The Twentieth Century American Part 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curiously enough, the true Yankee in America, especially of the rural districts, has the same distrust of the veracity of the Western American as the Englishman generally has of the Yankee himself (in which he includes all Americans). I had been living for some years in Minnesota when, standing one day on the platform of the railway station at, I think, Schenectady, in New York State, I was addressed by one who was evidently a farmer in the neighbourhood. Learning that I had just come from Minnesota he referred to the two towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

"Right lively towns," he had heard them to be. "And how many people might there be in the two together?" he asked. "About a quarter of a million," I replied--the number being some few thousand less than the figure given by the last census. The farmer, perhaps, had not heard anything of the two towns for ten or a dozen years, when their population had been not much more than a third of what it had grown to at that time; and he looked at me. He did not say anything; he merely looked at me, long and fixedly. Then he deliberately turned his back and walked to the other end of the platform as far as possible from my contaminating influence. I was never so explicitly and categorically called a liar in my life; and he doubtless went home and told his family of the magnificent Western exaggerator whom he had met "down to the depot." I fear the American reputation often suffers no less unjustly in England.

FOOTNOTES:

[349:1] Even up to a quarter of a century ago, there was at least one corner of the United States, near to the Canadian border, where among Indians not yet rounded up or blanketed the old feeling still existed, so that an Englishman, proclaiming himself a "King George Man," could go and hunt and fish safely, sure of the friends.h.i.+p and protection of the red man, while an American would not have been safe for a night. The subject of the relations between the British and the Indian tribes in Revolutionary times has, of course, been provocative of much bitterness in the hearts of Americans; but happily their own historians of a later day have shown that this bitterness has only been partially justified.

There was not much to choose between Patriots and Loyalists. Those who know the Indian know also that the universal liking for the Englishman cannot have rested only on motives of political expediency or from temporary alliances made in Revolutionary times. They must have had abundant proof of the loyalty and trustworthiness of Englishmen before so deep-rooted a sentiment could have been created. The contrast, of course, was not with the American colonist, but with the French. The colonists, too, were King George Men once.

[351:1] Yes; I am aware that elsewhere I quote Professor Munsterberg without enthusiasm, but on another cla.s.s of subject. Except for the limitations which his national characteristics and upbringing impose upon him (and for the fact that he seems to be unacquainted with the West) the Professor has written a just and clear-sighted estimate of the American character. We do not look to a German for a proper understanding of the sporting instinct, as British and Americans understand it, nor perhaps for views that will coincide with ours on the subject of morality in the youth of either s.e.x. But the laws of common honesty are the same in all countries. A German is as well able to estimate the commercial morality of a people as an Englishman, however little he may be qualified to talk about their games or about the _nuances_ in the masculine att.i.tude towards women.

[358:1] That meeting has an incidental historical interest from the fact that it was then that Mr. Morgan first stepped into the public view as a financial power. Up to that time, his name was not particularly well known outside of New York or the financial circles immediately connected with New York. Most Western papers found it necessary to explain to their readers (if they could) who the Mr. Morgan was at whose house the meeting was being held.

CHAPTER XIV

A CONTRAST IN PRINCIPLES

The Commercial Power of the United States--British Workmans.h.i.+p-- Tin-tacks and Conservatism--A Prophetic Frenchman--Imperialism in Trade--The Anglo-Saxon Spirit--About Chaperons--"Insist upon Thyself"--English and American Banks--Dealing in Futures-- Dog Eat Dog--Two Letters--Commercial Octopods--Trusts in America and England--The Standard Oil Company--And Solicitors-- Legal Chaperons--The Sanct.i.ty of Stamped Paper--Conclusions-- American Courts of Justice--Do "Honest" Traders Exist?

