The Comparative Morality Of Nations

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Title:     The Comparative Morality Of Nations
Author: Edwin Lawrence Godkin [More Titles by Godkin]

We had, four or five weeks ago, a few words of controversy with the Christian Union as to the comparative morality of the Prussians and Americans, or, rather, their comparative religiousness--meaning by religiousness a disposition "to serve others and live as in God's sight;" in other words, unselfishness and spirituality. We let it drop, from the feeling that the question whether the Americans or Prussians were the better men was only a part, and a very small part, of the larger question. How do we discover which of any two nations is the purer in its life or in its aims? and, is not any judgment we form about it likely to be very defective, owing to the inevitable incompleteness of our premises? We are not now going to try to fix the place of either Prussia or the United States in the scale of morality, but to point out some reasons why all comparisons between them should be made by Americans with exceeding care and humility. There is hardly any field of inquiry in which even the best-informed man is likely to fall into so many errors; first, because there is no field in which the vision is so much affected by prejudices of education and custom; and, secondly, because there is none in which the things we see are so likely to create erroneous impressions about the things we do not see. But we may add that it is a field which no intelligent and sensible man ever explores without finding his charity greatly stimulated.

Let us give some illustrations of the errors into which people are apt to fall in it. Count Gasparin, a French Protestant, and as spiritually minded a man as breathed, once talking with an American friend expressed in strong terms his sense of the pain it caused him that Mr. Lincoln should have been at the theatre when he was killed, not, the friend found, because he objected in the least to theatre-going, but because it was the evening of Good Friday--a day which the Continental Calvinists "keep" with great solemnity, but to which American non-episcopal Protestants pay no attention whatever. Count Gasparin, on the other hand, would have no hesitation in taking a ride on Sunday, or going to a public promenade after church hours, and, from seeing him there, his American friend would draw deductions just as unfavorable to the Count's religious character as the Count himself drew with regard to Mr. Lincoln's.

Take, again, the question of drinking beer and wine. There is a large body of very excellent men in America who, from a long contemplation of the evils wrought by excessive indulgence in intoxicating drinks, have worked themselves up to a state of mind about all use of such drinks which is really discreditable to reasonable beings, leads to the most serious platform excesses, and is perfectly incomprehensible to Continental Europeans. To the former, the drinking even of lager beer connotes, as the logicians say, ever so many other vices--grossness and sensuality of nature, extravagance, indifference to home pleasures, repugnance to steady industry, and a disregard of the precepts of religion and morality. To many of them a German workman, and his wife and children, sitting in a beer-garden on a summer's evening, which to European moralists and economists is one of the most pleasing sights in the world, is a revolting spectacle, which calls for the interference of the police. Now, if you go to a beer-garden in Berlin you may, any Sunday afternoon, see doctors of divinity--none of your rationalists--but doctors of real divinity, to whom American theologians go to be taught, doing this very thing, and, what is worse, smoking pipes. An American who applied to this the same course of reasoning which he would apply to a similar scene in America, would simply be guilty of outrageous folly. If he argued from it that the German doctor was selfish, or did not "live as in the sight of God," the whole process would be a model of absurdity.

Foreigners have drawn, on the other hand, from the American "diligence in business," conclusions with regard to American character far more uncomplimentary than those the Christian Union has expressed with regard to the Prussians. There are not a few religious and moral and cultivated circles in Europe in which the suggestion that Americans, as a nation, were characterized by thoughtfulness for others and a sense of God's presence would be received with derisive laughter, owing to the application to the phenomena of American society of the process of reasoning on which, we fear, the Union relies. Down to the war, so candid and perspicacious a man as John Stuart Mill might have been included in this class. The earlier editions of his "Elements of Political Economy" contained a contemptuous statement that one sex in America was entirely given up to "dollar-hunting" and the other to "breeding dollar-hunters." In other words, he held that the American people were plunged in the grossest materialism, and he doubtless based this opinion on that intense application of the men to commercial and industrial pursuits which we see all around us, which no church finds fault with, but which, we know, bad as its effects are on art and literature, really coexists with great generosity, sympathy, public spirit, and ideality.

Take, again, the matter of chastity, on which the Union touched. We grant at the outset that wherever you have classes, the women of the lower class suffer more or less from the men of the upper class, and anybody who says that seductions, accomplished through the effect on female vanity of the addresses of "superiors in station," while almost unknown here, are very numerous in Europe, would find plenty of facts to support him. But, on the other hand, an attempt made to persuade a Frenchman that the familiar intercourse which the young people of both sexes in this country enjoy was generally pure, would fail in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. That it should be pure is opposed to all his experience of human nature, both male and female; and the result of your argument with him would be that he would conclude either that you were an extraordinarily simple person, or took him for one.

