CHAPTER VIII

THE LAND OF THE FREE

We should have been hard indeed to please if we had not enjoyed our visits to Chicago and Memphis. We should be ungrateful now if we confessed that there was any note of disappointment in the memory of the joyous time we had. Yet there is one thing we regret about that journey of ours to the Middle West and South. We should dearly have liked to see a dozen other places, smaller and less important, which lay along the railway line between Chicago and Memphis, and between Memphis and Indianapolis. We made the former of these journeys entirely, and the latter partly, by day. Some unimaginative friends warned us beforehand that these journeys were dull, that it would be better to sleep through them if possible, rather than spend hours looking out of railway carriage windows at uninteresting landscapes. These friends were entirely wrong. The journeys were anything but dull. The trains dragged us through a whole series of small towns, and, after the manner of many American trains, gave us ample opportunity of looking at the houses and the streets.

In other countries trains are obliged to hide themselves as much as possible when they come to towns. They go into tunnels when they can or wander round the backs of mean houses so that the traveler sees nothing except patches of half bald earth sown with discarded tins and rows of shirts and stockings hanging out to dry. European peoples, it appears, do not welcome trains. In America the train seems to be an honored guest. It is allowed, perhaps invited, to wander along or across the chief streets. I have been told by a very angry critic that this way of stating the fact is wrong, misleading, and abominably unjust to the American people. The towns, he says, did not invite the train, but the train, being there first, so to speak, invited the towns to exist. Very likely this is so. But it seems to me to matter but little whether the train or the town came first. The noticeable thing is that the town evidently likes the train. It is just as sure a mark of affection to lay out a main street alongside the railway line as it would be to invite the railway to run its line down the middle of the main street. An English town, if it found that a railway was established on its site before it got there would angrily turn its back to the line, would, even at the cost of great inconvenience, run its streets away from the railway. The American plan from the point of view of the passenger is far better. He gets the most delightful glances of human activity and is set wondering at ways of life that are strange to him.

Our imagination would, I think, have in any case been equal to the task of conjuring up mental pictures of what life is like in these small isolated inland towns. We should, no doubt, have gone grievously wrong, but we should have enjoyed ourselves even without guidance. Fortunately we were not left to our own imaginative blunderings. We had with us a volume of Mr. Irvin Cobb's stories for the possession of which we selfishly disputed. It gave us just what we wanted, a sure groundwork for our imaginings. We peopled those little towns with the men and women whom Mr. Cobb revealed to us. His humor and his delightful tenderness gave us real glimpses of the lives, the hopes, the fears, the prejudices and memories of many people who otherwise would have been quite strange to us. Each little town as we came to it was inhabited by friendly men and women. Thanks to Mr. Cobb they were our friends. All that was wanted was that we should be theirs. Hence the bitter disappointment at not being able to stop at one after the other of the towns, at being denied the chance of completing a friendship with people whom we already liked. But it may well be that we should not really have got to know them any better. We have not, alas! Mr. Cobb's gift of gentle humor or his power of sympathetic understanding. Also it takes years to get to know anyone. We could not, in any case, have stayed for years in all these towns. Life has not years enough in it.

Besides the towns there were the people we met on the trains. There was, for instance, a man who went up and down selling apples and grapes in little paper bags. We bought from him and while buying we heard him speak. There was no doubt about the matter. He was an Irishman, and not merely an Irishman by descent, the son or grandson of an emigrant, but one who had quite recently left Ireland. His voice to our ears was like well-remembered music. I know the feeling of joy which comes with landing from an English-manned steamer on the quay in Dublin and hearing again the Irish intonation and the Irish turns of phrase. But that is an expected pleasure. It is nothing compared to the sudden delight of hearing an Irish voice in some place thousands of miles from Ireland where the last thing you expect to happen is a meeting with an Irishman. I remember being told of an Irishwoman who was traveling from Singapore to Ceylon in a steamer. She lay in her cabin, helplessly ill with some fever contracted during her stay in the Far East. She seemed incapable of taking an interest in anything until two men came to mend something in the corridor outside her cabin door. They talked together and at the sound of their voices the sick lady roused herself. She had found something in life which still interested her. She wanted very much to know whether the men came from County Antrim or County Down. She was sure their homes were in one or the other. The Irish voices had stirred her.

