It is not easy to imagine that in England the Counties, each with its separate and sovereign government, preceded the National Government and voluntarily called it into existence only as a federation of themselves. But that, we must for the present understand, was indeed the course of history; and when that federation was formed, the various Counties entrusted to the Central Government only a strictly limited list of powers. The Central Government was authorised to treat with foreign nations in the name of the United Counties; to maintain a standing army of limited size, and to create a navy; to establish postal routes, regardless of County boundaries; to regulate commerce between the different Counties, to care for the national coast line and all navigable waters within the national dominions, and to levy taxes for national purposes. All powers not thus specifically conceded to the central authority were, in theory at least, reserved by the individual Counties to themselves; and to-day a County government, except that it cannot interfere with the postal service within its borders, nor erect custom-houses on its County lines to levy taxes on goods coming in from neighbouring Counties, is practically a sovereign government within its own territory.

It is only within the last ten years that the right of the Central Government—the Crown—to use the King's troops to protect from violence the King's property, in the shape of the Royal mails, in defiance of the wishes of the Governor of a County, was established by a decision of the Supreme Court. The Governor protested that the suppression of mobs and tumults within his County borders was his business, his County police and militia being the proper instruments for the purpose, and for the Crown to intervene without his request and sanction was an invasion of the sovereign dignity of the County.

Although so much has been said on this subject by various English writers, from Mr. Bryce downwards, few Englishmen, I think, have comprehended the theoretical significance of this independence of the individual States, and fewer still grasp its practical importance. Perhaps the most instructive illustration of what it means is to be found in the dilemma in which the American government has, on two occasions in recent years, found itself from its inability to compel a particular State to observe the national treaty obligations to a foreign power.

The former of the two cases arose in Louisiana when a number of citizens of New Orleans (including not only leading bankers and merchants but also, it is said, at least one ex-Governor of the State and one Judge), finding that a jury could not, because of terrorisation, be found to convict certain murderers, Italians and members of the Mafia, took the murderers out of gaol and hanged them in a public square in broad daylight. The Italian government demanded the punishment of the lynchers, and the American government had to confess itself entirely unable to comply with the request. Whether it would have given the satisfaction if it could is another question; but the dealing with the criminals was a matter solely for the Louisiana State authorities, and the Federal Government had no power to interfere with them or to dictate what they should do. The only way in which it could have obtained jurisdiction over the offenders would have been by sending Federal troops into the State to take them by force, a proceeding which the State of Louisiana would certainly have resisted by force, and civil war would have followed. Ultimately, the United States, without acknowledging any liability in the matter, paid to the Italian government a certain sum of money as a voluntary solatium to the widows and families of those who had been killed, and the incident was closed.

The second case, which has recently strained so seriously the relations between the United States and Japan, arose with the State of California, which refused to extend to Japanese subjects the privileges to which they are unquestionably entitled under the "most favoured nation" clause of the treaty between the two governments. It is a matter which cannot be dealt with fully here without too long a digression from the path of our present argument, and will be referred to later. It is enough for the present to point out that once again the National Government—or what we have called the Crown—has been seen to be entirely incapable, without recourse to civil war, of compelling an individual State—or County—to respect the national word when pledged to a treaty with a foreign power.[264:1]

The States then, or Counties, are independent units, in each of which there exists a complete party organisation of each of the great parties, which organisations control the destinies of the parties within the County borders and have no concern whatever with the party fortunes outside. The great parties in the nation and in Parliament must look to the organisations within the several Counties for their support and existence. The loss of a County, say Hampshire, by the local Conservative organisation will mean to the Conservative party in the nation not merely that the members to be elected to the lower house of Parliament by the Hampshire constituencies will be Liberal, but that the County Legislature will elect two Liberal Peers to the upper house as well; and it is likely that in one or other of the two houses parties may be so evenly balanced that the loss of the members from the one County may overthrow the government's working majority. Moreover, the loss of the County in the local County election will probably mean the loss of that County's vote at the next presidential election, which may result in the entire dethronement of the party from power.

Wherefore it is obviously necessary that the party as a whole—in the nation and in Congress—should do all that it can to help and strengthen the party leaders in the County. This it does in contests believed to be critical, and particularly just in advance of a national election, by contributing to the local campaign funds when a purely County (State) election is in progress (with which, of course, the national party ought theoretically to have nothing to do) and in divers other ways; but especially by judicious use of the national patronage in making appointments to office when the party is in power.

The President—or let us say the Prime Minister—would rarely presume to appoint a postmaster at Winchester or Petersfield, or a collector of the port of Portsmouth or Southampton, without the advice and consent of the Hampshire Peers or Senators. And the advice of the Hampshire Peers, we may be sure, would be shaped in accordance with their personal political interests or by considerations of the welfare of the party in the County. They would not be likely to recommend for preferment either a member of the opposite party or a member of their own party who was a personal opponent. Moreover, besides the appointments in the County itself, there are many posts in the government offices in Whitehall, as well as a number of consulates and other more remote positions, to be filled. In spite of much that has been done to make the United States civil service independent of party politics, it remains that the bulk of these posts are necessarily still filled on recommendations made by the Congressmen or party leaders from the respective Counties, and again it is the good of the party inside those Counties which inspires those recommendations.

Thus we see how the national party when in power is able to fatten and strengthen the hands of the party organisations within the several Counties; and strengthen them it must, for if they lose control of the voters within their territory then is the national party itself ruined and dethroned.

And below the County party organisations, the County governments, are the organisations and governments in the cities, which again are split on precisely the same lines of cleavage. The City Council of Petersfield or Midhurst is divided into Conservatives and Liberals precisely as the Hampshire Legislature or the Parliament at Westminster. Jealousies often arise between the County organisations and those in the cities. The influence of Birmingham might well become overpowering in the Warwickshire Legislature, whereby it would be difficult for any but a resident of Birmingham to become Governor of the County or to be elected to the House of Lords. If the Birmingham municipal organisation chanced to be controlled by a strong hand, it is not difficult to see how he might impose his will upon the County Legislature and the County party organisation, how he might claim more than his share of the sweets and spoils of office for his immediate friends and colleagues in the city, to the disgust of the other parts of the County. For the most part, however, such quarrels, between the city and County organisations of the same party, when they arise, are but lovers' quarrels, rarely pushed to the point of endangering the unity of the party in the State at election time.

But now if we remember what was said at first, that no candidates for Parliament or other elected functionaries are "sent down" by a central organisation, but all are "sent up" from the bottom, the impulse starting from small meetings in public-house parlours and the like (in the case of cities, meetings being held by "precincts" to elect delegates to a meeting of the "ward," which meeting again elects delegates to the meeting of the city), when we see how the city can coerce the County and the County sway the nation, then we have also no difficulty in seeing how it is, as has been said already, that the same power that appoints a janitor in a town-hall may dictate the nomination of a President. Even more than the County organisation is to the national party, is the city organisation to the County. The party, both as a national and as a County organisation, must fatten and strengthen the hands of the city machine. Thus comes it that such an alderman as the Delectable One is unassailable. His power reaches far beyond the city. The party organisation in the city cannot dispense with him, because he can be relied upon always to carry his ward, and that ward may be necessary, not to the city machine only, but to the County and the nation.

It is hardly necessary to explain that in a general election in England the party which is returned to power need not necessarily have a majority of the votes throughout the country. A party may win ten seats by majorities of less than a hundred in each and lose one, being therein in a minority of a thousand; with the result that, with fewer votes than were cast for its opponents, it will have a clear majority of nine in the eleven seats. This is of course well understood.

But in an American general or presidential election, this anomaly is immensely aggravated by the fact that the electoral unit is not a city or a borough but a whole County or State. The various States have a voice in proportion to their population, but that vote is cast as a unit. A majority of ten votes in New York carries the entire thirty-seven votes of that State, while a majority of one thousand in Montana only counts three. There are forty-six States in the Republic, but the thirteen most populous possess more than half the votes, and a presidential candidate who received the votes of those thirteen, though each was won by only the narrowest majority, would be elected over an antagonist who carried the other thirty-three States, though in each of the thirty-three his majority might be overwhelming. Bearing this in mind, we see at once what immense importance may, in a doubtful election, attach to the control of a single populous State.

If in an English election, similarly conducted, the country was known to be so equally divided that the vote of Warwickshire, with, perhaps, twenty votes, would certainly decide the issue, the man who could control Warwickshire would practically control the country. We have seen further, however, that the man who controls Warwickshire will probably be the man who controls Birmingham. He may be the Mayor of Birmingham, or, more likely, the chairman (or "boss") of the municipal machine who nominated and elected the Mayor and whose puppet the Mayor practically is. It then becomes evident that the man who can sway the politics of the nation is not merely the man who controls the single County of Warwickshire, but the man who, inside that County, controls the single city.

