AS OTHERS SEE US. AT a moment when there is about to be determined an issue in our national career graver than any known in the lifetime of the oldest among us, it can only do good to pause and take stock of ourselves as we appear to an impartial observer, a man of another nation. 'England and the English from an American Point of View' was published early in the present year, before the great upheaval was upon us. There is evidence in the book that its author has lived much in England, and has studied our social conditions from many points of view. He acknowledges that he is deeply in debt to the English for many delightful friendships, for generous and unstinted hospitality, and for teaching him much. He repeatedly says that he is not criticising, but only offering his impressions and trying to explain the facts he has observed. But none the less he hits hard and does not mince his language, whether he is speaking of the dress of English ladies, of the food of British people, of the streets of London after dusk, of the compromise of a Cathedral preacher, or of a Cabinet Minister. Who, he asks, are these English? When Cæsar and his legions came to Britain fifty-five years before the birth of Christ, they found our island inhabited by an Iberian race from South-Western Europe, of whom the Basque is to-day the best and last representative. The Romans occupied the land for more than 450 years, and then retired to the continent of Europe, leaving traces of their occupation in roads and fortified camps, and little else. The Britons remained; neither their language nor their laws nor their customs had been changed by the Romans. But now from NorthWestern Germany began another invasion. Jutes came for adventure and for booty; Saxons, because their country was overcrowded and they wanted land to settle on. These Saxons were an agricultural people of the peasant class; they gradually pushed their way over the land, thrusting back the Britons into Wales and across the water into Brittany ; they were troubled by Angles and by Danes, who landed and settled on the East Coast, where alone the Danes have left an appreciable mark, but elsewhere they held their own. They were independent farmers, they admitted a leader, and came to his aid at times of their own choosing. When they had own 1 England and the English from an American Point of View. By Price Collier. Printed by the Scribner Press, New York, U.S.A. Duckworth & Co., London. 1909. of all proportion to the increase of wages in other occupations in the last fifteen years. The next impression is that "this is a land of men, ruled by men, obedient to the ways and comforts and prejudices of men, not women. He contrasts England with America in this respect. He thinks that in a large majority of cases the amounts allowed to English women to dress on are on a scale that can only be called mean "; but he says, "This England has become the great Empire she is, because she is a man's country, and the expenditure permitted to the women is only one of the minor results of this." England is not only a man's country, but the English man is pre-eminently a man's man. The prizes here go to the soldiers, the sailors, the statesmen, the colonisers, the winners of new territory and the rulers over them, the travellers and explorers, the great churchmen and successful schoolmasters, to those in short with masculine minds and bodies. The feminine, the effeminate, and the Semitic prowess is rewarded, it is true-more of late years than ever before their rewards early and often. As a consequence, England has had for hundreds of years an honourroll of mighty men at the helm of her affairs. "England has never had a social upheaval which has driven out her old families, and in consequence the public service commands an ability, and on on the whole is conducted with an integrity, due to the fine feeling of class long trained in genuine patriotism such as no other country can boast of." Our author finds the Englishman self-contained, with а horror of interfering with other people's business, indifferent to foreigners or even colonists of his own race, without sympathy with or comprehension of them, them, or wish to understand them unless there is something to be got out of them. As to his attitude to Americans who have settled in England, and live luxuriously there, the Englishman "looks upon them first as people who have recognised his superiority, and therefore prefer his society, but secondly and always as renegades, as people who have shirked their duty as Americans." but it is not the ideal of England, in our author's the nation. It has been opinion, is a land, and Engwittily said that a states- lishmen the people, of comman is a dead politician; promise, which "some people but in England this does call hypocrisy, some pharisanot apply. The great ism." The chapter headed statesmen or the leading "The Land of Compromise" is politicians, as one may well worth study. Our naplease to call them, receive tional expenditure on drink, ... The British workman's savings bank deposits are only some 265 million dollars. It would take three times this amount to pay his drink bill for one year. But nobody. dares take his cup away from him. Instead of that it is proposed to promise him support in his old age, so that he need not save at the public-house in the meanwhile. "This matter of old-age pensions is an insidiously elastic form of outdoor relief, which will be stretched to suit the political exigencies of the hour, and a very enticing invitation to shiftlessness, to trust in God and let the powder get damp. It is the beginning of the change of English attitude from frank and free individualism to the fashionable present day effeminacy of State support." "We have seen," he says, "how neither opportunity nor responsibility has been denied to any man. Any man may rise in church, in State, or society. So much has ample freedom done. Men made England, and kept her inviolate. But now what a change! At the hour of this writing practically every important legislative movement is in some sort a plea and a plan to soften men, to lessen their responsibilities, and to make them feel that they need not earn their opportunities. This may do in some Utopian kingdom of which I know nothing, but it is death to when over 32 millions of the population of the United Kingdom are dwellers in cities and towns; this people, who, more than all others, have won their victories and achieved their development on the land and out of doors, it seems hardly the proper work of far-seeing statesmanship to weaken them still further by pandering to their own ignorant short-cuts to salvation. Now let us see what our republican writer thinks of our Constitution and of its constituent parts. "When one remembers that there is no written constitution here, no infallible or inviolable body body of law, but that each emergency is met by common sense and solved by the application of a kind of working worldly wisdom, one admires the more the calm way in which each, from the highest to the lowest, submits, is satisfied, and goes his way." Of the King he says, "He is the cheapest investment and the most valuable asset England has to-day. Whenever he has taken a part in national affairs it has been for the glory, the peace, and prosperity of his country. When he meddles it is not to advertise himself, not for the humiliation and undoing of his country, but for her honThe King is the people plus the experience, the knowledge, the impartial situation, and unprejudiced mind, which the people our. |