For the next assignment choose a passage from either the Bourne or Chesterton
essay. Write out the
passage:
I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel
narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility
and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is
something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless
tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen,
and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his
blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not
meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense,
which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On
the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real
sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and
draw dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the
abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those
who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental
truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he
is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many
modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to
meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of
supreme danger—the moment when[Pg 2] they meet. We might shiver, as at the old
euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.
Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most
travellers are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame
them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a Dutchman for
being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are wrong is that they
take their own amusement seriously. They base on it their serious ideas of
international instruction. It was said that the Englishman takes his pleasures
sadly; and the pleasure of despising foreigners is one which he takes most
sadly of all. He comes to scoff and does not remain to pray, but rather to
excommunicate. Hence in international relations there is far too little
laughing, and far too much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way
which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which
is actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the only
excuse of this book.
Let me begin my American impressions with two impressions I
had before I went to America. One was an incident and the other an idea; and
when taken together they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principle is
that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign;
the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is
funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits of mind against something
new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly healthy reaction. But the mind which
imagines that mere unfamiliarity can possibly prove anything about inferiority
is a very inadequate mind. It is inadequate even in criticising things that may
really be inferior to the things involved[Pg 3] here. It is far better to laugh
at a negro for having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping
skull. It is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in
dealing with highly civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning two
working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it; the sort of
thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort of thing he has a
duty to understand and respect, because it is the explanation of the joke.
When I went to the American consulate to regularise my
passports, I was capable of expecting the American consulate to be American.
Embassies and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which
they stand; and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. I
have seen the unmistakable French official living on omelettes and a little
wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last palm-trees fringing a
desert. In the heat and noise of quarrelling Turks and Egyptians, I have come
suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own shower-bath, on the listless
amiability of the English gentleman. The officials I interviewed were very
American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or
meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest
people in the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all
appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in
reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. At
least it was a little like a freer form of the game called 'Confessions' which
my friends and I invented in our youth; an examination paper containing
questions like, 'If you saw a rhinoceros[Pg 4] in the front garden, what would
you do?' One of my friends, I remember, wrote, 'Take the pledge.' But that is
another story, and might bring Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his
time.
One of the questions on the paper was, 'Are you an
anarchist?' To which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to
answer, 'What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?' along
with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes
an ἁρχη [Greek: archê]. Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour of
subverting the government of the United States by force?' Against this I should
write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the
beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written
down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not
such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex. But perhaps a
better answer would be that given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the
rhetorical question, 'Shall I slay my brother Boer?'—the answer that ran,
'Never interfere in family matters.' But among many things that amused me
almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing
was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it
respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into
America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to
write with a beautiful gravity, 'I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to
destroy you.' Or, 'I intend to subvert by force the government of the United
States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left
trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity.' Or again, 'Yes, I
am a[Pg 5] polygamist all right, and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me
on the voyage disguised as secretaries.' There seems to be a certain simplicity
of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and
polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them
questions and they are certain to tell no lies.
Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded
on foreign problems, at which a man's first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor
have I any intention of apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly
entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible.
What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then
criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and
mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so
different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be
inferior to himself.
Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be
easy enough to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal
spirit of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the
ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something to be
said later; but superficially it is true that this degree of officialism is
comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the year before I had
occasion to have my papers passed by governments which many worthy people in
the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and assassins; I have stood on
the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the
police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like.
But they did not ask me whether[Pg 6] I had come to subvert the power of the
Shereef; and they did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal
views on the ethical basis of civil authority. These ministers of ancient
Moslem despotism did not care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally
would not have minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a
polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in the old
liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire into my
thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of practice; they
did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to argue here that Western
democracy persecutes where even Eastern despotism tolerates or emancipates. It
would be easy to develop the fancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey
or Egypt, the American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.
Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally wrong;
and the traveller only too often does stop at that point. He has found
something to make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think. And
the remedy is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, to unlaugh
what he has laughed, not to deny that there is something unique and curious
about this American inquisition into our abstract opinions, but rather to continue
the train of thought, and follow the admirable advice of Mr. H. G. Wells, who
said, 'It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.' It is
not to deny that American officialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to
inquire what it really is which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to
America. In short, it is to get some ultimate idea of what America is;[Pg 7]
and the answer to that question will reveal something much deeper and grander
and more worthy of our intelligent interest.