To go a step below that again, the control of the city may depend entirely on the control of a given ward in the city. That ward may contain a very large labouring vote, by reason of the existence of a number of big factories within its limits. Unless that labouring vote can be polled for the Liberal party, the ward will not go Liberal, and without it the city will be lost. The loss of the city involves the loss of the County, and the loss of the County means the loss of the nation. The man therefore who by his personal influence, or by his leadership in a perfectly organised party machine in one ward of Birmingham, can be relied on to call out the full Liberal strength in that one ward of a single city may be absolutely indispensable to the success of the party in the country as a whole. And it is even conceivable that that man again may be dependent on one of his own henchmen, the "Captain" of a single precinct in the ward or the man who has the ear and confidence of the hands in the largest of the factories.

Let me not be understood as saying that the personal influence of an individual may not be extremely powerful in an English election; and that power may rest, similarly, on his popularity in, and consequent ability to carry with him into the party fold, one particular district. But there is not the same established form of County government on avowedly national lines, nor the same city government, as in America, through which that influence can make itself definitely and continuously felt.

* * * * *

We will state the situation in another way, which will make it clear to Englishmen from another point of view:

Let it be imagined that at the next general election in England, the decision is to be arrived at by a direct vote of the country as a whole for a Conservative or a Liberal Prime Minister. Instead of each County and borough electing its members of Parliament (they will do that only incidentally) the real struggle will take the form of a direct contest between two men. Each of the great parties will choose its own candidate, and the Conservatives have already nominated Mr. Balfour. It remains for the Liberals to name their man who is to run against Mr. Balfour. The selection is to be made in a National Convention, to be held in Manchester, at which each County will be represented by a number of delegates proportioned to its population. Those delegates have already been elected in each County by local meetings within the Counties themselves, and in nearly every case the delegations so elected will come into the Convention Hall at Manchester prepared to vote and act as a unit. Whether that has been arrived at by choice of the individual Counties when they elected their delegations or whether the Convention itself has decided the matter by adopting the "unit rule" does not matter. The fact is that each county will be compelled to vote in a body, i. e., that if London has forty votes and Kent twenty, those forty votes or those twenty will have to be cast solidly for some one man. They cannot be split into thirty votes for one man and ten for another; or into fifteen for one man and one each for five other men.

The Convention meets and it is plain from the first that the two strongest candidates are Lord Rosebery and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. There are scattering votes for Mr. Morley and Mr. Asquith, each of them getting the vote of one or more small Counties. But after the first ballot, which is always more or less preliminary, it is apparent that neither of those gentlemen can hope to be chosen, so the Counties which voted for them, having expressed their preference, proceed on the next ballot to give their suffrages either to Lord Rosebery or to Sir Henry. The second ballot is completed. Every County has voted, with the result that (out of a total vote of 521, of which 261 are necessary for a choice) there are 248 votes for Lord Rosebery and 253 for Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. But there is still one County which has not voted for either. Kent at both ballots has cast its twenty votes for Mr. Will Crooks. The reason why Kent does this is because the representatives from Woolwich and the neighbourhood are a numerical majority of the Kent delegation and those men are devoted to Mr. Crooks.

The third ballot produces the same result: Rosebery 248; Bannerman, 253; Crooks, 20. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh ballots show no change except that once in a while Rutland with three votes and Merioneth with four have amused themselves or caused a temporary flutter by swinging their votes from one side to the other or, perhaps, again casting them for Mr. Morley or Mr. Asquith. There is a deadlock. The Convention becomes impatient. The evening wears on and midnight arrives and still there is no change. Neither Lord Rosebery nor Sir Henry can get the extra dozen votes that are needed: still with regularity when the name of Kent is called the leader of the delegation rises and responds "Kent casts twenty votes for William Crooks."

At last in the small hours of the morning something happens. How it has been arrived at nobody seems to know; but when the roll is called for the thirteenth time, Norfolk, heretofore loyal to Sir Henry, suddenly votes for Crooks. Tremendous excitement follows. The word goes round that Campbell-Bannerman is beaten; his friends have given up and it is useless to vote for him any longer. Meanwhile in the course of the evening feeling between the supporters of Sir Henry and the Roseberyites has grown so bitter that whatever the deserting Bannermanites do, they will not help to elect Lord Rosebery. Here and there a Scotch County remains firm to its leader, but Oxford swings off to Mr. Morley; Suffolk, amid yells that make it difficult to tell who the vote is cast for, follows Norfolk and plumps for Crooks. Sussex brings in Mr. Asquith again and Warwickshire goes for Crooks. Amid breathless silence the result of the thirteenth ballot is read out: Rosebery, 248; Crooks, 96; Morley, 72; Asquith, 50; Bannerman, 43; etc.

The fourteenth ballot begins. "Aberdeen!" calls the Chairman. The head of the Aberdeen delegation stands up in a suspense so tense that it almost hurts. "Aberdeen casts seventeen votes for Mr. Will Crooks!" In an instant the whole hall is filled with maniacs. County after County rushes to range itself on the winning side. Before the roll is more than half completed it is evident that Crooks must be chosen. Thereafter there is no dissentient voice. The ballot is interrupted by a voice which is known to belong to Lord Rosebery's personal representative. He moves that the nomination of Mr. Crooks be made unanimous. In a din wherein no voice can be heard the erstwhile leader of the Bannermanite forces is seen waving his arms and is known to be seconding the motion. In ten minutes the hall is singing God Save the King and Mr. Will Crooks is the chosen candidate of the Liberal party to oppose Mr. Balfour at the coming election.

That is not materially different from what happened when Mr. Bryan was first nominated for the Presidency against Mr. McKinley—except that it did not take so long to accomplish. I have said that Mr. Bryan's nomination could have been defeated if a certain local delegation had been "attended to" in advance. What is to be noted is that Mr. Crooks has been nominated simply because he had a hold which could not be shaken on a small but compact body of men at Woolwich. It is true that it is not often that so dramatic a thing would happen as the nomination of Mr. Crooks himself but more frequently an arrangement—a "trade" or "deal"—would be entered into by which in consideration of the Crooks vote being thrown to one or other of the leading candidates, in the event of the latter's defeating Mr. Balfour and being elected to the Premiership, certain political advantages, in the form of appointments to office and "patronage" generally, would accrue, not necessarily to Mr. Crooks himself, but to his "machine," the citizens of Woolwich, and the Liberal party in the County of Kent at large. We see here how the local "boss" may become all-powerful in national affairs (and this is of course only one of fifty ways) and how the interdependence of the party in the nation with the party organisation in the County or the municipality tends to the fattening of the latter and, it must be added, the debauching of all three.

At the last general election in England, in January, 1906, there is no doubt that the Conservative party owed the loss of a large number of seats merely to the fact that it had been in office for so long, without serious conflict, that the local party organisations had not merely grown rusty but were practically defunct. In the United States the same thing, in anything like the same degree, would be impossible, because between the periods of the general elections (which themselves come every four years) come the State and municipal elections for the purposes of which the local party organisations are kept in continuous and more or less active existence. A State or a city may, of course, be so confirmedly Republican or Democratic that, even though elections be frequent, the ruling party organisation will become, in a measure, soft and careless, but it can never sink altogether out of fighting condition. When a general election comes round, each great party in the nation possesses—or organises for the occasion—a national committee as well as a national campaign organisation; but that committee and that national organisation co-operate with the local organisations in each State and city and it is the local organisations that really do the work—the same organisations as conduct the fight, in intermediate years, for the election of members to the State Legislature or of a mayor and aldermen. And each of those local organisations necessarily tends to come under the control of a recognised "boss."

Let us see another of the fifty ways in which, as has been said, one of these local bosses may be all-powerful in national affairs. A general election is approaching in Great Britain, and, as before, the Liberal party is in doubt whether to select as its candidate for the Premiership Lord Rosebery or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The political complexion of almost every County is known and there is no chance of changing that complexion—a condition, be it said, which exists in America in the case of a large majority of the States. It is evident that at the coming election the vote is going to be extremely close, the most important of the "doubtful" Counties being Lanarkshire, which has 25 votes; which 25 votes will of course be governed by the course of the working population of Glasgow. Whichever party can secure Lanarkshire's vote will probably be successful; so that the destiny of the country really depends on the temper of the labouring men of Glasgow. Glasgow has, let us suppose, a strong and well-organised local Liberal "machine" which carried the city at the last municipal election, so that the mayor and a large majority of the aldermen of Glasgow are Liberals to-day; and the dictator or "boss" of this machine is (we are merely using a name for the sake of illustration) Lord Inverclyde. Lord Inverclyde does not believe that Lord Rosebery is the right man for the Premiership. So he lets his views be known to the Liberal National Committee. "I am, as you know," he says, "a strong Liberal; but frankly I would rather see Mr. Balfour made Prime Minister than Lord Rosebery. Glasgow will not vote for Lord Rosebery. The party can nominate any other man whom it pleases and we will elect him. I will undertake to carry Lanark for Sir Henry or Mr. Morley or anybody else; but I warn you that if Lord Rosebery is nominated, we will 'knife' him"—that being the euphonious phrase used to describe the operation when a party leader or party machine turns against any particular candidate nominated by the party.

