Greater Britain

In spite of their possession of much political power, and of the entire city government of several great towns, the Irish in America are neither physically nor morally well off. Whatever may be the case at some future day, they still find themselves politically in English hands. The very language that they are compelled to speak is hateful, even to men who know no other. With an impotent spite which would be amusing were it not very sad, a resolution was carried by acclamation through both houses of the Fenian congress, at Philadelphia, this year, “that the word ‘English’ be unanimously dropped, and that the words ‘American language’ be used in the future.”

From the Cabinet, from Congress, from every office, high or low, not controlled by the Fenian vote, the Irish are systematically excluded; but it cannot be American public opinion which has prevented the Catholic Irish from rising as merchants and traders, even in New York. Yet, while there are Belfast names high up on the Atlantic side and in San Francisco, there are none from Cork, none from the southern counties. It would seem as though the true Irishman wants the perseverance to become a successful merchant, and thrives best at pure brain-work, or upon land. Three-fourths of the Irish in America remain in towns, losing the attachment to the soil which is the strongest characteristic of the Irish in Ireland, and finding no new home: disgusted at their exclusion in America from political life and power, it is these men who turn to Fenianism as a relief. Through drink, through gambling, and the other vices of homeless, thriftless men, they are soon reduced to beggary; and, moral as they are by nature, the Irish are nevertheless supplying America with that which she never before possessed – a criminal and pauper class. Of ten thousand people sent to jail each year in Massachusetts, six thousand are Irish born; in Chicago, out of the 3598 convicts of last year, only eighty-four were native born Americans.

To the Americans, Fenianism has many aspects. The greater number hate the Irish, but sympathize profoundly with Ireland. Many are so desirous of seeing republicanism prevail throughout the world that they support the Irish republic in any way, except, indeed, by taking its paper money, and look upon its establishment as a first step toward the erection of a free government that shall include England and Scotland as well. Some think the Fenians will burn the Capitol and rob the banks; some regard them with satisfaction, or the reverse, from the religious point of view. One of the latter kind of lookers-on said to me: “I was glad to see the Fenian movement, not that I wish success to the Brotherhood as against you English, but because I rejoice to see among Irishmen a powerful center of resistance to the Catholic Church. We, in this country, were being delivered over, bound hand and foot, to the Roman Church, and these Fenians, by their power and their violence against the priests, have divided the Irish camp and rescued us.” The unfortunate Canadians, for their part, ask why they should be shot and robbed because Britain maltreats the Irish; but we must not forget that the Fenian raid on Canada was an exact repetition, almost on the same ground, of the St. Alban‘s raid into the American territory during the rebellion.

The Fenians would be as absolutely without strength in America as they are without credit were it not for the anti-British traditions of the Democratic party, and the rankling of the Alabama question, or rather of the remembrance of our general conduct during the rebellion, in the hearts of the Republicans. It is impossible to spend much time in New England without becoming aware that the people of the six Northeastern States love us from the heart. Nothing but this can explain the character of their feeling toward us on these Alabama claims. That we should refuse an arbitration upon the whole question is to them inexplicable, and they grieve with wondering sorrow at our perversity.

It is not here that the legal question need be raised; for observers of the present position of the English race it is enough that there exists between Britain and America a bar to perfect friendship – a ground for future quarrel – upon which we refuse to allow an all-embracing arbitration. We allege that we are the best judges of a certain portion of the case, that our dignity would be compromised by arbitration upon these points; but such dignity must always be compromised by arbitration, for common friends are called in only when each party to the dispute has a case, in the justice of which his dignity is bound up. Arbitration is resorted to as a means of avoiding wars; and, dignity or no dignity, everything that can cause war is proper matter for arbitration. What even if some little dignity be lost by the affair, in addition to that which has been lost already? No such loss can be set against the frightful hurtfulness to the race and to the cause of freedom, of war between Britain and America.

