Some Novelists and the Business Man: Ii. In America
I
THOUGH the business man of American fiction comes second in these two papers for historical reasons, he is a more prominent and impressive person than his English colleague. His appearances are more frequent; he is oftener given the part of the hero, and he comes on oftener in his own character. Without seeing less of him than of the Englishman as a figure in society or as the husband of one, we see a good deal more of him as a business man doing business. Instead of the interest being confined, as it usually is in English fiction, to how he spends his money, it seems to lie almost as much for American novelists in how he makes it. A stock-exchange transaction, the strategy of a railroad war, the inner working of an insurance or mining company, the carrying out of an engineering or building contract, the creation of a ‘corner’ — in short, the details of some kind of commercial enterprise supply the background and even the body of many a story. Dour technicalities are handled with an enviable air of ease, and the understanding of the intricacies of finance which is presupposed in the general public must often excite the wonder of a foreign reader.
The French have gone beyond the English in describing the maze of business, and Balzac and Zola are said to have guided some American writers in this direction. But the handling of such material is, after all, exceptional in France, and neither Zola nor even Balzac, with all his power of bringing out its picturesque and dramatic side, suggests that matter-of-course, everyday acceptance of the subject which one feels in the American treatment. It seems to be a special dish at their tables, and something of a tour de force on the part of the chef. Moreover, there is a sensibly higher degree of density of commercial atmosphere throughout the Memoirs of an American Citizen, Sampson Rock of Wall Street, The Financier, The Pit, and the like, than the French writers maintain over any considerable space. It will hardly be disputed that for copious and intimate portrayal of business the American novelists are unequaled, and this is surely less due to inspiration from abroad than to the extraordinary prevalence of the commercial life at home.
In superimposing the American picture on the English, I shall again make a division, in order to simplify the process, between social and moral criticisms, although the two kinds are constantly shading off into each other at the edges.
II
The social criticism in the English novel is mostly concerned with the business man’s adventures and characteristics when he comes in touch with a class admittedly superior to his own. This constitutional upper class, which has a privileged position and important public functions to dignify it, is uncommercial — one might almost say, anti-commercial — by its traditions; and, whatever the shortcomings of some of its members, a finer standard of manners and a finer moral code than those supposed to obtain in the commercial world are popularly ascribed to it.
The theme of the social rise is a favorite with the American novelist also, but a different structure of the community gives a different and, I think, a sharper turn to his criticism of it. The question of class-distinctions in the United States as compared with those in England is not; easy for a foreigner to understand, but it must be glanced at for a moment.
In Mrs. Atherton’s American Wives and English Husbands an Englishwoman, Lady Mary Gifford, asks Lee, the American heroine, ‘“Is it really true that you have different grades of society as we have — an upper and middle class and all that sort of thing? . . . You are only a day or two old; how can you have so many distinctions?”
— “Of course, to be really anybody,” Lee replied, “you must have come from the South, one way or another.”
— “What South? South America?” asked Lady Mary. Lee endeavored to explain, but Lady Mary quickly lost interest.’
Perhaps the remark, ‘You are only a day or two old; how can you have so many distinctions?’ — hardly strikes the root of my compatriots’ difficulty in grasping the situation. Some ignorance of history may be admitted in our Lady Marys, but I think they are confused, not so much by an exaggerated idea of the youthfulness of society in the United States, as by the fact that under its Constitution all men are equal. Constitutionally speaking, it has no classes, and in the absence of such a quasi-official rating,‘individual systems of classification naturally grow up, of which they can hardly gauge the validity. Lee’s system, for instance, — ‘Of course, to be really anybody you must have come from the South,’— might have startled Lady Mary, if she had read many books by New England writers; and both Southerners and Northerners of the old stocks would probably dispute a third system, which seems to be common in contemporary fiction, of classifying people simply according to the size of their banking accounts. So in Mr. Phillips’s The Second Generation, young Ranger wonders sadly, after losing his fortune, whether he has not ‘descended in the eyes of his fashionable friends’ from the ‘upper’ to ‘the respectable but impossible middle class.’
A system may be individual, however, and yet possess historical sanction; and a foreign reader cannot go far without perceiving that the United States, instead of being too young to have produced many distinctions, has evidently lost or is now losing many that once flourished. An obvious social scheme, so to speak, which one often meets with in the novels, shows an ancien régime, that had grown up in the two centuries before the War of Secession, becoming dislocated or submerged by a prodigious irruption of new commercial wealth within the last fifty years.
