MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND

1922

By Leacock, Stephen

Introduction of Mr. Stephen Leacock Given by Sir Owen Seamanon the Occasion of His First Lecture in London

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: It is usual on these occasions for the chairmanto begin something like this: "The lecturer, I am sure, needs nointroduction from me. " And indeed, when I have been the lecturer andsomebody else has been the chairman, I have more than once suspectedmyself of being the better man of the two. Of course I hope I shouldalways have the good manners--I am sure Mr. Leacock has--to disguisethat suspicion. However, one has to go through these formalities, and Iwill therefore introduce the lecturer to you. 

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Stephen Leacock. Mr. Leacock, this isthe flower of London intelligence--or perhaps I should say one of theflowers; the rest are coming to your other lectures. 

In ordinary social life one stops at an introduction and does notproceed to personal details. But behaviour on the platform, as on thestage, is seldom ordinary. I will therefore tell you a thing or twoabout Mr. Leacock. In the first place, by vocation he is a Professor ofPolitical Economy, and he practises humour--frenzied fiction insteadof frenzied finance--by way of recreation. There he differs a good dealfrom me, who have to study the products of humour for my living, and byway of recreation read Mr. Leacock on political economy. 

Further, Mr. Leacock is all-British, being English by birth and Canadianby residence, I mention this for two reasons: firstly, because Englandand the Empire are very proud to claim him for their own, and, secondly, because I do not wish his nationality to be confused with that of hisneighbours on the other side. For English and American humourists havenot always seen eye to eye. When we fail to appreciate their humour theysay we are too dull and effete to understand it: and when they do notappreciate ours they say we haven't got any. 

Now Mr. Leacock's humour is British by heredity; but he has caughtsomething of the spirit of American humour by force of association. Thisputs him in a similar position to that in which I found myself once whenI took the liberty of swimming across a rather large loch in Scotland. After climbing into the boat I was in the act of drying myself when Iwas accosted by the proprietor of the hotel adjacent to the shore. "Youhave no business to be bathing here, " he shouted. "I'm not, " I said;"I'm bathing on the other side. " In the same way, if anyone on eitherside of the water is unintelligent enough to criticise Mr. Leacock'shumour, he can always say it comes from the other side. But the truthis that his humour contains all that is best in the humour of bothhemispheres. 

Having fulfilled my duty as chairman, in that I have told you nothingthat you did not know before--except, perhaps, my swimming feat, whichnever got into the Press because I have a very bad publicity agent--Iwill not detain you longer from what you are really wanting to get at;but ask Mr. Leacock to proceed at once with his lecture on "FrenziedFiction. "

CONTENTS

 I. THE BALANCE OF TRADE IN IMPRESSIONS II. I AM INTERVIEWED BY THE PRESS III. IMPRESSIONS OF LONDON IV. A CLEAR VIEW OF THE GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS OF ENGLAND V. OXFORD AS I SEE IT VI. THE BRITISH AND THE AMERICAN PRESS VII. BUSINESS IN ENGLAND VIII. IS PROHIBITION COMING TO ENGLAND? IX. "WE HAVE WITH US TO-NIGHT" X. HAVE THE ENGLISH ANY SENSE OF HUMOUR?

MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND

I. The Balance of Trade in Impressions

FOR some years past a rising tide of lecturers and literary men fromEngland has washed upon the shores of our North American continent. Thepurpose of each one of them is to make a new discovery of America. Theycome over to us travelling in great simplicity, and they return inthe ducal suite of the Aquitania. They carry away with them theirimpressions of America, and when they reach England they sell them. Thisexport of impressions has now been going on so long that the balanceof trade in impressions is all disturbed. There is no doubt that theAmericans and Canadians have been too generous in this matter of givingaway impressions. We emit them with the careless ease of a glow worm, and like the glow-worm ask for nothing in return. 

But this irregular and one-sided traffic has now assumed such greatproportions that we are compelled to ask whether it is right to allowthese people to carry away from us impressions of the very highestcommercial value without giving us any pecuniary compensation whatever. British lecturers have been known to land in New York, pass the customs, drive uptown in a closed taxi, and then forward to England from theclosed taxi itself ten dollars' worth of impressions of Americannational character. I have myself seen an English literary man, --thebiggest, I believe: he had at least the appearance of it; sit in thecorridor of a fashionable New York hotel and look gloomily into his hat, and then from his very hat produce an estimate of the genius of Amer icaat twenty cents a word. The nice question as to whose twenty cents thatwas never seems to have occurred to him. 

I am not writing in the faintest spirit of jealousy. I quite admit theextraordinary ability that is involved in this peculiar susceptibilityto impressions. I have estimated that some of these English visitorshave been able to receive impressions at the rate of four to the second;in fact, they seem to get them every time they see twenty cents. Butwithout jealousy or complaint, I do feel that somehow these impressionsare inadequate and fail to depict us as we really are. 

Let me illustrate what I mean. Here are some of the impressions of NewYork, gathered from visitors' discoveries of America, and reproduced notperhaps word for word but as closely as I can remember them. "New York", writes one, "nestling at the foot of the Hudson, gave me an impressionof cosiness, of tiny graciousness: in short, of weeness. " But comparethis--"New York, " according to another discoverer of America, "gave mean impression of size, of vastness; there seemed to be a big ness aboutit not found in smaller places. " A third visitor writes, "New Yorkstruck me as hard, cruel, almost inhuman. " This, I think, was becausehis taxi driver had charged him three dollars. "The first thing thatstruck me in New York, " writes another, "was the Statue of Liberty. "But, after all, that was only natural: it was the first thing that couldreach him. 

Nor is it only the impressions of the metropolis that seem to fall shortof reality. Let me quote a few others taken at random here and thereover the continent. 

"I took from Pittsburg, " says an English visitor, "an impression ofsomething that I could hardly define--an atmosphere rather than anidea. "

All very well, But, after all, had he the right to take it? Granted thatPittsburg has an atmosphere rather than an idea, the attempt to carryaway this atmosphere surely borders on rapacity. 

"New Orleans, " writes another visitor, "opened her arms to me andbestowed upon me the soft and languorous kiss of the Caribbean. " Thisstatement may or may not be true; but in any case it hardly seems thefair thing to mention it. 

"Chicago, " according to another book of discovery, "struck me as a largecity. Situated as it is and where it is, it seems destined to be a placeof importance. "

Or here, again, is a form of "impression" that recurs again andagain-"At Cleveland I felt a distinct note of optimism in the air. "

This same note of optimism is found also at Toledo, at Toronto--inshort, I believe it indicates nothing more than that some one gave thevisitor a cigar. Indeed it generally occurs during the familiar scenein which the visitor describes his cordial reception in an unsuspectingAmerican town: thus:

"I was met at the station (called in America the depot) by a memberof the Municipal Council driving his own motor car. After giving me anexcellent cigar, he proceeded to drive me about the town, to variouspoints of interest, including the municipal abattoir, where he gave meanother excellent cigar, the Carnegie public library, the First NationalBank (the courteous manager of which gave me an excellent cigar) andthe Second Congregational Church where I had the pleasure of meeting thepastor. The pastor, who appeared a man of breadth and culture, gave meanother cigar. In the evening a dinner, admirably cooked and excellentlyserved, was tendered to me at a leading hotel. " And of course he tookit. After which his statement that he carried away from the town afeeling of optimism explains itself: he had four cigars, the dinner, andhalf a page of impressions at twenty cents a word. 

Nor is it only by the theft of impressions that we suffer at the handsof these English discoverers of America. It is a part of the system alsothat we have to submit to being lectured to by our talented visitors. Itis now quite understood that as soon as an English literary man finishesa book he is rushed across to America to tell the people of the UnitedStates and Canada all about it, and how he came to write it. At home, inhis own country, they don't care how he came to write it. He's writtenit and that's enough. But in America it is different. One month afterthe distinguished author's book on The Boyhood of Botticelli hasappeared in London, he is seen to land in New York very quietly out ofone of the back portholes of the Olympic. That same afternoon you willfind him in an armchair in one of the big hotels giving off impressionsof America to a group of reporters. After which notices appear inall the papers to the effect that he will lecture in Carnegie Hall on"Botticelli the Boy". The audience is assured beforehand. It consists ofall the people who feel that they have to go because they know all aboutBotticelli and all the people who feel that they have to go because theydon't know anything about Botticelli. By this means the lecturer isable to rake the whole country from Montreal to San Franciscowith "Botticelli the Boy". Then he turns round, labels his lecture"Botticelli the Man", and rakes it all back again. All the way acrossthe continent and back he emits impressions, estimates of nationalcharacter, and surveys of American genius. He sails from New York in ablaze of publicity, with his cordon of reporters round him, and a monthlater publishes his book "America as I Saw It". It is widely read--inAmerica. 

In the course of time a very considerable public feeling was arousedin the United States and Canada over this state of affairs. The lack ofreciprocity in it seemed unfair. It was felt (or at least I felt)that the time had come when some one ought to go over and take someimpressions off England. The choice of such a person (my choice) fellupon myself. By an arrangement with the Geographical Society of America, acting in conjunction with the Royal Geographical Society of England (toboth of whom I communicated my proposal), I went at my own expense. 

It is scarcely feasible to give here full details in regard to my outfitand equipment, though I hope to do so in a later and more extendedaccount of my expedition. Suffice it to say that my outfit, which wasmodelled on the equipment of English lecturers in America, included acomplete suit of clothes, a dress shirt for lecturing in, a fountainpen and a silk hat. The dress shirt, I may say for the benefit of othertravellers, proved invaluable. The silk hat, however, is no longer usedin England except perhaps for scrambling eggs in. 

I pass over the details of my pleasant voyage from New York toLiverpool. During the last fifty years so many travellers have madethe voyage across the Atlantic that it is now impossible to obtain anyimpressions from the ocean of the slightest commercial value. My readerswill recall the fact that Washington Irving, as far back as a centuryago, chronicled the pleasure that one felt during an Atlantic voyagein idle day dreams while lying prone upon the bowsprit and watching thedolphins leaping in the crystalline foam. Since his time so many giftedwriters have attempted to do the same thing that on the large Atlanticliners the bowsprit has been removed, or at any rate a notice put up:"Authors are requested not to lie prostrate on the bowsprit. " Buteven without this advantage, three or four generations of writers havechronicled with great minuteness their sensations during the transit. I need only say that my sensations were just as good as theirs. I willcontent myself with chronicling the fact that during the voyage wepassed two dolphins, one whale and one iceberg (none of them moving veryfast at the time), and that on the fourth day out the sea was sorough that the Captain said that in forty years he had never seen suchweather. One of the steerage passengers, we were told, was actuallywashed overboard: I think it was over board that he was washed, but itmay have been on board the ship itself. 

I pass over also the incidents of my landing in Liverpool, exceptperhaps to comment upon the extraordinary behaviour of the Englishcustoms officials. Without wishing in any way to disturb internationalrelations, one cannot help noticing the rough and inquisitorial methodsof the English customs men as compared with the gentle and affectionateways of the American officials at New York. The two trunks that Ibrought with me were dragged brutally into an open shed, the strapof one of them was rudely unbuckled, while the lid of the other wasactually lifted at least four inches. The trunks were then roughlyscrawled with chalk, the lids slammed to, and that was all. Not oneof the officials seemed to care to look at my things or to have thepoliteness to pretend to want to. I had arranged my dress suit and mypyjamas so as to make as effective a display as possible: a New Yorkcustoms officer would have been delighted with it. Here they simplypassed it over. "Do open this trunk, " I asked one of the officials, "andsee my pyjamas. " "I don't think it is necessary, sir, " the man answered. There was a coldness about it that cut me to the quick. 

But bad as is the conduct of the English customs men, the immigrationofficials are even worse. I could not help being struck by the dreadfulcarelessness with which people are admitted into England. There are, itis true, a group of officials said to be in charge of immigration, butthey know nothing of the discriminating care exercised on the other sideof the Atlantic. 

"Do you want to know, " I asked one of them, "whether I am a polygamist?"

"No, sir, " he said very quietly. 

"Would you like me to tell you whether I am fundamentally opposed to anyand every system of government?"

The man seemed mystified. "No, sir, " he said. "I don't know that Iwould. "

"Don't you care?" I asked. 

"Well, not particularly, sir, " he answered. 

I was determined to arouse him from his lethargy. 

"Let me tell you, then, " I said, "that I am an anarchistic polygamist, that I am opposed to all forms of government, that I object to any kindof revealed religion, that I regard the state and property and marriageas the mere tyranny of the bourgeoisie, and that I want to see classhatred carried to the point where it forces every one into brotherlylove. Now, do I get in?"

The official looked puzzled for a minute. "You are not Irish, are you, sir?" he said. 

"No. "

"Then I think you can come in all right. " he answered. 

The journey from Liverpool to London, like all other English journeys, is short. This is due to the fact that England is a small country: itcontains only 50, 000 square miles, whereas the United States, as everyone knows, contains three and a half billion. I mentioned this fact toan English fellow passenger on the train, together with a provisionalestimate of the American corn crop for 1922: but he only drew his rugabout his knees, took a sip of brandy from his travelling flask, andsank into a state resembling death. I contented myself with jotting downan impression of incivility and paid no further attention to my fellowtraveller other than to read the labels on his lug gage and to perusethe headings of his newspaper by peeping over his shoulder. 

It was my first experience of travelling with a fellow passenger ina compartment of an English train, and I admit now that I was as yetignorant of the proper method of conduct. Later on I became fullyconversant with the rule of travel as understood in England. I shouldhave known, of course, that I must on no account speak to the man. But Ishould have let down the window a little bit in such a way as to make astrong draught on his ear. Had this failed to break down his reserve Ishould have placed a heavy valise in the rack over his head so balancedthat it might fall on him at any moment. Failing this again, I couldhave blown rings of smoke at him or stepped on his feet under thepretence of looking out of the window. Under the English rule as long ashe bears this in silence you are not supposed to know him. In fact, heis not supposed to be there. You and he each presume the other to be amere piece of empty space. But let him once be driven to say, "Oh, I begyour pardon, I wonder if you would mind my closing the window, " and heis lost. After that you are entitled to tell him anything about the corncrop that you care to. 

But in the present case I knew nothing of this, and after three hours ofcharming silence I found myself in London. 

II. I Am Interviewed by the Press

IMMEDIATELY upon my arrival in London I was interviewed by the Press. Iwas interviewed in all twenty times. I am not saying this in anyspirit of elation or boastfulness. I am simply stating it as afact--interviewed twenty times, sixteen times by men and twice by women. But as I feel that the results of these interviews were not all that Icould have wished, I think it well to make some public explanation ofwhat happened. 

The truth is that we do this thing so differently over in America that Iwas for the time being completely thrown off my bearings. The questionsthat I had every right to expect after many years of American andCanadian interviews failed to appear. 

I pass over the fact that being interviewed for five hours is afatiguing process. I lay no claim to exemption for that. But to that nodoubt was due the singular discrepancies as to my physical appearancewhich I detected in the London papers. 

The young man who interviewed me immediately after breakfast describedme as "a brisk, energetic man, still on the right side of forty, withenergy in every movement. "

The lady who wrote me up at 11. 30 reported that my hair was turninggrey, and that there was "a peculiar languor" in my manner. 

And at the end the boy who took me over at a quarter to two said, "Theold gentleman sank wearily upon a chair in the hotel lounge. His hair isalmost white. "

The trouble is that I had not understood that London reporters aresupposed to look at a man's personal appearance. In America we neverbother with that. We simply describe him as a "dynamo. " For some reasonor other it always pleases everybody to be called a "dynamo, " and thereaders, at least with us, like to read about people who are "dynamos, "and hardly care for anything else. 

In the case of very old men we sometimes call them "battle-horses" or"extinct volcanoes, " but beyond these three classes we hardly ventureon description. So I was misled. I had expected that the reporter wouldsay: "As soon as Mr. Leacock came across the floor we felt we were inthe presence of a 'dynamo' (or an 'extinct battle-horse' as the case maybe). " Otherwise I would have kept up those energetic movements all themorning. But they fatigue me, and I did not think them necessary. But Ilet that pass. 

The more serious trouble was the questions put to me by the reporters. Over in our chief centres of population we use another set altogether. I am thinking here especially of the kind of interview that I havegiven out in Youngstown, Ohio, and Richmond, Indiana, and Peterborough, Ontario. In all these places--for example, in Youngstown, Ohio thereporter asks as his first question, "What is your impression ofYoungstown?"

In London they don't. They seem indifferent to the fate of their city. Perhaps it is only English pride. For all I know they may have beenburning to know this, just as the Youngstown, Ohio, people are, andwere too proud to ask. In any case I will insert here the answer I hadwritten out in my pocket-book (one copy for each paper--the way we do itin Youngstown), and which read:

"London strikes me as emphatically a city with a future. Standing asshe does in the heart of a rich agricultural district with railroadconnection in all directions, and resting, as she must, on a bed of coaland oil, I prophesy that she will one day be a great city. "

The advantage of this is that it enables the reporter to get just theright kind of heading: PROPHESIES BRIGHT FUTURE FOR LONDON. Hadthat been used my name would have stood higher there than it doesto-day--unless the London people are very different from the people inYoungstown, which I doubt. As it is they don't know whether their futureis bright or is as dark as mud. But it's not my fault. The reportersnever asked me. 

If the first question had been handled properly it would have led upby an easy and pleasant transition to question two, which always runs:"Have you seen our factories?" To which the answer is:

"I have. I was taken out early this morning by a group of your citizens(whom I cannot thank enough) in a Ford car to look at your pail andbucket works. At eleven-thirty I was taken out by a second group in whatwas apparently the same car to see your soap works. I understand thatyou are the second nail-making centre east of the Alleghenies, and Iam amazed and appalled. This afternoon I am to be taken out to see yourwonderful system of disposing of sewerage, a thing which has fascinatedme from childhood. "

Now I am not offering any criticism of the London system ofinterviewing, but one sees at once how easy and friendly for allconcerned this Youngstown method is; how much better it works than theLondon method of asking questions about literature and art and difficultthings of that sort. I am sure that there must be soap works andperhaps a pail factory somewhere in London. But during my entire timeof residence there no one ever offered to take me to them. As for thesewerage--oh, well, I suppose we are more hospitable in America. Let itgo at that. 

I had my answer all written and ready, saying:

"I understand that London is the second greatest hop-consuming, thefourth hog-killing, and the first egg-absorbing centre in the world. "

But what I deplore still more, and I think with reason, is the totalomission of the familiar interrogation: "What is your impression of ourwomen?"

That's where the reporter over on our side hits the nail every time. That is the point at which we always nudge him in the ribs and buy hima cigar, and at which youth and age join in a sly jest together. Hereagain the sub-heading comes in so nicely: THINKS YOUNGSTOWN WOMENCHARMING. And they are. They are, everywhere. But I hate to think thatI had to keep my impression of London women unused in my pocket whilea young man asked me whether I thought modern literature owed more toobservation and less to inspiration than some other kind of literature. 

Now that's exactly the kind of question, the last one, that the Londonreporters seem to harp on. They seemed hipped about literature; andtheir questions are too difficult. One asked me whether the Americandrama was structurally inferior to the French. I don't call that fair. Itold him I didn't know; that I used to know the answer to it when I wasat college, but that I had forgotten it, and that, anyway, I am too welloff now to need to remember it. 

That question is only one of a long list that they asked me about artand literature. I missed nearly all of them, except one as to whether Ithought Al Jolson or Frank Tinney was the higher artist, and even thatone was asked by an American who is wasting himself on the London Press. 

I don't want to speak in anger. But I say it frankly, the atmosphereof these young men is not healthy, and I felt that I didn't want to seethem any more. 

Had there been a reporter of the kind we have at home in Montreal orToledo or Springfield, Illinois, I would have welcomed him at my hotel. He could have taken me out in a Ford car and shown me a factory and toldme how many cubic feet of water go down the Thames in an hour. I shouldhave been glad of his society, and he and I would have together made upthe kind of copy that people of his class and mine read. But I felt thatif any young man came along to ask about the structure of the moderndrama, he had better go on to the British Museum. 

Meantime as the reporters entirely failed to elicit the large fund ofinformation which I acquired, I reserve my impressions of London for achapter by themselves. 

III. Impressions of London

BEFORE setting down my impressions of the great English metropolis; aphrase which I have thought out as a designation for London; I think itproper to offer an initial apology. I find that I receive impressionswith great difficulty and have nothing of that easy facility in pickingthem up which is shown by British writers on America. I remember HughWalpole telling me that he could hardly walk down Broadway withoutgetting at least three dollars' worth and on Fifth Avenue five dollars'worth; and I recollect that St. John Ervine came up to my house inMontreal, drank a cup of tea, borrowed some tobacco, and got away withsixty dollars' worth of impressions of Canadian life and character. 

For this kind of thing I have only a despairing admiration. I can get animpression if I am given time and can think about it beforehand. Butit requires thought. This fact was all the more distressing to me in asmuch as one of the leading editors of America had made me a proposal, as honourable to him as it was lucrative to me, that immediately on myarrival in London;--or just before it, --I should send him a thousandwords on the genius of the English, and five hundred words on the spiritof London, and two hundred words of personal chat with Lord Northcliffe. This contract I was unable to fulfil except the personal chat with LordNorthcliffe, which proved an easy matter as he happened to be away inAustralia. 

But I have since pieced together my impressions as conscientiously as Icould and I present them here. If they seem to be a little bit modelledon British impressions of America I admit at once that the influenceis there. We writers all act and react on one another; and when I see agood thing in another man's book I react on it at once. 

London, the name of which is already known to millions of readers ofthis book, is beautifully situated on the river Thames, which heresweeps in a wide curve with much the same breadth and majesty as the St. Jo River at South Bend, Indiana. London, like South Bend itself, isa city of clean streets and admirable sidewalks, and has an excellentwater supply. One is at once struck by the number of excellent andwell-appointed motor cars that one sees on every hand, the neatnessof the shops and the cleanliness and cheerfulness of the faces of thepeople. In short, as an English visitor said of Peterborough, Ontario, there is a distinct note of optimism in the air. I forget who it was whosaid this, but at any rate I have been in Peterborough myself and I haveseen it. 

Contrary to my expectations and contrary to all our Transatlanticprecedents, I was not met at the depot by one of the leading citizens, himself a member of the Municipal Council, driving his own motor car. He did not tuck a fur rug about my knees, present me with a reallyexcellent cigar and proceed to drive me about the town so as to show methe leading points of interest, the municipal reservoir, the gas worksand the municipal abattoir. In fact he was not there. But I attributehis absence not to any lack of hospitality but merely to a certainreserve in the English character. They are as yet unused to the arrivalof lecturers. When they get to be more accustomed to their coming, theywill learn to take them straight to the municipal abattoir just as wedo. 

For lack of better guidance, therefore, I had to form my impressions ofLondon by myself. In the mere physical sense there is much to attractthe eye. The city is able to boast of many handsome public buildings andoffices which compare favourably with anything on the other side of theAtlantic. On the bank of the Thames itself rises the power house of theWestminster Electric Supply Corporation, a handsome modern edifice inthe later Japanese style. Close by are the commodious premises of theImperial Tobacco Company, while at no great distance the Chelsea GasWorks add a striking feature of rotundity. Passing northward, oneobserves Westminster Bridge, notable as a principal station of theunderground railway. This station and the one next above it, the CharingCross one, are connected by a wide thoroughfare called Whitehall. Oneof the best American drug stores is here situated. The upper end ofWhitehall opens into the majestic and spacious Trafalgar Square. Hereare grouped in imposing proximity the offices of the Canadian Pacificand other railways, The International Sleeping Car Company, the MontrealStar, and the Anglo-Dutch Bank. Two of the best American barber shopsare conveniently grouped near the Square, while the existence of a tallstone monument in the middle of the Square itself enables the Americanvisitor to find them without difficulty. Passing eastward towards theheart of the city, one notes on the left hand the imposing pile of St. Paul's, an enormous church with a round dome on the top, suggestingstrongly the first Church of Christ (Scientist) on Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. 

But the English churches not being labelled, the visitor is often at aloss to distinguish them. 

