On Prohibition

The Americans are a very self-conscious people. That is the nearest I have ever got to a generalization that really covers that great and mixed multitude. That is the thing that is really common to the optimism of Whitman and the pessimism of Poej to the humour of Lincoln and the romanticism of Leej to the Jingoism of President Roosevelt and the Pacifism of President Wilson j to the vulgarity of Billy Sunday and the virtuosity of Henry James. All the characteristics of all these characters had the slight extra touch of emphasis which belongs to a man who is conscious of his part or (in a more favourable phrase) who knows what he is doing. Dickens left behind him a legend of the rudeness of Americans, which is now hardly true enough even to be called legendary. But when an American really is rude, as a cocksure Yankee may sometimes be in a Continental hotel, it is always by overacting his part. It is by being conscious of being Yankee 3 by being conscious of being cocksure j by being cocksure of being cocksure. But an English tourist in a Continental hotel can not only be rude and stupid j he can be too stupid even to know that he is rude. For the

English are a much more unconscious people j much more blind and automatic and absent-minded. And as it is with the extreme of American rudeness, so it is with the extreme of American politeness. Enough remains even today of the traditions of the old Southern aristocracy to convince anyone that it was really the most stately and humane school of manners in the world. But the Southern gentleman was a very conscious gentleman j he was not like the ordinary unconscious English gentleman. I do not mean that it was a pose maintained with constraint or diiBculty. On the contrary, I mean that it was a part of him, as poetry is a part of the poet or music is a part of a musician. But the poet knows he is a poetj nobody would say that the musician was unconscious of music, or that this type of man was unconscious of manners. It was not an artificial thing, but it was an artistic thing. And the American gentleman is in that sense an artist and almost in that sense an actor. I have met the representatives of old families in the old cities on the eastern coast of America who were almost too civilized to be human j they had no imperfection except perfection. They really were artists in lifej and it must be a terrible and almost tragic vocation. But there is the same deliberate artistic quality in the commonest and coarsest smoking-room story told with an ever-lengthening drawl by an American drummer in the lounge of an hotel. There is the same self-consciousness in the photograph of the most absurd business bounder on the make, who tightens his mouth and swells out his jaws in the advertisements of a cheap magazine. He may not be exactly an artist, but he is far from being an artless character. He may not be a portrait-painter, but he knows how to be a portrait j and the photograph of him is not an accidental snapshot. That sort of art never deals with the unconscious outlying parts of a man, with glimpses of him behind his back, with qualities betrayed when he is oflF his guard, with the automatic actions of an animal walking av/ay. There are more of these sidelights and subconscious betrayals, both for good and evil, in the English mode of life. The American always fixes the world with his face, even if it is a mask in the sense that he may truly be said to be making a face. To use a yet more theatrical metaphor, we may say that he has made up his face, to prove that he has made up his mind.

There is a great deal of this American psychology in the contradictions of the Prohibition controversy. Nobody can be expected to have any respect for Prohibition, but we ought all to have a respect for patriotism. And American patriotism, while very strong, is a curiously sensitive and self-conscious and sometimes almost morbid thing. The truth about the intelligent American is very simple, but it is not one that he can always be expected to admit. He is ashamed of Prohibition, but he is also ashamed of being ashamed of Prohibition. Even if he would have preferred the movement never to have come, he does not like the suggestion that it has come to nothing. He does not like the idea of so big a thing being a bathos and an anticlimax. It goes against all his national instincts for that queer process which he calls ^'making good." He would prefer that a thing should make good, even if it is obviously bad. There was something of the same sensibility in the old days about the Negro Slave Trade 3 and there was a time when everybody's pride was up in arms although (or because) nobody's conscience was at ease. Of course, there were people, like Calhoun, who said that slavery was good in itself j and there are people, like Bryan, who manage to think Prohibition is good in itself. But I am not talking of these very provincial ■prophets of the new Islam, but of the many Americans who are conscious of the attitude of civilization as a whole towards such new religions. These good citizens cannot help feeling that the Amendment to the Constitution is the Constitution, and that the Constitution is the United States. Such a man has nailed the flag to the mast, even if he has nailed this ridiculous rag of nonsense to the flag. For good or evil, Old Glory has got another star, though all men say it is only a spot 5 it has got another stripe, though the whole world sees it is a stain. I repeat that we ought all to be able to sympathize with that sensibility in anybody j but in the American it is a very sensitive sensibility. American nationalism is the most self-conscious in the world, just as English nationalism is the most unconscious in the world. It is one of the many points on which the American and the Englishman, so often idiotically identified, are almost comically contrasted. The American never imitates the Englishman in simply taking for granted both his own patriotism and his own superiority. The American is still very insistent in asserting that he has a country, lest the world should still mistake it for a colony. Anyhow, the effect of this on the problem of Prohibition is to perplex it further by turning it into a problem of patriotism. Rather than that Prohibition should dishonour America, America must even honour Prohibition.

I think that this rather subtle and sensitive element in the case must be carefully considered. I suspect that negro slavery lasted much longer than it might have done, being maintained by national pride against the rather cheap challenges of the world outside. Men are touchy about their reputation abroad, even when they are careless about their regulations at home. But Americans as a race are at once unusually touchy and unusually careless. They are quite capable of standing stiffly upon some regulations about New York Harbour, at the very moment when they are sweeping the whole nonsense out of New York State.

The wisest tone we can adopt, I think, is to trust to the revolutionary spirit in the internal politics of the nation, as against any self-conscious rigidity in its international politics. It is an excellent illustration of the most necessary and the most neglected truth in Anglo-American relations. I mean the truth that the Englishman and the American can be friends because they diflFer, and not because they agree. For the real corrective to the American fad is a purely American freedom. America really is, as one of its greatest men said of his ideal State, a country where the people think lightly of the laws. That easy habit of revolt really is an American quality 5 it is certainly not an especially English quality. It would be harder to establish so bad a law in England j but I think it would also be harder to disobey it. If, therefore, we congratulate them on the contempt with which a bad law is often treated, our congratulation will be really a compliment. We shall be doing something that we do less often than we should j we shall really be praising others without praising ourselves.