The question comes plainly enough to this point; we say we are right; America says we are wrong; they offer arbitration, which we refuse upon a point of etiquette – for on that ground we decline to refer to arbitration a point which to America appears essential. It looks to the world as though we offer to submit to the umpire chosen those points only on which we are already prepared to admit that we are in the wrong. America asks us to submit, as we should do in private life, the whole correspondence on which the quarrel stands. Even if we, better instructed in the precedents of international law than were the Americans, could not but be in the right, still, as we know that intelligent and able men in the United States think otherwise, and would fancy their cause the just one in a war which might arise upon the difficulty, surely there is ground for arbitration. It would be to the eternal disgrace of civilization that we should set to work to cut our brothers’ throats upon a point of etiquette; and, by declining on the ground of honor to discuss these claims, we are compromising that honor in the eyes of all the world.

In democracies such as America or France, every citizen feels an insult to his country as an insult to himself. The Alabama question is in the mouth or in the heart – which is worse – of every American who talks with an Englishman in England or America.

All nations commit, at times, the error of acting as though they think that every people on earth, except themselves, are unanimous in their policy. Neglecting the race distinctions and the class distinctions which in England are added to the universal essential differences of minds, the Americans are convinced that, during the late war, we thought as one man, and that, in this present matter of the Alabama claims, we stand out and act as a united people.

A New Yorker with whom I stayed at Quebec – a shrewd but kindly fellow – was an odd instance of the American incapacity to understand the British nation, which almost equals our own inability to comprehend America. Kind and hospitable to me, as is any American to every Englishman in all times and places, he detested British policy, and obstinately refused to see that there is an England larger than Downing Street, a nation outside Pall Mall. “England was with the rebels throughout the war.” “Excuse me; our ruling classes were so, perhaps, but our rulers don‘t represent us any more than your 39th Congress represents George Washington.” In America, where Congress does fairly represent the nation, and where there has never been less than a quarter of the body favorable to any policy which half the nation supported, men cannot understand that there should exist a country which thinks one way, but, through her rulers, speaks another. We may disown the national policy, but we suffer for it.

The hospitality to Englishmen of the American England-hater is extraordinary. An old Southerner in Richmond said to me in a breath, “I‘d go and live in England if I didn‘t hate it as I do. England, sir, betrayed us in the most scoundrelly way – talked of sympathy with the South, and stood by to see us swallowed up. I hate England, sir! Come and stay a week with me at my place in – County. Going South to-day? Well, then, you return this way next week. Come then! Come on Saturday week.”

When we ask, “Why do you press the Alabama claims against us, and not the Florida, the Georgia, and the Rappahannock claims against the French?” the answer is: “Because we don‘t care about the French, and what they do and think; besides, we owe them some courtesy after bundling them out of Mexico in the way we did.” In truth there is among Americans an exaggerated estimate of the offensive powers of Great Britain; and such is the jealousy of young nations that this exaggeration becomes of itself a cause of danger. Were the Americans as fully convinced, as we ourselves are, of our total incapacity to carry on a land war with the United States on the western side of the Atlantic, the bolder spirits among them would cease to feel themselves under an assumed necessity to show us our own weakness and their strength.

The chief reason why America finds much to offend her in our conduct is, that she cares for the opinion of no other people than the English. America, before the terrible blow to her confidence and love that our conduct during the rebellion gave, used morally to lean on England. Happily for herself she is now emancipated from the mental thraldom; but she still yearns toward our kindly friendship. A Napoleonic Senator harangues, a French paper declaims, against America and Americans; who cares? But a Times’ leader, or a speech in Parliament from a minister of the Crown, cuts to the heart, wounding terribly. A nation, like an individual, never quarrels with a stranger; there must be love at bottom for even querulousness to arise. While I was in Boston, one of the foremost writers of America said to me in conversation: “I have no son, but I had a nephew of my own name; a grand fellow; young, handsome, winning in his ways, full of family affections, an ardent student. He felt it his duty to go to the front as a private in one of our regiments of Massachusetts volunteers, and was promoted for bravery to a captaincy. All of us here looked on him as a New England Philip Sidney, the type of all that was manly, chivalrous, and noble. The very day that I received news of his being killed in leading his company against a regiment, I was forced by my duties here to read a leader in one of your chief papers upon the officering of our army, in which it was more than hinted that our troops consisted of German cut-throats and pot-house Irish, led by sharpers and broken politicians. Can you wonder at my being bitter?”

