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                           Eclectic Magazine

                                  OF

                 FOREIGN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

                          ————————————
     New Series.    }                        { Old Series complete
  Vol. XLI., No. 4. }      April, 1885.      { in 63 vols.
                          ————————————




                      A WORD MORE ABOUT AMERICA.

                          BY MATTHEW ARNOLD.

When I was at Chicago last year, I was asked whether Lord Coleridge
would not write a book about America. I ventured to answer confidently
for him that he would do nothing of the kind. Not at Chicago only, but
almost wherever I went, I was asked whether I myself did not intend
to write a book about America. For oneself one can answer yet more
confidently than for one’s friends, and I always replied that most
assuredly I had no such intention. To write a book about America, on
the strength of having made merely such a tour there as mine was,
and with no fuller equipment of preparatory studies and of local
observations than I possess, would seem to me an impertinence.

It is now a long while since I read M. de Tocqueville’s famous
work on Democracy in America. I have the highest respect for M. de
Tocqueville; but my remembrance of his book is that it deals too much
in abstractions for my taste, and that it is written, moreover, in a
style which many French writers adopt, but which I find trying—a style
cut into short paragraphs and wearing an air of rigorous scientific
deduction without the reality. Very likely, however, I do M. de
Tocqueville injustice. My debility in high speculation is well known,
and I mean to attempt his book on Democracy again when I have seen
America once more, and when years may have brought to me, perhaps, more
of the philosophic mind. Meanwhile, however, it will be evident how
serious a matter I think it to write a worthy book about the United
States, when I am not entirely satisfied with even M. de Tocqueville’s.

But before I went to America, and when I had no expectation of ever
going there, I published, under the title of “A Word about America,”
not indeed a book, but a few modest remarks on what I thought
civilisation in the United States might probably be like. I had before
me a Boston newspaper-article which said that if I ever visited America
I should find there such and such things; and taking this article for
my text I observed, that from all I had read and all I could judge,
I should for my part expect to find there rather such and such other
things, which I mentioned. I said that of aristocracy, as we know it
here, I should expect to find, of course, in the United States the
total absence; that our lower class I should expect to find absent in a
great degree, while my old familiar friend, the middle class, I should
expect to find in full possession of the land. And then betaking myself
to those playful phrases which a little relieve, perhaps, the tedium of
grave disquisitions of this sort, I said that I imagined one would just
have in America our Philistines, with our aristocracy quite left out
and our populace very nearly.

An acute and singularly candid American, whose name I will on no
account betray to his countrymen, read these observations of mine, and
he made a remark upon them to me which struck me a good deal. Yes, he
said, you are right, and your supposition is just. In general, what
you would find over there would be the Philistines, as you call them,
without your aristocracy and without your populace. Only this, too,
I say at the same time: you would find over there something besides,
something more, something which you do not bring out, which you cannot
know and bring out, perhaps, without actually visiting the United
States, but which you would recognise if you saw it.

My friend was a true prophet. When I saw the United States I recognised
that the general account which I had hazarded of them was, indeed, not
erroneous, but that it required to have something added to supplement
it. I should not like either my friends in America or my countrymen
here at home to think that my “Word about America” gave my full and
final thoughts respecting the people of the United States. The new and
modifying impressions brought by experience I shall communicate, as I
did my original expectations, with all good faith, and as simply and
plainly as possible. Perhaps when I have yet again visited America,
have seen the great West, and have had a second reading of M. de
Tocqueville’s classical work on Democracy, my mind may be enlarged and
my present impressions still further modified by new ideas. If so, I
promise to make my confession duly; not indeed to make it, even then,
in a book about America, but to make it in a brief “Last Word” on that
great subject—a word, like its predecessors, of open-hearted and free
conversation with the readers of this Review.

       *       *       *       *       *

I suppose I am not by nature disposed to think so much as most people
do of “institutions.” The Americans think and talk very much of their
“institutions;” I am by nature inclined to call all this sort of
thing _machinery_, and to regard rather men and their characters.
But the more I saw of America, the more I found myself led to treat
“institutions” with increased respect. Until I went to the United
States I had never seen a people with institutions which seemed
expressly and thoroughly suited to it. I had not properly appreciated
the benefits proceeding from this cause.

