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 THE NEW AMERICA 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATI^NTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limitko 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE 
 NEW AMERICA 
 
 BY 
 
 AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 FRANK DILNOT 
 
 Author of "Lloyd George : the Man 
 and His Story," etc. 
 
 J13eto gork 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1919 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
COPTEIQHT, 1919 
 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set lip and electrotyped. Published, January, 1919 
 
 M 29 l^'° 
 
 (g)CI.A5ll454 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 Impressions sometimes equal facts and figures as 
 evidence. Now and again they are even more im- 
 portant. New feelings have been sweeping America 
 in the past two years, and they are feelings which 
 must leave their effect on people all over the world 
 for a long time to come. No one can doubt that one 
 way or another they will be of towering importance 
 to Britain and the British people. As an English- 
 man resident in America during this period I have 
 touched various sides of life and have formed feel- 
 ings about the American people in what is probably 
 an historic phase of their development as a nation. 
 The sketches that follow will reveal to Americans 
 the angle of an ordinary Englishman, and to my own 
 people will give perhaps a measure of information. 
 
 What I have written is not recklessly laudatory 
 for I pay to my American friends the tribute of sin- 
 cerity. I trust however they may find an indica- 
 tion, imperfect as it must be, of the affection engen- 
 dered by unceasing kindness extended to me as to 
 all my countrymen. Of the latter several thousands 
 
Foreward 
 
 have been in America on war work, many of them 
 distinguished men whose names are often in the pa- 
 pers, all of them experts in their various spheres of 
 activity. They take back to Britain a new vision of 
 America. And they are missionaries in a double 
 sense for it is certain they have spread among ac- 
 tive circles in the United States a better understand- 
 ing of British character, possibly also of British 
 capacity. These men for years to come will be pay- 
 ing tribute not only to the dynamic force of Amer- 
 ican genius in emergency, but also to American tem- 
 perament, its sparkle, generosity and idealism. In 
 common with them I realize the surface variations 
 which must ever exist between the two nations. In 
 common with them also I realize more than ever the 
 basic unity between the two English speaking peo- 
 ples. Americans and British have had to fight to- 
 gether and they have also had to work together. The 
 fighting is over but they have to go on working to- 
 gether. The more we know each other's daily life 
 the better. Genial frankness is one of the tests of 
 friendship. Those of us who have dived into Amer- 
 ican life have been always stimulated, sometimes be- 
 wildered, generally delighted. We have found that 
 a first class American and a first class Briton are a 
 rare combination when there is anything to be done. 
 Our very differences bind us together. The effect of 
 
Foreword 
 
 proper Englishmen on proper Americans is some- 
 thing I cannot write on though I have hopes. On 
 the other hand I can say from personal knowledge 
 that American friends leave on an Englishman a mark 
 for life. 
 
 F. D. 
 New York, December 1918. 
 
^» 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I The Vision of New York 1 
 
 II Food, Dress, Drink and Taxicabs .... 12 
 
 III The Written and Spoken Word .... 22 
 
 IV Hustle and Humour 29 
 
 V The American Woman 37 
 
 VI What American Public Men Are Really Like 45 
 
 VII What Americans Think of the English . . 58 
 
 VIII Washington 66 
 
 IX President Wilson at Close Quarters ... 76 
 
 X Amusements and Some Contrasts .... 83 
 
 XI My Most Interesting American .... 95 
 
 XII America at War 108 
 
 XIII Ships and Aeroplanes 119 
 
 XIV Chicago and Detroit 130 
 
 XV England Through a Telescope .... 139 
 
THE NEW AMERICA 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE VISION OF NEW YORK 
 
 I CAME across the Atlantic when America was at 
 peace. At eight on a piercing winter morning pas- 
 sengers of early enterprise brought into the saloon 
 of an American liner the news that the United States 
 was visible, and, in company with a peer of Eng- 
 land and a young South African engineer and his 
 wife, I went out on deck to see it. 
 
 Romance beclouds any sight of a new land and 
 especially of America. To an Englishman there are 
 generations of history for his race enshrined for him 
 in this first glance. Somewhere behind that break in 
 the horizon is a mysterious nation of genius set in a 
 continent of magnitude and beauty. No pulse but 
 what beats a little quicker at its approach. It is one 
 of the big moments. In me the thrill was not absent 
 on that January morning, but I was tantalized rather 
 than satisfied. Across a drab sea in the distance 
 was a strip of low-lying land with some box-like erec- 
 
2 The New America 
 
 tions on it — houses and hotels — and we were told this 
 was Coney Island — of which some of us had read in 
 0. Henry. It looked cold and flat and barren. "You 
 ought to see it in the summer," some one said. The 
 words seemed empty. Where was the America that 
 filled the imagination? 
 
 The next time I went out on deck the city of New 
 York was staring us full in the face. My first im- 
 pression as we came to the point of Manhattan Island 
 was a hodge-podge of buildings — warehouse-like 
 buildings to an English eye — severely squared, enor- 
 mously irregular in height, and all of them mottled 
 with little windows at rigid intervals from top to 
 bottom. It was a cubist picture. The great tow- 
 ers made a crudely irregular skyline, and yet the 
 whole had an overpowering square uniformity which 
 I knew was misleading. Then I picked out what 
 seemed cathedral spires, and dignity. It was incred- 
 ible without the actual sight that so much of building 
 should be established on any given space of land. 
 In this initial glimpse of New York I had a flash of 
 knowledge. The peaks of human endeavour were 
 here. Not that I had full comprehension. A grim 
 secret power about this huge, ungainly, orderly 
 colossus of a city warmed the blood one moment, and 
 caused a shiver the next. Mysterious strength lay 
 within its portals. It was ugly, overwhelming, stimu- 
 lating. 
 
The Vision of New York 3 
 
 We sidled into the pier, and within a few minutes 
 we heard the American language in its full strength 
 and savour. The language meant a real touch with 
 this new world of human beings. Later I found that 
 the people, similar in fundamental emotions to those 
 in old Britain, were in many of the relations of life 
 quite different, and in some every-day habits and ex- 
 pressions at least their three thousand miles away. 
 On that cold January morning I was plunged into a 
 world of speech where it is affectation to say "Bos- 
 ton" when you mean "Bawston," to say "last" when 
 you mean "laast," where it means confusion, even 
 incoherence, not to speak slowly, very slowly, where 
 it is essential to linger over the vowels and let some 
 of the consonants take care of themselves. 
 
 Strangers from Europe come over filled with the 
 knowledge of the hustling methods and rapid minds 
 of Americans and find them to be on the whole the 
 slowest speaking people on earth. They get some- 
 thing additional out of words that way, extract all 
 their savour, make them mean more. All the same 
 the slowness, quite apart from accent and phrases goes 
 towards a different language. Not till later on did I 
 get the full force of this discovery. Impressions 
 were too numerous and swiftly successive in those first 
 few hours for separate analysis. 
 
 One thing stands out and that was my immediate 
 experience of the generous spirit of Americans to a 
 
4 The New America 
 
 stranger coming to their land. On the pier collecting 
 my baggage I was debating as to what hotel I should 
 drive when a New Yorker with whom I had made the 
 passage learning of my thoughts sent them all to the 
 right-about. He insisted on taking me to his club, 
 fixing me up there in comfort and introducing me to 
 friends so that I should have immediately the touch of 
 good fellowship in a strange country. His own peo- 
 ple were awaiting him and he was anxious to see them, 
 but he put aside his personal concerns and insisted on 
 driving me to his club and installing me. I shall not 
 soon forget his kindness nor that of his friends to 
 whom I was introduced. Such is America's way. 
 
 That I did not fully appreciate all the New Yorker 
 did for me in those initial hours is due to the lessons 
 from material things which were crowding each other. 
 We drove along Broadway, famed the world over as 
 one of the great thoroughfares, and through adjoining 
 streets, and so bad was the roadway that we rocked 
 and swayed like an English channel steamer under 
 a south westerly gale. We passed through Sixth 
 Avenue which with some other thoroughfares is dis- 
 figured to a European eye by the elevated electric 
 railway on its iron pillars. The sight alone is nerve, 
 racking — and when you add the almost continual rat- 
 tle of the trains overhead you produce in the newcomer 
 a state of mind which treats as absurdly inadequate 
 the ameliorative statement that New York has the 
 
The Vision of New York 5 
 
 best traffic facilities of all great cities. And then one 
 is suddenly cured of the distemper by emerging into 
 Fifth Avenue, among the most dignified and handsome 
 streets in the world, free from railways, trolley cars 
 or disturbing advertisements, dignified by private 
 palaces and great churches set amid shops that re- 
 semble public institutions in their scope, their archi- 
 tecture, the richness, reserve, and artistry of their dis- 
 play. There are miles of Fifth Avenue. More than 
 one individual mile among them is worth a visit from 
 Europe. 
 
 But of all outward things that made a mark on me 
 that cold January day I think the most notable was the 
 busy portion of Broadway after dark. I had come 
 from London threatened with German air-craft, be- 
 dimmed in all its lights, and on my first evening in 
 New York I went out from 44th Street into Broadway, 
 with its seas of people ebbing and flowing on the side- 
 walks, with its offices and hotels going skyward, with 
 its roadway vibrating from the trains running beneath 
 the surface and the trolley cars above it, and with the 
 whole scene — here is the point — lighted up like a 
 theatre stage. There are street lamps, I suppose, in 
 Broadway but I have never noticed them. They do 
 not matter. Glowing restaurants and shops and the- 
 atres and hotels put them in obscurity, and, surpassing 
 all, there are ever active electric tableaux high above 
 on roofs or on the front of high buildings, telling in 
 
6 The New America 
 
 pictures of light, the advantages of brands of ma- 
 chinery, of chewing gum, whiskey, sewing cotton or 
 theatrical performances. These electric signs are the 
 joy and pride of Broadway. They constitute a pan- 
 orama and make the wide thoroughfare as far as one 
 can see in each direction as light as day. Half way 
 to Heaven there is a flickering everchanging multi- 
 coloured fountain with moving mannikins inset, the 
 whole reminding one of the set fireworks at the Crys- 
 tal Palace, only it is continuous, not for seconds, but 
 for hours. Nearby, outlined against the sky, is the 
 moving picture of a kitten thirty feet long on its back 
 playing with a spool of cotton, entangling itself, its 
 eyes sparkling with fun and bewilderment, and sud- 
 denly finding release in readiness for a continuation 
 of the gambol. In another place a huntsman is rais- 
 ing his gun to his shoulder firing bullets of light at 
 birds of light, one of which he unfailingly brings 
 down every time. There is a dazzling picture of a 
 butterfly, alive with shimmering hues, alighting on a 
 half open rose in natural colours, and that glittering 
 butterfly must be a dozen feet across at least. These 
 are but samples of the Broadway tableau at night. 
 To some I suppose it would give the eff"ect of blatancy. 
 To one straight from darkened Europe these palpi- 
 tating acres of light extended a sense of vitality and 
 amazing good cheer. 
 
 Here then were the broad outlines of the setting 
 
The Vision of New York 7 
 
 of a great community — a community stranger in many 
 ways to an Englishman than those older peoples in 
 Europe which spoke not his own tongue. To find out 
 the great secret of this complex nation so full of con- 
 trasts, so reputedly material on the one hand, so high 
 minded on the other, so intensely practical while at 
 the same time flaming with a spiritual patriotism un- 
 surpassed in history — here was a riddle not to be 
 solved in a day or in a month, or even in a year. The 
 soul of a nation is no more to be observed at a glance 
 than the soul of a man. My task it has been to take 
 note of the externals, of the symbols so to speak, to 
 try to extract some messages from them, not sepa- 
 rately, but as a whole. That I have to observe them 
 with an English eye and appraise them by English 
 standards is because I am an Englishman. And if I 
 do this it is consciously, and not blindly, and with 
 the full knowledge that the Americans have a standard 
 of their own, the American standard, that they proudly 
 live their own life. 
 
 The bewilderment of the recently arrived English- 
 man is best illustrated by personal contacts, and it is 
 easy to provide a sample or two which makes the 
 visitor clap his hand to his head. No one can be 
 more than a week or two in New York without being 
 conscious of the alert sympathy of the new people he 
 finds around him, their readiness to help each other, 
 their quick desire to help even those they do not know. 
 
8 The New America 
 
 They are naturally cheerful. There are no bars of 
 class distinction or stem etiquette to keep people apart 
 as in the old countries, and this lends itself to a help- 
 fulness and friendliness which is delightful to a vis- 
 itor. The charity of New Yorkers both public and 
 private is boundless. The courtesy and gracious man- 
 ners of people in educated circles could not be bet- 
 tered in any society in the world — and indeed in its 
 unaffectedness and genuineness it is probably su- 
 preme. And yet in spite of all this the stranger from 
 across the Atlantic, till he gets acclimatized, is 
 jarred and shocked by the new and unaccustomed 
 manners of the people in the streets — the ordinary 
 work-a-day people. They do not mean to be unman- 
 nered of course, and would probably be immensely 
 surprised if they were informed of the impression 
 they make. The standard is different, that is all. A 
 crowd on the subway is a good example. It is as dif- 
 ferent from a London crowd or a Paris crowd as Chi- 
 cago is from Moscow. No person stands aside for 
 another in a hurry. Rarely is there an apology. No 
 one says "Thank you" for a railway ticket. I have 
 yet to see a smiling query or a smiling response be- 
 tween officials and passengers. And all of these 
 things are commonplaces in the old world, common- 
 places which are not only smooth and pleasant but 
 which accelerate the business of life. Once in a sub- 
 way a well dressed young man and woman, probably 
 
The Vision of New York 9 
 
 sweethearts, were seated opposite me. The girl 
 dropped her gloves. I leaned forward, picked them 
 up and returned them to her. The man took them 
 from me. Neither he nor his companion uttered one 
 word of thanks. I should like to think they did not 
 speak our language, but I fear the worst. 
 
 It has been explained to me that the continual flow 
 of foreigners into New York is largely responsible for 
 this condition of things. I wonder if that is really so. 
 I was a frequent visitor to the beautiful public library 
 on Fifth Avenue. On six occasions — I counted them 
 after the first two — it was my privilege in passing out 
 or passing in to hold the door open for a well dressed 
 woman, young or old, going in or coming out, and 
 on only one of these occasions did the lady in question 
 say "Thank you" or indeed give the slightest indica- 
 tion that some one was performing an act of courtesy. 
 It may indeed be that this is a sidelight on the tribute 
 that all American men pay to women, that acts of 
 courtesy are taken to be so natural and commonplace 
 as to call for no recognition. It is probable those 
 ladies were all charming in private life, and would 
 have been seriously hurt at the thought that they could 
 be ungracious in any kind of contact. Probably, too, 
 an American man would not have noticed their silence. 
 To an Englishman it seemed strange and is therefore 
 worthy of note. I have the less hesitation in writing 
 down this incident in view of my early knowledge of 
 
10 The New America 
 
 the intensive charm in American women, their wit, 
 their camaraderie and intellectuality. I take my hat 
 off to them all the time. 
 
 After all this was only one of a hundred contrasts. 
 Let me give another of a different kind. In the early 
 hours of one morning I saw fire engines arriving on a 
 street off Broadway. The policemen were keeping 
 back persons who like myself came hurrying up. I 
 stood unmolested for a moment or two, then a police- 
 man approached swinging the inevitable stick and I 
 looked for the stem injunction of the London bobby. 
 I did not get it. He walked up to me like a friend 
 and said quietly, almost confidentially, "Hadn't you 
 better be moving?" He inclined his head across the 
 street. "The chief is round here." Who could re- 
 sist such an appeal? 
 
 At the next block I fell in with a friend, a news- 
 paper man on the way home. He asked me to have 
 a drink and I said a word of surprise as I had an 
 idea that by law all refreshment houses at that hour 
 were closed. He smiled at my innocence, took me by 
 the arm, crossed the street, knocked three times on 
 the darkened window of a particular saloon, and a 
 minute later we were comfortably seated in the back 
 part of the restaurant awaiting the arrival of two 
 Scotch whiskeys. Other customers were there too, 
 all quietly respectable. I blessed my friend's kindly 
 thought, as well as the benevolent lenity of New York 
 
The Vision of New York 11 
 
 government. And then I shuddered at the harsh 
 logicality of the rulers of London, and the thought 
 of how such elasticity, even spasmodically indulged 
 in, would bring inevitable business ruin as well as 
 personal punishment, and provide incidentally a small 
 sensation for the newspapers. I suppose on this oc- 
 casion I broke the law. I make my apologies. I 
 cannot refrain from saying I thoroughly enjoyed it. 
 Perhaps I ought to add that all this was a year ago. 
 Very likely such facilities do not exist now. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 FOOD, DRESS, DRINK AND TAXICABS 
 
 I HAVE heard the genial lamentations of Americans in 
 England on the absence of steam heat in the houses 
 and ice water at meals, and was inclined to smile 
 until after a brief period in America I realized how 
 one was a necessity as well as a comfort, and the 
 other a luxury, the loss of which becomes a tragedy 
 with the temperature one hundred degrees in the 
 shade. But steam heat and ice water are only two 
 of the novelties to an Englishman. The automobiles 
 of New York and in a lesser degree of other American 
 cities, are not only one of the sights but one of the 
 emotions. Sometimes they pack the streets. Al- 
 ways they provide an ever moving flood. There is 
 nothing of the kind to be seen in Europe. Everybody 
 who is anybody has an automobile of some kind, and 
 the interstices are filled with taxicabs, ownership 
 ranging from the pride of a Pierce Arrow or Rolls 
 Royce to pride no less in a lowly Ford. Dramatic 
 the revelation of prosperity which allows so many 
 thousands of persons to possess these cars. There is 
 
 12 
 
Food, Dress, Drink and Taxicabs 13 
 
 a far-flung automobile comradeship. I should think 
 there might even be a literature in view of the close- 
 ness with which the automobile is welded into the life 
 of the people. In New York the cars introduce a 
 new element into human aff^airs not only with regard 
 to those who own them but to those who as pedestrians 
 tolerate, avoid, or suffer them. They are as the fishes 
 of the sea in number, and as swift, as silent, and as 
 elusive. Their pace is staggering to witness. They 
 turn corners with a speed and at an acuteness of 
 angle which leaves a newcomer breathless till he 
 learns the astonishing skill of the drivers and the sup- 
 pleness of the instruments they handle. Those knights 
 of the road, the taxi-drivers, are past masters in the 
 avoidance of death for themselves and their charges. 
 To the spectator from abroad they seem almost capable 
 of making their cars rear up on their hind wheels in 
 face of some sudden emergency. When they want 
 to turn they spin round in the middle of the road with 
 freedom and suddenness. At intervals they lounge 
 along by the sidewalk and then go off at lightning 
 speed. They perform swift letter S's among the 
 traffic. They dart unexpectedly up side streets. As 
 to the feelings of a pedestrian, many a time have I 
 had the impression that an idling taxicab has sud- 
 denly leaped to its top speed to reach me before I 
 could get across the road. Others have felt the same. 
 I have made myself a solemn vow that I will not be 
 
14 The New America 
 
 run down by a taxicab in New York. It is one of 
 the preoccupations of my days and nights. 
 
 A new arrival will find the Americans more care- 
 fully dressed than English people — than Londoners 
 for instance. There is a punctiliousness in the way 
 the men dress which is striking and ever present, and 
 it is noticeable not only among the well-to-do but also 
 right down through the various grades of what may 
 be called the lower middle classes. The ordinary 
 men in the street, the clerk, the official, the store- 
 keeper all are smart, and trim, with well pressed 
 trousers, and bright boots. It is true that with the 
 younger men there is a taste for a brighter colour in 
 neckties, a wider stripe on the soft shirts than is liked 
 by the Englishman. There is also among many an in- 
 clination for jewelry which is not one of our prefer- 
 ences; tie pins are plentiful, and rings are common, 
 although some moderation is introduced in the fine 
 and delicate watch chains which are the fashion in 
 America. Moreover there is among the young men 
 about town a tendency, especially with regard to their 
 evening clothes, to have them made in an ornate style 
 which does not coincide with our old fashioned ideas. 
 When all this is said however the fact remains that 
 the ordinary man of affairs in America dresses with 
 taste, the taste of good material, simple cut, albeit 
 with some fastidiousness. They are a dressy people 
 the Americans, a fact not unrelated with self respect. 
 
Food, Dress, Drink and Taxicabs 15 
 
 In some matters they are more particular than 
 Europeans. When I came out to America I was in 
 doubt as to whether to bring a silk hat — rapidly dis- 
 appearing in London except for use on formal oc- 
 casions. I was told that no one in America wore a 
 silk hat. As a matter of fact within a month of my 
 arrival I saw more silk hats on Fifth Avenue than 
 I had seen in London in the course of a year. 
 
 I am not an expert in the dress of women but I 
 have noticed with respectful diffidence the variation 
 with customs in England. American women like the 
 men are extremely careful in their dress, careful to a 
 point of elaborateness, and this trait is not confined 
 to any one class. The careful harmonies of the 
 fashionable woman in society functions is reflected 
 in the trimness, the taste, the polish of the thousands 
 of business girls who go into New York to the offices 
 each day. That is the general eff'ect. When a mere 
 man comes to details on this matter he wallows hope- 
 lessly. But I have observed that the daytime dresses 
 are rather shorter than those in England, displaying 
 foot and ankle and sometimes a trifle more. Material 
 is thinner, frequently of the chiff'on type — georgette 
 I am informed is the correct name, and more of the 
 shoulder and neck and arm is shown — an eff'ect of 
 the climate. There is moreover the widest variety of 
 styles even among those who cannot be classed as rich, 
 and the general result is very pleasing to the male eye. 
 
16 The New America 
 
 Freedom of expression is carried to foot wear. In 
 England low shoes giving a woman's foot a light 
 appearance are in general wear. With American 
 women it is the fashion to wear boots laced up, cover- 
 ing above the ankle. They are of various colours and 
 material, of leather, cloth and suede in black, brown, 
 blue, white and various shades of grey. They hit the 
 eye of a visitor. I cannot help thinking that these 
 boots look heavier and in some cases larger than 
 do low shoes. But what is a mere man's opinion in 
 such matters? I am incapable of dealing with other 
 attire except to say that I am sensible of modes dif- 
 ferent from those across the water. I rarely see the 
 blouse and skirt so generally attractive in England 
 and instead I am told — for I have had to seek advice 
 on this technical point — that "one piece dresses" are 
 in popular use. The effect is good when the eyes 
 have got accustomed to the change, and when one re- 
 members that this is not England but another nation. 
 The care and completeness of the women's dress here 
 is another evidence of that freshness and intensity 
 which strives to get as much out of life as possible. 
 Withal I am not one of those who think that the 
 elaborateness of dress on the part of American 
 women is the characteristic chiefly to be marked with 
 regard to them. But that is another story — to be 
 dealt with a little later on. 
 