That there must be in America a profound feeling of affection for our country is shown by the avoidance of war when we recognized the rebels as belligerents; and, again, at the time of the Trent affair, when the surface cry was overwhelmingly for battle, and the cabinet only able to tide it over by promising the West war with England as soon as the rebellion was put down. “One war at a time, gentlemen,” said Lincoln. The man who, of all in America, had most to lose by war with England, said to me of the Trent affair: “I was written to by C – to do all I could for peace. I wrote him back that if our attorney-general decided that our seizure of the men was lawful, I would spend my last dollar in the cause.”

The Americans, everywhere affectionate toward the individual Englishman, make no secret of their feeling that the first advances toward a renewal of the national friendship ought to come from us. They might remind us that our Maori subjects have a proverb, “Let friends settle their disputes as friends.”

CHAPTER XXVIII.

AMERICA

WE are coasting again, gliding through calm blue waters, watching the dolphins as they play, and the boobies as they fly stroke and stroke with the paddles of the ship. Mountains rise through the warm misty air, and form a long towering line upon the upper skies. Hanging high above us are the Volcano of Fire and that of Water – twin menacers of Guatamala City. In the sixteenth century, the water-mountain drowned it; in the eighteenth, it was burnt by the fire-hill. Since then, the city has been shaken to pieces by earthquakes, and of sixty thousand men and women, hardly one escaped. Down the valley, between the peaks, we have through the mahogany groves an exquisite distant view toward the city. Once more passing on, we get peeps, now of West Honduras, and now of the island coffee plantations of Costa Rica. The heat is terrible. It was just here, if we are to believe Drake, that he fell in with a shower so hot and scalding, that each drop burnt its hole through his men‘s clothes as they hung up to dry. “Steep stories,” it is clear, were known before the plantation of America.

Now that the time has come for a leave-taking of the continent, we can begin to reflect upon facts gleaned during visits to twenty-nine of the forty-five Territories and States – twenty-nine empires the size of Spain.

A man may see American countries, from the pine-wastes of Maine to the slopes of the Sierra; may talk with American men and women, from the sober citizens of Boston to Digger Indians in California; may eat of American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colorado to clambakes on the shores near Salem; and yet, from the time he first “smells the molasses” at Nantucket light-ship to the moment when the pilot quits him at the Golden Gate, may have no idea of an American. You may have seen the East, the South, the West, the Pacific States, and yet have failed to find America. It is not till you have left her shores that her image grows up in the mind.

The first thing that strikes the Englishman just landed in New York is the apparent Latinization of the English in America; but before he leaves the country, he comes to see that this is at most a local fact, and that the true moral of America is the vigor of the English race – the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four pence. Excluding the Atlantic cities, the English in America are absorbing the Germans and the Celts, destroying the Red Indians, and checking the advance of the Chinese.