We were neither sick nor apathetic, but we were roused to fresh vitality by the sound of our Irish apple seller's voice. He came from County Wicklow. He told us so, needlessly indeed, for we knew it by his talk. He had been in America for two years, had drifted westward from New York, was selling apples in a train. Did he like America? Was he happy? Was he doing well? and—crucial, test question—would he like to go back to Ireland?

"I would so, if there was any way I could get my living there."

I suppose that is the way it is with the most of us. We have it fixed somehow in our minds that a living is easier got anywhere than at home. Perhaps it is. Yet surely apples might be sold in Ireland with as good a hope of profit as in Illinois or Tennessee. Baskets are cheap at home, and a basket is the sole outfit required for that trade. The apples themselves are as easy to come by in the one place as in the other. But possibly there are better openings in America. The profession may be overcrowded at home. Many professions are, medicine, for instance, and the law. Apple selling may be in the like case. At all events, here was an Irishman, doing fairly well by his own account in the middle west of America yet with a sincere desire to go back again to Ireland if only he could get a living there.

There was another man whom we met and talked to with great pleasure. Our train lingered, as trains sometimes will, for an hour or more at a junction. It was waiting for another train which ought to have met ours, but did not. We sat on the platform of the observation car, and gazed at the blinking signal lights, for the darkness had come. Suddenly a man climbed over the rail of the car and sat down beside us. He had, as we could see, a very dirty face, and very dirty hands. He wore clothes like those of an engine stoker. He was, I think, employed in shunting trains. He apologized for startling us and expressed the hope that we had not mistaken him for a murderous red Indian. He was a humorist, and he had seen at a glance that we were innocent strangers, the sort of people who might expect an American train to be held up by red Indians with scalping knives. He told us a long story about a lady who was walking from coach to coach of a train while he was engaged in shunting it about and was detaching some coaches from it. She was crossing the bridge between two coaches at an unlucky moment and found herself suddenly on the line between two portions of the train. The expression of her face had greatly amused our friend. His account of the incident greatly amused us. But the most interesting thing about this man, the most interesting thing to us, was his unaffected friendliness. In England a signal man or a shunter would not climb into a train, sit down beside a passenger and chat to him. A miserable consciousness of class distinction would render this kind of intercourse as impossible on the one side as on the other. Neither the passenger nor the shunter would be comfortable, not even if the passenger were a Liberal politician, or a newly made Liberal peer. In America this sense of class distinction does not seem to exist. I have heard English people complain that Americans are disrespectful. I should rather use the word unrespectful, if such a word existed. For disrespectful seems to imply that respect is somehow due, and I do not see why it should be. I am quite prepared to sign my assent to the democratic creed that one man is as good as another. I even go further than most Democrats and say that one man is generally better than the other, whenever it happen that I am the other. I see no reason why a railway signal man should not talk to me or to anyone else in the friendly tones of an equal, provided of course that he does not turn out to be a bore. It is a glory and not a shame of American society that it refuses to recognize class distinction.

My only complaint is that America has not gone far enough in the path of democratic equality. There are Americans who take tips. Now men neither take tips from nor give tips to their equals. If a friend were to slip sixpence into my hand when saying good-by I should resent it bitterly. Unless I were quite sure that he was either drunk or mad, I should feel that he was deliberately treating me as his inferior. I should admit that I was his inferior if I pocketed the tip. I should feel bound to touch my hat to him and say "Thank you, Sir," or "Much obliged to your honor." No man is in any way degraded by taking wages for the work he does, whatever that work may be, cleaning boots or lecturing in a University. But a man does lower himself when, in addition to his wages, he accepts gifts of money from strangers. He is being paid then not for courtesy or civility, which he ought to show in any case, but for servility; and that no one can render except to a recognized superior. The tip in a country where class distinctions are a regular part of the social order is right enough. It is at all events a natural outcome of the theory that some men by reason of their station in life are superior to others. In a social order which is based upon the principle of equality among men the tip has no proper place.

