CHAPTER VI

ADVANCE, CHICAGO!

Chicago possesses one exceedingly good hotel. We know this by experience. The other hotels in the city may be equally good, but we shall never try them. Having found one almost perfect hotel, we shall, whenever we visit that city again, go back to it. But I expect that all the other hotels there are good too, very good; for Chicago appears to take an interest in its hotels. In most cities, perhaps in all other cities, hotels are good or bad according as their managers are efficient or the reverse. The city itself does not care about its hotels any more than it cares about its bootmakers. A London bootmaker might provide very bad leather for the soles of a stranger's boots. "The Times" would not deal with that bootmaker in a special article. It might be very difficult to obtain hot water in one of the great London hotels—I have seen it stated, on the authority of an American, that it is very difficult—but London itself does not care whether it is or not. The soling of boots and the comfort of casual guests are, according to the generally prevailing view, affairs best settled between the people directly interested, the traveler on the one hand and the bootmaker or manager on the other. No one else thinks that he has a right to interfere.

Chicago takes a different view. It has a sense of civic responsibility for its hotels, possibly also for its bootmakers. I did not try the bootmakers and therefore cannot say anything certainly about them. But I am sure about the hotels. It happened that there was a letter awaiting my arrival at the hotel, the very excellent hotel, in which we stayed. This letter was not immediately delivered to me. I believe that I ought to have asked for it, that the hotel manager expects guests to ask for letters, and that I had no reasonable ground of complaint when the letter was not delivered to me. Nor did I complain. I am far too meek a man to complain about anything in a large hotel. I am desperately afraid of hotel officials. They are all much grander than I am and occupy far more important positions in the world. I should not grumble if a princess trod on my toe. Princesses have a right, owing to the splendour of their position, to trample on me. But I would rather grumble at a princess than complain to a head waiter or the clerk in charge of the offices of a large hotel. Princesses are common clay compared to these functionaries. But even if I were a very brave man, and even if I believed that one man was as good as another and I the equal of the manager of a large hotel, I should not have complained about the failure to deliver that letter. The hotel when we were there was very full, and full of the most important kind of people, doctors. It was not to be expected that such a trifle as a letter for me would engage the attention of anybody.

Next morning there was a paragraph in one of the leading Chicago papers about my letter and the manager of the hotel was told plainly, in clear print, that he must do his business better than he did. I was astonished when the manager, taking me solemnly apart, showed me the paragraph, astonished and terror-stricken. I apologized at once for daring to have a letter addressed to me at his hotel. I apologized for not asking for it when I arrived. I apologized for the trouble his staff had been put to in carrying the letter up to my room in the end. Then I stopped apologizing because, to my amazement, the manager began. He apologized so amply that I came gradually to feel as if I were not entirely in the wrong. Also I realized why it is that this hotel—and no doubt all the others in Chicago—is so superlatively good. Chicago keeps an eye on them. The press is alive to the fact that every citizen of a great city, even a hotel manager, should do not merely his duty but more, should practice counsels of perfection, perform works of supererogation, deliver letters which are not asked for.

The incident is in itself unimportant, but it seems to me to illustrate the spirit of Chicago. It is a great city and is determined to get things done right. It has besides, and this is its rare distinction, an unfaltering conviction that it can get things done right. Most communities are conscious of some limitations of their powers. For Chicago there are no limitations at all anywhere. Whatever ought to be done Chicago will do. Nothing is too small, nothing too great to be attempted and carried through. It may be an insignificant matter, like the comfort of a helpless and foolish stranger. It may be a problem against which civilized society has broken its teeth for centuries, like the evil of prostitution. Chicago is convinced that it can be got right and Chicago means to do it.

I admire this sublime self-confidence. I ought always to be happy when I am among men who have it, because I was born in Belfast and the first air I breathed was charged with exactly this same intensely bracing ozone of strong-willedness.

Belfast is very like Chicago. If a Belfast man were taken while asleep and transported on a magic carpet to Chicago, he would not, on waking up, feel that anything very strange had happened to him. The outward circumstances of life would indeed be different, but he would find himself in all essential respects at home. He would talk to men who said "We will," with a conviction that their "We will" is the last word which can or need be said on any subject; just as he had all his life before talked to men who said, "We won't," with the same certainty that beyond their "We won't" there was nothing.

