 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 7 Part 3 The American Businessman For instance, Americans are very unpunctual. That is the last thing that a critic expects who comes to condemn them for hustling and haggling and vulgar ambition. But it is almost the first fact that strikes the spectator on the spot. The chief difference between the humdrum English businessman and the hustling American businessman is that the hustling American businessman is always late. Of course there is a great deal of difference between coming late and coming too late. But I noticed the fashion first in connection with my own lectures, touching which I could hardly recommend the habit of coming too late. I could easily understand a crowd of commercial Americans not coming to my lectures at all. But there was something odd about their coming in a crowd and the crowd being expected to turn up sometime after the appointed hour. The managers of these lectures, and I continue to call them lectures out of courtesy to myself, often explained to me that it was quite useless to begin properly until about a half an hour after time. Often people were still coming in three quarters of an hour or even an hour after time. Not that I objected to that, as some lecturers are said to do. It seemed to me an agreeable break in the monotony. But as a characteristic of a people mostly engaged in practical business it struck me as curious and interesting. I have grown accustomed to being the most un-business-like person in any given company, and it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation to find I was not the most unpunctual person in that company. I was afterwards told by many Americans that my impression was quite correct, that American unpunctuality was really very prevalent and extended to much more important things. But at least I was not content to lump this along with all sorts of contrary things that I did not happen to like and call it America. I am not sure of what it really means, but I rather fancy that, though it may seem the very reverse of the hustling, it has the same origin as the hustling. The American is not punctual because he is not punctilious. He is impulsive and has an impulse to stay as well as an impulse to go. For after all, punctuality belongs to the same order of ideas as punctuation. And there is no punctuation in telegrams. The order of clocks and set hours which English business has always observed is a good thing in its own way. Indeed, I think that in a larger sense it is better than the other way. It is better because it is a protection against hustling, not a promotion of it. In other words, it is better because it is more civilized. As a great Venetian merchant prince clad in cloth of gold was more civilized, or an English merchant drinking in port in an oak-paneled room was more civilized, or a little French shopkeeper shutting up his shop to play dominoes is more civilized. And the reason is that the American has the romance of business and is monomaniac, while the Frenchman has the romance of life and is sane. But the romance of business really is a romance, and the Americans are really romantic about it. And that romance though it revolves around pork or petrol is really like a love affair in this, that it involves not only rushing, but also lingering. The American is too busy to have any business habits. He is also too much in earnest to have any business rules. If we wish to understand him we must compare him not with the French shopkeeper when he plays dominoes, but with the same French shopkeeper when he works the guns or mans the trenches as a conscript soldier. Everybody used to the punctilious Prussian standard of uniform and parade has noticed the roughness and apparent laxity of the French soldier, the looseness of his clothes, the unsightliness of his heavy knapsack, in short his inferiority in every detail of the business of war, except fighting. There he is much too swift to be smart. He is much too practical to be precise. By a strange illusion which can lift pork packing almost to the level of patriotism, the American has the same free rhythm in his romance of business. He varies his conduct not to suit the clock, but to suit the case. He gives more time to more important and less time to less important things, and he makes up his timetable as he goes along. Suppose he has three appointments. The first let us say is some mere trifle of erecting a tower twenty stories high and exhibiting a sky sign on the top of it. The second is a business discussion about the possibilities of printing advertisements of soft drinks on the table napkins at a restaurant. The third is attending a conference to decide how the populace can be prevented from using chewing gum and the manufacturers can still manage to sell it. He will be content merely to glance at the sky sign as he goes by in a trolley car or an automobile. He will then settle down to the discussion with his partner about the table napkins, each speaker indulging in long monologues in turn. A peculiarity of much American conversation. Now if in the middle of one of these monologues he suddenly thinks that the vacant space of the waiter's shirt front might also be utilized to advertise the G. Whiz Ginger Champagne, he will instantly follow up the new idea in all its aspects and possibilities, in an even longer monologue, and will never think of looking at his watch while he is rapturously looking at his waiter. The consequence is that he will come late into the great social movement against chewing gum, where an Englishman would probably have arrived at the proper hour. But though the Englishman's conduct is more proper, it need not be in all respects more practical. The Englishman's rules are better for that business of life, but not necessarily for the life of business. And it is true that for many of these Americans, business is the business of life. It is really also, as I have said, the romance of life. We shall admire or deplore this spirit accordingly as we are glad to see trade irradiated with so much poetry, or sorry to see so much poetry wasted on trade. But it does make many people happy, like any other hobby, and one is disposed to add that it does fill their imaginations like any other delusion. For the true criticism of all this commercial romance would involve a criticism of this historic phase of commerce. These people are building on the sand, though it shines like gold, and for them like fairy gold. But the world will remember the legend about fairy gold. Half the financial operations they follow deal with things that do not even exist. For in that sense all finance is a fairy tale. Many of them are buying and selling things that do nothing but harm. But it does them good to buy and sell them. The claim of the romantic salesman is better justified than he realizes. Business really is romance, for it is not reality. There is one real advantage that America has over England, largely due to its livelier and more impressionable ideal. America does not think that stupidity is practical. It does not think that ideas are merely destructive things. It does not think that a genius is only a person to be told to go away and blow his brains out. Rather, it would open all its machine range of the genius and beg him to blow his brains in. It might attempt to use a natural force like Blake or Shelley for the very ignoble purpose. It would be quite capable of asking Blake to take Tiger and his golden lions round as a sort of barnum show or Shelley to hang his stars and haloed clouds among the lights of Broadway. But it would not assume that a natural force is useless any more than that Niagara is useless. And there is a very definite distinction here touching the intelligence of the trader. Whatever we may think of either course touching the intelligence of the artist. It is one thing that Apollo should be employed by Admetus, though he is a god. It is quite another thing that Apollo should always be sacked by Admetus because he is a god. Now in England, largely owing to the accident of a rivalry and therefore a comparison with the French, there arose about the end of the eighteenth century an extraordinary notion that there was some sort of connection between dullness and success. What the Americans call a bonehead became what the English call a hard headed man. The merchants of London evinced their contempt for the fantastic logicians of Paris by living in a permanent state of terror lest somebody should set the tames on fire. In this, as in much else, it is much easier to understand the Americans. If we connect them with the French who were their allies than with the English who were their enemies. There are a great many Franco-American resemblances, which the practical Anglo-Saxons are of course too hard headed or boneheaded to see. American history is haunted with the shadow of the plebiscitary president. They have a classical architecture for public buildings. Their cities are planned upon the squares of Paris and not upon the labyrinth of London. They call their cities Corinth and Syracuse, as the French called their citizens Epaminotus and Timoleon. Their soldiers wore the French kepi and they make coffee admirably and do not make tea at all. But of all the French elements in America, the most French is this real practicality. They know that at certain times the most businesslike of all quality is a French phrase. The publisher may induce the poet to do a pot-boiler, but the publisher would cheerfully allow the poet to set the Mississippi on fire if it would boil his particular pot. It is not so much that Englishmen are stupid as that they are afraid of being clever, and it is not so much that Americans are clever as they do not try to be any stupider than they are. The fire of French logic has burnt that out of America as it has burnt it out of Europe, and of almost every place except England. This is one of the few points on which English insularity really is a disadvantage. It is the fatal notion that the only sort of common sense is to be found in confusion, and that the only sort of compromise is to be found in confusion. This must be clearly distinguished from the common place about the utilitarian world not rising to the invisible values of genius. Under this philosophy the utilitarian does not see the utility of genius, even when it is quite visible. He does not see it, not because he is a utilitarian, but because he is an idealist whose ideal is dullness. For some time the English aspired to be stupid, prayed and hoped with soaring spiritual ambition to be stupid. But with all their worship of success they did not succeed in being stupid. The natural talents of a great and traditional nation were always breaking out in spite of them. In spite of the merchants of London Turner did set the tames on fire. In spite of our previously explained preference for realism to romance, Europe persisted in resounding with the name of Byron. And just when we had made it perfectly clear to the French that we despised all their flamboyant tricks, that we were a plain, prosaic people, and there was no fantastic glory or chivalry about us, the very shaft we sent against them, shown with the name of Nelson, a shooting, and a falling star. CHAPTER VIII. PRESSEDANCE AND PROBLEMS All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen. All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen. This difference, deep and perhaps inerradicable in the temperaments of the two peoples, explains a thousand things in their literature and their laws. The American national poet praised his people for their readiness to rise against the never-ending audacity of elected persons. The English national anthem is content to say hardly but almost hastily, confound their politics, and then more cheerfully, as if changing the subject, God save the king. For this is especially the secret of the monarch or the chief magistrate in the two countries. They arm the president with the powers of a king that he may be a nuisance in politics. We deprive