It may have seemed something less than a compliment to
compare the American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough,
it does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a
compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in
this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world
that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even
theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece
of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great
literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice,
that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is
for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by
inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate
authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern
political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in
the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more
lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least
about human things.
Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing
in the world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of
all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of all
men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to exclude neither
Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute something else for Jewish
religion[Pg 8] or Greek philosophy. It was truly said to be a net drawing in of
all kinds; but a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman.
And this is true even of the most disastrous distortions or degradations of
that creed; and true among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been
narrow touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about
nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition might be admittedly
Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a
Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be broader than
his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he
must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we see, even in modern
times, that the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also
blamed for making savages priests. Now in a much vaguer and more evolutionary
fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American
experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been
compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself
is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The
melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines of
Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes
shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma
that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its primary ideal is
concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. The
missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a
Sandwich Islander. And in something of the same spirit the American[Pg 9] may
exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.
Now for America this is no idle theory. It may have been
theoretical, though it was thoroughly sincere, when that great Virginian
gentleman declared it in surroundings that still had something of the character
of an English countryside. It is not merely theoretical now. There is nothing
to prevent America being literally invaded by Turks, as she is invaded by Jews
or Bulgars. In the most exquisitely inconsequent of the Bab Ballads, we are
told concerning Pasha Bailey Ben:—
One morning knocked at half-past eight
A tall Red Indian at his gate.
In Turkey, as you 'r' p'raps aware,
Red Indians are extremely rare.
But the converse need by no means be true. There is nothing
in the nature of things to prevent an emigration of Turks increasing and
multiplying on the plains where the Red Indians wandered; there is nothing to
necessitate the Turks being extremely rare. The Red Indians, alas, are likely
to be rarer. And as I much prefer Red Indians to Turks, not to mention Jews, I
speak without prejudice; but the point here is that America, partly by original
theory and partly by historical accident, does lie open to racial admixtures
which most countries would think incongruous or comic. That is why it is only
fair to read any American definitions or rules in a certain light, and
relatively to a rather unique position. It is not fair to compare the position
of those who may meet Turks in the back street with that of those who have
never met Turks except in the Bab Ballads. It is not fair simply to compare
America with England in its regulations about[Pg 10] the Turk. In short, it is
not fair to do what almost every Englishman probably does; to look at the
American international examination paper, and laugh and be satisfied with
saying, 'We don't have any of that nonsense in England.'
We do not have any of that nonsense in England because we
have never attempted to have any of that philosophy in England. And, above all,
because we have the enormous advantage of feeling it natural to be national,
because there is nothing else to be. England in these days is not well
governed; England is not well educated; England suffers from wealth and poverty
that are not well distributed. But England is English; esto perpetua. England
is English as France is French or Ireland Irish; the great mass of men taking
certain national traditions for granted. Now this gives us a totally different and
a very much easier task. We have not got an inquisition, because we have not
got a creed; but it is arguable that we do not need a creed, because we have
got a character. In any of the old nations the national unity is preserved by
the national type. Because we have a type we do not need to have a test.
Take that innocent question, 'Are you an anarchist?' which
is intrinsically quite as impudent as 'Are you an optimist?' or 'Are you a
philanthropist?' I am not discussing here whether these things are right, but
whether most of us are in a position to know them rightly. Now it is quite true
that most Englishmen do not find it necessary to go about all day asking each
other whether they are anarchists. It is quite true that the phrase occurs on
no British forms that I have seen. But this is not only because most of the
Englishmen are not anarchists. It is even more[Pg 11] because even the
anarchists are Englishmen. For instance, it would be easy to make fun of the
American formula by noting that the cap would fit all sorts of bald academic
heads. It might well be maintained that Herbert Spencer was an anarchist. It is
practically certain that Auberon Herbert was an anarchist. But Herbert Spencer
was an extraordinarily typical Englishman of the Nonconformist middle class.
And Auberon Herbert was an extraordinarily typical English aristocrat of the
old and genuine aristocracy. Every one knew in his heart that the squire would
not throw a bomb at the Queen, and the Nonconformist would not throw a bomb at
anybody. Every one knew that there was something subconscious in a man like
Auberon Herbert, which would have come out only in throwing bombs at the
enemies of England; as it did come out in his son and namesake, the generous
and unforgotten, who fell flinging bombs from the sky far beyond the German
line. Every one knows that normally, in the last resort, the English gentleman
is patriotic. Every one knows that the English Nonconformist is national even
when he denies that he is patriotic. Nothing is more notable indeed than the
fact that nobody is more stamped with the mark of his own nation than the man
who says that there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobden the
International Man; but no man could be more English than Cobden. Everybody
recognises Tolstoy as the iconoclast of all patriotism; but nobody could be
more Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries where there are these national
types, the types may be allowed to hold any theories. Even if they hold certain
theories, they are unlikely to do certain things. So the conscientious
objector, in the English sense,[Pg 12] may be and is one of the peculiar
by-products of England. But the conscientious objector will probably have a
conscientious objection to throwing bombs.
