Chapter VI: Part 6

And now he thought I was a Russian! It touched me rather tenderly. I was dressed like an American, and my attire was not like that of a Russian at all. How enthusiastic this boy was! It was a real holiday for him. The Slav peoples are emotional; they need every now and then a means of publicly expressing their feelings. This procession from the town to the graveyard was a link with the customs of their native land, where at least twice a year the living have a feast among the crosses and mounds of the cemetery, and share their joys and interests with the dear dead, whose bodies have been given back to earth.

Among those accompanying the procession were Austrian Slavs, in soot-coloured, broad-brimmed, broken-crowned hats, not yet cast away; and I noted solemn-faced, placid Russian peasants in overalls staring with half-awakened comprehension. I saw a negro attired in faultless black cloth, having a bunchy umbrella in his hand, a heavy gold chain across his waistcoat, a cigar in his mouth, a soft smoky hat on his head. He tried to get to the front, and I heard one white man say to another, "Make way for him, it's not _your_ funeral." The negro is a pretty important person--considering that the war was really fought for him. Perhaps not many actively remember that now; it is not soothing to do so. It is the American hero who matters more than the cause for which he fell; though of course America, the idea of America, matters more than either the heroes or the cause. It is a pity that on Decoration Day there is a tendency to decorate the graves of those who fell in the Spanish War and to pin medals on the survivors of that conflict rather than to perpetuate the memory of the struggle for the emancipation of the negro. America's great problem is the negro whom she has released; but the Spanish War meant no more than that America's arm proved strong enough to defeat a European power inclined to meddle with her civilisation.

It was, however, at the oldest grave in the cemetery that the procession stopped and the people gathered. All the men were uncovered, and there was a feeling of unusual respect and emotion in the crowd. The wreaths were put down and the flags lowered as the little memorial service commenced. We sang an old hymn, slowly, sweetly, and very sadly, so that one's very soul melted. A hymn of the war, I suppose:

_Let him sleep,_
_Calmly sleep,_
_While the days and the years roll by._
_Let him sleep,_
_Sweetly sleep,_
_Till the call of the roll on high._

In the time of the war, in the dark hours of danger and distress, in the times of loss and appalling personal sorrow the Americans were very near and dear to God and to one another--nearer than they are to-day in their peace and prosperity.

When the hymn had been sung, an old grey-headed man came to the foot of the grave and read a portion of the speech made by Abraham Lincoln at the great cemetery at Gettysburg:

_Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. We are now engaged in
a great Civil War, testing whether that nation so conceived and so
dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield ...
to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for
those who have given their lives that the nation might live. It is
altogether fitting and proper that we should do this._

_But in a larger sense we cannot consecrate this ground. The dead
themselves have consecrated it. It is rather for us, the living,
to consecrate ourselves to the work they died for, that we resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation
shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the
people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the
earth._

The reading of these words was most impressive. I realised in it the Gospel of America--something more national than even the starry flag.

When the reading was accomplished the eight veterans fired their salute, not up at heaven, but across and over the people's heads, as at an unseen enemy. Then the old grey-headed man who had read the words of Lincoln pronounced the blessing:

_The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your
hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God...._

And we dispersed to wander among the graves and see the decorations, and add decorations of our own if we willed. Wherever I went, the haunting air was in my ears:

Let him sleep,
Sweetly sleep,
Till the call of the roll on high.

Americans believe very really in the roll-call. They believe that they will answer to their names on a great last day--"When the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there," says a popular hymn. It is all important to the American that he feels he lives and dies for the Right, for the moral virtues. The glory of the wars which the Americans have fought in their history is not only that they, the Americans, were victorious, but that they were morally right before ever they started out to fight.

Well, civilisation has approved the abolition of slavery. The great mass of people nowadays consider slavery as something wrong in itself. The North took up its weapons and convinced the South, and the negro was freed. The peculiar horrors of slavery no longer exist--no one man has power of life and death over the African. That much the war has achieved. But it is strange that for the rest the negro seems to have become worse off, and that America feels that she cannot extend the personal privileges of democracy to the blacks. America has brutalised the nigger; has made of a very gentle, loving and lovable if very simple creature, an outcast, a beast, who may not sit beside an ordinary man. It has in its own nervous imagination accused him of hideous crimes which he did not commit, did not even imagine; it has deprived him of the law, tortured him, flayed him, burned him at the stake. It has made a black man a bogey; so that a fluttering white woman, finding herself alone in the presence of a negro, will rush away in terror, crying "murder," "rape," "fire," just because she has seen the whites of his eyes. Then the hot-blooded southern crowd comes out....

The war was a healthy war. It did much good, it strengthened the roots of many American families; it gave the nation a criterion for future development; it brought many individuals nearer to reality, brought them to the mystery of life, caused them to say each day their prayers to God. But if a war must be judged by its political effect, then as regards the happiness of the negro the war has not yet proved to be a success. The service by the graveside, and the apt words of Abraham Lincoln were a reminder to the American people that though they realise to themselves the maximum of prosperity the New World affords, and yet lose their souls, it profits them nothing. America by her unwritten but infallible charter is consecrated to freedom. If America is going to be true to itself it must work for freedom, it must carry out the idea of freedom. The emigrant from Europe expects to realise in America the idea of freedom, the opportunity for personal and individual development. He does not expect to find repeated there the caste system and relative industrial slavery of the East.