the king even of the powers of a president, lest he should remind us of a politician. We desire to forget the never-ending audacity of elected persons, and with us therefore it really never does end. That is the practical objection to our own habit of changing the subject instead of changing the ministry. The king, as the Irish would observe, is not a subject, but in that sense the English crowned head is not a king. He is a popular figure intended to remind us of the England that politicians do not remember, the England of horses and ships and gardens and good fellowship. The Americans have no such purely social symbol, and it is rather the root than the result of this, that their social luxury, and especially their sports, are a little lacking in humanity and humor. It is the American, much more than the Englishman, who takes his pleasure sadly, not to say savagely. The genuine popularity of constitutional monarchs in parliamentary countries can be explained by any practical example. Let us suppose that great social reform, the compulsory hair cutting act, has just begun to be enforced. The compulsory hair cutting act, as every good citizen knows, is a statute which permits any person to grow his hair to any length, in any wild or wonderful shape, so long as he is registered with the hairdresser who charges a shilling. But it imposes a universal close shave, like that which is found so hygienic during a curative detention at Dartmoor, on all who are registered only with a barber, who charges three pence. Thus, while the ornamental classes can continue to ornament the street with Piccadilly weepers or chinbeers if they choose, the working classes demonstrate the care with which the state protects them by going about in a fresher, cooler, and cleaner condition, a condition which has the further advantage of revealing at a glance that outline of the criminal skull which is so common among them. The compulsory hair cutting act is thus in every way a compact and convenient example of all our current laws about education, sport, liquor, and liberty in general. While the law is passed and the masses insensible to its scientific value are still murmuring against it, the ignorant peasant maiden is averse to so extreme a fashion of bobbing her hair, and does not see how she can even be a flapper with nothing to flap. Her father, his mind already poisoned by Bolshevists, begins to wonder who the devil does these things and why. In proportion as he knows the world of today he guesses that the real origin may be quite obscure, or the real motive quite corrupt. The pressure may have come from anybody who has gained power or money anyhow. It may have come from the foreign millionaire who owns all the expensive hairdressing saloons. It may have come from some swindler in the cutlery trade who has contracted to sell a million bad razors. Hence the poor man looks about him with suspicion in the street, knowing that the lowest sneak or the loudest snob he sees may be directing the government of his country. Anybody may have to do with politics, and this sort of thing is politics. Suddenly he catches sight of a crowd, stops and begins wildly to cheer a carriage that is passing. The carriage contains the one person who has certainly not any great scientific reform. He is the only person in the common wealth who is not allowed to cut off other people's hair or to take away other people's liberties. He at least is kept out of politics, and men hold him up as they did an unspotted victim to appease the wrath of the gods. He is their king, and the only man they know is not their ruler. We need not be surprised that he is popular, knowing how they are ruled. The popularity of a president in America is exactly the opposite. The American Republic is the last medieval monarchy. It is intended that the president shall rule and take all the risks of ruling. If the hair is cut, he is the haircutter, the magistrate that bears not the razor in vain. All the popular presidents, Jackson and Lincoln and Roosevelt have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not as constitutional monarchs. In short, the names have become curiously interchanged, and as a historical reality it is the president who ought to be called the king. But it is not only true that the president could correctly be called the king. It is also true that the king might correctly be called the president. We could hardly find a more exact description of him than to call him a president. What is expected in modern times of a modern constitutional monarch is emphatically that he should preside. We expect him to take the throne exactly as if he were taking the chair. The chairman does not move the motion or resolution, far less voted. He is not supposed even to favor it. He is expected to please everybody by favoring nobody. The primary essentials of a president or chairman are that he should be treated with ceremonial respect, that he should be popular in his personality, and yet impersonal in his opinions, and that he should actually be a link between all the other persons by being different from all of them. This is exactly what is demanded of a constitutional monarch in modern times. It is exactly the opposite to the American position, in which the president does not preside at all. He moves, and the things he moves may truly be called a motion, for the national idea is perpetual motion. Technically it is called a message, and might often be called a menace. Thus we may truly say that the king presides and the president reigns. Some would prefer to say that the president rules, and some senators and members of Congress would prefer to say that he rebels. But there is no doubt that he moves. He does not take the chair or even the stool, but rather the stump. Some people seem to suppose that the fall of President Wilson was a denial of this almost ideal in America. As a matter of fact it was the strongest possible assertion of it. The idea is that the president shall take responsibility and risk, and responsibility means being blamed, and risk means the risk of being blamed. The theory is that the things are done by the president, and if things go wrong or are alleged to go wrong, it is the fault of the president. This does not invalidate, but rather ratifies the comparison with true monarchs, such as the medieval monarchs. Constitutional princes are seldom deposed, but despots were often deposed. In the simpler races of sunnier lands such as Turkey they were commonly assassinated. Even in our own history a king often received the same respectful tribute to the responsibility and reality of his office. But King John was attacked because he was strong, not because he was weak. And the second lost the crown because the crown was a trophy, not because it was a trifle. And President Wilson was deposed because he had used a power, which is such in its nature, that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. As a matter of fact, of course, it is easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's real unpopularity, and still more easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's real failure. There are a great many people in America who justify and applaud him, and what is yet more interesting, who justify him not on pacifist and idealistic, but on patriotic and even military grounds. It is especially insisted by some that his demonstration, which seemed futile as a threat against Mexico, was a very far-sighted preparation for the real threat against Prussia. But in so far as the democracy did disagree with him, it was but the occasional and inevitable result of the theory by which the despond has to anticipate the democracy. Thus the American king and the English president are the very opposite of each other, yet they are both the varied and very national indications of the same contemporary truth. It is the great weariness and contempt that have fallen upon common politics in both countries. It may be answered with some show of truth that the new American president represents a return to common politics, and that in that sense he marks a real rebuke to the last president and his more uncommon politics. And it is true that many who put Mr. Harding in power regard him as the symbol of something which they call normalcy, which may roughly be translated into English by the word normality. And by this they do mean more or less the return to the vague capitalist conservatism of the 19th century. They might call Mr. Harding a Victorian if they had ever lived under Victoria. Perhaps these people do entertain the extraordinary notion that the 19th century was normal. But there are very few who think so, and even they will not think so long. The blunder is the beginning of nearly all our present troubles. The 19th century was the very reverse of normal. It suffered a most unnatural strain in the combination of political equality in theory with extreme economic inequality in practice. Capitalism was not normalcy, but an abnormalcy. Property is normal, and is more normal in proportion as it is universal. Slavery may be normal and even natural in the sense that a bad habit may be second nature. But capitalism was never anything so human as a habit. We may say it was never anything so good as a bad habit. It was never accustomed, for men never grew accustomed to it. It was never even conservative, for before it was even created wise men had realized that it could not be conserved. It was from the first a problem, and those who will not even admit the capitalist problem deserve to get the Bolshevist solution. All things considered I cannot say anything worse of them than that. Presidents and Problems The recent presidential election preserves some trace of the old party system of America. But its tradition has very nearly faded like that of the party system of England. It is easy for an Englishman to confess that he never quite understood the American party system. It would perhaps be more courageous in him and more informing to confess that he never really understood the British party system. The planks in the two American platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected and ramshackle. But our own party was as much of a patchwork and indeed I think even more so. Everybody knows that the two American factions were called Democrat and Republican. It does not at all cover the case to identify the former with liberals and the latter with conservatives. The Democrats are the party of the South and have some true tradition from the Southern aristocracy and the defense of secession and states' rights. The Republicans rose in the North as the party of Lincoln, largely condemning slavery. But the Republicans are also the party of tariffs and are at least accused of being the party of trusts. The Democrats are the party of free trade and in the great movement of twenty years ago the party of free silver. The Democrats are also the party of the Irish and the stones they throw at trusts are retorted by stones thrown at Tammany. It is easy to see all these things as curiously sporadic and bewildering. But I am inclined to think that they are as a whole more coherent and rational than our own old division of liberals and conservatives. There is even more doubt nowadays about what is the connecting link between the different terms and the old party programs. I have never been able to understand why being in favor of protection should have anything to do with being opposed to home rule, especially as most of the people who were to receive home rule were themselves in favor of protection. I could never see what giving people cheap bread had to do with forbidding them cheap beer, or why the party which sympathizes with Ireland cannot sympathize with Poland. I cannot see why liberals did not liberate public houses or conservatives, conserved crofters. I do not understand the principle upon which the causes were selected on both sides. And I am inclined to think that it was with the impartial object of distributing nonsense equally on both sides. Heaven knows there