Harry Perry Robinson

The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon—America's Resemblance to Japan—A German View—Can Americans Lie?—Honesty as the Best Policy—Religious Sentiment—Moral and Immoral Railway Managers—A Struggle for Self-Preservation—Gentlemen in Business—Peculation among Railway Servants—How the Old Order Changes, Yielding Place to New—The Strain on British Machinery—Americans as Story-Tellers—The Incredibility of the Actual.

My desire is to contribute, if possible, something towards the establishment of a better understanding between the two peoples by correcting certain misapprehensions which exist in the mind of each in regard to the other. At the present moment we are concerned with the particular misapprehension which exists in the English mind in regard to the commercial ethics—the average level of common honesty—in the masses of American business men. I have endeavoured to show, first, that the majority of Englishmen have, even though unconsciously, a fundamental misconception of the character of the American people, arising primarily from the absence of a recognised aristocracy in the United States:—that, in fact, the two peoples are, in the construction of their social fabrics, much more alike than the Englishman generally assumes. I have endeavoured to show, next, that if we were entirely without any knowledge of, or any prejudices in regard to, the code of commercial ethics at present existing in either country, but had to deduce for ourselves a priori from what we knew of the part which commerce and business played in the social life of the two countries the probable degree of morality which would be found in the respective codes, we should be forced to look for a higher standard in the United States than in England. We have seen how it comes that Englishmen have, justifiably and even unavoidably, acquired the erroneous notions which they have acquired, first, from the fact that, in the rough days of the past, American business morality was, at least in certain parts of the country, looser than that which prevailed in the older-established and better constituted society of the England of the same day (and in the older communities of the United States itself); and, second, from the fact that the chief channel through which Englishmen must necessarily derive their contemporary ideas on the subject, namely, the American press, is, by reason of qualities peculiar to itself, not to be trusted to correct the misapprehensions which exist. Finally, we have seen that there exist in certain American minds some mistaken notions, not much dissimilar in character to those which I am trying to point out are present in the minds of Englishmen, about the character of a considerable section of the people of Great Britain; and if Americans can be thus mistaken about England, there is no inherent improbability in the suggestion that Englishmen may be analogously mistaken about the United States.

The English people has had abundant justification in the past for arriving at the conclusion that in many of the qualities which go to make a great and manly race it stands first among the peoples of the earth. The belief of Englishmen in their own moral superiority as a people is justified by the course of history, and is proven every day afresh by the attitudes of other races,—especially by the behaviour in their choice of friends, when compelled to choose as between England and other European powers, of the peoples more or less unlike the Anglo-Saxon in their civilisations in the remoter corners of the world. It is to the eternal honour of England that in countless out-of-the-way places, peoples more or less savage have learned to accept the word of a British official or trader as a thing to be trusted, and have grown quick to distinguish between him and his rivals of other European nationalities. There has been abundant testimony to the respect which the British character has won from the world,—from the frank admiration of the Prince-Chancellor for the "Parole de Gentleman" to the unshakable confidence of the far red Indian in the faith of a "King George Man"; from the trust of an Indian native in the word of a Sahib to the dying injunction to his successor of one of the greatest of the Afghan Ameers: "Trust the English. Do not fight them. They are good friends and bad enemies."[349:1] And the most solemn oath, I believe, which an Arab can take is to swear that what he says is as "true as the word of an Englishman."

But, granting all that has happened in the past, and recognising that British honour and the sacredness of the British word have stood above those of any other peoples, the American nation of to-day is a new factor in the situation. It did not exist at the time when the old comparisons were made. I have suggested elsewhere that the popular American contempt for the English climate is only an inheritance of the opinions based on a comparison of that climate with the climates of Southern Europe. If the climate of certain parts—of the greater part—of the United States had then been a factor to be taken into consideration, English skies would have had at least one fellow to share with them the opprobrium of the world. So in the matter of commercial morality; we are thinking and speaking in terms of a day that has gone, when other standards governed.

