The Onlooker | Page 9

nation makes in outward expansion, but there are here no Little Americanders. The Little Englanders doubt the nation's power to hold the nation's possessions. Here, in the United States, are men who question the advisability of penetrating into world politics, but no man among them has doubt of the nation's power to keep whatever territory the Star Spangled Banner once has floated over. They are merely jealous, jealous of the absolute isolation of their commonwealth, quick to resent any remotest possibility of interference with it.
In every American's ears rings the music of assured success, the certainty of a rich inheritance laid up for him and his children's children in the internal resources of his country. In many an Englishman's ears sound only the doleful croakings of the prophets, the sinister rumblings of approaching doom. Though his pessimism be in great part born of his climate, it has had a very real effect upon his statecraft. It has driven him outward to find hope and sunshine abroad, in his colonies, and in India. It has made of the race a nation of expansionists, reaping where they have not sown, gathering where they have not strawed.
It is otherwise here with us under a sky that would make of Job an optimist. All around are light and color, the evidences of life and hope. Here the whites are white, and not a dirty drab. The streets glisten clean in the sunlight, and every window is a reflector of glad promise. In London, choked with fog, and grimy with soot-dust, the Englishman cannot see the future for smoke, cannot extract a gleam of hope from the sodden, mud-soaked thoroughfares. To be sanguine here on my housetop is to be natural and in harmony with my surroundings. To be hilarious in the Strand is to be unnatural, to court detention in a police cell or a lunatic asylum. There is a wide gulf separating Sandy Hook from Land's End, but a still wider between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Westminster Bridge Road.
And so those who have dreamed of Anglo-American alliances awake to find themselves deceived by the very intensity of their desires. The bloodship between the nations is itself the surest deterrent of alliance. Just as in the Church marriage between nigh kinsmen is forbidden, so political marriage between the British and American nations can never be. The United States is possessed of a single idea--the consolidation and enrichment of the United States. No interest is permitted to clash with that paramount national ambition.
To that end all share in the pomp and vanities of the world is sacrificed; her ambassadors tolerated, not supported; her Secretary of State snubbed; her President jealously watched in all his exchanges of courtesy with foreign Powers. United States citizens may be maltreated and murdered in Bulgaria or in China, the United States will not go to war on their behalf. Her mission is confined to the Western Hemisphere, and over its borders no insult, no cajolery will avail to tempt her. Within her own sphere her temper is quick, and her arm strong to avenge. Across the ocean she is long suffering and slow to anger.
Down here at my feet the American is engaged in his nation-building somewhat less satisfactorily than out in the wide world beyond. A nation compounded of a dozen alien races may unite on matters of foreign policy, but in that is no warranty of harmony at home. Domestic strife is as bitter here as in Germany or Britain or France. I watch from my housetop men marching in processions of protest; I read of strikes; I hear of an infinity of rude wranglings, of senators battling on the floor of the forum, of disputes in the sacred halls of Tammany. Not yet has the Irish lamb lain down with the Virginian lion.
It were strange were it otherwise in a land where the city man has destroyed the home. The American has shown no great genius for the domestic virtues. He has hauled down the homes of his ancestors, has builded in their stead vast apartment-houses and tenement buildings--steam-heated Towers of Babel. Into each of these he has packed the population of a European market-town, has left the children to grow up on the roofs and staircases, the babies to find a blessed release through rickety fire-escapes. When a fit of reform has touched him, he has stirred up the garbage of the Tenderloin and the Red Light District, has spread it broadcast over his cities to poison his wife and his daughter.
No, the American has still much to learn of domestic politics. Let him sit with me here any night on my housetop and he will see the sad effects of sectarian reform and newspaper hysteria. He will see the creatures of the Tenderloin at home