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• Part III: The Party System
• Chapter 53: Political Parties and Their History
• Chapter 54: The Parties of Today
• Chapter 55: Composition of the Parties
• Chapter 56: Further Observations On the Parties
• Chapter 57: The Politicians
• Chapter 58: Why the Best Men Do Not Go Into Politics
• Chapter 59: Party Organizations
• Chapter 60: The Machine
• Chapter 61: What the Machine Has to Do
• Chapter 62: How the Machine Works
• Chapter 63: Rings and Bosses
• Chapter 64: Local Extension of Rings and Bosses
• Chapter 65: Spoils
• Chapter 66: Elections and Their Machinery
• Chapter 67: Corruption
• Chapter 68: The War Against Bossdom
• Chapter 69: National Nominating Conventions
• Chapter 70: The Nominating Convention At Work
• Chapter 71: The Presidential Campaign
• Chapter 72: The Issues In Presidential Elections
• Chapter 73: Further Observations On Nominations and Elections
• Chapter 74: Types of American Statesmen
• Chapter 75: What the People Think of It
• Supplementary Note to Editions of 1910 and 1914
• Part IV: Public Opinion
• Chapter 76: The Nature of Public Opinion
• Chapter 77: Government By Public Opinion
• Chapter 78: How Public Opinion Rules In America
• Chapter 79: Organs of Public Opinion
• Chapter 80: National Characteristics As Moulding Public Opinion
• Chapter 81: Classes As Influencing Opinion
• Chapter 82: Local Types of Opinion—east, West, and South
• Chapter 83: The Action of Public Opinion
• Chapter 84: The Tyranny of the Majority
• Chapter 85: The Fatalism of the Multitude
• Chapter 86: Wherein Public Opinion Fails
• Chapter 87: Wherein Public Opinion Succeeds
• Part V: Illustrations & Reflections
• Chapter 88: The Tammany Ring In New York City
• Chapter 89: The Philadelphia Gas Ring
• Chapter 90: Kearneyism In California
• Epilogue to This and the Two Last Preceding Chapters
• Chapter 91: The Home of the Nation
• Chapter 92: The Latest Phase of Immigration
• Chapter 93: The South Since the War
• Chapter 94: Present and Future of the Negro 1
• Chapter 95: Further Reflections On the Negro Problem
• Chapter 96: Foreign Policy and Territorial Extension
• Chapter 97: The New Transmarine Dominions
• Chapter 98: Laissez Faire
• Chapter 99: Woman Suffrage
• Chapter 100: The Supposed Faults of Democracy
• Chapter 101: The True Faults of American Democracy
• Chapter 102: The Strength of American Democracy
• Chapter 103: How Far American Experience Is Available For Europe
• Part VI: Social Institutions
• Chapter 104: The Bar
• Chapter 105: The Bench
• Chapter 106: Railroads
• Chapter 107: Wall Street
• Chapter 108: The Universities and Colleges
• Chapter 109: Further Observations On the Universities
• Chapter 110: The Churches and the Clergy
• Chapter 111: The Influence of Religion
• Chapter 112: The Position of Women
• Chapter 113: Equality
• Chapter 114: The Influence of Democracy On Thought
• Chapter 115: Creative Intellectual Power
• Chapter 116: The Relation of the United States to Europe
• Chapter 117: The Absence of a Capital
• Chapter 118: American Oratory
• Chapter 119: The Pleasantness of American Life
• Chapter 120: The Uniformity of American Life
• Chapter 121: The Temper of the West
• Chapter 122: The Future of Political Institutions
• Chapter 123: Social and Economic Future
• Appendix I
• Note to Chapter 61: Explanation (by Mr. G. Bradford) of the Nominating Machinery and Its Procedure In the State of Massachusetts 1
• Note to Chapter 90: Remarks By Mr. Denis Kearney On “kearneyism In California”
• Appendix II: The Predictions of Hamilton and De Tocqueville
• Appendix III: Bryce’s American Commonwealth: a Review  *
• Appendix IV: Review of the American Commonwealth *

Part VI

Social Institutions

chapter 104

The Bar

Among the organized institutions of a country which, while not directly a part of the government, influence politics as well as society, the bar has in England, Scotland, and France played a part only second to that played by the church. Certainly no English institution is more curiously and distinctively English than this body, with its venerable traditions, its aristocratic sympathies, its strong, though now declining, corporate spirit, its affinity for certain forms of literature, its singular relation, half of dependence, half of condescension, to the solicitors, its friendly control over its official superiors, the judges. To see how such an institution has shaped itself and thriven in a new country is to secure an excellent means of estimating the ideas, conditions, and habits which affect and colour the social system of that country, as well as to examine one of the chief among the secondary forces of public life. It is therefore not merely for the sake of satisfying the curiosity of English lawyers that I propose to sketch some of the salient features of the legal profession as it exists in the United States, and to show how it has developed apart from the restrictions imposed on it in England by ancient custom, and under the unchecked operation of the laws of demand and supply.

When England sent out her colonies, the bar, like most of her other institutions, reappeared upon the new soil, and had gained before the revolution of 1776 a position similar to that it held at home, not owing to any deliberate purpose on the part of those who led and ruled the new communities (for the Puritan settlers at least held lawyers in slight esteem), but because the conditions of a progressive society required its existence. That disposition to simplify and popularize law, to make it less of a mystery and bring it more within the reach of an average citizen, which is strong in modern Europe, is of course still stronger in a colony, and naturally tended in America to lessen the corporate exclusiveness of the legal profession, and do away with the antiquated rules which had governed it in England. On the other hand, the increasing complexity of relations in modern society, and the development of many new arts and departments of applied science, bring into an always clearer light the importance of a division of labour, and, by attaching greater value to special knowledge and skill, tend to limit and define the activity of every profession. In spite, therefore, of the democratic aversion to exclusive organizations, the lawyers in America soon acquired professional habits and a corporate spirit similar to that of their brethren in England; and early last century they had reached a power and social consideration relatively greater than the bar has ever held on the eastern side of the Atlantic.

But the most characteristic peculiarity of the English system disappeared. In the United States, as in some parts of Europe, and most British colonies, there is no distinction between barristers and attorneys. Every lawyer, or “counsel,” is permitted to take every kind of business: he may argue a cause in the Supreme Federal Court at Washington, or write six-and-eightpenny letters from a shopkeeper to an obstinate debtor. He may himself conduct all the proceedings in a cause, confer with the client, issue the writ, draw the declaration, get together the evidence, prepare the brief, and conduct the case when it comes on in court. He is employed, not like the English barrister, by another professional man, but by the client himself, who seeks him out and makes his bargain directly with him, just as in England people call in a physician or make their bargain with an architect. In spite, however, of this union of all a lawyer’s functions in the same person, considerations of practical convenience have in many places established a division of labour similar to that existing in England. Where two or more lawyers are in partnership, it often happens that one member undertakes the court work and the duties of the advocate, while another or others transact the rest of the business, see the clients, conduct correspondence, hunt up evidence, prepare witnesses for examination, and manage the thousand little things for which a man goes to his attorney. The merits of the plan are obvious. It saves the senior member from drudgery, and from being distracted by petty details; it introduces the juniors to business, and enables them to profit by the experience and knowledge of the mature practitioner; it secures to the client the benefit of a closer attention to details than a leading counsel could be expected to give, while yet the whole of his suit is managed in the same office, and the responsibility is not divided, as in England, between two independent personages. However, the custom of forming legal partnerships is one which prevails much more extensively in some parts of the Union than in others. In Boston and New York, for instance, it is common, and I think in the Western cities; in the towns of Connecticut and in Philadelphia one is told that it is rather the exception. Even apart from the arrangement which distributes the various kinds of business among the members of a firm, there is a certain tendency for work of a different character to fall into the hands of different men. A beginner is of course glad enough to be employed in any way, and takes willingly the smaller jobs; he will conduct a defence in a police court, or manage the recovery of a tradesman’s petty debt. I remember having been told by a very eminent counsel that when an old apple-woman applied to his son to have her market licence renewed, which for some reason had been withdrawn, he had insisted on the young man’s taking up the case. As he rises, it becomes easier for him to select his business, and when he has attained real eminence he may confine himself entirely to the higher walks, arguing cases and giving opinions, but leaving most of the preparatory work and all the communications with the client to be done by the juniors who are retained along with him. He is, in fact, with the important difference that he is liable for any negligence, very much in the position of an English leader or King’s counsel, and his services are sought, not only by the client, but by another counsel, or firm of counsel, who have an important suit in hand, to which they feel themselves unequal. He may however be, and often is, retained directly by the client; and in that case he is allowed to retain a junior to aid him, or to desire the client to do so, naming the man he wishes for, a thing which the etiquette of the English bar is supposed to forbid. In every great city there are several practitioners of this kind, men who only undertake the weightiest business at the largest fees; and even in the minor towns court practice is in the hands of a comparatively small group. In one New England city, for instance, whose population is about 50,000, there are, I was told, some sixty or seventy practising lawyers, of whom not more than ten or twelve ever conduct a case in court, the remainder doing what Englishmen would call attorney’s and conveyancer’s work.

Whatever disadvantages this system of one undivided legal profession has, it has one conspicuous merit, on which anyone who is accustomed to watch the career of the swarm of young men who annually press into the Temple or Lincoln’s Inn full of bright hopes, may be pardoned for dwelling. It affords a far better prospect of speedy employment and an active professional life, than the beginner who is not “strongly backed” can look forward to in England. Private friends can do much more to help a young man, since he gets business direct from the client instead of from a solicitor; he may pick up little bits of work which his prosperous seniors do not care to have, may thereby learn those details of practice of which in England a barrister often remains ignorant, may gain experience and confidence in his own powers, may teach himself how to speak and how to deal with men, may gradually form a connection among those for whom he has managed trifling matters, may commend himself to the good opinion of older lawyers, who will be glad to retain him as their junior when they have a brief to give away. So far he is better off than the young barrister in England. He is also, in another way, more favourably placed than the young English solicitor. He is not taught to rely in cases of legal difficulty upon the opinion of another person. He does not see the path of an honourable ambition, the opportunities of forensic oratory, the access to the judicial bench, irrevocably closed against him, but has the fullest freedom to choose whatever line his talents fit him for. Every English lawyer’s experience, as it furnishes him with cases where a man was obliged to remain an attorney who would have shone as a counsel, so also suggests cases of persons who were believed, and with reason believed, by their friends to possess the highest forensic abilities, but literally never had the chance of displaying them, and languished on in obscurity, while others in every way inferior to them became, by mere dint of practice, fitter for ultmate success. Quite otherwise in America. There, according to the universal witness of laymen and lawyers, no man who combines fair talents with reasonable industry fails to earn a competence, and to have, within the first six or seven years of his career, an opportunity of showing whether he has in him the makings of something great. This is not due, as might be supposed, merely to the greater opportunities which everybody has in a new country, and which make America the working man’s paradise, for, in the Eastern states at least, the professions are nearly as crowded as they are in England. It is owing to the greater variety of practice which lies open to a young man, and to the fact that his patrons are the general public, and not, as in England, a limited class who have their own friends and connections to push. Certain it is that American lawyers profess themselves unable to understand how it can happen that deserving men remain briefless for the best years of their life, and are at the last obliged to quit the profession in disgust.

A further result of the more free and open character of the profession may be seen in the absence of many of those rules of etiquette which are, in theory at least, observed by the English lawyer. It is not thought undignified, except in the great cities of the Eastern states, for a counsel to advertize himself in the newspapers.1 He is allowed to make whatever bargain he pleases with his client: he may do work for nothing, or may stipulate for a commission on the result of the suit or a share in whatever the verdict produces—a practice which is open to grave objections, and which in the opinion of more than one eminent American lawyer, has produced a good deal of the mischief which caused it to be seventeen centuries ago prohibited at Rome. However, in some cities the sentiment of the bar seems to be opposed to the practice, and in some states there are rules limiting it. A counsel can, except in New Jersey (a state curiously conservative in some points), bring an action for the recovery of his fees, and, pari ratione, can be sued for negligence in the conduct of a cause.

A lawyer can readily gain admission to practice in the federal courts, and may by courtesy practise in the courts of every state. But each state has its own bar, that is to say, there is no general or national organization of the legal profession, the laws regulating which are state laws, differing in each of the forty-eight commonwealths. In no state does there exist any body resembling the English Inns of Court, with the right of admitting to the practice of public advocacy and of exercising a disciplinary jurisdiction; and in few have any professional associations resembling the English Incorporated Law Society obtained statutory recognition. State law generally vests in the courts the duty of admitting persons as attorneys, and of generally excluding them if guilty of any serious offence. But the oversight of the judges is necessarily so lax that in many states and cities voluntary bar associations have been formed with the view of exercising a sort of censorship over the profession. Such associations can blackball bad candidates for admission, and expel offenders against professional honour; and they are said to accomplish some good in this way. More rarely they institute proceedings to have black sheep removed from practice. Being virtually an open profession like stockbroking or engineering, the profession has less of a distinctive character and corporate feeling than the barristers of England or France have, and I think rather less than the solicitors of England have. Neither wig, bands, gown, cap, nor any other professional costume is worn, and this circumstance, trivial as it may seem, no doubt contributes to weaken the sentiment of professional privilege and dignity, and to obscure the distinction between the advocate as an advocate, not deemed to be pledging himself to the truth of any fact or the soundness of any argument, but simply presenting his client’s case as it is presented to him.

In most states the judges impose some sort of examination on persons seeking to be admitted to practice, often delegating the duty of questioning the candidate to two or three counsel named for the purpose. Candidates are sometimes required to have read for a certain period in a lawyer’s office, but this condition is easily evaded, and the examination, nowhere strict, is often little better than a form or a farce. Notwithstanding this laxity, the level of legal attainment is in some cities as high or higher than among either the barristers or the solicitors of London. This is due to the extraordinary excellence of many of the law schools. I do not know if there is anything in which America has advanced more beyond the mother country than in the provision she makes for legal education.2 As far back as 1860, when there was nothing that could be called a scientific school of law in England, the Inns of Court having practically ceased to teach law, and the universities having allowed their two or three old chairs to fall into neglect and provided scarce any new ones, several American universities possessed well-equipped law departments, giving a highly efficient instruction. Even now, when England has bestirred herself to make a more adequate provision for the professional training of both barristers and solicitors, this provision seems insignificant beside that which we find in the United States, where, not to speak of minor institutions, all the leading universities possess law schools, in each of which every branch of Anglo-American law, i.e., common law and equity as modified by federal and state constitutions and statutes, is taught by a strong staff of able men, sometimes including the most eminent lawyers of the state.3 Here at least the principle of demand and supply works to perfection. No one is obliged to attend these courses in order to obtain admission to practice, and the examinations are generally too lax to require elaborate preparation. But the instruction is found so valuable, so helpful for professional success, that young men throng the lecture halls, willingly spending two or three years in the scientific study of the law which they might have spent in the chambers of a practising lawyer as pupils or as junior partners. The indirect results of this theoretic study in maintaining a philosophical interest in the law among the higher class of practitioners, and a higher sense of the dignity of their profession, are doubly valuable in that absence of corporate organizations on which I have already commented.4

In what may be called habits of legal thought, their way of regarding legal questions, their attitude towards changes in the form or substance of the law, American practitioners, while closely resembling their English brethren, seem on the whole more conservative. Such law reforms as have been effected in England during the last century have mostly come from the profession itself. They have been carried through Parliament by attorneys general or lord chancellors, usually with the tacit approval of the bar and the solicitors. The masses and their leaders have seldom ventured to lay profane fingers on the law, either in despair of understanding it or because they saw nearer and more important work to be done. Hence the profession has in England been seldom roused to oppose projects of change; and its division into two branches, with interests sometimes divergent, weakens its political influence. In the United States, although the legislatures are largely composed of lawyers, many of these have little practice, little knowledge, comparatively little professional feeling. Hence there is usually a latent and sometimes an open hostility between the better kind of lawyers and the impulses of the masses, seeking probably at the instigation of some lawyer of a demagogic turn to carry through legal changes. The defensive attitude which the upper part of the profession is thus led to assume fosters those conservative instincts which a system of case law engenders, and which are further stimulated by the habit of constantly recurring to a fundamental instrument, the federal Constitution. Thus one finds the same dislike to theory, the same attachment to old forms, the same unwillingness to be committed to any broad principle which distinguished the orthodox type of English lawyers in the first half of last century. Prejudices survive on the shores of the Mississippi which Bentham assailed when those shores were inhabited by Indians and beavers; and in Chicago, a place which living men remember as a lonely swamp, special demurrers, replications de injuria, and various elaborate formalities of pleading which were swept away by the English Common Law Procedure Acts of 1850 and 1852, flourish and abound to this day.

Is the American lawyer more like an English barrister or an English solicitor? This depends on the position he holds. The leading counsel of a city recall the former class, the average practitioners of the smaller places and rural districts the latter. But as every American lawyer has the right of advocacy in the highest courts, and is accustomed to advise clients himself instead of sending a case for opinion to a counsel of eminence, the level of legal knowledge—that is to say, knowledge of the principles and substance of the law, and not merely of the rules of practice—is somewhat higher than among English solicitors, while the familiarity with details of practice is more certain to be found than among English barristers. Neither an average barrister nor an average solicitor is so likely to have a good working all-round knowledge of the whole field of common law, equity, admiralty law, probate law, patent law, as an average American city practitioner, nor to be so smart and quick in applying his knowledge. On the other hand, it must be admitted that England possesses more men eminent as draftsmen, though perhaps fewer eminent in patent cases, and that much American business, especially in state courts, is done in a way which English critics might call lax and slovenly.

I have already observed that both in Congress and in most of the state legislatures the lawyers outnumber the persons belonging to any one other walk of life. Nevertheless, they have not that hold on politics now which they had in the first and second generations after 1783. Politics have, in falling so completely into the hands of party organizations, become more distinctly a separate profession, and an engrossing profession, which a man occupied with his clients cannot follow. Thus among the leading lawyers, the men who win wealth and honour by advocacy, comparatively few enter a legislative body or become candidates for public office. Their influence is still great when any question arises on which the profession, or the more respectable part of it, stands together. Many bad measures have been defeated in state legislatures by the action of the bar, many bad judicial appointments averted. Their influence strengthens the respect of the people for the Constitution, and is felt by the judges when they are called to deal with constitutional questions. But taking a general survey of the facts of today, as compared with those of the middle of last century, it is clear that the bar counts for less as a guiding and restraining power, tempering the crudity or haste of democracy by its attachment to rule and precedent, than it did then.

A similar decline, due partly to this diminished political authority, may be observed in its social position. In a country where there is no titled class, no landed class, no military class, the chief distinction which popular sentiment can lay hold of as raising one set of persons above another is the character of their occupation, the degree of culture it implies, the extent to which it gives them an honourable prominence. Such distinctions carried great weight in the early days of the Republic, when society was smaller and simpler than it has now become. But of late years not only has the practice of public speaking ceased to be, as it once was, almost their monopoly, not only has the direction of politics slipped in great measure from their hands, but the growth of huge mercantile fortunes and of a financial class has, as in France and England, lowered the relative importance and dignity of the bar. An individual merchant holds perhaps no better place compared with an average individual lawyer than he did forty years ago; but the millionaire is a much more frequent and potent personage than he was then, and outshines everybody in the country. Now and then a brilliant orator or writer achieves fame of a different and higher kind; but in the main it is the glory of successful commerce which in America and Europe now draws wondering eyes. Wealth, it is true, is by no means out of the reach of the leading lawyers; yet still not such wealth as may be and constantly is amassed by contractors, railway men, financial speculators, hotel proprietors, newspaper owners, and retail storekeepers. The incomes of the first counsel in cities like New York are probably as large as those of the great English leaders. I have heard firms mentioned as dividing sums of $300,000 a year, and individual lawyers as earning $200,000 or more. It is, however, only in two or three of the greatest cities that such incomes can be made, and possibly not more than thirty counsel in the whole country make by their profession more than $100,000 a year. Next after wealth, education may be taken to be the element or quality on which social standing in a purely democratic country depends. In this respect the bar ranks high. Most lawyers have had a college training, and are, by the necessity of their employment, persons of some mental cultivation; in the older towns they, with the leading clergy, form the intellectual elite of the place, and maintain worthily the literary traditions of the Roman, French, English, and Scottish bars. But education is so much more diffused than formerly, and cheap literature so much more abundant, that they do not stand so high above the multitude as they once did. It may, however, still be said that the law is the profession which an active youth of intellectual tastes naturally takes to, that a large proportion of the highest talent of the country may be found in its ranks, and that almost all the first statesmen of the present and the last generation have belonged to it, though many soon resigned its practice. It is also one of the links which best serves to bind the United States to England. The interest of the higher class of American lawyers in the English law, bar, and judges, is wonderfully fresh and keen. An English barrister, if properly authenticated, is welcomed as a brother of the art, and finds the law reports of his own country as sedulously read and as acutely criticized as he would in the Temple.5

I have left to the last the question which a stranger finds it most difficult to answer. The legal profession has in every country, apart from its relation to politics, very important functions to discharge in connection with the administration of justice. Its members are the confidential advisers of private persons, and the depositaries of their secrets. They have it in their power to promote or to restrain vexatious litigation, to become accomplices in chicane, or to check the abuse of legal rights in cases where morality may require men to abstain from exacting all that the letter of the law allows. They can exercise a powerful influence upon the magistracy by shaming an unjust judge, or by misusing the ascendency which they may happen to possess over a weak judge, or a judge who has something to hope for from them. Does the profession in the United States rise to the height of these functions, and in maintaining its own tone, help to maintain the tone of the community, especially of the mercantile community, which, under the pressure of competition, seldom observes a higher moral standard than that which the law exacts? So far as my limited opportunities for observation enable me to answer this question, I should answer it by saying that the profession, taken as a whole, seems to stand on a level with the profession, also taken as a whole, in England. But I am bound to add that some judicious American observers hold that since the Civil War there has been a certain decadence in the bar of the greater cities. They say that the growth of enormously rich and powerful corporations, willing to pay vast sums for questionable services, has seduced the virtue of some counsel whose eminence makes their example important, and that in a few states the degradation of the bench has led to secret understandings between judges and counsel for the perversion of justice. Strenuous efforts have of late been made by the bar associations to establish codes of legal ethics and etiquette, and much good is expected from their action.

As the question of fusing the two branches of the legal profession into one body has been of late much canvassed in England, a few words may be expected as to the light which American experience throws upon it.

There are two sets of persons in England who complain of the present arrangements—a section of the solicitors, who are debarred from the exercise of advocacy, and therefore from the great prizes of the profession; and a section of the junior bar, whose members, depending entirely on the patronage of the solicitors, find themselves, if they happen to have no private connections among that branch of the profession, unable to get employment, since a code of etiquette forbids them to undertake certain sorts of work, or to do work except on a fixed scale of fees, or to take court work directly from a client, or to form partnerships with other counsel. Attempts have also been made to enlist the general public in favour of a change, by the argument that law would be cheapened by allowing the attorney to argue and carry through the courts a cause which he has prepared for trial.

There are three points of view from which the merits or demerits of a change may be regarded. These are the interests respectively of the profession, of the client, and of the community at large.

As far as the advantage of the individual members of the profession is concerned, the example of the United States seems to show that the balance of advantage is in favour of uniting barristers and attorneys in one body. The attorney would have a wider field, greater opportunities of distinguishing himself, and the legitimate satisfaction of seeing his cause through all its stages. The junior barrister would find it easier to get on, even as an advocate, and, if he discovered that advocacy was not his line, could subside into the perhaps not less profitable or agreeable function of a solicitor. The senior barrister or leader might, however, suffer, for his attention would be more distracted by calls of different kinds.

The gain to the client is still clearer; and even those (very few) American counsel who say that for their own sake they would prefer the English plan, admit that the litigant is more expeditiously and effectively served where he has but one person to look to and deal with throughout. It does not suit him, say the Americans, to be lathered in one shop and shaved in another; he likes to go to his lawyer, tell him the facts, get an off-hand opinion, if the case be a simple one (as it is nine times out of ten), and issue his writ with some confidence; whereas under the English system he might either have to wait till a regular case for the opinion of counsel was drawn, sent to a barrister, and returned, written on, after some days, or else take the risk of bringing an action which turned out to be ill-founded. It may also be believed that a case is, on the whole, better dealt with when it is kept in one office from first to last, and managed by one person, or by partners who are in constant communication. Mistakes and oversights are less likely to occur, since the advocate knows the facts better, and has almost invariably seen and questioned the witnesses before he comes into court. It may indeed be said that an advocate does his work with more ease of conscience, and perhaps more sangfroid, when he knows nothing but his instructions. But American practitioners are all clear that they are able to serve their clients better than they could if the responsibility were divided between the man who prepares the case and the man who argues or addresses the jury. Indeed, I have often heard them say that they could not understand how English counsel, who rarely see the witnesses beforehand, were able to conduct witness causes satisfactorily.

The English plan is more conducive to the despatch of business, because in England the few leading counsel know the judges, and the judges know them, whereas in America, the absence of a small class to whom advocacy is restricted brings into court a number proportionately much larger of lawyers handling causes. Where the counsel and the judges are in constant contact, cases are more promptly dealt with. The counsel knows when he has said enough to the judge. The judge knows how far he can trust the counsel.

If asked whether the community has gained by the disappearance of a distinction between the small body of advocates and the large body of attorneys, I should reply that it has not. Society is interested in the maintenance of a high tone among those who can powerfully influence the administration of justice and the standard of commercial morality. It is easier to maintain such a tone in a small body, which can be kept under a comparatively strict control and cultivate a warm professional feeling than in a large body, many of whose members are practically just as much men of business as lawyers. And it may well be thought that the conscience or honour of a member of either branch of the profession is exposed to less strain where the two branches are kept distinct. The counsel is under less temptation to win his cause by doubtful means, since he is removed from the client by the interposition of the attorney, and therefore less personally identified with the client’s success. He probably has not that intimate knowledge of the client’s affairs which he must have if he had prepared the whole case, and is therefore less likely to be drawn into speculating, to take an obvious instance, in the shares of a client company, or otherwise playing a double and disloyal game. Similarly it may be thought that the attorney also is less tempted than if he appeared himself in court, and were not obliged, in carrying out the schemes of a fraudulent client, to call in the aid of another practitioner, amenable to a strict professional discipline. Where the advocate is also the attorney, he may be more apt, when he sees the witnesses, to lead them, perhaps unconsciously, to stretch their recollection; and it is harder to check the practice of paying for legal services by a share of the proceeds of the action.

Looking at the question as a whole, I doubt whether the result of a study of the American arrangements is calculated to commend them for imitation, or to induce England to allow her historic bar to be swallowed up and vanish in the more numerous branch of the profession. Those arrangements, however, suggest some useful minor changes in the present English rules. The passage from each branch to the other might be made easier; barristers might be permitted to form open (as they now sometimes do covert) partnerships among themselves; students of both branches might be educated and examined together in the professional law schools as they now are, with admittedly good results, in the universities.

chapter 105

The Bench

So much has already been said regarding the constitution and jurisdiction of the various courts, federal and state, that what remains to be stated regarding the judicial bench need refer only to its personal and social side. What is the social standing of the judges, the average standard of their learning and capacity, their integrity and fidelity in the discharge of functions whose gravity seems to increase with the growth of wealth and the complexity of society?

The English reader who wishes to understand the American judiciary ought to begin by realizing the fact that his conception of a judge is purely English, not applicable to any other country. For some centuries Englishmen have associated the ideas of power, dignity, and intellectual eminence with the judicial office; while a tradition, shorter no doubt, but still of respectable length, has made them regard it as incorruptible. The judges are among the greatest permanent officials of the state. They have earned their place by success, more or less brilliant, but generally considerable, in the struggles of the bar; they are removable by the Crown only upon an address of both houses of Parliament; they enjoy large incomes and great social respect. Some of them sit in the House of Lords; some are members of the Privy Council. When they traverse the country on their circuits, they are received by the High Sheriff of each county with the ceremonious pomp of the Middle Ages, and followed hither and thither by admiring crowds. The criticisms of an outspoken press rarely assail their ability, hardly ever their fairness. Even the bar, which watches them daily, which knows all their ins and outs (to use an American phrase) both before and after their elevation, treats them with more respect than is commonly shown by the clergy to the bishops. Thus the English form their conception of the judge as a personage necessarily and naturally dignified and upright; and, having formed it, they carry it abroad with them like their notions of land tenure and other insular conceptions, and are astonished when they find that it does not hold in other countries. It is a fine and fruitful conception, and one which one might desire to see accepted everywhere, though it has been secured at the cost of compelling litigants to carry to London much business which in other countries would have been dealt with in local courts. But it is peculiar to Britain; the British judge is as abnormal as the British Constitution, and owes his character to a not less curious and complex combination of conditions. In most parts of the Continent the judge, even of the superior courts, does not hold a very high social position. He is not chosen from the ranks of the bar, and has not that community of feeling with it which England has found so valuable. Its leaders outshine him in France; the famous professors of law often exert a greater authority in Germany. His independence, and even purity, have been at times by no means above suspicion. In no part of Europe do his wishes and opinions carry the same weight, or does he command the same deference as in England. The English ought not, therefore, to be surprised at finding him in America different from what they expect, for it is not so much his inferiority there that is exceptional as his excellence in England.

In America, the nine federal judges of the Supreme Court retain much of the dignity which surrounds the English Supreme Court of Judicature. They are almost the only officials who are appointed for life, and their functions are of the utmost importance to the smooth working of the Constitution. Accordingly great public interest is felt in the choice of a judge, and the post is an object of ambition. Though now and then an eminent lawyer may decline it because he is already making by practice five times as much as the salary it carries, still there has been no difficulty in finding first-rate men to fill the court. The minor federal judges are usually persons of ability and experience. They are inadequately paid, but the life tenure makes the place desired and it is usually respected.

Of the state judges it is hard to speak generally, because there are great differences between state and state. In six or seven commonwealths, of which Massachusetts is the best example among Eastern and Michigan among Western states, they stand high—that is to say, the post attracts a prosperous barrister though he will lose in income, or a law professor though he must sacrifice his leisure. But in some states it is otherwise. A place on the bench of the superior courts carries little honour, and commands but slight social consideration. It is lower than that of an English county court judge or stipendiary magistrate, or of a Scotch sheriff-substitute. It raises no presumption that its holder is able or cultivated or trusted by his fellow citizens. He may be all of these, but if so, it is in respect of his personal merits that he will be valued, not for his official position. Often he stands below the leading members of the state or city bar in all these points and does not move in the best society.1 Hence a leading counsel seldom accepts the post, and men often resign a judgeship, or when their term of office expires do not seek reelection, but return to practice at the bar.2 Hence, too, a judge is not expected to set an example of conformity to the conventional standards of decorum. No one is surprised to see him in low company, or to hear, in the ruder parts of the South and West, that he took part in a shooting affray. He is as welcome to be “a child of nature and of freedom” as any private citizen.

The European reader may think that these facts not only betoken but tend to perpetuate a low standard of learning and capacity among the state judges, and from this low standard he will go on to conclude that justice must be badly administered, and will ask with surprise why an intelligent and practical people allow this very important part of their public work to be ill discharged. I shrink from making positive statements on so large a matter as the administration of justice over a vast country whose states differ in many respects. But so far as I could ascertain, civil justice is better administered than might be expected from the character which the bench bears in most of the states. In the federal courts and in the superior courts of the six or seven states just mentioned it is equal to the justice dispensed in the superior courts of England, France, and Germany. In the remainder it is inferior, that is to say, civil trials, whether the issue be of law or of fact, more frequently give an unsatisfactory result; the opinions delivered by the judges are wanting in scientific accuracy, and the law becomes loose and uncertain.3 This inferiority is more or less marked according to the general tone of the state. That it is everywhere less marked than a priori reasonings would have suggested, may be ascribed partly to the way shrewd juries have of rendering substantially just verdicts, partly to the ability of the bar, whose arguments make up for a judge’s want of learning, by giving him the means of reaching a sound decision, partly to that native acuteness of Americans which enables them to handle any sort of practical work, roughly, perhaps, but well enough for the absolute needs of the case. The injury to the quality of state law is mitigated by the fact that abundance of good law is produced by the federal courts, by the highest courts of the best states, and by the judges of England, whose reported decisions are frequently referred to. Commercial men complain less of the inefficiency than of the delays of state tribunals, while the leading lawyers, whose interest in the scientific character of law makes them severe critics of current legislation, and opponents of these schemes for codifying the common law which have been dangled before the multitude in several states, blame the legislatures more than the judges for such faults as they discover.

Whatever the defects of civil justice, those of criminal justice are much more serious. It is accused of being slow, overtechnical, uncertain, and unduly lenient both to crimes of violence and to commercial frauds. Yet the blame is laid less on the judges than on the weakness of juries,4 and on the facilities for escape which a cumbrous and highly technical procedure, allowing numerous opportunities for interposing delays and raising points of law, provides for prisoners.5 Indulgence to prisoners is now as marked as harshness to them was in England before the days of Bentham and Romilly. Legislation is chiefly to blame for this procedure, though stronger men on the bench would more often overrule trivial points of law and expedite convictions.6

The European traveller must own his surprise that stronger and more persistent efforts have not been made long ago to secure the needed improvements in the administration of justice in state courts.

The causes which have lowered the quality of the state judges have been referred to in previous chapters. Shortly stated they are: the smallness of the salaries paid, the limited tenure of office, often for seven years only, and the method of appointment, nominally by popular election, practically by the agency of party wire-pullers. The first two causes have prevented the ablest lawyers, the last often prevents the most honourable men, from seeking the post. All are the result of democratic theory, of the belief in equality and popular sovereignty pushed to extremes. And this theory has aggravated the mischief in withdrawing from the judge, when it has appointed him, those external badges of dignity which, childish as they may appear to the philosopher, have power over the imagination of the mass of mankind, and are not without a useful reflex influence on the person whom they surround, raising his sense of his position, and reminding him of its responsibilities. No American magistrate, except the judges of the Supreme Court when sitting at Washington, and those of the intermediate federal Courts of Appeal, the judges of the New York Court of Appeals at Albany, and those of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, wears any robe of office or other distinctive dress, or has any attendant to escort him,7 or is in any respect treated differently from an ordinary citizen. Popular sentiment tolerates nothing that seems to elevate a man above his fellows, even when his dignity is really the dignity of the people who have put him where he is. I remember in New York under the reign of Boss Tweed to have been taken into one of the courts. An ill-omened looking man, flashily dressed, and rude in demeanour, was sitting behind a table, two men in front were addressing him, the rest of the room was given up to disorder. Had one not been told that he was a judge of the highest court of the city, one might have taken him for a criminal. His jurisdiction was unlimited in amount, and though an appeal lay from him to the Court of Appeals of the state, his power of issuing injunctions put all the property in the district at his mercy. This was what democratic theory had brought New York to. For the change which that state made in 1846 was a perfectly wanton change. No practical object was to be gained by it. There had been an excellent bench, adorned, as it happened, by one of the greatest judges of modern times, the illustrious Chancellor Kent. But the convention of 1846 thought that the power of the people was insufficiently recognized while judges were named by the governor and council and held office for life, so theory was obeyed. The convention in its circular address announced, in proposing the election of judges for five years by the voters of the district, that “the happiness of the people of this State will henceforth, under God, be in their own hands.” But the quest of a more perfect freedom and equality on which the convention started the people gave them in twenty-five years Judge Barnard instead of Chancellor Kent.

The limited attainments of the bench in many states, and its conspicuous inferiority to the counsel who practise before it are, however, less serious evils than the corruption with which it is often charged. Nothing has done so much to discredit American institutions in Europe as the belief that the fountains of justice are there generally polluted; nor is there any point on which a writer treating of the United States would more desire to be able to set forth incontrovertible facts. Unluckily, this is just what from the nature of the case cannot be done as regards some parts of the country. There is no doubt as to the purity of most states, but as to others it is extremely hard to test the rumours that are current. I give such results as many questions in many districts enable me to reach.

The higher federal judges are above suspicion. I do not know that any member of the Supreme Court or any Circuit judge has been ever accused of corruption; and though the appointments made to district judgeships are sometimes freely criticised, the allegations made against these persons have not been, except in two or three instances, seriously pressed.

The state judges have been and are deemed honest and impartial in most parts of the Union. In a few states, such as Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, the bench has within the last or the present generation included men who would do credit to any court in any country. Even in other states an eminent man is occasionally found, as in England there are some County Court judges who are sounder lawyers and abler men than some of the persons whom political favour has of late years raised to the bench of the High Court.

In some states, perhaps six or seven in all, suspicions have at one time or another since the Civil War attached to one or more of the superior judges and in a few other states they are deemed to be, although personally honest, subservient to powerful local influences. Sometimes these suspicions may have been ill-founded.8 But though I know of very few cases in which they have been substantiated, there can be little doubt that some improprieties have been committed. The judge may not have taken a bribe, but he has perverted justice at the instance of some person or persons who either gave him a consideration or exercised an undue influence over him. It would not follow that in such instances the whole bench was tainted; indeed I have never heard of a state in which more than two or three judges were the objects of distrust at the same time.9

In one state, viz., New York, in 1869–71, there were flagrant scandals which led to the disappearance of three justices of the superior court who had unquestionably both sold and denied justice. The Tweed Ring, when masters of New York City and engaged in plundering its treasury, found it convenient to have in the seat of justice accomplices who might check inquiry into their misdeeds. This the system of popular elections for very short terms enabled them to do; and men were accordingly placed on the bench whom one might rather have expected to see in the dock—barroom loafers, broken-down Tombs10 attorneys, needy adventurers whose want of character made them absolutely dependent on their patrons. Being elected for eight years only, these fellows were obliged to purchase reelection by constant subservience to the party managers. They did not regard social censure, for they were already excluded from decent society; impeachment had no terrors for them, since the state legislature, as well as the executive machinery of the city, was in the hands of their masters. It would have been vain to expect such people, without fear of God or man before their eyes, to resist the temptations which capitalists and powerful companies could offer.

To what precise point of infamy they descended I cannot attempt, among so many discordant stories and rumours, to determine. It is, however, beyond a doubt that they made orders in defiance of the plainest rules of practice; issued, in rum shops, injunctions which they had not even read over; appointed notorious vagabonds receivers of valuable property;11 turned over important cases to a friend of their own stamp, and gave whatever decision he suggested. There were members of the bar who could obtain from these magistrates whatever order or decree they chose to ask for. A leading lawyer and man of high character said to me in 1870, “When a client brings me a suit which is before —— (naming a judge), I feel myself bound to tell him that though I will take it if he pleases, he had much better give it to So-and-So (naming a lawyer), for we all know that he owns that judge.” A system of client robbery had sprung up by which each judge enriched the knot of disreputable lawyers who surrounded him; he referred cases to them, granted them monstrous allowances in the name of costs, gave them receiverships with a large percentage, and so forth; they in turn either at the time sharing the booty with him, or undertaking to do the same for him when he should have descended to the bar and they have climbed to the bench. Nor is there any doubt that criminals who had any claim on their party often managed to elude punishment. The police, it was said, would not arrest such an offender if they could help it; the district attorney would avoid prosecuting; the court officials, if public opinion had forced the attorney to act, would try to pack the jury; the judge, if the jury seemed honest, would do his best to procure an acquittal; and if, in spite of police, attorney, officials, and judge, the criminal was convicted and sentenced, he might still hope that the influence of his party would procure a pardon from the governor of the state, or enable him in some other way to slip out of the grasp of justice. For governor, judge, attorney, officials, and police were all of them party nominees; and if a man cannot count on being helped by his party at a pinch, who will be faithful to his party?

Although these malpractices diverted a good deal of business from the courts to private arbitration, the damage to the regular course of civil justice was much less than might have been expected. The guilty judges were but three in number, and there is no reason to think that even they decided unjustly in an ordinary commercial suit between man and man, or took direct money bribes from one of the parties to such a suit. The better opinion seems to be that it was only where the influence of a political party or of some particular persons came in that injustice was perpetrated, and the truth, I believe, was spoken by another judge, an honest and worthy man, who in talking to me at the time of the most unblushing of these offenders, said, “Well, I don’t much like ——; he is certainly a bad fellow, with very little delicacy of mind. He’ll give you an injunction without hearing what it’s about. But I don’t think he takes money down from everybody.” In the instance which made most noise in Europe, that of the Erie Railroad suits, there was no need to give bribes. The gang of thieves who had gained control of the line and were “watering” its stock were leagued with the gang of thieves who ruled the city and nominated the judges; and nobody doubts that the monstrous decisions in these suits were obtained by the influence of the Tammany leaders over their judicial minions.

The fall of the Tammany Ring was swiftly followed by the impeachment or resignation of these judges, and no similar scandal has since disgraced the Empire State, though it must be confessed that some of the criminal courts of the city would be more worthily presided over if they were “taken out of politics.” At present New York appoints her chief city judges for fourteen years and pays them a large salary, so she gets fairly good if not first-rate men.12 Unhappily the magnitude of this one judicial scandal, happening in the greatest city of the Union, and the one which Europeans hear most of, has thrown over the integrity of the American bench a shadow which does great injustice to it as a whole.

Although judicial purity has of late years come to be deemed an indispensable accompaniment of high civilization, it is one which has been realized in very few times and countries. Hesiod complained that the kings who heard the cause between himself and his brother received gifts to decide against him. Felix expected to get money for loosing St. Paul. Among Orientals to this day an incorruptible magistrate is a rare exception.13 In England a lord chancellor was removed for taking bribes as late as the time of George I. In Spain, Portugal, Russia, parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and, one is told, even in Italy, the judges, except perhaps those of the highest court, are not assumed by general opinion to be above suspicion. Many are trusted individually, but the office is not deemed to guarantee the honour of its occupant. Yet in all these countries the judges are appointed by the government, and hold either for life or at its pleasure,14 whereas in America suspicion has arisen only in states where popular election prevails; that is to say, where the responsibility for a bad appointment cannot be fixed on any one person. The shortcomings of the bench in these states do not therefore indicate unsoundness in the general tone either of the people or of the profession from whom the offenders have been taken, but are the natural result of a system which, so far from taking precautions to place worthy persons on the seat of justice, has left the choice of them in four cases out of five to a secret combination of wire-pullers. When this system has been got rid of—and the current seems to be flowing against it—the quality of the bench will doubtless improve.

chapter 106

Railroads

No one will expect to find in a book like this a description of that prodigy of labour, wealth, and skill—the American railway system. Of its management, its finance, its commercial prospects, I do not attempt to speak. But railroads, and those who own and control them, occupy a place in the political and social life of the country which requires some passing words, for it is a place far more significant than similar enterprises have obtained in the Old World.

The United States are so much larger, and have a population so much more scattered than any European state that they depend even more upon means of internal communication. It is these communications that hold the country together, and render it one for all social and political purposes as well as for commerce. They may indeed be said to have made the West, for it is along the lines of railway that the West has been settled, and population still follows the rails, stretching out to south and north of the great trunk lines wherever they send off a branch. The Americans are an eminently locomotive people. Were statistics on such a point attainable, they would probably show that the average man travels over thrice as many miles by steam in a year as the average Englishman, six times as many as the average Frenchman or German. The New Yorker thinks of a journey to Chicago (900 miles) as the Londoner of a journey to Glasgow (400 miles); and a family at St. Louis will go for sea-bathing to Cape May, a journey of thirty-five or forty hours, as readily as a Birmingham family goes to Scarborough. The movements of goods traffic are on a gigantic scale. The greatest branch of heavy freight transportation in England, that of coal from the north and west to London, is not to be compared to the weight of cotton, grain, bacon, cattle, fruit, and ores which comes from the inland regions to the Atlantic coast. This traffic does not merely give to the trunk lines an enormous yearly turnover—it interests all classes, I might almost say all individuals, in railway operations, seeing that every branch of industry and every profession except divinity and medicine is more or less directly connected with the movements of commerce, and prospers in proportion to its prosperity. Consequently, railroads and their receipts, railroad directors and their doings, occupy men’s tongues and pens to a far greater extent than in Europe.

Some of the great railway companies possess yet another source of wealth and power. At the time when they were formed, the enterprise of laying down rails in thinly peopled, or perhaps quite uninhabited regions, in some instances over deserts or across lofty mountains, seemed likely to prove so unremunerative to the first shareholders, yet so beneficial to the country at large, that Congress was induced to encourage the promoters by vast grants of unoccupied land, the property of the United States, lying along the projected line.1 The grants were often improvident, and they gave rise to endless lobbying and intrigue, first to secure them, then to keep them from being declared forfeited in respect of some breach of the conditions imposed by Congress on the company. However, the lines were made, colonists came, much of the lands was sold to speculators as well as to individual settlers; but much long remained in the hands of two or three companies. These gifts made the railroads great landowners, gave them a local influence and divers local interests besides those arising from their proper business of carriers, and brought them into intimate and often perilously delicate relations with leading politicians.

No wonder, then, that the railroads, even those that held no land beyond that on which their rails ran, acquired immense power in the districts they traversed. In a new and thinly peopled state the companies were by far the wealthiest bodies, and able by their wealth to exert all sorts of influence. A city or a district of country might depend entirely upon them for its progress. If they ran a line into it or through it, emigrants followed, the value of fixed property rose, trade became brisk; if they passed it by, and bestowed transportation facilities on some other district, it saw itself outstripped and began to languish. If a company owned a trunk line it could, by raising or lowering the rates of freight on that line through which the products of the district or state passed towards the sea, stimulate or retard the prosperity of the agricultural population, or the miners, or the lumbermen. That is to say, the great companies held in their hands the fortunes of cities, of counties, even sometimes of states and Territories.2 California was for many years practically at the mercy of the Central Pacific Railway, then her only road to the Mississippi Valley and the Atlantic. Oregon and Washington were almost equally dependent upon the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, and afterwards upon the Northern Pacific. What made the position more singular was that, although these railroads had been built under statutes passed by the state they traversed (or, in the case of Territories, wholly or partially under federal statutes), they were built with Eastern capital, and were owned by a number, often a small number, of rich men living in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, unamenable to local influences, and caring no more about the wishes and feelings of the state whence their profits came than an English bondholder cares about the feelings of Paraguay. Moreover, although the railroads held a fuller sway in the newer states, they were sometimes potent political factors in the older ones. In 1870 I often heard men say, “Camden and Amboy (the Camden and Amboy Railroad) rules New Jersey.” In New York the great New York Central Railroad, in Penn_sylvania the Pennsylvania Railroad under its able chief, exerted immense influence with the legislature, partly by their wealth, partly by the opportunities of bestowing favours on individuals and localities which they possessed, including the gift of free passes and sometimes influence exercised on the votes of their employees. Sometimes, at least in Pennsylvania and New York, they even threw their weight into the scale of a political party, giving it money as well as votes. But more commonly they have confined themselves to securing their own interests, and obliged, or threatened and used, the state leaders of both parties alike for that purpose. The same sort of power was at one time exerted over some of the cantons of Switzerland by the greater Swiss railway companies; though, since the Constitution of 1874, it was believed to have disappeared.3

In such circumstances conflicts between the railroads and the state governments were inevitable. The companies might succeed in “capturing” individual legislators or committees of either or both houses, but they could not silence the discontented cities or counties who complained of the way in which they were neglected while some other city obtained better facilities, still less the farmers who denounced the unduly high rates they were forced to pay for the carriage of their produce. Thus a duel began between the companies and the peoples of some of the states, which has gone on with varying fortune in the halls of the legislatures and in the courts of law. The farmers of the Northwest formed agricultural associations called “Patrons of Husbandry,” or popularly “Granges,” and passed a number of laws imposing various restrictions on the railroads, and providing for the fixing of a maximum scale of charges. But although the railroad companies had been formed under, and derived their powers of taking land and making bye-laws from, state statutes, these statutes had in some cases omitted to reserve the right to deal freely with the lines by subsequent legislation; and the companies therefore attempted to resist the “Granger laws” as being unconstitutional. They were defeated by two famous decisions of the Supreme Federal Court in 1876,4 establishing the right of a state to impose restrictions on public undertakings in the nature of monopolies. But in other directions they had better luck. The Granger laws proved in many respects unworkable. The companies, alleging that they could not carry goods at a loss, refused to construct branches and other new lines, and in various ways contrived to make the laws difficult of execution. Thus they procured (in most states) the repeal of the first set of Granger laws; and when further legislation was projected, secret engines of influence were made to play upon the legislatures, influences which, since the first wave of popular impulse had now spent itself, often proved efficacious in averting further restrictions or impeding the enforcement of those imposed. Those who profited most by the strife were the less scrupulous among the legislators, who, if they did not receive some favour from a railroad, could levy blackmail upon it by bringing in a threatening bill.5

The contest, however, was not confined to the several states. It passed to Congress. Congress was supposed to have no authority under the Constitution to deal with a railway lying entirely within one state, because it carried intrastate commerce only, but to be entitled to legislate, under its power of regulating commerce between different states, for all lines (including connecting lines which are worked together as a through line) which traverse more than one state there being agencies of interstate commerce. And of course it has always had power over railways situate in the Territories. As the federal courts decided some time ago that no state could legislate against a railway lying partly outside its own limits, because this would trench on federal competence, the need for federal legislation, long pressed upon Congress, became urgent; and after much debate an act was passed in 1887 establishing an Interstate Commerce Commission, with power to regulate railroad transportation and charges in many material respects. The companies had opposed it; but after its passage they discovered that it hurt them less than they had feared, and in some points even benefited them; for the prohibition of all discriminations and secret rebates, and the requirement to adhere to their published list of charges, although they could not “take care” of the commissioners as they often had state legislatures, gave them a ready answer to demands for exceptional privileges.6 This momentous statute, which forbade the exaction of unreasonable charges and all discriminations between persons and places gave rise to a swarm of difficult legal questions, and while hampering the railroads did not at first do much to lessen the complaints of the farming and commercial classes. It has, however, been amended, and the act of 1906, while strengthening the Commission in its numbers and its powers, provided for it a more efficient procedure. The act of 1910 has still further extended its powers, which now cover telegraph and telephone companies so far as relates to interstate business, and also pipelines carrying oil. A court of commerce was also created, consisting of five judges to be selected from the federal Circuit judges.

That the railroads had exercised autocratic and irresponsible power over some regions of the country, and had occasionally abused this power, especially by imposing discriminations in their freight charges, is not to be denied.7 They had become extremely unpopular, a constant theme for demagogic denunciations; and their success during some years in resisting public clamour by their secret control of legislatures, or even of the state commissioners appointed to deal with them, increased the irritation. All corporations are at present unpopular in America, and especially corporations possessed of monopolies. The agitation may continue, though the confidence felt in the Commission has done something to allay it, and attempts be made to carry still more stringent legislation. Some have proposed that all railways, as well as telegraphs, should be taken over by the nation, and that not merely for revenue purposes, but to make them serve more perfectly the public convenience. Apart from the question of amending the Constitution for this end, the objection which to most men seems decisive against any such arrangement is that it would not only encumber government with most difficult rate problems, affecting local interests, and therefore involving the certainty of local political pressure, but would also throw a stupendous mass of patronage and power into the hands of the party for the time being holding office. Considering what a perennial spring of bitterness partisan patronage has been, and how liable to perversion under the best regulations patronage always must be, he would be a bold man who would toss an immense number of places—the railroads employed in 1907, 1,672,000 persons and were paying them $1,072,386,427—into the lap of a party minister. Economic gain, assuming that such gain could be secured, would be dearly bought by political danger.

Their strife with the state governments has not been enough to occupy the pugnacity of the companies. They must needs fight with one another; and their wars have been long and fierce, involving immense pecuniary interests, not only to the shareholders in the combatant lines, but also to the inhabitants of the districts which they served. Such conflicts have been most frequent between the trunk lines competing for the carriage of goods from the West to the Atlantic cities, and have been conducted not only by lowering charges so as to starve out the weaker line,8 but by attacks upon its stocks in the great share markets, by efforts to defeat its bills in the state legislatures, and by lawsuits with applications for injunctions in the courts. Sometimes, as in the famous case of the struggle of the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe railway with the Denver and Rio Grande for the possession of the great canyon of the Arkansas River,9 the easiest route into an important group of Rocky Mountain valleys, the navvies of the two companies fought with shovels and pickaxes on the spot, while their counsel were fighting in the law courts sixteen hundred miles away. A well-established company has sometimes to apprehend a peculiarly annoying form of attack at the hands of audacious adventurers, who construct a competing line where the traffic is only sufficient to enable the existing one to pay a dividend on the capital it has expended, aiming, not at the creation of a profitable undertaking, but at levying blackmail on one which exists, and obtaining an opportunity of manipulating bonds and stocks for their own benefit. In such a case the railway company in possession has its choice between two courses: it may allow the new enterprise to go on, then lower its own rates, and so destroy all possibility of profits; or it may buy up the rival line, perhaps at a heavy price. Sometimes it tries the first course long enough to beat down the already small prospects of the new line and then buys it; but although this may ruin the “pirates” who have built the new line, it involves a hideous waste of the money spent in construction, and the shareholders of the old company as well as the bondholders of the new one suffer. This is a form of raid upon property which evidently ought to be prevented by greater care on the part of state legislatures in refusing to pass special acts for unnecessary railroads, or in so modifying their law as to prevent a group of promoters from using, for purposes of blackmail, the powers of taking land and constructing railroads, which general statutes confer.10

This atmosphere of strife has had something to do with the feature of railway management which a European finds most remarkable; I mean its autocratic character. Nearly all the great lines are controlled and managed either by a small knot of persons or by a single man. Sometimes one man, or a knot of three or four capitalists acting as one man, holds an actual majority of the shares, and then he can of course do exactly what he pleases. Sometimes the interest of the ruling man (or knot) comes so near to being a controlling interest that he may safely assume that no majority can be brought against him, the tendencies of many shareholders being to support “the administration” in all its policy. This accumulation of voting power in a few hands seems to be due partly to the fact that the shares of new lines do not, in the first instance, get scattered through the general public as in England, but are commonly allotted in masses to a few persons, often as a sort of bonus upon their subscribing for the bonds of the company. In the United States shares do not usually represent a cash subscription, the practice being to construct a railway with the proceeds of the bonds and to regard the shares as the materials for future profit, things which may, if the line be of a speculative character, be run up in price and sold off by the promoters; or, if it be likely to prosper, be held by them for the purpose of controlling as well as gaining profits from the undertaking, the profits including those derivable from watering the stock.11 It is partly also to be ascribed to the splendid boldness with which financial operations are conducted in America, where the leaders of Wall Street do not hesitate to buy up enormous masses of shares or stock for the purpose of some coup. Having once got into a single hand, or a few hands, these stock masses stay there, and give their possessors the control of the line. But the power of the railways, and the position they hold towards local governments, state legislatures, and one another, have also a great deal to do with the phenomenon. War used for a time to be, and in some parts of the country is still, the natural state of an American railway towards all other authorities and its own fellows, just as war was the natural state of cities towards one another in the ancient world. And as an army in the field must be commanded by one general, so must this latest militant product of an eminently peaceful civilization. The president of a great railroad needs gifts for strategical combinations scarcely inferior to those, if not of a great general, yet of a great war minister—a Chatham or a Carnot. If his line extends into a new country, he must be quick to seize the best routes—the best physically, because they will be cheaper to operate, the best in agricultural or mineral resources, because they will offer a greater prospect of traffic. He must so throw out his branches as not only to occupy promising tracts, but keep his competing enemies at a distance; he must annex small lines when he sees a good chance, first “bearing” their stocks so as to get them cheaper; he must make a close alliance with at least one other great line, which completes his communications with the East or with the farther West, and be prepared to join this ally in a conflict with some threatening competitor. He must know the governors and watch the legislatures of the states through which his line runs; must have adroit agents at the state capitals, well supplied with the sinews of war, ready to “see” leading legislators and to defeat any legislative attacks that may be made by blackmailers or the tools of rival presidents. And all the while he must not only keep his eye upon the markets of New York, prepared for the onslaught which may be made upon his own stock by some other railroad or by speculators desiring to make a profit as “bears,” and maintaining friendly relations with the capitalists whose help he will need when he brings out a new loan, but must supervise the whole administrative system of the railroad—its stations, permanent way, locomotives, rolling stock, engineering shops, freight and passenger rates, perhaps also the sale of its land grants and their defence against the cabals of Washington. No talents of the practical order can be too high for such a position as this; and even the highest talents would fail to fill it properly except with a free hand. Concentration of power and an almost uncontrolled discretion are needed; and in America whatever commercial success needs is sure to be yielded. Hence, when a group of capitalists own a railway, they commit its management to a very small committee among themselves, or even to a single man; and when the shares are more widely distributed, the shareholders, recognizing the necessary conditions of prosperity, not to say of survival in the struggle for existence, leave themselves in the hands of the president, who has little to fear except from the shares being quietly bought up by some syndicate of enemies seeking to dethrone him.

Of these great railway chieftains, some have come to the top gradually, by the display in subordinate posts of brilliant administrative gifts. Some have begun as financiers, and have sprung into the presidential saddle at a bound by forming a combination which has captured the railway by buying up its stock. Occasionally a great capitalist will seize a railroad only for the sake of manipulating its stock, clearing a profit, and throwing it away. But more frequently, when a really important line has passed into the hands of a man or group, it is held fast and developed into a higher efficiency by means of the capital they command.

