We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be a.s.similating, the different voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul, the Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically a.s.serting his origin in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans have as stolidly maintained their ident.i.ty for two centuries as the Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning another are as lively as ever, apparently, however the enmities may have worn themselves away. One need not record any of these English prejudices concerning the Scotch or Irish; they are too well known; but I may set down the opinion of a lively companion in a railroad journey that the Welsh are "the prize liars of the universe." He was an expert accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably afford them terms for p.r.o.nouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests, there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together the lovely September landscape through which we were running, and I ventured some remark upon the large holdings of the land: a thing that always saddened me in the face of nature with the reflection that those who tilled the soil owned none of it; though I ought to have remembered the times when the soil owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to strike him for the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary part of the English system; it had never occurred to him that there could be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot blame the others.
I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was he whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment in the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at least of a different mind concerning the Welsh. "These Welsh farmers,"
he said, "send their sons and daughters to college as if it were quite the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant sending his boy to a University!"
We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase are no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by which the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving through the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify because every part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an ill.u.s.tration of the reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide.
It was the acc.u.mulation, not merely within men"s memories, but within the actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great n.o.bleman who had contrived a t.i.tle in them by the simple device of enclosing the people"s commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of the wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through the broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to their aid. Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of our national foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin.
Doubtless the aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know what the attacks of the press amount to against the steadfast will of a powerful corporation, and a great n.o.bleman in England is a powerful corporation. In this instance he had not apparently taken the people"s land without some wish to make them a return for it. He had built a handsome road through their property, which he maintained in splendid condition, and he allowed them to drive over his road, and to walk freely in certain portions of their woods. He had also built a magnificent hospital for them, and it seemed rather hard, then, to hear that one of the humblest of them had been known to speak of him in whispered confidence as a "Upas tree."
XIII
Probably he was not personally a Upas tree, probably the rancor toward him left from being bawled after by one of his gatemen at a turning we had taken in his enclosure, "That"s a private path!" was unjust. There was no sign, such as everywhere in England renders a place secure from intrusion. The word "Private" painted up anywhere does the effect of bolts and bars and of all obsolete man-traps beyond it, and is not for a moment that challenge to the wayfaring foot which it seems so often with us; but the warnings to the public which we make so mandatory, the English language with unfailing gentleness. You are not told to keep your foot or your wheel to a certain pathway; you are "requested,"
and sometimes even "kindly requested"; I do not know but once I was "respectfully requested." Perhaps that n.o.bleman"s possession of these lands was so new that his retainers had to practise something of unwonted rudeness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At any rate, the rule of civility is so universal that the politeness from cla.s.s to cla.s.s is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare say he does not see everything, even the Argus-eyed American, but apparently the manners of the lower cla.s.s, where they have been touched by the upper, have been softened and polished to the same consistence and complexion. When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and insistences, and acceptances between people of condition, such as I witnessed once in a crowded first-cla.s.s carriage from London on an Oxford holiday, nothing could be more gently urgent, more beautifully forbearing. If the writers of our romantic novels could get just those manners into their fiction, I should not mind their dealing so much with the English n.o.bility and gentry; for those who intend being our n.o.bility and gentry, by-and-by, could not do better than study such high-breeding.
If we approach the morals of either superiors or inferiors, we are in a region where it behooves us to tread carefully. To be honest, I know nothing about them, and I will not a.s.sume to know anything. I heard from authority which I could not suspect of posing for omniscience that the English rustics were apt to be very depraved, but they may on the other hand be saints for all that I can prove against them. They are superst.i.tious, it is said, and there are few villages or old houses that have not their tutelary spectres. The belief in ghosts is almost universal among the people; as I may allow without superiority, for I do not know but I believe in them myself, and there are some million of American spiritualists who make an open profession of faith in them. It is said also that the poor in England are much spoiled by the constant aid given them in charity. This is supposed to corrupt them, and to make them dependent upon the favors of fortune, rather than the sweat of their brows. On the other hand, they often cannot get work, as I infer from the armies of the unemployed, and, in these cases, I cannot hold them greatly to blame if they bless their givers by their readiness to receive. If one may infer from the incessant beneficences, and the constant demands for more and more charities, one heaped upon another, there are more good objects in England than anywhere else under the sun, for one only gives to good objects, of course. The oppression of the subscriptions is tempered by the smallness of the sum which may satisfy them. "Five shillings is a subscription," said a friend who was accused of really always giving five pounds.