Englishmen have been very willing, within the last year or two, to believe in the revolution which has taken place in the character of another people, less akin to them than the Americans and farther away. The promptitude with which the British masses have accepted the fact that, in certain of the virtues on which Englishmen have most peculiarly prided themselves in the past, the Japanese are their superiors, has been curiously un-British. There should be no greater difficulty in believing that another revolution, much more gradual and less picturesque, and by so much the more easily credible, has taken place in the American character. The evidence in favour of the one is, rightly viewed, no less strong than that in favour of the other. It would have been impossible for the Japanese to have carried on the recent war as they did had they not been possessed of the virtues of courage and patriotism in the highest degree. It would have been equally impossible for the Americans to have built up their immense trade in competition with the great commercial powers of the world, unless they had in an equally high degree possessed the virtue of commercial honesty. No one ought to know better than the English business man that a great national commercial fabric is not built up by fraud or trickery.

On this subject Professor MÜnsterberg,[351:1] striving to eradicate from the minds of his German countrymen the same tendency to underestimate the honesty of American business men, says (and let me say that neither my opinion, nor the form in which it is expressed, was borrowed from him): "It is naÏve to suppose that the economic strength of America has been built up through underhanded competition, without respect to law or justice, and impelled by nothing but a barbarous and purely material ambition. One might better suppose that the twenty-story office buildings on lower Broadway are supported by the flag-stones in the street.... The colossal fabric of American industry is able to tower so high only because it has its foundations on the hard rock of honest conviction."

"It has been well said," says the same author, "that the American has no talent for lying, and distrust of a man's word strikes the Yankee as specifically European." Now in England "an American lie" has stood almost as a proverb; yet the German writer is entirely in earnest, though personally I do not agree with him. He sees the symptoms, but the diagnosis is wrong. The American has an excellent talent for lying, but in business he has learned that falsehood and deception are poor commercial weapons. Business which is obtained by fraud, any American will tell you, "doesn't stick"; and as every American in his business is looking always to the future, he prefers, merely as a matter of prudence, that his foundations shall be sound.

All society is a struggle for the survival of the fittest; and in crude and early forms of society, it is the strongest who proves himself most fit. In savage communities—and Europe was savage until after the feudal days—it is the big man and brutal who comes to the top. In the savage days of American commerce, which, at least for the West, ended only a generation back, it was too often the man who could go out and subdue the wilderness and beat down opposition, who rode rough-shod over his competitors and used whatever weapons, whether of mere brute strength or fraud, with the greatest ferocity and unscrupulousness, who made his mark and his fortune. But in a settled and complex commercial community it is no longer the strongest who is most fit; it is the most honest. The American commercial community as a whole, in spite of occasional exceptions and in defiance of the cynicism of the press, has grasped this fact and has accepted the business standards of the world at large.

Let me not be interpreted as implying that there are any fewer Americans than there are Englishmen who live rightly from the fear of God or for the sake of their own self-respect. The conclusion of most observers has been that the American people is more religious than the English, that the temperament, more nervous and more emotional, is more susceptible to religious influence. It may be so. It is a subject on which the evidence is necessarily so intangible—on which an individual judgment is likely to be so entirely dependent on individual observation in a narrow field—that comparison becomes extremely difficult. My own opinion would be that there is at least as much real religious feeling in England as in the United States, and certainly more in Scotland than in either; but that the churches in America are more active as organisations and more efficient agents in behalf of morality.

But we are now speaking of the business community as a whole, and the force which ultimately keeps the ethics of every business community pure is, I imagine, the same, namely that without honesty the community itself cannot live or prosper and that, with normal ability, he who is most honest prospers most. American business was dishonest before society had settled down and knitted itself together.

The change which has come over the American business world can perhaps best be made clear to English readers by taking a single example; and it must necessarily be an example from a field with which I am familiar.