* * * * * * *

Clearfield was much touched by the graveside service. The whole evening after it the men in the hotel lounge talked American sentiment. The lads and lasses crowded into the cinema houses, and watched with much edification the specially instructive set of films which, on the recommendation of the town council, had been specially installed for the occasion,--the perils of life for a young girl going to dance-halls, the Soudanese at work, Japanese children at play, the ferocious habits of the hundred-legs, a review of troops at Tiflis, a portrait of the Governor of Mississippi wearing a high silk hat, pottery-making in North Borneo, the Pathé news. It was good to see so many pictures of foreign and dark-skinned people presented in an interesting and sympathetic manner. The Americans need to care more for the national life of other races. For they are often strangely contemptuous of the people they conceive to be wasting their time.

I had a pleasant talk with a doctor who was extremely keen on "temperance." He struck up acquaintance with me by complimenting me on my complexion, and betting I didn't touch spirituous liquors. "The war's still going on," said he. "I wage my part against drink and disease. I'd like to make the medical profession a poor one to enter, yes, sirr. I'd like to uproot disease, and if I could stop the drinking in America I'd do it. Never touch liquor and you'll never have gout, live to a good age, and be happy. I am glad to meet you, sir, glad to meet a Briton. America will stand shoulder and shoulder with the British in war or peace. They are of the same blood. The only two civilised nations in the world."

All the same, Clearfield regarded me with some suspicion, and as I sat at my bedroom window at night a young man called up:

"English Gawd: Lord Salisbury."

XI

WAYFARERS OF ALL NATIONALITIES

The men whom you meet during the day are like a hand of cards dealt out to you by Providence. But they are more than that, for you feel that luck does not enter into it. You feel there is no such thing as luck, and that the wayfarer is in his way a messenger sent to you by the hospitable spirit of man. He brings a sacred opportunity.

I sit tending my fire, and watching and balancing the kettle upon it; or I sit beside the cheerful blaze on which I have cooked my breakfast or my dinner, and I hold my mug of coffee in my hand and my piece of bread; I chip my just-boiled eggs, or I am digging into a pot of apple-jelly or cutting up a pine-apple, and I feel very tender towards the man who comes along the road and stops to pass a greeting and give and take the news of the day and the intelligence of the district.

There is a sort of hermit's charity. It is to have a spirit that is quietly joyful, to be in that state towards man that a gentle woodsman is towards the shy birds who are not afraid of him as he lies on a forest bank and watches them tripping to and from their little nests. Your fellow-man instinctively knows you and trusts you, and he puts aside the mask in which he takes refuge from other fellow-travellers who are alert and busy. I cherish as very precious all the little talks I had with this man and that man who came up to me in America.

As I sat one day by the side of my pleasant Susquehanna road, an oil-carrier met me, a gentle-voiced man in charge of four tons of kerosene and petrol, which his horses were dragging over the mountains from village to village and store to store. I was an opportunity to rest the horses, and the driver pulled up, relaxed his reins and entered into converse with me. Was I going far? Why was I tramping? What nationality was I? I told him what I was doing, and he said he would like to give up his job and do the same; he also was of British origin, though his mother was a German. He was a descendant of Sir Robert Downing. "There used to be many English about here," said he, "but they wore off." He went on to tell me what a wild district it had once been. His grandfather had shot a panther on the mountains. But there were no panthers now. The railways and the automobiles had frightened the wild things away. The change had come about very suddenly. He remembered when there were no telephone-poles along the road, but only road-poles. It used to be a posting-road, and a good one too; but now the automobiles had torn up all the surface, and no one would take any trouble about the needs of horse vehicles.

One hot noontide, on the road to Shippenville and Oil City, I was having luncheon when a very pleasant Swede came down the road carrying a bucket in his hand,--Mr. G. B. Olson, bossing a gang of workers on the highway. He was going down the hill to a special spring to draw water for his thirsty men, but he could hardly resist the smoke of my wayside fire, and he told me, as it seemed, his whole story. He had come to America in 1873, and had worked on a farm in Illinois before the great Chicago fire. He was twenty-four then, and was sixty-five now.

When he heard I was British he told me how he had come from Europe _via_ Leith and Glasgow, and had been fifteen and a half days crossing the Atlantic.

"Have you ever been back to Sweden?" I asked.

"No, sirr, never."

"Are you content with America?"

"Yes, sirr; it's the finest country under the sun. It gives the working man a show."

"The Americans speak very kindly of your countrymen. They like them."

"Yes. We gave the Americans a good lift, we Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Germans, by settling the land when the rest of the colonists were running to the towns. We came in and did the rough pioneer work that had to be done if America was going to be more than a mushroom growth. Where would America be to-day if it were not for us in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa? You can't keep up big cities unless you've got plenty of men working in the background on the land."