The distinction between tips and wages is a real one, although it is sometimes obscured by the fact that the wages of some kinds of work are paid entirely or almost entirely in the form of tips. A waiter in a restaurant or an hotel lives, I believe, mainly on tips. Tips are his wages. Nevertheless he places himself in a position of inferiority by allowing himself to be paid in this way. It is plain that this is so. There is a sharp line which divides those who are tipped from those who are not. It may, for instance, be the misfortune of anyone to require the services of a hospital nurse; but we do not tip her however kind and attentive she may be. She gets her wages, her salary, a fixed sum. It would be insulting to offer her, in addition, five shillings for herself. Hers is a profession which neither involves nor is supposed to involve any loss of self respect. On the other hand the chambermaid who makes the beds in an hotel is tipped. She expects it. And her profession, in the popular estimation at least, does involve a certain loss of self respect. The best class of young women are unwilling to be domestic servants, but are not unwilling to be hospital nurses. Yet the hospital nurse works as hard as, if not harder than, a housemaid. She does the same kind of work. There is no real difference between making the bed of a man who is sick and making the bed of a man who is well. In either case it is a matter of handling sheets and blankets. But a suggestion of inferiority clings to the profession of a housemaid and none to that of a hospital nurse. The reason is that the one woman belongs to the class which takes tips, while the other belongs to the class which does not.

It is easy to see that in a country like America into which immigrants are continually flowing from Europe there is sure to be a large number of people—Italian waiters for instance, and Swedish and Irish domestic servants—who have not yet grasped the American theory of social equality. They have grown up in countries where the theory does not prevail. They naturally and inevitably expect and take tips, the largesse of their recognized superiors. No one accustomed to European life grudges them their tips. But there are, unfortunately, many American citizens, born and bred in America, with the American theory of equality in their minds, who also take tips and are very much aggrieved if they do not get them. Yet they, by word and manner, are continually asserting their position of equality with those who tip them. This is where the American theory of equality between man and man breaks down. The driver of a taxicab for instance can have it one way or the other. He cannot have it both. He may, like a doctor, a lawyer, or a plumber, take his regular fee, the sum marked down on the dial of his cab, and treat his passenger as an equal. Or he may take, as a tip, an extra twenty cents, in which case he sacrifices his equality and proclaims himself the inferior of the man who tips him, a member of a tippable class. There ought to be no tippable class of American citizens. The English complaint of the disrespectfulness of Americans is, in my opinion, a foolish one, unless the American expects and takes tips. Then the complaint is well founded and just. The tipper pays for respectfulness when he gives a tip and what he pays for he ought to get.

It is, I think, quite possible that the custom of tipping has something to do with the difficulty, so acute in America, of getting domestic servants. It is widely felt that domestic service in some way degrades the man or woman who engages in it. There is no real reason why it should. It is not in itself degrading to do things for other people, even to render intimate personal service to other people. The dentist who fills a tooth for me does something for me, renders me a special kind of personal service. He loses no self respect by supplying me with a sound instrument for chewing food. Why should the person who cooks the food which that tooth will chew lose self respect by doing so? There is no real distinction between these two kinds of service. Nor is there anything in the contention that the domestic servant is degraded by abrogating her own will and taking orders from someone else. Nine men out of ten take orders from somebody. From the soldier on the battlefield, the most honorable of men, to the clerk in a bank, we are almost all of us obeying orders, doing not what we ourselves think best or pleasantest but what someone in authority thinks right. What is the difference between obeying when you are told to clean a gun and obeying when you are told to wash a jug? The real reason why a suggestion of inferiority clings to the profession of domestic service is that domestic servants belong to the tippable class. Society can, if it likes, raise domestic service to a place among the honorable professions, by ceasing to tip and paying wages which do not require to be supplemented by tips. If this were done there would be far less difficulty in keeping up the supply of domestic servants.

I find myself on much more difficult ground when I pass on to discuss the impression made on me by the claim of America to be, in some special way, a free country.

"To the West! to the West! to the land of the free." So my farmer friend sang to me twenty years ago. The tradition survives. The American citizen believes that a man is freer in America than he is for instance in England. If freedom means the power of the individual to do what he likes without being interfered with by laws then no man can ever be quite free anywhere except on a desert island. I, as an individual, may earnestly desire to go out into a crowded thoroughfare and shoot at the street cars with a revolver. I am not free to do this in any civilized country in the world. For people with desires of that kind there is no such thing as liberty. The freedom of the individual is everywhere a compromise between his personal inclination and the general sense of the community. Men are more free where the community makes fewer laws, less free where the community makes more. In England I can, if I like, buy, and drink at dinner, a bottle of beer in the restaurant car of any train which has a restaurant car, in any part of the country. In certain states in America I cannot buy a bottle of beer in the restaurant car of the train. There is a law which stops me. It may be a very good law. The infringement of my liberty which it entails may be for my good and the good of society in general; but where that law exists I am certainly less free than where it does not exist.