These railway kings are among the greatest men, perhaps I may say are the greatest men, in America. They have wealth, else they could not hold the position. They have fame, for everyone has heard of their achievements; every newspaper chronicles their movements. They have power, more power—that is, more opportunity of making their personal will prevail—than perhaps anyone in political life, except the president and the Speaker, who after all hold theirs only for four years and two years, while the railroad monarch may keep his for life. When the master of one of the greatest Western lines travels towards the Pacific on his palace car, his journey is like a royal progress. Governors of states and Territories bow before him; legislatures receive him in solemn session; cities and towns seek to propitiate him, for has he not the means of making or marring a city’s fortunes? Although the railroad companies are unpopular, and although this autocratic sway from a distance contributes to their unpopularity, I do not think that the ruling magnates are themselves generally disliked. On the contrary, they receive that tribute of admiration which the American gladly pays to whoever has done best what everyone desires to do. Probably no career draws to it or unfolds and develops so much of the characteristic ability of the nation; and I doubt whether any congressional legislation will greatly reduce the commanding positions which these potentates hold as the masters of enterprises whose wealth, geographical extension, and influence upon the growth of the country and the fortunes of individuals, find no parallel in the Old World.

It has already been shown how the task of regulating railroads by law, nowhere an easy one, is in the United States rendered more perplexing by the division of jurisdiction between the national government and the states, the control of the former having been deemed to be confined to traffic between the states. To adhere to and apply this distinction has become in practice more and more difficult with the increase not only of interstate traffic but of the demands made for regulating matters formerly untouched by legislation. Thus the tendency to enlarge the scope of national control is inevitable, and likely to go further. Little as the railroads relish regulation from either quarter, they prefer that which proceeds from Congress, because it is uniform, it hampers them less, it is less subject to frequent change, and it is exerted through a body, the Interstate Commerce Commission, whose members possess capacity and experience. People already ask whether the ultimate issue will not be the assumption by the national government of the sole power of controlling an agency of transportation of national magnitude which ought to be dealt with as a whole and which would, one can hardly doubt, have been assigned to that government by the framers of the Constitution had it existed in their day.

It may be thought that some of the phenomena I have described belong to an era of colonization, and that when the West has been filled up, and all the arterial railways made, when, in fact, the United States have become even as England or France, the power of railroads and their presidents will decline. No doubt there will be less room for certain bold ventures and feats of constructive strategy; and as the network of railways grows closer, states and districts may come to depend less upon one particular company. At the same time it must be remembered that the more populous and wealthy the country, so much the larger the business of a trunk line, and the number of its branches and its employees; while the consolidation of small lines, or their absorption by large ones, is a process evidently destined to continue. In 1910 six or seven financial groups controlled more than four-fifths of all the 250,000 miles of railroad in the United States; and it seemed probable that some of these groups might unite or make arrangements with one another, under which the vast systems which each group administered might be worked as one system. It may therefore be conjectured that the railroad will long stand forth as a great and perplexing force in the economico-political life of the country. It cannot be left to itself—the most extreme advocate of laissez faire would not contend for that, for to leave it to itself would be to make it a tyrant. It cannot be absorbed and worked by the national government as are the railways of Switzerland and many of those in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Only the most sanguine state socialist would propose to impose so terrible a strain on the virtue of American politicians, not to speak of the effect upon the constitutional balance between the states and the federal authority. Many experiments may be needed before the true mean course between these extremes is discovered. Meanwhile, the railroads illustrate two tendencies specially conspicuous in America—the power of the princple of association, which makes commercial corporations, skilfully handled, formidable to individual men; and the way in which the principle of monarchy, banished from the field of government, creeps back again and asserts its strength in the scarcely less momentous contests of industry and finance.

chapter 107

Wall Street

No invention of modern times, not even that of negotiable paper, has so changed the face of commerce and delighted lawyers with a variety of new and intricate problems as the creation of incorporated joint-stock companies. America, though she came latest into the field, has developed these on a grander scale and with a more refined skill than the countries of the Old World. Nowhere do trading corporations play so great a part in trade and industry; nowhere are so many huge undertakings in their hands; nowhere else has the method of controlling them become a political problem of the first magnitude. So vigorous, indeed, is the inventive genius of American commerce that, not satisfied with the new applications it has found for the principles of the joint-stock corporation, it subsequently attempted a further development of the arts of combination by creating those anomalous giants called trusts, groups of individuals and corporations concerned in one branch of trade or manufacture, which are placed under the irresponsible management of a small knot of persons, who, through their command of all the main producing or distributing agencies, intend and expect to dominate the market, force manufacturers or dealers to submit, and hold the consumer at their mercy.1

Here, however, I am concerned with the amazing expansion of joint-stock companies in America, only as the cause of the not less amazing activity in buying and selling shares which the people display. This is almost the first thing that strikes a European visitor, and the longer he remains the more deeply is he impressed by it as something to which his own country, be it England, France, or Germany, furnishes no parallel. In Europe, speculation in bonds, shares, and stocks is confined to a section of the commercial world, with a few stragglers from other walks of business, or from the professions, who flutter near the flame and burn their wings. Ordinary steady-going people, even people in business, know little or nothing about the matter, and seldom think of reading the share lists. When they have savings to invest they do as they are bidden by their banker or stockbroker, if indeed they have a stock broker, and do not get their banker to engage one.2 In the United States a much larger part of the population, including professional men as well as businessmen, seem conversant with the subject, and there are times when the whole community, not merely city people but also storekeepers in country towns, even farmers, even domestic servants, interest themselves actively in share speculations. At such times they watch the fluctuations of price in the stocks of the great railroads, telegraph companies (or rather the Telegraph Company, since there is practically but one), and other leading undertakings; they discuss the prospects of a rise or fall, and the probable policy of the great operators; they buy and sell bonds or stocks on a scale not always commensurate with their own means.3 In the great cities the number of persons exclusively devoted to this occupation is very large, and naturally so, because, while the undertakings lie all over a vast extent of country, the capital which owns them is mostly situate in the cities, and, indeed, six-sevenths of it (so far as it is held in America) in four or five of the greatest Eastern cities. It is chiefly in railroads that these Easterns speculate. But in the Far West mines are an even more exciting and pervasive interest. In San Francisco everyone gambles in mining stocks, even the nursemaids and the Chinese. The share lists showing the oscillations of prices are hung up outside the newspaper offices, and fixed on posts in the streets, and are changed every hour or two during the day. In the silver districts of Colorado and New Mexico the same kind of thing goes on.4 It is naturally in such spots that the fire burns hottest. But go where you will in the Union, except, to be sure, in the more stagnant and impecunious parts of the South, you feel bonds, stocks, and shares in the atmosphere all round you. Te veniente die—they begin the day with the newspaper at breakfast; they end it with the chat over the nocturnal cigar.5

This eager interest centres itself in New York, for finance, more perhaps than any other kind of business, draws to few points, and New York, which has as little claim to be the social or intellectual as to be the political capital of the country, is emphatically its financial capital. And as the centre of America is New York, so the centre of New York is Wall Street. This famous thoroughfare is hardly a quarter of a mile long, a little longer than Lombard Street in London. It contains the Sub-Treasury of the United States, and the Stock Exchange (which used to be in it) is quite close to it. In it and the three or four streets that open into it are situated the Produce Exchange, the offices of the great railways, and the places of business of the financiers and stockbrokers, together representing an accumulation of capital and intellect comparable to the capital and intellect of London, and destined before many years to surpass every similar spot in either hemisphere.6 Wall Street is the great nerve centre of all American business; for finance and transportation, the two determining powers in business, have here their headquarters. It is also the financial barometer of the country, which every man engaged in large affairs must constantly consult, and whose only fault is that it is too sensitive to slight and transient variations of pressure.

The share market of New York, or rather of the whole Union, in “the Street,” as it is fondly named, is the most remarkable sight in the country after Niagara and the Yellowstone Geysers. It is not unlike those geysers in the violence of its explosions, and in the rapid rise and equally rapid subsidence of its active paroxysms. And as the sparkling column of the geyser is girt about and often half concealed by volumes of steam, so are the rise and fall of stocks mostly surrounded by mists and clouds of rumour, some purposely created, some self-generated in the atmosphere of excitement, curiosity, credulity, and suspicion which the denizens of Wall Street breathe. Opinions change from moment to moment; hope and fear are equally vehement and equally irrational; men are constant only in inconstancy, superstitious because they are sceptical, distrustful of patent probabilities, and therefore ready to trust their own fancies or some unfathered tale. As the eagerness and passion of New York leave European stock markets far behind, for what the Paris and London exchanges are at rare moments Wall Street is for weeks, or perhaps, with a few intermissions, for months together, so the operations of Wall Street are vaster, more boldly conceived, executed with a steadier precision, than those of European speculators. It is not only their bearing on the prosperity of railroads or other great undertakings that is eagerly watched all over the country, but also their personal and dramatic aspects. The various careers and characters of the leading operators are familiar to everyone who reads a newspaper; his schemes and exploits are followed as Europe followed the fortunes of Prince Alexander of Battenberg or the Dreyfus trial. A great “corner,” for instance, is one of the exciting events of the year, not merely to those concerned with the stock or species of produce in which it is attempted, but to the public at large.

How far is this state of things transitory, due to temporary causes arising out of the swift material development of the United States? During the Civil War the creation of a paper currency, which rapidly depreciated, produced a wild speculation in gold, lasting for several years, whose slightest fluctuations were followed with keen interest, because in indicating the value of the paper currency they indicated the credit of the nation, and the view taken by the financial community of the prospects of the war. The reestablishment of peace brought with it a burst of industrial activity, specially directed to the making of new railroads and general opening up of the West. Thus the eyes that had been accustomed to watch Wall Street did not cease to watch it, for these new enterprises involved many fortunes, had drawn much capital from small investors, and were really of great consequence—the transcontinental railways most of all—to the welfare of the country. From time to time the work of railway construction slackens, when trade is depressed and loans are less easily raised, but it presently revives. In the five years from 1903 to 1907 inclusive the average number of miles annually added exceeded 6,000. Silver mines have been less profitable since the heavy fall in that metal; copper mines, however, continue subject to rapid variations, their value having greatly increased with the new applications of electricity. The price of United States bonds fluctuates, in ordinary times, less than does that of the public securities of the great European countries. Times of commercial depression are comparatively quiet, yet even when transactions are fewer, the interest of the public in the stock markets does not greatly diminish. Trade and manufactures cover the whole horizon of American life far more than they do anywhere in Europe. They—I include agriculture, because it has been, in America, commercialized, and become really a branch of trade—are the main concern of the country, to which all others are subordinate. So large a part of the whole capital employed is in the hands of joint-stock companies,7 so easy a method do these companies furnish by which the smallest investor may take part in commercial ventures and increase his pile, so general is the diffusion of information (of course often incorrect) regarding their state and prospects, so vehement and pervading is the passion for wealth, so seductive are the examples of a few men who have realized stupendous fortunes by clever or merely lucky hits when there came a sharp rise or fall in the stock market, so vast, and therefore so impressive to the imagination, is the scale on which these oscillations take place,8 that the universal attention given to stocks and shares, and the tendency to speculation among the nonfinancial classes which reveals itself from time to time, seem amply accounted for by permanent causes, and therefore likely to prove normal. Even admitting that neither such stimulations as were present during the war period nor those that belonged to the era of inflated prosperity which followed are likely to recur, it must be observed that habits formed under transitory conditions do not always pass away with those conditions, but may become a permanent and, so to speak, hereditary element in national life.

So far as politics are concerned, I do not know that Wall Street does any harm. There is hardly any speculation in foreign securities, because capital finds ample employment in domestic undertakings; and the United States are so little likely to be involved in foreign complications that neither the action of European powers nor that of the federal government bears directly enough upon the stock markets to bring politics into stocks or stocks into politics.9 Hence one source of evil which poisons public life in Europe, and is believed to have proved specially pernicious in France—the influence of financial speculators or holders of foreign bonds upon the foreign policy of a government—is wholly absent. An American secretary of state, supposing him base enough to use his official knowledge for stock-jobbing operations, would have little advantage over the meanest broker in Wall Street.10 Even as regards domestic politics, the division of power between Congress and the state legislatures reduces the power of the former over industrial undertakings, and leaves comparatively few occasions on which the action of the federal government tends to affect the market for most kinds of stocks, though of course changes in the public debt and in the currency affect by sympathy every part of the machinery of commerce. The shares of railroad companies owning land grants were, and to some slight extent still are, depressed and raised by the greater or slighter prospects of legislative interference; but this point of contact between speculators and politicians, which, like the meeting-point of currents in the sea, was marked by a good deal of rough and turbid water, has now ceased to exist, there being no more railroad lands which Congress has to deal with.

The more serious question remains: How does Wall Street tell on the character of the people? They are naturally inclined to be speculative. The pursuit of wealth is nowhere so eager as in America, the opportunities for acquiring it are nowhere so numerous. Nowhere is one equally impressed by the progress which the science and arts of gain—I do not mean the arts that add to the world’s wealth, but those by which individuals appropriate an exceptionally large share of it—make from year to year. The materials with which the investor or the speculator has to work may receive no sensible addition; but the constant application of thousands of keen intellects, spurred by sharp desire, evolves new combinations out of these old materials, devises new methods and contrivances apt for a bold and skilful hand, just as electricians go on perfecting the machinery of the telegraph, just as the accumulated labours of scholars present us with always more trustworthy texts of the classical writers and more precise rules of Greek and Latin syntax. Under these new methods of business, speculation, though it seems to become more of a science, does not become less speculative. People seem to buy and sell on even slighter indications than in Paris or London. The processes of “bulling” and “bearing” are more constant and more skilfully applied. The whole theory and practice of “margins” has been more completely worked out. The stock market is worked in conjunction with the stock markets of Europe, and the fact that the stock exchange in London opens four hours earlier than that of New York enables the former to be used so as to affect the latter. However, it is of less consequence for our present purpose to dwell on the proficiency of the professional operator than to note the prevalence of the habit of speculation: it is not intensity so much as extension that affects an estimate of the people at large.

Except in New York, and perhaps in Chicago, which is more and more coming to reproduce and rival the characteristics of New York, Americans bet less upon horse races than the English do. Horse races are, indeed, far less common, though there is a good deal of fuss made about trotting-matches. However, much money changes hands, especially in Eastern cities, over yacht-races, and plenty everywhere over elections.11 The purchase and sale of “produce futures,” i.e., of cotton, wheat, maize, bacon, lard, and other staples not yet in existence but to be delivered at some distant day, has reached an enormous development.12 There is, even in the Eastern cities, where the value of land might be thought to have become stable, a real estate market in which land and houses are dealt in as matter for pure speculation, with no intention of holding except for a rise within the next few hours or days; while in the new West the price of lands, especially near cities, undergoes fluctuations greater than those of the most unstable stocks in the London market. It can hardly be doubted that the preexisting tendency to encounter risks and “back one’s opinion,” inborn in the Americans, and fostered by the circumstances of their country, is further stimulated by the existence of so vast a number of joint-stock enterprises, and by the facilities they offer to the smallest capitalists. Similar facilities exist in the Old World; but few of the inhabitants of the Old World have yet learned how to use and abuse them. The Americans, quick at everything, have learned long ago. The habit of speculation is now a part of their character, and it increases that constitutional excitability and high nervous tension of which they are proud.

Some may think that when the country fills up and settles down, and finds itself altogether under conditions more nearly resembling those of the Old World, these peculiarities will fade away. I doubt it. They seem to have already passed into the national fibre.

chapter 108

The Universities and Colleges

Among the universities of America there is none which has sprung up of itself like Bologna or Paris or El Azhar or Oxford, none founded by an emperor like Prague, or by a pope like Glasgow. All have been the creatures of private munificence or denominational zeal or state action. Their history is short indeed compared with that of the universities of Europe. Yet it is full of interest, for its shows a steady growth, it records many experiments, it gives valuable data for comparing the educational results of diverse systems.

When the first English colonists went to America, the large and liberal mediæval conception of a university, as a place where graduates might teach freely and students live freely, was waxing feeble in Oxford and Cambridge. The instruction was given chiefly by the colleges, which had already become, what they long continued, organisms so strong as collectively to eclipse the university they had been meant to aid. Accordingly when places of superior instruction began to grow up in the colonies, it was on the model not of an English university but of an English college that they were created. The glory of founding the first place of learning in the English parts of America belongs to a Puritan minister and graduate of Cambridge, John Harvard of Emmanuel College,1 who, dying in 1638, eighteen years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, gave half his property for the establishment of a college in the town of Cambridge, three miles from Boston, which, originally organized on the plan of Emmanuel College, and at once taken under the protection of the infant Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has now grown into the most famous university on the North American continent.2

The second foundation was due to the Colonial Assembly of Virginia. So early as 1619, twelve years after the first settlement at Jamestown, the Virginia Company in England voted ten thousand acres of land in the colony for the establishment of a seminary of learning, and a site was in 1624 actually set apart, on an island in the Susquehanna River, for the “Foundinge and Maintenance of a University and such schools in Virginia as shall there be erected, and shall be called Academia Virginiensis et Oxoniensis.” This scheme was never carried out. But in 1693 the Virginians obtained a grant of land and money from the home government for the erection of a college, which received the name of the College of William and Mary.3 The third foundation was Yale College, established in Connecticut (first at Saybrook, then at New Haven) in 1700; the fourth Princeton, in New Jersey, in 1746. None of these received the title of university: Harvard is called “a school or colledge”; Yale used the name “collegiate school” for seventeen years. “We on purpose gave your academy as low a name as we could that it might the better stand the wind and weather” was the reason assigned. Other academies or colleges in New England and the Middle states followed: such as that which is now the University of Pennsylvania, in 1749; King’s, now Columbia, College in New York, in 1754; and Rhode Island College (now Brown University), in 1764; and the habit of granting degrees grew up naturally and almost imperceptibly. A new departure is marked after the Revolution by the establishment, at the instance of Jefferson, of the University of Virginia, whose large and liberal lines gave it more resemblance to the universities of the European continent than to the then educationally narrow and socially domestic colleges of England.

At present most of the American universities are referable to one of two types, which may be described as the older and the newer, or the private and the public type. By the old or private type I denote a college on the model of a college in Oxford or Cambridge, with a head called the president, and a number of teachers, now generally called professors; a body of governors or trustees in whom the property and general control of the institution is vested; a prescribed course of instruction which all students are expected to follow; buildings, usually called dormitories, provided for the lodging of the students, and a more or less strict, but always pretty effective discipline enforced by the teaching staff. Such a college is usually of private foundation, and is almost always connected with some religious denomination.

Under the term new or public type I include universities established, endowed, and governed by a state, usually through a body of persons called regents. In such a university there commonly exists considerable freedom of choice among various courses of study. The students, or at least the majority of them, reside where they please in the city, and are subject to very little discipline. There are seldom or never denominational affiliations, women are admitted, and very low charges are made for instruction.

There are, however, institutions which it is hard to refer to one or other type. Some of these began as private foundations, with a collegiate and quasi-domestic character, but have now developed into true universities, generally resembling those of Germany or Scotland. Harvard in Massachusetts and Yale in Connecticut are instances. Others have been founded by private persons, but as fully equipped universities, and wholly undenominational. Cornell at Ithaca in western New York is an instance; Johns Hopkins in Baltimore is another of a different order. Some have been founded by public authority, yet have been practically left to be controlled by a body of self-renewing trustees. Columbia College in New York City is an instance. Still if we were to run through a list of the universities and colleges in the United States, we should find that the great majority were either strictly private foundations governed by trustees, or wholly public foundations governed by the state. That is to say, the two familiar English types, viz., the university, which though a public institution is yet little interfered with by the state, which is deemed to be composed of its graduates and students, and whose self-government consists in its being governed by the graduates, and the college, which is a private corporation, consisting of a head, fellows, and scholars, and governed by the head and fellows—neither of them appear in modern America.4 On the other hand, the American university of the public type differs from the universities of Germany in being placed under a state board, not under a minister. Neither in Germany nor in Scotland do we find anything corresponding to the American university or college of the private type, for in neither of these countries is a university governed by a body of self-renewing trustees.5

It is impossible within the limits of a chapter to do more than state a few of the more salient characteristics of the American universities. I shall endeavour to present these characteristics in the fewest possible words, and for the sake of clearness shall group what I have to say under separate heads.

Statistics.

The United States Education Bureau received in 1912 reports from 596 universities and colleges and technological schools, i.e., institutions granting degrees and professing to give an instruction, higher than that of schools, in the liberal arts. Of these 144 were for men only and 343 for both men and women, while 109 were for women only. The total number of teachers was 30,034, 24,508 men and 5,524 women teachers, teaching in the 596 institutions. Of the total number, 80.2 per cent were men, 19.8 percent women.6

The total number of students in the undergraduate and graduate departments of the 596 institutions was 198,453, viz., 125,750 men and 72,703 women. In the 109 colleges for women only there were 21,423 undergraduate students. These numbers do not include those in the preparatory departments. The attendance has risen rapidly: it is double that of eighteen years ago. Besides these there are returned:

The total number of baccalaurate degrees conferred is returned as 22,354, 58 per cent on men, 42 per cent on women; of graduate degrees, 5,226, 83.4 per cent on men, 16.6 per cent on women.

General Character of the Universities and Colleges.

Out of this enormous total of degree-granting bodies very few answer to the modern conception of a university. If we define a university as a place where teaching that puts a man abreast of the fullest and most exact knowledge of the time is given in a range of subjects covering all the great departments of intellectual life, not more than fifteen and possibly only ten or twelve of the American institutions would fall within the definition. Of these two-thirds are to be found in the Atlantic states. Next below them come some forty or more foundations which are scarcely entitled to the name of university, some because their range of instruction is still limited to the traditional literary and scientific course such as it stood fifty years ago, others because, while professing to teach a great variety of subjects, they teach them in an imperfect way, having neither a sufficiently large staff of highly trained professors, nor an adequate provision of laboratories, libraries, and other external appliances. The older New England colleges are good types of the former group. Their instruction is sound and thorough, well calculated to fit a man for the professions of law or divinity, but it omits many branches of learning and science which have grown to importance within the last fifty years. There are also some Western colleges which deserve to be placed in the same category. Most of the Western state universities belong to the other group of this second class, that of institutions which aim at covering more ground than they are as yet able to cover. They have an ambitious programme; but neither the state of preparation of their students, nor the strength of the teaching staff, enables them to do justice to the promise which the programme holds out. They are true universities rather in aspiration than in fact.

Below these again there is a third and much larger class of colleges, three hundred or more, which are for most intents and purposes schools. They differ from the gymnasia of Germany, the lycées of France, the grammar schools of England, and high schools of Scotland, not only in the fact that they give degrees to those who have satisfactorily passed through their prescribed course or courses, but in permitting greater personal freedom to the students than boys would be allowed in those countries. They are universities or colleges as respects some of their arrangements, but schools in respect of the educational results attained. This large group may be further divided into two subclasses, distinguished from one another partly by their revenues, partly by the character of the population they serve, partly by the personal gifts of the president and teachers. Some seventy or eighty, though comparatively small, are strong by the zeal and capacity of their staff, and while not attempting to teach everything, teach the subjects which they do undertake with increasing thoroughness. The remainder would do better to renounce the privilege of granting degrees and be content to do school work according to school methods. The West and South are covered with these small colleges. In Illinois I find 32 named in the Report of the United States Education Bureau, in Tennessee 25. Oklahoma has already 6, with nearly 2,000 students, but all are still in an early stage of development. In Ohio out of 35, or possibly more, scarce any deserves to be called a university. The number of teachers and students is sometimes large, but not very many are in the collegiate and far fewer in the graduate departments. Most of the students are to be found in the preparatory department.

The total number of students in Harvard University was, in 1913, 4,354, in Yale 3,262, in Columbia University, New York, 9,379, and in four great state universities as follows: Michigan 5,805, Illinois 5,054, Wisconsin 5,982, California 6,817. These numbers, which except in the first case include women, show a great increase during the last twenty years.

Revenues.

Nearly all, if not all, of the degree-granting bodies are endowed, the great majority by private founders, but a good many also by grants of land made by the state in which they stand, partly out of lands set apart for educational purposes by the federal government. In most cases the lands have been sold and the proceeds invested. Many of the state universities of the West receive a grant from the state treasury, voted annually or biennially by the legislature, but a preferable plan, adopted by several states, is to enact a permanent statute giving annually to the university some fraction of a cent, or a mill (1/1000 of a dollar) out of every dollar of the total valuation of the state. This acts automatically, increasing the grant as the resources of the state increase. The greater universities are constantly being enriched by the gifts of private individuals, often their own graduates; but the complaint is heard that these gifts are too frequently appropriated to some specific purpose, instead of being added to the general funds of the university. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins are now all of them wealthy foundations, and the stream of munificence swells daily.8 Before long there will be universities in America with resources far surpassing those of any Scottish university, and exceeding even the collective income of the university and all the colleges in Oxford or in Cambridge. In some states the real property and funds of universities are exempt from taxation.

Government.

As already remarked, no American university or college is, so far as I know, governed either by its graduates alone, like Oxford and Cambridge, or by its teaching staff alone, like the Scotch universities before the Act of 1858. The state universities are usually controlled and managed by a board generally called the regents, sometimes elected by the people of the state, sometimes appointed by the governor or the legislature. There are states with an enlightened population, or in which an able president has been able to guide and influence the regents or the legislature, in which this plan has worked excellently, securing liberal appropriations, and interesting the commonwealth in the welfare of the highest organ of its intellectual life. There have also been states in which the haste or unwisdom of the legislature seemed for a time to have cramped the growth of the university. On the whole the regents of late years have generally ruled well and the states have shown more and more interest in university work; though too apt to bestow their liberality almost wholly on the more directly practical branches of its work.

All other universities and colleges are governed by boards of governors or trustees, sometimes allowed to renew themselves by cooptation, sometimes nominated by a religious denomination or other external authority.9 The president of the institution is often, but not always, an ex officio member of this board, to which the management of property and financial interests belongs, while internal discipline and educational arrangements are usually left to the academic staff. A visitor from Europe is struck by the prominence of the president in an American university or college, and the almost monarchical position which he sometimes occupies towards the professors as well as towards the students. Far more authority is vested in him, more turns upon his individual talents and character, than in the universities of Europe. Neither the German pro-rector, nor the vice-chancellor in Oxford and Cambridge, nor the principal in a Scottish university, nor the provost of Trinity College in Dublin, nor the head in one of the colleges in Oxford or Cambridge, is anything like so important a personage.10 In this, as in not a few other respects, America is less republican than England.

Of late years there have been active movements to secure the representation of the graduates of each university or college upon its governing body; and it now frequently happens that some of the trustees are elected by the alumni. Good results follow, because the alumni are disposed to elect men younger and more abreast of the times, than most of the persons whom the existing trustees coopt.

The Teaching Staff.

The faculty, as it is usually called, varies in numbers and efficiency according to the popularity of the university or college and its financial resources. The largest staff mentioned in the tables of the U.S. Bureau of Education is that of Harvard, with 731 professors, instructors, and lecturers; while Yale has 455, Columbia has 907, the University of Pennsylvania 553, Princeton 203, the University of Michigan 331, Johns Hopkins 225. Cornell returns 700, but apparently not all of these are constantly occupied in teaching.

In the colleges of the West and Northwest the average number of teachers is small, say twelve to fifteen in the collegiate, five to ten in the preparatory department. It is larger in the state universities, but in some of the Southern and ruder Western states sinks to five or six, each of them taking two or three subjects. I remember to have met in the Far West a college president—I will call him Mr. Johnson—who gave me a long account of his young university, established by public authority, and receiving some small grant from the legislature. He was an active sanguine man, and in dilating on his plans frequently referred to “the faculty” as doing this or contemplating that. At last I asked of how many professors the faculty at present consisted. “Well,” he answered, “just at present the faculty is below its full strength, but it will soon be more numerous.”“And at present?” I inquired. “At present it consists of Mrs. Johnson and myself.”

The salaries paid to professors seem small compared with the general wealth of the country and the cost of living. The highest known to me are those in Columbia College, a few of which exceed $5,000 a year, and in the University of Chicago, which pays some of $7,000. Even in Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell, most fall below $4,000. A very few presidents receive $10,000, but over the country generally I should guess that a president rarely receives $4,000, often only $3,000 or $2,000, and the professors less in proportion. Under these conditions it may be found surprising that so many able men are to be found on the teaching staff of not a few colleges as well as universities, and that in the greater universities there are also many who have trained themselves by a long and expensive education in Europe for their work. The reason is to be found partly in the fondness for science and learning which has lately shown itself in America, and which makes men of intellectual tastes prefer a life of letters with poverty to success in business or at the bar, partly, as regards the smaller Western colleges, to religious motives, these colleges being largely officered by the clergy of the denomination they belong to, especially by those who love study, or find their talents better suited to the classroom than to the pulpit.

The professors seem to be always among the social aristocracy of the city in which they live, though usually unable, from the smallness of their incomes, to enjoy social life as the corresponding class does in Scotland or even in England. The position of president is often one of honour and wide influence.

The Students.

It is the glory of the American universities, as of those of Scotland and Germany, to be freely accessible to all classes of the people. In the Eastern states a comparatively small yet an increasing number have been the sons of working men, because parents can rarely bear the expense of a university course, or dispense with a boy’s earnings after he reaches fourteen. But even in the East a good many come from straitened homes, receiving assistance from some richer neighbour or from charitable funds belonging to the college at which they may present themselves; while some, in days when the standard of instruction was lower, and women were less generally employed as teachers, used to teach district schools for three months in winter. In the West, where there is little distinction of classes though great disparity of wealth, the state universities make a small or possibly no charge, and some other institutions require a merely nominal fee, or are ready to receive without charge a promising student. Thus the only difficulty in a young man’s way is that of supporting himself during his college course; and this he frequently does by earning during one half the year what keeps him during the other half. Often he earns it by teaching school: many of the eminent men, including several presidents of the United States, from 1840 to 1890 thus supported themselves in some part of their earlier careers. Sometimes he works at a trade, as many a student has done in Scotland; and, as in Scotland, he is all the more respected by his classmates for it. The instruction which he gets in one of these Western colleges may not carry him very far, but it opens a door through which men of real power can pass into the professions, or even into the domain of learning and scientific research. In no country are the higher kinds of teaching more cheap or more accessible. There is a growing tendency for well-to-do parents to send their sons to one of the greater universities irrespective of the profession they contemplate for him, that is to say, purely for the sake of general culture, or of the social advantages which a university course is thought to confer. The usual age at which students enter one of the leading universities of the East is, as in England, from eighteen to nineteen, and the usual age of graduation twenty-two to twenty-three,11 the regular course covering four years. In the West some students come at a more advanced age, twenty-four or twenty-five, their early education having been neglected, so the average in Western colleges is higher than in the East. In Scotland boys of fourteen and men of twenty-four used to sit side by side in university classrooms, and compete on equal terms, a pleasing relic of mediæval times which survives in the University of El Azhar in Cairo. The places of less note draw students from their immediate vicinity only; to those of importance boys are sent from all parts of the Union. The University of Michigan, the first among the state universities to develop on a large scale, used to be a sort of metropolitan university for the Northwestern states. Harvard and Yale, which used to draw only from the Atlantic states, now receive students from the West and even from the shores of the Pacific. Princeton has long drawn many from the South.12 A student generally completes his four years’ graduation course at the same institution, but some few leave a small college after one year to enter at a larger one. A man who has graduated in a college which has only an arts or collegiate department, will often, in case he designs himself for law or medicine, resort to the law or medical school of a larger university, or even, if he means to devote himself to science or philology, will pursue what is called a “post-graduate course” at some one of the greatest seats of learning. Thus it may happen, as in Germany, that a man has studied at two or three universities in succession.

Buildings and External Aspect.

Few of the buildings in any college or university are more than a century old,13 and among these there is none of an imposing character, or with marked architectural merit. Many of the newer ones are handsome and well arranged, but I have heard it remarked that too much money is now being spent, at least in the West, upon showy buildings, possibly with the view of commanding attention. The ground plan is rarely or never that of a quadrangle as in England and Scotland, not because it was desired to avoid monastic precedents, but because detached buildings are thought to be better adapted to the cold and snows of winter. At Harvard and Yale the brick dormitories (buildings in which the students live) and classrooms are scattered over a large space of grass planted with ancient elms, and have a very pleasing effect. Rochester, too, has a spacious campus. Princeton, Amherst, Williams, and Dartmouth, being placed in small country towns and pleasing scenery, have even more attractive surroundings, and the situations of the Universities of Virginia, Wisconsin, and California are highly favoured by nature. Ample and agreeable pleasure grounds surround the women’s colleges of Vassar, Wellesley, and Bryn Mawr.

Time Spent in Study.

Vacations are shorter than in England or Scotland. That of summer usually lasts from the middle of June to the middle of September, and there are generally ten days or more given at Christmas and at least a week in April. Work begins earlier in the morning than in England, but seldom so early as in Germany. Hardly any students seem to work as hard as the men reading for high honours do at Cambridge in England.

Local Distribution of Universities and Colleges.

The number of degree-granting bodies seems to be larger in the Middle and Northwestern states than either in New England or in the South. In the tables of the Bureau of Education I find New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, credited with 191, one-third of the total for the United States; but as many are small and indifferent, the mere number does not necessarily speak of an ample and solid provision of education. Indeed Ohio has no single institution to which a place in the front rank would be assigned. The fourteen Southern states (excluding Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware) stand in the tables as possessing 191, but it may be doubted whether any of these, except the University of Virginia, attains the very first rank; and though some have been rising steadily, the great majority are undermanned and hampered by the imperfect preparation of the students whom they receive. In this respect, and as regards education generally, the South, though advancing, is still far behind the other sections of the country. There are several colleges, all or nearly all of them denominational, established for coloured people only.

System and Methods of Instruction.

In 1860 it would have been comparatively easy to describe these, for nearly all the universities and colleges prescribed a regular four years’ curriculum to a student, chiefly consisting of classics and mathematics, and leading up to a B.A. degree. A youth had little or no option what he would study, for everybody was expected to take certain classes in each year, and received his degree upon having satisfactorily performed what was in each class required of him.14 The course was not unlike that followed (till 1892) in the Scottish universities: it began with Latin, Greek, and mathematics, and wound up with logic, mental and moral philosophy, and a tincture of physics. Instruction was mainly, indeed in the small colleges wholly, catechetical. About 1870 the simple uniformity of this traditional system began to vanish in the greater universities of the Eastern and Middle states, and in most of the state universities of the West. In most of the smaller colleges, however, there are still regular classes, a certain number of which every student must attend, but he is allowed to choose for himself between a variety of courses or curricula, by following any one of which he may obtain a degree. The freedom of choice is greater in some universities, less in others; in some, choice is permitted from the first, in most, however (including the great university of Yale), only after two years. In Harvard freedom reached its maximum. The controversies out of which the “elective system” emerged turned largely on the question whether Greek should be a compulsory subject. The change was introduced for the sake of bringing scientific subjects into the curriculum and enabling men to specialize in them and in matters like history and Oriental or Romance philology, and was indeed a necessary concomitant to such a broadening of universities as may enable them to keep pace with the swift development of new branches of study and research during the last forty years. It is defended both on this ground and as being more likely than the old strictly limited courses to give every student something which will interest him. It is opposed as tending to bewilder him, to disperse and scatter his mind over a too wide range of subjects, perhaps unconnected with one another, to tempt him with the offer of an unchartered freedom which he wants the experience to use wisely. One or two conspicuous universities, and many smaller colleges, have clung to the old system of two or three prescribed degree courses in which little variation is admitted.15 An elective system is indeed possible only where the teaching staff is able to do justice to a wide range of subjects.

A parallel change has passed upon the methods of teaching. Lecturing with the interposition of few or no questions to the class is becoming the rule in the larger universities, those especially which adopt the elective system, while what are called “recitations,” that is to say, catechetical methods resembling those of Scotland or of a college (not university) lecture in Oxford sixty years ago, remain the rule in the more conservative majority of institutions, and are practically universal in the smaller colleges. Some of the largest universities have established a system of informal instruction by the professor to a small group of students on the model of the German seminar. Private “coaching,” such as prevailed largely in Oxford and still prevails in Cambridge, is almost unknown.

Requirements for Entrance.

All the better universities and colleges exact a minimum of knowledge from those who matriculate. Some do this by imposing an entrance examination. Others allow certain schools, of whose excellence they are satisfied, to issue leaving certificates, the production of which entitles the bearers to be admitted without examination. This plan is said to work well.16 Michigan led the way in establishing a judiciously regulated and systematized relation between the public schools and the state university, and other universities have now an excellent system for inspecting schools and admitting students on the basis of school certificates.

Degrees and Examinations.

It is only institutions which have been chartered by state authority that are deemed entitled to grant degrees. There are others which do so without any such legal title, but as the value of a degree per se is slight, the mischief done by these interlopers can hardly be serious. B.A., M.A., (less frequently) Ph.D., D.D., and LL.D., the two latter usually for honorary purposes,17 are the only degrees conferred in the great majority of colleges; but of late years the larger universities have, in creating new courses, created a variety of new degrees also.18 Degrees are awarded by examination, but never, I think, as often in Europe, upon a single examination held after the course of study has been completed. The student, as he goes through the various classes which make up his course, is examined, sometimes at frequent intervals, sometimes at the end of each year, on the work done in the classes or on prescribed books, and the degree is ultimately awarded or refused on the combined result of all these tests. At no point in his career is he expected to submit to any one examination comparable, for the combined number and difficulty of the subjects in which he is questioned, to the final honour examinations at Oxford or Cambridge, even as now constituted, much less as they stood in the middle of last century.

There is indeed no respect in which the American system is more contrasted with that of Oxford and Cambridge than the comparatively small part assigned to the award of honours. In England the class list or tripos has for many years past, ever since the universities awoke from their lethargy of the eighteenth century, been the main motive power in stimulating undergraduates to exertion and in stemming the current which runs so strongly towards amusement and athletic exercises. Examinations have governed teaching instead of being used to test it. In the United States, although most universities and colleges reward with some sort of honourable mention the students who have acquitted themselves conspicuously well, graduation honours are not a great object of ambition; they win little or no fame within the institution, they are unnoticed beyond its walls. In many universities there is not even the stimulus, which acts powerfully in Scotland, of class prizes, awarded by examination or by the votes of the students. It is only a few institutions that possess scholarships awarded by competition. American teachers seem to find the discipline of their regular class system sufficient to maintain a reasonable level of diligence among their students, being doubtless aided by the fact that, in all but a very few universities, the vast majority of the students come from simple homes, possess scanty means, and have their way in life to make. Diligence—a moderate but fairly sustained diligence—was the tradition of the American colleges until the passion for athletic competitions became pronounced; and this is still true in most of those remote from the dissipating influences and social excitements of large cities. It is still the rule in post-graduate courses and in the professional schools, for students who have got so far feel the need for turning their opportunities to full account. Even the greater universities have never been, as the English universities avowedly were in the first half of the last century, and to some extent are still, primarily places for spending three or four pleasant years, only incidentally places of instruction. For the absence of a competitive system two merits have been claimed. One is that it escapes that separation which has grown up in Oxford and Cambridge between pass or poll men and honour men. The ordinary student supposes himself to have come to college for the purpose of learning something. In all countries, even in Switzerland and Scotland, there is a percentage of idle men in places of study; but the idleness of an American student is due to something in his own character or circumstances, and does not, as in the case of the English “poll-man,” rest on a theory in his own mind, probably shared by his parents, that he entered the university in order to enjoy himself and form useful social connections. It is held to be another merit that the love of knowledge and truth is not, among the better minds, vulgarized by being made the slave of competition and of the passion for quick and conspicuous success. An American student is not induced by his university to think less of the intrinsic value of what he is learning than of how far it will pay in an examination; nor does he regard his ablest fellow students as his rivals over a difficult course for high stakes, rivals whose speed and strength he must constantly be comparing with his own. Americans who have studied in an English university after graduating in one of their own have told me that nothing surprised them more in England than the incessant canvassing of one another’s intellectual capacities which went on among the undergraduates.19 Much less work is got out of the better American students than the examination system exacts from the same class of men in Oxford and Cambridge. Probably the qualities of readiness and accuracy are not so thoroughly trained. Possibly it is a loss not to be compelled to carry for a few weeks a large mass of facts in one’s mind under the obligation of finding any one at a moment’s notice. Those who direct the leading American universities recognize in these points the advantages of English practice, but have not so far been disposed to alter their own traditional system, which relies on the interest the student has in turning to account his college years and doing work enough to secure his degree.

Nearly all American students do graduate, that is to say, as those who would be likely to fail drop off before the close of the fourth year, the proportion of plucks in the later examinations is small. As regards the worth of the degrees given, there is of course the greatest possible difference between those of the better and those of the lower institutions, nor is this difference merely one between the few great universities and the mass of small colleges or Western state universities, for among the smaller colleges there are some which maintain as high a standard of thoroughness as the greatest. The degrees of the very numerous colleges to which I have referred as belonging to the lower group of the third class have no assignable value, except that of indicating that a youth has been made to work during four years at subjects above the elementary. Those of institutions belonging to the higher group and the two other classes represent, on an average, as much knowledge and mental discipline as the poll or pass degrees of Cambridge or Oxford, possibly less than the pass degrees of the Scottish universities. Between the highest American degrees and the honour degrees of Oxford and Cambridge it is hard to make any comparison.

A degree is in the United States given only to those who have followed a prescribed course in the teaching institution which confers it. No American institution has so far departed from the old and true conception of a university, approved by both history and policy, as to become a mere examining board, awarding degrees to anybody who may present himself from any quarter. However, the evils of existing arrangements, under which places below the level of German gymnasia are permitted to grant academic titles, are deemed so serious by some educational reformers that it was proposed as far back as 1890 to create in each state a single degree-conferring authority to which the various institutions within the state should be, so to speak, tributary, sending up their students to its examinations, which would of course be kept at a higher level than most of the present independent bodies maintain. This is what physicians call a “heroic remedy”; it does not seem to have won favour, nor need this be regretted.

Notwithstanding these evils, and the vast distance between the standard of a university like Johns Hopkins at the one end of the scale, and that of the weakest Southern colleges at the other, a degree, wherever obtained, seems to have a certain social value. “It is,” said one of my informants, “a thing which you would mention regarding a young man for whom you were writing a letter of introduction.” This does not mean very much, but it is better than nothing; it would appear to give a man some sort of advantage in seeking for educational or literary work. In several states a man who can point to his degree obtains speedier entrance to the bar, and some denominations endeavour to secure that their clergy shall have graduated.

Post-graduate Courses.

Several of the leading universities have lately instituted sets of lectures for students who have completed the regular four years’ collegiate course and taken their B.A. or B.Sc., hoping in this way to provide for the special study of subjects for which room cannot be found in the regular course. Johns Hopkins University was among the first to devote itself especially to this object. Its aim was not so much to rival the existing universities as to discharge a function which many of them had not the means of undertaking—that of providing the highest special instruction, not necessarily in every subject, but in subjects which it could secure the ablest professors. It did much admirable work in this direction, and soon made good its claim to a place in the front rank of transatlantic seats of education. There are also many graduates who, desiring to devote themselves to some particular branch of science or learning, such as experimental physics, philology, or history, spend a semester or two at a German or to a less extent at a French university.20 Fewer come to Oxford or Cambridge, but the number has increased since the foundation of the Rhodes scholarships provided funds for two from each state to proceed to Oxford. American professors, when asked why they send their men chiefly to Germany, considering that in England they would have the advantage of a more interesting social life, and of seeing how England is trying to deal with problems similar in many respects to their own, answer that the English universities make no provision for any students except those who wish to go through one of the regular degree courses, and are so much occupied in preparing men to pass examinations as to give, except in two or three branches, but little advanced teaching. There can be no doubt that if Oxford and Cambridge offered the advantages which Leipzig and Berlin do, the afflux to the two former of American graduates would soon be considerable.

Professional and Scientific Schools.

Besides the very large number of schools for all the practical arts, agriculture, engineering, mining, and so forth, as well as for the professions of theology, law, and medicine, statistics of which have been already given, some universities have established scientific schools, or agricultural schools, or theological, legal, and medical faculties. The theological faculties are usually denominational; but Harvard, which used to be practically Unitarian, has now an unsectarian faculty, in which there are several learned divines belonging to Trinitarian denominations; and no difficulty seems to have arisen in working this arrangement. The law school is usually treated as a separate department, to which students may resort who have not graduated in the university. The course is usually of two, sometimes of three, years, and covers all the leading branches of common law, equity, crimes, civil and criminal procedure. Many of these schools are extremely efficient.

Research.

Till recently no special provision was made for the promotion of research as apart from the work of learning and teaching; but the example set by Johns Hopkins and Harvard in founding fellowships for this purpose has now been largely followed, and in 1907 there were 664 fellowships, of which 115 were in Massachusetts, 114 in Illinois, and 85 in New York. The munificence of private benefactors may be expected to continue to supply the necessary funds. There is now, especially in the greater universities, a good deal of specialization in teaching, so an increasing number of professors are able to occupy themselves with research. The Institution for Research founded in Washington by Mr. Carnegie incidentally aids the universities by its grants of money to professors engaged in research work.

Aids to Deserving Students.

In proportion to the number of colleges, not many have scholarships or bursaries open to competition like those of the colleges in Oxford and Cambridge and of the Scottish universities. The number has, however, been increasing.21 But in a large number there exist funds, generally placed at the disposal of the president or the faculty, which are applicable for the benefit of industrious men who need help; and it is common to remit fees in the case of those whose circumstances warrant the indulgence. When, as occasionally happens, free places or grants out of these funds are awarded upon examination, it would be thought improper for anyone to compete whose circumstances placed him above the need of pecuniary aid. When the selection is left to the college authorities, they are said to discharge it with honourable impartiality. Having often asked whether favouritism was complained of, I could never hear that it was. In some colleges there exists a loan fund, out of which money is advanced to the poor student, who afterwards repays it. President Garfield obtained his education at Williams College by the help of such a fund. The denominations often give assistance to promising youths who intend to enter the ministry. Says one of my most experienced informants: “In our country any young fellow of ability and energy can get education without paying for it.”22 The experiment tried at Cornell University in the way of providing remunerative labour for poor students who were at the same time to follow a course of instruction, seems to have proved unworkable, for the double effort is found to impose too severe a strain.

Social Life of the Students.

Those who feel that not only the keenest pleasure, but the most solid moral and intellectual benefit of their university life lay in the friendships which they formed in that happy springtime, will ask how in this respect America compares with England. Oxford and Cambridge, with their historic colleges maintaining a corporate life from century to century, bringing the teachers into easy and friendly relations with the taught, forming between the members of each society a close and almost family tie which is not incompatible with loyalty to the great corporation for whose sake all the minor corporations exist, have succeeded in producing a more polished, graceful, and I think also intellectually stimulative, type of student life than either Germany, with its somewhat boyish frolics of duelling and compotations, or Scotland, where the youth has few facilities for social intercourse with his classmates and none with his professor. The American universities occupy an intermediate position between those of England and those of Germany or Scotland. Formerly all or nearly all the students were lodged in buildings called dormitories—which, however, were not merely sleeping places, but contained sitting rooms jointly tenanted by two or more students—and meals were taken in common. This is still the practice in the smaller colleges, and remains firmly rooted in Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, though in the two former for part only of the students. In the new state universities, and in nearly all universities planted in large cities, the great bulk of the students board with private families, or (more rarely) live in lodgings or hotels, and an increasing number have begun to do so even in places which, like Harvard and Brown University (Rhode Island) and Cornell, have some dormitories. The dormitory plan works well in comparatively small establishments, especially when, as is the case with the smaller denominational colleges, they are almost like large families, and are permeated by a religious spirit. But in the larger universities the tendency is now towards letting the students reside where they please, though some state universities have dormitories. The maintenance of discipline gives less trouble; the poorer student is less inclined to imitate or envy the luxurious habits of the rich. Sometimes, however, as where there is no town for students to lodge in, dormitories are indispensable. The chief breaches of order which the authorities have to deal with arise in dormitories from the practice of “hazing,” i.e., playing practical jokes, especially upon freshmen. In an American college the students are classed by years, those of the first year being called freshmen, of the second year sophomores, of the third year juniors, of the fourth year seniors. The bond between the members of each “class” (i.e., the entrants of the same year) is a pretty close one, and they are apt to act together. Between sophomores and freshmen—for the seniors and juniors are supposed to have put away childish things—there is a smouldering jealousy which sometimes breaks out into a strife sufficiently acute, though there is seldom anything more than mischievously high spirits behind it, to give the president and faculty trouble.23 Otherwise the conduct of the students is generally good. Intoxication, gaming, or other vices are rare, those who come to work, as the vast majority do, being little prone to such faults; it is only in a few universities situate in or near large cities and resorted to by the sons of the rich that they give serious trouble. Of late years the passion for baseball, football, rowing, and athletic exercises generally, has become very strong in the universities last mentioned, where fashionable youth congregates, and the student who excels in these seems to be as much a hero among his comrades as a member of the university eight or eleven is in England.

The absence of colleges constituting social centres within a university has helped to develop in the American universities one of their most peculiar and interesting institutions—I mean the Greek letter societies. There are clubs or fraternities of students, denoted by two or three Greek letters, the initials of the secret fraternity motto. Some of these fraternities exist in one college only, but the greater are established in a good many universities and colleges, having in each what is called a chapter, and possessing in each a sort of clubhouse, with several meeting and reading rooms, and sometimes also with bedrooms for the members. In some colleges as many as a third or a half of the students belong to a fraternity, which is an institution recognized and patronized by the authorities. New members are admitted by the votes of the chapter; and to obtain early admission to one of the best is no small compliment. They are, so far as I know, always nonpolitical, though political questions may be debated and political essays read at their meetings; and one is told that they allow no intoxicants to be kept in their buildings or used at the feasts they provide. They are thus something between an English club and a German Studenten Corps, with a literary element sometimes thrown in. They are deemed a valuable part of the university system, not so much because they cultivate intellectual life as on account of their social influence. It is an object of ambition to be elected a member; it is a point of honour for a member to maintain the credit of the fraternity. Former members, who are likely to include some of the university professors, keep up their connection with the fraternity, and often attend its chapters in the college, or its general meetings. Membership constitutes a bond between old members during their whole life, so that a member on settling in some distant city would probably find there persons who had belonged to his fraternity, and would be admitted to their local gatherings.24 Besides these ther exist a few honorary societies into which students are elected in virtue of purely literary or scientific acquirements, as evidenced in the college examinations. The oldest and most famous is called the φΒΚ, which is said to mean φιλοσοφίαβίουκυβερνήτης, and exists in many of the leading universities in some of the states.

Religion.

I have already observed that a good many of the American universities, and indeed a majority of the smaller colleges, are denominational. This term, however, does not mean what it would mean in Europe, or at least in England. It means that they have been founded by or in connection with a particular church, and that they remain to some extent associated with it or influenced by it. Apart from the 81 state or municipal institutions, only 84 out of the 493 mentioned in the educational report state that they are unsectarian. The Methodists claim 77 colleges; the Presbyterians, 54; the Baptists, 39; the Roman Catholics, 52; the Congregationalists, 10; the Protestant Episcopalians, 2. But, except as regards the Roman Catholic institutions, there is seldom any exclusion of teachers, and never of students, belonging to other churches, nor any attempt to give the instruction (except, of course, in the theological department, if there be one) a sectarian cast; this indeed is apt to be expressly repudiated by them. Although it usually happens that students belonging to the church which influences the college are more numerous than those of any other church, students of other persuasions abound; nor are efforts made to proselytize them. For instance, Harvard retains a certain flavour of Unitarianism, and has one or two Unitarian clergymen among the professors in its theological faculty; Yale has always been Congregationalist, and has by its charter ten Congregationalist clergymen among the trustees; and moreover had formerly Congregationalist clergymen as its presidents, as Brown University has a Baptist clergyman.25 Princeton is still more specifically Presbyterian, and the Episcopalians have several denominational colleges in which the local bishop is one of the trustees. But in none of these is there anything approaching to a test imposed upon professors; all are resorted to alike by students belonging to any church or to none.

In all the older universities, and in the vast majority of the more recent ones, there is a chapel in which religious services are regularly held, short prayers on the five weekdays and sometimes also a full service twice on Sundays. In most institutions every student, unless of course he has some conscientious objection, is expected to attend. The service seldom or never contains anything of a sectarian character, and arrangements are sometimes made for having it conducted by the clergy of various denominations in turn. Even among the professedly neutral new state universities, there are some which, like the University of Michigan, have daily prayers. There are of course persons who think that an unsectarian place of education cannot be a truly Christian place of education, and Cornell University in its early days had to face attacks directed against it on this score.26 But the more prevalent view is that a university ought to be in a general sense religious without being sectarian.27 An interesting experiment in unsectarian religious worship has for some time past been tried at Harvard. Attendance at the college chapel, formerly compulsory, is now voluntary, and short morning daily services with extempore prayers are conducted by the chaplains, who are eminent ministers of different denominations, serving in turn for a few weeks each. The late Dr. Phillips Brooks was one of them; and his short addresses profoundly impressed the students.

The Provision of University Education for Women.

The efforts made and experiments tried in this matter furnish material for a treatise. All I have space to mention is that these efforts have chiefly flowed in two channels. One is the admission of women to coeducation with men in the same places of higher education. This has gone on for many years in some of the denominational colleges of the West, such as Oberlin and Antioch in Ohio. Both sexes have been taught in the same classes, meeting in the hours of recreation, but lodged in separate buildings. My informants generally commended the plan, declaring that the effect on the manners and general tone of the students was excellent. The state universities founded of late years in the West are by law open to women as well as to men. The number of women attending is always smaller than that of men, yet in some institutions it is considerable, as for instance at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor there were, in 1911–12, 810 women and 4,120 men, in that of California 1,710 women and 3,088 men, in that of Minnesota, 1,746 women and 3,143 men, while Oberlin had 1,064 women and 670 men and Chicago 3,611 women and 3,421 men. The students live where they will, but are taught in the same classes, generally, however, sitting on the opposite side of the classroom from the men. The evidence given to me as to the working of this system in the Universities of California and Michigan, as well as in Cornell University, was on the whole favourable, save that the young men sometimes find the competition of the girls rather severe, and call them “study machines,” observing that they are more eager, and less addicted to sports or to mere lounging.

In the Eastern states the tendency has been to establish universities or colleges exclusively for women, and cases are known to me in which institutions that received both sexes ended by having a distinct department or separate college for women. There are persons even in the East who would prefer the scheme of coeducation, but the more general view is that the stricter etiquette and what is called the “more complex civilization” of the older states render this undesirable.28 The total number of colleges specially for women was given in the Education Report for 1909 at 113, at two grades. In Division A were 16 colleges, with 357 male and 568 female instructors and 8,610 students of whom 142 were in preparatory departments. The 97 colleges in Division B might more fitly be described as “upper schools” with 301 male instructors, 1,443 women, 12,211 “collegiate students” and 6,691 preparatory. The number of degrees conferred was 978. Among these colleges the best known, and apparently the most complete and efficient,29 are Vassar, at Poughkeepsie, New York; Wellesley, Smith, and Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts; Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania. In visiting three of these, I was much impressed by the earnestness and zeal for learning by which both the professors and the students seemed to be inspired, as well as by the high level of the teaching given. They have happily escaped the temptation to which some similar institutions in England were in danger of yielding, of making everything turn upon degree examinations. Harvard has established, in what was called its Annex, but is now more generally known as Radcliffe College, a separate department for women, in which the university professors lecture. I have no adequate data for comparing the quality of the education given to women in America with that provided by women’s colleges, and especially by those in Cambridge and Oxford, in England, but there can be no doubt that the eagerness to make full provision for women has been keener in the former country, and that amuch larger number avail themselves of what has been provided.

General Observations.

The European reader will by this time have perceived how hard it is to give such a general estimate of the educational and social worth of the higher teaching in the United States as one might give of the universities of Germany, England, and Scotland. In America the universities are not, as they are in those countries, a well-defined class of institutions. Not only is the distance between the best and the worst greater than that which in Germany separates Leipzig from Rostock, or in England Cambridge from Durham, but the gradations from the best down to the worst are so imperceptible that one can nowhere draw a line and say that here the true university stops and the pretentious school begins.30 As has been observed already, a large number present the external seeming and organization—the skeleton plan, so to speak—of a university with the actual performance of a rather raw school.

Moreover, the American universities and colleges are in a state of transition. True, nearly everything in America is changing, the apparently inflexible Constitution not excepted. But the changes that are passing in the universities are only to be paralleled by those that pass upon Western cities. The number of small colleges, especially in the Mississippi and Pacific states, has greatly increased since 1870. The character of the Eastern universities is being constantly modified. The former multiply, because under the federal system, every state likes to have its own universities numerous, and its inhabitants independent of other states, even as respects education; while the abundance of wealth, the desire of rich men to commemorate themselves and to benefit their community, and the rivalry of the churches, lead to the establishment of new colleges where none are needed, and where money would be better spent in improving those which exist. Individualism and laissez faire have, in this matter at least, free scope, for a state legislature is always ready to charter any number of new degree-giving bodies.31 Meanwhile, the great institutions of the Atlantic states continue to expand and develop not merely owing to the accretion of wealth to them from the liberality of benefactors, but because they are in close touch with Europe, resolved to bring their highest education up to the European level and to keep pace with the progress of science, filled with that love of experiment and spirit of enterprise which are so much stronger in America than anywhere else in the world.