That great story, which led American fiction into a fresh field, and went beyond any previous or contemporary English work as a portrait of the business man in his business,— The Rise of Silas Lapham,—described, in the seventies, an incomplete stage of this submersion. One sees the ancien régime, as represented by the Bromfield Coreys, still more or less holding its own, without superiority of wealth, by its local consolidation through family ties, its distinguished forebears, and its culture. One sees also, however, several obvious weaknesses of the Corey régime, which presage disaster. It does not form part of a national system, and it has no official stamp or guarantee. The Laphams could be so hazy about its very existence as to reside a good many years at the ‘wrong’ end of Boston without suspecting their error; and the mental attitude of Bromfield Corey toward the invaders seems to reflect again the personal nature of the grouping. ‘“The whole Lapham tribe is distasteful to me,”’ he says, when his son wishes to marry one of them: and one rather infers that the question of personal taste prevails throughout the episode — even from the parents’ point of view.
Since those days the Silas Laphams have shot up into giants, while the Coreys have not perhaps increased in stature. Such an extraordinary, sudden flood of new power as has burst upon the nation within the last few decades might have overwhelmed the existing order anywhere. Smaller forces than this have brought about in other countries revolutions that are famous in history. Considering the strength of the invasion, and the fact that each of the old leading sets in the different parts of the United States has had to stand or fall by itself in local isolation, one reads with surprise about so many fragments of them still surviving and serving as rallying-points in the modern torrent of ‘chance and arithmetic.’ Yet later novels give the idea that the new giants do not always go out of their way to court these fragments, and also that they might sometimes be snubbed if they did. One hears people like the Coreys described as ‘cave-dwellers,’ and the invaders seem often to leave them on one side, when their onrush does not go over them. One might call it the misfortune rather than the fault of the Corey régime that it has not proved a vessel strong enough to hold the new wine. It had neither the external support nor the elasticity which a political basis gives to the English upper class, and which still enables the House of Lords to receive newcomers from the counting-house as converts rather than as conquerors, and to absorb their forces into itself. The result is that, while the social goal of the ambitious business man in England has nothing vague about it, but is as definite and concrete and national as the Court of Saint James, one finds one’s self in some doubt as to what is, exactly, the goal at present of his American counterpart. Into what definite sphere is he rising? It would almost seem, to judge from some criticisms, as if he were rising into a void.
The contrast which Maria Edgeworth drew a century ago in The Manufacturers between William Darlay, who in spite of his wealth did not care about ‘fine connexions,’ but preferred to remain a plain business man, and his partner, Charles Darlay, whose imagination soared toward higher circles, is substantially paralleled in The Second Generation by the contrast between the Rangers and the Whitneys. We are told about Ranger the elder that he ‘was not a rich man who was a manufacturer, but a manufacturer who was incidentally rich; he made of his business a vocation.’ At the height of prosperity he continues to preach and practice the simple life, and detecting a tendency in his son to play the fine gentleman, he goes so far as to disinherit him, in order to provide him with the better heritage of compulsory work. Whitney, on the other hand, who started on a level with Ranger and is still his partner, builds a ‘palace’ in Chicago, and his family is described as burdening themselves with ostentatious luxury, as trying to widen ‘ the barriers which separate the very rich from the rest of the people,’ and as devoted to ‘ the imported follies and frauds of family.’
Now, although the traits of character contrasted in each of these two books are intrinsically the same, Mr. Phillips does not judge them in quite the same way as Maria Edgeworth judges them. He would probably endorse her praise of William Darlay’s common sense and independence in ‘confining himself to his own station in life,’ and her blame of Charles’s vanity and want of selfrespect in posing as one of the upper class; but he has something further to say about the matter. Maria Edgeworth confines herself to what may be called the private aspect of the case; Mr. Phillips pays more attention to its public aspect. His chief ground for commending the Rangers is that they are American and democratic; his chief ground for condemning the Whitneys is that they are un-American and undemocratic. This difference of treatment, which is typical, I think, of the novelists of the two countries, seems to be mainly due to the different form of the two societies.
There is nothing un-English about Charles Darlay’s social aspiration, because it is directed toward an accepted part of the English community. The Whitneys, however, are represented as setting themselves up into a new, unaccepted class, whose advent is an offense against the American community. When they assume coats of arms, surround themselves with lackeys, and so on, they are reproached not merely for personal folly, vulgarity, and want of self-respect, as Charles is, but for treachery to a national ideal. Indeed, Charles’s ambition does not, like theirs, wear an aristocratic color, but rather the opposite, since it tends to maintain a right of way for plebeians into what might otherwise become an exclusive caste.
