on of yellow journalism.

CHAPTER XIII

THE GROWTH OF HONESTY

The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon--America's Resemblance to
Japan--A German View--Can Americans Lie?--Honesty as the Best
Policy--Religious Sentiment--Moral and Immoral Railway
Managers--A Struggle for Self-Preservation--Gentlemen in
Business--Peculation among Railway Servants--How the Old Order
Changes, Yielding Place to New--The Strain on British
Machinery--Americans as Story-Tellers--The Incredibility of
the Actual.

My desire is to contribute, if possible, something towards the
establishment of a better understanding between the two peoples by
correcting certain misapprehensions which exist in the mind of each in
regard to the other. At the present moment we are concerned with the
particular misapprehension which exists in the English mind in regard to
the commercial ethics--the average level of common honesty--in the
masses of American business men. I have endeavoured to show, first, that
the majority of Englishmen have, even though unconsciously, a
fundamental misconception of the character of the American people,
arising primarily from the absence of a recognised aristocracy in the
United States:--that, in fact, the two peoples are, in the construction
of their social fabrics, much more alike than the Englishman generally
assumes. I have endeavoured to show, next, that if we were entirely
without any knowledge of, or any prejudices in regard to, the code of
commercial ethics at present existing in either country, but had to
deduce for ourselves _a priori_ from what we knew of the part which
commerce and business played in the social life of the two countries the
probable degree of morality which would be found in the respective
codes, we should be forced to look for a higher standard in the United
States than in England. We have seen how it comes that Englishmen have,
justifiably and even unavoidably, acquired the erroneous notions which
they have acquired, first, from the fact that, in the rough days of the
past, American business morality was, at least in certain parts of the
country, looser than that which prevailed in the older-established and
better constituted society of the England of the same day (and in the
older communities of the United States itself); and, second, from the
fact that the chief channel through which Englishmen must necessarily
derive their contemporary ideas on the subjec