There is in my possession an interesting document, being one of the (I think) two original manuscript copies of the famous "Gentleman's Agreement," bearing the signatures of the parties thereto, which was entered into by the Presidents or Chairmen of a number of railway companies at Mr. Pierpont Morgan's house in New York in 1891. In the year following the signing of the Agreement, I was in London in connection with affairs which necessitated rather prolonged interviews with many of the Chairmen or General Managers of the British railways,—Sir George Findlay, Sir Edward Watkin, Mr. J. Staats Forbes, and others. With all of them the mutual relations existing between railway companies in the two countries respectively formed one of the chief topics of our conversations, and that at that time the good faith and loyalty of attitude of one company towards another were much greater in England than in America it is not possible to question. British companies are subject to a restraining influence which does not exist in the United States, in the parliamentary control which is exercised over them. Every company of any size has, with more or less frequency, to go to Parliament for new powers or privileges, and any Chairman or Board of Directors which established a reputation for untrustworthiness in dealings with other companies would probably be able to expect few favours from the next Parliamentary Committee. But (although the two last of the gentlemen whose names I have mentioned were notoriously parties to a peculiarly bitter railway war) I believe that the motives which have chiefly operated to make the managers of English companies observe faith with each other better than the American have ever succeeded in doing, are chiefly the traditional motives of a high sense of personal honour—the fact that they were gentlemen first and business men afterwards.

The circumstances which led up to the formation of the Gentlemen's Agreement were almost inconceivable to English railway operators. The railways, it must always be borne in mind, have been the chief civilisers of the American continent. It is by their instrumentality that the Great American Desert of half a century ago is to-day among the richest and most prosperous agricultural countries in the world. The railways have always thrust out ahead of the settler into whatever territory, by reason of the potential fertility of its soil or for other causes, has held out promise of some day becoming populated. Along the railway the population has then flowed. In forcing its way westward each company in its course has sought to tap with its lines the richest strips of territory: all alike endeavoured to obtain a share of the traffic originating from a point where a thriving town was already established or topographical conditions pointed out a promising site. As the American laws impose practically no restrictions on railway construction it necessarily followed that certain districts and certain favourable strategic points were invaded by more lines than could possibly be justified either by the traffic of the moment or the prospective traffic of many years to come. This was conspicuously the case in the region Northwestward from Chicago. Business which might have furnished a reasonable revenue to two companies was called upon to support six or seven and the competition for that business became intense,—all the more intense because, unlike English railway companies, few American railways in their early days have had any material reserve of capital to draw upon. They have had to earn their living as they went, out of current receipts, or submit to liquidation.

The officials in charge of the Traffic Departments of each company had to justify their retention in their positions by somehow getting more than their share of the business, and the temptations to offer whatever inducements were necessary to get that business amounted almost to compulsion. Without it, not the particular official only, but his company, would be extinguished. The situation was further aggravated by the fact that the goods that were to be carried were largely staples shipped in large quantities by individual shippers—millers, owners of packing houses, mining companies from the one end, and coal and oil companies from the other. One of these companies might be able to offer a railway more business in the course of a year than it could hope to get from all the small traders on its lines combined—enough to amount almost to affluence if it could be secured at the regularly authorised rates. The keenness of the competition to secure the patronage of these large shippers can be imagined; for it was, between the companies, a struggle for actual existence. All that the shipper had to do was to wait while the companies underbid each other, each in turn cutting off a slice from the margin of profit that would result from the carrying of the traffic until, not infrequently and in some notorious cases, not only was that margin entirely whittled away but the traffic was finally carried at a figure which meant a heavy loss to the carrier. The extent to which the Standard Oil Company has profited by this necessity on the part of the railways to get the business of a large shipping concern at almost any price, rather than allow its cars and motive power to remain idle, has been made sufficiently public.

