ON BECOMING 
 AN AMERICAN 
 
 H GRACE J. BKIDGES 
 
Smil G. Beck 
 
ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
J..^^^^^ 
 
ON BECOMING AN 
 AMERICAN 
 
 SOME meditations;cf: ; 
 
 A NEWLY NATURALIZE^ IMMIQ^ANT 
 BY 
 
 HORACE J. BRIDGES 
 
 AUTHOR or "criticisms of life," "the religion of experience,'* 
 
 "our fellow SHAKESPEARE," ETC. 
 
 BOSTON 
 MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 
 MCMXIX 
 
B7 
 
 COPYRIGHT, I918 
 BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 
 All rights reser-vtd 
 
 m MEMORIAM 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 
 
7Si 
 
 TO 
 
 zMRS. TiJCHARTi lVJRR€:Ni,S£ARS 
 
 WHOSE KINDLY SYMPATHY AND GENEROUS RECOGNITION HAVE 
 
 ENCOURAGED THE AUTHOR TO HOPE THAT HIS 
 
 WORK MAY NOT DISHONOUR THE HIGH 
 
 GIFT OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP 
 
 THIS 'BOOK^ IS gRATSFULLT ^ND RCSVeCTFULLT 
 'DETHCATCTt 
 
 9351'11 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE acrid epigram of Johnson, that " Patriot- 
 ism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," still 
 lingers at the back of our minds, and induces a cer- 
 tain anticipatory distrust of a person who makes 
 public proclamation of his devotion to the country 
 of his birth or choice. So long as your chief reason 
 for believing a man virtuous is that you have his own 
 word for it, your feelings towards him will be mixed, 
 and appreciation and confidence will assuredly not 
 be the dominant elements in them. 
 
 Nevertheless, it would be unfortunate if this 
 obvious consideration should prevail to the extent of 
 preventing anybody from expressing himself, either 
 in speech or writing, on the subject of patriotism 
 and its obligations. The matter has great practical 
 importance. Nowhere is this truer than in Amer- 
 ica, and never was it more true than at the present 
 hour. Nor must we let the partizan virus of John- 
 son's dictum infect our feelings to such an extent 
 that they send our judgment packing. Even the 
 adoring Boswell felt it necessary to demur to his 
 idol's assertion, and, in recording it, to explain what 
 Johnson ought to have meant. 
 
 We know that it is not patriotism in which the 
 scoundrel takes refuge, any more than it is holiness 
 to which the hypocrite resorts. Nothing is so like a 
 
vlii PREFACE 
 
 genuine coin as a counterfeit one ; but no two things 
 are more different. The scoundrel may mask him- 
 self with a profession of patriotism, just as Mr. 
 Chadband may soak himself in the unction of pre- 
 tended piety until he reeks of it; but in neither case 
 will the imposture stand the acid test. Johnson was 
 thinking of a set of men who for discreditable per- 
 sonal reasons had pretended to a patriotism which 
 they did not really possess. They abused this term, 
 just as among us at the present day the fine word 
 Politics is " soiled with all ignoble use," by persons 
 who do not know its real meaning, and have no 
 tincture of the spirit or the science which the term 
 properly denotes. 
 
 Politics, we must remind ourselves, is the science 
 that lies beyond ethics. It was in this sense that its 
 greatest ancient master, Aristotle, understood and 
 treated the subject. His work on Morals is de- 
 signed and placed as an introduction to the work on 
 Politics that follows it. He treats Morals as the 
 science of the conduct of individual men in their 
 personal relations; Politics, as the science of the 
 conduct of cities and States. This latter is the art 
 of counselling and serving one's country, not (as in 
 our nauseous perversion) the art of preying upon 
 one's country, and making the pretence of its service 
 a cloak under which to rob it. In like manner. 
 Patriotism denotes the spirit which is ready to live 
 and die for the ideals of one's country, not only in 
 war with foreign enemies, but also when its stand- 
 ards have to be asserted against the perverted senti- 
 ment or the irrational Impetuosity of one's fellow- 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IX 
 
 citizens. It implies, accordingly, that one shall be 
 ready to think for one's nation as well as to fight 
 for it. 
 
 Now, a man may venture upon occasion to write 
 on Patriotism in this sense, without falling into the 
 absurdity of seeming to present himself as a model 
 patriot. And the way, I take it, by which he may 
 avoid this extravagance is by recognizing that patri- 
 otism is a virtue towards which he must aspire, 
 rather than a quality of character which he has al- 
 ready attained. Once it is understood that patriot- 
 ism is a virtue, it becomes no more offensive or 
 pretentious to write of it than to treat of any other 
 subdivision of the field of ethics. 
 
 Such, at least, is my apologia in venturing to sub- 
 mit these informal Meditations to the judgment of 
 the public. But perhaps some explanation may be 
 desirable on another point of detail. 
 
 Precedent would suggest that a book of this kind 
 should take the form of an autobiography. Dr. 
 Edward Steiner and the late Mr. Jacob Riis have 
 both woven their ideas on the meaning of America 
 and the obligations of the naturalized immigrant 
 into the form of histories of their personal careers. 
 More famous even than their well-known works is 
 the entrancing volume of my brilliantly gifted friend 
 Mary Antin, entitled " The Promised Land." In 
 this she has given us one of those masterpieces 
 which, under the guise of a record of individual 
 experience, bring before us the full pulsating life of 
 ages and nations. You read what seems to be only 
 the artless tale of the adventures of Mary Antin, 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 first as a little Jewish girl living among her perse- 
 cuted people in Russia, and afterwards as the bud- 
 ding American citizen, focussing upon herself and 
 sensitively responding to the influences of school and 
 Settlement and college in Boston. But before you 
 have finished, it dawns upon you that this seemingly 
 simple story is an epitome of the agelong tragedy of 
 the whole Jewish people under persecution, and also 
 of the emancipating mission of America to the op- 
 pressed of all the earth. 
 
 Evidently, however, one must either be a very 
 exceptional person, or stand in a very uncommon 
 position, to be justified in publishing an autobiog- 
 raphy. In Mary Antin's case, both these conditions 
 are fulfilled. The same was true of Mr. Riis and 
 Dr. Steiner, and yet more unmistakably so of that 
 finely distinguished patriot, that anima 7iaturaUter 
 A7nericana, the late Carl Schurz. Nor can even 
 genius, or the wide significance of the experiences 
 recorded, completely safeguard the autoblographer 
 against an appearance of egotism, which, however 
 Illusory it may be, nevertheless creates in the reader's 
 mind an impression which the most ordinary sensi- 
 tiveness leads one to shrink from. Neither her 
 genius nor her artistic success has availed to protect 
 Mary Antin against this most distasteful imputation. 
 To judge from Dr. Steiner's book, one cannot but 
 think that he must have frankly taken for his motto 
 the words, "They say! What do they say? Let 
 them say 1 " With a courage that I could not emu- 
 late, he has made of himself a "subject," in the sense 
 in which the anatomist or the psychologist would 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 use the term. In a manner more obtrusive even than 
 Montaigne's, he has followed that classical prece- 
 dent by making himself the matter of his book. 
 
 Now I cannot presume on any ground to place 
 myself in competition with these eminent autobiog- 
 raphers, or to suggest a parity between myself and 
 them. My individual experiences have been of the 
 commonplace kind that deserve no record, and se- 
 cure none, save in the indulgent memory of personal 
 friends; nor have I attained any such distinction as 
 would impart to the episodes of my life that extrinsic 
 interest which alone can justify autobiography or 
 biography. Quite apart, however, from the ques- 
 tion of one's personal significance or insignificance, 
 the plan pursued in the following pages may possess 
 at least one advantage which is lacking to the auto- 
 biographical method, even when the author-subject 
 possesses outstanding genius or has lived a life the 
 incidents of which merit public consideration. This 
 advantage is that in an abstract or impersonal pres- 
 entation of the principles involved in a voluntary 
 change of nationality, the general import of those 
 principles is less likely to be overlooked than when 
 the charm of a personal history competes with them 
 and distracts attention from them. 
 
 Accordingly, I have attempted only to set forth, 
 in the informal and unsystematic fashion suggested 
 by the word Meditations, my convictions as to the 
 deeper implications of a transaction which, although 
 qtid oneself it be insignificant, derives a large and 
 enduring importance from the fact that a great na- 
 tion is a party to it. I desire to place myself upon 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 record as one who with deep gratitude appreciates 
 the privileges conferred upon him by the Republic, 
 and Is not oblivious of the corresponding obligations 
 which he has assumed. 
 
 My first Impulse was to cast these chapters Into 
 the form of letters to my children, that upon their 
 arrival at years of maturity they might learn In what 
 spirit their father had renounced his allegiance to 
 the land of his birth, and sworn fealty, for them 
 as well as for himself, to the United States. Further 
 reflection, however, suggested that this purpose 
 would perhaps be better met If my Meditations on 
 the subject had run the gauntlet of publication and 
 criticism before my children scanned them. 
 
 And, as my thoughts unfolded themselves in the 
 process of preparation and writing, I could not 
 avoid the hope that this brief and simple statement 
 of them might possess a certain value for other 
 immigrants, whether of the same national origin as 
 myself or sprung from different lands or races. At 
 the same time, too, the recollection of the cordial- 
 ity of many audiences before whom some of the 
 thoughts I was expressing had been uttered, inspired 
 the feeling that possibly even to born Americans 
 my Meditations might be not altogether devoid of 
 value or of interest. For the Immigrant Is, during 
 several years, in the position of the onlooker, who 
 proverbially sees more of the game than the players. 
 The accident &f his position, too, compels him to 
 think out the question of his relation to his country, 
 and to define for himself the obligations as well as 
 the privileges of citizenship. This gives him a cer- 
 
PREFACE xiil 
 
 tain advantage o\'er those who, having never con- 
 templated the abandonment of the loyalty to which 
 they were born, have never had occasion to subject 
 themselves to any such process of self-examination. 
 
 I can but hope that these considerations will ex- 
 cuse the apparent presumption of a newcomer in 
 airing his opinions concerning the process by which 
 immigrants are assimilated into the Republic, and 
 upon the more delicate subject of the relation be- 
 tween the Nation and the States. The importance 
 of these matters would at any time make it excusable 
 for an American to subject them to his most care- 
 ful study. If a newcomer needs some additional 
 justification for treating of them, I trust that the 
 foregoing explanation may be accepted as furnish- 
 ing it. 
 
 Several years ago, when my position was that of 
 a visiting lecturer from England, and before I had 
 decided to make my permanent abode in this coun- 
 try, some friends in New York urged me to refrain 
 from writing a book upon America until my experi- 
 ence of the land and its people had become some- 
 what closer and more extensive. Having already 
 felt not a little humiliated by the audacious super- 
 ficiality of Mr. Wells's volume on " The Future in 
 America," and by the remarks concerning parlour- 
 cars and skyscrapers in Mr. Arnold Bennett's " Im- 
 pressions of a First Visit," I promptly replied that 
 nothing would induce me to attempt such a task 
 until I had enjoyed at least ten years of familiarity 
 with American life. No Englishman unequipped 
 with the mask of brass habitually worn by the popu- 
 
xlv PREFACE 
 
 lar practitioners of journalism, can think without 
 shame of the contrast between such a masterpiece 
 as Emerson's " English Traits " and the triviality 
 and inadequacy of many of the volumes dealing with 
 America produced by English authors. If ever the 
 time comes when I shall have completed the proba- 
 tion I imposed upon myself, it shall at least be my 
 endeavour that any study of America which I may 
 produce shall compensate by fullness of information 
 for lack of the genius and insight which go so far 
 to redeem the appalling defects of some English 
 criticisms of America. But that time is not yet; and 
 I refer to the matter here only to remind the friends 
 to whom I gave my promise that this book in no 
 sense constitutes a breach of it. It is not a book on 
 America; it is only a sort of informal soliloquy on 
 the meaning of Americanism, as regarded from the 
 standpoint of one newly initiated into it. 
 
 Several of the principles underlying the latter half 
 of this book (from Chapter VI onwards) are con- 
 sidered in a more general manner, and with fuller 
 reference to history, philosophy and religion, in an 
 earlier work of mine, entitled *' Some Outlines of 
 the Religion of Experience " (pubhshed by The 
 Macmillan Company). Readers who feel that the 
 treatment of the subject in these pages leaves open 
 questions which they would care to see differently 
 discussed, will perhaps do me the honour of turning 
 to this other book. 
 
 H. J. B. 
 
 Chicago, July 4, 1918. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. The Privilege of Naturalization i 
 
 II. The Duty of Naturalization . . 12 
 
 III. What Can I Give to America? . . 24 
 
 IV. What Can America Give to Me? . 46 
 V. The Renunciation of Foreign 
 
 Loyalties 64 
 
 VI. To What Does One Swear Alle- 
 giance? 79 
 
 VII. The American Experiment ... 94 
 
 VIII. The Fallacy of the Melting-Pot 109 
 
 IX. The National-Group Idea, and 
 
 the Anti-Nationalists .... 122 
 
 X. The Right Method: Cultural 
 
 Cross-Fertilization 135 
 
 XI. "My Country, Right or Wrong" 150 
 XII. The Religious Aspect of Ameri- 
 canism 166 
 
ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
llE njoho freely magnifies nvhat hath been nobly 
 done, and fears not to declare as freely nvhat 
 might be done better, giijes ye the best covenant 
 of his fidelity, and that his loyalist affection and 
 his hope ivaits on your proceedings. His highest 
 praising is not flattery, and his plainest ad'vice 
 is a kind of praisitig."" — John Milton to the 
 Long Parliament (^1644). 
 
ON BECOMING AN 
 AMERICAN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PRIVILEGE OF NATURALIZATION 
 
 IN the month of August, 19 13, I stood with my 
 wife and children on the deck of a majestic 
 steamer at Liverpool, and waved farewells to the 
 people ashore. Our relatives and nearest friends 
 had said good-bye to us at Euston Station in Lon- 
 don, and now we had to take leave not of our imme- 
 diate kith and kin, but of our fellow-countrymen in 
 general, and of the dear old land itself. I had spent 
 the previous winter in America, spying out the land, 
 so to speak, from my own little point of view, and 
 had decided to take my family across the ocean with 
 me, to make a new home and discover an appro- 
 priate field for our life-work. Since my return to 
 England in the spring of 1913, time had fled rapidly, 
 and we had been busily occupied with preparations 
 for our great adventure. And now the day had 
 come. Our household gods had been dispersed — 
 some ahead of us to America, to impart a kindly 
 savour of the old home to the new; others to friends, 
 to keep alive our memory and serve as links with 
 
2 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 the bodily presence, after we were gone. We had 
 pulled up our roots; and, like millions before us, had 
 set out in faith to find new soil wherein. If the fates 
 were kindly, we might " branch and blossom as 
 before." The great ocean-palace (since, alas! sent 
 to the depths by one of those dastardly acts of 
 piratical assassination which have made the world- 
 war more Infamous than any that ever happened 
 before) lay fair and spotless In the summer sun- 
 shine, awaiting its hour to glide with smooth preci- 
 sion down the crowded Mersey and out Into the 
 beaten path of the tamed Atlantic. 
 
 To our little ones the day was one of joyous ad- 
 venture. They were faring forth into the unknown. 
 The ship, with her marvels of science and ingenuity, 
 was all a wonder and a wild desire. With the full 
 flooding life of boyhood, they found the fleeting 
 moment all-sufficient and all-entrancing. Yesterday 
 was dead; to-day was so thrilling that to-morrow 
 was unthought-of. America was a magic name, 
 like Atlantis or the Hesperides. They wondered 
 at the grave faces of father and mother, for they 
 recked nothing of the pain to their parents that had 
 attended the ploughing up of the soil of heart and 
 memory, and the plucking out of roots that had 
 struck so much deeper than consciousness. Nor did 
 they yet dream of the years of anxious pre-occupa- 
 tlon which we already felt ahead, — the long labour 
 of mental and spiritual adjustment to a new world of 
 hearts and faces, a new physical environment, new 
 manners and customs, Ideals and standards, new 
 life-values, a new social order. Fortunate were the 
 
PRIVILEGE OF NATURALIZATION 3 
 
 youngsters, in that the change came for them at a 
 time when their world was fluent and plastic, when 
 they had not yet grappled other souls to theirs with 
 the steel hoops of long love and firm-set will; when 
 each new companion was welcome as the morning, 
 and each older face no harder to part from than 
 yesterday when it is gone I 
 
 But now the time has come when I have had to 
 make a further decision: the most solemn, the most 
 weight}^ the most tremendous in its import for wife 
 and children, as well as for oneself, that It can ever 
 befall a man to make. In this decision I had to act 
 not only for myself, but for my family as well. My 
 sons were not old enough to understand what this 
 change imports, or to share with me the responsibil- 
 ity for making it. I therefore write these chapters 
 not only in the hope that they may help other men 
 in my position to make the same decision as I have 
 made, and to make It with Intelligence as well as 
 with a whole heart, but also with the desire that a 
 few years hence my children may read them, and 
 realize that in choosing for them the sovereignty 
 under which they are to live, I did not act hastily or 
 without careful thought. 
 
 Nationality Is a very serious, Indeed a sacred fact. 
 In declaring my allegiance to America, and thereby 
 severing the loyalty that has hitherto bound me to 
 the land of my birth, I feel as I imagine a person 
 must feel who changes his religion and makes solemn 
 public profession of a new faith. A man owes it to 
 himself, as well as to the country which is receiving 
 
4 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 him, to interpret, as best he can, what he under- 
 stands to be the significance of the occasion. 
 
 I have observed that thousands of persons go 
 through the rather perfunctory ceremony of natural- 
 ization in this country with little more reflection or 
 seriousness than they would display in exchanging 
 an old coat for a new one. America has not as yet 
 seen the need of investing the transaction with any 
 very impressive dignity or solemnity. The formali- 
 ties accompanying it are as unedifying as those that 
 attend the filling up of a tax-return. The officials 
 entrusted with the issuing of naturalization papers 
 are (at all events in the city where I live) a hap- 
 hazard assemblage of low-grade " political appoint- 
 ees," who seem to be deaf and blind to the import 
 of the acts which it is their duty to perform and to 
 record.^ 
 
 But America in her deeper selfhood is fully 
 aware of the immense privilege which she freely 
 accords to the newcomers whom in such vast num- 
 bers she has welcomed from all the ends of the 
 earth. Though it is her way to perform her public 
 acts with a sort of awkward casualness, and not to 
 express their vital meaning by symbol or ceremony, 
 she nevertheless knows that the engagement into 
 which she enters with her recruits of foreign birth 
 is one of vital import and irrevocable significance 
 both to herself and to them. A man may not attach 
 much weight to the plain bald sentences with which 
 he renounces his allegiance to the sovereign of the 
 
 * See the account of Dr. Edward Steiner's experience, in his book 
 "From Alien to Citizen," p. 247. (New York: Revell, 19 14.) 
 
PRIVILEGE OF NATURALIZATION 5 
 
 count!-}' whence he came, and pledges his fealty to 
 the Republic. Nevertheless America knows well 
 what she Is offering to him, and what she demands 
 of him; and the days In which It has fallen to my 
 lot to take this final step have made clear, even to 
 the most self-absorbed and careless immigrant, the 
 fact that he has to commit himself to an engagement 
 much more weighty, more heavily laden with the 
 issues of life and death, than any other relation Into 
 which he may enter — even than marriage itself. 
 
 Such a matter has many sides, and must be 
 considered from many points of view. In this 
 chapter we will consider it with reference to the 
 privilege which America confers upon her adopted 
 children. 
 
 This Republic, which owes Its existence to the 
 blood-sacrifice of Its founders, offers freely to all 
 comers the citizenship which was so dearly bought 
 by Its makers. The Roman official before whom 
 St. Paul was haled declared that he had obtained 
 his imperial citizenship with a great sum. The 
 privilege of incorporation Into the American Com- 
 monwealth Is bestowed freely; and this Is as It should 
 be, for such a gift cannot be measured in any terms 
 of money. It is literally a priceless thing, because 
 it was bought with men's lives; and nothing so 
 purchased can be valued in cash. What, then, Is It 
 that we receive thus freely? 
 
 In the first place, admission to American citizen- 
 ship means participation in American sovereignty. 
 You become at once a part of the government of 
 your country. Nothing stands between you and 
 
6 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 direct participation in the election of all the officials 
 who are to conduct the affairs of your city and State 
 and the Internal and external course of the nation as 
 a whole. Save for the fact that, by reason of 
 foreign birth, one is excluded from the possibility 
 of occupying the highest executive post of the Fed- 
 eral Government, there is no office in city, State or 
 nation to which one is not, by the fact of admission 
 to citizenship, immediately made eligible. One be- 
 comes automatically a voter and a potential candi- 
 date for the suffrages of one's fellow-citizens. In 
 the land of my birth, while it was theoretically pos- 
 sible for one to attain to any office except the Crown, 
 it was in practice most exceptional for anybody but 
 those born in a small and exclusive caste to attain to 
 any important governmental or diplomatic position. 
 That is not the case in this country. Despite many 
 deviations from the ideal, it remains the fact that 
 any boy from any class of the population may be- 
 come a member of the Senate or House of Repre- 
 sentatives of his State or of the national Govern- 
 ment. You may enter any profession, and the 
 higher education which is necessary as a qualifica- 
 tion for the more intellectual and scientific profes- 
 sions is gratuitously at your disposal. There is still 
 a great difference in this respect between England 
 and America — notwithstanding that England is 
 the most democratic nation of the Old World in this 
 direction. 
 
 The next privilege conferred by naturalization is 
 that of moral and civic equality with one's fellow- 
 citizens, and the guarantee, backed by the whole 
 
PRIVILEGE OF NATURALIZATION 7 
 
 physical and spiritual force of the nation, of all 
 those rights listed in the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence and the Constitution of the State and nation. 
 The philosophy underlying the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence was provisional and transient, and, in my 
 judgment, has been proved in large part unsound 
 and untenable. But this does not In any way Impair 
 the practical value and Importance of the rights 
 which It declares to be Inalienable and universal. It 
 comes to this, that the nation regards every man as 
 being, by the mere fact of his humanity, equal to 
 every other human being, and entitled equally with 
 all others to security of life and property, to liberty, 
 and the pursuit of whatever he may freely elect as 
 the main end of his being. These privileges are con- 
 ferred unconditionally. No question Is raised as to 
 one's pedigree, as to the education one has received, 
 as to the wealth or poverty of oneself or one's fore- 
 bears. No Inquisition is made as to a man's reli- 
 gious beliefs or (with one necessary exception) his 
 political doctrines; on the contrary, we are most 
 expressly and solemnly guaranteed entire liberty 
 of conscience. The nation has not established and 
 does not maintain any form of worship or any theo- 
 logical creed. It believes in educating all its citizens 
 at Its own expense, because it recognizes that educa- 
 tion is necessary to the discharge of the high re- 
 sponsibilities which Its constitution Imposes upon 
 all of them. This education Is Intended not to 
 cut men to a set pattern, but rather to enable them 
 to think, freely for themselv^es, and to become 
 independent Individuals, capable not only of obedi- 
 
8 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 ence to constituted authority, but also of initiative, 
 counsel and criticism in the conduct of the nation's 
 affairs. 
 
 The enormous wealth of the country is also laid 
 open to the exertions which the nation, by its system 
 of universal free education, prepares a man to put 
 forth. Here again, no doubt, we must allow for 
 differences between ideal and actuality, between 
 theory and practice. Yet there is in this country no 
 landed aristocracy, no privileged caste of monopo- 
 lists, authorized to stand between the worker and 
 the fruits of his labours, or to take from him in the 
 name of ancient privilege or consecrated wrong the 
 wealth that his efforts have created. The standard 
 of living here is high; and if prices are high, so too 
 are wages, salaries and profits. Taxation is low. 
 There are no costly figureheads to maintain, no 
 irremovable parasites upon the industry of the com- 
 munity. Abuses, of course, there are; yet they are 
 only such as arise from the public's unworthiness 
 of the privileges and responsibilities which the na- 
 tion confers upon it. But it lies in the very nature 
 of democracy that the power to remedy abuses shall 
 be as widespread as the abuses themselves. The 
 people gets the government it deserves. Where 
 there is corruption or maladministration, waste, 
 parasitism or despoiling of the public funds, the 
 remedy lies with that same electorate whose careless- 
 ness or lack of public spirit has enabled the abuses 
 to occur. If coarse, venal, unenlightened persons 
 are entrusted with important posts in political life 
 or the civil service, as they often are, it is our own 
 
PRIVILEGE OF NATURALIZATION 9 
 
 fault; without our consent it could not happen. One 
 should not, therefore, institute unfavourable com- 
 parisons between America and other countries, be- 
 cause in some particular respects the standard of 
 civilization, and of dignity, patriotism and efficiency 
 in public life, is higher elsewhere than it is here. 
 Where else is the antidote as widespread as the 
 bane? Where else can an admitted evil be removed 
 as soon as the people recognize that it is an evil, 
 and desire to remove it? Reforms which in other 
 countries can be effected only by revolution can be 
 brought about here at any moment, by the simple 
 and peaceful expedient of a public vote. 
 
 And this leads us to the further consideration, 
 that America in giving her citizenship challenges 
 the recruit to aid her in correcting what is amiss in 
 her present organization. With sincere humility she 
 asks him to contribute whatever he may have or may 
 obtain of character and insight to the upbuilding of 
 the more perfect Republic that is to be. 
 
 What could be more unreasonable than to expect 
 in this recently settled land the finished grace, the 
 mature poise, the deeply ingrained culture of coun- 
 tries that have been loved by an uninterrupted suc- 
 cession of generations, and enriched with the prod- 
 ucts of their labour and leisure, for many hundreds 
 of years? Until four short centuries ago, no white 
 man's foot had touched the soil of what is now the 
 American Republic. For three centuries after its 
 discovery, it was settled by tiny handfuls of people, 
 who for the most part had been denied liberty and 
 opportunity in the lands of their birth: otherwise 
 
lo ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 they would not have needed to come here and un- 
 dertake the desperate task of pitting their inex- 
 perience and their miserably inadequate resources 
 against the vast hostility of an untamed continent. 
 During the last hundred years, the ever-increasing 
 millions of natives and newcomers have poured an 
 incalculable sum of energy and labour into the work 
 of transforming a boundless wilderness into a gar- 
 den. Nothing in the world's history is comparable 
 with what has been done here. We have million- 
 peopled cities where, within the memory of men yet 
 living, there were primeval solitudes. Trackless 
 deserts and virgin mountains have been spanned by 
 magnificent railways. What has elsewhere been the 
 growth of generations and centuries has here been 
 accomplished in years and decades. 
 
 How unreasonable, then, is the attitude of those 
 who, standing aside from this gigantic task, sneer at 
 America for what she has not yet done, without 
 conceding any recognition to what has been so won- 
 derfully accomplished! When one looks at a city 
 like Chicago, the mushroom growth of a short four- 
 score years, the marvel is that any set of human 
 beings can in such a time have produced a work so 
 stupendous. It is in large part raw, ugly, strident 
 and offensive; but so in large part are the cities of 
 the Old World, which have had centuries of wealth 
 and leisure in which to repair the errors of their 
 youth. But Chicago has already begun to put on 
 beauty, to shed the hasty chrysalis-shell which it at 
 first thrust out in the effort to establish its footing, 
 and to devote itself, with ever greater strenuousness 
 
PRIVILEGE OF NATURALIZATION ii 
 
 of self-regeneration, to the task of becoming a great 
 as well as a large city. 
 
 And yet, when every allowance has been made 
 which truth can demand for the " rawness " of 
 America, is not the opportunity of manipulating this 
 material into the new world that it is to become, the 
 highest privilege which could be conferred on any 
 man? In the Old World you are shown the beau- 
 tiful or stately products of a wondrous past; you 
 cannot withhold your admiration for the works 
 produced by men of old, under the stimulus of in- 
 spirations which now are extinct. In the New 
 World, you are paid the greater compliment of being 
 asked to contribute to the inspiration of the future, 
 to aid in creating the miracles of art and science 
 that unborn men shall wonder at. Instead of being 
 overawed and discouraged by the sight of master- 
 pieces which the present cannot rival, you are stimu- 
 lated to creative originality by the sight and the use 
 of resources out of which a civilization of un- 
 dreamed-of grandeur is to be hewn. The God of 
 America does not say to you, " Stand aside, and see 
 Me out of this chaos create a world in six days." 
 He says, " Here is My new experiment, as yet for 
 the most part without form and void; but over its 
 face My spirit broods, and by your help and through 
 your labour it shall be made perfect." Of all the 
 privileges of American citizenship, this is the most 
 inspiring and the most beneficent. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE DUTY OF NATURALIZATION 
 
 THERE are in this country great numbers of 
 men of foreign nationality, who have lived 
 here for many years and who expect to remain here 
 all their lives, and yet have not become citizens of 
 the Republic, nor have any intention of doing so. 
 Thousands of these men are married, often to wives 
 of American birth who have forfeited their nation- 
 ality by their union with foreigners; and they have 
 children who will never know any other home but 
 America. Nevertheless they thrust aside the sugges- 
 tion that they should renounce their allegiance to 
 lands with which they have ceased to have any tie of 
 direct intercourse, and tender their loyalty to the 
 country which has welcomed them, which protects 
 them, and which offers them opportunities for the 
 sake of which it was worth their while to abandon 
 their native homes and pitch their tents here. Are 
 they right in the course they take, or are they neglect- 
 ing a great duty? 
 
 Now, this is obviously a question which every 
 man must settle for himself; and for the conduct of 
 some of these men there undoubtedly are reasons 
 which would command our respect if we knew what 
 they were. It is difficult to discuss the matter with- 
 out seeming to cast on one's neighbours reflections 
 
THE DUTY OF NATURALIZATION 13 
 
 which in many cases are assuredly undeserved. 
 Nevertheless, since in the case of those who intend 
 this country to be the permanent home of them- 
 selves and their children, it seems to me to be their 
 duty to offer their allegiance to the nation, I must 
 set forth my reasons for holding this conviction, 
 even at the risk of seeming to cast aspersions upon 
 those who do not act as I have done. 
 
 It is not possible for any human being to live 
 without a supreme loyalty, save at the cost of fatal 
 deterioration of his character. Let a man make his 
 private ends the one sovereign object of all his 
 activities, let him have no purpose greater than his 
 individual gain, or that of his immediate family, 
 and It must follow that his nature will shrink and 
 wither, and become " subdued to what it works in, 
 like the dyer's hand." It Is a proven fact of psychol- 
 ogy, and not a mere theological assertion, that in 
 order to find one's life one must lose It, and that the 
 certain way to lose It is to be concerned only about 
 finding it. Every man or woman who for years has 
 sacrificed and laboured for any cause that seeks to 
 promote the general good, or to make smoother the 
 pathway of posterity, becomes aware of a vast, in- 
 definable difference that separates him or her from 
 the shrivelled and atrophied person who has cared 
 only for " miserable aims that end with self." Noth- 
 ing can be more pitiable than the fate of the person 
 who has made money-getting the sole end of his 
 career, and has never known the ecstasy of self- 
 abandonment for a super-personal object. 
 
 Now, the nation in which one is born, or to which 
 
14 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 one has sworn allegiance, is and must always re- 
 main to every human being the greatest and most 
 commanding sphere of immediate duty. It is quite 
 true that we have a duty to humanity at large; but 
 It is no less true that in the overwhelming majority 
 of cases, the only way in which a man can discharge 
 this duty is by working for the moral, intellectual, 
 or even material advancement of his own nation. 
 Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of America, 
 regarded in the light of its historic function as a 
 land of refuge for the oppressed of all the world. 
 What could be plainer than that the main duty of an 
 American to these oppressed refuge-seekers is to 
 make this country correspond to the ideal vision 
 which its standards and professions have engen- 
 dered in their minds? Not one American in ten 
 thousand, even in war-time, can do anything directly 
 to ameliorate the lot of the unfortunate in Russia or 
 Galicia or the Balkans; but, by improving conditions 
 at home, by making freedom not only an ideal but a 
 reality, by securing substantial economic as well as 
 political justice for all in America, every citizen can 
 serve those to whom America is an example and 
 potentially a harbour of refuge. 
 
 Now if a settler in this country lets his loyalty to 
 the land of his birth wither and die out, and does 
 not, by his own free act, assume an equivalent loy- 
 alty to the United States, he is himself the loser, 
 and America gains nothing by his residence here. 
 All her privileges, except those which (very rightly) 
 are reserved for citizens, are given to him. He 
 greedily accepts and exploits them to the uttermost. 
 
THE DUTY OF NATURALIZATION 15 
 
 Yet It does not seem to him at all his duty to tender 
 anything in return, save what the State extorts from 
 him in taxes. But if such a sentiment became wide- 
 spread, If the whole population, or anything like a 
 majority of it, were to become Infected with this 
 sordid and thankless spirit, how long could America 
 remain the sanctuary of the oppressed? How long 
 could it continue to deserve that name? The Re- 
 public became the land of refuge because men who 
 loved it laboured and gave their lives to make it so. 
 The liberty they won for us has made it possible for 
 the self-seeker to act as he does to-day. But his 
 spirit, if it became general, would in time destroy 
 the heritage by which he profits. Democratic insti- 
 tutions in themselves are nothing but machinery; 
 it is only the purpose for which the machinery is 
 used that can give It beauty and dignity or make it 
 holy. If they who owe everything to America refuse 
 to love and serve her, she must inevitably, in time, 
 become unworthy of the love and service of others. 
 It Is only loyalty that can make a nation great. It 
 is only by being loved that a country can become 
 lovable. And the thousands who prey upon Amer- 
 ica and yet contemn her; who make their homes 
 here, and yet reserve the allegiance of their hearts 
 for the other lands which they have deserted; — 
 how dare they scoff at America for not being all that 
 she should be, when it is their ingratitude, more 
 than anything else, that prevents her from fulfilling 
 to the utmost her ideals? 
 
