No More Learning

He noted that in 1870 a chief source of British prosperity had been agriculture, but that already a Bagehot had been writing about how British money circulated round via Lombard Street, saving British landed gentry, almost as that used in discounting bills from British industrial areas. That Bagehot's words were hardly in print, before a shift of the world equilibrium had set in.
Mr. Adams noted the apparently meager accumulation of POPULAR SAVINGS in England and that during the Boer war you seemed to be relying on foreign bankers. I don't want to insist unduly. But let us take a date five years later than the publication of Mr. Brooks Adams' The New Empire, say he meant the American empire. The great American reorganization WAS complete in 1897; a decade later almost any average American arriving in London would have been full up with ideas of PROGRESS. He would, if he had met an intelligent British Tory (the two words COULD at that time be joined in at least a few cases without being ridiculous) he, the imaginary, homme moyen sensuel, average American, young or middle aged, would have encountered something absolutely new TO him, something unknown, and I think undreamt in America. Namely the conSERVATIVE view, the utterly surprisin' idea that things weren't gettin' better, and that you, meaning England of course, but being an Englishman, the English Tory would have applied it to the universe, on which the British eye never rests. Well that people, mankind, etc. better go slow, better not agitate, better let things stay in status quo. I believe that any and every American who
? heard this view for the first time was "struck all of a heap. " It was unbelievable heresy.
What, not progress, not everything moving upward (not to say onwards) toward bigger and brighter bonanzas? Mr. Adams in 1907, or 1908, or 1900 would have been one of the few Americans capable of locatin' the Tory outlook, Anschauung, disposition, in relation to something concrete, to something real in the then status of England. I have said before that his perceptions pretty well covered the world as it remained during his life time. In 1903 he thought that England, France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, the core of Europe were "apparently doomed not only to buy their raw materials abroad but to pay the cost of transport. " That view is interesting today. It may shed a bit of light on lease and lend sport. He cast his eye fairly wide over the world. He found Siberia "a narrow belt of arable land bounded by ice on the north, and by mountains and deserts on the south. " Seemed to him a poor bet as against the American continent, plus [the] fact the Rhoosians were still a bit unhandy with new fangled machinery.
Those are a few items, say [a] few high lights of the world setup as seen by an American expansionist in 1903. And I 'spose the pale blue Tory eye that greeted me in Kensington five years later was lookin' backward. Backward toward Her own (that is' England's own) agriculture. Down till 1845 it nearly sufficed for her wants. ENGLAND. Ole Viktoria's England. Advantage over the olde Roman empire. Instead of bein' drained of her bullion England sold cotton to India, instead of havin' to buy grain from Sicily and from Egypt, and so on. . . . No such favorable conditions had perhaps ever existed. An equilibrium so stable, had not some fellow gone and invented the steam locomotive. "Given effective land transportation," wrote Mr. Adams, "the North American continent seems devised by nature to be the converging point of the cheapest routes between Asia and Europe. "
? Possibly not quite the present day view. But NO view of tomorrow's trade routes is a going to put England plumb in their middle. Brother: whaaar do you land?
Ezra Pound askin'.
#63 (February 23, 1943) U. S. (C10) COMPLEXITY
You have to have more than ONE idea in your head to understand anything. You have to have possibly one idea and a mass of concrete data either conducin' to your general idea, or opposin' it.
And I try occasionally to get you to think of one, the other or both. It may be confusin'. Get you to think of an economic system, or a MERCANTILE system, or a monetary system. That is, of an organization of facts. Brooks Adams wrote a good deal about a mercantile system. Called it an economic system sometimes. Anyhow, am I clear if I say he wrote about TRADE routes? Raw materials pass over a trade route TO a point where they are wanted. Sometimes to a place where they pass into manufacture, then to a place where the finished stuff is wanted for consumption. The seats of manufacturin' shift. Obviously convenient if they are or can be shifted to the sources of the raw materials, not always handy, but whether the stuff moves raw or in finished products, the merchandise tends to seek, as they say, the most expeditious trade route.
