Harry Perry Robinson

The Rhodes Scholarships—"Pullulating Colleges"—Are American Universities Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?—Other Educational Forces—The Postal Laws—Ten-cent Magazines and Cheap Books—Pigs in Chicago—The Press of England and America Compared—Mixed Society—Educated Women—Generals as Booksellers—And as Farmhands—The Value of War to a People.

It may be presumed that when Cecil Rhodes conceived the idea of establishing the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford, it did not occur to him that Americans might not care to come to Oxford—might think their own universities superior to the English. Nor is it likely that there will in the immediate future be any dearth of students anxious to take those scholarships, for the mere selection has a certain amount of kudos attaching to it and, at worst, the residence abroad should be of advantage to any young American not destined to plunge at once into a business life. If it were a mere question of the education to be received, it is much to be feared that the great majority of Americans, unless quite unable to attend one of their own universities, would politely decline to come to England. At the time when the terms of the will were made public, a good many unpleasant things were said in the American press; and it was only the admiration of Americans for Mr. Rhodes (who appealed to their imagination as no other Englishman, except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, has appealed in the last fifty years), coupled with the fact that he was dead, that prevented the foundation of the scholarships from being greeted with resentment rather than gratitude.

There was a time, of course, when the name of Oxford sounded very large in American ears; and it will probably be a surprise to Englishmen to be told that to-day the great majority of Americans would place not only Harvard and Yale, but probably also several other American universities, ahead of either Oxford or Cambridge. Nor is this the opinion only of the ignorant. Trained educational authorities who come from the United States to Europe to study the methods of higher education in the various countries, seldom hesitate to say that the education to be obtained at many of the minor Western colleges in America is fully as good as that offered by either of the great English universities, while that of Harvard and Yale is far superior to it.[167:1] And it must be remembered that education itself, as an art, is incomparably more studied, and more systematically studied in America than in England.

Matthew Arnold spoke of the "pullulating colleges and universities" of America—"the multitude of institutions the promoters of which delude themselves by taking seriously, but which no serious man can so take"; and he would be surprised to see to what purpose some of those institutions have "pullulated" in the eighteen years that have passed since he wrote—to note into what lusty and umbrageous plants have grown such institutions as the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, though one of those is further west by some distance than he ever penetrated. That these or any other colleges have more students than either Oxford or Cambridge need not mean much; and they cannot of course acquire in twenty years the old, history-saturated atmosphere. Against that are to be set the facts that the students undoubtedly work, on the average, much harder than do English undergraduates and that the teaching staffs are possessed of an enthusiasm, an earnestness, a determination not merely to fill chairs but to get results, which would be almost "bad form" in some Common (or Combination) Rooms in England. Wealth, moreover, and magnificence of endowment can go a considerable way towards even the creation of an atmosphere—not the same atmosphere as that of Oxford or Cambridge, it is true; for no money can make another Addison's Walk out of Prairie Avenue, or convert the Mississippi by St. Anthony's Falls into new "Backs."

But an atmosphere may be created wholly scholastic, and well calculated to excite emulation and inspire the ambition of youths.

Nor is it by any means certain that the American people would desire to create the atmosphere of an old-world university if they could. The atmosphere of Oxford produces, as none other could, certain qualities; but are they the qualities which, if England were starting to make her universities anew, she would set in the forefront of her endeavour?[169:1] Are they really the qualities most desirable even in an Englishman to-day? Are they approximately the qualities most likely to equip a man to play the noblest part in the life of modern America? The majority of American educators would answer unhesitatingly in the negative. There are things attaching to Oxford and Cambridge which they would dearly love to be able to transplant to their own country, but which, they recognise, nothing but the passage of the centuries can give. Those things are unattainable; and, frankly, if they could only be attained by transplanting with them many other attributes of English university life, they would rather forego them altogether.

