Francis Lean), in her desire to do justice to the amplitude of the
American continent, gravely asserts that "Pennsylvania covers a tract
of land larger than England, France, Spain, and Germany all put
together," the real fact being that even the smallest of the countries
named is much larger than the State, while the combined area of the
four is more than fourteen times as great. Texas, the largest State in
the Union, is not so very much more extensive than either Germany or
France.

An analogous want of acquaintance with the mental geography of America
was shown by the English lady whom Mr. Freeman heard explaining to a
cultivated American friend who Sir Walter Scott was, and what were the
titles of his chief works.

It is to such international ignorance as this that much, if not most,
of the British want of appreciation of the United States may be
traced; just as the acute critic may see in the complacent and
persistent misspelling of English names by the leading journals of
Paris an index of that French attitude of indifference towards
foreigners that involved the possibility of a Sedan. It is not,
perhaps, easy to adduce exactly parallel instances of American
ignorance of Great Britain, though Mr. Henry James, who probably knows
his England better than nine out of ten Englishmen, describes Lord
Lambeth, the eldest son of a duke, as himself a member of the House of
Lords ("An International Episode"). It was amusing to find when _meine
Wenigkeit_ was made the object of a lesson in a Massachusetts school,
that many of the children knew the name England only in connection
with their own New England home. Nor, I fear, can it be denied that
much of the historical teaching in the primary schools of the United
States gives a somewhat one-sided view of the past relations between
the mother country and her revolted daughter. The American child is
not taught as much as he ought to be that the English people of to-day
repudiate the attitude of the aristocratic British government of 1770
as strongly as Americans themselves.

The American, however, must not plume himself too much on his superior
knowledge. Shameful as the British ignorance of America often is, a
corresponding American ignorance of Great Britain would be vastly more
shameful. An American cannot understand himself unless he knows
something of his origins beyond the seas; the geography and history of
an American child must perforce include the history and geography of
the British Isles. For a Briton, however, knowledge of America is
rather one of the highly desirable things than one of the absolutely
indispensable. It would certainly betoken a certain want of humanity
in me if I failed to take any interest in the welfare of my sons and
daughters who had emigrated to New Zealand; but it is evident that for
the conduct of my own life a knowledge of their doings is not so
essential for me as a knowledge of what my father was and did. The
American of Anglo-Saxon stock visiting Westminster Abbey seems
paralleled alone by the Greek of Syracuse or Magna Græcia visiting the
Acropolis of Athens; and the experience of either is one that less
favoured mortals may unfeignedly envy. But the American and the
Syracusan alike would be wrong were he to feel either scorn or elation
at the superiority of the guest's knowledge of the host over the
host's knowledge of the guest.

However that may be, and whatever latitude we allow to the proverbial
connection of familiarity and contempt, there seems little reason to
doubt that closer knowledge of one another will but increase the
mutual sympathy and esteem of the Briton and the American. The former
will find that Brother Jonathan is not so exuberantly and perpetually
starred-and-striped as the comic cartoonist would have us believe;
and the American will find that John Bull does not always wear
top-boots or invariably wield a whip. Things that from a distance seem
preposterous and even revolting will often assume a very different
guise when seen in their native environment and judged by their
inevitable conditions. It is not always true that "_coelum non
animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_" that is, if we allow ourselves
to translate "_animum_" in its Ciceronian sense of "opinion."[9] To
hold this view does not make any excessive demand on our optimism.
There seems absolutely no reason why in this particular case the line
of cleavage between one's likes and one's dislikes should coincide
with that of foreign and native birth. The very word "foreign" rings
false in this connection. It is often easier to recognise a brother in
a New Yorker than in a Yorkshireman, while, alas! it is only
theoretically and in a mood of long-drawn-out aspiration that we can
love our alien-tongued European neighbour as ourselves.

The man who wishes to form a sound judgment of another is bound to
attain as great a measure as possible of accurate self-knowledge, not
merely to understand the reaction of the foreign character when
brought into relation with his own, but also to make allowance for
fundamental differences of taste and temperament. The golden rule of
judging others by ourselves can easily become a dull and leaden
despotism if we insist that what _we_ should think and feel on a given
occasion ought also to be the thoughts and actions of the Frenchman,
the German, or the American. There are, perhaps, no more pregnant
sentences in Mr. Bryce's valuable book than those in which he warns
his British readers against the assumption that the same phenomena in
two different countries must imply the same sort of causes. Thus, an
equal amount of corruption among British politicians, or an equal
amount of vulgarity in the British press, would argue a much greater
degree of rottenness in the general social system than the same
phenomena in the United States. So, too, some of the characteristic
British vices are, so to say, of a spontaneous, involuntary,
semi-unconscious growth, and the American observer would commit a
grievous error if he ascribed them to as deliberate an intent to do
evil as the same tendencies would betoken in his own land. Neither
Briton nor American can do full justice to the other unless each
recognises that the other is fashioned of a somewhat different clay.

The strong reasons, material and otherwise, why Great Britain and the
United States should be friends need not be enumerated here. In spite
of some recent and highly unexpected shocks, the tendencies that make
for amity seem to me to be steadily increasing in strength and
volume.[10] It is the American in the making rather than the matured
native product that, as a rule, is guilty of blatant denunciation of
Great Britain; and it is usually the untravelled and preëminently
insular Briton alone that is utterly devoid of sympathy for his
American cousins. The American, as has often been pointed out, has
become vastly more pleasant to deal with since his country has won an
undeniable place among the foremost nations of the globe. The
epidermis of Brother Jonathan has toughened as he has grown in
stature, and now that he can look over the heads of most of his
compeers he regards the sting of a gnat as little as the best of them.
Perhaps not _quite_ so little as John Bull, whose indifference to
criticism and silent assurance of superiority are possibly as far
wrong in the one direction as a too irritable skin is in the other.

Of the books written about the United States in the last score of
years by European writers of any weight, there are few which have not
helped to dissipate the grotesquely one-sided view of America formerly
held in the Old World. Preëminent among such books is, of course, the
"American Commonwealth" of Mr. James Bryce; but such writers as Mr.
Freeman, M. Paul Bourget, Sir George Campbell, Mr. William Sanders,
Miss Catherine Bates, Mme. Blanc, Miss Emily Faithful, M. Paul de
Rousiers, Max O'Rell, and Mr. Stevens have all, in their several
degrees and to their several audiences, worked to the same end. It
may, however, be worth while mentioning one or two literary
performances of a somewhat different character, merely to remind my
British readers of the sort of thing we have done to exasperate our
American cousins in quite recent times, and so help them to understand
the why and wherefore of certain traces of resentment still lingering
beyond the Atlantic. In 1884 Sir Lepel Griffin, a distinguished Indian
official, published a record of his visit to the United States, under
the title of "The Great Republic." Perhaps this volume might have been
left to the obscurity which has befallen it, were it not that Mr.
Matthew Arnold lent it a fictitious importance by taking as the text
for some of his own remarks on America Sir Lepel's assertion that he
knew of no civilised country, Russia possibly excepted, where he
should less like to live than the United States. To me it seems a book
most admirably adapted to infuriate even a less sensitive folk than
the Americans. I do not in the least desire to ascribe to Sir Lepel
Griffin a deliberate design to be offensive; but it is just his calm,
supercilious Philistinism, aggravated no doubt by his many years'
experience as a ruler of submissive Orientals, that makes it no less a
pleasure than a duty for a free and intelligent republican to resent
and defy his criticisms.

Can, for instance, anything more wantonly and pointlessly insulting be
imagined than his assertion that an intelligent and well-informed
American would probably name the pork-packing of Chicago as the thing
_best worth seeing_ in the United States? After that it is not
surprising that he considers American scenery singularly tame and
unattractive, and that he finds female beauty (can his standard for
this have been Orientalised?) very rare. He predicts that it would be
impossible to maintain the Yellowstone National Park as such, and
asserts that it was only a characteristic spirit of swagger and
braggadocio that prompted this attempt at an impossible ideal. He also
seems to think lynching an any-day possibility in the streets of New
York. The value of his forecasts may, however, be discounted by his
prophecy in the same book that the London County Council would be
merely a glorified vestry, utterly indifferent to the public interest,
and unlikely to attract any candidates of distinction!

An almost equal display of Philistinism--perhaps greater in proportion
to its length--is exhibited by an article entitled "Twelve Hours of
New York," published by Count Gleichen in _Murray's Magazine_
(February, 1890). This energetic young man succeeded (in his own
belief) in seeing all the sights of New York in the time indicated by
the title of his article, and apparently met nothing to his taste
except the Hoffman House bar and the large rugs with which the
cab-horses were swathed. He found his hotel a den of incivility and
his dinner "a squashy, sloppy meal." He wishes he had spent the day in
Canada instead. He is great in his scorn for the "glue kettle" helmets
of the New York police, and for the ferry-boats in the harbour, to
which he vastly prefers what he wittily and originally styles the
"common or garden steamer." His feet, in his own elegant phrase, felt
"like a jelly" after four hours of New York pavement. What are the
Americans to think of us when they find one of our innermost and most
aristocratic circle writing stuff like this under the ægis of,
perhaps, the foremost of British publishers?

As a third instance of the ingratiating manner in which Englishmen
write of Americans, we may take the following paragraph from "Travel
and Talk," an interesting record of much journeying by that well-known
London clergyman, the Rev. H.R. Haweis: "Among the numerous kind
attentions I was favoured with and somewhat embarrassed by was the
assiduous hospitality of another singular lady, _also since dead_. I
allude to Mrs. Barnard, the wife of the venerable principal of
Columbia College, a well-known and admirably appointed educational
institution in New York. This good lady was bent upon our staying at
the college, and hunted us from house to house until we took up our
abode with her, and, I confess, I found her rather amusing at first,
and I am sure she meant most kindly. But there was an inconceivable
fidgetiness about her, and an incapacity to let people alone, or even
listen to anything they said in answer to her questions, which poured
as from a quick-firing gun, that became at last intolerable." Comment
on this passage would be entirely superfluous; but I cannot help
drawing attention to the supreme touch of gracefulness added by the
three words I have italicised.

There is one English critic of American life whose opinion cannot be
treated cavalierly--least of all by those who feel, as I do, how
inestimable is our debt to him as a leader in the paths of sweetness
and light. But even in the presence of Matthew Arnold I desire to
preserve the attitude of "_nullius addictus jurare in verba
magistri_," and I cannot but believe that his estimate of America,
while including much that is subtle, clear-sighted, and tonic, is in
certain respects inadequate and misleading. He unfortunately committed
the mistake of writing on the United States before visiting the
country, and had made up his mind in advance that it was almost
exclusively peopled by, and entirely run in the interests of, the
British dissenting Philistine with a difference.

It is the more to be regretted that he adopted this attitude of
premature judgment of American characteristics because it is only too
prevalent among his less distinguished fellow-countrymen. From this
position of _parti pris_, maintained with all his own inimitable
suavity and grace, it seems to me that he was never wholly able to
advance (or retire), though he candidly admitted that he found the
difference between the British and American Philistine vastly greater
than he anticipated. The members of his preconceived syllogism seem to
be somewhat as follows: the money-making and comfort-loving classes in
England are essentially Philistine; the United States as a nation is
given over to money-making; _ergo_, its inhabitants must all be
Philistines. Furthermore, the British Philistines are to a very large
extent dissenters: the United States has no established church;
_ergo_, it must be the Paradise of the dissenter.

This line of argument ignores the fact that the stolid
self-satisfaction in materialistic comfort, which he defines as the
essence of Philistinism, is _not_ a predominant trait in the American
class in which our English experience would lead us to look for it.
The American man of business, with his restless discontent and
nervous, over-strained pursuit of wealth, may not be a more inspiring
object than his British brother, but he has little of the smugness
which Mr. Arnold has taught us to associate with the label of
Philistinism. And his womankind is perhaps even less open to this
particular reproach. Mr. Arnold ignores a whole far-reaching series of
American social phenomena which have practically nothing in common
with British nonconformity, and lets a similarity of nomenclature
blind him too much to the differentiation of entirely novel
conditions. The Methodist "Moonshiner" of Tennessee is hardly cast in
the same mould as the deacon of a London Little Bethel; and even the
most legitimate children of the Puritans have not descended from the
common stock in parallel lines in England and America.

