I LIKED THE GREETING OF THE TRAIN CONDUCTOR
And I liked all the glimpses I had of American home life in the suburbs of New York and in other townships of the United States. I liked the white woodwork of the houses, and the bright sunlight that swept the sky above them, and the gardens that grew without hedges. I liked the good nature of the people, the healthiness of their outlook on life, their hopefulness in the future, their self-reliance and their sincerity of speech. Iliked the children of America, and the college girls who strolled in groups along the lanes, and the crowds who assembled in the morning at the local station to begin a new day's work or a new day's shopping in the big city at their journey's end. They had a keen and vital look, and nodded to one another in a neighborly way as they bought bulky papers from the bookstall and chewing-gum from the candy stall and had their shoes shined with one eye on the ticket office. I liked the greeting of the train conductor to all those people whose faces he knew as familiar friends, and to whom he passed the time o' day with a jesting word or two. I liked the social life of the American middle classes, because it is based, for the most part, on honesty, a kindly feeling toward mankind, and healthiness of mind and body. They are not out to make trouble in the world, and unless somebody asks for it very badly they are not inclined to interfere with other people's business. The thing I liked best in the United States is the belief of its citizens in the progress of mankind toward higher ideals of common sense; and after the madness of a world at war it is good to find such faith, however difficult to believe.
The United States of America has a new meaning in the world, and has entered, by no desire of its own, into the great family of nations, as a rich uncle whose authority and temper must be respected by those who desire his influence in their family quarrels, difficulties, and conditions of life. Before the war the United States was wonderfully aloof from the peoples of Europe. The three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean made it seem enormously far away, and quite beyond the orbit of those passionate politics which stirred European communities with Old World hatred and modern rivalries. It was free from the fear which was at the back of all European diplomacy and international intrigue—the fear of great standing armies across artificial frontiers, the fear of invasion, the fear of a modern European war in which nation against nation would be at one another's throats, in awild struggle for self-preservation. America was still the New World, far away, to which people went in a spirit of adventure, in search of fortune and liberty. There was a chance of one, a certainty of the other, and it was this certain gift which called to multitudes of men and women—Russians and Russian Jews, Poles and Polish Jews, Czechs, and Bohemians, and Germans of all kinds—to escape from the bondage which cramped their souls under the oppression of their own governments, and to gain the freedom of the Stars and Stripes. To the popular imagination of Europe, America was the world's democratic paradise, where every man had equal opportunity and rights, a living wage with a fair margin and the possibility of enormous luck. A steady stream of youth flowed out from Ireland to New York, year after year, and Irish peasants left behind in their hovels heard of great doings by Pat and Mick, who had become the gentlemen entirely out there in the States, and of Kathleen and Biddy, who were piling up the dollars so fast that they could send some back to the old people and not feel the loss of them at all, at all.
The internal resources of America were sovast and the development of their own states so absorbed the energies of the people that there was no need of international diplomacy and intrigue to capture new markets of the world or to gain new territory for the possession of raw material. The United States was self-centered and self-sufficient, and the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine prohibiting foreign powers from any colonizing within the boundaries of the Republic was developed in popular imagination and tradition to a firm policy of self-isolation and of non-interference by others. The American people had no interest, politically, in the governments or affairs of other nations, and they desired to be left alone, with a "Hands off!" their own sovereign power. It was this reality of isolation which gave America immense advantages as a republic and had a profound influence upon the psychology of her citizens. Being aloof from the traditions of European peoples and from their political entanglements and interdependence, the United States could adopt a clear and straightforward policy of self-development on industrial lines. Her diplomacy was as simple as a child's copy-book maxim. Her ambassadors and ministers at Europeancourts had no need of casuistry or Machiavellian subtlety. They had an exceedingly interesting and pleasant time reporting back the absurdities of European embassies, the melodrama of European rivalries, the back-stairs influence at work in secret treaties, the assassinations, riots, revolutions, and political crises which from time to time convulsed various countries—and the corrupt bargainings and jugglings between small powers and great powers. The American representatives in Europe watched all this as the greatest game on earth, but far away from the United States, and without the slightest effect upon the destiny of their own country, except when it excited Wall Street gamblers. American diplomats were not weighted down by the fear of offending the susceptibilities of Germany or France or Italy or Russia, nor were they asked to play off one country against another, in order to maintain that delicate and evil mechanism known as "the balance of power"—the uniting of armed bands for self-defense or the means of aggression. The frontiers of America were inviolate and the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards were not open to sudden attack, like the boundaries between Germanyand France, Turkey and Bulgaria, Italy and Austria, where fear of invasion was the under-current of all political and popular thought, and the motive power of all national energy, to the detriment of social progress, because of the crippling cost of standing armies and unproductive labor for the material of war. Nationally, therefore, the United States of America was in supreme luck because it could use its youth and resources with full advantage, free from menace and beyond all rivalry.
The character of the people responded to this independence of the Republic. The average American citizen, as far as I knew him, in Europe before the war, had an amused contempt for many institutions and social ideas which he observed in a continental tour. He was able to regard the hotch-potch of European nationalities and traditions from an aloof and judicial viewpoint. They seemed to him on the whole very silly. He could not understand why an invisible line on a road should make people on each side of the line hate each other desperately. He watched the march past of troops in France or Germany, the saluting of generals, the clicking of heels, the brilliant uniforms of officers, asa pageant which was utterly out of date in its application to life, and as a degradation of individual dignity. He did not link up the thriftiness of the French peasant—the desperate hoarding of hispetit sou—with the old fear of invasion by German legions across the frontier, when the peasant might see his little farm in flames and his harvest trampled down by soldiers' boots. The American visitor observed the fuss made when one king visited another, and read the false adulation of the royal visitor, the insincere speeches at royal banquets, the list of decorations conferred upon court flunkies, and laughed at the whole absurdity, not seeing that it was all part of a bid for a new alliance or a bribe for peace, or a mask of fear, until the time came when all bids and bribes should be of no more avail, and the only masks worn were to be gas-masks, when the rival nations should hack at one another in a frenzy of slaughter. The American in Europe who came to have a look 'round was astonished at the old-fashioned ways of people—their subservience to "caste" ideas, their allegiance to the divine right of kings, as to the "Little Father" of the Russian people, and the "shining armor" of the German Kaiser,and their apparent contentment with the wide gulf between underpaid labor and privileged capital. He did not realize that his own liberty of ideas and high rate of wage-earning were due to citizenship in a country free from militarism and its crushing taxation, and free also from hereditary customs upheld by the power of the sword used in civil strife as well as in international conflict, by the imperial governments of Russia, Germany, and other powers whose social philosophy was no different, though less tyrannical in expression. The American said, "I like Europe as a peep-show, and it's a good place to spend money in; but we can teach you a few things in the United States; one of them is equality, and another is opportunity." He was right, and it was his luck. Because of those privileges many pilgrims of fortune went to America from all the countries of Europe, in a great tide of emigration, adopting American citizenship in most cases soon after sighting the Statue of Liberty—"old Lib.," as I heard her called. The United States received these foreigners in hundreds of thousands and became "the melting-pot" of races. The melting process, however, was not so rapid as somepeople imagined, and it was something of a shock to the States to discover a few years before the war, and with a deeper realization at the outbreak of war, that they had within their boundaries enormous populations of foreign-born citizens, Germans, Poles, Slavs of all kinds, Italians, and Austrians, who had not assimilated American ideas, but kept their speech, customs, and national sentiment. It was the vast foreign element which had to be converted to the American outlook upon the world tragedy which opened in August, 1914. This mass of hostile or unwilling people had to be dragged into action when America found that her isolation was broken, that she could no longer stand aloof from the rest of mankind, nor be indifferent to the fate of friendly nations menaced with destruction, nor endure a series of outrages which flouted her own power, nor risk the world supremacy of a military autocracy which, if triumphant in Europe, would very soon dictate to the United States. It is the miracle of the Stars and Stripes that when the American government conscripted all able-bodied youth and raised a vast and well-trained army, and sent it into the battlefields of France andFlanders, there was no civil outbreak among those foreign-born citizens, and with absolute obedience they took their places in the ranks, Germans to fight against their own flesh and blood, because of allegiance to a state which had given them liberty, provided they defended the ideals which belonged to the state—in this case the hardest test of loyalty, not without tragedy and agony and fear.
