The Great Stupidity

I

THE cynic who delights in registering human stupidities need never be at a loss for masterpieces to add to his collection. But the masterpiece of masterpieces, the Great Stupidity of these latter days, is surely that of the Britons and Americans who, thoughtlessly or wickedly, say and do things calculated to make bad blood between their two countries.

With those who do so wickedly I am not here concerned. They are not stupid in the ordinary sense of the term, but only as all criminals are stupid. They deliberately subordinate to motives of personal cupidity or spite the manifest interests of their country and, ultimately, of the world. There are, perhaps, more atrocious evildoers, but none meaner or more despicable. In saying this, I have in mind individuals and groups on both sides of the Atlantic.

I put aside also the Irish. Were I an Irish-American, I should probably make use of my opportunities to embroil the two countries with whose destinies that of Ireland is so inextricably interwoven. The historic case of Ireland against England is an enormously strong one, and recent history has enormously strengthened it. No doubt there have been black crimes and egregious blunders on both sides; but that is no defense for England. It was for her, as the stronger party in the case, to show wisdom and magnanimity; and these qualities have been sadly to seek in the record of her dealings with Ireland. Irish-American tactics are not, in my eyes, far-sighted, but they are extremely human. There is no use in quarreling with our fellow creatures because they are not angels.

It is the thoughtless mischief-makers — the people who are moved by mere ignorant and silly prejudice — who are guilty of the Great Stupidity. Here again I have my eye on individuals, on both sides of the water; but the culprits, in the mass, run into hundreds of thousands — into millions. They are more numerous, no doubt, in America, but they are more inexcusable in England. Americans have certain historic reasons for disliking us — bad reasons, but comprehensible. In England, on the other hand, we have no sane reason for disliking America — or, rather, we have precisely as much reason as the English have for disliking the Scotch, or the Scotch the English. The mutual antipathy of Scot and Southron was, as we know, pretty strong in the eighteenth century; and it lingers on to this day in certain quarters. Our neighbors naturally chafe us more than total strangers. Small differences of temperament, of accent, of standards, of sense of humor, irritate us more in people who are, on the whole, similar to ourselves, than in those who are wholly and inevitably dissimilar. Just to this extent is mutual dislike between Englishmen and Americans comprehensible; but everyone knows that these family jars arise from the foibles of our nature, and are corrigible by a very slight exercise of rational tolerance. The time is long past when the sense of unlikeness-in-likeness between an Englishman and a Scot led them to doubt or ignore the solidarity of their interests.

A patent, yet seemingly unconquerable, fallacy promotes ill-feeling between nations, and is not without its influence between Britain and America. All of us, I suppose, dislike with some intensity a good many of our own countrymen: but we do not, because Mr. Smith is a snob, Mr. Jones a bounder, and Mr. Thompson a tattling bore, go about asserting an unconquerable dislike for ‘the English’ as a nation.

Many English people, on the other hand, will profess to dislike ‘Americans’ in general because they have met two or three of that nation whose manners displeased them. Could there be any greater stupidity? I, for my part, know hundreds of Americans, and have met thousands. I do not profess to love them all, any more than I love all Englishmen. There are even some general traits of American manners,— let us say, for instance, the practice of indiscriminate introductions and hand-shakings, — which, I think, might well be amended. But do I therefore dislike America? On the contrary, the more I see of her, the more I am convinced that there is no country in the world where the average of human worth, the percentage of admirable human beings, is higher. The average may be somewhat pulled down, no doubt, by the large importation of the mere refuse and wreckage of Europe; but people are not necessarily worthless because they are unfortunate.

This large importation of alien elements is, of course, a factor in the problem by no means to be ignored. It lends color to the old protest — which Mr. Chesterton repeated the other day, as if it were something new and startling — against the bracketing of England and America as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nations. The term Anglo-Saxon always was unscientific, although not more so than most racial appellations. Ethnology is a science that revises its nomenclature every ten years or so. But though the word corresponds to no ethnological fact, it has a quite real historic and sociological meaning. To be sure, people of British ancestry are no longer largely predominant, in the United States; but it is no less true that the Republic remains, in its laws, traditions,and ideals, predominantly an Anglo-Saxon community. No Englishman in America feels himself in a foreign country, as he does in France, in Italy, or in Spain. America is different, but not foreign.

