The Twentieth Century American Part 15

The intense feverishness of the campaign is of course increased by the vastness of the country, the tremendous distances over which the national organisation has to endeavour to exercise control, and the immense diversity in the conditions of the people and communities to whom appeal has to be made. The voting takes place all over the country on the same day; and it must be remembered that the area of the United States (not counting Alaska or any external dependencies) is so great that it reaches from west to east about as far as from London to Teheran, and north and south from London to below the southern boundary of Morocco. The difficulty of organisation over such an area can, perhaps, be imagined. In the course of the campaign there came in one day in my mail a letter written on a torn half of a railway time-card.

It ran:

"DEAR SIR--There is sixty-five of us here working in a gravel pit and we was going to vote solid for Bryan and Free Silver.

Some of your books [_i. e._, campaign leaflets, etc.] was thrown to us out of a pa.s.sing train. We have organised a Club and will cast sixty-five votes for William McKinley.--Yours, etc."

So far as those sixty-five were concerned our chief interest thereafter lay in seeing that the existence of that gravel-pit was never discovered by the enemy. A faith which had been so speedily and unanimously embraced might perhaps not have been una.s.sailable.

Before leaving this subject it may be well to say a few words on a recent election in New York which excited, perhaps, more interest in England than any American political event of late years. The eminence which Mr. Hearst has won is an entirely deplorable thing, which has been made possible by the fact, already sufficiently dwelt upon, that political power in the United States is so largely exerted from the bottom up. In their comments on the incident after the event, however, English papers missed some of its significance. Most English writers spoke of Mr. Hearst's appeal to the forces of discontent as a new phenomenon and drew therefrom grave inferences as to what would happen next in the United States. The fact is that the phenomenon is not new in any way. Mr. Hearst, in but a slightly different form, appealed to precisely the same pa.s.sions as Mr. Bryan aroused--the same as every demagogue has appealed to throughout, at least, the northern and western sections of the country any time in this generation. Mr. Hearst began from the East and Mr. Bryan from the West, but in all essentials the appeal was the same. And Mr. Hearst was not elected. And Mr. Bryan was not elected. What will happen next will be that the next man who makes the same appeal will not be elected also.

It is the allegory of the river and its ripples over again. Englishmen need not despair of the United States, for the great body of the people is extraordinarily conservative and well-poised. In America, man never is, but always to be, cursed. Dreadful things are on the eve of happening, and never happen. There is a great saving fund of common-sense in the people--a sense which probably rests as much on the fact that they are as a whole conspicuously well-to-do as on anything else--which as the last resort shrinks from radicalism. In spite of the yellow press, in spite of all the Socialist and Anarchist talk, in spite of corruption and bra.s.s bands and torchlight processions, when the people as a whole is called upon to speak the final word, that word has never yet been wrong. Perhaps some day it will be, for all peoples go mad at times; but the nation is normally sound and sane, with a sanity that is peculiarly like that of the English.

FOOTNOTES:

[264:1] I trust that, because, for the purpose of making an ill.u.s.tration which will bring the matter home familiarly to English minds, I speak of the States as English Counties, I shall not be suspected of thinking (as some writers appear to have thought) that there is really any historical or structural a.n.a.logy between the two.

[281:1] None the less my friendly American critic (already quoted) holds, and remains firm in, the opinion that "however strenuous the fighting, the political issues produce no such social changes or personal differences in the United States as have frequently obtained in England, say at the time of the leaders.h.i.+p of Gladstone, or more recently, in connection with the 'tariff reform' of Chamberlain." It is his contention that Americans take their politics on the whole more good-humouredly than has always been found possible by their English cousins, and that when the campaign is over, there is more readiness in the United States than in England to let pa.s.s into oblivion any bitterness that may have found expression during the fighting.

CHAPTER XI

SOME QUESTIONS OF THE MOMENT

Sovereign States and the Federal Government--California and the Senate--The Const.i.tutional Powers of Congress and the President--Government by Interpretation--President Roosevelt as an Inspiration to the People--A New Conception of the Presidential Office--"Teddy" and the "'fraid strap"--Mr.