For the first time there was no liberty in the United States—no liberty of private judgment, no liberty of action, no liberty of speech. The state ruled with complete despotism over the lives of its citizens, not tolerating any infringements of its orders, because the safety of the state would be endangered unless victory were assured. That was an enormous shock, I am sure, to the psychology of all Americans, even to those most loyal to the state authority, and it has caused an entire change in the mental attitude of all American citizens toward the conditions and relationships of life, because that sense of utter liberty they had before the war is limited now by the knowledge that at any time the Republic of which they are citizens may call upon them for life itselfand for all service up to that of death, and that, whatever their ideas should be, they may not refuse. In that way they have no longer an advantage over Frenchmen, or Germans, or Russians, or Italians, whom they pitied as men without liberty of souls or bodies. That is to say, they have to make surrender to the state of all things in the last resort, which is war—a law which many European peoples learned to their cost, many times before, and which America learned once in her own Civil War, but thought she could forget with other painful old things in the lumber-room of history.
The people of the United States have learned many other things during the last few years, when all the world has changed, and they stand now at the parting of the ways, looking back on the things they knew which they will never see again, and looking forward to the future, which is still doubtful to them in its destiny. I went to them on a visit during the period between armistice and peace, when mentally, I think, they were in a transition stage, very conscious of this place at the crossroads, and filled with grave anxiety, in spite of exultation at the power of their armies and the valor of theirmen who had helped to gain stupendous victory.
The things that had happened within the United States before and after its declaration of war had stirred them with passionate and complicated emotions. From the very outset of the Great War, long before the United States was directly involved, large numbers of Americans of the old stock, born of English, Irish, Scottish, or Dutch ancestry, were neutral only by order and not at all in spirit. Their sentiment toward France, based on the Lafayette tradition and their love of Paris and of French literature and wit, made them hate the invasion of northern France and eager to act as champions of the French people. Their old ties with England, the bond of speech and of blood, made them put aside any minor antagonisms which they had felt on account of old prejudice, and they followed with deep sympathy and anxiety the progress of the heroic struggle of British armies in the slaughter-fields. They were impatient for America to get into the conflict against German aggression. As the Germans became more ruthless of humane laws, more desperate in their attacks upon non-combatant as well as military populationsby sea and air and land, these Americans became sick and fevered at the thought of their own neutrality, and supported Colonel Roosevelt in his driving influence to get the United States into the war. They became more and more embittered with President Wilson, who adopted an academic view of the jungle scenes in Europe, dissociated the German people from the crimes of their war lords, and expounded a Christian philosophy of world politics which seemed like cowardice and humiliation of American pride to people stung to fury by German insults and outrages. These thoughts were beginning to seethe like yeast throughout masses of American people, especially in the East, but took a long time to reach and stir the great West and were resisted by the mentality of foreign-born populations, including the Jewish communities and the Irish. They were averse to war, and took a detached view of the struggle in Europe, which seemed to them too far away to matter to America. The German populations had a natural sympathy for their own race, much as some of them detested its militaristic ideals. There were, I imagine, also many intellectual men, not dragged down by theapathy of the masses, to whom "the war" seemed of less importance to the United States than the condition of the crops or the local baseball match. They felt that President Wilson's hesitations, long-drawn-out notes, and exalted pacifism were on nobler lines of thought than the loud-mouthed jingoism and bloodthirsty howlings of low-class newspapers and speakers.
TheLusitaniawas sunk, and a cry of agony and wrath went up from many hearts in the world at this new phase of war; but still the United States stayed out; and many Americans lowered their heads with shame and had a fire of indignation in their hearts because their President still temporized. They believed that the American people would have rallied to him as one man had he made that outrage the signal of war. They had no patience with his careful letter-writing, his anxiety to act as a moral mentor instead of as a leader of great armies in a fight against world criminals.... At last Wilson was forced to act, even his caution being overmastered by the urgent necessity of intervention on behalf of Great Britain and France and Belgium, panting and bleeding from every pore after three years ofstruggle; even his philosophy of aloofness being borne down by acts of war which wounded American interests and threatened American security. So the United States declared war, gathered its youth into great training-camps, and launched into the world struggle with slow but ever-increasing energy which swept the people with a mighty whirlwind of emotion.
The American people as a whole did truly enter into war in the spirit of crusaders. They sent out their sons as rescuers of stricken peoples fighting desperately against criminal powers. They had no selfish interests behind their sacrifice, and they did not understand that defeat of the nations allied against Germany would inevitably menace them with dire perils to their sovereign power, to their commercial prosperity, and to their ideals of civilization. Those things were true, but it was not because of them that the people of the United States were uplifted by a wonderful exaltation and that they put their full strength into preparing themselves for a long and bloody war. Every little home was turned into a Red Cross factory. Every young man of pluck and pride was eager to get the first call foractive service in the field. Girls took on men's jobs, old ladies knitted until their eyes were dim. Hard business men gave away their dollars in bundles, denied themselves at meal-time so that Europe should be fed, tried by some little sacrifice to share the spirit of those who made offer of their lives. The materialism of which America had been accused, not unjustly, was broken through by a spiritual idealism which touched every class, and Americans did not shrink from sacrifice, but asked for it as a privilege, and were regretful that as a people they suffered so little in comparison with those who had fought and agonized so long....
All this I heard when I went to America in the spring, between armistice and peace, and with my own eyes and ears I saw and heard the proof of it. Down Fifth Avenue I saw the march past of troops whom I had seen before marching along the roads of war to Ypres and Amiens, when the British army was hard pressed and glad to see these newcomers. In New York clubs I met young American officers who had been training with British staffs and battalions before they fought alongside British troops. And in American homes I met women who were stillwaiting for their men whom they had sent away with brave faces, hiding the fear in their hearts, and now knew, with thankfulness, that they were safe. Victory had come quickly after the entry of the American troops, but it was only the low braggart who said, "We won the war—and taught the English how to fight." The main body of educated people whom I met in many American cities said, rather: "We were the last straw that broke the camel's back. We were glad to share the victory, but we did not suffer enough. We came in too late to take our full share of sacrifice."