In some measure the companies were able to protect themselves by the making of pooling (or joint-purse) arrangements between themselves; but the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Law in 1887 made pooling illegal. The companies endeavoured to frame agreements which would not be repugnant to the law but would take the place of the pools; but it was impossible to attach any penalties to infringements of such agreements and under pressure of the necessity of self-preservation, no agreement, however solemnly entered into, was strong enough to restrain the parties. The Passenger Agents framed agreements to control the passenger traffic and the Freight Agents made agreements to control the goods traffic, and both were equally futile. Then the Traffic Managers made agreements to cover both classes of business, which held no longer than the others. So the General Managers tried their hands. But the inexorable exigencies of the situation remained. Each official was still confronted with the same dilemma: he must either secure more business than he was entitled to or he—and his company—must starve. And the agreements made by General Managers bound no better than those which Passenger Agents or Traffic Managers had made before. Then it was that the Gentlemen stepped in.

The Gentlemen, it should be explained, were the Presidents and Chairmen of the Boards of the respective companies. They, it was hoped, would be able to reach an agreement which, if once their names were signed to it, would hold. The meeting, as has been said, was held at Mr. Pierpont Morgan's house[358:1] and an agreement was in fact arrived at and signed, as has been said, in duplicate. It is lamentable to have to record that that agreement—except in so far as it set a precedent for other meetings of the same gentlemen, which in turn led to others out of which finally grew large movements in the direction of joint ownerships and consolidations of interests which have helped materially to make the conditions more tolerable—except for that, the Gentlemen's Agreement did no more good, and it lasted not appreciably longer, than any of the others which had been made by mere officials.

Englishmen will all agree that it is unthinkable that the Chairmen of the great British railway companies could meet and give their words as gentlemen that each of their companies would observe certain rules in the conduct of its business and that a few weeks thereafter it should become evident that no single company was keeping the word so pledged. But it would be just as absurd to question the personal integrity or sense of honour of such men as Mr. Marvin Hughitt, Mr. E. W. Winter, Mr. W. H. Truesdale, and the others, as it would be to question that of the most upright man in England. The fact is that the conditions are almost unthinkable to Englishmen. No company, in becoming party to the agreement, had surrendered its right to retaliate when another violated the provisions. The actual conduct of the business of the companies—the quoting of the rates to secure the traffic—was in the hands of a host of subordinate officials, and when a rate is cut it is not cut openly, but in secret and by circuitous devices. It was, on subsequent investigation, always impossible to tell where the demoralisation had begun, amid the cloud of charges, counter-charges, and denials. There was not one of the subordinate officials but declared (and seemingly proved) that he had acted only in retaliation and self-defence. As there was no way of obtaining evidence from the shippers, in whose favour the concessions had been made, it was impossible to sift out the truth. Each Chairman or President could only say that he had entire confidence in his own staff. There was no visible remedy except to discharge the entire membership of the Traffic Departments of all the companies simultaneously and get new men, to the number of several hundreds, who would be no better able to accomplish the impossible than their predecessors.

My reason for going into this, I fear, somewhat tedious narration is that British distrust of American commercial honesty was originally created, perhaps, more than by anything else, by the scandals which were notoriously associated with the early history of railways in the United States. It is not desired here either to insist on the occurrence of those scandals or to palliate them. The point is that the conditions which made those scandals possible (of which the incapacity on the part of the North-western lines to keep faith with each other may be regarded as symptomatic) were concomitants of a particular stage only in the development of the country. Competition must always exist in any business community; but in the desperate form of a breathless, day-to-day struggle for bare existence it need only exist among railway companies where lines have been built in excess of the needs of the population. With the increase in population and the growth of trade the asperity of the conditions necessarily becomes mitigated, until at last, when the traffic has assumed proportions which will afford all competitors alike a reasonable profit on their shares, the management ceases to be exposed to any more temptation than besets the Boards of the great British companies. Not a few railway companies in the United States have arrived at that delectable condition—are indeed now more happily circumstanced than any English company—and among them are some the names of which, not many years ago, were mere synonyms for dishonesty. In the North-western territory of which I have spoken the fact that the current values of all railway shares had on the average increased (until the occurrence of the financial crisis of the close of 1907) by about three hundred per cent. in the last ten years is eloquent.

