Chapter VIII: Part 8

The next great problem which the Great International League sets before itself to solve is this: the National Debt being annihilated, how is the accumulation of property to be prevented in the future? I observed that at this point Polus was not so inclined for the monologue form of discussion as before. It was not the Socratic speaking _ex cathedrâ_, as in the _Laws_; there was a quite unusual glad-of-a-hint attitude, as in the _Lysis_ or the _Meno_.

“Come,” I said, “I see through you; you haven’t thought it out, and you want me to give you a hint. Which is it to be? Am I to serve as whetstone, or do you come in trouble and pain crying out for τὴν μαιείαν?” He threw up his hands: “Speak, and I will listen.” Then said I, “O Polus, you’re just the man I want. Everybody knows I am a dull old dog, slow of thought and slow of speech as a country bumpkin must be; feeling after my words, and as often as not choosing the wrong ones. But I have been excogitating of late a theory which will supply your next plank to perfection, and in fact would make your fortune as a politician, if indeed the Great League will allow you to have any property, even in your brains. Forty years ago--for there were _thinkers_, my dear Polus, in the waste places of the earth even before you were born--I came across quite a “sublime” scheme of some French financier, propounded, I think, during the Great Revolution, for which the world was not yet ready. The man was before his age, and his own generation pooh-poohed him. I quite forget his name. I quite forget the title of his book if he ever wrote one; and I shall be very much obliged to you if you can find out something about the great man, for a great man he was. When I heard of this scheme I was little more than a lad, and now, after much cogitation, I cannot honestly tell you how much of the plan is his and how much my own. But I’ll give him all the credit for it.”

The scheme was a scheme for automatically adjusting all incomes and reducing them to something like equilibrium--that is, the operation of the process set in motion would tend in that direction. All incomes, no matter from what sources derived, were to be fixed according to an algebraic formula, and the formula was this:

·0001 (x - m)² = The income tax levied upon each citizen.

Here x=the actual income earned by the citizen;

m=1,000 pounds sterling, or an equivalent in francs or dollars, if
you prefer it.

When x=m, then of course there could be nothing to pay; which is only another way of saying that a man with £1,000 a year was free from all taxation.

When x was greater than m, then taxation upon the income in excess of £1,000 came into operation with rather alarming rapidity: until when a man was convicted of having in any single year made £10,000 his taxation amounted to £8,100 for that year, and if he were ever found guilty of having made an income of £12,000 the State claimed the whole in obedience to this great and beneficent law.

But what happens in the case of those who have an income below the £1,000 a year--that is, when x is less than m?

In this case the grandeur and sagacity, not to speak of the paternal character of the scheme, become apparent. The moment a man begins to earn more than the normal £1,000 a year, that moment he begins to pay his beautifully adjusted quota of taxation to the State; but the moment that his income falls below the £1,000, that moment the State begins to pay him. Of course you will not forget that _minus_ into _minus_ gives _plus_, therefore the square of the _minus_ quantity represented by x-m, where m is greater than x, offers no difficulty. The two poles of this perfect sphere, if I may so speak, this financial orb--_teres atque rotundus_--are reached, first when x=0, last when x = £11,000. In the first case the State comes to the help of the pauper who has earned or can earn nothing, and gives him a ten-thousandth part of a hypothetical million, which amounts to exactly £100 a year; in the other case the State deprives the bloated plutocrat of a ten-thousandth part of the same million, and relieves the dangerous citizen of ten thousand out of the eleven, saying to him, “Citizen, be grateful that you still have your thousand, and beware how you persist in piling up riches, for the State knows how to gather them.”

“Now, my dear Polus, next time you come, do bring me tidings of my Frenchman, and do work the thing out on paper, for I never was much of a mathematician, and now my decimals are scandalously vague!” So Polus went his way with a dainty rosebud in a dainty paper box for Mrs. Polus, and a saucy message from the Lady Shepherd. “Tell her, with my love, I’m very sorry her husband’s such a goose!” We watched him floundering through the snowdrifts; and I verily believe he was working out my problem with his stick, ·0001 (x-m)².

I don’t think that man went away much impressed with the darkness and desolation of our Arcadian life. Nay, I’m inclined to think the other side had something to say, and I’m afraid this is what it said: “Oh yes, it’s all very fine--intellectual intercourse, and so on. Freshens you up? Glad to see people? Of course I am. But I _did_ hope we were going to have a long day together, and there! it’s all broken into. It’s always the way. How was I to do my autographs with him extinguishing my £1,000 in the funds all the while?”

* * * * *

Here I may as well explain that the Shepherd and his lady are the objects of some wonder and perplexity to their great friends on the one hand and their little friends on the other. The first pronounce them to be poor as rats; the second declare that they are rolling in riches. This conflict of opinion is easily accounted for. When the great and noble Asnapper comes to smile at us he has to take pot-luck. Come when he may, there is all due provision--

Ne turpe toral, ne sordida mappa
Corruget nares, ne non et cantharus et lanx
Ostendat tibi te.

