There is, no doubt, exaggeration in such language; there are forms of very genuine human greatness that it fails to recognise. But it is impossible not to feel that, on the intellectual and æsthetic side, America has not yet fulfilled her part, and that an unduly large proportion of her greatest achievements belong to a time when she had not a tithe of her present population and wealth. Washington and Franklin and Hamilton, the Constitution of 1787, the Federalist and the Commentaries of Judge Story, have not been eclipsed.
Many causes have been assigned for this intellectual sterility, continuing long after America had taken her place among the great nations of the world. Tocqueville believed that there was no country with less intellectual independence and less real liberty of discussion than America, or in which the expression of unpopular opinion was more bitterly resented; and he said that there were no great American writers because ‘literary genius cannot exist without liberty of thought, and there is no liberty of thought in America.’92 Mill, expanding another passage from Tocqueville, described America as, ‘intellectually speaking, a province of England—a province in which the great occupation of the inhabitants is making money, because for that they have peculiar facilities, and are, therefore, like the people of Manchester or Birmingham, for the most part contented to receive the higher branches of knowledge ready-made from the capital.93 Maine attributed much to the long refusal of the Congress to grant an international copyright. The want of such copyright effectually crushed American authorship in the Home market by the competition of the unpaid and appropriated works of British authors, and ‘condemned the whole American community to a literary servitude unparalleled in the history of thought.’94
In all this there is much truth; but it must, I think, be added that modern democracy is not favourable to the higher forms of intellectual life. Democracy levels down quite as much as it levels up. The belief in the equality of man, the total absence of the spirit of reverence, the apotheosis of the average judgment, the fever and the haste, the advertising and sensational spirit which American life so abundantly generates, and which the American press so vividly reflects, are all little favourable to the production of great works of beauty or of thought, of long meditation, of sober taste, of serious, uninterrupted study. Such works have been produced in America, but in small numbers and under adverse conditions. The habit, too, which has so long existed in America, and which is rapidly growing in England, of treating the private lives of eminent men as if they were public property; of forcing their opinions on all subjects into constant publicity by newspaper interviews; of multiplying demands upon their time for public functions for which they have no special aptitude, adds greatly to the evil. Among the advantages which England derives from her aristocracy, not the least is the service it renders to literature by providing a class of men who are admirably fitted for presidential and other public functions, which in another society would have been largely thrown on men of letters. No one can fail to observe how large a proportion of the Americans who have shown distinguished talent in literature and art have sought in European life a more congenial atmosphere than they could find at home.
In spite of all retarding influences, America will, no doubt, one day occupy a far higher position than at present in the intellectual guidance of the world. It is probable that the concession of international copyright, placing American authors on the same footing with foreign ones, will hasten that day, and there are clear signs that a school of very serious scholarship and very excellent writing is arising among them. Many of the peccant humours of the body politic will, no doubt, be ultimately dispersed. The crudest, most ignorant, most disorderly elements of European life have been poured into America as into a great alembic, and are being gradually transformed into a new type. The enormously corrupting influences which New York and some other immigration centres have exercised on American politics must diminish when they cease to be what Americans call ‘pivot states,’ holding the balance between rival parties, and when the centre of power moves onward towards the west. A people supremely endowed with energy and intelligence, and among whom moral and religious influences are very strong, can scarcely fail sooner or later to mould their destinies to high and honourable ends.
Optimism certainly reigns more widely in America than in Europe, and Americans are the best judges of their own institutions and future. Serious clouds seem to hang on their horizon. The decay, in some parts of America, of family life through the excessive facility of divorce; the alarming prevalence of financial dishonesty on a large scale; the strange and ominous increase of ordinary crime, which contrasts remarkably with its steady diminution in Great Britain95 the profligacy that still reigns in political and municipal life, and the indifference with which that profligacy is contemplated, afford much ground for melancholy thought. It is contrary to all past experience that political corruption should be a mere excrescence in a nation, affecting either slightly or not at all the deeper springs of national morals. As the country fills up, as national expenses increase, as the problems of government become more difficult and delicate, the necessity of placing the Administration in all its branches in trustworthy and honest hands must be more felt, and the future of America seems to me very largely to depend upon the success with which her reformers can attain this end. Something considerable, as we have seen, has been already done; yet some of the worst instances of corrupt rings have been posterior to the downfall of the Tammany rule at New York, which was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era. The evidence which was brought before the Senate of New York in 1894, disclosing the enormous and systematic corruption of the police force of that great city, is in itself sufficient to show how little this hope has been fulfilled.96
The policy of Protection in America, which has been carried to such a high point since the war, is no new thing. It existed, though with some fluctuations, through a great part of earlier American history;97 the high duties imposed during the war were amply justified by the necessity of obtaining money for its support, and their continuance for some years after the peace was probably justified by the transcendent importance of reducing rapidly an unparalleled debt. With the ideas that are now floating through the world, nothing could be more dangerous than for a pure democracy, in times of difficulty or poverty, to find itself burdened with an enormous debt taxation for the fulfilment of ancient contracts. The statesmen who followed the war have at least secured America from this danger. But the immense increase of Protection, which began with the Woollen Act of 1867 and the Copper Act of 1869, and which culminated in the McKinley tariff, was largely due to other motives. If the best American authorities may be trusted, it includes as much purely class legislation, intended to support class interests and carried by corrupt means, as can be found in the most effete monarchy of Europe.
The wonderful surplus which for many years existed in consequence of the high protective duties astonished Europe, but not more so than the manner in which it was expended. I suppose there is no page in the financial history of the world more extraordinary than the history of the American pension list. At the close of the war pensions were, very properly, given to soldiers who were disabled in the course of it, and to wives of soldiers who had been married during the war, and who were left widows. It was naturally supposed that in America, as elsewhere, the war pensions would diminish as time rolled on and as the actors in the struggle passed away. For some years there seemed every prospect that this would have been the case; and there can be no doubt that it would have been so if the Protectionist interest had not found it necessary to maintain and expend an enormous surplus. The result of that necessity is, that in a long period of unbroken peace a war pension list has been created in the United States which far exceeds in magnitude any other that is known in history. Fifty-seven years after the war of 1812 pensions were voted to its surviving soldiers and to their widows; thirty-nine years after the Mexican War a similar measure was taken in favour of the survivors of that war. The list was made to include men who had been disabled long after the war, and by causes totally unconnected with it, and widows who had not been married, who in many cases had not been born when the last shot was fired. Personation, and other frauds almost grotesque in their cynicism and enormity, became notoriously common, and were practised with the most absolute impunity. Multitudes of young women formed real or pretended connections with old men for the purpose of qualifying for a pension. It appears from official documents that, in 1892, there were on the pension list 165 persons pensioned as survivors of the war
