People of Destiny Part 3

To my mind a great deal of this criticism is due to a misconception of the meaning of democracy. In England it was a tradition of liberal thought that democracy meant not only the right of the people to govern themselves, but the right of the individual or of any body of men to express their disagreement with the policy of the state, or with the majority opinion, or with any idea which annoyed them in any way. But, as we have seen by recent history, democratic rule does not mean individual liberty. Democracy is government by the majority of the people, and that majority will be less tolerant of dissent than autocracy itself, which can often afford to give greater liberty of expression to the minority because of its inherent strength. The Russian Soviet government, which professes to be the most democratic form of government in the world, is utterly intolerant of minorities. I suppose there is less individual liberty in Russia than in any other country, because disagreement with the state opinion is looked upon as treachery to the majority rule. So in the United States, which is a real democracy, in spite of the power of capital, there is less toleration of eccentric notions than in England, especially when the majority of Americans are overwhelmed by a general impulse of enthusiasm or pa.s.sion, such as happened when they went into the war. The people of the minority are then regarded as enemies of the state, traitors to their fellow-citizens, and outlaws. They are crushed accordingly by the weight of ma.s.s opinion, which is ruthless and merciless, with more authority and power than the decree of a king or the law of an aristocratic form of government.

Although disagreeing to some extent with those who criticize the American sense of liberty, I do believe that there is a danger in the United States of an access of popular intolerance, and sudden gusts of popular pa.s.sion, which may sweep the country and lead to grave trouble.

Being the greatest democracy in the world, it is subject to the weakness of democracy as well as endowed with its strength, and to my mind the essential weakness of democracy is due to the unsteadiness and feverishness of public opinion. When the impulse of public opinion happens to be right it is the most splendid and vital force in the world, and no obstacle can stand against it. The idealism of a people attains almost supernatural force. But if it happens to be wrong it may lead to national and world disaster.

In countries like England public opinion is still controlled and checked by a system of heavy drag wheels, which is an intolerable nuisance when one wants to get moving. But that system is very useful when there are rocks ahead and the s.h.i.+p of state has to steer a careful course. Our const.i.tutional monarchy, our hereditary chamber composed of men who do not hold their office by popular vote, our traditional and old-fas.h.i.+oned school of diplomacy, our social castes dominated by those on top who are conservative and cautious because of their possessions and privileges, are abominably hindering to ardent souls who want quick progress, but they are also a national safeguard against wild men. The British system of government, and the social structure rising by a series of caste gradations to the topmost ranks, are capable of tremendous reforms and changes being made gradually, and without any violent convulsion or break with tradition.

I am of opinion that this is not so in the United States, owing to the greater pressure of ma.s.s emotion. If, owing to the effects of war throughout the world, altering the economic conditions of life and the psychology of peoples, there is a demand for radical alteration in the conditions of labor within the United States, and for a different distribution of wealth (as there is bound to be), it is, in the opinion of many observers, almost certain that these changes will be effected after a period of greater violence in America than in England. The clash between capital and labor, they think, will be more direct and more ruthless in its methods of conflict on both sides. It will not be eased by the numerous differences of social cla.s.s, shading off one into the other, which one finds in a less democratic country like mine, where the old aristocratic families and the country landowning families, below the aristocracy, are bound up traditionally with the sentiment of the agricultural population, and where the middle cla.s.ses in the cities are sympathetic on the one hand with the just demands of the wage-earning crowd, and, on the other hand, by sn.o.bbishness, by romanticism, by intellectual a.s.sociation, and by financial ambitions with the governing, and moneyed, regime.

There are students of life in the United States who forecast two possible ways of development in the future history of the American people. Neither of them is pleasant to contemplate, and I hope that neither is true, but I think there is a shade of truth in them, and that they are sufficiently possible to be considered seriously as dangers ahead.

The first vision of these minor prophets (and gloomy souls) is a social revolution in the United States on Bolshevik lines, leading through civil strife between the forces of the wage-earning cla.s.ses and the profit-holding cla.s.ses to anarchy as fierce, as wild, and as b.l.o.o.d.y as that in Russia during the Reign of Terror.