The Swede went on to compliment me on my English. I spoke pretty clear for one who had been only three months in the country. He had met many British who spoke "very broken," especially Scotch. "I shouldn't have been able to understand them," said he, "but that I am a foreigner myself, and know what it is not to speak good."

"Well, I must be off," he added, and pointed to the bucket.

"You've got a gang of men working up above?"

"Yes. I'm bossing them for the State. A good job it is too, good money, and I don't have to work much."

"I should say you'd make a kind boss!"

"Yes. I never do anything against them. I get a good day's work out of the men, but I never put myself above them. I've got authority, that's all--it doesn't make me better'n they. I've got to boss them, they've got to work. That's how it's turned out.... Well, I must be off to water my hands!"

And he hastened away down the hill, whilst I put my things together and shouldered my pack.

The strange thing about this American journey was the diversity of nationality I encountered, and the friendly terms in which it was possible for me as a man on the road to converse with them.

On leaving Clearfield I fell in with Peter Deemeff, a clever little Bulgarian immigrant, and spent two days in his company. He was an unpractical, rebellious boy, a student by inclination, but a labourer by necessity, nervous in temperament, and alternately gay and despondent. He was thin-bodied, broad-browed, clean-shaven, but blue-black with the multitude of his hair-roots; he had two rows of faultless, little, milk-white teeth; an angelic Bulgarian smile, and an occasional ugly American grimace.

We tramped along the most beautiful Susquehanna road to Curwenville, and then through magnificent gorges to the height of Luthersburg.

"Ho! Where you going?" said one of a group of Italian labourers at Curwenville.

"Oil City," I answered.

"You'll be sore," the Italian rejoined, and slapped his thigh. "Why not stop here and get good job?"

But Peter and I were not looking for a job just then, and we went on. I was glad the Bulgarian was not tempted, for I relished his company, and he was pleasantly loquacious.

"Do you like the Americans?" I asked him.

He raised his eyebrows. Evidently he did not like them very much.

"Half-civilise," said he. "When I say my boss, 'I go,' he want me fight. He offens me. I say, 'You Americans--bulldogs, no more, half-civilise.' And I go all the same and no fight great big fat American."

"You think Bulgaria a better country?"

"'S a poor country, that's all. There's more life in Europe. Americans don't know what they live for."

I looked with some astonishment on this day-labourer in shabby attire talking thus intelligently, and withal so frankly.

He told me he hated the English. They had said, anent the Balkan War, "The fruits must not be taken from the victors"; but when Montenegro took Scutari they were the first to say to King Nicholas "Go back, go back." He thought I was a Slav immigrant like himself, or he would not have struck up acquaintance with me. But he seemed relieved when I told him my sympathies were entirely with the Slavs.

We talked of Russian literature, and of Tolstoy in particular.

"Tolstoy understood about God," said he. "He said God is within you, not far away or everywhere, but in yourself. By that I understand life. All life springs from inside. What comes from outside is nahthing. That is how Americans live--in outside things, going to shows, baseball matches.... I know Shakespeare was the mirror of life, that's not what I mean.... To be educated mentally is light and life; to be developed only physically is death and.... That's why I say bulldogs, not civilise. When I was in Philadelphia I hear a Socialist in the Park and he asked, 'How d'ye fellows live?--eat--work, eat--work--drink, eat--work--sleep, eat--work--sleep. Machines, that's what y'are.'"

The most astonishing evidence of thought and culture that Peter Deemeff gave me was contained in a reflection he made half-aloud, in a pause in the conversation--"A great writer once said, 'If God had not existed, man would have invented his God'--that is a good idea, eh?" Fancy that from the lips of an unskilled labourer! These foreign working-men are bringing something new to America. If they only settle down to be American citizens and look after their children's education!

"Do many Bulgarians think?" I asked him.

"Yes, many--they think more than I do."

We spent the night under great rocks; he under one, I under another. My bed, which I made soft with last year's bracken, was under three immense boulders, a natural shelter, a deep dark cavern with an opening that looked across the river-gorge to the forested cliff on the other side. The Bulgarian, less careful about his comfort, lay in a ferny hollow, just sheltered by an overhanging stone. Before lying down he commended himself to God, and crossed himself very delicately and trustfully. With all his philosophy he had not cast off the habits of the homeland. And almost directly he laid himself down he fell asleep.

It was a wonderful night. As I lay in my cave and the first star was looking down at me from over the great wooded cliff, what was my astonishment to see a living spark go past the entrance of the cave, a flame on wings--the firefly. I lay and watched the forest lose its trees, and the cliff become one great black wall, ragged all along the crest. Mists crept up and hid the wall for a while, and then passed. An hour and a half after I had lain down, and the Bulgarian had fallen asleep, I opened my eyes and looked out at the black wall--little lamps were momentarily appearing and disappearing far away in the mysterious dark depths of the cliff. It seemed to me that if when we die we perish utterly, then that living flame moving past my door was something like the passing of man's life. It was strange to lie on the plucked rustling bracken, and have the consciousness of the cold sepulchre-like roof of the cave, and look out at the figure of man's life. But the river chorus lulled me to sleep. Whenever I reawakened and looked out I saw the little lights once more, appearing and vanishing, like minutest sprites searching the forest with lanterns.