On one turnpike four horses could draw three thousand pounds 18 miles a day. On the Erie canal four horses could draw 200 thousand pounds 24 miles in one day. Hence the prosperity of Manhattan. That is a simple and homely case out of Woodward, "A New American History. " Brooks Adams took a wider sweep. Sargon, Alexander, the silver of Quedi, the Foires de Champagne, Flemish cities, working out a general law for the vortex of trade and dominion. Might call it the material base for an
? economic system. Only it isn't. It is the ADMINISTRATIVE BASE, the material base is the raw stuff and the labor.
Brooks Adams was the mercantilist philosopher, or theorist, or better say ANALYST, analyzer of mercantilist materialist process. Possibly the most distinguished mind that ever tackled the subject. He saw a great chance for the U. S. A. IF the U. S. A. kept awake and observed the general laws of mercantile progress. Natural flow of goods by the easiest routes (easiest routes ought to be cheapest and ARE the cheapest save when the usurer or blackmailer intervenes).
BUT Brooks Adams observed that after Waterloo the mercantilist had got the push and that usury reigned; blackmailing the terrestrial universe.
I want to separate in your minds the mercantilist administrative basis of an economic order, and the accountancy, the tricks played with bits of paper: bank ledgers, engraved certificates. You can't understand the dirty deal that has been put over you till you can keep those two things clear in your minds.
And you have got the gold damndest ASS of a government in Washington that ever the American people was called on to suffer from. Eastern idea about money, said Bankhead of that saddistic slob in the White House. Down on his knees every morning adoring the usury system, saying his prayers to the usury system, maintaining six sorts of racket for bleedin' the American people. That had been going on for some time. Mess of bleedin' by gold. Mess of bleeding the American people by silver, and then to war. The major ineptitude, the cutting of trade with the Orient, the cutting of trade to the European continent, the blackmailing of South America, and the dry pie crust left of French Africa.
Well, the French were NOT the world's star, the cynosure, best admired model when it come to colonial empire. You are not taking on a perfectly
? arranged productive system, such as Italy was setting up in HER colonies, and in Abyssinia. You were being rotted by a paleozoic usury system. I 'spose there are still cavemen and relics of the ice age in the Republican Party who don't yet know what was wrong with that system. It's a pity 'cause the Republican Party could have built up an opposition to the infamy of the Democrats.
And of course one of the first steps toward prosperity or toward sanity would have been to bring the U. S. , if not up to date, at least to shorten the time lag so as the people could have got to where Jefferson had arrived in 1816, or Gallatin in 1813 as camouflage perhaps to his bonds, which the New England Yanks were not buying 'cause the privateer racket paid better, and they did not trust Mr. Gallatin's government.
I may have been late myself, but not quite as tardy as most of you. Twenty years ago I had got onto the money racket. Mebbe I have learned something since then, movin' round on the continent.
Your economics professors are driftin' behind. Lot 'em were behind, oh, SOMEWHAT, when I was last in America, but it ain't enough for 'em to just get to where I was in '39. EUROPE has been a movin'. When I shifted out of London and Paris, I found a prejudice, what seemed prejudice, against what was called "money magic. " European economist saying, "no money magic," meaning hocus pocus accountancy.
Europe was thinking in terms of the material basis, NOT mercantilist, but productionist, with distributionist as the corollary. And they go further than the money reformer, perhaps because they started at the rock bottom, RAW materials, WORK. After that come the trade routes, and on top of it all the accountancy. Now being discussed by German and Italian economists. Not only Funk and Riccardi, but Dr. Hans Fischboeck. And what that Italian phrase about money magic meant was simply that you can't do it with money alone, you can't do it merely by changing accountancy IF the material base isn't there. And that, as
? mankind apparently can NOT grasp accountancy very quickly, and has, historically been flimflammed more easily by usurers' palavar and propaganda than by any other one swindle. It was politic, it was horse- sense to insist on the productive basis.