They see Fifth Avenue swept by machine-gun fire, and its rich shops sacked, and some of its skysc.r.a.pers rising in monstrous bonfires to lick the sky with flames.

They see cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland in the hands of revolutionary committees of workmen after wild scenes of pillage and mob pa.s.sion.

They see the rich daughters of millionaires stripped of their furs and their pearls and roughly handled by hordes of angry men, hungry after long strikes and lockouts, desperate because of a long and undecided warfare with the strong and organized powers of law and of capital.

Their vision is rather hazy about the outcome of this imaginary civil war, but of its immense, far-reaching anarchy they have no doubt, with the certainty that prophets have until the progress of history proves them to be false.

Let me say for myself that I do not pose as a prophet nor believe this particular prophecy in its lurid details. But I do believe that there may be considerable social strife in the United States for various reasons. One reason which stares one in the face is the immense, flaunting, and dangerous luxury of the wealthy cla.s.ses in cities like New York. It is provocative and challenging to ma.s.ses of wage-earners who find prices rising against them quicker than their wages rise, and who wish not only for a greater share of the proceeds of their labor, but also a larger control of the management and machinery of labor. The fight, if it comes, is just as much for control as for profit, and resistance on the part of capital will be fierce and ruthless on that point.

American society--the high caste of millionaires and semi-millionaires, and demi-semi-millionaires--is perhaps rather careless in its display of wealth and in its open manifestations of luxury. The long, unending line of automobiles that go crawling down Fifth Avenue and rus.h.i.+ng down Riverside Drive, on any evening of the year, revealing women all aglitter with diamonds, with priceless furs round their white shoulders, in gowns that have cost the year's income of a working family, has no parallel in any capital of Europe. There is no such pageant of wealth in London or Paris. In no capital is there such luxury as one finds in New York hotels, mansions, and ballrooms. The evidence of money is overwhelming and oppressive. The generosity of many of these wealthy people, their own simplicity, good humor, and charm, are not safeguards against the envy and the hatred of those who struggle hard for a living wage and for a security in life which is harder still to get.

When I was in America I found a consciousness of this among the rich people, with some of whom I came in touch. They were afraid of the future. They saw trouble ahead, and they seemed anxious to build bridges between the ranks of labor and their own cla.s.s. The wisest among them did not adopt the stiff-necked att.i.tude of complete hostility to the demands of labor for a more equal share of profit and of governance. One or two men I met remembered the days when they were at the bottom of the ladder, and said, "Those fellows are right.... I'm going half-way to meet them."

If capital goes anything like half-way, there will be no b.l.o.o.d.y conflict in the United States. But there will be revolution, not less radical because not violent. That meeting half-way between capital and labor in the United States would be the greatest revolution the modern world has seen.

That, then, is one of the ways in which English observers see the future of the United States. The other way they suggest would be a great calamity for the world. It is the way of militarism--a most grisly thought!

It is argued by those who take this line of prophecy that democracy is no enemy of war. On the contrary, they say, a democracy like that of the United States, virile, easily moved to emotion, pa.s.sionate, sure of its strength, jealous of its honor, and quick to resent any fancied insult, is more liable to catch the war fever than nations controlled by cautious diplomats and by hereditary rulers. It is generally believed now that the Great War in Europe which ravaged so many countries was not made by the peoples on either side, and that it did not happen until the rival powers on top desired it to happen and pressed the b.u.t.tons and spoke the spell-words which called the armies to the colors. It is probable, and almost certain, that it would not have happened at all if the peoples had been left to themselves, if the decision of war and peace had been in their hands, and if their pa.s.sions had not been artificially roused and educated. But that is no argument, some think, against the warlike character of strong democracies. The ancient Greeks were a great democracy, but they were the most ardent warriors of their world, and fought for markets, sea supremacy, and racial prestige.