A little further on one finds oneself in the heart of financial London. Here all the great financial institutions of America--The First NationalBank of Milwaukee, The Planters National Bank of St. Louis, The MontanaFarmers Trust Co. , and many others, --have either their offices or theiragents. The Bank of England--which acts as the London Agent of TheMontana Farmers Trust Company, --and the London County Bank, whichrepresents the People's Deposit Co. , of Yonkers, N. Y. , are said to be inthe neighbourhood. 

This particular part of London is connected with the existence of thatstrange and mysterious thing called "the City. " I am still unable todecide whether the city is a person, or a place, or a thing. But as aform of being I give it credit for being the most emotional, the mostvolatile, the most peculiar creature in the world. You read in themorning paper that the City is "deeply depressed. " At noon it isreported that the City is "buoyant" and by four o'clock that the City is"wildly excited. "

I have tried in vain to find the causes of these peculiar changes offeeling. The ostensible reasons, as given in the newspaper, are sotrivial as to be hardly worthy of belief. For example, here is the kindof news that comes out from the City. "The news that a modus vivendihas been signed between the Sultan of Kowfat and the Shriek-ul-Islamhas caused a sudden buoyancy in the City. Steel rails which had beendepressed all morning reacted immediately while American mules rose upsharply to par. ". .. "Monsieur Poincar, speaking at Bordeaux, saidthat henceforth France must seek to retain by all possible means theping-pong championship of the world: values in the City collapsed atonce. ". .. "Despatches from Bombay say that the Shah of Persia yesterdayhanded a golden slipper to the Grand Vizier Feebli Pasha as a sign thathe might go and chase himself: the news was at once followed by a dropin oil, and a rapid attempt to liquidate everything that is fluid. .. "

But these mysteries of the City I do not pretend to explain. I havepassed through the place dozens of times and never noticed anythingparticular in the way of depression or buoyancy, or falling oil, orrising rails. But no doubt it is there. 

A little beyond the city and further down the river the visitor findsthis district of London terminating in the gloomy and forbiddingTower, the principal penitentiary of the city. Here Queen Victoria wasimprisoned for many years. 

Excellent gasoline can be had at the American Garage immediately northof the Tower, where motor repairs of all kinds are also carried on. 

These, however, are but the superficial pictures of London, gathered bythe eye of the tourist. A far deeper meaning is found in the examinationof the great historic monuments of the city. The principal ones ofthese are the Tower of London (just mentioned), the British Museum andWestminster Abbey. No visitor to London should fail to see these. Indeedhe ought to feel that his visit to England is wasted unless he has seenthem. I speak strongly on the point because I feel strongly on it. Tomy mind there is something about the grim fascination of the historicTower, the cloistered quiet of the Museum and the majesty of the ancientAbbey, which will make it the regret of my life that I didn't see anyone of the three. I fully meant to: but I failed: and I can only hopethat the circumstances of my failure may be helpful to other visitors. 

The Tower of London I most certainly intended to inspect. Each day, after the fashion of every tourist, I wrote for myself a little list ofthings to do and I always put the Tower of London on it. No doubt thereader knows the kind of little list that I mean. It runs:

 1. Go to bank. 

 2. Buy a shirt. 

 3. National Picture Gallery. 

 4. Razor blades. 

 5. Tower of London. 

 6. Soap. 

This itinerary, I regret to say, was never carried out in full. Iwas able at times both to go to the bank and buy a shirt in a singlemorning: at other times I was able to buy razor blades and almost tofind the National Picture Gallery. Meantime I was urged on all sides bymy London acquaintances not to fail to see the Tower. "There's a grimfascination about the place, " they said; "you mustn't miss it. " I amquite certain that in due course of time I should have made my way tothe Tower but for the fact that I made a fatal discovery. I found outthat the London people who urged me to go and see the Tower had neverseen it themselves. It appears they never go near it. One night at adinner a man next to me said, "Have you seen the Tower? You really oughtto. There's a grim fascination about it. " I looked him in the face. "Have you seen it yourself?" I asked. "Oh, yes, " he answered. "I've seenit. " "When?" I asked. The man hesitated. "When I was just a boy, " hesaid, "my father took me there. " "How long ago is that?" I enquired. "About forty years ago, " he answered;

"I always mean to go again but I don't somehow seem to get the time. "

After this I got to understand that when a Londoner says, "Have you seenthe Tower of London?" the answer is, "No, and neither have you. "

Take the parallel case of the British Museum. Here is a place that isa veritable treasure house. A repository of some of the most pricelesshistorical relics to be found upon the earth. It contains, for instance, the famous Papyrus Manuscript of Thotmes II of the first Egyptiandynasty--a thing known to scholars all over the world as the oldestextant specimen of what can be called writing; indeed one can here seethe actual evolution (I am quoting from a work of reference, or atleast from my recollection of it) from the ideographic cuneiform to thephonetic syllabic script. Every time I have read about that manuscriptand have happened to be in Orillia (Ontario) or Schenectady (N. Y. ) orany such place, I have felt that I would be willing to take a whole tripto England to have five minutes at the British Museum, just five, tolook at that papyrus. Yet as soon as I got to London this changed. Therailway stations of London have been so arranged that to get to anytrain for the north or west, the traveller must pass the British Museum. The first time I went by it in a taxi, I felt quite a thrill. "Insidethose walls, " I thought to myself, "is the manuscript of Thotmes II. "The next time I actually stopped the taxi. "Is that the British Museum?"I asked the driver, "I think it is something of the sort, sir, " hesaid. I hesitated. "Drive me, " I said, "to where I can buy safety razorblades. "

After that I was able to drive past the Museum with the quiet assuranceof a Londoner, and to take part in dinner table discussions as towhether the British Museum or the Louvre contains the greater treasures. It is quite easy any way. All you have to do is to remember that TheWinged Victory of Samothrace is in the Louvre and the papyrus of ThotmesII (or some such document) is in the Museum. 

The Abbey, I admit, is indeed majestic. I did not intend to miss goinginto it. But I felt, as so many tourists have, that I wanted to enterit in the proper frame of mind. I never got into the frame of mind; atleast not when near the Abbey itself. I have been in exactly that frameof mind when on State Street, Chicago, or on King Street, Toronto, oranywhere three thousand miles away from the Abbey. But by bad luck Inever struck both the frame of mind and the Abbey at the same time. 

But the Londoners, after all, in not seeing their own wonders, are onlylike the rest of the world. The people who live in Buffalo never goto see Niagara Falls; people in Cleveland don't know which is Mr. Rockefeller's house, and people live and even die in New York withoutgoing up to the top of the Woolworth Building. And anyway the pastis remote and the present is near. I know a cab driver in the city ofQuebec whose business in life it is to drive people up to see the Plainsof Abraham, but unless they bother him to do it, he doesn't show themthe spot where Wolfe fell: what he does point out with real zest is theplace where the Mayor and the City Council sat on the wooden platformthat they put up for the municipal celebration last summer. 

No description of London would be complete without a reference, howeverbrief, to the singular salubrity and charm of the London climate. Thisis seen at its best during the autumn and winter months. The climate ofLondon and indeed of England generally is due to the influence of theGulf Stream. The way it works is thus: The Gulf Stream, as it nears theshores of the British Isles and feels the propinquity of Ireland, risesinto the air, turns into soup, and comes down on London. At times thesoup is thin and is in fact little more than a mist: at other times ithas the consistency of a thick Potage St. Germain. London people are alittle sensitive on the point and flatter their atmosphere by calling ita fog: but it is not: it is soup. The notion that no sunlight ever getsthrough and that in the London winter people never see the sun isof course a ridiculous error, circulated no doubt by the jealousy offoreign nations. I have myself seen the sun plainly visible in London, without the aid of glasses, on a November day in broad daylight; andagain one night about four o'clock in the afternoon I saw the sundistinctly appear through the clouds. The whole subject of daylight inthe London winter is, however, one which belongs rather to the techniqueof astronomy than to a book of description. In practice daylight isbut little used. Electric lights are burned all the time in all houses, buildings, railway stations and clubs. This practice which is nowuniversally observed is called Daylight Saving. 

But the distinction between day and night during the London winter isstill quite obvious to any one of an observant mind. It is indicated byvarious signs such as the striking of clocks, the tolling of bells, theclosing of saloons, and the raising of taxi rates. It is much less easyto distinguish the technical approach of night in the other cities ofEngland that lie outside the confines, physical and intellectual, ofLondon and live in a continuous gloom. In such places as the greatmanufacturing cities, Buggingham-under-Smoke, or Gloomsbury-on-Ooze, night may be said to be perpetual. 

 *****

I had written the whole of the above chapter and looked on it asfinished when I realised that I had made a terrible omission. Ineglected to say anything about the Mind of London. This is a thing thatis always put into any book of discovery and observation and I can onlyapologise for not having discussed it sooner. I am quite familiar withother people's chapters on "The Mind of America, " and "The ChineseMind, " and so forth. Indeed, so far as I know it has turned out thatalmost everybody all over the world has a mind. Nobody nowadays travels, even in Central America or Thibet, without bringing back a chapter on"The Mind of Costa Rica, " or on the "Psychology of the Mongolian. " Eventhe gentler peoples such as the Burmese, the Siamese, the Hawaiians, andthe Russians, though they have no minds are written up as souls. 

It is quite obvious then that there is such a thing as the mind ofLondon: and it is all the more culpable in me to have neglected it in asmuch as my editorial friend in New York had expressly mentioned it tome before I sailed. "What, " said he, leaning far over his desk after hismassive fashion and reaching out into the air, "what is in the minds ofthese people? Are they, " he added, half to himself, though I heard him, "are they thinking? And, if they think, what do they think?"

I did therefore, during my stay in London, make an accurate study of thethings that London seemed to be thinking about. As a comparative basisfor this study I brought with me a carefully selected list of the thingsthat New York was thinking about at the moment. These I selectedfrom the current newspapers in the proportions to the amount of spaceallotted to each topic and the size of the heading that announced it. Having thus a working idea of what I may call the mind of New York, Iwas able to collect and set beside it a list of similar topics, takenfrom the London Press to represent the mind of London. The two placedside by side make an interesting piece of psychological analysis. Theyread as follows:

 THE MIND OF NEW YORK THE MIND OF LONDON What is it thinking? What is it thinking?

 1. Do chorus girls make 1. Do chorus girls marry good wives? well?

 2. Is red hair a sign of 2. What is red hair a temperament? sign of?

 3. Can a woman be in 3. Can a man be in love love with two men? with two women?

 4. Is fat a sign of genius? 4. Is genius a sign of fat?

Looking over these lists, I think it is better to present them withoutcomment; I feel sure that somewhere or other in them one should detectthe heart-throbs, the pulsations of two great peoples. But I don't getit. In fact the two lists look to me terribly like "the mind of CostaRica. "

The same editor also advised me to mingle, at his expense, in thebrilliant intellectual life of England. "There, " he said, "is a coterieof men, probably the most brilliant group East of the Mississippi. " (Ithink he said the Mississippi). "You will find them, " he said to me, "brilliant, witty, filled with repartee. " He suggested that Ishould send him back, as far as words could express it, some of thisbrilliance. I was very glad to be able to do this, although I fearthat the results were not at all what he had anticipated. Still, I heldconversations with these people and I gave him, in all truthfulness, theresult. Sir James Barrie said, "This is really very exceptional weatherfor this time of year. " Cyril Maude said, "And so a Martini cocktailis merely gin and vermouth. " Ian Hay said, "You'll find the undergroundever so handy once you understand it. "

I have a lot more of these repartees that I could insert here if it wasnecessary. But somehow I feel that it is not. 

IV. A Clear View of the Government and Politics of England

A LOYAL British subject like myself in dealing with the government ofEngland should necessarily begin with a discussion of the monarchy. Ihave never had the pleasure of meeting the King, --except once on theG. T. R. Platform in Orillia, Ontario, when he was the Duke of York andI was one of the welcoming delegates of the town council. No doubt hewould recall it in a minute. 

But in England the King is surrounded by formality and circumstance. Onmany mornings I waited round the gates of Buckingham Palace but I foundit quite impossible to meet the King in the quiet sociable way in whichone met him in Orillia. The English, it seems, love to make the kingshipa subject of great pomp and official etiquette. In Canada it is quitedifferent. Perhaps we understand kings and princes better than theEnglish do. At any rate we treat them in a far more human heart-to-heartfashion than is the English custom, and they respond to it at once. Iremember when King George--he was, as I say, Duke of York then--came upto Orillia, Ontario, how we all met him in a delegation on the platform. Bob Curran--Bob was Mayor of the town that year--went up to him andshook hands with him and invited him to come right on up to the OrilliaHouse where he had a room reserved for him. Charlie Janes and MelTudhope and the other boys who were on the town Council gathered roundthe royal prince and shook hands and told him that he simply must stayover. George Rapley, the bank manager, said that if he wanted a chequecashed or anything of that sort to come right into the Royal Bank andhe would do it for him. The prince had two aides-de-camp with him and asecretary, but Bob Curran said to bring them uptown too and it would beall right. We had planned to have an oyster supper for the Prince at JimSmith's hotel and then take him either to the Y. M. C. A. Pool Room or elseover to the tea social in the basement of the Presbyterian Church. 

Unluckily the prince couldn't stay. It turned out that he had to getright back into his train and go on to Peterborough, Ontario, where theywere to have a brass band to meet him, which naturally he didn't want tomiss. 

But the point is that it was a real welcome. And you could see that theprince appreciated it. There was a warmth and a meaning to it that theprince understood at once. It was a pity that he couldn't have stayedover and had time to see the carriage factory and the new sewerageplant. We all told the prince that he must come back and he said that ifhe could he most certainly would. When the prince's train pulled outof the station and we all went back uptown together (it was beforeprohibition came to Ontario) you could feel that the institution ofroyalty was quite solid in Orillia for a generation. 

But you don't get that sort of thing in England. 

There's a formality and coldness in all their dealings with royalty thatwould never go down with us. They like to have the King come and openParliament dressed in royal robes, and with a clattering troop ofsoldiers riding in front of him. As for taking him over to the Y. M. C. A. To play pin pool, they never think of it. They have seen so much of themere outside of his kingship that they don't understand the heart of itas we do in Canada. 

But let us turn to the House of Commons: for no description of Englandwould be complete without at least some mention of this interestingbody. Indeed for the ordinary visitor to London the greatest interest ofall attaches to the spacious and magnificent Parliament Buildings. TheHouse of Commons is commodiously situated beside the River Thames. Theprincipal features of the House are the large lunch room on the westernside and the tea-room on the terrace on the eastern. A series of smallerluncheon rooms extend (apparently) all round about the premises: while acommodious bar offers a ready access to the members at all hours of theday. While any members are in the bar a light is kept burning in thetall Clock Tower at one corner of the building, but when the bar isclosed the light is turned off by whichever of the Scotch members leaveslast. There is a handsome legislative chamber attached to the premisesfrom which--so the antiquarians tell us--the House of Commons took itsname. But it is not usual now for the members to sit in the legislativechamber as the legislation is now all done outside, either at the homeof Mr. Lloyd George, or at the National Liberal Club, or at one or otherof the newspaper offices. The House, however, is called together atvery frequent intervals to give it an opportunity of hearing the latestlegislation and allowing the members to indulge in cheers, sighs, groans, votes and other expressions of vitality. After having cheered asmuch as is good for it, it goes back again to the lunch rooms and goeson eating till needed again. 

It is, however, an entire exaggeration to say that the House of Commonsno longer has a real share in the government of England. This is not so. Anybody connected with the government values the House of Commons in ahigh degree. One of the leading newspaper proprietors of London himselftold me that he has always felt that if he had the House of Commons onhis side he had a very valuable ally. Many of the labour leaders areinclined to regard the House of Commons as of great utility, while theleading women's organizations, now that women are admitted as members, may be said to regard the House as one of themselves. 

Looking around to find just where the natural service of the House ofCommons comes in, I am inclined to think that it must be in the practiceof "asking questions" in the House. Whenever anything goes wrong amember rises and asks a question. He gets up, for example, with a littlepaper in his hand, and asks the government if ministers are aware thatthe Khedive of Egypt was seen yesterday wearing a Turkish Tarbosh. Ministers say very humbly that they hadn't known it, and a thrill runsthrough the whole country. The members can apparently ask any questionsthey like. In the repeated visits which I made to the gallery of theHouse of Commons I was unable to find any particular sense or meaningin the questions asked, though no doubt they had an intimate bearingon English politics not clear to an outsider like myself. I heard onemember ask the government whether they were aware that herrings werebeing imported from Hamburg to Harwich. The government said no. Anothermember rose and asked the government whether they considered Shakespereor Moliere the greater dramatic artist. The government answered thatministers were taking this under their earnest consideration and thata report would be submitted to Parliament. Another member asked thegovernment if they knew who won the Queen's Plate this season atToronto. They did, --in fact this member got in wrong, as this is thevery thing that the government do know. Towards the close of the eveninga member rose and asked the government if they knew what time it was. The Speaker, however, ruled this question out of order on the groundthat it had been answered before. 

The Parliament Buildings are so vast that it is not possible to statewith certainty what they do, or do not, contain. But it is generallysaid that somewhere in the building is the House of Lords. When theymeet they are said to come together very quietly shortly before thedinner hour, take a glass of dry sherry and a biscuit (they are allabstemious men), reject whatever bills may be before them at the moment, take another dry sherry and then adjourn for two years. 

The public are no longer allowed unrestricted access to the Houses ofParliament; its approaches are now strictly guarded by policemen. Inorder to obtain admission it is necessary either to (A) communicatein writing with the Speaker of the House, enclosing certificates ofnaturalization and proof of identity, or (B) give the policeman fiveshillings. Method B is the one usually adopted. On great nights, however, when the House of Commons is sitting and is about to dosomething important, such as ratifying a Home Rule Bill or cheering, or welcoming a new lady member, it is not possible to enter by merelybribing the policeman with five shillings; it takes a pound. The Englishpeople complain bitterly of the rich Americans who have in this waycorrupted the London public. Before they were corrupted they would doanything for sixpence. 

This peculiar vein of corruption by the Americans runs like a thread, Imay say, through all the texture of English life. Among those who havebeen principally exposed to it are the servants, --especially butlers andchauffeurs, hotel porters, bell-boys, railway porters and guards, alltaxi-drivers, pew-openers, curates, bishops, and a large part of thepeerage. 

The terrible ravages that have been made by the Americans on Englishmorality are witnessed on every hand. Whole classes of society arehopelessly damaged. I have it in the evidence of the English themselvesand there seems to be no doubt of the fact. Till the Americans came toEngland the people were an honest, law-abiding race, respecting theirsuperiors and despising those below them. They had never been corruptedby money and their employers extended to them in this regard theirtenderest solicitude. Then the Americans came. Servants ceased to bewhat they were; butlers were hopelessly damaged; hotel porters becamea wreck; taxi-drivers turned out thieves; curates could no longer betrusted to handle money; peers sold their daughters at a million dollarsa piece or three for two. In fact the whole kingdom began to deterioratetill it got where it is now. At present after a rich American has stayedin any English country house, its owners find that they can donothing with the butler; a wildness has come over the man. There is arestlessness in his demeanour and a strange wistful look in his eyeas if seeking for something. In many cases, so I understand, after anAmerican has stayed in a country house the butler goes insane. He isfound in his pantry counting over the sixpence given to him by a Duke, and laughing to himself. He has to be taken in charge by the police. With him generally go the chauffeur, whose mind has broken down fromdriving a rich American twenty miles; and the gardener, who is foundtearing up raspberry bushes by the roots to see if there is any moneyunder them; and the local curate whose brain has collapsed or expanded, I forget which, when a rich American gave him fifty dollars for his soupkitchen. 

There are, it is true, a few classes that have escaped this contagion, shepherds living in the hills, drovers, sailors, fishermen and suchlike. I remember the first time I went into the English country-sidebeing struck with the clean, honest look in the people's faces. Irealised exactly where they got it: they had never seen any Americans. I remember speaking to an aged peasant down in Somerset. "Have you everseen any Americans?" "Nah, " he said, "uz eeard a mowt o' 'em, zir, but uz zeen nowt o' 'em. " It was clear that the noble fellow was quiteundamaged by American contact. 

Now the odd thing about this corruption is that exactly the same idea isheld on the other side of the water. It is a known fact that if a youngEnglish Lord comes to an American town he puts it to the bad in oneweek. Socially the whole place goes to pieces. Girls whose parents arein the hardware business and who used to call their father "pop" beginto talk of precedence and whether a Duchess Dowager goes in to dinnerahead of or behind a countess scavenger. After the young Lord hasattended two dances and one tea-social in the Methodist Church SundaySchool Building (Adults 25 cents, children 10 cents--all welcome. ) thereis nothing for the young men of the town to do except to drive him outor go further west. 

One can hardly wonder then that this general corruption has extendedeven to the policemen who guard the Houses of Parliament. On the otherhand this vein of corruption has not extended to English politics. Unlike ours, English politics, --one hears it on every hand, --are pure. Ours unfortunately are known to be not so. The difference seems tobe that our politicians will do anything for money and the Englishpoliticians won't; they just take the money and won't do a thing for it. 

Somehow there always seems to be a peculiar interest about Englishpolitical questions that we don't find elsewhere. At home in Canada ourpolitics turn on such things as how much money the Canadian NationalRailways lose as compared with how much they could lose if they reallytried; on whether the Grain Growers of Manitoba should be allowed toimport ploughs without paying a duty or to pay a duty without importingthe ploughs. Our members at Ottawa discuss such things as highwaysubsidies, dry farming, the Bank Act, and the tariff on hardware. Thesethings leave me absolutely cold. To be quite candid there is somethingterribly plebeian about them. In short, our politics are what we call inFrench "peuple. "

But when one turns to England, what a striking difference! The English, with the whole huge British Empire to fish in and the European system todraw upon, can always dig up some kind of political topic of discussionthat has a real charm about it. One month you find English politicsturning on the Oasis of Merv and the next on the hinterland of Albania;or a member rises in the Commons with a little bit of paper in his handand desires to ask the foreign secretary if he is aware that the Ahkoondof Swat is dead. The foreign secretary states that the government haveno information other than that the Ahkoond was dead a month ago. Thereis a distinct sensation in the House at the realisation that the Ahkoondhas been dead a month without the House having known that he was alive. The sensation is conveyed to the Press and the afternoon papers appearwith large headings, THE AHKOOND OF SWAT IS DEAD. The public who havenever heard of the Ahkoond bare their heads in a moment in a pause topray for the Ahkoond's soul. Then the cables take up the refrain andword is flashed all over the world, The Ahkoond of Swat is Dead. 

There was a Canadian journalist and poet once who was so impressed withthe news that the Ahkoond was dead, so bowed down with regret that hehad never known the Ahkoond while alive, that he forthwith wrote a poemin memory of The Ahkoond of Swat. I have always thought that the reasonof the wide admiration that Lannigan's verses received was not merelybecause of the brilliant wit that is in them but because in a widersense they typify so beautifully the scope of English politics. Thedeath of the Ahkoond of Swat, and whether Great Britain should supportas his successor Mustalpha El Djin or Kamu Flaj, --there is somethingworth talking of over an afternoon tea table. But suppose that the wholeof the Manitoba Grain Growers were to die. What could one say about it?They'd be dead, that's all. 

So it is that people all over the world turn to English politics withinterest. What more delightful than to open an atlas, find out where thenew kingdom of Hejaz is, and then violently support the British claim toa protectorate over it. Over in America we don't understand this sort ofthing. There is naturally little chance to do so and we don't knowhow to use it when it comes. I remember that when a chance did come inconnection with the great Venezuela dispute over the ownership of thejungles and mud-flats of British Guiana, the American papers at onceinserted headings, WHERE IS THE ESSIQUIBO RIVER? That spoiled the wholething. If you admit that you don't know where a place is, then thebottom is knocked out of all discussion. But if you pretend that you do, then you are all right. Mr. Lloyd George is said to have caused greatamusement at the Versailles Conference by admitting that he hadn't knownwhere Teschen was. So at least it was reported in the papers; and forall I know it might even have been true. But the fun that he raised wasnot really half what could have been raised. I have it on good authoritythat two of the American delegates hadn't known where Austria Properwas and thought that Unredeemed Italy was on the East side of New York, while the Chinese Delegate thought that the Cameroons were part ofScotland. But it is these little geographic niceties that lend a charmto European politics that ours lack forever. 