Peter and I woke almost at the same time in the morning in a dense mist. I sent him for water, and I collected wood for a fire. We made tea, took in warmth, and then set off once more.

"Let us go to a farmhouse and get some breakfast," said I.

"We get it most likely for nothing, because it's Sunday," said Peter with a smile.

The Americans are much more hospitable on Sundays than on week days. They do not, however, like to see you tramping the road on the day of rest; it is thought to be an infraction of the Sabbath--though it is difficult to see what tramps can do but tramp on a Sunday.

We had a splendid breakfast for ten cents apiece at a stock-breeding farm below Luthersburg,--pork and beans, bread and butter and cookies, strawberry jam and home-canned plums, pear-jelly. I thanked the lady of the establishment when we had finished, and remarked that I thought it very cheap at the price. She answered that she didn't serve out lunches for a profit, but wouldn't let decent men pass hungry.

"Are you hiking to the next burg?" she asked.

"Chicago," said I.

"Gee!"

We came to Luthersburg, high up on the crest of the hills, a large village, with two severe-looking churches.

"When I see these narrow spires I'm afraid," said the Bulgarian. "I should have to wither my soul and make it small to get into one of these churches. I like a church with walls of praise and a spire of yearning,--Tolstoy, eh? That spire says to me 'I feared Thee, O God, because Thou art an austere man.'"

I, for my part, thought it strange that Americans, taking so many risks in business, and daring and imagining so large-heartedly in the secular world, should be satisfied with so cramped an expression of their religion.

Peter and I went down on the other side of the hills to Helvetia, the first town in a wild coaling district, a place of many Austrians, Poles, and Huns. It was the Sunday evening promenade, and every one was out of doors, hundreds of miners and labourers in straight-creased trousers (how soon obtained) and cheap felt hats, a similar number of dark, interesting-looking Polish girls in their gaudy Sunday best. We passed a hundred yards of grey coke-ovens glowing at all their doors and emitting hundreds of fires and flames. Peter seemed unusually attracted by the coke-ovens or by the Slav population, and he decided to remain at Helvetia and seek for a job on the morrow. So I accompanied him into a "boarding-house," and was ready to spend the night with him. But when I saw the accommodation of coaly beds I cried off. So the Bulgarian and I parted. I went on to Sykesville and the Hotel Sykes. Obviously I was in America,--fancy calling a hotel in England "Hotel Sykes." But I did not stay there, preferring to hasten up country and get a long step beyond black breaker-towers, the sooty inclines up which trucks ran from the mines, the coke-ovens, the fields full of black stumps and rotting grass, the seemingly poverty-stricken frame-buildings, and more dirt and misery than you would see even in a bad district in Russia. It surprised me to see the Sunday clothes of Sykesville, the white collars, the bright red ties, the blue serge trousers with creases, the bowler hats, and American smiles. Despite all the dirt, these new-come immigrants say _Yes_ to American life and American hopes. But to my eyes it was a terrible place in which to live. It was an astonishing change, moreover, to pass from the magnificent loveliness of the Susquehanna gorges to this inferno of a colliery. But I managed to pass out of this region almost as quickly as I came into it, and next day was in the lovely country about Reynoldsville; and I tramped through beautiful agricultural or forested country to the bright towns of Brookville, Clarion, and Shippenville, clean, new, handsome settlements, with green lawns, shady avenues, fine houses, and well-stocked shops. In such places I saw America at its best, just as at Helvetia and Sykesville I saw it at about its worst. I suppose Sykesville will never be made as beautiful as Brookville; the one is the coal-cellar, the other is the drawing-room in the house of modern America.

But I had definitely left the coal region behind, now I was striking north, for oil. In three days I came into Oil City, so wonderfully situated on the wide and stately Alleghany river--the river having brown rings here and there, glimmering with wandering oil. The city is built up five or six hills, and is only a unity by virtue of its fine bridges. It is a clean town compared with Scranton, as oil is cleaner to deal with than coal. But the houses are more ramshackle. The poor people's dwellings suggest to the eye that they were made in a great hurry many years ago, and are now falling to bits; they are set one behind another up the hills, and you climb to them by wooden stairways. Some seem veritably tumbling down the hill. There were a fair number of foreign immigrants there, mostly Italians; but the oil business seems to be worked by Americans, the foreigners being too stupid to understand. Oil City is a cheap town to live in. I was boarded at a hotel for a dollar a day; and when I bought provisions for my next tramp to Erie Shore I found everything cheaper than in Eastern Pennsylvania. There appeared to be little cultured life, however, no theatre but the cinema, and little offered for sale in the shape of books.

I set out for Meadville on the "Meadville Pike." A feature of the new landscape and of the road and fields was the oil-pump, working all by itself, the long cables, connecting the pump with the engine, often coming across the roadway, the _jig, jig, jig_ of the pumping movement, the _clump, clump, clump, stump_ of the engine--the pulse of the industrial countryside.

I met a Dutchman. He asked:

"What's on? What is it for?"