It is this very fact that makes American travel comparatively unattractive to many English people. Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, remind them of English provincial cities on a somewhat larger scale. They have none of the picturesqueness, the romance, the obvious foreignness, of Vienna or Moscow, of Lisbon or Genoa. It takes some effort of imagination to see in them the romantic and fascinating places they really are. It is much more of ‘a change’ to the Englishman to cross the Channel than to cross the Atlantic. Only after a time does he find in America that peculiar charm which England has for the Scot. He says, ‘This is no my ain hoose, I ken by the biggin’ o’t’; and the very subtlety of the differences gives him greater pleasure than he receives from the obtrusive foreignness of ‘Picturesque Europe.’

II

To an Englishman who is not entirely devoid of imagination, America brings a sense of incalculable enlargement of the powers and privileges conferred upon him by the accident of birth. His mother-tongue has made him free of this gigantic, this illimitable civilization, with all its stupendous achievements and its fabulous potentialities. He is akin by blood to the people who remain, in spite of all admixture, the leading factors in that civilization;¹ and he has no doubt that the non-English elements — all but one — will mean ultimate enrichment of the composite stock. For the calamitous presence of the African element he ought to feel co-responsible, since it is largely due to the sins of his forefathers. America, to put it at the very lowest, is a product, an extension of English history. It is born of the follies of English kings, the bigotry of English prelates, t he great ness and the littleness of English statesmen, the indomitable tenacity of British pioneers, the liberal conservatism of British nation-builders, and the magnanimity of two world-heroes who, though they never saw the shores of Britain, were none the less of the purest British blood. An Anglo-Saxon nation it certainly is not; but a creation of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, it as certainly is. The Englishman is either an ignoramus or a fool who does not recognize in his kinship to America an inestimable enhancement of his birthright.

It is not for a Briton to say how far an intelligent American ought to be moved by similar sentiments: how far he ought to feel his kinship, by blood or by adoption, to Britain and her history, an extension of his personality, an enrichment of his heritage. Perhaps I may, without offense, put it in this way: if my ancestors of the fourth or fifth generation had emigrated to America, instead of staying cannily in Britain, I feel sure that no conceivable folly of British politicians, or tactlessness of British tourists, would for a moment tempt me to renounce my hereditary share in the splendors of Lincoln and Durham and Salisbury, the unique beauties of Oxford and Cambridge, the associations of Stratford-on-Avon and the Lakes, of Edinburgh and Westminster.

There are, after all, features in English history which ought to appeal to the very Americanism of Americans. Not to go back to King Alfred or King John, they ought to remember that, if their immediate ancestors ‘threw a sovereign across the Atlantic,’ it was their remoter forbears who, along with ours, ‘garred kings ken they had a lith in their necks’ — taught kings that there were joints in their cervical vertebræ. It is easy to argue that that act was, at the moment, impolitic; but does anybody wish it undone? Does anybody doubt that it was, both symbolically and actually, one of the most august of historic transactions?

Again, the reflection that England has, four separate times, at intervals of a century, been largely instrumental in shattering gigantic dreams of WorldAutocracy ought not to discommend her in American eyes. She saved not only herself, but the Reformation, when she shattered the Spanish Armada. William of Orange and Marlborough saved Europe, and ultimately America, from falling under the domination of France. Trafalgar, the Peninsular War, and Waterloo baffled the grandiose ambitions of Napoleon. And, last but not least, it was British tenacity, leagued with the splendid valor of France, which brought the furious megalomania of Germany crashing to the ground. In all those historic crises Britain was, in a very real sense, fighting the battle of Americanism.