BUT your government violated EVERYTHING. In fact, there is apparently NO department, administrative, mercantile, monetary, where the maximum of stupidity has not been attained, coupled with errors which it is difficult from this distance to attribute to anything save the maximum of rascality. I may be in error, the actions of the Roosevelt- Frankfurter government may be due to sheer imbecility and not to ingrained rascality. Or the two may be twin born and inseparable in that milieu. Go to it: diagnose 'em. Don't shoot 'em; analyze their tropisms, their behavior, and tell us whether their policy is due to badheartedness or caries of the cerebellum.
NOT only did the present American regime NOT set up a monetary system which would distribute American abundance so that each American family could have enough, if not a just share, BUT they proceeded to destroy the mercantile base of a vast hunk of that prosperity.
The land was erodin'. Some sane steps were taken toward afforestation (at least so I heard); that was also before Morgenthau got into the White House. And something was done about power plants, bases of public convenience. BUT the trade with the outer world was BUSTED by the gold draddtest series of imbecile actions that are to be chronicled in ANY era of American chicken headedness, bar none.
The cutting off of the trade with the Orient; the severance of trade relations with the continent of Europe; the endeavor simultaneously to carry on war in the most diverse and widely separated areas on the planet: Iceland, the Solomon Levy Islands, Calcutta, the Sea of Azov. Well, you are out of the Sea of Azov and you are not garrisoning the
? hinterland of Czechoslovakia, and you are not putting up much of a show in Tibet at this moment. But Napoleon and Alex the Great would be hard put to it to determine the unity of your strategy in the lands of your alleged allies. I am not an expert in military affairs, but even the B. B. C. wishful thinkers haven't yet made out a case for the enlightenment or divine guidance of the Anglo-Jewish command. And the word COLLABORATION, world collaboration, as an alternative to tyranny by the incompetent has not yet found its place in Mr. Wallace's vocabulary. In fact, I don't think he is very clear in his own mind, on the subject, and of course if Baruch or some other American patriot hasn't explained it to Mr. Wallace, I don't suppose Franklin has troubled to go into the matter. I am not advocatin' return to the horse and buggy days of American economy, but even what they knew seems to have perished without your having joined with the present.
#64 (March 7, 1943) U. K. (C13) TOWARD VERACITY
My talk this evening is not controversial but narrativie, in fact recounted from personal experience. I note that when I first began to listen to radio --that is, after two friends determined to break down my antipathy to radio had planted, that is, given me a small sized medium wave apparatus, and then fled the village--I began and listened sometimes to London. When I began to speak over the air, I definitely tried to listen to London but with the passage of time I listen to London less. I listen to Berlin more. This is the fruit or result of experience. It has not been done by directing or forcing my will, it has resulted from inclination; and to explain that inclination I have found nothing better than a passage from the letters of J. B. Yeats, old man who used to be rather better known as Yeats' father, a painter, who used to talk with his models, that in fact was his method of studying anthropology. His models were not exceptional people; and his conclusion about talking with them was that he listened with inter'st not to remarkable sayings, and not to displays of unusual
? brilliance, but that the interesting talkers were those who were simply telling the truth.
And now in the year 1943 I find it almost impossible to listen to London. I stuck along a while with your social comedy, the unconscious humor of your Hirntrust, sogenannt, the tortuous meanderings of Mr. Laski, etc. But now I just wearily turn the button.
The monotony of your evasions breeds infinite boredom. Berlin by contrast is placid, as against your gallic hysteria. Patient but firm German voices go on explaining urbe et orbe just what the war is about, just why it started. They go on EDUcating their public, fact on fact, many of the facts can be found in your own best writers, that is approximately all the facts that existed before the war started can be found in your own best writers. The injustice of the Versailles Treaty, the history of Danzig, German since, I think it is 1300, no 1200, Capital of the Duchy of Pommern.
