The Cockney Columbus

Preface

. That portion of the present book which relates to the United States of America is composed of a series of letters, which, at the time of their writing, served a double purpose. They were actually addressed to my own home, and were primarily intended to be read there, but on their way they were translated into type, and appeared in the columns of the Nezv York Herald and a syndicate of newspapers with which that journal is allied. They offer just such surface observations as might suggest themselves to any traveller, and do not profess to do more than touch the deeper ques tions revealed by a close and rational study of the differences which divide the great American people from ourselves. The division is real, and at any moment it may become dangerous, and this is true in spite of the plain fact that there are no material interests in dispute between the two countries which are worth much more than the cost of the diplomatic stationery employed in their determination.

The Preface VI unguarded letter which excited in England an almost incredulous amazement some two years ago was read by millions of Americans with delight. Millions of Americans are always ready to cheer any insult or defiance which may be hurled against Great Britain. There is a portion of the populace of that country which is permanently ready to declare war against us, which welcomes every chance of an imbroglio, and strives unceas ingly to fan every ember of national misliking to a flame. The curious part of the fact is that this feeling of animosity is wholly one-sided, and that there is no counterpart to it amongst ourselves. Personal dislikes and scorns there will be everywhere, but the broad, general, and unmistakable feeling for the United States at home is void of jealousy or malice, compact of serene good wishes, and marred only by a touch of our national and characteristic air of patronage.

Our settled con fidence in ourselves, our fashion of thinking things excellent because we do them, or own them, may answer for a certain sum of the dislike with which we are regarded by a great section of the American public, which will not see that it shares our characteristic, and sometimes displays it in an exaggerated fashion. But this of itself, though a factor in the case, could not embitter the whole stream of good-will which flows from Preface VII us to them. It seems to me that there are two great plain causes for the soreness of American feeling towards us, and even if my belief should be mistaken, as it well may be, I feel it a duty to offer it for consideration. The United States and Great Britain were once at war, and we were beaten. Looking back impartially on the history of that struggle, most Englishmen, nowadays, are filled with shame at the ineptitude of our own rulers, and with admiration for the valour of great-hearted men of our own race, who fought for those principles of self-government which were first established in England.

Tennyson, in that matter, has spoken for us, for good and all : What wonder, if in noble heat Those men thine arms withstood ; Retaught the lesson thou hadst taught, And in thy spirit with thee fought, Who came of English blood ! As a rule a victor finds it easy to be magnani mous. It is for the vanquished to scratch the itch of wounded vanity. Why should a moral condition otherwise universal be flatly contra dicted in one case alone ? A partial reason is that on our side history has been just. For almost a century no writer of repute has dared to uphold the action of the British Government of that day. Every later generation of Englishmen has purged Preface VIII its soul of all complicity with the criminal folly which made war inevitable. No living thinker offers for it any better apology than is conveyed in the admission that it was a wicked blunder.

We have spoken our word of repentance long ago. Washington, the arch-rebel, is a household word for duty and patriotism. He has his place in the thronged Valhalla of British heroes. There is no likeness in the history of nations to the place now held in English hearts by the man who once took up arms against us. The honour in which all Englishmen hold the leading spirit of the revolu tion is a thing unique in the annals ofthe world. Never elsewhere has the vanquished held the victor in such ungrudged esteem. It is a fact to be regretted, that every citizen of the United States is taught the history of that old conflict in such a way as to make the hatred of England a patriotic duty. It is not at all to be wondered at that such histories as are still dis seminated in the schools were written.

They are, of course, biassed, but in the main they are true. There are episodes of horrible barbarity in them. These are feelingly related, as is just and natural, and they excite revolt against their perpetrators in the mind of any reader. The cosmopolitan American, the man of culture and travel, the man of thought and reading, does not hate the England of to-day because of the stories Preface IX of barbarity and wrong with which his childhood was familiar. But the scores of thousands who have done with history when the school-doors close behind them, the millions whose only mental pabulum in manhood is to be found in the columns of the newspapers, are faithful to early opinion. In the May of this present year I received an invitation to address some friendly word to the fiftieth gathering of the Association of State Teachers, then preparing in New York.