Roosevelt and the Corporations--As a Politician--His Imperiousness--The Negro Problem--The Americanism of the South.

It was said that it would be necessary to refer again to the subject of the relations of the General Government to the several States, as ill.u.s.trated by the New Orleans incident and the treatment of the j.a.panese on the Pacific Coast; and the first thing to be said is that no well-wisher of the United States living in Europe can help deploring the fact that the General Government has not the power to compel all parties to the Union to observe the treaties to which the faith of the nation as a whole has been pledged. It is a matter on which the apologist for the United States abroad has, when challenged, no defence. Few people in other countries do not consider the present situation unworthy of the United States; and I believe that a large majority of the American people--certainly a majority of the people east of the Rocky Mountains--is of the same opinion.

It is no excuse to urge that when another Power enters into treaty relations with the United States it does so with its eyes open and with a knowledge of the peculiarities of the American Const.i.tution. This is an argument which belongs to the backwoods stage of American statesmans.h.i.+p. In the past, it is true, the United States has been in a measure the spoilt child among the nations and has been permitted to sit somewhat loosely to the observance of those formalities which other Powers have recognised as binding on themselves; but the time has gone by when the United States can claim, or ought to be willing to accept, any especial indulgences. It cannot at once a.s.sert its right to rank as one of the Great Powers and affect to enter into treaties on equal terms with other nations, and at the same time admit that it is unable to honour its signature to those treaties.

This, I say, is the general opinion of thinking men in other countries; but, however desirable it may be that the General Government should have the power to compel the individual States to comply with the requirements of the national undertakings, it is difficult, so long as the several States continue jealous of their sovereignty without regard to the national honour, to see how the end is to be arrived at.

The first obvious fact is that all treaties are made by the President "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate" and no treaty is valid until ratified by a vote of the Senate in which "two thirds of the Senators present concur." The Senate occupies a peculiar position in the scheme of government. It does not represent either the nation as a whole nor, like the House of Representatives, the people as a whole. The Senate represents the individual States each acting in its sovereign capacity[287:1]; and the voice of the Senate is the voice of those States as separate ent.i.ties. When the Senate pa.s.ses upon any question it has been pa.s.sed upon by each several State and it is not easy to see how any particular State can claim to be exempt from the responsibility of any vote of the Senate as a whole.

It would appear to follow of necessity that when the Senate has by a formal two-thirds vote ratified a treaty, every State is bound to accept all the obligations of that treaty, not merely as part of the nation but as a separate unit. The provision in the Const.i.tution which makes the vote of the Senate on any treaty necessary can have no other intent than to bind the several States themselves. As a matter of historical accuracy it had no other intent when it was framed.

In the particular case of the j.a.panese treaty, the time for the State of California to have made its att.i.tude known was surely when the treaty pa.s.sed the Senate. The California Senators, or the people of the State, had then two honest courses open to them. They could have let it be known unequivocally that they did not propose to hold themselves bound by the action of the Senate but would, if any attempt were made to force them to comply with the terms of the treaty, secede from the Union; or they could have determined there and then to abide loyally by the terms of the treaty and no matter at what cost to the State, or at what sacrifice of their _amour propre_, to see that all the rights provided in the treaty were accorded to j.a.panese within the State. Either of these courses would have been honest; and j.a.panese who came to California would have come with their eyes open. The course which was followed, of allowing them to settle in the State in the expectation of receiving that treatment to which the faith of the United States was pledged, and then denying them that treatment, was distinctly dishonest.

If, however, the State of California, or any other individual State, refuses to acknowledge the responsibilities which it has a.s.sumed by the vote of the Chamber of which its representatives are members, there appears no way in which the Federal Government can compel such acknowledgment except those of force and what the believers in the extreme doctrine of State Sovereignty consider Const.i.tutional Usurpation.

It has in many cases been necessary as the conditions of the country have changed so to interpret the phrases of the Const.i.tution as to give to the General Government powers which cannot have been contemplated by the framers of that instrument. In this case there is every evidence, however, that the framers did intend that the General Government should have precisely those powers which it now desires--or that the individual States should be subject to precisely those responsibilities which they now seek to evade--and if any sentence in the Const.i.tution can be so interpreted as to give to the General Government the power to compel States to respect the treaties made by the nation, it seems unnecessary to shrink from putting such interpretation upon it.