Mr. Arnold admitted that the political clothes of Brother Jonathan
fitted him admirably, and allowed that he can and does think
straighter (_c'est le bonheur des hommes quand ils pensent juste_)
than we can in the maze of our unnatural and antiquated complications;
he wholly admired the natural, unselfconscious manner of the American
woman; he saw that the wage-earner lived more comfortably than in
Europe; he noted that wealthy Americans were not dogged by envy in the
same way as in England, partly because wealth was felt to be more
within the range of all, and partly because it was much less often
used for the gratification of vile and selfish appetites; he admitted
that America was none the worse for the lack of a materialised
aristocracy such as ours; he praises the spirit which levels false and
conventional distinctions, and waives the use of such invidious
discriminations as our "Mr." and "Esquire." Admissions such as these,
coming from such a man as he, are of untold value in promoting the
growth of a proper sentiment towards our transatlantic kinsmen. When
he points out that the dangers of such a community as the United
States include a tendency to rely too much on the machinery of
institutions; an absence of the discipline of respect; a proneness to
hardness, materialism, exaggeration, and boastfulness; a false
smartness and a false audacity,--the wise American will do well to
ponder his sayings, hard though they may sound. When, however, he goes
on to point out the "prime necessity of civilisation being
interesting," and to assert that American civilisation is lacking in
interest, we may well doubt whether on the one hand the quality of
interest is not too highly exalted, and, on the other, whether the
denial of interest to American life does not indicate an almost
insular narrowness in the conception of what is interesting. When he
finds a want of soul and delicacy in the American as compared with
John Bull, some of us must feel that if he is right the latitude of
interpretation of these terms must indeed be oceanic. When he gravely
cites the shrewd and ingenious Benjamin Franklin as the most
considerable man whom America has yet produced, we must respectfully
but firmly take exception to his standard of measurement. When he
declares that Abraham Lincoln has no claim to distinction, we feel
that the writer must have in mind distinction of a singularly
conventional and superficial nature; and we are not reassured by the
_quasi_ brutality of the remark in one of his letters, to the effect
that Lincoln's assassination brought into American history a dash of
the tragic and romantic in which it had hitherto been so sadly lacking
("_sic semper tyrannis_ is so unlike anything Yankee or English middle
class"). When he asserts that from Maine to Florida and back again all
America Hebraises, we reflect with some bewilderment that hitherto we
had believed the New Orleans creole (_e.g._) to be as far removed from
Hebraising as any type we knew of. It is strikingly characteristic of
the weak side of Mr. Arnold's outlook on America that he went to stay
with Mr. P.T. Barnum, the celebrated showman, without the least idea
that his American friends might think the choice of hosts a peculiar
one. To him, to a very large extent, Americans were all alike
middle-class, dissenting Philistines; and so far as appears on the
surface, Mr. Barnum's desire to "belong to the minority" pleased him
as much as any other sign of approval conferred upon him in America.

A native of the British Isles is sometimes apt to be a little nettled
when he finds a native of the United States regarding him as a
"foreigner" and talking of him accordingly. An Englishman never means
the natives of the United States when he speaks of "foreigners;" he
reserves that epithet for non-English-speaking races. In this respect
it would seem as if the Briton, for once, took the wider, the more
genial and human, point of view; as if he had the keener appreciation
of the ties of race and language. It is as if he cherished continually
a sub-dominant consciousness of the fact that the occupation of the
North American continent by the Anglo-Saxons is one of the greatest
events in English history--that America is peopled by Englishmen. When
he thinks of the events of 1776 he feels, to use Mr. Hall Caine's
illustration, like Dr. Johnson, who dreamed that he had been worsted
in conversation, but reflected when he awoke that the conversation of
his adversary must also have been his own. As opposed to this there
may be a grain of self-assertion in the American use of the term as
applied to the British; it is as if they would emphasise the fact that
they are no mere offshoot of England, that the Colonial days have long
since gone by, and that the United States is an independent nation
with a right to have its own "foreigners." An American friend suggests
that the different usage of the two lands may be partly owing to the
fact that the cordial, frank demeanour of the American, coupled with
his use of the same tongue, makes an Englishman absolutely forget that
he is not a fellow-countryman, while the subtler American is keenly
conscious of differences which escape the obtuser Englishman. Another
partial explanation is that the first step across our frontier brings
us to a land where an unknown tongue is spoken, and that we have
consequently welded into one the two ideas of foreignhood and
unintelligibility; while the American, on the other hand, identifies
himself with his continent and regards all as foreigners who are not
natives of it.

The point would hardly be worth dwelling upon, were it not that the
different attitude it denotes really leads in some instances to actual
misunderstanding. The Englishman, with his somewhat unsensitive
feelers, is apt, in all good faith and unconsciousness, to criticise
American ways to the American with much more freedom than he would
criticise French ways to a Frenchman. It is as if he should say, "You
and I are brothers, or at least cousins; we are a much better sort
than all those foreign Johnnies; and so there's no harm in my pointing
out to you that you're wrong here and ought to change there." But,
alas, who is quicker to resent our criticism than they of our own
household? And so the American, overlooking the sort of clumsy
compliment that is implied in the assurance of kinship involved in the
very frankness of our fault-finding criticism, resents most keenly the
criticisms that are couched in his own language, and sees nothing but
impertinent hostility in the attitude of John Bull. And who is to
convince him that it is, as in a Scottish wooing, because we love him
that we tease him, and in so doing put him (in our eyes) on a vastly
higher pedestal than the "blasted foreigner" whose case we consider
past praying for? And who is to teach us that Brother Jonathan is able
now to give us at least as many hints as we can give him, and that we
must realise that the same sauce must be served with both birds? Thus
each resiles from the encounter infinitely more pained than if the
antagonist had been a German or a Frenchman. The very fact that we
speak the same tongue often leads to false assumptions of mutual
knowledge, and so to offences of unguarded ignorance.

One of the most conspicuous differences between the American and the
Briton is that the former, take him for all in all, is distinctly the
more articulate animal of the two. The Englishman seems to have
learned, through countless generations, that he can express himself
better and more surely in deeds than in words, and has come to
distrust in others a fatal fluency of expressiveness which he feels
would be exaggerated and even false in himself. A man often has to
wait for his own death to find out what his English friend thinks of
him; and

    "Wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
    To see oursels as others see us,"

we might often be surprised to discover what a wealth of real
affection and esteem lies hid under the glacier of Anglican
indifference. The American poet who found his song in the heart of a
friend could have done so, were the friend English, only by the aid of
a post-mortem examination. The American, on the other hand, has the
most open and genial way of expressing his interest in you; and when
you have readjusted the scale of the moral thermometer so as to allow
for the change of temperament, you will find this frankness most
delightfully stimulating. It requires, however, an intimate knowledge
of both countries to understand that when an Englishman congratulates
you on a success by exclaiming, "Hallo, old chap, I didn't know you
had it in you," he means just as much as your American friend, whose
phrase is: "Bravo, Billy, I always _knew_ you could do something
fine."

That the superior powers of articulation possessed by the American
sometimes takes the form of profuse and even extreme volubility will
hardly be denied by those conversant with the facts. The American may
not be more profound than his English cousin or even more fertile in
ideas, but as a rule he is much more ready and easy in the discussion
of the moment; whatever the state of his "gold reserve" may be, he has
no lack of the small counters of conversation. In its proper place
this faculty is undoubtedly most agreeable; in the fleeting interviews
which compose so much of social intercourse, he is distinctly at an
advantage who has the power of coming to the front at once without
wasting precious time in preliminaries and reconnaissances. Other
things being equal, the chances of agreeable conversation at dinner,
at the club, or in the pauses of the dance are better in the United
States than in England. The "next man" of the new world is apt to talk
better and to be wider in his sympathies than the "next man" of the
old. On the other hand, it seems to me equally true that the Americans
possess the defects of their qualities in this as in other respects;
they are often apt to talk too much, they are afraid of a
conversational lull, and do not sufficiently appreciate the charm of
"flashes of brilliant silence." It seemed to me that they often
carried a most unnecessary amount of volubility into their business
life; and I sometimes wondered whether the greater energy and rush
that they apparently put into their conduct of affairs were not due to
the necessity of making up time lost in superfluous chatter. If an
Englishman has a mile to go to an appointment he will take his
leisurely twenty minutes to do the distance, and then settle his
business in two or three dozen sentences; an American is much more
likely to devour the ground in five minutes, and then spend an hour or
more in lively conversation not wholly pertinent to the matter in
hand. The American mind is discursive, open, wide in its interests,
alive to suggestion, pliant, emotional, imaginative; the English mind
is concentrated, substantial, indifferent to the merely relative,
matter-of-fact, stiff, and inflexible.

The English have reduced to a fine art the practice of a stony
impassivity, which on its highest plane is not devoid of a certain
impressiveness. On ordinary occasions it is apt to excite either the
ire or the amusement of the representatives of a more animated race. I
suppose it is almost impossible for an untravelled Englishman to
realise the ridiculous side of the Church Parade in Hyde Park--as it
would appear, say, to a lively girl from Baltimore. The parade is a
collection of human beings, presumably brought together for the sake
of seeing and being seen. Yet the obvious aim of each English item in
the crowd is to deprive his features of all expression, and to look as
if he were absolutely unconscious that his own party were not the only
one on the ground. Such vulgarity as the exhibition of the slightest
interest in a being to whom he has not been introduced would be
treason to his dearest traditions. In an American function of the same
kind, the actors take an undisguised interest in each other, while a
French or Italian assembly would be still more demonstrative. On the
surface the English attitude is distinctly inhuman; it reminds one
that England is still the stronghold of the obsolescent institution of
caste, that it frankly and even brutally asserts the essential
inequality of man. Nowhere, perhaps, will you see a bigger and
handsomer, healthier, better-groomed, more efficient set of human
animals; but their straight-ahead, phlegmatic, expressionless gaze,
the want of animated talk, the absence of any show of intelligence,
emphasises our feeling that they are _animals_.

The Briton's indifference to criticism is at once his strength and his
weakness. It makes him invincible in a cause which has dominated his
conscience; it hinders him in the attainment of a luminous
discrimination between cause and cause. His profound self-confidence,
his sheer good sense, his dogged persistence, his bulldog courage, his
essential honesty of purpose, bring him to the goal in spite of the
unnecessary obstacles that have been heaped on his path by his own
[Greek: hubris] and contempt of others. He chooses what is physically
the shortest line in preference to the line of least resistance. He
makes up for his want of light by his superiority in weight. Social
adaptability is not his foible. He accepts the conventionality of his
class and wears it as an impenetrable armour. Out of his own class he
may sometimes appear less conventional than the American, simply
because the latter is quick to adopt the manners of a new _milieu_,
while John Bull clings doggedly or unconsciously to his old conventions.
If an American and an English shop-girl were simultaneously married to
peers of the realm, the odds would be a hundred to one in favour of the
former in the race for self-identification with her new environment.

The American facility of expression, if I do not err, springs largely
from an amiable difference in temperament. The American is, on the
whole, more genially disposed to all and sundry. I do not say that he
is capable of truer friendships or of greater sacrifices for a friend
than the Englishman; but the window through which he looks out on
humanity at large has panes of a ruddier hue, he cultivates a mildness
of tone, which a Briton is apt to despise as weakness. His desire to
oblige sometimes impels him to uncharacteristic actions, which lead to
fallacious generalisations on the part of his British critic. He
shrinks from any assumption of superiority; he is apt to think twice
of the feelings of his inferiors. The American tends to consider each
stranger he meets--at any rate within his own social sphere--as a good
fellow until he proves himself the contrary; with the Englishman the
presumption is rather the other way. An Englishman usually excuses
this national trait as really due to modesty and shyness; but I fear
there is in it a very large element of sheer bad manners, and of a
cowardly fear of compromising one's self with undesirable
acquaintances. Englishmen are apt to take _omne ignotum pro
horribile_, and their translation of the Latin phrase varies from the
lifting of the aristocratic eyebrow over the unwarranted address of
the casual companion at _table d'hôte_ down to the "'ere's a stranger,
let's 'eave 'arf a brick at 'im" of the Black Country. In England I am
apt to feel painfully what a lame dog I am; in America I feel, well,
if I am a lame dog I am being helped most delightfully over the
conversational stile. An Englishman says, "Would you _mind_ doing
so-and-so for me?" showing by the very form of the question that he
thinks kindness likely to be troublesome. An American says, "Wouldn't
you _like_ to do this for me?" assuming the superior attitude of one
who feels that to give an opportunity to do a kindness is itself to
confer a favour. The Continental European shares with the American the
merit of having manners on the self-regarding pattern of _noblesse
oblige_, while the Englishman wants to know who _you_ are, so as to
put on his best manners only if the _force majeure_ of your social
standing compels him. No one wishes the Englishman to express more
than he really feels or to increase the already overwhelming mass of
conventional insincerity; but it might undoubtedly be well for him to
consider whether it is not his positive duty to drop a little more of
the oil of human kindness on the wheels of the social machinery, and
to understand that it is perfectly possible for two strangers to speak
with and look at each other pleasantly without thereby contracting the
obligation of eternal friendship. Why should an English traveller deem
it worthy of special record that when calling at a Boston club, he
found his friend and host not yet arrived, other members of the club,
unknown to him, had put themselves about to entertain him? An American
gentleman would find this too natural to call for remark.

Whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge the fact that our
brutal frankness, our brusqueness, and our extreme fondness for
calling a spade a spade are often extremely disagreeable to our
American cousins, and make them (temporarily at any rate) feel
themselves to be our superiors in the matter of gentle breeding. As
Col. T.W. Higginson has phrased it, they think that "the English
nation has truthfulness enough for a whole continent, and almost too
much for an island." They think that a line might be drawn somewhere
between dissembling our love and kicking them downstairs. They also
object to our use of such terms as "beastly," "stinking," and "rot;"
and we must admit that they do so with justice, while we cannot assoil
them altogether of the opposite tendency of a prim prudishness in the
avoidance of certain natural and necessary words. For myself I
unfeignedly admire the delicacy which leads to a certain parsimony in
the use of words like "perspiration," "cleaning one's self," and so
on. And, however much we may laugh at the class that insists upon the
name of "help" instead of "servant," we cannot but respect the class
which yields to the demand and looks with horror on the English slang
word "slavey."

On the other hand there are certain little personal habits, such as
the public use of the toothpick, and what Mr. Morley Roberts calls the
modern form of [Greek: kottabos], which I think often find themselves
in better company in America than in England. Still I desire to speak
here with all due diffidence. I remember when I pointed out to a
Boston girl that an American actor in a piece before us, representing
high life in London, was committing a gross solecism in moistening his
pencil in his mouth before adding his address to his visiting card,
she trumped my criticism at once by the information that a
distinguished English journalist, with a handle to his name, who
recently made a successful lecturing tour in the United States,
openly and deliberately moistened his thumb in the same ingenuous
fashion to aid him in turning over the leaves of his manuscript.

A feature of the average middle-class Englishman which the American
cannot easily understand is his tacit recognition of the fact that
somebody else (the aristocrat) is his superior. In fact, this is
sometimes a fertile source of misunderstanding, and it is apt to beget
in the American an entirely false idea of what he thinks the innate
servility of the Englishman. He must remember that the aristocratic
prestige is a growth of centuries, that it has come to form part of
the atmosphere, that it is often accepted as unconsciously as the law
of gravitation. This is a case where the same attitude in an American
mind (and, alas, we occasionally see it in American residents in
London) would betoken an infinitely lower moral and mental plane than
it does in the Englishman. No true American could accept the
proposition that "Lord Tom Noddy might do so-and-so, but it would be a
very different thing for a man in my position;" and yet an Englishman
(I regret to say) might speak thus and still be a very decent fellow,
whom it would be unjust cruelty to call a snob. No doubt the English
aristocracy (as I think Mr. Henry James has said) now occupies a
heroic position without heroism; but the glamour of the past still
shines on their faded escutcheons, and "the love of freedom itself is
hardly stronger in England than the love of aristocracy."

Matthew Arnold has pointed out to us how the aristocracy acts like an
incubus on the middle classes of Great Britain, and he has put it on
record that he was struck with the buoyancy, enjoyment of life, and
freedom of constraint of the corresponding classes in America. In
England, he says, a man feels that it is the _upper class_ which
represents him; in the United States he feels that it is the _State_,
_i.e._, himself. In England it is the Barbarian alone that dares be
indifferent to the opinion of his fellows; in America everyone
expresses his opinion and "voices" his idiosyncrasies with perfect
freedom. This position has, however, its seamy side. There is in
America a certain anarchy in questions of taste and manners which the
long possession of a leisured, a cultivated class tends to save us
from in England. I never felt so kindly a feeling towards our
so-called "upper class" as when travelling in the United States and
noting some effects of its absence. This class has an accepted
position in the social hierarchy; its dicta are taken as authoritative
on points of etiquette, just as the clergy are looked on as the
official guardians of religious and ecclesiastical standards. I do not
here pretend to discuss the value of the moral example of our
_jeunesse dorée_, filtering down through the successive strata of
society; but their influence in setting the fashion on such points as
scrupulous personal cleanliness, the avoidance of the _outré_ in
costume, and the maintenance of an honourable and generous standard in
their money dealings with each other, is distinctly on the side of the
humanities. In America--at least, "Out West"--everyone practically is
his own guide, and the _nouveau riche_ spends his money strictly in
accordance with his own standard of taste. The result is often as
appalling in its hideousness as it is startling in its costliness. On
the other hand I am bound to state that I have known American men of
great wealth whose simplicity of type could hardly be paralleled in
England (except, perchance, within the Society of Friends). They do
not feel any social pressure to imitate the establishment of My Lord
or His Grace; and spend their money for what really interests them
without reference to the demands of society.

It is rather interesting to observe the different forms which
vulgarity is apt to take in the two countries. In England vulgarity is
stolid; in America it is smart and aggressive. We are apt, I think, to
overestimate the amount in the latter country because it is so much
more in voluble evidence. An English vulgarian is often hushed into
silence by the presence of his social superior; an American vulgarian
either recognises none such or tries to prove himself as good as you
by being unnecessarily _grob_. This has, at any rate, a manlier air
than the vulgar obsequiousness of England towards the superior on the
one hand or its cynical insolence to the inferior on the other. The
feeling which made a French lady of fashion in the seventeenth century
dress herself in the presence of a footman with as much unconcern as
if he were a piece of furniture still finds its modified analogy in
England, but scarcely in America. Almost the only field in which the
Americans struck me as showing anything like servility was in their
treatment of such mighty potentates as railway conductors, hotel
clerks, and policemen. Whether, until a millenial golden mean is
attained, this is better than our English bullying tone in the same
sphere might be an interesting question for casuists.

Americans can rarely understand the amount of social recognition given
by English duchesses to such American visitors as Col. William Cody,
generally known as "Buffalo Bill." They do not reflect that it is
just because the social gap between the two is so irretrievably vast
and so universally recognised that the duchesses can afford to amuse
themselves cursorily with any eccentricity that offers itself. As
Pomona's husband put it, people in England are like types with letters
at one end and can easily be sorted out of a state of "pi," while
Americans are theoretically all alike, like carpet-tacks. Thus
Americans of the best class often shun the free mixing that takes
place in England, because they know that the process of redistribution
will be neither easy nor popular. The intangible sieve thus placed
between the best and the not-so-good is of a fine discrimination,
beside which our conventional net-works seem coarse and ineffective.

Since returning from the United States I have occasionally been asked
how the general tone of morality in that country compared with that in
our own. To answer such a question with anything approaching to an air
of finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme presumption.
The opinions which one holds depend so obviously on a number of
contingent and accidental circumstances, and must so inevitably be
tinged by one's personal experiences, that their validity can at best
have but an approximate and tentative character. In making this
comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the phenomena of mining
camps and other phases of life on the fringes of American
civilisation, which can be fairly compared only with pioneer life on
the extreme frontiers of the British Empire. From a similar cause we
may omit from the comparison a great part of the Southern States,
where we do not find a homogeneous mass of white civilisation, but a
state of society inexpressibly complicated by the presence of an
inferior race. To compare the Southerner with the Englishman we should
need to observe the latter as he exists in, say, one of our African
colonies. Speaking, then, with these reservations, I should feel
inclined to say that in domestic and social morality the Americans are
ahead of us, in commercial morality rather behind than before, and in
political morality distinctly behind.

Thus, in the first of these fields we find the American more
good-tempered and good-natured than the Englishman. Women, children,
and animals are treated with considerably more kindness. The American
translation of paterfamilias is not domestic tyrant. Horses are driven
by the voice rather than by the whip. The superior does not thrust his
superiority on his inferior so brutally as we are apt to do. There is
a general intention to make things pleasant--at any rate so long as it
does not involve the doer in loss. There is less _gratuitous_
insolence. Servility, with its attendant hypocrisy and deceit, is
conspicuously absent; and the general spirit of independence, if
sometimes needlessly boorish in its manifestations, is at least sturdy
and manly. In England we are rude to those weaker than ourselves; in
America the rudeness is apt to be directed against those whom we
suspect to be in some way our superior. Man is regarded by man rather
as an object of interest than as an object of suspicion. Charity is
very widespread; and the idea of a fellow-creature actually suffering
from want of food or shelter is, perhaps, more repugnant to the
average American than to the average Englishman, and more apt to act
immediately on his purse-strings. In that which popular language
usually means when it speaks of immorality, all outward indications
point to the greater purity of the American. The conversation of the
smoking-room is a little less apt to be _risqué_; the possibility of
masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on
the streets is rare; few American publishers of repute dare to issue
the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the
columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to
anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly
healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so
popular, in spite of the general sympathy of American taste with
French. The statistics of illegitimacy point in the same direction,
though I admit that this is not necessarily a sign of unsophisticated
morality. In a word, when an Englishman goes to France he feels that
the moral tone in this respect is more lax than in England; when he
goes to America he feels that it is more firm. And he will hardly find
adequate the French explanation, _viz._, that there is not less vice
but more hypocrisy in the Anglo-Saxon community.

There is another very important sphere of morality in which the
general attitude of the United States seems to me very appreciably
superior to that of England. It is that to which St. Paul refers when
he says, "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat." American
public sentiment is distinctly ahead of ours in recognising that a
life of idleness is wrong in itself, and that the possibility of
leading such a life acts most prejudicially on character. The American
answer to the Englishman trying to define what he meant by "gentlemen
of leisure" "Ah, we call them _tramps_ in America"--is not merely a
jest, but enshrines a deep ethnical and ethical principle. Most
Americans would, I think, agree strongly with Mr. Bosanquet's
philosophical if somewhat cumbersomely worded definition of legitimate
private property, "that things should not come miraculously and be
unaffected by your dealings with them, but that you should be in
contact with something which in the external world is the definite
material representative of yourself" ("Aspects of the Social Problem,"
p. 313). The British gentleman, aware that his dinner does not agree
with him unless he has put forth a certain amount of physical energy,
reverts to one of the earliest and most primitive forms of work,
_viz._, hunting. There is a small--a very small--class in the United
States in the same predicament; but as a rule the worker there is not
only more honoured, but also works more in accordance with the spirit
of the age.

The general attitude of Americans towards militarism seems to me also
superior to ours; and one of the keenest dreads of the best American
citizens during a recent wave of jingoism was that of "the reflex
influence of militarism upon the national character, the
transformation of a peace-loving people into a nation of swaggerers
ever ready to take offence, prone to create difficulties, eager to
shed blood, and taking all sorts of occasions to bring the Christian
religion to shame under pretence of vindicating the rights of humanity
in some other country." The spectacle of a section in the United
States apparently ready to step down from its pedestal of honourable
neutrality, and run its head into the ignoble web of European
complications, was indeed one to make both gods and mortals weep. But
I do not believe it expressed the true attitude of the real American
people. Perhaps the personal element enters too largely into my
ascription of superior morality to the Americans in this matter,
because I can never thoroughly enjoy a military pageant, no matter how
brilliant, for thinking of the brutal, animal, inhuman element in our
nature of which it is, after all, the expression: military pomp is to
me merely the surface iridescence of a malarious pool, and the honour
paid to our life destroyers would, from my point of view, be
infinitely better bestowed on life preservers, such as the noble and
intrepid corps of firemen. Sympathisers with this view seem much more
numerous in the United States than in England.[11]

The judgment of an uncommercial traveller on commercial morality may
well be held as a feather-weight in the balance. Such as mine is, it
is gathered mainly from the tone of casual conversation, from which I
should conclude that a considerable proportion of Americans read a
well-known proverb as "All's fair in love or business." Men--I will
not say of a high character and standing, but men of a standing and
character who would not have done it in England--told me instances of
their sharp practices in business, with an evident expectation of my
admiration for their shrewdness, and with no apparent sense of the
slightest moral delinquency. Possibly, when the "rules of the game"
are universally understood, there is less moral obliquity in taking
advantage of them than an outsider imagines. The prevalent belief that
America is more sedulous in the worship of the Golden Calf than any
other country arises largely, I believe, from the fact that the
chances of acquiring wealth are more frequent and easy there than
elsewhere. Opportunity makes the thief. Anyhow, the reproach comes
with a bad grace from the natives of a country which has in its annals
the outbreak of the South Sea Bubble, the railway mania of the Hudson
era, and the revelations of Mr. Hooley.

