The Twentieth Century American Part 9

That the American should hold the opinions that he does of England is no matter of reproach. Not only is it natural, but inevitable. Absorbed as he has been with his own affairs and his own history, and viewing Great Britain only in her occasional relations thereto, seeing nothing of her in her private life or of her position and policies in the world at large, how could the American have other than a distorted view of her--how could she a.s.sume right proportions or be posed in right perspective? Nor is the Englishman any more to be blamed. America has been beyond and below his horizon, and among the travellers' tales that have come to him of her people and her inst.i.tutions has been much misinformation; and if he has not yet--as in the realms of literature and art--come to any realisation of America's true achievements, how should he have done so, when Americans themselves have only just shaken off the morbid sensitiveness and diffidence of their youth, and have so recently arrived at some partial comprehension of those achievements themselves?

Probably the most successful joke which _Life_ ever achieved (Americans will please believe that it is not with any disrespect that I explain to English readers that _Life_ is the _Punch_ of New York), successful, that is, measured by the continent-wide hilarity which it provoked, had relation to the New York dandy who turned up the bottoms of his trousers because it was "raining in London." That was published--at a guess--some twenty years ago.

Some ten years later a Chicagoan (one James Norton--he died, alas! all too soon afterwards) leaped into something like national notoriety by a certain speech which he delivered at a semi-public dinner in New York.

In introducing Mr. Norton as coming from Chicago the chairman had made playful reference to the supposed characteristic lack of modesty of Chicagoans and their pride in their city. Norton, in acknowledgment, confessed that there was justice in the accusation. Chicagoans, he said, were proud of their city. They had a right to be. They were as proud of Chicago as New Yorkers were of London! And the quip ran from mouth to mouth across the continent.

It would be too much to say that those jokes are meaningless to-day, but to the younger generation of Americans they have lost most of their point, for Anglomania has ceased to be the term of reproach that once it was--it has, at least, dropped from daily use--partly because the official relations of the country with Great Britain have so much improved, but much more because the United States has come to consider herself as Great Britain's equal and, in the new consciousness of her greatness, the idea of toadying to England has lost its sting. It is already difficult to throw one's mind back to the conditions of twenty years ago--to remember the deference which (in New York and the larger cities at least) was paid to English ideas, English manners, English styles in dress--the enthusiasm with which any literary man was received who had some pretension to an English reputation--the disrepute in which all "domestic" manufactured articles were held throughout the country in comparison with the "imported," which generally meant English. In all manufactured products this was so nearly universal that "domestic" was almost synonymous with inferior and "imported" with superior grades of goods. That an immense proportion of American manufactured articles were sold in the United States masquerading as "imported"--and therefore commanding a better price--goes without saying, and in some lines, in which the British reputation was too well established and well deserved to be easily shaken, the practice still survives; but in the great majority of things, the American now prefers his home-made article, not merely from motives of patriotism but because he believes that it is the better article. It is not within our present province to discuss how far this opinion is correct, or how far the policy of protection, by a.s.sisting manufacturers to obtain control of their own markets and so distract attention from imported goods, has helped to bring about the change. The point is that the change has taken place. And, so far as the ordinary commodities of commerce are concerned, the Englishman is in a measure aware of what has occurred. He could not be otherwise with the figures of his trade with the United States before him. Nor can he conceal from himself the fact that the change of opinion in America may have some justification when he sees how many things of American manufacture he himself uses daily and prefers--patriotism notwithstanding--to the British-made article.

But Englishmen have little conception as yet that the same revolution has taken place in regard to the less material--less easily exploited--commodities of art and literature. American novels and the drawings of Mr. Gibson have made their way in England in the wake of American boots and American sweetmeats; but Americans would be unwilling to believe that their creative ability ends with the production of Western romances and drawings of the American girl.

Until recent years, the volume as well as the quality of the literary and artistic output of Great Britain was vastly superior to that of the United States. The two were not comparable; but they are comparable to-day, though England is as yet unaware of it. In time, Englishmen will awake to a realisation of the fact; but what the relative standing of the two countries will be by that time it is impossible to say.

Englishmen would, perhaps, not find it to their disadvantage, and it would certainly (if not done in too condescending a spirit) not be displeasing to the people of the United States, if they began, even now, to take a livelier interest in the work that the other is doing.