Mr. Phillips gives a concrete turn to the charge of un-Americanism, when he speaks of the Whitneys’ devotion to ‘the imported follies and frauds of family.’ And one finds a good deal elsewhere about the newly rich imitating and seeking the society of foreign nobility. One remembers, for instance, in The House of Mirth, a lively description of the operations of Mrs. Fisher, who is a professional introducer of the Mr. and Mrs. Charles Darlays of America into aristocratic circles abroad; the satire is only too courteous toward the European ‘end’ of the traffic. ‘The Brys, intoxicated by their first success, already thirsted for new kingdoms, and Mrs. Fisher, viewing the Riviera as an easy introduction to London society, had guided their course thither. “But things are not going so well as I expected,” Mrs. Fisher frankly admitted. “ It’s all very well to say that everybody with money can get into society, but it would be more true to say that nearly everybody can. And the London market is so glutted with new Americans that to succeed there now they must be very clever or awfully queer. The Brys are neither.”’ So Mrs. Fisher gives them up for the Sam Gormers, who are ‘still in the elementary stage.’
Another shade of difference between the American and the English view of our friend may be noted here, because it seems to be connected in a way with the alleged un-Americanism. More emphasis is laid upon the futility or triviality of the social aims of such people as the Brys and Gormers than one notices in English descriptions of like cases, and this agrees with the idea that the Bry and Gormer set is whirling, as it were, in a void, outside of the true life of the community. Mrs. Wharton makes Rosedale, one of her ‘climbers,’ defend himself with the remark: ‘“A man ain’t ashamed to say he wants to own a racing stable or a picture-gallery. Well, a taste for society’s just another kind of hobby.”’ And his goal is bluntly described as ‘the great gilt cage into which they were all huddled for the mob to gaze at.’ Charles Darlay would probably be as loath to call his ambition a ‘hobby’ as to use such language about his goal. No doubt, there is here a difference of presentation rather than of fact. The English ‘climber’s ’ triviality is somewhat screened from view by the serious prestige and public function of the class to which he aspires.
The Whitneys are not only ‘unAmerican,’ but ‘undemocratic,’ and the second count is the more prominent of the two in the novels. To have exotic tastes, to beat gilded wings in a void in vain, are, after all, peccadilloes compared with treachery to the ideal of equality. Political feeling plays a part in American criticism, which the English business man is usually fortunate enough to escape. The infusion of this feeling, which is very noticeable in the works of Mr. Upton Sinclair and Mr. Phillips, and by no means absent from those of Mr. Herrick and others, adds severity to the censure, and pretty often, I think, makes it rather unfair. How often does Mr. Sinclair heap indiscriminate abuse on ‘millionaires’ for all kinds of traits, some of which at least are innocent enough. In The Metropolis, the indictment of their ‘mad race in display’sets such items as ‘slumming’ beside ‘sniffing brandy through the nose’; ‘horse-back dinners ’ beside ‘ playing leap-frog ’; ‘tablecovers woven of rose-leaves’ beside ‘classes for the study of Plato.' Whether the millionaire indulges in fabulous banquets, or ‘eats nothing but spinach,’ or ‘eats only once a week,’ Mr. Sinclair will still be at him. Not even the servants of the rich are spared. ‘Bound for ever to the service of sensuality, how terrible must be their fate, how unimaginable their corruption!' The passage is typical of the book, and though the book is extreme, the same drift at least may be found elsewhere.
But the American picture, though sombre in parts, has its high lights of admiration. If there is more blame, there is also more praise than one gets from the English novelists, who are tolerably impartial, but unenthusiastic. Their chief injustice toward our friend lies in their lack of interest in him. What they are most willing to commend him for is the rather negative trait of ‘confining himself to his own station in life.’ The truth is, commercial feats win little popular prestige in England. A mixture of one part of business with three of Imperialism, as represented by Cecil Rhodes, has been extolled in some English novels — for instance, The God in the Car. But it is the Imperialism rather than the business which is the passport in these cases.
In the United States, on the other hand, the qualities of mind and will which lie behind commercial achievements are often described by the novelists with enthusiasm. Even those who are most hostile to the business man’s manners and morals bear testimony to his daring and force. They admit the ’iron will,’ steel-like muscles, and effective-looking teeth of the ‘predatory male.’ Virility is perhaps the point most commonly asserted in his favor. One might almost fancy an intentional protest against the old idea of the trader as a physically timid creature, who attains his ends by craft and stealth. This portrait of Jadwin in The Pit has replicas in other novels: ‘He was a heavy-built man, would have made two of Corthell, and his hands were large and broad, the hands of a man of affairs, who knew how to grip and, above all, how to hang on. Those broad, strong hands, and keen, calm eyes would enfold and envelope a Purpose with tremendous strength.