The Englishman, even the Englishman with industrial experience and commercial training, generally, when he makes a short visit to the United States, comes away with a certain distrust of the stability of the American commercial fabric--a distrust which he cannot altogether explain to himself. The rapidity of movement, the vastness of the results, these things are before his eyes; but there insists on obtruding itself a sense of unsubstantiality. Habituated to English surroundings, with their ages-old traditions, the rugged deep-rooted inst.i.tutions, the deliberate revolutions of all the fly-wheels of a long-const.i.tuted society, he cannot believe that the mushroom establishments, thrust up as it were from the soil of a continent which is yet one half but partially broken wilderness, have permanence. He cannot deny the magnitude or the excellence of the work that is being done now, at this moment, under his eyes; but it all has too much the seeming of unreality, as though suspended in midair, unsupported. He misses the foundations of centuries of civilisation below and the lines of shafting running back into the past. Often, it is to be feared, having all his life been accustomed to see power exerted only in c.u.mbersome processes and through old-fas.h.i.+oned channels, he has come to regard the c.u.mbersomeness and the antiquity as necessary conditions of such exertion--nay, even to confuse them with the sources of the power themselves. It will be remembered that the first pig that was roasted in China was roasted by the accidental burning down of a house; and for a long time the Chinese supposed that only by burning down a house was it possible to come at roast pig. Finally arose a great philosopher ("like our Locke") who discovered that it was not necessary to burn houses, but that pigs might be cooked by much less costly and more rapid methods.

Unquestionably many of those who had been accustomed to house-burning must have looked at the new and summary culinary processes with profound distrust. It may even be a.s.serted with confidence that many of the older generation died unconverted, though pig-roasting over all sorts of makes.h.i.+ft fires had been going on around them for some years.

After a more or less prolonged residence in the United States, the Englishman finds his distrust lessening. He in turn becomes accustomed to doing without those traditions, those foundations, those lines of shafting, which once he considered so essential to all sound workmans.h.i.+p. When in due time he returns to England he is not seldom amazed to see how many of the things which he was wont to regard as effective links in the machinery are really no more than waste parts which do but r.e.t.a.r.d the motion and cause loss of power. It is not difficult to make machinery so complicated that the power exhausts itself in overcoming the resistance of belts and pulleys and cogs.

I had lived in the United States for many years before I ceased to cling to the notion--which I never hesitated to impart cheerfully to Americans when occasion offered--that though American workmen turned out goods that served their purpose well enough, for really sound and honest workmans.h.i.+p you had, after all, to come to England. It was only after I had been back in England and had experience of the ways of English workmen once more that doubts began to acc.u.mulate. English furniture makers told me that England nowadays did not produce such well-made or solid furniture as pieces that I showed them from America, and which are made in America in wholesale quant.i.ties. English picture-frame makers marvelled at the costliness of material and the excellence of the work in American frames. A Sackville Street tailor begged me to leave in his hands for a few days longer some clothes which he was pressing for me, made in a far Western State, in order that he might keep them--where they then were--hanging in his work-room as an object-lesson to his men in how work ought to be done. These are but isolated instances out of many which have bred misgiving in one who for many years cherished the conviction that a British-made article was always the best. That English workmen should be slower, less quick-minded, more loth to take up new ideas, or to make things as you wanted them and not as they had always made them--these things I had expected to find, and found less often than I had expected. But that the English workman did ultimately produce a better and more trustworthy article--that I never doubted, till I found it, from the confessions of the workmen and manufacturers themselves, far from necessarily true.

Few Englishmen returning to England after many years of residence in the United States (unless perchance they have lived on a ranch where their contact with the industrial or commercial life of the people has been slight) do not find themselves more or less frequently appealed to for opinions, in giving which they are compelled, however reluctantly, to pose as prophets, warning their countrymen to flee from the wrath to come, telling them that they underestimate the commercial power of the United States. Sometimes it may be that there will be some one in the company who has spent some few weeks, perhaps, in the United States.

"Now, I don't agree with you there," this traveller will say. "When I was in the States, I saw . ." He saw, in fact, pigs being roasted at a commonplace sort of fire, made for the purpose, of logs and sticks and coal and things, whereas everybody knows that no pig can be duly roasted unless chimney stacks and window-casings and front-door handles be mixed up with the combustibles. And the others present take comfort and are convinced that the Old Country is a long way from going to the dogs as yet. Of course she is, bless her! But it is not many years since an eminently distinguished authority on iron and steel (was he not President of the Iron and Steel a.s.sociation?), after having made a tour of the United States, a.s.sured British manufacturers that they had nothing to fear from American compet.i.tion in the steel trade. It was some years earlier that Chatham declared that he would not allow the American colonies to manufacture even one hobnail for themselves.

I have no desire now to join the band of those who are urging England so insistently to "wake up." This is not the place for such evangelism, for that is not the gospel which this book is intended to spread. None the less one story I must tell, told to me many years ago in America by one who claimed to have had some part in the transactions; a story that has to do with (let us say, to avoid hurting any susceptibilities) the sale of tin-tacks to j.a.pan. And whether the story is true or not, it is at least well found.