is enough nonsense in American politics too, towering and tropical nonsense like a cyclone or an earthquake. But when all is said, I am inclined to think that there was more spiritual and atmospheric cohesion in the different parts of the American party than in those of the English party. And I think this unity was all the more real because it was more difficult to define. The Republican Party originally stood for the triumph of the North, and the North stood for the 19th century. It is for the characteristic commercial expansion of the 19th century. For a firm faith in the profit and progress of its great and growing cities, its division of labor, its industrial science, and its evolutionary reform. The Democratic Party stood more loosely for all the elements that doubted whether this development was democratic or was desirable. All that looked back to Jeffersonian idealism and the serene abstractions of the 18th century, more forward to Brianite idealism, and some simplified utopia founded on grain rather than gold. Along with this went, not at all, unnaturally, the last and lingering sentiment of the southern squires who remembered a more rural civilization that seemed by comparison romantic. Along with this went quite logically the passions and the pathos of selfish, themselves a rural civilization whose basis is a religion or what the 19th century tended to call superstition. Above all, it was perfectly natural that this tone of thought should favor local liberties, and even a revolt on behalf of local liberties, and should distrust the huge machine of centralized power called the Union. In short, something very near the truth was said by a suicidally silly Republican supporter, who was running blame for the presidency, when he denounced the Democratic Party as supported by Rome, Rome, and rebellion. They seemed to me to be three excellent things in their place, and that is why I suspect that I should have belonged to the Democratic Party if I had been born in America when there was a Democratic Party. But I fancy that by this time even this general distinction has become very dim. If I had been an American twenty years ago, in the time of the great Free Silver Campaign, I should certainly never have hesitated for an incident about my sympathies or my side. My feelings would have been exactly those that are nobly expressed by Mr. Vachel Lindsay, in a poem bearing the characteristic title of Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, and by the way nobody can begin to sympathize with America, whose soul does not to some extent begin to swing and dance to the drums and gongs of Mr. Vachel Lindsay's great orchestra, which has the note of his whole nation in this, yet a refined person can revile it a hundred times over as violent and brazen and barbarous and absurd, but not as insincere. There is something in it, and that something is the soul of many million men. But the poet himself, in the political poem referred to, speaks of Brian's fall over Free Silver as defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream, and it is only too probable that the cause has fallen as well as the candidate. The William Jennings Brian of later years is not the man whom I should have seen in my youth, with the visionary eyes of Mr. Vachel Lindsay. He has become a commonplace pacifist, which is in its nature the very opposite of a revolutionist. For if men will fight rather than sacrifice humanity on a golden cross, it cannot be wrong for them to resist its being sacrificed to an iron cross. I came into very indirect contact with Mr. Brian when I was in America, in a fashion that made me realize how hard it has become to recover the illusions of a bryanite. I believe that my lecture agent was anxious to arrange a debate, and I thought a sort of loose challenge to the effect that woman's suffrage had weakened the position of woman. And while I was away in the wilds of Oklahoma, my lecture agent, a man of blood, curdling courage and enterprise, asked Mr. Brian to debate with me. Now Mr. Brian is one of the greatest orators of modern history, and there is no conceivable reason why he should trouble to debate with a wandering lecturer. But as a matter of fact he expressed himself in the most magnanimous and courteous terms about my personal position, but said, as I understood, that it would be improper to debate on female suffrage, as it was already part of the political system. And when I heard that I could not help a sigh, for I recognized something I knew only too well on the front benches of my own beloved land. The great and glorious demagogue had degenerated into a statesman. I had never expected for a moment that the great orator could be bothered to debate with me at all. But it had never occurred to me, as the general moral principle, that two educated men were forever forbidden to talk sense about a particular topic, because a lot of other people had already voted on it. What is the matter with that attitude? Is the loss of the freedom of the mind? There can be no liberty of thought unless it is ready to unsettle what has recently been settled, as well as what has long been settled. We are perpetually being told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong man who will do things. What is wanted is a strong man who will undo things. And that will be a real test of strength. Anyhow, we could have believed in the time of free silver fight that the Democratic Party was Democratic with a small d. In Mr. Wilson it was transfigured. His friends would say into a higher, and his foes into a hazier thing. And the Republican reaction against him, even where it has been healthy, has also been hazy. In fact, it has been not so much the victory of a political party as a relapse into a repose after certain political passions. And in that sense, there is a truth in the strange phrase about normalcy, in the sense that there is nothing more normal than going to sleep. But an even larger truth is this. It is most likely that America is no longer concentrated upon these faction fights at all, but is considering certain large problems upon which those factions hardly trouble to take sides. They are too large even to be classified as foreign policy, distinct from domestic policy. They are so large as to be inside as well as outside the state. From an English standpoint, the most obvious example is the Irish, for the Irish problem is not a British problem, but also an American problem. And this is true even of the great external enigma of Japan. The Japanese question may be a part of foreign policy for America, but it is a part of domestic policy for California. And the same is true of that other intense and intelligent Eastern people, the genius and limitations of which have troubled the world so much longer. What the Japanese are in California, the Jews are in America. That is, they are a piece of a foreign policy that has become embedded in domestic policy, something which is found inside but still has to be regarded from the outside. On these great international matters, I doubt if Americans got much guidance from their party's system, especially as most of these questions have grown very recently and rapidly to enormous size. Men are left free to judge of them with fresh minds. And that is the truth of the statement that the Washington Conference has opened the gates of a new world. On the relations to England and Ireland, I will not attempt to dwell adequately here. I have already noted that my first interview was with an Irishman and my first impression from that interview of if it's sense of the importance of Ireland in Anglo-American relations. And I have said something of the Irish problem prematurely and out of its proper order, under the stress of that sense of urgency. Here I will only add two remarks about the two countries effectively. A great many British journalists have recently imagined that they were pouring oil upon the troubled waters when they were rather pouring out oil to smooth the downward path and to turn the broad road to destruction into a butter slide. They seem to have no notion of what to do, except to say what they imagine the very stupidest of their readers would be pleased to hear, and conceal whatever the most intelligent of their readers would probably like to know. They therefore inform the public that the majority of Americans had abandoned all sympathy with Ireland because of its alleged sympathy with Germany, and that this majority of Americans was now ardently in sympathy with its English brothers across the sea. Now to begin with, such critics have no notion of what they are saying when they talk about the majority of Americans. To anybody who has happened to look in, let us say, on the city of Omaha, Nebraska, the remark will have something enormous and overwhelming about it. It's like saying that the majority of the inhabitants of China would agree with the Chinese ambassador in a preference for dining at the Savoy rather than the Ritz. There are millions and millions of people living in those great central plains of the North American continent, of whom it would be nearer the truth to say that they have never heard of England, or of Ireland either, than to say that their first emotional movement is a desire to come to the rescue of either of them. It is perfectly true that the more monomaniac sort of sin fainter might sometimes irritate this innocent and isolated American spirit by being pro-Irish. It is equally true that a traditional Bostonian or Virginian might irritate it by being pro-English. The only difference is that large numbers of pure Irishmen are scattered in those far places, and large numbers of pure Englishmen are not. But it is truest of all to say that neither England nor Ireland so much as crosses the mind of most of them once in six months. Painting up large notices of watch us grow, making money by farming with machinery, together with an occasional hold up with six shooters and photographs of a beautiful murderous or divorcee, fill up the round of their good and happy lives, and fleet the time carelessly as in the Golden Age. But putting aside all this vast and distant democracy, which is the real majority of Americans, and confining ourselves to that older culture on the eastern coast, which the critics probably had in mind, we should find a case more comforting, but not to be covered with cheap and false comfort. Now it is perfectly true that any Englishman coming to this eastern coast, as I did, finds himself not only most formally welcomed as a guest, but most cordially complimented as an Englishman. Men recall with pride the branches of their family that belong to England, or the English counties where they were rooted, and there are enthousiasms for English literature and history, which are as spontaneous as patriotism itself. Something of this may be put down to certain promptitude and flexibility in all American kindness, which is never sufficiently stodgy to be called good nature. The Englishman does sometimes wonder whether, if he had been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered remote Russian aunts and uncles, and disinterred a Muscovite great-grandmother, or whether, if he had come from Iceland, they would not have known as much about Iceland's sagas, and been as sympathetic about the absence of Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the portions of the case he will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that a number of educated Americans are very warmly and sincerely sympathetic with England. What I began to feel with a certain creeping chill was that they were only too sympathetic with England. The word sympathetic is sometimes rather a double sense. The impression I received was that all these chivalrous Southerners and men mellow with Bostonian memories were rallying to England, and they were on the defensive, and it was poor old England that they were defending. Their attitude implied that somebody or something was leaving her undefended or finding her indefensible. The burden of that hearty chorus was that England was not so black as she was painted. It seemed clear that somewhere or other she was being painted pretty black. But there was something else that made me uncomfortable. It was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously forgiven, it was also something involving questions of power as well as morality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned to me hot and cold, and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land. Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation. Never during the great and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly that note in a human voice. England was being pitied. I, as an Englishman, was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be an object of compassion like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full of the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. But the anger has given place to anxiety, and the anxiety is not yet at an end. It is not my business here to expound my view of English politics, still less of European politics or the politics of the world, but to put down a few impressions of American travel. On many points of European politics the impression will be purely negative. I am sure that most Americans have no notion of the position of France or the position of Poland. But if English readers want the truth, I am sure this is the truth about their notion of the position of England. They are wondering, or those who are watching are wondering, whether the term of her success has come and she is going down the dark road after Prussia. Many are sorry if this is so. Some are glad if it is so. But all are seriously considering the probability of its being so. And herein lay especially the horrible folly of our black and tan terrorism over the Irish people. I have noted that the newspapers told us that America had been chilled in its Irish sympathies by Irish detachment during the war. It is the painful truth that any advantage we might have had from this we ourselves immediately proceed to destroy. Ireland might have put herself wrong with America by her attitude about Belgium, if England had not instantly proceeded to put herself more wrong by her attitude towards Ireland. It is quite true that two blacks do not make a white, but you cannot send a black to reproach people with tolerating blackness. And this is quite as true when one is a black Brunswicker and the other a black and tan. It is true that since then England has made surprisingly sweeping concessions. Concession so large as to increase the amazement that the refusal should have been so long. But unfortunately the combination of the two rather clinches the conception of our mind. Since the concession had come before the terror it would have looked like an attempt to emancipate and would probably have succeeded. Coming so abruptly after the terror it looked only like an attempt to tyrannize and an attempt that failed. It was partly an inheritance from a stupid tradition which tried to combine what is called firmness with what is conciliation, as if when we made up our minds to sue the man with a five pound note we always took care to undo our own action by giving him a kick as well. The English politician has often done that, though there is nothing to be said of such a fool except that he has wasted a fiver. But in this case he gave the kick first, received the kicking in return, and then gave up the money. And it was hard for the bystanders to say anything except that he had been badly beaten. The combination and sequence of events seems almost as if it were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous parallel. The first action looked only too like the invasion of Belgium and the second like the evacuation of Belgium. So that vast and silent crowd in the west looked at British Empire as men look at a great tower that has begun to lean. Thus it was that while I found real pleasure I could not find unrelieved consolation in the sincere compliments paid to my country by so many cultivated Americans. Their memories of homely corners of historic counties from which their fathers came, of the cathedral that dwarfs the town, or the inn at the turning of the road. There was something in their voices and look in their eyes which from the first disturbed me. So I have heard good Englishmen who died afterwards the death of soldiers cry aloud in 1914. It seems impossible of those Jolly Bavarians, or I will never believe it when I think of the time I had at Heidelberg, but there are other things beside the parallel of Prussia or the problem of Ireland. The American press is much freer than our own. The American public is much more familiar with the discussion of corruption than our own, and it is much more conscious of the corruption of our politics than we are. Almost any man in America may speak of the Marconi case. Many a man in England does not even know what it means. Many imagine that it had something to do with the propriety of politicians speculating on the stock exchange. So that it means a great deal to Americans to say that one figure in that drama is ruling India, and another is ruling Palestine. And this brings me to another problem, which is dealt with much more openly in America than in England. I mention it here only because it is a perfect model of the misunderstandings in the modern world. If anyone asks for an example of exactly how the important part of every story is left out, and even the part that is reported is not understood, he could hardly have a stronger case than the story of Henry Ford of Detroit. When I was in Detroit, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ford, and it really was a pleasure. He is a man quite capable of views which I think silly to the point of insanity, but he is not the vulgar benevolent boss. It must be admitted that he is a millionaire, but he cannot really be convicted of being a philanthropist. He is not a man who merely wants to run people. It is rather his views that run him and perhaps run away with him. He has a distinguished and sensitive face. He really invented things himself, unlike most men who profit by inventions. He is something of an artist and not a little of a fighter. A man of that type is always capable of being wildly wrong, especially in the sectarian atmosphere of America. And Mr. Ford has been wrong before and may be wrong now. He is chiefly known in England for a project which I think very preposterous, that of the peace ship, which came to Europe during the war. But he is not known in England at all in connection with a much more important campaign which he has conducted much more recently and with much more success. A campaign against the Jews, like one of the anti-Semitic campaigns of the continent. Now anyone who knows anything of America knows exactly what the peace ship would be like. It was a national combination of imagination and ignorance, which has at least some of the beauty of innocence. Men living in those huge hedgeless inland plains know nothing about frontiers or the tragedy of a fight for freedom. They know nothing of alarm and armaments and the peril of a high civilization poised like a precious statue within reach of a mailed fist. They are accustomed to a cosmopolitan citizenship in which men of all bloods mingle and in which men of all creeds are counted equal. Their highest moral boast is humanitarianism. Their highest mental boast is enlightenment. In a word they are the very last men in the world who would seem likely to pride themselves on a prejudice against the Jews. They have no religion in particular except a sincere sentiment which they would call true Christianity and which especially forbids an attack on the Jews. They have a patriotism which prides itself on assimilating all types including the Jews. Mr. Ford is a pure product of this pacific world and was sufficiently proved by his pacifism. If a man of that sort has discovered that there is a Jewish problem it is because there is a Jewish problem. It is certainly not because there is an anti-Jewish prejudice. For if there had been any amount of such racial and religious prejudice he would have been about the very last sort of man to have it. His particular part of the world would have been the very last place to produce it. We may well laugh at the peace ship and its wild course and the inevitable shipwreck, but remember that its very wildness was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle of Israel. Everything that made him anti-war should have prevented him from being anti-Semite. We may mock him for being mad on peace, but we cannot say that he was so mad on peace that he made war on Israel. It happened that when I was in America I had just published some studies on Palestine and I was besieged by rabbis lamenting my prejudice. I pointed out that they would have got hold of the wrong word even if they had not got hold of the wrong word again. As a point of personal autobiography I do not happen to be a man who dislikes Jews, though I believe that some men do. I have had Jews among my most intimate and faithful friends since my boyhood and I hope to have them till I die. But even if I did have a dislike of Jews it would be illogical to call that dislike a prejudice. Prejudice is a very lucid Latin word, meaning the bias which a man has before he considers a case. I might be said to be prejudiced against a Harry Anu because of his name, for I have never been on terms of such intimacy with him as to correct my preconceptions. But if after moving about in a modern world and meeting Jews, knowing Jews, doing business with Jews and reading and hearing about Jews, I came to the conclusion that I did not like Jews. My conclusion certainly would not be a prejudice. It would simply be an opinion, and one I should be perfectly entitled to hold, though as a matter of fact I do not hold it. No extravagance of hatred merely following an experience of Jews can properly be called a prejudice. Now the point is that this new American anti-Semitism springs from experience and nothing but experience. There is no prejudice for it to spring from, or rather the prejudice is all the other way. All the traditions of that democracy and very creditable traditions too are in favor of toleration and a sort of idealistic indifference. The sympathies in which these 19th century people were reared were all against front de bouffe and in favor of Rebecca. They inherited a prejudice against anti-Semitism, a prejudice of anti-Semitism. These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as they might have struck oil, because it is there, and not even because they were looking for it. Their view of the problem, like their use of the oil, is not always satisfactory, and with parts of it I entirely disagree. But the point is that the thing which I call a problem and others call a prejudice has now appeared in broad daylight in a new country where there is no priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancient superstition to explain it. It has appeared because it is a problem, and those are the best friends of the Jews, including many of the Jews themselves, who are trying to find a solution. That is the meaning of the incident of Mr. Henry Ford in Detroit, and you will hardly hear an intelligible word about it in England. The talk of prejudice against the Japanese is not unlike the talk of prejudice against the Jews. Only in this case our indifference is really the excuse of ignorance. We used to lecture the Russians for oppressing the Jews, before we heard the word Bolshevist and began to lecture them for being oppressed by the Jews. In the same way we have long lectured the Californians for oppressing the Japanese without allowing for the possibility of therefore seeing that the oppression may soon be the other way. As in the other case it may be a persecution, but it is not a prejudice. The Californians know more about the Japanese than we do, and their own colonists, when they are placed in the same position, generally say the