I don't mean to say the English politics always turn on romantic placesor on small questions. They don't. They often include questions of thelargest order. But when the English introduce a really large question asthe basis of their politics they like to select one that is insoluble. This guarantees that it will last. Take for example the rights of theCrown as against the people. That lasted for one hundred years, --all theseventeenth century. In Oklahoma or in Alberta they would have called aconvention on the question, settled it in two weeks and spoiled it forfurther use. In the same way the Protestant Reformation was used for ahundred years and the Reform Bill for a generation. 

At the present time the genius of the English for politics has selectedas their insoluble political question the topic of the German indemnity. The essence of the problem as I understand it may be stated as follows:

It was definitely settled by the Conference at Versailles that Germanyis to pay the Allies 3, 912, 486, 782, 421 marks. I think that is thecorrect figure, though of course I am speaking only from memory. At anyrate, the correct figure is within a hundred billion marks of the above. 

The sum to be paid was not reached without a great deal of discussion. Monsieur Briand, the French Minister, is reported to have thrown out thefigure 4, 281, 390, 687, 471. But Mr. Lloyd George would not pick it up. Nordo I blame him unless he had a basket to pick it up with. 

Lloyd George's point of view was that the Germans could very properlypay a limited amount such as 3, 912, 486, 782, 421 marks, but it was notfeasible to put on them a burden of 4, 281, 390, 687, 471 marks. 

By the way, if any one at this point doubts the accuracy of the figuresjust given, all he has to do is to take the amount of the indemnity asstated in gold marks and then multiply it by the present value of themark and he will find to his chagrin that the figures are correct. If heis still not satisfied I refer him to a book of Logarithms. If he is notsatisfied with that I refer him to any work on conic sections and if notconvinced even then I refer him so far that he will never come back. 

The indemnity being thus fixed, the next question is as to the method ofcollecting it. In the first place there is no intention of allowing theGermans to pay in actual cash. If they do this they will merely inflatethe English beyond what is bearable. England has been inflated now foreight years and has had enough of it. 

In the second place, it is understood that it will not do to allow theGermans to offer 4, 218, 390, 687, 471 marks' worth of coal. It is morethan the country needs. 

What is more, if the English want coal they propose to buy it in anordinary decent way from a Christian coal-dealer in their own country. They do not purpose to ruin their own coal industry for the sake ofbuilding up the prosperity of the German nation. 

What I say of coal is applied with equal force to any offers of food, grain, oil, petroleum, gas, or any other natural product. Payment in anyof these will be sternly refused. Even now it is all the British farmerscan do to live and for some it is more. Many of them are having to selloff their motors and pianos and to send their sons to college to work. At the same time, the German producer by depressing the mark further andfurther is able to work fourteen hours a day. This argument may not bequite correct but I take it as I find it in the London Press. WhetherI state it correctly or not, it is quite plain that the problem isinsoluble. That is all that is needed in first class politics. 

A really good question like the German reparation question will go onfor a century. Undoubtedly in the year 2000 A. D. , a British Chancellorof the Exchequer will still be explaining that the government is fullyresolved that Germany shall pay to the last farthing (cheers): but thatministers have no intention of allowing the German payment to take aform that will undermine British industry (wild applause): that theGerman indemnity shall be so paid that without weakening the power ofthe Germans, to buy from us it shall increase our power of selling tothem. 

Such questions last forever. 

On the other hand sometimes by sheer carelessness a question getssettled and passes out of politics. This, so we are given to understand, has happened to the Irish question. It is settled. A group of Irishdelegates and British ministers got together round a table and settledit. The settlement has since been celebrated at a demonstration ofbrotherhood by the Irish Americans of New York with only six casualties. Henceforth the Irish question passes into history. There may be some oddfighting along the Ulster border, or a little civil war with perhapsa little revolution every now and then, but as a question the thing isfinished. 

I must say that I for one am very sorry to think that the Irish questionis gone. We shall miss it greatly. Debating societies which haveflourished on it ever since 1886 will be wrecked for want of it. Dinnerparties will now lose half the sparkle of their conversation. It will beno longer possible to make use of such good old remarks as, "After allthe Irish are a gifted people, " or, "You must remember that fifty percent of the great English generals were Irish. "

The settlement turned out to be a very simple affair. Ireland was merelygiven dominion status. What that is, no one knows, but it means that theIrish have now got it and that they sink from the high place that theyhad in the white light of publicity to the level of the Canadians or theNew Zealanders. 

Whether it is quite a proper thing to settle trouble by conferringdominion status on it, is open to question. It is a practice that isbound to spread. It is rumoured that it is now contemplated to conferdominion status upon the Borough of Poplar and on the Cambridgeundergraduates. It is even understood that at the recent disarmamentconference England offered to confer dominion status on the UnitedStates. President Harding would assuredly have accepted it at once butfor the protest of Mr. Briand, who claimed that any such offer must beaccompanied by a permission to increase the French fire-brigade by fiftyper cent. 

It is lamentable, too, that at the very same moment when the Irishquestion was extinguished, the Naval Question which had lasted fornearly fifty years was absolutely obliterated by disarmament. Henceforththe alarm of invasion is a thing of the past and the navy practicallyneedless. Beyond keeping a fleet in the North Sea and one on theMediterranean, and maintaining a patrol all round the rim of the PacificOcean, Britain will cease to be a naval power. A mere annual expenditureof fifty million pounds sterling will suffice for such thin pretence ofnaval preparedness as a disarmed nation will have to maintain. 

This thing too, came as a surprise, or at least a surprise to thegeneral public who are unaware of the workings of diplomacy. Those whoknow about such things were fully aware of what would happen if a wholelot of British sailors and diplomatists and journalists were exposedto the hospitalities of Washington. The British and Americans are bothalike. You can't drive them or lead them or coerce them, but if you givethem a cigar they'll do anything. The inner history of the conference isonly just beginning to be known. But it is whispered that immediatelyon his arrival Mr. Balfour was given a cigar by President Harding. Mr. Balfour at once offered to scrap five ships, and invited the entireAmerican cabinet into the British Embassy, where Sir A. Geddes was rashenough to offer them champagne. 

The American delegates immediately offered to scrap ten ships. Mr. Balfour, who simply cannot be outdone in international courtesy, saw theten and raised it to twenty. President Harding saw the twenty, raised itto thirty, and sent out for more poker chips. 

At the close of the play Lord Beatty, who is urbanity itself, offeredto scrap Portsmouth Dockyard, and asked if anybody present would likeCanada. President Harding replied with his customary tact that ifEngland wanted the Philippines, he would think it what he would term aresiduum of normalcy to give them away. There is no telling what mighthave happened had not Mr. Briand interposed to say that any transferof the Philippines must be regarded as a signal for a twenty per centincrease in the Boy Scouts of France. As a tactful conclusion to thematter President Harding raised Mr. Balfour to the peerage. 

As things are, disarmament coming along with the Irish settlement, leaves English politics in a bad way. The general outlook is toopeaceful altogether. One looks round almost in vain for any of those"strained relations" which used to be the very basis of English foreignpolicy. In only one direction do I see light for English politics, andthat is over towards Czecho-Slovakia. It appears that Czecho-Slovakiaowes the British Exchequer fifty million sterling. I cannot quote theexact figure, but it is either fifty million or fifty billion. In eithercase Czecho-Slovakia is unable to pay. The announcement has just beenmade by M. Sgitzch, the new treasurer, that the country is bankrupt orat least that he sees his way to make it so in a week. 

It has been at once reported in City circles that there are "strainedrelations" between Great Britain and Czecho-Slovakia. Now what I adviseis, that if the relations are strained, keep them so. England has lostnearly all the strained relations she ever had; let her cherish the fewthat she still has. I know that there are other opinions. The suggestionhas been at once made for a "round table conference, " at which the wholething can be freely discussed without formal protocols and somethinglike a "gentleman's agreement" reached. I say, don't do it. England isbeing ruined by these round table conferences. They are sitting round inCairo and Calcutta and Capetown, filling all the best hotels and eatingout the substance of the taxpayer. 

I am told that Lloyd George has offered to go to Czecho-Slovakia. Heshould be stopped. It is said that Professor Keynes has proved thatthe best way to deal with the debt of Czecho-Slovakia is to send themwhatever cash we have left, thereby turning the exchange upside downon them, and forcing them to buy all their Christmas presents inManchester. 

It is wiser not to do anything of the sort. England should send thema good old-fashioned ultimatum, mobilise all the naval officers at theEmbankment hotels, raise the income tax another sixpence, and defy them. 

If that were done it might prove a successful first step in bringingEnglish politics back to the high plane of conversational interest fromwhich they are threatening to fall. 

V. Oxford as I See It

MY private station being that of a university professor, I was naturallydeeply interested in the system of education in England. I was thereforeled to make a special visit to Oxford and to submit the place to asearching scrutiny. Arriving one afternoon at four o'clock, I stayed atthe Mitre Hotel and did not leave until eleven o'clock next morning. The whole of this time, except for one hour spent in addressing theundergraduates, was devoted to a close and eager study of the greatuniversity. When I add to this that I had already visited Oxford in 1907and spent a Sunday at All Souls with Colonel L. S. Amery, it willbe seen at once that my views on Oxford are based upon observationsextending over fourteen years. 

At any rate I can at least claim that my acquaintance with the Britishuniversity is just as good a basis for reflection and judgment as thatof the numerous English critics who come to our side of the water. Ihave known a famous English author to arrive at Harvard University inthe morning, have lunch with President Lowell, and then write a wholechapter on the Excellence of Higher Education in America. I have knownanother one come to Harvard, have lunch with President Lowell, and do anentire book on the Decline of Serious Study in America. Or take the caseof my own university. I remember Mr. Rudyard Kipling coming to McGilland saying in his address to the undergraduates at 2. 30 P. M. , "Youhave here a great institution. " But how could he have gathered thisinformation? As far as I know he spent the entire morning with SirAndrew Macphail in his house beside the campus, smoking cigarettes. WhenI add that he distinctly refused to visit the Palaeontologic Museum, that he saw nothing of our new hydraulic apparatus, or of our classesin Domestic Science, his judgment that we had here a great institutionseems a little bit superficial. I can only put beside it, to redeem itin some measure, the hasty and ill-formed judgment expressed by LordMilner, "McGill is a noble university": and the rash and indiscreetexpression of the Prince of Wales, when we gave him an LL. D. Degree, "McGill has a glorious future. "

To my mind these unthinking judgments about our great college do harm, and I determined, therefore, that anything that I said about Oxfordshould be the result of the actual observation and real study based upona bona fide residence in the Mitre Hotel. 

On the strength of this basis of experience I am prepared to makethe following positive and emphatic statements. Oxford is a nobleuniversity. It has a great past. It is at present the greatestuniversity in the world: and it is quite possible that it has a greatfuture. Oxford trains scholars of the real type better than any otherplace in the world. Its methods are antiquated. It despises science. Itslectures are rotten. It has professors who never teach and students whonever learn. It has no order, no arrangement, no system. Its curriculumis unintelligible. It has no president. It has no state legislature totell it how to teach, and yet, --it gets there. Whether we like itor not, Oxford gives something to its students, a life and a mode ofthought, which in America as yet we can emulate but not equal. 

If anybody doubts this let him go and take a room at the Mitre Hotel(ten and six for a wainscotted bedroom, period of Charles I) and studythe place for himself. 

These singular results achieved at Oxford are all the more surprisingwhen one considers the distressing conditions under which the studentswork. The lack of an adequate building fund compels them to go onworking in the same old buildings which they have had for centuries. The buildings at Brasenose College have not been renewed since the year1525. In New College and Magdalen the students are still housed in theold buildings erected in the sixteenth century. At Christ Church I wasshown a kitchen which had been built at the expense of Cardinal Wolseyin 1527. Incredible though it may seem, they have no other place to cookin than this and are compelled to use it to-day. On the day when Isaw this kitchen, four cooks were busy roasting an ox whole for thestudents' lunch: this at least is what I presumed they were doing fromthe size of the fire-place used, but it may not have been an ox; perhapsit was a cow. On a huge table, twelve feet by six and made of slabs ofwood five inches thick, two other cooks were rolling out a game pie. Iestimated it as measuring three feet across. In this rude way, unchangedsince the time of Henry VIII, the unhappy Oxford students are fed. Icould not help contrasting it with the cosy little boarding houseson Cottage Grove Avenue where I used to eat when I was a student atChicago, or the charming little basement dining-rooms of the students'boarding houses in Toronto. But then, of course, Henry VIII never livedin Toronto. 

The same lack of a building-fund necessitates the Oxford students, living in the identical old boarding houses they had in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. Technically they are called "quadrangles, ""closes" and "rooms"; but I am so broken in to the usage of my studentdays that I can't help calling them boarding houses. In many of thesethe old stairway has been worn down by the feet of ten generations ofstudents: the windows have little latticed panes: there are old namescarved here and there upon the stone, and a thick growth of ivy coversthe walls. The boarding house at St. John's College dates from 1509, theone at Christ Church from the same period. A few hundred thousand poundswould suffice to replace these old buildings with neat steel and brickstructures like the normal school at Schenectady, N. Y. , or the PeelStreet High School at Montreal. But nothing is done. A movement wasindeed attempted last autumn towards removing the ivy from the walls, but the result was unsatisfactory and they are putting it back. Any onecould have told them beforehand that the mere removal of the ivy wouldnot brighten Oxford up, unless at the same time one cleared the stonesof the old inscriptions, put in steel fire-escapes, and in fact broughtthe boarding houses up to date. 

But Henry VIII being dead, nothing was done. Yet in spite of itsdilapidated buildings and its lack of fire-escapes, ventilation, sanitation, and up-to-date kitchen facilities, I persist in my assertionthat I believe that Oxford, in its way, is the greatest universityin the world. I am aware that this is an extreme statement and needsexplanation. Oxford is much smaller in numbers, for example, than theState University of Minnesota, and is much poorer. It has, or had tillyesterday, fewer students than the University of Toronto. To mentionOxford beside the 26, 000 students of Columbia University soundsridiculous. In point of money, the 39, 000, 000 dollar endowment of theUniversity of Chicago, and the $35, 000, 000 one of Columbia, and the$43, 000, 000 of Harvard seem to leave Oxford nowhere. Yet the peculiarthing is that it is not nowhere. By some queer process of its own itseems to get there every time. It was therefore of the very greatestinterest to me, as a profound scholar, to try to investigate just howthis peculiar excellence of Oxford arises. 

It can hardly be due to anything in the curriculum or programmeof studies. Indeed, to any one accustomed to the best models of auniversity curriculum as it flourishes in the United States and Canada, the programme of studies is frankly quite laughable. There isless Applied Science in the place than would be found with us in atheological college. Hardly a single professor at Oxford would recognisea dynamo if he met it in broad daylight. The Oxford student learnsnothing of chemistry, physics, heat, plumbing, electric wiring, gas-fitting or the use of a blow-torch. Any American college studentcan run a motor car, take a gasoline engine to pieces, fix a washer on akitchen tap, mend a broken electric bell, and give an expert opinion onwhat has gone wrong with the furnace. It is these things indeed whichstamp him as a college man, and occasion a very pardonable pride in theminds of his parents. 

But in all these things the Oxford student is the merest amateur. 

This is bad enough. But after all one might say this is only themechanical side of education. True: but one searches in vain in theOxford curriculum for any adequate recognition of the higher and morecultured studies. Strange though it seems to us on this side ofthe Atlantic, there are no courses at Oxford in Housekeeping, or inSalesmanship, or in Advertising, or on Comparative Religion, or onthe influence of the Press. There are no lectures whatever on HumanBehaviour, on Altruism, on Egotism, or on the Play of Wild Animals. Apparently, the Oxford student does not learn these things. This cutshim off from a great deal of the larger culture of our side of theAtlantic. "What are you studying this year?" I once asked a fourth yearstudent at one of our great colleges. "I am electing Salesmanship andReligion, " he answered. Here was a young man whose training was destinedinevitably to turn him into a moral business man: either that ornothing. At Oxford Salesmanship is not taught and Religion takes thefeeble form of the New Testament. The more one looks at these things themore amazing it becomes that Oxford can produce any results at all. 

The effect of the comparison is heightened by the peculiar positionoccupied at Oxford by the professors' lectures. In the colleges ofCanada and the United States the lectures are supposed to be a reallynecessary and useful part of the student's training. Again and again Ihave heard the graduates of my own college assert that they had gotas much, or nearly as much, out of the lectures at college as out ofathletics or the Greek letter society or the Banjo and Mandolin Club. In short, with us the lectures form a real part of the college life. AtOxford it is not so. The lectures, I understand, are given and may evenbe taken. But they are quite worthless and are not supposed to haveanything much to do with the development of the student's mind. "Thelectures here, " said a Canadian student to me, "are punk. " I appealed toanother student to know if this was so. "I don't know whether I'd callthem exactly punk, " he answered, "but they're certainly rotten. " Otherjudgments were that the lectures were of no importance: that nobody tookthem: that they don't matter: that you can take them if you like: thatthey do you no harm. 

It appears further that the professors themselves are not keen on theirlectures. If the lectures are called for they give them; if not, theprofessor's feelings are not hurt. He merely waits and rests his brainuntil in some later year the students call for his lectures. There aremen at Oxford who have rested their brains this way for over thirtyyears: the accumulated brain power thus dammed up is said to becolossal. 

I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations ofthe person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him, thatthe students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on that. Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. "We go over to hisrooms, " said one student, "and he just lights a pipe and talks to us. ""We sit round with him, " said another, "and he simply smokes and goesover our exercises with us. " From this and other evidence I gather thatwhat an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of students togetherand smoke at them. Men who have been systematically smoked at for fouryears turn into ripe scholars. If anybody doubts this, let him go toOxford and he can see the thing actually in operation. A well-smoked manspeaks, and writes English with a grace that can be acquired in no otherway. 

In what was said above, I seem to have been directing criticism againstthe Oxford professors as such: but I have no intention of doing so. Forthe Oxford professor and his whole manner of being I have nothing buta profound respect. There is indeed the greatest difference between themodern up-to-date American idea of a professor and the English type. Buteven with us in older days, in the bygone time when such people as HenryWadsworth Longfellow were professors, one found the English idea; aprofessor was supposed to be a venerable kind of person, with snow-whitewhiskers reaching to his stomach. He was expected to moon around thecampus oblivious of the world around him. If you nodded to him he failedto see you. Of money he knew nothing; of business, far less. He was, ashis trustees were proud to say of him, "a child. "

On the other hand he contained within him a reservoir of learning ofsuch depth as to be practically bottomless. None of this learning wassupposed to be of any material or commercial benefit to anybody. Its usewas in saving the soul and enlarging the mind. 

At the head of such a group of professors was one whose beard was evenwhiter and longer, whose absence of mind was even still greater, andwhose knowledge of money, business, and practical affairs was belowzero. Him they made the president. 

All this is changed in America. A university professor is now a busy, hustling person, approximating as closely to a business man as he cando it. It is on the business man that he models himself. He has alittle place that he calls his "office, " with a typewriter machine anda stenographer. Here he sits and dictates letters, beginning after thebest business models, "in re yours of the eighth ult. , would say, etc. , etc. " He writes these letters to students, to his fellow professors, tothe president, indeed to any people who will let him write to them. Thenumber of letters that he writes each month is duly counted and setto his credit. If he writes enough he will get a reputation as an"executive, " and big things may happen to him. He may even be askedto step out of the college and take a post as an "executive" in a soapcompany or an advertising firm. The man, in short, is a "hustler, " an"advertiser" whose highest aim is to be a "live-wire. " If he is not, hewill presently be dismissed, or, to use the business term, be "let go, "by a board of trustees who are themselves hustlers and live-wires. As tothe professor's soul, he no longer needs to think of it as it has beenhanded over along with all the others to a Board of Censors. 

The American professor deals with his students according to his lights. It is his business to chase them along over a prescribed ground at aprescribed pace like a flock of sheep. They all go humping together overthe hurdles with the professor chasing them with a set of "tests" and"recitations, " "marks" and "attendances, " the whole apparatus obviouslycopied from the time-clock of the business man's factory. This processis what is called "showing results. " The pace set is necessarily thatof the slowest, and thus results in what I have heard Mr. Edward Beattydescribe as the "convoy system of education. "

In my own opinion, reached after fifty-two years of profound reflection, this system contains in itself the seeds of destruction. It puts apremium on dulness and a penalty on genius. It circumscribes thatlatitude of mind which is the real spirit of learning. If we persistin it we shall presently find that true learning will fly away from ouruniversities and will take rest wherever some individual and enquiringmind can mark out its path for itself. 

Now the principal reason why I am led to admire Oxford is that the placeis little touched as yet by the measuring of "results, " and by thispassion for visible and provable "efficiency. " The whole system atOxford is such as to put a premium on genius and to let mediocrity anddulness go their way. On the dull student Oxford, after a proper lapseof time, confers a degree which means nothing more than that he livedand breathed at Oxford and kept out of jail. This for many students isas much as society can expect. But for the gifted students Oxford offersgreat opportunities. There is no question of his hanging back till thelast sheep has jumped over the fence. He need wait for no one. He maymove forward as fast as he likes, following the bent of his genius. Ifhe has in him any ability beyond that of the common herd, his tutor, interested in his studies, will smoke at him until he kindles him intoa flame. For the tutor's soul is not harassed by herding dull students, with dismissal hanging by a thread over his head in the class room. TheAmerican professor has no time to be interested in a clever student. Hehas time to be interested in his "deportment, " his letter-writing, hisexecutive work, and his organising ability and his hope of promotionto a soap factory. But with that his mind is exhausted. The student ofgenius merely means to him a student who gives no trouble, who passesall his "tests, " and is present at all his "recitations. " Such a studentalso, if he can be trained to be a hustler and an advertiser, willundoubtedly "make good. " But beyond that the professor does not thinkof him. The everlasting principle of equality has inserted itself in aplace where it has no right to be, and where inequality is the breath oflife. 

American or Canadian college trustees would be horrified at the notionof professors who apparently do no work, give few or no lectures anddraw their pay merely for existing. Yet these are really the only kindof professors worth having, --I mean, men who can be trusted with a vaguegeneral mission in life, with a salary guaranteed at least till theirdeath, and a sphere of duties entrusted solely to their own consciencesand the promptings of their own desires. Such men are rare, but asingle one of them, when found, is worth ten "executives" and a dozen"organisers. "

The excellence of Oxford, then, as I see it, lies in the peculiarvagueness of the organisation of its work. It starts from the assumptionthat the professor is a really learned man whose sole interest lies inhis own sphere: and that a student, or at least the only student withwhom the university cares to reckon seriously, is a young man whodesires to know. This is an ancient mediaeval attitude long sinceburied in more up-to-date places under successive strata of compulsoryeducation, state teaching, the democratisation of knowledge and thesubstitution of the shadow for the substance, and the casket for thegem. No doubt, in newer places the thing has got to be so. Highereducation in America flourishes chiefly as a qualification for entranceinto a money-making profession, and not as a thing in itself. But inOxford one can still see the surviving outline of a nobler type ofstructure and a higher inspiration. 

I do not mean to say, however, that my judgment of Oxford is oneundiluted stream of praise. In one respect at least I think that Oxfordhas fallen away from the high ideals of the Middle Ages. I refer to thefact that it admits women students to its studies. In the Middle Ageswomen were regarded with a peculiar chivalry long since lost. It wastaken for granted that their brains were too delicately poised toallow them to learn anything. It was presumed that their minds wereso exquisitely hung that intellectual effort might disturb them. Thepresent age has gone to the other extreme: and this is seen nowhere morethan in the crowding of women into colleges originally designed for men. Oxford, I regret to find, has not stood out against this change. 

To a profound scholar like myself, the presence of these young women, many of them most attractive, flittering up and down the streets ofOxford in their caps and gowns, is very distressing. 