The unqualifiable swinishness of the yittisch position at the League of Nations, against Italy. The absence of malice on the part of Europe toward the British empire; e. g. , C. Del Croix marvelling at English opposition "but we don't want to do any harm to their empire. "
The undeniable horror of your own slums, in contrast to slum clearance under fascism and national socialism. All that, plus details of bonifica, of improvements, just price, and the homestead. Exposition, calm and patient, of ideas that every decent Englishman accepts, and that are, I repeat, to be found in the minority books printed in England, by two dozen authors, by two score authors of books, and two hundred writers of articles. BUT which are opposed to the lies which you all know to be lies; the frauds which you--most of you--know to be frauds that are upheld by your Jews, your monopolists, and your internal national enemies. And against which the best men in England had been protesting for 20 years. So much for the positive facts, and secondly your
? repressions, or suppressions, and the omission of vital topics, such as international jewry.
You preferred Jews to news. And you've got 'em. You were extremely obtuse in dying for Jewish interests. You have poisoned America, that was perhaps imprudent. You perhaps got in, or mobilized the wrong lot of cannon fodder, after centuries of success in stirring up or exploiting backward nations, hurling savages against the more civilized nations, you have perhaps mobilized the wrong set of roughnecks.
A minor point has been made recently, namely, that you have discovered that the U. S. A. is not wholly pro-English. You have discovered that the invading American troops in Ulster stem from a number of continental stocks, and are NOT all sighing romantically for the British homes of the ancestors. That much I have told you. In fact I did tell my rare and select readers several plain truths about Anglo-Yank relations. And it is now being slowly discovered in England and her dominions that the Yanks are more interested in their own interests than in yours. Your sentimental hold on the U. S. was confined to a Tory sect, and to sentimentalists. BUT among the English stock itself you had and have always had your most strenuous opponents, those who had the American tradition, something stronger than Jew propaganda.
Ah, but, you say, look at Wallace, look at this solidarity of the kindred races. And there you are mistaken. You exported Anglo-Israel. A body of doctrine, or superstition NOT taken seriously in your governing classes; but which can be found in England among housekeepers, nursemaids, people with weak minds, but some leisure, or rather hours of enforced solitude, have to stay IN, for hours when nothing very exciting offers [itself]. And they, even in England mug up these fantasies about the Stone of Scone, and the prophet Jeremiah. But what you fail to note is that it is the ISRAEL end, not the Anglo end of the curious compound that has hooked the American Vice-President and his similars.
? When Cromwell betrayed the British race, unintentionally perhaps, but at any rate, when he "had to speak to these men," the religious sectaries "in their own language," as he said by way of his excuse to his cousin Waller when he brought back the Jews, and when Bible reading became prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic, the way was prepared for curious fanaticisms, witch burnings, etc.
And traces of religious mania, or vagrant fantasy are still found. Wallace's hallucinations come from Bible reading, not from being pro-English. And of course the U. S. is being had. The sanity of the 18th century is gettin' snowed under. And it is NOT the Jew that America loves.
It is merely the dialect of that curious King James translation that has perturbed the mind of the simple hearted Americans. In fact has wormed into the American popular mind for some time, though the effect has considerably waned in the more sophisticated American circles. Post- Christianity has set in, as one of your better writers has dubbed it. Of course the minute a man says he accepts the decalog and the crucifix simultaneously, he has got into a tangle. As was shown in Engand where the crucifix went by the board, about the time Cromwell was committin' mass [muder? ] in Ireland. Old Crumwell feedin' on powder an' ball as he appears in that touchin' ballad, "Blarney Castle; me darlint. "
You have been singularly unconscious of that undermining and of subsequent underminings. One of your writers who died a few years ago made gallant efforts to awaken you. Her novels were not widely read. She wrote one called "The Death of Felicity Taverner" that would pay you to read, as sociological study. Dear Mary's work rather distressed one at times things came out with such a raw edge on 'em, and the style was sometimes so jammed and elaborate. She presented a couple of South Afrikanders in another book, more raw than the general reader was used to. In Felicity Taverner she has gone under the surface. If your people were painted by Holbein (the Lady Butts) and if your Great Grandfather was a patron of Blake, you might conceivably want to preserve something that Lord Beaverbrook hadn't heard of, that the
? Daily Express wasn't all out to uphold. That is the crux of the Felicity Taverner novel. In England an heritage going back at least to the days of Holbein but NOT limited to that period, and inimical to that tradition, to the fine elegance of the older houses, to clarity of English air on the western seacoast. There is (in the novel and in reality), as I think you may wake [up] too late to perceive, there is another force working. Something not very open, something that you decline to take very seriously.
