CHAPTER VIIIAND EUROPE LAUGHS
Anattaché of one of the Continental Embassies to the King of England was dining at the Carlton with an American, an old friend of his. The room was filled with English and Americans. Almost all the English were men and women of title or rank, or both. Almost all the Americans were well known both at home and abroad because of their wealth, their fondness for display, and their intimacies and relationships by marriage with the aristocratic caste of Europe.
“You Americans are popular here,” said the diplomat.
“Yes,” assented the American.
“And on the Continent also,” said the diplomat.
“Yes,” replied the American. “How the German Emperor does love us—he is almost as enthusiastic about us as is King Edward.”
“You are popular,” went on the diplomat, “and very unpopular. You were never so popular nor so unpopular.”
“You mean we are unpopular because of the American trade invasion?”
“Not at all. That is a trifling matter. It concerns only the politicians and a few manufacturers and the farmers, and does not concern them very deeply. No—let me explain. Formerly we—and when I say ‘we’ I mean the upper classes of Europe, those which still rule, despite all this talk about the progress of Democracy—formerly we feared you; we pretended to despise you, but in fact we were afraid. You were the great experiment in Democracy, that is, in anarchy—in the rule of the masses, the mob. Your success meant serious trouble for us, if not the handwriting on the wall, because our masses were always thinking of you.”
Here the diplomat smiled peculiarly and glanced round the room.
“Now all that has been changed,” he went on. “Europe and America are better acquainted. We no longer fear you. Why should we?”
And again he paused to let his glance travelround the room, finally to rest with good-humored satire upon the American’s face.
“Yes—we understand you better. Our fears have been proved groundless, our suspicions have been justified. Your new path, after making a wide bend, has returned into the old historic highway of caste. And so our upper class, which hated you, now—well, it neither loves nor admires you, but it honors and courts you. It laughs a little at your pretensions to birth. But it respects the solid foundation of your aristocracy—wealth. For, no matter what we may pretend, not blood, but money, wealth, is the essence of aristocracy. As for our masses, that once looked up to you as their ideal——” He shrugged his shoulders.
“They no longer look up to us?”
“They look down upon you. They see that you, too, have your dominating class just as they have. And they prefer their own kind of upper class as less sordid, less vulgar, the embodiment of a more inspiring ideal. So long as they knew you only by report they believed in you; and that belief still makes them restless under us. But now that they have seen you, now that you are constantly in evidence, they see that their hopes—at least sofar as they were based upon you—were a foolish dream. They prefer their own princes to ‘bosses’ and upstart newly-rich.”
“But suppose these Americans whom you see over here and whom you read most about are not representative?”
The diplomat smiled. “I have heard that before,” said he. “But, my dear friend, they are representative. Your country has changed and you do not realize it. You are deceived, not we. You are like the Romans who thought they had a republic when, in fact, the republic had been dead five hundred years. Think a moment. What sort of men did you formerly send to us as diplomats? And what sort of men do you send now? What has become of the old horror of court dress and rank and precedence which they used to exhibit? You cannot deny that your diplomats are representative. And are they not of the same class as these ladies and gentlemen about us here, so obviously delighted with themselves and their aristocratic company, with themselves because of their company?”
There is much truth in the diplomat’s comments on the state of European public sentiment towardAmerica. And the change is, as he said, due to better acquaintance. Europe thinks it has discovered that as soon as an American rises in prosperity above the mass of his fellow-citizens, he enters an actual ruling class that dictates and disdains the laws, uses them for enriching himself and for exploiting the mass of his fellow-countrymen. Europe thinks that as soon as he reaches this stage he turns his eyes longingly toward the Old World monarchies and begins to plan to become as nearly like the aristocrats as possible. He may not flaunt his power—he must respect republican forms. But he may, and does, flaunt his wealth. And in Europe he can get open recognition of his superior rank when such recognition as it gets at home is indirect and more or less secret.
Thousands of Americans live in Europe. Every considerable city on the Continent has its American colony, and year by year these colonies grow apace. Americans—chiefly the women—have intermarried everywhere into the European nobility. Nearly all these expatriated Americans are people of means; many of them are rich. They lead lives of industrious idleness. Many of them frankly express their contempt for the country from whichthey draw their incomes, the country but for which they would be miserable peasants, sweating for the amusement of some European land-holder.
It is fortunate that their dislike of their native land has been strong enough to take them away and to keep them away; it is a pity that the migrating impulse does not seize upon more of their kind. The world has room for idlers—it has room for all sorts of people. But America has no room for them. That great workshop wants no idlers obstructing the aisles and hindering the toilers at their tasks. That would be a sorry day for us when our rapidly growing leisure class should “civilize” and “refine” America into an agreeable place of residence for “ladies” and “gentlemen” of the European pattern.