 The food and drink of America are peculiarly na- 
 
Food, Dress, Drink and Taxicabs 17 
 
 tional. It is not until an Englishman has been here 
 for a week or two that he discovers how really dif- 
 ferent the food is to that which he has been accus- 
 tomed. Breakfast is almost invariably begun by 
 fruit and delicious fruit it is too, oranges, bananas, 
 strawberries, gra]pe-fruit, something juicy and re- 
 freshing. Then there follows in sequence courses 
 which in name have some resemblance to the old 
 country's fare but which in substance are different. 
 There are various kinds of cereals of course, some 
 of them with fancy names. Fish has an important 
 place. Among the varieties of fish are those of which 
 the average Englishman has never heard the name, 
 "Blue fish," "White fish" "Shad"— fish from the 
 rivers, and fish from the lakes in the Middle West, 
 mixed in with the fish of English names and bearing 
 a family resemblance to what we get in England. It 
 is when you come to the eggs and bacon that you get 
 a real shock. The eggs are the same but alas for 
 the bacon. I am sure Americans like American bacon 
 best. An Englishman on this point must regretfully 
 part company. During eighteen months in this coun- 
 try I have met scores of travelling Englishmen, many 
 of them distinguished in their various walks of life, 
 and it is a fact worth putting down that rarely has 
 our conversation come to an end without a heart- 
 rending word about American bacon. They do not 
 sigh for English lanes these men of the world, for the 
 
18 The New America 
 
 delights of London or even for the reunion with old 
 friends, but their hearts are full of gloom as they 
 talk of the English bacon so far from their reach, and 
 try to be polite about the bacon in America. It is 
 difficult because of the deceptiveness of those little 
 strips which with their thinness give an appearance of 
 delicacy but which in the mouth make one think how 
 far away are Yorkshire and Wiltshire. America is 
 a great nation but it has not yet learned much about 
 bacon. Mr. Raymond Blathwayt sat with me in a 
 cheery New York club only a few nights ago in a 
 circle of genial Americans and held them in thrall 
 while he discoursed on the merits of a well cooked 
 Wiltshire ham. He described to smiling listeners a 
 slice of that ham properly cooked, how it required no 
 chewing, how it was full of flavour and melted in the 
 mouth like chocolate. I was much moved. What 
 Englishman would not be? Even our American 
 friends were stirred by this modem Charles Lamb and 
 his roast pig. All the same I believe they would 
 prefer American bacon. It is one of the few serious 
 dividing lines between the two nations. Not to put 
 too fine a point upon it these delicate looking wafer- 
 like strips are to an Englishman on the tough side. 
 Also they lack flavour. I am blunt about this. The 
 matter is not one to be trifled with. 
 
 Chicken is a great specialty in America. It is 
 
Food, Dress, Drink and Taxicabs 19 
 
 comparatively cheap, well cooked in a score of ways, 
 and the same applies to turkey and other poultry. 
 Beef as it is cooked and cut in many restaurants and 
 hotels does not attract an Englishman for it is carved 
 in slices which are enormously thick and served so 
 underdone as to remove it from the class of deli- 
 cacies. No lunch or dinner is complete for an Ameri- 
 can without ices, and they call the course "ice cream" 
 in full, not "ice" as on the other side. For those who 
 like ice cream there is no better in the world and it is 
 served with a profusion which indicates the general 
 taste. The extreme sweetness of pastry, cakes and 
 other confections in America is very remarkable to 
 a European and even the chocolates are far sweeter 
 than we have them. 
 
 What of drink? America so far as my observa- 
 tion goes is a very temperate country, many of the 
 states prohibiting the sale of liquor, while in those 
 that do not there is an absence of excessive drinking, 
 an absence indeed of regular drinking, which is bound 
 to impress a traveller. One need not put it all down 
 to natural virtue. The climate so dry and invigorat- 
 ing has a lot to do with the condition of things in 
 which a man accustomed to a moderate glass of liquor 
 in western Europe finds the need of it to disappear 
 when he lands in America. The moist winds that 
 sweep the countries across the Atlantic, and the heavier 
 
20 The New America 
 
 atmosphere, somehow give alcohol less effect, and pro- 
 mote a desire for it which is lessened under the clear 
 skies of America. In the course of a year I have 
 travelled through nearly all of the principal cities in 
 the United States and my travels have taken me out 
 at all hours of the night and day and during that time 
 I do not think the drunken men I have seen on the 
 streets would number a dozen. Another excellent 
 variation to an Englishman is the absence of barmaids 
 in the saloons, all the liquor being sold by men. 
 
 So far as non-intoxicating drink is concerned, cof- 
 fee is the stand-by of the country, and it is made ex- 
 cellently. Tea, alas for English taste, is an abstrac- 
 tion to the ordinary American. They know it by 
 name and by sight and some even drink it, but as a 
 rule it is a thin vapid decoction unworthy of the name. 
 Restaurants and hotels have something they label 
 "English Breakfast Tea," which is supposed to pro- 
 vide for our stronger tastes, but it is only a substitute. 
 I have found a method of meeting the emergency. 
 It is to demand Ceylon tea and to insist that double 
 the usual quantity is used in the tea pot. They mean 
 well about tea, the Americans, but perhaps they re- 
 tain a prejudice with regard to that little affair at 
 Boston. I once made a pathetic plea on a Washington 
 train to a waiter for strong tea. He was anxious to 
 oblige me but his attitude of mind on this all im- 
 portant matter was eloquently revealed when in his 
 
Food, Dress, Drink and Taxicabs 21 
 
 desire to meet my wishes he brought me a jug of 
 moderately warm water and the tea canister and asked 
 me to put in as much tea as I liked so as to give it the 
 proper strength. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE WRITTEN AND SPOKEN WORD 
 
 One of the staggering discoveries in America is the 
 occasional comment on the "English accent" of Eng- 
 lishmen with its suggestion of an amiable eccentricity 
 on the part of a foreign people. It is hard for a 
 visitor from London to get his balance. When he 
 does so and makes his feeble protest he is shaken 
 by the challenge direct — about the mincing intonation 
 of the English, their lack of h's, the impression of 
 sing-song in their speech. I was present at a popular 
 comedy in New York recently where a dialogue on the 
 stage between a young American doctor and an Eng- 
 lish friend led the American to declare with a fervour 
 which might have concealed humour, "If you wish to 
 hear the real English language spoken as it should 
 be with purity and correctness you must come to 
 America." A well dressed and intelligent audience 
 applauded this with what struck me to be seriousness. 
 Conceive the mental situation of the poor Englishman 
 who has realized that around him is a new pronuncia- 
 tion and a hurly burly of fresh phrases all of which 
 he had hitherto regarded as a local variation from 
 
 22 
 
The Written and Spoken Word 23 
 
 the proper and accepted English he had brought from 
 the other side. Taking a strong hold of himself the 
 Englishman may make a stand against his Ameri- 
 can friends; he will give way much but he 
 must and will persist that the true English language is 
 in possession of the English people. And this in spite 
 of the fact that some of the less educated people es- 
 pecially in London drop their h's in pretty much the 
 same way that the less educated do in New York. 
 
 Broadly speaking there are two tendencies with re- 
 gard to the English language in America, one to- 
 wards its reinvigoration, the other towards its dilu- 
 tion and corruption and the difficulty is to say where 
 one tendency unites with the other. The measured 
 speech of the educated American, extracting from 
 words and phrases the full savour with a kind of salty 
 tang, is a powerful new instrument for both wit and 
 wisdom, but who can tell the border line when, 
 descending through a hundred shades, it reaches at 
 last a high pitched harshness for which slowness is 
 no compensation. Then there are the phrases. Show 
 me the alert Englishman who will not find a stimula- 
 tion in those nuggety word-groupings which are the 
 commonplaces in good American conversation. They 
 are like flashes of crystal. They come from all kinds 
 of people, — who are brilliantly innocent of enriching 
 the language. But here again there is a descending 
 scale which presently touches undoubtable slang. 
 
24 
 
 The New America 
 
 Who is going to mark the limit? Perhaps there is 
 none, only a slow graduation the character of which 
 alters as time ripens taste. Let me give a little list 
 of colloquial expressions, some of which explain them- 
 selves and all of which are interesting as examples of 
 a language in transition. 
 
 "Don't be fresh." 
 "Rubber neck." 
 "Foxy gink." 
 "Get wise to it." 
 "To jolly you along.' 
 "Take a Brodie." 
 
 "Shook me for a blonde." 
 "Cut it out." 
 
 "The jinx have a hunch 
 
 on me." 
 "Turn over, you've said 
 
 a pageful." 
 "He's a bird and you want 
 
 to watch him fly." 
 
 "Don't be cheeky." 
 
 "Sight seer." 
 
 "A sly person." 
 
 "Ascertain the facts." 
 
 "To chaff you." 
 
 "Take a chance (from 
 Steve Brodie who dived 
 from Brooklyn bridge) . 
 
 "Left me for another." 
 
 "Stop that nonsense; get 
 to business." 
 
 "Evil spirits haunt me." 
 
 "You've talked enough 
 
 and too much." 
 "He's smart, keep your 
 
 eye on him." 
 
 It may be slang but notice hoAV the English transla- 
 tion rather limps behind. Of course it is the figura- 
 tiveness, the quick pictorial imagination, which helps 
 
The Written and Spoken Word 25 
 
 the formation of the new language. All the same 
 there is a liule shock for the Englishman in the 
 mandatory "Listen" for the more gracious "Do you 
 know," or "Excuse me." Besides "Listen" there are 
 "Say" and "Gee" and several others. They can be 
 uttered sweetly; when they are not, well then the 
 stranger has to smile and suffer. 
 
 The written word in America follows generally 
 along the lines of the spoken word. In the best maga- 
 zines and reviews and in the more intellectual of the 
 books one finds a clearness, a correctness, a vigour, 
 not a whit behind similar work in England and in 
 some cases so excellent as to be a model to English 
 writers. There is a nervous directness in the best 
 American writing which is truly part of literature 
 and a distinctive emanation from the American 
 genius. A love of beauty in words shows up re- 
 peatedly, a desire to get the core out of language. 
 Moreover the Americans, in a kind of artistic ex- 
 uberance, are not afraid to use words as we some- 
 times are in England. Along the fagade of the new 
 post office building in New York there runs an in- 
 scription from Herodotus. "Neither snow, nor rain, 
 nor heat, nor night stays these couriers from the swift 
 completion of their appointed rounds." Somehow 
 this inscription adds point and dignity to a noble 
 building. Who but the Americans would have 
 placed Y/ords with a lilt and march upon a teeming 
 
26 The New America 
 
 bureau of practical work. They use words in un- 
 accustomed ways these Americans in their daily 
 pursuits, in their business for example. Look at the 
 American advertisements, against those in Britain! 
 I was walking up Broadway near twelve o'clock one 
 night and came to a halt in front of a shop across 
 which was stretched a scroll bearing these words, 
 "Can a snake cross a frozen lake?" I read it twice 
 to know if my eyesight was right and then I thought 
 I was in the presence of one of those tantalizing puz- 
 zles for which there is no answer. What did it 
 mean? Was the storekeeper a colossal joker who 
 wished to bewilder the passing crowds just for the 
 fun of the thing? I went up and looked into the 
 store and found the explanation. It specialized in 
 an encyclopedia which purported to answer all kinds 
 of questions. "Can a snake cross a frozen lake?" 
 was one of the puzzles which the encyclopedia eluci- 
 dated for the curious. 
 
 This however is not the whole of the picture, for in 
 writing as well as in speech there is a widespread 
 range of what to an Englishman is looseness, occa- 
 sionally slovenliness. Americans are never tired of 
 bursting the bonds of convention, but when the less 
 disciplined do this they are apt to emerge on to a 
 stage where freedom though delightful has its dis- 
 advantages. 
 
 The leading editorials in the principal papers of 
 
The Written and Spoken Word 27 
 
 America are generally from an English point of view 
 well written, vivacious, with precision and taste. The 
 news columns on the other hand are often enough 
 marked with redundancy, and a certain careless haste. 
 It all rises from that intensive desire to get to the 
 heart of things quickly, to solidify thought without 
 much regard to the medium. It is not a case of gram- 
 matical inaccuracy so much as a disregard of con- 
 struction, an indifference to the briefest and sharpest 
 way of conveying meaning — unless indeed it can be 
 done by the short cut of slang. Formal correctness 
 really doesn't matter so long as the general meaning 
 is apparent, that is the impression a visitor gets. Of 
 course this informality sometimes goes with bright- 
 ness, occasionally with wit. Whether this is suffi- 
 cient recompense depends on the temperament and 
 training of the reader. Nor can this restiveness in 
 the presence of arbitrary rules of grammar and con- 
 struction be charged solely against the newspapers. 
 I have seen in the streets public notices issued by the 
 authorities, in which the lack of grammar stared to 
 Heaven. 
 
 However a language must be looked upon as a 
 whole and the American tongue written or spoken 
 with its alteration from the English of England is a 
 potent and penetrating instrument, rich in new vibra- 
 tions, full of joy as well as shocks for the unsuspect- 
 ing visitor. The many created words are but another 
 
28 The New America 
 
 evidence of a trenchant originality. I once cited 
 some of them as well as changes I have indicated to 
 a good friend of mine, a dignitary of the Episcopal 
 church. He was sensitive. "Our English may be 
 a little changed," he said, "but it is an alteration 
 vastly for the better. You are lagging far behind. 
 Good Heavens, why you still spell parlour with a 
 'U'." I quailed under his air of pride and contempt. 
 I had not the courage to point out the thousand simi- 
 lar illogicalities which still remain in the English 
 language as it is spoken in America. I think he 
 would have trampled on me if I had. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 HUSTLE AND HUMOUR 
 
 One of the hasty judgments which a visiting English- 
 man is likely to formulate in the first month or two 
 of his residence in the United States is that the reputa- 
 tion of America for whirl-wind energy and an ever 
 present poignancy of humour is a fallacy. He moder- 
 ates this opinion a little later on, but there continues 
 to remain with him the conviction that Europeans 
 have an entirely wrong idea of the temperament of 
 Americans with regard to their quality of action and 
 their humour and wit. One hears so much in Europe 
 of the nervous tension of the Americans, of their 
 electric energy in business and pleasure that there 
 comes a discovery which is in the nature of a shock. 
 Conceive the disillusionment among people in Eng- 
 land when told that the New York crowds on the 
 sidewalks, in the subways, in both business and resi- 
 dential sections, walk in a more leisurely way than 
 do similar crowds in London. It is one of the 
 astounding things to an Englishman here. He notes 
 the slowness in a hundred directions, the carefully 
 measured activity of the elevator men, railway of- 
 
 29 
 
30 The New America 
 
 ficials, the salesmen in the shops. Nobody is in any 
 hurry. New York leads the way in this calm de- 
 tached disregard of time but New York does not stand 
 alone. At Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, I have 
 stopped in the best hotels and the slowness of the 
 service of the waiters, of the attendants and again of 
 the railway men roused a feeling of disappointment 
 in one who expected a new-world dashing rapidity. 
 Taxicabs are the only things that go really fast. 
 Time is the cheapest commodity in America. Is it 
 heresy to say that I found indications of the same 
 leisureliness in some distinguished walks of life? 
 If it is I would add that I found the atmosphere 
 pleasant. Withal, the daily work gets itself accom- 
 plished, new big original achievements are carried 
 through in a score of industries, and there is an out- 
 put which is large compared to that of similar in- 
 dustries across the Atlantic. Why this apparent con- 
 tradiction? There is probably more than one ex- 
 planation for it. The root fact is that America has 
 resources and natural wealth which enables its popu- 
 lation to secure a livelihood with less effort than the 
 crowded populations in the severe state of competi- 
 tion of the old countries. No wonder there is a con- 
 stant stream of immigration. It would be even 
 larger if the poor people in Europe knew the ad- 
 vantages in America and its opportunities. There are 
 some popular restaurants in New York correspond- 
 
Hustle and Humour 31 
 
 ing with our light refreshment houses in London, and 
 whereas in London the waitresses working long hours 
 may make fifteen shillings a week the waitresses in 
 these American restaurants (I am speaking now of 
 New York) get three good meals a day and earn in 
 wages and tips from eighteen to twenty dollars — 
 between three pounds ten shillings and four pounds 
 a week for six days' work, seven and a half hours a 
 day. This may be a little exceptional but it certainly 
 is an indication. In New York City it is difficult to 
 get manual labourers except negroes or immigrants 
 from the southern states of Europe. There are so 
 many things people can do besides work with their 
 hands in America. Of course there are poor people, 
 poor for a variety of reasons but speaking generally 
 it is far easier to secure a comfortable material exist- 
 ence than on the other side of the Atlantic. This is 
 in spite of the high cost of living, which may even 
 be double and then leave a substantial margin. 
 
 The theory of American hustle arises not from 
 actual daily swiftness in which the British are not 
 outpaced, but in the new state of mind, the willingness 
 and indeed the ardency to try new methods, to ex- 
 periment with new ideas. Not only in one class but 
 in all classes one finds readiness to discover a more 
 effective method of handling business, to ascertain 
 novelties not only in inventions but in methods. The 
 result is that in some directions wonderful eff"ects in 
 
32 The New America 
 
 efficiency are secured. In England old traditions are 
 too rigidly adhered to, especially in matters of busi- 
 ness, and the consequence is that the people work 
 harder and sometimes achieve less. Of course there 
 has to be borne in mind also the essential consideration 
 that America is a country both new and vast, with 
 potentialities only on the fringe of development, hav- 
 ing within its boundaries uncountable riches yet to 
 be produced by the energy and ingenuity of its in- 
 habitants. For the industrious, material life is easier. 
 It is now, no less than in years gone by, the land of 
 opportunity. Meanwhile its progressing development 
 places prosperity within the hands of many classes. 
 Perhaps this is why New York, teeming with ideas, 
 shows no signs of real hurry. 
 
 It is a legend, or perhaps it would be more cor- 
 rect to say a religious article of faith, with Ameri- 
 cans that the English, to whose many qualities they 
 are not unwilling to pay tribute, do not possess a 
 sense of humour. It is not a matter to be argued 
 about. The slow comprehension of the English in 
 funny matters is a text. I have heard it referred to 
 not only in private conversation but repeatedly on the 
 stage and more than once at public dinners, all the 
 references being quite good humoured and without 
 offence but all very downright and made with sin- 
 cerity. Amusing stories are frequently told in sup- 
 port. A typical one is said to come from Mr. Nat 
 
Hustle and Humour 33 
 
 Goodwin, the actor, who during his stay in London 
 told an English friend of his experiences with a 
 cigar salesman. In recommending a special brand 
 of cigars the salesman said the purchaser of five hun- 
 dred cigars received a valuable leather wallet, the 
 purchaser of a thousand got a watch, and the man 
 who took five thousand received a grand piano. The 
 actor's reply to the cigar salesman was, "If I smoke 
 five thousand of your cigars it wouldn't be a grand 
 piano that I should want but a harp." Nat Good- 
 win related this instance of his repartee to his Eng- 
 lish friend who received it with a polite smile. It 
 was the next day that the Englishman sought out Nat 
 Goodwin, shook him warmly by the hand and said, 
 "You know I only got the meaning of that joke last 
 night in bed. I could hardly sleep for laughing. 
 Of course what you meant was that travelling round 
 the country as you do as an actor you couldn't carry 
 the grand piano with you, whereas you could take a 
 harp along quite easily." 
 
 I think it may be said that English lack of humour 
 provides the same staple source of merriment to the 
 Americans that the mother-in-law used to provide in 
 funny papers and on the music-hall stage in England. 
 I know one Englishman who listened to a chaffing 
 after-dinner speech in New York and became restive. 
 Presently he said, "I want to get up and make a 
 speech." I asked him his reason. He said, "I want 
 
34 The New America 
 
 to explain that there is no lack of courtesy in English- 
 men when they don't laugh at American jokes. I 
 personally have sometimes tried for as long as twenty 
 minutes to laugh at an American joke. I want to 
 explain that so as to show there is no ill feeling." 
 I do not think this was justifiable comment on the 
 general situation because so far as my experience 
 goes, and I have cultivated an amateur interest in 
 the matter, it is not hard to understand or appreciate 
 American humour. Nor do I agree with many visit- 
 ing Englishmen who say that Americans are really in 
 essence devoid of humour. These critics in their dis- 
 appointment generalize from two or three individual 
 experiences. It is true that an Englishman's vanity 
 suffers when he finds that what he believes to be his 
 humorous asides, his witty inflexions, and some- 
 times even the pith of his best narratives leave Ameri- 
 cans cold, leave them, alas, not even inquisitive — 
 but this arises from the fact that American humour 
 is developed along diff'erent lines, and also that both 
 nations include dull people. The latter fact one 
 may put aside for the moment. Among those whom 
 nature has not forgotten to endow properly on both 
 sides of the Atlantic there are differences with regard 
 to humour although frequently they meet on common 
 ground. If I were asked to specify as definitely as 
 possible the difference between the humour of America 
 and England I should say that American humour 
 
Hustle and Humour 35 
 
 was the more direct and English humour the more 
 allusive. It is the situation which appeals to the 
 American, it is the handling of the situation which 
 arouses the smile in an Englishman. The American 
 moreover is not afraid of humour and we English are 
 a little timorous about it. Humour is not in such 
 general currency in England. To the extent that with 
 us it has to have a sharper point, to be well tempered, 
 may be a sign that we are indeed a duller people. 
 On the other hand it makes for an agreeable variety 
 of humour, not essentially subtle, and yet approaching 
 subtlety. It is the flavour of the humour which the 
 English like to turn over on their tongue. We are 
 in fact a gravely humorous people. With the Amer- 
 ican there are no dilatory measures. They have a 
 crispness, and sharp percussion, stimulating and re- 
 freshing. While humour is better understood and 
 more frequently used among ordinary citizens in 
 America it does not seem to me that humour is nearly 
 so powerful a public weapon as it is in England. 
 All our leading statesmen find it a tremendous ally 
 not only in the House of Commons but on the public 
 platforms. Mr. Balfour is one of our subtlest hu- 
 mourists. Mr. Asquith brings to bear on his op- 
 ponents from time to time a pawky allusiveness which 
 is very penetrating. Mr. Lloyd George sparkles in 
 his fiercest speeches. Mr. Winston Churchill culti- 
 vates a mordant turn of phrase which is particularly 
 
36 The New America 
 
 exhilarating. I have not noticed a similar u^e of 
 humour in America. 
 