Chicago is, indeed, greater than Belfast, not merely in the number of its inhabitants and the importance of its business, but in the fact that it asserts where Belfast denies. It is a greater and harder thing to say "Yes" than "No." But there is a spiritual kinship between the two places in that both of them mean what they say and are quite sure that they can make good their "yes" and "no" against the world. If all the rest of America finds itself up against Chicago as the British empire is at present up against Belfast, the result will be the bewilderment of the rest of America.

I was in Chicago only for a short time. I did not see any of the things which visitors usually see there. I went there with certain prejudices. I had read, like every one else, Mr. Upton Sinclair's account of the slaughter of pigs in Chicago. I had read several times over the late Mr. Frank Norris's "The Pit." I had read and heard many things about the wonderful work of Miss Jane Addams. I had a vague idea that Chicago was both better and worse than other places, that God and the devil had joined battle there more definitely than elsewhere, that the points at issue were plainer, that there was something nearer to a straight fight in Chicago between good and evil than we find in other places.

"We are here," says Matthew Arnold, "as on a darkling plain, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies strive by night."

In Chicago I felt the armies would be less ignorant, the alarms a little less confused. I am not sure now that this is so. It may be quite as hard in Chicago as it is anywhere else to find out quite certainly what is right; which, in certain tangled matters, is God's side and which the devil's. But I do not believe that the Chicago man, any more than the Belfast man, is tormented with the paralysis of indecision. He may and very likely will do a great many things which will turn out in the end not to be good things. But he will do them quite unfalteringly. When, having done them, he has time to look round at the far side of them, he may discover that there was some mistake about them somewhere. Then he will undo them and do something else instead with the same vigorous conviction. He will, in any case, keep on doing things and believing in them.

I was in a large bookseller's shop while I was in Chicago. It was so large that it was impossible to discover with any certainty what pleases Chicago most in the way of literature. There seemed to me to be copies of every book I had ever heard of waiting there for buyers, and, I presume, they would not wait unless buyers were likely to come. But I was struck with the very large number of books dealing with those subjects which may be classed roughly under the term Eugenics. There were more of these books in that shop than I had ever seen before. I should not have guessed that there were so many in the world. I may, of course, have received a wrong impression. This particular shop had its books arranged according to subjects. There was not, as generally in England and Ireland, a counter devoted to the latest publications, or a series of shelves given over to books priced at a shilling. In this shop all books on economics, for example, whether old or new, cheap or dear, were in one place; all books on music in another; and so forth. The idea underlying the arrangement being that a customer knows more or less the subject he wants to read about and is pleased to find all books on that subject ready waiting for him in rows. Our idea, on the other hand, that which underlies the arrangements of our shops, is that a customer wants, perhaps a new book, perhaps a ten-and-sixpenny book, perhaps a shilling book, without minding much what the book is about. He is best suited by finding all the new books in one place, all the ten-and-sixpenny books in another, and all the shilling books in a third. I do not know which is the better plan, but that adopted in the Chicago shop has the effect of making the casual customer realize the very large number of books there are on every subject. I may therefore have been deceived about the popularity of books on eugenics in Chicago. There may be no more on sale there than elsewhere. But I think there are. Of some of these books there were very large numbers, twenty or thirty copies of a single book all standing in a row. Plainly it was anticipated that there were in Chicago twenty or thirty people who would want that particular book. I never, in any book shop elsewhere, saw more than five or six copies of a eugenic book in stock at the same time. I also noticed that the majority of these books were cheap; not detailed and elaborate treatises on, let us say, Weissmannism and the mechanism of heredity; but short handbooks, statements of conclusions supposed to be arrived at and practical advice suited to plain people. I formed the opinion that the study of eugenics is popular in Chicago, more popular than elsewhere, and that a good many people believe that some good is to be got out of knowing what science has to teach on these subjects.

I was told by a man who ought to have known that these books are steadily becoming more popular. The demand for them was very small five years ago. It is very large now and becoming steadily larger. This seems to me a very interesting thing. For a long time people were content just to take children as they came, and they did not bother much about the hows and the whys of the business. Grown-up men and women did not indeed believe that storks dropped babies down chimneys or that doctors brought them in bags. But they might just as well have believed these things for all the difference such knowledge as they had made in their way of conducting the business. Their philosophy was summed up in a proverb. "When God sends the mouth He sends the food to fill it." To go further into details struck people, twenty years ago, as rather a disgusting proceeding.