Under the Const.i.tution, Congress has the power to "regulate commerce with foreign nations"--and commerce is a term which has many meanings--as well as "to define and punish offences against the law of nations" and to "make all laws which shall be necessary for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." The President is invested with the power, "by and with the advice of the Senate, to make treaties," and he is charged with the duty of taking "care that the laws be faithfully executed." It would seem that among these provisions there is specific authority enough to cover the case, if the will to use that authority be there. And I believe that in a large majority of the people the will is there.

It would appear to be competent for Congress to "define" any failure on the part of the citizens of any State to comply with whatever requirements in the treatment of foreigners may be imposed on them by a treaty into which the nation has entered, as an "offence against the law of nations." This power of "definition" on the part of Congress is quite unhampered. So also is the power "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution" the powers of definition and punishment. And it would be the duty of the President and the Federal Courts to take care that the laws were executed.

If there would be any "usurpation" involved in such an interpretation of the phrases of the Const.i.tution it is certainly less--much less, when regard is had to the intention of the framers of the Const.i.tution--than other "usurpations" which have been effected, and sometimes without protest from the individual States; as, for instance, by the expansion of the right to regulate commerce between the several States into an authority to deal with all manner of details of the control of railways of which the framers of the Const.i.tution never contemplated the existence. It cannot even remotely be compared with such an extension of the Federal power as would be involved in the translation of the authority to "establish post-offices and post-roads" as empowering the government to take an even larger measure of control over those railroads than can be compa.s.sed under the right to regulate commerce--a translation which seems to have the approval of President Roosevelt.

Incidentally it may be remarked that it would be peculiarly interesting if, at this day, that authority to construct post-roads should thus be invoked to give the General Government new powers of wide scope, when we remember that it was this same provision of the Const.i.tution which stood sponsor for the very earliest steps which, in the construction of the c.u.mberland Road and other military or post routes, the young republic took in the path of practical federalism.

To those Americans who received the cause of State Sovereignty as a trust from their fathers and grandfathers before them, the cause doubtless appears a n.o.ble one; but to the outsider, unbia.s.sed by such inherited sentiment, it seems evident, first, that the cause, however n.o.ble, is also hopeless; and, second, that it is unreasonable that in the forlorn effort to preserve one particular shred of a fabric already so tattered, the United States as a nation should be exposed to frequent dangers of friction with other Powers, and, what is more serious, should be made, once in every decade or so, to stand before the world in the position of a trader who repudiates his obligations.

And if I seem to speak on what is after all a domestic subject with undue vehemence (as I cannot hope that I shall not seem to do to the minds of residents on the Pacific Coast), it is only because it is impossible for an earnest well-wisher of the United States living abroad not to feel acutely (while it does not seem to me that Americans at home are sensible) how much the country suffers in the estimate of other peoples by its present anomalous position. When two business concerns in the United States enter into any agreement, each a.s.sumes the other to be able to control its own agents and representatives, nor will it accept a plea of inability to control them as excuse for breach of contract.

It may be that a select circle of the statesmen and foreign office officials in other countries are familiar with the intricacies of the American Const.i.tution, but the ma.s.ses of the people cannot be expected so to be, any more than the ma.s.ses of the American people are adepts in the const.i.tutions of those other countries. And it is, unfortunately, the ma.s.ses which form and give expression to public opinion. In these days it is not by the diplomacies of amba.s.sadors or the courtesies of monarchs that friends.h.i.+ps and enmities are created between nations. The feelings of one people towards another are shaped in curious and intangible ways by phrases, sentiments, ideas--often trivial in themselves--which pa.s.s current in the press or travel from mouth to mouth. It is a pity that the United States should in this particular expose itself to the contempt of lesser peoples, giving them excuse for speaking lightly of it as of a nation which does not keep faith. It does not conduce to increase the illuminating power of the example of America for the enlightenment of the world.

