European Americans

“ The Americans do not belong to “our” system—“our” meaning the intimate close brotherhood of British and French and Italians and Spanish and so forth, the British rather marginal to the Latin Catholic world. The Americans are a “New Thing”—capitals; they are a new culture outside the Western European culture. They are a “new race.” ”

“ And the average American who lives for some time on the Continent of Europe comes home dismayed at the exaggerated and specious politeness of Europe and rejoiced at the greater humanity of the Americans. The incontinence of France, the intemperance of Germany, the business dishonesty of Southern Europe, are favourite examples in America of European lack of virtue; and aside from all local differences, the Americans believe 523that they find everywhere in Europe the symptoms of moral decadence and laxity, and on finding the same things in large American cities, they put the blame on Europe. ”

“ Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world! ”

“ If a native of North America were to come to some European nation, he would probably, after having informed himself of the different states and conditions of the people in this society, be most struck with the great profusion and splendour of some among them, and the penury and obscurity of all the others ”

“ This immense continent being peopled with elements of European civilization, could not remain a mere appendix to Europe. But when it is connected with Europe by a thousand social, moral, and material ties, by blood, religion, language, science, civilization, and commerce, to believe that it can rest isolated in politics from Europe, would be just such a fault as it was that England did not believe in time the necessity of America's independence. ”

“ Yes, gentlemen, this is so sure to me, that I would pledge life, honour, and everything dear to man's heart and honourable to man's memory, that either America must take her becoming part in the political regeneration of Europe, or she herself must yield to the pernicious influence of European politics. There was never yet a more fatal mistake, than it would be to believe, that by not caring about the political condition of Europe, America may remain unaffected by the condition of Europe. ”

“ I had learned in Europe, long before joining the “United States,” that the respect we exact from foreigners is paid more to Americans afloat, than to a continent they think as far off at least as the moon. ”

“ I therefore confess to you frankly, ending these lectures, that I do not belong to that number of Europeans who most enthusiastically admire things American. I think that Americans in general, in North America as in South, so readily recognise in themselves a sufficient number of virtues, that we Europeans hardly need help them in the belief, easy and agreeable to all, that they stand first in the world. ”

“ However little reflection and cool reasoning the European may bring to his abuse of America on the score of its excessive zeal in the production of riches, or the American to his abuse of Europe on account of the scanty remains of the spirit of tradition and conservatism in the Old World, each will recognise that he is at the same time inveighing against his own continent. ”

“ No sooner does an European arrive, no matter of what condition, than his eyes are opened upon the fair prospect; he hears his language spoke, he retraces many of his own country manners, he perpetually hears the names of families and towns with which he is acquainted; he sees happiness and prosperity in all places disseminated; he meets with hospitality, kindness, and plenty everywhere; he beholds hardly any poor, he seldom hears of punishments and executions; and he wonders at the elegance of our towns, those miracles of industry and freedom. ”

“ Compare the four most conspicuous periodicals of America with the four great quarterlies of England, and you see how inferior our literature is to theirs—in all things, in form and in substance too. The European has the freedom of a well-bred man—it appears in the movement of his thought, his use of words, in the easy grace of his sentences, and the general manner of his work; the American has the stiffness and limitations of a [Pg 384] big, raw boy in the presence of his schoolmaster. ”

“ I was getting furiously American, in the big sense I invoked, through this felt growth of an ability to reach out westward, southward, anywhere, everywhere, on that apprehension of finding myself but patriotically charmed. Thus there dawned upon me the grand possibility that, charm for charm, the American, the assumed, the postulated, would, in the particular case of its really acting, count double; whereas the European paid for being less precarious by being also less miraculous. ”

“ To be thus vivid and convincing about any phase of life is not easy; to make intimate to the European a life in the world’s remotest outskirts, of whose terms the European has no conception, in which he has no natural interest, whose actors are of a different race, color, and psychology from his own, is a feat bristling [94] with difficulties. ”

“ Nay, when you meet an American who is really interested in Europe, you will be surprised to find how little he cares for the things that we consider liberal or progressive. Such things are not what he wants of Europe. He can get them at home. He likes Europe to be European. What he asks of Europe is picturesqueness; old castles, and Louis XIV., and Austrian rules of etiquette and an unreformed House of Lords. When we reform such things away he is rather regretful, as we in England might be at the Chinese cutting off their pigtails. ”

“ By ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but the exceptions proved nothing. The European believed in his station in life, his civil status, the standing of his family in the financial or social world. ”

“ And the European, proud in his might, in his strength, in his civilization and his humanity, rules arrogantly, blindly, selfishly, egoistically, amidst all the intricate cog-wheels of [151] his authority, which he slips into gear with the certainty of clockwork, controlling its every movement, till to the foreigner, the outside observer, this overlordship of tangible things, this colonizing of territory alien in race and mind, appears a masterpiece, a very world created. ”

“ The result of this community of interests, commercial, political, and moral, between Europe and America—of this frequency and rapidity of intercourse between them, is, that it becomes as difficult to point out the geographical degree where American policy shall terminate, and European policy begin, as it is to trace out the line where American commerce begins and European commerce terminates. ”