Nothing can ever undo the fact that, in the last and greatest overthrow of autocracy, America bore her part along with Britain and France. She ‘won the war’ in the sense in which the last straw broke the camel’s back; but she was a very substantial last straw, and no one can tell what might have happened if that straw had been withheld. Can anything be more ungenerous than to forget and belittle our gratitude to America on the ground that she ought to have come earlier into the struggle? I do not myself think that this is the case; but supposing it were so, are we to repudiate an obligation because it came a little tardily? Could there be a clearer sign of a base and paltry soul? Was it in a spirit of hypocrisy, or simply with an eye to the political exigencies of the moment, that Mr. Winston Churchill said, on the Fourth of July, 1918,—

‘Deep in the heart of the people of these islands, the heart of those who, in the language of the Declaration of Independence, are styled “our British brethren,” lay the desire to be truly reconciled before all men and all history with their kindred across the Atlantic Ocean, to blot out the reproaches and redeem the blunders of a bygone age, to dwell once more in spirit with them, to stand once more in battle at their side, to create once more a union of hearts, to write once more a history in common. That was our heart’s desire. It seemed utterly unattainable, but it has come to pass. However long the struggle, however cruel the victory, that supreme reconciliation will make amends for all. That is the reward of Britain; that is the lion’s share.’

These words were spoken on the eve of victory —are they to be falsified, forgotten, expunged from the international record, with all the fine phrases that were current in the hour of need? Is there to be no limit to the pettiness of spirit that is leading us to throw away with both hands all the most precious fruits of the great struggle and the great sacrifice?

III

Whatever be the reason, the fact is indisputable that, after our glorious comradeship in the greatest of wars, an impression is abroad on both sides of the Atlantic that Anglo-American relations are worse than they were before 1914. It was possible for Mr. Bernard Shaw to stand up a few months ago, and say that there was only one nation who hated us more than the Americans, and that was the French. Of course, this was fundamentally false; but it is sad that it should have even the superficial plausibility requisite for a Shavian paradox. The fact that such things can be light ly said and lightly accepted is a testimony to the prevalence among us of what I call The Great Stupidity. If it had been true, Mr. Shaw ought to have rent his garments and strewn ashes on his head before giving voice to such disastrous tidings.

That things have gone askew since the Armistice is, of course, true enough and deplorable enough. But to magnify light-heartedly some temporary disillusionment: into a permanent, or even serious, breach between the two countries is to treat the situation with a mischievous levity which is entirely out of place in view of the enormous interests at stake.

Let it not be thought that in appealing to the interests at stake I am lowering the plane of my argument. My plea is, first, last, and all the time, based on frankly utilitarian common sense. Sentiment has no absolute value. It is not a good-in-itself, but only as it ministers to the human well-being. That is the justification even of mother-love and of the love of man for woman; it is the sole and ample justification of the mutual respect and affection which ought to exist between Britain and America, which does exist in many British and American hearts. If I thought that the welfare of the world, or even of Britain, would be promoted by misunderstanding and enmity between the two countries, I would unhesitatingly join the ranks of the mischief-makers. But that opinion, as matters stand, cannot possibly be held by any rational and honest man. Therefore, I dismiss the deliberate fomenters of hatred (Irish apart) as either criminals or lunatics, while the inadvertent, thoughtless, babbling mischief-makers I set down as victims of the Great Stupidity.

The essence of the situation can be stated in very few words. If Britain and America stand back to back, they are so utterly unassailable that no external enmity need cause them one moment’s uneasiness, and they can devote themselves without let or hindrance to the solution of their manifold and pressing internal problems. If, on the other hand, they insist on standing face to face, exchanging glances of suspicion and covert defiance, and even (oh, folly of follies! oh, crime of crimes!) arming against each other, they leave their backs exposed to assaults from many quarters, while they wantonly spend their labor and their substance on that which profiteth not, or profiteth only the profiteer. If they live in amity and act in concert, they have the world at their feet; and the world can afford to leave them in that position, since they have no instinct and no motive to trample on it. Their desire is to live freely among free peoples; nor is there any justice in calling this profession hypocritical because history has brought them into relation with certain peoples as yet incapable of self-government. They possess at this moment — it has been forced upon them by circumstances — that Weltmacht in pursuit of which Germany stained her soul and forfeited her place among the nations. They possess it just so long and in so far as they make the most of that unity of sentiment and purpose which their common origin and common language seem to force upon them; but they can easily throw away their magnificent position of advantage, by listening to the mischief-makers, and drawing apart instead of pulling toget her. The future of the world depends upon whether enlightened magnanimity or pettifogging meanness shall gain the mastery in the souls of Britain and America.