At that time, after the armistice and when Mr. Wilson was in Europe at the Peace Conference, the people I met were not so much buoyed up with the sense of victory as perplexed and anxious about the new responsibilities which they would be asked to fulfill. A tremendous controversy raged round the President, who baffled them by his acts and speeches and silences. When in an article which I wrote soon after my landing I said I was "all for Wilson" I received an immense number of letters "putting me wise" as to the failure of the President to gain the confidence of the American peopleand their grievous apprehensions that he was, out of personal vanity and with a stubborn, autocratic spirit, bartering away the rights and liberties of the United States, without the knowledge or support of the people, and involving them in European entanglements which they were not prepared to accept. This antagonism to the President was summed up clearly enough in some such words as those that follow:
Taft and Roosevelt quarreled; Wilson was born of it. Wilson is all there is to the Democratic party. He has had to dominate it; the brain of America is in the Republican camp. He refused to use this material when offered for the war. He would not allow Roosevelt to go to France and fight; he would not use General Wood, who was the "Lord Bobs" of this country in regard to preparedness. For the winning of the war we put party aside and the Congress gave Wilson unlimited power. (Lincoln put party aside and used the best he could get.) Now Mr. Wilson asks and gets very little advice. When he has a difficult question he secludes himself, except for Colonel House—and we know nothing about Colonel House. Mr. Wilson dominated America and no one objected; the war was being won. In the fall he saw, of course, victory, and was planning his trip abroad. He boldly asked for a Democratic Senate, which would give him control of the treaty-making power. He said, practically: "Everybody shows himself bigger than party. I will, too. All together now! But you prove it and give me a party Senate,not a Senate picked from the best brains of this America, but a Democratic Senate, so that I can have full power in the Peace Conference." The laugh that went up must have hit the stars, and we almost forgot the war to watch the election. Can you imagine Roosevelt in New York in this crisis? He held a monster meeting and said what he thought, through his teeth. "Unconditional surrender for Germany, no matter what it costs" (not idle words—Quentin's death in France had cost Roosevelt his famous boyishness of spirit), "and a Senate that will curb autocratic power in America." Then he told his hearers that they would not need a key to understand his speech. Now, power goes to people's heads. Mr. Wilson had changed. Time and again opposition in Congress failed. You would hear, "Wilson always wins." Always a dominating figure, he grew defiant, a trifle ruthless, heady. The American answer to Wilson was a Republican Senate, and the Senators were put there to balance him. When he decided to go to Europe he simply said he was going. He did not ask our approval, nor find out our wishes, nor even tell us what he was going to say, but did take over the cables and put them under government control. He made himself so inaccessible at that time that no one could get his ear. On his flying visit to New York he said that he returned to France to tell them that we backed him. Is that true? We don't know what we think yet. We haven't made up our minds. We will back him when he is frank and when we are convinced. We can't sign our souls away, all our wonderful heritages, without knowing all about it.... If we join a League of Nations, shall we prevent war? Or, if we join, shall we be absorbed and make the fight a bigger one?
Taft and Roosevelt quarreled; Wilson was born of it. Wilson is all there is to the Democratic party. He has had to dominate it; the brain of America is in the Republican camp. He refused to use this material when offered for the war. He would not allow Roosevelt to go to France and fight; he would not use General Wood, who was the "Lord Bobs" of this country in regard to preparedness. For the winning of the war we put party aside and the Congress gave Wilson unlimited power. (Lincoln put party aside and used the best he could get.) Now Mr. Wilson asks and gets very little advice. When he has a difficult question he secludes himself, except for Colonel House—and we know nothing about Colonel House. Mr. Wilson dominated America and no one objected; the war was being won. In the fall he saw, of course, victory, and was planning his trip abroad. He boldly asked for a Democratic Senate, which would give him control of the treaty-making power. He said, practically: "Everybody shows himself bigger than party. I will, too. All together now! But you prove it and give me a party Senate,not a Senate picked from the best brains of this America, but a Democratic Senate, so that I can have full power in the Peace Conference." The laugh that went up must have hit the stars, and we almost forgot the war to watch the election. Can you imagine Roosevelt in New York in this crisis? He held a monster meeting and said what he thought, through his teeth. "Unconditional surrender for Germany, no matter what it costs" (not idle words—Quentin's death in France had cost Roosevelt his famous boyishness of spirit), "and a Senate that will curb autocratic power in America." Then he told his hearers that they would not need a key to understand his speech. Now, power goes to people's heads. Mr. Wilson had changed. Time and again opposition in Congress failed. You would hear, "Wilson always wins." Always a dominating figure, he grew defiant, a trifle ruthless, heady. The American answer to Wilson was a Republican Senate, and the Senators were put there to balance him. When he decided to go to Europe he simply said he was going. He did not ask our approval, nor find out our wishes, nor even tell us what he was going to say, but did take over the cables and put them under government control. He made himself so inaccessible at that time that no one could get his ear. On his flying visit to New York he said that he returned to France to tell them that we backed him. Is that true? We don't know what we think yet. We haven't made up our minds. We will back him when he is frank and when we are convinced. We can't sign our souls away, all our wonderful heritages, without knowing all about it.... If we join a League of Nations, shall we prevent war? Or, if we join, shall we be absorbed and make the fight a bigger one?
This, I believe, is a fair statement of the views held by many educated people in the United States at the time between armistice and peace. I heard just such words in the City Club of New York, in the Union League Club, from people in Boston and Philadelphia and Washington, and at many dinner-tables where, after the preliminary courtesies of conversation, there was a quick clash of opinion among the guests, husbands differing from wives, brothers from sisters, and friends from friends, over the personality and purpose of the President, and the practical possibilities of a League of Nations. The defenders of the President waived aside all personal issues and supported him ardently because they believed that it was only by the application of his ideals, modified, no doubt, by contact with the actual problems of European states, that a new war more devastating to the world than the one just past could be prevented, and that his obstinacy and singleness of purpose on behalf of a League of Nations pointed him out as the Man of Destiny who would lead humanity out of the jungle to a higher plane of civilized philosophy.
That was my own view of his mission andcharacter, though now I think he failed at the Peace Conference in carrying out the principles of his own Fourteen Points, and weakened under the pressure of the governing powers of France, Belgium, and England, who desired revenge as well as reparation, and the death of German militarism under the heel of an Allied militarism based on the old German philosophy of might. The President failed largely because he insisted upon playing "a lone hand," and did not have the confidence of his country behind him, nor its understanding of his purpose, while he himself wavered in his principles.
America, during the time of my visit, was afraid of taking too strong a lead in the resettlement of Europe. So far from wishing to "boss the show," as some people suspected, most Americans had an unnatural timidity, and one count of their charge against Wilson was his obstinacy in his dealings with Lloyd George and Clemenceau. It was a consciousness of ignorance about European problems which made the Americans draw back from strong decisions, and above all it was the fear of being "dragged in" to new wars, not of their concern, which made them deeply suspicious of the Leagueof Nations. In many conversations I found this fear the dominant thought. "If you people want to fight each other again, you will have to do without us," said American soldiers just back from the front. "No more crusades for us!" said others. "American isolation—and a plague on all your little nations!" said civilians as well as soldiers. Bitter memories of French "economy" spoiled for American soldiers the romance of the Lafayette tradition. "I lost my leg," said one man, "for a country which charged for the trenches where we fought, and for people who put up their prices three hundred per cent. when the American armies came to rescue them. France can go to hell as far as I'm concerned."... Nevertheless, it became more clear to thinking minds in America that the days of "isolation" were gone, and that for good or evil the United States is linked up by unbreakable bonds of interest and responsibility with other great powers of the world. Never again can she be indifferent to their fate. If another great convulsion happens in Europe, American troops will again be there, quicker than before, because her action in the last war and her share of the terms of peace have made herresponsible in honor for the safety of certain peoples and the upholding of certain agreements. The Atlantic has shrunk in size to a narrow strip of water and the sky is a corridor which will be quickly traversed by aircraft before the next great war. But these physical conditions which are changing by mechanical development, altering the time-tables of traffic, are of no account compared with the vast change that happened in the world when the Stars and Stripes fluttered in the fields of France and Flanders, when the bodies of America's heroic youth were laid to rest there under little white crosses, and when the United States of America entered into an intimate and enduring relationship with Great Britain and France.