What are the party leaders to do in such a case? To nominate Lord Rosebery after that warning (Lord Inverclyde is known to be a man of his word) will be merely to invite defeat at the election; consequently, though he may be the actual preference of a large majority of the Liberals of the country, Lord Rosebery does not get the nomination. It goes to some one who can carry Lanarkshire,—some one, that is, who is pleasing to the boss of the local machine of Glasgow. It would be not unlikely that the national leaders might resent the dictation of Lord Inverclyde and might (but not until after the election was safely over) start intriguing in Glasgow politics to have him dethroned from the position of local "boss,"—might, in fact, begin "knifing" him in turn. Whether they would succeed in their object before another general election supervened would depend on the security of his hold on the local Liberal organisation; and that would depend on his personal ability as a politician and—very largely—on his unscrupulousness. For it may, I think, be stated as an axiom that no man can long retain his hold as "boss" of the machine in a large city except by questionable methods,—methods which sometimes involve dishonesty. He must—no matter whether he likes it or not—use his patronage and his power to advance unworthy men; and he must in some measure show leniency to certain forms of lawlessness. Otherwise the influence of the saloons, gamblers, keepers of disorderly houses, and all the other non-law-abiding elements will be thrown against him with sufficient weight to work his downfall.

Unscrupulousness and friendship with wickedness in the slums of a city may thus be the direct road to influence in the councils of the national party. When it is remembered that not a few large cities, and therefore some States, are practically controlled, through the balance of power, by voters of an alien nationality, it is further plain how such an alien vote may become a serious factor in the politics of the nation. Thus is the German element very strong in Milwaukee, and the Scandinavian element in the towns and State of Minnesota. Thus the Irish influence has been almost paramount in New York, though now outnumbered by Germans, Italians, and others; and it is there, in New York, that the conditions which we have imagined in connection with Glasgow and Lord Inverclyde are actually being almost exactly repeated in American Democratic politics as often as a general election comes round.

You may frequently hear it said in America that "as goes New York, so goes the country"; which is to say that in a presidential election the party which carries New York will carry the nation. In theory this is not necessarily so, although it is evident that New York's thirty-six votes in the electoral college must be an important contribution to the support of a candidate. In practice it has proven itself a good rule, partly by reason of the importance of those thirty-six votes, but more, perhaps, because the popular impetus which sways one part of the country is likely to be felt in others—that, in fact, New York goes as the country goes.

But let us assume that the New York vote is really essential to the election of a candidate—that the vote in the country as a whole is evidently so evenly divided that whichever candidate can win New York must be elected the next President. Tammany Hall is a purely local organisation of the Democratic party in New York City. New York State, outside the city, is normally Republican, but many times the great Democratic majority in the Metropolitan district has swamped a Republican majority in the rest of the State. That Democratic vote in the Metropolitan district can only be properly "brought out" and controlled by Tammany; so that the cordial support of Tammany Hall, though, as has been said, it is in reality a strictly local organisation, and as such is probably the worst and most corrupt organisation (as it is also the best managed) that has been built up in the country, may be absolutely vital to the success of a Democratic presidential candidate. Tammany is practically an autocracy, the power of the Chief being almost absolute. England and English society have had some acquaintance with one Chief, and do not like him. But, as Chief of Tammany Hall, it is easy to see how even a coarse-grained Irishman may become for a time influential in American national affairs—even to the dictating of a nominee for the Presidency.

I am not prepared to say that under the same conditions the same things could occur in England. What I am saying is that they do occur in the United States under conditions which do not exist in England; and, while it may be that British civic virtue would be proof against the manifold temptations of a similar political system, we have no sufficient data to justify us in being sure of it, nor is it wise or charitable to assume that because a certain number of American politicians yield to temptations which Englishmen have never experienced, therefore the people are of a less rigid virtue. Mr. Bryce has recorded his opinion that the mass of the public servants in America are no more corrupt than those in England. I prefer not to agree with him for, if it was true when he wrote it, the Americans to-day must be much the better, because since then there has unquestionably been an enormous improvement in the United States, while we have no evidence of a corresponding improvement in England. I believe, not only that many more public men are corrupt in America than in England, but that a larger proportion of the public men are corrupt, which, however, need not imply a lower standard of political incorruptibility: only that there are much greater opportunities of going wrong.

It is interesting to note, moreover, that in the public service the opportunities of malfeasance in public officers in Great Britain are increasing rapidly and, moreover, in precisely those lines wherein they have proved most demoralising in America. I have elsewhere recorded the apprehension with which many Englishmen cannot help regarding the closeness of the relations which are growing up between the national and local party organisations, but in addition to this the urban public bodies are coming to play a vastly larger role in the life of the people, while the multiplication of electric car lines and similar enterprises is exposing the members of those bodies to somewhat the same class of untoward influence as has so often proven fatal to the civic virtue of similar bodies in America. Whether, as a result, any large number of cases of individual frailty have exposed themselves, probably only those immediately interested know; the exposure at least has not reached the general public.

It may not, however, be amiss to remember that a century and a half ago, when the conditions in the two countries were widely different from what they are to-day, Benjamin Franklin, coming to England, was shocked and astounded at the corruption then prevalent in English public life.

* * * * *

The procedure of an American presidential campaign has been sufficiently often described for the benefit of English readers. Suffice it to say that it is devastating, at times almost titanic. I have had some experience of the amenities of political campaigning in England, but the most bitterly contested fight in England never produces anything like the intensity of passion that is let loose in the quadrennial upheavals in the United States.

It was my lot to be closely associated with the conduct of a national campaign—as bitterly fought a campaign as the country has seen since the days of the war,—namely that of 1896 when Mr. Bryan was the candidate of the Free Silver Democracy. Early in the fight I began to receive abusive letters, for which a large and capacious drawer was provided in the office, into which they were tossed as they came, on the chance of their containing some reading which might be interesting when the trouble was over. As the fight waxed, they came by every post and in every form, ranging from mere incoherent personal abuse to threats of assassination. Hundreds of them were entirely insane: many hundred more the work, on the face of them, of anarchists pure and simple. A large proportion of them were written in red ink, and in many—very many—cases the passions of the writers had got so far beyond their control that you could see where they had broken their pens in the futile effort to make written words curse harder than they would. The receptacle in which they were placed was officially known in the office as the Chamber of Horrors, but it was, I think, universally spoken of among the staff as the "Hell-box." Before the end of the campaign, capacious though it was, it was crowded to overflowing, and hardly a document that was not as venomous as human wrath could make it. Incidentally I wish to say that never was a campaign—at least as far as my colleagues in our particular department were concerned—more purely in the interest of public morality, without any sort of selfish aims, and less deserving of abuse. What the correspondence of a presidential candidate himself must be in like circumstances, it is horrible to think.[281:1]

The intense feverishness of the campaign is of course increased by the vastness of the country, the tremendous distances over which the national organisation has to endeavour to exercise control, and the immense diversity in the conditions of the people and communities to whom appeal has to be made. The voting takes place all over the country on the same day; and it must be remembered that the area of the United States (not counting Alaska or any external dependencies) is so great that it reaches from west to east about as far as from London to Teheran, and north and south from London to below the southern boundary of Morocco. The difficulty of organisation over such an area can, perhaps, be imagined. In the course of the campaign there came in one day in my mail a letter written on a torn half of a railway time-card. It ran:

"DEAR SIR—There is sixty-five of us here working in a gravel pit and we was going to vote solid for Bryan and Free Silver. Some of your books [i. e., campaign leaflets, etc.] was thrown to us out of a passing train. We have organised a Club and will cast sixty-five votes for William McKinley.—Yours, etc."

So far as those sixty-five were concerned our chief interest thereafter lay in seeing that the existence of that gravel-pit was never discovered by the enemy. A faith which had been so speedily and unanimously embraced might perhaps not have been unassailable.

Before leaving this subject it may be well to say a few words on a recent election in New York which excited, perhaps, more interest in England than any American political event of late years. The eminence which Mr. Hearst has won is an entirely deplorable thing, which has been made possible by the fact, already sufficiently dwelt upon, that political power in the United States is so largely exerted from the bottom up. In their comments on the incident after the event, however, English papers missed some of its significance. Most English writers spoke of Mr. Hearst's appeal to the forces of discontent as a new phenomenon and drew therefrom grave inferences as to what would happen next in the United States. The fact is that the phenomenon is not new in any way. Mr. Hearst, in but a slightly different form, appealed to precisely the same passions as Mr. Bryan aroused—the same as every demagogue has appealed to throughout, at least, the northern and western sections of the country any time in this generation. Mr. Hearst began from the East and Mr. Bryan from the West, but in all essentials the appeal was the same. And Mr. Hearst was not elected. And Mr. Bryan was not elected. What will happen next will be that the next man who makes the same appeal will not be elected also.