. . . And the two long, lean, fibrous arms of him; what a reach they could attain, and how wide and huge and even formidable would be their embrace of affairs.’ And so the language of military glorification is applied by Mr. Norris to the Chicago brokers. We see the type, as it were a Front de Bœuf, — ‘hard, rigorous, panoplied in the harness of the warrior, strive among the trumpets, and in the brunt of conflict, conspicuous, formidable, set the battle in a rage about him and exult like a champion in the shoutings of the captains.’ Jadwin is compared to Napoleon, — a frequent comparison for his kind.
The more traditional aspect of the business man is not excluded, but his ‘craft’ is sometimes interpreted in a finer sense, so that it ceases to be the cunning of Isaac the Jew, to become the subtle craft of an artist. Cowperwood, the Philadelphia broker, of whom Mr. Dreiser draws so admirable a portrait in The Financier, — and any uninitiated reader, by the bye, who grasps all the intricate transactions set forth in this almost complete guide to the Stock Exchange should advance his commercial education by a long step,
—is said to resemble ‘one of those subtle masters of the higher mysteries of chess.’ ‘Cowperwood was innately and primarily your egoist and intellectual. We think of egoism and intellectualism as closely confined to the arts. Finance is an art. And it presents the operations of the subtlest of the intellectuals and egoists.’ As becomes an artist, this dealer in money, who despised dealing in flour and grain as ‘not mental enough,’ is, in a way, disinterested. It is not so much money that he cares about as ‘ the game.’ As a young child, we are told, he listened eagerly to stories of banking operations. ' They seemed wonderful to him; this whole world of money was like a fairyland, full of delight.’ His heroes were from the first the magnates of finance, and almost before he was breeched, ‘he knew how to make money,’ and made it. But observe: ‘He did this more to exercise his talent for financiering; no one ever dreamed of thinking of him as stingy.’ Freedom from the passion for lucre is made a characteristic of Jadwin too. He ‘corners’ the wheat-market in as detached a spirit as may animate a Russian Grand Duke breaking the bank at Monte Carlo.
But if our American friend sometimes comes before us with the attributes of a popular hero, this prestige goes against him, when the novelist turns censor. Faults are worse when they are likely to be imitated.
III
To come to the moral question. The first real presentation of the business man in American fiction was prophetic in this respect. Standing not far inside the threshold of the new America, Silas Lapham had to choose between a commercial and a moral rise, between success and conscience. And his conscience, it should be observed, was not very easy to satisfy. It asked something more of him than merely to refrain from violating the ordinary conventions of business. ‘Happy is the man for ever after,’ says Mr. Howells, ‘who can choose the ideal, the unselfish part, in such an exigency.’ Silas wavered for a time; he defended himself on the ground, ‘It’s done every day,’ but in the end his old, simple country way of conceiving right and wrong triumphed, and his rise became, commercially considered, a descent. Mr. Howells is far from putting the case forward as a national problem. He only shows that the individual Silas, being what he was, could not have acted otherwise. He does not philosophize, and he does not preach. Nevertheless, the book embodies in a very human instance the question which has since become so prominent in American novels.
The English novelist usually leaves the same question out, unless, like Mr. Wells, he dismisses it with the curt remark that business has no morals, — a remark suggestive in a way of the prevailing English opinion. Business is looked upon by it as something like a neutral zone on the ethical map. Not everybody in England would go so far as a respected English journal went the other day, when The New Statesman observed about some German armourers, who were accused of a ‘deliberate attempt to promote a war scare for private ends,’ — ‘It is impossible to blame the private firms, they are in business to make profits, and are only acting in accordance with the accepted principles of commercial enterprise.’ But Englishmen are willing to concede a good deal to the ‘accepted principles.’ The feeling about the business man is somewhat the same as about the lawyer or the soldier, whose professional rules escape lay criticism when they are confined to professional matters. The commercial code, when it is regulating commercial transactions, is regarded as something quasi-technical, and therefore as not calling for discussion from the general point of view which the novelists represent.