The effect of this change is not yet apparent in its fullness. America is still in a state of transition, watching, studying, thinking, feeling, and talking herself into convictions which will alter the fate of the world. I believe with all my heart and soul that America's closer relationship with Europe will be all the better for Europe. I believe that the spirit of the American people is essentially and unalterably democratic, and that as far as their power goes it will be used against thetyranny of military castes and attempted oppression of peoples. I believe that the influence of this spirit, visible to me in many people I met, will be of enormous benefit to England and France, because it will be used as an arbitrating factor in the conflict which is bound to come in both those countries between the old régime and the new. The influence of America will be the determining power in the settlement of Ireland on a basis of common sense free from the silly old fetishes of historical enmities on both sides. It will intervene to give a chance of life to the German race after they have paid the forfeit for their guilt in the last war, and will, I am certain, react against the stupid philosophy of enduring vengeance with its desire to make a slave-state in Central Europe, which still animates bloody-minded men and women so passionate of revenge that they are kindling the fires of another terrible and devastating war. The United States of America is bound up with the fate of Europe, but its people will still remain rather aloof in mentality from the passions of European nations, and will be more judicial in their judgment because of that. Instinctively, rather than intellectually, Americanswill act in behalf of democratic rights against autocratic plots. They will not allow the Russian people to be hounded back to the heels of grand dukes and under the lash of the knout. They will give their support to the League of Nations not as a machinery to stifle popular progress by a combination of governments, but as a court for the reform of international laws and the safeguarding of liberty. Europe will not be able to ignore the judgment of America. That country is, as I said, the rich uncle whose temper they must consult because of gratitude for favors to come—and because of wealth and power in the world's markets.
America is at the threshold of her supreme destiny in the world. By her action in the war, when for the first time her strength was revealed as a mighty nation, full grown and conscious of power, she has attained the highest place among the peoples, and her will shall prevail if it is based upon justice and liberty. I believe that America's destiny will be glorious for mankind, not because I think that the individual American is a better, nobler, more spiritual being than the individual Englishman, Frenchman, or Russian, but because I see, or think I see, thatthis great country is inspired more than any other nation among the big powers by the united, organized qualities of simple, commonplace people, with kindness of heart, independence of spirit, and sincerity of ideas, free from the old heritage of caste, snobbishness, militarism, and fetish-worship, which still lingers among the Junkers of Europe. They are a middle-class empire, untainted by imperial ambition or ancient traditions of overlordship. They are governed by middle-class sentiment. They put all problems of life to the test of that simplicity which is found in middle-class homes, where neither anarchy is welcome nor aristocratic privilege. America is the empire of the wage-earner, where even her plutocrats have but little power over the independence of the people. It is a nation of nobodies great with the power of the common man and the plain sense that governs his way of life. Other nations are still ruled by their "somebodies"—by their pomposities and High Panjandrums. But it is the nobodies whose turn is coming in history, and America is on their side. In that great federation of United States I saw, even in a brief visit, possible dangers that may spoil America'schance. I saw a luxury of wealth in New York and other cities which may be a vicious canker in the soul of the people. I saw a sullen discontent among wage-earners and home-coming soldiers because too many people had an unfair share of wealth. I met American Junkers who would use the military possibilities of the greatest army in the world for imperialistic adventures and world dominance. I heard of anarchy being whispered among foreign-born masses in American cities and passed over to other laborers not of foreign origin. In the censorship of news I saw the first and most ominous sign of government autocracy desiring to work its will upon the people by keeping them in ignorance and warping their opinions; and now and then I was conscious of an intolerance of free thought which happened to conflict with popular sentiment, as ruthless as in Russia during Czardom. I saw hatred based on ignorance and the brute spirit of men inflamed by war. But these were only accidental things, to be found wherever humanity is crowded, and after my visit to America I came away with memories, which are still strong in my heart, of a people filled with vital energy, kind in heart, sincere andsimple in their ways of thought and speech, idealistic in emotion, practical in conduct, and democratic by faith and upbringing. The soil of America is clean and strong and free; and the power that comes out of it will, I think and hope and pray, be used to gain the liberties of other nations, and to help forward the welfare of the human family.
The title I have chosen for this chapter is indiscreet, and, as some readers may think, misleading. At least it needs this explanation—that there is no absolute point of view in England about the United States. "England" does not think (a statement not intended to be humorous at the expense of my own people) any more than any nation may be said to think in a single unanimous way about any subject under the sun. England is a collection of individuals and groups of individuals, each with different points of view or shades of view, based upon certain ideals and knowledge, or upon passion, ignorance, elementary common sense, or elementary stupidity, like the United States and every country on earth.
It would convey an utterly false impression to analyze and expound the opinions of one such class, or to give as a general truth a fewindividual opinions. One can only get at something like the truth by following the drift of current thought, by contrasting national characteristics, and by striking a balance between extremes of thought. It is that which I propose to do in this chapter, frankly, and without fear of giving offense, because to my mind insincerity on a subject like this does more harm than good.
I will not disguise, therefore, at the outset, that after the armistice which followed the Great War huge numbers of people in England became annoyed, bitter, and unfriendly to the United States. The causes of that unkindness of sentiment were to some extent natural and inevitable, owing to the state of mind in England at that time. They had their foundations in the patriotism and emotion of a people who had just emerged from the crudest ordeal which had ever called to their endurance in history. When American soldiers, sailors, politicians, and patriots said, "Well, boys, we won the war!" which, in their enthusiasm for great achievements, they could hardly avoid saying at public banquets or welcomes home, where every word is not measured to the sensibilities of other people or to the exacttruth, English folk were hurt. They were not only hurt, but they were angry. Mothers of boys in mean streets, or rural villages, or great mansions, reading these words in newspapers which gave them irritating prominence, said, "So they think that we did nothing in the years before they came to France!" and some mothers thought of the boys who had died in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, and they hated the thought that Americans should claim the victory which so many English, Scottish, Irish, Canadians, Australians, New-Zealanders, South-Africans, and French had gained most of all by long-suffering, immense sacrifice, and hideous losses.
They did not know, though I for one tried to tell them, that all over the United States American people did not forget, even in their justified enthusiasm for the valor of their own men and the immense power they had prepared to hurl against the enemy, that France and England had borne the brunt of the war in the long years when Germany was at her strongest.