What Englishmen most value in their universities is not any book-learning which is to be acquired thereat, so much as the manners and rules for the conduct of life which are supposed to be imparted in a university course,—manners and rules which are of an essentially aristocratic tendency. Without wishing to push a point too far, it is worth noting that that aristocratic tendency is purely Norman, quite out of harmony with the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon. It would never occur to an Anglo-Saxon, pure and simple, to make his university anything else than an institution for scholastic training, in which every individual should be taught as much, and as equally, as possible. The last thing that would occur to him would be to make it a weapon of aristocracy or an institution for perpetuating class distinctions. The aim and effect of the English universities in the past has been chiefly to keep the upper classes uppermost.

That there are too many "universities" in America no one—least of all an educated American—denies; but with the vast distances and immense population of the country there is room for, perhaps, more than Matthew Arnold eighteen years ago could have foreseen, and not a few of those establishments which in his day he would doubtless have unhesitatingly classed among those which could not be taken seriously, have more than justified their existence.

To the superiority of the American public school system over the English, considered merely as an instrumentality for the general education of the masses of a people, and not for the production of any especially privileged or cultivated class, is generally ascribed the confessedly higher average of intelligence and capacity among (to use a phrase which is ostensibly meaningless in America) the lower orders. But the educational system of the country has been by no means the only factor in producing this result; and it may be worth while merely as a matter of record, and not without interest to American readers, to note what some of those other factors have been during the last twenty years—factors so temporary and so elusive that even now they are in danger of being forgotten.

First among these factors I would set the American postal laws, an essential feature of which is the extraordinarily low rates at which periodical literature may be transmitted. A magazine which may be sent to any place in the United States for from an eighth of a penny to a farthing, according to its weight, will cost for postage in England from two-pence-halfpenny to fourpence. It is not the mere difference in cost of the postage to the subscriber that counts, but the low American rate has permitted the adoption by the publishers of a system impossible to English magazine-makers, a system which has had the effect of making magazines, at least as good as the English sixpenny monthlies, the staple reading matter of whole classes of the population, the classes corresponding to which in England never read anything but a local weekly, or halfpenny daily, paper. It might be that the reading matter of a magazine would not be much superior to that of a small weekly paper. But at least it encourages somewhat more sustained reading and, what is the great fact, it accustoms the reader to handling something in the form of a book. That is the virtue. A people weaned from the broad-sheets by magazines readily takes next to book-reading.

Moreover, under the American plan, books themselves, if issued periodically, used to have the same postal advantages as the magazines.[171:1] A so-called "library" of the classical English, writers could be published at the rate of a book a month, call itself a periodical, and be sent through the post in precisely the same way. The works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, or anybody else could be published in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly parts. If in monthly parts at sixpence, the cost to the subscriber would be practically the same as that of a monthly magazine, only that the reader would accumulate at the rate of twelve volumes a year—and read at the rate of one a month—the works of Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Of course much worthless literature, fiction of the trashiest, has been circulated in the same way—much more perhaps than of the better class. But even so, the reading matter was superior to that previously accessible, and the vital fact still remains that the people acquired the habit of book-reading.

In America, the part thus played by some of the periodical libraries was of much importance, but it was probably not comparable to the influence of the ten-cent magazine. In the United States itself, the immense beneficence of that influence has hardly been appreciated. The magazines came into vogue, and the people accepted the fact as they accept the popularity of a new form of "breakfast food." The quickening of the national intelligence which resulted was no more immediate, no more readily traceable or conspicuous to the public eye, than would be the improvement in the national stamina which might result from the introduction of some new article of diet. A change which takes five or ten years to work itself out is lost sight of, becomes invisible, amid the jostling activities of a national life like the American. Moreover, several causes were contributing to the same end and, had any one stopped to endeavour to do it, it would not have been at any time easy to unravel the threads and show what proportion of the fabric was woven by each; but if it had been possible to affix an intellect-meter to the aggregate brain of the American people during the last twenty years, of such ingenious mechanism that it would have shown not only what the increase in total mental power had been but also what proportions of that increase were ascribable to the various contributing causes—education, colonial expansion, commercial growth, ten-cent magazines, and so forth—and if, further, the "readings" of that meter could be interpreted into terms of increase in national energy, national productiveness, national success, I do not think that Parliament would lose one unnecessary day in passing the legislation necessary to reform the English postal laws.