But the forks are all electro-plate, and the dishes are all of the willow pattern. When meek little Mr. Crumb brings Mrs. Crumb and two of the eight daughters to enjoy one hearty meal at afternoon tea, he is awe-struck by the sight of the books and the splendour of half a dozen good engravings hanging upon the walls. As the old grey pony trots home in high spirits--for Jabez has a standing order always to give that poor little beast a double feed of corn--Mr. Crumb remarks to Mrs. Crumb, “Those people must be extremely affluent. I wonder he does not restore his church!”

The great and noble Asnapper, on the contrary, observes, “All the signs of deep poverty, my dear. Keeps his pluck up, though. Quite out of character with the general appearance of the establishment to have those books and collections and what not. I suppose some uncle left him the things. Cooking? I forgot to notice that; but the point of one’s knife went all sorts of ways, and the earthenware was most irritating. Eccentric people. The Lady Shepherd, as they call her, has actually got near a thousand autographs. Why in the world doesn’t she send them up to Sotheby’s and buy some new stair carpets?” Ah! why indeed? Because such as she and the Shepherd have a way of their own which is not exactly your way, my noble Asnapper; because they have made their choice, and they do not repent it. Some things they have, and take delight in them; some things they have not, and they do without them.

But not even in Arcady is it all cakes and ale. Thank God we have our duties as well as our enjoyments; pursuits and tastes we have, and the serious blessed duties which call us from excess in self-indulgence. When the roads are blocked for man and beast we chuckle because there can be no obligation to trudge down to the school a mile and a half off, or to go and pay that wedding call upon the little bride who was married last week, or to inquire about the health of Mrs. Thingoe on the common, whose twins are ten days old.

But snow or no snow, as long as old Biddy lives, one of us positively must go and look after “the old lady.” Every man, woman, and child in the parish calls her “the old lady,” and a real old lady she is. Biddy was ninety-three last November. She persists she’s ninety-four--“leastways _in_ my ninety-four. That Register only said when I was christened, you know, and who’s a-going to say how long I was born before I was christened?”

Biddy has been married three times, and she avers that she wouldn’t mind marrying again if she could get another partner equal to her second. Every one of her husbands had had one or more wives before he wedded Biddy. We make out that Biddy and her three spouses committed an aggregate of twelve acts of matrimony. If you think that old Biddy is a feeble old dotard, drivelling and maundering, you never made a greater mistake in your life. She is as bright as a star of the first magnitude, and as shrewd as the canniest Scotchman that ever carried a pack. She is almost the only genuine child of Arcady I ever knew who has a keen sense of humour, and is always on the look-out for a joke. She is quite the only one in whom I have noticed any tender pity for the fallen, not because of the consequences that followed the lapse, but simply and only because it was a fall. Biddy lives by herself in a house very little bigger than an enlarged dog-kennel, and much smaller than an average cow-house. Till she was eighty-three she went about the country with a donkey and cart, hawking; since then she has managed to exist, and pay her rent too, on eighteen pence a week and a stone of flour. She is always neat and clean, and more than cheerful. She has been knitting socks for me for eight years past, and I am provided with sufficient hosiery now to last me even to the age of the patriarchs. Of course we demoralise old Biddy; her little home is hardly 100 yards off the parsonage, and every now and then the old lady comes to tea in the kitchen. One of the servants goes to fetch her, and another takes her home; and, as I have said, most days one of us goes to sit with her, and I make it a rule never to leave her without making her laugh. You may think what you like, but I hold that innocent merriment keeps people healthy in mind and body, improves the digestion, clears the intellect, brightens the conscience, prepares the soul for adoration--for is not gaiety the anticipation of that which in the spiritual world will be known as fulness of joy?

On this day of snow I found Biddy sitting before the fire, half expecting me and half doubting whether I could get there. “‘Cause, you know, you ain’t as young as you was when you came here first.” “Is any one, Biddy?” She looked up in her sly way. “Dash it, I ain’t!” By her side on the little table was a Book of Common Prayer in very large print, and her spectacles on it. “I’ve begun to read that book through,” she said, “and I’ve got as far as where it’s turned down, but there’s some on it as I’ve got to be very particular with. That there slanting print, that’s hard, that is; that ain’t so easy as the rest on it. But I’m going to read it all through for all that. You see I’ve _done_ it all before, and some of it comes easy.” “Well, Biddy, you ought to know the marriage service by this time.” “And so I do,” said Biddy, grinning. “But I never had no churchings, and I don’t hold wi’ that there _Combination_. Dash it! I never did like cussing and swearing!”[7] It turned out that Biddy had set herself the task of reading the Prayer Book through, _rubrics and all_. Very funny, wasn’t it? Pray, my reverend brethren of the clergy, have you all of you set yourselves the same task and carried it out?

A little later the Lady Shepherd dropped in to look at Biddy. She found the old woman chuckling over some very mild pleasantry of mine, which she repeated in her own odd way. Suddenly she stopped. “Our doctor won’t live to ninety-four!” “Oh, Biddy, that’s more than you can tell. One thing is quite certain; if he does, you won’t be here to see him.” “Why sha’n’t I?” answers Biddy. “He’s nigh upon threescore, ain’t he? and I’m in my ninety-four. You can’t tell, neither, as I shan’t be here. The Lord knows.”