Who is to blame for this and how they first got in I do not know. But Iunderstand that they first of all built a private college of their ownclose to Oxford, and then edged themselves in foot by foot. If this isso they only followed up the precedent of the recognised method in usein America. When an American college is established, the women go andbuild a college of their own overlooking the grounds. Then they put onbecoming caps and gowns and stand and look over the fence at the collegeathletics. The male undergraduates, who were originally and by nature ahardy lot, were not easily disturbed. But inevitably some of the seniortrustees fell in love with the first year girls and became convincedthat coeducation was a noble cause. American statistics show thatbetween 1880 and 1900 the number of trustees and senior professors whomarried girl undergraduates or who wanted to do so reached a percentageof, --I forget the exact percentage; it was either a hundred or a littleover. 

I don't know just what happened at Oxford but presumably something ofthe sort took place. In any case the women are now all over theplace. They attend the college lectures, they row in a boat, andthey perambulate the High Street. They are even offering a seriouscompetition against the men. Last year they carried off the ping-pongchampionship and took the chancellor's prize for needlework, while inmusic, cooking and millinery the men are said to be nowhere. 

There is no doubt that unless Oxford puts the women out while there isyet time, they will overrun the whole university. What this means to theprogress of learning few can tell and those who know are afraid to say. 

Cambridge University, I am glad to see, still sets its face sternlyagainst this innovation. I am reluctant to count any superiority in theUniversity of Cambridge. Having twice visited Oxford, having made theplace a subject of profound study for many hours at a time, having twiceaddressed its undergraduates, and having stayed at the Mitre Hotel, I consider myself an Oxford man. But I must admit that Cambridge haschosen the wiser part. 

Last autumn, while I was in London on my voyage of discovery, a votewas taken at Cambridge to see if the women who have already a privatecollege nearby, should be admitted to the university. They weretriumphantly shut out; and as a fit and proper sign of enthusiasm theundergraduates went over in a body and knocked down the gates of thewomen's college. I know that it is a terrible thing to say that anyone approved of this. All the London papers came out with headingsthat read, --ARE OUR UNDERGRADUATES TURNING INTO BABOONS? and so on. The Manchester Guardian draped its pages in black and even the LondonMorning Post was afraid to take bold ground in the matter. But I do knowalso that there was a great deal of secret chuckling and jubilation inthe London clubs. Nothing was expressed openly. The men of England havebeen too terrorised by the women for that. 

But in safe corners of the club, out of earshot of the waiters and awayfrom casual strangers, little groups of elderly men chuckled quietlytogether. "Knocked down their gates, eh?" said the wicked old men to oneanother, and then whispered guiltily behind an uplifted hand, "Serve 'emright. " Nobody dared to say anything outside. If they had some one wouldhave got up and asked a question in the House of Commons. When this isdone all England falls flat upon its face. 

But for my part when I heard of the Cambridge vote, I felt as LordChatham did when he said in parliament, "Sir, I rejoice that Americahas resisted. " For I have long harboured views of my own upon thehigher education of women. In these days, however, it requires no littlehardihood to utter a single word of criticism against it. It is likethrowing half a brick through the glass roof of a conservatory. It isbound to make trouble. Let me hasten, therefore, to say that I believemost heartily in the higher education of women; in fact, the higher thebetter. The only question to my mind is: What is "higher education"and how do you get it? With which goes the secondary enquiry, What isa woman and is she just the same as a man? I know that it sounds aterrible thing to say in these days, but I don't believe she is. 

Let me say also that when I speak of coeducation I speak of what Iknow. I was coeducated myself some thirty-five years ago, at the verybeginning of the thing. I learned my Greek alongside of a bevy of beautyon the opposite benches that mashed up the irregular verbs for us verybadly. Incidentally, those girls are all married long since, and allthe Greek they know now you could put under a thimble. But of thatpresently. 

I have had further experience as well. I spent three years in thegraduate school of Chicago, where coeducational girls were as thick asautumn leaves, and some thicker. And as a college professor at McGillUniversity in Montreal, I have taught mingled classes of men and womenfor twenty years. 

On the basis of which experience I say with assurance that the thing isa mistake and has nothing to recommend it but its relative cheapness. Let me emphasise this last point and have done with it. Coeducation isof course a great economy. To teach ten men and ten women in a singleclass of twenty costs only half as much as to teach two classes. Where economy must rule, then, the thing has got to be. But where thediscussion turns not on what is cheapest, but on what is best, then thecase is entirely different. 

The fundamental trouble is that men and women are different creatures, with different minds and different aptitudes and different paths inlife. There is no need to raise here the question of which is superiorand which is inferior (though I think, the Lord help me, I know theanswer to that too). The point lies in the fact that they are different. 

But the mad passion for equality has masked this obvious fact. Whenwomen began to demand, quite rightly, a share in higher education, theytook for granted that they wanted the same curriculum as the men. They never stopped to ask whether their aptitudes were not in variousdirections higher and better than those of the men, and whether it mightnot be better for their sex to cultivate the things which were bestsuited to their minds. Let me be more explicit. In all that goes withphysical and mathematical science, women, on the average, are far belowthe standard of men. There are, of course, exceptions. But they provenothing. It is no use to quote to me the case of some brilliant girl whostood first in physics at Cornell. That's nothing. There is an elephantin the zoo that can count up to ten, yet I refuse to reckon myself hisinferior. 

Tabulated results spread over years, and the actual experience of thosewho teach show that in the whole domain of mathematics and physics womenare outclassed. At McGill the girls of our first year have wept overtheir failures in elementary physics these twenty-five years. It is timethat some one dried their tears and took away the subject. 

But, in any case, examination tests are never the whole story. To thosewho know, a written examination is far from being a true criterion ofcapacity. It demands too much of mere memory, imitativeness, and theinsidious willingness to absorb other people's ideas. Parrots and crowswould do admirably in examinations. Indeed, the colleges are full ofthem. 

But take, on the other hand, all that goes with the aesthetic side ofeducation, with imaginative literature and the cult of beauty. Herewomen are, or at least ought to be, the superiors of men. Women were inprimitive times the first story-tellers. They are still so at the cradleside. The original college woman was the witch, with her incantationsand her prophecies and the glow of her bright imagination, and ifbrutal men of duller brains had not burned it out of her, she would beincanting still. To my thinking, we need more witches in the collegesand less physics. 

I have seen such young witches myself, --if I may keep the word: I likeit, --in colleges such as Wellesley in Massachusetts and Bryn Mawr inPennsylvania, where there isn't a man allowed within the three milelimit. To my mind, they do infinitely better thus by themselves. Theyare freer, less restrained. They discuss things openly in their classes;they lift up their voices, and they speak, whereas a girl in such aplace as McGill, with men all about her, sits for four years as silentas a frog full of shot. 

But there is a deeper trouble still. The careers of the men andwomen who go to college together are necessarily different, and thepreparation is all aimed at the man's career. The men are going to belawyers, doctors, engineers, business men, and politicians. And thewomen are not. 

There is no use pretending about it. It may sound an awful thing to say, but the women are going to be married. That is, and always has been, their career; and, what is more, they know it; and even at college, while they are studying algebra and political economy, they have theireye on it sideways all the time. The plain fact is that, after a girlhas spent four years of her time and a great deal of her parents' moneyin equipping herself for a career that she is never going to have, thewretched creature goes and gets married, and in a few years she hasforgotten which is the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, and shedoesn't care. She has much better things to think of. 

At this point some one will shriek: "But surely, even for marriage, isn't it right that a girl should have a college education?" To which Ihasten to answer: most assuredly. I freely admit that a girl who knowsalgebra, or once knew it, is a far more charming companion and a noblerwife and mother than a girl who doesn't know x from y. But the point isthis: Does the higher education that fits a man to be a lawyer also fita person to be a wife and mother? Or, in other words, is a lawyer a wifeand mother? I say he is not. Granted that a girl is to spend four yearsin time and four thousand dollars in money in going to college, whytrain her for a career that she is never going to adopt? Why not giveher an education that will have a meaning and a harmony with the reallife that she is to follow?

For example, suppose that during her four years every girl luckyenough to get a higher education spent at least six months of it inthe training and discipline of a hospital as a nurse. There is moreeducation and character making in that than in a whole bucketful ofalgebra. 

But no, the woman insists on snatching her share of an educationdesigned by Erasmus or William of Wykeham or William of Occam for thecreation of scholars and lawyers; and when later on in her home there isa sudden sickness or accident, and the life or death of those nearest toher hangs upon skill and knowledge and a trained fortitude in emergency, she must needs send in all haste for a hired woman to fill the placethat she herself has never learned to occupy. 

But I am not here trying to elaborate a whole curriculum. I am onlytrying to indicate that higher education for the man is one thing, forthe woman another. Nor do I deny the fact that women have got to earntheir living. Their higher education must enable them to do that. Theycannot all marry on their graduation day. But that is no great matter. No scheme of education that any one is likely to devise will fail inthis respect. 

The positions that they hold as teachers or civil servants they wouldfill all the better if their education were fitted to their wants. 

Some few, a small minority, really and truly "have acareer, "--husbandless and childless, --in which the sacrifice is greatand the honour to them, perhaps, all the higher. And others no doubtdream of a career in which a husband and a group of blossoming childrenare carried as an appendage to a busy life at the bar or on theplatform. But all such are the mere minority, so small as to make nodifference to the general argument. 

But there--I have written quite enough to make plenty of trouble exceptperhaps at Cambridge University. So I return with relief to my generalstudy of Oxford. Viewing the situation as a whole, I am led then to theconclusion that there must be something in the life of Oxford itselfthat makes for higher learning. Smoked at by his tutor, fed in HenryVIII's kitchen, and sleeping in a tangle of ivy, the student evidentlygets something not easily obtained in America. And the more I reflecton the matter the more I am convinced that it is the sleeping in the ivythat does it. How different it is from student life as I remember it!

When I was a student at the University of Toronto thirty years ago, Ilived, --from start to finish, --in seventeen different boarding houses. As far as I am aware these houses have not, or not yet, been marked withtablets. But they are still to be found in the vicinity of McCaul andDarcy, and St. Patrick Streets. Any one who doubts the truth of what Ihave to say may go and look at them. 

I was not alone in the nomadic life that I led. There were hundredsof us drifting about in this fashion from one melancholy habitation toanother. We lived as a rule two or three in a house, sometimes alone. Wedined in the basement. We always had beef, done up in some way after itwas dead, and there were always soda biscuits on the table. They usedto have a brand of soda biscuits in those days in the Toronto boardinghouses that I have not seen since. They were better than dog biscuitsbut with not so much snap. My contemporaries will all remember them. A great many of the leading barristers and professional men of Torontowere fed on them. 

In the life we led we had practically no opportunities for associationon a large scale, no common rooms, no reading rooms, nothing. We neversaw the magazines, --personally I didn't even know the names of them. The only interchange of ideas we ever got was by going over to the CaerHowell Hotel on University Avenue and interchanging them there. 

I mention these melancholy details not for their own sake but merely toemphasise the point that when I speak of students' dormitories, and thelarger life which they offer, I speak of what I know. 

If we had had at Toronto, when I was a student, the kind of dormitoriesand dormitory life that they have at Oxford, I don't think I wouldever have graduated. I'd have been there still. The trouble is that theuniversities on our Continent are only just waking up to the idea ofwhat a university should mean. They were, very largely, instituted andorganised with the idea that a university was a place where young menwere sent to absorb the contents of books and to listen to lectures inthe class rooms. The student was pictured as a pallid creature, burningwhat was called the "midnight oil, " his wan face bent over his desk. Ifyou wanted to do something for him you gave him a book: if you wanted todo something really large on his behalf you gave him a whole basketfulof them. If you wanted to go still further and be a benefactor to thecollege at large, you endowed a competitive scholarship and set two ormore pallid students working themselves to death to get it. 

The real thing for the student is the life and environment thatsurrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by theactive operation of his own intellect and not as the passive recipientof lectures. And for this active operation what he really needs most isthe continued and intimate contact with his fellows. Students must livetogether and eat together, talk and smoke together. Experience showsthat that is how their minds really grow. And they must live togetherin a rational and comfortable way. They must eat in a big dining roomor hall, with oak beams across the ceiling, and the stained glass inthe windows, and with a shield or tablet here or there upon the wall, to remind them between times of the men who went before them and lefta name worthy of the memory of the college. If a student is to get fromhis college what it ought to give him, a college dormitory, with thelife in common that it brings, is his absolute right. A university thatfails to give it to him is cheating him. 

If I were founding a university--and I say it with all the seriousnessof which I am capable--I would found first a smoking room; then when Ihad a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory; then afterthat, or more probably with it, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn't use, I would hirea professor and get some text books. 

This chapter has sounded in the most part like a continuous eulogyof Oxford with but little in favour of our American colleges. I turntherefore with pleasure to the more congenial task of showing what iswrong with Oxford and with the English university system generally, andthe aspect in which our American universities far excell the British. 

The point is that Henry VIII is dead. The English are so proud ofwhat Henry VIII and the benefactors of earlier centuries did for theuniversities that they forget the present. There is little or nothingin England to compare with the magnificent generosity of individuals, provinces and states, which is building up the colleges of the UnitedStates and Canada. There used to be. But by some strange confusion ofthought the English people admire the noble gifts of Cardinal Wolsey andHenry VIII and Queen Margaret, and do not realise that the Carnegiesand Rockefellers and the William Macdonalds are the Cardinal Wolseysof to-day. The University of Chicago was founded upon oil. McGillUniversity rests largely on a basis of tobacco. In America the world ofcommerce and business levies on itself a noble tribute in favour of thehigher learning. In England, with a few conspicuous exceptions, such asthat at Bristol, there is little of the sort. The feudal families arecontent with what their remote ancestors have done: they do not try toemulate it in any great degree. 

In the long run this must count. Of all the various reforms that aretalked of at Oxford, and of all the imitations of American methods thatare suggested, the only one worth while, to my thinking, is to capturea few millionaires, give them honorary degrees at a million poundssterling apiece, and tell them to imagine that they are Henry theEighth. I give Oxford warning that if this is not done the place willnot last another two centuries. 

VI. The British and the American Press

THE only paper from which a man can really get the news of the world ina shape that he can understand is the newspaper of his own "home town. "For me, unless I can have the Montreal Gazette at my breakfast, and theMontreal Star at my dinner, I don't really know what is happening. Inthe same way I have seen a man from the south of Scotland settle down toread the Dumfries Chronicle with a deep sigh of satisfaction: and a manfrom Burlington, Vermont, pick up the Burlington Eagle and studythe foreign news in it as the only way of getting at what was reallyhappening in France and Germany. 

The reason is, I suppose, that there are different ways of serving upthe news and we each get used to our own. Some people like the newsfed to them gently: others like it thrown at them in a bombshell: someprefer it to be made as little of as possible; they want it minimised:others want the maximum. 

This is where the greatest difference lies between the Britishnewspapers and those of the United States and Canada. With us in Americathe great thing is to get the news and shout it at the reader; inEngland they get the news and then break it to him as gently aspossible. Hence the big headings, the bold type, and the double columnsof the American paper, and the small headings and the general air ofquiet and respectability of the English Press. 

It is quite beside the question to ask which is the better. Neither is. They are different things: that's all. The English newspaper is designedto be read quietly, propped up against the sugar bowl of a man eatinga slow breakfast in a quiet corner of a club, or by a retired bankerseated in a leather chair nearly asleep, or by a country vicar sittingin a wicker chair under a pergola. The American paper is for readingby a man hanging on the straps of a clattering subway express, by aman eating at a lunch counter, by a man standing on one leg, by a mangetting a two-minute shave, or by a man about to have his teeth drawn bya dentist. 

In other words, there is a difference of atmosphere. It is not merelyin the type and the lettering, it is a difference in the way the newsis treated and the kind of words that are used. In America we love suchwords as "gun-men" and "joy-ride" and "death-cell": in England theyprefer "person of doubtful character" and "motor travelling at excessivespeed" and "corridor No. 6. " If a milk-waggon collides in thestreet with a coal-cart, we write that a "life-waggon" has struck a"death-cart. " We call a murderer a "thug" or a "gun-man" or a "yeg-man. "In England they simply call him "the accused who is a grocer's assistantin Houndsditch. " That designation would knock any decent murder story topieces. 

Hence comes the great difference between the American "lead" or openingsentence of the article, and the English method of commencement. In theAmerican paper the idea is that the reader is so busy that he must firstbe offered the news in one gulp. After that if he likes it he can goon and eat some more of it. So the opening sentence must give the wholething. Thus, suppose that a leading member of the United States Congresshas committed suicide. This is the way in which the American reporterdeals with it. 

"Seated in his room at the Grand Hotel with his carpet slippers on hisfeet and his body wrapped in a blue dressing-gown with pink insertions, after writing a letter of farewell to his wife and emptying a bottleof Scotch whisky in which he exonerated her from all culpability in hisdeath, Congressman Ahasuerus P. Tigg was found by night-watchman, HenryT. Smith, while making his rounds as usual with four bullets in hisstomach. "

Now let us suppose that a leading member of the House of Commons inEngland had done the same thing. Here is the way it would be written upin a first-class London newspaper. 

The heading would be HOME AND GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. That is inserted soas to keep the reader soothed and quiet and is no doubt thought betterthan the American heading BUGHOUSE CONGRESSMAN BLOWS OUT BRAINS INHOTEL. After the heading HOME AND GENERAL INTELLIGENCE the Englishpaper runs the subheading INCIDENT AT THE GRAND HOTEL. The reader stilldoesn't know what happened; he isn't meant to. Then the article beginslike this:

"The Grand Hotel, which is situated at the corner of Millbank andVictoria Streets, was the scene last night of a distressing incident. "

"What is it?" thinks the reader. "The hotel itself, which is anold Georgian structure dating probably from about 1750, is a quietestablishment, its clientele mainly drawn from business men in thecattle-droving and distillery business from South Wales. "

"What happened?" thinks the reader. 

"Its cuisine has long been famous for the excellence of its boiledshrimps. "

"What happened?"

"While the hotel itself is also known as the meeting place of theSurbiton Harmonic Society and other associations. "

"What happened?"

"Among the more prominent of the guests of the hotel has been numberedduring the present Parliamentary session Mr. Llewylln Ap. Jones, M. P. , for South Llanfydd. Mr. Jones apparently came to his room last nightat about ten P. M. , and put on his carpet slippers and his blue dressinggown. He then seems to have gone to the cupboard and taken from it awhisky bottle which however proved to be empty. The unhappy gentlemanthen apparently went to bed. .. "

At that point the American reader probably stops reading, thinking thathe has heard it all. The unhappy man found that the bottle was emptyand went to bed: very natural: and the affair very properly called a"distressing incident": quite right. But the trained English readerwould know that there was more to come and that the air of quiet wasonly assumed, and he would read on and on until at last the tragicinterest heightened, the four shots were fired, with a good long pauseafter each for discussion of the path of the bullet through Mr. Ap. Jones. 

I am not saying that either the American way or the British way is thebetter. They are just two different ways, that's all. But the result isthat anybody from the United States or Canada reading the English papersgets the impression that nothing is happening: and an English readerof our newspapers with us gets the idea that the whole place is in atumult. 

When I was in London I used always, in glancing at the morning papers, to get a first impression that the whole world was almost asleep. Therewas, for example, a heading called INDIAN INTELLIGENCE that showed, on close examination, that two thousand Parsees had died of the blueplague, that a powder boat had blown up at Bombay, that some one hadthrown a couple of bombs at one of the provincial governors, and thatfour thousand agitators had been sentenced to twenty years hard laboureach. But the whole thing was just called "Indian Intelligence. "Similarly, there was a little item called, "Our Chinese Correspondent. "That one explained ten lines down, in very small type, that a hundredthousand Chinese had been drowned in a flood. And there was anotherlittle item labelled "Foreign Gossip, " under which was mentionedthat the Pope was dead, and that the President of Paraguay had beenassassinated. 

In short, I got the impression that I was living in an easy drowsyworld, as no doubt the editor meant me to. It was only when the MontrealStar arrived by post that I felt that the world was still revolvingpretty rapidly on its axis and that there was still something doing. 

As with the world news so it is with the minor events of ordinarylife, --birth, death, marriage, accidents, crime. Let me give anillustration. Suppose that in a suburb of London a housemaid hasendeavoured to poison her employer's family by putting a drug inthe coffee. Now on our side of the water we should write that littleincident up in a way to give it life, and put headings over it thatwould capture the reader's attention in a minute. We should begin itthus:

 PRETTY PARLOR MAID DEALS DEATH-DRINK TO CLUBMAN'S FAMILY

The English reader would ask at once, how do we know that the parlormaid is pretty? We don't. But our artistic sense tells us that she oughtto be. Pretty parlor maids are the only ones we take any interest in: ifan ugly parlor maid poisoned her employer's family we should hang her. Then again, the English reader would say, how do we know that the man isa clubman? Have we ascertained this fact definitely, and if so, of whatclub or clubs is he a member? Well, we don't know, except in so far asthe thing is self-evident. Any man who has romance enough in his lifeto be poisoned by a pretty housemaid ought to be in a club. That's theplace for him. In fact, with us the word club man doesn't necessarilymean a man who belongs to a club: it is defined as a man who is arrestedin a gambling den; or fined for speeding a motor or who shoots anotherperson in a hotel corridor. Therefore this man must be a club man. Having settled the heading, we go on with the text:

"Brooding over love troubles which she has hitherto refused to divulgeunder the most grilling fusillade of rapid-fire questions shot at herby the best brains of the New York police force, Miss Mary De Forrest, a handsome brunette thirty-six inches around the hips, employed as aparlor maid in the residence of Mr. Spudd Bung, a well-known clubmanforty-two inches around the chest, was arrested yesterday by the flyingsquad of the emergency police after having, so it is alleged, put fourounces of alleged picrate of potash into the alleged coffee of heremployer's family's alleged breakfast at their residence on HudsonHeights in the most fashionable quarter of the metropolis. Dr. Slink, the leading fashionable practitioner of the neighbourhood who wasimmediately summoned said that but for his own extraordinary dexterityand promptness the death of the whole family, if not of the entireentourage, was a certainty. The magistrate in committing Miss DeForrest for trial took occasion to enlarge upon her youth and attractiveappearance: he castigated the moving pictures severely and said that heheld them together with the public school system and the present methodof doing the hair, directly responsible for the crimes of the kindalleged. "

Now when you read this over you begin to feel that something big hashappened. Here is a man like Dr. Slink, all quivering with promptnessand dexterity. Here is an inserted picture, a photograph, a brick housein a row marked with a cross (+) and labelled "The Bung Residence as. Itappeared immediately after the alleged outrage. " It isn't really. It isjust a photograph that we use for this sort of thing and have grown tolike. It is called sometimes:--"Residence of Senator Borah" or "Sceneof the Recent Spiritualistic Manifestations" or anything of the sort. As long as it is marked with a cross (+) the reader will look at it withinterest. 

In other words we make something out of an occurrence like this. Itdoesn't matter if it all fades out afterwards when it appears that MaryDe Forrest merely put ground allspice into the coffee in mistake forpowdered sugar and that the family didn't drink it anyway. The readerhas already turned to other mysteries. 

But contrast the pitifully tame way in which the same event is writtenup in England. Here it is:

SUBURBAN ITEM

"Yesterday at the police court of Surbiton-on-Thames Mary Forrester, aservant in the employ of Mr. S. Bung was taken into custody on a chargeof having put a noxious preparation, possibly poison, into the coffee ofher employer's family. The young woman was remanded for a week. "

Look at that. Mary Forrester a servant?

How wide was she round the chest? It doesn't say. Mr. S. Bung? Ofwhat club was he a member? None, apparently. Then who cares if he ispoisoned? And "the young woman!" What a way to speak of a decent girlwho never did any other harm than to poison a club man. And the Englishmagistrate! What a tame part he must have played: his name indeeddoesn't occur at all: apparently he didn't enlarge on the girl's goodlooks, or "comment on her attractive appearance, " or anything. I don'tsuppose that he even asked Mary Forrester out to lunch with him. 

Notice also that, according to the English way of writing the thing up, as soon as the girl was remanded for a week the incident is closed. The English reporter doesn't apparently know enough to follow Miss DeForrest to her home (called "the De Forrest Residence" and marked witha cross, +). The American reporter would make certain to supplement whatwent above with further information of this fashion. "Miss De Forrestwhen seen later at her own home by a representative of The Eaglesaid that she regretted very much having been put to the necessity ofpoisoning Mr. Bung. She had in the personal sense nothing against Mr. Bung and apart from poisoning him she had every respect for Mr. Bung. Miss De Forrest, who talks admirably on a variety of topics, expressedherself as warmly in favour of the League of Nations and as a devotee ofthe short ballot and proportional representation. "

Any American reader who studies the English Press comes upon thesewasted opportunities every day. There are indeed certain journals ofa newer type which are doing their best to imitate us. But they don'treally get it yet. They use type up to about one inch and after thatthey get afraid. 

