V

COMMON ORDER AND SOCIAL COÖPERATION

Ir is a little strange, and yet it seems to be true, that for a long time America was better understood by the French than by the English. This may be partly due to the fact that the French are more idealistic and more excitable than the English; in both of which qualities the Americans resemble them. It may also be due in part to the fact that the American Revolution was in a certain sense a family quarrel. A prolonged conflict of wills between the older and the younger members of the same household develops prejudices which do not easily subside. The very closeness of the family relation intensifies the misunderstanding. The seniors find it extremely difficult to comprehend the motives of the juniors, or to believe that they are really grown up. They seem like naughty and self-confident children. A person outside of the family is much more likely to see matters in their true light.

At all events, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Dr. Samuel Johnson was calling the Americans "a race of convicts, who ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hang

ing," and declaring that he was willing to love all mankind except the Americans, whom he described as "Rascals Robbers - Pirates," Robbers - Pirates," a Frenchman, named Crèvecœur, who had lived some twenty years in New York, gave a different portrait of the same subject.

"What then is the American," he asks, "this new man? He is either a European or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a Frenchwoman, and whose present four sons have now wives of four different nations. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the East. They will finish the great circle.”

This is the language of compliment, of course. It is the saying of a very polite prophet; and even in prophecy one is inclined to like pleasant manners. Yet that is not the reason why it seems to Americans to come much nearer to the truth than Dr. Johnson's remarks, or Charles Dickens's American Notes, or Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Ameri

cans. It is because the Frenchman has been clearsighted enough to recognize that the Americans started out in life with an inheritance of civilized ideals, manners, aptitudes, and powers, and that these did not all come from one stock, but were assembled from several storehouses. This fact, as I have said before, is fundamental to a right understanding of American character and history. But it is particularly important to the subject of this lecture: the sentiment of common order, and the building-up of a settled, decent, sane life in the community.

Suppose, for example, that a family of barbarians, either from some native impulse, or under the influence of foreign visitors, should begin to civilize themselves. Their course would be slow, irregular, and often eccentric. It would alternate between servile imitation and wild originality. Sometimes it would resemble the costume of that Australian chief who arrayed himself in a stove-pipe hat and polished boots and was quite unconscious of the need of the intermediate garments.

But suppose we take an example of another kind,

let us say such a family as that which was made famous fifty years ago by a well-known work of juvenile fiction, The Swiss Family Robinson. They are shipwrecked on a desert island. They carry ashore with them their tastes, their habits,

their ideas of what is desirable and right and fitting for decent people in the common life. It is because their souls are not naked that they do not wish their bodies to become so. It is because there is already a certain order and proportion in their minds that they organize their tasks and their time. The problem before them is not to think out a civilized existence, but to realize one which already exists within them, and to do this with the materials which they find on their island, and with the tools and implements which they save from their wrecked ship.

Here you have precisely the problem which confronted the Americans. They began housekeeping in a wild land, but not as wild people. An English lady once asked Eugene Field of Chicago whether he knew anything about his ancestors. "Not much, madam," he replied, "but I believe that mine lived in trees when they were first caught." This was an illustration of conveying truth by its opposite.

The English Pilgrims who came from Norwich and Plymouth, the Hollanders who came from Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the Huguenots who came from La Rochelle and Rouen were distinctly not treedwellers nor troglodytes. They were people who had the habits and preferences of a well-ordered life in cities of habitation, where the current of existence was tranquil and regular except when disturbed by the storms of war or religious persecution.