Politics enter so slightly into the scope of this book that a very few
words on the question of political morality must suffice. That
political corruption exists more commonly in the United States than in
Great Britain--especially in municipal government--may be taken as
admitted by the most eminent American publicists themselves. A very
limited degree of intercourse with "professional politicians" yields
ample confirmatory evidence. Thus, to give but one instance, a wealthy
citizen of one of the largest Eastern towns told me, with absolute
ingenuousness, how he had "dished" the (say) Republican party in a
municipal contest, not in the least because he had changed his
political sympathies, but simply because the candidates had refused to
accede to certain personal demands of his own. He spoke throughout the
conversation as if it must be perfectly apparent to me, as to any
intelligent person, that the only possible reason for working and
voting for a political party must be personal interest. I confess this
seemed to me a very significant straw. On the other hand the
conclusions usually drawn by stay-at-home English people on these
admissions is ludicrously in excess of what is warranted by the facts.
"To imagine for a moment that 60,000,000 of people--better educated
than any other nation in the world--are openly tolerating universal
corruption in all Federal, State, and municipal government is simply
assuming that these 60,000,000 are either criminals or fools." Now,
"you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the
people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of
the time." A more competent judge[12] than the present writer estimates
the morals of the American political "wire-puller" as about on a level
with those of our company directors. And before my English readers
make their final decision on the American political system let them
study Chapter XLVI. of that very fascinating novel, "The Honorable
Peter Stirling," by Paul Leicester Ford. It may give them some new
light on the subject of "a government of the average," and show them
what is meant by the saying, "The boss who does the most things that
the people want can do the most things that the people don't want."

We must remember, too, that nothing is hidden from general knowledge
in America: every job comes sooner or later into the merciless glare
of publicity. And if our political sins are not the same as theirs,
they are perhaps equally heinous. Was not the British landlord who
voted against the repeal of the corn laws, so that land might continue
to bring in a high rent at the expense of the poor man, really acting
from just as corrupt a motive of self-interest as the American
legislator who accepts a bribe? It does not do to be too superior on
this question.

We may end this chapter by a typical instance of the way in which
British opinion of America is apt to be formed that comes under my
notice at the very moment I write these lines. The _Daily Chronicle_
of March 24, 1896, published a leading article on "Family Life in
America," in which it quotes with approval Mme. Blanc's assertion that
"the single woman in the United States is infinitely superior to her
European sister." In the same issue of the paper is a letter from Mrs.
Fawcett relating to a recent very deplorable occurrence in Washington,
where the daughter of a well-known resident shot a coloured boy who
was robbing her father's orchard. In the _Chronicle_ of March 25th
appears a triumphant British letter from "Old-Fashioned," asking
satirically whether the habit of using loaded revolvers is a proof of
the "infinite superiority" of the American girl. Now this estimable
gentleman is making the mistake that nine out of ten of his countrymen
constantly make in swooping down on a single _outré_ instance as
_characteristic_ of American life. If "Old-Fashioned" has not time to
pay a visit to America or to read Mr. Bryce's book, let him at least
accept my assurance that the above-mentioned incident seems to the
full as extraordinary to the Bostonian as to the Londoner, and that it
is just as typical of the habits of the American society girl as the
action of Miss Madeleine Smith was of English girls.

    "Of all the sarse thet I can call to mind,
    England doos make the most onpleasant kind.
    It's you're the sinner ollers, she's the saint;
    Whot's good's all English, all thet isn't, ain't.
    She is all thet's honest, honnable, an' fair.
    An' when the vartoos died they made her heir."

FOOTNOTES:

[9] See, _e.g._, "Ad Familiares," 5, 18.

[10] This was written just after President Cleveland's pronunciamento
in regard to Venezuela, and thus long before the outbreak of the war
with Spain.

[11] This paragraph was written before the outbreak of the
Spanish-American war; but the events of that struggle do not seem to
me to call for serious modification of the opinion expressed above.

[12] Sir George Campbell, in "Black and White in America."

VII

Sports and Amusements

In face of the immense sums of money spent on all kinds of sport, the
size and wealth of the athletic associations, the swollen salaries of
baseball players, the prominence afforded to sporting events in the
newspapers, the number of "world's records" made in the United States,
and the tremendous excitement over inter-university football matches
and international yacht-races, it may seem wanton to assert that the
love of sport is not by any means so genuine or so universal in the
United States as in Great Britain; and yet I am not at all sure that
such a statement would not be absolutely true. By true "love of sport"
I understand the enjoyment that arises from either practising or
seeing others practise some form of skill-demanding amusement for its
own sake, without question of pecuniary profit; and the true sport
lover is not satisfied unless the best man wins, whether he be friend
or foe. Sport ceases to be sport as soon as it is carried on as if it
were war, where "all" is proverbially "fair." The excitement of
gambling does not seem to me to be fairly covered by the phrase "love
of sport," and no more does the mere desire to see one's university,
state, or nation triumph over someone else's university, state, or
nation. There are thousands of people who rejoice over or bewail the
result of the Derby without thereby proving their possession of any
right to the title of sportsman; there is no difference of quality
between the speculator in grain and the speculator in horseflesh and
jockeys' nerves. So, too, there are many thousands who yell for Yale
in a football match who have no real sporting instinct whatever.
Sport, to be sport, must jealously shun all attempts to make it a
business; the more there is of the spirit of professionalism in any
game or athletic exercise the less it deserves to be called a sport. A
sport in the true sense of the word must be practised for fun or
glory, not for dollars and cents; and the desire to win must be very
strictly subordinated to the sense of honour and fair play. The
book-making spirit has undoubtedly entered far too largely into many
of the most characteristic of British sports, and I have no desire to
palliate or excuse our national shortcomings in this or other
respects. But the hard commercial spirit to which I have alluded seems
to me to pervade American sport much more universally than it does the
sport of England, and to form almost always a much larger factor in
the interest excited by any contest.

This is very clearly shown by the way in which games are carried on at
the universities of the two countries. Most members of an English
college are members of some one or other of the various athletic
associations connected with it, and it cannot be denied that the
general interest in sport is both wide and keen. But it does not
assume so "business-like" an air as it does in such a university as
Yale or Princeton. Not nearly so much money is spent in the
paraphernalia of the sport or in the process of training. The
operation of turning a pleasure into a toil is not so consistently
carried on. The members of the intercollegiate team do not obtain
leave of absence from their college duties to train and practise in
some remote corner of England as if they were prize-fighters or
yearlings. "Gate-money" does not bulk so largely in the view; in fact,
admission to many of the chief encounters is free. The atmosphere of
mystery about the doings of the crew or team is not so sedulously
cultivated. The men do not take defeat so hardly, or regard the loss
of a match as a serious calamity in life. I have the authority of Mr.
Caspar W. Whitney, the editor of _Forest and Stream_, and perhaps the
foremost living writer on sport in the United States, for the
statement that members of a defeated football team in America will
sometimes throw themselves on their faces on the turf and weep (see
his "Sporting Pilgrimage," Chapter IV., pp. 94, 95).[13] It was an
American orator who proposed the toast: "My country--right or wrong,
my country;" and there is some reason to fear that American college
athletes are tempted to adapt this in the form "Let us _win_, by fair
means or foul." I should hesitate to suggest this were it not that the
evidence on which I do so was supplied from American sources. Thus,
one American friend of mine told me he heard a member of a leading
university football team say to one of his colleagues: "You try to
knock out A.B. this bout; I've been warned once." Tactics of this kind
are freely alleged against our professional players of association
football; but it may safely be asserted that no such sentence could
issue from the lips of a member of the Oxford or Cambridge university
teams.

Mr. E.J. Brown, Track Captain of the University of California,
asserted, on his return from a visit to the Eastern States, that
Harvard was the only Eastern university in which the members of the
athletic teams were all _bonâ fide_ students. This is doubtless a very
exaggerated statement, but it would seem to indicate which way the
wind blows. The entire American tendency is to take amusement too
seriously, too strenuously. They do not allow sport to take care of
itself. "It runs to rhetoric and interviews." All good contestants
become "representatives of the American people." One serious effect of
the way in which the necessity of winning or "making records" is
constantly held up as the _raison d'être_ of athletic sports is that
it suggests to the ordinary student, who has no hopes of brilliant
success in athletics, that moderate exercise is contemptible, and that
he need do nothing to keep up his bodily vigour. Thus, Dr. Birkbeck
Hill found that the proportion of students who took part in some
athletic sport was distinctly less at Harvard than at Oxford. Nor
could I ascertain that nearly so large a proportion of the adult
population themselves played games or followed athletics of any kind
as in England. I should say, speaking roughly, that the end of his
university career or his first year in responsible business
corresponded practically for the ordinary American to the forty-fifth
year of the ordinary Englishman, _i.e._, after this time he would
either entirely or partially give up his own active participation in
outdoor exercises. Of course there are thousands of exceptions on both
sides; but the general rule remains true. The average American
professional or business man does not play baseball as his English
cousin does cricket. He goes in his thousands to see baseball
matches, and takes a very keen and vociferous interest in their
progress; but he himself has probably not handled a club since he left
college. No doubt this contrast is gradually diminishing, and such
games as lawn tennis and golf have made it practically a vanishing
quantity in the North-eastern States; but as one goes West one cannot
but feel that baseball and other sports, like dancing in China, are
almost wholly in the hands of paid performers.

The national games of cricket and baseball serve very well to
illustrate this, as well as other contrasts in the pastimes of the two
nations. In cricket the line between the amateur and the professional
has hitherto been very clearly drawn; and Englishmen are apt to
believe that there is something elevating in the very nature of the
game which makes it shed scandals as a duck's back sheds water. The
American view is, perhaps, rather that cricket is so slow a game that
there is little scope for betting, with all its attendant excitement
and evils. They point to the fact that the staid city of Philadelphia
is the only part of the United States in which cricket flourishes;
and, if in a boasting mood, they may claim with justice that it has
been cultivated there in a way that shows that it is not lack of
ability to shine in it that makes most Americans indifferent to the
game. A first-class match takes three days to play, and even a match
between two teams of small boys requires a long half-holiday. Hence
the game is largely practised by the members of the leisure class. The
grounds on which it is played are covered with the greenest and
best-kept of turf, and are often amid the most lovely surroundings.
The season at which the game is played is summer, so that looking on
is warm and comfortable. There is comparatively little chance of
serious accident; and the absence of personal contact of player with
player removes the prime cause of quarrelling and ill-feeling. Hence
ladies feel that they may frequent cricket matches in their daintiest
summer frocks and without dread of witnessing any painful accident or
unseemly scuffle. The costumes of the players are varied, appropriate,
and tasteful, and the arrangement of the fielders is very picturesque.

Baseball, on the other hand (which, _pace_, my American friends, is
simply glorified rounders), with the exception of school and college
teams, is almost wholly practised by professional players; and the
place of the county cricket matches is taken by the games between the
various cities represented in the National League, in which the
amateur is severely absent. The dress, with a long-sleeved semmet
appearing below a short-sleeved jersey, is very ugly, and gives a sort
of ruffianly look to a "nine" which it might be free from in another
costume. The ground is theoretically grass, but practically (often, at
least) hard-trodden earth or mud. A match is finished in about one
hour and a half. In running for base a player has often to throw
himself on his face, and thereby covers himself with dust or mud. The
spectators have each paid a sum varying from 1s. or 2s. to 8s. or even
10s. for admission, and are keenly excited in the contest; while their
yells, and hoots, and slangy chaff are very different to the decorous
applause of the cricket field, and rather recall an association
football crowd in the Midlands. As a rule not much sympathy or
courtesy is extended to the visiting team, and the duties of an
umpire are sometimes accompanied by real danger.[14] Several features
of the play seem distinctly unsportsmanlike. Thus, it is the regular
duty of one of the batting team, when not in himself, to try to
"rattle" the pitcher or fielder by yells and shouts just as he is
about to "pitch" or "catch" or "touch." It is not considered
dishonourable for one of the waiting strikers to pretend to be the
player really at a base and run from base to base just outside the
real line so as to confuse the fielders. On the other hand the game is
rapid, full of excitement and variety, and susceptible of infinite
development of skill. The accuracy with which a long field will throw
to base might turn an English long-leg green with envy; and the way in
which an expert pitcher will make a ball deflect _in the air_, either
up or down, to the right or left, must be seen to be believed. A
really skilful pitcher is said to be able to throw a ball in such a
way that it will go straight to within a foot of a tree, _turn out for
the tree_, and resume its original course on the other side of it!