In the old days the wrong-doing which was rampant, through excess of opportunity and more than abundant temptation, in the higher circles, ran also through all grades of the service; and there was one case at least of a railway company which used in fact to have to discharge all its servants of a certain class at intervals of once a month or thereabouts. The Northern Pacific Railway line was opened across the continent in 1883, and during the next twelve months it was my fortune to have to travel over the western portion of the road somewhat frequently. The company had a regularly established tariff of charges, and tickets from any one station to another could be bought at the booking offices just as on any other railway line in America or England. But few people bought tickets. The line was divided, of course, into divisions, of so many hundreds of miles each, the train being in charge of one conductor (or guard) to the end of his division, where he turned it over to his successor for the next division. It was the business of the conductor to take up the tickets, or collect the fares, while the train was running, and it was well understood among regular passengers on the line that each conductor expected to receive one dollar to the end of his division, no matter at what point a passenger entered the train. The conductor merely walked through the cars collecting silver dollars, of which he subsequently apportioned to the treasury of the company as many as he saw fit. They were probably not many.

On one occasion I stood at a booking-office and, speaking through the small window, asked the clerk for a ticket to a certain place. The conductor of the train, already waiting in the station, had strolled into the office and heard my request.

"Don't you buy a ticket!" said he to me. "I can let you travel cheaper than he can, can't I, Bill?"—this last being addressed to the clerk behind the window; and Bill looked out through the hole and said he guessed that was so.

The company, as I have said, used to discharge its conductors with regularity, or they resigned, at intervals depending on the periods at which accounts were made up, but it was said in those days that there was not a town between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast which did not contain a drinking saloon owned by an ex-Northern Pacific conductor, and established out of the profits that he had made during his brief term of service.

In the American railway carriages, the method of communication between passengers and the engine, in case of emergency, is by what is known as the "bell-cord" which runs from end to end of the train, suspended from the middle of the ceiling of each car in a series of swinging rings. The cord sways loosely in the air to each motion of the train like a slackened clothes-line in a gale. On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FÉ Railway the story used to be told that at the end of the day the conductors would toss each coin received into the air to see if it would balance on the bell-cord. The coins which balanced went to the company; those which did not, the conductor took as his own.

That, be it noted, was the state of affairs some twenty-four years ago. I question if there is much more peculation on the part of the employees of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FÉ to-day than there is on the part of the servants of the Great Western of England or any other British company.

The place where the conductor advised me not to buy a ticket had then a few yards of planking laid on the prairie for a platform and a small shed as a station building. The town consisted of three or four brick buildings and a huddle of wooden shanties. To-day it is one of the twenty most populous cities in the United States with tall office buildings, broad busy streets, and sumptuous private residences. I used to have excellent trout-fishing in what is now the centre of a great town. Where the air to-day is filled with the hum of wheels and the roar of machinery, then was only open prairie innocent of any evidence of human occupation beyond some three or four things like dog-kennels badly built of loose lattice-work on the river's bank. These were the red Indians' Turkish baths.

The old code of morality has vanished with the red Indian and the trout-fishing. In the early days of that town there used to be nobody to maintain public order but an efficient Vigilance Committee, which executed justice by the simple process of hanging persons whom the public disliked, and which was still in nominal existence when I was there. Now the city has the proper complement of courts, from the United States Court downwards, and a bar which has already furnished one or two members to the United States Senate. Of course this has happened in the very far West but the change which has come over New York in the same length of time is no less astonishing if less picturesque. It is as unjust to compare the morals or manners of the American people of to-day with those of even three decades ago as it would be to compare the state of twentieth-century society in New Zealand with the old convict days. In one generation Japan has stepped from the days of feudalism to the twentieth century. America, in all that goes to constitute civilisation, has in the last twenty-five years jumped, according to European canons, at least a hundred.

