What the visiting foreigner takes away from America -will always hear a fixed proportion to what he brings. "I felt instinctively," says Mr. Wells,' "that Boston could never possibly understand the light traveling of a philosophical carpet-beggar." He makes no secret, indeed, of his conviction that the Bostonians do not know what to forget. We find him impatient of pilgrimages to Mount Vernon and Concord and other shrines, excusing himself on the ground that the English are such a young people.
This is in sharp contrast, of course, to the mood of Mr. Bryce, but it may be doubted whether any book written about us since the appearance of the "American Commonwealth" has been quite so well worthwhile. Mr. Bryce remembered everything; Mr. Wells contrives to forget everything save his consuming interest in the future of mankind upon this planet, and in America's probable part in the shaping of that future. Divested to a wonderful degree of national prejudice, of literary preoccupation, of leisure even (for he was here only seven weeks), our visitor brought with him a very keen pair of eyes and the gift, moreover, of picturesque and effective presentation. His book is a bold, strongly drawn cartoon, in which the lines, though not always right perhaps, are at least consistent and inspiring.
To the European eye, our continent is still unpopulated, despite its urban congestion. Our people are roughly prosperous, not yet consciously defeated in the economic struggle, and childishly delighted with growth –not with mere having, as some observers think, but with growing bigger and bigger.
A sight in Alderman Kenna's saloon of the base and coarse faces of those who have no ideals and yet have votes has brought vividly home to our author the alternative with us for private ownership. "If public services are to be taken out of the hands of such associations of financiers as the Standard Oil group they have to be put in the hands of politicians resting at last upon this sort of basis. Therein resides the impossibility of socialism in America-as the case for socialism is put at present." Wise socialist to see it!
Is the future in America, as Mr. Wells forecasts it, hopeful or the reverse? He sees dangers in our plutocracy and in our immigration. We might stagnate like China or decay like Rome. "An illiterate, shortsighted America would be America doomed."
But we are not illiterate. Our ten cent magazines are so far superior to those sold in England for six-pence that he has hopes of us. "It is these millions of readers who make the American problem, and the problem of Europe and the world today, unique and incalculable, who provide a cohesive and reasonable and pacifying medium the Old World did not know.
–The Charity Organization Review, Vol. 18 [1907]
