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The idea of a house, founded two hundred years ago upon a crime, remaining ever since in possession of its original owners, and becoming the theatre, at last, of the judgment upon that crime, is a thoroughly picturesque idea, but it is thoroughly un-American. Such a thing might conceivably occur, but nothing in this country could well be more unlikely.
Herzfeld and Cohn were Jews, old, white-bearded, orthodox Jews; their unpoetic business was the jobbing of iron beds; and Una was typical of that New York which the Jews are conquering, in having nebulous prejudices against the race; in calling them "mean" and "grasping" and "un-American," and wanting to see them shut out of offices and hotels.
The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country.
Chamberlain and his colleagues seemed exceedingly un-American, and terribly embarrassing to Hay. Trained early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue, and to help make the political machine run somehow, since it could never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with theoretical objections which were every day fretting him in practical forms.
It was not without pain, however, that even in this un-American region we discovered the old Adam of journalism in the disposition of the newspapers of St. John toward sarcasm touching the well-meant attempts to entertain the Governor and his lady in the provincial town of Halifax, a disposition to turn, in short, upon the demonstrations of loyal worship the faint light of ridicule.
"Fiske tried the high and mighty, brotherly act with her," Miller continued, "but she shook him up like a charge of rack-a-rock. She told him that a duel was unmanly and un-American, and that he would be a murderer. She said his honor didn't require him to risk his life for every cad who went about armed, insulting unarmed people " "What did she say?" I cried. "Say that again."
Not quite all the vulgar insolence of the M'Crackin letter was repeated. Mr. Seward did not ask Mr. Motley to deny or confirm the assertion of the letter that he was a "thorough flunky" and "un-American functionary." But he did insult him with various questions suggested by the anonymous letter, questions that must have been felt as an indignity by the most thick-skinned of battered politicians.
There has come over the land that un-American set of conditions which enables a small number of men who control the government to get favors from the government; by those favors to exclude their fellows from equal business opportunity; by those favors to extend a network of control that will presently dominate every industry in the country, and so make men forget the ancient time when America lay in every hamlet, when America was to be seen in every fair valley, when America displayed her great forces on the broad prairies, ran her fine fires of enterprise up over the mountain-sides and down into the bowels of the earth, and eager men were everywhere captains of industry, not employees; not looking to a distant city to find out what they might do, but looking about among their neighbors, finding credit according to their character, not according to their connections, finding credit in proportion to what was known to be in them and behind them, not in proportion to the securities they held that were approved where they were not known.
Everything that meets the eye seems new, unfamiliar, and, in some subtle, indefinable way, un-American.
Even a man who knows nothing but science will be provided for, if he does not think it necessary to hang about his birthplace all his days, which is a most un-American weakness. The apron-strings of an American mother are made of India-rubber.
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