(decorative flower image)
The Americans are all “sports.” But to their credit, they are one and all “dead games.” They have a sporting tradition which extends back to the time when their great-grandfathers gambled for negresses and went trailing for Indians in pretty much the same way that an Englishman goes shooting wild duck.
It is said, with what truth I know not, that the Americans hunt the fox in red coats and top-hats, and that they are yachtsmen and fishermen and big game killers. I have met a considerable number of Americans—well-to-do and otherwise—but I never yet came across one whom I could conscientiously figure in any of the latter connections. Of course, there is the America Cup Race to confound me, and there are the redoubtable doings of President Roosevelt on the rolling prairie and in the Rockies, and there is young Mr. Jay Gould’s defeat of our Mr. Eustace Miles at Rackets or Ping Pong or some such game. All the same, I will never believe that the modern American is leisurelyenough or uncommercial enough to know much about real sport.
That they play games in America even as we play games in England appears to be fairly evident. The game of white man’s games, namely, cricket, is, however, a game they do not understand. Baseball and football on the other hand are exercises which they are alleged to have cultivated out of all recognition. Baseball I know nothing about. And when I come to consider it closely, I could wish that I knew nothing about American football.
Pugilism without the gloves having been forbidden by law in America, the free and equal inhabitants thereof must e’en look round for a form of sport which would allow of their “lamming the hides off one another” without being pulled up short by the police; and they settled on football. The essence of American football is not to kick or punch the ball, but to kick, punch, break up, deface and destroy the next man. On all American football fields a squad of surgeons, bonesetters, and nurses have to be in continual attendance. The crushing of a player’s ribs, the gouging out of his eye, or the splitting open of his head are regarded as trifling matters among American sportsmen, and when the football player goes forth to thefray, he makes a point of taking a fond farewell of his relations and friends in case of even more serious accident. Here, again, you have a distinct instance of the American tendency to outrage and excess. They have overdone football to such an extent that they themselves consider it in the light of something which approximates closely to a murderous affray. So much for games.
As Indians are no longer shootable, and negroes can no longer be hunted with dogs, and the buffalo is extinct, and the grizzly a “rare proposition” and difficult of access, the modern American sport has to be content with smaller deer, such as possum and bobolink and wild turkey. And when he goes gunning for these trophies he is a sight to see. Nobody can rival him in the magnificence of his outfit. He insists upon donning cow-boy attire and proceeding to the field of action on a fiery mustang, with a magazine of guns slung all over him, and enough ammunition to take Port Arthur. The whole of this equipment has been purchased at store prices, and he acquires it not because it is likely to be useful to him but because he thinks that it makes him look smart. When it comes to yachting or fishing or racing you can depend upon him to display an equal gaiety of demeanour and to“dress” and “swank” the part to perfection.
For the fox-hunting I shall say nothing. The indigenous American fox does not run straight, the imported fox has lost some of the best qualities of his English forbears, and the American variety of foxhound is a romping, ill-mannered, and indiscreet quadruped.
The national sport of America is horse racing, qualified with a considerable dash of trotting. And here, of course, the American temperament in all its aspects is made to shine. The head quarters of American horse racing—the Epsom, Ascot and Sandown of the United States—is a place called Saratoga, where the trunks come from. Here you find the American horse, the American racing man, and the American sport in their highest and lowest and most perfect expression. It is said that a Saratoga horse is poison-proof; being so accustomed to profound potations of laudanum, bromide, and other sedatives that he can quaff any quantity of them without turning a hair. The people who live at Saratoga are all horsey and dishonest. They speak the most degraded form of Anglo-Saxon—a sort of Americo-Negroid flash talk—and what they do not know in the way of knavery andbrutality has yet to be invented. It goes without saying that all American racing men do not necessarily dwell in this sublime spot. But a quite considerable contingent of them have learnt lessons out of the Saratoga book, and are consequently as dangerous to deal with as it is possible to conceive that white men could be.