same thing. I will not attempt to deal adequately here with the vast international and diplomatic problems which arise with the name of the new power in the Far East. It is possible that Japan having imitated European militarism may imitate European pacifism. I cannot honestly pretend to know what the Japanese mean by the one any more than by the other. When Englishmen, especially English liberals like myself, take a superior and censorious attitude towards Americans, and especially Californians, I am moved to make a final remark. When a considerable number of Englishmen talk of the grave contending claims of our friendship with Japan and our friendship with America, when they finally tend in a sort of summing up to dwell on the superior virtues of Japan, I may be permitted to make a single comment. We are perpetually boring the world, and each other with talk about the bonds that bind us to America. We are perpetually crying aloud that England and America are very much alike, especially England. We are always insisting that the two are identical in all things in which they most obviously differ. We are always saying that they both stand for democracy when we should not consent to stand their democracy for half a day. We are always saying that at least we are all Anglo-Saxons when we are descended from Romans and Normans and Britons and Danes, and they are descended from Irishmen and Italians and Slavs and Germans. We tell a people whose very existence is a revolt against the British Crown that they are passionately devoted to the British Constitution. We tell a nation whose whole policy has been isolation and independence that with us she can bear safely the white man's burden of the universal empire. We tell a continent crowded with Irishmen to thank God that the Saxon can always rule the Kelt. We tell a populace whose very virtues are lawless that together we uphold the reign of law. We recognize our own law abiding character in people who make laws that neither they nor anybody else can abide. We congratulate them on clinging to all they have cast away, and on imitating everything which they came into existence to insult. And when we have established all these nonsensical analogies with a non-existent nation, we wait until there is a crisis in which we really are at one with America. And then we falter and threaten to fail her. In a battle where we really are of one blood, the blood of the great white race throughout the world, when we really have one language and the fundamental alphabet of Cadmus and the script of Rome, when we really do represent the same reign of law, the common conscience of Christendom and the morals of men baptized, when we really have an implicit faith and honor and type of freedom to summon up our souls as with trumpets, then many of us begin to weaken and waver and wonder whether there is not something very nice about little yellow men whose heroic stories revolve around polygamy and suicide and whose heroes war two swords and worship the ancestors of the Mikado. Section 19 Chapter 9 Part 1 Prohibition in fact and fancy. I went to America with some notion of not discussing prohibition, but I soon found that well to do Americans were only too delighted to discuss it over the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, to dispense with the nuts. I'm far from sneering at this, having a general philosophy which need not here be expounded, but which may be symbolized by saying that monkeys can enjoy nuts, but only men can enjoy wine. But if I'm to deal with prohibition, there's no doubt of the first thing to be said about it. The first thing to be said about it is that it does not exist. It is to some extent enforced among the poor. At any rate it was intended to be enforced among the poor, even though among them I fancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced among the rich. And I doubt whether it was intended to be. I suspect that this has always happened whenever this negative notion has taken hold of some particular province or tribe. Prohibition never prohibits. It never has in history. Not even in Muslim history. And it never will. Muhammad at least had the argument of a climate and not in the interest of a class. But if a test is needed, consider what part of Muslim culture has passed permanently into our own modern culture. You will find that the one Muslim poem that has really pierced is a Muslim poem in praise of wine. The crown of all the victories of the Crescent is that nobody reads the Koran and everybody reads the Rubia. Most of us remember with satisfaction an old picture in punch representing a festive old gentleman in a state of collapse on the pavement, and a philanthropic old lady anxiously calling the attention of a cab man to the calamity. The old lady says, I'm sure this poor gentleman is ill, and the cab man replies with fervor, ill. I wish I'd add half his complaint. We talk about unconscious humor, but there is such a thing as unconscious seriousness. Flippancy is a flower whose roots are often underground in the subconsciousness. Many a man talks sense when he thinks he is talking nonsense, touches on a conflict of ideas as if it were only a contradiction of language, or really makes a parallel when he means only to make a pun. Some of the punch jokes of the best period are examples of this, and that quoted above is a very strong example of it. The cab man meant what he said, but he said a great deal more than he meant. His utterance contained fine philosophical doctrines and distinctions of which he was not perhaps entirely conscious. The spirit of the English language, the tragedy and comedy of the condition of the English people, spoke through him as the God spoke through a tariff-head or a brazen mask of oracle. And the oracle is an omen. And in some sense, an omen of doom. Observe to begin with the sobriety of the cab man. Note his measure, his moderation. Or to use the yet truer term his temperance. He only wishes to have half the old gentleman's complaint. The old gentleman is welcome to the other half along with all the other pumps and luxuries of his superior social station. There is nothing bullshivester even communist about the temperance cab man. He might almost be called distributionist in the sense that he wishes to distribute the old gentleman's complaint more equally between the old gentleman and himself. And of course the social relations that are represented are very much truer to life than it is fashionable to suggest. By the realism of this picture Mr. Punch made amends for some more snobbish pictures with the opposite social moral. It will remain eternally among his real glories that he exhibited a picture in which the cab man was sober and the gentleman was drunk. Despite many ideas to the contrary, it was emphatically a picture of real life. The truth is subject to the simplest of all possible tests. If the cab man were really and truly drunk he would not be a cab man, for he could not drive a cab. If he had the whole of the old gentleman's complaint he would be sitting happily on the pavement beside the old gentleman, a symbol of social equality found at last and the levelling of all classes of mankind. I do not say that there has never been such a monster known as a drunken cab man. I do not say that the driver may not sometimes have approximated imprudently to three quarters of the complaint, instead of adhering to his severe but wise conception of half of it. But I do say that most men of the world, if they spoke sincerely, could testify to more examples of helplessly drunk gentleman put inside cabs than of helplessly drunken drivers on top of them. Philanthropists and officials who never look at people, but only at papers, probably have a mass of social statistics to the contrary, found it on the simple fact that cab man can be cross examined about their habits and gentlemen cannot. Social workers probably have the whole thing worked out in sections and compartments, showing how the extreme intoxication of cab man compares with a parallel intoxication of costar-mongers, or measuring the drunkenness of a dust man against the drunkenness of a crossing sweeper. But there is more practical evidence embodied in the practical speech of the English and in the proverb that says, as drunk as a lord. Now, prohibition, whether as a proposal in England or a pretense in America, simply means that the man who has drunk less shall have no drink, and the man who has drunk more shall have all the drink. It means that the old gentleman shall be carried home in a cab drunker than ever, but that in order to make it quite safe for him to drink to this, the man who drives him shall be forbidden to drink even in moderation. That is what it means. That is all it means. That is all it ever will mean. It tends to that in Muslim countries, where the luxurious and advanced drink champagne, while the poor and fanatical drink water. It means that in modern America, where the wealthy are all at this moment sipping their cocktails and discussing how much harder laborers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity. This is what it means, and all it means. And men are divided about it according to whether they believe in a certain transcendental concept called justice expressed in a more mystical paradox as the equality of men. So long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as you are rich and really confident of remaining so, you can have prohibition and be as drunk as you choose. I see that some remarks by the Reverend R. J. Campbell dealing with social conditions in America are reported in the press. They include some observations about sinfane in which, as in most of Mr. Campbell's allusions to Ireland, it is not difficult to detect his dismal origin or the accurate smell of the smoke of Belfast. But the remarks about America are valuable in the objective sense, over and above their philosophy. He believes that prohibition will survive and be a success, nor does he seem himself to regard the prospect with any special disfavor. But he frankly and freely testifies to the truth I have asserted, that prohibition does not prohibit, so far as the wealthy are concerned. He testifies to constantly seeing wine on the table, as will any other grateful guest of the generous hospitality of America, and he implies humorously that he asks no questions about the story told him of the old stocks in the cellars. So there is no dispute about the facts, and we come back as before to the principles. Is Mr. Campbell content with a prohibition which is another name for privilege? If so, he is simply absorbed along with his new theology and new morality, which is different from mine. But he does state both sides of the inequality with equal logic and clearness, and in these days of intellectual fog that alone is like a ray of sunshine. Now my primary objection to prohibition is not based on any arguments against it, but on the one argument for it. I need nothing more for its condemnation than the only thing that is said in its defense. It is said by capitalists all over America, and it is very clearly and correctly reported by Mr. Campbell himself. The argument is that employees work harder and therefore employers get richer. That this idea should be taken calmly by itself as the test of a problem of liberty is in itself a final testimony to the presence of slavery. It shows that people have completely forgotten that there is no other test except the survival test. Employers are willing that workmen should have exercise as it may help them to do more work. They are even willing that workmen should have leisure, for the more intelligent capitalists can see that this also means that they can do more work. But they are not in any way willing that workmen should have fun. For fun only increases the happiness and not the utility of the worker. Fun is freedom, and in that sense is an end in itself. He concerns the man not as a worker but as a citizen, or even as a soul, and the soul in that sense is an end in itself. That a man shall have a