One other point is worth dwelling upon—equally trivial in seeming, equally important in its essence—which is the selling of books by the great department stores, the big general shops, in America. Taking all classes of the British population together and both sexes—artisans and their wives, peasants in country districts, slum residents in London and other large cities,—what proportion of the population of the British Isles do of set purpose go into a bookseller's shop once a year or once in their lives? Is it ten per cent.—or five per cent.—or two per cent.? The exact proportion is immaterial; but the number must be very small. In America some years ago, the owners of department stores and publishers found that there was considerable profit to be made in the handling of books—cheap reprints of good books in particular. The combined booksellers' and stationers' shops in the cities of the United States are in themselves more frequent and more attractive than in England: and I am going back to the days before the drug-store library which is as yet too recent an institution to have had an easily measurable influence. But incomparably more influential than these, in bringing the multitude in immediate contact with literature, have been the department stores, of almost every one of which the "book and stationery" department is a conspicuously attractive, and generally most profitable, feature. Here every man or woman who goes to do any shopping is brought immediately within range of the temptation to buy books—is involuntarily seduced into a bookshop where the wares are temptingly displayed and artfully pressed on the attention of customers. New books of all kinds are sold at the best possible discount; but what was of chief importance was the institution of the cheap libraries of the "Classics"—tables heaped with them in paper at fourpence, piles of them shoulder high in cloth at ninepence, shelves laden with them in glittering backs and by no means despicable in typography at one and sevenpence. Thus simultaneously with the inculcation of the book-reading habit by the magazines came the facility for book-buying, and, always remembering the difference in the scale of prices in the two countries, it was easy for the woman doing her household shopping to fall a victim to the importunities of the salesman and lavish an extra eighteen or thirty-eight cents on a copy of The Scarlet Letter or Ivanhoe, Irving's Alhambra, or Bleak House, to take home as a surprise. In this way, whole classes in America, the English counterparts of which rarely read anything more formidable than a penny paper, acquired the habit of book-buying and the ambition to form a small library. The benefit to the people cannot be computed.

Incidentally, as we know, not a little injustice was done to English authors by the pirating of their books, without recompense, while the copyright still lived. It was after I went to America, though I had heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford, that I first read Fors Clavigera and Sesame and Lilies in Lovell's Library, at five-pence a volume, and, about the same time, Tolstoi's War and Peace in the Franklin Square Library, at the same price. Of older works, I can still remember Lamb and part of De Quincey, Don Quixote and Rasselas (those four for some reason stand out in my mind from their fellows in the row), all bought for the modest ten-cent piece per volume—the price of two daily newspapers (for all newspapers in America then cost five cents) or one blacking of one's shoes. Much has, of course, been done of late years in England in popularising the "Classics" in the form of cheap libraries; but the facilities for buying the books—or rather the temptations to do so—are incomparably less, while the relative prices remain higher.

Even at fourpence halfpenny (supposing them to be purchasable at the price) Lamb's Essays still cost more in London than a drink of whiskey. In America, more than twenty years ago, the whiskey cost half as much again as the book.

All of which is in the nature of a digression, but it has not led us far from the main road, for the object that I am aiming at is to convey to the English reader some idea of what the forces are which are at work on the education of the American people. The Englishman generally knows that in the United States there is nothing analogous to the great public schools of England—Winchester, Westminster, Eton, and the rest—and that they have a host of more or less absurd universities in no way to be compared to Oxford or Cambridge. The American, as has been said, challenges the latter statement bluntly; while, as for the public schools, he maintains that it is not the American ideal (if he wished to fortify his position, he might say it was not an Anglo-Saxon ideal) to produce a limited privileged and cultivated class, but that the aim is to educate the whole nation to the highest level; that, barring such qualities as their mere selectness may enable the great English schools to give to their pupils, the national high schools of America do, as a matter of fact, prepare pupils just as efficiently for the university as do the English institutions, while the great system of common schools secures for the mass of the people a much better education than is given in England to the same classes. Added to which, various other causes co-operate with the avowedly educational instrumentalities to produce a higher level of intellectual alertness and a more general love of reading in the people.