So some people believe that the United States may adopt a philosophy of militarism challenging the sea-power of the British Empire, by adding Mexico to her dominions, and by capturing the strategic points of the world's trade routes. They see in the ease with which the United States adopted military service in the late war and the rapid, efficient way in which an immense army was raised and trained a menace to the future of the world, because what was done once to crush the enemy of France and England may be done again if France or England arouse the hostility of the American people. The intense self-confidence of the Americans, their latent contempt of European peoples, their quickness to take affront at fancied slights worked up by an unscrupulous press, their consciousness of the military power that was organized but only partially used in the recent war, and their growing belief that they are a people destined to take and hold the leaders.h.i.+p of the world, const.i.tute, in the opinion of some nervous onlookers, a psychology which may lead the United States into tremendous and terrible adventures. I have heard it stated by many people not wholly insane that the next world war will be mainly a duel between the United States and the British Empire.

They are not wholly insane, the people who say these things over the dinner-table or in the club smoking-room, yet to my mind such opinions verge on insanity. It is of course always possible that any nation may lose all sense of reason and play the wild beast, as Germany did. It is always possible that by some overwhelming popular pa.s.sion any nation may be stricken with war fever. But of all nations in the world I think the people of the United States are least likely to behave in that way, especially after their experience in the European war.

The men who went back were under no illusions as to the character of modern warfare. They hated it. They had seen its devilishness. They were convinced of its idiocy, and in every American home to which they returned were propagandists against war as an argument or as a romance.

Apart from that, it is almost certain that militarism of an aggressive kind is repugnant to the tradition and instinct of the American people.

They have no use for "s.h.i.+ning armor" and all the old s.h.i.+bboleths of war's pomp and pageantry which put a spell on European peoples. The military tradition based on the falsity of war's "glory" is not in their spirit or in their blood. They will fight for the safety of civilization, as it was threatened in 1914, for the rescue of free peoples menaced by brutal destruction, and they will fight, as all brave people will fight, to safeguard their own women and children and liberty.

But I do not believe that the American people will ever indulge in aggressive warfare for the sake of imperial ambitions or for world domination. Their spirit of adventure finds scope in higher ideals, in the victories of science and commerce, in the organization of every-day life, in the triumph of industry, in the development of the natural sources of wealth which belong to their great country and their ardent individuality. They believe in peace, if we may judge by their history and tradition, and non-interference with the outside world. Their hostility to the peace terms and to certain clauses in the League of Nations was due to a deep-seated distrust of entanglements with foreign troubles, jealousies, and rivalries, and the spirit of the United States, so far from desiring "mandates" over great populations outside the frontiers of its own people, harked back to the old faith in a "splendid isolation" free from imperial responsibilities. The people were perhaps too cautious and too reserved. They risked the chance they had of reshaping the structure of human society to a higher level of common sense and liberty. They made "reservations" which caused the withdrawal of their representatives from the council-chamber of the Allied nations. But that was due not merely, I think, to party politics or the pa.s.sionate rivalry of statesmen. Truly and instinctively, it was due to the desire of the American people to draw back to their own frontiers and to work out their own destiny in peace, neither interfering nor being interfered with, according to their traditional and popular policy.

Apart from individual theorists, of the "cranky" kind, the main body of intellectual opinion in England, as far as I know it, looks to the United States as the arbitrator of the world's destiny, and the leader of the world's democracies, on peaceful and idealistic lines. There is a conviction among many of us--not killed by the controversy over the Peace Treaty--that the spirit of the American people as a whole is guided by an innate common sense free from antiquated spell-words, facing the facts of life shrewdly and honestly, and leaning always to the side of popular liberty against all tyrannies of castes, dynasties, and intolerance. Aloof from the historical enmities that still divide the nations of Europe, yet not aloof in sympathy with the sufferings, the strivings, and the sentiment of those peoples, the United States is able to play the part of a reconciling power, in any league of nations, with a detached and disinterested judgment. It is above all because it is disinterested that Europe has faith and trust in its sense of justice. It is not out for empire, for revenge, or for diplomatic vanity. Its people are supporters of President Wilson's ideal of "open covenants openly arrived at," and of the "self-determination of nations," however violently they challenge the authority by which their President pledged them to definite clauses in an unpopular contract.

They are a friendly and not unfriendly folk in their instincts and in their methods. They respond quickly and generously to any appeal to honest sentiment, though they have no patience with hypocrisy. They are realists, and hate sham, pose, and falsehood. Give them "a square deal"

and they will be scrupulous to a high standard of business morality.

