Still, I Doubt Whether
Their Four-O'clock-Tea Habit Is Any Worse Than Our
Five-O'clock Cocktail Habit.
It all depends, I suppose, on whether
one prefers being tanned inside to being pickled.
But we are
getting bravely over our cocktail habit, as attested by figures
and the visual evidences, while their tea habit is growing on
them - so the statisticians say.
As for the Englishman's sense of humor, or his lack of it, I judge
that we Americans are partly wrong in our diagnosis of that phase
of British character and partly right. Because he is slow to laugh
at a joke, we think he cannot see the point of it without a diagram
and a chart. What we do not take into consideration is that,
through centuries of self-repression, the Englishman has so drilled
himself into refraining from laughing in public - for fear, you
see, of making himself conspicuous - it has become a part of his
nature. Indeed, in certain quarters a prejudice against laughing
under any circumstances appears to have sprung up.
I was looking one day through the pages of one of the critical
English weeklies. Nearly all British weeklies are heavy, and this
is the heaviest of the lot. Its editorial column alone weighs
from twelve to eighteen pounds, and if you strike a man with a
clubbed copy of it the crime is assault with a dull blunt instrument,
with intent to kill. At the end of a ponderous review of the East
Indian question I came on a letter written to the editor by a
gentleman signing himself with his own name, and reading in part
as follows:
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