Part 5

"Yes, some go and smash windows and get sent to gaol, some become tramps, and some come to America. In Giant Despair's dungeon poor Christian exclaims, 'What a fool I am to remain here when I have in my heart a key which I am persuaded will unlock any of the doors of this castle. Strange that it has only now occurred to me that all I need to do is to lift my hand and open the door and go away.' Then poor Christian books a passage to America or Australia. He starts for the New World; and the moment he puts his foot on the vessel he begins to outgrow. He was his very smallest and meanest under the pressure of the Old World; when the pressure is removed he begins to expand. He is free. He is on his own. He is sailing to God as himself. The exception has beaten the rule. Now I hold as a personal belief that we are all exceptions, that we take our stand before God as tender human creatures of His, each unique in itself. The emigrant on the boat has the delicious feelings of convalescence, of getting to be himself again. He basks in the sun of freedom. The sun itself seems like the all-merciful Father, the Good Shepherd who cares for each one and knows each by name, leading him out to an earthly paradise."

"That paradise is America, eh?" said I rather mockingly, and then I paused and added, "But America ought to be really a paradise; it is pathetic to think of the difference between America as the Russian thinks it to be and America as it is. It is a shame that your trusts and tariffs and corrupt police should have made America a worse place to live in than the Old World. I know it is the land of opportunity, opportunity to become rich, to get on, to be famous; but for the poor immigrant it is rather the land of opportunism, a land where he himself is the opportunity, which not he but other people have the chance to seize."

My friend was scandalised. "I think it gives every one an opportunity," said he, "even the drunkard and the thief and the embezzler whom you so incharitably hand over to us. You know the saying, 'It takes an ocean to receive a muddy stream without defilement.' The ocean of American life cleanses many a muddy stream of the Old World."

"Still," said I, "not to abandon oneself utterly to ideas, is it not true that Pittsburg actually destroys thousands of Slav immigrants yearly? It utterly destroys them. They have no children who come to anything--they are just wiped out. I gather so much from your Government survey of Pittsburg."

"Well," said he, "that survey is just part of the New America, of the new national conscience. Terrible things do happen, witness the enormous white-slave traffic. You have just come to us at the right moment to see the initiation of sweeping changes. President Wilson is like your David Lloyd George, only he has more power, because he has more people at his back. We are just beginning a great progressive era. On the other hand, America is not the place of the weak. That's why we send so many back home from Ellis Island. We've got something else to do than try and put Humpty Dumpty up on the wall again. When the weaker get past Ellis Island into our fierce national life they are bound to go to the wall. We haven't time even to be sorry, and if questioned we can only answer that we believe the sacrifice will be justified."

I recall to my mind the startling objection of Ivan Karamazof in the greatest of Russian novels. "When God's providence is fulfilled we shall understand all things; we shall see how the pain and death of, for instance, a little child could be necessary. I understand of course what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise, and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud, 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed'; but to my mind the pain of one little child were too high a price to pay." Ivan Karamazof would certainly have renounced the grand future of America bought by the exploitation of thousands of weak and helpless ones.

Still I suppose the past must take care of itself, and the America which stands to-day on the threshold of a new era has more thought and tenderness for the victims of its commercial progress. It is making up its mind to save the foreign women and their little babies. For the rest, America plays large, as my friend said. There is a spaciousness with her, there is contrast, there is life and death, virtue and sin, things to laugh over and things to cry over. The little baby buds are taken away and branches are lopped, but the mustard grows a great tree.

There is a chance in America, a chance that you may be a victim, but also a chance that you may be in at the mating of the King.

* * * * * * *

Several months later, when I had tramped some six hundred American miles, and talked to all manner of persons, I realised that America was superlatively a place of hope. I had been continually asking myself, "What _is_ America? What _is_ this new nation? How are they different from us at home in England?" And one morning, sitting under a bush in Indiana, the answer came to me and I wrote it down. They are fundamentally people who have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and we are stay-at-homes. They are adventurous, hopeful people. They are people who have thrown themselves on the mercy of God and Nature.

We live in a tradition; they live in an expectation. We are remedying the old state; they are building the new. We are loyal to the ideas of our predecessors, they are agape to divine the ideas of generations yet to come.

It is possible to come to Britain and see what Britain is, but if you go to America the utmost you can see is what America is becoming. And when you see the Briton you see a man steadfast at some post of duty, but the American is something to-day but God-knows-what to-morrow. Our noblest epitaph is "He knew his job"; theirs, "He sacrificed himself to a cause."