A friend of mine—an English officer—was in a New York hotel on Armistice Night, when emotion and patriotic enthusiasm were high—and hot. A young American mounteda chair, waving the Stars and Stripes. He used the good old phrase: "Well, boys, we won the war! The enemy fell to pieces as soon as the doughboys came along. England and France could not do the trick without us. We taught 'em how to fight and how to win!"
My friend smiled, sat tight, and said nothing. He remembered a million dead in British ranks, untold and unrecorded heroism, the first French victory of the Marne, the years of epic fighting when French and British troops had hurled themselves against the German lines and strained his war-machine. But it was Armistice Night, and in New York, and the "Yanks" had done jolly well, and they had a right to jubilation for their share in victory. Let the boy shout, and good luck to him. But an American rose from his chair and pushed his way toward my friend.
"I'm ashamed to hear such rant before British and French officers," he said, holding out his hand. "We know that our share is not as great as yours, within a thousand miles."
Those were chivalrous words. They represented the conviction, I am sure, of millionsof Americans of the more thoughtful type, who would not allow themselves to be swept away beyond the just merits of their national achievements, even by the fervor of the moment.
But in England people only knew the boast and not the modesty. Because some Americans claimed too much, the English of the lower and less intelligent classes belittled the real share of victory which belonged to America, and became resentful. It was so in France as in England. It was lamentable, but almost unavoidable, and when this resentment and this sullen denial of American victory became known in the United States, passed over the wires by newspaper correspondents, it naturally aroused counter-action, equal bitterness, and then we were in a vicious circle, abominable in its effect upon mutual understanding and liking.
All that, however, was limited to the masses, for the most part certainly, and was only used as poison propaganda by the gutter press on both sides of the Atlantic. Educated people in both countries understood the folly and squalor of that stuff, and discounted it accordingly.
What was more serious in its effect uponthe intelligent classes was the refusal of the Senate to ratify the Peace Treaty and its repudiation of President Wilson's authority. I have already dealt in previous writings with that aspect of affairs, and have tried to prove my understanding of the American view. But there is also an English view, which Americans should know and understand.
At the time I am writing this chapter, and for some months previously, England has been irritated with the United States because of a sense of having been "let down" over the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations by American action. I think that irritation has been to some extent justified. When President Wilson came to London he received, as I have told elsewhere, the most enthusiastic and triumphant ovation that has ever been given to a foreign visitor by the population of that great old city. The cheers that rose in storms about him were shouted not only because his personality seemed to us then to have the biggest and most hopeful qualities of leadership in the world, but because he was, as we thought, the authorized representative of the United States, to whom, through him, we gave homage. It was only months afterward, whenthe Peace Treaty had been signed and when the League of Nations (Wilson's child) had been established, that we were told that Wilson was not the authorized representative of the United States, that the American Senate did not recognize his authority to pledge the country to the terms of the treaty, and that the signature to the document was not worth ten cents. That made us look pretty foolish. It made France and Italy and other powers, who had yielded in many of their demands in order to satisfy President Wilson's principles, feel pretty mad. It made a laughingstock of the new-born League of Nations. It was the most severe blow to the prospects of world peace and reconstruction. In England, as I know, there were vast numbers of people who regarded the Peace Treaty as one of the most clumsy, illogical, and dangerous documents ever drawn up by a body of diplomats. I am one of those who think so. But that has nothing to do with the refusal of the Senate to acknowledge Wilson's signature.
The character of the clauses which created a series of international blunders leading inevitably to new wars unless they are altered during the next decade was not the cause ofthe Senate's "reservations." The American Senators did not seem to be worried about that aspect of the treaty. Their only worry was to safeguard the United States from any responsibility in Europe, and to protect their own traditional powers against an autocratic President. However right they may have been, it must at least be acknowledged by every broad-minded American that we in Europe were put completely "into the cart" by this action, and had some excuse for annoyance. All this is now past history, and no doubt before this book is published many other things will have happened as a consequence of the events which followed so rapidly upon the Peace of Versailles, so that what I am now writing will read like historical reminiscence. But it will always remain a painful chapter, and it will only be by mutual forbearance and the most determined efforts of people of good will on both sides of the Atlantic that the growth of a most lamentable misunderstanding between our two peoples in consequence of those unfortunate episodes will be prevented.
Another cause of popular discontent with the United States was the rather abrupt statement of Mr. Carter Glass, Secretary ofthe Treasury, that the United States would not grant any more loans to Europe so long as she failed to readjust her financial situation by necessary taxation, economy, and production.
The general (and in my opinion unjustified) anger aroused by this statement was expressed by a cartoon inPunchcalled "Another Reservation." It was a picture of a very sinister-looking Uncle Sam turning his back upon a starving woman and child who appeal to his charity, and he says: "Very sad case. But I'm afraid she ain't trying."
Mr. Punch is a formidable person in England, and by his barbed wit may destroy any public man or writing man who lays himself open to ridicule, but I ventured to risk that by denouncing the cartoon as unjust and unfair in spirit and fact. I pointed out that since the beginning of the war the United States had shown an immense, untiring, and inexhaustible generosity toward the suffering peoples of Europe, and reminded England how under Mr. Hoover's organization the American Relief Committee had fed the Belgian and French populations behind the German lines, and how afterwardthey had poured food into Poland, Serbia, Austria, and other starving countries. That challenge I made against Mr. Punch was supported by large numbers of English people who wrote to me expressing their agreement and their gratitude to America. They deplored the spirit of the cartoon and the evil nature of so many attacks in low-class journals of England against the United States, whose own gutter press was at the same time publishing most scurrilous abuse of us. But among the letters I received was one from an American lady which I will quote now, because it startled me at the time, and provides, in spite of its bitterness, some slight excuse for the criticism which was aroused in England at the time. If an American could feel like that, scourging her own people too much (as I think), it is more pardonable that English sentiment should have been a little ruffled by America's threat to abandon Europe.