Because of the infusion of foreign blood in their democracy which has been slowly produced from the great melting-pot of nations, they are subject to all the sensibilities of the human race and not narrowly fixed to one racial idea or type of mind. The Celt, the Slav, the Saxon, the Teuton, the Hebrew, and the Latin strains are present in the subconsciousness of the American people, so that they are capable of an enormous range of sympathy with human nature in its struggle upward to the light. They are the new People of Destiny in the world of progress, because after their early adventures of youth, their time of preparation, their immense turbulent growth, their forging of tools, and training of soul, they stand now in their full strength and maturity, powerful with the power of a great, free, confident people.

To some extent, and I think in an increasing way, the old supremacy which Europe had is pa.s.sing westward. Europe is stricken, tired, and poor. America is hearty, healthy, and rich. Intellectually it is still boyish and young and raw. There is the wisdom as well as the sadness of old age in Europe. We have more subtlety of brain, more delicate sense of art, a literature more expressive of the complicated emotions which belong to an old heritage of civilization, luxury, and philosophy. But I look for a Golden Age of literature and art in America which shall be like our Elizabethan period, fresh and spring-like, and rich in vitality and promise. I am bound to believe that out of the fusion of races in America, and out of their present period of wealth and power, and out of this new awakening to the problems of life outside their own country, there will come great minds, and artists, and leaders of thought, surpa.s.sing any that have yet revealed themselves. All our reading of history points to that evolution. The flowering-time of America seems due to arrive, after its growing pains.

Be that as it may, it is clear, at least, that the destiny of the American people is now marked out for the great mission of leading the world to a new phase of civilization. By the wealth they have, and by their power for good or evil, they have a controlling influence in the reshaping of the world after its convulsions. They cannot escape from that power, even though they shrink from its responsibility. Their weight thrown one way or the other will turn the scale of all the balance of the world's desires. People of destiny, they have the choice of arranging the fate of many peoples. By their action they may plunge the world into strife again or settle its peace. They may kill or cure.

They may be reconcilers or destroyers. They may be kind or cruel. It is a terrific power for any people to hold. If I were a citizen of the United States I should be afraid--afraid lest my country should by pa.s.sion, or by ignorance, or by sheer carelessness take the wrong way.

I think some Americans have that fear. I have met some who are anxious and distressed. But I think that the majority of Americans do not realize the power that has come to them nor their new place in the world. They have a boisterous sense of importance and prestige, but rather as a young college man is aware of his l.u.s.tiness and vitality without considering the duties and the dangers that have come to him with manhood. They are inclined to a false humility, saying: "We aren't our brothers' keepers, anyway. We needn't go fussing around. Let's keep to our own job and let the other people settle their own affairs." But meanwhile the other people know that American policy, American decisions, the American att.i.tude in world problems, will either make or mar them. It is essential for the safety of the world, and of civilization itself, that the United States should realize its responsibilities and fulfill the destiny that has come to it by the evolution of history. To those whom I call the People of Destiny I humbly write the words: Let the world have peace.

VI

AMERICANS IN EUROPE

It is only during the war and afterward that European people have come to know anything in a personal way of the great democracy in the United States. Before then America was judged by tourists who came to "do"

Europe in a few months or a few weeks. In France, especially, all of them were popularly supposed to be "millionaires," or, at least, exceedingly rich. Many of them were, and in Paris, to which they went in greatest numbers, they were preyed upon by hotel managers and shopkeepers, and were caricatured in French farces and French newspapers as the "_nouveaux riches_" of the world who could afford to buy all the luxury of life, but had no refinement of taste or delicacy of sentiment.

There was an enormous ignorance of the education, civilization, and temperament of the great ma.s.ses of people in the United States, and it was an absolute belief among the middle cla.s.ses of Europe that the "almighty dollar" was the G.o.d of America and that there was no other wors.h.i.+p on that side of the Atlantic.

This opinion changed in a remarkable way during the war and before the United States had sent a single soldier to French soil. The cause of the change was mainly the immensely generous, and marvelously efficient, campaign of rescue for war-stricken and starving people by the American Relief Committee under the direction of Mr. Hoover.