Observe, "that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me," puts the Briton in a static order of things. He is in his little shop, or at the forge, or in the coal yard. Within his sight is the Norman tower of the village church. He is known to the priest by his name and his job. He is part of the priests' cure of souls. His life is functionised at the village altar and not at the far shrines of ambition. He belongs to the peasant world. Even though he is English he is as the Russian, "one of God's faithful slaves."

Thousands of English, Scotch, and Irish, simple souls, say their prayers to God each night, not because they are pillars of a chapel or have lately been "saved," but because they have been brought up in that way of life and in that relation to God. They pray God sometimes in anguish that they may be helped _to do their duty_. They say the Lord's Prayer, not as a patter, but with the stark simplicity which you associate with the grey wall of the old church.

These village folk of ours are like old trees. Close your eyes to the visible and open them to the invisible world, and you see the young man of to-day as the stem, his father as the branch, his grandfather the greater branch. You see in the shadow rising out of the earth the ancient trunk. You think of many people, and yet it is not father and grandfather, and grandfather and great-grandfather, and so on, but one tree, the name of which is the young man leafing in the world of to-day. That man is no shoot, no seedling, he has behind him the consciousness of the vast umbrageous oak. When he says "Our Father, which art in heaven," the voice comes out of the depths of the earth, and it comes from father and grandfather, and from greybeard after greybeard standing behind one another's shoulders, innumerably.

The place to which it shall please God to call you is not a definite locality in the United States of America; the dream of wealth is dreamed inside each cottage door. Each man is intent on getting on, on realising something new. He is revolving in his mind ways of doing more business; of doing what he has more quickly, more economically; ways of "boosting," ways of buying. Our customers _buy from_ us: his customers _trade with_ him--they enter into harmony with him. Store-keepers and customers sing together like gnats over the oak trees; they make things hum. There is a feeling that whether buying or selling you are getting forward.

The British, however, put a great question-mark in front of this American life. Do those who are striving know what they want in the end of ends? Do those toiling in the wood know what is on the other side?

The late Price Collier remarked that the German thinks he has done something when he has an idea and the Frenchman when he has made an epigram; it may be inferred that the American thinks he has done something when he has made his pile. The ultimate earthly prize for "boosting" and bargaining is a vulgar solatium,--a big house, an abundant person, a few gold rings, an adorned wife, a high-power touring car. Out in those wider spaces where lagging and outdistanced competitors are not taken into your counsel you still handle business. But now it is in "graft" that you deal. You are engineering trusts, and cornering commodities, you develop political "pull," you own saloons, and have ledgers full of the bought votes of Italians and Slavs.

You are great ... sitting at the steering-wheel of this great ramshackle political and commercial machine, your coat off and your immaculate lawn sleeves tucked up above your elbows, you own to wolfish-eyed reporters that you have an enormous appetite for work and zest for life.

And yet....

What is the crown? You die in the midst of it. There is no goal, no priceless treasure that even in the death-struggle your hands grasp after.

Some of your children are going in for a life of pleasure. They go to be the envy of waiters and hotel-porters and all people waiting about for tips, but often to be the laughing-stock of the cultured. One of your sweet but simple-souled daughters is going to marry a broken-down English peer. He will not marry her for less than a million dollars. In the old store where you began business, gossiping over bacon and flour, you would have looked rather blank if some one had said that a foreigner would consent to marry your daughter only on the payment of an indemnity.

"Well," said my road-companion to me under a bush in Indiana, "the game goes to pass the time. The world is a prison-house, and a good game has been invented, commerce, and it saves us from ennui, that is the philosophy of it all. Scores of years pass like an hour over cards. Those who win are most interested and take least stock of the time--and they have invented happiness."

But I cannot believe that the American destiny leads up a cul-de-sac. We have been following out a cross-road. There is a high road somewhere that leads onward.

There are two sorts of immigrant, one that makes his pile and returns to Europe, the other who thinks America a desirable place to settle in. The second class is vastly more numerous than the first, for faith in American life is even greater than faith in America's wealth.

Quite apart from the opportunities for vulgar success America has wonderful promise. It can offer to the newcomer colonist a share in a great enterprise. It is quite clear to the sympathetic observer that something is afoot in the land which in Great Britain seems to be best known by police scandals, ugly dances, sentimental novels, and boastful, purse-conscious travellers.

The dream of Progress by which Westerners live is going to be carried forward to some realisation in America. There is a great band of workers united in the idea of making America the most pleasant and happy place to live in that the world has ever known. I refer to those working with such Americans as J. Cotton Dana, the fervent librarian; Mr. Fred Howe, who is visualising the cities of the future; the President of the City College, who has such regard not only for the cultural but for the physical well-being of young men; Jane Addams, who with such precision is diagnosing social evils; President Wilson, who promises to uproot the tree of corruption; to mention only the chief of those with whom I was brought in contact in my first experience of America.