I only wish with all my heart [she wrote] that thePunchcartoon is wholly undeserved, or that your kind "apologia" is wholly deserved. I have never been "too proud to fight," but a great deal too proud to wear laurels I haven't earned. Personally, I think the drubbing we are getting is wholesome and likely to do good. We have been given praisead nauseam,and, to be honest, you can never compete with us on that ground. We can praise ourselves in terms that would silence any competitors....I wish, too, that I could believe that the "beggars from Europe" had either their hats or their bags stuffed with dollars. I'm afraid you have spoken to the Americans, not to the beggars. I was one myself. I went home in April, prouder of my country than I had ever been, jealous of its good repute, and painfully anxious that it should live up to its reputation. I fear I found that people were not only tired of generosity, but wholly indifferent to the impressions being so widely circulated in the press—that France had been guilty of every form of petty ingratitude, that the atrocities of Great Britain in Ireland outdid the Germans in Belgium and France. A minority everywhere was struggling against the tide, with dignity, and the generosity I had so securely counted on from my own people. But the collections being made for the Serbians, for instance, were despairingly small. Belgian Relief had been turned into Serbian Relief groups, and from New York to California I heard the same tale—and, alas, experienced it—people were tired of giving, tired of the war. In New York I was invited to speak before a well-known Women's Club—I was "a guest of honor." I accepted, and spoke for ten minutes, and a woman at a table near by begged me to take up an immediate contribution. I was not at all anxious to do so, for it seemed a very base advantage to take of a luncheon invitation, so I referred her to the president. A contribution was taken up by a small group of women, all fashionably dressed, with pearl or "near-pearl," and the result was exactly $19.40. As there were between 200 and 300 women present in the ballroom, I was inexpressibly shocked, and sternlysuggested that the president should announce the sum for which I should have to account, and her speech was mildly applauded. All through my trip I felt bewilderment. I had just come from Belgium and France, and the contrast oppressed me. I had the saddest kind of disillusionment, relieved by the most beautiful instances of charity and unselfishness.Even in regard to the Relief of Belgium too much stress is laid on our generosity and a false impression has gone abroad—an impression nothing can ever eradicate. The organization of the B. R. F. was American, but Mr. Hoover never failed to underline how much of the fund came from Great Britain and Canada. In fact, the Belgian women embroidered their touching little phrases of gratitude to the Americans, as I myself saw, onCanadianflour sacks. During the first year or so the contributions of Americans were wholly incommensurate with our wealth and prosperity, and a letter from Gertrude Atherton a year after the war scourged us for our indifference even then.Mr. Balfour's revelation that Great Britain had contributed £35,000,000 toward the relief of Austria, etc., made my heart go down still farther. I have tried to believe that my experience was due to something lacking in myself. People were so enchantingly kind, so ready to give me large and expensive lunches, dinners, teas—but they would not be induced to refrain from the lunches and contribute the cost of them toward my cause....I hope you will pardon this long effusion. Like most Americans who have served abroad I feel we came in too late, we failed to stay on the ground to clear up afterward, and now we are indulging in the most wicked propaganda against our late allies—France as well as England. Personally, I realizethat if we had contributed twenty times as much I should still not feel we had done enough. If you were not so confirmed a friend of America, I could never write as I have done, but just because you reach such an enormous public, because your influence is so great, I am anxious that America should not be given undue praise—which she does not herself credit—and that the disastrous results of her policy (if we have one) should be printed clear for her to read and profit by.
I only wish with all my heart [she wrote] that thePunchcartoon is wholly undeserved, or that your kind "apologia" is wholly deserved. I have never been "too proud to fight," but a great deal too proud to wear laurels I haven't earned. Personally, I think the drubbing we are getting is wholesome and likely to do good. We have been given praisead nauseam,and, to be honest, you can never compete with us on that ground. We can praise ourselves in terms that would silence any competitors....
I wish, too, that I could believe that the "beggars from Europe" had either their hats or their bags stuffed with dollars. I'm afraid you have spoken to the Americans, not to the beggars. I was one myself. I went home in April, prouder of my country than I had ever been, jealous of its good repute, and painfully anxious that it should live up to its reputation. I fear I found that people were not only tired of generosity, but wholly indifferent to the impressions being so widely circulated in the press—that France had been guilty of every form of petty ingratitude, that the atrocities of Great Britain in Ireland outdid the Germans in Belgium and France. A minority everywhere was struggling against the tide, with dignity, and the generosity I had so securely counted on from my own people. But the collections being made for the Serbians, for instance, were despairingly small. Belgian Relief had been turned into Serbian Relief groups, and from New York to California I heard the same tale—and, alas, experienced it—people were tired of giving, tired of the war. In New York I was invited to speak before a well-known Women's Club—I was "a guest of honor." I accepted, and spoke for ten minutes, and a woman at a table near by begged me to take up an immediate contribution. I was not at all anxious to do so, for it seemed a very base advantage to take of a luncheon invitation, so I referred her to the president. A contribution was taken up by a small group of women, all fashionably dressed, with pearl or "near-pearl," and the result was exactly $19.40. As there were between 200 and 300 women present in the ballroom, I was inexpressibly shocked, and sternlysuggested that the president should announce the sum for which I should have to account, and her speech was mildly applauded. All through my trip I felt bewilderment. I had just come from Belgium and France, and the contrast oppressed me. I had the saddest kind of disillusionment, relieved by the most beautiful instances of charity and unselfishness.
Even in regard to the Relief of Belgium too much stress is laid on our generosity and a false impression has gone abroad—an impression nothing can ever eradicate. The organization of the B. R. F. was American, but Mr. Hoover never failed to underline how much of the fund came from Great Britain and Canada. In fact, the Belgian women embroidered their touching little phrases of gratitude to the Americans, as I myself saw, onCanadianflour sacks. During the first year or so the contributions of Americans were wholly incommensurate with our wealth and prosperity, and a letter from Gertrude Atherton a year after the war scourged us for our indifference even then.
Mr. Balfour's revelation that Great Britain had contributed £35,000,000 toward the relief of Austria, etc., made my heart go down still farther. I have tried to believe that my experience was due to something lacking in myself. People were so enchantingly kind, so ready to give me large and expensive lunches, dinners, teas—but they would not be induced to refrain from the lunches and contribute the cost of them toward my cause....
I hope you will pardon this long effusion. Like most Americans who have served abroad I feel we came in too late, we failed to stay on the ground to clear up afterward, and now we are indulging in the most wicked propaganda against our late allies—France as well as England. Personally, I realizethat if we had contributed twenty times as much I should still not feel we had done enough. If you were not so confirmed a friend of America, I could never write as I have done, but just because you reach such an enormous public, because your influence is so great, I am anxious that America should not be given undue praise—which she does not herself credit—and that the disastrous results of her policy (if we have one) should be printed clear for her to read and profit by.
That is a sincere, painful, and beautiful letter, and I think it ought to be read in the United States, not because I indorse its charge against America's lack of generosity—I cannot do that—but because it exculpates England and France of unreasoning disappointment, and is also the cry of a generous American soul, moved by the sufferings of Europe, and eager that her people should help more, and not less, in the reconstruction of the world. The English people did not take her view that the Americans had not done enough or were tired of generosity. It must be admitted by those who followed our press that, apart from two gutter journals, there was a full recognition of what the United States had done, and continual reminders that no policy would be tolerated which did not have as its basis Anglo-American friendship.
Upon quite another level of argument is the criticism of American psychology and political evolution expressed by various English writers upon their return from visits to the United States, and a fairly close acquaintance with the character of American democracy as it was revealed during the war, and afterward. The judgment of these writers does not affect public opinion, because it does not reach down to the masses. It is confined rather to the student type of mind, and probably has remained unnoticed by the average man and woman in the United States. It is, however, very interesting because it seeks to forecast the future of America as a world power and as a democracy. The chief charge leveled against the intellectual tendency of the United States may be summed up in one word, "intolerance." Men like George Bernard Shaw, J. A. Hobson, and H. W. Massingham do not find in their study of the American temperament or in the American form of government the sense of liberty with which the people of the United States credit themselves, and with which all republican democracies are credited by the proletariat in European countries.
They seem inclined to believe, indeed, that America has less liberty in the way of free opinion and free speech than the English under their hereditary monarchy, and that the spirit of the people is harshly intolerant of minorities and nonconforming individuals, or of any idea contrary to the general popular opinion of the times. Some of these critics see in the "Statue of Liberty" in New York Harbor a figure of mockery behind which is individualism enchained by an autocratic oligarchy and trampled underfoot by the intolerance of the masses. They produce in proof of this not only the position of an American President, with greater power over the legislature than any constitutional king, but the mass violence of the majority in its refusal to admit any difference of opinion with regard to war aims during the time of war fever, and the tyrannical action of the Executive in its handling of labor disputes and industrial leaders, during and after the war.
