must fight the battle of the children and the future
over again against interests, lies, prejudice and
stupidity. Each State pleads the bad example of
another State, and there is always the threat that
capital will withdraw. No national minimum is
possible under existing conditions. And when the
laws have passed there is still the universal con
tempt for State control to reckon with, the impos
sibilities of enforcement. Illinois, for instance,
scandalized at the spectacle of children in those
filthy stock-yards, ankle-deep in blood, cleaning in
testines and trimming meat, recently passed a
child-labor law that raised the minimum age for
such employment to sixteen, but evasion, they told
me in Chicago, was simple and easy. New York,
too, can show by its statute-books that my drowsy
nocturnal messenger - boy was illegal and impos
sible. . . .
This is the bottomest end of the scale that at the
top has all the lavish spending of Fifth Avenue, the
joyous wanton giving of Mr. Andrew Carnegie.
Equally with these things it is an unpremeditated
consequence of an inadequate theory of freedom.
The foolish extravagances of the rich, the archi
tectural pathos of Newport, the dingy, noisy, eco
nomic jumble of central and south Chicago, the
114
CERTAIN WORKERS
Standard Oil offices in Broadway, the darkened
streets beneath New York's elevated railroad, the
littered ugliness of Niagara's banks, and the lower
most hell of child suffering are all so many ac
cordant aspects and inexorable consequences of the
same undisciplined way of living. Let each man
push for himself — it comes to these things. . . .
So far as our purpose of casting a horoscope goes
we have particularly to note this as affecting the
future; these working children cannot be learning
to read — though they will presently be having votes
—they cannot grow up fit to bear arms, to be in
any sense but a vile computing sweater's sense,
men. So miserably they will avenge themselves by
supplying the stuff for vice, for crime, for yet more
criminal and political manipulations. One million
seven hundred children, practically uneducated, are
toiling over here, and growing up, darkened, marred,
and dangerous, into the American future I am seek
ing to forecast.
CHAPTER VIII
CORRUPTION
So, it seems to me, in this new crude
continental commonwealth, there is go
ing on the same economic process, on a
grander scale, indeed, than has gone so far in our
own island. There is a great concentration of
wealth above, and below, deep and growing is the
abyss, that sunken multitude on the margin of
subsistence which is a characteristic and necessary
feature of competitive industrialism, that teeming
abyss where children have no chance, where men and
women dream neither of leisure nor of self-respect.
And between this efflorescence of wealth above and
spreading degradation below, comes the great mass
of the population, perhaps fifty millions and more
of healthy and active men, women and children (I
leave out of count altogether the colored people and
the special trouble of the South until a later chapter)
who are neither irresponsibly free nor hopelessly
bound, who are the living determining substance of
America.
116
CORRUPTION
Collectively they constitute what Mr. Roosevelt
calls the "Nation," what an older school of Ameri
cans used to write of as the People. The Nation is
neither rich nor poor, neither capitalist nor laborer,
neither Republican nor Democrat; it is a great
diversified multitude including all these things. It
is a comprehensive abstraction; it is the ultimate
reality. You may seek for it in America and you
cannot find it, as one seeks in vain for the forest
among the trees. It has no clear voice; the con
fused and local utterances of a dispersed innumer
able press, of thousands of public speakers, of
books and preachers, evoke fragmentary responses
or drop rejected into oblivion. I have been told by
countless people where I shall find the typical
American; one says in Maine, one in the Alle-
ghenies, one "farther west," one in Kansas, one in
Cleveland. He is indeed nowhere and everywhere.
He is an English-speaking person, with extraordi
narily English traits still, in spite of much good
German and Scandinavian and Irish blood he has
assimilated. He has a distrust of lucid theories,
and logic, and he talks unwillingly of ideas. He is
preoccupied, he is busy with his individual affairs,
but he is — I can feel it in the air — thinking.
How widely and practically he is thinking that
curious product of the last few years, the ten-cent
magazine, will show. In England our sixpenny
magazines seem all written for boys and careless
people; they are nothing but stories and jests and
117
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
pictures. The weekly ones achieve an extraordi
narily agreeable emptiness. Their American equiva
lents are full of the studied and remarkably well-
written discussion of grave public questions. I
pick up one magazine and find a masterly exposi
tion of the public aspect of railway rebates, another
and a trust is analyzed. Then here are some titles
of books that all across this continent are being
multitudinously read: Parson's Heart of the Railway
Problem, Steffens's Shame of the Cities, Lawson's
Frenzied Finance, Miss Tarbell's Story of Standard
Oil, Abbott's Industrial Problem, Spargo's Bitter
Cry of the Children, Hunter's Poverty, and, pioneer
of them all, Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth.
These are titles quoted almost at hap-hazard.
Within a remarkably brief space of time the Ameri
can nation has turned away from all the heady
self-satisfaction of the nineteenth century and com
menced a process of heart searching quite unpar
alleled in history. Its egotistical interest in its
own past is over and done. While Mr. Upton Sin
clair, the youngest, most distinctive of recent
American novelists, achieved but a secondary suc
cess with his admirably conceived romance of the
Civil War, Manassas, The Jungle, his book about
the beef trust and the soul of the immigrant, the
most unflattering picture of America that any one
has yet dared to draw, has fired the country.
The American nation, which a few years ago
seemed invincibly wedded to an extreme individu-
118
CORRUPTION
alism, seemed resolved, as it were, to sit on the
safety valves of the economic process and go on to
the ultimate catastrophe, displays itself now alert
and questioning. It has roused itself to a grave
and extensive consideration of the intricate eco
nomic and political problems that close like a net
about its future. The essential question for Amer
ica, as for Europe, is the rescue of her land, her
public service, and the whole of her great eco
nomic process from the anarchic and irresponsi
ble control of private owners — how dangerous and
horrible that control may become the Railway and
Beef Trust investigations have shown — and the or
ganization of her social life upon the broad, clean,
humane conceptions of modern science. In every
country, however, this huge problem of reconstruc
tion which is the alternative to a plutocratic de
cadence, is enormously complicated by irrelevant
and special difficulties. In Great Britain, for ex
ample, the ever-pressing problem of holding the
empire, and the fact that one legislative body is
composed almost entirely of private land-owners,
hampers every step towards a better order. Upon
every country in Europe weighs the armor of war.
In America the complications are distinctive and
peculiar. She is free, indeed, now to a large ex
tent from the possibility of any grave military
stresses, her one overseas investment in the Philip
pines she is evidently resolved to forget and be rid
of at as early a date as possible. But, on the other
9 119
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
hand, she is confronted by a system of legal en
tanglements of extraordinary difficulty and per
plexity, she has the most powerful tradition of in
dividualism in the world, and a degraded political
system, and she has in the presence of a vast and
increasing proportion of unassimilable aliens in her
substance — negroes, south European peasants, Rus
sian Jews and the like — an ever-intensifying com
plication.
II
Now what is called corruption in
Graft America is a thing not confined to
politics; it is a defect of moral method
found in every department of American life. I
find in big print in every paper I open, "GRAFT."
All through my journey in America I have been
trying to gauge the quality of this corruption, I
have been talking to all kinds of people about it, I
have had long conversations about it with President
Eliot of Harvard, with District - Attorney Jerome,
with one leading insurance president, with a num
ber of the City Club people in Chicago, with several
East - Siders in New York, with men engaged in
public work in every city I have visited, with
Senators at Washington, with a Chicago saloon
keeper and his friend, a shepherd of votes, and with
a varied and casual assortment of Americans upon
120
CORRUPTION
trains and boats; I read my Ostrogorsky, my
Otiinsterberg, and my Roosevelt before I came to
America, and I find myself going through any
American newspaper that comes to hand always
with an eye to this. It is to me a most vital issue
in the horoscope I contemplate. All depends upon
the answer to this question: Is the average citizen
fundamentally dishonest ? Is he a rascal and hum
bug in grain? If he is, the future can needs be no
more than a monstrous social disorganization in
the face of divine opportunities. Or is he funda
mentally honest, but a little confused ethically ? . . .
The latter, I think, is the truer alternative, but I
will confess I have ranged through all the scale be
tween a buoyant optimism and despair. It is ex
traordinarily difficult to move among the crowded
contrasts of this perplexing country and emerge
with any satisfactory generalization. But there is
one word I find all too frequently in the American
papers, and that is "stealing." They come near
calling any profitable, rather unfair bargain with
the public »a "steal." It's the common journalistic
vice here always to overstate. Every land has its
criminals, no doubt, but the American, I am con
vinced, is the last man in the world to steal. Nor
does he tell you lies to your face, except in the way
of business. He's not that sort of man. Nor does
he sneak bad money into your confiding hand.
Nor ask a higher price than he means to accept.
Nor cheat on exchange. For all the frequency of
121
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
"graft" and "stealing" in the press head-lines, I
feel the American is pretty distinctly less "mean"
than many Europeans in these respects, and much
more disposed to be ashamed of meanness.
But he certainly has an ethical system of a
highly commercial type. If he isn't dishonest he's
commercialized. He lives to get, to come out of
every transaction with more than he gave.
In the highly imaginative theory that underlies
the realities of an individualistic society there is
such a thing as honest trading. In practice I
don't believe there is. Exchangeable things are
supposed to have a fixed quality called their value,
and honest trading is, I am told, the exchange of
things of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by
honest trading, and therefore nobody can grow rich
by it. And nobody would do business except to
subsist by a profit and attempt to grow rich. The
honest merchant in the individualist's dream is a
worthy and urbane person who intervenes between
the seller here and the buyer there, fetches from
one to another, stores a surplus of goods, takes
risks, and indemnifies himself by charging the
seller and the buyer a small fee for his waiting and
his carrying and his speculative hawking about.
He would be sick and ashamed to undervalue a
purchase or overcharge a customer, and it scarcely
requires a competitor to reduce his fee to a mini
mum. He draws a line between customers with
whom he deals and competitors with whom he
122
CORRUPTION
wouldn't dream of dealing. And though it seems a
little incredible, he grows rich and beautiful in
these practices and endows Art, Science, and Litera
ture. Such is the commercial life in a world of
economic angels, magic justice and the Individual
ist's Utopia. In reality flesh and blood cannot re
sist a bargain, and people trade to get. In reality
value is a dream, and the commercial ideal is to
buy from the needy, sell to the urgent need, and
get all that can possibly be got out of every trans
action. To do anything else isn't business — it's
some other sort of game. Let us look squarely into
the pretences of trading. The plain fact of the
case is that in trading for profit there is no natural
line at which legitimate bargaining ends and cheat
ing begins. The seller wants to get above the
value and the buyer below it. The seller seeks to '
appreciate, the buyer to depreciate; and where is
there room for truth in that contest? In bargain
ing, overvaluing and undervaluing are not only
permissible but inevitable, attempts to increase the
desire to buy and willingness to sell. Who can in
vent a rule to determine what expedients are per
missible and what not? You may draw an arbi
trary boundary — the law does here and there, a
little discontinuously — but that is all. For ex
ample, consider these questions that follow: Noth
ing is perfect in this world; all goods are defective.
Are you bound to inform your customer of every
defect? Suppose you are, then are you bound to
123
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
examine your goods minutely for defects? Grant
that. Then if you intrust that duty to an em
ployee ought you to dismiss him for selling defective
goods for you ? The customer will buy your goods
anyhow. Are you bound to spend more upon clean
ing and packing them than he demands? — to wrap
them in gold-foil gratuitously, for example? How
are you going to answer these questions? Let me
suppose that your one dream in life is to grow rich.
Suppose you want to grow very rich and found a
noble university, let us say?
You answer them in the Roman spirit, with
caveat emptor. Then can you decently join in the
outcry against the Chicago butchers?
Then turn again to the group of problems the
Standard Oil history raises. You want the cus
tomer to buy your goods and not your competitor's.
Naturally you do everything to get your goods to
him, to make them seem best to him, to reduce the
influx of the other man's stuff. You don't lend
your competitor your shop -window anyhow. If
there's a hoarding you don't restrict your adver
tisements because otherwise there won't be room
for him. And if you happen to have a paramount
interest in the carrying line that bears your goods
and his, why shouldn't you see that your own goods
arrive first? And at a cheaper rate? . . .
You see one has to admit there is always this
element of overreaching, of outwitting, of fore
stalling, in all systematic trade. It may be refined,
124
INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING
CORRUPTION
it may be dignified, but it is there. It differs in
degree and not in quality from cheating. A very
scrupulous man stops at one point, a less scrupu
lous man at another, an eager, ambitious man may
find himself carried by his own impetus very far.
Too often the least scrupulous wins. In all ages,
among all races, this taint in trade has been felt.
Modern western Europe, led by England, and
America have denied it stoutly, have glorified the
trader, called him a "merchant prince," wrapped
him in the purple of the word "financier," bowed
down before him. The trader remains a trader, a
hand that clutches, an uncreative brain that lays
snares. Occasionally, no doubt, he exceeds his
function and is better than his occupations. But
it is not he but the maker who must be the power
and ruler of the great and luminous social order
that must surely come, that new order I have per
suaded myself I find in glimmering evasive promises
amid the congestions of New York, the sheds and
defilements of Niagara, and the Chicago reek and
grime. . . . The American, I feel assured, can be a
bold and splendid maker. He is not, like the un
creative Parsee or Jew or Armenian, a trader by
blood and nature. The architecture I have seen,
the finely planned, internally beautiful, and ad
mirably organized office buildings (to step into
them from the street is to step up fifty years in the
scale of civilization), the business organizations, the
industrial skill — I visited a trap and chain factory
125
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
at Oneida, right in the heart of New York State,
that was like the interior of a well-made clock —
above all, the plans for reconstructing his cities
show that. Those others make nothing. But
nevertheless, since he, more than any man, has sub
served the full development of eighteenth and
nineteenth century conceptions, he has acquired
some of the very worst habits of the trader. Too
often he is a gambler. Ever and again I have had
glimpses of preoccupied groups of men at green
tables in little rooms, playing that dreary game
poker, wherein there is no skill, no variety except
in the sum at hazard, no orderly development, only
a sort of expressionless lying called "bluffing." In
deed, poker isn't so much a game as a bad habit.
Yet the American sits for long hours at it, dispers
ing and accumulating dollars, and he carries its
great conception of " bluff" and a certain experi
ence of kinetic physiognomy back with him to his
office. . . .
And Americans talk dollars to an astonishing
extent. . . .
Now this is the reality of American corruption, a
huge exclusive preoccupation with dollar - getting.
What is called corruption by the press is really no
more than the acute expression in individual cases
of this general fault.
Where everybody is getting it is idle to expect a
romantic standard of honesty between employers
and employed. The official who buys rails for the
126
CORRUPTION
big railway company that is professedly squeezing
every penny it can out of the public for its share
holders as its highest aim, is not likely to display
any religious self-abnegation of a share for himself
in this great work. The director finds it hard to
distinguish between getting for himself and getting
for his company, and the duty to one- self of a dis
creet use of opportunity taints the whole staff
from manager to messenger-boy. The politicians
wrho protect the interests of the same railway in
the House of Commons or the Senate, as the case
may be, are not going to do it for love either. No
body will have any mercy for their wives or children
if they die poor. The policeman who stands be
tween the property of the company and the irregu
lar enterprise of robbers feels his vigilance merits a
special recognition. A position of trust is a posi
tion of advantage, and deserves a percentage.
Everywhere, as every one knows, in all the modern
States, quite as much as in China, there are com
missions, there are tips, there are extortions and
secret profits, there is, in a word, " graft." It's no
American specialty. Things are very much the
same in this matter in Great Britain as in America,
but Americans talk more and louder than we do.
And indeed all this is no more than an inevitable
development of the idea of trading in the mind,
that every transaction must leave something be
hind for the agent. It's not stealing, but never
theless, the automatic cash-register becomes more
127
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
and more of a necessity in this thickening atmos
phere of private enterprise.
in
IT seems to me that the political
corruption that still plays so large a
part in the American problem is a
natural and necessary underside to a purely middle-
class organization of society for business. Nobody
is left over to watch the politician. And the evil is
enormously aggravated by the complexities of the
political machinery, by the methods of the presi
dential election that practically prescribes a ticket
method of voting, and by the absence of any second
ballots. Moreover, the passion of the simpler
minded Americans for aggressive legislation con
trolling private morality has made the control of
the police a main source of party revenue, and
dragged the saloon and brothel, essentially retiring
though these institutions are, into politics. The
Constitution ties up political reform in the most
extraordinary way, it was planned by devout Re
publicans equally afraid of a dictatorship and the
people; it does not so much distribute power as
disperse it, the machinery falls readily into the
hands of professional politicians with no end to
secure but their immediate profit, and is almost
inaccessible to poor men who cannot make their
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CORRUPTION
incomes in its working. An increasing number of
wealthy young men have followed President Roose
velt into political life — one thinks of such figures as
Senator Colby of New Jersey, but they are but in
cidental mitigations of a generally vicious scheme.
Before the nation, so busy with its diversified
private affairs, lies the devious and difficult prob
lem of a great reconstruction of its political meth
ods, as a preliminary to any broad change of its
social organization. . . .
How vicious things are I have had some inkling
in a dozen whispered stories of votes, of ballot-
boxes rifled, of votes destroyed, of the violent per
sonation of cowed and ill-treated men. And in Chica
go I saw a little of the physical aspect of the system.
I made the acquaintance of Alderman Kenna,
who is better known, I found, throughout the
States as "Kinky-Dink," saw his two saloons and
something of the Chinese quarter about him. He
is a compact, upright little man, with iron-gray
hair, a clear blue eye, and a dry manner. He wore
a bowler hat through all our experiences in com
mon, and kept his hands in his jacket-pockets. He
filled me with a ridiculous idea, for which I apolo
gize, that had it fallen to the lot of Mr. J. M. Barrie
to miss a university education, and keep a saloon
in Chicago and organize voters, he would have
looked own brother to Mr. Kenna. We com
menced in the first saloon, a fine, handsome place,
with mirrors and tables and decorations and a con-
129
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
sumption of mitigated mineral waters and beer in
bottles; then I was taken over to see the other
saloon, the one across the way. We went behind
the counter, and while I professed a comparative
interest in English and American beer-engines, and
the Alderman exchanged commonplaces with two
or three of the shirt-sleeved barmen, I was able to
survey the assembled customers.
It struck me as a pretty tough gathering.
The first thing that met the eye were the schooners
of beer. There is nothing quite like the American
beer-schooner in England. It would appeal strongly
to an unstinted appetite for beer, and I should be
curious to try it upon a British agricultural laborer
and see how many he could hold. He would, I am
convinced, have to be entirely hollowed out to hold
two. Those I saw impressed me as being about
the size of small fish-globes set upon stems, and
each was filled with a very substantial-looking beer
indeed. They stood in a careless row all along the
length of the saloon counter. Below them, in atti
tudes of negligent proprietorship, lounged the
"crowd" in a haze of smoke and conversation.
For the most part I should think they were Ameri
canized immigrants. I looked across the counter
at them, met their eyes, got the quality of their
faces — and it seemed to me I was a very flimsy and
unsubstantial intellectual thing indeed. It struck
me that I would as soon go to live in a pen in a
stock-yard as into American politics.
130
CORRUPTION
That was my momentary impression. But that
line of base and coarse faces seen through the reek
was only one sample of the great saloon stratum of
the American population in which resides political
power. They have no ideas and they have votes;
they are capable, if need be, of meeting violence
by violence, and that is the sort of thing Ameri
can methods demand. . . .
Now Alderman Kenna is a straight man, the sort
of man one likes and trusts at sight, and he did not
invent his profession. He follows his own ideas of
right and wrong, and compared with my ideas of
right and wrong, they seem tough, compact, de
cided things. He is very kind to all his crowd.
He helps them when they are in trouble, even if it
is trouble with the police; he helps them find em
ployment when they are down on their luck; he
stands between them and the impacts of an un
sympathetic and altogether too - careless social
structure in a sturdy and almost parental way. I
can quite believe what I was told, that in the lives
of many of these rough undesirables he's almost
the only decent influence. He gets wives well
treated, and he has an open heart for children. And
he tells them how to vote, a duty of citizenship
they might otherwise neglect, and sees that they
do it properly. And whenever you want to do
things in Chicago you must reckon carefully with
him. . . .
There you have a chip, a hand specimen, from
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
the basement structure upon which American poli
tics rest. That is the remarkable alternative to
private enterprise as things are at present. It is
America's only other way. If public services are
to be taken out of the hands of such associations of
financiers as the Standard Oil group they have to
be put into the hands of politicians resting at last
upon this sort of basis. Therein resides the im
possibility of socialism in America — as the case for
socialism is put at present. The third course is the
far more complex, difficult and heroic one of creat
ing imaginatively and bringing into being a new
state — a feat no people in the world has yet achieved,
but a feat that any people which aspires to lead the
future is bound, I think, to attempt.