 One could not venture to speak thus publicly of 
 one's personal reasons for coming to this country, 
 
1 6 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 were it not that the commonplaceness of one's case 
 makes it typical of the situation of thousands of 
 others. There was no coercion exercised upon me. 
 In my native land I enjoyed political and religious 
 freedom; I was able to earn a fairly satisfactory 
 livelihood. It was by my own free decision that I 
 expatriated myself. Coming here first for a holiday, 
 and afterwards for a short professional tour, and 
 finding that for such work as mine there was a better 
 field here than in England, I accepted the flattering 
 invitation extended to me by my Chicago friends to 
 return and dwell among them. Inasmuch as I was 
 not expelled by tyranny from my mother country, 
 I did not fall back upon America as a mere necessit5^ 
 I am in the position of a man who has married a 
 wife, and who, having had every opportunity of 
 knowing her and her family beforehand, cannot pre- 
 tend that he was deceived either as to her character 
 and social position or as to those of her relations. 
 Or I am like a man who has bought a house which 
 he had first surveyed. He knows how the house is 
 constructed, the advantages and disadvantages of 
 its site and the aspects of the neighbourhood. If 
 he is not satisfied he does not buy; but when he has 
 bought, he has no right to complain of matters about 
 which he was fully informed beforehand. 
 
 Why then did I deliberately choose America and 
 forsake England? Why did I come out of my coun- 
 try, and from my kindred, and from my father's 
 house, unto the land which the circumstances of my 
 experience had shown me? Not for abstract or 
 fanciful reasons, but upon the most solidly practical 
 
THE DUTY OF NATURALIZATION 17 
 
 considerations. I came here because my work is 
 more in demand and is better rewarded here than in 
 England; because opportunities of initiative and 
 self-development are open to me here as they were 
 not in the Old Country; because class distinctions 
 and considerations of birth or ancestry do not here 
 prevent one from gaining any success which one may 
 have energy or skill to deserve. I came here, too, 
 because in this country I could secure a better educa- 
 tion for my children, and give them a more auspi- 
 cious start in life, than England seemed willing to 
 provide. 
 
 In short, America is more generous to me, in re- 
 gard to all my immediate interests and duties, than 
 was my native land. It is no ingratitude to England 
 that makes me say this. I hav^e always loved her, 
 and I always shall; for, though a man must needs 
 forsake father and mother that he may cleave to his 
 wife, it does not follow that he need cease to love 
 his parents or to look back with gratitude to them. 
 England has her faults, as every nation necessarily 
 must have ; but I did not abandon her on account of 
 her faults, nor yet because I was naive enough to 
 think America faultless. The ideals England has 
 taught me are noble ones; and if at times I must 
 criticize her, I can only do so by applying the stand- 
 ards of moral judgment which she herself has in- 
 stilled into me. 
 
 But, having made my choice, with what conscience 
 can I do less than meet America in the spirit in 
 which she has met me? How can I make of this 
 land a mere convenience, and say, in the quaint 
 
1 8 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 phrase of the Psalmist, " Moab is my washpot"? 
 Where would be my honour if I came here like a 
 parasite, to suck my sustenance from this soil and 
 then return to enjoy it to the land whence I came? 
 With what decency could I live here, availing my- 
 self of the freedom of republican institutions and 
 thriving under them, and at the same time sneering 
 at America for the imperfection of her institutions, 
 and praising by contrast those of the country which 
 I had left? Such conduct is in the highest degree 
 snobbish and ungentlemanly ; — not to call it by any 
 severer term. 
 
 Consider, further, the plight of the person who 
 has allowed his native allegiance to lapse, and has 
 not assumed allegiance to the land of his adoption. 
 He is that most forlorn and pitiable of all creatures, 
 the man without a country. He is an uprooted tree, 
 an extracted tooth, a divorce, an organ that has lost 
 its function, and therewith lost its meaning and its 
 reason for existence. For a man does not take his 
 character, his impress, his individuality, from the 
 world as a whole; he takes it from the nation that 
 gave birth to his soul and body. He is an epitome 
 of the vast, continuous life of his people. His per- 
 sonality resumes and carries forward that of all his 
 ancestors, through the storied centuries that lie be- 
 hind him. The old saying, " Homo sum " — "I 
 am a man " — is at best not more than a half-truth; 
 and he who used it should have said, " Civis Ro- 
 manus sum " — "I am a Roman citizen." For you 
 never see a human being who is purely and simply 
 human; you see men who are Romans, Greeks, 
 
THE DUTY OF NATURALIZATION 19 
 
 Jews; English, Italians, Frenchmen, Russians. 
 There is no such thing as unqualified, undifferen- 
 tiated humanity. Or, rather, humanity in that sense 
 is an abstraction, — an idea in the mind, formed by 
 isolating in imagination what cannot be isolated 
 objectively: the common element in all people of all 
 nationalities. The notion that the time will ever 
 come when all that distinguishes nations from each 
 other will be obliterated, and men the world over 
 will be cut to the same pattern, use the same speech, 
 inherit the same traditions and cherish an identical 
 loyalty, is a wild, impossible dream. — But of this 
 we must speak hereafter. 
 
 For the present, it suffices to remind ourselves 
 of the truth that a man cannot effectually pull up his 
 roots from his native soil without promptly sinking 
 them anew in the soil of his new homeland. The 
 life of the spirit must be fed from some source; 
 and a man's loyalty (however he may misjudge him- 
 self when he dreams that he has ceased to have any) 
 is in truth given, consciously or unconsciously, either 
 to one people or to another. One may remain un- 
 aware of this for half a lifetime; but our oblivious- 
 ness of a fact does not destroy the fact. Very few 
 people consciously remember that the atmosphere 
 has weight; still fewer could tell you exactly with 
 how many pounds' pressure it thrusts down upon us 
 at sea-level. Yet this utterly ignored fact is the 
 most absolutely unescapable influence of our life; 
 never for a single second can we withdraw ourselves 
 from it. 
 
 And so it is with one's national loyalty. It may 
 
20 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 He buried In oblivion through years of self-centred 
 absorption in money-getting or the pursuit of pleas- 
 ure, or of dreaming in the Lotus-land of cosmopoli- 
 tanism. But at last the hour will strike when there 
 will come a clash, a conflict, a sharp Issue on which 
 one must decide. Then the buried flame will re- 
 kindle itself; the volcano will prove that It is not 
 extinct; It will blaze forth anew through the cold 
 embers of affection and Instinct. And the man 
 whose Indifference, or whose mistaken theory, has 
 made him think of himself as neither Jew nor Greek, 
 but a dispassionate, cosmopolitan humanitarian, or 
 a solely self-regarding individualist, will become 
 aware that he Is after all a patriot, a member of a 
 nation, one In will and devotion with a whole people. 
 Then, perchance, he may find that his resurrected 
 heart belongs to the nation that he has forsaken, 
 and that has In consequence forsaken him; and woe 
 to him In that hour! 
 
 With what dramatic, with what tragic Intensity 
 has this truth been brought home to myriads of men, 
 the world over, In connection with the present war! 
 How were the anti-national theories shattered, and 
 the Icy Indifferences broken up, by the swelling of the 
 great deeps! What has become of the doctrine of 
 those Socialists who thought that patriotism was 
 only a decoy-duck held by exploiters before the eyes 
 of the working people? Thousands of men who for 
 many a year had been thinking and proclaiming 
 this, have now by their death given the lie to the 
 teaching they had proclaimed. The Idea that the 
 real division among men is along the line of class, 
 
THE DUTY OF NATURALIZATION 21 
 
 and not of nationality, — that a worker or capitalist 
 in one country has more in common with the men of 
 his own class abroad than with the other classes 
 among his own people, — which had been drilled 
 into the minds of the European working classes by 
 the followers of Karl Marx, vanished like a thawed 
 icicle the moment there came that awful voice which 
 called to the deeps of human nature. " Your coun- 
 try " was the word of power, even to the men who 
 had believed that one country is as good (or as bad) 
 as another, and that their loyalty was due in equal 
 measure to all the world. 
 
 No ! the cosmopolitans misunderstand themselves. 
 When Paine, the stalwart pioneer of liberty alike 
 in politics and religion, declared that the world was 
 his country, he was uttering a piece of doctrinaire 
 sentimentality, not a rational conviction. Neither 
 he nor any other man was ever able to live out that 
 facile but impracticable sophism. He did not really 
 mean to insult his American hearers by saying that 
 they were no more to him than the Kaffirs or Hotten- 
 tots, and that the summit of Fuji Yama was as dear 
 to his heart as Beacon Hill or the site of Independ- 
 ence Hall. That was what he said, m effect; but he 
 did not mean it, because he could not. Sir Walter 
 Scott, in lines too hackneyed to be quotable, was 
 literally right in saying that only a man whose soul 
 is dead can cease to feel the thrill of the words, 
 " My native land." Paine was a trueborn English- 
 man. That is why, like all true Englishmen, he had 
 grown to hate King George III and the system of 
 Prussian tyranny which that pett>'-souled alien tried 
 
22 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 to impose on England and America. The Ideals he 
 began to express as soon as he arrived in America 
 were English ideals ; for, be it remembered, the de- 
 mands embodied in the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence are as English in origin and spirit as the lan- 
 guage in which they are expressed. 
 
 It is clear, then, to me, that every immigrant who 
 intends to make this country his permanent home is 
 bound in honour to accept the privilege of incorpo- 
 ration into the American Republic. It is his duty 
 both to the nation and to himself to do this. If he 
 refuses it, he is rather shabbily sponging on Amer- 
 ica. He is a bad guest, a thankless and parasitic 
 intruder. But he is also doing a grievous harm to 
 himself. He has lost his share in the general life of 
 his native land, and has no right to take any in the 
 country of his condescending half-adoption. In case 
 of war between America and his old country, he 
 finds himself an alien enemy in the one, with the 
 doors of the other closed against him. If he thinks 
 that there are things amiss in America which he 
 might help to rectify, he has not acquired the right 
 of offering his counsel or criticism. With what 
 grace, indeed, could he express himself upon such 
 issues? America's answer, felt if not uttered, would 
 be: "No! You are using me and exploiting me, 
 but you do not intend to blend yourself with my life 
 nor to share in my upward struggles. I am a con- 
 venience to you; you prefer to give your loyalty 
 elsewhere. My effort at building up a nation, mani- 
 fold yet one, recruited from all the world yet united 
 by liberty and democracy, does not inspire your rev- 
 
THE DUTY OF NATURALIZATION 23 
 
 erence or enlist your allegiance. My Institutions 
 are not good enough for your sensitive spirit. So 
 be it; but do not presume to affront me with your 
 advice or criticism. Do I not know, as well as you 
 can tell me, that there are many things amiss in my 
 household? But these shall be corrected by those 
 who love me well enough to unite with me in spite 
 of my defects, and who have enough faith in my 
 spirit and my future to make of me not only a place 
 of exploitation but the object of their dearest 
 allegiance." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 
 
 THIS country is pre-eminently the land of the 
 doctrine of Rights. The conflict which led to 
 its separate establishment was inspired by a sense 
 of violated justice, and the assertion of rights is 
 made primary and principal in the historical docu- 
 ment by which the Colonies declared themselves an 
 independent nation. In that composition the word 
 " rights " occurs nine times, and the word " duty " 
 appears only once, in a clause in which It is made 
 subordinate to a claim of rights. The tradition thus 
 inaugurated has continued ever since to character- 
 ize the American spirit; and, although no nation in 
 history has evinced in its actions a finer sense of col- 
 lective duty, or had (considering Its very short life- 
 time) a more illustrious roster of sons who have 
 freely given their lives to the sustaining of its na- 
 tional ideals, it yet remains true that in the thought 
 of the average American his rights come first and 
 his duties a somewhat laggard second. He thinks of 
 the Government, the army and the navy as existing 
 for the sake of securing and safeguarding his rights. 
 The members of the legislatures in State and nation 
 are his servants, paid to give effect to his will. 
 
 But this is a one-sided and only half-true way of 
 regarding the situation. It has not been sufficiently 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 25 
 
 considered that the circumstances which gave rise 
 to the conflict with King George III, and which in- 
 evitably coloured and toned the Declaration of In- 
 dependence, were exceptional and transient, and that 
 the claims of right in that document are not fitted, 
 and vjere never intended, to be the foundation-stones 
 of a permanent and complete doctrine of the rela- 
 tions of men in society under normal conditions. 
 Although it is natural in times of war and revolution 
 for claims of right to be thrust forward, it is no less 
 natural and necessary that when, by the issue of the 
 conflict, the rights in dispute have been secured, the 
 emphasis should be transferred to those Duties of 
 Man from which all rights are necessarily deriva- 
 tive, and upon which they are dependent. 
 
 The primacy of our duties over our rights is a 
 truth which does not need any very elaborate or 
 subtle argument for its demonstration. The fact 
 that a man is born at all is the evidence of an effort, 
 so to speak, on the part of the universe, which began 
 millions of years ago and has needed the co-opera- 
 tion not only of all the forms of life, from its very 
 beginnings, but also of the vast energies of the inor- 
 ganic world. This far-drawn cosmic pedigree of 
 ours is vividly described in a passage in Henry 
 Dnimmond's book entitled " The Ascent of Man," 
 from which I may be permitted to quote a few 
 sentences : 
 
 Those who know the Cathedral of St. Mark's will re- 
 member how this noblest of the Stones of Venice owes its 
 greatness to the patient hands of centuries and centuries of 
 workers, how every quarter of the globe has been spoiled 
 
26 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 of its treasures to dignify this single shrine. But he who 
 ponders over the more ancient temple of the human body 
 will find imagination fail him as he tries to think from what 
 remote and mingled sources, from what lands, seas, climates, 
 atmospheres, its various parts have been called together, 
 and by what innumerable contributory creatures, swimming, 
 creeping, flying, climbing, each of its several members was 
 wrought and perfected. . . . 
 
 Even to make the first cell possible, stellar space required 
 to be swept of matter, suns must needs be broken up and 
 planets cool, the agents of geology labour millennium after 
 millennium at the unfinished earth to prepare a material 
 resting-place for the coming guest. Consider all this, and 
 judge if Creation could have a sublimer meaning, or the 
 human race possess a more splendid genesis. 
 
 But even in this eloquent passage, the specific 
 basis of duty Is not made clear. Whatever we may 
 owe to the unconscious forces of nature, the fact 
 that they are unconscious makes It Impossible for 
 any relation of the nature of duty to exist between 
 us and them, or for us to feel towards them any 
 sense of gratitude, save by the exercise of poetic 
 imagination. When, however, out of the Interplay 
 of mindless energies manifested In the suns and 
 stars, the beginnings of conscious, self-directing life 
 had emerged,^ the situation underwent a radical 
 change. Social evolution would have remained for 
 ever Impossible, had not man from the very begin- 
 ning accepted the stern condition that he should not 
 live merely for himself. In proportion as he rose 
 
 ^ The philosophic reader is requested kindly to note that this state- 
 ment does not involve any admission that consciousness is a product of 
 matter or physical energy, but only that certain determinations of these 
 are necessary conditions of its manifestation. 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 27 
 
 above animallty, his activities have ever been for- 
 ward-looking and other-regarding. He has pitted 
 himself against the hostile forces of nature in the 
 interests of wife and child, of tribe and nation. 
 Our life to-day would have been impossible but for 
 the unrecorded struggles of the cave-men and the 
 ploughing and sowing of the nameless, forgotten 
 generations. 
 
 When, therefore, one speaks of duty coming first, 
 far from stating a mere arbitrary dogma, one is only 
 expressing in a shorthand phrase the indisputable 
 fact that each human being owes to mankind a debt 
 far vaster than any activity even of the longest and 
 most gifted life can possibly discharge. And when 
 to this we add the fact that the rare gift of the genius 
 is itself something that has been conferred upon him 
 by the human race, — something which he could not 
 and did not create for himself, — the convincing- 
 ness of the plea is rendered overwhelming. 
 
 This being the case, I do not feel it necessary to 
 apologize for discussing what the immigrant can 
 give to America before raising the question of what 
 America can give to him. My contention is that 
 anybody who rightly considers the circumstances of 
 human life and is not a monster of egotism or in- 
 gratitude, ought to approach his country in the spirit 
 that asks " What can I give? " rather than " What 
 can I get? " Patriotism, indeed, has for its basis a 
 recognition, often instinctive and unconscious, of the 
 facts I have here briefly indicated. To each individ- 
 ual person the nation stands as the representative 
 of humanity at large; and because our immediate 
 
28 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 debt is to the nation, and because, moreover, it is to 
 the nation only (as a general rule) that we are able 
 to render any direct assistance, it is right that the 
 service of our country should be the channel in which 
 our activities should run. 
 
 As in the following paragraphs I shall occasion- 
 ally be constrained to speak somewhat personally, 
 I desire to guard myself against the supposition that 
 I am a ridiculous egotist, or that I have any excessive 
 idea of the contribution I can make to the well-being 
 of the Republic. Obviously, one has no right to 
 speak for immigrants in general, since the very value 
 of immigration into a democracy lies in the fact that 
 each group of different national or racial origin may 
 contribute something which the others cannot give. 
 If I were a Russian or a Greek, I should naturally 
 have to answer the question which this chapter asks 
 in a very different fashion. This portion of my 
 book, accordingly, cannot pretend to apply to immi- 
 grants of other than British origin, except in so far 
 as the duties of citizens are the same universally, 
 and except that it may possibly induce others to put 
 to themselves the same question that I am proposing 
 to myself and to all Americans who hail from 
 Britain. 
 
 I. In the first place, all newcomers can contribute 
 to America their labour; and any study of the in- 
 dustrial and physical development of the country 
 during the last hundred years will show how great 
 their contribution in this kind has been and con- 
 tinues to be. But not less important — nay, more 
 important — than the actual work is the sense of 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 29 
 
 the social ends which all honourable labour sub- 
 serves. It is these alone which can give it dignity 
 and make of it a means for the education and spirit- 
 ual development of the labourer. The ploughman 
 and his horse are both workers; but the difference 
 between them is that the ploughman has (or can 
 have, and therefore ought to have) a vision of the 
 distant populations who are to be sustained by the 
 produce of his task, whereas the horse has presum- 
 ably no consciousness of the ends which he is pro- 
 moting. Not the least of the tragedies of modern 
 life, and especially of the life of the labouring class, 
 is the fact that their work is so often gone about in 
 a dull, routine spirit, without any enlarging con- 
 sciousness of the place of each man's task in the 
 common life, and the remote and splendid goals 
 toward which it is directed. We seldom or never 
 think of ordinary wage-work as a means of educa- 
 tion. We think of the man as a mere tool or in- 
 strument. We speak of him only as a " hand," and 
 of workers collectively as " help." We thus betray 
 the fact that we are unconscious of the worker as 
 an end in himself, or of his work as a means to the 
 enrichment of his life and the development of his 
 distinctively human powers. If I am to be a worker, 
 I must insist, as a human being, that I be permitted 
 not only to exercise the strength of my body and 
 the craft of my hands, but to enter with my will and 
 intellect into the purpose of my work. Not only 
 has nobody a right to degrade me to the level of a 
 mere tool, but I have no right to suffer myself to 
 be thus degraded. The immigrant, who gives his 
 
30 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 labour, may render to the commonwealth a press- 
 ingly needed service by contributing also the con- 
 ception of labour as a means to the common ends 
 of the nation, and therefore as a means to the devel- 
 opment of the higher human attributes of the 
 labourer himself; for these alone constitute the true 
 wealth of a democracy. 
 
 2. Every man, moreover, who swears allegiance 
 to the United States must do so with the clear 
 consciousness that that oath obliges him, should 
 the need arise, to offer his life in the service of the 
 country against any foreign enemy. It is perhaps 
 in this connection that the perfunctory manner in 
 which the naturalization ceremony has hitherto been 
 carried out is most to be regretted, since the solem- 
 nity of the obligation thus assumed is apt to escape 
 the attention of the person who undertakes it. Your 
 vow to the United States is a vow that in case of 
 need {which need is to be determined not by you 
 individually , but by the constituted authorities of the 
 Republic) you are ready to take arms against the 
 land of your birth, and to give your life in fighting 
 for America against those who have hitherto been 
 your fellow-countrymen.^ Bethink yourself care- 
 fully of this tremendous pledge, and face the situa- 
 tion at its possible worst before you take it. If you 
 
 ^ The language of the statute governing the admission of aliens, 
 though somewhat gauche, is decisive on this point. "He [the person 
 naturaUzed] will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the 
 United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bear true 
 faith and allegiance to the same." Act of June 29, 1906, § IV, par. 3. 
 This does not mean, of course, that he is to bear true faith and allegiance 
 to all enemies, foreign and domestic. It may seem to say so; but that 
 is only the playful little way of our legislators. 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 31 
 
 are not ready to do this, you have no right to take 
 the oath of naturalization, for you will be forswear- 
 ing yourself. When such an exigency arises, as for 
 vast numbers of American citizens it lately arose, 
 those who are faced with so awful a responsibility 
 are entitled to our fullest sympathy; and every im- 
 migrant who takes the oath may well pray that he 
 shall never be called upon to fulfil this most tragic 
 of all freely chosen duties. 
 
 Nevertheless, it must be insisted that whenever 
 the crisis does arise, no foreign-born citizen shall 
 shirk his duty, or be permitted to pretend that he 
 did not know to what he was committed. The terms 
 of his contract with America are as clear and ex- 
 plicit as language can make them; and if a man is 
 not willing to carry out the contract, he ought never 
 to enter into it. He is not compelled to be natural- 
 ized, and it is inexcusable in him to hesitate or refuse 
 his duties as an American, after he has, freely and 
 with open eyes, made his final and irrevocable choice. 
 
 I am a naturalized immigrant. I was a British 
 subject, but I am so no more; for I have, with full 
 consciousness of the import of my act, " renounced 
 for ever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign 
 prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, and particu- 
 larly to George V, King of Great Britain and Ire- 
 land." This means that if, in the whirligig of inter- 
 national politics, a state of war should arise between 
 the United States and Great Britain, I am sternly 
 bound in honour to give my service, whenever called 
 upon, to sustain the cause of America against Great 
 Britain. It may mean that I shall have to engage 
 
32 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 in murderous contest with my own brother or with 
 my oldest friends. If so, I must set my teeth and 
 go through with it. Or it may mean that the Re- 
 public will ask my sons of me for the same grim 
 duty. That, if anything can, would be a heavier 
 burden than the other; but again I must neither 
 hesitate nor countenance any hesitation on their 
 part. For the choice of nationality is one of the 
 irrevocable and irreversible finalities of life. It is 
 Either-Or; if you are an American, you can he 
 nothing else. Other Englishmen before me have 
 made this choice, and have not failed in their duty 
 when the time of testing came. Were not " Com- 
 mon Sense " and " The Crisis " written by an Eng- 
 lishman? Thousands of men of German origin, 
 too, are at this moment proving that human nature 
 is equal to the heavy demand. Give, then, your 
 pledge to the Republic, with open eyes. Do all that 
 a man honourably can to prevent war, and especially 
 the tragedy of war between the two great English- 
 speaking democracies. But if, in spite of reason, 
 in spite of all that should make for the fraternal 
 co-operation of peoples, such a tragedy should occur 
 in your time, remember to what obligations you 
 have unchangeably committed yourself. 
 
 3. A third gift which the immigrant may bring 
 is that of faith in the institutions of America, despite 
 the defects and perversions of their present work- 
 ing. And it may be that the experience of an Eng- 
 lishman is peculiarly calculated to prepare him for 
 this service. For he has known what it is to live 
 under democratic laws and customs, to enjoy and 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 33 
 
 profit by them, and recognize them as blessings, even 
 though at the same time he were in constant rebellion 
 against the injustices of incomplete democracy, the 
 tyrannies of aristocracy and capitalism disguised 
 under democratic trappings, and the selfishness and 
 self-assertion of those who misuse the opportunities 
 of power and self-realization which democracy 
 gives. He has thus learned to discriminate between 
 the democratic ideal and the sometimes unsatisfac- 
 tory actualities of a democratic community. He is 
 therefore less likely than others may be to take the 
 sins and stupidities of a republic as a proof that 
 republicanism must needs be sinful and stupid. He 
 knows too well that, with the best constitution in 
 the world, the actual state of a nation will still de- 
 pend, and must for ever depend, upon the character 
 and capacity of its citizens. He cannot be deceived 
 by the frothy platitudes of the demagogue or the 
 spread-eagleism of the jingo. He knows that the 
 idolatry of flags and phrases may be to the full as 
 deceptive and pernicious as the idolatry of crowns 
 and monarchs; and that a paper Constitution can as 
 readily be perverted into a means of destroying the 
 very things it was intended to promote as can the 
 consuetudinary prerogatives of a House of Lords or 
 an established Church. 
 
 For men whose younger years have been spent 
 under the rule of eflScient autocracies, It is a not un- 
 natural, though a wholly erroneous inference, that 
 the waste, carelessness, peculation and general In- 
 efficiency often to be observed In republics {e.g., in 
 France and America before the war) are the neces- 
 
34 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 sary and the only possible fruits of democracy. Such 
 observers are convinced that the average man is a 
 stupid and selfish person. They hold with Machia- 
 velli, that — 
 
 in the general men are ungrateful, inconstant, hypocritical, 
 fearful of danger, and covetous of gain. Whilst they receive 
 any benefit by you, and the danger is at a distance, they are 
 absolutely yours; their blood, their estates, their lives and 
 their children ... are all at your service. But when mis- 
 chief is at hand, and you have present need of their help, 
 they make no scruple to revolt; and that prince who leaves 
 himself naked of other preparations, and relies wholly upon 
 their professions, is sure to be ruined.^ 
 
 They therefore look upon the attempt to organize 
 a nation on the basis of universal freedom and self- 
 government as a crazy dream, and are convinced 
 that the only enduring instruments for the securing 
 of a people against the chances of the world are 
 arms, wielded by the strong-willed. " Men," says 
 Machiavelli elsewhere, *' are either to be flattered 
 and indulged or utterly destroyed — because for 
 small offences they do usually revenge themselves, 
 but for great ones they cannot: so that injury is to 
 be done in such a manner as not to fear any re- 
 venge." 2 This is the basis of the doctrine of Macht- 
 politik: a belief in the baseness of mankind. All 
 men will be either exploiters of their fellows or ex- 
 ploited by them ; the wise man, accordingly, will take 
 care that he shall do the exploiting, and do it on so 
 grand a scale and with such thoroughness that none 
 shall be able to withstand him. 
 
 ^ The Prince, cap. xvii. * /^jj.^ cap, {{^ 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 35 
 
 Whoever holds such a belief must look with 
 amused contempt on any community that seeks to 
 build itself upon faith in human nature and in the 
 capacity of the average man to think clearly upon 
 world-issues, and to decide justly, even when a just 
 decision makes against his personal interests. Nor 
 can it be forgotten that there is always enough cor- 
 ruption in every republic or democracy to give to 
 such a view a superficial plausibility. But when a 
 half-truth is isolated, it is invariably transformed 
 into a whole falsehood. The democrat and repub- 
 lican takes his stand upon the fact that no autocracy 
 has ever endured; and that, in every case where 
 tyranny has collapsed, or where schemes of world- 
 conquest have broken down, — from the days of 
 Xerxes and Alexander to those of the Pan-German 
 conspiracy, — the failure has been due to the ignor- 
 ing of the high and heroic potentialities which are 
 always present even in those people whose ordinary 
 conduct is mean, grasping and selfish. 
 
 An Englishman, then, can pledge his faith to 
 America with a firm belief in the soundness of her 
 ideals and a convinced preference for her institutions 
 over those of other nations, without for a moment 
 closing his eyes to the wrongs that are prevalent 
 under them. His contribution to the Republic is 
 this faith and this insight, born of his experience in 
 his native land. He has enjoyed enough of liberty 
 to know that it can only be preserved and kept pure 
 by eternal vigilance; but also that it is uncondition- 
 ally worth the price. He knows that if the manifest 
 shortcomings of men had been held in the past as 
 
36 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 a sufficient reason for despairing of their possibili- 
 ties, the liberties that the British race has achieved 
 for itself and the world by a thousand years of 
 struggle would never have been won, for the struggle 
 would not have seemed worth while. But he also 
 knows that not until heroic demands are made on 
 men does the best element of their nature disclose 
 itself and begin to grow. 
 
 Now, it is painfully easy, not only for foreigners 
 to indicate conditions in American political and 
 social life which are a disgrace to the name of democ- 
 racy, but for Americans themselves to see these 
 things. Indeed, in the few years that I have lived 
 in this country, I have heard far more railing against 
 America from Americans than I ever heard from 
 foreigners, either here or in Europe. Many of my 
 American friends seem to have taken It for granted 
 that, in political life at all events, their fellow-coun- 
 trymen were such as Machlavelli declared all men 
 to be. They did not expect common honesty in the 
 public service, or ordinary, everyday business capac- 
 ity from the officials in charge of city and State 
 affairs. They have often hinted to me that corrup- 
 tion, selfishness, peculation and inefficiency were such 
 common and constant attributes of political life that 
 anything different would be like a miracle. Of 
 course I have never believed this; neither, I suspect, 
 did those of my American friends from whom I have 
 heard it. My reason for referring to It here is to 
 make clear that an immigrant, at all events when 
 he has had experience of democracy elsewhere, is 
 neither to be deceived about American institutions by 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 37 
 
 the flamboyant rhodomontade of the Fourth of July 
 orator, nor yet rendered cynical by the contrast of 
 the reality to the Ideal picture. 
 
 The first lesson that we have to learn In dealing 
 with our fellow-men Is that we must not expect too 
 much of them. But If this sounds cynical, let me 
 hasten to add the second lesson, which Is that every 
 human being can at times rise above his record, and 
 that we are often put to shame by finding how we 
 have under-estimated men's possibilities. The same 
 is true with regard to those collective activities of 
 mankind which we call political systems. No polity 
 is exempt from abuse; no nation lives constantly up 
 to Its ideals. There is corruption everywhere, the 
 main difference being In the degrees of coarseness 
 and blatancy with which it Is displayed. Undoubt- 
 edly we have had In this country too much of the 
 saloon-keeper In politics, and It Is inevitable that 
 corruption in a saloon-keeper should be character- 
 ized by the offensive coarseness which is usually 
 associated with his trade. But one cannot forget 
 that England has occasionally raised brewers to the 
 peerage, and placed them in the House of Lords, 
 there to obstruct by their veto every measure of 
 temperance legislation that threatened to touch their 
 profits. Nor can I see why it Is worse for an Ameri- 
 can saloon-keeper (who, after all, has to get, by 
 hook or crook, the support of a majority of his 
 constituents) to sit in a city council or State legis- 
 lature In the Interest of his trade, than for a Lord 
 Bass or a Lord Burton to buy his way Into the 
 House of Peers, where he has the power both to 
 
38 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 initiate legislation and to veto that passed by the 
 House of Commons, without ever having to solicit 
 a vote, and being unremovable from his post of 
 vantage by any protest of the electors. Both things, 
 of course, are wrong, and I am not apologizing for 
 the saloon-keeper here. My point is only that cor- 
 ruption may exist even where all its associations are 
 those of outward charm and culture. 
 
 But as no rational Englishman despairs of Eng- 
 land because of such unjust anomalies as those to 
 which I have alluded, so neither has any American 
 the right to despair of the Republic because its insti- 
 tutions are capable of abuse. I have formed my 
 impression of the working of the machinery of public 
 life in this country not from the disparaging com- 
 ments of my friends, but by my own observation, 
 and by a reading of such admittedly authoritative 
 studies as Lord Bryce's book on " The American 
 Commonwealth"; and from these sources I have 
 acquired a deep respect for the flexibility of Ameri- 
 can institutions and for their ready responsiveness 
 to the impact of public opinion. To revert for a 
 moment to what was mentioned earlier, the fact that 
 startles a newcomer is the rapidity with which things- 
 in this country are changing for the better. Not 
 only is it true that the personnel of local adminis- 
 trations tends steadily to be drawn from better edu- 
 cated and more honourable sections of the commu- 
 nity, but the pressure upon political bodies exercised 
 by self-created or unofllicial organs of the higher 
 public opinion grows ever greater, ever more irre- 
 sistible. Indeed, the very critics whose cynical com- 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 39 
 
 ments would lead the unwary to despair, betray their 
 amiable inconsistency by admitting that things are 
 much better than they used to be; — and this after 
 denunciations implying that things are now so bad 
 that they never could conceivably have been worse. 
 
 One of the advantages of coming from a com- 
 munity with a much longer history is the habit a 
 man forms of comparing the successive stages in the 
 development of a nation's life. Nobody who has 
 any idea of what English political life was like in the 
 eighteenth century, in the days of Walpole and of 
 Wilkes and Junius; nobody who has read the tre- 
 mendous indictment of even so moderate a reformer 
 as Edmund Burke; nobody who recalls Dickens's 
 picture of the election at Eatanswill, and remembers 
 that that flaring and delightful satire scarcely exag- 
 gerates the corruption that permeated English politi- 
 cal life less than a century ago; — nobody, I say, 
 who compares all this with the present state of things 
 in England can ever again despair of a democracy, 
 or fail to recognize that, as freedom extends and 
 becomes more of a reality and less of a pretence, 
 a nation is certain to go forward in the path of self- 
 regeneration and self-purification. 
 
 4. A fourth contribution which every immigrant 
 can bring to America consists in the positive good 
 which he has derived from the civilization of his 
 native country. It is at this point that one may seem 
 to be setting oneself up, in a ludicrously pharisaic 
 fashion, as an example. I must therefore beg the 
 reader to understand that in what I am about to say 
 I am thinking not of what I am, but of what any 
 
40 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 Englishman ought to be. I must also repeat that on 
 this subject the testimony of each immigrant will be 
 different according as he hails from one nation or 
 another. I contend that the British contribution to 
 American civilization, great and splendid as I believe 
 it to be, is yet only the chief among diverse elements 
 that have entered into the life of the Republic. No- 
 body dreams that i\merica is, and no enlightened 
 thinker will desire that it should be, a mere repro- 
 duction of Anglo-Saxondom, or an instance of what 
 a community of purely British origin would become 
 under republican institutions. The value of the 
 American experiment would be lost if this nation 
 became conformed exclusively to the type of any 
 one of the nationalities which have entered into its 
 composition. The business of America is to produce 
 a new type of national character and civilization, 
 by the cross-fertilization of the many culture-types 
 which the Republic has absorbed and is absorbing. 
 Let it, then, be understood that I here enumerate the 
 possible contributions of the British immigrant 
 merely as contributions, and not as an exhaustive 
 characterization of the American people. 
 