Certain outward manifestations of the change which has been wrought, the peoples of Europe have been unable to ignore;—the immense growth in the power of the United States as a nation, her invasion of the markets of the world even in lines wherein, twenty years ago, the internal markets of America herself were at the mercy of British manufacturers, the splendid generosity which individual citizens of the United States are showing in buying wherever they can all that is most beautiful or precious among the treasures of the Old World for the enrichment of their museums and galleries at home—these things the people of Europe cannot help but see. It would be well if they would strive also to understand the development of the moral forces which underlies these things, which alone has made them possible.

What has been the course of events in England in the same period? I have already said that I believe that Englishmen justly earned the reputation of being the most upright of all peoples in their commercial dealings; and for the sake of the context perhaps Americans who have had little opportunity of gauging the opinions of the world will accept it as true. It is probable that the world has seen no finer set of men engaged in commerce than those who laid the foundations of England's commercial greatness; and I imagine that there are more honest men in England to-day than ever there were—more men of what is, it will be noticed, instructively called "old-fashioned" honesty. Yet no one will be quicker than just one of these "old-fashioned" honest men to declare that the standard of commercial morality in England is deteriorating.

The truth is that a vast new trading community has sprung up with new ideas which no longer accepts the old canons or submits to the old authority. The old maxims pass current; there is the same talk of honest goods and honest methods, but under stress of keener competition and the pressure of the more rapid movement of modern life, there is more temptation to allow products to deteriorate, greater difficulty in living always up to the old rigid standards. The words "English made" no longer carry, even to English minds, the old guarantee of excellence.

In no small measure it may be that it is the example and influence of America itself which is working the mischief; which by no means implies that American example and influence must in themselves be bad. American methods, both in the production and sale of goods, might be wholly good, but the attempt to graft them upon established English practice might have nothing but deplorable results. It is not necessarily the fault of the new wine if old bottles fail to hold it. One factory may have the capacity to turn out one thousand of a given article, all of the highest quality and workmanship, per diem. If a factory with one tenth the capacity strains itself to compete and turns out the same number of articles of the same kind in the same time, something will be wrong with the quality of those articles. I am not prepared to say that in any given line English manufacturers are overstraining the capacity of their plants to the sacrifice of the quality of their goods in their effort to keep pace with American rate of production; but I do most earnestly believe that something analogous to it is happening in the commercial field as a whole, and that neither English commercial morality nor the quality of English-made goods has been improved by the necessity of meeting the intense competition of the world-markets to-day, with an industrial organisation which grew up under other and more leisurely conditions.

Postscript.—Not necessarily as a serious contribution to my argument but rather as a gloss on Professor MÜnsterberg's remark that the American has no talent for lying, I have often wondered how far the Americans reputation for veracity has been injured by their ability as story-tellers. "Story" it must be remembered is used in two senses. The American has the reputation of being the best narrator in the world; and he loves to narrate about his own country—especially the big things in it. In nine cases out of ten, when he is speaking of those big things, he is conscientiously truthful; but not seldom it happens that what may be a mere commonplace to the American seems incredible to the English listener unacquainted with the United States and unable to give the facts as narrated their due proportion in the landscape.

More than a quarter of a century ago, when electric light was still a very new thing to Londoners, an American casually told myself and three or four others that the small town from which he came in the far Northwest of America was lighted entirely by a coronal of electric lights of some prodigious candle-power on the top of a mast, erected in the centre of the town, of a, to us, incredible height. It was, at the time, quite unbelievable; but in less than a year chance took me all the way to that identical little town in the far Northwest, and what the American had said was strictly true—true, I doubt not, to a single candle-power and to a fraction of a foot of mast. And a costly and indifferent method of lighting, for a whole town, it may be remarked, it was.

