"This is very illuminating," she told me. "It is a—what's that nice word Professor Whiting used ?—a microcosm —isn't it?"
By this time my dear investigator had as clear an idea of gen- eral human history as any one, not a specialist could wish; and had it in a very small notebook. While in England someone had given her Winwood Reade's wonderful "Martyrdom of Man," as good a basis for historical study as could be asked; and all the facts and theories she had been collecting since were duly re- lated to her general views.
"Here you have done it so quickly— inside of a century. Only 1820—and these nice gentle golden-colored people were living here by themselves."
"They weren't always gentle—don't idealize them too much!" I interrupted. "They had wars and quarrels, and they had a very horrid taboo religion—particularly hard on women."
"Yes—I know that—they weren't 'perfect, as we are,' as Pro- fessor Boynton used to say; but they were beautiful and healthy and happy; they were courteous and kind; and oh, how splendidly they could swim! Even the babies, they tell me."
"I've understood a child can swim earlier than it can walk—did they tell you that?"
"Yes—why not? But look here, my dear. Then came the mis- sionaries and —interfered. Now these natives and owners of the land are only 15 per cent. of the population, with 20 per cent. of the deaths. They are dispossessed and are being exterminated."
"Yes," I said. "Well?"
Ellador looked at me. One could watch the expressions follow one another over her face, like cloud shadows and sunlight over a landscape. She looked puzzled; she evidently saw a reason. She became stern; then a further reason was recog- nized, and then that heavenly mother-look came over her, the one I had grown to prize most deeply.
But all she said was: "I love you. Van."
"Thank Heaven for that, my dear. I thought you were going to cast me out because of the dispossessed Hawaiians. / didn't do it—you're not blaming me, are you ?"
"Did not—America—do it?" she asked, quietly. "And do you care at all?"
Then I embarked on one of those confined and contradictory explanations by which the wolf who has eaten the lamb seeks to show how unavoidable— if not how justifiable it all was.
"Do you feel like that about England's taking the Boers' coun- try?" she asked gently.
I did not. I had always felt that a particularly inexcusable piece of "expansion."
"And your country it not packed very close yet—is it? Having so much— why did you need these ?"
"We wanted to Christianize them— to civilize them," I urged rather sulkily.
"Do you think Christ would have had the same effect on them? And does civilization help dead people?"
She saw I was hurt, and stopped to kiss me. "Let's drop it, dear—I was wrong to press the point. But I've become so used to saying everything to you, just as if you were one of my sis- ters—I forget that things must look differently when one's own country is involved."
She said no more about the vanishing Hawaiians, but I began to look at them with a very different feeling from what I had ever had before. We had brought them syphilis and tuberculos- is. The Chinese brought them leprosy. One of their lovely is- lands was now a name of horror from that ghastly disease, a place where noble Christians strive to minimize the evil—too late.
The missionaries, nobly purposed, no doubt, to begin with, had amassed great fortunes in land given to them by these careless children who knew so little of land ownership; and the children and grandchildren of the missionaries lived wealthy and powerful, proud of the "great work" of their forefathers, and apparently seeing no evil in the sad results. Perhaps they thought it was no matter how soon the natives died, so that they died Christians.
And the civilization we have brought them means an endless day of labor, long hours of grinding toil for other people's profit, in place of the clean ease and freedom of their own old life. Hard labor, disease, death; and the lasting consciousness of all this among their dwindling ranks; exclusion, social dissemination, industrial exploitation, approaching extermina- tion—it is no wonder their music is mournful.
I was glad to leave the lovely place; glad to put aside a sense of national guilt, and to see Ellador freshen again as the golden days and velvet nights flowed over us as we steamed toward the sunrise—and Home.
There were plenty of Californians on board, both wise and unwise, and I saw my wile, with a constantly increasing case and skill, extracting information from each and all she talked with. It is not difficult to extract information about California from a Californian. Not being one myself; and having more def- inite knowledge about my own country than I had had about most of the others we had visited, I was able to check off this triumphant flood of "boosting" with somewhat colder facts.