And what is the result? Is the American people as well educated or as well informed or as well cultivated as the English? To endeavour to make a comparison between the two is to traverse a very morass, full of holes, swamps, sloughs, creeks, inlets, quicksands, and pitfalls of divers and terrifying natures. If it is to be threaded at all, it must be only with the greatest caution and, at times, indirectness.

The charming English writer, the author of Sinners and Saints, affected, on alighting from the train in the railway station at Chicago, to be immensely surprised by the fact that there was not a pig in sight. "I had thought," he said, "Chicago was all pigs." There are a good many English still of the same opinion.

The one institution in any country of which the foreigner sees most, and by which perhaps every people is, if unwittingly, most commonly judged by other peoples, is its press; and it is difficult for a superficial observer to believe that the nation which produces the newspapers of America is either an educated or a cultivated nation. Max O'Rell's comment on the American press is delightful: "Beyond the date, few statements are reliable." Matthew Arnold called the American newspapers "an awful symptom"—"the worst features in the life of the United States." Americans also—the best Americans—have a great dislike of the London papers.

The fact is that merely as newspapers (as gatherers of news) the American papers are probably the best in the world. What repels the Englishman is primarily the form in which the news is dressed—the loudness, the sensationalism but if he can overcome his repugnance to these things sufficiently to be able to judge the paper as a whole, he will find, apart from the amazing quantity of "news" which it contains, a large amount of literary matter of a high order. I am not for one moment claiming that the American paper (not the worst and loudest, which are contemptible, nor the best, which are almost as non-sensational as the best London papers, but the average American daily paper) is, or ought to be, as acceptable reading to a cultivated man—still less to a refined woman—as almost any one of the penny, or some halfpenny, London papers. But the point that I would make and which I would insist on very earnestly is that the two do not stand for the same thing in relation to the peoples which they respectively represent.

We have seen the same thing before in comparing the consular and diplomatic services of the two countries. Just as in the United States the consuls are plucked at random from the body of the people, whereas in England they are a carefully selected and thoroughly trained class by themselves, so the press of the United States represents the people in its entirety, whereas the English press represents only the educated class. The London papers (I am omitting consideration of certain halfpenny papers) are not talking for the people as a whole, nor to the people as a whole. Consciously or unconsciously they are addressing themselves always to the comparatively small circle of the educated class. When they speak of the peasant or the working man, even of the tradesman, they discuss him as a third person: it is not to him that they are talking. They use a language which is not his language; they assume in their reader information, sentiments, modes of thought, which belong not to him, but only to the educated class—that class which, whether each individual thereof has been to a public school and a university or not, is saturated with the public school and university traditions.

It was said before that the English people has a disposition to be guided by the voice of authority—to follow its leaders—as the American people has not. The English newspaper speaks to the educated class, trusting, not always with justification, that opinion once formulated in that class will be communicated downwards and accepted by the people. The American newspaper endeavours to speak to the people direct.

That English papers are immensely more democratic than once they were goes without saying. A man need not be much past middle age to be able to remember when the Daily Telegraph created, by appealing to, a whole new stratum of newspaper readers. The same thing has been done again more recently by the halfpenny papers, some of which come approximately near to being adapted to the intelligences, and representing the tastes, of the whole population, or at least the urban population, down to the lowest grade. But it is not by those papers that England would like to be judged. Yet when Englishmen draw inferences about the American people from the papers which they see, they are doing what is intrinsically as unjust. It would be no less unjust to take the first hundred men that one met with, on Broadway or State Street, and compare them—their intellectuality and culture—with one hundred members of the London university clubs.

Let us also remember here what was said of the Anglo-Saxon spirit—that spirit which is so essentially non-aristocratic, holding all men equal in their independence. We have seen how this spirit is more untrammelled and works faster in the United States than in England; but where, in any case, it has moved ahead among Americans the tendency in England generally is to follow in the same lines, not in imitation of America but by the impulse of the common genius of the peoples.