* * * * *

Dear old Biddy! Who _does_ know anything? It seems to me that we can none of us know anything about anything but the past. I hardly know whether we are most ignorant of the things that shall be or the things that are. Old Biddy is the last of the old-world folk that fascinated me so much with their legends and traditions and reminiscences when first I settled among them--it seems but yesterday. Old Biddy has told me all she has to tell, the gossip and the experiences of days that were not as our days. With her will pass away all that is left of a generation that was the generation of our fathers. If I leave her with a smile upon the wrinkled old face there is more often a shade of sadness that passes over my own. Other faces rise up before me; other voices seem to sound; the touch of the vanished hand--gone--gone! As I turn homeward with bowed head in the grey twilight, and muse upon those ten years that have rushed by so peacefully, and yet which have remorselessly levied their tribute and left me beggared of some who were dearer than all the jewels of the mine--

The farm-smokes, sweetest sight on earth,
Slow through the winter air a-shrinking,
Seem kind o’ sad, and round the hearth
Of empty places set me thinking.

That, however, is not because Arcady is Arcady, but because life is life.

Such as we have long ago found the secret of contentment, and something more. Shall I tell you what that secret is? Will you promise to take it as the rule of your own life if I do? Here it is, then, wrapped up in a very short and pithy aphorism--“The man who does not like the place he _has to live in_ is a fool.” Ponder it well, you people who are never tired of prescribing “a change” as absolutely necessary to endurable existence. Banished to the sweetest village in England, how dazed and forlorn you’d be! _We_ could accommodate ourselves to your life as easily as we could put on a new suit of clothes. _You_ could never accommodate yourselves to ours. You would mope and pine. Your only solace would be in droning forth a new version of the _Tristia_, which would not be half as melodious as Ovid’s.

This poor Shepherd and his Lady Shepherd will never see the Alps again--never take a boat on Lugano’s lake in the summer evening, never see Rome or Florence, never again stand before the Sistine Madonna, hearing their hearts beat. Ravenna will remain for them unvisited, and Munich will be welcome to keep its acres of splashes, which Britain’s young men and maidens are told with some insistence are genuine works of Rubens, every one of them. These are joys of the past. But if you assume that two old fogies like us _must_ be longing for a change, fidgeting and hankering after it, and that we _must_ be getting rusty, dull, and morose for lack of it, that we are eating our hearts out with a querulous whimpering, instead of brimming over with thankfulness all day and every day--then you do us grievous wrong. What, sir! Do you take us for a couple of babies floundering in a tub, and puling for a cake of Pears’ Soap? Arcady or Athens is much the same to us. Where our home must be, there are our hearts.

NOTE.

THE AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENT OF INCOMES.

This--the great financial measure of the future--can hardly be expected to commend itself to the philosophic economists of the present day. It is the penalty which every man who is before his time must expect to pay for his excessive sagacity, that his contemporaries neglect or deride him. Accordingly the very name of the French thinker who suggested this beautiful scheme for ensuring Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity has been forgotten and--will it be believed?--the number of those who have ever taken the trouble to work out his formula is quite disgracefully small.

The _Formula_ of the great unknown stands thus:--

·0001 (x - m)² = The amount which the state deals with in all incomes
above £100 a year.[8]

Here x = the income. m = £1,000.

In working out this Formula, the _Rule_ may be stated as follows:--

1. From the number of pounds of income (x) deduct 1,000.

2. Multiply the remainder into itself, _i.e._, _square_ it.

3. Divide the product by 10,000.

The result will give--

(i) The amount paid _by_ the State to the owners of income _under_
£1,000 a year.

(ii) The amount paid _to_ the State by owners of income _above_
£1,000 a year.

Examples:--

(_a_) Income of £200 a year; _i.e._, x = 200.

200 - 1,000 = -800.
-800 squared; [_i.e._,-800 multiplied by -800] = 640,000.

Result of 640,000/10,000 = 64.

Consolation income to all possessors of £200 a year ... £64.

(_b_) Income of £500 a year; _i.e._, x = 500.

500 - 1,000 = -500.
-500 squared; [_i.e._,-500 multiplied by -500] = 250,000.

Result of 250,000/10,000 = 25.

Consolation income to all possessors of £500 a year ... £25.

(_c_) Income of £900 a year; _i.e._, x = 900.

900 - 1,000 = -100.
-100 squared; [_i.e._, -100 multiplied by -100] = 10,000.

Result of 10,000/10,000 = 1.

Consolation income to all possessors of £900 a year ... £1.

(_d_) Income of £1,000 a year; _i.e._, x = 1,000.

1,000 - 1,000 = 0.
0 multiplied by 0 = 0.

Consolation income to all possessors of £1,000 a year ... 0.

(_e_) Income of £2,000 a year; _i.e._, x = 2,000.