I hope that in describing the spirit of the English Press I do not seemto be writing with any personal bitterness. I admit that there might bea certain reason for such a bias. During my stay in England I was mostanxious to appear as a contributor to some of the leading papers. Thisis, with the English, a thing that always adds prestige. To be able tocall oneself a "contributor" to the Times or to Punch or the MorningPost or the Spectator, is a high honour. I have met these "contributors"all over the British Empire. Some, I admit, look strange. An ancientwreck in the back bar of an Ontario tavern (ancient regime) has toldme that he was a contributor to the Times: the janitor of the buildingwhere I lived admits that he is a contributor to Punch: a man arrestedin Bristol for vagrancy while I was in England pleaded that he was acontributor to the Spectator. In fact, it is an honour that everybodyseems to be able to get but me. 

I had often tried before I went to England to contribute to the greatEnglish newspapers. I had never succeeded. But I hoped that while inEngland itself the very propinquity of the atmosphere, I mean the verycontiguity of the surroundings, would render the attempt easier. I triedand I failed. My failure was all the more ignominious in that I had verydirect personal encouragement. "By all means, " said the editor of theLondon Times, "do some thing for us while you are here. Best of all, do something in a political way; that's rather our special line. " Ihad already received almost an identical encouragement from the LondonMorning Post, and in a more qualified way from the Manchester Guardian. In short, success seemed easy. 

I decided therefore to take some simple political event of the peculiarkind that always makes a stir in English politics and write it up forthese English papers. To simplify matters I thought it better to use oneand the same incident and write it up in three different ways and getpaid for it three, times. All of those who write for the Press willunderstand the motive at once. I waited therefore and watched the papersto see if anything interesting might happen to the Ahkoond of Swat orthe Sandjak of Novi Bazar or any other native potentate. Within a coupleof days I got what I wanted in the following item, which I need hardlysay is taken word for word from the Press despatches:

"Perim, via Bombay. News comes by messenger that the Shriek of Kowfatwho has been living under the convention of 1898 has violated the modusoperandi. He is said to have torn off his suspenders, dipped himself inoil and proclaimed a Jehad. The situation is critical. "

Everybody who knows England knows that this is just the kind of newsthat the English love. On our side of the Atlantic we should be botheredby the fact that we did not know where Kowfat is, nor what was theconvention of 1898. They are not. They just take it for granted thatKowfat is one of the many thousand places that they "own, " somewherein the outer darkness. They have so many Kowfats that they cannot keeptrack of them. 

I knew therefore that everybody would be interested in any discussionof what was at once called "the Kowfat Crisis" and I wrote it up. Iresisted the temptation to begin after the American fashion, "Shrieksheds suspenders, " and suited the writing, as I thought, to the market Iwas writing for. I wrote up the incident for the Morning Post after thefollowing fashion:

"The news from Kowfat affords one more instance of a painful back-downon the part of the Government. Our policy of spineless supineness is nowreaping its inevitable reward. To us there is only one thing to be done. If the Shriek has torn off his suspenders he must be made to put themon again. We have always held that where the imperial prestige of thiscountry is concerned there is no room for hesitation. In the presentinstance our prestige is at stake: the matter involves our reputation inthe eyes of the surrounding natives, the Bantu Hottentots, the Negritos, the Dwarf Men of East Abyssinia, and the Dog Men of Darfur. What willthey think of us? If we fail in this crisis their notion of us will fallfifty per cent. In our opinion this country cannot stand a fifty percent drop in the estimation of the Dog Men. The time is one that demandsaction. An ultimatum should be sent at once to the Shriek of Kowfat. Ifhe has one already we should send him another. He should be made at onceto put on his suspenders. The oil must be scraped off him, and he mustbe told plainly that if a pup like him tries to start a Jehad he willhave to deal with the British Navy. We call the Shriek a pup in no senseof belittling him as our imperial ally but because we consider that thepresent is no time for half words and we do not regard pup as half aword. Events such as the present, rocking the Empire to its base, makeone long for the spacious days of a Salisbury or a Queen Elizabeth, oran Alfred the Great or a Julius Caesar. We doubt whether the presentCabinet is in this class. "

Not to lose any time in the coming and going of the mail, always aserious thought for the contributor to the Press waiting for a cheque, Isent another editorial on the same topic to the Manchester Guardian. Itran as follows:

"The action of the Shriek of Kowfat in proclaiming a Jehad against us isone that amply justifies all that we have said editorially since JeremyBentham died. We have always held that the only way to deal with aMohammedan potentate like the Shriek is to treat him like a Christian. The Khalifate of Kowfat at present buys its whole supply of cottonpiece goods in our market and pays cash. The Shriek, who is a man ofenlightenment, has consistently upheld the principles of Free Trade. Not only are our exports of cotton piece goods, bibles, rum, and beadsconstantly increasing, but they are more than offset by our importationfrom Kowfat of ivory, rubber, gold, and oil. In short, we have neverseen the principles of Free Trade better illustrated. The Shriek, it isnow reported, refuses to wear the braces presented to him by our envoyat the time of his coronation five years ago. He is said to have thrownthem into the mud. But we have no reason to suppose that this is meantas a blow at our prestige. It may be that after five years of use thelittle pulleys of the braces no longer work properly. We have ourselvesin our personal life known instances of this, and can speak of the senseof irritation occasioned. Even we have thrown on the floor ours. And inany case, as we have often reminded our readers, what is prestige? Ifany one wants to hit us, let him hit us right there. We regard a blow atour trade as far more deadly than a blow at our prestige. 

"The situation as we see it demands immediate reparation on our part. The principal grievance of the Shriek arises from the existence of ourfort and garrison on the Kowfat river. Our proper policy is to knockdown the fort, and either remove the garrison or give it to the Shriek. We are convinced that as soon as the Shriek realises that we areprepared to treat him in the proper Christian spirit, he will at oncerespond with true Mohammedan generosity. 

"We have further to remember that in what we do we are being observed bythe neighbouring tribes, the Negritos, the Dwarf Men, and the Dog Men ofDarfur. These are not only shrewd observers but substantial customers. The Dwarf Men at present buy all their cotton on the Manchester marketand the Dog Men depend on us for their soap. 

"The present crisis is one in which the nation needs statesmanship and abroad outlook upon the world. In the existing situation we need not theduplicity of a Machiavelli, but the commanding prescience of a Gladstoneor an Alfred the Great, or a Julius Caesar. Luckily we have exactly thistype of man at the head of affairs. "

After completing the above I set to work without delay on a similarexercise for the London Times. The special excellence of the Times, aseverybody knows is its fulness of information. For generations past theTimes has commanded a peculiar minuteness of knowledge about all partsof the Empire. It is the proud boast of this great journal that towhatever far away, outlandish part of the Empire you may go, you willalways find a correspondent of the Times looking for something to do. It is said that the present proprietor has laid it down as his maxim, "I don't want men who think; I want men who know. " The arrangements forthinking are made separately. 

Incidentally I may say that I had personal opportunities while I wasin England of realising that the reputation of the Times staff for thepossession of information is well founded. Dining one night with somemembers of the staff, I happened to mention Saskatchewan. One of theeditors at the other end of the table looked up at the mention of thename. "Saskatchewan, " he said, "ah, yes; that's not far from Alberta, isit?" and then turned quietly to his food again. When I remind the readerthat Saskatchewan is only half an inch from Alberta he may judge of thenicety of the knowledge involved. Having all this in mind, I recast theeditorial and sent it to the London Times as follows:

"The news that the Sultan of Kowfat has thrown away his suspendersrenders it of interest to indicate the exact spot where he has thrownthem. (See map). Kowfat, lying as the reader knows, on the Kowfat River, occupies the hinterland between the back end of south-west Somalilandand the east, that is to say, the west, bank of Lake P'schu. It thusforms an enclave between the Dog Men of Darfur and the Negritos ofT'chk. The inhabitants of Kowfat are a coloured race three quartersnegroid and more than three quarters tabloid. 

"As a solution of the present difficulty, the first thing requiredin our opinion is to send out a boundary commission to delineate moreexactly still just where Kowfat is. After that an ethnographical surveymight be completed. "

It was a matter not only of concern but of surprise to me that not oneof the three contributions recited above was accepted by the EnglishPress. The Morning Post complained that my editorial was not firm enoughin tone, the Guardian that it was not humane enough, the Times thatI had left out the latitude and longitude always expected by theirreaders. I thought it not worth while to bother to revise the articlesas I had meantime conceived the idea that the same material might beused in the most delightfully amusing way as the basis of a poem farPunch. Everybody knows the kind of verses that are contributed to Punchby Sir Owen Seaman and Mr. Charles Graves and men of that sort. Andeverybody has been struck, as I have, by the extraordinary easiness ofthe performance. All that one needs is to get some odd little incident, such as the revolt of the Sultan of Kowfat, make up an amusing title, and then string the verses together in such a way as to make rhymes withall the odd words that come into the narrative. In fact, the thing isease itself. 

I therefore saw a glorious chance with the Sultan of Kowfat. Indeed, Ifairly chuckled to myself when I thought what amusing rhymes could bemade with "Negritos, " "modus operandi" and "Dog Men of Darfur. " I canscarcely imagine anything more excruciatingly funny than the rhymeswhich can be made with them. And as for the title, bringing in the wordKowfat or some play upon it, the thing is perfectly obvious. The ideaamused me so much that I set to work at the poem at once. 

I am sorry to say that I failed to complete it. Not that I couldn'thave done so, given time; I am quite certain that if I had had about twoyears I could have done it. The main structure of the poem, however, ishere and I give it for what it is worth. Even as it is it strikes me asextraordinarily good. Here it is:

 Title

 . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . Kowfat

 Verse One

 . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . , . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Modus operandi; . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . , . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . , Negritos: . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. P'shu. 

 Verse Two

 . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Khalifate; . .. .. .. .. .. .. Dog Men of Darfur: . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. T'chk. 

Excellent little thing, isn't it? All it needs is the rhymes. As far asit goes it has just exactly the ease and the sweep required. And if someone will tell me how Owen Seaman and those people get the rest of theease and the sweep I'll be glad to put it in. 

One further experiment of the same sort I made with the English Press inanother direction and met again with failure. If there is one paper inthe world for which I have respect and--if I may say it--an affection, it is the London Spectator. I suppose that I am only one of thousandsand thousands of people who feel that way. Why under the circumstancesthe Spectator failed to publish my letter I cannot say. I wanted nomoney for it: I only wanted the honour of seeing it inserted beside theletter written from the Rectory, Hops, Hants, or the Shrubbery, Potts, Shrops, --I mean from one of those places where the readers of theSpectator live. I thought too that my letter had just the right touch. However, they wouldn't take it: something wrong with it somewhere, Isuppose. This is it:

 To the Editor, The Spectator, London, England. 

 Dear Sir, Your correspondence of last week contained such interesting information in regard to the appearance of the first cowslip in Kensington Common that I trust that I may, without fatiguing your readers to the point of saturation, narrate a somewhat similar and I think, sir, an equally interesting experience of my own. While passing through Lambeth Gardens yesterday towards the hour of dusk I observed a crow with one leg sitting beside the duck-pond and apparently lost in thought. There was no doubt that the bird was of the species pulex hibiscus, an order which is becoming singularly rare in the vicinity of the metropolis. Indeed, so far as I am aware, the species has not been seen in London since 1680. I may say that on recognising the bird I drew as near as I could, keeping myself behind the shrubbery, but the pulex hibiscus which apparently caught a brief glimpse of my face uttered a cry of distress and flew away. 

 I am, sir, Believe me, yours, sir, O. Y. Botherwithit. (Ret'd Major Burmese Army. );

Distressed by these repeated failures, I sank back to a lower level ofEnglish literary work, the puzzle department. For some reason or otherthe English delight in puzzles. It is, I think, a part of the peculiarschool-boy pedantry which is the reverse side of their literary genius. I speak with a certain bitterness because in puzzle work I met with nosuccess whatever. My solutions were never acknowledged, never paid for, in fact they were ignored. But I append two or three of them here, withapologies to the editors of the Strand and other papers who should havehad the honour of publishing them first. 

 Puzzle I

Can you fold a square piece of paper in such a way that with a singlefold it forms a pentagon?

My Solution: Yes, if I knew what a pentagon was. 

 Puzzle II

A and B agree to hold a walking match across an open meadow, eachseeking the shortest line. A, walking from corner to corner, may be saidto diangulate the hypotenuse of the meadow. B, allowing for a slightrise in the ground, walks on an obese tabloid. Which wins?

My Solution: Frankly, I don't know. 

 Puzzle III

(With apologies to the Strand. )

A rope is passed over a pulley. It has a weight at one end and a monkeyat the other. There is the same length of rope on either side andequilibrium is maintained. The rope weighs four ounces per foot. Theage of the monkey and the age of the monkey's mother together total fouryears. The weight of the monkey is as many pounds as the monkey's motheris years old. The monkey's mother was twice as old as the monkey waswhen the monkey's mother was half as old as the monkey will be whenthe monkey is three times as old as the monkey's mother was when themonkey's mother was three times as old as the monkey. The weight of therope with the weight at the end was half as much again as the differencein weight between the weight of the weight and the weight of the monkey. Now, what was the length of the rope?

My Solution: I should think it would have to be a rope of a fairly goodlength. 

In only one department of English journalism have I met with a decidedmeasure of success; I refer to the juvenile competition department. Thisis a sort of thing to which the English are especially addicted. As areally educated nation for whom good literature begins in the home theyencourage in every way literary competitions among the young readersof their journals. At least half a dozen of the well-known Londonperiodicals carry on this work. The prizes run all the way from oneshilling to half a guinea and the competitions are generally open to allchildren from three to six years of age. It was here that I saw my openopportunity and seized it. I swept in prize after prize. As "LittleAgatha" I got four shillings for the best description of Autumn in twolines, and one shilling for guessing correctly the missing letters inBR-STOL, SH-FFIELD, and H-LL. A lot of the competitors fell downon H-LL. I got six shillings for giving the dates of the NormanConquest, --1492 A. D. , and the Crimean War of 1870. In short, the thingwas easy. I might say that to enter these competitions one has to havea certificate of age from a member of the clergy. But I know a lot ofthem. 

VII. Business in England. Wanted--More Profiteers

It is hardly necessary to say that so shrewd an observer as I am couldnot fail to be struck by the situation of business in England. Passingthrough the factory towns and noticing that no smoke came from the tallchimneys and that the doors of the factories were shut, I was led to theconclusion that they were closed. 

Observing that the streets of the industrial centres were everywherefilled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed: and when Ilearned that the moving picture houses were full to the doors every dayand that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera, and religiousconcerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the country wassuffering from an unparalleled depression. This diagnosis turned out tobe absolutely correct. It has been freely estimated that at the time Irefer to almost two million men were out of work. 

But it does not require government statistics to prove that in Englandat the present day everybody seems poor, just as in the United Stateseverybody, to the eye of the visitor, seems to be rich. In Englandnobody seems to be able to afford anything: in the United Stateseverybody seems to be able to afford everything. In England nobodysmokes cigars: in America everybody does. On the English railways thefirst class carriages are empty: in the United States the "reserveddrawingrooms" are full. Poverty no doubt is only a relative matter: buta man whose income used to be 10, 000 a year and is now 5, 000, is livingin "reduced circumstances": he feels himself just as poor as the manwhose income has been cut from five thousand pounds to three, or fromfive hundred pounds to two. They are all in the same boat. What with thelowering of dividends and the raising of the income tax, the closing offactories, feeding the unemployed and trying to employ the unfed, thingsare in a bad way. 

The underlying cause is plain enough. The economic distress that theworld suffers now is the inevitable consequence of the war. Everybodyknows that. But where the people differ is in regard to what is going tohappen next, and what we must do about it. Here opinion takes a varietyof forms. Some people blame it on the German mark: by permitting theirmark to fall, the Germans, it is claimed, are taking away all thebusiness from England; the fall of the mark, by allowing the Germans towork harder and eat less than the English, is threatening to drive theEnglish out of house and home: if the mark goes on falling still furtherthe Germans will thereby outdo us also in music, literature and inreligion. What has got to be done, therefore, is to force the Germans tolift the mark up again, and make them pay up their indemnity. 

Another more popular school of thought holds to an entirely contraryopinion. The whole trouble, they say, comes from the sad collapse ofGermany. These unhappy people, having been too busy for four years indestroying valuable property in France and Belgium to pay attention totheir home affairs, now find themselves collapsed: it is our first dutyto pick them up again. The English should therefore take all the moneythey can find and give it to the Germans. By this means German trade andindustry will revive to such an extent that the port of Hamburg will beits old bright self again and German waiters will reappear in the Londonhotels. After that everything will be all right. 

Speaking with all the modesty of an outsider and a transient visitor, I give it as my opinion that the trouble is elsewhere. The danger ofindustrial collapse in England does not spring from what is happening inGermany but from what is happening in England itself. England, likemost of the other countries in the world, is suffering from theover-extension of government and the decline of individual self-help. For six generations industry in England and America has flourished onindividual effort called out by the prospect of individual gain. Everyman acquired from his boyhood the idea that he must look after himself. Morally, physically and financially that was the recognised way ofgetting on. The desire to make a fortune was regarded as a laudableambition, a proper stimulus to effort. The ugly word "profiteer" had notyet been coined. There was no income tax to turn a man's pockets insideout and take away his savings. The world was to the strong. 

Under the stimulus of this the wheels of industry hummed. Factoriescovered the land. National production grew to a colossal size and thewhole outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the great industry. Asa system it was far from perfect. It contained in itself all kindsof gross injustices, demands that were too great, wages that weretoo small; in spite of the splendour of the foreground, poverty anddestitution hovered behind the scenes. But such as it was, the systemworked: and it was the only one that we knew. 

Or turn to another aspect of this same principle of self-help. The wayto acquire knowledge in the early days was to buy a tallow candleand read a book after one's day's work, as Benjamin Franklin read orLincoln: and when the soul was stimulated to it, then the aspiring youthmust save money, put himself to college, live on nothing, think much, and in the course of this starvation and effort become a learned man, with somehow a peculiar moral fibre in him not easily reproduced to-day. For to-day the candle is free and the college is free and the studenthas a "Union" like the profiteer's club and a swimming-bath and a DramaLeague and a coeducational society at his elbow for which he buys BeautyRoses at five dollars a bunch. 

Or turn if one will to the moral side. The older way of being good wasby much prayer and much effort of one's own soul. Now it is done bya Board of Censors. There is no need to fight sin by the power of thespirit: let the Board of Censors do it. They together with three or fourkinds of Commissioners are supposed to keep sin at arm's length and tosupply a first class legislative guarantee of righteousness. As ashort cut to morality and as a way of saving individual effort ourlegislatures are turning out morality legislation by the bucketful. Thelegislature regulates our drink, it begins already to guard us againstthe deadly cigarette, it regulates here and there the length of ourskirts, it safeguards our amusements and in two states of the AmericanUnion it even proposes to save us from the teaching of the DarwinianTheory of evolution. The ancient prayer "Lead us not into temptation" ispassing out of date. The way to temptation is declared closed by Act ofParliament and by amendment to the constitution of the United States. Yet oddly enough the moral tone of the world fails to respond. Theworld is apparently more full of thugs, hold-up men, yeg-men, bandits, motor-thieves, porch-climbers, spotters, spies and crooked policemen thanit ever was; till it almost seems that the slow, old-fashioned method ofan effort of the individual soul may be needed still before the world ismade good. 

This vast new system, the system of leaning on the government, isspreading like a blight over England and America, and everywhere wesuffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effortand a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It hasbecome like a dead weight upon us. Wherever it touches industry itcripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy deficit: it builds shipsand loses money on them: it operates the ships and loses more money:it piles up taxes to fill the vacuum and when it has killed employment, opens a bureau of unemployment and issues a report on the depression ofindustry. 

Now, the only way to restore prosperity is to give back again to theindividual the opportunity to make money, to make lots of it, and whenhe has got it, to keep it. In spite of all the devastation of the warthe raw assets of our globe are hardly touched. Here and there, as inparts of China and in England and in Belgium with about seven hundredpeople to the square mile, the world is fairly well filled up. There isstanding room only. But there are vast empty spaces still. Mesopotamiaalone has millions of acres of potential wheat land with a few Arabssquatting on it. Canada could absorb easily half a million settlers ayear for a generation to come. The most fertile part of the world, thevalley of the Amazon, is still untouched: so fertile is it that for tensof thousands of square miles it is choked with trees, a mere tangleof life, defying all entry. The idea of our humanity sadly walking thestreets of Glasgow or sitting mournfully fishing on the piers of theHudson, out of work, would be laughable if it were not for the pathos ofit. 

The world is out of work for the simple reason that the world haskilled the goose that laid the golden eggs of industry. By taxation, bylegislation, by popular sentiment all over the world, there has beena disparagement of the capitalist. And all over the world capital isfrightened. It goes and hides itself in the form of an investment in avictory bond, a thing that is only a particular name for a debt, with noproductive effort behind it and indicating only a dead weight of taxes. There capital sits like a bull-frog hidden behind water-lilies, refusingto budge. 

Hence the way to restore prosperity is not to multiply governmentdepartments and government expenditures, nor to appoint commissionsand to pile up debts, but to start going again the machinery of boldproductive effort. Take off all the excess profits taxes and thesuper-taxes on income and as much of the income tax itself as can bedone by a wholesale dismissal of government employees and thengive industry a mark to shoot at. What is needed now is not themultiplication of government reports, but corporate industry, theformation of land companies, development companies, irrigationcompanies, any kind of corporation that will call out private capitalfrom its hiding places, offer employment to millions and start thewheels moving again. If the promoters of such corporations presentlyearn huge fortunes for themselves society is none the worse: and in anycase, humanity being what it is, they will hand back a vast part of whatthey have acquired in return for LL. D. Degrees, or bits of blue ribbon, or companionships of the Bath, or whatever kind of glass bead fits thefancy of the retired millionaire. 

The next thing to be done, then, is to "fire" the government officialsand to bring back the profiteer. As to which officials are to be firedfirst it doesn't matter much. In England people have been greatlyperturbed as to the use to be made of such instruments as the "GeddesAxe": the edge of the axe of dismissal seems so terribly sharp. Butthere is no need to worry. If the edge of the axe is too sharp, hit withthe back of it. 

As to the profiteer, bring him back. He is really just the same personwho a few years ago was called a Captain of Industry and an EmpireBuilder and a Nation Maker. It is the times that have changed, not theman. He is there still, just as greedy and rapacious as ever, but nogreedier: and we have just the same social need of his greed as a motivepower in industry as we ever had, and indeed a worse need than before. 

We need him not only in business but in the whole setting of life, orif not him personally, we need the eager, selfish, but reliant spiritof the man who looks after himself and doesn't want to have a spoon-fededucation and a government job alternating with a government dole, anda set of morals framed for him by a Board of Censors. Bring back theprofiteer: fetch him from the Riviera, from his country-place on theHudson, or from whatever spot to which he has withdrawn with his tinbox full of victory bonds. If need be, go and pick him out of thepenitentiary, take the stripes off him and tell him to get busy again. Show him the map of the world and ask him to pick out a few likelyspots. The trained greed of the rascal will find them in a moment. Then write him out a concession for coal in Asia Minor or oil in theMackenzie Basin or for irrigation in Mesopotamia. The ink will hardlybe dry on it before the capital will begin to flow in: it will come fromall kinds of places whence the government could never coax it and wherethe tax-gatherer could never find it. Only promise that it is not goingto be taxed out of existence and the stream of capital which is beingdried up in the sands of government mismanagement will flow into thehands of private industry like a river of gold. 

And incidentally, when the profiteer has finished his work, we canalways put him back into the penitentiary if we like. But we need himjust now. 