Not the least interesting of the phenomena of the last thirty years is the struggle which has gone on in the Middle and Western states between the greater, and especially the state universities, and the small denominational colleges. The latter, which used to have the field to themselves, are now afraid of being driven off it by the growth of the former, and not only redoubled their exertions to increase their own resources and students, but—in some states—to prevent the state university from obtaining larger grants from the state treasury. They alleged that the unsectarian character of the state establishments, as well as the freedom allowed to their students, made them less capable of giving a moral and religious training. But as the graduates of the state universities became numerous in the legislatures and influential generally, and as it was more and more clearly seen that the small colleges would not, for want of funds, provide the various appliances—libraries, museums, laboratories, and so forth—which universities need, the balance inclined in favour of the state universities. It is probable that while these will rise towards the level of their Eastern sisters, many of the denominational colleges will subside into the position of places of preparatory training.

One praise which has often been given to the universities of Scotland may be given to those of America. While the German universities have been popular but not free, while the English universities have been free32 but not popular, the American universities have been both free and popular. Although some have been managed on too narrow a basis, the number has been so great that the community have not suffered. They have been established so easily, they have so fully reflected the habits and conditions of the people, as to have been accessible to every stratum of the population. They show all the merits and all the faults of a development absolutely uncontrolled by government, and little controlled even by the law which binds endowments down to the purposes fixed by a founder,33 because new foundations were constantly rising, and new endowments were accruing to the existing foundations. Accordingly, while a European observer is struck by their inequalities and by the crudeness of many among them, he is also struck by the life, the spirit, the sense of progress, which pervades them. In America itself educational reformers are apt to deplore the absence of control. They complain of the multiplication of degree-giving bodies, and consequent lowering of the worth of a degree. They point to such instances as the dissipation over thirty-five colleges in Ohio of the funds and teaching power which might have produced one first-rate university. One strong institution in a state does more, they argue, to raise the standard of teaching and learning, and to civilize the region which it serves, than can be done by twenty weak ones.

The European observer, while he admits this, conceives that his American friends may not duly realize the services which these small colleges perform in the rural districts of the country. They get hold of a multitude of poor men, who might never resort to a distant place of education. They set learning in a visible form, plain, indeed, and humble, but dignified even in her humility, before the eyes of a rustic people, in whom the love of knowledge, naturally strong, might never break from the bud into the flower but for the care of some zealous gardener. They give the chance of rising in some intellectual walk of life to many a strong and earnest nature who might otherwise have remained an artisan or storekeeper, and perhaps failed in those avocations. They light up in many a country town what is at first only a farthing rushlight, but which, when the town swells to a city, or when endowments flow in, or when some able teacher is placed in charge, becomes a lamp of growing flame, which may finally throw its rays over the whole state in which it stands. In some of these smaller Western colleges one finds today men of great ability and great attainments, one finds students who are receiving an education quite as thorough, though not always as wide, as the best Eastern universities can give. I do not at all deny that the time for more concentration has come, and that restrictions on the power of granting degrees would be useful. But one who recalls the history of the West during the second half of the last century, and bears in mind the tremendous rush of ability and energy towards a purely material development which has marked its people, will feel that this uncontrolled freedom of teaching, this multiplication of small institutions, have done for the country a work which a few state-regulated universities might have failed to do. The higher learning is in no danger. The great universities of the East, as well as one or two in the West, are already beginning to rival the ancient universities of Europe. They wll soon have far greater funds at their command with which to move towards the same ideal as Germany sets before herself; and they have already what is better than funds—an ardour and industry among the teachers which equals that displayed early in the last century in Germany by the foremost men of the generation which raised the German schools to their glorious eminence.

It may be thought that an observer familiar with two universities which are among the oldest and most famous in Europe, and are beyond question the most externally sumptuous and beautiful, would be inclined to disparage the corresponding institutions of the United States, whose traditions are comparatively short, and in whose outward aspect there is little to attract the eye or touch the imagination. I have not found it so. An Englishman who visits America can never feel sure how far his judgment has been affected by the warmth of the welcome he receives. But if I may venture to state the impression which the American universities have made upon me, I will say that while of all the institutions of the country they are those of which the Americans speak most modestly, and indeed deprecatingly, they are those which seem to be at this moment making the swiftest progress, and to have the brightest promise for the future. They are supplying exactly those things which European critics have hitherto found lacking to America: and they are contributing to her political as well as to her contemplative life elements of inestimable worth.

chapter 109

Further Observations on the Universities

As the many years that have elapsed since the last preceding chapter was written have brought many changes to the universities of the United States, it seems fitting to note here the more important among those changes, and thus convey more fully than can be done by insertions made here and there in that chapter the present state of the universities, the course which their development is taking, the reflections which a more intimate knowledge of them suggests.

I. Except in the newest parts of the West such as Oklahoma and parts of the Pacific slope, the founding of colleges or universities has almost stopped. It is generally felt all through the more populous and well-settled regions that there are already at least enough degree-giving institutions, and that it is more important to strengthen and improve those that exist than to create new ones. Nevertheless the desire of a rich man to perpetuate his name by a new foundation and the desire of a denomination to have the satisfaction of pointing to a college as its very own may be expected to cause new institutions to be from time to time, though less frequently than heretofore, established even in districts where they are not needed.

The development of the already existing universities and colleges goes on with undiminishing speed. It is seen in four directions: additions to the endowments, the creation of new departments, the raising of salaries paid to teachers, and an increase in the number of students. In 1913 the total gifts of money for the purposes of higher education amounted to $24,983,090, and the number of students in institutions of higher education (including science schools) had risen from 55,687 in 1889 to 227,074, exclusive of those in preparatory departments.

In every civilized country the march of scientific discovery has led to an enormous increase in the applications of science to productive industry. This has been followed by a demand for men conversant with these applications, and to supply that demand the teaching of applied science has been provided on a scale undreamed of even a generation ago. Nowhere, perhaps not even in Germany, has this movement gone so fast or so far as in the United States. While the existing universities have been enlarged by the addition of scientific departments, a host of independent or affiliated scientific schools and technical institutes have sprung up. Most of these have been planted in the cities, but the agricultural colleges, perhaps the most numerous class, are often placed in rural areas. Of these latter many are really secondary schools, or are teaching engineering quite as much as agriculture, but some of the best have experimental farms attached to them. Many of the states, and especially the Western states, have been active in setting up and endowing such schools of agriculture either as parts of a state university or as independent institutions, and in the case of the best of these, such as those of Wisconsin and Illinois, the large sums spent in buildings and annual grants are deemed to have been amply repaid to the state by the increase in its production whether of tillage crops, or of fruit, or of milk and cheese, or of other forms of food. The classes in these best agricultural colleges are attended by crowds of students, some of them middle-aged or elderly farmers; while the universities also send their lecturers out through the country and supply from their head offices information and advice to those who apply for it. Thus one may say that the idea that agriculture in all its branches is a science, to be pursued with exact knowledge and by scientific methods, has now thoroughly laid hold of the American mind, and is, in the north and west, almost as fully realized by the farmers as by the men of science.1

These new developments, including the enlargement of the professional schools (medicine, dentistry, and law) attached to the universities, have of course led to large increases in the teaching staff. The number of professors and instructors of all kinds rose from 7918 in 1889 to 30,034 in 1912. There has also been a tendency to raise the salaries of the teachers, and in some few universities the full professor now receives $5,000 to $6,000 a year.2 But as a rule the remuneration allotted to presidents and teachers of all grades remains small when compared on the one hand with the attainments now expected and on the other hand with the growing cost of living.3

The most considerable improvement in the position of the professor has come from a private source. Mr. Andrew Carnegie has created a fund with an annual income (in 1909) of $500,000 for the purpose of providing retiring allowances for professors in those universities and colleges in the United States, Canada, and Newfoundland that comply with certain conditions prescribed, the most important of which is that they are not to be under the control of any particular sect or denomination, the trustees of the fund having a discretionary power to determine how this principle is to be applied in each particular case.4

The recent development of the higher education is, however, most conspicuous in the enormous increase in the attendance of students. In 1889–90 the total number returned to the Bureau of Education as collegiate and resident graduate students was 44,926 men and 10,761 women. In 1910–11 the numbers were 169,026 men and 10,761 women. In 1910–11 the numbers were 169,026 men and 64,549 women, besides several thousand students in the collegiate and graduate departments of a different and much less advanced group of colleges for women. The actual number was larger, because there are colleges which make no return. But these figures are enough to show how rapid has been the growth in twenty years, a growth whose rate is far in excess of the rate at which the population has grown, and which is twice as large for women students as for the men. Of the total number of students who are receiving higher education no accurate record is attainable, for though the Bureau of Education Report gives a total enrolment of 308,163 in the preparatory, collegiate, graduate, and professional departments of the 606 universities, colleges, and technological schools that have made returns, it is quite impossible to say how many of these are receiving instruction of a true university type. The institutions that make up the 606 enumerated are of all kinds and descriptions. Many are not above the grade of secondary schools, and it is impossible to draw the line between them and those which give an instruction corresponding to that of universities in Europe. Still, without venturing to form any numerical estimate of the students in institutions of the latter class, it is safe to say that they bear a larger proportion to the population of the United States than similar students do to the whole population in any other country. That is to say, universities and technical or professional schools of the university level are more numerous and attract more students, not merely absolutely, but relatively to the whole community, than in the most advanced of European countries.

Of the quality of the instruction given it is even more difficult to speak in general terms than it is to fix the type to which each institution belongs. But the fact remains that the institutions are there and the students are there. The revenues grow; the attendance grows. Quantity at least has been obtained. Of quality I shall speak later.

This striking growth in the number of students seems due to two causes. One cause, operative all over the country, but perhaps most operative in the Western states, is the sense that a knowledge of applied science has great practical value for many occupations, and especially for agriculture and for the various branches of engineering, and that it is therefore worth while “as a business proposition” to spend some years in acquiring that knowledge systematically rather than to begin practical life on leaving school at fifteen or sixteen years of age. The other cause is that university education has become fashionable,5 and is more and more coming to be considered not a luxury for the few, nor a thing needed only by those who mean to enter one of the so-called “learned professions,” but a preparation for life with which all those who can afford the money and the time ought to be furnished. Formerly young men intended for a business life seldom thought, except in two or three of the older states, of going to college. Now they are just as likely to go as are any others. This is the most noteworthy new feature of the last thirty years, and is also the most striking educational difference between America and Europe. A university education has in the United States ceased to be the privilege of the few. It is for all the world.

The change is itself largely due to two economic facts. One is the rapid increase in the number of persons with incomes large enough to make it easy for them to send sons and daughters to college. The other is the creation of state universities, especially in the Western states, in which instruction is provided at a very low charge. These have so much popularized the higher education that through their example and influence the afflux of students to all colleges has increased. It may be added that charges are everywhere moderate, and that in the smaller towns of the West, a student can lodge and board cheaply. Two other causes, however, must not be altogether omitted. Colleges have profited by the modern passion for athletic competition and the immense interest which the public take in football and baseball matches between the teams of different universities. Many a boy finds in these an incitement to university life which the desire for knowledge might have failed to provide. Nor can it be denied that the rivalry, not only of denominations but of particular places, even comparatively small places, has borne a part in this immense multiplication of teaching institutions. Each little city or even rural area thinks it a feather in its cap to possess a college, and those who own real estate believe that it raises the value of the land they have to sell. Once the college is established, its staff as well as the local people are concerned to “boom” and “boost” it. So the resources of advertising are called in, sometimes with a certain lack of the dignity which befits a seat of learning. Thus it happens, not only that colleges are established where they are not wanted, but that many students are drawn to them who ought to be preparing themselves at school, including some whom nature has not blessed with the gifts needed to profit by the higher branches of education.

This increase has tended to give the universities, and especially the larger ones, a much more prominent place in the life of the country than they formerly had. They have become objects of general interest. Questions affecting them are more amply discussed in newspapers and magazines, and appear to lay more hold on the attention of the community at large than is the case in England or perhaps in any European country. The alumni of the greater universities form associations, some few of which have branches in the chief cities of the country, while others are locally established. They meet from time to time; and when their Alma Mater celebrates an anniversary or opens a new building or inaugurates a new president, they flock to her, and give importance to the festivity. They are inclined—sometimes unduly inclined—to discourage innovations. The elder man was even in the days of Horace laudator temporis acti, se puero, and a reforming president sometimes finds the influence of the alumni to be a drag on his efforts. But they respond generously when the university asks them to contribute to some new object; indeed, it is largely through them that extension funds are raised. In one university the custom has grown up that each “class” shall on the completion of the twenty-fifth year from graduation offer not less than $100,000 (£20,000) to the university treasury.

With this rise in the importance of the American university its headship has come to be an office of enhanced dignity and influence. The man selected for it is usually a person of literary or scientific eminence, though he is also expected to possess administrative talents. He is now, in the larger universities, almost always a layman, and needs to have unusual energy and tact, for one of his chief duties is to travel hither and thither delivering public addresses, meeting the societies of the alumni of his university, and endeavouring, by a description of its desires and needs, to obtain further funds for its purposes. His powers in the management of the institution and the selection of professors are much greater than those of the head of an English or Scottish university. But he is often also a leading figure in the state, perhaps even in the nation. No persons in the country, hardly even the greatest railway magnates, are better known, and certainly none are more respected, than the presidents of the leading universities. Much of course depends on personal qualities. The place will not give strength to a weak man. But if he be strong, the place doubles his opportunities for exerting his strength, and ensures a wide and attentive hearing for anything he may have to say.

Although the terms “university” and “college” continue to be loosely used in the United States, and although it is still difficult to draw lines dividing into classes the various institutions which bear these names, still it may be said that three main types are now beginning to emerge, to one or other of which all may be referred.

The first includes the larger among the old degree-giving bodies of the Eastern states, such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, to which may be added some more recent institutions of private foundation, such as the University of Chicago, Cornell University in New York, Stanford University in California, and Washington University in St. Louis. All these were originally colleges giving instruction of the old-fashioned kind in classics, mathematics, and moral philosophy. They have now superadded to those subjects, formerly deemed to constitute a general liberal education, various professional and technical departments, as well as post-graduate courses in special but not professional subjects, the students in which, taken all together, exceed in number those pursuing the course for the regular academic arts or science degrees. In these institutions it is now the practice to use the term “university” to denote the aggregate of all the various aforesaid schools and to restrict the term “college” to that central department which prepares students for some regular degree in the liberal arts, science, or philosophy.

The institutions of this type are all (with minor differences in their constitutions) governed by bodies of trustees who perpetuate themselves by cooptation (with sometimes the addition of persons representing the alumni) and they are supported by endowments plus the sums which the students pay for instruction.6

The second type embraces universities founded and supported wholly or mainly by a state. There are several of these in the Eastern states, such as the Universities of North Carolina,7 Virginia, Vermont, and Maine. But the largest and most characteristic examples occur in the West, such as the Universities of Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, California. There are in all thirty-eight such state universities, including three in Ohio, and the youthful universities of New Mexico and Arizona. These resemble the first type in having an undergraduate department giving a general liberal education, round which cluster a number of professional and technical schools, the schools of medicine and agriculture being the most important. They differ from the first type in being governed by a body, usually called regents, appointed by the state government (generally by the legislature) and in being supported by annual or biennial grants from the revenues of the state, which has of course provided their buildings and apparatus. In a few of them instruction is gratuitous to citizens of the state; in all it is supplied very cheaply to citizens and cheaply to all comers. Women students are admitted on equal terms with men. As respects instruction, they differ little from the universities of the former type. Being state supported, they are of course absolutely undenominational.

The third type is less easy to describe, and is, indeed, rather a residual mass than a well-defined class. It includes those degree-granting bodies, most of them called colleges but some of them universities (there being seldom any distinction in fact corresponding to the difference in name), which confine themselves wholly or mainly to the giving of a general liberal education without providing either post-graduate courses or professional departments. To this division belong a very few Eastern colleges of high rank and a large attendance of students—Princeton, Dartmouth, and Brown (in Rhode Island) are examples—which have not yet set up professional schools. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore holds a peculiar position, for having begun with post-graduate and professional schools it has now engrafted thereon an academic department. Here too we must place those old New England colleges such as Williams, Amherst, and Bowdoin, which, situated in small country towns, have adhered to the older traditions and devoted themselves chiefly to the preparation of students for the B.A. degree, whether in literary or in scientific courses. These latter colleges have as a rule remained, and have wished to remain, comparatively small. They retain, and they well deserve, the credit of making their instruction thorough and of cultivating a strong social spirit among their alumni. From them have come many of the strongest intellects and characters of the last generation. In this division we must also place the large number of small colleges in the Middle, the Southern, and the Western states, most of which provide only the regular undergraduate course, though a very few have begun to develop special departments, especially of a technical kind. Most of these are connected with some denomination, those of the Roman Catholic, Methodist, Protestant Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Baptist bodies being the most numerous, but students of all persuasions are freely admitted to them. There are such great differences among them both as regards the size and qualifications of the staff, the attendance of students, and the standard of instruction that no general statements can be made. Comparatively few, however, have an attendance exceeding five hundred; many might be classed rather with upper secondary schools than with universities; some can scarcely be called efficient even as schools. Some few, such as the Iowa College at Grinnell, resemble the small colleges of New England, such as Amherst, in the thoroughness of their academic work; and it is to be desired that this useful order was more largely represented in the West. As has been already observed, colleges of this third type now spring up less frequently than formerly, and we may conjecture that in the West and South the weakest among them will either die out, or frankly admit thmselves to be no more than secondary schools, or possibly be affiliated to some strong state university, while the richest and strongest will grow into institutions of the first type. Denominational sentiment is a less powerful force now than it was fifty years ago, so the state university, with its conspicuous visibility and its command of money, begins to dwarf all but the best endowed universities of private foundation.

It was noted in the preceding chapter that the old system of prescribed courses for degrees limited to a few subjects, taken in regular order, had about 1880 begun to break up and disappear in nearly all the universities. The process went on briskly after 1890, until, in some institutions, a student might attend lectures and offer himself for examination in any one or more of the numberous subjects taught. The subjects need not have any relation to one another, the selection of a prescribed number among them being left entirely to his personal tastes. After a while a reaction set in against this “unchartered freedom.” Much debate followed as to the desirability of prescribing a certain small number of regular curricula, either for the whole or at least for the first year, or first two years, of the students’ four years of residence. Great diversity still exists, both in opinion and in practice; indeed, the present situation is, if not chaotic, yet evidently transitional. Only two things are pretty clear: the first that the general tendency is at present away from the extreme form of what is called the elective system; the second that nothing like the rigidity of the old curriculum will reappear. Probably, while some universities may continue to allow the widest freedom, the bulk will arrange some four, five, or six groups or curricula suited to different tastes and capacities, or will permit the student a choice, within certain limits, or subjects to the approval of some members of the faculty entrusted with the duty of advising.

Controversies, similar to those with which Europe is familiar, are carried on regarding the respective values of various subjects of study. But the main issue between the ancient classics versus the natural sciences and so-called “modern subjects” has been practically decided in favour of the latter. Latin and (still more) Greek are, especially in the West, vanishing quantities. Less than ten per cent of all the students in the universities and colleges acquire an effective knowledge of the former, less than two per cent of the latter language, understanding by “effective knowledge” the ability to read a previously unseen but easy Latin or Greek passage two years after graduation. If universities of the first type only were taken, the percentage would be larger, yet even in them small. Efforts are being made to restore the study of the ancient authors to their proper place in the scheme of a truly liberal education. But in America, as in Europe, the stream runs strong towards those branches of instruction deemed most directly useful for gainful occupations. Even in Europe, where traditions are more powerful than in America, it is hard to convince persons who have not themselves either a knowledge of the ancient languages or a taste for letters and for history, of what is called the “cultural value” of a knowledge of ancient literature. Philosophical courses have in America declined less than classical; and history, which does not usually require a knowledge of ancient languages, holds its own. It is indeed one of the subjects for which a comparatively ample provision is made in Universities both of the first and of the second of the above-mentioned types. The number of persons teaching it in all the Universities and colleges must be reckoned by hundreds, indeed, by many hundreds. It is, however, towards scientific subjects, and especially towards applied science, that the drift is strongest. The same tendency prevails in Europe, and seems likely to continue for a good while to come.

The graduate schools mentioned in the preceding chapter as novelties have immensely expanded. Johns Hopkins has the honour of having led the way; and now such schools have been created in most of the great universities, a notable instance in which the educational spirit and enterprise of Americans have outstripped the conservatism or the poverty of English and Scottish seats of learning. It may, however, be doubted whether it would not have been better if some at least of the universities which have founded these schools had, instead of attempting to spread themselves over a large variety of subjects, each confined itself to a few only, on which its resources might have been concentrated. Some few universities may command revenues large enough to enable them to cover the whole field of knowledge, but in others the spirit of rivalry induces the spending, in efforts to do many things imperfectly, the money which might better have been employed in doing a few things thoroughly. The academic department must of course make full provision for all the general academic subjects; and to specialize a university, on its general teaching side, would be to narrow it, and to lose the benefit that comes from the mingling of minds pursuing different branches of scholarship or scientific enquiry. But more might be done for advanced study in particular subjects if one university devoted itself chiefly to one group of subjects, another to another, so that the graduate student might resort to an institution which had gathered together the most eminent teachers and investigators in the line he desired to follow, and had provided the most complete laboratory or apparatus. The country is so large that there would always be several universities dedicated to each group, so that none would enjoy a monopoly, yet the benefits incident to division of labour and specialization of function would follow. Nearly all the scientific work of the country, except that directly connected with inventions of practical commercial value, is done in the universities and the need for strengthening research departments begins to be more and more recognized.

It may be added that in this, as in some other respects, there is at present less diversity between American universities than the European visitor who sees the vastness of the country, the different economic conditions of its different parts, and the different elements in its population has been led to expect. Oxford and Cambridge are more unlike either the Scottish universities or the new universities in Manchester and Liverpool, than any American university is to any other, for although the appliances are generally (not always) inferior in the newer parts of the country, although the students are less well prepared and possibly rougher in externals in some districts than in others, still the educational habits and views of policy and methods of instruction are essentially similar all over the country. This is a natural result of the long course of historical development in Britain, as compared with the shorter time during which the higher education has been developing itself in the New World, but it suggests the wish that American universities may in time similarly differentiate themselves from one another, for there is in variety a sort of richness helpful to the thought and imagination of a great country.

The restless activity of our time has further displayed itself in the university extension movement, which, coming a little later than it did in England, has reached even larger proportions. It was felt that something ought to be done for those who could not spare the time to follow a regular degree course, as well as for those whose previous training had not qualified them to matriculate. Of the many institutions which are doing this work, twenty-three state universities offer general extension work, and fifteen of these have organized departments for the purpose. Correspondence study has been found valuable for students living in rural areas which lecturers cannot easily reach. Some universities, notably the great one at Chicago, have established summer schools to which great numbers of students resort who have not time for a regular four years’ course. It is believed that these extension methods have been helpful to the elementary teachers and are serving to bring the teaching profession of a state into closer touch with the leading universities, a thing profitable to both.8 They throw, however, a heavy burden on the university staff, which is already so hard worked as to have insufficient time for study and research.

The number of women students has increased faster than that of men and faster in the West than in the other parts of the country. In the University of Illinois the proportion of one-fourth is steadily maintained, but in Chicago the attendance of women bears a higher ratio. All state universities are coeducational, though fears are expressed that as these institutions become more fashionable places of resort it may prove less easy to maintain that spirit of hard work which has hitherto prevented questions of college discipline from causing trouble. There is even some talk of establishing separate departments for women in the state universities. In the East coeducation does not make way. Parents prefer to send their daughters to colleges for women only, and three colleges which taught men and women together have recently ceased to do so.9 So far, the women are said to have shown more assiduity and zeal in their studies than the men. A sort of differentiation is visible in the fact that while men prefer science as practically serviceable, women favour the courses in languages and history, and keep going, in the West, the classes in Latin and Greek. As the public schools in the North and West are chiefly staffed by female teachers, who in some states are five-sixths or even more of the total number of instructors, this equal right of access to the universities does much for the teaching profession.

Among the minor changes of the last twenty years it is not without interest to note that the growth of an æsthetic spirit among the educated classes has led some universities to erect handsome buildings in mediæval or post-mediæval styles. Washington University at St. Louis has followed the types of English college architecture with felicity; the University of Chicago has reproduced the hall of Christ Church, Oxford and the tower of Magdalen College. Stanford University, near San Francisco, has beautiful cloisters and lecture rooms of a colonial Spanish type; and the University of California has half erected, half carved out of the hillside, a Greek theatre modelled on that at Epidaurus which has preserved the admirable acoustic properties of the original. So too, the faculties of nearly all the greater universities have now blossomed out into a variety of gowns and a still richer and more brilliant variety of coloured hoods worn upon solemn academic occasions. The effect when a long procession, clad in all the colours of the rainbow, winds across the green spaces of the college campus under the shade of spreading trees has been such as to silence the cavils of those who condemned this departure from democratic simplicity. It is an innovation which even the alumni do not disapprove.

Three other questions besides that relating to curricula and the range of choice allowed to students, have of recent years begun to claim the attention of those who direct university policy.

One of these is the increased passion for athletic competitions, especially in football and baseball, and, to a much smaller extent, in rowing. The ordinary undergraduate plays games far less than does the ordinary English youth at Oxford or Cambridge, and as little as the ordinary youth in a Scotch or German university. But he is incomparably more interested in the performances of his college team when it competes with that of another university. The members of the team are the heroes of their time. The contests sometimes draw fifty or sixty thousand spectators and excite passionate curiosity over the country, among women not less than among men; and while the long list of hurts, not rarely fatal, received in their contests leads to protests against the roughness of the way in which football is played, some college presidents declare that the preoccupation of the undergraduate with these games has reduced the attention, not too great before, which is given to study. But these contests continue to be the most conspicuous, and to many the most attractive, feature of university life, especially in the Eastern states, where the rival claims of learning might be thought to have a better chance than in the strenuously practical and fiercely competitive West.

Another topic of discussion is the possibility of creating in those universities which have grown very large something in the nature of the residential colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. It is thought that these might furnish social groups of a size favourable to the formation of friendships and the creation of a sort of quasi-domestic life. The idea has not yet had time to strike root, but if it does, benefactors to give effect to it will be found, for the universities have now among their alumni a great many rich men who are on the lookout for means of spending their fortunes on purposes useful in themselves, and calculated to perpetuate their names.

The third question touches a more vital point. In the professional and scientific and post-graduate departments of universities, diligence and interest on the part of the students are the rule. They have entered in order to fit themselves for their future avocations, and they apply themselves steadily, throwing their force into work which they feel to be for their practical benefit. But in the so-called “college,” or academic part of the institution, that which gives a general liberal education, whether in languages or philosophy or history or natural science, things are said to be otherwise. The average undergraduate, especially the son of well-to-do parents, is now described as being more absorbed in social life and its amusements than in the subjects in which he is lectured and on which he is examined. He does no more than is absolutely needed to get his degree. The man who enjoys his work and follows it con amore is the exception. That intellectual stimulation which a university ought to give is received by comparatively few; that atmosphere of keen and eager thought which ought to pervade all the more vigorous minds is, if not wanting, yet comparatively faint.

To these criticisms, those who know Oxford and Cambridge sometimes add another, viz., that there is not a sufficiently close relation between teacher and student whereby the latter is influenced and stimulated privately as well as in class lectures. Many of the teachers are young men—the instructors (as distinct from the full professors) are nearly all so. Yet it is alleged that the want of something resembling a college and something in the nature of a tutorial system prevents the teachers from getting into personal touch with the students as individuals as they do in the older English universities, though to be sure neither in Scotland nor in Germany.10

How far either of these allegations is true, I am not able to determine. But this at least seems certain, that in most universities, including the oldest and greatest in the Eastern states, intellectual distinction in the work of the college is little sought by ambitious spirits, and little valued by their companions. A prominent athlete is a far more brilliant and honoured figure than the man most distinguished in the studies of the place. Undergraduates declare that the assiduous student, even if there be nothing of the bookworm about him, is apt to be looked down upon as a dull and plodding fellow. And a further point of unlikeness to English and Scotch conditions appears in the fact that nobody seems to think he will get any better start in his profession by having done well at college; nor when references are made to men who have won success or fame in after life, does one hear anything said about their university careers, though statistical enquiries have shown that the proportion of successes in life is much larger among those who did in fact apply themselves to their studies.11 In England there are of course many undergraduates, perhaps a half, who neglect their work, and others who, though they do study, are moved less by love of knowledge than for the sake of getting a degree sufficiently high to help them forward in their future profession. Still there are also many who are really interested, and care far more for their studies than they do for the amusements of the place. Among nearly all the men of talent the desire to achieve distinction is strong, and the men who achieve it are marked out among their fellows. Accordingly those who in the American universities regret what they think the deficient interest taken by undergraduates in their studies and the preponderating attraction of interuniversity contests in such games as football, have begun to canvas the question whether the introduction of honour courses and of competitions for literary and scientific distinctions may not be needed. Observers from other countries have long expected that such a debate would some day arise, and await with curiosity its issue.

One who surveys the progress of the United States during the last fifteen or twenty years finds nothing more significant than the growth of the universities in number, in wealth, and in the increased attendance of students from all ranks of life. They have become national and popular in a sense never attained before in any country. This growth is not due to any set purpose; and in it the national government has had no hand.12 For nearly a century it was a quite spontaneous growth, due to private liberality and denominational zeal, since it is only within the last few decades that the state legislatures have thrown themselves effectively into the work. Effective as their action has been, it has been done without concert, and seldom upon any fixed plan, so the state universities have enjoyed a large freedom of natural development and have, taking them all in all, suffered little more from governmental control than have those which depended on private liberality or on the payments made by students.

In some ways they would all, both state and private institutions, have profited by a little more, not indeed of uniformity, yet of systematic direction and regulation. There has been much waste of effort and of money in planting several weak colleges where one strong one would have rendered better service. Weakness has meant acquiescence in a low standard of entrance requirements (hard anyhow to avoid in the newer states where secondary schools are still insufficient in number and quality), in imperfect teaching, in degrees which witness to no high level of attainment. This has been specially unfortunate as respects the profession of medicine, where the maintenance of a high level is essential for the safety of the whole community. Some of the American medical schools are equal to any in Europe, but some are far below the level of any recognized in England, France, or Germany.13 The abundance of colleges and universities whose performances are obviously mediocre has naturally lowered among the people at large the conception of what a university ought to be and achieve, and the eagerness of rival institutions to secure students has led not only to superficiality but to a preference of the subjects most attractive to the practical mind and a corresponding undervaluing of those whose virtue lies in the general intellectual cultivation they give.

Nevertheless, with all these defects the universities and colleges have, taken as a whole, rendered an immense service. They have brought instruction within the reach of every boy and girl of every class. They receive a larger proportion of the youthful population than do any similar institutions in any other country. They are resorted to hardly less by those who mean to tread the paths of commerce or industry than by those who prepare themselves for a learned profession. They have turned a university course from being the luxury which it has been in the Old World into being almost a necessary of life. And they have so expanded their educational scheme as to provide (in the larger institutions) instruction in almost every subject in which men and women are likely to ask for it.

So far then as quantity goes, whether quantity and variety of attendance or quantity and variety of instruction, nearly all that the needs of the time and the country demand has been attained.

Quality is of course another matter. In education, improvements in quality do not always keep pace with increase in quantity, and often follow with sadly lagging steps. Nevertheless, they do generally tend to follow. No doubt the first and easier thing for an ambitious institution is to devote itself to material improvements, to enlarge its buildings and its library, its scientific apparatus, even its gymnasium.14 When money is spent on these things the result can be seen, and even the least instructed visitors are impressed. To secure more able, more learned, more inspiring teachers, and by their help to improve the instruction given and the standard of attainment which a degree represents is a slower and more difficult task. Yet here, too, the natural tendency is upward, and the emulation of these numerous and aspiring bodies helps that tendency. When one university has made evident its excellence by the work of its teachers and by the kind of men it turns out, others feel they must try to reach its level by similar methods.

The things which the most judicious friends of the universities (including many of their presidents) hold to be now most needed, would appear to be the following:

(1) The development in each region of the country—by which I mean in each populous state or in each group of less populous states—of at least one university which may serve as a model to the others in that section, setting before them in a tangible form the organs of activity and the excellences of arrangement and method which a first-rate place of education, learning, and research ought to possess. In some parts of the country there are several universities so much ahead of others that they are already being taken as patterns. In other parts none such yet exist.

(2) As a means to the above end, there is required a higher scale of salaries for the teaching staff. This is no doubt needed in European countries also, but in those countries the attractions which other careers have for a man of energy are seldom so great as in the United States, and the cost of living is neither so high nor rising so rapidly.

(3) It is felt that there ought to be a stronger pulse of intellectual life among the undergraduates in the “college” or academic department. They are not generally idle or listless, but rather, like most young Americans, alert and active in temperament. Their conduct is usually good; in no country are vices less common among students. But those who are keenly interested either in their particular studies or in the “things of the mind” in general are comparatively few in number. Athletic competitions and social pleasures claim the larger part of their thoughts, and the university does not seem to be giving them that taste for intellectual enjoyment which ought to be acquired early if it is to be acquired at all.

(4) The conception of a general liberal education, the ideal of such an education as something which it is the function of a university to give in order to prepare men for life as a whole, over and above the preparation required for any particular walk of life, is described as being in some institutions insufficiently valued and imperfectly realized. Those whose views I am setting forth admit that professional and other special schools can give, and often do give, an effective training of the mental powers in the course of the special instruction they impart. What they miss is that largeness of view and philosophic habit of thought which the study of such subjects as literature, philosophy, and history is fitted to implant when these subjects are taught in a broad and stimulating way. In short, the pressure of the practical subjects and of the practical spirit in handling these subjects, is deemed to be unduly strong.

How far the criticisms summarized under the two last heads as made by competent American observers are generally applicable, I will not attempt to determine. They are given because they are made by persons entitled to be heard. This, however, may be said, that forces and tendencies are discernible all over the country which cannot but work for raising the level of instruction and diffusing more widely those educational ideals which the best representatives of university progress already cherish.

Foreign critics often say, and some domestic critics have echoed the censure, that what is chiefly admired in America is bigness, things being measured by their size or by what they cost. This quantitative estimate finds little place in the universities. With very few exceptions, the teaching staff are not thinking of size, nor of money, except so far as it helps to extend the usefulness of their institution. All the better men, and not merely the ablest men, but the good average men, feel that it is the mission of a university to seek and find and set forth the real values. It has been well said by one of the most acute and large-minded of all recent visitors to the United States15 that nowhere in the world do university teachers feel more strongly that the first object of their devotion is truth. They are of all classes in the country that which is least dazzled by wealth, least governed by material considerations. No wealth-seeker would, indeed, choose such a profession. To one who looks back over the last twenty years, the universities seem to have grown not only in their resources and the number of their students, but also in dignity and influence. They hold a higher place in the eyes of the nation. They have almost entirely escaped any deleterious contact either with politics or with those capitalistic groups whose power is felt in so many other directions.16 Through the always widening circle of their alumni they are more closely in touch than ever before with all classes in the community. The European observer can express now with even more conviction than he could twenty years ago the opinion that they constitute one of the most powerful and most pervasive forces working for good in the country.

chapter 110

The Churches and the Clergy

In examining the national government and the state governments, we have never once had occasion to advert to any ecclesiastical body or question, because with such matters government has in the United States absolutely nothing to do. Of all the differences between the Old World and the New this is perhaps the most salient. Half the wars of Europe, half the internal troubles that have vexed European states, from the Monophysite controversies in the Roman Empire of the fifth century down to the Kulturkampf in the German Empire of the nineteenth, have arisen from theological differences or from the rival claims of church and state. This whole vast chapter of debate and strife has remained virtually unopened in the United States. There is no established church. All religious bodies are absolutely equal before the law, and unrecognized by the law, except as voluntary associations of private citizens.

The federal Constitution contains the following prohibitions:

No attempt has ever been made to alter or infringe upon these provisions. They affect the national government only, placing no inhibition on the states, and leaving the whole subject to their uncontrolled discretion, though subject to the general guarantees against oppression.

Every state constitution contains provisions generally similar to the above. Most declare that every man may worship God according to his own conscience, or that the free enjoyment of all religious sentiments and forms of worship shall be held sacred;1 most also provide that no man shall be compelled to support or attend any church; some forbid the creation of an established church, and many the showing of a preference to any particular sect; while many provide that no money shall ever be drawn from the state treasury, or from the funds of any municipal body, to be applied for the benefit of any church or sectarian institution or denominational school. Thirty-three constitutions, including those of the six most recently admitted states, forbid any religious test to be required as a qualification for office; some declare that this principle extends to all civil rights; some specify that religious belief is not to affect a man’s competence as a witness. But in several states there still exist qualifications worth noting. Vermont and Delaware declare that every sect ought to maintain some form of religious worship, and Vermont adds that it ought to observe the Lord’s Day. Six Southern states exclude from office anyone who denies the existence of a Supreme Being. Besides these six, Pennsylvania and Tennessee pronounce a man ineligible for office who does not believe in God and in a future state of rewards and punishments. Maryland and Arkansas even make such a person incompetent as a juror or witness.2 Religious freedom has been generally thought of in America in the form of freedom and equality as between different sorts of Christians, or at any rate different sorts of theists; persons opposed to religion altogether have till recently been extremely few everywhere and practically unknown in the South. The neutrality of the state cannot therefore be said to be theoretically complete.3

In earlier days the states were very far from being neutral. Rhode Island indeed, whose earliest settlers were seceders from Massachusetts, stood from the first for the principle of complete religious freedom and the detachment of Christian communities from all secular power or secular control. Roger Williams, the illustrious founder of this little state, was one of those few to whom this principle was revealed when the great mass of Christians were still in bondage to the ideas of the Middle Ages. But the other two states of old New England began with a sort of Puritan theocracy, and excluded from some civil rights persons who stood outside the religious community. Congregationalism was the ruling faith, and Roman Catholics, Quakers, and Baptists were treated with great severity. The early constitutions of several states recognized what was virtually a state church, requiring each locality to provide for and support the public worship of God. It was not till 1818 that Connecticut in adopting her new constitution placed all religious bodies on a level, and left the maintenance of churches to the voluntary action of the faithful. In Massachusetts a tax for the support of the Congregationalist churches was imposed on all citizens not belonging to some other incorporated religious body until 1811, and religious equality was first fully recognized by a constitutional amendment of 1833. In Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Maryland, Protestant Episcopacy was the established form of religion till the Revolution, when under the impulse of the democratic spirit, and all the more heartily because the Anglican clergy were prone to Toryism (as attachment to the British connection was called), and because, at least in Virginia, there had been some persecution of Nonconformists, all religious distinctions were abolished and special ecclesiastical privileges withdrawn. In Pennsylvania no church was ever legally established. In New York, however, first the Dutch Reformed, and afterwards the Anglican Church, had in colonial days enjoyed a measure of state favour. What is remarkable is that in all these cases the disestablishment, if one may call it by that name, of the privileged church was accomplished with no great effort, and left very little rancour behind. In the South it seemed a natural outcome of the Revolution. In New England it came more gradually, as the necessary result of the political development of each commonwealth. The ecclesiastical arrangements of the states were not inwoven with the pecuniary interests of any wealthy or socially dominant class; and it was felt that equality and democratic doctrine generally were too palpably opposed to the maintenance of any privileges in religious matters to be defensible in argument. However, both in Connecticut and Massachusetts there was a political struggle over the process of disestablishment, and the Congregationalist ministers predicted evils from a change which they afterwards admitted to have turned out a blessing to their own churches. No voice has ever since been raised in favour of reverting—I will not say to a state establishment of religion—but even to any state endowment or state regulation of ecclesiastical bodies. It is accepted as an axiom by all Americans that the civil power ought to be not only neutral and impartial as between different forms of faith, but ought to leave these matters entirely on one side, regarding them no more than it regards the artistic or literary pursuits of the citizens.4 There seem to be no two opinions on this subject in the United States. Even the Protestant Episcopalian clergy, who are in many ways disposed to admire and envy their brethren in England; even the Roman Catholic bishops, whose creed justifies the enforcement of the true faith by the secular arm, assure the European visitor that if state establishment were offered them they would decline it, preferring the freedom they enjoy to any advantages the state could confer. Every religious community can now organize itself in whatever way it pleases, lay down its own rules of faith and discipline, create and administer its own system of judicature, raise and apply its funds at its uncontrolled discretion. A church established by the state would not be able to do all these things, because it would also be controlled by the state, and it would be exposed to the envy and jealousy of other sects.

The only controversies that have arisen regarding state action in religious matters have turned upon the appropriation of public funds to charitable institutions managed by some particular denomination. Such appropriations are expressly prohibited in the constitutions of some states. But it may happen that the readiest way of promoting some benevolent public purpose is to make a grant of money to an institution already at work, and successfully serving that purpose. As this reason may sometimes be truly given, so it is also sometimes advanced where the real motive is to purchase the political support of the denomination to which the institution belongs, or at least of its clergy. In some states, and particularly in New York, state or city legislatures are often charged with giving money to Roman Catholic institutions for the sake of securing the Catholic vote.5 In these cases, however, the money always purports to be voted not for a religious but for a philanthropic or educational purpose. No ecclesiastical body would be strong enough to obtain any grant to its general funds, or any special immunity for its ministers. The passion for equality in religious as well as secular matters is everywhere in America far too strong to be braved, and nothing excites more general disapprobation than any attempt by an ecclesiastical organization to interfere in politics. The suspicion that the Roman Catholic church uses its power over its members to guide their votes for its purposes has more than once given rise to strong anti-Catholic or (as they would be called in Canada) Orange movements, such as that which at the end of the nineteenth century figured largely in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois under the name of the American Protective Association. So the hostility to Mormonism was due not merely to the practice of polygamy, but also to the notion that the hierarchy of the Latter Day Saints constitutes a secret and tyrannical imperium in imperio opposed to the genius of democratic institutions.

The refusal of the civil power to protect or endow any form of religion is commonly represented in Europe as equivalent to a declaration of contemptuous indifference on the part of the state to the spiritual interests of its people. A state recognizing no church is called a godless state; the disestablishment of a church is described as an act of national impiety. Nothing can be farther from the American view, to an explanation of which it may be well to devote a few lines.

The abstention of the state from interference in matters of faith and worship may be advocated on two principles, which may be called the political and the religious. The former sets out from the principles of liberty and equality. It holds any attempt at compulsion by the civil power to be an infringement on liberty of thought, as well as on liberty of action, which could be justified only when a practice claiming to be religious is so obviously antisocial or immoral as to threaten the well-being of the community. Religious persecution, even in its milder forms, such as disqualifying the members of a particular sect for public office, is, it conceives, inconsistent with the conception of individual freedom and the respect due to the primordial rights of the citizen which modern thought has embraced. Even if state action stops short of the imposition of disabilities, and confines itself to favouring a particular church, whether by grants of money or by giving special immunities to its clergy, this is an infringement on equality, putting one man at a disadvantage compared with others in respect of matters which are not fit subjects for state cognizance.

The second principle, embodying the more purely religious view of the question, starts from the conception of the church as a spiritual body existing for spiritual purposes, and moving along spiritual paths. It is an assemblage of men who are united by their devotion to an unseen Being, their memory of a past divine life, their belief in the possibility of imitating that life, so far as human frailty allows, their hopes for an illimitable future. Compulsion of any kind is contrary to the nature of such a body, which lives by love and reverence, not by law. It desires no state help, feeling that its strength comes from above, and that its kingdom is not of this world. It does not seek for exclusive privileges, conceiving that these would not only create bitterness between itself and other religious bodies, but might attract persons who did not really share its sentiments, while corrupting the simplicity of those who are already its members. Least of all can it submit to be controlled by the state, for the state, in such a world as the present, means persons many or most of whom are alien to its beliefs and cold to its emotions. The conclusion follows that the church as a spiritual entity will be happiest and strongest when it is left absolutely to itself, not patronized by the civil power, not restrained by law except when and in so far as it may attempt to quit its proper sphere and intermeddle in secular affairs.

Of these two views it is the former much more than the latter that has moved the American mind. The latter would doubtless be now generally accepted by religious people. But when the question arose in a practical shape in the earlier days of the Republic, arguments of the former or political order were found amply sufficient to settle it, and no practical purpose has since then compelled men either to examine the spiritual basis of the church, or to inquire by the light of history how far state action has during sixteen centuries helped or marred her usefulness. There has, however, been another cause at work, I mean the comparatively limited conception of the state itself which Americans have formed. The state is not to them, as to Germans or Frenchmen, and even to some English thinkers, an ideal moral power, charged with the duty of forming the characters and guiding the lives of its subjects. It is more like a commercial company, or perhaps a huge municipality created for the management of certain business in which all who reside within its bounds are interested, levying contributions and expending them on this business of common interest, but for the most part leaving the shareholders or burgesses to themselves. That an organization of this kind should trouble itself, otherwise than as matter of police, with the opinions or conduct of its members would be as unnatural as for a railway company to inquire how many of the shareholders were Wesleyans or total abstainers. Accordingly it never occurs to the average American that there is any reason why state churches should exist, and he stands amazed at the warmth of European feeling on the matter.

Just because these questions have been long since disposed of, and excite no present passion, and perhaps also because the Americans are more practically easygoing than pedantically exact, the national government and the state governments do give to Christianity a species of recognition inconsistent with the view that civil government should be absolutely neutral in religious matters. Each house of Congress has a chaplain, and opens its proceedings each day with prayers. The president annually after the end of harvest issues a proclamation ordering a general thanksgiving, and occasionally appoints a day of fasting and humiliation. So prayers are offered in the state legislatures,6 and state governors issue proclamations for days of religious observance. Congress in the crisis of the Civil War (July 1863) requested the president to appoint a day for humiliation and prayer. In the army and navy provision is made for religious services, conducted by chaplains of various denominations, and no difficulty seems to have been found in reconciling their claims. In most states there exist laws punishing blasphemy or profane swearing by the name of God (laws which, however, are in some places openly transgressed and in few or none enforced), laws restricting or forbidding trade or labour on the Sabbath, as well as laws protecting assemblages for religious purposes, such as camp meetings or religious processions, from being disturbed. The Bible is (in most states) read in the public state-supported schools, and though controversies have arisen on this head, the practice is evidently in accord with the general sentiment of the people.

The matter may be summed up by saying that Christianity is in fact understood to be, though not the legally established religion, yet the national religion.7 So far from thinking their commonwealth godless, the Americans conceive that the religious character of a government consists in nothing but the religious belief of the individual citizens, and the conformity of their conduct to that belief. They deem the general acceptance of Christianity to be one of the main sources of their national prosperity, and their nation a special object of the Divine favour.

The legal position of a Christian church is in the United States simply that of a voluntary association, or group of associations, corporate or unincorporate, under the ordinary law. There is no such thing as a special ecclesiastical law; all questions, not only of property but of church discipline and jurisdiction, are, if brought before the courts of the land, dealt with as questions of contract;8 and the court, where it is obliged to examine a question of theology, as for instance whether a clergyman has advanced opinions inconsistent with any creed or formula to which he has bound himself—for it will prefer, if possible, to leave such matters to the proper ecclesiastical authority—will treat the point as one of pure legal interpretation, neither assuming to itself theological knowledge, nor suffering considerations of policy to intervene.9 Questions relating to the union of two religious bodies are similarly dealt with on a basis merely legal.

As a rule, every religious body can organize itself in any way it pleases. The state does not require its leave to be asked, but permits any form of church government, any ecclesiastical order, to be created and endowed, any method to be adopted of vesting church property, either simply in trustees or in corporate bodies formed either under the general law of the state or under some special statute. Sometimes a limit is imposed on the amount of property, or of real estate, which an ecclesiastical corporation can hold; but, on the whole, it may be said that the civil power manifests no jealousy of the spiritual, but allows the latter a perfectly free field for expansion. Of course if any ecclesiastical authority were to become formidable either by its wealth or by its control over the members of its body, this easy tolerance would disappear; all I observe is that the difficulties often experienced, and still more often feared, in Europe, from the growth of organizations exercising tremendous spiritual powers, have in America never proved serious.10 No church has anywhere a power approaching that of the Roman Catholic church in Lower Canada. Religious bodies are in so far the objects of special favour that their property is in most states exempt from taxation; and this is reconciled to theory by the argument that they are serviceable as moral agencies, and diminish the expenses incurred in respect of police administration.11 Two or three states impose restrictions on the creation of religious corporations, and one, Maryland, requires the sanction of the legislature to dispositions of property to religious uses. But speaking generally, religious bodies are the objects of legislative favour.12

I pass on to say a few words as to the religious bodies of the country.13

In 1906 an attempt was made to obtain from each of these bodies full statistics regarding its numbers and the value of its property. The results, which I take from the bulletins and abstracts of that census, were, as respects the denominations whose membership exceeds 500,000 persons, as follows:

Besides these eight bodies the Jews are returned as having 143,000 members (only heads of families, however, being reckoned), the Friends 118,752, the Spiritualists 295,000, and eight communistic societies (including the so-called Shakers) only 3,084. The total number of persons returned as communicants or members of all the churches is 32,936,445.

Of the above-mentioned denominations, or rather groups, for most of them include numerous minor denominations, the Methodists and Baptists are numerous everywhere, but the Methodists especially numerous in the South, where they have been the chief evangelizers of the Negroes, and in the Middle states, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. Of the Congregationalists nearly one-half are to be found in New England, the rest in such parts of the Middle and Western states as have been peopled from New England. The Presbyterians are strongest in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, New Jersey, and in the older Southern states,16 especially Virginia and North Carolina, states where many Scoto-Irish emigrants settled, but are well represented over the West also. Of the Lutherans nearly one-half are Germans and one-quarter Scandinavians, including Icelanders and Finns. The Protestant Episcopalians are strongest in New York (which supplies one-fourth of their total number), Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. There are 65 dioceses and 94 bishops, but no archbishop, the supreme authority being vested in a convention which meets triennially. The Unitarians (in all 70,542 with 541 ministers) are few outside New England and the regions settled from New England, but have exercised an influence far beyond that of their numbers owing to the eminence of some of their divines, such as Channing, Emerson, and Theodore Parker, and to the fact that they include a large number of highly cultivated men. The Roman Catholics are, except in Maryland and Louisiana, nearly all either of Irish, German, Italian, Slavonic, or French-Canadian extraction. They abound everywhere, except in the South and some parts of the Northwest, and are perhaps, owing to the influx of Irish and French-Canadians, most relatively numerous in New England. The great development of the Lutheran bodies is of course due to German and Scandinavian immigration. Of all denominations the Jews have increased most rapidly, viz., at the rate of 160 per cent or the ten years 1880–90. The Jewish population of the U.S. was estimated to be in 1880, 230,257; in 1897, 937,800; and in 1907, 1,777,185. Of the Orthodox Jews (for there is also a large “Reformed” section), half are in New York.

All these phenomena find an easy historical explanation. The churches of the United States are the churches of the British Isles, modified by recent Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Jewish immigration from the European continent. Each race has, as a rule, adhered to the form of religion it held in Europe; and where denominations comparatively small in England have, like the Methodists and Baptists, swelled to vast proportions here, it is because the social conditions under which they throve in England were here reproduced on a far larger scale. In other words, the causes which have given their relative importance and their local distribution to American denominations have been racial and social rather than ecclesiastical. No new religious forces have sprung up on American soil to give a new turn to her religious history. The breaking up of large denominations into smaller religious bodies seems to be due, partly to immigration, which has introduced slightly diverse elements, partly to the tendency to relax the old dogmatic stringency, a tendency which has been found to operate as a fissile force.

It need hardly be said that there exist no such social distinctions between different denominations as those of England. No clergyman, no layman, either looks down upon or looks up to any other clergyman or layman in respect of his worshipping God in another way. The Roman Catholic church of course stands aloof from the Protestant Christians, whom she considers schismatic; and although what is popularly called the doctrine of apostolic succession is less generally deemed vital by Protestant Episcopalians in America than it has come to be by them of late years in England, the clergy of that church did not often admit to their pulpits pastors of other bodies (though they sometimes appear in the pulpits of those churches) until in 1908 a canon was passed expressly legalizing the admission of ministers of other Christian communions. Such exchanges of pulpit are common among Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and other orthodox Protestant bodies. In many parts of the North and West the Protestant Episcopal church has long been slightly more fashionable than its sister churches; and people who have no particular “religious preferences,” but wish to stand well socially, will sometimes add themselves to it.17 In the South, however, Presbyterianism (and in some places Methodism) is equally well regarded from a worldly point of view; while everywhere the strength of Methodists and Baptists and Roman Catholics resides in the masses of the people.18

Of late years proposals for union between some of the leading Protestant churches, and especially between the Presbyterians and Congregationalists and Lutherans, have been freely canvassed. They witness to a growing good feeling among the clergy, and a growing indifference to minor points of doctrine and church government. The vested interests of the existing clergy create some difficulties serious in small towns and country districts; but it seems possible that before many years more than one such union will be carried through.

The social standing of the clergy of each church corresponds pretty closely to the character of the church itself—that is to say, the pastors of the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Episcopalian, and Unitarian bodies come generally, at least in the Northern states, from a higher social stratum than those of other more numerous denominations. The former are usually graduates of some university or college. As in Great Britain, comparatively few are the sons of the wealthy; and not very many come from the working classes. The position of a minister of the Gospel always carries with it some dignity—that is to say, it gives a man a certain advantage in the society, whatever it may be, to which he naturally belongs in respect of his family connections, his means, and his education. In the great cities the leading ministers of the chief denominations, including the Roman Catholic and Protestant Episcopal bishops, whether they be eminent as preachers, or as active philanthropists, or in respect of their learning, are among the first citizens, and exercise an influence often wider and more powerful than that of any layman. Possibly no man in the United States, since President Lincoln, has been so warmly admired and so widely mourned as the late Dr. Phillips Brooks. Some of the Roman Catholic prelates are known and admired far beyond the limits of their dioceses. In cities of the second order, the clergymen of these denominations, supposing them (as is usually the case) to be men of good breeding and personally acceptable, move in the best society of the place. Similarly in country places the pastor is better educated and more enlightened than the average members of his flock, and becomes a leader in works of beneficence. The level of education and learning is rising among the clergy with the steady improvement of the universities. This advance is perhaps most marked among those denominations which, like the Methodists and Baptists, have heretofore lagged behind, because their adherents were mostly among the poor. So far as I could learn, the incomes of the clergy are also increasing, though not so fast as the cost of living, which, especially in cities, bears heavily upon members of a profession from which the maintenance of “a certain style” is expected. The highest salaries are those received by the Presbyterian and Congregationalist pastors in the great cities, which run from $8,000 up to $15,000, and by the Protestant Episcopal bishops ($3,300 up to $12,500). Roman Catholic bishops, being celibate and with poorer flocks, have from $3,000 to $5,000; Methodist bishops usually $5,000, with travelling expenses. In the wealthier denominations there are many city ministers whose incomes exceed $3,000, while in small towns and rural districts few fall below $1,000; in the less wealthy $1,500 for a city and $700 for a rural charge may be a fair average as regards the North and West. The average income of a Roman Catholic priest is given at $800. To the sums regularly paid must be added in many cases a residence, and in nearly all various gifts and fees which the minister receives.

These figures, which, however, must be a little reduced for the Southern states, compare favourably with the average incomes received by the clergy of all denominations in England or Scotland, and are above the salaries paid to priests in France or to Protestant pastors in Germany. Reckoning in the clergy of all denominations in Great Britain and in the United States, both the pecuniary and the social position of the American clergy may, so far as it is possible to strike an average, be pronounced slightly higher.

Although the influence of the clergy is still great it has changed its nature, yielding to the universal current which makes for equality. At the beginning of the century the New England ministers enjoyed a local authority not unlike that of the bishops in Western Europe in the sixth century or of the Presbyterian ministers of Scotland in the seventeenth. They were, especially in country places, the leaders as well as instructors of their congregations, and were a power in politics scarcely less than in spiritual affairs.19 That order of things has quite passed away. His profession and his education still secure respect for a clergyman,20 but he must not now interfere in politics; he must not speak on any secular subject ex cathedra; his influence, whatever it may be, is no longer official but can only be that of a citizen distinguished by his talents or character, whose office gives him no greater advantage than that of an eminence where shining gifts may be more widely visible. Now and then this rule of abstention from politics is broken through. Mr. Henry Ward Beecher took the field as a Mugwump in the presidential campaign of 1884, and was deemed the more courageous in doing so because the congregation of Plymouth Church were mostly “straight out” Republicans. The Roman Catholic bishops have sometimes been accused of lending secret aid to the political party which will procure subventions for their schools and charities, and do no doubt, as indeed their doctrines require, press warmly the claims of denominational education. But otherwise they also abstain from politics. Such action as is constantly taken in England by ministers of the Established Church on the one side of politics, by Nonconformist ministers on the other, would in America excite disapproval. It is only on platforms or in conventions where some moral cause is to be advocated, such as Abolitionism was before the war years or temperance is now, that clergymen can with impunity appear.

Considering that the absence of state interference in matters of religion is one of the most striking differences between all the European countries on the one hand and the United States on the other, the European reader may naturally expect some further remarks on the practical results of this divergence. “There are,” he will say, “two evil consequences with which the European defenders of established churches seek to terrify us when disestablishment and disendowment are mentioned, one that the authority and influence of religion will wane if state recognition is withdrawn, the other that the incomes of the clergy and their social status will sink, that they will in fact become plebeians, and that the centres of light which now exist in every country parish will be extinguished. There are also two benefits which the advocates of the ‘Free Church in a Free State’ promise us, one that social jealousies and bitternesses between different sects will melt away, and the other that the church will herself become more spiritual in her temper and ideas, more earnest in her proper work of moral reform and the nurture of the soul. What has American experience to say on these four points?”