In February of 1915 I left the war zone for a little while on a mission to Holland, to study the Dutch methods of dealing with their enormous problem caused by the invasion of Belgian refugees. Into one little village across the Scheldt 200,000 Belgians had come in panic-stricken flight from Antwerp, utterly dest.i.tute, and Holland was choked with these starving families. But their plight was not so bad at that time as that of the millions of French and Belgian inhabitants who had not escaped by quick flight from the advancing tide of war, but had been made civil prisoners behind the enemy lines. Their rescue was more difficult because of the needs of the German army, which requisitioned the produce and the labor of the peasants and work-people, so that they were cut off from the means of life. The United States was quick to understand and to act, and in Mr. Hoover it had a man able to translate the generous emotion in the heart of a great people into practical action. I saw him in his offices at Rotterdam, dictating his orders to his staff of clerks, and organizing a scheme of relief which spread its life-giving influence over great tracts of Europe where war had pa.s.sed.

My conversation with him was brief, but long enough to let me see the masterful character, the irresistible energy, the cool, unemotional efficiency of this great business man whose brain and soul were in his job.

It was in the arena of war that I and many others saw the result of American generosity. After the battles of the Somme, when the Germans fell back in a wide retreat under the pressure of the British army, many ruined villages fell into our hands, and among the ruins many French civilians. To this day I remember the thrill I had when in some of those bombarded places I saw the sign-boards of the American Relief over wooden shanties where half-starved men and women came to get their weekly rations which had come across the sea and by some miracle, as it seemed to them, had arrived at their village close to the firing-lines.

I went into those places, some of which had escaped from sh.e.l.l-fire, and picked up the tickets for flour and candles and the elementary necessities of life, and read the notices directing the people how to take their share of these supplies, and thanked G.o.d that somewhere in the world--away in the United States--the spirit of charity was strong to help the victims of the cruelty which was devastating Europe.

An immense grat.i.tude for America was in the hearts of these French civilians. Whatever causes of irritation and annoyance may have spoiled the fine flower of the enthusiasm with which France greeted the American armies when they first landed on her coast, and the admiration of the American people for France herself, it is certain, I think, that in those villages which were engirdled by the barbed wire of the hostile armies, and to which the American supplies came in days of dire distress, there will be a lasting reverence for the name of America, which was the fairy G.o.dmother of so many women and children. Over and over again these women told me of their grat.i.tude. "Without the American Relief," they said, "we should have starved to death." Others said, "The only thing that saved us was the weekly distribution of the American supplies." "There has been no kindness in our fate," said one of them, "except the bounty of America."

It is true that into Mr. Hoover's warehouses there flowed great stores of food from England, Canada, France, and other countries, who gave generously, out of their own needs, for the sake of those who were in greater need, but the largest part of the work was America's, and hers was the honor of its organization.

In the face of that n.o.ble effort, revealing the enormous pity of the United States for suffering people, and a careless expenditure of that "almighty dollar" which now the American people poured into this abyss of European distress, it was impossible for France or England to accuse the United States of selfishness or of callousness because she still held back from any declaration of war against our enemies.

I honestly believe (though I shall not be believed in saying so) that the Americans who came over to Europe at this time, in the Red Cross or as volunteers, were more impatient of that delay of their country's purpose than public opinion in England. I met many American doctors, nurses, Red Cross volunteers, war correspondents, and business men, during that long time of waiting when President Wilson was writing his series of "Notes," and I could see how strained was their patience and how self-conscious and apologetic they were because their President used arguments instead of "direct action." One American friend of mine, with whom I often used to walk when streams of wounded Tommies were a b.l.o.o.d.y commentary on the everlasting theme of war, used to defend Wilson with a chivalrous devotion and wealth of argument. "Give him time," he used to say. "He is working slowly but surely to a definite conviction, and when he has made up his mind that there is no alternative not all the devils of h.e.l.l will budge him from his course of action. You English must be patient with him and with all of us."

"But, my dear old man," I used to say, "we _are_ patient. It is you who are impatient. There is no need of all that defensive argument. England realizes the difficulty of President Wilson and has a profound reverence for his ideals."