CHAPTER IX
THE IMMIGRANT
MY picture of America assumes now a
The Flood certain definite form. I have tried to
convey the effect of a great and ener
getic English - speaking population strewn across a
continent so vast as to make it seem small and thin ;
I have tried to show this population caught by the
upward sweep of that great increase in knowledge
that is everywhere enlarging the power and scope of
human effort, exhilarated by it, and active and hope
ful beyond any population the world has ever seen,
and I have tried to show how the members of this pop
ulation struggle and differentiate among themselves
in a universal commercial competition that must, in
the end, if it is not modified, divide them into two
permanent classes of rich and poor. I have vent
ured to hint at a certain emptiness in the resulting
wealthy, and to note some of the uglinesses and
miseries inseparable from this competition. I have
tried to give my impressions of the vague, yet widely
diffused, will in the nation to resist this differentia
ls
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
tion, and of a dim, large movement of thought
towards a change of national method. I have glanced
at the debasement of politics that bars any immedi
ate hope of such reconstruction. And now it is time
to introduce a new element of obstruction and diffi
culty into this complicating problem— the immigrants.
Into the lower levels of the American community
there pours perpetually a vast torrent of strangers,
speaking alien tongues, inspired by alien traditions,
for the most part illiterate peasants and working-
people. They come in at the bottom: that must be
insisted upon. An enormous and ever-increasing
proportion of the laboring classes, of all the lower
class in America, is of recent European origin, is
either of foreign birth or foreign parentage. The
older American population is being floated up on the
top of this influx, a sterile aristocracy above a raci
ally different and astonishingly fecund proletariat.
(For it grows rankly in this new soil. One section
of immigrants, the Hungarians, have here a birth
rate of forty-six in the thousand, the highest of any
civilized people in the world.)
Few people grasp the true dimensions of this in
vasion. Figures carry so little. The influx has
clambered from half a million to 700,000, to 800,000 ;
this year the swelling figures roll up as if they mean
to go far over the million mark. The flood swells to
overtake the total birth-rate; it has already over
topped the total of births of children to native-
American parents.
THE IMMIGRANT
I have already told something of the effect of
Ellis Island. I have told how I watched the long
procession of simple - looking, hopeful, sunburned
country folk from Russia, from the Carpathians,
from southern Italy and Turkey and Syria, filing
through the wickets, bringing their young wives for
the mills of Paterson and Fall River, their children
for the Pennsylvania coal-breakers and the cotton-
mills of the South.
Yet there are moments when I could have imag
ined there were no immigrants at all. All the time,
except for one distinctive evening, I seem to have
been talking to English-speaking men, now and then
to the Irishman, now and then, but less frequently,
to an Americanized German. In the clubs there are
no immigrants. There are not even Jews, as there
are in London clubs. One goes about the wide
streets of Boston, one meets all sorts of Boston
people, one visits the State-House; it's all the au
thentic English-speaking America. Fifth Avenue,
too, is America without a touch of foreign-born ; and
Washington. You go a hundred yards south of the
pretty Boston Common and, behold! you are in a
polyglot slum! You go a block or so east of Fifth
Avenue and you are in a vaster, more Yiddish White-
chapel. You cross from New York to Staten Island,
attracted by its distant picturesque suggestion of
scattered homes among the trees, and you discover
black-tressed, bold-eyed women on those pleasant
verandas, half-clad brats, and ambiguous washing,
10 135
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
where once the native American held his simple state.
You ask the way of a young man who has just
emerged from a ramshackle factory, and you are
answered in some totally incomprehensible tongue.
You come up again after such a dive below, to dine
with the original Americans again, talk with them,
go about with them and forget. . . .
In Boston, one Sunday afternoon, this fact of
immigration struck upon Mr. Henry James:
"There went forward across the cop of the hill a
continuous passage of men and women, in couples
and talkative companies, who struck me as laboring
wage-earners of the simpler sort arrayed in their
Sunday best and decently enjoying their leisure . . .
no sound of English in a single instance escaped their
lips ; the greater number spoke a rude form of Italian,
the others some outland dialect unknown to me —
though I waited and waited to catch an echo of an
tique refrains."
That's one of a series of recurrent, uneasy ob
servations of this great replacement I find in Mr.
James's book.
The immigrant does not clamor for attention. He
is, indeed, almost entirely inaudible, inarticulate, and
underneath. He is in origin a peasant, inarticulate,
and underneath by habit and tradition. Mr. James
has, as it were, to put his ear to earth, to catch the
murmuring of strange tongues. The incomer is of
diverse nationality and diverse tongues, and that
" breaks him up " politically and socially. He drops
136
THE IMMIGRANT
into American clothes, and then he does not catch
the careless eye. He goes into special regions and
works there. Where Americans talk or think or
have leisure to observe, he does not intrude. The
bulk of the Americans don't get as yet any real sense
of his portentous multitude at all. He does not read
very much, and so he produces no effect upon the
book trade or magazines. You can go through such
a periodical as Harper's Magazine, for example, from
cover to cover, and unless there is some article or
story bearing specifically upon the subject you might
doubt if there was an immigrant in the country.
On the liner coming over, at Ellis Island, and some
times on the railroads one saw him- — him and his
womankind, — in some picturesque east- European
garb, very respectful, very polite, adventurous, and
a little scared. Then he became less visible. He
had got into cheap American clothes, resorted to
what naturalists call " protective mimicry," even
perhaps acquired a collar. Also his bearing had
changed, become charged with a certain aggression.
He had got a pocket-handkerchief, and had learned
to move fast and work fast, and to chew and spit
with the proper meditative expression. One detect
ed him by his diminishing accent, and by a few per
sistent traits — rings in his ears, perhaps, or the like
adornment. In the next stage these also had gone;
he had become ashamed of the music of his native
tongue, and talked even to his wife, on the trolley-
car and other public places, at least, in brief re-
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
markable American. Before that he had become
ripe for a vote.
The next stage of Americanization, I suppose, is
this dingy quick-eyed citizen with his schooner of
beer in my Chicago saloon — if it is not that crumpled
thing I saw lying so still in the sunlight under the
trestle bridge on my way to Washington. . . .
II
EVERY American above forty, and
most of those below that limit, seem
to be enthusiastic advocates of un
restricted immigration. I could not make them
understand the apprehension with which this huge
dilution of the American people with profoundly
ignorant foreign peasants rilled me. I rode out on
an automobile into the pretty New York country
beyond Yonkers with that finely typical American,
Mr. Z. — he wanted to show me the pleasantness of
the land, — and he sang the song of American con
fidence, I think, more clearly and loudly than any.
He told me how everybody had hope, how every
body had incentive, how magnificently it was all
going on. He told me — what is, I am afraid, a
widely spread delusion — that elementary education
stands on a higher level of efficiency in the States
than in England. He had no doubt whatever of
138
THE IMMIGRANT
the national powers of assimilation. " Let them all
come/' he said, cheerfully.
"The Chinese?" said I.
"We can do with them all." . . .
He was exceptional in that extension. Most
Americans stop at the Ural Mountains, and refuse
the "Asiatic." It was not a matter for discussion
with him, but a question of belief. He had ceased
to reason about immigration long ago. He was a
man in the fine autumn of life, abounding in honors,
wrapped in furs, and we drove swiftly in his auto
mobile, through the spring sunshine. ("By Jove!"
thought I, "you talk like Pippa's rich uncle.") By
some half-brother of a coincidence we happened first
upon this monument commemorating a memorable
incident of the War of Independence, and then upon
that. He recalled details of that great campaign as
Washington was fought out of Manhattan north
ward. I remember one stone among the shooting
trees that indicated where in the Hudson River near
by a British sloop had fired the first salute in honor
of the American flag. That salute was vividly pres
ent still to him; it echoed among the woods, it filled
him with a sense of personal triumph ; it seemed half
way back to Agincourt to me. All that bright
morning the stars and stripes made an almost
luminous visible presence about us. Open-handed
hospitality and confidence in God so swayed me that
it is indeed only now, as I put this book together, I
see this shining buoyancy, this bunting patriotism,
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
in its direct relation to the Italian babies in the
cotton-mills, to the sinister crowd that stands in
the saloon smoking and drinking beer, an accumulat
ing reserve of unintelligent force behind the ma
noeuvres of the professional politicians. . . .
I tried my views upon Commissioner Watchorn as
we leaned together over the gallery railing and sur
veyed that bundle-carrying crowd creeping step by
step through the wire filter of the central hall of
Ellis Island — into America.
"You don't think they'll swamp you?" I said.
"Now look here," said the Commissioner, "I'm
English born — Derbyshire. I came into America
when I was a lad. I had fifteen dollars. And here
I am! Well, do you expect me, now I'm here, to
shut the door on any other poor chaps who want
a start — a start with hope in it, in the New
World?"
A pleasant-mannered, a fair-haired young man,
speaking excellent English, had joined us as we went
round, and nodded approval.
I asked him for his opinion, and gathered he was
from Milwaukee, and the son of a Scandinavian im
migrant. He, too, was for "fair-play" and an open
door for every one. " Except, " he added, " Asiatics. "
So also, I remember, was a very New England lady
I met at Hull House, who wasn't, as a matter of fact,
a New-Englander at all, but the daughter of a Ger
man settler in the Middle West. They all seemed to
think that I was inspired by hostility to the im-
140
THE IMMIGRANT
migrant in breathing any doubt about the desir
ability of this immense process. . . .
I tried in each case to point out that this idea of
not being churlishly exclusive did not exhaust the
subject, that the present immigration is a different
thing entirely from the immigration of half a century
ago, that in the interest of the immigrant and his
offspring more than any one, is the protest to be
made. Fifty years ago more than half of the tor
rent was English speaking, and the rest mostly from
the Teutonic and Scandinavian northwest of Europe,
an influx of people closely akin to the native Amer
icans in temperament and social tradition. They
were able to hold their own and mix perfectly. Even
then the quantity of illiterate Irish produced a
marked degradation of political life. The earlier
immigration was an influx of energetic people who
wanted to come, and who had to put themselves to
considerable exertion to get here; it was higher in
character and in social quality than the present flood.
The immigration of to-day is largely the result of
energetic canvassing by the steamship companies;
it is, in the main, an importation of laborers and not
of economically independent settlers, and it is in
creasingly alien to the native tradition. The bulk
of it is now Italian, Russian Jewish, Russian, Hun
garian, Croatian, Roumanian, and eastern European
generally.
"The children learn English, and become more
American and better patriots than the Americans,"
141
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
Commissioner Watchorn — echoing everybody in that
— told me. ...
(In Boston one optimistic lady looked to the
Calabrian and Sicilian peasants to introduce an
artistic element into the population — no doubt be
cause they come from the same peninsula that pro
duced the Florentines.)
in
WILL the reader please remember that
Assimilation I've been just a few weeks in the States
altogether, and value my impressions
at that! And will he, nevertheless, read of doubts
that won't diminish. I doubt very much if America
is going to assimilate all that she is taking in now;
much more do I doubt that she will assimilate the
still greater inflow of the coming years. I believe
she is going to find infinite difficulties in that task.
By "assimilate" I mean make intelligently co-opera
tive citizens of these people. She will, I have no
doubt whatever, impose upon them a bare use of the
English language, and give them votes and certain
patriotic persuasions, but I believe that if things
go on as they are going the great mass of them will
remain a very low lower class — will remain largely
illiterate industrialized peasants. They are decent-
minded peasant people, orderly, industrious people,
rather dirty in their habits, and with a low standard
142
THE IMMIGRANT
of life. Wherever they accumulate in numbers they
present to my eye a social phase far below the level
of either England, France, north Italy, or Switzer
land. And, frankly, I do not find the American
nation has either in its schools — which are as back
ward in some States as they are forward in others —
in its press, in its religious bodies or its general tone,
any organized means or effectual influences for
raising these huge masses of humanity to the require
ments of an ideal modern civilization. They are, to
rny mind, " biting off more than they can chaw" in
this matter.
I got some very interesting figures from Dr. Hart,
of the Children's Home and Aid Society, Chicago,
in this matter. He was pleading for the immigrant
against my scepticisms. He pointed out to me that
the generally received opinion that the European im
migrants are exceptionally criminal is quite wrong.
The 1 900 census report collapsed after a magnificent
beginning, and its figures are not available, but from
the earlier records there can be no doubt that the
percentage of criminals among the " foreign-born"
is higher than that among the native-born. This,
however, is entirely due to the high criminal record
of the French Canadians in the Northeast, and the
Mexicans in Arizona, who are not over-seas immi
grants at all. The criminal statistics of the French
Canadians in the States should furnish useful matter
for the educational controversy in Great Britain.
Allowing for their activities— which appear to be
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
based on an education of peculiar religious virtue —
the figures bring the criminal percentage among the
foreigners far below that of the native-born. But
Dr. Hart's figures also showed very clearly some
thing further : as between the offspring of native and
foreign parents the preponderance of crime is enor
mously on the side of the latter.
That, at any rate, falls in with my own precon
ceptions and roving observations. Bear in mind
always that this is just one questioning individual's
impression. It seems to me that the immigrant
arrives an artless, rather uncivilized, pious, good-
hearted peasant, with a disposition towards sub
missive industry and rude effectual moral habits.
America, it is alleged, makes a man of him. It
seems to me that all too often she makes an in
furiated toiler of him, tempts him with dollars and
speeds him up with competition, hardens him,
coarsens his manners, and, worst crime of all, lures
and forces him to sell his children into toil. The
home of the immigrant in America looks to me worse
than the home he came from in Italy. It is just as
dirty, it is far less simple and beautiful, the food is
no more wholesome, the moral atmosphere far less
wholesome; and, as a consequence, the child of the
immigrant is a worse man than his father.
I am fully aware of the generosity, the nobility of
sentiment which underlies the American objection to
any hindrance to immigration. But either that
general sentiment should be carried out to a logical
144
THE IMMIGRANT
completeness and a gigantic and costly machinery
organized to educate and civilize these people as
they come in, or it should be chastened to restrict the
inflow to numbers assimilable under existing condi
tions. At present, if we disregard sentiment, if we
deny the alleged need of gross flattery whenever one
writes of America for Americans, and state the bare
facts of the case, they amount to this: that America,
in the urgent process of individualistic industrial
development, in its feverish haste to get through
with its material possibilities, is importing a large
portion of the peasantry of central and eastern
Europe, and converting it into a practically illiterate
industrial proletariat. In doing this it is doing a
something that, however different in spirit, differs
from the slave trade of its early history only in the
narrower gap between employer and laborer. In the
"colored" population America has already ten mill
ion descendants of unassimilated and perhaps un-
assimilable labor immigrants. These people are not
only half civilized and ignorant, but they have in
fected the white population about them with a
kindred ignorance. For there can be no doubt that
if an Englishman or Scotchman of the year 1 500 were
to return to earth and seek his most retrograde and
decivilized descendants, he would find them at last
among the white and colored population south of
Washington. And I have a foreboding that in this
mixed flood of workers that pours into America by
the million to-day, in this torrent of ignorance,
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
against which that heroic being, the schoolmarm,
battles at present all unaided by men, there is to be
found the possibility of another dreadful separation
of class and kind, a separation perhaps not so pro
found but far more universal. One sees the possi
bility of a rich industrial and mercantile aristocracy
of western European origin, dominating a darker-
haired, darker -eyed, uneducated proletariat from
central and eastern Europe. The immigrants are
being given votes, I know, but that does not free
them, it only enslaves the country. The negroes
were given votes.
That is the quality of the danger as I see it. But
before this indigestion of immigrants becomes an in
curable sickness of the States many things may hap
pen. There is every sign, as I have said, that a great
awakening, a great disillusionment, is going on in the
American mind. The Americans have become sud
denly self -critical, are hot with an unwonted fever
for reform and constructive effort. This swamping
of the country may yet be checked. They may
make a strenuous effort to emancipate children be
low fifteen from labor, and so destroy one of the
chief inducements of immigration. Once convince
them that their belief in the superiority of their
public schools to those of England and Germany is
an illusion, or at least that their schools are inade
quate to the task before them, and it may be they
will perform some swift American miracle of educa
tional organization and finance. For all the very
146
THE IMMIGRANT
heavy special educational charges that are needed if
the immigrant is really to be assimilated, it seems a
reasonable proposal that immigration should pay.
Suppose the new-comer were presently to be taxed on
arrival for his own training and that of any children
he had with him, that again would check the inrush
very greatly. Or the steamship company might be
taxed, and left to settle the trouble with the im
migrant by raising his fare. And finally, it may be
that if the line is drawn, as it seems highly probable
it will be, at ''Asiatics," then there may even be a
drying up of the torrent at its source. The European
countries are not unlimited reservoirs of offspring.
As they pass from their old conditions into more and
more completely organized modern industrial states,
they develop a new internal equilibrium and cease
to secrete an excess of population. England no
longer supplies any great quantity of Americans;
Scotland barely any ; France is exhausted ; Ire
land, Germany, Scandinavia have, it seems, dis
gorged nearly all their surplus load, and now run
dry. . . .
These are all mitigations of the outlook, but still
the dark shadow of disastrous possibility remains.
The immigrant comes in to weaken and confuse the
counsels of labor, to serve the purposes of corruption,
to complicate any economic and social development,
above all to retard enormously the development of
that national consciousness and will on which the
hope of the future depends.
i47
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
IV
I TOLD these doubts of mine to a
mal ^
Alliance
The Educational pieasant young lady of New York, who
seems to find much health and a sus
taining happiness in settlement work on the East
Side. She scorned my doubts. "Children make
better citizens than the old Americans," she said,
like one who quotes a classic, and took me with her
forthwith to see the central school of the Educational
Alliance, that fine imposing building in East Broad
way.
It's a thing I'm glad not to have missed. I recall
a large cool room with a sloping floor, tier rising
above tier of seats and desks, and a big class of
bright-eyed Jewish children, boys and girls, each
waving two little American flags to the measure of
the song they sang, singing to the accompaniment
of the piano on the platform beside us.
"God bless our native land," they sang — with a
considerable variety of accent and distinctness, but
with a very real emotion.
Some of them had been in America a month, some
much longer, but here they were — under the aus
pices of the wealthy Hebrews of New York and Mr.
Blaustein's enthusiastic direction — being American
ized. They sang of America — "sweet land of
liberty"; they stood up and drilled with the little
bright pretty flags; swish they crossed and swish
they waved back, a waving froth of flags and flushed
148
THE IMMIGRANT
children's faces ; and they stood up and repeated the
oath of allegiance, and at the end filed tramping by
me and out of the hall. The oath they take is finely
worded. It runs:
"Flag our great Republic, inspirer in battle,
guardian of our homes, whose stars and stripes stand
for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we salute
thee! We, the natives of distant lands, who find
rest under thy folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives,
and our sacred honor to love and protect thee, our
country, and the liberty of the American people
forever."
I may have been fanciful, but as I stood aside and
watched them going proudly past, it seemed to me
that eyes met mine, triumphant and victorious eyes
— for was I not one of these British from whom free
dom was won ? But that was an ignoble suspicion.
They had been but a few weeks in America, and that
light in their eyes was just a brotherly challenge to
one they supposed a fellow-citizen who stood unduly
thoughtful amid their rhythmic exaltation. They
tramped out and past with their flags and guidons.
"It is touching!" whispered my guide, and I saw
she had caught a faint reflection of that glow that lit
the children.
I told her it was the most touching thing I had
seen in America.
And so it remains.
Think of the immense promise in it ! Think of the
flower of belief and effort that may spring from this
149
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
warm sowing! We passed out of this fluttering
multiplication of the most beautiful flag in the
world, into streets abominable with offal and inde
scribable filth, and dark and horrible under the
thunderous girders of the Elevated railroad, to our
other quest for that morning, a typical New York
tenement. For I wanted to see one, with practically
windowless bedrooms. . . .
The Educational Alliance is of course not a public
institution; it was organized by Hebrews, and con
ducted for Hebrews, chiefly for the benefit of the
Hebrew immigrant. It is practically the only or
ganized attempt to Americanize the immigrant child.
After the children have mastered sufficient English
and acquired the simpler elements of patriotism —
which is practically no more than an emotional
attitude towards the flag — they pass on into the
ordinary public schools.
"Yes," I told my friend, "I know how these
children feel. That, less articulate perhaps, but
no less sincere, is the thing — something between
pride and a passionate desire — that fills three-
quarters of the people at Ellis Island now. They
come ready to love and worship, ready to bow down
and kiss the folds of your flag. They give them
selves — they want to give. Do you know I, too,
have come near feeling that at times for America." . . .
We were separated for a while by a long hole in the
middle of the street and a heap of builder's refuse.