It is the allegory of the river and its ripples over again. Englishmen need not despair of the United States, for the great body of the people is extraordinarily conservative and well-poised. In America, man never is, but always to be, cursed. Dreadful things are on the eve of happening, and never happen. There is a great saving fund of common-sense in the people—a sense which probably rests as much on the fact that they are as a whole conspicuously well-to-do as on anything else—which as the last resort shrinks from radicalism. In spite of the yellow press, in spite of all the Socialist and Anarchist talk, in spite of corruption and brass bands and torchlight processions, when the people as a whole is called upon to speak the final word, that word has never yet been wrong. Perhaps some day it will be, for all peoples go mad at times; but the nation is normally sound and sane, with a sanity that is peculiarly like that of the English.

FOOTNOTES:

[264:1] I trust that, because, for the purpose of making an illustration which will bring the matter home familiarly to English minds, I speak of the States as English Counties, I shall not be suspected of thinking (as some writers appear to have thought) that there is really any historical or structural analogy between the two.

[281:1] None the less my friendly American critic (already quoted) holds, and remains firm in, the opinion that "however strenuous the fighting, the political issues produce no such social changes or personal differences in the United States as have frequently obtained in England, say at the time of the leadership of Gladstone, or more recently, in connection with the 'tariff reform' of Chamberlain." It is his contention that Americans take their politics on the whole more good-humouredly than has always been found possible by their English cousins, and that when the campaign is over, there is more readiness in the United States than in England to let pass into oblivion any bitterness that may have found expression during the fighting.



CHAPTER XI

SOME QUESTIONS OF THE MOMENT

Sovereign States and the Federal Government—California and the Senate—The Constitutional Powers of Congress and the President—Government by Interpretation—President Roosevelt as an Inspiration to the People—A New Conception of the Presidential Office—"Teddy" and the "'fraid strap"—Mr. Roosevelt and the Corporations—As a Politician—His Imperiousness—The Negro Problem—The Americanism of the South.

It was said that it would be necessary to refer again to the subject of the relations of the General Government to the several States, as illustrated by the New Orleans incident and the treatment of the Japanese on the Pacific Coast; and the first thing to be said is that no well-wisher of the United States living in Europe can help deploring the fact that the General Government has not the power to compel all parties to the Union to observe the treaties to which the faith of the nation as a whole has been pledged. It is a matter on which the apologist for the United States abroad has, when challenged, no defence. Few people in other countries do not consider the present situation unworthy of the United States; and I believe that a large majority of the American people—certainly a majority of the people east of the Rocky Mountains—is of the same opinion.

It is no excuse to urge that when another Power enters into treaty relations with the United States it does so with its eyes open and with a knowledge of the peculiarities of the American Constitution. This is an argument which belongs to the backwoods stage of American statesmanship. In the past, it is true, the United States has been in a measure the spoilt child among the nations and has been permitted to sit somewhat loosely to the observance of those formalities which other Powers have recognised as binding on themselves; but the time has gone by when the United States can claim, or ought to be willing to accept, any especial indulgences. It cannot at once assert its right to rank as one of the Great Powers and affect to enter into treaties on equal terms with other nations, and at the same time admit that it is unable to honour its signature to those treaties.

This, I say, is the general opinion of thinking men in other countries; but, however desirable it may be that the General Government should have the power to compel the individual States to comply with the requirements of the national undertakings, it is difficult, so long as the several States continue jealous of their sovereignty without regard to the national honour, to see how the end is to be arrived at.

The first obvious fact is that all treaties are made by the President "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate" and no treaty is valid until ratified by a vote of the Senate in which "two thirds of the Senators present concur." The Senate occupies a peculiar position in the scheme of government. It does not represent either the nation as a whole nor, like the House of Representatives, the people as a whole. The Senate represents the individual States each acting in its sovereign capacity[287:1]; and the voice of the Senate is the voice of those States as separate entities. When the Senate passes upon any question it has been passed upon by each several State and it is not easy to see how any particular State can claim to be exempt from the responsibility of any vote of the Senate as a whole.

It would appear to follow of necessity that when the Senate has by a formal two-thirds vote ratified a treaty, every State is bound to accept all the obligations of that treaty, not merely as part of the nation but as a separate unit. The provision in the Constitution which makes the vote of the Senate on any treaty necessary can have no other intent than to bind the several States themselves. As a matter of historical accuracy it had no other intent when it was framed.

In the particular case of the Japanese treaty, the time for the State of California to have made its attitude known was surely when the treaty passed the Senate. The California Senators, or the people of the State, had then two honest courses open to them. They could have let it be known unequivocally that they did not propose to hold themselves bound by the action of the Senate but would, if any attempt were made to force them to comply with the terms of the treaty, secede from the Union; or they could have determined there and then to abide loyally by the terms of the treaty and no matter at what cost to the State, or at what sacrifice of their amour propre, to see that all the rights provided in the treaty were accorded to Japanese within the State. Either of these courses would have been honest; and Japanese who came to California would have come with their eyes open. The course which was followed, of allowing them to settle in the State in the expectation of receiving that treatment to which the faith of the United States was pledged, and then denying them that treatment, was distinctly dishonest.

If, however, the State of California, or any other individual State, refuses to acknowledge the responsibilities which it has assumed by the vote of the Chamber of which its representatives are members, there appears no way in which the Federal Government can compel such acknowledgment except those of force and what the believers in the extreme doctrine of State Sovereignty consider Constitutional Usurpation.

It has in many cases been necessary as the conditions of the country have changed so to interpret the phrases of the Constitution as to give to the General Government powers which cannot have been contemplated by the framers of that instrument. In this case there is every evidence, however, that the framers did intend that the General Government should have precisely those powers which it now desires—or that the individual States should be subject to precisely those responsibilities which they now seek to evade—and if any sentence in the Constitution can be so interpreted as to give to the General Government the power to compel States to respect the treaties made by the nation, it seems unnecessary to shrink from putting such interpretation upon it.

Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to "regulate commerce with foreign nations"—and commerce is a term which has many meanings—as well as "to define and punish offences against the law of nations" and to "make all laws which shall be necessary for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." The President is invested with the power, "by and with the advice of the Senate, to make treaties," and he is charged with the duty of taking "care that the laws be faithfully executed." It would seem that among these provisions there is specific authority enough to cover the case, if the will to use that authority be there. And I believe that in a large majority of the people the will is there.

It would appear to be competent for Congress to "define" any failure on the part of the citizens of any State to comply with whatever requirements in the treatment of foreigners may be imposed on them by a treaty into which the nation has entered, as an "offence against the law of nations." This power of "definition" on the part of Congress is quite unhampered. So also is the power "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution" the powers of definition and punishment. And it would be the duty of the President and the Federal Courts to take care that the laws were executed.

If there would be any "usurpation" involved in such an interpretation of the phrases of the Constitution it is certainly less—much less, when regard is had to the intention of the framers of the Constitution—than other "usurpations" which have been effected, and sometimes without protest from the individual States; as, for instance, by the expansion of the right to regulate commerce between the several States into an authority to deal with all manner of details of the control of railways of which the framers of the Constitution never contemplated the existence. It cannot even remotely be compared with such an extension of the Federal power as would be involved in the translation of the authority to "establish post-offices and post-roads" as empowering the government to take an even larger measure of control over those railroads than can be compassed under the right to regulate commerce—a translation which seems to have the approval of President Roosevelt.

Incidentally it may be remarked that it would be peculiarly interesting if, at this day, that authority to construct post-roads should thus be invoked to give the General Government new powers of wide scope, when we remember that it was this same provision of the Constitution which stood sponsor for the very earliest steps which, in the construction of the Cumberland Road and other military or post routes, the young republic took in the path of practical federalism.

To those Americans who received the cause of State Sovereignty as a trust from their fathers and grandfathers before them, the cause doubtless appears a noble one; but to the outsider, unbiassed by such inherited sentiment, it seems evident, first, that the cause, however noble, is also hopeless; and, second, that it is unreasonable that in the forlorn effort to preserve one particular shred of a fabric already so tattered, the United States as a nation should be exposed to frequent dangers of friction with other Powers, and, what is more serious, should be made, once in every decade or so, to stand before the world in the position of a trader who repudiates his obligations.