FOOTNOTES:

[153:1] At this point my American friend, to the value of whose criticisms I have already paid tribute, interjects marginally: "none the less _Fliegende Blatter_ presents more real humour in a week than is to be found in _Punch_ in a month." To which I can but make the obvious reply that I have already said that Americans think so. He points out, however, further that, while the Munich paper is always to be found in the higher-cla.s.s American clubs, it is comparatively infrequent in the clubs of Great Britain, which is undoubtedly true; and that is a subject (the relative breadth of outlook on the world-literature of the day in the two countries) which will necessarily receive attention later on.

[155:1] Lest any American readers should a.s.sume that some personal feeling is responsible for my point of view (which would entirely destroy any value in my argument) it seems necessary to explain that I have become calloused to being told that I am the only Englishman the speaker ever met with an American sense of humour. Sometimes I have taken it as a compliment.

[159:1] It is merely pathetic to find such a paper as the London _Academy_ at this late day summing up the American aesthetic impulse as follows: "Their culture is now a borrowed thing animated by no life of its own. Their art is become a reflection of French art, their literature a reflection of English literature, their learning a reflection of German learning. A velleity of taste in their women of the richer cla.s.s seems to be all that maintains in their country the semblance of a high, serious, and disinterested pa.s.sion for the things of the mind."

It would be interesting to learn from the _Academy_ what school of English writers it is that the American humourists "reflect," who among English novelists are the models for the present school of Western fiction, where in English historiography is to be found the prototype of the great histories of their country, collaborated or otherwise, which the Americans are now producing, which journals published in England are responsible for American newspapers, what English magazine is so happy as to be the father of the _Century_, _Harper's_, or _Scribner's_. The truth is that the writer in the Academy, like most Englishmen, knows nothing of American literature as a whole, or he would know that, whether good or bad, the one quality which it surely possesses is that it is individual and peculiar to the people. The _Academy_, it is only fair to say, has recently changed hands and I am not sure that under its present direction it would make the same mistake.

CHAPTER VII

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

The Rhodes Scholars.h.i.+ps--"Pullulating Colleges"--Are American Universities Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?--Other Educational Forces--The Postal Laws--Ten-cent Magazines and Cheap Books-- Pigs in Chicago--The Press of England and America Compared-- Mixed Society--Educated Women--Generals as Booksellers--And as Farmhands--The Value of War to a People.

It may be presumed that when Cecil Rhodes conceived the idea of establis.h.i.+ng the Rhodes scholars.h.i.+ps at Oxford, it did not occur to him that Americans might not care to come to Oxford--might think their own universities superior to the English. Nor is it likely that there will in the immediate future be any dearth of students anxious to take those scholars.h.i.+ps, for the mere selection has a certain amount of _kudos_ attaching to it and, at worst, the residence abroad should be of advantage to any young American not destined to plunge at once into a business life. If it were a mere question of the education to be received, it is much to be feared that the great majority of Americans, unless quite unable to attend one of their own universities, would politely decline to come to England. At the time when the terms of the will were made public, a good many unpleasant things were said in the American press; and it was only the admiration of Americans for Mr.

Rhodes (who appealed to their imagination as no other Englishman, except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, has appealed in the last fifty years), coupled with the fact that he was dead, that prevented the foundation of the scholars.h.i.+ps from being greeted with resentment rather than grat.i.tude.

There was a time, of course, when the name of Oxford sounded very large in American ears; and it will probably be a surprise to Englishmen to be told that to-day the great majority of Americans would place not only Harvard and Yale, but probably also several other American universities, ahead of either Oxford or Cambridge. Nor is this the opinion only of the ignorant. Trained educational authorities who come from the United States to Europe to study the methods of higher education in the various countries, seldom hesitate to say that the education to be obtained at many of the minor Western colleges in America is fully as good as that offered by either of the great English universities, while that of Harvard and Yale is far superior to it.[167:1] And it must be remembered that education itself, as an art, is incomparably more studied, and more systematically studied in America than in England.

Matthew Arnold spoke of the "pullulating colleges and universities" of America--"the mult.i.tude of inst.i.tutions the promoters of which delude themselves by taking seriously, but which no serious man can so take"; and he would be surprised to see to what purpose some of those inst.i.tutions have "pullulated" in the eighteen years that have pa.s.sed since he wrote--to note into what l.u.s.ty and umbrageous plants have grown such inst.i.tutions as the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, though one of those is further west by some distance than he ever penetrated.