 There are thus two brands of humour, the Ameri- 
 can and the English and if you are an American you 
 naturally prefer the product of the United States. 
 Mark Twain, 0. Henry, and other witty writers are 
 read with avidity in Britain. I have an impression 
 that writers like W. W. Jacobs, an unfailing delight 
 to the English humorous mind, would not be re- 
 garded in the United States as being uproariously 
 funny. From these facts one may draw two entirely 
 different sets of conclusions. It depends on which 
 side of the Atlantic one resides. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE AMERICAN WOMAN 
 
 American women are an acute problem for an Eng- 
 lishman, but they are a problem which it is a delight 
 to solve, even though the process is one which is both 
 prolonged and intricate. It must be very hard for a 
 bachelor from the other side, whatever prejudices and 
 affections he brings across, to keep from trying to 
 marry an American girl. Resistance in the old coun- 
 try calls for delicacy and vigilance, but in the United 
 States it means constant and strenuous labour. The 
 exasperating factor is that an Englishman will note 
 what to him are deficiencies in the American woman, 
 deficiencies which time does not wipe out nor ameli- 
 orate. The soft speech of his own women, their un- 
 conscious graciousness, their silent and enduring pas- 
 sion for all home things, are but some of those al- 
 most indefinable qualities which are woven into the 
 fabric of the English race. There is not the same 
 atmosphere with American women, who have an at- 
 mosphere of their own. One lives in a different 
 medium in America and there are additions and 
 
 subtractions. 
 
 37 
 
38 The New America 
 
 The companionship of the American women is 
 such as to make them a magnet. They touch fibres 
 which before have been undisturbed. They have a 
 volition which drives them into notice, regard, and, 
 ofttimes, affection. There is in fact something dyna- 
 mic about the attractions of American women. That 
 does not mean they please the taste of a visitor in 
 every way at the start. There are in the United 
 States women as gracious and as beautiful as any 
 on the other side of the Atlantic, but speaking gen- 
 erally they miss here and there an attribute which 
 an Englishman appreciates. First of all there is 
 the accent which to an Englishman's ears is not so 
 womanlike as the lower tone and softer appeal of an 
 Englishwoman's voice. Many of them too are more 
 decided, with a little more of that assertiveness which 
 perhaps comes from independence. The English- 
 woman has an intense devotion to domestic affairs 
 and a family, and though this is not missing in 
 America it is sometimes shaded down a little by an 
 interest in outside affairs, in private work, in public 
 activities, possibly in sheer amusement — and this 
 makes her a trifle harder, perhaps more practical but 
 now and again not quite so lovable, at least to stran- 
 gers who have not yet acquired the taste. 
 
 American women away from the damp atmos- 
 phere of western Europe have not the bright com- 
 plexions of their trans-Atlantic cousins, but they 
 
The American Woman 39 
 
 more than make up for this by the vivacity of their 
 eyes and the charm of their hair. Whether it is the 
 manner of their dress, or the natural effect of climate 
 or race, they seem to have a slimness and straight- 
 ness of figure compared with Europeans. It is the 
 fashion, too, I think. All the same one's eyes have 
 to become accustomed to it when one is fresh from 
 Europe. They walk well, the American women, up- 
 rightly, with dignity and grace though not with the 
 swinging alertness, and resilience of, say, the Scottish 
 girls. The dress of the American women is a mat- 
 ter of great care, even of elaborateness, and every 
 part of her from her light lace-like collar to her 
 spic-and-span boots is groomed to a nicety. A cul- 
 tured American woman in evening dress is a delight 
 to the eye. There is, however, discernible here and 
 there a tendency to overdress, a disregard for the 
 charm in simplicity as against the effect of omateness. 
 From time to time one meets women who are ob- 
 viously too expensively dressed for what an English- 
 man would regard as taste. These are the excep- 
 tions, and are the inevitable development of the 
 thoughtful care and precision in matters of apparel 
 which is an inherent part of the American woman's 
 being. 
 
 One of the charms of the best American woman 
 is her vivid interest in those affairs of life in which 
 an ordinarily well-read man finds material for thought 
 
40 The New America 
 
 and activity. Right down from the richer circles to 
 the woman in what may be called the lower middle 
 class, there is a pulsing curiosity about life, a desire 
 to know and understand, a courage which flinches 
 from no unpleasant knowledge, indeed asks for it, 
 and withal a humour which if a stranger may hazard 
 an opinion is even more noticeable than in the Ameri- 
 can men. The American woman reads the news- 
 papers fervently. She reads books of all kinds, to 
 an extent which I should guess is unequalled in any 
 other part of the world. It is the fashion to say that 
 the American woman is spoiled by her husband and 
 her men-folk in general. That is probably true with 
 regard to certain circles in the wealthier classes where 
 indulgence is carried to a point which makes not only 
 for selfishness but also for smart emptiness, or sheer 
 stupidity. But it is a libel to apply the verdict gen- 
 erally to American women. By virtue of a camara- 
 derie, a keenness of perception, and independence of 
 outlook which arises partly from the general condi- 
 tions of the country, the American woman is a live 
 and sparkling companion for an intelligent man. 
 Perhaps it is this very fact that leads in some cases 
 to her being spoiled. 
 
 One of the fascinating things about a typical Ameri- 
 can woman is her truly romantic temperament. She 
 is not as a rule sentimental for the sake of gambling 
 in so-called love as a pastime. She loves attention 
 
The American Woman 41 
 
 (what woman does not?), but she is not prepared to 
 pay for it in make-believe currency, in soft glances, 
 in sugary notes, in sweet triflings, which are the be- 
 ginning and end of the game. She does not respond 
 easily or quickly but when she does all of her feel- 
 ings are engaged, and there is no turning back. She 
 expects devotion and will respond with self-sacrifice 
 to the limit. The uncompromising directness of the 
 American temperament comes in here. If she loves 
 a man she wishes to marry him and to marry him 
 quickly and no obstacle of convention is too great 
 for her to overcome. She is contemptuous of diffi- 
 culties when she is really roused. She is thus just 
 such a woman as the poets and the story writers de- 
 scribe for their livelihood. Some of these romantic 
 writers would be disturbed at meeting in the flesh so 
 downright and sincere an example of womanhood. 
 They would certainly meet her in America. Not 
 that this uncompromising attitude towards one of the 
 principal phases of life is without its objections. 
 The ease with which marriages can be legally carried 
 through in America is a discovery for visitors who 
 are accustomed to restraints and delays in England, 
 to retarding influences which have their value in a 
 certain publicity and in the time for reflection which 
 they enforce. The nature of the American women 
 must produce supremely happy marriages, but in 
 conjunction with the facilities for marriage it must 
 
42 The New America 
 
 also at times be responsible for very unhappy results. 
 This is to some extent corrected by the comparatively 
 easy way by which in some of the states divorces can 
 be obtained. It is futile for an Englishman who has 
 lived his life in the atmosphere of his own people with 
 their own racial tendencies and environment to ap- 
 praise in any way the respective position of the sexes 
 in the two countries. It is probable that while greater 
 heights of happiness are sometimes obtained there 
 are also some extensive valleys of noncontent. 
 
 The prevalent American unexpectedness is to be 
 found in women as well as in men. I remember one 
 elderly lady, devoted mother of a charming family, to 
 whom in an unguarded moment I related an incident 
 of American life which to me had a humorous touch. 
 I told of how I had heard in a city of the Middle West 
 with which she was acquainted, of two editors who 
 quarrelled not merely in the columns of their papers 
 but also in their personal activities, and how the 
 quarrel reached a climax when one editor drew a 
 revolver in the street and shot the other dead. I 
 described how an American friend had given me the 
 incident and had related that the bullet which killed 
 the editor went through him and killed another man 
 behind, and how I said an appropriate word of sur- 
 prise and horror, which was replied to by a reas- 
 surance on the part of my American friend. "The 
 assailant didn't escape," he said. "It was too ter- 
 
The American Woman 43 
 
 rible an affair. He had to pay for it. He got a 
 year's imprisonment." This to an Englishman, used 
 to trials where there is rarely anything but swift ex- 
 ecution for murderers, whatever the provocation, was 
 a climax which was irresistible. I told the tale to 
 the American mother, a tender, good woman, with a 
 sense of humour and to my amazement she said 
 calmly, "Yes, I heard of the case and the dead man 
 deserved all he got. A year's imprisonment was far 
 too much for the man who killed him." That is only 
 a small and incidental instance of the way an English- 
 man is unbalanced by new discoveries with regard to 
 mental attitudes. 
 
 One finds among the American women a constant 
 striving for a wider, higher experience of life, and 
 by this I do not mean the ambitions of those who 
 seek an outlet for energy or an opportunity for public 
 notice in politics or social work of an uplift kind. 
 I mean a struggle towards the messages to be derived 
 from books, from music, from history, from the 
 knowledge of men and women. I was in a city in 
 the Middle West where there was a gathering of scores 
 of young women, typists, school teachers, and others 
 who had contributed from their earnings to provide 
 the fee for a lecture on some special phase of litera- 
 ture by an author from Europe. They filled me with 
 interest and appreciation and their private discus- 
 sions afterwards showed them to be young women of 
 
44 The New America 
 
 judgment as well as aspiration. The Chautauqua 
 Movement with its systematic efforts through a period 
 of months, over a great stretch of country, with its 
 lectures attended by hundreds of thousands of en- 
 thusiasts carries on the story. There is an avidity in 
 the American woman for the best things of life. They 
 get many of them too. There is vanity and selfish- 
 ness to be found among some of those who have been 
 pampered by fortune. But there is no Englishman 
 who will remember these with more than a smile and 
 a shrug of the shoulder, while there will remain to him 
 throughout the years, wherever he may travel, the 
 undimmed and fragrant memory of other American 
 women, gentle and devoted, whose unselfishness, com- 
 radeship and sweet understanding will always remain 
 a treasure and an inspiration. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WHAT AMERICAN PUBLIC MEN ARE REALLY LIKE 
 
 One has to adjust mental frontiers in nothing more 
 than in meeting and studying America's foremost 
 citizens. They have the blessed quality of unex- 
 pectedness. They are unfettered. They are men of 
 juice. From an old fashioned standpoint it might be 
 made a matter of criticism by an Englishman that 
 some of them lack restraint, do not cultivate the 
 dignity which sometimes goes with culture. But an 
 English observer on the spot is forced to the retort 
 that on the other hand there is no opportunity in 
 America for the cloak of dignity to hide stupidness, 
 that in the absence of caste privileges the inefficient 
 have no cover. They stand or fall by their achieve- 
 ments and their personality. It is true they miss here 
 and there some of the soft shades — but be it remem- 
 bered that in the humanities America is a stark nation. 
 The first notability that I met in America was 
 Colonel House, the friend of President Wilson, a 
 private and unofficial ambassador to foreign states, a 
 devoted worker for his country, one who shrinks pain- 
 fully from publicity, a man who persistently refuses 
 
 45 
 
46 The New America 
 
 office, and is unknown to public platforms, and yet 
 one of the most powerful men in America. Here at 
 least was a good study to begin with. Colonel House 
 has been called the man of mystery. To talk to him 
 at all was regarded as an achievement. To get at 
 any of his private views an impossibility. He was the 
 big silent man of the United States. I happened to 
 know where he lived in New York owing to an intro- 
 duction to him, or I would have had some difficulty 
 in putting myself in touch. There was no reference 
 to him in the telephone book. Politicians shook their 
 heads at any idea of visiting him. I had heard con- 
 versations in drawing rooms about Colonel House, 
 his abnormal seclusion, and there were always guesses 
 as to the sources of his personal power. 
 
 When I saw him first I did not sense him as a man 
 of power. I doubt if any ordinary person would. 
 I found a man in the fifties, of medium height with 
 thoughtful face, gracious manners, and soft voice. 
 He is a picture of an unobtrusive thoroughbred 
 American. He is unostentation itself, and withal he 
 carries a sincere and simple courtesy. He makes one 
 at home and talks like a friend, talks not too much 
 nor yet too little, just frankly and pleasantly, and it 
 is impossible to imagine him the popularly supposed 
 "man of mystery." It is in truth a little hard to 
 imagine him the force in world politics he really is. 
 Gentleness radiates from him. Presently, however, it 
 
What American Public Men are Really Like 47 
 
 breaks on one that those sympathetic eyes are very 
 straight and for all their kindness are extracting sub- 
 stance from the visitor. One remembers with sud- 
 den relevance that this unviolent man with the soft 
 voice is as swift and accurate a revolver shot as ever 
 came out of Texas. There is a clue in that. One 
 of the qualities of Colonel House is an almost unfail- 
 ing appraisement of men. He knows whom to trust, 
 and more important still he knows whom not to trust, 
 and he never says anything about either discovery. 
 
 Why has Colonel House not accepted office, why 
 has he refused dignities, position, and profit? The 
 answer to that I should think he would never tell in 
 words. I can but make a guess by means of those 
 glimpses of the man which have come to me as a 
 visitor. With a passion to serve his country goes a 
 dislike for public acclaim, a temperamental aversion 
 from clamour. He dislikes noise, distrusts it. He 
 has vision and is uplifted by the knowledge of his 
 silent services. To achieve is his reward. He does 
 not in the least mind being misunderstood. 
 
 His qualities include that telling gift of insight 
 not merely to the kernel of a controversy but to the 
 motives that move clever men. Of intimate friends 
 I should think he makes but few but to those few he 
 gives a depth of affection and loyalty which can 
 never be plumbed or exhausted. Colonel House is a 
 man to know. 
 
48 The New America 
 
 Let me give an impression of another famous Amer- 
 ican, Mr. Roosevelt. I went down to see the ex-Presi- 
 dent at his residence in Oyster Bay with but a word 
 of introduction from a newspaper man. His house 
 away in the country stands in grounds which, in keep- 
 ing with American custom, are unshielded from the 
 road by any hedges or shrubs. I had never seen 
 Colonel Roosevelt and he knew me not at all. After 
 I had knocked at the door for a minute it was sud- 
 denly opened by a thick-set burly man in a tweed coat 
 and knickerbockers. His grey stockings concealed 
 huge calves and he wore a pair of heavy country 
 boots. It was Mr. Roosevelt himself. There was 
 genial inquiry on his face as if he were used to strange 
 callers. I told him my name and that I was a writer 
 from England. "Come in," he said cheerfully, "but 
 I hope you are not going to ask me to say anything 
 for publication." "No, I have just come down to in- 
 troduce myself." I might have added had I been 
 fully truthful that I had also come to see what manner 
 of man was the Colonel Roosevelt of whom I had 
 heard so much. "Come right in," he said cordially, 
 and as I stepped into the hall he said, "Here, let me 
 help you off with your overcoat." He was beaming. 
 If ever a stranger had a warmer welcome I should like 
 to know when or where. He took me into his study 
 where there was a roaring fire (the temperature out- 
 side being near zero), introduced me to a friend of 
 
What American Public Men are Really Like 49 
 
 his, placed me at a comfortable distance from the fire, 
 threw himself into a rocking chair half a dozen feet 
 away, and began to answer questions and to ask them 
 with rapidity, wit, and comprehension. It was be- 
 fore America entered the war and he spoke with re- 
 markable freedom of various countries, of America 
 herself and — I tread a little timidly here — of Ameri- 
 can statesmen in office. He is an artist with words, 
 Mr. Roosevelt, though I suspect he is not greatly 
 troubled whether he is or not. Some of his phrases 
 had punch in them, many had a piercing humour, and 
 even his asides were rich with interest. I suppose 
 one might call him loquacious, but whereas some peo- 
 ple of this kind are merely bursting with words he 
 was bursting with thoughts. Be it said that Mr. 
 Roosevelt in such circumstances is not as is commonly 
 reputed, one who wants to talk all the time; he is a 
 fine listener, and was keen to learn about facts and 
 people in England. Never have I met so frank a man 
 in high position. He talked about himself as freely 
 as about others, and described with humour some of 
 his experiences when President. He suggested his 
 plans for the future with what was amazing openness 
 to a stranger, seeing that those plans were confidential. 
 It wanted no student of human nature to understand 
 the power which this man had secured over vast masses 
 of his fellow countrymen. Electricity was jumping 
 out of him all the time. In moments of excitement 
 
50 The New America 
 
 or at the culmination of a joke his voice rose almost 
 to a falsetto, giving extraordinary effect to his cli- 
 maxes. I came away from Colonel Roosevelt feeling 
 that I had had a real experience. I wondered as I 
 walked down to the roadway as to the ease of access 
 to an ex-President of the United States, and thought 
 of the wire entanglements, to say nothing of the earth 
 works, which would confront a stranger who tried to 
 see one of the ex-Prime Ministers of England. 
 
 Since my visit to Oyster Bay I have seen Mr. 
 Roosevelt on the platform, heard that falsetto voice 
 just as effective in public as it is in private, seen him 
 rouse thousands as he does individuals. He may be 
 right or wrong in his policies, with that I have no 
 concern for the moment, but of the power of the man 
 there can be no shadow of doubt. In speaking on a 
 platform he squares his shoulders, poises his head 
 back pugnaciously, and from time to time brings his 
 closed fist with a sudden blow on to his chest and 
 keeps it there. Once at a meeting after war had been 
 entered into by America, he was interrupted by a man 
 in the gallery who shouted, "Why don't you go?" and 
 Mr. Roosevelt became in a second a roaring furnace. 
 That thick body of his was bent forward, his head 
 was forced out. His finger shook with passion ex- 
 tended towards the interrupter as he hissed that it was 
 not his fault he had not gone to the front, that he de- 
 sired to go. "But I have three sons at the front and 
 
What American Public Men are Really Like 51 
 
 that creature, that miserable creature up there I tell 
 him, although it will be impossible for such a crea- 
 ture to understand it, that I would a thousand times 
 rather have gone myself and given my life." 
 
 Very soon after this I went to a down town office in 
 New York to see a man who typifies America's 
 strength rather than her vivacity. So strange are the 
 twists of human ignorance that I in common with a 
 good many strangers vaguely knew that Mr. Elihu 
 Root had been a distinguished secretary of state yet 
 bore him chiefly in mind because of the pronunciation 
 puzzle on his christian name. Well, a triviality of 
 that kind vanishes at the first glimpse of Mr. Root. I 
 have heard political criticism of him even though he 
 is out of politics now, and every word of that criti- 
 cism may be justified, but is there any one with a dis- 
 cerning eye who has seen him who does not know in a 
 flash that Elihu Root is a big human force! They 
 are not frequent, these elemental men, in any part of 
 the world. I knew he was seventy years of age and 
 yet when he stood up at a meeting in Washington a 
 month before America entered the war I saw a man 
 whose erectness, dark hair and gloomily vigorous 
 eyes indicated fifty, not more. When he spoke there 
 was clarity in his words, and a power that braced and 
 stimulated even one who like myself knew him but as 
 a name with no special recommendation. Robert 
 Louis Stevenson says of one of his characters what 
 
52 The New America 
 
 he might have said about himself. "He was a type 
 hunter among mankind. He despised small game 
 and insignificant personalities, whether in the shape of 
 dukes or bagmen, but show him a refined or powerful 
 face, a passionate gesture, a meaning and ambiguous 
 smile, and his mind was instantaneously awakened." 
 Stevenson would have been on fire at the sight of 
 Elihu Root, a man with words so sternly moderate, 
 with spirit so ruthless and strong, with a brain like an 
 irresistible machine that grinds to power human mo- 
 tives, and the ebullitions of smaller intellects. It is 
 said that Elihu Root has no emotions; it may be. I 
 saw evidence of patience and charity and insight, but 
 possibly these were only instruments of that clear 
 visioned and irresistible will. Seated at his desk in 
 the law office of which he is head he gave me a close-up 
 view a week or two later. My first impressions were 
 confirmed and deepened. The one change was that 
 I saw some signs of age — but not many. A peculiar 
 short fringe coming straight down over the forehead 
 gave a sense of boyishness almost of carelessness. A 
 square face every line telling of power, a strong, hard 
 mouth, eyes laden with grim wisdom — all these things 
 went with a quietness, moderateness of words which 
 was startling. One explanation is illustrative and 
 there is no harm in relating it now. Every one knows 
 that Mr. Root is a leading Republican, that he has 
 been a great fighter, and I mentioned to him the fact, 
 
What American Public Men are Really Like 53 
 
 that while other Republican leaders were severely- 
 criticizing President Wilson for not entering the war 
 he on the other hand contented himself with praising 
 the President for such actions as might conceivably 
 be taken as encouraging to the Allies. There instantly 
 came from Mr. Root biting words about Germany, and 
 he went on to ask was it not better to encourage the 
 President with regard to policy on behalf of the Allies 
 rather than to pick out matters for criticism? That 
 gives you a touch in Elihu Root. No Englishman 
 could meet this man without feeling that in him 
 America has a bulwark. 
 
 I was in an aviation field at Dayton, Ohio, to watch 
 demonstrations by a new war aeroplane, and I saw 
 among the group of spectators a slim man of between 
 forty and fifty who in dress and poise reminded one 
 of a certain type of refined well bred Englishmen. 
 He kept himself in the background among the visitors 
 although he was evidently much sought after. His 
 talk was gentle. In his regular delicate features one 
 found traces of that old British type — Celtic or Ibe- 
 rian — ^which is buried in the recesses of Wales and 
 Cornwall. He had dark blue eyes, dark hair, the 
 straightest nose, and a trim little moustache touched 
 with grey. There was something fragile and retiring 
 about him. He reminded me of J. M. Barrie. That 
 man was one of the daring geniuses of America. It 
 was Orville Wright, the man who first left the ground 
 
54 The New America 
 
 in a flying machine, after years of ceaseless work, 
 investigation and experiment with his brother Wilbur. 
 Since Wilbur's death Orville Wright is the remaining 
 parent of the aeroplane, the inventor who has brought 
 to being the dream of centuries, who has set loose 
 forces the extent and effect of which in war and peace 
 are even now but dimly perceived. And this man 
 who has conquered the air for the world of today, 
 given a priceless secret to future generations, and 
 risked his life in those early experiments a hundred 
 times to do it, looked like the cultured book recluse 
 from the city, anxious not to obtrude himself among 
 the distinguished amateurs who, presumably with a 
 wealth of knowledge, were examining a new engine of 
 science of war. In conversations he strengthened the 
 idea of a man of culture rather than of action. He 
 was not sternly reticent, being far too good natured, 
 but he would rather talk about the ordinary topics of 
 the day than himself. I had a word or two with him 
 on those early days of struggle, disappointment and 
 non-recognition. He described them like a spectator 
 without bitterness, or enthusiasm, though sometimes 
 the glint of a smile stole on him. You could never 
 dream that this man had achieved anything very re- 
 markable, and he calmly took for granted the fact 
 that his postal address was "Orville Wright, Amer- 
 ica." 
 
What American Public Men are Really Like 55 
 
 I went to hear Billy Sunday preach because he is a 
 national institution, and because a man who has been 
 a professional baseball player and has become a re- 
 vivalist with the power to attract tens of thousands 
 whenever he speaks must be a great actor, a prophet, 
 or a supreme man of business. Billy Sunday has 
 been called all these things. Judgment depends 
 largely on one's temperament. I found him at least a 
 tremendous spectacle. 
 