2,000 - 1,000 = 1,000.
1,000 squared [_i.e._, 1,000 multiplied by 1,000] = 1,000,000.

Result of 1,000,000/10,000 = 100.

_Income tax paid by_ all possessors of £2,000 a year ... £100.

Reduced to a tabulated form it becomes evident that the consolation paid by the State to all owners of income below £1,000 will decrease as the incomes increase; until, when a prosperous gentleman attains to £1,000 a year, the consolation will disappear, and instead of _receiving_ anything he will begin to _pay_ tax upon his income, such tax becoming greater and greater as his income grows--until, if he be so rash as to attain an income of £11,000 a year, he will pay £10,000 a year income tax, and if he does not take this warning and rises to £12,000 a year the State will not only claim all his £12,000 but demand £100 a year more.

That is to say,

A.

Incomes of

£200 will receive from the State the Consolation of £64
300 ” ” ” 49
400 ” ” ” 36
500 ” ” ” 25
600 ” ” ” 16
700 ” ” ” 9
800 ” ” ” 4
900 ” ” ” 1
1,000 ” ” ” Nil

B.

Incomes of

£2,000 will pay to the State a Tax of £100
3,000 ” ” ” 400
4,000 ” ” ” 900
5,000 ” ” ” 1,600
6,000 ” ” ” 2,500
7,000 ” ” ” 3,600
8,000 ” ” ” 4,900
9,000 ” ” ” 6,400
10,000 ” ” ” 8,100
11,000 ” ” ” 10,000
12,000 ” ” ” 12,100

* * * * *

The richest man in the community will thus be he who has an income of £6,000 a year; on this he will have to pay £2,500 income tax, leaving him with an available balance of £3,500 a year to spend! Now was not this anonymous Frenchman a man of real genius? And is he not a signal example of the truth that

“The world knows nothing of its greatest men”?

* * * * *

The assumptions on which this lofty attempt to reconstruct the social fabric are based are obvious. They are these:--

I. That the earners of daily or weekly wages are not owners of
property, nor can they be classed among the possessors of a
secure annual income. _De minimis non curat lex._

II. That it is to the advantage of the community to _increase_
the number of small capitalists, and to assist them
with State aid--though in a diminishing ratio as their
property or incomes increase, and they need less and less
encouragement.

III. That it is equally for the advantage of the community
to _decrease_ the number of large capitalists and to
discourage the accumulation of wealth in few hands; and
therefore it is necessary to fix a limit of wealth which
men shall not be permitted to exceed.

Oh! ye Astors and Vanderbilts! Ye Rothschilds and Barings! Ye kings of railroads and bacon and nitre! Aye! and such as thou citizen Labouchere--thou of the morbidly sensitive conscience. Tremble, for your day is coming! The age of hap-hazard and empirical finance is passing--the age of scientific and philosophic readjustment is about to dawn. There are those whose mission it will be to set all things straight, and to bring peace on earth and goodwill to men by the exquisitely simple machinery of Fiscal Reform. When that time comes Mammon’s Kingdom will sink to be a mere tributary to the great pantisocracy of the future. Hoarding and accumulating will pass away and die--brought to an end by the phlebotomy of the scientists. Money-grubbing will be an incident in the historic romances of that happy time, and the tutored youth, young men and maidens, will smile at the darkness and fumbling stupidity of those untaught generations who only chattered of a golden age, with never a dream that a better age than that would come with the revolving years--to wit, the age of--

·0001 (x-m)².

VII.

_WHY I WISH TO VISIT AMERICA._

Many more years than I like to acknowledge, have passed away since a day when my father caught me slinking out of his library with Mrs. Trollope’s “Travels in the United States” under my arm. He laughed at my absurd precocity, for I was little more than a child, and as he took the book away from me, he said, “My boy, that is not a book for you to read. It is not even true. You shall go to America yourself one day, when you’re a man, and you’ll know better than to write that kind of stuff.” It was a great hope that was stirred by that promise that I should go to America myself some day. I used to think about it, and wonder when I might look forward to being a man, and how it could be managed, and who would help me, and whether I should settle there and own a slave. A hundred times I have dreamt of Boston, and of Richmond, for somehow I never thought of New York, and there was no Chicago then, and no San Francisco. Perhaps, too, the United States might collapse before I ever grew to be a man, and that was a prospect that made my heart sick to think of. I have been told, indeed, that one night I awoke with a cry, and was heard to exclaim, “Pray, God, keep America till I’ve been and seen it!”

And yet I never have seen America, and I am afraid I never shall see it now, though my youthful prayer has been answered, and America has been kept and seems in small danger of collapsing yet awhile. I have read a great many books about America since those days; but I am bound to say they have not made me much in love with the writers, and I am also bound to say that they have given me very, very little information upon exactly those points that I most wished to inquire into. Of late years I have altogether given up this kind of literature. I believe the last time I looked into any one of these so-called “Travels,” or “Tours,” or “Reminiscences,” was when Mr. Anthony Trollope’s volumes appeared, and I could not get through them. Somehow my father’s words on the mother’s book seemed to apply to the son’s, and spite of myself his voice seemed to be saying to me, “It is not even true!”