Before we came within talking distance again I was
150
THE IMMIGRANT
in reaction against the gleam of satisfaction my last
confession had evoked.
"In the end," I said, "you Americans won't be
able to resist it."
"Resist what?"
"You'll respect your country," I said.
"What do you mean?"
In those crowded noisy East Side streets one has
to shout, and shout compact things. "This!" I
said to the barbaric disorder about us. "Lynching!
Child Labor! Graft!"
Then we were separated by a heap of decaying
fish that some hawker had dumped in the gutter.
My companion shouted something I did not catch.
"We'll tackle it!" she repeated.
I looked at her, bright and courageous and youth
ful, a little overconfident, I thought, but extremely
reassuring, going valiantly through a disorderly
world of obstacles, and for the moment — I sup
pose that \vaving bunting and the children's voices
had got into my head a little — I forgot all sorts of
things. . . .
I could have imagined her the spirit of America
incarnate rather than a philanthropic young lady of
New York.
CHAPTER X
STATE-BLINDNESS
IN what I have written so far, I have
Sensta°tfethe tried to Set tne effect of the American
outlook, the American task, the Amer
ican problem as a whole, as it has presented itself to
me. Clearly, as I see it, it is a mental and moral
issue. There seems to me an economic process
going on that tends to concentrate first wealth and
then power in the hands of a small number of ad
venturous individuals of no very high intellectual
type, a huge importation of alien and unassimilable
workers, and a sustained disorder of local and
political administration. Correlated with this is a
great increase in personal luxury and need. In all
these respects there is a strong parallelism between
the present condition of the United States and the
Roman Republic in the time of the early Caesars ; and
arguing from these alone one might venture to fore
cast the steady development of an exploiting and
devastating plutocracy, leading perhaps to Cassarism,
and a progressive decline in civilization and social
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STATE-BLINDNESS
solidarity. But there are forces of recuperation and
construction in America such as the earlier instance
did not display. There is infinitely more original
and originating thought in the state, there are the
organized forces of science, a habit of progress, clearer
and wider knowledge among the general mass of the
people. These promise, and must, indeed, inevit
ably make, some synthetic effort of greater or less
homogeneity and force. It is upon that synthetic
effort that the distinctive destiny of America de
pends.
I propose to go on now to discuss the mental
quality of America as I have been able to focus it.
(Remember always that I am an undiplomatic
tourist of no special knowledge or authority, who
came, moreover, to America with certain prepos
sessions.) And first, and chiefly, I have to convey
what seems to me the most significant and pregnant
thing of all. It is a matter of something wanting,
that the American shares with the great mass of
prosperous middle-class people in England. I think
it is best indicated by saying that the typical Amer
ican has no " sense of the state. " I do not mean that
he is not passionately and vigorously patriotic. But
I mean that he has no perception that his business
activities, his private employments, are constituents
in a large collective process; that they affect other
people and the world forever, and cannot, as he
imagines, begin and end with him. He sees the
world in fragments; it is to him a multitudinous
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
collection of individual "stories" —as the news
papers put it. If one studies an American newspaper,
one discovers it is all individuality, all a matter of
personal doings, of wThat so and so said and how so
and so felt. And all these individualities are un-
fused. Not a touch of abstraction or generalization,
no thinnest atmosphere of reflection, mitigates these
harsh, emphatic, isolated happenings. The Amer
ican, it seems to me, has yet to achieve what is,
after all, the product of education and thought,
the conception of a whole to which all individual
acts and happenings are subordinate and contrib
utory.
When I say this much, I do not mean to insinuate
that any other nation in the world has any superiority
in this matter. But I do want to urge that the
American problem is pre-eminently one that must
be met by broad ways of thinking, by creative,
synthetic, and merging ideas, and that a great num
ber of Americans seem to lack these altogether.
ii
LET me by way of illustration give a
specimen American mind. It is not the
mind of a writer or philosopher, it is
just a plain successful business - man who exposes
himself, and makes it clear that this want of any
sense of the state of any large duty of constructive
STATE-BLINDNESS
loyalty, is not an idiosyncrasy, but the quality of all
his circle, his friends, his religious teacher. . . .
I found my specimen in a book called With John
Bull and Jonathan. It contains the rather rambling
reminiscences of Mr. J. Morgan Richards, the
wealthy and successful London agent of a great
number of well - advertised American proprietary
articles, and I read it first, I will confess, chiefly in
search of such delightful phrases as the one " mam
moth in character" I have already quoted. But
there were few to equal that first moment's bright
discovery. What I got from it finally wasn't so
much that sort of thing as this realization of Mr.
Richards 's peculiar quality, this acute sense of all
that he hadn't got. Mr. Richards told of adver
tising enterprises, of contracts and journey ings, of
his great friendship with the late Dr. Parker, of his
domestic affairs, and all the changes in the world
that had struck him, and of a remarkable dining
club, called (paradoxically) the Sphinx, in which
the giants (or are they the mammoths ?) of the world
of advertisement foregather. He gave his portrait,
and the end-paper presented him playfully as the
jolly president of the Sphinx Club, champagne-
bottle crowned, but else an Egyptian monarch; and
on the cover are two gilt hands clasped across a gilt
ripple of sea (" hands across the sea"), tinder inter
twining English and American flags. From the
book one got an effect, garrulous perhaps, but on the
whole not unpleasing, of an elderly but still active
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
business personality quite satisfied by his achieve
ments, and representative of I know not what pro
portion, but at any rate a considerable proportion, of
his fellow-countrymen. And one got an effect of a
being not simply indifferent to the health and vigor
and growth of the community of which he was a
part, but unaware of its existence.
He displays this irresponsibility of the commercial
mind so illuminatingly because he does in a way
attempt to tell something more than his personal
story. He notes the changes in the world about
him, how this has improved and that progressed,
which contrasts between England and America
struck upon his mind. That he himself is respon
sible amid these changes never seems to dawn upon
him. His freedom from any sense of duty to the
world as a whole, of any subordination of trading to
great ideas, is naive and fundamental. He tells of
how he arranged with the authorities in charge of the
Independence Day celebrations on Boston Common
to display "three large pieces" containing the name
of a certain " bitters," which they did, and how this
no doubt very desirable commodity was first largely
advertised throughout the United States in the fall of
1 86 1, and rapidly became the success of the day, be
cause of the enormous amount of placarding given to
the cabalistic characters 'S-T- i86o-X.' Those
strange letters and figures stared upon people from
wall and fence and tree, in every leading town
throughout the United States. They were painted
156
STATE-BLINDNESS
on the rocks of the Hudson River to such an extent
that the attention of the Legislature was drawn to
the fact, and a law was passed to prevent the further
disfigurement of river scenery."
He calls this "cute." He tells, too, of his educa
tional work upon the English press, how he won it
over to "display" advertisements, and devised "the
first sixteen-sheet double-demy poster ever seen in
England in connection with a proprietary article."
He introduced the smoking of cigarettes into England
against great opposition. Mr. Richards finds no in
congruity, but apparently a very delightful associa
tion, in the fact that this great victory for the
adolescent's cigarette was won on the site of Strud-
wick's house, wherein John Bunyan died, and hard
by the path of the Smithfield martyrs to their fiery
sacrifice. Both they and Mr. Richards "lit such a
candle in England-
Well, my business is not to tell of the feats by
which Mr. Richards grew wealthy and important as a
tree may grow and flourish amid the masonry it
helps to disintegrate. My business is purely with
his insensibility to the state as an aspect of his per
sonal life. It is insensibility — not disregard or
hostility. One gets an impression from this book
that if Mr. Richards had lived in a different culture,
he would have been a generous giver of himself. In
spite of his curious incapacity to appreciate any issues
larger than large enterprises in selling, he is very
evidently a religious man. He sat under the late
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
Dr. Parker of the rich and prosperous City Temple,
and that reverend gentleman's leonine visage adorns
the book. Its really the light one gets on Dr.
Parker and his teaching that appeals to me most in
this volume. For this gentleman Mr. Richards seems
to have entertained a feeling approaching reverence.
He notes such details as :
"At the conclusion of an invocation or prayer, his
habit always was to make a pause of a few seconds
before pronouncing 'Amen/ This was most im
pressive. . . .
"He spoke such words as 'God/ 'Jesus Christ/
'No/ 'Yes,' 'Nothing/ in a way to give more
value to each word than any speaker I have ever
heard."
They became great friends, rarely a week passed
without their meeting, and, says Mr. Richards, he
"was pleased, in the course of time, to honor me
with his confidence in a marked degree, as though
he recognized in me some quality which satisfied his
judgment, that I could be trusted in business ques
tions quite apart from those relating to his church.
He was not only a born preacher, but possessed a
marvellous grasp of sound, practical knowledge
upon the affairs of the day. I often consulted with
him regarding my own affairs, always getting the
most practical help."
When Dr. Parker came to America, the two
friends corresponded warmly, and several of the
letters are quoted. Even "£5000 a year easily
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STATE-BLINDNESS
made" could not tempt him from London and the
modest opulence of the City Temple. . . .
But my business now is not to dwell on these
characteristic details, but to point out that Mr.
Richards does not stand alone in the entire detach
ment, not only of his worldly achievements, but of
his spiritual life, from any creative solicitude for the
state. If he was merely an isolated " character" I
should have no concern with him. His association
with Dr. Parker shows most luminously that he
presents a whole cult of English and American rich
traders, who in America "sat under" such men as
the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, for example, who evi
dently stand for much more in America than in Eng
land, and who, so far as the state and political and
social work go, are scarcely of more use, are probably
more hindrance, than any organization of selfish vo
luptuaries of equal wealth and numbers. It is a
cult, it has its teachers and its books. I have had a
glimpse of one of its manuals. I find Mr. Richards
quoting with approval Dr. Parker's "Ten General
Commandments for Men of Business," command
ments which strike me as not only State-blind, but
utterly God-blind, which are, indeed, no more than
shrewd counsels for "getting on." It is really quite
horrible stuff morally. "Thou shalt not hobnob
with idle persons," parodies Dr. Parker in command
ment V., so glossing richly upon the teachings of Him
who ate with publicans and sinners, and (no doubt
to instil the advisability of keeping one's more
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
delicate business procedure in one's own hands),
"Thou shalt not forget that a servant who can tell
lies for thee, may one day tell lies to thee." . . .
I am not throwing any doubt upon the sincerity
of Dr. Parker and Mr. Richards. I believe that
nothing could exceed the transparent honesty that
ends this record which tells of a certain bitters
pushed at the sacrifice of beautiful scenery, of a
successful propaganda of cigarette-smoking, and of
all sorts of proprietary articles landed well home in
their gastric target of a whole life lost, indeed, in
commercial self-seeking, with "What shall I render
unto the Lord for all his benefits?"
" The Now is an atom of Sand,
And the Near is a perishing Clod,
But Afar is a fairyland,
And Beyond is the Bosom of God."
What I have to insist upon now is that this is a
sample, and, so far as I can tell, a fair sample, of the
quality and trend of the mind-stuff and the breadth
and height of the tradition of a large and I know
not how influential mass of prosperous middle-
class English, and of a much more prosperous and in
fluential and important section of Americans. They
represent much energy, they represent much prop
erty, they are a factor to reckon with. They pre
sent a powerful opposing force to anything that will
suppress their disgusting notice-boards or analyze
their ambiguous "proprietary articles," or tax their
1 60
STATE-BLINDNESS
gettings for any decent public purpose. And here I
find them selling poisons as pain-killers, and alcohol
as tonics, and fighting ably and boldly to silence ad
verse discussion. In the face of the great needs that
lie before America their active trivality of soul, their
energy and often unscrupulous activity, and their
quantitative importance become, to my mind, ad
verse and threatening, a stumbling-block for hope.
For the impression I have got by going to and fro
in America is that Mr, Richards is a fair sample of
at least the older type of American. So far as I can
learn, Mr. J. D. Rockefeller is just another product
of the same cult. You meet these older types every
where, they range from fervent piety and temper
ance to a hearty drinking, "story "-telling, poker-
playing type, but they have in common a sharp,
shrewd, narrow, business habit of mind that ignores
the future and the state altogether. But I do not
find the younger men are following in their lines.
Some are. But just how many and to what extent,
I do not know. It is very hard for a literary man to
estimate the quantity and importance of ideas in a
community. The people he meets naturally all
entertain ideas, or they would not come in his way.
The people who have new ideas talk ; those who have
not, go about their business. But I hazard an
opinion that Young America now presents an al
together different type from the young men of enter
prise and sound Baptist and business principles who
were the backbone of the irresponsible commercial
161
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
America of yesterday, the America that rebuilt
Chicago on "floating foundations," covered the
world with advertisement boards, gave the great
cities the elevated railroads, and organized the
trusts.
in
I SPENT a curious day amid the
Oneida memories of that strangely interesting
social experiment, the Oneida Com
munity, and met a most significant contemporary,
"live American" of the newer school, in the son of
the founder and the present head of "Oneida
Limited."
There are moments when that visit I paid to
Oneida seems to me to stand for all America. The
place, you know, was once the seat of a perfectionist
community; the large red community buildings
stand now among green lawns and ripening trees, and
I dined in the communal dining-room, and visited
the library, and saw the chain and trap factory, and
the silk-spinning factory and something of all its
industries. I talked to old and middle-aged people
who told me all sorts of interesting things of " com
munity days," looked through curious old-fashioned
albums of photographs, showing the women in their
bloomers and cropped hair, and the men in the ill-
fitting frock-coats of the respectable mediocre per-
162
STATE-BLINDNESS
son in early Victorian times. I think that some of
the reminiscences I awakened had been voiceless for
some time. At moments it was like hearing the
story of a flattened, dry, and colorless flower be
tween the pages of a book, of a verse written in
faded ink, or of some daguerreotype spotted and
faint beyond recognition. It was extraordinarily
New England in its quality as I looked back at it all.
They claimed a quiet perfection of soul, they search
ed one another marvellously for spiritual chastening,
they defied custom and opinion, they followed their
reasoning and their theology to the inmost amaz
ing abnegations — and they kept themselves solvent
by the manufacture of steel traps that catch the
legs of beasts in their strong and pitiless jaws. . . .
But this book is not about the things that con
cerned Oneida in community days, and I mention
them here only because of the curious developments
of the present time. Years ago, when the founder,
John Humphrey Noyes, grew old and unable to con
trol the new dissensions that arose out of the scep
tical attitude of the younger generation towards his
ingenious theology, and such-like stresses, commu
nism was abandoned, the religious life and services
discontinued, the concern turned into a joint-stock
company, and the members made shareholders on
strictly commercial lines. For some years its
prosperity declined. Many of the members went
away. But a nucleus remained as residents in the
old buildings, and after a time there were returns.
163
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
I was told that in the early days of the new period
there was a violent reaction against communistic
methods, a jealous inexperienced insistence upon
property. " It was difficult to borrow a hammer,"
said one of my informants.
Then, as the new generation began to feel its feet,
came a fresh development of vitality. The Oneida
company began to set up new machinery, to seek
wider markets, to advertise and fight competitors.
This Mr. P. B. Noyes was the leader into the new
paths. He possesses all the force of character, the
constructive passion, the imaginative power of his
progenitor, and it has all gone into business com
petition. I have heard much talk of the romance
of business, chiefly from people I heartily despised,
but in Mr. Noyes I found business indeed romantic.
It had got hold of him, it possessed him like a
passion. He has inspired all his half-brothers and
cousins and younger fellow-members of the com
munity with his own imaginative motive. They,
too, are enthusiasts for business.
Mr. Noyes is a tall man, who looks down when he
talks to one. He showed me over the associated
factories, told me how the trap trade of all North
America is in Oneida 's hands, told me of how they
fight and win against the British traps in South
America and Burmah. He showed me photographs
of panthers in traps, tigers in traps, bears snarling
at death, unfortunate deer, foxes caught by the
paws. . . .
164
STATE-BLINDNESS
I did my best to forget those photographs at once
in the interest of his admirable machinery, which
busied itself with chain-making as though it had
eyes and hands. I went beside him, full of that
respect that a literary man must needs feel when a
creative business controller displays his quality.
"But the old religion of Oneida?" I would in
terpolate.
" Each one of us is free to follow his own religion.
Here is a new sort of chain we are making for hang
ing-lamps. Hitherto — "
Presently I would try again. "Are the workers
here in any way members of the community?"
"Oh no! Many of them are Italian immigrants.
We think of building a school for them. ... No, we
get no labor troubles. We pay always above the
trade-union rates, and so we get the pick of the
workmen. Our class of work can't be sweated." . . .
Yes, he was an astonishing personality, so im
mensely concentrated on these efficient manu
facturing and trading developments, so evidently
careless of theology, philosophy, social speculation,
beauty.
"Your father was a philosopher," I said.
" I think in ten years' time I may give up the con
trol here," he threw out, "and write something."
"I've thought of the publishing trade myself," I
said, "when my wits are old and stiff." . . .
I never met a man before so firmly gripped by the
romantic constructive and adventurous element of
165
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
business, so little concerned about personal riches
or the accumulation of wealth. He illuminated
much that had been dark to me in the American
character. I think better of business by reason of
him. And time after time I tried him upon politics.
It came to nothing. Making a new world was, he
thought, a rhetorical flourish about futile and
troublesome activities, and politicians merely a dis
reputable sort of parasite upon honorable people
who made chains and plated spoons. All his con
structive instincts, all his devotion, were for Oncida
and its enterprises. America was just the impartial
space, the large liberty, in which Oneida grew, the
Stars and Stripes a wide sanction akin to the im
partial irresponsible harboring sky overhead. Sense
of the State had never grown in him — can now, I
felt convinced, never grow. . . .
But some day, I like to imagine, the World State,
and not Oneida corporations, and a nobler trade
than traps, will command such services as his.
CHAPTER XI
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
IN considering the quality of the
American mind (upon which, as I be
lieve, the ultimate destiny of America
entirely depends) , it has been necessary to point out
that, considered as one whole, it still seems lacking
in any of that living sense of the state out of which
constructive effort must arise, and that, conse
quently, enormous amounts of energy go to waste
in anarchistic and chaotically competitive private
enterprise. I believe there are powerful forces at
work in the trend of modern thought, science, and
method, in the direction of bringing order, control,
and design into this confused gigantic conflict, and
the discussion of these constructive forces must
necessarily form the crown of my forecast of Amer
ica's future. But before I come to that I must deal
with certain American traits that puzzle me, that I
cannot completely explain to myself, that dash my
large expectations with an obstinate shadow of fore
boding. Essentially these are disintegrating in-
167
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
fluences, in the nature of a fierce intolerance, that
lead to conflicts and destroy co-operation. One
makes one's criticism with compunction. One
moves through the American world, meeting con
stantly with kindness and hospitality, with a famil
iar helpfulness that is delightful, with sympathetic
enterprise and energetic imagination, and then sud
denly there flashes out a quality of harshness. . . .
I will explain in a few minutes what I mean by
this flash of harshness. Let me confess here that I
cannot determine whether it is a necessary conse
quence of American conditions, the scar upon the
soul of too strenuous business competition, or whether
it is something deeper, some subtle, unavoidable
infection perhaps in this soil that was once the Red
Indian's battle-ground, some poison, it may be,
mingled with this clear exhilarating air. And going
with this harshness there seems also something else,
a contempt for abstract justice that one does not
find in any European intelligence — not even among
the English. This contempt may be a correlative
of the intense practicality begotten by a scruple-
destroying commercial training. That, at any rate,
is my own prepossession. Conceivably I am over-
disposed to make that tall lady in New York Harbor
stand as a symbol for the liberty of property, and to
trace the indisputable hastiness of life here — it is
haste sometimes rather than speed, — its scorn of
aesthetic and abstract issues, this frequent quality of
harshness, and a certain public disorder, whatever
168
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
indeed mars the splendid promise and youth of
America, to that. I think it is an accident of the
commercial phase that presses men beyond dignity,
patience, and magnanimity. I am loath to believe it
is something fundamentally American.
I have very clearly in my memory the figure of
young MacQueen, in his gray prison clothes in Tren
ton jail, and how I talked with him. He and Mr.
Booker T. Washington and Maxim Gorky stand for
me as figures in the shadow — symbolical men. I
think of America as pride and promise, as large
growth and large courage, all set with beautiful
fluttering bunting, and then my vision of these three
men comes back to me; they return presences in
separable from my American effect, unlit and un
complaining on the sunless side of her, implying
rather than voicing certain accusations. America
can be hasty, can be obstinately thoughtless and
unjust. . . .