England, then, had had for years a monopoly of the sale of tin-tacks to the j.a.panese, when a trader in j.a.pan became impressed with the fact that the traffic was badly handled. The tacks came out from England in packages made to suit the needs of the English market. They were labelled, quite truthfully of course, "Best English Tacks," and each package contained an ounce, two ounces, or four ounces in weight, and was priced in plain figures at so much in English money. The trader had continual trouble with those packages. His customers were always wanting them to be split up. They wanted two or three _sen_ worth--not four pennyworth; also they did not care about ounces. So the trader, starting for a visit to England, had some labels written in j.a.panese characters, and when he arrived in England he went to the manufacturers and explained matters. He showed them the labels that he had had written and said:

"The j.a.panese trade is worth considering and worth taking some little trouble to retain; but the people dislike your present packages and I have to spend most of my time splitting up packages and counting tacks.

If you will make your packages into two thirds of an ounce each and put a label like that on them, you will be giving the people what they want and can understand, and it will save a lot of trouble all around."

But the manufacturers, one after another, shook their heads. They could not read the label. They never had put any such outlandish stuff on anything going out of their works, nor had their fathers before them.

The j.a.panese ought to be satisfied with the fact that they were getting the Best English Tacks and not be unreasonable about it. And the trader exhausted himself with argument and became discouraged.

He returned to j.a.pan _via_ the United States, and stopped to see the nearest tack-manufacturer. He showed him the label and told his story.

"Looks blamed queer!" said the manufacturer, "but you say that's what they want out there? Let's catch a j.a.p and see if he can read the thing."

So a clerk was sent out to fetch a j.a.panese, which he did.

"How' do, John?" said the manufacturer to the new arrival. (Chinese and j.a.panese alike were all "John" to the American until a few years ago.) "You can read that, eh?"

The j.a.panese smiled, looked at the label and read it aloud.

"All straight goods, eh, John?" asked the manufacturer. The j.a.panese answered in the affirmative and retired.

Then the manufacturer called for his manager.

"Mr. Smith," he said, as the manager came in, "this is Mr. Brown of Tokio, j.a.pan. He tells me that if we do up tacks in two third of an ounce lots and stick that label on each package, we might do some good business out there. That label--it don't matter which is the top of the thing--calls for a price that figures out to us at about two cents a pound more than our regular export rates. I want this gentleman to have a trial lot s.h.i.+pped out to him and he'll see what he can do. Just go ahead will you and see to it?"

"Yes, sir," said the manager; and when the trader sailed from San Francisco a couple of weeks later the same vessel carried out a trial order of tacks consigned to him at Tokio, made up in two thirds of an ounce packages with mysterious hieroglyphics on the labels. It only took the trader a few days, after his return, to satisfy himself that the sooner he cabled the American manufacturer to duplicate the order the better. There never has been anybody in the American works who has been able to read what is on that label; but when instructions were given for printing new labels after six months of trial the order was for a quarter of a million, and British manufacturers were astonished to discover that by some unexplainable chicanery they had lost the j.a.panese market for tacks.

I have said that I do not know whether the story is true or not; but fifty similar stories are. And in the aggregate they explain a good deal.

But let me say again that the conservatism of British manufacturers is not now my theme. But I do most earnestly believe that Englishmen as a whole--even English traders and manufacturers--unwisely underestimate the commercial power of the United States. What the United States has accomplished in the invasion of the world's markets in the last ten years (since the trade revival of 1896-97) is only a foretaste of what is to come. So far from there being anything unsubstantial--any danger of lack of staying power, any want of reserve force--the power has hardly yet begun to exert itself. Of Europeans who have recently written upon the subject, it seems to me that none has shown a truer appreciation of the situation than M. Gabriel Hanotaux, the former French Minister for Foreign Affairs.[378:1] He sees the shadow of America's commercial domination already falling across Europe; and, so far as France is concerned, he discerns only two directions from which help can come. He pleads with young Frenchmen to travel more, so that the rising generation may be less ignorant of the commercial conditions of the modern world and may see more clearly what it is that they have to fight, and, second, he points to the Colonial Empire of France, with an area not much inferior to that of the United States, and believes that therein may be laid the foundations of a commercial power which will be not unable to cope even with that of America.

It may be only the arrogance and superciliousness of the Anglo-Saxon that prevent one sharing the sanguineness of M. Hanotaux as to any relief coming to the help of France from these two sources, for British hopes can only lie in a.n.a.logous directions. Englishmen also need to understand better the conditions which have to be met and the power of their compet.i.tors; and it is the young men who must learn. Also, if it be impossible that the British Isles should hold their own against the United States, there appears no reason why the British Empire should not be abundantly able to do so.