The American dailies, even the leading dailies, are made practically for those hundred men on Broadway; the London penny papers are addressed in the main to the university class. Judging from the present trend of events in England it may not be altogether chimerical to imagine a time when in London only two or three papers will hold to the class tradition and will still speak exclusively in the language of the upper classes (as a small number of papers in New York do to-day), while the great body of the English press will have followed the course of the American publishers; and when the English papers are frankly adapted to the tastes and intelligence of as large a proportion of the English people as are now catered for by the majority of the American papers, he would be a rash Englishman whose patriotism would persuade him to prophesy that the London papers would be any more scholarly, more refined, or more chastened in tone than are the papers of New York or Chicago.

And while the Englishman is generally ready to draw unfavourable inferences from the undeniably unpleasant features of the majority of American daily papers, he seldom stops to draw analogous inferences from a comparison of the American and English monthly magazines. Great Britain produces no magazines to compare with Harper's, The Century, or Scribner's. Those three magazines combined have, I believe, a number of readers in the United States equalling the aggregate circulation of the London penny dailies; which is a point that is worth consideration. When, moreover, the cheaper magazines became a possibility, how came it that such publications as McClure's and The Cosmopolitan arose? The illustrated magazines of the United States are indeed a fact of profound significance, for which the Englishman when he measures the taste and intellectuality of the American people by its press makes no allowance. Magazines of the same excellence cannot find the same support in England. At least two earnest attempts have been made in late years to establish English monthlies which would compare with any of the three first mentioned above, and both attempts have failed.

What has been said about the much more representative character of the American daily press—the fact that the same papers are read by a vastly larger proportion of the population—brings us face to face with a root-fact which vitiates almost any attempt at a rough and ready comparison between the peoples. In America, there exist the counterparts of every class of man who is to be found in England—men as refined, men no less crass and brutal—some as vulgar and some as full of the pride of birth. Most Englishmen will be surprised to hear that the American, democrat though he is, is as a rule more proud of an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War than is an Englishman of one who fought in the Wars of the Roses. I am sure that he sets more store by a direct and authentic descent from one of the company of the Mayflower than the Englishman does by an equally direct and authentic line back to the days of William the Conqueror. Incidentally it may be said that the American will talk more about it. But while in America all classes exist, they are not fenced apart, as in England, in fact any more than they are in theory. The American people (pace the leaders of the New York Four Hundred) "comes mixed"; dip in where you will and you bring up all sorts of fish. In England if you go into educated society, you are likely to meet almost exclusively educated people—or at least people with the stamp of educated manners. Sir Gorgius Midas is not of course inexorably barred from the society of duchesses. Her Grace of Pentonville must have met him frequently. But in America the duchesses have to rub shoulders with him every day. And—which is worth noting—their husbands also rub shoulders with his wife.

Which brings us to the second root-fact, which is almost as disturbing and confounding to casual observation as the first, namely, the much larger part in the intellectual life of the country played by women in America. Intellectuality or culture in its narrower sense—meaning a familiarity with art and letters—is not commonly regarded by Englishmen as an essential possession in a wife. The lack of it is certainly not considered by the American woman a cardinal offence in a husband. I know many American men who, on being consulted on any matter of literary or artistic taste, say at once: "I don't know. I leave all that to my wife."

An Englishman in an English house, looking at the family portraits, may ask his hostess who painted a certain picture.

"I don't know," she will say, "I must ask my husband. Will, who is the portrait of your grandfather by—the one over there in his robes?"

"Raeburn," says Will.

"Of course," says the wife. "I never can remember the artists' names; they are so confusing—especially the English ones."

The Englishman thinks no worse of her; but the American woman, listening, wishes that she had a portrait of her husband's grandfather by Raeburn and opines that she would know the artist's name.

The same Englishman goes to America and, being entertained, asks a similar question of his host.

"I don't know," says the man, "I must ask my wife. Mary, who painted that picture over there—the big tree and the blue sky?"

"Rousseau," says Mary.

"Of course," says the husband. "I never can remember the names of these fellows. They mix me all up—especially the French ones."

And the Englishman returning home tells his friends of the queer fellow with whom he dined over there—"an awfully good chap, you know"—who owned all sorts of jolly paintings—Rousseaux and things—and did not even know the names of the artists: "Had to ask his wife, by Jove!"