Well, let me set down as shortly as I can how I
saw them, and then go on again with my main thesis.
ii
MACQUEEN is one of those young men
MacQueen England is now making by the thousand
in her elementary schools — a man of
that active, intelligent, mentally hungry, self -edu
cating sort that is giving us our elementary teach-
169
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
ers, our labor members, able journalists, authors,
civil servants, and some of the most public-spirited
and efficient of our municipal administrators. He
is the sort of man an Englishman grows prouder of
as he sees America and something of her politicians
and labor leaders. After his board -school days
MacQueen went to work as a painter and grainer,
and gave his spare energy to self -education. He
mastered German, and read widely and freely. He
corresponded with William Morris, devoured Tolstoy
and Bernard Shaw, followed the Clarion week by
week, discussed social questions, wrote to the news
papers, debated, made speeches. The English read
er will begin to recognize the type. Jail had worn
him when I saw him, but I should think he was al
ways physically delicate; he wears spectacles, he
warms emotionally as he talks. And he decided,
after much excogitation, that the ideal state is one
of so fine a quality of moral training that people will
not need coercion and repressive laws. He calls
himself an anarchist — of the early Christian, Tols
toy an, non-resisting school. Such an anarchist was
Emerson, among other dead Americans whose
names are better treasured than their thoughts.
That sort of anarchist has as much connection with
embittered bomb-throwers and assassins as Miss
Florence Nightingale has with the woman Hartmann,
who put on a nurse's uniform to poison and rob. . . .
Well, MacQueen led an active life in England,
married, made a decent living, and took an honor-
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TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
able part in the local affairs of Leeds until he was
twenty-six. Then he conceived a desire for wider
opportunity than England offers men of his class.
In January, 1902, he crossed the Atlantic, and,
no doubt, he came very much aglow with the
American idea. He felt that he was exchanging a
decadent country of dwarfing social and political
traditions for a land of limitless outlook. He became
a proof-reader in New York, and began to seek
around him for opportunities of speaking and for
warding social progress. He tried to float a news
paper. The New York labor-unions found him a
useful speaker, and, among others, the German
silk-workers of New York became aware of him.
In June they asked him to go to Paterson to speak
in German to the weavers in that place.
The silk-dyers were on strike in Paterson, but the
weavers were weaving "scab-silk," dyed by dyers
elsewhere, and it was believed that the dyers' strike
would fail unless they struck also. They had to be
called out. They were chiefly Italians, some Hun
garians. It was felt by the New York German silk-
workers that perhaps MacQueen's German learned
in England might meet the linguistic difficulties of
the case.
He went. I hope he will forgive me if I say that
his was an extremely futile expedition. He did very
little. He wrote an entirely harmless article or so in
English for La Questione Sociale, and he declined
with horror and publicity to appear upon the same
171
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
platform with a mischievous and violent lady
anarchist called Emma Goldman. On June 17,
1902, he went to Paterson again, and spoke to his
own undoing. There is no evidence that he said any
thing illegal or inflammatory, there is clear evidence
that he bored his audience. They shouted him
down, and called for a prominent local speaker named
Galiano. MacQueen subsided into the background,
and Galiano spoke for an hour in Italian. He
aroused great enthusiasm, and the proceedings ter
minated with a destructive riot.
Eight witnesses testify to the ineffectual efforts
on the part of MacQueen to combat the violence in
progress. . . .
That finishes the story of MacQueen 's activities
in America, for which he is now in durance at Tren
ton. He, in common with a large crowd and in
common, too, with nearly all the witnesses against
him, did commit one offence against the law — he did
not go home when destruction began. He was ar
rested next day. From that time forth his fate was
out of his hands, and in the control of a number of
people who wanted to "make an example" of the
Paterson strikers. The press took up MacQueen.
They began to clothe the bare bones of this simple
little history I have told in fluent, unmitigated lying.
They blackened him, one might think, out of sheer
artistic pleasure in the operation. They called this
rather nervous, educated, nobly meaning if ill-
advised young man a "notorious anarchist"; his
172
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
head -line title became "Anarchistic MacQueen";
they wrote his " story" in a vein of imaginative
fervor; they invented "an unsavory police record"
for him in England; and enlarged upon the mar
vellous secret organization for crime of which he was
representative and leader. In a little while Mac-
Queen had ceased to be a credible human being ; he
might have been invented by Mr. William le Queux.
He was arrested — Galiano went scot-free — and re
leased on bail. It was discovered that his pleasant,
decent Yorkshire wife and three children were
coming out to America to him, and she became " the
woman Nellie Barton" — her maiden name — and "a
socialist of the Emma Goldman stripe." This, one
gathers, is the most horrible stripe known to Amer
ican journalism. Had there been a worse one, Mrs.
MacQueen would have been the ex officio. And now
here is an extraordinary thing — public officials began
to join in the process. This is what perplexes me most
in this affair. I am told that Assistant-Secretary-of-
the-Treasury H. A. Taylor, without a fact to go upon,
subscribed to the "unsavory record" legend and
Assistant-Secretary C. H. Keep fell in with it. They
must have seen what it was they were indorsing.
In a letter from Mr. Keep to the Reverend A. W.
Wishart, of Trenton (who throughout has fought
most gallantly for justice in this case), I find Mr.
Keep distinguishes himself by the artistic device of
putting "William MacQueen V name in inverted
commas. So, very delicately, he conveys out of the
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
void the insinuation that the name is an alias.
while the Commissioner of Immigration prepared to
take a hand in the game of breaking up MacQueen.
He stopped Mrs. MacQueen at the threshold of
liberty, imprisoned her in Ellis Island, and sent her
back to Europe. MacQueen, still on bail, was not
informed of this action, and waited on the pier for
some hours before he understood. His wife had
come second class to America, but she was returned
first class, and the steamship company seized her
goods for the return fare. . . .
That was more than MacQueen could stand. He
had been tried, convicted, sentenced to five years'
imprisonment, and he was now out on bail pending
an appeal. Anxiety about his wife and children was
too much for him. He slipped off to England after
them ("Escape of the Anarchist MacQueen"), made
what provision and arrangements he could for them,
and returned in time to save his bondsman's money
("Capture of the Escaped Anarchist MacQueen").
Several members of the Leeds City Council (" Crim
inal Associates in Europe") saw him off. That was
in 1903. His appeal had been refused on a technical
point. He went into Trenton jail, and there he is
to this day. There I saw him. Trenton Jail did not
impress me as an agreeable place. The building is
fairly old, and there is no nonsense about the food.
The cells hold, some of them, four criminals, some of
them two, but latterly MacQueen has had spells in
the infirmary, and has managed to get a cell to him-
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
self. Many of the criminals are negroes and half-
breeds, imprisoned for unspeakable offences. In
the exercising-yard MacQueen likes to keep apart.
"When I first came I used to get in a corner," he
said. . . .
Now this case of MacQueen has exercised my mind
enormously. It was painful to go out of the gray
jail again after I had talked to him — of Shaw and
Morris, of the Fabian Society and the British labor
members — into sunlight and freedom, and ever and
again, as I went about New York having the best
of times among the most agreeable people, the figure
of him would come back to me quite vividly, in his
gray dress, sitting on the edge of an unaccustomed
chair, hands on his knees, speaking a little nervously
and jerkily, and very glad indeed to see me. He is
younger than myself, but much my sort of man, and
we talked of books and education and his case like
brothers. There can be no doubt to any sensible
person who will look into the story of his conviction,
who will even go and see him, that there has been a
serious miscarriage of justice.
There has been a serious miscarriage of justice,
such as (unhappily) might happen in any country.
That is nothing distinctive of America. But what
does impress me as remarkable and perplexing is the
immense difficulty — the perhaps unsurmountable
difficulty — of getting this man released. The Gover
nor of the State of New Jersey knows he is innocent,
the judges of the Court of Pardons know he is in-
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
nocent. Three of them I was able to button-hole at
Trenton, and hear their point of view. Two are of
the minority and for release, one was doubtful in
attitude but hostile in spirit. They hold, the man,
he thinks, on the score of public policy. They put
it that Paterson is a " hotbed " of crime and violence ;
that once MacQueen is released every anarchist in
the country will be emboldened to crime, and so on
and so on. I admit Paterson festers, but if we are
to punish anybody instead of reforming the system,
it's the masters who ought to be in jail for that.
"What will the property-owners in Paterson say
to us if this man is released?" one of the judges ad
mitted frankly.
" But he hadn't anything to do with the violence,"
I said, an argued the case over again — quite missing
the point of that objection.
Whenever I had a chance in New York, in Boston,
in Washington, even amid the conversation of a
Washington dinner-table, I dragged up the case of
MacQueen. Nobody seemed indignant. One lady
admitted the sentence was heavy, "he might have
been given six months to cool off in," she said. I
protested he ought not to have been given a day.
" Why did he go there ?" said a Supreme Court judge
in Washington, a lawyer in New York, and several
other people. "Wasn't he making trouble?" I was
asked.
At last that reached my sluggish intelligence.
Yet I still hesitate to accept the new interpreta-
176
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
tions. Galiano, who preached blind violence and
made the riot, got off scot-free; MacQueen, who
wanted a legitimate strike on British lines, went to
jail. So long as the social injustice, the sweated
disorder of Paterson's industrialism, vents its cries
in Italian in La Questione Sociale, so long as it re
mains an inaudible misery so far as the great public
is concerned, making vehement yet impotent ap
peals to mere force, and so losing its last chances of
popular sympathy, American property, I gather, is
content. The masters and the immigrants can deal
with one another on those lines. But to have out
siders coming in!
There is an active press campaign against the
release of "the Anarchist MacQueen," and I do not
believe that Mr. Wishart will succeed in his en
deavors. I think MacQueen will serve out his five
years.
The plain truth is that no one pretends he is in
jail on his merits; he is in jail as an example and
lesson to any one who proposes to come between
master and immigrant worker in Paterson. He has
attacked the system. The people who profit by the
system, the people who think things are " all right as
they are," have hit back in the most effectual way
they can, according to their lights.
That, I think, accounts for the sustained quality
of the lying in this case, and, indeed, for the whole
situation. He is in jail on principle and without
personal animus, just as they used to tar and feather
177
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
the stray abolitionist on principle in Carolina. The
policy of stringent discouragement is a reasonable
one — scoundrelly, no doubt, but understandable.
And I think I can put myself sufficiently into the
place of the Paterson masters, of the Trenton judges,
of those journalists, of those subordinate officials at
Washington even, to understand their motives and
inducements. I indulge in no self-righteous pride.
Simply, I thank Heaven I have not had their
peculiar temptations.
But my riddle lies in the attitude of the public — of
the American nation, which hasn't, it seems, a spark
of moral indignation for this sort of thing, which
indeed joins in quite cheerfully against the victim.
It is ill served by its press, no doubt, but surely it
understands. ,
in
THEN I assisted at the coming of
Maxim Gorky Maxim Gorky, and witnessed many in
timate details of what Professor Gid-
dings, that courageous publicist, has called his
"lynching."
Here, again, is a case I fail altogether to under
stand. The surface values of that affair have a
touch of the preposterous. I set them down in in
finite perplexity.
My first week in New York was in the period of
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
Gorky's advent. Expectation was at a high pitch,
and one might have foretold a stupendous, a history-
making campaign. The American nation seemed
concentrated upon one great and ennobling idea, the
freedom of Russia, and upon Gorky as the embodi
ment of that idea. A protest was to be made against
cruelty and violence and massacre. That great
figure of Liberty with the torch was to make it flare
visibly half-way round the world, reproving tyranny.
Gorky arrived, and the eclat was immense. We
dined him, we lunched him, we were photographed
in his company by flash-light. I very gladly shared
that honor, for Gorky is not only a great master of
the art I practise, but a splendid personality. He is
one of those people to whom the camera does no
justice, whose work, as I know it in an English
translation, forceful as it is, fails very largely to
convey his peculiar quality. His is a big, quiet
figure; there is a curious power of appeal in his face,
a large simplicity in his voice and gesture. He was
dressed, when I met him, in peasant clothing, in a
belted blue shirt, trousers of some shiny black ma
terial, and boots ; and save for a few common greet
ings he has no other language than Russian. So it
was necessary that he should bring with him some
one he could trust to interpret him to the world.
And having, too, much of the practical helplessness
of his type of genius, he could not come without his
right hand, that brave and honorable lady, Madame
Andreieva, who has been now for years in every-
179
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
thing but the severest legal sense his wife. Russia
has no Dakota; and although his legal wife has
long since found another companion, the Orthodox
Church in Russia has no divorce facilities for men in
the revolutionary camp. So Madame Andreieva
stands to him as George Eliot stood to George Lewes,
and I suppose the two of them had almost forgotten
the technical illegality of their tie, until it burst upon
them and the American public in a monstrous storm
of exposure.
It was like a summer thunder-storm. At one mo
ment Gorky was in an immense sunshine, a plenipo
tentiary from oppression to liberty, at the next he
was being almost literally pelted through the streets.
I do not know what motive actuated a certain
section of the American press to initiate this pelting
of Maxim Gorky. A passion for moral purity may
perhaps have prompted it, but certainly no passion
for purity ever before begot so brazen and abundant
a torrent of lies. It was precisely the sort of cam
paign that damned poor Mac Queen, but this time
on an altogether imperial scale. The irregularity
of Madame Andreieva 's position was a mere point of
departure. The journalists went on to invent a
deserted wife and children, they declared Madame
Andreieva was an "actress," and loaded her with
all the unpleasant implications of that unfortunate
word; they spoke of her generally as "the woman
Andreieva"; they called upon the Commissioner of
Immigration to deport her as a "female of bad
1 80
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
character"; quite influential people wrote to him
to that effect; they published the name of the hotel
that sheltered her, and organized a boycott. Who
ever dared to countenance the victims was de
nounced. Professor Dewar of Columbia had given
them a reception; " Dewar must go," said the head
lines. Mark Twain, who had assisted in the great
welcome, was invited to recant and contribute un
friendly comments. The Gorkys were pursued with
insult from hotel to hotel. Hotel after hotel turned
them out. They found themselves at last, after mid
night, in the streets of New York city with every
door closed against them. Infected persons could
not have been treated more abominably in a town
smitten with a panic of plague.
This change happened in the course of twenty-
four hours. On one day Gorky was at the zenith,
on the next he had been swept from the world. To
me it was astounding — it was terrifying. I wanted
to talk to Gorky about it, to find out the hidden
springs of this amazing change. I spent a Sunday
evening looking for him with an ever-deepening
respect for the power of the American press. I had
a quaint conversation with the clerk of the hotel in
Fifth Avenue from which he had first been driven.
Europeans can scarcely hope to imagine the moral
altitudes at which American hotels are conducted.
... I went thence to seek Mr. Abraham Cahan in the
East Side, and thence to other people I knew, but in
vain. Gorky was obliterated.
181
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
I thought this affair was a whirlwind of foolish mis
understanding, such as may happen in any capital,
and that presently his entirely tolerable relationship
would be explained. But for all the rest of my time
in New York this insensate campaign went on.
There was no attempt of any importance to stem the
tide, and to this day large sections of the American
public must be under the impression that this great
writer is a depraved man of pleasure accompanied by
a favorite cocotte. The writers of paragraphs rack
ed their brains to invent new and smart ways of in
sulting Madame Andreieva. The chaste entertainers
of the music-halls of the Tenderloin district intro
duced allusions. And amid this riot of personali
ties Russia was forgotten. The massacres, the chaos
of cruelty and blundering, the tyranny, the women
outraged, the children tortured and slain — all that
was forgotten. In Boston, in Chicago, it was the
same. At the bare suggestion of Gorky's coming
the same outbreak occurred, the same display of im
becile gross lying, the same absolute disregard of the
tragic cause he had come to plead.
One gleam of comedy in this remarkable outbreak I
recall. Some one in ineffectual protest had asked
what Americans would have said if Benjamin
Franklin had encountered such ignominies on his
similar mission of appeal to Paris before the War of
Independence. "Benjamin Franklin," retorted one
bright young Chicago journalist, " was a man of very
different moral character from Gorky," and proceed-
182
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
ed to explain how Chicago was prepared to defend
the purity of her homes against the invader. Ben
jamin Franklin, it is true, was a person of very dif
ferent morals from Gorky — but I don't think that
bright young man in Chicago had a very sound idea
of where the difference lay.
I spent my last evening on American soil in the
hospitable home in Staten Island that sheltered
Gorky and Madame Andreieva. After dinner we
sat together in the deepening twilight upon a broad
veranda that looks out upon one of the most beautiful
views in the world, upon serene large spaces of land
and sea, upon slopes of pleasant, window-lit, tree-set
wooden houses, upon the glittering clusters of lights,
and the black and luminous shipping that comes and
goes about the Narrows and the Upper Bay. Half
masked by a hill contour to the left was the light
of the torch of Liberty. . . . Gorky's big form fell into
shadow, Madame Andreieva sat at his feet, trans
lating methodically, sentence by sentence, into clear
French whatever he said, translating our speeches
into Russian. He told us stories — of the soul of the
Russian, of Russian religious sects, of kindnesses and
cruelties, of his great despair.
Ever and again, in the pauses, my eyes would go
to where New York far away glittered like a brighter
and more numerous Pleiades.
I gauged something of the real magnitude of this
one man's disappointment, the immense expectation
of his arrival, the impossible dream of his mission
13 183
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
He had come — the Russian peasant in person, out of
a terrific confusion of bloodshed, squalor, injustice —
to tell America, the land of light and achieved free
dom, of all these evil things. She would receive
him, help him, understand truly what he meant
with his "Rossia." I could imagine how he had
felt as he came in the big steamer to her, up that
large converging display of space and teeming
energy. There she glowed to-night across the
water, a queen among cities, as if indeed she was the
light of the world. Nothing, I think, can ever rob
that splendid harbor approach of its invincible
quality of promise. . . . And to him she had shown
herself no more than the luminous hive of multitudes
of base and busy, greedy and childish little men.
MacQueen in jail, Gorky with his reputation
wantonly bludgeoned and flung aside; they are just
two chance specimens of the myriads who have come
up this great waterway bearing hope and gifts.
CHAPTER XII
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
I SEEM to find the same hastiness and
HamenJtsdg" something of the same note of harsh
ness that strike me in the cases of Mac-
Queen and Gorky in America's treatment of her
colored population. I am aware how intricate, how
multitudinous, the aspects of this enormous question
have become, but looking at it in the broad and
transitory manner I have proposed for myself in
these papers, it does seem to present many parallel
elements. There is the same disposition towards an
indiscriminating verdict, the same disregard of pro
portion as between small evils and great ones, the
same indifference to the fact that the question does
not stand alone, but is a part, and this time a by no
means small part, in the working out of America's
destinies.
In regard to the colored population, just as in
regard to the great and growing accumulations of
unassimilated and increasingly unpopular Jews, and
to the great and growing multitudes of Roman
185
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
Catholics whose special education contradicts at so
many points those conceptions of individual judg
ment and responsibility upon which America relies,
I have attempted time after time to get some an
swer from the Americans I have met to what is to me
the most obvious of questions. " Your grandchildren
and the grandchildren of these people will have to
live in this country side by side ; do you propose, do
you believe it possible, that under the increasing
pressure of population and competition they should
be living then in just the same relations that you and
these people are living now ; if you do not, then what
relations do you propose shall exist between them?"
It is not too much to say that I have never once
had the beginnings of an answer to this question.
Usually one is told with great gravity that the
problem of color is one of the most difficult that we
have to consider, and the conversation then breaks
up into discursive anecdotes and statements about
black people. One man will dwell upon the un
controllable violence of a black man's evil passions
(in Jamaica and Barbadoes colored people form an
overwhelming proportion of the population, and
they have behaved in an exemplary fashion for the
last thirty years) ; another will dilate upon the in
credible stupidity of the full-blooded negro (during
my stay in New York the prize for oratory at
Columbia University, oratory which was the one
redeeming charm of Daniel Webster, was awarded
to a Zulu of unmitigated blackness) ; a third will
186
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
speak of his physical offensiveness, his peculiar smell
which necessitates his social isolation (most well-to-
do Southerners are brought up by negro "mam
mies"); others, again, will enter upon the painful
history of the years that followed the war, though it
seems a foolish thing to let those wrongs of the past
dominate the outlook for the future. And one
charming Southern lady expressed the attitude of
mind of a whole class very completely, I think,
when she said, " You have to be one of us to feel this
question at all as it ought to be felt."
There, I think, I got something tangible. These
emotions are a cult.