I told him I was studying the emerging American, and he told me what a menace the fecund Slavs were to the barren Americans. According to him the extinction of the American was a matter of mathematics.

I came upon an enormous gang of Americans, Russians, Slavs, Italians at work on the highroad, digging it out, laying a bed of mortar, putting down bricks; some hundreds of workmen, extending over a mile and a half of closed road. Many of the American workmen were dressed as smartly as stockbrokers' clerks and city men, and they kept themselves neat and clean--a new phenomenon in labouring. Americans, however, were working together, Italians together, and Russians together. A fine-looking American workman said to me knowingly, "You can photograph me if you like, but the Guineas won't want to be photographed--most of them shot some one sometime or other, you bet!"

Near Cochranton I made the acquaintance of four little girls--Julia, Margaret, Elinor, Cora, and Georgiana--scampering about in bare legs and week-day frocks, whilst father and mother, with gauze bags on their heads, were "boxing the bees." It was the first swarm of summer; two lots of bees had been boxed, but the third was giving much trouble. Julia, aged twelve, was a very pretty girl, and when at her mother's recommendation she went indoors, washed her face and put on a Sunday frock, she looked a very smart young lady. She was conscious of that fact, and informed me in course of conversation that she was going to travel when she was grown up. She was dying to see Paris, and she wanted to visit all the European towns!

Some miles north, near Frenchville, I met one of the French colonists of Northern Pennsylvania,--a tall, well-built stripling,--and he told me how the Breton peasants had settled at Boussot and Frenchville, bringing all their French ways of farming and economy, and becoming the admiration of the district round--a little Brittany. The young man's father-in-law had been the first Frenchman to come and settle in the district. After him had come, straight from France, relatives and friends, and relatives of friends and friends of friends in widening circles. They were beginning to speak English well now, but the newcomers were still without the new language. It was interesting for me to realise what a great gain such people were to America--to the American nation in the making. It is good to think of such agricultural settlements lying in the background of industrial America--the whole villages of Swedes, of Russians, of Danes, Finns, Germans, French. They are ethnic reserves; they mature and improve in the background. They are Capital. If urban America can subsist on the interest, the surplus of the ambitious, how much richer she will be than if the population of whole country-sides is tempted to rush _pêle-mêle_ to the places of fortune-making and body-wasting.

Coming into Meadville, a town of twelve thousand inhabitants, most of the labourers of whom are Italians employed at the great railway works, I was attracted to Nicola Hiagg, a Syrian, sitting outside his ice-cream shop, reading the Syrian paper. Whilst I had a "pine-apple soda," I drew him into talk. It was a matter of pleasing interest to him that I had myself tramped in Syria, and knew the conditions in his native land. Nicola had first left Syria twelve years ago, had come to Philadelphia, and started making his living selling "soft drinks" in the street. After five years he had saved enough to take a holiday and go back to the old land. He and his brother had been merchants in Jerusalem before he set out for America; the brother had had charge of the store, and Nicola had convoyed the merchandise and the train of thirty asses to and from the country. He had many friends in Syria, but it was a poor country. The Turks were bloodsuckers, and drained it of every drop of vital energy.

"I lived in a poor little town between Beyrout and Damascus, not with my brother in Jerusalem. So poor! You cannot start anything new in Syria--the Turk interferes. No bizness! What you think of the war? The Turk is beaten, hey? Now is the time for the Syrians to unite and throw off the Turk. There are Syrians all over the world; they are prosperous everywhere but in Syria.... America is a fine country; but if Syria became independent I'd go back...."

Nicola, when he had his holiday, found a Syrian girl and brought her back to America as his wife. She was not visible now, however; for the Syrian kept her in the background, and he told me he didn't believe in women's rights to public life. A bit of a Turk himself!

He was very proud of his little girl, who is being brought up as an American in the town school. "Already she can write, and when you say to her, 'Write something,' she does not look up at you and say, 'How d'you spell it?' She just writes it."

"She's sharp."

"You bet."

The Turks, the Greeks, and the Syrians, and to some extent the Italians, are engaged in the sweet-stuff and ice-cream business. Turkish Delight, the most characteristic thing of the Levant, seems to be their bond of union. It is a great business in America, for the Americans are, beyond all comparison, fonder of sweet things than we are. I stopped one day at a great candy shop in South Bend, Indiana. It was kept by a Mr. Poledor, who was so pleased that I had been in Greece and knew the habits of the Greek Orthodox, that he gave me the freedom of the shop and bade me order anything I liked--he would "stand treat." There were over a hundred ways of having ice-cream, twenty sorts of ice-cream soda, thirteen sorts of lemonade, twelve frappes, and the menu card was something like a band programme. Mr. Poledor was a man of inventiveness, and the names of some of the dishes were as delicious as the dishes themselves. I transcribe a few:

Merry Widow.
Don't Care.
John D. (is very rich).
Yankee Doodle.
Upside down.
New Moon.
Sweet Smile.
Twin Beauties.
Nôtre Dame.
Lover's Delight.
Black-eyed Susan.

A young man could take his girl there and give her anything she asked for, were it the moon itself. The Greek was a magician.