The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. Up to the commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians of Central North America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists, no numerous race had ever been blotted out by an invader. The Danes and Saxons amalgamated with the Britons, the Normans with the English, the Tartars with the Chinese, the Goths and Burgundians with the Gauls: the Spaniards not only never annihilated a people, but have themselves been all but completely expelled by the Indians, in Mexico and South America. The Portuguese in Ceylon, the Dutch in Java, the French in Canada and Algeria, have conquered but not killed off the native peoples. Hitherto it has been nature‘s rule, that the race that peopled a country in the earliest historic days should people it to the end of time. The American problem is this: does the law, in a modified shape, hold good, in spite of the destruction of the native population? Is it true that the negroes, now that they are free, are commencing slowly to die out? that the New Englanders are dying fast, and their places being supplied by immigrants? Can the English in America, in the long run, survive the common fate of all migrating races? Is it true that, if the American settlers continue to exist, it will be at the price of being no longer English, but Red Indian? It is certain that the English families long in the land have the features of the extirpated race; on the other hand, in the negroes there is at present no trace of any change, save in their becoming dark brown instead of black.

The Maories – an immigrant race – were dying off in New Zealand when we landed there. The Indians of Mexico – another immigrant people – had themselves undergone decline, numerical and moral, when we first became acquainted with them. Are we English in turn to degenerate abroad, under pressure of a great natural law forbidding change? It is easy to say that the English in Old England are not a native but an immigrant race; that they show no symptoms of decline. There, however, the change was slight, the distance short, the difference of climate small.

The rapidity of the disappearance of physical type is equaled at least, if not exceeded, by that of the total alteration of the moral characteristics of the immigrant races – the entire destruction of eccentricity, in short. The change that comes over those among the Irish who do not remain in the great towns is not greater than that which overtakes the English handworkers, of whom some thousands reach America each year. Gradually settling down on land, and finding themselves lost in a sea of intelligence, and freed from the inspiring obstacles of antiquated institutions and class prejudice, the English handicraftsman, ceasing to be roused to aggressive Radicalism by the opposition of sinister interests, merges into the contented homestead settler, or adventurous backwoodsman. Greater even than this revolution of character is that which falls upon the Celt. Not only is it a fact known alike to physiologists and statisticians, that the children of Irish parents born in America are, physically, not Irish, Americans, but the like is true of the moral type: the change in this is at least as sweeping. The son of Fenian Pat and bright-eyed Biddy is the normal gaunt American, quick of thought, but slow of speech, whom we have begun to recognize as the latest product of the Saxon race, when housed upon the Western prairies, or in the pine-woods of New England.

For the moral change in the British workman it is not difficult to account: the man who will leave country, home, and friends, to seek new fortunes in America, is essentially not an ordinary man. As a rule, he is above the average in intelligence, or, if defective in this point, he makes up for lack of wit by the possession of concentrativeness and energy. Such a man will have pushed himself to the front in his club, his union, or his shop, before he emigrates. In England he is somebody; in America he finds all hands contented; or, if not this, at all events too busy to complain of such ills as they profess to labor under. Among contented men, his equals both in intelligence and ambition, in a country of perfect freedom of speech, of manners, of laws, and of society, the occupation of his mind is gone, and he comes to think himself what others seem to think – a nobody; a man who no longer is a living force. He settles upon land; and when the world knows him no more, his children are happy corn-growers in his stead.

The shape of North America makes the existence of distinct peoples within her limits almost impossible. An upturned bowl, with a mountain rim, from which the streams run inward toward the center, she must fuse together all the races that settle within her borders, and the fusion must now be in an English mould.

There are homogeneous foreign populations in several portions of the United States; not only the Irish and Chinese, at whose prospects we have already glanced, but also Germans in Pennsylvania, Spanish in Florida, French in Louisiana and at Sault de Ste Marie. In Wisconsin there is a Norwegian population of over a hundred thousand, retaining their own language and their own architecture, and presenting the appearance of a tough morsel for the English to digest; at the same time, the Swedes were the first settlers of Delaware and New Jersey, and there they have disappeared.