Ellador liked it. "It does my heart good," she said, "both to know that there is such a country on earth, and that people can care for it like that."
She particularly revelled in Ina Coolbrith's exquisite poem "California," so rich with tender pride, with vivid appreciation. Some devotee had the book with her, and poured forth a new torrent of praise over a fine list she had of "Californian authors."
This annoyed me rather more than real estate, climate, fruit or flowers; and having been somewhat browbeaten over Hawaii, I wanted to take it out of somebody else. I am not as good as Ellador; don't pretend to be. At moments like that I don't even want to be. So I said to this bubbling enthusiast: "Why do you call all these people 'Californian authors 7 "
She looked at me in genuine surprise.
"Were they born there?" I inquired. "Are they native sons or daughters?"
She had to admit they were not, save in a few cases. We marked those who were—it was a most insufficient list.
"But they lived in California," she insisted.
"How long?" I asked. "How long a visit or residence does it take to make an author a 'Californian'—like Mark Twain, for in- stance? Is he 'a Connecticut author' because he lived more years than that in Connecticut, or 'a New York author' because he lived quite a while in New York?"
She looked much annoyed, and I was not a bit sorry, but went on ruthlessly: "I think California is the only state in the Union that is not content with its own crop—but tries to claim everything in sight."
Chapter 5
My Country
IN THROUGH the Golden Gate we steamed at last, one glori- ous morning; calm Tamalpais basking on the northern side, and the billowing city rising tumultously on the southern, with the brilliant beauty of "The Fair" glowing on the water's edge.
I had been through before, and showed her through the glass as we passed, the Seal Rocks and the Cliff House with the great Sutro Baths beside it; and then the jewelled tower, the streaming banners of that wonder-city of a year.
It was in February. There had been rain, and now the lumin- ous rich green of the blazing sudden spring was cloaking every sloping shore. The long bay stretched wide on either hand; the fair bay cities opposite embroidered the western shore for miles; San Francisco rose before us.
Ellador stood by my side, holding my arm with tense excite- ment. "Your country, dear!" she said. "How beautiful it is! I shall love it!"
I was loving it myself, at that moment, as I never had before. Behind me was that long journey of us three adventurous ex-
plorers; our longer imprisonment, and then these travels of ours, through war-torn Europe, and the slow dark reaches of the Oriental civilization.
"It certainly looks good to me!" I told her.
We spent many days at the great Exposition, and others, later, at the still lovelier, smaller one at San Diego,—days of great happiness to both of us, and real pride to me. Later on I lost this feeling —replacing it with a growing discomfort.
I suppose everyone loves and honors his own country—prac- tically everyone. And we Americans, so young a people, so buoyantly carried along on the flood of easy geographical ex- pansion, so suddenly increased in numbers, not by natural growth of our own stock but by crowding injections of alien blood, by vast hordes of low-grade laborers whose ignorant masses made our own ignorant masses feel superior to all the earth—we Americans are almost as boastful as the still newer Federation of Germany.
I had thought myself a sociologist, an ethnologist, one able to judge fairly from wide knowledge. And yet, with all my know- ledge, with all my lucid criticism of my country's errors and shortcomings, I had kept an unshaken inner conviction of our superiority.
Ellador had shaken it.
It was not that she had found any fault with the institutions of my beloved land. Quite the contrary. She believed it fault- less—or nearly so. She expected too much. Knowing her as I now did, becoming more and more familiar with the amazing lucidity and fairness of her mind, with its orderly marshalling of well-knit facts and the swinging searchlight of perception which covered every point in her field of vision, I had a strange helpless sense of coming to judgment.