The football match between Yale and Princeton on Thanksgiving Day
(last Thursday in November) may, perhaps, be said to hold the place in
public estimation in America that the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race
does in England. In spite of the inclement season, spectators of
either sex turn out in their thousands; and the scene, except that
furs are substituted for summer frocks, easily stands comparison with
the Eton and Harrow day at Lord's. The field is surrounded in the same
way with carriages and drags, on which the colours of the rival teams
are profusely displayed; and there are the same merry coach-top
luncheons, the same serried files of noisy partisans, and the same
general air of festivity, while the final touch is given by the fact
that a brilliant sun is not rarer in America in November than it is in
England in June. The American game of football is a developed form of
the Rugby game; but is, perhaps, not nearer it than baseball is to
rounders. It is played by eleven a side. American judges think that
neither Rugby nor Association football approaches the American game
either in skill or in demand on the player's physical endurance. This
may be so: in fact, so far as my very inexpert point of view goes I
should say that it is so. Undoubtedly the American teams go through a
much more prolonged and rigid system of training, and their scheme of
tactics, codes of signals, and sharp devices of all kinds are much
more complicated. "Tackling" is probably reduced to a finer art than
in England. Mr. Whitney, a most competent and impartial observer, does
not think that our system of "passing" would be possible with American
tacklers. Whether all this makes a better _game_ is a very different
question, and one that I should be disposed to answer in the negative.
It is a more serious business, just as a duel _à outrance_ is a more
serious business than a fencing match; but it is not so interesting to
look at and does not seem to afford the players so much _fun_. There
is little running with the ball, almost no dropping or punting, and
few free kicks. The game between Princeton and Yale which I,
shivering, saw from the top of a drag in 1891, seemed like one
prolonged, though rather loose, scrimmage; and the spectators fairly
yelled for joy when they saw the ball, which happened on an average
about once every ten or fifteen minutes. Americans have to gain five
yards for every three "downs" or else lose possession of the ball; and
hence the field is marked off by five-yard lines all the way from goal
to goal. American writers acknowledge that the English Rugby men are
much better kickers than the American players, and that it is now
seldom that the punter in America gets a fair chance to show his
skill. There are many tiresome waits in the American game; and the
practice of "interference," though certainly managed with wonderful
skill, can never seem quite fair to one brought upon the English
notions of "off-side." The concerted cheering of the students of each
university, led by a regular fugle-man, marking time with voice and
arms, seems odd to the spectator accustomed to the sparse,
spontaneous, and independent applause of an English crowd.

An American football player in full armour resembles a deep-sea diver
or a Roman retiarius more than anything else. The dress itself
consists of thickly padded knickerbockers, jersey, canvas jacket, very
heavy boots, and very thick stockings. The player then farther
protects himself by shin guards, shoulder caps, ankle and knee
supporters, and wristbands. The apparatus on his head is fearful and
wonderful to behold, including a rubber mouthpiece, a nose mask,
padded ear guards, and a curious headpiece made of steel springs,
leather straps, and India rubber. It is obvious that a man in this
cumbersome attire cannot move so quickly as an English player clad
simply in jersey, short breeches, boots, and stockings; and I question
very much whether--slugging apart--the American assumption that the
science of Yale would simply overwhelm the more elementary play of an
English university is entirely justified. Anyone who has seen an
American team in this curious paraphernalia can well understand the
shudder of apprehension that shakes an American spectator the first
time he sees an English team take the field with bare knees.

Certainly the spirit and temper with which football is played in the
United States would seem to indicate that the over-elaborate way in
which it has been handled has not been favourable to a true ideal of
manly sport. On this point I shall not rely on my own observation, but
on the statements of Americans themselves, beginning with the
semi-jocular assertion, which largely belongs to the order of true
words spoken in jest, that "in old English football you kicked the
ball; in modern English football you kick the man when you can't kick
the ball; in American football you kick the ball when you can't kick
the man." In Georgia, Indiana, Nebraska, and possibly some other
States, bills to prohibit football have actually been introduced in
the State Legislatures within the past few years. The following
sentences are taken from an article in the _Nation_ (New York),
referring to the Harvard and Yale game of 1894:

     The game on Saturday at Springfield between the two great teams
     of Harvard and Yale was by the testimony--unanimous, as far as
     our knowledge goes--of spectators and newspapers the most brutal
     ever witnessed in the United States. There are few members of
     either university--we trust there are none--who have not hung
     their heads for shame in talking over it, or thinking of it.

     In the first place, we respectfully ask the governing body of all
     colleges what they have to say for a game between youths
     presumably engaged in the cultivation of the liberal arts which
     needs among its preliminaries a supply on the field of litters
     and surgeons? Such preparations are not only brutal, but
     brutalising. How any spectator, especially any woman, can witness
     them without a shudder, so distinctly do they recall the duelling
     field and the prize ring, we are unable to understand. But that
     they are necessary and proper under the circumstances the result
     showed. There were actually seven casualties among twenty-two men
     who began the game. This is nearly 33 per cent. of the
     combatants--a larger proportion than among the Federals at Cold
     Harbor (the bloodiest battle of modern times), and much larger
     than at Waterloo or at Gravelotte. What has American culture and
     civilisation to say to this mode of training youth? "Brewer was
     so badly injured that he had to be taken off the field crying
     with mortification." Wright, captain of the Yale men, jumped on
     him with both knees, breaking his collar bone. Beard was next
     turned over to the doctors. Hallowell had his nose broken. Murphy
     was soon badly injured and taken off the field on a stretcher
     unconscious, with concussion of the brain. Butterworth, who is
     said nearly to have lost an eye, soon followed. Add that there
     was a great deal of "slugging"--that is, striking with the fist
     and kicking--which was not punished by the umpires, though two
     men were ruled out for it.

     It may be laid down as a sound rule among civilised people that
     games which may be won by disabling your adversary, or wearing
     out his strength, or killing him, ought to be prohibited, at all
     events among its youth. Swiftness of foot, skill and agility,
     quickness of sight, and cunning of hands, are things to be
     encouraged in education. The use of brute force against an
     unequally matched antagonist, on the other hand, is one of the
     most debauching influences to which a young man can be exposed.
     The hurling of masses of highly trained athletes against one
     another with intent to overcome by mere weight or kicking or
     cuffing, without the possibility of the rigid superintendence
     which the referee exercises in the prize ring, cannot fail to
     blunt the sensibilities of young men, stimulate their bad
     passions, and drown their sense of fairness. When this is done in
     the sight of thousands, under the stimulation of their frantic
     cheers and encouragement, and in full view of the stretchers
     which carry their fellows from the field, for aught they know
     disabled for life, how, in the name of common sense, does it
     differ in moral influence from the Roman arena?

Now, the point in the above notice is that it is written of
"gentlemen"--of university men. It is to be feared that very similar
charges might be brought against some of the professionals of our
association teams: but our amateurs are practically exempt from any
such accusation. The climax of the whole thing is the statement by a
professor of a well-known university, that a captain of one of the
great football teams declared in a class prayer-meeting "that the
great success of the team the previous season was in his opinion due
to the fact that among the team and substitutes there were so many
praying men." The true friends of sport in the United States must wish
that the football mania may soon disappear in its present form; and
the Harvard authorities are to be warmly congratulated on the manly
stand they have taken against the evil. And it is to be devoutly hoped
that no president of a college in the future will ever, as one did in
1894, congratulate his students on the fact "that their progress and
success in study during the term just finished had been _fully equal_
to their success in intercollegiate athletics and football!".[15]

I have, however, no desire to pose as the British Pharisee, and I am
aware that, though we make the better showing in this instance, there
are others in which our record is at least as bad. The following
paragraph is taken from the _Field_ (December 7th, 1895):

     HIGHCLERE.--As various incorrect reports have been
     published of the shooting at Highclere last week, Lord Carnarvon
     has desired me to forward the enclosed particulars of the game
     shot on three days: November 26, 27, and 29, James McCraw (13,
     Berkeley-square, w.). November 26, Grotto (Brooks) Beat, 5
     partridges, 1,160 pheasants, 42 hares, 2,362 rabbits, 7 various;
     total, 3,576. November 27, Highclere Wood (Cross) Beat, 5
     partridges, 1,700 pheasants, 1 hare, 1,702 rabbits, 4 woodcock,
     16 various; total, 3,428. November 29, Beeches (Cross) Beat, 6
     partridges, 2,811 pheasants, 969 rabbits, 2 wild fowl, 15
     various; total, 3,803. Grand total: 16 partridges, 5,671
     pheasants, 43 hares, 5,033 rabbits, 4 woodcock, 2 wild fowl, 38
     various; total, 10,807. The shooters on the first two days were
     Prince Victor Duleep Singh, Prince Frederick Duleep Singh, Lord
     de Grey, Lord Ashburton, Lord Carnarvon, and Mr. Chaplin. On
     November 29 Mr. Rutherford took the place of Mr. Chaplin.

A little calculation will show that each of the six gentlemen
mentioned in the paragraph must have killed one head of game every
minute or two. This makes it impossible that there could have been
many misses. This in turn makes it certain that the pheasants in the
bag must have been nearly as tame as barndoor fowl. The shooting,
then, must have been one long drawn-out massacre of semi-tame animals,
with hardly a breathing interval. I confess such a record seems to me
as absolutely devoid of sport and as full of brutality as the worst
slugging match between Princeton and Yale; and it, moreover, lacks the
element of physical courage which is certainly necessary in the
football match. Besides, the English sinners are grown men and members
of the class which is supposed to set the pattern for the rest of the
nation; the university footballers, in spite of their own sense of
importance, are after all raw youths, to whom reason does not
altogether forbid us to hope that riper years may bring more sense and
more true manliness.

Two of the most popular outdoor amusements in the United States are
driving and sailing. I do not know how far statistics would bear me
out, but one certainly gets the impression that more people keep
horses for pleasure in America than in England. Horses are
comparatively cheap, and their keep is often lower than with us. The
light buggies must cost less than the more substantial carriages of
England. Hence, if a man is so fond of driving as to be willing to be
his own coachman and groom, the keeping of a horse and shay is not
very ruinous, especially in the country or smaller towns. As soon as
the element of wages enters into the question the result is very
different: carriage-hire is usually twice as high as in England and
often more. However that may be, it is certainly very striking to see
the immense number of one-horse "teams" that turn out for an afternoon
or evening spin in the parks and suburban roads of places like New
York, Boston, and Chicago. Many of these teams are of a plainness, not
to say shabbiness, which would make an English owner too shamefaced to
exhibit them in public. The fact that the owner is his own stableman
is often indicated by the ungroomed coat of his horse, and by the
month-old mud on his wheels. The horse, however, can generally do a
bit of smart trotting, and his owner evidently enjoys his speed and
grit. The buggies, unsubstantial as they look, are comfortable enough
when one is seated; but the access, between, through, and over the
wheels, is unpleasantly suggestive for the nervous. So fond are the
Americans of driving that they evidently look upon it as a form of
active exercise for themselves as well as for their nags. One man said
to me: "I am really getting too stout; I must start a buggy."

I am almost ashamed to avow that I spent five years in the United
States without seeing a trotting-race, though this was owing to no
lack of desire. The only remark that I shall, therefore, venture to
make about this form of sport is that the American claim that it has a
more practical bearing than the English form of horse-racing seems
justified. It is alleged indeed that the English "running" races are
of immense importance in keeping up the breed of horses; but it may
well be open to question whether the same end could not be better
attained by very different means. What is generally wanted in a horse
is draught power and ability to trot well and far. It is not clear to
the layman that a flying machine that can do a mile in a minute and a
half is the ideal parent for this form of horse. On the other hand,
the famous trotting-horses of America are just the kind of animal that
is wanted for the ordinary uses of life. Moreover, the trot is the
civilised or artificial gait as opposed to the wild and natural
gallop. There are 1,500 trotting-tracks in the United States, owned by
as many associations, besides those at all county and State fairs as
well as many private tracks at brood-farms and elsewhere. Stakes,
purses, and added moneys amount to more than $3,000,000 annually; and
the capital invested in horses, tracks, stables, farms, etc., is
enormous. The tracks are level, with start and finish directly in
front of the grand stand, and are either one mile or one-half mile in
length. They are always of earth, and are usually elliptical in shape,
though the "kite-shaped track" was for a time popular on account of
its increased speed. In this there is one straight stretch of
one-third mile, then a wide turn of one-third mile, and then a
straight run of one-third mile back to the start and finish. The
horses are driven in two-wheeled "sulkies" of little weight, and the
handicapping is exclusively by time-classes. Records of every race are
kept by two national associations. Horses that have never trotted a
mile in less than two minutes and forty seconds are in one class;
those that have never beaten 2.35 in another; those that have never
beaten 2.30 in a third; and so on down to 2.05, which has been beaten
but a dozen times. Races are always run in heats, and the winner must
win three heats. With a dozen entries (or even six or eight, the more
usual number) a race may thus occupy an entire afternoon, and require
many heats before a decision is reached. Betting is common at every
meeting, but is not so prominent as at running tracks.