I am not concerned to deny that the danger of the situation arises more from the American than from the British side. There is more active ill-will in America than in England. The average American citizen has been very imperfectly awakened to his citizenship of the world, and, in the lassitude following upon the war-fever, is even inclined to abjure and deny it. Disregarding the plain evidence of his senses, he yields, consciously and deliberately, to the illusion of the Atlantic, and vehemently assures himself that that ocean still exists, as it did in the days of Washington, Monroe, and Canning. He sees (what is quite true) that England needs America more obviously and immediately than America needs England; and he infers (what is quite false) that to admit the solidarity of their interests would be to acquiesce in a bad bargain. His secular tradition of aloofness, reinforced in some cases by historic rancors and antagonisms, blinds him to the enormous access of power, and economy of resources, that would result from a firm friendship and a working agreement between the two great English-speaking nations.

It is not for me to argue against this quite natural, though unenlightened, frame of mind. It is for Americans to demonstrate to their countrymen the advantage — nay, the imperative need — of enlightened magnanimity. My humbler task is to appeal to my own countrymen not to make the situation more difficult by impertinent criticism, ignorant condescension, and, in general, by silly chatter. It is an old but very true remark that community of speech, while it is undoubtedly the great bond between the two peoples, is also a fruitful source of misunderstanding and irritation.

IV

Sheer ignorance and lack of imagination lie at the root of all that is wrong in the British attitude toward America. We do not begin to realize the magnitude and the majesty of the phenomenon with which we have to deal.

Ask the average Englishman what he associates with the words ‘New York,’ what mental picture the name evokes for him, and there are ten chances to one that he will express himself in terms of vague depreciation and distaste. He will tell you of a noisy, nerveracking city, whose inhabitants are so intent on the pursuit of the elusive dollar that they habitually bolt their food at ‘quick-lunch’ counters, and seek to soothe their chronic dyspepsia by masticating either chewing-gum or big black cigars. He has heard of a clattering abomination called the Elevated Railroad; he has probably never heard of the Subway — most wonderful, if still inadequate, system of urban transit. The word ‘sky-scraper’ is, of course, familiar to him, connoting, in his imagination, a hideous monstrosity, which the Americans have somehow evolved out of the naughtiness of their hearts. He thanks his stars that such freaks arc impossible in England, where municipal wisdom has established a strict correlation between the height of buildings and the width of streets. Furthermore, he has heard of Tammany, a conspiracy of corruption, which keeps the city ill-paved, ill-lighted, and a prey to the alternate — or simultaneous — tyranny of brutal Irish policemen and indigenous ‘gunmen,’ who will shoot you as soon as look at you. Here, or hereabouts, his knowledge ends; and he will present this meagre caricature in a tone of pharisaism, congratulating himself that London (or Manchester, or Glasgow, as the case may be) is not crude and corrupt after the manner of New York.

No doubt there are shreds and patches of truth in the picture; but they are wholly inessential. The essential fact is that New York is by far the most magnificent and marvelous city in the whole world — a wonder to the eye and an incomparable stimulus to the imagination. Throned between its noble estuaries, it proclaims, in one majestic symbol, the supremacy of Man over Matter. Here we feel, for the first time in the modern world, — what the Roman of the Empire may have felt in a minor degree, — that, for all our puny proport ions, we belong to a race of titans. The sky-scraper was, in its beginnings, ugly and unimaginative enough; forty years of development have made it a thing of beauty, of power, of grandeur. And it is still — I will not say in its infancy, but — in its adolescence. The Singer building, the Metropolitan Tower, and the Woolworth building are not likely to be greatly overtopped. The sky-scraper, essentially a street tilted on end, is also inevitably a cul-de-sac; and a too long cul-de-sac is uneconomic and inconvenient. Besides, the development of the tower form — immense height on a relatively small base — is practically confined to Manhattan Island, with its rock foundations; in few other places would architects dare to pile up such enormous weights to the square foot. But there is boundless room for the lateral development of the moderately high building — the building of, say, 15 to 25 floors. Every year that passes adds some new triumph to the cyclopean architecture of New York. Park Avenue, though it contains no buildings of excessive height, will soon be like a boulevard of Brobdingnag — without any of the rude disproportion, however, that we might look for in the palaces of giants; and it is doubly impressive when we reflect that, unseen and unheard, the railway traffic of half a continent is gliding to and fro beneath its central gardens.