XIV
The English rich do not give so spectacularly as our rich do--that is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that there is no dest.i.tution, but only that the better off seem to have the worse off more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All this is believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the certainty of soup and flannel is bad for the soul of an old woman whose body is doubled up with rheumatism. The Church seems to blame for much of the evil that ensues from giving something to people who have nothing; but I dare say the Dissenters are also guilty.
Just how much is wanted to stay the stomach of a healthy pauper, it would be hard to say; but now and then the wayfarer gets some hint of the frequency if not the amount of feeding among the poor who are able to feed themselves. One day, in the outskirts--they were very tattered and draggled--of Liverpool, we stopped at a pastry-shop, where the kind woman "thought she could accommodate" us with a cup of tea, though she was terribly pressed with custom from all sorts of minute maids and small boys coming in for "penn"orths" of that frightful variety of tart and cake which dismays the beholder from innumerable shop windows in England. When we were brought our safer refection, we noted her activities to the hostess, and she said, "Yes, they all want a bit of cake with their tea, even the poorest"; and when we ventured our supposition that they made their afternoon tea the last meal of the day, she laughed at the notion. "Last meal! They have a good supper before they go to bed. Indeed, they all want their four meals a day."
Another time, thriftily running in a third-cla.s.s carriage from Crewe to Chester, I was joined by a friendly man who addressed me with the frank cordiality of the lower cla.s.ses in recognizing one of their sort. "They don"t know how to charge!" he said, with an irony that referred to the fourpence he had been obliged to pay for a cup of station tea; and when I tried to allege some mitigating facts in behalf of the company, he readily became autobiographical. The transition from tea to eating generally was easy, and he told me that he was a plumber, going to do a job of work at Llandudno, where he had to pay fourteen bob, which I knew to be shillings and mentally translated into $3.50, a week for his board. His wages were $1.50 a day, which the reader who multiplies fourpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, will find to be the wages of a good mechanic in the first Edward"s time, five hundred years ago. On this he professed to live very well. He rose every morning at half-past four, and at six he had a breakfast of bread, b.u.t.ter, and coffee; at nine he had porridge and coffee; at one, he had soup, meat, and eggs, and perhaps beer; at night, after he got home from work, he had a stew and a bit of meat, and perhaps beer, with Mother. He thought that English people ate too much, generally, and especially on Sunday, when they had nothing else to do. Most men never came home without asking, "Well, Mother, what have you got for me to eat now?"
When I remembered how sparely our farm people and mechanics fared, I thought that he was right, or they were wrong; for the puzzling fact remained that they looked gaunt and dyspeptic, and he hale and fresh, though the difference may have had as much to do with the air as the food. I liked him, and I cannot leave him without noting that he was of the lean-faced, slightly aquiline British type, with a light mustache; he was well dressed and well set up, and he spoke strongly, as North Britons do, with nothing of our people"s husky whine. I found him on further acquaintance of anti-Chamberlain politics, pro-Boer as to the late war, and rather socialistic. He blamed the labor men for not choosing labor men to office instead of the gentry who offered themselves. He belonged to a plumbers" union, and he had nothing to complain of, but he inferred that the working-man was better off in America, from the fact that none of his friends who had gone to the States ever came home to stay, though they nearly all came home for a holiday, sooner or later. He differed from my other friend, the accountant, in being very fond of the Welsh; it must be owned their race seemed to have acquired merit with him through the tip of two sovereigns which his last employer in Llandudno had given him. On the other hand, he had no love for the Italians who were coming in, especially at Glasgow. In Glasgow, he said, there were more drunken women than anywhere else in the world, though there was no public-house drinking with them as in London. This, so far as I got at it, formed his outlook on life, but I dare say there was more of it.