It is not easy for one who has not lived all his life in England to share the satisfaction with which the English papers commonly welcome the intelligence that some great American manufacturing concern is establis.h.i.+ng branch works in Canada. It is well for Canada that such works should be established; but it is pitiable for the Empire that it should be left to the United States to establish them. British capital was the chief instrumentality with which the United States was enabled to build its own railways and conduct the other great enterprises for the development of the resources of its mighty West, and it is, from the point of view of a British Imperialist, deplorable that British capitalists should not now be ready to take those risks for the sake of the Empire which American capital is willing to take with no other incentive than the probable trade profits.

His conservatism, it should be noticed, has a tendency to fall away from the Englishman when he goes out from the environment and atmosphere of the British Isles. The Canadian, or the Englishman who has gone to Canada young enough to imbibe the colonial spirit, is not easily to be distinguished from the citizen of the United States in his ways of doing business. Even the Anglo-Indian refuses to subject himself, in India, to all the c.u.mbersome formalities with which he is compelled to conduct any business transaction when at home. Mr. Kipling in one of his latest stories has given us a delightful picture of the bafflement of the Australasian Minister struggling to bring his Great Idea for the Good of his Colony and the Empire to the attention of the officials in Whitehall.

The enc.u.mbering conservatism which now hangs upon the wheels of British commerce is no part of--no legitimate offshoot of--the English genius.

It is a fungoid and quite alien growth, which has fastened upon that genius, taking advantage of its frailties. Englishmen, we hear, are slow to change and to move; yet they have always moved more quickly than other European peoples as the Empire stands to prove. And if the people of Great Britain had the remodelling of their society to do over again to-day, they, following their native instincts, would hardly rebuild it on its present lines. With the same "elbow room" they would, it may be suspected, produce something but little dissimilar (except in the monarchical form of government) from that which has been evolved in the United States.

When Englishmen, looking at the progress of the United States, doubt its permanence--when they distrust the substantiality or the honesty in the workmans.h.i.+p in the American commercial fabric--it might be well if they would say to themselves that the men who are doing these things are only Englishmen with other larger opportunities. Behind all this that meets the eye is the same old Anglo-Saxon spirit of pluck and energy which made Great Britain great when she was younger and had in turn her larger opportunities. Above all, that pluck and energy are unhampered by tradition and precedent in exerting themselves in whatever direction may be most advantageous; and to be unhampered does not necessarily mean freedom only to go wrong.

An American girl once explained why it was much pleasanter to have a chaperon than to be without one:

"If I am allowed about alone," she explained, "I feel that I am on my honour and can never do a thing that I would not like mama to see; but when a chaperon is with me, the responsibility for my behaviour is s.h.i.+fted to her. It is her duty to keep me straight. I have a right to be just as bad as I can without her catching me."

The tendency of American business life is first to develop the individuality and initiative of a man and, second, to put him, as it were, on his honour. It is, of course, of the essence of a democracy that each man should be encouraged to develop whatever good may be in him and to receive recognition therefor; but there have been other factors at work in the shaping of the American character besides the form of government. Chief among these factors have been the work which Americans have had to do in subduing their own continent and that they have had to do it unaided and in isolation. Was.h.i.+ngton Irving has a delightful sentence somewhere (in _Astoria_ I think) about the frontiersman hewing his way through the back woods and developing his character by "bickering with bears." "The frontiersmen, by their conquest of nature, had come to despise the strength of all enemies,"

says Dr. Sparks in his _History of the United States_. It was only to be expected, it was indeed inevitable, that the first of American thinkers--the man whose philosophy caught the national fancy and has done more towards the moulding of a national temperament than, perhaps, any man who ever wrote, should have been before all things the Apostle of the Individual. "Insist upon Thyself!" Emerson says--not once, but it runs as a refrain through everything he wrote or thought. "Always do what you are afraid to do!" "The Lord will not make his works manifest by a coward." "G.o.d hates a coward." "America is only another name for Opportunity." My quotations come from random memory, but the spirit is right. It is the spirit which Americans have been obliged to have since the days when the Fathers walked to meeting in fear of Indian arrows.

And they need it yet. It has become an inheritance with them and it, more than anything else, shapes the form and method of their politics and above all of their business conduct.