The postulate of a limited area is the key to this attitude. Suppose that the business sphere had practically no bounds in England, that, instead of its being a somewhat subordinate department of the national life, it embraced the whole community, would its peculiar code still be accepted without discussion? Hardly. But something like this supposition seems to be true about the United States. Its commercial world spreads so far and wide as to have scarcely any recognizable limits. The American business man, instead of being, comparatively speaking, nobody in particular, is, as it were, everybody; besides which, he is very distinctly somebody. He is both the bulk of the nation, and also, under the new dispensation at least, its leader, who is called upon to set an example. In this state of affairs the relation between the commercial and the common codes could not fail to arouse lively attention.
Apart from any question of right or wrong, such a presence of business as amounts to an omnipresence, may be unwelcome and lead to criticism. Mr. Wister complains of the omnipresence in Lady Baltimore: ‘We’re no longer a small people living and dying for an idea; we’re a big people living and dying for money.’ The heroine of Mr. Harrison’s Queed speculates with some melancholy about the passers-by in the street: ‘“Don’t you think they’re all hoping and dreaming just one thing — how to make more money than they’re making at present? . . . Bright young men lie awake at night, thinking up odd, ingenious ways to take other people’s money away from them. These young men are the spirit of America.”’ Mr. Sinclair asserts about New York: ‘The sole test of excellence was money, and every natural desire of men and women had become tainted by this influence. The love of beauty, the impulse to hospitality, the joys of music and dancing and love — all these things had become simply means to the demonstration of the moneypower.’ And writers who are free from Mr. Sinclair’s socialistic bias express the same sort of fear about the influence that omnipresent commercial competition may exercise on other activities — on art, for instance, and, above all, on politics.
Scarcely less than the business man as everybody, the business man as somebody — as the leader — stimulates the critics. Our successful friend in America, rising into or creating a new ‘upper’ class, finds himself burdened with something of the moral responsibility which is heavily imposed on the leaders of all communities. In addition to Charles Darlay’s share of criticism, he is exposed to that which English fiction heaps upon its Lord Steynes and Lady Arabella de Courcys. And he is, by the bye, rather unfortunately placed for bearing this debt of aristocracy. The leading classes of Europe, being recognized and privileged by the State, have the powers as well as the duties of leadership. Moreover, they are permanently organized, so that the better element in them can exercise some control over the worse. But these American leaders get no recognition or powers from the State, and have no standing organization. They are a shifting body, a casual aristocracy, which a man may suddenly enter and as suddenly leave. He accepts no particular standard of conduct on admission, and is subject to no special control while he remains. Seeing that European aristocracy, with all its protective advantages, suffers not a little under the inquisition of the moralists, what may one expect here? A pretty rigorous examination of our friend’s conduct, at all events.
After reading the startling ‘revelations’ about the commercial world of New York by Mr. Phillips, Mr. Sinclair, Mr. Lefevre, or about that of Chicago by Mr. Herrick, or about that of Philadelphia by Mr. Dreiser, to say nothing of such more moderate attacks as Mr. Churchill makes on his Flints and Jethro Basses, a foreigner might be a little taken aback by Mr. Bryce’s statement that ‘ the average of general probity in the United States is higher than in any of the great nations of Europe.’ But on looking again at these revelations, he will perhaps suspect that they are not quite so significant, comparatively speaking, as they seemed at first sight.
For one thing, the foil of the business man in many of these compositions is not a mere lord or baronet, as he might probably be in an English tale, but a good woman; and in criticizing the business transactions the authors range themselves at the good woman’s point of view. Commercial doings are submitted to the ruthlessly ‘unpractical,’ ‘untechnical’ test of the ‘finer female sense.’ One thinks of Cynthia Wetherell, in Coniston, who, with Mr. Churchill’s evident approval, judges and reforms Jethro Bass; of Neva, in Light-fingered Gentry, who, with Mr. Phillips’s evident approval, judges and reforms Armstrong; of May, in the Memoirs of an American Citizen, who, with Mr, Herrick’s evident approval, criticizes Harrington in the sharpest way, though she fails to reform him.
Where the foil, and judge, is not a woman, the part is pretty often given to an inexperienced rustic, or to some one else as remote from the commercial atmosphere, and as deaf to a defense on ‘technical’ grounds,—an ingenuous boy, like Samuel the Seeker, or exaltés, like the Anarch and Hugh Grant in A Life for a Life. ‘You women don’t know what business means,’ says Harrington to May. She is quick with her answer — but how terribly severe a standard it implies! — ‘It seems to be just as well we don’t.’ This is the sort of standard the unpractical Colonel Newcome measured Sir Barnes by, when he was angry with the banker for giving up the Bundelcund company. The difference is, that Thackeray does not endorse it, as Mr. Herrick seems to do. Thackeray had no great love for the game of business, but within the limits of the game he accepted its rules, and he blames the Colonel for ignoring the legitimacy of them.