That these or any other colleges have more students than either Oxford or Cambridge need not mean much; and they cannot of course acquire in twenty years the old, history-saturated atmosphere. Against that are to be set the facts that the students undoubtedly work, on the average, much harder than do English undergraduates and that the teaching staffs are possessed of an enthusiasm, an earnestness, a determination not merely to fill chairs but to get results, which would be almost "bad form" in some Common (or Combination) Rooms in England. Wealth, moreover, and magnificence of endowment can go a considerable way towards even the creation of an atmosphere--not the same atmosphere as that of Oxford or Cambridge, it is true; for no money can make another Addison's Walk out of Prairie Avenue, or convert the Mississippi by St.

Anthony's Falls into new "Backs."

"We may build ourselves more gorgeous habitations, Fill our rooms with painting and with sculpture, We cannot buy with gold the old a.s.sociations----."

But an atmosphere may be created wholly scholastic, and well calculated to excite emulation and inspire the ambition of youths.

Nor is it by any means certain that the American people would desire to create the atmosphere of an old-world university if they could. The atmosphere of Oxford produces, as none other could, certain qualities; but are they the qualities which, if England were starting to make her universities anew, she would set in the forefront of her endeavour?[169:1] Are they really the qualities most desirable even in an Englishman to-day? Are they approximately the qualities most likely to equip a man to play the n.o.blest part in the life of modern America?

The majority of American educators would answer unhesitatingly in the negative. There are things attaching to Oxford and Cambridge which they would dearly love to be able to transplant to their own country, but which, they recognise, nothing but the pa.s.sage of the centuries can give. Those things are unattainable; and, frankly, if they could only be attained by transplanting with them many other attributes of English university life, they would rather forego them altogether.

What Englishmen most value in their universities is not any book-learning which is to be acquired thereat, so much as the manners and rules for the conduct of life which are supposed to be imparted in a university course,--manners and rules which are of an essentially aristocratic tendency. Without wis.h.i.+ng to push a point too far, it is worth noting that that aristocratic tendency is purely Norman, quite out of harmony with the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon. It would never occur to an Anglo-Saxon, pure and simple, to make his university anything else than an inst.i.tution for scholastic training, in which every individual should be taught as much, and as equally, as possible. The last thing that would occur to him would be to make it a weapon of aristocracy or an inst.i.tution for perpetuating cla.s.s distinctions. The aim and effect of the English universities in the past has been chiefly to keep the upper cla.s.ses uppermost.

That there are too many "universities" in America no one--least of all an educated American--denies; but with the vast distances and immense population of the country there is room for, perhaps, more than Matthew Arnold eighteen years ago could have foreseen, and not a few of those establishments which in his day he would doubtless have unhesitatingly cla.s.sed among those which could not be taken seriously, have more than justified their existence.

To the superiority of the American public school system over the English, considered merely as an instrumentality for the general education of the ma.s.ses of a people, and not for the production of any especially privileged or cultivated cla.s.s, is generally ascribed the confessedly higher average of intelligence and capacity among (to use a phrase which is ostensibly meaningless in America) the lower orders. But the educational system of the country has been by no means the only factor in producing this result; and it may be worth while merely as a matter of record, and not without interest to American readers, to note what some of those other factors have been during the last twenty years--factors so temporary and so elusive that even now they are in danger of being forgotten.

First among these factors I would set the American postal laws, an essential feature of which is the extraordinarily low rates at which periodical literature may be transmitted. A magazine which may be sent to any place in the United States for from an eighth of a penny to a farthing, according to its weight, will cost for postage in England from two-pence-halfpenny to fourpence. It is not the mere difference in cost of the postage to the subscriber that counts, but the low American rate has permitted the adoption by the publishers of a system impossible to English magazine-makers, a system which has had the effect of making magazines, at least as good as the English sixpenny monthlies, the staple reading matter of whole cla.s.ses of the population, the cla.s.ses corresponding to which in England never read anything but a local weekly, or halfpenny daily, paper. It might be that the reading matter of a magazine would not be much superior to that of a small weekly paper. But at least it encourages somewhat more sustained reading and, what is the great fact, it accustoms the reader to handling something _in the form of a book_. That is the virtue. A people weaned from the broad-sheets by magazines readily takes next to book-reading.