These are questions so pertinent to a right conception of the ecclesiastical side of American life that I cannot decline the duty of trying to answer them, though reluctant to tread on ground to which European conflicts give a controversial character.

I. To estimate the influence and authority of religion is not easy. Suppose, however, that we take either the habit of attending church or the sale of religious books as evidences of its influence among the multitude; suppose that as regards the more cultivated classes we look at the amount of respect paid to Christian precepts and ministers, the interest taken in theological questions, the connection of philanthropic reforms with religion. Adding these various data together, we may get some sort of notion of the influence of religion on the American people as a whole.

Purposing to touch on these points in the chapter next following, I will here only say by way of anticipation that in all these respects the influence of Christianity seems to be, if we look not merely to the numbers but also to the intelligence of the persons influenced, greater and more widespread in the United States than in any part of western continental Europe, and I think greater than in England. In parts of France, Italy, Spain, and the Catholic parts of Germany, as well as in German Austria, the authority of religion over the masses is of course great. Its influence on the best educated classes—one must include all parts of society in order to form a fair judgment—is apparently smaller in France and Italy than in Great Britain, and apparently smaller than in the United States. The country which most resembles America in this respect is Scotland, where the mass of the people enjoy large rights in the management of their church affairs, and where the interest of all classes has, ever since the Reformation, tended to run in ecclesiastical channels. So far from suffering from the want of state support, religion seems in the United States to stand all the firmer because, standing alone, she is seen to stand by her own strength. No political party, no class in the community, has any hostility either to Christianity or to any particular Christian body. The churches are as thoroughly popular, in the best sense of the word, as any of the other institutions of the country.

II. The social and economic position of the clergy in the United States is above that of the priesthood, taken as a whole, in Roman Catholic countries, and equal to that of all denominations taken together; Anglican and Nonconformist, in England. No American pastors enjoy such revenues as the prelates of England and Hungary; but the average income attached to the pastoral office is in America larger. The peculiar conditions of England, where one church looks down socially on the others, make a comparison in other respects difficult. The education of the American ministers, their manners, their capacity for spreading light among the people, seem superior to those of the seminarist priesthood of France and Italy (who are of course far more of a distinct caste) and equal to those of the Protestant pastors of Germany and Scotland.

III. Social jealousies connected with religion scarcely exist in America, and one notes a kindlier feeling between all denominations, Roman Catholics included, a greater readiness to work together for common charitable aims, than between Catholics and Protestants in France or Germany, or between Anglicans and Nonconformists in England. There is a rivalry between the leading denominations to extend their bounds, to erect and fill new churches, to raise great sums for church purposes. Viewed from the side of the New Testament, it may appear a foolish rivalry; but it is not unfriendly, and does not provoke bad blood, because the state stands neutral, and all churches have a free field. There is less mutual exclusiveness than in any other country, except perhaps Scotland. An instance may be found in the habit of exchanging pulpits, another in the comparative frequency with which persons pass from one denomination to another, if a particular clergyman attracts them, or if they settle in a place distant from a church of their own body. One often finds members of the same family belonging to different denominations. Some of the leading bodies, and especially the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, between whose doctrines there exists practically no difference, have been wont, especially in the West, to cooperate for the sake of efficiency and economy in agreeing not to plant two rival churches in a place where one will suffice, but to arrange that one denomination shall set up its church, and the other advise its adherents to join and support that church.

IV. To give an opinion on the three foregoing questions is incomparably easier than to say whether and how much Christianity has gained in spiritual purity and dignity by her severance from the secular power.

There is a spiritual gain in that diminution of envy, malice, and uncharitableness between the clergy of various sects which has resulted from their being all on the same legal level; and the absence both of these faults and of the habit of bringing ecclesiastical questions into secular politics, gives the enemy less occasion to blaspheme than he is apt to have in Europe. Church assemblies—synods, conferences, and conventions—seem on the whole to be conducted with better temper and more good sense than these bodies have shown in the Old World, from the Council of Ephesus down to our own day. But in America as elsewhere some young men enter the clerical profession from temporal motives; some laymen join a church to improve their social or even their business position; some country pastors look out for city cures, and justify their leaving a poorer flock for a richer by talking of a wider sphere of usefulness. One hears that in some bodies there is much intriguing to secure a post of eminence, and that men of great wealth exert undue influence, as they did in the days when the Epistle of St. James was written. The desire to push the progress of the particular church or of the denomination often mingles with the desire to preach the gospel more widely; and the gospel is sometimes preached, if not with “respect of persons” yet with less faithful insistence on unpalatable truths than the moral health of the community requires.

So far as I could ascertain, the dependence of the minister for his support on his congregation does not lower him in their eyes, nor make him more apt to flatter the leading members than he is in established churches. If he is personally dignified and unselfish, his independence will be in no danger. But whether the voluntary system, which no doubt makes men more liberal in giving for the support of religious ordinances among themselves and of missions elsewhere, tends to quicken spiritual life, and to keep the church pure and undefiled, free from the corrupting influences of the world, is another matter, on which a stranger may well hesitate to speak. Those Americans whose opinion I have inquired are unanimous in holding that in this respect also the fruits of freedom have been good.

chapter 111

The Influence of Religion

To convey some impression of the character and type which religion has taken in America, and to estimate its influence as a moral and spiritual force, is an infinitely harder task than to sketch the salient ecclesiastical phenomena of the country. I approach it with the greatest diffidence, and do not profess to give anything more than the sifted result of answers to questions addressed to many competent observers belonging to various churches or to none.

An obviously important point to determine is the extent to which the external ministrations of religion are supplied to the people and used by them. This is a matter on which no trustworthy statistics seem attainable, but on which the visitor’s own eyes leave him in little doubt. There are churches everywhere, and everywhere equally: in the cities and in the country, in the North and in the South, in the quiet nooks of New England, in the settlements which have sprung up along railroads in the West. It is only in the very roughest parts of the West, and especially in the region of mining camps, that they are wanting, and the want is but temporary, for “home missionary” societies are quickly in the field, and provide the ministrations of religion even to this migratory population. In many a town of moderate size one finds a church for every thousand inhabitants, as was the case with Dayton, in Ohio, which, when it had 40,000 people, had just forty churches. The growth of churches is deemed an indication of prosperity, as I remember that the dweller in a new Oklahoma city, anxious to prove its swift progress, pointed to a corner lot and said, “A fifteen thousand dollar church is going up there.”

Denominational rivalry has counted for something in the rapid creation of churches in the newly settled West and their multiplication everywhere else. So, too, weak churches are sometimes maintained out of pride when it would be better to let them be united with other congregations of the same body. Attendance is pretty good, though in some denominations the women greatly outnumber the men. In cities of moderate size, as well as in small towns and country places, a stranger is told that possibly a half of the native American population go to church at least once every Sunday. In the great cities the proportion of those who attend is very much less, but whether or no as small as in English cities no one could tell me. One sometimes finds the habit of churchgoing well formed in the more settled parts of the Far West where the people, being newcomers, might be supposed to be less under the sway of habit and convention. California is an exception, and is the state supposed to be least affected by religious influences. In the chief city of Oregon I found in 1881 that a person, and especially a woman of the upper class, who did not belong to some church and attend it pretty regularly, would be looked askance on. She need not actually lose caste, but the fact would excite surprise and regret; and her disquieted friends would put some pressure upon her to enrol herself as a church member. That would hardly happen in such a city today, and there are grounds for thinking that, taking the country as a whole, church attendance does not keep pace with the growth of population.

The observance of the Sabbath as it was, or the Sunday as it is now usually, called, furnishes another test. The strictness of Puritan practice has quite disappeared, even in New England, but there are still a few out of the way places, especially in the South, where the American part of the rural population refrains from amusement as well as from work.1 It is otherwise with the Germans; and in some parts of the country their example has brought in laxity as regards amusement. Such cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and San Francisco have a Sunday quite unlike that of New England, and more resembling what one finds in Germany or France. Nowhere however does one see the shops open or ordinary work done. On many railroads there are few Sunday trains, and museums are in many cities closed. But in two respects the practice is more lax than in Great Britain. Most of the leading newspapers publish Sunday editions, which contain a great deal of general readable matter, stories, gossip, and so forth, over and above the news of the day; and in the great cities theatres are now open on Sunday evenings.2

The interest in theological questions is less keen than it was in New England a century ago, but keener than it has generally been in England since the days of the Commonwealth. Much of the ordinary reading of the average family has a religious tinge, being supplied in religious or semi-religious weekly and monthly magazines. Till recently in parts of the West the old problems of predestination, reprobation, and election continued to be discussed by farmers and shopkeepers in their leisure moments with the old eagerness, and gave a sombre tinge to their views of religion. The ordinary man used to know the Bible better, and took up an allusion to it more quickly than the ordinary Englishman, though perhaps not better than the ordinary Scotchman. Indeed I may say once for all that the native American in everything concerning theology reminds one much more of Scotland than of England, although in the general cast and turn of his mind he is far more English than Scotch. One is told, however, that nowadays the knowledge of Scripture has declined. It is hard to state any general view as to the substance of pulpit teaching, because the differences between different denominations are marked; but the tendency has been, and daily grows alike among Congregationalists, Baptists, Northern Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, for sermons to be less metaphysical and less markedly doctrinal than formerly, and to become either expository or else of a practical and hortatory character. This is less the case among the Presbyterians of the South, who are more stringently orthodox, and in all respects more conservative than their brethren of the North. The discussion of the leading theological questions of the day, such as those of the authority of Scripture, the relation of natural science to the teachings of the Bible, the existence of rewards and punishments in a future state, goes on much as in England. Some of the leading reviews and magazines publish articles on these subjects, which are read more widely than corresponding articles in England, but do not, I think, absorb any more of the thought and attention of the average educated man and woman.

Whether scepticism makes any sensible advance either in affecting a larger number of minds, or in cutting more deeply at the roots of their belief in God and immortality, is a question which it is today extremely difficult for anyone to answer even as regards his own country. There are many phenomena in every part of Europe which appear to indicate that it does advance; there are others which point in the opposite direction. Much more difficult, then, must it be for a stranger to express a positive opinion as regards America on this gravest of all subjects of enquiry. The conditions of England and America appear to me very similar; whatever tendency prevails in either country is likely to prevail in the other and like changes of taste in theological literature have shown themselves. The mental habits of the people are the same; their fundamental religious conceptions are the same, except that those who prize a visible church and bow to her authority are relatively fewer among American Protestants; their theological literature is the same. In discussing a theological question with an American one never feels that slight difference of point of view, or, so to speak, of mental atmosphere, which is sure to crop up in talking to a Frenchman or an Italian, or even to a German. Considerations of speculative argument, considerations of religious feeling, affect the two nations in the same way: the course of their religious history is not likely to diverge. If there be a difference at all in their present attitude, it is perhaps to be found in this, that whereas Americans are more frequently disposed to treat minor issues in a bold spirit, they are more apt to recoil from blank negation. As an American once said to me—they are apt to put serious views into familiar words—“We don’t mind going a good way along the plank, but we like to stop short of the jump-off.”

Whether pronounced theological unbelief, which has latterly been preached by lectures and pamphlets with a freedom unknown half a century ago, has made substantial progress among the thinking part of the working class is a question on which one hears the most opposite statements. I have seen statistics which purport to show that the proportion of members of Christian churches to the total population rose in the Protestant churches from 1 in 141/2 in 1800 to 1 in 5 in 1880; and which estimated the number of communicants in 1880 at 12,000,000, the total adult population in that year being taken at 25,000,000. So the census of churches of 1906 gives the number of church members or communicants at 33,000,000 or 39.1 of the total estimated population. But one also hears many lamentations over the diminished attendance at city churches; and in ecclesiastical circles people say, just as they say in England, that the great problem is how to reach the masses. The most probable conclusion seems to be that while in cities like New York and Chicago the bulk of the humbler classes (except the Roman Catholics, who are largely recent immigrants) are practically heathen to the same extent as in London, or Liverpool, or Berlin, the proportion of working men who belong to some religious body is rather larger in towns under 30,000 than it is in the similar towns of Great Britain or Germany.

In the more cultivated circles of the great cities one finds a number of people, as one does in England, who have virtually abandoned Christianity, and a much larger number who seem practically indifferent, and seldom accompany their wives or sisters to church. So also in most of the cities there is said to be a knot of men who profess agnosticism, and sometimes have a meeting place where secularist lectures are delivered. In the middle of the last century the former class would have been fewer and more reserved; the latter would scarcely have existed. But the relaxation of the old strictness of orthodoxy has not diminished the zeal of the various churches, nor their hold upon their adherents, nor their attachment to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.

This zeal and attachment happily no longer show themselves in intolerance. Except perhaps in small places in the West or South, where aggressive scepticism would rouse displeasure and might affect a man’s position in society, everybody is as free in America as in London to hold and express any views he pleases. Within the churches themselves there is an unmistakable tendency to loosen the bonds of subscription required from clergymen. Prosecutions for heresy of course come before church courts, since no civil court would take cognizance of such matters unless when invoked by someone alleging that a church court had given a decision, or a church authority had taken an executive step, which prejudiced him in some civil right, and was unjust because violating an obligation contracted with him.3 Such prosecutions have latterly become uncommon, but the sympathy of the public is usually with the accused minister, and the latitude allowed to divergence from the old standards becomes constantly greater. At present it is in the Congregationalist church pretty much the same as in that church in England; in the Presbyterian church of the North, and among Baptists and Methodists, slightly less than in the unestablished Presbyterian churches of Scotland. Most of the churches usually called orthodox have allowed less latitude in doctrine and in ritual than recent decisions of the courts of law, beginning from the “Essays and Reviews” case, have allowed to the clergy of the Anglican Establishment in England; but I could not gather that the clergy of the various Protestant bodies feel themselves fettered, or that the free development of religious thought is seriously checked, except in the South, where orthodoxy is rigid, and forbids a clergyman to hold Mr. Darwin’s views regarding the descent of man.4 A pastor who begins to chafe under the formularies or liturgy of his denomination would be expected to leave the denomination and join some other in which he could feel more at home. He would not suffer socially by doing so as an Anglican clergyman possibly might in the like case in England. In the Roman Catholic church there is, of course, no similar indulgence to a deviation from the ancient dogmatic standards; but there is a greater disposition to welcome the newer forms of learning and culture than one finds in England or Ireland, and what may be called a more pronounced democratic spirit. So among the younger Protestant clergy there has been of late years a tendency, if not to Socialism, yet to a marked discontent with existing economic conditions, resembling what is now perceptible among the younger clergy in Britains.

As respects what may be called the everyday religious life and usages of the United States, there are differences from those of England or Scotland which it is easy to feel but hard to define or describe. There is rather less conventionalism or constraint in speaking of religious experiences, less of a formal separation between the church and the world, less disposition to treat the clergy as a caste and expect them to conform to a standard not prescribed for the layman,5 less reticence about sacred things, perhaps less sense of the refinement with which sacred things ought to be surrounded. The letting by auction of sittings in a popular church, though I think very rare, excites less disapproval than it would in Europe. Some fashionable churches are supplied with sofas, carpets, and the other comforts of a drawing room; a well-trained choir is provided, and the congregation would not think of spoiling the performance by joining in the singing. The social side of church life is more fully developed than in Protestant Europe. A congregation, particularly among the Methodists, Baptists, and Congregationalists, is the centre of a group of societies, literary and recreative as well as religious and philanthropic, which not only stimulate charitable work, but bring the poorer and richer members into friendly relations with one another, and form a large part of the social enjoyments of the young people, keeping them out of harm’s way, and giving them a means of forming acquaintances. Often a sort of informal evening party, called a “sociable,” is given once a month, at which all ages and classes meet on an easy footing.6 The Young Men’s Christian Association movement which has attained vast dimensions does much to attract the young people by providing facilities for exercise and amusement as well by work of a more definitely religious character. Religion seems to associate itself better with the interests of the young in America, and to have come within the last forty years to wear a less forbidding countenance than it has generally done in Britain, or at least among English Nonconformists and in the churches of Scotland.

A still more peculiar feature of the American churches is the propensity to what may be called Revivalism which some of them, and especially the Methodist churches, show. That exciting preaching and those external demonstrations of feeling which have occasionally appeared in Britain were long chronic there, appearing chiefly in the form of the camp meeting, a gathering of people usually in the woods or on the sea shore, where open-air preaching goes on perhaps for days together. One hears many stories about these camp meetings, not always to their credit, which agree at least in this that they exercise a powerful even if transient influence upon the humbler classes who flock to them. In the West they have been serviceable in evangelizing districts where few regular churches had yet been established. Of late years they have tended to pass into mere summer outings, except in some parts of the South, where however it is now chiefly among the humbler classes, and of course still more among the Negroes, that they flourish. All denominations are more prone to emotionalism in religion, and have less reserve in displaying it, than in England or Scotland. I remember in 1870 to have been a passenger by one of the splendid steamers which ply along the Sound between New York and Fall River. A Unitarian Congress was being held in New York, and a company of New England Unitarians were going to attend it. Now New England Unitarians are of all Americans perhaps the most staid and sober in their thoughts and habits, the least inclined to a demonstrative expression of their faith. This company, however, installed itself round the piano in the great saloon of the vessel and sang hymns, hymns full of effusion, for nearly two hours, many of the other passengers joining, and all looking on with sympathy. Our English party assumed at first that the singers belonged to some Methodist body, in which case there would have been nothing to remark except the attitude of the bystanders. But they were Unitarians.

European travellers have in one point greatly exaggerated the differences between their own continent and the United States. They have represented the latter as preeminently a land of strange sects and abnormal religious developments. Such sects and developments there certainly are, but they play no greater part in the whole life of the nation than similar sects do in Germany and England, far less than the various dissenting communities do in Russia. The Mormons drew the eyes of the world because they attempted to form a sort of religious commonwealth, and revived one ancient practice which modern ethics condemn, and which severe congressional legislation is supposed to have now stamped out. But the Mormon church is chiefly recruited from Europe. In 1881 I found few native Americans among the Mormons in Salt Lake City, and those few from among the poor whites of the South.7 The number of recruits from all quarters began soon thereafter to decrease. The Shakers are an interesting and well-conducted folk, but there are very few of them, and they decrease—there were in 1906 only 516 persons in their eleven communities; while of the other communistic religious bodies one hears more in Europe than in America. Here and there some strange little sect emerges and lives for a few years;8 but in a country seething with religious emotion, and whose conditions seem to tempt to new departures and experiments of all kinds, the philosophic traveller may rather wonder that men have stood so generally upon the old paths.9

We have already seen that Christianity has in the United States maintained, so far as externals go, its authority and dignity, planting its houses of worship all over the country and raising enormous revenues from its adherents. Such a position of apparent influence might, however, rest upon ancient habit and convention, and imply no dominion over the souls of men. The Roman Empire in the days of Augustus was covered from end to end with superb temples to many gods; the priests were numerous and wealthy, and enjoyed the protection of the state; processions retained their pomp, and sacrifices drew crowds of admiring worshippers. But the old religions had lost their hold on the belief of the educated and on the conscience of all classes. If therefore we desire to know what place Christianity really fills in America, and how far it gives stability to the commonwealth, we must inquire how far it governs the life and moulds the mind of the country.

Such an enquiry may address itself to two points. It may examine into the influence which religion has on the conduct of the people, on their moral standard and the way they conform themselves thereto. And it may ask how far religion touches and gilds the imagination of the people, redeeming their lives from commonness, and bathing their souls in “the light that never was on sea or land.”

In works of active beneficence no country has surpassed, perhaps none has equalled, the United States. Not only are the sums collected for all sorts of philanthropic purposes larger relatively to the wealth of America than in any European country, but the amount of personal interest shown in good works and personal effort devoted to them seems to a European visitor to exceed what he knows at home. How much of this interest and effort would be given were no religious motive present it is impossible to say. Not all, but I think nearly all of it, is in fact given by religious people, and, as they themselves suppose, under a religious impulse. This religious impulse is less frequently than in England a sectarian impulse, for all Protestants, and to some extent Roman Catholics also, are wont to join hands for most works of benevolence.

The ethical standard of the average man is of course the Christian standard, modified to some slight extent by the circumstances of American life, which have been different from those of Protestant Europe. The average man has not thought of any other standard, and religious teaching, though it has become less definite and less dogmatic, is still to him the source whence he believes himself to have drawn his ideas of duty and conduct. In Puritan days there must have been some little conscious and much more unconscious hypocrisy, the profession of religion being universal, and the exactitude of practice required by opinion, and even by law, being above what ordinary human nature seems capable of attaining. The fault of antinomianism which used to be charged on high Calvinists is now sometimes charged on those who become, under the influence of revivals, extreme emotionalists in religion. But taking the native Americans as a whole, no people seems today less open to the charge of pharisaism or hypocrisy. They are perhaps rather more prone to the opposite error of good-natured indulgence to offences of which they are not themselves guilty.

That there is less crime among native Americans than among the foreign born is a point not to be greatly pressed, for it may be partly due to the fact that the latter are the poorer and more ignorant part of the population; and in parts of the South and West violence and even homicide are common enough among the native-born. If, however, we take matters which do not fall within the scope of penal law, the general impression of those who have lived long both in Protestant Europe and in America seems to be that as respects veracity, temperance, the purity of domestic life,10 tenderness to children and the weak, and general kindliness of behaviour, the native Americans stand rather higher than either the English or the Germans.11 And those whose opinion I am quoting seem generally, though not universally, disposed to think that the influence of religious belief, which may survive in its effect upon the character when a man has dropped his connection with any religious body, counts for a good deal in this. There is now a general feeling that the state judges administer in too lax and easy a way laws which are themselves too lax. The abuse of divorce procedure amounts in some states to a scandal.

If we ask how far religion exerts a stimulating influence on the thought and imagination of a nation, we are met by the difficulty of determining what is the condition of mankind where no such influence is present. There has never been a civilized nation without a religion; and though many highly civilized individual men live without one, they are so obviously the children of a state of sentiment and thought in which religion has been a powerful factor, that no one can conjecture what a race of men would be like who had during several generations believed themselves to be the highest beings in the universe, or at least entirely out of relation to any other higher beings, and to be therewithal destined to no kind of existence after death. Some may hold that respect for public opinion, sympathy, an interest in the future of mankind, would do for such a people what religion has done in the past; or that they might even be, as Lucretius expected, the happier for the extinction of possible supernatural terrors. Others may hold that life would seem narrow and insignificant, and that the wings of imagination would droop in a universe felt to be void. All that need be here said is that a people with comparatively little around it in the way of historic memories and associations to touch its emotion, a people whose energy is chiefly absorbed in commerce and the development of the material resources of its territory, a people consumed by a feverish activity that gives little opportunity for reflection or for the contemplation of nature, seems most of all to need to have its horizon widened, its sense of awe and mystery touched, by whatever calls it away from the busy world of sight and sound into the stillness of faith and meditation. A perusal of the literature which the ordinary American of the educated farming and working class reads, and a study of the kind of literature which those Americans who are least coloured by European influences produce, led one to think that the Bible and Christian theology altogether have in the past done more in the way of forming the imaginative background to an average American view of the world of man and nature than they have in most European countries.

No one is so thoughtless as not to sometimes ask himself what would befall mankind if the solid fabric of belief on which their morality has hitherto rested, or at least been deemed by them to rest, were suddenly to break up and vanish under the influence of new views of nature, as the ice fields split and melt when they have floated down into a warmer sea. Morality with religion for its sanction has hitherto been the basis of social polity, except under military despotisms. Would morality be so far weakened as to make social polity unstable? And if so, would a reign of violence return? In Europe this question does not seem urgent, because in Europe the physical force of armed men which maintains order is usually conspicuous, and because obedience to authority is everywhere in Europe matter of ancient habit, having come down little impaired from ages when men obeyed without asking for a reason. But in America the whole system of government seems to rest not on armed force, but on the will of the numerical majority, a majority most of whom might well think that its overthrow would be for them a gain. So sometimes, standing in the midst of a great American city, and watching the throngs of eager figures streaming hither and thither, marking the sharp contrasts of poverty and wealth, an increasing mass of wretchedness and an increasing display of luxury, knowing that before long a hundred millions of men will be living between ocean and ocean under this one government—a government which their own hands have made, and which they feel to be the work of their own hands—one is startled by the thought of what might befall this huge yet delicate fabric of laws and commerce and social institutions were the foundations it has rested on to crumble away. Suppose that all these men ceased to believe that there was any power above them, any future before them, anything in heaven or earth but what their senses told them of; suppose that their consciousness of individual force and responsibility, already dwarfed by the overwhelming power of the multitude, and the fatalistic submission it engenders, were further weakened by the feeling that their swiftly fleeting life was rounded by a perpetual sleep:

• Soles occidere et redire possunt:
• Nobis, quum semel occidit brevis lux
• Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Would the moral code stand unshaken, and with it the reverence for law, the sense of duty towards the community, and even towards the generations yet to come? Would men say “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die”? Or would custom, and sympathy, and a perception of the advantages which stable government offers to the citizens as a whole, and which orderly self-restraint offers to each one, replace supernatural sanctions, and hold in check the violence of masses and the self-indulgent impulses of the individual? History cannot answer this question. The most she can tell us is that hitherto civilized society has rested on religion, and that free government has prospered best among religious peoples.

America is no doubt the country in which intellectual movements work most swiftly upon the masses, and the country in which the loss of faith in the invisible might produce the completest revolution, because it is the country where men have been least wont to revere anything in the visible world. Yet America seems as unlikely to drift from her ancient moorings as any country of the Old World. It was religious zeal and the religious conscience which led to the founding of the New England colonies nearly three centuries ago—those colonies whose spirit has in such large measure passed into the whole nation. Religion and conscience have been a constantly active force in the American commonwealth ever since, not, indeed, strong enough to avert many moral and political evils, yet at the worst times inspiring a minority with a courage and ardour by which moral and political evils have been held at bay, and in the long run generally overcome.

It is an old saying that monarchies live by honour and republics by virtue. The more democratic republics become, the more the masses grow conscious of their own power, the more do they need to live, not only by patriotism, but by reverence and self-control, and the more essential to their well-being are those sources whence reverence and self-control flow.

chapter 112

The Position of Women

It has been well said that the position which women hold in a country is, if not a complete test, yet one of the best tests of the progress it has made in civilization. When one compares nomad man with settled man, heathen man with Christian man, the ancient world with the modern, the Eastern world with the Western, it is plain that in every case the advance in public order, in material comfort, in wealth, in decency and refinement of manners, among the whole population of a country—for in these matters one must not look merely at the upper class—has been accompanied by a greater respect for women, by a greater freedom accorded to them, by a fuller participation on their part in the best work of the world. Americans are fond of pointing, and can with perfect justice point, to the position their women hold as an evidence of the high level their civilization has reached. Certainly nothing in the country is more characteristic of the peculiar type their civilization has taken.

The subject may be regarded in so many aspects that it is convenient to take up each separately.

As respects the legal rights of women, these, of course, depend on the legislative enactments of each state of the Union, for in no case has the matter been left under the rigour of the common law. With much diversity in minor details, the general principles of the law are in all or nearly all the states similar. Women have been placed on an equality with men as respects all private rights. In some states husband and wife can sue one another at law. Married as well as unmarried women have long since (and I think everywhere) obtained full control of their property, whether obtained by gift or descent, or by their own labour. This has been deemed so important a point that, instead of being left to ordinary legislation, it has in several states been directly enacted by the people in the constitution. Women have in most, possibly not yet in all, states rights of guardianship over their children which the law of England denied to them till the Act of 1886; and in some states the mother’s rights are equal, where there has been a voluntary separation, to those of the father. The law of divorce is in many states far from satisfactory, but it always aims at doing equal justice as between husbands and wives. Special protection as respects hours of labour is given to women by the laws of many states, and a good deal of recent legislation has been passed with intent to benefit them, though not always by well-chosen means.

Women have made their way into most of the professions more largely than in Europe. In many of the Northern cities they practise as physicians, and seem to have found little or no prejudice to overcome. Medical schools have been provided for them in some universities.1 It was less easy to obtain admission to the bar, yet several have secured this, and the number seems to increase. They mostly devote themselves to the attorney’s part of the work rather than to court practice. One edited the Illinois Law Journal with great acceptance. Several have entered the Christian ministry, though, I think, only in what may be called the minor sects, not in any of the five or six great denominations, whose spirit is more conservative. Several have obtained success as professional lecturers, and not a few are journalists or reporters. One hears little of them in engineering. They are seldom to be seen in the offices of hotels, but many, more than in Europe, are employed as clerks or secretaries, both in some of the government departments, and by telegraphic and other companies, as well as in publishing houses and other kinds of business where physical strength is not needed. Typewriting work is largely in their hands. They form an overwhelming majority of the teachers in public schools for boys as well as for girls, and are thought to be better teachers, at least for the younger sort, than men are.2 No class prejudice forbids the daughters of clergymen or lawyers of the best standing to teach in elementary schools. Taking one thing with another, it is easier for women to find a career, to obtain remunerative work of literary or of a commercial or mechanical kind, than in any part of Europe. Popular sentiment is entirely in favour of giving them every chance, as witness the constitutions of those Western states (including Washington, even while it refused them the suffrage) which expressly provide that they shall be equally admissible to all professions or employments. They have long borne a conspicuous part in the promotion of moral and philanthropic causes. They were among the earliest, most zealous, and most effective apostles of the anti-slavery movement, and have taken an equally active share in the temperance agitation. Not only has the Women’s Christian Temperance Union with its numerous branches been the most powerful agency directed against the traffic in intoxicants, particularly in the Western states, but individual women have thrown themselves into the struggle with extraordinary zeal. Some time ago, during what was called the women’s whiskey war, they forced their way into the drinking saloons, bearded the dealers, adjured the tipplers to come out. At elections in which the Prohibitionist issue is prominent, ladies will sometimes assemble outside the polls and sing hymns at the voters. Their services in dealing with pauperism, charities, and reformatory institutions have been inestimable. In New York when legislation was needed for improving the administration of the charities, it was a lady (belonging to one of the oldest and most respected families in the country) who went to Albany, and by placing the case forcibly before the state legislature there, succeeded in obtaining the required measure. Many others have followed her example with the best results. The charity organization societies of the great cities are largely managed by women; and the freedom they enjoy makes them invaluable agents in this work, which the inrush of new and ignorant immigrants renders daily more important. So too when it became necessary after the war to find teachers for the Negroes in the institutions founded for their benefit in the South, it was chiefly Northern girls who volunteered for the duty, and discharged it with single-minded zeal.

American women take far less part in politics than their English sisters, although more than the women of Germany, France, or Italy. That they talk less about politics may be partly ascribed to the fact that politics come less into ordinary conversation in America (except during a presidential election) than in England. But the practice of canvassing at elections, recently developed by English ladies with eminent success, seems unknown. Women have seldom been chosen members of either Republican or Democratic conventions. However, at the National Convention of the Prohibitionist party at Pittsburg in 1884 some presented credentials as delegates from local organizations, and were admitted to sit. One of the two secretaries of that convention was a woman. In 1912 women served as delegates to the Republican National Convention. So women have in some cities borne a useful and influential, albeit comparatively inconspicuous, part in movements for the reform of municipal government. Here we are on the debatable ground between pure party politics and philanthropic agitation. Women have been so effective in the latter that they cannot easily be excluded when persuasion passes into constitutional action, and one is not surprised to find the Prohibition party declare in their platform of 1884 that “they alone recognize the influence of woman, and offer to her equal rights with man in the management of national affairs.” At some gatherings in the West which gave expression to the discontent of the farming class, women appeared, and were treated with a deference which anywhere but in America would have contrasted strangely with the roughness of the crowd. One of them signalized herself by denouncing a proposed banquet, on the ground that it was being got up in the interest of the brewers. Presidential candidates have often “receptions” given in their honour by ladies. Attempts have been, but with little success, to establish political “salons” at Washington, nor has the influence of social gatherings anywhere attained the importance it has often possessed in France, though occasionally the wife of a politician makes his fortune by her tact and skill in winning support for him among professional politicians or the members of a state legislature. There was another and less auspicious sphere of political action into which women found their way at the national capital. The solicitation of members of a legislature with a view to the passing of bills, especially private bills, and to the obtaining of places, has become a profession there, and the persuasive assiduity which had long been recognized by poets as characteristic of the female sex made them widely employed and efficient in this work.

I have already, in treating of the woman suffrage movement (Chapter 99), referred to the various public offices which have been in many states thrown open to women. It is admitted that wherever the suffrage has been granted the gift carries with it the right of obtaining those posts for which votes are cast.

The subject of women’s education opens up a large field. Want of space obliges me to omit a description, for which I have accumulated abundant materials, and to confine myself to a few concise remarks.

The public provision for the instruction of girls is quite as ample and adequate as that made for boys. Elementary schools are of course provided alike for both sexes, grammar schools and high schools are organized for the reception of girls sometimes under the same roof or even in the same classes, sometimes in a distinct building, but always, I think, with an equally complete staff of teachers and equipment of educational appliances. The great majority of the daughters of mercantile and professional men, especially of course in the West,3 receive their education in these public secondary schools; and what is more remarkable, the number of girls who continue their education in the higher branches, including the ancient classics and physical science, up to the age of seventeen or eighteen, is as large, in many places larger than, that of the boys, the latter being drafted off into practical life, while the former indulge their more lively interest in the things of the mind. In the Western universities the ancient classics are now more largely studied by women than by men, partly because the latter form a majority of the teachers. One sometimes hears it charged as a fault on the American system that its liberal provision of gratuitous instruction in the advanced subjects tends to raise girls of the humbler classes out of the sphere to which their pecuniary means would destine them, makes them discontented with their lot, implants tastes which fate will forever forbid them to gratify.

As stated in a previous chapter (Chapter 108), university education is provided for women in the Eastern states by colleges expressly erected for their benefit, and in the Western states by state universities, whose regulations usually provide for the admission of female equally with male students to instruction in all subjects. There are also some colleges of private foundation which receive young men and maidens together, teaching them in the same classes, but providing separate buildings for their lodging.

I must not attempt to set forth and discuss the evidence regarding the working of this system of coeducation, interesting as the facts are, but be content with stating the general result of the inquiries I made.

Coeducation answers perfectly in institutions like Antioch and Oberlin in Ohio, where manners are plain and simple, where the students all come from a class in which the intercourse of young men and young women is easy and natural, and where there is a strong religious influence prevading the life of the place. No moral difficulties are found to arise. Each sex is said to improve the other: the men become more refined, the women more manly. Now and then students fall in love with one another, and marry when they have graduated. But why not? Such marriages are based upon a better reciprocal knowledge of character than is usually attainable in the great world, and are reported to be almost invariably happy. So also in the Western state universities coeducation is generally, if not quite invariably, well reported of. In these establishments the students mostly lodge where they will in the city, and are therefore brought into social relations only in the hours of public instruction; but the tendency of late years has been, while leaving men to find their own quarters, to provide places of residence for the women. Of late years a resort to them has become so fashionable that the authorities express some anxiety lest the interest in social enjoyments may with some women students be found to exceed their devotion to study. Should this happen to any great extent, difficulties might arise. But so far there has been little to do in the way of discipline or supervision, and the heads of the universities have raised few objections to the system of coeducation. I did find, however, that the youths in some cases expressed aversion to it, saying they would rather be in classes by themselves; the reason apparently being that it was disagreeable to see a man whom men thought meanly of standing high in the favour of women students. In these Western states there is so much freedom allowed in the intercourse of youths and girls, and girls are so well able to take care of themselves, that the objections which occur to a European have little weight. Whether a system which has borne good fruits in the simple society of the West is fit to be adopted in the Eastern states, where the conditions of life approach nearer to those of Europe, is a question warmly debated in America. The need for it is at any rate not urgent, because the liberality of founders and benefactors has provided in at least five women’s colleges—one of them a department of Harvard University—places where an excellent education, surpassing that of most of the Western universities, stands open to women. These colleges are at present so efficient and popular, and the life of their students is in some respects so much freer than it could well be, considering the etiquette of Eastern society, in universities frequented by both sexes, that they will probably continue to satisfy the practical needs of the community and the wishes of all but the advocates of complete equality.

It will be seen from what has been said that the provision for women’s education in the United States is ampler and better than that made in any European countries, and that the making of it has been far more distinctly recognized as a matter of public concern. To these advantages, and to the spirit they proceed from, much of the influence which women exert must be ascribed. They feel more independent, they have a fuller consciousness of their place in the world of thought as well as in the world of action. The practice of educating the two sexes together in the same colleges tends, in those sections of the country where it prevails, in the same direction, placing women and men on a level as regards attainments, and giving them a greater number of common intellectual interests. It is not deemed to have made women either pedantic or masculine, or to have diminished the differences between their mental and moral habits and those of men. Nature is quite strong enough to make the differences of temperament she creates persistent, even under influences which might seem likely to reduce them.

Custom allows to women a greater measure of freedom in doing what they will and going where they please than they have in any European country, except, perhaps, in Russia. No one is surprised to see a lady travel alone from the Atlantic to the Pacific, nor a girl of the richer class walking alone through the streets of a city. If a lady enters some occupation heretofore usually reserved to men, she is subject to much less censorious remark than would follow her in Europe, though in this matter the society of Eastern cities is hardly so liberal as that of the West.

Social intercourse between youths and maidens is everywhere more easy and unrestrained than in England or Germany, not to speak of France. Yet, there are considerable differences between the Eastern cities, whose usages have begun to approximate to those of Europe, and other parts of the country. In the rural districts, and generally all over the West, young men and girls are permitted to walk together, drive together, go out to parties, and even to public entertainments together, without the presence of any third person, who can be supposed to be looking after or taking charge of the girl. So a girl may, if she pleases, keep up a correspondence with a young man, nor will her parents think of interfering. She will have her own friends, who, when they call at her house, ask for her, and are received by her, it may be alone; because they are not deemed to be necessarily the friends of her parents also, nor even of her sisters. In the cities of the Atlantic states, it is beginning to be thought scarcely correct for a young man to take a young lady out for a solitary drive; and he would not in all sets be permitted to escort her alone to the theatre. But girls still go without chaperons to dances, the hostess being deemed to act as chaperon for all her guests; and as regards both correspondence and the right to have one’s own circle of acquaintances, the usage even of New York or Boston allows more liberty than does that of London or Edinburgh. It was at one time, and it may possibly still be, not uncommon for a group of young people who know one another well to make up an autumn “party in the woods.” They choose some mountain and forest region, such as the Adirondack wilderness west of Lake Champlain, engage three or four guides, embark with guns and fishing rods, tents, blankets, and a stock of groceries, and pass in boats up the rivers and across the lakes of this wild country through sixty or seventy miles of trackless forest to their chosen camping ground at the foot of some tall rock that rises from the still crystal of the lake. Here they build their bark hut, and spread their beds of the elastic and fragrant hemlock boughs; the youths roam about during the day, tracking the deer, the girls read and work and bake the corn cakes; at night there is a merry gathering round the fire or a row in the soft moonlight. On these expeditions, brothers will take their sisters and cousins, who bring perhaps some women friends with them; the brothers’ friends will come too; and all will live together in a fraternal way for weeks or months, though no elderly relative or married lady be of the party.

There can be no doubt that the pleasure of life is sensibly increased by the greater freedom which transatlantic custom permits; and as the Americans insist that no bad results have followed,4 one notes with regret that freedom declines in the places which deem themselves most civilized. American girls have been, so far as a stranger can ascertain, less disposed to what are called “fast ways” than girls of the corresponding classes in England,5 and exercise in this respect a pretty rigorous censorship over one another. But when two young people find pleasure in one another’s company, they can see as much of each other as they please, can talk and walk together frequently, can show that they are mutually interested, and yet need have little fear of being misunderstood either by one another or by the rest of the world.6 It is all a matter of custom. In the West custom sanctions this easy friendship; in the Atlantic cities so soon as people have come to find something exceptional in it, constraint is felt, and a conventional etiquette like that of the Old World begins to replace the innocent simplicity of the older time, the test of whose merit may be gathered from the universal persuasion in America that the generally happy marriages in the society of the rural districts, no less than the idyllic charm of the life of young people there, were due to the ampler opportunities which young men and women have of learning one another’s characters and habits. Most girls have a larger range of intimate acquaintances than girls have in Europe, intercourse is franker, there is less difference between the manners of home and the manners of general society.

In no country are women, and especially young women, so much made of. The world is at their feet. Society seems organized for the purpose of providing enjoyment for them. Parents, uncles, aunts, elderly friends, even brothers, are ready to make their comfort and convenience bend to the girls’ wishes. The wife’s opportunities are circumscribed, except among the richest people, by the duties of household management, owing to the great difficulty of obtaining domestic “help.” But she holds in her own house a more prominent, if not a more substantially powerful, position than in England or even in France. With the German Hausfrau, who is too often content to be a mere housewife, there is of course no comparison. The best proof of the superior place American ladies occupy is to be found in the notions they profess to entertain of the relations of an English married pair. They talk of the English wife as little better than a slave, declaring that when they stay with English friends, or receive an English couple in America, they see the wife always deferring to the husband and the husband always assuming that his pleasure and convenience are to prevail. The European wife, they admit, often gets her own way, but she gets it by tactful arts, by flattery or wheedling or playing on the man’s weaknesses; whereas in America the husband’s duty and desire is to gratify the wife and render to her those services which the English tyrant exacts from his consort.7 One may often hear an American matron commiserate a friend who has married in Europe, while the daughters declare in chorus that they will never follow the example. Laughable as all this may seem to Englishwomen, it is perfectly true that the theory as well as the practice of conjugal life is not the same in America as in England. There are overbearing husbands in America, but they are more condemned by the opinion of the neighbourhood than in England. There are exacting wives in England, but their husbands are more pitied than would be the case in America. In neiter country can one say that the principle of perfect equality reigns, for in America the balance inclines as much in favour of the wife as it does in England in favour of the husband. No one man can have a sufficiently large acquaintance in both countries to entitle his individual opinion on the results to much weight. Those observers who, having lived in both countries, favour the American practice, do so because the theory it is based on departs less from pure equality than does that of England. Such observers do not mean that the recognition of women as equals or superiors makes them any better or sweeter or wiser than Englishwomen; but rather that the principle of equality, by correcting the characteristic faults of men, and especially their selfishness and vanity, is more conducive to the concord and happiness of a home. This may be true, but I have heard others declare that there is, at least among the richer class, a growing detachment of the wife from the husband’s life and interests, so that she is more disposed to absent herself for long periods from him; and some observers maintain that the American system, since it does not require the wife habitually to forego her own wishes, tends, if not to make her self-indulgent and capricious, yet slightly to impair the more delicate charms of character; as it is written, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

It need hardly be said that in all cases where the two sexes come into competition for comfort, the provision is made first for women. Before drawing room cars had become common, the end car in railroad trains, being that farthest removed from the smoke of the locomotive, was often reserved for them (though men accompanying a lady could enter it), and at hotels their sitting room is the best and sometimes the only available public room, ladyless guests being driven to the bar or the hall. It is sometimes said that the privileges yielded to American women have disposed them to claim as a right what was only a courtesy, and have told unfavourably upon their manners. Instances, such as that of women entering public vehicles already overcrowded, are cited in support of this view, but I cannot on the whole think it well founded. The better bred women do not presume on their sex; and the area of good breeding is always widening. It need hardly be said that the community at large gains by the softening and restraining influence which the reverence for womanhood diffuses. Nothing so quickly incenses the people as any insult offered to a woman. Wife beating, and indeed any kind of rough violence offered to a woman, is far less common among the rudest class than it is in England. Field work or work at the pit-mouth of mines is seldom or never done by women in America; and the American traveller who in some parts of Europe finds women performing severe manual labour is revolted by the sight in a way which Europeans find surprising.

In the farther West, that is to say, beyond the Mississippi, in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific states, one is much struck by what seems the absence of the humblest class of women. The trains are full of poorly dressed and sometimes (though less frequently) rough-mannered men. One discovers no women whose dress or air marks them out as the wives, daughters, or sisters of these men, and wonders whether the male population is celibate, and if so, why there are so many women. Closer observation shows that the wives, daughters, and sisters are there, only their attire and manner are those of what Europeans would call middle class and not working class people. This is partly due to the fact that Western men affect a rough dress. Still one may say that the remark so often made that the masses of the American people correspond to the middle class of Europe is more true of the women than of the men, and is more true of them in the rural districts and in the West than it is of the inhabitants of Atlantic cities. I remember to have been dawdling in a book store in a small town in Oregon when a lady entered to inquire if a monthly magazine, whose name was unknown to me, had yet arrived. When she was gone I asked the salesman who she was, and what was the periodical she wanted. He answered that she was the wife of a railway workman, that the magazine was a journal of fashions, and that the demand for such journals was large and constant among women of the wage-earning class in the town. This set me to observing female dress more closely, and it turned out to be perfectly true that the women in these little towns were following the Parisian fashions very closely, and were, in fact, ahead of the majority of English ladies belonging to the professional and mercantile classes.8 Of course in such a town as I refer to there are no domestic servants except in the hotels (indeed, almost the only domestic service to be had in the Pacific states was that of Chinese), so these votaries of fashion did all their own housework and looked after their own babies.

Three causes combine to create among American women an average of literary taste and influence higher than that of women in any European country. These are, the educational facilities they enjoy, the recognition of the equality of the sexes in the whole social and intellectual sphere, and the leisure which they possess as compared with men. In a country where men are incessantly occupied at their business or profession, the function of keeping up the level of culture devolves upon women. It is safe in their hands. They are quick and keen-witted, less fond of open-air life and physical exertion than Englishwomen are, and obliged by the climate to pass a greater part of their time under shelter from the cold of winter and the sun of summer. For music and for the pictorial arts they do not yet seem to have formed so strong a taste as for literature, partly perhaps owing to the fact that in America the opportunities of seeing and hearing masterpieces, except indeed operas, are rarer than in Europe. But they are eager and assiduous readers of all such books and periodicals as do not presuppose special knowledge in some branch of science or learning, while the number who have devoted themselves to some special study and attained proficiency in it is large. They love society, and now there is hardly a village that has not its women’s club where papers are read and all sorts of current questions discussed, often with the incidental result of enabling those of slender means but cultivated tastes to come into social contact with those of higher position. The fondness for sentiment, especially moral and domestic sentiment, which is often observed as characterizing American taste in literature, seems to be mainly due to the influence of women, for they form not only the larger part of the reading public, but an independent-minded part, not disposed to adopt the canons laid down by men, and their preferences count for more in the opinions and predilections of the whole nation than is the case in England. Similarly the number of women who write is infinitely larger in America than in Europe. Fiction, essays, and poetry are naturally their favourite provinces. In poetry more particularly, many whose names are quite unknown in Europe have attained widespread fame.

Someone may ask how far the differences between the position of women in America and their position in Europe are due to democracy, or if not to this, then to what other cause?

They are due to democratic feeling in so far as they spring from the notion that all men are free and equal, possessed of certain inalienable rights, and owing certain corresponding duties. This root idea of democracy cannot stop at defining men as male human beings, any more than it could ultimately stop at defining them as white human beings. For many years the Americans believed in equality with the pride of discoverers as well as with the fervour of apostles. Accustomed to apply it to all sorts and conditions of men, they were naturally the first to apply it to women also; not, indeed, as respects politics, but in all the social as well as legal relations of life. Democracy is in America more respectful of the individual, less disposed to infringe his freedom or subject him to any sort of legal or family control, than it has shown itself in continental Europe, and this regard for the individual enured to the benefit of women. Of the other causes that have worked in the same direction two may be mentioned. One is the usage of the Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, under which a woman who is a member of the congregation has the same rights in choosing a deacon, elder, or pastor, as a man has. Another is the fact that among the westward-moving settlers women were at first few in number, and were therefore treated with special respect. The habit then formed was retained as the communities grew, and propagated itself all over the country.

What have been the results on the character and usefulness of women themselves?

On the whole favourable. Though critics dwell on some drawbacks, it is a gain that American women have been admitted to a wider life and more variety of career than is enjoyed in continental Europe. Thus there has been produced a sort of independence and a capacity of self-help which are increasingly valuable as the number of unmarried women increases. Many resources are now open to an American woman who has to lead a solitary life, not merely in the way of employment, but for the occupation of her mind and tastes; while her education has not rendered the American wife less competent for the discharge of household duties.

How has the nation at large been affected by the development of this new type of womanhood, or rather perhaps of this variation on the English type?

If women have on the whole gained, it is clear that the nation gains through them. As mothers they mould the character of their children, while the function of forming the habits of society and determining its moral tone rests greatly in their hands. But there is reason to think that the influence of the American system tells directly for good upon men as well as upon the whole community. The respect for women which every American man either feels or is obliged by public sentiment to profess has a wholesome effect on his conduct and character, and serves to check the cynicism which some other peculiarities of the country foster. The nation as a whole owes to the active benevolence of its women, and their zeal in promoting social reforms, benefits which the customs of continental Europe would scarcely have permitted women to confer. Europeans have of late years begun to render a well-deserved admiration to the brightness and vivacity of American ladies. Those who know the work they have done and are doing in many a noble cause will admire still more their energy, their courage, their self-devotion. No country seems to owe more to its women than America does, nor to owe to them so much of what is best in social institutions and in the beliefs that govern conduct.

chapter 113

Equality

The United States are deemed all the world over to be preeminently the land of equality. This was the first feature which struck Europeans when they began, after the peace of 1815 had left them time to look beyond the Atlantic, to feel curious about the phenomena of a new society. This was the great theme of Tocqueville’s description, and the starting point of his speculations; this has been the most constant boast of the Americans themselves, who have believed their liberty more complete than that of any other people, because equality has been more fully blended with it. Yet some philosophers say that equality is impossible, and others, who express themselves more precisely, insist that distinctions of rank are so inevitable, that however you try to expunge them, they are sure to reappear. Before we discuss this question, let us see in what senses the word is used.

First there is legal equality, including both what one may call passive or private equality, i.e., the equal possession of civil private rights by all inhabitants, and active or public equality, the equal possession by all of rights to a share in the government, such as the electoral franchise and eligibility to public office. Both kinds of political equality exist in America, in the amplest measure, and may be dismissed from the present discussion.

Next there is the equality of material conditions, that is, of wealth, and all that wealth gives; there is the equality of education and intelligence; there is the equality of social status or rank; and there is (what comes near to, but is not exactly the same as, this last) the equality of estimation, i.e., of the value which men set upon one another, whatever be the elements that come into this value, whether wealth, or education, or official rank, or social rank, or any other species of excellence. In how many and which of these senses of the word does equality exist in the United States?

Not as regards material conditions. Till about the middle of last century there were no great fortunes in America, few large fortunes, no poverty. Now there is some poverty (though only in a few places can it be called pauperism), many large fortunes, and a greater number of gigantic fortunes than in any other country in the world. The class of persons who are passably well off but not rich is much larger than in the great countries of Europe. Between the houses, the dress, and the way of life of these persons, and those of the richer sort, there is less difference than in Europe. The very rich do not (except in a few places) make an ostentatious display of their wealth, because they have no means of doing so, and a visitor is therefore apt to overrate the extent to which equality of wealth, and of material conditions generally, still prevails. The most remarkable phenomenon of the last half century has been the appearance, not only of those few colossal millionaires who fill the public eye, but of a crowd of millionaires of the second order, men with fortunes ranging from $5,000,000 to $20,000,000. At a seaside resort like Newport, where one sees the finished luxury of the villas, and counts the well-appointed equipages, with their superb horses, which turn out in the afternoon, one gets some impression of the vast and growing wealth of the Eastern cities. But through the country generally there is little to mark out the man with an income of $100,000 a year from the man of $20,000, as he is marked out in England by his country house with its park, or in France by the opportunities for display which Paris affords. The number of these fortunes seems likely to go on increasing, for they are due not merely to the sudden development of the West, with the chances of making vast sums by land speculation, or in railway construction, but to the field for doing business on a great scale, which the size of the country presents. Where a merchant or manufacturer in France or England could realize thousands, an American, operating more boldly, and on this far wider theatre, may realize tens of thousands. We may therefore expect these inequalities of wealth to grow; nor will even the habit of equal division among children keep them down, for families are often small, and though some of those who inherit wealth may renounce business, others will pursue it, since the attractions of other kinds of life are fewer than in Europe. Politics are less exciting, there is no great landholding class with the duties towards tenants and neighbours which an English squire may, if he pleases, usefully discharge; the pursuit of collecting pictures or other objects of curiosity implies frequent visits to Europe, and although the killing of birds prevails in the Middle states and the killing of deer in the West, this rather barbarous form of pleasure is likely in time to die out from a civilized people. Other kinds of what is called “sport” no doubt remain, such as horse racing, eagerly pursued in the form of trotting matches,1 “rushing round” in an automobile, and the manlier amusements of yacht racing, rowing, and baseball, but these can be followed only during part of the year, and some of them only by the young. To lead a life of so-called pleasure gives much more trouble in an American city than in Paris or Vienna or London. Accordingly, while great fortunes will continue to be made, they will be less easily and quickly spent than in Europe, and one may surmise that the equality of material conditions, almost universal in the eighteenth century, still general in the middle of the nineteenth will more and more diminish by the growth of a very rich class at one end of the line, and of a very poor class at the other end.2

As respects education, the profusion of superior as well as elementary schools tends to raise the mass to a somewhat higher point than in Europe, while the stimulus of life being keener and the habit of reading more general, the number of persons one finds on the same general level of brightness, keenness, and a superficially competent knowledge of common facts, whether in science, history, geography, or literature, is extremely large. This general level tends to rise. But the level of exceptional attainment in that small but increasing class who have studied at the best native universities or in Europe, and who pursue learning and science either as a profession or as a source of pleasure, rises faster than does the general level of the multitude, so that in this regard also it appears that equality has diminished and will diminish further.

So far we have been on comparatively smooth and easy ground. Equality of wealth is a concrete thing; equality of intellectual possession and resource is a thing which can be perceived and gauged. Of social equality, of distinctions of standing and estimation in private life, it is far more difficult to speak, and in what follows I speak with some hesitation.

One thing, and perhaps one thing only, may be asserted with confidence. There is no rank in America, that is to say, no external and recognized stamp marking one man as entitled to any social privileges, or to deference and respect from others. No man is entitled to think himself better than his fellows, or to expect any exceptional consideration to be shown by them to him. Except in the national capital, there is no such thing as a recognized order of precedence, either on public occasions or at a private party, save that yielded to a few official persons, such as the governor and chief judges of a state within that state, as well as to the president and vice-president, the Speaker of the House, the federal senators, the judges of the Supreme Federal Court, and the members of the president’s cabinet everywhere, through the Union. In fact, the idea of a regular “rule of precedence” displeases the Americans,3 and one finds them slow to believe that the application of such rules in Europe gives no offence to persons who possess no conventional rank, but may be personally older or more distinguished than those who have it.

What, then, is the effect or influence for social purposes of such distinctions as do exist between men, distinctions of birth, of wealth, of official position, of intellectual eminence?

To be sprung from an ancient stock, or from a stock which can count persons of eminence among its ancestors, is of course a satisfaction to the man himself. There is at present almost a passion among Americans for genealogical researches. A good many families can trace themselves back to English families of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and of course a great many more profess to do so. For a man’s ancestors to have come over in the Mayflower is in America much what their having come over with William the Conqueror used to be in England and is often claimed on equally flimsy grounds. The descendants of any of the revolutionary heroes, such as John Adams, Edmund Randolph, Alexander Hamilton, and the descendants of any famous man of colonial times, such as the early governors of Massachusetts from William Endicott downwards, or of Jonathan Edwards, or of Eliot, the apostle of the Indians, are regarded by their neighbours with a certain amount of interest, and their legitimate pride in such an ancestry excites no disapproval.4 In the Eastern cities, and at fashionable summer resorts one begins to see carriages with armorial bearings on their panels, but most people appear to disapprove or ridicule this as a piece of Anglomania, more likely to be practised by a parvenu than by the scion of a really old family. Virginians used to set much store by their pedigrees, and the letters F.F.V. (First Families of Virginia) had become a sort of jest against persons pluming themselves on their social position in the Old Dominion.5 Since the war, however, which shattered old Virginian society from its foundations, one hears little of such pretensions.6

The fault which Americans are most frequently accused of is the worship of wealth. The amazing fuss which is made about very rich men, the descriptions of their doings, the speculation as to their intentions, the gossip about their private life, lend colour to the reproach. He who builds up a huge fortune, especially if he does it suddenly, is no doubt a sort of hero, because an enormous number of men have the same ambition. Having done best what millions are trying to do, he is discussed, admired, and envied in the same way as the captain of a cricket eleven is at an English school, or the stroke of the university boat at Oxford or Cambridge. If he be a great financier, or the owner of a great railroad or a great newspaper, he exercises vast power, and is therefore well worth courting by those who desire his help or would avert his enmity. Admitting all this, it may seem a paradox to observe that a millionaire has a better and easier social career open to him in England than in America. Nevertheless there is a sense in which this is true. In America, if his private character be bad, if he be mean, or openly immoral, or personally vulgar, or dishonest, the best society will keep its doors closed against him. In England great wealth, skilfully employed, will more readily force these doors to open. For in England great wealth can, by using the appropriate methods, practically buy rank from those who bestow it; or by obliging persons whose position enables them to command fashionable society, can induce them to stand sponsors for the upstart, and force him into society, a thing which no person in America has the power of doing. To effect such a stroke in England the rich man must of course have stopped short of positive frauds, that is, of such frauds as could be proved in court. But he may be still distrusted and disliked by the elite of the commercial world, he may be vulgar and ill-educated, and indeed have nothing to recommend him except his wealth and his willingness to spend it in providing amusement for fashionable people. All this will not prevent him from becoming a baronet, or possibly a peer, and thereby acquiring a position of assured dignity which he can transmit to his offspring. The existence of a system of artificial rank enables a stamp to be given to base metal in Europe which cannot be given in a thoroughly republican country.7 The feeling of the American public towards the very rich is, so far as a stranger can judge, one of curiosity and wonder rather than of respect. There is less snobbishness shown towards them than in England. They are admired as a famous runner or a jockey is admired, and the talents they have shown, say, in railroad management or in finance, are felt to reflect lustre on the nation. But they do not necessarily receive either flattery or social deference, and sometimes, where it can be alleged that they have won their wealth as the leading spirits in monopolistic combinations, they are made targets for attack, though they may have done nothing more than what other businessmen have attempted, with less ability and less success.