And if I seem to speak on what is after all a domestic subject with undue vehemence (as I cannot hope that I shall not seem to do to the minds of residents on the Pacific Coast), it is only because it is impossible for an earnest well-wisher of the United States living abroad not to feel acutely (while it does not seem to me that Americans at home are sensible) how much the country suffers in the estimate of other peoples by its present anomalous position. When two business concerns in the United States enter into any agreement, each assumes the other to be able to control its own agents and representatives, nor will it accept a plea of inability to control them as excuse for breach of contract.

It may be that a select circle of the statesmen and foreign office officials in other countries are familiar with the intricacies of the American Constitution, but the masses of the people cannot be expected so to be, any more than the masses of the American people are adepts in the constitutions of those other countries. And it is, unfortunately, the masses which form and give expression to public opinion. In these days it is not by the diplomacies of ambassadors or the courtesies of monarchs that friendships and enmities are created between nations. The feelings of one people towards another are shaped in curious and intangible ways by phrases, sentiments, ideas—often trivial in themselves—which pass current in the press or travel from mouth to mouth. It is a pity that the United States should in this particular expose itself to the contempt of lesser peoples, giving them excuse for speaking lightly of it as of a nation which does not keep faith. It does not conduce to increase the illuminating power of the example of America for the enlightenment of the world.

It might be well also if Americans would ask themselves what they would do if a number of American citizens were subjected to outrage (whether they were murdered as in New Orleans, or merely forced to submit to indignities and inconvenience as in California) in some South American republic, which put forward the plea that under its constitution it was unable to control the people or coerce the administration of the particular province in which the offences were committed. Would the United States accept the plea? Or if the outrages were perpetrated in one of the self-governing colonies of Great Britain and the British Government repudiated liability in the matter? The United States, if I understand the people at all, would not hesitate to have recourse to force to endeavour to compel Great Britain to acknowledge her responsibility.

In the matter of the relation of the general government to the several States the most important factor to be considered at the present moment is undoubtedly the personality of President Roosevelt, and any attempt to make intelligible the change which has come over the United States of recent years would be futile without some recognition of the part which he has played therein. Mr. Roosevelt has been credited with being the author of "a revival of the sense of civic virtue" in the American people. Certainly he has been, by his example, a powerful agent in directing into channels of reform the exuberant energy and enthusiasm which have inspired the people since the great increase in material prosperity and the physical unification of the country bred in it its quickened sense of national life. In the period of activity and expansiveness—one is almost tempted to say explosiveness—which followed the Cuban war, such a man was needed to guide at least a part of the national energy into paths of wholesome self-criticism and reformation. He set before the youth of the country ideals of patriotism and of civic rectitude which were none the less inspiring because easily intelligible and even commonplace.[293:1] The ideals have, it is true, since then, perhaps inevitably and surely not by his will, been dragged about in the none too clean mud of party politics; but the impetus which he gave, before his single voice became largely drowned in the factional hubbub around him, endures and will endure. Whatever comes, the American people is a different people and a better people for his preaching and example.

Moreover, what touches the question of State sovereignty nearly, he has given a new character to the Presidential office. I have expressed elsewhere my belief that the process of the federalising of the country, the concentration of power in the central government, must proceed further than it has yet gone; but it is difficult now to measure, what history will see clearly enough, how much Mr. Roosevelt has contributed to the hastening of the process. No President, one is tempted to say since Washington, but certainly since Lincoln, has had anything like the same conception of the Presidential functions as Mr. Roosevelt, coupled with the courage to insist upon the acceptance of that conception by the country. Whether for good or ill the office of President must always stand for more, reckoned as a force in the national concerns, than it did before it was occupied by Mr. Roosevelt. A weak President may fail to hold anything like Mr. Roosevelt's authority; but the office must for a long time at least be more authoritative, and I think more honourable, for the work which he has done in it.

* * * * *

I first came in contact with Mr. Roosevelt some twenty-five years ago, when his personality already pervaded the country from the Bad Lands of Dakota to the Rocky Mountains. I had a great desire to meet this person about whom, not only in his early life but, as it were, in his very presence, myth was already clustering,—a desire which was almost immediately gratified by chance,—but the particular detail about him which at the time made most impression on my mind was that he was the reputed inventor of the "'fraid strap." The "'fraid strap" is—or was—a short thong, perhaps two feet in length, fastened to the front of the clumsy saddle, which, at signs of contumacy in one's pony, one could, with a couple of hitches, wrap round his hand, in such a way as to increase immensely the chance of a continuity of connection with his seat. The pony of the Plains in those days was not as a rule a gentle beast, and I was moved to gratitude to the inventor of the "'fraid strap"—though whether it was really Mr. Roosevelt's idea or not it is (without confession from himself) impossible to guess, for, as I have said, he was already, though present almost a half-mythical person to the men of the north-western prairie country.

What vexed me no little at the time was that it was with some effort that I could get his name right. I could not remember whether it was Teddy Roosevelt or Roosy Teddevelt. The name now is familiar to all the world; but then it struck strangely on untrained English ears and to me it seemed quite as reasonable whichever way one twisted it round. Mr. Jacob Riis (or Mr. Leupp) has protested against the President of the United States being called "Teddy" and we have his word for it that Mr. Roosevelt's own intimates have never thought of addressing him otherwise than as "Theodore." Doubtless this is correct (certainly I know men who assure me that they call him "Theodore" now) but at least the more friendly "Teddy" has, as is proved by that confusion in my mind of a quarter of a century ago, the justification of long prescription. Nor am I sure that it has not been a fortunate thing both for Mr. Roosevelt and the country that his name has been Teddy to the multitude. I doubt if the men of the West, the rough-riders and the plainsmen, would give so much of their hearts to Theodore.

It is not easy to estimate the value, or otherwise, of Mr. Roosevelt's work in that capacity in which he has of late come to be best known to the world, namely as an opponent of the Trusts; but it is a pity that so many English newspapers habitually represent him as an enemy of all concentrated wealth. He has been called "the first Aristocrat to be elected President." Whether that be strictly true or not, he belongs distinctly to the aristocratic class and his sympathies are naturally with that class. His instincts are not destructive. No one, I have reason to believe, has a shrewder estimate of the worthlessness of the majority of those politicians who use his name as a cloak for their attacks on all accumulated wealth than he. It is only necessary to read his speeches to see how constantly he has insisted that it is not wealth, but the abuse of it, which he antagonises: "We draw the line not against wealth, but against misconduct." He has many times protested against the "outcry against men of wealth," for most of which he has declared "there is but the scantiest justification." Again and again he has proclaimed his desire not to hurt the honest corporation, "but we need not be over-tender about sparing the dishonest."[296:1]

One of the chief difficulties in the practical application of his policies has been that the Government cannot have the power to punish dishonest corporations without first being entrusted with a measure of control over all corporate operations, the concession of which control the honest corporations have felt compelled to resist. Nor is it possible to say that their resistance has not been justified. However wisely and forbearingly Mr. Roosevelt himself might use whatever power was placed in his hands, there has been little in the experience of the corporations in America to make them believe that they can trust either office-holders in general or, for any long term, the Government itself. Dispassionate students of the railway problem in the United States are aware that there is nothing which the corporations have done to the injury of the public worse than the wanton and gratuitous injuries which have been done by the politicians, by the State governments, and even on occasions by the Federal Government itself, to the corporations. If particular railway companies have at times abused the power of which they were possessed as monopolising the transportation to and from a certain section of the country, that abuse has not excelled in wantonness and immorality the abuses of their power over the corporations of which several of the Western States have been systematically guilty. There has been little encouragement to the corporations to submit themselves to any larger measure of public control than has been necessary; and the lessons of the past have shown that it would be injudicious for the railways to surrender uncomplainingly to the State governments authority which the British companies can leave to the Board of Trade without misgiving. And there was a time when the national Interstate Commerce Commission was, if more honest, not much less prejudiced in its dealing with the corporations subject to its authority than were the governments or railway commissions of the individual States.

Mr. Roosevelt's desire may have been (as it is) only to protect the people against the misuse of their power by dishonest corporations; and the honest corporations would be no less glad than Mr. Roosevelt himself to see the dishonest brought to book. But in the necessity of resisting (or what has seemed to the corporations the necessity of resisting) the extensions of the federal power which were requisite before reform could be achieved, the honest have been compelled to make common cause with the dishonest, so that the President has, in particular details, been forced into an attitude of hostility towards all corporations (and the corporations have for the most part been forced to put themselves in an attitude of antagonism to him) in spite of their natural sympathies and common interests.