In Herland I had never fully realized the quality of mind de- veloped by their cultural system. Some of its power and clarity was of course plain to us, but we could no more measure that mind than a child can measure its teacher's. I had lived with it now, watched it work, seen it in relation to others, to those of learned men and women of various nations. There was no os- tentation about Ellador's intellectual processes. She made no display of learning, did not contradict and argue. Sometimes, in questions of fact, if it seemed essential to the matter under discussion, she would quote authority in opposition, but for the most part she listened, asking a few questions to satisfy herself as to the point of view of her interlocutor. I used to note with appreciative delight how these innocent, almost irrelevant questions would bring out answers each one of which was a branching guide-post as to the mind of the speaker. Sometimes just two would show him to be capable of believing flat contra- dictions, or merely one would indicate a limitation of know- ledge or an attitude of prejudice which "placed" the man at once. These were not "smart" questions, with a flippantly tri- umphant and all-toological demand at the end, leaving the victim confused and angry. He never realized what was being done to him.
"How do you have patience with these chumps ?" I asked her. "They seem like children in your hands—and yet you don't hurt them a bit."
"Perhaps that is why," she answered gravely. "We are so used to children, at home And when a whole country is always, more or less, teaching children— why it makes us patient, I suppose. What good would it do to humiliate these people? They all know more than I do— about most things."
"They may know more, about some things, but it's their men- tal processes that seem so muddy—so sticky—so slow and fum- bling somehow."
"You're right there, Van. It impresses me very much. There is an enormous fund of knowledge in the minds of your people—I mean any of these people I have met, but the minds themselves are —to me—astonishing. The Oriental mind is far more highly developed than the Occidental—in some lines; but as serenely unconscious of its limits as—as the other is. What strikes me most of all is the lack of connection between all this knowledge they have accumulated, and the way they live. I'm hoping to find it wholly different here. You Americans, I understand, are the people who do things."
Before I go on with Ellador's impressions of America I want to explain a little further, lest my native-born fellowcitizens re- sent too bitterly her ultimate criticisms. She perhaps would not have published those criticisms at all; but I can—now.
The sensitiveness I felt at first, the hurt pride, the honest pain, as my pet ideals inexorably changed color under that searchlight of hers, do what I would to maintain them in their earlier glory— all this is outgrown. I love my country, better than I ever did before. I understand it better—probably that ac- counts for the increased tenderness and patience. But if ever a country needed to wake up and look itself in the face, it is this one.
Ellador, in that amazing little pocket history she compiled, had set up the "order of exercises" in our development, and placed the nations in due sequence as contributors. Running over its neat pages, with the outline maps, the charts with their varied washes of color, showing this or that current of tendency and pressure of condition, one gathered at once a clear bird's eye view of what humanity had been doing all this time. She speculated sagely, with me, as to what trifling deflec- tion of type, what variation in environment, was responsible for the divigation of races; especially those of quite recent com- mon stock. But in the little book was no speculation, merely the simple facts.
Referring to it she could show in a few moments what special influences made Egypt Egypt, and differentiated Assyria from Chaldea. She shook her head sadly over those long early ages.
"They were slow to learn, weren't they?" she'd say; "Never seemed to put two and two together at all. I suppose that pecu- liar arrest of the mental processes was due first to mere social inertia, with its piled up weight of custom, and then much more to religion. That finality, that 'believing', seemed to put an end to real thinking and learning."
"But, my dear," interposed, "they were learned, surely. The ancient priests had practically all the learning, and in the Dark Ages, the Church in Europe was all that kept learning alive at all."
"Do you mean 'learning^ dear, or just 'remembering'?" she asked. "What did the Mediaeval Church 'learn'?"
This was a distinction I had never thought of. Of course what we have always called "learning" was knowing what went be- fore—long before—and mostly what people had written. Still I made out something of a case about the study of alchemy and medicine—which she gravely admitted.
It remained true that the Church, any church, in any period, had set its face like a flint against the people's learning any- thing new; and, as we commonly know, had promptly punished the most progressive.