VIII. Is Prohibition Coming to England?

IN the United States and Canada the principal topic of politeconversation is now prohibition. At every dinner party the serving ofthe cocktails immediately introduces the subject: the rest of the dinneris enlivened throughout with the discussion of rum-runners, bootleggers, storage of liquor and the State constitution of New Jersey. Underthis influence all social and conversational values are shifted andrearranged. A "scholarly" man no longer means a man who can talk well onliterary subjects but a man who understands the eighteenth amendment andcan explain the legal difference between implementing statutes such asthe Volstead Act and the underlying state legislation. A "scientist"(invaluable in these conversations) is a man who can make clear thedistinction between alcoholic percentages by bulk and by weight. Anda "brilliant engineer" means a man who explains how to make homebrewedbeer with a kick in it. Similarly, a "raconteur" means a man who hasa fund of amusing stories about "bootleggers" and an "interestingtraveller" means a man who has been to Havana and can explain how wetit is. Indeed, the whole conception of travel and of interest in foreigncountries is now altered: as soon as any one mentions that he has beenin a foreign country, all the company ask in one breath, "Is it dry?"The question "How is Samoa?" or "How is Turkey?" or "How is BritishColumbia?" no longer refers to the climate or natural resources: itmeans "Is the place dry?" When such a question is asked and the answeris "It's wet, " there is a deep groan all around the table. 

I understand that when the recent disarmament conference met atWashington just as the members were going to sit down at the tableMonsieur Briand said to President Harding, "How dry is the UnitedStates, anyway?" And the whole assembly talked about it for halfan hour. That was why the first newspaper bulletins merely said, "Conference exchanges credentials. "

As a discoverer of England I therefore made it one of my chief cares totry to obtain accurate information of this topic. I was well aware thatimmediately on my return to Canada the first question I would be askedwould be "Is England going dry?" I realised that in any report I mightmake to the National Geographical Society or to the Political ScienceAssociation, the members of these bodies, being scholars, would wantaccurate information about the price of whiskey, the percentage ofalcohol, and the hours of opening and closing the saloons. 

My first impression on the subject was, I must say, one of severe moralshock. Landing in England after spending the summer in Ontario, itseemed a terrible thing to see people openly drinking on an Englishtrain. On an Ontario train, as everybody knows, there is no way oftaking a drink except by climbing up on the roof, lying flat on one'sstomach, and taking a suck out of a flask. But in England in any diningcar one actually sees a waiter approach a person dining and say, "Beer, sir, or wine?" This is done in broad daylight with no apparent sense ofcriminality or moral shame. Appalling though it sounds, bottled ale isopenly sold on the trains at twenty-five cents a bottle and dry sherryat eighteen cents a glass. 

When I first saw this I expected to see the waiter arrested on the spot. I looked around to see if there were any "spotters, " detectives, orsecret service men on the train. I anticipated that the train conductorwould appear and throw the waiter off the car. But then I realised thatI was in England and that in the British Isles they still tolerate theconsumption of alcohol. Indeed, I doubt if they are even aware thatthey are "consuming alcohol. " Their impression is that they are drinkingbeer. 

At the beginning of my discussion I will therefore preface a few exactfacts and statistics for the use of geographical societies, learnedbodies and government commissions. The quantity of beer consumed inEngland in a given period is about 200, 000, 000 gallons. The life of abottle of Scotch whiskey is seven seconds. The number of public houses, or "pubs, " in the English countryside is one to every half mile. Thepercentage of the working classes drinking beer is 125: the percentageof the class without work drinking beer is 200. 

Statistics like these do not, however, give a final answer to thequestion, "Is prohibition coming to England?" They merely show thatit is not there now. The question itself will be answered in asmany different ways as there are different kinds of people. Anyprohibitionist will tell you that the coming of prohibition to Englandis as certain as the coming eclipse of the sun. But this is always so. It is in human nature that people are impressed by the cause they workin. I once knew a minister of the Scotch Church who took a voyage roundthe world: he said that the thing that impressed him most was the growthof presbyterianism in Japan. No doubt it did. When the Orillia lacrosseteam took their trip to Australia, they said on their return thatlacrosse was spreading all over the world. In the same way there is saidto be a spread all over the world of Christian Science, proportionalrepresentation, militarism, peace sentiment, barbarism, altruism, psychoanalysis and death from wood alcohol. They are what are calledworld movements. 

My own judgment in regard to prohibition in the British Isles is this:In Scotland, prohibition is not coming: if anything, it is going. InIreland, prohibition will only be introduced when they have run out ofother forms of trouble. But in England I think that prohibition couldeasily come unless the English people realise where they are driftingand turn back. They are in the early stage of the movement already. 

Turning first to Scotland, there is no fear, I say, that prohibitionwill be adopted there: and this from the simple reason that theScotch do not drink. I have elsewhere alluded to the extraordinarymisapprehension that exists in regard to the Scotch people and theirsense of humour. I find a similar popular error in regard to the use ofwhiskey by the Scotch. Because they manufacture the best whiskey in theworld, the Scotch, in popular fancy, are often thought to be addicted tothe drinking of it. This is purely a delusion. During the whole of twoor three pleasant weeks spent in lecturing in Scotland, I never on anyoccasion saw whiskey made use of as a beverage. I have seen people takeit, of course, as a medicine, or as a precaution, or as a wise offsetagainst a rather treacherous climate; but as a beverage, never. 

The manner and circumstance of their offering whiskey to a strangeramply illustrates their point of view towards it. Thus at my firstlecture in Glasgow where I was to appear before a large and fashionableaudience, the chairman said to me in the committee room that he wasafraid that there might be a draft on the platform. Here was a seriousmatter. For a lecturer who has to earn his living by his occupation, adraft on the platform is not a thing to be disregarded. It might killhim. Nor is it altogether safe for the chairman himself, a man alreadyin middle life, to be exposed to a current of cold air. In thiscase, therefore, the chairman suggested that he thought it might be"prudent"--that was his word, "prudent"--if I should take a small dropof whiskey before encountering the draft. In return I told him that Icould not think of his accompanying me to the platform unless he wouldlet me insist on his taking a very reasonable precaution. Whiskey takenon these terms not only seems like a duty but it tastes better. 

In the same way I find that in Scotland it is very often necessary totake something to drink on purely meteorological grounds. The weathersimply cannot be trusted. A man might find that on "going out into theweather" he is overwhelmed by a heavy fog or an avalanche of snow or adriving storm of rain. In such a case a mere drop of whiskey might savehis life. It would be folly not to take it. Again, --"coming in outof the weather" is a thing not to be trifled with. A person comingin unprepared and unprotected might be seized with angina pectoris orappendicitis and die upon the spot. No reasonable person would refusethe simple precaution of taking a small drop immediately after hisentry. 

I find that, classified altogether, there are seventeen reasons advancedin Scotland for taking whiskey. They run as follows: Reason one, becauseit is raining; Two, because it is not raining; Three, because you arejust going out into the weather; Four, because you have just come infrom the weather; Five; no, I forget the ones that come after that. ButI remember that reason number seventeen is "because it canna do ye anyharm. " On the whole, reason seventeen is the best. 

Put in other words this means that the Scotch make use of whiskey withdignity and without shame: and they never call it alcohol. 

In England the case is different. Already the English are showing thefirst signs that indicate the possible approach of prohibition. Alreadyall over England there are weird regulations about the closing hoursof the public houses. They open and close according to the varyingregulations of the municipality. In some places they open at six in themorning, close down for an hour from nine till ten, open then till noon, shut for ten minutes, and so on; in some places they are open in themorning and closed in the evening; in other places they are open in theevening and closed in the morning. The ancient idea was that a waysidepublic house was a place of sustenance and comfort, a human need thatmight be wanted any hour. It was in the same class with the life boator the emergency ambulance. Under the old common law the innkeeper mustsupply meat and drink at any hour. If he was asleep the traveller mightwake him. And in those days meat and drink were regarded in the samelight. Note how great the change is. In modern life in England there isnothing that you dare wake up a man for except gasoline. The mere factthat you need a drink is no longer held to entitle you to break hisrest. 

In London especially one feels the full force of the "closing"regulations. The bars open and shut at intervals like daisies blinkingat the sun. And like the flowers at evening they close their petals withthe darkness. In London they have already adopted the deadly phrases ofthe prohibitionist, such as "alcohol" and "liquor traffic" and so on:and already the "sale of spirits" stops absolutely at about eleveno'clock at night. 

This means that after theatre hours London is a "city of dreadfulnight. " The people from the theatre scuttle to their homes. The lightsare extinguished in the windows. The streets darken. Only a belated taxistill moves. At midnight the place is deserted. At 1 A. M. , the lingeringfootfalls echo in the empty street. Here and there a restaurant ina fashionable street makes a poor pretence of keeping open for aftertheatre suppers. Odd people, the shivering wrecks of theatre parties, are huddled here and there. A gloomy waiter lays a sardine on thetable. The guests charge their glasses with Perrier Water, Lithia Water, Citrate of Magnesia, or Bromo Seltzer. They eat the sardine and vanishinto the night. Not even Oshkosh, Wisconsin, or Middlebury, Vermont, isquieter than is the night life of London. It may no doubt seem a wisething to go to bed early. 

But it is a terrible thing to go to bed early by Act of Parliament. 

All of which means that the people of England are not facing theprohibition question fairly and squarely. If they see no harm in"consuming alcohol" they ought to say so and let their code ofregulations reflect the fact. But the "closing" and "regulating" and"squeezing" of the "liquor traffic", without any outspoken protest, means letting the whole case go by default. Under these circumstancesan organised and active minority can always win and impose its will uponthe crowd. 

When I was in England I amused myself one day by writing an imaginarypicture of what England will be like when the last stage is reached andLondon goes the way of New York and Chicago. I cast it in the form of aletter from an American prohibitionist in which he describes the finaltriumph of prohibition in England. With the permission of the reader Ireproduce it here:

 THE ADVENT OF PROHIBITION IN ENGLAND

 As written in the correspondence of an American visitor

 How glad I am that I have lived to see this wonderful reform of prohibition at last accomplished in England. There is something so difficult about the British, so stolid, so hard to move. 

 We tried everything in the great campaign that we made, and for ever so long it didn't seem to work. We had processions, just as we did at home in America, with great banners carried round bearing the inscription: "Do you want to save the boy?" But these people looked on and said, "Boy? Boy? What boy?" Our workers were almost disheartened. "Oh, sir, " said one of them, an ex-barkeeper from Oklahoma, "it does seem so hard that we have total prohibition in the States and here they can get all the drink they want. " And the good fellow broke down and sobbed. 

 But at last it has come. After the most terrific efforts we managed to get this nation stampeded, and for more than a month now England has been dry. I wish you could have witnessed the scenes, just like what we saw at home in America, when it was known that the bill had passed. The members of the House of Lords all stood up on their seats and yelled, "Rah! Rah! Rah! Who's bone dry? We are!" And the brewers and innkeepers were emptying their barrels of beer into the Thames just as at St. Louis they emptied the beer into the Mississippi. 

 I can't tell you with what pleasure I watched a group of members of the Athenaeum Club sitting on the bank of the Thames and opening bottles of champagne and pouring them into the river. "To think, " said one of them to me, "that there was a time when I used to lap up a couple of quarts of this terrible stuff every evening. " I got him to give me a few bottles as a souvenir, and I got some more souvenirs, whiskey and liqueurs, when the members of the Beefsteak Club were emptying out their cellars into Green Street; so when you come over, I shall still be able, of course, to give you a drink. 

 We have, as I said, been bone dry only a month, and yet already we are getting the same splendid results as in America. All the big dinners are now as refined and as elevating and the dinner speeches as long and as informal as they are in New York or Toronto. The other night at a dinner at the White Friars Club I heard Sir Owen Seaman speaking, not in that light futile way that he used to have, but quite differently. He talked for over an hour and a half on the State ownership of the Chinese Railway System, and I almost fancied myself back in Boston. 

 And the working class too. It is just wonderful how prohibition has increased their efficiency. In the old days they used to drop their work the moment the hour struck. Now they simply refuse to do so. I noticed yesterday a foreman in charge of a building operation vainly trying to call the bricklayers down. "Come, come, gentlemen, " he shouted, "I must insist on your stopping for the night. " But they just went on laying bricks faster than ever. 

 Of course, as yet there are a few slight difficulties and deficiencies, just as there are with us in America. We have had the same trouble with wood-alcohol (they call it methylated spirit here), with the same deplorable results. On some days the list of deaths is very serious, and in some cases we are losing men we can hardly spare. A great many of our leading actors--in fact, most of them--are dead. And there has been a heavy loss, too, among the literary class and in the legal profession. 

 There was a very painful scene last week at the dinner of the Benchers of Gray's Inn. It seems that one of the chief justices had undertaken to make home brew for the Benchers, just as the people do on our side of the water. He got one of the waiters to fetch him some hops and three raw potatoes, a packet of yeast and some boiling water. In the end, four of the Benchers were carried out dead. But they are going to give them a public funeral in the Abbey. 

 I regret to say that the death list in the Royal Navy is very heavy. Some of the best sailors are gone, and it is very difficult to keep admirals. But I have tried to explain to the people here that these are merely the things that one must expect, and that, with a little patience, they will have bone-dry admirals and bone-dry statesmen just as good as the wet ones. Even the clergy can be dried up with firmness and perseverance. 

 There was also a slight sensation here when the Chancellor of the Exchequer brought in his first appropriation for maintaining prohibition. From our point of view in America, it was modest enough. But these people are not used to it. The Chancellor merely asked for ten million pounds a month to begin on; he explained that his task was heavy; he has to police, not only the entire coast, but also the interior; for the Grampian Hills of Scotland alone he asked a million. There was a good deal of questioning in the House over these figures. The Chancellor was asked if he intended to keep a hired spy at every street corner in London. He answered, "No, only on every other street. " He added also that every spy must wear a brass collar with his number. 

 I must admit further, and I am sorry to have to tell you this, that now we have prohibition it is becoming increasingly difficult to get a drink. In fact, sometimes, especially in the very early morning, it is most inconvenient and almost impossible. The public houses being closed, it is necessary to go into a drug store--just as it is with us--and lean up against the counter and make a gurgling sound like apoplexy. One often sees these apoplexy cases lined up four deep. 

 But the people are finding substitutes, just as they do with us. There is a tremendous run on patent medicines, perfume, glue and nitric acid. It has been found that Shears' soap contains alcohol, and one sees people everywhere eating cakes of it. The upper classes have taken to chewing tobacco very considerably, and the use of opium in the House of Lords has very greatly increased. 

 But I don't want you to think that if you come over here to see me, your private life will be in any way impaired or curtailed. I am glad to say that I have plenty of rich connections whose cellars are very amply stocked. The Duke of Blank is said to have 5, 000 cases of Scotch whiskey, and I have managed to get a card of introduction to his butler. In fact you will find that, just as with us in America, the benefit of prohibition is intended to fall on the poorer classes. There is no desire to interfere with the rich. 

IX. "We Have With Us To-night"

NOT only during my tour in England but for many years past it has beenmy lot to speak and to lecture in all sorts of places, under all sortsof circumstances and before all sorts of audiences. I say this, not inboastfulness, but in sorrow. Indeed, I only mention it to establish thefact that when I talk of lecturers and speakers, I talk of what I know. 

Few people realise how arduous and how disagreeable public lecturing is. The public sees the lecturer step out on to the platform in his littlewhite waistcoat and his long tailed coat and with a false air of aconjurer about him, and they think him happy. After about ten minutesof his talk they are tired of him. Most people tire of a lecture in tenminutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go tolectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tiredof it, presently hold it as a sort of a grudge against the lecturerpersonally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs. 

For my own part I always try to appear as happy as possible while I amlecturing. I take this to be part of the trade of anybody labelled ahumourist and paid as such. I have no sympathy whatever with the ideathat a humourist ought to be a lugubrious person with a face stampedwith melancholy. This is a cheap and elementary effect belonging to thelevel of a circus clown. The image of "laughter shaking both his sides"is the truer picture of comedy. Therefore, I say, I always try to appearcheerful at my lectures and even to laugh at my own jokes. Oddly enoughthis arouses a kind of resentment in some of the audience. "Well, Iwill say, " said a stern-looking woman who spoke to me after one of mylectures, "you certainly do seem to enjoy your own fun. " "Madam, " Ianswered, "if I didn't, who would?" But in reality the whole business ofbeing a public lecturer is one long variation of boredom and fatigue. So I propose to set down here some of the many trials which the lecturerhas to bear. 

The first of the troubles which any one who begins giving publiclectures meets at the very outset is the fact that the audience won'tcome to hear him. This happens invariably and constantly, and notthrough any fault or shortcoming of the speaker. 

I don't say that this happened very often to me in my tour in England. In nearly all cases I had crowded audiences: by dividing up the moneythat I received by the average number of people present to hear me Ihave calculated that they paid thirteen cents each. And my lectures areevidently worth thirteen cents. But at home in Canada I have very oftentried the fatal experiment of lecturing for nothing: and in that casethe audience simply won't come. A man will turn out at night when heknows he is going to hear a first class thirteen cent lecture; but whenthe thing is given for nothing, why go to it?

The city in which I live is overrun with little societies, clubs andassociations, always wanting to be addressed. So at least it is inappearance. In reality the societies are composed of presidents, secretaries and officials, who want the conspicuousness of office, and alarge list of other members who won't come to the meetings. For such anassociation, the invited speaker who is to lecture for nothing prepareshis lecture on "Indo-Germanic Factors in the Current of History. " If heis a professor, he takes all the winter at it. You may drop in athis house at any time and his wife will tell you that he is "upstairsworking on his lecture. " If he comes down at all it is in carpetslippers and dressing gown. His mental vision of his meeting is that ofa huge gathering of keen people with Indo-Germanic faces, hanging uponevery word. 

Then comes the fated night. There are seventeen people present. Thelecturer refuses to count them. He refers to them afterwards as "about ahundred. " To this group he reads his paper on the Indo-Germanic Factor. It takes him two hours. When he is over the chairman invites discussion. There is no discussion. The audience is willing to let the Indo-Germanicfactors go unchallenged. Then the chairman makes this speech. He says:

"I am very sorry indeed that we should have had such a very poor 'turnout' to-night. I am sure that the members who were not here have misseda real treat in the delightful paper that we have listened to. I wantto assure the lecturer that if he comes to the Owl's Club again wecan guarantee him next time a capacity audience. And will any members, please, who haven't paid their dollar this winter, pay it either to meor to Mr. Sibley as they pass out. "

I have heard this speech (in the years when I have had to listen to it)so many times that I know it by heart. I have made the acquaintance ofthe Owl's Club under so many names that I recognise it at once. I amaware that its members refuse to turn out in cold weather; that they donot turn out in wet weather; that when the weather is really fine, it is impossible to get them together; that the slightestcounter-attraction, --a hockey match, a sacred concert, --goes to theirheads at once. 

There was a time when I was the newly appointed occupant of a collegechair and had to address the Owl's Club. It is a penalty that all newprofessors pay; and the Owls batten upon them like bats. It is one ofthe compensations of age that I am free of the Owl's Club forever. Butin the days when I still had to address them, I used to take it out ofthe Owls in a speech, delivered, in imagination only and not out loud, to the assembled meeting of the seventeen Owls, after the chairman hadmade his concluding remarks. It ran as follows:

"Gentlemen--if you are such, which I doubt. I realise that the paperwhich I have read on 'Was Hegel a deist?' has been an error. I spentall the winter on it and now I realise that not one of you pups know whoHegel was or what a deist is. Never mind. It is over now, and I am glad. But just let me say this, only this, which won't keep you a minute. Yourchairman has been good enough to say that if I come again you will gettogether a capacity audience to hear me. Let me tell you that if yoursociety waits for its next meeting till I come to address you again, youwill wait indeed. In fact, gentlemen--I say it very frankly--it will bein another world. "

But I pass over the audience. Suppose there is a real audience, andsuppose them all duly gathered together. Then it becomes the business ofthat gloomy gentleman--facetiously referred to in the newspaper reportsas the "genial chairman"--to put the lecturer to the bad. In nine casesout of ten he can do so. Some chairmen, indeed, develop a great gift forit. Here are one or two examples from my own experience:

"Ladies and gentlemen, " said the chairman of a society in a littlecountry town in Western Ontario, to which I had come as a paid (a veryhumbly paid) lecturer, "we have with us tonight a gentleman" (here hemade an attempt to read my name on a card, failed to read it and put thecard back in his pocket)--"a gentleman who is to lecture to us on" (herehe looked at his card again)--"on Ancient Ancient, --I don't very wellsee what it is--Ancient--Britain? Thank you, on Ancient Britain. Now, this is the first of our series of lectures for this winter. The lastseries, as you all know, was not a success. In fact, we came out at theend of the year with a deficit. So this year we are starting a new lineand trying the experiment of cheaper talent. "

Here the chairman gracefully waved his hand toward me and there was acertain amount of applause. "Before I sit down, " the chairman added, "I'd like to say that I am sorry to see such a poor turn-out to-nightand to ask any of the members who haven't paid their dollar to pay iteither to me or to Mr. Sibley as they pass out. "

Let anybody who knows the discomfiture of coming out before an audienceon any terms, judge how it feels to crawl out in front of them labelledcheaper talent. 

Another charming way in which the chairman endeavours to put both thespeaker for the evening and the audience into an entirely good humour, is by reading out letters of regret from persons unable to be present. This, of course, is only for grand occasions when the speaker has beeninvited to come under very special auspices. It was my fate, not longago, to "appear" (this is the correct word to use in this connection) inthis capacity when I was going about Canada trying to raise some moneyfor the relief of the Belgians. I travelled in great glory with a passon the Canadian Pacific Railway (not since extended: officials of theroad kindly note this) and was most generously entertained wherever Iwent. 

It was, therefore, the business of the chairman at such meetings asthese to try and put a special distinction or cachet on the gathering. This is how it was done:

"Ladies and gentlemen, " said the chairman, rising from his seat on theplatform with a little bundle of papers in his hand, "before I introducethe speaker of the evening, I have one or two items that I want to readto you. " Here he rustles his papers and there is a deep hush in the hallwhile he selects one. "We had hoped to have with us to-night Sir RobertBorden, the Prime Minister of this Dominion. I have just received atelegram from Sir Robert in which he says that he will not be able to behere" (great applause). The chairman puts up his hand for silence, picksup another telegram and continues, "Our committee, ladies and gentlemen, telegraphed an invitation to Sir Wilfrid Laurier very cordially invitinghim to be here to-night. I have here Sir Wilfrid's answer in which hesays that he will not be able to be with us" (renewed applause). Thechairman again puts up his hand for silence and goes on, picking up onepaper after another. "The Minister of Finance regrets that he will beunable to come" (applause). "Mr. Rodolphe Lemieux (applause) will notbe here (great applause)--the Mayor of Toronto (applause) is detainedon business (wild applause)--the Anglican Bishop of the Diocese(applause)--the Principal of the University College, Toronto (greatapplause)--the Minister of Education (applause)--none of these arecoming. " There is a great clapping of hands and enthusiasm, after whichthe meeting is called to order with a very distinct and palpable feelingthat it is one of the most distinguished audiences ever gathered in thehall. 

Here is another experience of the same period while I was pursuing thesame exalted purpose: I arrived in a little town in Eastern Ontario, and found to my horror that I was billed to "appear" in a church. I wassupposed to give readings from my works, and my books are supposed to beof a humorous character. A church hardly seemed the right place to getfunny in. I explained my difficulty to the pastor of the church, avery solemn looking man. He nodded his head, slowly and gravely, as hegrasped my difficulty. "I see, " he said, "I see, but I think that I canintroduce you to our people in such a way as to make that right. "

When the time came, he led me up on to the pulpit platform of thechurch, just beside and below the pulpit itself, with a reading desk anda big bible and a shaded light beside it. It was a big church, and theaudience, sitting in half darkness, as is customary during a sermon, reached away back into the gloom. The place was packed full andabsolutely quiet. Then the chairman spoke:

"Dear friends, " he said, "I want you to understand that it will be allright to laugh tonight. Let me hear you laugh heartily, laugh right out, just as much as ever you want to, because" (and here his voice assumedthe deep sepulchral tones of the preacher), -"when we think of the nobleobject for which the professor appears to-night, we may be assured thatthe Lord will forgive any one who will laugh at the professor. "

I am sorry to say, however, that none of the audience, even with theplenary absolution in advance, were inclined to take a chance on it. 