It is, I think, true that as soon as America entered the war there was no liberty of opinion allowed in the United States. There was no tolerance of "conscientious objectors" nor mercy toward people who from religiousmotives, or intellectual crankiness, were antagonistic to the use of armed might. People who did not subscribe to the Red Cross funds were marked down, I am told, dismissed from their posts, and socially ruined. Many episodes of that kind were reported, and startled the advanced radicals in England who had regarded the United States as the land of liberty. Americans may retort that we did not give gentle treatment to our own "conscientious objectors," and that is true. Many of them were put into prison and roughly handled, but on the other hand there was a formal, though insincere, acknowledgment that even in time of war there should be liberty of conscience, and a clause to that effect was passed by Parliament. In spite also of the severity of censorship, and the martial law that was enforced by the Defense of the Realm Act, there was, I believe, a greater freedom of criticism allowed to the press than would have been tolerated by the United States. Periodicals like theNationand theNew Statesman, even newspapers like theDaily Mailand theMorning Post, indulged in violent criticism of the conduct of the war, the methods of the War Cabinet,the action and military policy of leaders like Lord Kitchener, and the failure of military campaigns in the Dardanelles and other places. No breath of criticism against American leadership or generalship was admitted to the American press, and their war correspondents were censored with far greater severity than their English comrades, who were permitted to describe, very fully, reverses as well as successes in the fields of war.
What, however, has startled the advanced wing of English political thought more than all that is the ruthless way in which the United States government has dealt with labor disputes and labor leaders since the war. The wholesale arrests and deportations of men accused of revolutionary propaganda seem to these sympathizers with revolutionary ideals as gross in their violation of liberty as the British government's coercion of Ireland. These people believe that American democracy has failed in the essential principle which alone justifies democracy, a toleration of minorities of opinion and of the absolute liberty of the individual within the law. They say that even in England there is greater liberty, in spite of its mediævalstructure. In Hyde Park on Sunday morning one may hear speeches which would cause broken heads and long terms of imprisonment if uttered in New York. Labor, they say, would rise in instant and general revolt if any of their men were treated with the tyranny which befalls labor leaders in the United States.
To my mind a great deal of this criticism is due to a misconception of the meaning of democracy. In England it was a tradition of liberal thought that democracy meant not only the right of the people to govern themselves, but the right of the individual or of any body of men to express their disagreement with the policy of the state, or with the majority opinion, or with any idea which annoyed them in any way. But, as we have seen by recent history, democratic rule does not mean individual liberty. Democracy is government by the majority of the people, and that majority will be less tolerant of dissent than autocracy itself, which can often afford to give greater liberty of expression to the minority because of its inherent strength. The Russian Soviet government, which professes to be the most democratic form of government in the world, is utterlyintolerant of minorities. I suppose there is less individual liberty in Russia than in any other country, because disagreement with the state opinion is looked upon as treachery to the majority rule. So in the United States, which is a real democracy, in spite of the power of capital, there is less toleration of eccentric notions than in England, especially when the majority of Americans are overwhelmed by a general impulse of enthusiasm or passion, such as happened when they went into the war. The people of the minority are then regarded as enemies of the state, traitors to their fellow-citizens, and outlaws. They are crushed accordingly by the weight of mass opinion, which is ruthless and merciless, with more authority and power than the decree of a king or the law of an aristocratic form of government.
Although disagreeing to some extent with those who criticize the American sense of liberty, I do believe that there is a danger in the United States of an access of popular intolerance, and sudden gusts of popular passion, which may sweep the country and lead to grave trouble. Being the greatest democracy in the world, it is subject to the weakness of democracy as well as endowedwith its strength, and to my mind the essential weakness of democracy is due to the unsteadiness and feverishness of public opinion. When the impulse of public opinion happens to be right it is the most splendid and vital force in the world, and no obstacle can stand against it. The idealism of a people attains almost supernatural force. But if it happens to be wrong it may lead to national and world disaster.
In countries like England public opinion is still controlled and checked by a system of heavy drag wheels, which is an intolerable nuisance when one wants to get moving. But that system is very useful when there are rocks ahead and the ship of state has to steer a careful course. Our constitutional monarchy, our hereditary chamber composed of men who do not hold their office by popular vote, our traditional and old-fashioned school of diplomacy, our social castes dominated by those on top who are conservative and cautious because of their possessions and privileges, are abominably hindering to ardent souls who want quick progress, but they are also a national safeguard against wild men. The British system of government, and the social structure rising by aseries of caste gradations to the topmost ranks, are capable of tremendous reforms and changes being made gradually, and without any violent convulsion or break with tradition.
I am of opinion that this is not so in the United States, owing to the greater pressure of mass emotion. If, owing to the effects of war throughout the world, altering the economic conditions of life and the psychology of peoples, there is a demand for radical alteration in the conditions of labor within the United States, and for a different distribution of wealth (as there is bound to be), it is, in the opinion of many observers, almost certain that these changes will be effected after a period of greater violence in America than in England. The clash between capital and labor, they think, will be more direct and more ruthless in its methods of conflict on both sides. It will not be eased by the numerous differences of social class, shading off one into the other, which one finds in a less democratic country like mine, where the old aristocratic families and the country landowning families, below the aristocracy, are bound up traditionally with the sentiment of the agricultural population,and where the middle classes in the cities are sympathetic on the one hand with the just demands of the wage-earning crowd, and, on the other hand, by snobbishness, by romanticism, by intellectual association, and by financial ambitions with the governing, and moneyed, régime.
There are students of life in the United States who forecast two possible ways of development in the future history of the American people. Neither of them is pleasant to contemplate, and I hope that neither is true, but I think there is a shade of truth in them, and that they are sufficiently possible to be considered seriously as dangers ahead.
The first vision of these minor prophets (and gloomy souls) is a social revolution in the United States on Bolshevik lines, leading through civil strife between the forces of the wage-earning classes and the profit-holding classes to anarchy as fierce, as wild, and as bloody as that in Russia during the Reign of Terror.
They see Fifth Avenue swept by machine-gun fire, and its rich shops sacked, and some of its skyscrapers rising in monstrous bonfires to lick the sky with flames.
They see cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland in the hands of revolutionary committees of workmen after wild scenes of pillage and mob passion.
They see the rich daughters of millionaires stripped of their furs and their pearls and roughly handled by hordes of angry men, hungry after long strikes and lockouts, desperate because of a long and undecided warfare with the strong and organized powers of law and of capital.
Their vision is rather hazy about the outcome of this imaginary civil war, but of its immense, far-reaching anarchy they have no doubt, with the certainty that prophets have until the progress of history proves them to be false.
Let me say for myself that I do not pose as a prophet nor believe this particular prophecy in its lurid details. But I do believe that there may be considerable social strife in the United States for various reasons. One reason which stares one in the face is the immense, flaunting, and dangerous luxury of the wealthy classes in cities like New York. It is provocative and challenging to masses of wage-earners who find prices rising against them quicker than theirwages rise, and who wish not only for a greater share of the proceeds of their labor, but also a larger control of the management and machinery of labor. The fight, if it comes, is just as much for control as for profit, and resistance on the part of capital will be fierce and ruthless on that point.
