Harry Perry Robinson

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.

Not only this, but something of the same qualities of spaciousness, as of trafficking between large horizons, attach to almost all lines of business in the United States,—to many which in England are necessarily humdrum and commonplace. Almost every Englishman has been surprised on making the acquaintance of an accidental American (no "magnate" or "captain of industry" but an ordinary business man) to learn that though he is no more than the manufacturer of some matter-of-fact article, his operations are on a confusing scale and that, with branch offices in three or four towns and agents in a dozen more, his daily dealings are transacted over an area reaching three thousand miles from his home office, in which the interposition of prairies, mountain ranges, and chains of lakes are but incidents. Business in the United States has almost necessarily something of the romance of remote and adventurous enterprises.

It has been said (and the point is worth insisting on) that the Englishman cannot pretend that he goes into business with any other object than to make money. His motives are on the face of them mercenary if not sordid. The American is impelled primarily by quite other ambitions. Similarly, when the Englishman thinks of business, the image which he conjures up in his mind is of a dull commonplace like, on lines so long established and well-defined that they can embrace little of novelty or of enterprise; a sedentary life of narrow outlook from the unexhilarating atmosphere of a London office or shop. To the American, except in small or retail trade in the large cities, the conditions of business are widely different. All around him, lies, both actually and figuratively, new ground, wilderness almost, inviting him to turn Argonaut. The mere vastness and newness of the country make it full of allurement to adventure, the rewards of which are larger and more immediate than can be hoped for in older and more straitened communities.

It has been said that the American people was, by its long period of isolation and self-communion, made to become, in its outlook on the policies of the world, a provincial people; but that the very provincialism had something of dignity in it from the mere fact that it was continent-wide. So it is with American business. The exigencies of their circumstances have made the American people a commercial people; but whereas in England a commercial life may not offer scope for any intellectual activity and may even have a necessary tendency to stunt the mentality of any one engaged in it, business in the United States offers exercise to a much larger gamut of abilities and, by its mere range and variety, instead of dwarfing has a tendency to keep those abilities trained and alert. A business in England has not approximately the same large theatre of operation or the same variety of incident as a business of the same turn over in America. It is almost the difference between the man who furnishes his larder by going out to his farmyard and wringing the necks of tame ducks therein, and him who must snatch the same supply with his gun from the wild flocks in the wilderness.

But, indeed, no argument should be needed on the subject; for one solid fact with which almost every Englishman is familiar is that in any American (let us use the word) shopkeeper whom he may meet travelling in Europe there is a certain mental alertness, freshness, and vigour, however objectionably they may at times display themselves—which are at least not characteristic of the English shopkeeping class.

Just, then, as we have seen that, if we knew nothing about the peoples of the two countries, beyond the broad outlines of their respective social structures, we should be compelled, other things being equal, to look for a higher code of commercial morality in America than in England, so, when we see one further fact, namely that of the difference in the conditions under which business is conducted, we must naturally, other things being equal, look for a livelier intellect and a higher grade of mentality in the American than in the English business man.

Unfortunately other things never are equal. First, there is the taint of the political corruption in America which must, as has been said, in some measure contaminate the community. Then, England is an old country, with all the machinery of society running in long-accustomed grooves; above all it is a wealthy country and the first among creditor nations, to whose interest it has been, and is, to see that every bond and every engagement be literally and exactly carried out. The United States in the nineteenth century was young and undisciplined, with all the ardour of youth going out to conquer the world, seeing all things in rose-colour, but, for the present,—poor. It was, like any other youth confident of the golden future, lavish alike in its borrowings and its spendings, over-careless of forms and formalities. Happily the confidence in the future has been justified and ten times justified, and it is rich—richer than it yet knows—with resources larger even than it has learned properly to appraise or control. Whatever obligations it incurred in the headlong past are trifles to it now,—a few hundreds of college debts to a man who has come into millions. And with its position now assured it has grown jealous of its credit, national and individual.