Now we have all, everywhere, grown out of this primitive innocence. We have been driven away from our old casual ways of reproducing ourselves, and are forced to think about what we are doing. There is nothing very interesting or curious about this. It is simply a rather unpleasant fact. What is interesting is that Chicago seems to be thinking more than the rest of us, is at all events more interested than the rest of us in the range of subjects which I have very roughly called eugenics. Chicago is, apparently, buying more books on these subjects, and presumably buys them in order to read them. Is this a symptom of the existence of a latent vein of weakness in Chicago?

I am not a very good judge of a question of this sort. The whole subject of Eugenics and all the other subjects which are associated with it are extremely distasteful to me. I like to think of young men and young women falling in love with each other and getting married because they are in love without considering overmuch the almost inevitable consequences until these are forced upon them. I fancy that in an entirely healthy community things would be managed in this way, and that the result, generally speaking and taking a wide number of cases into consideration, would be a race of wholesome, sound children, fairly well endowed with natural powers and fitted to meet the struggle of life. But Chicago evidently thinks otherwise. The subject of Eugenics is studied there, and, as a consequence of the study, a number of clergy of various churches have declared that they will not marry people who are suffering from certain diseases. They have all reason on their side. I admit it. I have nothing to urge against them except an old-fashioned prejudice in favor of the fullest possible liberty to the individual. Yet I cannot help feeling that it is not a sign of strength in a community that it should think very much about these things. A man seldom worries about his digestion or reads books about his stomach until his stomach and his digestion have gone wrong and begun to worry him. A great interest in what is going on in our insides is either a sign that things are not going on properly or else a deliberate invitation to our insides to give us trouble. It is the same with the community. But I should not like to think that anything either is or soon will be the matter with Chicago. It would be a lamentable loss to the world if Chicago's definite "I will" were to weaken, if the native hue of this magnificent, self-confident resolution were to be sicklied o'er with a pale cast of thought.

At present, at all events, there is very little sign of any such disaster. It happened that while we were in Chicago there was some sort of Congress of literary men. They dined together, of course, as all civilized men do when they meet to take counsel together on any subject except the making of laws. In all probability laws would be better made if Parliaments were dining clubs; but this is too wide a subject for me to discuss. The literary men who met in Chicago had a dinner, and I was highly honored by receiving an invitation to it. I wish it had been possible for me to be there. I could not manage it, but I did the next best thing, I read the report of the proceedings in the papers on the following morning. One speaker said that he looked forward to the day when Chicago would be the world center of literature, music and art. He was not, of course, a stranger, one of the literary men who had gathered there from various parts of America. He was a citizen of Chicago. No stranger would have ventured to say so magnificent a thing. As long as Chicago says things like that, simply and unaffectedly, and believes them, Chicago can study eugenics as much as it likes, might even devote itself to Christian Science or take to Spiritualism. It would still remain strong and sane. For this was not a silly boast, made in the name of a community which knows nothing of literature, music or art. Chicago knows perfectly well what literature is and what art is. Chicago understands what England has done in literature and art, what France has done, what Germany has done. Chicago has even a very good idea of what Athens did. If I were to say that I looked forward to inventing a perfect flying machine I should be a fool, because I know nothing whatever about flying machines and have not the dimmest idea of what the difficulties of making them are. If Chicago were as ignorant about literature and art as I am about aeronautics, its hope of becoming the world center of these things would be fit matter for a comic paper. What makes this boast so impressive is just the fact that Chicago knows quite well what it means.

There are no bounds to what a man can do except his own self-distrust. There is nothing beyond the reach of a city which unfalteringly believes in itself. No other city believes in itself quite so whole-heartedly as Chicago does, and I expect Chicago _will_ be the world center of literature, music and art. There is nothing to stop it, unless indeed Chicago itself gives up the idea and chooses to be something else instead. It may, I hope it will, decide to be the New Jerusalem, with gates of pearl and streets of gold and a tree of life growing in the midst of it. Then Chicago will be the New Jerusalem and I shall humbly sue to be admitted as a citizen. My petition will, I am sure, be granted, for the hospitality of the people of Chicago seems to me to exceed, if that be possible, the hospitality of other parts of America. I am not sure that I should be altogether happy there, even under the new, perfected conditions of life; but perhaps I may. I was indeed born in Belfast, and as a young man shared its spirit. That gives me hope. But I left Belfast early in life. I have dwelt much among other peoples, and learned self-distrust. It may be too late for me to go back to my youth and learn confidence again. If it is too late, I shall not be really happy in Chicago.