I recall in this same connection the chairman of a meeting at a certaintown in Vermont. He represents the type of chairman who turns up solate at the meeting that the committee have no time to explain to himproperly what the meeting is about or who the speaker is. I noticedon this occasion that he introduced me very guardedly by name (from alittle card) and said nothing about the Belgians, and nothing about mybeing (supposed to be) a humourist. This last was a great error. Theaudience, for want of guidance, remained very silent and decorous, andwell behaved during my talk. Then, somehow, at the end, while some onewas moving a vote of thanks, the chairman discovered his error. So hetried to make it good. Just as the audience were getting up to put ontheir wraps, he rose, knocked on his desk and said:

"Just a minute, please, ladies and gentlemen, just a minute. I have justfound out--I should have known it sooner, but I was late in coming tothis meeting--that the speaker who has just addressed you has done so inbehalf of the Belgian Relief Fund. I understand that he is a well-knownCanadian humourist (ha! ha!) and I am sure that we have all beenimmensely amused (ha! ha!). He is giving his delightful talks (ha!ha!)--though I didn't know this till just this minute--for the BelgianRelief Fund, and he is giving his services for nothing. I am sure whenwe realise this, we shall all feel that it has been well worth while tocome. I am only sorry that we didn't have a better turn out to-night. But I can assure the speaker that if he will come again, we shallguarantee him a capacity audience. And I may say, that if there are anymembers of this association who have not paid their dollar this season, they can give it either to myself or to Mr. Sibley as they pass out. "

With the amount of accumulated experience that I had behind me I wasnaturally interested during my lecture in England in the chairmen whowere to introduce me. I cannot help but feel that I have acquired a finetaste in chair men. I know them just as other experts know old furnitureand Pekinese dogs. The witty chairman, the prosy chairman, the solemnchairman, --I know them all. As soon as I shake hands with the chairmanin the Committee room I can tell exactly how he will act. 

There are certain types of chairmen who have so often been described andare so familiar that it is not worth while to linger on them. Everybodyknows the chairman who says; "Now, ladies and gentlemen, you have notcome here to listen to me. So I will be very brief; in fact, I willconfine my remarks to just one or two very short observations. " He thenproceeds to make observations for twenty-five minutes. At the end ofit he remarks with charming simplicity, "Now I know that you are allimpatient to hear the lecturer. .. . "

And everybody knows the chairman who comes to the meeting with a veryimperfect knowledge of who or what the lecturer is, and is driven tointroduce him by saying:

"Our lecturer of the evening is widely recognised as one of the greatestauthorities on; on, --on his subject in the world to-day. He comes tous from; from a great distance and I can assure him that it is agreat pleasure to this audience to welcome a man who has done so muchto, --to, --to advance the interests of, --of; of everything as he has. "

But this man, bad as he is, is not so bad as the chairman whosepreparation for introducing the speaker has obviously been made at theeleventh hour. Just such a chairman it was my fate to strike in theform of a local alderman, built like an ox, in one of those smallmanufacturing places in the north of England where they grow men of thistype and elect them into office. 

"I never saw the lecturer before, " he said, "but I've read his book. " (Ihave written nineteen books. ) "The committee was good enough to send meover his book last night. I didn't read it all but I took a look at thepreface and I can assure him that he is very welcome. I understand hecomes from a college. .. . " Then he turned directly towards me and said ina loud voice, "What was the name of that college over there you said youcame from?"

"McGill, " I answered equally loudly. 

"He comes from McGill, " the chairman boomed out. "I never heard ofMcGill myself but I can assure him he's welcome. He's going to lectureto us on, --what did you say it was to be about?"

"It's a humorous lecture, " I said. 

"Ay, it's to be a humorous lecture, ladies and gentlemen, and I'llventure to say it will be a rare treat. I'm only sorry I can't stay forit myself as I have to get back over to the Town Hall for a meeting. Sowithout more ado I'll get off the platform and let the lecturer go onwith his humour. "

A still more terrible type of chairman is one whose mind is evidentlypreoccupied and disturbed with some local happening and who comes on tothe platform with a face imprinted with distress. Before introducing thelecturer he refers in moving tones to the local sorrow, whatever it is. As a prelude to a humorous lecture this is not gay. 

Such a chairman fell to my lot one night before a gloomy audience ina London suburb. "As I look about this hall to-night, " he began in adoleful whine, "I see many empty seats. " Here he stifled a sob. "Nor amI surprised that a great many of our people should prefer to-night tostay quietly at home--"

I had no clue to what he meant. I merely gathered that some particularsorrow must have overwhelmed the town that day. 

"To many it may seem hardly fitting that after the loss our town hassustained we should come out here to listen to a humorous lecture, --", "What's the trouble?" I whispered to a citizen sitting beside me on theplatform. 

"Our oldest resident"--he whispered back--"he died this morning. "

"How old?"

"Ninety-four, " he whispered. 

Meantime the chairman, with deep sobs in his voice, continued:

"We debated in our committee whether or not we should have the lecture. Had it been a lecture of another character our position would have beenless difficult, --", By this time I began to feel like a criminal. "Thecase would have been different had the lecture been one that containedinformation, or that was inspired by some serious purpose, or that couldhave been of any benefit. But this is not so. We understand that thislecture which Mr. Leacock has already given, I believe, twenty or thirtytimes in England, --"

Here he turned to me with a look of mild reproval while the silentaudience, deeply moved, all looked at me as at a man who went aroundthe country insulting the memory of the dead by giving a lecture thirtytimes. 

"We understand, though this we shall have an opportunity of testing forourselves presently, that Mr. Leacock's lecture is not of a characterwhich, --has not, so to speak, the kind of value, in short, is not alecture of that class. "

Here he paused and choked back a sob. 

"Had our poor friend been spared to us for another six years he wouldhave rounded out the century. But it was not to be. For two or threeyears past he has noted that somehow his strength was failing, that, forsome reason or other, he was no longer what he had been. Last monthhe began to droop. Last week he began to sink. Speech left him lastTuesday. This morning he passed, and he has gone now, we trust, insafety to where there are no lectures. "

The audience were now nearly in tears. 

The chairman made a visible effort towards firmness and control. 

"But yet, " he continued, "our committee felt that in another senseit was our duty to go on with our arrangements. I think, ladies andgentlemen, that the war has taught us all that it is always our duty to'carry on, ' no matter how hard it may be, no matter with what reluctancewe do it, and whatever be the difficulties and the dangers, we mustcarry on to the end: for after all there is an end and by resolution andpatience we can reach it. 

"I will, therefore, invite Mr. Leacock to deliver to us his humorouslecture, the title of which I have forgotten, but I understand it tobe the same lecture which he has already given thirty or forty times inEngland. "

But contrast with this melancholy man the genial and pleasing person whointroduced me, all upside down, to a metropolitan audience. 

He was so brisk, so neat, so sure of himself that it didn't seempossible that he could make any kind of a mistake. I thought itunnecessary to coach him. He seemed absolutely all right. 

"It is a great pleasure, "--he said, with a charming, easy appearance ofbeing entirely at home on the platform, --"to welcome here tonight ourdistinguished Canadian fellow citizen, Mr. Learoyd"--he turned halfway towards me as he spoke with a sort of gesture of welcome, admirablyexecuted. If only my name had been Learoyd instead of Leacock it wouldhave been excellent. 

"There are many of us, " he continued, "who have awaited Mr. Learoyd'scoming with the most pleasant anticipations. We seemed from his books toknow him already as an old friend. In fact I think I do not exaggeratewhen I tell Mr. Learoyd that his name in our city has long been ahousehold word. I have very, very great pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, in introducing to you Mr. Learoyd. "

As far as I know that chairman never knew his error. At the close of mylecture he said that he was sure that the audience "were deeply indebtedto Mr. Learoyd, " and then with a few words of rapid, genial apologybuzzed off, like a humming bird, to other avocations. But I have amplyforgiven him: anything for kindness and geniality; it makes the wholeof life smooth. If that chairman ever comes to my home town he is herebyinvited to lunch or dine with me, as Mr. Learoyd or under any name thathe selects. 

Such a man is, after all, in sharp contrast to the kind of chairman whohas no native sense of the geniality that ought to accompany his office. There is, for example, a type of man who thinks that the fitting wayto introduce a lecturer is to say a few words about the finances of thesociety to which he is to lecture (for money) and about the difficultyof getting members to turn out to hear lectures. 

Everybody has heard such a speech a dozen times. But it is the paidlecturer sitting on the platform who best appreciates it. It runs likethis:

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, before I invite the lecturer of the eveningto address us there are a few words that I would like to say. There area good many members who are in arrears with their fees. I am aware thatthese are hard times and it is difficult to collect money but at thesame time the members ought to remember that the expenses of the societyare very heavy. The fees that are asked by the lecturers, as I supposeyou know, have advanced very greatly in the last few years. In fact Imay say that they are becoming almost prohibitive. "

This discourse is pleasant hearing for the lecturer. He can see themembers who have not yet paid their annual dues eyeing him with hatred. The chairman goes on:

"Our finance committee were afraid at first that we could not afford tobring Mr. Leacock to our society. But fortunately through the personalgenerosity of two of our members who subscribed ten pounds each out oftheir own pocket we are able to raise the required sum. "

 (Applause: during which the lecturer sits looking and feeling like the embodiment of the "required sum. ")

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, " continues the chairman, "what I feel isthat when we have members in the society who are willing to make thissacrifice, --because it is a sacrifice, ladies and gentlemen, --we oughtto support them in every way. The members ought to think it their dutyto turn out to the lectures. I know that it is not an easy thing to do. On a cold night, like this evening, it is hard, I admit it is hard, toturn out from the comfort of one's own fireside and come and listen to alecture. But I think that the members should look at it not as a matterof personal comfort but as a matter of duty towards this society. Wehave managed to keep this society alive for fifteen years and, though Idon't say it in any spirit of boasting, it has not been an easy thingto do. It has required a good deal of pretty hard spade work by thecommittee. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I suppose you didn't come here tolisten to me and perhaps I have said enough about our difficulties andtroubles. So without more ado (this is always a favourite phrase withchairmen) I'll invite Mr. Leacock to address the society; oh, just aword before I sit down. Will all those who are leaving before the end ofthe lecture kindly go out through the side door and step as quietly aspossible? Mr. Leacock. "

Anybody who is in the lecture business knows that that introduction isfar worse than being called Mr. Learoyd. 

When any lecturer goes across to England from this side of the waterthere is naturally a tendency on the part of the chairman to playupon this fact. This is especially true in the case of a Canadian likemyself. The chairman feels that the moment is fitting for one of thosegreat imperial thoughts that bind the British Empire together. Butsometimes the expression of the thought falls short of the full glory ofthe conception. 

Witness this (word for word) introduction that was used against me by aclerical chairman in a quiet spot in the south of England:

"Not so long ago, ladies and gentlemen, " said the vicar, "we used tosend out to Canada various classes of our community to help build upthat country. We sent out our labourers, we sent out our scholars andprofessors. Indeed we even sent out our criminals. And now, " with a waveof his hand towards me, "they are coming back. "

There was no laughter. An English audience is nothing if not literal;and they are as polite as they are literal. They understood that I was areformed criminal and as such they gave me a hearty burst of applause. 

But there is just one thing that I would like to chronicle here infavour of the chairman and in gratitude for his assistance. Even at hisworst he is far better than having no chairman at all. Over in England agreat many societies and public bodies have adopted the plan of "cuttingout the chairman. " Wearying of his faults, they have forgotten thereasons for his existence and undertaken to do without him. 

The result is ghastly. The lecturer steps up on to the platform aloneand unaccompanied. There is a feeble ripple of applause; he makes hismiserable bow and explains with as much enthusiasm as he can who he is. The atmosphere of the thing is so cold that an 'Arctic expedition isn'tin it with it. I found also the further difficulty that in the absenceof the chairman very often the audience, or a large part of it, doesn'tknow who the lecturer is. On many occasions I received on appearing awild burst of applause under the impression that I was somebody else. I have been mistaken in this way for Mr. Briand, then Prime Minister ofFrance, for Charlie Chaplin, for Mrs. Asquith, --but stop, I may get intoa libel suit. All I mean is that without a chairman "we celebrities" getterribly mixed up together. 

To one experience of my tour as a lecturer I shall always be able tolook back with satisfaction. I nearly had the pleasure of killing a manwith laughing: and this in the most literal sense. American lecturershave often dreamed of doing this. I nearly did it. The man in questionwas a comfortable apoplectic-looking man with the kind of merry rubicundface that is seen in countries where they don't have prohibition. He wasseated near the back of the hall and was laughing uproariously. All ofa sudden I realised that something was happening. The man had collapsedsideways on to the floor; a little group of men gathered about him; theylifted him up and I could see them carrying him out, a silent and inertmass. As in duty bound I went right on with my lecture. But my heartbeat high with satisfaction. I was sure that I had killed him. Thereader may judge how high these hopes rose when a moment or two later anote was handed to the chairman who then asked me to pause for amoment in my lecture and stood up and asked, "Is there a doctor in theaudience?" A doctor rose and silently went out. The lecture continued;but there was no more laughter; my aim had now become to kill anotherof them and they knew it. They were aware that if they started laughingthey might die. In a few minutes a second note was handed to thechairman. He announced very gravely, "A second doctor is wanted. " Thelecture went on in deeper silence than ever. All the audience werewaiting for a third announcement. It came. A new message was handed tothe chairman. He rose and said, "If Mr. Murchison, the undertaker, is inthe audience, will he kindly step outside. "

That man, I regret to say, got well. 

Disappointing though it is to read it, he recovered. I sent back nextmorning from London a telegram of enquiry (I did it in reality so asto have a proper proof of his death) and received the answer, "Patientdoing well; is sitting up in bed and reading Lord Haldane's Relativity;no danger of relapse. "

X. Have the English any Sense of Humour?

It was understood that the main object of my trip to England was to findout whether the British people have any sense of humour. No doubt theGeographical Society had this investigation in mind in not payingmy expenses. Certainly on my return I was at once assailed with thequestion on all sides, "Have they got a sense of humour? Even if it isonly a rudimentary sense, have they got it or have they not?" I proposetherefore to address myself to the answer to this question. 

A peculiar interest always attaches to humour. There is no quality ofthe human mind about which its possessor is more sensitive than thesense of humour. A man will freely confess that he has no ear for music, or no taste for fiction, or even no interest in religion. But I have yetto see the man who announces that he has no sense of humour. In point offact, every man is apt to think himself possessed of an exceptional giftin this direction, and that even if his humour does not express itselfin the power either to make a joke or to laugh at one, it none the lessconsists in a peculiar insight or inner light superior to that of otherpeople. 

The same thing is true of nations. Each thinks its own humour ofan entirely superior kind, and either refuses to admit, or admitsreluctantly, the humorous quality of other peoples. The Englishman maycredit the Frenchman with a certain light effervescence of mind which heneither emulates nor envies; the Frenchman may acknowledge that Englishliterature shows here and there a sort of heavy playfulness; but neitherof them would consider that the humour of the other nation could stand amoment's comparison with his own. 

Yet, oddly enough, American humour stands as a conspicuous exception tothis general rule. A certain vogue clings to it. Ever since the spaciousdays of Artemus Ward and Mark Twain it has enjoyed an extraordinaryreputation, and this not only on our own continent, but in England. Itwas in a sense the English who "discovered" Mark Twain; I mean itwas they who first clearly recognised him as a man of letters of theforemost rank, at a time when academic Boston still tried to explain himaway as a mere comic man of the West. In the same way Artemus Ward isstill held in affectionate remembrance in London, and, of the latergeneration, Mr. Dooley at least is a household word. 

This is so much the case that a sort of legend has grown around Americanhumour. It is presumed to be a superior article and to enjoy the samekind of pre-eminence as French cooking, the Russian ballet, and Italianorgan grinding. With this goes the converse supposition that the Britishpeople are inferior in humour, that a joke reaches them only with greatdifficulty, and that a British audience listens to humour in gloomy andunintelligent silence. People still love to repeat the famous story ofhow John Bright listened attentively to Artemus Ward's lecture inLondon and then said, gravely, that he "doubted many of the young man'sstatements"; and readers still remember Mark Twain's famous parody ofthe discussion of his book by a wooden-headed reviewer of an Englishreview. 

But the legend in reality is only a legend. If the English are inferiorto Americans in humour, I, for one, am at a loss to see where it comesin. If there is anything on our continent superior in humour to Punch Ishould like to see it. If we have any more humorous writers in our midstthan E. V. Lucas and Charles Graves and Owen Seaman I should like toread what they write; and if there is any audience capable of morelaughter and more generous appreciation than an audience in London, orBristol, or Aberdeen, I should like to lecture to it. 

During my voyage of discovery in Great Britain I had very exceptionalopportunities for testing the truth of these comparisons. It was mygood fortune to appear as an avowed humourist in all the great Britishcities. I lectured as far north as Aberdeen and as far south as Brightonand Bournemouth; I travelled eastward to Ipswich and westward intoWales. I spoke on serious subjects, but with a joke or two in loco, at the universities, at business gatherings, and at London dinners; Iwatched, lost in admiration, the inspired merriment of the Savagesof Adelphi Terrace, and in my moments of leisure I observed, with ascientific eye, the gaieties of the London revues. As a result of whichI say with conviction that, speaking by and large, the two communitiesare on the same level. A Harvard audience, as I have reason gratefullyto acknowledge, is wonderful. But an Oxford audience is just as good. Agathering of business men in a textile town in the Midlands is justas heavy as a gathering of business men in Decatur, Indiana, but noheavier; and an audience of English schoolboys as at Rugby or at Cliftonis capable of a wild and sustained merriment not to be outdone fromHalifax to Los Angeles. 

There is, however, one vital difference between American and Englishaudiences which would be apt to discourage at the outset any Americanlecturer who might go to England. The English audiences, from the natureof the way in which they have been brought together, expect more. InEngland they still associate lectures with information. We don't. OurAmerican lecture audiences are, in nine cases out of ten, organised bya woman's club of some kind and drawn not from the working class, butfrom--what shall we call it?--the class that doesn't have to work, or, at any rate, not too hard. It is largely a social audience, welleducated without being "highbrow, " and tolerant and kindly to a degree. In fact, what the people mainly want is to see the lecturer. They haveheard all about G. K. Chesterton and Hugh Walpole and John Drinkwater, and so when these gentlemen come to town the woman's club want to havea look at them, just as the English people, who are all crazy aboutanimals, flock to the zoo to look at a new giraffe. They don't expectthe giraffe to do anything in particular. They want to see it, that'sall. So with the American woman's club audience. After they haveseen Mr. Chesterton they ask one another as they come out--just as anincidental matter--"Did you understand his lecture?" and the answer is, "I can't say I did. " But there is no malice about it. They can now goand say that they have seen Mr. Chesterton; that's worth two dollars initself. The nearest thing to this attitude of mind that I heard of inEngland was at the City Temple in London, where they have every week ahuge gathering of about two thousand people, to listen to a (so-called)popular lecture. When I was there I was told that the person who hadpreceded me was Lord Haldane, who had lectured on Einstein's Theoryof Relativity. I said to the chairman, "Surely this kind of audiencecouldn't understand a lecture like that!" He shook his head. "No, " hesaid, "they didn't understand it, but they all enjoyed it. "

I don't mean to imply by what I said above that American lectureaudiences do not appreciate good things or that the English lecturerswho come to this continent are all giraffes. On the contrary: when theaudience finds that Chesterton and Walpole and Drinkwater, in additionto being visible, are also singularly interesting lecturers, they areall the better pleased. But this doesn't alter the fact that they havecome primarily to see the lecturer. 

Not so in England. Here a lecture (outside London) is organised on amuch sterner footing. The people are there for information. The lectureis organised not by idle, amiable, charming women, but by a body called, with variations, the Philosophical Society. From experience I shoulddefine an English Philosophical Society as all the people in townwho don't know anything about philosophy. The academic and universityclasses are never there. The audience is only of plainer folk. In theUnited States and Canada at any evening lecture a large sprinkling ofthe audience are in evening dress. At an English lecture (outside ofLondon) none of them are; philosophy is not to be wooed in such a garb. Nor are there the same commodious premises, the same bright lights, andthe same atmosphere of gaiety as at a society lecture in America. Onthe contrary, the setting is a gloomy one. In England, in winter, nightbegins at four in the afternoon. In the manufacturing towns of theMidlands and the north (which is where the philosophical societiesflourish) there is always a drizzling rain and wet slop underfoot, a bedraggled poverty in the streets, and a dimness of lights thatcontrasts with the glare of light in an American town. There is novisible sign in the town that a lecture is to happen, no placards, noadvertisements, nothing. The lecturer is conducted by a chairman througha side door in a dingy building (The Institute, established 1840), andthen all of a sudden in a huge, dim hall--there sits the PhilosophicalSociety. There are a thousand of them, but they sit as quiet as a prayermeeting. They are waiting to be fed--on information. 

Now I don't mean to say that the Philosophical Society are not a goodaudience. In their own way they're all right. Once the PhilosophicalSociety has decided that a lecture is humorous they do not stinttheir laughter. I have had many times the satisfaction of seeing aPhilosophical Society swept away from its moorings and tossing in a seaof laughter, as generous and as whole-hearted as anything we ever see inAmerica. 

But they are not so willing to begin. With us the chairman has only tosay to the gaily dressed members of the Ladies' Fortnightly Club, "Well, ladies, I'm sure we are all looking forward very much to Mr. Walpole'slecture, " and at once there is a ripple of applause, and a responsiveexpression on a hundred charming faces. 

Not so the Philosophical Society of the Midlands. The chairman rises. He doesn't call for silence. It is there, thick. "We have with usto-night, " he says, "a man whose name is well known to the PhilosophicalSociety" (here he looks at his card), "Mr. Stephen Leacock. " (Completesilence. ) "He is a professor of political economy at--" Here he turns tome and says, "Which college did you say?" I answer quite audibly inthe silence, "At McGill. " "He is at McGill, " says the chairman. (Moresilence. ) "I don't suppose, however, ladies and gentlemen, that he'scome here to talk about political economy. " This is meant as a jest, butthe audience takes it as a threat. "However, ladies and gentlemen, youhaven't come here to listen to me" (this evokes applause, the first ofthe evening), "so without more ado" (the man always has the impressionthat there's been a lot of "ado, " but I never see any of it) "I'll nowintroduce Mr. Leacock. " (Complete silence. )

Nothing of which means the least harm. It only implies that thePhilosophical Society are true philosophers in accepting nothingunproved. They are like the man from Missouri. They want to be shown. And undoubtedly it takes a little time, therefore, to rouse them. Iremember listening with great interest to Sir Michael Sadler, who ispossessed of a very neat wit, introducing me at Leeds. He threw threejokes, one after the other, into the heart of a huge, silent audiencewithout effect. He might as well have thrown soap bubbles. But thefourth joke broke fair and square like a bomb in the middle of thePhilosophical Society and exploded them into convulsions. The process isvery like what artillery men tell of "bracketing" the object fired at, and then landing fairly on it. 

In what I have just written about audiences I have purposely been usingthe word English and not British, for it does not in the least apply tothe Scotch. There is, for a humorous lecturer, no better audience inthe world than a Scotch audience. The old standing joke about the Scotchsense of humour is mere nonsense. Yet one finds it everywhere. 

"So you're going to try to take humour up to Scotland, " the most eminentauthor in England said to me. "Well, the Lord help you. You'd bettertake an axe with you to open their skulls; there is no other way. " Howthis legend started I don't know, but I think it is because the Englishare jealous of the Scotch. They got into the Union with them in 1707and they can't get out. The Scotch don't want Home Rule, or Swa Raj, orDominion status, or anything; they just want the English. When they wantmoney they go to London and make it; if they want literary fame theysell their books to the English; and to prevent any kind of politicaltrouble they take care to keep the Cabinet well filled with Scotchmen. The English for shame's sake can't get out of the Union, so theyretaliate by saying that the Scotch have no sense of humour. But there'snothing in it. One has only to ask any of the theatrical people and theywill tell you that the audiences in Glasgow and Edinburgh are the bestin the British Isles--possess the best taste and the best ability torecognise what is really good. 