It was inevitable that the heedless days should beget indiscretions, the memories of which smart to-day. It was inevitable that amid so much recklessness and easy faith there should be some wrong-doing. Above all, was it inevitable that in the realisation of its dreams, when wealth and power grew and money came pouring into it, there should be bred in the people an extraordinary and unwholesome love of speculation which in turn opened their opportunities to the gambler and the confidence-man of all kinds and sizes. They flourished in the land,—the man who wrecked railways and issued fictitious millions of "securities," the man who robbed the government of moneys destined for the support of Indians or the establishment of postal routes in the farther West, the man who salted mines, the "land-grabber" and the "timber-shark" who dealt not in acres but in hundreds of square miles, the bogus trust company, and the fraudulent land and investment agent. When even the smallest community begins to "boom," the people of the community lose their heads and the harvest ripens to the sickle of the swindler. And the entire United States—sometimes in one part, sometimes in another, sometimes all together,—with only an occasional and short-lived panic to check the madness, boomed continuously for half a century.

It is still booming, but with wealth, established institutions, and invested capital, have come comparative soberness and a sense of responsibility. The spirit which governs American industrial life to-day is quite other than that which ruled it two or three decades ago. The United States has sown its wild oats. It was a generous sowing, certainly, for the land was wide and the soil rich. But that harvest has been all but garnered and the country is now for the most part given over to more legitimate crops.

[Tares still spring up among the wheat. The commercial community is not yet as well ordered as that of England or another older country; and since the foregoing paragraphs were written, the panic which fell upon the United States in the closing months of 1907 has occurred. The country had enjoyed a decade of extraordinary financial prosperity, in the course of which, in the spirit of speculation which has already been mentioned, all values had been forced to too high a level, credits had been extended beyond the margin of safety, and the volume of business transactions had swollen to such bulk in proportion to the amount of actual monetary wealth in existence that any shock to public confidence, any nervousness resulting in a contraction of the circulating medium, could not fail to produce catastrophe. The shock came; as sooner or later it had to come. In the stern period of struggle and retrenchment which followed, all the weak spots in the financial and industrial fabric of the country have been laid bare and, while depression and distress have spread over the whole United States, until all parts are equally involved, not only have the exposures of anything approaching dishonest or illegitimate methods been few, but the way in which the business communities at large have stood the strain has shown that there is nothing approaching unsoundness in the general business conditions. With the system of credit shattered and with hardly circulating medium enough to conduct the necessary petty transactions of everyday life, the country is already recovering confidence and feeling its way back to normal conditions. The results have not been approximately as bad as those which followed the panic of 1893; and the difference is an index to the immensely greater stability of the country's industries. Meanwhile there was at first (and still exists) a feeling of intense indignation in all parts of the country that so much suffering should have been thrown upon the whole people by the misbehaviour of a small circle of men in New York. The experience, however painful, will in the long run be salutary. It will be salutary in the first place for the obvious reason that business will have to start again conservatively and with inflated values reduced to something below normal levels. But it will be even more salutary for the less obvious reason that it has intensified the already acute disgust of the business men of the country as a whole with what are known as "Wall Street methods." Englishmen generally have an idea that Wall Street methods are the methods of all the United States; and, while they have had impressed upon them every detail of those financial irregularities in the small New York clique which precipitated the catastrophe, they have heard and know nothing of the coolness and cheery resolution with which the crisis has been faced by the commercial classes as a whole.]