Now I am very far from intending to imply that these
American tests are good tests, or that there is no danger of tyranny becoming
the temptation of America. I shall have something to say later on about that
temptation or tendency. Nor do I say that they apply consistently this conception
of a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious and not racial
selection. If they did apply that principle consistently, they would have to
exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the democratic ideal; an excellent
thing but a rather improbable one. What I say is that when we realise that this
principle exists at all, we see the whole position in a totally different
perspective. We say that the Americans are doing something heroic, or doing
something insane, or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of
simply wondering what the devil they are doing.
When we realise the democratic design of such a cosmopolitan
commonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, we see at
once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic. We see why in
some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant. Any one can see the
practical point by merely transferring into private life a problem like that of
the two academic anarchists, who might by a coincidence be called the two
Herberts. Suppose a man said, 'Buffle, my old Oxford tutor, wants to meet you;
I wish you'd ask him down for a day or two. He has the oddest opinions, but
he's very stimulating.' It would not occur to us that the oddity of the Oxford[Pg
13] don's opinions would lead him to blow up the house; because the Oxford don
is an English type. Suppose somebody said, 'Do let me bring old Colonel
Robinson down for the week-end; he's a bit of a crank but quite interesting.'
We should not anticipate the colonel running amuck with a carving-knife and
offering up human sacrifice in the garden; for these are not among the daily
habits of an old English colonel; and because we know his habits, we do not
care about his opinions. But suppose somebody offered to bring a person from
the interior of Kamskatka to stay with us for a week or two, and added that his
religion was a very extraordinary religion, we should feel a little more
inquisitive about what kind of religion it was. If somebody wished to add a Hairy
Ainu to the family party at Christmas, explaining that his point of view was so
individual and interesting, we should want to know a little more about it and
him. We should be tempted to draw up as fantastic an examination paper as that
presented to the emigrant going to America. We should ask what a Hairy Ainu
was, and how hairy he was, and above all what sort of Ainu he was. Would
etiquette require us to ask him to bring his wife? And if we did ask him to
bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? In short, as in the American
formula, is he a polygamist? Merely as a point of housekeeping and
accommodation the question is not irrelevant. Is the Hairy Ainu content with
hair, or does he wear any clothes? If the police insist on his wearing clothes,
will he recognise the authority of the police? In short, as in the American
formula, is he an anarchist?
Of course this generalisation about America, like other
historical things, is subject to all sorts of cross[Pg 14] divisions and
exceptions, to be considered in their place. The negroes are a special problem,
because of what white men in the past did to them. The Japanese are a special
problem, because of what men fear that they in the future may do to white men.
The Jews are a special problem, because of what they and the Gentiles, in the
past, present, and future, seem to have the habit of doing to each other. But
the point is not that nothing exists in America except this idea; it is that
nothing like this idea exists anywhere except in America. This idea is not
internationalism; on the contrary it is decidedly nationalism. The Americans
are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans.
But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that
comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called
Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition
to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to
Anglicise thousands of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not
trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war.
America is the one place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy,
possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is
not internationalisation. It would be truer to say it is the nationalisation of
the internationalised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of
exiles. This is what at once illuminates and softens the moral regulations
which we may really think faddist or fanatical. They are abnormal; but in one
sense this experiment of a home for the homeless is abnormal. In short, it has
long been recognised that America was an asylum. It is[Pg 15] only since
Prohibition that it has looked a little like a lunatic asylum.
It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that I
stood with the official paper in my hand and these thoughts in my head. It was
while I stood on English soil that I passed through the two stages of smiling
and then sympathising; of realising that my momentary amusement, at being asked
if I were not an Anarchist, was partly due to the fact that I was not an
American. And in truth I think there are some things a man ought to know about
America before he sees it. What we know of a country beforehand may not affect
what we see that it is; but it will vitally affect what we appreciate it for
being, because it will vitally affect what we expect it to be. I can honestly
say that I had never expected America to be what nine-tenths of the newspaper
critics invariably assume it to be. I never thought it was a sort of
Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of
very different colonists. During the war I felt that the very worst propaganda
for the Allies was the propaganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out
that in one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. If she is not
nearer to Bulgaria, she is nearer to Bulgars; if she is not nearer to Bohemia,
she is nearer to Bohemians. In my New York hotel the head waiter in the
dining-room was a Bohemian; the head waiter in the grill-room was a Bulgar.