Moreover, under the American plan, books themselves, if issued periodically, used to have the same postal advantages as the magazines.[171:1] A so-called "library" of the cla.s.sical English, writers could be published at the rate of a book a month, call itself a periodical, and be sent through the post in precisely the same way. The works of Scott, d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, or anybody else could be published in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly parts. If in monthly parts at sixpence, the cost to the subscriber would be practically the same as that of a monthly magazine, only that the reader would acc.u.mulate at the rate of twelve volumes a year--and read at the rate of one a month--the works of Scott, or d.i.c.kens, or Thackeray. Of course much worthless literature, fiction of the tras.h.i.+est, has been circulated in the same way--much more perhaps than of the better cla.s.s. But even so, the reading matter was superior to that previously accessible, and the vital fact still remains that the people acquired the habit of book-reading.

In America, the part thus played by some of the periodical libraries was of much importance, but it was probably not comparable to the influence of the ten-cent magazine. In the United States itself, the immense beneficence of that influence has hardly been appreciated. The magazines came into vogue, and the people accepted the fact as they accept the popularity of a new form of "breakfast food." The quickening of the national intelligence which resulted was no more immediate, no more readily traceable or conspicuous to the public eye, than would be the improvement in the national stamina which might result from the introduction of some new article of diet. A change which takes five or ten years to work itself out is lost sight of, becomes invisible, amid the jostling activities of a national life like the American. Moreover, several causes were contributing to the same end and, had any one stopped to endeavour to do it, it would not have been at any time easy to unravel the threads and show what proportion of the fabric was woven by each; but if it had been possible to affix an intellect-meter to the aggregate brain of the American people during the last twenty years, of such ingenious mechanism that it would have shown not only what the increase in total mental power had been but also what proportions of that increase were ascribable to the various contributing causes--education, colonial expansion, commercial growth, ten-cent magazines, and so forth--and if, further, the "readings" of that meter could be interpreted into terms of increase in national energy, national productiveness, national success, I do not think that Parliament would lose one unnecessary day in pa.s.sing the legislation necessary to reform the English postal laws.

One other point is worth dwelling upon--equally trivial in seeming, equally important in its essence--which is the selling of books by the great department stores, the big general shops, in America. Taking all cla.s.ses of the British population together and both s.e.xes--artisans and their wives, peasants in country districts, slum residents in London and other large cities,--what proportion of the population of the British Isles do of set purpose go into a bookseller's shop once a year or once in their lives? Is it ten per cent.--or five per cent.--or two per cent.? The exact proportion is immaterial; but the number must be very small. In America some years ago, the owners of department stores and publishers found that there was considerable profit to be made in the handling of books--cheap reprints of good books in particular. The combined booksellers' and stationers' shops in the cities of the United States are in themselves more frequent and more attractive than in England: and I am going back to the days before the drug-store library which is as yet too recent an inst.i.tution to have had an easily measurable influence. But incomparably more influential than these, in bringing the mult.i.tude in immediate contact with literature, have been the department stores, of almost every one of which the "book and stationery" department is a conspicuously attractive, and generally most profitable, feature. Here every man or woman who goes to do any shopping is brought immediately within range of the temptation to buy books--is involuntarily seduced into a bookshop where the wares are temptingly displayed and artfully pressed on the attention of customers. New books of all kinds are sold at the best possible discount; but what was of chief importance was the inst.i.tution of the cheap libraries of the "Cla.s.sics"--tables heaped with them in paper at fourpence, piles of them shoulder high in cloth at ninepence, shelves laden with them in glittering backs and by no means despicable in typography at one and sevenpence. Thus simultaneously with the inculcation of the book-reading habit by the magazines came the facility for book-buying, and, always remembering the difference in the scale of prices in the two countries, it was easy for the woman doing her household shopping to fall a victim to the importunities of the salesman and lavish an extra eighteen or thirty-eight cents on a copy of _The Scarlet Letter_ or _Ivanhoe_, Irving's _Alhambra_, or _Bleak House_, to take home as a surprise. In this way, whole cla.s.ses in America, the English counterparts of which rarely read anything more formidable than a penny paper, acquired the habit of book-buying and the ambition to form a small library. The benefit to the people cannot be computed.