England has not yet forgotten the disclosures in the matter of the Chicago packing houses. That the light which was then turned on that industry revealed conditions that were in some details inconceivably shocking, is hardly to be doubted: and I trust that those are mistaken who say that if similar investigation had been made into the methods of certain English establishments, before warning was given, the state of affairs would have been found not much different. What is certain, however, is that the English public received an exaggerated idea of the extent of the abuses. In part, this was a necessary result of the exigencies of journalism. A large majority of the newspapers even of London—certainly those which reach a large majority of the readers—prefer sensationalism. Even those which are anxious in such cases to be fair and temperate are sadly hampered both by the limitations of space in their own columns and by the costliness of telegraphic correspondence. It is inevitable that the most conservative and judicial of correspondents should transmit to his papers whatever are the most striking items—revelations—accusations in an indictment such as was then framed against the packers. The more damning details are the best news. On the other hand he cannot, save to a ridiculously disproportionate extent, transmit the extenuating circumstances, the individual denials, the local atmosphere. Telegraph tolls are heavy and space is straitened while atmosphere and extenuating circumstances are not news at all. An Englishman is generally astonished when he reads the accounts of some conspicuous divorce case or great financial scandal in England as they appear in the American (or for that matter the French or German) papers, with the editorial comments thereupon. In the picture of any event happening at a great distance the readers of even the best-intentioned journals necessarily have presented to their view only the highest lights and the blackest shadows. In this instance a certain section of the American press—what is specifically known as the "yellow" press—had strong motives, of a political kind, for making the case against the packers as bad as possible. It is unfortunate that many of the London newspapers look much too largely to that particular class of American paper for their American news and their views on current American events.

If we assume that any reasonable proportion of the accusations made against the packing houses were true of some one or other establishment, it still remains that a considerable proportion of the American business community is otherwise engaged than in the canning of meats. There is a story well known in America of a countryman who entered a train with a packet of eggs, none too fresh, in his coat-tail pocket. He sat down upon them; but deemed it best to continue sitting rather than give the contents a chance to run down his person. Meanwhile the smell permeated through the car and at last the passenger sitting immediately behind the countryman saw whence the unpleasantness arose. Whereupon he fell to abusing the other.

"Thunder!" exclaimed the countryman. "What have you got to complain of? You've only got the smell. I'm sitting in it!"

This is much how Americans feel in regard to foreign criticisms of the packing house scandals. Whatever wrong-doing there may have been in individual establishments in this one industry in Chicago, is no more to be taken as typical of the commercial ethics of the American people than the discovery of a fraudulent trader or group of traders in one particular line in Manchester or Glasgow would imply that the British trading public was corrupt. The mere ruthlessness with which, in this case, the wrong-doers were exposed ought in itself to be a sufficient evidence to outsiders that the American public is no more willingly tolerant of dishonesty than any other people. Judged, indeed, by that criterion, surely no other country can detest wrong-doing so whole-heartedly.

And I wish here to protest against the habit which the worst section of the English newspapers has adopted during the last year or so of holding "American methods" in business up to contempt. It is true that it is not done with any idea of directing hostility against the United States; and those who use the catchword so freely would undoubtedly much prefer to speak of "German methods" or even "French" or "Russian methods," if they could. All that is meant is that the methods are un-English and alien; but whether the intention is to lessen the public good-will towards the United States or not, that must inevitably be the effect. Even if it were not, the American public is abundantly justified in resenting it.

The idea that America is trust-ridden to the extent popularly supposed in England has been carefully fostered by those extreme journals in America already referred to (it is impossible not to speak of them as the Yellow Press) for personal and political reasons—reasons which Englishmen would comprehend if they understood better the present political situation in the United States. The idea has been encouraged by divers English "impressionist" authors and writers on the English press who, with a superficial knowledge of American affairs, have caught the jargon of the same school of American journalist-politicians. It has been further confirmed by a misunderstanding of the attitude and policy of President Roosevelt himself, which has already been sufficiently dealt with.

England is, in the American sense, much more "trust-ridden" than the United States. It is not merely that (as any reference to statistics will show) wealth is less concentrated in America than in England—that nothing like the same proportion of the capital of the country is lodged in a few hands—for that, inasmuch as the majority of large fortunes in Great Britain are not commercial in their origin, might mean little; but in business the opportunity for the small trader and the man without backing to win to independence is a hundred times greater in America, while the control exercised by "rings" and "cliques" over certain large industries in England and over the access to certain large markets is, I think, much more complete than has been attained, except most temporarily, by any trust or ring in the United States, except, as in the case of oil, where artificial monopoly has been assisted by natural conditions.

