Hi've got a better plan." But the next speaker was
blaring away at the top of his voice, making threatening faces
and waving his clenched fists aloft and pounding with them on the
top of his rostrum.
"Now this," I said to myself, "is going to be something worth
while. Surely this person would not be content merely with drowning
all the parsons and sinking all the warships in the hole at the
bottom of the sea. Undoubtedly he will advocate something really
radical. I will invest five minutes with him."
I did; but I was sold. He was favoring the immediate adoption of
a universal tongue for all the peoples of the earth - that was all.
I did not catch the name of his universal language, but I judged
the one at which he would excel would be a language with few if
any h's in it. After this disappointment I lost heart and came
away.
Another phase, though a very different one, of the British spirit
of fair play and tolerance, was shown to me at the National Sporting
Club, which is the British shrine of boxing, where I saw a fight
for one of the championship belts that Lord Lonsdale is forever
bestowing on this or that worshipful fisticuffer. Instead of being
inside the ring prying the fighters apart by main force as he would
have been doing in America, the referee, dressed in evening clothes,
was outside the ropes. At a snapped word from him the fighters
broke apart from clinches on the instant. The audience - a very
mixed one, ranging in garb from broadcloths to shoddies - was as
quick to approve a telling blow by the less popular fighter as to
hiss any suggestion of trickiness or fouling on the part of the
favorite. When a contestant in one of the preliminary goes, having
been adjudged a loser on points, objected to the decision and
insisted on being heard in his own behalf, the crowd, though plainly
not in sympathy with his contention, listened to what he had to
say. Nobody jeered him down.
Had he been a foreigner and especially had he been an American I
am inclined to think the situation might have been different. I
seem to recall what happened once when a certain middleweight from
this side went over there and broke the British heart by licking
the British champion; and again what happened when a Yankee boy
won the Marathon at the Olympic games in London a few years ago.
But as this man was a Briton himself these other Britons harkened
to his sputterings, for England, you know, grants the right of
free speech to all Englishmen - and denies it to all Englishwomen.
The settled Englishman declines always to be jostled out of his
hereditary state of intense calm. They tell of a man who dashed
into the reading room of the Savage Club with the announcement
that a lion was loose on the Strand - a lion that had escaped from
a traveling caravan and was rushing madly to and fro, scaring
horses and frightening pedestrians.
"Great excitement! Most terrific, old dears - on my word!" he added,
addressing the company.
Over the top of the Pink Un an elderly gentleman of a full habit
of life regarded him sourly.
"Is that any reason," he inquired, "why a person should rush into
a gentleman's club and kick up such a deuced hullabaloo?"
The first man - he must have been a Colonial - gazed at the other
man in amazement.
"Well," he asked, "what would you do if you met a savage lion loose
on the Strand?"
"Sir, I should take a cab!"
And after meeting an Englishman or two of this type I am quite
prepared to say the story might have been a true one. If he met
a lion on the Strand to-day he would take a cab; but if to-morrow,
walking in the same place, he met two lions, he would write a
letter to the Times complaining of the growing prevalence of lions
in the public thoroughfares and placing the blame on the Suffragettes
or Lloyd George or the Nonconformists or the increasing discontent
of the working classes - that is what he would do.
On the other hand, if he met a squirrel on a street in America it
would be a most extraordinary thing. Extraordinary would undoubtedly
be the word he would use to describe it. Lions on the Strand would
be merely annoying, but chipmunks on Broadway would constitute a
striking manifestation of the unsettled conditions existing in a
wild and misgoverned land; for, you see, to every right-minded
Englishman of the insular variety - and that is the commonest variety
there is in England - whatever happens at home is but part of an
orderly and an ordered scheme of things, whereas whatever happens
beyond the British domains must necessarily be highly unusual and
exceedingly disorganizing. If so be it happens on English soil
he can excuse it. He always has an explanation or an extenuation
handy. But if it happens elsewhere - well, there you are, you see!
What was it somebody once called England - Perfidious Alibi-in',
wasn't it? Anyhow that was what he meant. The party's intentions
were good but his spelling was faulty.
An Englishman's newspapers help him to attain this frame of mind;
for an English newspaper does not print sensational stories about
Englishmen residing in England; it prints them about people resident
in other lands. There is a good reason for this and the reason
is based on prudence. In the first place the private life of a
private individual is a most holy thing, with which the papers
dare not meddle; besides, the paper that printed a faked-up tale
about a private citizen in England would speedily be exposed and
also extensively sued. As for public men, they are protected by
exceedingly stringent libel laws.