Americans have nationalities at the end of the street which for us are at the
ends of the earth. I did my best to persuade my countrymen not to appeal to the
American as if he were a rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in
the provinces and had not heard the latest news about the[Pg 16] town. I shall
record later some of those arresting realities which the traveller does not
expect; and which, in some cases I fear, he actually does not see because he
does not expect. I shall try to do justice to the psychology of what Mr. Belloc
has called 'Eye-Openers in Travel.' But there are some things about America
that a man ought to see even with his eyes shut. One is that a state that came
into existence solely through its repudiation and abhorrence of the British
Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of the British Constitution.
Another is that the chief mark of the Declaration of Independence is something
that is not only absent from the British Constitution, but something which all
our constitutionalists have invariably thanked God, with the jolliest boasting
and bragging, that they had kept out of the British Constitution. It is the thing
called abstraction or academic logic. It is the thing which such jolly people
call theory; and which those who can practise it call thought. And the theory
or thought is the very last to which English people are accustomed, either by
their social structure or their traditional teaching. It is the theory of
equality. It is the pure classic conception that no man must aspire to be
anything more than a citizen, and that no man should endure to be anything
less. It is by no means especially intelligible to an Englishman, who tends at
his best to the virtues of the gentleman and at his worst to the vices of the
snob. The idealism of England, or if you will the romance of England, has not
been primarily the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of America, we may
safely say, still revolves entirely round the citizen and his romance. The
realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider in its place the[Pg
17] question of whether the ideal will be able to shape the realities or will
merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal is besieged by inequalities of
the most towering and insane description in the industrial and economic field.
It may be devoured by modern capitalism, perhaps the worst inequality that ever
existed among men. Of all that we shall speak later. But citizenship is still
the American ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but
there is no ideal opposed to that ideal. American plutocracy has never got
itself respected like English aristocracy. Citizenship is the American ideal;
and it has never been the English ideal. But it is surely an ideal that may
stir some imaginative generosity and respect in an Englishman, if he will
condescend to be also a man. In this vision of moulding many peoples into the
visible image of the citizen, he may see a spiritual adventure which he can
admire from the outside, at least as much as he admires the valour of the
Moslems and much more than he admires the virtues of the Middle Ages. He need
not set himself to develop equality, but he need not set himself to
misunderstand it. He may at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant,
and he may possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they
said. He may realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men
being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe but
cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by which all
men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity as intangible as
death. He may at least be a philosopher and see that equality is an idea; and
not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics who, having risen by low tricks to
high places, drink bad[Pg 18] champagne in tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each
other twenty times over, with unwearied iteration, that equality is an
illusion.
In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme
disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of changing
lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and distortions. We
find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find him forgotten; we see a
race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay. It is the experience of men
that always returns to the equality of men; it is the average that ultimately
justifies the average man. It is when men have seen and suffered much and come
at the end of more elaborate experiments, that they see men as men under an
equal light of death and daily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being
many. Nor is it in vain that these Western democrats have sought the blazonry
of their flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that endure behind the
fires we see, and gathered them into the corner of Old Glory whose ground is
like the glittering night. For veritably, in the spirit as well as in the
symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our skies with a fleeting and
almost theatrical conflagration; and wherever the old shadow stoops upon the
earth, the stars return.
Under that explain the meaning of the passage:
This passage tells ours about the different kinds of people that we see
when we travel to different places, how everyone is different from everyone
else’s. Also, how we as humans always are punishments ourselves because of the
way we think or ours reaction .This passage emphasize that the American nation
never will forget where they coming from or where they going based on their
creed. Last but not least from my point of view I believed this passage is
trying to explain ours that America is a county where every can have justice
and will trade equality to others not matter their color, race or ethnicity.
Then,
under that explain why you chose this passage:
I selected this passage
because the title of passage called my attention immediately I read it. Also,
because we live in America and as immigrant I could like to know more about the
past history of America. Finally but not least because explains at the last
part of the passage that inequality in America is an illusion.