In an earlier stage of my youth I lost all confidence in an elderly and eminently respectable friend of the family who had travelled much because he once informed me that the Japanese watered their horses out of spoons. Of course I knew that the old gentleman was a liar.

An American travelling in an English railway carriage fell into conversation with the other occupants, who were Englishmen. Among divers pieces of information about things in the United States which he gave them he told (it was at the time when the steel construction of high buildings was still a novelty) of a twenty-storey "sky-scraper" which he passed daily on his way to and from his office on which, to save time, the walls were being put up simultaneously at, perhaps, the second, eighth, and fifteenth floors, working upwards from each point, the intervening floors being in the meanwhile left untouched. He explained that, in the system of steel construction, the walls did not support the building; that being done by the skeleton framework of metal, on which the walls were subsequently hung as a screen. They might, theoretically, be of paper; though as a matter of fact the material used was generally terra-cotta or some fire-proof brick. The American said that it was queer to see a house being built at the eighth storey in midair, as it were, with nothing but the thin steel supports and open sky below.

"I should imagine it would look very queer," said the Englishman whom he was addressing, with obvious coolness; and the American was entirely aware that every person in that carriage regarded him as a typical American liar. Time passed and the carriage relapsed into silence, each of the occupants becoming immersed in such reading-matter as he had with him. Suddenly one of them aroused the others with the ejaculation:

"By Jove! If here isn't a picture of that very building you were talking of!"

It was a Graphic or Illustrated London News, or some other such undoubtedly trustworthy London paper which he was reading, and he passed it round for the inspection of the rest of the company. The American looked at it. It was not his particular building but it did as well, and there was the photograph before them, with the walls complete, to window casing and every detail of ornament, on the eighth and ninth floors, while not a brick had been laid from the second storey to the seventh. A god from the machine had intervened to save the American's reputation. Often have I seen incredulity steal over the faces of a well-bred company in England at some statement from an American of a fact in itself commonplace enough, when no such providential corroboration was forthcoming.

Curiously enough, the true Yankee in America, especially of the rural districts, has the same distrust of the veracity of the Western American as the Englishman generally has of the Yankee himself (in which he includes all Americans). I had been living for some years in Minnesota when, standing one day on the platform of the railway station at, I think, Schenectady, in New York State, I was addressed by one who was evidently a farmer in the neighbourhood. Learning that I had just come from Minnesota he referred to the two towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis. "Right lively towns," he had heard them to be. "And how many people might there be in the two together?" he asked. "About a quarter of a million," I replied—the number being some few thousand less than the figure given by the last census. The farmer, perhaps, had not heard anything of the two towns for ten or a dozen years, when their population had been not much more than a third of what it had grown to at that time; and he looked at me. He did not say anything; he merely looked at me, long and fixedly. Then he deliberately turned his back and walked to the other end of the platform as far as possible from my contaminating influence. I was never so explicitly and categorically called a liar in my life; and he doubtless went home and told his family of the magnificent Western exaggerator whom he had met "down to the depot." I fear the American reputation often suffers no less unjustly in England.

FOOTNOTES:

[349:1] Even up to a quarter of a century ago, there was at least one corner of the United States, near to the Canadian border, where among Indians not yet rounded up or blanketed the old feeling still existed, so that an Englishman, proclaiming himself a "King George Man," could go and hunt and fish safely, sure of the friendship and protection of the red man, while an American would not have been safe for a night. The subject of the relations between the British and the Indian tribes in Revolutionary times has, of course, been provocative of much bitterness in the hearts of Americans; but happily their own historians of a later day have shown that this bitterness has only been partially justified. There was not much to choose between Patriots and Loyalists. Those who know the Indian know also that the universal liking for the Englishman cannot have rested only on motives of political expediency or from temporary alliances made in Revolutionary times. They must have had abundant proof of the loyalty and trustworthiness of Englishmen before so deep-rooted a sentiment could have been created. The contrast, of course, was not with the American colonist, but with the French. The colonists, too, were King George Men once.