The tendency in the United States even in the last twenty years has not been in the direction of a concentration of wealth, but towards its diffusion in a degree unparalleled in any country in the world. The point in which the United States is economically almost immeasurably superior to England is not in the number of her big fortunes but in the enormously greater well-to-do-ness of the middle classes—the vastly larger number of persons of moderate affluence, who are in the enjoyment of incomes which in England would class them among the reasonably rich.

Consolidation and amalgamation are the necessary and unavoidable tendencies of modern business. As surely as the primitive partnership succeeded individual effort and as, later, corporations were created to enlarge the sphere of partnerships, so is it certain that the industrial units which will fight for control of trade in the much larger markets of the modern world will represent vastly larger aggregations of capital than (except in extraordinary and generally state-aided institutions) were dreamed of fifty years ago. That must be accepted as a certainty. It does not by any means necessarily follow that this process entails a concentration of wealth in fewer hands; on the contrary the larger a corporation is, the wider proportionally, as a general rule, is the circle of the shareholders in whom the property is vested. But presuming the commercial growth of the United States to continue for half a century yet on the lines on which it has developed in the last two decades, the country will then, not so much by any concentration of wealth, but by the mere filling up of the commercial field (so that by increase in the intensity of competition the opportunity for the small or new trader to force his way to the surface will be more curtailed, and the gulf between owner or employer and non-owner or employed will become greater and more permanent)—if, I say, that growth should continue for another fifty years then will the conditions in America approximate to those in England. This it is against which the masses in America are more or less blindly and unconsciously fighting to-day. The comparison with European conditions is generally not formulated in the individual mind; but an approach to those conditions is what the masses of America see—or think they see—in the tendency towards greater aggregations of corporate power. It is not the process of aggregation, but the protest against it, which is peculiar to the United States: not the trust-power but the hatred of it.

This being so, for Englishmen or other Europeans to speak of all manifestations of the process itself as "American" is not a little absurd. Besides which, to so speak of it in the tone which is generally adopted is extremely impolite to a kindred people whose good-will Englishmen ought to, and do, desire to keep.

The thing is best illustrated by taking a single example. The term "Trust" is, of course, very vaguely used, being generally taken, quite apart from its proper significance, to mean any form of combination, corporate aggregation, or working agreement which tends to extend control of a company or individual, or group of companies or individuals, over a larger proportion of a particular trade or industry. In the United States, with the possible exception of the Standard Oil Company (which is not properly a trust), the form of corporate power against which there has been the most bitterness is that of the railways, and the specific form of railway organisation most fiercely attacked has been the Pool or Joint Purse—which is, in all essentials, a true trust. In 1887 the formation of a Pool, or Joint Purse Agreement, was made illegal in the United States; but Englishmen can have no conception of the popular hatred of the word "Pools" which exists in America or of the obloquy which has been heaped upon railway companies for entering into them. Few Englishmen on the other hand have any clear idea of what a Joint Purse Agreement is; and they jog along contentedly ignorant that this iniquitous engine for their oppression is in daily use by the British railway companies.

My personal belief is that the prohibition of pools in America was a mistake: that it would have been better for the country from the first to have authorised, even encouraged, their formation, as in England, under efficient governmental supervision. But the point is that the majority of the American people thought otherwise and no other manifestation of the trust-tendency has been more virulently attacked than the—to English ideas—harmless institution of a joint purse. And whether the American people ultimately acted wisely or unwisely, they were justified in regarding any form of association or agreement between railways with more apprehension than would be reasonable in England. It is not possible here to explain why this is so, except to say broadly that the longer distances in America and the lack of other forms of transportation render an American community, especially in the West, more dependent upon the railway than is the case in England. The conditions give the railway company a larger control over, or influence in, the well-being of the people.