 5. The first, then, of these contributions is the 
 historic memory which British birth and education 
 give to a man. He Inevitably escapes the shallow- 
 ness of a retrospect that is bounded by 1776 or 1619, 
 or even by 1492. Even though his philosophy may 
 not have accustomed him to apply the formal doc- 
 trine of evolution to human societies and institu- 
 tions, he still cannot forget that in our life to-day, 
 and in the standards of right and wrong by which 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 41 
 
 we appraise or condemn our present surroundings, 
 the forces that were at work in the fifth century and 
 the tenth, and the thirteenth and fifteenth and six- 
 teenth, are still present and active. He knows him- 
 self to be not a new creature, but the latest pulsation 
 of a universal rhythm, the continuation of a spirit 
 that was " hoary with exceeding eld " before the 
 American continent was known to the European 
 adventurers. He is at home in the pages of Chaucer; 
 he remembers the demands made upon the Norman 
 kings for the restitution of the laws of Edward 
 the Confessor. The name of Alfred the Great is 
 no myth to him, and he consciously participates in 
 the perennial and indomitable struggle for freedom, 
 over the older and obscurer efforts of which that 
 name sheds its imperishable lustre. He finds him- 
 self on familiar ground and among his own people 
 when he contemplates the quietly serviceable higher 
 life preserved, amid the welter of constant warfare, 
 by the monks of Jarrow in the seventh century, and 
 reflected in the quaintly charming pages of Bede. 
 The characters of Shakespeare are not to him re- 
 mote and unfamiliar figures, for he has lived among 
 their counterparts and talked with them. The 
 struggles of the seventeenth century were still pul- 
 sating and reverberating in the forward movements 
 among which he was bred. 
 
 To him, therefore, the spirit of 1776, when he 
 meets with It in American history, is neither new 
 nor strange. He knows that long before there was 
 a man George Washington, there had been one 
 Oliver Cromwell, who, as Boswell's father pithily 
 
42 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 remarked to Dr. Johnson, " Gar'd kings ken that 
 they had a lith In their necks " ; that before Ben- 
 jamin Franklin there had been such men as Hamp- 
 den and Pym and Russell and Algernon Sidney. 
 Being familiar with the spirit which in 1649 executed 
 Charles I as " a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer and a 
 public enemy," he responds at a glance to that indict- 
 ment of George III which we call the Declaration of 
 Independence, and knows quite well its antecedents. 
 With such a memory, it would be surprising if he 
 were out of sympathy with that long struggle for 
 freedom which is English history as well as Ameri- 
 can history, or did not in some measure share the 
 spirit which made that struggle and has been made 
 by it. 
 
 If, then, all this has not gone for nothing with 
 him, there should be something of worth in the patri- 
 otism that he offers to the land of his choice. He 
 must feel his trusteeship for the spirit of Hampden 
 and Falkland, of Milton and Halifax, of Burke and 
 Macaulay, of Cobden and Gladstone. They should 
 be to him a present influence, an enduring standard. 
 His aspiration should be that he and his children 
 shall prove no worse Americans than these were 
 Englishmen, that his thought shall become no more 
 provincial than theirs, that his service shall be as 
 magnanimous and disinterested, his vision as far- 
 reaching, his grasp of principle as clear and 
 tenacious. 
 
 6. With such a standard, the quondam Britisher 
 will also be able to contribute a certain dissatisfac- 
 tion with the actual which is the animating spring 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 43 
 
 of all improvement. Major Ian Hay Beith, in his 
 delightful little essay entitled " Getting Together," 
 gives some advice to an Englishman as to what he 
 should remember in conversing with an American, 
 and to an American as to what he must bear in mind 
 in talking with an Englishman. To the Englishman 
 he says, " Remember you are talking to a man who 
 regards his nation as the greatest nation in the 
 world. He will probably tell you this." To the 
 American he says, " Remember you are talking to a 
 man who regards his nation as the greatest in the 
 world. He will not tell you this, because he takes 
 it for granted that you know already." As satire, 
 nothing could be more delicate and charming; but 
 the patriotism of a man who derives his spirit from 
 England ought to wean him from any such com- 
 placency as Major Beith attributes both to English- 
 men and Americans. It may lead him to determine 
 that his nation shall become the greatest in the world, 
 but never to take satisfaction in the belief that it 
 already is so. The Englishman has the reputation 
 of being a grumbler, and quite often it is true that 
 this disposition degenerates into mere petulance and 
 querulousness. Yet, as Aristotle would remind us, 
 every vice is a deteriorated virtue; and the spirit of 
 complaint, when it is not morbid, is a spirit of whole- 
 some criticism. The Englishman turned American 
 will neither say nor think that America is the great- 
 est nation in the world; but he will sternly deter- 
 mine to do rll in his power to make it greater than 
 it is. He chooses it because he is convinced that by 
 promise and potency it is destined to an incalculable 
 
44 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 development, that it carries the seeds of the richest 
 blessings both to its own population and to the world 
 at large; but his very consciousness of the ideal will 
 forbid him to be blind to the imperfection of things 
 as they are. Nor will he condescend to flatter the 
 ignorant egotism and vanity of the populace, whose 
 braggadocio and contempt for the foreigner are at 
 once the proof and the measure of its own unworthi- 
 ness of the American ideal. 
 
 Indeed, we do not reach the level of a truly dis- 
 criminating and humane patriotism until we abandon 
 the use of the comparative and superlative degrees 
 in estimating the position of our country among 
 the nations of the world. Not only ought we to cast 
 out from ourselves the transfigured vanity and tribal 
 egotism which we display when we speak of our 
 nation as greatest, but we ought also to realize that 
 the world as a whole will never become truly the 
 kingdom of man until all nations are great, and 
 until each is recognized by all the rest as embodying 
 and contributing to the world some distinctive ex- 
 cellence which belongs to no other. Our ambition 
 for our own country, accordingly, should be not to 
 over-top or eclipse its sister nations, but to develop 
 the moral and spiritual implications of its own ideal 
 in the service of mankind at large. It is only when 
 we attain this level that we are true to the standard 
 expressed in classic and imperishable form by Presi- 
 dent Wilson, in the series of public utterances by 
 which he preluded and proclaimed our entrance into 
 the European war. For nations as for men the 
 standard should be : *' He that is greatest among 
 
WHAT CAN I GIVE TO AMERICA? 45 
 
 you shall be your servant." The spirit, whether in 
 man or State or nation, that talks of itself as " big- 
 gest and best," that takes pride in the fact that its 
 population or its wealth is larger than that of others, 
 is a tawdry, provincial, nauseating spirit, of which 
 the only thing to be said is that, so long as it is satis- 
 fied with its own greatness, it can never be truly 
 great. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 
 
 WITH a sense of relief, I turn from the some- 
 what embarrassing theme of the preceding 
 chapter to one on which there seems less danger of 
 one's purpose being misunderstood. But this feeling 
 is speedily qualified by the recognition that into this 
 chapter I must somehow manage to compress a well- 
 nigh inexhaustible story. How in a few pages shall 
 I even catalogue the benefits which I am conscious 
 of having already derived from America, to say 
 nothing of those " good things to come " of which 
 I have a lively presentiment? The undertaking 
 seems desperate; but as the attempt must needs be 
 made, I must throw myself upon the reader's indul- 
 gence, confident that he will not too severely con- 
 demn an effort to compass something palpably 
 impossible. 
 
 I. In seeking to analyze and assort the elements 
 in my own consciousness which I owe to my contact 
 with America, the first great and definite benefit 
 which rises into clear outline is that of emancipation 
 from the burden of the past. 
 
 When out of the silence of the ocean one passes 
 into the deafening clamour of the streets of New 
 York, and again when one journeys on into the yet 
 more raucous and bewildering (and unnecessary) 
 
WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 47 
 
 shrieks of the Chicago " Loop," one seems for a 
 time to be lost amid the turmoil of chaos. But after 
 awhile one becomes aware that there is a spirit 
 brooding over this chaos ; and gradually, as the in- 
 ward ear grows accustomed to the noises, they trans- 
 late themselves from mere confusion into a thunder- 
 ous assertion: " Behold, I make all things new." It 
 is the Oversoul, the living spirit of America, — the 
 power which makes Americans but is not made by 
 them, — that thus communicates its presence and 
 intention to the puzzled stranger. 
 
 I have already intimated that a sense of the real- 
 ity and meaning of the past is one of the things that 
 Americans frequently lack, and that its European 
 recruits may do it a service by contributing. Let me 
 therefore hasten to add that America repays such a 
 service in advance, in generous over-measure, by 
 liberating a man from the thraldom of an excessive 
 pre-occupation with and subservience to the past. 
 Such a thraldom is one of the penalties of age, alike 
 to the nation and to the individual. Under its spell 
 the creativ^e, inventive and originative powers are 
 apt to grow benumbed and atrophied, and one be- 
 comes incapable of conceiving an order of things 
 radically different from that by which one is sur- 
 rounded. The wisdom of your ancestors is so im- 
 posing, and has left so many magnificent survivals, 
 that it seems like the presumption of an upstart to 
 think of superseding the institutions they devised. 
 
 It cannot, of course, be asserted that all Euro- 
 peans are so steeped in conservatism as this bald 
 statement might seem to imply. Many of them 
 
48 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 would laugh at the Idea that they are thus tram- 
 melled and impeded; but I think it may safely be said 
 that this great force of social inertia is much more 
 powerful, even over people of radical and innovat- 
 ing temperament, than they themselves imagine. 
 Their conscious active Intellects reject Its jurisdic- 
 tion, and they are as free in asserting that it ought 
 not to prevail as any American. But the unconscious 
 and subliminal parts of their mental and psychic life 
 continue to be swayed by it, despite their conscious 
 revolt. 
 
 I will put the difference between England and 
 America in this respect into a deliberately exagger- 
 ated aphoristic form, In order that the direction of 
 the two tendencies may stand out clearly : 
 
 In America, it is an objection to a thing that it 
 was used and approved by our grandfathers; in 
 Europe, It is an objection to a thing that it was not. 
 
 Or, to borrow a phrase from a brilliant article by 
 Mr. Alfred ZImmern that appeared a few years ago 
 In the London Sociological Review, America *' re- 
 places the philosophic ' Why? ' of Europe with the 
 unanswerable ' Why not? ' " 
 
 General tendencies of this kind disclose them- 
 selves in a thousand ways; sometimes In ludicrous 
 details. I had, for Instance, two dear old great- 
 uncles, who were elderly men when I was a boy, 
 and who died not many years ago, at the ages of 
 eighty-one and ninety-three respectively. They had 
 retired from business, and their chief occupation In 
 life when I was growing up was to sit at the fireside 
 and expatiate on the degeneracy of England as com- 
 
WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 49 
 
 pared with the good old days they had known In 
 their youth. Their house was lighted with kerosene 
 lamps, because gas was dangerous. Even the oil 
 lamp was looked upon with squint suspicion as a 
 parvenu, but the old gentlemen had got It Into their 
 heads that the kind of candles their parents had 
 used were no longer obtainable. (As a matter of 
 fact, I believe they could have been bought at any 
 oilshop in London.) They insisted that in their 
 youth the poor had been far better off than now, 
 and were entirely invulnerable to the statistics which 
 demonstrated the universal rise of wages and fall 
 of prices. One gathered from their conversation 
 that the race of great actors and preachers had be- 
 come extinct somewhere about 1850. All praise of 
 Irving and Terry, of Melba and even of Patti, fell 
 athwart their ears; for what could be the value of 
 the testimony of a generation that had not known 
 "the giant race before the flood"? One of these 
 dear old buffers was a great reader, but he kept 
 alive his faith In the unapproachability of the older 
 English literature by resolutely refusing to read a 
 line of Swinburne or Browning, Ruskin or Huxley, 
 or to Imperil his convictions by comparing the novels 
 of George Meredith with those of Thackeray and 
 Jane Austen. When questioned as to whether 
 Dickens's pictures of the now obsolete debtors' pris- 
 ons did not demonstrate that a marked advance in 
 humanity and civilization had occurred in recent 
 years, they were either silent, or would take refuge 
 In references to some contemporary scandal. In 
 the early '90's they were Impenetrably certain that 
 
50 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 the " horseless carriage" was an impossibility; and 
 though they lived to ride in motor-omnibuses and 
 taxicabs, their faith that the conquest of the air 
 could never possibly be achieved did not moult a 
 feather. One of them was lying ill on the day when 
 the Channel was for the first time crossed by an 
 aviator (M. Bleriot), and I am to this day con- 
 vinced that my ancient relative's end was hastened 
 by that melancholy portent. No matter how urgent 
 the business on which I wished to consult them, I 
 could never get a telegram out of either of them; 
 and I am certain that they would have felt guilty of 
 a species of witchcraft if they had ever tried to use a 
 telephone. Peace to their ashes ! 
 
 I still find it almost impossible to believe the testi- 
 mony of my own eyes and ears, and I almost despair 
 of inducing others to believe me, when I record the 
 fact that in 1898 and '99 I talked with a consider- 
 able number of agricultural labourers in the county 
 of Berkshire who had never seen a railway train. 
 This was at a village among the hills, between New- 
 bury and Wantage. The nearest station was about 
 four miles distant, and that was on a branch line of 
 the Great Western Railway, where about two toy 
 trains arrived per diem. These people had actually 
 never journeyed four miles from the cottages in 
 which they were born; and their condition was in no 
 important respect different from that of their Anglo- 
 Saxon serf-ancestors of the days of King Alfred. 
 Many of them could neither read nor write; for 
 even those who had been taught to do so in child- 
 hood had forgotten how. The Church of England 
 
WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 51 
 
 (which, as Samuel Butler somewhere remarks, has 
 not found it necessary to change a single one of its 
 opinions in three hundred years) was the chief influ- 
 ence to which they were subjected; and the difference 
 between the village parson who preached to them 
 on Sundays (for ten whole minutes at a stretch) 
 and one of the turnips in their fields was scarcely 
 visible to the naked eye. The squire, who prac- 
 tically owned them, and whose lightest word they 
 would never have dreamed of questioning or dis- 
 obeying, was a charming fellow, who according to 
 his lights was kind and affable to them; but he, like 
 the parson who taught them to obey him, had 
 scarcely a religious or political idea in his head later 
 than 1562, — or whenever it was that the XXXIX 
 Articles were put into their present shape. 
 
 It may be objected that I have deliberately chosen 
 extreme instances of British conservatism. I admit 
 this, but would remind the objector that such in- 
 stances were by no means rare, and also that ex- 
 tremes are the best illustrations of a general tend- 
 ency. The state of things in my Berkshire village 
 was repeated in a hundred others. Only in a coun- 
 try where the hand of the past is almost omnipotent 
 would it have been possible for such things to con- 
 tinue down to the dawn of the twentieth century. 
 It may also be objected that in remote districts of 
 America there are similar survivals of the conditions 
 of the later Middle Ages. But though this be true, 
 it is not true that the American mountain com- 
 munities which still speak sixteenth- or seventeenth- 
 century English are within hailing distance of the 
 
52 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 great centres of civilization, nor do they have Hving 
 among them an aristocracy educated at the great 
 universities, accustomed to foreign travel, sitting in 
 Parliament and received at Court, and abreast of all 
 the latest movements of social and scientific advance. 
 The villagers with whom I conversed lived within 
 twenty miles of the city of Oxford, that glorious 
 " home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, of un- 
 popular names and impossible loyalties"; but they 
 had no more idea of what Oxford meant or was 
 like than they had of Damascus. 
 
 For myself, I can testify with absolute conviction 
 that it was not until I had twice visited America that 
 I finally succeeded (if. Indeed, I have even now suc- 
 ceeded) In ridding my soul of the oppressive sense 
 that a man Is fettered to the particular place In 
 society In which he happened to be born. I was 
 brought up, like all good little Anglicans, on the 
 Church Catechism, the chief ethical teaching of 
 which Is conveyed In the following paragraph : — 
 
 My duty towards my neighbour, is to love him as myself, 
 and to do to all men, as I would they should do unto me: 
 To love, honour, and succour my father and mother: To 
 honour and obey the King, and all that are put in authority 
 under him: To submit myself to all my governors, teachers, 
 spiritual pastors and masters: To order myself lowly and 
 reverently to all my betters: To hurt no body by word nor 
 deed: To be true and just in all my dealing: To bear no 
 malice nor hatred in my heart : To keep my hands from pick- 
 ing and stealing, and my tongue from evil-speaking, lying, 
 and slandering: To keep my body in temperance, soberness, 
 and chastity: Not to covet nor desire other men's goods; but 
 to learn and labour truly to get mine own living; and to do 
 
WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 53 
 
 my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God 
 to call me. 
 
 The emphasis here on obedience to the King and 
 his appointees, on submission to governors, teachers 
 and the clergy, on lowliness and reverence to one's 
 " betters," — all elaborated in the sixteenth century, 
 — is sufficient, when inculcated (as it is) by a clergy 
 who for the most part still think themselves the 
 natural superiors of the laity, to stifle all radical or 
 republican sentiment, and to produce In the mind of 
 a child the feeling that if any Ideas of revolt ever 
 enter his head, they can only be suggestions from 
 the devil. Not, indeed, that this is the necessary 
 meaning of the injunctions; but this Is the meaning 
 read Into and deduced from them for the benefit of 
 the catechumen. Indeed, I am constrained to con- 
 fess, absurd as the admission may seem, that until 
 my twenty-seventh year, I was firmly convinced that 
 the closing words of this passage of the Catechism 
 were: "To do my duty in that state of life unto 
 which it has pleased God to call me " ; and I re- 
 member with particular pleasure that It was an 
 American friend who drew my attention to the mis- 
 take. I received my training in the Anglican Church 
 from Tory High Churchmen who thought political 
 Liberalism as vile as atheism, and were Indeed the 
 counterparts of Macaulay's 
 
 Doctor Humbug, who proved Mr. Canning 
 The Beast in St. John's Revelation. 
 
 Consequently It had convinced me that God's call 
 to the individual was made unchangeably before 
 
54 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 his birth; Insomuch that I ventured on a small 
 wager with my American friend that his reading 
 was the wrong one. When he showed me the actual 
 words In the Prayer Book, I was dumfoundered 
 with astonishment. 
 
 By making a compendious end of all these sur- 
 vivals of feudalism, and of the mood of resignation 
 which they induce, America renders an inexpress- 
 ible service to Its adopted sons. It delivers them, if 
 not from the sense of original sin, at least from the 
 sense of the sinfulness of originality. If the fore- 
 going passage from the Catechism (which was 
 drilled Into every English child for centuries In the 
 same spirit in which it was drilled Into me) may be 
 taken as typical of the older spirit of British con- 
 servatism, at least In its extremer form, we may 
 contrast it with a not less extreme embodiment of 
 the radical and revolutionary spirit of America by 
 citing the familiar words of Whitman : — 
 
 This is what you shall do: 
 
 Love the earth, and the sun, and the animals; 
 
 Despise riches; 
 
 Give alms to everyone that it will help; 
 
 Stand up for the stupid and crazy; 
 
 Devote your income and labour to others; 
 
 Hate tyrants; 
 
 Argue not concerning God ; 
 
 Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, nor to 
 any man or number of men ; 
 
 Go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with 
 the young, and with the mothers of families; 
 
 Re-examine all you have been taught at school, or church, 
 or in any book; 
 
 Dismiss whatever insults your own soul. 
 
WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 55 
 
 What a contrast! and how clear it is that wisdom 
 lies between the two extremes ! Yet It was necessary 
 that the new extreme should be set up to defy and 
 counteract the old, In order that the victims of the 
 old might be shaken out of the slumber that it had 
 produced. 
 
 Applying the generous spirit, if not the eccentric 
 letter, of Whitman's doctrine, America asks what a 
 man can do, and accepts him for that. It does not 
 inquire about his ancestors or his paper credentials, 
 and dismiss him If these fail to satisfy the Heralds' 
 College. Here and there (In Philadelphia and Bos- 
 ton, for example) one meets with a certain Inquisl- 
 tiveness about pedigrees which smacks rather of 
 Europe than America, and the way in which — even 
 in Chicago — a plain citizen finds himself be-doctor'd 
 and professor'd shows that even In a Republic, 
 which has deprived Itself of the right to confer titles 
 of nobility, the hankering after such " additions " 
 may not be wholly extinct. Yet the fashion in which 
 all doors are opened to demonstrated ability in any 
 department, and the beginner or newcomer Is greeted 
 with faith and encouragement, makes of the United 
 States a veritable new world as compared with West- 
 ern Europe. 
 
 2. The next specific benefit which I am personally 
 conscious of owing to America is that of confronta- 
 tion and Intimate association with representatives 
 of all the races and nationalities of Europe. It has 
 been my fortune to live for several months in a 
 settlement house on the West Side of Chicago, and 
 at various times to spend many weeks In the Unl- 
 
S6 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 verslty Settlement in New York and in similar 
 institutions elsewhere. There is nothing like a disci- 
 pline of this kind to take the insularity and provin- 
 cialism out of a man, if only he has enough flexibility 
 of spirit to profit by it. Ordinary foreign travel 
 does not produce the effect which I have in mind. 
 When you dwell for a holiday season among 
 Frenchmen or Italians, you do not seek to pierce 
 through the barrier of foreignness that separates 
 you from them. You are not associated with them 
 in the performance of civic duties or the furtherance 
 of social ends. Here, however, you rub shoulders 
 with them from the first upon the understanding 
 that they and you are to be fellow-citizens. Usually 
 they have learned to speak your language, whereas, 
 when you encounter them in their old homes, you 
 have to make ungainly efforts to speak theirs. In 
 this country you do not find merely what Italians 
 think of Italy or Germans of Germany; you have 
 the much more profitable experience of estimating 
 their outlook upon American conditions, and their 
 influence in modifying the environment into which 
 they are being assimilated. One's views on the sub- 
 ject of immigration become, I fancy, considerably 
 more catholic and tolerant when one is an immigrant 
 oneself. 
 
 It is an astonishment to me that so few Americans 
 seem aware of the great educational opportunity 
 which lies at their doors, through contact with their 
 fellow-citizens of alien origin. One would have 
 expected a priori that familiarity with foreign lan- 
 guages would be much more general among Ameri- 
 
WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 57 
 
 cans than among any other people. Yet the fact, I 
 fear, is precisely the opposite of this. My impres- 
 sion, tested on a fairly large scale, is that among 
 native-born Americans there are comparatively few 
 who are really at home in the languages and litera- 
 tures of continental Europe. The feeling of many 
 Americans in this matter seems to be identical with 
 that of a certain English duchess, who, when trav- 
 elling with her sons in France, heard them talking 
 French to the servants; whereupon she exclaimed: 
 " Boys, you ought not to talk to those people in that 
 way; it only encourages them." 
 
 The Hollander in his own country makes It his 
 business to learn the speech of the people whom he 
 daily meets. Even the boot-black in your hotel can 
 generally express himself passably in French, Eng- 
 lish and German; and there is reason to think that 
 he can even speak Dutch. The Pole usually knows 
 Russian and German, as well as his native tongue. 
 In Switzerland you can hardly find a schoolboy who 
 has not three languages in tolerable repair and in 
 constant use. But where in America do you find the 
 born American, even though he lives in a community 
 of Swedish or German antecedents, who has con- 
 descended to learn the inherited speech of his 
 neighbours? 
 
 It is right enough that the immigrant into an 
 English-speaking nation should learn the English 
 language ; — indeed, my own feeling is that no such 
 person should be allowed to vote until he can not only 
 speak English, but read and write it as well. But, 
 on the other hand, it is altogether desirable that 
 
58 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 Americans should broaden their own culture by 
 learning from the immigrant as well as by teaching 
 him. In no other way can the possible benefits of 
 the amalgamation of national and racial types be 
 secured. Yet, in this most cosmopolitan of all coun- 
 tries, hardly any of the newspapers have the typo- 
 graphical equipment to print correctly a sentence in 
 French.^ Their renderings even of French names 
 produce upon a stranger an impression of incredible 
 illiteracy. In every large city we have many news- 
 papers printed in foreign languages, but these con- 
 stitute an unknown world to most of the Americans 
 who see them daily on the news-stands and in shop 
 windows. Now, the business of learning to read a 
 language (as distinct from writing and speaking it) 
 is a fairly easy and quite delightful occupation, and 
 in no other way can the horizon of the mind be so 
 vastly enlarged at the cost of so little effort. But, 
 owing to our unwillingness to make this effort, we 
 are in serious danger of perpetuating the barriers 
 which ought to be broken down between ourselves 
 and our neighbours. We quite rightly ask them to 
 abandon their old loyalties; but we shall be incred- 
 ibly foolish if we also constrain them to forget the 
 culture they have inherited. 
 
 It makes a man's teeth ache to hear hov/ foreign 
 names are commonly pronounced by Americans, 
 and one's sympathy goes out to the unfortunate 
 bearers of these names, who are compelled to 
 acquiesce in their mutilation and vulgarization. I 
 
 ^ See the delightful article entitled "Accents Wild," by Charles 
 Fitzhugh Talman, in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1915. 
 
WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 59 
 
 shall never forget an incident which occurred in my 
 early days in America. When sitting with some 
 friends at a cafe, one of the party asked for a bottle 
 of beer with a well-known German name. This 
 name, in a fit of absent-mindedness, he pronounced 
 correctly, — only to find that the waiter did not 
 understand him, and to be humiliated by having that 
 functionary admonish him in loud tones of his error ! 
 I have now (for my sins) been travelling for six 
 years in the street-cars of Chicago, and I am at last 
 beginning to recognize the name of Goethe Street 
 as variously rendered by the conductors. We blame 
 our foreigners for their clannishness. We resent 
 the fact that they sequester themselves among people 
 of their own race, and do not take the trouble to 
 understand our language or our history and institu- 
 tions; but we are guilty of an exactly analogous 
 piece of provincialism when we betray our unwilling- 
 ness to learn from them, while expecting them to 
 learn from us. 
 
 This is all the more surprising and disappointing 
 in view of another great benefit which America is 
 conferring upon its children and its adopted citizens, 
 — namely, the genuine democratization of higher 
 education. The free high school and university (the 
 former of which is a recent innovation and the latter 
 non-existent in England) are preparing the way for 
 an immense enrichment of the life of future genera- 
 tions. But, by general admission, these institutions 
 remain seriously defective on the cultural as distinct 
 from the utilitarian side. Yet, amazingly enough, 
 many persons conscious of this defect propose to 
 
6o ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 remedy it, not by improving the teaching of the so- 
 called cultural subjects, but by eliminating them 
 altogether. I gather from the propaganda of Mr. 
 Flexner that because Latin and Greek are badly 
 taught, and are (so he erroneously asserts) useless 
 to persons who do not know them completely, they 
 should be dropped from the curricula of our high 
 schools and universities. Other complaints are made 
 about the uselessness of grammar (though nobody 
 who reads our newspapers can do their writers the 
 injustice of supposing that they have sacrificed much 
 time in studying the laws of correct speech and writ- 
 ing). It would seem to a plain man that the right 
 way to remedy the defects complained of is not to 
 abolish the studies in question, but to teach them 
 thoroughly. The specific culture of America must, 
 of course, be a new thing; but it is fantastic to ima- 
 gine that this new thing can be produced otherwise 
 than by growth out of the many older cultures of 
 the world, and by cross-fertilization between them. 
 No reasonable thinker will plead that everybody 
 should learn Greek and Latin; that would be almost 
 as bad as saying that nobody should learn them. 
 But it may be asserted without exaggeration that 
 every pupil who goes through our universities, or 
 even our high-schools, no matter what may be the 
 fields in which he is to specialize, ought to be given 
 a sound working knowledge of at least three lan- 
 guages besides English. It has been demonstrated 
 that such a knowledge can be given, when rational 
 methods of teaching are employed, in six months 
 for each language, — provided, of course, that the 
 
WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 6i 
 
 pupil Is not abnormally deficient in the kind of mem- 
 ory and mentality which the subject requires, and 
 provided that he is taught the essentials in a natural 
 manner, and not required (as is too often the case 
 with Latin and Greek) to perform conjuring-tricks 
 upon the grammar or to learn rules for the manu- 
 facture of worthless verses. Things far more diffi- 
 cult than foreign languages are taught successfully 
 in as short a period as six months; for instance, the 
 art of stenography. Having once had occasion to 
 acquire that art myself, I can testify that it demanded 
 more labour than the learning of two languages. 
 
 If we insist not only on dropping Latin and Greek, 
 but upon bringing about a general oblivion of the 
 living languages which are to-day spoken among us, 
 we shall cut ourselves off from our spiritual roots, 
 and become the most provincial nation upon the 
 face of the earth. Even our own older literature 
 (the works, for example, of Lowell and Emerson) 
 will become unintelligible to us. But this will not 
 happen; for we shall not allow Mr. Flexner, and the 
 exceeding great army of the phllistines which he 
 leads, to triumph over us. 
 
 3. I have reserved for the last of these random 
 instances of the benefits which America bestows on 
 the newcomer, that one which I think most impor- 
 tant. It is the universal conviction of Americans 
 that a life of idleness is disgraceful, no matter how 
 great may be the wealth of the person who indulges 
 in it. England, like Europe In general, is still un- 
 consciously dominated by the idea, surviving from 
 feudal times, that work and trading are the heritage 
 
62 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 of slaves, and beneath the dignity of the upper 
 classes. The fact of being a merchant or manu- 
 facturer is still a stamp of inferiority and a barrier 
 to social acceptance. It is not felt to be in any way 
 wrong for a man who inherits a landed estate or a 
 fortune to pass through life without ever engaging 
 in any form of productive or socially useful labour. 
 The tradition still survives that for a gentleman 
 there are but four possible professions: the Army, 
 the Navy, the Law and the Church; and these are 
 the only things that Oxford and Cambridge fit a man 
 for. A member of the " gentleman class " may in- 
 deed be a shareholder in commercial enterprises, 
 but he may not sully his hands by active participation 
 in them. In Samuel Butler's cynical novel, " The 
 Way of All Flesh," we have an over-true picture of 
 the fashion in which English upper-class education 
 fails to prepare a boy for the real business of life. 
 All this, of course, is rapidly changing under the 
 stress of the inexorable demand for efficiency, es- 
 pecially as this has been brought brusquely home by 
 the unprecedented exigency of the war. But even 
 when such changes take place, the mental and psychic 
 dispositions that correspond to the older order are 
 apt to survive its disappearance. One could wish, 
 for the sake of the English upper classes, that every 
 one of their sons and daughters should be obliged 
 to spend two or three years in America, either before 
 or after completing their university education. This 
 would rid them for ever of the notion that there is 
 anything inferior or degrading in honest work of any 
 kind, and would force them to realize that an idle 
 
WHAT CAN AMERICA GIVE TO ME? 63 
 
 life, no matter what may be the charm of its culture 
 or dignity, is itself the worst of vices. Of all the 
 things that I owe to America, there is none for 
 which I am more grateful than for its universal 
 assertion and enforcement of this truth. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE RENUNCIATION OF FOREIGN LOYALTIES 
 
 IT is Important that one should realize clearly 
 and fully what is involved in the demand which 
 America makes, that upon becoming a citizen here 
 a man must renounce all foreign allegiances. The 
 actual terms of the contract are bald and legalistic, 
 and they cannot and do not disclose all the depth of 
 significance which the transaction carries with it. A 
 man, moreover, who enters upon his new citizenship 
 in a generous spirit will feel bound in honour not to 
 minimize the obligations he assumes, but to give of 
 his loyalty in full measure, and rather to exceed than 
 to fall short of what the Republic asks of him. In 
 clearing up my ideas, then, as to what I am about 
 when I exchange my British citizenship for that of 
 the United States, I conceive it to be incumbent upon 
 me to search out the underlying principles of the 
 compact, and in my demands upon myself to go fur- 
 ther than the strict letter of the covenant, instead 
 of falling short of it. 
 
 For instance, so far as the mere terms of the bond 
 are concerned, there is nothing to prevent a man 
 from becoming a naturalized citizen even though he 
 believes in monarchy, — and in the divine right of 
 kings to boot. It is only asked (a) that he shall 
 abandon his allegiance to the particular sovereign 
 
FOREIGN LOYALTIES 65 
 
 of whom he was formerly a subject, and (b) that 
 he shall be a believer in some form of governmental 
 organization of society. He is not asked to affirm 
 that he believes in the republican type of constitution 
 as more humane, just, and desirable than that of 
 monarchy or oligarchy. He has to swear that he is 
 not an anarchist; but he is asked no question as to 
 whether he would think it right to work for the 
 overthrow of the existing Constitution of the United 
 States and the establishment of an hereditary king- 
 ship or a military despotism in its place. 
 
 Now, it is evident that a person of a casuistical 
 turn of mind might readily take this oath, even 
 though he considered a republican government and 
 democratic institutions to be the invention of the 
 devil, and were determined to do all in his power 
 to abrogate them. But everybody with an unso- 
 phisticated sense of honour and truthfulness will feel 
 that he has no right so to act. You ought not to 
 become a citizen of this or any republic unless you 
 are by conviction a republican. The principle upon 
 which you should act Is one which is expressed in 
 an historic utterance by Edmund Burke : " Not what 
 a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, 
 reason and justice tell me I ought to do." The 
 casuist may show you how, for sinister purposes, it 
 is possible for you to comply with the letter of the 
 covenant while your intention is to violate its spirit; 
 but untainted honesty will Insist that such a course 
 Is worse, by reason of its subtlety and hypocrisy, 
 than open and flagrant perjury. 
 