But my friend used to shake his head sadly.

"You are always guying us," he said. "Even at the mess-table your young officers fling about the words 'too proud to fight!' It makes it very hard for an American among you."

That was true. Our young officers, and some of our old ones, liked to "pull the leg" of any American who sat at table with them. They made jocular remarks about President Wilson as a complete letter-writer. That unfortunate remark, "too proud to fight," was too good to miss by young men with a careless sense of humor. It came in with devilish appropriateness on all sorts of occasions, as when a battery of ours fired off a consignment of American sh.e.l.ls in which some failed to explode.

"They're too proud to fight, sir," said a subaltern, addressing the major, and there was a roar of laughter which hurt an American war correspondent in English uniform.

The English sense of humor remains of schoolboy character among any body of young men who delight in a little playful "ragging," and there is no doubt that some of us were not sufficiently aware how sensitive any American was at this time, and how a chance word spoken in jest would make his nerves jump.

But I am sure that the main body of English opinion was not impatient with America before she entered the war, but, on the contrary, understood the difficulty of obtaining a unanimous spirit over so vast a territory in order to have the whole nation behind the President. Indeed we exaggerated the differences of opinion in the United States and made a bogy of the alien population in the great "melting-pot." It seemed to many of us certain that if America declared war against Germany there would be civil riots and rebellions on a serious scale among German-Americans. That thought was always in our minds when we justified Wilson's philosophical reluctance to draw the sword; that and a very general belief among English "intellectuals" that it would be well to have one great nation and democracy outside the arena of conflict, free from the war madness that had taken possession of Europe, to act as arbitrator if no decision could be obtained in the battlefields. It is safe to say now that in spite of newspaper optimism, engineered by the propaganda departments, there were many competent observers in the army as well as in the country who were led to the belief, after the first eighteen months of strife, that the war would end in a deadlock and that its continuance would only lead to further years of mutual extermination. For that reason they looked to the American people, under the leaders.h.i.+p of President Wilson, as the only neutral power which could intervene to save the civilization of Europe, not by military acts, but by a call back to sanity and conciliation.

It was not until the downfall of Russia and the approaching menace of an immense concentration of German divisions on the western front that France and England began to look across the Atlantic with anxious eyes for military aid. Our immense losses and the complete elimination of Russia gave the Germans a chance of striking us mortal blows before their own man-power was exhausted. The vast accession of power that would come to us if the United States mobilized her manhood and threw them into the scale was realized and coveted by our military leaders, but even after America's declaration of war the imagination of the rank and file in England and France was not profoundly stirred by a new hope of support. Vaguely we heard of the tremendous whirlwind efforts "over there" to raise and equip armies, but there was hardly a man that I met who really believed in his soul that he would ever hear the tramp of American battalions up our old roads of war or see the Stars and Stripes fluttering over headquarters in France. Our men knew that at the quickest it would take a year to raise and train an American army, and in 1917 the thought of another year of war seemed fantastic, incredible, impossible. We believed--many of us--that before that year had pa.s.sed the endurance of European armies and peoples would be at an end, and that in some way or other, by German defeat or general exhaustion, peace would come. To American people that may seem like weakness of soul. In a way it was weakness, but justified by the superhuman strain which our men had endured so long. Week after week, month after month, year after year, they had gone into the fields of ma.s.sacre, and strong battalions had come out with frightful losses, to be made up again by new drafts and to be reduced again after another spell in the trenches or a few hours "over the top." It is true they destroyed an equal number of Germans, but Germany seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of "gun-fodder." Only extreme optimists, and generally those who were most ignorant, prophesied an absolute smash of the enemy's defensive power.

By the end of 1917, when the British alone had lost 800,000 men in the fields of Flanders, the thought that another year still might pa.s.s before the end of the war seemed too horrible to entertain by men who were actually in the peril and misery of this conflict. Not even then did it seem likely that the Americans could be in before the finish. It was only when the startling menace of a new German offensive, in a last and mighty effort, threatened our weakened lines that England became impatient at last for American legions and sent out a call across the Atlantic, "Come quickly or you will come too late!"