 Billy Sunday is an oval faced man with a big 
 mouth, lively eyes, and the well knit body of the 
 athlete. He is a sensationalist. He is also flam- 
 ingly sincere. It is the novelty of the man that both 
 horrifies and attracts. I saw him walking up and 
 down a platform on a hot summer evening sending 
 forth exhortations with the rattle of machine gun fire, 
 exciting an audience of twenty-five thousand people, 
 and also exciting himself, until at last in a sudden 
 paroxysm of physical energy he slipped off his coat 
 and stood forth in shirt and trousers with handker- 
 chief in hand to wipe continually the moisture from 
 his forehead. The listeners were almost as hot as 
 he was. That is Billy Sunday. His language is 
 ferocious, appealing, audacious, but it is all part of 
 the man. He means every word. He talks of the 
 Deity, and to the Deity, with the utmost familiarity. 
 I heard him break off in the middle of a long prayer 
 
56 The New America 
 
 and suddenly address biting personal words to the 
 Devil. In order to do so he doubled himself at right 
 angles and looked down over the platform on to the 
 floor as though he had Satan below in front of him. 
 He sneered at the arch enemy, derided him, pointed 
 out to him his failures in keeping away certain in- 
 dividuals from the meeting that night. The reality of 
 it was staggering. He could almost hypnotize you 
 into believing the devil was on the floor there throw- 
 ing back snarling words. 
 
 On top of all this Billy Sunday accentuates his de- 
 liverance with his athletics, sometimes swiftly crouch- 
 ing, at other times framing himself in fighting atti- 
 tude, frequently bounding with electric movement 
 from one side of the platform to the other. He is in 
 a quiver the whole time and so are some of his 
 hearers. Words and action go together with him. 
 He is afraid of nothing in either direction. He was 
 recently preaching on Bible women with special ref- 
 erence to the mother of Moses whom he exalted. 
 "When I go to Heaven one of the first persons I'm 
 going to meet is the mother of Moses. I shall say 
 to Peter 'Where is the mother of Moses?' and Peter, 
 he will turn round to one of the angels in attendance, 
 and say 'Page Heaven for the mother of Moses. 
 Billy wants to see her.' " It was all uttered with 
 fervour and seriousness. 
 
 One may or may not receive an uplifting religious 
 
What American Public Men are Really Like 57 
 
 influence from Billy Sunday but it is to be perceived 
 why he is an institution praised, and abused, but not 
 ignored. He certainly brightens life for many — 
 though in different ways. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 WHAT AMERICANS THINK OF THE ENGLISH 
 
 No written words have ever conveyed or can ever 
 convey to the people of one country what are the 
 motive forces in the soul of another country. Resi- 
 dence among the people is necessary to get a knowl- 
 edge of that influence called temperament. States- 
 men sometimes reflect it but not always, authors oc- 
 casionally give us a hint of it, newspapers provide a 
 guide sometimes accurate, sometimes erratic. Among 
 the great majority of the English people there is no 
 true knowledge of the spirit and feelings of Ameri- 
 cans, and among Americans as a whole there is a 
 similar lack of understanding of Britain and the Brit- 
 ish. Ask an American who has lived some years in 
 England or an Englishman who has lived some years 
 in America and you will be surprised at the sidelights 
 and the illuminations which will be forthcoming. 
 
 An Englishman is entitled to a smile when he hears 
 a sincere inquiry as to the powers of the King and 
 questions which suggest that he sits on a golden throne, 
 sceptre in his hand issuing his mandates to the Gov- 
 ernment of the country with the power to hit on the 
 
 58 
 
What Americans Think of the English 59 
 
 head with his sceptre any offending subject who op- 
 poses his royal will. A smile will hardly meet the 
 case of a high British official who had never been to 
 America but who had a son there spending more 
 money than was good for himself or his father. This 
 high official asked advice of a friend of mine recently. 
 "My son is at Boston," he said. "He is spending too 
 much money. A month ago I sent him a substantial 
 sum. He wrote back thanking me for it but his letter 
 was accompanied by lamentations, for he said he had 
 encountered a misfortune. He had been visiting some 
 friends, fiwe miles from Boston and returning at night 
 was set upon by red Indians who robbed him of all he 
 possessed. Do you think that is possible in America 
 at this time?" 
 
 These are extravagant incidents but from farcical 
 altitudes there stretches down a vast range of mis- 
 interpretation and misunderstanding. It is one of 
 the ameliorations of the war that it will bring inci- 
 dental education to both sides, largely by means of 
 those millions of unofficial ambassadors in olive green 
 and khaki who are visiting Europe carrying lessons in 
 their daily talk, and destined to bring back with them 
 to America a thousand truths to be disseminated from 
 one end of the country to the other. 
 
 I find generally speaking that in America the 
 gorgeous history of Britain is unknown save for that 
 disastrous blot upon it in 1776, which, to many, com- 
 
60 The New America 
 
 prises the whole story of that country. For the other 
 side of the picture you have the English with an im- 
 pression that America, a new country, boundless in 
 extent, still with primitive ways, and detached from 
 the older civilizations is yet in some indefinable man- 
 ner still part and parcel of the British world. There 
 is but little realization of the sensitiveness of Ameri- 
 cans, their intensive patriotism, their fervour at being 
 a distinctive nation, pride at their separateness and 
 individuality. There is, or there has been, one other 
 extraordinary misapprehension among high and low 
 in America, arising to some extent from lack of feel- 
 ing or tact or it may be intelligence among individual 
 Englishmen — and that is as to the general feeling on 
 America in the old country. With an amiable criti- 
 cism here and there the English people have never felt 
 anything but the utmost friendliness to Americans. 
 Apart from a gibing joke or two we never heard even 
 in those trying days before America was in the war 
 bitter comment on the United States, and aside from 
 the war there was an almost exaggerated respect for 
 the American genius, reflected partly in the news- 
 papers but more particularly in private talk. Judge 
 of my surprise on coming to America to find there was 
 an impression that Britain on the whole was critical 
 of the United States, that the English people were al- 
 ways taking the opportunity of pin pricking, or fault 
 finding. I think this impression in America was one 
 
What Americans Think of the English 61 
 
 of my most amazing discoveries, for never was a be- 
 lief more mistaken. To an Englishman it seemed 
 that this sensitive and proud nation was entirely mis- 
 taking the attitude of its genial if somewhat old fash- 
 ioned progenitor in Europe. Other travelled Eng- 
 lishmen, friends of America to whom I have spoken, 
 have been equally astonished at this error. One said 
 "I came across from among English people who never 
 say anything unkindly of the Americans to find a be- 
 lief here that we were always bent on criticizing. It 
 is staggering." 
 
 Long before the war began there was a vast body 
 of responsible opinion especially in the Eastern States 
 which was cordial in feeling to Britain, and that feel- 
 ing has deepened since the war began. It would how- 
 ever be blinking facts to deny that widespread through- 
 out the country among the masses of people there was 
 indifference varied in many cases with suspicions or 
 actual antagonism with regard to Britain. It arose 
 from many causes, some of them unconscious. The 
 story of the American revolution in school books has 
 been such as to implant in the young mind a sturdy 
 prejudice against England, and this has persistently 
 permeated high and low, although subsequent knowl- 
 edge and travel has modified or removed the feeling 
 in wide circles. Still the prejudice existed. It was 
 buttressed and added to by the influx of Irish popula- 
 tion during the past fifty years who have come over 
 
62 The New America 
 
 here from a land which was poor, and felt itself op- 
 pressed, and they and their children and even their 
 children's children carried the rancour in their hearts. 
 Among many of these the efforts of Britain for Ire- 
 land in the past generation, the money and beneficient 
 legislation which has been placed at her disposal 
 had made no impression. They still lived back in 
 the middle of the last century. Some of them even 
 hated England more than they loved America. Then 
 there was a vast mixture of other races who with noth- 
 ing to incline them towards Britain became impreg- 
 nated with a feeling, cold rather than hostile, but in 
 no case affectionate. 
 
 There is a wide change going on through the war, 
 because of the better understanding of the British 
 people which has resulted. Still the old tendency has 
 not entirely disappeared. I was talking to a distin- 
 guished citizen of high position only a few days ago 
 and he frankly confessed that in the early stages of 
 the war his instinctive prejudices against England 
 made him feel that America ought not to take part 
 in a war in which she was not specially concerned. 
 He admitted that his feelings were altered now. A 
 prosperous and intelligent tradesman whose fore- 
 bears came to this country from France half a century 
 ago was indifferent to the British cause. "The 
 blooming English," (with a half smile,) indicates the 
 sentiment. And yet when all this is said there re- 
 
What Americans Think of the English 63 
 
 mains the fact that individual Englishmen are received 
 in America with a hospitality, a kindliness and a wel- 
 coming hand such as is a delight and a comfort to any- 
 stranger. He is invited out socially, and profession- 
 ally. Opportunities are forthcoming and he feels 
 an invigorating warm heartedness wherever he goes. 
 Educated Americans (and these reach down through 
 many classes) are keenly interested in the intellec- 
 tual life of Europe and the personalities of the old 
 countries, and possess what may be called a generous 
 intellectual curiosity with regard to the other world. 
 Just now and again an amiable prejudice against Eng- 
 land creeps out but it is not in the least offensive and 
 is such as to put an Englishman at his best rather 
 than to alienate him. Now and again one meets peo- 
 ple who are enthusiastic about England, generally 
 those who have lived there for a period and these are 
 almost more English than the English. It has to be 
 acknowledged too that from time to time one meets 
 Englishmen who are incapable of appreciating the 
 advantages of American life, who are narrow, and 
 who, without intending to be so are distinctly ill man- 
 nered with their fault findings and their criticisms. 
 Though not a general type they produce a bad im- 
 pression wherever they go even among the kindliest 
 of persons. 
 
 If you want to know the opinion of the common 
 people with regard to an Englishman you must visit 
 
64 The New America 
 
 a place of amusement, the vaudeville, moving picture 
 show, or the theatre where from time to time what 
 is supposed to be a typical Englishman is presented 
 to the audience. You will generally find him to be 
 rather vulgarly overdressed, almost invariably wear- 
 ing white spats over his boots, with a single eye-glass, 
 with a walking stick, and silk hat. Whatever his 
 class in life he uses no h's and repeatedly exclaims, 
 "Don't you know," "deucedly clever," and the word 
 "blooming" in every other sentence. That is the 
 type which is supposed to represent the average Eng- 
 lishman. 
 
 Such exaggerations need not be taken too seriously 
 any more than the accentuated drawl which is put 
 into the mouths of the Americans on the vaudeville 
 stage in England sometimes. Nevertheless these rep- 
 resentations do manage to convey an erroneous im- 
 pression among people who have not, and never can 
 have, the opportunity for learning about a foreign 
 people at first hand. Americans conscious of the 
 power and extent of their country and incalculable 
 future have been sensitive with regard to the com- 
 placency and self sufficiency of England. In the fu- 
 ture there will be differences. Americans are now 
 confronted with a hundred manifestations that the 
 English are not insensible to the great qualities of 
 America. The war will also demonstrate that Eng- 
 
What Americans Think of the English 65 
 
 land's stolidity is in essence one of the virtues associ- 
 ated with good fellowship, a placid kindliness and 
 not as is sometimes supposed a patronizing self con- 
 tent. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 WASHINGTON 
 
 The name of Washington somehow conveys the im- 
 pression of a respectable city of officialdom, a city 
 which, though important, is deficient in human inter- 
 est. I went to Washington and found it to be one of 
 the beautiful cities of the world. 
 
 From the Pennsylvania station in New York, a 
 handsome edifice with cathedral like spaciousness, 
 from which one descends as into a crypt to the gloomy 
 platforms beneath, I set out on my two hundred and 
 thirty miles journey southwest, with my English eyes 
 open for new impressions. The flat country, the ab- 
 sence of wheat fields and lush meadows, with a certain 
 sense of barrenness were forgotten in the uplift of two 
 exhilarations — and that was when the train crossed the 
 noble rivers of the Delaware and the Susquehanna. 
 The sight of the great waters like inland seas rolling 
 to the ocean brought back the stories of early America, 
 with the picture of Red Indian life, settlers, cabins 
 and forests sloping to the water's edge. 
 
 At Washington I alighted to find myself in what 
 is called the Union Station, but which might in truth 
 
Washington 67 
 
 have been a King's palace, in its pillared splendour. 
 There was something incongruous in the fact that 
 taxicabs were speeding up to it and hastening away 
 from it. From the station onward one gets immedi- 
 ately the note of Washington, with open squares rich 
 with trees, tall houses and hotels in white, sudden 
 openings with graceful distances and over all a rest- 
 fulness. 
 
 The White House, a charm to the eye, bowered in 
 grounds not too large, is faced by a full foliaged 
 public square with statues which in their gracefulness 
 are a welcome change from some of those in London. 
 Turn your eye towards the station from which you 
 have travelled and you will see nearby a slowly ris- 
 ing hill surmounted by a pile of buildings all in white 
 with a domed dignity. This is the Capitol where Con- 
 gress works. It has an exquisite effect looking down 
 as it does on the spread of the city beneath, remain- 
 ing meanwhile a landmark, and a symbol. 
 
 I had spent some years watching the proceedings 
 in the British Houses of Parliament, and it was with 
 special interest that I went up to Congress to see the 
 House of Representatives and the Senate at work. 
 I found as was to be expected wide differences. In 
 the Mother of Parliaments the parties are divided by 
 a separate aisle down the middle of the Chamber, and 
 in Washington, as in many of the European Parlia- 
 ments, members fill the Chamber in a fan-like series 
 
68 The New America 
 
 of seats. The British Speaker, bewigged and be- 
 gowned, sits in a canopied chair with no desk in front 
 of him. The Speaker of the House of Representa- 
 tives is seated at a desk on a platform, without mark 
 of office except the huge gavel which to my foreign 
 eyes seemed as big as a carpenter's mallet. There is 
 no Prime Minister to face criticism in Congress, no 
 line of Ministers who have to make good before their 
 audience who when the occasion is of sufficient im- 
 portance are liable to turn those Ministers out of of- 
 fice. The authority of Congress is, so to speak, dele- 
 gated and not direct. In the House of Commons cen- 
 turies of precedent, beaten into form by the needs of 
 progress, and a compromising commonsense, have 
 evolved a procedure which is held in reverential re- 
 gard by the members. I witnessed some debating 
 excitement in the House of Representatives and the 
 Speaker, Mr. Champ Clark, rose in his place and used 
 his great mallet with all his strength. He had to 
 keep on hammering. In the House of Commons the 
 Speaker has no gavel but just rises to his feet, and 
 that is sufficient on all ordinary occasions to bring a 
 lively or excited assembly to instant quiet. I dare- 
 say Congress would find British Parliamentary pro- 
 cedure irksome. Every nation has its temperament. 
 
 There is a good deal more freedom in Congress. 
 I saw members reading newspapers, a deadly sin in 
 the House of Commons. I saw, on one memorable 
 
Washington 69 
 
 occasion, children brought in by Congressmen to sit 
 with them, an unheard of thing at Westminster where 
 the floor and members' seats are sacrosanct. With 
 their greater freedom in many directions in the House 
 of Representatives I noticed however that in debate 
 members were courteous to opponents, one of the 
 signs of a public comradeship and joint responsi- 
 bility which is discernible also at Westminster — a 
 parliamentary spirit born of legislative bodies with 
 history and traditions. This similarity served but to 
 sharpen contrasts. One thing I particularly missed 
 was the sharp cut and thrust of "Question Time" in 
 the House of Commons, where the day's proceedings 
 are prefaced by three quarters of an hour of direct 
 enquiries addressed to Ministers on policy or admin- 
 istration. 
 
 The Senate I found more sedate as becomes a sec- 
 ond Chamber. In relative importance it outranks 
 the British House of Lords, the legislative effec- 
 tiveness and human interest of which are much be- 
 hind the House of Commons. The Senate, a potent 
 instrument in the governing of the United States, com- 
 prises able, distinguished and determined men whose 
 calibre is evident even to visitors albeit the speeches 
 like many public utterances are a trifle measured and 
 elaborate in delivery to the ear of one accustomed to 
 the brisker accents of the British Parliament. The 
 House of Lords is a dull place without very much 
 
70 The New America 
 
 power. The American Senate is interesting with a 
 great deal of power. 
 
 In connection with Congress here let it be said that I 
 found not only in Washington but in other parts of 
 the country a wide difference between the estimation 
 of Congressman and the estimation of a member of 
 Parliament in England. A member of the legisla- 
 ture in England is a man of note, who gains social 
 distinction by the addition of the letters M. P. after 
 his name. A Congressman in America is not re- 
 garded in the same light. The fact that he is in Con- 
 gress is of interest but does not elevate him so very 
 much among his fellows. A successful business man 
 in Britain frequently looks upon it as the culmination 
 of his career to enter Parliament. The public so 
 regard it also. A man makes a fortune with the de- 
 liberate intention of entering political life when he 
 has achieved his lower aim. In America legislative 
 work seems to be more largely taken for granted, and 
 a man does not derive any special elevation among 
 his fellows because he takes a hand in it. The ex- 
 planation is perhaps due in part to the fact that there 
 are opportunities open to an English M. P. which are 
 not available to a Congressrrian, at least not in the 
 same direct manner. To become a Minister of the 
 Crown one has to be a member of Parliament, and it is 
 the straight road, if you are fortunate as well as clever, 
 to becoming Prime Minister of the countiy. 
 
Washington 71 
 
 It is said that all Government departments in every 
 country are more or less bound up with red tape, and 
 there is a certain amount of truth in the suggestion, 
 but in Washington there is certainly more openness 
 and accessibility to officials and to Government leaders 
 than is known in England, probably more than is 
 known in any other country. Provided one has a 
 genuine reason for an interview it is possible to see 
 almost anybody short of the President himself. Be- 
 fore the war it was possible to see even him at times. 
 During the war all communications with him was al- 
 most entirely through his secretary. The secretary to 
 the President is an institution. Mr. Tumulty, for he 
 was the incumbent when I was in Washington, occu- 
 pies a position far greater in importance than the sec- 
 retary of any Cabinet Minister in London. He is, I 
 should imagine, the President's confidential adviser 
 and friend. It so happened that I had to see Mr. Tu- 
 multy, during an early visit to Washington and I made 
 inquiries and found that, busy man as he must be, he 
 was open to callers at the White House each day. I 
 had a most interesting visit not so much for its purport 
 or its result as for its sidelights. I had no introduc- 
 tion but I had a professional card. A policeman 
 stopped me at the White House gates, learned my mis- 
 sion and pointed out to me the entrance towards the 
 wing where Mr. Tumulty was to be found. At the 
 door an attendant asked me if I had an appointment. 
 
72 The New America 
 
 I said "No" but explained who I was. The attendant 
 weighed me up, although he took but a second to 
 do so, and then he said "First door on the right, go 
 straight in. Mr. Tumulty is there." I entered the 
 room. Mr. Tumulty was seated at a flat-topped writ- 
 ing table at the other end near the window. He was 
 talking to a man who was standing by the desk, ap- 
 parently a caller like myself. The room was large 
 and round the sides of it, seated in waiting were 
 nearly a dozen people. As the turn of one came Mr. 
 Tumulty would smile across at him and the man would 
 go over to the desk and would sometimes seat him- 
 self in front, but at other times Mr. Tumulty would 
 stand up and go a step to meet him, which may or may 
 not have been an indication that the interview was 
 to be a short one. The conversation between the 
 Secretary and the caller was generally in full hearing 
 of all others present, though occasionally there would 
 be an unobtrusive retirement to the window where 
 the two could talk together in semi-privacy for a 
 minute. All kinds of persons were there. Congress- 
 men, business men, newspaper men, and I heard at 
 least a dozen problems or questions put to Mr. Tu- 
 multy in the hope of transmission to the President. 
 There were consultations on public matters and priv- 
 ate matters, but throughout all Mr. Tumulty was 
 serene, genial, unworried. He was capable too. 
 That geniality and slow speech of his concealed a pro- 
 
Washington 73 
 
 fundity of tact, and swift thought. How under the 
 pressure of work he could preserve that wonderful 
 air of cheerfulness and patience with some who must 
 have been bores passed my understanding. I made 
 my mental obeisance not only to American ability but 
 to American diplomacy. It was rather like being in 
 the ante-room of Cardinal Richelieu and watching the 
 efforts of callers, distinguished and undistinguished, 
 to get a hint of the Cardinal's mind, to put some re- 
 quest before him, possibly to try to obtain an audi- 
 ence. The Secretary's swift review of visitors and 
 their needs to the President at a later hour came to 
 my mind. One may hazard a guess that in some cases 
 it would be piquant. 
 
 The hotels at Washington are a social institution; 
 incidentally they provide one of the city's principal 
 industries. I do not know that it has another apart 
 from Government work. Two of the principal ho- 
 tels are not only places of residence but rendezvous 
 for politicians, diplomats and officials and business 
 men and officers. The entrance halls are like public 
 lobbies, teeming with talking groups and couples. 
 The dining rooms seem to be choked at every hour 
 of the day by those who make eating an excuse for 
 consultations. In one at least of the hotels there is 
 opportunity for public meetings in a hall which will 
 seat hundreds. It was in this hall on my first visit 
 to Washington that I sampled an American repre- 
 
74 The New America 
 
 sentative gathering and came in contact with the un- 
 expected incident which is never long absent from 
 the stranger. The meeting was that of a patriotic 
 association and the speeches were interesting, but 
 what specially held me was the undertoned talk of a 
 middle aged lady on my right, who had travelled some 
 hundreds of miles to attend but who occupied her- 
 self in a running comment to her neighbour who hap- 
 pened to be myself. She was well read, slightly 
 angular, and very serious. At first her talk was level 
 headed though rather high flown. Presently a refer- 
 ence in one of the speeches led to her private an- 
 nouncement that she knew the way to bring the war 
 to a satisfactory end, namely by spiritual effort. The 
 Allies should immediately all lay down their arms. 
 I agreed that this would bring the war to an end. She 
 seemed pleased. She then confided to me that she 
 wrote books, and I politely enquired for particulars. 
 In reply she said that one of her writings was di- 
 rected towards showing how by an eff"ort of will the 
 so-called dead could be brought to life. "We could 
 reassemble Lord Kitchener here at this moment if we 
 chose to do so." She developed her theory at con- 
 siderable length. I asked for further examples of 
 her work, and she explained that she was interested 
 in the resuscitation of forgotten or neglected branches 
 of knowledge. "For instance there is laughter at the 
 idea that witches could ride on broomsticks and yet 
 
Washington 75 
 
 there is nothing to laugh at in it. I have written a 
 little book demonstrating their capacity." I was a 
 stranger in a strange land and I wrestled to get com- 
 mand of myself. She seemed quite sane, and was 
 tremendously respectable. To secure my balance I 
 had to neglect her for a time and turn my attention 
 to powerful words by Mr. Elihu Root from the plat- 
 form for a little. A few minutes later in a pause 
 I sought protection by turning to my neighbour on the 
 other side, a well dressed, middle aged man from 
 New York. It was a relief to get his matter-of-fact 
 reflections on the speeches, and I felt on solid ground 
 again. When the speeches were over I strolled 
 through the crowd in conversation with the New 
 Yorker. He was keen for the Allies. "I ought to 
 be," he said, "my forebears came from France." I 
 was sympathetic and heard other facts. "My family 
 goes back a long way," he continues. "I am indeed 
 descended from no less a person than Charlemagne. 
 By the way, he also hated the Germans. He strung 
 up no less than three hundred of them in one day, and 
 what was more did it when hemp was dear." His 
 face was that of an earnest man. I fled from him to 
 get some tea in the restaurant. I asked the waiter to 
 make it of treble strength. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON AT CLOSE QUARTERS 
 
 President Wilson, a distinguished man of letters 
 and somewhat of a recluse, with an intellectual in- 
 terest in politics and Government, became President 
 of the United States by what his one-time opponents 
 might regard as an electoral accident. If so the ac- 
 cident is one which will leave its mark on the history 
 of the world. 
 