 It would, then, be " conduct unworthy of a gentle- 
 
66 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 man" for a man to subscribe this oath, unless he 
 believed (as I believe) that kingship by divine 
 right is a superstitious imposture; that governments 
 are the servants of the people, who have a right to 
 call them to account, and to change them, If they 
 do not work honestly for the ends for which they 
 are appointed. In choosing the sovereignty under 
 which for the rest of my life I am to live, I am ex- 
 ercising a right which I believe to inhere inalienably 
 in all men and in all nations. It may be true that 
 In the far past monarchy was Inevitable ; it may long 
 ago have been the only possible means of securing 
 unity of national action and responsibility In govern- 
 ment. But I believe that at best it was a necessary 
 evil, and that the Idolatrous reverence for the per- 
 son of the king, and the irrational belief in the super- 
 natural quality of his authority, were nothing short 
 of a curse upon mankind. Accordingly, I renounce 
 for ever all allegiance and fidelity, not merely to 
 foreign princes In general and to the King of Eng- 
 land in particular, but to monarchy as a form of 
 government, to the Institution of kingship, and to 
 any scheme whereby the powers of government are 
 entrusted to a person or class selected only because 
 of the fact of birth in particular families. And I 
 believe that nobody can be or become a good Amer- 
 ican who does not from his soul pledge himself in 
 this sense. 
 
 It goes without saying that, no matter what the 
 statutes of other countries may permit, it Is morally 
 impossible and practically Intolerable for any man 
 to accept the privilege of American citizenship with- 
 
FOREIGN LOYALTIES 67 
 
 out utterly renouncing his former loyalty. Until 
 some forty or fifty years ago British law formally 
 refused to its subjects the right to expatriate them- 
 selves. It was not that the law authorized a man 
 to swear allegiance to another Government with a 
 mental reservation, or provided machinery by which, 
 while professing to become a citizen elsewhere, he 
 could retain the privileges of membership in the 
 British Commonwealth. That, thank heaven, was 
 never the English way of doing things. It was 
 simply that the British Parliament did not recognize 
 any contract by which a man absolved himself from 
 his native allegiance. But this unjustifiable law was 
 abrogated more than a generation ago. 
 
 A much more recent enactment dealing with the 
 same problem was passed by the Prussian Govern- 
 ment not long before the outbreak of the world- 
 war. According to that statute, a German subject 
 residing abroad may take the oath of allegiance to 
 the Government under which he lives, but at the 
 same time, by making an arrangement with the Ger- 
 man Consul in the place of his residence, he may 
 retain the prerogatives of his German citizenship. 
 It might perhaps be instructive to inquire into the 
 motives of this extraordinary arrangement; but, 
 whatever they may have been, it is quite clear that 
 no nation which is alive to its own dignity, or con- 
 scious of the dangers to which it may be exposed, 
 will accept the proffer of allegiance from any man 
 who does not most solemnly bind himself not to take 
 advantage of such a statute. Still plainer is it that, 
 at least so far as the American declaration of citizen- 
 
68 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 ship is concerned, no man could avail himself of this 
 German law without committing perjury. For the 
 statement that the applicant " renounces for ever all 
 allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince" means 
 nothing less than it says; and if anybody were to 
 make it, after having arranged with the Consul of 
 a foreign Power that he was not to be deprived of 
 that Power's citizenship, he would be guilty of per- 
 jury, and the Consul and the foreign Government 
 would be guilty of aiding and abetting him in that 
 crime. 
 
 There is one further stipulation in this oath of 
 naturalization which, when we peep beneath the 
 surface of its wording, opens up for many people 
 a tremendously important problem in the obligations 
 of loyalty. The applicant is required to swear that 
 he is "not a polygamist or a believer in the practice 
 of polygamy." To most civilized men this will not 
 seem very much to affirm. Nor, indeed, is it; the 
 doctrine and practice of polygamy being an accom- 
 paniment of barbarism. But the point that arrests 
 one's attention when one comes to take this oath 
 is that the State, in makin;g belief in monogamy a 
 condition of citizenship, tacitly claims to possess 
 independent and inderivative authority in the sphere 
 of morals and conduct. Whoever subscribes to this 
 affirmation impliedly admits the right of the State 
 to make this claim. 
 
 Now, it happens that there is one foreign prince 
 who claims the right, by divine commission, to ex- 
 ercise supreme authority in the domain of morals 
 and conduct, and denies that any State possesses 
 
FOREIGN LOYALTIES 69 
 
 authority in this sphere. He assumes the right to 
 regulate marriage, and to override or pronounce 
 void any marriage law of any Government which 
 he disapproves. The foreign prince in question is 
 the Pope; and there are many points at which his 
 claims (which in theory are binding upon all mem- 
 bers of the Roman Catholic Church) come into vio- 
 lent conflict with the sovereignty which all demo- 
 cratic States claim and exercise. For Instance, in 
 the Encyclical and Syllabus of Errors issued on the 
 8th of December, 1864, it Is declared to be an 
 " erroneous opinion," " fatal to the Catholic Church 
 and the safety of souls," and Indeed an insanity, that 
 
 liberty of conscience and of worship is the right of every 
 man, and that in every well-constituted State this right ought 
 to be proclaimed and sanctioned, and that citizens have a 
 right to put forward their opinions openly and in public, 
 whatever they may be, either by word or in print or other- 
 wise, without limitation by ecclesiastical or civil authority. 
 
 These opinions, together with many others enumer- 
 ated In the same document, are reprobated " by our 
 Apostolic authority." " We proscribe them," pro- 
 ceeds the Encyclical; "we condemn them, and we 
 desire and command that all the children of the 
 Catholic Church should hold them as entirely repro- 
 bated, proscribed and condemned." 
 
 Now, it Is difficult to see how anybody who recog- 
 nizes the authority of the Italian autocracy by which 
 this decree was promulgated, can with a clear con- 
 science take the oath of allegiance to the American 
 Commonwealth, which claims the authority to as- 
 sure, and actually does assure, liberty of conscience 
 
70 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 and of worship to every man as a right, and main- 
 tains that freedom of speech and of publication of 
 opinion are also rights which a well-constituted State 
 is bound to uphold. The distinction commonly drawn 
 between temporal and spiritual affairs is nugatory, 
 for the simple reason that many so-called temporal 
 affairs are purely spiritual, and that all of them have 
 spiritual implications. Every question of conduct, 
 for example, is palpably both spiritual and temporal. 
 The Pope, in condemning liberty of conscience and 
 worship, and denying the right of free speech and 
 free publication, aimed a blow at the sovereignty 
 of this Republic, and of all other Governments which 
 do not accept him as an absolute arbiter. 
 
 Nobody can doubt that there are millions of 
 American-Roman Catholics who are really loyal to 
 the Republic, and who, if the latent clash between 
 its sovereignty and that arrogated by the Pope ever 
 came to an open issue, would be faithful to their 
 nation. But these men can maintain their fidelity 
 to their country only at the cost of an Intellectual 
 inconsistency. Nobody dreams for a moment of 
 questioning their right to hold the Catholic faith 
 and practise its worship. All that is in question is 
 their allegiance to an Italian prince who professes 
 to be the infallible custodian of that faith, and to 
 possess authority above all human jurisdiction to 
 govern the morals and conduct of Catholics. The 
 Catholic faith is something which the American Re- 
 public guarantees men the right to hold, to observe, 
 and to propagate by speech and writing. Loyalty 
 and obedience, however, to a foreign dictator Is a 
 
FOREIGN LOYALTIES 71 
 
 totally different matter. This is something which 
 the very principles of the American Constitution 
 prohibit a man from entertaining. It is no more 
 possible, in logic or in honour, for an American to 
 be a subject of the Pope than it is for him to be a 
 subject of the German Kaiser. 
 
 How sharp is this latent conflict of sovereignties 
 becomes still more manifest when we read, in the 
 same Syllabus of Errors from which I have al- 
 ready quoted, the condemnation of State education. 
 Among the errors " proscribed, reprobated and con- 
 demned" Is the following: — 
 
 The entire direction of the public schools in which the 
 youth of Christian States is educated, except to a certain 
 extent the episcopal seminaries, may and must pertain to the 
 civil authority, in such a manner that no other authority 
 whatsoever shall be recognized as having the right to inter- 
 fere in the discipline of the schools, the course of studies, the 
 taking of degrees, or the choice and approval of masters. 
 
 This means that the Pope, and the clergy to whom 
 he delegates his powers, are by right the sole cus- 
 todians of all education. From such a point of 
 view, the American public school, with Its studies 
 decreed by laymen and its teachers chosen by civil 
 authority without reference to their theological be- 
 liefs, Is an abomination. And there are actually 
 American-Roman priests who preach and publish the 
 doctrine that the State transgresses its legitimate 
 authority when It establishes or maintains schools 
 or prescribes the curriculum of studies therein. 
 
 One such priest Is the Rev. James Conway, S.J., 
 of Canlslus College, Buffalo, N. Y., the author of 
 
72 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 a pamphlet entitled "The Rights of Our Little 
 Ones; or, First Principles on Education, in Cate- 
 chetical Form." This pamphlet, copyrighted in 
 1890, appeared in a third edition in 1905, with the 
 imprint of Messrs. Benziger Bros., printers to the 
 Holy Apostolic See; from which edition the ensu- 
 ing quotations are taken. The author has an ad- 
 mirable gift of clear and lucid exposition, so that 
 there Is no possibility of misunderstanding his posi- 
 tion or his purpose. He believes that by natural 
 and divine law the whole business of education is 
 reserved to parents and to the Church (by which 
 he means the Roman Catholic section of It). He 
 deduces this from what he calls the natural law and 
 the divine law, the latter consisting of texts of 
 Scripture Interpreted In accordance with his own 
 preconceptions. As his very bright and lucid little 
 statement Is now apparently out of print and unob- 
 tainable, it may be Interesting to present the reader 
 with a few of his questions and answers: — 
 
 Question 21. Is education an exclusively parental right? 
 
 Education is a parental right to the exclusion of all in- 
 terference on the part of civil authority. 
 
 Q. 33. Are parents, therefore, free to choose teacher and 
 school for their children? 
 
 Parents are altogether free, despite all legislation to the 
 contrary,'^ not onlj^ to choose teacher and school for their 
 children, but also, if it seems good to them, to educate their 
 own offspring themselves, either personally or with the aid 
 of others. 
 
 Q. 40. Does education lie ivithin the scope of civil 
 authority? 
 
 ^ Italics the present writer's. 
 
FOREIGN LOYALTIES 73 
 
 Education does not lie within the scope of civil authority, 
 wherefore the State cannot, without violating higher and 
 holier rights, usurp the right and discharge the duty of edu- 
 cating the young. 
 
 Q. 41. What rights does the State violate by usurping the 
 work of education? 
 
 By usurping the work of education, the State not only 
 thwarts the intent of the Creator; ^ but also violates — 
 
 a. The personal right of the child to enjoy the education 
 intended by the Creator; 
 
 b. The domestic right of the parents to educate their off- 
 spring in the way it seems best to them ; 
 
 c. As we shall see, the divine right of the Church to dis- 
 charge the educational mission entrusted to her by her Divine 
 Founder. 
 
 After these refreshingly unambiguous assertions, 
 Fr. Conway proceeds to explain that the modern 
 policy of State education originated In countries 
 where the Roman Church had been robbed of Its 
 temporalities by Protestant Governments. He tells 
 his readers that these proceedings led to such a 
 decadence of education that the Governments in 
 question " found It necessary to erect schools at the 
 public expense; which institutions they considered 
 themselves justified in exclusively controlling." He 
 then delivers himself of some astonishing and ro- 
 mantic statements about the results of State educa- 
 tion; as thus: — 
 
 (Answer to Q. 44, p. 26.) 
 
 a. The introduction of State education has been every- 
 where attended by an enormous increase of crime, which can- 
 not be attributed to any other cause. In our own country 
 proportionally by far the greater share of crime is committed 
 
 ^ Italics the present writer's. 
 
74 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 not by the illiterate, or by foreigners, but by those who en- 
 joyed all the blessings of a public school education; and, 
 what is most surprising of all, as has been statistically proved, 
 the increase of crime has kept even pace with the efforts and 
 expenditure made for public education. 
 
 b. The leaders of anarchists, communists, socialists, nihil- 
 ists, and, in short, all those who endanger the social order 
 and disturb the peace of nations, are for the most part the 
 outgrowth of State or public school education. 
 
 c. The same might easily be shown of the lukewarm in 
 religion, of agnostics, and professed infidels of the school of 
 Ingersoll. 
 
 Q. 45. What are the effects of State education on civi- 
 lization in general? 
 
 While State education removes illiteracy and puts a lim- 
 ited amount of knowledge within the reach of all, it can- 
 not be said to have a beneficial influence on civilization in 
 general. 
 
 After this we learn that " the State cannot justly 
 enforce compulsory education, even in the case of 
 utter illiteracy, as long as the essential physical and 
 moral education are suflfiiciently provided for." 
 
 In the fourth chapter of his little book, the author 
 lays it down that the Church has the right (which 
 nobody has ever disputed) to establish schools at 
 its own expense and run them without any control 
 from the secular authorities.^ He also claims that 
 where there are different types of schools, the 
 Church has the right " to exercise such supervision 
 over the secular instruction in all schools to which 
 her children are confided as to assure herself that 
 there is nothing in the subject-matters taught, or in 
 the means of conveying them, or in the adjuncts, 
 
 » Q. 68, p. 40. 
 
FOREIGN LOYALTIES 75 
 
 which might endanger the faith and morals of the 
 youth " ; ^ also to examine teachers for all schools, 
 to remove them if necessary, or, where schools are 
 not fully under the control of the Church, to exact 
 the removal of incompetent teachers.^ He insists 
 that Catholics " cannot in conscience send their 
 children to American public schools, except for 
 very grave reasons approved by the ecclesiastical 
 authorities." ^ 
 
 It would be superfluous, and irrelevant to my 
 present purpose, to take up the points of controversy 
 involved in these assertions and these exorbitant 
 claims. My only desire here is to point out that 
 the position which Fr. Conway presents, with such 
 admirable honesty and lucidity, is a denial of the 
 sovereignty which the Republic has always claimed 
 and exercised. He demands for a foreign juris- 
 diction, for an alien prince and Government, a mo- 
 nopoly of the moral and religious education of the 
 children of America, and at least an inquisitorial 
 jurisdiction over their education in all so-called secu- 
 lar subjects. In the name of this foreign Govern- 
 ment, he does not hesitate to tell American citizens, 
 in so many words, that they cannot without grave 
 sin suffer their children to be educated in our public 
 schools. He makes the demonstrably false assertion 
 that the introduction of State-controlled schools has 
 caused a great increase in crime wherever it has 
 occurred. One would like to be favoured with the 
 statistics upon which this assertion is based, since 
 the official returns of various Governments give it 
 
 1 Q. 68, p. 39. Ibid., p. 40. 3 Q. 89, p. so. 
 
76 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 the lie direct. One could also desire to be informed 
 as to the bearing of the assertion, that State educa- 
 tion originated in European countries whose Govern- 
 ments had robbed the Roman Church of its tem- 
 poralities, upon the establishment of State schools 
 in this country. Supposing that the exceedingly 
 partizan statement of Fr. Conway were true, what 
 discredit could it throw upon the schools of America, 
 where neither the Roman Catholic nor any other 
 sect has ever been robbed of a pennyworth of its 
 temporalities? Even if State education had origin- 
 ated in this way abroad, the fact would no more 
 reflect discredit upon it here and now than the fact 
 that the Catholic Church in antiquity took over by 
 violence the temples of other worships, and con- 
 verted them to its own uses, reflects upon present- 
 day Catholicism. 
 
 We have here, then, a potentially dangerous con- 
 flict of sovereignties; and we have a Roman-Ameri- 
 can priest defiantly asserting the supremacy of a 
 foreign Government over our own. He talks much 
 of the rights of parents, but he denies that the na- 
 tional or State Governments, which are the organs 
 of the will of the vast majority of parents in this 
 country, have any right to establish the kind of 
 schools those parents desire, or can possibly possess 
 an authority superior to, or even co-ordinate with, 
 that of the despotic Italian prince in whose name he 
 speak. 
 
 Now, Fr. Conway's doctrine may possibly be good 
 Catholicism (though there are plenty of good Cath- 
 olics ready to aver that it is not), but it is certainly 
 
FOREIGN LOYALTIES 77 
 
 bad Americanism. The most subtle and insidious 
 of all foreign loyalties, and the one which, before 
 all others, ought to be renounced by the citizens of 
 a free commonwealth, is this loyalty to a man who 
 claims to be the irresponsible arbiter of morals and 
 conduct. It may be wise to let sleeping dogs and 
 sleeping dogmas lie; but, if I mistake not, this par- 
 ticular dogma is very far from sleeping. Its eyes 
 are not more than half closed, and its teeth and 
 claws are ready for use the moment a propitious 
 conjuncture of circumstances shall arise. 
 
 I swear allegiance to America, in the conviction 
 that my oath necessarily carries with it the rejection 
 of the claims of the Pope to override the sovereignty 
 of democratic nations. I understand the American 
 Commonwealth to maintain that every nation has 
 the right to unquestioned autonomy in spiritual mat- 
 ters, like education, as well as in so-called temporal 
 ones, like taxation. I admit that claim ; — which, 
 indeed, is only a deduction from the right of every 
 man to freedom of thought and conscience. There 
 are millions of Catholics who are not Papists; which 
 demonstrates that Papalism has nothing necessarily 
 to do with Catholicism. The pretences of the Pope 
 are an indefensible usurpation of a sovereignty that 
 belongs, by divine right, to the democratic nation 
 itself; and I understand my oath to mean the rejec- 
 tion of these pretences, as much as of the allegiance 
 I formerly owed to the King of Great Britain. 
 
 It may possibly be replied to the foregoing argu- 
 ment that Roman Catholics are no longer bound by 
 the Encyclical of 1864. I may be told that Fr. Con- 
 
78 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 way, being a Jesuit, does not represent the general 
 attitude of the Roman Catholics of this country, or 
 of their priesthood. Nothing would be more grati- 
 fying to clear-headed Americans than to have this 
 assurance made officially on behalf of the American- 
 Roman clergy. It will be easy enough for them to 
 disavow the assumptions of the Vatican, If they are 
 in a position to do so ; and by doing it, without equi- 
 vocation or mental reservation, they will free them- 
 selves from an imputation which many of the laity, 
 at least, undoubtedly do not deserve, but which at 
 present stands as a barrier in the way of whole- 
 hearted communion in the service of the Republic 
 between them and their fellow-citizens. Let them 
 acknowledge that the State possesses an original 
 and Imprescriptible authority to secure freedom of 
 conscience and of worship to all, and to endow 
 schools and control the teaching therein. Let them 
 declare that free thought and speech, and the public 
 school, exist de iiire, and are not merely to be toler- 
 ated because they cannot at present be got rid of. 
 As soon as men see that Roman Catholics, clergy 
 as well as laity, are free to take this stand without 
 condemnation from Rome, all difficulty and distrust 
 will be at an end. 
 
 Note. — I wish to repeat, with the strongest possible emphasis, that 
 the foregoing pages do not contain or constitute an attack upon 
 Catholicism, or upon any article of the Catholic creeds, or upon the 
 usages of Catholic worship, or upon the orders of the ministry, or 
 upon the Pope in his spiritual capacity. They are a criticism and a re- 
 jection only of the Pope's claim to exercise a sovereignty rivalling the 
 just sovereignty of nations over their citizens, and superior to that of 
 nations. All that I have said could perfectly well be subscribed to by 
 any believer in the entire Catholic faith; indeed, I have but expressed 
 what is actually held by many Catholics, and what is impUcitly held 
 and expressed in practice by millions of them. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 TO WHAT DOES ONE SWEAR ALLEGIANCE? 
 
 THE answer to this question is less obvious 
 than at a superficial glance It would appear 
 to be. One gives one's pledge to the Government of 
 the Republic, through its legally authorized officials; 
 but It Is far from being merely a declaration of per- 
 sonal loyalty to the Administration which happens 
 to be in office at the time when It is made. In a 
 republic you do not become a subject; you are made 
 a citizen : and this means that your allegiance Is 
 given not exclusively to any person or group of per- 
 sons, but to something far more enduring, far more 
 powerful, and yet far more elusive. You become 
 Incorporated into the nation, and It Is to the nation 
 that your fidelity Is vowed. 
 
 But what Is a nation? 
 
 It is when we begin to think about this question 
 that the complexity of the problem discloses Itself. 
 It Is quite clear that a nation (in Mazzinl's words) 
 is " not a mere zone of territory "; for a child can 
 see that the territory of the United States existed 
 before the American nation had begun to come Into 
 being, and would remain though the nation were 
 utterly destroyed; and besides, the Idea of pledging 
 one's allegiance to three million square miles of land 
 is ridiculous. You can be loyal to a personal being 
 
8o ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 or to an ideal, but not to a stretch of country. It Is 
 only when the land has become, so to speak, drenched 
 with the ideals of its people that it can begin, even 
 in a figurative sense, to constitute a part of the object 
 of a man's loyalty. 
 
 Nor, again, would it be correct to say that one's 
 allegiance is tendered to the hundred millions of 
 people who happen to be living under the Stars and 
 Stripes at a given moment. For again it is clear 
 that the nation existed before they were born, and 
 will continue to exist after they are dead. The na- 
 tion was already alive and active when the Declara- 
 tion of Independence was drawn up, and every 
 American hopes and believes that it will continue to 
 be alive and active after Macaulay's New Zealander 
 shall have crossed the Atlantic and meditated among 
 the ruins of New York. Again, as Americans have 
 been insisting ever since the Revolution, and more 
 particularly since the Civil War, the nation is a 
 single and indivisible unity. It is the " One out of 
 many" referred to on our coinage; and neither a 
 hundred millions of people nor yet forty-eight States 
 can properly be called One, save in a sense that it 
 needs careful analysis to disentangle. 
 
 The plot thickens, and begins to take on almost 
 the air of a metaphysical riddle, when we have 
 realized that neither the existing generation nor any 
 of its predecessors can be said to constitute Amer- 
 ica. For every American now living would find it 
 impossible, — indeed, every American who was liv- 
 ing in 1776 would have found it impossible, — to 
 deny that it was America which had made him. 
 
SWEARING ALLEGIANCE 8i 
 
 Each native-born citizen of this country is the out- 
 come of a history, an Ideal, a tradition, and a unique 
 collective life. It is not merely that men are the 
 products of their environment in the biological sense; 
 it Is also the fact that that environment has itself 
 been moulded and changed by the more elusive 
 spiritual forces which determine the history and con- 
 stitute the identity of the nation In which they inhere. 
 
 In these hidden potencies the nation really con- 
 sists. Every American at birth becomes a part of 
 It; but he can do this only because It existed, com- 
 plete and living, and ready to absorb him, before- 
 hand. It may be likened to a fire. Into which suc- 
 cessive increments of fuel are thrown. Each of them 
 becomes a part of the fire, and contributes to its 
 heat and flame; but they could not do this if the fire 
 had not been burning before they were cast Into it. 
 
 And yet the comparison fails us; for the truth 
 about a nation is subtler than any physical Image 
 can represent. We must remind ourselves that, 
 whereas a fire does not create the things that are 
 thrown upon it, the nation does create its citizens. 
 
 To express the connection between the Republic 
 and the States, we use the phrase " E plurihus 
 ununi.^^ But how is It possible for the One — the 
 nation — to be derived from forty-eight States, 
 thirty-five of which did not exist when it came into 
 being? Yet nobody, I suppose, will deny that the 
 relation of vital Interdependence between the nation 
 and, let us say, Oregon or California, is now as close 
 and real as that between the nation and Pennsyl- 
 vania or Massachusetts. Whatever may have been 
 
82 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 the case with regard to the original thirteen Col- 
 onies, all the rest of the States have unquestionably 
 been created by the nation; although, to be sure, 
 the moment they are made, they in turn become 
 parts of that which has created them. 
 
 But we must push the problem further back, and 
 recognize, even though it appear at first blush to be 
 in defiance of the historic facts, that it was the nation 
 which made the first thirteen States. They had 
 been mere Colonies; that is to say, offshoots of an- 
 other nation; and their transition from the rank of 
 Colonies to that of States was possible only because 
 there was already a new nation to confer upon them 
 their higher status and prerogatives. None of them 
 singly could have made itself a State. It was the 
 living power which we call America that did this. 
 It was the new will, which had grown up in and 
 through the exigencies of Colonial experience. The 
 moment this will became conscious of itself, the 
 moment its identity in all the Colonies was recog- 
 nized, the American nation was born. This means 
 that it had existed before the first Continental Con- 
 gress had convened, its first unmistakable expression 
 being the impulse which led to the convening of that 
 Congress. From then till now, by an Irresistible 
 process of self-development, the nation has been 
 growing towards the consciousness that It Is the one 
 truly autonomous, sovereign entity In all these three 
 million square miles, and over all these successive 
 and ever-multiplying hosts of human creatures. 
 
 The States at first Imagined that the little child 
 born to them was inferior to them, — that it pos- 
 
SWEARING ALLEGIANCE 83 
 
 sessed no original and inderivative powers of its 
 own, but, like all good children, was to do what its 
 parents told it, and not presume to arrogate to itself 
 any rights or functions other than those which were 
 specifically delegated to it. At first the child was 
 obedient enough; but it was not long before the 
 parents discovered that something incalculably great 
 and strange — something which they could not con- 
 trol, but which was predestined to control them — 
 had come into life. It was impossible to arrest the 
 growth of the child; and in little more than seventy 
 years the young giant had developed to such an 
 extent that he was ready to turn upon his begetters, 
 and threaten with destruction those of them that 
 refused to submit to his will. 
 
 The essence of the Civil War was the clash be- 
 tween the theoretical idea with which the original 
 States had set out, and the massive and unescapable 
 reality which in the meantime had been growing up. 
 To-day, if we prefer scientific precision to the flat- 
 tery of local vanities, we shall have to recognize 
 that the Republic is in truth not only a single nation, 
 but also a single State. For it is the Republic in 
 its unity which alone possesses and exercises the dis- 
 tinctive prerogatives of Statehood, — those, namely, 
 of entering into relations with foreign States, of 
 imposing and removing tariffs, of making treaties, 
 appointing and commissioning ambassadors, and 
 determining the issues of peace and war. Any 
 Power which can do these things is a State; one 
 which cannot do them is not accurately described by 
 that term. 
 
84 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 It was the half-unconscious recognition of these 
 realities which led to the War of Secession. Mis- 
 taking words for things, the Confederacy imagined 
 that the locally self-governing units composing it 
 were free to secede from the Union into which they 
 had voluntarily entered. Had they been truly 
 States, this would unquestionably hav,e been the 
 case; but because, like their Northern neighbours, 
 they were in reality not States, but only constituent 
 parts of the one American State, it was not in their 
 power or within their right to sunder themselves 
 from the indivisible Republic. 
 
 Evidently, then, the America to which at naturali- 
 zation we pledge our fidelity is something vaster 
 than what can be seen and touched at any moment; 
 it is something more even than the Constitution and 
 laws, to which the statute demands our allegiance. 
 It Is the over-arching and informing Spirit out of 
 which these have come. It is the mighty Will, which 
 has been growing to self-consciousness and self- 
 determination from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers 
 to our own. It was not made by the Revolution; 
 it made the Revolution. While, to be sure, it can 
 act only through the persons who at a given moment 
 constitute the population of the country, it is never- 
 theless true that by it those persons have been made 
 what they are. 
 
 There is, in strictness, no such thing as " accident 
 of birth " ; a man's character, up to the point at 
 which it becomes free and self-determining, is the 
 outgrowth of definitely traceable causes, spiritual 
 as well as physical. America embodies itself anew 
 
SWEARING ALLEGIANCE 85 
 
 in each of its sons. Unique as their individuality 
 may be, original and independent as their genius 
 and temperament often are, they yet owe their very 
 inmost selfhood to this super-personal and super- 
 temporal spirit of the nation, from and into which 
 they are born. It is this spirit which demands of the 
 newcomer his loyalty and the renunciation of all 
 other allegiances. It is this mighty mother of free- 
 men, this inspirer of a people's ideals, which says 
 to its children, as the genius of the Hebrew nation 
 said to the Jews of old, " Thou shalt have none 
 other gods before me." 
 
 Nothing is more striking than the fashion in 
 which these deeper tmths about the nature and 
 meaning of nationality emerge into men's conscious- 
 ness upon the pressure of any great crisis or shock 
 of danger. Never was there a population whose 
 national character was more marked than that of 
 Americans; yet never has there been a people that 
 in ordinary times was so unconscious of the reality, 
 the presence and power of the forces that had made 
 and were for ever re-making it. The great utter- 
 ances of the American spirit all belong to times of 
 war or national peril; they have all been inspired by 
 the presence of danger, either from within or from 
 without. And of late, with a war of unprecedented 
 magnitude upon our hands, history has repeated it- 
 self. Last year, for example, Mr. Franklin Lane, 
 Secretary of the Department of the Interior, dis- 
 cussing the question why we were at war with Ger- 
 many, expressed the true nature of America in these 
 eloquent words : — 
 
86 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 America is not the name of so much territory. It is a 
 living spirit, born in travail, grown in the rough school of 
 bitter experiences; a living spirit which has purpose and 
 pride and conscience; knows why it wishes to live, and to 
 what end ; knows how it comes to be respected of the world, 
 and hopes to retain that respect by living on with the light 
 of Lincoln's love of man as its old and new testament. 
 
 It is more precious that this America should live than that 
 we Americans should live.^ 
 
 " America is a living spirit." " This America " 
 is substantive; "we Americans" are adjectival. 
 The very collocation of the words shows the priority 
 of the nation to its people and their derivativeness 
 from It. Now, when a man uses such phrases, Is he 
 merely sentimentalizing, is he embroidering upon 
 the facts a lacework of poetic fancy? Is It only a 
 flight of Imagination, to which the speaker Is Im- 
 pelled by the exaltation of the moment? 
 
 Nay; rather It Is the exaltation of the moment 
 which lifts a man out of the ground-mists In which 
 our pedestrian dally life Is enshrouded, and discloses 
 to him the truth that can only be seen In the light 
 of the upper air. America Is In literal truth a living 
 spirit; for what save life can beget life? What but 
 a living spirit could create men and women as 
 America creates her children? What but a mighty 
 personal or super-personal power can engender soul 
 and character, Impart individuality, and make the 
 difference between the South Sea Islander and the 
 proud and self-reliant American? 
 
 Mr. Lane speaks of " Lincoln's love of man " 
 
 * From a report in The Springfield Republican, weekly edition, 
 June 7th, 1917. 
 
SWEARING ALLEGIANCE 87 
 
 as the old and new testament of America ; and again 
 he is meticulously exact, for that love of man was 
 old in America before it was made new in Lincoln. 
 It was the Old Covenant, the divinely appointed 
 thing, which had given rise to and justified the sepa- 
 rate life of America. From her, Lincoln himself 
 derived it; his glory is that he was, in Lowell's 
 words, " the first American," — the first in whom 
 what had always been implicit in the American 
 genius became explicit, fully conscious, and power- 
 fully active. This love of man, we may say, without 
 irreverence but with closest truth, was the American 
 Word, which had been from the beginning, by which 
 all things American were made; and in Lincoln it 
 was made flesh. 
 
 " But where," it may be asked, " are we to look 
 for this America? What evidence can be adduced 
 to show that it is anything more than a dream, an 
 ideal, a fleshless, lifeless abstraction, or the aspira- 
 tion of a few enthusiasts? Granted that once in a 
 century there comes a man like Lincoln, do we not 
 delude ourselves if we think that there is anything 
 peculiarly American in his spirit and genius? Would 
 he not have been the same Abraham Lincoln if he 
 had been born in France or England? 
 
 "And," — so we may imagine our objector reason- 
 ing, — " seeing how utterly different Lincoln was 
 from the mass of his fellow-countrymen (who, on 
 your own showing, are just as much products of 
 America as he), is it not fantastic to credit his vir- 
 tues to this mystical American spirit of which you 
 speak? At all events, if we grant that America is 
 
88 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 entitled to the praise of his virtues, must not the 
 vices of other Americans be equally debited to it? " 
 
 These objections may be most simply answered 
 by pointing to the fact that in the history of Amer- 
 ica, as of every nation, there can be traced a certain 
 general tendency, which is at first obscure, but which 
 with the years grows into clear definition. This is 
 the movement towards complete and fully articu- 
 lated democracy. Western civilization as a whole 
 has during the last four centuries manifested this 
 tendency; but in each nation the common urge has 
 taken a specific direction. It has had to encounter 
 not only a special set of circumstances and events in 
 each country, but also a national character in the 
 people, distinct and individual in each case, the out- 
 come of their former history and of many other 
 factors, too complicated for analysis. 
 
 This tendency towards democracy has proceeded 
 fastest and farthest in Britain and America. Al- 
 though it had made important progress In Britain 
 more than a century before the American Revolu- 
 tion, it moved much more rapidly in America, once 
 it had got started on the national scale, than in 
 Britain; for the simple reason that in America the 
 obstacles, in the shape of tradition, national tem- 
 perament, and vested Interests in antiquated insti- 
 tutions, were immeasurably less powerful. 
 
 If, now, we consider American history, as a single 
 evolutionary movement, from 1776 to the present 
 day, we shall see that the spirit which Mr. Lane 
 calls " Lincoln's love of man " has been growing 
 more clearly conscious of itself throughout the 
 
SWEARING ALLEGIANCE 89 
 
 process. In the Revolution, the stream of tendency 
 which subsequent growth proved to be the dominant 
 current of American life was only one among a 
 number of rills, trickling towards their confluence. 
 At the outset, the emphasis on liberty and equality 
 might seem to have been mainly dictated by the 
 exigencies of the moment. The very men who 
 raised this standard were in many cases slave-hold- 
 ers. And certainly the formulation of the Consti- 
 tution and the establishment of the national Gov- 
 ernment was marked by an extreme hesitancy, an 
 obvious reluctance to give freedom its head, a pro- 
 nounced disposition to bridle and saddle it with all 
 sorts of checks and balances; insomuch that many 
 critics (such as Walter Bagehot, in his book on 
 "The English Constitution") have declared that 
 the democratic movement in England has been much 
 less trammelled, in the absence of a written Consti- 
 tution, than in America, with Its social contract 
 drawn up on paper. 
 