American society—the high caste of millionaires and semi-millionaires, and demi-semi-millionaires—is perhaps rather careless in its display of wealth and in its open manifestations of luxury. The long, unending line of automobiles that go crawling down Fifth Avenue and rushing down Riverside Drive, on any evening of the year, revealing women all aglitter with diamonds, with priceless furs round their white shoulders, in gowns that have cost the year's income of a working family, has no parallel in any capital of Europe. There is no such pageant of wealth in London or Paris. In no capital is there such luxury as one finds in New York hotels, mansions, and ballrooms. The evidence of money is overwhelming and oppressive. The generosity of many of these wealthy people, their own simplicity, good humor, and charm, are not safeguards against the envy and the hatred of those who strugglehard for a living wage and for a security in life which is harder still to get.
When I was in America I found a consciousness of this among the rich people, with some of whom I came in touch. They were afraid of the future. They saw trouble ahead, and they seemed anxious to build bridges between the ranks of labor and their own class. The wisest among them did not adopt the stiff-necked attitude of complete hostility to the demands of labor for a more equal share of profit and of governance. One or two men I met remembered the days when they were at the bottom of the ladder, and said, "Those fellows are right.... I'm going half-way to meet them."
If capital goes anything like half-way, there will be no bloody conflict in the United States. But there will be revolution, not less radical because not violent. That meeting half-way between capital and labor in the United States would be the greatest revolution the modern world has seen.
That, then, is one of the ways in which English observers see the future of the United States. The other way they suggest would be a great calamity for the world. It is the way of militarism—a most grisly thought!
It is argued by those who take this line of prophecy that democracy is no enemy of war. On the contrary, they say, a democracy like that of the United States, virile, easily moved to emotion, passionate, sure of its strength, jealous of its honor, and quick to resent any fancied insult, is more liable to catch the war fever than nations controlled by cautious diplomats and by hereditary rulers. It is generally believed now that the Great War in Europe which ravaged so many countries was not made by the peoples on either side, and that it did not happen until the rival powers on top desired it to happen and pressed the buttons and spoke the spell-words which called the armies to the colors. It is probable, and almost certain, that it would not have happened at all if the peoples had been left to themselves, if the decision of war and peace had been in their hands, and if their passions had not been artificially roused and educated. But that is no argument, some think, against the warlike character of strong democracies. The ancient Greeks were a great democracy, but they were the most ardent warriors of their world, and fought for markets, sea supremacy, and racial prestige.
So some people believe that the United States may adopt a philosophy of militarism challenging the sea-power of the British Empire, by adding Mexico to her dominions, and by capturing the strategic points of the world's trade routes. They see in the ease with which the United States adopted military service in the late war and the rapid, efficient way in which an immense army was raised and trained a menace to the future of the world, because what was done once to crush the enemy of France and England may be done again if France or England arouse the hostility of the American people. The intense self-confidence of the Americans, their latent contempt of European peoples, their quickness to take affront at fancied slights worked up by an unscrupulous press, their consciousness of the military power that was organized but only partially used in the recent war, and their growing belief that they are a people destined to take and hold the leadership of the world, constitute, in the opinion of some nervous onlookers, a psychology which may lead the United States into tremendous and terrible adventures. I have heard it stated by many people not wholly insane that the next world war willbe mainly a duel between the United States and the British Empire.
They are not wholly insane, the people who say these things over the dinner-table or in the club smoking-room, yet to my mind such opinions verge on insanity. It is of course always possible that any nation may lose all sense of reason and play the wild beast, as Germany did. It is always possible that by some overwhelming popular passion any nation may be stricken with war fever. But of all nations in the world I think the people of the United States are least likely to behave in that way, especially after their experience in the European war.
The men who went back were under no illusions as to the character of modern warfare. They hated it. They had seen its devilishness. They were convinced of its idiocy, and in every American home to which they returned were propagandists against war as an argument or as a romance. Apart from that, it is almost certain that militarism of an aggressive kind is repugnant to the tradition and instinct of the American people. They have no use for "shining armor" and all the old shibboleths of war's pomp and pageantry which put a spell onEuropean peoples. The military tradition based on the falsity of war's "glory" is not in their spirit or in their blood. They will fight for the safety of civilization, as it was threatened in 1914, for the rescue of free peoples menaced by brutal destruction, and they will fight, as all brave people will fight, to safeguard their own women and children and liberty.
But I do not believe that the American people will ever indulge in aggressive warfare for the sake of imperial ambitions or for world domination. Their spirit of adventure finds scope in higher ideals, in the victories of science and commerce, in the organization of every-day life, in the triumph of industry, in the development of the natural sources of wealth which belong to their great country and their ardent individuality. They believe in peace, if we may judge by their history and tradition, and non-interference with the outside world. Their hostility to the peace terms and to certain clauses in the League of Nations was due to a deep-seated distrust of entanglements with foreign troubles, jealousies, and rivalries, and the spirit of the United States, so far from desiring "mandates" over great populations outside thefrontiers of its own people, harked back to the old faith in a "splendid isolation" free from imperial responsibilities. The people were perhaps too cautious and too reserved. They risked the chance they had of reshaping the structure of human society to a higher level of common sense and liberty. They made "reservations" which caused the withdrawal of their representatives from the council-chamber of the Allied nations. But that was due not merely, I think, to party politics or the passionate rivalry of statesmen. Truly and instinctively, it was due to the desire of the American people to draw back to their own frontiers and to work out their own destiny in peace, neither interfering nor being interfered with, according to their traditional and popular policy.
Apart from individual theorists, of the "cranky" kind, the main body of intellectual opinion in England, as far as I know it, looks to the United States as the arbitrator of the world's destiny, and the leader of the world's democracies, on peaceful and idealistic lines. There is a conviction among many of us—not killed by the controversy over the Peace Treaty—that the spirit of the American people as a whole is guided by an innatecommon sense free from antiquated spell-words, facing the facts of life shrewdly and honestly, and leaning always to the side of popular liberty against all tyrannies of castes, dynasties, and intolerance. Aloof from the historical enmities that still divide the nations of Europe, yet not aloof in sympathy with the sufferings, the strivings, and the sentiment of those peoples, the United States is able to play the part of a reconciling power, in any league of nations, with a detached and disinterested judgment. It is above all because it is disinterested that Europe has faith and trust in its sense of justice. It is not out for empire, for revenge, or for diplomatic vanity. Its people are supporters of President Wilson's ideal of "open covenants openly arrived at," and of the "self-determination of nations," however violently they challenge the authority by which their President pledged them to definite clauses in an unpopular contract. They are a friendly and not unfriendly folk in their instincts and in their methods. They respond quickly and generously to any appeal to honest sentiment, though they have no patience with hypocrisy. They are realists, and hate sham, pose, and falsehood. Givethem "a square deal" and they will be scrupulous to a high standard of business morality. Because of the infusion of foreign blood in their democracy which has been slowly produced from the great melting-pot of nations, they are subject to all the sensibilities of the human race and not narrowly fixed to one racial idea or type of mind. The Celt, the Slav, the Saxon, the Teuton, the Hebrew, and the Latin strains are present in the subconsciousness of the American people, so that they are capable of an enormous range of sympathy with human nature in its struggle upward to the light. They are the new People of Destiny in the world of progress, because after their early adventures of youth, their time of preparation, their immense turbulent growth, their forging of tools, and training of soul, they stand now in their full strength and maturity, powerful with the power of a great, free, confident people.