The American sportsmen we are privileged to see in England have, with some notable exceptions, failed signally to secure our confidence. There are honest men among them—though never by any chance a “jay”—and there are sheep of a blackness which would do no discredit to the nether pit. On the whole their connection with the English turf has been unfortunate for the English turf. We are most of us quite old enough to remember the unpleasant things that happened when an organised gang of these gentry descended upon our innocent English rings and racecourses some three years ago. They got their hands well into the English pockets, depleted us of much glittering money, raised what they were pleased to consider “general h—l” in the scandal way, and left us outraged and aghast. Up to this period in our history the astute English racing-man had regarded himself as the last word in craft and wariness; but theAmericans despoiled him as easily as if he had been a “tenderfoot,” and when he discovered it, Mr. Englishman was very shocked. The racing interests of these realms is still suffering from the shaking it received during the exciting period to which I refer. The only profit the poor Britishers got out of the deal was a new-fashioned way of riding, which still remains in vogue, and a lesson in caution which will last us a good century.
What the American jockey really means was forcibly borne in upon us by the vagaries of a Mr. Tod Sloan. By dint of the usual advertising and bluff, coupled indeed with no ordinary gifts as a horseman, Mr. Sloan made his early career in England a success at the first blush. He was soon in receipt of an income of ridiculous dimensions, and hob-nobbing with the best blood of the country. He got found out, as Americans will, and ended up feebly by smacking a waiter across the head with a champagne bottle. Luck does not appear to have looked his way since. He went back to America a disgraced man, even for America; and took to giving tips for a New York paper. At the present moment he is said to be engaged in the gentle art of billiard-marking at a salary running to at least ten dollars a week. I recitethe history of Mr. Sloan to encourage the others. Our experiences with the American racing-man in this country justify us in assuming that he is an exceptionally sad dog at home. America is overrun with him, and while she has done everything that lay in her power to corral and exterminate him he still continues merrily on his wicked way.
It only remains to point out that the Americans as a people are frantic gamblers, and that they are infatuated enough to regard gambling as a form of sport. Probably more gambling at cards goes on in the United States than in the whole of the countries of Europe put together. The proper American is everlastingly playing at poker, which is a bluffing game, and which he will assure you trains him for his business. The American card-sharper has been famous in song and story time out of mind. For sheer coolness, audacity, and skill at the job, he has never had an equal. Occasionally he lands on these shores, with a picturesque entourage, takes a flat in the West End of London, and relieves the adolescent gentry of the neighbourhood of their little alls. Then he is up and off, on the wings of the morning.
Among themselves, too, the Americans play a great deal of roulette, petit chevaux,and kindred fascinations. They count also amongst the most enthusiastic patrons of Monte Carlo, where season after season many of them turn up with very little money and make a fat thing of it. Last season a long-haired gentleman from Kansas City scooped up between two and three hundred louis a night for twenty nights running by the simple process of walking from table to table and backing 17. He told me that he and his wife were there for a little trip, and that he had hit on the 17 idea because 17 was the number of their cabin on the liner which brought them over. Of course 17 can refuse to come up at Monte Carlo for hours at a time. But whenever this raw-boned large-handed citizen of Kansas chose to put money on it, up it came inside two or three spins.
There are American gamblers at Monte Carlo, however, who are not by any means so consistently lucky as my friend. The money some of them get through when they are having a bad time would probably astonish the old folks at home. But it is only fair to them to say that they take their losses with an unruffled, if rather moist, brow and go off solemnly to cable for further supplies.
When a certain sort of Americanmillionaire turns up in the Mediterranean paradise there are sure to be merry doings. I have seen such a one mop his wet face after handing the bank a bundle of notes that would have made a tidy year’s income for a man with a large family, and remark, a little feebly, “Gee whizz!” Then he was led gently away by a number of pretty ladies.
It is in what one may term hard gambles such as he gets at Monte Carlo that the American shows his most sportsmanlike qualities. At roulette, or trente et quarente, it is almost impossible for him to cheat, and consequently he wins or loses more or less calmly and with perfect honour. But at poker—tut—tut!
(decorative flower image)
(decorative flower image)
The national peril of the United States is hogs. Of the peculiar and subtle influences which have driven most Americans into the pig business I find it impossible to formulate any reasonable account. Of course, there is the fact that the pig business has large monies in it, and that America is a country in which it would seem you have only to tickle a little pig with a hoe to turn him into a fine fat porker.
There can be no doubt whatever that a very large percentage of Americans think, talk, and raise pig throughout the whole of their natural lives. This industry appears to be of such a fascinating character that when once you have got into it you cannot possibly get out of it. Even if you wax unrighteously rich and get elected to Congress and move your family to New York, you still stick to pork and lard as if they were your brother. I understand that many of the ball-rooms in the big brown stone mansions in Fifth Avenue are waxed with lard.
