4

the American workman handles. There is no largeness or nobility of conception, no Rubens-like purity of colour or outline; because these qualities, in their equivalent form, are not characteristic of any American art or achievement.

Perhaps a distinctive school of American art may arise-is arising-in America.

"What struck one most in the American work at Paris, in 1900," remarked an English critic recently, was the beauty, the strength, the originality of the landscapes, most of which came from American painters living, not in Paris or London, but at home. Their canvasses were not mere reflections of French models, as American painting often is; so that it seemed as if, were an original American school to be looked for anywhere, it would be among the landscape men who are working quietly in their own country.

As for American journalism, it is hardly necessary to explain its salient features to Englishmen, since the establishment within their own community of newspapers conducted on similar lines and animated by the same ideals. As one recent observer has said, "The American newspaper has simply become an industry-a business conducted for the usual ends of business, with public teaching and influence, but by a by-product." As to the number and value of newspapers in the United States, there are, it appears, over 15,000 establishments for the publication of periodicals; an increase of 24 per cent. in the decade since the previous census. About 400 are started every year, or more than one for every day of the year, including Sundays. Of the 15,000 existing journals, about 2000

are dailies, and 13,000 weeklies. Considerably more than the half of these publications are really very unimportant, as but 6000 out of the 15,000 have more than 1000 circulation. After giving the amount of the capital invested in the newspapers and their output in wages and material, it is reckoned that "the value of the product is $223,000,000, that is £44,600,000. As a "business proposition," therefore, the American newspaper is exceedingly attractive.

The mainspring of such journals being in the counting-house, there are no longer any editors in America in the old sense of the term. In fact, most of the American newspapers are equipped with leaderwriters, news editors, city editors, theatrical editors, sporting editors, "exchange" editors, every kind of editor except a real editor. Yet there are exceptions to this rule, and I think the exceptions have been growing more numerous of late. The reaction against the Yellow Press is already felt, and it is possible that the new journalism will find a method to maintain itself in spite of commercial disadvantages.1

1 Anything more hideous to the eye and repulsive to good taste than the advertisements and head-lines in the American newspapers can hardly be conceived. One marvels how it is they are tolerated by the reader.

CHAPTER XVIII

PROGRESS AND CHARACTER

IN inquiring into the growth of what we may call the American Empire we learn that in the lapse of a century and a quarter the number of States has increased from thirteen to forty-eight, that from an area of 860,000 square miles it is now over three millions, that from a population of three millions it is now eighty millions.

America proper is thus a big country, but it is not the biggest country on the planet, as nine-tenths of its inhabitants piously believe.' In mere area it is smaller than our Canada. Leaving out Alaska and the Philippines there are 3,025,600 square miles of territory under the Stars and Stripes. Australasia has a territory of 3,077,374 square miles. So it would perhaps be well for us to rid ourselves of the mere idea of size. Life being counted not by moments but by actions, so a country should be estimated not by its superficial area, but by the number of its settlements. Deserts, prairies, forests and lakes add nothing to actual civilization. A wheat farm of half a million acres and two hundred inhabitants is a consideration merely equivalent

1 Russia, which has all the natural resources of America, and is already matching its progress, has an area of 8,450,081 square miles and a population of 129,211,113.

to an equally profitable manufactory of less than five hundred thousandth the area. America is in truth a country of magnificent distances, but mere distance, like time, becomes meaningless if it be not punctuated by human art, industry, and population. Great Britain, small as it is in area, is a compact organization, and if it were spread out to the size of America it would, humanly speaking, be no greater. It contains cities, towns, villages, and hamlets. Each of these centres of life is separated by green fields, by forests, by moors, by rivers and other natural features. Expand the area of these spaces-these natural features-enormously, and, have America!

lo, you

But even then, how much smaller would be America by reason of the history, the accumulated interests, the traditions, the legends, the associations that invest with life, even to complexity, every mile of English ground?

One is bound to say that the homogeneity of the American people spread out over such a country is astonishing. Here in Europe we are accustomed to a dozen diverse nationalities within such a space as separates New York from San Francisco. To travel four or five hundred miles in any direction is almost of necessity to encounter varying racial types, strange religious manners and customs. But America, vast as its area, presents the same face from ocean to ocean, from Canada to Mexico.' The city which is reached by the traveller to-day is the city of yesterday, in replica, nor

1 This is a great change indeed. Mr. S. L. Clemens, writing in 1882, was able to tell the geography of the country by the dress and personal appearance of the inhabitants.-"Life on the Mississippi."

does the eye catch anything to vary the monotony of architecture or the dreary parallelograms of the streets. With the people, speech, dress, and deportment is the same. The shops are the same, the same goods you find in Boston are displayed in the same manner in St. Louis. Market Street in San Francisco is the counterpart of Market Street, Philadelphia, even to the ferries at the bottom of each thoroughfare; State Street, Chicago, is a reproduction of Broadway, New York. Birmingham is far less like Nottingham than is Cincinnati unlike any other city in America.

A great deal of this homogeneity may be more apparent than real. You cannot eradicate racial tendencies and predispositions. Yet it is certainly a fact that the American type is at present in the ascendency. As Mr. Frederic Harrison has recently observed

"Those who direct the State, who administer the cities, control the legislatures, the financiers, merchants, professors, journalists, men of letters-those whom I met in society, are nearly all of American birth and all of marked American type. I rarely heard a foreign accent or saw a foreign countenance. The American world is practically 'run' by genuine Americans. Foreigners are more in evidence in London or Manchester, it seemed to me, than they are in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston."

Sir William Butler some America as

years ago spoke of

That vast human machine which grinds Celt and Saxon, Teuton and Dane, Fin and Goth into the same image and likeness of inevitable Yankee-grinds him, too, into that image in one short generation, and oftentimes in less; doing it without