The result has been unfortunate for business interests generally because the mere fact that the President was "against the companies" (no matter on what grounds, or whether he was against them all or only against some) has encouraged throughout the country the anti-corporation feeling which needed no encouragement. Any time these forty years, or since the early days of the Granger agitation, the shortest road to notoriety and political advancement (at least in any of the Western States) has been by abuse of the railroad companies. A thousand politicians and newspapers all over the country are eager to seize on any phrase or pronouncement of the President which can be interpreted as giving countenance to the particular anti-railroad campaign at the moment in progress in their own locality. A vast number of people are interested in distorting, or in interpreting partially, whatever is said at the White House, so that any phrase, regardless of its context,—each individual act, without reference to its conditions,—which could be represented as an encouragement to the anti-capitalist crusade has been seized upon and made the most of. All over the West there have always, in this generation, been a sufficient number of persons only too anxious, for selfish reasons, to inflame hostility against the railroad companies or against men of wealth; but only within the last few years has it been possible for the most unscrupulous demagogue to find colour and justification for whatever he has chosen to preach in the example and precept of the President—and of a President whose example and precept have counted for more with the masses of the people than have those of any occupant of the White House since the war. In this way Mr. Roosevelt has done more harm than could have been accomplished by a much worse man.

If the corporations have suffered, the course of events has been unfortunate too for Mr. Roosevelt. No one is better aware than he of the misrepresentation to which he is subjected and the unscrupulous use which is made of his example; and it is impossible that at times it can fail to be very bitter. It must also be bitter to find arrayed against him many men whose friendship he must value and whose co-operation in his work it must seem to him that he ought to have. It happens that his is not a character which is swayed by such considerations one hair's breadth from the course which he has marked out for himself; but it is deplorable that a very large proportion of precisely that class of men in which Mr. Roosevelt ought (or at least is justified in thinking that he ought) to find his strongest allies have felt themselves compelled to become his most determined opponents, while those interests which ought (or at least are justified in thinking that they ought) to to find in Mr. Roosevelt, as the occupant of the White House, their strongest bulwark against an unreasoning popular hostility only see that that hostility is immensely inflamed and strengthened by his course and example. The conditions are injurious to the business interests of the country and weaken Mr. Roosevelt's influence for good.

Yet it seems impossible—or certainly impossible for one on the outside—to place the responsibility anywhere except on those general conditions of the country which make possible both the misrepresentation of the position of the President and the wide-spread hostility to the corporations, or on those laxities in political and commercial morality in the past which have put it in the power alternately of the politician to plunder the railways and the railways to prey upon the people. In the ill-regulated conditions of the days of ferment there grew up abuses, both in politics and in commerce, which can only be rooted out with much wrenching of old ties and tearing of the roots of things; but it is worth an Englishman's understanding that the fact that this wrenching and this tearing are now in progress is only an evidence of that effort at self-improvement, an effort determined and conscious, which, as we have already seen more than once, the American people is making. Whatever certain sections of the American press, certain politicians, or certain financial interests, may desire the world to think, there is no need for those at a distance to see in the present conflict evidence either of a wicked and radically destructive disposition in the President or of an approaching disintegration of the American commercial fabric.

Meanwhile, as has been said, one result has been to weaken Mr. Roosevelt's personal influence for good. I have been assured by men of undoubted truthfulness, who are at the head of large financial interests, that he has, in the last few years, become as tricky and unscrupulous in his political methods as the oldest political campaigner; a statement which I believe to be entirely mistaken. "Practical politics," said Mr. Roosevelt once, "is not dirty politics. On the contrary in the long run the politics of fraud and treachery is unpractical politics, and the most practical of all politicians is the one who is clean and decent and upright." There is no evidence which I have been able to find that Mr. Roosevelt does not now believe this as thoroughly and act upon it as consistently as when he first entered the New York State Legislature.

A more reasonable accusation against him, which is made by many of his best friends, is that his imperious will and his confidence in his own opinions make him at times unjust and intolerant in his judgment of others. There have been occasions when he has seemed over-ready to accuse others of bad faith without other ground than his own opinion or the recollection of what has occurred at an interview. He may have been right; but it is certain that he has alienated the friendship of not a few good men by the vehemence and positiveness with which he has asserted his views. And anything, independent of all questions of party, which weakens his influence is, for the country's sake, a thing to be deplored.

* * * * *

The negro question has contributed not a little to Mr. Roosevelt's difficulties, as it has to the misunderstanding of the American people in England. I know intelligent Englishmen who have visited the United States and honestly believe that in the not very distant future the country will again be torn with civil war, a war of black against white, which will imperil the permanence of the Republic no less seriously than did the former struggle. I do not think that the apprehension is shared by many intelligent Americans.

It is perhaps inevitable that Americans should frequently be irritated by the tone of the comments in English papers on the lynchings of negroes which occur in the South. Some of these incidents are barbarous and disgraceful beyond any possibility of palliation, but it is certain that if Englishmen understood the conditions in the South better they would also understand that in some cases it is extremely difficult to blame the lynchers. Many of those people who in London (or in Boston) are loudest in condemnation of outrages upon the negro would if they lived in certain sections of the South not only sympathise with but participate in the unlawful proceedings.

It has already been mentioned that among the men in New Orleans who assisted at the summary execution of the Italian Mafiotes there were, it is believed, an ex-Governor of the State and a Judge: men, that is to say, as civilised and of as humane sentiments as the members of any club in Pall Mall. They were not bloodthirsty ruffians, but gentlemen who did what they did from a stern sense of necessity. It has been my lot to live for a while in a community in which the maintenance of law and order depended entirely on a self-constituted Vigilance Committee; and the operations of that committee were not only salutary but necessary. It has also been my lot to live in a community where the upholders of law and order were not strong enough to organise a Vigilance Committee. I have been one of three or four who behind closed doors earnestly canvassed the possibilities of forming such an organisation, and neither I nor any of the others (among whom I remember were included one attorney-at-law and one mining engineer and surveyor) would have hesitated to serve on such a committee could it have been made of sufficient strength to achieve any useful purpose, but the disparity between our numbers and those of the "bad men" who at that time controlled the community was too obvious to give us any hope of being able to enforce our authority. There may, therefore, be conditions of society infinitely worse than those where order is preserved by lynch law; and I make no doubt that neither I myself nor any fellow-member of my London Club would, if living in one of the bad black districts of the South, act otherwise than do the Southern whites who live there now.

What is deplorable is not the spirit which prompts the acts of summary justice (I am speaking only of one class of Southern "outrage") but the conditions which make the perpetration of those acts the only practicable way of rendering life livable for white people; and for the responsibility for these conditions we must go back either to the institution of slavery itself (for which it should be remembered that England was to blame) or to the follies and passions of half a century ago which gave the negro the suffrage and put him on a plane of political equality with his late masters.[303:1] If, since then, the problem has grown more, rather than less, difficult, it has not been so much by the fault of the Southern white, living under conditions in which only one line of conduct has been open to him, as of Northern philanthropists and negro sympathisers who have helped to keep alive in the breasts of the coloured population ideas and ambitions which can never be realised.

The people of the North have of late years come to understand the South better, and whereas what I have said above would, twenty years ago, have found few sympathisers in any Northern city, I believe that to-day it expresses the opinion of the large majority of Northern men. I also believe that the necessary majority could be secured to repeal so much of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution as would be necessary to undo the mistake which has been committed. It is true that in some Southern States the majority of the blacks are practically disfranchised now; but it would remove a constant cause of friction and of political chicanery if the fact were recognised frankly that it is not possible to contemplate the possibility of the negro ever becoming the politically dominant race in any community where white people live. There is no reason to believe that the two races cannot live together comfortably even though the blacks be in a large majority, but there must be no question of white control of the local government and of the machinery of justice.

Taking away the franchise from the negro would not, of course, put an end to many of the social difficulties of the situation, but, the present false relations between the two being abolished, those difficulties are no more than have to be dealt with in every community. There would be a chance for the negroes as a race to develop into useful members of the community, as negroes, filling the stations of negroes and doing negroes' work, along such lines as those on which Mr. Booker Washington is working. The English have had a wide experience of native races in all parts of the world and they have not yet found the problem of living with them and of holding at least their respect, together with some measure of their active good-will, anywhere insoluble. To an Englishman it does not seem that it should be insoluble in the United States. He is rather inclined to think that the rapidity with which the negro of the South would work out his economic salvation, if once the political difficulty were removed, would depend chiefly on the ability of the race to produce a continuity of men like Mr. Booker Washington, with, perhaps, the concurrent ability of the north to produce men (shall I say, like the late W. H. Baldwin?) to co-operate with the leaders and teachers of the blacks and to interpret them and their work to the country.

The Englishman in England is chiefly impressed by the stories of Southern outrages upon the blacks and he gets therefrom an erroneous idea of the character of the Southern white. An Englishman who studies the situation on the spot is likely to acquire great sympathy with the Southern white and to condemn only the political ineptitude which has made the existing conditions possible.