My globe-trotting impudence will seem, no doubt,
to mount to its zenith when I declare that hardly
any Americans at all seem to be in possession of the
elementary facts in relation to this question. These
broad facts are not taught, as of course they ought
to be taught, in school; and what each man knows
is picked up by the accidents of his own untrained
observation, by conversation always tinctured by
personal prejudice, by hastily read newspapers and
magazine articles and the like. The quality of this
discussion is very variable, but on the whole pretty
low. While I was in New York opinion was greatly
swayed by an article in, if I remember rightly, the
Century Magazine, by a gentleman who had deduced
from a few weeks' observation in the slums of
Khartoum the entire incapacity of the negro to es
tablish a civilization of his own. He never had,
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
therefore he never could; a discouraging ratiocina
tion. We English, a century or so ago, said all these
things of the native Irish. If there is any trend of
opinion at all in this matter at present, it lies in the
direction of a generous decision on the part of the
North and West to leave the black more and more to
the judgment and mercy of the white people with
whom he is locally associated. This judgment and
mercy points, on the whole, to an accentuation of the
colored man's natural inferiority, to the cessation of
any other educational attempts than those that in
crease his industrial usefulness (it is already illegal
in Louisiana to educate him above a contemptible
level), to his industrial exploitation through usury
and legal chicanery, and to a systematic strengthen
ing of the social barriers between colored people of
whatever shade and the whites.
Meanwhile, in this state of general confusion, in
the absence of any determining rules or assumptions,
all sorts of things are happening — according to the
accidents of local feeling. In Massachusetts you
have people with, I am afraid, an increasing sense
of sacrifice to principle, lunching and dining with
people of color. They do it less than they did, I
was told. Massachusetts stands, I believe, at the
top of the scale of tolerant humanity. One seems
to reach the bottom at Springfield, Missouri, which
is a county seat with a college, an academy, a high
school, and a zoological garden. There the exem
plary method reaches the nadir. Last April three
1 88
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
unfortunate negroes were burned to death, apparently
because they were negroes, and as a general corrective
of impertinence. They seem to have been innocent
of any particular offence. It was a sort of racial
sacrament. The edified Sunday-school children hur
ried from their gospel-teaching to search for souve
nirs among the ashes, and competed with great spirit
for a fragment of charred skull.
It is true that in this latter case Governor Folk
acted with vigor and justice, and that the better
element of Springfield society was evidently shocked
when it was found that quite innocent negroes had
been used in these instructive pyrotechnics ; but the
fact remains that a large and numerically important
section of the American public does think that
fierce and cruel reprisals are a necessary part of the
system of relationships between white and colored
man. In our dispersed British community we have
almost exactly the same range between our better
attitudes and our worse — I'm making no claim of
national superiority. In London, perhaps, we out
do Massachusetts in liberality; in the National
Liberal Club or the Reform a black man meets all the
courtesies of humanity — as though there was no
such thing as color. But, on the other hand, the
Cape won't bear looking into for a moment. The
same conditions give the same results; a half-
educated white population of British or Dutch or
German ingredients greedy for gain, ill controlled and
feebly influenced, in contact with a black population,
189
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
is bound to reproduce the same brutal and stupid
aggressions, the same half -honest prejudices to
justify those aggressions, the same ugly, mean
excuses. "Things are better in Jamaica and Bar-
badoes," said I, in a moment of patriotic weakness,
to Mr. Booker T. Washington.
"Eh!" said he, and thought in that long silent
way he has. . . . "They're worse in South Africa-
much. Here we've got a sort of light. We know
generally what we've got to stand.. There—
His words sent my memory back to some con
versations I had quite recently with a man from a
dry-goods store in Johannesburg. He gave me
clearly enough the attitude of the common white out
there; the dull prejudice; the readiness to take ad
vantage of the "boy"; the utter disrespect for
colored womankind; the savage, intolerant resent
ment, dashed dangerously with fear, which the native
arouses in him. (Think of all that must have hap
pened in wrongful practice and wrongful law and
neglected educational possibilities before our Zulus
in Natal were goaded to face massacre, spear against
rifle !) The rare and culminating result of education
and experience is to enable men to grasp facts, to
balance justly among their fluctuating and innumer
able aspects, and only a small minority in our world
is educated to that pitch. Ignorant people can
think only in types and abstractions, can achieve
only emphatic absolute decisions, and when the
commonplace American or the commonplace colonial
190
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
Briton sets to work to " think over " the negro prob
lem, he instantly banishes most of the material
evidence from his mind — clears for action, as it were.
He forgets the genial carriage of the ordinary colored
man, his beaming face, his kindly eye, his rich, jolly
voice, his touching and trusted friendliness, his
amiable, unprejudiced readiness to serve and follow
a white man who seems to know what he is doing.
He forgets — perhaps he has never seen — the dear
humanity of these people, their slightly exaggerated
vanity, their innocent and delightful love of color
and song, their immense capacity for affection, the
warm romantic touch in their imaginations. He
ignores the real fineness of the indolence that de
spises servile toil, of the carelessness that disdains the
watchful aggressive economies, day by day, now a
wretched little gain here and now a wretched little
gain there, that make the dirty fortune of the Rus
sian Jews who prey upon color in the Carolinas. No ;
in the place of all these tolerable every-day ex
periences he lets his imagination go to work upon a
monster, the "real nigger."
" Ah! You don't know the real nigger," said one
American to me when I praised the colored people I
had seen. "You should see the buck nigger down
South, Congo brand. Then you'd understand, sir."
His voice, his face had a gleam of passionate
animosity.
One could see he had been brooding himself out
of all relations to reality in this matter. He was a
191
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
man beyond reason or pity. He was obsessed.
Hatred of that imaginary diabolical "buck nigger"
blackened his soul. It was no good to talk to him
of the "buck American, Packingtown brand," or the
"buck Englishman, suburban race-meeting type,"
and to ask him if these intensely disagreeable persons
justified outrages on Senator Lodge, let us say, or
Mrs. Longworth. No reply would have come from
him. "You don't understand the question," he
would have answered. "You don't know how we
Southerners feel."
Well, one can make a tolerable guess.
ii
I CERTAINLY did not begin to realize
Thstrainite one most important aspect of this
question until I reached America. I
thought of those eight millions as of men, black as
ink. But when I met Mr. Booker T. Washington,
for example, I met a man certainly as white in ap
pearance as our Admiral Fisher, who is, as a matter
of fact, quite white. A very large proportion of
these colored people, indeed, is more than half white.
One hears a good deal about the high social origins
of the Southern planters, very many derive indispu
tably from the first families of England. It is the
same blood flows in these mixed colored people's
veins. Just think of the sublime absurdity, there
fore, of the ban. There are gentlemen of education
192
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
and refinement, qualified lawyers and doctors, whose
ancestors assisted in the Norman Conquest, and they
dare not enter a car marked "white" and intrude
upon the dignity of the rising loan-monger from
Esthonia. For them the "Jim Crow" car. . . .
One tries to put that aspect to the American in
vain. "These people," you say, "are nearer your
blood, nearer your temper, than any of those bright-
eyed, ringleted immigrants on the East Side. Are
you ashamed of your poor relations? Even if you
don't like the half, or the quarter of negro blood,
you might deal civilly with the three-quarters white.
It doesn't say much for your faith in your own
racial prepotency, anyhow. "...
The answer to that is usually in terms of mania.
"Let me tell you a little story just to illustrate,"
said one deponent to me in an impressive under
tone — " just to illustrate, you know. ... A few years
ago a young fellow came to Boston from New Orleans.
Looked all right. Dark — but he explained that by
an Italian grandmother. Touch of French in him,
too. Popular. Well, he made advances to a Boston
girl — good family. Gave a fairly straight account of
himself. Married."
He paused. "Course of time — offspring. Little
son."
His eye made me feel what was coming.
"Was it by any chance very, very black?" I
whispered.
"Yes, sir. Black! Black as your hat. Abso-
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
lutely negroid. Projecting jaw, thick lips, frizzy
hair, flat nose — everything. . . .
" But consider the mother's feelings, sir, consider
that! A pure-minded, pure white woman!"
What can one say to a story of this sort, when the
taint in the blood surges up so powerfully as to black
en the child at birth beyond even the habit of the
pure-blooded negro ? What can you do with a pub
lic opinion made of this class of ingredient? And
this story of the lamentable results of intermarriage
was used, not as an argument against intermarriage,
but as an argument against the extension of quite
rudimentary civilities to the men of color. " If you
eat with them, you've got to marry them," he said,
an entirely fabulous post-prandial responsibility.
It is to the tainted whites my sympathies go out.
The black or mainly black people seem to be fairly
content with their inferiority; one sees them all
about the States as waiters, cab - drivers, railway
porters, car attendants, laborers of various sorts, a
pleasant, smiling, acquiescent folk. But consider the
case of a man with a broader brain than such small
uses need, conscious, perhaps, of exceptional gifts,
capable of wide interests and sustained attempts,
who is perhaps as English as you or I, with just a
touch of color in his eyes, in his lips, in his finger
nails, and in his imagination. Think of the ac
cumulating sense of injustice he must bear with him
through life, the perpetual slight and insult he must
undergo from all that is vulgar and brutal among the
194
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
whites! Something of that one may read in the
sorrowful pages of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk.
They would have made Alexandre Dumas travel in
the Jim Crow car if he had come to Virginia. But I
can imagine some sort of protest on the part of that
admirable but extravagant man. . . . They even talk
of " Jim Crow elevators" now in Southern hotels.
At Hull House, in Chicago, I was present at a
conference of colored people — Miss Jane Addams
efficiently in control — to consider the coming of a
vexatious play, "The Clansman," which seems to
have been written and produced entirely to exacer
bate racial feeling. Both men and women were
present, business people, professional men, and their
wives ; the speaking was clear, temperate, and won
derfully to the point, high above the level of any
British town council I have ever attended. One
lady would have stood out as capable and charming
in any sort of public discussion in England — though
we are not wanting in good women speakers — and
she was at least three-quarters black. . . .
And while I was in Chicago, too, I went to the
Peking Theatre — a "coon" music-hall — and saw
something of a lowrer level of colored life. The
common white, I must explain, delights in calling
colored people "coons," and the negro, so far as I
could learn, uses no retaliatory word. It was a
"variety" entertainment, with one turn, at least,
of quite distinguished merit, good-humored and
brisk throughout. I watched keenly, and I could
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
detect nothing of that trail of base suggestion one
would find as a matter of course in a music-hall in
such English towns as Brighton and Portsmouth.
What one heard of kissing and love-making was
quite artless and simple indeed. The negro, it
seemed to me, did this sort of thing with a better
grace and a better temper than a Londoner, and
shows, I think, a finer self-respect. He thinks more
of deportment, he bears himself more elegantly by
far than the white at the same social level. The
audience reminded me of the sort of gathering one
would find in a theatre in Camden Town or Hoxton.
There were a number of family groups, the girls
brightly dressed, and young couples quite of the
London music-hall type. Clothing ran "smart,"
but not smarter than it would be among fairly pros
perous north London Jews. There was no gallery
• — socially — no collection of orange-eating, interrupt
ing hooligans at all. Nobody seemed cross, nobody
seemed present for vicious purposes, and everybody
was sober. Indeed, there and elsewhere I took and
confirmed a mighty liking to these gentle, human,
dark-skinned people.
in
BUT whatever aspect I recall of this
taboo that shows no signs of
lifting, of this great problem of the
future that America in her haste, her indiscriminat-
196
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
ing prejudice, her lack of any sustained study and
teaching of the broad issues she must decide, com
plicates and intensifies, and makes threatening,
there presently comes back to mind the browned
face of Mr. Booker T. Washington, as he talked to
me over our lunch in Boston.
He has a face rather Irish in type, and the soft
slow negro voice. He met my regard with the
brown sorrowful eyes of his race. He wanted very
much that I should hear him make a speech, because
then his words came better; he talked, he implied,
with a certain difficulty. But I preferred to have
his talking, and get not the orator — every one tells
me he is an altogether great orator in this country
where oratory is still esteemed — but the man.
He answered my questions meditatively. I want
ed to know with an active pertinacity. What
struck me most was the way in which his sense of the
overpowering forces of race prejudice weighs upon
him. It is a thing he accepts ; in our time and condi
tions it is not to be fought about. He makes one
feel with an exaggerated intensity (though I could
not even draw him to admit) its monstrous injustice.
He makes no accusations. He is for taking it as a
part of the present fate of his "people," and for
doing all that can be done for them within the limit
it sets.
Therein he differs from Du Bois, the other great
spokesman color has found in our time. Du Bois,
is more of the artist, less of the statesman; he con-
197
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
ceals his passionate resentment all too thinly. He
batters himself into rhetoric against these walls.
He will not repudiate the clear right of the black
man to every educational facility, to equal citizen
ship, and equal respect. But Mr. Washington has
statecraft. He looks before and after, and plans and
keeps his counsel with the scope and range of a
statesman. I use "statesman" in its highest sense;
his is a mind that can grasp the situation and des
tinies of a people. After I had talked- to him I went
back to my club, and found there an English news
paper with a report of the opening debate upon Mr.
Birrell's Education Bill. It was like turning from
the discussion of life and death to a dispute about
the dregs in the bottom of a tea-cup somebody had
neglected to wash up in Victorian times.
I argued strongly against the view he seems to
hold that black and white might live without
mingling and without injustice, side by side. That
I do not believe. Racial differences seem to me al
ways to exasperate intercourse unless people have
been elaborately trained to ignore them. Uned
ucated men are as bad as cattle in persecuting all
that is different among themselves. The most
miserable and disorderly countries of the world are
the countries where two races, two inadequate
cultures, keep a jarring, continuous separation.
"You must repudiate separation," I said. "No
peoples have ever yet endured the tension of inter
mingled distinctness . ' '
198
. HE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
"May we not become a peculiar people — like the
Jews?" he suggested. "Isn't that possible?"
But there I could not agree with him. I thought
of the dreadful history of the Jews and Armenians.
And the negro cannot do what the Jews and Ar
menians have done. The colored people of America
are of a different quality from the Jew altogether,
more genial, more careless, more sympathetic,
franker, less intellectual, less acquisitive, less wary
and restrained — in a word, more Occidental. They
have no common religion and culture, no conceit of
race to hold them together. The Jews make a
ghetto for themselves wherever they go; no law but
their own solidarity has given America the East Side.
The colored people are ready to disperse and inter
breed, are not a community at all in the Jewish
sense, but outcasts from a community. They are
the victims of a prejudice that has to be destroyed.
These things I urged, but it was, I think, empty
speech to my hearer. I could talk lightly of de
stroying that prejudice, but he knew better. It is
the central fact of his life, a law of his being. He has
shaped all his projects and policy upon that. Ex
clusion is inevitable. So he dreams of a colored race
of decent and inaggressive men silently giving the
lie to all the legend of their degradation. They will
have their own doctors, their own lawyers, their own
capitalists, their own banks — because the whites
desire it so. But will the uneducated whites endure
even so submissive a vindication as that ? Will they
14 IQ9
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
suffer the horrid spectacle of free and self -satisfied
negroes in decent clothing on any terms without
resentment ?
He explained how at the Tuskegee Institute they
make useful men, skilled engineers, skilled agri
culturalists, men to live down the charge of practical
incompetence, of ignorant and slovenly farming and
house management. . . .
"I wish you would tell me/' I said, abruptly,
"just what you think of the attitude of white
America towards you. Do you think it is generous ? ' '
He regarded me for a moment. "No end of
people help us," he said.
"Yes," I said; "but the ordinary man. Is he
fair?"
"Some things are not fair," he said, leaving the
general question alone. " It isn't fair to refuse a
colored man a berth on a sleeping-car. I? — I
happen to be a privileged person, they make an
exception for me ; but the ordinary educated colored
man isn't admitted to a sleeping-car at all. If he
has to go a long journey, he has to sit up all night.
His white competitor sleeps. Then in some places,
in the hotels and restaurants — It's all right here
in Boston — but southwardly he can't get proper re
freshments. All that's a handicap. . . .
"The remedy lies in education," he said; "ours —
and theirs.
"The real thing," he told me, "isn't to be done by
talking and agitation. It's a matter of lives. The
200
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
only answer to it all is for colored men to be patient,
to make themselves competent, to do good work, to
live well, to give no occasion against us. We feel
that. In a way it's an inspiration. . . .
" There is a man here in Boston, a negro, who owns
and runs some big stores, employs all sorts of people,
deals justly. That man has done more good for our
people than all the eloquence or argument in the
world. . . . That is what we have to do — it is all we
can do/' . . .
Whatever America has to sho\v in heroic living to
day, I doubt if she can show anything finer than the
quality of the resolve, the steadfast effort hundreds
of black and colored men are making to-day to live
blamelessly, honorably, and patiently, getting for
themselves what scraps of refinement, learning, and
beauty they may, keeping their hold on a civilization
they are grudged and denied. They do it not for
themselves only, but for all their race. Each
educated colored man is an ambassador to civiliza
tion. They know they have a handicap, that they
are not exceptionally brilliant nor clever people.
Yet every such man stands, one likes to think, aware
of his representative and vicarious character, fight
ing against foul imaginations, misrepresentations,
injustice, insult, and the naive unspeakable mean
nesses of base antagonists. Every one of them who
keeps decent and honorable does a little to beat
that opposition down.
But the patience the negro needs! He may not
201
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
even look contempt. He must admit superiority in
those whose daily conduct to him is the clearest
evidence of moral inferiority. We sympathetic
whites, indeed, may claim honor for him; if he is wise
he will be silent under our advocacy. He must go
to and fro self -controlled, bereft of all the equalities
that the great flag of America proclaims — that flag
for whose united empire his people fought and died,
giving place and precedence to the strangers who
pour in to share its beneficence, strangers ignorant
even of its tongue. That he must do — and wait.
The Welsh, the Irish, the Poles, the white South, the
indefatigable Jews may cherish grievances and rail
aloud. He must keep still. They may be hysterical
revengeful, threatening, and perverse; their wrongs
excuse them. F^r him there is no excuse. And of
all the races upon earth, which has suffered such
wrongs as this negro blood that is still imputed to
him as a sin? These people who disdain him, who
have no sense of reparation towards him, have
sinned against him beyond all measure. . . .
No, I can't help idealizing the dark submissive
figure of the negro in this spectacle of America. He,
too, seems to me to sit waiting — and waiting with
a marvellous and simple-minded patience — for finer
understandings and a nobler time.
CHAPTER XIII
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
I DO not know if I am conveying to
Recapitulatory any extent the picture of America as I
see it, the vast rich various continent,
the gigantic energetic process of development, the
acquisitive successes, the striving failures, the multi
tudes of those rising and falling who come between,
all set in a texture of spacious countryside, animate
with pleasant timber homes, of clangorous towns
that bristle to the skies, of great exploitation dis
tricts and crowded factories, of wide deserts and
mine-torn mountains, and huge half -tamed rivers.
I have tried to make the note of immigration grow
slowly to a dominating significance in this panorama,
and with that, to make more and more evident my
sense of the need of a creative assimilation, the cry
for synthetic effort, lest all this great being, this
splendid promise of a new world, should decay into
a vast unprogressive stagnation of unhappiness and
disorder. I have hinted at failures and cruelties, I
have put into the accumulating details of my vision,
203
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
children America blights, men she crushes, fine
hopes she disappoints and destroys. I have found
a place for the questioning figure of the South, the
sorrowful interrogation of the outcast colored people.
These are but the marginal shadows of a process in
its totality magnificent, but they exist, they go on
to mingle in her destinies.
Then I have tried to show, too, the conception I
have formed of the great skein of industrial com
petition that has been tightening and becoming
more and more involved through all this century-
long age, the age of blind growth, that draws now
towards its end; until the process threatens to
throttle individual freedom and individual enter
prise altogether. And of a great mental uneasiness
and discontent, unprecedented in the history of the
American mind, that promises in the near future
some general and conscious endeavor to arrest this
unanticipated strangulation of freedom and free
living, some widespread struggle, of I know not what
constructive power, with the stains and disorders
and indignities that oppress and grow larger in the
national consciousness. I perceive more and more
that in coming to America I have chanced upon a
time of peculiar significance. The note of dis
illusionment sounds everywhere. America, for the
first time in her history, is taking thought about
herself, and ridding herself of long-cherished illusions.
I have already mentioned (in Chapter VIII.) the
memorable literature of self-examination that has
204
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
come into being during the last decade. Hitherto
American thought has been extraordinarily localized ;
there has been no national press, in the sense that
the press of London or Paris is national. Americans
knew of America as a whole, mainly as the flag.
Beneath the flag America is lost among constituent
States and cities. All her newspapers have been, by
English standards, "local" papers, preoccupied by
local affairs, and taking an intensely localized point
of view. A national newspaper for America would
be altogether too immense an enterprise. Only
since 1896, and in the form of weekly and monthly
ten-cent magazines, have the rudiments of a national
medium of expression appeared, and appeared to
voice strange pregnant doubts. I had an interest
ing talk with Mr. Brisben Walker upon this new
development. To him the first ten-cent magazine,
The Cosmopolitan, was due, and he was naturally
glad to tell me of the growth of this vehicle. To-day
there is an aggregate circulation of ten millions of
these magazines; they supply fiction, no doubt, and
much of light interesting ephemeral matter, but not
one of them is without its element of grave public
discussion. I do not wish to make too much of this
particular development, but regard it as a sign of
new interests, of keen curiosities.