“ What the Europeans shared with each other, which in their own eyes distinguished them from everyone else and made them capable of ‘discovering’ and ‘civilising’ the rest of the world, was a distinctive kind of consciousness or conscience. ”

“ If, as above evidenced, Europe regarded America in 1898 with feelings of envy and malice, imagine then the European condition of mind towards the great American Republic in 1999 when it contained a population of over 500,000,000 citizens, inclusive of a territory that represented nearly one-fourth of the habitable globe. ”

“ It is an undoubted fact that Europe is becoming Americanised; that the American idea of progress—understood to mean the increase of wealth and the perfectioning of the instruments of production—is penetrating European society. No profound knowledge of European society is needed to recognise this. I would even go so far as to say that the only idea which in the last fifty years has sunk deep into the minds of the masses in Europe is this American idea of progress. ”

“ The power and policy of home governments, successive waves of emigration, and numberless events in Europe had effects which were deeply felt in America. This influence of Europe upon America, however, became less and less as time passed on; and the development of the American nation has made its history constantly more independent. ”

“ And as a matter of fact the Americans may well be desirous to see that region of the world whence they derive everything but their liberty and their wealth. For their religion, their language, their literature, their arts and sciences, their memories, and the very blood which courses in their veins, they are indebted to Europe. ”

“ But in whatever governments they end they will be American governments, no longer to be involved in the never-ceasing broils of Europe. The European nations constitute a separate division of the globe; their localities make them part of a distinct system; they have a set of interests of their own in which it is our business never to engage ourselves. ”

“ Into this vast shaggy continent of ours poured the first feeble tide of European settlement. European men, institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American wilderness, and this great American West took them to her bosom, taught them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common man, trained them in adaptation to the conditions of the New World, to the creation of new institutions to meet new needs ”

“ I’ve got Europe off my back. You’ve no idea how it simplifies things and how jolly it makes me feel. Now I can live, now I can talk. If we wretched Americans could only say once for all “Oh Europe be hanged!” we should attend much better to our proper business. We’ve simply to mind that business and the rest will look after itself. ”

“ The idea that Europe was in her decrepitude proved only ignorance and want of enlightenment, if not of freedom, on the part of Americans, who could only excuse their error by pleading that notwithstanding these objections, in matters which for the moment most concerned themselves Europe was a full century behind America. ”

“ But, aside from the fact that in Europe this political and social evolution had taken centuries, there was also the working of the law of the survival of the fittest. In European nations it had been the element, always composite, which deserved to live, that formed the nucleus of a nationality. ”

“ This is the first and greatest influence I would point out of the discovery of America on civilization: the appearance on earth of an immense continent destined to be the new home of the old European races, where they would meet and mix and speak the same language, while in the native soil their old stocks would continue separated and up till now belligerent. ”

“ In mixing with the commercial fashionables and exclusives of the American cities, the European is at once amused and annoyed with the assumption of a social tone and spirit at variance with the whole make of the country. ”

“ It is a work by which we will repay to France and Portugal and to Sweden—to all our mother lands across the Atlantic—all the gifts of civilization, of literature, of art, of the results of their long struggles upward from barbarism to light, with which they have endowed us. For in the vast fields of incalculable wealth that the American continents offer to the enterprise and the cultivation of the world, the older nations of Europe will find their wealth, and opportunity for the exercise of their powers in peace and with equality. ”

“ The rush of European emigrants to the United States as the land of promise for the poor, since its beginning half a century before, had continued with increasing volume, and drawn to us a great population from the best stocks of the Old World. Soon after the war the character of the immigration began to change, and during the eighties and nineties came to be almost entirely made up of the lowest, most wretched, and barbarous races of Europe--the very scum of the continent. ”

“ What has made the European family of nations an improving, instead of a stationary portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it exists, exists as the effect, not as the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable ”

“ Distinctions of class, profession, or nationality, entering so largely into European life, separating man from man, lose their hold upon Europeans meeting in the distant East. The great [Pg 288] West, seen at that distance, becomes their common country; they are drawn together by the bond of common views, feelings and modes of thought which obliterate the artificial lines of nationality—nay, they feel for, and treat each other as only blood relations and brothers would in Europe. ”

“ There the plenitude of society confines many useful ideas, and often extinguishes the most laudable schemes which here ripen into maturity. Thus Europeans become Americans.
But how is this accomplished in that crowd of low, indigent people, who flock here every year from all parts of Europe? I will tell you; they no sooner arrive than they immediately feel the good effects of that plenty of provisions we possess: they fare on our best food, and they are kindly entertained; their talents, character, and peculiar industry are immediately inquired into ”

“ The ultimate development of these mighty riches might be merely a general advance, both material and ideal, of Europe and America. Rich and prosperous Americans might try to assimilate the culture of Europe, and on her part Europe, in her effort to increase her own riches, might seek to equal America. But a historian of antiquity who returns from America cannot share this optimism. In the lap of modern civilisation, there are twin worlds struggling with each other for leadership. But these two worlds are not, as people are apt to think, Europe and America. Their names are Quality and Quantity. ”