 My first sight of President Wilson was in the most 
 dramatic hour of his life, that hour in which he stood 
 up before Congress to declare war on Germany and 
 tell the tense gathering that all the young men of the 
 country must arm themselves for the struggle. The 
 gathering was at white heat. President Wilson was 
 the coolest man there. 
 
 I was not sure that he was a great man when I saw 
 
 him. I had heard a hundred statements about his 
 
 personality. When he mounted the platform by the 
 
 side of Speaker Champ Clark on the fateful evening 
 
 of April 2nd, I found in that slim, well-groomed figure 
 
 none of the electric output which sometimes tells one 
 
 instinctively that a great personality is at hand. I 
 
 76 
 
President Wilson at Close Quarters 77 
 
 even wondered if he were a commonplace man. 
 Vainly I sought for marks of genius. He might have 
 been a schoolmaster or a business man but I could 
 not see him as the leader of men, far less as the leader 
 of the nations. It may have been my blindness. I 
 saw a man on the tall side of medium height, erect, 
 leisurely, serious, with a long face rather pale, with 
 lustreless eyes, with grey hair smoothly brushed, a 
 touch of frontal baldness, a man with long white hands. 
 He was in morning coat and apparelled with a pre- 
 cision and indeed a polish which goes with a scrupu- 
 lous precise nature. His smile was polite but lifeless 
 as he shook hands with the Speaker. The imagina- 
 tion was affected by his extraordinary calmness in 
 the midst of that Chamber seething with expectancy. 
 Was he an ordinary nervousless man or was he the 
 supremely strong man? He was one or the other. 
 Ice is the only word for him in the midst of that cham- 
 ber of hot emotion. He took a couple of steps to the 
 reading desk before him, put his hand into his breast- 
 pocket and drew from it a sheaf of notes on small 
 sheets of paper. He placed them on the little writing 
 table, with one hand remaining there to keep them 
 steady, and then he began to read aloud in that pecul- 
 iar voice at once so soft and pleasing and penetrating. 
 Still he might have been the schoolmaster. Deathly 
 silence lay over all the assembly. Smoothly and with- 
 out a falter in word or phrase, without a misplaced 
 
78 The New America 
 
 syllable he read on from those sheets of paper a mes- 
 sage which was to take a hundred million people into 
 war and which was to set a mark in the history of 
 civilization for all time. He stood erect and at ease, 
 never shifting a foot as a nervous man might occa- 
 sionally do under tension, and his long white fingers 
 showed no quiver. I began to realize I was looking 
 at a phenomenon. Even so I was not sure of the kind 
 of a phenomenon. Subsequent events have helped 
 me to a judgment but on the evening President Wilson 
 uttered the words which were going to make him a 
 figure in the history books for centuries to come, he 
 might have been a professor addressing a class or the 
 secretary of a company reading out an interesting an- 
 nual report which called at appropriate intervals for 
 a little warming of the voice, a little stressing of 
 special phrases. When he had finished and the bursts 
 of cheering had died down, he turned and shook hands 
 with the Speaker, put the fateful notes in his inside 
 breast-pocket, and stepped down from the platform on 
 his way out with the air of a man who had carefully 
 and successfully accomplished a task necessitating 
 preparation and scrupulousness in delivery, but 
 which once done was part of the day's work, not to be 
 worried about in view of future activities to which 
 the mind must thenceforward be bent. 
 
 I thought about President Wilson afterwards and 
 tried to assimilate the flavour of the man. But for 
 
President Wilson at Close Quarters 79 
 
 that nervous body, that long rather narrow head and 
 intellectual face, I should have called him stolid and 
 yet I knew he was not stolid. He ought to have given 
 me impressions of British restraint. He did not do 
 so. There was something different, something more 
 direct and boyish despite his reserve, than was to be 
 found in a calm, reserved British statesman. I saw 
 in him traces of the mordant, clear-cut, uncompromis- 
 ing Joseph Chamberlain and yet he had a more effec- 
 tive touch and his phrases were more literary. There 
 was in him a suspicion of Mr. Asquith, intellectual, 
 with that mental poise which accompanies full knowl- 
 edge and an inflexible will. On the other hand he 
 was the antithesis of Mr. Lloyd George who is a flam- 
 ing, crackling, bursting kind of a person. The mys- 
 tery of the man was tantalizing. I wondered what 
 the outcome would be. The test to which he was about 
 to be put would unfailingly show his pith and fibre. 
 Was he a great man? Was he one on whom the 
 mantle of his position alone gave distinction? 
 
 The months sped on, America plunged into the 
 welter of war, and President Wilson began to loom 
 forth for good or for evil as one of the directing 
 figures of the conflict. He was criticized by sections 
 in America. There were mishaps and delays, con- 
 fusions and complexities, mere incidents, history will 
 say, in getting a continent into war. Mr. Wilson be- 
 gan to emerge as a force, strong to obstinacy in his 
 
80 The New America 
 
 courses, sometimes a little rhetorical in his diction, 
 but withal a man who got his own way amid a nation 
 of strong men. He may have been right or he may 
 have been wrong in his policies, but the strength of 
 the man was obvious to an onlooker. In some of the 
 criticisms I heard that the President did not mix suf- 
 ficiently, did not visit camps and other national cen- 
 tres, shut himself up in the White House away from 
 councillors, would not discharge departmental chiefs 
 who it was claimed were weak if not inefficient. And 
 during all this time his reputation was steadily rising 
 in Europe and he was reaching a pinnacle of estima- 
 tion probably never accorded to the greatest of Amer- 
 ican Presidents before. Once in a while he would 
 break forth with a speech so accurately tuned, so 
 poignantly vibrant as to still the voice of criticism 
 and to set up a great chorus of acclaim among friends 
 and opponents alike. I began now to see behind the 
 veil that covered President Wilson during his memor- 
 able speech in Congress on April 2nd, 1917. 
 
 It so happened that with a group of others I was 
 received by the President at the White House on the 
 eve of the time when the swelling American army was 
 to be able to make itself felt on the western front. 
 On a sunny spring day I went into the White House 
 and came face to face with the man who held the 
 world's destinies in his grasp. It was a different 
 President Wilson from the one I had seen in Con- 
 
President Wilson at Close Quarters 81 
 
 gress. He was still the well-dressed man with the 
 carefully brushed hair but now his face was irradi- 
 ated with a welcoming smile, and gentleness of man- 
 ner lay on him. The look of friendship was in his 
 eye. He stood in the midst of a group with his finger 
 and thumb in his waistcoat pocket talking appeal- 
 ingly. That long jaw, that curiously mobile mouth, 
 and soft southern accent, moulded themselves into 
 an aspect of reserve which never left him. It was 
 the reserve of strength. He had a poise of words, a 
 poise of manner and a poise of will which it was 
 easy to understand would bewilder more impulsive 
 people and sometimes dishearten them because they 
 would not understand it. He turned from one to 
 another in the group with a quick gesture and a toss 
 of the head not in the desire for approbation but be- 
 cause with a probing intuitive instinct he wanted to be 
 in touch with the party, wanted his words and ideas 
 to be understood. Freely and frankly he talked, ex- 
 plaining his policy and always using with a quiet 
 resoluteness the first person singular. He took it for 
 granted that he v/as the responsible man. He sought 
 to shift no burden on to other people, but there was no 
 arrogance about him for that is impossible in a man 
 with the temperament of Woodrow Wilson. There 
 was however a subtle assertiveness, a crystal con- 
 sciousness that his work called for personal decision 
 continuously. It was obviously impossible for this 
 
82 The New America 
 
 man to be in any position of authority without using 
 that authority to the fullest limit in his belief of what 
 was right. He spoke on vitally important matters, 
 but during the whole of his twenty minutes discourse 
 there was not one single phrase or ever a word wasted. 
 As a literary composition it was closely knit and with- 
 out flaw. His thoughts were interwoven in perfect 
 order, and had a directness and a relevance which set 
 ideas jumping in those who heard it. He used a lit- 
 tle swear word once. He joked once. But every- 
 thing he said fitted into the framework perfectly. No 
 sentence could be called brilliant in itself, but the 
 talk as a whole was that of a brilliant man. I shook 
 hands on leaving him. He has a soft and steady un- 
 hurried grip with those long fingers. You can learn 
 much from a handshake sometimes. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 AMUSEMENTS AND SOME CONTRASTS 
 
 The incidentals in life are more important to the 
 ordinary individual than the tendencies of politics. 
 Taken in the mass, men and women are day by day 
 creatures. America is a glittering new country with 
 the characteristics of youth and ardency, a country 
 wherein dignity is unexpectedly mixed with a free- 
 dom from conventions. Let an Englishman take a 
 glimpse at her amusements. 
 
 The moving picture business has become a great 
 industry, and if you want to know why you must go 
 to a place like the "Rialto" in New York, a large 
 and luxurious theatre constructed for the primary 
 purpose of showing pictures on the screen. A deli- 
 cate pink-tinted light steals unobtrusively through the 
 ceiling and sides. The stage is flanked by changing 
 pictorial scenes placed in recess. An orchestra num- 
 bering scores, it may be a hundred, is set in below 
 the level of the stage in front. The entertainment 
 opens with music from this orchestra not slap-dash 
 popular jingles, but extracts from the masters, given 
 
 with care and finish. No picture in this, — probably 
 
 83 
 
84 The New America 
 
 the finest picture house in the world — gets so much 
 applause as that music. There are songs by known 
 singers, sometimes opera choruses. Afterwards the 
 picture of the night is given in some romantic episode, 
 a wild and woolly west drama, or some rippling do- 
 mestic tale, and whatever is the story it is presented 
 with a photographic elaborateness and completeness 
 such as we do not know in England, a story moreover 
 which touches only the healthy sides of life. Finally 
 there is a rollicking comical series probably drawn 
 by one of the popular cartoonists which will tickle the 
 fancy of even the most highbrowed of intellectuals. 
 No more than say ten seconds seems to separate the 
 pieces of the entertainment; it goes like a piece of 
 swift machinery from start to finish. In the course 
 of many visits I have rarely seen the time when there 
 were vacant seats in the large auditorium. Prices 
 go from thirty cents to sixty cents or as we should 
 say in England one shilling and threepence to half a 
 crown. The audience range up to the millionaire 
 class for if you enjoy an entertainment in America you 
 can go and see it without any thought of caste, whoever 
 and whatever you are. President Wilson in Washing- 
 ton visits each week what we should call a music hall 
 performance and what in America is called vaudeville, 
 not a costly and ornate show such as that given in the 
 Palace or Alhambra in London but a lively entertain- 
 ment of the ordinary well-to-do hall such as the Ox- 
 
Amusements and Some Contrasts 85 
 
 ford. People think no less of the President but 
 rather more because of his simple tastes and human 
 feelings. 
 
 Thus it is that rich and poor flock to the movies, not 
 only in the great cities but in the smaller communities 
 throughout America. If I were asked to name one 
 recreation more general than any other in America 
 I should say the moving pictures. It has incidentally 
 some good results. A dozen educational influences 
 can be brought to bear in the pictures which are not 
 available by means of newspapers, the theatre, or 
 public meetings. 
 
 With regard to the stage in general an Englishman 
 sees but few variations from taste in England. Good 
 comedies and strong melodramas are favourite meat. 
 George Bernard Shaw lasts a week or two. Forbes 
 Robertson is ever popular. In one direction, espe- 
 cially in New York there is an innovation for an Eng- 
 lishman. Many of the popular restaurants have the 
 so-called cabaret shows, that is to say an entertain- 
 ment part of which is provided by performers and 
 part by the guests themselves. Either on the plat- 
 form or on the dining room floor there are what we 
 in England call "turns" — a fantastic dance by a thinly 
 clad young woman, or chorus dances by groups of 
 young women, gaily clad but still not over clad, a 
 sentimental or patriotic song by a young man in 
 evening dress, and sometimes a coarser ditty rattled 
 
86 The New America 
 
 out in metallic fashion by a lady who makes up in 
 violence of emphasis what she lacks in tunefulness. 
 This entertainment is varied by the guests themselves 
 in the shape of a dance to the music of the orchestra. 
 The dance is in a cleared space in the middle of the 
 room. Young men and women and elderly men and 
 women get up from their places, have a dance and sit 
 down again and complete their meal. It is all very 
 unusual to an Englishman. Dancing it should be 
 added is a rage among widespread circles. Waltzes 
 are a variety, and variations of the one-step and two- 
 step are the staple. 
 
 Crowds of thousands and tens of thousands go to 
 the baseball matches. Baseball is and will remain 
 to the Englishman a glorified and developed game 
 of rounders. Americans think that cricket is slow 
 and boresome, and that baseball is the king of games. 
 A cricketer looking on at baseball has his cricket 
 instincts jarred by the way the pitcher sends the ball 
 at the batter. He slings it with a fierce throw, hor- 
 rible heresy for a bowler in cricket. The quickness 
 and power of the man with the club is exhilarating 
 and so also is the agility and skill of the fielders. 
 The game goes with snap and dash: the men are in 
 and out, the sides are in and out, all in a swiftly 
 moving hour or two. "Think of this in comparison 
 to cricket," said an enthusiast to me one day. There 
 is no reply. You have to be an Englishman edu- 
 
Amusements and Some Contrasts 87 
 
 cated in cricket from early school days to manhood 
 to understand the thousand subtle fascinations of that 
 great pastime. An American will look at you 
 blankly if you try to explain the supreme joy of a 
 "late cut" or a "leg glide." They do not appreciate 
 the accumulated skill of a cricketer, and cannot be 
 expected to understand that one essential is the test of 
 patience, endurance, and doggedness. The niceties 
 in cricket, of judgment as well as of execution, are not 
 for Americans. Their highly strung nervous tempera- 
 ment has no tolerance for a game which to the stranger 
 appears slow, but which for the initiated has its fas- 
 cinations in a mixture of scientific skill, gracefulness, 
 the power to hold on, touched with flashes of brilli- 
 ance. Ranjitsinjhi would mean nothing to Ameri- 
 cans. They would regard W. G. Grace as a curiosity. 
 In nothing more than their respective aff'ections for 
 baseball and cricket are the temperamental diff"erences 
 of an Englishman and an American set forth. There 
 are however common ideals behind both, the rigid 
 fairness, the unselfishness of team work, the gener- 
 osity and self denial. To "play the game" is a phrase 
 which in after life has a meaning for the best men of 
 both countries. 
 
 Americans and Britons can find a common ground 
 in golf. There are the same joys, the same calami- 
 ties, almost the same swear words on the delightful 
 courses of the United States. An Englishman who 
 
88 The New America 
 
 wants to feel at home should immediately secure en- 
 trance to an American golf club. 
 
 A new spectacle of America at play is the seaside 
 resort in the summer. An Englishman will certainly 
 miss the homelike and beautiful hamlets, the warm 
 and cheering popular resorts like Folkestone or Cro- 
 mer or Broadstairs. Flat, unrelieved country gives 
 down to the sea. I went one summer's day to Long 
 Beach about an hour's journey from New York. 
 There were thousands of bathers on the scene, men 
 and women all mixed together. Officials were present 
 to see that the proper bathing dresses were worn, and 
 wonderful bathing dresses they were so far as the 
 women were concerned — of all colours, all shapes, 
 with a dozen effects. And here be it said that women 
 who go into the water must all wear stockings, a dis- 
 play of the calf of the leg being regarded as improper. 
 I wonder if Americans would be shocked at the sight 
 of our bathing places. Be that as it may I found some 
 freedom, and less reserve than is customary at English 
 resorts. It is a bathing costume life on the American 
 beaches. Men and women in light garb lie on the 
 sand, and sit on the sand, and walk about or run about 
 in their bathing dresses in a way which is not in con- 
 sonance with the English practice. The prejudiced 
 English eye finds something unpleasant in those half 
 clad men lingering about sun-bathing with their 
 women friends. Lon<}: Beach seemed to me to be a 
 
Amusements and Some Contrasts 89 
 
 packed mass of men and women who in spite of the 
 women's stockings were not garbed for lounging or 
 prolonged conversation. The climate makes a dif- 
 ference. Attitude of mind has also a bearing. 
 
 It is a highly coloured mosaic which makes up the 
 American life. I had heard terrible tales about Tam- 
 many, had read a book which demonstrated clearly 
 some of its misgoverning features, and was prepared 
 to meet monsters in its leaders. I had occasion to 
 come in contact with a high official, the District At- 
 torney of New York, who was classed as a Tammany 
 man. I chanced to be present when a distinguished 
 foreigner at the District Attorney's office had to give 
 some explanations, delicate and embarrassing for a 
 man in his position, with regard to charities with 
 which his name was associated. There had been 
 some little muddle and, thanks to a temporary official, 
 a touch of doubt as to the genuineness of the chari- 
 ties. As a matter of fact they were honestly run with 
 the highest of motives. But the distinguished for- 
 eigner, not a good hand at business, was soon deep in 
 involved explanations with the questioning lawyers 
 who took his preliminary examination in hand. They 
 were courteous but keen, very keen. Their enquiries 
 showed no mercy. In the midst of the business in 
 came the District Attorney to take charge of the mat- 
 ter, and with a kindly salutation to his visitor he mo- 
 tioned his assistants to continue their work. To a 
 
90 The New America 
 
 purely legal mind the irrelevancies, the tortuous ex- 
 planations, of the gentle, elderly, loquacious foreigner 
 would have been suspicious. The District Attorney, 
 a debonair man with quiet eyes and a humorous 
 mouth, fiddled with a book, looked over a document, 
 turned an occasional uninterested glance at his 
 lawyers and their erstwhile victim. Presently he 
 broke in smoothly, gravely but decisively, drew an 
 illustration from Charles Dickens to show how no- 
 tabilities should be on their guard against exploita- 
 tion, conveyed a caution in the anecdote. The next 
 minute he was pleasantly discoursing on Dickens in 
 general which was his way of showing the enquiry 
 was at an end. What had happened was that in those 
 few minutes of listening he had formed a judgment 
 of the man under examination, a judgment which 
 transcended all questions and replies, assured him 
 that the foreigner was an honest gentleman despite 
 his mixed and nervous explanations. At one stroke 
 the District Attorney had cut through all the network. 
 There was decision and charm about him. A man- 
 nerly gentleman is the same all over the world. I 
 know this is no argument for Tammany, but after all 
 one is human. 
 
 I had been told that American long distance trains 
 were the fastest and most comfortable in the world. 
 I found them travelling at the same rate though not 
 any faster than the best trains in Europe, found them 
 
Amusements and Some Contrasts 91 
 
 to speak plainly, not nearly so comfortable, perhaps 
 owing to their steel structure, perhaps because of the 
 different way the tracks are laid — at any rate with 
 a continual vibration and intermittent jolting unusual 
 in British trains. Pullman sleeping arrangements 
 too are in comfort far behind the English separate 
 compartments, each of which is a real bedroom in 
 itself at a cost no greater than is charged for the berth 
 in the Pullman. 
 
 The wooden houses of America are a surprise to 
 one who comes from a country of solid brick and 
 stone. The newer erections and especially the country- 
 homes, bowered as they are in trees and set in an 
 atmosphere of greenery, are a delight to the eye in 
 their freshness, lightness and comfort. But wooden 
 houses do ,not improve with age. Unless scrupulously 
 cared for they become shabby. You can however 
 easily build new ones. The big hotels have material 
 advantages over most of the hotels in Europe. Tele- 
 phones are excellent in their completeness. A fea- 
 ture is the separate bathroom for each guest. One 
 has however to get used to the task of going down to 
 breakfast with unpolished boots, for whereas in Eng- 
 land it is the custom at night to place one's boots out- 
 side the bedroom door in the corridor and find them 
 there brightly polished ready to wear in the morn- 
 ing, there is in America no such habit, and the guest 
 has to take his chance or to use his energy in finding 
 
92 The New America 
 
 a boot cleaner in the street or in the basement of the 
 hotel. 
 
 Some of the principal newspapers are national in- 
 stitutions, a little copious for the Englishman, but 
 carefully constructed, packed with f actful matter, and, 
 the best of them, models of good writing on the edi- 
 torial pages. In the less serious papers there is 
 sometimes a strength of comment due to a lack of 
 stringent libel laws, but it makes life much brighter 
 for readers. The main difference from English 
 papers is that space seems no object, and topics are 
 written up rather than written down. In some 
 journals there is a less meticulous regard for accuracy 
 in detail, but one cannot have everything in this im- 
 perfect world, and at any rate American papers are 
 rarely dull. There is frequently an element of care- 
 free gaiety which spares neither man nor his institu- 
 tions. One of my first weeks in America was bright- 
 ened by a paragraph reprinted from a local paper 
 announcing news of a citizen in one of the smaller 
 cities in the Middle West. It ran something like this : 
 "Mr. S. Brown, a resident of Newville who has been 
 blind for thirty years, has made it a practice to take 
 a walk of a couple of miles every morning for the 
 sake of his health. Yesterday morning he chose for 
 his walk the side of the railway track. The end of 
 the story is so painful we do not like to print it." 
 
Amusements and Some Contrasts 93 
 
 The Sunday papers have scores and scores of pages. 
 To a bewildered visitor they seem acres in extent. 
 It is however not necessary to read them all. 
 
 In the big cities in New York there is not nearly 
 so much of what we would call home life as there is 
 in England. It is the custom for persons of nearly 
 all stations to live in flats or as they are called, apart- 
 ments, rather than in houses large and small. Peo- 
 ple who can well afford a mansion prefer one of these 
 apartments. There is a strange sense of temporari- 
 ness in even the best of them. They give a visitor 
 an impression, however spacious and however lux- 
 urious, of being but a halting place, a depot for a 
 hurried breakfast rather than a home. 
 