The tendency of modern democratic states is to make more and more laws and thereby to confine within ever narrower limits the freedom of the individual man. A few years ago an Englishman could send his child to school or keep his child at home without any education just as he chose. Now he must send his child to school. The law insists on it. The Irishman, in most parts of Ireland, can still, if he likes, allow his child to grow up without ever going to school. There is no law to interfere with him. In that particular respect Ireland is freer than England, for England has gone further along the path of curtailing individual liberty. In the matter of buying beer England is freer than America, because you can buy beer anywhere in England if you go to a house licensed to sell beer. In some parts of America there are no houses licensed to sell beer and you cannot buy it. America has, in this particular respect, gone further than England along the path of curtailing individual liberty.

There are several other things about which there are laws in America which do not exist in England and with regard to which America is not so free a country as England is. But there are also laws in England which do not exist in America. The Englishman is more or less accustomed to his laws. He has got into the habit of obeying them and they do not seem to interfere with his freedom. The American laws, to which he is not accustomed, strike him as unwarrantable examples of minor tyranny. But it is likely that the American is, in the same way, accustomed to his laws and is not irritated by them. He has got into the way of not wanting to buy beer in Texas, and does not feel that his liberty is curtailed by the existence of a law which it does not occur to him to break. He may be, on the other hand, profoundly annoyed by English laws, to which he is not accustomed. It may strike him, when he comes to England, that his liberty is being continually interfered with just as an Englishman feels himself continually hampered in America. I can, for instance, understand that an American in England might feel that his liberty was most unwarrantably interfered with by the law which obliges him to have a penny stamp on every check he writes. It must strike him as monstrous that he cannot get his own money out of a bank without paying the government for being allowed to do so. After all it is his money and the Government is not even a banker. Why should he pay for taking a sovereign from the little pile of sovereigns which his banker keeps for him when he would not have to pay for taking one out of a stocking if he adopted the old-fashioned plan of keeping his money there? The Englishman feels no annoyance at the payment of this penny. He is so entirely accustomed to it that it seems to him a violation of one of the laws of nature to write a check on a simple, unstamped piece of paper.

On the whole, although the citizens of both countries feel free enough when they are at home, there is probably less freedom, that is to say there are more laws, in America than in England. America is more thoroughly democratic in constitution than England is and therefore less free. This seems a paradox, but is in reality a simple statement of obvious fact, nor is there any difficulty in seeing the reason for it. Democracies produce professional politicians. The professional politician differs from the amateur or voluntary politician exactly as any professional differs from any amateur. An amateur carpenter saws wood and hammers nails for the fun of the thing, and stops sawing and hammering as soon as sawing and hammering cease to amuse him. The professional carpenter must go on sawing and hammering even if he does not want to, because it is in this way that he earns his bread. He therefore gets a great deal more sawing and hammering done in a year than any amateur does. It is the same with politicians. The amateur politician makes a law now and then when he feels like it. When law-making ceases to interest him he goes off to hunt or fish. The professional politician must go on making laws even though the business has become inexpressibly wearisome. Thus it is that in states where there are professional politicians, in democratic states, there are more laws, and therefore less freedom, than in states which only have amateur politicians. America, being slightly more democratic than England, has slightly more laws and slightly less freedom.

But it would be easy to make too much of this difference between England and America.