reasonable amount of comedy and poetry and even fantasy in his life is part of his spiritual health, which is for the service of God, and not merely for his mechanical health, which is now bound to the service of man. The very test adopted has all the servile implication, the test of what we can get out of him instead of the test of what he can get out of life. Mr. Campbell is reported to have suggested, doubtless rather as a conjecture than a prophecy, that England may fight it necessary to become teetotal in order to compete commercially with the efficiency and economy of teetotal America. Well, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was in America one of the most economical and efficient of all forms of labor. It did not happen to be feasible for the English to compete with it by copying it. There were so many humanitarian prejudices about in those days. But economically there seems to be no reason why a man should not have prophesied that England would be forced to adopt American slavery then, as she is urged to adopt American prohibition now. Perhaps such a prophet would have prophesied rightly. Certainly it is not impossible that universal slavery might have been the vision of Calhoun, as universal prohibition seems to be the vision of Campbell. The old England of eighteen century would have said that such a plea for slavery was monstrous. But what would it have said of a plea for enforced water-drinking? Nevertheless the nobler's survival state of Calhoun collapsed before it could spread to Europe, and there is always the hope that the same may happen to the far more materialistic utopia of Mr. Campbell and soft drinks. Abstract morality is very important, and it may well clear the mind to consider what would be the effect of prohibition in America if it were introduced there. It would, of course, be a decisive departure from the tradition of the Declaration of Independence. Those who deny that are hardly serious enough to demand attention. It is enough to say that they are reduced to minimizing that document in defense of prohibition, exactly as the slave-owners were reduced to minimizing it in defense of slavery. They are reduced to saying that the Fathers of the Republic meant no more than that they would not be ruled by a king, and they are obviously open to the reply which Lincoln gave to Douglas on the slave-requestion. That if that great charter was limited to certain events in the 18th century, it was hardly worth making such a fuss about it in the 19th or in the 20th. But they are also open to another reply which is even more to the point when they pretend that Jefferson's famous preamble only means to say that monarchy is wrong. They are maintaining that Jefferson only meant to say something that he does not say at all. The great preamble does not say that all monarchial government must be wrong. On the contrary, it rather implies that most government is right. It speaks of human governments in general as justified by the necessity of defending certain personal rights. I see no reason whatever to suppose that it would not include any royal government that does defend those rights. Till less do I doubt what it would say of a republican government that does destroy those rights. But what are those rights? Sophists can always debate about their degree, but even Sophists cannot debate about their direction. Nobody in his five wits will deny that Jeffersonian democracy wished to give the law a general control in more public things, but the citizens are more general liberty in private things. Wherever we draw the line, liberty can only be personal liberty. And the most personal liberties must at least be the last liberties we lose. But today they are the first liberties we lose. It is not a question of drawing a line in the right place but of beginning at the wrong end. What are the rights of man if they do not include the normal right to regulate his own health in relation to the normal risks of diet and daily life? Nobody can pretend that beer is a poison, as plastic acid is a poison, that all the millions of civilized men who drank it all fell down dead when they had touched it. Its use and abuse is obviously a matter of judgment, and there can be no personal liberty if it is not a matter of private judgment. It is not in the least a question of drawing the line between liberty and license. If this is license, there is no such thing as liberty. It is plainly impossible to find any right more individual or intimate. To say that a man has a right to a vote, but not a right to a voice about the choice of his dinner, is like saying that he has a right to his hat, but not a right to his head. The end of section 19. This is a Libra Vox recording. All Libra Vox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton Section 20, Chapter 9, Part 2 Prohibition in Fact and Fancy Prohibition, therefore, plainly violates the rights of man. If there are any rights of man, what its supporters really mean is that there are none. And in suggesting this, they have all the advantages that every skeptic has when he supports a negation. That sort of ultimate skepticism can only be retorted upon itself, and we can point out to them that they can no more prove the right of the city to be oppressive, than we can prove the right of the citizen to be free. In the primary metaphysics of such a claim it would be surely easier to make it out for a single conscious soul than for an artificial social combination. If there are no rights of men, what are the rights of nations? Perhaps a nation has no claim to self-government. Perhaps it is no claim to good government. Perhaps it is no claim to any sort of government or any sort of independence. Perhaps they will say that is not implied in the Declaration of Independence. But without going deep into my reasons for believing in natural rights, or rather in supernatural rights, and Jefferson certainly states them as supernatural, I am content here to note that a man's treatment of his own body, in relation to traditional and ordinary opportunities for bodily access, is as near to his self-respect as social coercion can possibly go. And that when that is gone, there is nothing left. If coercion applies to that, it applies to everything, and in the future of this controversy it obviously will apply to everything. When I was in America people were already applying it to tobacco. I never can see why they should not apply it to talking. Talking often goes with tobacco as it goes with beer. And what is more relevant, talking may often lead both to beer and tobacco. Talking often drives a man to drink, both negatively in the form of nagging, and positively in the form of bad company. If the American Puritan is so anxious to be a censor morum, he should obviously put a stop to the evil communications that really corrupt good manners. He should reintroduce the skull's bridle among the other blue laws, for a land of blue devils. He should gag all gay deceivers and plausible cynics. He should cut off all flattering lips and the tongue that speaketh proud things. Nobody can doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is done simply by talking. Jefferson and the old Democrats allowed people to talk, not because they were unaware of this fact, but because they were fettered by this old fancy of theirs about freedom and the rights of man. But since we have already abandoned that doctrine in a final fashion, I cannot see why the new principle should not be applied intelligently, and in that case it would be applied to the control of conversation. The state would provide us with forms already filled up with the subject suitable for us to discuss at breakfast, perhaps allowing us a limited number of epigrams each. Perhaps we should have to make a formal application in writing to be allowed to make a joke that had just occurred to us in conversation, and the committee would consider it in due course. Perhaps it would be affected in a more practical fashion, and the private citizens would be shut up as the public houses were shut up. Perhaps they would all wear gags which the policemen would remove at stated hours, and their mouths would be open from one to three, as now in England even the public houses are from time to time accessible to the public. To some, this will sound fantastic, but not so fantastic as Jefferson would have thought prohibition. But there is one sense in which it is indeed fantastic, for by hypotheses it leaves out the favoritism that is the fundamental of the whole matter. The only sense in which we can say that logic will never go so far as this is that logic will never go the length of equality. It is perfectly possible that the same forces that have forbidden beer may go on to forbid tobacco, but they will in a special and limited sense forbid tobacco, but not cigars, or at any rate not expensive cigars. In America where large numbers of ordinary men smoke rather ordinary cigars, there would be doubtless a good opportunity of penalizing a very ordinary pleasure. But the Havana's of the millionaire will be all right. So it will be if ever the Puritans bring back the skull's bridle and the statutory silence of the populace. It will only be the populace that is silent. The politicians will go on talking. These I believe to be the broad facts of the problem of prohibition. But it would not be fair to leave it without mentioning two other causes which, if not defenses, are at least excuses. The first is that prohibition was largely passed in a sort of fervor or fever of self-sacrifice which was a part of the passionate patriotism of America in the war. As I have remarked elsewhere, those who have had any notion of what national unanimity was like will smile when they see America made a model of mere international idealism. Prohibition was partly a sort of patriotic renunciation for the popular instinct. Like every poetic instinct always tends at great crises to great gestures of renunciation. But this very fact, while it makes the inhumanity far more human, makes it far less final in convincing. Prohibition cannot remain standing stiffly in such symbolic attitudes, nor can a permanent policy be founded on something analogous to flinging a gauntlet or uttering a battle cry. We might as well expect all the ale students to remain through life with their mouths open exactly as they were when they uttered the college yell. It would be as reasonable to expect them to remain through life with their mouths shut while the wine cup which has been the sacrament of all poets and lovers passed round among all the youth of the world. This point appears very plainly in a discussion I had with a very thoughtful and sympathetic American critic, a clergyman writing in an Anglo-Catholic magazine. He put the sentiment of these healthier prohibitionists, which had so much to do with the passing of prohibition, by asking, May not a man who is asked to give up his blood for his country be asked to give up his beer for his country? And this phrase clearly illuminates all the limitations of the case. I have never denied in principle that it might in some abnormal crisis be lawful for a government to lock up the beer or to lock up the bread. In that sense I am quite prepared to treat the sacrifice of beer in the same way as the sacrifice of blood. But is my American critic really ready to treat the sacrifice of blood in the same way as the sacrifice of beer? Is blood shed to be as prolonged and protracted as prohibition? Is the normal noncombatant to shed his gore as often as he misses his drink? I can imagine people submitting to a special regulation as I can imagine them serving in a particular war. I do indeed despise the political neighbor that deliberately passes drink regulations as war measures and then preserves them as peace measures. But that is not a question of whether drink and drunkenness are wrong, but of whether lying and swindling are wrong. But I never deny that there might need to be exceptional sacrifices for exceptional occasions, and war is in its nature an