An excellent illustration of the difference in the point of view of the two peoples has been furnished since the above was written by the announcements, within a few weeks of each other in December 1907, of the formation of two "working agreements" between British railway companies,—that namely between the Great Northern and Great Central railways and that between the North British and Caledonian. In the former case the Boards of Directors of the two companies merely constituted themselves a Joint Committee to operate the two railways conjointly. In the latter, not many details of the agreement were made public, except that it was intended to control competition in all classes of traffic and, as the first fruits thereof, there was an immediate and not unimportant increase in certain classes of passenger rates. Neither agreement has, I think, yet received the sanction of the proper authorities, but the public generally received the announcement of both with approval amounting almost to enthusiasm. Of these agreements the former, certainly, and presumably the latter, would be flagrantly illegal in the United States. If, moreover, an attempt were made in America to arrive at the same ends in some roundabout way which would avoid technical illegality, the outburst of popular indignation would make it impossible. Personally I sympathise with the English view and believe both agreements to be not only just and proper but in the public interest; but it is certain that they would have created such an uproar in the United States that English newspapers would inevitably have reflected the disturbance, and English readers would have been convinced that once more the Directorates of American railways were engaged in a nefarious attempt to use the power of capital for the plundering and oppression of the public. In the still more recent debate (February 1908) in the House of Commons, the views expressed by both Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law in favour of the lessening of competition between railway companies would have exposed them to the hysterical abuse of a large part of the American press. Both those gentlemen would have been openly accused of being the tools of (if not actually subsidised by) the corporations, and (but for Mr. Bonar Law's company) Mr. Lloyd George's attitude would, I think, be sufficient to ruin an Administration. These statements contain no reflection on the American point of view. The conditions are such that that point of view may, in America, be the right one. But the absurdity is that Englishmen hear these things, or read of them as being said in the United States, and thereupon assume that terrible offences are being perpetrated; whereas nothing is being done which in England would not receive the approval of the majority of sensible men and be temperately applauded by the spokesmen of both the great parties in Parliament. It is not, I say again, the Trust-power, but the hatred of it, which is peculiar to America.

The same is true of the field as a whole. Things harmless in England might be very dangerous in America. We have so far considered the trust power only as a commercial and industrial factor—in its tendency, by crystallisation or consolidation in the higher strata, to depress the economic status of the industrial masses and to make the emergence of the individual trader into independence more difficult. In this aspect capital is immensely more dominant in England than in America. But there is a political side to the problem.

In the United States, owing to the absence of a throne and an established aristocracy, there is, as it were, no counterpoise to the power of wealth. This is, in practice, the chief virtue of the throne in the British constitution, that, in its capacity as the Fountain of Honour, it prevents wealth from becoming the dominant power in the country and thereby (which Americans are slow to understand) is the most democratic of forces, protecting the proletariat in some measure against the possibility of unhindered oppression by an omnipotent capitalism. The English masses are already by the mere impenetrability of the commercial structure above them much worse off than the corresponding masses in the United States. What their condition might be if for a generation the social restraint put upon wealth by the power of the throne and the established aristocracy were to be relaxed, it is not pleasant to consider. Nor need it be considered.[335:1]

It is, I think, evident that in America the danger to the industrial independence of the individual which might arise from the aggregation of wealth in a few hands is much greater than in England. The power would be capable of greater abuse; the evils which would flow from such abuse would be greater. It is not wealth, but the abuse of it that he is attacking, says President Roosevelt—not the wealthy class, but the "wealthy criminal class." The distinction has not been digested by those in England who rail against American methods or who write of American politics. It is necessary—or so it seems to a large number of the American people—that extraordinary checks should be put upon the possibility of the abuse of wealth in the United States, such as do not exist or are not needed (or at least we have heard no energetic demand for them) in England. As a political fact there is need of especial vigilance in the United States lest corporate power be abused. As a commercial fact it is merely preposterous to rail at the modern tendency to consolidation and amalgamation as specifically "American."