XV
I was always regretting that I got at the people so little, and that only chance hints of what they were thinking and feeling reached me.
Now and then, a native observer said something about them which seemed luminous. "We are frightfully feudal," such an observer said, "especially the poor." He did not think it a fault, I believe, and only used his adverb intensifyingly, for he was of a Tory mind. He meant the poor among the country people, who have at last mastered that principle of the feudal system which early enabled the great n.o.bles to pay nothing for the benefits they enjoyed from it. But my other friend, the plumber, was not the least feudal, or not so feudal as many a lowly ward-heeler in New York, who helps to make up the muster of some captain of politics, under the lead of a common boss. The texture of society, in the smarter sense, the narrower sense, is what I could not venture to speak of more confidently. Once I asked a friend, a very dear and valued friend, whether a man"s origin or occupation would make any difference in his social acceptance, if he were otherwise interesting and important. He seemed not to know what I would be at, and, when he understood, he responded with almost a shout of amazement, "Oh, not the least in the world!" But I have my doubts still; and I should say that it might be as difficult for a very cultivated and agreeable man servant to get on in London society, as for an artist or poet to feel at home in the first circles of New York. Possibly, however, London society, because of its almost immeasurable vastness, can take in more of more sorts of people, without the consciousness of differences which keeps our own first circles so elect. I venture, somewhat wildly, somewhat unwarrantably, the belief that English society is less sensitive to moral differences than ours, and that people with their little _taches_ would find less anxiety in London than in New York lest they should come off on the people they rubbed against. Some Americans, who, even with our increasing prevalence of divorces, are not well seen at home, are cheerfully welcomed in England.
Perhaps, there, all Americans, good and bad, high and low, coa.r.s.e and fine, are the same to senses not accustomed to our varying textures and shades of color; that is a matter I should be glad to remand to the psychologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire into such mysteries. One can never be certain just how the English take us, or how much, or whether they take us at all. Oftenest I was inclined to think that we were imperceptible to them, or that, when we were perceptible, they were aware of us as Swedenborg says the most celestial angels are aware of evil spirits, merely as something angular. Americans were distressful to their consciousness, they did not know why; and then they tried to ignore us. But perhaps this is putting it a little fantastically. What I know is that one comes increasingly to reserve the fact of one"s nationality, when it is not essential to the occasion, and to become as much as possible an unknown quality, rather than a quality aggressive or positive. Sometimes, when I could feel certain of my ground, I ventured my conviction that Englishmen were not so much interested in Americans as those Americans who stayed at home were apt to think; but when I once expressed this belief to a Unitarian minister, whom I met in the West of England, he received it with surprise and refusal. He said that in his own immediate circle, at least, his friends were interested and increasingly interested in America, what she was and what she meant to be, and still looked toward her for the lead in certain high things which Englishmen have ceased to expect of themselves. My impression is that most of the most forward of the English Sociologists regard America as a back number in those political economics which imply equality as well as liberty in the future. They do not see any difference between our conditions and theirs, as regards the man who works for his living with his hands, except that wages are higher with us, and that physically there is more elbow-room, though mentally and morally there is not. Save a little in my Unitarian minister, and this only conjecturally, I did not encounter that fine spirit which in Old England used to imagine the New World we have not quite turned out to be; but once I met an Englishman who had lived in Canada, and who, gentleman-bred as he was, looked back with fond homesickness to the woods where he had taken up land, and built himself a personable house, chiefly with his own hands. He had lived himself out of touch with his old English life in that new country, and had drawn breath in an opener and livelier air which filled his lungs as the home atmosphere never could again.