It might be well also if Americans would ask themselves what they would do if a number of American citizens were subjected to outrage (whether they were murdered as in New Orleans, or merely forced to submit to indignities and inconvenience as in California) in some South American republic, which put forward the plea that under its const.i.tution it was unable to control the people or coerce the administration of the particular province in which the offences were committed. Would the United States accept the plea? Or if the outrages were perpetrated in one of the self-governing colonies of Great Britain and the British Government repudiated liability in the matter? The United States, if I understand the people at all, would not hesitate to have recourse to force to endeavour to compel Great Britain to acknowledge her responsibility.

In the matter of the relation of the general government to the several States the most important factor to be considered at the present moment is undoubtedly the personality of President Roosevelt, and any attempt to make intelligible the change which has come over the United States of recent years would be futile without some recognition of the part which he has played therein. Mr. Roosevelt has been credited with being the author of "a revival of the sense of civic virtue" in the American people. Certainly he has been, by his example, a powerful agent in directing into channels of reform the exuberant energy and enthusiasm which have inspired the people since the great increase in material prosperity and the physical unification of the country bred in it its quickened sense of national life. In the period of activity and expansiveness--one is almost tempted to say explosiveness--which followed the Cuban war, such a man was needed to guide at least a part of the national energy into paths of wholesome self-criticism and reformation. He set before the youth of the country ideals of patriotism and of civic rect.i.tude which were none the less inspiring because easily intelligible and even commonplace.[293:1] The ideals have, it is true, since then, perhaps inevitably and surely not by his will, been dragged about in the none too clean mud of party politics; but the impetus which he gave, before his single voice became largely drowned in the factional hubbub around him, endures and will endure. Whatever comes, the American people is a different people and a better people for his preaching and example.

Moreover, what touches the question of State sovereignty nearly, he has given a new character to the Presidential office. I have expressed elsewhere my belief that the process of the federalising of the country, the concentration of power in the central government, must proceed further than it has yet gone; but it is difficult now to measure, what history will see clearly enough, how much Mr. Roosevelt has contributed to the hastening of the process. No President, one is tempted to say since Was.h.i.+ngton, but certainly since Lincoln, has had anything like the same conception of the Presidential functions as Mr. Roosevelt, coupled with the courage to insist upon the acceptance of that conception by the country. Whether for good or ill the office of President must always stand for more, reckoned as a force in the national concerns, than it did before it was occupied by Mr. Roosevelt.

A weak President may fail to hold anything like Mr. Roosevelt's authority; but the office must for a long time at least be more authoritative, and I think more honourable, for the work which he has done in it.

I first came in contact with Mr. Roosevelt some twenty-five years ago, when his personality already pervaded the country from the Bad Lands of Dakota to the Rocky Mountains. I had a great desire to meet this person about whom, not only in his early life but, as it were, in his very presence, myth was already cl.u.s.tering,--a desire which was almost immediately gratified by chance,--but the particular detail about him which at the time made most impression on my mind was that he was the reputed inventor of the "'fraid strap." The "'fraid strap" is--or was--a short thong, perhaps two feet in length, fastened to the front of the clumsy saddle, which, at signs of contumacy in one's pony, one could, with a couple of hitches, wrap round his hand, in such a way as to increase immensely the chance of a continuity of connection with his seat. The pony of the Plains in those days was not as a rule a gentle beast, and I was moved to grat.i.tude to the inventor of the "'fraid strap"--though whether it was really Mr. Roosevelt's idea or not it is (without confession from himself) impossible to guess, for, as I have said, he was already, though present almost a half-mythical person to the men of the north-western prairie country.

What vexed me no little at the time was that it was with some effort that I could get his name right. I could not remember whether it was Teddy Roosevelt or Roosy Teddevelt. The name now is familiar to all the world; but then it struck strangely on untrained English ears and to me it seemed quite as reasonable whichever way one twisted it round. Mr.

Jacob Riis (or Mr. Leupp) has protested against the President of the United States being called "Teddy" and we have his word for it that Mr.