Now I must confess when I consider this ocean of
readers I find the fears I have expressed of some
analogical development of American affairs towards
the stagnant commercialism of China, or towards a
205
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
plutocratic imperialism and decadence of the Roman
type, look singularly flimsy. Upon its present lines,
and supposing there were no new sources of mental
supply and energy, I do firmly believe that America
might conceivably come more and more under the
control of a tacitly organized and exhausting plutoc
racy, be swamped by a swelling tide of ignorant and
unassimilable labor immigrants, decline towards
violence and social misery, fall behind Europe in
education and intelligence, and cease to lead civiliza
tion. In such a decay Cassarism would be a most
probable and natural phase, Cassarism and a split
ting into contending Cassarisms. Come but a little
sinking from intelligence towards coarseness and
passion, and the South will yet endeavor to impose
servitude anew upon its colored people, or secede —
that trouble is not yet over. A little darkening and
improverishment of outlook and New York would
split from New England, and Colorado from the
East. An illiterate, short-sighted America would
be America doomed. But America is not illiterate;
there are these great unprecedented reservoirs of
intelligence and understanding, these millions of
people who follow the process with an increasing
comprehension. It is these millions of readers
who make the American problem, and the problem
of Europe and the world to-day, unique and in
calculable, who provide a cohesive and reasonable
and pacifying medium the Old World did not
know.
206
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
II
You see, my hero in the confused
fdrama of human life is intelligence; in-
telligence inspired by constructive pas
sion. There is a demi-god imprisoned in mankind.
All human history presents itself to me as the un
conscious or half-unconscious struggle of human
thought to emerge from the sightless interplay of
instinct, individual passion, prejudice, and ignorance.
One sees this diviner element groping after law and
order and fine arrangement, like a thing blind and
half -buried, in ancient Egypt, in ancient Judaea, in
ancient Greece. It embodies its purpose in religions,
invents the disciplines of morality, the reminders of
ritual. It loses itself and becomes confused. It
wearies and rests. In Plato, for the first time, one
discovers it conscious and open-eyed, trying, indeed,
to take hold of life and control it. Then it goes
undei, and becomes again a convulsive struggle, an
inco-ordinated gripping and leaving, a muttering of
literature and art, until the coming of our own times.
Most painful and blundering of demi-gods it seems
through all that space of years, with closed eyes and
feverish effort. And now again it is clear to the
minds of many men that they may lay hold upon
and control the destiny of their kind. . . .
It is strange, it is often grotesque to mark how the
reviving racial consciousness finds expression to-day.
Now it startles itself into a new phase of self-
207
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
knowledge by striking a note from this art, and now
by striking one from that. It breaks out in fiction
that is ostensibly written only to amuse, it creeps
into after-dinner discussions, and invades a press
wrhich is economically no more than a system of ad
vertisement sheets proclaiming the price of the thing
that is. Presently it is on the stage ; the music-hall
even is not safe from it. Youths walk in the streets
to-day, talking together of things that were once the
ultimate speculation of philosophy. I am no con-
temner of the present. To me it appears a time of
immense and wonderful beginnings. New ideas are
organizing themselves out of the little limited efforts
of innumerable men. Never was there an age so
intellectually prolific and abundant as this in the
aggregate is. It is true, indeed, that we who write
and think and investigate to-day, present nothing
to compare with the magnificent reputations and in
tensely individualized achievements of the impres
sive personalities of the past. None the less is it
true that taken all together we signifiy infinitely
more. We no longer pose ourselves for admiration,
high priests and princes of letters in a world of finite
achievement; we admit ourselves no more than
pages bearing the train of a Queen — but a Queen of
limitless power. The knowledge we co-ordinate, the
ideas we build together, the growing blaze in which
we are willingly consumed, are wider and higher and
richer in promise than anything the world has had
before. . . .
208
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
When one takes count of the forces of intelligence
upon which we may rely in the great conflict against
matter, brute instinct, and individualistic disorder,
to make the new social state, when we consider the
organizing forms that emerge already from the
general vague confusion, we find apparent in every
modern state three chief series of developments.
There is first the thinking and investigatory elements
that grow constantly more important in our uni
versity life, the enlarging recognition of the need of a
systematic issue of university publications, books,
periodicals, and of sustained and fertilizing discus
sion. Then there is the greater, cruder, and bolder
sea of mental activities outside academic limits, the
amateurs, the free lances of thought and inquiry,
the writers and artists, the innumerable ill -dis
ciplined, untrained, but interested and well-meaning
people who write and talk. They find their medium
in contemporary literature, in journalism, in or
ganizations for the propaganda of opinion. And,
thirdly, there is the immense, nearly universally
diffused system of education which, inadequately
enough, serves to spread the new ideas as they are
elaborated, which does, at any rate by its pre
paratory work, render them accessible. All these
new manifestations of mind embody themselves
in material forms, in class-rooms and labora
tories, in libraries, and a vast machinery of
book and newspaper production and distribu
tion.
209
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
Consider the new universities that spring up all
over America. Almost imperceptibly throughout
the past century, little by little, the conception of a
university has changed, until now it is nearly al
together changed. The old-time university was a
collection of learned men; it believed that all the
generalizations had been made, all the fundamental
things said; it had no vistas towards the future; it
existed for teaching and exercises, and more than
half implied what Dr. Johnson, for example, be
lieved, that secular degeneration was the rule of
human life. All that, you know, has gone; every
university, even Oxford (though, poor pretentious
dear, she still professes to read and think metaphysics
in "the original" Greek) admits the conception of a
philosophy that progresses, that broadens and in
tensifies, age by age. But to come to America is to
come to a country far more alive to the thinking
and knowledge-making function of universities than
Great Britain. One splendidly endowed founda
tion, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,
exists only for research, and that was the first inten
tion of Chicago University also. In sociology, in
pedagogics, in social psychology, these vital sciences
for the modern state, America is producing an
amount of work which, however trivial in pro
portion to the task before her, is at any rate
immense in comparison with our own British out
put. . . .
210
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
in
I DID my amateurish and transitory
Colv?rs!tyUni" best to see something of the Ameri
can universities. There was Columbia.
Thither I went with a letter to Professor Giddings,
whose sociological writings are world famous. I
found him busy with a secretary in a business-like
little room, stowed away somewhere under the dome
of the magnificent building of the university library.
He took me round the opulent spaces, the fine
buildings of Columbia. ... I suppose it is inevitable
that a visitor should see the constituents of a uni
versity out of proportion, but I came away with
an impression overwhelmingly architectural. The
library dome, I confess, was fine, and the desks below
well filled with students, the books were abundant,
well arranged, and well tended. But I recall marble
staircases, I recall great wastes of marble steps, I
recall, in particular, students' baths of extraordinary
splendor, and I do not recall anything like an equiva
lent effect of large leisure and dignity for intellectual
men. Professor Giddings seemed driven and busy,
the few men I met there appeared all to have a lot of
immediate work to do. It occurred to me in Colum
bia, as it occurred to me later in the University
of Chicago, that the disposition of the university
founder is altogether too much towards buildings and
memorial inscriptions, and all too little towards the
more difficult and far more valuable end of putting
211
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
men of pre-eminent ability into positions of stimulat
ed leisure. This is not a distinctly American effect.
In Oxford, just as much as in Columbia, nay, far
more ! you find stone and student lording it over the
creative mental thing; the dons go about like some
sort of little short-coated parasite, pointing respect
fully to tower and facade, which have, in truth, no
reason for existing except to shelter them. Columbia
is almost as badly off for means of publication as
Oxford, and quite as poor in inducements towards
creative work. Professors talk in an altogether
British way of getting work done in the vaca
tion.
Moreover, there was an effect of remoteness about
Columbia. It may have been the quality of a blue
still morning of sunshine that invaded my impres
sion. I came up out of the crowded tumult of New
York to it, with a sense of the hooting, hurrying
traffics of the wide harbor, the teeming East Side,
the glitter of spending, the rush of finance, the whole
headlong process of America, behind me. I came
out of the subway station into wide still streets. It
was very spacious, very dignified, very quiet. Well,
I want the universities of the modern state to be
more aggressive. I want to think of a Columbia
University of a less detached appearance, even if she
is less splendidly clad. I want to think of her as
sitting up there, cheek on hand, with knitted brows,
brooding upon the millions below. I want to think
of all the best minds conceivable going to and fro —
212
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
thoughts and purposes in her organized mind. And
when she speaks that busy world should listen. . . .
As a matter of fact, much of that busy world still
regards a professor as something between a dealer in
scientific magic and a crank, and a university as an
institution every good American should be honestly
proud of and avoid.
IV
HARVARD, too, is detached, though
Harvard not quite with the same immediacy of
contrast. Harvard reminded me very
much of my first impressions of Oxford. One was
taken about in the same way to see this or that point
of view. Much of Harvard is Georgian red brick,
that must have seemed very ripe and venerable until
a year or so ago one bitter winter killed all the
English ivy. There are students' clubs, after the
fashion of the Oxford Union, but finer and better
equipped; there is an amazing Germanic museum,
the gift of the present Emperor, that does, in a con
centrated form, present all that is flamboyant of
Germany; there are noble museums and libraries,
and very many fine and dignified aspects and spaces,
and an abundant intellectual life. Harvard is hap
pily free from the collegiate politics that absorb
most of the surplus mental energy of Oxford and
Cambridge, and the professors can and do meet and
talk. At Harvard men count. I was condoled with
213
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
on all hands in my disappointment that I could
not meet Professor William James — he was still in
California — and I had the good fortune to meet and
talk to President Eliot, who is, indeed, a very
considerable voice in American affairs. To me he
talked quite readily and frankly of a very living sub
ject, the integrity of the press in relation to the
systematic and successful efforts of the advertising
chemists and druggists to stifle exposures of noxious
proprietary articles. He saw the problem as the
subtle play of group psychology it is ; there was none
of that feeble horror of these troubles as " modern and
vulgar" that one would expect in an English uni
versity leader. I fell into a great respect for his lean
fine face and figure, his deliberate voice, his open,
balanced, and constructive mind. He was the first
man I had met who had any suggestion of a force and
quality that might stand up to and prevail against
the forces of acquisition and brute trading. He bore
himself as though some sure power were behind him,
unlike many other men I met who criticised abuses
abusively, or in the key of facetious despair. He
had very much of that fine aristocratic quality one
finds cropping up so frequently among Americans of
old tradition, an aristocratic quality that is free from
either privilege or pretension. . . .
At Harvard, too, I met Professor Munsterberg,
one of the few writers of standing who have attempt
ed a general review of the American situation. He
is a tall fair German, but newly annexed to America,
214
, : m
HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHXSOX GATE, CAMBRIDGE
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
with a certain diplomatic quality in his personality,
standing almost consciously, as it were, for Germany
in America, and for America in Germany. He has
written a book for either people, because hitherto
they have seen each other too much through Eng
lish media ("von Englischen linseln retouchiert ") ,
and he has done much to spread the conception of a
common quality and sympathy between Germany
and America. " Blood," he says in this connection,
"is thicker than water, but . . . printer's ink is
thicker than blood." England is too aristocratic,
France too shockingly immoral, Russia too absolutist
to be the sympathetic and similar friend of America,
and so, by a process of exhaustion, Germany remains
the one power on earth capable of an "inner under
standing." (Also he has drawn an alluring paral
lel between President Roosevelt and the Emperor
William to complete the approximation of "die
beiden Edelnationen ") . I had read all this, and
was interested to encounter him therefore at a
Harvard table in a circle of his colleagues, agreeable
and courteous, and still scarcely more assimilated
than the brightly new white Germanic museum
among the red brick traditions of Kirkland and
Cambridge streets. . . .
Harvard impresses me altogether as a very living
factor in the present American outlook, not only
when I was in Cambridge, but in the way the place
tells in New York, in Chicago, in Washington. It
has a living and contemporary attitude, and it is
is 215
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
becoming more and more audible. Harvard opinion
influences the magazines and affects the press, at
least in the East, to an increasing extent. It may,
in the near future, become still more rapidly audible.
Professor Eliot is now full of years and honor, and I
found in New York, in Boston, in Washington, that
his successor was being discussed. In all these
cities I met people disposed to believe that if Presi
dent Roosevelt does not become President of the
United States for a further term, he may succeed
President Eliot. Now that I have seen President
Roosevelt it seems to me that this might have a most
extraordinary effect in accelerating the reaction
upon the people of America of the best and least
mercenary of their national thought. Already he is
exerting an immense influence in the advertisement
of new ideas and ideals. But of President Roosevelt
I shall write more fully later. . . .
CHICAGO UNIVERSITY, too, is a splen-
" did Place of fine buildings and green
spaces and trees, with a great going to
and fro of students, a wonderful contrast to the dark
congestions of the mercantile city to the north. To
all the disorganization of that it is even physically
antagonistic, and I could think as I went about it
that already this new organization has produced such
216
A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
writing as Veblen's admirable ironies (The Theory
of Business Enterprise, for example), and such
sociological work as that of Zueblin and Albion
Small. I went through the vigorous and admirably
equipped pedagogic department, which is evidently a
centre of thought and stimulus for the whole teach
ing profession of Illinois ; I saw a library of sociology
and economics beyond anything that London can
boast ; I came upon little groups of students working
amid piles of books in a businesslike manner, and
if at times in other sections this suggestion was still
insistent that thought was as yet only "moving in"
and, as it were, getting the carpets down, it was
equally clear that thought was going to live freely
and spaciously, to an unprecedented extent, so soon
as things were in order.
I visited only these three great foundations, each
in its materially embodiment already larger, wealth
ier, and more hopeful than any contemporary
British institution, and it required an effort to
realize that they were but a portion of the embattled
universities of America, that I had not seen Yale nor
Princeton nor Cornell nor Leland Stanford nor any
Western State university, not a tithe, indeed, of
America's drilling levies in the coming war of thought
against chaos. I am in no way equipped to estimate
the value of the drilling; I have been unable to get
any conception how far these tens of thousands of
students in these institutions are really alive in
tellectually, are really inquiring, discussing, reading,
217
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
and criticising ; I have no doubt the great numbers of
them spend many hours after the fashion of one
roomful I saw intent upon a blackboard covered
with Greek; but allowing the utmost for indolence,
games, distractions, and waste of time and energy
upon unfruitful and obsolete studies, the fact of this
great increasing proportion of minds at least a little
trained in things immaterial, a little exercised in the
critical habit, remains a fact to put over against that
million and a half child workers who can barely have
learned to read — the other side, the redeeming side
of the American prospect.
VI
I AM impressed by the evident con-
A ^coraeii°m sciousness of the American universities
of the r61e they have to play in Amer
ica's future. They seem to me pervaded by the
constructive spirit. They are intelligently antag
onistic to lethargic and self-indulgent traditions, to
disorder, and disorderly institutions. It is from the
universities that the deliberate invasion of the
political machine by independent men of honor and
position — of whom President Roosevelt is the type
and chief — proceeds. Mr. George lies has called
my attention to a remarkable address made so long
ago as the year 1883 before the Yale Alumni, by
President Andrew D. White (the first president), of
218
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
Cornell, who was afterwards American Ambassador
at St. Petersburg and Berlin. President White was
a member of the class of '53, and he addressed him
self particularly to the men of that year. His title
was "The Message of the Nineteenth Century to the
Twentieth," and it is full of a spirit that grows and
spreads throughout American life, that may ulti
mately spread throughout the life of the whole na
tion, a spirit of criticism and constructive effort, of
a scope and quality the world has never seen before.
The new class of '83 are the messengers.
"To a few tottering old men of our dear class of
'53 it will be granted to look with straining eyes over
the boundary into the twentieth century; but even
these can do little to make themselves heard then.
Most of us shall not see it. But before us and
around us ; nay, in our own families are the men who
shall see it. The men who go forth from these dear
shades to-morrow are girding themselves for it.
Often as I have stood in the presence of such bands
of youthful messengers I have never been able to
resist a feeling of awe, as in my boyhood when I
stood before men who were soon to see Palestine and
the Far East, or the Golden Gates of the West, and
the islands of the Pacific. The old story of St.
Fillipo Neri at Rome comes back to me, who, in the
days of the Elizabethan persecutions, made men
bring him out into the open air and set him oppo
site the door of the Papal College of Rome, that he
might look into the faces of the English students,
219
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
destined to go forth to triumph or to martyrdom foi
the faith in far-off, heretic England."
I cannot forbear from quoting further from this
address; it is all so congenial to my own beliefs.
Indeed, I like to think of that gathering of young
men and old as if it were still existing, as though the
old fellows of '53 were still sitting listening and look
ing up responsive to this appeal that comes down
to us. I fancy President White on the platform
before them, a little figure in the perspective of a
quarter of a century, but still quite clearly audible,
delivering his periods to that now indistinguishable
audience :
" What, then, is to be done ? Mercantilism, neces
sitated at first by our circumstances and position,
has been in the main a great blessing. It has been
so under a simple law of history. How shall it be
prevented from becoming in obedience to a similar
inexorable law, a curse?
''Here, in the answer to this question, it seems to
me, is the most important message from this century
to the next.
"For the great thing to be done is neither more
nor less than to develop other great elements of
civilization now held in check, which shall take their
rightful place in the United States, which shall
modify the mercantile spirit, . . . which shall make
the history of our country something greater and
broader than anything we have reached, or ever can
reach, under the sway of mercantilism alone.
220
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
" What shall be those counter elements of civiliza
tion? Monarchy, aristocracy, militarism we could
not have if we would, we would not have if we could.
What shall we have ?
" I answer simply that we must do all that we
can to rear greater fabrics of religious, philosophic
thought, literary thought, scientific, artistic, political
thought to summon young men more and more into
these fields, not as a matter of taste or social op
portunity, but as a patriotic duty; to hold before
them not the incentive of mere gain or of mere
pleasure or of mere reputation, but the ideal of a
new and higher civilization. The greatest work
which the coming century has to do in this country
is to build up an aristocracy of thought and feeling
which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of
mercantilism. I would have more and more the
appeal made to every young man who feels within
him the ability to do good or great things in any of
these higher fields, to devote his powers to them as a
sacred duty, no matter how strongly the mercantile
or business spirit may draw him. I would have the
idea preached early and late. . . .
"And as the guardian of such a movement, ... I
would strengthen at every point this venerable uni
versity, and others like it throughout the country.
Remiss, indeed, have the graduates and friends of
our own honored Yale been in their treatment of her.
She has never had the means to do a tithe of what
she might do. She ought to be made strong enough,
221
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
with more departments, more professors, more
fellowships, to become one of a series of great rally
ing points or fortresses, and to hold always con
centrated here a strong army, ever active against
mercantilism, materialism, and Philistinism. . . .
"But, after all, the effort to create these new
counterpoising, modifying elements of a greater
civilization must be begun in the individual man,
and especially in the youth who feels within himself
the power to think, the power to write, the power to
carve the marble, to paint, to leave something be
hind him better than dollars. In the individual
minds and hearts and souls of the messengers who
are preparing for the next century is a source of
regeneration. They must form an ideal of religion
higher than that of a life devoted to grasping and
grinding and griping, with a whine for mercy at the
end of it. They must form an ideal of science higher
than that of increasing the production of iron or
cotton. They must form an ideal of literature and
of art higher than that of pandering to the latest
prejudice or whimsey. And they must form an
ideal of man himself worthy of that century into
which are to be poured the accumulations of this.
So shall material elements be brought to their proper
place, made stronger for good, made harmless for
evil. So shall we have that development of new and
greater elements, that balance of principles which
shall make this republic greater than anything of
which we now can dream."
222
CHAPTER XIV
CULTURE
YET even as I write of the universi-
as ^ie central intellectual organ of a
modern state, as I sit implying salvation
by schools, there comes into my mind a mass of
qualification. The devil in the American world
drama may be mercantilism, ensnaring, tempting,
battling against my hero, the creative mind of man,
but mercantilism is not the only antagonist. In
Fifth Avenue or Paterson one may find nothing but
the zenith and nadir of the dollar hunt, at a Harvard
table one may encounter nothing but living minds,
but in Boston — I mean not only Beacon Street and
Commonwealth Avenue, but that Boston of the
mind and heart that pervades American refinement
and goes about the world — one finds the human
mind not base, nor brutal, nor stupid, nor ignorant,
but mysteriously enchanting and ineffectual, so
that having eyes it yet does not see, having powers
it achieves nothing. . . .
I remember Boston as a quiet effect, as something
a little withdrawn, as a place standing aside from the
221
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
throbbing interchange of East and West. When I
hear the word Boston now it is that quality returns.