 Yet, nevertheless, the impulse which is expressed 
 in the doctrine of inalienable natural rights has cut 
 its way through all the reticulations by which It was 
 impeded. Freedom has "broadened down"; and 
 at point after point of domestic policy, and still 
 more of foreign policy, America has become aware 
 that she must either stand for her organic principle, 
 her structural Ideal, or lose her reason for existence. 
 The stand taken by President Wilson, and endorsed 
 with such eloquent unanimity by the Congress, in 
 the matter of the European War, is only the latest 
 of a series of illustrations of the truth for which I 
 
90 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 am contending. America has avowedly undertaken 
 to make the world safe for democracy; — meaning, 
 of course, in the first place, to make the world safe 
 for the United States ; but, at the same time, to make 
 it safe for Russia and France and Switzerland, and 
 even for the democratic spirit which has so long 
 been fettered and cast into dungeons in Germany. 
 
 A man, it is said, only learns to know himself 
 when he is subjected to temptation. Similarly, a 
 nation only learns to know itself when it is con- 
 fronted with those great moral issues in which the 
 fate of all mankind may be involved. It is her deal- 
 ings with the rest of the world, even more than with 
 the exigencies of her internal development, that have 
 revealed to America her own real nature and spirit; 
 and she has always found, and we trust always will 
 find, that when such issues arise, she must stand for 
 an ever-increasing measure of liberty, self-govern- 
 ment and social justice. She realizes when the crises 
 come that, like Luther, she can do no other. 
 
 The answer, then, to our objector's first question 
 leads us to the answer to the others. The living 
 spirit of America, of which Mr. Lane spoke, is not 
 a dream. It is the determinant energy which gov- 
 erns and unifies and directs the will of the American 
 people. This is, If you please, an ideal; but then, 
 all thinkers (except extreme materialists) are aware 
 that Ideals are the most real of all things and the 
 most potent of realities. 
 
 It Is the presence and activity of this ideal which 
 accounts for the specific character and conduct of a 
 representative man like Lincoln. He is distinctively 
 
SWEARING ALLEGIANCE 91 
 
 and peculiarly American; and it is idle, or rather 
 meaningless, to say that he would have been the 
 same man had he been born In any other country. 
 It might as well be argued that the " Divina Corn- 
 media " would be the same poem had Dante been 
 born elsewhere than in Florence, or at another time 
 than the close of the thirteenth century. The repre- 
 sentative man (who must be most carefully dis- 
 tinguished from the average man) is representative 
 because he cannot be detached from the context of 
 history and psychology in which we find him. He is 
 like the budding-point on the tree, to which its life 
 converges; whereas the average man is like the bark, 
 the passive husk which only tells of the kind of life 
 that is within. It may, for the sake of argument, 
 be conceded that the same identical assemblage of 
 native predispositions which went to the making of 
 Lincoln might have been embodied In a single man 
 in France or England or Russia — though even this, 
 at bottom, is an unthinkable hypothesis. Yet, if this 
 had happened, the whole of such a man's post-natal 
 impressions and experiences would inevitably have 
 canalized his predispositions in quite different direc- 
 tions. Such powers as Lincoln's would, of course, 
 raise a man to some kind of leadership anywhere 
 and at any time. But in England, for example, class 
 distinctions, the emphasis on ancestry, and the 
 monopoly of university education by a particular re- 
 ligious denomination, would have prevented a man 
 of Lincoln's antecedents from struggling to the head- 
 ship of the nation; and analogous hindrances would 
 have had the same effect In any European country. 
 
92 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 Again, the special moral and political issues with 
 which a statesman is called upon to deal, are not 
 something wholly detached or separable from his 
 personality. On the contrary, his individuality 
 comes to be what it is by reason of the fact that 
 he is confronted with these issues rather than others. 
 They act upon him as much as he acts upon them; 
 and it is out of the wrestling that he wins the blessing 
 of his peculiar and distinctive greatness. Not only, 
 then, would Lincoln not have been the same man had 
 he been born and reared abroad, but he would not 
 have been the same even had he been born in Amer- 
 ica twenty years earlier or later. It was the pres- 
 sure of the special events of the eighteen-forties and 
 'fifties upon a unique spirit which was then growing 
 to its rich maturity, and which found itself through 
 its reaction to those events, that gave America its 
 unprecedented and induplicable hero. 
 
 The question whether, if we credit America with 
 the virtues of her great men, we must not also debit 
 her with the vices of her small ones, can best be 
 answered, like those we have already considered, 
 by discovering what is the main trend of American 
 development, and then ascertaining whether that 
 course of evolution Is such as must lead to the elim- 
 ination of the vices which have flourished among 
 Americans. Freedom Is always dangerous, because 
 there are always vicious propensities In human na- 
 ture, and the absence of outward restraint is natu- 
 rally conducive to their manifestation. America, in 
 the few decades of her youthful life which have thus 
 far elapsed, has had to suffer the penalty of her 
 
SWEARING ALLEGIANCE 93 
 
 daring faith in man. She has been the land of " wil- 
 ful men," of unbridled individualism. The bestowal 
 of almost unlimited opportunity has led hosts of 
 men to think in terms of their own aggrandizement, 
 and to care little or nothing for the general well- 
 being. Yet the history of the last forty years has 
 shown conclusively that this anti-social egoism is 
 hostile to the real trend of America, and that, unless 
 it be eliminated, the American spirit itself must 
 perish. Hence have followed the many movements 
 of education and legislation to bridle the wild self- 
 assertion of the individualist, and to inculcate — if 
 need be by force — the truth that men must care 
 first for the Republic. 
 
 Hence, too, springs the conclusion that the virtues 
 of Lincoln exemplify that in America which is truly 
 American, whereas the vices that are common 
 amongst us are extraneous and hostile to the spirit 
 of the nation. The good is constitutional and or- 
 ganic; the bad is of the nature of disease, which is 
 no more American, even when it is epidemic among 
 our population, than a cancer is a normal part of the 
 human body in which it grows, and which, if not 
 removed, it must destroy. 
 
 To this Living Spirit, then, our allegiance is 
 sworn. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT 
 
 WHEN God decided to make man in His own 
 image, He must have had His misgivings. 
 The venture of creating a being capable of revolting 
 against his Creator was undeniably a daring one. 
 It is magnanimous, but slightly reckless, for a God 
 to impart His own divine freedom and power of 
 initiative to a new spirit, who will in all probability 
 misuse it. And yet, when one comes to think of it, 
 there is quite a good deal to be said in God's jus- 
 tification. Think of the boredom of a solitary 
 eternity! What is the use of being God if there is 
 nobody to be aware of the fact? Where is the ad- 
 vantage of possessing infinite wisdom, if there is no 
 finite folly to give rise to situations that will necessi- 
 tate its exercise? And surely it would be otiose to 
 be endowed with perfect justice, love and mercy, if 
 through all eternity there are to be no injustices to 
 set right, no enmities to be overcome, no crimes to 
 be forgiven. In one of the Roman Catholic litur- 
 gies, there is a reference to the sin of Adam as 
 " certe necessariiim,^^ " clearly necessary." One 
 may be disposed to credit the formulator of this 
 phrase with a brilliant sense of humour; but at the 
 same time one must admit that he had great psycho- 
 logical insight. God's Godship could only be dis- 
 
THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT 95 
 
 played in relation to lesser beings who should defy 
 it, and its triumph could only come about when those 
 beings had freely, and of their own motion, accepted 
 it and made its eternal and inherent law the law of 
 their own will. 
 
 This little excursus into theology (which I trust 
 is not seriously unorthodox) leads us on to the justi- 
 fication for the daring experiment called democracy, 
 and particularly for that highly advanced instance 
 of democracy which we call the American Common- 
 wealth. The unification of the human race in the 
 bonds of peace and fraternal co-operation has been 
 the dream of thinkers throughout the ages, and 
 many notable attempts have been made to translate 
 the dream into actuality. But about all the efforts 
 hitherto made there have been two fatal defects. 
 One was, that the world-wide brotherhood was ex- 
 pected to be brought about by some single agency; 
 the other was, that those by whom it was to be 
 effected thought that they were to become and to 
 remain the dominant force in the world, and that to 
 their benevolent purposes the rest of mankind were 
 to submit willy-nilly. 
 
 Thus, for instance, the ancient Jews, with the 
 noblest intentions in the world, aspired to become 
 the leaders of the human race. They thought of 
 themselves as " chosen " for this purpose. Dut, un- 
 fortunately, they fell into the habit of thinking that 
 they were chosen for their own sake, rather than 
 for that of the other peoples; and they were also 
 convinced that all other nations would have to accept 
 their doctrines on the subject of God and His laws, 
 
96 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 and to look upon their capital city, Jerusalem, as 
 the metropolis of the universe. It was painfully 
 easy for their national egotism thus to mar an Ideal 
 which in principle was entirely admirable. 
 
 Nothing is so insidious as the temptation to na- 
 tional self-righteousness, and the belief in your own 
 people's superiority to the rest of the world. You 
 display this perversion of your ideal the moment 
 when, — not content with believing in your own 
 God and insisting that your own people shall have 
 none others before Him, — you go on to insult the 
 Gods of the other peoples, and declare that they 
 are nothing but idols. You can never get your 
 neighbour to give an impartial and dispassionate 
 consideration to the claims of your own God until 
 you have shown yourself capable of a courteous and 
 respectful estimate of his. When, like the ancient 
 Jews, you go the length of insisting that you will 
 not even eat with your neighbours, or recognize 
 them as entitled to spiritual equality with yourself, 
 unless they adopt your tribal customs as permanently 
 binding upon them, your ideal is fundamentally per- 
 verted, and all chance of Its realization goes glim- 
 mering. — Such I take to have been the gist of the 
 criticism which St. Paul found himself constrained 
 to offer to his apostolic colleagues in the Jerusalem 
 Church. 
 
 Christianity, under the inspiration of St. Paul's 
 common sense and relatively humane catholicity, 
 made a memorable effort to revamp the Jewish Ideal, 
 purged of its narrowness and Intolerance. And, of 
 all the efforts thus far made to bring about the 
 
THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT 97 
 
 spiritual unification of the human race, Christianity 
 has been the most widely and permanently success- 
 ful. Nothing but hostility or historical illiteracy 
 could make it possible to deny this. No other re- 
 ligion and no political system has drawn and held 
 together so many different racial and national types, 
 or succeeded so remarkably in adapting itself to the 
 imperious demands of such habitually self-assertive 
 and unruly peoples. Buddhism has been a practical 
 failure outside Asia, its gospel of resignation and 
 quiescent passivity being totally unadaptable to the 
 turbulent, forward-looking, chronically discontented 
 peoples of Europe, who, in virtue of these char- 
 acteristics, have beaten out the road of human prog- 
 ress and led the way over it for the last two thou- 
 sand years. Mohammedanism has in similar fashion 
 failed, both because of the bloodthirsty method of 
 propaganda which its founder adopted, and because 
 of the system of despotic government to which it 
 always leans. The appeal of Christianity to the in- 
 dividual, its assertion of his unconditional precious- 
 ness, its demand that he shall work out his own 
 salvation, and its ineradicable principle that no 
 man's allegiance is worth anything unless it is volun- 
 tary and unconstrained, made it adaptable to many 
 more of the exigencies of the historic situation, and 
 to many more racial and national types, than any of 
 its rivals could cope with. 
 
 But every ideal undergoes some perversion in the 
 effort to actualize it; and the Christian experiment 
 suffered by getting itself mixed up with the tradi- 
 tions and methods of Roman imperialism. The 
 
98 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 Roman Empire was a notable, and in some ways 
 a highly successful, attempt at the unification of man- 
 kind. Its area was practically co-extensive with the 
 known world, and wherever it went it contributed 
 largely, at least in externals, to the civilization of 
 the peoples it subdued. Its weakness lay in the fact 
 that its one fundamental method was the imposition 
 of force. Although its object was to unify, it sought 
 to rule by dividing. The difficulty, when you set out 
 to establish a world-empire by such methods, Is that 
 you must always be stronger than any possible com- 
 bination of those whom you oppress; and that is a 
 condition which no human organization has ever 
 been able permanently to fulfil. 
 
 In its later years, the Roman Empire became 
 conscious of this weakness, and began to cast about 
 for some mode of discipline which would enlist the 
 voluntary loyalty of its widely scattered subjects. 
 Hence Constantine's adoption of Christianity as 
 the State religion. He and his advisers displayed 
 great sagacity in selecting this system of doctrine 
 and discipline; but their inspiration came too late 
 to achieve that particular kind of success which they 
 desired. Nevertheless, the course of history has 
 demonstrated the soundness of their political in- 
 stinct. We may say, indeed, that they got more 
 than they bargained for, although not precisely what 
 they needed or expected. They set up an Institution 
 which was not able, indeed, to avert the political 
 collapse of the Empire, but which was able to secure 
 a secular immortality for the spirit of the Empire 
 after its body had been destroyed. It was the 
 
THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT 99 
 
 Church which, alone of Roman institutions, inspired 
 awe and reverence among the barbarian conquerors, 
 and thus became the channel through which was 
 mediated to them such part of the heritage of 
 Graeco-Roman civilization as survived the deluge. 
 
 Unfortunately, however, as the Empire became 
 Christianized, Christianity became imperialized. 
 The Papacy, although for the most part it refrained 
 from the direct use of the sword as an instrument 
 of spiritual suasion, nevertheless did rely upon force 
 and constraint for the establishment of its world- 
 wide dominance. The creeds which men were forced 
 to accept, the forms of worship which they might 
 not criticise or revise, the hierarchical organization, 
 run by Rome, which imposed itself according to a 
 uniform type upon all the nations, — these were 
 the methods employed; and in these there was as 
 much of force (although of force in a different 
 guise) as in the methods of Julius Caesar and his 
 successors. It was by adopting these devices and 
 modelling itself too closely upon imperial precedents 
 that the Church lost its hold of the genius of Chris- 
 tianity, as this had been understood and applied by 
 Jesus and St. Paul; and it was because of this sub- 
 stitution of imperial Roman for Christian methods 
 that the great experiment of the Catholic Church 
 ultimately failed. 
 
 With one hand, the Church propagated a doc- 
 trine of freedom and spiritual autonomy. This it 
 could not suppress without destroying the New 
 Testament and losing altogether the Christian 
 character. But meanwhile, with the other hand, it 
 
100 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 imposed the constraints and outward rule of a world- 
 empire of the old type. The institution of the In- 
 quisition is at once the evidence of the Church's 
 widest departure from the genius of Christianity, 
 and the confession of its greatest failure. These 
 instruments of coercive imperialism could be em- 
 ployed successfully only during the boyhood, so to 
 speak, of the new nations that arose out of the 
 politically dismembered body of the Roman Em- 
 pire; but as soon as the most advanced of those 
 nations had grown to something like maturity, the 
 long-postponed struggle between the two principles 
 broke out, and the Christian element in the synthesis 
 renewed its claim to precedence. First in England, 
 then in Bohemia, and long afterwards in Germany, 
 the standard of revolt was raised; and the battle 
 ended in the emancipation of the two most progres- 
 sive races of Europe from the transformed Roman 
 dominion which had been exercised by the Pope. 
 
 No scholar now needs to be told that the changes 
 in theological doctrine, which began in England in 
 the fourteenth century and were consummated there 
 and in Germany in the sixteenth, were the merest 
 accidents and incidents of the historic development, 
 the essence of which was the struggle of the claim 
 for spiritual freedom and national autonomy, against 
 the cosmopolitan despotism of the Papal system. 
 
 But meantime the revolted nations had them- 
 selves lost sight of another vital element In the 
 Christian Ideal. They had forgotten that In the 
 purpose of Its founders the Christian movement 
 was Intended to bring about the establishment of 
 
THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT loi 
 
 just relations among men in this world. Jesus and 
 St. Paul were out for the establishment of a real 
 kingdom. They used this word not as a. iir-fe'iched 
 figure of speech, but to describe actual huijifin.'SQ-. 
 ciety; and their goal was not the supersession but the 
 salvation of the world. It was not for nothing that 
 they had inherited the Jewish tradition, which had 
 never wholly lost itself in dreams and speculations 
 about the life after death. Although they perceived 
 the necessity for freedom, and understood that no 
 enforced allegiance could be worth while, they never 
 fell into the anarchistic heresy of thinking the gov- 
 ernmental organization of society useless or sinful 
 or pernicious. Their millennium was a just and 
 righteous organization of the life of men and 
 women, of cities and States, in this world. However 
 fantastic may have been their conception of the 
 means by which this consummation was to be 
 reached, there was nothing preternatural in the end 
 which they proposed to themselves. 
 
 After their death, however, the world suffered 
 from an epidemic of pessimism. Four centuries 
 after Jesus and St. Paul, St. Augustine had given 
 up this world as a bad job, and had perverted the 
 healthy and hopeful idealism of the founders of his 
 faith into a doctrine which consigned all human 
 society to merited destruction, and looked only for a 
 civitas Dei to be established in another world after 
 death. St. Augustine was a thinker of massive in- 
 tellect and the master of a tremendously effective 
 literary style; he was also (like most men) an epit- 
 ome of the prevailing temperament and outlook 
 
102 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 of the age in which he lived, which was an age of 
 ruin and collapse. He therefore proved more per- 
 suasive to his contemporaries and successors than 
 Jesus and St. Paul were any longer able to be. It 
 transpired, accordingly, that when, centuries later, 
 the new spirit broke out in England and on the Con- 
 tinent, the leaders of the movement of revolt, al- 
 though they had instinctively got hold of the Chris- 
 tian end of the stick, were bluffed out of their own 
 intuition by the terrifying ghost of the Augustinian 
 conception of mankind and its fate. They there- 
 fore continued to locate their goal in the clouds, and 
 construed their religion as a method of escaping 
 from hell and attaining to heaven; — always with 
 the misunderstanding that the hell to be escaped 
 was not the wretched state of society in which they 
 then lived, but something still worse after death; 
 and that the heaven to be attained was not the state 
 of society into which their own might be trans- 
 formed, but something unspeakably beatific into 
 which they were to be admitted after death, pro- 
 vided they had previously established the right kind 
 of relations with its authorities. 
 
 From this it followed that the Protestant reform- 
 ers misunderstood the very inspiration by force of 
 which they were working, and that the nations which 
 accepted their guidance came to conceive of reli- 
 gion almost exclusively as a direct, unmediated rela- 
 tion betw^een the individual souls of men and the 
 transcendent God. Christianity was dwarfed and 
 atrophied into a mere system of prayer, worship 
 and preparation for the hereafter. The plain and 
 
THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT 103 
 
 striking reminders of very different functions which 
 survived in the structure of the Church shrank to 
 the proportions of rudimentary organs, the meaning 
 of which had been forgotten. With the unmistak- 
 able language of the Book of Acts and the Pauline 
 Epistles staring them in the face, men obliviously 
 denied that Christianity had any rightful connec- 
 tion with government, politics, taxation and the 
 organization of national life. Things that to the 
 Christian founders were altogether secondary or 
 tertiary have in the last three hundred years been 
 made primary in religion; — questions, that is, con- 
 cerning minutiae of doctrine, the kind of club-houses 
 in which Christian societies should meet, or the pre- 
 cise method of attiring their officials and conducting 
 the proceedings of the assembly. 
 
 So far had this perversion gone that when, in our 
 own time, thinkers like Sir John Seeley ^ and Canon 
 Fremantle ^ began to show, from the actual lan- 
 guage of the New Testament (which we were 
 supposed to have been reading all our lives), that 
 government and national organization were the pri- 
 mary things that the early Christian leaders had set 
 themselves to establish or to permeate by their spirit, 
 we felt as though we were listening to something 
 altogether new and strange and heretical. 
 
 Thus the Augustinian and Protestant perversions 
 have caused men to lose sight of religion as a means 
 to the spiritual unification of mankind and the estab- 
 lishment of a just order of human society on earth. 
 
 * In Ecce Homo and "Natural Religion. 
 
 * In The World as the Subject of Redemption. 
 
I04 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 Among the many regrettable consequences of this 
 is the necessity, under which I labour at this mo- 
 ment, of reminding the reader that the American 
 experiment in nation-building is an undertaking iden- 
 tical in all essential respects with the life-work of 
 Jesus Christ and the enterprise which He entrusted 
 to His followers; — even though it may differ in 
 some secondary details from this, its greatest historic 
 precedent. 
 
 Yet surely it is evident that when we speak of an 
 order of ideally just relations among men, to be 
 established on the basis of individual freedom and 
 collective autonomy, we are using words which de- 
 scribe with close precision both the Christian enter- 
 prise, as it is depicted for us in the works of St. Paul 
 and the Evangelists, and the Commonwealth which 
 the fathers of this Republic sketched out and began 
 to actualize at the close of the eighteenth century. 
 The loyalty of the Christian to God was an alle- 
 giance to an invisible and intangible but nevertheless 
 real Power, the inherent Power of Righteousness 
 which makes for fullness of life, and which must 
 be unconditionally obeyed, upon peril of the failure 
 of the whole enterprise of the human race. The 
 loyalty of the American is offered, in similar fashion, 
 to an ideal, which qua ideal is indisputably real, and 
 which cannot be seriously swerved from except at 
 the cost of wrecking the purpose with which the 
 Republic established itself in the world. America 
 (as we learned in the previous chapter from Mr. 
 Franklin Lane) is a living spirit, with a will and 
 purposes of its own. It is the first great effort in 
 
THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT 105 
 
 history towards the spiritual unification of the 
 human race which has not been marred by the two 
 defects to which, a few pages back, I drew the atten- 
 tion of the reader. It does not attempt to produce 
 the fraternal organization of the entire world by 
 its single agency, nor does it imply that the Ameri- 
 can people, or any class or group of them, are to 
 hold a position of hegemony or mastery in the world- 
 organization which is sketched and prefigured in the 
 federal Republic. 
 
 Instead of the too colossal task of organizing 
 the whole earth by one agency upon a single prin- 
 ciple, the American experiment confines itself to 
 furnishing an example and working model, upon 
 which other cognate agencies may pattern them- 
 selves, in their own time, according to their own 
 judgment, and with whatever modifications they 
 desire. It demonstrates how, by means of a new 
 socio-political invention, men of all races and na- 
 tionalities can weld themselves into a voluntary 
 unity, and how all the differences of culture-type, 
 religious creed, and racial or national aspiration, 
 which have hitherto constituted impassable barriers 
 to such unification, can be turned into fraternal bonds 
 and made to contribute to the enrichment of the 
 whole. It shows how this can be done without im- 
 posing undesired constraint upon any element of the 
 synthesis; but rather by according to each of those 
 elements a fuller measure of liberty and self-expres- 
 sion than they had previously enjoyed. 
 
 This new invention is the Federal system, which 
 is as truly a product of American ingenuity as the 
 
io6 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 telephone or the linotype machine. The plan of 
 creating an indissoluble union of indestructible prov- 
 inces, each of which enjoys complete autonomy on 
 all matters save those in which it is vitally depend- 
 ent upon or interdependent with the others, was a 
 new piece of governmental mechanism. The bless- 
 ing, the enormous and inestimable blessing, which 
 it has brought to the world has been the demonstra- 
 tion that the obstacles to human fraternity which 
 hitherto have always been found insurmountable 
 can be scaled. Demands for different kinds of lib- 
 erty, different modes of self-realization, which else- 
 where have led to hatred and war, can be har- 
 monized. Not only can the desire of each element 
 for its own type of theological creed and religious 
 expression be gratified, but, through the mutual con- 
 frontation of all the creeds on a footing of equality, 
 the points which, exacerbated by strife and rivalry, 
 have elsewhere assumed an adventitious importance, 
 sink naturally and easily Into a position of relative 
 insignificance. 
 
 Under our Constitution it is possible for every 
 type of social organization, every scheme of muni- 
 cipal government, every method of advancing science 
 or overcoming specific evils, which in Europe has 
 been found successful, to be appropriated and util- 
 ized. We can adopt or adapt whatever attracts us 
 in English democracy or philosophy or religion, 
 without having to take with it the stratified, semi- 
 feudal arrangement of society which still survives 
 in England. We can borrow from Germany what- 
 ever is useful in its municipal developments and in 
 
THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT 107 
 
 its applications of science, and whatever we may 
 choose of its philosophy and poetry, without having 
 to import with these the curse of Germany — the 
 intensely militarized and centralized policy of the 
 Prussian State, and its doctrine of the divine and 
 indefeasible authority of an hereditary monarch. 
 By reason of the multiplicity of our centres of legis- 
 lative authority, we can try, on a limited scale, ex- 
 periments in the suppression of disease, the preven- 
 tion of bad heredity, or the removal of capitalized 
 vice, or new devices in government, taxation, and 
 the control of industry and property, which if suc- 
 cessful can afterwards be adopted by the nation as a 
 whole, or which, if they fail, can be abandoned, after 
 affecting only the single autonomous unit which un- 
 dertook them. 
 
 And withal, and more than all, we have eradi- 
 cated from this great area of the North American 
 Continent even the possibility of warfare. Never 
 again will the American people be rent asunder by 
 civil strife. The fact that each of our provinces is 
 sovereign within its own borders, and at the same 
 time is a constituent of the central Government, en- 
 sures us against the possibility of a disaster like the 
 European conflict occurring among us. Each of our 
 States enjoys all the liberty that any European 
 people could reasonably desire, and yet is exempt 
 both from the temptation to aggress upon its neigh- 
 bours and from the possibility of its neighbours 
 aggressing upon it. None can secede from the 
 Union; but none can be deprived of the benefits for 
 the sake of which it entered the Union. Each, in- 
 
io8 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 deed, Is encircled by all the others; but encirclement 
 is no bad thing when it has been voluntarily chosen 
 and can by no possibility be used as a means of in- 
 jury. If ever the present distribution of local sover- 
 eignty should be modified, it can only be with the 
 spontaneous assent of the areas affected, and in the 
 interest of a yet closer union, a more perfect 
 freedom. 
 
 What an object-lesson for Europe! What a 
 glorious presage of the future federation of the 
 world! No myth, no Utopia, no dream out of the 
 ivory gate, but an actual living, working, triumphant 
 commonwealth; the creation neither of transcendent 
 virtue nor of miraculous assistance, but simply of 
 common sense, democracy and humane reason. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FALLACY OF THE MELTING-POT 
 
 WHY does not somebody, other than a pro- 
 fessor of logic, write us a book on The Ty- 
 ranny of Words? Nothing is more needed; for in 
 every department of thought, from theology and 
 philosophy to parochial politics, we are misled and 
 obfuscated by metaphors and figures of speech. We 
 need a book written by a layman for laymen. There 
 are plenty of logic-books already, but nobody ever 
 reads them except under compulsion, — unless it be 
 brother-logicians anxious to confute their profes- 
 sional rivals. I verily believe that serious mischief 
 has been caused to the historic development of 
 America by the influence of two or three figurative 
 phrases which have masqueraded in our minds as 
 literal descriptions of fact. 
 
 I. Take, for one example, the fanciful phrase 
 fastened for all time upon this Continent by its dis- 
 coverers and early explorers : the phrase " New 
 World." Little did the inventor of that unlucky 
 term dream of the harm he was perpetrating. It 
 could not have occurred to him that this innocent 
 little flight of his imagination would survive to pro- 
 duce in future generations a radically false sense of 
 their own nature and position in the world, and of 
 their relation to Europe and to the past. And yet 
 
no ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 this Is what it has done. Popular thinking In this 
 country has been unconsciously distorted for more 
 than a century by the Illusion that America bears to 
 Europe a relation analogous to that In which the 
 moon stands to the earth. We have Imagined 
 that we could make what use we liked of Europe 
 as a happy hunting-ground for our trippers, as a 
 market, and as a source of recruits for our popu- 
 lation, but that, at the same time, we could arrange 
 our foreign policy and determine our own future 
 evolution on the supposition that Europe did not 
 exist, or at all events that it need not be considered 
 by us. 
 
 This fallacious Idea of newness, too, led us to 
 Ignore our own roots In the past, to think of our- 
 selves much as Adam may be supposed to have 
 thought of himself, and to write our history not 
 from 753 b. c. or SS B. c. or 800 A. d. (where It 
 ought to begin), but from 1776, or 1619, or, at 
 farthest, from 1492 A. D. We have been oblivious 
 of the psychological and historic truth that America 
 became a part of Europe the moment the keels of 
 Columbus entered the waters of the Gulf, and con- 
 sequently that Its history Is an organic growth from 
 that of Europe, without familiarity with which It is 
 unintelligible. 
 
 2. In the same way, the celebrated metaphor 
 about *' entangling alliances," employed In regard 
 to a particular and transient conjuncture of circum- 
 stances by Washington, has muddied the waters of 
 our thought, and thereby has affected our national 
 decisions In an Injurious fashion. Whenever we 
 
FALLACY OF THE MELTING-POT iii 
 
 quote or think of those words, the picture of a net 
 projects itself before our eyes. We dream that the 
 alternative confronting us is that of either keeping 
 our feet completely out of its meshes, by making 
 no alliances with foreign Powers, or of walking 
 into the net by contracting alliances and getting 
 tripped up. 
 
 But the truth is that it is only a treaty, an alliance, 
 — a definite understanding and specific working 
 agreement, — which can save us from becoming 
 entangled. We are knit to the other nations of the 
 world by a thousand strands of common descent, 
 culture, religion, commerce, and mutual aid through 
 science and art. These relations are inevitable, and 
 inevitably destined to become yet closer and more 
 Intricate. By letting things drift, by obstinately re- 
 fusing to come to any understanding as to the value 
 we place upon these bonds, or to state under what 
 conditions and to what extent we are willing to join 
 with others in preserving them, we become auto- 
 matically entangled. We are under obligations to 
 various European nations, of indefinite amount and 
 unspecified character; and they are in similar fashion 
 indebted to us. The only way (as any business 
 man would at once recognize) to avoid entangle- 
 ment, to prevent the raising of expectations which 
 we do not intend to gratify, and to escape being 
 charged with ingratitude or suspecting others of 
 ingratitude to us, is to come to a clear understanding 
 upon the whole matter, and then to ratify it in writ- 
 ing. And this is, in all probability, what our share 
 in the European War, and still more our share in 
 
112 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 the world-agreement by which it must be terminated, 
 will constrain us to do. 
 
 It was repeated a thousand times by Americans 
 (before they had found Germany out) that the 
 great war was brought about by the entanglements 
 of the European peoples with one another. The 
 idea apparently was that if the Entente Cordiale be- 
 tween France and England had not existed, or if 
 France and Russia had not been committed to each 
 other, or if the Triple Alliance had not led Germany 
 to imagine that she could count upon Italy's assist- 
 ance in prosecuting her aggressive designs, the war 
 would not have broken out. I affirm, on the con- 
 trary, that the war occurred because there were not 
 enough treaties and alliances among the nations, 
 and because those treaties that did exist were for 
 the most part not truly national, having been made 
 in secret by persons and cliques who were not repre- 
 sentative. Had each nation been isolated, there 
 would have been many wars, long before this one 
 occurred. If, on the other hand, the exact relations 
 between England, France and Russia had been 
 known to all Englishmen, Frenchmen and Russians, 
 and above all to Germany; — if Germany had 
 known for a certainty that she would have England 
 and Italy as her active enemies, instead of England 
 neutral and Italy on her side; — and, more espe- 
 cially, if she had been informed beforehand that 
 her methods of warfare would infallibly draw the 
 United States into the field against her; — it is mor- 
 ally certain that the peace would have remained un- 
 broken. When we say that Germany wanted war, 
 
FALLACY OF THE MELTING-POT 113 
 
 we speak, I believe, the sober truth; but that does 
 not mean that she wanted such a war. What Ger- 
 many wanted was the victory of which her unex- 
 pected enemies — first England, then Italy, and 
 lastly this country — have come in to deprive her. 
 Now, a thorough public understanding would have 
 made it certain in advance that the war would be 
 a universal disaster, and that the aggressor would 
 be crushed instead of obtaining from it the plunder 
 he desired. 
 
 The President, although under the influence of 
 the American tradition he felt constrained to say 
 (on January 22nd, 1917), "I am proposing that 
 all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances," 
 yet showed that he had grasped the truth for which 
 I am here contending when he added, " There is 
 no entangling alliance in a concert of power." Alli- 
 ances are entangling only when they are indefinite, 
 secret, or made by persons who, not being vested 
 with democratic authority, do not represent their 
 nations. When these conditions are avoided, written 
 treaties are the one way of preventing the entangle- 
 ments which arise from the indefinite, unwritten 
 alliances of blood and benefit that exist, and must 
 exist, between us and Europe. 
 
 3. Another of the verbal images by which, within 
 the last few years, our minds have been led astray 
 from the right track of thought. Is the one which 
 Mr. Zangwill selected for the title of his celebrated 
 play, " The Melting-Pot." It would be unfair, of 
 course, to hold Mr. Zangwill responsible either for 
 this term or for the mental muddle which it stands 
 
114 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 for and which it tends to perpetuate. Both things 
 originated in America. During his brief and hurried 
 visits to this country, Mr. Zangwill heard his Amer- 
 ican friends use the word " melting-pot " to describe 
 what is going on here as a result of our tremendous 
 and heterogeneous immigration. It was no part of 
 Mr. Zangwill's business as a dramatist to think the 
 situation out or to put us right in our sociology. 
 That we must do for ourselves. Nevertheless, one 
 cannot but regret that he lent the apparent sanction 
 of his keen Intellect and his brilliant reputation to a 
 figure of speech which, instead of directing us into 
 the true path, points us clean away from it. 
 