The record for fast trotting is held at present by Mr. Morris Jones'
mare "Alix," which trotted a mile in two minutes three and
three-quarters seconds at Galesburg in 1894. Turfmen confidently
expect that a mile will soon be trotted in two minutes. The two-minute
mark was attained in 1897 by a _pacing_ horse.

Sailing is tremendously popular at all American seaside resorts; and
lolling over the ropes of a "cat-boat" is another form of active
exercise that finds innumerable votaries. Rowing is probably practised
in the older States with as much zest as in Great Britain, and the
fresh-water facilities are perhaps better. Except as a means to an
end, however, this mechanical form of sport has never appealed to me.
The more nearly a man can approximate to a triple-expansion engine the
better oarsman he is; no machine can be imagined that could play
cricket, golf, or tennis.

The recent development of golf--perhaps the finest of all games--both
in England and America might give rise to a whole series of
reflections on the curious vicissitudes of games and the mysterious
reasons of their development. Golf has been played universally in
Scotland for hundreds of years, right under the noses of Englishmen;
yet it is just about thirty years ago that (except Blackheath) the
first golf-club was established south of the Tweed, and the present
craze for it is of the most recent origin (1885 or so). Yet of the
eight hundred golf-clubs of the United Kingdom about four hundred are
in England. The Scots of Canada have played golf for many years, but
the practice of the game in the United States may be dated from the
establishment of the St. Andrew's Club at Yonkers in 1888. Since then
the game has been taken up with considerable enthusiasm at many
centres, and it is estimated that there are now at least forty
thousand American golfers. There is, perhaps, no game that requires
more patience to acquire satisfactorily than golf, and the preliminary
steps cannot be gobbled. It is therefore doubtful whether the game
will ever become extensively popular in a country with so much nervous
electricity in the air. I heartily wish that this half-prophecy may
prove utterly mistaken, for no better relief to overcharged nerves and
wearied brains has ever been devised than a well-matched "twosome" or
the more social "foursome;" and the fact that golf gently exercises
_all_ the muscles of the body and can be played at _all_ ages from
eight to eighty gives it a unique place among outdoor games. The skill
already attained by the best American players is simply marvellous;
and it seems by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that the
open champion of (say) the year 1902 may not have been trained on
American soil. The natural impatience of the active-minded American
makes him at present very apt to neglect the etiquette of the game.
The chance of being "driven into" is much larger on the west side of
the Atlantic than on the conservative greens of Scotland; and it seems
almost impossible to make Brother Jonathan "replace that divot." I
have seen three different parties holing out at the same time on the
same putting green. In one open handicap tournament I took part in
near Boston the scanty supply of caddies was monopolized by the
members of the club holding the tournament, and strangers, who had
never seen the course, were allowed to go round alone and carrying
their own clubs. On another occasion a friend and myself played in a
foursome handicap tournament and were informed afterwards that the
handicaps were yet to be arranged! As the match was decided in our
favour it would be ungracious to complain of this irregularity. Those
little infringements of etiquette are, after all, mere details, and
will undoubtedly become less and less frequent before the growing
knowledge and love of the game.

Lacrosse, perhaps the most perspicuous and fascinating of all games to
the impartial spectator, is, of course, chiefly played in Canada, but
there is a Lacrosse League in the Atlantic cities of the United
States. The visitor to Canada should certainly make a point of seeing
a good exposition of this most agile and graceful game, which is seen
at its best in Montreal, Toronto, or Ottawa. Unfortunately it seems to
be most trying to the temper, and I have more than once seen players
in representative matches neglect the game to indulge in a bout of
angry quarter-staff with their opponents until forcibly stopped by the
umpires, while the spectators also interfere occasionally in the most
disgraceful manner. Another drawback is the interval of ten minutes
between each game of the match, even when the game has taken only two
minutes to play. This absurd rule has been promptly discarded by the
English Lacrosse Clubs, and should certainly be modified in Canada
also.

Lawn tennis is now played almost everywhere in the United States, and
its best exponents, such as Larned and Wrenn, have attained all
but--if not quite--English championship form. The annual contest for
the championship of America, held at Newport in August, is one of the
prettiest sporting scenes on the continent. Polo and court tennis also
have their headquarters at Newport. Hunting, shooting, and fishing
are, of course, immensely popular (at least the last two) in the
United States, but lie practically beyond the pale of my experience.

Bowling or ten-pins is a favourite winter amusement of both sexes, and
occupies a far more exalted position than the English skittles. The
alleys, attached to most gymnasia and athletic-club buildings, are
often fitted up with great neatness and comfort; and even the
fashionable belle does not disdain her "bowling-club" evening, where
she meets a dozen or two of the young men and maidens of her
acquaintance. Regular meetings take place between the teams of various
athletic associations, records are made and chronicled, and
championships decided. If the game could be naturalised in England
under the same conditions as in America, our young people would find
it a most admirable opportunity for healthy exercise in the long dark
evenings of winter.

Track athletics (running, jumping, etc.) occupy very much the same
position in the United States as in England; and outside the
university sphere the same abuses of the word "amateur" and the same
instances of selling prizes and betting prevail. Mr. Caspar Whitney
says that "amateur athletics are absolutely in danger of being
exterminated in the United States if something is not done to cleanse
them." The evils are said to be greatest in the middle and far West.
There are about a score of important athletic clubs in fifteen of the
largest cities of the United States, with a membership of nearly
25,000; and many of these possess handsome clubhouses, combining the
social accommodations of the Carlton or Reform with the sporting
facilities of Queen's. The Country Club is another American
institution which may be mentioned in this connection. It consists of
a comfortably and elegantly fitted-up clubhouse, within easy driving
distance of a large city, and surrounded by facilities for tennis,
racquets, golf, polo, baseball, racing, etc. So far it has kept clear
of the degrading sport of pigeon shooting.

Training is carried out more thoroughly and consistently than in
England, and many if not most of the "records" are held in America.
The visits paid to the United States by athletic teams of the L.A.C.
and Cambridge University opened the eyes of Englishmen to what
Americans could do, the latter winning seventeen out of twenty events
and making several world's records. Indeed, there is almost too much
of a craze to make records, whereas the real sport is to beat a
competitor, not to hang round a course till the weather or other
conditions make "record-making" probable. A feature of American
athletic meetings with which we are unfamiliar in England is the
short sprinting-races, sometimes for as small a distance as fifteen
yards.

Bicycling also is exposed, as a public sport, to the same reproaches
on both sides of the Atlantic. The bad roads of America prevented the
spread of wheeling so long as the old high bicycle was the type, but
the practice has assumed enormous proportions since the invention of
the pneumatic-tired "safety." The League of American Wheelmen has done
much to improve the country roads. The lady's bicycle was invented in
the United States, and there are, perhaps, more lady riders in
proportion in that country than in any other. As evidence of the
rapidity with which things move in America it may be mentioned that
when I quitted Boston in 1893 not a single "society" lady so far as I
could hear had deigned to touch the wheel; now (1898) I understand
that even a house in Beacon Street and a lot in Mt. Auburn Cemetery
are not enough to give the guinea-stamp of rank unless at least one
member of the family is an expert wheelwoman. An amazing instance of
the receptivity and adaptability of the American attitude is seen in
the fact that the outsides of the tramway-cars in at least one Western
city are fitted with hooks for bicycles, so that the cyclist is saved
the unpleasant, jolting ride over stone pavements before reaching
suburban joys.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] I wish to confess my obligation to this interesting book for much
help in writing the present chapter.

[14] A match played in no less aristocratic a place than Newport on
Sept. 2, 1897, between the local team and a club from Brockton, ended
in a general scrimmage, in which even women joined in the cry of "Kill
the umpire!"

[15] It is, perhaps, only fair to quote on the other side the opinion
of Mr. Rudolf Lehmann, the well-known English rowing coach, who
witnessed the match between Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania
in 1897. He writes in the London _News_: "I have never seen a finer
game played with a manlier spirit. The quickness and the precision of
the players were marvellous.... The game as I saw it, though it was
violent and rough, was never brutal. Indeed, I cannot hope to see a
finer exhibition of courage, strength, and manly endurance, without a
trace of meanness."

And to Mr. Lehmann's voice may be added that of a "Mother of Nine
Sons," who wrote to the Boston _Evening Transcript_ in 1897, speaking
warmly of the advantages of football in the formation of habits of
self-control and submission to authority.

VIII

The Humour of the "Man on the Cars"

"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."
So wrote George Eliot in "Daniel Deronda." And the truth of the
apothegm may account for much of the friction in the intercourse of
John Bull and Brother Jonathan. For, undoubtedly, there is a wide
difference between the humour of the Englishman and the humour of the
American. John Bull's downrightness appears in his jests also. His
jokes must be unmistakable; he wants none of your quips masquerading
as serious observations. A mere twinkle of the eye is not for him a
sufficient illumination between the serious and the comic. "Those
animals are horses," Artemus Ward used to say in showing his panorama.
"I know they are--because my artist says so. I had the picture two
years before I discovered the fact. The artist came to me about six
months ago and said, 'It is useless to disguise it from you any
longer--they are horses.'"[16] This is the form of introduction that
John Bull prefers for his witticisms. He will welcome a joke as
hospitably as a visitor, if only the credentials of the one as of the
other are unimpeachable.

Now the American does not wish his joke underlined like an urgent
parliamentary whip. He wants something left to his imagination; he
wants to be tickled by the feeling that it requires a keen eye to see
the point; he may, in a word, like his champagne sweet, but he wants
his humour dry. His telephone girls halloo, but his jokes don't. In
this he resembles the Scotsman much more than the Englishman; and both
European foreigners and the Americans themselves seem aware of this.
Thus, Max O'Rell writes:

     De tous les citoyens du _Royaume_ plus ou moins _Uni_ l'ami
     Donald est le plus fini, le plus solide, le plus positif, le plus
     persévérant, le plus laborieux, et le plus spirituel.

     Le plus spirituel! voilà un grand mot de lâché. Oui, le plus
     spirituel, n'en déplaise a l'ombre de Sydney Smith.... J'espère
     bien prouver, par quelques anecdotes, que Donald a de l'esprit,
     de l'esprit de bon aloi, d'humour surtout, de cet humour fin
     subtil, qui passerait à travers la tête _d'un Cockney_ sans y
     laisser la moindre trace, sans y faire la moindre impression.

The testimony of the American is equally explicit.

The following dialogue, quoted from memory, appeared some time since
in one of the best American comic journals:

     _Tomkyns_ (of London).--I say, Vanarsdale, I told such a good
     joke, don't you know, to MacPherson, and he didn't laugh a bit! I
     suppose that's because he's a Scotsman?

     _Vanarsdale_ (of New York).--I don't know; I think it's more
     likely that it's because you are an Englishman!

An English audience is usually much slower than an American or
Scottish one to take up a joke that is anything less than obvious. I
heard Max O'Rell deliver one of his witty orations in London. The
audience was good humored, entirely with the lecturer, and only too
ready to laugh. But if his joke was the least bit subtle, the least
bit less apparent than usual, it was extraordinary how the laughter
hung fire. There would be an appreciable interval of silence; then,
perhaps, a solitary laugh in a corner of the gallery; then a sort of
platoon fire in different parts of the house; and, finally, a
simultaneous roar. So, when Mr. John Morley, in his admirable lecture
on the Carlyle centenary celebration (Dec. 5, 1895), quoted Carlyle's
saying about Sterling: "We talked about this thing and that--except in
opinion not disagreeing," there was a lapse of half-a-minute before
the audience realised that the saying had a humorous turn. In an
American audience, and I believe also in a Scottish one, the report
would have been simultaneous with the flash.

Perhaps the Americans themselves are just a little too sure of their
superiority to the English in point of humour, and indeed they often
carry their witticisms on the supposed English "obtuseness" to a point
at which exaggeration ceases to be funny. It is certainly not every
American who scoffs at English wit that is entitled to do so. There
are dullards in the United States as well as elsewhere; and nothing
can well be more ghastly than American humour run into the ground. On
the other hand their sense of loyalty to humour makes them much more
free in using it at their own expense; and some of their stories show
themselves up in the light usually reserved for John Bull. I
remember, unpatriotically, telling a stock story (to illustrate the
English slowness to take a joke) to an American writer whose pictures
of New England life are as full of a delicate sense of humour as they
are of real and simple pathos. It was, perhaps, the tale of the London
bookseller who referred to his own coiffure the American's remark
apropos of the two-volume English edition of a well-known series of
"Walks in London"--"Ah, I see you part your _Hare_ in the middle."
Whatever it was, my hearer at once capped it by the reply of a Boston
girl to her narration of the following anecdote: A railway conductor,
on his way through the cars to collect and check the tickets, noticed
a small hair-trunk lying in the forbidden central gangway, and told
the old farmer to whom it apparently belonged that it must be moved
from there at once. On a second round he found the trunk still in the
passage, reiterated his instructions more emphatically, and passed on
without listening to the attempted explanations of the farmer. On his
third round he cried: "Now, I gave you fair warning; here goes;" and
tipped the trunk overboard. Then, at last, the slow-moving farmer
found utterance and exclaimed: "All right! the trunk is none o' mine!"
To which the Boston girl: "Well, whose trunk was it?" We agreed, _nem.
con._, that this was indeed _Anglis ipsis Anglior_.