I do not know whether there were any pigs in America before the PilgrimFathers landed. But it is certain that there are millions of them there now, and that they eat apples and grow wondrous frisky and have a good time of it—till killing day comes around. And it is precisely here that the frightful Americanism of the hog begins. For the wicked pig, like the wicked man, has a knack of finding his way to Chicago—which, as all the world now knows, is the most bloodthirsty, sultry, and unregenerate city on the face of the earth. In this place they kill pigs by the thousand daily. Hoggish shrieks rend all the air, the stores and warehouses groan with the pig’s dismembered parts, and the odour of his frizzling adipose tissue is in every nostril.
It seems to me more than likely that the pig owes the beginnings of his present supremacy in the United States to the Irish, who are pretty thick upon the ground there. An Irishman without a pig in one form or another would in all likelihood take cold, or die of heart-ache. In his own distressful Island, the Irishman and his pig live on terms of freedom and fraternity that put the American Constitution to the distinct blush. Not only does the pig pay the greater proportion of rent that gets paid in Ireland, but he is the friend and playmate of the family, and is invariably accorded a cosycorner for himself on the domestic hearth.
It seems only natural, therefore, that in emigrating to the States, the Irishman who could manage it would insist on taking with him one or more pigs, probably as much for company’s sake as for any other reason. And behold the result! What was a simple and very human foible on the part of the Irishman, has become, with the American, a raging and soul-consuming obsession. Pork, pork, pork, pork, pork! That is the cry that rises daily and hourly to heaven from the greater part of the United-States-half of North America. Everybody is concerned in it; everybody has money in it; everybody wants to get more money out of it. The pig is rushed through his feeds, weighed every morning till he has assumed the right specific gravity, hurried off by car to his doom, killed and slain on the no-waiting-here principle, and turned into hams, sides, lard, brawn, and sausages for the delectation of a hungry world before he has a chance to say George Washington.
America as a country, and the Americans as a people, depend upon hogs for their prosperity to an extent that is appalling. Upon the dead weight of him in the warehouses, and upon his firmness, or want of it, in the markets, hangs thestability of all sorts of stocks, shares, bonds, debentures, and general securities. If pig is “up,” America is a land of contented households and smiling faces. If pig is “down,” she is plunged forthwith into the deepest woe and the meanest irritability.
All of which affords one further striking evidence that the Americans are really a wonderful people, and that they deserve the generous tributes of praise that they so consistently and lavishly draw upon themselves.
A nation whose principal diet is pea-nuts, and whose principal profit is derived from the sale of pigs, is obviously pretty low down in the scale of civilisation. A hog tender cannot by any chance be the finest kind of man, neither can a pork butcher or a wholesale ham merchant. And every American who is not a member of a trust, or a pastor of a church, or a boss billposter, or a missionary, or a comic singer, is either a hog tender, a pork butcher, or a wholesale ham merchant. At any rate, so one gathers from the authorised reports.
And just as nut-chewing is responsible for certain grave weaknesses in the American character, so is pig-dealing. The pig and the potato have made the Irishman the idlest man in the world. The pig takes no rearing, and the potatois such a lively and prolific tuber that it will grow almost without planting. The Irishman has reaped the full disadvantages incident to these merits in the pig and the potato. And one feels sure that the American is suffering equally from the effects of the pig. I have no wish to reopen the box of horrors which was introduced to our notice some time back by the author of “The Jungle.” That gentleman did his work thoroughly, and the atmosphere is even yet redolent in consequence. It does not concern me that Chicago meats, tinned or cured, are not always entirely fitted for human consumption, or that the Chicago method of treating such meats are uncleanly, or that the Chicago idea of industrial efficiency is a perverted one. What does concern me is that Chicago is an American city, built by Americans, run by Americans, and made lurid by Americans—on pig.
To suggest to the American reformer that he should take steps for the immediate extermination of the pigs in America, steps, in fact, such as have been taken with a view to the extinction of the rabbit in Australia, would be to fill him with horror and amazement. He is all for the amelioration and improvement and cleaning up of Chicago; he does not see that it is the pig and thegreat American people who are the root trouble. Prohibit the breeding and rearing of pigs throughout the United States, and you will have gone much further towards the cleaning up of Chicago, and, for that matter, the cleaning up of America, than you are ever likely to get by dealing simply with Chicago itself. So long as there are pigs, so long will Chicago reek. Abolish pigs, and you have abolished the worst features of the world’s foulest city.