 I do not desire to quarrel with anybody over a 
 mere phrase. The word " melting-pot " would not 
 be of the slightest importance, were it not for the 
 fundamental errors which it masks, and for the limit- 
 less consequences to which these errors may give rise. 
 We must therefore ask ourselves what the term sug- 
 gests to our minds, and whether it is true that the 
 human Increment which we have imported from 
 abroad does undergo a process in any way compar- 
 able to the melting of metal and its subsequent work- 
 ing up into pre-determined shapes. We must ask 
 further whether it is possible for the invisible, in- 
 tangible thing which we call consciousness, personal- 
 ity, humanity, to receive such treatment. 
 
 The answer to these questions is that It Is neither 
 true nor possible. You can take a piece of metal 
 and, by melting it down, entirely destroy its previous 
 form; and when you have done this, you hav^e a 
 material that Is plastic, and can be moulded or beaten 
 
FALLACY OF THE MELTING-POT 115 
 
 into any shape you desire. The metal has no his- 
 tory, in the sense in which that term applies to living 
 things. To use the terminology of M. Bergson, it 
 has no duration. Time does not bite into it. At 
 any moment it is possible (at least theoretically, and 
 in large measure practically) to reverse all that has 
 happened to it and restore it to the form in which 
 it was taken from the earth. 
 
 With living beings, and above all with conscious 
 beings, on the other hand, this process is a stark 
 impossibility. You cannot reverse the past of hu- 
 manity — whether of a nation or of an individual 
 person. There is no such thing as humanity-in-gen- 
 eral, into which the definite, heterogeneous, living 
 creature can be melted down. I remarked in an 
 earlier chapter on the fact that every man and 
 woman is an epitome of the vast, collective, time- 
 spanning life of vanished multitudes. The forms 
 of our ancestors have perished, but their life lives 
 on in us, and their experience is written in the tissues 
 and nerves of our bodies and in our souls. Your 
 selfhood at this moment, friend reader, is not merely 
 a living synthesis of all your own experiences from 
 birth onwards, it is also a living synthesis of the life 
 of your ancestors and the history of your nation. 
 You cannot unmake yourself; America cannot un- 
 make you; nay, God Almighty could not take you 
 back to the condition of relative simplicity in which 
 you were born, or even reverse a single moment of 
 your past. The characters traced by the pencil of 
 experience are indelible. All that lives carries with 
 it into the future its ever-augmenting past. Instead 
 
ii6 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 of fading with the years, the effects of our experi- 
 ences, like inscriptions cut into the living bark of a 
 tree, grow ever deeper and more definite. It may 
 be possible to annihilate your consciousness, but it is 
 not possible to reverse the set of the current of your 
 life or to destroy the channel which It has created. 
 For a human personality may be defined as a pro- 
 longation of the past into the present. 
 
 Since, then, there is no humanity-in-general, save 
 in abstract thought, and since it is impossible to 
 treat a man like a piece of metal, it follows that 
 the term " melting-pot " and the idea which it im- 
 plies are inapplicable to America and to the process 
 of assimilation which the immigrant undergoes. 
 
 But the metaphor is misleading also in another 
 way. When you melt down metal, your purpose 
 is to work it up afterwards into a shape determined 
 tipoft in advance. You do not deal with It unless the 
 mould into which it is to be poured is ready to your 
 hand and is of the precise shape which you intend 
 your metal to take. To justify, therefore, this figure 
 of speech, it would be necessary that the American 
 type, into which the immigrant is to he transformed, 
 should be finally fixed, definitely agreed upon and 
 accepted. 
 
 But there is no human mould In America to which 
 the spiritual stuff of the immigrant is to be patterned. 
 Not only is there as yet no fixed and final type, but 
 there never can be. All life Is miraculous, in the 
 sense that it perpetually defies its antecedents, and 
 presents us with more in the effect than was contained 
 in the cause. The difference between the organic 
 
FALLACY OF THE MELTING-POT 117 
 
 and the inorganic world is that, whereas the inor- 
 ganic is the sphere of repetition, of calculability, of 
 equivalence between antecedent and consequent, the 
 organic world is the world of variation, of individu- 
 ality, of manifestations which no calculus can reduce 
 to equivalence with their antecedents, and which no 
 conceivable extension of our knowledge could enable 
 us to predict in detail. 
 
 The very genius of democracy, moreover, must 
 lead us to desire the widest possible range of vari- 
 ability, the greatest attainable differentiation of in- 
 dividuality, among our population. It may be con- 
 venient in a military autocracy to have men as much 
 alike as possible, to curb or amputate their eccen- 
 tricities, to cancel their individual differences and 
 originalities. Such a State, being formed on the 
 analogy of a machine — that is to say, being de- 
 signed to have no will and purpose of its own, but 
 to act always in a determinate fashion at the will 
 and purpose of its controllers — is hampered and 
 inconvenienced by originality and individual initia- 
 tive. The characteristics which lead men to think 
 and to act differently from their predecessors and 
 their fellows are a menace to it. This, however, is 
 the antipodes of the democratic conception of so- 
 ciety, the very raison d'etre whereof is the encour- 
 agement of independence and originality. It fol- 
 lows, then, that America should wish to do unto the 
 immigrant the precise opposite of what this fallacy- 
 breeding image of the melting-pot suggests to our 
 minds. 
 
 Americans desire, moreover, that the immigrant 
 
ii8 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 shall modify them as well as that he shall be modi- 
 fied by them. Or, at all events, whether this be de- 
 sired or not, the nature of man makes it inevitable 
 that it will happen. The newcomer is, or should be, 
 welcomed for the reason that his presence here leads 
 to contact and contrast between our minds and his, 
 between our culture-type and that of the race or 
 nation which he represents. Molten metal conforms 
 by rigid necessity to the shape of the container into 
 which it is poured, while the container itself remains 
 unaffected. Whenever two men meet, on the con- 
 trary, the result of their contact must be a mutual 
 modification. This is the very condition of life and 
 growth. The business of America is to get rid of 
 mechanical uniformity, and, by encouraging the ut- 
 most possible differentiation through mental and 
 psychic cross-fertilization, to attain to a higher level 
 of humanity. Not, indeed, that America is, or ever 
 has been, perverted by the despotic superstition of 
 the Superman; her ideal and function is to abolish 
 the gulf dividing Sub-man from Man. She may not 
 pray with Browning, " Make no more giants, God," 
 but she does pray, " elevate the race at once! " In- 
 stead of despising common humanity, she believes 
 in its uncommon possibilities. She has an unswerv- 
 ing faith that liberty and just relations will call forth 
 in common men powers and virtues which, in an un- 
 just or undemocratic society, must remain for ever 
 latent and unsuspected even by their possessors. 
 
 The truth is, this image of the melting-pot is de- 
 rived from a doctrine about the ultimate destiny of 
 human society which in the last few decades has be- 
 
FALLACY OF THE MELTING-POT 119 
 
 come exceedingly widespread, and which awakens 
 the enthusiasm of many well-meaning people who 
 do not take the trouble to think out its implications. 
 I refer to the doctrine called Cosmopolitanism. 
 The cosmopolitan believes In the Brotherhood of 
 Man. He loves to take that noble phrase upon his 
 tongue. But he forgets, while doing so, that the 
 very possibility of human evolution depends on the 
 fact that brothers, instead of being mere replicas of 
 each other, differ Incalculably and unpredictably. 
 He dreams that a worldwide human fraternity can 
 be achieved by obliterating all national and psychic 
 frontiers and transforming the world into a single 
 nation, a single State, with one tradition, one loyalty, 
 one flag. He Ignores the psychological facts which 
 show that such a future for mankind is impossible, 
 and would be horribly undesirable even If it were 
 possible. He forgetc that the evolution of all life is 
 away from homogeneity and towards heterogeneity, 
 and that, even among the lower animals, the chance 
 of perpetuity for a species Increases as the number of 
 Its varieties multiplies. The greater the number of 
 varieties, the greater Is the range of adaptability, 
 and the wider, consequently, Is the environment In 
 which the species will be able to survive and develop. 
 In this matter, human evolution, spiritual evolution, 
 presents the same law that we discover in the sub- 
 human world. 
 
 The Brotherhood of Man ? Yes ! But not by the 
 obliteration of variety and distinctness; rather by 
 seeing to it that there shall be free scope and favour- 
 ing environment for as many and as widely varying 
 
120 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 types as man's purposive evolution can create. And 
 this means that there must be separate and distinct 
 nationalities as well as separate and distinct individu- 
 alities. It is a fantastic heresy to suppose that two 
 nations can melt wholly into one another, or that a 
 single people can pass away, without the world be- 
 coming poorer. We cannot suffer the extinction 
 even of primitive tribes like the Tasmanlans or the 
 Australian aborigines without a loss to the universe. 
 We cannot turn Indians into imitation New Eng- 
 enders, or Danes or Poles or Frenchmen into imita- 
 tion Germans, — God forbid! — without destroying 
 something infinitely precious, because irreplaceable. 
 The cosmopolitan ideal would mean Chinese iso- 
 lation universalized, and Chinese history repeated 
 on the scale of the whole world; for it would ex- 
 clude the possibility of intercourse between dissimi- 
 lar culture-types. The nineteenth century has al- 
 ready mechanized and stereotyped us far too much. 
 But in the future. If a wise policy prevails, we shall 
 make machinery our servant instead of permitting 
 It to be our master, as hitherto It has so largely been. 
 For we must grow towards the perception that 
 the two Indispensable conditions of human advance- 
 ment are freedom and variety. Instead of the Cos- 
 mopolitan, we must set up the International ideal. ^ 
 There must be many nations, and every nation must 
 be made unconditionally safe against aggression. 
 
 ^ Many Socialists and other cosmopolitans thought they were 
 preaching internationalism when what they were really preaching was 
 anti-nationalism. The two ideals are poles asunder. Internationalism 
 presupposes nations, and national patriotisms, and divergent types of 
 character and culture; anti-national Socialism would obliterate all 
 these. 
 
FALLACY OF THE MELTING-POT 121 
 
 The conception of patriotism must be expanded, un- 
 til it acquires the universality which is a necessary 
 characteristic of every sound ethical principle. It 
 must come to mean that the very devotion of a man 
 to his own country shall constrain him to respect 
 the devotion of all other men to their countries; 
 that the idea of inviolability, which haloes his own 
 nation, shall attach itself equally to every nation. 
 On this line, and on this alone, may we look for a 
 genuine fraternity of the human race; and also for a 
 development of the spiritual potentialities of human- 
 ity to which no limit can be assigned by the most 
 piercing vision. Mankind is one; but it must be 
 One-in-Many, a Unity-in- Variety. Upon this condi- 
 tion we have hope, progress, and the open road. 
 The cosmopolitan plan would mean arrest, stagna- 
 tion, and a closed horizon. 
 
 Of all possible modes, then, for the assimilation 
 of immigrants into America, that suggested by the 
 image of the melting-pot is the least possible and 
 the least desirable. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE NATIONAL-GROUP IDEA, AND THE ANTI- 
 NATIONALISTS 
 
 MANY people may agree with the arguments 
 advanced in the preceding chapter, and yet 
 may proceed to draw from them a conclusion as 
 erroneous as the theory against which I have set 
 them forth. " If the melting-pot idea is unwork- 
 able," they will say, " it must follow that the right 
 course is to preserve unchanged the identity, to keep 
 unmodified the racial and national memories and 
 the inherited cultures, of the various groups which 
 have been added to our population." 
 
 Accordingly, they will think it right that Greeks 
 and Czechs, Slavs and Italians, Germans and Irish, 
 shall as groups have their distinct local habitations 
 and retain all the peculiarities which they brought 
 with them to our shores. Separate nationalistic 
 societies, each with its special organ, and the use of 
 " a leash of languages " for the purposes of our 
 common political life, will seem to be the right alter- 
 native — nay, the only alternative — to the policy 
 prescribed by a doctrine which our examination has 
 shown to be fallacious. 
 
 I must, however, request the favour of a patient 
 hearing in my attempt to explain why I think this 
 idea no less mistaken than the one to which the last 
 
THE NATIONAL-GROUP IDEA 123 
 
 chapter was devoted. We must distinguish. There 
 is a thoroughly sound and legitimate work to be 
 done by the nationalistic societies and their organs, 
 but it is not that of merely preserving untainted and 
 unchanged the language, the traditions and the cul- 
 ture of the newcomers. 
 
 That the argument which I am about to submit is 
 neither a merely academic nor a superfluous one is 
 shown by the extent to which this backward-looking 
 conception of the relation of immigrant groups to 
 America and to each other at present prevails. The 
 segregation, clannishness and in-breeding of our na- 
 tional groups has been notorious. Sometimes by 
 conscious intention, perhaps more often by accident 
 or economic pressure, or perhaps through sheer fail- 
 ure to think out any theory of their moral obliga- 
 tions and of their American destiny, our foreigners 
 have herded together, and transformed the areas 
 in which they live into mere detached fragments of 
 the lands from which they came. They rendered 
 themselves as impervious as possible to the seeping 
 in of American influences. In this they were some- 
 times abetted by that Papalistic policy which, as we 
 saw from Fr. Conway's pamphlet, would deliberately 
 prefer utter illiteracy to the kind of Americanization 
 our public schools seek to effect. Nor is the Papal 
 sect by any means the only one which resorts to this 
 policy, for the Greek Church and various Protestant 
 bodies have acted in similar fashion. All around 
 us we find churches and schools and homes in which 
 the Polish, the Greek, the Italian or the German 
 language is exclusively employed; with the natural 
 
124 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 and inevitable — and often, one must add, the con- 
 sciously designed — result that the most sacred 
 things are dissociated in men's minds from the life 
 and ideals of the nation. 
 
 Nobody Is better aware than your carefully 
 trained Jesuit priest of " the effect of early educa- 
 tion in sealing up the mind against all access of new 
 ideas that seem to conflict with early impressions," 
 — to use the language of the Rev. M. P. Hill, S.J., 
 in his able treatise entitled " The Catholic's Ready 
 Answer." Implant your foreign language first, and 
 drench your pupil's entire sub-conscious life, with all 
 its emotions and sentiments, in the feeling that that 
 language is the only appropriate means of lifting the 
 soul into the presence of the divine; and the result 
 must necessarily be that he will always feel towards 
 America as towards something secondary and secu- 
 lar, something unworthy to be the object of the high- 
 est loyalty of the heart. The spontaneous affection 
 of a person so brought up will cluster for ever around 
 the source from which his language and his religious 
 faith have come to him. No matter what may be 
 the new ideas, or even the rational judgments, of 
 later life, his mind, as Fr. Hill puts it, will be sealed 
 against them. Every attempt which such a policy 
 dictates to keep him a foreigner, in so far as it suc- 
 ceeds, prevents him from becoming a true American. 
 
 If, in addition to the early influences of church, 
 school and home, a man's adolescent and mature 
 life find all their satisfactions in association with 
 persons and influences of the same provenance as 
 his first language, the invisible barrier that secludes 
 
THE NATIONAL-GROUP IDEA 125 
 
 him from vital contact and interdependence with his 
 nation will be all the more impenetrable. If Amer- 
 ica means to him psychologically an outer, unhome- 
 like world, in which he works because he must, but 
 all his gains from which are merely a convenience to 
 augment the pleasures and satisfactions which he 
 seeks within the ring-fence of his parental nation, his 
 essential foreignness must remain almost complete. 
 
 I am here speaking, be it remembered, not hypo- 
 thetically, but on the basis of experience. We have 
 all known persons born and educated in this country, 
 and never subjected by travel to immediate Euro- 
 pean influence, who nevertheless have remained as 
 thoroughly foreign in spirit and in their heart's alle- 
 giance as the last arrival from Ellis Island. We 
 have all met persons who, despite their American 
 birth, speak English haltingly and with difficulty, and 
 can express themselves spontaneously only in some 
 other tongue. We have all seen evidence of the 
 contempt which such persons sometimes entertain 
 for the Constitution and the laws of this country, 
 as contrasted with their ecstatic adoration for the 
 institutions of other lands, which they know only by 
 tradition. Many of us have heard them say that if 
 there should come a clash between this country and 
 the lands to which they looked back, as Adam and 
 Eve may be supposed to have looked back to para- 
 dise, America would mean nothing to them.^ 
 
 Such being the effects of segregation, what be- 
 liever in the integrity and spiritual worth of the 
 
 1 I heard this from more than one German-American before we went 
 into the war. 
 
126 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 Republic can find it tolerable? What patriot can 
 bear to think that his neighbour, born under the same 
 flag, living under the same institutions, voting at the 
 same elections, yet regards this country as something 
 merely to be endured and preyed upon, and as alto- 
 gether wretched and contemptible in comparison 
 with some European State? To any sincere lover 
 of this country, the thought of its being thus re- 
 garded and thus exploited is more unbearable than 
 the thought of being himself treated as a mere tool 
 for the advantage of others who look down upon 
 him with scorn. 
 
 The remedy, however, for this state of things 
 need not be any such violent action as has lately 
 been recommended by Colonel Roosevelt. There is 
 no occasion to suppress all the foreign-language 
 newspapers; and even if this were done, it would 
 not destroy, but would rather intensify, the spirit 
 to which Mr. Roosevelt objects. But there is occa- 
 sion to see that those newspapers become organs of 
 the American spirit, centres for the propagation of 
 American ideals, and instruments for the education 
 of their readers in the high privileges and responsi- 
 bilities of American citizenship. 
 
 Having already pleaded that Americans should 
 learn from the immigrant as well as teach him, I 
 can now without inconsistency express my desire to 
 see every American a regular reader of one or more 
 foreign-language newspapers, and, at the same time, 
 my wish that every immigrant or child of an immi- 
 grant should be a reader of one or more newspapers 
 in the English tongue, as well as of the journals 
 
THE NATIONAL-GROUP IDEA 127 
 
 printed in the language of his forebears. Nor, in 
 bare justice, can one refrain from adding, while on 
 this subject, that our foreign Press does frequently 
 voice the American spirit and inculcate its principles 
 in a way that would put many of our English-using 
 newspapers to the blush. But in order that it may 
 fully justify its delicate and seemingly anomalous 
 position, the foreign Press must consciously and un- 
 equivocally accept the Americanization of Its read- 
 ers as its constant major goal. Its political influence 
 ought always to be exerted to induce its readers to 
 think and vote as Americans and with a single eye 
 to the well-being of America. 
 
 The spectacle of appeals at our elections, made 
 on behalf of candidates of native citizenship, to 
 foreigners as foreigners, urging them to support 
 the recommended candidate because he is a friend to 
 the nation whence they came, is, I suppose, so famil- 
 iar to born Americans that they have come either to 
 ignore it or to accept it as a part of the natural order 
 of things. Yet, as a newcomer, I cannot refrain 
 from expressing the horror and the sense of outrage 
 which the sight and sound of these appeals has awak- 
 ened in me. 
 
 Before the last mayoral election in Chicago, I 
 was shown a post-card, printed in the German lan- 
 guage, urging the Germans of the city (as though 
 any citizen and voter in Chicago could be a Ger- 
 man !) to vote for a candidate with a German name, 
 on the unspeakable ground that his election would 
 have great weight with the authorities at Washing- 
 ton, and might lead to a modification of the policy 
 
128 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 of the Republic in favour of the Central Powers. 
 There was perhaps a touch of ironic humour in the 
 fact that the person who showed me this card was 
 the son of a German immigrant, who, having neg- 
 lected the culture of his ancestors, was unable to read 
 it, and therefore appealed to an Englishman to tell 
 him its purport! After translating the message, I 
 read my acquaintance a homily on the enormity of 
 the offence which this post-card represented, and 
 upon what I understood to be the honourable obli- 
 gations of citizenship. I rejoice to say that the 
 candidate on whose behalf this treasonable appeal 
 was made did not win the election; — though, to 
 be sure, when one remembers who did win it, there 
 seems little enough reason for satisfaction. On an- 
 other occasion, when a vacancy in the United States 
 Senate was to be filled, I saw a printed placard 
 pasted up on the walls, which read: *' Deutscher! 
 
 Stimmen fiir . Er ist iinser Freund! " Again 
 
 I rejoice to testify that this infamous mandate failed 
 of its object. 
 
 Of all the forms of political corruption by which 
 our democracy is vitiated, this form, in which there 
 is no question of money-bribery or " graft," but in 
 which the debauchery is spiritual, is immeasurably 
 the worst. No person who permits such an appeal 
 to issue in his name ought ever again to be allowed 
 to offer himself as a candidate for any public office. 
 Indeed, for one offence, he ought to be deprived of 
 civil rights and committed to the penitentiary. We 
 may say on paper that in times of peace the crime 
 of treason cannot be committed against the United 
 
THE NATIONAI^GROUP IDEA 129 
 
 States/ just as we may say on paper, if we choose, 
 that in time of peace water shall not be permitted 
 to flow downhill ; but in truth the one statement is as 
 false and idle as the other. Treason can be, and is, 
 committed against the Republic whenever a local 
 or national question of American politics is manip- 
 ulated for the purpose of encouraging in citizens a 
 loyalty which they have forsworn with their lips, 
 and ought to have renounced with their hearts. 
 Treason can be, and is, committed whenever any 
 candidate for an American office designs, or even 
 pretends to design, to use the office, if he gains it, in 
 the interests of a foreign Power. 
 
 Scarcely less reprehensible than such practices is 
 the habit, notoriously prevalent among our politi- 
 cians, of appealing not to the American loyalty of 
 their constituents, but to their tribal pride as mem- 
 bers of some European race. But for the testimony 
 of my own ears, I could not have believed that a 
 responsible American citizen of national fame would 
 urge an audience mainly composed of Southern Ital- 
 ians to vote against a candidate for the Presidency 
 on the ground that many years earlier, in a published 
 work, that candidate had made some uncomplimen- 
 tary comparisons between Southern Italians and 
 other immigrant groups. Yet such an appeal I actu- 
 ally heard made by an eminent Progressive, when 
 advocating the candidacy of Mr. Roosevelt against 
 that of Mr. Wilson in the year 19 12. 
 
 It needs but a slight knowledge of history and 
 
 1 "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying 
 war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and 
 comfort." — Constitution, Art. Ill, § 3. 
 
I30 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 of the world to make one realize that no other na- 
 tion would dream of tolerating such abuse of its 
 hospitality, such insidious and traitorous misuse of 
 its freedom. If the ignorant immigrant, new to 
 this land, unfamiliar with its history and ideals, 
 makes the interests of Italy or Germany the main 
 consideration determining his vote, our feeling of 
 resentment may be cooled by consideration for his 
 position. But when responsible Americans, with no 
 such excuse, thus flagrantly prostitute the interests 
 of the Republic in the effort to advance their own 
 political fortunes, one can find no language of a 
 printable description strong enough to characterize 
 their conduct. We have but to remind them how 
 they would fare if in similar circumstances they 
 pursued the same course in England or France or 
 Germany. 
 
 If they would refrain from such conduct in those 
 countries, what would be their motive? Fear of the 
 police? Terror of the odium and contempt, to say 
 nothing of the prison sentence, which it would prob- 
 ably bring down upon them? If so, what are we 
 to think of persons whom nothing but terror can in- 
 duce to behave with common decency? Is America, 
 which trusts to their honour and attaches no penalty 
 to such offences, to be exploited and insulted in re- 
 quital of her magnanimity? 
 
 The national function which I would assign to 
 the foreign-language newspaper is also the only one 
 which can justify the existence of societies composed 
 of Americans of alien origin. By every principle 
 of honour, and also indeed by every principle of 
 
THE NATIONAL-GROUP IDEA 131 
 
 enlightened self-interest, they are bound to make 
 their efforts subservient to the Americanization of 
 their members and the inculcation of the spirit and 
 principles of the Republic. In this way, but only in 
 this way, they can achieve a legitimate and a useful 
 end. Let them keep alive Italian and German music 
 and literature, Balkan handicrafts, and the folk-lore 
 and folk-dances of the Old World; — not for the 
 sake of the Old World, but as elements contributory 
 to American culture. Let them spend as much time 
 in bringing the spirit and meaning of American in- 
 stitutions home to their members as in bringing home 
 to Americans the spirit and meaning of their Euro- 
 pean traditions. 
 
 It may seem inappropriate to discuss the attitude 
 of the anti-national political theorist in the same 
 chapter in which we consider the error of those who 
 devote themselves to the preservation of national 
 loyalties incompatible with American patriotism. 
 Inasmuch, however, as, qua America, the practical 
 effect of both these wrong policies is the same, I 
 cannot think it out of place to devote a word here 
 to the duty of all political parties to be animated by 
 loyalty to the Republic, to inculcate this loyalty in 
 their members, and to make the spiritual and ma- 
 terial development of the nation the be-all and end- 
 all of their efforts. I have already cited instances of 
 the fashion in which members of the two dominant 
 national parties are sometimes false to this duty. 
 But there is another influential party, the Socialist, 
 many of whose members regard all nations alike as 
 
132 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 their enemies, and teach that men's only loyalty 
 should be given to their own class throughout the 
 world. 
 
 This is, of course, the familiar doctrine of Karl 
 Marx, as understood and reiterated by the most 
 prominent of his followers in many countries. For 
 reasons which it is not necessary here to adduce, I 
 maintain that this Marxian heresy has nothing what- 
 ever to do with Socialism in its true sense. The very 
 genius of that movement is the plea for nationaliza- 
 tion. Its watchwords are, and have always been, 
 the nationalization of land, capital, and all the in- 
 strumentalities of production, distribution and ex- 
 change. To preach the abrogation or supersession 
 of nationality in the same breath with this doctrine 
 is a childish inconsistency. What could be the pro- 
 gramme which should aim simultaneously at nation- 
 alizing all resources and destroying the nation? 
 But, unhappily, the proletariat to which the evangel 
 of Socialism is commonly preached is for the most 
 part at a childish stage of intellectual development, 
 and consequently is unable to detect the transparent 
 fallacies and sophistries of its exhorters. 
 
 On the very day on which I first wrote this page, 
 I read in the newspaper of a public demonstration 
 addressed by leaders of Socialism in Chicago, who 
 informed their hearers that America's entrance into 
 the European War was motived not at all by the hu- 
 manitarian and democratic ideals expounded by the 
 President, but by the vicious desire of capitalists to 
 profit financially through it. This, be it remembered, 
 in face of the notorious fact that our capitalists 
 
THE NATIONAI^GROUP IDEA 133 
 
 gained Immensely more by our neutrality than they 
 could possibly gain by our belligerency; in face, also, 
 of the equally glaring facts that members and sons 
 of the so-called capitalist class volunteered to risk 
 their lives in the nation's service in far greater pro- 
 portion than members of the working class volun- 
 teered, and that the selective conscription laws apply 
 to all classes alike. What can be the curious twist 
 in the minds of educated men which leads them to 
 support their cause by such disgraceful falsehoods? 
 I speak, perhaps, with the more heat in this mat- 
 ter, because I feel in some measure personally com- 
 promised by the outrageous conduct of these per- 
 verters of the populace. For a number of years I 
 have been a member of the British Fabian Society. 
 This is a group of thinkers who for thirty years 
 have been demonstrating that the ideal of Socialism 
 is thoroughly consistent with nationality and with 
 the most ardent patriotism; that it does not need the 
 support either of the anti-national heresy of Marx 
 or of his dogmatic and unphilosophic materialism 
 and economic determinism. The Fabian students 
 have shown, further, that the measures by which the 
 transition from competitive individualism to the co- 
 operative commonwealth may be brought about need 
 not involve any wide social upheaval, or any revenge 
 upon the beneficiaries of the existing order. No 
 man who has come under the influence of these sane 
 teachings,^ no man who has sat at the feet of Mr. 
 
 1 Which have latterly been made widely known among us, thanks 
 to the enterprise of The New Republic in reprinting the Programme of 
 War Aims and the Programme of Reconstruction of the British Labour 
 Party. 
 
134 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 Sidney Webb and his distinguished colleagues, can 
 witness patiently the attempts of anarchists and anti- 
 patriots to pervert the ideal they profess into some- 
 thing far more hideous than the worst of the injus- 
 tices against which they are ostensibly in revolt. 
 
 It is neither ethically nor psychologically, neither 
 historically nor economically sound, to believe that 
 the nation can ever be superseded; nor is it sound 
 to hold that the immigrant groups in America should 
 remain permanently segregated from each other and 
 from the nation at large. While retaining and de- 
 veloping the culture which they bring, they must at 
 the same time transform it into American culture, 
 and themselves into depositaries and channels of 
 American ideals and principles. They must assim- 
 ilate the older culture of the American people and 
 that of their fellow-immigrants of other race, to the 
 end that, through the mutual penetration of these 
 many embodiments of the human spirit, something 
 greater and finer than any of them may be produced. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE RIGHT METHOD: CULTURAL 
 CROSS-FERTILIZATION 
 
 IF the reader's patience has not been exhausted 
 by the analysis of " how not to do it " in the two 
 preceding chapters, I may now submit for his con- 
 sideration a brief outline of what I take to be the 
 true method of realizing the cultural promise of 
 the American nation. 
 
 The heterogeneity of our population, which so 
 many people deplore, is in my judgment not at all a 
 thing to be regretted, but is rather the very fact 
 which enables us to entertain a rational hope that 
 America will take rank among the foremost, if not 
 as the foremost, of the nations of the world, in 
 elaborating the mental, aesthetic and material civili- 
 zation of the next few centuries. My belief in this 
 possibility is rooted in a study of history, not indeed 
 so broad or deep as I could wish, but sufficiently so 
 to convince me that we have in the Republic to-day 
 precisely such a set of conditions as in the past has 
 always preceded and caused every notable efflores- 
 cence of national or racial genius, every marked 
 advance in the cultural development of mankind. 
 
 For such developments have always resulted from 
 the meeting and blending of contrasted culture- 
 types. This is a rule to which, I think, there has 
 
136 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 been no outstanding exception. Formerly, indeed, 
 the high achievement of the Hellenic peoples used 
 to be regarded as a spontaneous or, so to say, 
 parthenogenetic quickening of the higher genius of 
 a nation. But modern research has demonstrated 
 that, here as elsewhere, the general law is exempli- 
 fied. We now know that not until the crude art and 
 philosophy of early Greece had been brought into 
 intimate contact with the older cultures of Egypt 
 and the East did the rapid ascent begin. Through 
 its colonies on the coast of Asia Minor, through 
 intercourse with the ancient civilization of the Nile 
 Valley, and through what it derived from the won- 
 derful culture of the so-called Minoan period in 
 Crete, the genius of the Greek peoples was stimu- 
 lated to the point at which the glories of Periclean 
 Athens — the sculpture of Pheidias, the philosophy 
 of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, and the drama 
 of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides — could 
 arise. Had Greece been spiritually isolated, or had 
 its tribal egotism and contempt for foreigners for- 
 bidden it to profit by the opportunities of associa- 
 tion with other nations, it would in all probability 
 have remained until the end at a dwarfed and pov- 
 erty-stricken level of civilization. 
 
 The manifestation of the same principle in the 
 case of Rome is so clear that it needs no emphasis. 
 It is generally recognized that Roman literature is 
 for the most part a pallid imitation of that of Greece, 
 — an imitation which sometimes sinks to the level 
 of flat plagiarism. Every step in the development 
 from the primitive times of the Republic to the 
 
CULTURAL CROSS-FERTILIZATION 137 
 
 magnificence of the Augustan era has been shown 
 to have resulted from the appropriation by the 
 Romans of some of the ideas of the peoples whom 
 they conquered. Just as their army became a com- 
 posite, formed from all the peoples of the known 
 world, so their civilization was a blend of the cul- 
 tural achievements of every nation. Even the reli- 
 gion which, as we have seen, was the one great 
 heritage transmitted by Rome to its barbarian con- 
 querors, was a fusion of ideas, doctrines and prac- 
 tices blended together out of many varieties of 
 Paganism, and organized about a Judaeo-Christian 
 nucleus. No single or " pure " cultus could have 
 won the allegiance of so many nations as accepted 
 the Roman Catholic faith. A glance at the Atha- 
 nasian Creed, or even at the much earlier Prologue 
 to the Gospel of St. John, reveals the large extent 
 to which the theology of the Church was indebted 
 to the philosophy of Greece. Its ritual, its hagiol- 
 ogy, and its festivals testify to a similar indebted- 
 ness to many of the cults which it superseded. 
 
 Again, it should not be forgotten that the English 
 nation is the product of a blending of tribes and 
 races which continued for a thousand years. An 
 English immigrant to this country cannot, therefore, 
 be moved to despair by the multiplicity of tongues 
 or the sharp and even incongruous contrasts of race 
 and culture-level which he discovers here, unless he 
 feels that his own people have proved themselves a 
 failure in the world. For what is the story of 
 Britain, from the year 55 B. C, and earlier, to 1066 
 A. D. and later, but just such a welter of immigration 
 
138 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 and assimilation as that to which the term " melting- 
 pot " has been applied in America? To be sure, 
 the amalgamating elements were fewer, the experi- 
 ment was on a more limited scale, and the time 
 which it occupied was very much longer than the 
 whole life of America has thus far been. Never- 
 theless, the outcome of the process, as shown by a 
 comparison between the contributing elements and 
 the synthesis into which they at last blended, justi- 
 fies the conviction that America's repetition of the 
 experiment will indubitably lead to something finer 
 than any single one of the factors which co-operate 
 to produce it. 
 
 The ethnological antecedents of the race or races 
 which Julius Caesar found in Britain are very un- 
 certain, and for our present purpose of no great 
 importance. It suffices to remind the reader that 
 the " Ancient Britons " were neither destroyed nor 
 wholly driven into Wales and Cornwall and Brit- 
 tany. Large numbers of them were enslaved or 
 otherwise assimilated with their conquerors. After 
 the withdrawal of the Roman armies at the begin- 
 ning of the fifth century, the country that is now 
 England was for nearly five hundred years the hunt- 
 ing-ground and battle-field of predatory and war- 
 like tribes from all the northern lands of Europe. 
 Many Germanic stocks established themselves in 
 petty kingdoms on the eastern coast, and afterwards 
 spread inland. These were followed and fought 
 by Danes and other Scandinavians. The relations 
 between the successive floods of newcomers and 
 those already in possession were, of course, alter- 
 
CULTURAL CROSS-FERTILIZATION 139 
 
 nately martial and marital. Christianity, widely 
 prevalent during the period of the Roman occupa- 
 tion, was temporarily submerged by the Paganism 
 of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, to be subsequently 
 re-established by a missionary propaganda directed 
 from Rome. 
 