For 25 years to my knowledge there has been a difference of view, I mean among the serious minority, of the intelligentsia, as to how far the attack is conscious, how far it is part of a plan, premeditated. How far the evil is brought in by carriers. Unconscious agents, that bring an Anschauung, an attitude toward life, poisonous as the germs of bubonic plague, carried by animals who don't know they have got it.
Maiski of course KNOWS he has it. Litvinov has made no bones about having it. But it is not merely political, it is molecular or atomic. It destroys all scale and all sense of proportionate values. It calls to the basic laziness of the mind, the basic softness of human organism. It profanes. It soils, it is greasy and acid. It revolts all men who have any desire toward cleanliness. But it entangles the clean, it entangles them because of their inconsequentiality, their inability to see the connection between one thing and another. Facilis descensus.
The young are unheeding. Nothing is more tiresome than the moralist. Nothing more difficult for a profane author than to draw the line somewhere, or to persuade his reader that certain sloppiness of outlook can possibly have any consequence.
I make a tardy acknowledgement to Mary Butts, author of the Death of Felicity Taverner. I did not advertise the book during her lifetime. It may have arrived while I was busy, and I was not a reviewer; not specifically. I was concerned with very rare books that conformed to a certain canon.
? Your own press and your own native critics might have done more for it. They might start doing so now. Add it to the list of books and add its authoress to the list of writers who did something for England. Tried to maintain something English, in the face of something unclean. Who knew that there had been values, in England, values based on tradition. Values that no nation can root out from itself, or allow to be lost, without losing its place among nations.
There again, under the slightly too jeweled style, the interest of the narrator, rises from the narrator's veracity.
#65 (March 9, 1943) U. S. (C17) POTS TO FRACTURE
By the time 1836 had come round the debt was liquidated. The government did not owe a cent and there was a surplus of 36 million dollars.
This refers to the U. S. National Treasury. But for havin' a Jew at the head of the U. S. Treasury in the present unfortunate century and a man of unsound mind, to say nothing of his personal character, at the head and stomach of the American government, the American people might today see their treasury in a similar happy condition. The adjectival term crackpot is sometimes applied to economics by persons of imperfect education, and ill furnished with historic background.
A measure for distributin' the national surplus of 37 million among the states was introduced by Henry Clay, for once being in agreement with Andy Jackson. And 28 million were so distributed, before the long and dirty hand of international finance working from some bank failures in London, brought on a panic, such as the usurers have always brought on whenever a government ANYwhere shows signs of NOT allowing itself and a nation to be bled by people like Roosevelt, Morgenthau and his British accomplices.
? But the New Yorker is often provincial; I mean when provincial a Parisian is the most limited of Frenchmen and the New Yorker the worst hecker in Uncke Sam's once happy dominions. There is NO sense; that is, there is no patriotism, no devotion to the welfare of the whole people, in fact there is nothing but downright devilment, or bone ignorance, in allowing a national debt to increase in normal times, or to be made a permanent yoke on the necks of the people.
Naturally if a nation is governed by swine whose sole, or main aim is to enslave the people, [it] will occur. In fact that is WHY such people go [into politics or are put] into office by kikes and the lenders [of money]. Nothing but unsoundness of the national mind as a whole could have led the American people to elect the present government. Nothing but bone ignorance and mental squalor would keep 'em dazzled by international complications, and steadily more and more unmindful of the havoc being wrought on 'em in the home, by the Kikefurter, Morgenberg, Cohen, and company administration.
And nothing but mud in the head would permit American college presidents to hold down their jobs with one buttock and prevent the study of American history with the other. Yes, they occupy chairs, that is the official designation of a professor's position, he HOLDS a chair. The French used to have chairs made in a pattern no longer needed in the houses equipped with modern convenience (ref. M. le Docteur Cabannes, for details of French domestic life in the earlier centuries). Quote:
A universal economic crisis whereby we shall throw upon the streets the whole mobs of workers simultaneously in all countries of Europe. These mobs will rush delightedly to shed the blood of those whom, in the simplicity of their ignorance, they have envied from their cradles, and whose property they will then be able to loot. OURS they will not touch.