Incidentally, as we know, not a little injustice was done to English authors by the pirating of their books, without recompense, while the copyright still lived. It was after I went to America, though I had heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford, that I first read _Fors Clavigera_ and _Sesame and Lilies_ in Lovell's Library, at five-pence a volume, and, about the same time, Tolstoi's _War and Peace_ in the _Franklin Square Library_, at the same price. Of older works, I can still remember Lamb and part of De Quincey, _Don Quixote_ and _Ra.s.selas_ (those four for some reason stand out in my mind from their fellows in the row), all bought for the modest ten-cent piece per volume--the price of two daily newspapers (for all newspapers in America then cost five cents) or one blacking of one's shoes. Much has, of course, been done of late years in England in popularising the "Cla.s.sics" in the form of cheap libraries; but the facilities for buying the books--or rather the temptations to do so--are incomparably less, while the relative prices remain higher.

Even at fourpence halfpenny (supposing them to be purchasable at the price) Lamb's Essays still cost more in London than a drink of whiskey.

In America, more than twenty years ago, the whiskey cost half as much again as the book.

All of which is in the nature of a digression, but it has not led us far from the main road, for the object that I am aiming at is to convey to the English reader some idea of what the forces are which are at work on the education of the American people. The Englishman generally knows that in the United States there is nothing a.n.a.logous to the great public schools of England--Winchester, Westminster, Eton, and the rest--and that they have a host of more or less absurd universities in no way to be compared to Oxford or Cambridge. The American, as has been said, challenges the latter statement bluntly; while, as for the public schools, he maintains that it is not the American ideal (if he wished to fortify his position, he might say it was not an Anglo-Saxon ideal) to produce a limited privileged and cultivated cla.s.s, but that the aim is to educate the whole nation to the highest level; that, barring such qualities as their mere selectness may enable the great English schools to give to their pupils, the national high schools of America do, as a matter of fact, prepare pupils just as efficiently for the university as do the English inst.i.tutions, while the great system of common schools secures for the ma.s.s of the people a much better education than is given in England to the same cla.s.ses. Added to which, various other causes co-operate with the avowedly educational instrumentalities to produce a higher level of intellectual alertness and a more general love of reading in the people.

And what is the result? Is the American people as well educated or as well informed or as well cultivated as the English? To endeavour to make a comparison between the two is to traverse a very mora.s.s, full of holes, swamps, sloughs, creeks, inlets, quicksands, and pitfalls of divers and terrifying natures. If it is to be threaded at all, it must be only with the greatest caution and, at times, indirectness.

The charming English writer, the author of _Sinners and Saints_, affected, on alighting from the train in the railway station at Chicago, to be immensely surprised by the fact that there was not a pig in sight.

"I had thought," he said, "Chicago was all pigs." There are a good many English still of the same opinion.

The one inst.i.tution in any country of which the foreigner sees most, and by which perhaps every people is, if unwittingly, most commonly judged by other peoples, is its press; and it is difficult for a superficial observer to believe that the nation which produces the newspapers of America is either an educated or a cultivated nation. Max O'Rell's comment on the American press is delightful: "Beyond the date, few statements are reliable." Matthew Arnold called the American newspapers "an awful symptom"--"the worst features in the life of the United States." Americans also--the best Americans--have a great dislike of the London papers.

The fact is that merely as newspapers (as gatherers of news) the American papers are probably the best in the world. What repels the Englishman is primarily the form in which the news is dressed--the loudness, the sensationalism but if he can overcome his repugnance to these things sufficiently to be able to judge the paper as a whole, he will find, apart from the amazing quant.i.ty of "news" which it contains, a large amount of literary matter of a high order. I am not for one moment claiming that the American paper (not the worst and loudest, which are contemptible, nor the best, which are almost as non-sensational as the best London papers, but the average American daily paper) is, or ought to be, as acceptable reading to a cultivated man--still less to a refined woman--as almost any one of the penny, or some halfpenny, London papers. But the point that I would make and which I would insist on very earnestly is that the two do not stand for the same thing in relation to the peoples which they respectively represent.

We have seen the same thing before in comparing the consular and diplomatic services of the two countries. Just as in the United States the consuls are plucked at random from the body of the people, whereas in England they are a carefully selected and thoroughly trained cla.s.s by themselves, so the press of the United States represents the people in its entirety, whereas the English press represents only the educated cla.s.s. The London papers (I am omitting consideration of certain halfpenny papers) are not talking for the people as a whole, nor to the people as a whole. Consciously or unconsciously they are addressing themselves always to the comparatively small circle of the educated cla.s.s. When they speak of the peasant or the working man, even of the tradesman, they discuss him as a third person: it is not to him that they are talking. They use a language which is not his language; they a.s.sume in their reader information, sentiments, modes of thought, which belong not to him, but only to the educated cla.s.s--that cla.s.s which, whether each individual thereof has been to a public school and a university or not, is saturated with the public school and university traditions.