The persons to whom official rank gives importance are very few indeed, being for the nation at large only about one hundred persons at the top of the federal government, and in each state less than a dozen of its highest state functionaries. For these state functionaries, indeed, the respect shown is extremely scanty, and much more official than personal. A high federal officer, a senator, or justice of the Supreme Court, or cabinet minister, is conspicuous while he holds his place, and is of course a personage in any private society he may enter; but less so than a corresponding official would be in Europe. A simple member of the House of Representatives is nobody. Even men of the highest official rank do not give themselves airs on the score of their position. Long ago, in Washington, I was taken to be presented to the then head of the United States Army, a great soldier whose fame all the world knows. We found him standing at a desk in a bare room in the War Department, at work with one clerk. While he was talking to us the door of the room was pushed open, and there appeared the figure of a Western sightseer belonging to what Europeans would call the lower middle class, followed by his wife and sister, who were “doing” Washington. Perceiving that the room was occupied they began to retreat, but the commander in chief called them back. “Walk in, ladies,” he said. “You can look around. You won’t disturb me; make yourselves at home.”

Intellectual attainment does not excite much notice till it becomes eminent, that is to say, till it either places its possessor in a conspicuous position, such as that of president of one of the greatest universities, or till it has made him well known to the world as a preacher, or writer, or scientific discoverer. When this kind of eminence has been reached, it receives, I think, more respect than anywhere in Europe, except possibly in Italy, where the interest in learned men, or poets, or artists, seems to be greater than anywhere else in Europe.8 A famous writer or divine is known by name to a far greater number of persons in America than would know a similar person in any European country. He is one of the glories of the country. There is no artificial rank to cast him into the shade. He is possibly less famous than the railroad kings or manipulators of the stock markets; but he excites a different kind of sentiment; and people are willing to honour him in a way, sometimes distasteful to himself, which would not be applied to the millionaire except by those who sought to gain something from him.

Perhaps the best way of explaining how some of the differences above mentioned, in wealth or official position or intellectual eminence, affect social equality is by reverting to what was called, a few pages back, equality of estimation—the idea which men form of other men as compared with themselves. It is in this that the real sense of equality comes out. In America men hold others to be at bottom exactly the same as themselves.9 If a man is enormously rich, or if he is a great orator, like Daniel Webster or Henry Ward Beecher, or a great soldier like Ulysses S. Grant, or a great writer like R. W. Emerson, or president, so much the better for him. He is an object of interest, perhaps of admiration, possibly even of reverence. But he is deemed to be still of the same flesh and blood as other men. The admiration felt for him may be a reason for going to see him and longing to shake hands with him, a longing frequent in America. But it is not a reason for bowing down to him, or addressing him in deferential terms, or treating him as if he was porcelain and yourself only earthenware.10 In this respect there is, I think, a difference, slight but perceptible, between the sentiment of equality as it exists in the United States, and as one finds it in France and Switzerland, the countries of the Old World where (if we except Norway, which has never had an aristocracy) social equality has made the greatest progress. In France and Switzerland there lingers a kind of feeling as if the old noblesse were not quite like other men. The Swiss peasant, with all his manly independence, has in many cantons a touch of instinctive reverence for the old families; or perhaps, in some other cantons, a touch of jealousy which makes him desire to exclude their members from office, because he feels that they still think themselves better than he is. Nothing like this is possible in America, where the very notion of such distinctions excites a wondering curiosity as to what sort of creature the titled noble of Europe can be.

The total absence of rank and the universal acceptance of equality do not however prevent the existence of grades and distinctions in society which, though they may find no tangible expression, are sometimes as sharply drawn as in Europe. Except in the newer parts of the West, those who deem themselves ladies and gentlemen draw just the same line between themselves and the multitude as is drawn in England, and draw it in much the same way. The nature of a man’s occupation, his education, his manners and breeding, his income, his connections, all come into view in determining whether he is in this narrow sense of the word “a gentleman,” almost as they would in England,11 though in most parts of the United States personal qualities count for rather more than in England, and occupation for hardly anything. The word is equally indefinable in both countries, but in America the expression “not quite a lady” seems to be less frequently employed. One is told, however, that the son of cultivated parents would not like to enter a retail store; and even in a Western city like Detroit the best people will say of a party that it was “very mixed.” In some of the older cities society was, till the sudden growth of huge fortunes towards the end of last century, as exclusive as in the more old-fashioned English counties, the “best set” considering itself very select indeed. In such a city I remember to have heard a family belonging to the best set, which is mostly to be found in a particular quarter of the city, speak of the inhabitants of a handsome suburb two miles away just as Belgravians might speak of Islington; and the son of the family who, having made in Europe the acquaintance of some of the dwellers in this suburb, had gone to a ball there, was questioned by his sisters about their manners and customs much as if he had returned from visiting a tribe in Central Africa. On inquiry I discovered that these North Side people were as rich and doubtless thought themselves as cultivated as the people of my friends’quarter. But all the city knew that the latter were the “best set.” People used to say that this exclusiveness spreads steadily from East to West, and that before long there would be such sets in all the greater cities. So indeed there are sets, but great wealth now so generally secures entrance to them that they can scarcely be called exclusive.

Europeans have been known to ask whether the United States do not suffer from the absence of a hereditary nobility. As may be supposed, such a question excites mirth in America; it is as if you were to offer them a court and an established church. They remark, with truth, that since Pitt in England and the Napoleons in France prostituted hereditary titles, these have ceased to be either respectable or useful. “They do not,” say the Americans, “suggest antiquity, for the English families that enjoy them are mostly new; they are not associated, like the ancient titles, with the history of your nation; they are merely a prize offered to wealth, the expression of a desire for gilding that plutocracy which has replaced the ancient aristocracy of your country. Seeing how little service hereditary nobility renders in maintaining the standard either of manners, or morals, or honour, or public duty, few sensible men would create it in any European country where it did not exist; much less then should we to dream of creating it in America, which possesses none of the materials or conditions which could make it tolerable. If a peerage is purchaseable even in England, where the dignity of the older nobility might have suggested some care in bestowal, purchaseable not so openly as in Portugal or a German principality, but practically purchaseable by party services and by large subscriptions to public purposes, much more would it be purchaseable here, where there are no traditions to break down, where wealth accumulates rapidly, and the wealthy seek every avenue for display. Titles in this country would be simply an additional prize offered to wealth and ambition. They could not be respected. They would make us as snobbish as you are.” A European observer will not quarrel with this judgment. There is a growing disposition in America, as everywhere else, to relish and make the most of such professional or official titles as can be had; it is a harmless way of trying to relieve the monotony of the world. If there be, as no doubt there is, less disposition than in England to run after and pay court to the great or the fashionable, this is perhaps due not to any superior virtue, but to the absence of those opportunities and temptations which their hereditary titles and other social institutions set before the English. It would be the very wantonness of folly to create in the new country what most thinking people would gladly be rid of in the old one.

Another question is more serious and less easily answered. What is the effect of social equality upon manners? Many causes go to the making of manners, as one may see by noting how much better they are in some parts of Europe than in other parts where nevertheless the structure of society is equally aristocratic, or democratic, as the case may be. One must therefore be careful not to ascribe to this source only such peculiarities as America shows.12 On the whole, bearing in mind that the English race has less than some other races of that quickness of perception and sympathy which goes far to make manners good, the Americans have gained more than they have lost by equality. The upper class does not lose in grace, and the humbler class gains in independence. The manners of the “best people” are exactly those of England, with a thought more of consideration towards inferiors and of frankness towards equals. Among the masses there is, generally speaking, as much real courtesy and good nature as anywhere else in the world.13 There is less outward politeness than in some parts of Europe, Portugal for instance, or Tuscany, or Sweden. There is a certain coolness or off-handedness which at first annoys the European visitor, who still thinks himself “a superior”; but when he perceives that it is not meant for insolence, and that native Americans do not notice it, he learns to acquiesce. Perhaps the worst manners are those of persons dressed in some rag of authority. The railroad car-conductor has a bad name; but personally I have always been well treated by him, and remember with pleasure one on a Southern railroad (an ex-Confederate soldier) who did the honours of his car with a dignified courtesy worthy of those Hungarian nobles who are said to have the best manners in Europe. The hotel clerk used to be supercilious, but when one frankly admitted his superiority, his patronage became friendly, and he would even condescend to interest himself in making your stay in the city agreeable. One finds most courtesy among the rural population of New England and the Middle states, least among the recent immigrants in the cities and the unsettled population of the West. However, the most material point to remark is the improvement of recent years. The concurrent testimony of European travellers, including both admirers and detractors of democracy, proves that manners must have been disagreeable in the days when Dickens and Lyell travelled through the country, and one finds nowadays an equally general admission that the Americans are as pleasant to one another and to strangers as are the French or the Germans or the English. The least agreeable feature to the visitors of former years, an incessant vaunting of their own country and disparagement of others, has disappeared, and the tinge of self-assertion which the sense of equality used to give is now but faintly noticeable.

chapter 114

The Influence of Democracy on Thought

Two opposite theories regarding the influence of democratic institutions on intellectual activity have found currency. One theory extols them because they stimulate the mind of a people, not only sharpening men’s wits by continual struggle and unrest, but giving to each citizen a sense of his own powers and duties in the world, which spurs him on to exertions in ever-widening fields. This theory is commonly applied to Athens and other democracies of the ancient world, as contrasted with Sparta and the oligarchic cities, whose intellectual production was scanty or altogether wanting. It compares the Rome of Cicero, Lucretius, and Catullus, and the Augustan age, whose great figures were born under the Republic, with the vaster but comparatively sterile Roman world of Marcus Aurelius or Constantine, when freedom had long since vanished. It notes the outburst of literary and artistic splendour that fell in the later age of the republics of mediæval Italy, and dwells with especial pleasure on the achievements of Florence, the longest-lived and the most glorious of the free commonwealths of Italy.

According to the other theory, democracy is the child of ignorance, the parent of dulness and conceit. The opinion of the greatest number being the universal standard, everything is reduced to the level of vulgar minds. Originality is stunted, variety disappears, no man thinks for himself, or, if he does, fears to express what he thinks. A drear pall of monotony covers the sky.

• Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall
• And universal darkness buries all.

This doctrine seems to date from the appearance of Tocqueville’s book, though his professed disciples have pushed it much further than his words warrant. It is really an a priori doctrine, drawn from imagining what the consequences of a complete equality of material conditions and political powers ought to be. But it claims to rest upon the observed phenomena of the United States, which, in the middle of last century, were still the only great modern democracy; and it was with reference to the United States that it was enunciated by Mr. Robert Lowe in one of those speeches of 1866 which so greatly impressed his contemporaries.

Both these theories will be found on examination to be baseless. Both, so far as they are a priori theories, are fanciful; both, in so far as they purport to rest upon the facts of history, err by regarding one set of facts only, and ignoring a great number of concomitant conditions which have probably more to do with the result than the few conditions which have been arbitrarily taken to be sufficient causes. None of the Greek republics was a democracy in the modern sense, for all rested upon slavery; nor, indeed, can the name be applied, except at passing moments, to the Italian cities. Many circumstances besides their popular government combined to place the imperishable crown of literary and artistic glory upon the brows of the city of the Violet and the city of the Lily. So also the view that a democratic land is necessarily a land of barren monotony, while unsound even as a deduction from general principles, is still more unsound in its assumption of certain phenomena as true of America, and in the face it puts on the phenomena it has assumed. The theorists who have propounded it give us, like Daniel, the dream as well as their interpretation of it. But the dream is one of their own inventing; and such as it is, it is wrongly interpreted.

It is a common mistake to exaggerate the influence of forms of government. As there are historians and politicians who, when they come across a trait of national character for which no obvious explanation presents itself, set it down to “race,” so there are writers and speakers who, too indolent to examine the whole facts of the case, or too ill-trained to feel the need of such examination, pounce upon the political institutions of a country as the easiest way to account for its social and intellectual, perhaps even for its moral and religious peculiarities. Few problems are in reality more complex than the relation between the political and the intellectual life of a country; few things more difficult to distinguish than the influences respectively attributable to an equality of political rights and powers on the one hand, and an equality of material and social conditions on the other. It is commonly assumed that democracy and equality go hand in hand, but as one may have popular government along with enormous differences of wealth and dissimilarities in social usage, so also one may have social equality under a despot. Doubtless, when social and political equality go hand in hand they intensify one another; but when inequality of material conditions becomes marked, social life changes, and as social phenomena become more complex their analysis becomes more difficult.

Reverting to the two theories from which we set out, it may be said that the United States furnish little support to either. American democracy has certainly produced no age of Pericles. Neither has it dwarfed literature and led a wretched people, so dull as not even to realize their dulness, into a barren plain of featureless mediocrity. To ascribe the deficiencies, such as they are, of art and culture in America, solely or even mainly to her form of government, is not less absurd than to ascribe, as many Americans of what I may call the trumpeting school do, her marvelous material progress to the same cause. It is not democracy that has paid off a gigantic debt and raised Chicago out of a swamp. Neither is it democracy that has denied her philosophers like Burke and poets like Wordsworth.

Most writers who have dealt with these matters have not only laid more upon the shoulders of democratic government than it ought to bear, but have preferred abstract speculations to the humbler task of ascertaining and weighing the facts. They have spun ingenious theories about democracy as the source of this or that, or whatever it pleased them to assume; they have not tried to determine by a wide induction what specific results appear in countries which, differing in other respects, agree in being democratically governed. Such speculations may have their use in suggesting to us what phenomena we ought to look for in democratic countries; but if any positive results are to be reached, they must be reached by carefully verifying the intellectual phenomena of more than one country, and establishing an unmistakable relation between them and the political institutions under which they prevail.

If someone, starting from the current conception of democracy, were to say that in a democratic nation we should find a disposition to bold and unbridled speculations, sparing neither theology nor morals, a total absence of rule, tradition, and precedent, each man thinking and writing as responsible to no criticism, “every poet his own Aristotle,” a taste for strong effects and garish colours, valuing force rather than fineness, grandeur rather than beauty, a vigorous, hasty, impetuous style of speaking and writing, a grandiose, and perhaps sensational art: he would say what would be quite as natural and reasonable a priori as most of the pictures given us of democratic societies. Yet many of the suggested features would be the opposite of those which America presents.

Every such picture must be fanciful. He who starts from so simple and (so to speak) bare a conception as that of equal civil rights and equal political powers vested in every member of the community cannot but have recourse to his fancy in trying to body forth the results of this principle. Let anyone study the portrait of the democratic man and democratic city which the first and greatest of all the hostile critics of democracy has left us,1 and compare it with the very different descriptions of life and culture under a popular government in which European speculation has disported itself since Tocqueville’s time. He will find each theory plausible in the abstract, and each equally unlike the facts which contemporary America sets before us.

Let us, bidding farewell to fancy, try to discover what are now the salient intellectual features of the mass of the native population in the United States.

As there is much difference of opinion regarding them, I present with diffidence the following list:

• 1. A desire to be abreast of the best thought and work of the world everywhere, to have every form of literature and art adequately represented, and excellent of its kind, so that America shall be felt to hold her own among the nations.
• 2. A fondness for bold and striking effects, a preference for large generalizations and theories which have an air of completeness.
• 3. An absence among the multitude of refined taste, and disposition to be attracted rather by general brilliance than by delicacy of workmanship; a want of mellowness and inadequate perception of the difference between first-rate work in a quiet style and mere flatness.
• 4. Little respect for canons or traditions, accompanied by the notion that new conditions must of necessity produce new ideas.
• 5. An undervaluing of special knowledge or experience, except perhaps in the sphere of applied science and commerce, an idea that an able man can do one thing pretty much as well as another, as Dr. Johnson thought that if he had taken to politics he would have been as distinguished therein as he was in poetry.
• 6. An admiration for literary or scientific eminence, an enthusiasm for anything that can be called genius, with an undue eagerness to discover it.
• 7. A passion for novelties.
• 8. An intellectual impatience, and desire for quick and patent results.
• 9. An overvaluing of the judgments of the multitude; a disposition to judge by newspaper success work which has not been produced for the sake of success.
• 10. A tendency to mistake bigness for greatness.

Contrariwise, if we regard not the people generally but the most cultivated class, we shall find, together with some of the above-mentioned qualities, others which indicate a reaction against the popular tendencies. This class relishes subtlety of thought and highly finished art, whether in literature or painting. Afraid of crudity and vagueness, it is prone to devote itself to minute and careful study of subjects unattractive to the masses.

Of these characteristics of the people at large some may at first sight seem inconsistent with others, as for instance the admiration for intellectual gifts with the undervaluing of special knowledge; nevertheless it could be shown that both are discoverable in Americans as compared with Englishmen. The former admire intelligence more than the latter do; but they defer less to special competence. However, assuming for the moment that there is something true in these suggestions, which it would take too long to attempt to establish one by one, be it observed that very few of them can be directly connected with democratic government. Even these few might take a different form in a differently situated democracy. The seventh and eighth seem due to the general intelligence and education of the people, while the remainder, though not wholly uninfluenced by the habits which popular government tends to breed, must be mainly ascribed to the vast size of the country, the vast numbers and homogeneity of its native white population, the prevalence of social equality, a busy industrialism, a restless changefulness of occupation, and the absence of a leisured class dominant in matters of taste—conditions that have little or nothing to do with political institutions. The prevalence of evangelical Protestantism has been quite as important a factor in the intellectual life of the nation as its form of government.

Someone may say—I wish to state the view fairly though I do not entirely agree with it—that assuming the foregoing analysis to be correct, the influence of democracy, apart from its tendency to secure an ample provision of education, is discernible in two points. It produces self-confidence and self-complacency, national and personal, with the result both of stimulating a certain amount of thought and of preventing the thought that is so produced from being subjected to proper tests. Ambition and self-esteem will call out what might have lain dormant, but they will hinder a nation as well as a man from duly judging its own work, and in so far will retard its progress. Those who are naturally led to trust and obey common sense and the numerical majority in matters of state, overvalue the judgment of the majority in other matters. Now the judgment of the masses is a poor standard for the thinker or the artist to set before him. It may narrow his view and debase his style. He fears to tread in new paths or express unpopular opinions; or if he despises the multitude he may take refuge in an acrid cynicism. Where the masses rule, a writer cannot but think of the masses, and as they do not appreciate refinements he will eschew these, making himself at all hazards intelligible to the common mind, and seeking to attract by broad, perhaps coarsely broad, effects, the hasty reader, who passes by Walter Scott or Thackeray to fasten on the latest sketch of fashionable life or mysterious crime.

There is some force in this way of putting the case. Though democracy tends to produce a superficially active public, and perhaps also a jubilant and self-confident public, yet there may be a democratic people which shall be neither fond of letters nor disposed to trust its own judgment and taste in judging them. Much will depend on the other features of the situation. In the United States the cultivated public increases rapidly, and the very reaction which goes on within it against the defects of the multitude becomes an important factor. All things considered, I doubt whether democracy tends to discourage originality, subtlety, refinement, in thought and in expression, whether literary or artistic. Monotony or vulgarity under any and every form of government have appeared and may appear. The causes of these things lie deeper. Art and literature have been base and vulgar under absolute monarchies and under oligarchies. For two centuries the society of Vienna was one of the most polished and aristocratic societies in Europe. Yet what society could have been intellectually duller or less productive? Venice was almost the only Italian city of the first rank that contributed nothing to the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the habits of popular government which open a career to talent in public life, open it in literature also. No man need lean on a faction or propitiate a coterie. A pure clear voice with an unwonted message may at first fail to make itself heard over the din of competitors for popular favour; but once heard, it and its message will probably be judged on their own merits.

Passing away from this question as to the supposed narcotic power of democracy, the further question may be asked, What is the distinctive note of democratic thought and art as they actually appear in the United States? What is the peculiar quality or flavour which springs from this political element in their condition? I cannot tell. I find no such note. I have searched for it, and, as the Americans say, it is hard work looking for what is not there. Some Europeans and many Americans profess to have found it, and will tell you that this or that peculiarity of American literature is due to democracy. No doubt, if you take individual writers, you may discover in several of them something, though not always the same thing, which savours of democratic feeling and tinges their way of regarding human life. But that is not enough. What must be shown is a general quality running through the majority of these writers—a quality which is at once recognized as racy of the soil, and which can be traced back to the democratic element which the soil undoubtedly contains. Has any such quality been shown? That there is a distinctive note in many—not, perhaps, in all—of the best American books may be admitted. It may be caught by ears not the most delicate. But is this note the voice of democracy? Is it even the voice of democracy and equality combined? There is a difference, slight yet perceptible, in the part which both sentiment and humour play in American books, when we compare them with English books of equivalent strength. The humour has a vein of oddity, and the contrast between the soft copiousness of the sentiment and the rigid lines of lingering Puritanism which it suffuses, is rarely met with in England. Perhaps there is less repose in the American style; there is certainly a curious unrestfulness in the effort, less common in English writers, to bend metaphors to unwonted uses. But are these differences, with others I might mention—and, after all, they are slight—due to any cause connected with politics? Are they not rather due to a mixed and curiously intertwined variety of other causes which have moulded the American mind during the last two centuries? American imagination has produced nothing more conspicuously original than the romances of Hawthorne. If anyone says that he finds something in them which he remembers in no previous English writer, we know what is meant and probably agree. But can it be said that there is anything distinctively American in Hawthorne, that is to say, that his specific quality is of a kind which reappears in other American writers? The most peculiar, and therefore I suppose the most characteristically American school of thought, has been what used to be called the Concord or Transcendental school of 1830 to 1860; among the writings produced by which those of Emerson and Thoreau are best known in Europe. Were the authors of that school distinctively democratic either in the colour of their thought, or in its direction, or in the style which expresses it? And if so, can the same democratic tinge be discerned in the authors of today? I doubt it; but such matters do not admit of proof or disproof. One must leave them to the literary feeling of the reader.

A very distinguished American man of letters once said to me that he hated nothing so much as to hear people talk about American literature. He meant, I think, that those who did so were puzzling themselves unnecessarily to find something which belonged to a new country, and a democratic country, and were forgetting or ignoring the natural relation of works of imagination and thought produced in America to books written by men of the same race in the Old World before and since 1776.

So far, then, as regards American literature generally, there may be discovered in it something that is distinctive yet little (if anything) specifically democratic. Nor if we look at the various departments of speculative thought, such as metaphysics and theology, or at those which approach nearer to the exact sciences, such as economics and jurisprudence, shall we find that the character and substance of the doctrines propounded bear marked traces of a democratic influence. Why should we be surprised at this, seeing that the influence of a form of government is only one among many influences, even where a nation stands alone, and creates a literature distinctively local? But can books written in the United States be deemed to constitute a literature locally American in the same sense as the literatures of France and Germany, of Italy and Russia, belong to those countries? For the purposes of thought and art the United States is a part of England, and England is a part of America. Many English books are more widely read and strike deeper to the heart in America than in England. Some American books have a like fortune in England. Differences there are, but differences how trivial compared with the resemblances in temper, in feeling, in susceptibility to certain forms of moral and physical beauty, in the general view of life and nature, in the disposition to revere and be swayed by the same matchless models of that elder literature which both branches of the English race can equally claim. American literature does not today differ more from English literature than the Scottish writers of the later eighteenth century—Burns, Scott, Adam Smith, Reid, in later eighteenth century Hume, Robertson—differed from their English contemporaries. There was a fondness for abstractions and generalizations in the Scottish prose writers; there was in the Scottish poets a bloom and fragrance of mountain heather which gave to their work a charm of freshness and singularity, like that which a faint touch of local accent gives to the tongue of an orator. But they were English as well as Scottish writers: they belong to English literature and make part of its glory to the world beyond. So Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and those on whom their mantle has fallen, belong to England as well as to America; and English writers, as they more and more realize the vastness of the American public they address, will more and more feel themselves to be American as well as English, and will often find in America not only a larger but a more responsive audience.

We have been here concerned not to discuss the merits and estimate the place of American thinkers and writers, but only to examine the relation in which they stand to their political and social environment. That relation, however, sets before us one more question. The English-speaking population of the United States is more than double that of the United Kingdom. The white part of it is a more educated population, in which a greater number of persons come under the influence of books and might therefore be stirred up to intellectual production. Why then does it not make more important contributions to the common literary wealth of the race? Is there a want of creative power? And if so, to what is the want due?

This is a question frequently propounded. I propose to consider it in the chapter which follows.

chapter 115

Creative Intellectual Power

There is a street in Florence on each side of which stand statues of the famous Florentines of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ghiberti, Machiavelli, Michael Angelo, and others scarcely less illustrious, all natives of the little city which in their days had never a population of more than seventy thousand souls.1 No one can walk between these rows of world-famous figures, matched by no other city of the modern world, without asking himself what cause determined so much of the highest genius to this one spot; why in Italy herself populous Milan and Naples and Venice have no such list to show; why the succession of greatness stopped with the beginning of the sixteenth century and has never been resumed? Questions substantially the same constantly rise to the mind in reading the history of other countries. Why did England produce no first-rate poet in the two stirring centuries between Chaucer and Shakespeare, and again in the century and a half between Milton’s birth and Wordsworth’s? Why have epochs of comparative sterility more than once fallen upon Germany and France? And why has music sometimes reached its highest pitch of excellence at moments when the other arts were languishing? Why does the sceptre of intellectual and artistic leadership pass now to one great nation, now to another, inconstant and unpredictable as are the shifting winds?

These questions touch the deepest and most complex problems of history; and neither historian nor physiologist has yet been able to throw any real light upon them. Even the commonplace remark that times of effort and struggle tend to develop an unusually active intellectual movement and therewith to awaken or nourish rare geniuses, is not altogether true; for some of the geniuses have arisen at moments when there was no excitement to call them forth, and at other times seasons of storm and stress have raised up no one capable of directing the efforts or interpreting the feelings of his generation. One thing, however, is palpable: numbers have nothing to do with the matter. There is no average of a man of genius to so many thousands or millions of persons. Out of the seventy thousand of Florence there arise during two centuries more men of undying fame than out of huge London during the last three centuries. Even the stock of solid second-class ability does not necessarily increase with increasing numbers; while as to those rare combinations of gifts which produce poetry or philosophy of the first order, they are revealed no more frequently in a great European nation now than they were in a Semitic tribe or a tiny Greek city twenty-five or thirty centuries ago.

There is therefore no reason why the absence of brilliant genius among the ninety millions in the United States should excite any surprise; we might as well wonder that there is no Goethe or Schiller or Kant or Hegel in the Germany of today, so much more populous and better educated than the Germany of their birthtime. It is not to be made a reproach against America that men like Tennyson or Darwin have not been born there. “The wind bloweth where it listeth;” the rarest gifts appear no one can tell why or how. In broad France a century ago no man was found able to spring upon the neck of the Revolution and turn it to his will. Fate brought her favourite from a wild Italian island, that had but just passed under the yoke of the nation to which it gave a master.

The question we have to ask as regards the United States is therefore not why it has given us few men of the highest and rarest distinction, but whether it has failed to produce its fair share of talents of the second rank, that is, of men capable of taking a lead in all the great branches of literary or artistic or scientific activity, men who instruct and delight their own generation, though possibly future generations may not hold all of them in remembrance.

Have fewer men of this order adorned the roll of fame in the United States, during the years since 1776, than in England, or France or Germany during the same period? Obviously this is the fact as regards art in all its branches; and also, though less distinctly so, as regards physical and mathematical science. In literature there is less disparity, yet most candid Americans will agree with Englishmen that it is greater than those who know the education and intelligence of the younger people would have expected. I pass by oratory and statesmanship, because comparison is in these fields very difficult. The fact therefore being admitted, we have to endeavour to account for it.

If the matter were one of numerical averages, it would be pertinent to remark that of the total population of the United States about one-tenth are Negroes, at present altogether below the stratum from which production can be expected; that of the whites there may be four or five millions to whom English is virtually a foreign language, and that many millions are recent immigrants from Europe who are below the educational stratum in which literary gifts can be expected to germinate. This diminishes the contrast between numbers and intellectual results. But numbers have so little to do with the question that the point scarcely deserves a passing reference.

Those who have discussed the conditions of intellectual productivity have often remarked that epochs of stir and excitement are favourable, because they stimulate men’s minds, setting new ideas afloat, and awakening new ambitions. It is also true that vigorous unremitting labour is, speaking generally, needed for the production of good work, and that one is therefore less entitled to expect it in an indolent time and from members of the luxurious classes. But it is not less true, though less frequently observed, that tranquillity and repose are necessary to men of the kind we are considering, and often helpful even to the highest geniuses, for the evolving of new thoughts and the creation of forms of finished and harmonious beauty. He who is to do such work must have time to meditate, and pause, and meditate again. He must be able to set his creation aside, and return to it after days or weeks to look at it with fresh eyes. He must be neither distracted from his main purpose, nor hurried in effecting it. He must be able to concentrate the whole force of his reason or imagination on one subject, to abstract himself when needful from the flitting sights and many-voiced clamour of the outer world. Juvenal said this long ago about the poet; it also applies, though possibly in a lower degree, both to the artist and to the serious thinker, or delicate workman, in any field of literature, to the metaphysician, the theologian, the philosophic historian, the economist, the philologist, even the novelist and the statesman. I have heard men who had gone from a quiet life into politics complain that they found their thinking powers wither, and that while they became far more expert in getting up subjects and speaking forcibly and plausibly, they found it harder and harder to form sound general views and penetrate beneath the superficialities of the newspaper and the platform. Interrupted thought, trains of reflection or imaginative conceptions constantly broken by a variety of petty transient calls of business, claims of society, matters passing in the world to note and think of, not only tire the mind but destroy its chances of attaining just and deep views of life and nature, as a wind-ruffled pool ceases to reflect the rocks and woods around it. Mohammed falling into trances on the mountain above Mecca, Dante in the sylvan solitudes of Fonte Avellana, Cervantes and Bunyan in the enforced seclusion of a prison, Hegel so wrapt and lost in his speculations that, taking his manuscript to the publisher in Jena on the day of the great battle, he was surprised to see French soldiers in the streets; these are types of the men and conditions which give birth to thoughts that occupy succeeding generations; and what is true of these greatest men is perhaps even more true of men of the next rank. Doubtless many great works have been produced among inauspicious surroundings, and even under severe pressure of time; but it will, I think, be almost invariably found that the producer had formed his ideas or conceived his creations in hours of comparative tranquillity, and had turned on them the full stream of his powers to the exclusion of whatever could break or divert its force.

In Europe men call this a century of unrest. But the United States is more unrestful than Europe, more unrestful than any country we know of has yet been. Nearly everyone is busy; those few who have not to earn their living and do not feel called to serve their countrymen, find themselves out of place, and have been wont either to make amusement into a business or to transfer themselves to the ease of France or Italy. The earning of one’s living is not, indeed, incompatible with intellectually creative work, for many of those who have done such work best have done it in addition to their gainful occupation, or have earned their living by it. But in America it is unusually hard for anyone to withdraw his mind from the endless variety of external impressions and interests which daily life presents, and which impinge upon the mind, I will not say to vex it, but to keep it constantly vibrating to their touch. Life is that of the squirrel in his revolving cage, never still even when it does not seem to change. It becomes every day more and more so in England, and English literature and art show increasing marks of haste. In the United States the ceaseless stir and movement, the constant presence of newspapers, the eagerness which looks through every pair of eyes, even that active intelligence and sense of public duty, strongest in the best minds, which make a citizen feel that he ought to know what is passing in the wider world as well as in his own, all these render life more exciting to the average man than it is in Europe, but chase away from it the opportunities for repose and meditation which art and philosophy need, as growing plants need the coolness and darkness of night no less than the blaze of day. The type of mind which American conditions have evolved is quick, vigorous, practical, versatile; but it is unfavourable to the natural germination and slow ripening of large and luminous ideas; it wants the patience that will spend weeks or months on bringing details to an exquisite perfection. And accordingly we see that the most rich and finished literary work America has given us has proceeded from the older regions of the country, where the pulsations of life are slower and steadier than in the West or in the great commercial cities. It is from New England that nearly all the best books of the last generation came; and that not solely because the English race has been purest there, and education most generally diffused, for the New Englanders who have gone West, though they have carried with them their moral standard and their bright intelligence, seem either to have left behind their gift for literary creation, or to care to employ it only in teaching and in journalism.

It may be objected to this view that some of the great literary ages, such as the Periclean age at Athens, the Medicean age at Florence, the age of Elizabeth in England, have been ages full of movement and excitement. But the unrestfulness which prevails in America is altogether different from the large variety of life, the flow of stimulating ideas and impressions which marked those ages. Life is not as interesting in America, except as regards commercial speculation, as it is in Europe; because society and the environment of man are too uniform. It is hurried and bustling; it is filled with a multitude of duties and occupations and transient impressions. In the ages I have referred to men had time enough for all there was to do, and the very scantiness of literature and rarity of news made that which was read and received tell more powerfully upon the imagination.

Nor is it only the distractions of American life that clog the wings of invention. The atmosphere is over full of all that pertains to material progress. Americans themselves say, when excusing the comparative poverty of learning and science, that their chief occupation is at present the subjugation of their continent, that it is an occupation large enough to demand most of the energy and ambition of the nation, but that presently, when this work is done, the same energy and ambition will win similar triumphs in the fields of abstract thought, while the gifts which now make them the first nation in the world for practical inventions, will then assure to them a like place in scientific discovery. There is evidently much truth in this. The attractions of practical life are so great to men conscious of their own vigour, the development of the West and the vast operations of commerce and finance which have accompanied that development have absorbed so many strenuous talents, that the supply of ability available not only for pure science (apart from its applications) and for philosophical and historical studies, but even for statesmanship, has been proportionately reduced. But, besides this withdrawal of an unusually large part of the nation’s force, the predominance of material and practical interests has turned men’s thoughts and conversation into a channel unfavourable to the growth of the higher and more solid kinds of literature, perhaps still more unfavourable to art. Goethe said, “If a talent is to be speedily and happily developed the chief point is that a great deal of intellect and sound culture should be current in a nation.” There is certainly a great deal of intellect current in the United States. But it is chiefly directed to business, that is, to railways, to finance, to commerce, to inventions, to manufactures (as well as to practical professions like law), things which play a relatively larger part than in Europe, as subjects of universal attention and discussion. There is abundance of sound cultur, but it is so scattered about in divers places and among small groups which seldom meet one another, that no large cultured society has arisen similar to that of European capitals or to that which her universities have created for Germany. In Boston in 1860 a host could have brought together round his table nine men as interesting and cultivated as Paris or London would have furnished. But a similar party of eighteen could not have been collected, nor perhaps even the nine, anywhere except in Boston. At present, culture is more diffused: there are many cities where men of high attainments and keen intellectual interests are found, and associate themselves in literary or scientific clubs. Societies for the study of particular authors are not uncommon among women. I remember to have been told of a Homer club and an Æschylus club, formed by the ladies of St. Louis, and of Dante clubs in some Eastern cities. Nevertheless a young talent gains less than it would gain in Europe from the surroundings into which it is born. The atmosphere is not charged with ideas as in Germany, nor with critical finesse as in France. Stimulative it is, but the stimulus drives eager youth away from the groves of the Muses into the struggling throng of the marketplace.

It may be thought fanciful to add that in a new country one whole set of objects which appeal to the imagination are absent—no castles gray with age; no solemn cathedrals whose altering styles of architecture carry the mind up or down the long stream of history from the eleventh to the seventeenth century; few spots or edifices consecrated by memories of famous men or deeds, and among these none of remote date. There is certainly no want of interest in those few spots: the warmth with which Americans cherish them puts to shame the indifference of the English Parliament to the historic and prehistoric sites and buildings of Britain. But not one American youth in a thousand comes under the spell of any such associations. In the city or state where he lives there is nothing to call him away from the present. All he sees is new, and has no glories to set before him save those of accumulated wealth and industry skilfully applied to severely practical ends.

Someone may say that if (as was observed in last chapter) English and American literature are practically one, there is no need to explain the fact that one part of a race undivided for literary purposes leaves the bulk of literary production to be done by the other part, seeing that it can enter freely into the labours of the latter and reckon them its own. To argue thus would be to push the doctrine of the unity of the two branches rather too far, for after all there is much in American conditions and life which needs its special literary and artistic interpretations; and the question would still confront us, why the transatlantic branch, nowise inferior in mental force, contributes less than its share to the common stock. Still it is certainly true that the existence of a great body of producers, in England of literature, as in France of pictures, diminishes the need for production in America. Or to put the same thing in another way, if the Americans did not speak English they would evidently feel called on to create more high literature for themselves. Many books which America might produce are not produced because the men qualified to write them know that there are already English books on the same subject; and the higher such men’s standard is, the more apt are they to overrate the advantages which English authors enjoy as compared with themselves. Many feelings and ideas which now find adequate expression through the English books which Americans read would then have to be expressed through American books, and their literature would be not only more individual, but more copious and energetic. If it lost in breadth, it would gain in freshness and independence. American authors conceive that even the nonrecognition of international copyright has told for evil on their profession. Since the native writer was undersold by reprints of English and French books, which, paying nothing to the European author, can be published at the cost of the paper and printing only, native authorship was discouraged, native talent diverted into other fields, while at the same time the intellectual standard of the public was lowered and its taste vulgarized. It might be thought that the profusion of cheap reprints would tend to quicken thought and diffuse the higher kinds of knowledge among the masses. But experience proves that by far the largest part of these reprints, and the part which is most extensively read, were novels, and among them many flimsy novels, which drove better books, including some of the best American fiction, out of the market, and tended to Europeanize the American mind in the worst way. One may smile at the suggestion that the allegiance of the working classes to their democratic institutions will be seduced by descriptions of English duchesses; yet it is probably true—eminent observers assure one of it—that the profusion of new frothy or highly-spiced fiction offered at ten or twenty-five cents a volume did much to spoil the popular palate for the enjoyment of more wholesome and nutritious food. And whatever injures the higher literature by diminishing the demand, may further injure it by creating an atmosphere unfavourable to the growth of pure and earnest native literary talent.

What then of the newspapers? The newspapers would need a chapter to themselves, and their influence as organs of opinion has been already discussed. The vigour and brightness of many among them are surprising. Nothing escapes them; everything is set in the sharpest, clearest light. Their want of reticence and delicacy is regretfully admitted by all educated Americans—the editors, I think, included. The cause of this deficiency is probably to be found in the fact that, whereas the first European journals were written for the polite world of large cities, American journals were, early in their career, if not at its very beginning, written for the bulk of the people, and published in communities still so small that everybody’s concerns were already pretty well known to everybody else. They had attained no high level of literary excellence when towards the middle of last century an enterprising man of unrefined taste created a new type of “live” newspaper, which made a rapid success by its smartness, copiousness, and variety, while addressing itself entirely to the multitude. Other papers were almost forced to shape themselves on the same lines, because the class which desired something more choice was still relatively small; and now the journals of the chief cities have become such vast commercial concerns that they still think first of the mass and are controlled by its tastes, which they have themselves done so much to create. There are cities where the more refined readers who dislike flippant personalities are counted by tens of thousands, but in such cities competition is now too severe to hold out much prospect of success to a paper which does not expect the support of hundreds of thousands. It is not, however, with the æsthetic or moral view of the newspaper that we are here concerned, but with the effect on the national mind of the enormous ratio which the reading of newspapers bears to all other reading, a ratio higher than even in France or England. A famous Englishman, himself a powerful and fertile thinker, contrasted the value of the history of Thucydides with that of a single number of the Times newspaper, greatly to the advantage of the latter. Others may conceive that a thoughtful study of Thucydides, or, not to go beyond our own tongue, of Bacon, Milton, Locke, or Burke, perhaps even of Gibbon, Grote, or Macaulay, will do more to give keenness to the eye and strength to the wings of the mind than a whole year’s reading of the best daily newspaper. It is not merely that the matter is of more permanent and intrinsic worth, nor that the manner and style form the student’s taste; it is not merely that in the newspaper we are in contact with persons like ourselves, in the other case with rare and splendid intellects. The whole attitude of the reader is different. His attention is loose, his mind unbraced, so that he does not stop to scrutinize an argument, and forgets even valuable facts as quickly as he has learnt them. If he read Burke as he reads the newspaper, Burke would do him little good. And therefore the habit of mind produced by a diet largely composed of newspapers is adverse to solid thinking and dulling to the sense of beauty. Scorched and stony is the soil which newspaper reading has prepared to receive the seeds of genius.

Does the modern world really gain, so far as creative thought is concerned, by the profusion of cheap literature? It is a question one often asks in watching the passengers on an American railway. A boy walks up and down the car scattering newspapers and books in paper covers right and left as he goes. The newspapers are glanced at, though probably most people have read several of the day’s papers already. The books are nearly all novels. They are not bad in tone, and sometimes they give incidentally a superficial knowledge of things outside the personal experience of the reader; while from their newspapers the passengers draw a stock of information far beyond that of a European peasant, or even of an average European artisan. Yet one feels that this constant succession of transient ideas, none of them impressively though many of them startlingly stated, all of them flitting swiftly past the mental sight as the trees flit past the eye when one looks out of the car window, is no more favourable to the development of serious intellectual interests and creative intellectual power than is the limited knowledge of the European artisan or peasant.

Most of the reasons I have hazarded to account for a phenomenon surprising to one who recognizes the quantity of intellect current in America, and the diffusion, far more general than in any other country, of intellectual curiosity, are reasons valid in the Europe of today as compared with the Europe of last century, and still more true of the modern world as compared with the best periods of the ancient. Printing is by no means pure gain to the creative faculties, whatever it may be to the acquisitive; even as a great ancient thinker seems to have thought that the invention of writing in Egypt had weakened the reflective powers of man. The question follows, Are these causes, supposing them to be true causes, likely to be more or less operative in the America of next century than they now are? Will America become more what Europe is now, or will she be even more American?

I have elsewhere thrown out some conjectures on this point. Meantime it is pertinent to ask what are the most recent developments of American thought and research, for this will help us to see whether the tide of productive endeavour is rising or falling.

The abundant and excellent work done in fiction need be mentioned only for the sake of calling attention to the interest it has, over and above its artistic merit, as a record of the local manners and usages and types of character in various parts of the Union—types which are fast disappearing. The Creoles of Louisiana, the Negroes under slavery, with African tales still surviving in their memories, the rough but kindly backwoodsmen of early Indiana, the bosses of rural New England, the mountain folk of Tennessee, the humours of the Mississippi steamboat and the adventurous life of the Far West, were all made known to Europe through the tales of writers of the last or present generation, as the Indians of long ago became known through the romances of Fenimore Cooper. However, this is familiar ground to European readers, so I pass to work of a less generally attractive order.

In the middle of last century the standard of classical scholarship was low, and even the school commentaries on classical authors fell far short of those produced in Germany or England. Nowadays both in classical and in Oriental philology admirably thorough and painstaking work is produced. I have heard high European authorities observe that there is an almost excessive anxiety among American scholars to master all that has been written, even by third-rate Germans, and that the desire they evince to overtake Germany in respect of knowledge betrays some among them into the German fault of neglecting merits of form and style. In the sciences of nature, especially in those of observation, remarkable advances have been made. Dr. Asa Gray, was one of the two or three greatest botanists of his age, and Simon Newcomb one of the greatest mathematical astronomers. Much excellent work has been done in geology and palæontology, particularly in exploring the Rocky Mountain regions. Both for the excellence of their instruments and the accuracy of their observations, the astronomers stand in the front rank; nor has America fallen behind Europe in the theoretical part of this science. In some branches of physics and chemistry, such as spectrum analysis, American investigators have won like fame. Competent authorities award the highest praise to their recent contributions to biology and to medical science and are perhaps still more impressed by the achievements of their surgeons. In economics they seem to stand before either England or France, both as regards the extent to which the subject is studied in universities and as regards the number of eminent persons whom it occupies. In jurisprudence and law, American textbooks are of high excellence;2 and one author, the late Mr. Justice Story, deserves, looking to the quantity as well as to the quality of his work, to be placed at the head of all who have handled these topics in the English tongue during the nineteenth century. Political science has begun to be studied more energetically than in England, where, to be sure, it is scarcely studied at all; and every year sees treatises and articles of permanent value added to the scanty modern literature which our language possesses on this subject. Similarly there is great activity in the field of both secular and ecclesiastical history, though as the work done has largely taken the direction of inquiries into local American history, and has altogether been more in the nature of research than of treatises attractive to the general public, its quantity and its merits have not yet been duly appreciated even at home, much less in Europe. Indeed, it is remarkable how far from showy and sensational is the bulk of the work now done in America. It is mostly work of a solid, careful, exact, and often rather dry type, not at all the sort of work which theorists about democracy would have looked for, since it appeals rather to the learned few than to the so-called general reader. One receives the impression that the class of intellectual workers, who until recently wanted institutions in which the highest and fullest training could be had, have now become sensible that their country, occupied in developing its resources and educating its ordinary citizens, had fallen behind Europe in learning and science, and that they are therefore the more eager to accumulate knowledge and spend their energy in minutely laborious special studies.3

I may be reminded that neither in the departments above mentioned, nor in statesmanship, can one point to many brilliant personalities. Perhaps this is true of Europe also; perhaps the world is passing through an age with a high level of mediocrity in literature, art, and science as compared with the outstanding figures of last century. There have been periods in history when striking figures were lacking, although great events seemed to call for them. As regards America, if there be few persons of exceptional gifts, it is significant that the number of those who are engaged in scientific work, whether in the investigation of nature or in the moral, political, and historical sciences, is larger, relatively to the population of the country, than it was fifty years ago, the methods better, the work done more solid, the spirit more earnest and eager. Nothing more strikes a stranger who visits the American universities than the ardour with which the younger generation has thrown itself into study, even kinds of study which will never win the applause of the multitude. There is more zeal and heartiness among these men, more freshness of mind, more love of learning for its own sake, more willingness to forego the chances of fame and wealth for the sake of adding to the stock of human knowledge, than is to be found today in Oxford or Cambridge, or in the universities of Scotland. One is reminded of the scholars of the Renaissance flinging themselves into the study of rediscovered philology, or of the German universities after the War of Liberation. And under the impressions formed in mingling with such men, one learns to agree with the conviction of the Americans that for a nation so abounding in fervid force there is reserved a fruitful career in science and letters, no less than in whatever makes material prosperity.

chapter 116

The Relation of the United States to Europe

One cannot discuss American literature and thought without asking, What is the intellectual relation of the United States to Europe? Is it that of an equal member of the great republic of letters? Or is it that of a colony towards the mother country, or of a province towards a capital? Is it, to take instances from history, such a relation as was that of Rome to Greece in the second and first centuries before Christ? or of Northern and Western Europe to Italy in the fifteenth? or of Germany to France in the eighteenth? in all of which cases there was a measure of intellectual dependence on the part of a nation which felt itself in other respects as strong as or stronger than that whose models it followed, and from whose hearth it lighted its own flame.

To answer this question we must first answer another—How do the Americans themselves conceive their position towards Europe? And this, again, suggests a third—What does the American people think of itself?

The conceit of the people was at one time a byword. It was not only self-conscious but obtrusive and aggressive. Every visitor satirized it, Dickens most keenly of all, in forgiving whom the Americans gave the strongest proof of their good nature. Doubtless all nations are either vain or proud, or both; and those not least who receive least recognition from their neighbours. A nation could hardly stand without this element to support its self-reliance; though when pushed to an extreme it may, as happens with the Turks, make national ruin the more irretrievable. But American conceit has been steadily lessening as the country has grown older, more aware of its true strength, more respected by other countries.1 There was less conceit after the Civil War than before, though the Civil War had revealed elements of greatness unexpected by foreigners; there is less now than there was at the close of the Civil War. An impartially unsparing critic from some other planet might say of the Americans that they are at this moment less priggishly supercilious than the Germans, less restlessly pretentious than the French, less pharisaically self-satisfied than the English. Among the upper or better-educated classes, glorification has died out, except of course in Fourth of July and other public addresses, when the scream of the national eagle must be heard. One sometimes finds it replaced by undue self-depreciation, with lamentations over the want of culture, the decline of faith, or the corruption of politics. Among the masses it survives in an exultation over the size and material resources of the country—the physically large is to them the sublime—in an overestimate of men and events in American history; in a delight, strongest, of course, among the recent immigrants, in the completeness of social equality, and a corresponding contempt for the “serfs of Europe” who submit to be called “subjects” of their sovereign, in a belief in the superior purity of their domestic life and literature, and in the notion that they are the only people who enjoy true political liberty, liberty far fuller than that of England, far more orderly than that of France.2 Taking all classes together, they are now not more sensitive to external opinion than the nations of Western Europe, and less so than the Russians, though they are still a trifle more apt to go through Europe comparing what they find with what they left at home. A foreign critic who tries to flout or scourge them no longer disturbs their composure; his jeers are received with amusement or indifference.

Accordingly the attitude of thoughtful Americans to Europe has no longer either the old open antagonism or the old latent self-distrust. It is that of a people which conceives itself to be intellectually the equal of any other people, but to have taken upon itself for the time a special task which impedes it in the race of literary and artistic development. Its mission is to reclaim the waste lands of a continent, to furnish homes for instreaming millions of strangers, to work out a system of harmonious and orderly democratic institutions. That it may fulfil these tasks it has for the moment postponed certain other tasks which it will in due time resume.3 Meanwhile it may, without loss of dignity or of faith in itself, use and enjoy the fruits of European intellect which it imports until it sees itself free to rival them by native growths. If I may resort to a homely comparison, the Americans are like a man whose next-door neighbour is in the habit of giving musical parties in the summer evenings. When one of these parties comes off, he sits with his family in the balcony to enjoy the quartettes and solos which float across to him through the open windows. He feels no inferiority, knowing that when he pleases he can have performers equally good to delight his own friends, though for this year he prefers to spend his surplus income in refurnishing his house or starting his son in business.

There is of course a difference in the view of the value of European work as compared with their own, taken by the more educated and by the less educated classes. Of the latter some fail to appreciate the worth of culture and of science, even for practical purposes, as compared with the industrial success, though in this respect they are no more obtuse than the bulk of Englishmen; and they accordingly underrate their obligations to Europe. Others, knowing that they ought to admire works of imagination and research, but possessed of more patriotism than discernment, cry up second or third-rate fiction, poetry, and theology because it is American, and try to believe that their country gives as much to Europe as she receives. Taste for literature is so much more diffused than taste in literature that a certain kind of fame is easily won. There are dozens of poets and scores of poetesses much admired in their own state, some even beyond its limits, with no merit but that of writing verse which can be scanned, and will raise no blush on the most sensitive cheek. Yet the quality of the poetry publishing improves, and its quantity witnesses to the growing number of those who love letters and cultivate the imagination. Criticism is lenient, and for a time it could scarcely be said to exist, for the few journals which contained good reviews were little read except in four or five Northern Atlantic states, and several inland cities. A really active and searching criticism, which should appraise literary work on sound canons, not caring whether it has been produced in America or in Europe, by a man or by a woman, in the East or in the West, is one of the things which America needed, and the rise of which is a thing to be welcomed. Among highly educated men this extravagant appreciation of native industry used to produce a disgust expressing itself sometimes in sarcasm, sometimes in despondency. Some still deem their homegrown literature trivial, and occupy themselves with European books, watching the presses of England, France, and Germany more carefully than almost anyone does in England. Yet even these, I think, cherish silently the faith that when the West has been settled and the railways built, and possibilities of sudden leaps to wealth diminished, when culture has diffused itself among the classes whose education is now superficial, and their love of art extended itself from furniture to pictures and statuary, American literature will in due course flower out with a brilliance of bloom and a richness of fruit rivalling the Old World.

The United States are therefore, if this account be correct, in a relation to Europe for which no exact historical parallel can be found. They do not look up to her, nor seek to model themselves after her. They are too proud for a province, too large for a colony. They certainly draw from Europe far more thought than they send to her, and though they have produced several brilliant artists, no distinctively American school has arisen. Yet they cannot be said to be led or ruled by Europe, because they apply their own standards and judgment to whatever they receive.

Their special relations to the leading European countries are worth noting. In old colonial days England was everything. The revolt of 1776 produced an estrangement which might have been healed after 1783, had England acted with common courtesy and good sense, but which was embittered by her scornful attitude. Wounds which were just beginning to scar over were reopened by the war of 1812; and the hostility continued as long as the generation lived whose manhood saw that war. The generation which remembered 1812 was disappearing when the sympathy for the Southern Confederacy not indeed of the English people, but of a section of the English upper classes, lit up the almost extinguished flames. These were quenched, so far as the native Americans are concerned, by the settlement of the Alabama claims, which impressed the United States not merely as a concession to themselves, but as an evidence of the magnanimity of a proud country. There remained a certain amount of rivalry with England, and for a time a certain sensitiveness to the criticisms even of ignorant Englishmen. But these lingering touches of jealousy have all but vanished with the growing sympathy felt for “the old country,” as it is still called. It is the only European country in which the American people can be said to feel any personal interest, or towards an alliance with which they are drawn by any sentiment. For a time, however, the sense of gratitude to France for her aid in the War of Independence was very strong. It brought French literature as well as some French usages into vogue, and increased the political influence which France exercised during the earlier years of her own Revolution. Still that influence did not go far beyond the sphere of politics: one feels it but slightly in the literature of the half century from 1780 to 1830.

During the reign of Louis Napoleon, wealthy Americans resorted largely to Paris, and there, living often for years together in a congenial atmosphere of display and amusement, imbibed undemocratic tastes and ideas, which through them found their way back across the ocean, and coloured certain sections of American society, particularly in New York. Although there is still an American colony in Paris, Parisian influence seems no longer to cross the Atlantic. French books, novels excepted, and these in translations, are not largely read. French politics excite little interest; France is practically not a factor at all in the moral or intellectual life of the country. Over art, however, especially painting and decoration, she has still great power. Many American artists study in Paris, indeed all resort thither who do not go to Rome or Florence; French pictures enjoy such favour with American dealers and private buyers as to make the native artists complain, not without reason, that equally good homemade work receives no encouragement;4 and house decoration, in which America seems to stand before England, particularly in the skilful use of wood, is much affected by French designs and methods.

The enormous German immigration from about 1860 till 1900 might have been expected to do something in the way of Germanizing the American mind, giving it a taste for metaphysics on the one hand, and for minutely patient research on the other. It had neither the one result nor the other, nor indeed any result whatever in the field of thought. It enormously stimulated the brewing industry; it retarded the progress of Prohibitionism; it introduced more outdoor life than formerly existed; it increased the taste for music; it broke down the strictness of Sabbath observance; and has indeed in some critics produced what is commonly called “a Continental Sunday.” But the vast majority of German immigrants belong to the humbler classes, and were but faintly influenced by their own literature. There have been among them extremely few savants, or men likely to become savants, nor have these played any conspicuous part in the universities or in literature.

Nevertheless the influence of Germany has been of late years powerfully stimulative upon the classes that follow after learning, for not only are German treatises largely read, but many of the most promising graduates of the universities proceed to Germany for a year or two to complete their studies, and there become imbued with German ideas and methods. The English universities have, by their omission to develop advanced instruction in special branches of knowledge, lost a golden opportunity of coming into relation with and influencing that academic youth of America in whose hands the future of American science and learning lies. This German influence on American work has however not tended towards the propagation of metaphysical schools, metaphysics themselves being now on the ebb in Germany. It appears in some departments of theology, and is also visible in historical and philological studies, in economics, and in the sciences of nature.

On the more popular kinds of literature, as well as upon manners, social usages, current sentiment generally, England and her influences are of course nearer and more potent than those of any other European country, seeing that English books go everywhere among all classes, and that they work upon those who are substantially English already in their fundamental ideas and habits. Americans of the cultivated order, and especially women, are more alive to the movements and changes in the lighter literature of England, and more curious about those who figure in it, especially the rising poets and essayists, than equally cultivated English men and women. I have been repeatedly surprised to find books and men that had made no noise in London well known, especially in the Atlantic states, and their merits canvassed with more zest and probably more acuteness than a London drawing room would have shown. The verdicts of the best circles were not always the same as those of similar circles in England, but they were nowise biased by national feeling, and often seemed to proceed from a more delicate and sympathetic insight. I recollect, though I had better not mention, instances in which they welcomed English books which England had failed to appreciate, and refused to approve American books over which English reviewers had become ecstatic.