On the other hand, we believe the German, who thinks nothing of drinking as much wine or beer as he cares for, draws from the conduct of the American young woman whom he sees abroad, and from what he reads in our papers about "free love," Indiana divorces, abortion, and what not, conclusions with regard to American chastity very different from those of the Union; and, if you sought to meet him in discussion, he would overwhelm you with facts and cases which, looked at apart from the general tenor of American life and manners, it would be very hard to dispose of. He would say, for instance, that we are not, perhaps, guilty of as many violations of the marriage vows as Europeans; but that we make it so light a vow that, instead of violating it, we get it abrogated, and then follow our will; and then he would come down on us with boarding-house and hotel life, and other things of the same kind, which might make us despise him, but would make it a little difficult to get rid of him.

There is probably no minor point of manners which does more to create unfavorable impressions of Europeans among the best class of Americans--morally the best, we mean--than the importance attached by the former to their eating and drinking; while there is nothing which does more to spread in Europe impressions unfavorable to American civilization than the indifference of Americans, and, we may add, as regards the progressive portion of American society--cultivated indifference--to the quality of their meals and the time of eating them. In no European country is moderate enjoyment of the pleasures of the table considered incompatible with high moral aims, or even a sincerely religious character; but a man to whom his dinner was of serious importance would find his position in an assembly of American reformers very precarious. The German or Frenchman or Englishman, indeed, treats a man's views of food, and his disposition or indisposition to eat it in company with his fellows as an indication of his place in civilization. Savages love to eat alone, and it has been observed in partially civilized communities relapsing into barbarism, that one of the first indications of their decline was the abandonment of regular meals on tables, and a tendency on the part of the individuals to retire to secret places with their victuals. This is probably a remnant of the old aboriginal instinct which we still see in domesticated dogs, and was, doubtless, implanted for the protection of the species in times when everybody looked on his neighbor's bone with a hungry eye, and the man with the strong hand was apt to have the fullest stomach. Accordingly, there is in Europe, and indeed everywhere, a tendency to regard the growth of a delicacy in eating, and close attention to the time and manner of serving meals and their cookery, and the use of them as promoters of social intercourse, as an indication of moral as well as material progress. To a large number of people here, on the other hand, the bolting of food--ten-minute dinners, for instance--and general unconsciousness of "what is on the table," is a sign of preoccupation with serious things. It may be; but the German love of food is not necessarily a sign of grossness, and that "overfed" appearance, of which the Union spoke, is not necessarily a sign of inefficiency, any more than leanness or cadaverousness is a sign of efficiency. There is certainly some power of hard work in King William's army, and, indeed, we could hardly point to a better illustration of the truth, that all the affairs of men, whether political, social, or religious, depend for their condition largely on the state of the digestion.

Honesty, by which we mean that class of virtues which Cicero includes in the term bona fides, has, to a considerable extent, owing, we think, to the peculiar humanitarian character which the circumstances of the country have given to the work of reform, been subordinated in the United States to brotherly kindness. Now, this right to arrange the virtues according to a scale of its own, is something which not only every age, but every nation, has claimed, and, accordingly, we find that each community, in forming its judgment of a man's character, gives a different degree of weight to different features of it. Keeping a mistress would probably, anywhere in the United States, damage a man's reputation far more seriously than fraudulent bankruptcy; while horse-stealing, which in New England would be a comparatively trifling offence, out in Montana is a far fouler thing than murder. But in the European scale, honesty still occupies the first place. Bearing this in mind, it is worth any man's while who proposes to pass judgment on the morality of any foreign country, to consider what is the impression produced on foreign opinion about American morality by the story of the Erie Railroad, by the career of Fisk, by the condition of the judicial bench in the commercial capital of the country, by the charges of corruption brought against such men as Trumbull and Fessenden at the time of the impeachment trial; by the comically prominent and beloved position which Butler has held for some years in our best moral circles, and by the condition of the civil service.

The truth is that it is almost impossible for anybody to compare one nation with another fairly, unless he possesses complete familiarity with the national life of both, and therefore can distinguish isolated facts from symptomatic facts.

The reason why some of the phenomena of American society which shock foreigners greatly, do not shock even the best Americans so much, is not that the latter have become hardened to them--though this counts for something--but that they know of various counteracting and compensating phenomena which prevent, or are sure to prevent, them in the long run from doing the mischief which they seem to threaten. In other words, they understand the checks and balances of their society as well as its tendencies. Anybody who considers these things will be careful how he denounces people whose manners differ from his own for want of spirituality or morality, and we may add that any historical student engaged in comparing the morality of the age in which he lives with that of any other age which he knows only through chronicles, will do well to exercise the same caution for the same reasons.

[The end]
Edwin Lawrence Godkin's essay: Comparative Morality Of Nations

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