Roosevelt's own intimates have never thought of addressing him otherwise than as "Theodore." Doubtless this is correct (certainly I know men who a.s.sure me that they call him "Theodore" now) but at least the more friendly "Teddy" has, as is proved by that confusion in my mind of a quarter of a century ago, the justification of long prescription. Nor am I sure that it has not been a fortunate thing both for Mr. Roosevelt and the country that his name has been Teddy to the mult.i.tude. I doubt if the men of the West, the rough-riders and the plainsmen, would give so much of their hearts to Theodore.

It is not easy to estimate the value, or otherwise, of Mr. Roosevelt's work in that capacity in which he has of late come to be best known to the world, namely as an opponent of the Trusts; but it is a pity that so many English newspapers habitually represent him as an enemy of all concentrated wealth. He has been called "the first Aristocrat to be elected President." Whether that be strictly true or not, he belongs distinctly to the aristocratic cla.s.s and his sympathies are naturally with that cla.s.s. His instincts are not destructive. No one, I have reason to believe, has a shrewder estimate of the worthlessness of the majority of those politicians who use his name as a cloak for their attacks on all acc.u.mulated wealth than he. It is only necessary to read his speeches to see how constantly he has insisted that it is not wealth, but the abuse of it, which he antagonises: "We draw the line not against wealth, but against misconduct." He has many times protested against the "outcry against men of wealth," for most of which he has declared "there is but the scantiest justification." Again and again he has proclaimed his desire not to hurt the honest corporation, "but we need not be over-tender about sparing the dishonest."[296:1]

One of the chief difficulties in the practical application of his policies has been that the Government cannot have the power to punish dishonest corporations without first being entrusted with a measure of control over all corporate operations, the concession of which control the honest corporations have felt compelled to resist. Nor is it possible to say that their resistance has not been justified. However wisely and forbearingly Mr. Roosevelt himself might use whatever power was placed in his hands, there has been little in the experience of the corporations in America to make them believe that they can trust either office-holders in general or, for any long term, the Government itself.

Dispa.s.sionate students of the railway problem in the United States are aware that there is nothing which the corporations have done to the injury of the public worse than the wanton and gratuitous injuries which have been done by the politicians, by the State governments, and even on occasions by the Federal Government itself, to the corporations. If particular railway companies have at times abused the power of which they were possessed as monopolising the transportation to and from a certain section of the country, that abuse has not excelled in wantonness and immorality the abuses of their power over the corporations of which several of the Western States have been systematically guilty. There has been little encouragement to the corporations to submit themselves to any larger measure of public control than has been necessary; and the lessons of the past have shown that it would be injudicious for the railways to surrender uncomplainingly to the State governments authority which the British companies can leave to the Board of Trade without misgiving. And there was a time when the national Interstate Commerce Commission was, if more honest, not much less prejudiced in its dealing with the corporations subject to its authority than were the governments or railway commissions of the individual States.

Mr. Roosevelt's desire may have been (as it is) only to protect the people against the misuse of their power by dishonest corporations; and the honest corporations would be no less glad than Mr. Roosevelt himself to see the dishonest brought to book. But in the necessity of resisting (or what has seemed to the corporations the necessity of resisting) the extensions of the federal power which were requisite before reform could be achieved, the honest have been compelled to make common cause with the dishonest, so that the President has, in particular details, been forced into an att.i.tude of hostility towards all corporations (and the corporations have for the most part been forced to put themselves in an att.i.tude of antagonism to him) in spite of their natural sympathies and common interests.

The result has been unfortunate for business interests generally because the mere fact that the President was "against the companies" (no matter on what grounds, or whether he was against them all or only against some) has encouraged throughout the country the anti-corporation feeling which needed no encouragement. Any time these forty years, or since the early days of the Granger agitation, the shortest road to notoriety and political advancement (at least in any of the Western States) has been by abuse of the railroad companies. A thousand politicians and newspapers all over the country are eager to seize on any phrase or p.r.o.nouncement of the President which can be interpreted as giving countenance to the particular anti-railroad campaign at the moment in progress in their own locality. A vast number of people are interested in distorting, or in interpreting partially, whatever is said at the White House, so that any phrase, regardless of its context,--each individual act, without reference to its conditions,--which could be represented as an encouragement to the anti-capitalist crusade has been seized upon and made the most of. All over the West there have always, in this generation, been a sufficient number of persons only too anxious, for selfish reasons, to inflame hostility against the railroad companies or against men of wealth; but only within the last few years has it been possible for the most unscrupulous demagogue to find colour and justification for whatever he has chosen to preach in the example and precept of the President--and of a President whose example and precept have counted for more with the ma.s.ses of the people than have those of any occupant of the White House since the war. In this way Mr.