Whether Mr. Roosevelt's course has been the one best adapted to facilitate a solution of the difficulties it would be idle to enquire. The laws being as they are, and he being the kind of man he is and, as President, entrusted with the duty of seeing that the laws are faithfully executed, he could not have taken a different line. Another man (and an equally good man) might have refrained from making one or two of his appointments and from entertaining Mr. Washington at the White House. But if Mr. Roosevelt did not do precisely those things, he would not do fifty other of the things which have most endeared him to the people.

* * * * *

In this connection, it may be that there will be readers who will think that in many things which I say, when generalising about the American people as a whole, I fail to take into proper account the South and characteristics of such of the people of the South as are distinctively Southern. It is not from any lack of acquaintance with the South; still less from any lack of admiration of or affection for it. But what has been said of New York may in a way be said of the South, for whatever therein is typically Southern to-day is not typically American; and all that is typically Southern is moreover rapidly disappearing. In the tremendous activity of the new national life which has been infused into the country as a result of its solidification and knitting together of the last thirty years, there is no longer room for sectional divergences of character. They are overwhelmed, absorbed, obliterated; and the really vital parts of the South are no longer Southern but American. What has the spirit of Atlanta in Georgia, of Birmingham in Alabama, of any town in the South-west, from St. Louis to Galveston, to do with the typical spirit of the South? However strong Southern sentiment may still be, what is there of the Southern spirit even in Richmond or in Louisville? I need hardly say that America produces no finer men than the best Virginian or the best Kentuckian, but, with all his Southern love and his hot rhetoric, the man of this generation who is a leader among his fellows in Kentucky or in Virginia is so by virtue of the American spirit that is in him and not by virtue of any of the dying spirit of the old South.

FOOTNOTES:

[287:1] Mr. Bryce felicitously speaks of the Senate as "a sort of Congress of Ambassadors from the respective States" (The American Commonwealth, vol. 1, page 110).

[293:1] "He stands for the commonplace virtues; he is great along lines on which each one of us can be great if he wills and dares" (Theodore Roosevelt, the Man and Citizen, by Jacob A. Riis). Mr. Roosevelt has spoken of himself as "a very ordinary man." A pleasant story is told by Mr. Riis of the lady who said: "I have always wanted to make Roosevelt out a hero, but somehow, every time he did something that seemed really great, it turned out, upon looking at it closely, that it was only just the right thing to do."

[296:1] See his Addresses and Presidential Messages, with an introduction by Henry Cabot Lodge (Putnams, 1904).

[303:1] To those who would understand the negro question and the mistakes of the people of the North during the Reconstruction period (to which the present generation owes the legacy of the problem in its acute form) I commend the reading of Mr. James Ford Rhodes's History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home Rule in the South in 1877 (Macmillan).



CHAPTER XII

COMMERCIAL MORALITY

Are Americans more Honest than Englishmen?—An American Peerage—Senators and other Aristocrats—Trade and the British Upper Classes—Two Views of a Business Career—America's Wild Oats—The Packing House Scandals—"American Methods" in Business—A Countryman and Some Eggs—A New Dog—The Morals of British Peers—A Contract of Mutual Confidence—Embalmed Beef, Re-mounts, and War Stores—The Yellow Press and Mr. Hearst— American View of the House of Lords.

It would seem to be inevitable that any general diffusion of corruption in political circles should act deleteriously on the morals of the whole community. It will therefore seem almost absurd to Englishmen to question whether on the whole the code of commercial ethics in America—the standard of morals which prevails in the every-day transaction of business—is higher or lower than that which prevails in Great Britain. The answer must be almost a matter of course. But, setting aside any expression of individual opinion and all preconceived ideas based on personal experience, let us look at the situation and see, if we can, what, judging only from the circumstances of the two countries, would be likely to be the relative conditions evolved in each. To do this it will be necessary first to clear away a common misapprehension in the minds of Englishmen.

It is somehow generally assumed—for the most part unconsciously and without any formulation of the notion in the individual mind—that American society is a sort of truncated pyramid: that it is cut off short—stops in mid-air—before it gets to the top. Because there are no titles in the United States, therefore there are no Upper Classes; because there is no Aristocracy therefore there is nothing that corresponds to the individual Aristocrat.[309:1] If there were a peerage in the United States, the country would have its full complement of Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, and the rest. And—this is the point—they would be precisely the same men as lead America to-day;—but how differently Englishmen would regard them!

The middle-class Englishman, when he says that he is no respecter of titles and declares that it does not make any difference to him whether a man be a Lord or not, may think he is speaking the truth. It is even conceivable that there are some so happily constituted as to be able to chat equally unconcernedly with a Duke and with their wife's cousin, the land agent. Such men, I presume, exist in the British middle classes. But the fact remains that in the mass and, as it were, at a distance the effect of titles on the imagination of the British people is extraordinarily powerful.

That the men in America are precisely the same men, though they have no titles, as they would be if they had, is best shown by the example of Americans who have crossed the Canadian border. If Sir William Van Horne had not gone to Canada in 1881 or thereabouts, he would still be plain "Bill" Van Horne and just as wonderful a man as he is to-day. On the other hand if fortune had happened to place Mr. James J. Hill a little farther north—in Winnipeg instead of in St. Paul—it is just as certain that he would to-day be Lord Manitoba (or some such title) as that his early associates George Stephen and Donald Smith are now Lord Mount Stephen and Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. But somehow—it were useless to deny it—Englishmen would think of him as quite a different man. Mr. C. M. Hays in Montreal is still what he was in St. Louis—Charlie Hays. He will not change his nature when he becomes Lord Muskoka.

And what is true of a few individuals is no less true all over the United States. In the immediate neighbourhood of Mr. Hill, there should be at least one peerage in the Washburn family and a couple of baronetcies among the Pillsburys. Chicago would have of course one Duke in the head of the McCormick family, Mr. Marshall Field would have died Earl Dearborn, and Mr. Hughitt might be Viscount Calumet. In New York Lord Waldorf would be the title of the eldest son of the (at present third) Duke of Astoria. The Vanderbilt marquisate—of Hudson probably—would be a generation more recent. So throughout the country, from Maine to Mississippi, from Lord Penobscot to the Marquis of Biloxi, there would be a peerage in each of the good old houses—the Adamses, the Cabots, and the Quincys, the Livingstons, the Putnams, and Stuyvesants, the Carters and Randolphs and Jeffersons and Lees.

Americans will say: "Thank Heaven and the wisdom of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers that it is not so!" If it were so, however, a good deal of British misunderstanding of the United States would be removed. Nor will it be contended that any of the Americans whom Englishmen have known best—Mr. Bayard, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Choate, or Mr. Whitelaw Reid, or General Horace Porter—would be other than ornaments to any aristocracy in the world. It would be idle to enquire whether Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Cleveland or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. Root or Lord Rosebery, Mr. Olney or Sir Edward Grey were the better man, for every Englishman will probably at once concede that the United States does somehow manage to produce individuals of as fine a type as England herself. But what no Englishman confesses in his heart is that there is any class of these men—that there is as good an upper stratum to society there as in England. These remarkable individuals can only be explained as being what naturalists call a "sport"—mere freaks and accidents. This idea exists in the English mind solely, I believe, from the lack of titles in America; which is because the colonists were inspired by Anglo-Saxon and not by Norman ideas. Had Englishmen been accustomed for a generation or two to have relations, diplomatic and commercial, not with Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith, but with Lord Savannah and the Earl of Chicopee, the idea would never have taken root. And if Englishmen knew the United States better, they would be astonished to find how frequent these "sports" and accidents seem to be. And it must be remembered that the country does at least produce excellent Duchesses and Countesses in not inadequate numbers.

Because American society is not officially stratified like a medicine glass and there is, ostensibly at least, no social hierarchy, Englishmen would do well to disabuse themselves of the idea that therefore the people consists entirely of the lower middle class, with a layer of unassimilated foreign anarchists below and a few native and accidental geniuses thrusting themselves above. Democracy, at least in the United States, is not nearly so thorough a leveller as at a first glance it appears. You will, it is true, often hear in America the statement that it is "four generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves," which is to say that one man, from the farm or the workshop, builds up a fortune; his son, being born in the days of little things and bred in the school of thrift, holds it together; but his sons in turn, surrounded from their childhood with wealth and luxury, have lost the old stern fibre and they slip quickly back down the steep path which their grandfather climbed with so much toil. But no less often will you hear the statement that "blood will tell."

In a democracy the essential principle of which is that every man shall have an equal chance of getting to the top, it is a matter of course that that top stratum will be constantly changing. The idea of anything in the nature of an hereditary privileged class is abhorrent to the mind of every good American. If he had to have an official Aristocracy, he would insist on a brand new one with each generation; or more likely that it should be re-elected every four years. We are not now discussing the advantages or disadvantages of the hereditary principle; the point that I desire to make is that at any given time American society, instead of being truncated and headless, has the equivalent of an aristocracy, whether the first, second, third, or fifth generation of nobility, just as abundant and complete as if it were properly labelled and classified into Dukes, Marquises, Viscounts, and the rest. And this aristocracy is quite independent of any social cachet, whether of the New York Four Hundred or of any other authority.