But to return. As I was going out of Meadville, two young men swung out of a saloon and addressed me thus strangely:

"Have you had a benevolent? We're giving them away."

One of them showed me a stylographic pen.

"Wha're you doing?" said the other.

"Oh, I'm travelling," I replied.

"How d'ye get your living?"

"I write in the magazines now and then."

A look of disappointment crept over the faces of the young men. The stylographic pen was replaced in waistcoat pocket.

"Did you say you were working for a magazine? So are we--_The Homestead_. I was about to ask you to become a subscriber."

"And the benevolent?" I asked.

"Oh, these are given away to subscribers."

I explained that I wasn't a commercial traveller, but one of those who wrote sometimes in magazines.

"You'd be a sort of reporter?"

"Well, not quite."

"A poet?"

"No. I earn my living by writing."

"Better than a poet, I suppose. Well, good-day, wish you luck!"

So I won free of my last big town in mighty Pennsylvania, and set out for the State of Ohio.

I had a "still-creation-day" in quiet country, and towards evening came through the woods to the store and house of Padan-Aram. And just on the border of Ohio an elf-like person skipped out of a large farm and conducted me across, a boy of about twenty years, who cried out to me shrilly as he caught me up:

"I say, you're still in Pennsylvania."

"Yes," said I.

"Yes, but that house over there is in Ohio. Say! Would you like some candy?"

"I thought you were fumbling in your pocket for tobacco," said I.

"No use for it," said the boy. "I've found God. I used to chew it, but I've stopped it."

"That is good. You've a strong will," said I.

"I reckon God can break any will," said the boy. "Once I ran away from home with five hundred dollars. You're walking? I can walk. I walked a hundred miles in five days and five nights. Feet were sore for a week. Five times I ran away. The sixth time I stayed away four years and worked on the steel works."

"Were your parents unkind?" I asked. "Or did you run away to see life?"

"Ran to show them I could," said the boy.

"They lay in to me I can tell you. There were Chinamen and niggers--all sorts. Hit a fellow over the head with an ice-cream refrigerator--killed him dead."

"Where was this?"

"Poke. At the institution. I showed them I could fight."

"What are you, American?"

"Pennsylvanian Dutch."

"I suppose there is a church about here that you go to?"

"Yes; a Methodist. But I don't go. Family service. We get many blessings."

"Is there a hotel at Padan-Aram?"

"No; but at Leon. If you go there, you'll get a Christian woman. You'll find God. She'll lighten your load. She's a saint. I know her well."

"What's your name? I'll mention you to her."

"Dull."

"I'll tell her I met you."

"Tell her you met Ralph Dillie--she'll know."

"All right," said I.

"Now you're in Ohio," said the boy. "Are you going into the store at Padan-Aram?"

"No."

"Don't you want to buy some candy?"

"No. I don't eat it along the road."

"Buy some for me."

"All right; yes."

"Buy a nickel's worth."

"Yes."

Ralph Dillie rejoiced. We went into the store and ordered a nickel's worth of candy. And directly the boy got it he started back for home on the run. And I watched him re-cross the border once more--into Pennsylvania.

XII

CHARACTERISTICS

The chief characteristic of America is an immense patriotism, and out of that patriotism spring a thousand minor characteristics, which, taken by themselves, may be considered blemishes by the critical foreigner,--such troublesome little characteristics as national pride and thin-skinnedness, national bluster and cocksureness. But personal annoyance should not blind the critic or appreciator to the fundamental fact of the American's belief in America. This belief is not a narrow partizanship, though it may seem unpleasantly like that to those who listen to the clamour of excited Americans at the Olympic games and other competitions of an international interest. It is not merely the commercial instinct ever on the watch for opportunities for self-advertisement. It is a real, hearty patriotic fervour, the deepest thing in an American. It is something that cannot be shaken.

"_It is a sacrament to walk the streets as an American citizen_," says a Presbyterian circular. "_Being an American is a sacred mission._ Our whole life must be enthralled by a holy passion."

You could never hear it said, except in an imperial way, that being a Briton, or being a German, or being a Russian was a sacred mission. In Britain it would be bad form, in Germany absurd, in Russia quite untrue. It is part of the greatness of America that she can come forward unashamed and call herself the handmaiden of the Lord.

Now there is a fine healthy spirit abroad in the land counteracting the more sentimental and sanctimonious self-honour of the Americans. Something more in deeds than in words, a pulse that beats for America, a greater purpose that breathes through myriads of personal acts, done for personal ends. Outside, beyond the degrading commercialism of the nation, there is a feeling that building for a man is building also for America; that buying and selling in the store is buying and selling for the great nation; that writing or singing or painting, though done in self-conceited cities and before limited numbers, is really all consecrated to the idea of the new America.

In several schools of America the children take the following pledge:

I am a citizen of America and an heir to all her greatness and
renown. The health and happiness of my own body depend upon each
muscle and nerve and drop of blood doing its work in its place. So
the health and happiness of my country depend upon each citizen
doing his work in his place.