Roosevelt has done more harm than could have been accomplished by a much worse man.

If the corporations have suffered, the course of events has been unfortunate too for Mr. Roosevelt. No one is better aware than he of the misrepresentation to which he is subjected and the unscrupulous use which is made of his example; and it is impossible that at times it can fail to be very bitter. It must also be bitter to find arrayed against him many men whose friends.h.i.+p he must value and whose co-operation in his work it must seem to him that he ought to have. It happens that his is not a character which is swayed by such considerations one hair's breadth from the course which he has marked out for himself; but it is deplorable that a very large proportion of precisely that cla.s.s of men in which Mr. Roosevelt ought (or at least is justified in thinking that he ought) to find his strongest allies have felt themselves compelled to become his most determined opponents, while those interests which ought (or at least are justified in thinking that they ought) to to find in Mr. Roosevelt, as the occupant of the White House, their strongest bulwark against an unreasoning popular hostility only see that that hostility is immensely inflamed and strengthened by his course and example. The conditions are injurious to the business interests of the country and weaken Mr. Roosevelt's influence for good.

Yet it seems impossible--or certainly impossible for one on the outside--to place the responsibility anywhere except on those general conditions of the country which make possible both the misrepresentation of the position of the President and the wide-spread hostility to the corporations, or on those laxities in political and commercial morality in the past which have put it in the power alternately of the politician to plunder the railways and the railways to prey upon the people. In the ill-regulated conditions of the days of ferment there grew up abuses, both in politics and in commerce, which can only be rooted out with much wrenching of old ties and tearing of the roots of things; but it is worth an Englishman's understanding that the fact that this wrenching and this tearing are now in progress is only an evidence of that effort at self-improvement, an effort determined and conscious, which, as we have already seen more than once, the American people is making.

Whatever certain sections of the American press, certain politicians, or certain financial interests, may desire the world to think, there is no need for those at a distance to see in the present conflict evidence either of a wicked and radically destructive disposition in the President or of an approaching disintegration of the American commercial fabric.

Meanwhile, as has been said, one result has been to weaken Mr.

Roosevelt's personal influence for good. I have been a.s.sured by men of undoubted truthfulness, who are at the head of large financial interests, that he has, in the last few years, become as tricky and unscrupulous in his political methods as the oldest political campaigner; a statement which I believe to be entirely mistaken.

"Practical politics," said Mr. Roosevelt once, "is not dirty politics.

On the contrary in the long run the politics of fraud and treachery is unpractical politics, and the most practical of all politicians is the one who is clean and decent and upright." There is no evidence which I have been able to find that Mr. Roosevelt does not now believe this as thoroughly and act upon it as consistently as when he first entered the New York State Legislature.

A more reasonable accusation against him, which is made by many of his best friends, is that his imperious will and his confidence in his own opinions make him at times unjust and intolerant in his judgment of others. There have been occasions when he has seemed over-ready to accuse others of bad faith without other ground than his own opinion or the recollection of what has occurred at an interview. He may have been right; but it is certain that he has alienated the friends.h.i.+p of not a few good men by the vehemence and positiveness with which he has a.s.serted his views. And anything, independent of all questions of party, which weakens his influence is, for the country's sake, a thing to be deplored.

The negro question has contributed not a little to Mr. Roosevelt's difficulties, as it has to the misunderstanding of the American people in England. I know intelligent Englishmen who have visited the United States and honestly believe that in the not very distant future the country will again be torn with civil war, a war of black against white, which will imperil the permanence of the Republic no less seriously than did the former struggle. I do not think that the apprehension is shared by many intelligent Americans.