It is a commonly accepted maxim among thoughtful Americans that the United States Senate is as much superior to the House of Lords as the House of Representatives is inferior to the House of Commons. One may, or may not, agree with that dictum; but it is worth noticing that, in the opinion of Americans themselves, it is, at least, not by comparison with the hereditary aristocracy that they show to any disadvantage.

Nor need one accept the opinion (in which many eminent Englishmen coincide with the universal American belief) that the United States Supreme Court is the ablest as well as the greatest judicial tribunal in the world. But when one looks at the membership of that Court and at the majority of the members of the Senate (especially those members from the older States which hold to some tradition of fixity of tenure), when one sees the men who constitute the Cabinets of successive Presidents and those who fill the more distinguished diplomatic posts, when, further, one becomes acquainted with the class of men from which, all over the country, the presidents and attorneys of the great railway corporations and banks and similar institutions are drawn (all of which offices, it will be noticed, with the exception of the senatorships, are filled by nomination or appointment and not by popular election)—when one looks at, sees, and becomes acquainted with all these, he will begin to correct his impressions as to the non-existence of an American aristocracy which, though innocent of heraldry, can fairly be matched against the British.

* * * * *

The average Englishman looks at America and sees a people wherein there is no recognised aristocracy nor any titles. Also he sees that it is, through all its classes, a commercial people, immersed in business. Therefore he concludes that it is similar to what the English people would be if cut off at the top of the classes engaged in business and with all the upper classes wiped out. It will be much nearer the truth if he considers the people as a whole to be class for class just like the English people, subject to the accident that there are no titles, but with the difference that all classes, including the untitled Dukes and Marquises and Earls, take to business as to their natural element. The parallel may not be perfect; but it is incomparably more nearly exact than the alternative and general impression.

It is of course necessary to recognise how rapidly the constitution of English society is changing, how old traditions are dying out, and in accordance with the Anglo-Saxon instinct the social scheme is tending to assimilate itself to the American model. The facts in outline are almost too familiar to be worth mentioning, except perhaps for the benefit of some American readers, for Americans in England are continually puzzled by anomalies which they see in English society. In my childhood I was taught that no gentleman could buy or sell anything for profit and preserve either his self-respect or the respect of his fellows. The only conceivable exceptions—and I think I was not informed of them at too early an age—were that a gentleman might deal in horses or in wines and still remain, if somewhat shaded, a gentleman; the reason being that a knowledge of either horses or wines was a gentlemanly accomplishment. The indulgence extended to the vendor of wines did not extend to the maker or seller of beer. I remember the resentment of the school when the sons of a certain wealthy brewer were admitted; and those boys had, I imagine, a cheerless time of it in their schooldays. The eldest of those boys, being now the head of the family, is to-day a peer. But at that time, though brewers or brewers' sons might be admitted grudgingly to the company of gentlemen, they were not gentlemen themselves. An aunt or a cousin who married a manufacturer, a merchant, or a broker—no matter how rich or in how large a way of business—was coldly regarded, if not actually cut, by the rest of the family. There are many families—though hardly now a class—in which the same traditions persist, but even the families in which the horror of trade is as great as ever make an exception as a rule in favour of trade conducted in the United States. The American may be pardoned for being bewildered when in an aristocracy which is forbidden, so he is told, to make money in trade, he finds no lack of individuals who are willing to take shares in any trading concern in which money in sufficient quantities may be made. The person who will not speak to an English farmer except as to an inferior, sends his own sons to the Colonies or to the United States to farm. These things, however, are, to Englishmen, mere platitudes. But though all are familiar with the change which is passing over the British people, few Englishmen, perhaps, have realised how rapidly the peerage itself is coming to be a trade-representing body. Of seventeen peers of recent creation, taken at random, nine owe their money and peerages to business, and the present holders of the title were themselves brought up to a business career. It may not be long before the English aristocracy will be as universally occupied in business as is the American; and it will be as natural for an Earl to go to his office as it is for the American millionaire (perhaps the father of the Countess) to do so to-day.

In spite of all the change that has taken place, however, it still remains very difficult for the English gentleman, or member of a gentle family, to engage actively in business—certainly in trade—without being made to feel that he is stepping down into a lower sphere where there is a new and vitiated atmosphere. The code of ethics, he understands, is not that to which he is accustomed at his club and in his country house. He trusts that it will not be necessary to forget that he himself is a gentleman, but at least he will have to remember that his associates are only business men.

The American aristocrat, on the other hand, takes to business as being the most attractive and honourable career. Setting aside all question of money-making, he believes it to be (and his father tells him that it is) the best life for him. Idleness is not good for any man. He will enjoy his annual month or two of shooting or fishing or yachting all the better for having spent the last ten or eleven months in hard work. Moreover, immersion in affairs will keep him active and alert and in touch with his fellow-men, besides being in itself one of the largest and most fascinating of pastimes. There is also the money; but when business is put on this level, money has a tendency to become only one among many objects. In England no man can with any grace pretend that he goes into business for any other reason than to make money. In America a man goes into it in order to gain standing and respect and make a reputation.

Under these conditions, to return to our original point, in which country, putting other things aside, would one naturally expect to find the better code of business morals? Let us, if we can, consider the matter, as has been said before, without preconceived ideas or individual bias; let us imagine that we are speaking of two countries in which we have no personal stake whatever. If in any two such countries—in Gombroonia and Tigrosylvania, let us say—we should see two peoples approximately matched, of one tongue and having similar political ideals, not visibly unequal in strength, in abilities, or in the individual sense of honour, and if in one we should further see the aristocracy regarding the pursuit of commerce as a thing beneath and unworthy of them, in which they could not engage without contamination, while in the other it was followed as the most honourable of careers,—in which of the two should we expect to find the higher code of commercial ethics?

It does not seem to me that there can be any doubt as to the answer. Other things being equal, and as a matter of theory only, business in the United States ought to be ruled by much higher standards of conduct than in England.

Before proceeding to an analysis of any particular conditions, there is one further general consideration which I would urge on the attention of English readers, most of whom have preconceived ideas on this subject already formed.

I am not among those who believe that trade or commerce of ordinary kinds either requires or tends to develop great intellectuality in those engaged in it. Indeed, my opinion (for which I am willing to be abused) is that any considerable measure of intellect is a hindrance to success in retail trade or in commerce on a small scale. It is a thesis which some one might develop at leisure, showing that it is not merely not creditable for a man to make money in trade but that it is an explicit avowal of intellectual poverty. Whence, of course, it follows that the London tradesman who grows rich and retires to the country or suburbs to build himself a statelier mansion is more justly an object of pity, if not of contempt, than is often consciously acknowledged. Any imaginative quality or breadth of vision which contributes to distract the mind of a tradesman from the one transaction immediately in hand and the immediate financial results thereof is a disqualification. I state my views thus in their extreme form lest the English reader should think that I entertain too much respect (or too little contempt) for the purely commercial brain. At the same time the English reader will concede that commercial enterprises and industrial undertakings may be on such a scale as to offer full exercise to the largest intellects.

As an illustration of this: Cecil Rhodes grew, as we know, wealthy from the proceeds of vast undertakings; but men closely associated with him have assured me that Rhodes was a very indifferent "business man." We may, I think, take it for certain that if Rhodes had been condemned to conduct a retail grocery he would have conducted it to speedy irretrievable disaster. We are probably all agreed that the conduct of a small grocery does not require fineness of intellect; most English readers, I think, will follow me in believing that success in such a sphere of life implies at least an imperfect intellectual development. On the other hand enterprises truly Rhodian do call for intellectual grasp of the largest.

The consideration which I wish to urge is that business in the United States during the period of growth and settlement of the country has been largely on Rhodian lines. The great enterprises by which the country has been developed, and on which most of the large fortunes of individual Americans are based have been of truly imperial proportions. The flinging of railways across thousands of miles of wilderness (England has made peers of the men who did it in Canada) with the laying out of cities and the peopling of provinces; the building of great fleets of boats upon the lakes; the vast mining schemes in remote and inaccessible regions of the country; lumbering enterprises which (even though not always honestly) dealt with virgin forests by the hundreds of square miles; "bonanza" wheat farming and the huge systems of grain elevators for the handling of the wheat and the conveyance of it to the market or the mill; cattle ranching on a stupendous scale (perhaps even the collecting of those cattle in their thousands daily for slaughter in the packing houses); the irrigating of wide tracts of desert;—these things and such as these are the "businesses" out of which the Americans of the last and present generations have largely made their fortunes. And they are enterprises, most of them, not unworthy to rank with Chartered Companies and the construction of railways from the North to the South of Africa.