It is probably safe to say that if the United States had such a social counterweight as is furnished in England by the throne and the recognised aristocracy, the growth of what is called "trust-power" would be viewed to-day with comparative unconcern. At all events England is able to view with something like unconcern the conditions, as they exist in England, worse than, as has been said, the trust power is humanly capable of imposing on the American people in another half-century of unhindered growth. Which, American readers will please understand, is not a suggestion that the United States would be benefited, even commercially, by the institution of a monarchy.

Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Englishmen long ago acquired the idea that American business methods in what may be called large affairs were too often unscrupulous; and of such methods, there were certainly examples. I have explained why the temptations to, and the opportunities for, dishonesty were very great in the earlier days and it would be impossible to find language too severe to characterise many of the things which were done—not once, but again and again—in the manipulation of railways, the stealing of public lands, and the plundering of the public treasury. The dog deserved as bad a name as he received. But that dog died. The Americans themselves stoned him to death—with precisely the same ferocity as they have recently exhibited when they discovered, as they feared, some of his litter in the Chicago packing houses—or a year before in the offices of certain insurance companies. The present generation of Americans may not be any better men than their fathers (let us hope that they are, if only for the reputation of the vast immigration of Englishmen and Scotchmen which has poured into the country) but at least they are much less tempted. They live under a new social code. They have nothing like the same opportunity for successful dishonesty and immeasurably greater chance of punishment, whether visited on them by the law or by the opinion of their fellows, if unsuccessful or found out. It is not fair that the new dog should be damned to drag around the old dog's name.

There is an excellent analogy in which the relations of the two peoples are reversed.

Americans are largely of the opinion that the British aristocracy is a disreputable class. They gave that dog its name too; and there have been individual scandals enough in the past to justify it. It is useless for an Englishman living in America to endeavour to modify this opinion in even a small circle, for it is only a question of time—probably of a very short time—before some peer turns up in the divorce court and the Englishmen's friends will send him newspaper clippings containing the Court Report and will hail him on street corners and at the club with: "How about your British aristocracy now?"

Americans cannot see the British peerage as a whole; they only hear of those who thrust themselves into unsavoury notoriety. So Englishmen get no view of the American business community in its entirety, but only read with relish the occasional scandal. Of the two, the American has the better, or at least more frequent, justification for his error than has the Englishman; but it is a pity that the two cannot somehow agree to an exchange. Perhaps a treaty might be entered into (if it were not for the United States Senate) which, when ratified, should be published in all newspapers and posted in all public places in both countries, setting forth that:

"In consideration of the Party of the Second Part hereafter cherishing a belief in the marital fidelity and general moral purity of all members of the British peerage, their wives, heirs, daughters, and near relations, and further agreeing that when, by any unfortunate mishap, any individual member of the said Peerage or his wife, daughter, or other relation shall have been discovered and publicly shown to have offended against the marriage laws or otherwise violated the canons of common decency, to understand and take it for granted that such mishap, offence, or violation is a quite exceptional occurrence owing to the unexplainable depravity of the individual and that it in no way reflects upon the other members of the said Peerage, whether in the mass or individually, or their wives, daughters, or near relations: Therefore the Party of the First Part hereby agrees to decline to give any credence whatsoever to any story, remark, or reflection to the discredit of the general honesty of the American commercial classes or public men, but agrees that he will hereafter assume them to be trustworthy and truthful whether individually or in the mass, except in such cases as shall have been publicly proven to the contrary, and that he will always understand and declare that such isolated cases are purely sporadic and not in any way to be taken as evidences either of an epidemic or of a general low state of public morality, but that on the contrary the said American commercial classes do, whether in the mass or individually, hate and despise an occasional scoundrel among them as heartily as would the Party of the First Part hate and despise such a scoundrel if found among his own people—as, he confesses, does occasionally occur."