But though I have ceased to read books about America, the strong desire to see the New World has never faded; nay, it has increased in intensity as the years have gone on, and what was at first but a vague hankering after something merely visionary, has gradually become a definite longing to see and know an attainable reality. My friends laugh at me and assure me I should be very much disappointed; that I should not like it; that no man ought to go to the States after thirty; that at Cincinnati there are only hogs to see, and at Chicago only monstrous corn warehouses, at New York only monster hotels, and at Boston--oh, dear! such arrogant prigs; finally, that it would be quite impossible for me to continue wearing a white cravat over there, for the washing of my linen would simply ruin me. I hold my peace, but I am not convinced, and I still wish to visit America. And why is this wish so strong in me? I will try to answer that question as briefly as I can, but I must needs answer it in a disorderly kind of way, and give my reasons as they occur to me, without any attempt at systematic arrangement.

First and foremost, let it be understood that I wish to visit America because I am so very ignorant about the real life of a great nation that has sprung into magnificent maturity in a single century. History has nothing like a parallel to produce, which can for a moment be compared with the growth of this nationality. I use that word advisedly. As to the mere progress in wealth and numbers, that does not impress me much. From anything I have heard or read, it does not seem to me inconceivable that a horde of Chinamen, urged on by avarice and selfishness, might have done quite as much as has been done in the United States in the same time, if John Chinaman had happened to get the start; but if they had done so, they would, I am convinced, have remained a horde of Chinamen still. There would have been no new nation; there would have been nothing like the sublime patriotism that, to my mind, characterizes the great American nation; none of that incomparable chivalry that animated a whole people during the war of secession; none of that proud sensitiveness that surprises cosmopolitan philosophers when they hear Americans speak of “the flag.” This is what I should like to look into, like to ask about, like to study on the spot, namely, What is the amazing cohesive force so infinitely potent to bind together into one corporate, living nationality, atoms so dissimilar as the population that makes up the great American people; which, as I understand it does, seems to give a new focus to whatever old love of home warms the breast of German, or Dane, or Swiss, or Englishman; which makes them, one and all, forget their old country and their father’s house, and lose all desire to return; which, extinguishing the old love of fatherland, replaces it by a new love, a passion for the glory of the present, with its boundless hopes and ambitions, and an almost haughty contempt for traditions; this exulting confidence in a great destiny which disdains the lessons of experience, and does not ask from them guidance or instruction or warning? Am I wrong? or is it not the fact that Americans have incomparably more faith in the _solvitur ambulando_ principle than in any other, and that, whenever it is a question between looking back to see what others have done, and looking forward regardless of all precedent, they always prefer striking out a new line rather than following another’s lead? Above all men upon earth, Americans are self-reliant, self-asserting. Yet, was there ever a people so much at unity with itself? Selfishness never seems to diminish the intense national pride; the fierce war of parties in politics never seems to affect patriotism. A whisper of disrespect to “our country,” or the semblance of a sneer at it, and woe to you! Is not this so? I should like to see the working of this mysterious and, to my mind, awful force, a force that acts upon the new-comer with exceeding rapidity. How soon does the immigrant feel its operation? By what processes does it exercise its prodigious sway? How is it that the Dutchman, who has spent all his life in Java, looks to lay his bones with his father’s at Amsterdam or the Hague; that our own Australian colonists, when they have “made their pile,” come back to us and call England still their home; that the Frenchman is always a Frenchman, with an astonishing faculty of producing a bad copy of French fashions wherever he settles, and no power of assimilating himself to the manners and customs of the people among whom he sojourns; but that, when people go to America, it is only a question of time when they will become Americans--become absorbed, that is, into a new nationality? These are questions I should like to ask on the spot, and, if possible, test the truth of the answers suggested.

As there are these problems that present themselves in what I may call the national life of America, so there are others in the political life of the American people that I have never been fortunate enough to find discussed adequately.

We in England have been spending fifty years in timidly feeling our way toward giving our masses a voice in the election of members of Parliament. We are on the eve of a great change, when something very like manhood suffrage will be ushered in among us. It is undeniable that among the upper and middle classes there is a feeling of great uneasiness at the prospect, amounting in some quarters to absolute terror and despair, of what may be coming in the not very distant future. Yet America has prospered in spite of universal suffrage, and, as far as I know, seems to be by no means afraid of it. One hears, indeed, of numbers of dainty people, who are sometimes spoken of as “the upper classes” in American society, affecting to hold aloof from political life and taking no part in the strife of parties. It may be so; but do not these citizens of the great commonwealth who give themselves such airs--these ἄχρηστοι πολῖται, as somebody calls them, who, like naughty children, won’t play because they can’t always be on the in side--constitute a very insignificant number? The fact remains that the enormous majority of Americans are not only earnest and, if I am rightly informed, passionate politicians, but they go to the polls in shoals. That fact alone strikes some of us here with wonder; and the wonder increases upon us enormously when we are assured that this deep interest in political questions appears to be wholly distinct from the political excitement that intermittently rouses the masses in Europe to outbreaks of frenzied hate against established institutions. In France men get wild with panic lest the _ouvriers_ should turn upon the _bourgeoisie_. In Germany the socialists have their own ends in view, and do not disguise them. In Ireland the wretched peasantry avow their designs to confiscate the land. The war of politics with us is eminently selfish, and in proportion as it is carried on with more and more passion the less there seems to be of real patriotism. On our side of the Atlantic it is becoming increasingly apparent that the characteristic of our political warfare may be described as

Each man lusting for all that is not his own.