 In a thousand ways America is more outspoken 
 than the older peoples, indication perhaps of a new 
 outlook as well as of courage. In the West divorces 
 are more easily to be obtained than in other parts of 
 the country, and consequently the unhappily married 
 go there for temporary or prolonged residence. The 
 result is a continual but changing gathering of the 
 newly unmarried, and it is perhaps to meet the desires 
 and impulses of these people that there appear ad- 
 vertisements in the local papers similar to the fol- 
 lowing. 
 
 "Marry if lonely — For results try me: best and 
 most successful. 'Home maker': hundreds rich wish 
 
94 The New America 
 
 marriage soon: strictly confidential: most reliable: 
 
 years experience: descriptions free. 'The 
 
 Club.' " 
 
 "Marry if lonely — For speedy marriage, try my 
 club: very successful; best, largest in the country; 
 established 12 years; thousands wealthy wishing 
 early marriage: confidential; descriptions free. The 
 Club." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 MY MOST INTERESTING AMERICAN 
 
 Once in a while a stark man appears in a country. 
 He has qualities which are such, despite any patriot- 
 ism, to make him a citizen of the world. He may 
 not be faultless, or particularly popular, but he is 
 big, and hard, and strong and real. In such a man 
 sincerity bums like a furnace and shrivels into ashes 
 the more or less innocent everyday evasions, and 
 unconscious dishonesties of lesser men and women. 
 Such men are strong meat — not food for babes. 
 Rich is the country that produces them. 
 
 I have met one in America who notwithstanding 
 his eighty-seven years has a mind sharp-edged, and 
 gleaming. His tongue is as caustic, his sympathies 
 as lively, his courage as unabashed as when a colonel 
 of thirty in the Union Army he had an inter\dew with 
 President Lincoln at the White House, outlined a 
 method in conducting the campaign and suggested 
 the removal of General McClellan. General Rush 
 C. Hawkins lives in the Washington Square district 
 of New York, a commanding figure of a man in spite 
 
 of the weight of years, who may be seen taking his 
 
 95 
 
96 The New America 
 
 constitutional up Fifth Avenue of an afternoon, or 
 mounting the steps of the Union League Club, where 
 even forty years ago he was a prominent figure. It 
 was my good fortune to meet him shortly after my 
 arrival in America, and I knew I had made a dis- 
 covery. General Hawkins is one of the persons who 
 convey something of themselves in their looks — spare 
 and gaunt with a long face, a fighter's jaw, a delicate 
 uprearing forehead, with a glint of humour in eyes 
 and mouth, and with the eagle nose of the man con- 
 temptuous of fear or favour. Virility lights him 
 even at eighty-seven. He is a picture of what I have 
 imagined the old Duke of Wellington to look like, 
 "The Iron Duke" as he was called. General Haw- 
 kins, American to the core, has some of the character- 
 istics of that old breed of last century well-to-do Eng- 
 lishmen, kindly in their private relations, fierce to 
 their public enemies, and whose attitude to shallow 
 theorists and effusive optimists was summed up in 
 the phrase "The country is going to the dogs, sir." 
 That does not mean that General Hawkins is narrow, 
 for he is travelled and cultured, with an expert's in- 
 terest in those things which inspirit high natures, 
 paintings, music, literature, philosophy, and, last but 
 not least, men and women. 
 
 Back in the sixteenth century there were three 
 Devonshire men who swept the seas for Elizabeth and 
 their names were Hawkins, Drake and Frobisher. It 
 
My Most Interesting American 97 
 
 was probably in the seventeenth century that General 
 Hawkins' ancestors reached America, and they came 
 from Devonshire, and I like to think that the old 
 General is a descendant of that sea dog who knew 
 not fear, and helped to tie the British flag to the mast 
 head for all the world to see. Be that as it may there 
 was a grandfather of General Hawkins, Dexter 
 Hawkins, who fought in the Revolutionary war, keep- 
 ing the family name to the front in the field where 
 it had won distinction. It was his grandfather on 
 his mother's side, William Hutchinson, who was Ad- 
 jutant of the "First Squadron of Horse, Vermont 
 Forces" in the war of 1812 which patrolled the Can- 
 adian border at Vermont. 
 
 Of the fighting blood in the Hawkins family there 
 can be no doubt. Rush Hawkins, a boy of fifteen, 
 deliberately went away from his Vermont home in 
 1846 to join the American army in Mexico, and al- 
 though he could only secure enlistment as a private, 
 he saw war in being, slept under canvas, experienced 
 camp life and generally picked up the ways of a 
 soldier. He must have been a hardy young rascal, 
 as well as an independent one, a curious boy too. I 
 should like to have known him. 
 
 General Hawkins once said to me with a hard smile, 
 "I was bom without faith, hope or fear." But that 
 dogmatic negative assertion covers an implication of 
 positive qualities with which his life is amply marked. 
 
98 The New America 
 
 In the twenties he spent a couple of years in the South 
 and that spirit, at once so hard and so sympathetic, 
 was revoked by the institution of slavery. When in 
 1861 the war came he was in New York, and pro- 
 ceeded immediately to raise a regiment for service, 
 and the "Hawkins Zouaves" became the name which 
 even now sounds like a trumpet not only to those who 
 fought, but to their sons and grandsons. He soon 
 had opportunity for service. It became necessary to 
 capture southern forts which had been established 
 at Hatteras Inlet, and in the squadron which went 
 away under sealed orders in August 1861 from New- 
 port News, Colonel Hawkins was the second in com- 
 mand of the military forces, consisting of four com- 
 panies of his own regiment and other details. There 
 was a clean-cut piece of work, with bombardment and 
 the landing of troops at Hatteras, and Colonel Haw- 
 kins was left in charge of the captured forts. He was 
 a man bom to incident and adventure as the sparks 
 fly upwards. It so happened that Governor Morgan 
 of New York sent down to him an officer to be joined 
 to his regiment, but Colonel Hawkins, knowing that 
 the character and private life of this officer was sub- 
 ject to reproach, refused to assign him to a regiment 
 of which he was as proud as a sweetheart. There 
 was immediate trouble. General Williams came 
 down, placed Colonel Hawkins under arrest for dis- 
 obedience of orders and sent him up to headquarters 
 
My Most Interesting American 99 
 
 at Old Point Comfort for trial. As luck would 
 have it the Government at Washington wished infor- 
 mation as to the position at Hatteras Inlet, and Col- 
 onel Hawkins was released from arrest and sent 
 to Washington to give the benefit of his advice and 
 knowledge to the Government with regard to the cap- 
 tured positions. He saw President Lincoln, spent an 
 evening with him at the White House, and as a sequel 
 was present at the next day's meeting at the Cabinet. 
 It was during his talk with President Lincoln that 
 Colonel Hawkins was enabled to give the story as to 
 his insubordination and what had happened to him- 
 self. Lincoln listened gravely and sympathetically 
 and then said: "You did the right thing although 
 perhaps you did it in the wrong way. This matter 
 must be settled quietly and amicably. You will go 
 back and tell the General this from me. You will 
 say that I do not wish to offend Governor Morgan, 
 Governor of the State of New York, on which I must 
 rely to draw the largest number of troops to end this 
 terrible war. You and the Governor and the Gen- 
 eral must settle this matter between you. You can 
 say from me that I think you acted rightly." 
 
 It was shortly after this that Colonel Hawkins hav- 
 ing learned the position of affairs at Washington, 
 "Over run with McClellan's Generals who did noth- 
 ing but talk," became incensed at McClellan's inac- 
 tivity, took council with Mr. Caleb Smith, one of 
 
100 The New America 
 
 the Cabinet, and secured interviews with President 
 Lincoln to whom he explained that action should be 
 taken immediately, that the lack of movement of 
 the army of the Potomac was playing into the ene- 
 mies' hand, and suggested a line of action which 
 would bring, he believed, both battle and victory. 
 One can picture a very human and very wise Abra- 
 ham Lincoln listening to the enthusiastic and hard 
 headed young Colonel, and I have no doubt that it 
 was the memory of this interview which later caused 
 him to say "I wish all the officers in the army had 
 your spirit. If they had this war would soon be 
 over." The President took in all the arguments 
 which the Colonel laid before him, put in a ques- 
 tioning word here and there, and showed both sym- 
 pathy and understanding. When the interview drew 
 to its close he expressed his appreciation. He 
 added : "I shall not remove General McClellan from 
 his position as Commander in Chief. He is my 
 General and I must support him." The President 
 however gave his card to Colonel Hawkins, and in- 
 structed him to go to General McClellan and to lay 
 before him his arguments for an immediate advance. 
 Colonel Hawkins went over to General McClellan's 
 office, and sent up his card with the President's only 
 to be told that General McClellan was too busy to 
 see him. The young Colonel would not perhaps have 
 been so offended by the rebuff had he known that 
 
My Most Interesting American 101 
 
 McClellan a few days before had refused an inter- 
 view to President Lincoln himself. How McClellan 
 was subsequently removed from his command after 
 the utmost patience and kindness from Lincoln is a 
 matter of history. It was in 1864 that President 
 Lincoln recalling that early interview to Colonel Haw- 
 kins spoke of McClellan. "Poor George. I did all 
 I could for him. He could do nothing for himself." 
 
 Of the dash and courage with which Colonel 
 Hawkins led his men in action there is evidence in 
 the official records. On one occasion at least his 
 sagacity saved a great deal of useless slaughter. 
 After the first battle of Fredericksburg, where an 
 attack on practically unpregnable positions cost 
 thousands of men against southern losses of a few 
 hundreds there was a council of Generals to formu- 
 late another attack next morning, and it was the facts 
 and arguments of Colonel Hawkins, present as a bri- 
 gade commander, which caused General Bumside to 
 countermand the order for the new attack. 
 
 But the salt and savour of General Hawkins springs 
 not from the one fact that he is a fighter, but from 
 many other things that he is in addition to being a 
 fighter. He was chairman of a Committee of the 
 Union League Club in 1875 which investigated Tam- 
 many methods and presented a report as poignant in 
 facts and figures as in argument. There were searing 
 words. Needless to say that General Hawkins was 
 
102 The New America 
 
 the writer. He has his prejudices, and whether they 
 may be altogether well founded or not he retains 
 them. It is possible to listen to his bitter denuncia- 
 tions with joy even when one does not entirely share 
 his views. He has many links with England for 
 which he has both affection and admiration, but 
 he heartily dislikes some of the English. "My 
 first books as a boy were 'Scottish Chiefs' and the 
 'Life of Wallace.' I loved to read of old Wallace 
 with that great claymore of his sweeping off the 
 heads of acres of Englishmen." (There would be a 
 chuckle after this.) He loves the French. He has a 
 passion for books, paintings, is an art connoisseur 
 and has a fine taste in literature. Forty years 
 ago he wrote the first, and then, only authoritative 
 history in relation to the first books produced from 
 early printing presses. Since then he has spent a 
 quarter of a century in collecting first books or at 
 any rate early books from the first presses of the first 
 printers of the fifteenth century. His collection now 
 ranks with that possessed by the British Museum 
 and is probably the second finest in the world. His 
 love of art is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that 
 in 1889 he was appointed American art commissioner 
 at the Paris Exposition. During his work there he 
 had his famous encounter with Whistler, reported in 
 the "Gentle Art of Making Enemies," an encounter 
 in which the General took upon himself, in view of 
 
My Most Interesting American 103 
 
 Whistler's demands, to agree with almost offensive 
 alacrity that the famous painter should immediately 
 remove the whole of his exhibits from the American 
 collection. It was during this period in Paris that 
 he had talks with King Edward VII, then Prince of 
 Wales, and received from him a private invitation 
 to call and have a chat next time he was in London. 
 I can not help thinking that the pride of General 
 Hawkins was at least the equal of the pride of the 
 heir apparent to the British throne, who revealed 
 himself as a genial well informed keen man and who 
 in other circumstances might have been an acceptable 
 friend. 
 
 Running like a golden thread through the eventful 
 life of this belligerent critical man of the world was 
 the companionship of his wife who was Miss Ann- 
 mary Brown, daughter of Mr. Nicholas Brown of 
 Providence. She is now dead. Her portrait shows 
 some secret of the sweet influence she brought to 
 bear on a man with few of the softer illusions about 
 human nature and who had one ideal only during 
 forty-three years of married life. It is too sacred a 
 matter for an outsider to do more than touch with the 
 lightest hand. But no one who knows this strong, 
 dominating man can fail to perceive the beautiful 
 mystery within, which has persisted from the day 
 when he married, twenty-nine years of age, and is 
 now, after his wife is gone, as strong and as pervad- 
 
104 The New America 
 
 ing as in those sweetheart times when few of those at 
 present living had come upon the earth. Since Mrs. 
 Hawkins' death he has established at Providence a 
 memorial to her which houses a notable collection of 
 art treasures, the early books of which I have spoken, 
 an assembly of pictures, old manuscripts and some 
 fifteen thousand letters, many of them from the dis- 
 tinguished men and women who have lived during his 
 time. 
 
 His naked fierce sincerity would lead casual ob- 
 servers to believe that he was a cynic — and indeed 
 in some matters he is a cynic. He has for instance 
 wrestled with divines about the everlasting secret. 
 He does not wish to live again, he says. Brusquely 
 he asks whether the enormous majority of humans 
 are worth preserving. "Why there is only one per- 
 son in fifty thousand persons who is worth acquain- 
 tance, and what is the Almighty going to do with 
 all this trash? I don't want to live another life on one 
 of the rings of Saturn or anywhere else. If there is 
 immortality, dogs and horses are at least as worthy 
 of it as human beings. Is there any man or woman 
 with the fidelity of dogs, with the unselfishness of 
 dogs? Of course there's not." Here it may be 
 said in parenthesis that the old General has always 
 been moved by a love of animals. He was one of 
 the original members of the Society for the Preven- 
 tion of Cruelty to Animals founded by Henry Bergh 
 
My Most Interesting American 105 
 
 — a society from which has sprung 400 similar or- 
 ganizations in various parts of the world. 
 
 He will tell you that he adopts the considered judg- 
 ment of Simon Newcomb, the astronomer, who devoted 
 a long life to studying the heavens for the practical 
 purposes of the Government, and who once said to 
 him "In my experience I have never discovered any 
 'fact' that leads me to believe there is an existence 
 beyond the present." 
 
 Yet this fierce, contemptuous, unbelieving critic has 
 written down his code of life in words illumined 
 by spirituality. I cull a few passages. 
 
 THE FINDING OF PEACE 
 
 "Those who love nature 
 And search understandingly 
 Will find the infinite." 
 
 THE USES OF LIFE 
 
 "Not as we take but as we give, 
 Not as we pray but as we live, 
 Not as they say but as we do, 
 Not as we reap but as we sow." 
 
 CREDO 
 
 "I believe in unconditioned honesty. 
 The power and practice of truth, 
 Love of the beautiful, and the 
 Influence of noble aspirations." 
 
 He is a man of no compromise, General Hawkins, 
 and yet here is an extract which carries with singular 
 
106 The New America 
 
 clearness the imprint of mingled challenge and hope: 
 "To men the puzzle of the world will never be 
 revealed. The all-powerful illimitable creative force 
 that directs its course and that of numberless others 
 is a jealous authority holding this secret of the ages 
 under single control. Men may surmise, guess, be- 
 lieve, have faith and hope, but to no purpose. The 
 little we may be permitted to understand about this 
 boundless power and its creation can come to us only 
 through contemplation and study of its works, our 
 world, as we see, love, and learn to appreciate its 
 intimate benevolence and never ending enchanting 
 beauties." 
 
 His comments on public affairs are as pungent as 
 they are penetrating. He is a swift discerner of 
 men and women. Some might find in him a harsh 
 philosopher. His words are often without mercy. 
 And yet in private his benefactions are unceasing, 
 bestowed often in secret and sometimes anonymously. 
 To those persons, men and women, whom he likes, 
 he has the graciousness which for centuries has been 
 accompanied by the name of "perfect gentleman." 
 He loves to think himself material, living from day to 
 day a straight life, an upright life, just for what that 
 day may bring forth, and yet unknown to himself 
 there is running through him and emanating from 
 him a spirituality which lifts him cloud high, which 
 permeates those who come in touch with him and 
 
My Most Interesting American 107 
 
 leaves them fitter men and women. When the time 
 comes for Rush Hawkins to leave this earth, his 
 countrymen may appropriately write on his memorial 
 the words "Here lies a great American," but those 
 who know him best will realize that an inscription 
 even more fitting would be "Here rests the shadow of 
 a great soul." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 AMERICA AT WAR 
 
 A WELL-KNOWN American clergyman described to 
 me his pre-war attitude as follows: "I am not un- 
 friendly to England and France and prefer their way 
 of life to that of Germany but still I see no adequate 
 reason for leading the American people into the ter- 
 rible abyss of war." I believe that phrase, in spite 
 of enthusiastic friends the Allies possessed in the 
 Eastern States, gives a pretty good hint of what the 
 majority of American people felt. There were veins 
 of Germany sympathy. There were patches — and big 
 patches — of non-German suspicion or hostility towards 
 Britain. But the bulk of the American people, loving 
 peace and hating war, saw no compelling reason for 
 the entry to a shambles of destruction of millions 
 of their young men. German propaganda probably 
 had something to do with it; old prejudices against 
 Britain helped. But the main reason was the tra- 
 ditional American aloofness from the troubles and 
 quarrels of an ancient continent, the merits or de- 
 merits of which had no concern for a self sufficing 
 
 nation three thousand miles away. 
 
 108 
 
America at War 109 
 
 There were however flutterings of feeling from 
 time to time as German aims and methods were 
 focussed in the light. The plight of Belgium was 
 hard to swallow, and so was the danger to France. 
 Then the submarine activities were unpleasant to 
 America's self respect. And looking back over a pe- 
 riod of eighteen months one may perhaps perceive a 
 certain stirring of spirit against the military monster 
 which threatened the world, a rousing which sooner 
 or later would have led to action. And there were 
 of course thunderous champions of the Allies espe- 
 cially in the newspapers of the Eastern States. All 
 the same it was a peace-desiring nation in which I 
 lived in the first three months of 1917. President 
 Wilson was undoubtedly supported by the vast ma- 
 jority of Americans in withholding his hand. That 
 may or may not be palatable but it strikes an observer 
 as an outstanding truth. 
 
 Suddenly a dramatic change swept across the na- 
 tion, already a little restive amid certain sections. 
 Germany practically ordered the American flag off 
 the ocean except in such parts as were specified as 
 exempt. That was the match to powder. The Ameri- 
 can nation flamed out in a proud rage. Defiance 
 was flung forth. Pro-German and other groups tried 
 to stem the resentment among many of the people. 
 They might as well have tried to stop Niagara. When, 
 after a series of outrages on American ships and 
 
110 The New America 
 
 the loss of American lives, President Wilson went 
 down to Congress and declared a state of war to exist 
 with Germany, the country shouted applause to the 
 sky and set itself with a will to the task of turning 
 the United States into a war machine. The people 
 put out the Stars and Stripes from their houses to 
 show their spirit. It was a real sentiment; no mere 
 outward display. In "Treasure Island" Captain 
 Smollett attacked by the mutineers in the stockade 
 ran up his country's flag and refused to take it in 
 even though it drew the enemy's fire. "My name 
 is Alexander Smollett, I have flown my Sovereign's 
 colours and I'll see you to Davy Jones." There is 
 much in a symbol. The heart of America plunged 
 forth in that show of the Stars and Stripes. 
 
 For the first time in history the American flag was 
 mingled with the colours of Britain; the Union Jack 
 on the one side and the Tricolour of France on the 
 other were to be found in quarters where for genera- 
 tions the Union Jack was unknown — and if known 
 was disliked. I remember hearing the story of how 
 a man in New Jersey was lynched some five and 
 twenty years ago because on July 4th he ran up the 
 British flag with the American. It was hard to 
 realize this in the autumn of 1917 as one surveyed 
 Fifth Avenue a blaze of colour in which the Union Jack 
 was prominent. The American temperament never 
 displays its diff'erence from the English more strik- 
 
America at War 111 
 
 ingly than in its fearlessness of its own feelings. 
 There has been comparatively little bunting shown in 
 Britain during the war. In America not only was 
 the national flag freely displayed on every possible 
 occasion and in many cases hung out continuously 
 on buildings public and private, but a further display 
 followed as the men began to be drafted. There was 
 devised a white flag with a red border and on the 
 white ground were placed blue stars indicating the 
 number of men who had gone to service from the par- 
 ticular place which showed the flag. Private houses, 
 shops, public institutions, clubs, all had these flags and 
 a brave show they made. A variation and extension 
 was in the enameled brooches and lapel pins indicat- 
 ing by their stars the number of those in service from 
 the wearer's family. America went into the war 
 sternly but with high heart, and with something of 
 that chivalrous display which marked a cause in 
 ancient days of knightly service. 
 
 War songs began to appear. They were direct and 
 not oblique as in Britain where the soldiers adopted 
 a music hall ditty like "Tipperary" which had no 
 possible relevance to battle eff'orts. Nor did the peo- 
 ple in America take readily to plaintive melodies like 
 "Keep the Home Fires Burning," which replaced 
 "Tipperary" as the favourite among British soldiers. 
 The ardent nervous temperament required something 
 direct, something with a lilt and a march and a ring 
 
112 The New America 
 
 about it. And thus the popular places of amusement 
 rattled with such choruses as, 
 
 Over there, over there, send the word, send the word, over 
 
 there, 
 That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming. 
 The drums rum4umming everywhere. 
 So prepare, say a pray'r, send the word, send the word, to 
 
 beware. 
 We'll be over, we're coming over, and we won't come back 
 
 till it's over over there. 
 
 or 
 
 Where do we go from here, boys, where do we go from here? 
 Anywhere from Harlem to a Jersey city pier. 
 When Patty'd meet a pretty girl, he'd whisper in her ear, 
 "0 joy, boy, where do we go from here?" 
 
 Indifferent America had vanished as though in 
 a landslide. And a visitor soon had striking evidence 
 of the distinctive temperament of the country. There 
 was a mingled boyishness, fierceness, and intensity 
 totally unknown in the older nations. Pro-Germans 
 bowed timidly under the storm. A storm indeed it 
 was. In the cities a word in sympathy with Germany 
 in a restaurant would procure a man's arrest and 
 sharp punishment. From the West and South came 
 news of prominent citizens who had spoken slight- 
 ingly of the Allies' cause who were compelled pub- 
 licly to kiss the Stars and Stripes and retract their 
 words. There was one story of how the convicts 
 in a big prison tarred and feathered a prominent 
 
America at War 113 
 
 pro-German among them — though how they obtained 
 the material is a mystery. Young drafted men re- 
 fusing to don the United States uniform were promptly 
 sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment. Public 
 men and women with a tendency to pacifism, and 
 possibly pro-Germanism, simply found themselves 
 under arrest and sentenced to terms of up to thirty 
 years imprisonment. There is no nonsense about 
 America when she is roused. 
 
