BOOKS .
JOHN HAY.* FOREIGNERS, a term which for the purposes of the present argument may be held to embrace all but the English-speaking races, must find America and the Americans difficult of com- prehension, and even kindred Anglo-Saxons may arrive at very erroneous conclusions as regards the working of American institutions unless they maintain a firm grip of what, for want of a •better expression, may be termed political perspective. If either one class or the other keep their attention steadily fixed on the general nature of those institutions, on the really permanent and predominant features of American national character, and on the ideals to the accomplishment of which American policy has generally been directed, they will find much which will elicit their warmest admiration. If, how- ever, they lay undue stress on the casual excrescences of the American system, they will find much to condemn, and may even, more especially if they are themselves the subjects of an absolute ruler, derive some pharisaical but very fallacious consolation from the reflection that the country of their birth is ruled under a system very different from that which prevails amongst these democratic publicans. The contrasts presented by American political life are, indeed, very striking. On the one hand, it may be noted that a very high standard of morality often constitutes the guiding principle of State policy. On the other hand, a feeling little short of disgust is engendered by the by-products of the system, such, for instance, as corruption, place-bunting, and an extreme degree of newspaper licence, all of which appear to germinate and to blossom freely under democratic rule. Mr. Thayer's very interesting biography of John Hay brings these rival aspects of American public life into special prominence. Both the character and the career of -Hay were typically American. The son of a small Illinois doctor, he owed nothing to the accident of birth or to other adventitious causes. He was emphatically a self-made man, but without a tinge of the somewhat displeasing qualities which are at times developed in those who have been• the makers of their own fortunes. In his boyhood there was a question of his becoming a schoolmaster. He records that his " very pious friends were convinced that there was no sphere of life for him but the pulpit." He himself wished to be a poet, and at one time wrote to his Egeria, Miss Nora Perry, in the true spirit of juvenile Romanticist despondency. " I have wan- dered," he said, " this winter in the valley of the shadow of death. All the universe, God, earth and Heaven, have been to me but vague and gloomy phantasms. I have conversed with wild imaginings in the gloom of the forest." To the great benefit both of his country and of literature, this phase lasted but a short while, for, although ho maintained to the last his poetic imagination, it may be inferred from the specimens of his poetry which are reproduced by his biographer that in this particular branch of literary activity he would never have got beyond that mediocrity which, Horace has told us, is hateful alike to gods and men. Eventually he settled down to study the law, but the turning-point in his life came when, at twenty- two years of age, he obtained a post of a nature calculated, probably, more than any other to lay the foundations of a useful political career. He was appointed assistant private secretary to Abraham Lincoln. He thus became apprenticed to a master of rare excellence.
The temptation to turn aside from the biography of Hay himself in order to dwell upon the career of one of the greatest statesmen that the nineteenth century produced is strong. Without unduly yielding to it, it may be noted that Mr. Thayer, without adding anything substantially new to what we know of Lincoln, confirms two impressions which have floated down the tide of history and have fixed themselves in the publio mind. He speaks of Lincoln's eloquence and of his homely wit. So good a judge of oratory as Lord Curzon has characterized the famous Gettysburg speech as " a masterpiece of modern English eloquence," The following, which is less known, also reaches a very high standard. It was delivered on March 4th, 1861, before the Civil War broke out. " I am loth," Lincoln said, " to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, • Life and Lotion of John Hay. By William Roscoe Thayer. 2 vols. London : Constable and Co. L211. net.]
stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature." Lincoln's simple and pathetic eloquence came not from his head but his heart. That is why it produced so great an effect on his hearers. Goethe was quite right when he said :- " Doch werdet ihr nie Herz zu tferzen schaffen, Wenn es ouch nicht von Herzen geht."
One specimen of that typically national humour for which Lincoln became celebrated may also be given. Although he behaved with the utmost magnanimity to McClellan, who in- trigued against him, he could not forbear in private conversation from declaring his true opinion. Hay's diary records that Lincoln said to him : " McClellan is like Jim Jett's brother. Jim used to say that his brother was the d—dent scoundrel that over lived, but in the infinite mercy of Providence he was also the d—dest fool." We are unable to form an opinion on the justice of this withering analogy, for the fame of Jim Jett's brother has never crossed the Atlantic. In some respects the mantle of the peculiar class of wit possessed by Lincoln appears to have fallen on his private secretary, for years afterwards he records that in the lobby of one of the Houses of Parliament he met Lord Eliot " looking, with his blazing head and whiskers, as if he had just come through hell with his hat off."