The reason for this lies, I think, in the well-known fact that theScotch are a truly educated people, not educated in the mere sense ofhaving been made to go to school, but in the higher sense of havingacquired an interest in books and a respect for learning. In Englandthe higher classes alone possess this, the working class as a whole knownothing of it. But in Scotland the attitude is universal. And the moreI reflect upon the subject, the more I believe that what counts mostin the appreciation of humour is not nationality, but the degree ofeducation enjoyed by the individual concerned. I do not think that thereis any doubt that educated people possess a far wider range of humourthan the uneducated class. Some people, of course, get overeducatedand become hopelessly academic. The word "highbrow" has been inventedexactly to fit the case. The sense of humour in the highbrow has becomeatrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under theaccumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishesa fine growth of conceit. But even in the highbrow the educatedappreciation of humour is there--away down. Generally, if one attemptsto amuse a highbrow he will resent it as if the process were beneathhim; or perhaps the intellectual jealousy and touchiness with which heis always overcharged will lead him to retaliate with a pointlessstory from Plato. But if the highbrow is right off his guard and has nojealousy in his mind, you may find him roaring with laughter and wipinghis spectacles, with his sides shaking, and see him converted as bymagic into the merry, clever little school-boy that he was thirty yearsago, before his education ossified him. 

But with the illiterate and the rustic no such process is possible. Hissense of humour may be there as a sense, but the mechanism for settingit in operation is limited and rudimentary. Only the broadest and mostelementary forms of joke can reach him. The magnificent mechanism of theart of words is, quite literally, a sealed book to him. Here and there, indeed, a form of fun is found so elementary in its nature and yet soexcellent in execution that it appeals to all alike, to the illiterateand to the highbrow, to the peasant and the professor. Such, forexample, are the antics of Mr. Charles Chaplin or the depiction of Mr. Jiggs by the pencil of George McManus. But such cases are rare. As arule the cheap fun that excites the rustic to laughter is execrable tothe man of education. 

In the light of what I have said before it follows that the individualsthat are findable in every English or American audience are much thesame. All those who lecture or act are well aware that there are certaintypes of people that are always to be seen somewhere in the hall. Someof these belong to the general class of discouraging people. They listenin stolid silence. No light of intelligence ever gleams on their faces;no response comes from their eyes. 

I find, for example, that wherever I go there is always seated in theaudience, about three seats from the front, a silent man with a bigmotionless face like a melon. He is always there. I have seen thatman in every town or city from Richmond, Indiana, to Bournemouth inHampshire. He haunts me. I get to expect him. I feel like nodding tohim from the platform. And I find that all other lecturers have the sameexperience. Wherever they go the man with the big face is always there. He never laughs; no matter if the people all round him areconvulsed with laughter, he sits there like a rock--or, no, like atoad--immovable. What he thinks I don't know. Why he comes to lectures Icannot guess. Once, and once only, I spoke to him, or, rather, he spoketo me. I was coming out from the lecture and found myself close to himin the corridor. It had been a rather gloomy evening; the audience hadhardly laughed at all; and I know nothing sadder than a humorous lecturewithout laughter. The man with the big face, finding himself beside me, turned and said, "Some of them people weren't getting that to-night. "His tone of sympathy seemed to imply that he had got it all himself;if so, he must have swallowed it whole without a sign. But I have sincethought that this man with the big face may have his own internal formof appreciation. This much, however, I know: to look at him from theplatform is fatal. One sustained look into his big, motionless face andthe lecturer would be lost; inspiration would die upon one's lips--thebasilisk isn't in it with him. 

Personally, I no sooner see the man with the big face than instinctivelyI turn my eyes away. I look round the hall for another man that I knowis always there, the opposite type, the little man with the spectacles. There he sits, good soul, about twelve rows back, his large spectaclesbeaming with appreciation and his quick face anticipating every point. I imagine him to be by trade a minor journalist or himself a writer ofsorts, but with not enough of success to have spoiled him. 

There are other people always there, too. There is the old lady whothinks the lecture improper; it doesn't matter how moral it is, she'sout for impropriety and she can find it anywhere. Then there is anothervery terrible man against whom all American lecturers in England shouldbe warned--the man who is leaving on the 9 P. M. Train. English railwaysrunning into suburbs and near-by towns have a schedule which isexpressly arranged to have the principal train leave before the lectureends. Hence the 9-P. M. -train man. He sits right near the front, andat ten minutes to nine he gathers up his hat, coat, and umbrella verydeliberately, rises with great calm, and walks firmly away. His air isthat of a man who has stood all that he can and can bear no more. Tillone knows about this man, and the others who rise after him, it is verydisconcerting; at first I thought I must have said something to reflectupon the royal family. But presently the lecturer gets to understandthat it is only the nine-o'clock train and that all the audience knowabout it. Then it's all right. It's just like the people rising andstretching themselves after the seventh innings in baseball. 

In all that goes above I have been emphasising the fact that the Britishand the American sense of humour are essentially the same thing. But there are, of course, peculiar differences of form and peculiarpreferences of material that often make them seem to diverge widely. 

By this I mean that each community has, within limits, its ownparticular ways of being funny and its own particular conception of ajoke. Thus, a Scotchman likes best a joke which he has all to himselfor which he shares reluctantly with a few; the thing is too rich todistribute. The American loves particularly as his line of joke ananecdote with the point all concentrated at the end and exploding in aphrase. The Englishman loves best as his joke the narration of somethingthat actually did happen and that depends, of course; for its point onits reality. 

There are plenty of minor differences, too, in point of mere form, andvery naturally each community finds the particular form used by theothers less pleasing than its own. In fact, for this very reason eachpeople is apt to think its own humour the best. 

Thus, on our side of the Atlantic, to cite our own faults first, westill cling to the supposed humour of bad spelling. We have, indeed, told ourselves a thousand times over that bad spelling is not funny, butis very tiresome. Yet it is no sooner laid aside and buried than it getsresurrected. I suppose the real reason is that it is funny, at leastto our eyes. When Bill Nye spells wife with "yph" we can't help beingamused. Now Bill Nye's bad spelling had absolutely no point to it exceptits oddity. At times it was extremely funny, but as a mode it led easilyto widespread and pointless imitation. It was the kind of thing--likepoetry--that anybody can do badly. It was most deservedly abandoned withexecration. No American editor would print it to-day. But witness thenew and excellent effect produced with bad spelling by Mr. Ring W. Lardner. Here, however, the case is altered; it is not the falseness ofMr. Lardner's spelling that is the amusing feature of it, but the truthof it. When he writes, "dear friend, Al, I would of rote sooner, " etc. , he is truer to actual sound and intonation than the lexicon. The modeis excellent. But the imitations will soon debase it into such bad cointhat it will fail to pass current. In England, however, the humour ofbad spelling does not and has never, I believe, flourished. Bad spellingis only used in England as an attempt to reproduce phonetically adialect; it is not intended that the spelling itself should be thoughtfunny, but the dialect that it represents. But the effect, on the whole, is tiresome. A little dose of the humour of Lancashire or Somerset orYorkshire pronunciation may be all right, but a whole page of it lookslike the gibbering of chimpanzees set down on paper. 

In America also we run perpetually to the (supposed) humour of slang, aform not used in England. If we were to analyse what we mean by slang Ithink it would be found to consist of the introduction of new metaphorsor new forms of language of a metaphorical character, strained almostto the breaking point. Sometimes we do it with a single word. When somegenius discovers that a "hat" is really only "a lid" placed on top ofa human being, straightway the word "lid" goes rippling over thecontinent. Similarly a woman becomes a "skirt, " and so on ad infinitum. 

These words presently either disappear or else retain a permanent place, being slang no longer. No doubt half our words, if not all of them, were once slang. Even within our own memory we can see the wholeprocess carried through; "cinch" once sounded funny; it is now standardAmerican-English. But other slang is made up of descriptive phrases. Atthe best, these slang phrases are--at least we think they are--extremelyfunny. But they are funniest when newly coined, and it takes a masterhand to coin them well. For a supreme example of wild vagaries oflanguage used for humour, one might take O. Henry's "Gentle Grafter. "But here the imitation is as easy as it is tiresome. The invention ofpointless slang phrases without real suggestion or merit is one of ourmost familiar forms of factory-made humour. Now the English people areapt to turn away from the whole field of slang. In the first place itpuzzles them--they don't know whether each particular word or phraseis a sort of idiom already known to Americans, or something (as with O. Henry) never said before and to be analysed for its own sake. The resultis that with the English public the great mass of American slang writing(genius apart) doesn't go. I have even found English people of undoubtedliterary taste repelled from such a master as O. Henry (now read bymillions in England) because at first sight they get the impression thatit is "all American slang. "

Another point in which American humour, or at least the form which ittakes, differs notably from British, is in the matter of story telling. It was a great surprise to me the first time I went out to a dinnerparty in London to find that my host did not open the dinner by tellinga funny story; that the guests did not then sit silent trying to "thinkof another"; that some one did not presently break silence by saying, "Iheard a good one the other day, "--and so forth. And I realised that inthis respect English society is luckier than ours. 

It is my candid opinion that no man ought to be allowed to tell a funnystory or anecdote without a license. We insist rightly enough that everytaxi-driver must have a license, and the same principle should applyto anybody who proposes to act as a raconteur. Telling a story is adifficult thing--quite as difficult as driving a taxi. And the risksof failure and accident and the unfortunate consequences of such to thepublic, if not exactly identical, are, at any rate, analogous. 

This is a point of view not generally appreciated. A man is apt to thinkthat just because he has heard a good story he is able and entitled torepeat it. He might as well undertake to do a snake dance merely becausehe has seen Madame Pavlowa do one. The point of a story is apt to liein the telling, or at least to depend upon it in a high degree. Certainstories, it is true, depend so much on the final point, or "nub, " as weAmericans call it, that they are almost fool-proof. But even these canbe made so prolix and tiresome, can be so messed up with irrelevantdetail, that the general effect is utter weariness relieved by a kind ofshock at the end. Let me illustrate what I mean by a story with a "nub"or point. I will take one of the best known, so as to make no claim tooriginality--for example, the famous anecdote of the man who wanted tobe "put off at Buffalo. " Here it is:

A man entered a sleeping-car and said to the porter, "At what time dowe get to Buffalo?" The porter answered, "At half-past three in themorning, sir. " "All right, " the man said; "now I want to get off atBuffalo, and I want you to see that I get off. I sleep heavily and I'mhard to rouse. But you just make me wake up, don't mind what I say, don't pay attention if I kick about it, just put me off, do you see?""All right, sir, " said the porter. The man got into his berth and fellfast asleep. He never woke or moved till it was broad daylight andthe train was a hundred miles beyond Buffalo. He called angrily to theporter, "See here, you, didn't I tell you to put me off at Buffalo?" Theporter looked at him, aghast. "Well, I declare to goodness, boss!" heexclaimed; "if it wasn't you, who was that man that I threw off thistrain at half-past three at Buffalo?"

Now this story is as nearly fool-proof as can be. And yet it is amazinghow badly it can be messed up by a person with a special gift formangling a story. He does it something after this fashion:

"There was a fellow got on the train one night and he had a berthreserved for Buffalo; at least the way I heard it, it was Buffalo, though I guess, as a matter of fact, you might tell it on any other townjust as well--or no, I guess he didn't have his berth reserved, he goton the train and asked the porter for a reservation for Buffalo--or, anyway, that part doesn't matter--say that he had a berth for Buffalo orany other place, and the porter came through and said, 'Do you want anearly call?'--or no, he went to the porter--that was it--and said--"

But stop. The rest of the story becomes a mere painful waiting for theend. 

Of course the higher type of funny story is the one that depends for itsamusing quality not on the final point, or not solely on it, but on thewording and the narration all through. This is the way in which a storyis told by a comedian or a person who is a raconteur in the real sense. When Sir Harry Lauder narrates an incident, the telling of it is funnyfrom beginning to end. When some lesser person tries to repeat itafterwards, there is nothing left but the final point. The rest isweariness. 

As a consequence most story-tellers are driven to telling stories thatdepend on the point or "nub" and not on the narration. The storytellergathers these up till he is equipped with a sort of little repertory offun by which he hopes to surround himself with social charm. In Americaespecially (by which I mean here the United States and Canada, but notMexico) we suffer from the story-telling habit. As far as I am able tojudge, English society is not pervaded and damaged by the story-tellinghabit as much as is society in the United States and Canada. On ourside of the Atlantic story-telling at dinners and on every other socialoccasion has become a curse. In every phase of social and intellectuallife one is haunted by the funny anecdote. Any one who has ever attendeda Canadian or American banquet will recall the solemn way in which thechairman rises and says: "Gentlemen, it is to me a very great pleasureand a very great honour to preside at this annual dinner. There was anold darky once--" and so forth. When he concludes he says, "I will nowcall upon the Rev. Dr. Stooge, Head of the Provincial University, HaroeEnglish Any Sense of Humour? to propose the toast 'Our Dominion. '" Dr. Stooge rises amid great applause and with great solemnity begins, "Therewere once two Irishmen--" and so on to the end. But in London, England, it is apparently not so. Not long ago I had the pleasure of meeting atdinner a member of the Government. I fully anticipated that as a memberof the Government he would be expected to tell a funny story about anold darky, just as he would on our side of the water. In fact, I shouldhave supposed that he could hardly get into the Government unless hedid tell a funny story of some sort. But all through dinner the CabinetMinister never said a word about either a Methodist minister, or acommercial traveller, or an old darky, or two Irishmen, or any of thestock characters of the American repertory. On another occasion I dinedwith a bishop of the Church. I expected that when the soup came he wouldsay, "There was an old darky--" After which I should have had to listenwith rapt attention, and, when he had finished, without any pause, rejoin, "There were a couple of Irishmen once--" and so on. But thebishop never said a word of the sort. 

I can further, for the sake of my fellow-men in Canada and the UnitedStates who may think of going to England, vouchsafe the following facts:If you meet a director of the Bank of England, he does not say: "I amvery glad to meet you. Sit down. There was a mule in Arkansas once, "etc. How they do their banking without that mule I don't know. But theymanage it. I can certify also that if you meet the proprietor of a greatnewspaper he will not begin by saying, "There was a Scotchman once. " Infact, in England, you can mingle freely in general society without beingcalled upon either to produce a funny story or to suffer from one. 

I don't mean to deny that the American funny story, in capable hands, isamazingly funny and that it does brighten up human intercourse. Butthe real trouble lies, not in the fun of the story, but in the painfulwaiting for the point to come and in the strained and anxious silencethat succeeds it. Each person around the dinner table is trying to"think of another. " There is a dreadful pause. The hostess puts up aprayer that some one may "think of another. " Then at last, to the reliefof everybody, some one says: "I heard a story the other day--I don'tknow whether you've heard it--" And the grateful cries of "No! no! goahead" show how great the tension has been. 

Nine times out of ten the people have heard the story before; and tentimes out of nine the teller damages it in the telling. But his hearersare grateful to him for having saved them from the appalling mantleof silence and introspection which had fallen upon the table. For thetrouble is that when once two or three stories have been told it seemsto be a point of honour not to subside into mere conversation. It seemsrude, when a story-teller has at last reached the triumphant ending andclimax of the mule from Arkansas, it seems impolite, to follow it up bysaying, "I see that Germany refuses to pay the indemnity. " It can't bedone. Either the mule or the indemnity--one can't have both. 

The English, I say, have not developed the American custom of the funnystory as a form of social intercourse. But I do not mean to say thatthey are sinless in this respect. As I see it, they hand round ingeneral conversation something nearly as bad in the form of what one maycall the literal anecdote or personal experience. By this I refer to thehabit of narrating some silly little event that has actually happened tothem or in their sight, which they designate as "screamingly funny, " andwhich was perhaps very funny when it happened but which is not the leastfunny in the telling. The American funny story is imaginary. It neverhappened. Somebody presumably once made it up. It is fiction. Thusthere must once have been some great palpitating brain, some glowingimagination, which invented the story of the man who was put off atBuffalo. But the English "screamingly funny" story is not imaginary. Itreally did happen. It is an actual personal experience. In short, it isnot fiction but history. 

I think--if one may say it with all respect--that in English societygirls and women are especially prone to narrate these personalexperiences as contributions to general merriment rather than the men. The English girl has a sort of traditional idea of being amusing; theEnglish man cares less about it. He prefers facts to fancy every time, and as a rule is free from that desire to pose as a humouristwhich haunts the American mind. So it comes about that most of the"screamingly funny" stories are told in English society by the women. Thus the counterpart of "put me off at Buffalo" done into Englishwould be something like this: "We were so amused the other night inthe sleeping-car going to Buffalo. There was the most amusing old negromaking the beds, a perfect scream, you know, and he kept insisting thatif we wanted to get up at Buffalo we must all go to bed at nine o'clock. He positively wouldn't let us sit up--I mean to say it was killing theway he wanted to put us to bed. We all roared!"

Please note that roar at the end of the English personal anecdote. It isthe sign that indicates that the story is over. When you are assured bythe narrators that all the persons present "roared" or "simply roared, "then you can be quite sure that the humorous incident is closed and thatlaughter is in place. 

Now, as a matter of fact, the scene with the darky porter may have been, when it really happened, most amusing. But not a trace of it getsover in the story. There is nothing but the bare assertion that it was"screamingly funny" or "simply killing. " But the English are such anhonest people that when they say this sort of thing they believe oneanother and they laugh. 

But, after all, why should people insist on telling funny stories atall? Why not be content to buy the works of some really first-classhumourist and read them aloud in proper humility of mind without tryingto emulate them? Either that or talk theology. 

On my own side of the Atlantic I often marvel at our extraordinarytolerance and courtesy to one another in the matter of story-telling. I have never seen a bad story-teller thrown forcibly out of the room oreven stopped and warned; we listen with the most wonderful patience tothe worst of narration. The story is always without any interest exceptin the unknown point that will be brought in later. But this, until itdoes come, is no more interesting than to-morrow's breakfast. Yet forsome reason or other we permit this story-telling habit to invade anddamage our whole social life. The English always criticise this andthink they are absolutely right. To my mind in their social life theygive the "funny story" its proper place and room and no more. That is tosay--if ten people draw their chairs in to the dinner table and somebodyreally has just heard a story and wants to tell it, there is no reasonagainst it. If he says, "Oh, by the way, I heard a good story to-day, "it is just as if he said, "Oh, by the way, I heard a piece of news aboutJohn Smith. " It is quite admissible as conversation. But he doesn't sitdown to try to think, along with nine other rival thinkers, of all thestories that he had heard, and that makes all the difference. 

The Scotch, by the way, resemble us in liking to tell and hear stories. But they have their own line. They like the stories to be grim, dealingin a jocose way with death and funerals. The story begins (will thereader kindly turn it into Scotch pronunciation for himself), "There wasa Sandy MacDonald had died and the wife had the body all laid out forburial and dressed up very fine in his best suit, " etc. Now for me thatbeginning is enough. To me that is not a story, but a tragedy. I amso sorry for Mrs. MacDonald that I can't think of anything else. But Ithink the explanation is that the Scotch are essentially such a devoutpeople and live so closely within the shadow of death itself that theymay without irreverence or pain jest where our lips would falter. Orelse, perhaps they don't care a cuss whether Sandy MacDonald died ornot. Take it either way. 

But I am tired of talking of our faults. Let me turn to the morepleasing task of discussing those of the English. In the first place, and as a minor matter of form, I think that English humour suffers fromthe tolerance afforded to the pun. For some reason English people findpuns funny. We don't. Here and there, no doubt, a pun may be made thatfor some exceptional reason becomes a matter of genuine wit. But thegreat mass of the English puns that disfigure the Press every week aremere pointless verbalisms that to the American mind cause nothing butweariness. 

But even worse than the use of puns is the peculiar pedantry, not to saypriggishness, that haunts the English expression of humour. To make amistake in a Latin quotation or to stick on a wrong ending to a Latinword is not really an amusing thing. To an ancient Roman, perhaps, itmight be. But then we are not ancient Romans; indeed, I imagine thatif an ancient Roman could be resurrected, all the Latin that any of ourclassical scholars can command would be about equivalent to the Frenchof a cockney waiter on a Channel steamer. Yet one finds even theimmortal Punch citing recently as a very funny thing a newspapermisquotation of "urbis et orbis" instead of "urbi et orbos, " or theother way round. I forget which. Perhaps there was some further point init that I didn't see, but, anyway, it wasn't funny. Neither is itfunny if a person, instead of saying Archimedes, says Archimeeds; whyshouldn't it have been Archimeeds? The English scale of values in thesethings is all wrong. Very few Englishmen can pronounce Chicago properlyand they think nothing of that. But if a person mispronounces thename of a Greek village of what O. Henry called "The Year B. C. " it issupposed to be excruciatingly funny. 

I think in reality that this is only a part of the overdone scholarshipthat haunts so much of English writing--not the best of it, but a lot ofit. It is too full of allusions and indirect references to all sorts ofextraneous facts. The English writer finds it hard to say a plain thingin a plain way. He is too anxious to show in every sentence what afine scholar he is. He carries in his mind an accumulated treasure ofquotations, allusions, and scraps and tags of history, and into this, like Jack Horner, he must needs "stick in his thumb and pull out aplum. " Instead of saying, "It is a fine morning, " he prefers to write, "This is a day of which one might say with the melancholy Jacques, it isa fine morning. "

Hence it is that many plain American readers find English humour"highbrow. " Just as the English are apt to find our humour "slangy" and"cheap, " so we find theirs academic and heavy. But the difference, afterall, is of far less moment than might be supposed. It lies only on thesurface. Fundamentally, as I said in starting, the humour of the twopeoples is of the same kind and on an equal level. 

There is one form of humour which the English have more or less tothemselves, nor do I envy it to them. I mean the merriment that theyappear able to draw out of the criminal courts. To me a criminal courtis a place of horror, and a murder trial the last word in human tragedy. The English criminal courts I know only from the newspapers and askno nearer acquaintance. But according to the newspapers the courts, especially when a murder case is on, are enlivened by flashes ofjudicial and legal humour that seem to meet with general approval. Thecurrent reports in the Press run like this:

"The prisoner, who is being tried on a charge of having burned hiswife to death in a furnace, was placed in the dock and gave his name asEvans. Did he say 'Evans or Ovens?' asked Mr. Justice Blank. The courtbroke into a roar, in which all joined but the prisoner. .. . " Or takethis: "How many years did you say you served the last time?" asked thejudge. "Three, " said the prisoner. "Well, twice three is six, " said thejudge, laughing till his sides shook; "so I'll give you six years. "

I don't say that those are literal examples of the humour of thecriminal court. But they are close to it. For a judge to joke is as easyas it is for a schoolmaster to joke in his class. His unhappy audiencehas no choice but laughter. No doubt in point of intellect the Englishjudges and the bar represent the most highly trained product ofthe British Empire. But when it comes to fun, they ought not to pitthemselves against the unhappy prisoner. 

Why not take a man of their own size? For true amusement Mr. CharlesChaplin or Mr. Leslie Henson could give them sixty in a hundred. I eventhink I could myself. 

One final judgment, however, might with due caution be hazarded. I donot think that, on the whole, the English are quite as fond of humouras we are. I mean they are not so willing to welcome at all times thehumorous point of view as we are in America. The English are a seriouspeople, with many serious things to think of--football, horse racing, dogs, fish, and many other concerns that demand much national thought:they have so many national preoccupations of this kind that they haveless need for jokes than we have. They have higher things to talk about, whereas on our side of the water, except when the World's Series isbeing played, we have few, if any, truly national topics. 

And yet I know that many people in England would exactly reverse thislast judgment and say that the Americans are a desperately seriouspeople. That in a sense is true. Any American who takes up with an ideasuch as New Thought, Psychoanalysis or Eating Sawdust, or any "uplift"of the kind becomes desperately lopsided in his seriousness, and as avery large number of us cultivate New Thought, or practise breathingexercises, or eat sawdust, no doubt the English visitors think us adesperate lot. 

Anyway, it's an ill business to criticise another people's shortcomings. What I said at the start was that the British are just as humorous asare the Americans, or the Canadians, or any of us across the Atlantic, and for greater Certainty I repeat it at the end.