A COMPARISON OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN LIFE

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]

Sia,—The observations of Mr. Norman Angel upon hotels in American cities of moderate size, and his comparison of one modern specimen thereof with its analogue in an English city of much greater size, were extremely interesting to me, since I am an Englishman who has lived very nearly thirty years in the United States and has never had, so far, an opportunity to return to his native land for the purpose of discovering what its social customs have become since he last saw them just before the Diamond Jubilee of 1887.

I have not the least desire to accuse Mr. Angell of exaggera- tion, and there may be cities in the United States of no more than 80,000 inhabitants boasting hotels of the kind he so vividly described ; but I am bound to say that I have never yet found one so good, or half so good, in such a community. - What Mr. Angell is describing is a small edition of the typical high-class commercial hostelry of the large cities ; a small edition of the famous Statler hotels of New York (Hotel Pennsylvania), Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit. Yet it is only fair to say that even these excellent types of the latest word in hotel-keeping stand almost by themselves, and that hotels of two hundred rooms only, in which every room is equipped with private bath, are extremely rare, even in the United States.

As a matter of fact, my observations lead me to think that the typical American town of fewer than 75,000 inhabitants, especially in the South and South-West, has to put up with hotels which can only be called abominable and often are literally intolerable. Bad food, inefficient management, bad physical construction and high prices combine to make the lot of the commercial traveller who must " make " these towns anything but a delight.

It is true, of course, that in respect of the telephone, now universal from one end of the land to another, with its extra- ordinary influence upon every item of daily life, the people of the United States are favoured beyond all other peoples. Only by living in this country among the people can one begin to realize what the telephone has done to revolutionize home and communal life. One may doubt that the almost universal motor-car has had an equally powerful influence.

Central heating, too, is almost universal throughout the land, save on the farms and in the smallest villages, and even in the latter the hot-air furnace in the basement of the wooden houses is wellnigh universal. To-day the block of flats or apartments without a central heating system is virtually unknown, save in the less reputable quarters of the older eastern cities, and even here it is rapidly passing away.

I suppose that nothing so forcibly strikes an American visitor to Great Britain as the slimness of the British people in taking up- this elementary convenience of life.

Mr. Angell is perfectly right in his description of the American municipality of thirty years ago ; at least, in respect of cities of thirty thousand inhabitants, more or less. In the Mid-West, in the South and in the Far West, life in such towns was something pretty nearly intolerable to anyone who had been accustomed to anything better. The unpaved streets, the dirty wooden buildings, the almost complete lack of cultural aCtivitieS, the influence of a gloomy and often fanatical evangelical Protestantism, the practice of which supplied the greater part• of the intellectual and all of the spiritual life of the community, the arrogance and insolence of personal conduct and political thought, aiising from total ignorance of, and indifference to, the affairs of any part of the world east of the Atlantic and west of the Pacific coasts all these things were, the commonplaces of American small-town life thirty years ago. In the still smaller towns, cultural and

social conditions were simply the same things still less civilizedly organized. Political " graft," an amazing cynicism in the face of municipal corruption and inefficiency, combined with an almost religious belief in the total superiority of everything American to everything not American, were taken as a matter of course.

Things indeed have changed. Since 1896 the people of the United States have enjoyed an amazing, an almost incredible, financial prosperity. Since 1917, despite the depression of 1921, the good fortune which had been accumulating for the two previous decades came to its climax. Ambitious for culture, worshipping the children of each new generation with almost idolatrous adoration, the Americans have pressed forward to spend their easily earned money in beautifying their cities, in acquiring new learning, in building and endowing new universities, colleges and schools, in founding schools of music, of the other fine arts, and of almost every cultural activity. They have founded symphony orchestras and endowed them (there are at least two dozen of high rank to- day, whereas thirty years ago there were at most three) in almost every really large centre of population. They have in every community of more than one thousand or so their literary clubs, such as Mr. Angell has described and before one of which he doubtless lectured. Cities like Chicago are spending untold millions to make themselves beautiful, and are suc- ceeding in face of appalling difficulties. The American people are richer, more ambitious and more active than ever.

Municipal, State and National Government, unhappily, cannot be described even yet in these same flattering terms ; yet the fact that public opinion no longer condones, no longer takes for granted the corruption and the inefficiency un- happily so prevalent, is in itself hopeful for the future.

This is still a new country, still a country sparsely settled. Mr. H. G. Wells, fifteen years and more since, noticed how, even between New York and Chicago, where the railways run through the richest and most densely populated parts of the Union, the train runs for hours through a country with not twenty inhabitants to the square mile. The Southern States are still years behind the others in level of civilization, in material wealth and in material activity. Agriculture still claims more than 45 per cent, of the population. New York, the city, in its magnificent quasi-oriental barbarism, alter- nately astounding and offending the eye and the spirit, over- whehning, incredibly rich and powerful New York, is in reality hardly an American city at all. Its population is actually predominantly a foreign population, and its com- munal thought is leagues apart from the thought of the peoples of those great central agricultural States, whose votes tip the balance of political power. Which explains much, as, for instance, American abandonment of that European post-War settlement which an American President almost alone had impoied.

Yes, the United States still is a new country, and in many a remote corner the ideas and much of the living of the eighteenth—nay, of the seventeenth—century may still be discovered, On the other hand, the telephone, the motor-car and the radio-telephone are finding their way into every corner of the land, and the day is coming, although it is by no means here as yet, when what commercial travellors call a " decent hotel " will be found in every town of more than ten thousand inhabitants. The intending British lecturer or pilgrim of business should not, however, think that he will find a New Arlington in every town of thirty thousand, or that every such town is a Birchampton.

It is very difficult for one like myself to understand the complaints made so often, and by Englishmen as much as by Americans, concerning the backwardness of hotels, and the inconveniences of contemporary houses and flats in Great Britain. Like most exiles, I subscribe to a number of home magazines, technical journals, &c., and I find that central heating systems, motor-cars, gas appliances, electric appliances of every .kind--and even apparently telephones--are made, and to be had, among you. Who buys all these things ?

Like every Englishman, I hope, I am proud of my native land and would not have her aught but her own great self. If the luxury of. American life had to be purchased at the cost of American intolerance, parochialism, lawlessness, political corruption, governmental inefficiency, and social barbarism, then it would be too hardly gained indeed ; but if it could be gained rather at the cost only of some of the American cheer- fulness, ambitious activity, self-confidence and hard-working " push," surely no one would be harmed and all would be benefited. The American devotion to business is, of course, often no more than the absence of a cultural outlook on life, driving the individual back upon the only thing he can do well. I am far from wishing for England such a hopeless gospel as that.

From afar one can sometimes see what cannot be detected near at hand. Americans who have seen the British people enough to know what they are and what are their accomplish- ments in the world have neither contempt nor dislike for a great people. There is still, after all, some reason for believing that the British people is the greatest of the world's peoples.—