But this is no place to go into details. My point is that the miscalled skyscraper — the high building — is not a monstrosity, but a thing of great imaginative daring, sometimes ugly, no doubt, but more often truly grandiose and colossal. It first came into being, for topographical reasons, in the congested toe of Manhattan Island; but, in a modified form, it is certain to spread through all great cities. I do not mean that such windy canons as lower Broadway and Wall Street will arise in London and Paris, but that in all populous places great islands of beautiful architecture will stand out above the sea of ordinary fiveand six-story houses.

The typical New York office-building has enormous advantages. Go to see a publisher or a lawyer in London, and you find him installed in stuffy, dusty, insanitary chambers, perhaps in a converted dwelling-house of the eighteenth century, or two such dwellinghouses inconveniently run together — at all events, in a dingy rabbit-warren of a place. In New York you arc shot up in an express elevator to the twelfth or fifteenth floor of a vast building. If your business is with a lawyer, you pass along a spotlessly clean corridor, paved and lined with white marble, and you find him in a sunny, airy suite of rooms, high above the noises of the city, and looking out, it may be over the noble Hudson to the New Jersey shore, or over the series of gigantic bridges that span the East River — otherwise Long Island Sound.

If, on the other hand, your visit is to a publisher, you pass along no corridor, for the probability is that the elevator will land you right in his waitingroom. In all likelihood he occupies one whole floor of the great building, — half an acre of glass-partitioned space, — a busy hive of multifarious industry. It is comfort ably heated in winter, admirably ventilated in summer: the grubbiness and stuffiness of London are entirely absent. The publisher’s own sanctum is probably in a corner, with magnificent views in two directions over the endless expanse of the city, with its cliffs of masonry and its innumerable plumes of white steam. Air and sunshine penetrate everywhere — glorious sunshine being amazingly prevalent in New York.

Business has put off its grime, and has housed itself in the blue spaces of the sky. And we make it our foolish pride that we are earth-bound, and boast of our determined propinquity to the gutter!

People often ask why the practical Americans use four syllables to designate an appliance which we denote by the single syllable — lift. This is at first sight paradoxical; but after a few days in America, you realize that the two words are admirably appropriate to two very different things. The American elevator exhilaratingly elevates, the British lift laboriously lifts. I confess to taking great delight in the swift, sensitive machines that rush you up in the twinkling of an eye to the twentieth floor of a great hotel or business building. They are to the crawling, doddering British lift as a race-horse to a packmule. The tone of mind that professes to shrink in horror from such achievements of ‘mechanical civilization’ is one of the innumerable phases of the Great Stupidity.

But ‘elevator architecture,’ though the most prominent feature of New York and other American cities, is not the only evidence of the constructive genius of the race. In every type of building America leads the world. The finest railway-stations in Europe — Frankfort, Cologne, and the Paris Gare d’Orléans — are paltry in comparison with those vast palaces of marble and travertine, the Pennsylvania and the Grand Central termini, with the Union Station at Washington not far behind them. Each of the great New York stations is a city in itself. There has been nothing like them in the world since the Baths of Diocletian or of Caracalla. The Library of Congress and the Public Libraries of New York ² and Boston are stately and splendid beyond comparison; and even Detroit, which holds only the sevent h place among American cities, is housing its library in a superb white-marble palace. In domestic architecture, again, America easily holds the first place, having gone ahead with giant strides during the past quarter of a century. The typical brownstone dwelling of old New York was cramped, stuffy, and inconvenient. To-day the country or suburban homes, even of people of quite moderate means, are models of convenience and comfort — the abodes, in every sense, of the highest civilization.