I ventured to touch upon this subject and to say : — " Since I am permitted to address this word of greeting to a body so influential, I beg to be allowed to make an appeal on one point, which seems to me of the highest moment. There is no question on which I feel so strongly as on this : — The more the people of your country are made to understand the true affection with which they are regarded by the people of Great Britain, the better it will be for us, and them, and all the world. Next to the pride and affection with which we regard our own land and its great de pendencies, is the pride and affection with which we regard the Great Republic of the West. The last itching of the sore of wounded nationaj vanity died years ago. There is no Englishman worth his salt who does not espouse your side in the quarrel which once divided us.

In the mingled Preface X shame and pride with which we survey that episode in our national history, our shame is all for our own share in it, and our pride is all for the strong men of our own blood, who retaught to us the lesson we once taught the world, but had, unhappily, in those foolish years, forgotten. Not the press, powerful as it is, nor popular politicians, eloquent and earnest as they may be, nor embassies, nor Governments, have such power to spread this friendly and healing truth as the members of your association. When I visited your country I made acquaintance with certain books employed in schools which seemed to me to deal with that long-buried controversy with an acrimony, which, however just and natural at one time, had grown out of date and needless. You can afford to teach your children now that the England of to-day regrets and condemns nothing in its history as it regrets and condemns that time.

There are, thank God, many forces which tend to unite us to each other, but there are some influences of disruption too, and I take these school-books to be one of the latter. Truth has a right to be told, and Englishmen have no right to shrink from it. But in this case, more than in most, the whole truth is desirable. Side by side with the history of arrogance and folly, set down the history of regret. Teach the story of the valour of your forefathers — your_children have Preface XI a claim to hear it — but let it be known to your charges in their tender years, that not even in their own land is that valour more esteemed than it is amongst your old-time enemies. Tell them there is no name in English annals more revered by Englishmen than that of Washington." I have no pretence to be a statesman, and I have no mandate from any constituency however humble, but I think that passage a fair statement of the average Briton's feeling on this matter.

Some will tag to it a reservation, to this effect. Many such protests have been made, and it is not wise to make them, because the very sense of justice by which they are inspired is misconstrued by a mass of people on the other side. Any overture to the American mob is accepted as a hint of fear. Any admission of regret for the past is twisted into a petition for the future. Great American Spread Eagle, spare us ! We acknowledge our iniquities, and we do kotow before you ! Not a bit of it, unfriendly tub-thumper ! We desire your good-will. We admit your ill-will to be natural and excusable. We acknowledge that our great-grandfathers earned it, but we invite you to the contemplation of the fact that there is nothing any longer to be angry at, nothing any longer to fight about. And if you won't take the proffered hand of friendship yet, and will insist on thinking that only a coward could offer it, we Preface XII must needs have patience, and take credit for having chosen the right side at this particular moment.

Your best men know what we mean, and between the pick of the basket on your side and the pick of the basket on ours there is full and warm accord, and sympathy and affection. Neither you nor I, unfriendly cousin, are afraid of anybody. It doesn't run in the blood. Apart from this matter of the school-books, but very near it, and presenting many elements of likeness to it, is the great Irish question. There, again, we are doomed to suffer for the sins of our fathers. Hundreds of thousands of Irishmen have crossed the Atlantic with black hatred for England in their hearts, and no sane man who knows the truth of their exodus can wonder at the sentiment. Within our borders it is known to-day that all Englishmen wish well to Ireland, that no party is in favour of the old tyrannous repressions, that we are united at least in a common hope for her welfare, and a common striving to secure it, though we differ widely as to the means to be adopted.

Here, again, we are ashamed of our past ; and here, again, we are striving to undo it. The calmer Irish politicians recognize the fact that something has been done, and the old animosities are toning down. But the exile in America feels nothing of the ameliorating influences which have been at work in his absence. Hatred is a tradition Preface XIII with him, and home legislation does not easily touch tradition in a foreign country. The Irish people are not yet satisfied, but if they had always been under the laws which now affect them — if they had always been as wisely and as kindly ruled as they are to-day — they would never have carried the wide world over the seeds of disunion and discontent. But as things are, the Irish people do not live in Ireland only, and for generations yet to come the American Irishman will hate us, not because of what we are, but because of what our fathers were.