After Lincoln's death, Hay's occupations, though of a some- what promiscuous character, were generally either diplomatic or journalistic,. At Paris, he saw a good deal of Napoleon IIL, for whom he entertained a very great dislike, and whose character he sketched in graphic prose and somewhat indifferent verse. At Vienna, he notes that " Austria is the only country on earth whore the priests wear top boots," and he speaks with democratic scorn of a people who are "starting off with the awkward walk of political baby- hood." In Spain, Castelar's principles and oratory excited his warmest admiration. After an interval of life in America, during which he wrote for the " Great Moral Organ," in othr words for the Tribune, ho was sent as American Am- bassador to London, a post which he occupied with equal advan- tage to the country which employed him and to that to which he was accredited. Indeed, it may be said that, with the very able assistance of Mr. Henry White, whose numerous friends in this country will read with pleasure the very well deserved praise Mr. Thayer bestows upon him, the greatest work of Hay's life was that ho strenuously held to the principle that the two great Anglo-Saxon races should always be united by the bonds of the closest amity. When he was eventually appointed Secretary of State, he encountered great opposition from his own countrymen in the execution of this policy. At one time he speaks of " the mad-dog hatred of England prevalent amongst newspapers and politicians " in America. At another time he records, when speaking of the " Open Door " negotiations in China, that " every Senator he sees says : For God's sake, don't let it appear that we have any understanding with Eng- land.' " He complains that " Biyan, roaring out his desperate appeals to hate and envy, is having an effect on the dangerous classes." " No sane man," he wrote to a friend abroad, " can appreciate the stupid and mad malignancy of our Anglophobia." But in the end his statesmanship and patience triumphed. After a long struggle, he signed the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, and generally settled all outstanding questions between the United States and Great Britain in a•reasonable and satisfactory manner.
Hay was a staunch democrat in the ordinary and not the American party sense of that term. His hatred of absolutism comes out clearly in the views he expresses about the German Emperor. He mistrusted the German Government, which, he said, was " generally brutal but seldom silly." In November, 1900, ho wrote to his friend Henry Adams : " We are spared the infamy of an alliance with Germany. I would rather, I think, be the dupe of China than the chum of the Kaiser." He saw clearly enough that German policy and German intrigues in America, of which a very interesting account is given by Mr. Thayer, were mainly directed towards encouraging American Anglophobia. In spite, however, of his loyalty to democratic institutions, he was not blind to the defects of democracy. He turned with loathing from the place-hunting and corruption which are so prevalent in the United States. He tells how, when the American Consul at Berlin died, the President wished to anoomt to the vacant place " the best Consul in the service." He was deterred from doing so. " Before the other mane funeral, nearly every State in the Union had claimed the place by wire." He was obliged to give the Consulship at Iquique to a protegi of a Senator who did not know that Iquique was in Chile, but thought it was in Mexico. " The pressure for a place," he wrote in 1902, " is almost indescribable." Mr. Thayer is scarcely fair on the Old World when ho says, in giving some instances of petty corruption in the American Consular Service: " Such practices would cause no remark in a monarchy ; in a republic they are among the ironies of patriotism." In none of the more advanced monarchies of Europe would many of the practices to which Mr. Thayer alludes be tolerated.
Hay's relations with the legislative bodies in America were peculiar. Those with the Senate were very distinctly unfriendly. " There will," ho wrote in 1900, " always be thirty-four per cont. of the Senate on the blackguard side of every question that comes before them." At a moment when a good deal of pressure is being exerted in this country to place diplomacy to a greater extent than heretofore under democratic control, the opinion on this subject of one of the most eminent and successful diplo- matists that America has produced is worth noting. But, in truth, it is impossible to read Mr. Tbayer's work without enter- taining a strong suspicion that John Hay was one of the least democratic democrats that over lived. Mr. Thayer says : "Almost from the first he held the Senate as his antagonist. That a few men, not diplomats by training, should have the right to shatter a delicate piece of diplomacy seemed to him as monstrous as if a clodhopper should be privileged to trample on a violin. The artist in him revolted ; his reason revolted ; his conscience revolted." This assuredly indicates a highly undemocratic frame of mind ; neither is an altogether satisfactory explanation afforded by pleading that, as was certainly the case, Hay in his disputes with the Senate was generally right and that the latter were wrong. Diplomatists and other officials who serve a democratic: Government have to recognize the fact that in accepting the advantages they must also be prepared to put up with the inconveniences of democracy. Lord Salisbury, who often had to encounter difficulties very similar in character to those which aroused Hay's indignation, treated the matter with more toleration and in a more philosophic spirit. I remember on one occasion his saying to me that a Foreign Minister in a demo- cratic country was in much the same position as the steersman of a surf-boat outside the mouth of an African river. He has to wait for a high wave to get him over the bar. Being animated with sentiments such as those which Mr. Thayer has described, it was natural that Hay should despise the arts of the demagogue. He speaks with scorn of what he calls "gutter Ciceros," and of the practice adopted during a sharp electoral campaign of " hiring dirty orators by the dozen to blather on street corners." He very rightly held that it was the special duty of statesmen in democratic countries to have the courage of their opinions. He himself wrote a novel, entitled The Bread Winners, which was widely read, and which was really an elaborate defence of Capital against the attacks of Labour; and in 1905 ho wrote to President Roosevelt : " It is a comfort to sea the most popular man in America telling the truth to our masters, the people. It requires no courage to attack wealth and power, but to remind the masses that they too are subject to the law, is some- thing few public men dare to do."
America at her best can produce men of a very high type. Such a man was John Hay. Ho was an honourable gentleman, a loyal friend, and a far-seeing and courageous statesman rather than a politician in the technical sense in which that term is used both in England and in the United States. So much of his work was done behind the scenes that it may well be that posterity will recognize his signal merits somewhat less than those of others who played on the political stage in the full glare of the footlights. Nevertheless, his Anglo-Saxon kinsmen on both sides of the Atlantic will be merely performing an act of posthumous justice if they willingly accord to him the sole privilege which, with his dying breath, he claimed. That privilege was that he " should occupy a modest place in the
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