? Do you recognize the source of the quotation? If not, why not? 'We gave," I am quoting again, quote: "We gave the name great to the French Revolution, the secrets of its preparation are well known to us, for it was wholly the work of our hands. " Unquote. I am quoting from a brochure published some years ago; more American college students ought to read it.
Quote: When we have accomplished our coup d'etat we shall say then to the various people: Everything has gone terribly badly, all have been worn out with sufferings. We are destroying the causes of your torment, nationalities, frontiers, differences of coinage.
Considering that this program was printed, in its English version, some 20 years ago, and that Small Maynard brought out an American edition (and quite naturally went broke after doing so) but considering the date of the publication, MORE of you nice clean-limbed young college boys OUGHT by now, 20 years later, to take an interest in the nature of the program, so slickly carried out by Mr. Roosevelt, YOUR president, with the so able collaboration of the kikery whereby he is almost completely peninsula'd.
I continue quoting: "On the one hand to reduce the number of magazines, which are the worst form of printed poison, and on the other hand, in order that this measure may force writers into such lengthy [productions] that they will be little read, especially as they will be costly. " Yes, someone had thought it out with some detail.
Taxation will be covered by a progressive tax on property. When the comedy is played out, there emerges the fact that a debit and an exceedingly burdensome debit has been created. For the payment of the interest it becomes necessary to have recourse to new loans which do not swallow up but only add to the capital debt.
? Unquote and so on. But doesn't it strike you, doesn't it strike one per cent of the possible auditors under 20 or over 20, under 30 or over 30 that it would be useful for more of you to take a look at the full text of the quite interesting little brochure from which I am quoting and quote: "all these peoples were stage managed by us, according to program. " Well, now can it happen to you? Does this curious and fantastic brochure apply only to PAST and European actions? Quote again:
In the third rank we shall set up what will in appearances be an opposition to us, and which in at least one of its organs will appear to be our very antipodes. Our REAL opponents at heart will accept this opposition as their own, and will show us their cards.
How VERY fantastic. "The Great Power, the press which with a few exceptions that may be disregarded is already in our hand. " Unquote, that was printed in 1922. Do you think things are now less so, or more so?
All of this being printed, in 1922, less than a century after General Jackson had extinguished the American national debt. Well, now wouldn't it be more intelligent of the American people, or at least the American intellengentsia, to realize what was implied by Jackson and Van Buren in extinguishing the national debt as well as showin' a more active interest in political and/or economic programs, published during our present life times?
I am not saying the U. S. could or should return to the rusticity of the Jacksonian era. I am saying, and repeatin' that it is a shameful, and ALSO dangerous thing to be bone ignorant, ham ignorant, ignorant to the point of squalor of so much that was known to Jackson, and Taylor; to be complete acephalous asses on so many matter wherein our great grand fathers showed a most laudible horsesense. You can not get all American history from one volume. Woodward's A New American History is an admirable introduction. It is better reading after you have
? digested Brooks Adams taking the grand, but inhuman sweep, seeing ideas, and material forces. Woodward realizin' as Voltaire had realized that ideas and forces move and are moved by human beings, each with his own quirks, kinks and limitations.
I think Woodward underestimates the Adamses and Van Buren. I also think he would be a good check on anyone who, like myself, tends preponderantly to see a man's aim, his idea, and what might have been. Seeing the reasons why certain ideas have not fully gone into action, or have not attained their completion as custom, as law, as event.
There are several points omitted by Woodward. And that fact should be borne in mind by the student. But the professors who high hat Woodward, because he does not write on stilts and carry a pair of lemon colored gloves peeking out of his pocket, are in error. There is probably more American history in Woodward's 875 pages than in any one volume that covers a similar stretch of American history. Needing checkup, needing additions, needing reference to the actual papers of four generations of Adamses and those of Van Buren.