These remarks as to the comparative merits of English and American
humour must be understood as referring to the average man in each
case--the "Man on the Cars," as our cousins have it. It would be a
very different position, and one hardly tenable, to maintain that the
land of Mark Twain has produced greater literary humorists than the
land of Charles Lamb. In the matter of comic papers it may also be
doubted, even by those who most appreciate American humour, whether
England has altogether the worst of it. It is the fashion in the
States to speak of "poor old _Punch_," and to affect astonishment at
seeing in its "senile pages" anything that they have to admit to be
funny. Doubtless a great deal of very laborious and vapid jesting goes
on in the pages of the _doyen_ of English comic weeklies; but at its
best _Punch_ is hard to beat, and its humours have often a literary
quality such as is seldom met with in an American journal of the same
kind. No American paper can even remotely claim to have added so much
to the gaiety of nations as the pages that can number names like Leech
and Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold and Tom Hood, Burnand and Charles
Keene, Du Maurier and Tenniel, Linley Sambourne and the author of
"Vice Versâ," among its contributors past and present. And
besides--and the claim is a proud one--_Punch_ still remains the only
comic paper of importance that is always a perfect gentleman--a
gentleman who knows how to behave both in the smoking-room and the
drawing-room, who knows when a jest oversteps the boundary line of
coarseness, who realises that a laugh can sometimes be too dearly won.
_Punch_ is certainly a comic journal of which the English have every
reason to be proud; but if we had to name the paper most typical of
the English taste in humour we should, perhaps, be shamefacedly
compelled to turn to _Ally Sloper_.

The best American comic paper is _Life_, which is modelled on the
lines of the _Münchener Fliegende Blätter_, perhaps the funniest and
most mirth-provoking of all professedly humorous weeklies. Among the
most attractive features are the graceful and dignified drawings of
Mr. Charles Dana Gibson, who has in its pages done for American
society what Mr. Du Maurier has done for England by his scenes in
_Punch_; the sketches of F.G. Attwood and S.W. Van Schaick; and the
clever verses of M.E.W. The dryness, the smart exaggeration, the
point, the unexpectedness of American humour are all often admirably
represented in its pages; and the faults and foibles of contemporary
society are touched off with an inimitable delicacy of satire both in
pencil and pen work. _Life_, like _Punch_, has also its more serious
side; and, if it has never produced a "Song of the Shirt," it earns
our warm admiration for its steadfast championing of worthy causes,
its severe and trenchant attacks on rampant evils, and its eloquent
tributes to men who have deserved well of the country. On the other
hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes the birth of which
considerably antedates that of the United States itself; and it
sometimes descends to a level of trifling flatness and vapidity which
no English paper of the kind can hope to equal. It is hard--for a
British critic at any rate--to see any perennial interest in the long
series of highly exaggerated drawings and jests referring to the
gutter children of New York, a series in which the same threadbare
_motifs_ are constantly recurring under the thinnest of disguises. And
occasionally--very occasionally--there is a touch of coarseness in the
drawings of _Life_ which suggests the worst features of its German
prototype rather than anything it has borrowed from England.

Among the political comic journals of America mention may be made of
_Puck_, the rough and gaudy cartoons of which have often what the
Germans would call a _packende Derbheit_ of their own that is by no
means ineffective. Of the other American--as, indeed, of the other
British--comic papers I prefer to say nothing, except that I have
often seen them in houses and in hands to which they seemed but ill
adapted.

Among the characteristics of American humour--the humour of the
average man, the average newspaper, the average play--are its utter
irreverence, its droll extravagance, its dry suggestiveness, its
_naïveté_ (real or apparent), its affectation of seriousness, its
fondness for antithesis and anti-climax. Mark Twain may stand as the
high priest of irreverence in American humour, as witnessed in his
"Innocents Abroad" and his "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur." In
this regard the humour of our transatlantic cousins cannot wholly
escape a charge of debasing the moral currency by buffoonery. It has
no reverence for the awful mystery of death and the Great Beyond. An
undertaker will place in his window a card bearing the words: "You
kick the bucket; we do the rest." A paper will head an account of the
hanging of three mulattoes with "Three Chocolate Drops." It has no
reverence for the names and phrases associated with our deepest
religious feelings. Buckeye's patent filter is advertised as
thoroughly reliable--"being what it was in the beginning, is now, and
ever shall be." Mr. Boyesen tells of meeting a venerable clergyman,
whose longevity, according to his introducer, was due to the fact that
"he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity." One of the daily
bulletins of the captain of the large excursion steamer on which I
visited Alaska read as follows: "The Lord only knows when it will
clear; and _he_ won't tell." And none of the two hundred passengers
seemed to find anything unseemly in this official freedom with the
name of their Creator. On a British steamer there would almost
certainly have been some sturdy Puritan to pull down the notice. One
of the best newspaper accounts of the Republican convention that
nominated Mr. J.G. Blaine for President in 1884 began as follows: "Now
a man of God, with a bald head, calls the Deity down into the _mêlée_
and bids him make the candidate the right one and induce the people to
elect him in November." If I here mention the newspaper head-line
(apropos of a hanging) "Jerked to Jesus," it is mainly to note that M.
Blouët saw it in 1888 and M. Bourget also purports to have seen it in
1894. Surely the American journalist has a fatal facility of
repetition or--?

American humour has no reverence for those in high position or
authority. An American will say of his chief executive, "Yes, the
President has a great deal of taste--and all of it bad." A current
piece of doggerel when I was in Washington ran thus:

    "Benny runs the White House,
      Levi keeps a bar,
    Johnny runs a Sunday School--
      And, damme, there you are!"

The gentlemen named are the then President, Mr. Harrison; the
Vice-President, Mr. Morton, who was owner or part owner of one of the
large Washington hotels; and Mr. Wanamaker, Postmaster General, well
known as "an earnest Christian worker."

I have seen even the sacred Declaration of Independence imitated, both
in wording and in external form, as the advertisement of a hotel.

A story current in Philadelphia refers to Mr. Richard Vaux, an eminent
citizen and member of a highly respected old Quaker family, who in his
youth had been an _attaché_ of the American Legation in London. One of
his letters home narrated with pardonable pride that he had danced
with the Princess Victoria at a royal ball and had found her a very
charming partner. His mother replied: "It pleaseth me much, Richard,
to hear of thy success at the ball in Buckingham Palace; but thee must
remember it would be a great blow to thy father to have thee marry out
of meeting."

Philosophy, art, and letters receive no greater deference at the hands
of the American humorist. Even an Oliver Wendell Holmes will say of
metaphysics that it is like "splitting a log; when you have done, you
have two more to split." A poster long used by the comedians Crane and
Robson represented these popular favourites in the guise of the two
lowermost cherubs in the Sistine Madonna. Bill Nye's assertion that
"the peculiarity of classical music is that it is so much better than
it sounds" is typical of a whole battalion of quips. Scenery, even
when associated with poetry, fares no better. The advertising fiend
who defaces the most picturesque rocks with his atrocious
announcements is, perhaps, hardly entitled to the name of humorist;
but the man who affixed the name of Minniegiggle to a small fall near
the famous Minnehaha evidently thought himself one. So, doubtless, did
one of my predecessors in a dressing-cabin at Niagara, who had
inscribed on its walls:

    "Cannon to right of them,
    Cannon to left of them,
    Cannon in front of them,
    Volleyed and thundered!
    But the man who desc_i_nds
    Through the Cave of the Winds
    Can give points to the noble six hundred."

Of the extravagant exaggeration of American humour it is hardly
necessary to give examples. This, to the ordinary observer, has
perhaps been always its salient feature; and stock examples will occur
to everyone. It is easy to see how readily this form of humour can be
abused, and as a matter of fact it is abused daily and hourly. Many
would-be American humorists fail entirely to see that exaggeration
_alone_ is not necessarily funny.

To illustrate: the story of the woman who described the suddenness of
the American cyclone by saying that, as she looked up from her
gardening, "she saw the air black with her intimate friends," seems to
me a thoroughly humorous application of the exaggeration principle.
So, too, is the description of a man so terribly thin that he never
could tell whether he had the stomach-ache or the lumbago. But the
jester who expects you to laugh at the tale of the fish that was so
large that the water of the lake subsided two feet when it was drawn
ashore simply does not know where humour ends and drivelling idiocy
begins.

The dry suggestiveness of American humour is also a well-known
feature. In its crudest phase it assumes such forms as the following:
"Mrs. William Hankins lighted her fire with coal oil on February 23.
Her clothes fit the present Mrs. Hankins to a T." The ordinary
Englishman will see the point of a jest like this (though his mind
will not fly to it with the electric rapidity of the American's), but
the more delicate forms of this allusive style of wit will often
escape him altogether. Or, if he now begins to "jump" with an almost
American agility it is because the cleverest witticisms of the Detroit
_Free Press_ are now constantly served up to him in the comic columns
of his evening paper. We have got the length of being consumers if not
producers of this style of jest.

In its higher developments this quality of humour melts imperceptibly
into irony. This has been cultivated by the Americans with great
success--perhaps never better than in the columns of that admirable
weekly journal the _Nation_. Anyone who cares to search the files of
about eight or ten years back will find a number of ironical leaders,
which by their subtlety and wit delighted those who "caught on,"
while, on the other hand, they often deceived even the elect Americans
themselves and provoked a shower of innocently approving or
depreciatory letters.

Apart altogether from the specific difference between American and
English humour we cannot help noticing how humour penetrates and gives
savour to the _whole_ of American life. There is almost no business
too important to be smoothed over with a jest; and serio-comic
allusions may crop up amongst the most barren-looking reefs of scrip
and bargaining. It is almost impossible to imagine a governor of the
Bank of England making a joke in his official capacity, but wit is
perfected in the mouth of similar sucklings in New York. Of recent
prominent speakers in America all except Carl Schurz and George
William Curtis are professed humorists.

When Professor Boyesen, at an examination in Columbia College, set as
one of the questions, "Write an account of your life," he found that
seventeen out of thirty-two responses were in a jocular vein. Fifteen
of the seventeen students bore names that indicated American
parentage, while all but three of the non-jokers had foreign names.
Abraham Lincoln is, of course, the great example of this tendency to
introduce the element of humour into the graver concerns of life; and
his biography narrates many instances of its most happy effect. _All_
the newspapers, including the religious weeklies, have a comic column.

The tremendous seriousness with which the Englishman takes himself and
everything else is practically unknown in America; and the ponderous
machinery of commercial and political life is undoubtedly facilitated
in its running by the presence of the oil of a sub-conscious humorous
intention. The American attitude, when not carried too far, seems,
perhaps, to suggest a truer view of the comparative importance of
things; the American seems to say: "This matter is of importance to
you and for me, but after all it does not concern the orbit of a
planet and there is no use talking and acting as if it did." This
sense of humour often saves the American in a situation in which the
Englishman would have recourse to downright brutality; it unties the
Gordian knot instead of cutting it. A too strong conviction of being
in the right often leads to conflicts that would be avoided by a more
humorous appreciation of the relative importance of phenomena. To look
on life as a jest is no doubt a deep of cynicism which is not and
cannot lead to good, but to recognise the humorous side, the humorous
possibilities running through most of our practical existence, often
works as a saving grace. To his lack of this grace the Englishman owes
much of his unpopularity with foreigners, much of the difficulty he
experiences in inducing others to take his point of view, even when
that point of view is right. You may as well hang a dog as give him a
bad name; and a sense of humour which would prevent John Bull from
calling a thing "un-English," when he means bad or unpractical, would
often help him smoothly towards his goal. To his possession of a keen
sense of humour the Yankee owes much of his success; it leads him,
with a shrug of his shoulders, to cease fighting over names when the
real thing is granted; it may sometimes lean to a calculating
selfishness rather than spontaneous generosity, but on the whole it
softens, enriches, and facilitates the problems of existence. It may,
however, be here noted that some observers, such as Professor Boyesen,
think that there is altogether too much jocularity in American life,
and claim that the constant presence of the jest and the comic
anecdote have done much to destroy conversation and eloquence.