The freedom which men value most is very little affected by laws. Laws neither give nor withhold it. Freedom is really an atmosphere in which we are able to breathe without anxiety or fear. There are some societies in which a man must be constantly watching himself lest he should give expression to a thought or an opinion which is liable to offend some powerful interest or outrage some cherished conviction. All sorts of unpleasant consequences follow incautious utterance of an unpopular opinion, or even the discovery that unpopular opinions are held. It may be that the rash individual is looked on very coldly. It may be that those who seem to be his friends gradually draw away from him. It may be—this is not so unpleasant but quite unpleasant enough—that he is assailed in newspapers and held up in their columns to public odium. It may be that he is made to suffer in more material ways, that he loses business or runs the risk of being deprived of some position which he holds. In very uncivilized communities he is sometimes actually treated with physical violence. The windows of his house are broken or he is mobbed. The dread of some or all of these penalties makes him very cautious. He goes through life glancing timidly from side to side, always anxious, always a little frightened and therefore—since fear is the real antithesis of liberty—never free.

All communities suffer from spasmodic fits of this kind of intolerance. In England in the year 1900 it was not safe to be a pro-Boer, and England at that time was not a free country. England is now free to quite an extraordinary extent. A man may hold and express almost any conceivable opinion without suffering for it. He can stand up in a public assembly and say hard things about England herself, point out her faults in plain and even bitter language. The English people as a whole remain totally indifferent to what he says about them. If the hard thing is said wittily they laugh. If it is said dully they yawn. In neither case do they display any signs of anger. They succeed in giving the stranger in their midst the impression that nothing he does or says matters in the least so long as he avoids crossing the indefinable line which separates "good form" from bad. His manners may get him into trouble. His opinions will not.

America is free too in this same way, but is not, I think, so free as England. There are several subjects about which it is not wise to talk quite freely in America. The ordinary middle class American, the man with whom one falls into casual conversation in a train, is sensitive about criticism of his country and its institutions in a way that the ordinary Englishman is not. It may very well be that in this he is the Englishman's superior. A perfectly detached judge of humanity, some epicurean deity observing all things with passion-less calm and weighing all emotion in the scales of absolute justice—might, quite conceivably, rank a slightly resentful patriotism higher than tolerant apathy. We Irishmen are not tolerant of criticism, and I sincerely hope that ours is the better part. We do not like the expression of opinions which differ from our own and are inclined to suppress them with some violence when we can. As a nation we value truth far more than liberty; truth being, of course, the thing which we ourselves believe; obviously that, for we would not believe it unless we were quite sure that it was true. Americans are not so whole hearted as we are in this matter. The more highly educated Americans are even inclined to drift into a tolerant agnosticism which is almost English. But most Americans are still a little intolerant of strange opinions and still have enough conscious patriotism to resent criticism.

It is the fault of a great quality. No society can be both enthusiastic and free. It is the tips and the equality over again. We can not have things both ways. If society allows a man, without pain or penalty, to say exactly what he means, it is always because that society is convinced, deep down in its soul, that he cannot possibly mean what he says. A man is free to speak what he chooses, to criticize, to abuse, to sneer, wherever his fellow men have made up their minds that it does not matter what he says how keenly he criticizes, abuses or sneers. On the other hand, a society which is very much in earnest about anything,—and a great many Americans are—will not suffer differences of opinion patiently and will always be resentful of criticism. Say to an Englishman that American football is superior to the Rugby Union game. He will look at you with a sleepy expression in his eyes, and, after a short pause, politeness requiring some answer from him, he will say: "Is it really?" His tone suggests that he does not care whether it is or not, but that he means to go on playing the Rugby Union game if he plays at all, a point about which he has not quite made up his mind. Say to an American that Rugby Union football is superior to his game and he will look at you with highly alert but slightly troubled eyes. He wants to respect you if he can, and he does not like to hear you saying a thing which cannot possibly be true. But he too is polite.

"There may be," he says, "some points of superiority about the English game—but on the whole—think of the organization of our forwards. Think of the amount of thought required. Think of the rapid decisions which have to be made. Think of——But come and see the match next Saturday and then you'll understand."

There is still another kind of freedom—freedom to behave as we like, freedom of manners. This is almost as important as freedom to speak and think without fear of consequences. Indeed, for most people it is more important. Only a few of us think, or want to say what we think. All of us have to behave, to have manners of some sort either good or bad. It is curious to notice that, while men everywhere are acquiescing without much protest to the curtailment of the sort of freedom which is affected by law, they are steadily claiming and securing more and more freedom of manners. We are far less bound by conventions than we used to be. There was a time when everybody possessed and once a week wore what were called "Sunday clothes." One hardly ever hears the phrase now, and men go to church in coats which would have struck their grandmothers as distinctly unsuited to a place of worship. Sunday clothes were a bondage and we have broken free. There was, very long ago, a definite code of manners binding upon men and women when they met together. When it prevailed the intercourse between the sexes must have been singularly stiff and uncomfortable. There were many things which a woman could not do without losing her character for womanliness, and many things which a man could not do in the company of ladies—smoke, for instance.