I will not fill any post or pursue any business where I can
live upon my fellow-citizens without doing them useful service
in return; for I plainly see that this must bring suffering and
want to some of them. I will do nothing to desecrate the soil of
America, or pollute her air or degrade her children, my brothers
and sisters.

I will try to make her cities beautiful, and her citizens healthy
and happy, so that she may be a desired home for myself now, and
for her children in days to come.

Teachers are recommended to explain to children that patriotism means love of your own country and not hate of other countries; and that the best mode of patriotism is love and care for the ideals of the fatherland.

The most obvious fields of activity are the school, the building,
the yard or playgrounds, and the surrounding streets. Whatsoever
is offensive and unsightly, detrimental to health, or in violation
of law, is a proper field for action. The litter of papers and
refuse; marks on side walks, buildings, and fences; mutilation,
vandalism, and damage of any kind to property; cleanliness of
the school building and the surrounding streets, door-yards,
and pavements; observance of the ordinances for the disposal of
garbage by the scavenger and people in the community; protection
and care of shade trees; improper advertisements, illegal signs
and bill-boards; unnecessary noises in the streets around the
school, including cries of street-vendors and barking of dogs
and blowing of horns; the display of objectionable pictures and
postcards in the windows of stores--all supply opportunities to
the teachers to train pupils for good citizenship.

Circulars like the following are scattered broadcast to citizens, and they breathe the patriotism of the American:

_Do you approve of your Home City?_

I mean, do you like her looks, her streets, her schools, her
public buildings, her stores, factories, parks, railways, trolleys
and all that makes her what she is? Do you approve of these things
as they are? Do you think they could be better? Do you think you
know how they can be made better?

If you do you are unusual. Few take the trouble to approve or
disapprove. Many may think they care about the city; but few, very
few, act as if they did!

When you see something you think can be improved you go straight
and find out who is the man who has that something in charge;
whatever it is, factories, smoke, stores, saloons, parks, paving,
playgrounds, lawns, back-yards, ash-cans, overhead signs,
newspapers, bill-boards, side-walks, street cars, street lighting,
motor traffic, freight yards, or what not, you find out who is the
man who has in charge that thing you dislike; then you talk to
him, or write to him, and tell him what you disapprove of, and ask
him if he can and will make it better, or tell you why he can't.
He wants to make it better. He will if he can. Almost invariably
he wants to do his work of looking after that thing better than
it was ever done before. He will welcome your complaint; he will
explain his handicaps; he will ask your help. Then you give the
help.

J. C. D.

Making the city beautiful and fostering a love for the home-city, however dingy and dreary that city may at present be, is one of the most potent and attractive expressions of American patriotism, and it is well to note the characteristic. It has great promise for the America of the future, the America which the sons and daughters of the immigrants will inherit. The America of the future is to be one of artistically imagined cities and proud, responsible citizens. Even now, despite the unlovely state of New York and Chicago and the reputation for devastating ugliness which America has in Europe, there are clear signs of the commencement of an era of grace and order. Already the parks of the American cities are the finest in the world, and are worth much study in themselves. American townsmen have loved Nature enough to plant trees so that every decent town on the western continent has become a cluster of shady avenues. Some cities favour limes, some maples; New Haven is known as "The City of Elms"; in Washington alone it is said that there are 78,000 street trees; Cleveland has been called "The City of the Forest." Wherever I tramped in America I found the most delicious shade in the town streets--excepting, of course, the streets of the coaling infernos of Pennsylvania. No idea of the expense of land deters the American from getting space and greenery into the midst of his wilderness of brick and mortar. It is said that the value of the parks in such a city as Newark, for instance, is over two and a quarter millions of pounds (nine million dollars). "Our aim," says a Newark circular, "is the city beautiful, and it requires the aid of everyday patriots to make it so. Pericles said, 'Make Athens beautiful, for beauty is now the most victorious power in the world.'"

America has become the place of continuous crusades--against dirt, against municipal corruption, immorality, noise. It would surprise many Europeans to know the fight which is being made against bell-advertisement, steam whistles, organ-grinders' music, shouts of street hawkers, and the exuberance of holiday-makers.

"Don't be ashamed to fight for your city to get it clean and beautiful, to rid it of its sweat-shops and hells," I read in a Chicago paper. "Some folk call our disease Chicagoitis, but that is a thousand times better than Chicagophobia. Those suffering from Chicagophobia are as dangerous to society as those who have hydrophobia."

Then, most potent expression of all in American patriotism is the American's belief in the future of its democracy, the faith which is not shattered by the seeming bad habits of the common people, the flocking to music halls and cinema shows, the reading of the yellow press.

It has been noted in the last few years that there is a distinct falling off in the acceleration of reading at the public libraries. This is attributed to the extraordinary amount of time spent by men and women at the "movies," when they would otherwise be reading. Such a fact would breed pessimism in Great Britain or Europe were it established. But America has such trust in the hearts and hopes of the common people that it approves of the picture show. "If readers of books go back to the cinema, let them go," says the American; "it is like a child in the third class voluntarily going back to the first class, because the work being done there is more suited to his state of mind." The cinema show is doing the absolutely elementary work among the vast number of immigrants, who are almost illiterate. It is not a be-all and an end-all, but stimulates the mind and sets it moving, thinking, striving. The picture show will bring good readers to the libraries in time. It is the first step in the cultural ladder of the democracy.