These Americans who have “outgrown” their country serve to confirm Europe in the suspicions raised by the news that has reached it of stupendous aristocratic changes in the American people, of rotten political machines ruled by the rich, of toll-gates set up on every highway of American trade and commerce for the tax-gatherers of plutocracy, of a people fatuously imagining that it is free because it can go to the polls and freely choose whichof two sets of candidates shielded by the plutocracy shall make and execute the laws. This brings up the whole subject of our relations with “abroad”—and the social and political meaning and tendency of those relations.
A few years ago Paris was the paradise of Americans, especially of the Americans of wealth. It is so no longer. It is now for them a mere stopping-place for buying clothes—a pauseen routeto the true, fashionable, American Mecca, London. A few years ago Americans, except those of the ordinary sight-seeing, mind-improving kind, loathed London. They knew few people there—and, like Vienna, London is an impossible place for the stranger in search of amusement; if he does not know natives, is not invited to their houses, a soundless desert is a cheerful, companionable place in comparison. Further, such English as the rich, fashionable, amusement-hunting American knew—that is, such Englishmen “of the right sort”—were about as friendly and sociable as they are to their servants. But that was before the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance.”
The change came with the British discovery that the American multi-millionaire and the Americanheiress were not, as had been supposed, rarities found only occasionally after long search through trackless and vast wildernesses of “unspeakable bounders,” but were deposited in “the States” in quantities, were easily accessible, were yearning for high society, for aristocracy, for titled friends, for titled alliances. This was tidings of great joy to the English aristocracy. For an aristocrat may not work; and no matter how heavily “endowed” a title may be, values will shrink as time passes—not to speak of those savage “death duties” which the rascally Liberals enacted to the infuriating of the upper classes, who yet dare not repeal them.
The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” began forthwith. Scores of English upper-class families opened their hearts and their hearths to their “cousins across the sea.” The more American friends one accumulated the more likely was one to find an American multi-millionaire or so among them, or at least to be by way of getting into touch with American multi-millionaires or within “touching” distance of them.
To realize to what an extent the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” was and is based upon this notion, one must realize how all-powerful the upper class isin England, and how inarticulate, how socially, politically and in every public way insignificant, are the English masses, including the bulk of the middle classes. When you speak of English public sentiment you mean the sentiment of the London drawing-rooms. They are filled with the governing class, which constitutes parliaments and ministries; they dominate the journalists, who are either of the upper class or desperately struggling to get into it; they also dominate the masses who have been trained by centuries of unbroken custom to bow before rank and title.
There were excellent reasons in international politics for England’s turning favorable, friendly, even enthusiastic eyes upon America. But there could not have been this present passionate, personal love, this daily and hourly working of that toothless old saw, “blood is thicker than water,” had there not existed a reason which appealed directly to the personal and family self-interest of every member of nearly every upper-class family in England.
And soon the German Emperor and those about him, all of a high and impoverishing nobility, began to work the same trusty, but never now-a-daysrusty, old saw about the thickness of blood and water—are we not “Germanic,” we Americans? But the motive which is the less with the King and the upper classes of England is the stronger with our tempestuous German suitor—the motive of political, or, rather, industrial friendship. He feels that in dining and wining and treating, “just as if they were equals,” American owners of yachts and multi-millionaires, he is endearing himself to the American people. For, like practically the whole of Europe to-day, he thinks America is no longer a Democracy, but a thinly disguised plutocracy. And the more he reads and hears of the power and prestige of American multi-millionaires at home, the more firmly is he convinced that when he is tickling the vanity of these “dollar-swollen upstarts,” he is sending delicious thrills up and down the spine of the American eagle.
Yes, European princes and potentates are rubbing noses and back-scratching in the friendliest, most democratic fashion in the world, with such of the American people as can afford to visit Europe in royal luxury and get themselves admitted to royal inclosures. The object of these condescensions to our fellow-countrymen is to improve therelations between sundry European monarchies and the American people. A worthy object, as is any which has at bottom the promoting of peace on honorable terms. But Europe is wasting energy in misdirected effort. It assumes that these American beneficiaries have the same “rank” at home that similarly fortuned Europeans have in their countries. And, not unnaturally, it is confirmed in its false notion by many a petty success through this courtship of snobbish plutocrats and plutocratic diplomats.
The American multi-millionaire and his wife and his son and his daughter—again this does not mean all Europe-visiting Americans of wealth—are directly responsible for Europe’s present opinion of the American brand of Democracy. For they—not unnaturally—wish to make themselves out the relative equals of their titled and exalted friends. They begin to “talk tall”; and, being far away from home, they soon are thinking as tall as they talk. They confirm each other in the idea that they are really the “whole show” at home. They return with retinues of caste-trained, servile domestics; they live in colonies in our own cities into which none but dollar-hunters and dollar-worshiperspenetrate. The political bosses court them, give them laws and senatorships and diplomatic posts in exchange for campaign contributions. Their infatuation grows apace.