It is not for one moment claimed that there are not in England many women fully as cultured as the most cultured and fairest Americans; that there are not many Englishwomen much better informed, much more widely read, than their husbands. The phenomenon, however, is not nearly as common as in America, where, it has already been suggested, it is probably the result of the fact that the women have at the outset received precisely the same education as the men and, since leaving school or college, have had more leisure, being less engrossed in business and material things.

But this feminine predominance in matters of Æsthetics in the United States does not as a rule increase the Englishman's opinion of the intellectuality or culture of the people as a whole. He still judges only by the men. Indeed, he is not entirely disposed to like so much intellectuality in women—such interest in politics, educational matters, art, and literature. Not having been accustomed to it he rather disapproves of it. Blue regimentals are only fit for the blue horse or the artillery.

The Englishman in an American house meets a man more rough and less polished than a man holding a similar position in society would be in England; and he thinks poorly of American society in consequence. He also meets that man's wife, who shows a familiarity with art, letters, and public affairs vastly more comprehensive than he would expect to find in a woman of similar position in England. But he does not therefore strike a balance and re-cast his estimate of American society, any more than in his estimate of the American press he makes allowance for the American magazines. He only thinks that the woman's knowledge is rather out of place and conjectures it to be probably superficial. Wherein he is no less one-sided in his prejudice than the American who will not believe in English humour because he cannot understand it.

Philistinism is undoubtedly more on the surface in educated society in the United States than in Great Britain; but in England outside that society it is nearly all Philistinism. Step down from a social class in England, and you come to a new and lower level of refinement and information. In America the people still "come mixed."

Twenty-five years ago in England, you did not expect a stock-broker, and to-day you do not expect a haberdasher (even though he may have been knighted), to know whether Botticelli is a wine or a cheese. In America, because the Englishman meets that stock-broker or that haberdasher in a society in which he would not be likely to meet him in England, he does expect him to know; and I suspect that if a census were taken there would be found more stock-brokers and haberdashers in America than in England who do know something of Botticelli. I am quite certain that more of their wives do. Matthew Arnold spoke not too pleasantly of the curious sensation that he experienced in addressing a bookseller in America as "General." The "bookseller" in question was a man widely respected in the United States, the head of a great house of publishers and booksellers, a conspicuously public-spirited citizen, and a bona fide General who saw stern service in the Civil War. To Englishmen, knowing nothing of the background, the mere fact as stated by Matthew Arnold is curious.

But if civil war were to break out in Great Britain—England and Wales against Scotland and Ireland—and the conflict assumed such titanic proportions that single armies of a million men took the field, then would Tennyson's "smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue" indeed have to "leap from his counter and till and strike, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home." The entire population of England that was not actually needed at home would be compelled to take the field, and in the slaughter (it is curious how little English men know of the terrific proportions of the conflict between the North and South) the demand for officers would be so great that there would not be enough men of previous training to fill the places. Men would rise from the ranks by merit and among those who rose to be generals there might well be a publisher or bookseller or two. On the termination of the war, the soldiers would turn from their soldiering to their old trades and it might be General Murray or General Macmillan or General Bumpus; and the thing would not then be strange to English ears.

An American story tells how, soon after the close of the Civil War, a stranger asked a farmer if he needed any labourers; and the farmer replied in the negative. He had just taken on three new ones, he said, all of them disbanded soldiers. One, he added, had been a private, one a captain, and one a full-blown colonel.

"And how do you find them?" asked the other.

"The private's a first-class workman," said the farmer, "and the captain he isn't bad."

"And the colonel?"

"Well, I don't want to say nothing agin a man as fit as a colonel in the war," said the farmer, "but I know I ain't hiring no brigadier-generals if they come this way."

They are growing old now, and fewer, the men who held commissions in the war that ended over forty years ago; but during those forty years there has been no community, no trade or profession or calling, in which they have not been to be found, indistinguishable from their civilian colleagues, except by the tiny button in the lapels of their coats. Until Mr. Roosevelt, (and he won his spurs in another war) there has been no man elected President of the United States, except Mr. Cleveland, the one Democrat, who had not a distinguished record as an officer in the Union armies—Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley were all soldiers. You may still see that little button in many pulpits. Farmers wear it, and cabinet ministers, millionaires, and mechanics.