exception. Only if war is the exception why should prohibition be the rule? If the surrender of beer is worthy to be compared to the shedding of blood, why then blood ought to be flowing forever like a fountain in the public squares of Philadelphia and New York? If my critic wants to complete his parallel he must draw up rather a remarkable program for the daily life of the ordinary citizen. He must suppose that through all their lives they are paraded every day at lunchtime and prodded with bayonets to show that they will shed their blood for their country. He must suppose that every evening after a light repass to poison gas and travel they are made to go to sleep in a trench under a permanent drizzle of shell fire. It is surely obvious that if this were the normal life of the citizen this citizen would have no normal life. The common sense of the thing is that sacrifices of this sort are admirable but abnormal. It is not normal for the state to be perpetually regulating our days with the discipline of a fighting regiment. And it is not normal for the state to be perpetually regulating our diet with the discipline of a famine. To say that every citizen must be subject to control in such bodily things is like saying that every Christian ought to tear himself with red hot pincers because the Christian martyrs did their duty in time of persecution. A man has a right to control his body, though in a time of martyrdom he may give his body to be burned, and a man has a right to control his bodily health, though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. Thus, though the patriotic defense was a sincere defense, it is a defense that comes back on the defenders like a boomerang, for it only proves that prohibition ought to be ephemeral unless war ought to be eternal. The other excuse is much less romantic and much more realistic. I have already said enough of the cause which is really realistic. The power behind prohibition is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing employers who wish to get the last inch of work out of the workmen. But before the progress of modern plutocracy had reached this stage, there was a predetermining cause for which there was a much better case. The whole business began with the problem of black labor. I have not attempted in this book to deal adequately with the question of the negro. I have refrained for a reason that may seem somewhat sensational, that I do not think I have anything particularly valuable to say or suggest. I do not profess to understand this singularly dark and intricate matter, and I see no use in men who have no solution filling up the gap with sentimentalism. The chief thing that struck me about the colored people I saw was their charming and astonishing cheerfulness. My sense of pathos was appealed to much more by the Red Indians, and indeed I wish I had more space here to do justice to the Red Indians. They did heroic service in the war, and more than justify their glorious place in the daydreams and nightmares of our boyhood. But the negro problem certainly demands more study than a sightseer could give it, and this book is controversial enough about things that I have really considered, without permitting it to exhibit me as a sightseer who shoots at sight. But I believe that it was always common ground to people of common sense that the enslavement and importation of negroes had been the crime and catastrophe of American history. The only difference was originally that one side had thought that, the crime once committed, the only reparation was their freedom, while the other thought that, the crime once committed, the only safety was their slavery. It was only comparatively lately, by a process I shall have to indicate elsewhere, that anything like a positive case for slavery became possible. Now, among the many problems of the presence of an alien, and at least recently barbaric figure among the citizens, there was a very real problem of drink. Drink certainly has a very exceptionally destructive effect upon the negroes in their native countries, and it was alleged to have a peculiarly demoralizing effect upon negroes in the United States, to call up the passions that are the particular temptation of the race, and to lead to appalling outrageous that are followed by appalling popular vengeance. However, this may be. Many of the states of the American Union, which first forbade liquor to citizens, meant simply to forbid it to negroes. But they had not the moral courage to deny that negroes are citizens. About all their political expedience, necessarily hung the load that hangs so heavy on modern politics. Hippocracy. The superior race had to rule by a sort of secret society organized against the inferior. The American politicians dared not disenfranchise the negroes, so they coerced everybody in theory, and only the negroes in practice. The drinking of the white man became as much a conspiracy as the shooting by the white horseman of the Ku Klux Klan, and in that connection it may be remarked in passing that the comparison illustrates the idiocy of supposing that the moral sense of mankind will ever support the prohibition of drinking as if it were something like the prohibition of shooting. Shooting in America is liable to take a free form, and sometimes a very horrible form, as when private bravos were hired to kill workmen in the capitalistic interests of that pure patron of disarmament, Carnegie. But when some of the rich Americans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we may well be disposed to smile. When I was there at any rate, they were using them up very fast, and with no apparent fears about the supply. But if the Ku Klux Klan had started suddenly shooting everybody they didn't like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they were only using up the stocks of ammunition left over from the Civil War, it seems probable that there would at least have been a little curiosity about how much they had left. There might at least have been occasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. It is even conceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it. No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly because the rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, but partly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of this particular rule, and the truth is, as I have indicated, that it was originally established as an exception and not as a rule. The emancipated Negro was an exception in the community, and a certain plan was rightly or wrongly adopted to meet his case. A law was made, professedly for everybody and practically only for him. Prohibition is only important as marking the transition by which the trick tried successfully on black labor could be extended to all labor. We in England have no right to be pharisaic at the expense of the Americans in this matter, for we have tried the same trick in a hundred forms. The true philosophical defence of the modern oppression of the poor would be to say, frankly, that we have ruled them so badly that they are unfit to rule themselves. But no modern oligarch is enough of a man to say this. For, like all virile cynicism, it would have an element of humility which would not mix with the necessary element of hypocrisy. So we proceed just as the Americans do to make a law for everybody and then evade it for ourselves. We have not the honesty to say that the rich may bet because they can't afford it. So we forbid any man to bet in any place and then say that a place is not a place. It is exactly as if there were an American law allowing a Negro to be murdered because he is not a man within the meaning of the act. We have not the honesty to drive the poor to school because they are ignorant. So we pretend to drive everybody and then send inspectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. We apply the same ingenious principle and are quite as undemocratic as Western democracy. Nevertheless, there is an element in the American case which cannot be present in ours and this chapter may well conclude upon so important to change. America can now say with pride that she has abolished the color bar. In this matter the white labor and the black labor have at last been put upon an equal social footing. White labor is every bit as much enslaved as black labor and is actually enslaved by a method and a model only intended for black labor. We might think it rather odd if the exact regulations about flogging Negroes were reproduced as a plan for punishing strikers or if industrial arbitration issued its reports in the precise terminology of the fugitive slave law. But this is, in essentials, what has happened and one could almost fancy some Negro orgy of triumph with the beating of gongs and all the secret violence of Udu crying aloud to some ancestral mumbo-jumbo that the poor white trash was being treated according to its name. The end of Chapter 9 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org What I saw in America by G. K. Chesterton Section 21 Chapter 10 Part 1 Fads and public opinion A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is perfectly entitled to laugh at anything so long as he realizes in a reverent and religious spirit that he himself is laughable. I was a foreigner in America and I can truly claim that the sense of my own laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner have finished with seeing the fun in each other in things that are meant to be serious they both approach the far more delegate and dangerous ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humor is generally very national. Perhaps that is why the internationalists are so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And rightly or wrongly I came to the conclusion that they arose from a failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke. The English and the American types of humor are in one way directly contrary. The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination piling one house on another in a tower like that of a skyscraper. The most English humor consists of a sort of bathos of a man returning to the earth, his mother, in a homely fashion as when he sits down suddenly on a butter slide. English farce describes a man as being in a hole. American fantasy in its more aspiring spirit describes a man as being up a tree. The former is to be found in the cockney comic songs that concern themselves with hanging out the washing or coming home with the milk. The latter is to be found in those fantastic yarns about machines that turn live pigs into pigskin purses or burning cities that serve to hatch an egg. But it will be inevitable when the two first come into contact that bathos will sound like vulgarity and the extravagance will sound like boasting. Suppose an American soldier said to an English soldier in the trenches the Kaiser may want a place in the sun. I reckon he won't have a place in the solar system when we begin to hustle. The English soldier will very probably form the impression that this is arrogance an impression based on the extraordinary assumption that the American means what he says. The American has merely indulged in little art for art's sake and abstract adventure of the imagination. He has told an American short story. But the Englishman not understanding this will think the other man is boasting and reflecting on the insufficiency of the English effort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like oh you'll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that and asking for a kipper with your tea. And it is quite likely that the American will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty answered in so personal a fashion. Being an American he will probably have a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife and may object to her being called an old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under the extraordinary delusion that talking of the old woman really means that the woman is old. Possibly he thinks the mysterious demand