Mr. Lowell has summed it all up in one of those stinging antitheses that are so stinging they can hardly be true, when, speaking from the American point of view, he says:

Their people’s turned to mob--our mob’s turned people.

How is it that in America the masses can be disciplined so readily to take their side, and to engage so heartily in the fray, moving together as mysteriously as the swallows that with scarce audible twitterings gather in thousands, plume their wings for flight, seem to hesitate for a brief hour, and the next are gone? We, indeed, have of late been aping some American practices, and trying our hands at the caucus, and the three hundred, and what not. I suspect it is a very feeble imitation, and I suspect that one of my American friends was right when he said with a laugh: “Your fellows don’t know their business; they don’t understand what they are talking about. They’re first-rate at turning out steel pens and such small ware, but they’d better leave our political machinery alone. You’re too crowded up in your little island to find room for one of our big fly-wheels!” But how is all this enthusiasm for politics kept up with comparatively so little appeal to the lowest selfishness? and how are these immense numbers manipulated, the vast armies handled as skilfully as if they were soldiers on parade? It is all inexplicable to large numbers of wiseacres in England, who will persist in talking of petty “motives” and “reason” as if _they_ were the prime factors in every social problem.

And this leads me to touch upon another matter, on which I feel myself profoundly ignorant, and which I am sure that others here are quite as ignorant about as I am. We are told that in America there is a recognized profession of politics, just as here there is a medical profession or a legal profession, or, if this is putting the case too strongly, just as here there is the profession of journalism. How in the world do the members of this profession get along? A new President is elected, and we are told that all the old officials are turned out. Where do they go? What becomes of them? What is the effect upon the executive? With us the patronage of the government, at any rate in the civil service, has been reduced to a minimum. Our executive is to a very great extent, indeed, independent of the government of the day. “Men may come and men may go,” but permanent secretaries “go on for ever.” So do commissioners and their clerks, and the thousands of stipendiaries to whom it matters not one straw whether the Radicals are in or the Tories. With us, when a man has gained an appointment by passing a good examination at eighteen or nineteen years old, it is his own fault if he ever loses it. Practically, there is no getting rid of him as long as he can do his work; he is as safe as a judge, and irremovable. But in America, we hear, every four years they shuffle the cards, and away they go! What results from this? Am I wrongly informed? or is there more absolute patronage, patronage _pur et simple_, in the hands of the President of the United States than in any other hands on the face of the earth? Assuming that it is so, what, I ask, must be the effect upon the moral sentiments of the people at large, inevitably brought day by day and hour by hour into relations with a class of eager office-seekers, hungry, alert, jealous, disappointed, unprincipled, or vindictive, according to their success or failure, in getting what they consider their due. Do the “outs” accept the logic of facts without demur, and forthwith betake themselves to other callings?

That in every change in the chief magistracy of a nation every stipendiary of the executive, from the postman to the judge of the supreme court, should get his dismissal, and the Democrat clerk in the custom-house who was behindhand with his work on Monday evening should leave his arrears to be made up by his Republican successor on Tuesday morning; that when President A enters upon his office, a new game should be begun, and the pieces be all set up again, regardless of the position in which the knights or the pawns were when President B was checkmated,--all this seems to us, from our point of view, not only difficult to understand, but difficult to imagine. Surely, theory and fact in this matter must differ very widely. Am I only exposing my ignorance?

I have used the terms “upper and middle classes” on a previous page. When I have asked Americans what the subtle barriers are that in American society separate class from class, they have replied more than once, “In America there are no classes! We have no differences of rank with us.” Strange! And yet we hear of colonels and generals and senators often enough, and I am much mistaken if such titles are at all less esteemed on that side of the water than on this. Be it as it may, however, rank and title may be shadows, but class differences are substantial things. With us the titular aristocracy constitute a class, an inner circle, that at one time united in itself shadow and substance, and now tends to become less exclusive and less influential, however loudly some may complain that

... in these British islands
’Tis the substance that wanes ever, ’tis the symbol that exceeds.

We love rank, because we have a lingering suspicion that it somehow symbolizes wealth, or power, or brilliant intellectual gifts, or great public services, that have forced their possessors into the front rank at some time or other, and received their due recognition in the shape of titular distinction conferred either recently or in days gone by. But if a title is found to be dissociated from any nobleness of character, and is unsupported by brain power or purse power, it will not save a man from humiliating snubs, or give him the _entrée_ to the drawing-rooms of the upper classes. For we have more than one upper class among us, as other nations have had and will continue to have while the world lasts. In that social world where Mrs. Grundy bears sway, our titular aristocracy undoubtedly are the acknowledged leaders, and to them great homage is paid. But it is not only because a man is an earl, or a lady is a duchess, that the one or the other is surrounded by a little court, approached with deference and treated with studied respect, but because both the one and the other are rich enough to “support the title,” as we say. Yes, it is true that in some sense or other

Our nobles wear their ermine on the outside, or walk blackly
In presence of the social law, as most ignoble men.