 At length. In the eleventh century, there came the 
 Norman Conquest — a conquest, that is, by North- 
 men who had been racially diluted and culturally 
 modified by a century and a half of Gallic environ- 
 ment. The kingdom of William the Conqueror was 
 thus a violent fusion of two broadly differentiated 
 peoples, each a composite derived from many stocks. 
 But within three centuries the inevitable process of 
 physical and psychical cross-fertilization between 
 these two types had resulted in their disappearance 
 and replacement by a new people, different from 
 both. Just as the English language, by the time of 
 Chaucer, is neither Anglo-Saxon nor Norman- 
 French, but a new creation, immeasurably richer 
 and more flexible than either of the elements from 
 which it had sprung, so the English people Is no 
 longer Angle or Saxon or Jute or Scandinavian or 
 Norman, but a new entity, in which the physical 
 stigmata of the various contributory races can per- 
 haps sometimes be traced, but which would never 
 have come into being had those races remained 
 segregated and " pure." 
 
 The term " Anglo-Saxon," which many people 
 proudly use to describe themselves, or the modern 
 English nation, or those elements In the American 
 Republic which are of British origin, is recognized 
 
140 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 by anthropologists to be scientifically worthless. No 
 Englishman can venture to say, without making him- 
 self ridiculous, that he is of undiluted Anglo-Saxon 
 or Danish or Celtic or Norman descent. Every one 
 of us is in this sense a hybrid, a product of miscegena- 
 tion. If we are to use the term "Anglo-Saxon" at all, 
 we ought to restrict it to the psychic characteristics 
 which have been dominant in this much-mixed people 
 since its emergence as a distinct unity, or to the 
 political ideals and social institutions which it has 
 evolved for itself and planted throughout the world. 
 As a sociological term, in this sense, the word may 
 be justified; but for purposes of ethnology it is 
 worse than useless. 
 
 The instances already cited, and many others 
 with which it is unnecessary to weary the reader, 
 establish the thesis that the enrichment of a civiliza- 
 tion is always by way of the crossing of compara- 
 tively unlike types. The process may or may not 
 involve the physical inter-breeding of different races, 
 but it must involve the mingling of variegated ideas 
 and ideals, aesthetic standards, religious beliefs, and 
 philosophical and scientific lore. The physical blend- 
 ing of races, provided they are not too markedly 
 divergent, has usually brought about an improve- 
 ment of the stock. The contact of culture-standards 
 always causes a widening of the mental horizon of 
 the peoples concerned, and a stimulation of their 
 creative power. 
 
 Reverting for a moment to the religion of Europe, 
 we must remind ourselves that this religion was 
 originally the cultural tradition of the Jewish nation. 
 
CULTURAL CROSS-FERTILIZATION 141 
 
 To be sure, It was already composite before it had 
 begun to spread among the Western peoples; but, 
 relatively to them. It may be regarded as a single 
 and simple factor. The adoption, therefore, of 
 Christlanlt)^ by the Western world was, from the 
 sociological standpoint, an Instance of cultural cross- 
 fertilization. It was the acceptance of the Ideas and 
 Ideals of a foreign people; the borrowing of that 
 people's literature, and its elevation to the rank of 
 divine revelation. All the peoples of Europe, how- 
 ever little they may have been physically modified 
 by Infusions of alien race, have thus been spiritually 
 impregnated by an influence from without; and this 
 influence, as we have seen, was for many centuries 
 the dominant factor In their lives, the condition, in- 
 deed, of their emergence into distinct and self- 
 conscious nationhood. 
 
 More restricted geographically, but not less 
 markedly effective, was the spiritual blending which 
 occurred when in the Middle Ages the literature of 
 ancient Greece was re-discovered. The term " New 
 Birth," — Renaissance, — which has so generally 
 been applied to this event. Is something more than a 
 mere metaphor, the event being a real case of bio- 
 genesis on the spiritual plane. The words that 
 ancient Greece spoke unto mediaeval Europe, they 
 were spirit and they were life. This Is proved by 
 the fact that they engendered life after their own 
 kind. They gave a wholly new direction to the men- 
 tal activities of the Western peoples. They made 
 and marked the difference between the mediaeval 
 and the modern world. 
 
142 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 We may say, then, that if there are any " pure " 
 races, they are the least civilized and the least pro- 
 gressive races in the world. If there are civilizations 
 which have received no infiltration from contrasted 
 cultures, they are so obscure and undeveloped that 
 they have contributed nothing to the general prog- 
 ress of mankind. No doubt the pre-Columbian races 
 of Mexico and Peru were relatively " pure," but 
 that, with their isolation, was the very reason for 
 their arrested development; that was why, when 
 discovered, they were so inferior to the civilization 
 of the discoverers. Purity, in the queer technical 
 sense in which the term is applied to nations and 
 their cultures, is a synonym for poverty. Pure lan- 
 guages are always poorer than those which have 
 assimilated alien elements. The Germans foolishly 
 pride themselves on the comparative freedom of 
 their tongue from foreign adulteration, which they 
 do their utmost to resist. They profess contempt 
 for French, and particularly for English, on the 
 ground that these are hybrids. But it is precisely 
 their hybridity which has given them their wealth, 
 their flexibility, their power to express the entire 
 gamut of emotions, the subtlest shades of meaning, 
 and the most abstract metaphysical conceptions. 
 The prevalence of French as the language of diplo- 
 macy, and the spread of English over the world,^ 
 
 ^ A curious episode recently occurred, according to a Church news- 
 paper, at a conference of native Christians in China. The delegates 
 were from all parts of the country, and the difference of Chinese dialects 
 is such that no one of them was intelligible to all present. So, in order 
 that all the Chinamen might understand each other, the proceedings 
 were conducted in English. 
 
CULTURAL CROSS-FERTILIZATION 143 
 
 are in large measure due to their adaptability to 
 every need of the mind. 
 
 The fate of the Aztec civilization, of the ab- 
 origines of Australia and Melanesia, and even of 
 the highly developed culture of China, reads this 
 lesson to the world: that it is not good for a civiliza- 
 tion to be alone. 
 
 The conclusion seems irresistibly to follow from 
 a survey of history that the conditions which prevail 
 in America to-day, if understood aright and wisely 
 handled, contain the promise and the potency of a 
 new epiphany of the human spirit, which shall be 
 as much higher and grander than that of contem- 
 porary Europe as contemporary Europe is higher 
 and grander than the Europe of two thousand years 
 ago. All the more does this seem possible when 
 we remember that the conscious providence of hu- 
 manity is now far more developed, and equipped 
 with far more potent instruments for the fulfilment 
 of its will, than at any previous period in the history 
 of the world. 
 
 The mastery over the earth's resources which ap- 
 plied science has given us, although, as we see to- 
 day, it can all too easily be degraded into a means 
 of collective suicide, nevertheless needs only good 
 will and humane purpose to transform the world 
 into a paradise. It even contains the promise that 
 we may turn what has hitherto been a fortuitous and 
 accidental development into a consciously controlled 
 process. For the minds of men, and the general 
 mind of society, have their uniformities no less than 
 the outer world. Although we are now only be- 
 
144 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 ginning to understand these, it seems not irrational, 
 following the analogy of our experience of the outer 
 world, to indulge the hope that a fuller knowledge 
 of our own nature's laws will enable us to plan our 
 future mental evolution. It may give us the possi- 
 bility of psychic and spiritual, as well as of bodily 
 eugenics. 
 
 But the wise utilization of our present oppor- 
 tunity in America does not require us to wander off 
 into the nebulous regions of prophecy and specula- 
 tion. Our practical duty clearly is to see that none 
 of the elements of civilization represented by the 
 many races among our population shall be suffered 
 to become extinct until it shall have crossed its genius 
 with that of others, and thereby given birth to some- 
 thing higher than itself. We need all the varieties 
 that are at hand. We cannot spare the ethical 
 mysticism of the Jew or the imaginative sacramen- 
 talism of the Catholic. We need that Italian soul 
 which has lived in Dante and Savonarola, in Pe- 
 trarch and Boccaccio, in Michel Angelo, in Mazzini 
 and Garibaldi, and which is not dead and cannot 
 die. We need the hardihood of the Northman and 
 the dreamy yet sturdy spirit of the Russian. We 
 must preserve the scientific thoroughness and meta- 
 physical profundity of the pre-imperial German, 
 and his genius for music and poetry. All these must 
 fructify and blend with the equally differentiated 
 and indispensable gifts and energies of the French 
 and British stocks. 
 
 By way, then, of a practical programme, I would 
 venture to set over against the notion of the melting- 
 
CULTURAL CROSS-FERTILIZATION 145 
 
 pot and the opposite doctrine of the segregation and 
 in-breeding of our national groups, the following 
 suggestions : — 
 
 {a) That every immigrant should be a member 
 of a society of his own national origin, and also a 
 member of an international society, composed of 
 representatives of as many different peoples as 
 possible. This would enable him to keep alive and 
 develop the culture inherited from his own race, 
 and to recognize that his business with that heritage 
 is to engraft it upon the new civilization which Amer- 
 ica is evolving. It would protect him against the 
 provincialism which inevitably results from isola- 
 tion. Fellowship with Americans of different origin 
 in an international society would lead him to re- 
 nounce the vulgar prejudices of race against race 
 and nation against nation, to respect his neighbour 
 as himself, and to value the cultural traditions of 
 other peoples as highly as his own. 
 
 {b) That each native-born American should also 
 be a member of an International society. This 
 would wean him from the conceit that the New Eng- 
 land Puritan type, or the Southern cavalier, or in- 
 deed any mere modification of what is called the 
 Anglo-Saxon race, is the final cast of Americanism, 
 upon which all newcomers, now and hereafter, are 
 to be moulded. It would enable him both to learn 
 and to teach, both to receive and to impart the quick- 
 ening Impulses of mental and spiritual life. 
 
 {c) That there should be intermarriage between 
 persons of different national descent; — between 
 Jews from Russia, from Germany and from Galicia, 
 
146 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 and also between Jews and Gentiles of every origin; 
 between Americans who have been Russians or 
 Hollanders or Italians or Czecho-Slovaks and 
 Americans of other race. 
 
 But the essential element in the plan which I am 
 sketching is the deliberate crossing, by means of 
 education and association, of the various cultures 
 represented; and its success need not depend upon 
 an extensive physical inter-breeding of racial and 
 national types. Although I believe profoundly in 
 the beneficence of " mixed marriages " of this kind, 
 I yet recognize that the spiritual element in the 
 process is the most important one from the national 
 standpoint, and that this can be secured, if necessary, 
 without the other. 
 
 {d) One important factor in such an enterprise 
 would be the establishment of State or municipal 
 theatres, which should not be confined to the pro- 
 duction of plays in English, nor yet restricted (as 
 our foreign theatres now are) to the work of any 
 single race or nation. I look for the time when we 
 shall have polyglot theatres, maintained at the pub- 
 lic expense (for there is no more objection to the 
 public endowment of a theatre than to that of any 
 other kind of school), in which, on alternate days 
 or weeks, there shall be plays in English, French, 
 German, Swedish, Russian, Italian, and Yiddish, 
 presented by members of those races who have been 
 bred in the traditions which the plays reflect. I also 
 hope that when this time comes, such plays will at- 
 tract audiences not only of persons of the same 
 antecedents as the performers, but of citizens of 
 
CULTURAL CROSS-FERTILIZATION 147 
 
 every origin. We shall not be, relatively to our op- 
 portunities, an educated nation until every one of our 
 citizens is able to appreciate plays in at least four 
 languages. To remain content with less than this 
 is as foolish a neglect of our spiritual resources as it 
 would be to leave our coal mines unworked and use 
 only wood for fuel. 
 
 (e) As the readiest means of rendering such a 
 scheme possible and profitable, we should inaugu- 
 rate in our high schools and universities a systematic 
 study of what has been called the Science of Civiliza- 
 tions. For this idea I am indebted to Professor 
 Felix Adler, of New York, who has already set on 
 foot a number of efforts towards its realization. 
 This science might, for practical purposes, be grafted 
 on to the study either of history or of sociology. 
 Its concrete details (such as the preparation of 
 text-books and the delivery of courses of lectures by 
 persons expert in the culture-history of particular 
 nations) could readily be worked out by any body 
 of educators, as soon as they had caught the vision 
 and appreciated the high promise of the scheme. 
 
 The conception which we are to realize, in work- 
 ing out our national evolution, is that which was so 
 well expressed by Mazzini, when he said that " Na- 
 tions are the citizens of humanity, just as individuals 
 are the citizens of a nation." The American doc- 
 trine of equality, in the only sense in which it can be 
 true at all, is true of peoples collectively as well as 
 of men individually. The peoples of foreign birth 
 or descent in this country are here because America 
 needs them as much as they need America. Had 
 
148 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 they not been needed, they would not have been 
 permitted to come. Each national stock is the bearer 
 of some mental or spiritual gift which is unique, 
 and which we cannot afford to lose. But immigra- 
 tion is a failure unless it Is so dealt with as to pro- 
 duce reciprocal benefits both to America and to the 
 newcomers whom she receives. The fusion of these 
 many cultures will result in each of them shedding 
 whatever is undesirable or unadaptable to the Amer- 
 ican environment; and, at last, in the merging of 
 them all Into a distinctively American civilization 
 which shall transcend them all. 
 
 It Is In the nature of such a new enterprise In 
 human evolution that Its final outcome should be 
 unpredictable. But If it be undertaken with due 
 regard to the lessons of history, and In the catholic 
 spirit of American democracy. It cannot be doubted 
 that the result must be of surpassing excellence. In- 
 deed, the very reason why it cannot be predicted is 
 the certainty that it will be nobler and more splendid 
 than anything we can now Imagine. No observer 
 in England, in the days Immediately following the 
 Norman Conquest, could have foreseen the work 
 of Geoffrey Chaucer, or the richly diversified and 
 yet unified nation which lives Immortally In " The 
 Canterbury Tales." Nor could any thinker In 
 Chaucer's time have prophesied the advent of Shake- 
 speare and the world he mirrored. When the seeds 
 of the Renaissance were sown, the harvest, although 
 certain, was Incalculable. The discovery of the New 
 World, the unprecedented outburst of mental life 
 and genius in many lands, the invention of printing, 
 
CULTURAL CROSS-FERTILIZATION 149 
 
 and the power, through science, of achieving the 
 imperium hominis of Bacon, were all hidden in the 
 haze of the morning twilight. Yet, looking back, 
 we now can see that these divine achievements of 
 the race were the natural results of the causes to 
 which we trace them. 
 
 And so, although it doth not yet appear what 
 America shall be, we know that, if she be true to her 
 own genius and respond worthily to her unrivalled 
 opportunity, her achievement, like her resources, 
 will be more precious for mankind than that of all 
 earlier times. Rich as her history already is in great 
 men, superb as is the accomplishment represented by 
 the names of Lincoln and Washington, of Emerson 
 and Lowell, and of her great inventors and men of 
 science, her future history will prove all these to 
 have been but 
 
 August anticipations, symbols, types 
 Of a dim splendour ever on before. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 "my country, right or wrong" 
 
 A NAVAL officer, flushed with enthusiasm and 
 perhaps just faintly exhilarated with wine, 
 proposing a toast after dinner, is hardly the person 
 to whom one would look for a satisfactory and uni- 
 versally applicable code of patriotic ethics. If he 
 had not been dining, and could not be suspected of 
 wining, it seems fairly obvious that the code which 
 such a gentleman might propound, even though it 
 were entirely sound in its application to men of his 
 own profession, might not be the right one for citi- 
 zens in general. The naval or military officer is 
 pledged to a discipline and an unquestioning obedi- 
 ence to the constituted authorities of his Govern- 
 ment which make his position radically different 
 from that of the lay citizen. 
 
 The business of a fire brigade is to put out fires, 
 not to let them burn while they discuss their causes. 
 The business of an army and navy is to win wars, 
 not to debate their origin or to suspend action until 
 they have independently satisfied themselves that 
 the cause in which they are commanded to fight is a 
 perfectly just and equitable one. The house would 
 burn down while the firemen were investigating; the 
 war Would be won by the enemy before the army 
 and navy had concluded their deliberations. While 
 
"MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG" 151 
 
 In his capacity as citizen, and when not engaged upon 
 professional duty, the soldier or sailor has the same 
 right to form and express opinions on national pol- 
 icy as the rest of us, the situation for him becomes 
 entirely changed when he is on duty. 
 
 We might concede, therefore, that the dogma of 
 Decatur (which a Chicago newspaper has for years 
 been reciting daily, with the somnolent regularity of 
 a Churchman reciting his Creed) is true and valid 
 for sailors and soldiers in their official capacity, and 
 yet deny its truth and validity for the rest of the 
 nation. But, as we shall see, there are strong rea- 
 sons why we cannot make even this concession. 
 
 For it cannot be said that a dogma, whether of 
 theology or of politics, is true and valid for any- 
 body so long as it is expressed in such loose terms 
 that it has no single, definite, and unmistakable 
 meaning. Now this is the trouble with the phrase 
 from Decatur's toast It may m^ean at least five or 
 six different things, every successive one of which 
 is worse than the others. But let us first construct 
 a few parallel watchwords on the same principle : — 
 
 " My mother, drunk or sober." 
 
 " My wife, faithful or unfaithful." 
 
 " My religion, true or false." 
 
 " My city, good or bad." 
 
 " My partner, honest or dishonest." 
 
 Can anybody point to a single reason for rejecting 
 these variations which would not be equally decisive 
 against the original theme? Why may not a priest, 
 at the command of his superiors or from regard to 
 a declaration made years ago, proclaim doctrines 
 
152 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 which he no longer believes to be true? Why may 
 not a merchant endorse or profit by the dishonest 
 procedure of his partner? If a man's mother, while 
 drunk, smashes his neighbour's windows, why should 
 he not declare her justified and refuse to make 
 amends? On the other hand, if these courses are 
 morally impossible, as they are, how can It be right 
 to preach or act upon the parrot-cry of " My coun- 
 try, right or wrong " ? 
 
 But, waiving for the moment the obvious moral 
 objections to the maxim, let us set forth the case 
 against it on the score of its many possible mean- 
 ings; — reminding ourselves, while doing so, that if 
 a word or phrase may mean anything it actually 
 means nothing. The saying, " My country, right 
 or wrong," is susceptible at least of the following 
 five interpretations : — 
 
 (a) "I will stand by my country whether she is 
 right or wrong. I will fight for her with the same 
 enthusiasm, and back up her demands for annexa- 
 tions or indemnities with the same zeal, whether 
 these are just or unjust." 
 
 (b) "I will give up the whole question of right- 
 ness or wrongness, and close my mind to the inquiry. 
 My country's decision shall be to me as the word of 
 God, which I will accept with unquestioning rever- 
 ence. The President and the Secretary for Foreign 
 Affairs shall be to me as a Pope and a Cardinal 
 Penitentiary, and what they decide I will accept as 
 the devout Romanist accepts a pronouncement ex 
 cathedra from the Vatican. In short, I will believe 
 my country right even though all the rest of the 
 
"MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG" 153 
 
 world declares her wrong and I know nothing about 
 the matter of my own knowledge. If her authorities 
 put an onion in my mouth and tell me it is an apple, 
 an apple it shall be." 
 
 (c) " I will swear that my country is right, 
 whether I believe it or not; and with all the more 
 emphasis if I don't. What is a lie, that one should 
 hesitate to tell it for the honour or advantage of 
 one's country? " 
 
 (d) " If I think her wrong, I will keep silence, 
 and allow others to assume that I believe her to be 
 right. This would only be a lie of silence anyway, 
 and surely that is common enough in daily life, as 
 well as in international politics! " 
 
 (e) '* Even though I know my country to be 
 wrong, and confess as much to myself and to my 
 fellow-countrymen, I will so speak and act that 
 the rest of the world shall believe that I think her 
 right." 
 
 In whichever of these senses the aphorism be con- 
 strued, it is a justification, gratuitously and gener- 
 ously presented by its American author and his 
 followers, to any present or future enemy of the Re- 
 public. Whether Mr. Roosevelt and the rest of 
 those who repeat it intend this use to be made of it is 
 not clear. Presumably they do not; but that it can 
 and will be so used is certain. When the President 
 of the United States drew his distinction between 
 the German people and " the Government that 
 speaks for them," what was to prevent their answer- 
 ing that in tolerating that Government and backing- 
 it in all its piracies and murders they had only acted 
 
154 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 upon the principle which so many influential Ameri- 
 cans have accepted from Stephen Decatur? " Place 
 whatever interpretation you like upon the maxim," 
 they might have said, " we shall maintain that all 
 that we have done at the behest of our Government 
 for the last forty years, and particularly since Aug- 
 ust, 1 9 14, Is compendiously justified out of your own 
 mouths." 
 
 And unless we are prepared to take the ground 
 that what Is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the 
 gander, — unless we claim that America is free to 
 make her own code for her own exclusive use, while 
 the rest of the world must abide by the standards 
 of ordinary morality, — we shall never be able to 
 rebut this defence. The invasion of Belgium and 
 the plundering and enslavement of its people, the 
 hideous devastation of French territory, the massacre 
 of the Armenians, the wantonly illegal assassination 
 of sleeping civilians by bombs from the air and of 
 passengers and non-combatants by torpedoes from 
 beneath the sea, can all be whitewashed If the maxim 
 *' My country, right or wrong," is once admitted to 
 be binding upon citizens. According to this doc- 
 trine, the English who supported George III against 
 the American Colonies were patriots and heroes; 
 and there never has been and never can be an unjust 
 war, unless It be one not commanded by the consti- 
 tuted authorities of any nation. 
 
 At this point, however, we may be impatiently 
 interrupted, and told that there Is another possible 
 meaning to Decatur's maxim which we have thus far 
 omitted. It may mean (we shall hear) that, Inas- 
 
"MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG" 155 
 
 much as my country Is my country, I must, willynilly 
 and Inevitably, stand by It right or wrong; but that, 
 while doing so, I am under no necessity to stifle my 
 moral judgment or to refrain from using my utmost 
 efforts towards Inducing my country to take the 
 course that I believe to be right. Suppose, for ex- 
 ample, that my country engages in a war which I 
 think unjust. When hundreds of thousands of my 
 fellow-citizens are risking their lives In that cause, 
 it Is inconceivable that I can attempt to obstruct the 
 furnishing of them with food, munitions, and other 
 supplies. But I should still be free to denounce the 
 Administration which had caused the war, to insist 
 that peace be made, and that compensation, in 
 money or territory, should be given to the victims 
 of its aggression. I should thus be standing by my 
 country even when I thought her wrong, but should 
 at the same time be doing everything in my power to 
 set her right. 
 
 Let us consider a concrete instance from recent 
 history. During the Boer War there was a large 
 party in England upon whom was fastened the 
 epithet " pro-Boer." These men and women, rightly 
 or wrongly, were convinced that the Tory and im- 
 perialistic Government which was then in oflice had 
 forced the war upon the Transvaal Republic in the 
 interests of the gold- and diamond-mining capitalists 
 and of the megalomaniac Imperialism of Mr. Cecil 
 Rhodes. They conducted an agitation all over the 
 country, by public meetings and in the Press, their 
 chief spokesman being the brilliant (and then bit- 
 terly hated) Mr. David Lloyd George. Their cry 
 
156 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 was that the war must be ended and justice done to 
 the Boers. But, so far as my memory serves me, 
 not a single member of this party ever suggested, 
 or dreamed of suggesting, that the British soldiers 
 in the field should be left in the lurch, that there 
 should be any stinting or withholding of their sup- 
 plies, or that they should be kept so few as to be in 
 danger of annihilation. None of the opponents of 
 the war failed to rejoice when a victory occurred. 
 When Baden-Powell and his garrison in Mafeking 
 were relieved after a long and dreadful siege, the 
 exultation among the " pro-Boers " was not less 
 genuine than among the Tories. 
 
 Soon after this war ended, as everybody knows, 
 there was a change of Government in England. 
 The party responsible for it suffered the heaviest 
 political defeat in the history of the country, and 
 their successors in office (many of whom during the 
 contest had been howled at as white-livered traitors, 
 and in some cases had actually gone in peril of their 
 lives) proceeded with general consent to bestow on 
 the Boers a far more satisfactory form of self-gov- 
 ernment than that which had been taken from them. 
 Have we not here, then, it may be urged, an instance 
 of the application of Decatur's maxim in its best 
 sense? 
 
 In reply to this, there are two things to be urged. 
 The first is that there has never been a case in which 
 those who mouthed the watchword " My country, 
 right or wrong," have applied or thought of apply- 
 ing it to such a course of conduct as that pursued by 
 Mr. Lloyd George and his associates in connection 
 
"MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG" 157 
 
 with the Boer War. This doctrine was constantly 
 invoked against the "pro-Boers" by their opponents. 
 The Chicago journal which hurls it at its readers in 
 large type every day, has also demonstrated in a 
 hundred editorials that it means the precise opposite 
 of such an ethical and critical patriotism. In the 
 very spirit of Treitschke and Bernhardi, it repeatedly 
 suggested (before April, 1917) that America should 
 seize Mexico, because that was easy, but keep clear 
 of the European War, because that would be difficult 
 and costly and its profits problematical. 
 
 The second reply is that nobody who really meant 
 to insist that his country should be always in the 
 right, even though he recognized that in the event 
 of her making war in a wrong cause he would be 
 obliged to stand by her, would dream of embodying 
 his conviction in such a silly expression. It is the 
 maxim not of one who intends vigilantly to use his 
 moral judgment, but of one who seeks an excuse for 
 abandoning it. It is the doctrine not of a free man 
 but of a slave; and not even of a manly slave who 
 revolts against his servitude, but of one who loves 
 his bonds, and dreads the responsibility of inde- 
 pendence. 
 
 But in this maxim there lurks a further confusion 
 of thought. What is "my country"? In earlier 
 chapters we have attempted, with the help of Mr. 
 Franklin Lane as well as by our own analysis, to 
 answer this question; and the conclusion to which 
 we were led is that our country consists essentially 
 of the idealizing will which brought it to the birth 
 through the struggle of the Revolution, and has 
 
158 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 ever since been growing more fully conscious of its 
 own nature and direction. If this be true, — if 
 America be in very fact the spirit that begot Wash- 
 ington and Lincoln, that freed the slaves, worked 
 out salvation for the Cubans, and returned the in- 
 demnity to China, — then it must follow that Amer- 
 ica ceases to be herself whenever she acts in a spirit 
 contrary to these precedents. In other words, when 
 she is wrong she is not our country. When a man 
 becomes insane, he is no longer himself; he is alien- 
 ated from his true nature and character. Your 
 mother drunk is not your mother. America wrong 
 is America de-Americanized, making shipwreck of 
 her faith, undoing her own history, reverting to the 
 type of the ancient despotisms against which her very 
 being is a protest. 
 
 Let a militaristic and aggressive party grasp the 
 reins of government in this Republic, and set out on 
 a policy of conquest and annexation. It well may 
 be that, with the immense resources in men and 
 munitions that could be mustered, it would succeed 
 in building up a world-empire, and find leaders who 
 could extend the dominion of the American people 
 as widely as Julius Caesar spread the sway of what 
 he pretended was the populus Romanus. But before 
 this process had been carried very far, it would be- 
 gin to be seen that America had utterly changed her 
 nature in embarking upon such an enterprise. She 
 could not do this and remain the Republic that we 
 know and love. The commanders who carried out 
 her perverted will would quickly become, as the serv- 
 ants of republican Rome became, her tyrants and 
 
"MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG" 159 
 
 dictators ; for such imperialism brings the imperator, 
 with the certainty of natural law. And all who, 
 against their reason and conscience, acquiesced in 
 the perversion, justifying their cowardice by the cry 
 of " My country, right or wrong," would live to 
 learn the truth of the contention that our country 
 wrong is not our country at all; that America is 
 synonymous with America right; that the Republic 
 free and freedom-loving, free and working for 
 freedom everywhere, is the only alternative to the 
 suicide of the real America. 
 
 Logical and moral consistency is never the strong 
 point of your jingo counterfeit-patriot. Conse- 
 quently, it was not surprising to discover that the 
 people who from 19 14 to 191 7 dinned the Decatur 
 motto into our ears, were throughout that time 
 clamorous in their criticism of the Administration 
 for its conduct of our foreign affairs. Yet, after 
 they had thus violated their own favourite maxim, 
 when America was at last forced to enter the Euro- 
 pean War, they at once became sternly insistent that 
 nobody, on penalty of being classed as a traitor, 
 should attempt in any way to safeguard the Republic 
 against being false to itself in the objects for which 
 it fought. 
 
 Now, while Decatur's maxim, the moment one 
 scans it closely, is seen to be either false or foolish, 
 and thoroughly unsuitable as a watchword for ra- 
 tional men in a free country, it nevertheless must be 
 conceded that the problem of conserving the right 
 of free speech in war time, while not abusing it, is 
 one of the most difficult in the whole range of theo- 
 
i6o ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 retical or practical ethics. Freedom without free 
 speech cannot exist. The liberty to utter one's con- 
 victions is its heart; and if the heart is injured, the 
 body must die. Yet, at the same time, it is obvious 
 that if even a small minority — say, ten per cent. — 
 of the population of a country at war with a power- 
 ful enemy were allowed to fill the newspapers and 
 the public forums with denunciations of the Govern- 
 ment and its policy, the effect of their action must 
 be precisely the same as if they were deliberately 
 committing treason. They would not only be giving 
 aid and comfort to the enemy, but they would be in 
 serious danger of enlisting the sympathy of the neu- 
 tral world on the enemy's behalf and against their 
 own nation. Their voices would be worth more 
 to the foe than many thousands of soldiers and 
 tons of munitions. If this happened here to-day, and 
 our Government were driven by the recognition of 
 these facts to a gagging of all opposition and a 
 temporary withdrawal of the right of free speech, 
 our enemy would promptly pervert this into a 
 plausible contention that the watchwords of Ameri- 
 can freedom were nothing but the mouthings of 
 conscious hypocrisy. 
 
 Difficult as this problem is in every democratic 
 country in time of war, the confusion is worse con- 
 founded in the United States than anywhere else, 
 by reason of the heterogeneity of its population. 
 It would be the same, so far as the nature of the 
 problem is concerned, if we were at war with Russia 
 or Italy as it is now that we are at war with Ger- 
 many; although probably the extreme ability and 
 
"MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG" i6i 
 
 unscrupulousness of the German system of espionage 
 makes it more acute in fact. The two great comph- 
 cations are the instinctive leaning of a few Ameri- 
 cans of German origin to the side of the enemy, and 
 the exploitation of this sentiment by the agents of 
 the enemy's Government. 
 
 The way in which, ever since August, 19 14, Ger- 
 man propaganda in America has been organized, 
 inspired and paid for by Berlin is notorious and 
 undeniable. Plot after plot has been traced to the 
 doors of the German Consulates and to the Embassy 
 at Washington. Since we entered the war, we have 
 seen our Courts convict official representatives of 
 the Prussian autocracy for having, with one hand, 
 sought to induce a neighbouring people to arise and 
 stab us in the back, and to bring about the incendiary 
 destruction of our munition-plants and other supply- 
 centres, while with the other they have been exploit- 
 ing the pacifist sentiment and paying for the promul- 
 gation of the idea that war is in itself, and under all 
 circumstances, wicked and inhuman. The result of 
 these disclosures is to prove, to everybody except 
 those who will not learn, that the expression of 
 pacifist sentiments, or of the opinion that America 
 has sinned in entering this particular war, is a play- 
 ing into the hands of the enemy. Americans who so 
 act are doing exactly what the Prussian autocracy 
 would have them do; they are doing gratuitously 
 what that autocracy would be willing enough to pay 
 them for doing. 
 
 Under such circumstances, recognizing, as they 
 needs must, that they are a small minority, and that 
 
1 62 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 the general judgment not only of their own country- 
 men but of the rest of humanity is decisively against 
 them, it becomes the duty of pro-German Americans 
 in general, and of pacifists in particular, to impose 
 upon themselves a self-denying ordinance, a volun- 
 tary censorship. A most honourable instance of this 
 kind of action was furnished when England entered 
 this war. Lord Morley of Blackburn (better known 
 to his American admirers by his plain name of John 
 Morley), veteran statesman, brilliant historian, 
 biographer and philosophic thinker, dissented from 
 the opinion of his colleagues in the Cabinet and of 
 the country at large. His dissent was shared by Mr. 
 John Burns, then also in the Cabinet. These two 
 gentlemen were not pro-German; heaven forbid that 
 I should insult them by suggesting that they werel 
 But they thought that it was not England's quarrel, 
 and that she should have been neutral. Finding, 
 however, that the tide of the national judgment was 
 against them, and realizing that their country was 
 fighting for its very life, they instantly resigned their 
 offices and retired into a silence which neither of 
 them has broken by a single word throughout these 
 desperate years. No coercion was exercised upon 
 them. Had they chosen, they could have gone from 
 end to end of Britain, preaching their doctrine to the 
 whole nation; — yes, and to all the world. But 
 they recognized that in the circumstances which the 
 war produced the exercise of their constitutional 
 right of free speech was morally impossible. Ac- 
 cordingly, like Milton, they " preferred a blame- 
 less silence"; thereby manifesting a high and fine 
 
"MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG" 163 
 
 patriotism, and also the self-control which is an 
 implied condition of all democratic privileges. 
 