V

I have dwelt thus far upon architecture because it is the outward and visible sign, if not of inward and spiritual grace, at any rate of a people’s energies, and, in no small measure, of its imagination. It may seem that I have weakened my effect by overworking my superlatives; but I know not how to convey the sense of stupendous magnitude in words of one syllable. And it is the stupendous magnitude of America, from every aspect and in every dimension, on which I wish to insist. Nature has made her huge, and man, in his efforts to tame her and harness her vastness, is only working to the scale set by nature. I am not, I think, insensitive to the historic associations of England or of Italy, of Egypt or of India; but in America the imagination is thrilled by the very fact that so much of her history is pre-historic. It is only yesterday that the first explorers blazed their trail into her pathless hinterlands and launched their canoes upon her mighty waters. Is there anything in nature so majestic and spirit-stirring as a great river? And are there any nobler rivers on earth than those of America? The traveler who does not study up his map in advance is constantly coming unawares upon majestic yet uncelebrated streams, which in Europe would be world-famous.

Not long ago, journeying from Massachusetts into New Hampshire, I found the train following for hours a beautiful river for whose existence I was quite unprepared. Inquiring its name, I learned that it was the Merrimac, and was further informed that it drove more spindles than any other river in the world. A little later, business took me to Binghamton, New York, and again a beautiful river lent dignity to an otherwise undistinguished town. Once more I had to confess my ignorance: this was the Susquehanna, just entering the State of Pennsylvania on its way to Chesapeake Bay.

Yet these are, so to speak, hole-andcorner rivers, not to be compared to the great arteries of the continent. The superb expanse of the Hudson puts Rhine and Danube to shame. No less grandiose than romantic is the confluence at Pittsburgh of the Allegheny and the Monongahela, with the tiny little blockhouse of Fort Pitt still occupying the tip of the tongue of land, overshadowed by the giant buildings of the City of Steel. And the Allegheny and the Monongahela unite in the mighty Ohio; and the mighty Ohio itself is but a tributary of the still mightier Mississippi, the Father of Waters. Without any disrespect to the Nile, the Euphrates, or the Ganges, great rivers of the past, I venture to find these great rivers of the future every bit as thrilling to the imagination.

There is no mass of territory on eart h that combines so many natural advantages as the United States. Other vast political units, such as Russia, China, Brazil, Australia, suffer from marked natural disabilities. The United States has temperate climate, great and varied fertility, enormous mineral resources, magnificent waterways, and two, or rather three, great stretches of seaboard, with many noble harbors. It borders on the Tropics and the Frigid Zone, and it faces the sea-fronts of Europe and Asia. In spite of all its diversity, it is a natural unit; and its unity has been vindicated and consecrated in a great war. With all its hundred million people, it is still greatly underpopulated. Unless human unwisdom should defeat the manifest tendency of things, the coming century will see it, incontestably and in every respect, the greatest of nations.

And this giant Commonwealth is English in speech, English in tradition, to a large extent English in race. Should we not esteem it a marvelous good fortune, which has linked us to it by so many impalpable yet indefeasible ties? And is it not the height of folly to ignore or make light of this providential relation? Is it not the depth of stupidity to convert what ought to be a source of strength and assurance to both nations into a fertile seed-plot of misunderstanding and disquietude?

VI

The present juncture of mundane affairs is not one in which any nation can afford to neglect sources of strength, or, in Shakespeare’s phrase, to ‘woo the means of weakness and debility.’ It would scarcely be extravagant to cite the ancient jest, and say that, if America and England cannot hang together, they stand a very good chance of hanging separate. Their solidarity is the one sure cornerstone of world-peace; and world-peace is indispensable to the fortunate solution of the internal problems which confront America no less menacingly than England. The founders of the commonwealth, while they sought religious and political freedom, brought with them, unchastened and uncriticized, the then current European views on the subject of property, with the result that the enormous resources of the country have been in a very great measure grabbed and exploited by individuals, to the detriment of the community at large. It is very doubtful whether the Unit ed States can properly be called the richest country in the world. It is the country of the richest men — a wholly different proposition. And that very fact is bound to make the inevitable economic readjustment a matter of great difficulty. Capital holds gigantic power, and is not going to see it impaired without a bitter struggle. There is a quite real sense in which it is to the interest of capitalism to foment suspicion and hostility between the Republic and the Empire; for insecurity is the one possible excuse for militarism, and militarism is the best ally of capitalism all the world over. It is hard to say how far this motive is consciously present to the minds of some, at any rate, of the people who are deliberately working to keep the two nations apart. But the Machiavellian mischief-maker might safely be left to do his worst if babbling ignorance and stupidity did not play into his hands. It is against this inadvertently disastrous influence that the present note of warning is raised.