For another thing, the American and English situations do not seem to be the same in respect of the laws which regulate business. Mr. Churchill, in A Modern Chronicle, makes the heroine say, ‘Father took the ground that the laws were n’t logical, and that they were different and conflicting, anyway, in the different States.’ The novelists put this excuse into our friend’s mouth rather often, and an Englishman may wonder a little at their usual instant rejection of it. How is one to define ‘honest business’? An Englishman would probably answer something like ‘the pursuit of gain within the limits laid down by the law.’ With that definition in mind, he may naturally think that, where the limits laid down by the law are illogical, different and conflicting, the business man has some excuse for wavering a little in his courses. The division of the United States into dozens of legislatures, the tremendously expansive and protean nature of commerce in a new country of extraordinary resources, must of course make it exceedingly difficult for the laws which regulate trade to be always clear and well-adjusted. But when some new kind of field is being opened up, and a pioneer is asked to cripple his venture by strict observance of an unforeseeing law, one feels that something more, at all events, is being asked of him than the Englishman in his old-settled land is likely to have to sacrifice on the altar of virtue.
Now, the greater part of the ‘revelations’ in American novels concern dealings between our friend and public functionaries, — legislative bodies, judges, and the like,—and in a good many of these cases the distribution of blame between the parties is not the same as it would be in England.
Harrington, in The Memoirs of an American Citizen, is fighting his way up in the meat-packing industry of Chicago against ‘big men’ who try to thwart him at every step. He sees a chance of securing a firmer foothold by taking over the stock of a bankrupt company, and offers a fair price for it. His opponents, who have offered a lower price, bribe the treasurer of the bankrupt company to refuse his bid. Harrington thereupon, playing tit for tat, overbribes the treasurer. The game proceeds, and his opponents get a ‘political’ judge to issue an injunction, stopping his acquisition of the property. Harrington counters by overbribing the judge. This gets out, and he becomes the centre of a storm of public indignation. The newspapers rage against Harrington; a clergyman preaches at him when he is in church: an old gentleman, who has made a fortune in more Arcadian times, tells him that he can ‘no longer be trusted with honest people’s money and confidence’; May denounces him as ‘a big plain rascal, ’ and says, ‘The very sight of men like you is the worst evil of our country.’ Later on, very much the same situation recurs in Harrington’s dealings with a state legislature. He ‘influences’ it in order to obtain a franchise for a railroad, which others are ‘influencing’ it to withhold.
In England, given the pliability of the public functionaries, and, further, the advantage taken of it by his opponents, Harrington’s dealings with the judge and the legislature would not, I think, be much, if at all, blamed. We should probably content ourselves with asking, ‘What else could you expect in the circumstances?’ On the other hand, the public functionaries, whose errors seem to be taken for granted in Mr. Herrick’s and other accounts of such incidents, would be heavily censured. So it happened not long ago in England, when some municipal councillors were alleged to have been bribed by a contractor. Not a word, so far as I remember, was said against the contractor by the newspapers; but the councillors, instead of being spoken of as helpless victims of his machinations, came in for much abuse as well as a legal prosecution.
It is the business man who is allowed to have a peculiar standard of his own in England; the public functionary is expected to conform to the common code. In the United States this expectation seems to be inverted. ‘A politician was now a politician,’ says Mr. Churchill, in Coniston, — ‘his ways and standards set apart from those of ordinary citizens, and not to be judged by men without the pale of public life.’
Altogether, it is clear that more is asked of our friend on the moral score by the American novelists than by the English. Whether too much is asked is another question. An English reader is likely to think, however, that they do not ask enough of the law and its representatives. There seems to be a tendency, here and there, to advocate the control of business by sentiment, to the neglect of its control by law, to abandon what has always been the first line of defense and fall back upon the second. In so far as they would make sentiment a substitute for law, instead of merely a supplement to it, these reformers are surely astray. They may only be acting as Portia did, however. When the law showed signs of inadequacy, she appealed to the feelings of the business man of Venice, but she came back to the law in the end. Both defenses are necessary, of course, — each after its kind, — and if the control by sentiment is overestimated in the United States, it is probably underestimated in England, which might be all the better for a little more idealism about commercial standards.