for a kipper carries with it some charge of ill-treating his wife which his national sense of honor swiftly resents. But the real cross purposes come from the contrary direction of the two exaggerations. The American making life more wild and impossible than it is. And the Englishman making it more flat and farcical than it is. The one escaping from the house of life by a skylight and the other by a trapdoor. This difficulty of different humours is a very practical one for practical people. Most of those who profess to remove all international differences are not practical people. Most of the phrases offered for the reconciliation of severly patriotic peoples are entirely serious and even solemn phrases. But human conversation is not conducted in those phrases. The normal man on nine occasions out of ten is rather a flippant man. And the normal man is almost always the national man. Patriotism is the most popular of all the virtues. The drier sort of Democrats who despise it have the democracy against them in every country in the world. Hence their international efforts seldom go any farther than to affect an international reconciliation of all internationalists. But we have not solved the normal and popular problem until we have an international reconciliation of all nationalists. It is very difficult to see how humour can be translated at all. When Sam Weller is in the Fleet Prison and Mrs. Weller and Mr. Stiggins sit on each side of the fireplace and weep and groan with sympathy, old Mr. Weller observes, ''Val Sammy, I hope you find your spirits rose by this earlively visit.'' I have never looked up this passage in the popular and successful French version of Pickwick. But I confess I am curious as to what the French past participle conveys the precise effect of the word rose. A translator has not only to give the right translation of the right word but the right translation of the wrong word. And in the same way I am quite prepared to suspect that there are English jokes which an Englishman must enjoy in his own rich and romantic solitude without asking for the sympathy of an American. But Englishmen are generally only too prone to claim this fine perception without seeing that the fine edge of it cuts both ways. I have begun this chapter on the note of national humor because I wish to make it quite clear that I realize how easily a foreigner may take something seriously that is not serious. When I think something in America is really foolish it may be that I am made a fool of. It is the first duty of traveller to allow for this. But it seems to be the very last thing that occurs to some travellers. But when I seek to say something of what may be called the fantastic side of America I allow beforehand that some of it may be meant to be fantastic and indeed it is very difficult to believe that some of it is meant to be serious. But whether or no there is a joke there is certainly an inconsistency and it is an inconsistency of the moral makeup of America which both puzzles and amuses me. The danger of democracy is not anarchy but convention. There is even a sort of double meaning in the word convention for it is also used for the most informal and popular sort of parliament a parliament not summoned by any king. The Americans come together very easily without any king but their coming together is in every sense a convention and even a very conventional convention. In a democracy right is rather the exception and respectability certainly the rule and though a superficial sightseer should hesitate about all such generalizations and certainly should allow for enormous exceptions to them he does receive a general impression of unity verging on uniformity. Thus Americans all dress well one might almost say that American women all look well but they do not as compared with Europeans look very different. They are in the fashion too much in the fashion even to be conspicuously fashionable. Of course there are patches both Bohemian and Babylonian of which this is not true but I'm talking of the general tone of a whole democracy. I've said there is more respectability than riot but indeed in a deeper sense the same spirit is behind both riot and respectability. It is the same social force that makes it possible for the respectable to boycott a man and for the riotous to lynch him. I do not object to it being called the herd instinct so long as we realize that it is a metaphor and not an explanation. Public opinion can be a prairie fire. It eats up everything that opposes it and there is the grandeur as well as the grave disadvantage of a natural catastrophe in that national unity. Pacifists who complain in England of the intolerance of patriotism have no notion of what patriotism can be like. If they had been in America after America had entered the war they would have seen something which they have always perhaps subconsciously dreaded and would then have beyond all their worst dreams detested and the name of it is democracy. They would have found that there are disadvantages in birds of a feather flucking together and that one of them follows on a too complacent display of the white feather. The truth is that a certain flexible sympathy with eccentrics of this kind is rather one of the advantages of an aristocratic tradition. The imprisonment of Mr. Debs, the American pacifist which really was prolonged and oppressive would probably have been shortened in England where his opinions were shared by aristocrats like Mr. Bertrand Russell and Mr. Ponsonby. A man like Lord Hugh Cecil would be moved to the defence of conscientious objectors partly by a true instinctive chivalry but partly also by the general feeling that a gentleman may very probably have aunts and uncles who are quite as mad. He takes the matter personally in the sense of being able to imagine the psychology of the persons but the democracy is no respecter of persons. It is no respecter of them either in the bad and servile or in the good and sympathetic sense and Debs was nothing to the democracy. He was but one of the millions. This is a real problem or question in the balance touching different forms of government which is of course quite neglected by the idealists who merely repeat long words. There was during the war a society called a Union of Democratic Control which would have been instantly destroyed anywhere where democracy had any control or where there was any union and in this sense the United States have most emphatically got a union. Nevertheless I think there is something rather more subtle than this simple popular solidity behind the assimilation of American citizens to each other. There is something even in the individual ideal that drives towards this social sympathy and it is here that we have to remember that biological fancies like the herd instinct are only figures of speech and cannot really cover anything human for the Americans are in some ways a very self-conscious people. To compare their social enthusiasm to a stampede of cattle is to ask us to believe in a bull or a cow looking in a looking glass. Intensely sensitive by their very vitality they are certainly conscious of criticism and not merely of a blind and brutal appetite but the peculiar point about them is that it is this very vividness in the self that often produces the similarity. It may be that when they are unconscious they are like bulls and cows but it is when they are self-conscious that they are like each other. Individualism is the death of individuality. It is so if only because it is an ism. Many Americans become almost impersonal in their worship of personality where their natural selves might differ their ideal selves tend to be the same. Anybody can see what I mean in those strong self-conscious photographs of American businessmen that can be seen in any American magazine. Each may conceive himself to be a solitary Napoleon brooding at St. Helena but the result is a multitude of Napoleons brooding all over the place. Each of them must have the eyes of a mesmerist but the most weak-minded person cannot be mesmerized by more than one millionaire at a time. Each of the millionaires must thrust forward his jaw offering, if I may say so, to fight the world with the same weapons as Samson. Each of them must accentuate the length of his chin especially of course by always being completely clean-shaven. It would be obviously inconsistent with personality to prefer to wear a beard. These are of course fantastic examples on the fringe of American life but they do stand for a certain assimilation not through brute gregariousness but rather through isolated dreaming. And though it is not always carried so far as this I do not think it is carried too far. There is not quite enough unconsciousness to produce real individuality. There is a sort of worship of willpower in the abstract so that people are actually thinking about how they can will more than about what they want. To this I do think a certain corrective could be found in the nature of English eccentricity. Every man in his humor is most interesting when he is unconscious of his humor or at least when he is in an intermediate stage between humor in the old sense of oddity and in the new sense of irony. Much is said in these days against negative morality and certainly most Americans would show a positive preference for positive morality. The virtues they venerate collectively are very active virtues. Cheerfulness and courage and vim. Otherwise zip also pep and similar things but it is sometimes forgotten that negative morality is freer than positive morality. Negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pattern of which the lines or chords constrict at longer intervals. A man like Dr. Johnson could grow in his own way to his own stature in the net of the Ten Commandments precisely because he was convinced that there were only ten of them. He was not compressed into the mold of positive beauty like that of the Apollo Belvedere or the American citizen. This criticism is sometimes true even of the American woman who is certainly a much more delightful person than the mesmeric millionaire with his shaven jaw. Interviewers in the United States perpetually asked me what I thought of American women and I confessed the distaste for such generalizations which I have not managed to lose. The Americans who are the most chivalrous people in the world may perhaps understand me but I can never help feeling that there is something polygamous about talking of women in the plural at all something unworthy of any American except a Mormon. Nevertheless, I think the exaggeration I suggest does extend in a less degree to American women fascinating as they are. I think they too tend too much to this cult of impersonal personality. It is a description easy to exaggerate even by the faintest emphasis for all these things are subtle and subject to striking individual exceptions. To complain of people for being brave and bright and kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable and yet there is something in the background that can only be expressed by a symbol something that is not shallowness but a neglect of the subconsciousness and the vaguer and slower impulses something that can be missed amid all that laughter and light under the starry candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over me in a wordless wave that I should like to see a sulky woman how she would walk in beauty like the night and reveal more silent spaces full of older stars. These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate proportion even in the most detached description but the same thing was in the mind of a white bearded old man I met in New York an Irish exile and a wonderful talker who stared up at the tower of gilded galleries of the great hotel and said with that spontaneous movement of style which is hardly heard except from Irish talkers and I have been in a village in the mountains where the people could hardly read or write but all the men were like soldiers and all the women had pride. The end of section 21