Democracy will, indeed, prove itself to be incapable of self-preservation, if the mass of the people in England and America can long be blinded to the fact that their only hope of a just and (more or less) peaceful solution of the economic problems of the future lies in a cordial understanding between the two great English-speaking nations. If they are going to let themselves be dragooned into wars, or even beguiled into shouldering the burdens of compet itive armaments, the reign of social justice is indefinitely postponed, and can be reached only through bloody revolutions.

In the avoidance of such convulsions, moreover, lies the chief hope that the world may escape the gigantic and devastating color-wars with which it is otherwise threatened. Only by presenting an unassailable front to the possible mass-migrations of yellow and black peoples can the white peoples maintain their supremacy over Europe and America, and the present equilibrium of the races be perpetuated. If the colored races see no hope of mass-expansion, they will automatically check their fecundity, and remain content with the extensive portions of the planet which they at present possess, and from which they are not in the slightest danger of being ousted. If, on the other hand, they see a reasonable chance of supplanting the white occupants of any considerable extent of territory, they will in all probability justify the fears of the alarmists who prophesy race-wars of unexampled magnitude and horror. It is hard to believe that, after the experience of 1914 to 1918, the white peoples will be guilty of the suicidal folly of failing to show a united front. But a firm Anglo-Saxon understanding is certainly the keystone of the arch of the white world; and should that keystone split, who shall set a limit to the disintegration that may follow?

VII

It may seem an anti-climax to descend from world-wars to pin-pricks; but pin-pricks have before now altered the course of history, and gnat-stings have worked greater devastation than fire and sword. The practical upshot of all these reflections is an appeal to men of good-will on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially to my British fellow countrymen, to realize the enormous importance of Anglo-American relations, and not to throw away in childish levity or petulance the priceless advantages which history has conferred upon them. In dealing with America, let us always think twice before we speak once; and when we are tempted to speak unkindly or patronizingly, let us bite our tongue. Let those of us who know nothing of America at first-hand beware of showing off the second-hand prejudices and misconceptions that cluster round the word. Let us remember that we ourselves may say things about England which we should regard as impertinences in the mouths of strangers; and do not let us blame Americans if they are prone to the same foible. Let us not set up a foolish claim to exclusive proprietorship in the English language, and treat ‘Americanisms’ (which, five times out of six, are good old Anglicisms) as linguistic misdemeanors. Let us realize that any sort of flippancy is painfully out of place in dealing with Anglo-American relations, and that tact and delicacy are even more indispensable among relatives than among strangers.

This is not to say that serious, competent, courteous criticism ought to be tabooed. The time is long past when Americans were morbidly sensitive to the slightest unfavorable comment on their polity or their manners. They are very busy criticizing themselves (is not Main Street the popular novel of the day?), and are no more resentful than other people of outside criticism founded on knowledge and animated by good-will. It is the thoughtless jibe, the ignorant assumption of superiority, — in a word, the pin-prick, — that stings and rankles.

I will conclude with one or two examples. Sir Owen Seaman, in the preface, or prologue, to the latest volume of Punch, took it upon himself to read America a lecture in which a very thin veil of good-humor did not conceal a rather bitter undercurrent of ill-feeling. This document was too long to be discussed at length. I will only say that, even if Sir Owen’s reproaches had been just (which was far from being the case), he was under no compulsion to utter them, and would much better have held his peace. Furthermore, an Englishman who cites the attitude of England during the Civil War as a model for America to-day reveals a disconcerting depth of ignorance. The attitude of the British ministry and the British upper classes toward the cause of the Union is perhaps the episode in our international relations which Americans find it hardest to forgive.