Milwaukee is a Norwegian town. The houses are narrow and high, the windows many, with circular tops ornamented in wood or dark-brown stone, and a heavy wooden cornice crowns the front. The churches have the wooden bulb and spire which are characteristic of the Scandinavian public buildings. The Norwegians will not mix with other races, and invariably flock to spots where there is already a large population speaking their own tongue. Those who enter Canada generally become dissatisfied with the country, and pass on into Wisconsin, or Minnesota, but the Canadian government has now under its consideration a plan for founding a Norwegian colony on Lake Huron. The numbers of this people are not so great as to make it important to inquire whether they will ever merge into the general population. Analogy would lead us to expect that they will be absorbed; their existence is not historical, like that of the French in Lower Canada.

From Burlington, in Iowa, I had visited a spot the history of which is typical of the development of America – Nauvoo. Founded in 1840 by Joe Smith, the Mormon city stood upon a bluff overhanging the Des Moines rapids of the Mississippi, presenting on the land side the aspect of a gentle, graceful slope, surmounted by a plain. After the fanatical pioneers of English civilization had been driven from the city, and their temple burnt, there came Cabet‘s Icarian band, who tried to found a new France in the desert; but in 1856 the leader died, and his people dispersed themselves about the States of Iowa and Missouri. Next came the English settlers, active, thriving, regardless of tradition, and Nauvoo is entering on a new life as the capital of a Wine-growing country. I found Cabet and the Mormons alike forgotten. The ruins of the temple have disappeared, and the huge stones have been used up in cellars, built to contain the Hock – a pleasant wine, like Zeltinger.

The bearing upon religion of the gradual destruction of race is of great moment to the world. Christianity will gain by the change; but which of its many branches will receive support is a question which only admits of an imperfect answer. Arguing à priori, we should expect to find that, on the one hand, a tendency toward unity would manifest itself, taking the shape, perhaps, of a gain of strength by the Catholic and Anglican Churches; on the other hand, there would be a contrary and still stronger tendency toward an infinite multiplication of beliefs, till millions of men and women would become each of them his own church. Coming to the actual cases in which we can trace the tendencies that commence to manifest themselves, we find that in America the Anglican Church is gaining ground, especially on the Pacific side, and that the Catholics do not seem to meet with any such success as we should have looked for; retaining, indeed, their hold over the Irish women and a portion of the men, and having their historic French branches in Louisiana and in Canada, but not, unless it be in the Cities of New York and Philadelphia, making much way among the English.

Between San Francisco and Chicago, for religious purposes the most cosmopolitan of cities, we have to draw distinctions. In the Pacific city the disturbing cause is the presence of New Yorkers; in the metropolis of the Northwestern States it is the dominance of New England ideas: still, we shall find no two cities so free from local color, and from the influence of race. The result of an examination is not encouraging: in both cities there is much external show in the shape of church attendance; in neither does religion strike its roots deeply into the hearts of the citizens, except so far as it is alien and imported.

The Spiritualist and Unitarian churches are both of them in Chicago extremely strong: they support newspapers and periodicals of their own, and are led by men and women of remarkable ability, but they are not the less Cambridge Unitarianism, Boston Spiritualism; there is nothing of the Northwest about them. In San Francisco, on the other hand, Anglicanism is prospering, but it is New York Episcopalianism, sustained by immigrants and money from the East; in no sense is it a Californian church.

Throughout America the multiplication of churches is rapid, but among the native-born Americans, Supernaturalism is advancing with great strides. The Shakers are strong in thought, the Spiritualists in wealth and numbers; Communism gains ground, but not Polygamy – the Mormon is a purely European church.

There is just now progressing in America a great movement, headed by the “Radical Unitarians,” toward “free religion,” or church without creed. The leaders deny that there is sufficient security for the spread of religion in each man‘s individual action: they desire collective work by all free-thinkers and liberal religionists in the direction of truth and purity of life. Christianity is higher than dogma, we are told; there is no way out of infinite multiplication of creeds but by their total extirpation. Oneness of purpose and a common love for truth form the members’ only tie. Elder Frederick Evans said to me: “All truth forms part of Shakerism;” but these free religionists assure us that in all truth consists their sole religion.