The mistakes of our forefathers are a part of our heritage. It is ours to undo them. It is ours as a first step to acknowledge them in the sight and hearing of all men. It is for England to cultivate the good-will which England blindly alienated long ago, and to endure with patience the insult and rage which are the natural answer to her own deeds. We can afford no quarrel with America — not in the sense in which the Bowery politician reads the word — but in the sense that the nobler destinies ofthe world are in great measure in her hands and ours. If we could achieve a real and stable union with her, we could bid war to cease. The thing willed by the confederated English speaking races would be willed by Heaven beforehand. This is a grave beginning to a book of such small Preface XIV pretensions, but I believe I have indicated the only sources of American ill-feeling towards our selves.

The school histories and the transmitted Irish sentiment are alone answerable for it, and for both of these we have to thank old England. We may wear their influences out in time, and every deed which aids that work and every word which helps it forward is well worth act or speech. David Christie Murray. Pensarn, North Wales, December 4th, 1897.

Chapter I

Inspired by the example of hundreds of my intrepid countrymen — from Sir Francis Head to Mr. Rudyard Kipling — I have resolved to discover America. Wherever I have wandered, and I have wandered far and wide, I have thrilled with joy in the contemplation of the British traveller. His attachment to home institutions and home methods, his inspired certainty in the superiority of whatever is British and of home repute, and his corresponding detestation for whatever is novel in his experience, have made me proud. I have rarely had to blush, in looking at a fellow countryman abroad, over any of those beastly conciliatory ways which make many foreigners contemptible. I am told that it is pleasing to the people of this country to be periodically dis covered. There are only some sixty millions of them, and I feel that when I come to publish I shall soothe their amour propre.

In addressing you, dearest lady, I can afford to be thus candid. If I were writing for publication, now, I might be disposed to confess that what the Americans think of me is, to me, a vastly more important question than what I think about the Americans is to them. But I promised you my sincerest opinions, and, such as they are, poor things, you are welcome to them. It is a little impertinent to begin to write so early, but there is an advantage in the method, too. If it is, as yet, absurd to form theories, it would, by and by, be too late to revive first impressions, and they are often the most vivid and valuable. Every Englishman who is worth his salt has his hopes and fears about America, and, above all, every Englishman who is worth his salt hopes for the growth and continuance of her friendship.

For my own part I came with hopes so large that my one fear is to find them unfulfilled. It has been the dream of my life to see the English-speaking people wherever they inhabit, and I have told you of that dream a hundred times at least. When I started on that quest five and a half years ago, and set out for Australia, I encountered a terrible shock to my natural and inborn parochialism. I found a prodigious number of people who did not love and admire England as I did. I found a smaller number of people, speaking my native language, First Impressions 3 who hated the country in which their fathers and their mothers had their birth. I heard of the hatefulness of our greed, the shamelessness of our oppression, the hypocrisy of our rulers, and the perfidy of our peaceful conquests. I was told that our history was one of open theft, or pilfering annexation or disgraceful purchase.

I was told many hard things, some of which are true enough, and for none of which I was in the least degree responsible. I expected an English enthusiasm equal or superior to my own, and it chilled and discomfited me not to find it. Here in the United States I find, so far, an equal surprise in exactly the opposite direction. I say " so far," and I know that I cannot expect to make an intimate acquaintance with the country without hearing a note or two which I shall find discordant. So far I have heard but one note of discord, and that was sounded by an Englishman. He has been here a year or two, hates the country and hates the people, tells everybody so with an outspoken vigour, and is painfully surprised to find himself unpopular. He assured me he was hated because he was an Englishman. I have found myself treated with a genuine and cordial friendship on that very ground.

I presume that the Americans are very much like other people in this respect, that they prefer to be treated with civility. In England we B say " in the street " or " at the corner." In the Victoria Hotel in London I saw a cockney and a New Yorker get to actual fisticuffs on the question as to whether it should not be " on the street " and " on the corner." It was not the philological question which led to results so serious, but the Englishman was good enough to say that nobody but a fool of an unmentionable sort would dream of using the form against which he argued. I have very rarely met a man who liked to be told that he was a fool. Even I, inured as I am by habit, have a lingering objection to the statement when I hear it made. And a question of verbal propriety may be discussed, by gentlemen, without any such deviation from the strict line of argument.