A week or two after this editorial pronouncement, there appeared in the same paper a brief paragraph that affords an excellent example of the things we had much better leave unsaid: —

‘A new type of American warship is expected to be able to cross t he Atlantic in a little over three days. It will be remembered that the fastest of the 1914 lot took nearly three years.’

Probably the wit to whom we owe this scintillation intended no ill. He had his tale of bricks to supply, and it seemed to him the simplest thing in the world to throw one of them at the alleged tardiness of America in coming into the war. It did not occur to him that, even supposing she was unduly deliberate, she came in at last, came in superbly, saved a precarious situation, and has therefore claims upon the undying gratitude of all sane and rightthinking Englishmen. How base to go back to past faults, — if they were faults, — which have been redeemed, many times over, by conspicuous and decisive benefits!

No doubt it is taking a very heavy line to find baseness in an irresponsible comic paragraph; but my point is that, where Anglo-American relations are concerned, irresponsible flippancy is wholly out of place. Such a paragraph can at best do no good, and may do immeasurable harm: neither the world nor the paragraphist would have been perceptibly poorer had it been bluepenciled. I suggest that, when Mr. Punch is tempted to indulge in such merry jibes at the expense of America, he should recall and follow his own sagacious advice — ‘ Don’t! ’

Another form of mildly offensive insularity which might well be discontinued is the habit of pulling a wry face over American expressions, not because they are inherently bad, but simply because they are American. Here is an example from a review by Mr. J. C. Squire of a translation of the Goncourt Journal: —

‘It is an excellent free version; but one may just wish that Mr. West had not spoken of a pavement as a “sidewalk.” We shall be getting “trolleycar” and “hand-grip” acclimatized next.’

I do not pretend, of course, that any sensible American would take offense at a little faddish Anglicism like this; but it none the less indicates a sort of pedagogic habit of mind toward America, which is quite unreasonable and can do no good.

The pedagogue is in this case particularly ill-inspired. The Americans disclaim responsibility for ‘hand-grip,’ — a term unknown to them, — and may fairly inquire in what respect the illogical and inaccurate ‘pavement’ is preferable to the logical and accurate ‘sidewalk.’ The thing to be expressed is the portion of a street or road appropriated to pedestrians; and this, always a ‘sidewalk,’ is often a ' pavement ’ only by courtesy; while there are many ‘pavements’ which cover large areas and do not serve the purpose in question. It would be pedantry, of course, to suggest that we should drop the word ‘pavement’ because of its inaccuracy; but it is a much more futile pedantry to take offense at the more precise, descriptive, and (incidentally) more English term, because it happens to be preferred in America. As for ‘tram-car’ and ‘trolley-car,’ neither word is such a thing of beauty as to dispose me to perish in its defense. For my own part, I think the word ‘street-car’ preferable to either; but that, too, I fear, is open to a suspicion of Americanism.

The vague and unformulated idea behind all such petty cavilings is that the English language is in danger of being corrupted by the importation of Americanisms, and that it behooves us to establish a sort of quarantine, in order to keep out the detrimental germs. This notion is simply one of the milder phases of the Great Stupidity. The current English of to-day owes a great deal to America; and though certain American writers carry to excess the cult of slang, that tendency is not in t he least affecting serious American literature and journalism. Much of the best and purest English of our time has been, and is being, written in America. Not to speak of books, one may read the better class of American newspapers and periodicals by the hour without finding a single expression with any local tinge in it.

I do not say that the ‘Pure English’ movement, which is being actively pressed in America, is wholly superfluous. There are undoubtedly classes of the population which deliberately employ slovenly and degenerate dialects; but are there none such in England? The broad fact remains that no such degeneracy is traceable in literature or in the better sort of journalism. If English journalists make a show of arrogant and self-righteous Briticism, it is quite possible that a certain class of American journalists may retaliate by setting afoot a deliberately anti-British movement, and attempting (as an American writer has wittily put it) to ‘deserve well of mankind by making two languages grow where only one grew before.’ Already there are symptoms of such a tendency, and, though I do not think they are very serious, they point in a disastrous direction. Let us not foment them by a thoughtless and offensive insularism. To make our glorious common speech a subject of carping contention would be, perhaps, the most gratuitous and inexcusable form of the Great Stupidity.