 At the various times when a week or a fortnight 
 was set aside for subscriptions either to Liberty Loan 
 issues or the Red Cross Fund the great cities were 
 in a ferment. Leisureliness was gone. In New 
 York at the start of one of the Liberty Loan cam- 
 paigns cardboard representations of a bell — the Lib- 
 erty Bell — were made by the million, and in the 
 early hours of the first morning they were hung on 
 door knobs not only of houses and shops and offices 
 but on the doors of flats and apartments in hundreds 
 of thousands of homes; crowds of enthusiastic boys 
 were enlisted for the work. There were bands and 
 banners at street corners from early morning till early 
 the next morning. Impassioned speeches were made 
 from the stage of every theatre, moving picture palace 
 and every vaudeville show, and clever orators both 
 men and women extracted competitive announcements 
 from individuals in the audiences, pitting city against 
 city, country against country in the amount of sub- 
 
114 The New America 
 
 scriptions. Every office in New York, large or small, 
 was invaded once, twice, or thrice in a week by a 
 collector who might be a nurse in uniform, a boy 
 scout, a sailor or a bank official; there was no escape 
 for the stingy. At various busy points in the city a 
 large coffin on trestles on the side-walk, with nails 
 resting on the lid, was forced on the attention of 
 passing crowds by collectors, hammers in hand who 
 invited men and women to drive nails into "the 
 Kaiser's coffin" at the price of a dollar. Sums 
 amounting to millions of dollars for the Red Cross, 
 and billions of dollars for the war loan were readily 
 obtained. It was a wonder where the money came 
 from. 
 
 When the Government put restrictions on the use 
 of fuel and light during an exceptionally cold winter 
 there was but little grumbling. And when the coun- 
 try was appealed to for voluntary food rationing 
 so that the necessary supplies might be sent to the 
 Allies there was a response which practically did 
 away with the use of white bread, and put a sweet- 
 loving nation to the test of the smallest lump of 
 sugar in a cup of coffee. 
 
 In the streets of Washington and New York could 
 be seen each evening couples and groups of British 
 and French soldiers and sailors (principally sailors) 
 enjoying themselves amid strange scenes and with 
 hospitable hosts. I was in one of the table-d'hote 
 
America at War 115 
 
 restaurants in 49th Street crowded with diners when 
 a couple of French blue-jackets, attracted by the 
 French name on the sign outside, came in looking 
 rather at a loss and perhaps a little shy. Directly 
 the man at the piano and his companion with the 
 violin saw them they struck up the Marseillaise. 
 The whole of the crowded gathering rose to its feet 
 and sang the chorus, while the French soldiers, stag- 
 gered at this blast of welcome, were conducted to 
 a table by the proprietor, and had set before them 
 the best the establishment could provide at no cost 
 to themselves. 
 
 There was no mincing of expression among the 
 ordinary people whether with regard to their likes 
 or dislikes. A great blazing electrical device over 
 the door of a moving picture theatre on Broadway 
 in its most crowded section displayed as the legend 
 of its evening entertainment "To Hell with the Kaiser." 
 Here is the copy of a printed notice apparently spe- 
 cially directed towards the millions of aliens which 
 was prominently shown over some business establish- 
 ment in New York, and for all I know in other cities 
 also : 
 
 "This is an American house. 
 
 You earn a better living here and live better than you ever 
 
 did before. 
 Don't criticize our President, our Government or our Allies. 
 If you don't like the way we are running our Government, 
 Go back to your own country, 
 
116 The New America 
 
 If you are just a natural rebel, or if you have no country 
 then go to Hell." 
 
 I found in the cities and villages of the Middle 
 West no resentment at the war but a steady acceptance 
 of it as a national trial and a duty to be performed. 
 There was seriousness but no repining. The respon- 
 sibility of Americanism was almost a religion among 
 the quiet work-a-day-people with whom I made it 
 my business to mix from time to time. 
 
 A spectacle never to be obliterated was the first 
 parade down Fifth Avenue of thousands of soldiers 
 on their way to the camps preparatory for France. 
 They were taller than our English lads, not quite so 
 thick set, with lean faces, and nervous muscular 
 bodies. They differed too from the British in respect 
 of what may be called thoughtfulness, what to an 
 imaginative mind reflected a touch of the old puritan 
 spirit. The English lads set with a touch of square- 
 ness in their faces marched off with a joke and a rip- 
 pling smile even to the serious business of war, and I 
 dare say that attitude represents to a certain extent 
 a temperament which includes reserve as one of its 
 first qualities. The pulse beat quicker, and at mo- 
 ments it was not easy to speak, as one watched those 
 gallant young Americans so lithe, so full of health, 
 going forward to offer their lives at their country's 
 demand on a foreign battle field. 
 
 One of the effects of the war at Washington was 
 
America at War 117 
 
 to produce not only a famine of offices, speedily 
 met by the erection of vast new Government build- 
 ings but also a famine of hotels. Persons with busi- 
 ness in the capital frequently had to stay at Baltimore, 
 an hour's railway journey away because they could 
 not get accommodations at the seat of Government. 
 What some regard as a minor tragedy and others as 
 an undisguised blessing fell upon Washington during 
 war time, namely the prohibition of the sale of alco- 
 hol. "A dull place has become duller," said one 
 American scoffer, to me. But a more just estimation 
 would be perhaps that the laws of revenue and the 
 laws of luxury on the one hand were compensated 
 for by the trade of war time on the other, by the gath- 
 ering of great men and small men from all parts of 
 the country, by the increase of population amounting 
 to twenty per cent, in the course of a year. I remem- 
 ber visiting Washington three months after prohibi- 
 tion was in force and calling to see a genial friend 
 of Irish descent who received me with what I felt was 
 an increase of his usual warmth. He expressed his 
 pleasure at seeing me in a way which was more than 
 usually gratifying. I was really flattered. There 
 was a pause after a minute or two and then he said 
 appealingly and expectantly, "Have you brought any- 
 thing with you?" I was humiliated, not so much at 
 the blow to my self-esteem, as at my lack of foresight 
 in neglecting to provide for the emergency. 
 
118 The New America 
 
 President Wilson progressed from stages of respect 
 to those of admiration and presently to high popular 
 acclaim. He was recognized as a great possession 
 of the American people, who it seemed, were not 
 unappreciative of the fact that he was also regarded 
 by the allied people as one of the great assets of the 
 cause. The President came to New York once or 
 twice. I should not like to be asked to decide whether 
 he had his greatest popular following, — when he went 
 to see "Polly with a Past" at a theatre, or went on 
 Sunday to the Old Brick Presbyterian Church to attend 
 service. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 SHIPS AND AEROPLANES 
 
 To a visitor in America there has been nothing so 
 typically dramatic in the awakening of the giant as 
 the gesture with which she set about to make ships. 
 That the colossal and continuing output of mercantile 
 vessels would help to turn the world into a different 
 place when peace comes again was an incidental. The 
 consequences during the war and after the war were 
 both in my mind when I travelled along the eastern 
 coast and saw what had been done after six months 
 in the construction of a new industry. I had a full 
 untrammelled view of the genius which in great emer- 
 gency comes forth from beneath its occasional dis- 
 guises. 
 
 It had been the practice to bring sheets of steel 
 to the water front, and there fashion them for the 
 sides and interior of the ships. But now ships were 
 wanted in a number previously unheard of, and it 
 occurred to the agile mind of the Americans to 
 utilize the great steel works in the interior of the 
 country in order to manufacture the parts of the 
 vessel where special facilities existed for the work, 
 
 119 
 
120 The New America 
 
 and to bring them down to the coast and fit them 
 together there. This meant, of course, there would 
 still be a great amount of work to be done at the 
 shipways but it would be enormously less than un- 
 der the previous system. I went to Newark where 
 a new shipyard was to consist of twenty-eight ship- 
 ways. Twenty of them were already finished, and 
 on the afternoon I arrived ten keels were laid 
 and before I left the yard this was increased to 
 eleven keels. The ship on the first way was well 
 advanced towards completion, and I walked on the 
 deck. Fifty to a hundred feet behind the ship were 
 big piles of steel work in all kinds of shapes, dotted 
 with rivet holes, for all the world like parts of a 
 child's jig-saw puzzle. They were the sections that 
 were to be rivetted together. I stood on the deck of 
 number one ship and looked down into its interior, 
 and it was like looking into the workings of a clock. 
 It is no simple matter to build a ship. I glanced 
 along the line of shipways by the water front, and 
 they seemed to me to reach beyond sight. That was 
 partly the effect of the busy activity, the noise of 
 rivetters, the movement of men, the network of work- 
 ing cranes and machinery, in a word of a pulsing 
 soul. Optimism, energy and organizing verve radi- 
 ated from the Vice-President who accompanied me, 
 and his spirit was found in all parts of the yard. The 
 ten thousand workmen there had founded a newspaper 
 
Ships and Aeroplanes 121 
 
 of their own. It was called "Speed Up," and con- 
 tained all kinds of news and stories and pieces of 
 verse contributed by the men. Here are two sam- 
 ples: 
 
 HUNKA TIN 
 
 You may talk about your voitures, 
 When you're sitting round the quarters, 
 
 But when it comes to getting wounded in, 
 Take a little tip from me, 
 Let those heavy motors be, 
 
 Pin your faith to Henry Ford's old Hunka Tin. 
 Give her essence, give her I'eau, 
 Crank her up, and let her go, 
 
 You back-firin', spark-plug foulin' Hunka Tin. 
 
 Chorus. 
 
 Yes, Tin, Tin, Tin. 
 
 You exasperating puzzle, Hunka Tin. 
 I've abused you and I've flayed you. 
 But by Henry Ford, who made you, 
 You are better than a big car, Hunka Tin. 
 
 BUILDERS OF SHIPS 
 
 Lay me a keel, and build me a framework. 
 
 Build it of steel with rivets to hold; 
 Strong be the plates and true be the workmen. 
 
 Fervent as iron when red in the mould. 
 
 Out of the ways, then, launch me a vessel. 
 
 Proud as the proudest, impatient to be 
 Clearing the pathway, the sea road to England, 
 
 Speeding to France for dear Liberty. 
 
122 The New America 
 
 A journey to near Boston took me to a ship-building 
 yard, long established, but which the needs of the war 
 were intensively developing. Here were great mer- 
 chantmen being erected, and lines of submarines in 
 dry-dock strung out like huge mackerel. In one part 
 of the yard where a month or two before there were 
 ten feet of water on swamp ground there had been 
 formed a solid platform of earth and piles on which 
 destroyers were rapidly being built. This yard has 
 a corresponding establishment on the Pacific coast, 
 and the foremen from the two yards had a bet of ten 
 tiiousand dollars between them as to which yard 
 would turn out the most ships by the end of the year. 
 A mile or two away an entirely new shipyard was 
 being built up, and thousands of men were swarming 
 over skeleton erections, hammer and rivet and drill 
 in hand. There was one shed practically completed. 
 It was of glass and iron about one hundred feet in 
 height and sixteen acres in extent, all under one 
 roof. Here it was that I saw first the interesting 
 operation familiar in the building of sky-scrapers, 
 namely the continuous supply of white hot rivets or 
 bolts to mid air. These cannot be heated by the men 
 who are a hundred feet or so above the ground seated 
 on a swinging strip, and they are made hot in a 
 little furnace down below and are then tossed up 
 aloft. It is a fascinating sight. With a long pair 
 of pinchers the man on the ground extracts from the 
 
Ships and Aeroplanes 123 
 
 furnace the white hot rivet, and with an apparently 
 careless, but quite accurate jerk, projects it 
 through the air towards the men up on the building. 
 It is like the shooting of a meteor. Up above a man 
 makes a casual sweep of a little basket and the rivet 
 is caught, — or missed, — as the case may be. There 
 is always a thrill in the onlooker as to whether that 
 stream of white hot rivets may not hurt one or other 
 of the men to whom they are directed. It is hard to 
 take one's eyes from the operation. None of those 
 concerned are ever perturbed. But some time, some- 
 where, some man must be hurt by one of those deadly 
 incandescent missiles. Even the best of cricketers 
 gets a nasty blow from the ball sometimes. The spec- 
 tacle is one which for a thrill cannot be equalled in 
 the entertainment on any New York stage. 
 
 Hog Island is one of the much talked of war 
 incidents of the United States. Eight hundred acres 
 of flat swamp and marsh land on the banks of the 
 Delaware near Philadelphia have become famous as 
 Hog Island. I went there six months after an army 
 of men had been at work on its natural desolation 
 and emptiness. I found it midway in transformation. 
 Fifty shipways were to be constructed on the edge 
 of the Delaware, and the program included the 
 launching of fifty-two ships before the end of the 
 year. But to get the proper perspective of Hog 
 Island one must thrust the imagination forward and 
 
124 The New America 
 
 picture it in the following year, discharging into the 
 Delaware an unbroken succession of great ships, sev- 
 eral a week. 
 
 Hog Island may in the future be the leading world 
 depot where ocean going ships will be fitted together 
 like children's toys. All these reflections and fore- 
 casts came upon me afterwards. An automobile ride 
 which, as soon as we left the city behind us, was 
 Siberian in its bleakness and monotony — through 
 windswept flats over an extemporized road, miles in 
 length, which for all the outlook there was ahead 
 might have been leading to a desert, took us by a sud- 
 den twist in the road through some undulations, then 
 over an almost imperceptible stream. I was at Hog 
 Island. The first impression was of an earthquake, 
 and of attempts to produce order out of chaos. Con- 
 fusion and activity spread everywhere to the limit of 
 the eye. Boarded roads ran through morasses of 
 mud, gave access to labryinths of wooden barracks, 
 towering cranes, gangs of men, hustling locomotives, 
 mountains of stripped tree trunks, packed masses of 
 steel in every conceivable size and shape. To the 
 uninstructed eye crudity and disordered eff'ort lay 
 over all the world. Then came relief. I was taken 
 to the top floor of an office building right in the 
 middle of the grounds where from a glass encased 
 turret one could survey the eight hundred acres of 
 Hog Island in a bird's eye view. A square faced 
 
Ships and Aeroplanes 125 
 
 chief pointed out with his finger the parts of the 
 establishment and their functions. Away went the 
 chaos. He was like a commander in a battle dis- 
 playing from an eminence the co-ordinating opera- 
 tions of his troops on a wide-spread field beneath. 
 The magnitude of Hog Island grew upon me. One 
 realized American daring. Here were strips of rail- 
 way lines where material was received, here were 
 branches to other groups of lines where orders were 
 delivered with material for the use of certain ways, 
 here were great workshops in carefully arranged 
 order for their special activities. Every crane that I 
 could see, every automobile, every intersecting excava- 
 tion, every pile of material, all the barracks in assem- 
 bled places, were working towards a smooth running 
 operation as a whole. It was an illuminating idea, 
 that glass turret. 
 
 I asked about the workmen. I learned that there 
 were twenty thousand altogether, most of them en- 
 gaged at that moment in building the Island into a 
 huge machine, although later they would be instructed 
 and drafted into the actual shipbuilding, which when 
 in complete working order would employ thirty thou- 
 sand. The twenty thousand men were drawn from 
 all parts. There were Italians, and Mexicans, ne- 
 groes, Greeks, and Indians. They were paid well. 
 Even the unskilled labourer would earn $3.86 a day. 
 His living expenses including his board and all his 
 
126 The New America 
 
 food would cost him about $1.00 a day on the spot. 
 Food was provided and there were games in the club 
 rooms and comfortable chairs for the men when they 
 were off duty. Nothing was omitted to stimulate 
 efficiency. All over the shipyard one found notices, 
 "The sooner we finish these ships the sooner the war 
 will be ended." 
 
 I came back to New York, tired with night journeys 
 but with a comfortable feeling that if all round the 
 American coast there were to be found establish- 
 ments such as I had opportunity of seeing within 
 a few hundred miles, Germany's submarines would 
 have to be as thick as ants on an ant hill to cope 
 with the fleets of ships which America a few months 
 hence would be discharging each week into the ocean. 
 I wondered what was going to happen to all the 
 ships after the war was over. 
 
 From ships I went to see aeroplanes. At Dayton 
 I was shown the instruments of air warfare, and 
 stood side by side with Mr. Orville Wright in the 
 flying field while the latest war model did tricks in the 
 air above us, standing on its head, so it seemed, throw- 
 ing itself backward, pretending to fall a thousand 
 feet, recovering itself and then shooting past three 
 hundred feet above our heads at the rate of a hun- 
 dred miles an hour. 
 
 "What is the essential diff^erence between these 
 machines and the early aeroplanes?" I asked. 
 
Ships and Aeroplanes 127 
 
 "Little enough in fundamentals," said Mr. Wright. 
 "The main factors are still the same." I extracted 
 from Mr. Wright the story of the hour when he on be- 
 half of human beings in general made the first flight 
 into the air. 
 
 "My brother Wilbur and I had been experimenting 
 with gliders on the sides of hills for some time," he 
 said. "We had devoted ourselves to exhaustive cal- 
 culations with regard to progress through the air, 
 calculations which, of course, were increased and mul- 
 tiplied as our experiments progressed. Finally, we 
 built an airship and put a motor in it, with a view to 
 trying to make a flight. We went down to North 
 Carolina on the shore. It was in the winter on De- 
 cember 17, 1903, that we made the venture down there. 
 We got the machine out in the morning — I remember 
 it was about 10.30. There was nobody about, but 
 while we were fixing up things a man made his 
 appearance, attracted by the unusual sight of the 
 aeroplane. 'What is this?' he asked. I told him 
 it was a flying machine. 'Do you expect to fly with 
 it?' he said smilingly. 'Yes,' I answered; 'that 
 is if the conditions are favourable.' 'Oh, yes,' he 
 said, 'your machine will fly — if the conditions are 
 favourable/ The intonation made his meaning per- 
 fectly clear. He went off" and left us, apparently hav- 
 ing no time to waste on such useless fads. 
 
 "The moment came when we were to start the ma- 
 
128 The New America 
 
 chine. It was a question who should make the first 
 trip, Wilbur or I. We tossed a penny as to who 
 should be the first. Wilbur won. He got into the 
 machine, but after a lot of trying we couldn't start 
 it. We spent some time in adjustment, and then I 
 took my turn. The machine began to rise in an 
 undulating kind of way, then it got clear off the 
 ground, some fifteen feet or more, and made a flight 
 of about one hundred and fifty feet. That was the 
 first flight. Later in the day we had longer trips." 
 
 I asked Mr. Wright if he had any idea when he 
 and his brother were trying to make the flying ma- 
 chine as to their eventual use in war. 
 
 "From the very first the idea of their use in that 
 way was in my mind." 
 
 I asked him if in the course of his experiments 
 he had read a story by H. G. Wells in which the 
 author brought into being flights of aircraft, demon- 
 strating their destructiveness, and going so far as to 
 visualize air battles over American territory. Mr. 
 Wright pondered for a moment. "No," he said; 
 "I heard of the story since. I don't think I have 
 read it even now." He spoke apologetically. 
 
 I went to Buff'alo and saw another huge factory. 
 There as in Dayton messenger boys in the factory 
 were progressing over the wooden floors on roller 
 skates in order to save time. It was a real piece of 
 American hustle. If it was interesting to a spectator 
 
Ships and Aeroplanes 129 
 
 it was also very exhilarating for the boys. My one 
 general conclusion was that in skill, in material, in 
 labour, in organization America had facilities to turn 
 out fleets of aeroplanes with no less speed and volume 
 than she could turn out ships. I look into the future 
 and see that the ships and aeroplanes of America 
 may be one of the governing factors of the world not 
 only in war but in peace. I saw no rushing, hustling 
 operations such as is sometimes conceived by an 
 Englishman of Americans at work on a special object. 
 I saw manufacturers and workmen waiting for Wash- 
 ington and the soldiers at the front to determine the 
 details of the best kind of battle machine so that 
 they could be turned out not by the thousand but by 
 the tens of thousands. Of course a great many ma- 
 chines were being made but the impression left on 
 me was that they were but a fraction of what could 
 be achieved. 
 
 America's shrewdness is sometimes minimized 
 against her rapidity. She can be slow when slowness 
 is an essential of success. For long vision you must 
 have the proper focus. The magnitude of America's 
 task had to be met by the magnitude of America's 
 power. You cannot set the earth a-spinning by the 
 quick turn of a crank handle. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 CHICAGO AND DETROIT 
 
 An expedition to the Middle West to see and hear 
 what the industrial districts were like in war-time left 
 on me the sensations of the moving picture. It was 
 at eight o'clock one morning that our train approached 
 Chicago, and looking out of the window I saw quite 
 close to the tracks waves mounting high against lines 
 of piles, and an expanse of water to the horizon, which 
 for all the world was like the English Channel under 
 a south westerly gale. Really it was Lake Michigan. 
 I had heard terrible tales about the gloom and other 
 disadvantages of Chicago but my first real sight of it 
 from a taxicab was an esplanade by the water front 
 miles in length with solid and handsome buildings on 
 one side as far as the eye could see. It had a kind of 
 family resemblance to Kings Road at Brighton, though 
 less sparkling and less crowded, as becomes a great 
 business centre compared with a holiday place. But 
 the miles of open water front, the buildings massed 
 behind had a rather home-like air to an Englishman 
 who is familiar with so many somewhat similar out- 
 looks in his sea-surrounded island. Streets humming 
 
 130 
 
Chicago and Detroit 131 
 
 with traffic ran from the water front in to the heart 
 of the city, and up one of these we turned to a big 
 hotel where the courtesy of waiters and attendants 
 was only equalled by their slowness in doing tilings. 
 Within a few hours I was under escort to the stock- 
 yards, one of the sights not only of Chicago but of 
 America, and presently I stood on a long wooden 
 bridge and surveyed all around spreading acres, — 
 it may have been square miles, — of cattle pens and 
 enclosures with connecting passages, and on the rim 
 the great factories for turning the live animals into 
 meat. Riding through the enclosures were men on 
 horseback, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in 
 pairs. They were the agents for the farmers who 
 had sent live stock, and the buyers for the big packing 
 houses, and the bargaining was going on under the 
 open eye. A deal was settled by a crack of the whip. 
 As I passed along the overhead platforms I saw in 
 one of the yards a lonely steer with long horns, pacing 
 up and down like a wild animal paces up and down 
 in its cage in the zoo. "Mad," said my guide. "They 
 get like that sometimes after a long journey. We 
 have to keep them apart then because they become 
 dangerous." I shall remember that solitary wild- 
 eyed long-homed steer making his swift mechanical 
 passage round his yard long after I have forgotten 
 astounding figures of production. Presently in one 
 of the buildings I witnessed the nasty scene of syste- 
 
132 The New America 
 
 matic slaughter. Bullocks, sheep, pigs proceeded in 
 single line with automatic regularity towards a de- 
 partment where blood ran like water continuously. 
 I had as a companion a war correspondent who had 
 been for three years on the western front and had 
 seen all manner of terrible sights. He turned his 
 eyes away in the slaughter houses. He resolutely 
 refused to see what was going on. The most unpleas- 
 ant memory I have of the business is the grin on 
 the face of a negro whose duty it was to stun the 
 sentenced cattle with a long hammer before they were 
 dispatched. It was a real relief to get away to an- 
 other part of the establishment where they were grind- 
 ing up peanuts into the most delicious looking butter, 
 and producing other manufactured eatables which go 
 under the name of groceries. My limbs were aching 
 not with physical fatigue only as I came out of those 
 vast stock-yards. I had a strong warming of the 
 heart towards vegetarians. 
 