 The most specious form which the business of 
 giving aid and comfort to the enemy has taken 
 among us was the organization of public meetings 
 to inquire why we were at war, and to nag the Gov- 
 ernment into publishing a full and detailed state- 
 ment of the terms on which we should be willing 
 to conclude peace. We must make allowance for 
 the simplicity of youthful zeal in the case of some 
 of the organizers of these meetings, and for the 
 na'ivete of sentimental provincialism in others. Yet 
 it was obvious to everybody who scanned the lists 
 of promoters and endorsers of this propaganda 
 (and still more to those who looked over the audi- 
 ences they convened, and noticed what points in the 
 speeches were received with stony silence and what 
 points evoked deafening applause), that the whole 
 thing, in fact and effect, whatever it may have been 
 in intention, was a move to prevent America from 
 striking hard and effectually in the war, to lame its 
 arm, to discourage its soldiers and sailors, and cor- 
 respondingly to strengthen and encourage the enemy. 
 The very question, " Why are we at war? " is one 
 that cannot be asked by any grown-up American 
 who knows the history of the Republic and has fol- 
 lowed intelligently the course of events during the 
 last four years. The assertion that our war aims 
 were unknown was absurdly false. Before we 
 entered the war, the President, in his Address to the 
 Senate of January 22nd, 1917, had made a full and 
 splendid statement of them; and since then, in his 
 
1 64 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 various public utterances, he has not abandoned 
 a single one of the principles he then laid down. 
 There is something strabismic about the mental 
 vision of an American who could read these speeches 
 and not recognize them as classical extensions to 
 mankind in general of the principles upon which the 
 Republic was organized and has lived for a hundred 
 and forty years. The President's words are not 
 only a statement of America's aims, they are the 
 statement; that is, they are such an assertion of our 
 position as any competent committee of patriotic 
 Americans, of any party, desiring to interpret the 
 spirit and purposes of the American nation, must 
 have drawn up. They can be overlooked or mis- 
 trusted only by persons who are either strangely 
 ignorant or are blinded by secret affection for that 
 colossal embodiment of all that is un-American and 
 anti-democratic, the Prussian State. 
 
 The duty of true " pacifists " at this juncture is 
 to see that our terms of peace are vigorously fought 
 for and lived up to when our cause triumphs. Their 
 demand for a statement of America's principles and 
 objects is as superfluous as it is unpatriotic. Let 
 them see to it that the terms drawn up and promul- 
 gated before we went to war are made known to 
 every person the country over, as well as to the rest 
 of the world. Their duty is not to back what they 
 believe to be wrong, but to insist on the maintenance 
 of what they cannot deny to be right. In the pro- 
 gramme for world-organization and for the super- 
 national control of the forces of mankind which 
 Mr. Wilson has repeatedly outlined as the only 
 
"MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG" 165 
 
 means of securing and maintaining an equitable 
 peace, we have the very voice of America right, 
 America true to its own genius, faithful to the gos- 
 pel by which it lives. Let, then, our peace-lovers 
 take the stand that these principles must be kept 
 in every American mind and heart, so that, when 
 the time for establishing peace arrives, there shall 
 be no danger of our swerving from the true path 
 by reason of the hatreds and resentments which the 
 war has engendered. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF AMERICANISM 
 
 SEVERAL times in these pages I have insisted, 
 in a way which some of my readers may have 
 thought strange, upon the identity of spirit between 
 the ideals of the RepubHc and the Christian religion, 
 regarded in its historic aspect as a movement for 
 the spiritual unification and reformation of the pres- 
 ent world. I have not been unconscious of the ques- 
 tions and objections to which this identification 
 might give rise; but I have of set purpose deferred 
 them for elucidation in this chapter. It will now 
 be possible, I trust, to make it clear that the view I 
 advocate can be adopted by Christians of all denom- 
 inations, and also by Jews, without involving the re- 
 jection of any doctrine which may seem to them 
 material to the soundness of their faith. 
 
 That most of what we call the world-religions 
 have included among their objects such a unification 
 of mankind and such an abolition of the evils which 
 infest the life of nations, is a statement to which 
 history in every page bears testimony. Nor can 
 Christianity be considered an exception to this rule, 
 without a violent distortion of the language of its 
 Founder and his immediate followers, or without 
 ignoring both the manifest purpose of St. Paul and 
 the principles on which the Christian Church con- 
 
AMERICANISM: RELIGIOUS ASPECT 167 
 
 sistently acted, from the time of St. Paul down to 
 and beyond the Reformation. When the Massa- 
 chusetts Puritans made it their object to establish a 
 society which should be Church and State in one, 
 however narrow and biassed their conception of a 
 Christian Commonwealth may have been, they were 
 unquestionably true to the genius of their religion in 
 feeling that it demanded an organization of govern- 
 mental character. Christianity reduced to the di- 
 mensions of a " Sunday religion," a private enter- 
 prise merely for prayer and worship, cut off from 
 the life of business, science, art and politics, and 
 declared to have no real bearing on the common 
 life. Is Christianity denatured. It was meant, as Its 
 Jewish predecessor and parent had been meant, to 
 animate with a living soul each nation that adopted 
 It, and at last to bring all the nations of the earth 
 together in a free brotherhood of mutual benefi- 
 cence. 
 
 Now if this be true, every enterprise which Is 
 directed towards the same goal, whether or not 
 overtly associated with a theological creed, and 
 whether It bears the Christian name or not, must be 
 of the same spirit with Christianity. 
 
 But the Identity of goal is not the only point of 
 contact between Americanism and the historic faith 
 of Europe. There Is also, In several vitally im- 
 portant respects, an Identity of method as well. 
 Both Christianity and American democracy Insist 
 on the sacredness and worth of the individual human 
 being, and both Insist, at the same time, that the 
 individual Is to seek his true self-fulfilment by abdi- 
 
1 68 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 eating his exclusive, egocentric individuality and 
 finding a larger and freer life in the service of the 
 Whole whereof he forms a part. 
 
 Both have grasped the truth that man needs a 
 twofold emancipation. He must be set free first 
 from external tyranny, from the dictation of kings 
 and overlords, and secondly from internal tyranny, 
 the debasing slavery of self-absorption and self- 
 worship. If America has been less successful in 
 realizing the latter of these conditions than the 
 former, that fault or misfortune does not destroy 
 the fact that the attainment of inward liberation has 
 been as much her object as the destruction of ex- 
 ternal tyranny. Experience demonstrated to the 
 Fathers of the Republic the soundness of the Chris- 
 tian psychology. It was in freely sacrificing their 
 self-interest and dedicating their lives and fortunes 
 to the perilous cause of their country's freedom 
 that they found their own souls, and became the 
 heroes and patriots whom subsequent generations 
 have venerated. 
 
 When we recognize that every religion in its 
 mature development is a moral ideal which has be- 
 come the living dynamic of the will of a nation or 
 nations devoted to its actualization, the propriety of 
 assuming that Americanism possesses a religious 
 aspect is seen to be incontestable. Now, such a liv- 
 ing ideal was Judaism in antiquity; such, indeed, it 
 still remains at the present day. This, too, is what 
 Christianity was from the beginning until the seven- 
 teenth century; and if it has ceased — or rather, in 
 so far as it has ceased — to be this, it has been false 
 
AMERICANISM : RELIGIOUS ASPECT 169 
 
 to its own nature and to the inspiration of its found- 
 ers. Its greatness lay always in its national rather 
 than in its merely individual appeal; and even in its 
 degenerate form, — when, instead of looking for a 
 renewed society of men on earth, it placed its civitas 
 Dei wholly beyond the grave, — the very retention 
 of the word civitas shows how inseparable from it 
 was the notion of a governmentally organized 
 society. 
 
 Using, then, the word " religion " In the sense 
 above defined, which, I submit, is a sense that all his- 
 tory justifies, it may next be affirmed that there can 
 be no nation without a religion, however formless or 
 rudimentary it may be. Some ideal, some standard 
 of what human life should become, some sense of a 
 mission to the world at large, is an indispensable 
 condition of nationhood. And America, as we have 
 seen, has a very definite and conscious contribution 
 to make to the democratic federation of mankind. 
 Mazzini, with a soul fired by the great struggle for 
 Italian unification, passionately declared that '* Italy 
 is itself a religion." In the same sense, we may say 
 that America is itself a religion. America, as a 
 spiritual being, is animated by an ideal and charged 
 with a gospel which it needs must preach. It could 
 not rest while it was itself half slave and half free, 
 nor can it ever rest until freedom has been won for 
 all nations. 
 
 But neither, without being false to its own nature, 
 can it ever seek to impose its ideals or forms of 
 government by force upon any other nation. It 
 recognizes that government for the people is only 
 
170 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 half, and the less important half, of genuine democ- 
 racy, the heart of which is government by the people. 
 " Work out your own salvation," is its watchword, 
 since it is in and through the " working " that men 
 discover, or create, their higher selfhood. The 
 American evangel, therefore, must always seek to 
 propagate itself by means of an appeal to the inde- 
 pendent moral judgment of others. America is, as 
 we have elsewhere said, an example and working 
 model of free and peaceful federation to the race. 
 It can never fight except in self-defence, or in the 
 defence of some weak struggler engaged in up- 
 holding the ideal of autonomous democracy against 
 the aggression of autocracy. 
 
 Now, in order to be an internationalist, one must 
 first be a nationalist. It is impossible to believe in a 
 relation without believing in the terms that it con- 
 nects. It is preposterous to believe in a peaceful 
 federation of nations unless one begins by believing 
 in the integrity and inviolability of those distinct 
 collective personalities which we call nations. The 
 mission of a democracy in the world is to encourage 
 national aspirations everywhere, and to work for 
 the voluntary acceptance by all nations of a super- 
 national government, which shall not only secure 
 their freedom from aggression, but shall also pro- 
 vide scope for the achievement by each of its dis- 
 tinctive contribution to the universal welfare. Only 
 by taking such a view of its mission in the world can 
 a free people escape both the Scylla of aggressive 
 jingoism and the Charybdis of a denationalized 
 cosmopolitanism. 
 
AMERICANISM : RELIGIOUS ASPECT 171 
 
 This must mean that, instead of living directly 
 and exclusively for itself, and seeking its own ag- 
 grandizement at the expense of others, a nation 
 must, in a very true and real sense, die to itself, and 
 find its true life in promoting the free life of other 
 nations. In such a statement there is nothing either 
 mystical or quixotic. Ethics recognizes that every 
 man must be regarded simultaneously as an end in 
 himself — that is to say, as precious and worth- 
 while on his own account — and as a means to the 
 ends of others. On the same principle, it regards 
 the family as an end in itself which must never be 
 violated, as a group which must under no condition 
 be made merely an instrument for the benefit of 
 others. Yet, at the same time, the family achieves 
 its own purpose and its own happiness only when, 
 through the discipline of which it is the vehicle, it 
 equips each of its members for some career of effi- 
 cient service to the nation, and through the nation 
 to the world. If it were only an end to itself, if it 
 lived exclusively for its own sake and with no out- 
 look beyond, it would degenerate, and all its mem- 
 bers with it. Now, the view of the nature and des- 
 tiny of a nation which is here suggested is simply an 
 extension of that which nobody denies to be the true 
 conception of the nature and purposes of the family. 
 
 Why is the history of organized mankind so full 
 of tragedy? What is the basis of fact which ex- 
 plains, though it does not justify, the terrific pessi- 
 mism of Schopenhauer's conviction that the will-to- 
 iive is the sin of sins, the very root of evil which 
 must be extirpated? Why was it that the passionate 
 
172 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 humanity of Buddha could find refuge only in the 
 prospect of the utter extinction of individual self- 
 consciousness? At bottom, the explanation is that 
 individuals, families and nations have missed the 
 true law of their relations, and madly sought to live 
 by the law of death instead of by that of life. The 
 doctrine " He that findeth his life shall lose it, and 
 he that loseth his life shall find it " is too much of a 
 paradox, does too much violence to the animal in- 
 stincts and the unenlightened reason of men, to 
 secure general or speedy acceptance. After these 
 measureless aeons of evolutionary struggle we have 
 at last begun to perceive the soundness of this ethi- 
 cal law as regards individuals, and perhaps even as 
 regards families; but its application to the life of 
 nations can scarcely even yet be said to have begun. 
 The law of the jungle, the conviction that each must 
 live at the cost of all other life, has been the practical 
 creed of nations; and the tragedy of their history 
 results precisely from this. 
 
 If there were no other way, — if human com- 
 munities were so constituted that they never could 
 transcend a principle the following of which inevi- 
 tably precipitates them into disaster, — there would 
 be ample justification for the pessimism of Buddha 
 and Schopenhauer, which at its root is the same with 
 the pessimism of St. Augustine. But when experi- 
 ence has demonstrated the possibility of an alterna- 
 tive course which will avert the evils that the law of 
 the jungle brings upon its own trail, it becomes in- 
 excusable to groan with Koheleth that all is vanity, 
 or with Schopenhauer to advocate the suicide of the 
 
AMERICANISM: RELIGIOUS ASPECT 173 
 
 will-to-live. Believers in the uniformity of nature 
 cannot feel that a principle which is valid and fruit- 
 ful in one department of human life will fail when it 
 is extended to a larger sphere. Moral laws are as 
 constant as any of the other regularities of the 
 world. If, then, in the paradox of achievement 
 through renunciation we have found the true way 
 of life for the individual and the family, it is dis- 
 tinctly unscientific to thrust aside the probability that 
 a like procedure in the case of nations will produce 
 like effects. 
 
 Let me anticipate an obvious objection by remind- 
 ing the reader that I am not preaching the doctrine 
 of non-resistance, or passive submission by the weak 
 to the tyranny of the strong. I am no Tolstoian; on 
 the contrary, I am, at all events in this matter, the 
 extreme opposite of a Tolstoian — viz., a Christian. 
 In an earlier volume ^ I have attempted to show that 
 Christ's injunction about non-resistance to evil was 
 given not to the world at large, but only to a hand- 
 ful of His immediate followers, and not even to 
 them as a counsel for ordinary life, but distinctly as 
 a rule for their guidance in a special and particular 
 line of work. In His own practice Christ's life was 
 one long resistance to evil, — a resistance which, 
 when necessary, took the form of personal violence. 
 No sane man can be a lover of war; we must all 
 agree with Mr. Hosea Biglow: " Ez fer war, I call 
 it murder." But neither will any sane man deny that 
 resistance to the murderer is a high and holy enter- 
 
 » Somf Outlines of the Religion of Experience, p. loi. (New York: 
 Macmillans, 1916.) 
 
174 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 prise. When, therefore, murderous aggression is 
 attempted, whether by one man or by a whole nation, 
 it is right and humane (and, one may add. Chris- 
 tian) to meet it not with peace but with a sword. 
 
 The Western world in general assents, at least 
 with its lips, to the Christian-democratic valuation 
 of man, and to the principles of political organiza- 
 tion which are necessary to express this valuation in 
 practice. But our generation is confronted with a 
 philosophy, expressed by a great literary genius in 
 books which have been read with eager admiration 
 in several languages, which denies this valuation 
 utterly and rejects democracy and all its works root 
 and branch. As I am convinced that the issue be- 
 tween Nietzsche and democracy Is one of war to the 
 knife, I may be pardoned for quoting at some length 
 from this magnificent philosopher of despotism and 
 slavery, and afterwards presenting the case for 
 democracy as against him. 
 
 In his treatise entitled " The Antichrist," Nietz- 
 sche uses with regard to Christianity language more 
 opprobrious than has ever been employed in con- 
 troversy since the days of Tertullian. He literally 
 foams at the mouth, his eyes distend, he turns purple 
 in the face, and seems on the point of bursting a 
 blood-vessel, in the impossible attempt to find 
 epithets foul and vituperative enough to charac- 
 terize the religion which has incurred his hatred. 
 As thus : — 
 
 The Christian concept of God — God as the deity of the 
 sick, God as a spider, God as spirit — is one of the most cor- 
 
AMERICANISM: RELIGIOUS ASPECT 175 
 
 rupt concepts of God that has ever been attained on earth. 
 Maybe it represents the low-water mark in the evolutionary 
 ebb of the godlike type. God degenerated into the contra- 
 diction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal 
 Yea ! With God war is declared on life, nature, and the will 
 to life ! God is the formula for every calumny of this world 
 and for every lie concerning a beyond! In God, nonentity 
 is deified, and the will to nonentity is declared holy! . . . 
 
 This miserable God of Christian monotono-theism ! This 
 hybrid creature of decay, nonentity, concept and contradic- 
 tion, in which all the instincts of decadence, all the coward- 
 ices and languors of the soul find their sanction ! . . . 
 
 In Christianity all the instincts of the subjugated and op- 
 pressed come to the fore: it is the lowest classes who seek 
 their salvation in this religion. Here the pastime, the man- 
 ner of killing time, is to practise the casuistry of sin, self- 
 criticism, and conscience inquisition. Here the ecstasy in the 
 presence of a powerful being, called " god," is constantly 
 maintained by means of prayer; while the highest thing is 
 regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as an act of " grace." 
 Here plain dealing is also entirely lacking: concealment and 
 the darkened room are Christian. Here the body is despised, 
 hygiene is repudiated as sensual; the church repudiates even 
 cleanliness ( — the first Christian measure after the banish- 
 ment of the Moors was the closing of the public baths, of 
 which Cordova alone possessed 270). A certain spirit of 
 cruelty towards one's self and others is also Christian : hatred 
 of all those who do not share one's views; the will to perse- 
 cute. Sombre and exciting ideas are in the foreground; the 
 most coveted states and those which are endowed with the 
 finest names, are really epileptic in their nature; diet is 
 selected in such a way as to favour morbid symptoms and to 
 over-excite the nerves. Christian, too, is the mortal hatred 
 of the earth's rulers, — the " noble," — and at the same time 
 a sort of concealed and secret competition with them (the 
 subjugated leave the "body" to their master — all they 
 want is the " soul "). Christian is the hatred of the intellect, 
 of pride, of courage, freedom, intellectual libertinage; Chris- 
 
176 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 tian is the hatred of the senses, of the joys of the senses, of 
 joy in general. . . . 
 
 Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its expedient 
 is to make them ill, — to render feeble is the Christian re- 
 cipe for taming, for " civilization." . . . 
 
 — I cannot, at this point, stifle a sigh. There are days when 
 I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy 
 — the contempt of man. And in order that I may leave 
 3'ou in no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: I 
 declare that it is the man of to-day, the man with whom I 
 am fatally contemporaneous. The man of to-day, I am 
 asphyxiated by his foul breath. . . . Towards the past, like 
 all knights of knowledge, I am profoundly tolerant, — that 
 is to say, I exercise a sort of generous self-control: with 
 gloomy caution I pass through whole millennia of this mad- 
 house world, and whether it be called " Christianity," 
 " Christian Faith," or " Christian Church," I take care not 
 to hold mankind responsible for its mental disorders. But 
 my feeling suddenly changes, and vents itself the moment I 
 enter the modern age, our age. Our age knoivs. . . . That 
 which formerly was merely morbid, is now positively inde- 
 cent. It is indecent nowadays to be a Christian. And it is 
 here that my loathing begins. I look about me: not a word 
 of what was formerly known as " truth " has remained 
 standing ; we can no longer endure to hear a priest even pro- 
 nounce the word " truth." Even he who makes but the most 
 modest claims upon truth, must know at present, that a theo- 
 logian, a priest, or a pope, not only errs but actually lies, 
 with every word that he utters, — and that he is no longer 
 able to lie from " innocence," from " ignorance." Even the 
 priest knows quite as well as everybody else does that there 
 is no longer any " God," any " sinner " or any " Saviour," 
 and that " free will," and " a moral order of the universe " 
 are lies. Seriousness, the profound self-conquest of the spirit, 
 no longer allows anyone to be ignorant about this. . . . 
 All the concepts of the Church have been revealed in their 
 true colours — that is to say, as the most vicious frauds on 
 earth, calculated to depreciate nature and all natural values. 
 
AMERICANISM: RELIGIOUS ASPECT 177 
 
 The priest himself has been recognised as what he is — that 
 is to say, as the most dangerous kind of parasite, as the actual 
 venomous spider of existence. ... At present we know, our 
 conscience knows, the real value of the gruesome inventions 
 which the priests and the Church have made, and what end 
 they served. By means of them that state of self-profanation 
 on the part of man has been attained, the sight of which 
 makes one heave. The concepts " Beyond," " Last Judg- 
 ment," " Immortality of the Soul," the " soul " itself, are 
 merely so many instruments of torture, so many systems of 
 cruelty, on the strength of which the priest became and re- 
 mained master. . . . Everybody knows this, and neverthe- 
 less everything remains as it was. Whither has the last shred 
 of decency, of self-respect gone, if nowadays even our states- 
 men — a body of men who are otherwise so unembarrassed, 
 and such thorough anti-Christians in deed — still declare 
 themselves Christians and still flock to communion ? ^ . . . 
 Fancy a prince at the head of his legions, magnificent as the 
 expression of the egoism and self-exaltation of his people, — 
 but shameless enough to acknowledge himself a Christian! 
 . . . What then does Christianity deny? What does it call 
 "world"? "The world" to Christianity means that a 
 man is a soldier, a judge, a patriot, that he defends himself, 
 that he values his honour, that he desires his own advantage, 
 that he is proud. . . . The conduct of every moment, every 
 instinct, every valuation that leads to a deed, is at present 
 anti-Christian: what an abortion of falsehood modern man 
 must be, in order to be able without a blush still to call him- 
 self a Christian ! ^ 
 
 Now these passages have not been arbitrarily or 
 maliciously selected from a work produced when the 
 author was on the verge of mental collapse. Nietz- 
 sche's Insight into his own meaning, his power of 
 
 ^ "This apparently applies to Bismarck, the forger of the Ems tele- 
 gram and a sincere Christian." — Note by Nietzsche's translator. 
 
 ^ Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §§ l8, 19, 21, 22, 38 (English trans, by 
 A. M. Ludovici). 
 
178 ON BECOMIITG AN AMERICAN 
 
 perceiving what things favoured his philosophy and 
 what were its natural enemies, was never clearer or 
 more unerring than when he dipped his pen in gall 
 to write these envenomed paragraphs. They con- 
 tain the quintessence of his doctrine; they represent 
 his concept of the Superman and the self-justifying 
 will-to-power, fully conscious of its meaning and 
 end, armed at all points, and brought face to face 
 with its immortal and most implacable foe. 
 
 His disciples invariably tell us that the fact of his 
 ultimate insanity must not be taken as discrediting 
 his philosophy; and in this they are perfectly right. 
 But when, taking them at their word, one quotes 
 such passages as the foregoing, and does Nietzsche 
 the honour of assuming that he knew exactly what 
 he meant and was capable of conveying his meaning 
 in the plainest of plain language, those same dis- 
 ciples furiously declare that one is misinterpreting or 
 has failed to understand him. Now, to this we are 
 entitled to object. Such a defence is really an insult 
 to their master. Why should those who have read 
 their Plato and Aristotle, their Schopenhauer, their 
 Berkeley and Hume, their Bradley and Green and 
 Bergson, and shown themselves not incapable of 
 understanding and interpreting them, submit to the 
 Imputation that they cannot get out of the text of 
 Nietzsche the meaning he intended it to yield? Why 
 acquiesce in the suggestion that he, who was a great 
 literary artist, a master of concise and precise utter- 
 ance, was less capable than any other philosopher 
 of saying what he meant and guarding himself 
 against misunderstanding? It looks rather as though 
 
AMERICANISM: RELIGIOUS ASPECT 179 
 
 his followers were somewhat halting In their al- 
 legiance, somewhat chary of the real meaning of the 
 doctrines they have embraced. 
 
 The passages I have quoted, and the context in 
 which they appear, do not represent any vagary, any 
 departure from previous positions, on Nietzsche's 
 part. What he here says so explicitly was implicit 
 in his doctrine from the first. In these sentences we 
 have " Thus Spake Zarathustra " and " Beyond 
 Good and Evil " in a nutshell. He is perfectly 
 consistent in his main thought, and (unlike some of 
 his admirers) he does not shrink from following it 
 out to its logical and practical consequences. He 
 sees and knows that a philosophy which on one side 
 is a gospel of self-assertion must be on the other side 
 a gospel of slavery. He realizes that you cannot 
 affirm autocracy without denying democracy; you 
 cannot worship the " beast of prey " without assent- 
 ing to the devouring of the prey. Like any well- 
 thought-out doctrine, his must be taken or rejected 
 as a whole. The attempt of his half-hearted ad- 
 mirers to keep the self-assertion and leave the 
 slavery, to have the tyrant without the victims, to 
 cultivate the tiger but not provide him with his 
 food, is sheer muddle-headed fatuity, which Nietz- 
 sche himself would have been the first to stigmatize 
 in the severest terms. 
 
 When Mr. Bernard Shaw, for example, makes 
 this attempt; when he speaks about a " Democracy 
 of Supermen " as though such a thing were a prac- 
 tical possibility, without realizing that to ask for it 
 is exactly like asking for a range of hills without any 
 
i8o ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 valleys; we have a perfect illustration of the im- 
 possibility of fusing these opposites, of running 
 democracy and autocracy, Socialism and Nietzsche- 
 ism, in double harness. Mr. Shaw speaks much of 
 Equality, and sneers (more suo) at the rest of the 
 world for not understanding it/ But has he under- 
 stood it himself? Has he realized that men are 
 and must always remain unequal in every respect 
 save one — that of moral worth, inviolability, the 
 unconditional right to be regarded as ends per se 
 and not merely as means — but that this one all- 
 important Equality is the thing which democracy 
 insists upon and which Nietzsche utterly denies and 
 rejects? Admit this Equality, and you are com- 
 mitted once and for all to democracy; deny it, and 
 you can be a Nietzschean, a believer in the Super- 
 man, — which means in practice the right of the 
 Prussian sinkers of hospital-ships to govern the 
 world on the same principles on which for the last 
 four years they have governed Belgium. That is 
 what Nietzsche believed in and frankly advocated. 
 You cannot have it both ways; you cannot serve 
 these two masters. His hatred of Christianity was 
 due to his clear perception that in its essence — that 
 is, in its ethical valuation of the common man, in 
 its insistence on his inviolability — Christianity was 
 the deadly enemy of his creed. He tells us this ; we 
 understand him; and we reject his doctrine root and 
 branch and altogether. 
 
 According to Nietzsche, as we have seen, every- 
 
 * "Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand 
 them." — Man and Superm-an, p. 223, in the American edition. 
 
AMERICANISM: RELIGIOUS ASPECT i8i 
 
 body who even pretends to believe in Christianity 
 is a conscious liar, a hypocrite and an impostor, or 
 else a doddering idiot. This religion, he declares, 
 is the curse of the world, the enemy of all that is 
 grand and noble in mankind and in the universe. It 
 is the religion of slaves, the nauseous self-protective 
 device of the weaklings and failures of the world, 
 whereby they essay to safeguard themselves against 
 the just and necessary self-assertion of the higher 
 type, the predestined Superman. 
 
 From his own standpoint, then, Nietzsche was 
 entirely right in selecting Christianity as the object 
 of his hatred, and in pouring out upon it the floods 
 of his literary billingsgate. For it is certain, not 
 only that one cannot be at the same time a democrat 
 and a superman-worshipper, but that the only choice 
 for the world lies between the Christian estimate of 
 humanity and the Nietzschean. It is Christ or 
 Nietzsche; it is Man or Superman; it is Democracy 
 or Despotism. To this alternative we are shut up, 
 in practice as well as in theory. Either, with Chris- 
 tianity and democracy, we must trust to the higher 
 nature of the common man, and make him the 
 sovereign and the law-giver, in the faith that this will 
 at last result in the just and fraternal organization 
 of human society; or we must take our stand, as 
 Nietzsche so frankly did, on the doctrine of slavery, 
 relinquishing the world into the hands of a few 
 self-elected exploiters, whose " will-to-power " is to 
 be regarded as self-justifying. The law of equality 
 and mutuality, or the law of the wolf against the 
 lamb : that is the only real choice before us. 
 
1 82 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 Which is it to be? For Americans, the answer 
 cannot remain a moment in doubt. By all our tradi- 
 tions, by all our inherited instincts, and by the un- 
 exampled success of our national experiment, we are 
 committed to the democratic horn of the alternative. 
 Among common people, within the common man, we 
 look for the kingdom of God. In the history of the 
 world is writ large the menace of the Nietzschean 
 ideal. It must begin with a spurning of the ele- 
 mentary principles of morality; love and sympathy, 
 the protection of the weak, justice to the poor — 
 these things it spews out of its mouth. The proto- 
 types of the Superman, the Caesars and the Alex- 
 anders, the Borgias and the Napoleons, come cen- 
 tury after century, with their ever-renewed attempt 
 to degrade human nature into a footstool beneath 
 their feet. Rapidly, like comets, they shoot across 
 the earth, leaving behind them their trail of blood 
 and fire; but the end in all cases is the same. The 
 gospel of power is shattered by its own impotence; 
 but not, alas! until it has arrested for ages the 
 growth of civilization, blasted the world, and dem- 
 onstrated ever anew that in its path lie only madness 
 and ruin. 
 
 The terrible fate of its most brilliant literary ex- 
 positor cannot be separated from his doctrine. The 
 Nietzschean philosophy is from beginning to end 
 the premonition of the mental ruin into which Nietz- 
 sche collapsed. A man's beliefs, as we now know, 
 affect not only his conduct but also his health. 
 Nietzsche's choice from the outset was a doctrine 
 which alienated him ever further and more com- 
 
AMERICANISM: RELIGIOUS ASPECT 183 
 
 pletely from the kindly world of common men. 
 Whether it was his temperament that determined 
 his philosophy, or his philosophy that moulded his 
 character, the interconnection of the two things was 
 constant throughout. The gospel of the Superman, 
 with its rejection on the Superman's behalf of all 
 participation in the common nature and the common 
 life of men, is the gospel of insanity; for what is 
 insanity but precisely this alienation carried to com- 
 pletion? 
 
 It is arguable, indeed, that the state of conscious- 
 ness of the lunatic is something altogether higher 
 than that of the sane man, — that he has an intuition 
 of ultimate reality, a private and Incommunicable 
 revelation of the undiscovered and uncharted realms 
 of nature lying beyond our senses, beyond the reaches 
 of our souls. Yet, even if it be so, the closer this 
 experience approaches to absolute uniqueness, the 
 more completely is it insane. For the condition of 
 normality and of healthful evolution is that the 
 whole species shall evolve together, the pioneer 
 being the man who carries to new perfection 
 qualities which he shares in common with his race. 
 When, therefore, a man deliberately repudiates the 
 garnered tradition of the myriad-peopled centuries, 
 tramples on morality as the expression of the feeble 
 cowardice of the unfit, denies the objective validity 
 of the norms of human reason, and looks to a future 
 being who is to represent not the natural unfolding 
 of what is general in mankind, but a catastrophic 
 breach with its previous life, he is necessarily on the 
 way to complete alienation from " the kindly race 
 
i84 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 of men." Then it becomes natural for him to pro- 
 claim his " contempt of man," his anger with " this 
 madhouse world." But we know what to fear for a 
 man when he declares his whole race insane. Such 
 abnormality, in more or less advanced degree, is 
 traceable in all the would-be masters of the world, 
 from the legendary Sesostris to the God-patronizing 
 Wilhelm II and the epileptic chorus in " Hurrah 
 and Hallelujah." 
 
 It would be presumptuous in a volume of this 
 kind to intrude, even in this connection, upon the 
 province of the theologian. Yet one may be per- 
 mitted to point out that the conception of nations 
 as " the citizens of humanity," each with a distinct 
 blessing to contribute to the unified whole, is not in- 
 susceptible of assimilation to those forms of theism 
 which hold by the doctrine of the immanence of 
 God. If I have studied these aright, they all assert 
 the identity of the higher attributes of humanity 
 (and especially of humanity regarded in its collec- 
 tive aspect) with the divine nature. They affirm, to 
 be sure, that God is transcendent as well as imma- 
 nent; but this affirmation raises no difficulty for my 
 argument. They cannot consistently maintain that 
 the drama of history is a gradual unfolding of the 
 scheme of the Divine Providence without conceding 
 that the results which this Providence, through Its 
 human instrumentalities, has achieved, evince the 
 identity of man-at-his-best with God. 
 
 The doctrine that God is finite, being, in fact, the 
 author only of the good in the world and not of its 
 evil, is an ancient one. It was taught with great 
 
AMERICANISM: RELIGIOUS ASPECT 185 
 
 depth of conviction and keenness of insight by Soc- 
 rates, and powerfully reiterated in modern times 
 by John Stuart Mill in his Essay on Theism, and by 
 the late William James in several passages of his 
 later books. This idea has now been thrust upon 
 the attention of the man in the street as a new dis- 
 covery by Mr. H. G. Wells. Whether such a belief 
 is philosophically sound or morally satisfactory 
 we need not here discuss. My own judgment is 
 that a thorough philosophic and ethical analysis of 
 the facts would not sustain it. But it has at least 
 the practical value of stressing the distinction be- 
 tween good and evil, forcing us to recognize the 
 finality of that distinction and the fallacy of the 
 Nietzschean attempt to pass beyond it. It also 
 heightens our sense of the value and dignity of 
 the good, making us realize that no idea of God 
 which presents Him as alien or hostile to any mani- 
 festation of the good, whether in man or the sub- 
 human world, can be permanently satisfactory. 
 
 The bearing of these considerations upon our 
 theme needs little elaboration. Whoever believes 
 in the divine immanence must recognize that the 
 ethical and social ideal of America, and the nation 
 itself in so far as it is true to that ideal, is one mani- 
 festation of God, one incarnation of the Transcend- 
 ent, one epiphany in time of the Eternal. Patriot- 
 Ism, conceived as the self-surrendering acceptance of 
 that ideal, and the devotion of men's lives to the 
 never-completed task of actualizing it in the world, 
 is thus raised to the dignity of religion. And religion 
 ceases to be a mere Sunday affair or a monopoly of 
 
1 86 ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN 
 
 priests and pastors, and becomes the inspiration of 
 the collective effort of the nations after perfection, 
 the task of God, renewed century after century, un- 
 shattered by a thousand disasters, inextinguishable 
 by war and bloodshed or by the cowardice and un- 
 worthiness of its instruments, and destined to make 
 the law of the spirit at last universally triumphant 
 over the blind animality of the jungle. 
 
 FINIS 
 
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