It is, I think, women and not men who decide how much of this sort of liberty people are to enjoy. If I am right about this, then American women are more generous than English women. There is much more freedom in the matter of clothes in America than England. I remember hearing an Englishwoman complain that no matter how she tried she never could succeed in dressing correctly in America. In England she knew exactly the kind of gown to wear at an afternoon party, at a small dinner, at a large dinner, at an evening reception, in the box of a theater. In America she perpetually found herself wearing the wrong thing. I imagine that in reality she did not wear the _wrong_ thing, because there is no such rigid standard of appropriateness of dress in America as there is in England. More latitude is allowed, and if a gown is hardly ever correct it is also hardly ever wrong. Every man who sits in the stalls of a London theater must display eighteen inches of white shirt above the top button of his waistcoat. In America he may wear a blue flannel shirt if he likes, and nobody cares whether it is visible beneath his tie or not. In England a man who dines in a very smart restaurant must wear a tail coat and a white tie. In America he can, if he chooses, wear a tail coat and a black tie, or a short coat and a white tie. There is no fixed rule determining the connection between coats and ties.

It is not only the class of people who dine in smart restaurants and sit in stalls of theaters which is subject to rules of this kind. Every class has its own conventions, and, so far as my observation goes, every class is a little freer in America than it is in England. No English chauffeur with any self-respect would consent to drive a motor car about London unless he were wearing some kind of uniform. In America the most magnificent cars are frequently driven by chauffeurs in gray tweed suits with ordinary caps on their heads.

I am nearly sure that it is women, the women of our own class, who decide what clothes we shall wear and what clothes they will wear themselves. I am quite sure that it is they who regulate the degree of formal stiffness there is to be in our intercourse with them. English women have to a very considerable extent given up requiring from men those symbols of respect which had long ago ceased to be anything but the mere conventional survivals of the mediæval idea of chivalry. Men and women in England meet on friendlier and more equal terms than they used to. American women have gone even further than the English in setting themselves and us free from the old restrictions. They invite comradeship and have, as far as possible, swept away the barriers to free intercourse between sex and sex.

To some people liberty of any sort, liberty for its own sake, will always seem a desirable thing. These will prefer the manners of America to those of England, but will cling to their admiration of the Englishman's tolerance of criticism. There are others—it is a matter of temperament—who prefer restraint, who like to talk cautiously, who cling to social conventions. To them it will be a comfort to know that in one respect the American woman is not so free as her English sister. In England a woman may, without loss of reputation, smoke almost anywhere, anywhere that men smoke, except in the streets and the entrance halls of theaters. In New York there are only two or three restaurants in which a woman is allowed to smoke. Even if she is indifferent to her reputation and does not mind being considered fast, she cannot smoke in the other restaurants. The head waiter comes and stops her if she tries. This may be quite right. I do not know whether it is or not. Many very strong arguments may be and are brought against women smoking. It is, I am thankful to say, no business of mine to weigh them against the other arguments which go to show that women are as well entitled to the solace of tobacco as men are. What interests me far more than the arguments on either side is the fact that American women are in this one respect much less free than English women. The women of both nations smoke, but the American woman must do it in privacy or semi-privacy. The Englishwoman inhales her cigarette with untroubled enjoyment in any restaurant in London. She must dress herself strictly as convention prescribes for each occasion. She must be a little careful in her intercourse with men. She has not yet got a vote. But she may smoke. The American woman has much more freedom in the matter of clothes. She can be as friendly with a man as she likes. In several states she has a vote. But society in general frowns on her smoking and sets its policeman, the head waiter, to prevent her doing it. I should myself prefer a cigarette to a vote; but I am fond of tobacco, and all elections bore me, so I am not an unprejudiced judge. American women may be in this matter, as indeed they certainly are in other matters, nobler than I am. They may gladly sacrifice tobacco for the sake of the franchise, but I do not see why they should not have both.