I do not think of the spreading parkways of Mr.
Woodbury and Mr. Olmstead nor of the crowded
harbor; the congested tenement-house regions, full
of those aliens whose tongues struck so strangely on
the ears of Mr. Henry James, come not to mind.
But I think of rows of well-built, brown and ruddy
homes, each with a certain sound architectural
distinction, each with its two squares of neatly
trimmed grass between itself and the broad, quiet
street, and each with its family of cultured people
within. I am reminded of deferential but un
ostentatious servants, and of being ushered into
large, dignified entrance-halls. I think of spacious
stairways, curtained archways, and rooms of agree
able, receptive persons. I recall the finished in
formality of the high tea. All the people of my im
pression have been taught to speak English with a
quite admirable intonation; some of the men and
most of the women are proficient in two or three
languages; they have travelled in Italy, they have
all the recognized classics of European literature in
their minds, and apt quotations at command. And
I think of the constant presence of treasured as
sociations with the titanic and now mellowing liter
ary reputations of Victorian times, with Emerson
(who called Poe "that jingle man"), and with Long
fellow, whose house is now sacred, its view towards
the Charles River and the stadium — it is a real,
224
CULTURE
correct stadium — secured by the purchase of the
sward before it forever. . . .
At the mention of Boston I think, too, of autotypes
and then of plaster casts. I do not think I shall ever
see an autotype again without thinking of Boston.
I think of autotypes of the supreme masterpieces of
sculpture and painting, and particularly of the
fluttering garments of the "Nike of Samothrace."
(That I saw, also, in little casts and big, and photo
graphed from every conceivable point of view.) It
is incredible how many people in Boston have
selected her for their aesthetic symbol and expression.
Always that lady was in evidence about me, un
obtrusively persistent, until at last her frozen stride
pursued me into my dreams. That frozen stride
became the visible spirit of Boston in my imagina
tion, a sort of blind, headless, and unprogressive
fine resolution that took no heed of any contem
porary thing. Next to that I recall, as inseparably
Bostonian, the dreaming grace of Botticelli's "Prima
vera." All Bostonians admire Botticelli, and have a
feeling for the roof of the Sistine chapel — to so casual
and adventurous a person as myself, indeed, Boston
presents a terrible, a terrifying unanimity of aesthetic
discriminations. I was nearly brought back to my
childhood's persuasion that, after all, there is a right
and wrong in these things. And Boston clearly
thought the less of Mr. Bernard Shaw when I told
her he had induced me to buy a pianola, not that
Boston ever did set much store by so contemporary
225
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
a person as Mr. Bernard Shaw. The books she reads
are toned and seasoned books — preferably in the old
or else in limited editions, and by authors who may
be lectured upon without decorum. . . .
Boston has in her symphony concerts the best
music in America, and here her tastes are severely
orthodox and classic. I heard Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony extraordinarilv well done, the familiar
pinnacled Fifth Symphony, and now, whenever I
grind that out upon the convenient mechanism be
side my desk at home, mentally I shall be transferred
to Boston again, shall hear its magnificent aggressive
thumpings transfigured into exquisite orchestration,
and sit again among that audience of pleased and
pleasant ladies in chaste, high-necked, expensive
dresses, and refined, attentive, appreciative, bald,
or iron-gray men. . . .
II
THEN Boston has historical associa-
Antfq°uity tions that impressed me like iron-
moulded, leather-bound, eighteenth-cen
tury books. The War of Independence, that to us
in England seems half-way back to the days of
Elizabeth, is a thing of yesterday in Boston. " Here,"
your host will say and pause, "came marching'' so-
and-so, " with his troops to relieve " so-and-so. And
you will find he is the great-grandson of so-and-so,
and still keeps that ancient colonial's sword. And
226
CULTURE
these things happened before they dug the Hythe
military canal, before Sandgate, except for a decrepit
castle, existed; before the days when Bonaparte
gathered his army at Boulogne — in the days of
muskets and pigtails — and erected that column my
telescope at home can reach for me on a clear day.
All that is ancient history in England and in Boston
the decade before those distant alarums and ex
cursions is yesterday. A year or so ago they restored
the British arms to the old State-House. " Feeling,"
my informant witnessed, "was dying down.'* But
there were protests, nevertheless. . . .
If there is one note of incongruity in Boston, it is
in the gilt dome of the Massachusetts State-House
at night. They illuminate it with electric light.
That shocked me as an anachronism. It shocked
me — much as it would have shocked me to see one
of the colonial portraits, or even one of the endless
autotypes of the Belvidere Apollo replaced, let us
say, by one of Mr. Alvin Coburn's wonderfully
beautiful photographs of modern New York. That
electric glitter breaks the spell; it is the admission
of the present, of the twentieth century. It is just
as if the Quirinal and Vatican took to an exchange of
badinage with search-lights, or the King mounted an
illuminated E. R. on the Round Tower at Windsor.
Save for that one discord there broods over the
real Boston an immense effect of finality. One
feels in Boston, as one feels in no other part of the
States, that the intellectual movement has ceased,
227
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
Boston is now producing no literature except a
little criticism. Contemporary Boston art is imita
tive art, its writers are correct and imitative writers
the central figure of its literary world is that charm
ing old lady of eighty-eight, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe.
One meets her and Colonel Higginson in the midst of
an authors' society that is not so much composed of
minor stars as a chorus of indistinguishable culture.
There are an admirable library and a museum in
Boston, and the library is Italianate, and decorated
within like an ancient missal. In the less ornamental
spaces of this place there are books and readers.
There is particularly a charming large room for
children, full of pigmy chairs and tables, in which
quite little tots sit reading. I regret now I did not
ascertain precisely what they were reading, but I
have no doubt it was classical matter.
I do not know why the full sensing of what is ripe
and good in the past should carry with it this quality
of discriminating against the present and the future.
The fact remains that it does so almost oppressively.
I found myself by some accident of hospitality one
evening in the company of a number of Boston
gentlemen who constituted a book-collecting club.
They had dined, and they were listening to a paper
on Bibles printed in America. It was a scholarly,
valuable, and exhaustive piece of research. The sur
viving copies of each edition were traced, and when
some rare specimen was mentioned as the property
of any member of the club there was decorously
228
CULTURE
warm applause. I had been seeing Boston, drink
ing in the Boston atmosphere all day. ... I know it
will seem an ungracious and ungrateful thing to con
fess (yet the necessities of my picture of America
compel me), but as I sat at the large and beautifully
ordered table, with these fine, rich men about me, and
listened to the steady progress of the reader's ever
unrhetorical sentences, and the little bursts of ap
proval, it came to me with a horrible quality of con
viction that the mind of the world was dead, and
that this was a distribution of souvenirs.
Indeed, so strongly did this grip me that presently,
upon some slight occasion, I excused myself and
went out into the night. I wandered about Boston
for some hours, trying to shake off this unfortunate
idea. I felt that all the books had been written,
all the pictures painted, all the thoughts said — or at
least that nobody would ever believe this wasn't so.
I felt it was dreadful nonsense to go on writing books.
Nothing remained but to collect them in the richest,
finest manner one could. Somewhere about mid
night I came to a publisher's window, and stood in
the dim moonlight peering enviously at piled copies
of Izaak Walton and Omar Khayyam, and all the
happy immortals who got in before the gates were
shut. And then in the corner I discovered a thin,
small book. For a time I could scarcely believe my
eyes. I lit a match to be the surer. And it was A
Modern Symposium, by Lowes Dickinson, beyond
all disputing. It was strangely comforting to see it
229
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
there — a leaf of olive from the world of thought I had
imagined drowned forever.
That was just one night's mood. I do not wish
to accuse Boston of any wilful, deliberate repudiation
of the present and the future. But I think that
Boston — when I say Boston let the reader always
understand I mean that intellectual and spiritual
Boston that goes about the world, that traffics in
book-shops in Rome and Piccadilly, that I have
dined with and wrangled with in my friend W.'s
house in Blackheath, dear W., who, I believe, has
never seen America — I think, I say, that Boston
commits the scholastic error and tries to remember
too much, to treasure too much, and has refined
and studied and collected herself into a state of
hopeless intellectual and aesthetic repletion in con
sequence. In these matters there are limits. The
finality of Boston is a quantitive consequence. The
capacity of Boston, it would seem, was just sufficient
but no more than sufficient, to comprehend the whole
achievement of the human intellect up, let us say,
to the year 1875 A.D. Then an equilibrium was es
tablished. At or about that year Boston filled up.
in
IT is the peculiarity of Boston's in-
About weiksiey tellectual quality that she cannot un
load again. She treasures Longfellow
in quantity. She treasures his works, she treasures
230
CULTURE
associations, she treasures his Cambridge home.
Now, really, to be perfectly frank about him, Long
fellow is not good enough for that amount of in
tellectual house room. He cumbers Boston. And
when I went out to Wellesley to see that delightful
girls' college everybody told me I should be re
minded of the "Princess." For the life of me I
could not remember what " Princess." Much of my
time in Boston was darkened by the constant strain
of concealing the frightful gaps in my intellectual
baggage, this absence of things I might reasonably
be supposed, as a cultivated person, to have, but
which, as a matter of fact, I'd either left behind,
never possessed, or deliberately thrown away. I
felt instinctively that Boston could never possibly
understand the light travelling of a philosophical
carpet-bagger. But I hid — in full view of the tree-
set Wellseley lake, ay, with the skiffs of " sweet girl
graduates" — own up. "I say," I said, "I wish
you wouldn't all be so allusive. What Princess?"
It was, of course, that thing of Tennyson's. It is
a long, frequently happy and elegant, and always
meritorious narrative poem, in which a chaste Vic
torian amorousness struggles with the early formulae
of the feminist movement. I had read it when I
was a boy, I was delighted to be able to claim,
and had honorably forgotten the incident. But in
Boston they treat it as a living classic, and expect
you to remember constantly and with appreciation
this passage and that. I think that quite typical
16 231
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
of the Bostonian weakness. It is the error of the
clever high-school girl, it is the mistake of the
scholastic mmd all the world over, to learn too
thoroughly and to carry too much. They want to
know and remember Longfellow and Tennyson —
just as in art they want to know and remember
Raphael and all the elegant inanity of the sacrifice
at Lystra, or the miraculous draught of Fishes ; just
as in history they keep all the picturesque legends of
the War of Independence — looking up the dates and
minor names, one imagines, ever and again. Some
years ago I met two Boston ladies in Rome. Each
day they sallied forth from our hotel to see and
appreciate; each evening, after dinner, they revised
and underlined in Baedeker what they had seen.
They meant to miss nothing in Rome. It's fine in its
way — this receptive eagerness, this learners' avidity.
Only people who can go about in this spirit need, if
their minds are to remain mobile, not so much heads
as cephalic pantechnicon vans. . . .
IV
I FIND this appetite to have all the
me^°w ano^ refined and beautiful things
in life to the exclusion of all thought for
the present and the future even in the sweet, free
air of Wellesley's broad park, that most delight
ful, that almost incredible girls' university, with its
232
CULTURE
class-rooms, its halls of residence, its club-houses
and gathering-places among the glades and trees. I
have very vivid in my mind a sunlit room in which
girls were copying the detail in the photographs of
masterpieces, and all around this room were cabinets
of drawers, and in each drawer photographs. There
must be in that room photographs of every picture
of the slightest importance in Italy, and detailed
studies of many. I suppose, too, there are photo
graphs of all the sculpture and buildings in Italy
that are by any standard considerable. There is,
indeed, a great civilization, stretching over centuries
and embodying the thought and devotion, the
scepticism and levities, the ambition, the pretensions,
the passions, and desires of innumerable sinful and
world-used men — canned, as it were, in this one
room, and freed from any deleterious ingredients.
The young ladies, under the direction of competent
instructors, go through it, no doubt, industriously,
and emerge — capable of Browning.
I was taken into two or three charming club
houses that dot this beautiful domain. There was
a Shakespeare club-house, with a delightful theatre,
Elizabethan in style, and all set about with Shake
spearean things; there was the club-house of the
girls who are fitting themselves for their share in the
great American problem by the study of Greek.
Groups of pleasant girls in each, grave with the fine
gravity of youth, entertained the reluctantly critical
visitor, and were unmistakably delighted and re-
233
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
laxed when one made it clear that one was not in the
Great Teacher line of business, when one confided
that one was there on false pretences, and insisting
on seeing the pantry. They have jolly little pantries,
and they make excellent tea.
I returned to Boston at last in a state of mighty
doubting, provided with a Wellesley College calendar
to study at my leisure.
I cannot, for the life of me, determine how far
Wellesley is an aspect of what I have called Boston ;
how far it is a part of that wide forward movement
of the universities upon which I lavish hope and
blessings. Those drawings of photographed Ma
donnas and Holy Families and Annunciations, the
sustained study of Greek, the class in the French
drama of the seventeenth century, the study of the
topography of Rome fill me with misgivings, seeing
the world is in torment for the want of living thought
about its present affairs. But, on the other hand,
there are courses upon socialism — though the text
book is still Das Kapital of Marx — and upon the in
dustrial history of England and America. I didn't
discover a debating society, but there is a large
accessible library.
How far, I wonder still, are these girls thinking
and feeding mentally for themselves ? What do
they discuss one with another? How far do they
suffer under that plight of feminine education —
notetaking from lectures? . . .
But, after all, this about Wellesley is a digression
234
CULTURE
into which I fell by way of Boston's autotypes. My
main thesis was that culture, as it is conceived in
Boston, is no contribution to the future of America,
that cultivated people may be, in effect, as state-
blind as — Mr. Morgan Richards. It matters little
in the mind of the world whether any one is con
centrated upon mediaeval poetry, Florentine pict
ures, or the propagation of pills. The common,
significant fact in all these cases is this, a blindness
to the crude splendor of the possibilities of America
now, to the tragic greatness of the unheeded issues
that blunder towards solution. Frankly, I grieve
over Boston — Boston throughout the world — as a
great waste of leisure and energy, as a frittering away
of moral and intellectual possibilities. We give too
much to the past. New York is not simply more
interesting than Rome, but more significant, more
stimulating, and far more beautiful, and the idea
that to be concerned about the latter in preference
to the former is a mark of a finer mental quality is
one of the most mischievous and foolish ideas that
ever invaded the mind of man. We are obsessed by
the scholastic prestige of mere knowledge and genteel
remoteness. Over against unthinking ignorance is
scholarly refinement, the spirit of Boston; between
that Scylla and this Charybdis the creative mind
of man steers its precarious way.
CHAPTER XV
AT WASHINGTON
I CAME to Washington full of expec-
as tat{ons an(^ curiosities. Here, I felt, so
/vnti-ciimax
far as it could exist visibly and palpably
anywhere, was the head and mind of this colossal
America over which my observant curiosities had
wandered. In this place I should find, among other
things, perhaps as many as ten thousand men who
would not be concerned in trade. There would be
all the Senators and representatives, their secre
taries and officials, and four thousand and more
scientific and literary men of Washington's institu
tions and libraries, the diplomatic corps, the educa
tional centres, the civil service, the writers and
thinking men who must inevitably be drawn to this
predestined centre. I promised myself arduous in
tercourse with a teeming intellectual life. Here I
should find questions answered, discover missing
clues, get hold of the last connections in my inquiry.
I should complete at Washington my vision of
America ; my forecast would follow.
236
AT WASHINGTON
I don't precisely remember how this vision de
parted. I know only that after a day or so in
Washington an entirely different conception was es
tablished, a conception of Washington as architect
ure and avenues, as a place of picture post -cards
and excursions, with sightseers instead of thoughts
going to and fro. I had imagined that in Washing
ton I should find such mentally vigorous discussion-
centres as the New York X Club on a quite mag
nificent scale. Instead, I found the chief scientific
gathering - place has, like so many messes in the
British army before the Boer war, a rule against
talking "shop." In all Washington there is no
clearing-house of thought at all ; Washington has no
literary journals, no magazines, no publications other
than those of the official specialist — there does not
seem to be a living for a single firm of publishers in
this magnificent empty city.
I went about the place in a state of ridiculous and
deepening concern. I went though the splendid
Botanical Gardens, through the spacious and beau
tiful Capitol, and so to the magnificently equipped
Library of Congress. There in an upper chamber
that commands an altogether beautiful view of long
vistas of avenue and garden to that stupendous un
meaning obelisk (the work of the women of America)
that dominates all Washington, I found at last a
little group of men who could talk. It was like a
small raft upon a limitless empty sea. I lunched
with them at their Round Table, and afterwards Mr.
237
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
Putnam showed me the Rotunda, quite the most
gracious reading-room dome the world possesses,
and explained the wonderful mechanical organiza
tion that brings almost every volume in that immense
collection within a minute of one's hand. " With all
this," I asked him, "why doesn't the place think?"
He seemed, discreetly, to consider it did.
It was in the vein of Washington's detached dead-
ness that I should find Professor Langley (whose
flying experiments I have followed for some years
with close interest) was dead, and I went through
the long galleries of archaeological specimens and
stuffed animals in the Smithsonian Institution to
inflict my questions upon his temporary successor,
Dr. Cyrus Adler. He had no adequate excuses. He
found a kind of explanation in the want of enter
prise of American publishers, so that none of them
come to Washington to tap its latent resources of
knowledge and intellectual capacity; but that does
not account for the absence of any traffic in ideas.
It is perhaps near the truth to say that this dearth of
any general and comprehensive intellectual activity
is due to intellectual specialization. The four
thousand scientific men in Washington are all too
energetically busy with ethnographic details, elec
trical computations, or herbaria to talk about com
mon and universal things. They ought not to be so
busy, and a science so specialized sinks half-way
down the scale of sciences. Science is one of those
things that cannot hustle; if it does, it loses its con-
238
IX THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY
AT WASHINGTON
nections. In Washington some men, I gathered,
hustle, others play bridge, and general questions are
left, a little contemptuously, as being of the nature of
"gas," to the newspapers and magazines. Philos
ophy, which correlates the sciences and keeps them
subservient to the universals of life, has no seat
there. My anticipated synthesis of ten thousand
minds refused, under examination, to synthesize at
all; it remained disintegrated, a mob, individually
active and collectively futile, of specialists and
politicians.
ii
BUT that is only one side of Washing-
ton life> the side east and south of the
White House. Northwestward I found,
I confess, the most agreeable social atmosphere in
America. It is a region of large fine houses, of
dignified and ample-minded people, people not given
over to "smartness" nor redolent of dollars, un
hurried and reflective, not altogether lost to the
wider aspects of life. In Washington I met again
that peculiarly aristocratic quality I had found in
Harvard — in the person of President Eliot, for ex
ample — an aristocratic quality that is all the finer
for the absence of rank, that has integral in it —
books, thought, and responsibility. And yet I
could have wished these fine peopie more alive to
239
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
present and future things, a little less established
upon completed and mellowing foundations, a little
less final in their admirable finish. . . .
There was, I found, a little breeze of satisfaction
fluttering the Washington atmosphere in this region.
Mr. Henry James came through the States last year
distributing epithets among their cities with the
justest aptitude. Washington was the "City of
Conversation"; and she was pleasantly conscious
that she merited this friendly coronation.
Washington, indeed, converses well, without awk
wardness, without chatterings, kindly, watchful,
agreeably witty. She lulled and tamed my purpose
to ask about primary things, to discuss large ques
tions. Only once, and that was in an after-dinner
duologue, did I get at all into a question in Wash
ington. For the rest, Washington remarked and al
luded and made her point and got away.
in
AND Washington, with a remarkable
Mount Vemon unanimity and in the most charming
manner, assured me that if I came to
see and understand America I must on no account
miss Mount Vernon. To have passed indifferently
by Concord was bad enough, I was told, but to ignore
the home of the first president, to turn my back upon
that ripe monument of colonial simplicity, would be
240
AT WASHINGTON
quite criminal neglect. To me it was a revelation
how sincerely insistent they were upon this. It re
minded me of an effect I had already appreciated
very keenly in Boston — and even before Boston,
when Mr. Z took me across Spuyten Duyvil into the
country of Sleepy Hollow, and spoke of Cornwallis
as though he had died yesterday — and that is the
longer historical perspectives of America. America
is an older country than any European one, for she
has not rejuvenesced for a hundred and thirty years.
In endless ways America fails to be contemporary.
In many respects, no doubt, she is decades in front
of Europe, in mechanism, for example, and produc
tive organization, but in very many other and more
fundamental ones she is decades behind. Go but a
little way back and you will find the European's
perspectives close up; they close at '71, at '48, down
a vista of reform bills, at Waterloo and the treaty of
Paris, at the Irish Union, at the coming of Victor
Emanuel; Great Britain, for example, in the last
hundred years has reconstructed politically and
socially, created half her present peerage, evolved
the Empire of India, developed Australia, New Zea
land, South Africa, fought fifty considerable wars.