#66 (March 14, 1943) U. K. (C15) ANGLOPHILIA
I have before now told you things too soon. I mean I told 'em to you (the small select elect who have listened), I told you that Wilson had NOT the power to sign treaties for the American people. And so on? I told you that a line of poetry could be poetry, could be poetry even if it did not contain precisely ten syllables arranged in the order of ti tumti tum ti tum. And so ON.
And I told you, I think I told you over this radio that in the U. S. of America there is a basis of anglophobia, quite deep rooted, and having ascertainable causes. I hear that this simple perception is gainin' ground in your country.
? Mr. Kipling wrote Habitation Enforced, Mr. H. James replied to it in a rather more realistic study. In fact he took up Kip's romantic sentimental theme, and examined it.
Kip presenting the dear American who came over and fitted in perfectly, and Henry James the American sentimentalist who came over expecting and very much annoyed the British remnant of the family, who didn't understand what the fellow was up to. Well now, suppose you quietly try to analyze the basis for the supposed anglophilia. Apart from Whore Belisha's ad hoc propaganda, Anglo-Israel and other spurious articles.
Yes, there were, in America, Tory families and rebel families. I mean in 1776. At [the] start, say 1750 or 60, almost nobody wanted to separate. But the bullheaded swinishness, greed, dishonesty, meanness of King George's government's ruling pigs of the period finally forced half the Torys into the opposition. Remaining Tory families think very highly of themselves, but are not, and for 150 years have NOT been very highly thought of by others. The old revolution families think very, very highly of themselves, but no longer constitute a majority in America.
Alas the day, etc. they did NOT develop a lasting sense of responsibility. I know a few of 'em had it once. At any rate, with them it is kifkif, 50/50 as to whether they take snob in their ancestry, and British origin, or are still fighting the Revolutionary War (as I am, at odd moments) for your own good, oh naturally. The Anglo Saxon race never fights a war except for the good of somebody or other. BUT the ruling class in America is no longer wholly of English origin. People from Thraxstead married the Rileys, for example. And that wasn't all of it. In and about 1848 there was a beneficial German migration, not merely the oirish ever enamoured of the Crown of owld England, and later migrations. Slaves from Africa, chattel slaves, black ones, then more or less white ones, or swarthy ones, got over, dumped in for purpose of industrial slavery, and to work for the usury system.
? As you have discovered, at least some B. B. C. boko discovered in Ulster, there are Americans who do not speak English, whose native stock is not English. I say do not speak English, I mean not even in its American dialect form. Even if they are choked up to the eyes with propaganda, they have not an interior basis for adorin' you and your empire. Many of the denizens of that empire do not adore you.
Why should they fight for your empire? You might get me on sentiment. The romantic period of my life was passed in London. Blood is thicker than corn juice. But I am not a majority specimen.
It would probably never occur to you that the attitude of my compatriots was hostile to me, during the 12 years I spent in London. It turned friendly in 1920 when I shifted over to Paris. What causes that? I am not trying to prove anything, I am just telling you. A truly representative American, the well known and very widely read writer, Mr. E. Hemingway considered me in 1922, the ONLY American who ever got out of England alive.
That was a perfectly sincere opinion, given in a decade when neither Hemingway nor I were being political. Mr. Hemingway is hardly ever political. I believe his father was English. The most violent Americans I have known, at least two of 'em had English grandfathers, they were NOT anglophile.
The charm of London is feminine. I suppose your colonials know that. London is romantic. That is, the three or whatever million surplus females in England open up possibilities to the traveler. BUT to balance that the young Englishman, in nine cases out of ten, strikes the young of ALL other nations as a fatuous sap head. The lack of the most intense stimulus to competition can but take effect in the course of the centuries. The exceptional man, the, as Mr. Hemingway would call him "the good guy," does NOT constitute the mass of the population. He goes out and gets shot in the first months of 1914. His mass weight in the democratic
? majority tends to diminish. You must take count of these things, these imponderabilia in estimating the force of the cohesion of nations.