Page:Ian Hay - The New America - The Times - 1917-07-16 b.jpg



or four hundred years. There is no prouder aristocracy in the world. In public life you will find bankers, financiers, and heads of great commercial enterprises who have achieved the last word in business organization. Some one once said that there were only three invincible organizations in the world—the Roman Catholic Church, the German Army (before the war, presumably), and the Standard Oil Company of America. Again, in the laboratories and workshops of the Northern States you will find mechanical and inventive genius at its highest point. The names of Thomas Edison and Orville Wright are the first which suggest themselves as illustrations.

Now for a slightly different angle. Living under the same flag with these-less conspicuous, mayhap, but returning two Senators to Congress per State notwithstanding-you will find men of the "Solid South," who still remember the "carpet-bagger" of the North and the dreadful days of the Reconstruction period-men to whom the word "Yankee," instead of meaning, as to us, an American citizen, is still almost a term of opprobrium. In the Middle West you will find farmers of Kansas and Illinois who regard New York City as an annexe to hell, and who care nothing for world politics so long as their pigs get safe to Chicago and their wheat to Minneapolis. Further west again, cut off from their fellow-countrymen by trackless deserts and impassable mountains, you will find isolated communities, like Denver and Salt Lake City, each with its own activities, traditions, and public opinion. Further west still, in country that grows more beautiful and wonderful as you proceed, you will come to the Pacific Slope, where oranges and peaches grow in the open air, and flowers bloom all the year round, but where life is beginning to be complicated by Asiatic problems of which the East knows nothing. In the North-West, again, you will find certain thriving seaport towns, not altogether insensible of the proximity of Canada. (Seattle, for instance, has a great deal more in common with Vancouver than with San Francisco.) Lastly, in South-Western States like Arizona and New Mexico you will encounter certain interesting and primitive communities (each, remember, returning its quota to Congress), who invent their own customs and practise the same without assistance. The other day, for instance, in one of these States a crowd of about a thousand white persons, men and women, decided that a certain negro criminal ought to die forthwith. So they put him in a cage, poured paraffin oil over him, and roasted him alive. No one seems to object to these engaging tribal customs. At least, Washington took no steps in the matter, and apparently never does. But the incident affords us a useful sidelight upon the difficulty of standardizing American thought.

Take nationality, and language again. First of all, let us get over the delusion that America is entirely inhabited by our "cousins "-people of pure British descent. Before the war nearly two million immigrants entered the United States every year. Very few of these could speak English. To-day, it is said, only one-half of the inhabitants of Manhattan Island (the main part of New York City) are American born. If you take a walk down the lower end of Fifth Avenue during the dinner-hour, when the mighty sky-scraping office buildings of perhaps forty storeys have temporarily decanted their human contents on to the pavement below, you will find yourself elbowing your way through a crowd which is more fitted to serve as an ethnological museum than as a representative body of capital citizens. Within the compass of a mile you will probably hear seven or eight languages spoken—French, German, Italian, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and Czech. Possibly you will not hear English spoken once. You will see men standing at street corners reading newspapers printed in German, or Hebrew, or Modern Greek—papers printed and published daily in New York. New York alone contains more Germans than many large German cities. The same may be said of Chicago. Indeed, the Mayor of that city recently excused himself from issuing an official invitation to Marshal Joffre and the French Mission on the ground that "Chicago is the third German city of the world." But the rest of Chicago declined to stomach this dreadful insinuation; the Mayor was overruled, and Joffre paid a triumphant visit. In other great cities, such as St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, the German population, though actually smaller, is relatively still greater.

And the German is not the only foreign element. In South-Western States like Texas and New Mexico, and even in Southern California, there is a strong Mexican strain, and the Spanish tongue is constantly heard. In San Francisco, again, you will find a considerable Chinese and Japanese element, who, although they take no part in politics, add to the variegated nature of the American population. Down in Louisiana. New Orleans still retains something of its ancient Gallic atmosphere. In numerous reservations throughout the country you will find the remnants of the moribund Indian tribes; and finally on every hand you will encounter a vast, vigorous, and increasing negro population, all nominally in possession of the franchise. Throw in a few oddments from Cuba, the Philippines, and Honolulu, and you have the tale complete.

And this is the country which we, in our tight little parochial island, expect to speak and act upon questions of international importance with a single voice!