You may protest that society in England is under the dominion of a plutocracy, then. Yes! and No! Yes! in so far as it is true and always must be true, that no man or woman can live on familiar terms, and keep up the habitual intercourse with the leisure classes, without a certain amount of money. No! in so far as it is also true that money alone, however abundant it may be, will never, among us, give any one an introduction to what we call society. I have heard of cases, and I know of one, where a millionaire from our colonies took a palace in London, and lived _en prince_; was visited by no one, failed to get into any but a third-rate club, found no one to entertain and but few people to speak to; and finally has gone back from whence he came, astonished, disappointed, and soured. They tell me that wealth in America will gain admission to any society for any one. I have been repeatedly assured by intelligent Americans that this is so; yet I cannot understand that it should be so. I can quite understand that, whatever a man’s rank, or gifts, or prospects may be, he would find it very painful to mix with the upper ten thousand if he could not afford to pay for cab-hire, or keep up his subscription at the club, every day finding it hard to get his dinner, and every night perplexed _de lodice paranda_; but I can no more understand how a mere expenditure of cash could get X, Y, or Z into the best society, than I can understand how a payment of, say £10,000, would get an average cricketer into the All-England eleven, or a second-rate oar into the University crew. The Corporation of London is a plutocracy; but society, while accepting his lavish hospitality, treats even the Lord Mayor of London _de haut en bas_. The Lady Mayoress receives ambassadors with condescension; next year some young _attaché_ stares at Mrs. Tomkins, and wonders where he has met that woman.

Who are the upper classes in America? It is nonsense to say there are none. Not to speak of those states in pre-Christian times that tended more or less to become dominated over by an oligarchy, Athens was at least as pure a republic as America is; her people were as proud, as self-asserting, as audaciously enterprising, as ambitious, as shrewd in commercial ventures, as greedy for money, and as lavish in spending it, as the Americans are; yet the “first families” among the Athenians were as haughty as Spaniards, as exclusive as the old French noblesse, and bragged of their ancestry as absurdly as Scotchmen do. If a loud-voiced, bawling demagogue came to the front by sheer force of will and impudence, his political opponents never allowed the populace to forget that he was brought up in a tan-yard. Demosthenes gives point to his most withering sarcasms against Æschines by reminding his audience that he was the son of a school-mistress, and had to scrub the ink off the desks at which his mother taught the dirty little urchins; and who that has read the “Clouds” can forget Strepsiades’s doleful lamentation over his fatal mistake in marrying a fine lady with a pedigree, and begetting a son who did not take after his father? There must be an aristocracy in America who stand upon their birth rather than their mere wealth, yet how little we hear of them. What recognition do they receive? How is it they so seldom come to be leaders? How is it that Hyperbolus seems to push aside Cimon, and Cleon is quite too much for Alcibiades?

It used to be said that no two Englishmen could be found to maintain a conversation together for five minutes without one asking the other what he thought of the weather. It is true still; but there is another question that of late years has become the stock question when two people meet one another, and that is, “When are you going away?” If a man replies boldly that he is not going away at all, he is looked upon as the very impersonation of eccentricity. “Not going away! Why, what are you going to do?” This “going away” means leaving our country-houses when the flowers are in their splendour and all nature bids us stay where we are, and starting off for Norway or Switzerland to spend our money among strange people, drink bad wine, get in late for _table-d’hôte_ when we are faint and weary, or find ourselves five flights of stairs from our pocket handkerchief in a towering edifice without a lift. But go where we will, we are sure to find ourselves not two chairs away from American tourists; they are everywhere. Sir James Ross used to say that if ever he reached the North Pole he would be sure to find a Scotchman sitting upon it. I don’t know what has become of all the Scotchmen; they and the gypsies have grown rarer since I was a boy; but you can never escape from Americans. Of course there are Americans and Americans; they differ from one another as much as any other people do, as much and no more; but this is true of all the transatlantic tourists, they are abundantly supplied with money, and they do not grudge spending it; in fact, if we were to judge by the Americans we meet with in Europe, we should be forced to the conclusion that all Americans are rich, even very rich. But when I have asked them how clergymen and doctors and lawyers and elderly people with strictly limited incomes live in the United States,--such people as among us live in comfort with a couple of female servants, or even keep a pony chaise,--I have found my tourist acquaintances very much amused at my supposing that in America _helps_ could be got to stay in such a household. “Are there, then, no small people in America?” I have asked. The answer has been more often than not, “If there are, we don’t know them.”