Passing English fashions in social customs and in such things as games sometimes spread to America—possibly more often than similar American fashions do to England—but sometimes encounter ridicule there. The Anglomaniac is a familiar object of good-humoured satire. As for those large movements of opinion or taste or practical philanthropy in which a parallelism or correspondence between the two countries may often be discerned, this correspondence is more frequently due to the simultaneous action of the same causes than to any direct influence of the older country. In theology, for instance, the same relaxation of the rigid tests of orthodoxy has been making way in the churches of both nations. In the Protestant Episcopal church there has been a similar, though less pronounced, tendency to the development of an ornate ritual. The movement for dealing with city pauperism by voluntary organizations began later than the charity organization societies of England, but would probably have begun without their example. The university extension movement, and the establishment of “university settlements” in the poorer parts of great cities are further instances. The semi-socialistic tendency which I have referred to as now noticeable among the younger clergy and the younger teachers in some of the universities, although similar to that which may be discerned in England, does not seem traceable to direct English influences. So too the rapidly growing taste for beauty in house decoration and in street architecture is a birth of the time rather than of Old World teaching, though it owes something to Mr. Ruskin’s books, which have been more widely read in America than in England.5

In political matters the intellectual sympathy of the two countries is of course less close than in the matters just described, because the difference between institutions and conditions involves a diversity in the problems which call for a practical solution. Political changes in England affect American opinion less than such changes in France affect English opinion, although the Americans know more and care more and judge more soundly about English affairs than the French do about English or the English about French. The cessation of bitterness between Great Britain and the Irish has made a difference in American politics; but no political event in England less serious than, let us say, the establishment of a powerful Socialist party, would sensibly tell on American opinion, just as no event happening beyond the Atlantic, except the rise and fall of the Southern Confederacy, has influenced the course of English political thought. However, the wise men of the West watch English experiments for light and guidance in their own troubles. A distinguished American who came a year or two ago to London to study English politics, told me that he did so in the hope of finding conservative institutions and forces from which lessons serviceable to the United States might be learned. After a fortnight, however, he concluded that England was in a state of suppressed revolution, and departed sorrowful.

On a review of the whole matter it will appear that although as respects most kinds of intellectual work America is rather in the position of the consumer, Europe, and especially England, in that of the producer, although America is more influenced by English and German books and by French art than these countries are influenced by her, still she does not look for initiative to them, or hold herself in any way their disciple. She is in many points independent; and in all fully persuaded of her independence.

Will she then in time develop a new literature, bearing the stamp of her own mint? She calls herself a new country: Will she give the world a new philosophy, new views of religion, a new type of life in which plain living and high thinking may be more happily blended than we now see them in the Old World, a life in which the franker recognition of equality will give a freshness to ideas and to manners a charm of simplicity which the aristocratic societies of Europe have failed to attain?

As regards manners and life, she has already approached nearer this happy combination than any society of the Old World. As regards ideas, I have found among the most cultivated Americans a certain cosmopolitanism of view, and detachment from national or local prejudice, superior to that of the same classes in France, England, or Germany. In the ideas themselves there is little one can call novel or distinctively American, though there is a kind of thoroughness in embracing or working out certain political and social conceptions which is less common in England. As regards literature, nothing at present indicates the emergence of a new type. The influence of the great nations on one another grows always closer, and makes new national types less likely to appear. Science, which has no nationality, exerts a growing sway over men’s minds, and exerts it contemporaneously and similarly in all civilized countries. For the purposes of thought, at least, if not of literary expression, the world draws closer together, and becomes more of a homogeneous community.

A visitor doubts whether the United States are, so far as the things of the mind are concerned, “a new country.” The people have the hopefulness of youth. But their institutions are old, though many have been remodelled or new faced; their religion is old; their views of morality and conduct are old; their sentiments in matters of art and taste have not greatly diverged from those of the parent stock. Is the mere fact that they inhabit new territories, and that the conditions of life there have trained to higher efficiency certain gifts, and have left others in comparative quiescence, is this fact sufficient so to transform the national spirit as to make the products of their creative power essentially diverse from those of the same race abiding in its ancient seats? A transplanted tree may bear fruit of a slightly different flavour, but the apple remains an apple and the pear a pear.

However, it is still too early in the growth of the United States to form any conclusions on these high matters, almost too soon to speculate regarding them. There are causes at work which may in time produce a new type of intellectual life; but whether or not this come to pass, it can hardly be doubted that when the American people give themselves some repose from their present labours, when they occupy themselves less with doing and more with being, there will arise among them a literature and a science, possibly also an art, which will tell upon Europe with a new force. It will have behind it the momentum of hundreds of millions of men.

chapter 117

The Absence of a Capital

The United States are the only great country in the world which has no capital. Germany and Italy were long without one, because the existence of the mediæval Empire prevented the growth in either country of a national monarchy. But the wonderfully reconstructive age we live in has now supplied the want; and although Rome and Berlin are by no means to their respective states what Paris and London are to France and England, what Vienna and Pesth are to the Dual Monarchy, they may in time attain a similar rank1 in their respective nations. By a capital I mean a city which is not only the seat of political government, but is also by the size, wealth, and character of its population the head and centre of the country, a leading seat of commerce and industry, a reservoir of financial resources, the favoured residence of the great and powerful, the spot in which the chiefs of the learned professions are to be found, where the most potent and widely read journals are published, whither men of literary and scientific capacity are drawn. The heaping together in such a place of these various elements of power, the conjunction of the forces of rank, wealth, knowledge, intellect, naturally makes such a city a sort of foundry in which opinion is melted and cast, where it receives that definite shape in which it can be easily and swiftly propagated and diffused through the whole country, deriving not only an authority from the position of those who form it, but a momentum from the weight of numbers in the community whence it comes. The opinion of such a city becomes powerful politically because it is that of the persons who live at headquarters, who hold the strings of government in their hands, who either themselves rule the state or are in close contact with those who do. It is true that under a representative government power rests with those whom the people have sent up from all parts of the country. Still these members of the legislature reside in the capital, and cannot but feel the steady pressure of its prevailing seniment, which touches them socially at every point. It sometimes happens that the populace of the capital, by their power of overawing the rulers or perhaps of effecting a revolution, are able to turn the fortunes of the state. But even where no such peril is to be apprehended, any nation with the kind of a capital I am describing acquires the habit of looking to it for light and leading, and is apt to yield to it an initiative in political movements.

In the field of art and literature the influence of a great capital is no less marked. It gathers to a centre the creative power of the country, and subjects it to the criticism of the best instructed and most polished society. The constant action and reaction upon one another of groups of capable men in an atmosphere at once stimulative to invention and corrective of extravagance may give birth to works which isolated genius could hardly have produced. Goethe made this observation as regards Paris, contrasting the centralized society of France with the dispersion of the elements of culture over the wide area of his own Germany.

The same idea of the power which a highly polished and strenuously active society has to educe and develop brilliant gifts underlies the memorable description which Pericles gives of Athens.3 And if it be suggested that the growth of such a centre may impoverish the rest of a country because the concentration of intellectual life tends to diminish the chances of variability, and establish too uniform a type, some compensation for any such loss may be found in the higher efficiency which such a society gives to the men of capacity whom it draws into its own orbit.

In the case both of politics and of literature, the existence of a capital tends to strengthen the influence of what is called society, that is to say, of the men of wealth and leisure who have time to think of other matters than the needs of daily life, and whose company and approval are apt to be sought by the men of talent. Thus where the rich and great are gathered in one spot to which the nation looks, they effect more in the way of guiding its political thought and training its literary taste than is possible where they are dispersed over the face of a large country. In both points, therefore, it will evidently make a difference to a democratic country whether it has a capital, and what degree of deference that capital receives. Paris is the extreme case of a city which has been everything to the national literature and art, and has sought to be everything in national politics also. London, since the decline of Dublin and of Edinburgh, has stood without a British rival in the domain of art and letters, and although one can hardly say that a literary society exists in London, most of the people who employ themselves in writing books and nearly all those who paint pictures live in or near it. Over politics London has less authority than Paris has exerted in France, doubtless because parts of the north and west of Britain are more highly vitalized than the provinces of France, while the English city is almost too populous to have a common feeling. Its very hugeness makes it amorphous.

What are the cities of the United States which can claim to approach nearest to the sort of capital we have been considering? Not Washington, though it is the meeting place of Congress and the seat of federal administration. It has a relatively small population (in 1910, 331,069, of whom one-third were Negroes). Society consists of congressmen (for about half the year), officials (including many scientific men in the public service), members of the diplomatic corps, and some rich and leisured people who come to spend the winter. The leaders of finance, industry, commerce, and the professions are absent; there are some journalists, but few men of letters, and scarcely any artists. What is called the fashionable society of Washington, which, being small, polished, and composed of people who constantly meet one another, is agreeable, and not the less agreeable because it has a peculiar flavour, is so far from aspiring to political authority as to deem it “bad form” to talk politics.4 Its political society on the other hand has been so largely composed of officials, “professionals,” and office-seekers, as to produce an atmosphere unlike that of the nation at large, and dangerous to those statesmen who breathe it too long without interruption.

Not New York, though it is now by far the most populous city. It is the centre of commerce, the sovereign of finance. But it has no special political influence or power beyond that of casting a large vote, which is a main factor in determining the thirty-nine presidential votes of the state. Business is its main occupation: and though the representatives of literature are now pretty numerous, few of them are concerned with politics, the journals, marked as is their ability, are, after all, New York journals, and not, like those of Paris, London, or even Berlin, professedly written for the whole nation. Next come Chicago, perhaps the most typically American place in America, and Philadelphia, the latter once the first city of the Union. Neither is a centre of literature or ideas for more than its own vicinity. Boston was for a time the chosen home of letters and culture, and still contains, in proportion to her population, a larger number of men and women capable of making or judging good work than any other city. But she can no longer be said to lead abstract thought, much less current opinion. Nor can one say that any of these cities is on the way to gain a more commanding position. New York will probably retain her preeminence in population and commercial consequence, but she does not rise proportionately in culture, while the centre of political gravity, shifting slowly to the West, will doubtless finally fix itself in the Mississippi Valley.5

It deserves to be remarked that what is true of the whole country is also true of the great sections of the country. Of the cities I have named, none, except possibly Boston and Chicago, can be said to be even a local capital, either for purposes of political opinion or of intellectual movement and tendency. Boston retains her position as the literary centre of New England; San Francisco by her size has a preponderating influence on the Pacific coast. But no other great city is regarded by the inhabitants of her own and the adjoining states as their natural head, to which they look for political guidance, or from which they expect any intellectual stimulance. Even New Orleans, though by far the largest place in the South, is in no sense the metropolis of the South; and does little more for the South than set a conspicuous example of municipal misgovernment. Though no Paris, no Berlin stands above them, these great American cities are not more important in the country, or even in their own sections of the country, than Lyons and Bordeaux are in France, Hamburg and Cologne in Germany. Even as between municipal communities, even in the sphere of thought and literary effort, equality and local independence have in America their perfect work.

The geographical as well as political causes that have produced this equality are obvious enough, and only one needs special mention. The seat of federal government was in 1790 fixed at a place which was not even a village, but a piece of swampy woodland,6 not merely for the sake of preventing the national legislature from being threatened by the mob of a great city, but because the jealousies of the states made it necessary to place the legislature in a spot exempt from all state influence or jurisdiction. So too in each state the seat of government is rarely to be found in the largest city. Albany, not New York, is the capital of New York State; Springfield, not Chicago, of Illinois; Sacramento, not San Francisco, of California; Harrisburg, not Philadelphia, of Pennsylvania. This seems to have been so ordered not from fear of the turbulence of a vast population, but partly to secure a central spot, partly from the jealousy which the rural districts and smaller cities feel of the place which casts the heaviest vote, and may seek to use the state resources for its own benefit.

It is a natural result of the phenomena described that in the United States public opinion crystallizes both less rapidly and in less sharp and well-defined forms than happens in those European countries which are led by the capital. The temperature of the fluid in which opinion takes shape (if I may venture to pursue the metaphor), is not so high all over a large country as in the society of a city, where the minds that make opinion are in daily contact, and the process by which opinion is made is therefore slower, giving a somewhat more amorphous product. I do not mean that a European capital generates opinion of one type only; but that each doctrine, each programme, each type of views, whether political or economic or religious, is likely to assume in a capital its sharpest and most pronounced form, that form being taken up and propagated from the capital through the country. And this is one reason why Americans were the first to adopt the system of conventions, mass meetings of persons belonging to a particular party or advocating a particular cause, gathered from every corner of the country to exchange their ideas and deliberate on their common policy.

It may be thought that in this respect the United States suffer from the absence of a centre of light and heat. Admitting that there is some loss, there are also some conspicuous gains. It is a gain that the multitude of no one city should be able to overawe the executive and the legislature, perhaps even to change the form of government, as Paris has so often done in France. It is a gain, for a democratic country, that the feeling of what is called society—that is to say, of those who toil not, neither do they spin, who are satisfied with the world, and are apt to regard it as a place for enjoyment—should not become too marked and palpable in its influence on the members of the legislature and the administration, that it should rather be diffused over the nation and act insensibly upon other classes through the ordinary relations of private life than take visible shape as the voice of a number of wealthy families gathered in one spot, whose luxury may render them the objects of envy and the target for invective. And although types of political view may form themselves less swiftly, though doctrines may be less systematic, programmes less fully reasoned out than when the brisk intelligence of groups gathered in a capital labours to produce them, they may, when they do finally emerge from the mind of the whole people, have a breadth and solidity proportioned to the slowness of their growth, and be more truly representative of all the classes, interests, and tendencies that exist within the nation.

How far the loss exceeds the gain as respects the speculative and artistic sides of intellectual effort, it is too soon to determine, for American cities are all the creatures of the last two centuries. That which Goethe admired in Paris is evidently impossible to the dispersed geniuses of America. On the other hand, that indraught of talent from the provinces to Paris which many thoughtful Frenchmen deplore, and which has become more unfortunate since Paris has grown to be the centre of amusement for the dissipated classes of Europe, is an experience which no other country need wish to undergo. Germany has not begun to produce more work or better work since she has given herself a capital; indeed, he who looks back over her annals since the middle of last century will think that so far as scholarship, metaphysics, and possibly even poetry are concerned, she gained from that very want of centralization which Goethe regretted. Great cities realize so vividly the defects of the system they see around them that they sometimes underrate the merits that go with those defects. It may be that in the next age American cities will profit by their local independence to develop varieties greater than they now exhibit, and will evolve diverse types of literary and artistic production. Europe will watch with curiosity the progress of an experiment which it is now too late for any of her great countries to try.

chapter 118

American Oratory

Oratory is an accomplishment in which Europeans believe that Americans excel; and that this is the opinion of the American themselves, although they are too modest to express it, may be gathered from the surprise they betray when they find an Englishman fluent before an audience. They had at one time the advantage (if it is an advantage) of much more practice than any European nation; but now, with democracy triumphant in England and France, the proportion of speeches and speaking to population is probably much the same in all three countries. Some observations on a form of effort which has absorbed a good deal of the talent of the nation, seem properly to belong to an account of its intellectual life.

Oratorical excellence may be said to consist in the combination of five aptitudes:

• Invention, that is to say the power of finding good ideas and weaving effective arguments
• Skill and taste in the choice of appropriate words
• Readiness in producing appropriate ideas and words at short notice
• Quickness in catching the temper and tendencies of the particular audience addressed
• Weight, animation, and grace in delivery

Such excellence as the Americans possess, such superiority as they may claim over Englishmen, consists rather in the three latter of these than in the two former.

The substance of their speeches is not better than one finds in other countries, because substance depends on the intellectual resources of the speaker and on the capacity of the audience for appreciating worthy matter. Neither is the literary form better, that is to say, the ideas are not clothed in any choicer language. But there is more fluency, more readiness, more self-possession. Being usually nimbler in mind than an Englishman, and feeling less embarrassed on his legs, an American is apt to see his point more clearly and to get at it by a more direct path. I do not deny that American speakers sometimes weary the listener, but when they do so it is rather because the notions are commonplace and the arguments unsound than because, as might often happen in England, ideas of some value are tediously and pointlessly put. It is true that with the progress of democracy, and the growing volume of speeches made, the level of public speaking has in Britain risen within the last generations while the number of great orators has declined. Still, if one is to compare the two countries, the English race seems to have in America acquired a keener sensitiveness of sympathy. That habit of deference to others, and that desire to be in accord with the sentiments of others, which equality and democratic institutions foster, make the American feel himself more completely one of the audience and a partaker of its sentiments than an average English speaker does. This may have the consequence, if the audience be ignorant or prejudiced, of dragging him down to its level. But it makes him more effective. Needless to add that humour, which is a commoner gift in America than elsewhere, often redeems an otherwise uninteresting address, and is the best means of keeping speaker and audience in touch with one another.

A deliberate and even slow delivery is the rule in American public speaking, as it is in private conversation. This has the advantage of making a story or a jest tell with more effect. There is also, I think, less stiffness and hesitation among American than among English speakers, greater skill in managing the voice, because more practice in open-air meetings, greater clearness of enunciation. But as regards grace, either in action or in manner, the Teutonic race shows no more capacity on the other side of the Atlantic than it has generally done in England for rivalling the orators of Italy, Spain, and France.

The commonest American defect used to be a turgid and inflated style. The rhetoric was Rhodian rather than Attic, overloaded with tropes and figures, apt to aim at concealing poverty or triteness in thought by exaggeration of statement, by a profusion of ornament, by appeals to sentiments loftier than the subject or the occasion required. Too frequently the florid diction of the debating club or the solemn pomp of the funeral oration was invoked when nothing but clearness of exposition or cogency of argument was needed. These faults sprang from the practice of stump oratory, in which the temptation to rouse a multitude by declamation is specially strong. A man straining his voice in the open air is apt to strain his phrases also, and command attention by vehemence. They were increased by the custom of having orations delivered on certain anniversaries, and especially on the Fourth of July, for on these great occasions the speaker feels bound to talk “his very tallest.” Public taste, generally good in the days after the Revolution, when it was formed by a small number of educated men, degenerated in the first half of the nineteenth century. Despite the influence of several orators of the first rank, incessant stump speaking and the inordinate vanity of the average audience brought a gaudy and inflated style into fashion, which became an easy mark for European satire. Of late years a reaction for the better set in, probably strengthened by the example of Abraham Lincoln, who was direct, clear, and sinewy. There are still those who imitate Macaulay or Webster without the richness of the one or the stately strength of the other. The newspapers, in acknowledging that a lecturer is fluent or lucid, still complain if he is not also “eloquent.” Commemorative addresses, which are far more abundant than in Europe, usually sin by over-finish of composition. But on the whole there has been an improvement in the taste of listeners and in the style of speeches. Such improvement would be more rapid were it not for the enormous number of speeches by people who have really nothing to say, as well as by able men on occasions when there is nothing to be said which has not been said hundreds of times before. This is, of course, almost equally true of England, and indeed of all popularly governed countries. Profusion of speech is one of the drawbacks to democracy, and a drawback which shows no signs of disappearing.

As respects the different kinds of oratory, that of the pulpit is pretty much on the English level, the discourses not superior in substance, but perhaps less frequently dull in delivery. Even when the discourse is read, it is read in a less mechanical way, and there is altogether more sense of the worth of vivacity and variety. The average length of sermons is a mean between the twenty minutes of an Anglican minister and the fifty minutes of Scotland. The manner is slightly less conventional, because the American pastor is less apt than his European brother to feel himself a member of a distinct caste.

Forensic oratory has not of late years been cultivated with the ardour of former years. In the United States, as in England, there are many powerful advocates, but no consummate artist. Whether this is due to the failure of nature to produce persons specially gifted, or to the absence of trials whose issues and circumstances are calculated to rouse forensic ability to exceptional efforts, or to a change in public taste, and a disposition to prefer the practical to the showy, is a question which is often asked in England, and no easier to answer in America.

Congress, for reasons explained in the chapter treating of it, is a less favourable theatre for oratory than the great representative assemblies of Europe. The House of Representatives has at no period of its history shone with lights of eloquence, though a few of Clay’s great speeches were delivered in it. There is some good short brisk debating in Committee of the Whole, but the set speeches are mostly pompous and heavy. The Senate has maintained a higher level, partly from the smaller size of its chamber, partly from its greater leisure, partly from the superior ability of its members. Webster’s and Calhoun’s greatest efforts were made on its floor, and produced an enormous effect on the nation. At present, however, the “full-dress debates” in the Senate are apt to want life, the great set speeches being fired off rather with a view to their circulation in the country than to any immediate effect on the assembly. But the ordinary discussions of bills, or questions of policy, reveal plenty of practical speaking power. If there be little passion and no brilliancy, there is strong common sense put in a plain and telling form.

Of the state legislatures not much need be said. In them, as in the House of Representatives, the bulk of the work is done in committees, and the opportunities for displays of eloquence are limited. They are good schools to form a practical business speaker, and they do form many such. But the characteristic merits and defects of transatlantic oratory are more fully displayed on the stump and in those national and state nominating conventions whereof I have already spoken. So far as the handling great assemblies is an art attainable by a man who does not possess the highest gifts of thought and imagination, it has been brought to perfection by the heroes of these mass meetings. They have learnt how to deck out commonplaces with the gaudier flowers of eloquence; how to appeal to the dominant sentiment of the moment; above all, how to make a strong and flexible voice the means of rousing enthusiasm. They scathe the opposite party by vigorous invective; they interweave stories and jokes with their declamatory passages so as to keep the audience constantly amused. They deliver contemptible claptrap with an air of hearty conviction. The party men who listen, because there are few present at a mass meeting, and still fewer at a convention, except members of the party which convoked the gathering, are better pleased with themselves than ever, and go away roused to effort in the party cause. But there has been little argument all through, little attempt to get hold of the reason and judgment of the people. Stimulation, and not instruction or conviction, is the aim which the stump orator sets before himself; and the consequence is that election campaigns have generally been less educationally valuable than those of England. It is worth remarking that the custom which in England requires a representative to deliver at least once a year an address to his constituents, setting forth his view of the political situation and explaining his own speeches and votes during the preceding session, does not seem to be general in the United States. In the campaign of 1896, however, the currency question was argued before the electors with a force and point which were both stimulative and instructive; and the habit of appealing to the intelligence as well as the feelings or prejudices of the voters has been since maintained. When an address meant to be specifically instructive has to be given, it takes the form of a lecture, and is usually delivered by some well-known public man, who receives a fee for it.

There are three kinds of speech which, though they exist in most European countries, have been so much more fully developed beyond the Atlantic as to deserve some notice.

The first of these is the oration of the occasion. When an anniversary comes round—and celebrations of an anniversary are very common in America—or when a sort of festival is held in honour of some public event, such for instance as the unveiling of a statue, or the erection of a monument on a battlefield, or the opening of a city hall or state capitol, or the driving the last spike of a great railroad, a large part of the programme is devoted to speaking. The chief speech is entrusted to one eminent person, who is called the orator of the day, and from whom is expected a long and highly finished harangue, the length and finish of which are wearisome to an outsider, though the people of the locality are flattered. Sometimes these speeches contain good matter—I could mention instances when they embody personal recollections of a distinguished man in whose honour the celebration was being held—but the artificial elevation at which the speaker usually feels bound to maintain himself is apt to make him pompous and affected.

Speeches of a complimentary and purely “epideictic” nature of the English public banquet type are very common. There is scarcely an occasion in life which brings forty or fifty people together on which a prominent citizen or a stranger from Europe is not called upon “to offer a few remarks.” No subject is prescribed for him; often no toast has to be proposed or responded to. He is simply put on his legs to talk upon anything in heaven or earth which may rise to his mind. The European, who is at first embarrassed by this unchartered freedom, presently discovers its advantages, for it gives him a wider range for whatever he may have to say. In nothing does the good nature of the people stand revealed more than in the courteous patience with which they will listen to a long-winded after-dinner speaker, even when he reads a typewritten address at one o’clock A.M.

The third form of discourse specially characteristic of the United States is the lecture. It was less frequent and less fashionable, partly from the rise of monthly magazines full of excellent matter, partly because other kinds of evening entertainment have become more accessible to people outside the great cities, but it began to revive towards the close of last century. With the disappearance of Puritan sentiment the theatre is now extremely popular, perhaps more popular than in any part of Europe. There is hardly a new settlement in the West which strolling companies do not visit. But the lecture, even if dwarfed by the superior attractions of the drama, is still a valuable means of interesting people in literary, scientific, and political questions. And the art of lecturing has been developed in a corresponding measure. A discourse of this kind, whatever the merits of its substance, is usually well arranged, well composed to meet the taste of the audience, and above all, well delivered. It is listened to with an absence of laughter (where it is intended to amuse) and of applause which surprises European observers, but no audiences can be imagined more attentive or appreciative of any real effort to provide good matter.

This grave reserve in American listeners surprises Europeans,1 especially those who have observed the excitability shown on presidential campaigns. It seems to arise from the practical turn of their minds as well as from their intelligence. In an election campaign it is necessary and expedient to give vent to one’s feelings; in listening to a lecture it is not. One comes to be instructed or entertained, and comes with a critical habit formed by hearing many lectures as well as reading many books. Something may also be due to the large proportion of women in an American audience at lectures or other nonpolitical occasions.

Many Europeans think that the kind of oratory in which the Americans show to most advantage is neither the political kind, abundant as it is, nor the commemorative oration, assiduously as it is cultivated, but what may be called the lighter ornamental style, such as the after-dinner speech. The fondness (sometimes pushed to excess) of the people for anecdotes, and their skill in telling them, the general diffusion of humour, the readiness in catching the spirit of an occasion, all contribute to make their efforts in this direction more easy and happy, while furnishing less temptation for the characteristic fault of a straining after effect. I have already observed that they shine in stump speaking, properly so called—that is, in speaking which rouses an audience but ought not to be reported. The reasons why their more serious platform and parliamentary oratory has been, of course with brilliant exceptions, less excellent are, over and above the absence of momentous issues, probably the same as those which have affected the average quality of newspaper writing. In Europe the leading speakers and writers have nearly all belonged to the cultivated classes, and, feeling themselves raised above their audiences, have been in the habit of obeying their own taste and that of their class rather than the appetite of those whom they addressed. In England, for instance, the standard of speaking by public men has been set by parliamentary debate, because till within the last few decades the leading men of the country had all won their reputation in Parliament. They carried their parliamentary style with them into popular meetings, and aspirants of all classes imitated this style. It sometimes erred in being too formal and too prolix; but its taste was good, and its very plainness obliged the speaker to have solid matter. In America, on the other hand, stump oratory is older or at least quite as old as congressional oratory, and the latter has never gained that hold on the ideas and habits of the people which parliamentay debate held in England. Hence speaking has generally moved on a somewhat lower level, not but what there were brilliant popular orators in the first days of the Republic, like Patrick Henry, and majestic parliamentary orators like Daniel Webster in the next generation, but that the volume of stump speaking was so much greater than in England that the fashion could not be set by a few of the greatest men, but was determined by the capacities of the average man. The taste of the average man, instead of being raised by the cultivated few to their own standard, but tended to lower the practice, and to some extent even the taste, of the cultivated few. To seem wiser or more refined than the multitude, to incur the suspicion of talking down to the multitude, would have offended the sentiment of the country, and injured the prospects of a statesman. It is perhaps a confirmation of this view that, while pompousness has flourished in the West, and floridity still marks the South, the most polished speakers have generally belonged to New England, where the level of average taste and knowledge was exceptionally high. One of these speakers, the late Mr. Wendell Phillips, was, in the opinion of competent critics, an opinion which those who remember his conversation will be inclined to agree with, one of the first orators of that time, and not more remarkable for the finish than for the transparent simplicity of his style, which attained its highest effects by the most direct and natural methods.

chapter 119

The Pleasantness of American Life

I have never met a European of the middle or upper classes who did not express astonishment when told that America was a more agreeable place than Europe to live in. “For working men,” he would answer, “yes; but for men of education or property, how can a new rough country, where nothing but business is talked and the refinements of life are only just beginning to appear, how can such a country be compared with England, or France, or Italy?”

It is nevertheless true that there are elements in the life of the United States which may well make a European of any class prefer to dwell there rather than in the land of his birth. Let us see what they are.

In the first place there is the general prosperity and material well-being of the mass of the inhabitants. In Europe, if an observer takes his eye off his own class and considers the whole population of any one of the greater countries, he will perceive that by far the greater number lead very laborious lives, and are, if not actually in want of the necessaries of existence, yet liable to fall into want, the agriculturists when nature is harsh, the wage earners when work is scarce. In England the lot of the labourer has been hitherto a hard one, incessant field toil, with rheumatism at fifty and the workhouse at the end of the vista; while the misery massed in such cities as London, Liverpool, and Glasgow is only too well known. In France there is less pauperism, but nothing can be more pinched and sordid than the life of the bulk of the peasantry. In the great towns of Germany there is constant distress and increasing discontent. The riots of 1886 in Belgium told an even more painful tale of the wretchedness of the miners and artisans there. In Italy the condition of the rural population of Venetia as well as of the southern provinces still gives cause for grave concern. Of Russia, with her ninety millions of ignorant peasants living in half barbarism, there is no need to speak. Contrast any one of these countries with the United States, where the working classes are as well fed, clothed, and lodged as the lower middle class in Europe, and the farmers who till their own land (as nearly all do) much better, where a good education is within the reach of the poorest, where the opportunities for getting on in one way or another are so abundant that no one need fear any physical ill but disease or the results of his own intemperance. Pauperism already exists and increases in some of the larger cities, where drink breeds misery, and where recent immigrants, with the shiftlessness of Europe still clinging round them, are huddled together in squalor. But outside these few cities one sees nothing but comfort. In Connecticut and Ohio the native American operatives in many a manufacturing town lead a life easier, and more brightened by intellectual culture and by amusements, than that of the clerks and shopkeepers of England or France. In cities like Kansas City or Chicago one finds miles on miles of suburb filled with neat wooden houses, each with its tiny garden plot, owned by the shop assistants and handicraftsmen who return on the electric cars in the evening from their work. All over the wide West, from Lake Ontario to the Upper Missouri, one travels past farms of one to two hundred acres, in every one of which there is a spacious farmhouse among orchards and meadows, where the farmer’s children grow up strong and hearty on abundant food, the boys full of intelligence and enterprise, ready to push their way on farms of their own or enter business in the nearest town, the girls familiar with the current literature of England as well as of America. The life of the agricultural settler in the further West has its privations, but it is brightened by hope, and has a singular charm of freedom and simplicity. The impression which this comfort and plenty makes is heightened by the brilliance and keenness of the air, by the look of freshness and cleanness which even the cities wear, all of them except the poorest parts of those few I have referred to above. The fog and soot flakes of an English town, as well as its squalor, are wanting; you are in a new world, and a world which knows the sun. It is impossible not to feel warmed, cheered, invigorated by the sense of such material well-being all around one, impossible not to be infected by the buoyancy and hopefulness of the people. The wretchedness of Europe lies far behind; the weight of its problems seems lifted from the mind. As a man suffering from depression feels the clouds roll away from his spirit when he meets a friend whose good humour and energy present the better side of things and point the way through difficulties, so the sanguine temper of the Americans, and the sight of the ardour with which they pursue their aims, stimulates a European, and makes him think the world a better place than it had seemed amid the entanglements and sufferings of his own hemisphere.

To some Europeans this may seem fanciful. I doubt if any European can realize till he has been in America how much difference it makes to the happiness of anyone not wholly devoid of sympathy with his fellow beings, to feel that all round him, in all classes of society and all parts of the country, there exist in such ample measure so many of the external conditions of happiness: abundance of the necessaries of life, easy command of education and books, amusements and leisure to enjoy them, comparatively few temptations to intemperance and vice.

The second charm of American life is one which some Europeans will smile at. It is social equality. To many Europeans the word has an odious sound. It suggests a dirty fellow in a blouse elbowing his betters in a crowd, or an ill-conditioned villager shaking his fist at the parson and the squire; or, at any rate, it suggests obtrusiveness and bad manners. The exact contrary is the truth. Equality improves manners, for it strengthens the basis of all good manners, respect for other men and women simply as men and women, irrespective of their station in life. Probably the assertion of social equality was one of the causes which injured American manners fifty years ago, for that they were then bad among townsfolk can hardly be doubted in face of the testimony, not merely of sharp tongues like Mrs. Trollope’s, but of calm observers like Sir Charles Lyell and sympathetic observers like Richard Cobden.1 In those days there was an obtrusive self-assertiveness among the less refined classes, especially towards those who, coming from the Old World, were assumed to come in a patronizing spirit. Now, however, social equality has grown so naturally out of the circumstances of the country, has been so long established, and is so ungrudgingly admitted, that all excuse for obtrusiveness has disappeared. People meet on a simple and natural footing, with more frankness and ease than is possible in countries where everyone is either looking up or looking down.2 There is no servility on the part of the humbler, and if now and then a little of the “I am as good as you” rudeness be perceptible, it is almost sure to proceed from a recent immigrant, to whom the attitude of simple equality has not yet become familiar as the evidently proper attitude of one man to another. There is no condescension on the part of the more highly placed, nor is there even that sort of scrupulously polite coldness which one might think they would adopt in order to protect their dignity. They have no cause to fear for their dignity, so long as they do not themselves forget it. And the fact that your shoemaker or your factory hand addresses his employer as an equal does not prevent him from showing all the respect to which any one may be entitled on the score of birth or education or eminence in any walk of life.

This naturalness is a distinct addition to the pleasure of social life. It enlarges the circle of possible friendship, by removing the gêne which in most parts of Europe persons of different ranks feel in exchanging their thoughts on any matters save those of business. It raises the humbler classes without lowering the upper; indeed, it improves the upper no less than the lower by expunging that latent insolence which deforms the manners of so many of the European rich. It relieves women in particular, who in Europe are specially apt to think of class distinctions, from that sense of constraint and uneasiness which is produced by the knowledge that other women with whom they come in contact are either looking down on them, or at any rate trying to gauge and determine their social position. It expands the range of a man’s sympathies, and makes it easier for him to enter into the sentiments of other classes than his own. It gives a sense of solidarity to the whole nation, cutting away the ground for all sorts of jealousies and grudges which distract people so long as the social pretensions of past centuries linger on to be resented by the levelling spirit of a revolutionary age. And I have never heard native Americans speak of any drawbacks corresponding to and qualifying these benefits.

There are, moreover, other rancours besides those of social inequality whose absence from America brightens it to a European eye. There are no quarrels of churches and sects. Judah does not vex Ephraim, nor Ephraim envy Judah. No Established Church looks down scornfully upon Dissenters from the height of its titles and endowments, and talks of them as hindrances in the way of its work. No Dissenters pursue an Established Church in a spirit of watchful jealousy, nor agitate for its overthrow. One is not offended by the contrast between the theory and the practice of a religion of peace, between professions of universal affection in pulpit addresses and forms of prayer, and the acrimony of clerical controversialists. Still less, of course, is there that sharp opposition and antagonism of Christians and anti-Christians which lacerates the private as well as public life of France. Rivalry between sects appears only in the innocent form of the planting of new churches and raising of funds for missionary objects, while most of the Protestant denominations, including the four most numerous, constantly fraternize in charitable work. Between Roman Catholics and the more educated Protestants there is little hostility, and sometimes even cooperation for a philanthropic purpose. The sceptic is no longer under a social ban, and discussions on the essentials of Christianity and of theism are conducted with good temper. There is not a country in the world where Frederick the Great’s principle, that everyone should be allowed to go to heaven his own way, is so fully applied. This sense of religious peace as well as religious freedom all around one is soothing to the weary European, and contributes not a little to sweeten the lives of ordinary people.

I come last to the character and ways of the Americans themselves, in which there is a certain charm, hard to convey by description, but felt almost as soon as one sets foot on their shore, and felt constantly thereafter. In purely business relations there is hardness, as there is all the world over. Inefficiency has a very short shrift. But apart from those relations they are a kindly people. Good nature, heartiness, a readiness to render small services to one another, an assumption that neighbours in the country, or persons thrown together in travel, or even in a crowd, were meant to be friendly rather than hostile to one another, seem to be everywhere in the air, and in those who breathe it. Sociability is the rule, isolation and moroseness the rare exception. It is not merely that people are more vivacious or talkative than an Englishman expects to find them, for the Western man is often taciturn and seldom wreathes his long face into a smile. It is rather that you feel that the man next you, whether silent or talkative, does not mean to repel intercourse, or convey by his manner his low opinion of his fellow creatures. Everybody seems disposed to think well of the world and its inhabitants, well enough at least to wish to be on easy terms with them and serve them in those little things whose trouble to the doer is small in proportion to the pleasure they give to the receiver. To help others is better recognized as a duty than in Europe. Nowhere is money so readily given for any public purpose; nowhere, I suspect, are there so many acts of private kindness done, such, for instance, as paying the college expenses of a promising boy, or aiding a widow to carry on her husband’s farm; and these are not done with ostentation. People seem to take their own troubles more lightly than they do in Europe, and to be more indulgent to the faults by which troubles are caused. It is a land of hope, and a land of hope is a land of good humour. And they have also, though this is a quality more perceptible in women than in men, a remarkable faculty for enjoyment, a power of drawing more happiness from obvious pleasures, simple and innocent pleasures, than one often finds in overburdened Europe.

As generalizations like this are necessarily comparative, I may be asked with whom I am comparing the Americans. With the English, or with some attempted average of European nations? Primarily I am comparing them with the English, because they are the nearest relatives of the English. But there are other European countries, such as France, Belgium, Spain, in which the sort of cheerful friendliness I have sought to describe is less common than it is in America. Even in Germany and German Austria, simple and kindly as are the masses of the people, the upper classes have that roideur which belongs to countries dominated by an old aristocracy, or by a plutocracy trying to imitate aristocratic ways. The upper class in America (if one may use such an expression) has not in this respect differentiated itself from the character of the nation at large.

If the view here presented be a true one, to what causes are we to ascribe this agreeable development of the original English type, a development in whose course the sadness of Puritanism seems to have been shed off?

Perhaps one of them is the humorous turn of the American character. Humour is a sweetener of temper, a copious spring of charity, for it makes the good side of bad things even more visible than the weak side of good things; but humour in Americans may be as much a result of an easy and kindly turn as their kindliness is of their humour. Another is the perpetuation of a habit of mutual help formed in colonial days. Colonists need one another’s aid more constantly than the dwellers in an old country, are thrown more upon one another, even when they live scattered in woods or prairies, are more interested in one another’s welfare. When you have only three neighbours within five miles, each of them covers a large part of your horizon. You want to borrow a plough from one; you get another to help you to roll your logs; your children’s delight is to go over for an evening’s merrymaking to the lads and lasses of the third. It is much pleasanter to be on good terms with these few neighbours, and when others come one by one, they fall into the same habits of intimacy. Anyone who has read those stories of rustic New England or New York life which delighted those who were English children in 1850—I do not know whether they delight children still, or have been thrown aside for more highly spiced food—will remember the warm-hearted simplicity and atmosphere of genial goodwill which softened the roughness of peasant manners and tempered the sternness of a Calvinistic creed. It is natural that the freedom of intercourse and sense of interdependence which existed among the early settlers, and which have always existed since among the pioneers of colonization in the West as they moved from the Connecticut to the Mohawk, from the Mohawk to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Mississippi, should have left on the national character traces not effaced even in the more artificial civilization of our own time. Something may be set down to the feeling of social equality, creating that respect for a man as a man, whether he be rich or poor, which was described a few pages back; and something to a regard for the sentiment of the multitude, a sentiment which forbids any man to stand aloof in the conceit of self-importance, and holds up geniality and good fellowship as almost the first of social virtues. I do not mean that a man consciously suppresses his impulses to selfishness or gruffness because he knows that his faults will be ill regarded; but that, having grown up in a society which is infinitely powerful as compared with the most powerful person in it, he has learnt to realize his individual insignificance, as members of the upper class in Europe never do, and has become permeated by the feeling which this society entertains—that each one’s duty is not only to accept equality, but also to relish equality, and to make himself pleasant to his equals. Thus the habit is formed even in natures of no special sweetness, and men become kindly by doing kindly acts.

Whether, however, these suggestions be right or wrong, there is no doubt as to the fact which they attempt to explain. I do not, of course, give it merely as the casual impression of European visitors, whom a singularly frank and ready hospitality welcomes and makes much of. I base it on the reports of European friends who have lived for years in the United States, and whose criticism of the ways and notions of the people is keen enough to show that they are no partial witnesses.

chapter 120

The Uniformity of American Life

To the pleasantness of American life there is one, and perhaps only one, serious drawback—its uniformity. Those who have been struck by the size of America, and by what they have heard of its restless excitement, may be surprised at the word. They would have guessed that an unquiet changefulness and turmoil were the disagreeables to be feared. But uniformity, which the European visitor begins to note when he has travelled for a month or two, is the feature of the country which Englishmen who have lived long there, and Americans who are familiar with Europe, most frequently revert to when asked to say what is the “crook in their lot.”

It is felt in many ways. I will name a few.

It is felt in the aspects of nature. All the natural features of the United States are on a larger scale than those of Europe. The four chief mountain chains are each of them longer than the Alps.1 Of the gigantic rivers and of those inland seas we call the Great Lakes one need not speak. The centre of the continent is occupied by a plain larger than the western half of Europe. In the Mississippi Valley, from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Superior, there is nothing deserving to be called a hill, though, as one moves westward from the great river, long soft undulations in the great prairie begin to appear. Through vast stretches of country one finds the same physical character maintained with little change—the same strata, the same vegetation, a generally similar climate. From the point where you leave the Alleghenies at Pittsburg, until, after crossing the Missouri, you approach the still untilled prairie of the West, a railway run of some twelve hundred miles, there is a uniformity of landscape greater than could be found along any one hundred miles of railway run in Western Europe. Everywhere the same nearly flat country, over which you cannot see far, because you are little raised above it, the same fields and crops, the same rough wooden fences, the same thickets of the same bushes along the stream edges, with here and there a bit of old forest; the same solitary farmhouses and straggling wood-built villages. And when one has passed beyond the fields and farmhouses, there is an even more unvaried stretch of slightly rolling prairie, smooth and bare, till after three hundred miles the blue line of the Rocky Mountains rises upon the western horizon.

There are some extraordinary natural phenomena, such as Niagara, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the indescribably grand and solemn canyon of the Colorado River, which the Old World cannot equal. But taking the country as a whole, and remembering that it is a continent, it is not more rich in picturesque beauty than the much smaller western half of Europe. The long Allegheny range contains a good deal of pretty scenery and a few really romantic spots, but hardly anything so charming as the best bits of Scotland or southern Ireland, or the English Lake Country. The Rocky Mountains are pierced by some splendid gorges, such as that famous one through which the Arkansas River descends to South Pueblo, and show some very grand prospects, such as that over the Great Salt Lake from the Mormon capital. But neither the Rocky Mountains, with their dependent ranges, nor the Sierra Nevada, can be compared for variety of grandeur and beauty with the Alps; for although each chain nearly equals the Alps in height, and covers a greater area, they have little snow, no glaciers,2 and a singular uniformity of character. One finds, I think, less variety in the whole chain of the Rockies than in the comparatively short Pyrenees. There are, indeed, in the whole United States very few quite first-rate pieces of mountain scenery rivalling the best of the Old World. The most impressive are two or three of the deep valleys of the Sierra Nevada (of which the Yosemite is the best known), and the superb line of extinct volcanoes, bearing snowfields and glaciers, which one sees, rising out of vast and sombre forests, from the banks of the Columbia River and the shores of Puget Sound.3 So the Atlantic coast, though there are charming bits between Newport and the New Brunswick frontier, cannot vie with the coasts of Scotland, Ireland, or Norway; while southward from New York to Florida it is everywhere flat and generally dreary. In the United States people take journeys proportionate to the size of the country. A family thinks nothing of going twelve hundred miles, from St. Louis to Cape May (near Philadelphia), for a seaside holiday. But even journeys of twelve hundred miles do not give an American so much change of scene and variety of surroundings as a Parisian has when he goes to Luchon, or a Berliner to Berchtesgaden. The man who lives in the section of America which seems destined to contain the largest population, I mean the states on the Upper Mississippi, lives in the midst of a plain wider than the plains of Russia, and must travel hundreds of miles to escape from its monotony.

When we turn from the aspects of nature to the cities of men, the uniformity is even more remarkable. With eight or nine exceptions to be mentioned presently, American cities differ from one another only herein, that some of them are built more with brick than with wood, and others more with wood than with brick. In all else they are alike, both great and small. In all the same wide streets, crossing at right angles, ill-paved, but planted along the side walks with maple trees whose autumnal scarlet surpasses the brilliance of any European foliage.4 In all the same shops, arranged on the same plan, the same Chinese laundries, with Li Kow visible through the window, the same ice-cream stores, the same large hotels with seedy men hovering about in the dreary entrance hall, the same streetcars passing to and fro with passengers clinging to the doorstep, the same locomotives ringing their great bells as they clank slowly down the middle of the street. I admit that in external aspect there is a sad monotony in the larger towns of England also. Compare English cities with Italian cities, and most of the former seem like one another, incapable of being, so to speak, individualized as you individualize a man with a definite character and aspect unlike that of other men. Take the Lancashire towns, for instance, large and prosperous places. You cannot individualize Bolton or Wigan, Oldham or Bury, except by trying to remember that Bury is slightly less rough than Oldham, and Wigan a thought more grimy than Bolton. But in Italy every city has its character, its memories, its life and achievements wrought into the pillars of its churches and the towers that stand along its ramparts. Siena is not like Perugia, nor Perugia like Orvieto; Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Ancona, Osimo, standing along the same coast within seventy miles of one another, have each of them a character, a sentiment, what one may call an idiosyncrasy, which comes vividly back to us at the mention of its name. Now, what English towns are to Italian, that American towns are to English. They are in some ways pleasanter; they are cleaner, there is less poverty, less squalor, less darkness. But their monotony haunts one like a nightmare. Even the irksomeness of finding the streets named by numbers becomes insufferable. It is doubtless convenient to know by the number how far up the city the particular street is. But you cannot give any sort of character to Fifty-third Street, for the name refuses to lend itself to any association. There is something wearisomely hard and bare in such a system.

I return joyfully to the exceptions. Boston has a character of her own, with her beautiful Common, her smooth environing waters, her Beacon Hill crowned by the gilded dome of the State House, and Bunker Hill, bearing the monument of the famous fight. New York, besides a magnificent position, has in the gigantic towerlike buildings which have since 1890 soared into her sky, as well as in the tremendous rush of men and vehicles along the streets, as much the air of a great capital as London, or Paris, or Berlin. Chicago, with her enormous size and the huge warehouses that line her endless thoroughfares, now covered by a dense smoke pall, leaves an impression which might be gloomy were it not for the stateliness of her lake front with the stretch of blue beyond. Richmond has a quaint old-world look which dwells in the memory; few cities have a prospect over shining waters finer than that which the heights of Cleveland command. Kansas City has shown how to use a noble situation, for she has laid out parks along the valleys and preserved the steep wooded slope of the bluff that rises above the broad flood of the Missouri. Washington, with its wide and beautifully graded avenues, and the glittering white of the Capitol, has become since 1880 a singularly handsome city. In April and May it has a woodland charm unequalled by any other great city in the world. Charleston has the air of an English town of last century, though lapped in a far richer vegetation, and with the shining softness of summer seas spread out before it. And New Orleans—or rather the Creole quarter of New Orleans, for the rest of the city is commonplace—is delicious, suggesting old France and Spain, yet a France and Spain strangely transmuted in this new clime. I have seen nothing in America more picturesque than the Rue Royale, with its houses of all heights, often built round a courtyard, where a magnolia or an orange tree stands in the middle, and wooden external staircases lead up to wooden galleries, the house fronts painted of all colours and carrying double rows of balconies decorated with pretty ironwork, the whole standing languid and still in the warm soft air, and touched with the subtle fragrance of decay. Here in New Orleans the streets and public buildings, and specially the old City Hall, with the arms of Spain still upon it, speak of history. One feels, in stepping across Canal Street from the Creole quarter to the business parts of the town, that one steps from an old nationality to a new one, that this city must have had vicissitudes, that it represents something, and that something one of the great events of history, the surrender of the northern half of the New World by the Romano-Celtic races to the Teutonic. Quebec and (in some slight degree) Montreal, fifteen hundred miles away, tell the same tale; Sante Fe in New Mexico repeats it.

It is the absence in nearly all the American cities of anything that speaks of the past that makes their external aspect so unsuggestive. In pacing their busy streets and admiring their handsome city halls and churches, one’s heart sinks at the feeling that nothing historically interesting ever has happened here, perhaps ever will happen. In many an English town, however ugly with its smoke and its new suburbs, one sees at least an ancient church, one can discover some fragments of a castle or a city wall. Even Wigan and Northampton have ancient churches, though Northampton lately allowed the Northwestern Railway to destroy the last traces of the castle where Henry II issued his assize. But in America hardly any public building is associated with anything more interesting than a big party convention; and, nowadays, even the big conventions are held in temporary structures, whose materials are sold when the politicians have dispersed. Nowhere, perhaps, does this sense of the absolute novelty of all things strike one so strongly as in San Francisco. Few cities in the world can vie with her either in the beauty or in the natural advantages of her situation; indeed, there are only two places in Europe—Constantinople and Gibraltar—that combine an equally perfect landscape with what may be called an equally imperial position. Before you there is the magnificent bay, with its far-stretching arms and rocky isles, and beyond it the faint line of the Sierra Nevada, cutting the clear air like mother-of-pearl; behind there is the roll of the ocean; to the left, the majestic gateway between mountains through which ships bear in commerce from the farthest shores of the Pacific; to the right, valleys rich with corn and wine, sweeping away to the southern horizon. The city itself is full of bold hills, rising steeply from the deep water. The air is keen, dry, and bright, like the air of Greece, and the waters not less blue. Perhaps it is this air and light, recalling the cities of the Mediterranean, that make one involuntrily look up to the top of these hills for the feudal castle, or the ruins of the Acropolis, which one thinks must crown them. I found myself so looking all the time I remained in the city. But on none of these heights is there anything more interesting, anything more vocal to the student of the past, than huge hotels or the sumptuous villas of railway magnates, who have chosen a hilltop to display their wealth to the city, but have erected houses like all other houses, only larger. San Francisco has had a good deal of history since 1846; but this history does not, like that of Greece or Italy, write itself in stone.

Of the uniformity of political institutions over the whole United States I have spoken already. Everywhere the same system of state governments, everywhere the same municipal governments, and almost uniformly bad or good in proportion to the greater or smaller population of the city; the same party machinery organized on the same methods, “run” by the same wire-pullers and “workers.” In rural local government there are some diversities in the names, areas, and functions of the different bodies, yet differences slight in comparison with the points of likeness. The schools are practically identical in organization, in the subjects taught, in the methods of teaching, though the administration of them is as completely decentralized as can be imagined, even the state commissioner having no right to do more than suggest or report. So it is with the charitable institutions, with the libraries, the lecture courses, the public amusements. All these are more abundant and better of their kind in the richer and more cultivated parts of the country, generally better in the North Atlantic than in the inland states, and in the West than in the South. But they are the same in type everywhere. It is the same with social habits and usages. There are still some differences between the South and the North; and in the Eastern cities the upper class is more Europeanized in its code of etiquette and its ways of daily life. But even these variations tend to disappear. Eastern customs begin to permeate the West, beginning with the richer families; the South is more like the North than it was before the war. Travel where you will, you feel that what you have found in one place that you will find in another. The thing which hath been, will be: you can no more escape from it than you can quit the land to live in the sea.

Last of all we come to man himself—to man and to woman, not less important than man. The ideas of men and women, their fundamental beliefs and their superficial tastes, their methods of thinking and their fashions of talking, are what most concern their fellow men; and if there be variety and freshness in these, the uniformity of nature and the monotony of cities signify but little. If I observe that in these respects also the similarity of type over the country is surprising, I shall be asked whether I am not making the old mistake of the man who fancied all Chinese were like one another, because, noticing the dress and the pigtail, he did not notice minor differences of feature. A scholar is apt to think that all businessmen write the same hand, and a businessman thinks the same of all scholars. Perhaps Americans think all Englishmen alike. And I may also be asked with whom I am comparing the Americans. With Europe as a whole? If so, is it not absurd to expect that the differences between different sections in one people should be as marked as those between different peoples? The United States are larger than Europe, but Europe has many races and many languages, among whom contrasts far broader must be expected than between one people, even if it stretches over a continent.

It is most clearly not with Europe, but with each of the leading European peoples that we must compare the people of America. So comparing them with the people of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, one discovers more varieties between individuals in these European peoples than one finds in America. Scotchmen and Irishmen are more unlike Englishmen, the native of Normandy more unlike the native of Provence, the Pomeranian more unlike the Würtemberger, the Piedmontese more unlike the Neapolitan, the Basque more unlike the Andalusian, than the American from any part of the country is to the American from any other. Differences of course there are between the human type as developed in different regions of the country—differences moral and intellectual as well as physical. You can generally tell a Southerner by his look as well as by his speech. A native of Maine will probably differ from a native of Kentucky, a Georgian from an Oregonian. But these differences strike even an American observer much as the difference between a Yorkshireman and a Warwickshire man strikes the English, and is slighter than the contrast between a middle-class southern Englishman and a middle-class Scotchman, slighter than the differences between a peasant from Northumberland and a peasant from Dorsetshire. Or, to take another way of putting it: If at some great gathering of a political party from all parts of the United Kingdom you were to go round and talk to, say, one hundred, taken at random, of the persons present, you would be struck by more diversity between the notions and the tastes and mental habits of the individuals comprising that one hundred than if you tried the same experiment with a hundred Americans of the same education and position, similarly gathered in a convention from every state in the Union.

I do not in the least mean that people are more commonplace in America than in England, or that the Americans are less ideal than the English. Neither of these statements would be true. On the contrary, the average American is more alive to new ideas, more easily touched through his imagination or his emotions, than the average Englishman or Frenchman. I mean only that the native-born Americans appear to vary less, in fundamentals, from what may be called the dominant American type than Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Italians do from any type which could be taken as the dominant type in any of those nations. Or, to put the same thing differently, it is rather more difficult to take any assemblage of attributes in any of these European countries and call it the national type than it is to do the like in the United States.

These are not given as the impressions of a traveller. Such impressions, being necessarily hasty, and founded on a comparatively narrow observation, would deserve little confidence. They sum up the conclusions of Europeans long resident in America, and familiar with different parts of the country. They are, I think, admitted by the most acute Americans themselves. I have often heard the latter dilate on what seems to them the one crowning merit of life in Europe—the variety it affords, the opportunities it gives of easy and complete changes of scene and environment. The pleasure which an American finds in crossing the Atlantic, a pleasure more intense than any which the European enjoys, is that of passing from a land of happy monotony into regions where everything is redolent with memories of the past, and derives from the past no less than from the present a wealth and a subtle complexity of interest which no new country can possess.

Life in America is in most ways pleasanter, easier, simpler, less cumbered by conventions than in Europe; it floats in a sense of happiness like that of a radiant summer morning. But life in any of the great European centres is capable of an intensity, a richness blended of many elements, which has not yet been reached in America. There are more problems in Europe calling for solution; there is more passion in the struggles that rage round them; the past more frequently kindles the present with a glow of imaginative light. In whichever country of Europe one dwells, one feels that the other countries are near, that the fortunes of their peoples are bound up with the fortunes of one’s own, that ideas are shooting to and fro between them. The web of history woven day by day all over Europe is vast and of many colours: it is fateful to every European. But in America it is only the philosopher who can feel that it will ultimately be fateful to Americans also; to the ordinary man the Old World seems far off, severed by a dissociating ocean, its mighty burden with little meaning for him.

Those who have observed the uniformity I have been attempting to describe have commonly set it down, as Europeans do most American phenomena, to what they call democracy. Democratic government has in reality not much to do with it, except in so far as such a government helps to induce that deference of individuals to the mass which strengthens a dominant type, whether of ideas, of institutions, or of manners. More must be ascribed to the equality of material conditions, still more general than in Europe, to the fact that nearly everyone is engaged either in agriculture, or in commerce, or in some handicraft, to the extraordinary mobility of the population, which in migrating from one part of the country to another brings the characteristics of each part into the others, to the diffusion of education, to the cheapness of literature and universal habit of reading, which enable everyone to know what everyone else is thinking, but above all to the newness of the country, and the fact that four-fifths of it have been made all at a stroke, and therefore all of a piece, as compared with the slow growth by which European countries have developed. Newness is the cause of uniformity, not merely in the external aspect of cities, villages, farmhouses, but in other things also, for the institutions and social habits which belonged a century ago to a group of small communities on the Atlantic coast, have been suddenly extended over an immense area, each band of settlers naturally seeking to retain its customs, and to plant in the new soil shoots from which trees like those of the old home might spring up. The variety of European countries is due not only to the fact that their race elements have not yet become thoroughly commingled, but also that many old institutions have survived among the new ones; as in a city that grows but slowly, old buildings are not cleared away to make room for others more suited to modern commerce, but are allowed to stand, sometimes empty and unused, sometimes half adapted to new purposes. This scarcely happens in America. Doubtless many American institutions are old, and were old before they were carried across the Atlantic. But they have generally received a new dress, which, in adapting them to the needs of today, conceals their ancient character; and the form in which they have been diffused or reproduced in the different states of the Union is in all those states practically identical.

In each of the great European countries the diversity of primeval and mediæval times, when endless varieties of race, speech, and faith existed within the space of a few hundred miles, has been more or less preserved by segregative influences. In America a small race, of the same speech and faith, has spread itself out over an immense area, and has been strong enough to impose its own type, not only on the Dutch and other early settlers of the Middle states, but on the immigrant masses who have been arriving since the middle of last century.

There are now in America more Irish people, and children of Irish people, than there are in Ireland; while large tracts in the country and some of the cities are in speech rather German than American, so much so that public documents are issued in both tongues.5 Yet neither the Celtic nor the Teutonic incomers, much less the more recent Slavs and Italians, have as yet substantially affected the national character and habits.