XVI
Yet he was standing stiffly up for himself, and strewing his convictions and opinions broadcast as the English all do when pressed by circ.u.mstance, while we, with none of their shyness, mostly think our thoughts to ourselves. I suppose we do it because we like better than they to seem of one effect with the rest of our kind. In England one sees a variety of dress in men which one rarely sees at home. They dress there not only in keeping with their work and their play, but in the indulgence of any freak of personal fancy, so that in the street of a provincial town, like Bath, for instance, you will encounter in a short walk a greater range of trousers, leggings, caps, hats, coats, jackets, collars, scarfs, boots and shoes, of tan and black, than you would meet at home in a month of Sundays. The differences do not go to the length of fashions, such as reduce our differences to uniformity, and clothe, say, our legs in knickerbockers till it is found everybody is wearing them, when immediately n.o.body wears them. Only ladies, of fashions beyond men"s, gratify caprices like ours, and even these perhaps not voluntarily. In the obedience they show to the rule that they must never wear the same dinner or ball gown twice, it was said (but who can ever find out the truth of such things?) that they sometimes had sent home from the dressmaker"s a number of dresses on liking, and wore them in succession, only to return them, all but one at least, as not liked, the dressmaker having found her account in her work being shown in society.
[Ill.u.s.tration: AN ENGLISH HOUSEMAID]
I do not know just what is to be inferred from a social fact or statement like this, but I may say that the devotion to an ideal of social position is far deeper with the English than with us. Whether we spend more or not, I believe that the English live much nearer their incomes than Americans do. I think that we save more out of our earnings than they out of theirs, and that in this we are more like the Continental peoples, the French or the Italians. They spend vastly more on state than we do, because, for one thing, they have more state to spend on. A man may continue to make money in America, and not change his manner of living till he chooses, and he may never change it. Such a thing could not happen to an Englishwoman as happened to the elderly American housewife who walked through the magnificent house which her husband had bought to surprise her, and sighed out at last, "Well, now I suppose I shall have to keep a girl!" The girl would have been kept from the beginning of her husband"s prosperity, and multiplied, till the house was full of servants. If you have the means of a gentleman in England, you must live like a gentleman, apparently; you cannot live plainly, and put by, and largely you must trust to your life-insurance as the fortune you will leave your heirs. It cannot be denied that the more generous expenditure of the English adds to the grace of life, and that they are more hospitable according to their means than we are; or than those Continental peoples who are not hospitable at all.
A thing that one feels more and more irritatingly in England is that, while with other foreigners we stand on common ground, where we may be as unlike them as we choose, with the English we always stand on English ground, where we can differ only at our peril, and to our disadvantage.
A person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The effort involved in distinguishing ourselves breeds a sort of annoyance, or call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad conscience; and in our sense of hopeless perdition we turn vindictively upon our judge. But that is not fair and it is not wise; he does not mean to be our judge, except when he comes to us for the purpose; in his own house, he is civilly unaware of putting us to any test whatever. If you ask him whether he likes this thing or that of ours, he will tell you frankly; he never can see why he should not be frank; he has a kind of helplessness in always speaking the truth; and he does not try to make it palatable.
XVII
An English Radical, who would say of his King no more than that he was a good little man, and most useful in promoting friendship with France, was inclined to blame us because we did not stay by at the time of our Revolution, and help them fight out as Englishmen the fight for English freedom. He had none of the loyalty of sentiment which so mystifies the American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia which should not be of political but of economical cast. But one was always coming upon ill.u.s.trations of the loyalty of sentiment with which of course one could have no quarrel, for their patriotism seldom concerned us, except rather handsomely to include us. The French have ceased to be the hereditary enemy, and the Russians have now taken their place in the popular patriotism. I always talked with the lower cla.s.ses when I could, perhaps because I felt myself near them in my unworthy way, and one evening in a gra.s.sy lane I made the acquaintance of a friendly man letting his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the livery-stable line, but he had been a soldier many years. Upon this episode he became freely autobiographical, especially concerning his service in India. He volunteered the declaration that he had had enough of war, but he added, thoughtfully, "I should like to go out for a couple of years if there was any trouble with Russia."