Mount Vernon, on the other hand, goes back with
unbroken continuity, a broad band of mellow tradi
tion, to the War of Independence.
Well, I got all that in conversation at Washington,
and so I didn't need to go to Mount Vernon, after all.
I got all that about 1777, and I failed altogether to
241
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
get anything of any value whatever about 1977 —
which is the year of greater interest to me. About
the direction and destinies of that great American
process that echoes so remotely through Washing
ton's cool gracefulness of architecture and her um
brageous parks, this cultivated society seemed to me
to be terribly incurious and indifferent. It was alive
to political personalities, no doubt, its sons and hus
bands were Senators, judges, ambassadors, and the
like; it was concerned with their speeches and
prospects, but as to the trend of the whole thing
Washington does not picture it, does not want to
picture it. I found myself presently excusing my
self for Mount Vernon on the ground that I was not a
retrospective American, but a go-ahead Englishman,
and so apologizing for my want of reverence for
venerable things. "We are a young people," I
maintained. "We are a new generation. "
IV
I WENT to see the Senate debating the
In 1ieouse"ate~ railway-rate bill, and from the Senato
rial gallery I had pointed out to me
Tillman and Platt, Foraker and Lodge, and all the
varied personalities of the assembly. The chamber
is a circular one, with enormously capacious galleries.
The members speak from their desks, other mem
bers write letters, read (and rustle) newspapers, sit
342
AT WASHINGTON
among accumulations of torn paper, or stand round
the apartment in audibly conversational groups.
A number of messenger-boys — they wear no uniform
— share the floor of the House with the representa
tives, and are called by clapping the hands. They
go to and fro, or sit at the feet of the Vice-President.
Behind and above the Vice-President the newspaper
men sit in a state of partial attention, occasionally
making notes for the vivid descriptions that have
long since superseded verbatim reports in America.
The public galleries contain hundreds of intermittent
ly talkative spectators. For the most part these did
not seem to me to represent, as the little strangers'
gallery in the House of Commons represents, in
terests affected. They were rather spectators see
ing Washington, taking the Senate en route for the
obelisk top and Mount Vernon. They made little
attempt to hear the speeches.
In a large distinguished emptiness among these
galleries is the space devoted to diplomatic repre
sentatives, and there I saw, sitting in a meritorious
solitude, the British charge d'affaires and his wife
following the debate below. I found it altogether
too submerged for me to follow. The countless
spectators, the Senators, the boy messengers, the
comings and goings kept up a perpetual confusing
babblement. One saw men walking carelessly be
tween the Speaker and the Vice-President, and at one
time two gentlemen with their backs to the member
in possession of the House engaged the Vice-President
243
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
in an earnest conversation. The messengers cir
culated at a brisk trot, or sat on the edge of the dais
exchanging subdued badinage. I have never seen a
more distracted Legislature.
The whole effect of Washington is a want of con
centration, of something unprehensile and apart.
It is on, not in, the American process. The place
seems to me to reflect, even in its sounds and physi
cal forms, that dispersal of power, that evasion of a
simple conclusiveness, which is the peculiar effect of
that ancient compromise, the American Constitution.
The framers of that treaty were haunted by two
terrible bogies, a military dictatorship and what they
called " mob rule,'* they were obsessed by the need of
safeguards against these dangers, they were con
trolled by the mutual distrust of constituent States
far more alien to one another than they are now, and
they failed to foresee both the enormous assimilation
of interests and character presently to be wrought
by the railways and telegraphs, and the huge pos
sibilities of corruption, elaborate electrical arrange
ments offer to clever unscrupulous men. And here
in Washington is the result, a Legislature that fails
to legislate, a government that cannot govern, a
pseudo-responsible administration that offers enor
mous scope for corruption, and that is perhaps in
vincibly intrenched behind the two-party system
from any insurgence of the popular will. The plain
fact of the case is that Congress, as it is constituted
at present, is the feeblest, least accessible, and most
244
AT WASHINGTON
inefficient central government of any civilized nation
in the worst west of Russia. Congress is entirely in
adequate to the tasks of the present time.
I came away from Washington with my pre
conception enormously reinforced that the supreme
need of America, the preliminary thing to any social
or economic reconstruction, is political reform. It
seems to me to lie upon the surface that America has
to be democratized. It is necessary to make the
Senate and the House of Representatives more in
terdependent, and to abolish the possibilities of
deadlocks between them, to make election to the
Senate direct from the people, and to qualify and
weaken the power of the two-party system by the
introduction of "second ballots" and the referen
dum. . . .
But how such drastic changes are to be achieved
constitutionally in America I cannot imagine. Only
a great educated, trained, and sustained agitation
can bring about so fundamental a political revolu
tion, and at present I can find nowhere even the
beginnings of a realization of this need.
IN the White House, set midway be-
twe6n the Washington of the sight
seers and the Washington of brilliant
conversation, I met President Roosevelt. I was
245
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
mightily pleased by the White House; it is dignified
and simple — once again am I tempted to use the
phrase " aristocratic in the best sense" of things
American; and an entire absence of uniforms or
liveries creates an atmosphere of Republican equal
ity that is reinforced by "Mr. President's" friendly
grasp of one's (indistinguishable hand. And after
lunch I walked about the grounds with him, and so
achieved my ambition to get him "placed," as it
were, in my vision of America.
In the rare chances I have had of meeting states
men, there has always been one common effect, an
effect of their being smaller, less audible, and less
saliently featured than one had expected. A com
mon man builds up his picture of the men prominent
in the great game of life very largely out of caricature,
out of head-lines, out of posed and "characteristic"
portraits. One associates them with actresses and
actors, literary poseurs and suchlike public per
formers, anticipates the same vivid self-conscious
ness as these display in common intercourse, keys
one's self up for the paint on their faces, and for
voices and manners altogether too accentuated for
the gray -toned lives of common men. I've met
politicians who remained at that. But so soon as
Mr. Roosevelt entered the room, "Teddy," the
Teddy of the slouch hat, the glasses, the teeth, and
the sword, that strenuous vehement Teddy (who
had, let me admit, survived a full course of reading
in the President's earlier writings) vanished, and
246
AT WASHINGTON
gave place to an entirely negotiable individuality.
To-day, at any rate, the "Teddy" legend is untrue.
Perhaps it wasn't always quite untrue. There was
a time during the world predominance of Mr.
Kipling, when I think the caricature must have come
close to certain of Mr. Roosevelt's acceptances and
attitudes. But that was ten years and more ago,
and Mr. Roosevelt to this day goes on thinking and
changing and growing. . . .
For me, anyhow, that strenuousness has vanished
beyond recalling, and there has emerged a figure in
gray of a quite reasonable size, with a face far more
thoughtful and perplexed than strenuous, with a
clinched hand that does indeed gesticulate, though
it is by no means a gigantic fist — and with quick
movements, a voice strained indeed, a little forced
for oratory, but not raised or aggressive in any fash
ion, and friendly screwed-up eyes behind the glasses.
It isn't my purpose at all to report a conversation
that went from point to point. I wasn't interview
ing the President, and I made no note at the time
of the things said. My impression was of a mind—
for the situation — quite extraordinarily open. That
is the value of President Roosevelt for me, and why
I can't for the life of my book leave him out. He
is the seeking mind of America displayed. The
ordinary politician goes through his career like a
charging bull, with his eyes shut to any changes in
the premises. He locks up his mind like a powder
magazine. But any spark may fire the mind of
17 247
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
President Roosevelt. His range of reading is amaz
ing ; he seems to be echoing with all the thought of the
time, he has receptivity to the pitch of genius. And
he does not merely receive, he digests and recon
structs ; he thinks. It is his political misfortune that
at times he thinks aloud. His mind is active with
projects of solution for the teeming problems around
him. Traditions have no hold upon him — nor, his
enemies say, have any but quite formal pledges. It
is hard to tie him. In all these things he is to a sin
gle completeness, to mind and will of contemporary
America. And by an unparalleled conspiracy of
political accidents, as all the world knows, he has got
to the White House. He is not a part of the regular
American political system at all — he has, it happens,
stuck through.
Now my picture of America is, as I have tried to
make clear, one of a gigantic process of growth, of
economic coming and going, spaced out over vast
distances and involving millions of hastening men;
I see America as towns and urgency and greatnesses
beyond, I suppose, any precedent that has ever been
in the world. And like a little island of order amid
that ocean of enormous opportunity and business
turmoil and striving individualities, is this District
of Columbia, with Washington and its Capitol and
obelisk. It is^a mere pin-point in the unlimited, on
which, in peace times, the national government lies
marooned, twisted up into knots, bound with safe
guards, and altogether impotently stranded. And
248
AT WASHINGTON
peering closely, and looking from the Capitol down
the vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, I see the White
House, minute and clear, with a fountain playing
before it, and behind it a railed garden set with fine
trees. The trees are not so thick, nor the railings so
high but that the people on the big ' ' seeing Washing
ton ' ' cannot crane to look into it and watch whoever
walk about it. And in this garden goes a living
speck, as it were, in gray, talking, swinging a white
clinched hand, and trying vigorously and resolutely
to get a hold upon the significance of the whole vast
process in which he and his island of government
are set.
Always before him there have been political re
sultants, irrelevancies and futilities of the White
House; and after him, it would seem, they may come
again. I do not know anything of the quality of
Mr. Bryan, who may perhaps succeed him. He, too,
is something of an exception, it seems, and keeps a
still developing and inquiring mind. Beyond is a
vista of figures of questionable value so far as I am
concerned. They have this in common that they
don't stand for thought. For the present, at any
rate, a personality, extraordinarily representative,
occupies the White House. And what he chooses to
say publicly (and some things he says privately) are,
by an exceptional law of acoustics, heard in San
Francisco, in Chicago, in New Orleans, in New York
and Boston, in Kansas, and Maine, throughout the
whole breadth of the United States of America. He
249
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
assimilates contemporary thought, delocalizes and
reverberates it. He is America for the first time
vocal to itself.
What is America saying to itself?
I've read most of the President's recent speeches,
and they fall in oddly with that quality in his face
that so many photographs even convey, a complex
mingling of will and a critical perplexity. Taken all
together they amount to a mass of not always con
sistent suggestions, that and conflict overlap. Things
crowd upon him, rebate scandals, insurance scandals,
the meat scandals, this insecurity and that. The
conditions of his position press upon him. It is no
wonder he gives out no single, simple note. . . .
The plain fact is that in the face of the teeming
situations of to-day America does not know what to
do. Nobody, except those happily gifted individuals
who can see but one aspect of an intricate infinitude,
imagines any simple solution. For the rest the time
is one of ample, vigorous, and at times impatient
inquiry, and of intense disillusionment with old as
sumptions and methods. And never did a President
before so reflect the quality of his time. The trend
is altogether away from the anarchistic individualism
of the nineteenth century, that much is sure, and
towards some constructive scheme which, if not
exactly socialism, as socialism is defined, will be, at
any rate, closely analogous to socialism. This is the
immense change of thought and attitude in which
President Roosevelt participates, and to which he
250
AT WASHINGTON
gives a unique expression. Day by day he changes
with the big world about him — contradicts
himself. . . .
I came away with the clear impression that neither
President Roosevelt nor America will ever, as some
people prophesy, "declare for socialism," but my
impression is equally clear, that he and all the world
of men he stands for, have done forever with the
threadbare formulae that have served America such
an unconscionable time. We talked of the press and
books and of the question of color, and then for a
while about the role of the universities in the life
of the coming time.
Now it is a curious thing that as I talked with
President Roosevelt in the garden of the White
House there came back to me quite forcibly that
undertone of doubt that has haunted me throughout
this journey. After all, does this magnificent ap
pearance of beginnings which is America, convey any
clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfil
ment whatever? Much makes for construction, a
great wave of reform is going on, but will it drive on
to anything more than a breaking impact upon even
more gigantic uncertainties and dangers. Is America
a giant childhood or a gigantic futility, a mere latest
phase of that long succession of experiments which
has been and may be for interminable years — may be
indeed altogether until the end — man's social his
tory? I can't now recall how our discursive talk
settled towards that, but it is clear to me that I
251
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
struck upon a familiar vein of thought in the Presi
dent's mind. He hadn't, he said, an effectual dis
proof of any pessimistic interpretation of the future.
If one chose to say America must presently lose the
impetus of her ascent, that she and all mankind
must culminate and pass, he could not conclusively
deny that possibility. Only he chose to live as if
this were not so.
That remained in his mind. Presently he reverted
to it. He made a sort of apology for his life against
the doubts and scepticisms that, I fear, must be in
the background of the thoughts of every modern
man who is intellectually alive. He mentioned a
little book of mine, an early book full of the deliberate
pessimism of youth, in which I drew a picture of a
future of decadence, of a time when constructive
effort had fought its fight and failed, when the in
evitable segregations of an individualistic system had
worked themselves out and all the hope and vigor of
humanity had gone forever. The descendants of the
workers had become etiolated, sinister, and sub
terranean monsters, the property-owners had de
generated into a hectic and feebly self-indulgent race,
living fitfully amid the ruins of the present time.
He became gesticulatory, and his straining voice a
note higher in denying this as a credible interpreta
tion of destiny. With one of those sudden move
ments of his, he knelt forward in a garden chair —
we were standing before our parting beneath the
colonnade — and addressed me very earnestly over
252
AT WASHINGTON
the back, clutching it, and then thrusting out his
familiar gesture, a hand first partly open and then
closed.
" Suppose after all," he said, slowly, "that should
prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies
and morlocks. That doesn't matter now. The ef
fort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it.
It's worth it — even then." . . .
I can see him now and hear his unmusical voice
saying "The effort — the effort's worth it," and see
the gesture of his clinched hand and the — how can
I describe it ? the friendly peering snarl of his face,
like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my
mind as that, as a very symbol of the creative will
in man, in its limitations, its doubtful adequacy, its
valiant persistence amid perplexities and confusions.
He kneels out, assertive against his setting — and his
setting is the White House with a background of all
America.
I could almost write, with a background of all the
world — for I know of no other a tithe so representa
tive of the creative purpose, the good-will in men as
he. In his undisciplined hastiness, his limitations,
his prejudices, his unfairness, his frequent errors,
just as much as in his force, his sustained courage,
his integrity, his open intelligence, he stands for his
people and his kind.
THE ENVOY
AND at last I am back in my study by the sea. It
is high June. When I said good-bye to things it
was March, a March warm and eager to begin with,
and then dashed with sleet and wind; but the
daffodils were out, and the primulas and primroses
shone brown and yellow in the unseasonable snow.
The spring display that was just beginning is over.
The iris rules. Outside the window is a long level
line of black fleur-de-lys rising from a serried rank of
leaf-blades. Their silhouettes stand out against
the brightness of the twilight sea. They mark, so
opened, two months of absence. And in the in
terval I have seen a great world.
I have tried to render it as I saw it. I have tried
to present the first exhilaration produced by the
sheer growth of it, the morning-time hopefulness of
spacious and magnificent opportunity, the optimism
of successful, swift, progressive effort in material
things. And from that I have passed to my sense
of the chaotic condition of the American will, and
that first confidence has darkened more and more
towards doubt again. I came to America question
ing the certitudes of progress. For a time I forgot
254
ENVOY
my questionings; I sincerely believed, "These people
can do anything," and, now I have it all in perspec
tive, I have to confess that doubt has taken me
again. "These people," I say, "might do anything.
They are the finest people upon earth — the most
hopeful. But they are vain and hasty; they are
thoughtless, harsh, and undisciplined. In the end,
it may be, they will accomplish nothing." I see, I
have noted in its place, the great forces of construc
tion, the buoyant, creative spirit of America. But
I have marked, too, the intricacy of snares and
obstacles in its path. The problem of America, save
in its scale and freedom, is no different from the
problem of Great Britain, of Europe, of all humanity;
it is one chiefly moral and intellectual ; it is to resolve
a confusion of purposes, traditions, habits, into a
common ordered intention. Everywhere one finds
what seem to me the beginnings of that — and, for
this epoch it is all too possible, they may get no
further than beginnings. Yet another Decline and
Fall may remain to be written, another and another,
and it may be another, before the World State
comes and Peace.
Yet against this prospect of a dispersal of will,
of a secular decline in honor, education, public
spirit, and confidence, of a secular intensification of
corruption, lawlessness, and disorder, I do, with a
confidence that waxes and wanes, balance the crea
tive spirit in America, and that kindred spirit that
for me finds its best symbol in the President's kneel-
255
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
ing, gesticulating figure, and his urgent "The effort's
worth it!" Who can gauge the far-reaching in
fluence of even the science we have, in ordering and
quickening the imagination of man, in enhancing and
assuring their powers? Common men feel secure
to-day in enterprises it needed men of genius to
conceive in former times. And there is a literature
— for all our faults we do write more widely, deeply,
disinterestedly, more freely and frankly than any
set of writers ever did before — reaching incalcula
ble masses of readers, and embodying an amount
of common consciousness and purpose beyond all
precedent. Consider only how nowadays the prob
lems that were once the inaccessible thoughts of
statesmen may be envisaged by common men!
Here am I really able, in a few weeks of observant
work, to get a picture of America. I publish it.
If it bears a likeness, it will live and be of use ; if not
it will die, and be no irreparable loss. Some frag
ment, some suggestion may survive. My friend Mr.
F. Madox Hueffer was here a day or so ago to say
good-bye; he starts for America as I write here, to
get his vision. As I have been writing these papers
I have also been reading, instalment by instalment,
the subtle, fine renderings of America revisited by
Mr. Henry James. We work in shoals, great and
small together, one trial thought following another.
We are getting the world presented. It is not
simply America that we swarm over and build up
into a conceivable process, into something under-
256
ENVOY
standable and negotiable by the mind. I find on
my desk here waiting for me a most illuminating
Vision of India, in which Mr. Sidney Low, with a
marvellous aptitude, has interpreted east to west.
Besides my poor superficialities in The Tribune ap
pears Sir William Butler, with a livid frankness ex
pounding the most intimate aspects of the South
African situation. A friend who called to-day spoke
of Nevinson's raid upon the slave trade of Portuguese
East Africa, and of two irrepressible writers upon
the Congo crimes. I have already mentioned the
economic and social literature, the so-called literature
of exposure in America. This altogether represents
collectively a tremendous illumination. No social
development was ever so lit and seen before. Col
lectively, this literature of facts and theories and
impressions is of immense importance. Things are
done in the light, more and more are they done in the
light. The world perceives and thinks. . . .
After all is said and done, I do find the balance of
my mind tilts steadily to a belief in a continuing and
accelerated progress now in human affairs. And in
spite of my patriotic inclinations, in spite, too, of the
present high intelligence and efficiency of Germany,
it seems to me that in America, by sheer virtue of its
size, its free traditions, and the habit of initiative
in its people, the leadership of progress must ultimate
ly rest. Things like the Chicago scandals, the insur
ance scandals, and all the manifest crudities of the
American spectacle, don't seem to me to be more
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THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
\
than relatively trivial after all. There are the uni
versities, the turbines of Niagara, the New York
architecture, and the quality of the mediocre people
to set against these. . . .
Within a week after I saw the President I was on
the Umbria and steaming slowly through the long
spectacle of that harbor which was my first im
pression of America, which still, to my imagination,
stands so largely for America. The crowded ferry
boats hooted past; athwart the shining water, tugs
clamored to and fro. The skyscrapers raised their
slender masses heavenward — America's gay bunting
lit the scene. As we dropped down I had a last
glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge. There to the right
was Ellis Island, where the immigrants, minute by
minute, drip and drip into America, and beyond
that the tall spike-headed Liberty with the reluctant
torch, which I have sought to make the centre of
all this writing. And suddenly as I looked back at
the skyscrapers of lower New York a queer fancy
sprang into my head. They reminded me quite
irresistibly of piled-up packing cases outside a ware
house. I was amazed I had not seen the resem
blance before. I could really have believed for
a moment that that was what they were, and that
presently out of these would come the real thing,
palaces and noble places, free, high circumstances,
and space and leisure, light and fine living for the
sons of men. . . .
Ocean, cities, multitudes, long journeys, moun-
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ENVOY
tains, lakes as large as seas, and the riddle of a
nation's destiny; I've done my impertinent best now
with this monstrous insoluble problem. I finish.
The air is very warm and pleasant in my garden
to-night, the sunset has left a rim of greenish-gold
about the northward sky, shading up a blue that is,
as yet, scarce pierced by any star. I write down
these last words here, and then I shall step through
the window and sit out there in the kindly twilight,
now quiet, now gossiping idly -of what so-and-so has
done while I have been away, of personal motives
and of little incidents and entertaining intimate
things.
THE END
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