The reformer will find that my suggestion is an impracticable one. He may even go the length of calling it frivolous and ridiculous. But we shall see what we shall see. America will one day either have to forsake pig or come to very bitter grief. She is already in considerable straits as to the marketing of her porcine staples. She has shoved them down the necks of her own people till they can no more. She is pushing them down English throats with all the force that in her lies, and the limit is within a very little way of being reached. Do as one will, one cannot consume more than a certain amount of American pig in the course of the day’s deglutition. Europe is taking far more than is good for her even now, and yet the American demand is for bigger sales and extended markets, to prevent the stuff from rottingat home. The position is unfortunate in quite a number of senses; but it is precisely what any prescient American ought to have expected. America is overdoing it in the matter of pig, just as she is overdoing it in most other matters. When you have got the measure of people’s hunger and purchasing capacity you cannot appreciably increase them by any amount of advertising or bluff.
The Americans boast that they can sell everything appertaining to a pig save and except the squeal. I don’t wish to frighten them, but it would not surprise me in the least if within the space of a few years the large accumulation of squeals which they must, by this time, have on hand were to arise up as it were, and din their ears in a manner which they will not relish.
I may remark finally that in spite of everything that Chicago may say and publish in their praise, there can be no question that American pig products are of a most inferior and unappetising quality as compared with the real article. American hog meat exhibits a coarseness of grain and a crudeness of flavour which will incline any person of gustatory discrimination to the abstention of the Hebrew. Eggs and bacon constitutethe English national breakfast dish; ham and eggs are the sure rock and support of our country inns and cheap restaurants. Both these dishes have, however, fallen into sad disrepute during late years, and I have no hesitation in attributing this grave and heartrending circumstance to the fact that the bacon and ham nowadays served are almost exclusively American.
The gentlemen from the other side must excuse me if I appear as he would phrase it, “to tread somewhat too severely on his face”; but I really mean him no evil. Rather do I wish him all manner of good.
Besides which it is one’s duty to be patriotic; and charity—even in the article of pig—should begin at home.
(decorative flower image)
Before I leave the jury of potent, grave and reverend Britishers to their own reflections on the subject before them, it may be well to indulge in a little summing-up.
I have shown that the fiery, untameable American is a creature of more than doubtful antecedents, and that he conceals beneath a veneer of smartness and originality several qualities of mind and heart that are not greatly to his credit. I have shown that his destiny would seem to lie in the direction of a reversion to a condition of pseudo-barbarism which will in many respects identify him with the aboriginal possessors of his country. Already the face, features and body of him are becoming plainly Red-Indianised. Already his talk contains hints and suggestions of “war-paint,” the “war-path,” the “tomahawk” and the getting of “scalps.” If I mistake not the rest is bound soon to follow.
I have shown also that the American woman, in so far as she is exhibited to us in London, and on the Continent of Europe, is a somewhat frivolous female, and not always comely; smart, possibly,and lively, possibly, but on the whole disposed to be too smart and too lively. I have given you a peep at the American millionaire, and found him wanting in everything but money, and not invariably too well provided with that. I have pointed out that American advertising, whether for the sake of gain or of notoriety, is a shameless, blatant and undesirable affair. For the first time in history I have set it on record that the Americans eat too many pea-nuts. I have run the rule over their painful attempts at the dramatic art, and proved that in this important connection they have been responsible for many banalities and futilities, and that their average of performance is far below that of the rest of the theatre-using world. I have demonstrated, also, that their real metier is the giddy tenth-rate circus, ablast with drums and the roaring of wild beasts, the snuffling of freaks, and the shrieking mirth of the vulgar. I have paid a passing tribute to the integrity and blamelessness of their sportsmen. And I have warned them solemnly about pork. What more can be expected of me?
It is more than likely that I shall be told that I have chosen for the subject of my remarks a rather stodgy type of American, which is rapidly giving placeto a saner, wholesomer, and pleasanter type, resulting from the spread of culture and a modification of manners on the best European plans. To this I reply that I have spoken of the American exactly as he seems to me to be, and judged him on the numerous samples which have hitherto come my way. That there must be some residuum of sound and serious people in the United States seems probable, but I have never been to the United States.