Humour also acts as a great safety-valve for the excitement of
political contests. When I was in New York, just before the election
of President Harrison in 1888, two great political processions took
place on the same day. In the afternoon some thirty thousand
Republicans paraded the streets between lines of amused spectators,
mostly Democrats. In the evening as many Democrats carried their
torches through the same thoroughfares. No collisions of any kind
took place; no ill humour was visible. The Republicans seemed to enjoy
the jokes and squibs and flaunting mottoes of the Democrats; and when
a Republican banner appeared with the legend, "No frigid North, no
torrid South, no temperate East, no _Sackville West_," nobody appeared
to relish it more than the hard-hit Democrat. The Cleveland cry of
"Four, four, four years more" was met forcibly and effectively with
the simple adaptation, "Four, four, four _months_ more," which proved
the more prophetic of that gentleman's then stay at the White House.
At midnight, three days later, I was jammed in the midst of a yelling
crowd in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, watching the electoral returns
thrown by a stereopticon light, as they arrived, on large white
sheets. Keener or more interested partisans I never saw; but at the
same time I never saw a more good-humored crowd. If I encountered one
policeman that night that was all I did see; and the police reports
next morning, in a city of a million inhabitants let loose in the
streets on a public holiday, reported the arrest of five drunk men and
one pickpocket!

Election bets are often made payable in practical jokes instead of in
current coin. Thus, after election day you will meet a defeated
Republican wheeling his Democratic friend through the chuckling crowd
in a wheelbarrow, or walking down the Bond Street of his native town
with a coal-black African laundress on his arm. But in such forms of
jesting as in "White Hat Day," at the Stock Exchange of New York,
Americans come perilously near the Londoner's standard of the truly
funny.

In comparing American humour with English we must take care that we
take class for class. Those of us who find it difficult to get up a
laugh at _Judge_, or Bill Nye, or Josh Billings, have at least to
admit that they are not quite so feeble as _Ally Sloper_ and other
cognate English humorists. When we reach the level of Artemus Ward, Ik
Marvel, H.C. Bunner, Frank Stockton, and Mark Twain, we may find that
we have no equally popular contemporary humorists of equal excellence;
and these are emphatically humorists of a pure American type. If
humour of a finer point be demanded it seems to me that there are few,
if any, living English writers who can rival the delicate satiric
powers of a Henry James or the subtle suggestiveness of Mr. W.D.
Howells' farces, for an analogy to which we have to look to the best
French work of the kind. But this takes us beyond the scope of this
chapter, which deals merely with the humour of the "Man on the Cars."

FOOTNOTES:

[16] In an English issue of Artemus Ward, apparently edited by Mr.
John Camden Hotten (Chatto and Windus), this passage is accompanied
with the following gloss: "Here again Artemus called in the aid of
pleasant banter as the most fitting apology for the atrocious badness
of the painting."

This note is an excellent illustration of English obtuseness--if
needed, on the part of the reading public; if needless, on the part of
the editor.

IX

American Journalism--A Mixed Blessing

The average British daily newspaper is, perhaps, slightly in advance
of its average reader; if we could imagine an issue of the _Standard_,
or the _Daily Chronicle_, or the _Scotsman_ metamorphosed into human
form, we should probably have to admit that the being thus created was
rather above the average man in taste, intelligence, and good feeling.
Speaking roughly, and making allowances for all obvious exceptions, I
should be inclined to say that a similar statement would not be as
universally true of the American paper and the American public,
particularly if the female citizen were included under the latter
head. If the intelligent foreigner were to regard the British citizen
as practically an incarnation of his daily press, whether metropolitan
or provincial, he would be doing him more than justice; if he were to
apply the same standard to the American press and the American
citizen, it would not be the latter who would profit by the
assumption. The American paper represents a distinctly lower level of
life than the English one; it would often seem as if the one catered
for the least intelligent class of its readers, while the other
assumed a standard higher than most of its readers could reach. The
cultivated American is certainly not so slangy as the paper he reads;
he is certainly not keenly interested in the extremely silly social
items of which it contains several columns. Such journals as the New
York _Evening Post_ and the Springfield _Republican_ are undoubtedly
worthy of mention alongside of our most reputable dailies; but
journals of their admirably high standard are comparatively rare, and
no cultivated English visitor to the United States can have been
spared a shock at the contrast between his fastidious and gentlemanly
host and the general tone of the sheet served up with the matutinal
hot cakes, or read by him on the cars and at the club.

Various causes may be suggested for this state of affairs. For one
thing, the mass of half-educated people in the United States--people
intelligent enough to take a lively interest in all that pertains to
humanity, but not trained enough to insist on literary _form_--is so
immense as practically to swamp the cultivated class and render it a
comparatively unimportant object for the business-like editor. In
England a standard of taste has been gradually evolved, which is
insisted on by the educated class and largely taken on authority by
others. In America practically no such standard is recognised; no one
there would continue to take in a paper he found dull because the
squire and the parson subscribed for it. The American reader--even
when himself of high education and refinement--is a much less
responsible being than the Englishman, and will content himself with a
shrug of his shoulders where the latter would write a letter of
indignant protest to the editor. I have more than once asked an
American friend how he could endure such a daily repast of pointless
vulgarity, slipshod English, and general second-rateness; but elicited
no better answer than that one had to see the news, that the
editorial part of the paper was well done, and that a man had to make
the best of what existed. This is a national trait; it has simply to
be recognised as such. Perhaps the fact that there is no metropolitan
press in America to give tone to the rest of the country may also
count for something in this connection. The press of Washington, the
political capital, is distinctly provincial; and the New York papers,
though practically representative of the United States for the outside
world, can hardly be said to play a genuinely metropolitan rôle within
the country itself.

The principal characteristics of American journalism may be summed up
in the word "enterprise." No one on earth is more fertile in
expedients than an American editor, kept constantly to the collar by a
sense of competing energies all around him. No trouble, or expense, or
contrivance is spared in the collection of news; scarcely any item of
interest is overlooked by the army of alert reporters day and night in
the field. The old-world papers do not compete with those of the new
in the matter of _quantity_ of news. But just here comes in one of the
chief faults of the American journal, one of the besetting sins of the
American people,--their well-known love of "bigness," their tendency
to ask "How much?" rather than "Of what kind?" There is a lack of
discrimination in the daily bill of fare served up by the American
press that cannot but disgust the refined and tutored palate. It is
only the boor who demands a savoury and a roast of equal bulk; it is
only the vulgarian who wishes as much of his paper occupied by brutal
prize-fights or vapid "personals" as by important political
information or literary criticism. There is undoubtedly a modicum of
truth in Matthew Arnold's sneer that American journals certainly
supply news enough--but it is the news of the servants' hall. It is as
if the helm were held rather by the active reporter than by the able
editor. It is said that while there are eight editors to one reporter
in Denmark, the proportion is exactly reversed in the United States.
The net of the ordinary American editor is at least as indiscriminating
as that of the German historiographer: every detail is swept in,
irrespective of its intrinsic value. The very end for which the
newspaper avowedly exists is often defeated by the impossibility of
finding out what is the important news of the day. The reporter prides
himself on being able to "write up" the most intrinsically
uninteresting and unimportant matter. The best American critics
themselves agree on this point. Mr. Howells writes: "There are too
many things brought together in which the reader can and should have
no interest. The thousand and one petty incidents of the various
casualties of life that are grouped together in newspaper columns are
profitless expenditure of money and energy."

The culminating point of this aimless congeries of reading matter,
good, bad, and indifferent, is attained in the Sunday editions of the
larger papers. Nothing comes amiss to their endless columns: scandal,
politics, crochet-patterns, bogus interviews, puerile hoaxes, highly
seasoned police reports, exaggerations of every kind, records of
miraculous cures, funny stories with comic cuts, society paragraphs,
gossip about foreign royalties, personalities of every description. In
fact, they form the very ragbag of journalism. An unreasonable pride
is taken in their very bulk--as if forty pages _per se_ were better
than one; as if the tons of garbage in the Sunday issue of the Gotham
_Gasometer_ outweighed in any valuable sense the ten or twelve small
pages of the Parisian _Temps_. Not but that there is a great deal of
good matter in the Sunday papers. _Wer vieles bringt wird manchem
etwas bringen_; and he who knows where to look for it will generally
find some edible morsel in the hog-trough. It has been claimed that
the Sunday papers of America correspond with the cheaper English
magazines; and doubtless there is some truth in the assertion. The
pretty little tale, the interesting note of popular science, or the
able sketch of some contemporary political condition is, however, so
hidden away amid a mass of feebly illustrated and vulgarly written
notes on sport, society, criminal reports, and personal interviews
with the most evanescent of celebrities that one cannot but stand
aghast at this terrible misuse of the powerful engine of the press. It
is idle to contend that the newspaper, as a business undertaking, must
supply this sort of thing to meet the demand for it. It is (or ought
to be) the proud boast of the press that it leads and moulds public
opinion, and undoubtedly journalism (like the theatre) is at least as
much the cause as the effect of the depravity of public taste.
Enterprising stage-managers have before now proved that Shakespeare
does _not_ spell ruin, and there are admirable journals in the United
States which have shown themselves to be valuable properties without
undue pandering to the frivolous or vicious side of the public
instinct.[17]

A straw shows how the wind blows; let one item show the unfathomable
gulf in questions of tone and taste that can subsist between a great
American daily and its English counterparts. In the summer of 1895 an
issue of one of the richest and most influential of American
journals--a paper that such men as Mr. Cleveland and Mr. McKinley have
to take account of--published under the heading "A Fortunate Find" a
picture of two girls in bathing dress, talking by the edge of the sea.
One says to the other: "How did you manage your father? I thought he
wouldn't let you come?" The answer is: "I caught him kissing the
typewriter." It is, of course, perfectly inconceivable that any
reputable British daily could descend to this depth of purposeless and
odious vulgarity. If this be the style of humour desiderated, the
Thunderer may take as a well-earned compliment the American sneer that
"no joke appears in the London _Times_, save by accident." If another
instance be wanted, take this: Major Calef, of Boston, officiated as
marshal at the funeral of his friend, Gen. Francis Walker. In so doing
he caught a cold, of which he died. An evening paper hereupon
published a cartoon showing Major Calef walking arm in arm with Death
at General Walker's funeral.

Americans are also apt to be proud of the number of their journals,
and will tell you, with evident appreciation of the fact, that "nearly
two thousand daily papers and fourteen thousand weeklies are published
in the United States." Unfortunately the character of their local
journals does not altogether warrant the inference as to American
intelligence that you are expected to draw. Many of them consist
largely of paragraphs such as the following, copied verbatim from an
issue of the Plattsburg _Sentinel_ (September, 1888):

     George Blanshard, of Champlain, an experienced prescription clerk
     and a graduate of the Albany School of Pharmacy, has accepted a
     position in Breed's drug-store at Malone.

     Clerk Whitcomb, of the steamer "Maquam," has finished his
     season's work in the boat, and has resumed his studies at
     Burlington.

I admit that the interest of the readers of the _Sentinel_ in the
doings of their friends Mr. Blanshard and Mr. Whitcomb is, perhaps,
saner and healthier than that of the British snob in the fact that
"Prince and Princess Christian walked in the gardens of Windsor Castle
and afterwards drove out for an airing." But that is the utmost that
can be said for the propagation of such utter vapidities; and the man
who pays his five cents for the privilege of reading them can scarcely
be said to produce a certificate of intelligence in so doing. If the
exhibition of such intellectual feebleness were the worst charge that
could be brought against the American newspaper, there would be little
more to say; but, alas, "there are some among the so-called leading
newspapers of which the influence is wholly pernicious because of the
perverted intellectual ability with which they are conducted." (Prof.
Chas. E. Norton, in the _Forum_, February, 1896.)

The levity with which many--perhaps most--American journals treat
subjects of serious importance is another unpleasant feature. They
will talk of divorces as "matrimonial smash-ups," or enumerate them
under the caption "Divorce Mill." Murders and fatal accidents are
recorded with the same jocosity. Questions of international importance
are handled as if the main purpose of the article was to show the
writer's power of humour. Serious speeches and even sermons are
reported in a vein of flippant jocularity. The same trait often
obtrudes into the review of books of the first importance. The
traditional "No case--abuse the plaintiff's attorney" is translated
into "Can't understand or appreciate this--let's make fun of it."

By the best papers--and these are steadily multiplying--the
"interview" is looked upon as a serious opportunity to obtain in a
concise form the views of a person of greater or less eminence on
subjects of which he is entitled to speak with authority. By the
majority of journals, however, the interview is abused to an
inordinate extent, both as regards the individual and the public. It
is used as a vehicle for the cheapest forms of wit and the most