The love of England comes out charmingly in the swarming of English tourists in every part of their country. Americans may sometimes outnumber them at the Continental shrines, but we are in a pitiful minority at the memorable places in England; in fact, we are nowhere beside the natives. I liked their fondness for their own so much that I never could feel the fine scorn for "trippers" which I believe all persons of condition ought to a.s.sume. Even when the trippers did not seem very intelligently interested in what they saw, they were harmlessly employed, for a scene of beauty, or of historic appeal, could not be desecrated by the courtships which are constantly going on all over England, especially at the holiday seasons.
The English are, indeed, great holiday-makers, even when past the age of putting their arms around one another"s waists. The many and many seaside resorts form the place of their favorite outings, where they try to spend such days and weeks of the late summer as their savings will pay for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year round for these vacations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pounds, repair to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its a.n.a.logue in their neighborhood, and lavish them upon the brief joy of the time. They take the cheaper lodgings, and bring with them the less perishable provisions, and lead a life of resolute gayety on the sands and in the sea, and at the pier-ends where the negro minstrels and the Pierrots, who equally abound, make the afternoons and evenings a delight which no one would suspect from their faces to be the wild thing it is. If they go home at the end "high sorrowful and cloyed," there is no forecast of it in their demeanor, which is as little troubled as it is animated.
The young people are even openly gay, and the robustness of their flirtations adds sensibly to the interest of the spectator. Our own public lovers seem of a humbler sort, and they mostly content themselves with the pa.s.sive embraces of which every seat in our parks affords an example; but in England such lovers add playful struggles. A favorite pastime seemed to be for one of them to hold something in the hand, and for the other to try prying it open. When it was the young man who kept his hand shut, the struggle could go on almost indefinitely. I suppose it led to many engagements and marriages.
When the young people were not walking up and down, or playfully scuffling, they were reading novels; in fact, I do not imagine that anywhere else in the world is there a half, or a tenth part, so much fiction consumed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at the volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it was all out of the circulating library. As there were often several young women to one man, most of the girls had to content themselves with the flirtations in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines were always prying the heroes" hands open. On every seat one found them poring upon the glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume under the arm, and another clasped to the heart. At places where the hand played, and they were ostensibly listening to the music, they were bowed upon their books, and the flutter of the turning leaves almost silenced the blare of the horns. By what inspiration they knew when _G.o.d Save the King_ was coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common, I should not be able to say. Perhaps they always reached the end of a story at the time the band came to that closing number, or perhaps they felt its imminence in their nerves. The fiction was not confined to the young girls, however. Both s.e.xes and all ages partook of it; I saw as many old girls as young girls reading novels, and mothers of families were apparently as much addicted to the indulgence. I suppose they put by their books when they took tea, which is the other most noticeable dissipation in England. But I cannot enter upon that chapter; it is too large a theme; I will say, merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth Avenue, so the tearooms are in every part of the island.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS]
XVIII
It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian Sabbath was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last I have a more cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in London, where as many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets symbolized a world abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the forenoon. Even then, the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to them were the scenes of an activity which was not without gayety, and certainly not without noise; and when the afternoon came, the lower cla.s.ses, such as had remained in town, thronged to the public houses, and the upper cla.s.ses to the evening parade in the Park. As to the relative amount of church-going, I will not even a.s.sume to be sure; but I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to be. Still, in provincial places, I found the churches full on a Sunday morning, and all who could afford it hallowed the day by putting on a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn outside of London on week-days. The women, of course, were always in their best on Sunday.
Perhaps in the very country the upper cla.s.ses go to church as much as formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much obliged to it in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their inferiors.
Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.
But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained at home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally conscienced, as those who came to America in the times of the successive Protestant fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The home-keeping English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the peoples who still acknowledged as their head "the Bishop of Rome."