May one, then, expect that when novelty has worn off, and America counts her life by centuries instead of by decades, variety will develop itself, and such complexities, or diversities, or incongruities (whichever one is to call them) as European countries present, be deeper and more numerous?

As regards the outside of things, this seems unlikely. Many of the small towns of today will grow into large towns, a few of the large towns into great cities, but as they grow they will not become less like one another. There may be larger theatres and hotels, more churches (in spite of secularist lecturers) and handsomer ones; but what is to make the theatres and churches of one city differ from those of another? Fashion and the immense facilities of intercourse tend to wear down even such diversities in the style of building or furnishing, or in modes of locomotion, or in amusements and forms of social intercourse, as now exist.

As regards ideas and the inner life of men, the question is a more difficult one. At present there are only two parts of the country where one looks to meet with the well-marked individualities I refer to. One of these is New England, where the spirit of English Puritanism, expressed in quite other forms by Emerson and his associates, did produce a peculiar type of thinking and discoursing, which has now, however, almost died out; and where one still meets, especially among the cultivated classes, a larger number than elsewhere of persons who have thought and studied for themselves, and are unlike their fellows.6 The other part of the country is the Far West, where the wild life led by pioneers in exploration, or ranching, or gold-mining has produced a number of striking figures, men of extraordinary self-reliance, with a curious mixture of geniality and reckless hardihood, no less indifferent to their own lives than to the lives of others. Of preserving this latter type there was never much hope; the swift march of civilization has now almost expunged it. Before the end of the twentieth century the natural resources of the country will have been completely developed and some of them exhausted. Railway construction will have slackened. Few if any irrigation works will remain to be made. Some of the present opportunities for amassing vast fortunes will have vanished. When lines of work that are now open and stimulants to ambition that are now operative have become less numerous or less potent, upon what will the eager and restless energy of the American expend itself? Or will that eagerness itself abate when the present stimuli have become less insistent?

When one sees millions of people thinking the same thoughts and reading the same books, and perceives that as the multitude grows, its influence becomes always stronger, it is hard to imagine how new points of repulsion and contrast are to arise, new diversities of sentiment and doctrine to be developed. Nevertheless it may be hoped that as the intellectual proficiency and speculative play of mind which are now confined to a comparatively small class become more generally diffused, as the pressure of effort towards material success is relaxed, as the number of men devoted to science, art, and learning increases, so will the dominance of what may be called the business mind decline, and with a richer variety of knowledge, tastes, and pursuits, there will come also a larger crop of marked individualities, and of divergent intellectual types.

Time will take away some of the monotony which comes from the absence of historical associations; for even if, as is to be hoped, there comes no war to make battlefields famous like those of the Civil War, yet literature and the lives of famous men cannot but attach to many spots associations to which the blue of distance will at last give a romantic interest. No people could be more ready than are the Americans to cherish such associations. Their country has a short past, but they willingly revere and preserve all the memories the past has bequeathed to them.

chapter 121

The Temper of the West

Western America is one of the most interesting subjects of study the modern world has seen. There has been nothing in the past resembling its growth, and probably there will be nothing in the future. A vast territory, wonderfully rich in natural resources of many kinds; a temperate and healthy climate, fit for European labour; a soil generally, and in many places marvellously, fertile; in some regions mountains full of minerals, in others trackless forests where every tree is over two hundred feet high; and the whole of this virtually unoccupied territory thrown open to a vigorous race, with all the appliances and contrivances of modern science at its command—these are phenomena absolutely without precedent in history, and which cannot recur elsewhere, because our planet contains no such other favoured tract of country.1

The Spaniards and Portuguese settled in tropical countries, which soon enervated them. They carried with them the poison of slavery; their colonists were separated, some by long land journeys, and all by still longer voyages from the centres of civilization. But the railway and the telegraph follow the Western American. The Greeks of the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, who planted themselves all round the coasts of the Mediterranean, had always enemies, and often powerful enemies, to overcome before they could found even their trading stations on the coast, much less occupy the lands of the interior. In Western America the presence of the Indians has done no more than give a touch of romance or a spice of danger to the exploration of some regions, such as Western Dakota and Arizona, while over the rest of the country the unhappy aborigines have slunk silently away, scarcely even complaining of the robbery of lands and the violation of plighted faith. Nature and time seem to have conspired to make the development of the Mississippi basin and the Pacific slope the swiftest, easiest, completest achievement in the whole record of the civilizing progress of mankind since the founder of the Egyptian monarchy gathered the tribes of the Nile under one government.

The details of this development and the statistics that illustrate it have been too often set forth to need restatement here. It is of the character and temper of the men who have conducted it that I wish to speak, a matter which has received less attention, but is essential to a just conception of the Americans of today. For the West is the most American part of America; that is to say, the part where those features which distinguish America from Europe come out in the strongest relief. What Europe is to Asia, what England is to the rest of Europe, what America is to England, that the Western states are to the Atlantic states, the heat and pressure and hurry of life always growing as we follow the path of the sun. In Eastern America there are still quiet spots, in the valleys of the Alleghenies, for instance, in nooks of old New England, in university towns like Ithaca or Ann Arbor. In the West there are none. All is bustle, motion, and struggle, most so of course among the native Americans, yet even the immigrant from the secluded valleys of Thuringia, or the shores of some Norwegian fjord, learns the ways almost as readily as the tongue of the country, and is soon swept into the whirlpool.

It is the most enterprising and unsettled Americans that come West; and when they have left their old homes, broken their old ties, resigned the comforts and pleasures of their former homes, they are resolved to obtain the wealth and success for which they have come. They throw themselves into work with a feverish yet sustained intensity. They rise early, they work all day, they have few pleasures, few opportunities for relaxation.2 I remember in the young city of Seattle on Puget Sound to have found business in full swing at seven o’clock a.m.: the shops open, the streets full of people. Everything is speculative, land (or, as it is usually called, “real estate”) most so, the value of lots of ground rising or falling perhaps two or three hundred per cent in the year. No one has any fixed occupation; he is a storekeeper today, a ranchman tomorrow, a miner next week. I found the waiters in the chief hotel at Denver, in Colorado, saving their autumn and winter wages to start off in the spring “prospecting” for silver “claims” in the mountains. Few men stay in one of the newer cities more than a few weeks or months; to have been there a whole year is to be an old inhabitant, an oracle if you have succeeded, a byword if you have not, for to prosper in the West you must be able to turn your hand to anything, and seize the chance today which everyone else will have seen tomorrow. This venturesome and shifting life strengthens the reckless and heedless habits of the people. Everyone thinks so much of gaining that he thinks little of spending, and in the general dearness of commodities, food (in the agricultural districts) excepted, it seems not worth while to care about small sums. In California for many years no coin lower than a ten-cent piece (5d.) was in circulation; and even in 1881, though most articles of food were abundant, nothing was sold at a lower price than five cents. The most striking alternations of fortune, the great coups which fascinate men and make them play for all or nothing, are of coure commoner in mining regions than elsewhere.3 But money is everywhere so valuable for the purposes of speculative investment, whether in land, livestock, or trade, as to fetch very high interest. In Walla Walla (in what was then the Territory of Washington) I found in 1881 that the interest on debts secured on what were deemed good safe mortgages was at the rate of fourteen per cent per annum, of course payable monthly.

The carelessness is public as well as private. Tree stumps are left standing in the streets of a large and flourishing town like Leadville, because the municipal authorities cannot be at the trouble of cutting or burning them. Swamps are left undrained in the suburbs of a populous city like Portland, which every autumn were breeding malarial fevers; and the risk of accidents to be followed by actions does not prevent the railways from pushing on their lines along loosely heaped embankments, and over curved trestle bridges which seem as if they could not stand a high wind or the passage of a heavy train.

This mixture of science and rudeness is one of a series of singular contrasts which runs through the West, not less conspicuous in the minds of the people than in their surroundings. They value good government, and have a remarkable faculty for organizing some kind of government, but they are tolerant of lawlessness which does not directly attack their own interest. Horse-stealing and insults to women are the two unpardonable offences; all others are often suffered to go unpunished. I was in a considerable Western city, with a population of seventy thousand people, some years ago, when the leading newspaper of the place, commenting on one of the train robberies that had been frequent in the state, observed that so long as the brigands had confined themselves to robbing the railway companies and the express companies of property for whose loss the companies must answer, no one had greatly cared, seeing that these companies themselves robbed the public; but now that private citizens seemed in danger of losing their personal baggage and money, the prosperity of the city might be compromised, and something ought to be done—a sentiment delivered with all gravity, as the rest of the article showed.4 Brigandage tends to disappear when the country becomes populous, though there are places in comparatively old states like Illinois and Missouri where the railways are still unsafe. But the same heedlessness suffers other evils to take root, evils likely to prove permanent, including some refinements of political roguery which it is strange to find amid the simple life of forests and prairies.

Another such contrast is presented by the tendency of this shrewd and educated people to relapse into the oldest and most childish forms of superstition. Fortune-telling, clairvoyance, attempts to pry by the help of “mediums” into the book of fate, are so common in parts of the West that the newspapers devote a special column, headed “astrologers,” to the advertisements of these wizards and pythonesses.5 I have counted in one issue of a San Francisco newspaper as many as eighteen such advertisements, six of which were of simple fortune-tellers, like those who used to beguile the peasant girls of Devonshire. In fact, the profession of a soothsayer or astrologer is a recognized one in California now, as it was in the Greece of Homer. Possibly the prevalence of mining speculation, possibly the existence of a large mass of ignorant immigrants from Europe, may help to account for the phenomenon, which, as California is deemed an exceptionally unreligious state, illustrates the famous saying that the less faith the more superstition.

All the passionate eagerness, all the strenuous effort of the Westerners is directed towards the material development of the country. To open the greatest number of mines and extract the greatest quantity of ore, to scatter cattle over a thousand hills, to turn the flower-spangled prairies of the Northwest into wheatfields, to cover the sunny slopes of the Southwest with vines and olives: this is the end and aim of their lives, this is their daily and nightly thought—

• juvat Ismara Baccho
• Conserere atque olea magnum vestire Taburnum.

The passion is so absorbing, and so covers the horizon of public as well as private life that it almost ceases to be selfish—it takes from its very vastness a tinge of ideality. To have an immense production of exchangeable commodities, to force from nature the most she can be made to yield, and send it east and west by the cheapest routes to the dearest markets, making one’s city a centre of trade, and raising the price of its real estate—this, which might not have seemed a glorious consummation to Isaiah or Plato, is preached by Western newspapers as a kind of religion. It is not really, or at least it is not wholly, sordid. These people are intoxicated by the majestic scale of the nature in which their lot is cast, enormous mineral deposits; boundless prairies; forests which, even squandered—wickedly squandered—as they now are, will supply timber to the United States for centuries; a soil which, with the rudest cultivation, yields the most abundant crops; a populous continent for their market. They see all round them railways being built, telegraph wires laid, steamboat lines across the Pacific projected, cities springing up in the solitudes, and settlers making the wilderness to blossom like the rose. Their imagination revels in these sights and signs of progress, and they gild their own struggles for fortune with the belief that they are the missionaries of civilization and the instruments of Providence in the greatest work the world has seen. The following extract from a newspaper published at New Tacoma in Washington (then a Territory) expresses with frank simplicity the conception of greatness and happiness which is uppermost in the Far West; and what may seem a touch of conscious humour is, if humorous it be, nonetheless an expression of sincere conviction.

If happiness is thus procurable, the Great West ought to be happy.6 But there is often a malignant influence at work to destroy happiness in the shape of a neighbouring city, which is making progress as swift or swifter, and threatens to eclipse its competitors. The rivalry between these Western towns is intense and extends to everything. It is sometimes dignified by an unselfish devotion to the greatness of the city which a man has seen grow with his own growth from infancy to a vigorous manhood. I have known citizens of Chicago as proud of Chicago as a Londoner, in the days of Elizabeth, was proud of London. They show you the splendid parks and handsome avenues with as much pleasure as a European noble shows his castle and his pictures; they think little of offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to beautify the city or enrich it with a library or an art gallery. In other men this laudable corporate pride is stimulated, not only by the love of competition which lies deep in the American as it does in the English breast, but also by personal interest, for the prosperity of the individual is inseparable from that of the town. As its fortunes rise or fall, so will his corner lots or the profits of his store. It is not all towns that succeed. Some after reaching a certain point stand still, receiving few accessions; at other times, after a year or two of bloom, a town wilts and withers; trade declines; enterprising citizens depart, leaving only the shiftless and impecunious behind; the saloons are closed, the shanties fall to ruin, in a few years nothing but heaps of straw and broken wood, with a few brick houses awaiting the next blizzard to overthrow them, are left on the surface of the prairie. Thus Tacoma is harassed by the pretensions of the even more eager and enterprising Seattle;7 thus the greater cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis have striven for the last twenty years for the title of Capital of the Northwest. In 1870 St. Paul was already a substantial city, and Minneapolis just beginning to be known as the possessor of immense water advantages from its position on the Mississippi at the Falls of St. Anthony. In 1883, though St. Paul contained some 135,000 inhabitants, Minneapolis with 165,000 had distanced her in the race, and had become, having in the process destroyed the beauty of her falls, the greatest flour-milling centre in America.8 The newspapers of each of such competing cities keep up a constant war upon the other; and everything is done by municipal bodies and individual citizens to make the world believe that their city is advancing and all its neighbours standing still. Prosperity is largely a matter of advertising, for an afflux of settlers makes prosperity, and advertising, which can take many forms, attracts settlers. Many a place has lived upon its “boom” until it found something more solid to live on; and to a stranger who asked in a small Far Western town how such a city could keep up four newspapers, it was well answered that it took four newspapers to keep up such a city.

Confidence goes a long way towards success. And the confidence of these Westerners is superb. I happened in 1883 to be at the city of Bismarck in Dakota when this young settlement was laying the cornerstone of its capitol, intended to contain the halls of the legislature and other state offices of Dakota when that flourishing Territory becomes, as it soon must, a state, or perhaps, for they talk of dividing it, two states. The town was then only some five years old, and may have had six or seven thousand inhabitants. It was gaily decorated for the occasion, and had collected many distinguished guests—General U. S. Grant, several governors of neighbouring states and Territories, railroad potentates, and others. By far the most remarkable figure was that of Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux chief, who had surprised and slain a detachment of the American army some years before. Among the speeches made, in one of which it was proved that as Bismarck was the centre of Dakota, Dakota the centre of the United States, and the United States the centre of the world, Bismarck was destined to “be the metropolitan hearth of the world’s civilization,” there came a short but pithy discourse from this grim old warrior, in which he told us, through an interpreter, that the Great Spirit moved him to shake hands with everybody. However, the feature of the ceremonial which struck us Europeans most was the spot chosen for the capitol. It was not in the city, nor even on the skirts of the city; it was nearly a mile off, on the top of a hill in the brown and dusty prairie. “Why here?” we asked. “Is it because you mean to enclose the building in a public park?”“By no means; the Capitol is intended to be in the centre of the city; it is in this direction that the city is to grow.” It is the same everywhere from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Men seem to live in the future rather than in the present; not that they fail to work while it is called today, but that they see the country not merely as it is, but as it will be, twenty, fifty, a hundred years hence, when the seedlings shall have grown to forest trees.

This constant reaching forward to and grasping at the future does not so much express itself in words, for they are not a loquacious people, as in the air of ceaseless haste and stress which pervades the West.9 They remind you of the crowd which Vathek found in the hall of Eblis, each darting hither and thither with swift steps and unquiet mien, driven to and fro by a fire in the heart. Time seems too short for what they have to do, and result always to come short of their desire. One feels as if caught and whirled along in a foaming stream, chafing against its banks, such is the passion of these men to accomplish in their own lifetimes what in the past it took centuries to effect. Sometimes in a moment of pause, for even the visitor finds himself infected by the all-pervading eagerness, one is inclined to ask them: “Gentlemen, why in heaven’s name this haste? You have time enough. No enemy threatens you. No volcano will rise from beneath you. Ages and ages lie before you. Why sacrifice the present to the future, fancying that you will be happier when your fields teem with wealth and your cities with people? In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours, and we are not happy. You dream of your posterity; but your posterity will look back to yours as the golden age, and envy those who first burst into this silent splendid nature, who first lifted up their axes upon these tall trees and lined these waters with busy wharves. Why, then, seek to complete in a few decades what the other nations of the world took thousands of years over in the older continents? Why do things rudely and ill which need to be done well, seeing that the welfare of your descendants may turn upon them? Why, in your hurry to subdue and utilize nature, squander her splendid gifts? Why allow the noxious weeds of Eastern politics to take root in your new soil, when by a little effort you might keep it pure? Why hasten the advent of that threatening day when the vacant spaces of the continent shall all have been filled, and the poverty or discontent of the older states shall find no outlet? You have opportunities such as mankind has never had before, and may never have again. Your work is great and noble: it is done for a future longer and vaster than our conceptions can embrace. Why not make its outlines and beginnings worthy of these destinies the thought of which gilds your hopes and elevates your purposes?”

Being once suddenly called upon to “offer a few remarks” to a Western legislature, and having on the spur of the moment nothing better to offer, I tendered some such observations as these, seasoned, of course, with the compliments to the soil, climate, and “location” reasonably expected from a visitor. They were received in good part, as indeed no people can be more kindly than the Western Americans; but it was surprising to hear several members who afterwards conversed with me remark that the political point of view—the fact that they were the founders of new commonwealths, and responsible to posterity for the foundations they laid, a point of view so trite and obvious to a European visitor that he pauses before expressing it—had not crossed their minds. If they spoke truly—as no doubt they did—there was in their words further evidence of the predominance of material efforts and interests over all others, even over those political instincts which are deemed so essential a part of the American character. The arrangements of his government lie in the dim background of the picture which fills a Western eye. The foreground is filled by ploughs and sawmills, ore-crushers and railway locomotives. These so absorb his thoughts as to leave little time for constitutions and legislation; and when constitutions and legislation are thought of, it is as means for better securing the benefits of the earth and of trade to the producer, and preventing the greedy corporation from intercepting their fruits.

Politically, and perhaps socially also, this haste and excitement, this absorption in the development of the material resources of the country, are unfortunate. As a town built in a hurry is seldom well built, so a society will be the sounder in health for not having grown too swiftly. Doubtless much of the scum will be cleared away from the surface when the liquid settles and cools down. Lawlessness and lynch law will disappear, saloons and gambling houses will not prosper in a well-conducted population; schools will improve and universities grow out of the raw colleges which one already finds even in the newer Territories. Nevertheless the bad habits of professional politics, as one sees them on the Atlantic coast, are not unknown in these communities; and the unrestfulness, the passion for speculation, the feverish eagerness for quick and showy results, may so soak into the texture of the popular mind as to colour it for centuries to come. These are the shadows which to the eye of the traveller seem to fall across the glowing landscape of the Great West.

chapter 122

The Future of Political Institutions

The task of forecasting the future is one from which a writer does well to turn away, for the coasts of history are strewn with the wrecks of predictions launched by historians and philosophers. No such ambitious task shall be essayed by me. But as I have described the institutions of the American commonwealth as they stand at this moment, seldom expressing an opinion as to their vitality or the influences which are at work to modify them, I may reasonably be asked to state, before bringing this book to a close, what processes of change these institutions seem to be at this moment undergoing. Changes move faster in our age than they ever moved before, and America is a land of change. No one doubts that fifty years hence it will differ at least as much from what it is now as it differs now from the America which Tocqueville described. The causes whose action will mould it are far too numerous, too complex, too subtly interwoven to make it possible to conjecture their joint result. All we can ever say of the future is that it will be unlike the present. I will therefore attempt, not to predict future changes, but only to indicate some of the processes of change now in progress which have gone far enough to let us see that they are due to causes of unmistakable potency, causes likely to continue in activity for some time to come.

I begin with a glance at the federal system, whose equilibrium it has been the main object of the federal Constitution to preserve. That equilibrium has been little disturbed. So far as law goes, it has suffered no change since the amendments to the Constitution which recorded and formulated the results of the Civil War. Before the war many Americans and most Europeans expected a dissolution of the Union, either by such a loosening of the federal tie as would reduce the Union to a mere league, or by the formation of several state groups wholly independent of one another. At this moment, however, nothing seems less likely than another secession. The states’ rights spirit has declined. The material interests of every part of the country are bound up with those of every other. The capital of the Eastern cities has been invested in mines in the West, in iron works and manufactories in the South, in mortgages and railroads everywhere. The South and the West need this capital for their development, and are daily in closer business relations with the East. The produce of the West finds its way to the Atlantic through the ports of the East. Every produce market, every share market, vibrates in response to the Produce Exchange and Stock Exchange of New York. Each part of the country has come to know the other parts far better than was possible in earlier times; and the habit of taking journeys hither and thither grows with the always-growing facilities of travel. Many families have sons or brothers in remote states; many students come from the West and the South to Eastern universities, and form ties of close friendship there. Railways and telegraphs are daily narrowing and compressing the vast area between ocean and ocean. As the civilized world was a larger world in the days of Herodotus than it is now—for it took twice as many months to travel from the Caspian Sea to the Pillars of Hercules as it takes now to circumnavigate the globe; one was obliged to use a greater number of languages, and the journey was incomparably more dangerous—so now the United States, with their ninety millions of people, extending from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of California, are a smaller country for all the purposes of government, of commerce, and of social intercourse than before the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, for it took longer then to go from Boston to Charleston than it takes now to go from Portland in Maine to Portland in Oregon, and the journey was far more costly and difficult.

Even the Pacific states, which might have seemed likely to form a community by themselves, are being drawn closer to those of the Mississippi basin. Population will in time become almost continuous along the lines of the Northern and Southern Pacific Railways, and though the deserts of Nevada may remain unreclaimed, prosperous communities round the Great Salt Lake will form a link between California and the Rocky Mountain states and irrigation may create habitable oases along the courses of some of the rivers. With more frequent communication, local peculiarities and local habits of thought diminish; the South grows every day less distinctively Southern, and country-folk are more influenced by city ideas. There is now not a single state with any material interest that would be benefited, probably none with any sentiment that would be gratified, by separation from the body of the Union. No great question has arisen tending to bind states into groups and stimulating them to joint action. The chief problems which lie before the country wear an aspect substantially the same in its various sections, and public opinion is divided on them in those sections upon lines generally similar. In a word, the fact that the government is a federal one does not at this moment seem to make any difference to the cohesion of the body politic; the United States are no more likely to dissolve than if they were a unified republic like France or a unified monarchy like Italy.

As secession is improbable, so also is the extinction of the several states by absorption into the central government. It was generally believed in Europe, when the North triumphed over secession in 1865, that the federal system was virtually at an end. The legal authority of Congress and the president had been immensely developed during the struggle; a powerful army, flushed with victory, stood ready to enforce that authority; and there seemed reason to think that the South, which had fought so stubbornly, would have to be kept down during many years by military force. However, none of these apprehended results followed. The authority of the central government presently sank back within its former limits, some of the legislation based on the constitutional amendments which had extended it for certain purposes being cut down by judicial decision. The army was disbanded; self-government was soon restored in the lately insurgent states, and the upshot of the years of civil war and reconstruction has been, while extinguishing the claim of state sovereignty, to replace the formerly admitted states rights upon a legal basis as firm as they ever occupied before. At this moment states’ rights are in question only so far as certain economic benefits might be obtained by a further extension of federal authority, nor has either party an interest in advocating the supersession of state action in any department of government. The conservatism of habit and well-settled legal doctrine which would resist any such proposal is very strong. State autonomy, as well as local government within each state, is prized by every class in the community, and bound up with the personal interest of those who feel that these comparatively limited spheres offer a scope to their ambition which a wider theatre might deny.

It is nevertheless impossible to ignore the growing strength of the centripetal and unifying forces. I have already referred to the influence of easier and cheaper communications, of commerce and finance, of the telegraph, of the filling up of the intermediate vacant spaces in the West. There is an increasing tendency to invoke congressional legislation to deal with matters, such as railroads, which cannot be adequately handled by state laws, or to remove divergences, such as those in the law of marriage and divorce, which give rise to practical inconveniences. So the various parties which profess to champion the interests of the farmers or of workingmen recur to the federal government as the only agency strong enough and wide-reaching enough to give effect to their proposals, most of which indeed would obviously be impracticable if tried in the narrow area of one or a few states. State patriotism, state rivalry, state vanity, are no doubt still conspicuous, yet the political interest felt in state governments is slighter than it was before the civil war, while national patriotism has become warmer and more pervasive. The role of the state is socially and morally, if not legally, smaller now than it then was, and ambitious men look on a state legislature as little more than a stepping-stone to Congress. Moreover, the interference of the federal executive to suppress by military power disorders which state authorities have seemed unable or unwilling to deal with has shown how great a reserve of force lies in its hands, and has led peace-loving citizens to look to it as their ultimate resort in troublous times. It would be rash to assert that disjunctive forces will never again reveal themselves, setting the states against the national government, and making states’ rights once more a matter of practical controversy. But any such force is likely, so far as we can now see, to prove transitory, whereas the centripetal forces are permanent and secular forces, working from age to age. Wherever in the modern world there has been a centrifugal movement, tending to break up a state united under one government, or to loosen the cohesion of its parts, the movement has sprung from a sentiment of nationality, and has been reinforced, in almost every case, by a sense of some substantial grievance or by a belief that material advantages were to be secured by separation. The cases of Holland and Belgium, of Hungary and Germanic Austria, of the Greeks and Bulgarians in their struggle with the Turks, of Iceland in her struggle with Denmark, all illustrate this proposition. When such disjunctive forces are absent, the more normal tendency to aggregation and centralization prevails. In the United States all the elements of a national feeling are present, race,1 language, literature, pride in past achievements, uniformity of political habits and ideas; and this national feeling which unifies the people is reinforced by an immensely strong material interest in the maintenance of a single government over the breadth of the continent. It may therefore be concluded that while there is no present likelihood of change from a federal to a consolidated republic, and while the existing legal rights and functions of the several states may remain undiminished for many years to come, the importance of the states will decline as the majesty and authority of the national government increase.

The next question to be asked relates to the component parts of the national government itself. Its equilibrium stands now as stable as at any former epoch. Yet it has twice experienced violent oscillations. In the days of Jackson, and again in those of Lincoln, the executive seemed to outweigh Congress. In the days of Tyler, Congress threatened the executive; while in those of Andrew Johnson it reduced the executive to impotence. That no permanent disturbance of the balance followed the latter of these oscillations shows how well the balance had been adjusted. There is nothing now to show that any one department is gaining on any other, though whenever the president is personally a strong man, the executive may seem to be dominating Congress. The judiciary seemed in 1890 to have less discretionary power than they had exerted fifty years earlier, for by their own decisions they have narrowed the scope of their discretion, determining points in which, had they remained open, their personal impulses and views might have had room to play. But soon after new groups of questions arose, raising new issues for judicial determination, nor have the rulings of the Supreme Court ever involved larger interests or been awaited with more eager curiosity than were those delivered in 1908 and the immediately succeeding years. Congress has been the branch of government with the largest facilities for usurping the powers of the other branches, and probably with the most disposition to do so. Congress has constantly tried to encroach both on the executive and on the states, sometimes, like a wild bull driven into a corral, dashing itself against the imprisoning walls of the Constitution. But although Congress has succeeded in occupying nearly all of the area which the Constitution left vacant and unallotted between the several authorities it established, Congress has not become any more distinctly than in earlier days the dominant power in the state, the organ of national sovereignty, the irresistible exponent of the national will. In a country ruled by public opinion, it could hold this position only in virtue of its capacity for leading opinion; that is to say, of its courage, promptitude, and wisdom. Since it grows in no one of these qualities, it wins no greater ascendency; indeed its power, as compared with that of public opinion, seems rather to decline. Its division into two coordinate houses is no doubt a source of weakness as well as of safety. Yet what is true of Congress as a whole is true of each house taken separately. The Senate, to which the eminence of many individual senators formerly gave a moral ascendency, has lost as much in the intellectual authority of its members as it has gained in their wealth. The House, with its far greater numbers and its far greater proportion of inexperienced members, suffers from the want of internal organization, and seems unable to keep pace with the increasing demands made on it for constructive legislation. Now and then the helplessness of the House when a party majority happens to be torn by internal dissensions, or the workings of self-interest visible in the Senate, when the animosities or personal aims of individual senators or groups retard or confuse its action, causes delays and leads to compromises or half measures which exasperate even this all too patient people. One is sometimes inclined to think that Congress might lose its hold on the esteem and confidence of the nation, and sink into a subordinate position, were there any other authority which could be substituted for it. There is, however, no such authority, for lawmaking cannot be given to a person or to a court, while the state legislatures have the same faults as Congress in a greater degree. We may accordingly surmise that Congress will retain its present place; but so far as can be gathered from present phenomena, it will retain this place in respect not of the satisfaction of the people with its services, but of their inability to provide a better servant.

The weakness of Congress is the strength of the president. Though it cannot be said that his office has grown in power or dignity since the days when it was held by Washington, there are reasons for believing that it has been rising to a higher point than it has occupied at any time since the Civil War. The tendency everywhere in America to concentrate power and responsibility in one man is unmistakable. There is no danger that the president should become a despot, that is, should attempt to make his will prevail against the will of the majority. But he may have a great part to play as the leader of the majority and the exponent of its will. He is in some respects better fitted both to represent and to influence public opinion than Congress is. No doubt he suffers from being the nominee of a party, because this draws on every act he does the hostility of zealots of the opposite party. But the number of voters who are not party zealots increases, increases from bad causes as well as from good causes; for as a capable president sways the dispassionately patriotic, so a crafty president can find means of playing upon those who have their own ends to serve. A vigorous personality attracts the multitude, and attracts it the more the huger it grows and the more the characteristic weakness of an assembly stand revealed; while a chief magistrate’s influence, though his political opponents may complain of it, excites little alarm when exerted in leading a majority which acts through the constitutional organs of government. There may therefore be still undeveloped possibilities of greatness in store for the presidents of the future. But as these possibilities depend, like the possibilities of the British and German Crowns, perhaps one may add of the papacy, on the wholly unpredictable element of personal capacity in the men who may fill the office, we need speculate on them no further.

From the organs of government I pass to the party system, its machinery and its methods. Nothing in recent history suggests that the politicians who act as party managers, are disposed either to loosen the grip with which their organization has clasped the country, or to improve the methods it employs. Changes in party methods there will of course be in the future, as there have been in the past; but the professionals are not the men to make them changes for the better. The machine will not be reformed from within; it must be assailed from without. Three heavy blows have been lately struck at it. The first was the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. If this act continues to be honestly administered, and its principle extended to other federal offices, if states and cities follow, as a few have done, in the wake of the national government, the Spoils System may be rooted out, and with that system the power of the machine will crumble. The Spoils System has stood since Jackson’s days, and the bad habits it has formed cannot at once be unlearned. But its extinction will deprive professionals of their chief present motive for following politics. The tares which now infest the wheat will presently wither away, and the old enemy will have to sow a fresh crop of some other kind. The second blow has been the passing of secret ballot laws and other measures which have reduced the opportunities for tampering with elections, and have made them purer. And the third has been that uprising of independent citizens which has induced the enactment of the so-called Primary Laws, intended to take nominations out of the hands of the machine and place them in those of the voters as a whole. Whether these laws succeed or not, they testify to a new spirit among the better citizens, impatient of the perversion of republican institutions to selfish ends. There is now often seen in state and municipal elections, a strong group of independent men pledged to vote for honest candidates irrespective of party. The absence for a number of years past of genuine political issues dividing the two parties, if it has worked ill in taking moral and intellectual life out of the parties, and making their contests mere scrambles for office, has worked well in disposing intelligent citizens to sit more loose to party ties, and to consider, since it is really on men rather than on measures that they are required to vote, what the personal merits of candidates are. In and after 1840, at the time when the fruits of Jacksonism, that is to say, of wild democratic theory coupled with sordid and quite undemocratic practice, had begun to be felt by thoughtful persons, the urgency of the slavery question compelled the postponement of reforms in political methods, and made patriotic men fling themselves into party warfare with unquestioning zeal. When the winning of elections, no less than the winning of battles, meant the salvation of the Union, no one could stop to examine the machinery of party. For ten years after the war, the party which was usually in the majority in the North was the party which had saved the Union, and on that score commanded the devotion of its old adherents; while the opposite party was so much absorbed in struggling back to power that it did not think of mending its ways. But when the war issues had been practically settled and dismissed, public-spirited citizens at last addressed themselves to the task, which ought to have at last been undertaken in 1850, of purifying politics. Their efforts began with city government, where the evils were greatest, but have now become scarcely less assiduous in state and national politics.

Will these efforts continue, and be crowned by a growing measure of success?

To a stranger revisiting America at intervals, the progress seems to be steadily though very slowly upward. This is also the belief of those Americans who, having most exerted themselves in the struggle against bosses and spoilsmen, have had most misrepresentation to overcome and most disappointments to endure. The presidents of this generation are abler and more high-minded men than those of 1830–60, and neither the members of a knot of party managers nor its creatures. The poisonous influence of slavery is no longer felt. There is every day less of sentimentalism, but not less of earnestness in political discussions. There is less blind obedience to party, less disposition to palliate sins committed from party motives. The standard of purity among public men, especially in the Federal government, is higher. The number of able men who occupy themselves with scientific economics and politics is larger, their books and articles are more widely read. The press more frequently helps in the work of reform; the pulpit deals more largely with questions of practical philanthropy and public morals. That it should be taken as a good sign when the young men of a city throw themselves into politics, shows that the new generation is believed to have either a higher sense of public duty or a less slavish attachment to party ties than that whose votes ruled from 1870 till 1890. Above all, the nation is less self-sufficient and self-satisfied than it was in days when it had less to be proud of. In the middle of last century the Americans walked in a vain conceit of their own greatness and freedom and scorned instruction from the effete monarchies of the Old World, which repaid them with contemptuous indifference. No despot ever exacted more flattery from his courtiers than they from their statesmen. Now when Europe admires their power, envies their wealth, looks to them for instruction in not a few subjects, they have become more modest, and listen willingly to speakers and writers who descant upon their failings. They feel themselves strong enough to acknowledge their weaknesses, and are anxious that the moral life of the nation should be worthy of its expanding fortunes. As these happy omens have become more visible from year to year, there is a reasonable presumption that they represent a steady current which will continue to work for good. To judge of America rightly the observer must not fix his eye simply upon her present condition, seeking to strike a balance between the evil and the good that now appear. He must look back at what the best citizens and the most judicious strangers perceived and recorded seventy, forty, twenty years ago, and ask whether the shadows these men saw were not darker than those of today, whether the forecasts of evil they were forced to form have not in many cases been belied by the event. Tocqueville was a sympathetic as well as penetrating observer. Many of the evils he saw, and which he thought inherent and incurable, have now all but vanished. Other evils have indeed revealed themselves which he did not discern, but these may prove as transient as those with which he affrighted European readers in 1834. The men I have met in America, whose recollections went back to the fourth decade of last century, agreed in saying that there was in those days a more violent and unscrupulous party spirit, a smaller respect for law, a greater disposition to violence, less respect for the opinion of the wise, a completer submission to the prejudices of the masses, than there is today. No ignorant immigrants had yet arrived upon the scene, but New York was already given over to spoilsmen. Great corporations had scarcely arisen; yet corruption was neither uncommon nor fatal to a politician’s reputation. A retrospect which shows us that some evils have declined or vanished while the regenerative forces are more numerous and more active in combating new mischiefs than they ever were before, encourages the belief that the general stream of tendency is towards improvement, and will in time bring the public life of the country nearer to the ideal which democracy is bound to set before itself.

When the Americans say, as they often do, that they trust to time, they mean that they trust to reason, to the generally sound moral tone of the multitude, to a shrewdness which after failures and through experiments learns what is the true interest of the majority, and finds that this interest coincides with the teachings of morality. They can afford to wait, because they have three great advantages over Europe—an absence of class distinctions and class hatred, a diffusion of wealth among an immense number of small proprietors all interested in the defence of property, an exemption from chronic pauperism and economical distress, work being at most times abundant, many careers open, the still undeveloped parts of the West providing a safety valve available in times of depression. With these advantages the Americans conceive that were their country now left entirely to itself, so that full and free scope could be secured to the ameliorative forces, political progress would be sure and steady; the best elements would come to the top, and when the dregs had settled the liquor would run clear.

In a previous chapter I have observed that this sanguine view of the situation omits two considerations. One is that the country is not being left to itself. European immigration continues, and though more than half of the immigrants make valuable citizens, the remainder, many by their political ignorance and instability, some few by their proneness to embrace anti-social doctrines, are a source of danger to the community, lowering its tone, providing material for demagogues to work on, threatening outbreaks like those of Pennsylvania in 1877, of Cincinnati in 1884, of Chicago in 1886 and 1894, of large districts in the West in 1893 and subsequently.

The other fact to be borne in mind is of still graver import. There is a part of the Atlantic where the westward speeding steam vessel always expects to encounter fogs. On the fourth or fifth day of the voyage, while still in bright sunlight, one sees at a distance a long low dark gray line across the bows, and is told this is the first of the fog banks which have to be traversed. Presently the vessel is upon the cloud, and rushes into its chilling embrace, not knowing what perils of icebergs may be shrouded within the encompassing gloom. So America, in her swift onward progress, sees, looming on the horizon and now no longer distant, a time of mists and shadows, wherein dangers may lie concealed whose form and magnitude she can scarcely yet conjecture. As she fills up her western regions with inhabitants, she sees the time approach when all the best land, even that which the extension of irrigation has made available, will have been occupied, and when the land now under cultivation will have been so far exhausted as to yield scantier crops even to more expensive culture. Although transportation may also have then become cheaper, the price of food will rise; farms will be less easily obtained and will need more capital to work them with profit; the struggle for existence will become more severe. And while the outlet which the West now provides for the overflow of the great cities will have become less available, the cities will have grown immensely more populous; pauperism, now confined to some six or seven of the greatest, will be more widely spread; wages will probably sink and work be less abundant. In fact the chronic evils and problems of old societies and crowded countries, such as we see them today in Europe, will have reappeared on this new soil, while the demand of the multitude to have a larger share of the nation’s collective wealth may well have grown more insistent.

High economic authorities pronounce that the beginnings of this time of pressure lie years ahead. All of the best arable land in the West is already occupied; much even of the second and third best is already under cultivation; and unless agricultural science renders further aid, the exhaustion already complained of in farms which have been under the plough for three or four decades will be increasingly felt. It may be a time of trial for democratic institutions. The future of the United States during the next half century sometimes presents itself to the mind as a struggle between two forces, the one beneficent, the other malign, the one striving to speed the nation on to a port of safety before this time of trial arrives, the other to retard its progress, so that the tempest may be upon it before the port is reached. And the question to which one reverts in musing on the phenomena of American politics is this—Will the progress now discernible towards a wiser public opinion and a higher standard of public life succeed in bringing the mass of the people up to the level of what are now the best districts in the country before the days of pressure are at hand? Or will existing evils prove so obstinate, and European immigration so continue to depress the average of intelligence and patriotism among the voters, that when the struggle for life grows far harder than it now is, the masses will yield to the temptation to abuse their power and will seek violent, and because violent, probably vain and useless remedies, for the evils which will afflict them? Some such are indeed now proposed, and receive a support which, small as it is, is larger than any one would in 1870 have predicted for them.

If the crisis should arrive while a large part of the population still lacks the prudence and self-control which a democracy ought to possess, what result may be looked for? This is a question which no experience from similar crises in the past helps us to answer, for the phenomena will be new in the history of the world. There may be pernicious experiments tried in legislation. There may be—indeed there have been already—occasional outbreaks of violence. There may even be, though nothing at present portends it, a dislocation of the present frame of government. One thing, however, need not be apprehended, the thing with which alarmists most frequently terrify us: there will not be anarchy. The forces which restore order and maintain it when restored are as strong in America as anywhere else in the world.

While admitting the possibility of such a time of strife and danger, he who has studied America will not fail to note that she will have elements of strength for meeting it which are lacking in some European countries. The struggles of labour and capital, though they have of late years become more virulent, do not seem likely to take the form of a widely prevailing hatred between classes. The distribution of landed property among a great many small owners is likely to continue. The habits of freedom, together with the moderation and self-control which they foster, are likely to stand unimpaired, or to be even confirmed and mellowed by longer use. The restraining and conciliating influence of religion is stronger than in France or Germany, and more enlightened than in those continental countries where religion now seems strongest. I admit that no one can say how far the United States of fifty years hence will in these respects resemble the United States of today. But if we are to base our anticipations on the facts of today, we may look forward to the future, not indeed without anxiety, when we mark the clouds that hang on the horizon, yet with a hope that is stronger than anxiety.

chapter 123

Social and Economic Future

If it be hard to forecast the development of political institutions and habits, how much harder to form a conception of what the economic and social life of the United States will have become when another half century of marvellously swift material progress has quintupled its wealth and tripled its population; and when the number of persons pursuing arts and letters, and educated to enjoy the most refined pleasures of life, will have become proportionately greater than it is now. The changes of the last fifty years, great as they have been, may then prove to have been no greater than those which the next fifty will have brought. Prediction is even more difficult in this sphere than in the sphere of government, because the forces at work to modify society are more numerous, as well as far more subtle and complex, and because not only the commercial prosperity of the country but its thought and culture are more likely than its politics to be affected by the course of events in the Old World. All I can attempt is, as in the last preceding chapter, to call attention to some of the changes which are now in progress, and to conjecture whether the phenomena we now observe are due to permanent or to transitory causes. I shall speak first of economic changes and their influence on certain current problems, next of the movements of population and possible alterations in its character, lastly, of the tendencies which seem likely to continue to affect the social and intellectual life of the nation.

The most remarkable economic feature of the years that have elapsed since the war has been the growth of great fortunes. There is a passage in the Federalist, written in 1788, which says, “the private fortunes of the President and Senators, as they must all be American citizens, cannot possibly be sources of danger.” Even in 1833, Tocqueville was struck by the equal distribution of wealth in the United States and the absence of capitalists. Today, however, there are more great millionaires, as well as more men with a capital of from $500,000 to $2,000,000, in America than in any other country; and before 1950 it may probably contain as many large fortunes as will exist in all the countries of Europe put together. Nor are these huge accumulations due to custom and the policy of the law, which in England keep property, and especially landed property, in the hands of a few by the so-called custom of primogeniture, whereas in the United States the influence of law has tended the other way. An American testator usually distributes his wealth among his children equally. However rich he may be, he does not expect his daughters to marry rich men, but is just as willing to see them mated to persons supporting themselves by their own efforts. And he is far more inclined than Europeans are to bestow large parts of his wealth upon objects of public utility, instead of using it to found a family. In spite of these dispersing forces, great fortunes grow with the growing prosperity of the country, and the opportunities it offers of amassing enormous piles by bold operations. Even an unspeculative business may, if skilfully conducted, bring in greater gains than can often be hoped for in Europe, because the scale of operations is in America so large that a comparatively small percentage of profit may mean a very large income. These causes are likely to be permanent; nor can any legislation that is compatible with the rights of property as now understood, do much to restrict them. We may therefore expect that the class of very rich men, men so rich as to find it difficult to spend their income in enjoying life, though they may go on employing it in business, will continue to increase.

It may be suggested that the great fortunes of today are due to the swift development of the West, so that after a time they will cease to arise in such numbers, while those we now see will have been scattered. The development of the West must, however, continue at least till the middle of the century; and though the wealthy do not seek to keep their wealth together after their death by elaborate devices, many are the sons of the rich who start with capital enough to give them a great advantage for further accumulation. There are as yet comparatively few careers to compete with business; nor is it as easy as in Europe to spend a fortune on pleasure. The idle rich of America, who, though relatively few, are numerous enough to form a class in the greatest Atlantic cities, are by no means the most contented class in the country.

The growth of vast fortunes has helped to create a political problem, for they become a mark for the invective of the more extreme sections of the Labour or Socialist parties. But should its Collectivist propaganda so far prosper as to produce legislative attacks upon accumulated wealth, such attacks will be directed (at least in the first instance), not against individual rich men, but against incorporated companies, since it is through corporations that wealth has made itself obnoxious. Why the power of these bodies should have grown so much greater in the United States than in Europe, and why they should be more often controlled by a small knot of men, are questions too intricate to be here discussed. Companies are in many ways so useful that any general diminution of the legal facilities for forming them seems improbable; but I conceive that they will be even more generally than hitherto subjected to special taxation; and that their power of taking and using public franchises will be further restricted. He who considers the irresponsible nature of the power which three or four men, or perhaps one man, can exercise through a great corporation, such as a railroad or telegraph company, the injury they can inflict on the public as well as on their competitors, the cynical audacity with which they have often used their wealth to seduce officials and legislators from the path of virtue, will find nothing unreasonable in the desire of the American masses to regulate the management of corporations and narrow the range of their action. The same remark applies, with even more force, to combinations of men not incorporated but acting together, the so-called trusts, i.e., commercial rings or syndicates. The next few years or even decades may be largely occupied with the effort to deal with these phenomena of a commercial system far more highly developed than the world has yet seen elsewhere. The economic advantages of the amalgamation of railroads and the tendency in all departments of trade for large concerns to absorb or supplant small ones, are both so marked that problems of this order seem likely to grow even larger and more urgent than they now are. Their solution will demand, not only great legal skill, but great economic wisdom.

Of the tendency to aggregation there are happily few signs so far as relates to agriculture. The only great landed estates are in the Far West, particularly in California, where they are a relic from Spanish days, together with some properties held by land companies or individual speculators in the Upper Mississippi states, properties which are being generally sold in small farms to incoming settlers. The census returns of 1900 and of 1910 did no doubt show an increase in the number of persons who hire from others the lands they till. While the increase in the number of farms cultivated by the owner during the decade ending with the latter year was only 8.1 per cent, that of farms rented for money by the cultivator was 9.9 per cent, and that of farms rented for a share of the products 20.0 per cent. This may, however, be due partly to the growth of small Negro farms in the South, partly to the disposition of many Western farmers to retire from active labour when old age approaches, letting their farms, and living on the rent thereof, partly also to the buying up of lands near a “boom town” by speculators for a rise. Taking the country as a whole, there is no indication of any serious change to large properties.1 In the South, large plantations are more rare than before the war, and much of the cotton crop is raised by peasant farmers, as the increase in the number of farms returned in 1910 proves. It is of course possible that cultivation on a large scale may in some regions turn out to be more profitable than that of small freeholders: agriculture as an art may be still in its infancy, and science may alter the conditions of production in this highly inventive country. But at present nothing seems to threaten that system of small proprietors tilling the soil they live on which so greatly contributes to the happiness and stability of the commonwealth. The motives which in Europe induce rich men to buy large estates are here wholly wanting, for no one gains either political power or social status by becoming a landlord.

Changes in economic conditions have begun to bring about changes in population which will work powerfully on the future of society and politics. One such change has been passing on New England during the last twenty years. Its comparatively thin and ungenial soil, which has generally hard rock at no great depth below the surface, and has been cultivated in many places for nigh two hundred years, has been unable to sustain the competition of the rich and virgin lands of the West. The old race of New England yeomen have accordingly mostly sold or abandoned their farms and migrated to the upper valley of the Mississippi, where they make the prosperity of the Northwestern states. The lands which they have left vacant are frequently occupied by immigrants, sometimes French Canadians, but chiefly Irish, with some Poles and other Slavs and a few Italians, for comparatively few Germans settle in rural New England; and thus that which was the most purely English part of America is now becoming one of the least English, since the cities also are full of Irish, Jews, Slavs, and Canadians. In Massachusetts, for instance, the persons of foreign birth were in 1910 31.5 per cent of the population, while the foreign born and their children were more than half. In Rhode Island the percentages of foreigners are even higher. It is impossible not to regret the disappearance of a picturesquely primitive society which novelists and essayists have made familiar to us, with its delightful mixture of homely simplicity and keen intelligence. Of all the types of rustic life which imagination has since the days of Theocritus embellished for the envy or refreshment of the dwellers in cities, this latest type has been to modern Europe the most real and not the least attractive. It has now almost entirely passed away; nor will the life of the robust sons of the Puritans in the Northwestern prairies, vast and bare and new, reproduce the idyllic quality of their old surroundings. But the Irish squatters on the forsaken farms rear their children under better conditions than those either of the American cities or of the island of their birth, and they are replenishing New England with a vigorous stock.

Another change is now beginning to be seen, for immigration is already turning from the Northwest towards the Southern region, the far greater part of which has remained until now underdeveloped. Western North Carolina, Northern Georgia and Alabama, and Eastern Tennessee possess enormous mineral deposits, only a few of which have yet begun to be worked. There are also splendid forests; there is in many places, as for instance in the vast swamp regions of Florida, a soil believed to be fertile, much of it not yet brought under cultivation; while the climate is not, except in a very few low maritime tracts, too hot for white labour. As the vacant spaces of the West are ceasing to be able to receive the continued influx of settlers, even with the room which has been made by the migration of farmers into the Western provinces of Canada, these Southern regions will more and more attract settlers from the Northern and Western states, and these will carry with them habits and ideas which may further quicken the progress of the South, and bring her into a more perfect harmony with the rest of the country.

The mention of the South raises a group of questions, bearing on the future of the Negro and the relation she will sustain to the whites, which need not be discussed here, as they have been dealt with in preceding chapters (Chapters 93 to 95). The alarm which the growth of the coloured people formerly excited was allayed by the census of 1890, which showed that they increase more slowly than the whites, even in the South, and form a constantly diminishing proportion of the total population of the country. The Negro is doubtless a heavy burden for American civilization to carry. No problems seem likely so long to confront the nation, and so severely to tax the national character on its moral side, as those which his presence raises. Much patience will be needed, and much sympathy. The Negroes, however, are necessary to the South, which has not enough white workers; and their labour is helpful not only to the agriculturist but also to the mine-owners and iron-masters of the mining regions I have just referred to. Their progress since emancipation has been more rapid than those who saw them in slavery expected, for no section has relapsed into sloth and semi-barbarism, while in many districts there has been a steady rise in education, in intelligence, in thrift, and in the habit of sustained industry. The relation of the two races, though it presents some painful features, is not, on the whole, one of hostility, and contains no present elements of political danger. Though the great majority of the Negroes are now excluded from the exercise of the suffrage, their condition is not the same as though that gift had never been bestowed, for the fact that the Negro is legally a citizen has raised both the white’s view of him and his own view of himself. Thoughtful observers in the South seem to feel little anxiety, and expect that for many years to come the Negroes, naturally a good-natured and easy-going race, will be content with the position of an inferior caste, doing the humbler kinds of work, but gradually permeated by American habits and ideas, and sending up into the walks of commercial and professional life a slowly increasing number of its most capable members. It might be thought that this elevating process would be accelerated by the sympathy of the coloured people at the North, who, as they enjoy greater educational opportunities, might be expected to advance more quickly. But the Negro race increases comparatively slowly to the north of latitude 40°, and does not make sufficient progress in wealth and influence to be able to help its Southern members.2

Two other questions relating to changes in population must be adverted to before we leave this part of the subject. There are Europeans who hold—and in this physiologically-minded age it is natural that men should hold—that the evolution of a distinctively American type of character and manners must be still distant, because the heterogeneous elements of the population (in which the proportion of English blood is smaller now than it was in 1850) must take a long time to become mixed and assimilated. This is a plausible view; yet I doubt whether differences of blood have the importance which it assumes. What strikes the traveller, and what the Americans themselves delight to point out, is the amazing solvent power which American institutions, habits, and ideas exercise upon newcomers of all races. The children of Irishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians are certainly far more like native Americans than the current views of heredity would have led us to expect; nor is it without interest to observe that Nature has here repeated on the Western continent that process of mixing Celtic with Germanic and Norse blood which she began in Britain more than a thousand years ago. The ratio borne by the Celtic elements in the population of Great Britain (i.e., the Picts and Gaels of Northern Britain and those of the Cymry of Middle and Western Britain who survived the onslaught of the Angles and Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries) to the Teutonic (Low German and Norse) elements in that population as it stood in the seventeenth century, when England began to colonize North America, may probably be a ratio not much smaller than that which the Irish immigrants to America bear to the German immigrants; so that the relative proportions of Celtic and Teutonic blood, as these proportions may be taken to have existed in the Americans of a hundred years ago, have not been greatly altered by Irish and German immigration.3

On the whole, we may conclude that the intellectual and moral atmosphere into which the settlers from Europe come has more power to assimilate them than their race qualities have power to change it; and that the future of America will be less affected by this influx of new blood, even Italian and Slavonic blood, than anyone who has not studied the facts on the spot can realize. The influence of European immigration is so far to be traced, not in any tinging of the national character, but economically in the amazingly swift growth of the agricultural West, and politically in the unfortunate results it has had upon the public life of cities, in the outbreaks of savage violence which may be traced to it, particularly in the mining districts, and in the severe strain it has put on universal suffrage. Another possible source of evil has caused disquiet. The most conspicuous evidence of American prosperity has been hitherto seen in the high standard of living to which the native working classes of the North have risen, in the abundance of their food and the quality of their clothing, in the neatness and comfort of their homes, in the decent orderliness of their lives, and the fondness for reading of their women. The Irish and German settlers of last century, though at first behind the native Americans in all these respects, have now risen to their level and, except in a few of the larger cities, have adopted American standards of comfort. Will the same thing happen with the new swarms of European immigrants who have been drawn from their homes in the eastern parts of Central Europe by the constant cheapening of ocean transit and by that more thorough drainage, so to speak, of the inland regions of Europe which is due to the extension of railways?4

Some have feared that possibly these immigrants, coming from a lower stratum of civilization than the German immigrants of the past, and, since they speak foreign tongues, less quickly amenable to American influences than are the Irish, retain their own low standard of decency and comfort, and menace the continuance among the white work people of that far higher standard which has hitherto prevailed. But experience has hitherto shown that these latest comers, though they live far more roughly than native Americans, soon cease to be content with lower wages, so if they do depress the average of decent living, it will not be through underbidding the older inhabitants.

The intrusion of these inauspicious elements is not the only change in the population which may cause anxiety. For many years past there has been an indraught of people from the rural districts to the cities. More than one-third of the whole population is now, it is estimated, to be found in cities with a population exceeding eight thousand, and the transfer of people from a rural to an urban life goes on all the faster because it is due not merely to economic causes, such as operate all the world over, and to the spirit of enterprise which is strong in the American youth, but also to the distaste which the average native American, a more sociable and amusement-loving being than the English or German peasant, feels for the isolation of farm life and the monotony of farm labour.5 Even in 1844 R. W. Emerson wrote: “The cities drain the country of the best part of its population, the flower of the youth of both sexes goes into the towns, and the country is cultivated by a much inferior class.” Since then the Western forests have been felled and the Western prairies brought under the plough by the stalwart sons of New England and New York. But now again, and in the West hardly less than in the East, the complaint goes up that native American men and women long for a city life, and gladly leave tillage to the newcomers from Germany and Scandinavia. To make rural life more attractive and so check the inflow to the cities, is one of the chief tasks of American statesmanship today. Fortunately, the introduction of the telephone, of electric car lines traversing the rural districts, of automobiles, and of a delivery of letters over the country are all tending to reduce the loneliness and isolation which have made country life distasteful.

Whether a city-bred population will have the physical vigour which the native rural population has shown—a population which in some of the Western states strikes one as perhaps more vigorous than any Europe can point to—is at least doubtful, for though American cities have sanitary advantages greater than those of most towns in Europe, the stress and strain of their city life is more exhausting. And it need scarcely be added that in the oldest and most highly civilized districts of the country, and among the more refined sections of the people, the natural increase of population is much smaller than it is among the poorer and the ruder.

We have been wont to think of the principle of natural selection as that which makes for the progress of the race in mankind, as it has done in the other families of animated creatures. But in the most advanced communities this principle is apt to be reversed, and the section of the population which tends to propagate itself most largely is that very section which is least fitted to raise, or even to sustain, the intellectual and moral level, as well as the level of physical excellence, already attained. Marriages are later and families smaller among the best nurtured and most cultivated class than they are among the uneducated and improvident; more children are born to the physically weak and morally untrained than to those among the rich whose natural gifts would in ages of violence, when men and families survived by physical and mental strength, have enabled them to prevail in the struggle for existence. Thus a force which once worked powerfully for the improvement of a national stock has now been turned the other way, and makes for a decline in the average capacities wherewith each man is born into the world. So in New England and the Eastern states generally, though there are a few families, historic by the number of eminent names they have produced, which still flourish and count their cousinhood by hundreds, it is nevertheless true that the original English stock, if it maintains its numbers (which seems in some parts of the country to be doubtful), grows less swiftly than do the immigrant stocks, and far less swiftly than it did a century ago.6 Yet here also that assimilative power of which I have spoken comes to the help of the nation. Those who rise from the less cultivated classes, whether of native or foreign extraction, are breathed upon by the spirit of the country; they absorb its culture and carry on its traditions; and they do so all the more readily because the pervading sense of equality makes a man’s entrance into a class higher than that wherein he was born depend solely on his personal qualities.

European readers may ask whether the swift growth not only of wealth but of great fortunes in the United States will not end in creating an aristocracy of rich families, and therewith a new structure of society. I see no ground for expecting this, not merely because the wealthiest class passes down by imperceptible gradations of fortune to a working class far better off than the working classes of Europe, but also because the faith in equality and the love of equality are too deeply implanted in every American breast to be rooted out by any economic changes. They are the strongest beliefs and passions of the people. They make no small part of the people’s daily happiness; and I can more easily imagine the United States turned into a monarchy on the one hand or a group of petty republics on the other than the aristocratic ideas and habits of Germany established on American soil. Social exclusiveness there may be—signs of it are already discernible—but visible and overt recognitions of differences of rank, whether in the use of hereditary titles, or in the possession by one class of special privileges, or in the habit of deference by one class to another, would imply a revolution in national ideas, and a change in what may be called the chemical composition of the national mind, which is of all things the least likely to arrive.