 I went to see a picture of a different kind on the 
 next day at a spot about an hour's railway journey 
 from Chicago by the side of Lake Michigan. It was 
 a place where tens of thousands of young Americans 
 who have never seen the sea were being trained to 
 be sailors. When they emerge from the Middle West 
 to the Atlantic or the Pacific in order to smell salt 
 water for the first time they are completely equipped 
 for ocean work, fit to match the best sailors in the 
 
Chicago and Detroit 133 
 
 world. The secret, of course, is that they have a 
 great lake to train on, and the lake reproduces nearly- 
 all the conditions to be found on the ocean. The Great 
 Lakes Naval Training Station in peace time had about 
 a thousand men under tuition. When I visited it there 
 were in training over twenty thousand men with volun- 
 teer recruits coming in at the rate of a thousand a 
 week. Park-land, hundreds of acres in extent, front* 
 ing on to the lake side, gives opportunity for open 
 air training of a dozen kinds, while spacious build- 
 ings are available for such indoor work as air-plane 
 construction, and repair and the necessities of navi- 
 gation. It was on Sunday afternoon when I was 
 there, fine and sunny, and throughout the grounds 
 there were many visitors. With a whimsical smile 
 the young officer who was going around with me said 
 that one of the problems was to regulate the influx 
 of girl sweethearts, sweethearts in being or sweet- 
 hearts potential. Sailor boys are a great attraction 
 but so far as I could judge from a casual observation 
 of the couples and groups in the grounds the attrac- 
 tion was mutual. Let me make my salute to those 
 young sailors so obviously keen, so fresh and en- 
 ergetic. They are under training for three months, 
 training which is not surpassed in the world, that of 
 the American naval officer. Generations of new men 
 were being turned out by that three months' training 
 at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, not only 
 
134 The New America 
 
 new men but very fine men. Classes of them will 
 be utilized in managing the vast mercantile fleet of 
 America. 
 
 A two hundred mile journey west to Rock Island 
 Arsenal on the Mississippi, swelling under war pres- 
 sure and highly efficient superintendence to a huge 
 military manufacturing depot, remains in my mind 
 not only for its national importance but because my 
 visit afforded me at least one sidelight, that had noth- 
 ing to do with the war. I was in the State of Iowa, 
 which is dry, only I did not know it. A long fatiguing 
 journey had inclined me for a glass of claret with my 
 dinner, but my request in that direction was met with 
 the refusal of a law-abiding waitress who seemed to 
 reflect a puritan aspect in her amazement at my 
 request. After dinner I went from the dining room 
 into the lounge of the hotel with a stranger's fear that 
 I should not be able to get anything to smoke. But 
 I found not only a cigar store in the hotel but means 
 other than cash for the buying of goods. Two sets 
 of dice were there, one plain dice, one poker dice, and 
 you were invited to gamble for what you wanted. If 
 you won you paid a purely nominal price for your 
 goods, and if you lost the nominal price was taken 
 from you without any return. It was quite easy to 
 lose money. One cannot get strong drink in Iowa, 
 but one may at least get other little excitements. 
 
 Come away back to Detroit where I saw the man- 
 
Chicago and Detroit 135 
 
 uf acture of the much discussed Liberty motor, a sight 
 which could not inform the non-expert eye as to its 
 qualities but which was at least impressive as a 
 mechanical spectacle. I went into a field where the 
 testing sheds were erected, dozens of them, scores of 
 them in long lines, I wouldn't like even to guess at 
 the number. Here, sheltered on a stalwart platform 
 surrounded by testing apparatus of various kinds and 
 watched by an engineer from a special little cabinet, 
 was one of these sober grey complicated compact 
 masses of machinery. To it was added a propeller 
 similar in its weight and air resistance to that used 
 in the flying machines. I stood at the end of one 
 of the open sheds while the propeller was revolving 
 under the stimulus of the Liberty motor. The noise 
 was that of a thousand railway trains, and it was 
 accompanied by a hurricane which made it necessary 
 to plant one's feet very firmly and wide apart on the 
 ground, and to hold one's hat. For hours afterward 
 the vibration of that machine sang in my head; I 
 was even a little deaf till the next day. The 
 mechanic in blue overalls, with clean shaven face, and 
 disordered hair who superintended each one of these 
 experiments was like a spirit from another world rid- 
 ing on a thunder storm. 
 
 They test these motors in all kinds of ways, test 
 them for hours at a stretch with revolutions per minute 
 which stagger the imagination, test them occasionally 
 
136 The New America 
 
 to a point, deliberately reached, in which the machine 
 is dismembered by the force developed. After two 
 or three or four tests the Liberty motor is taken to 
 pieces and examined part by part, screw by screw, 
 examined by the naked eye, by touch, by magnifying 
 glass and by testing acids, and all of this is done 
 not by ordinary workmen but by highly skilled 
 experts. I am no judge of the merits of the Lib- 
 erty motor, but this at least can be said, that no 
 man's life could be imperilled in the air for want 
 of skill or care in its manufacture. It was the same 
 afternoon that I went and saw another wonderful 
 thing, namely the miracle' known as Ford's factory. 
 I regard it as one of the sights of the world. Here 
 is an establishment which employs thirty-four thou- 
 sand men, no man of whom after six months service 
 receives less than five dollars a day — obtaining up 
 to that time three dollars and fifty cents. Through- 
 out the whole of the previous year only two men had 
 been discharged because it is a rule of the factory 
 that if a man is not suitable for one job he is put 
 in some other position for which he is better adapted. 
 I saw how the Ford motor car is manufactured. 
 There is a bench, breast-high, winding its way 
 through hundreds of yards of the factory, and along 
 that bench at intervals of a yard on either side stand 
 workmen. Above the bench within reach run for- 
 ward-moving belts containing various parts of the mo- 
 
Chicago and Detroit 137 
 
 tor car. The nucleus of the car, about the size of a 
 bushel basket, is placed on the bench in front of the 
 first of the men, and by means of a travelling car- 
 riage passes on a slow but continuous journey be- 
 tween the two lines. Each man does something to 
 that nucleus, or adds something as it passes, and by 
 the time it has traversed over the winding line it has 
 been built up by the hundreds of workmen into prac- 
 tically a complete car. And these cars follow each 
 other at intervals of seconds only. I went into an- 
 other part of the factory where the genius of Mr. 
 Ford was constructing a new submarine destroyer 
 which contains improvements not only in construc- 
 tion but in material. To the uninstructed eye it 
 looks like a big ship. Conceive the impression made 
 by the sober statement that Mr. Ford intended to turn 
 these out at the rate of two a day. He is a won- 
 derful man. He is also a good American. Mr. 
 Ford, be it remembered, was a leading pacifist who 
 wanted to stop the war before his country entered into 
 it. Afterwards he sought to stop it by seeing his 
 country victorious, and was doing everything possible 
 to help produce that truly inevitable result. 
 
 When I came back to New York I was in some doubt 
 as to which day to make the journey. I took the 
 first of two alternatives. The train on the second day 
 was dismantled by a landslide mid-way and there 
 was one death and some people injured. I congrat- 
 
138 The New America 
 
 ulated myself on missing at least one American ex- 
 perience. From various causes I was beginning to 
 glimpse the power and temperament of the American 
 people. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 ENGLAND THROUGH A TELESCOPE 
 
 The American in England will soon find contrasts 
 with his own country, and while all of them will be 
 strange, some of them will not be unpleasant, although 
 he will naturally prefer the other ways of his home 
 land. Let me tell in a few sentences the unaccus- 
 tomed things he will see in Parliament if he has been 
 used to the congressional system at Washington. He 
 will find that while the laws of Britain have to be 
 agreed to by the King, the House of Lords, and the 
 House of Commons, it is the House of Commons 
 which initiates nearly all legislation and has prac- 
 tically complete power. The Cabinet, which is the 
 executive government, depends for its existence on a 
 majority vote of the House of Commons, and if it 
 fails to maintain a majority it has to go out of office, 
 and the King has to select a Cabinet which will be 
 supported by the Commons. Generally when a Gov- 
 ernment is thus overthrown there is a general election, 
 and then there comes back direct from the people 
 a Government in consonance with the desires and 
 wishes of the community. Hundreds of years of ex- 
 
 139 
 
140 The New America 
 
 periment mixed with struggles and many compromises 
 have evolved this system, which suits the tempera- 
 ment of the British people. The King remains the 
 glowing symbol of a continuous and proud history 
 of a thousand years, and thus represents an emotion 
 which has its part in the make up of the nation. And 
 he moreover serves the purpose of what may be called 
 a permanent chairman of the nation, summoning to 
 him the Ministers whom his people desire. The 
 Prime Minister presides over the Cabinet, each mem- 
 ber of whom takes his office direct from the hands 
 of the King and is responsible for his own depart- 
 ment. Each Minister, the Prime Minister particu- 
 larly, has to face his supporters and opponents in the 
 House of Commons day by day, and if necessary 
 to explain his policy and administration. The busi- 
 ness of the sittings is prefaced by a period during 
 which members may put questions to the various 
 Ministers, friendly questions, hostile questions, criti- 
 cal questions. Question-time therefore it may easily 
 be seen is a testing period, and often enough a 
 critical one, for the Government. It may be asked 
 what would happen if the King refused assent to the 
 laws passed by Parliament. The answer is that no 
 King would do so, for the situation would automati- 
 cally adjust itself. The King acts on the advice of 
 his Ministers, who are responsible for Government 
 action. With the House of Commons rests all the 
 
England Through a Telescope 141 
 
 power to run the country. It controls the purse 
 strings of the nation, arranges not only the taxation 
 but the way in which the money shall be spent, pro- 
 vides the resources for the army, navy and civil serv- 
 ices. If the Government were mad enough to advise 
 the King to stand out in opposition against the will 
 of the majority of the House of Commons, the House 
 could bring matters to an abrupt conclusion by re- 
 fusing supplies, by refusing to conduct any business. 
 The position is such that neither King nor Ministers 
 are effective without the support of the House of 
 Commons. With this system runs many traces of 
 ancient ritual, some of them interesting from a his- 
 torical point of view, and others indicative of a love 
 of liberty which is ineradicable. When a message 
 is brought down by an official from the House of 
 Lords to the House of Commons one of the attend- 
 ants always closes the door of the House of Commons 
 in their face, locks the door, ascertains their mission 
 through a little wicket gate in one of the panels and 
 finally with the permission of the Speaker admits 
 them. That is to show the Commons are supreme 
 in their own house and that they can shut out even the 
 most highly placed persons if they desire to do so. 
 The American who is interested in history will dis- 
 cover traces of the Norman conquest remaining in 
 Parliament. The King always transmits to this day 
 his assent to bills in the Norman French language. 
 
142 The New America 
 
 "Le roy le veult" (The King wills it.) is the phrase 
 still used after nine hundred years. 
 
 In the smaller things of life the American will find 
 English life in some respects different from his own. 
 The raw cold weather will be extremely disagreeable 
 to a visitor especially in the absence of that excellent 
 system of steam heating or hot air heating which is 
 prevalent in America. The sense of comfort with 
 which one enters an American house or store or any 
 kind of building in America in the winter will be 
 absent. Open coal fires are the rule and though very 
 cheerful they are nothing like so effective for the 
 warming of buildings. The halls, the passages, the 
 upstairs rooms, the shops, the public halls, lack that 
 gratifying soothing warmth which is such a comfort 
 in the United States. In the summer a visitor will 
 also miss the use of ice water without which no 
 American meal is complete. English people do not 
 put ice in their drinking water and the consequence is 
 it seems soft and warm and unpalatable to an Ameri- 
 can. He will find, at least in peace time, surpris- 
 ing cheapness for some of the common services and 
 ordinary commodities. An excellent shave may be 
 had for six cents although some of the more elaborate 
 establishments may charge as much as twelve cents. 
 Motor omnibuses radiate from London to all parts, 
 and the common fare for short distances, say a mile, 
 sometimes as much as two miles, is one penny (2c), 
 
England Through a Telescope 143 
 
 longer distances being charged in proportion. He 
 will find that the men in the street, the policemen, the 
 postmen, the salesmen in the shops, the omnibus con- 
 ductors, the railway officials are good humoured and 
 kindly, with the word "Thank you" given in return 
 continually, a species of graciousness which in its 
 various forms reaches down to the lowest class. He 
 will find caste distinctions to which he is unaccus- 
 tomed, a respect for good clothes, good manners and 
 educated speech which while it sometimes descends 
 into snobbery, has valuable uses, and curiously 
 enough helps towards providing self respect. One 
 thing not nearly so agreeable is the difficulty to be 
 encountered in meeting people in authority, in 
 approaching big business men, and in securing a 
 foothold for original proposals in whatever line of 
 life one's activities tend. 
 
 There is reserve, too, among individuals which will 
 certainly be a little irksome, a standoffishness which 
 requires that a stranger must be tested out before 
 he can be admitted to acquaintanceship much less 
 to friendship. On the other hand once a visitor is 
 received by a family he is treated with a cordiality 
 and open heartedness unsurpassed in any nation. 
 If you become a friend you are a friend for good, 
 and there is no kindness which will be denied. The 
 true American will find little real difficulty in secur- 
 ing admittance to English home life and that home 
 
144 The New America 
 
 life is one of the most beautiful possessions which 
 the country has. An American who has been a few 
 months in England travelled about it, mixed with the 
 common people, will, I trust and believe, find the truth 
 in the words of a recent writer, "A great country of 
 hill and valley, moorland and marsh, full of wood- 
 lands, meadows, and all manner of flowers, and 
 everywhere set with steadings and dear homesteads, 
 old farms, and old churches of greystone or flint, and 
 peopled by the kindest and quietest people in the 
 world." 
 
 I have set out some of the diff"erences in tempera- 
 ment, in manners, and in method, between America 
 and England. Each people has to live its own life. 
 But the differences only throw up into relief their 
 common nature in the big things. No person can 
 live for a period in England and in America without 
 perceiving how like is the thread which runs through 
 the life of each. Determination for freedom, freedom 
 for the state and for the individual, bums strongly 
 in the old country and the new. Both nations are 
 virile, tenacious, idealistic. In rich America some 
 of the leading citizens, with their faces forward, are 
 almost ashamed of their dollars; in ancient aristo- 
 cratic England labouring men are warmly welcomed 
 as part of the Government. 
 
 The strength and pride of each, with that interven- 
 ing three thousand miles of water, have in the past 
 
England Through a Telescope 145 
 
 contributed to misunderstandings. A closer, more 
 sympathetic knowledge of each other's daily life and 
 daily thoughts is to be the great emollient. The mil- 
 lions of American soldiers will play a great part in 
 drawing the two nations together. Many of these 
 soldiers, perhaps the greater number of them, have 
 seen something of England, and of English people. 
 Equally important they have been at close quarters 
 with Englishmen in the crucial days and nights of 
 the battlefield. They will bring to the English peo- 
 ple, new sidelights, new ideas, from the great re- 
 public of the West. There are moreover millions 
 of letters coming back from Europe to homes in all 
 parts of the United States, telling of the discoveries 
 that have been made among these people, only known 
 by tradition or by rumour. And presently there will 
 return to America the victorious American army, the 
 glory of the nation who sent it forth with a thousand 
 further messages. 
 
 Herein should be the consolidation of unifying fac- 
 tors already in existence. Ties of race are one of 
 those factors, a common language is even a greater. 
 Knit together thus with an extended knowledge and 
 a new sympathy, united in their vision on the prob- 
 lems of humanity, is there a clear observer who can 
 doubt that the joint effort of America and England 
 in the future presages a new era for coming genera- 
 tions? 
 
 PBINTED IN THK UNITED STATES OF AMEBIOA 
 
*HE following pages contain advertisements of a few 
 of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects. 
 
The American Commonwealth 
 
 By JAMES VISCOUNT BRYCE. D.C.L. 
 New Edition, revised throughout, after many reprintings 
 
 In two crown 8vo volumes, $4.00 
 
 " His work rises at once to an eminent place among studies of great nations 
 and their institutions. It is, so far as America goes, a work unique in scope, 
 spirit, and knowledge. There is nothing like it anywhere extant, nothing that 
 approaches it. . . . Without exaggeration it may be called the most consider- 
 able and gratifying tribute that has yet been bestowed upon us by an English- 
 man, and perhaps by even England herself. . . . One despairs in an attempt to 
 give, in a single newspaper article, an adequate account of a work so in- 
 fused with knowledge and sparkling with suggestion. . . . Every thoughtful 
 American will read it and will long hold in grateful remembrance its author's 
 name." — New York Times. 
 
 " Written with full knowledge by a distinguished Englishman to dispel vul- 
 gar prejudices and to help kindred people to understand each other better. 
 Professor Bryce's work is in a sense an embassy of peace, a message of good- 
 will from one nation to another." — The Times, London. 
 
 " This work will be invaluable ... to the American citizen who wishes some- 
 thing more than superficial knowledge of the political system under which he 
 lives and of the differences between it and those of other countries. . . . The 
 fact is that no writer has ever attempted to present so comprehensive an 
 account of our political system founded upon such length of observation, 
 enriched with so great a mass of detail and so thoroughly practical in its 
 character. . . . We have here a storehouse of political information regarding 
 America such as no other writer, American or other, has ever provided in one 
 work. ... It will remain a standard even for the American reader." — New 
 York Tribune. 
 
 The American Commonwealth 
 
 Abridged Edition, for the use of Colleges and High Schools. Being 
 an Introduction to the Study of the Government and Institu- 
 tions of the United States. By JAMES VISCOUNT BRYCE 
 One volume. Crown 8vo, $1.75 
 
 " It is a genuine pleasure to commend to our readers the abridged edition 
 of * The American Commonwealth ' just issued by the Macmillan Company. 
 Mr. Bryce's book, which has heretofore been issued only in two volumes, has 
 no peer as a commentary upon American political institutions." — Public 
 Opinion. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
DR. WALTER WEYUS BOOKS 
 
 The End of the War 
 
 By WALTER E. WEYL, Ph.D. 
 
 $2.00 
 
 " Mr. Weyl says sobering and important things. . . . His plea is 
 strong and clear for America to begin to establish her leadership of 
 the democratic forces of the world ... to insure that the settlement 
 of the war is made on lines that will produce international amity 
 everywhere." — A''. Y. Times. 
 
 American World Policies 
 
 By WALTER E. WEYL, Ph.D. 
 
 $2.25 
 
 " It is refreshing to read Dr. Weyl . . . his approach to the prob- 
 lem is absolutely sound and right." — The Dial. 
 
 " An economic philosophy neatly balanced, suavely expressed, and 
 of finely elastic fibre." — New York Sun. 
 
 " To find so fine and true and well reasoned an interpretation of 
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 of thought and sanity of judgment in the deciding of many of our 
 problems." — The Bookman. 
 
 The New Democracy 
 
 An Essay on Certain Political and Economic Tendencies 
 in the United States 
 
 By WALTER E. WEYL, Ph.D. 
 
 $2.00 
 
 " A masterly, scathing, and absolutely fearless arraignment of 
 things that ought not to be in a republic, and of tendencies that no 
 democracy ought to tolerate." — Boston Herald. 
 
 " A thoughtful volume ... a big synthesis of the whole social 
 problem in this country. A keen survey." — Chicago Evening Post. 
 
 " A searching and suggestive study of American life. ... A book 
 to make people think. . . . Notable for its scholarship and brilliant 
 in execution, it is not merely for the theorist, but for the citizen." — 
 Newark Evening News. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64:-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
H. H. POWERS' NEW WORK 
 
 America and Britain 
 
 The Story of the Relations Between two Peoples 
 
 By H. H. powers 
 
 $.40 
 
 This new work of Mr. Powers, though but a little 
 book of some eighty pages, sets forth in vigorous style 
 the story of our relationship with Great Britain from 
 the struggle for independence to this day ; that people 
 with whom we have had more to do, — and must seem- 
 ingly continue to have more to do, — than with any 
 other in the world. The fact that we are British in 
 origin, in culture, institutions, laws and language is 
 seen to have influenced us in the many crises that have 
 arisen in the years of our history as a nation. Dr. 
 Powers' work is nice in its balance, and sane and trust- 
 worthy in its judgments. The book rings true to these 
 times and in every patriotic school the classes in 
 American history should read it as supplementary to 
 their regular textbook. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
The English Speaking Peoples 
 
 THEIR FUTURE RELATIONS AND JOINT INTER- 
 NATIONAL OBLIGATIONS 
 
 By GEORGE LOUIS BEER 
 
 Author of " British Colonial Policy, 1754-1765," " The Old Colonial 
 System, 1 660-1754," etc. 
 
 $1.50 
 
 "Belongs to a far higher order of political literature, and pos- 
 sesses at this time unique interest. It is indeed one of the best, 
 most original and judicious attempts to construct out of the political 
 anarchy of these times new organizations. . . . Mr. Beer modestly 
 describes his book as a livre de circonstance dealing with an unpre- 
 dictable future. It is in reality a valuable addition to political sci- 
 ence." — The London Times, Literary Supplement. 
 
 " Distinguished by such brilliantly demonstrated criticism of cur- 
 rent political thought, by such unusual gifts of casuality and practical 
 ideality that it cannot fail of recognition as a factor of the first 
 importance m the moulding of public opinion in this country." — 
 N. Y. Times. 
 
 *' Professor Beer, in this earnest and luminous volume, raises the 
 question whether it is not about time for us to think a little about 
 what we might, for lack of an obviously better term, call Pan- 
 Anglo-Saxonism and he suggests and supports an affirmative answer 
 with a convincing wealth of citations of precedents and arguments." 
 A''. Y. Tribune. 
 
 "The student of current movements and trends will find this to 
 be a thoroughly considered and authoritative outlook upon economic 
 interrelations." — Washington Evening Star. 
 
 "A remarkable book. . . . The wonderful Insight of the writer 
 has enabled him to discuss, with a remarkable degree of prophetic 
 skill — the question of closer relations between Britain, American 
 and the English-speaking peoples as a whole." — Tribune, Oakland, 
 Cal. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Pu"blishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
 C 310 8 8 
 

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