Then people of good taste in Europe decry the reading of newspapers; a leader of thought and politics like A. J. Balfour can boast that he never reads the papers. But America says, "You have the newspaper habit. This habit is one of the most beneficial and entertaining habits you have. Few people read too many newspapers. Most people do not read enough." This, of American papers of all papers in the world. But let me go on quoting the most significant words of America's great librarian, J. Cotton Dana:

Readers of newspapers are the best critics of them. The more they
are read the wiser the readers; the wiser the readers the more
criticisms, and the more the newspapers are criticised the better
they become.

Do you say this does not apply to the yellow journal? I would
reply that it does. The yellow journal caters all the time to the
beginners in reading, who are also the beginners in newspaper
reading. A new crop of these beginners in reading is born every
year. This new crop likes its reading simply printed, in large
letters, and with plenty of pictures. The more of this new crop
of readers there are the more the yellow journals flourish; and
the more the yellow journals flourish the sooner this new crop is
educated by the yellow journals, by the mere process of reading
them, and the sooner they get into the habit of reading journals
that are not yellow and contain a larger quantity of more reliable
information, until at last the yellow journals are overpassed by
the readers they have themselves trained.

The yellow press is the second rung on the cultural ladder of democracy. America is glad of it, glad also of the princess novelette, the pirate story, glad of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli; all these are, as it were, divining-rods for better things. The American says "Yes" to the novels of Florence Barclay, as indeed most sensible Britons would also. _The Rosary_ was a most helpful book--so much more helpful to the unformed intellect and young intelligence of the mass of the people than, for instance, Tolstoy's dangerously overpraised _Resurrection_ or Wells's _New Machiavelli_. America recognises the truth that the ugly has power to make those who look at it ugly like itself; but that the crude and elementary stuff, however poor it may be artistically, is nevertheless most useful to democracy if it speaks in language and sentiment which is common knowledge to the reader. How useful to America is such a book as Churchill's _Inside of the Cup_.

It is a very true dictum that "reading makes more reading"; and in a young, hopeful nation, striving to divine its own destiny and to visualise its future, "more reading" always means _better reading_.

Perhaps the cultured ladder of democracy may be seen allegorically as the ladder of Jacob's dream. Religion, which may be thought to have flown from the churches, is in evidence at the libraries. It is a librarian who is able to say in _The Inside of the Cup_ that we are on the threshold of a greater religious era than the world has ever seen.

In America to-day we are confronted with two parties,--one the great multifarious, unformed mass of the people, and the other the strong, emancipated, cultured American nation, which is at work shaping the democracy. The aspect of the "rabble," the commercial heathen, and horde of unknowing, unknown immigrants, gives you the first but not the final impression of America. You remark first of all the slouching, blank-eyed, broad-browed immigrant, who indulges still his European vices and craves his European pleasures, flocking into saloons, debauching his body, or at best looking dirty and out of hand, a reproach to the American flag. You see the Jews leaping over one another's backs in the orgy of mean trade. You see the fat American, clever enough to bluff even the Jew--the strange emerging bourgeois type of what I call the "white nigger," low-browed, heavy-cheeked, thick-lipped, huge-bodied, but _white_; men who seem made of rubber so elastic they are; men who seem to get their thoughts from below upward. I've often watched one of these "white negroes" reflecting; he seems to sense his thoughts in his body first of all--you can watch his idea rise up to him from the earth, pass along his body and flicker at last in a true American smile across his lips--a transition type of man I should say. One wonders where these men, who are originally Jews or Anglo-Saxons or Dutch or Germans, got their negro souls. It would almost tempt one to think that there were negro souls floating about, and that they found homes in white babies.

Beside the fat American is the more familiar lean, hatchet-faced type, which is thought to correspond to the Red Indian in physiognomy. Perhaps too much importance is attached to the Darwinian idea that the climate of America is breeding a race of men with physique and types similar to the aborigines. The American is still a long way from the red-skin. Meanwhile, however, one may note with a smile the extraordinary passion of Americans for collecting autographs, curios, snippets of the clothes of famous men, Italian art, British castles,--which seems to be scalp-hunting in disguise. The Americans are great scalp-hunters.

On the whole, the dry, lean Americans are the most trustworthy and honourable among the masses of the people. In England we trust fat men, men "who sleep o' nights," but in America one prefers the lean man. Shakespeare would not have written of Cassius as he did if he had been an American of to-day. Of course too much stress might easily be laid on the unpleasantness of the "white-nigger" type. There are plenty of them who are true gentlemen.

The American populace has also its bad habits. There are those who chew "honest scrap," and those who chew "spearmint." It is astonishing to witness the service of the cuspidor in a hotel, the seven or eight obese, cow-like American men, all sitting round a cuspidor and chewing tobacco; almost equally astonishing to sit in a tramcar full of American girls, and see that every jaw is moving up and down in the mastication of sweet gum.