Thus the American fresh from America finds London—let us confine ourselves to the one capital as typical—a strange, humorous spectacle in the fashionable season. He can hardly believe his own eyes and ears. A week or two, and so persistent are the impressions of a true American nobility visiting Europe that he almost feels that he has been asleep with Rip Van Winkle and has awakened to a new country and a new order in which there is no American Republic.
And we are only at the beginning. The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” between the English upper class and the American aspirants to be thought “upper class,” the dragging in of the rich American pilgrim out of the fog to the cheeriest corner of the English fire, these are matters of yesterday. And already Paris gets but a glance from the rich Americans, and the most foresighted of Paris shopkeepers are establishing London branches for the “Anglo-Saxon” American who no longer can spare the time from his or her English social duties tomake the outfitting trip across the English Channel. To-morrow—The English hearth is large; there is room on it for every presentable or hope-inspiring American who can afford to cross the Atlantic; and the news of the jollity of the London season and of the round of English house parties is spreading in America and is attracting the pretentious society of all the large American cities. The “Alliance” is indeed booming.
It is not through English aversion to the Atlantic voyage that, though we are the sought, we go to the home of the seeker to be sought. The English upper classes would come to us if we insisted upon it, although the item of expense looks larger to them than to us. But we do not insist upon it. Our “leisure class” is made far more comfortable in England than it is at home. America has no such facilities as has England for amusing sheer idleness in ways that are not undisguisedly inane. Through several centuries, the filling in of the idle hours of professional idlers has been a study there; the houses, the streets, the theatres, the restaurants, the whole social system is adapted to it.
Further, the American can feel so “tall,” can believe so thoroughly in his own aristocracy andaloofness above the general run of mankind when there are three thousand miles of barren water between him in his grandeur and the shop where he worked as a “clark,” or the cabin where his father was born, or the back yard where his mother, in gingham, hung out the wash. Thus, the Americans in search of “the high life” for which they yearn prefer to go to it rather than to have it brought to them.
“As I study your countrymen here and get their views,” said an Englishman, famous as a lifelong admirer of America and of the democratic idea, “I become convinced against my will that your Democracy is dying. It seems the ideal of Democracy is too high to survive prosperity; apparently it can exist only in what one of your countrymen, writing in your simple days, called the atmosphere of plain living and high thinking. As soon as a man becomes prosperous he begins to ‘put on airs,’ as you Americans say. And the pity of it is that the less prosperous concede his superiority, and so make his ‘airs’ significant where they would otherwise be ridiculous. The reason our monarchies, that is, our monarchical governments and our aristocratic classes, are becoming friendly to you, isthat you are becoming like them. They concede something; but you—you concede your principles. They get something—cash dividends on their condescensions. But I’m blest if I can see whatyouget.”
To the stay-at-home American, or, for the matter of that, to the travelling American who retains his sense of proportion, the exaggerating of bumptious American “diplomats” and “dollarcrats” into a national phenomenon of peril, and the gloomy croakings or sardonic rejoicings in Europe over the decay of the American Republic may seem preposterous—as preposterous as an ambassador’s fancying that his ecstasies when a king claps him on the shoulder are the ecstasies of the entire American people. But it is a phenomenon that should not, that cannot wisely, be left out of account. Steam and electricity have bridged the chasm across which our ancestors fled to establish here a system based upon sanity, simplicity and justice. And at a peculiarly trying time there are crossing over to us European ideas and ideals that so dangerously disguise snobbishness and plundering and injustice under pretentious culture and such plausible frauds as the “natural leadership of theclasses that have demonstrated their superiority by success.”
The problem is often stated cart before the horse. “What will our plutocracy do with us?” men say in all seriousness. The question, in fact, is, “What shall we do with our plutocracy?” It has descended upon us swift as a cyclone, insidious as a plague. We had no adequate warning. We have not yet, as a people, grasped the situation in its fullness. Of all the cure-alls so confidently proposed by our political and sociological quacks, which one does not show on its very surface to any careful mind utter futility at best, disaster in the application as a highly probable event?
The plutocracy itself shares in the delusion of so many of our “publicists.” “What shall we do with America?” it insolently says in effect.
A little patience; a little time for our eighty millions, surcharged with Democracy, to weigh and measure and judge. Be sure, the dog will not be wagged by the tail. And before many decades European caste will see such a handwriting upon the western sky as has not terrified it since our Declaration of Independence.