The political struggles of America form truly a sad spectacle, but by a thousand non-political signs one is aware that there is a real passion in the breast of the individual.

Going through the public gardens at Newark I see written up: "Citizens, this park is yours. It was planted for you, that the beauty of its flowers and the tender greenery of tree and lawn might refresh you. You will therefore take care of it...."

Going through Albany I find it placarded: "Dirt is the origin of sin; get rid of dirt, and other evils will go with it," and the whole city is having a clean-up week, all the school children formed into anti-dirt regiments making big bonfires of rubbish and burying the tomato-cans and rusty iron.

Every city in America has been stirring itself to get clean. Even in a remote little place like Clarion, Pa., I read on every lamp-post: "Let your slogan be 'Do it for Home, Sweet Home'--clean up!" and again in another place, "Develop your social conscience; you've got one, make the country beautiful." In New York I have handed me the following prayer, which has seemed to me like the breath of the new passion:

We pray for our sisters who are leaving the ancient shelter of the home to earn their wage in the store and shop amid the press of modern life. Grant them strength of body to bear the strain of unremitting toil, and may no present pressure unfit them for the holy duties of home and motherhood which the future may lay upon them. Give them grace to cherish under the new surroundings the old sweetness and gentleness of womanhood, and in the rough mingling of life to keep the purity of their hearts and lives untarnished. Save them from the terrors of utter want. Teach them to stand by their sisters loyally, that by united action they may better their common lot. And to us all grant wisdom and firm determination that we may not suffer the women of our nation to be drained of strength and hope for the enrichment of a few, lest our homes grow poor in the wifely sweetness and motherly love which have been the saving strength and glory of our country. If it must be so that our women toil like men, help us still to reverence in them the mothers of the future. If they yearn for love and the sovereign freedom of their own home, give them in due time the fulfilment of their sweet desires. By Mary the beloved, who bore the world's redemption in her bosom; by the memory of our own dear mothers who kissed our souls awake; by the little daughters who must soon go out into that world which we are now fashioning for others, we pray that we may deal aright by all women.

Men are praying for women, and women are working for themselves. Commercial rapacity is tempered by women's tears, and the tender stories of the shop-girl that O. Henry wrote are more read to-day than they were in the author's lifetime. The newspapers are all agog with the "vice-probes," scandals, questions of eugenics, the menace of organised capital, the woman's movement. And they are not so because vice is more prolific than in Europe, or the race more inclined to fail, or the working men and working women more tyrannised over. They are so because this generation wishes to realise something of the New Jerusalem in its own lifetime. It may be only a foolish dream, but it provides the present atmosphere of America. It discounts the despair which on the one hand prudery and on the other rag-time dancing invite. It discounts the commercial and mechanical obsession of the people. It discounts the wearisome shouting of the cynic who has money in his pocket, and makes America a place in which it is still possible for the simple immigrant to put his trust. In the light of this passion, and never forgetful of it, I view all that comes to my notice in America of to-day.

IV

INEFFACEABLE MEMORIES OF NEW YORK

First, the flood of the homeward tide at six-thirty in the evening, the thousands and tens of thousands of smartly dressed shop-girls hurrying and flocking from the lighted West to the shadowy East--their bright, hopeful, almost expectant features, their vivacity and energy even at the end of the long day. I felt the contrast with the London crowd, which is so much gloomier and wearier as it throngs into our Great Eastern terminus of Liverpool Street. New York has a stronger class of girl than London. Our shop-girls are London-bred, but your Sadie and Dulcie are the children of foreigners; they have peasant blood in them and immigrant hope. They have a zest for the life that New York can offer them after shop-hours.

The average wage of the American shop-girl is stated to be seven dollars (twenty-eight shillings) per week; the average wage in London is about ten shillings, or two and a half dollars.[1] I suppose that is another reason why our New York sisters are more cheerful. Despite the high price of food in New York there must be a comparatively broad margin left to the American girl to do what she likes with. The cult of the poor little girl of the Department Store is perhaps only a cult. For there are many women in New York more exploited than she. When the shop-girl sells herself to rich men for marriage or otherwise she does so because she has been infected by the craze for finery and wealth, is energetic and vivacious, and is morally undermined. It is not because she is worn out and ill-paid. If New York is evil it is not because New York is a failure. The city is prosperous and evil as well. The freshness and health and vigour of the rank and file of New York were amazing to one familiar with the drab and dreary procession of workers filing into the city of London at eight in the morning and away from it at the same hour in the evening.