I have left to the last the most difficult problem which a meditation on the future of American society raises. From those first days of the Republic in which its people realized that they were Americans and no longer merely English colonists, it has been a question of the keenest interest for them, as it is now for the world, when and how and in what form they would develop a distinctively new and truly national type of character and genius. In 1844 Emerson said, addressing those who had lately seen the coincidence of two fateful phenomena—the extension of railways into the West and the establishment of lines of swift ocean steamers to Europe:

Since these words were spoken, many events have intervened to delay that full expression of the national gifts in letters and arts, as well as in institutions, by which a modern people must reveal the peculiar nature of its genius. Emerson would doubtless have admitted in 1874 that the West had contributed less of a “new and continental element” than he expected, and that the majesty of nature had not yet filled Congress with its inspiration. Probably another generation must arise, less preoccupied with the task of material development than the two last have been, before this expression can be looked for. Europe, which used to assume in its contemptuous way that neither arts nor letters could be expected from commercial America—as Charles Lamb said that the whole Atlantic coast figured itself to him as one long counter spread with wares—Europe has now fallen into the opposite error of expecting the development of arts and letters to keep pace with and be immediately worthy of the material greatness of the country. And the Americans themselves have perhaps, if a stranger may be pardoned the remark, erred in supposing that they made, either in the days of the first settlements or in those when they won their independence, an entirely new departure, and that their new environment and their democratic institutions rendered them more completely a new people than the children of England, continuing to speak the English tongue and be influenced by European literature, could in truth have been expected to become. As Protestants have been too apt to forget the traditions of the mediæval church, and to renounce the glories of St. Anselm and St. Bernard and Dante, so the Americans of 1850—for this is a mistake which they have now outgrown—sought to think of themselves as superior in all regards to the aristocratic society from which they had severed themselves, and looked for an elevation in their character and an originality in their literature which neither the amplitude of their freedom nor the new conditions of their life could at once produce in the members of an ancient people.

What will be either the form or the spirit of transatlantic literature and thought when they have fully ripened is a question on which I do not attempt to speculate, for the forces that shape literature and thought are the subtlest the historian has to deal with. I return to the humbler task of pointing to causes whose already apparent power is producing a society such as has never yet been seen in Europe. Nowhere in the world is there growing up such a vast multitude of intelligent, cultivated, and curious readers. It is true that of the whole population a vast majority of the men read little but newspapers, and many of the women little but fiction. Yet there remains a number to be counted by millions who enjoy and are moved by the higher products of thought and imagination; and it must be that as this number continues to grow, each generation rising somewhat above the level of its predecessors, history and science, and even poetry, will exert a power such as they have never yet exerted over the masses of any country. And the masses of America seem likely to constitute one-half of civilized mankind. There are those now living who may see before they die three hundred millions of men dwelling between the Atlantic and the Pacific, obeying the same government, speaking the same tongue, reading the same books. A civilized society like this is so much vaster than any which history knows of, that we can scarcely figure to ourselves what its character will be, nor how the sense of its immensity will tell upon those who address it. The range of a writer’s power will be such as no writers have ever yet possessed; and the responsibility which goes hand in hand with the privilege of moving so great a multitude will devolve upon the thinkers and poets of England hardly less than upon those of America.

The same progress which may be expected in the enjoyment of literature and in its influence may be no less expected in the other elements of what we call civilization. Manners are becoming in America more generally polished, life more orderly, equality between the sexes more complete, the refined pleasures more easily accessible than they have ever yet been among the masses of any people. And this civilization attains a unity and harmony which makes each part of the nation understand the other parts more perfectly, and enables an intellectual impulse to be propagated in swifter waves of light than has been the case among the far smaller and more ancient states of Europe.

While this unity and harmony strengthen the cohesion of the Republic, while this diffused cultivation may be expected to overcome the economic dangers that threaten it, they are not wholly favourable to intellectual creation, or to the variety and interest of life. I will try to explain my meaning by describing the impression which stamps itself on the mind of the stranger who travels westward by railway from New York to Oregon. In Ohio he sees communities which a century ago were clusters of log huts among forests, and which are now cities better supplied with all the appliances of refined and even luxurious life than were Philadelphia and New York in those days. In Illinois he sees communities which were in 1848 what Ohio was in 1805. In the newer states of Wyoming and Washington he sees settlements just emerging from a rudeness like that of primitive Ohio or Illinois, and reflects that such as Ohio is now, such as Illinois is fast becoming, such in a few years more will Wyoming and Washington have become, the process of development moving, by the help of science, with an always accelerated speed. “If I return this way twenty years hence,” he thinks, “I shall see, except in some few tracts which nature has condemned to sterility, nothing but civilization, a highly developed form of civilization, stretching from the one ocean to the other; the busy, eager, well-ordered life of the Hudson will be the life of those who dwell on the banks of the Yellowstone, or who look up to the snows of Mount Shasta from the valleys of California.” The Far West has hitherto been to Americans of the Atlantic states the land of freedom and adventure and mystery, the land whose forests and prairies, with trappers pursuing the wild creatures, and Indians threading in their canoes the maze of lakes, have touched their imagination and supplied a background of romance to the prosaic conditions which surround their own lives. All this is fast vanishing; and as the world has by slow steps lost all its mystery since the voyage of Columbus, so America will from end to end be to the Americans even as England is to the English. What new background of romance will be discovered? Where will the American imagination of the future seek its materials when it desires to escape from dramas of domestic life? Where will bold spirits find a field in which to relieve their energies when the Western world of adventure is no more? As in our globe so in the North American continent, there will be something to regret when all is known and the waters of civilization have covered the tops of the highest mountains.

He who turns away from a survey of the government and society of the United States and tries to estimate the place they hold in the history of the world’s progress cannot repress a slight sense of disappointment when he compares what he has observed and studied with that which idealists have hoped for, and Americans have desired to establish. “I have seen,” he says, “the latest experiment which mankind have tried, and the last which they can ever hope to try under equally favouring conditions. A race of unequalled energy and unsurpassed variety of gifts, a race apt for conquest and for the arts of peace, which has covered the world with the triumphs of its sword, and planted its laws in a hundred islands of the sea, sent the choicest of its children to a new land, rich with the bounties of nature, bidding them increase and multiply, with no enemies to fear from Europe, and few of those evils to eradicate which Europe inherits from its feudal past. They have multiplied till the sapling of two centuries ago overtops the parent trunk; they have drawn from their continent a wealth which no one dreamed of; they have kept themselves aloof from Old World strife, and have no foe in the world to fear; they have destroyed, after a tremendous struggle, the one root of evil which the mother country in an unhappy hour planted among them. And yet the government and institutions, as well as the industrial civilization of America, are far removed from that ideal commonwealth which European philosophers imagined, and Americans expected to create.” The feeling expressed in these words, so often heard from European travellers, is natural to a European, who is struck by the absence from America of many of those springs of trouble to which he has been wont to ascribe the ills of Europe. But it is only the utterance of the ever-fresh surprise of mankind at the discovery of their own weaknesses and shortcomings. Why should either philosophers in Europe or practical men in America have expected human nature to change when it crossed the ocean? When history could have told them of many ideals not less high and hopes not less confident than those that were formed for America which have been swallowed up in night. The vision of a golden age has often shimmered far off before the mind of men when they have passed through some great crisis, or climbed to some specular mount of faith, as before the traveller when he has reached the highest pastures of the Jura, the line of Alpine snows stands up and glitters with celestial light. Such a vision seen by heathen antiquity still charms us in that famous poem of Virgil’s which was long believed to embody an inspired prophecy. Such another rejoiced the souls of pious men in the days of Constantine, when the Christian church, triumphant over her enemies, seemed about to realize the kingdom of heaven upon earth. Such a one reappeared to the religious reformers of the sixteenth century, who conceived that when they had purged Christianity of its corrupt accretions, the world would be again filled with the glory of God, and men order their lives according to His law. And such a vision transported men just a century ago, when it was not unnaturally believed that in breaking the fetters by which religious and secular tyranny had bound the souls and bodies of men, and in proclaiming the principle that government sprang from the consent of all, and must be directed to their good, enough had been done to enable the natural virtues of mankind to secure the peace and happiness of nations. Since 1789 many things have happened, and men have become less inclined to set their hopes upon political reforms. Those who still expect a general amelioration of the world from sudden changes look to an industrial and not a political revolution, or seek in their impatience to destroy all that now exists, fancying that from chaos something better may emerge. In Europe, whose thinkers have seldom been in a less cheerful mood than they are today, there are many who seem to have lost the old faith in progress; many who feel when they recall the experiences of the long pilgrimage of mankind, that the mountains which stand so beautiful in the blue of distance, touched here by flashes of sunlight and there by shadows of the clouds, will when one comes to traverse them be no Delectable Mountains, but scarred by storms and seamed by torrents, with wastes of stone above, and marshes stagnating in the valleys. Yet there are others whose review of that pilgrimage convinces them that though the ascent of man may be slow it is also sure; that if we compare each age with those which preceded it we find that the ground which seems for a time to have been lost is ultimately recovered, we see human nature growing gradually more refined, institutions better fitted to secure justice, the opportunities and capacities for happiness larger and more varied, so that the error of those who formed ideals never yet attained lay only in their forgetting how much time and effort and patience under repeated disappointment must go to that attainment.

This less sombre type of thought is more common in the United States than in Europe, for the people not only feel in their veins the pulse of youthful strength, but remember the magnitude of the evils they have vanquished, and see that they have already achieved many things which the Old World has longed for in vain. And by so much as the people of the United States are more hopeful, by that much are they more healthy. They do not, like their forefathers, expect to attain their ideals either easily or soon; but they say that they will continue to strive towards them, and they say it with a note of confidence in the voice which rings in the ear of the European visitor, and fills him with something of their own hopefulness. America has still a long vista of years stretching before her in which she will enjoy conditions far more auspicious than any European country can count upon. And that America marks the highest level, not only of material well-being, but of intelligence and happiness, which the race has yet attained, will be the judgment of those who look not at the favoured few for whose benefit the world seems hitherto to have framed its institutions, but at the whole body of the people.

[1] California has passed a statute forbidding counsel to advertise for divorce cases.

[2] Modern England seems to stand alone in her comparative neglect of the theoretic study of law as a preparation for legal practice. Other countries, from Germany at the one end of the scale of civilization to the Mohammedan East at the other end, exact three, four, five, or even more years spent in this study before the aspirant begins his practical work.

[3] This instruction is in most of the law schools confined to Anglo-American law, omitting theoretic jurisprudence, Roman law (except, of course, in Louisiana, where the Civil Law is the basis of the code), and international law. The latter subjects are, however, now beginning to be more frequently taught, though sometimes placed in the historical curriculum. In some few law schools educational value is attributed to the moot courts in which the students are set to argue cases, a method much in vogue in England two centuries ago.

[4] Some of the best American lawbooks, as for instance that admirable series which has made Justice Story famous, have been produced as lectures given to students. Story was professor at Harvard while judge of the Supreme Court, and used to travel to and from Washington to give his lectures. A few years ago there were several men in large practice who used to teach in the law schools out of public spirit and from their love of the subject, rather than in respect of the comparatively small payment they received.

[5] American lawyers remark that the English Law Reports have become less useful since the number of decisions upon the construction of statutes has so greatly increased. They complain of the extreme difficulty of keeping abreast of the vast multitude of cases reported in their own country, from the courts of all the states as well as federal courts.

[1] Years ago a prominent New Yorker said to me, speaking of one of the chief judges of the city, “I don’t think him such a bad fellow; he has always been very friendly to me, and would give me a midnight injunction or do anything else for me at a moment’s notice. And he’s not an ill-natured man. But, of course, he’s the last person I should dream of asking to my house.”

[2] Most states are full of ex-judges practising at the bar, the title being continued as a matter of courtesy to the person who has formerly enjoyed it, and sometimes even extended to an elderly counsel who has never sat on the bench. For social purposes, once a judge, always a judge.

[3] State constitutions sometimes require the judges of the higher courts to give their decisions in writing and this seems to be the practice everywhere.

[4] There are places where the purity of juries is not above suspicion. New York has recently created a new office, that of Warden of the Grand Jury. As a distinguished lawyer observed in mentioning this, Quis custodiet ipsum custoderm.

[5] Even judges suffer from this misplaced leniency. Here is a case which happened in Kentucky. A decree of foreclosure was pronounced by a respected judge against a defendant of good local family connections. As the judge was walking from the court to the railway station the same afternoon the defendant shot him dead. It was hard to avoid arresting and trying a man guilty of so flagrant an offence, so arrested he was, tried, and convicted; but on an allegation of lunacy being put forward, the court of appeals ordered a new trial; he was acquitted on the ground of insanity, under instructions based on the opinion of an appellate court, and presently allowed to escape into Ohio from the asylum to which he had been consigned. There was, I was told, a good deal of sympathy for him.

[6] The message of President Taft of December 1909, in referring to “the deplorable delays in the administration of civil and criminal law,” proceeded as follows: “A change in judicial procedure, with a view to reducing its expense to private litigants in civil cases and facilitating the despatch of business and final decision in both civil and criminal cases, constitutes the greatest need in our American institutions. Much of the lawless violence and cruelty exhibited in lynchings is directly due to the uncertainties and injustice growing out of the delays in trials, judgments and the execution thereof by our courts.” See also note 3 to Chapter 100, page 1239.

[7] Save that in the rural counties of Massachusetts and possibly of some other New England states, the sheriff, as in England, escorts the judges to and from the courthouse.

[8] An instance told me in the West shows how suspicions may arise. A person living in the capital of the state used his intimacy with the superior judges, most of whom were in the habit of occasionally dining with him, to lead litigants to believe that his influence with the bench would procure for them favourable decisions. Considerable sums were accordingly given him to secure his good word. When the litigant obtained the decision he desired, the money given was retained. When the case went against him, the confidant of the bench was delicately scrupulous in handing it back, saying that as his influence had failed to prevail, he could not possibly think of keeping the money. Everything was done in the most secret and confidential way, and it was not till after the death of this judicious dinner-giver that it was discovered that he had never spoken to the judges about lawsuits at all, and that they had lain under a groundless suspicion of sharing the gains their friend had made.

[9] For instance, there is a Western state in which a year or two ago there was one, but only one, of the superior judges whose integrity was doubted. So little secret was made of the matter, that when a very distinguished English lawyer visited the city, and was taken to see the courts sitting, the newspapers announced the fact next day as follows:

Lord X. in the city,

He has seen Judge Y.

A statute of Arizona prescribes a change of venue where an affidavit is made alleging that a judge is biased.

[10] The Tombs is the name of the city prison of New York, round which lawyers of the lowest class hover in the hope of picking up defences.

[11] “In the minds of certain New York judges,” said Mr. Charles F. Adams at that time, “the old-fashioned distinction between a receiver of property in a Court of Equity and a receiver of stolen goods at common law may be said to have been lost.” The abuses of judicial authority were mostly perpetrated in the exercise of equitable jurisdiction, which is no doubt the most delicate part of a judge’s work, not only because there is no jury, but because the effect of an injunction may be irremediable, whereas a decision on the main question may be reversed on appeal. In Scotland some of the local courts have a jurisdiction unlimited in amount, but no action can be taken on an interdict issued by such a court if an appeal is made with due promptness to the Court of Session.

[12] As to the recent introduction in some states of the recall of judges by popular vote, see Vol. I, Chap. 42 (State Judiciary). Although the recall is a significant evidence of distrust in the bench, that distrust springs not so much from suspicions of corruption as from the belief that judges are apt to be too much under the influence of financial interests, especially those of great corporations. The similar proposal for a recall (i.e., reversal) of judicial decisions by the people is grounded on the notion that in interpreting the state constitutions the judges are over technical, and are too much in sympathy with the sentiments of the wealthy class.

[13] Neither is he at all too common in Central and South America. In Egypt I was told in 1888 that there might be here and there among the native judges a man who did not take bribes, but probably not more than two or three in the whole country. Things have, however, mended since then.

[14] There is the important difference between these countries and England that in all of them not only is little or no use made of the civil jury, but public opinion is less active and justice more localized, i.e., a smaller proportion of important suits are brought before the supreme courts of the capital. The centralization of English justice, costly to suitors, has contributed to make law more pure as well as more scientific.

[1] These grants usually consisted of alternate sections, in the earlier cases of five to the mile along the line. The total grant made to the Union Pacific Railway was 13,000,100 acres; to the Kansas Pacific 6,000,000; to the Central Pacific, 12,100,100; to the Northern Pacific, 47,000,000; to the Atlantic and Pacific, 42,000,000; to the Southern Pacific, 9,520,000. Enormous money subsidies, exceeding $60,000,000, were also granted by Congress to the first transcontinental lines.

[2] This was of course especially the case with the newer Western states; yet even in the older parts of the country any very large railway system had great power, for it might have a monopoly of communication; or if there were two lines they might have agreed to “pool,” as it is called, their traffic receipts and work in harmony.

[3] The Swiss railways are now under the control of the federal government.

[4] See Munn v. Illinois, and Peake v. Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, 94 U.S. Reports.

[5] Some time ago the legislature of Iowa passed a statute giving the state Railway Commission full powers to fix charges; and injunctions were obtained from the courts restraining the commission from imposing, as they were proceeding to do, rates so low as to be destructive of reasonable profits.

[6] Subsequent statutes have enlarged the functions of this commission and have, among other things, put an end to the bestowal of free passes for passengers, a form of preference which had assumed large proportions and given rise (especially where legislators were concerned) to some abuses.

[7] It would appear that the freight charges on American railways were, before 1887, generally lower than those in England and in Western Europe generally. They are now lower, and in some cases very much lower, than those of British railways. English third-class passenger fares are, however, as a rule slightly lower than those in the ordinary American cars.

[8] In one of these contests, one railway having lowered its rates for cattle to a figure below paying point, the manager of the other promptly bought up all the cattle he could find at the inland terminus, and sent them to the coast by the enemy’s line, a costly lesson to the latter.

[9] This so-called “Royal Gorge” of the Arkansas is one of the most striking pieces of scenery on the North American continent, not unlike the grandest part of the famous Dariel Pass in the Caucasus.

[10] “It is an extraordinary fact,” says Mr. Hitchcock, “that the power of eminent domain which the State itself confessedly ought never to use save on grounds of public necessity should be at the command of irresponsible individuals for purposes of private gain, not only without any guarantee that the public interest will be promoted thereby, but when it is perfectly well known that it may be, and has been deliberately availed of for merely speculative purposes. The facility with which, under loosely drawn railroad laws, purely speculative railroad charters can be obtained has contributed not a little to develop the law of receiverships. In Missouri there is nothing to prevent any live men whose combined capital would not enable them to build five miles of track on a level prairie from forming a railroad corporation with power to construct a road five hundred miles long, and to condemn private property for that purpose, for a line whose construction no public interest demands, and from which no experienced man could expect dividends to accrue.”—Address to the American Bar Association, 1887.

[11] The great Central Pacific Railway was constructed by four men, two of whom were, when they began, storekeepers in a small way in San Francisco, and none of whom could be called capitalists. Their united funds when they began in 1860 were only $120,000 (£24,000). They went on issuing bonds and building the line bit by bit as the bonds put them in funds, retaining the control of the company through the shares. This Central Pacific Company ultimately built the Southern Pacific and numerous branches, and became by far the greatest power in the West, owning nearly all the railways in California and Nevada. When one of the four died in 1878, his estate was worth $30,000,000, a vast sum for those days.

[1]Note to edition of 1914: The question what is the legal status (if any) of these trusts, the first of which was created in 1869, has been much discussed by American jurists. When Congress legislated against them in 1890 there existed at least thirty, and their power grew thereafter.

During the last ten years many lawsuits have been brought by successive administrations, under the Sherman Act, to restrain the monopolistic action of trusts and great corporations, and considerable results have been thereby attained.

[2] There are, of course, simple folk in England who take shares on the faith of prospectuses of new companies sent to them; but the fact that it pays to send such prospectuses is the best proof of the general ignorance, in such matters, of laymen (including the clergy) and women in that country.

[3] In many country towns there are small offices, commonly called “bucket shops,” to which farmers and tradesmen resort to effect their purchases and sales in the stock markets of the great cities. Not a few ruin themselves. Some states have endeavoured to extinguish them by penal legislation.

[4] In a mining town in Colorado the landlady of an inn in which I stayed for a night pressed me to bring out in London a company to work a mining claim which she had acquired, offering me what is called an option. I inquired how much money it would take to begin to work the claim and get out the ore. “Less than thirty thousand dollars” (£6,000). (The carbonates are in that part of Colorado very near the surface.) “And what is to be the capital of your company?”“Five millions of dollars” (£1,000,000)!

[5] Of course I am speaking of the man you meet in travelling, who is a sample of the ordinary citizen. In polite society one’s entertainer would no more bring up such a subject, unless you drew him on to do so, than he would think of talking politics.

[6] The balances settled in the New York Clearing House each day are two-thirds of all the clearings in the United States.

[7] The wealth of corporations has been estimated by high authorities at one-fourth of the total value of all property in the United States.

[8] The great rebound of trade in 1879–83 trebled within those years the value of many railroad bonds and stocks, and raised at a still more rapid rate the value of lands in many parts of the West.

[9] Of course the prospects of war or peace in Europe do sensibly affect the American produce markets, and therefore the railroads, and indeed all great commercial undertakings. But these prospects are as much outside the province of the American statesman as the drought which affects the coming crop or the blizzard that stops the earnings of a railway.

[10] The secretary of the treasury, by his control of the public debt, has no doubt means of affecting the markets; but I have never heard any charge of improper conduct in such matters on the part of anyone connected with the Treasury Department.

[11] The mischief has been thought sufficient to be specially checked by the constitutions or statutes of some states; and there has been a good deal of legislation against betting on races.

[12] It is stated that the Produce Exchange sells in each year five times the value of the cotton crop, and that the Petroleum Exchange has sometimes sold fifty times the amount of that year’s yield.

I have referred in a note to a preceding chapter to some recent attempts to check by legislation this form of speculation (p. 1220 ante).

[1] Emmanuel was a college then much frequented by the Puritans. Of the English graduates who emigrated to New England between 1620 and 1647, nearly one hundred in number, three-fourths came from the University of Cambridge.

[2] In 1636 the General Court of the colony of Massachusetts Bay agreed “to give Four Hundred Pounds towards a school or college, whereof Two Hundred Pounds shall be paid the next year, and Two Hundred Pounds when the work is finished, and the next Court to appoint where and what building.” In 1637 the General Court appointed a commission of twelve “to take order for a college at Newtoun.” The name Newton was presently changed to Cambridge. John Harvard’s bequest being worth more than twice the £400 voted, the name of Harvard College was given to the institution; and in 1642 a statute was passed for the ordering of the same. Teaching began in 1650.

[3] The Virginians had worked at this project for more than thirty years before they got their charter and grant. “When William and Mary had agreed to allow £2000 out of the quit rents of Virginia towards building the college, the Rev. Mr. Blair went to Seymour, the attorney-general, with the royal command to issue a charter. Seymour demurred. The country was then engaged in war, and could ill afford to plant a college in Virginia. Mr. Blair urged that the institution was to prepare young men to become ministers of the gospel. Virginians, he said, had souls to be saved as well as their English countrymen. ‘Souls!’ said Seymour. ‘Damn your souls! Make tobacco!’”—The College of William and Mary, by Dr. H. B. Adams. This oldest of Southern colleges was destroyed in the Civil War [1862] (it has recently received a national grant of $64,000 as compensation), but was restored, and has been reendowed by the legislature of Virginia in 1888.

[4] As respects government the American university more resembles the newer type of university recently created in some great cities, which is governed by a council in which various elements are represented and, for some educational purposes, by its faculty.

[5] The Scotch universities (since the Act of 1858), under their university courts, present, however, a certain resemblance to the American system, inasmuch as the governing body is in these institutions not the teaching body.

[6] These figures are to some extent imperfect, because a few institutions omit to send returns, and cannot be compelled to do so, the federal government having no authority in the matter. The number of degree-giving bodies, teachers, and students is therefore somewhat larger than is here stated, but how much larger it is not easy to ascertain.

[8] Mr. Johns Hopkins gave £700,000 to the university he founded at Baltimore. In 1906–7 the State University of Wisconsin received from its state treasury $624,456, that of California $446,040, that of Illinois $350,000. The legislature of California has since further raised its grant. Some universities, such as Columbia (in New York), Harvard, and Chicago, have very large revenues derived from private endowments. A magnificent endowment was given by Mr. Leland Stanford, senator for California, to found a new university at Palo Alto in that state, and still more recently Mr. John D. Rockefeller bestowed immense sums on the new university (opened in 1891) he established in Chicago.

[9] In Harvard the government is vested in a self-renewing body of seven persons called the corporation, or technically, the President and Fellows of Harvard College, who have the charge of the property; and in a board of overseers, appointed formerly by the legislature, now by the graduates, five each year to serve for six years, with a general supervision of the educational system, educational details and discipline being left to the faculty.

[10] The president of a college was formerly usually, and in denominational colleges almost invariably, a clergyman, and generally lectured on mental and moral philosophy. (When a layman was chosen at Harvard in 1828 the clergy thought it an encroachment.) He is today not so likely to be in orders. However, of the forty Ohio colleges twenty have clerical presidents. The greater universities of the East and the Western state universities are now usually ruled by laymen. Even some of the denominational colleges have no longer clerical heads.

[11] President Eliot gives it for Harvard at 22 years and 7 months.

[12] Many students now come from Europe and Asia. In 1909 there were in 34 United States universities 1,467 from abroad, including 458 from Asia (including 158 Japanese and 193 Chinese, with 60 from the East Indies), 313 from Europe, 154 from South America, and 64 from Australia.

[13] I remember one in Yale of 1753, called South Middle, which was venerated as the oldest building there.

[14] The University of Virginia was an exception, having received from the enlightened views of Jefferson an impulse towards greater freedom.

[15] The small colleges were the more unwilling to drop Greek as a compulsory subject because they think that by doing so they would lose the anchor by which they held to the higher culture, and confess themselves to be no longer universities. But Greek declines in them also.

[16] At Harvard I was informed that about one-third of the students came from the public (i.e., publicly supported) schools. The proportion is in most universities larger. There is a growing tendency in America, especially in the East, for boys of the richer class to be sent to private schools, and the number and excellence of such schools increases. The total number of endowed academies, seminaries, and other private secondary schools over the country in 1912 is returned as 2,044, with 12,110 pupils (7,646 boys and 4,464 girls) preparing for a college classical course; 8,575 pupils (7,679 boys and 896 girls) preparing for a scientific course. But these figures are far from complete.

[17] Honorary degrees are in some institutions, and not usually those of the highest standing, conferred with a profuseness which seems to argue an exaggerated appreciation of inconspicuous merit.

[18] Among the degree titles awarded in some institutions to women, the titles of Bachelor and Master being deemed inappropriate, are the following—Laureate of Science, Proficient in Music, Maid of Philosophy, Mistress of Polite Literature, Mistress of Music (North American Review for March 1885).

[19] If this be true of England, the evil is probably no smaller under the class prize system of Scotland.

[20] In 1909 there were said to be 298 American students enrolled at the German universities.

[21] The Report of the Bureau of Education for 1911–12 gives the total number of scholarships and fellowships at 13,989, but does not state how many are awarded by competition. Of these, 7,073 were reported from the North Atlantic states.

[22] Fees, in the West especially, are low. In the University of Michigan a student belonging to the state pays $10 on admission and an annual fee of $30 (Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts), or $45 (other departments), students from without the state paying $25 (admission), $40 (Department of Literature, etc.), $55 (other departments), with special fees in law and laboratory courses.

[23] Sophomores and freshmen have a whimsical habit of meeting one another in dense masses and trying which can push the other aside on the stairs or path. This is called “rushing.” In some universities the admission of women as students has put an end to it. Hazing has diminished of late years.

[24] There are, of course, other students’ societies and social clubs, sometimes expensive and exclusive, besides these Greek letter ones.

[25] Brown University, formerly called Rhode Island College (founded in 1764), is in the rather peculiar position of having by its regulations four denominations, Baptists, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Quakers, equally represented on its two governing bodies, the trustees and the fellows, the Baptists having a majority.

[26] At Cornell University there exists a Sunday preachership endowed with a fund of $30,000 (£6000), which is used to recompense the services of distinguished ministers of different denominations who preach in succession during twenty-one Sundays of the academic year. The founder was an Episcopalian, whose first idea was to have a chaplaincy limited to ministers of his denomination, but the trustees refused the endowment on such terms. The only students who absent themselves are Roman Catholics.

[27] This idea is exactly expressed in the regulations for the most recent great foundation, that of Mr. Leland Stanford in California. It is declared to be the duty of the trustees “to prohibit sectarian instruction, but to have taught in the University the immortality of the soul, the existence of an all-wise and benevolent Creator, and that obedience to His laws is the highest duty of man.” The founders further declare, “While it is our desire that there shall be no sectarian teaching in this institution, it is very far from our thoughts to exclude divine service. We have provided that a suitable building be erected, wherein the professors of the various religious denominations shall from time to time be invited to deliver discourses not sectarian in character.” On the other hand, the still more recent foundation of Mr. Rockefeller at Chicago prescribes that “at all times two-thirds of the trustees and also the president of the university and of its said college shall be members of regular Baptist churches—and in this particular the charter shall be for ever unalterable.” All professorships, however, are to be free from any religious tests.

[28] As the late Mr. George William Curtis wrote: “It is now settled that Juliet may study, but shall she study with Romeo?—that is a question which gives even Boston pause.”

[29] In 1913–14 Wellesley had 1,480 students, with 133 professors and teachers and an income from all sources of $716,000. Smith College had 1,548 students, 127 instructors and an income from all sources of $581,000. Vassar had 1,073 students, 115 instructors and an income of $1,176,108. Bryn Mawr had 469 students, 67 instructors and an income of $331,274. The proportion of men teachers to women teachers varied from one-third to two-thirds.

[30] Even in Europe it is curious to note how each country is apt to think the universities of the other to be rather schools than universities. The Germans call Oxford and Cambridge schools, because they have hitherto given comparatively little professional and specialized teaching. The English call the Scotch universities schools because many of their students enter at fifteen.

[31] The New York legislature recently offered a charter to the Chatauqua gathering, one of the most interesting institutions in America, and one most thoroughly characteristic of the country, standing midway between a popular university and an educational camp meeting, and representing both the religious spirit and the love of knowledge which characterize the better part of the native American middle and poorer classes. It has been imitated in the West; there are many such gatherings called Chautauquas.

[32] Free as regards self-government in matters of education, for they were tightly bound by theological restrictions till 1871.

[33] The law of most American states has not yet recognized the necessity of providing proper methods for setting aside the dispositions made by founders when circumstances change or their regulations prove unsuitable. Endowments, if they continue to increase at their present rate, will become a very doubtful blessing unless this question is boldly dealt with. The difficulties of so dealing are complicated by the provisions of the federal Constitution.

[1] Though many of the so-called agricultural colleges are still far from having reached the level of those few mentioned above. Some trenchant remarks on this subject may be found in the Report of the Carnegie Foundation for 1909.

[2] In Harvard the maximum salary is in the Law School $7,500, in other departments $5,500, but this maximum is reached only after a number of years’ service as full professor.

[3] In 1908 one-third of the degree-granting universities paid their full professors an average salary of less than $1,000 a year, and only 20 paid an average of $3,000 or over, only 5 paying an average salary of $3,500 or over. The salaries of assistant professors are much lower, those of instructors lower still.

[4] In 1913 the total number of retiring allowances in force was 315, and 83 widows’ pensions, total annual distribution being $570,423.

The creation of this fund has had the incidental result of tending to establish, not without protests and complaints, a sort of unofficial standard of excellence for colleges, and this “by-product” is deemed valuable.

[5] A degree conferred at one of the few oldest and most famous universities has even a social value, especially to a member of a “new rich” family which is, as people say, “on the make.”

[6] Cornell, however, receives also a grant from the state of New York though not strictly a state university.

[7] The state university of North Carolina, founded in 1789, seems to be the oldest state institution of the modern type, though in several states, such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, the legislatures had granted charters and money to colleges which were or subsequently became self-governing. See an interesting paper entitled The Origin of American State Universities by Dr. Elmer Elsworth Brown (Univ. of Calif. Publications, 1903).

[8] The universities and colleges in and near Boston have organized a combined system of courses and offer the degree of A.A. to those who attain a certain standard.

[9] One of these has provided a separate college for women.

[10] Except of course in what is called in Germany the seminar.

[11] Distinction in a professional school (law and medicine) in a few of the greatest universities is, however, supposed to help a man in his start in professional life, and in some few universities there are honours to be won by competition. Harvard so awards scholarships, and the number of those who thought they obtain the honour do not receive, because they do not need, the emolument, practically equals that of those to whom the stipend is paid.

[12] Except of course in respect of the land grants made by Congress to the states for university and agricultural education. Latterly, moreover, the Agricultural Department at Washington has rendered valuable help to agricultural state colleges.

[13] The Carnegie Foundation Report for 1909 observes, “There are in this country more medical schools than in all Europe, and these schools have turned upon the public a far larger number of physicians than are needed, the majority ill trained and educated, the imperative need being now not more medical schools but fewer and better ones,” p. 91.

[14] One university is reported to have recently mortgaged its campus for $400,000 to erect what is called a stadium, while paying its full professors an average yearly salary of $1,800 only.

[15] Professor Dr. Lamprecht of Leipzig in his Amerikana.

[16] The exceptions to this general statement are so rare as to emphasize the fact that it is almost universally true.

[1] Four states provide that this declaration is not to be taken to excuse breaches of the public peace, many that it shall not excuse acts of licentiousness or justify practices inconsistent with the peace and safety of the state, and three that no person shall disturb others in their religious worship.

[2] Full details on these points will be found in Mr. Stimson’s valuable collection entitled American Statute Law.

[3] Idaho disfranchises all polygamists or advocates of polygamy; but Mormonism is attacked not so much as a religion as in respect of its social features and hierarchical character.

[4] There was however, for some time, a movement led I think by some Baptist and Methodist ministers, for obtaining the insertion of the name of God in the federal Constitution. Those who desired this appear to hold that the instrument would be thereby in a manner sanctified, and a distinct national recognition of theism expressed.

[5] In 1910 the Roman Catholic schools and charities of New York received more than $1,500,000; very few other denominational institutions received money, but those of some Hebrew, German, French, and similar societies received smaller amounts, of which the largest, $235,000, went to Hebrew charities.

[6] Though Michigan and Oregon forbid any appropriation of state funds for religious services.

[7] It has often been said that Christianity is a part of the common law of the states, as it has been said to be of the common law of England; but on this point there have been discrepant judicial opinions, nor can it be said to find any specific practical application. A discussion of it may be found in Justice Story’s opinion in the famous Girard will case.

[8] Or otherwise as questions of private civil law. Actions for damages are sometimes brought against ecclesiastical authorities by persons deeming themselves to have been improperly accused or disciplined or deprived of the enjoyment of property.

[9] The emperor Aurelian decided in a like neutral spirit a question that had arisen between two Christian churches.

[10] Occasionally a candidate belonging to a particular denomination receives some sympathetic support from its members. Once in a state election in Arkansas, as one candidate for the governorship had been a Baptist minister and the other a Methodist presiding elder, and four-fifths of the voters belonged to one or other denomination, each received a good deal of denominational adhesion.

[11] In his message of 1881 the governor of Washington Territory recommends the legislature to exempt church property from taxation, not only on the ground that “churches and schoolhouses are the temples of education, and alike conduce to the cultivation of peace, happiness, and prosperity,” but also because “churches enhance the value of contiguous property, which, were they abolished, would be of less value and return less revenue.”

[12] New Hampshire has lately taxed churches on the value of their real estate exceeding $10,000.

[13] An interesting and impartial summary view of the history of the chief denominations in the United States may be found in Dr. George P. Fisher’s History of the Christian Church, pp. 559–82.

[16] The strength of Presbyterianism in the South is probably due in part to the immigration into those states of Ulstermen in the middle of last century, and of settlers from Holland at a still earlier date.

[17] The proposal which has been more than once made in the annual convention of the Protestant Episcopal church, that it should call itself “The National Church of America,” has been always rejected by the good sense of the majority, who perceive that an assumption of this kind would provoke much displeasure from other bodies of Christians.

[18] The Methodists and Baptists are said to make more use of social means in the work of evangelizing the masses, and to adapt themselves more perfectly to democratic ideas than do the other Protestant bodies.

[19] In a few states clergymen are still declared ineligible, by the constitution, as members of a state legislature. They do not seem to have in the early days sat in these bodies; and they very rarely sit in Congress, but one finds them in conventions. One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister and president of Princeton College, who had come recently from Scotland. Some of the best speeches in the Massachusetts convention of 1788 which ratified the federal Constitution were made by ministers. In New England, they were nearly all advocates of the Constitution, and passed into the Federalist party.

[20] The clergy are the objects of a good deal of favour in various small ways; for instance, they used to receive free passes on railroads, and the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, while forbidding the system of granting free passes, which had been much abused, specially exempted clergymen from the prohibition. Their children are usually educated at lower fees, or even gratis, in colleges, and storekeepers often allow them a discount.

[1] An interesting summary of the laws for the observance of Sunday may be found in a paper read by Mr. Henry E. Young at the Third Annual Meeting of the American Bar Association (1880). These laws, which seem to exist in every state, are in many cases very strict, forbidding all labour, except works of necessity and mercy, and in many cases forbidding also travelling and nearly every kind of amusement. Vermont and South Carolina seem to go farthest in this direction. The former prescribes, under a fine of $2, that no one shall “visit from house to house, except from motives of humanity or charity, or travel from midnight of Saturday to midnight of Sunday, or hold or attend any ball or dance, or use any game, sport, or play, or resort to any house of entertainment for amusement or recreation.”

In Indiana, where all labour and “engaging in one’s usual avocation” are prohibited, it has been held by the Courts that “selling a cigar to one who has contracted the habit of smoking is a work of necessity.”

South Carolina winds up a minute series of prohibitions by ordering all persons to apply themselves to the observance of the day by exercising themselves thereon in the duties of piety and true religion. It need hardly be said that these laws are practically obsolete, except so far as they forbid ordinary and unnecessary traffic and labour. To that extent they are supported by public sentiment, and are justified as being in the nature not so much of religious as of socially and economically useful regulations. The habit of playing outdoor games and that of resorting to places of public amusement on Sunday have much increased of late years.

[2] One hears that it is now becoming the custom to make a week’s engagement of an operatic or theatrical company—there are many traversing the country—begin on Sunday instead of, as formerly, on Monday night.

Boston, Philadelphia, and New York have opened their public libraries, museums, and art galleries on Sunday.

[3] Including the case in which a church court had disregarded its own regulations, or acted in violation of the plain principles of judicial procedure.

[4] Some while ago, a professor, not in the theological faculty, was removed from his chair in the University of South Carolina for holding Unitarian views.

[5] Although total abstinence is much more generally expected from a clergyman than it would be in Great Britain. In most denominations, including Baptists and Methodists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, it is practically universal among the clergy.

[6] Even dances may be given, but not by all denominations. When a Presbyterian congregation in a great Western city was giving a “reception” in honour of the opening of its new church building—prosperous churches always have a building with a set of rooms for meetings—the sexton (as he is called in America), who had come from a Protestant Episcopal church in the East, observed, as he surveyed the spacious hall, “What a pity you are not Episcopalians; you might have given a ball in this room!”

[7] There is a nonpolygamous Mormon church, rejecting Brigham Young and his successors in Utah, which returned itself to the census of 1906 as having 40,851 members. Some Southern states punish the preaching of Mormonism.

[8] Near Walla Walla in the state of Washington I came in 1881 across a curious little sect formed by a Welshman who fell into trances and delivered revelations. He had two sons, and asserted one of them to be an incarnation of Christ, and the other of St. John Baptist, and gathered about fifty disciples, whom he endeavoured to form into a society having all things in common. However, both the children died; and in 1881 most of his disciples had deserted him. Probably such phenomena are not uncommon; there is a good deal of proneness to superstition among the less educated Westerns, especially the immigrants from Europe. They lead a solitary life in the midst of a vast nature.

[9] As regards new sects the most noticeable feature of recent years has been the growth of the body which calls itself by the name of “Christian Science.” It is said to claim a million of adherents, many of them in New England.

[10] The great frequency of divorce in many states—there are districts where the proportion of divorces of marriages is 1 to 7—does not appear to betoken immorality, but to be due to the extreme facility with which the law allows one or both of a married pair to indulge their caprice. Divorce is said to be less frequent in proportion among the middle classes than among the richer and the humbler and is, speaking generally, more frequent the further West one goes, though it is unhappily frequent in some of the Middle states and in some Eastern also. It is increasing everywhere; but it increases also in those European countries which permit it. Some remarks on this subject, and a comparison of the conditions which prevailed in the Roman Empire may be found in an essay entitled “Marriage and Divorce in Roman and English Law” in my Studies in History and Jurisprudence.

[11] This cannot be said as regards commercial uprightness, in which respect the United States stand certainly on no higher level than England and Germany, and possibly below France and Scandinavia.

[1] In 1909 there were 805 women returned as studying medicine in the medical schools, and 95 in the dentistry schools.

[2] The number of teachers in the common schools is given by the United States Bureau of Education Report for 1909 at 104,495 men and 390,988 women. As male teachers are in a majority in a very few Southern states (Tennessee, West Virginia, and Arkansas), and in New Mexico, the preponderance of women in the Northern states generally is very great. It has increased sensibly of late years over the whole country. In Massachusetts women teachers are ten and one-half times as numerous as men.

[3] There are many private boarding schools as well as private day schools for girls in the Eastern states. Comparatively few children are educated at home by governesses.

[4] I may be reminded of the prevalence and growing frequency of divorce, but think that this grave evil is due not to the comparative freedom of transatlantic matters. The cause is rather to be sought in the habit which men no less than women have formed of lightly, almost capriciously, entering into and dissolving the marriage tie. I have, however, discussed this subject in another book (Studies in History and Jurisprudence).

[5] The habit of smoking cigarettes which began to spread among English women of the richer class in the end of last century seems to be less frequent among American girls.

[6] Between fastness and freedom there is in American eyes all the difference in the world, but newcomers from Europe are startled. I remember to have once heard a German lady settled in a Western city characterize American women as “furchtbar frei und furchtbar fromm” (frightfully free and frightfully pious).

[7] I have heard American ladies say, for instance, that they have observed that an Englishman who has forgotten his keys sends his wife to the top of the house to fetch them; whereas an American would do the like errand for his wife, and never suffer her to do it for him.

[8] The above, of course, does not apply to the latest immigrants from Europe, who are still European in their dress and ways, though in a town they become quickly Americanized.

[1] The trotting horse is driven, not ridden, a return to the earliest forms of horse racing we know of.

[2] How far extreme inequality of material conditions, coexisting with political equality, is likely to prove a source of political danger is a question discussed in other chapters. Hitherto it has not proved serious. Cf. Aristotle, Polit. V., 1, 2.

[3] In private parties, so far as there is any rule of precedence, it is that of age, with a tendency to make an exception in favour of clergymen or of any person of special eminence. It is only in Washington, where senators, judges, ministers, and congressmen are sensitive on these points, that such questions seem to arise, or to be regarded as deserving the attention of a rational mind.

[4] In all the cases mentioned in the text, I remember to have been told by others, but never by the persons concerned, of the ancestry. This is an illustration of the fact that while such ancestry is felt to be a distinction it would be thought bad taste for those who possess it to mention it unless a necessity arose for them to do so.

[5] An anecdote is told of the captain of a steamer plying at a ferry from Maryland into Virginia, who being asked by a needy Virginian to give him a free passage across, inquired if the applicant belonged to one of the F.F.V. “No,” answered the man, “I can’t exactly say that; rather to one of the second families.”“Jump on board,” said the captain; “I never met one of your sort before.”

[6] Clubs have been formed in Eastern cities including only persons who could prove that their progenitors were settled in the state before the Revolution, and one widely spread women’s association (the Colonial Dames) has a like basis.

[7] The English system of hereditary titles tends to maintain the distinction of ancient lineage far less perfectly than that simple use of a family name which prevailed in Italy during the Middle Ages, or in ancient Rome. A Colonna or a Doria, like a Cornelius or a Valerius, carried the glory of his nobility in his name, whereas any upstart may be created a duke.

[8] In Germany great respect is no doubt felt for the leaders of learning and science; but they are regarded as belonging to a world of their own, separated by a wide gulf from the territorial aristocracy, which still deems itself (as in the days of Candide’s brother-in-law) a different form of mankind from those who have not sixteen quarterings to show.

[9] Someone has said that there are in America two classes only, those who have succeeded and those who have failed.

[10] This is seen even in the manner of American servants. Although there is an aversion among native Americans to enter domestic service, the temporary discharge of such duties does not necessarily involve any loss of caste. Many years ago I remember to have found all the waiting in a large hotel in the White Mountains done by the daughters of respectable New England farmers in the low country who had come up for their summer change of air to this place of resort, and were earning their board and lodging by acting as waitresses. They were treated by the guests as equals, and were indeed cultivated and well-mannered young women. So college students sometimes do waiting, and do not feel humbled thereby.

[11] On the New York elevated railroad smoking is not permitted in any car. When I asked a conductor how he was able to enforce this rule, considering that on every other railway smoking was practised, he answered, “I always say when any one seems disposed to insist, ‘Sir, I am sure that if you are a gentleman you will not wish to bring me into a difficulty,’ and then they always leave off.”

[12] It was an old reproach in Europe against republics that their citizens were rude: witness the phrases, “manières d’un Suisse,”“civilisé en Hollande” (Roscher, Politik, p. 314).

[13] There are parts of the West which still lack polish; and the behaviour of the whites to the Chinese often incenses a stranger from the Atlantic states or Europe. I remember in Oregon to have seen a huge navvy turn an inoffensive Chinaman out of his seat in a railway car, and when I went to the conductor and tried to induce him to interfere, he calmly remarked, “Yes, I know those things do make the English mad.” On the other hand, on the Pacific slope coloured people often sit down to table with whites.

[1] Plato indeed indulges his fancy so far as to describe the very mules and asses of a democracy as prancing along the roads, scarcely deigning to bear their burdens. The passion for unrestrained licence, for novelty, for variety is to him the note of democracy, whereas monotony and even obstinate conservatism are the faults which the latest European critics bid us expect.

[1] Petrarch saw the light in Arezzo, but his family was Florentine, and it was by a mere accident that he was born away from his own city.

[2] The number of legal journals and magazines in the United States is very much larger than in England, and the average level of workmanship in them equally high. Two journals are dedicated to political science, a subject only just beginning to be represented in the British press.

[3] The extreme pains taken in America to provide every library with a classified catalogue directing readers to the books on each subject, seem to illustrate this tendency.

[1] Tocqueville complains that the Americans would not permit a stranger to pass even the smallest unfavourable criticism on any of their institutions, however warmly he might express his admiration of the rest.

[2] It must, however, be admitted that this whimsical idea is not confined to the masses. I find, for instance, in an address delivered by an eminent man to a distinguished literary fraternity in October 1887 the following passage: “They (i.e. ‘the immortal periods of the Declaration of Independence’) have given political freedom to America and France, unity and nationality to Germany and Italy, emancipated the Russian serf, relieved Prussia and Hungary from feudal tenures, and will in time free Great Britain and Ireland also”!

I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual man is worse off in England as regards either his private civil rights, or his political rights, or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and of hereditary titles, and so forth—matters which are of course quite different from freedom in its proper sense.

[3] A Chicago man is reported to have expressed this belief with characteristic directness in the sentence “Chicago has had no time for culture yet, but when she does take hold she will make it hum.” The time came; and Chicago has now set an example to many an older city in what it is doing for the adornment of its lake front and the establishment of art collections.

[4] The heavy import duty on foreign works of art did not benefit the native artist, for the men who buy pictures can usually buy notwithstanding the duty, while it prevented the artist from furnishing himself with the works he wished to have around him for the purposes of his own training. The Tariff Act of 1909 dropped the duty for works of art more than twenty years old.

[5] America has produced of late years several distinguished architects, and the art is cultivated with great energy and success. European artists and critics who saw the buildings erected for the Chicago Exhibition of 1893 were greatly impressed by the inventiveness and taste they displayed; nor can a traveller fail to be struck by the beauty and variety of design shown both by some of the newer public buildings and by the villas which surround the richer cities.

[1] Athens, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Brussels, are equally good instances among the smaller countries. In Switzerland, Bern has not reached the same position, because Switzerland is a federation, and, so to speak, an artificial country made by history. Zurich, Lausanne, and Geneva are intellectually quite as influential. So Holland retains traces of her federal condition in the relatively less important position of Amsterdam. Madrid being a modern city placed in a country more recently and less perfectly consolidated than most of the other states of Europe, is less of a capital to Spain than Lisbon is to Portugal or Paris to France.

[2]Conversations with Eckermann.

[3] Thucyd. II, 37–41.

[4] Washington, being situated in the federal District of Columbia, is not a part of any state, and therefore enjoys no share in the federal government. Its inhabitants vote neither for a member of Congress nor for presidential electors; and the city is ruled, greatly to its advantage, by a federal commission.

[5] A leading New York paper once said, “In no capital that we know of does the cause of religion and morality derive so little support against luxury from intellectual interest or activity of any description. This interest has its place here, but it leads a sickly existence as yet under the shadow of great wealth which cares not for it.” This remark is, I think, less true today of New York or Chicago or St. Louis than it would have been in 1890.

[6] Congress, however, did not remove from Philadelphia to the banks of the Potomac until 1800. Thomas Moore’s lines on Washington as he saw it in 1804 deserve to be quoted:

[1] A story is told of Edmund Kean acting before an audience in New England which he found so chilling that at last he refused to come on for the next scene unless some applause were given, observing that such a house was enough to put out Vesuvius.

[1] Volney, who at the end of last century commented on the “incivilité nationale,” ascribes it “moins à un système d’intentions qu’à l’indépendance mutuelle, à l’isolement, au défaut des besoins réciproques.”

[2] A trifling anecdote may illustrate what I mean. Long ago in Spokane, a small Far Western town, the stationmaster lent me a locomotive to run a few miles out along the railway to see a remarkable piece of scenery. The engine took me and dropped me there, as I wished to walk back, much to the surprise of the driver and stoker, for in America no one walks if he can help it. The same evening, as I was sitting in the hall of the hotel, I was touched on the arm, and turning round found myself accosted by a well-mannered man, who turned out to be the engine driver. He expressed his regret that the locomotive had not been cleaner and better “fixed up,” as he would have liked to make my trip as agreeable as possible, but the notice given him had been short. He talked with intelligence, and we had some pleasant chat together. It was fortunate that I had resisted in the forenoon the British impulse to bestow a gratuity.

[1] The Alleghenies, continued in the Green and White Mountains; the Rocky Mountains; the Sierra Nevada, continued in the Cascade Range; and the Coast Ranges, which border the Pacific.

[2] There are a few inconsiderable glaciers in the northernmost part of the Rocky Mountains, and a small one on Mount Shasta.

[3] Want of space compels the omission of the chapters which were intended to describe the scenery of the United States and conjecture its probable future influence on the character of the people.

The Great West, from the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, has many striking and impressive pieces of scenery to show. Nevertheless its mountains are less beautiful than the Alps, just as the mountains of Asia Minor, even when equal or superior in height, are less beautiful, and largely for the same reason. They are much drier, and have therefore fewer streams and less variety and wealth of vegetation, the upper zone of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range excepted; and the Rockies, as they run north and south, present less of a contrast between their two sides than do the northern and southern derivities of the Alps or the Caucasus. The deserts have a strange and weird beauty of their own, unlike anything in Europe.

[4] In the newer cities one set of parallel streets is named by numbers, the others, which cross them at right angles, are in some instances, as in New York, called avenues, and so numbered. In Washington the avenues are called after states, and of the two sets of streets (which the avenues cross obliquely), one is called by numbers, the other by the letters of the alphabet, a convenient but unpleasing system.

[5] Even so far back as the presidential contest of 1892 “campaign documents” were published by the Democratic National Committee in German, French, Italian, Swedish, Norse, Polish, Dutch, Welsh, and Hebrew; and newspapers were distributed printed in Czech, Hungarian, and Spanish.

[6] The old-fashioned Puritan farmer has vanished from Massachusetts; when he went West, attracted by the greater richness of the soil, Irishmen, and now Poles also, have come in his place.

[1]Note to the Edition of 1910: This chapter, composed in 1887 after two visits to the Far West, has been left almost as it was then written, because it describes a phase of life which is now swiftly disappearing and may never be again seen elsewhere. Pioneer work in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific states is almost at an end; and these regions are becoming more like the older parts of the Republic. Yet the habits of those days have left their mark upon Western character.

[2] In the newer towns, which are often nothing more than groups of shanties with a large hotel, a bank, a church, an inn, some drinking saloons, and gambling houses, there are few women and no homes. Everybody, except recent immigrants, Chinese, and the very poorest native Americans, lives in the hotel.

[3] In California in 1881 I was shown an estate of 600,000 acres which was said to have been lately bought for $225,000 (£45,000) by a man who had made his fortune in two years’ mining, having come out without a penny.

[4] This makes plausible the story of the Texas judge who allowed murderers to escape on points of law till he found the value of real estate declining, when he saw to it that the next few offenders were hanged.

[5] Ohio in 1883 imposed a licence tax of $300 a year on “astrologers, fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, palmisters, and seers.”

[6] Tacoma has one glory which the inhabitants, it is to be feared, value less than those dwelt on in the article: it commands the finest view of a mountain on the Pacific coast, perhaps in all North America, looking across its calm inlet to the magnificent snowy mass of Mount Tacoma (14,700 feet) rising out of deep dark forests thirty miles away.

[7] Seattle has now (1910) distanced Tacoma, while St. Paul and Minneapolis have so expanded that they touch one another and are (though distinct municipalities) practically one city.

[8] In 1910 Minneapolis had 301,400 inhabitants and St. Paul 214,700.

[9] In the West men usually drop off the cars before they have stopped, and do not enter them again till they are already in motion, hanging on like bees to the end of the tail car as it quits the depot.

[1] The immense influx of immigrants of various races speaking diverse languages has not greatly affected the sense of race unity, for the immigrant’s child is eager to become, and does soon become, to all intents and purposes an American. Moreover, the immigrants are so dispersed over the country that no single section of them is in any state nearly equal to the native population. Here and there in the West, Germans tried to appropriate townships or villages, and keep English-speaking folk at a distance; and in Wisconsin their demand to have German taught regularly in the schools once caused some little bitterness. But these were transitory phenomena, and the very fact that the feeling of racial distinction produces no results more serious shows how far that feeling is from being a source of political danger.

[1] Of 6,361,502 farms returned in the census of 1910, 3,948,722 were cultivated by the owner and 2,354,676 rented by the farmer; and of those owned a little more than one-third (33.6) would appear to be subject to mortgages. The proportion to the whole number of dwellings not owned but hired by those who live in them is, of course, very much larger, viz., 53.5 per cent for the whole country, and 74.3 per cent for 160 cities with at least 25,000 inhabitants.

[2] In 1790 the coloured people were 19.3 per cent of the total population of the United States, and in 1880 only 13.1. In 1900 the percentage had sunk to 11.6, in 1910 to 10.7, and is still on the decrease.

[3] The analogy may be carried one step farther by observing that the Scandinavians who now settle in the Northwestern states, as they have come to America later than Celts or Germans, so also have come in a proportion to Celts and Germans corresponding to that borne to the previous inhabitants of Britain by the Danes and Norwegians who poured their vigorous blood into the veins of the English race from the ninth century onwards. The larger and more obscure question of the influence of Slavonic, Jewish, and Italian immigrants has been dealt with in Chapter 92.

[4] The largest percentages of increase of foreign population, where absolute numbers were significant, were, in the decade of 1900–10 the following: Persons born in Hungary 240.1 per cent, in Russia 177.4 per cent, in Italy 177.5 per cent, in Austria 139.2 per cent. In the preceding decade these percentages had been 133, 132, 165, and 124, respectively.

[5] There is sometimes a scarcity of labour on farms in the Eastern states, while the cities are crowded with men out of work.

The percentage of urban to total population, which in 1790 was 3.35, was, in 1890, 29.12, in 1900, 33.1, and in 1910, 46.3. In the New England and Middle Atlantic states it was 83.3 and 71 per cent, respectively, of the population. The increase in these states was chiefly in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and a part was of course due to the large increase of immigration into New York City.

[6] General F. A. Walker gave the rate of increase of the native whites generally in the United States at 31.25 per cent in the decade 1870–80, but that of native whites born of native parents at 28 per cent. The thirteenth census, 1910, gives the rate of increase in the years 1900–10 as 20.8 per cent of native whites, and of native whites born of native parents as 20.9 per cent. The average size of the family decreased in 1870–80 from 5.09 persons to 5.04. In 1900 it had further fallen to 4.7 and in 1910 to 4.5 and in some of the states where the population is most largely native born it was still lower, e.g., Maine (4.20), New Hampshire (4.20), Indiana (4.20), whereas in the South it was comparatively high, e.g., West Virginia (4.90), Texas (4.9), North Carolina (5.00).