It is obvious that quiet, domestic people of small means are not to be met with among tourists at luxurious hotels, and equally obvious that such people are hard to get at by travellers who are themselves birds of passage. When a householder is living very near the wind, he does not like to expose his small economies and humble ways to a stranger; and because he is living a quiet, unostentatious life, he has little to offer to those whose occupation is seeing sights. But any man or woman who wishes to gain some insight into our domestic life may easily obtain it if he will but take the trouble to read our works of fiction. Our novelists come from the middle classes, not from the rich or leisure classes, and they speak as they do know. They tell us all about the habits and sentiments and ways of talking among clergymen and doctors and farmers and millers and clerks and shopkeepers in England; they show us the good and the bad side with equal impartiality; and no more faithful delineations have ever been made of the inner and outer life of the lowest struggling classes than are to be found in English literature. But if we want to get an insight into the _morale_ of such people in America, we do not know where to look for it. Such a character as Kitty Ellison in Mr. Howell’s “Chance Aquaintance,” whose heart is with Uncle Jack and his anxieties and troubles while she is enjoying all the gaieties and luxuries that wealth can bestow, is a rarity in America; and, moreover, all the people one meets with in Mr. Howell’s stories are away from home. In the “Biglow Papers” one does now and then get a hint that there are shrewd farmers and hard-headed country folk somewhere in the States, who do not wander very far, but one never gets to know them. That exquisite story of Mr. Stockton’s, “Rudder Grange,” as far as I know, occupies a unique position in American literature, and has for many of us lifted the veil from a whole world of little people across the Atlantic, of whose very existence some on our side the water had almost begun to entertain doubts. Yet we are in the habit of thinking that it is precisely among these people that we must look for the real heart of a great nation, and that the pulse of every great nation is to be felt among them, if at all.

But of all subjects of inquiry that a thoughtful Englishman could set himself to work at, the most instructive, the most suggestive, would be the effect of perfect equality between the various religious bodies upon the philosophic speculations, religious sentiments, and ethical convictions of the American people. In England there is one Church by law established, and they who separate from the communion of that Church are all classed together as dissenters. That there should be anywhere on the face of the earth a condition of society where there can be no such thing as a dissenter, is a thought extremely difficult for some good folks here to grasp. But much harder is the other notion, which I presume is familiar enough to Americans, that there should be anywhere no sects. No dissenters, because no predominant or paramount Christian organization that rejoices in the “most-favoured-nation” clause. No sects, because no church recognized as _the_ Church from which the other religious bodies have cut themselves off. That there should be no bigotry and exclusiveness, no _odium theologicum_, no fierce rivalry, no proselytizing, in America, as everywhere else, is inconceivable. Theological disputants will cease to wrangle when lawyers learn to love one another as brethren and doctors differ without asperity; but among us the situation is extremely embarrassing as between the Church--for with us it is _the_ Church--and the non-conformist, that is, with those who will not subscribe to our Church doctrine, accept our formularies, or conform to our liturgy. Here we have a standard by which we try all other Christian bodies, and we pronounce them more or less orthodox or denounce them as absolutely unorthodox, in proportion as they approach or depart from this standard which is tacitly accepted among us as the established standard. If there were no Church of England by law established, I believe that a vast number of people would find themselves quite dazed, quite lost. To them it would be practically pretty much as if we were all to awake some fine morning to find that the Home Secretary had shut up Greenwich observatory and run away with the key, having previously taken measures to stop all the great clocks in the land. We should all of us be going by our own watches.

Yet somehow in America every man goes by his own watch; and if nobody is right, nobody else is likely to consider himself hopelessly wrong. Here the social position of the clergy of the established Church is something quite peculiar. There is no need to dwell upon the fact, but that it is a fact there can be no doubt. The result is, that the attitude of the clergy[9] toward all the religious teachers has always been exclusive; there has never been any cordiality, and very little coöperation. I do not say this is not deplorable; I am concerned with facts only. A supercilious tone is so habitually natural to the clergyman when speaking or dealing with the dissenting minister, and a tone of soreness, jealousy, and suspicion on the part of the minister towards the clergyman seems to us so inseparable from their relations one to the other, that we in England can hardly bring ourselves to believe that the Episcopalian and the Independent, the Wesleyan and the Primitive Methodist, could meet on absolutely equal terms, just as officers of two regiments in the same army can meet at mess and fight valiantly side by side against the common foe. Every now and then we get one of those necessary evils, the religious newspapers, sent us by kind friends from America, or we catch a glimpse of an American bishop or Episcopalian popular preacher. Was it only a dream, or have I really, actually, in the flesh, once met with an American archdeacon? But from these exalted personages and their organs surprisingly little is to be learned; and I observe that an ecclesiastic, let him come from where he may, is a shy creature, ready enough to listen, but not to talk. He puts himself on the defensive, and is so very much afraid of committing himself, that you are apt to retire into your interior, too; just as I have observed two snails meeting on their evening walk; one at the approach of his brother shuts himself up in his shell, and the other tickles at him with his horns for a little while, but ends by accepting the situation, and shutting himself up also. Result, to all appearance, nothing but two unoccupied snail-shells, inhabitants having retired from publicity.