Sir Henry Maine, in an admirable essay which, though not signed,
betrays him for its author by its rare and characteristic qualities of
mind and style—Sir Henry Maine in the _Quarterly Review_ adopts and
often reiterates a phrase of M. Scherer, to the effect that “Democracy
is only a form of government.” He holds up to ridicule a sentence of
Mr. Bancroft’s History, in which the American democracy is told that
its ascent to power “proceeded as uniformly and majestically as the
laws of being and was as certain as the decrees of eternity.” Let us be
willing to give Sir Henry Maine his way, and to allow no magnificent
claim of this kind on behalf of the American democracy. Let us treat
as not more solid the assertion in the Declaration of Independence,
that “all men are created equal, are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.” Let us concede that these natural rights are a figment;
that chance and circumstance, as much as deliberate foresight and
design, have brought the United States into their present condition,
that moreover the British rule which they threw off was not the rule of
oppressors and tyrants which declaimers suppose, and that the merit of
the Americans was not that of oppressed men rising against tyrants, but
rather of sensible young people getting rid of stupid and overweening
guardians who misunderstood and mismanaged them.

All this let us concede, if we will; but in conceding it let us not
lose sight of the really important point, which is this: that their
institutions do in fact suit the people of the United States so well,
and that from this suitableness they do derive so much actual benefit.
As one watches the play of their institutions, the image suggests
itself to one’s mind of a man in a suit of clothes which fits him to
perfection, leaving all his movements unimpeded and easy. It is loose
where it ought to be loose, and it sits close where its sitting close
is an advantage. The central government of the United States keeps in
its own hands those functions which, if the nation is to have real
unity, ought to be kept there; those functions it takes to itself
and no others. The State governments and the municipal governments
provide people with the fullest liberty of managing their own affairs,
and afford, besides, a constant and invaluable school of practical
experience. This wonderful suit of clothes, again (to recur to our
image), is found also to adapt itself naturally to the wearer’s growth,
and to admit of all enlargements as they successively arise. I speak of
the state of things since the suppression of slavery, of the state of
things which meets a spectator’s eye at the present time in America.
There are points in which the institutions of the United States may
call forth criticism. One observer may think that it would be well if
the President’s term of office were longer, if his ministers sate in
Congress or must possess the confidence of Congress. Another observer
may say that the marriage laws for the whole nation ought to be fixed
by Congress, and not to vary at the will of the legislatures of the
several States. I myself was much struck with the inconvenience of
not allowing a man to sit in Congress except for his own district; a
man like Wendell Phillips was thus excluded, because Boston would not
return him. It is as if Mr. Bright could have no other constituency
open to him if Rochdale would not send him to Parliament. But all
these are really questions of _machinery_ (to use my own term), and
ought not so to engage our attention as to prevent our seeing that the
capital fact as to the institutions of the United States is this: their
suitableness to the American people and their natural and easy working.
If we are not to be allowed to say, with Mr. Beecher, that this people
has “a genius for the organisation of States,” then at all events we
must admit that in its own organisation it has enjoyed the most signal
good fortune.

Yes; what is called, in the jargon of the publicists, the political
problem and the social problem, the people of the United States does
appear to me to have solved, or Fortune has solved it for them, with
undeniable success. Against invasion and conquest from without they
are impregnably strong. As to domestic concerns, the first thing to
remember is, that the people over there is at bottom the same people
as ourselves, a people with a strong sense for conduct. But there
is said to be great corruption among their politicians and in the
public service, in municipal administration, and in the administration
of justice. Sir Lepel Griffin would lead us to think that the
administration of justice, in particular, is so thoroughly corrupt, that
a man with a lawsuit has only to provide his lawyer with the necessary
funds for bribing the officials, and he can make sure of winning his
suit. The Americans themselves use such strong language in describing
the corruption prevalent amongst them that they cannot be surprised if
strangers believe them. For myself, I had heard and read so much to
the discredit of American political life, how all the best men kept
aloof from it, and those who gave themselves to it were unworthy, that
I ended by supposing that the thing must actually be so, and the good
Americans must be looked for elsewhere than in politics. Then I had the
pleasure of dining with Mr. Bancroft in Washington; and however he
may, in Sir Henry Maine’s opinion, overlaud the pre-established harmony
of American democracy, he had at any rate invited to meet me half a
dozen politicians whom in England we should pronounce to be members of
Parliament of the highest class, in bearing, manners, tone of feeling,
intelligence, information. I discovered that in truth the practice, so
common in America, of calling a politician “a thief,” does not mean
so very much more than is meant in England when we have heard Lord
Beaconsfield called “a liar” and Mr. Gladstone “a madman.” It means,
that the speaker disagrees with the politician in question and dislikes
him. Not that I assent, on the other hand, to the thick-and-thin
American patriots, who will tell you that there is no more corruption
in the politics and administration of the United States than in those
of England. I believe there _is_ more, and that the tone of both is
lower there; and this from a cause on which I shall have to touch
hereafter. But the corruption is exaggerated; it is not the wide and
deep disease it is often represented; it is such that the good elements
in the nation may, and I believe will, perfectly work it off; and even
now the truth of what I have been saying as to the suitableness and
successful working of American institutions is not really in the least
affected by it.