The Anglo-Saxon is a fighting breed. The population of the British Isles sprang from the loins of successive waves of fighting men. It was not the weaklings of the Danes or Normans, Jutes, Saxons, or Angles who came to conquer Britain, but the bold, the hardy, the venturesome of each tribe or people. It was not the mere mixture of bloods that made the English character what it was, the race a race of empire builders; it was because of each blood there came to Britain only of the most adventurous. And through the centuries it has been the constant stress and training of the perpetual turmoil in which the people have lived that have kept the stock from degeneration. There has never been a time in English history, save when the people have been struggling in wars among themselves, when there has been an English family that has not at any given moment had sons or fathers, uncles or cousins out somewhere doing the work of the Empire.

I have already explained how far Americans are from understanding the British Empire. It is a pity; they would understand Englishmen better and like them better. And what the building of the Empire and the keeping of it have done for Englishmen, the Civil War did in large measure for the Americans. Even the struggle with their own wilderness might not have sufficed to keep the people hard and sound of heart and limb through a century of peace and growing prosperity. The Civil War is already beginning to slip into the farther reaches of the people's memory; but twenty-five years ago the echoes of the guns had hardly died away—the minds of the people were still inspired. It was an awful, and a splendid, experience for the nation. It is not necessary, with Emerson, "always to respect war hereafter"; but there have been times when it has seemed to me that I would rather be able to wear that little tri-colour button of the American Loyal Legion than any other decoration in the world.[189:1]

It is the great compensation of war that it does not breed in a people only a fighting spirit. All history shows that it is in the mental exhilaration and the moral uplift after a period of war successfully waged that a people puts forth the best that is in it, in the production of works of art and in its literature. It is an old legend—older than Omar—that the most beautiful flowers spring from the blood of heroes. And it is true. When the genius of a nation has been ploughed up with cannon-shot and bayonets and watered with blood—then it is that it breaks into the most nearly perfect blossom. It has been so through all history, back beyond the times of gun and bayonet, when spears and swords were the plough-shares, as far as we can see and doubtless farther. In America, the necessities of the case compelled the people to turn first to material works; it was to the civilising of their continent, the repairing of their shattered commercial and industrial structure (shattered when it was yet only half built), that their new inspiration had perforce to turn first. But there was impetus enough for that and to spare, and, after satisfying their mere physical needs, they swept on with a sort of inspired hunger for things to satisfy their minds and souls. Europeans are accustomed to think that the American desire for culture is something superficial—something put on for appearance's sake; and nothing could well be farther from the truth. It is an intense, deep-seated, national craving. War on the scale of the Civil War ploughs deep. It may be impossible for a nation to make itself cultivated—to grow century-old shrubberies and five-century-old turf—in ten years or forty; and when the Americans in their ravening famine reach out to grasp at once all that is good and beautiful in the world, it may be that at first they cannot assimilate all that they draw to them—they can grasp, but not absorb. To that extent there may be much that is superficial in American culture. But every year and every day they are sucking the nourishment deeper—the influences are penetrating, percolating, permeating the soil of their natures (yes, I know that I am running two metaphors abreast, but let them run)—and it is a mistake to conclude because in some places the culture lies only on the surface that there are not others where it has already sunk through and through. Above all is it a mistake to suppose that the emotion itself is shallow or that the yearning is not as deep as their—or any human—natures.

It is possible that some critics may be found cavilling enough to accuse me of inconsistency in thus celebrating the praise of War in a work which is avowedly intended for the promotion of Peace. Carlyle wisely, if somewhat brutally, pointed out that if an Oliver Cromwell be assassinated "it is certain you may get a cart-load of turnips from his carcase." But one does not therefore advocate regicide for the sake of the kitchen-gardens.

FOOTNOTES:

[171:1] In 1906, under a stricter definition of the term "periodical," the privilege of sending as second-class matter books issued at regular intervals was withdrawn.