When we passed through New York six weeks ago it was with a rush, and the city fairly terrified me. Compared with Twenty-third Street our London Strand is a garden of sleep. Such a dreadful sway of life and a hurry of coming and going, such a roar of traffic and clanging of bells as I made acquaintance with in one short afternoon, I had never dreamed of. The elevated railway stretches away before and behind in a protracted monotony of ugliness, and the engines pant and scream. Huge trams dash over a resounding stone pavement with a noise like thunder. Purposeful people stride along — thou- Noise and Hurry 5 sands of them — each as earnest as if he carried in his pocket a reprieve from execution for some dear friend. Loungers and shopping people lounge and shop, each figure an oasis in the populous desert of bustle.

You and I know many cities, but we know none which, compared with New York, looks occupied, or which makes half so much noise in the pursuit of its occupation. To sit at a window and watch it all would be delightful. A treble window, carefully padded at all places at which sound could enter, would make the spectacle entirely enjoyable. But to be down in the midst of it and to preserve composure demands a less harassed set of nerves than mine. Only the other day a gentleman in Boston showed me a cutting from one of the satirical prints. It presented two pictures, side by side. In one Colonel William Cody, known better to you by name as " Buffalo Bill," was depicted in the full triumph ofthe slaughter of, I think, his twenty seventh grizzly in the Rocky Mountains. He has one foot on the prostrate monarch of the moun tain, and one hand, waving in the air, grasps a rifle.

The pose is wildly noble, and indicative of courage triumphant. The companion picture shows the same man in the act of crossing Broad way. He hangs limp and helpless on the arm of a policeman, and his eyes are rolling with terror. I don't accept this as a literal fact in the career of the hero of the Wild West show, but I quote it as showing that I am not altogether alone in thinking that a New York crossing holds some element of excitement. There are few private vehicles to be seen. The pavement of the roadways is atrocious, and so thickly intersected with tramway lines that a narrow wheeled vehicle would be in constant danger of ruin. The other day I bought a copy of the American edition of the Review of Reviews. I found in it a portrait of the Mayor of the city, Mr. Gilroy. He looks like a sane and truthful minded man, but he has been to Paris, and after inspecting the pavement there he says that it will not compare with that of New York.

These patriotic delusions are very curious, and one finds them everywhere. But the more one knows of the world, the less offended one is by that blind fold parish form of patriotism. The Americans do not mind noise so much as we do, or if they find it disagreeable they endure it with a patience which is perhaps the result of education. That is one's first impression. You are in a country where people are doing business, and they let you know it. The rail way engines roar into the great termini bang ing bells. The street cars ring bells. They ring a bell to warn you out of their devouring Noise and Hurry 7 way. They ring a bell when they take a pas senger's fare, and they ring a bell to start the car or to stop it. In the hotels electric bells tingle all day long. Telephone calls are every where.

My nerves are surcharged with clang ings and tinglings as if with electricity. Even in quiet Boston in what are known as " the con gested districts " it is an adventure to cross a street, and the noise is deafening and confusing. You see there the electric tramway cars (called " electrics " — for here language is in as great a hurry as everything else, and we have no time to waste in drawling the full name of anything) — you see the " electrics " so thick along the line for a hundred yards that the huge vehicles almost touch each other. The power which drives them is conveyed by an overhead wire, and in the night time these wires rain down miniature lightnings. The cars are crowded beyond endurance. The conductor packs his fares remorselessly, and men and women stand for miles holding on to straps of leather, while the flying coaches pitch like boats at sea.

" Forward, there ! Forward, if you please ! " and the swaying flock moves forward until there are ten people to every four seats inside, and the front and rear platforms are covered with men who hang on apparently by miracle. The cars are the property of a business corporation, and in any other country in the world the rapacity of that corporation would be checked in a week. But this American people, as I see more and more every day, has one great unexpected characteristic. There is a spirit of patience here, the like of which I have never found elsewhere. I shall tell you more of that as I go on, but in the meantime I content myself with recording the fact. I have some surprising examples in my mind — things which might look natural in Turkey, for example. But here is a nation which has replenished the earth and subdued it, as no people ever did before in the history of mankind — a people effervescing with energy, rich in the genius of resource, crammed full of all the devices the amplest brains can find for them, a people courageous, hardy, wise — !