Furthermore, American society is not in danger from revolution. Here,
again, I do not mean that the United States are exempt from the
operation of every one of the causes—such a cause as the division
between rich and poor, for instance—which may lead to revolution. But I
mean that comparatively with the old countries of Europe they are free
from the danger of revolution; and I believe that the good elements in
them will make a way for them to escape out of what they really have
of this danger also, to escape in the future as well as now—the future
for which some observers announce this danger as so certain and so
formidable. Lord Macaulay predicted that the United States must come
in time to just the same state of things which we witness in England;
that the cities would fill up and the lands become occupied, and then,
he said, the division between rich and poor would establish itself on
the same scale as with us, and be just as embarrassing. He forgot that
the United States are without what certainly fixes and accentuates the
division between rich and poor—the distinction of classes. Not only
have they not the distinction between noble and bourgeois, between
aristocracy and middle class; they have not even the distinction
between bourgeois and peasant or artisan, between middle and lower
class. They have nothing to create it and compel their recognition of
it. Their domestic service is done for them by Irish, Germans, Swedes,
<DW64>s. Outside domestic service, within the range of conditions which
an American may in fact be called upon to traverse, he passes easily
from one sort of occupation to another, from poverty to riches, and
from riches to poverty. No one of his possible occupations appears
degrading to him or makes him lose caste; and poverty itself appears to
him as inconvenient and disagreeable rather than as humiliating. When
the immigrant from Europe strikes root in his new home, he becomes as
the American.

It may be said that the Americans, when they attained their
independence, had not the elements for a division into classes, and
that they deserve no praise for not having invented one. But I am
not now contending that they deserve praise for their institutions,
I am saying how well their institutions work. Considering, indeed,
how rife are distinctions of rank and class in the world, how prone
men in general are to adopt them, how much the Americans themselves,
beyond doubt, are capable of feeling their attraction, it shows, I
think, at least strong good sense in the Americans to have forborne
from all attempt to invent them at the outset, and to have escaped
or resisted any fancy for inventing them since. But evidently the
United States constituted themselves, not amid the circumstances of a
feudal age, but in a modern age; not under the conditions of an epoch
favorable to subordination, but under those of an epoch of expansion.
Their institutions did but comply with the form and pressure of the
circumstances and conditions then present. A feudal age, an epoch of
war, defence, and concentration, needs centres of power and property,
and it reinforces property by joining distinctions of rank and class
with it. Property becomes more honorable, more solid. And in feudal
ages this is well, for its changing hands easily would be a source
of weakness. But in ages of expansion, where men are bent that every
one shall have his chance, the more readily property changes hands
the better. The envy with which its holder is regarded diminishes,
society is safer. I think whatever may be said of the worship of
the almighty dollar in America, it is indubitable that rich men are
regarded there with less envy and hatred than rich men are in Europe.
Why is this? Because their condition is less fixed, because government
and legislation do not take them more seriously than other people,
make grandees of them, aid them to found families and endure. With
us, the chief holders of property are grandees already, and every
rich man aspires to become a grandee if possible. And therefore an
English country-gentleman regards himself as part of the system of
nature; government and legislation have invited him so to do. If the
price of wheat falls so low that his means of expenditure are greatly
reduced, he tells you that if this lasts he cannot possibly go on
as a country-gentleman; and every