Their greater morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than spiritual, and, leaving the church to look after religion much more than our Puritans did, they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists of New England were almost essentially different from the Calvinists of Holland, of France, even of Scotland. If our ancestors were the children of light, as they trusted, they were darkened by the forest, into which they plunged, to certain reasons which the children of darkness, as the Puritans believed the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers from the world about them. There is no denying that with certain great gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized, and that if they lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while the others, who lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate handsomely. From our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able to imagine a life more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life from which theirs must look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man feels within himself the prompting to be something better or higher than he is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a n.o.bility, a n.o.bility supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a system of government kept, by a.s.sent so general that the dissent does not matter, in the hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society so intimately and thoroughly self-acquainted that one touch of gossip makes its whole world kin, and responsive to a single emotion; with a charity so wisely studied, and so carefully applied, that restive misery never quite grows rebellious; with a patriotism so inborn and ingrained that all things English seem righteous because English; with a willingness to share the general well-being quite to the verge, but never beyond the verge, of public control of the administration--with all this, the thing must strike the unbelieving observer as desperately perfect. "They have got it down cold," he must say to himself, and confirm himself in his unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.
XIX
The best observer of England that ever was, he whose book about the English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back for him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits, brought to bay by certain great English friends of his, who challenged him to say whether there really were any Americans with an American idea, and a theory of our future. "Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of Congress, neither of President nor of Cabinet Ministers, nor of such as would make of America another Europe.... I opened the dogma of no-government and non-resistance, and antic.i.p.ated the objections and the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, It is true that I have never yet seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet ... "tis certain, as G.o.d liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution.... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of the view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman; that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London or in Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, "_Messieurs, je n"en vois pas la necessite_."" In other words, Emerson laid before his great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be, of philosophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance than it would if now presented to the most respectable of his American readers. Yet it is never to be forgotten that it was the English who, with all their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to which their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only form of Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless indeed the German Mennonites are the same as the earlier English Quakers were in creed and life. In the pseudo-republic of the Cromwellian commonwealth the English had a state as wholly without liberty, equality, and fraternity as in the king-capped oligarchy they had before and have had ever since. We may be sure that they will never have such another commonwealth, or any resembling ours, which can no longer offer itself as an eminent example.
The sort of Englishmen, of whose respect Americans can make surest are those English thick-and-thin patriots who admire force and strength, and believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon mission to possess the earth, and to profit by its weaker peoples, not cruelly, not unkindly, yet unquestionably. The Englishmen of whose disrespect we can make surest are those who expect to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity in the economic way, the political way having failed; who do not care whether the head of the state is born or elected, is called "King" or called "President," since he will presently not be at all; who abhor war, and believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and these only if they work for a living. They have already had their will with the existing English state, until now that state is far more the servant of the people in fetching and carrying, in guarding them from hard masters and succoring them in their need, than the republic which professes to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. When one encounters this sort of Englishman, one thinks silently of the child labor in the South, of the monopolies in the North, of the companies which govern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Englishman is not silently thinking of them too. He is probably of the lower cla.s.ses, and one consoles one"s self as one can by holding one"s head higher in better company, where, without secret self-contempt, one can be more openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our increasing territory, and our warlike adequacy to a first position among the nations of the world. There is no fear that in such company one"s national susceptibilities will be wounded, or that one will not be almost as much admired for one"s money as at home. I do not say quite, because there are still things in England even more admired than money. Certainly a very rich American would be considered in such English society, but certainly he would not be so much considered as an equally rich Englishman who was also a duke.
I cannot name a n.o.bleman of less rank, because I will not belittle my rich countryman, but perhaps the English would think differently, and would look upon him as lower than the latest peer or the newest knight of the King"s creation. The King, who has no power, can do almost anything in England; and his touch, which is no longer sovereign for scrofula, can add dignity and give absolute standing to a man whose achievements merit it, but who with us would fail of anything like it.
The English system is more logical than ours, but not so reasonable. The English have seen from the beginning inequality and the rule of the few.
We can hardly prove that we see, in the future, equality and the rule of the many. Yet our vision is doubtless prophetic, whatever obliquities our frequent astigmatism may impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range there is room for the play of any misgiving short of denial; but the English cannot doubt the justice of what they have seen without forming an eccentric relation to the actual fact. The Englishman who refuses the formal recognition of his distinction by his prince is the anomaly, not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone who declines a peerage is anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of the English system, as a true believer in the oligarchically administered monarchy, Gladstone was illogical, and Tennyson was logical.
THE END