It was said before that the English people has a disposition to be guided by the voice of authority--to follow its leaders--as the American people has not. The English newspaper speaks to the educated cla.s.s, trusting, not always with justification, that opinion once formulated in that cla.s.s will be communicated downwards and accepted by the people.

The American newspaper endeavours to speak to the people direct.

That English papers are immensely more democratic than once they were goes without saying. A man need not be much past middle age to be able to remember when the _Daily Telegraph_ created, by appealing to, a whole new stratum of newspaper readers. The same thing has been done again more recently by the halfpenny papers, some of which come approximately near to being adapted to the intelligences, and representing the tastes, of the whole population, or at least the urban population, down to the lowest grade. But it is not by those papers that England would like to be judged. Yet when Englishmen draw inferences about the American people from the papers which they see, they are doing what is intrinsically as unjust. It would be no less unjust to take the first hundred men that one met with, on Broadway or State Street, and compare them--their intellectuality and culture--with one hundred members of the London university clubs.

Let us also remember here what was said of the Anglo-Saxon spirit--that spirit which is so essentially non-aristocratic, holding all men equal in their independence. We have seen how this spirit is more untrammelled and works faster in the United States than in England; but where, in any case, it has moved ahead among Americans the tendency in England generally is to follow in the same lines, not in imitation of America but by the impulse of the common genius of the peoples.

The American dailies, even the leading dailies, are made practically for those hundred men on Broadway; the London penny papers are addressed in the main to the university cla.s.s. Judging from the present trend of events in England it may not be altogether chimerical to imagine a time when in London only two or three papers will hold to the cla.s.s tradition and will still speak exclusively in the language of the upper cla.s.ses (as a small number of papers in New York do to-day), while the great body of the English press will have followed the course of the American publishers; and when the English papers are frankly adapted to the tastes and intelligence of as large a proportion of the English people as are now catered for by the majority of the American papers, he would be a rash Englishman whose patriotism would persuade him to prophesy that the London papers would be any more scholarly, more refined, or more chastened in tone than are the papers of New York or Chicago.

And while the Englishman is generally ready to draw unfavourable inferences from the undeniably unpleasant features of the majority of American daily papers, he seldom stops to draw a.n.a.logous inferences from a comparison of the American and English monthly magazines. Great Britain produces no magazines to compare with _Harper's_, _The Century_, or _Scribner's_. Those three magazines combined have, I believe, a number of readers in the United States equalling the aggregate circulation of the London penny dailies; which is a point that is worth consideration. When, moreover, the cheaper magazines became a possibility, how came it that such publications as _McClure's_ and _The Cosmopolitan_ arose? The ill.u.s.trated magazines of the United States are indeed a fact of profound significance, for which the Englishman when he measures the taste and intellectuality of the American people by its press makes no allowance. Magazines of the same excellence cannot find the same support in England. At least two earnest attempts have been made in late years to establish English monthlies which would compare with any of the three first mentioned above, and both attempts have failed.

What has been said about the much more representative character of the American daily press--the fact that the same papers are read by a vastly larger proportion of the population--brings us face to face with a root-fact which vitiates almost any attempt at a rough and ready comparison between the peoples. In America, there exist the counterparts of every cla.s.s of man who is to be found in England--men as refined, men no less cra.s.s and brutal--some as vulgar and some as full of the pride of birth. Most Englishmen will be surprised to hear that the American, democrat though he is, is as a rule more proud of an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War than is an Englishman of one who fought in the Wars of the Roses. I am sure that he sets more store by a direct and authentic descent from one of the company of the _Mayflower_ than the Englishman does by an equally direct and authentic line back to the days of William the Conqueror. Incidentally it may be said that the American will talk more about it. But while in America all cla.s.ses exist, they are not fenced apart, as in England, in fact any more than they are in theory. The American people (_pace_ the leaders of the New York Four Hundred) "comes mixed"; dip in where you will and you bring up all sorts of fish. In England if you go into educated society, you are likely to meet almost exclusively educated people--or at least people with the stamp of educated manners. Sir Gorgius Midas is not of course inexorably barred from the society of d.u.c.h.esses. Her Grace of Pentonville must have met him frequently. But in America the d.u.c.h.esses have to rub shoulders with him every day. And--which is worth noting--their husbands also rub shoulders with his wife.