Can anyone point to anything in the world that America is accomplishing which is purely and simply calculated to serve the highest interests of the human race? Can you look upon her trusts, her general methods of finance, her social and industrial system, her bosses, her political parties, the administration of her law, her press, her religious mountebanks, her quacks and charlatans of all conditions, and pronounce them to be good? Is it not the fact that these, in common with pretty well the whole of the remainder of her institutions, are not only defective, but a great deal more defective than one’s right to expect in view of the exceptional natural resources of the country and her great energy and wealth?
You are at liberty to answer these questions in any way you please; butthe conviction of myself and a by no means inconsiderable number of other persons will remain the same.
It is clear that if the Americans are going to take that exalted position among the nations to which they are for ever laying claim, they will be compelled to get rid of a great many excrescences of temperament which they seem now only too busy developing and emphasising by every means in their power.
Is it possible for them, in the nature of things, so to disencumber themselves?
Will they ever become a really free country, dethrone the millionaire and the boss and acknowledge honesty as a political virtue?
Will they ever put silencers on the yellow press and elect a congressional committee to examine the gangrenous decay of their wit and the dropsical growth of their emotions?
Will they ever make a point of keeping their women at home and give practical proof of their pride in the peaches by marrying them themselves?
Will they ever learn the English language which was the best thing imported in the “Mayflower”?
Will they ever get rid of the climatic influences that compel them to speak and sing through their noses?
Will they ever quote their astounding President at anything but a discount or realise that he is their greatest national asset?
Will they ever place a prohibitive tariff on noise and lynch sensation-mongers as they do niggers?
Will their playwrights ever learn the difference between a phonograph record and a play and will their audiences ever learn to appreciate acting when they see it?
Will they ever discover that sport is not merely a business of record breaking and that business and football, I class the two together, are not the sports of the stone age in which the vanquished was not only overthrown but subsequently utterly consumed?
Will they ever give up pea-nuts?
Will they ever cease from the blind cultivation of pork?
I trow not.
And as these chapters are intended a great deal more for the English than for the Americans, I may say here and now that it is the Englishman’s plain duty to himself and to the race to refrain as far as in him lies from the easy sin of imitation. In his admiration and envy for the magical and almost uncanny successes of his American brother, let him not becarried away with the stupid notion that it is possible for him to go forth and do likewise. For one thing, he hasn’t got the climate; and for another he hasn’t got either the pea-nuts or the pork.
Let the Englishman, therefore, be content to remain unreservedly and unsophisticatedly English. When he sees an American adaptation or invasion—whether commercial, social, religious, or otherwise—coming his way, let him frown it down, pass by it and flee from it. Such things may seem simple and innocuous and desirable enough in themselves, they may tickle the imagination, and they may even appear to be for the distinct betterment of mankind. But in the aggregate they must of necessity tend to the Americanisation of this Country—and that is an evil which every Britisher ought to be prepared to make any sacrifice to avoid.
If any profit worth having is to come out of the present welter it will come by the Anglicisation of America, and not by the Americanisation of England. The Americans themselves recognise the weight and importance of this fact. Some of them are already wearing eye-glasses. They smile in their sleeves at our readiness to adopt the least admirable of their multifarious foolish ways. When an American meets an Englishman who istrying to run his business or his household or other of his affairs after American models, and particularly when he meets an Englishman who looks upon the Americans as his superiors and masters at the game of life, he is sheerly, if unavowedly, amazed. He knows what America is, he knows in his heart what America means, and if it lay in his power to choose the place to which he will go when he dies, that place would not be Chicago, nor would it be even Paris, but a clean, free, un-Americanised England.
But with all their usually enormous and often brilliant faults—that amaze, even if they do not stagger humanity—the Americans are a nation of Cæsars. In every field of activity they have scored many triumphs. But they are not satisfied with acquisition and conquest on a colossal scale, they want to surpass all previous records in ancient or modern times. They are endowed with an inherent genius for arriving at their destination, and the destination they have set down for themselves in the national time-table is one in keeping with their vast and great country, whose mission it seems to be to make Europe and the world sit-up. Therefore, within the next decade or two, I should not be surprised to seea very much larger splash of purple on the map of the earth—and to see it called the American Empire.
(decorative flower image)
UNWIN BROS., LTD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND WOKING.