I look on in amaze ment, and in a week I learn that this masterful, dominant, go-ahead people, which has been my admiration for a lifetime, is robbed and jobbed, and hustled and bustled by a myriad of self seekers, and endures them all. If I were a painter or sculptor, and had to paint or carve an emblem of America, I would give you an image of Patience. Or— this would do : A Sphinx of a new pattern. The head that of a man — the forehead splendid — the eyes benevolent — the mouth shrewd and sweetened with humour. The body that of a milch cow and a crowd of pigmies tugging at the udders. Motto : " Let 'em tug! There's plenty ! " New England Autumn 9 If it were not for the tramcars, the pavements and the elevated railway, New York would be one of the noblest cities of the world. As it is, it is overshadowed, noisy, half-obstructed, confused ; a Malebolge of a place, worse than London, worse than Paris.

In the course of nature it had nothing more difficult to contend with than either. Our underground railway is a stenching nuisance, to be sure, but it is only a nuisance to the people who travel by it. The elevated railway is a nuisance to the world at large, an obstruction to traffic, an obstruction to sunlight, an invasion of privacy, and away out of all whooping distance the most astonishing monument to ugliness the world can show. Now, I am informed, the New York engineers are going to burrow. Then it is to be hoped they will pull the elevated rail way down, free their streets, and make their city visible. There is no mortal thing this people can't do when once it makes up its mind. New York is awake, and is going to manage its own affairs. I got here just in time to hear the public declaration to that effect.

I should like to see the city in a dozen years' time. Since I landed I have spent nearly all my time in New England. I wished I had Bernard Evans there to paint the splendours of the autumn. We have a sombre glory of our own in the fall of the year. You remember the Yorkshire dales of '92. But the vividness, the fiery glow, the jewelled glory of the New England woods is unrivalled. They tell me this has been a tame year, because of the unusual absence of early frost, but to me it was a revelation, and will be a memory until I die. I was driven out from Newtonville a week or two ago to see the house in which Hawthorne laid the scene of his " Blythedale Romance." There were trees the foliage of which was pure, bright, dragon's-blood red. There were trees of fullest and purest Indian yellow. There were browns and russets and scarlets and cadmiums — Nature had emptied her colour box.

And a November sun like that of an English August burned in a sky of merest Italian, and the soft haze of the late Indian summer — what we call a martin's summer — made the near distance a rich purple. Bref — one of the feasts of a lifetime. To any Englishman of letters New England is and must be delightful. Last Saturday fortnight I sat in the chair which has been occupied by Agassiz and Whittier, and Hawthorne and Long fellow, and Emerson and Lowell, and Holmes. Sixteen miles away from Boston, in old Salem, there is a House with Seven Gables, and the shadow of it seems to cast a twilight of romance over the whole country. I felt pretty much as I used to do in my constant pilgrimages to Stratford-on-Avon. At Manchester-on-Sea the The Priscilla 11 other night I looked out of my host's windows into the moonlight and saw that very Reef of Norman's Woe on which the skipper and his little daughter went down in the wreck of the Hesperus !

And thinking of Longfellow reminds me of the Puritan maiden Priscilla. And the maiden's name brings to mind the most astonishing thing I have yet seen in this big country. The Priscilla is a boat, or so they tell me. It is a thing built in stories, and about as high as the Pyramids, more or less. It is not quite as long as from Hyde Park Corner to Charing Cross. You walk from the dock into an entrance hall paved with mottled concrete. There is room here for a pair of tennis courts. You don't believe it, but you are "onboard." You go up a huge great staircase, and you find yourself in a concert hall, in which there is ample room to seat a thousand people ; quite a moderate sized apartment in comparison with "the boat." The boat! Ha! ha ! The boat ! You go up another magnificent staircase, and you lose yourself in hundreds of yards of lordly corridor.

You find another vast chamber — a reading-room this time. There is plush velvet enough to upholster several theatres. There are gilding and moulding enough to furnish forth a whole London suburbful of parlours. There are twelve hundred beds in bedrooms — not berths, but bedrooms, some of them furnished in the richest style. There are more staircases and more stories, and there is a restaurant, like a football field for its dimensions, and you laugh at the ridiculous Aladdin, who made his genii build such a city of a vessel under the impression that it is in the power of any machinery made by man to make the " derned " thing move. And while you are sniggering and wondering when the skipper and his officers are going to apolgize for the whole gigantic hoax, bells begin to ring and machinery begins to move, and away you glide, majestic, impossible (they take the impossible in the ordinary way of business here), and before you know it you are doing three and twenty miles an hour.