Then the Grand Central Station, with its vast high hall of marble, surmounted by a blue-green ceiling which, aping heaven itself, is fretted and perforated and painted to represent the clear night sky. That starry roof astonished me. It reminded me of a story I heard of G. K. Chesterton, that he lay in bed on a Sunday morning and with a crayon mounted on a long handle drew pictures on the white ceiling. It was like some dream of Chesterton's realised.

For a long time I looked at the painted roof and picked out my beloved stars and constellations,--the planets under which I like to sleep,--and then I thought, "Strange, that out in the glowing Broadway, not far away, the real stars are hidden from the gaze of New York by flashing and twinkling and changing sky-signs in manifold colour and allurement. Every night the dancing-girl is dancing in the sky, and the hand pours out the yellow beer into the foaming glass which, like the vision of the Grail, appears but to vanish; every night the steeds prance with the Greek chariot, the athletes box, the kitten plays with the reel. These are the real stars and constellations of Broadway, for Charles's Wain is never seen, neither Orion nor the chair of Cassiopeia nor the Seven Sisters. To see them you must come in here, into the Grand Central Station."

But apart from this paradox, what a station this is--a great silent temple, a place wherein to come to meditate and to pray. It is more beautiful than any of the churches of America. How much more beautiful than the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, for instance. That cathedral will be the largest church in the world when it is finished, and, vanity of vanities, how much more secular it is than the station! It is almost conceivable that after some revolution in the future, New York might change its mind and go to worship at the Grand Central Station and run its trains into the Cathedral of St. John.

Americans are proud of saying that the Woolworth Building, the Grand Central Station, the Pennsylvania Railway Station, and the New York Central Library show the New York of the future. Almost everything else will be pulled down and built to match these. They are new buildings, they are the soul of the New America finding expression. They are temples of a new religion. Americans pray more and aspire more to God in these than they do in their churches.

* * * * * * *

There stands out in my memory the East Side, and the slums which I walked night after night in quest of some idea, some redeeming feature, something that would explain them to me. I walked almost at random, taking ever the first turning to the left, the first to the right, and the first to the left again, coming ever and anon to the river and the harbour, and having to turn and change.

The East Side is more spectacular than the East End of London. The houses are so high, and there is so much more crowding, that you get into ten streets of New York what we get into a hundred streets. The New York slums are slums at the intensest. The buildings, great frames of rags and dirt, hang over the busy street below, and are wildly alive from base to summit. All day long the bedding hangs out at the windows or on the iron fire-escapes attached to the houses. Women are shouting and children are crying on the extraordinary stairs which lead from room to room and story to story in the vast honeycomb of dens. On the side-walk is a rough crowd speaking all tongues. The toy doors of the saloons swing to and fro, simple couples sit on high stools in the soda-bars and suck various kinds of "dope." Lithuanian and Polish boys are rushing after one another with toy pistols, the girls are going round and round the barber's pole, singing and playing, with hands joined. The stores are crowded, and notices tell the outsider that he can buy two quarts of Grade B milk for eleven cents, or ten State eggs for twenty-five cents. You come to streets where all the bakers' shops are "panneterias," and you know you are among the Italians. One Hundred and Thirteenth Street as it goes down from Second Avenue to First Avenue is full of Greeks and Italians, and is extraordinarily dark and wild; men of murderous aspect are prowling about, there is howling across the street from tenement to tenement. Dark, plump women stand at doorways and stare at you, and occasionally a negress in finery trapes past.

You come to little Italian theatres where the price of admission is only five cents, and find them crammed with families, so that you cannot hear _Rigoletto_ for the squalling of the babies. There are mean cinema houses where you see only worn-out and spoiled films giving broken and incoherent stories. And all the while the lights and shadows play, the Greek hawker of confectionery shouts:

"Soh-dah!"

"Can-dee!"

You continue your wanderings and you strike a nigger district. Negresses and their beaux are flirting in corners and on doorsteps. Darky boys and girls are skirling in the roadway. Smartly dressed young men, carrying canes, come giggling and pushing one another on the pavement, crying out music-hall catches--"Who was you with last night?" and the like.

You know the habitat of the Jew by the abundance of junk-shops, old-clothes shops, and offices of counsellors-at-law. It seems the Jews are very litigious, and even the poorest families go to law for their rights. You find windows full of boxing-gloves, for the Jews are great boxers in America. You find stalls and push-carts without end. And every now and then rubbish comes sailing down from a window up above. That is one of the surest signs of the Jews being installed--the pitching of cabbage-leaves and fish-bones and sausage-parings from upper windows.